Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 124: Better Ingredients, Better Airplanes

Episode Date: November 27, 2019

An episode all about flying, just in time for your Thanksgiving holiday travels. We also talk about Papa John, Trump knighting Jon Voight, and read from a very bizarre op-ed in Bloomberg about nonprofits. Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Thanksgiving crew in the building. Did you go to a Friendsgiving? I did. I did. I walked right in and I walked right out. That's right. There were people there that were not friends. There were enemies there.

Is that a thing that people... We should have enemies givings. They'll just show up and it's like a player haters ball. Yeah, just a bunch of people you don't want to be hanging out with. You look at corn pudding, I spin it and it's your rotten son of a bitch. Yeah, you surround, I mean, friends are kind of enemies in a way. It's like, I mean, it is kind of the Seinfeld bit where it's like the people you choose to surround yourself with are the people that cause you the most anguish yeah it's pretty accurate um because it's yes you're right you have a choice in the matter yeah um but the thing is the thing about friendship is that you can't

hold your friends to standards of perfection because if you did that you'd never have any friends that's true so you have to overlook a lot of flaws the most unlikable person on the planet's like i don't like that person because i know people are petty reason i know people like that who will just cut off over the most minor offenses yeah i was talking to a friend yesterday about this and i was like um i was just talking about like how, like me and like, like some of the, not all, I mean,

I still got a lot of friends from college that I keep in touch with, but there's some that like, I just don't know what we would talk about. Like, we don't have anything in common. And then they were just like, oh no,

I just cut those people out. I'm like, how? So I just refused to talk to them. I don't want to be around people that I'm like, like you're not even cordial. Yeah know no i mean i know people who will go through life and like just re do their whole friend circle every few years you know yeah i mean is that is there a word for those people are they like borderline personality or something or like narcissistic or there are people

i'll tell you this here's the hallmark of a good friend the hallmark of a good friend is one that doesn't put demands on their friends i agree with that it's someone who doesn't guilt it's like you've always said if anybody's guilting you and not your friend they're not your friend now i mean there's a little gamesmanship that comes with friendship that's different from guilt tripping like if you perpetually feel obligated because of somebody's manipulation tactics, that person is by definition not your friend. A bad person. Right, right. Yeah.

I agree with that. Friendship should feel effortless. It should feel on your own terms. It should feel mostly effortless. um should feel mostly effortless the people that are that are all the time talking about like people not putting anything into their friendships and want me to commiserate about them i'm just i just can't get there well this here's something that i've never voiced publicly and i might as well say it i kind of think sometimes that the whole recent trend of sort of browbeating people into go seeing a therapist is kind of like what they really mean is like you just need to talk to somebody.

And I don't know. I think a lot of us are so alienated and sort of isolated now that we need therapists to like talk to when in reality like 50 years ago that person would just kind of that would be your friend or yeah something yeah basically what i'm saying is that a therapist is like a paid friend totally it's like joining a fraternity no and i'm not saying don't go to therapy therapy is good i'm just saying that like also have friends yeah well i mean listen i'm a mental i mean i have you know i suffer from a lot of mental illnesses so i'm not like debasing or um trying to make light or minimizing somebody's

neuroses or mental illness or whatever i am that's all i do but i i do think that there is a certain amount of medicalization of sadness yeah stuff you know what i mean yeah like that's that's possible well there's a medicalization of isolation social isolation yeah and alienation it's i mean it moves the diagnosis from one of like that the problem is the system the system is alienating you to one of like, well, you know, you're just sad because your job's not working out or your career's not working out. It medicalizes something that actually has a systemic origin

rather than, I don't know, a biological one or something like that. Right, totally. But at the same time, I dated somebody one time who was like, would tell me that depression wasn't basically that it was a it was a word for something we didn't understand yet you know what i mean and that like taking medication for it was uh that's a bad person and that's a bad person yeah yeah that's not what i'm saying at all what i'm saying is that like uh there could be things that there's no sort of chemical route for that you could you know probably address without medical you know without going to medicine first i mean

certainly if like you've exhausted every avenue and you know you're still in the blue then i think that's right yeah you should see a therapist you should you know take medicine're still in the blue, then I think that's right. Yeah. You should see a therapist. You should, you know, take medicine. You should do all that stuff. But I think, so I, I have experienced both. I've experienced, um, sadness and sort of being lonely, which I think over time, when you experience that chronically, it manifests as mental illness. I think it can. Right. Uh, I think, I think that's what happens what tends to happen for a lot of people um but then i've also experienced like

something's just wrong you know what i mean that kind of mental illness in which i still struggle with today oh yeah i mean what you're saying is a chemical imbalance yeah yeah something that can be corrected by yes therapy and medicine, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. I've had many days, probably one just in the last week where I feel like I'm completely out of my mind.

Yeah. Just disassociating from reality. Yeah, that's not good. That's not normal. That's not something that you could just talk to somebody about. Scratch your ass and get glad about. Friends giving.

What about therapists giving? What if you go to a friends giving and it's only therapists? That sounds amazing. This is a question. Who is a therapist's therapist? It's like who's a barber's barber, who's a doctor's doctor. Do you just like test yourself? Do you just cut your own hair?

Do you just... Therapists have therapists or at least in the Sopranos they do. Yeah. That's a good point. But yeah, I mean, I don't know.

Could you imagine if your family was a family of therapists how insufferable Thanksgiving would be? Or if you were a therapist and your whole clientele was just therapists. Like you're the therapist's therapist.

That would be awful. Yeah, that would be. And I'm sure there are families like that. You know, like how there's families of lawyers or families of doctors or whatever. Right. That would be a very... I mean, if you still had problems, that would be weird.

Right. Friendsgiving. Do you go to any Friendsgivings? I've not done a Friendsgiving in a number of years. Why not? Mostly because I don't have friends, but... The other side of that is I hate giving. You hate having a friend fish?

No, I like the Thanksgiving holiday. i do i i think it's you know obviously rooted in genocide and whatever but i think uh any opportunity where you get to suspend the norms of society and you know like that's not true for everybody but i mean for a lot of workers this is like you know one of their handful of days off well uh you mean, for a lot of workers, this is like, you know, one of their handful of days off. Well, you know, yeah, for a lot of workers, except for the transit workers. Yeah. Who, I mean, I was just seeing in the Baffler, I think Kim Kelly had written something about, like, the power that transit workers have. Like, if they threaten to go on strike before Thanksgiving, it would grind the entire fucking system to a hole you know what i mean like airport workers and pilots and that is true stewardesses that's

so funny is that industry has also been flying close to the sun for a number of years now like pilots don't make shit yeah like they used to pull down like major league baseball player salaries right and now that's just like y'all are really flirting with disaster in that industry. Now they get blamed for when a software bug takes down an entire fucking airplane. Yeah, we were talking about that last night. It's just an industry. What were you saying about the guy's uncle?

Oh, okay. Oh yeah, I can read that to you, all right. So imagine you go to a friendsgiving right you're at the cookout um on friendsgiving and uh you know you run into your uncle you've just been you've spent the the entire past year working on the seven boeing 737 max all right seeing all kinds of problems with it um it's well so just so just for a little um well so the boeing 737 max is sort of the uh the materialization of the old phrase um 20 pounds of shit in a 10 pound bag right i'd say it's like it's got these huge engines they put in there to save on fuel costs

yes that also were too heavy for the lightweight frame of the plane they made they put massive engines because on a on airplanes the larger the engine the greater the fuel efficiency right there's like a law i don't know what the fucking law is called. It's some law of physics. Oh, I thought you were talking about like an actual literal FAA regulation. It's a law of physics. It says the bigger the engine, the greater the fuel efficiency. The bigger the cap, the bigger the fuel. Exactly. So they put these massive engines on a smaller airplane frame, a lighter one.

smaller airplane frame, a lighter one. But what that did was it would cause the plane to go into an aerodynamic stall. So what that is is, you know, is when the front of the plane tips up. And you can practice this if you're driving in your car and you put your hand out of the window and you put your hand up like this and, you know, you'll feel it go back. You can also practice this if you're getting ready to have sex and she tells you to put a condom on. And you have to walk your ass across. And by the time you get back, it's your stall now.

That's also an aerodynamic stall. Unfortunately, there's no software fix for that one. There's a chemical one, though. So there is aer though. So there was aerodynamics. So this would create an aerodynamics stall. And so to fix this problem Boeing came up with a software fix. To fix a

hardware problem they came up with a software fix. Because that's the age we live in right? Right. And so they contracted out like a bunch of Bangladeshi coders making $7 an hour to make this program called MCAS. And I think it was like Maneuvering Computer Aviation System or something like that. I can't remember what MCAS stands for.

We'll just say it's something like that. And what MCAS does is it just, as soon as the plane starts to go into a stall, it just tips the nose down. That's it. It's very simple. It just takes the nose down. The problem with that is that once the software starts doing that, planes nowadays are run almost entirely by computers. Like, none of the controls you see on an airplane cockpit actually control the wings. The pilots are just sort of window dressing.

Yes, pretty much. They're there to just sort of monitor the computers. But computers get the final say in an airplane. Like they basically, you know, a human can intervene and sort of change course and make recommendations and everything. But computers... Does this make you feel confident you're going to get on a plane in about an hour? Look, I like taking my life into my own hands.

I've always said that if I was going to go, I think a plane would be pretty fun. It'd be terrifying, but... It'd be a fun sociological experiment. Your last way out, you just see 100 people melting down. It'd be a great opportunity for polling, too. You could see who actually the world's most predominant religions are. Right, exactly. You know what I mean? Who's praying to who actually the world's most predominant religions are. Right, exactly. You know what I mean?

Who's praying to who on the way down? You can learn all kinds of things about humanity in a plane that's going down. Hey, just by a show of hands here, assuming we make it out of this, who's a Buttigieg voter here? And then if you survive, you can go, listen, CNN, I've ran the numbers here in the most dire consequences. Let me tell you something, they ain't shouting for Mayor Pete in the end. All political polling should be done on planes that are going down.

But don't tell the people. No. You know what I mean? Don't tell the people. Right, right. So, just like, listen, try to remain calm here and tell me if there was a presidential nominee that you would like to have at the wheel right now. To stop this this fucking

piece of metal from careening thousands of feet to your demise who would it be right um i would say amy klobuchar she's the only one that would have stiff enough of an upper lip to like like you know let's keep her wits about manual yeah yeah yeah it just like totally stone faced yeah um okay so uh sorry sorry so the uh okay so computers um pilots um so mcas mcas is a basically like a demon um in the plane because. Because it gets final say over what happens. So once MCAS kicks in, they were finding this, and a few text messages just came out between simulation pilots. And the text messages are fucking hilarious.

These guys are just bantering like, oh, I ran the sim again, and MCAS was having problems with it. And they would find that in simulation, MCAS would cause the plane to go straight down, straight into the earth. But the FAA signed off on it. Everything went fine. And the reason why is because the FAA allows Boeing, it's something they call regulatory capture, the FAA allows Boeing to basically self-certify their own planes. And a lot of the people that work at the FAA worked at Boeing.

There's a lot of back and forth. Let me, again, interject one of my favorite sayings in the Appalachian MTR movement. So they're letting the inmates run the asylum. The fox is guarding the hen house. the fox is guarding the fox is guarding the hen house huh yes it is a classic example of letting the inmates run the asylum um and so uh all right so what happened was there was two planes that went down, one in October of last year and one in the spring of this year. One was in, I believe, Indonesia, and the other one was in Ethiopia.

Everybody on board was killed, both of these planes. And what happened both times. Like last night when we were talking about this, Alex said, oh, that's the one where everybody made. And you go, no, everybody was killed both times. Upwards, I think, of four or five hundred people. And then I think you went. The only reason I laugh is because how macabre it actually is.

Comically, cosmically, just goofy. Completely. That we just make products to self-destruct now. Because that's what mcas is mcas is a self-sabotaging device in a plane right and so what happens is the plane will start going down and the pilots no matter how hard they pull back on the the throttle the joystick whatever the fuck it's called they can't get the plane to go back up and so that both times this happened the planes just went straight down into the earth and just crashed boeing knew about it the whole time

they knew that was likelihood or a possibility yeah yes um interesting they chose a country like ethiopia which is like sort of in the western world shorthand for disposable people you know what i mean i don't people make ethiopia jokes still like well they had fucking horror like appalachia you know like no exemplar of like fucking just a perfectly ran society they've you know they boeing basically blamed the pilots and everything after this. They went on a huge campaign. You can watch the congressional testimonies because Congress had committee hearings about this. Like, what the fuck happened?

And the Boeing executives were like, it's the pilots' fault. They didn't receive enough training. We made a big boo-boo. We made a big boo-boo. But there's a really great article about it in the New Republic by Maureen Tkacic. And it's like, I was just reading casick and it's like i was just reading it and um there's this part in it this is the darkest thing i've ever read um there's this

guy who used to work for boeing for the longest time and he was an engineer and he was like talking about the frustrations he had with the development of the 737 max and um and he he said he was telling the story about how he like went to uh a cookout or friends giving um to a friend's a friend's giving that happened to be attended by his nephew right um yeah so his uncle was there and his uncle is like a accountant professor at the university of michigan and he said he was like talking to his uncle was there, and his uncle is like an accountant professor at the University of Michigan. And he said he was talking to his uncle about all the problems that they were experiencing and all this. This was before any of these planes went down. And his uncle turned to Adam.

And I just want to point out here that Boeing is the quintessential example of financialization. is the quintessential example of financialization because it is like in the 1990s and early 2000s it went through this um process where um they you know they would buy back their own stocks to increase stock prices and were relying less and less on the expertise of engineers and more and more on these sort of innovative ideas. And so this accountant professor looks at his nephew, just stone-faced, just completely just, you know, just looks at him seriously and just tells him flat out, he says, you are in a mature industry that is no longer innovative. It's a commodity business.

The last great innovation capable of driving major growth in aviation was the jet engine back in the 1950s. And every technological advance since has been incremental. And so the emphasis of the business is going to switch away from engineering and towards supply chain management. Because every mature company has to isolate which parts of its business add value and delegate the more commodity-like things to the supply chain. The more you look to the market for pricing signals, the more the role of the engineer will shrink. I just thought that was amazing. Well, there's another sort of tangentially related thing

to tack on to what Uncle Wonk here has got to say. Do you remember the documentary, 2007 documentary, The Zoo? No. It's about a Boeing engineer named Ken Pinion that died from peritonitis after getting fucked in the ass by a horse. Okay, I do remember this yeah the new it was uh you know probably more colloquially known as the newman claw horse yes right the new mcgraw i do know the zoo now so i've just you know i just want to point that out what we're taught what caliber person

boeing is that a history of hiring to uh he was a boeing exec uh he was a he was an engineer i think he might have ended up being an exec or something like that yeah um amazing that boeing has uh survived not only now this scandal but also the newman claw horse it would have been damning for any other company. Well, there's that. And then there's the 787 Dreamliner, which one of the executives at Boeing said publicly, the pieces of the plane were supposed to snap together like Legos.

Like, they had tried to, you know, it's like I was saying earlier they were trying to like um after having all these problems with aviation uh construction in the 90s they were like we're no longer going to be offshoring all these jobs we're going to take them like right to work states in the south and like build the batteries like you know these the thing with the 787 dreamliner is that the lithium battery in it is highly flammable there was a lithium battery factory in arizona that completely burned down while they were trying to make the battery for this in development in development right um so

like the whole thing is a disaster though the 780 the dreamliner is a is also grounded too like the 737 max um but both of them are just examples of what he's saying here like attempts to innovate something that does not need to be innovated right and so like yes there's no longer any way to innovate an airplane that is the thing about capital is it is something we've talked about when every time we say the word uberization is is capital creates problems that actually do not exist right what it tries to do is convenience to see how they can make more money off conveniencing something that already exists you know what i'm saying it's like why cab drivers are you know doing horrible right now that's why you know they take minor inconveniences and then convince us that like,

actually, this could shave five minutes off your like, you know what I mean? Yeah, like, fuck it, I use Lyft,

you know, when I go to a city or whatever, or whatever. But like, that's really only because I don't really understand the ritual of going

and hailing a cab on the side, you know what I mean? Well, I feel like, I wasn't raised in a place with cabs. I don't know how to hail. Just walk out on your street and stand there for three hours ritual of going and hailing a cab on the side you know what i mean yeah well i feel like i didn't i wasn't raised in a place with cabs i don't know how to walk out on your street and stand there for three hours with your arm in there it's like what are you doing yeah um well i mean i just dude

i thought that was such a fucking funny quote listen listen man there's no longer any innovation left the role of the engineer you're fucked man there's there is nothing to be done in certain no it's all about supply chain management now it's all about maximizing profits for the shareholders that only ends in death and injury like it's gotten to the point where it's so absurd that we build flying death machines. No, it's crazy. You know, it's interesting about this. It's like this sort of idea of just trying to engineer innovation in a way that we're just trying to improve on what cannot be improved upon. On the other end of that like we also have like planned failures

and like like you cannot convince me honestly like those people in ethiopia they they gave this thing a dry run in a place where it's just like oh this this will get lost in the rest of the shuffle with the problems of right africa or whatever right like that's the thing they did blame it on that they did they blamed it on poor training for Indonesian and African pilots. Of course they did. There's a reason they didn't fucking launch this at JFK or O'Hara. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah.

I had a friend that went to prison in Clay County a couple years ago on a check-catting fraud scheme. He was taking advantage of the float at banks to basically take out a bunch of money that he didn't have in his bank account or whatever. To hear him tell there's also tie-ins with Russian mob and

all this stuff. Take out a grain of salt. But he told me something interesting because in Clay County he said it was because he, the reason he went to interesting because in Clay County, he said it was because he, the reason he went to Clay County is Clay County is mostly like white collar. Yeah. It was like that kind of stuff.

Yeah. It's basically tennis jail. And he was working for the IRS at the time he did this. And so he kind of got lumped in with all of them, even though that didn't really have much to do. He just happened to, his day job happened to be with the IRS. Right. He was doing all this shit.

So he did two years there. And he said that he was there with these guys that worked. Have you ever seen like the Sokolov Law Office commercials? I think so. James J. Sokolov and stuff. He said basically, and I don't know if this is real, if this is like some sort of crazy conspiracy. But if anybody knows about this, like, feel free to shoot us some, some information,

but he's, to hear him tell it, he says that, um, that, like, there's people in Congress that

basically, um, are, I don't know if they work with the FDA, or there's some, there's some sort of way that they ram drugs through FDA approval, uh, knowing full well that there's gonna be a lot of people die from this and that these law firms like sock love you usually see them like on like late night

tv like have you had a transdermal mesh have you had like mesothelic like asbestos all that kind of there's an industry where they take advantage of it. Those kind of stuff. Right, right, right. And so these law offices know about these huge pots of money that are set aside, pre-set aside for, like, malpractice and, like, medical, like, liability stuff. Right. And they take those cases to get that.

And he said he was in prison with a lot of them, with a lot of those guys that had got in trouble for various schemes around that right and uh it's kind of fucked up that it's like in some ways in a under a capitalist society i guess the idea that our destiny is preordained is somewhat true you know what i mean you're right under communism i think in a weird way it's so strange because like that was always the knock on communism growing up as our sort of evan drago understanding of it you know like soviet era understanding your life is planned for you plan for you you don't have any sort of agency or agency you're gonna be uh if you're gonna be a gymnast you're gonna train your whole life to be a gymnast and that's it and you have no say in the matter whatever whatever but in reality like even if

that sort of cartoonish understanding of like communism were true it's like how's capital any different right you know what i mean well on a long enough timeline this is the thing that kills me about libertarians that we were talking about last night like libertarians who are like i don't care what you do as long as it doesn't affect me or whatever it's like on a long enough timeline the contradictions of capitalism will affect you as well one of these days you're going to be on an airplane it doesn't fucking matter your class status unless you can afford a private plane or something but even if you are making into the top five percent and you're on an airplane one of these days you might be on one of're on an airplane, one of these days you might

be on one of these death machines. Yeah. Or one of these days you might get polluted by some sort of, you know, C8 chemical spill. In fact, you already are. Right. That is wild. Right. Every man, woman, child, gender non-conforming person that exists today has a DuPont concocted

chemical in their tissues right now yep because look there's no way to live in this society without it affecting you in some way because we let corporations do whatever the fuck they want it is i mean there is like that sort of calvinism is true under under capital you're right. You know what I mean? Under socialism, what we think of as a more sort of strict, we're tethered to our destiny thing is actually not true. You're actually free to do whatever. You have autonomy over your life. Right.

Yeah. Things are planned because that's the fucking smart thing, rational thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. Like the things that you need are, yeah, that's the fucking smart thing, rational thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. Like the things that you need are. Yeah, that's right.

Dude, I mean, I don't know. I just I just can't fucking. I was laughing my ass off for that quote. Listen, man, you no longer are in an innovative industry. I'm just going to break it to you. It's all about supply chain. Jump ship. Children, I employ you employ you tear out your

mercury feelings it's just so dark i mean it's so macabre yeah it's just so incredible speaking of macabre and speaking of you were saying the mcast thing was like a demon no there's another demon that did an interview recently promising a day of reckoning right right all right i mean do we figure out what's wrong with papa john's voice why is he it's so weird go listen to that interview and then go listen to better ingredients better pizza papa john's i don't know if they speed his voice up a little bit it kind of sounds like they yeah they might they might speed his voice up for the commercials or something but my man looked really he looked like ray leota in like that scene in the good fellas when we're like the doctor insists that he gets some care right exactly it's like seeing

helicopters like i need my hat yeah that's right i don't fly without my hat he uh yeah he looks like she looks like a man that's uh eating a few too many tv dinners i mean well in fact that's what he said he said i've i've eaten more than 40 pies in 30 days why would you even say that well what he was saying was that he thinks that current management of Papa John's has resulted in a decline in the pizza quality. I want to just go ahead and tell you something, Papa. After you get past the novelty of the garlic butter, and that's how you always know a shitty pizza company

is when they include the garlic butter. Right, because they have to... To mask it. It's just like this doughy, cheesy blob. Right, right. Papa John's really not that great i want to know the process of like how you just like release a press release or something or like reach out to a local news affiliate like look day of reckoning what is it i mean he's like here i

got a concept i'm gonna get out of the sauna i'm gonna dress it put my shirt back on jeff baseball i'm gonna talk in a really ominous fucking voice and promise a day reckoning for those that had screwed me over um yeah i don't know man it's pretty the whole scandal stemmed from him using the slur on like some sort of call about diversity training they were having yeah use the n-word yeah i think schnaider does remind me of one of those guys that just tries to say that word in like an innocuous way just because he wants to like you know those type that just like will drop it but like in the context of something that like absolves them from like, right. Like any racist connotation or people who would like, uh,

relish like reading it in a book or like, you know, or like the people that like, like you're like, like somebody who's doing a reading of like Mark Twain and you're like, I wonder if he's going to say it. I wonder if he's going to say it. And then they do.

And then you're just like, Oh yeah. It's just never like, you're really enjoying that a little too much. Yeah. Like, yeah, like just, like you're really enjoying that a little too much yeah like yeah like just yeah i don't know um yeah papa john uh well i guess we'll see that whole thing is so if you think about like the whole structure of what happened at the university of louisville

and the athletics program with papa john over the past couple years. It's just a complete shit show. You got Rick Pitino, who's also like one of these fucking like, who's a lot like Papa John, just like this sweaty, fucking disgusting human. It's like, you know, it was basically you know, there was the Porcini's incident where he

had like testified that he like got off in three seconds with his mistress at porcinis and like came down his leg just like man like look i get you're doing deposition but you know i'd probably spare some of those gory details didn't patino didn't he also do a thing like that didn't he also have something where he was like a day of reckoning will come i could have sworn yeah he did it with matt bevin when bevin got elected he was like he did some sort of like funny meme like slay queen meme with bevin losing the election or something oh okay well i just think like i always but yeah

he did do some kind of batshit interview i thought that he did or that he was writing a book or something like like these guys whenever they get fired or something happens they always come back into the news briefly and they'll be like the real story is gonna come out soon a day of reckoning it's like you've already got caught in all the shit you've got caught lying about the shit like 12 times already man so there's no day of reckoning coming it's like move on you're rich go do something with that. Go fucking buy a boat. Yeah. I don't know. I guess it just shows that pizza really was all that Papa John had. He's still holding on to it, apparently.

40 in 30 days. But that's pretty... Yeah. You'd be so constipated if you ate 40 pizzas in 30 days. He's just so not... Listen, I've eaten more than 40 pizzas in 30 days and none of them have been up to snuff. I wouldn't fucking tell that man.

You'd feel like shit. Anyway. Well, let's see. What else we got on the old list? The 737 mags. Oh, the reason we were talking about that is because last night the faa announced that they would be taking back control of the certification program of boeing yeah just like

a little fucking late oh that inspires a lot of confidence right you know you know like there's like international like sort of like aeronautic like agreements between countries i'm like there's only like two countries that haven't signed on to the general agreement and i think one is sudan and then the other is or i'm like not south like sudan like the the other city omar al-bashar the og sudan yeah cartoon uh and what's the other one? I can't remember now, but it's like, what is it? They have to sign on to, I don't know if there's some sort of generalized standards that every international airport has to meet in terms of their planes and their facilities or whatever. I'm not sure.

Well, if you're listening to this, it's so funny. It makes so much sense now to put out an episode about flying on the busiest holiday traveling time of the year. So if you have an insane fear of flying and you're listening to this and we're just giving you anxiety turn us off and maybe come back to sunday and listen to no i was just gonna say redirect that into several things go one go buy some box cutters go talk to your accountant uncle. But also, you know, it's just, I have always maintained that if the airline industry was actually run by the workers,

it would be such a more pleasant experience. Because it's awful. It sucks so fucking bad. Every aspect of it is awful. It's so bad. It's really bad. But more than that, I i mean if we didn't even have an airline industry just high speed rail would be so much better i was reading i was

reading this book about um the sort of uh japanese dandies from the 60s when the olympics were going to go there and like japanese had like but their monorail in like the 60s. You know what I mean? Like it's just so fucking. We haven't really truly invested in infrastructure in this country in like 40 fucking years.

Yeah. Yeah, no, it's true. Longer than that really. Probably just to like save Detroit and shit. Yeah. Well, I do have an article to read

if you want. I mean, see if I can find it real quick. It was in Bloomberg. Oh, that's right. Let's talk about that. So, Bloomberg, which, by the way, we haven't talked at all about Bloomberg entering the presidential race. entering the presidential race um which is i mean so okay last week he spent what was it 33 million dollars on a on a series of ads here's what i want to say about that real quick is as a general rule if the thing that you've been bagging on the guy that currently holds the office for like it's one of like right that's one of your bargaining chips is running as a democrat is like no more billionaires buying elections no more like and it's not just bernie saying that you know what i mean like they all pay lip service to that even if they're all taking money from billionaires yes yeah all the campaigns

are saying like we're not taking corporate money i think even like kamala harris and shit is said yeah it's just like i just i don't understand the rationale of like bloomberg so it seems like bloomberg's whole angle is like i'm going to um fight fire with fire i'm gonna be the good billionaire he's gonna be the best i'm gonna be uh you know like what's the uh rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? There's, like, Heatmiser and, like, the ice guy. You know what I mean? Yeah. Which one's the good one? I forget.

Anyway. Trump would be Heatmiser just because he looks like it. He kind of looks like it. He's got the hair. Yeah. But, yeah, I just don't understand the rationale of, like, I'm going to get in here. I own my own media company.

I'm going to get in this race and like buy up all this media and like fight fire with fire you know there is no rationale behind it yeah it's just these guys are all just like bored old and rich and like yeah what else i got better to do i'll just run for president i'll take a flyer and see if i can you know they see an opportunity in beating trump and honestly this is i, this is not controversial to say or anything. It honestly could lead to Bernie being the nominee. We're talking about this. It would not be that hard to take Bernie down.

All you have to do is find one candidate and unite behind that candidate. But they keep throwing more and more fucking people into the fire because they're all, you go, it's like Obama saying today, like, what did he say about Biden? He's not resonating with voters. Like, Joe Biden is running on, I'm Barack Obama's friend. And he's saying all this contradictory stuff. Obama is. And Obama is like, well, first off, he said said the thing joe you don't have to do this

that was one thing then now he's like he's now he's downright being antagonistic i wonder what that means for biden's campaign i don't know i mean it could be that maybe obama's gonna endorse somebody else it's not biden um but but i just don't understand like how's joe gonna play that down in the election like in the debates now like he's running he's running on he's really running on curbing the repudiation of obama's legacy that's his whole thing yeah yeah right and like building on like obamacare and all this stuff. And his guy, President My Guy, is saying, you're fucking screwing the pooch, Joe. What's that doing for Joe?

That's got to be devastating for Joe. What is Obama's endgame here? This is what I don't understand. Why the fuck is he even... You think he's throwing his weight, trying to like bolster like a devol patrick or could be somebody that's not like really in the race right now because it seems like obama's not had anything but pejorative to say about really everybody in

the race or he's just been mum about it you know what i mean he definitely hasn't put his finger on the scale of anyone in particular but he has singled out bernie and warren and warren yeah which is hilarious that like and it shows really how like like for somebody that like you know that all that people talk about is how like he had these two great electoral victories like how much his political acumen has just gone down the toilet before years since he's left office. He's completely out of touch. You can't see that for their worldview, Warren is the person you should be throwing your weight behind.

No, seriously. You're right, because she's the candidate who has all the radical rhetoric. And the only one that could chip away at Bernie's base. Right, exactly. But won't do shit once she gets in office. But won't do a fucking thing, yeah. It's horrible, yeah.

No, so yes, so it is the Obama candidate but won't do shit once you get won't do a fucking thing yeah it's horrible yeah i'm not saying no so yes so it is the obama candidate right that should be his hand chosen but he's gonna do some dumb shit like uh you know support butt chug or something he might he might i don't know i don't know who do you think barack obama just knowing what now now knowing that the mask has slipped and this guy is just like the water holder for this like for all his billionaire buddies and like just this sort of like weirdly conservative it's like this like it's like the dave chappelle turn almost you get older and rich and you just like get more conservative and all this stuff like it like it's so funny that he is willing to mortgage the future of the entire base of the party most like because i would say most working people are democrats

yeah okay most uh you know i mean as much as we revile liberals i think that the majority of the working class would consider themselves liberal for mostly for lack of a better framing but right right would say that and he's just pissing on their material concerns basically just to shield his sort of genocidal foreign policy from scrutiny yeah and you see that when like he's talking about like oh well we need to abandon our like moral moral high ground about foreign policy, about the drone program and all this stuff. He's saying this stuff. Did you see that profile of him, what he said about ISIS? Oh, it was about this, the Joker? Yes.

His analysis on ISIS is that they just want to watch the world burn. And he quoted from Batman. That's his analysis so like he's just as fucking dumb as trump is in a lot of ways i mean you just wake up it's so weird so much of navigating the world is just thinking there's some other force at work smarter than me that's at the wheel and this thing's more or less going to balance itself out no and there's nobody at the wheel no dude this thing's more or less going to balance itself out. No. And there's nobody at the wheel. No, dude. It's like...

It's complete mediocrity. It's like the Adam Curtis documentary you were watching last night, Living Dead, where that guy is talking about waking up in a ditch and seeing dead bodies all around him and seeing people shredded on the battlefield of World War II. And he gives this speech. He's like, that's when I realized the world was no longer governed by reason it was no longer governed by rationality i realized that i was in this and i had to find a way to survive or navigate it like but but basically he was saying like my whole conception of the world was completely

imploded yeah like there are there is nobody at the helm there's nobody at the wheel no no there are the closest thing is sort of a billionaire class with too much like time and money on their hands that are like building trinkets that are ultimately going to be used to kill us like those little robot dogs that do the flips or this fucking tesla truck that looks like fucking or airplanes that self-s Or airplanes that self-sabotage. That self-sabotage. It's all in the name of like... They know that they ostensibly run the world because there's nobody at the wheel. And they're using all their time

just to like play games with innovation. Yes, that's exactly what it is. My God. All right, well, so back to Bloomberg. There is something in, there was an op-ed in Bloomberg that I thought was so weird. It was just so all over the place and weird that I thought we should probably cover it. It was called Tax the Wealthy and Their Charities Will Suffer. Non-profit organizations would probably get more donations

but become less efficient. This is by Tyler Cohen. America's corporate economy has long been divided between a taxed for-profit sector and a non-taxed not-for-profit sector. This division has significant implications for tax policy. To wit, if the wealth gained from for-profits is penalized, the non-profit sector will also suffer.

Consider the wealth taxes that have been proposed by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Even an apparently modest annual wealth tax of 2% could, applied cumulatively, erode most of the value of an asset over a few decades. Damn. In response, billionaires won't be so keen to hold those assets in their personal portfolios. They may decide to place more of them in their personal foundations and in donor trusts. With those institutions are taxed as well, billionaires can simply give more money to nonprofits. Either way, significantly more resources will end up in nonprofits. The size of the nonprofit sector will dramatically increase.

So far, so good, right? Not necessarily. This is what I mean by, like, all over the place. Many nonprofits are inefficient, have poorly defined goals, and lack accountability. That's true. All right, keep going. In this new world, they also would be spending more time and money chasing after donor dollars. Nonprofit institutions already receive significant subsidies through the tax system.

Not only are donations tax-deductible, but nonprofits do not typically pay tax on net income or property taxes. Applying confiscatory tax rates to capital asset values would make the value of that subsidy far greater. The effects of pushing wealth out of the for-profit sector would be far-ranging, though. Wealthy donors might be more likely to pressure nonprofits for luxury consumption experiences, for example. Basically, this amounts to a woke opposition to a wealth tax. So bizarre.

Many nonprofits sponsor cruises to Alaska or the Caribbean for their donors as a method of fundraising. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but the pressures would rise for those cruise experiences to be more luxurious. Think freshly caught sushi, Rolling Stones concerts, and private butlers. In essence, the nonprofits would be used to recreate private consumption experiences, but in non-taxable form. Dude, I'm telling you, this thing is all over the fucking place. form dude i'm telling you this thing is all over the fucking place hell yeah baby that means i'm gonna be i'm gonna be treated to all these yeah you're gonna man you're gonna get to sit front roll yeah he's making me vote for bernie sanders because i'm gonna sit front row private stone show which is even more fascinating that this is in bloomberg a guy who funds your job

it's true i am on the bloomberg doll is it that's the thing we haven't dug into with bloomberg like how much money he gave like the the war on coal stuff if there's anybody who's single-handedly responsible for ending coal it's not obama it's michael mich Michael Bloomberg. Just gave millions of dollars. Well, he is running on that, too. Yeah. He's like, I took on coal. He's not wrong about that. One response, of course, could be the government to regulate nonprofit institutions more stringently.

Maybe that would happen, but such regulation would inevitably become absurdly complex. Okay, here's what I thought was really funny, though. Or imagine how art markets might be affected by a wealth tax. Rather than keeping their art collections private, many more billionaires would donate that art to museums and other non-profits. This appears to be a good outcome, but it would exacerbate one of the art world's worst problems, which is inflated appraisals for tax purposes. At any rate, America's museums do not have the space or resources to display

and look at all of these paintings and sculptures. It is already common for a museum to display no more than 5% or 10% of its collection. This is like weird word salad. It is totally all over the he's like riding like a guy that's trying to make like the word count for his term paper you just go to these weird diversions where he's just like i can add 60 words by talking about the

percent of works that are in museums yeah i uh and also like i don't know essentially a lot of part would a lot of art would be removed from circulation, stored in warehouses largely for tax reasons. Along the way, Christie's and Sotheby's might go bankrupt as well. Oh, that would be a tragedy. You see a Sotheby's sign in every fucking bougie, like, house yard in Lexington. Yep.

It's like, oh, yeah, that would be terrible. That'd be terrible. That'd be terrible if, like, we had if we had to take over those houses or something. Yeah, as well as many art galleries, as the demand to buy art would plummet. You may think that the demise of a few galleries and auction houses is a small price to pay to reduce wealth inequality. I do.

I'm going to go ahead and tell you something. I would take a piss on fucking Starry Night, the OG Starry Night, if we could have communism. I would shit on every famous work of art that we've ever had. If we could just have some fucking healthcare so I can make my prostate go down a little bit.

But consider that artists, too, need to make a living. Artists like Caravaggio. they've been dead 400 years yeah yeah artists artists like uh rembrandt's great great great great great great great whatever yeah peter broigel the elder and all of this is considering only the wealth tax and its particularly striking effects. There are other tax law decisions that affect the nonprofit sector. If the U.S. restores the corporate income tax rate to what it was before 2018, for example, it could induce more hospitals to switch back to a nonprofit status to lower their tax burden. That might not be good for patients since over time for profit hospitals have proved to be more effective competitors. Well,

nonprofits do not. Let me just, let me just, let me tell you what my man's done here. One, he's casting a wide net. He's painting broad strokes, but my man has,

my man has jumped from Bernie wealth tax to art collection to what makes hospitals compete to, I mean, he's going to have opinions about the fucking bringing the Dodgers back to Brooklyn here in a second. It's just, I do like that framing. It's like, Tyler, here's 2,500 words, man. Just do something with it. Just fucking throw paint at a canvas. Just like the framing of hospitals as...

They have to be competitive. Like, that's the only way that they can... Yeah. One place that you shouldn't have competition at, well, there's a lot of places, in my opinion, you shouldn't have competition at. One is fucking hospital. Yeah. One place you shouldn't have competition at, well, there's a lot of places, in my opinion, you shouldn't have competition at. One is fucking hospital. Yeah.

And this is it. This is the last paragraph. It was a very short piece. The U.S. has created the most dynamic and effective nonprofit sector in the world. It rests on a delicate balance of private support and some indirect not-too-much government subsidy. America interferes with that balance at its peril.

You know, here's... We're messing with forces we don't understand when we're rocking the boats of the NGOs. We're gonna disturb the delicate balance. Man a little bit of ways of seeing last night and talking about that and i maybe this would be good when to have kate wagner back on when she gets back from her honeymoon or whatever but i wonder what i'd like to talk about art under communism and what that would look like yeah because for so long, even in Europe, all the painters and artists were patrons of the ultra-wealthy.

I'd like to talk about conceptions of that. Right. Yeah. Artists gotta make a living. Well, all I've got to say is this came out on the same week that this website, Sludge, who our buddy Brendan O'Connor has written for before, published this incredible fucking investigation. Nation's biggest charity is funding influential white nationalist group. A charitable nonprofit linked to Fidelity Investments has donated at least $100,000 to the New Century Foundation.

linked to Fidelity Investments, has donated at least $100,000 to the New Century Foundation, the organization behind white nationalist publication American Renaissance, since mid-2015. So it's like, tax nonprofits out of existence? Sounds dope, man. Well, I mean, like, the concept of nonprofits and NGOs is to, like, theoretically alleviate suffering in the world and like

whatever it's like if we if we didn't have to do that because there was plenty yeah to go around like there wouldn't be a purpose for that like and and that should be I mean even even if, like, you're working for a nonprofit under the, you know, sort of thought that you're doing some real good in the world or whatever, like, ideally, you should want to end suffering. Live in a world that doesn't need nonprofits. Right, right right exactly like put you like you know like the old line when i first started like working for non-profits was you want to like organize your way out of a job like eliminate the need for your like your job you know what i mean which is hilarious because that would literally never happen no well i mean it's also like there's like you it's just such a weird thing to do to like bring somebody in to to make them a worker and then be like,

what you want to do is do such a good job that you don't need your job anymore. It's such a weird framing anyway. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's the twisted ideology, though, that you find in nonprofits. Right. The self-loathing, self-flagellating ideology you find in nonprofits. Yeah.

But the way to expedite that process is to eliminate billionaires yes millionaires and even like a hundred thousand exactly well that's the thing like non-profits the non-profit sector is so well funded and um robust now because there's been so much goddamn wealth that's been created in the last 30 or 40 years just an astronomical amount and it's coincided with the neutralization of the government from doing anything but regulating markets so i feel like a hundred years ago the government kind of existed to manage the contradictions of capitalism now it's all been just sort of privatized into the non-profit set well i mean when you think about, like, the Clinton Foundation in particular

being the arch example of, like, being the water holders for the ineptitudes of government. It's like they exist to facilitate, like, getting HIV AIDS drugs into places. You know what I mean? Like, they're doing, doing like work for big pharma essentially like as a conduit but under the like pretense of like we're eliminating suffering in the world and that might you know theoretically be true but the haitian government's like in hock tea and all this kind of stuff you know it's like you've just done all kinds of horrible shit

down there yeah yeah so yeah forgive me if i'm just like if i think we should eliminate the profit motive from the alleviation of suffering right well um tyler cohen my man well done tyler i wish i want to write like i want to write i want to just be like he kind of writes like joe biden talks during the debates well he honestly he's kind of a distillation of bloomberg's personal opinions and like just this incoherence you know what i mean like and literally early in it in the early in the essay he says non-profits are vaguely defined and inefficient and at the very end he's like we defund them and our own parents it's like which is it you know i mean dude it's completely incredible

well to put a bow on this one i wanted to talk about trump uh nodding John Voight and talking about what deliverance the you know what did he say about deliverance I want to bring the video up right now so I watched the big burger video and I don't know if it was edited in this way or what but

regardless the video brought out the truly absurdity like the true absurdity of this event. Like how quiet it was. Like Jon Voight got up and danced at one point. Did you see that? No, no, I didn't. Yeah, Jon Voight danced.

I don't know what song that they played. In the Vic Berger video, it was like an 80s B-movie song. Oh, was it like a song from Deliverance, maybe? He might have. He might have played Dueling Banjos. ...artists, musicians, and scholars who make our world a more beautiful, enlightened, and joyful place. Each of today's recipients has made outstanding contributions to American society. Alison Krauss got in on this.

I saw that. The genius, talent, and creativity of our exceptional nation. Oh, yeah. This is from Delay. Is that when he's dancing? Yeah. Oh, sisters, let's go down. Is that when he's dancing? Yeah. He wants to be Christopher Walken. He's trying to dance like him in that video.

No one's fucking... No one's walking. You ever notice Trump's always doing this? Like, when he... Like, when they ask somebody to step up, he's always, like, stepping in front of them and trying to like. Yes. Riched the souls of millions.

Is Alison Kronos a conservative too? I like that album she did with Robert Plant. Yeah, I like Alison Krauss. I mean, I don't like her. I like that album. Yeah, I should say that. I mean, I'm not really into Bluegrass. I think that shit's kind of lame.

You don't like that Foo Foo Lame shit? No, dude. Bluegrass sucks. Oh, man. I fucking hate Bluegrass. I ain't cosigning that. I hate it, dude. Yeah, so he got a medal for his acting. I was trying to find the clip where he said that deliverance moved him to tears.

I can't find it, but if somebody can find footage of Trump saying to John Boyd. Squeal like a little piggy. I like that. I like the scene. You know the scene, folks. We all know the scene. We all know the scene, folks. It's lodged in our nightmares.

We all know the scene, folks. It's lodged in our nightmares. We all know it. But the squeal like a piggy scene, it reveals a greater truth about the human condition. The duality of man. Frankly, many are saying that we're better for. And then there's the boy with the banjo, the thing. And he does the thing, you know. It's beautiful art. Beautiful movie, folks. And if you text the nonprofits, art know. It's beautiful art. Beautiful movie, folks.

And if you tax the nonprofits, art like this will go away. Will go away. No more deliverances, folks. Sorry, nothing you can do about it. Okay, all right. Well, let's put a bow on that. That's a good episode for the week. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy flying now with all that new flight information. All that knowledge you have that there's a very thin margin of error between you and... If you have a fear of flying, here's what I say. Just do the scientific thing where you learn as much about every airplane as possible so that you can be that one nerd who enters the plane and is like oh this must be a 387 uh jetliner or something like that and then they calmly escort you off the plane particularly if you've got a seat in the emergency row

sir you cannot know the make and model of this plane clearly you're trying to take it down particularly if you've got a seat in the emergency row. Sir, you cannot know the make and model of this plane. Clearly, you're trying to take it down. You know when you get on a plane and they explain to you the importance of sitting in the emergency exit row just so you can have the leg room? Uh-huh. I wonder if anybody's done that. Oh, no, yeah, I'm willing to help in the case of emergency. And they're just totally freaked out.

It's safe saved themselves. Yeah. Maybe I'll do it. I think I've been sitting in the emergency room. Spring for the extra leg room. Except I'm just not going to do it for sociological reasons. I'm not opening this fucking door until you tell me who you're

reporting for. Yeah. Well, Happy Thanksgiving. Go to the Patreon. We need your support. We need your support. Yeah, we need your hard-earned dollars. P-A-T-R-E-O-N

dot com slash DrillBillyWorkersParty $5 a month. We'll get you an extra one of these. An extra one of these every week. So go do that. I've heard the content over there is hot. A lot of people, a lot of men are saying it's good. So.

All right. Well, happy Thanksgiving, and we'll see you next time.