Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 34: Ustica Massacre

Episode Date: July 19, 2020

Today we talk about incredibly corrupt Italian politics. slides: https://youtu.be/xHqzUTTZWyI DONATE TO BAIL FUNDS AND ETC AND PROVIDE THE RECEIPT TO US VIA TWITTER OR E-MAIL AND WE WILL SEND YOU THE BONUS EPISODES: https://www.phillybailfund.org/ https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019 E-MAIL IS IN THE YOUTUBE CHANNEL ABOUT PAGE patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod

All right. So, welcome to Well There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters, which also has slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. I am Alice Caldwell-Kelly. My pronouns are she and her, and I am looking forward to a second extremely concise and focused podcast. Yes. Yes, she said over the top that way. Well, you know, Italian politics is very simple to explain, so I don't know why this would

be a problem. I am Liam Anderson. I am at Old Man Anderson on Twitter. My pronouns are he and him. And we have a guest. Yeah, yeah. Do you want me to... Hello, guest. Yeah, hi. I'm guest.

Hello, guest. I picked it myself. Thank you. I'm guest, and I'm an alcoholic. No, my name's Noah. I have a history degree, and that's my qualification for being on here. I am on Twitter. And... I must be nice. Listen, I'm sorry that can't... We do not use the show Twitter for ourselves. Shut up.

Well, to be fair, Justin, if you had simply signed the cancel culture letter, you would be canceled by Twitter. You would be a free speech warrior. I will replace J.K. Rowling as the next beloved character to become transphobic in order to get back on Twitter. The most insulting thing is just that these people have lived their entire lives in these weird bubbles where they've never been criticized before. And the whole idea of cancel culture I think is honestly just a result of, like, famous people finding out people really fucking hate them on the internet.

You're being mean to me, Barry Weiss. That should be illegal. Also, like, there's real anti-Semitism and being mean to Barry Weiss is not it. Barry Weiss also got to date Kate McKinnon, so it's like, you know, why is she complaining? Don't, don't, don't go there. I'm into much pain emotionally from knowing that. I'm glad I barely know who these people are. All right, well, after this is done recording, I'm going to sit you down with a picture book. Flash cards. You just got like a children's picture book with like illustrations of everyone who signed

the cancel culture letter. Where did you acquire this so quickly? Incredibly offensive caricature of Barry Weiss myself. You're like, all right, if you're a conservative woman who had a bot mitsa in the 1990s, you probably got a gold chain with your Hebrew name on it. Is this like an Eddie Murphy stand-up routine? No, it's, it's, it's, sorry, it's, no, it's, it's, what's this face? Larry the Cable Guy. It's like, you might be, et cetera.

You know, that's, that's that thing. No, that's, that's, that's, that's the other guy. That's the guy, the guy who, the guy who went up in the jet fighter plane. Jeff Fox, will they? No, no, it's the other other guy. It's not Jeff Fox worthy. Oh, um, the other blue collar comedy tour guy. Are you, are you, are you trying to talk about Bill Engvall? Bill Engvall, yes.

You might be a redneck as Jeff Fox worthy. You don't. I knew it was right. I knew it. I don't know any of these shit. Ross, Ross is not from the South. Get your coastal elite. Ross is actually from the North. I have seen his palatial holdings in Boston as well.

No, no. Well, here's the thing. All these people are Kulaks, right? Jeff Fox worthy was like, like a programmer from Microsoft. That's true. I would like to say I am a West coast liberal Hollywood elite. So I don't know who any of these people are. And the fact that you're, you know, the fact that you're asking me to learn is,

is really, really hurtful to me. Yeah. So here we have Bill Engvall's plane. Yet another fine aircraft in the Spirit Airlines fleet. What you're looking at here is a plane. And it doesn't look so good. Oh, was that for weight reduction? Yeah.

There's a lightning kit on my fucking head. Listen, if you take off the exterior of the plane, then the air can go through it, which enables it to fly. It's a COVID thing. Yeah. Then you don't have to breathe in all those, all those harmful, whatever. This is my convertible airplane. Do you remember the one time we saw the,

the Mach 1 seaplane? What? Yes. The seaplane. I don't like whatever this is. The Willow Grove Air Force Museum. That was supposed to go Mach speed, but it had a nasty habit of destroying itself instead.

Is that the weird one that's just north of the city? Too beautiful for this one. Yeah. You and I went there and then went to a brewery. Oh yeah. I remember that. What if we combined two famously safe things, power boating and jet aircraft?

I'll only fly in a convertible seaplane if it's just like, you know, like the Spruce Goose, but like with the top sheer coffee. You can really feel the wind through your hair. I'll shoot the pasta sauce. You know, you could be like, you could be like any number of wealthy, wealthy executives and just like fly your plane.

It's 60 miles per hour through, through various wealthy neighborhoods of LA. You know, that's a convertible. I love to get a Cessna. Yeah. The thing that kills surgeons. I want a Cessna. So fucking bad.

I don't even care. Like I just, I just want to be one of those guys. I'm going to wear aviators, like an asshole. I'm going to have a bomber jacket. Wings sewn onto the breast. What I'm saying is I'm going to be Joe Biden. To be fair,

to be fair, there is actually a very, a thriving subculture of people who like both own Cessnas and also restore like World War two era fighter jet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. You just like, you just restoring like a BF 109 and you're fucking. I have to say every single one of those people

is just so fucking cool. And like kind of like the, like the, your uncle who like has a boat kind of white, they're really cool. Yeah. They're, they're pilots. They have to be cool. That's true. My food is here.

I'll be right back. Okay. We will wait for you to get back and then we will start the news. The news. Oh, so it's just the news now. Okay. I didn't know whether we were, I was making a family friendly.

Oh yeah. This very family friendly podcast about 21 people talking about their disaster. News. Wait, Alice, can you get the news man? Oh shit. Yeah. News man, news man, news man.

The problem is I got to scroll through the drops. You're a fucking news man, Don. I ever tell you otherwise you punched me in the face. Yeah. What do you need is one of those like old, you know, like the sound boards, you know, that they used to have like made out of flash. Yeah.

Well, the problem is on the actual thing, right? I have to do everything through software because the only button, I have four buttons so I can have, I can hot wire those, right? I can just have four drops that I can just press. But for everything else, I have to scroll through an enormous list of drops to get to, I don't know, moan.wav, which for the fucking like the Mario theme tune,

but with a guy going bruh in place of every note. I mean, you know that, you know that. There we go. I'm chilling. I love this. I cannot imagine an occasion when you would need that. I love this. It's just now.

Just now. I don't know. You would never need that drop in real life. You don't know. You don't know. There's no reason why you would ever need that. Stop insulting people's lived experiences, boss. All you need is like a drop board, but it's like, you know,

it's just a million, billion buttons. Maybe you got some buttons on top, like it's an airplane. Yeah, I want, I want like a special drop where I have to like turn two keys at once and like flip a button cover up. You have a big fucking lever for one of the drops. You have like a pulley, a crank wheel that determines exactly what percentage of the drop gets played. And it like springs back in the position after.

For some reason inexplicably, you can see like real to real tapes going around in there. Have you ever seen a photo player? A what? A photo player. It is a player piano with a wide variety of extra sound effects attached. Oh, yes, I have.

Yeah. For the podcast of the day. Well, to be fair, Alice, I feel like you need to become a radio DJ and just have like one of those like, welcome to 109.7. You're listening to WTYP. When you think about it, when you think about it, a silent film is basically the opposite of a podcast.

That's true. Anyway, let's get back on topic. Back on topic. Unbelievable. All right, let's go to the news, the goddamn news. Well, turns out everybody hates cops. Yes. As it turns out.

Who can guess? They made Philly police apologize for being assholes and tear gassing people in a confined space. I bet there was a fucking like really like learning and growing bodies in spaces apology and not like some fat shithead coming out and being like, oh, I'm sorry. Sorry we did our jobs too good. Well, I mean, it took him it took him like a couple of weeks

for anyone to see any consequences because the New York Times finally reported on it using a bunch of footage, which was freely available literally everywhere. And the police commissioner came out and apologized and the mayor came out and apologized even though they were like, we needed to do this for public safety. Like the day it happened. And like, you just almost cause like a massive crushing.

What did they actually do again? They killed 45 people with this easily. Tear gas a bunch of people who were trapped on either side. Oh, yeah. It was like down in the transfer. I said 76. Although to me fair, this is like the city of this is where Joey Baloney, the, you know, the strong.

Yeah. That's true. The pop that all the pops love is from. So, you know, Joey and Tony Baloney. Yeah. Good. Who was it who resigned yesterday? It was maybe partially responsible.

Yeah. What was this position? Managing director of the city. I see. I see. That sounds like something corporate as opposed to something municipal. I don't like that.

No. It's like replacing the mayor with a CEO. If you don't run the city like a business, then what are you doing? Right? That's very good at like forcing people into a freeway trench and then teargassing them. I run the city like a business and I get bought by private

equity, which I mean, you know, it's kind of basically what's happening. But I mean, that's basically how daily ran Chicago back when daily was mayor. So good stuff. Daily was funny corrupt. That's true. And he also did have the decency to get hit by a car door on a

bike, which was very funny. So, you know, impossible to say if bad or good. That is about to say a man of the people. He was. He was very good at bikes. Okay. And another news. Open it up.

It's not a second peak if you don't do anything. So it stays the first peak. I actually I actually have. So I am I am currently podcasting, first of all, land acknowledgement from stolen Tonga land. But second of all, I am podcasting from the city of Los Angeles, where our dipshit middle management mayor decided to open up this thing called LA al fresco, which was like every

single business is now allowed to do like outdoor dining, just take over a section of sidewalk, which we have LA outside today. Right. So so the thing is the thing that you have to understand is that California has passed a constitutional amendment that basically made it impossible to levy a property tax that is like reasonable to benefit old people and developers mainly.

But as a result, most of the revenue of Los Angeles and a lot of the state revenue comes from sales taxes. And the thing is we refuse to cut our $3 billion police budget by more than $150 million because Michael Moore has to continue to fly a stupid little helicopter above my house 24 hours a day. Every citizen of Los Angeles County gets an LAPD helicopter to fly over their house.

That's actually what the situation I'm living in because I am, you know, not to, not to, you know, undisclosed location and all that, but like I am in a position where, you know, there is just a helicopter over my house every couple of hours. Are you sure that some cops didn't like creep up on your roof and like paint like a fuck this guy in particular on your roof? It's entirely possible. There is like a, there is like a, like a very suspicious dude that

just sits outside of my apartment all the time. So it's probably bugged. But anyway, I wanted to, I wanted to call out, you know, I wanted to say thank you to, you know, spineless weasel Eric Garcetti for, you know, deciding that in order for his very good developer friends to continue to make money and his various police friends that he's completely scared shitless of, like thousands of Angelenos have to die.

So that's cool. We love our cops. We love our law enforcement. I mean, it could be worse. Like cops cannot be trusted with helicopters. Cops cannot be trusted with helicopters, but at least you never had the thing that Glasgow did where they just fucking crash a helicopter into your city.

I mean, fair, but like, you know, we did have the thing where they shot a bunch of people to death in the nineties with the help of the National Guard. So, you know, that's, although that was, I was not born and also I've lived in Chicago most of my life, which has similar problems. But by the way, Garcetti is still promoting LA El Fresco is like, go home, don't go to bars, don't go to gyms, but also El Fresco is still happening.

That's the same shit Bill is doing where they're just like, just because it's open doesn't mean you should go and then like keeps all the shit open anyway. Well, we have El Fresco. We have it. And like our cases are generally staying pretty low, right? You know, it's between like 60, 150 cases a day in the city. I mean, we're not doing too bad.

The problem with our El Fresco dining doesn't seem to be so much, you know, people are getting killed by it or getting sick from it. The problem is that they're leaving no space on the sidewalk for people with disabilities to get around. And when they've tried now once or twice to do El Fresco dining where they close off a whole street, like on East Paschunk Avenue, the business owners just cannot restrain themselves

from pulling guns on black people. As you say. Yeah. Kulaks. Yes. That was on 2nd Street. Was it on 2nd Street? I thought that was on Paschunk.

No, it was at the Infusion Lounge, which is a shit hole. You don't say. And the guy who runs it or at least used to run it was nothing but a huge dick when I worked at the liquor store. So I hope that somebody, you know, shows him what for we'll say. Yes. Go on.

I mean, you know, it's just it's all pretty stupid because also, you know, when you're outside to people walking by or not wearing masks, you know, the people eating aren't wearing masks. I'm like, okay, cool. You got to get that thing. You got to get the dad thing, whether like you have the mask that you designed on your own that like leave as itself open

so you can fucking shove ravioli in there. Exactly. I would also like to point out that El Fresco is not even how you would refer to dining outdoors in Italian. So it's very annoying. It's a real appropriation. Yeah, exactly. It's a humidity thing, right?

Because you're in sunny Southern California and we have, you know, gross East Coast humidity air, which is, you know, just suffocating constantly. Yeah. Except I, you know, it's been 90 degrees for the past like couple, we've been in a heat wave for the past couple of weeks and it's been like truly one of the worst experiences I've had with heat waves in LA.

Even when I was like in college and there was no, like I don't have air conditioning now, but at least I live on the first floor when I was in college and I didn't have air conditioning and was like on like the fifth floor of a building with like the sun in my goddamn eyeballs all the time. I was like, ah, yes, I'm cooking like a grill. Wow. I love to, I love to like live on the top of this mesa of graph

that we've constructed here and just kind of wait for it to go down. Yeah. It's fine. It's also, it's the numbers are going to go down because now all the hospitals have to report all of their data to a random LLC that is deeply associated with the Trump campaign instead of the CDC.

So I'm sure it's fine and we won't have any problems. Wait, they got a report to like Goya? Listen, as a Puerto Rican, as a Puerto Rican, nothing has upset me more than like having to deal with a conservative suddenly being like, I'm buying Goya products because I'm like, what the fuck are you going to do with some people? And for the first time in my life, it's like, they keep buying Adobo, which by the way is an amazing seasoning and I'm upset

that I can't buy it now and I just have to make my own. But it's like, I keep buying Adobo and I'm like, what are you going to do? Put one grain of it on chicken and be like that spicy. Yeah, you put it into a big bowl of water. To dilute it, right? Where is, well, listen, not to, not to, not to, you know, be too, you know, spicy on main, but like, where is Larita Lebron when

you need her? You know, that's obscure enough that I don't have to be there. Anyway, in other praxis news, the USS, the USS Bonon Richard, which is like named for James, like name for John Paul Jones, I think they said James Earl Jones, named for John Paul Jones's flagship, named for James Earl Jones flagship in the hunt for Red October. Yeah, the USS Fancy Lad, right?

The fucking, they actually nicknamed it the Bonnie Dick at one point, which the USS Fancy Lad who desires a treat fucking extremely caught fire in San Diego. They had it in for routine maintenance and as part of the routine maintenance, the first thing they did switch off all of the firefighting equipment and then it catches fire. Yeah, no. It seems like a bad time to turn off the fire, it's fighting

equipment. It's not the order I would do it in. Well, it reminds, it reminds me so very strongly of the thing that the Glasgow School of Art did after it burned down, which was burned down again the day before they installed the firefighting equipment. Well, no trick down. Yes.

Yeah. The time when it's most likely for a building or in this case a boat, which is like a building, but it floats to catch fire is when it's undergoing maintenance because people are using like grinders and shit. Smoking cigarettes. I figure when you're working on a fire suppression system, that should be the only time the fire suppression system is turned

off. No, just leave it on. Just leave it on. Just open a like a valve and just get fucking drenched with firefighting foam. Oh my god. Shit. Hey, when I go down to San Diego and my Bonnie Dick catches

fire, you know. Yeah, you got to stop meeting Marines on Tinder as what? I don't intentionally meet Marines on Tinder. They just don't help me. Nice. Making of buildings in the water. What about buildings in the sky? Oh, that was a beautiful segue.

Yes. Perfect. What you're looking at here is an airplane. It is a specific kind of airplane. This is a McDonald Douglas DC nine. You can tell because it says DC nine on the side. Right. It's hopefully labeled.

Right. So this was a, you know, a commercial jet. It's single aisle. You know, you got like, I think two seats on each side of the aisle. It's a narrow body. You know, it's meant for shorter flights. A predecessor to the Boeing 717.

That was after they merged. Oh yeah. I forgot. McDonnell Douglas eight Boeing and made it bad. Oh yeah. Essentially. They made it seem like it was the other way around, but it really wasn't.

Parasitized it like a cordyceps fungus, you know, just like getting all the aircraft executives to go stand on top of roofs. So, you know, this was, this plane was good for, you know, shorter, medium range flights. You know, especially back when most air travel was on shorter routes, right? One to one replacement for a propeller plane. Really.

I also sold it in Europe also for shorter routes. You know, and that was especially prior to like when we had high speed rail, when shorter routes were taken over by trains that ran fast enough, they could be with planes. It of course has this wonderful thing called a tea tail, which means it's really easy to stall. Air stairs. You can you can be Cooper out of there really easy.

That is something that I look for in a flight. Yeah. I can take a shit ton of money. Yeah. Just like leap out over a state park in Washington and fucking die. This is all like Italian D.B. Cooper, like Daniela Bernoulli Cooper, you know, 100% D.B.

Cooper died on impact. But like let's not get into that. At a range of 1278 nautical miles, had a cruising speed of 484 knots and fuck off with kilometers. I'm not sure. Yeah. Just no, no metric system podcast. I keep having a conversation about how the the imperial

system is just so much easier to use from like a personal scale of reference where like, you know, a foot is a foot and I can put my foot next to something and be like, yeah, that's a foot. You know, 484 knots is very intuitive. It's how many fucking knots of rope I would let out of the back of a boat if it was going at 484 knots. We need to be using red keen on temperature and we need to be

bringing back the qubit. Okay. How many qubits per hour is this plane? But like also one thing I do notice about this is that this is an Italian plane and you can tell because of the Etavia on it. That's exactly the right intonation. The history behind this particular one because it's originally sold to Hawaiian Airlines.

Now, here's a question. You have a range on this plane of 1278 nautical miles. If a train leave in Chassan, New Jersey. How do you how do you get it from Hawaii to Italy? You simply bring it on a boat. Yeah. No, you don't. You do a bunch of like stops and like ask for yours and like

fucking any in Guam. You don't do that either. The way they transport these tiny planes out to Hawaii in the middle of nowhere is they take out all the seats and they put in fuel tanks inside the fuselage to extend the range. Holy shit. That sounds same. That sounds same.

Yeah. It's a KC9. But for itself. Yes. Incredible. I love that for it. They don't talk about this in the movie Cars, but you know. This is that that's the plane you would least want to have a

plane crash is the one that's just filled with slatters full of fuel. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it's okay because as long as the building is steel framed, it won't do anything. You know. Yeah.

Future. Future episode there. Oh boy. I guess I got to hand it off here to Alice and Noah to talk about Italian politics. I'm not going to see it. I am Lisa and I am so happy. So here you're going to see a map of the 1948 Italian election

result. You don't want to touch my spaghetti. Exactly. The famous slogan of Democrazia Cristiana at the time. But here you'll see a map of the Italian election results. So in order to talk about the Ustica thing, I think we need to talk about Italian politics specifically because Italy is, how do I put this?

The CIA hammering a big sign into the ground that says no communism allowed. Yeah. At the Soviet Union, just kind of like air dropping money to a bunch of like starving Italian communists or just like, I would like to have the union, please. The factory owners in Milan are the worst and they make me eat the stupid Milanese food.

Okay, please. So you may recall that Italy was fascist in World War II and you may also recall that some Italians did not like this very much and like Mussolini got involved in with some Antifa who like compromised him to a permanent end along with a bunch of other like various anti-fascist leaders. Allegedly. Allegedly.

You don't put any photos of partisans killing Mussolini that have identifiable faces. Allegedly Mussolini. We'll talk about that later. The point of me talking about this is that a lot of those guys were communists. And if you're operating, if you are Alan Dulles, right, you're operating on this kind of domino theory that communism is like

this social contagion. You can't fucking let Italy just be the western most bit of the Soviet Union, right? Their pasta is already red. What if the rest of them become, you know? Yeah, exactly. So you have this like, you have a communist party in Italy, the PCI, which is, as you say, you know, it gets some money from

Papa Stalin, right? And then on the other hand of this, you have the CIA just throwing money and arms and everything at anyone who says, yeah, no, fuck those guys. Yeah. And I think it's also, it's important to talk about the whole like Italy does this thing where in every single war they just push to whatever the winning side is halfway through, which is

a strategy that is being cool, right? Which is a strategy that is working really well actually for them. Got to hedge them bets, man. Yeah. Because like, you know, very few, very few Italian fascists actually like suffered consequences as a result of the war.

I mean, very few fucking German fascists suffered any consequences. Yeah, but some of them were executed. Let's talk about Operation Papercloth and how we beat the Germans. Yeah. Our Germans are better than their Germans. Right.

But also like, you know, the Soviets did execute a bunch of, did execute a bunch of Nazis, whereas like nothing similar. I mean, yes, partisans went around like rounding up and killing, you know, the FAA, the Antifa super soldiers did that. But, you know, it's, that's fine. And I'm not going to. The important guys got away even more scot-free than in Germany.

Exactly. The Americans did some war crimes, but like the big one is like a massacre at a concentration camp of a bunch of SS dudes. And I got to tell you, I don't care all that. Well, they also, I would also like to point out, so already during World War II, what happens is essentially the king is like, yeah, I'm not so down with Mussolini anymore. And it's like, what if I, I'm not going to that.

What if I, you know, throw in my giant elaborate hat in with the winning side? So he did. And so the Italian forces essentially joined up with the allies and then we reconquered Italy in the process we bombed a like a bunch of communist neighborhoods all over Italy to prevent communism, including in Rome. And the only part of Rome that was bombed.

And so what happens is at the end of the war, there's this referendum that abolishes the monarchy because people are like, how could the, how could the king lead us into this? And then there's this battle over what Italy is going to be going forward. So the first big election that happens after that is the 1948 election, which again, you're seeing the results right here. It was very popular in Tuscany region. And, you know, the income.

And she, Alfredo just got booted off the. But we all know this. But so basically both sides are pouring a ton of money into this. And you have two basic coalitions. You have the same coalition that I think Alice, you've talked about in other instances of this podcast, the Christian Democrats, it was actually it's, I keep forgetting. It's on the Austrian wine team's tainting scandal episode.

You have this like a centrist party that doesn't really stand for anything other than just being in power everywhere and all of your uncles in it. Like a carpeted version of the Democrats. Yes, kind of. There's the tweet that's like Italy is the ideal. Like the 70s Italy is the sort of apex of multi-party democracy because like, you know, there are like 300 different parties and you're constantly getting blown up in your attempt to vote for any one of them.

But, you know, so yeah, as you mentioned in the episode with Riley, long time listener, first time caller, there's this Christian Democrat series of parties that spring up that are essentially like fronts for the U.S. government to tamp down communism. And on the other side, you have Antifa super soldier, and his party to communist Italian, which does is part of the common turn and takes orders from Moscow. They're in coalition with some pictures here, don't we?

We do in the next slide. And we have the if we want to go ahead and cut to that next slide. Thank you, Justin. Yeah. So on the left, Michael Cain, Michael Cain, who is in the middle, we have, you know, we have Pietro Nenni as as Danny DeVito playing the penguin, which I think is also there might be a thing that comes in on that.

If you hit the next button. Okay. Anyway, and then on the right, you have like Jeff Goldblum, cross the floor, frog, who is a cheetah, the gas Betty, who is the head of the Christian Democrats at the time. So from left to right, then both literally and politically, we have like the guy who could have been the chairman of the People's Republic. Yeah.

This kind of like squishy socialist. And then what if we just did continuity fascism? And then also like you have a spoiler party, sort of the social democratic socialist unity party, which is very ironic, led by Giuseppe Saragat, who is a fine, I guess. But, you know, combined, combined, the, you know, the, the Democratia Cristiana gets 48% of the vote or something like that. But the, all of the left wing parties get about third or sorry, 45%

of the vote and all the left wing parties get about like 38% of the vote. So this is Italy is one of the battleground states in Europe against communism. So that's like uncomfortably close. Right. And, and, and in order to combat this, the US government puts a lot of money into an initiative developed by the originally the British.

So here's where I get to once again blame the British for everything that's wrong with the state of the world. Yeah. So basically, you know, you have a situation where the Alice, do you want to talk about the SOE? Oh, yeah. Next slide, please. So basically,

three gladios. Yeah. So the short, the short version of this is that Winston Churchill is a dipshit, right? He doesn't, he doesn't know how to fight wars. He keeps like being like, well, what if we invade the soft underbelly of Turkey in the first world war? Second world war.

It goes horribly. But the government campaign was well known for working. Oh, yeah. But famously, it's mutilated a bunch of Japanese war dead of World War two. Oh, yeah. But yeah. I'll do that.

So, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, anyway, let's not get sidetracked. Let's not talk about my grandfather anyway. So, so the thing is right. Part of Churchill's like military stupidity is that he constantly wants aggression, aggression, aggression.

This is does not make him very popular with spies. England has quite good spies at times. But they're all sort of these like aristocratic fobs who are like, I don't think I don't like this idea of killing people very much. And so they let Churchill form this his own little private secret service called the Special Operations Executive, whose sole goal is to recruit these incredibly dangerous and incredibly brave dudes from occupied countries and ladies,

I should say, parachute them in to build resistance networks so they can spend six months blowing up like a power substation that gets repaired in a week and then all get tortured and executed by the start. Alice, Alice, Alice. On the other hand, these days, you can be arrested and thrown in jail simply for putting up a power station or a breach. Yeah.

But that's all the fun. Yeah. So we get to do the like the fun stuff and you get a lot of like action movies out of it after the war, but they're disbanded very quickly after the war because nobody wants that like that skill set of blowing up power stations anymore. And it wasn't that useful.

And those, you want to you want to join the SOE and go behind the enemy lines and do some petty vandalism and then get tortured to death? Oh, yeah. You want to join the SOE and draw like a mural of like Hitler making out with Stalin on the side of a bridge. Oh, my God. They're a nasty habit of getting killed by the Soviets,

which is actually my favorite. Well, fair play. So, you know, fair play. Okay. But like this idea, this idea of SOE, it doesn't quite die though because there's always going to be someone as dumb as Winston Churchill. And in this case, the someone that dumb is probably Alan Dallas.

Yeah. Alan Dallas head of the CIA at this time, like one of the few like brother double acts in politics. Yeah. No, he, he just decides, huh, what if we just kind of keep doing this? And we have this like stay behind thing because we know that like if the Soviets invade Western Europe, we're never going

to be able to hold Europe itself. Maybe Britain, maybe. But like assuming things don't go nuclear, all of these countries like France and Germany are going to get completely overrun. So what if, what if we have the SOE guys just like just like living, living quietly, chilling, and then when the Soviets overrun them, they go like they go sicko mode and they go blow

up Soviet stuff and shoot Soviet offices and things of that nature. And to quote the television series Archer, it turned into a crypto fascist shit show starring Alan Dulles and a bunch of former Nazis. Yes. Because all of the like all of the people you can recruit for this stuff are former like Vafaneses guys.

And so that's what they do. I'm sorry. You just have 10 people go stand in the folder gap. And I don't know. Throw one hedgehog tank trap down and kind of hope for the best. I would also like to point out, I mean, you know, what you're maligning these people as Nazis, but really they're just free speech warriors acting out against the Antifa threat.

You hear about this shit and you realize like maybe Stalin's paranoia was not that unjustified. You should not have killed the Jews. We're not here to defend Stalin. Much. Yes. This initiative is codenamed Gladio. Right.

It means sword. You can see it on the thing. And there's one of these in pretty much every country. And as you say, it looks like a dick and balls and immediately these turn fascist. It's very difficult to ascertain exactly how much their actions are like controlled by anyone. The ones in Belgium just fucking turn into like natural born

killers, guys, because they realize, oh, hey, we have all of these like American submachine guns and explosives. We can go just rob bank vans and kill people for fun. And the one in Turkey just turns into what becomes the original deep state there. So like it gets weird very quickly, but this is Italy is the big like showpiece. Gladio saying especially because like Italian fascism was

already really weird because like you get people like like it's underpinned by people like Julius Evella, who is like just like a fascist wizard. I mean, literally he's just fascist Gandalf or like J.K. Rowley, you know, that's just who he is as a person. But yeah, so it gets very weird very quickly. And one of the ways in which it gets weird is on the next slide. Alice, can we get the drop for this?

Which which dropped? Oh, yeah, fuck you wanted to. Yeah, it's Berlusconi's horrifying election song. I keep making jokes about how this is just Italian Pete Buddha judge because like every line in this song is like we have hopes and dreams. We're going to make those dreams reality. And the president is going to help you do that, but it never

spells out exactly what the hell they are. Which is cool. I don't know. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's me. I'm doing doing fascist stuff. I don't care about Christianity.

I'm so tired. This is Silvio Berlusconi, right? He was older. Yes. Look at that face. The reason Silvio Berlusconi is on here is because one of the various appendages of Operation Gladio is this this Masonic Lodge.

And if you could go to the next thing in this slide. Justin, I would appreciate it. Thank you. There's a total evolution of the slide that we'll get to. But so the thing is there is a literal Masonic Lodge pulling the strings of Italian politics for a long, long time. And it's led by this dude named Licio Gelli, who is just an unapologetic fascist from the time of Mussolini.

And they actually get decommissioned in like 68 or 70 because they're too political. And what they're doing is they're getting money from the Vatican. Next thing on the slide, please. Yeah. They're getting money from the Vatican. There we go. All of this sounds deeply insane.

But the thing to learn here is that in 70s Italy, every conspiracy theory is true once, but only in Italy. So the thing about propaganda due is propaganda due is a conduit for a number of things. And I don't think I've explained the reason Silvio Berlusconi is on the slide is because he was a member of this lodge and continued to be in Italian politics after that was discovered and also owns all the media in Italy now, which is fine and cool.

But again, to be clear, the lodge was called propaganda due. Yeah, it's straight up called propaganda due. It's not like a nickname. And there was no propaganda uno. It was because they switched to numbering the Masonic lodges. Oh, so it's like local propaganda number four. It's your local Freemason Junior. It's a national brotherhood of gladio operatives.

It's the Tress. It's the Tress from the from the novel Foucault's pendulum, but they're a union now and it's good. So we have to support. Listen, I represent conspiracy theory instigate as union local 103. I do UFOs. I do multiple. We represent.

Big mic down there does weather control. Listen, listen, listen. I troll it in 45 minutes late with like a happy Italian. So fucking forgot to turn on the weather machine today. Just got like a truck and a truck bed full of weather machine parts just raffling around loose. It's fine. It's fine.

What does it matter? We set the tornado the right place. It's 45 minutes late. You talk to the rep. Can I walk up to these conditions? I'm from the local 9 11 conspiracists union. And I want to say that you're treading on our territory a little bit. Shit.

Okay. So propaganda. Propaganda doing is like this is why the union, the conspiracist union should be under IWW. You take your red card from like. Shooting the stage shooting. Listen, my father, my father organized the JFK assassination. I organize the put the shoe bombing on the plane.

You know, my this is a union. That is what propaganda doing is like the conspiracy theorists union. And the thing about this is that they act primarily as well. First of all, to direct operations of gladio allegedly to direct operations of gladio. And there's like enough stuff going on with that, that it becomes pretty clear that like some, there's definitely connections between the two.

But also there is this thing with a bank that is managed by a member propaganda doing called Robert Fokalvi whom Alice will talk about in a second. But they take money from the CIA and route it through the Vatican bank and then send it out all over the world to causes that the US government is trying to support. So for example, they sold, they sent money to the Contras. They sent money to Solidarność in Poland. And when that became a whole thing and generally support,

you know, the anti-antifa movements across the world, which you can just call fun. So Roberto Calvi Alice, if you want to do the Calvi thing. Roberto Calvi is like this guy. He was called God's banker because he moved so much money through the Vatican bank. But like, eventually he gets a little bit too, too nervous about this. And there is perhaps some suspicion that he moved some money to some places

that he shouldn't have in order to enrich himself. And so he disappears completely, which is a normal thing to do, right? He goes to London where he takes a walk to the underside of Blackfriars Bridge, a thing you can only reach by boat. He fills his pockets full of rocks and ties his neck to the bridge and strangles himself. Just like a perfectly normal suicide. No need to investigate further.

It's absolutely perfectly, nothing is weird about this. I would also like to point out as we continue into the next section and the discussion of this. A, I was Googling a bunch of farms in the Falkland Islands. Because of a New Yorker article. So if I disappear and have said that I've gone to the Falkland Islands, that's not where I went. You know, my highway phone is like pretty weak.

And, you know, I am constantly having dark thoughts. So keep all this in mind. This is the thing. Like, you know, you referenced an Umberto Eco novel called For Coast Pendulum, the premise of which is not to spoil too much that every conspiracy theory is true and happening simultaneously. And one day I will get the film rights to it one day. Yeah, it's fine.

It's also a prison. Yeah, it is. It is a prison. Yeah. So, you know, I'm glad that we're talking about how much of a prison this all is. Okay. So the next slide has, I think the context for Ussika, because we are getting back to the plane,

but clockwise from left, that's the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, and the Bologna train station bombing about which we will hear more later. But essentially, the deal is that during the 70s, there are a series of incidents that take place that are terrorist attacks from both the far right and the far left. Later, it is discovered that Galadio has some involvement in supporting and making these happen as part of what's called the strategy of tension.

Literal false flag attacks. Once again, 70s Italy, the only place where Alex Jones could have been right. And, you know, it's very... Operation Northwoods was a thing, man. Yeah, that's true. I mean, also, like, you know, it's, it's, you say that, but also, you know, Cointel Pro existed, you know, the U.S. government regularly, like, just straight up lies to us about things,

not to get Alex Jonesy on here, but like, the CIA carries these tactics with them both home and abroad. But essentially, the strategy of tension is intended to create a stable, like, crypto fascist government to maintain capitalist power within a country. And it does this... Which is such a, like, bombing the village in order to save it, ass thing. Right. Very normal, very normal world.

Stability is when you blow up enough train stations that people do not vote communist. Right, and the more train stations you've blown up, the more stable the country is, as we all know. That's true. True. But also, by the way, interesting thing to talk about, like, all of these suspiciously timed quote-unquote Islamic terror attacks in England that are part of the same. So the way that the strategy of tension works is essentially that you allow,

slash, fund fascist terrorist attacks against, not the state, but against the people. So that's why you do only attack civilian targets at that. So Piazza Fontana was at a bank. The Bologna train station bombing thing was a train station. Various other attacks were carried on the civilian population. And the idea is you then make the civilian population turn towards the government to protect them against the fascist. But then you also allow left-wing terror attacks, slash, fund, slash, make up, left-wing terror attacks, against the state so that the people who are now aligned with the state in terms of protecting themselves

are seeing the communists as the real threat and the real enemy. And that's why if you look at the Piazza Fontana bombing, like, they immediately arrested this random anarchist for it, and then he suspiciously just happened to fall out of a fourth-floor window, which is normal. Classic anarchist attacks? I see how that happens. It's so weird how anarchists keep getting arrested for things they just do spontaneously and then just dying while trying to escape. All anarchists know is be bisexual, hand out water, fall out of fourth-floor window, and lie. They don't believe in these state-mandated safety features that prevent you from falling out windows, you see.

No gods, no monsters, no stairs. Hold on, they're anarchists, not anarchists. This is a bunch of... A state is a state. That's fair, that's fair. It's so much of an iron-rand-inspired terrorist just not complying with OSHA regulations. And the thing is that, like, Gladio is kind of involved to some extent or another in pretty much all of these, right? Because they have this secret network of people who are trained to use explosives and stuff,

and they have, like, just regular, like, big old caches of explosives just all over Italy. One of them is in a Gravia Arden Verona, which is incredibly, like, fucking movie shit. And they all contain, as we'll talk about later, like plastic explosives, high-grade rifles, so they don't contain any SA-80s, and that's important. But the... No, you open one of these and it's just like... Lassi! Listen, I have, you know, compiled references, like, to tie this into previous episodes,

just like the writer that I am. But the thing is, the one on the left is probably one that we should just very quickly go over to talk about the guy that's in charge of Italy when all this happens, who centers very closely in this upcoming plane disaster. The guy on the left is all around, like, just nice dude Aldo Moro, who was the head of Democrazia Cristiana, who was the prime minister in the 70s, in a portion of the 70s, until he was... his bodyguards were shot dead, and he was kidnapped out of the blue by the Red Brigades.

And please note that I'm making a really big, like, air-quote motion while I say that. It's that thing, that classic thing that communist terrorists are able to do. Kill a bunch of bodyguards, kidnap a prime minister, and then evade detection for months. Sometimes just by minutes, like, the cops would be going to, like, raid an apartment. Huh, the coffee's still warm, but everyone's left, almost like they were warm. Oh, everyone's gone! I wonder what could have happened here.

Yeah, also... Certainly we, the police, have nothing to do with this. Also, I would like to say that, like, the machines that they were communicating on were previously owned by the Italian government, like, within that year. So the Red Brigades kidnapped Aldo Moro, and this guy called Francesco Cosiga, who we will talk about, forms essentially three emergency committees that grant himself a wide variety of powers. One of the... two of them are public, and one of them is secret,

and contains a bunch of doctors who are like, what's going on with Aldo Moro? Because he seems to be chilling, like, Jay chilling. And the thing that happens there is that all of the minutes of that committee are leaked so that it makes it look like he's got Stockholm syndrome, and there's no way to get him back. And eventually, someone within the Red Brigades, Francesco Cosiga refuses to negotiate with terrorists,

and someone within the Red Brigades pulls the trigger and kills Aldo Moro. Because, and here's the pulse of the motive. F's in the chat. F's in the chat for, you know, a nice boy. Because the motive is that Aldo Moro had a plan to essentially invite the left into government, and take the democracia priciana out of coalition with the right-wing party. That kind of shit is bad for your health.

That's like when an African leader starts using the words land reform. Or like, when a Bolivian president is like, I don't want to give this lithium to Elon Musk. It's like, whoops. Yeah, really hazardous activity. I'm sure that election is going to go fine, and we won't hear any problems with that. And the left will very peacefully and democratically regain its spot.

Naturally. Right, exactly. So this would have given the left in Italy actual power in terms of things like to pass, for example, welfare and union shit and all that. Can't have that. And it's very widely suspected among Italians in Italy that this was a front operation of Gladio,

especially because propaganda, the way it met, literally hours after Aldo Moro was kidnapped. And Licio Genli says, OK, well, the hard part is done. Jesus Christ. I can't remember even hiding it. Where you're leading us to is this guy, Cosiga, who is like mysteriously, who's investigating, who's like leading the government through its troubled time,

in the midst of this hostage crisis. Right. He becomes... Oh, sorry, go ahead. He becomes Prime Minister, right? Yes, he becomes Prime Minister at the time that the Ustaga thing is happening. So if we could go to the next slide, we'll see him with one of history's greatest monsters

headed to a pizza hut. Yes. So the thing is that Francesco Cosiga is from a bourgeois family who are radically anti-communist. He made his bones and politics by putting down the Bologna Student Rebellion, by infiltrating them, directing them to do violence, and then arresting them and their professors and putting them in jail. No parallels.

Right. These days, he can be arrested and thrown in jail, simply for being a student activist. But anyway, I love that joke. Anyway, so he is elected Prime Minister after this kidnapping in 79 to 80. And the thing about the Ocasio-Cristiana is they have like 10 very boring politicians who are just sort of shunted upwards

of the ladder between Prime Minister and President, et cetera. Yeah, Jack Johnson and John Jackson are like trading places to be Prime Minister of Italy. And the John Jackson in this situation is Francesco Cosiga and the Jack Johnson is this guy whose name I am... Giulio Andreotti, who is basically the same dude, but less fun and cool. And Cosiga is Prime Minister during this whole thing.

We'll talk a little bit more about his Prime Ministership, but he resigns a few months after Bologna, and after a bunch of evidence about Operation Gladio is revealed, like the list of members of Propaganda 2 and the extent of that conspiracy, et cetera, which is very suspicious. Then he becomes President in the 90s, but he starts getting very depressed and sarcastic after this big fight that he has with Giulio Andreotti,

where Andreotti spills the beans on Gladio, and he's like, yeah, we did this, Cosiga was involved and I was involved, and it's all fine now, you know? It's over. Everything's fine. Yeah, so the thing is... Sorry about that. You know, and then the Communists tried to impeach him,

but he, you know, he got really mad, and he basically... he was called Il Matacone, so like the pickaxe wielder, because he just, like, said whatever the fuck was on his mind, including that, like, for example, Palestinians did the Bologna train station. The Bologna train station, yeah. Just absolute bullshit, but like he's a quiet part loud guy, right?

Yeah, and he did actually struggle with bipolar disorder and depression a lot in his later years, so it's... He's a small bean. He's just a small bean who's just doing fascist coups. So, okay, now that's the plan. So that's the background that you need to understand what exactly is going on with... Thank you.

Thank you for attending Noah and Alice's Italian Politics University about how everything bad is the CIA. Right, but Lisa, the CIA loves to make the pizza and loves to make the pasta, you know? So speaking of pizza and pasta... Don't bother touching my spaghetti! So up here is Bologna, right? Up here, right?

That's Bologna. That's it. Bologna, yes. Down here is Palermo, right? Right, people like to go there for vacations to Southern Italy from Northern Italy, right? It's going from Germany to Spain. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, because over here, this is basically Germany, or it's also kind of like Ohio. Yeah, exactly. I'd like to, again, just say that I'm here to defend Italians unironically and say that Northern Italy is very beautiful and that particular region is very communist. So, you know. Yeah, but you don't like the pasta like Ohio.

I do actually like Northern Italian pasta. I like all Italian pastas. They all rule. Anyway, I love Italy. Best country in the world. Anyway. Yeah, all right. So, okay, now one of the things is back in the late 70s, early 80s,

the way you get anywhere from anywhere else in Italy is you got to basically fly there, right? Unless you want to take a long, slow train, get on a ferry across the strait, get the Palermo. I absolutely want to do that, but I'm fucking weird. Sorry. The ferry is a row-row ferry, so you don't really want to do that. Exactly.

No, don't belay that. At this point, there was one high-speed line. It went from Florence to Rome. It was called the Directissima, right? And that opened in 1977. The ferry directs. I think around the same time, yes. I think around the same time, the French had the TGV,

but we never hear about the Italians pioneering high-speed rail for some reason. The left hates Italians and erases their contribution. It's just world. I mean, that's literally, I'm just here to defend Italians. That's why I'm here, okay? That's my rule, and I love Italy. Please let me back in.

On the 27th of June, 1980, Itavia Flight 870, which was a McDonnell-Douglas DC-9 Series 15 that we saw in an earlier slide, takes off from Bologna on route to Palermo, right? Two hours delayed on the tarmac. Imagine being in that line being like, Oh, can this get any worse?

I know, right? I can't learn from friends. Stop the fuck up. They just left out of the lounge before they took off. They took off in heavy weather, but the weather clears after they get into the Turinian Sea. That's this area here, right? So around 837 p.m.,

they just lose radio contact with the plane, right? Oh, good. No one knows what happened, right? There's no indication of distress, nothing. Is that good? Just people living their lives, not a cell phone in sight. They scrambled the Air Force to look for the flight, right? Now, it was very clear, right?

But they still had poor visibility. Because it was night. That's not a good... Yeah, that's a twist. There was a grappling on the plane way, and nobody was paying attention. They didn't believe me. Now, again, the weather was good.

They gave no distress signal. The next day, they found wreckage floating on the surface and a bunch of bodies also floating on the ocean. They found out the plane wrecked pretty quickly. It's not like MH370, where it's like, I don't know, it flew into a time warp or some bullshit. Yeah, you got to like, crash it into a bigger ocean

if you want the time warp effect. It's the worst vacation ever. So, then the question became, alright, how did this plane wreck? Hmm. It was a mysterious act of God's love, and I don't think that we can question that. Yes.

Yeah. Well, the investigation was sandbagged for a long time by the Italian government and a lot of other Italian institutions, right? The Murro di Gamma. Yeah, so... You're going to do the accent. The Murro di Gamma.

The Murro di Gamma means the rubber wall, and that's what it's referred to, because every time that the families of the victims try and get any answers out of the Italian government, it just bounces off. Especially because they really had the pressure Cossi got to do an investigation into it, which eventually he caged.

Which is fucking weird. Right, like, if there's a plane crash that's like normal and unsuspicious when you ask the president or the prime minister, hey, do you think we should do something about this? Normally, I think their reaction is not like, hmm, no, I have to go now. To be fair, Alice, all of the people

who could have investigated it were, you know, on shop at all. They were striking, so it's fine. The local, the local 69th conspiracy in the universe on strike. New merch idea. So after a long time, Casigo, he's the prime minister, right?

Yeah. Well, actually, he's president at the time that they do the investigation. He was prime minister, he resigned in 1980, and then he was elected. Basically interchangeable, who cares? I don't know what I'm talking about. It's the same clique of like 10 people

that control the government. Yeah, it's Jack Johnson and John Jackson. Who cares? Yeah. He allows the French to investigate the underwater crash site, you know, with this nice friendly ROV right here, you know, going up or whatever it's called.

It's called Robin. Yeah, it's called Robin. It's cute. It's a little, like, little photocopier on the wall, so I kind of like it. Her name's on the side. They managed to find the cockpit voice recorder, you know, at the black box.

But, you know, it had been on the seafloor by, like, 12 years once they get it. Jesus. That's a real Italian pacing there. I love it. But they're able to recover it thanks to a company that may or may not be owned by front companies of the French Secret Service,

according to the Corriere de la Serra, but, you know, not suspicious. Well, y'all didn't get it, so I don't know what the fucking problem is. Yeah, you want it so bad, you go find it. Uh, manager. They sent the cockpit voice recorder to Washington, D.C. for investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, right?

Normal. Because the sky is American. All of us Americans. This is America's business. That's true. Yes. Yes, unironically that. Well, that's what the C's are.

The C's are open to buy a haircut. Yeah, it says, from C to... I'm sorry, you don't have a blue water navy or a leaven aircraft carrier. Maybe you should find an orange ties bag. I need an aircraft carriers and one fewer helicopter carrier as it's currently burning to the waterline.

That's fine, we'll fix it. We'll build it. We'll build it. With our many, many factories that we still have in our goods. We'll have to replace it. No, we got the shipyards, baby. We can rebuild it. We have the technology.

Yes. They recover a lot of the plane. They recover it. They reassemble it as per the photo we put up before. I think this is one of the first big flagship cases for reconstructing an airplane from the wreckage of it. That hadn't really been done before. It was this in Lockerbie, I think.

Before that, there was a stupid idea to be like, we just put the jigsaw puzzle back together in a hangar. This is one of the brilliant things about stupid ideas. Sometimes they work. Yes. It works and it's stupid. It's not stupid, Roz. True.

Some of it's sent to a British lab for chemical analysis. This is the part where we need to talk about plastic explosives. Thank you, Alice. Thank you, Jeff, for trusting the goddamn British. That's true. That's true. We should be arresting them simply for the... The rule of threes, I had to put it in there.

We're starting another war of 1812, but on our terms now. I didn't tweet out. We're taking Canada. We'll burn Toronto again. I did tweet out last night at like midnight. Oh no, the British are awake again. It's time for me to put away my plans for taking revenge for the war of 1812.

We're planning crimson, baby. Let's fuck it up. We're going to draw a distinction here between plastic explosives and a different kind of... Between plastic explosives and explosives with plastic in them. Plasticized explosives. Your earliest plastic explosives were developed by Alfred Nobel You know, the dynamite guy.

He came out with something in 1875 called delignite, right? Also known as blasting jelly. He kept hitting home runs and he didn't want to. He was like, no, actually this is bad, but... I hit it when I improperly store my blasting jelly and it grows a layer of mold. Because I have a really fancy L.A. restaurant where I just sell blasting jelly to a bunch of hipsters for like...

A french toast with blasting jelly. And we both... 19 bucks a plate, baby, fuck you. When you have a plastic explosive, right? Plastic refers to how the explosive can be shaped and molded and deformed, right? Rather than using actual plastic, right? It's an adjective, not a noun.

A lot of the early ones would use like paraffin wax or something like that as opposed to plastic because they didn't have any. Although, they may use actual plastic in the formulation just to confuse you further, right? In this case, it's helpful to think of it as... Plastic just here means like squishable. Yeah.

This is actually... This is good. That I'm learning this because this is the one area that my material science class that I had to take when I was being an engineer foolishly just did not cover at all. So, you know... Weird.

That's for some reason. For some reason. A distinction between plastic and elastic. Oh, no. I mean, it's just like literally like explosives not covered. What do you mean? What do you mean flammable and flammable mean the same thing? Don't like that.

All right. So, let's look at the parts of the explosive that explode, right? Oh, boy. La la la la la la la la. Oh, look how about it. All we talk about in this podcast is organic chemistry, of course. Shit. So, first, we got to talk about RDX that stands for

Research Department Explosive, right? It's explosive starts with an E, not an X. So, you can see all these blue guys are nitrogen. That means it can go boom, right? Hmm. It's also fertilizer. Yeah. But it's also good fertilizer.

It's so impossible to say if bad or good on this one. Spreading plastic explosives in a thin sheet over my feet. I'm pretty sure this one is X. This was first synthesized in 1898 by George Friedrich Henning, but production was not really perfected until the early years of World War II by the British, right? Our fault. Our fault.

Our fault. You know, per pound, it's got more energy than TNT, because, you know, lots of nitrogens. You can have a smaller and more explosive charge. Right? It's very, very stable. You can shoot it. It won't detonate usually.

You can set it on fire. You can do a lot of stuff to it. Usually won't detonate. It's also the main ingredient in C4, right? Which, incidentally, means a fun fact that I learned. You can burn small amounts of C4 to use the main ingredient in C4. Right?

You can use the main ingredient in C4. And you can burn small amounts of C4 to use them as ration heaters. Oh, yeah. You should not do this, however, because it will create a fucking ton of extremely toxic gases. And so every couple of years, you'll see a news story in Stiles and Stripes or whatever that's like,

a couple of Marines got hospitalized again because they were like, instead of using the FRH in this MRE, we should just burn some C4. Oh, wait. What? Yes. My entire body is shutting down now. I have a question on this, which may be a stupid question

because, again, I switched out of being an engineer because I hated it. And material science was like one of the classes that dropped my GPA so low I almost lost my scholarship. But so if you have an RDX compound, will it explode on its own? Or does it have to have a casing in order for it to build up the pressure in order to explode?

I believe it just explodes on its own. Oh, very fun. I think you need a proper detonator, right? Which brings us to the second chemical here, DETN. That stands for Penta Arethbratoletronitrate. I don't know if I pronounced that right. Yeah, that makes sense. That's enough.

La, la, la. Because there's four nitrates. We can see the difference. There's a difference of alkyda. Yeah. This was also invented by the Germans in 1894. It was used a lot in World War I. Less stable than RDX, still pretty commonly used,

especially in detonators for, like, other plastic explosives. And it's the main ingredient in a few kinds of semtex because there's lots of different kinds of semtex. I learned this today. Used often by Albert's quote, Al, unquote. I should point out, since you asked, this is classified RDX as a secondary explosive, or sometimes a tertiary explosive.

The difference is that they don't explode very sensitively on their own. You usually need to, like, detonate it with a smaller charge or something more reactive. Well, they look very delicious. So, you know, just something to not eat. So, yeah, your semtex and your C4, they're plastic explosives.

They can be shaped by hand or with simple tools in the field. But now I have to talk about their counterpart, also made out of these components. You know, explosives made with plastic, which are not plastic explosives. Oh, boy. Okay. So far.

Yeah. So, you combine these with certain plastics to form PBX. That's polymer bonded explosives, right? Man, you do all of this complicated chemistry and you still don't know that explosive starts with a fucking E. Yes. So, these are like, they have plastic in them, but they're not deformable.

They're not ductile. Yeah, you can't really do it by hand like you can with the plastic explosives, right? Okay. So, you can mold their shape at room temperature, right? Got it. So, you can take PBX and you can shape it into complex shapes. You can mold them at high pressure.

You can even mill some of them on a CNC machine, right? Just using my big fucking turret lathe on some explosives. Filing that one away. You can extrude them. You can extrude them like they're pasta. The forbidden pasta. Yeah. Like, like, like, oh no.

Bump on it. Puts you my spaghetti. Oh, no. That's the spicy thing at Holy that we all did it. So, cuting spaghetti if you're careful enough. So, one of the things these guys are used for, I mean, they're used for shaped charges, of course, because you can shape them easy.

Sometimes you can make them so they're like rubbery, so they're more shock resistant, right? They're also very good for nuclear explosives, right? So, you can form what's called an explosive lens. And that's sort of like the way you have a shape charge inside the nuclear warhead in order to properly squish the nuclear material into itself to achieve supercriticality, right?

No, thank you. I would simply not do that. Explosive. No, you have to. It won't work. So, it's also used in conventional weapons such as the Sidewinder missile, right? That uses a sort of hollow steel spring, right?

That's filled with PBX N3. And that's 85% RBX, 15% nylon, right? And that allows it to achieve a specific explosive pattern, right? You cast debris out in as wide an area as possible so you don't have near misses. Oh, yeah, it goes into a circle, because it's like a bunch of steel bars which are welded together alternately at each end,

so it expands out into a big ring. It's like chainshot, but like... Can we just go back to using bronze cannons to storm the walls of Constantinople? A race tradition rejects modernity. You think the warfare has gone too modern? It has. I miss the days when people had these big, puffy sleeves

on their outfits and they had hikes and shit and 90% of casualties were just because you got tuberculosis or legionnaires to see is out in the field, you know? Call of duty. Triple shades. Don't give them ideas. I wouldn't play that. Actually, I think that's just Mountain Blade Warband.

I see you have a slide here that requires like some sensitive and tactful drops that... Terrorists win. This is a very... I just want to point out again, because I'm here to defend Italians, this is a placeholder slide that just kind of... Like, this is just where we're at.

Again, you know, I love Italy and please don't ban me from visiting because it is my ambition to die in an apartment in Rome. Yeah. Don't care how. So we're doing some... We're doing Rashomon here, right? Because this did the spooky mystery thing

of just fucking blowing up or something and just disappearing. We don't know what happened. All we can have are theories and we're going to present those theories to you. That's not how I remember it. Precisely. And so this is theory one.

Somebody put a fucking bomb in the turlet. Me after my morning coffee. So log it out. Yeah. Yeah. So they, you know, they just reached in a tissue holder built in a wall, put a small quantity of plastic explosives wrapped in sheeting

right up against the frame of the aircraft and that goes off on a timer at some point. The plane splits in half in midair. No warning. The front goes in the Mediterranean more or less vertically, right? Hmm. Like it's also, that's borne out by the cockpit voice recorder

because those dudes had no idea what was going on. Like it just ends with a dude just going like, what? And then it just ends. Right. And again, what we have of the cockpit voice recorder does say that. Yes. You know, let's, but it's basically that they don't even get a full sentence

out before it just cuts out, which is cool and fine. Normal. Hmm. We can say with relative certainty that they, the plane did go nose down into the Mediterranean, right? Because how the way the front of the wreckage is deformed, you know, kind of crumpled like an accordion, you know, right? Which, and it's, yeah.

This, we get all of this detail from the British report, which like got into some, some highly technical stuff about the like actual fuselage wreckage. And it also contains this sentence, which I enjoyed because I'm a child. It is still firmly believed that no initial event other than an internal explosion in this area can explain the extensive, violent and consistent movement outwards and away from the toilet. Which is a fucking mood.

Let me tell you. I have an IBS post. I had to drop it due to the club. Someone had a couple too many spicy meatballs. He had the forbidden, the forbidden spicy explosive rigatoni. And, you know, Oh no, I feel like beating pasta, but instead of pasta explosives. The sauce.

The sauce was gently spiced with a secondary explosive. Where they added Pecorino Romano on top, created the ultimate, you know, an ultimate accidental explosion. So there is, yeah. That's what I call a pasta alla rabiata. Cancelled. Cutters, Mike. They made it.

They made the sauce with nitric glycerin, but also really good tomatoes still imported from the Netherlands for some reason, because that's what Italy is now doing with most of its tomatoes. Oh my God. There's no rail. There's not a good rail infrastructure to get tomatoes up from the south where they are better. Still not fixed.

Jesus Christ. Like, is this why I can't get San Marzano's anymore? Well, you can get really shitty San Marzano's, but yeah, that's that's part of the reason. Um, I mean, you know, everybody's like, I'm a Mussolini. I've had so many good things. And I'm like, OK, well, you know,

well, then where are those good things in regards to the railways in the Mezzo Giorno? Are you saying you didn't make the trains run on time? Actually, in fact, there is empirical evidence to support that the trains ran less well under Mussolini. So if you were on the fence about doing fascism, please do not, because it does make the trains worse. The trains are worse.

Right. That's true. So this is this is like, so what we're proposing here is that somebody does some terrorism by like blowing up the toilets. Yeah. And I want to I want to say there's a note in here that says that, like, you know, when you do terrorism, there's a political motive and people show up.

But when you do terrorism in Italy in the 70s and 80s and 60s, they're actually when you do terrorism in Italy in the entire second half of the 20th century, the assigning a motive to like people and like the responsibility is very unclear. It's not like, you know, when you when you have like a shoe bomber who's like, ah, I'm working with ISIS, you know, it's, you know, because he went to the HR director for ISIS and was like, hello, I'm looking for a job.

They were like, well, what are your cold patients? That's also somewhat murkier because like generally what happens when you have claims of responsibility for an Islamic terrorist attack is unless it's one of the like big guys like ISIS or al-Qaeda, you will find that like people claim responsibility in the name of groups no one has ever heard of that are probably just fronts to other groups. So like you'll find that like, ah, it's the the Ansar al-Din of,

you know, fucking Stoke Newington or wherever. And that's exactly what happens here. Except in Austin. Right. Exactly. Oh, God, it's the Chicago Maoists who are like, yeah, we're going to, instead of building public housing, we're just going to build, we're going to plant vegetables in this oil.

Yes. Illinois Nazis. Yeah. I hate Illinois Nazis. Well, you know, I hate Illinois Nazis too because I once had to work as a, I once had to work doing a street canvassing for the ACLU in Chicago, which is my hometown. And everybody got mad at me because everybody remember the time

that the ACLU defended Nazi's rights to march through Skokie, a primarily Jewish neighborhood. So what I'm saying is fuck that. Fuck the ACLU. Yeah. Yeah. Well, anti-ACLU podcast. For the most part.

Yes. You know, they're just, they're liberal brainwarns. What we're saying here is that it's, it's potentially a little bit weird that like nobody's claiming responsibility for this. But on the other hand, it's not unheard of. It's, it's like also like nobody claimed responsibility for like Piazza Fontana. They just found a guy and pinned it on him.

And then later we're like, Oh, nope. It was fascists. He fell out of this fourth floor window. Like the Bologna thing, which we'll talk about there, like somebody claimed responsibility. Yeah. No one will talk about that, but like somebody claimed responsibility. I do want to point out that the, the, the placeholder note text

for this slide simply says jacked up turlet pics. Bathrooms are threatening oras. They found traces of RDX on the plane. Right. Hmm. They also find some weird uranium byproducts. Right. No, I'm sure that's fine.

But like also it was the 80s and they had only just gotten rid of the fiesta wear that is radioactive. So you know what it's going to be is because 80s Italy is every conspiracy theory at once, there was just independently like a suitcase on the plane for different unrelated reasons. No, it was, it was, they were eating the explosive spicy pasta in a fiesta wear uranium bowl. I love to get on the plane and play with my radium chemistry set.

But yeah, so here's some images showing how the, the bathroom blew up indicating the bomb was in the bathroom. Yeah. Weird how you'd know to like put the bomb inside the toilet tissue holder because that's right up against the like actual airframe. That's weird. I mean, I assume they have some amount of spatial awareness. Like they can find out the, oh yeah, the bathroom is next to the

side of the plane. I guess I'm kind of like, like I don't, when I open the door to the bathroom in the plane, I don't suddenly like lose object permanence. Right. Brake much. What is my butthole? Oh no.

Isn't it also like next to the engine, the bathroom on this plane? It's, it's kind of, it's towards, it's like in the rear third. So yeah, it's pretty close. It's over the back of the wing. And then, yeah, so if you wanted to like blow up a plane as like cleanly as possible, this would be how, which suggests that if it, if there's a guy. In this picture, in this picture, you will see an agent for operation.

This is taken in the Bologna transit. An agent for operation Gladio, standing in front of Bologna with a plastic explosive bomb. The funniest portion of this image. That's just like a carrying case for the bomb. It just happens to look like a cartoon bomb. The funniest portion of this image. It's a block.

The funniest part of this is I already had this made before this podcast. Yeah. Thanks to another bit that we did. So like, no, my favorite part is the Gladio chef's hat. Well, you got to make that. You got to make the explosives lasagna. That's right. Yeah.

This is the Bologna bombing, right? Which we're tracing with the gravity and seriousness that we're known for. Which like the thing about this is that it's important to remember again, this is where the plane came from. Bologna is known to be a very like left wing region. It's called the Regione Rosa because it's like the red region. And again, remember that Francesco Ciga is like famous for putting down student riots in Bologna that were like very left wing, very communist.

So this is a big communist stronghold. And basically there is a, you know, there's an air conditioned waiting room in the Bologna train station, which I don't think you can see in this particular slide. I think it might actually be on the left in this slide, that little building to the left. I'm pointing with my finger as if you can see it. But basically... Over here is what got hit the worst. Yeah.

No, I think that's the spot. I'm not entirely sure because there are other pictures that are just like a different angle. But basically it's an air conditioned waiting room. And Bologna got very hot that summer. This is in August. And this is right after like literally like, you know, like a month after the Ustica thing. And there's like a hundred people in there and it explodes all of a sudden. There's a bomb in a suitcase and it blows up and it kills a bunch of people.

Again, I'm really glad that we treated this at the seriousness that it deserves so that we did. Yeah, that's right. I will certainly not use any drops of terrorists with... Oh. Again, again, please don't ban me from Italy, a country to which I really need to emigrate immediately. But so the thing is that this bombing is real interesting because initially like, you know, a call comes in saying that a neo-fascist terrorist group set it off, but then they trace the call and it's coming from Sismi headquarters, which is the Italian intelligence service.

Once again, between this and the morrow thing, it's like this barely covering your tracks thing. Not even really. Right. So interesting. It's very interesting that this bombing happens in such quick succession after the Ustica thing and then like a month after this, all the names of the propaganda of the two members are leaked. And then there's the Banco Ambrosiano scandal and it all happens in pretty quick succession. And Cosiga also resides.

So, you know, I don't know who could have done this. You know, who... Oh, also, Francesco Cosiga blamed this on Palestinians, which like, again, real. Thank you. We have no idea who could have done this. Next slide, please. Palestinians is ill. Picture on the list.

Yeah. Yeah. So, this is our like unified theory one, right? Is Gladio in some like, whether controlled or not in some way uses some of those American supplied explosives and like just blows up the plane. So, I actually have a corollary theory too. Corollary theory to this, which is that essentially, there's a really interesting thing to note about and I think Ross pointed this out that like, there is the two hour delay in the plane on

the bomb timer. Yeah, because Italy is an efficient country. And if the plane had been allowed to reach its destination, it would have landed in the Palermo airport, which is a flashpoint of conflict between local communists and a mob boss whose name was Gaetano Badarmamenti, who was like very closely tied in with Giulio Andreotti, who was one of these DC vultures who like all control the government. And allegedly Giulio Andreotti used this guy to do a murder of a journalist and like a bunch of other shit.

Allegedly, it's not been... He was charged of a bunch of things and then cleared and he was like, you know, he was like, oh, I have been, except for the Punic Wars, which I was too young to be a part of, I've been accused of everything bad in Italy. And I was like, okay. I mean, so... Don't tweet about that. No, don't tweet about that.

That's... I like this theory. It's a good mix of like malice and incompetence at the same time. But there's also... Yeah, we try to blow up this airport. But there's also what I think is happening is that this is a situation where there is mass lack of coordination within the Gladio State Behind Network. So you have multiple people just going out and doing all these bombings and drawing a

lot of attention to it. So if I were the U.S. government and I wanted to wrap up this whole thing without incident, I would theoretically put out a name of all of these people and discredit them and have them removed from their government positions while not touching the very highly placed people like Giulio Andreotti and Francesco Cosiga, who I have as my assets. And in fact, you know, they're... Afterward, there are CIA people who are skulking around Milan and being like, so tell me about Gladio.

Anybody still involved with Gladio around here? And I'm like... The tax insensitivity. Like, you think we're bad. The CIA is worse. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So...

And I... You know, I don't know whether it was like, you know, some sort of schism going on in Gladio, which it could have been, or some sort of, you know, some sort of rounding up and wrapping up of the operation now that the Soviet Union was starting to sort of fall and you're moving from the domestic disasters of the Carter... The foreign disasters of the Carter administration to like the Reagan administration and all that, who they were collaborating with. Or just like an inflection point of like, this gets to be too much even for the U.S.

Yeah. And they're just like, no, you can't just be bombing shit at random anymore. That's our job. Yeah. And then, you know, you can't be bombing shit at random in Europe. When we move to the Middle East, that is where we will relocate our bombing shit at random operations. We're closing our regional franchise of the CIA bombing shit association and opening

a new regional franchise in Saudi Arabia. And when a guy comes in from corporate... I mean, that basically was Pete Boosage's job, either whether you believe in the CIA or not, is just being the guy from corporate who flies in and tells you you're doing everything wrong. Like the guy from corporate who flies into like Somaliland and it's like, no, no, you're supposed to be growing opium. Come on.

The Pete's come in and say, what would you say you do here? You're just like, listen, I planted that bomb in that train station that killed all those people and they're just like, yeah, well, you know, what have you done for us lately? Well, they're trying to increase the stapler away. There's an Italian fucking office space guy somewhere in Italy, I guarantee you there is a guy named Pietro Boosage and like, you know, he's like, you know, exactly. He's just like constantly going like, si amo la gente, et cetera. You know, okay, so that's that's one theory.

That's one one. They were trying to diversify their their workforce and interrogate more bodies and spaces. Next slide. Ah, Elizabeth Warren. That's not how I remember it. Yeah, we're rolling it back. That's not what happened.

What happened is remember that thing about PBX about the like composition of explosives in Sidewinder air to air missiles. And this is a Sidewinder, by the way, the snake. Oh, it's very cute. Very cute. So murder you. So the whole time after the crash, there are these secret diplomatic cables flying around between various members of NASA, which is weird, right?

Like for an unsuspicious plane crash. And in one of these cables, they say, huh, well, you know, we said it was it was RDX from like C4, but actually it was this PBX compound that's used in air to air missiles, which would lead you. They specifically mentioned it's used in one of three types of missiles. And I think I don't know if they got the facts wrong or they just knew something we didn't. But they said it was either a Sidewinder, a Sparrow or Matra. And the first two of those were U.S.

And the last one was French. So normal. Hmm. So just yeah, somebody was carrying in their checked baggage, an American or French air to air missile at the same time that somebody blew up the toilet and like took out somebody's uranium collection. Well, they can't let you do. You can't do that anymore because they don't let you. They don't let you carry more than like three hours.

Sidewinder. Back in the day, Italian Air Force Security was just a guy waves your air to air missile onto the like plane as like carry on. Excuse me. That's not a carry on. That's my wife. I have a theory about the uranium, but that will be revealed at a future time. Okay.

All right. I'm excited. The thing I'm suggesting here is the plane gets shot down by a fighter jet. Yes. And again, these are diplomatic cables. They continue after the thing and like there's a lot of talking about like what evidence they can really get out of the plane and things of that nature. They send the British, they go to the British consulate and they're like, they're just like

real sorry on a chap, but could you go down to the lab and find out what you could really get out of that plane, you know? One of those questions you asked were waggling your eyebrows theatrically. That's what British people sound like to me. That's just a fucking idea too. He's just like, man, look, we're going to find a watch or what. I gotta go back down there again. Jesus Christ.

You've got to take your cigarette break underwater. Again, we come back to the same question. As with the bombing, which is do you do something like this by accident or on purpose? And I guess this plane two and a half hours late, there is a suggestion. I personally do not buy this, but there is a suggestion that the Italian Air Force known for their competence and their restraint are doing some training and then, huh, all of a sudden there's a flight in airspace where it's not supposed to be. At night.

And then at night. And hey, Luigi, I shot down at the airline there. Oops, there's a leon, no. A question like that. I meant a guazzabuglio, right? Oh, by the way, great Italian word. Great. The huge mess is, uh, you know, it's basically translates to clusterfuck.

By the way, I also want to defend Italians again by saying that Italy had the best Air Force in the world until Mussolini. I'm shooting down. Oh, no. Until Mussolini. We break the case wide open as we zoom in really far on this photo and find like a little like painted silhouette of a passenger plane. That's only because we're in the United States. We use the Navy to shoot down airliners.

That's true. They keep doing it. I do want to say, I do want to say we had the Italians had the best, uh, you know, Air Force in the world. And we're one of the first militaries to really use planes and spin off an Air Force until Mussolini was like, uh, I don't like this guy who does the Air Force. Yeah. Watch the documentary.

Yeah, that's true. I'd rather be a fascist or rather being a pig than a fascist. So, you know, uh, so yeah. And we have, we have a, we have a next slide of this, which is the Ramstein air disaster. Is that a new album? It's like the, the Italian Air Force is doing aerobatics and due to a slight miscalculupsy, it just fully takes out, I think it was like two fast jets and then a bunch of spectators on the ground.

Um, they were all also involved in the conspiracy. They knew too much. Like every, every single one of them was about to shoot the other one with a silence pistol. I mean, no, I mean, the thing is they both knew about the impending return of Mussolini who had survived his attack because Mussolini is the occluded Imam of Gladio. Yeah, that's right. So, yeah. It's around my head in a jar.

Yeah. So like, yeah, this is, this is part of the Muradigoma, right? If you, depending, it's apt that it's Digoma, right? Because it is elastic in that sense. You can stretch things as much as you want to include them being part of this cover-up up to and including both of these pilots who died in the Ramstein Air Force air show disaster, like knew too much and maybe they were the ones who shot down the plane, right? It's ironic that it's elastic when it has to do with plastic explosives.

But I would also like to add though, as a counterpoint, two of the guys involved, the the upper level Air Force guys involved, died in suicides. One of them just slid his throat casually and did not leave a note. And at the funeral, the families, the families were told explicitly not to get an autopsy. And also a third guy just died of a heart attack at 37. No word on this one. On tonight's episode of The X-Files, we investigate the Hyoid bone. I remember there was another one of like an air traffic controller who was on duty that night

being like telling his wife, yeah, I think I kind of saw something I wasn't really supposed to. I don't know what's up with that. I'm feeling kind of nervous about it and then just like does not come home. Weird. So like obviously there is there is some cover-up happening. Who could be responsible for this? Next slide please. Oh, what's that?

What's with that unrelated photo? How does this keep getting into our slides? I'm sorry. I keep copying it and putting increasingly vulgar jokes in the notes, which we can't read a lot because they're too spicy for the video. What if Alan Dull in relation to... What if that has been censored by the American Central Intelligence Agency? This broadcast has been ended and we will now switch over to NPR.

This is WPEC 91.5. I'm with the Lawyers. Welcome to Morning Edition. I'm Steven Ski. Welcome to Morning Edition. I'm Steven Ski. I'm Steven Ski. I'm on this nice location.

As I was kidnapped in the middle of the night, we're going too much. Coming to you from the trunk of a Renault 5. And I'm Linda Bertheiber. So that's Rashomon 2. Rashomon 3. Oh boy. What really happened. What is this cool guy?

Do you remember Muammar Gaddafi? Coverage Farms remembers. Muammar Gaddafi, you may be familiar, used to be the dictator of Libya until he was compromised to a permanent end by Hillary Clinton. When body count... Ane going away. The funniest I've ever found Hillary Clinton is when she said when she came, we saw he died after Gaddafi was shot.

That was pretty funny. It was pretty funny. You got to hand it to her. So Gaddafi is like, I guess, doing agents of chaos stuff. He's the dang joker, right? His actual ideology changes based on the needs. You live in a socialist drama community. Yeah, that's right.

So he's socialist if the Soviet Union will help him out. He's a pan-Arabist if the Arab states will help him out. He's pan-African if the African states will help him out. He will torture people on behalf of British intelligence and the CIA if they'll help him out. It avails him not at all because eventually the Clinton crime family gets to him. But... He's a compromise builder. He builds consensus.

That's true. In the 80s, he is doing this thing where he's like, fuck the West specifically. I'm gonna like... But in a way that I'm going to be a bad guy in the naked gun too. So I'll arm the good guys like the IRA and send them a shit ton of AKs and stuff. But not for any particular reason other than just to fuck with the British, which is cool. I agree. That is good. But it kind of means that as a consequence of this, everybody wants to kill him.

Hillary Clinton's bloodlust for this guy did not come from nowhere, right? Ronald Reagan tries to have him assassinated with airstrikes at least two times. So he's Middle Eastern Castro. Yeah, pretty much. Except not as cool. Yeah, he dodges all of these bullets. And again, I cannot stress enough, the US government has prior form for trying to kill this guy with fighter jets, right? And everybody in NATO hates him except for, well, like the IRA, I suppose, and Italy.

Because Italy used to be the colonial occupier of Libya. And as such, you get this really weird vibe. Do not ask what happened to the Senussi order. Do not ask. But like genuinely, it's strange. Italy is the only colonial power that seems to bother ever feeling guilty about doing colonialism, which is very, very weird considering they did it as part of fascism. It's because Italians are good-hearted people who are nice and wonderful and we support them.

So the Italian state, like all of these like Jack Johnson and John Jackson guys, still have this really kind of patriarchal view of Libya as being like, oh, well, you know, Gaddafi, you help the guy out for old times sake. And okay, maybe he gives you like a million dollars in a suitcase, but that's just like what friends do. And sometimes he sends you prostitutes if you're Silvio Verlusconi and that's good. Yeah, exactly. You have a working relationship with this guy. And so, you know, occasionally he has to come to Europe to buy new epaulets and like new uniform supplies.

I take most of my fashion cues from like 80s period Gaddafi here, the sick double-breasted tunic. Just incredibly pimp. So like, okay, fine. The guy wants to like fly to Paris. He needs an air corridor to do that. What if you just kind of give him Italian airspace and you do this on the choir, on and off for years and years and years and years. So what if the people who want to kill this guy, the U.S., like the foreign policy blob,

the fun police, the bad guys decide, okay, well, look, shooting down a high value targets plane in transit. It worked for killing Isaroko Yamamoto, right? Why the fuck not? Why don't we just quietly scramble some fast jets? And then he just disappears over the ocean, like our plane did. Easy peasy. Easy peasy, except it's night. And then all of a sudden, where you're looking for like a small VIP jet, there's a small passenger jet

that's in a place where it shouldn't be because it's two and a half hours late. And then, oops, it is. No, you've just shot down the fucking Itavia plane and Gaddafi escapes unscathed yet again. Because again, like history is very kind to dictates like this until it isn't. And much like Castro, he just kind of keeps getting away with it. But Alice, it's very important that we kill Gaddafi because the only way to revitalize some of Libya's most important industries is to kill Gaddafi. And now that we've done that, we can once again bring slave markets back to Libya.

And that's what freedom is. Absolutely. An economic engine of the Middle East. Really, the Knights of the Golden Circle were on the wrong set of continents. We're not just here for oil. We're not just here for oil. Shut up. Liberation.

I see that we're like bringing back like some sort of warped version of the Sultanate of Ifrakia here. Yeah, that's a real deep cut. Ramsey Ruig, you shout out, you know. I think they should have just let Gaddafi do all of the weird shit he wanted to. Like when he just decided he was a pan-Africanist and he was like, I'm just going to wear a leopard skin now and invade Chad and get fucking owned by a bunch of dudes and pleosas. Look at my bodyguards. Look at my hot bodyguards.

The world is the worst place without Muar Gaddafi. Yeah, that's true. I mean, genuinely, yes. Objectively speaking, yeah. Once again, Hillary Clinton screwing shit up. It's very important that we once again talk about how Hillary Clinton helped create ISIS in the modern form. She took Gaddafi and gave us Trump. We used to have hopes, jobs, and cash, and now...

Alice, do you have like a fight song drop or do I need to sing it? A fight song? I mean... A fight song drop, like, you know, this is... No, no, no, no, no, no. Not like that kind of fight song. I mean, like, this is a fight song. I do not have a Clinton drop. I'm sorry. I should have thought ahead. It's okay. So we have another weird detail that crops up.

You keep putting together these weird details and it's like... Yeah, it's strange. A bunch of weird unrelated coincidences. If you would just stop looking at it. I pretend I do not see, but actually I do. A couple of weeks after they find the, like, floating bodies and wreckage, independently, they find a Libyan MiG-23 fighter jet just crashed into a mountain in Southern Calabria, which is, like, the back of beyond.

So it takes them that long to even notice. Pilots dead inside and it's just, it's wreckage, right? But, like, what the fuck is a Libyan fighter jet doing in Italy? Crashing. None of your goddamn business. Well, we have the flight path here. It's anti-colonialism. Well, like, the official explanation for this...

See, I don't like it. See if you believe this is that the guy flying it, Captain Khalil, does not know how to fly a plane because he, like, the Libyans as part of this Pan-Arabist thing that Gaddafi is doing, they're training Palestinians to fly jets. The Palestinians use Arabic and the cockpit. The Libyans speak English, so there's a miscommunication. The guy forgets to turn his oxygen supply on

and just, like, hypoxically drifts across the entire Mediterranean. The same time, because every conspiracy is true and happening at once, the same time as this plane is, like, blowing up for unrelated reasons, smacks into a mountainside. And nobody, like, notices this. He just gets into NATO airspace. No one cares. There's massive cover-up of this and it's just a coincidence.

I do believe this because also the MiG did not have weapons on board and it was outfitted for practice. According to the people who discovered the MiG, which, you know, they would have incentive to lie the other way, you know? The other narrative, which, to me, makes more sense, especially if you believe that those people are, you know, lying, is that, okay, fine, Gaddafi is busy flying across the Mediterranean. He's not stupid.

He knows the Americans would like to kill him. He gets some fighter cover and you just have this, like, sort of implicit idea of, well, maybe there's a fucking dogfight between, like, NATO assassin planes and Libyan MiGs. That's too cool not to be true. True. Yeah. Yep.

And then in that chaos, somebody gets a missile lock on the wrong thing, shoots down the plane. I mean, I'm just going to refer to the next slide, for my opinion, on this particular one. In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrast. Thank you. Let's bring back Libyan Bart. Also, I would like to say that the notes on this say,

because I'm a hack, Libya, I barely know you. Got him. Got him. Right. Again. Who could be responsible for this? How do these slides keep getting into the notes? So, Justin, what's the uranium theory?

Does that fit in here? It will seem fairly obvious to me, right? Okay. So, like, they found PBX on the plane, right? And they found uranium on the plane, right? Mm-hmm. Uranium residue. PBX is used for, you know, the explosive casing of nuclear weapons, right?

Oh. Exactly. What happened was, what happened was, and Giuseppe's, like, atomic weapons factory, you know, there were a couple... Where did they let them ship stuff? Their union, and it was in their contract. Yeah. I don't know.

I imagine, like, a couple nuclear warheads didn't pass quality control, right? And, you know, they don't want to reuse the PBX. It's all irradiated, right? So, they throw that out back, you know, and then Gladio Luigi mentions to Giuseppe, who runs the shop one day, hey, can I grab some of that PBX out back? I'm not going to touch it for long. It should be fine. And Giuseppe shrugs his shoulders, and he's like, not my problem.

And, you know, they use it to blow up this plane for whatever reason. It fell off the back of a truck. Yeah, exactly. This makes a lot of sense to me. I don't know. Well, this adequately explains it using incompetence. No, that doesn't make sense. But what if also, like, okay, real tinfoil hat time, what if that plane was going to carry...

Just combining all three of these, four of these, rather, what if that plane was going to be carrying fissile nuclear material to Libya and was intercepted and blown up by Gladio with unacceptable civilian casualties? So they're like, okay, maybe don't do this. Gladio retaliates by blowing up the Bologna train station bombing, and the CIA retaliates by leaking the names of all the propaganda duo members and crippling their operations in Italy. You know what I should have got as a drop for this is the Hank Scorpio episode of The Simpsons

where the UN guys like, maybe it just fell down on its own. Also, also, you know, the... I want to take a chance. What's the UN going to do? Send me a strongly worded letter? I think the idea they're trying to bring in the fissile material to Libya and, you know, land at Palermo, and then they have to explain to the passengers, I'm sorry, we lost all your luggage.

Well, they don't have to do that because... We had... Remember who owns the airport? The airport is owned by a... By the way, you know, by a mafia boss who had recently had the only guy who was like really leading the opposition to bulldozing a poor neighborhood to build a third runway, recently had that guy assassinated and was thus in complete control of the airport at the time that like...

It's really real. They would still have to lose all the luggage in order to be able to take off. Fair, fair. But... Just pushing shit out onto the runway. I don't know. I think it's adequately explained. You know this radiation sickness after all being on the plane plane.

You know this is... This is the onion... The retrospective onion headline. JFK assassinated by CIA, Cuban, Soviets, Teamsters, Unions... I'll be Jay. President shot 127 different times from 60 different angles. Yeah, that makes sense. I forgot to mention that the PBX in this theory is Rottini.

I think that theory adequately explains a lot of elements of this, and what is this weird red dot on my forehead? Next slide, please. So, we're kind of wrapping this up, right? This is a picture of some Italian judges. Not the ones that we're talking about. These are the Amanda Knox ones. And by the way, it says on the back wall behind them, the law is equal for all.

La legia e uguale e pudi. Unless you're like... Very strong blouse game, and the lady on the right there. I like that a lot. So, in 2013, the Italian courts ruled that it's probably a missile that shot this down. And all of the British, especially, are very, very mad about this, because we did the technical analysis on the record, and we're like, no, it has to be a bomb, because we said it was a bomb.

There's a quote here from an extremely annoyed British man that's like, I'm sorry, but Italy is a dreadful place to have an aviation accident. If you want the truth, you're less likely to find it there than just about anywhere else in the world. I'm implying that there are good places to have an aviation accident. Yeah, I was about to say, what's a good place to have an aviation accident? Just falling out of the fucking sky and thinking, at least this will be extremely well investigated. I'd like a very large mattress.

The one thing I would tease out of this as a conclusion is something that we would have learned from this, is that the technical evidence is rarely neutral, especially on political questions like this. And so it's very easy to just be like, oh, well, we're scientists, and as such, the scientific evidence says bomb. It may not be that simple, and you do have to look at all of the other factors, like Francesco Casiga in his old age being like,

yeah, man, the French shot down the plane trying to kill Gaddafi. Don't know what was up with that. However, that was wild as he's being taken off stage with one of those kind of goals. Yeah, and it's like Hillary Clinton at the other end. I'm not a count. What I would like to say is that, and if we go to the next slide,

I think there's a good illustration of who's really responsible for all of this. I think, at least in my mind, the fact that everybody's trying to declare it's a missile now, in my mind, it immediately makes me think that it was the bomb argument from earlier and that it points. Always do opposite of what CIA says. The other thing is, you may recall that Gaddafi is no longer,

is now late of this parish, right? And as part of his ouster, you saw dudes going into Makhararat buildings and just reading all of the files. And some of that stuff that was released was very damaging, like him just fucking torturing people on behalf of MI6. One of the things was the Libyan view of the Ustaka massacre, which is, man, they fucking tried to kill Gaddafi.

The Italian intelligence services tipped us off, because I don't know, they just kind of like Gaddafi. And he, like, diverts to mortar and they shoot down the wrong plane by accident. Well, to be fair, if Disney is so corrupt, I mean, it's the most corrupt intelligence agency in the world. If there are two threads that you can get from this, one is that you are not immune from having evidence doctored

and the other is that the Italian secret services are the least competent in the world. But they're designed to be that way, because all of the stuff that, like, Italy in the 60s, 70s and 80s was designed to be a puppet of the U.S. foreign, like, the U.S. foreign policy, as was, like, you know, as was Germany, West Germany, and as, sorry, Alice, England has always been

since the end of the war. Not even because we had to do anything, because, like, you all are so desperate to break off the NHS and sell it to us that you'll just kind of do. You know, you all want to pay $300 for insulin, because, you know... Because we're cucks, yeah, we're cucks. I was going to say it, but I'm going to let you say it.

No, I love England. Anyway, the point being... Why? I find England very, very full of history and very rich in... Interesting from an academic standpoint, yes. Very rich. When I go to England, everybody is, you know,

very nice to me, because I am, you know, I am a white-passing Hispanic person, if that weren't the case, who knows. But anyway, so my point being that Italy was designed, as was, like, Turkey and Greece and all these other countries, designed to be an extension of the U.S. government's foreign policy aims. And in the process of this, the CIA killed whether or not

you believe that they did this particular instance of murder. They killed thousands and thousands of people and engendered an environment in which Italians could not feel safe taking a train, taking a plane, getting into their car, going to work, et cetera. And for that reason, I am deeply, deeply ashamed to, you know, to be an American, because we allowed this to continue, and not just here, but abroad, but we did this

and allowed this to continue solely so, like, you know, Giuseppe can't join a union at the Piaggio Ape plant, you know? Like, it's deeply sickening to me that this is, like, the degree to which the United States went to make sure that nobody could live a comfortable life. And not just killing Giuseppe and Sans' atomic weaponry, but not just killing people or, like, destroying buildings, but, like, destroying the concept of, like,

trust in democracy itself, something which is, like, a specialty of the house currently on display in Bolivia. And also here, yeah, I mean, the thing is, and the other thing is, you know, important things to note, that this is a golden age for political corruption in Italy, because all these people's jobs are basically secure, because the CIA would just back them with tons of money. Which leads to, which leads to the next era of Italian politics,

which is, huh, why is everyone in the pocket of the mob? Right, and also, like, so this is where you get a touch, and, like, why is the mob still around? Because they've been, the American intelligence has been working with them and sending them money for many, many years, like, you know, like a grandma sending you a crisp $20 bill on your birthday. And, you know, this is where you get the Tanjentopoli scandal,

and you get Operazione Money Puglite, and then, ultimately, those people are still in power. Silvio Berlusconi is still active in Italian politics, even now, after everything, you know. Do you remember that song? That song has three key changes. So, you know, it's great. That's how you know it's good.

It's good. It's the, you know... How many key changes does Bella Chow have? It's the love on top of political Italian songs. But, yeah, it's, and what I want to add, just to conclude at least the historical analysis of this, is that you should never assume that, like, you're immune from this simply because you're in, like, the United States, or you're in the UK,

or you're in, like, a country that, you know, doesn't have to deal with this. Like, why are school shootings allowed to happen at an increasing frequency all across America? Well, it's a justification for us to increase the surveillance state. It is the strategy of tension, as applied domestically, once we no longer had a country in which to apply it. And you should never, ever think, even for a second,

that, like, any of this is really by accident. So that's... Once again, I'm referring to Robert Paxton's back-of-the-envelope definition of fascism as colonial violence applied to the imperial core. You don't have to, like... Again, another lesson from this. You don't have to be secretly, like,

organizing everything through, like, a Masonic Lodge, although it helps, I guess. You can just kind of have stochastic violence and stochastic terrorism where just, like, a guy goes out and does something terrible, thinks it's his idea, and you're just kind of content to let it happen. Yeah, he just doesn't do anything strategically

not doing stuff. Right. I mean, the Joe Biden way. Right, exactly. I mean, as long as they're unionized and, you know, they're all coordinating with each other when they're unioned, they could spear us as union. People planting bombs are workers. And as such, as the professional managerial class, we should not condescend to them.

And, you know... And, you know, like, those scabs of Giuseppe and son's atomic weaponry. Listen, you know, it's... That's why they've got that old mill in Granjano. You know, you got to have the... You got to have the real, the bronze cut, you know. It's a kind of shenanigans of continuity there.

They built some of the first atomic weapons for the Papal States. Oh, no. We're all family here. Yeah, exactly. It's an old family business, you know. My father built atomic weapons. His father built atomic weapons.

It's my non-na. My non-na split the atom in her bath tub. And ever since then, we have a proud family tradition of continuing to make new weapons. Just every time anyone's in the kitchen, somebody is inexplicably stirring a huge pot of plutonium. Just looking at the pot.

Like a shaker of plutonium. But it's yellow cake uranium. Yeah. I'm going to play us out with a fucking drop again. Yeah. Somebody touch my spuget! I hope the NSA agent listening to this loves your drops.

I hope so, too. They've recently figured out you can get a better yield if you use Papadella for the PBX. Well, listen. It's in the way of progress, Budface. You've got to get that DOC PBX, you know, if it doesn't have the ribbon on it. True.

You know, if it's not DOC, then it doesn't have the right, it doesn't have the right flavor, and it doesn't have the right torois, you know. The explosive velocity is not guaranteed. Yeah. So, you know. All right. Here we are at the end.

Once again. Yeah, it's again. Next episode is the Tacoma-Nara's bridge disaster. Does anyone have any commercials? Ah, listen to Trash Future. We're all like, in quarantine, we're all going crazy. We're spinning off new shows. So Milo and Nate are doing a Britonology where they,

like, discover a new kind of guy, like one of the psychotic dudes that Britain produces. And Riley and Andrew Law from Boone's Avista are doing a show where they watch every episode of season five of the show bones for some fucking reason. So, subscribe to the Patreon. Yeah. Yeah, and listen to those.

And our bonus episode should be up shortly. Oh, I have a commercial. I have a commercial which is, A, I would like to give a shout out to my dad, who may or may not be listening to this podcast because I keep dodgering him to listen to this podcast. And he liked the episode on the news. So that's...

I know his dad. Yeah. I know his dad. Shout out to my dad. And also my other commercial is, you know, I have a podcast that is very infrequently updated because I'm also doing like three DSA projects right now. So, you know, it's called Disaster's House of Money

and check it out if you want. I, you know, that's fine. It's for fun. I don't care. And follow you on Twitter at Noah Sykes. Yeah. Sykes spelled like psychiatrists. Yes.

Also, Alice is on the next episode whenever I'm able to release it. And also join DSA. Yeah. Oh, look who's... Who's that standing by that bridge? Oh, my God. Bye, everybody.

Oh, my God. Oh. Stuffing rocks into my pockets. No, I... Alice is Moth Woman. I want you to know, I want you to know, I had to reverse Google image search the exact JPEG of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that you used.

Then I had to go into paint.net and you, like, cut out just the Alice and shrink it down just as long as it comes. And no one would notice it. To get it into the slide. Incredible. Incredible work of sabotage. In many ways.

I am the heir to Operation Gladio. We're using this one for every subsequent episode. Serbia is going to charge you to death for doing petty vandalism now. Yeah. Yeah, right. Ranking, yeah. You know, I'm into that.

I'm okay with that. I think that's good. I deserve it. You know, I am bourgeois. I am an assistant in Hollywood, meaning I am part of the bourgeois professional class, apparently, even though I make about 30,000 a year,

which is not like... Yeah, we're all... We're all... I'd cast Kool-Ax here at this point, so... Mm-hmm.