First off, I enjoy and never miss a podcast or livestream. I just wanted to say I don't mind the Maddow look-in. It breaks things up a little, and it consumes just a few minutes. I don't have cable TV and never watched cable news when I did, so it's funny to see what goes on there. The various clips/articles can lead to amusing commentary from you and Walt. I don't care if everything fits into a Grand Unification Theory of Society. I guess my point is, show it or don't, it doesn't matter to me, but don't feel constrained.
Why is no one angry at Tom Cotton for trying to manipulate Tulsi Gabbard into taking a position on FISA, which she would have no way to change? This is a legislative issue. He is a slime ball.
Gabbard is not yet confirmed, so If what you say is true, then I’d do the same if I were her. Why be truthful to people you don’t respect, especially if it isn’t relevant to the job for which you are being interviewed?
We heard Obama cultists make that excuse for eight years. Assuming that Gabbard turns out to be as she says, will you keep making excuses for her or Trump?
Obama is a perfect example of someone who could sum up verbally both sides of an issue fairly and then acted in whatever way helped him personally. All my Obama apologist friends would believe the words and excuse the actions. This is the opposite of what I’m advising. So why not wait for the actions of Trump and his crew? I am not expecting much, but it’s an uncertainty as opposed to a certainty if Harris had been elected.
Meh. I’m not convinced that she was a bad pick. Her comments are of the tight-rope variety. She hasn’t been confirmed, so she has to play the game, right? You can’t go wading into three feet of swamp and not expect to have the gators checking you out right? She literally said that she will limit 702 activities to non-US persons overseas AND protect US citizens Fourth Amendment rights. Is that our utopian-all-or-nothing-empty-swamp scenario? Hell, no! But it is a vision in the right direction and I’ll take that incremental step over continuing in the direction we are going in as of today.
Tulsi Gabbard said "Significant FISA reforms have been enacted since my time in Congress to address these issues." Do you know what reforms she was referring to? She left Congress in 2021 and the most recent change to FISA was in 2018, according to Wikipedia.
I trust her to do what she thinks is best. For the love of Mike, she's been through the fire for her principles. IDGAF what her reasons are, b/c she's Tulsi Fucking Gabbard.
I know, I know... maintaining skepticism is important; but at the absolute worst (i.e. she did the rong thingamajig), if there's one person in DC who gets a Hall Pass it's this woman.
Hey Matt, A thought just occurred to me. I think you should write a book about the GEC, the agency's short illicit life and it's demise. I know people would read it and buy it.
Supplemental question: what brilliant person who is a bundle of smarts & perception — and gifted with epic energy — will provide us with the necessary metaview / synthesis / overview of the horrific murderous censorship acts & consequences perpetrated during the Covid years, including #CIC roots & mechanisms ‼️⁉️
Apparently Mike Benz has made a start, describing himself (descriptor on his @MikeBenzCyber account) as “author of the unpublishable monstrosity, Weapons of Mass Deletion.”
Maybe ‘all’ 😉 that’s needed to whip it into a riveting bestseller is The Planet’s Greatest Book Editor ‼️‼️‼️⁉️
💥This is an absolutely serious suggestion / request. 💥
The (apparently tip of the iceberg) TwitterFiles and the amazing Judiciary staff reports alone are massive…
An accessible understanding of the scope of this brazen hijacking of the body politic — a book easily absorbed and shared with family and friends — is now clearly essential.
Secondary question - do you write book jackets for a living?
Comment - Both Matt and Benz had front row seats to the agency's operating developments. Matt had a very unique outsiders view. Benz had the full view of the beltway wheelworks. I'm obviously keen on Matt's view because, like most press normies, he wasn't working for the government. The GEC was a hidden dragon made public by people like him and truth hustlers, like Mike Benz. They both can write books. The public would benefit from more than one book covering the subject.
I need more writing in 2025. I need more reading and writing in 2025. Far less TV. An occasional documentary. More public readings. My mental system is kind of vomiting out binge-watch media. However, Benz is a qualified consultant for a History channel limited series.
Great discussion, guys. Glad to hear Walter has switched to a new laundromat. That is the first step in a spiritual journey.
I really enjoyed your discussion about Biden. Let us not forget that the Democratic Party establishment rallied around him to keep Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination. I still can't help but to find it extraordinary that a political party would nominate someone who clearly wasn't fit for office just to placate the donors, but you know the old saying, money talks. And if he hadn't been so out of it, Harris would have never been chosen to take on Trump. These things make me feel more justified than ever for leaving the Democratic Party and for writing in Cornel West.
I think Vito Corleone and Tony Soprano might have a thing or two to say about Walt's assertion that a don only has to be present at Cosa Nostra meetings, but that's another matter.
I replied the way I did because FF's comment was so patronizing. He intentionally missed the very simple point I was making (even though it was the same point he went on to make), so I did the same to him. Now let me say it differently, in a way a fourth-grader could understand: Climate change is VASTLY more important a factor than these other issues. If anything, our obsession with petty human squabbles over equality, justice and so on—important to US as these may be—are of no consequence to Mother Nature. She couldn't care less how the greenhouse effect impacts one species among zillions. Her job is to keep all species alive, so as to promote life on Earth, and that requires balance. Humans' insignificance in the scheme of this reality is immense—that is, until we go rogue and begin killing other livings things with wanton disregard for the greater good. The irony is, we depend entirely on climate stability, on predictable rain and winds and warmth. That these are no longer predictable is why this fire happened. Period. Squabbling over how we should have put out or prevented (apart from eliminating greenhouse gases) an inferno of this once unimaginable scale is just another distraction along the lines of Nero fiddling as Rome burned.
Feral Finster's first comment was a simple, straightforward statement, pointing out that there are several factors at play. That's not "doing something" to you that needs retribution.
When you asked "How so?", F.F. reasonably assumed your question was a straightforward one and he/she answered it in a simple, straightforward fashion.
You, by contrast, are using sarcasm and insult ("in a way a fourth-grader could understand"). Your reply to me is not "saying it differently" - it's saying something different than what you said at first.
I don't know Feral Finster's views on climate change, but he/she did not deny its importance or deny that it's by far the most important factor, though I don't know his or her opinion on that point.
Your point seems to be that we should only talk about climate change in relation to the California fires, as everything else is insignificant by comparison. I don't agree. There are legitimate questions about whether L.A. officials were derelict in their duty to prepare for a major fire. The fact that climate change plays a role in increasing the severity of weather events doesn't make those questions irrelevant, especially in light of the loss of life and property.
The climate is always changing; it doesn't follow that it means the end of the world; so there is really no need to bite bullets and scare kids and cause grown-ups to have ulcers about it.
It's erroneous to use meteorological phenomena as justification for extremist political ideology. Michael Shellenberger's podcast PUBLIC on Substack presents some good fact-checking on the issue.
Of course it doesn't mean the end of the world. It means the end of the lives (other living creatures) that humans rely on for their own existence. It means the end of humans, in other words. The only reason super-rich guys like Peter Thiel are silent on this issue (Musk insists he's only making money on a "trend" and doesn't discuss climate) is because their plan is to save themselves, extend their lives, enslave the lucky few and program robots to perform the most onerous work, as the rest of us die. (See their in-house philosopher Yuval Harari on this if you don't believe me.) Then they will live out their exceedingly long lives dining on organic food and restoring the earth to the Eden it was before all those groveling members of H. sapiens wrecked it. Harari called one of his books "Homo Deus" in honor of this new species. When I used to write newspaper commentaries for a living (before I got fired for writing such things) I referred to H. Deus as H. Superbus. Same difference.
I give her one free hall pass on this one. As I will when Kennedy says he’s actually “ not anti vax”.. they will both speak to these things in a matter of days.
At this point, I recommend we wait and see. My analysis is that if she had not promised this change, she had no chance of confirmation - too many RINOs. Once in office however, despite her general level of integrity, she may well say that - in light of further information received - she can no longer support it. However, even with this change, I don't see any other candidate that is better who might be confirmed. I'm just hoping Tulsi is enough of a politician to lie when necessary to accomplish what she is being appointed to do.
I remain one. If she were as willing to "go along to get along" as most politicians, she would just have made peace with the neocon world view and continued to enjoy the bright future she once had with the Democrats.
That she switched parties - chased by a wave of slander in the liberal press - rather than bend on her signature issue showed a lot of integrity, and she still has credit with me. If this was the price Republican Senators demanded for confirmation, I'm glad she paid it.
No, my point was that she HASN'T. I realize I wasn't clear if you are not familiar with her history, but her signature issue is opposition to neoconservative foreign policy, not surveillance. People don't realize the extent to which the neocons are all Democrats now.
I realize that. Washington is largely a uniparty from a foreign policy perspective. However, that wasn’t the straw that broke the camels back on Tulsi’s political shift. The issue that did it for her was federal intrusion into private speech, most obviously characterized by section 702 of FISA, which she has now completely flip-flopped on.
My impression is that members of both houses of Congress are trying to amuse themselves—somehow—for the next week—until after Trump’s inauguration. After the inauguration, all hell breaks loose. Members of both houses will then be on the run. So now, they are hunkering down in their bunkers, because their emotions are so out of control. They cannot handle it individually and/or collectively. It seems like members of both houses are in full panic mode. Their imaginations are running wild on them. They cannot function. They don’t know which way to turn. What friends they had, are gone. Poof! What enemies they have, are shadows. Their world is no longer cozy. They are the benighted, strung-out mentally-ill. They will never recover their old predictable lives.
Musk fired the majority of Twitter staff...and it turns out they weren't missed. I wonder if a bunch of those upper class folks in LA not "going to work Monday..." will even be noticed, in a similar manner...
First off, I enjoy and never miss a podcast or livestream. I just wanted to say I don't mind the Maddow look-in. It breaks things up a little, and it consumes just a few minutes. I don't have cable TV and never watched cable news when I did, so it's funny to see what goes on there. The various clips/articles can lead to amusing commentary from you and Walt. I don't care if everything fits into a Grand Unification Theory of Society. I guess my point is, show it or don't, it doesn't matter to me, but don't feel constrained.
Plus it’s super fun to watch Walter lose his mind over Maddow. I LMAO every time
This!
I'm with you!
💯 I love the unscripted flow
I mind it. I just can't stand to listen to or look at her. As i can't take a smoke break as i quit,there's always a bathroom break.
Yeah, it is OK to look in on Maddow in narrative but playing one of her 7 minute warm ups on a video to nowhere is not OK. It is simply abuse
Why is no one angry at Tom Cotton for trying to manipulate Tulsi Gabbard into taking a position on FISA, which she would have no way to change? This is a legislative issue. He is a slime ball.
I am angry at Tom Cotton for this, and for his general war piggery.
He is definitely a slime ball.
Gabbard is not yet confirmed, so If what you say is true, then I’d do the same if I were her. Why be truthful to people you don’t respect, especially if it isn’t relevant to the job for which you are being interviewed?
Don;t make excuses for people when they betray you.
I think it’s better to judge people by their actions not by what they say.
We heard Obama cultists make that excuse for eight years. Assuming that Gabbard turns out to be as she says, will you keep making excuses for her or Trump?
Obama is a perfect example of someone who could sum up verbally both sides of an issue fairly and then acted in whatever way helped him personally. All my Obama apologist friends would believe the words and excuse the actions. This is the opposite of what I’m advising. So why not wait for the actions of Trump and his crew? I am not expecting much, but it’s an uncertainty as opposed to a certainty if Harris had been elected.
I heard similar rationalizations in 2016, even as it was obvious that Trump wasn't going to fight the Deep State.
Cotton knows wherre his true loyalties lie.
Meh. I’m not convinced that she was a bad pick. Her comments are of the tight-rope variety. She hasn’t been confirmed, so she has to play the game, right? You can’t go wading into three feet of swamp and not expect to have the gators checking you out right? She literally said that she will limit 702 activities to non-US persons overseas AND protect US citizens Fourth Amendment rights. Is that our utopian-all-or-nothing-empty-swamp scenario? Hell, no! But it is a vision in the right direction and I’ll take that incremental step over continuing in the direction we are going in as of today.
Exactly. All or nothings bore me now.
Tulsi Gabbard said "Significant FISA reforms have been enacted since my time in Congress to address these issues." Do you know what reforms she was referring to? She left Congress in 2021 and the most recent change to FISA was in 2018, according to Wikipedia.
I am so tired of nothing ever changing (for the better) in this country.
I have racheted down my expectations ahead of time.
Not sure how mine could be any lower, but we're trying like hell
WHOA PEOPLE!
Here's my take re Tulsi:
I. TRUST. HER.
I trust her to do what she thinks is best. For the love of Mike, she's been through the fire for her principles. IDGAF what her reasons are, b/c she's Tulsi Fucking Gabbard.
I know, I know... maintaining skepticism is important; but at the absolute worst (i.e. she did the rong thingamajig), if there's one person in DC who gets a Hall Pass it's this woman.
How TF could I not?
Just happened to hear Brian Lehrer this morning, straight up called Tulsi a Putin apologist and a threat to democracy, why is this clown on the radio?
Probably because he calls people Putin apologists and threats to democracy?
Hey Matt, A thought just occurred to me. I think you should write a book about the GEC, the agency's short illicit life and it's demise. I know people would read it and buy it.
Supplemental question: what brilliant person who is a bundle of smarts & perception — and gifted with epic energy — will provide us with the necessary metaview / synthesis / overview of the horrific murderous censorship acts & consequences perpetrated during the Covid years, including #CIC roots & mechanisms ‼️⁉️
Apparently Mike Benz has made a start, describing himself (descriptor on his @MikeBenzCyber account) as “author of the unpublishable monstrosity, Weapons of Mass Deletion.”
Maybe ‘all’ 😉 that’s needed to whip it into a riveting bestseller is The Planet’s Greatest Book Editor ‼️‼️‼️⁉️
💥This is an absolutely serious suggestion / request. 💥
The (apparently tip of the iceberg) TwitterFiles and the amazing Judiciary staff reports alone are massive…
An accessible understanding of the scope of this brazen hijacking of the body politic — a book easily absorbed and shared with family and friends — is now clearly essential.
Secondary question - do you write book jackets for a living?
Comment - Both Matt and Benz had front row seats to the agency's operating developments. Matt had a very unique outsiders view. Benz had the full view of the beltway wheelworks. I'm obviously keen on Matt's view because, like most press normies, he wasn't working for the government. The GEC was a hidden dragon made public by people like him and truth hustlers, like Mike Benz. They both can write books. The public would benefit from more than one book covering the subject.
Absolutely not. Mike is amazing and has been well ahead of the understanding curve; more such broad shoulders are truly needed now.
Matt & Walter have carved out their own fabulous ATW groove and we *really* need their biweekly pep talks.
So am *not* proposing that they cloister themselves …
This is not the kind of topic that lends itself to a video, seems to me. But am still intellectually mired in the Gutenberg age of print…
I need more writing in 2025. I need more reading and writing in 2025. Far less TV. An occasional documentary. More public readings. My mental system is kind of vomiting out binge-watch media. However, Benz is a qualified consultant for a History channel limited series.
happiness is when you drain the reservoir, tell your base the uncontrollable wildfires were due to climate change, and they believe you.
That beeper at the end… that an older FISA device that’s running out of battery. It’s in Walter’s house.
Great discussion, guys. Glad to hear Walter has switched to a new laundromat. That is the first step in a spiritual journey.
I really enjoyed your discussion about Biden. Let us not forget that the Democratic Party establishment rallied around him to keep Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination. I still can't help but to find it extraordinary that a political party would nominate someone who clearly wasn't fit for office just to placate the donors, but you know the old saying, money talks. And if he hadn't been so out of it, Harris would have never been chosen to take on Trump. These things make me feel more justified than ever for leaving the Democratic Party and for writing in Cornel West.
I think Vito Corleone and Tony Soprano might have a thing or two to say about Walt's assertion that a don only has to be present at Cosa Nostra meetings, but that's another matter.
PLEASE don't go on about the incompetent mayor and the fat lesbian. Now's the time to bite the bullet and admit that climate change is real.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Climate change being real is of no bearing to whether the fire chief is a DEI hire or the mayor is an incomp.
How so?
Assume for the sake of argument that climate change is real. It is still real, regardless what boxes the mayor or fire chief check off.
It's not like hiring a white dude will make climate change go away. Nor will hiring an entire transfeminist collective make the oceans rise or fall.
It's odd that someone would ask for an explanation of your previous comment.
I replied the way I did because FF's comment was so patronizing. He intentionally missed the very simple point I was making (even though it was the same point he went on to make), so I did the same to him. Now let me say it differently, in a way a fourth-grader could understand: Climate change is VASTLY more important a factor than these other issues. If anything, our obsession with petty human squabbles over equality, justice and so on—important to US as these may be—are of no consequence to Mother Nature. She couldn't care less how the greenhouse effect impacts one species among zillions. Her job is to keep all species alive, so as to promote life on Earth, and that requires balance. Humans' insignificance in the scheme of this reality is immense—that is, until we go rogue and begin killing other livings things with wanton disregard for the greater good. The irony is, we depend entirely on climate stability, on predictable rain and winds and warmth. That these are no longer predictable is why this fire happened. Period. Squabbling over how we should have put out or prevented (apart from eliminating greenhouse gases) an inferno of this once unimaginable scale is just another distraction along the lines of Nero fiddling as Rome burned.
Feral Finster's first comment was a simple, straightforward statement, pointing out that there are several factors at play. That's not "doing something" to you that needs retribution.
When you asked "How so?", F.F. reasonably assumed your question was a straightforward one and he/she answered it in a simple, straightforward fashion.
You, by contrast, are using sarcasm and insult ("in a way a fourth-grader could understand"). Your reply to me is not "saying it differently" - it's saying something different than what you said at first.
I don't know Feral Finster's views on climate change, but he/she did not deny its importance or deny that it's by far the most important factor, though I don't know his or her opinion on that point.
Your point seems to be that we should only talk about climate change in relation to the California fires, as everything else is insignificant by comparison. I don't agree. There are legitimate questions about whether L.A. officials were derelict in their duty to prepare for a major fire. The fact that climate change plays a role in increasing the severity of weather events doesn't make those questions irrelevant, especially in light of the loss of life and property.
The climate is always changing; it doesn't follow that it means the end of the world; so there is really no need to bite bullets and scare kids and cause grown-ups to have ulcers about it.
It's erroneous to use meteorological phenomena as justification for extremist political ideology. Michael Shellenberger's podcast PUBLIC on Substack presents some good fact-checking on the issue.
Of course it doesn't mean the end of the world. It means the end of the lives (other living creatures) that humans rely on for their own existence. It means the end of humans, in other words. The only reason super-rich guys like Peter Thiel are silent on this issue (Musk insists he's only making money on a "trend" and doesn't discuss climate) is because their plan is to save themselves, extend their lives, enslave the lucky few and program robots to perform the most onerous work, as the rest of us die. (See their in-house philosopher Yuval Harari on this if you don't believe me.) Then they will live out their exceedingly long lives dining on organic food and restoring the earth to the Eden it was before all those groveling members of H. sapiens wrecked it. Harari called one of his books "Homo Deus" in honor of this new species. When I used to write newspaper commentaries for a living (before I got fired for writing such things) I referred to H. Deus as H. Superbus. Same difference.
🙄
Is anyone else getting "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" vibes from Tulsi's abrupt reversal?
No. She simply knows what the price of power is. Trump sycophants will ladle on the excuses.
I give her one free hall pass on this one. As I will when Kennedy says he’s actually “ not anti vax”.. they will both speak to these things in a matter of days.
I was an enthusiastic supporter of Tulsi Gabbard....until just now.
At this point, I recommend we wait and see. My analysis is that if she had not promised this change, she had no chance of confirmation - too many RINOs. Once in office however, despite her general level of integrity, she may well say that - in light of further information received - she can no longer support it. However, even with this change, I don't see any other candidate that is better who might be confirmed. I'm just hoping Tulsi is enough of a politician to lie when necessary to accomplish what she is being appointed to do.
I remain one. If she were as willing to "go along to get along" as most politicians, she would just have made peace with the neocon world view and continued to enjoy the bright future she once had with the Democrats.
That she switched parties - chased by a wave of slander in the liberal press - rather than bend on her signature issue showed a lot of integrity, and she still has credit with me. If this was the price Republican Senators demanded for confirmation, I'm glad she paid it.
So compromising on your signature issue is acceptable? Once you have done that, everything else becomes negotiable.
No, my point was that she HASN'T. I realize I wasn't clear if you are not familiar with her history, but her signature issue is opposition to neoconservative foreign policy, not surveillance. People don't realize the extent to which the neocons are all Democrats now.
I realize that. Washington is largely a uniparty from a foreign policy perspective. However, that wasn’t the straw that broke the camels back on Tulsi’s political shift. The issue that did it for her was federal intrusion into private speech, most obviously characterized by section 702 of FISA, which she has now completely flip-flopped on.
Ask Palestinians how they feel about loosing their homes.
My impression is that members of both houses of Congress are trying to amuse themselves—somehow—for the next week—until after Trump’s inauguration. After the inauguration, all hell breaks loose. Members of both houses will then be on the run. So now, they are hunkering down in their bunkers, because their emotions are so out of control. They cannot handle it individually and/or collectively. It seems like members of both houses are in full panic mode. Their imaginations are running wild on them. They cannot function. They don’t know which way to turn. What friends they had, are gone. Poof! What enemies they have, are shadows. Their world is no longer cozy. They are the benighted, strung-out mentally-ill. They will never recover their old predictable lives.
John Michael Greer wrote:
"Crash now and avoid the rush!"
He wasn't wrong.
Musk fired the majority of Twitter staff...and it turns out they weren't missed. I wonder if a bunch of those upper class folks in LA not "going to work Monday..." will even be noticed, in a similar manner...