SPEAKER_02 0:34

Welcome to the Better Two Podcast. I'm your host, Donna. Today's guest is Gerald Everett Jones, and he has a book out called Jonathan's Journal. The book kind of deals with finding a journal about World War One and the mystery behind it. So we talk about that. We talk about what's going on in the world and the similarities to World War One and so much more. So tune in. Hi, Gerald. How are you doing today?

SPEAKER_00 0:58

So pleased to be with you, Donna. Very well.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

It's been a while since we've talked, but and and a lot has changed in in the world and everything. And I want to dive right into your book, which is called Jonathan's Journal. And you talk about in this book the fact that how we didn't necessarily learn from things in the World War I. And one of the things that was brought up that I saw was the trauma echo. And I was recently looking at a study that talked about how trauma can be in our DNA, in the father's DNA, and how it gets passed on in their uh sperm to the for further along generations, which is kind of an amazing thing because we don't ever think about that. We talk about generational trauma as it just being a learned inherited belief. But it's a possibility that it's actually passed on from the trauma you experience that becomes part of your DNA.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Wow, that is a new thought. I had not read that or heard that. My father was a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy in World War II on a troop transport, which an LST, which they thought they would say jokingly, a large slow target. Because see, if you're taking thousands of men and vehicles and tanks across the Pacific, okay, you're gonna have a squ a naval escort, you know, gonna have destroyers on your flank. But once you've dumped the troops on the beach and disgorged all those vehicles, and you're heading back, you might be viewed as kind of expendable.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

And so uh he he defined war in his experience as two years of boredom and punctuated by uh very brief 15-minute periods of pure terror.

SPEAKER_02 2:57

I can imagine.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

Yeah, so uh, I mean he made it through, um, and he also you know made the point, you know, he he was very much in favor of uh Truman's decision to you know drop the bomb. And yet, having read that history, it turns out that it's kind of Truman, it wasn't like he was really decisive about it, he just kind of did never said no. You know, the the the the generals would all sit around and you know, then they would have you know uh war office meetings, but um I I don't think that he was and he was from my hometown, independence, Missouri. See okay. The man from independence, they called him, and uh yeah, he was he was a crusty fellow, and of course, in in uh in his first assignment in that job, he was not elected. And you wonder why. Well, you know, I think the idea that somebody who's put thrust into that job as primarily an administrator rather than a rock star, I think is likely to do a better job. But the problem is, especially in today's media landscape, well, I mean, and it was very much true of Reagan. Reagan Reagan was an actor who could read Q cards, and he was very charming, and he had he had a you know a reasonable side. But I mean, going back to Eisenhower in the early 1950s, you know, general, war hero, uh, and he ran against Adlai Stevenson. Adelai Stevenson on the Democratic side was an intellectual, he was a college professor, you know, he he was a senator, but I mean he was renowned for being a thinker, a someone who would ponder over geopolitics. And you know, you have uh John Kerry, who, you know, Secretary of State, good role for him. Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, good role. I mean, you know, these are more these are more the sharp tacks. Well, I mean, good sorry, go ahead. No, no, I'm just saying that the idea of being a wonk is uh that you know that doesn't put you uh on the billboard in in today's media landscape.

SPEAKER_02 5:30

So and that's that's the thing. I mean, if you look at the we'll look at Bill and Hillary for a second, you know, Bill had the persona, he had the charisma. Hillary doesn't. And and I mean, okay, back to when Bill ran, you know, there was Ross Perot. Everybody thought he was the mad scientist. If I was going to put a businessman in politics, Ross Perot would have been it because at least he had some idea of what some of the trade the trade agreements would do to America. Uh, but everybody was so enamored with they didn't want to know the policy bit. They didn't care about the policy bit. They wanted the charismatic dude that could play saxophone. And and it's not that I'm not, it's not that I'm not a Democrat. And it's not that I'm a Republican. It's just the fact that when you really look at how the media skews things and paints things. And and and sorry, and I was gonna say real quick, and in a prime example of that right now, and I don't really want to touch too far into this, is how we have a narrative coming out about certain killings and certain shootings based on their opinion of how we haven't even investigated this, but we're gonna say right off the bat that they're they're a terrorist. Okay, do you do you realize we're not in 1950 anymore? Do you realize that we actually have cell phones now? That you'll have every angle around. So I think in a way we've become much more savvy because we have all this other stuff to dispute the narrative that is presented to us by the media.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

And this actually that point actually feeds back into this the story of Jonathan's journal. Jonathan's a a college professor in the present time. Uh, he's writing just after COVID, after lockdown, and he'd been caregiver of his possibly demented mother during that time. And she she passed away during that time. But I mean, being locked, being locked up with your, you know, that he paid his dues, let's put it that way. But he's something of something of an introverted fellow. And among her, he has her collectibles, and he's going through uh the things in her estate, and he finds this gorgeous collectible volume with a red leather binding that is a handwritten diary, and it it's it's clear that in the days before uh everybody had a typewriter, you would hire a calligrapher to transcribe your memoirs. Okay, and so these are the this is a memoir of a real World War I soldier, and the problem is it's anonymous. There's just some initials there. And Jonathan thinks, well, did mom have this because it's a relative? I mean, she did she never really talked about her side of the family. And so his whole project, you know, he's he's on sabbatical leave. He's supposed to be finishing his, he's an art historian, he's supposed to be finishing his paper. He can't really get around to it, but he's enough of a data driller and an obsessive researcher that he's like, you know, I'm just gonna dig into this and find out, you know, and like, you know, you you you join ancestry.com and you just keep digging. Yeah, yeah, we've all done that. And and and now you're just hearing from you know, fourth and fifth cousins. It's like, well, what's what's up with this? So this is the engine of the story. And then he stumbles into the library, the local library, because he goes, Well, you know, some of this stuff are really kind of lightweight on I know art history, but I don't know history. Uh uh, and he finds this very cooperative and attractive librarian who happens to be Russian-Ukrainian. Okay, and she was in the diplomatic corps, and she was in the diplomatic corps among the people who got kicked out the last time. Okay, so she kind of knows where bodies are buried there. And the one thing that that Jonathan shares with her is you know something as he digs into it and he finds out, you know, what we're being told about the reasons for going to war, you know, the Iraq, you know, the the more recent experiences, is his he remembers that his elementary school teacher, and this is this was true, this was true of me in seventh grade. My teacher, my history teacher said, if you remember nothing else from this course, he said, remember this. Russia will always covet warm water ports. Now, when you start digging into this, you begin to realize that not only was that the main reason for the outbreak of World War I and the Black access to the Black Sea, but also it's the reason that Putin invaded Ukraine and and because the one of his principal sub-bases is in Sebastopol. Okay, well, when his puppet government was in the power seat there in Ukraine, there probably wasn't any concern about the lease of that sub-base, even though there's they were a separate country. But if you got the uh the populace in there wanting to join NATO, what do you think NATO is going to say about a Russian sub-base in Subascopol?

SPEAKER_02 11:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Now is is this something that you hear on CNN?

SPEAKER_02 11:22

No.

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Or MSNBC or MS now, sorry. Oh, you know, you know why MSN MBC changed their name?

SPEAKER_02 11:29

Why?

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Uh so that they could dissociate themselves from uh NBC, possibly be spun off as a separate company, so the FCC would have nothing to say about their license.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

Well, and see, this is part of the problem. We had a fairness doctrine before, and then as time progressed, we removed the fairness doctrine and it became infotainment. So we we report and we we create a narrative that's going to gen up ratings, that's going to get people going against one another.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

Indeed, indeed. And one of the things also about the World War I experience is that they didn't really have, well, I mean, even if they it was early radio broadcasts, but not not much even that. You know, they they would be relying on daily newspapers, even if, you know, the you know, the a lot of the stories set in the in what they call the Near East, Mesopotamia, uh, which you know is mostly Iraq these days, and India. And it was just complete news to me that there was that those were at all theaters of that war. And yet you find out that what was going on in the Near East may have had a lot more to do with what was happening between, let's say, Austria, Hungria, and France, because the Germans wanted to build a railroad between Berlin and Baghdad. Okay. And that would have, and the British thought that was a good idea at the time. They had uh a few decades before that, they had uh managed to bail the French out. The French had had uh the Franco-Prussian War, they'd run out of money. They were in the meanwhile, in the meantime, they were digging the Suez Canal and they just plain run out of money. And that and the British investors came in and said, you know something? We'll bail you out if we have rights to use the canal. And that was a good good deal for everybody, right? For the Western powers, if you will. So, I mean, so suddenly the the British steamships don't have to go all the way around Africa, they're going through the Suez uh to get to India and and the Far East. But then as well, the the Germans in in the idea of the Berlinda-Baghdad Railway, the British thought, oh, let's invest in that too. That's that's a pretty good idea, until they realized that that the goal was to connect not just Baghdad, but Basra, which is was a big deal in the our Iraq war. We have an airbase there, we did. But the idea was to go from Berlin and actually Rotterdam all the way up and down into the into Basra and to the Persian Gulf and bypass the Suez Canal. Now, the other thing that the that really caused the British to slap their foreheads was they did some math and realized that the the proposed route of the Berlin Baghdad Railway would be beyond the range of British gunboats in the Mediterranean. Those clever Germans and who and who on the German side was really involved in that financing? Dr. Siemens. Dr. Siemens was head of Deutsche Bank, and so Siemens is still around. I mean, the last time I had a chest x-ray. Yes, well, Siemens machine, and that's kind of what they're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 15:11

That's some of the stuff that's coming out in in certain files, that it is it it can go back generations, it's going back generations, it's not just something that's happening in the last couple of years or the last few decades. This is going back to the Rothschilds and everything else. The the go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

There was there was a uh commentator, and I I wish I could remember his name. I believe I saw him on Democracy Now, and he was he had been an Eastern European diplomat, and he was talking about the present day, and he was comparing the ascendancy of the multinationals and the power of people we won't name. Yeah, uh, the the the the the tech bros, let's let's say that's good. And exactly, yeah, we know it's a it's a short list, but he was comparing this. I did not hear this comparison before, and I found it astounding because I had already run across it in doing this book. Is that again another thing that I know that I heard about in school, and I'm it might have been on one or two tests, but the early involvement of the Brits in India was the East British East India Company. That went back to the time of Shakespeare. Shakespeare. And the thing that this guy pointed out that again nobody ever taught was that the British government, wealthy as they thought they were, and victors in all these sea battles with you know Spain and whatever, they didn't have the financing with all their hoarded wealth to launch anything of that magnitude. And and and especially to open new trade routes to an entire continent. Okay. So what the way the British East India Company was constituted was it was the largest companies, and they weren't even companies back then because corporations didn't exist, but the largest business ventures, the the wealthiest people in Britain got together and said, let's form this thing called the British East India Company, and it's going to pave our way for selling you know all of our goods back and forth. You know, and and you know, you dig into this stuff and you find out nutmeg. That's not something anybody knew about. Okay, I mean you that if you go back to the British East Indian Company and the and the Indies with the Dutch, you know, coffee, uh and I mean, you know, cocoa is more um Central American, perhaps. But again, all this is this this is the legacy. Why do we drink coffee in the morning? Because of the British East Indian Company, uh, and things like um jute for making rope.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Well what every ship that's on the sea? What what else are you gonna make your rope out of? I mean, yeah. Uh and and so here here was a really powerful economic reason for exploiting, if you will, the people who would harvest this, who owned those assets, let's say, until you took it away from them. And so let's jump ahead to today's environment. Now, this this is not mentioned anywhere in the book, but I recently reviewed a book by uh one of the NASA directors who has retired. Now, whether he was forced out or not, I you know, yeah, so he'll he'll remain nameless for the sake of this discussion. But um his book is about if you were to double the NASA budget, and the budget, NASA budget is vanishingly small as it is, okay. I mean, it's it's not even a thimble in the ocean of the Department of, we'll still call it Department of Defense, okay?

SPEAKER_02 19:27

Because because we've given it, we want to give that to the the tech bros to handle going out in space. But go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

Indeed, but but he's making an argument for making, as Samuel Johnson would have said back in the day, for making tech bros richer than the dreams of avarice, even richer than the dreams of avarice, is he said, if you could double the NASA budget, you could afford to put a base at the Lagrange Point. The Lagrange point is about a million. Well, there's two of them, but one of them is about a million miles out. That's where the James Webb telescope is parked. Okay. Okay, the Lagrange Point is is a place within uh uh not that far from the orbit of our earth by celestial standards, where all the gravitational forces are balanced between the sun, the moon, the earth. Okay, so if you park something there, it's likely to stay parked. Yeah, yeah. So you put a space station there and he says, you know what we should do from that space station? We should then send out mining crews to mine the asteroids. And he says, There are enough rare earth mineral minerals, there's platinum, gold, I mean, you you you name it on the asteroids. And he said, you know, you're you're going to have enough to fund the next generation in space. I mean, if you want to, you know, go to terraform Mars, if you want to go to that moon of Jupiter, which everybody thinks might be Earth like, which it's not, but you know, yeah, if if he said this would be a really viable way from an economic standpoint to use the greed of investors to get us into space instead of the largesse of world governments, which you know is already kind of running dry. Um, so but but again, British East India Company 1640. And so uh this fellow, this soldier, it turns out that he misses he enlists and he thinks he might be going to uh Europe for the trench warfare, which is what we know about from you know all the movies. You know, thank you, Steven Spielberg, and but also you know uh the early phil. Filmmakers as well, uh all quiet western front, uh Paths of Glory. The French So we know all that. We oh we we know all that, okay. But back then all they had was to read read the newspapers and again, uh you know, you you you keep reminding me of parallels. They're reading the newspapers and the the the news articles about what was going on in Europe in the war was like baseball box scores. Okay, was it they're not describing the suffering the right you know the it was sensationalized. Well, I mean, this you know, we we've we've seen the dismembered bodies on the ground because of CGI and and whatever all. And yet back then it was going to war was considered to be kind of a glorious thing because you know, you the the the fellows who came back would put on their red uniforms and go to you know great great to to some ballroom with their lady, and you know, war was just something that happened elsewhere, yeah. You know, on in a in a no man's land that nobody, you know, tourists wouldn't go there. Okay, there might be some farmers, but they got kicked out, you know. There's this well, there you know, there's gonna be some fighting here tomorrow. So best leave. And that happened in the Civil War, too. Uh, you know, uh my my relatives were asked to leave their farm in the middle of Missouri because that would not have been a very safe place to stay. So uh so uh coming back again to other things we were taught about that war is that it was on the lip lips of everyone back then who read a paper or who followed the debates in parliament. What are we going to do about the eastern question? Now, if you were to put that on a multiple choice desk today, was the eastern question a factor in what war? Okay.

SPEAKER_02 24:10

You know what people would say? I remember that from Pirates of the Caribbean.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

No, this no, the the eastern question is whether that new mayor of New York is gonna make it, okay?

SPEAKER_01 24:23

Yeah, there you go. There's a but you understand what I'm getting at. It's like of course the East Indian trading company. Wait a second, didn't Johnny Depp go against them in pirates? Yep, whatever. I mean, I know it's a real question.

SPEAKER_00 24:35

Yeah, the eastern question had to do with the fact that everybody at that time in history was aware that the Turkish Ottoman Empire was in severe decline and didn't have much longer. So if it did decline further, because it was running out of money and and also um influential leadership, and also trying to manage an extended empire that was just probably unmanageable, mostly Arab tribes, and we can say tribes now, we're supposed to say ethnic communities, but the Ottoman Empire is falling apart apart. Okay, here you have this big southern portion of the Black Sea, and the you know, this access to what was now going to be, you know, Suez in the bottleneck to the Persian Gulf. If they're not going to be there or they're not gonna be influential, who's going to rush into that power vacuum? Now, remember what your teacher told you in school, Russia will covet warm water ports. It was all about not only the British, but also the Germans, fearing what the Russians would do if if they didn't assert them their their empire's influence. Now, as it happened in World War I, something that really not as many people saw coming was something called the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Russians were actually actually had troops poised to rush from the Caspian Sea area into the Middle East to begin to take control under the Romanovs, under the czar. But 1917, the Bolsheviks decided, you know something? We've got we've got bigger things to worry about here. They with they with recalled all of their armies to Moscow. Okay, they they kind of voluntarily gave up. And that's what happened. That's what the Germans actually in 1870, 1879, they came very close to just overrunning Paris, just taking Paris for the first time. Well, the first time in recent memory. And they would have prevailed had they stayed. They were using our they were lobbying artillery shells into Paris and they were cutting Paris off from food supplies. The Parisians were so desperate, they were not only eating rats, they they killed uh the only two elephants that were in the zoo and served them in in restaurants to rich people. Because that was, you know, uh, and you know, people were stealing and hoarding and whatever all. But it was simply because Kaiser Wilhelm kind of gave up on his Western front uh because he uh uh was more interested in the internal politics of consolidating Prussia into Germany and trying to to work out his treaties with Austria-Hungary, which of course became the the power axis for World War I. So he he was really, you know, these French are just kind of an aggravation. What are we gonna get? We're gonna get this fruit for syndicate. Um, and then amazingly, and the part that we are taught in school is oh, the French and 1880s, 1890s, what a glorious place. The Eiffel Tower comes up in 1889, and and and everybody from all the rich ladies in from America are buying their dresses from Worth in Paris, and what you know, this was the place to be. Well, the the thing that they didn't teach us was that France re literally rebuilt Paris in about 15 years with the help of again British investors.

SPEAKER_02 28:40

Well, and I want to say this. Okay, so what you've learned in history is different than what I learned in history, because I I mean I'm not even gonna go that claim to remember exactly what I learned, but I remember history when I was taught it, it was very brief. It wasn't, and this is I learned I was in high school in the 80s, the early 80s. So if what I learned was small, imagine what people learn today. It's gotta be even more minute. So, so and and we have a cylindrical thing of every 80 years we repeat patterns astrologically, and here we are 80 years again. And so it's a very fascinating thing to see that we keep repeating these patterns over and over and over again, and we don't learn.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

Well, in school it was names, dates, and events in my day. And you don't really think about the reasons behind things. No, you certainly don't think about how you know you'll talk about French history, German history, American history, British history, but how those things interacted, that was not that just that would have been that would have been college level course. Okay. Now, my senior year in high school, um my one of our teachers had pleaded with the school board so that he could teach an advanced course to seniors, and it was called US diplomatic history. And that was amazing. That was amazing. Uh and and then you find out, I mean, you know, the again, the reasons for war. Uh, you know, um there's a movie, actually, I happened to watch it on um uh Turner, uh classic movie uh called Disraeli about Benjamin Disraeli, and it was an early, early talkie. I want to say it was 1929, and it had been adapted from a play. And Disraeli is counseling this young fellow who's gonna be kind of his protege, and he's gonna be sending him off to Egypt to because Disraeli's the one who actually negotiated for the sale of the Suez Canal, and the and the the Bank of England backed him reluctantly, it turns out it was like five million bucks, which back then was like a ginormous amount of money, you know, uh not small change at all. But uh, but he's telling this this uh uh uh kid, I mean young young fellow, uh and it's it's a quote that was in the play, because I double-checked it, and it's in every version of the there's been two several versions of the movie, and he says, war um strife is not a cause of war. War is an aggravation. So I mean, it you know, you you've got you've got these other factors that are swelling, brewing, interacting with each other. And yeah, okay. World War I, what we were taught was uh it was interlocking interlocking directorates, which was a a term for you know uh mutual defense treaties between the nations of Europe. So once one got dragged in, they were all dragged in. All right, that's that's a consequence of it's not a cause. Okay, but but the other supposed cause it was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, uh Austrian, Austro-Hungarian leader, uh royalty, by a a Serb dissident. But the thing is, if you start figuring in the eastern question and the railway, the Berlin-Baghdad Railroad would rail railroad would have to cut right through Serbia. So why why wouldn't why would the Serbs be upset that Germany is coming through and using what we would call eminent domain to to buy up all their farmland and cut right through their pastures and and tell them, you know, we're going to be the new bosses here. Okay, this wasn't uh okay, you could say this guy was a nut job, this guy, but see, that's another thing that happens in especially in our country in the media landscape, is and I can understand the rationale for this, the consequence for this is particularly unfortunate. And that is when you do have a terrorist, quote unquote, do something heinous, it has long been a policy of the FBI and the Justice Department that you do not publicize or speculate on the reasons. Okay. And that's not because it's not news, it's not because everybody, because everybody wants to know that's the you know, right? Why did he do it? You know, that that's the that's the headline news the next day. And now it gets speculated about all over. But the old policy was you don't talk about that because one of the main reasons for a terrorist who's not just out of their minds to do something like this is to get a platform to broadcast their cause. Right. And so what you're doing if you're going to have a reasonable debate among citizens about this policy that this person is resisting or advocating, if you're going to do that, then you're simply encouraging more acts like that. And that is a catch-22. I don't know how to address that. I do not know how to address that.

SPEAKER_02 34:39

I have to wrap this up, but I do want to say, real quickly, in response to that, is the fact that it's they I think the current administration likes to flood the field, as they say, and distract us from everything that they don't want us to see. And the difference is compared to what we did a long time ago is yes, the newspaper was one thing, it wasn't instantaneous. Sometimes that news was already three or four days old before it actually hit the paper. Oh, and now, and that's where I think they've lost track while they're still trying to play that playbook of oh, I can deny everything, especially with AI, because that can be a problem. But everything is instantaneous, it's all instant gratification. So, is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to add real quick?

SPEAKER_00 35:23

Well, we could say human beings, as much as we're upset about the internet, which we're on right now, we might be optimistic and say human beings in their perpetual talent for survival have invented global consciousness at the precise time when if we don't use global consciousness, we're gone.

SPEAKER_02 35:47

Yeah, agreed. Agreed. I thank you for coming on the show.

SPEAKER_00 35:53

You've been very generous and charming, and I wish you ever I I'm sending white light, let's put it that way.

SPEAKER_01 36:01

Well, thank you.

SPEAKER_02 36:02

If I would have had more time, we would have dug much deeper into what's going on and the similarities of today versus back then. And it's interesting because I was, I think it was on threads, and they were talking, somebody had posted, and they posted a bunch of news articles and pictures and everything, and it was from 1926. And you would think, so what does 1926 and 19 or 2026 have in common? Because it's a hundred years. Well, amazingly and surprisingly enough, there was some very much some similar commonalities. One I remember offhand because I do write smut, um, was that you know, there was too much trouble. Books were causing too much trouble, romance books were causing too much trouble for women. Okay. And there was just these little similarities about things that we are still complaining about today that were being complained about back then. And since we were talking about media, and I didn't get to bring this up with Gerald, it's like we're painting a narrative, and we're trying to go back to the traditional family values. We're trying to, you know, say that people should be lesser class citizens, and this whole narrative we've been repeating over and over. And it's like, okay, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, but nothing ever changes. And you have to really wonder at what point is it just people trying to conquer and divide? Because honestly, most people don't have the luxury of having that time to really dig deep and see what's going on in the undercurrent of the world. We just accept and we keep going, especially if you are on a hamster wheel with your work, you got family, you got to go home, you got to cook dinner, you got to go to bed, or you know, you have no time for yourself to really just relax. And when you do, sure, you want to read something, maybe, or you want to doom scroll, or you want to watch TV, you want to tune out because the stress of the world, not just your job, but the world, just adds so much more to it. And and the thing is, you have to question then, where is my hope? And and that's the one thing we have to hang on to. So sometimes we have to step away from the media. And I'm not saying go get your news off the internet. Um, but sometimes if we look at our news in the states, and then we look at how the other countries outside of the US view us and actually get more appropriate news, we can understand things better. And as I was saying earlier about flooding the field, it's like that is constantly what's going on. We are so bombarded with story after story after story after story. It's like, which one do you follow? And which one is the distraction? And you know how he was saying, how Gerald was saying it used to be that before anything was said openly, well, we have to investigate this. And and once we investigate it, then we'll give you the information. But now it's like, and this is what I was saying, we paint this narrative, we give you this information that we're just that makes us look good, that makes us look like the tough guy. All right, but is it true? Oh, wait, you didn't realize there was like six or seven people filming at the same time and they caught every angle and they saw everything that happened? You didn't see you didn't know that? Are you still living in 1950? Because everybody's got a cell phone now, or they have glasses that can film things. And you know, the right to privacy, that's a whole nother issue about all this stuff. But somebody posted a meme that is so true. We have so many people that are certain, you know, they're they're anti-immigration and all this, and they're there with, you know, you you see them posting pictures on Facebook and whatnot, and this is before what's recently happened with their 8K 47 and they're a big tough guy, and they're gonna stand up. And this is why we have the Second Amendment because we're gonna fight. We're gonna fight hard and we're gonna show you who's tough, and we're gonna stand up against tyranny. Okay. The thing about the meme was that it was amazing that people actually were using their phone to stand up against tyranny. Nobody could, you know, nobody has to die because they're holding a phone. There's no intimidation factor except that you're gonna get caught in what you're doing if it's wrong. So you really have to look at the narrative in a bigger way. And I know I'm gonna tick some people off by by saying what I'm saying, but the biggest thing that has to happen, and this is not just here in this country, this is in the world. We have to quit labeling things, and I've talked about labels Lord knows since I started this podcast. But we label things, and and we we have the have and have nots, we have ethnicity, we have you know, male, female, bisexual, uh, pansexual, we have all these labels. But when it comes down to it, we are all human beings. And when he was talking about NASA, about the fact that we could be mining asteroids, you mean we can mine asteroids instead of going and invading somebody else's country for their minerals? Wouldn't that be a novel concept? But everybody wants to puff up their chest and be the fight man. She's like, we need a war. And I'm like, why do we need a war? Because it'll help the economy. Isn't that just kind of fucked up? And yes, I dropped the F-bomb. Sorry, folks, but if you've listened to other episodes, you know. But we need a war to prop up the economy. And all I can think of, I believe, was Eisenhower that said, do not feed the military-industrial complex. So who does who makes money off of war? And I think that's where you have to look at everything. Who makes the money off war? Who makes money off of our division? Who makes money? Where is you have to follow the money? And I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's not just a Democrat-Republican problem. We have people in power that have made money and they thrive, and then they turn around and say, Well, you could survive off of a $3 budget for meals. Really? And what how much is your budget for food? And I know I'm on my soapbox, and yes, you I'm sure some of you guys have taught tuned out. But the fact of the matter is, we need we need reform. Corporations are not people, and we have to reel things back in, and we can't let people dictate who gets, you know, we're just gonna bail out people for whatever and screw the common person. We all need to be able to survive. We have more than enough in our country to have health care. We don't have to have the war the military complex that we do. We don't have to go buy a hundred spend 172 million on empty buildings so we can house illegal immigrants. Because there's somebody making money off of all of this. Somebody making money off of detention centers, somebody making money off of all these little things. And yes, dare I say, I realize what I'm saying could get me in a lot of trouble. And if I disappear, I disappear. But I'm not saying anything that anybody else isn't. So there is a fear sometimes when I get on here and I start spouting off and I could. Definitely edited out that I could disappear. And never in my lifetime did I think that that would be a possibility in my country. So, but as the David Bowie song said from The Falcon and the Snowman, which plays occasionally in my head, this is not America. And it's not. Because that's really the key. Seeing humanity for what it is, then we can start making change, not just here, but in the world. Because ultimately we have to take care of us. We have to support us. We have to show community and faith. So on that note, I thank you guys for tuning in. I thank Gerald for coming on and talking. I like I said, I wish the conversation could have been longer. Um and you know, I like to thank Fast Susie for the intro and outro music. But I want to leave this one more statement to you guys. If you can take a moment each day and appreciate everything you have, the freedoms you have, the ability to tune in and listen, and the fact that you have a roof over your head. Appreciate those small things because there's people that don't have them. And there are people, the sad thing is there are people that are relishing that these other people don't have them, don't have the things that maybe a normal life would benefit. So appreciate what you have. It's important. And I thank you guys as always for tuning in, whether it be morning, noon, and night. I hope you enjoy the show. If you do, leave a review, tell your friends, and um, I'll catch you next time, guys. Bye.