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What can we say? Frustration has a way of concentrating the mind, and this week we’ve got one word: Afghanistan. Victor Davis Hanson joins us to talk about our absurd administration and its pathetic priorities. Then national security correspondent Eli Lake joins us to speak on the Taliban, Biden’s “return to normal” on the world stage and his moral illiteracy. The fellas also have a chance to muse on the tug-of-war of nation-building versus our security interests, along with the question of what America’s choice will be regarding its role as the leader of the free world. We’d be interested in what Ricochet members think. Let us know in the comments!
Music from this week’s podcast: Bad Decisions by The Strokes
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Re: Peter’s wondering at the end where the country is going, I can’t stop thinking the problem is not the country as a whole but our over credentialed self styled elites who quite literally hate the country and the people in it, the boll weevils who’ve eaten out the hearts of all of our institutions. Whenever I hear one of them speak I think in a reverse Sally Field fashion ‘They hate us, they really, really hate us’. We have to stop listening to them, hiring them, appointing them and electing them just because of their paper credentials. Be wary of any candidates who have never had a paying job outside of government.
Peter kind of blew right past that one as a stated fact. Despite Matt Damon making movies to this effect, that’s not true.
Regarding the Constitution component, how it was first written, and Rob’s comments on “agile”, as part of software development: I’m likely picking nits again, but deferring something huge and impactful to later on is absolutely the opposite of the agile framework. Generally features for any piece of software are valued in one way or another (typically using Business Value as a scoring mechanism), so you can basically rate all the features you want, which in turn guides which features are implemented first. Some features may be “must haves” and some will be “nice to haves”, but they all get scored.
Rob’s point is correct in that some huge things got kicked down the road – slavery being the obvious one. But the alternative to that would have been no Constitution, no United States, at best a United States of a Half-Dozen States, slavery would still exist, and you’d have less leverage to eventually ban slavery had we not been able to pull the southern contingent into the signers.
I’ve managed a couple of software projects using the Agile framework, and have a professional certification in it (fwiw, anyway, it just means I passed a test). The doing is the learning, in any line of work.
But the analogy is off. I’d be loathe to shoehorn the origins of the country into an agile framework to enhance understanding, it’s a bit like throwing rocks at the obelisk to announce your fear and confusion.
Then I must’ve been on mute.
Then James was right, he must have muted himself and didn’t realize it when he muttered something against Peter’s assertion.
The guys seemed to be struggling to answer the question “Are we up to the challenge?”.
Rob cited Regan as a president who provided leadership to rally the nation to continue not merely opposing the Soviet Union, but to defeat it (“We win, they lose”).
We need that same kind of leaders who can explain why America must oppose our adversaries and why America is worth defending. Around whom might we rally?
Ben Sasse, Mike Gallagher (WI-8), and Dan Crenshaw are striving to lead and worthy of our support.
In order to stave off a Pod-Gate type scandal, I can explain what happened here.
The final step of producing this (and all of our podcasts) is running an algorithm on the audio of the show that removes extemporaneous noises: mute buttons being turned on and off, papers rustling, coffee cups landing on desktops, lawnmowers, dogs, etc. It has a decibel level and length of noise threshold that can be set manually and everything beneath the threshold is automatically deleted. It’s very handy, a real timesaver, allows us to create a much better experience for the listener, and it generally is very reliable. But it can on occasion delete something relevant, and that is what occurred in this instance.
Here is an image of the edit of this show at the place where this occurred before we ran the noise removing algorithm:
As you can see there is a very short piece of audio from James at that moment. Here is the audio of original version of it.
So yes, James does react to Peter’s assertion about WMD, but it’s very subtle and soft. I doubt Peter himself even heard it.
Now, here’s a screen shot of the same place in the show, after the noise removal algorithm had been run:
Yup, James’ reaction had been deleted. Silenced by a machine. Oh, the humanity!
James, my advice to you is stop being so damn subtle! Either that or the algorithm in Logic (the audio editing software we use) is sentient and believes that there
werewere not WMD in Iraq and is determined to silence opinions to the contrary.That would be, it believes there were NO WMD, if the algorithm is silencing contrary opinions (actually facts) such as James’.
So where did this program come from, anyway? CDC? CCP?
Nice to hear Rose Mary Woods is still active after all these years …
Except I produced the missing audio. She never did. So your analogy doesn’t work.
Logic is made by Apple. Have they taken a position on WMD that I’m not aware of?
Well maybe you didn’t see it still, but if Logic deleted James’ objection to Peter’s assertion that there were NO WMD in Iraq, then that would be supporting Peter, which means that Logic would agree with Peter that there were NO WMD in Iraq, not that there WERE, and so it silenced James’ opposing viewpoint.
Except James didn’t bring up any facts, he just subtlety reacted to what Peter said. If he had brought up a fact or two, it never would have been deleted by the algorithm.
That said, I am of the opinion that James’ reaction was appropriate for this discussion. The topic was Afghanistan, not Iraq and a conversation about WMD wasn’t appropriate for this show and would have taken the conversation into a non-relevant tangent.
Deleting audio that is organic to the show during the cleanup phase of post-production is rare, but it does happen on occasion. I’m glad this instance was brought to my attention so I could correct it.
Please, I was making a joke. I promise you that the software doesn’t have opinions about any thing. It just deletes audio below a certain decibel level with zero regard to what it is.
Mike Gallagher was scheduled to be a guest on this show but had to cancel Friday AM because he was called into a Congressional briefing with Blinken and Austin at the same time we were recording. Luckily, Victor was able to join us.
Mike will be on with us very soon.
A number of commenters have said that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, but had shipped them out of Iraq itself–to Syria, one or two people said–before we invaded. If anyone who’s familiar with this material has a moment or two, could he provide links to articles on this? I’d thought the idea that Saddam got rid of his WMDs just in time remained speculation. If I’ve missed something decisive–and, Lord knows, I’ve missed things before–I’d be grateful for the education. Thanks muchly!
There were some things found by the inspectors too, afterward, but the larger media wasn’t interested in that, and it’s not like Saddam had a nuclear missile in an underground silo, ready to launch, like in War Games or The Day After or something. And I don’t think anyone ever claimed that he had something like that.
And they were definitely hiding things too, and trying to win a propaganda war, such as by showing the destruction of the “baby milk factory” which just happened to have big signs in English…
No, if he had muted himself, there would have been silence on his track. The fact that his reaction was recorded means he did not mute himself.
Okay, I see what you mean now. But in fairness, the first graph you posted looked like he had himself muted.
The Original Queen of Missing Data did not have to contend with modern technology!
That’s what I thought initially, but when I restored the version of the show before we ran it through the silencing algorithm, I understood what occurred and rewrote my original post.