Trump's Strategic Realignment Against China

The Mark Billing podcast is presented by ULINE. For quality shipping and industrial supplies, ULIN has everything in stock , visit youline. com . The Mark Belling podcast is a production of iHeart Radio podcasts. I have an opinion as to what's causing the incredible increase in autism . But I'm going to save that for a moment because my opinion is unproven . It may be wrong. I don't have much to back it up on , back it up with , but I'm bringing it up for a different purpose . Let me approach it this way. I'm a capitalist. The reason capital ism works is the theory of Pavlov's dog . Pavlov's dog celebrated what he thought he was going to be fed . People respond to incentives. If you want someone to do something great , they have to be compensated for it or they won't do it. It's the reason that the United States is advanced so much more than any other nation. We were the most purely capitalist nation. I'm a believer in capitalism. The leftis are the ones that say that they don't believe in capitalism, however , I'm telling you they are more obsessed with money than anyone on the right . There are some flaws in the financial reward system . When you take a look at anything that either is or isn't happening with leftist establishments and institutions or for that matter even, a political or right leading establishments and institutions , it has to do with money and following the money The great motivator . I'm fascinated by the fact that we have had massive increase in autism and almost nobody has spent any time trying to figure out why . I mean, I've done a few segments this podcast season on autism and I talk about when I was a kid a million years ago . There wasn't a single kid in any of my classes all the way through high school that was autistic . There may have been some who showed signs of what we now consider aut ism. They may have been introverted and so on, but nobody that was diagnosed as it and certainly nobody whose symptoms seem to be anything near what you're seeing now . So if this isn't simply hyped diagnoses and parents getting theirselves declared as being on the spectrum so that they can get all the financial benef its of it . If it isn't that, if there actually is a dramatic increase in autism , doesn't it strike you as odd that there has been so little curiosity as to why that's occurred ? I compare it to the seeming lack of curiosity about why so many young people and children are obese now as compared to before . And I think the answer comes back to if we figured out what caused autism, who makes money off of that I just think what would happen is a lot of people would stop making the money they're making now . When someone is autistic, that means that people are going to be paid to treat their autism . If we can come up with drugs to combat autism, the drug companies that make it will make that money . We have an entire infrastructure out there the treating aut istic kids infrastructure . Zillions of people are employed at that . If kids aren't autistic anymore, if we come up with a cure or better yet, we find out what the cause is , so we don't have as many autistic kids in the future . Who makes money off of that ? And if addressing the cause doesn't mean that you have to take a drug, it means that you just have to stop doing whatever it is that's causing it . There's no financial windfall in it, so therefore nobody's pursuing it . Now I get why therefore a business or a therapist wouldn't pursue it, but what about the rest of society . I want to open with that and in there I'm just going to throw out not because I'm trying to persuade you that I'm right, but because I want to trigger people to start figuring this thing out and get a national determination, a battle to determine what the cause of autism is, so we can stop doing whatever that is. When it comes to shipping, packaging, industrial supplies and equipment, many suppliers offer endless ails of product. ULI knows what you can't do with endless ails of product. Test the quality of each product, ensure everything is in stock and ready to ship the same day, and have a team available twenty four seven to answer your product questions. Uline only carries supplies and equipment they have tested, tried and often use in their own business. Experience the ULIN difference today . Visit youline . com . Now, I've been pondering this issue for years . Why is autism on the increase ? And I've had a number of theories and I've thrown some of them out in the past . My biggest is the number of women who , while pregnant , are filling their bodies up and therefore their baby's bodies up with stuff that can numb their brains . Not just illegal narcotics , like say fentanyl, and imagine a pregnant woman with fentanyl knowing how powerful fentanyl an opioid is. Imagine if just the tiniest amount of that gets into her baby , but not just that , not just methads who are pregnant , or crackheads or people on opioids . Although I think that's part of it But all of the legal medications , the antidepressants, what does an antidepressant do? It changes the chemical response in your brain to block those feelings feelings of anxiety . In other words to over simplify it, it isn't oversimplify in the same way that a painkiller numbs your response to the pain , the thing that's painful is still there. Your brain doesn't get the trigger of it. The anti anxiety meds stop your brain from feeling the anxiety that your body is triggering, or the antidepressants . Again, legal . The number of kids that are put on ridalin and go into adults still dependent on that . All of this, well, these are the women that are now having babies . And that's where I've been on this issue for the longest time . That I think that's the answer . When I was a kid, you know what the moms all did? They drank and they smoked. They ain't supposed to do either of those two things anymore . I remember when it was and they started telling women that it probably wasn't a good idea to have sex when you were pregnant. First two months and again, these things have all changed, but it was around, I think nineteen eighty. I told a joke to somebody who was pregnant and I got a bad response to it. That's how I'm able to trigger this. They kind of say, Okay, you probably shouldn't have sex when you're pregn ant. These things have come and gone and it was right around then that no drinking . For the longest time, women drank when they were pregnant . We were a country that everybody smoked. They smoked or they were pregn ant. Well, those things could have became verbotin. So obviously it dawned on us many, many years ago that something that a mother ingests can affect the baby . So I've just taken the same thing and now looked at all of the, okay, pregnant women aren't supposed to smoke or drink anymore . But what about all this other stuff ? Is that it was my idea . I got a new one . I admit this isn't original . A friend of mine has this idea . And the moment I heard it, my response is that's it . This explains autism . Again , the purpose of telling you this is not to persuade you because I'm not backing this up with anything . This is simply that makes sense from a dope guy like me . It's just my idea, but it doesn't mean that I think that we should act on that idea, but I certainly think it should be studied just as almost all of this should be studied and there should be in depth tracking of it. But there isn't because there's no money in it . Finding Finding out that somebody's doing something that's leading to their baby being autistic , who makes money off of that? You're just going to result in if mothers stop doing that thing, they don't do that thing. There's no cash in that at all. So there's no drug company to put all grants for the research . There's nobody chasing this dollar at all. And all of the people that are involved in the treatment of autism and so on They're all dealing with this stuff after the fact. I'm trying to get to the cause, the thing in the first place . Well, here's the thought . Can you think of anything that we are doing right now with pregnant women that might be blasting the brains of the babies in their bodies? You say no, think about it for a moment . Many of the children that are autistic, you'll see them walking around and they have headphones on because they're really bothered by loud sounds . And often you'll see with a child when they're showing the first signs of autism, they're putting their hands over their ears. They're freaking out when anything loud occur s . It's one of the first real signs of autism and autistic children as they grow up later on in life . That's one of the things that really difficult for them really loud sounds, a cacophony of sounds . Well, let's run with that for a moment . What would be something that might have happened early on like in the womb that would create such an inability to handle loud sounds . Certainly isn't my experience. I was of the rock and roll generation . David Boy put right on his album covers that the music was created for the purpose of being played at maximum volume, putting your headphones on and blasting it to the top . The louder and the more crashing the better . But now simply hearing anything loud , thunder, anything can really harm and bother and upset kids that are autistic . That to me is the first clue , not proof of anything, but clue , it's the where we should be looking to see what happened to them . What would create this incredible sensitivity to loud sounds . And for that matter , what could create permanent altering conditions on your brain that gives you the symptoms of autism the withdrawing The kind of sense of stepping back , almost a need to be kind of dulled and apart and non responsive . Well Well , I can think of something that we're doing right now and some pregnant mothers do constantly , which is shattering babies brains with extreme deafening noise . What the hell is an ultrasound ? Ultrasound is it's ultrasonic . We take that gadget . I remember the first ultrasound they did on me . When I lived in Springfield, Illinois, my stomach was for reasons having to do with an insane lifestyle and a ludicrous diet of eating one meal a day, which would be like two whole boxes of hamburger helper all at once. Not surprisingly , my stomach was screwed up and I actually had to go into the hospital all gassed up and all that and they were doing the ultrasound. They were rolling the thing over there and they were, I remember the tech was doing it when I went into the hospital. Oh my goodness . They straightened my stomach out. I was resilient and that was the first experience I had with an ultrasound . We take the ultrasound monitor and it is able to create these images , which function like an x ray . We take the images and we hold it on the stomach of the woman and try to position it where right next to the baby 's brain . And the image is created with it's called ultrasound ultrasonic . High waves at the human. You hear about the old song sounds at only a dog hears the hearing of dogs goes to a higher frequency than human beings are. You know, there's radio waves out there. You can walk past the radio signal and you don't hear the radio station, but those are sound waves that are bouncing around. Obviously, ultrasounds are done for a medical purpose, make sure that the baby is healthy . So in prepping this, I talked to some women they',re pregnant and I would get like, well, we had one or two . But now , everybody seems to want to do the gender reveal . So they look at the baby and look at the baby to see oh is that a boy or is it a girl? And they'll take pictures. I've seen women with like lockets of their fetus hanging around their neck. And I've always thought that this is a good thing because it's certainly a great argument against abortion. Once we started seeing the ultrasound, it killed off this notion that abortion was unviable tissue mass and you weren't killing a baby . But there are women now that go in every month to get more pictures . Has anybody ever asked if this is good ? When I go to the dentist and they do an x ray. You know, they throw that big , what is that? Is that asbestos that thing that they throw on you? I don't know what it is. They throw that big pad on you so that the x ray only goes into like the tooth . What does the x ray tech always do before they zap the picture . They get the hell out of the room because you don't want to expose to that much radiation. There's other stuff too. Do we know the long term impact? They say that some people say that holding cell phones to your ear constantly isn't good for you . I'm laying down. I got the laptop. It's on my chest. Is that good for me? I don't know . But the radiation from an ultrasound is so powerful enough that we are getting a high quality image that penetrates the woman's muscle and tissue mass and goes right into the woman and shows you the baby And we know this. fifty years ago they weren't doing ultrasounds . Again , just because A happens and B happens doesn't mean A cause b . Sometimes things are coincidental, sometimes there's a cause and effect . This has, I've researched this. Now there's been some research on it, but it's been very limited. And most of it has concluded that there isn't any evidence or proof that ultrasounds lead to autism, but the studies tend to be very, very small , a lot of them are anecdotal . The only way to do it is if you had just a large, large , large subset of women that didn't get any ultrasounds of their children or maybe only one and compare that against women who had multiple ultrasounds and then you'd have to wait like five, ten years for the manifestation of autism. You can go back and do it in retrospect and talk to mothers of how many ultrasounds did you have but that's based off of memory . We haven't done any animal experim entation. There's been almost none of it . Now, maybe this isn't it. Maybe ultrasounds are perfectly fine . But my point in raising this is there's a complete lack of curiosity in finding out any of these series . We know this . There are a lot of people who don't want it to be ultrasounds Can you imagine the retroactive lawsuits ? And how many women want to have the guilt of thinking the fact that they zap their baby seven times so that they can run around with all of these photos of the infant in the womb that you made your baby autistic by doing it . Maybe it's diet . Diet, I think, explains a lot . Processed and ultra processed foods, the crap for us . The years we were being told about eat only fruits and vegetables . So they were loading ourselves up with carbohydrates for fattan could be. They told us forever that fat is bad . Growing evidence is that fat is great for you, not an excess. We change our opinions on all sorts of things and maybe some of the things that made everybody fat is also what's creating kids that are autistic. And again, I'm also open to the notion that a lot of kids are getting hyped diagnoses. Parents want their kids to be designated autistic. They get discounts off of this that and the other thing. There's tax breaks, there's incentives, they get medical treatment. There's also then, okay , the reason my kid is like this isn't because of any of my parenting. It's not my fault. The kid is autistic . The zillions of people that are in the autism industry , they have a vested interest in getting every kid possible designated as autistic because now there's a market for their services and more jobs available. I get all of that, but undeni ably there is more autism . Even if some of the diagnoses are hyped , there's certainly more . When you see these kids and sometimes it's at a young age that gets so freaked out with any kind of noise going on and they're troubled and they're having their hands over their ears and withdrawing themselves. I never saw a kid do that ever when I was a kid Noise and commotion generally made you interested . One of the reasons I was encouraged at Kennedy getting in there at HHS is he wanted to get to the bottom of this. And boy, boy, whenever anybody suggests that something might cause autism, it just smacked down without any body open minded enough, let's pursue it. Again, the vaccines were one of the first that were blamed for this. A lot of celebrities and a lot of moms whose kids were autistic connected this with the fact that we now have zillions of vaccinations as opposed to again when I was a kid when there were only a few . It's been disproven. It's been disproven, it's been disproven. I don't know that it's been disproven because I don't trust any of these people anymore. If COVID told us anything , it's that the public health community is filled with liars and often a lot of people who make a fortune getting kicked backs on grants, fauci, fauci, fauci I don't trust the drug companies . They don't want to be sued because their drugs did something bad and they certainly want to make a fortune creating when I say I don't trust them, it doesn't bring to trust anybody. That's why you have to pursue things in an open mind without a concern about where the truth turns out to be and not pursue something just to ratify what somebody's opinion was in the first place . We ought to be trying to get to the bottom of this, particularly since the problem seems to be getting worse . So this friend of mine, she's a mom. This is her theory . She convinced her husband of it and I said, This is it. This just explains it. Maybe it doesn't. What do I know? Nothing is what I do . But at least , I'm thinking we ought to try to figure it out so we can do it. Let's imagine that this is it. And again, maybe it's not, probably it's not. And we therefore decide that we're only going to do an ultrasound that is medically necessary, maybe one and a weakened version of it early on to see that something bad isn't going on there with the kid , but that we banned them for the purposes of gender reveal and all of this other stuff or we put a limitation on it Wouldn't be the end of the world, would it ? Look at all of the things that we used to do that we don't do anymore . We ate trans fats because we thought they were good and now everyone at Chan fats the worst kind of fat out there It's taken forever for us to figure out how bad sugar is for us . And that was held off for so many years because of the number of companies that make a fortune filling stuff with sugar. I'll tell my kool aid story again There was a time that the kool Aid didn't come all just in the packet. The kool A just was like the color and the flavor . I was a kid when my mother made the kool aid . But there's always that big picture and the Kool Aid logo was a picture. It was a big picture. Huge picture . And she took like a bag of sugar. I mean the thing was just filled with sugar . And then she put in the kool aid, which is like one thousand the amount of the sugar, ran the water in. And what you had was it was sugar water that took on the coloration of the kool aid, which might have had a little bit of flavor. And we drowned ourselves in that stuff . It's now started to dawn on people that the reason that we have a blood sugar problem and a diabetes problem is that people are getting too many sugars, especially sugars added to foods as opposed to the foods that naturally have the sugar in it. Okay, well we learned that and now it's taking some time to get people off that stuff. Some people just don't gain weight. It's not an issue for them. Others, it's screwing up their lives. There just hasn't been any type of desire at all collectively to figure out what causes autism and a whole lot of people that have great power don't want us to find out the cause because they fear it might be them . Let me change the subject . This is just to me an interesting story . First of all, I was blown away when I found out that Floyd Mayweather is forty nine. I mean, I know he's he tries to come back and box a little bit, but boy . So that Haiti was twenty five years ago and then I think, yeah, it was. He emerged in his twenties . One of the greatest pound for pound fighters in the history of boxing may be the greatest. The thing with Floyd Mayweather is you couldn't hit him . He just you couldn't hit him . He was better at eluting punches, either blocking them or making you miss than anybody ever. Anyway , Floyd Mayweather created an image . This is kind of it was sort of the anti what's happened with Leftism now. Floyd Mayweather was the ultimate capitalist. He named himself money , Money Mayweather . Money Mayweather is now dead broke . The lawsuits are coming. This one is from a jewelry store in Las Vegas . On New Year's Eve of twenty twenty four, in other words, what seventeen, eighteen months ago , he went into a store and bought an autom ir's Pig watch . I know they're real expensive . I don't know particularly how to pronounce it. I like nice watches. These are wavy and the only one I'm going to be wearing is one that's busted . two hundred grand . The check bounced . No , I know people at the really, really high end do things to write out a two hundred thousand dollars check at a retail store in the store accepts it well, it's Floyd Maywell, they figure he's good for it. He wasn't. The check bounce, they say that they've contacted him repeatedly trying to resolve this so that everybody doesn't get embarrassed by the thing going on publicly. He won't return the watch and he's never come up with the money . In the meantime , there's a seven million dollar IRS lien on him . He apparently has debts all over the map . The reason he called himself money is he was being paid a fortune for every fight and he was mister endorsement . So you wonder, how can somebody who was so obsessed with money end up without any money ? And here's the answer . Floyd Mayweather in fact didn't want money . He wanted to spend money . That was his whole thing . The stories he'd talk about in which he'd publicly go into a Vegas casino and make a massive bet in a sporting good and then she take a picture and show the picture of the ticket so he could be seen. He's spending this on all the jewelry, all the cards, all the everything . He wanted to be seen with money . But here's the thing , no matter how much money you have, maybe not at the musk level , ultimately you can outspend whatever you do have. Here's the next thing. I'm pretty sure I don't know anything about how boxes are paid, but I'm guessing that they don't withhold the taxes from the checks at all this stuff. If you get an endorsement to do this or if you sign a contract to get paid fifteen million dollars even after your manager gets a do they take the taxes I honestly don't know but my guess is they don't . That your business manager supp'ossed to set it aside and they're probably telling them maybe they weren't because they were all yes men. Floyd's spending more than what's coming in . So the guy who desperately wanted to be known for having money now ends up with this has happened to a lot of boxers . It happens to boxers in part because they don't control their own money and they have a lot of hangers on who spend it all and there are more so than other sports. There's just a lot of people who go back to even Muhammad Ali. There's just these and Muhammad Ali was taken advantage of the worst. The religion called the black Muslims took him for every penny that he had There were other hustlers that would attach themselves to him . So by the time the boxer got the money out of the back in all these days, the two million or the three million dollars, who knows how much was left over, but you still have to pay taxes on the whole thing that you got . It's happened a lot to these boxes and you know , then their mind starts to slip because they've been punched so many times. They become punch drunk . But it's happened to athletes and other sports as well. It's happened to musicians . You're talking about fields in which not like a regular job of a highly paid person where you're kind of making the same money or you make a little bit more every year. With regard to Floyd Mayweather, he made a fortune for ten or fifteen years and now here to ever make that money again, which is why he's dragged his sorry butt back into the ring in some of these goofy fights that he's in . Even knowing he was destitute New Year's Eve goes in and buys the two hundred thousand dollars watch. He probably knew there was no money in his checking account. He couldn't stop spending. He's an addict . He was never an addict to having money. He was an addict to spending money . Because putting on that image of having money, if you don't spend it, how does anybody know you have it? There's no glamor or glory in saying I got twenty five million in the bank or I've invested in this. The glamour is running around showing it off Next , a listener sent this to me . I've hinted at this myself, but this listener put the point pretty coach at least, so I'm going to quote him rather than steal the idea and take it on as my own . He's right about it , but he's drawing attention to the fact that and I'm going to tease it this way . What have you not heard a lot about from the lefties lately . I'll help you out of this. Something that it used to be damn near the only thing they talked about . And now they're hardly talking about it at all . It's always hard to notice something that isn't happening. Anybody can notice that is happening . When's the last time you heard any of them? Try to scare us to ethical climate change. They've dropped that . This is not the first time they've gone on about something for twenty years and then just moved on . Now one of the things that I point out about Leftis is Conservatives are always proven right, but by the time the Lefties are disproven, they simply move on. They never admit that they were wrong. They just move on. A lot of the Trump stuff is perfect examples of this . The Russia collusion. They dropped it when it was disproven. They're not out there accusing Trump of colluding with the Russians anymore. They're just onto the next thing. They've been telling us forever and ever and ever that climate change was going to destroy humanity . The climate keeps changing as it always has . Global temperatures keep going up moderately . Unclear what's really going on with the sea because until recently we didn't have temperature gauges all over the oceans . But there's been some warming of the oceans, modest warming of the land, as has been going on back and forth as long as there's humanity . We once had glaciers covering Wisconsin . Well, something warmed up and made them melt and something made it cold enough . Maybe God Himself decided he wanted to have glaciers and wanted to get rid of them. Whatever the cause , it's been warm. We've had periods of warming and cold, but in this one, though, they said that humanity was threatened . You really should go back and watch El Gore's stupid movie . I'm telling you everything El Gore said would happen. Most of it he said what happened by now, none of it has happened . Miami Beach was going to be gone. It's in its stupid movie . I spend four months of the year a few miles north of Miami Beach . The beach is still there, the hotels are still there Then there are going to be no glaciers left. They're all gonna melt . There's been some melting , and then there's some refreezing. And then while they melt, the ocean levels are gonna rise . They've risen so moderately . Hardly any of the shoreline that was there thirty years ago is gone now . Well, this is going to happen and that's going to happen Nothing's threatening humanity . Well, now there's more storms. They say that and then they say it in a year in which there's no hurricanes at all . Without regard to whether or not climate change is caused by man or not, so far there's been almost nothing that threatens anyone . So they moved on . Always always this goes back to my discussion about why nobody's partic ularly interested in finding out the cause of autism . Follow the money. This is my point about leftists, as much as they claim that they hate capitalism, they're the biggest money chasers of all. Let's just go to the climate change thing. Do you know how many people made a fortune researching and teaching about climate change? The numbers of companies that made fortunes developing alternative energy that isn't going to affect the planet in a way that's creating climate change, all of that . Well, all that money has now been spent. We need to go on to the new thing . And the guy who wrote me the thing, he's got the new thing, and you probably know what it is. It's going to be the boogeyman for the Left for the next twenty years and that is AI. I'm going to share with you what he wrote. Listening to your recent podcast number one hundred and nineteen, I realized something. The Left always needs one big issue as a rallying point around which to call for the centralization of power, something they can scare the general public with and promise that with only a little more power we can save you. Now he's right about this . The leftis create the problem , the media which consists of people who are stenographers for the left, they regurgitate what the left is are saying . People that don't have the ability to judge that these people are all full of crap f,all for it, panic over it, and then what? We spend the fortunes on the lefties who are now going to save us from this terrible threat that they themselves say is so threatening. So he's on to this. He continues. For the longest time, that issue has been climate change. Before that it was no nukes, before that overpopulation and so on. And he's right about that. That's the same list I would have. Before climate change , the best The big thing was no nukes . Remember there's a movie in the seventies that Jane Fonda, somehow John Voy who's conservative. Gee got involved roped into this. I think Jack Lemon was in it. China Syndrome , nuclear reactor's melting down and destroys the planet . The no nukes movement they were there in nuclear weapons, nuclear power is all going to destroy us . So we stopped building nuclear power plants for thirty or forty years The threat to the world from nuclear power was non existent. The threat from nuclear bombs is very, very powerful. But before that, the pop overpopulation . That was the one when I was a kid. The big book when I was like in high school and college was by this quack named Paul Erlick. He might still be alive. The population bomb . Will's population was about half than what it was now when he was we're going to have going everybody was going to be starved. There aren't going to be enough resources. We've got to stop making babies, stop making babies, stop making babies. People listen to this. Well, the population's doubled . We still have poverty, but if anything, there's less starvation than there was before . The plan, our planet is huge , and we still have incredible events of the planet that aren't being used for much of anything . But he's right. These things last for about fifteen years and it's the big thing that the left claims and the academics claim are going to end humanity . And that's the thing. It's never, it's going to cause this issue. No, it's going to wipe us out . And the climate change is going to wipe us out . He continues . Over the past few months, I have been a loss as to why the Left has so quickly and utterly abandoned the issue of climate change. It was the last time you heard one of the Lefties railed about it AOC, none of them . They've kind of Trump has distracted them and they can't figure out how to blame Trump for climate change. I think that's part of it, but there's no real money in objecting to Trump. There is money in trying to save us from the next big threat, which is the point that he's making . I think I've got the answer. They are pivoting to focus on the bogeyman of AI . You can already see this in the news and on social media where the scolds have their knives out companies that embrace AI or for ordinary people who dare to use AI to do things like generate images . It goes downhill from here. Mark my words, it won't be long until the left starts inventing data about how AI disproportionately impacts minority communities , offers and then demands government solutions such as job training , more money for education, universal income for those who are left behind . Well, that's already happening. Oh , it's going to displace me, so therefore you got to give me all this money because there's not going to be anywhere for me. It's not just that I'm too lazy to find a job. Now AI's not going to let me have a job. So you got to give me money. Let's see how long it takes before the left identifies a need for more taxes , new forms of internal international governance, limits on individual access to use of AI and so forth. All of which will serve to centralize power in the government. I'll point out also . All of which will serve to make money for the people that are pushing all of these people that are going to create this to stop AI and this to cope with AI and this and this and so forth and so on. It's all a money grab. And now the experts will come out with writing the books and so on with regard to A . And I'm not here to tell you that AI is going to be good or bad, almost every technological breakthrough in my lifetime . And I would say in the lifetime of the planet it has been both good and bad . It does all sorts of good things and creates all sorts of problems. The internet is a perfect example of that. I think AI is going to be on many levels spectacular for the quality of human life and on many other levels is going to be absolutely terrible . Like everything else , like television . Gave people something and I'm talking to the TV when there are only three, four, five, six channels out there. Gave something to do. You could watch things on TV and dummed to doubt our society . It's all of it . Look how great electricity was and how it changed things . But was the overall quality of people's lives better now than it was before electricity. Are they happier or more content again ? Everything's good, equally good and bad. And I think the same is going to be said with regard to AI, but the AI threat that the is L goinge toft come up with, they're going to tell you everything about it is terrible and therefore we have to do what they want and all of it will be something that makes them money . But they have to scare you to death about something and people who are sheep who can't think for themselves, fall for this . I've been a debunker my entire professional career . Questioning all of this . My whole man's causing climate change. I just forever what made the glaciers melt. They had no answer for that . But you anti science . But then when the science actually proves that they were the ones that were wrong . They're just onto the next thing that they're going to be wrong about, finishing off the guy's letter . What makes these campaigns so effective is that buried under the self serving power grab there is a legitimate issue. He is pretty good. I won't name the guy but he's retired military . I'm not talking about the military weirdos that Biden promoted, you know , the trans general and so on. You get to be like a high ranking officer in the military. If you do your twenty or twenty five or thirty, you're generally really smart. That's what the guy is. So here's his point. What makes these campaigns so effective is they buried under the self serving power grab is a legitimate issue. And he's right about that. There is an issue here . Clearly, there's an issue on AI. There may be an issue with climate change. They have to grab something in which there's something there Global populations were rising, nuclear weapons are dangerous, aerod water pollution does negatively impact people, and AI does threaten to replace jobs and transform the economy. But if history teaches us anything, the answer is never found at big government solutions. Well, he's right about that too . I'd quote the guy by name. I'm uncomfortable with that as I've explained over the years because and I'm sure the guy would love to get the credit of having only if it's somebody who's otherwise known they're a public figure in a certain way. I don't like to do it because the world we live in people get harassed and so on. And in this instance I didn't independently verify his identity but why would somebody write this under a pick name? I just tend not to like to do it . But I'm sure in this instance the guy would love he'll he'll just have to run around and tell all his friends yeah that incredibly intelligent, eloquent letter that Belling read in his podcast has me . So I gave some tip off on it, but I said he's retired military. You're listening to the Mark Belling podcast . Charisma custom s and Delafield, their sponsor , they're also where I took my car. They do a lot of things to make your car look really good and stand up to all that we have to put up with on Wisconsin Roads. The package I took included ceramic coating which makes the vehicle look really good, paint protection for all of the chips and stuff that comes off of our roads, the wheel package and a tint job that adds to a little bit of priv acy and security . They handle all sorts of cars there from regular old family drivers to exotic spectacular cars. Anybody who wants to protect their car like I do or make it look really good like I do. Check out Charisma Customs in Dellafield. They're right off the freeway, that's Charisma Customs in Delafield. This is the Mark Belling podcast. All right , I got another one for you . There's a lot of things that communities keep doing over and over and over again despite the overwhelming evidence it does nothing but make the communities worse . Again, it's a lefty idea and it's a lefty concept . And I want to stress here that I'm not referring to all communities I am referring let me just lay it out . There has been a push forever for quote affordable housing in the suburbs and their version of affordable hous ing isn't housing for the middle class, it's housing for low income people . And the argument is a lot of these businesses are out in the suburbs, but they can't hire workers because there's no place for the workers to live . Or here's the next one . With the declining birth rates, our community is contracting in size, so therefore we need to bring in more people and have more dense housing, smaller lots , apartment buildings to keep our population up . Now, I want to stress that I am not opposed to developing lower income housing in communities where a significant portion of the population is lower income . I don't think you ever need to subsidize this, although we do subsidize it because there is a market for putting up low income housing and there's a reason why many landlords who have zillions of properties make a fortune. Barrada would be the obvious example in Milwaukee. Nonetheless , if you take a community where the median income is rather modest and already there are a lot of lower income people who live , adding more lower income housing certainly isn't bad . Now some will say, well, what are you saying that poor people are rotten people and they wreck the community? No. What I am saying is that the same thing, however, always tends to occur . The lower income housing is almost always rental . And renters obviously don't have skin in the game in the community or their properties . You then create in communities that weren't built for it , a density of people . Suddenly the traffic is worse . Crime goes up not only because you have lower income people there, but because you have more people there to be victims of crime. It just has repeated itself again and again and again and again and again and does nothing to enhance the quality of life for the people that already lived there . Yet we now have many of these suburban communities used to be. Cities were liberal, suburbs were conservative . That's not so black and white anymore . All over America there has been This changing of political demographic . Rural areas used to be split or lean Democrat. Rural areas are overwhelmingly Republican. You look at the blue and red maps of the state of Wisconsin . Get away from Milwaukee and Madison. The whole state's red. Up north is way red. There's a few pockets of blue near Lake Superior and then in the medium sized city city of Elclair, city of Lacrosse and so on city, of Oscar, they're Democratic, but all the rest of the state's Republican. But what has changed these suburbs, especially the affluent suburbs have moved to the left . Some are split right down the middle. Mecuan , Whitefish Bay probably leans a little Democrat, but it's closed to split . And so on. Some of the more blue collar suburbs very Republican . And some of the areas I will use the terms this is not my term. It's out there exerbs. An exerb is a community beyond the suburbs , Western Racine County, Western Kenosha County, Washington County , well away from the Metro area, but still in the Metro area, very Republican . So a lot of these more affluent and close in suburbs across the country have become overwhelmingly liberal. And liberals can fall victim to this . Well, we need to have affordable housing here. We need to have a diverse community . You guilt drip them . Where are we going with this ? I'm just telling you, if you want to be a talk show host or a podcaster that makes fun of affluent liberals, you need a Shorewood. Shorewood's the best one we have in southeastern Wisconsin. There are other candidates, but Sherwood's really good because Shorewood's a beautiful commun ity . Lots of trees , houses are huge . The lots aren't huge because it's an older community , but it's really nice . And for whatever reason, communities that are really nice like this tend to attract liberals in part because of the jobs that are associated with it. And it doesn't hurt that you have a huge university just outside Shorewood City limits. It might even encroach on them UW Milwaukee . Then when Milwaukee dropped its residency rules, some of the higher paid city employees went there. Other people get to go there because they get to be really close all the attractions to the city, but they have their own yards and Shorewood . Shorewood is as lefty as you could possibly be . So Shorewood is struggling with the fact that the population is declining and it's declining because the kinds of people who move to Shorewood have max two kids, sometimes only one and often none . Well, we need to get more of a population here that's going to be nobody left. Our residents are dying off and because Shorewood is an attractive community, the housing's insane You bought a house in Shorewood twenty five years ago unless you just didn't keep it up. You've had a you've made a fortune. Houses in Sherwood sell for an insane amount of money for . You put the same house in West Alice and I'm telling you, three times higher . So Shirwood has green light ed a proposal to put in and in this case it's market affordability housing. The housing has to be the people who get to rent in the housing have to be well below the median income in this case to get the full tax credits thirty percent to sixty percent of the county's median income . So lower income people are the only ones that can rent in the community. So therefore the rents are relatively low and they get the tax break to build the facility . And the site that they propose to do this on , I don't know anything about Hunter who's all filling in for me this week. It's a producer. Where are you from? Oh, you ' whatre from? You Lacrosse. Did you go to school there ? So you were an eagle. I was an Indian. We changed that name many years ago. Anyway, so you grew up in La Crosse too then, huh? Where do you live now ? In Milwaukee, but you're not you're not in Shorewood. You're not that far . There's like two main drags in Shorewood. Lake drive kind of but it's not really a main drag because it's residential on one side and a park on the other . Where the stores in Shorewood are overwhelmingly are Capitol Drive and Oakland Avenue . Those are the two commercial strips. We're talking about Okunavu . It kind of booms sort of like there's a grocery store there and there's a bank there and there's this there and you go a little bit north on Oakland Avenue north of Capitol, that's where the small businesses, where the restaurants are and some of the bars and so on . All of these properties are small and almost none of them have their own parking lots . Again, it's an older community, so that's how the community is laid out. So they've got a parking lot in the middle of this. It's about the four thousand five hundred block of North Oakland . And Shorewood has approved putting up an apartment building on that parking lot . It's been approved. It's only a nineteen unit project. So you're not bringing in a lot of people, but what you are doing is taking out a commission this parking lot . All of a sudden , there's a backlash . According to a lengthy report today in the business journal, twenty Shorewood businesses have signed a petition trying to block the development of this project. The response from Shorewood is , you're too late . The businesses, of course, are all located in this area near where the Coron parking lot is. I'll quote from the business journal report . A nineteen unit affordable housing project in Sherwood clears a final key financing hurdle. Local business leaders are making a final push to preserve the public parking lot . At least twenty businesses have signed a petition opposing the sale and development of the village home lot at four thousand four hundred forty eight North Oakland Avenue that Milwaukee developer Brian Spirrel of Sporal Commercial has under contractor purchase. Now let me interject . This is never the developer's fault. People always blame the developer. Why is the developer doing because he wants to make money ? It's not the developer's job to do what's in the best interest of Shirwood. It's in the developer's job to make money. And if Shirwood's willing to allow him to put up an apartment building that he gets tax credits and subsidies to be able to build. What's wrong with him doing that? The question is, why does the government go ahead and do something that may not be good for the community? But I suspect the majority of people say, Oh, yes, we should have more housing . Except what if you're one of the businesses where all of your customers use that parking lot ? My experience in going to a few restaurants up there in that section of North Oakland is at night it's not that hard to find a parking place on the street. Most of the residents have their own garages. It's not like Lori said in Milwaukee where everybody parks on street. Most of the residents there have a garage behind the place. And when the most of the business is closed, you can find parking on the street. You can find it on the street south of Capitol Drive and North, but during the day it's really hard . And during the day is when these businesses are open . The petition was delivered Tuesday morning to Shirwood officials. Spiral, the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, the petition states that the signers do not support and overwhelmingly oppose the proposed transaction . A copy of the signatures provided to the Milwaukee Business Journal lists surrounding businesses including Vanity Furris, Zayn Law, Nino Southern Sides , Gram Ole, don't know that and associates, Shorewood Coinshop, North Shore Boulanger Boulangerie , the men's room barber shop, acupuncture clinic, orchid Chinese Medicine, and Women Focus Co working space , Malama . So these are all really small businesses . They're all in the various buildings that are along there . The only parking that they have is on the street and in this lot , and they're now telling Shorewood , don't take this lot away. Now I will say this . This happens in a lot of communities. The time to oppose these things is when the developer brings it to the community, which was months and months and months ago, not after they've gotten financing approved, but in many communities nobody and now that you know that there isn't much of a newspaper anymore, many people don't know what's going on until they rally up too late. You gotta nip this stuff in the butt early on. I don't know what Shoreward's going to do because as I say, the vast majority of the people who don't live near that section of Oakland Avenue want to be able to pat themselves in the back and say, we went and get affordable housing. What I will tell you is if they do this , it might be nice for the twenty families to go in there. It'll probably be nice for the developer , but it does nothing for the people and the rest of the community, although it might open the door for more of it . There is nothing there is no requirement that every community has housing for lower income people . There's a reason some communities are mostly affluent and the reason some communities are mostly lower income . But for the communities that just are obsessed with going ahead and doing it . Sometimes there's a financial motive for the city officials, sometimes they're idiots who are sweet taught. Sometimes their ideology gets in the way . And every now and then there are people who are city officials who mysterious ly a couple of years later go on and work for a developer . And again, I'm not criticizing the developer . You do anything that's housing and shore when you're going to make money. So of course he wants to do it For the businesses that are now bitching about it, they're bitching belatedly , but they clearly are right . If you want to have a thriving business and for the people in Shirwood, they have to ask themselves, do they want to have a thriving , small retail district or do they want more housing? And I think the quality of a life in a community is to have a retail and when you listen to these fur shop or barber shop, all of that stuff adds to the fabric of a smaller community. It's a place where people are going to go because it's convenient to them so they don't have to go to the mall or go out to some big giant strip mall location, et cetera . It will be interesting to see how the leftis and sure would proceed on this . Will they do what the developers and the ideolog ues want ? Or will they realize that there is never an upside in an affluent community artificially creating below market rate housing . And when I say artificially, I mean when you create designations that the residents have to be at a certain income level and the reason the developers do that if you don't put those designations in, you can't get corporate welfare, you can't get welfare from the government to go ahead and do the development . I've got one more story that I want to do here. This appears in the spectator . It's an interesting take and I, like to share things with the audience when the take is interesting , especially when it bucks up against conventional wisdom . We live in a world in which we're just always dominated by one big story. And the story dominating us now is the war in Iran . Now, this is my take. It means for some people on the right that everything else that Trump has done, it's almost like it hasn't happened because all they got to war . Well, this case is about foreign policy . And the writer and the spectator and the spectator is a conservative publication, but generally their tild they're not neocons, they're the opposite. They would be more from the JD Vance , Tucker Carlson non interventionist wing , than the more militaristic per,isheral side, that's generally their take . I'll just quote the opening to the story so you can see where they're coming from. Almost all media commentators seem convinced that Donald Trump's foreign policy in his second term is a disaster. He has b ogged down in Iran, snookered in Ukraine , his tariff agenda has failed, and he has alienated his NATO allies , NATO allies. But I love that word, but this consensus has been too hastily formed. Looking at the bigger global picture, Trump's foreign policy has been a spectacular success . Take the Western hemisphere . We have the Don doctrine, the updated version of the nineteenth century Monroe doctrine. In eighteen twenty two, President James Monroe, having welcomed South America's overthrow of Spanish and Portuguese imperial rule, stated that Latin American nations would henceforth not to be considered as subject for future colonization by any European power. We should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere is dangerous to our peace and safety. Let me interject. So what the minority doctrine was, Europeans don't get to run South America, Latin America anymore. But those countries now independent Southern and Latin America, they better not think they can have one damn thing to say about us in the United States. In other words, we now have influence. You can govern yourselves . But what goes on over there is our business because you're on our half of the world. That was a minor rocket. Today, European power in this context should be replaced by Chinese power . And it is against the metric of Chinese power that Trump's foreign policy needs to be judged. The latest Peruvian presidential election results are currently too close to call, and the final tally may not be released until July. If the left wing Roberto Sanchez is able to secure a win, Chinese mining conglomerates may be able to tie off supply of Peruvian copper and iron ore, as well as control of a planned deep sea megaport. Happily for Trump, Sanchez's together party for Peru remains a long way short of a majority in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. Nevertheless, this potential setback aside, Trump's presidency, both by good fortune and design has seen a realignment of South American politics with the political with the political right. President Neb uchel in El Salvador led the way with an election victory in twenty nineteen based on a fearsomely tough law and order strategy. Trump has successfully leveraged his own Trump has successfully leveraged his own crackdowns on crime gangs by using El Salvador's infamous prisons to house alleged South American gangsters operating in the U. S. Despite recent protests about rising inflation, Bukel's popularity rating stands at ninety four percent. Libertarian President Javier Millet in Argentina is another right winger who led the way with his elections two years ago , a victory for the right that was reinforced by sweeping success in midterm elections last October. This victory for Trump was topped by an even more aggressive intervention in South America with the decapitation of Chinese China's South American ally, Venezuela, the capture of President Nicholas Maduro and a deal done with his v ice president cut off Chinese access to its oil . Furthermore, the toppling of Maduro's regime has brought the Communist Party of Cuba to its knees. The Trump administration is already anticipating its surrender because of oil and food shortages, President Miguel Diaz Canel may well have to reach an accommodation with the United States. The story goes on and it lists a number of points, and the takeaway from the column is that these countries in our hemisphere have all been critical to China. China has a foothold in all of them. China needs resources and it's been taking resources out of these countries that they are allied with, primarily in South Americ a, to some extent Central America, and Trump , one after the other after the other after the other, is turning those countries away from China and toward us. I think the great unspoken component of the Iran war , and I think this is my opinion, just my opinion . The thing that got Trump who was a non interventionist to decide that he was going to go after Iran is Iran was sending so much oil to China . Everything that Trump has been doing in the broader picture is to try to deal with the true existential threat and that's the Chinese thread. China wants to become the world's superpower. They want to displace us. And once they displace us, we are under their thumb . Trump was focused on China from the moment he walked down the escalator when he ran for president in twenty fifteen . I think his eyes were opened with regard to the COVID virus. I believe Trump believes China released that thing deliberately. Maybe you're wrong about that. I just think that's a Trump believes. Trump kept calling it the China virus. He knew that it came out of China. Trump believes China is the ultimate American threat . And what Trump has done in terms of foreign policy, in one nation after another after another after another has made things better for the United States by taking these nations that are geographically close to us and have all sorts of resources that we can use and has made those countries closer to us and less friendly to China . It's one of those issues that isn't talked about much , but I think will be judged by history to have been a tremendous success