Zed is an important letter in the alphabet, and the Chinese government is trying to ban it. Ezra explains why they want to ban the letter zed, and why it's not a bad thing. Plus, why the Russians have been putting the letter Zed on their military vehicles in the Ukraine war.
00:17:27.340That was a great Simpson episode. Now, there's been hucksters promoting monorails and high-speed rail in Canada and the United States for decades, for generations.
00:17:41.060You know, California has a high-speed rail project. Lots of people in California, LA, San Francisco, voters approved the idea back in 2008,
00:17:49.600and they assigned a $9 billion U.S. government bond to it, but it's still not built, and the price tag is now $80 billion U.S.
00:17:59.720But boy, does it have a lot of people getting rich off it.
00:18:03.540Here's a story in the LA Times, though. This is what it sort of looks like.
00:18:07.920Delays, half-built tracks and bridges, abandoned, political promises to make it work.
00:26:54.080I mean, I guess you could say the same thing about the Trump kids, but but they weren't they were in the business side of the dad, not the political side.
00:27:03.200Well, the difference between the two families is that the Trump family became wealthy outside of politics and Biden family had no independent wealth.
00:27:10.560They became wealthy through Biden's political career and the various members of his family, his brother, his son, various other relatives.
00:27:19.960They have become wealthy by advertising their connections to Biden.
00:27:23.160And that's how they have obtained foreign government contracts.
00:27:25.700That's how they have obtained domestic government contracts.
00:27:28.420That's how they have been able to get paid simply for connecting one person to another, which is lobbying.
00:27:37.880He was acting on behalf of various foreign actors in an unregistered way.
00:27:41.960Now, that's not a crime that's usually prosecuted, although it is a crime, but it has been prosecuted in the recent past.
00:27:48.040Remember that the Department of Justice went after Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort, for allegedly doing that.
00:27:55.220And so, look, I think this is a very important point of vulnerability for the Biden administration.
00:28:00.520It's also an important vulnerability for the media and for Silicon Valley, because the campaign of censorship that they undertook in 2020 was unlike anything we've ever seen in American history and haven't right before an election.
00:28:11.140The public had a right to know whether one of the candidates had potentially corrupt business relationships with foreign powers that could then use those relationships to control the president.
00:28:18.500And all of that information was suppressed.
00:28:20.820We were told it was Russian misinformation.
00:28:22.860We were lied to about the intelligence community's assessment of it.
00:28:26.180We were just fed all these complete lies.
00:28:29.360And then if you tried to actually share the truth on Twitter or Facebook, your account was suspended.
00:28:33.500Even journalists who didn't agree with where all this was going, who didn't like the fact that it was going to help Trump if it got out, they tried sharing the article to criticize it, and they found their own accounts were suspended.
00:28:44.620There was no debate allowed about these issues.
00:28:46.520So it was really the beginning of a dark age of censorship in this country, and the media are not just complicit in it, they actually tiered it on.
00:28:54.860So they're trying to bury that now under a slew of coverage, and you see it not just reaching the highbrow pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, but it's also on the nightly news and the networks.
00:29:04.880So there's now no one who can say they're not aware of it.
00:29:06.880But certainly before the November election, when it came out in mid-October in 2020, there was nobody who was aware of it outside of the conservative media because the rest of the media pressed it.
00:29:16.520You said something very terrifying about five minutes ago.
00:29:21.520You said, you know, could Joe Biden be replaced?
00:29:25.820And there's different ways he could be replaced.
00:29:28.100I don't know if it would be possible to lean on him and have him voluntarily resign using health as an excuse.
00:30:14.400Or if you remember Mr. Bean in that funny movie where he was asked to describe Whistler's mother, the painting, he said, well, my first point.
00:30:41.940We also recognize, just as it has been in the United States for Jamaica, one of the issues that has been presented as an issue that is economic in the way of its impact has been the pandemic.
00:30:53.340So to that end, we are announcing today also that we will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery efforts in Jamaica that have been essential to, I believe, what is necessary to strengthen not only the issue of public health, but also the economy.
00:31:15.160I don't quite know if I learned anything there.
00:31:18.420I don't think anyone in the audience did either.
00:31:23.340I suppose just that utter fog machine does less harm than the gaffe machine of Joe Biden.
00:31:32.180I mean, in a matter of a few days, as everyone knows, Biden said he'll meet a chemical weapons attack in kind, that there has to be regime change in Russia.
00:31:44.700And he implied that American troops either have been or will go into Ukraine all in the course of a week.
00:32:32.080And that's been the pattern of her management throughout her career.
00:32:36.680If you look at the various jobs she's held, she was district attorney in San Francisco, which began to descend into a morass of petty crime and decay.
00:32:46.820She presided over the beginning of a crime wave.
00:32:49.300She didn't really achieve much except for persecuting First Amendment rights of journalists who were pro-life and of organizations that contributed to conservative causes.
00:32:57.860I mean, that's basically all she's done is just do politics.
00:34:23.980Confucius said, if I can quote the great Chinese philosopher, that essentially all a good ruler needs to do is sit facing the right direction.
00:34:35.060But you have to have the right orientation.
00:34:37.440And the problem with Biden is he has the wrong orientation.
00:34:39.780Now, you can get away with that if you're young and vigorous and you can still take care of the things that government has to do, even if your overall philosophy is incorrect.
00:34:48.400That was, in a sense, Bill Clinton's secret.
00:34:50.280I mean, he was young and dynamic and charismatic.
00:34:52.960And even though a lot of his ideas were poor, he was able to fake it through his eight years.
00:34:57.520And Newt Gingrich and the Republicans really set the agenda after 1994, the last six years of Clinton's presidency.
00:35:02.600And although his moral example ended up nearly crumbling in his presidency, he was able to make up for it.
00:35:47.860Look, in the Canadian system, anyone could replace the leader.
00:35:51.100If Justin Trudeau were to take a walk in the snow, as we call it in Canada, and step down, there would immediately the other members of parliament in the Liberal caucus,
00:36:02.060would vote and choose an interim leader, they would choose.
00:36:06.020And then they would probably have a leadership race, and that person would become the prime minister.
00:36:11.840Now, America, the Constitution says it goes from the president to the vice president, and then the third in line is the Speaker of the House, if I'm not mistaken.
00:36:38.080There's an order of succession, which happens in case of terrible things.
00:36:42.300So if Joe Biden passes away, then Kamala Harris, and if she passes away, and there's no replacement in time, because there are procedures to replace a vice president, then it does go to the Speaker of the House, and so on and so forth.
00:36:54.880I think then it goes to the president pro tempura of the Senate, and then it goes to various cabinet members.
00:36:59.500So they have this long line of succession in the event of an emergency, you know, in the event of sort of a nuclear war, and all the cabinets meeting at the White House, they have this designated survivor who's not supposed to go where the other ones go in case they're all wiped out by a bomb.
00:37:11.740Then there's one person left to leave the country.
00:37:13.380So there is this bizarre succession, but that's not really how we elect our leaders.
00:37:17.820You know, when this kind of thing plays out over time, you know, if you lose the president, the vice president moves up immediately, then there's a vacancy.
00:37:24.580You see, in the vice presidency, you fill the vacancy.
00:37:26.680There's a process for doing that through the House and the Senate.
00:37:29.320So, you know, it gets a little complicated, but generally, because a presidential election is, in a sense, an election separate and apart from our legislative election, you can't just easily remove a president or a vice president.
00:37:42.680Well, it really would have to be both at the same time to kind of decapitate the government.
00:37:47.560A president can resign, but then the vice president would become the president.
00:37:50.120If a vice president leaves, we saw with Spiro Agnew under Nixon, you replace the vice president with the new vice president, having the federal court, it gets a little tricky.
00:37:59.920The problem here is that the president's incapable of doing his job, most people agree.
00:38:04.480Once he resigns, the vice president moves up, but she's incapable of doing her job for entirely different reasons.
00:38:09.980And so they don't have a third person in waiting, and there's no procedure for making that person the third.
00:38:15.920You know, if Republicans win Congress in November, they win the House specifically, which it looks like they will, then Kevin McCarthy, the Republican, would be Speaker of the House.
00:38:23.860Because if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris leave office at the same time, conceivably, it could happen that a Republican, Kevin McCarthy, takes over as president because he's the Speaker of the House.
00:38:34.040Democrats are not going to let that happen.
00:38:35.440So they're going to start to plan for some kind of procedural succession.
00:38:40.380What I mean by that is they're going to arrange the steps in order that they need to do to replace Kamala Harris with somebody, to replace Joe Biden once Kamala Harris moves up, or to find someone else to do it instead of Kamala Harris, whatever it is.
00:38:52.680But a lot of Democrats are already campaigning for the job, I believe.
00:38:55.920Pete Buttigieg is moving around behind the scenes, trying to get himself elevated out of the cabinet and into the executive vice presidency or presidency.
00:39:03.060And I think Democrats basically have to go through all these procedural calculations.
00:39:06.980But there are all kinds of consequences as to whether they do it before or after January 20th, because January 20th, the next coming January 20th would mark two years into the term, which is halfway.
00:39:17.700If they do it after halfway, there's all kinds of consequences for whether he can run for another term.
00:39:22.680You know, versus before, it's very complicated.
00:39:25.800So it's not like a parliamentary system where you have a majority party that can just elevate somebody into the leadership role.
00:41:36.140I used to follow the UN's global warming projects much more closely.
00:41:39.900Even the UN itself, their Framework Convention on Climate Change, as they call it, they say that even if all of their emission requests were met, even if we basically shut down all automobiles, all airplanes, basically shut down fossil fuel use, that would not reduce the temperature of the world at all.
00:42:01.460It would imperceptibly slow the growth of temperature over a century.
00:43:17.060And let me leave you with our video of the day from Alexa Lavoie, talking to a former Dragon's Den host named Vincenzo Goodzo, commenting on Jean Charest's aspirations to be prime minister.
00:43:32.100Vincenzo Goodzo, also known as Mr. Sunshine, was present at Mr. Jean Charest's event in Montreal for the Conservative Party of Canada's leader race.
00:43:44.800In 2018, Mr. Goodzo joined the cast of the CBC reality show Dragon's Den.
00:43:52.680He also owned several businesses, including the famous Goodzo movie theater in Quebec.
00:43:58.200In 2022, following the departure of the Conservative leader Erin O'Toole, Vincenzo Goodzo hinted that he might be interested in running for the leadership of the Conservative Party.
00:44:13.880I spoke with Mr. Goodzo, who, for his part, supported Jean Charest's candidacy.
00:44:23.580So, we know that Mr. Charest was the premier of Quebec, but for the Liberal Party, now he's running for being the leader of the Conservative Party.
00:44:34.880Well, look, I think you got to remember there's, in some provinces, there is no Conservative Party, provincially speaking, right?
00:44:40.680So, at the time that he came into provincial politics, the Federalist Party that regrouped all of the Federals, no matter whether you were Liberal, Conservative, whatever, was the Liberal Party of Quebec.
00:44:52.640So, I mean, if you wanted to defend the unity of Canada in Quebec, the only party that could do that was the Liberal Party of Quebec.
00:45:01.820And so, being its leader was just a legitimate transition towards that.
00:45:06.700The other thing is, as a leader of that party, he did implement very Conservative-minded fiscal policies and so forth.
00:45:18.080I think in BC, if I remember well, there's the Liberal Party of, or Manitoba, one of the provinces out west, there's a Liberal Party that's more Conservative than maybe most Conservative parties, right?
00:45:28.560So, the label doesn't really mean anything.
00:45:31.820And we know that his name was involved in the Mathuré investigation.
00:45:37.120We know that a lot of Quebecers have lost their trust for Mr. Charest.
00:45:44.340No, I mean, I wouldn't have supported him.
00:45:46.180And I'm here as co-chair of the fundraising for Quebec for his leadership.
00:45:50.720So, you got to remember, you know, I'm a Quebecer-Canadian of Italian origin.
00:45:55.860So, if there's anybody who's been labeled all kinds of stuff because of my success in business, it's me.
00:46:01.660So, I guess, you know, it's one of the sad things.
00:46:05.760But what I am happy about is that he wasn't found innocent.
00:46:09.200He was just not at all accused of anything, which is, I think, what's important here.
00:46:13.240It's not a question of, you know, they went after him and, you know, they couldn't find him guilty.
00:46:17.980The idea was they didn't even go after him.
00:46:19.460I mean, there was nothing to say about that.
00:46:22.920And at the end of the day, I think, you know, that ultimately it's already hard enough.
00:46:27.080Public life is hard enough that if we have to keep grudges on stuff like that, it just doesn't make sense.
00:46:33.280I think, you know, at the end of the day, we have a potential leader of a party and a potential prime minister who can unite the country,
00:46:40.220who can explain, you know, to Quebecers why, you know, we have to unite with Alberta and the rest of the country and why we're one country.
00:46:46.840He was, you know, Captain Canada in the 95 referendum.
00:46:54.160So why more him than Mr. Pierre Paulyer or Mr. Brown, example?
00:46:59.620So Mr. Brown, I really don't know very well.
00:47:02.100But Mr. Paulyer, as much as I'd go and have a beer with him and watch a hockey game,
00:47:08.260truth of the matter is, you know, Justin Trudeau or Pierre Paulyer, for me, is the same thing, just wearing a different blazer.
00:47:14.360At the end of the day, I think both of them are very well coached to repeat or to deviate and not answer the questions.
00:47:21.720The other problem is, you know, I've always said, so when I wanted to run as leader in the last campaign,
00:47:27.060somebody said to me, but you have no political experience.
00:47:28.980I said, well, for the politicians we've had in the last two years, I'm hoping we're putting somebody with zero political experience.
00:47:34.900And the truth of the matter is that Jean Charest has had the good fortune of being a politician,
00:47:40.020but he's also had the good fortune of being in public, in private life, sorry.
00:47:43.040And so, therefore, he knows what it is to be on both sides of that life versus Mr. Paulyer has been a career politician.
00:47:51.540And it's a little strange to say to somebody at 42 years old, you're a career politician.
00:47:56.100It means you haven't done anything else.
00:47:57.500So how could you have really empathy for Canadians?
00:48:00.540How could you understand what the average Canadian does or doesn't do or paying a mortgage, let's say,
00:48:06.380for an average Canadian when every one of your salaries had a Canadian flag on it because you were an employee of the state, in all intents and purposes?
00:48:14.420And I think that that's what got us into the trouble we're in today, right, is that we've elected de bon parler, as we would like to say.
00:48:22.500We've elected people with a lot nicer hair than I have.
00:48:25.700But that doesn't make them great administrators of public funds.
00:48:29.440And we've seen that both Trudeaus have indebted us more than ever.
00:50:49.420For my last question, did you support the Freedom Convoy that was in Ottawa?
00:50:54.340So, I would tell you that I supported the initial idea of them going there and making a point.
00:51:02.220I would have loved for them to behave like the one that went to Quebec City,
00:51:07.660which is, we'll be here for the weekend, we'll leave, we'll come back.
00:51:11.320I think, ultimately, you know, it was a slippery slide that occurred.
00:51:17.360And I think that was, I think what is interesting about what happened in Ottawa is how no government representative actually reached out to those people.
00:52:00.740And there's no reason to do bonfires and none of that.
00:52:04.960But, I mean, if they really wanted to bother Trudeau, they should have gone in front of his home and not in front of homes of other people, per se.
00:52:13.420But the spirit of it was, I think, well-intentioned.
00:52:16.360I think it just derailed at a certain point.
00:52:18.540But that happens often when, you know, you're not willing to put your foot down and say, okay, enough is enough.
00:52:26.880Versus the Quebec one, I think, was way more efficient.
00:52:30.100You know, three days and then they left.
00:52:32.460And I think it's Salah Ebranli, Monsieur Legault, I see that he started changing his tune very quickly.