➡ Eric Peters joined a show to discuss current events, including the political climate in the U.S. and issues related to cars. He expressed concern about the increasing presence of military enforcers on American streets and the potential for misuse of power. He also discussed the political situation in Ukraine and the U.S.’s involvement there. Lastly, he touched on the issue of illegal immigration, questioning the effectiveness of current deportation efforts and the potential implications for civil liberties.
➡ The text discusses concerns about government overreach and the erosion of civil liberties, using examples such as airport security measures and immigration issues. It criticizes the government’s handling of illegal immigration, suggesting that instead of creating a police state, the government should stop offering benefits to non-citizens and sanction employers who hire illegal immigrants. The text also criticizes law enforcement practices, such as high-speed chases for minor offenses and the presumption of guilt in situations like sobriety checkpoints. The author argues that these practices are a violation of the Fourth Amendment and a sign of a growing police state.
➡ The text discusses a police officer’s reckless pursuit of a suspect, endangering lives with high-speed chases and unnecessary force. It criticizes the escalation of minor incidents into dangerous situations, citing examples of police shootings and accidents. The text also mentions the controversial training of police officers in immediate submission tactics, comparing it to the Israeli Defense Force’s treatment of Palestinians. Lastly, it criticizes President Trump’s provocative actions and the callousness of his responses to tragedies.
➡ The text discusses various political and technological issues, including the aggressive actions of political figures, the dangers of setting harmful precedents, and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). It criticizes the use of AI in cars, arguing that it could be used to monitor and control people. The text also warns about the potential dangers of being too connected to the ‘Internet of Things’, suggesting that it could lead to our downfall.
➡ The article discusses the potential dangers of over-reliance on technology in vehicles, specifically focusing on Tesla’s software-controlled door handles and Porsche’s anti-theft system. The author argues that these complex systems can lead to dangerous situations, such as people getting trapped in their cars or vehicles being remotely disabled. The article also criticizes the ability of manufacturers to control aspects of the car without the owner’s consent, questioning the concept of private property.
➡ The article discusses the irony of carbon emissions from power plants being acceptable, but not from cars, despite power plants often emitting more. It also talks about the potential return of the Camaro, a popular car that became too expensive over time due to added features. The author suggests returning to simpler, more affordable cars, as the cost of living has increased, making expensive cars less feasible for many people.
➡ The article discusses how car and motorcycle companies are making their products too expensive and complex, which is turning off younger generations. Companies like Jeep are adding unnecessary features, making their vehicles unaffordable. Similarly, Honda is removing manual transmissions from motorcycles, which changes the traditional experience of riding. The article suggests that companies should return to simpler, more affordable designs to attract younger buyers.
➡ The text discusses the potential dangers of modern cars’ “drive by wire” systems, where many functions like acceleration, braking, and steering are controlled electronically rather than mechanically. This technology can be manipulated remotely, raising concerns about safety and privacy. The author also mentions that these systems make cars more complex and harder for the average person to repair, leading to increased costs and dependence on specialized technicians. Lastly, the text suggests that this complexity can alienate people from their cars, as they no longer understand how they work.
➡ Many trained professionals can’t work on new vehicles because they can’t afford the necessary software updates and equipment. This issue is becoming common in various aspects of our lives. There’s a concern about the increasing control and tracking of ordinary people, who are seen as simple but have inherent worth. It’s important to share information and expose what those in power want to hide.

Foreign. Joining us now is somebody who’s no stranger to this show, Eric Peters. Always great to have Eric on. I had him on. Well, didn’t have him on. I had his article on the same as having Eric on, talking about what was going on in Minnesota. He and I are of the same mind on these different things. And so I wanted to get him on to talk about what’s going on with cars as well as what’s going on with the insanity in this country right now. Thank you for joining us, Eric. Oh, absolutely, David. But do I get a medal? If you don’t give me a medal, there’s going to be repercussions.

I’m not going to find somebody put together a clip of him saying, we’re not going to have men taking women’s medals. You know about the tranny stuff, right? Then they had a clip of him saying, yeah, she gave me a Peace prize. So it truly is amazing. And it was also the intimidation that, you see, he’s able to put on people foreign and domestic. You know, she has to give him this Peace prize because if she doesn’t, she’s going to be on his bad side. Who knows what he’ll do. I think it’s kind of interesting that they continue to refuse to say that this guy they kidnapped is actually the head of state.

They say he’s not legitimate. They had an election and he didn’t win the election. And so it’s like, okay, well, you know, Ben, you got a couple of people that you got in mind that won the election, right? Machado was ahead in the voting, and so she got taken away. She wasn’t allowed to stand in the election, but another person, Gonzalez, was. And so you would think that if they wanted to support, quote, unquote, democracy, that they would put one of the two of them in, but instead, they’re going to have Marco Rubio be viceroy. Of course, they don’t seem to have a problem with the dictator of Ukraine, you know, this guy who canceled elections and continues to be on the receiving end of vast amounts of American material now indirectly, you know, through our proxies in Western Europe.

But nonetheless, the, you know, the incongruity of it, the cognitive dissonance of it, is just. It’s something to behold. It’s huge. Yeah, it is. It is the corruption. And, you know, it’s funny, even Bill Gates, we had a quote we played of Bill Gates saying, well, you know, Ukraine has been understood by everybody to be the most corrupt country on earth. It’s like, why do you think our politicians are handing them money because they can get it back in the back door? That’s a real admission, I think. And, you know, the precedents that are being set right now are going to come back to bite us, I think.

And that’s one of the most disturbing things about everything that’s going on with regard to what’s been happening in Minnesota. A lot of these. These conservatives and people who are red hat people are cheering it on. And I wonder to myself how it is that they can believe that the police state that they’re cheering isn’t going to end up policing them. It’s already happened. I mean, we had this back in January 6th, all the January 6th stuff, right? We had a lot of people showed up and they were peacefully protesting. You had some people who got violent and it’s like, okay, fine, you can punish those people.

But even for everybody, even violent people, the. The punishment was extreme, unusual and not valid because of that. But then they had other people who were just there. They were treated like they were violent. And you had a woman who was shot in the head when the police officer was not threatened and got away with it. But the conservatives who were outraged about that before are now cheering it when it’s done against the people that they hate. That’s the amazing thing. Yeah, well, yeah. And it’s going to make it very difficult for me to have much sympathy for them when it’s.

That get kicked down the next time around. That’s right. Maybe they think that Trump is going to be, you know, El Jefe, dictator in perpetuity. But the man’s almost 80 years old. You know, that’s, you know, I suppose in the midterms, and I suppose that, you know, we could end up having an American Brezhnev, you know, until. Until he’s 90, maybe. Well, you know, I mean, he does have amazing healing capabilities. He got shot in the air and there’s no visible sign of it. You know, either then, or. Here’s a dark thought that I’ve been entertaining as I’m out in the garage wrenching on my Trans Am.

I think to myself, this is so gratuitous. The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that it’s purposeful. Yeah. Like he’s deliberately wanting to inflame passions to trigger an event so that then he can claim that there’s a necessity for declaring the Insurrection act, martial law, whatever it is, getting. Getting everything so chaotic that he can assume, you know, actual overt dictatorial powers. He’s already the de facto dictator in a lot of ways. He’s just declaring anything he does, it’s an executive order. Everything’s an emergency, right? Oh, yeah. Literally anything that he, you know, whenever he wants to do something, it’s an emergency.

Yeah, that’s right. And that is exactly my take on it. We always see things exactly alike, Eric. You know, I just covered Wayne Allan Root, who talked about this. He had some. His memo to Trump. He had like five or six things he wanted to do. One of them was to rename ICE Nice, because that should fix it, Right? But the other thing he said, he said, and I said this from the very beginning, 90 days ago. And I said, yeah, I said the same thing as, well, don’t go to the places where you’re going to have known conflict.

If you want to deport people who are healed illegally, you could easily go to the Republican states and they would help you to do that. And there’s a lot of things that they could do that would not be confrontational. You know, if you’re going to have a situation where governors and attorneys general doubled down on the massive billions of dollars of fraud, like half of the amount of money that they were spending on daycare and food issues was fraudulent in Minnesota. But, you know, they want to protect those people. They want to say that you’re not going to investigate them.

They actually said the quiet part out loud in Washington state. And so if they’re going to aid and abet that kind of welfare fraud, there’s other things that you could do to the leaders. But instead, what they want to do, they want to go door to door. They want to get in people’s faces, they want to challenge them, to push them. There was one clip that I played where people had set up a little memorial to the woman who was shot, Renee Goode. And there was a big fat cop. And he comes over and he starts kicking the stuff.

And the guy says, what are you doing? You know, and this is a memorial. And the guy walks over to him, gets in his face and keeps walking, making him back up. He goes, back up, back up, back up. And the guy kept backing up, and he kept telling him, back up, back up. And he’s trying to get the guy to shove him so that he could get violent with a guy, because now he’s a threat for his life because the guy resisted this stuff, right? He resisted his bullying. And so that is basically the Trump administration’s goal, I think, in a nutshell.

And what Wayne Allen Rood as a cheerleader for Trump didn’t see is the fact that Trump wants the conflict. I mean, he thrives on this professional wrestling thing. That is his gimmick. That is his. That’s his calling card, is conflict. He wants conflict everywhere. Yeah. The whole thing is so disingenuous. Here’s some math. They claim, the administration claims something around the order of 75,000 of these illegals have been rounded up and deported thus far. So one year in 75,000. Okay, so if we factor that out over the remaining three years of Trump’s presidency, what about 300,000 people? Now, on the low end, we’re told that roughly 10 million illegal aliens have come into the country over the course of the Biden second term.

So it’s a rounding error. It has no meaning. If they round up and deport 300,000 of these people, it means nothing, and nothing fundamentally changes. So why are they doing it? And I believe that the reason that they’re doing it, among other things, is to normalize people. Normalize the presence of military enforcers on American streets and getting Americans habituated to seeing people literally grabbed. And I’m not, you know, I’m not defending illegal immigration. I’m saying that there’s something unsettling about seeing people grabbed and stuffed into the back of unmarked vehicles. Yeah. And taken away from, you know, who knows what, what, what, you know, it means anybody.

That could happen to anybody. And that’s just the point. It’s going to happen to everybody if this is normalized. That’s right. Used to, as a culture, having to, you know, stand there with our legs spread at the airport and let government goon touch us and go through our things in the name of protecting us from the terrorists. This is exactly of a piece. It’s the same thing. It’s just getting Americans used to something. And once they’re used to it, then it will be expanded. You’re absolutely right. That’s what I say to people. I say be very wary when the government that has created both parties have created a problem.

Like the open border immigration thing. And I’ve said for the longest time, it’s the welfare magnet. Stupid. It’s not a wall. It’s not anything else. Just stop paying people who come here to live for. Right. The welfare system’s bad enough. We don’t need to extend it to the entire world. But when the government creates a problem and lets it fester for a long time and then they come in with some authoritarian solution, always be aware. I mean, that is the biggest. Tell that’s out there, isn’t it? Absolutely. And as you say, if they were being genuine about this, the easiest way to solve the problem is to cut off the benefits to people who aren’t American citizens and not entitled to them.

You and I, we go to the pharmacy to get over the counter cough syrup, have to present id. American citizens have to present ID for all sorts of things. Okay? So if somebody applies for government benefits, they should have to produce id, establishing that they are minimally legal residents, if not citizens, in order to access these benefits. And if they can’t do that, no benefits, you know, and then, then you get rid of most of the problem. And another thing you could do is do something about these big corporate employers that hire these illegals, sanction them, make them pay for the local services that you know that are incurring costs because of all the illegals find them.

Financially. You don’t have to turn America into a police state. You don’t have to have body armored automatic weapon toting soldiers on streets. It’s very simple. Just stop the, as you say, stop the incentivizing, stop offering free things. The people who are here want to work, you know, the productive ones. I don’t have an issue with that. One of my oldest friends is a guy who, you know, has some, has some of these guys working for him and they work hard. I don’t mind those guys. They’re not taking money out of my pocket. You know, I, I don’t like, I don’t like the leeches and the parasites and most people don’t.

And it’s reasonable to not like that. But that’s what they’re manipulating us with. That’s what they’re using against us to get us to go along with this burgeoning police state. You’re absolutely right. Yeah. I have called Donald Trump precedent Trump for the longest time because that seems to be what his role is. Let’s set a precedent and we’re going to take the gun and do the due process later type of thing. And we talk about them arresting innocent people. I talked about the, I’m sure you saw the situation of the Hmong guy. I think I’m pronouncing that correctly.

Hmong, they’re from Laos and they took this 56 year old grandfather, 10 to 15 guys, crashed through the house, drug raid style. Okay, this is something straight out of, I’m sure you’re familiar with Brazil done by Terry Gunn. This is straight out of Brazil. Right. And so they’re looking for bottle, but they Go after Tuttle, right? And they, they kick the door down, they grab this guy, he’s sitting in his living room, he’s in shorts with no shirt. They drag him out in the 10 degree weather wearing just crocs his shorts and he grabbed the blanket from his five year old grandson before they took him outside.

And that’s it. You know, that kind of harassment is happening. He was the wrong guy. He was not the guy they were looking for. They put him in the car, they drive him around for an hour. He keeps telling him, I’m an American citizen. He has been for over 30 some odd years. He’s never had any legal issues within. And so after they finally check him out, they bring him back and just dump him off like nothing ever happened, right? And this is exactly what Trump was talking about doing with guns. Take the gun and do the due process.

Now they’re going to grab the man and do the due process later. It’s like, why don’t you do an investigation? Why don’t you get a search warrant? Why don’t you know who you’re coming after? But what they did was they backfilled all this stuff with lies from Kristi Noem’s department. They had her secretary come out and say that, well, they were looking for two guys who were convicted sexual predators that were there at that address. And the family came out and said, no, we don’t know anybody. We don’t know who those guys are. They’ve never lived here, we don’t know them at all.

And our guy doesn’t have any issues with it. And they put out the pictures of these guys and they’re young men. This guy’s 56 years old. There’s absolutely no way that you would mistake this guy for those guys. Everything that they do, Eric, is a lie to start with. It’s just like Kristi Noem in that Renee Goode shooting. The first thing she says, well, they were stuck in the snow and they were attacked by a car. And it’s like none of that is true, right? Everything has been reversed. It used to be that there was the presumption of innocence and that it was understood that it was necessary, that the government hobbled to some degree in terms of what it does to people in order to protect people.

The, the impetus is, well, everybody’s guilty of something and you know, it’s up to the person who is accosted to establish that they aren’t guilty. And this is not new. This is something that has been systematically imposed over a long Period of time. I’ve been ranting for decades now about these sobriety checkpoints. No longer is it a case of you have given a cop probable cause to suspect that you might be drunk driving because you’re, you know, you’re. You’re driving erratically. Let’s say you’re wandering. Instead, they just set up these dragnets where everybody just happens to be on that road has given zero probable cause.

They have to prove to the satisfaction of the cop that they’re not drunk. And how do you prove it? In Texas, they had involuntary broad draws. I mean, these are people gonna pull you over and they’re going to strap you down if you don’t want to do it, and take blood out of you to prove that you’re not drunk. It’s like, that’s insane. They expect people to form roadside gymnastics. Most people aren’t athletes and gymnasts. So, you know, you’re out of your car with a light shining in your face, and you’re supposed to stand on one leg and recite the Alphabet backwards.

And, you know, if you, if they set it up so that it’s guaranteed, you’re going to, you know, you’re going to, you’re going to maybe waver a little bit. And then, as you say, that becomes the pretext for dragging you to the hospital in a forced blood draw. And all of this stuff is a complete vitiation of the, of the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment says, you know, that you’re not supposed to be subjected to searches absent probable cause or a warrant issued by a judge. Nobody cares about that anymore. That’s right. They were to do that to me.

Since my stroke, I would fail, stand on one leg and, yeah, whistle Dixie. You know, it’s like, I can’t do that anymore. So, yeah, it’s insane. But you got an article about a. Tell us a little bit about that. The background of this story where there was a guy who didn’t have a tag on his motorcycle. Oh, yeah, this is really an appalling story. Again, it’s another example of the escalation that ensues over these trivial, pedantic, no harm involved to anybody offenses. There’s a guy out riding his motorcycle. He’s got his girlfriend or wife on the back of the bike, and apparently he didn’t have a plate or a valid plate on the bike.

And so, you know, a cop rolls in behind him and lights him up and he’s going to pull him over. Now, you know, I’m not suggesting that it was right of the guy to take off. But I understand, you know, he’s potentially facing, you know, having to pay hundreds of dollars in fines, maybe getting his bike seized. You know, he’s just, he wasn’t speeding or doing anything, he’s just out riding his bike. Anyway, so he takes off and a pursuit ensues. He ends up wrecking and dying. He and his passenger are both killed. They lose control in a corner and that’s it.

Over, over this sort of nonsense high speed chase. And, and an additional facet of it is that in the course of pursuing this guy, the cop is driving with extraordinary recklessness on these backcountry roads. You know, taking corners in the opposite lane or halfway in the opposite lane, blind corners. You know, it looks to me to have been 80, 90, 100 miles an hour on a road with a 35 mile speed limit. At one point he barrels through this kind of a small town looking thing and you could just imagine somebody’s walking across the street or, you know, they’re pulling out from a side road and boom, you know, there’s a catastrophic wreck.

All because this guy just had to catch that guy, you know, on the bike, had to get him for, you know, affronting the authority of the state because he wasn’t displaying his proper ear tag. Yep, that’s right. And you know, that really does reflect back on this Renee Goode thing as well, because you look at the situation that’s there and I don’t really know what’s going on. It doesn’t appear from the videos that were taken and from the cops own video, it doesn’t appear like she’d really even panicked or trying to flee. There were people that, you know, one person said, get out of here.

The other one says, get out of your car. So there was a little bit of perhaps confusion on that part. But even if she was trying to just drive off, there wasn’t anything that looked like she was trying to, you know, she was moving pretty slowly. And the fact is that she backs up and then turns her wheel immediately. And I looked at that and it’s like all these people saying, well, that shows that she’s trying to run him over. It’s like, no, she’s turning her wheel away from him. It’s like, have you ever driven a car? Do you know how this works? A three point turn? Do you understand how that operates? And you can see that’s what she’s doing there.

And then you can see from the cop’s perspective of his own footage that he rushes forward and still he doesn’t get hit. So I think that that was really what was happening with it. But, you know, in terms of the high speed chases, a lot of police departments have said, we’re not going to do that because it puts a lot of people’s lives at risk. There are a lot of police departments that have said since the early 90s, the New York Police Department is one of them, that we’re not going to fire into a car if somebody doesn’t have some kind of weapon that they are firing.

You know, we’re not going to shoot into a car just to stop the car. Because number one, you may not hit it. You might not, you know, hit that moving target. You might hit other people, including other cops that are there, right? And then if you do hit the person, what you wind up with is an unguided missile, right? The driver is not driving anymore. Their foot might mash down on the accelerator, which we saw a little bit of what happened with that. And so all of that makes absolutely no sense. When I was living in Houston, when Karen and I first got married, there was a situation where they had these really huge flyovers and there was a motorcycle cop who pulled over a car and pulled them over, like at the top of this large flyover on the curve.

And as he’s there writing this ticket that is so important, this gasoline fuel tanker comes along and hits them. And everybody died, okay? The cop, the people that were getting the ticket, the person who’s driving the truck, everybody dies in this fiery crash. And it burned down the concrete flyover that was there. It was so intense. It was amazing to see what happened. All of that was over a ticket, you know, which is where this goes back. A small thing. And they escalate it to that extent, to a deadly extent. In Minneapolis, I think one of the most egregious aspects of that situation was that clearly this woman wasn’t some sort of gun toting felon that just robbed a bank.

She had been haranguing the ice people. They had her plate. Why not, why not just go to her house later? They knew who she was, give her a ticket for obstruction or whatever, you know, whatever charge they want to give her. Fine. It wasn’t necessary to escalate it to the degree that they did. I see it as protectual murder, frankly. Yes. I think that that cop deliberately put himself in a position where he knew he could get bumped by the fender, you know, and at that point he has the justification to unload on her, which is just what he did, I agree, easily.

Stepped out of the way, just let her go, whatever. It’s just some lady in a car who was obnoxious to us. You know, we can give her a ticket later. Yeah. And in that context, I see this entire operation in Minneapolis just like that. Except it’s Trump who’s doing the provocative in your face. Come on, you know, take a swing at me and let’s see what happens. Right. The people out there saying fafo, you know, that’s what they want. They want to provoke that. And so he’s not just setting precedents, he’s out there deliberately provoking things to set precedents.

He doesn’t have an emergency, he wants to create one. An adult might have said something to the effect of, you know, this is a horrible tragedy, and we’re sorry that things spiraled out of control the way that they did. Yeah. Instead, there’s this callousness in the way that he responds to these sorts of things. Almost glee. You know, she deserved it. You know, it’s a good thing that an American citizen was shot dead in the street like that. Well, the thing that really ticked me off was the response of the MAGA influencers that are out there that are trying to make an excuse for all this stuff.

They were even worse than Trump and Kristi Noem and JD Vance and all these other people were commenting on it. One guy had a podcast. I don’t remember his name. I played the clip and he said, here’s what you need to remember. Hands up, show your hands, obey commands. It’s like, what are you talking about? Is this a police state that you’re talking about where I have to always obey the commands of the police and show my hands, but they have to come up with these little juvenile rhymes like click it or ticket. So show hands, obey commands.

And it’s like, that really set me off. I have read, and I have not been able to confirm this, but I think it’s true that a lot of police departments send cops over to Israel to be trained by the IDF in these immediate submission tactics that are imposed upon the Palestinians over there, where even the slightest questioning or sign of resistance brings down an extreme response. I can remember when I was in college, back in the 80s, when I’d get pulled over for speeding. It was routine to get out of the car and walk over the cop and have a conversation.

That was common, believe it or get back in the car. Now it’s like, yeah, now if you step. If I were to get out of my car, you Know it much older me now, you know, to get out of the car, and the guy would probably draw a gun and say, scream at me, get on the ground. Get on the ground now. Now. Yeah, I know. It’s crazy. Yeah. When you look at how long is it before we have the situation of the IDF where they’ve got this yellow line somewhere in Gaza and people don’t even necessarily see it, but if you cross that yellow line, we perceive you as a threat.

And now we have the ability and the government will stand behind us. We can kill you right there on the spot because we felt threatened, because you crossed that yellow line that you didn’t even see. Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense of respect for life. And again, the callousness and the brutality is something that should be concerning to everybody. That’s right. Because once this thing starts to metastasize, you get into a point where life is cheap, you know, and. And you end up in, like, in these. These hard third world countries where people just, you know, you see a dead body in the street, some guy just got shot, and everybody just keeps on walking.

It becomes commonplace. It becomes nothing to. To even be. To remark about. Well, again, and you look at what President Trump is doing when he kidnapped Maduro, I thought the funniest take on all that was Jon Stewart who said, we, we imported this guy. We didn’t deport him, we imported his. That’s hilarious. But, you know, when you look at the kidnapping of Maduro, immediately you had people saying, well, you know, we should do that. Some Russians were like Alexander Dugin hardliners were saying, why doesn’t Trump do that to Zelensky? And then you had the UK Defense Minister saying, why don’t we do that to Putin? Actually, I like to turn that around.

How about Putin send a team of Spetsnaz guys to snatch Trump? Yeah, exactly. I mean, it just starts. It kicks off this domino thing like that. I mean, they always love their domino theories for wars, don’t they? But really what we see is when we see these kind of criminal acts of aggression, what do you think about Stephen Miller? You know, Stephen Miller’s out there saying, well, you know, if you have a territory, historically, we’ve seen that you need to be strong enough to be able to keep that territory, or the stronger people are just gonna take it away from you.

Those are the rules under which we operate. And one person said, he seems psychopathic, sociopathic to me. Like, so many associated with Trump, unfortunately, seem to be sadistic people, cruel people. You know, including Kristi Noem, who I like to refer to her as the Ilsa, the She Wolf of the ss. Somebody put out a meme of Stephen Miller in the Nazi uniform and captioned it and said peewee German. Yes, because that’s basically what he’s talking about. And one person said, well, he just gave authorization for a bigger guy in his neighborhood to steal everything he’s got in his house.

Right. That’s basically what we’re talking about. You know, just take whatever I want. And, you know, they’re making the world a much more dangerous place. Everything they do, they claim is national security, and yet they’re threatening our security because they’re threatening everybody else’s security. They’re also styling it law enforcement, which is an interesting concept. You know, the snatch. How does the United States have jurisdiction over Venezuela, legally speaking? And if it does, then why couldn’t other countries essentially make the same argument? How about Netanyahu, who’s actually been indicted for something? He’s been indicted for war crimes, and yet Trump welcomes him, receives him with honors in Washington.

He doesn’t get. Netanyahu doesn’t get arrested. Well, they appeal to the precedent that George H.W. bush did. He’s like, oh, yeah, we went in and we. We got. What was. He got strong Manuel Noriega. We got Noriega, so we can do that again. And that’s the danger of these precedents. You know, once somebody does it, you’re gonna have another president that comes down the line and says, well, so. And so did it, so I can do it as well. I call it whataboutism. Because every time you point out something that is wrong or criminal about Donald Trump, you always hear the MAGA apologists say, yeah, but what about what Hillary Clinton did, you know, or this or that? So it’s always what about ism? As if that somehow excuses it.

Again, we’re at a point in the history of this country where principles don’t matter. Everything’s situational, everything’s subjective. And ultimately, it comes down to which party is in power, which wing of the party is in power. And it just. It reminds me. It’s so. So mirror. Like, of Orwell’s 80, 1984, where, you know, he talked about the. He created this wonderful scene where Winston Smith, the character, is attending a party rally and the. The party order is giving a harangue to the crowd, and somebody walks behind the party order and hands him a piece of paper, and immediately the order changes from a rant against the War being, I think with Eurasia to a war being with East Asia.

And the crowd, it immediately percolates through the crowd that the political position has changed and they just continue to roar their approval of the diametrically opposed position. Having understood that, you know, this is the new orthodoxy that has to be. That has to be cheered. Yeah, that’s right. Well, while we’re talking about orthodoxy that has to be chaired, I mean, that’s one of the things about AI and the way that it is going to be used to make people. You know, there was just. They’ve already started putting out robocops in China for right now. They’re just kind of surveillance devices and you know, meter made safety nannies that are out there nagging people, things like that.

But they’re making them to look humanoid, actually making biped versions of them now and they can walk from place to place. It’s not that much further out that they’re going to start replacing these human robots that are dressed up as armed government workers. Pretty soon they’re going to be replaced by the mechanized armed government workers that are out there, I think. But you got an article about AI along for the ride. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, well, it focuses on a new Volvo electric vehicle. I think it’s the EX60 and they’re incorporating Google’s Gemini AI into it.

And of course it’s being presented as a helpy helperson kind of a thing because you know, they created this problem of having these touchscreen interfaces in the car that make it difficult to control things while you’re driving because it’s kind of hard. It’s ridiculous. Yeah. So instead of that, now you’re going to have a conversation with the Gemini AI and ask it to do things. So if you need the stereo to change its station, it’ll do that. It’ll do all sorts of things. It can make all sorts of adjustments while you drive. But beyond that, ultimately what people don’t see is that this is going to be used to control us, monitor us and control us.

In this case, Volvo is not only incorporating the AI, in addition to that, they are giving their AI access, direct feed access to the cameras that are in the car. You know about the flock cameras that are being put up all over the country. Yeah, well, the flock that you drive, so, you know, the cameras that are in your car that are sweeping the, the surroundings feed that data to the AI and then transmit that to the hive mind. And it’s a mechanism by which ultimately they will have real time 24. Access to all of our movements.

They’ll be able to know exactly what we’re doing all the time. And even creepier than that, a lot of these new cars have cameras inside the car to watch you, which, again, they present that as a safety feature. You know, we don’t want people to be drowsy behind the wheel. So we’re watching, you know, you’re watching your eye movements in your face, and, you know, and that way the car can let you know it’s time for a coffee break. It literally says that a little icon will come up. Time for a coffee break. Well, you know, ultimately, they’ll be able to just.

Just shut the thing down. If they decide that you look angry, you express something politically incorrect about what’s going on in Davos, whatever it might be. It’s horrible. Lance, Fidel, Gemini. Tilt the air vent up. No, a little less. Wait, go back. No, not too far. That’s what you’re going to wind up doing. Why can’t I just have a little mechanical thing that I just reach over with my hand and move it? Right. What is the problem with that? Do you remember the reboot of the Battlestar Galactica series that aired back in the early 2000s? No, I never saw that.

Yeah, it was really good. One of the. One of the interesting things about it was that the ship that survived the Cylon attack, the Cylons, are these AI robots. They know that into the fleet because the fleet used AI so they turned off all of their defenses except for this one old antique ship that was analog and still had everything hardwired so that one ship, which was the Galactica, managed to escape. And that was the premise. And I think there’s actually a lot to that. You know, I just. I think that us being connected to what they refer to as the Internet of things, is going to be our undoing.

And I think that it is. It is the smartest, wisest thing we can possibly do to disconnect from all of that. That’s right. Yeah. We’re going to have these flock cameras everywhere. I have flock cameras in the car. We’re going to flock around and find out, aren’t we? Right. So, yeah, that’s been one of my pet peeves about this interface that began with Tesla where they put that touch screen in the middle because I guess it’s a lot cheaper than making mechanical knobs that are going to last for a while. And again, even changing the air vents that are there.

And it’s unnecessarily complicated. It’s difficult to use. And isn’t it interesting, and I think you and I have talked about this before, the fact that they can do that kind of an interface. And it’s very distracting because you’re trying to pinch and zoom and there’s no tactile feedback. So you got to take your eyes off the road to do it. And yet, if you are using a cell phone, they’ll give you a ticket. But if you’re driving one of these cars, hey, that’s all just fine, not a problem at all. But it is very distracting. I have rented cars that have had that kind of stuff in it, and it is impossible to do anything while you’re driving with them.

Even the simplest things, changing the volume of air or the direction of the air, the volume of the radio or any of that kind of stuff, it makes it impossible to do that. And then they take things like the door handles on the Teslas. We’ve had a lot of reports about how people have been trapped inside because they have an accident. Now the door handle that’s under software control doesn’t work anymore. I had a friend who has a Tesla and he got stuck inside of his car for quite some time. Fortunately, he had his phone with him and he could call text support, but he had to call tech support to get the door open on his car.

It’s like, this is crazy, absolutely crazy that we turn our life over to these complicated systems. And I think if we look at the bigger picture, that is kind of what has happened to our entire infrastructure. We are on the cusp of something really, really bad happening to us. And it’s such a complicated, interconnected, just in time delivery system that it wouldn’t take much to disrupt all this stuff and create total chaos and havoc. Because the complicated, unnecessarily complicated in many ways system that we live with. Yeah, I agree. It’s gratuitously complex. And by the way, while Tesla was the first to pioneer those, their flush mounted door pulls that they extend when you approach the car.

And so then you have something to, you know, grab to open the door with. The problem is that if there’s an electrical failure, then you can’t get in the car. And compounding that problem, Teslas have laminated side glass that’s very difficult to shatter. So you remember, I think it was the. What was it? The. I can’t remember the family relation of Mitch McConnell, a woman, she’s like some tech lady, big billionaire person. Anyways, you know, she was apparently a little bit drunk and backed her Tesla into a pond. And it was, it was something that was completely survivable.

It wasn’t a high speed thing. She just rolled backwards into the pond. But they couldn’t get her out of the car because the car shorted out in the water and they couldn’t get the doors open and they couldn’t smash the windows open. So she drowned to death. Wow. You know, and, and again, it’s not just Tesla. A number of higher end vehicle manufacturers now are emulating it and they’ve got the same types of door pulls and it’s totally gratuitous complexity. Yeah, I’m not. I just don’t like technology for its own sake and, and complexity for its own sake.

There’s no meaningful improvement. I mean, is it that difficult really, to pull a handle? It’s geekism, right? It’s like, look, guys, this is really cool. Look what I can do with this. These systems are fragile. You know, a car is subjected to a lot of environmental harshness. You know, it’s hot, it’s cold, it gets jostled and bumped. So what works when the thing is new maybe isn’t going to work so well when it’s 8, 9, 10 years old. You know, there’s going to be a failure at some point where it wouldn’t have happened before. And the failure is going to involve a lot of money and hassle too.

Do you know, having something simple like a pull, you know, I mean, you know, a monkey could change a door pull with a screwdriver and a few basic handles. But when it’s this complicated electronic system and you’ve got body control modules and computers and all this stuff, you know, now it’s something that you end up having to have the thing towed to a dealership for and end up spending, you know, orders of magnitude more money to have the problem fixed. It’s just, it’s stupid. It’s. It’s almost a childish fascination with tech for its own sake. Like a seagull that is like dazzled by a piece of timber tinfoil at the beach that keeps pecking at it.

Speaking of foolish complications, we’ve got bricked Porsches. You’ve got an article about that. I just saw that they’d been doing really well the last couple of years. They’d had very good years. This last year their sales were flat or declined slightly. Is it because of this or is it something else? What is this about the bricked ones? Well, this particular thing touches on what we have been talking about. Nominally, it’s a, it’s about their anti theft system. I think the acronym is vts and apparently it’s one of these systems where if the, the hive mind senses that the car hasn’t reported in after a while, then it will disable the car because it thinks that the car was stolen.

In other words, it’s some kind of an anti theft device. But it points out that the cars can be disabled. All these, all these Porsches in Russia, I should back up, all these Porsche models that are in Russia just don’t work anymore. All of a sudden they’ve been effectively bricked and turned off because a signal was sent out to the cars telling them to shut off. That’s the key point, that’s the key take home point. And it’s not just Porsches. You and I have discussed this before. Connected vehicles, which means any vehicle that can receive over the air updates to the software that runs the computer.

These have become essentially standard now and they have been since around 220, 15ish. So you know, for about 10 years now all the vehicles that have been been sold, not just high end cars like Porsches, are connected. You know, they receive updates over the air. And implicit in that is the ability of an external force, whether it’s a hacker or it could be the government, or it could be the vehicle manufacturer, it could be a variety of different sources is capable of interfering with the operation of your car and of shutting it down. Another example of it goes, let me ask you, is this happening in Russia? Is this happening because Germany doesn’t like Russia, so they’re just saying enabling Porsches.

Well, it could be. One of the theories that’s been put forward is that yeah, it’s kind of a punishment to Porsche and it may well be, it may well be in that particular case. But I think the thing that people listening to us should really take to heart is that if they have a newish vehicle, something that’s built after 2015 or so that has this ability to receive over the air updates, implicit in that is that somebody else can get into your vehicle and control it. They can, can turn it off, they can, they can change the parameters.

There was an incident several years ago where there was a hurricane, I think it was in Texas. You may remember this, this hurricane was projected to come down, you know, come down into that area. It was supposed to be a bad one. So Elon Musk and his great beneficence sent out an over the air update that increased the driving range of Teslas, you know, to get so that people could get out of the way of this hurricane. And he was widely lost. Look what a humanity, what a nice guy Elon Musk is. And I think I was maybe the only person who said well wait a minute, that’s great.

If you can increase the range of your car that means he could also decrease it or give you no range at all. He could just out an update to turn the car off. And keep in mind we’re dealing with people who might say there’s a climate emergency. We can’t have people out there driving. So they just send out the signal and automatically they shut off the great majority of the cars that are out on the roads. Because most of the cars that are out on the roads now have this connected technology. Yeah. As a matter of fact you’re talking about a climate emergency.

Did you see that? Germany just told Toyota that they had to turn off the auto start. So you know, people start up the car. Oh, you mean to warm your car up? Yeah, that’s right. You start the car early before you get in it so you can de ice it and warm it up and that type of thing. They said no, we don’t want your internal combustion engines idling needlessly so we going to have to, you know. So Lexus and Toyota just did an over the air update to delete the ability to do that. Correct. It’s pretty amazing.

That speaks to what we’re talking about. They have the capability to control all sorts of things about your car without your consent. And it’s a frontal assault against the whole concept of private property. I mean you bought the thing, it’s your property, you, you supposedly own this, your name is on the title, you paid for it, and yet this external third party, this party out there can exert control over what is supposed to be yours. And if somebody else can exert control over the thing, then it really isn’t yours, is it? That’s right, that’s right. And of course adding to all this they’re allowing EVs and hybrids to heat up early.

You know, they get an exception to all of this stuff. One person said, well wait a minute, I guess this is because the politicians can’t tell the difference between a building and a car. Sure. So you know, it’s like we got both of those. One of them you’re allowed to heat, the other one you’re not allowed to heat. Well, it’s one of again, it’s one of the fatuities that has, has been a part of this whole EV thing since the get go the idea that, well, it’s okay to have carbon emissions, as they put it, if they come from some, a power plant, you know, or some, some centralized location where the power is generated.

But it’s a bad, bad thing, you know, if it, if it comes out of the tailpipe of a car. Even though you look at it, the amount of CO2 emissions, even if you buy into that whole thing that emanate from say, you know, a natural gas fired utility plant, are enormous, you know, compared to the trivial amount that comes out of the exhaust pipe of a car or something comes out of one of Elon Musk’s rockets that are going on. But it was a few years ago you and I were talking about this very thing and pointed out that in India the power plants that were providing power to the grid were so dirty because they were allowed to make them cheap and dirty.

You know, the Paris Climate Accord 2015 that allowed India and China to build as many and as dirty a power plants as they wished. No restrictions whatsoever. And so the power grid was powered and in India by power plants that were so dirty that if you had a car that was a gasoline engine, you would emit less than they did. If you had a car that got 30 miles per gallon, you would be using less of their measured emissions than if you had an electric vehicle that was charged off of the power grid that was sourcing off of these dirty power plants.

And so we said, well, maybe what we could do is just put a great big balloon on the back of the tailpipe and just collect all of the gas until it gets really big. And then you have to drive to a location of a power plant and let this thing go. Because it’s okay if it goes in the atmosphere at a power plant. It’s just not okay coming out of your own tailpipe as you’re driving around. It’d be funny if it weren’t so stupid, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, just match their stupidity, I guess. That’s amazing.

Well, well, what else is on your radar here? I see that you had an article up about Camaro may be coming back. Yeah, there’s that. Well, there’s a rumor. There’s nothing that’s been confirmed definitively, but GM’s president, Mark Royce has hinted that they might bring back the Camaro. Now the Camaro was last available in 2024. Previously it had been available all the way back to 1967 as kind of a GM version of the Camaro. And it was a hugely successful car. Car. The problem was that over the years it got progressively more complex and expensive, Such that by 2024, even the base Camaro, the least expensive version of it, was nearly $32,000.

That’s the problem. You know, some people would say, well, it was an impractical car, it had tight back seats and, you know, you didn’t have a, a lot of room in the trunk. Well, that never was a problem for Camaro in its heyday. I did a little digging. I know a lot about these generation cars because I’ve been a fan of them for many years and I’ve owned a number of them. Well, well, 1978 was the high water mark for Camaro, and during that year, Chevy sold something like 270,000 of them, which is an astoundingly huge number of them.

And you, and I can remember back in the 70s and 80s, they were everywhere. Oh, yeah, just absolutely everywhere. And, well, that was because the base camaro back in 78 was $4,400. And if you plug that number into the, you know, the government’s sketchy BLS inflation calculator, which probably is way underestimating it. But anyway, it comes out $22,000. I kind of think if people could buy a camaro today for $22,000, probably they would. The difficulty is that the typical demographic for that car is mostly young guys. Mostly guys under 35 buy Camaros. That’s, you know, that, that’s, it’s that kind of a car.

The problem is that most young guys don’t have $32,000 plus the insurance, plus everything else that goes along with it to buy the car. So it’s mostly an older guy’s car. And, you know, you get to be older and it gets to be hard to get into one of these little cars and unpleasant. I can testify to that. Yeah. Yeah. Probably married and you got kids and it’s just not that practical. And unless you’re very affluent, you can’t afford that second impractical car, the fun car. You know, you have to buy one car. So typically people will buy a crossover or an SUV because it’s, you know, it’s suitable for a family.

It’s practical. So that’s the reason why Camaro got canceled. Canceled, chiefly. Now what I’d like to see is them try to return to the roots of the car and bring back something that’s much less expensive and something that’s much more basic. You know, in 78, the Camaro, it didn’t have the standard Camaro, did not have power Windows or locks. It had a manual transmission. It had a 36 cylinder engine. And that was just fine. You know, it was a fun, sporty car that was affordable. Now, if you look at like the base. I don’t even know why they use that term anymore.

Base. The base trim, the base trim has. Has things that would have been considered high end, luxurious things once upon a time. Everything has power windows, power locks, climate control, power seats, a great stereo, cruise control. And all of those things are nice if you can afford them. That’s right. Yeah. I had a. I had a Mustang, a 68 Mustang. And of course it had. The windows were powered by my arm. And no air conditioning, no back seat. Really. I can test it how small that back seat was. And that wasn’t a problem. It’s still a very popular car, as a matter of fact.

No air conditioning. But even in Florida, they used to have those, you know, the triangle that is part of the, you know, right behind the. A pillar. I don’t know what you call that thing, but yeah, it used to be able to open that thing up and I could turn it. And so I would get a massive amount of water. Water. If it was raining, it would be water, but usually would be wind that’s getting dumped into my lap and chest, you know, and that would really keep you cool. The only problem with it was that the control that latched it kept popping off of the glass.

They didn’t glue it very well, and I had a hard time trying to get it glued back on. But other than that, you know, the thing was very simple and very, very fun to drive, you know, and when I got rid of that, I got a car that was even more simple. And that was. Was the Triumph Spitfire. But it was also mechanically unreliable. It had a lot more things than just the. The little shutting, the little thing, the little control on the window that popped off. It had a lot of body integrity as well as engine integrity issues with that thing as well, as far as personality.

But, you know, I think that’s right. There’s a lag time. Like everything that’s on the market right now is premised on people being. Being able to deal with the cost in terms of the monthly payment. And that. That did work for a while, but it’s not the way it was. You know, the cost of everything else has increased so dramatically over the last several years that it’s no longer feasible for most people to go out and pick up a 30 or $40,000 car. On top of paying twice as much for groceries. On top of twice as much for car insurance, you know, rent and everything else that has gone through the roof.

So, you know, that’s why it’s no longer, to use the favorite word of the progressive, as sustainable. So if we went back to a situation where certain options were simply a la carte like they used to be, you know, you know, you get the base car, there it is. You know, you look at the options box and you see how much if power windows cost. 300 bucks. Okay, I’ll go, I’ll, I’ll buy that. You know, if I can’t afford it now, I’m going to skip that this time. I’d like to see, I’d like to see things get back to that, you know, so that more and more people could once again afford cars and fun cars.

I think it’s sad that, you know, most of the fun cars now are very expensive cars. So, you know, only older people and the handful of other people who aren’t older and have the money can afford to indulge in them. And that’s, you know, that’s, that’s undermining everything that, that, you know, that I like about cars. The whole point is to have fun while you’re driving and to enjoy the freedom of mobility. And, you know, it’s, people are being turned off to that, especially the younger generations, because they can’t afford it. Well, a good example of that is, a good example is Jeep.

Look at what Stellantis has done with it. They’ve added all the bells and, and whistles and luxury appointments to the Jeep that now they’re not affordable to anybody. They have completely lost sight of what their target audience was. You know, these are people who wanted to grab this thing and go out in the rough with this stuff. And instead what they’re doing is they’re adding everything that they can think of to it so people can’t afford them at all. Well, there’s some good news there, though. A couple of days ago, Stellantis, which is the parent company of Jeep and Chrysler and Dodge and Ram trucks, announced that they were, I love the phrase pulling the plug on their plug in hybrid versions of Jeep vehicles.

They had been trying to sell, if you can imagine it, they tried to sell, they called it the 4XE version of the Wrangler and it cost $20,000 more than the Wrangler that didn’t have the hybrid drivetrain. And the big sell according to Jeep was, hey, you can drive this thing 20 miles on battery power alone. That’s worth $20,000 more. They pushed the price of the thing up to nearly $50,000 for a Wrangler. That’s insane. Yeah, especially because a lot of people like to take this out in the outback or whatever, and that 20 miles of driving without any gasoline doesn’t really make any difference because you’re going to be going a long way before you get to where you really want to play with the thing, Right? Yeah, absolutely.

They undermined everything that was the point of owning a Jeep, which is simplicity, ruggedness, durability, and turned it into kind of a. A rich suburban person’s plaything. And the problem with that is there are only so many rich suburban people who want to have, like, an image of being, hey, I’ve got a Jeep and I’m rugged. Look at me. As you know, I park it in front of my McMansion. That’s right. Honda’s killing the motorcycle. I saw that’s one of your articles. There was a going on with that. Well, that’s a bit much, but I. I don’t like the trend.

Yeah, they, you know, and they’ve done this in the past. They’re trying to broaden the market, and they’re trying to reach the younger demographic in particular by essentially taking the manual transmission out of the equation, which, to me, if you do that, it’s not a motorcycle anymore. There’s a name for what that is. It’s a moped or a scooter. And you’re not. And I’m not. I’m not slamming either of us. You know, I don’t have an issue with it. They make a lot of sense for a lot of people, but it’s not a motorcycle. Motorcycle has a manual transmission.

Part of the experience is shifting through the gears yourself and having that additional level of control over the bike that you don’t have with. With, you know, a moped or a scooter. And I know, I understand the dynamic that they, you know, these, these, you know, a lot of the younger generation have never done what you and I did when we were kids. Rode dirt bikes, you know, and learned how to ride a bike, riding a dirt bike. They’ve not done that. So they’re trying to get that. That new buyer demographic in because they understand that right now, the majority, the typical buyer of a new motorcycle is a guy our age, you know, and.

And we’re not going to be buying many more motorcycles. You know, that’s the bottom line. That’s right. We know that people are aging out of that market. So you Know, they’re, they’re trying to get the young crowd in, but I think it’s self defeating to do that because ultimately it really isn’t a motorcycle. Yeah, I’ve never really, I never used, I never rode a motorcycle, but I did en riding little scooters on the beach in Daytona Beach. I was really upset about the fact that when I took Karen back about a decade ago and we went over to Daytona beach where my family used to go frequently because it was only about four hours away from where we used to live in Tampa.

And they won’t even let you on the beach anymore. I mean, you go back and you look at, you know, Daytona 500 really originally was a race that was on, on the beach. And so, you know, we used to have these little, little scooters that we could, could rent. Even when I was in junior high school I did that. And you know, they said you got to only drive it on the beach and you can’t take it out anywhere else. And you know, they would only go like 30 miles an hour. It was a lot of fun.

And now you can’t drive anything on the beach. So all that stuff, it’s like a ghost town there. It’s amazing. You know, everything is closed off. They had a boardwalk there. Nobody’s allowed to do that anymore. And so I’ve actually even got a bumper that I put up where I show some clips from back in the 1970s or so and just crowded with people and cars and all this teeming with life and with fun. And then I juxtapose that with what’s there now, which is nothing. Yeah, that’s all just. Governments have taken over everything, haven’t they? At least they’re trying to.

Now there is some good news and it’s ironic. The Indians have taken over a lot of the classic British brands like Royal Enfield and they have been bringing back affordable light small bikes and, and they’re actually doing quite well with those things because they’re accessible to young people. Under $10,000 will buy you a very nice Royal Enfield Oreo. What’s the other one? I can’t. I’m having a Biden moment. The, the big British brand of bike that’s controlled by the Indians. I can’t think of it. Anyway, you know, it took the Indians to bring, bring motorcycling back.

I guess the Japanese and the Americans are even more guilty of this. Harley, you know, is selling $30,000 bikes to, you know, to 60 year old guys with pleated leather. Leather chaps. Yeah, of course, I guess the Indians could get the Indian bike. Right. But they haven’t bought that one yet. Right. So I kind of hope that they do because they might actually bring back something that’s elemental. You know, one time a Harley was like the, the quintessential bike and an Indian, the same thing. It was a frame, a gas tank, you know, in an air cooled V twin engine.

Yeah. And it was specifically designed for, you know, lug heads like me, you know, to be able to work on them with a crescent wrench. You know, now you have to go to the Harley store to get the computer hooked up and, and get your accessory flashed. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s. They’ve taken all of the wrenching and all the personalization that used to be one of the huge appeals of these bikes. You bought it and then you made it yours by adding stuff to it and customizing it and fiddling with so your bike was not like everybody else’s bike.

Now you got to go to the dealer and pay the Harley tech to do that for you. That’s right, because they’ve got control. They really own the thing, not you. And of course you and I have talked about that. The Digital Millennium Copyright act and the fights that were going back and forth and still are, I think with John Deere and telling the farmers, no, no, no, you can’t even buy the part from us and put it in. You’re going to have to have us put it in so that we can set this up properly. Otherwise we’ll brick your tractor.

I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a revolt about that. Well, people are not happy with it, that’s for sure. They should just stop buying it. I mean, I personally would never buy something like that that I don’t have control over. It’s just a demeaning thing to think, okay, this item, whatever it may be that I’ve just paid money for, that is ostensibly my property. Well, somebody else can yank my chain, you know, at their whim, and I’m holding to them and I have to go beg permission from them to be able to use my property that I paid for.

I don’t understand people who willingly sign up for that. That’s right. Well, you know, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before, you know, AI on board and the control to be able to remotely alter or even shut down your car and that type of thing. The first time I really started thinking about that was with the death of Michael Hastings, a reporter That I still to this day believe that they killed him and that they did it with the Mercedes because he was, before it all happened, he had sent out some messages to people saying, I’m working on this thing and I’ve got to go into hiding.

And he was looking under his Mercedes that he had, and he had made comments to the person that he was renting the house from that he was very worried about what they might do with his car and everything. We look at the way the thing crashed, the engine went down the road in the direction that he was traveling. It was going very fast. They got pictures of it going very fast. But of course that could be done remotely. And the engine went down the road in the direction he was traveling, whereas he went over in the right hand direction and had a head on with a tree.

That was not the kind of head on that you would expect when. And there is a lot of speed going on with it. In other words, it wasn’t completely crushed, but it immediately burst into fire. And all of that I thought was very suspicious. But we’d already had people who had been part of security saying, yeah, we could use that to assassinate people. And I think that’s what they did. And that of course, as you point out, that’s the most radical version of that. But of course they could also, just like they brick us and shadow ban us on, you know, we get debanked, we get shadow banned on social media and other places like that.

They could brick our cars as well for the same types of things if they don’t like what we’re saying. You know, certainly this is something people I think really ought to be aware of. A lot of the systems in the car, for example, the accelerator pedal are now drive by wire. And what does that mean? Well, it means you have the illusion that when you push down on the accelerator pedal that it’s your physical action that’s resulting in the engine speeding up and the car accelerating. That’s not. So what’s happening is the signals data are being sent to the ecu, the engine controller, and that in turn is telling the computer to increase the engine speed.

So implicit in that is that the engine could be told to speed to, you know, to race and rev and make you go barreling down the road. Now you think, well then all I have to do is if it’s an automatic transmission, well, I’ll just put it in new neutral. Well, the problem there is that the transmission is now drive by wire. Also you have the illusion that when you move that selector from park to reverse to neutral and drive that you’re engaging something mechanically. You’re not. All you’re doing is transmitting data to the computer, which then puts the transmission into reverse, neutral, drive, and so on.

Well, if it stays in drive, you know, you’re trying to frantically put it neutral to get the car. Yeah. Also steering now, you know, they have these lane keep assist things with electric assisted power steering that can exert physical control over your steering. That’s right. And you know, that could make this car steer violently to the left or violently to the right. All of these things are now part of the embedded software suite of pretty much all the new cars on the market. I’m leery of that stuff. I like mechanical things because mechanical things can’t be controlled externally.

That’s right. So you got your accelerator, your brake, your transmission, your steering. All that is by wire. All that can be controlled. I remember. I remember Rowan Atkinson and he said, the modern cars, he said, you don’t so much drive them as you manage them. Right. And so he was talking about some of the hypercars that he was able to afford. But that has now been extended pretty much to everything under this kind of regime of drive by wire, hasn’t it? Yeah, absolutely. It’s a combination of synergistic things that aren’t necessarily all malevolent. It’s a way for the manufacturers to reduce cost costs.

You know, it’s rather than when a car comes down the assembly line, in the old days, they had to have a guy making the fine adjustments to things like a throttle cable. You know, the throttle had to be connected to the engine, and then it had to be routed through the firewall. And then it had to be connected to the pedal, and they checked the tension on it and made sure everything was working correctly. Now it’s just literally what they say, plug and play. You know, the whole assembly comes down the line, plug, plug, plug. And it’s cheaper from the standpoint of the manufacturer to do that.

Saves them money, increases their profits. So it’s not all evil, but it’s still, you know, it’s still unfortunate and potentially very dangerous for us all. And again, to get back to what we were talking about earlier, it needlessly increases the complexity of the thing. You know, back in the olden days, like in my Trans Am, if the throttle cable binds or snaps, I can easily find and fix it. And a cable is like a $20 part. Well, you know, if the electronics that control the drive by wire throttle fail, it’s not like Likely you’re going to be able to diagnose it yourself, unless you’ve got the equipment to do it with.

And it’s probably going to entail expensive sensors and computer related stuff that you’re going to have to pay a dealer to fix. That’s right. You have to have entire modules changed out and that type of thing. Every time we talk about this, I think about what the guys at flying Miata were looking at the various generations. The first generation, it’s like, yeah, we can take out the small, small four cylinder engine that’s in there. We can put in a big eight cylinder Corvette engine. And so it’s just kind of a mechanical thing. Can we squish it in there? Yeah, we can do that with this one.

But then, you know. And so the first couple of generations it was like that. By the time they got the third generation, there was a good bit of electronic control and so it got a bit complicated. By the time they got to the fourth generation, however, it took them a very long time. They had to go hire specialists who could reprogram things because everything was interconnected. You couldn’t just pull the engine out and put another engine in there because then it broke. All these other supporting systems for ventilation and all this other. It was all tied together and it all had to be reprogrammed.

And that’s really a good example of what’s happening. You take a very simple sports car like a Miata and you make it complicated like that. Yeah. And essentially unrepairable, except by a technician. That’s right. You know, I’m doing this project we were talking about before. I’m converting my transition Trans Am from an automatic transmission to a manual transmission. And it’s all mechanical parts. And as long as everything fits and lines up, it’s going to work. My engine doesn’t care whether an automatic transmission or a manual transmission is bolted to it. It’ll work just the same. But with anything modern, if it was assembled and made at the factory, to have an automatic transmission, if you wanted to put a manual with it, you’d have to completely change all the computer stuff, reprogram everything to be in control congruence, if you even could do that, it might not be possible to do that.

Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. That’s what’s happened to everything in our life. It’s gotten hopelessly complicated and needlessly complicated. I would say you look at all the things that are out there. Of course, it’s made the guys who are the tech Geeks in Silicon Valley, it’s made them very, very rich. But it is much worse even than the planned obsolescence that we’ve seen for the longest time. Because what they’ve done is they’ve created things that are needlessly complicated, needlessly expensive and under their control and continuing to be under their control. So it’s a disturbing trend, isn’t it? And especially when you start to see AI moving its way into cars.

I’m sure the geeks thought, hey, this is going to be great. We can talk to the car and it can talk back to us. This is like Knight Rider or something like that, without the attractiveness of it. You know, there’s logical aspect of it, but it’s interests me in that it’s a sad thing. People are being alienated from their cars because they don’t understand them. That’s right. Even people who are mechanically inclined. You know, the tradition of the, the feeling that you got of, hey, I can fix this or I’m gonna do this to my car, I can do it.

It’s within my skill set now. You know, it’s a car is just a 2 ton cell phone and it works. And you’re happy that it works, I guess, you know, until it stops working, at which point you feel completely inadequate, inept and powerless. Most people, and I’ve got friends who are professional mechanics of 30 years plus standing and because they can’t afford to pay for the software updates, the proprietary diagnostic equipment, they can’t diagnose and work on a number of new late model vehicles because they just don’t have the necessary equipment. And again, these are professionally trained people, they can’t do it.

Yeah, yeah, it’s sad. And that’s really something that we’re seeing happening in a lot of different facets of our life, of our culture that’s happening out there. It’s always great talking to you, Eric. Thank you so much for coming on. You and I are of the same mind when it comes to this stuff and we’re seeing some very dangerous precedents that are being put in place. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we talk to each other and hopefully next time we talk there won’t be some new war in Greenland or Iran or wherever. I mean, we got orange man is really coveting Greenland, isn’t he? I hope I can get my Trans Am back on the road before, before the poo hits the fan so I can at least go out, you know, running over the zombies with my Super T10 4 speed.

There you go. That’d be great. Thank you so much. Have a good day. Thank you, David. The Common Man. They created Common Core to dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us. Their Commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing. And the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That that is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.

It’s time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide. Please share the information and links you’ll find@thedavidknightshow.com thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. If you can’t support us financially, please keep us in your prayers. Thedavidkshow.com. Sa.
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