Observations: The QandO Podcast for 09 Jun 17
James Comey is a giant of a man, who fearlessly bestrides the political landscape like a pouty, teenage girl. Unlike the President, who only tweets like a pouty, teenage girl. The Brits had an election. No one won. Happily, that includes aging commie Jeremy Corbin, who has never been right about anything, up to and including what the current time or date might be. Socialism, by the way, is the failure that we apparently can’t help repeating. I guess we’ll do it until we get it right. We don’t really know what the American–or British, apparently–people want from their government. There’s just an increasing dissatisfaction with how our governments work in the West.
This week’s podcast is up on the Podcast page.
LNG, ROK and UK
Here’s a great way to help Europe crawl out from under Russia’s intimidation factor. LNG:
Poland just took a symbolic step forward in wresting itself from Russia’s energy dominance.
On Thursday, the first ever liquified natural gas shipment from the United States arrived in Poland, a landmark of sorts in Europe’s continuing drive to diversify the sources of its energy imports. The gas came from an export terminal in Louisiana that was first out of the gate to exploit the U.S. shale boom to supply the global market.
For Warsaw, the first delivery is fruit of new energy infrastructure that allows it to reduce near total dependence on Russian imports, following closely in step with neighboring Lithuania’s move to open its own floating LNG terminal.
Putin has, in the past, threatened to turn Europe’s supply off if the don’t play right. This is probably as important a step as rattling sabers near the border. And much less fraught with the danger of escalation. Have you toasted your fracker today?!
Meanwhile in South Korea. I’m sorry but I had to laugh at the “concerns” of the new South Korean government.
South Korea does not aim to change its agreement with the United States on the deployment of a U.S. anti-missile system and it will continue to work closely with Washington on it, the South’s top national security adviser said on Friday.
A decision to postpone the full deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system pending a review of its environment impact was a domestic measure to ensure a democratic process, Chung Eui-yong told a news briefing.
U.S. ally South Korea said on Wednesday it would hold off on installing remaining elements of the THAAD system, which China strongly objects to, until the environmental study was completed.
Because a radioactive Seoul would be much less of an environmental hazard than a … missile launcher or two. Really, North Korea will wait for the study to by completed. Promise.
Everyone seems to be surprised by the UK vote. Can’t say I am. Theresa May was never one who was identified in the “tough on terrorism” column when she was Home Secretary. And, this is the first time the “remainers” have had a shot at getting even with the Brexit voters. Any guess as to which constituency was more motivated in this election?
One last point – the majority of the polls were useless as usual. Shocking, I know.
Talk to you on the Podcast tonight!
~McQ
Shocker: Media got it all wrong [updated]
Well, as far as I can tell the Comey hearing is a big “nothingburger”. He claims, in a memo, that Trump “hoped” he would back off the Flynn investigation. But that was in a one-on-one session, and he told no one else about it.
So what do we have? Nothing – although the Washington Post is pretty sure that all but proves Trump is guilty of obstruction. “All but proves” being the operative phrase – especially when considering the “proof” came from a disgraced former FBI director who didn’t have the integrity to resign when he was told to stifle the Clinton investigation and was the anonymous leaker in connection with today’s circus.
Without corroboration, it’s just “he said, she said”. Oh, and the NYT got it almost entirely wrong according to Comey. Yes, yes, here’s my shocked face.
Evergreen State College. What a disaster these past few weeks have been for that place’s reputation as a liberal oasis of tolerance. That reputation is now a laugh line.
Have to say, I agree with this conclusion:
An academic department as dysfunctional as Evergreen State College would be a good candidate for being put under receivership. Evergreen, at the very least, needs new leadership. President Bridges should step down. If he does not, Evergreen’s Board of Trustees should fire him.
Bridges has completely lost control. He has student gangs roaming campus armed with baseball bats to “enforce” whatever they decide is necessary to enforce. Bridges has lost any respect he or his office had garnered through his total lack of leadership.
This will not end will for Evergreen the institution.
Those damn Christians are at it again. More Muslim violence in London:
A worker at a London-area preschool was attacked Wednesday by three women who reportedly chanted “Allah will get you.”
Karrien Stevens, who runs the Little Diamonds preschool in the Hermon Hill area of London, said a member of her staff was walking to work when she was stabbed by three females who chanted about Allah.
After the incident was reported, local parents received emails stating that schools were on “lockdown.”
This is becoming farcical. As I’ve seen others say, this has moved from terrorism to insurgency. Most thinking people out there, which apparently doesn’t include most politicians, understand who it is attacking and why they’re attacking. Pretending otherwise will not stop the attacks. My guess is the “authorities” are still trying to puzzle out the motive for the attack in this case.
Much more important than the current witch hunt? This, of course:
Take it down a notch
Will someone grow a pair and tell Donald Trump to get off Twitter and STFU? He’s not a reality show host anymore, he’s the freakin’ POTUS. The time when it was amusing or even vaguely interesting are long past.
Oh, and Kathy Griffin? Take it down a notch, b*tch.
Well, there … I feel better.
So, how are we doing economically? Well, according to an MIT economist, not so hot.
In his view, the United States is shifting toward an economic and political makeup more similar to developing nations than the wealthy, economically stable nation it has long been. Temin applied W. Arthur Lewis’s economic model – designed to understand the workings of developing countries – to the United States in an effort to document how inequality has grown in America.
Inequality or 8 years of Obama and the massive expansion of the regulatory state? Its one of the reasons the Tangerine Dream is sitting in the White House today.
Up for another reason Trump is POTUS? Leftist hypocrisy:
If one believes that charter schools and vouchers weaken the public-school system, then an effective way to counter such challenges would be to put one’s own children in public classrooms rather than to deny the poor the ability to disconnect from the public schools for the same reasons that so many elites have. One of the most surreal paradoxes of Washington, D.C., is the number of progressives (including the former president of the United States) who put their children in Sidwell-Friends while passionately opposing charter schools and vouchers.
The list of progressive paradoxes is limitless: handgun possession by the law-abiding is a supposed catalyst for violence, but not for security details who surround Hollywood and political celebrities. Elites lecture Americans on their supposed -isms and -ologies (sexism, racism, nativism), but when such sins are endemic to Middle Eastern societies abroad or indeed among immigrant communities inside the West, they are paternalistically excused or ignored.
People are tired of being lectured by abject hypocrites who believe the lifestyle they claim we should all live are good for “thee but not me”.
Oh, and reason three? Hillary Clinton. Nuff said.
Still think the Paris Accord was about climate? Try listening to former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:
One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.
[…]
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.
Need more?
Last year, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made a similar statement.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said in anticipation of last year’s Paris climate summit.
“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
Any guess who the Sugar Daddy was supposed to be? Beginning to understand why the rest of the world is so mad. The offer by the US to renegotiate the accord was soundly rejected? Why? Because, as you can see, it was never about climate change.
Was it worth it? That’s the question the University of Missouri is likely asking right now. Out of control actions by the students and faculty have led to a large drop in enrollment. And who gets hurt? Well, the very people the protesters would like you to believe they represent:
But now the damages go deeper since concerned parents, white and black, have decided to send their freshmen children to less racially troubled schools. The resultant declining enrollments and tuitions have caused the legislature to enact budget cuts to save $100 million, forcing the UM administration to axe almost 500 positions. Consider the fact that black organizations frequently complain that in layoffs blacks are the first to go. Even if that is not the case here, of 474 jobs on the chopping block, how many of those are likely to be blacks and other people of color, multiple dozens at the least? And what about all those other folks, whites, Asians, Jews, Muslims, who are going to lose their jobs?
It’s always the “little people” that suffer. Nice work, protesters. Next up for this sort of a decline, Evergreen State College where the campus Nazis still hold control.
~McQ
Time to get tough?
It’s always nice to see a politician suddenly get a good dose of the obvious:
“We cannot and must not pretend that things can continue as they are. Things need to change…It is time to say enough is enough.” ~Theresa May, British Prime Minister, following London Bridge terror attack, 3 Jun 17
Lord help me, but for most of us that “time” came on 9/11. I have no idea what the quote actually means in real or concrete terms, however I can say, “it’s about time”.
Katie Hopkins, however, takes her to task:
What she DIDN’T offer was much concrete to change things on the home-front beyond a crackdown on Islamic extremism, tougher sentences and another assault on the social media giants’ role in allowing terrorists the means of communication and propaganda.
But I’m sorry, Prime Minister, neither of the last two things is going to make much difference at all and the first will only work if you follow through with real, tough action.
Actions speak louder than words, as I learned as a child. You have to wonder what our “leaders” learned.
Why is it every time I read something by Sally Kohn, my first reaction to her is “you’re an idiot?” As is my second reaction.
Colleges and Universities – increasingly the inmates are running the assylum:
Students are demanding that the University of California-Davis create an “Environmental Justice” degree program because existing environmental studies courses are not focused on “social justice.”
The students complain that the Environmental Science & Policy department is currently too “white-dominated,” and that courses focus too heavily on environmental issues affecting “privileged communities.”
Yes, friends, I’m sure employers are lining up at the door to hire someone with an “Environmental Justice” degree. Colleges – graduating thousands of future baristas every year.
Meanwhile at Evergreen College – another day, another threat (speaking of the inmates running the place}:
Evergreen College was closed and partially evacuated last Thursday and Friday after authorities received a call from someone threatening to murder people on campus. Over the weekend, authorities received a new threat which prompted the college to be shut down again Monday.
Even the “progressives” are getting a little upset with this nonsense.
The majority of Americans who utterly reject the ridiculous behavior of this growing group must not let the extremists control the narrative by characterizing their behavior as being politically rebellious or “on the right side of history.” Instead, this behavior must be portrayed as it truly is, as a shameful and pedestrian surrender to authoritarian political doctrine and mob mentality.
Considering this, “fascist” works fairly well as a label for members of the social justice mob. It drives home their authoritarian, ideologically-possessed mindset and tactics which can only be described as systematic brainwashing followed by witch hunts for any who would even think to diverge from the social justice orthodoxy…
The writer is the former president of the College Democrats of Maryland. And I agree – if it looks like a fascist, talks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, it’s probably a fascist. And those at Evergreen involved in this bullying and intimidation fit the description like a glove. I’m torn between describing them as the New Red Guard or Ne0-Brownshirts.
Like I’ve said, the reckoning for Evergreen will likely come next fall when enrollment drops like a rock.
Fake News? CNN denies it was staging a shot of anti-extremist Muslims in London. Of course if you watch the video at the link, it’s clear they were indeed staging. But their explanation/defense was … well pretty lame.
“This story is nonsense,” a rep for CNN told us via email. “The group of demonstrators that was at the police cordon was being allowed through by officers so they could show their signs to the gathered media. The CNN crew along with other media present simply filmed them doing so.”
A source with knowledge of the situation added that the network was part of an “assembled group of media” in the area where the shot in question occurred.
“You an clearly see at the beginning of the video on social media that a group of press photographers is asking the demonstrators to stand in front of them so that they can see them — there’s nothing sinister going on there.”
I’m not sure anyone said there was anything “sinister”. In fact, I’d guess it’s pretty much business as usual. It’s a posed shot, not a spontaneous demonstration. My question is, if there was a police cordon, why couldn’t CNN go to the demonstrators? That, at least, would lend their shot and story some credibility and authenticity. Instead we get a posed shot, with demonstrators jammed together to appear to be a part of a larger group and it’s not … fake news?
~McQ
Observations: The QandO Podcast for 02 Jun 17
Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord, although we weren’t actually in it, since it was never ratified by the Senate. But, you know, he hates Mother Gaia. That doesn’t change the fact that the climate science is settled…if by “settled” you mean “asserted without a falsifiable hypothesis or working predictive model”. In fact, there’s a lot of strange “science” getting published, like gender theory mathematics and whatnot. Meanwhile, Kathy Griffin posed for an unflattering picture of Donald Trump–or his head, at least–and now is complaining that we didn’t all get the joke. Meanwhile, the DNC is being sued by Bernie Sanders supporters, because the DNC’s nominating process was fixed. Like Superdelegates didn’t already make that obvious.
This week’s podcast is up on the Podcast page.
Paris Accord: Trump says ‘no’ to the global elitist scam and the globalists howl
You know, I have to keep saying this to myself to remind myself that even a stopped clock is right twice a day – I’m not a fan of Donald Trump. But then I wasn’t a fan of Barack Obama. Or particularly, G.W. Bush. It’s a cross any libertarian has to bear. But it is also why, for the most part, we can look a bit more dispassionately at circumstances or events than can liberals or conservatives. They have a vested interest in protecting the reputation (and work) that their person is doing (and one of the reasons that you see so much hypocrisy on both sides). We have no such vested interest. However, since libertarians rarely see the work of liberty done, it’s somewhat surprising when it is.
It was done this week when Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord. All parsing aside, “accord” is a synonym for treaty. And the accord Barack Obama signed, because it was never ratified according to our Constitutional process, has no force of law here or elsewhere. The Senate gets the final word on that and it never has seen the document. Said succinctly, we have no legal or moral obligation to abide by that accord. Here are the facts of how this treaty has been handled by other countries:
Countries seem invariably to have accepted the agreement as a treaty that requires going through their internal treaty-ratification processes, typically submission to the legislature. Countries from the United Kingdom to China to Jamaica have ratified it through their legislatures. So has Brazil, Japan, the Philippines and Australia. In the latter, the question of whether it was a binding international accord requiring submission to Parliament received some discussion, and a parliamentary analysis concluded it was a “major treaty” that needed to be submitted.
I know of no country that has taken the U.S. approach. All countries seem to understand that ratification requires using the domestic procedure for ratifying treaties.
The universal interpretation of the agreement as a treaty cuts against Obama’s insistence that it is not one. (It should also be noted that SOEs for multilateral agreements are themselves almost unheard of, and certainly not for global ones.) A treaty is an international agreement, and in a multilateral treaty, the views of other signatories are at least probative of the question of whether it creates binding obligations upon ratification.
Here’s another way of saying the same thing by the editors of National Review:
The Paris Agreement is a treaty in all but name: The European signatories put it through their usual treaty-ratification protocols, but the United States did not. President Obama went to great lengths to pretend that the treaty was something other than a treaty because he did not wish to submit it for ratification by the Senate, which was almost sure to reject it — as, indeed, the Senate would likely reject it today. In a government of laws, process matters.
All Mr. Obama had to do was submit the treaty to the Senate. But instead he played the “pen and phone” angle claiming it was an SOE when no other country that did in fact ratify the treaty treated it as such.
Of course, the central planning globalists in Europe (and here as well) are beside themselves because a President actually exerted leadership and did what was best both for his country and the cause of liberty. He crashed their scam. And the howling is cacophonous, not to mention petty and insulting.
However, this is precisely the smack around the head that Europe badly needs. Trump isn’t playing along with their “let’s loot the US and claim it is for a good cause” game and they’re livid. They and the rest of the world put together a treaty that essentially obligates the US to trillions of its tax payer’s money (and millions of jobs) to be redistributed to the lesser nations of the world. Meanwhile the largest polluters in the world have absolutely no obligation to stop or even step back their pollution. None. Because, you see, this is a “voluntary” obligation – well, for everyone but the US it appears.
The bureaucrats in Europe are now spouting nonsense about “international law” and how Obama’s unilateral action obligates the US. Yeah, someone needs to tell them that unless they can enforce it, international law is about as useful as European politicians. After all, they’ve done such a fine job in Europe we simply need to accede to their “leadership”. If they can centrally plan Europe (and that’s going swimmingly isn’t it) surely they can centrally plan how we should react to climate change. What could go wrong?
The Paris Agreement is no different in its epistemological conceit than Obamacare, the war on drugs, nation-building, universal schooling, or socialism itself. They are all attempts to subvert the capacity of society to manage itself on behalf of the deluded dreams of a few people with power and their lust for controlling social and economic outcomes.
And that always leads to less liberty as we’ve seen countless times over the centuries.
Not to mention the whole scam is based on very poor ‘science’.
~McQ
A liberal professor’s epiphany
The WSJ today carries a piece by Professor Bret Weinstein of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He was the professor, whose stand against what he called a “coercive segregation” of whites off campus during what had been traditionally a day when people of color voluntarily stayed away to demonstrate their value to the community.
What’s interesting is the “Day of Absence”, as it is called, had been done a month before without incident. His controversial stand?
“There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles . . . and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away,” I wrote. “On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”
So, thinking he’d made his point and the world had moved on, he was more than a bit surprised when a mob of students showed up at his classroom and called him a racist among may other choice and vulgar epithets. Obviously some hadn’t moved on and it took these little cretins a month to gather a mob and their courage to go and make absolute fools of themselves.
But because they did, it has become apparent to Weinstein that there is trouble in Liberal Land and most of it is of their own doing. He talks about the “why” of the problem that academia now confronts:
[T]he protests resulted from a tension that has existed throughout the entire American academy for decades: The button-down empirical and deductive fields, including all the hard sciences, have lived side by side with “critical theory,” postmodernism and its perception-based relatives. Since the creation in 1960s and ’70s of novel, justice-oriented fields, these incompatible worldviews have repelled one another. The faculty from these opposing perspectives, like blue and red voters, rarely mix in any context where reality might have to be discussed. For decades, the uneasy separation held, with the factions enduring an unhappy marriage for the good of the (college) kids.
Or said another way, the social sciences developed into an intellectual garbage pit and became more and more radical over the years. Feminism and identity politics, the “Eugenics” movement of the 21st Century, are scientifically baseless in much of their theorizing and had to, at some point, take on the hard sciences in order to compete for the minds of the “kids”. The example of the feminist critique of Newtonian physics I posted yesterday is an example of the garbage “science” of which I speak. However, as it was playing out on campuses everywhere, a reckoning between these two sides of academia has been in the offing for decades. The object for the social sciences is control.
One of the ways to get that sort of control is to increase and populate the “administration” of the school.
Things began to change at Evergreen in 2015, when the school hired a new president, George Bridges. His vision as an administrator involved reducing professorial autonomy, increasing the size of his administration, and breaking apart Evergreen’s full-time programs. But the faculty, which plays a central role in the college’s governance, would never have agreed to these changes. So Mr. Bridges tampered with the delicate balance between the sciences and humanities by, in effect, arming the postmoderns.
The particular mechanism was arcane, but it involved an Equity Council established in 2016. The council advanced a plan that few seem to have read, even now—but that faculty were nonetheless told we must accept without discussion. It would shift the college “from a diversity agenda” to an “equity agenda” by, among other things, requiring an “equity justification” for every faculty hire.
The plan and the way it is being forced on the college are both deeply authoritarian, and the attempt to mandate equality of outcome is unwise in the extreme. Equality of outcome is a discredited concept, failing on both logical and historical grounds, as anyone knows who has studied the misery of the 20th century. It wouldn’t have withstood 20 minutes of reasoned discussion.
But it never got the 20 minutes of reasoned discussion. Instead, it got, by fiat, an “equity agenda” which would surely and quickly swing the school’s professorial and administrative population to those aligned with “critical theory”, postmodernism and “equity” . That, apparently, is precisely what is happening at Evergreen. It seems education is now a second or third level priority behind activism and social justice. The New Red Guard doesn’t need education, it requires indoctrination. And the reality of the hard sciences has no place in that sort of a program.
How do you stop that? Courage and united front. Stand up for what you know to be right.
But hey, we’re talking about leftists academia here. That’s not how they roll:
This presented traditional independent academic minds with a choice: Accept the plan and let the intellectual descendants of Critical Race Theory dictate the bounds of permissible thought to the sciences and the rest of the college, or insist on discussing the plan’s shortcomings and be branded as racists. Most of my colleagues chose the former, and the protesters are in the process of articulating the terms. I dissented and ended up teaching in the park.
Dissent. They will brook no dissent. Nor can the professor dissenting expect backup from the school he’s been a part of for 14 years. Instead, students who do what these students did are held unaccountable and their demands are actually given credence. And a man who spoke up for the values of academia ended up teaching in a park because the school couldn’t guarantee his safety.
Is it any surprise that he now finds that where the left is headed is extremely troubling?
~McQ
So many subjects, so little time
Lord the SJW bucket is full this week.
Evergreen State College. What can one say when you get a real good look at the New Red Guard in action simply because a professor there protested an event they demanded take place – namely all white people abandon campus for a day. The implicit “or else” is to be seen in a few videos that have, according to the SJWs, been stolen and posted by “white supremacists” to humiliate them.
Seems to me that their actions should be enough to humiliate them. They are now demanding – demanding – that the videos be taken down. If you haven’t seen these extraordinary videos, do yourself a favor and watch them. They showcase in exquisite detail the shenanigans and vulgarity of a bunch of entitled 19 and 20 year olds who apparently have the world all figured out. And the administration? Well caving in, of course. And the cycle repeats.
Here’s my question though. Given the huge drop in enrollment at the University of Missouri this year because of events very similar to these that took place there about a year ago, one has to wonder what Evergreen’s enrollment will look like next year. I mean, would you want your kid going to a place as out of control as Evergreen? And besides, education must not be their first priority. Just look at the illiterate demands these SJWs have issued. The left is engaged in eating their own as the New Red Guard establishes itself on campus.
Speaking of illiteracy, apparently now it gets peer reviewed and published. Have you seen this?
A feminist academic affiliated with the University of Arizona has invented a new theory of “intersectional quantum physics,” and told the world about it in a journal published by Duke University Press.
Whitney Stark argues in support of “combining intersectionality and quantum physics” to better understand “marginalized people” and to create “safer spaces” for them, in the latest issue of The Minnesota Review.
Because traditional quantum physics theory has influenced humanity’s understanding of the world, it has also helped lend credence to the ongoing regime of racism, sexism and classism that hurts minorities, Stark writes in “Assembled Bodies: Reconfiguring Quantum Identities.”
A researcher in culture and gender studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Stark also holds an appointment in women’s and gender studies at the University of Arizona through its Institute for LGBT Studies.
She is a member of the Somatechnics Research Network, hosted by UA, whose scholars “reflect on the mutual inextricability of embodiment and technology.”
Stark identifies Newtonian physics as one of the main culprits behind oppression. “Newtonian physics,” she writes, has “separated beings” based on their “binary and absolute differences.”
The level of ignorance necessary to actually believe this, much less write about it and claim to be an “academic” is incredible. This is right up there with Chelsea Clinton’s claim that global warming is connected with child marriage and Gwyneth Paltrow’s “jade eggs”.
Oh, and here’s the chaser:
Stark did not respond to multiple email and Facebook requests for comment from The College Fix. While she does not have any academic training in physics or quantum physics, she did complete a master’s degree in “Cyborg and Post Colonial Theory” at the University of Utrecht.
Lord help us.
I mentioned the burrito stand in Oregon that was essentially shamed out of business because of … “cultural appropriation.” Seriously. Apparently in that world, white women shouldn’t be making Mexican food. But a Mexican chef disagrees. He says that Mexicans rip off other cultures all the time when it comes to food.
Of course they do. And by the way, what in the hell does anyone think the “fusion” movement is where it combines cuisines? I wonder if I ought to put a protest sign together and head on down to our local Burger King to protest. The owners are Asian. How dare they!
~McQ
Observations: the QandO Podcast for 26 May 17
Trump went to Saudi Arabia, and told Middle Eastern leaders to drive out terrorists. We’ll see how that works. He also fondled the Palantir with Saruman. Then he went to Europe and a NATO conference where he shoved around the Prime Minister of Montenegro or something, then called the other NATO members freeloaders. Which, essentially, they are. The news media is worthless, but, soon, they’ll have their impeachment victory. Or not. Meanwhile SJWs try to enforce their views on all of the rest of us. There was a terror attack in Manchester, England, though the motivation for this attack may never be known. Speaking of becoming useless, how’s that Federal Judiciary working?
This week’s podcast is up on the Podcast page.