Episode #1064: Colonel Vodka
First Broadcast: 9/21/26
On Tuesday, September 15, 2026, Congressman Thomas Massie, a lame duck Republican representing the 4th District of Kentucky, introduced a resolution in the House to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on eight different counts of "high crimes and misdemeanors," covering acts ranging from the launch of the illegal war against Iran, to defying Congress's orders to stop the war, to bombing a school in Iran and killing at least 200 civilians in that bombing during that war, to killing hundreds of people extrajudiciously (or, what most people would call "murdering people") by bombing dozens of boats in the Carribean and elsewhere, to killing survivors of these bombings instead of rescuing them, to increasing the likelihood of more civilians being killed and more troops being fired upon in the future, to attempting to suppress the free speech of civilians, to kidnapping the leader of a foreign country--this resolution has everything! The very next day, on Wednesday, September 16, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson adjourned the House for the next month and a half, postponing all possible votes on this resolution until after the midterm elections in November. Coincidence? Will a majority of Congress vote in favor of impeaching Hegseth when the vote eventually happens? Why do some Republicans only feel free to do the right thing when their political careers are over? Will we finally get meaningful oversight of the Executive branch if a Democratic majority wins both houses of Congress this year? Will the midterms be as big a blowout as I'm hoping they will? We'll all find out in less than 50 days, won't we?
Episode #1065: Vacuum Tubes
First Broadcast: 10/5/26
When we recorded this episode, the 12 attorneys general who had sued Paramount Skydance to block its proposed merger with Warner Brothers Discovery had reached a settlement to allow the merger to go forward, and Paramount was attempting to sell debt to fund the deal while waiting for a judge to approve the settlement--an approval which has since come to pass. Needless to say, we at Free New York don't approve of this kind of media consolidation, especially the kind that puts four different news outlets like CBS, CNN, HBO, and Comedy Central (yes, I count those last two as news outlets, thanks to The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight) under the same roof. But, wait! There's more! Well over 300 different media properties will now call this new mega-corporation home, and that doesn't sound good for anyone. After all, if that many media outlets are all owned by the same parent, aren't they only creating the illusion of difference instead of maintaining their own individual visions? What can consumers do, if all their media choices turn out to be different angles of the same choice? I guess Jello Biafra's advice still holds: "Don't hate the media: Become the media!" We're trying, man! We're trying!
Episode #1066: Haiku About Mangoes
First Broadcast: 10/12/26
Will A.I. kill us all? It's a question that's on many people's minds lately, but who do you trust for the answer? People like Jacob Coxon, for example, say that A.I. software is becoming too dangerous to use, and has the potential to kill off all humans in less than a decade; but other people like Ed Zitron think Coxon and his ilk are just inflating the hypothetical dangers of A.I. in order to boost their own careers (Coxon notably hasn't divested from A.I. stocks, remember). People within the A.I. industry point to thought experiments like the paper clip problem (where an A.I. tasked with creating paper clips ends up using every resource in the universe to do so, eventually battling humans who try to stop it from completing its task) as examples of how A.I. is infinitely more dangerous than we realize. In comparison, the consensus of experts who aren't directly connected with A.I. companies seems to be more restrained, in that the potential for A.I. to do malicious things exists, but that requires people to give it the instructions that allow malicious behavior in the first place. This brings up the question: Why are A.I. programs being trained with malicious behavior anyway? After all, if A.I. programs can only refer to the data they're given for reference (much like the Star Trek villain Trelane, whose only knowledge of Earth was what he could see through his telescope, and therefore several hundred years out of date; or the tweet about how someone who has only seen the movie Boss Baby would think any other movie would have strong "Boss Baby" vibes), why give them any data at all that could help them make humanity extinct? Peraonally, I'm much less concerned with A.I. destroying us than I am with people becoming over-reliant on A.I. to the point where they just accept whatever the A.I. tells them, without question, like Michael Scott in The Office blindly following his GPS instructions to drive into a lake; or lawyers who have chatbots write their legal briefs that end up including "hallucinated" citations for cases that don't exist; or students who don't review the work that chatbots generate for their school assignments, missing the results of the instructions teachers added to specifically catch students who used chatbots; or people who are fooled into thinking the chatbots they're conversing with are real humans, and end up putting their lives at risk because of their delusions. Maybe we're better off unplugging all this stuff until we're smart enough to use it responsibly? HA! Sorry, I don't know what I was thinking when I said that.