(upbeat music) - Hey everybody, welcome to the Weekend Verdish on the Macquarie podcast, I'm Jerry Dade Sexton. I'm here with the councilman, hey bud. - Hey, Jared, happy through Friday. Whoops. (laughing) Well, it was a four day before, I'm sure. - That was so labored, that was like watching you navigate that with something. - I wasn't prepared, you kind of got to me a little earlier than normal, so I just, you know, wasn't. - Oh, is that quicker than normal? - There's usually a little bit more of something before you turned to me, I think. - You're, you, I get it, the pattern. - The pattern, pattern, pattern. - The pattern, pattern. - Yes. - Okay, all right, we'll work on that. - Okay. - Everybody, as you know, this is the Weekender for those of you listening to the preview at home, patreon.com/maquariepodcast. It's growing by leaps and bounds, people are enjoying it. We're hearing that people are loving it. Come on over patreon.com/maquariepodcast. They don't want to miss the fun, Nick. They don't want us to live shows. We do, after the tent pull events, they don't want to miss our movie breakdowns. - We have a BP debate coming up that we all want to watch. - Oh, we do. And this one's going to have it. You have no doubts it's going to happen, and no one's back. - I think this one's going to happen, yes. - Yeah, it kind of has to. - Yeah, I think this one has to happen, but patreon.com/maquariepodcast. And people, we have a whole lot to talk about today, but we have to start with a really, really bizarre story that I think has huge implications. Over the past few days, Israel has carried out, I don't even know what else to call it, a strange, innovative, tragic attack in Lebanon against Hezbollah. Blowing up pagers and walkie talkies, so far it looks like the death toll has climbed up over 30, and we're talking about over 2,000 people being injured by this. The details are starting to come out a little bit here and there, how this might have happened, what exactly took place. Israel has officially called this, quote, a new era of war, and also it seems that they're now turning their eye towards Lebanon in their operations as peace remains, unfortunately, and tragically far off or nonexistent. Nick, I have a lot of thoughts about this. I've been walking around thinking about it for a few days now. What were your initial reactions when you heard about this? - I mean, it sounds like the mission impossible thing where somehow a number is dialed, and at some point I thought it was only, the only, they could have put explosives in there, and then the next page is when it blows up, but supposedly no, it was coordinated to only a specific number received, so they all go off at the same time. And I suppose the real question now is why now, that was really what's on my mind most, is why are they widening what's going on in Israel to another front, basically? And so we have to now decipher, or maybe we get more information eventually, about the timing, it wasn't simply a use it or lose it situation where somebody was about to tell them what was happening, and they were going to find out, and obviously Israel wanted to continue this mission for whatever reason, and then pull the trigger on this thing. So that is what I find most interesting, exactly what's going on and why they have to do it now in the midst of a war they're in with Gaza on the other front. - Well, it appears, and there have been leaks that have been coming out, and of course, the Biden administration has handled a lot of this by leaking to the press, its frustrations, what it's trying to do, what it can achieve. It does appear as if Israel felt like this plot wasn't going to come to fruition, or it would be discovered, and they needed to do it. I think it is, on one hand, I think it is evident of a new type of attack that I want to talk about in just a moment because I'm truly horrified by this and its implications and larger thoughts that we need to have. But I think, logistically, Israel has been given the most state-of-the-art weaponry and innovations that you could imagine. The United States has kept them afloat and awash with weapons. Meanwhile, America just continually is just like, "I don't even know what to do here." And now we're hearing leaks that they're trying to keep them from putting troops on the ground in order to follow this thing out. But I think the other thing with this, and Nick, we're talking about, over 2,000 people being injured, children being killed, innocent bystanders being injured and killed. Like, this is, again, I think, another moment where Israel has all this innovation, it has all this support, it has all these abilities, and it's just haphazard. Right? It really doesn't matter. Like, we can hear about, quote unquote, terrorist. Like, that is a very, very handy, you know, rhetorical designation. Like, if you got killed by this thing and you got wounded by this thing, then that means you're a terrorist. But I think it is the sloppiness and the brutality that the Netanyahu regime represents. I think it shows that they have no interest in peace whatsoever. I think it's only going to continue and any idea that this is going to be taken care of in November, much less just in a timely manner, I think we can wave goodbye to that, and just, you know, settle up to the reality that Netanyahu absolutely depends on this thing growing and continuing, and that's where we are. Oh, I agree wholeheartedly as far as the resolution of conflicts going on there. None of this is going to get settled, you know, by probably the middle of next year, the way this is going. Give that, yeah. And there are plenty of reports that, you know, Netanyahu continues to torpedo any kind of ceasefire in Gaza, and so if that's the case and they're trying to just continue keeping chaos going so he can stay in power, this is how you would do it, but, you know, Hezbollah is going to respond and Israel is going to respond, so you kind of have to wonder, 'cause again, there were two choices. It's not a user to lose in a situation. You could have decided, you know what, we're not going to send out that code, anyway, even if they do find out. In fact, they could have made it into some sort of a diplomatic thing where they said, you know what, okay, you found them, we didn't do it. Now, you know, we showed restraint, something, you know, they could have tried to make a positive out of that. But here we are now, where, yeah, they're going to mount some sort of attack, it's going to widen the war, and then when mistakes are made, which are inevitable in a war situation. Already happening, yes. Yeah, it widens, it gets worse and worse, and so it's still unfathomable that this guy can still be in power, 'cause we have to imagine that Netanyahu had final say, right, on whether they dedicated these things. And I don't believe that they had done this like a year ago, right? This is not a thing, I mean, I don't know. To me, it seems like it would have been more recent when they have gotten over this. It appears that this was put into motion a few months ago. Right, so it's like in the middle of what they're doing already, right, with the whole thing going on in Gaza, they're actively planning this stuff, too, and then they go, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. If any kind of resolution is the goal here. Oh, it's not. And I think one of the things that we have to do is we have to change the way that we view Netanyahu. And I've been thinking about him a lot through the lens of someone like a Kim Jong-un, like a dictator who only relies on fear in paranoia, right? Like the only reason that North Korea is able to operate the way it is is because it has the quote-unquote threat of the West, right? They're spies everywhere, they're going to attack you, they will annihilate you. And that is the entire basis of power, which is the entire basis of Netanyahu's power. What concerns me, Nick? I've been thinking a lot about the horror. I mean, this is state terrorism. Let's make this clear. That's what this is. Like literally this was done not just to kill and assassinate members of Hezbollah, but the way that it was done was intended to so fear. We're hearing reports now out of Lebanon. People are turning off their refrigerators. They're turning off their baby monitors. They're turning off every appliance that they own for fear that somewhere or another, there's a bomb that is hidden in this that could kill them or their family. That is a lot different from state power in the past, such as drone attacks and drone strikes. I was thinking a lot about Barack Obama regime of drone strikes. Like you would be going to a wedding and if there was a suspect there, like a drone strike could wipe out your entire extended family. But that actually, Nick, that involved intelligence. At least there was somebody in a room looking at a report that said these people will be here. That's not what this is. It's literally a device that they're not tracking. They don't know who has it. They don't know what the vicinity is. We've now seen like footage of people being in like marketplaces and places and it just goes off and it can kill anybody. On top of that, this is also a weaponization of the global industrial like chain. Like the reason this happened is because Israel made a deal. These pagers, I don't know about the Walkie Talkies, but the pagers came out of a company in Taiwan called Gold Apollo. Israel went over there, worked with Taiwan and talked them into putting weapons great explosives in their products. Like, how are we supposed to feel about this knowing that the global supply chain can be taken over by states and have weapons put in them? And by the way, it's not like this happened and no one's ever going to do it again. This, you know, it's like you develop a weapon. Somebody's going to develop their own version of it and somebody's going to use it. And now like to look at that entire sort of like new sort of frontier for a person who worries about state power particularly with growing authoritarianism. Like it has me really, really concerned. - For what it's worth, the company in Taiwan is saying that they license their name to a company in Budapest and they're perhaps they're the ones. - So it's here, it's here, it's here. - Who even knows no one's to blame? - Yeah. - I mean, although listen, they ship it and it somehow is intercepted in between them and has the law and they do it. That could be possible to, you know, again, this is like out of the movies. This is insane what we're reading about. What if someone was on a plane? Now, again, if you're at 30,000 feet you probably don't get a page, I don't think. But like, you know, if you, not say you leave it on, you forget it's on, you're taxing, you're 5,000 feet in the air, whatever. Yeah, you've got the page. You probably would have bought that. - This will not stop with pagers for the record. - Yeah, right. So it's like, yeah, it was so, it was terrorism. You're exactly how-- - It's terrorism. - It was what that is. And whoever would have approved it. Again, it would have had to have gone to the top if not the very top of the government in Israel. So it's just, you know, rather than hearing more and more reports about how they're getting closer and closer to getting hostages released and cease fires, we're, it's just hearing more and more escalation. It doesn't make any sense in terms of that. Again, that is clearly not the goal of the administration. I think it's the goal of the majority of people in Israel. - True. - Yeah, they cannot seem to arrest control of the government back from this tyrant. - Well, and by the way, the idea of state control versus small-D democratic populist movements against it. Nick, think about the implications here. And that one of the worst things America has done in the 21st century, and we have done plenty, was the war on terror. And the designation of the idea of a terrorist, being anybody that we decide is a terrorist, which Israel has now learned from, right? That idea that state power needs to defend itself against the people, like, I'm sorry, that if you look around the surveillance that we have been under during the 21st century is overwhelming, we now know that all these companies have worked with the government in order to provide constant surveillance. On top of that, now the idea that any product, or anything, cars, phones, laptops, you name it. And by the way, it's almost quaint. It almost feels like the old plots to kill Fidel Castro, with like an exploding cigar, like that idea that a state can then weaponize the articles and artifacts of consumerism to basically carry out targeted assassinations. And by the way, I just wanna remind you, and everybody listening, 'cause I almost forgot about this. Remember how the Supreme Court said that a president can do anything under their official power, including possibly killing political opponents? Like, this type of stuff starts to grow and grow, and a large part of the problem, it's not individual-based. Like, Netanyahu didn't come up with this, right? Like, he wasn't sitting around and he came up with this. Like, it's expressions of power by the state as things become more and more destabilized. Like, there is a creep that happens here, whether it's Israel, the United States, Great Britain, you name it, whatever it is. That creep mixed with the willingness to use state power to kill randomly and indiscriminately, like, I've been seeing people like laugh about this online. I don't find this funny. This isn't about supporting Hezbollah. This is about needing to always be curious and to always have a critique of state power, because unchecked state power only will grow and grow and grow and take advantage of whatever is given to it. - Absolutely. I mean, listen, Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. - Sure. - Generally, people who are affiliated with it are people who are terrorists. But, you know, people are getting named, they're losing eyes, they're losing limbs, they're dying. And then, yeah, again, the residual or the, you know, people who are nearby who are getting injured again, those are the, that's where it becomes terrorism on Israel's part. By the way, did you mention, you know, maybe a couple of times, a couple of pods before, about how Wi-Fi routers can actually see people? Did you ever see that report? - No, I didn't, but I'm not surprised. - There was a report about that where somehow they could take data that they're receiving and it can actually map, like, movement in rooms so they can almost have, like, that matrices, matrix-y looking thing and now see where you are and where you're moving. - Oh, no, and we've even heard, you know, that, like, things like Roombas do that. And what we've basically done is we've come to accept all of this. I'll never forget, back in the early 20th century, when the Patriot Act was happening, whenever the whole prison program was coming out, people would tell me, like, hey, we don't need to worry about this, like, you know, just sort of relax about it. That's not how this stuff works. It grows and grows and grows. And if you really wanna know how any of this works, look at China, which isn't just an authoritarian state, it's a model for how Western societies are starting to change themselves. Like, eventually over time, this sort of access that we give corporations, which, for the record, just to go ahead and connect the dots, Nick, am I wrong or do all these corporations work hand-in-hand with authoritarian regimes when it serves their bottom line? - Yeah, I mean, they wanna make money, so the guy-- They wanna make money and they wanna, you know, have their contracts going back and forth. They wanna access to, you know, giant markets like China and India. Like, there is a relationship that starts to take place and anything that happens overseas, particularly, and America knew about this. We've now heard that they gave America a heads up that they were going to carry out this attack. They didn't give them all the specifics, if you believe that. All the stuff that happens to people across the ocean and other countries, it's always going to boomerang back. That is just how this stuff works. And this thing, I'm sickened by it, Nick. I really, truly am, and, like, the first thing I had was surprise and shock by it, but the more time that has passed since these attacks took place, the more than I am absolutely concerned and sick. - You've been listening to the free part of this episode. If you'd like to hear the rest of this great conversation, head over to patreon.com/muckrakepodcast and subscribe for lots more additional content, including a Discord server and live shows. We'd really appreciate it if you could give it a try. We know you'll love it and come back for more. [MUSIC PLAYING] (dramatic music)
