Back to episode — Episode 2683 CWSA 12/08/24
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hat makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now. Go. Oh, incredible. Sound is working. Video is working. I think everything's working today. Would you like to talk about some new things in science and the new studies? Yes, let's, before we talk about the politics. According to a publication called The Conversation, did you know that taking a short daily walk mig…
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Yeah, they could save a little money on that study if they were thinking of studying it. We'll see if it creates any new children. Maybe. I doubt it. I kind of doubt it it's going to work.
Here's something funny. The song "YMCA" that you know Trump likes to use and dance to at his rallies and whatnot, apparently it hit number one on the song charts, which is interesting because it had never been number one before. So 45 years ago when it was first created, the song, it made it to number two on the charts but it never made it to number one. But thanks to Trump it made it to number one.
And apparently the writer of the song, at least the writer of the lyrics who was also the singer of it, at one point he was thinking, oh I don't want Trump using the song. But then people liked it so much they thought, yeah, why not let him use it. And now he's happy because he made millions of dollars doing no work whatsoever. So just by allowing Trump to use it, it became a number one song and he's the beneficiary of that.
So he gets millions of dollars just for not being a dick. He could have been a dick and said, oh don't use my song. But because he just said, ah, if you like it, if the people are enjoying it, go ahead, if you like it, then he makes millions of dollars. That's the way it should work, right? When people just do considerate, reasonable, common sense decisions, something good should come their way. And it did.
Well, you may have heard by now that Syria has fallen to the rebels. Damascus has fallen and Assad, their leader, is nowhere to be seen. We assume he's alive and escaped but we don't know where he is. Trump put down a message just before it fell saying that Syria is not our fight. He wants to make sure you know that we're not going to go in there and try to change what's happening.
But what is happening? Well, who are these people who are getting rid of this terrible dictator Assad and replacing him with more reasonable leadership? Well there's a guy named Abu Mohammad al-Julani, and it turns out that the rebels are mostly Islamists who are somewhat radical. And he was, I think he has a $10 million bounty on his head from the US. That's the leader of the guy who just took over Syria, and he was detained by the US military in the first decade.
So my question is this. Who's backing the rebels? There's something I don't understand about this story. To me there's no situation in which rebels can just put together a successful rebel army and take over a country that's backed by Russia and Iran. And just some rebels put together a successful coup that only took a few weeks really. There's something that doesn't make sense here.
So part of the story I don't understand is if the United States is not backing these Islamists with money and resources, and Russia is not doing it because Russia's on the side of the deposed government, and Iran was on the side of the deposed government, who exactly was
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backing these rebels? Do we know? And the rebels would be Sunni, right? No, wait, would the rebels be Sunni or Shiite? Actually I don't know that. That's one of those things I should know. If you're going to talk in public about stuff like this, probably the most basic thing you should know about this story is whether the Islamists that took over are Sunni or Shiite. And I don't really know. I'm…
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