o I don't know if I do. But that would be more of the same for the United States anyway to be influencing other countries' elections.

Anyway, according to Wall Street Journal, American defense companies are having a good time. They're increasing their dominance of the global arms trade. And the European nations are trying to buy as much as they can to protect themselves. They're buying US fighter jets and missiles.

Now how many of you have ever heard this? I'm going to call it a conspiracy theory but I think we're all sophisticated enough to know that conspiracy theory doesn't mean it's not true, right? So I don't know that it's true so I'll call it a conspiracy theory but it's certainly not ruled out. And it goes like this. That the real reason that there's been such a push to increase the number of NATO countries is not to defend against Russia. It's because as soon as you turn into a NATO country you have to buy American weapons to be compatible with NATO. Is that true? That the real reason that there's always a continuous push to add new countries is because the military industrial complex in the US gets to sell more weapons because you can't be in NATO unless your weapons are compatible with the rest of NATO. I hate to think that that's the whole story but it could be right. It could be part of the story. It could be just opportunistic stuff like, oh yeah we want to protect against Russia but by the way it's pretty good for business. You know, that's not the main reason we're doing it but it's also good for business. It's a little hard for me to accept that the real reason is protecting the countries from Russia versus the gazillions of dollars that the military industrial complex would make if we just add one more country. So I'm a little skeptical there.

Meanwhile RFK Jr. has asked the CDC to look into the link between vaccines and autism. Now that's interesting. The Gateway Pundit is reporting this. And apparently that study would involve using the Vaccine Safety Datalink which monitors safety of vaccines and investigates adverse reactions. I don't believe anything about this story. Sorry, I don't believe that there's an existing database that if you just looked at it carefully you would know if there's a link between vaccines and autism. Are you kidding me? There's no way we have a database that if you just looked at it really carefully you would know the answer. No.

Now I saw in the comments before I came on that all you'd have to do is study let's say the Amish or the Mennonites or whoever they are because there are some groups that are not vaccinated. So if you check the unvaccinated group and they didn't have any autism, well then you'd say, aha it must be those darn vaccinations. But that won't work because there are too many things that are different about the Amish. Let me give you an example. One of the hypotheses that I'd heard years ago but now I don't believe it's true but it is one of the hypotheses that what's different about the modern world is that smart people meet other smart people more easily. So we go to college and you let's say you go to MIT you're more likely to meet somebody that you get married to who is also a top engineer or basically nerd. And there's some indication that if you take two people who are kind of sort of near the spectrum and they have a child the odds of them being on the spectrum are way higher. Now I can't promise you that's true. That's just something that's been around for a long long time.

Now the Amish don't reproduce that way so that's not their mating strategy. Presumably their mating strategy is old school where it's like, Jake looks like you're ready for a wife. Sally down the road, she'd be a good wife. All right she's the only one available. So it feels like the Amish may just do old school mating and it would be the nerds hooking up because they both work at Microsoft. Maybe, I don't know. The other thing is that the Amish are not eating the same food. They're not eating processed food. The other thing is they're spending more time outdoors. So and you could probably come up with five differen