52 said or with the idea. Fitts: You and I will occasionally have a disagreement where I tell you that you are more powerful than you realize. That is because, if you look at how your material is spreading, it’s unbelievable, but it’s being stolen. However, here is the thing, and this is what Ronald Reagan said, “You can get anything done in Washington as long as you don’t want the credit.” I think it is possible to shift things in a really positive way; we only have to let them keep stealing it from us. Farrell: The problem is that when they steal, they spin it in directions that you would never go. This is happening under a certain marketing scheme that we both know about now. I’ve seen it happen before. I gave 30 hours of my time talking to a tele- vision producer, and then I saw a program with all of these ideas that we talked about in the program, and absolutely no mention that I was his consultant – absolutely none. From that point, I won’t deal with Ameri- can television. I will deal with Russian tele- vision because they credit me. They know the standard academic game. Fitts: You know that McCain placed a pro- vision in the new Appropriations Bill, the National Defense Authorization Act. Mattis asked for an increase, and Trump increased the increase, and then McCain increased Trump’s increase to $700 billion. One of the provisions he put in was that, if it passes and gets signed, RT is not allowed to broadcast in America. He is outlawing Russian TV. Farrell: Well, that leaves the internet. I’ll still watch it and I’m sorry, Senator Mc- Cain. Fitts: They can still broadcast on the inter- net from anywhere. So much for that. Back to the Peace of Westphalia, I want people to focus on this. One of our challenges is to realize that we are functioning in places where there are multiple actors acting with impunity outside the law. One of the chief things that we need to think about is: How do we provide security for ourselves in a way that is reasonable so that we can be productive? It’s a problem, and this is one of the reasons the gun issue is such a do or die issue. If I could stress anything – whether it’s on the Constitution or the Peace of Westphalia – we are coming into what I call the ‘swine flu’ moment. I tell the story that I told last week on precious metals with Franklin. When the swine flu vaccine came out, they were going from state to state to mandate it. I called Franklin and said, “I’m not going to take this vaccine.” I really believed that it could be extremely harmful and it could kill you. I called Franklin and said, “Can I come over to your house and bring my guns? I’m going to die in a gunfight, and I’d rather die in a gunfight with you than alone.” He said, “Oh, yes. We’re not taking it either. Feel free to come over because there will be a gunfight.” I think it’s one of the reasons they backed down on the swine flu vaccine. I think that they heard thousands of phone conversa- tions. Farrell: They’ve been very confrontational in a variety of ways where they’ve had push- back – the Bundy Ranch incident and the one in Oregon. There have been incidents like this previous to that where they’ve tried to go in and do something, and then they have been stopped by locals who were armed. That is their big bugaboo. Fitts: I said that I wanted to tell you the senior pilot seniority story. Let me close this out as we finish the Peace of Westphalia. When I was doing mortgage auction loan sales, we were using the AT&T optimiza- tion methodology, which they developed for routing telephone calls. Then, of course, when bandwidth became cheap, they took the technology and used it for other things. One thing they developed it for was airline cruise scheduling. So an airline would have fantastic variables to optimize against each other when a pilot said, “I want to fly this week, but not this week. That day is my birthday, and I don’t want to fly that day. I like going to Europe and Asia, but I don’t want to go to South America,” and of this becomes fantastically complex. One thing that they did – because they did scheduling over many, many years – is over time they could price out the cost of a rule, whether it was a government regulation or a union rule. One thing that they discovered was that seniority so constrained the model that the people with seniority would do better if they gave up their seniority. The optimization would be so much greater, and they would get more of what they wanted. By insisting on seniority, the senior pilots made life worse for themselves than if they had no seniority. I believe in part, that is what we are looking at in our society. By these varieties of different groups exercising or having the belief that they can exercise force invisibly any time they want outside the law, are basically destroying the entire thing for everybody, including for them- selves. This turns us to Russia. Speaking of ruining everything, one of the stories that most struck me in the 3rd Quarter was the story from Saker about the Russian General being killed, and Russia publishing the stories of US Special Forces collocating with the ISIS terrorists. So who is really financing ISIS? I took one look at it, the implication being that World War III is about to start because the Russian issue has escalated. In the mean- time, a story that NASA has signed and announced an agreement with Russia to do a moon station together is published. If we’re about to start World War III, why would we sign a deal with Russia over a moon station? Farrell: Especially during sanctions and that is highly suspicious and I’ll tell you why. A few months ago, Russia also inked a similar deal with the European space agency, AKA Germany, to do essentially the same thing. What you have is the United States, Germa- ny, and Russia looking as though they are going to build a space station somewhere between the Earth and the moon. What is very interesting here is not only, “Okay, we’re going to be cooperating in space, but not here on the ground,” and look who is shut out of the deal: China. VI. News Trends & Stories with Dr. Joseph Farrell