Shownotes
On this episode of Common Sense Ohio, we discuss various topics including the importance of enforcing standards and creating specific laws that can be consistently enforced. We also touch on the sensitive topic of the death penalty and how it is perceived by people in Cincinnati.
Additionally, we discuss the value of allowing open and educational debates about controversial topics in academia, and the importance of addressing the root causes of discrimination rather than surface-level characteristics.
We analyze issues related to the Cleveland Clinic's diversity policy, as well as the recent Court decision on vague language in legislation, among other topics.
The episode ends with a critique of "busybody sort of elitists" who believe they know better and want to have all the power to help people and a quote from C.S. Lewis on tyranny.
Stephen Palmer is the Managing Partner for the law firm, Palmer Legal Defense. He has specialized almost exclusively in criminal defense for over 26 years. Steve is also a partner in Criminal Defense Consultants, a firm focused wholly on helping criminal defense attorneys design winning strategies for their clients.
Norm Murdock is an automobile racing driver and owner of a high-performance and restoration car parts company. He earned undergraduate degrees in literature and journalism and graduated with a Juris Doctor from the University of Cincinnati College of Law in 1985. He worked in the IT industry for two years before launching a career in government relations in Columbus, Ohio. Norm has assisted clients in the Transportation, Education, Healthcare, and Public Infrastructure sectors.
Brett Johnson is an award-winning podcast consultant and small business owner for nearly 10 years, leaving a long career in radio. He is passionate about helping small businesses tell their story through podcasts, and he believes podcasting is a great opportunity for different voices to speak and be heard.
Transcripts
Yeah, and Brett really does bring the common sense to the show.
Steve Palmer [:Well, he is keep us in check.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah, he is, if you will, the most quote normal, unquote person on the crew here. If you don't mind, I just want to say that discussion with Paul last week was fabulous.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, Paul Scarcell last week talking about death penalty issues and off the hook.
Norm Murdock [:Really, really stimulating. I did want to so during the show a couple of things were said. Nothing wrong, nothing to correct, but it would have introduced had I jumped in there with a sidebar, it would have detracted from that show. I just very briefly want to address some things were said about different venues and how the outcomes would be different even in different parts of Ohio. For example, say Cincinnati. Well, Cincinnati is an interesting city. It's the headquarters of the right to life movement. And yet at the same time it does tend to be pretty tough visa vis. At least back when the death penalty was being given, it was one of the hotter spots and not implied. I don't think anybody meant it this way. I took it that way being a Cincinnati. But something was said about the propensity for the death penalty in that area and intimations that maybe it was a harsher climate. I just want to point out maybe a different way to look at it. I think people in Cincinnati or people that tend to use a death penalty I'm wearing a Texas T shirt today, so, for example, I don't think those people are meaner people or they more vengeful people. I really don't think that's it I think there tends to be a bit of sanctity of life philosophy in those areas and protection of innocence in those areas. And that's why the Right to Life movement, I believe was started and largely very active in Cincinnati, even nationally, right to Life is the protection of innocence. And I think a lot of people, a lot of very conservative people, it's not that they hate criminals. It's not that they hate the criminality, but they don't hate the criminals. And I'm like that. I love everybody, but yet I would put down a mangy dog that I love, okay? It's not hate of the criminal. It's protection of the innocence. And I believe that, at least I do. And I know we debated this aspect, and I may be wrong, but I think the reason for those very conservative areas to use the death penalty is they believe it is a deterrent. They believe also that it might be justice and that it certainly does deter that particular person from ever committing a murder again. But it may also be instructive to would be murderers that, hey, you're going to hang, you're going to get shot, you're going to get chemically put to death. So I just wanted to put that out there. I didn't want to create a big thing when Paul was on the show because we were going down a different path. And I don't feel like I'm defending Cincinnati. I just wanted to explain what I think the cultural difference might be.
Steve Palmer [:Steve well, as you might guess, I'm a fan of Jordan Peterson. I would be very curious to hear his take on this of the kind of psychological profile of folks who.
Norm Murdock [:Are.
Steve Palmer [:In favor of the death penalty versus those who are not, because I tend to be very empathetic, believe it or not, in my world. And maybe that's drawn me to this business of what I do is defending people charged with crimes. And again, I don't like the crime, but I've often found that people who commit the crime are actually good people. Very few people are all good, and very few people are all bad. I have encountered very few true psychopaths in my career as defending and representing folks in the criminal defense arena. So I agree with you here's. What I took away from that discussion was that I have a lot more thinking to do about it, that there's so many different angles and nuances to look at the problem and look at the death penalty, generally speaking, how it's implemented, whether it should be implemented, and in what situations it should be. That it's almost impossible to remain consistent in my views on it, and it's almost impossible to really if you think that you have it all figured out, go have a discussion with somebody like Paul or us at the table. Not that we have wisdom, but we brought different ideas to it, and then quickly it got scrambled up again. So there's a lot to be said. And that's why I think this is a virtue of doing a show like this, is that with common sense and without shutting down adverse views, we can air stuff out. And it really got me thinking, and like I said, I'd love to hear the psychology of it. And I don't look badly on Cincinnatians just because they support the death penalty more than others. I don't even know that's true. But if that is true, I wouldn't look bad at Cincinnatians. I mean, for other reasons I might.
Norm Murdock [:But, I mean, certainly the prosecutors down there seek the death penalty more often.
Steve Palmer [:They have traditionally.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:Anyway, let's talk about Cincinnati real quick, because there's a story you and I were kicking around before we got in the air. Another quick story. There is a gal, Olivia you wrote her name down.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. Olivian Krollcheck, a student at the University of Cincinnati having a very similar kind of case to others around the country where certain I guess they call this gender shaming or naming or there's some kind of word for this offense. And she used the term biological female in a paper proposal and received a zero grade, an F, if you will, from her professor, who just rejected that term as somehow unwarranted offensive.
Steve Palmer [:Bigotry.
Norm Murdock [:Hateful.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, hateful. It was hate speech. It was bigotry. And what's interesting to me is this. First of all, go Google it. She's given a couple of interviews now, and we watched one here this morning.
Norm Murdock [:It was on outkick.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah. And she's a very genuine she just looks like the quintessential sophomore in college. Innocent, in other words. Not no agenda, nothing, just learning.
Norm Murdock [:She wanted to write a paper. I believe her explanation went to write a paper about the merits of biological men swimming, in particular, her sport or her focus sports college swimming against biological females. I don't know how else she could have discussed it without using those terms.
Steve Palmer [:Right. If she's going to take the position that we need to protect biological women from the infiltration of biological men into their sports arena in college under title nine yeah. The only way to do that is to come up with language that distinguishes between the two groups that she's referencing.
Norm Murdock [:Exactly. Right.
Steve Palmer [:So there's no way to have this conversation logically without using that kind of language. But even more interesting to me is that she was in a women's studies class, and traditionally those would have been sort of the liberal classes of and I got no problem with those classes. Go study women all you want. It doesn't make a difference to me. I think these are very interesting issues.
Norm Murdock [:I think you can say, Steve, you and I have studied women quite thoroughly.
Steve Palmer [:I have married one, and they're awesome. But I mean that in the most sincere way too, almost the biblical way is I do feel like that completes me as a man. To have a good woman or a compatible woman, maybe, is the thing to say. But back to the point. It's like you start drawing these intersexual lines between group identities, and it is a nauseating ad infinitum project. It has no end. There's no bottom. That because, first of all, it's women. And now it's not just women. It's men who are dressed up like women and think they're women, but they're not really women.
Norm Murdock [:They're pretending.
Steve Palmer [:And then if it was a man dressed up as a woman who thinks he's a woman but he's not a woman, but happens to be black or happens to be Asian or happens to be a different nationality, well, that might be another intersexual line. So there is no logic to it. It's a logical fallacy from the outset.
Norm Murdock [:Well, Steve, in the Metaverse, that's coming right when we all get to be whatever we want, we can be whatever we want. I can be the old Japanese woman that I really want to be in the Metaverse. That's so ridiculous. It's so off the hook. So if we're allowing people to do that in the real physical world, another UC student, Dylan Mulvaney, and his Bud.
Steve Palmer [:Light catastrophe, who's now went from liking men being gay. Yes, now he likes women, sure. But he's a man. But he's a woman.
Norm Murdock [:Right.
Steve Palmer [:And so now he's a she likes women. So I suppose that makes him a lesbian.
Norm Murdock [:Right. Trapped in a man's body.
Steve Palmer [:Trapped in a man's body, which is what we are. But he's really on some level, but he's really a man.
Norm Murdock [:But we don't dress up as it just shows.
Steve Palmer [:And I think as an attorney, just sort of like with the death. And it's not that I don't have empathy for people. It's like and you say you love everybody, and I try to, but it's impossible to draw legal lines of distinction unless you use specific language to describe what you're doing. Everything in life is a discrimination. Everything. If I choose a blue pen instead of a black pen, I'm discriminating against black pens. Now it doesn't matter because who cares? But now if I choose to hire a white dude instead of a black dude or a black dude instead of white dude, I'm making a discriminatory choice. And it might be improper based on my motives. It might be proper if it just happens to be a black and white, but I choose for a different reason, like experience. And what we have is like, if you start to blur the language that describes these things, then you immediately are blurring the law. And this will get me into another topic about some legal standards, because you know the story before you go there.
Norm Murdock [:Steve, will you hold that thought?
Steve Palmer [:Holded okay, hold it.
Norm Murdock [:Before we finish up on this UC case, don't you find it highly confusing that the most recent justice to be added to the Supreme Court in her confirmation hearings said that the reason she couldn't define what a woman is is because she's not a biologist? She used that word biologist, and yet this young lady at UC used the word biological. So she's using the same language as the newest justice on the Supreme Court, and yet she gets rejected, but we're supposed to accept the answer that it is a biological determination per the Supreme Court justice. So this young lady is just using the same logic, and yet she can't be woke enough for her professor to accept her.
Steve Palmer [:Now, the good news is, Olivia challenged this. I mean, she did not back down, and I assumed she had some help of her family and some supporters around her, but she didn't back down, and she went back to the school. She appealed this decision. Another professor graded her paper, which I believe is 50% of her grade. And I don't know what the grade on the paper was, but the overall grade in the class ended up being an A. Yeah, she was wearing she.
Norm Murdock [:Was wearing a shirt in that interview on Outkick that said, don't back down.
Steve Palmer [:Don't back down.
Norm Murdock [:Either.
Steve Palmer [:She loves Tom Petty.
Norm Murdock [:Yes. Right.
Steve Palmer [:Or she doesn't want to back down. And I think it's very telling. So this is one of these things that I think is important for our culture here in Ohio and everywhere, is that if you believe in something like this, don't back down. Make a stand. If it's not right, it's not right. And just like we had people protesting actual racist discrimination back in the even back following Jim Crow, it's like they didn't back down.
Norm Murdock [:No.
Steve Palmer [:And we don't expect people to back down. So now the other side is not going to back down. They're going to shout you down and say, Why do you care? Why do you care? If I use these blurry words, why do you care? Because they become common and accepted practice. The next thing you know, you've degraded the standards to zero. And we have no basis of common ground, no basis to communicate, no basis to actually make pass laws that are enforceable. And that's sort of the problem here. And back to the Supreme Court, I believe a federal judge, a Trump appointed judge out of was this Tennessee? There was a law passed. I just drew a blank, I think, on transition surgeries. So cutting off parts or doing this or doing that. I think it was something along those lines. And it was a Trump appointed judge that struck down the law as being void and unconstitutional. And I think I'm going to, in my lawyer talk, going to do a breakdown on this because it's important. I hear some conservatives sort of up in arms about this, like, how could they possibly permit this? But conservative to me doesn't mean choosing a side that you like and riding that all the way to the end. I have to choose what we're conserving, which is a constitutional foundation for our government. If we're going to pass laws, they have to be specific enough that they can be enforced with regularity, so we can rely on what the law says to conform our conduct to the law along with that.
Norm Murdock [:Steve so it may bring up a different set of issues, but it is at the state level. Like, you're talking about a lot of courts, a lot maybe I should say a handful of cases, but they're very important cases. But there are various state cases also where the Dobbs decision has sent the topic of abortion back to the states and said it's a state issue for each of the 50 laboratory states to figure out what they want to do and set their own policies. So a number of states have put in various restrictions, like Ohio's Heartbeat Bill, for example, and a lot of these state statutes have been suspended by various state courts. So that's becoming a thing. The Supreme Court sends the issue back to the states. The states follow through on Dobbs and go ahead and start regulating abortion. And now the state courts are stepping in and wanting to stop those regulations.
Steve Palmer [:The question is, why now? This was a federal case.
Norm Murdock [:I'm talking about the Tennessee.
Steve Palmer [:I think it was Tennessee. It might have been Mississippi, I can't remember. I should have done my homework. No, you know what brought me to this was the blurry language that you brought up, and it made me think that when you blur the language, you get vague laws, and vague laws are unenforceable and they're unconstitutional. And I'm bringing this particular situation up to make the point that it doesn't matter if it's a cause that you believe in. It doesn't matter if it's a cause that you don't believe in. If the General Assembly or the legislative branch of government at the state level or the federal level writes a law and it is not specific enough to delineate between the people that it covers or the conduct that it prohibits or permits, then it becomes vague. And it doesn't matter if it's trying to do something that you agree with. It doesn't matter if it's trying to do something that you disagree with.
Norm Murdock [:I agree that the Supreme Court itself has been terribly vague on a few of their cases. For example, that Colorado, I think it is, or maybe Seattle, the famous cake decorator, right, that's now gone to the Supreme Court twice. Yeah, I mean, it's off the hook. It's like, why won't they come out and instruct the lower courts in very clear language that that is just against the First Amendment, that you cannot tell people that they have through these artistic.
Steve Palmer [:Lines, and that leaves room for interpretation.
Norm Murdock [:That's right.
Steve Palmer [:But that's still a little bit different than what I'm talking about. So the US. Supreme Court's job is to pronounce constitutionality, and what they're supposed to do, in theory, is sort of like this notion that they should rule on the most narrowly tailored issue. They can, they don't want to make it too broad. They want to rule on the issue.
Norm Murdock [:Right.
Steve Palmer [:At the same time, you get too narrow, it becomes a fact specific debate.
Norm Murdock [:That's right.
Steve Palmer [:Now what I'm talking about is when the legislative branch of government passes a law, you are not permitted to do X, Y, or Z if you don't define who you is. In other words, a class of people that you're focusing on. It doesn't have to be identity like we're talking about, but people driving, for instance, can't do this. Yes. You've got to define who it applies to, what the conduct is. And if you're vague about it, if you use language that leaves too much room for interpretation or say it can be enforced against people doing lawful things, constitutionally permitted things, then it becomes an unconstitutional law. And it doesn't matter if it's doing something you agree with. It doesn't matter if it's doing something you disagree with. So the conservatives who are up in arms about this, I don't think the Court was saying, I disagree with the policy that you're trying to promote. I think what the Court was saying is, roll up your sleeves, general assembly, legislative branch of government, go back and redraft this law in a way that passes constitutional muster.
Norm Murdock [:I got you better drafting.
Steve Palmer [:This is important for everybody. You can't just if you're going to make law, you have to make it very specific. And this is where we're going to fan tail back to Olivia. She was using specific language to define what she was talking about. The professor said that you can't do that.
Norm Murdock [:That's hateful, right?
Steve Palmer [:That's hateful. You can't use that language. And if you can't use that language, you start using these weird pronouns like they when there's only one person, and you can't build a society on that quicksand.
Norm Murdock [:You can't. So if Nor Murdoch was that professor, and I had, let's say, a racist student that wanted to write about how there shouldn't be any subhumans, he wants to write an essay, or she wants to write an essay that's very Nazi esque, I would not reject the subject matter of that paper. Very socratically, right? Like Socrates. I would let that student go ahead and be hoist on his or her own pitard. Go ahead and write your racist essay. I'll grade the essay based on the logic contained therein, and I'll blow it up. I'll teach that student something. That's what this professor had an opportunity to do. If she holds the view that using the term biological female is hateful, she should have let Olivia go ahead and write the paper and then grade the paper and return to her with some comments that would allow an open and educational debate between the professor and the student. That's what a university should be.
Steve Palmer [:That's exactly what it should be.
Norm Murdock [:It should be an open platform, because if I allow my racist Nazi student to write his essay, the little Hitler to write his little essay and then I grade it and I blow it up, I'm helping that young man or woman, this is why we have a First Amendment. The idea is it is a disinfectant when you allow people to say whatever they want to say and then you respond to it. That's how people learn. That's how you put down racism and put down hate, is by discussing it, exposing it. You don't suppress it.
Steve Palmer [:There's an interesting concept called the overton window where certain things should just be so taboo that you can't talk about them. And I don't know, I don't want to go into a debate about what those things are or whether that's an appropriate thing, but at the university level, this kind of debate should be happening.
Norm Murdock [:Absolutely.
Steve Palmer [:You should not punish a student for coming forward with this idea. In fact, what it reflects to me is a completely inept professor, right. And if she were here, I'd tell her to her face, if you're afraid of this argument that's right. Then you shouldn't be teaching anything, because that's really the only rational explanation. You can't logically respond to this argument, so therefore, you're going to shut it down based upon irrelevant factors. And, oh, this is hate language, so you got an F. The professor did nothing to grade this student on the merits of her ability to put together a syllogistic argument, meaning a logical flow.
Norm Murdock [:That's right.
Steve Palmer [:Like in college. That's what it should be. You should be teaching kids how to put on paper a logical flow of thought, right. Because if you can do that, then you can think.
Norm Murdock [:Exactly.
Steve Palmer [:And if you can think, you can talk. And if you can talk, you can write. It's like you should be teaching this, not discouraging it.
Norm Murdock [:100% topics, irrelevant, in other words. In large part, yeah, 100%. That was for me when I went to college. And there was a little bit of this woke stuff back then, of course, and people would call it politically correctness back in those days, like when I was in college, there were a lot of the recruiting people on campus from the military, for example. Some of the campuses were just then starting to say, no, we don't want the Marines and the Navy and the army here on campus, and that kind of thing. But there was no problem debating that. You were allowed to talk about it. If there wasn't considered, like, safe spaces where nobody could bring up a subject because it would bother somebody. Back when I was in college, it was okay to bother people.
Steve Palmer [:Right.
Norm Murdock [:And now it's like, oh, gosh, the last thing you can do is melt a snowflake by bringing up a topic that will just crush and collapse their worldview.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah. Challenge my ideas. That's hate speech.
Norm Murdock [:No, college should be an open forum.
Steve Palmer [:And there's a case, if we're going to get into First Amendment law, and this applies to public schools, folks, not private schools, but there's a case called Tinker versus Des Moines Independent School District. And old Tinker was a kid in high school, I think, who wore a black armband, I believe, to protest the Vietnam War. He was punished for it. And the case meanders its way all the way up to the US Supreme Court. And there's a famous quote is that students don't check their First Amendment rights at the door in the annual public school. I probably butcher the quote, but you get the gist. Yeah, right. And that was interesting because that would have been on the left, so to speak, at the time, fighting or protesting the Vietnam War. The same is true on the right. You should be able to come in and wear an armband in favor of the war.
Norm Murdock [:Well, there's that case in Texas that you might remember. It's a blip on the radar screen with today's culture, but there was a young man who wore an American flag shirt, and it didn't say, America, love it or leave it or anything. It was just a flag.
Steve Palmer [:Just a flag.
Norm Murdock [:Just a flag. And he wore it on Cinco de Mayo Day in Texas.
Steve Palmer [:And they call that hate speech.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah, hate speech or something. Now, Cinco de Mayo commemorates a victory of Mexico over France. It doesn't even have anything to do with nothing.
Steve Palmer [:It's a stupid holiday anyway. They don't celebrate it down. No, it's an occasion to sell beer.
Norm Murdock [:Or have a mojito with your burrito at your favorite Mexican restaurant. Fine. But yeah. So the principal, the superintendent told the kid, go home. You're out of school. Come back. No American T shirt in school.
Steve Palmer [:What are you talking about? It's utter insanity. And this is where, to some extent, Marx would say, a capitalistic society contains the seeds of its own destruction. And to some extent, there's a little bit of truth, probably not for the right reasons or not for the same reason he was advocating, but if you have a completely open and free society that permits viewpoints that are contrary to your own government, then that can take over. That can take over. And that's happened in a lot of ways, I think, in our country. So it's become racist, it's become hateful, it's become unpopular to love the country and wear an American flag. Now I get it. This student may have been trying to send a different message, like, look, it's a stupid holiday. I'm going to wear my American flag shirt. So nana. Nana. Well, who cares? He's still allowed to say it.
Norm Murdock [:Exactly.
Steve Palmer [:He's still allowed to say.
Norm Murdock [:Right? Sure.
Steve Palmer [:You're allowed to cut against the grain. That's what makes our country.
Norm Murdock [:Well, there were kids in his school, so part of the explanation were there were kids in his school wearing that Mexico should repatriate areas of the United States, like California, New Mexico, Arizona, that were part of Mexico. So kids are wearing shirts that advocate a greater Mexico and a return of those territories.
Steve Palmer [:That would be great. Yeah.
Norm Murdock [:But you can wear that shirt. Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:Have at it. Wear it. I mean, it's a stupid message, but it's okay. They can wear that shirt. I wouldn't stop them from wearing that shirt.
Norm Murdock [:No.
Steve Palmer [:I would debate them, and I would say, you're freaking idiots. But on the other hand yeah, right. Because you're doing a hell of a job keeping things straight down there.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. Because I am not stamping out anybody's right to wear whatever the heck they want to wear.
Steve Palmer [:And in Mexico, they would.
Norm Murdock [:Right. 100%.
Steve Palmer [:Right. I was down there with the federalis carrying, I think I don't know if they're fully automatic weapons, certainly. Oh, yeah, they are certainly semi automatic. AR 15 style military on every street corner wearing, like, face coverings. I mean I mean, it was like the fascist police down there, man. Crazy.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:Their freedom. All right.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. Their gang situation. Well, the cartels down there and their intermarriage with the government itself is highly confusing and schizophrenic. You have people that are being assassinated, I think. Nogalis. Across from El Paso, that particular city, the police chief typically doesn't last more than maybe six months to a year before they're assassinated. They can't even find anybody to do the job now.
Steve Palmer [:It's like the argument they used to make about the mob. Oh, this town was better when the mob ran it out in Vegas. Yeah. Except for the people who were murdered and buried in the desert. Except for all the theft that was going on, all the grift that was going on, all the shakedown money and protection money and the innocent people or the innocent shop owners who had to go pay. So you're looking at the tip of the spear and saying, well, it was safe, at least. Well, so is Nazi Germany. Unless you're a Jew.
Norm Murdock [:Right. Exactly right.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah. So is Nazi Germany, because they put jack boots on the ground and prevented all crime. Awesome.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. The trains ran on time.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah. Except you didn't have any freedom at all. And if you were a Jew, you were exterminated. And by exterminated, we mean killed.
Norm Murdock [:That's right.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah. Right after, like, gross medical testing and.
Norm Murdock [:Another 6 million people of various other defects born with either physical or mental defects. Old people. Catholic.
Steve Palmer [:This is the old Margaret Sanger stuff in. Here. And if you didn't think it could happen in the United States, go read Buck versus Bell, US. Supreme Court case. I think that was the one one generation of imbeciles is enough, says our Supreme Court. On the heels of that kind of ideology.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. Terrible.
Steve Palmer [:All right, let's move on.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. So I heard. Dr. ARN of. He's up at Michigan at that university in Michigan? I heard him talking hillsdale. Hillsdale. I heard him speaking, and he talked about and this was an excellent way to look at it, that we have exchanged dictatorship in America for what we call the expert class. And that's really where, like, Fauci and Dr. Collins, Francis Collins and these kinds of people basically became our oppressors during COVID And we have this tendency now to view we pick a scientist. The viewpoint of those scientists then becomes adopted by the deep state, and they run with it. And we've got these fires that are sending soot down here in Ohio right now. That fires in Quebec.
Steve Palmer [:I'm stuffed up from it. Yeah, it's in our air. My budy came in from Dayton. He goes, you don't know. He goes, man, it's a thing. He was all stuffing. He goes, It must be from that Canada thing. I was like, what are you talking about? Because I was in the middle of work and I didn't see the news. Well, there's Canada fire. It's like, it's happening here in Ohio.
Norm Murdock [:Oh, for sure. In fact, I got out of the shower this morning, and when your system is clean and at first breath of air in your house, I smelled smoke in the house. I'm like, yeah, it's penetrating our air in and out of buildings.
Steve Palmer [:Professor ARN is phenomenal.
Norm Murdock [:He's phenomenal. But where I'm going with this is his latest observation that everything is global warming. Everything is right when it's cold, when it's raining, when it's not raining, when it's hot, whatever it is, whatever the weather is, or whatever the condition is going on. So, okay. Some trees are on fire up in Quebec, and it's largely due to mismanagement.
Steve Palmer [:It's always forestry mismanagement.
Norm Murdock [:It's mismanagement.
Steve Palmer [:Not always, but often it is in Quebec.
Norm Murdock [:They have eliminated scientific management of their forests. They won't allow logging the way that timber companies would have trees of various ages. So that when a fire starts, there's areas of young trees where the fire will naturally cease because there's no material to burn.
Steve Palmer [:That's right.
Norm Murdock [:You just have little tiny saplings, and there's not enough fuel there.
Steve Palmer [:They leave aside the incongruity of their thought process on this is what's really, really telling. So they would say, Logging is bad. You shouldn't be cutting down these trees.
Norm Murdock [:It's horrible. Right.
Steve Palmer [:But our natural I think the natural consequence of that is that the new has to replace the old at some point. And I think the Earth naturally, God's creation naturally, will do that. And it's called a fire. So there'll be a forest fire that will sort of clear out a forest, and then another one will replace it'll, go back, right? Exactly. So what we're really saying is that's bad for us as humans, right? So what we have done is we started logging things and building houses and eliminating some of the forest and maybe too much of the forest, but it's got to be done at some level, otherwise you create a situation where forest fires are going to occur even naturally. And it's global warming.
Norm Murdock [:It has nothing to do with global warming. It's ridiculous.
Steve Palmer [:Michael Crichton was the author, wrote Jurassic Park and some other stuff, but he wrote a book, I forget which one it was, but the point he was making is like, look, we're not destroying the planet. We're destroying our own habitability in the planet, if anything. And if you think you can control this Earth that's been around for all this time, you're crazy. It'll survive long after we kill ourselves. And what we need to do is market solutions. Look at the bigger picture, right?
Norm Murdock [:A market solution to forestry is let people who own that land exploit it in a smart. They would not denude a logging company doesn't denude the land and just walk away. That land is still valuable. If they replant.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah, if they replant. And you could even have some regulation that requires that, I might argue. I have to dig into some of that, and we could debate it. But it's a renewable resource.
Norm Murdock [:The greatest renewer, if you will, if I can make up a word. The greatest renewer of forests in the universe is the Warehouser Corporation. They are world famous for their conservation of a natural resource that makes them money. There is a market solution to this.
Steve Palmer [:So two things could be true. There could be a market incentive for it, and it could be good.
Norm Murdock [:That's right. So they build their forests, if you will, in a natural way, so that the forest itself will put out the fire. It'll burn a while, and then it'll hit a spot where there's no more fuel, and the fire will go out.
Steve Palmer [:No, totally agree.
Norm Murdock [:Because they own that wood. They don't want the wood to burn up. They're selling the wood. It's a crop to them.
Steve Palmer [:If you look at all these things in a vacuum and pick one single cause, inevitably there's going to be adverse, unintended consequences. And that's what this is about. And like you said, these busy body sort of elitists. It reminded me of a quote. One of my favorite, perhaps my favorite modern thinker is a guy named C. S. Lewis. He wrote the line Witch and Wardrobe, but he was also a great Christian thinker. He's converted to Christianity after being at Oxford with, I think, Tolkien from Lord of the Rings, screw, tape letters. And he wrote the screw tape letters. He wrote a book called Mere Christianity, which was based upon a series of lectures he gave during the Blitz in World War II in London. But here's his quote, and it's a bit long, so bear with me. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busy bodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep. His cupidity may at some point be satiated. But those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. And that's what you're talking about. These jackasses think they're smarter than everybody, right? They think that they should have all the power because they know better and they're going to help us, and they feel good about it, but they're really morons.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah, 100%. So the Surgeon General, the CDC, the NIH, what credibility do they have?
Steve Palmer [:Zero.
Norm Murdock [:With the American people.
Steve Palmer [:They shouldn't have any to whatever credibility that people give them, I find it reprehensible.
Norm Murdock [:They need to do a mega Mia culpa and just say, you know what, people? We were 100% wrong. Almost everything we said about COVID was wrong. And we oppressed you. We made you do all this ridiculous, very expensive stuff. Trump spent 3 trillion on ameliorating COVID and then Biden came in and spent another 3 trillion after it been ameliorated. Now we're broke and we're debating who men and women are, and we're so distracted. And yesterday, the mainland Chinese Communists flew into the airspace, the defensive airspace of Taiwan. Right. While we're doing, Trump gets indicted and all of this nonsense is going on in the United States. It is having international implications that are going to involve American sons and daughters in the military and maybe the civilians here on the mainland, in the homeland. We may be looking at getting into a hot war not only over in Ukraine, but also in Taiwan.
Steve Palmer [:Well, look what's going on in the world from an Ohio perspective, sort of only because we're in Ohio. Yeah, but you've got China, Taiwan.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah.
Steve Palmer [:We're about to have a second Cuban missile cris. China is putting spy cameras and surveillance equipment on Cuba. In Cuba?
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. And the Pentagon is denying that.
Steve Palmer [:Is denying it, but it's happening.
Norm Murdock [:But it is happening.
Steve Palmer [:You've got basically, Biden's foreign policy with Ukraine is to let China deal with it, because in a vacuum, I guess look at it this way. Somebody told me this one time, and I forget what the context was, but think of the news like a vacuum. It's going to be full of something. The news is going to fill that vacuum. You cannot just eliminate it all. And the world is that way, too. I think. If we are not a superpower in the world, we being the United States of America, with all our warts, with all our historical flaws, with everything else, we're still better than everybody else and debate me till the cows come home, talk about it. So it's like if we're not out there with a strong arm flexing, then the vacuum is going to be filled up with bad people.
Norm Murdock [:Example the Chinese basically acting as the intermediary to resolve a dispute between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Yeah, they just did that a couple of months ago.
Steve Palmer [:And that should be our role.
Norm Murdock [:Who went and did Desert Storm twice, right?
Steve Palmer [:It should be our role.
Norm Murdock [:Unbelievable.
Steve Palmer [:We've ceded the field to the most evil empire.
Norm Murdock [:They are really? Yes. They're harvesting human organs out of political prisoners. They're oppressing Muslims and the Fallon gong.
Steve Palmer [:And we have college kids running around on campuses here wearing Mount Saitong shirts. It's like they're maoist. I'm not a stalinist. I'm a maoist. Yeah. It's not like he killed 100 million people. Except he did.
Norm Murdock [:Right.
Steve Palmer [:It's like, it's so insane. These idiots. And we're somehow like, they're going to do it better now. We may not do it perfectly, but we're going to do it better than regimes that commit genocide.
Norm Murdock [:They welded people's front doors shut. Welded, okay. During COVID to keep them in their apartment buildings. The Chinese Communist Party went around with acetylene torches.
Steve Palmer [:I didn't know that. That's insane.
Norm Murdock [:And welded people's doors shut. And it's like you can get your food through the mail slot, right? If you can figure it out, otherwise shrivel up and die. We don't care. But you're not going to give that COVID to some other Chinese citizen, right? It just is unbelievable.
Steve Palmer [:Utter insanity.
Norm Murdock [:Utter insanity. So you're asking about some little some.
Steve Palmer [:Other story nuggets, some quick little nuggets, and we'll wrap it up.
Norm Murdock [:Well, the Cleveland Clinic is finding itself. Which Cleveland Clinic? It's like the Mayo Clinic. It's one of the superstars of medicine. It's a center of excellence. I've been treated at the Cleveland Clinic. The Cleveland Clinic famously put that lady's face back on her after the chimpanzee tore her face off. They are an amazing institution. Cutting edge technology, tremendous procedure for record keeping, medical record keeping, and a leading light in this country for treatment of serious disease. At any rate, like a lot of places, like most places. In fact, harkening back to the UC thing that we opened the show with. They have a dei diversity, equity, inclusion manager and policy, and they set out racial goals for hiring managers at the Cleveland Clinic. And they have to do with if you've not been to the Cleveland Clinic, it's on the poor side of town. It's surrounded by a ghetto. It's surrounded by low income folks of both races, of all races, I should say. And so I don't know why you would why you would attach race to who you're going to hire for management. It would seem to me just like firefighters or military or police officers. You hire the best people and you're blind to their gender. You're blind to their race. You hire on the basis of merit, of competency. Isn't that what Martin Luther King Jr. Was trying to teach us to be colorblind? Well, at any rate, the Cleveland Clinic, unfortunately, has these quota goals, and they're not hitting them. And it's largely because the population that they I think they have a 17% or an 18% target where they want a certain number of minorities of a particular race, I think blacks to be the 17 or 18%, and they haven't hit that target, and they're lamenting that, and they're re calculating how to get there and all of that. And it seems to me that that is taking away from their core mission, and they're being criticized for that. And I think rightly so, that higher qualified African Americans, higher qualified minorities of of any size, shape, cultural difference. Fine. You know, but why would you have a number that you're trying to get to as some sort of a goal that seems.
Steve Palmer [:We talked about this, this intersectionality slipperiness because at first, now it's going to be we need certain races represented, but now soon we're going to need, like, certain races plus genders. Certain races plus genders plus sexual affiliation or sexual orientation. Now it's going to be race, gender, sexual affiliation. And then what else? What else do you have? Like, all I mean, my grandfather was Native American, so we need a little bit of that, these quotas. Now, on the other hand, we don't.
Norm Murdock [:Have enough female Armenian agricultural trans people.
Steve Palmer [:Imagine if we took all these points of light and pointed them at some of the true problems that's causing poverty or in this case, illness or discriminating against or not or discouraging. If you want more representation in the medical field, what's discouraging? Why isn't there more? And is it that, look, I don't want to be a doctor. I never wanted to be a doctor. I knew I'd be a terrible doctor because I couldn't get through med school. I couldn't do math homework. So why on earth would somebody say there should be more of me? Because I'm not good at that. It's like, I wouldn't be good at that. So to some extent, they're ignoring not natural sorting. And then beyond that, if there is a problem that's repressing certain groups and what's keeping people poor on the west side of Columbus or the east side of Columbus, start looking at that instead of just saying, we're going to and what they're not doing, Norm, is focusing on, all right, so we have two equally qualified candidates. They're not showing that one group is being hired and the other is not. They're saying, we have an underrepresentation of qualified candidates, so we're going to go and change that. But we're not going to change it by creating more qualified candidates. We're just going to hire under qualified candidates. Yeah, it's nonsense. It's lunacy. Nobody wants their doctor to be a certain color of skin at least anybody rational wouldn't want that. I want my surgeon to be damn good at what he's doing.
Norm Murdock [:My black friends don't want an incompetent doctor of any color.
Steve Palmer [:Of course not.
Norm Murdock [:I mean, same with lawyer or an airline pilot or whatever. They just want the if you're on a 737 on your way to Vegas, you want the best damn pilot in the world up in there, whoever's. And you don't care what color he.
Steve Palmer [:Or she my mechanic, my doctor I.
Norm Murdock [:Don'T care who they go to bed with. I could care.
Steve Palmer [:Care less. It doesn't make any difference to me. But don't change the standards.
Norm Murdock [:No.
Steve Palmer [:Now I care. Like, if you change the standards of the service I'm getting from my electrician, from my plumber, from my accountant, from my doctor, from my lawyer right. Just to include people that wouldn't otherwise qualify. Well, now I care.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. If my fireman coming into my house can't pick up my unconscious body and drag me out of the house to save my life, I don't want that standard lowered so that person can only dei checkbox. Yeah, well, instead of being able to drag 200 pounds out of the house, you only have to drag 100 pounds, and then that way, we get to hire.
Steve Palmer [:Now, I think both you and I would agree that if they are making decisions of equally qualified individuals based only on race, well, then, shame on them.
Norm Murdock [:Oh, of course, obviously. And I think we are post racial in that sense.
Steve Palmer [:I'd like to think so.
Norm Murdock [:Yeah. I don't think we have institutional or.
Steve Palmer [:Well, we're post racial, so they had to invent this sort of mystical racism.
Norm Murdock [:That just oppresses this white supremacy, which I literally don't know.
Steve Palmer [:So read Thomas Soul, read some economists, read some other thinkers on this that don't necessarily fall into the mainstream. And there's some answers to these questions about why poor people stay poor. Or even JD. Vance, the guy we talked to here. There's explanations that sort of maybe you can attribute some of it to racism, but not all of it. And maybe you can attribute some of it to upbringing, culture, but not all of it. Maybe there's multiple things on this that's right.
Norm Murdock [:Most elation whites are in great distress.
Steve Palmer [:Most of it, in my humble opinion, results and has resulted from horrible government policy.
Norm Murdock [:A lot of it. Yeah, absolutely.
Steve Palmer [:It's so insane. All right, so we got to wrap it up.
Norm Murdock [:We are well into one last thing, Steve. This is crazy, even for a Second Amendment advocate like myself. Some legislature lators in Ohio have introduced a tax exemption bill for guns and ammunition, which just so if you buy.
Steve Palmer [:Guns and ammo, you don't get taxed.
Norm Murdock [:That's the legislation that they're proposing.
Steve Palmer [:Yeah. Which is I mean, look, get rid of income or get rid of sales tax, if that's what you want to do.
Norm Murdock [:But don't get rid of the income tax. So God bless the Senate, the Ohio Senate in the budget, in their version of the budget, which has to be resolved with the House version, they've done two big things. These are epic, Steve. And maybe we'll talk about this next time. One, they're going to allow vouchers to be used by all income levels for all students in Ohio. That's in the Senate version. And two, they have reduced the income tax as a percent, and they've reduced the number of levels from four to two. So they've flattened the income tax, and they've reduced the burden on Ohioans, which come on, man, they need to eliminate the income tax. But this is a big step forward.
Steve Palmer [: ,: Norm Murdock [:Modern history, 79 years ago.
Steve Palmer [: ,:
