Welcome back to the Dirt Show. I hope you're all having a meaningful Memorial Day. Memorial

Day is a very important holiday as we commemorate the soldiers, sailors, Air Force, Merchant Marine,

civilian people who helped CIA intelligence, who kept us free, and who really, really allow us to

enjoy the blessings of liberty last night. My wife and I went to see a play. We're in Charleston,

South Carolina. That's where we're podcasting from, where my wife's family is from, and we went

to see a play yesterday about the Iliad, but it was really a political play about how bad old wars

are, and I didn't like it. You know, there have been bad wars. There have been good wars, and there

have been neutral wars, which everybody wish hadn't been, hadn't been for. And there are wars,

and this is going to be very controversial, which it would have been better if we had lost.

Let me start with that. The worst thing that happened in the 20th century was that the good

guys won the SEC, the First World War. If the First World War hadn't been won by United States

France and England, it never would have given rise to Nazism, and the Second World War.

It produced some terrible, terrible results, and millions and millions of deaths, but you can't

rewrite history. You know, when I'm down here in Charleston, I think of Fort Sumpter, and what would

have happened, had the Southern troops not fired on Union soldiers in Fort Sumpter if they had

just issued a declaration, a seceding from the Union would link and have actually fired on the

South. Would he have declared war on the South? If the South hadn't declared war on the North,

would the United States now be two countries, one North and one South? What would have happened

eventually to slavery? What if aspect of history has often fascinated me? What if the Japanese had

not, Pearl Harbor, and the United States hadn't entered the Second World War? What if Germany had

invaded Russia, foolishly, and Russia had been on the side of the Nazis through the

Ston pack all these what ifs, the contingencies of history, or are things we bring to mind and

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