Episode 1587 Scott Adams - Everyone Except You is Crazy and I'll Tell You Why. It's About the News
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: ----------- - Jussie Smollet's defense strategy - Zuckerberg election money - Record setting trans swimmer - Homeschooling advantages - Reality denial is becoming a thing - COVID vaccine risk assessment ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
Come to the best thing that's ever happened to you in your whole life. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams. I think you'll all agree that by the time this is over, your life will be better in a whole variety of ways, too many to really mention. Let's fix my cameras there. That's better. And if you'…
View segment →have. And we're going to go for it all today. Big old bite. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass or a tanker or stein, a canteen, jug or flask. A vessel. What kind? Any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit o…
View segment →hing that makes everything better. Yeah, it's called the simultaneous sip. Watch it go. Go. Oh, that's so good. Well, the news is hilarious today. I'll start with the fun stuff. Keith Olbermann, who has been my critic for decades, decided to come in on me on my Fox News Christmas tree joke that I…
View segment →They don't just make crimes a crime for no reason. But imagine you're on the jury and you didn't like the police. Would you care that the police did extra work? No, no. Not if you didn't like the police, you wouldn't care at all. And you would say, you know, all he did was a joke. It was a hoax. So…
View segment →om doing stuff, taking their freedom away? How about the freedom to make a business deal and then just break it? Well, we have courts that will make you pay for that, right? So everything about capitalism is a restriction on freedom that if you restrict it in a smart way, what's left, the unrestrict…
View segment →know what's true and what's not. We'll still get more about this. It's still fog of war period. But if that panned out and if we could reasonably claim that it made a difference at least in some localities that mattered, wouldn't that be rigged? And let me ask you this. Has Trump ever claimed that…
View segment →asons. Quote, this is one of the women on the team. Pretty much everyone individually has spoken to our coaches about not liking this. Our coach just really likes winning. He just really likes winning. He's like most coaches I think. Secretly everyone just knows it's the wrong thing to do. The femal…
View segment →that ever happened in the history of humanity if they're going to stop the thing that there's a very good chance is our only way out. It's our only way out and they're going to try to stop it. That's really happening. I'm not even making that up. Now the part that's in question of course is whether…
View segment →wo trends and put them together, the number of people who have let's say concealed carry, isn't it just purely chance, purely chance that none of the smash and grabs have run into a concealed carry person who is in a bad mood that day? Because the concealed carry person if they see somebody actually…
View segment →maybe there's no way to do that if they're outside of NATO but I would not want to be a Russian ground troop entering Ukraine. That seems like a pretty risky thing. But some people are giving Joe Biden trouble for saying that we would never, he ruled out sending U.S. ground troops to Ukraine. He ru…
View segment →cott of the Olympics. So two out of three people are in favor of the United States boycotting China for the Olympics. That's encouraging isn't it? And 47 percent say Biden's done a poor job on China. All right that is about everything I want to talk about today. Went a little long. Didn't mean to.…
View segment →Come to the best thing that's ever happened to you in your whole life. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams. I think you'll all agree that by the time this is over, your life will be better in a whole variety of ways, too many to really mention. Let's fix my cameras there. That's better.
And if you'd like to take it up even to another level, and I know that's who you are. Not only are you smarter than average, not only are you sexier than the people around you, yeah it's true, but you don't settle. You don't settle for less than you can have. And we're going to go for it all today. Big old bite.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass or a tanker or stein, a canteen, jug or flask. A vessel. What kind? Any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. Yeah, it's called the simultaneous sip.
Watch it go. Go. Oh, that's so good.
Well, the news is hilarious today. I'll start with the fun stuff. Keith Olbermann, who has been my critic for decades, decided to come in on me on my Fox News Christmas tree joke that I tweeted. Now the joke, I told you the joke yesterday, but just so I give you some context. I tweeted yesterday, I don't know who lit the Fox News Christmas tree on fire, but the two white guys who attacked Jesse Smollett are still out there somewhere.
Now that got a thousand retweets, which is big for my size account, and ten thousand likes. So can you conclude that it's funny? A thousand retweets, which is high, and ten thousand likes. Apparently people like Keith Olbermann have not learned that art and humor are subjective. No, it's really true, Keith. It's the first time you're hearing this, but it turns out there's no universal objective standard for humor. No, there isn't.
And so, Keith, if you don't find something funny but ten thousand people did, what do you conclude? Use your big old brain there, Keith. Ten thousand people laughed but you didn't. What did you conclude about the humor potential of that thing? Well, Keith Olbermann concluded it wasn't good because he decided that he would weigh in with this valuable comment on my joke, referring to the two white guys who attacked Jesse Smollett. He retweeted me and said, "Do they write your material too?"
Oh, I felt that like a dagger through the heart. I woke up this day feeling good only to find that Keith Olbermann does not approve of my comedic humor. Well, so I replied to him and said, I didn't know Keith Olbermann was still alive. I stole that from Elon Musk. You probably recognize that one. Yeah, I said I didn't know Keith Olbermann was still alive, to which Twitter user Kathy, also known as Mustang Girl Three, replied, "Only on the outside. He's only alive on the outside." Which I laughed about for about ten minutes. He's only alive on the outside. I'm still laughing about it.
Well, I think I'll talk about this later. No, I'll talk about it now. Jonathan Turley, who you should all be following and reading his stuff, probably the best writer on a lot of stuff. He's one of the best writers. He's a great writer, but he's also a lawyer, and so his takes on things are extra fun to read. And he's got this great take on Jesse Smollett's defense strategy, and I hadn't really seen it this way until he laid it out, and I liked it.
Which is that Smollett is trying for jury nullification, meaning he's not even going to convince them about the facts. You know, he's going to say the facts are all untrue, but beyond that he's got nothing because the facts are clearly true. There's plenty of evidence for them. So instead of doing something normal like, your evidence is not as good as you thought, which would be a normal defense, he's basically just putting himself on trial against the world and saying if you don't like the injustice in the world, I represent that.
So he's putting himself as sort of the martyr who represents the injustice against Black people in the system in general, trying to find at least one juror who says, you know, he is guilty as hell, but I'm still going to say he's not because I don't like the way Black people have been treated in this country. Do you think he's going to get away with that? Maybe it's not the worst play I've ever seen, because how hard would it be to convince one person to just do something that's non-standard? Probably not that hard.
So I don't know if he's made enough of a case that he's really the victim in this, but it's a bold strategy. Not one I would have used, but I don't know that this would have made sense in any other world. We've reached the point where everyone agrees the facts don't matter anymore. Do you remember when people argued about that? There was a time when I kept saying the facts don't really matter, and that what you hear about the facts or everything that's never been true, never been true, never will be true.
The facts matter sometimes in science over time, but in any moment the facts are usually lies. We can't tell what's true and what's not. So the facts don't really rule our existence and never will. So I guess this is in a weird way Jesse Smollett's approach. The defense is a high-awareness defense, meaning he understands the world maybe better than most people because he knows the facts won't be relevant. And I think he's trying to make them certainly not relevant by painting a framework in which you're judging the system itself. You're not even judging Jesse.
Now imagine that you're on the jury and you do have sympathies in that direction. Do you think that Jesse Smollett should go to jail for staging a hate crime hoax that inconvenienced law enforcement but not so much other people? Well, most of you do think so because it's clearly a crime. I mean, there's a reason it's a crime. They don't just make crimes a crime for no reason. But imagine you're on the jury and you didn't like the police. Would you care that the police did extra work? No, no. Not if you didn't like the police, you wouldn't care at all.
And you would say, you know, all he did was a joke. It was a hoax. So what? So he gets away with a hoax. It ruined his career, ruined his reputation. He's already paid. He's already paid the price. Do you see how easy it would be to rationalize voting not guilty? You could get there so fast. So I think Jonathan Turley is kind of onto something, that the Smollett defense might be a lot stronger than you think even though it has nothing to do with whether he's guilty.
So the mind-boggling thing is that he's not even going to deal with the question of whether he's guilty. I mean, he says he's not guilty and it's not a hoax, but he can't prove it and he can't even hurt the evidence against his case.
Anyway, in more interesting news, over in Saudi Arabia there's a camel beauty pageant and 40 camels were disqualified for receiving Botox injections and other cosmetic enhancements. Now I didn't mention what the other cosmetic enhancements were, but I'm assuming hump enhancement surgery because there are some camels that have really, no fault of their own, but just naturally small humps and they do get teased by the other camels. The other camels will be like, hey flatback, hey flatback. And a lot of camels will say, you know, I'm just going to get the hump enhancement surgery. But apparently that will disqualify you from the beauty pageant in Saudi Arabia.
Must control myself. Do not make culturally insensitive joke. You must move on to the next topic. Okay, got it. That was close. I almost didn't get out of that without getting canceled. Make your own jokes at home. That has nothing to do with me. You are culturally insensitive. I am not.
Let me give you an argument that sounds like I'm disagreeing with you but I'm not. Can you handle that? I'm going to give you some nuance. All of you binaries, please leave. Anybody who can't handle the idea that some argument has more than two positions, just go away now. Leave now because I'm going to be confusing you. If anybody doesn't get that things can be complicated.
Here's the thing I've been noodling on, which is that one of the big things that people say against mandates, and you must understand I'm against mandates because the next thing I say could be misjudged as being pro-mandate. Everybody okay with that? I'm completely opposed to mandates, completely. But the next thing I'm going to say is going to sound like I'm on the other side. Can you handle that? Of course you can. You're not only sexy but you're open-minded and beautiful in a lot of ways. So I'm going to trust you with this.
It goes like this. Most of the good things we have in society are because we restricted freedom. I'll just let that sit there for a moment. Most of what's good in society happened because of restrictions on freedom. Yes or no? Do you need an explanation of that? Well, let me give you an example. Did we win World War II because of a volunteer army? I don't know, maybe we could have, but we didn't.
Do you like the fact that criminals can't do anything they want? Do you like a world in which criminals are at least most of the time sent to jail or there's a police force to keep people from doing stuff, taking their freedom away? How about the freedom to make a business deal and then just break it? Well, we have courts that will make you pay for that, right? So everything about capitalism is a restriction on freedom that if you restrict it in a smart way, what's left, the unrestricted part, becomes more powerful.
So anybody who thinks restrictions are bad and taking your freedom away is just bad and giving you freedom is just good, what world do you live in? Because there's nothing like that going on. The world that you live in is mostly restrictions and mostly intelligent restrictions that you would be completely in favor of if I asked you one at a time. A legal system. Does anybody want a legal system which vastly decreases your freedom? Of the criminals anyway. Maybe not yours. Your freedom would increase because you got rid of the criminals so you could do more stuff in more places, right?
So to increase some freedom there's usually some freedom taken away somewhere else. So I think it's sort of a cartoonish view of the world that don't take my freedom and that's the end of the story. Nobody wants to give away their freedom. Not me, not you. But if you come to me with a proposition that says I've looked at the costs and the benefits and I'd like to propose this. I'd like to take away a little bit of your freedom but I think the net effect will be to give you more freedom in an area that you care about. So can we get away from the weird cartoon idea that we don't routinely restrict our own freedoms voluntarily all the time for good effect?
Now that has nothing to do with mandates, meaning that I'm not telling you mandates are a bad idea or a good idea. Personally I don't like them. I'm opposed to them. But this whole freedom not freedom thing is just a bad argument. The question is whether the cost benefit makes sense. That's the argument. As long as you say nope, freedom taken away, slippery slope, done. What world are you living in really? The entire civilization is the accumulated effect of freedoms taken away from you to give you a pretty good outcome because it increased your ability to stay home in your living room and have a good time any way you want. Otherwise you'd all be hunting and gathering all day.
So again, I'm anti-mandate. I think we're at the point of the pandemic where the mandates just don't make sense anymore. You know, in the balance of freedom versus risk. That's my personal view. But I'd like you to up your arguments if you agree with me.
Let's see, we've got lots going on here. Do you know a Twitter user named Anomaly? Many of you are familiar with him. And I asked this question on a Twitter poll because of something he said to me. He likes to prod me about whether I have second thoughts about my vaccine decision and he seems to delight in the possibility that I might have a bad health outcome from my decision. And so I asked, just before I got in here, I did a Twitter poll to find out how many people would be delighted if I were to die because of my vaccine decision.
And let's see how many people would agree with the notion. I'll just look at it right now. Let's see how the poll came out. Here it is. I asked, how happy would you be to see me die from a COVID vaccination, either to prove how right you were to not get vaxxed or just because you know I have it coming? Five percent. Five percent. Five percent of the people who saw my tweet would be delighted, with an exclamation mark. They'd be delighted if the vaccination killed me or maybe just because I have it coming for whatever the hell else I've done.
So I think Anomaly might be in that five percent. I can't read minds. I can't read minds. So you know I can't be sure, but his actions suggest that he would be delighted to watch me struggle and die because it would make him right.
So I don't know. CNN has an article by Zachary B. Wolf, which is a great name, B. Wolf. Anyway, so here's the good things that are happening according to CNN. Now I don't know if this is going to be part of a strategy for 2022 where CNN will be telling us that Biden is really killing it and things are going well. We'll see if there's more of that coming up. But he says gas prices are falling. Has anybody seen any gas prices falling? As of a few days ago they were at an all-time high where I am. I haven't seen any gas falling. I certainly haven't noticed it.
Oh yeah, Wolf Blitzer is a B. Wolf. All right. So I would say that's one that might be technically true. I'm not going to debate the data, but I haven't noticed. And if it went up a hundred percent and then came down five percent, are we supposed to be happy? I'm not sure how happy I'm supposed to get about that.
All right, here's another one. CNN's opinion piece here by Zachary Wolf. While it's still early, the Omicron variant does not appear to be as dangerous as public health officials initially feared it might be. What's left off of that? This is their optimistic take. But what's left off is that there are actually qualified virologists and experts saying, you know, it's too soon to say, but this might be like a vaccine. That's the good news. The potential good news is that it might be like a vaccine. They don't mention that because that would hurt their narrative more than they want, I suppose.
And then they say that the supply chain kinks are starting to get worked out. You probably still have some problems for Christmas, but that's not going to kill us. And is that true? It feels like it, right? The whole biggest problem in the world, we just gave it some time and then human engineer, human ingenuity basically is just going to work it out.
Now remember I tell you that Adams' Law of Slow-Moving Disasters has a pretty much a perfect track record, meaning that if we can see a disaster forming with enough time we can always adjust. We can always adjust. And I told you that this supply chain thing was sort of an edge case because it did kind of crop up somewhat suddenly. But still we had months and months. Can be a long time for some problems. And so I speculated that this might be just another one of those, something that fits in Adams' Law of Slow-Moving Disasters, which is on day one you can't see how you could solve it, but by day seven a smart person comes up with an idea. By day ten you're testing some ideas. By day fifteen you've got a good idea what works and what doesn't. Maybe you've got a new idea.
So I did predict that this would be an edge case, which is different from predicting which way it would go. And I'm now happy to say that Adams' Law of Slow-Moving Disasters might be even more applicable than I had hoped as a prediction mechanism.
Well, there's a story about Zuckerberg and elections that I'm still trying to sort out because I can't tell if it's a big deal or a little deal. Are you following the story? It just sort of broke recently. So it has something to do with Zuckerberg and his wife giving grants for election reasons, but maybe the grants were given for COVID safety, but maybe once the money was given they got repurposed for canvassers and stuff that might have helped Democrats get elected.
Now I don't know that any of it is illegal, is it? Because I haven't seen that alleged. Has anyone alleged that Zuckerberg himself did anything illegal? I haven't seen that, right? But it would certainly come close to satisfying Trump's claim that the election was rigged because you could call it rigged without it being illegal. Is that a thing? What would be the definition of rigged?
Let's see, define rigged. You'll probably have it in the comments before I can do it. Do you find rigged? Okay, they've got all the wrong definitions. Manipulated or controlled by deceptive or dishonest. So dishonest could be an or. So manipulated or controlled. I would say that would be called rigged, wouldn't you? Am I wrong? No, I don't like to do word thinking so I don't want to change your opinion by the word that I put on it, right?
If in fact you put the word rigged on it that shouldn't change your opinion of what happened. But if Trump were to say this is rigged and the Zuckerberg story turned out to be true, which I think it's too early to know what's true and what's not. We'll still get more about this. It's still fog of war period. But if that panned out and if we could reasonably claim that it made a difference at least in some localities that mattered, wouldn't that be rigged?
And let me ask you this. Has Trump ever claimed that the election was based on something illegal? He probably uses the word fraud. What's the definition of fraud? Does that have to be something illegal by definition or could it be? See, define fraud, because I'm really interested if Trump has said anything that can't be demonstrated to be true. So fraud is defined as wrongful or criminal deception. So fraud would be a non-legal word, but used in the normal way that people speak it would be correct.
Now under the condition that the Zuckerberg story turns out to be true the way it's being laid out, I think it would be legal because I haven't seen any allegations of illegality. Could come later but I haven't seen any. But fraud would be a correct word because it would be wrongful. I mean that would be an opinion but it wouldn't be incorrect. It would just be an opinion based on observation. And rigged, I think you could say rigged and fraudulent. Am I wrong? Would anybody disagree with just how the words are defined?
I think Trump's in actually pretty safe territory because if he keeps on his, let's say the MyPillow approach that there was some kind of a direct changing of votes, I don't know that he's going to look good with that. That would be a bad way to enter an election. But if he entered the election saying look, we could argue all day about what did happen that can't be audited. Let's agree we don't know. We don't have any way to check because there's a lot of parts of the election that can't be audited by their nature, mostly the electronic parts. And he could come out and say look, no matter what you think about illegal activities we can prove for sure, listen this is hypothetical based on the Zuckerberg story panning out, we can say for sure that there was fraud and that it was rigged and that would actually just be technically an accurate statement based on reporting. Interesting, isn't it?
So I don't know if that gives him a path to get back into the presidency without as much friction as he could, but Trump likes friction so he'll probably go for the most provocative way.
All right, here's a story that you hate and I love. It's about the trans swimmer who was breaking all the female records for swimming in college. Now you hate it because it's ruining women's sports, which it is. It is definitely ruining women's sports. Definitely bad for women or women who are born women, I guess, if you want to be woke about it. But everything about this story makes me laugh for all the wrong reasons.
Here's the part that I love more than life itself. So there was an interview with some of the players on the team and here's the actual quotes from one of the players who remained anonymous for obvious reasons. Quote, this is one of the women on the team. Pretty much everyone individually has spoken to our coaches about not liking this. Our coach just really likes winning. He just really likes winning. He's like most coaches I think. Secretly everyone just knows it's the wrong thing to do. The female Penn swimmer said during a phone interview. And then she goes on, quote, when the whole team is together we have to be like, oh my gosh go Leah, that's great, you're amazing. It's very fake, she added.
I don't know, I could talk more about this but it's so funny that it's hard for me to empathize with the fact that they're real losers in the story, right? The people who trained for these, trained to be on the team and you know maybe it'll hurt them in some way in the future. So I do feel bad for them but I love the fact that this newly female swimmer is not only beating the records but by beating them by like half a minute. One of his swimming races he won by half a minute. That's not even close. That is so ridiculous that this whole thing is just hilarious.
Now here's what I like about it. I guess that wokeness is eating itself. The reason that there's a women's team at all is because women said hey that's not fair and they were right. It wasn't fair at all. And so they got some fairness and then the trans people said hey that's not fair and then they went to get some fairness of their own. And then the people who got that fairness in the first place, the women, say hey we want to keep our fairness. We don't want to give up some fairness to you. And so the wokeness is eating itself and it's bad for women no doubt about it but it's good for this trans athlete.
So I would say the number of people who won and the number of people who lost were roughly even. One woman lost the top spot and one trans athlete, also a woman according to the new rules, won. So there's one person having a better day and one person having a worse day. That's what sports is all about. Sports is not about just winning. It's about losing with grace. It's about being a good sport. Are these women being good sports and taking their loss with grace? No they're not actually. They are because according to this when the whole team is together they're clapping and saying you're amazing Leah. Anyway, just the whole thing makes me laugh.
I saw a review in the New York Times about Yoko Ono and her role in the Beatles based on this news special, this documentary about the Beatles and it's called Get Back because the name of the show and it's terrific. You know I said before I'm about two-thirds through it. I just love it. It's just mind-blowingly fun if you're a fan or even a student of the Beatles. I'm more of a, I think I'm a fan and a student trying to learn what works and what doesn't.
And here's what the New York Times said about Yoko and the Beatles Get Back. Yoko Ono is always there. First it's unnerving then dazzling as if she is staging a marathon performance piece protesting the cult of male artistic genius. And that's actually pretty close to the take I had when I was watching it. Now I saw a number of people say what did Yoko do? If you watch the show she's just sort of sitting there minding her own business. I mean she's sitting right in the circle so she's shoulder to shoulder with Lennon as he's trying to create music and trying to work but she's not doing much. I mean she's not throwing in her opinion.
Kirby Carpe Dunked Him says in five years the WNBA will finally be watchable. It'll be all men. Not nice, Carpe. Very unwoke. I disapprove so strongly of your sporting preferences. But here back to Yoko. As a person who creates things for a living let me give you some advice. How much do you think I could have created if my wife and or girlfriend were sitting right next to me while I was doing it? Do you have any idea how much of a pressure that would be? Any idea?
So here's the problem. The point of having a spouse is that you're putting them first, right? I mean that's sort of baked into the whole deal of a spouse. If you take the person that you put first into a situation where it's a collaborative situation you're done. You're done. Because John can't say anything that he knows in advance will cause him a problem at home. And if he goes home and Yoko says you know John I like that one thing you did today but I like that other thing a little bit less, does John say no this is my thing and I will completely ignore your opinion, the most important person in my life whose existence is so important to me I don't want you more than an inch away from my body at any time? Do you think he can say no to Yoko? Well yes I mean he could say no but he's going to be very strongly influenced by not only what she does but what she might be thinking. Try to create something under that environment. Good luck.
So Yoko had the freedom to be in on this. Do you think she should have had less freedom and the world would have been a better place? Nobody knows. Now let me defend John Lennon and Yoko. Let me say as clearly as possible it was their marriage. If they decided that that worked for them and the cost of that was maybe the Beatles breaking up but they knew it and they made that choice, good for them. The world does not have some right to Beatles music or something, right? But he has a right to have whatever relationship he wants with the wife and she has the same. So I definitely do not find fault, not even a little bit, with what John Lennon and Yoko did. None. I find no fault. It was their life. They can do what they want and the rest of the Beatles just have to deal with it.
But I can guarantee it hurts their creativity because I can't even imagine, I just saw your word imagine combined I guess that's not a coincidence. Yeah I can't even imagine that they could be as effective with her in the room as with her not in the room. I can't even imagine.
So here's what peak pandemic looks like. You know everything starts out well-meaning and we're all confused in the first fog of war but as we work things out you start getting more and more reasonable and now your policies and things make more sense. You know we're not washing our groceries that are being delivered. We're not going crazy anymore. We're not wearing gloves everywhere. So you get smarter and smarter as time goes by. But then I think there's this point where you start getting stupid again.
Here's our current situation. Number one, the attenuated, meaning weakened, Omicron virus. It appears to act like a natural vaccine and there's some important people saying that now and it's probably, maybe almost certainly, the only way to end the pandemic would be an attenuated virus. Now experts are saying that's the only thing that stopped the Spanish flu was a variant that overcompeted and it wasn't as bad. So while we have this Omicron that looks like the only way out of the pandemic, at the same time the experts are talking about how we can stop that variant in its tracks with vaccines that we would have to take presumably forever. Those two things shouldn't be happening at the same time. Or at the very least the people making the vaccinations should be saying we're doing this just in case. Just in case we find out something we didn't know about Omicron. But if they're saying we're going balls to the wall to stop the Omicron, they need to be stopped. That would be basically criminal negligence. I mean that would be one of the worst things that ever happened in the history of humanity if they're going to stop the thing that there's a very good chance is our only way out. It's our only way out and they're going to try to stop it. That's really happening. I'm not even making that up.
Now the part that's in question of course is whether the Omicron really would be like a vaccination and I realize I'm being too optimistic but it's starting to look that way every day. Starting to look that way. There's a new study that says it's a retrospective study so not the high quality kind but it says that asthma might reduce your COVID risk by a lot. So too allergies and eczema. So if you've got eczema, allergies or asthma, and let me tell you how lucky I am. All three. You suckers. A lot of people don't have any of these things but me, I got all three. So I'm about as safe as you can be from the COVID except for one thing. I don't believe this study is anything but it looks like to me.
However if it's not I would suggest that there's a reason why people with asthma and allergies do better. Do you know the reason? Here's the reason. People with asthma take a COVID medicine every day. One of the things they give you for asthma is this inhaler. A certain kind of inhaler. There are two of them. One's for emergencies and one's for every day. But the everyday one that you do to keep your asthma under control is also what they give you if you have COVID.
Now what is one of the biggest things that triggers asthma? Well one is exercise and one is irritants like smoke but another one is allergies. I think allergies are maybe the biggest cause. So if you have allergies there's a good chance your Venn diagram overlaps with asthma. So people with allergies are probably taking asthma meds fairly frequently because it's a trigger. So and then the eczema thing I don't know maybe that's just a general correlation with people who are allergic to stuff because it's like a skin allergy or something. Yeah I'm getting all the medicines parts wrong so don't listen to any of that. Yeah oh prednisone would be also good for COVID I understand.
Anyway so I don't believe this study. It's a retrospective study. Those are a little lower quality than say a randomized kind of thing. But I'd like it to be true. But how can asthma be a comorbidity at the same time that it prevents you from having problems? The official word is still that asthma is a comorbidity, right? If I wanted to get a vaccination ahead of the line I would just say I have asthma and I would go to the front of the line. But apparently asthmatics are safer than you are if that study is right. I don't think it's right.
In other news Corey DeAngelis who's doing an amazing job going after school boards and their silliness tweets today that 27 state school boards associations have at least distanced themselves from the national school boards association. So the whole idea that the school boards should have this much control in our lives is being rejected by 27 states so far. And 18 of those states that are purple I guess, meaning neither red nor blue, have discontinued membership, participation or dues because of the national board's actions.
And do you always worry about the slippery slope? You know I always tell you that I'm less worried about the slippery slope than most people are. This is why. Because the slippery slope created this unintended consequence which might be the greatest boon to homeschooling of all time. By the way how many of you who don't do homeschooling think that homeschooling is one kid sitting at home with one of the parents who has to stay home? How many of you think that's what homeschooling is? Because I don't think many people actually even know what it is, right? Yeah it's pods and top teachers in many cases. Not all of course.
Here's what I think the world needs right now and Corey if you're listening to me or anybody else. I was watching a tweet thread by Joshua Lysak and he was talking about how apparently he must be homeschooling. That was what I got out of it. I guess their class of home schools, their pod or whatever, visits the workplace of the various parents of the different kids so they can see different jobs and you know how different businesses work and stuff. And I thought to myself well that's probably more valuable than just about every class that a kid in public school took today. Probably more valuable than every class they took maybe you know except for reading and writing and stuff. You know some basics. But if that's the sort of thing that you can do in a homeschool, homeschooling really needs some PR.
I would love to see whatever is the smallest package to describe what homeschooling really looks like. Here's my bigger reason for that. I think homeschooling has to be the future. I mean it almost has to be. And but there'll be better versions of it, right? You know homeschooling presumably has gone from crude to fairly sophisticated I would assume, right? Somebody can confirm that. And I would imagine this started out maybe worse than public school on day one on average, not for every person, but probably at this point it has exceeded public schools in every level. Would that be true? Can somebody tell me if you have enough experience with that topic? Would you say that homeschools have already exceeded every level of social and educational safety quality like on everything? Is there anything that a homeschool doesn't do better and unambiguously better than a public school?
Is there anything? Interactions with other kids? Okay that's my next topic. I have a hypothesis that I want to run by the parents here. All right so I'm only talking about people who are parents of kids right now. So if your kid grew up in an earlier time you know just watch the comments on this one. Those of you who currently have a kid who uses social media, so not the young young ones but they use social media, have you found that the obsession with social media has spilled over into the real world where the only thing that a kid can talk about is how many friends they have and what happened with their friends and who's making fun of them and there's actually nothing else that matters to them?
And I think the social media did that and Snapchat in particular. Snapchat makes you only think all day long about how many friends you have following you and what they're saying mostly about you and about other people. Now everything I know about brains and persuasion and hypnosis etc., everything I know about that tells me this and there's no argument on the thing I'm going to say. The thing you focus on the most is what's the most important to you. But not because that's not the reason you focused on it. Sometimes it is of course. You're going to focus more on important things. But social media is an addiction so it forces you to focus on something that's not that important but the focus makes it important.
And the model of social media is friends friends friends friends friends friends. What are your friends saying about you? Friends friends friends friends friends friends. What are your friends saying about you? That's it. Complete obsession. And now here's my question for the current parents. Do you find that when they come home all they can talk about is their real life friends? Friends friends friends and who's talking about them? Just watch the comments for a minute. I want to see if this is really something or just a weird idea.
Yes I'm addicted to social media that is correct. Constantly on their phones is what's causing it but do they also talk non-stop about their friends in the real world? The real world friends. So I'm seeing some yeses but a lot of nos. Some yeses and some nos. Okay. There are pressures them into the cult. Your kids aren't on social media interesting. Nope yes real world. Okay so I'm seeing more people who disagree with my hypothesis or at least they don't observe it happening but I think it is happening because I think it can't not happen. It's just the way your brain is wired. Whatever you focus on just becomes the most important thing. There's no way around that.
So I think that homeschooling is probably the only way you can get social media away from kids and at this point I think social, I think homeschooling is approaching a crisis requirement level. I mean public school is I think a crisis level. You know the school shootings are the canary in the coal mine but it's not just because there's some crazy people who've accessed the guns. It's that the public school is destroying children's lives and some of them are acting out on it.
Let me ask you this. How long is it going to be before one of these smash and grabs happens at the same time that somebody with a high-powered weapon is in the vicinity and they just decide to kill everybody who involved in the smash and grab? That's going to happen isn't it? What do you think? I'm not, I don't hope it happens but if you could take these two trends and put them together, the number of people who have let's say concealed carry, isn't it just purely chance, purely chance that none of the smash and grabs have run into a concealed carry person who is in a bad mood that day? Because the concealed carry person if they see somebody actually get injured, let's say there's a smash and grab and they take out a security guard as part of it, I feel like somebody's going to start shooting at all the people in masks and is going to take out 10 of them. I feel like that's going to happen. No I'm not trying to influence the simulation. I think it's just predictable that if you just combine these two trends eventually they're going to bump. But we don't want anybody to get killed.
PolitiFact is fact-checking a rumor which is apparently untrue that Kamala Harris was on a phone call and once referred to unvaccinated Americans as quote dirty Trump people. Apparently that never happened according to the fact checkers. But I love the fact that PolitiFact has to tell you what the rumor is before they fact check it. Dirty Trump people. Why is that so funny to me? I think it's funny because if you had never heard about the deplorables story you wouldn't have believed it on its face. But we've reached a point where so many things have happened that you didn't think could happen that having a vice president call half, you know 40% of the country or whatever, dirty Trump people was well within the believable realm. I don't think it happened but it was well within the believable realm and that's new.
All right so reality denial is becoming a thing. Not only in the Jesse Smollett case where he just denies reality and said nope nope wasn't a hoax, did not happen, despite all of the evidence that it totally did. And that seems to be more of a thing now that people will deny reality no matter how much reality is sitting on their head. And here's some examples.
So AOC is denying the crime wave. How could you possibly be alive and deny the crime wave? But that's pretty bold. Now she hasn't walked it back and it was plainly ridiculous to deny it but denying things that are right in front of you is sort of a new thing isn't it?
All right here's another one. Climate change doesn't look to be as bad as we once thought. Do you see anybody saying oh thank goodness turns out that whole thing was not as bad as we thought? What I mean by that is apparently for the past 10 years we're not increasing the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere. Still too much according to the experts. That would still raise the temperatures. It would still be lots of climate disruptions say the experts. But could be just as much good as bad. You know we could be growing more while losing a little beachfront. Could end up ahead.
So who's telling you the story that the most current knowledge about climate change is that it looks like we'll be okay? Right that seems to be the actual reality but I think that's being denied by basically everybody who's been climate change alarmists from the beginning. Yeah so you hear people like Michael Shellenberger telling you what's actually true but most of the world is just sort of acting like that's not true. We'll just pretend that's not the case.
By the way Elon Musk came out with a tweet unambiguously in favor of keeping and not closing nuclear power plants. That's Elon Musk, the number one competitor to nuclear power. The number one competitor to nuclear power just told you we have to keep those nuclear power plants. That seems like a big deal because he's pretty good at risk management, right? And if he looked at it and said yeah the risk is worth the reward, well maybe you should listen to that. Maybe you should listen to that.
The other reality denial is I keep hearing from people that say that vaccinations are not slowing the spread and are not keeping people out of hospitals. I'm not going to argue with you on that because anybody who believes that I'm not going to change their mind. But are you aware that zero experts agree? Is there anybody who holds that opinion? Is there anybody who holds the opinion that vaccinations are not slowing the spread and it's not even keeping people out of hospitals or keeping them alive? Does anybody believe that? Because you'd expect you'd have at least one rogue doctor, right? No rogue doctors on this one. I think there are zero rogue doctors saying that vaccinations don't work. They just might not like the side effects or something.
Speaking of rogue doctors, I was pointed to yet another rogue doctor who said that the COVID vaccinations would never have been approved under normal standards for vaccinations. Meaning that the signal or the number of people who had side effects was already well over the number that would stop a normal vaccination or I guess any med trial. And therefore you should not be taking these vaccinations because they have not been tested the same way all other vaccinations have been tested. What do you think of that? What do you think of that rogue, I'm not even going to give you his name, the rogue doctor's opinion that we should not trust the vaccinations because they were not actually, we already know for sure that more people died than we would ever allow a regular vaccination to go forward with. What do you think?
Here's my take. These rogue doctors I have decided have one characteristic that you need to understand. They seem to really really know their topic, number one. So if you think that I'm arguing that something they said is incorrect on some medical or scientific front I'm not doing that at all. I'm telling you that they're bad at reasoning. Real good at medicine but bad at reasoning. This is a perfect example.
Here's how you should reason during a pandemic. Compare the risk of the vaccinations as best you can to the risk of the virus itself and you're done. And you're done. That's it. This rogue doctor is telling us we're all idiots and then he compared what you do in the pandemic to what you do in normal times when you have all the time in the world and millions of people are not potentially dying and he didn't know the difference. He acted as though that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And I have to tell you that he was talking to Brett Weinstein and Brett did not call him on it. He didn't call him on that. I don't know why. I'd love to ask him that question like why you didn't call him on the wrong comparison because that's a really big problem. That's the biggest problem you could ever have. Comparing the wrong things is like the worst analytical problem you could have and he did that. He compared the wrong things.
So let me ask you this question. Suppose you knew, and we don't know this right, this is purely hypothetical. Suppose the vaccination people had told you, and since this didn't happen you don't have to treat this like it's real right. Suppose the vaccine people had said well bad news people we can tell already it's easy to tell that these vaccinations are going to kill tens of thousands of people. Normally we'd hope to keep that under a thousand. We would never approve anything we thought was going to kill more than a thousand people. I'm making up the numbers. These are just made up numbers to give you a sense of the argument. But because it's an emergency and because we think the downside risk is 100 million deaths, again whatever that number is, if they said to you we're going to give you a vaccination but I got to tell you tens of thousands of people are likely to die from this but there's a really high chance we're going to save 100 million. If you're one of the 10,000 it was the wrong decision for you no doubt about it and we won't sugarcoat it. If you're one of the unlucky ones you would have been better off with COVID probably it's just true. But these are not normal times. This is war. You know it's a pandemic. It's a crisis. And in this one situation we offer you this proposition. We can give you something that's way safer than getting the virus and it looks like you're all going to get it. You're all going to get that virus eventually. It'll be way safer than the virus itself but also way more dangerous than any vaccination we've ever given. How would you receive that?
In the comments would you say fair enough you have disclosed exactly all the information. I will now choose to get it or not get it but I'm good with you. That's my only choice. I'll make a choice. What do you think? Fair or no? Because I think that's what happened without the disclosure. I'll give you my current best thinking subject to modification right. So if you come back to me later and say Scott you were wrong about that I'll say yeah I thought it might have been. I thought I might have been.
Here's what I think. I think that these vaccinations we always knew were substantially more dangerous than normal approved medicines of any kind. How many of you would agree with the speculation there? It's just speculation because I don't have data to back that up but would you agree that the experts did know early on it was substantially, maybe even 10 times, you know whatever substantial means to you. I'd say maybe even 10 times more dangerous than an ordinary medicine. And that the proposition is it's still better, way better in terms of overall risk management. Not for an individual and this is important for the crowd right. So it still might be worth it for the crowd and for the nation but for an individual you're going to kill some in some cases yeah. And of course the trade-off is completely unknown because you don't know the long haul. You don't know the long haul of the vaccination. You don't know the long haul of the COVID itself. All of our data is sketchy. Who knows what the variants are going to do to you? Who knows what having these vaccines are going to do to you?
So in the context of all those unknowns if the only thing you were confident of is that the vaccines would kill tens of thousands but probably save a hundred million would you be okay with it? I don't think any of you would be okay with it being forced or mandated but I bet a lot of you would be okay with it as a voluntary thing.
Now I get mocked quite a bit by the anti-vaxxers for choosing to get vaccinated and sometimes I fight back more aggressively because my opinion it's you know my choice not yours everybody's different blah blah. But one of the larger reasons that I decided to get vaccinated was a public good that I could maybe, and again we're all guessing because we don't know for sure, but my best guess is that I could maybe on average would reduce the load on hospitals if I got vaccinated. Now I'm at a certain age where if I die tomorrow I'd be okay with that. I feel like I had a good run. You know I'm reaching the age where you say well you know if it happens now it happens. So very much a big part of my decision was not personal. I felt like it was a World War II join the army situation. Is joining the military good for you individually if you're a soldier? Probably not.
You got duped Cassandra you're an, I'm gonna block you because if you know I got duped Cassandra I'm gonna get rid of you. You put that user in timeout. Yeah you're just an. All right now you could suspect that I got duped and you could be right. I wouldn't even push back on that. But if you say you got duped well you're just an. That's just behavior. That's not an opinion. That's not new information. That's just being an. So go be an like Anomaly. You know you could join his live streams then all the could be in the same place.
All right Ukraine is looking dangerous. So we've got 200,000 Russian troops poised there looking like they're going to invade. I still say they're not going to because it would be suicide not only for the troops because what kind of weapons do you think Ukraine would instantly get if there were ground troops? What kind of air cover would they get? I don't know maybe there's no way to do that if they're outside of NATO but I would not want to be a Russian ground troop entering Ukraine. That seems like a pretty risky thing.
But some people are giving Joe Biden trouble for saying that we would never, he ruled out sending U.S. ground troops to Ukraine. He ruled it out. What do you think of that? Should we ever rule out military options? Some of you say we should not rule it out. I disagree because we rule out all kinds of options. We rule out a chemical attack haven't we? Haven't we ruled out a chemical attack? We have right? Have we ruled out a nuclear strike on the civilian populations in Russia? Well yes I mean unless something happened after this. Yeah the military is all about ruling stuff out. It's the most ordinary thing in the world. But you want to rule out the things that are definitely not going to happen. You don't want to rule out nuclear strikes because they might happen. A nuclear strike might happen. It's rare. We don't want it but it might happen.
But ground troops, what do you think of the odds of ground troops, American ground troops in Ukraine? It's actually zero. I mean nothing's really zero but that's as close as to zero as you can get I think because the public just wouldn't be in favor of it. Just isn't going to happen. So I don't fault Biden for taking that off the table. I think even Trump might have because if we wanted to punish Russia we wouldn't do it that way right? If you have better ways to punish them you would use those. You wouldn't use the bad way. The way that's going to ruin the United States too. So if we had a choice of ruining, of losing Ukraine which would be bad because they're an ally that would be very bad but it's not as bad as losing Ukraine and the United States because that's sort of what would happen if we sent ground troops. I mean the country itself would be so torn apart by that that it would be hard to put us back together. So I don't see ground troops happening but I also don't see Russian ground troops making much of an entry into Ukraine.
I will not be surprised if they enter Ukraine so let me be clear. If they enter Ukraine that won't surprise me at all because he might be just ratcheting up you know see how far you can get. But a full ground invasion where they go and hold territory I doubt it. I doubt it.
All right this is when we should just try to convert Russia to an ally against China and if we're not doing that we're idiots.
Let's see Biden has moved to squeeze Iran more, to tighten the sanctions on Iran. Who does that sound like? Who would tighten sanctions on Iran? Oh yeah Trump. So yet again, yet again you see Biden having to retreat to a Trump position right? Just like most of the important stuff. So there's that.
Tucker Carlson is very worried that the burning Fox News Christmas tree is an attack not just on Christmas but on Christianity itself. To which I say that's sort of a feature of Christianity isn't it? Modern Christianity you know not the old style but modern Christianity has a lot in common with democracy and the way the country is organized. Here's the analogy that I don't think I saw any Christians get upset about a tree that was lit on fire by a homeless person did you? Like I haven't talked to anybody who was actually upset about it. Now if this had been a symbol of a different religion I don't have to name names do you think people would have been militant and upset about it? Well I think so. I think so.
So I would say one of the great things about Christianity is you can burn up our Christmas tree, I'll say ours because I'm sort of on the team even though I'm not a believer, but you can burn up that Christmas tree and next year Christmas tree. It's like the flag. I've never understood people who are being mad at flag burning. I mean you could not like it like viscerally like it doesn't feel good viscerally but do you want a flag that can't be burned? You want to live in that country? You want to live in the country where you can't burn a flag?
Here's the magic thing about the flag. Do you know the national anthem one of the lines is and the flag was still there. That's like the coolest line in the national anthem. And the flag was still there. You can burn the flag and then wake up on July 4th still there right? It's the only thing you can burn. You can just burn it all day long. You can take millions of them you can collect them all up you can collect every flag in the country and burn it and in a month it's right back. It's still there right? It's unburnable. That's its feature. So every time I see one getting burned I go yeah that's my flag. That's my flag. Indestructible. Christianity indestructible. You can burn the Christmas tree. Next Christmas Christmas tree. In fact Fox News is already putting up a replacement presumably with better security. So you can burn it all you want as far as I care.
China has experimented, apparently there's some information that said they experimented with making it rain which you do by flying planes around and spraying some kind of material that will seed the clouds and make it rain. Now they did that allegedly to reduce the pollution before some international games I guess happened there in 2008 and apparently they've been experimenting with this technology. Now this is a known technology right cloud seeding that's been around but also there's talk separately about hacking the ocean. Apparently there are several ways you could modify the ocean to get it to suck more carbon out of the air.
Now that one scares me. The one about making it rain by putting microscopic stuff in the air that is a little less scary to me than anything with the ocean and here's why. I don't believe we'd try it unless we knew that whatever it is we were putting in the air didn't last there forever and we would certainly try it in one location first right? So I don't think you would seed the atmosphere of the planet just to see if it worked. I do think you might seed a city and see what happens you know five years from now. So I do, maybe not a city, maybe you pick something that's less populated but it does seem like something you could test and I would be interested if we can have some certainty about how long stuff stays in the air and what the health impacts if you breathe it and all that stuff are. I think that might be in the realm of testable but you know what's not testable? Messing with the ocean. I don't know if you could test that. Could you? I don't know that there's any reasonable way you'd be happy that you didn't start some chain reaction that ended life on earth. But I do imagine that some of those problems are solvable. A lot of stuff that seemed impossible at one point are possible now. So I wouldn't say that we can't do this and it's certainly on the table but yes we're all scared to death of geoengineering and should be.
Rasmussen says 67 percent of the people they polled support Biden's diplomatic boycott of the Olympics. So two out of three people are in favor of the United States boycotting China for the Olympics. That's encouraging isn't it? And 47 percent say Biden's done a poor job on China.
All right that is about everything I want to talk about today. Went a little long. Didn't mean to. Homeschooling persuasion. Your kids will visit you more often when they grow up. I'll bet that's true. I'll bet that's true. What happens to human behavior when they think they have more protection than they actually do? Well I think you know the answer to that.
And was today the best livestream you've ever seen? Yeah it was. I don't even have to ask. It's obvious. So yeah football helmets was a good example. Football helmets is another example of taking your freedom away but it's the only way you can have football. So we take freedom away all the time. Get moronic juice I don't know what that means. Yes it was the best one ever. You're confident that 98 percent of people who get COVID will survive? Well here's the other good news I forgot to mention. In some places the Omicron has already taken over. So apparently 75 percent of the cases in South Africa are Omicron already. Have you heard of anybody dying of the Omicron yet? Even one? It must be happening right because everything kills somebody but have you heard it yet? Have you heard of one confirmed Omicron death? Even one? It's a little early so it's possible that they're dying like crazy we just don't have the data. It's very possible but I feel like we would have heard it by now right because the news is all about scaring us. So if even one anecdotal report was available you would have seen it. You would have seen it all right but that's this is a little too early. It's possible it's out there we just haven't seen it.
All right that's all for now. I'll talk to you tomorrow.
come to the best thing that's ever happened to you in your whole thing in life it's called coffee with scott adams i think you'll all agree that by the time this is over your life will be better in a whole variety of ways too many to really mention let's fix my cameras there that's better and if you'd like to take it up even to another level and i know that's who you are not only are you smarter than average not only are you sexier than the people around you yeah it's true but you don't settle you don't settle for less than you can have and we're going to go for it all today big old bite and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tanker or stein a canteen joker flask a vessel what kind any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better yeah it's called the simultaneous sip watch it go go oh that's so good well the news is hilarious today um i'll start with the fun stuff uh keith olbermann who has been uh my critic for decades decided to uh come in on me on my fox news christmas tree joke that i tweeted now the joke i i told you the joke yesterday but just so i give you some context i tweeted yesterday i don't know who lit the fox news christmas tree on fire but the two white guys who attacked jesse smullet are still out there somewhere now that got a thousand retweets which is you know big for my size accounts and ten thousand likes so can you conclude that it's funny thousand likes which is high and ten thousand likes apparently people like keith olbermann have not learned that art and humor are subjective no it's really it's true keith it's the first time you're hearing this but it turns out there's no universal objective standard for humor no there isn't and so keith if you don't find something funny but 10 000 people did what do you conclude use your big old brain there keith ten thousand people laughed but you didn't what did you conclude about the humor potential of that thing well keith olbermann concluded it wasn't good because he decided that he would weigh in with this valuable comment on my joke uh referring to the two uh white guys who attacked jesse smallett he retweeted me and said do they write your material too oh i felt that like a dagger through the heart i woke up this day feeling good only to find the keith olbermann does not approve of my commercial humor well so i replied to him and said i didn't know keith olbermann was still alive i stole that from elon musk you probably recognize that one yeah i said i don't know i didn't know keith olbermann was still alive to which twitter user kathy also known as mustang girl three replied only on the outside he's he's only alive on the outside which i laughed about for about 10 minutes he's only alive on the outside i'm still laughing about it well in the uh well i think i'll talk about this later now i'll talk about it now jonathan turley who you should all be following and reading his stuff probably the best writer uh well on a lot of stuff he's one of the best writers he's a great writer but he's also a lawyer and so his takes on things are extra fun to read and he's got this great take on jesse smullett's um defense strategy and i hadn't really kind of seen it this way until he laid it out and i liked it which is that samala is trying for jury nullification meaning he's not even going to convince them about the facts you know he's going to say the facts are all untrue but beyond that he's got nothing because the facts are clearly true there's plenty of evidence for them so instead of doing something normal like oh your evidence is not as good as you thought which would be a normal defense he's basically just putting himself on trial against the world and saying if you don't like the injustice in the world i represent that so he's putting himself as sort of the martyr who represents the injustice against black people in the system in general trying to find at least one juror who says you know he is guilty as hell but i'm still going to say he's not because i don't like the way black people have been treated in this country do you think he's going to get away with that maybe it's not the worst play i've ever seen because how hard would it be to convince one person to just do something that's non-standard probably not that hard so i don't know if he's made enough of a case that he's really the victim in this but it's a it's a bold strategy not one i would have used but i don't know that this would have made sense in any other world we've reached the point where everyone agrees the facts don't matter anymore do you remember when that people argued about that there was a time when i kept saying you know the facts don't really matter and that what uh what you hear about the facts or everything that's never been true never been true never will be true the facts matter sometimes in science you know over time but in any moment the facts are usually lies we can't tell what's true and what's not so the facts don't really rule our existence and never will so i guess this is in a weird way jesse smullett's uh approach the defense is a high awareness defense meaning he understands the world maybe better than most people because he knows the facts won't won't be relevant and i think he's trying to make them certainly not relevant by painting a you know creating a framework in which you're judging the system itself you're not even judging jesse now imagine that you're on the you're on the jury and you do have sympathies in that direction do you think that jesse smullet should i go to jail for staging a hate crime hoax that inconvenienced law enforcement but not so much other people well most of you do think so because it's clearly a crime i mean there's a reason it's a crime they don't just make crimes the crime for no reason but imagine you're on the jury and you didn't like the police would you care that the police did extra work no no not if you didn't like the police you wouldn't care at all and you would say you know all he did was a joke it was a hoax you know so what so he gets away with a hoax it ruined his career ruined his reputation he's already paid he's already paid the price do you see how easy it would be to rationalize voting not guilty you could get there so fast so i think jonathan turley is kind of on to something that the this mullet defense might be a lot stronger than you think even though it has nothing to do with whether he's guilty so the the the mind-boggling thing is that he's not even going to deal with the question of whether he's guilty i mean he says he's not guilty and it's not a hoax but he can't prove it and he can't he can't even hurt the evidence against against his case anyway in more interesting news over in saudi arabia there's a camel beauty pageant and uh 40 camels were disqualified for receiving botox injections and other cosmetic enhancements now i didn't mention what the other cosmetic enhancements were but i'm assuming hump enhancement surgery because there are some camels that have really no fault of their own but just naturally small humps and they do get teased by the other camels the other camels will be like hey flat back hey flatback and a lot of camels will say you know i'm just going to get the hump enhancement surgery but apparently that will disqualify you from the beauty pageant in saudi arabia must control myself do not make culturally insensitive joke you must move on to the next topic okay got it that was close i almost didn't get out of that without getting canceled make your own jokes at home that has nothing to do with me you are culturally insensitive i am not um let me give you an argument that sounds like i'm disagreeing with you but i'm not can you handle that i'm going to give you some nuance all of you binaries please leave anybody who can't handle the idea that some argument has more than two positions just go away now leave now because i'm going to be confusing you if anybody doesn't get that things can be complicated here's the here's the thing i've been noodling on which is that one of the big things that people say against mandates and you must understand i'm against mandates because the next thing i say could be misjudged as being pro-mandate everybody okay with that i'm i'm completely opposed to mandates completely but the next thing i'm going to say is going to sound like i'm on the other side can you handle that of course you can you're not only sexy but you're open-minded and and beautiful in a lot of ways so i'm going to trust you with this it goes like this most of the good things we have in society are because we restricted freedom i'll just let that sit there for a moment most of what's good in society happened because of restrictions on freedom yes or no do you need an explanation of that well let me give you an example did we win world war ii because of a volunteer army i don't know maybe we could have but we didn't um do you like the fact that criminals can't do anything they want do you do you like a world in which criminals are at least most of the time sent to jail or there's a police force to keep people from doing stuff taking their freedom away how about the freedom to do um to make a business deal and then just break it well we have courts that will make you pay for that right so everything about capitalism is a restriction on freedom that if you restrict it in a smart way what's left the unrestricted part becomes more powerful so anybody who thinks restrictions are bad and taking your freedom away is just bad and giving you freedom is just good what world do you live in because there's nothing like that going on the world that you live in is mostly restrictions and mostly intelligent restrictions that you would be completely in favor of if i asked you one at a time okay a legal system does anybody want a legal system which vastly you know decreases your freedom of the criminals anyway maybe not yours your freedom would increase because you got rid of the criminals so you could do more stuff in more places right so to increase some freedom there's usually some freedom taken away somewhere else so i think it's sort of a cartoonish view of the world that don't take my freedom and that's the end of the story nobody wants to give away their freedom not me not you but if you come to me with a proposition that says i've looked at the costs and the benefits and i'd like to propose this i'd like to take away a little bit of your freedom but i think i think the net effect will be to give you more freedom in an area that you care about so can we get away from the weird cartoon idea that we don't routinely restrict our own freedoms voluntarily all the time for good effect now that has nothing to do with mandates meaning that i'm not telling you mandates are a bad idea or a good idea personally i don't like them i'm opposed to them but this this whole freedom not freedom thing is just a bad argument the question is whether the cost benefit makes sense that's the argument is as long as you say nope freedom taken away slippery slope done what world are you living in really entire the entire civilization is the accumulated effect of freedoms taken away from you to give you a pretty good outcome because it increased your ability to you know stay home in your living room and have a good time any way you are otherwise you'd all you'd be hunting and gathering all day so again i'm anti-mandate i think we're at the point of the pandemic where the mandates just don't make sense anymore you know in the balance of freedom versus versus risk that's my personal view but i'd like you to up your arguments if you agree with me um let's see we've got lots going on here do you know a uh twitter user named anomaly many of you are familiar with them and uh i uh i asked this question on a twitter poll because of something he said to me he likes to prod me about whether i am second thoughts about my vaccine decision and he seems to delight in the possibility that i might have a bad health outcome from my decision and so i asked just before i got in here i did a twitter poll to find out how many people would be delighted if i were to die because of my vaccine decision and let's see how many people would agree with the notion i'll just look at it right now let's see how the poll came out here it is i asked how happy would you be to see me die from a coven vaccination either to prove how right you were to not get vast or just because you know i have it coming uh five percent five percent five percent of the people who saw my tweet would be delighted with an exclamation mark they'd be delighted if the vaccination killed me uh or maybe just because i have it coming for whatever the hell else i've done so um i think anomaly might be in that five percent i can't read minds i can't read minds so uh you know i can't be sure but his actions suggest that he would be delighted to watch me struggle and die because it would make him right so i don't know cnn has a an article by zachary b wolf which is a great name b wolf anyway um so here's here's the the good things that are happening according to cnn now i don't know if this is going to be part of a strategy for 2022 where cnn will be telling us that biden is really killing it and things are going well we'll see if there's more of that coming up but he says gas prices are falling has anybody seen any gas prices falling uh as of a few days ago they were at an all-time high where where i am i haven't seen any gas falling i certainly haven't noticed it oh yeah wolf blitzer is a is a be wolf all right so i would say that's one that might be technically true i'm not gonna you know debate the data but i haven't noticed and and if it went up a hundred percent and then came down five percent are we supposed to be happy i'm not sure how happy i'm supposed to get about that all right here's another one cnn's opinion piece here by zachary wolfe uh while it's still early the omicron variant does not appear to be as dangerous as public health officials initially feared it might be what's left off of that this is their optimistic take but what's left off is that there are actually qualified virologists and experts saying you know it's too soon to say but this might be like a vaccine that's the good news the the potential good news is that it might be like a vaccine they don't mention that because that would that would hurt their narrative more than they want i suppose and then they say that the supply chain kinks are starting to get worked out you probably still some problems for christmas but that that's not going to kill us and um is that true it feels like it right the whole biggest problem in the world we just gave us some time and then human engineer human ingenuity basically is just going to work it out now remember i tell you that the adam's law of slow-moving disasters has a pretty much a perfect track record meaning that if we can see a disaster forming with enough time we can always adjust we can always adjust and i told you that this supply chain thing was sort of an edge case because it did kind of crop up somewhat suddenly but still we had months and months can be a long time for some problems and so i speculated that this might be just another one of those something that fits in the adam's law of slow-moving disasters which is on day one you can't see how you could solve it but by day seven a smart person comes up with an idea by day 10 you're testing some ideas you know by day 15 you got a good idea what works and what doesn't maybe you've got a new idea so um so i did predict that this would be an edge case which is different from predicting which way it would go and i'm now happy to say that the the adam's law of slow-moving disasters might be even more applicable than i had hoped as a prediction mechanism well there's a story about uh zuckerberg and elections that i'm still trying to sort out because i can't tell if it's a big deal or a little deal are you following the story just sort of broke recently so it has something to do with zuckerberg and his wife uh giving grants for election reasons but maybe the grants were given for coven's safety but maybe once the money was given they got repurposed for canvassers and stuff that might have helped democrats get elected now i don't know that any of it is illegal is it because i haven't seen that alleged as anybody has anyone alleged that zuckerberg himself did anything illegal i haven't seen that right but it would certainly come close to satisfying trump's claim that the election was rigged because you could call it rigged without it being illegal is that a thing what would be the definition of rigged let's see define rigged you'll you'll probably have it in the comments before i can do it do you find rigged um rigged okay they've got all the wrong definitions manipulated or controlled by deceptive or dishonest so dishonest could be an or so manipulated or controlled i i would say that would be called the rigged wouldn't you am i wrong no i don't like to do word thinking so i don't want to change your opinion by the word that i put on it right if in fact you put the word rigged on it that shouldn't change your opinion of what happened but if trump were to say this is rigged and the zuckerberg story turned out to be true which i think it's too early to know what's true and what's not we'll still we'll get more about this it's still fog of war period but if that panned down and if we could reasonably claim that it made a difference at least in some localities that mattered wouldn't that be rigged and let me ask you this has trump ever claimed that the election was based on something illegal he probably uses the word fraud what's the definition of fraud does that have to be something illegal by definition or could it be see define fraud because i'm really interested if trump has said anything that can't be demonstrated to be true so fraud is defined as wrongful or criminal deception so fraud would be a non-legal word but used in the in the normal way that people speak it would be correct now under the condition that the zuckerberg story turns out to be true the way it's being laid out i think it would be legal because i haven't seen any allegations of illegality could come later but i haven't seen any but fraud would be a correct word because it would be wrongful i mean that would be an opinion but it wouldn't be incorrect it would just be an opinion based on observation and rigged i think you could say rigged and fraudulent am i wrong would anybody disagree with just how the words are defined i think trump's an actually pretty safe territory because if he keeps on his let's say the the my pillow approach that there was some kind of a direct changing of votes i don't know that he's going to look good with that that that would be a bad way to enter an election but if he entered the election saying look we could argue all day about what did happen that can't be audited let's agree we don't know how we don't have any way to check because there's a lot of a lot of parts of the election that can't be audited by their nature mostly the electronic parts and he could come out and say look no matter what you think about illegal activities we can prove for sure listen this is hypothetical based on the zuckerberg story panning out we can say for sure that there was fraud and that it was rigged and that would actually just be technically an accurate statement based on reporting interesting isn't it so i don't know if that gives him a a path to get back into the presidency without as much friction as he could but trump likes friction so he'll probably go for the go for the most provocative way all right here's a story that you hate and i love it's about the trans swimmer who was breaking all the female records for swimming in college now you hate it because it's ruining women's sports which it is it is definitely ruining women's sports definitely bad for women or women who are born women i guess if you want to be woke about it but everything about this story is it makes me laugh for all the wrong reasons here's the part that i love more than life itself so there was an interview with some of the players on the team and here's the here's the actual quotes from one of the players who remained anonymous for obvious reasons quote this is one of the women on the team pretty much everyone individually has spoken to our coaches about not liking this our coach uh just really likes winning he just really likes winning uh he's like most coaches i think secretly everyone just knows is the wrong thing to do the the female pen swimmer said during a phone interview and then she goes on quote when the whole team is together we have to be like oh my gosh go leah that's great you're amazing it's very fake she added i don't know i could talk more about this but it's so funny that um it's hard for me to like empathize with the fact that they're real losers in the story right the the people who train for these trained to be on the team and you know maybe it'll hurt him in some way in the future so i do feel bad for him but i love the fact that this uh this newly female uh swimmer is uh is not only beating the records but by beating the blood but like half a minute one one of his swimming races he won by half a minute that's not even close that is so ridiculous that it that this whole thing is just hilarious now here's what i like about it i guess that uh wokeness is eating itself the reason that there's a women's team at all is because women said hey that's not fair and they were right it wasn't fair at all and so they got some fairness and then the trans people said hey that's not fair and then they went to get some fairness of their own and then the people who got that fairness in the first place the women say hey we want to keep our fairness we don't want to give up some fairness to you and so the the the wokeness uh is eating itself and it's bad for women no doubt about it but it's it's a good for this trans this trans athlete so i would say the number of people who won and the number of people lost were roughly even one woman lost the top spot and one trans athlete also a woman according to the new rules one so there's one person having a better day and one person having a worse day that's what sports is all about sports is not about just winning it's about losing with grace it's about being a good sport are these women being good sports and taking their loss with grace no they're not actually they are because according to this when the whole team is together they're clapping and saying you're amazing leah anyway just the whole thing makes me laugh um i saw a review in the new york times about yoko ono and her role in the beatles uh based on this news special this the documentary about a documentary about the about the beatles and it's called get back because the name of the the show and it's terrific you know i said before i'm about two-thirds through it i just love it it's like it's just mind-blowingly fun if you if you're a fan or even a student of the beatles i'm more of a i think i'm a fan and a student trying to learn what works and what doesn't and here's what the new york times said about yoko and the beatles get back yoko onu is always there first it's unnerving then dazzling as if she is staging a marathon performance piece protesting the cult of male artistic genius and that's actually pretty close to the take i had when i was watching it now i saw a number of people say what did yoko do if you watch the if you watch the show she's just sort of sitting there minding her own business i mean she's sitting right in the circle so she's you know shoulder to shoulder with lennon as he's trying to create music and trying to work but she's not doing much i mean she's not throwing in her opinion um kirby carpe dunked him says in five years the wnba will finally be watchable it'll be all men not nice carpe very unwoke i disapprove so strongly for your sporting preferences um but here back to yoko um as a person who creates things for a living let me give you some advice how much do you think i could have created if my wife and or girlfriend were sitting right next to me while i was doing it do you have any idea how much of a pressure that would be any idea so here's the problem the point of having a spouse is that you're putting them first right i mean that's that's sort of baked into the whole deal of a spouse if you take the person that you put first into a situation where it's a collaborative situation you're done you're done because john can't say anything that he knows in advance will cause him a problem at home and if he goes home and yoko says you know john i like that one thing you did today but i like that other thing a little bit less does john say no this is my thing and i will completely ignore your opinion the most important person in my life whose existence is so important to me i don't want you more than an inch away from my body at any time do you think he can say no to yoko well yes i mean he could say no but he's going to be very very strongly influenced by not only what she does but what she might be thinking try to create something under that environment good luck so uh yoko had the freedom to be in on this do you think she should have had less freedom and the world would have been a better place nobody knows now let me defend john lennon and yoko all right so let me say as clearly as possible it was their marriage if if they decided that that worked for them and the the cost of that was maybe the beatles breaking up but they knew it and they made that choice good for them the world does not have some right to beatles music or something right but he has a right to have whatever relationship he wants with the wife and she has the same so i definitely do not find fault not even a little bit with what john lennon and yoko did none i find no fault it was their life they can do what they want and the beetles the rest of the beetles just have to do what they want they just have to deal with it but i can guarantee it hurts their creativity because i can't imagine imagine i just saw your word imagine combine i guess that's not a coincidence um yeah i can't even imagine that they could be as effective with her in the room as with her not in the room i can't even imagine so here's what peak pandemic looks like you know everything starts out well-meaning and we're all confused in the first is the fog of war but as we work things out you start getting more and more reasonable and now your your policies and things make more sense you know we're not we're not washing our groceries that are being delivered you know we're not going crazy anymore we're not wearing gloves everywhere so you get smarter and smarter as time goes by but then i think there's this point where you got you start getting stupid again here's our current situation number one the attenuated uh meaning weakened uh omicron virus omicron virus it appears to act like a natural vaccine and there's some important people saying that now and it's probably maybe almost certainly the only way to end the pandemic would be an attenuated virus now experts are saying that's the only thing that stopped the spanish flu was a variant that you know over competed and it wasn't as bad so while we have this omicron that looks like the only way out of the pandemic at the same time the experts are talking about how we can stop that variant in its tracks with vaccines that we would have to take presumably forever those two things shouldn't be happening at the same time or at the very least the people making the vaccinations should be saying we're doing this just in case just in case we find out something we didn't know about omicron but if they're saying we're going balls to the wall to stop the omicron they need to be stopped that would be basically criminal uh negligence i mean that would be one of the worst things that ever happened in the history of humanity if they're going to stop the thing that there's a very good chance is our only way out it's our only way out and they're going to try to stop it that's really happening i'm not even making that up now the part that's in question of course is whether the omicron really would be like a vaccination and i realize i'm being too optimistic but it's starting to look that way every day starting to look that way there's a new study that says it's a retrospective study so not the high quality kind but it says that asthma might reduce your covert risk by a lot so too allergies and eczema so if you've got eczema allergies or asthma and let me tell you how lucky i am all three you suckers a lot of people don't have any of these things but me i got all three so i'm about as safe as you can be from the covet except for one thing i don't believe this study is anything but looks like to me however if it's not i would suggest that there's a reason why people with asthma and allergies do better do you know the reason here's the reason people with asthma take a coven medicine every day one of the things they give you for asthma is uh a coven i'm sorry one of the things i give you for asthma is this inhaler a certain kind of inhaler there are two of them one's for emergencies and ones for every day but the everyday one that you do to keep your asthma under control is also what they give you if you have covet now what is what is one of the biggest things that triggers asthma well one is exercise and one is you know irritants like smoke but another one is allergies i think allergies are maybe the biggest cause so if you have allergies there's a good chance you know your venn diagram overlaps with asthma so people with allergies are probably taking asthma meds fairly frequently because it's a trigger so and then the eczema thing i don't know maybe that's just a general uh correlation with people who are allergic to stuff because it's like a skin allergy or something yeah i'm getting all the medicines parts wrong so don't listen to any of that yeah oh prednisone would be also good for covet i understand anyway so i don't believe this this study it's a retrospective study those are a little lower quality than say a randomized kind of thing but uh i'd like it to be true but how can asthma be a comorbidity at the same time that it prevents you from uh having problems the official word is still that asthma is a comorbidity right if i wanted to get a vaccination ahead of the line i would just say i have asthma and i would go to the front of the line but apparently asthmatics are safer than you are if that study is right i don't think it's right in other news corey deangelis who's doing amazing job uh going after school boards and and their silliness tweets today that 27 state school boards associations have at least distanced themselves from the national school boards association so the the whole idea that the school boards should have this much control in our lives is being rejected by 27 states so far and 18 of those states that are uh purple i guess have uh meaning neither red nor blue have discontinued membership participation or dues because of the uh the national board's actions and do you always worry about the slippery slope you know i always tell you that i'm less worried about the slippery slope than most people are this is why because the slippery slope created this unintended consequence which might be the greatest boon to homeschooling of all time by the way how many of you who don't do homeschooling think that homeschooling is one kid sitting at home with one of the parents who has to stay home how many of you think that's what homeschooling is because i don't think i don't think many people actually even know what it is right yeah it's pods and top teachers in in many cases not all of course here's what i think uh the world needs right now and corey if you're listening to me or anybody else i was watching a tweet thread by uh joshua lysak and he was talking about how apparently he must be homeschooling that was what i got out of it uh i guess their class of home schools their pod or whatever visits the workplace of the various parents of the different kids so they can see different jobs and you know how different businesses work and stuff and i thought to myself well that's probably more valuable than just about every class that a kid in public school took today probably more valuable than every class they took maybe you know except for reading and writing and stuff you know some basics but if that's the sort of thing that you can do in a home school homeschooling really needs some pr i would love to see whatever is the smallest package to describe what homeschooling really looks like here's my here's my bigger reason for that i think homeschooling has to be the future i mean it almost has to be and but there'll be better versions of it right you know homeschooling presumably has gone from crude to fairly sophisticated i would assume right somebody can tell can confirm that and i would imagine this started out maybe worse than public school on day one on average not for every person but probably at this point it has exceeded public schools in every level would that be true can somebody tell me if you have enough experience with the with that topic would you say that home schools have already exceeded every level of social and educational safety quality like on everything is there anything that that a homeschool doesn't do better and unambiguously better than a public school is there anything interactions with other kids okay that's my next topic i have a hypothesis that i want to run by the parents here all right so i'm only talking about uh people who are parents of kids right now so if your kid grew up in an earlier time you know just watch the comments on this one those of you who currently have a kid who uses social media so not the young young ones but they use social media have you found that the obsession with social media has spilled over into the real world where the only thing that a kid can talk about is how many friends they have and what happened with their friends and who's and who's making fun of them and there's actually nothing else that matters to them and i think the social media did that and snapchat in particular snapchat makes you only think all day long about how many friends you have following you and what they're saying mostly about you and about other people now everything i know about brains and persuasion and hypnosis etc everything i know about that tells me this and there's no argument on the thing i'm going to say the thing you focus on the most is what's the most important to you but not because that's that's not the reason you focused on it sometimes it is of course you're going to focus more on important things but social media is an addiction so it forces you to focus on something that's not that important but the focus makes it important and the model of social media is friends friends friends friends friends friends what are your friends saying about you friends friends friends friends friends friends what are your friends saying about you that's it complete obsession and now here's my question for the current parents do you find that when they come home all they can talk about is their real life friends friends friends and who's talking about them just watch the comments for a minute i want to see if this is really something or or just a weird idea uh yes i'm addicted to social media that is correct constantly on their phones is what's causing it but do they also talk non-stop about their friends in the real world the real world friends so i'm seeing some yeses but a lot of no's some yeses and some news okay um there are pressures them into the cult your kids aren't on social media interesting nope yes real world okay so i'm saying more people who disagree with my hypothesis or at least they don't observe it happening but i think it is happening because i think it can't not happen it's just the way your brain is wired whatever you focus on just becomes the most important thing there's no way around that so i think that homeschooling is probably the only way you can get social media away from kids and at this point i think social i think homeschooling is approaching a crisis requirement level i mean public school is i think a crisis level you know the school shootings are the canary in the coal mine but it's not just because there's some crazy people who've accessed the guns it's that the public school is destroying children's lives and some of them are you know acting out on it let me ask you this how long is it going to be before one of these smash and grabs happens at the same time that somebody with a high-powered weapon is in the vicinity and they just decide to kill everybody who involved in the smash and grab that's going to happen isn't it what do you think i'm not i don't hope it happens but if you could take these two trends and put them together the number of people who have let's say concealed carry isn't it just purely chance purely chance that none of the smashing grabs have run into a concealed carry person who is in a bad mood that day because the concealed carry person if if they see somebody actually get injured let's say there's a smash and grab and they take out a security guard as part of it i feel like somebody's going to start shooting at all the people in masks and is going to take out 10 of them i feel like that's going gonna happen no i'm not trying to influence the simulation i think it's it's just predictable that if you if you just combine these two trends eventually they're gonna they're gonna bump but we don't want anybody to get killed uh politifact is uh fact-checking uh a rumor which is apparently untrue that kamala harris was on a phone call and once referred to unvaccinated americans as quote dirty trump people apparently that never happened according to the fact checkers but i love the fact that politifact has to tell you what what the rumor is before they fact check it dirty trump people why is that so funny to me i think it's funny because if you had never heard about the deplorable story you wouldn't you wouldn't have believed it on his face but we've reached a point where so many things have happened that you didn't think could happen that having a vice president call half you know 40 of the country or whatever dirty trump people was well within the believable realm i don't think it happened but it was well within the believable realm and that's new all right um so reality denial is becoming a thing not only in the jessie's smollett case where he just denies reality and said nope nope wasn't a hoax did not happen despite all of the evidence that it totally did and that seems to be more of a thing now that people will deny reality no matter how much reality is sitting on their head uh and here's some examples so aoc is denying the crime wave how could you possibly be alive and deny the crime wave but that's pretty bold now she hasn't walked him back and it was it was plainly ridiculous to deny it but denying things that are right in front of you is sort of a new thing isn't it all right um here's another one uh climate change doesn't look to be as bad as we once thought do you see anybody saying oh thank goodness turns out that whole thing was not as bad as we thought what i mean by that is apparently for the past 10 years we're not increasing the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere still too much according to the experts that would still raise the temperatures it would still be lots of climate disruptions say the experts but could be just as much good as bat you know we could be growing more while losing a little beachfront could end up ahead so who's telling you the story that the most current knowledge about climate change is that looks like we'll be okay right that seems to be the actual reality but i think that's being denied by basically everybody who's been you know uh climate change alarmists from the beginning yeah so you hear people like michael schellenberg telling you what's actually true but most of the world is just sort of acting like that's not true we'll just pretend that's not the case by the way elon musk came out with a tweet unambiguously in favor of keeping and not closing um nuclear power plants that's elon musk the the number one competitor to nuclear power the number one competitor to nuclear power just told you we have to keep those nuclear power plants that seems like a big deal because he's pretty good at risk management right and if he looked at him and said yeah the risk is worth the reward well maybe you should listen to that maybe you should listen to that the other reality denial is i keep hearing from people that say that vaccinations are not slowing the spread and are not keeping people in hospitals i'm not going to argue with you on that because anybody who believes that i'm not going to change their mind but are you aware that zero experts agree is there anybody who holds that opinion is there anybody who holds the opinion that vaccinations are not they're not slowing the spread and it's not even keeping people out of hospitals or keeping them alive does anybody believe that because you'd expect you'd have at least one rogue doctor right no rogue doctors on this one i think there are zero rogue doctors saying that vaccinations don't work they just might not like the you know might not like the side effects or something speaking of rogue doctors i was pointed to yet another rogue doctor who said that the the cohen vaccinations would never have been approved under normal standards for vaccinations meaning that the the signal or the number of people who had side effects was already well over the number that would stop a normal vaccination or or i guess any med trial and therefore you should not be taking these vaccinations because they have not been tested the same way all other vaccinations have been tested what do you think of that what do you think of that rogue i'm not even going to give you his name the rogue doctor's opinion that we should not trust the vaccinations because they were not actually we already know for sure that more people died than we would ever allow a regular vaccination to go forward with what do you think here's my take these rogue doctors i have decided have one characteristic that you need to understand they seem to really really know their topic number one so if you think that i'm arguing that something they said is incorrect on some medical or scientific front i'm not doing that at all i'm telling you that they're bad at reasoning real good at medicine but bad at reasoning this is a perfect example here's how you should reason during a pandemic compare the risk of the vaccinations as best you can to the risk of the virus itself and you're done and you're done that's it this rogue doctor is telling us we're all idiots and then he compared what you do in the pandemic to what you do in normal times when you have all the time in the world and millions of people are not potentially dying and he didn't know the difference he acted as though that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do and i i have to tell you that he was talking to brett weinstein and brett did not call him on it he didn't call him on that i don't know why i'd love to ask him that question like why you didn't call him on the wrong comparison because that's a really big problem that's a that's the biggest problem you could ever have comparing the wrong things is like the worst analytical problem you could have and he did that he compared the wrong things so let me ask you this question suppose you knew and we don't know this right this is purely hypothetical suppose the vaccination people had told you and since this didn't happen you don't have to treat this like it's real right suppose the vaccine people have said well uh bad news people we can tell already it's easy to tell that this these vaccinations are going to kill tens of thousands of people normally we'd hope to keep that under a thousand we would never approve anything we thought was going to kill more than a thousand people i'm making up the numbers these are just made up numbers to give you a sense of the argument but because it's an emergency and because we think the downside risk is 100 million deaths again whatever that number is if they said to you we're going to give you a vaccination but i got to tell you tens of thousands of people are likely to die from this but there's a really high chance we're going to save 100 million if you're one of the 10 000 it was the wrong decision for you no doubt about it and we won't we won't sugarcoat it if you're one of the unlucky ones you would have been better off with covered probably it's just true but these are not normal times this is war you know it's a pandemic it's a crisis and in this one situation we offer you this proposition we can give you something that's way safer than getting the virus and it looks like you're all going to get it you're all going to get that virus eventually it'll be way safer than the virus itself but also way more dangerous than any vaccination we've ever given how would you receive that in the comments would you say fair enough you have disclosed exactly all the information i will now choose to get it or not get it but i'm good with you that's my only choice i'll make a choice what do you think fair or no because i think that's what happened without the disclosure i'll give you my current best thinking subject to modification right so if you come back to me later and say scott you were wrong about that i'll say yeah i thought it might have been i thought i might have been here's what i think i think that these vaccinations we always knew were substantially more dangerous than normal approved medicines of any kind how many of you would agree with the speculation there it's just speculation because i don't have data to back that up but would you agree that the experts did know early on it was substantially maybe even 10 times you know whatever substantial means to you i'd say maybe even 10 times more dangerous than an ordinary medicine and that the proposition is it's still better way better in terms of overall risk management not for an individual and this is important for the crowd right so it still might be worth it for the crowd and for the nation but for an individual you're going to kill yourself in some cases yeah and of course the trade-off is completely unknown because you don't know the long haul you don't know the long haul of the vaccination you don't know the long haul of the covent itself all of our data is sketchy who knows what the variants are going to do to you who knows what you know having these vaccines are going to do to you so in the context of all those unknowns if the only thing you were confident of is that the vaccines would kill tens of thousands but probably save a hundred million would you be okay with it i don't think any of you would be okay with it being forced or mandated but i bet a lot of you would be okay with it as a voluntary thing now i get mocked quite a bit uh by the anti-vaxxers for choosing to get vaccinated and sometimes i you know i i fight back more aggressively because my opinion it's you know my choice not yours everybody's different blah blah but one of the larger reasons that i decided to get vaccinated was a public good that i could maybe and again we're all guessing because we don't know for sure but my best guess is that i could maybe on average would reduce the load on hospitals if i got vaccinated now i'm at a certain age where if i die tomorrow i'd be okay with that i feel like i had a good run you know i'm i'm reaching the age where you say well you know if it happens now it happens so very much a big part of my decision was not personal i i felt like it was a world war ii join the army situation is joining the military good for you individually if you're a soldier probably not you got duped cassandra you're an i'm gonna block you because if you know i got duped cassandra i'm gonna get rid of you you put that user in timeout yeah you're just an all right now you could suspect that i got duped and you could be right i wouldn't even push back on that but if you say you got duped well you're just an that's just behavior that's not an opinion that's not new information that's just being an so go be an like uh anomaly you know you could you join his uh join his live streams then all the could be in the same place all right um ukraine is uh looking dangerous so we've got 200 000 russian troops poised there looking like they're going to invade i still say they're not going to because it would be it would be suicide not only for the troops because what kind of weapons do you think ukraine would instantly get if there were ground troops what kind of air cover would they get i don't know maybe there's no way to do that if they're outside of nato but i i would not want to be a russian ground troop entering ukraine that seems like a pretty risky thing but um some people are giving joe biden uh trouble for saying that uh we would never he ruled down sending u.s ground troops to ukraine he ruled it out what do you think of that should we ever rule out military options some of you say we should not rule it out i disagree because we rule out all kinds of options we rule down we rule down a chemical attack haven't we haven't we ruled out a chemical attack we have right have we ruled out um uh a nuclear strike um on the civilian populations uh in russia well yes i mean unless something happened after this yeah the military is all about ruling stuff out it's the most ordinary thing in the world but you want to rule out the things that are definitely not going to happen you don't want to rule out nuclear strikes because they might they might happen a nuclear strike might happen it's know rare we don't want it but it might happen but ground troops what do you think of the odds of ground troops american ground troops and ukraine it's actually zero i mean nothing's really zero but that's as close as to zero as you can get i think because the public just wouldn't be in favor of it just isn't gonna happen so i don't i don't fault uh biden for taking that off the table uh i think even trump might have because if we wanted to punish russia we wouldn't do it that way right if you have better ways to punish them you would use those you wouldn't use the bad way the way that's going to ruin the united states too so if we had a choice of ruining uh of losing ukraine which would be bad because they're an ally uh that would be very bad but it's not as bad as losing ukraine and the united states because that's sort of what would happen if we sent ground troops i mean that the country itself would be so torn apart by that that it would be hard to put us back together so i don't see ground troops happening but i also don't see uh russian ground troops making much of an entry into ukraine i will not be surprised if they enter ukraine so let me be clear if they enter ukraine that won't surprise me at all because he might be just ratcheting up you know see how far you can get but but a full ground invasion where they they go and hold territory i doubt it i doubt it all right um this is when we should just try to convert russia to an ally against china and if we if we're not doing that we're idiots um let's see biden has uh move to to squeeze or iran more to tighten the sanctions on iran who does that sound like who would tighten sanctions on iran oh yeah trump so yet again yet again you see biden having to retreat to a trump position right just like most of the important stuff um so there's that uh tucker carlson uh is very worried that the burning fox news christmas tree is an attack not just on christmas but on christianity itself to which i say that's sort of a feature of christianity isn't it modern christianity you know not not the old style but modern christianity has a lot in common with um democracy and the way the country is organized here's the analogy that um i don't think i saw any christians get upset about a tree that was lit on fire by a homeless person did you like i haven't talked to anybody who was actually upset about it now if this had been a symbol of a different religion i don't have to name names do you think people would have been militant and upset about it well i think so i think so so i would say one of the great things about christianity is you can burn up our crystal i'll say ours because i'm sort of on the team even though i'm not a believer but uh you can burn up that christmas tree and next year christmas tree it's like the flag i've never understood people who are being mad at flag burning i mean you could not like it like viscerally like it doesn't feel good viscerally but do you want a flag that can't be burned you want to live in that country you want to live in the country where you can't burn a flag here's the magic thing about the flag uh do you know the the national anthem one of the lines is and the flag was still there that's like the coolest line in the national anthem and the flag was still there you can burn the flag and then wake up on july 4th still there right it's the only thing you can burn you can just burn it all day long you can take millions of them you can collect them all up you can collect every flag in the country and burn it and in a month it's right back it's still there right it's unburnable that's his feature so every time i see one getting burned i go yeah that's that's my flag that's my flag indestructible christianity indestructible you can burn the you can burn the christmas tree next christmas christmas tree in fact fox news is already putting up a replacement presumably with better better security so you can burn it all you want as far as i care um china is experimented apparently there's some information that said they experimented with making it rain which you do by flying planes around and spraying some kind of material that will see the clouds and make it rain now they did that allegedly to reduce the pollution before some international games i guess happened there in 2008 and apparently they've been experimenting with this technology now this is a known technology right cloud seeding that's been around but also there's talk separately about hacking the ocean apparently there are several ways you could modify the ocean to get it to you know suck more carbon out of the air now that one scares me the the one about um making it rain by putting you know microscopic stuff in the air that is a little less scary to me than anything with the ocean and here's why i don't believe we'd try it unless we knew that whatever it is we were putting in the air didn't last there forever and we would certainly try it in one location first right so i don't think you would like see the atmosphere of the planet just to see if it worked i do think you might see a city and see what happens you know five years from now so i do maybe not a city maybe you pick something that's less populated but it does seem like something you could test and i would be interested if we can have some certainty about how long stuff stays in the air and what the health impacts if you breathe it and all that stuff are i think that might be in the realm of testable but you know what's not testable messing with the ocean i don't know if you could test that could you i don't know that there's any reasonable way you'd be happy that you didn't start some chain reaction that ended life on earth but i do um imagine that some of those problems are solvable a lot of stuff that seemed impossible at one point are possible now so i wouldn't say that we can't do this and it's certainly on the table but yes we're all scared to death of geo engineering and should be rasmussen says 67 percent of the people they polled support biden's diplomatic boycott of the olympics so two out of three people are in favor of the united states boycotting china for the olympics that's encouraging isn't it and 47 percent say uh biden's done a poor job on china all right that is about everything i want to talk about today what a little long didn't mean to um homeschooling persuasion your kids will visit you more often when they grow up i'll bet that's true i'll bet that's true what happens to human behavior when they think they have more protection than they actually do well i think you know the answer to that and uh was was today the best live stream you've ever seen yeah it was i don't even have to ask it's obvious so um yeah football helmets was a good example football helmets is another example of taking your freedom away but it's the only way you can have football so we take freedom away all the time get moronic juice i don't know what that means yes it was the best one ever you're confident that 98 percent of people who covered will survive well here's the other good news i forgot to mention in some places the uh the omicron has already taken over so apparently 75 percent of the cases in south africa are omicron already have you heard of anybody dying of the omicron yet even one it must be happening right because everything kills somebody but have you heard it yet have you heard of one confirmed omicron death even one it's a little early so it's possible that they're dying like crazy we just don't have the data it's very possible but i feel like we would have heard it by now right because the the news is all about scaring us so if even one anecdotal report was available you would have seen it you would have seen it all right but that's this is a little too early it's possible it's out there we just haven't seen it all right that's all for now i'll talk to you tomorrow
come to the best thing that's ever
happened to you in your whole
thing in life it's called
coffee with scott adams i think you'll
all agree that by the time this is over
your life will be better in a whole
variety of ways
too many to really mention
let's fix my cameras there that's better
and if you'd like to take it up even to
another level and i know that's who you
are
not only are you smarter than average
not only are you sexier than the people
around you
yeah it's true
but you don't settle you don't settle
for less than you can have and we're
going to go for it all today big old
bite
and all you need is a cup or a mug or a
glass of tanker or stein a canteen joker
flask a vessel
what kind any kind
fill it with your favorite liquid i like
coffee
and join me now
for the unparalleled pleasure
the dopamine hit of the day the thing
that makes everything better
yeah it's called the simultaneous sip
watch it go go
oh that's so good
well the news is hilarious today
um i'll start with the fun stuff
uh keith olbermann who has been uh
my critic for decades
decided to uh come in on me on my fox
news christmas tree joke that i tweeted
now the joke i i told you the joke
yesterday but just so i give you some
context i tweeted yesterday i don't know
who lit the fox news christmas tree on
fire but the two white guys who attacked
jesse smullet are still out there
somewhere
now that got a thousand retweets which
is you know big for my size accounts and
ten thousand likes
so
can you conclude
that it's funny
thousand likes which is high
and
ten thousand likes
apparently people like keith olbermann
have not learned
that art
and humor
are subjective
no it's really it's true keith
it's the first time you're hearing this
but it turns out there's no universal
objective standard for humor
no there isn't and so keith
if you don't find something funny
but
10 000 people did
what do you conclude
use your big old brain there keith
ten thousand people laughed
but you didn't
what did you conclude about the
humor potential of that thing
well keith olbermann concluded it wasn't
good because he
decided that he would weigh in with this
valuable comment on my joke
uh referring to the
two uh white guys who attacked jesse
smallett he retweeted me and said
do they write your material too
oh i felt that like a dagger through the
heart
i woke up this day feeling good
only to find the keith olbermann does
not approve of my
commercial
humor
well so i replied to him and said
i didn't know keith olbermann was still
alive
i stole that from elon musk you probably
recognize that one
yeah i said i don't know i didn't know
keith olbermann was still alive to which
twitter user kathy also known as mustang
girl three replied
only on the outside
he's
he's only alive on the outside
which i laughed about for about 10
minutes
he's only alive on the outside
i'm still laughing about it
well in the uh
well i think i'll talk about this later
now i'll talk about it now
jonathan turley who you should all be
following and reading his stuff probably
the best writer
uh well on a lot of stuff he's one of
the best writers
he's a great writer but he's also a
lawyer and so his takes on things are
extra fun to read and he's got this
great take on jesse smullett's um
defense strategy
and i hadn't really kind of seen it this
way until he laid it out and i liked it
which is that samala is trying for jury
nullification
meaning he's not even going to convince
them about the facts
you know he's going to say the facts are
all untrue but beyond that he's got
nothing because the facts are clearly
true there's plenty of evidence for them
so instead of
doing something normal like oh your
evidence is not as good as you thought
which would be a normal defense
he's basically just putting himself on
trial against the world
and saying
if you don't like the injustice in the
world i represent that
so he's putting himself as sort of the
martyr who represents the injustice
against black people
in the system
in general
trying to find at least one juror who
says you know
he is guilty as hell
but i'm still going to say
he's not
because i don't like the way black
people have been treated in this country
do you think he's going to get away with
that
maybe
it's not the worst play i've ever seen
because how hard would it be to convince
one person
to just do something that's non-standard
probably not that hard
so i don't know if he's made enough of a
case that he's really the victim in this
but
it's a it's a bold strategy not one i
would have used but i don't know that
this would have made sense in any other
world
we've reached the point where everyone
agrees the facts don't matter anymore
do you remember when that people argued
about that
there was a time when i kept saying you
know the facts
don't really matter
and that what uh
what you hear about the facts or
everything
that's never been true
never been true never will be true the
facts
matter sometimes in science
you know over time but in any moment
the facts are usually lies we can't tell
what's true and what's not
so the facts don't really rule our
existence and never will
so i guess
this is in a weird way jesse smullett's
uh approach the defense
is a high awareness defense
meaning he understands the world
maybe better than most people
because he knows the facts won't
won't be relevant
and i think he's trying to make them
certainly not relevant by painting a you
know creating a framework in which
you're judging the system itself
you're not even judging jesse
now imagine that you're on the
you're on the jury
and you do have sympathies in that
direction
do you think that jesse smullet should i
go to jail
for staging a hate crime hoax that
inconvenienced law enforcement but not
so much
other people
well most of you do think so because
it's clearly a crime i mean there's a
reason it's a crime
they don't just make crimes the crime
for no reason
but imagine you're on the jury and you
didn't like the police would you care
that the police did extra work
no no not if you didn't like the police
you wouldn't care at all
and you would say you know all he did
was a joke it was a hoax
you know so what so he gets away with a
hoax it ruined his career ruined his
reputation he's already paid he's
already paid the price
do you see how easy it would be to
rationalize
voting not guilty
you could get there so fast
so i think jonathan turley is kind of on
to something that the this mullet
defense
might be a lot stronger than you think
even though it has nothing to do with
whether he's guilty
so the the the mind-boggling thing is
that he's not even going to deal with
the question of whether he's guilty i
mean he says he's not guilty and it's
not a hoax but he can't prove it
and he can't he can't even hurt the
evidence against
against his case
anyway in more interesting news over in
saudi arabia
there's a camel beauty pageant
and uh 40 camels were disqualified
for receiving botox injections and other
cosmetic enhancements now i didn't
mention what the other cosmetic
enhancements were
but i'm assuming hump enhancement
surgery
because there are some camels that have
really no fault of their own but just
naturally small humps
and they do get teased by the other
camels the other camels will be like hey
flat back
hey flatback
and a lot of camels will say you know
i'm just going to get the hump
enhancement surgery
but apparently that will disqualify you
from the beauty pageant
in saudi arabia
must
control myself
do not make culturally insensitive joke
you must move on to the next topic
okay
got it
that was close i almost didn't get out
of that
without getting canceled
make your own jokes at home that has
nothing to do with me
you are culturally insensitive i am not
um
let me give you an argument that sounds
like i'm disagreeing with you but i'm
not
can you handle that i'm going to give
you some nuance
all of you binaries please leave
anybody who can't handle the idea that
some argument has more than two
positions just go away now
leave now
because i'm going to be confusing you if
anybody doesn't get that things can be
complicated
here's the here's the thing i've been
noodling on which is that one of the big
things that people say against mandates
and you must understand i'm against
mandates
because the next thing i say
could be misjudged as being pro-mandate
everybody okay with that
i'm i'm completely opposed to mandates
completely
but the next thing i'm going to say is
going to sound like i'm on the other
side can you handle that
of course you can
you're not only sexy but you're
open-minded
and and beautiful in a lot of ways so
i'm going to trust you with this
it goes like this
most of the good things we have in
society
are because we restricted freedom
i'll just let that sit there for a
moment
most of what's good in society
happened because of restrictions on
freedom
yes or no
do you need an explanation of that
well let me give you an example
did we win world war ii because of a
volunteer army
i don't know maybe we could have
but we didn't
um
do you like the fact that criminals
can't do anything they want
do you do you like a world in which
criminals are
at least most of the time
sent to jail or
there's a police force to keep people
from doing stuff
taking their freedom away
how about the freedom to do um to make a
business deal
and then just break it
well we have courts that
will make you pay for that right
so
everything about capitalism is a
restriction on freedom
that if you restrict it in a smart way
what's left the unrestricted part
becomes more powerful
so
anybody who thinks restrictions are bad
and taking your freedom away is just bad
and giving you freedom is just good
what world do you live in because
there's nothing like that going on
the world that you live in is mostly
restrictions
and mostly intelligent restrictions that
you would be completely in favor of
if i asked you one at a time
okay
a legal system
does anybody want a legal system
which vastly you know decreases your
freedom
of the criminals anyway maybe not yours
your freedom would increase
because you got rid of the criminals so
you could do more stuff in more places
right
so to increase
some freedom
there's usually some freedom taken away
somewhere else
so i think it's sort of a cartoonish
view of the world that don't take my
freedom
and that's the end of the story
nobody wants to give away their freedom
not me
not you
but if you come to me with a proposition
that says i've looked at the costs and
the benefits
and i'd like to propose this i'd like to
take away a little bit of your freedom
but i think i think the net effect will
be to give you more freedom
in an area that you care about
so can we get away from the weird
cartoon idea
that we don't routinely restrict our own
freedoms voluntarily all the time
for good effect
now that has nothing to do with mandates
meaning that i'm not telling you
mandates are a bad idea or a good idea
personally i don't like them i'm opposed
to them
but
this this whole freedom not freedom
thing is just a bad argument the
question is whether the cost benefit
makes sense
that's the argument
is as long as you say nope freedom taken
away
slippery slope done
what world are you living in really
entire the entire civilization
is the accumulated effect of freedoms
taken away from you
to give you a pretty good outcome
because it increased your ability to you
know stay home in your living room and
have a good time any way you are
otherwise you'd all you'd be hunting and
gathering all day
so again i'm anti-mandate i think we're
at the point of the pandemic where the
mandates just don't make sense anymore
you know in the balance of freedom
versus
versus risk that's my personal view
but i'd like you to up your arguments if
you agree with me
um
let's see we've got lots going on here
do you know a uh twitter user named
anomaly
many of you are familiar with them
and
uh i uh i asked this question on a
twitter poll because of something he
said to me
he likes to prod me about whether i am
second thoughts about my vaccine
decision
and
he seems to delight
in the possibility that i might have a
bad health outcome
from my
decision and so i asked just before i
got in here i did a twitter poll
to find out how many people would be
delighted if i were to die
because of my vaccine decision
and let's see how many people would
agree with the notion i'll just
look at it right now
let's see how the poll came out
here it is
i asked how happy would you be to see me
die from a coven vaccination either to
prove how right you were to not get vast
or just because you know i have it
coming
uh five percent
five percent five percent of the people
who saw my tweet
would be delighted
with an exclamation mark they'd be
delighted if the vaccination killed me
uh or maybe just because i have it
coming for whatever the hell else i've
done
so um
i think anomaly might be in that five
percent i can't read minds
i can't read minds so
uh you know i can't be sure but his
actions suggest
that he would be delighted to watch me
struggle and die
because it would make him right
so
i don't know
cnn has a an article by zachary b wolf
which is a great name
b wolf
anyway um
so here's here's the the good things
that are happening according to cnn
now i don't know if this is going to be
part of a strategy for 2022
where cnn will be telling us that biden
is really killing it and things are
going well we'll see if there's more of
that coming up but he says gas prices
are falling has anybody seen any gas
prices falling
uh as of a few days ago they were at an
all-time high where where i am i haven't
seen any gas falling i certainly haven't
noticed it
oh yeah wolf blitzer is a
is a be wolf
all right so i would say that's one that
might be technically true i'm not gonna
you know debate the data but i haven't
noticed
and and if it went up a hundred percent
and then came down five percent are we
supposed to be happy
i'm not sure how happy i'm supposed to
get about that
all right here's another one
cnn's opinion piece here by zachary
wolfe
uh while it's still early the omicron
variant does not appear
to be as dangerous as public health
officials initially feared it might be
what's left off of that
this is their optimistic take
but what's left off
is that there are actually qualified
virologists
and experts saying you know it's too
soon to say
but this might be like a vaccine
that's the good news
the the potential good news is that it
might be like a vaccine
they don't mention that because that
would that would hurt their narrative
more than they want i suppose
and then they say that the supply chain
kinks
are starting to get worked out you
probably still some problems for
christmas but that that's not going to
kill us
and
um
is that true
it feels like it right the whole biggest
problem in the world
we just gave us some time and then human
engineer human ingenuity
basically is just going to work it out
now remember i tell you that the adam's
law of slow-moving disasters has a
pretty much a perfect track record
meaning that if we can see a disaster
forming with enough time
we can always adjust
we can always adjust and i told you that
this supply chain thing was sort of an
edge case
because it did kind of crop up somewhat
suddenly
but still we had months
and months can be a long time for some
problems and so i speculated that this
might be just another one of those
something that fits in the adam's law of
slow-moving disasters which is on day
one you can't see how you could solve it
but by day seven
a smart person comes up with an idea
by day 10
you're testing some ideas you know by
day 15
you got a good idea what works and what
doesn't maybe you've got a new idea
so
um
so i did predict
that this would be an edge case which is
different from predicting which way it
would go and i'm now happy to say that
the
the adam's law of slow-moving disasters
might be even more applicable than i had
hoped as a prediction
mechanism
well there's a story about uh
zuckerberg
and elections that i'm still trying to
sort out because i can't tell
if it's a big deal or a little deal are
you following the story just sort of
broke recently so it has something to do
with zuckerberg and his wife uh
giving grants for election reasons
but maybe the grants were given for
coven's safety but maybe once the money
was given they got repurposed for
canvassers and stuff that might have
helped democrats get elected
now i don't know that any of it is
illegal is it because i haven't seen
that alleged
as anybody has anyone alleged that
zuckerberg himself
did anything illegal i haven't seen that
right
but
it would certainly come close to
satisfying trump's claim that the
election was rigged
because you could call it rigged
without it being illegal
is that a thing
what would be the definition of rigged
let's see define rigged you'll you'll
probably have it in the comments before
i can do it
do you find
rigged
um
[Music]
rigged okay they've got all the wrong
definitions
manipulated or controlled by deceptive
or dishonest so dishonest could be an or
so manipulated or controlled
i i would say that would be called the
rigged wouldn't you
am i wrong no i don't like to do word
thinking so i don't want to
change your opinion by the word that i
put on it
right
if in fact you put the word rigged on it
that shouldn't change your opinion of
what happened
but if trump were to say this is rigged
and the
zuckerberg story turned out to be true
which i think it's too early to know
what's true and what's not we'll still
we'll get more about this it's still fog
of war
period
but if that panned down
and if we could reasonably claim that it
made a difference at least in some
localities that mattered
wouldn't that be rigged
and let me ask you this
has trump ever claimed
that the election was based on something
illegal
he probably uses the word fraud what's
the definition of fraud
does that have to be something illegal
by definition
or could it be
see define fraud because i'm really
interested if trump has said anything
that can't be demonstrated to be true
so fraud is defined as wrongful or
criminal deception
so fraud would be
a non-legal word but used in the
in the normal way that people speak
it would be correct now under the
condition that the zuckerberg story
turns out to be
true the way it's being laid out
i think it would be legal
because i haven't seen any allegations
of illegality
could come later but i haven't seen any
but fraud would be a correct word
because it would be wrongful
i mean that would be an opinion but it
wouldn't be incorrect it would just be
an opinion based on observation
and rigged i think you could say rigged
and fraudulent
am i wrong
would anybody disagree with just how the
words are defined
i think trump's an actually pretty safe
territory
because if he keeps on his let's say the
the my pillow
approach that there was some kind of a
direct
changing of votes i don't know that he's
going to look good with that
that that would be a bad way to enter an
election
but
if he entered the election saying
look we could argue all day about what
did happen that can't be audited
let's agree we don't know how we don't
have any way to check because there's a
lot of
a lot of
parts of the election that can't be
audited by their nature mostly the
electronic parts
and
he could come out and say look no matter
what you think about illegal activities
we can prove for sure listen this is
hypothetical based on the zuckerberg
story panning out
we can say for sure that there was fraud
and that it was rigged
and that would actually just be
technically an accurate statement based
on reporting
interesting isn't it
so i don't know if that gives him a
a path to get back into the presidency
without as much friction as he could but
trump likes friction so he'll probably
go for the
go for the most provocative way
all right here's a story that you hate
and i love it's about the trans swimmer
who was breaking all the female records
for swimming
in college
now you hate it because it's ruining
women's sports
which it is
it is definitely ruining women's sports
definitely bad for women or women who
are born women i guess if you want to be
woke about it
but
everything about this story is
it makes me laugh
for all the wrong reasons
here's the part
that i love more than life itself
so there was an interview with some of
the players on the team
and here's the
here's the actual quotes from one of the
players who remained anonymous for
obvious reasons
quote
this is one of the women on the team
pretty much everyone individually has
spoken to our coaches about not liking
this
our coach uh just really likes winning
he just really likes winning
uh he's like most coaches
i think secretly everyone just knows is
the wrong thing to do the the female pen
swimmer said during a phone interview
and then she goes on quote when the
whole team is together we have to be
like oh my gosh go leah that's great
you're amazing it's very fake she added
i don't know i could talk more about
this but it's so funny
that
um
it's hard for me to like empathize with
the fact that they're real losers in the
story right the the people who train for
these
trained to be on the team and you know
maybe it'll hurt him in some way in the
future so i do feel bad for him
but i love the fact that this uh
this newly female uh swimmer
is uh is not only beating the records
but by beating the blood but like half a
minute
one one of his swimming races
he won by half a minute
that's not even close
that is so ridiculous
that it that this whole thing is just
hilarious now here's what i like about
it i guess
that
uh
wokeness is eating itself
the reason that there's a women's team
at all
is because
women said hey that's not fair
and they were right it wasn't fair at
all and so they got some fairness
and then the trans people said hey
that's not fair
and then they went to get some fairness
of their own
and then the people who got that
fairness in the first place the women
say hey we want to keep our fairness we
don't want to give up some fairness to
you
and so the the the wokeness uh is eating
itself
and
it's bad for women no doubt about it
but it's
it's a good for this trans this trans
athlete so i would say the number of
people who won and the number of people
lost were roughly even
one woman lost the top spot
and one trans athlete
also a woman according to the new rules
one
so there's one person having a better
day and one person having a worse day
that's what sports is all about
sports is not about just winning
it's about losing with grace
it's about being a good sport
are these women being good sports and
taking their loss with grace
no they're not
actually they are because according to
this when the whole team is together
they're clapping and saying you're
amazing leah
anyway
just the whole thing makes me laugh
um i saw a review in the new york times
about yoko ono and her role in the
beatles
uh based on this news special this the
documentary about a documentary about
the about the beatles and it's called
get back because the name of the the
show
and it's terrific
you know i said before i'm about
two-thirds through it i just love it
it's like it's just mind-blowingly fun
if you if you're
a fan or even a student of the beatles
i'm more of a
i think i'm a fan and a student
trying to learn what works and what
doesn't
and here's what the new york times said
about yoko
and the beatles get back yoko onu is
always there first it's unnerving
then dazzling as if she is staging a
marathon performance piece protesting
the cult of male artistic genius
and
that's actually pretty close
to the take i had when i was watching it
now i saw a number of people say
what did yoko do
if you watch the if you watch the show
she's just sort of sitting there minding
her own business
i mean she's sitting right in the circle
so she's you know shoulder to shoulder
with lennon as he's
trying to create music and trying to
work
but
she's not doing much i mean she's not
throwing in her opinion
um
kirby carpe dunked him
says in five years the wnba will finally
be watchable it'll be all men
not nice carpe
very unwoke i disapprove so strongly
for your sporting preferences
um
but here back to yoko
um
as a person who creates things for a
living
let me give you some advice
how much do you think i could have
created if my wife and or girlfriend
were sitting right next to me while i
was doing it
do you have any idea
how much of a pressure that would be
any idea
so here's the problem
the point of having a spouse is that
you're putting them first right i mean
that's that's sort of baked into the
whole deal of a spouse
if you take the person that you put
first
into a situation where it's a
collaborative situation
you're done
you're done
because john can't say anything that he
knows in advance will cause him a
problem at home
and if he goes home and yoko says you
know john i like that one thing you did
today but i like that other thing a
little bit less
does john say no this is my thing
and i will completely ignore your
opinion the most important person in my
life
whose
existence is so important to me i don't
want you more than an inch away from my
body at any time
do you think he can say no to yoko
well yes i mean he could say no
but he's going to be very very strongly
influenced by not only what she does
but what she might be thinking
try to create something under that
environment
good luck
so uh yoko had the freedom to be in on
this
do you think she should have had less
freedom
and the world would have been a better
place
nobody knows now let me defend john
lennon and yoko
all right so let me say as clearly as
possible
it was their marriage
if if they decided that that worked for
them
and the the cost of that was maybe the
beatles breaking up
but they knew it
and they made that choice
good for them
the world does not have some right to
beatles music or something right
but he has a right to have whatever
relationship he wants with the wife and
she has the same so
i definitely do not find fault
not even a little bit
with what
john lennon and yoko did
none i find no fault it was their life
they can do what they want and the
beetles the rest of the beetles just
have to do what they want they just have
to deal with it
but
i can guarantee
it hurts their creativity
because i can't imagine
imagine i just saw your word imagine
combine
i guess that's not a coincidence
um
yeah i can't even imagine
that they could be as effective with her
in the room as with her not in the room
i can't even imagine
so here's what peak pandemic looks like
you know everything starts out
well-meaning and
we're all confused in the first is the
fog of war but as we work things out you
start getting more and more reasonable
and now your your policies and things
make more sense you know we're not we're
not washing our groceries that are being
delivered you know we're not going crazy
anymore we're not wearing gloves
everywhere so you get smarter and
smarter as time goes by but then i think
there's this point where you got you
start getting stupid again
here's our current situation
number one the attenuated uh
meaning weakened uh omicron virus
omicron virus it appears to act like a
natural vaccine and there's some
important people saying that now
and it's probably
maybe almost certainly the only way to
end the pandemic
would be an attenuated virus now experts
are saying that's the only thing that
stopped the spanish flu
was a variant that you know over
competed and it wasn't as bad
so while we have this omicron that looks
like the only way out of the
pandemic at the same time
the experts are talking about how we can
stop that variant in its tracks with
vaccines that we would have to take
presumably forever
those two things shouldn't be happening
at the same time
or at the very least the people making
the vaccinations should be saying
we're doing this just in case
just in case we find out something we
didn't know about omicron
but if they're saying we're going balls
to the wall to stop the omicron
they need to be stopped
that would be
basically criminal
uh negligence
i mean that would be one of the worst
things that ever happened in the history
of humanity
if they're going to stop the thing
that there's a very good chance
is our only way out
it's our only way out
and they're going to try to stop it
that's really happening i'm not even
making that up
now the part that's in question of
course is whether the omicron really
would be like a vaccination
and i realize i'm being too optimistic
but it's starting to look that way every
day starting to look that way
there's a new study that says it's a
retrospective study so not the high
quality kind but it says that asthma
might reduce your covert risk by a lot
so too allergies and eczema
so if you've got eczema allergies or
asthma
and
let me tell you how lucky i am
all three
you suckers a lot of people don't have
any of these things but me i got all
three
so i'm about as safe as you can be from
the covet
except for one thing i don't believe
this study is anything but
looks like to me
however if it's not i would
suggest that there's a reason
why people with asthma and allergies do
better
do you know the reason
here's the reason
people with asthma take a coven medicine
every day
one of the things they give you for
asthma
is
uh a coven
i'm sorry one of the things i give you
for asthma is this
inhaler
a certain kind of inhaler there are two
of them one's for emergencies and ones
for every day but the everyday one that
you do to keep your asthma under control
is also what they give you if you have
covet
now what is what is one of the biggest
things that triggers asthma
well one is exercise
and one is you know irritants like smoke
but another one is allergies i think
allergies are maybe the biggest cause
so if you have allergies there's a good
chance you know your venn diagram
overlaps with
asthma
so people with allergies are probably
taking asthma meds fairly frequently
because it's a trigger
so
and then the eczema thing i don't know
maybe that's just a general uh
correlation with people who are allergic
to stuff because it's like a skin
allergy or something
yeah
i'm getting all the medicines parts
wrong so don't listen to any of that
yeah oh prednisone would be
also good for covet i understand
anyway so i don't believe this this
study it's a retrospective study those
are a little lower quality than say a
randomized kind of thing
but uh
i'd like it to be true
but how can asthma be a comorbidity at
the same time that it prevents you from
uh having problems
the official word is still that asthma
is a comorbidity right
if i wanted to get a vaccination ahead
of the line i would just say i have
asthma and i would go to the front of
the line
but apparently asthmatics are safer than
you are
if that study is right i don't think
it's right in other news
corey deangelis who's doing amazing job
uh
going after school boards and and their
silliness
tweets today that 27 state school boards
associations have at least distanced
themselves from the national school
boards association
so the the whole idea that the school
boards should have this much control in
our lives is being rejected by 27 states
so far
and 18 of those states
that are uh purple i guess have uh
meaning neither red nor blue have
discontinued membership
participation or dues because of the uh
the national board's actions
and
do you always worry about the slippery
slope
you know i always tell you that i'm less
worried about the slippery slope than
most people are this is why
because the slippery slope created this
unintended consequence which might be
the greatest boon to homeschooling of
all time
by the way how many of you who don't do
homeschooling
think that homeschooling is one kid
sitting at home with one of the parents
who has to stay home
how many of you think that's what
homeschooling is
because i don't think
i don't think many people actually even
know what it is right
yeah it's pods and top teachers in
in many cases not all of course
here's what i think uh the world needs
right now and corey if you're listening
to me or anybody else
i was watching a tweet thread by uh
joshua lysak
and he was talking about how
apparently he must be homeschooling that
was what i got out of it
uh i guess their class of home schools
their pod or whatever
visits the workplace of the various
parents
of the different kids so they can see
different jobs and you know how
different businesses work and stuff and
i thought to myself well that's probably
more valuable than just about every
class
that a kid in public school took today
probably more valuable than every class
they took maybe you know except for
reading and writing and stuff you know
some basics
but
if that's the sort of thing that you can
do in a home school
homeschooling really needs some pr
i would love to see whatever is the
smallest package
to describe what homeschooling really
looks like
here's my
here's my bigger reason for that i think
homeschooling has to be the future i
mean it almost has to be
and but there'll be better versions of
it right you know homeschooling
presumably has gone from crude
to fairly sophisticated i would assume
right somebody can tell can confirm that
and i would imagine this started out
maybe worse than public school on day
one
on average not for every person
but probably at this point it has
exceeded public schools in every level
would that be true can somebody tell me
if you have enough experience with the
with that topic
would you say that home schools have
already
exceeded every level of
social and educational
safety
quality like on everything
is there anything that that a homeschool
doesn't do better and unambiguously
better than a public school is there
anything
interactions with other kids okay that's
my next topic
i have a hypothesis that i want to run
by the parents here
all right
so i'm only talking about uh people who
are parents of kids right now so if your
kid grew up in an earlier time
you know just watch the comments on this
one
those of you who currently have a kid
who uses social media
so not the young young ones
but they use social media
have you found
that the obsession with social media
has
spilled over into the real world
where the only thing that a kid can talk
about is how many friends they have and
what happened with their friends and
who's and who's making fun of them
and there's actually nothing else that
matters to them
and i think the social media did that
and snapchat in particular
snapchat makes you only think all day
long about how many friends you have
following you
and what they're saying
mostly about you and about other people
now
everything i know about brains and
persuasion and hypnosis etc
everything i know about that tells me
this and there's no argument on the
thing i'm going to say
the thing you focus on the most
is what's the most important to you
but not because
that's that's not the reason you focused
on it
sometimes it is of course you're going
to focus more on important things but
social media is an addiction
so it forces you to focus on something
that's not that important
but the focus makes it important
and the model of social media is
friends friends friends
friends friends friends
what are your friends saying about you
friends friends friends friends friends
friends what are your friends saying
about you that's it
complete obsession
and
now here's my question for the current
parents
do you find that when they come home all
they can talk about is their real life
friends friends friends and who's
talking about them
just watch the comments for a minute i
want to see if this is really something
or or just
a weird idea
uh yes i'm addicted to social media that
is correct
constantly on their phones is what's
causing it but do they also talk
non-stop about their friends in the real
world the real world friends
so i'm seeing some yeses but a lot of
no's
some yeses and some news okay
um
there are pressures them into the cult
your kids aren't on social media
interesting
nope yes real world okay so i'm saying
more people who disagree with my
hypothesis or at least they don't
observe it happening
but i think it is happening because i
think it can't not happen it's just the
way your brain is wired whatever you
focus on just becomes the most important
thing
there's no way around that
so i think that
homeschooling is probably the only way
you can get social media away from kids
and at this point i think social i think
homeschooling is
approaching a crisis
requirement level i mean
public school is i think a crisis level
you know the school shootings are the
canary in the coal mine but it's not
just because there's some crazy people
who've accessed the guns
it's that the public school is
destroying children's lives and some of
them are
you know acting out on it
let me ask you this
how long is it going to be
before one of these smash and grabs
happens at the same time that somebody
with a high-powered weapon
is in the vicinity
and they just decide to kill everybody
who involved in the smash and grab
that's going to happen isn't it
what do you think
i'm not i don't hope it happens
but if you could take these two trends
and put them together
the number of people who have let's say
concealed carry
isn't it just purely chance
purely chance that none of the smashing
grabs have run into a concealed carry
person
who is in a bad mood that day
because the concealed carry person if if
they see somebody actually get injured
let's say there's a smash and grab and
they take out a security guard
as part of it
i feel like somebody's going to start
shooting at all the people in masks and
is going to take out 10 of them
i feel like that's going gonna happen
no i'm not trying to influence the
simulation i think it's it's just
predictable
that if you if you just combine these
two trends eventually they're gonna
they're gonna bump
but we don't want anybody to get
killed
uh politifact is uh fact-checking
uh a rumor which is apparently untrue
that kamala harris was on a phone call
and once referred to unvaccinated
americans as quote
dirty trump people
apparently that never happened according
to the fact checkers but i love the fact
that politifact has to tell you what
what the rumor is before they fact check
it
dirty trump people why is that so funny
to me
i think it's funny because
if you had never heard about the
deplorable story you wouldn't you
wouldn't have believed it on his face
but we've reached a point where
so many things have happened that you
didn't think could happen
that having a vice president call half
you know 40 of the country or whatever
dirty trump people was well within the
believable realm
i don't think it happened
but it was well within the believable
realm
and that's new
all right
um
so reality denial is becoming a thing
not only in the jessie's smollett case
where he just denies reality and said
nope
nope wasn't a hoax did not happen
despite all of the evidence that it
totally did
and
that seems to be more of a thing now
that people will deny reality no matter
how much reality is
sitting on their head
uh and here's some examples
so aoc is denying the crime wave
how could you possibly be alive
and deny the crime wave
but that's pretty bold now she hasn't
walked him back
and it was it was plainly ridiculous to
deny it but denying things that are
right in front of you is sort of a new
thing isn't it
all right um
here's another one uh
climate change doesn't look to be as bad
as we once thought
do you see anybody saying oh
thank goodness
turns out that whole thing was not as
bad as we thought what i mean by that is
apparently for the past 10 years
we're not increasing the amount of
carbon we put in the atmosphere still
too much according to the experts that
would still raise the temperatures it
would still be lots of climate
disruptions say the experts
but
could be just as much good as bat
you know we could be growing more while
losing a little beachfront
could end up ahead
so who's telling you the story
that the most current knowledge about
climate change is that looks like we'll
be okay
right that seems to be the actual
reality
but i think that's being denied by
basically everybody who's been you know
uh climate change alarmists
from the beginning
yeah so you hear people like michael
schellenberg
telling you what's actually true
but most of the world is just sort of
acting like that's not true we'll just
pretend that's not the case
by the way elon musk came out with a
tweet
unambiguously in favor of keeping
and not closing
um nuclear power plants
that's elon musk
the the number one
competitor to nuclear power
the number one competitor
to nuclear power
just told you we have to keep those
nuclear power plants
that seems like a big deal because he's
pretty good at risk management right
and if he looked at him and said yeah
the risk is worth
the reward well maybe you should listen
to that
maybe you should listen to that
the other reality denial is i keep
hearing from people that say that
vaccinations
are not slowing the spread and are not
keeping people in hospitals
i'm not going to argue with you on that
because anybody who believes that i'm
not going to change their mind
but are you aware that zero experts
agree
is there anybody who holds that opinion
is there anybody who holds the opinion
that vaccinations are not they're not
slowing the spread
and it's not even keeping people out of
hospitals or keeping them alive does
anybody believe that
because you'd expect you'd have at least
one rogue doctor right
no rogue doctors on this one
i think there are zero rogue doctors
saying that vaccinations don't work they
just might not like the you know might
not like the side effects or something
speaking of rogue doctors i was
pointed to yet another rogue doctor
who said that the the
cohen vaccinations
would never have been approved
under normal standards for vaccinations
meaning that
the the signal or the number of people
who had side effects was already well
over
the number that would stop a normal
vaccination or
or i guess any med trial
and therefore
you should not be taking these
vaccinations
because they have not been tested the
same way all other vaccinations have
been tested
what do you think of that what do you
think of that rogue i'm not even going
to give you his name the rogue doctor's
opinion
that we should not trust the
vaccinations because they were not
actually we already know for sure
that more people died
than we would ever allow a regular
vaccination to go forward with
what do you think
here's my take
these rogue doctors i have decided have
one characteristic that you need to
understand
they seem to really really know their
topic
number one
so if you think that i'm arguing that
something they said is incorrect on some
medical or scientific front i'm not
doing that
at all
i'm telling you that they're bad at
reasoning
real good at medicine
but bad at reasoning
this is a perfect example
here's how you should reason during a
pandemic
compare the risk of the vaccinations as
best you can
to the risk of the virus itself
and you're done
and you're done
that's it this rogue doctor is telling
us we're all idiots
and then he compared what you do in the
pandemic
to what you do in normal times when you
have all the time in the world and
millions of people are not potentially
dying and he didn't know the difference
he acted as though that was a perfectly
reasonable thing to do
and i i have to tell you that he was
talking to
brett weinstein
and brett did not call him on it he
didn't call him on that
i don't know why i'd love to ask him
that question
like why you didn't call him on the
wrong comparison because that's a really
big problem
that's a that's the biggest problem you
could ever have
comparing the wrong things is like the
worst analytical problem you could have
and he did that
he compared the wrong things
so let me ask you this question
suppose you knew and we don't know this
right this is purely hypothetical
suppose the vaccination people had told
you
and since this didn't happen
you don't have to treat this like it's
real right
suppose the vaccine people have said
well
uh bad news people
we can tell already
it's easy to tell that this these
vaccinations are going to kill tens of
thousands of people
normally we'd hope to keep that under a
thousand
we would never approve anything we
thought was going to kill more than a
thousand people i'm making up the
numbers these are just made up numbers
to give you a sense of the argument
but
because it's an emergency and because we
think the downside risk is 100 million
deaths
again whatever that number is
if they said to you
we're going to give you a vaccination
but i got to tell you tens of thousands
of people are likely to die from this
but
there's a really high chance
we're going to save 100 million
if you're one of the 10 000 it was the
wrong decision for you no doubt about it
and we won't we won't sugarcoat it
if you're one of the unlucky ones
you would have been better off with
covered probably it's just true
but
these are not normal times
this is war
you know it's a pandemic it's a crisis
and in this one situation
we offer you this proposition
we can give you something that's way
safer
than getting the virus and it looks like
you're all going to get it you're all
going to get that virus eventually it'll
be way safer than the virus itself
but also
way more dangerous
than any vaccination we've ever given
how would you receive that
in the comments would you say fair
enough you have disclosed
exactly all the information
i will now choose to get it or not get
it but i'm good with you
that's my only choice
i'll make a choice
what do you think
fair or no
because i think that's what happened
without the disclosure
i'll give you my current best thinking
subject to modification right so if you
come back to me later and say scott you
were wrong about that
i'll say yeah i thought it might have
been
i thought i might have been
here's what i think i think that these
vaccinations we always knew
were substantially
more dangerous than normal approved
medicines of any kind
how many of you would agree with the
speculation there
it's just speculation because i don't
have data to back that up but would you
agree that the experts did know
early on it was substantially maybe even
10 times
you know whatever substantial means to
you i'd say maybe even 10 times more
dangerous than an ordinary medicine
and that the proposition is it's still
better way better
in terms of overall risk management not
for an individual and this is important
for the crowd
right
so it still might be worth it for the
crowd and for the nation
but for an individual you're going to
kill yourself in some cases
yeah and of course the trade-off is
completely unknown because you don't
know the long haul you don't know the
long haul of the vaccination you don't
know the long haul of the covent itself
all of our data is sketchy
who knows what the variants are going to
do to you who knows what you know having
these vaccines are going to do to you so
in the context of all those unknowns
if the only thing you were confident of
is that the vaccines would kill tens of
thousands
but probably save a hundred
million would you be okay with it
i don't think any of you would be okay
with it being forced or mandated
but i bet a lot of you would be okay
with it as a voluntary thing
now
i get mocked quite a bit
uh by the anti-vaxxers for choosing to
get vaccinated
and sometimes i
you know i i fight back more
aggressively because my opinion it's you
know my choice not yours everybody's
different blah blah
but
one of the larger reasons that i decided
to get vaccinated
was a public good
that i could maybe
and again we're all guessing because we
don't know for sure but my best guess
is that i could maybe on average would
reduce the load on hospitals if i got
vaccinated
now i'm at a certain age where if i die
tomorrow
i'd be okay with that
i feel like i had a good run
you know i'm i'm reaching the age where
you say well you know
if it happens now it happens so
very much a big part of my decision was
not personal
i i felt like it was a world war ii
join the army situation
is joining the military good for you
individually if you're a soldier
probably not
you got duped
cassandra you're an i'm gonna
block you
because if you know i got duped
cassandra i'm gonna
get rid of you
you put that user in timeout yeah you're
just an
all right
now you could suspect that i got duped
and you could be right i wouldn't even
push back on that but if you say you got
duped well you're just an
that's just behavior that's not
an opinion
that's not new information that's just
being an
so go be an like uh anomaly you
know you could you join his uh join his
live streams then all the could
be in the same place
all right
um
ukraine is uh
looking dangerous
so we've got 200 000 russian troops
poised there looking like they're going
to invade i still say they're not going
to because it would be it would be
suicide
not only for the troops
because
what kind of weapons do you think
ukraine would instantly get if there
were ground
troops what kind of air cover would they
get
i don't know maybe there's no way to do
that if they're outside of nato
but i i would not want to be a russian
ground troop entering ukraine that seems
like a pretty risky thing
but um some people are giving joe biden
uh
trouble for saying that uh we would
never
he ruled down sending u.s ground troops
to ukraine he ruled it out what do you
think of that
should we ever rule
out military options
some of you say we should not rule it
out
i disagree
because we rule out all kinds of options
we rule down
we rule down a chemical attack
haven't we
haven't we ruled out a chemical attack
we have right
have we ruled out um
uh a nuclear strike
um on the civilian populations uh in
russia
well yes
i mean unless something happened after
this
yeah
the military is all about ruling stuff
out it's the most ordinary thing in the
world but you want to rule out the
things that are definitely not going to
happen
you don't want to rule out nuclear
strikes because they might
they might happen
a nuclear strike might happen it's know
rare we don't want it but it might
happen but ground troops
what do you think of the odds of ground
troops american ground troops and
ukraine it's actually zero
i mean nothing's really zero but that's
as close as to zero as you can get
i think because the public just wouldn't
be in favor of it just isn't gonna
happen
so
i don't i don't fault uh biden for
taking that off the table
uh i think even trump might have
because if we wanted to punish russia we
wouldn't do it that way
right
if you have better ways to punish them
you would use those you wouldn't use the
bad way
the way that's going to ruin the united
states too
so if we had a choice of ruining uh of
losing ukraine which would be bad
because they're an ally
uh that would be very bad but it's not
as bad as losing ukraine and the united
states because that's sort of what would
happen if we sent ground troops i mean
that the country itself would be so torn
apart by that that it would be hard to
put us back together
so i don't see ground troops happening
but i also don't see
uh russian ground troops
making much of an entry into ukraine i
will not be surprised
if they enter ukraine
so let me be clear
if they enter ukraine that won't
surprise me at all because he might be
just ratcheting up you know see how far
you can get but but a full ground
invasion where they they go and hold
territory
i doubt it
i doubt it
all right
um this is when we should just try to
convert russia to an ally against china
and if we if we're not doing that we're
idiots
um
let's see biden has uh move to
to squeeze or iran more to tighten the
sanctions on iran
who does that sound like
who would tighten
sanctions on iran
oh yeah
trump
so yet again
yet again
you see biden having to retreat to a
trump position
right just like
most of the important
stuff
um
so there's that uh tucker carlson uh is
very worried that the burning fox news
christmas tree
is an attack not just on christmas but
on christianity itself
to which i say
that's sort of a feature of christianity
isn't it modern christianity
you know not not the old style but
modern christianity has a lot in common
with
um
democracy and the way the country
is organized here's the analogy
that um
i don't think i saw any christians get
upset
about a tree that was lit on fire by a
homeless person did you
like i haven't talked to anybody who was
actually upset about it
now if this had been a symbol of a
different religion
i don't have to name names
do you think people would have been
militant and upset about it
well i think so i think so
so i would say one of the great things
about christianity is you can burn up
our crystal i'll say ours because i'm
sort of on the team even though i'm not
a believer
but uh
you can burn up that christmas tree
and next year
christmas tree
it's like the flag
i've never understood people who are
being mad at flag burning i mean you
could not like it like viscerally like
it doesn't feel good viscerally
but
do you want a flag that can't be burned
you want to live in that country
you want to live in the country where
you can't burn a flag
here's the magic thing about the flag
uh do you know the
the national anthem one of the lines is
and the flag was still there
that's like the coolest line in the
national anthem
and the flag was still there
you can burn the flag
and then wake up on july 4th
still there
right it's the only thing you can burn
you can just burn it all day long you
can take millions of them you can
collect them all up you can collect
every flag in the country and burn it
and in a month
it's right back
it's still there
right it's unburnable
that's his feature so every time i see
one getting burned i go yeah
that's that's my flag
that's my flag
indestructible
christianity
indestructible
you can burn the you can burn the
christmas tree
next christmas
christmas tree
in fact fox news is already putting up a
replacement
presumably with better better security
so
you can burn it all you want as far as i
care um china is experimented apparently
there's some information that said they
experimented with making it rain
which you do by flying planes around and
spraying some kind of material that will
see the clouds and make it rain now they
did that allegedly
to
reduce the pollution before some
international games i guess happened
there in 2008
and apparently they've been
experimenting with this technology now
this is a known technology right cloud
seeding that's been around
but also there's talk separately about
hacking the ocean apparently there are
several ways you could
modify the ocean
to get it to you know suck more carbon
out of the air now that one scares me
the the one about um
making it rain by putting
you know microscopic stuff in the air
that is a little less scary to me
than anything with the ocean and here's
why
i don't believe we'd try it
unless we knew that whatever it is we
were putting in the air didn't last
there forever
and we would certainly try it in one
location first
right
so i don't think you would like
see the atmosphere of the planet just to
see if it worked
i do think
you might see
a city
and see what happens you know five years
from now
so i do maybe not a city maybe you pick
something that's less populated but it
does seem like something you could test
and i would be interested if we can have
some certainty
about how long stuff stays in the air
and what the health impacts if you
breathe it and all that stuff are i
think that might be in the realm of
testable
but you know what's not testable
messing with the ocean
i don't know if you could test that
could you i don't know that there's any
reasonable way you'd be happy that you
didn't start some chain reaction that
ended life on earth
but i do um imagine that some of those
problems are solvable a lot of stuff
that seemed impossible at one point
are possible now so i wouldn't say that
we can't do this and it's certainly on
the table
but yes we're all scared to death of geo
engineering and should be
rasmussen says 67 percent of the people
they polled
support biden's diplomatic boycott of
the olympics so two out of three people
are in favor of the united states
boycotting china
for the olympics
that's encouraging isn't it and 47
percent say uh
biden's done a poor job on china
all right
that is about everything i want to talk
about today what a little long didn't
mean to
um
homeschooling persuasion your kids will
visit you more often when they grow up
i'll bet that's true
i'll bet that's true
what happens to human behavior when they
think they have more protection than
they actually do
well i think you know the answer to that
and uh was was today the best live
stream you've ever seen yeah it was i
don't even have to ask it's obvious
so
um
yeah football helmets was a good example
football helmets is another example of
taking your freedom away
but it's the only way you can have
football
so we take freedom away all the time
get moronic juice i don't know what that
means
yes it was the best one ever
you're confident that 98 percent of
people who covered will survive well
here's the other good news i forgot to
mention in some places the uh the
omicron has already taken over
so apparently 75 percent of the cases in
south africa are omicron already
have you heard of anybody dying of the
omicron yet
even one
it must be happening right because
everything kills somebody but have you
heard it yet
have you heard of one confirmed omicron
death
even one
it's a little early so it's possible
that they're dying like crazy we just
don't have the data it's very possible
but
i feel like we would have heard it by
now
right
because the the news is all about
scaring us
so if even one anecdotal report
was available
you would have seen it
you would have seen
it all right but that's this is a little
too early it's possible it's out there
we just haven't seen it
all right that's all for now i'll talk
to you tomorrow
