e big news, I love political pranks, especially if they're funny. Now you saw the story about AOC's grandmother down in Puerto Rico, and AOC blamed President Trump for her grandmother still having a sub-optimal situation down there after the disasters in Puerto Rico.

So after AOC complained about her grandmother's situation, Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire, he did a GoFundMe to raise money for her grandmother. So it's funny because Matt Walsh is a right-leaning critic of AOC. So instead of complaining, he just fixes her problem.

Now the reason it's hilarious is because the Republican brand is more about fixing stuff and the Democrat brand is more about complaining about stuff. Now this may be just my own impression, right, but it feels like that. It feels like one is about fixing stuff and one is about complaining about stuff.

So AOC complains about stuff and Matt Walsh fixes it. He just fixes it. Except there's a wrinkle in the plan, which is apparently somebody in AOC's family rejected the money. So the GoFundMe people took it down and took her money away.

So imagine being AOC's grandmother, and she's having a bad time, and then AOC, who's doing great, is complaining about her grandmother having a bad time. And her grandmother is probably thinking, you know, you could probably fix some of this. I'm just saying, you're AOC, I'm your grandmother. You might be able to fix some of my problems if you really applied yourself to it. I feel like she was thinking that. You know, I'm doing some mind reading now.

But then Matt Walsh comes along and fixes her problem. Here's a hundred thousand dollars. It's already pledged, right? People actually put their credit cards in there. They pledged a hundred thousand dollars. So Grandma's problems are fixed.

And then Grandma finds out, and I don't know if this fact is true, but then Grandma finds out that somebody in her family decided to turn it down on her behalf. Well, there's your hundred thousand dollars, Grandma, right down the crapper.

So as political pranks go, this was one of the best. Because number one, it didn't cost him anything because the GoFundMe ended up getting canceled. The Democrats proved that they would shoot themselves in the foot rather than solve a problem. They would rather shoot themselves in the foot than solve a problem. And you've never seen it more cleanly laid out.

Here's my problem. Oh, okay, here's a total solution. Completely done. No ambiguity, nothing's missing. You needed some money, here you go. And then they took it away. I mean, you can't do a prank that works out better than this. Although it's kind of cruel for the grandmother, and I wish she'd gotten her money. I mean, the prank worked. The prank worked just as well whether she got her money or not.

So can she get her money? I mean, it feels like Grandma should get some money out of this. She was part of the show.

All right, so the Republicans had their convention last night, and Trump was the most interesting featured speaker. And we're getting a sense now what the Republicans will be pushing in 2022 and beyond for their main themes. So I'm going to run by you what I think will be their main themes based on what they've said so far, and let's judge them. All right, put your persuasion head on. Persuasion head on. Are these good ideas for Republican political interests?

And it looks like these are the major themes. Number one, Trump said that China is responsible for the virus and should pay 10 trillion dollars in reparations.

Now when Trump says China should pay 10 trillion dollars in reparations, is that good persuasion or bad? Judge his technique. Have I taught you anything? Well, I won't wait for your answer because it's good. It's really good persuasion. Trump is just good at this. You don't realize what good looks like persuasion-wise until he comes back into the headlines. The moment Trump enters the headlines, it's good persuasion again. It's like it's been missing the whole time, and then he comes in and he goes, well, let me show you how to do this again.

All right, you don't say China, we think maybe you owe us something. You don't say I don't know, maybe we should look into this. You don't say I think there are great economic problems caused by China. Hand waving, hand waving. China, China. That's bad persuasion.

Let me show you what good persuasion looks like. China, you owe us 10 trillion dollars. That's good persuasion. All right, the fact that it's a big round number is perfect. It's perfect. You can't forget 10 trillion. How many of you will hear 10 trillion and never forget it for the rest of your life? You probably remember that number for the rest of your life.

Imagine any other number that you were to remember for the rest of your life. Good luck. Good luck coming up with any number like a number that a politician says that you would remember for the rest of your life. I'll bet 9/11. Somebody says yeah, maybe nine justices of the Supreme Court. But basically there's almost no such thing as a number that you remember forever, you know, unless there's like a 9/11 event or something.

So Trump has this amazing ability to just say 10 trillion. Sticks in your head. It's an insanely big number. Feels like it could be in the neighborhood. Like your brain doesn't reject it. Your brain does not say it's too big. It really doesn't. But it's so big.

So here's the magic of Trump's approach. How do you come up with a number that is insanely big and your brain still says yeah, it's probably in the neighborhood, it's pretty close? He took two things that can't fit together and he made them fit together, and then your brain can't let go of it because two things that don't fit together just were made to fit together. You don't forget that.

How do you do that, right? He makes it look easy because you're saying to yourself, I think you're making too big a deal about this. He just threw out a big number. No, no, he's so consistent with the way he does this, right? That's not an accident. It's not just throwing out a big number. This is designed. It's designed in persuasion and designed perfectly.

The other thing that the Republicans are going after hard is critical race theory. Remember, Republicans like an enemy. Everybody likes an enemy in politics, right? But the Republicans, their enemies are going to be China. I give that an A-plus for technique. Critical race theory, that's going to get people to the polls, right? That's going to get people out of their chairs. So they know the things that will get people to stand up.

And certainly within the Republican party, if you say your kids are going to be brainwashed to think they're inferior, that's going to get you to the polls.

All right, the other enemy is Dr. Fauci. Dr. Fauci is the face that the Republicans and Trump in particular, they're going to put Fauci's face on the idea that experts should be trusted in all cases or that the experts are always right. And he's also on the side of the, let's say the overreaction, or maybe to be conservative, say the Republican approach to the pandemic.

What did he call Trump? Trump called Fauci a radical masker. A radical masker. He wants multiple masks, etc.

Now as soon as you heard that Trump said Fauci is a radical masker, you knew that was a keeper, right? Once again, Trump comes up with a phrase. Let's just add it in. He's a radical masker. Now everybody else has been talking about Fauci. Why did it take Trump to come up with a nickname that's certainly going to be the headline today? If it doesn't stick, he's got that gift.

And then of course the Republicans will be going hard against what they would call election fraud. So that looks to be their four big ones: China, critical race theory, Fauci as a stand-in for all bad experts, and then election fraud.

Apparently there was some booing when the Georgia Governor Brian Kemp got up there, and I think the Secretary of State Raffensperger got some booing too. And that is being reported as evidence that Trump has control of the Republican party. What do you think? Does Trump still have control of the Republican Party? Feels like it, because he has control of the public. He has control of so much of the public that the Republican Party pretty much is going to have to give him what he wants unless something changes.

So all the news was about Trump this morning. If you looked at CNN, the entire top part of the news where all the important stuff is, I think it was all Trump stories. And CNN was having a total Trump-gasm this morning. They're like, Trump said what? Oh, Trump gave somebody a nickname. Oh, Trump accused China of 10 trillion. So they're just having this massive serial orgasms over the fact that Trump's in the news again.

One of the big stories was Trump wearing his pants backwards. So on Twitter there are all these pictures of what appear to be Trump wearing his pants backwards. Now I don't believe he wore his pants backwards, let me just say that. But there is a photograph where his pants don't have a zipper. It looks like it was Photoshopped. It looks like somebody just photoshopped the zipper out. And the story was about the wrinkles in his pants and blah blah. But I think it's photoshopped because I don't think he was wearing pants that have no zipper, but that's what the photograph looked like.

Here is a hypothesis that I would need a fact check on. So Twitter user Adam tweeted this at me this morning, and I thought it's worth mentioning. Can somebody give me a fact check on this? And it's an innocent explanation for why Sunday morning voting might have been limited.

Remember when you heard that the Republicans want to limit the voting on Sundays to certain hours, and you said to yourself voter suppression? They're trying to keep the churches from voting or moving their people to vote directly after church. It's a trick to stop the black voters from being effective.

Well, one of the other explanations is, and when you hear this it's going to make you mad that nobody told you this before. Now I think this is true, but do me a fact check because I can't say I'm positive. And it goes like this. That in some places churches are also the polling place. Did you see that coming? The church is also the polling place.

So you can't have the church being a church at exactly the same time and day that the church is a polling place. So it turns out that this change might have at least had something to do with the fact that they don't want to make it hard to go to church. Give me a fact check on that. Is that true? That the real reason for the law was to make sure that you had time to go to church and that they didn't use it as a polling place on Sunday morning when you wanted to use the church for a church? Is that all this was?

Now I never believe anything is all it was, right? So even if there was a perfectly good reason, it might also have an effect on suppressing some votes. So I don't think. Okay, I'm seeing people confirm it. Oh, some John says yes, my polling place is a church. So doesn't it make sense that you should not make it illegal to do polling before 11 a.m. because that's when your churching is? Is that the whole story? I mean, is that actually the whole story? Because I don't know. It doesn't feel like it could be the whole story. It just feels a little too simple.

But did we go this far without that being a headline? Did nobody bring that up until I saw it from a user on Twitter? Like that wasn't on CNN? Nobody on Fox News thought to mention that? Has anybody even heard this before? How do we get this far in the topic that I've talked about in public? I've talked about this topic in public, and yet I heard this fact, or I guess is a fact, this morning. How in the world?

I would consider myself, maybe you can judge me too. If you were to judge all the people in this country in terms of how well informed they are on political stuff, where would you put me? If you've watched me long enough, would you say it's safe to say I'm in the top 10 percent of citizens who are well informed about politics? Would you give me that top 10 percent? Because I feel like if you just pay attention to it and it's part of your job and you do it every day, you're probably the top 10 percent. Now it might be higher, but for the purposes, if I'm in the top 10 percent and I didn't know about this Sunday churches as polling place thing until today, how uninformed are we?

I mean seriously, people. I should be in the upper realm of well-informed people, and I'm not even close. And if you think you're close, maybe you should examine that. Because I do this literally, I guess you could say I do it for a living, at least part of what I do, and I didn't know that. It's like the most basic part of the story, I think. Or it's not true. All right, that's possible. Maybe it's not true, and I still don't know.

How did we get this far into the biggest story in the country, which is are people gaming the elections, and I don't know that basic fact about the Sunday morning voting? How do I not know that by now? I mean seriously.

All right. Twitter is having a little fight over there in Nigeria. So what happened was it looks like the president of Nigeria was blocked on Twitter because he said some things that violated Twitter's rules. And he said some part of his population would be punished for bad behavior. So Twitter blocks the president, and then the president bans Twitter in all of Nigeria. And then Twitter complained in a tweet, of course.

So Twitter's policy tweet said this: "We are deeply concerned by the blocking of Twitter in Nigeria. Access to the free and open internet is an essential human right in modern society. We will work to restore access for all those in Nigeria who rely on Twitter to communicate and connect with the world. Hashtag keep it on."

Do you see any hypocrisy or inconsistency that is highlighted by this story? Well, let me point it out for you. Twitter bans people for speech that they consider over the line of their terms of use, and they consider that entirely appropriate. That Twitter makes the decision of what is allowed and what is not allowed.

Nigeria has adopted Twitter's hypocrisy. That somebody can make decisions about what is allowed and what is not allowed. Because if Twitter can make decisions about what is okay for the public and not okay, why can't others? Was there a constitution or was there some kind of law or natural law that says that Twitter is the only group that gets to decide what is okay and what is not okay for speech? No. Nigeria can do it too.

So if Twitter could make those decisions and Facebook can make those decisions, Nigeria, you can make those decisions, right? And when Nigeria does it, you say whoa, wait a minute, because your decision about what to allow and what not to allow is a bad decision. That's not the issue. The issue is not whether it's a bad decision. The issue is who gets to make it, right?

The decision is not whether Twitter always makes the right decision about who's on and who's out. The question is who gets to make it. Who gets to make it? Nigeria says we get to make it. Do they? Yeah, I guess they do. Twitter says we get to make it. Do they? Yeah, I guess they do. Unless somebody else makes it for them, like in Nigeria.

Now of course I would be in favor of Twitter winning this battle and getting access back to Nigeria. So I'm definitely backing Twitter over Nigeria on this topic. But I love how it highlights the problem with the philosophy, which is if some people can decide what you can see and it's up to them and it's subjective, then other people can do it too. All right, it's either all or none on that subjective censoring.

So I want to say this again because I don't understand why it's not the way it's framed nationally. So apparently the U.S., the Biden administration and the U.S. Department of Justice, they've elevated this ransomware business to similar priority as terrorism. Now what they're doing is making sure that all ransomware reports are reported centrally, and they'll have some kind of a group that will look at it more holistically to get a better idea of who's doing it and how to stop it and all that stuff.

Now compliments. I'll give my compliments to the Biden administration because I'm not a partisan in all things. I'm partisan in some things, I guess everybody is, but I try not to be partisan on certainly any kind of national defense things. And if Trump had done this, I would have said it's the right decision. And Biden's doing it, I'll also say it's the right decision to just make this terrorism.

I will go a little bit further than Biden's administration and say that if we determined that we could find these people, and let's say Russia wasn't willing to pick them up, we should drone them. So if we can find the bad guys, the hackers, and they happen to be in Russian territory, we should kill them where they stand. And we should send copies of the mission to Putin, show them all the video, tell them everything we did, completely transparently after the fact, after we killed them.

So we should kill them and then we should bill Putin. We should send him the bill for killing his citizens. Now that's persuasion. Bad persuasion would be just to kill them on Russian territory because that would be an act of war, right? It's an act of war to kill a Russian citizen on Russian territory, I would think so.

Instead of making it look like an act of war, send them the bill. Send them literally an itemized bill. Say, Putin, this is what you should have done, right? These are your guys. You didn't do it. We're going to kill your people and we're going to give you the bill. And if you don't pay it, we're shutting down all trade. Pay the bill.

Now if your story, Putin, is that these guys don't work for you, then let's keep that story. We'll take care of it for you. We'll send you the bill. You better pay it. All right, that's how I do it. I don't think Biden will do that, but you know, I would not rule out the fact that Biden's a badass on this stuff. I don't know if he's going to be a badass on China. He's got a little China problem. But I do think Biden has at least a chance. We'll give him a chance. We'll see what happens. I think Biden might push pretty hard on Russia. We'll see.

El Salvador made a big move today. So El Salvador's president, he's going to send a bill to his Congress to make Bitcoin legal tender in their country. So El Salvador will make it legal to accept Bitcoin. And I think part of the reason for that is that people living abroad can send remittances back home more easily by Bitcoin.

Now I don't know how many countries it will take or businesses to accept Bitcoin before it makes a big difference to the price, but this feels like a big deal. It did not, however, change the price of Bitcoin. So I thought that Bitcoin might get a little pop on this news, but it actually, last I checked, was down one percent. We'll see if it makes a difference.

Do you know what our system of government has evolved into? You know, I feel sorry for the founders, and it's a good thing that they stay dead, you know, the founders of this country. Because when they came up with the Constitution and they designed our system, I'm not so sure.

Somebody says preach. I did the same with fentanyl. Yeah, maybe so. I put a drone attack on their fentanyl dealers and send them the bill. That's not a bad idea, by the way. The sending the bill part is the persuasion. Because when you send the bill, that's all anybody's going to talk about. If you bill them, there's going to be a physical bill and people are going to look at it and they're going to look at the itemization.

So billing Putin for killing his hackers or billing President Xi for killing their fentanyl dealers changes the frame. It changes it from we attacked your country to we just did you a favor, you owe us. And it's a big deal, I think. Yeah, we'll never do anything like that, but that's the idea of it.

So we have a system in which whoever the leader of our country is, always selected at this point, the leader, well even Congress I would say, they're all selected based on who can game the election system the best. There's plenty of documentation that shows that Biden probably won because the Democrats just did a better job at using the legal system to get a set of rules that favored their outcome. So it didn't really probably have much to do with the voters' preferences. Probably had a lot to do with who gamed the system better.

Now the complaints from the Democrats are that the Republicans are catching up and they're regaming and changing the system so it might favor them. But you do all this work to create a democracy and have these elections, and basically the outcome is determined by the people who make the rules. So the rule makers are the ones who decide who got elected.

But on top of that, when it's all said and done and you've elected your leaders, then the next phase is ignoring the leaders. Because the only person that matters is Joe Manchin. Because as long as things stay really close, you know, if Congress is really close to even, Republicans and Democrats, then the only person who has any power is a person who's willing to sometimes vote on the other side. And that's Joe Manchin.

So Joe Manchin is the only smart person in Congress because he's openly told the world I could vote this way but I could also vote that way. That's all you have to do when you run the country. That's it. Somebody says Kyrsten Sinema maybe, maybe another one. Yeah.

So I don't know what's wrong with everybody else in Congress. All they have to do is sometimes vote for the other team and then you're in charge of the country. But I suppose you need to be more loyal to your party these days. So Manchin is probably paying the price from his own party. But it's a clever move. I would have done the same thing if I were in Congress and I saw this opening the way Manchin does.

I would have said to myself, wait a minute, wait a minute, can I understand this correctly? All I have to do is sometimes vote for the other team and I can actually be running the country? I would take that in a heartbeat. I would be all over that. I would run this country if they give it to me. I mean basically it would be the whole country just handing you the keys and say, could you decide for us because we can't really decide? Joe Manchin can. Can you just make up the decision for us? You know, we don't like all this representative democracy. We'll just let you do it, Joe Manchin.

So I did a little reading up on the problem with meta-analyses. So I've mentioned that the story about ivermectin, the proposed potential therapeutic for COVID, that there is some suggestion that if you do a meta-analysis, which is you sort of sum up all of the imperfect studies, that the imperfections can be sort of smoothed out, if you will. Speaking very approximately here, if you add them all together and treat them as one big study even though they were individually imperfect studies.

And Andres Backhaus, who knows more about the stuff than I do, had mentioned there's some problems with meta-analysis. And I didn't know exactly what they were, but here's the idiot's version. The idiot's version is that if you were to do an analysis of studies, so you're looking at a whole bunch of studies and you're deciding how to add them all together into one big ball, you have a lot of decisions that you make.

I see your comments are garbled and I don't understand all that context, but maybe I should. So the question on the meta-analyses is that if you're looking at which studies to include in your meta-analysis, then it's automatically subjective.

So apparently one of the things you might do is you say we're going to do a meta-analysis of all the studies, but of course we're going to leave out any of the pre-print stuff. So the pre-print stuff is the stuff that hasn't been published in a major publication and peer-reviewed and all that. It's like before that stuff happens. So do you include that? Should you include stuff that's not quite far enough along in the pipeline? Because if you decide not to include it, you might get a different result than if you included it.

There might be other criteria where you say well I'm not going to include a study unless it's at least a certain size, has to have a certain number of people, or is done in a certain place, or they looked at it in a certain way, maybe in the beginning versus later on.

So my point is that the outcome of the meta-analysis is determined by the person who decides what to look at. All right, I see you saying I'm lost. Let me see if I can do this one more time clearly.

If you're going to look at a bunch of individual small studies to kind of take their average direction, if you will, you still get to choose what's in the average. And what you decide to put in there will determine what the average is. So you can say to yourself I'm not going to include this kind of study because it's not the kind that looks good enough. Or you could say let's include everything because the whole point of it is to average out.

So the point is that you think you're doing an analysis but you're not. It's an illusion of analysis. Because the illusion is that there's some kind of objective process going on when nothing like that happened. In fact it was subjective because you chose what you were going to look at, and it was the choosing what you look at that probably determined the result.

Now here's the counter to the counter. If every one of the studies shows a strong effect in the same direction, probably none of this matters, right? So if a hundred percent of the studies showed that, let's take an example. I don't think this is true, but if 100 of the studies showed that ivermectin worked really, really well, it wouldn't matter which one you picked because they'd all be the same. But if that were also true, you wouldn't need a meta-analysis.

So here's what one expert said. The situation where you don't need a meta-analysis is where it's so obvious without one that you don't need to do it. But the moment it's not obvious, the meta-analysis also doesn't work because that's when you put the subjectivity into it.

So the meta-analysis actually is logically illogical, meaning that you either don't need it or it doesn't work. Those are the only two possibilities. You don't need it because it's so clear without it, or if it's murky, it's really subj