never going to change that opinion. It's good leadership. If you have two choices, slow disaster or fast disaster, good leadership picks the fast one because bad leadership lets you just string it along and do what you were doing. Don't get in trouble. Slow disaster. Oh it wasn't my fault. We did what we could do. Too bad the Taliban did better than we thought. Pulled that band-aid off. Biden did it and he didn't apologize for it and I will always give him credit for that.

Now could we have done a better job of preparing to get our allies out? Probably not. Probably not. You as a military genius believe that if we had done a lot more to get — to protect the people that we wanted to protect and we do want to protect them — if we'd done a lot more to protect them we'd be in better shape. But what would have happened if we had worked really hard to protect the people who were escaping with us? The government would have fallen like right away because you would have sent the signal that you're all doomed. If you start massively deporting the people who helped us the government falls right away and the Taliban just walks in. You didn't have a choice of winning. The moment you think there was a good way out you're just in crazy land. Do you think that there was some good way out and the experts in logistics and military strategy couldn't find it? Really? Do you know that our military is pretty well trained, right? Our military is really, really well trained. Somebody thought of the way to do it and figured out that it wouldn't work. I'm guessing. Now of course I'm speculating as much as you are. Right, could we find out tomorrow that it really was just massive stupidity? Yeah, yeah we could. But I don't have any evidence of that. I see no evidence of failure. And I believe I'm the only one saying this. I don't know if I've heard even one person say anything close to what I'm saying. There's no evidence of failure. Could be very, very, very possible. I'd even give it maybe more than 50 percent chance but we don't see it. It's not in evidence.

Will the Taliban support terrorists setting up camps? I don't know. All the smart people are telling you that the Al-Qaeda and the bad guys are all just going to reconstitute under the Taliban. But does the Taliban want that? Did the Taliban learn nothing? Does the Taliban want us to come back? I feel like the Taliban might do a little self-policing for their own interests. Don't know yet but I wouldn't rule out the fact that the Taliban doesn't want Al-Qaeda there.

Of course the big question is is it Trump's fault or somebody else's? Rasmussen did a poll on that. Found 51 percent think it's Biden's failure, the Afghanistan. And 33 percent think Trump. I think that 33 is sort of a rock bottom for politics. I don't think you can dislodge a third of the public from their opinions no matter what. But apparently Trump is being faulted for believing the Taliban might keep their end of the deal. Did he really believe that or did he just sell it? So we know he sold it. In other words he told people hey you know I think I got a deal with the Taliban. But do you think he believed it? I don't know because I don't think it mattered. Because whether the Taliban were going to keep their end of the deal or not we were still going to bug out right one way or the other. He got the Taliban to say yeah we'll do some things and then they didn't do them. But I don't think it mattered. So was that Trump's fault for believing the Taliban? I would say it's not in evidence what he believed. It's only in evidence what he tried to sell and that might have been a good strategy just to figure out a way to get out of there.

I also think that there's going to be a big question mark about what happens with women in Afghanistan because I don't know that you can put the toothpaste back in the bottle now. They did it once. The Taliban did oppress women once when they were in charge. I just think it's going to be harder. It's going to be harder. And I don't know what that does because remember the Taliban is acting weirdly non-Taliban-y in some ways, right? They said they would respect women's rights within the boundaries of Islam. Who knows what that is. So you know I think the odds are it's a disaster for women but I'm not so sure. I think there's at least some chance that the Taliban is going to change. I mean remember it's been 20 years. Even the Taliban might morph a little bit in 20 years. Don't know.

All right, so those were the things that I wanted to talk about today but I'm going to throw this in. There's a new study by Yale School of Management. They studied which mitigation strategies for the pandemic worked and they studied masks and mask effectiveness. If you haven't seen it yet what do you think they found? Yale School of Management. So let's assume that they know how to do statistics, right? It's Yale. So let's assume it's smart people who did it. What do you think that they determined about mask effectiveness? Go without seeing it what do you think? Pandemic mitigation. Did it help in the pandemic? Masks, 12 percent. They say 12 percent of deaths were avoided. Now 12 percent of deaths — let's see we had over 600,000 deaths so let's say maybe 65,000 deaths were avoided. Was that worth wearing masks? In the comments if it was true. Now of course you have to be skeptical of any kind of science and those who criticize me for not being skeptical of things that agree with me this would be one of those cases. So yes be skeptical of this even though it agrees with me. So that's about what we expected masks to be. 15, 12, you know somewhere in that range.

So if this is true and that's a big if, if it's true I would say that masks were a smart idea that have now reached the end of the trade-off where it's worth doing in my opinion. Saving 12 percent of a thousand deaths a day, maybe not worth it for the lack of freedom that it gives you and the lifestyle change it gives you etc. So I throw that out there for Anomaly my mascot who doesn't believe that that study will be valid