I don't think so. Does it look like there's a correlation versus causation problem? I don't see that.

Are we still in the fog of war phase? Are we in the fog of war where you're not quite sure what's going on? Yes we are. Yes we are still in the I'm not so sure what's going on here phase which is a big flag for fake news.

All right, is it too man bites dog? Is it only covered by lesser known news sites? No. Does a journalist have a grudge? No. Are you still waiting to hear the other side of the story? No.

Does the story give percentages without raw numbers? Does it? What percentage of the pilots are protesting? Do you know that would be the biggest part of the story, right? What percentage of the pilots? Yeah we have percentages of flights. Somebody said 6,000 out of 140,000.

Does it look as though the percentage is being left out of the story or underreported? Yeah so I do think there might be a little bit of playing with the raw numbers versus percentages. The stories I saw didn't seem to do a good job of sorting this out.

Is the story source a serial debunker? No. Is this politically active people? Now is the primary evidence a video? No.

So we do have several flags. There are some flags that would suggest this is fake news. Doesn't mean it is because remember this is just giving you an indication. You can't prove anything with this. But how could it be that Southwest, which does not have a reputation as a big lying company, right? Correct me if I'm wrong. Southwest actually has a pretty good reputation, one of the best, right? Isn't it often one of the best places to work, voted near the top all the time? So do you just, I think it's fair to distrust corporations but wouldn't you say Southwest is a little bit more on the reliable, non-lying side of the equation? Wouldn't you say? I feel yes, right? Which doesn't mean they're not lying in this case but I think reputationally they're a pretty solid company.

So how could it be true simultaneously that Southwest is telling the truth that it's not a pilot action while the pilots are saying oh it's a pilot action, trust me I'm a pilot and this is a pilot action? How could both be true? Well let me tell you what. If nobody has said to Southwest management we're doing this thing, what would Southwest say? If every time they talk to a pilot, hey are you doing this because of the vaccine mandate? And the pilot looked at them and said vaccine mandate? No I'm just taking my personal days that you've allocated. And then Southwest says oh well we heard people are doing this because of the mandate. And the pilot looks at them and says yeah I've heard that too. I think I'll take my personal days. See where I'm going?

I think they're both true. I think that from Southwest's point of view they have not been informed there's an employee action so from their point of view there isn't. Now furthermore they said it's weather. Could it be true that the problem is weather but also true that the problem is the pilots? Yes it can be both. Here's how. Suppose there are enough pilots doing the personal days that it puts a strain on the system but not a strain that they couldn't normally handle except the weather was bad too. It could be that they had two problems. Either one of them they could handle because they've got enough flexibility. So let's say you've got some bad weather in one place but you need to move some pilots around to adjust for the bad weather. You could do it but now they didn't have the flexibility because so many people took personal days.

Do you think that when each pilot went to their supervisor and said I'd like to take a personal day, did all the supervisors immediately coordinate with all the other supervisors to find out if too many people were asking for personal days at the same time? Probably not, right? So don't you think that if management asks the supervisors what's going on they say not much, few people ask for personal days but that's not that unusual. You know, wanted to get it in before Christmas. I feel as though Southwest is maybe giving us a little bit of a weasel answer and that they would certainly be aware that the pilots may be acting in a way that is reducing the number that are available but not so overtly that they're saying we're doing this. And on top of that the bad weather may have taken that little bit of extra cushion they had and removed it.

So could you say the weather is the problem because if the weather had not happened they would still have enough cushion to get things done? Yeah see it's like it's not so clear, is it? So I'm not so sure that the filter works in this case because it's just a murky situation. But I would say there's at least a possibility that both stories are completely true. There is a pilot action and from Southwest's point of view the weather was the problem because they could have handled the pilot action okay without the weather problem. See what I mean? It's sort of like saying COVID had killed you because you've done everything wrong in your life up to that point. You overate, you didn't exercise right. So you've done everything wrong and then the last thing that happens is the COVID. Well likewise it's entirely possible that the last thing that happened was the bad weather but they would have been able to handle it, should you know, if all the other bad things like the pilot actions hadn't happened. Anyway that's just speculation.

Biden is failing on getting us rapid tests. I don't know if Trump would have done better but this is a clear case of Biden failing. I mean I think even his friends would say he's not getting it done on the testing. So that's a gigantic failure for the Biden administration. Gigantic. Now would Trump have done better? I don't know. I don't know but we'll never know.

Ben and Jerry's was defending why it's, I don't know, boycotting someplace. Was it Israel or someplace? And was asked why don't you stop selling your ice cream in Texas because they've got that abortion law and you don't like that. And I don't know if it was Ben or Jerry got really, shall we say, befuddled because they couldn't answer how they can continue to stay in business selling any ice cream at all when everywhere you sell the ice cream, everywhere you sell the ice cream there's somebody doing something you don't like.

And I saw somebody make a comment on Twitter that looked like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm and boy did it. Once you hear that comment it didn't look like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The AP is fact checking this claim. See if you heard this fake news. There's an anti-vaccine website, a study on it. Vietnam. And it says that vaccinated people carry more virus than unvaccinated. Have you ever heard that? Have you ever heard that unvaccinated people carry more, I'm sorry have you ever heard that vaccinated people if they do get infected would carry more of the virus than an unvaccinated person? Has anybody heard that? That because it's not true. Somebody says obviously. Yeah so that's fake news.

Here's what the study actually said. That compared to the original virus, the ones that people are getting these days is the Delta variant and that's far more, far more infection in especially your mouth and nose I think.

How satisfied is Scott Adams with where we are? And now of course not. I ask because I have considered us t