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 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