a claim. That’s nothing.” If only one entity had told us that that stuff was true, and it obviously wasn’t, we might have said, “Oh, but these other entities don’t say it’s true.” But what happened was for the first time in American history, I think, that the people who colluded were all of our, or what we thought were credible organizations.

So you had the fake news saying it was true. You had the intelligence agencies saying it was true. You had the FBI, the DOJ, and the entire Democrat machine saying it was true. I’m talking about the Russia collusion hoax. Now, that’s what I call laundry list persuasion. When you don’t have anything that’s individually persuasive, but you just throw a fire hose of claims and then on top of the fire hose of claims, you have a fire hose of previously credible entities that gave up all their credibility to go all in on it because they were so afraid of Trump.

So I call that laundry list persuasion. So I’ve explained this before that if you say Trump did one thing bad, people would discount it. But if you say he did this and this and this and this and this, people assume there’s truth in there because there’s so much smoke there must be fire. But that’s not the case. That’s just laundry list persuasion. And I guess this book does a good job of showing how screwed we were.

Well, did you know according to the New York Times that when Trump backed off on funding weapons for Ukraine, it didn’t stop our involvement. The CIA took over and they didn’t do the same thing that we were doing, but they didn’t have their funding cut. And the CIA helped Ukraine target the most sensitive Russian places they could attack.

So it looks like the CIA helped Ukraine work smarter not harder. So instead of raw weapons and raw military, the CIA helped them get the stuff that was affordable and would make a big difference on the Russian economy. How many of you are surprised that the CIA just kept doing what they were doing? Of course they did. Of course they did.

Now the indication is that Trump was in favor of that. So as long as it wasn’t obvious what they were doing, he wanted to keep the pressure on Putin.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, there’s not much news happening today. A lot of it looks like a repeat. Every time I turn on X, it’s another claim of another state with another giant fraudulent thing they just discovered. I’m getting tired of it.

But I am worried that there is no solution for California’s debt and that however bad I think it’s going to get in California, it might get worse. Now, I will say that the one thing we have going for us is the Adams law of slow-moving disasters. I hope that the disaster, which is California’s debt problem and fraud problem, I hope that we’ve all known about it long enough that somebody’s figuring out what to do about it. And I don’t know what that would be. It doesn’t look like it’s solvable in any mathematical way that I can understand.

But I would expect that maybe in the next year, maybe two, there’s going to be some shock to the system that’s beyond anything we’ve imagined. Now, I don’t know what that is. It could be maybe we default on debt. I don’t know. Maybe there’s an earthquake. There’s something, but whatever it is, it’s going to have to be big and I don’t know if we’re ready for it.

So it could be, well, I mean, what would happen, for example, if the federal government said, “Here’s the deal. We’re just not going to fund $1.5 trillion worth of stuff. We don’t know exactly how much is fraud and how much isn’t. But we can’t survive unless we stop doing it.” What would happen? Well, in theory, it would also cut a bunch of things we didn’t want to cut, or at least we thought we wouldn’t, but it might be the only way to survive. So we might have to throw a whole bunch of poor people under the bus.

Oh, Hans, you’re so stupid. Of course I’ve researched that. Of course I did. Stop assuming that I didn’t look into my options. Stop it. All right. So no more stupid suggestions.

So I will give you a little bit of a heads up. I talked to my radiologist yesterday. He was working on the day before New Year’s. And it’s all bad news. So the odds of me recovering are essentially zero. So I’ll give you any updates if that changes, but it won’t. So there’s no chance I’ll get my feeling back in my legs. And I’ve got some ongoing heart failure which is making it difficult to breathe sometimes during the day. But at the moment I can breathe and I’m not in any pain.

However you should prepare yourself that January will be probably a month of transition one way or the other. Now, I haven’t made any decisions, but it was all bad news. No good news at all. So I will keep doing this as long as it makes sense because I like doing it. Keeps me busy.

You know what’s weird is that I have much bigger problems than the stuff I’m talking about in the news, but I’m so interested in what’s happening in the world that it’s very engaging. Totally engaging.

So after the show I will continue doing a robots read news comic which I do every day. I try to and I’ll try to make some new comics, Dilbert comics, and I’ll just act like nothing’s happening. I’ll just pretend I have no problems, which is weirder. It’s easier than you think. Then I’ll take some painkillers if I need them. There’s no real limit to what I can take at this point. And I will probably smoke massive amounts of marijuana because it puts me into a stupor. It actually feels kind of good.

In my current situation, if I do a full day’s work, which I plan to do, I allow myself to enter the stupor zone. I mean, yesterday, for example, I was doing work and watching the Warriors game high as a kite. It wasn’t bad. The only thing that’s really bugging me at the moment is the inability to breathe if I get one of these coughing attacks and that could last hours. It could last 8 to 12 hours. So it’s 8 to 12 hours of hell. But it’s not always hell. So but things are changing fast. So I thought I’d give you a little update on that.

Has anybody gotten an update on Victor Davis Hanson? Because I know he had some major surgery, but we don’t know what that was about. I hope he’s doing better than I am. Yep. And I do appreciate all of your thoughts. I will probably write down some closing thoughts today just so I have them just so you can see what I was thinking in my final glide path.

He’s recovering. Good. Good for him.

Well, I will tell you that my interest and my empathy for all of you and for Americans in general is very high. So to my final breath, if there’s anything I can do to make things better for you, I will definitely do it.

All right,