watch their brain reboot.

So what you should see, I'll do an impression. All right, so this would be somebody who is not experiencing cognitive dissonance. They still disagree with you but they don't have any cognitive dissonance. It's like, all right, I'll humor you. I'll read it. Blah blah blah blah blah. And they read it and then they would tell you why it's wrong or why they don't believe it or whatever. That would not be cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance would look like this. That's what it would look like. You would see somebody in a state of sort of mental confusion and panic where it would make them temporarily unable to speak. So look for temporarily unable to speak. That's your tell-tale sign of cognitive dissonance. Once you see that in this controlled exercise, you're gonna get closer to seeing the world the way I see it as a trained hypnotist.

Once you're a trained hypnotist you can see people's brains rebooting where before you didn't notice it. You just thought they were pausing to think or something. But once you can recognize it, it changes everything about the way you see the world because you'll see people getting triggered into it, dealing with it, and then coming out of it. And it will be a completely different filter on the world.

All right. We want to talk about, I know you want to talk about, the Barr situation now. So the story is the fake news of the day is that Mueller allegedly wrote a letter to Bob Barr saying that Mueller disagrees with how Barr summarized the report. Now of course the news is all fake because apparently there is no letter in which Mueller said that he disagrees with what Barr said. In other words, there's no suggestion that what Barr said was inaccurate.

The real story, which they don't quite say, at least not in these words, is that the real issue is that the way Bob Barr summarized it left out some texture so that it would be misleading to the public. It wasn't inaccurate, but the public, and the way the press is handling it, mostly the press, the press is handling it in a way that didn't seem true to the underlying stuff. To which I say, what did you expect from a summary?

Now I'm a writer, so maybe this is just glaringly obvious to me because I quite often create summaries of larger bodies of my own work. Now if you create a summary of your own work, which I do on a routine basis as a writer, does the summary capture all the goodness that you would very, very much like everybody to see? Well no. How could a summary be as accurate as the underlying body of information? That's what a summary is. There's no such thing as a summary that has all the details of the original. The original thing. I mean you can imagine some special case where that might be true, but with all of the complexity of the underlying stuff, was there any chance that a summary could capture it as well as the author of all the underlying stuff believes should have been captured? That wasn't a thing.

So if somebody says to you Mueller wrote a letter and he's complaining that there's oxygen in the world, would that be headline news? Because you'd look at yourself and say, well there's always sort of oxygen. I think oxygen is the basic quality of the world. I don't know that that's news, right? It wouldn't be news because it's what everybody knows is the obvious reality you live in. So if somebody says I don't believe that the summary captured all the nuance of the original work, have they said anything? Is that anything? Because we've already seen the underlying work. We don't have to wonder.

So I turned on, you know, I caught this story at the end of yesterday and really paid attention this morning. I woke up and I said, oh I'm gonna dig into this a little bit before my Periscope, and we're gonna find out what's the issue. So I go to CNN and I start clicking on some links to find out what is the problem. What specifically did Mueller say is getting wrong? Not in terms of what Barr said wrong but in terms of how the way Barr said it has allowed the media to misrepresent it, I guess. So I guess the question is what exactly is Mueller complaining about?

So I thought, well that will be obviously in the article, right? If I read an article about this story it's going to tell me what specifically Mueller had a problem with that Barr said wrong or where the media is getting it wrong. I couldn't find it. Did anybody find it? Now it might be there but it seems so hidden in the way that they're covering the story. They're covering it like it's gossip. They're covering it like the details of what it is that they're differing on, if anything, don't really matter. They're covering it like it's a personality against a personality. They're covering it like it's a team sport. They're covering it like it's a he-said-she-said situation. I couldn't even tell what the problem was, and they seem to be deeply trying to manufacture something out of nothing.

Now of course on the other side, you know, so I flip over to Fox News just to see what the other world looks like, and in the other world they're saying there's nothing here, there's nothing here.

Now as far as I can tell, the closest I can get to what the issue is is about the legal technicalities of whether there was something that would qualify as obstruction of justice. There didn't seem to be any disagreement on the fact that Trump was not involved in any Russia collusion. That part seems to be both sides agree. But Mueller is still saying that it sounds like there may be, the way the press is saying that the president, at least the press on the right, they're saying that the president is essentially cleared of obstruction of justice. And Mueller, I think this is as close as I can get to what's really happening, this might be wrong so fact-check on this, but I think Mueller was indicating that you could maybe make a case of obstruction but that in this special case because it's a sitting president that Mueller wasn't sure if there were, you know, that the rules against indictment, etc., whether that made enough of a difference. And then on top of that, although they're not supposed to take into account that the underlying charge, the collusion, wasn't true, because keep in mind you can be found guilty of obstructing justice even in the situation where there was no justice to obstruct, meaning that there was no crime. So there was still a justice system that you could obstruct but there was no justice being lost because there was no crime that anybody was trying to get away with.

So I think the questions are something about whether you can indict a sitting president and then the second one is whether the president just doing his normal job under the Constitution could ever be interpreted, this is the Alan Dershowitz twist, couldn't, not twist but his explanation, that could a president ever be charged with a crime for doing the ordinary things that you do in your job, which is hiring and firing, directing people to do things or directing them not to do things.

So those are the things that were, that Mueller apparently, and I might be getting ahead of myself here so please bring me back if I've gone too far, but it looks like Mueller said yeah there are little factual things which if he were not the president, that's the key, if he were not the president doing the job of a president under the Constitution and if there had been a crime which there wasn't, which isn't the important part, and if you could indict a president under those conditions you might think that this could have gone forward as a case. But given that he was the president and we don't indict presidents and he was just doing the normal things under a president's job, it's a little too complicated for me, Mueller, to make the call on this. So I'm just going to lay out the information for the public and for the Attorney General, mostly for the Attorney General, and then the Attorney General decides what the public sees and then the Attorney General will handle it from there.

Now did what I just described say that the president was cleared of obstruction? No. No. Yeah I can't go so far into blind punditry that I'm gonna say that that equals cleared of obstruction. But he did say there's no Russia collusion. And so I'm not a lawyer. Well I guess I'm not a judge. I'm not a lawyer. If you tell me, citizen of the United States, what we want is justice. That's the main thing. We're not a country who needs to obsess over dotting the i's and the details of stuff if it conflicts with justice. If you had a choice of following the law or achieving justice and those are your only two choices, if you follow the law you don't get justice but if you ignore the law you get justice, which is a far higher standard, which would you do? You're an American and you're talking about another American citizen, one of your teammates, somebody on your team, somebody you are tasked to protect. And the law says something bad is going to happen that isn't fair. But if you do something that's fair it might not be exactly technically compatible with law. Which one? Which way do you go? If you're an American, justice eve