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April 9, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
33:33
Episode 485 Scott Adams: Lack of Credible Democrat Candidates, Summer Reruns of Scandals, More
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Hey Peter!
Come on in here.
I'm sure that like Peter, you have your beverage ready.
Peter, I see you picking up your beverage container right now.
Those of you who are not as quick as Peter, such as Polly and Jackie and Arlene, I see you coming in here.
Grab your cups, your mugs, Your chalice, your steins, your tankards, perhaps your thermos.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
when I like coffee, and join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Ooh, extra, extra good today.
Extra. So, you may have noticed that the news has already gone into summer reruns.
A little early this year.
I was expecting the summer reruns to start closer to May.
You know what I'm talking about.
There's no good news coming out.
So the news has started to recycle scandals from the past.
Do you remember that time that President Trump made the hand motions that seemed to be mocking A man with a physical disability.
Now, I don't remember that.
I do remember President Trump being blamed for that.
And unlike half of the country who is trapped in a news silo, I saw the compilation clips showing that he uses that same motion, making fun of a lot of different people, including Ted Cruz.
In fact, I would like to suggest the Ted Cruz rule.
Are you ready for it? If the president uses a particular insult or attack against Ted Cruz, you cannot say that he is using it because the president is racist.
And you can't say that he's making fun of handicapped people.
Because also, the president questioned Ted Cruz's Birth certificate.
Not technically, but he questioned whether Ted Cruz was born in the United States and eligible to run for president.
So the president has blamed Ted Cruz.
No, he's mocked Ted Cruz exactly the same way he mocked a person with a bad arm.
And he's questioned Ted Cruz's citizenship and eligibility for president.
The same as he criticized President Obama.
So it's the Ted Cruz rule.
If he's ever done it to Ted Cruz, it doesn't count.
The other rerun we're getting is the animals comment taken in the context.
We're getting the fine people hoax over and over again.
The fine people hoax is coming out.
The idea that the president never...
I spoke out against white supremacists.
Oh, we're getting the Steve Miller attacks.
We've never seen those before, have we?
Oh, Steve Miller, that Jewish white supremacist.
How does that even work?
How could he even be a Jewish white supremacist?
Isn't that like opposites?
So the criticisms have become sort of hollow reruns of past criticisms that have already been debunked.
That's all they have.
It's really a good time to be alive, because you look at the problems in the world and you just say, uh, that's it?
The biggest problem in the world is a rerun of a hoax?
That everybody, well, not everybody, half of the country knows it's a hoax.
On CNN last night, the columnist Matt Lewis is saying that the Democrats are, quote, too woke.
They're over woke.
The Democrats are realizing that they're over woke.
They're so woke that they might not be able to beat President Trump.
Now, Not only are they overwoke, but today CNN is taking a run at knocking Kamala Harris out of the news.
Now they could be trying to inoculate her by getting her bad news out of the way, but it doesn't look like that.
It looks like they may have soured on Harris.
Why, you ask? Would CNN be seemingly, this is us just interpreting it from the outside, doesn't mean we're right, but the way it looks from the outside, is that CNN was initially very pro-Harris, but now that she is fourth in the polls, they may have soured a little bit.
Because the problem with, what is the big problem with Kamala Harris?
Can somebody tell me the big problem with Kamala Harris as a candidate?
Boring. Boring.
She's very boring.
She's had quite a few months here to make some news, and she doesn't know how to do it, apparently.
She's boring.
And you would never have imagined that boring would be such a problem.
Doesn't it seem to you that boring didn't used to be a problem?
Nobody really said, hey, that Romney, he can't work because he's boring.
Not really. I mean, people said that, but they said he was boring, but I don't think anybody said, there's no way you can win the presidency with your boring personality.
Although... I thought Romney was interesting and funny when he was talking about the effort by the Democrats to get Trump's tax returns, and he called it moronic with a big smile.
He showed some personality there.
I thought that was funny. So it could be the CNN, because CNN, remember, CNN is mostly, like any other public company, they're mostly involved with their own profitability.
Would, and so here's the interesting question, would CNN make more money if their candidate won?
In other words, if a Democrat beat Trump, would they make more money in the future or less?
Think about it.
Or like, along the same lines, would CNN as a business make more money in the future by running a boring candidate?
Against President Trump.
Which situation feeds their business model the most?
I don't know. It looks like running the interesting candidate who could also win would be in their best interest.
But I think on some level, they may not want to win.
Let me ask you this.
Would CNN have more stories that are interesting or fewer stories that are interesting if President Trump is no longer president?
They might actually be panicked that their side could win.
There might be, and this is no joke, so what I'm going to say is not hyperbole, just speculation.
CNN might get to the point where their financial interest is Exactly counter to their political preferences.
If we get to the point where, let's say, it looks like Kamala Harris could win, what would that do to CNN's ratings if she actually won?
Who would watch CNN again for the rest of their lives?
What would be the point? People watch CNN to watch them bash Trump.
Watching CNN bash Kamala Harris, that's not fun.
There's nothing fun about that.
So, we may be in this weird situation where CNN needs to take out their own side for financial reasons.
Now, I don't believe That there will ever be a conversation like that where anybody at CNN and management says anything like that.
So I'm not saying that anybody at CNN will ever say, hey, maybe we should put our thumb on the scale and let Trump win again because it's good for our ratings.
But they're all going to think it.
There's nobody at CNN who won't think it.
Excuse me. I don't know, my nose runs only when I talk on Periscope.
It's a weird thing. So, we may see a situation where CNN becomes the inadvertent ally of Trump just to give him a second term.
It's possible. You can't rule that out anymore.
All right. So, one of the big stories we're going to hear as we talk more and more about immigration It's about the administration putting kids in Obama cages.
You know about the Obama cages, right?
Oh, you didn't know there were Obama cages?
Of course, most of you do know that.
But I was testing out the idea of, for a long time, people saying, yes, Trump did put children in cages, but Obama did it too.
And you've noticed that absolutely nobody cares about that argument.
Have you noticed that? It's a true argument that can be verified.
The facts are all clear.
Obama did it at a lower level.
Situation changed so that more people were coming because of the rules that allowed amnesty, etc.
And Trump had more of it.
But did Trump build the cages, I ask you?
Did Trump build those cages?
Maybe. Maybe some of them are new.
My guess is that they are literally Obama cages.
So rather than saying Obama did it too, maybe we should just say, yeah, it is true that the administration put kids in Obama cages.
So let's call them Obama cages, because that's catchier than saying, well, Obama did it too.
Because the whataboutism just always falls on empty, well, empty ears.
No, that doesn't make sense.
When you say the other side did it too, nobody can hear that.
It's such an empty charge that everybody knows it's true, they just don't care.
So I would say, rather than trying to defend what Trump did, I wouldn't.
I wouldn't try to defend it, because you just can't.
There's just no defense for it that feels good.
There's plenty of defense for it in terms of explaining the situation, and it's unfortunate, but it really kept them safe.
Nobody can even hear that stuff.
It's like, it's just noise.
They hear cages, kids, and that's pretty much they're done with the thinking.
So let's talk more about the Obama cages.
That's what they should just be called.
If Obama built them, and Obama put them into action, and Trump just continued using them, just call them Obamacages.
We've got to get rid of the Obamacages.
Don't you think? I think it should be a goal of the administration to get rid of Obamacages.
All right. Cory Booker is...
Proposing legislation to create a reparations commission.
A commission to look into reparations for slavery.
Now, my first reaction to that was, next, meaning that it's such a non-starter for a national political campaign that it would make him irrelevant as a candidate.
That it would be such a...
Such a provocative stand that he would not really be a credible candidate for president.
And then I saw that most of the Democrats have to agree with it, or at least agree with looking into it, or agree to try to make something happen there.
And I thought to myself, the problem of them being too woke is really displayed in this issue.
Because I don't know that any Democratic candidate could win the nomination coming out against that.
It would be better if it had never been mentioned.
In terms of politics, as soon as the first candidate gets serious about it, and that was Booker, so now that Booker has gotten serious about it, the other candidates have to answer to it.
They have to answer a yes-no question.
Are you for or against it?
I don't think Trump will have trouble with the question, but the Democrats can have real trouble, because if they say no, they can't get the nomination, and if they say yes, they can't get elected president.
So Cory Booker has set up an almost complete trap, making it impossible for any Democrat to get elected.
Am I wrong? Am I wrong that you could not get the nomination now unless you come out in favor of reparations?
Because you wouldn't be woke enough if you didn't.
And if you do, and you get the nomination, Trump is going to slaughter you.
Just slaughter!
It is not even going to be close.
Now there's one thing that I don't think we've seen yet.
There's something we haven't seen yet, but If Trump ends up running against reparations, you're going to see it, and it's going to look like this.
Successful black people, and even maybe some who are not successful yet, are going to come out and say, F that.
You give us reparations and it's going to make us look like second-class citizens.
There will be black people Very aggressively coming out against this idea.
Because it's going to make them...
It's going to put a target on their back.
It's going to make them seem like less than regular citizens.
So I think you're going to see the reparations things as a double-edged sword.
On an intellectual, let's say, on a scholarly level, you can make a case for it.
We're all familiar with what the argument is, that The African-American population of the country has such a disadvantage coming from that legacy that maybe the country owes some kind of an evening.
Eventually somebody's going to say, let's be scientific about this.
If the argument is, God, can I even say this without losing everything I have?
This is one of those questions you have to stop and ask yourself when you talk in public.
What I'm going to say is innocent, but how easily it could be taken out of context.
Maybe not. Yeah.
Maybe not. Maybe I will save myself for a better fight.
Okay. But maybe we'll circle back to that another day.
Oh, no. Screw it.
I'm just going to say it anyway.
If the reparations argument gets serious, somebody's going to say, what is your reference point?
In other words, what is your reference point for saying, here's where the American, African-American community is, and what are you comparing it to?
When we get to that question...
Of who are you comparing it to, things are going to get ugly.
Because somebody, sooner or later, somebody's going to say, how would you be doing if you had never come to this country by force?
And they're going to say, I'm not saying this.
Let me clarify.
This is not my opinion.
Somebody's going to say, How would you have done if you had not come to this country by force as slaves?
And they're going to say, should we compare you to the people who didn't come?
Is that the right comparison?
Because if you compare them to, say, an average African citizen, are they doing better than the average African citizen or worse?
Now, do you feel how ugly that is?
Like that point? That's an ugly point.
Somebody's going to say it.
And then that argument is going to get really racist and really bad.
Because the reparations thing, and by the way, I have written, I have personally written back in 2016, I think, not that long ago, that we should consider reparations.
So just to be clear, I have come out saying we should seriously think about a way to do this.
Because there's a bad way to do it and there's a good way.
Now I'm going to suggest a way that avoids that ugly problem I just mentioned.
The good way to do it is what I'm going to call the Hawke Newsome approach.
And I'll give him credit for this.
Hawke, as you know, had been...
I think he's still associated with Black Lives Matter of New York.
And his idea was that any policy you do for the country that helps the African American part of the population ends up helping everybody.
And it's one of those points...
That you have to think about for a while to see that there's actually some depth to the point.
That even if you're thinking about helping the African American community, there's nothing you can do in a rule of laws that wouldn't also help everybody who's in a similar situation, meaning anybody who's got an economic disadvantage, for example.
So, if we came up with, let's say, reparations is just...
Prioritizing education at the top.
Free education. So let me say this.
Let's say Bernie Sanders.
I'll give Bernie some free advice.
If Bernie Sanders says, let's make education free as a response to reparations.
It's not reparations, because it would be free for everybody.
College and, let's say, trade, trade training, so any kind of training for an adult education, an adult skill set, any kind of training would be free, at least as a goal, if you're Bernie.
Let's say you're Bernie and you say this, and you say that this is our way to address reparations without making it unfair to the rest of the population who did not get any advantages.
From the legacy of slavery.
So if you framed it that way, you would simply have taken a whole bunch of priorities, and you'd say, what's our top priority?
Free healthcare, free education, you know, higher minimum wage, what's our priority?
And you just say, because of reparations, we'll make our top priority Because that has a societal benefit, but it has an unusually good benefit for anybody who's at the lowest part of the economic situation.
So, I'm not saying that would be necessarily the best idea in the world, but what I'm saying is that when you talk about reparations, it could be a really wide conversation.
And there might actually be a way to do it, That everybody in the country says, huh.
Because remember, there's always a second benefit to anything that you call reparations that people say is a good idea.
The second benefit is the psychological benefit.
I would argue that one of the great powers of this country is our rule of law, treating everybody equally as best we can.
You know, we have to tweak this every generation.
You know, the laws got to get tweaked to make sure that we're still staying on our brand.
But one of the great things this country did was brand itself as a melting pot.
So when America branded itself as a melting pot and started to socialize the children with that term, generations grew up saying that one of our powers, one of the powers of being an American, is that we can absorb different cultures and turn that into power.
The United States, probably more than any country ever, I'm not a historian.
There may be other examples where this has worked.
But I would argue that the United States, as a manufactured country, meaning, you know, we're created by people coming in from lots of different places, we're, you know, mostly a manufactured country.
Ancient Rome, somebody says, there might be another example of this.
But probably nobody, at least in the modern times, has done a better job Of turning what could be a problem, which is all kinds of different people trying to live together, naturally that would be a problem, right?
You would expect. But we've somehow cleverly managed to turn that into a strength.
And I think that that's legitimate.
As many problems as you get from having different types of people, and those are real.
Those are real problems when you have different types of people living in the same place.
I think we've legitimately turned it into a strength.
I think that's real. And it's amazing.
And it's a psychological invention.
It's a psychological invention as powerful as the steam engine.
It was that powerful for creating the America that we have.
So, if you have a little bit of a, let's say, a defect in your invention, and I'm going to say the invention is the psychological invention that America is a melting pot, and the idea that we do that well, and we can convert that into strength.
That's the invention.
And we've had that invention guiding us for generations.
But it's a little bit defective.
Because there's still this problem with our invention that the legacy of slavery is making people uncomfortable in different ways.
So if we could fix just that little tweak with our great invention of the melting pot, you know, mental construct, if we could do that at the same time that we're getting people better education, Maybe that's a win.
Who knows? All right.
Let's talk about...
I want to do...
It's a slow news day, so I'm going to do something for fun.
I promised you when I had my other technology that today I was going to do you a demonstration of cognitive dissonance.
I'm going to plug in my other headphone, and we're going to do that.
Alright, alright.
Assuming that you can hear me, I'm going to take some calls.
calls.
um Hmm.
But I'm going to take some calls from people who want to tell me that Uranium One was a big problem for the country.
So the only topic I'm going to take is somebody who wants to tell me that the Uranium One situation was Hello,
guest callers and we'll see and i'll i'll make the call quick if you only wanted to talk about something else so hello alex hey are you here to talk about uranium one I sure am. Do you think Uranium One was a big problem that affects the United States in a strategic way?
I think it is a problem legally, the way that it has been handled.
I think that it was swept under the rug.
Hold on. I will accept that there are some legal questions there, but that's not the interesting part.
Would you say that Beyond the fact there are some legal questions, does it have an effect on the readiness of the United States, the strategic strength of the United States, or in any way?
Next is that I think that it may have, only if it had been uncovered we would have known.
But we are unable to see because none of the information has really ever come out.
Other than little tidbits here and there that were reported because media mostly has been just, you know, CNN. All right.
So aside from the legal part, which is important, are you worried that there's a strategic thing that we lost because we sold those rights?
Are you worried that we're worse off as a country?
I would have no idea to that information.
Like, I wouldn't know, but I'm not concerned about it.
That's fair. You have a reasonable view, but I'm going to take another caller.
I want to get somebody who's going to argue that it matters.
All right, let's see if Doug, this looks like a troll, possibly a troll, because he's using my own character as his icon.
Caller, can you hear me? Hi.
Are you here to talk about Uranium One?
Yes, I am. Do you think that the United States was weakened or lost anything by the Uranium-1 deal?
I believe that's possible if things I've heard are true.
I don't know that they're true.
I have no way to confirm it.
But if what I heard is true, then yes, I believe so.
And what would be an example of something you heard that if it were true would be bad for the country for the Uranium-1 deal?
What I believe I read was that the uranium going through Russia was being processed out to Iran for their program, which would of course be a huge problem for us.
Okay, I haven't heard any of that.
I have heard that the stuff from the United States couldn't be released from the United States without official permission.
So, for example, another country couldn't buy it if they wanted to.
It would have to be sold inside the United States.
But I'm not sure about that.
All right, let me take another caller.
I'm looking for somebody who really buys into the whole story.
Let's say Joe.
All right.
Virus Joe, coming at you.
Thank you.
Joe. Good.
How are you? Do you have a Uranium One opinion?
Yes, I do.
I don't know if it's going to be able to trump what you're about to lay down, but basically with Uranium One, what the issue I think would be other than Potential corruption in the future as far as what other countries think that they're going to get from us as well.
But the crossover of the nuclear going around to different countries that If, as the media says, Russia is their enemy, then it's sort of odd that we're in bed in a situation where we're getting uranium,
trading it to different places, doing it in a way that is, I guess, national security-wise, the biggest danger would be the fact about how they're actually transferring it.
Joe, do you know that uranium is a product on the open market and that Pretty much anybody can buy it from one of the countries that sells it.
I did not know that.
Yeah. So what I was hoping to get here is apparently most of you are too smart or you know there's a trap.
I was trying to see if anybody would come here and say, That Russia got 20% of our critical uranium resources.
Because that's sort of the story you hear from some pundits and that by itself is the problem.
The problem is that this is a valuable national resource and that we're giving it to our potential nemesis, Russia.
But it sounds like everybody here is too smart for that.
So thanks, Joe.
And I will end my experiment there.
All right. What I expected was that some of you would come on here and say, no, we're giving away our critical resource.
And then I was going to tell you that your critical resource is 6% of domestic production.
Six. It's 6% of domestic production.
And you can buy it anywhere.
You can buy it from Canada.
You can get your uranium from Australia.
Now, you might say to yourself, well, wait a minute.
Wouldn't it be better to have it than to have to go buy it?
And the answer is, either way you have to buy it.
Just the fact that the mine is in the United States doesn't make it free.
There's some company that owns the mine.
You can go to that company and you can buy it.
You can still go to that company and buy it.
Just because Russia has an interest in a mine that's located in the United States, that doesn't make it Russia's.
Not really. I mean, if we got in a war with Russia, would Russia still be able to take their uranium out of their mine that's located in the United States?
I don't think so.
So we still have control over it.
We can buy it on the open market.
Uranium-1 was never a real Problem, except that there might have been some Clinton, you know, quid pro quo there that we'll never identify.
Anyway, yeah, I thought this would be interesting because I thought some of you would be hypnotized by the story, but apparently you're not.
You're all way beyond that, and that's good.
All right. Did Hillary receive a dollar from this transaction?
Well, some of the accusation is that Bill Clinton got half a million dollars for speaking in Russia.
Now, you'd have to know how different is half a million dollars from what he normally earned.
And it might not be that that was too far out of his market price.
I'd have to see that, but that's not in evidence.
So, anyway...
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