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May 2, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:01
Episode 515 Scott Adams: Barr, Climate Change Totally Solved, Fine People “Truthers”
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Alright, let's see if I've got a better signal this time.
I had to sign off and sign back on.
Apparently there was something wrong with the signal.
At least one person says it's good.
Okay, everybody says it's better.
As soon as everybody piles back in here, because I know you will.
Come on back. Come on back.
Alright, so I was starting to tell the story.
I know you want another simultaneous sip.
Get ready. Lift your cup of your mug or your glass or your stein, put your thumbs, and join me.
Ah, second one's even better.
So I was talking about, do I have the right last name, Pierce Morgan?
And his show, his co-host, was talking about the fine people hoax as if it were real.
And she was repeating the fake news that the president called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville fine people.
Now, they were talking to Al Sharpton.
So as I was saying before we got cut off here, that Al Sharpton, you would expect, of all people in the world, Would agree with the hoax.
In other words, you would expect Al Sharpton to act as though the president really had called neo-Nazis fine people in Charlottesville.
But he didn't.
He didn't.
Al Sharpton did not agree expressly with the hoax that the president called The neo-Nazis find people.
Instead, what he said was that if the president was talking about people on both sides of the statute debate, specifically the Robert E. Lee, And as Sharpton explained, Robert E. Lee was, in Sharpton's view, a bad guy because he was trying to overthrow the government, which is pretty bad, and he was a slave owner, which is really bad.
They're both really bad. So Al Sharpton is not wrong about his characterization of Robert E. Lee.
You know, the other people will characterize it differently.
I understand there's a difference of opinion, but he wasn't wrong on the facts.
And then he said that that's even the worst part, that if you could support people who support that statue, that's pretty darn racist.
Now, I'm going to claim success here, because most of you know, I've been talking about this forever, I too object to offensive Confederate statues.
But I also recognize that there are normal, good Americans who are not racists, who just wouldn't destroy any historical monument, no matter how offensive, because it's just part of their history, their culture, whatever.
And good people could imagine That we understand its context, so it's not, you know, maybe you should not be offended.
My view is that while I believe people should not be offended by it, people are offended by it.
You can't change that.
The fact that you don't want people to be offended by it.
Doesn't really change the fact that they are.
So if you live in a country where some huge percentage of your citizens are deeply offended, I mean, pretty deeply offended, and they've got a good argument for it, just be a good citizen.
Why would you offend half or a third of your country if you don't need to?
You don't need to. Anyway, so I'm opposed to Confederate statues, but I'm more opposed to the fine people hoax, which is a complete fabrication and has been driving the narrative about this president since 2017, I guess. So even Al Sharpton was unwilling to say on television that the president called the neo-Nazis fine people.
I'm pretty sure...
That by now he's been exposed to the actual transcript and he would actually be embarrassed to push the hoax that even the host of the show was pushing.
I call that success.
Now my article that I wrote or my blog post in which I I documented all of the ways that people go down the hoax funnel, from starting with the pure lie that the president called neo-Nazis fighting people, to show them the transcript.
It's easy to debunk.
But then they go down and say, well, they were marching with the Nazis, and then you show that they weren't.
Well, okay, they weren't marching with the Nazis, but why does the president wait so long, and why doesn't he...
So you get down to just these random questions instead of a statement.
Anyway, it got picked up by...
Zero Hedge has republished it today.
Where else has it been republished?
Seeing a few other places it was republished.
Why am I forgetting?
Oh, and then Ann Coulter...
Is featured in Breitbart talking about the hoax as well.
Now, there's no reference to anything I've done in that.
She just does her own work and well.
Oh, Larry Elder got after Pierce Morgan for spreading the hoax.
Who else we got going here?
Anyway, oh, and here's the funny part.
Apparently MSNBC is saying that the people who are calling the fine people hoax a hoax, in other words, people like me, they're calling us truthers.
Truthers. Now, if you're going to insult me, calling me a truther is the very best way you can do it.
Because I'm pretty sure that I am actually telling the truth in a way that any media organization can validate.
They report it as the truth.
So the things that I say Even all the news organizations report as the truth.
It's actually what he said.
He condemned the racists.
Alright, so I guess it was Nicole Wallace on MSNBC who was referring to the hoaxbusters as the Charlottesville truthers.
I hope they stick with that.
Oh my fucking God!
Are you telling me that we lost this again?
Are you fucking kidding me?
Seriously? Can anybody hear me now?
Alright. I was frozen for a minute.
Let me just confirm that we're back on here.
Because it just doesn't feel like this is accidental anymore, honestly.
Let's talk about Anyway, just to put a bow on this fine people hoaxer thing.
A number of people...
Anyway, how many of you have tried my challenge where you get somebody who believes the fine people hoax and you walk them through the hoax funnel and By debunking each claim until the claims get smaller and smaller, until people are asking just dumb questions like, well, why didn't X happen?
As soon as you get to, well, okay, you've debunked everything I think was true, but how do you explain this?
If you're down to how do you explain, and it's all easy to explain, you've kind of won.
How many of you have tried the challenge on someone, I saw on Twitter that somebody tried the challenge.
Have any of you tried it yet?
I just want to see if you had the experience I predicted that the person you asked to read the quote from President Trump, where he condemns totally the neo-Nazis, the challenge was to see if you can actually get them to read it out loud to you.
And the... Is it freezing again?
And the challenge is...
The challenge is...
That I don't think people can actually speak the words.
I think that their brain would actually freeze, and I mean that there would be an actual psychological phenomenon that you could spot where they wouldn't be able to say the words.
They would get mad, or they'd throw it at you, or they'd say it's made up, or it's out of context, or you're lying, but they wouldn't be able to just read it.
So that's the challenge.
See if it gives me a little bit. How do you debunk so many proven lies?
I don't know what you mean.
I'm just looking at your comments to see if we still have a connection.
I think we do. All right, let's talk about Barr, who apparently all yesterday I called Bob Barr, but is William Barr, Bill Barr.
So let's call him Bill Barr because that's actually his name.
We'll do that today. I've been trying to figure out from the terrible, terrible news coverage, and really the news coverage of the bar testimony was maybe the worst I've ever seen.
Probably the worst I've ever seen.
And I'm not talking about any one network.
It was all bad.
It was just all bad everywhere.
I mean, disgustingly bad.
Even on the same network, and I won't name names, but even within the same network, they were reporting the news as opposites.
Somebody would say that Barr is claiming X, and the next person would say, Barr is not claiming X. And I'm thinking, this is the same network.
Just decide what the news is.
You don't even have to write.
But just report it the same on your network.
But here are some of the things I've figured out.
And I don't know how many of you have figured this out as well.
There was a wonderful article which I just tweeted.
Tweeted by...
Oh, damn it.
Where is it? I am so unorganized.
All right. There was a wonderful article that I just retweeted By Will Chamberlain, in which he takes you through the fascinating story of how the lawyers for the president probably got to this good result.
And the basic story, I thought I knew this story, but Will offers one piece of speculation I hadn't heard.
So you knew that Bill Barr, before he was Attorney General, wrote a long, well-researched piece in which he said that the obstruction thing doesn't apply.
And he made a very narrow interpretation of it.
And his argument was based on that.
And I thought to myself, with all this reporting, I don't believe I've ever seen the actual word of the law.
In other words, the specific wording that everybody is saying the president either violated or did not violate.
Like, what exactly is the law?
So that's one of the failings.
So I'm going to read you the obstruction law.
There are two parts, and the two parts are what's important.
Now, Barr's argument, apparently, is that the second part is referring to the first part.
And Mueller's interpretation is that they're just two separate parts.
Now, I actually agree with Mueller on this, because they look like just separate parts to me.
But one says that you could be guilty of obstruction of justice if you alter or destroy documents or materials.
Now, that was very clear, and there's no claim that the president destroyed any documents or had anybody destroy any documents.
But the second part...
It's sort of a clean-up part where it says the word otherwise or otherwise obstructs, influence, or impedes any official proceedings or attempts to do so.
Now that to me seems exactly applicable to what they're accusing the president of, of otherwise obstructing, influencing, or impeding.
So that argument is the obstruction argument.
Apparently, Bill Barr wrote a piece that said that that second part was really just a clean-up to the first part, and so the law and obstruction is so narrow that since the president, I guess, didn't destroy any documents, that it didn't apply.
Now, I don't think that's a good argument.
I'm no lawyer, but it doesn't sound good to me.
But that's just one of the arguments.
And then what Will added was the speculation that the lawyers for the president may have asked Bill Barr to write that letter.
And then when it was a letter that they liked, they got rid of Sessions, got the president to fire Sessions after the midterms, brought in Barr so that they knew they had somebody who would have the right interpretation.
Somebody's mentioning Alan Dershowitz in the comments, and that's where I'm going next.
So one argument is that the obstruction ruling should not be interpreted the way Mueller says it is written.
It feels like a weak argument to me, but I'm not the Supreme Court, so don't take my word for it.
The other is that we heard was that obstruction only applied to a pending case and there was no pending case against the president.
I won't get too technical, but apparently that argument got thrown away because the obstruction rule has been interpreted or there's some precedent to say that potential cases are also included.
And certainly there was a potential case, so the argument that there's no ongoing criminal case was not relevant.
So there's two arguments that I've heard that don't make sense to me.
Again, not a lawyer, just a person watching the news.
Then there's one that says that everything the president did was within his job description.
I think this is closer to the Alan Dershowitz argument.
That you can't say somebody had intention to obstruct justice if what we've observed are the normal actions of a president doing the job of a president.
That even if that did have the effect of impeding the investigation, you couldn't say that was the intent Because it was also just doing regular president stuff.
Now I think that's the argument that Bill Barr settled on, essentially abandoning, or at least not mentioning, his own original argument.
So when he did his summary of the Mueller report, and God knows I might be getting some of this wrong, when he did his summary, he didn't use his original argument, the document he wrote before he was age eight, which is interesting.
He didn't use his own argument.
He used what sounded more like the Dershowitz argument, that there's no evidence that the president had intent Because everything was just an example of him doing his job.
And then there was the argument that you can't indict a sitting president, and apparently that was never anybody's argument.
So Mueller never made the argument.
Barr never made that argument.
So that was just sort of a pundit argument, I guess.
So that one really never became important in the case, but it was one of the arguments.
And then I was watching Judge Napolitano on Fox News saying that I hope I just heard this wrong.
So I'm going to say, just so I don't get sued for some kind of libel or slander, that I may have heard this wrong.
So don't take it from me as fact.
I'll put it out there as I don't know what I'm seeing and I don't understand it.
It looked to me like Napolitano was saying that Barr was basing his legal opinion on the fact that there was no underlying crime.
I didn't see that.
Does that even sound like a reality that you were watching?
Did you see Napolitano, or anyway, did anybody see Barr say that the reason there was no obstruction is because there was no underlying crime?
I don't think he said anything like that.
Indeed, I'm pretty sure he believes the opposite, although I don't know he said it specifically, but why wouldn't he believe the opposite when every lawyer in the world believes it?
I mean, it sounded like Judge Napolitano was saying that Barr is the only lawyer in the world, in the whole world.
He would be the only one who believes that obstruction of justice can only be applied if there's an underlying crime.
I don't believe anybody believes that, who is a lawyer.
So I didn't know what I was seeing.
How could... Judge Napolitano, who presumably is a very smart guy, how could he be saying that, and how could it be on the news?
Yeah. He said the opposite, right?
So, I didn't know if I was hearing it wrong, but this is my larger point.
When I was watching the news yesterday, did any of you have the same reaction?
That the news didn't seem to be news.
It looked like complete BS on all the channels all the time.
It looked like nobody really understood what they were watching.
Nobody understood who said what.
Nobody could remember what anybody's opinion was.
It just looked like a mess.
That's what I saw.
Now maybe the news will start to focus more.
We're getting out of this fog of war situation.
But I come down to this.
There's no way you could get 12 jurors to convict a president, forget about a sitting president, even an ex-president.
You can't get 12 citizens of this country to say that the president trying to impede something that he alone knew wasn't valid.
Because remember, everyone in the world didn't know what was true and what wasn't, except one person.
Only the president knew he didn't collude.
He was sure. Nobody else was sure, but he was sure.
So if you could tell me you can get a jury to convict on that, good luck.
You're never going to convince me of that, even if the facts say it should be a conviction.
I'd like to introduce a new conspiracy theory.
Or maybe a couple of them.
It starts with a general concept.
You can't trust anything in the news.
I think you agree with me so far, right?
Just because it's in the news, and even if it's on all the network news, that doesn't mean it's true.
And that's triple true if the news is coming from, let's say, the government only.
And especially, let's say, any military, intelligence, CIA, organization, any organization that does not traffic in the truth.
And that's a lot of organizations, right?
Any intelligence organization, they like to know the truth for themselves, but they're not really in the business of telling the public the truth.
In fact, they're in the business of telling the public untruths, if it's good for the country.
That's the business. Whether it's our public or some other country's public, they're in the business of lying.
That's They're professionals.
They're trained to do it.
It's practically the job description.
So there are two stories that make me scratch my head and say, I don't know if that's true.
Here's the first one.
The first story we heard is that Maduro, the horrible leader of Venezuela, The other day was planning to get on a plane and leave the country to the named president who would take over.
And the story that we were given by our government, not by the press, but the story that we're given by our government, is that Russia stopped Maduro from getting on the plane and leaving.
Now, there are two possibilities.
One, that's completely true.
You can't rule that out.
I mean, one possibility, that's exactly what happened.
Maduro was going to lose, right, and Bolton said it, so our government has said it very clearly, that he was going to get on the plane, but Russia stopped him.
Do you think that's true?
Really? Do you think that's true?
Because it might be. It makes perfect sense, right?
There's nothing about that story that, on the surface, rules it out, right?
So I'm not going to say it's not true.
I'm just going to put out this speculation.
If it were not true, it would be an excellent thing for our government to say to get the result we want.
Has our government ever said anything that wasn't true?
To get a result that we wanted.
Well, yeah, pretty much all the time.
So if you were a Venezuelan person and you supported Maduro and you heard that the only thing keeping him in the country is the Russians, would you support him as much?
If you were one of the protesters, or you were not on the side of Maduro, but you were not really active, you were sort of watching it, you weren't in the streets, and you heard that Maduro would have left, except for Russia, would that cause you to get off the couch and get in the streets?
So here's my question.
I'm not saying it's not true.
I'm just saying that if it's not true, it would have been an excellent rumor to start.
Because it's very productive.
It's an excellent rumor.
And in fact, starting to, you know, reframe Venezuela as a Russian puppet or worse, I'd like to know which sounds worse to the ears of a typical Venezuelan resident.
Which sounds worse?
You've been conquered by Cuba.
Which effectively is true, because Cuba is protecting Madura, the Cuban forces, and I don't think Madura can do anything that Cuba doesn't want him to do, because they protect him.
So, in effect, Madura already doesn't run the country.
The small group of people who are keeping him alive are the de facto rulers of the country.
Now, if Russia has direct control over those Cubans who are keeping Maduro alive, well, then you could say Russia is really already in charge of Venezuela.
And that would be really supportable if you knew that link was as strong as I said.
But which one of those two sounds worse?
It's probably been tested.
Our government probably tested And said, all right, what sounds worse, you Venezuelans?
Maybe focus group or somehow they talk to people who are close to the people on the street so that they can know what sounds worse.
Does it sound worse that Cuba took over your country?
Or does it sound worse that Putin took over your country?
Which one would get you back in the streets?
So when Bolton says that the Russians stopped Maduro and Maduro says that that's just not true, it's laughable, I say to myself, I don't think I'm going to uncritically assume that the official story from our own government is true.
It might be true-ish.
There might have been a conversation that Madura had with the Russians that you could spin that way.
But don't accept uncritically That that ever happened.
It might have happened. I'm not saying it didn't.
But don't accept it uncritically.
Secondly, and this is the fun one, the first one was just sort of to prime you for the second one.
Did you see the video of the al-Baghdadi, I guess the leader and founder of ISIS? Apparently we only had one video of him when he announced ISIS five years ago.
And then there's this complete lack of any video or photographs of him To the point where we weren't sure he was alive.
There was rumor he might have been killed or seriously injured.
And then, suddenly, there's this very clear video of him hanging around and talking to his buddies and talking about how ISIS has been badly defeated on the battlefield.
Now he still says his ISIS stuff, but he admits that on the battlefield they've just been basically crushed.
And now I ask you this.
Is that really al-Baghdadi?
How hard would it be for the CIA, or somebody who does that kind of work, to create a video of a fake Baghdadi?
And how good does it need to be?
Now, it doesn't have to be CGI, although that's an option.
It could just be somebody who grew a beard and sort of looks like Baghdadi.
Because suppose ISIS said, no, that's not the real Baghdadi.
We know who he is, and it's not that guy.
Who would know? Does ISIS... Let me use the concept.
When we watch fake news in our own country, you've all seen this said, that the fake news will go viral and it'll get 10 million views.
So the fake news gets 10 million views, and then following up is the, no, no, no, that was fake news.
And even if the fact that it was fake news can be demonstrated, The media will report that, because they do report corrections.
But how much will the correction be seen?
By a thousand people?
So the fake news goes to ten million, the correction goes to a thousand, because it's just not interesting or whatever.
So if you were the CIA, And Baghdadi had not been in public for five years.
And even ISIS fighters weren't quite sure if he was still around.
Wouldn't you try to create a video of fake news that would certainly be detected?
In other words, there are people in ISIS who would know for sure it's not real, because they would know Baghdadi, or they'd know he's dead, or they saw him yesterday or something.
So there would be some people.
But those people could not...
Tell their story without revealing that they've seen Baghdadi lately.
So let's say several people came out and said, it's not him.
I was just with him yesterday.
Suddenly, we have a much better idea where Baghdadi is.
So it's sort of awkward for ISIS to deny it because they would have to tell you a little bit too much about where he is and what he's up to in order to deny it credibly.
Just saying it's not him Would just cause confusion and probably wouldn't get nearly as much play as the original fake.
So, I'm not saying that was a fake al-Baghdadi.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying, if it wasn't a fake one, our CIA are incompetent.
Because they should have created a fake one by now.
If this is not a fake Baghdadi, who the hell is in charge of the people who are trying to fix this ISIS problem?
That would have been on the top of my list of smarter things to do.
You know, if that wasn't on the top of their frickin' list of smarter things to do, let's start firing people, because that was the obvious play.
It doesn't matter how easily it's debunked.
Irrelevant. It's going to have the same effect as all of our fake news does, that once it gets out there, you just can't take it back.
So, I ask myself, am I the only person who thought of this fake Baghdadi idea?
Well, I don't think so.
I mean, in terms of the CIA and, you know, Homeland Security and people who are battling ISIS, do you think I'm the first person who had this idea?
No. It would be the most obvious play you could ever do.
You could create an audio or, in this case, a video is really compelling because it's visual.
So I would think...
And here's the second part.
You would want that version of Baghdadi to paint a negative picture of ISIS, but not so negative.
It's obvious it's a fake.
So what would that look like?
Well, it would look like Baghdadi saying, you know, kill the West.
You know, the heathens are bad.
So just to be, you know, a normal al-Baghdadi ISIS guy.
But then he says the kill shot.
That our army, which we thought was supported by God, he didn't say that part, but it's implied, has been just completely crushed on the battlefield.
If you're listening to this and you're a potential ISIS recruit, do you say, yeah, let's do more of this?
I don't think so.
The best thing that we could have ever done, we meaning intelligence services, is to produce a fake Baghdadi saying that they're losing badly.
And apparently he doesn't have another, you know, I don't remember that he had a better plan.
He was just saying, the plan we have, the only plan we have is totally losing, and it's losing, like, badly.
That would be the best thing our CIA could do.
All right. Enough on that.
What else were we going to talk about today?
I'm going to check my...
Excuse me while I... Log back in.
All right. Have you noticed that the news...
Let me start this point by reading a tweet that I sent out.
So here's a tweet that I sent out.
It has around 1,000 retweets so people liked it.
Listen to this point.
I said that in 2016...
If everything the Democrats believed was true, so let's imagine that it's 2016 and the Democrats have a number of ideas about who President Trump is.
If any of that had been true, their belief in 2016, what would it look like today?
It would look like we'd be in a depression, we'd be in a nuclear war, there would be prison camps for, I guess, anybody who wasn't white, And we'd have an insane Russian puppet as our president.
How many of those things happened?
Zero. None of them.
Not even close, right?
Nothing even suggestive of that direction happened.
Instead, what do we have in 2019?
So in 2019, if Democrats are right about everything they believe, Let's say the Democrats starting today have a certain set of beliefs.
Let's say they're all true.
In 2016, it would have meant nuclear war, depressions, and all that.
Today, if everything the Democrats think about this president is true, it would mean that the president is guilty of almost impeding a witch hunt on a crime that didn't exist.
But he didn't.
He almost, but didn't, impede an investigation into a witch hunt.
That is literally the worst case scenario.
Now, have they noticed that their worst case scenario went from the zombie apocalypse, you know, nuclear war and starvation and prison camps?
Have they noticed That that has gone down the hoax funnel.
This hoax funnel idea, it's a little sticky, because you keep seeing it.
The big lie, nuclear war!
You know, the big lies.
Depression! We're going to have a depression!
He's a Russian puppet! And they've all been reduced to, well, what about his personality?
Well, what about the moral fiber of the country?
Hey, he's told 10,000 lies that for some reason have made no difference whatsoever.
But he's got that funny haircut.
And the fun will just get smaller and smaller until they just are asking questions.
So no longer are we talking about the 25th Amendment.
No longer are we talking about Russia collusion unless we're crazy.
No longer are we talking about a weak economy unless we're blind and stupid.
No longer are we talking about prison camps because it was frickin' stupid from day one and now it's just extra, extra stupid.
We're talking about his personality.
Maybe he says mean tweets.
That's it. That's it.
So that's pretty good news.
But here are some of the things that people are seriously arguing in the political realm as if these are the important points of the day.
And maybe you can add some more.
So think about some more and put them in the comments.
Here are some things that people are arguing about.
Who was he referring to when he said fine people?
Compared to nuclear war, depression, prison camps.
Wait a minute. What did he mean by those words?
Different, right?
Another thing is, he keeps, the president keeps saying he's exonerated, but Mueller says there's just not enough, there's not evidence to say he colluded.
Well, you're sort of arguing about the definition of words, and yes, yes, the president is over-claiming what it means to have no evidence.
You know, lack of evidence is not proof of no evidence, right?
But we do live in a country in which the presumption of guilty should be the guiding principle.
So for the president to say he's exonerated when somebody's looked at it for $35 million several years and can't find a frickin' thing, I don't think that's too far wrong.
It's wrong. Like, it's technically absolutely untrue that the president was exonerated.
But is it really wrong?
Is it really?
I mean, all we're arguing about is that.
The biggest arguments we have, my contribution to the argument would be, really?
Is that what those words mean?
It's not nuclear war.
It's not a Holocaust.
It's just a word.
He's using a word wrong.
My God, his semantics.
How will the Republic survive his different use of words?
Here's another one.
Is it obstruction or not?
And then there was the argument, I guess Kamala Harris was grilling Barr at the testimony, and Barr was wondering about the question of suggests.
And she said, did the president suggest that you do whatever?
And Barr is like, well, I don't know, I have a problem with the word suggest.
And I'm thinking, that's our biggest problem.
We're literally talking about words.
Now, got a couple of updates on climate.
All good news.
Sort of. If you want to believe it, it's all good news.
Number one, we're seeing the term green nuclear deal.
More places.
Michael Medved used the term in an article.
So this is another success for Mark Schneider, who's been an advocate for people understanding that nuclear is really the only solution that we know.
To any kind of climate risk, and it wouldn't even matter if you have climate risk.
It's still the only thing you should be doing, energy-wise, not the only thing you should be doing.
You should be doing it hard, no matter what you think about the climate, because we need the energy, it's good for the world, it helps poor people emerge.
Electricity basically takes people into poverty.
So that's good.
And also I believe China's doing some stuff with some plants.
I asked Mark an estimate for how many of the Generation 3 nuclear sites.
These are the kind that I understand France is mostly or all Generation 3.
We have a few of those I think planned in this country.
And The total number of Generation 3 nuclear sites who have been around for 20 years or so, the total number of them that have had a meltdown event, what do you think the number is?
Because there are a lot of them, right?
There are a lot of them around the world.
How many do you think have had a meltdown event, the Generation 3?
Yeah, zero. Exactly zero.
And that's what Michael Schellenberger was saying, that you don't need to wait for the exotics, you know, the generation four, which if you did everything right would be even safer because they would be designed so meltdown wasn't even an option.
You know, as opposed to designed to prevent it.
It's a slight difference.
One is designed to prevent something which is technically possible.
Generation 4, if it ever became practical and economical, would make it not even something that could happen, even if everything went wrong.
But still, apparently we've gone far enough on the learning curve That nuclear generation three is being built in this country.
There are a few being planned already in the process.
And on top of that, apparently AOC and others, there was some congressional testimony recently, I don't know all the details, in which there were experts who came in and talked about climate change.
And one of the experts was a statistician who essentially blew holes in the climate change, I guess, alarmist view.
Now, I can't remember his name, but I tweeted it.
So if you look at my tweets, let me see if I can find his name.
I want to give him credit. He was...
Bear with me, talk among yourselves.
He's a skeptical scientist.
Now, I don't want to say that I'm promoting the point of view of the people I'm talking about, because I'm not.
I'm just going to tell you what they talked about, and then you can make your own judgments.
All right, it's Dr. Caleb Rossiter.
And his money quote is that we're trying to save the people of the planet from the people saving the planet.
So his basic thesis is that carbon and warming have only been good, net, and very good for the world so far, and that, statistically speaking, there is not evidence that the CO2 increases that we've seen already Are going to create any kind of calamity, and in fact, it might all be positive.
Now, you might say to yourself, well, that's opposite of what I've been hearing.
And so I don't say that Rossiter is correct.
How would I know? But I want to make a distinction with the different kinds of skeptics.
So there's the Tony Heller kind of skeptic who believes that there was intentional bad faith changes to the data to create a false impression that there's a big problem.
Now, I'm not saying that's true or false.
I'm just saying that that's one flavor of skeptic who say the data has been fudged intentionally.
There are other skeptics who say that there's no such thing as CO2 causing warming, that the basic physics is just wrong, and that maybe it's something about sunspots.
I would say they are not the most credible of the skeptics.
Again, I don't know if they're right or wrong, but they talk about arguments that the climate scientists seem to have debunked pretty thoroughly.
But I'm not the judge.
I can't tell if the debunking is real or not.
Just, there's a lot of it.
And then there's what I would call the Judith Curry flavor of skeptic.
I'm not sure she'd call herself a skeptic, so I don't want to label her.
And maybe this Dr.
Caleb Roster, who are, I would say, statistically skeptical.
Meaning that they're looking at the same data that the climate scientists are, but they're saying, I think you've over interpreted the data, or you haven't done it as rigorously as science would require, or it's not as cleanly obvious that your interpretations are obvious, just based on the statistics.
And so this particular skeptic said to Congress, and he was, of course, I guess he's associated with Happer, who the president has chosen as his lead scientist, and Happer is a skeptic.
So it shouldn't surprise us that there is one.
And... Apparently, AOC did not like talking to somebody who knew a lot more than she did on the topic, who didn't agree with her assumptions about what was true.
Now, I have no way of evaluating Dr.
Caleb Rossiter's opinion.
But neither do you.
And I don't know who does.
How in the world are we citizens supposed to look at, you know, this scientist says X and then this statistics person with, you know, great resume?
Nobody says he's incompetent.
I mean, I haven't read that.
I'm sure somebody says that about everybody, but it looks like he has the right qualifications and he's looked into it and he's the right person.
And he's looked into it and says, I'm not seeing the danger.
But here's where this statistician, if I can call him that, that may be the wrong description for his job type, but here's where he's interesting.
He totally accepts the basic science that CO2 causes warming and that it's almost certainly already present.
So he's starting with an agreement with the most basic part of climate science.
Yeah, CO2 is here.
It's increased, adds to the temperature, and we can measure it.
And it does look like it's part of the answer, but maybe not all of it.
And then he makes a better argument.
That it doesn't matter, because it's all good.
The warming is better than the cooling, and all things being equal, even if the warming killed a million people, it's better than the cold that it replaced, because the cold would have killed 10 million people.
I don't know if that's true.
And by the way, I made up those numbers.
Those are not his numbers, but it's the sense of the argument.
All right, so we're seeing Tremendously positive things happen in the climate world.
One is that I think the argument and the debate is getting a little bit more robust.
You know, when we're down to that statistical level, it seems that there's a lot of agreement up to the statistical level, and that seems like something we could...
Kind of dig into and maybe come to some kind of a better understanding that way.
And then there's the nuclear progress, which is...
There's all kinds of nuclear progress all over the world, nuclear energy progress.
And that's all good, because that is the solution to climate change.
All right. Let's see if I created...
Oh, I said yesterday that when people were accusing...
Barr of creating a narrative by coming out first with his summary and then apparently Mueller has some disagreement and the news again was completely incompetent on this topic and the news was reporting that maybe the disagreement with Mueller and Barr was over just how the news was treating it or maybe it was that Barr shaded the narrative in a way that We'll have to change it after that.
So any kind of details are going to get lost because the main spin that Barr put on it...
Barr put on it...
Seriously? The audio is gone again?
Seriously? Uh...
I'm gonna wait until somebody tells me the audio is back.
Yeah, I know you can't hear it.
I'm just waiting.
Hold on. Hold on.
Interestingly... Ah, I'm back.
Okay. Interestingly, this is exactly the same point where my periscope broke up yesterday.
Probably total coincidence.
So I'm going to say the point again and see if it breaks up again.
Barr put a spin on the Mueller report by being the first one to talk about it and summarizing it.
All summaries are a narrative.
And they're also all inaccurate.
You can't create a summary that is also accurate.
Those two things are opposites.
The summary gets rid of the accuracy in order to make sure that you understand at least the central point.
So saying that Barr's summary was inaccurate or misleading is probably not understanding how the world works because somebody was going to spin this thing and it was whoever went first.
If Mueller's summary, apparently Mueller had his own summary, If that had gone first, it would have been one of the members of his team would decide how we interpreted it.
Is that fair? Well, don't know, because we don't know whether we should trust.
We don't know much about this member of the team.
That member of the team was not an elected person.
We can't, you know, it's sort of not transparent.
But when Barr does it, he's doing it in public.
He's showing his work.
He's fully qualified for this kind of decision.
He went to Congress.
He answered questions. He showed the entire Mueller report, all the data, but he did add his own narrative.
Somebody was going to add a narrative.
So if you're complaining that Barr added a narrative, you're not really complaining about anything.
Because somebody was going to do that.
Who's better? Do you want the fake news to put their narrative on it?
Because they would have. And you know that.
So you don't have a choice of somebody...
Here's what you don't have.
You never had the choice of nobody going first.
That's not a choice. Somebody was going to build a narrative and sell it to the country, and it was going to be the main one that other people complained about, but it was going to be the main one.
I think Barr being recently appointed or recently confirmed by Congress...
Did we lose the signal again?
Anyway, I think that Barr, having recently been in his job through a public process, is the most credible person to do it, even though we accept that he's spinning the narrative in a positive way for the president.
I think we'd all agree that he spun it in a positive way for the president.
But, remember, there was no underlying crime.
There's going to be a narrative.
There's no such thing as a neutral narrative in our world.
It doesn't happen. It can't happen.
You couldn't do it if you tried.
He had to spin it either anti-Trump or pro-Trump.
There wasn't anything like a neutral way to do it.
You couldn't write a summary that was neutral.
So the fact that he leaned pro-Trump says to me, He's doing the job the way you'd want him to do it.
And I would say the same whether it was Hillary Clinton or somebody else in the office.
It doesn't matter. If the underlying crime has been found to be, you know, just vaporous, I don't mind at all that the Attorney General said, all right, this whole thing was sort of a witch hunt.
And even if you can make some technical case on obstruction, do we want to do that?
As a country? Is that who we want to be?
Do we want to be that country that would make a technical argument on this BS witch hunt stuff that maybe if you read the law just right and interpreted it just a certain way, well, maybe you could put this president in jail.
You don't want that. You wouldn't want that if it were Hillary Clinton, if you're honest.
If you really want what's good for the country, you wouldn't want that for anybody.
It doesn't matter who's president.
You wouldn't want it for a citizen.
You wouldn't want it for a Congress member.
You wouldn't want anybody to be treated any differently than the way Attorney General Barr treated the President of the United States right in front of us and showed all of his work and showed all of Mueller's work.
All right, that's as good as you can do.
Even if you don't think it's perfect, even if you don't like it, it's still as good as you can do.
It's the best system we have in an imperfect world where somebody had to go first.
All right, that's all I got to say for today.
The leaf blower's outside my window.
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