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Dec. 20, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:09:32
Episode 762 Scott Adams: The Democrat Debate, Imaginary Crimes, Holiday Debate Tips, Shampeachment
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Should I hang left or hang right?
Or as we like to call it in the tailoring business, shall I dress left or dress right?
Or dress center? Can't really dress center.
Well, I know why you're all here.
It's because of the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Coffee with Scott Adams, Holiday Edition, getting ready to launch, and all you need to participate is grab your holiday cup, mug, glass, snifter, stein, chalice, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblet, vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite Liquid eggnog is acceptable.
Coffee is better.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
Including my throat.
The simultaneous sip.
Go. Ooh, holiday pleasure.
That's some of the best.
Well, today people will be taking off early in the United States.
Going to jump on the holidays.
Kids are going to be off school pretty soon for a week.
That's good and bad, isn't it?
It's time. It's time.
All right. So, let's talk about all the news.
Once again, we have only fun news.
There's no bad news today.
What happened to bad news?
I suppose there's news that's bad for one team or the other, but it's all just sort of political fun and nonsense and reality TV. I don't even think there's any bad news in the news today, is there?
If there is, I'm not reading it.
So, one of the hilarious things coming out of the impeachment that's not really an impeachment, we'll talk about that, Is that apparently a lot of people in the United States were under the impression that President Trump was removed from office.
Their worlds will become very confusing when they find out he's still in office.
Because it turns out that a lot of people think that impeachment means removed from office.
So a lot of people were celebrating on Twitter.
They were not what we'd call the well-informed people.
That's right. The poorly informed, and we love the poorly informed.
I think we can agree on that.
We're big fans of the poorly informed.
But the poorly informed lived in a different world yesterday in which President Trump had been removed from office.
It was kind of like the man in the Hightower situation, except reversed.
I don't even know what that means.
But we're going to talk about Representative Clyburn in a minute, and that'll all make sense.
So that's hilarious that so many people are going to think...
For so many people, it's going to be like Election Day 2016.
You know, yesterday, or the day before yesterday, they're all, yay!
Trump removed from office!
Yes, yes!
What? Impeachment means what?
They haven't even sent the articles over to the Senate.
What? Oh.
Well. I guess I'll have to wait for the new year.
I know what my resolution will be.
Well. So, that's hilarious.
Have any of you seen the new Trump campaign ad?
I tweeted it yesterday.
And this one's going to be hard to talk about because sometimes words don't really capture what you need to convey.
I'm pretty good with words, but I'm not going to be able to convey this.
So you simply have to experience what I'm going to describe.
The new Trump campaign ad is one minute long, and it is, I think, the best campaign ad ever produced.
Now, I haven't seen every campaign ad ever produced, but once you see it, you're probably going to have the same reaction I did, which is, okay, this is the best thing that's ever been produced as a campaign ad.
Here's what's special about it.
It's only one minute, and it takes you through an entire movie arc just the way a movie does.
I mean, it's got the same, almost the three-scene structure.
It's got somebody having a life that changes in the beginning, because all movies do that.
Somebody's life gets changed in some way.
And then there's the third act, where it's all doomed and it's all bad news.
And then there's the amazing part, and then there's the celebration afterwards.
Now, here's why you have to watch this.
So far you're saying to yourselves, probably a lot of you, you're saying to yourselves, there are good campaign ads, there are bad campaign ads.
Why are you going on about this?
Is it because you love President Trump?
You're just doing another commercial for him?
Nope. Let me tell you, if you're not convinced to watch this ad for the experience of it, and that's what I'm recommending, you have to experience it.
Before you do, read the comments where I tweeted it.
The comments are very uniform and exactly what I experienced.
I had a full body experience.
Meaning, literally, Every hair in my arm, every part of my skin, my brain, my exterior, my sympathetic nervous system, my breathing, my pulse.
One minute, I cried.
Cried like a baby at the end of it.
One minute reduced me to a quivering lump of...
Whatever. But in a good way.
It's a good cry. I watched it a second time after I put some distance on it.
Because I wanted to see if...
Was I just in a mood or something?
Watched it a second time.
Stronger. It was actually stronger the second time.
Now, there is so much technique...
Packed into this masterpiece.
And by the way, masterpiece is not a strong word.
If you see it, that one-minute campaign ad is comparable to the best movie you've ever seen.
In complete, in terms of how you feel.
Now, I'm not saying there aren't better two-hour movies that give you similar feelings, but nobody's ever done it in a minute before.
One minute to produce just an extreme feeling.
It's amazing.
Somebody says, I saw it, and man.
Obviously, these things are subjective, so you should expect that some people have no reaction.
Some people have very strong reaction.
Most people have some kind of reaction.
Somebody says, I think it's the prednisone.
Could be. I thought that too, until I saw the other commenters.
You have to read the other comments to see what they experience.
It's a physical feeling.
So I looked for all the technique in it, and I decided I'm not going to call it out, because I don't want to ruin it by showing you technique, but you'll feel it.
The music, the videography, the direction, the production, I've never seen anything better.
It's truly remarkable. You have to see it.
All right, and again, I have to say that this is about the experience.
This is not a political statement, not just a shilling for Trump.
Because some of you remember, I was equally, not quite as much, but I was very complimentary of Bernie Sanders' ad in the last go-around, the last election.
I thought he had the best campaign ad with the people streaming to the ocean to the Simon and Garfunkel music.
But that doesn't even come close to this thing.
I think Bernie's ad was one of the better ones I've seen up to that point, but this just wiped it off the table.
I'd love to know who's behind it, because I believe they must have, this is just speculation, they must have pulled together a team that had sort of the strongest people from a variety of different fields, There had to be somebody involved who's a persuasion or at least advertising genius.
So if you ever find out who is the actual person behind it, I don't know if it's the writer, director, consultant, or all of the above, but there is pure genius in that thing.
All right. Let's talk about the debates.
I agree with most observers that the debates probably didn't move the needle too much.
Everybody played it safe.
But in playing it safe, that does produce, somewhat accidentally, winners and losers.
I thought that Joe Biden had his best debate, as did others.
He didn't have any big gaffes.
He seemed good enough.
You know, he seemed like an old pair of jeans.
You know, they fit.
They were comfortable. They weren't great.
But they were terrible. So I think Biden simply by being not terribly incompetent, which is, unfortunately, we've seen him in the not looking so good phase, but he had a good night.
So let's give it to him.
Good night for Joe Biden. I am still predicting that if Joe Biden gets the nomination, which seems...
At least as likely as anything else at this point, completely surprised.
But if he does, he's going to have to fix that vice president problem, meaning that he's going to have to get a person of color and ideally a woman on the ticket and ideally a woman of color.
So who does that give you?
Klobuchar would be an excellent match.
She would be really an ideal vice presidential pick.
Why? Because even people who don't want Klobuchar to be their next president see in her somebody who has all the skill.
She doesn't have any blank spots.
She doesn't have the charisma.
Of even a Joe Biden, who doesn't have the charisma of an Obama.
So she's two levels removed in charisma, but totally solid.
However, she's got no color, as we see in the comments going by.
Right, so she would only solve half of the problem.
Kamala Harris has disappeared.
Here is my further updated prediction.
As you know, I predicted that Kamala would get the nomination.
Then when she suspended her campaign, I revised that too.
She will be picked as a vice presidential pick by Biden, which will in effect make her, in a lot of people's minds, the nominee.
Because people are going to look at Biden and they're going to say, okay, Joe Biden, who do you pick for vice president?
Because in this particular case, that's pretty important.
Because we don't know if he'll even make four years, much less eight.
So, here's my prediction.
I believe that Kamala Harris...
Is going to go dark if she hasn't already, meaning that she's going to go off the grid mostly.
Has she gone off the grid mostly?
Well, she's not in the news, so I guess so.
Here's what I think is happening.
Biden had the most recommendations from important Democrats, the most endorsements.
The number two person was Kamala Harris, which means that both Biden and Harris have the support of sort of the, let's say, the traditional Democratic leaders.
If you could coach Kamala Harris up to competent, You'd have a strong package.
Her performance in the primaries was completely incompetent.
But could she be coached up to at least not hurting anything?
I'll bet yes.
She just has to get rid of her sister as a campaign manager.
How do you get rid of your sister as the campaign manager?
Only one way. If you want to keep your family together, you don't want to lose your sister, but you need to fire her.
What's the only way you could do it?
Cancel your campaign.
Because if she becomes the vice presidential nominee, she might have a different team.
Somebody that Joe Biden might recommend.
So I think that Harris is going to solve the problem of her sister advising her.
And she did that by canceling her campaign.
And if she gets picked as vice president, I'll bet you that she comes back not looking like the old Kamala.
I believe that she will get a makeover.
Maybe even the way she dresses, you know, maybe her hair, maybe something like that, although her hair is fine.
And I think that she's going to come back as a more capable campaigner because she'll get fixed by the same people who want Biden to win.
Because the people who want him to win, we're kind of not that far away from the ones who wanted Kamala to win.
They're all the Democratic insiders.
So that's my prediction. All right, let's talk about some more.
I thought that Yang was the biggest winner.
Now, Biden wins just by not losing.
So he's sort of in the special class because he's at the head of the pack.
So simply not losing is a good day for him.
But I think Yang made a mark.
And here's how I think he made a mark.
The people who are persuadable are not on the pro-Trump side every day and they're not on the impeach Trump every day side.
Yang is the only one who realized that the persuadables, well I guess Biden realizes this too, but the persuadables...
Don't care too much about impeachment.
So when he was asked about impeachment, he basically brushed it off.
Exactly the right play.
And when I saw that, I thought, huh, that's a strong play.
He's the only person who's recognizing that the only persuadables are at the position he took, which is not that important.
Wipe it off the table. So that was good.
Here is the best part of the night.
And really, every now and then there are things which could change civilization entirely.
And they're small so you don't notice them when they happened.
One of those things happened last night.
There was something that happened at the debate that could change civilization.
And it was the fact that all of the candidates were asked about their views on nuclear energy.
Did you catch that? Now, I was having some technical difficulties, so I missed some of the answers.
So I didn't get all of their answers to it.
But the important part was that all the Democrats were asked a challenging question about nuclear energy.
And the way the question was couched Was as a positive for nuclear, and why don't you idiots endorse it?
I mean, they didn't say it that way, because the interviewers were not...
They were trying to play it down the middle.
And by the way, I thought that the people hosting it, the talent, etc., I thought they did the best job we've seen.
Am I wrong? That felt like the best of the debates by far in terms of how it was managed.
Anyway... So they were all asked about nuclear energy, and it was phrased as, obviously, a solution for clean energy and a solution for climate change.
And it was a very challenging question.
So it wasn't the answers that were important.
It was the question, because they all had to address it.
Yang said yes on nuclear energy.
It has to be part of the solution.
And then he went and mentioned thorium technology in particular.
Now, if you've been doing what I've been doing for the last couple of years, I guess, especially with Mark Schneider, his help in persuading on nuclear energy, and Michael Schellenberger, and people have been talking about this forever, hearing Yang call out a specific next generation technology, it was a big deal.
It was a big deal. And what I imagined was all of the other candidates, while they're watching Yang talk intelligently about the potential for thorium, a specific kind of new technology for nuclear, you could almost hear the other people thinking, Thorium. Which one is that?
Thorium. Thorium.
I think I'm going to need to read up on thorium.
The fact that Yang brought up thorium showed he had a deeper level of knowledge than, I imagine, half of the people on the stage.
I don't really know.
And I'm not even saying that thorium is the answer.
By the way, there's some controversy about which of the new technologies are going to be the one.
I'll talk about that a little bit later.
But the fact that he went full at it, Yang just went right at it and said, yeah, it's got to be that, and we've got to make it better.
Here's the technology.
I think that put him as the winner.
He was the only one who had a knockout answer for climate change.
He's the only one who put impeachment in its proper place.
But then he had...
He had a good moment that got a lot of clicks, which is also good because it's provocative.
If Yang has learned better than most of them that you have to be a little bit provocative to get attention, And attention is a big part of the equation.
So here's what Yang said.
So the question was, I guess Barack Obama said that women are better leaders in some contexts.
And so Yang was asked about that.
And Yang said, quote, the fact is, if you get too many men alone and leave us alone for a while, we kind of become morons.
And the audience laughed.
Now, the first time I heard this, My first reaction was, oh, God, just pandering to women.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I know you have to say that women have to be all the superheroes, and if it's an insurance commercial, you have to show that the women makes the good decisions on the insurance, and the man runs into telephone poles.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just more of this social justice crap where even if you're a man, you've got to say, oh, no.
Men are no good.
Women are great.
I thought that was my first impression.
And I thought about it a little bit.
And I compared it to my own experience.
Here's my experience.
If you put a bunch of men together, They will compete with each other.
They'll sort first into your alphas and your betas.
That's the first thing that men do when you put them all together.
And then within the alphas, they'll be fighting it out for dominance in a competition that doesn't help anybody.
So I would agree that when you put only men together on a process, Men will act sort of like men.
And you might not get a clean, let's say, a solution that makes sense for the whole public.
You might get just whatever happens when men compete with each other and try to sort themselves into alphas and betas and compete and who's great and who's got the biggest equipment and all that.
That's true. I would say my experience...
Supports that too many men without a female in the room does change the conversation.
Then, let's say you introduce one woman into the room, and this is just a thought experiment.
I'm not saying you should only have one woman in the room, but just introduce one woman into the mix, and what happens?
Immediately, the men start talking to the woman.
Not directly, not as in they focus their conversation at the woman, but they change their entire approach toward impressing the one woman in the room.
Because we're built that way.
Biologically, if you throw one woman in a room full of men, their biological instinct is to compete for the woman.
Now, somebody said, is she hot?
I'm not going to touch that question.
I'm going to say that you all know that there's a difference in who the woman is, right?
Let's just say average woman.
It doesn't matter if she's married or what.
The biological nature of men is that we will change our approach to be more appealing to the one woman in the room because we're built that way.
Now, if you have a woman in the room, do you have a better or a worse window on civilization in general?
Probably better, because women are a lot closer, in my opinion, just opinion here, folks.
You're free to disagree.
Women are closer in opinion, in general, to what the public considers appropriate or good.
Men are a little bit removed from that, and we depend on women to tell us what's acceptable.
Now, I know you don't like that, but it's just biologically true as an observation.
We men look to women to give us a little extra visibility on what's acceptable.
And if you left it to men, it would get pretty dark pretty quickly.
So I think that men willingly allow some of that decision-making about what's appropriate.
We willingly outsource that to women somewhat, because we trust them to have a clear understanding of what good behavior looks like.
Now, I'm not trying to make fun of women.
I'm not trying to make fun of men.
So nothing I just said should be considered an insult to men or women.
It has to do with the fact, and I know you don't want to hear this, that diversity has advantages.
Diversity has advantages.
That's a perfect scenario where diversity does help, I think.
If you don't have a woman in the room, you're flying blind if you're men.
Likewise, if you're a bunch of women in the room and there are no men in the room, you're also flying blind.
Now, I think that you can take that argument to if you don't have an African-American in the room, you don't know what's going on for that part of the population.
I think that's fair.
I think that's fair. I think you could argue that performance...
You just want the best people who are good at performing.
But if you want to have a good, clean filter on the world, what's a good idea, what's a bad idea, diversity gets you that.
All right. Let's talk about, who else was there?
Warren. I thought Warren was kind of maybe a break even or worse.
She's got this plan where she wants to tax the wealthy people who have over $50 million in wealth, tax them 2%, which they would hardly notice, wouldn't change their lifestyles, and then that 2% will pay for all manner of public services.
Because there are so many people with so much money that even that little tax on that tiny group will get you all, I don't know, free healthcare and education and stuff.
So the problem with that is...
The problem is that if you don't know much about anything...
It sounds pretty appealing, because it's so simple.
Wait, you're telling me you're going to take money from people who have plenty of money and won't even notice it's gone, and you're going to give it to people who desperately need it, and nothing's going to happen except that it will stimulate the economy and we'll all make more money?
Is that your proposition?
Because you know what?
It sounds pretty good to me, too.
I've argued, in the context of reparations, I've argued that if you were to tax just those richest people, the same ones that Warren wants to tax, they have a strange quality about them.
They're not like everybody else in lots of ways, but in this one way, the super rich are not like everybody else.
And that is that if the economy in general does well, They always do well.
Well, not always, but, you know, often enough that it's close to always.
So taxing the top 2% for something that clearly would help educate and keep the population healthy, keep them employed, keep them productive, keep them as good employees for your company, big billionaire, it's probably closer to an investment.
If a middle class person Gets taxed and it goes to the poor to pay for those services.
Well, maybe that's closer to a break even because the middle class person gets poorer.
That's not good. The person who got the money is better off, but maybe that's kind of a wash because somebody lost something in order for somebody to gain something.
But if you're only taxing the people who literally won't notice it, 2% and a 50 million?
Million dollars. Literally wouldn't notice it.
And it has a giant stimulating effect that's kind of appealing.
Now, I don't think economists quite back this plan, and the trouble with all of these economic plans is that the public can't understand them.
But the public does know That there are rich people and they have money and they could give it to...
Somebody says, in all capitals, real Dean Davis says, Scott, didn't you...
I'm reading it like shouting because it's all in capitals.
Scott, didn't you say you'd leave if taxed too much?
Hut, even if you say buy, you have FU money.
Well, yeah, I would.
If the tax...
If somebody got elected and started taxing rich people at 70% or 90% or something like that, yeah, I would leave the country for sure.
But if they taxed only the people with 50 million or more, a one-time tax of 2%, I think it's one time.
It's not annual, right?
I hope it's not annual.
That would be completely different.
But I think it's 1% or 2% once.
Maybe that's not enough.
So anyway, the point is that her proposition sounds good on paper the same way that supply-side economics sounds good if you don't know too much about economics.
So it's a strong approach, but I don't know that it's catching on.
Klobuchar looked competent but boring.
Didn't have a bad day.
Buttigieg got attacked a little bit, but I thought he was a little bit lawyerly.
He's getting better.
You have to watch people like Buttigieg, especially the younger candidates, because their ability to improve is hard to predict.
So you're seeing Buttigieg improving during the course of the campaign.
You don't know how much better he could get.
Maybe he could get a lot better.
So he got attacked for having fundraisers in something called a wine cave.
Literally a cave where expensive wine was served in Napa near me.
And it was just a standard fundraiser.
Apparently this is a very common way that Democrats do fundraisers.
Gavin Newsom even talked about it.
He said, yeah, it's just the normal way we do it.
Why would you want Why would you want rich people not to be able to give money to a campaign?
It doesn't even make sense. So I think Buttigieg did a good job of lawyerly explaining it away, but the lawyerly answer doesn't win.
The visual wins.
Compare Buttigieg's response, which is perfectly good, but it's just a concept with no image.
He said, quote, this is a problem with passing purity tests you yourself cannot pass.
Then went on to talk about how Warren had taken money in her Senate campaign and then transferred it over to her presidential campaign, which is legal, but it still takes money from rich people.
Now, Buttigieg's explanation is technical, it's lawyerly, it's true, it's clever, it's right, it's the right response.
It's all completely accurate.
Now, compare that to what, I think it was what Yang said about it, when he got his turn to comment on it.
Yang said that he doesn't want to go shake the money tree in the wine cave.
Now compare those two approaches.
Shake the money tree and the wine cave.
You might live to a thousand years old and never forget what I just said.
Shake the money tree and the wine cave.
That is so visual.
That is really, really visual.
It's as good as build the wall.
So again, when you watch the younger candidates, learn as they go.
Was Yang always that visual?
Was Yang always that good?
Or is he picking this up as he goes?
Because I've got a feeling he's picking it up as he goes.
He's a gamer, somebody said.
Right. He's picking up tools.
As he does his adventure, if you imagine it's a video game, he's like, oh, machine gun, pick that up.
Oh, food, pick that up.
Energy pellet, pick that up.
I feel like Yang is gaining power.
He's just picking up tools as he goes through the adventure.
And that visual reference, man, that was good.
That was so good. So I would say Yang had certainly something close to a breakout night by not buying into the politics as usual, by being very visual, by being provocative, being interesting.
And yeah, I think he just nailed it.
So Yang had a good night.
All right. Did you all see the newest Yanni and Laurel thing is Representative James Clyburn?
Was in an interview, and he was talking about Mitch McConnell's pretrial comments about how he wants to handle the impeachment.
If it goes over to the Senate, McConnell might want to vote on it without having witnesses and stuff.
And so Representative Clyburn, who's a Democrat, was talking about it, and he said...
And part of his explanation, he said, quote, give him a fair trial and hang him.
Except from the reverse perspective.
And everybody read that and said, what?
Did he just say that we want to give President Trump a fair trial and then hang him?
What? That sounds like the worst thing anybody ever said.
Except that as the New York Times fact checker Daniel Dale said, Yes, in the simulation, the fact checker for the New York Times is Daniel Dale.
He points out that actually this is not what Clyburn said.
He did use the words, give him a fair trial and hang him, except that he added right after that, except in the reverse.
So he was saying that what might happen is the opposite of giving somebody a fair trial and hanging them, Which would be giving them an unfair trial and letting them free.
So what Clyburn was trying to say is that McConnell wants to give Trump an unfair trial, meaning no trial at all, and then set him free.
But he said it in the worst possible way you could say it, for clarity.
He said it's like giving him a fair trial and then hanging him, except in reverse.
If you take out the last part, except in reverse...
It does sound like he's talking about giving Trump a trial and hanging him, but when you add accept in reverse, that's how you know that that's the opposite of what he meant.
So, the president's team, I think one of the campaign accounts, tweeted that as if Clyburn did say, hang the president, but Daniel Dale fact-checked it and said no, and said, and then I saw an opportunity.
You know me. If I see an opportunity, I'm in the crease.
And I said to myself, huh, I've been watching this Daniel Dale guy operate for quite a while, and I don't love the fact that he's fact-checking the GOP at every turn and finding that they have lots of things that need to be fact-checked.
I don't love it, but I read a lot of them, and I don't disagree with him.
I don't know if I ever have.
In other words, he shows his work.
This is what was said.
This is what is true.
Here's the source. More often than not, he'll show the source.
So I have a general positive view of Daniel Dale's critical thinking as well as his attempt to be Somewhat unbiased.
Now, he works for the New York Times, so there's a limit on how unbiased you can be, right?
We all know there's a limit to how unbiased any of us can be.
But some are trying, right?
Some people are trying to be unbiased.
And I get the impression that Daniel Dale is one of those people.
The way he writes gives me the impression he's attempting to be unbiased.
Doesn't mean he's right every time.
The same with all of us.
So I saw an opening.
And so I tweeted back to him, retweeted and then commented on his Clyburn comments.
I said, I agreed, which is always good to agree with people if you want to influence them.
Start by agreeing.
So I said, agreed.
I accepted that his interpretation of Clyburn is the accurate one, because it does look like the accurate one.
And I said, for credibility, meaning his own credibility, Daniel Dales, do the fine people hoax next.
Now somebody asked me, what are the odds he'll actually click on the link?
I linked over to Steve Cortez's article in Real Clear Politics that describes the hoax.
And somebody said, what are the odds that he'll click over to it?
And here's my answer.
Probably 100%.
Probably 100%. The odds of him not clicking on a prominent link from somebody else who's got a blue check.
You know, I have a blue check so people pay attention to me more.
Fair or not? That's just a fact.
They pay attention more. Probably.
I mean, almost certainly he's going to check that link.
Now, I would also say, and this is just speculation, my guess...
Is that he already agrees that the fine people hoax is a hoax.
That's my guess.
Now, he can choose what topics he talks about.
He's mostly talking about things that are current in the news.
And he started work after that fine people hoax.
So he doesn't have to circle back to it.
He could ignore it.
That's what I expect.
But what if it comes up again?
What if it comes up again in the general election?
Because you know it well. Does Daniel Dale correct that fact or does he ignore it?
It's an interesting question because there are very few people who are on the field whose job it is to at least attempt to be unbiased.
And if he ignores it, it works against any kind of branding that would make him look unbiased.
So I don't know. I think it would break the world in half if Daniel Dale came out and said the fine people hoax is a hoax.
Dale would cement his credibility forever.
That's it. If he wants to be credible...
And he wants to just put a cap on it and just say, all right, I'm going to take this, and for the rest of time, I'll be the guy who is the most credible person in the United States.
And just put a cap on it and say, here it is.
I just debunked the fine people hoax.
Criticize me now. You can't.
You can't criticize him for being biased any time in the future if he debunks that easily debunked hoax.
Alright, let's talk about the impeachment legalities.
I'm having the greatest time, I hope you are too, learning about the technical details of impeachment.
It's really interesting.
You know, in many ways, just learning about it is interesting.
And this tweet from John Roberts, Fox News.
According to a Harvard law professor, and this is important, the credibility of this guy is important.
According to Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, parenthetically, he was a Democratic witness in the judiciary hearing.
All right. So this is a Democrat.
He's as Democrat as you can get, and he's a Harvard Law professor.
Exactly the guy you want to ask about the details of this impeachment process.
He said, President Trump is not, quote, impeached until the articles are sent to the Senate.
If Pelosi holds on to them indefinitely, Trump would not be impeached.
So I tweeted today that you should take this tweet from John Roberts and you should print it out and take it with you or screenshot it for your holiday with your family.
Because when your family says, ha, ha, ha, your president got impeached, then you say, did he?
Oh, did he? Give me a second.
What's your... Phone number?
Send? Not so much.
Not so much.
You want him to be impeached?
He might be impeached.
But as of Christmas, he's not impeached.
Until Nancy sends over those articles.
So that's fun. By the way, this is just a famous person aside.
I met John Roberts years ago.
I think he was at CBS News.
He interviewed me when Dilbert first started taking off in my little two-bedroom condo in Dublin, California.
So I got to hang out with John Roberts for a while.
Very nice guy. That has nothing to do with anything.
He's just a nice guy. And so on that same point about how to argue with your relatives, I tweeted this morning that everybody who says, and I saw it again this morning in a tweet, that the president is not above the law.
And here's my take on that.
If today, like today, the 20th of December, you are still arguing in public using this phrase, nobody is above the law or the president is not above the law, Can you explain why the impeachment articles do not include any alleged law-breaking?
That's something to take with you for your family.
Because your family is going to say, the president's not above the law.
He's not above the law. Nobody's above the law.
And then you say, good point.
Can you explain why the Democrats did all this research and when they wrote up the articles of impeachment, none of it included even an allegation of a law being broken?
Because you'd think that would be right near the top.
If the president broke an actual law, You'd think that would be right up there in those articles of impeachment, right?
Can you explain why it's so obvious to the whole world, according to you, that the president broke a law or laws, and apparently they're important ones, because you wouldn't mention them otherwise.
It's not like littering.
They must be important.
Can you explain why the Democrats don't know What you know, because I'm pretty sure they would have put them in the articles of impeachment.
So there's that. Then, of course, there's the provocative question that Joel Pollack asks in Breitbart.
Isn't Nancy Pelosi, by holding up and delaying the articles of impeachment, obstructing Congress?
Is she not obstructing Congress?
Now, that's a fun point, but I suppose the Supreme Court could be involved in that decision, too, at some point.
So, neither she nor Trump are actually obstructing any Congress at all, as long as the Supreme Court is still the trapdoor that both of them had available to them.
All right. Let's see.
What else we got here? So, I think it's fascinating that Trump is not technically impeached, even according to the experts for the Democrats.
What would you predict?
Do you predict that he ever will be impeached?
I mean, technically.
Because it's starting to look like maybe, maybe, Maybe not.
Maybe not.
Because he's not impeached yet.
Andrew McCarthy had an interesting article on this, that in the legal political system, there are specific events which have to happen, like the filing of a document in the court, for example, that is when you're done.
And until a document is filed and stamped and accepted, You're only almost there.
You need the final official thing where it just doesn't count in the legal system.
And arguably, in this case, until they send it over to the Senate, they haven't met the minimum requirement of it being an impeachment, interestingly.
That doesn't change anything at all, but it's a fun point.
Now, because the simulation that we live in loves us, It keeps giving us entertaining events.
The most entertaining this week is that Hunter Biden might face a court order to disclose his finances because of his paternity suit with a stripper.
And might force him to produce his financial disclosures so we can see how much money he got from Ukraine and, I don't know, some bank and China maybe.
Now, here's what's funny.
If it turns out that Hunter Biden has to publicly disclose his finances before President Trump is forced to disclose his taxes, I don't know if I'll ever be able to stop laughing.
Now, I'm not saying it's good.
I'm not saying it's bad.
I'm not saying they shouldn't both release their information or neither or one or the other.
I'm not even making an opinion on what should or should not be done, what is right or wrong.
I'm just saying that when the simulation serves you up a dessert like this, eat that dessert because this is good stuff.
I would like to call out For the best meme that I've seen in a long time, and it didn't have a marker on it, so I'm going to describe it instead of show it.
But if somebody could tell me who came up with this, it's brilliant.
And it was a two-parter.
One was a picture of Trump, and the first picture of Trump said something along the lines of, well, maybe I can find it.
It'd be easier to show it to you, wouldn't it?
Because you have to see the visual to get the full beauty of it here.
I think I can find it pretty quickly.
And it looks like...
Hold on, hold on.
I swear I can find this quickly.
Here it is. All right.
So on top, it says, stop calling me orange.
You can barely see it.
And on the bottom, he's got a thumbs up.
He says, hashtag impeach.
Except when you read the word impeach, it looks like I am peach.
So the top is, stop calling me orange, hashtag I am peach.
And I looked at this and I thought...
Damn it. It just happened.
Remember I told you that Trump would not be the subject of impeachment and it would change him?
I told you that Trump would change what the word impeachment means?
Because he changes everything.
Things don't change Trump.
Trump changes other things.
And then it happened.
Stop calling me orange.
Hashtag, I impeach.
Could you love that better?
Let me take down the temperature of this and maybe you can see it better.
Can you see this now? Stop calling me orange.
Hashtag I am peach.
I mean, seriously.
Whoever thought of that?
Slow clap. Slow clap.
So if anybody knows who came up with that, let me know.
I'll give them a shout-out. That deserves attention.
All right. So you saw the news, I think it was yesterday, that there was missing footage of the outside of Jeffrey Epstein's cell the time that he attempted suicide.
I guess he attempted it once, allegedly.
Then he succeeded in a different attempt.
And the video from the first attempt was missing.
And people said to me, Scott, I know you think this is just incompetence, and it's not a murder attempt, it's a real suicide.
How do you explain this video that we used to have, and now it's missing?
And I said, still incompetence.
Still incompetence.
And today, the new news is they found the video.
So, probably incompetence.
But of course, the people who still believe in the clever murder scenario said, well, it's a deepfake.
It's a deep fake and it's been modified.
That's why it went away for a while and came back.
Maybe. Maybe.
Can't rule it out. You have to see Alan Dershowitz bitch-slapping Lawrence Tribe on Twitter with his legal opinion.
So Lawrence Tribe was trying to make the case that Nancy Pelosi did not have to Turn over the articles of impeachment to the Senate anytime soon if she suspects that the Senate would not give him a fair hearing.
And so Tribe used the analogy of, you know, if a judge...
Would a judge convene a jury if the judge knew for sure that the jury did not intend...
I think that was his analogy.
But anyway, the point was, as I often say, analogies are not a part of reason.
They are usually stupid, and that any smart person will just argue that the analogy is not exactly like the thing.
And that's the end of the argument.
So Dershowitz just rips apart Lawrence Tribe's analogy and says pretty directly it's a dumb analogy, because the better analogy would be X or Y, but in any case, analogies are a little weak.
So watching Dershowitz rip apart analogies, From a Harvard law professor whose analogy was just shit.
I mean, just shit. You have to read Dershowitz's explanation to find out how bad it was.
But that was very fun.
All right. Let's see.
Joe Biden in the debate...
He got the one-term question.
You know, would he be willing to run and just say he was going to commit to only one term?
No, he said, you know, I'm not going to make that decision, blah, blah.
But just putting it out there, it's got to be really bad for Joe Biden.
Just the fact that that even got asked in front of the public.
So I don't know that that'll have any impact on his polling, but it was certainly a question that suggests the people asking the question were making smart, reasonable, unbiased questions.
Here's the funniest part.
Biden has decided that the main thrust of his campaign, aside from Orange Man Bad, which of course we all know, is that the economy is not that good.
Joe Biden decided to rest his chances of becoming president on arguing that the best economy in the history of all economies, in the history of civilization, the best economic year we've had in approximately, if scientists are correct, 13 to 15 billion years.
It's the best.
So Biden's going to say, no, it's not really that good.
That's his argument.
That's not really that good, because the middle class is not benefiting enough.
Now, there might be truth to that, but it sounds like the worst argument anybody ever had going into an election.
No, the best economy we've ever had, no.
No, we don't want that.
Now, the others have it worse.
At least Biden is going into it with more moderate proposals that you don't imagine would immediately derail the economy.
But the other candidates are saying that the economy is not that good and they're going to make a whole bunch of changes that every economist would agree would make it worse.
They might make it more fair, the things that Warren and Bernie are suggesting.
You could argue that it would get closer to a balanced, fair situation if income equality and access to healthcare and all that are how you measure those things.
But I don't see how you could have a platform that says the economy is already not working and that we're going to do something that I think every economist would say would just decimate the GDP, you know, if you start making these big changes in the middle of a stream that's going well.
All right. Then, let's talk about something fun.
Have you ever heard of the Sahara Sea Project?
Apparently for decades there's been this idea that comes up and goes away about building a, I guess a, what would you call it, a canal from the ocean to the Sahara Desert.
Because I guess much of the Sahara Desert is below sea level.
So if you just built a canal, which wouldn't be easy, but you could do it, you build a canal, you create a vast sea ocean, In the middle of the Sahara Desert, and then, you know, the humidity changes, and you can have farming and all that stuff.
Somebody says it's too dry, or it's dry too.
I don't know what that means. So here's the idea.
So Chiel Merling, if I'm pronouncing it right, Chiel, tweeted out, why was the Sahara Sea project ever abandoned?
And he noted that it could neutralize sea level rises.
So it would be one place that any extra sea level rise could be siphoned off into in a happy way.
And I thought, yeah, that does make sense, right?
If you had a big basin that could substantially increase the quantity of seawater and distribute it to a different place, That would actually be very good for minimizing the impact of rising sea level.
I thought, not bad.
It would also create mass area for agriculture that's currently desert.
Not bad. And it would do...
I had some other benefit here, too.
And it would...
I don't know.
It would do something else good. Oh, and it would be just a great economic zone for Africa.
I would add to that, now he didn't say this, but I've heard this before, that if you could take the hottest spot in the world, and probably the Sahara would be that for a large land mass, if you could cool off the hottest part, It should make a bigger difference to climate change than everybody doing a little bit on the places that weren't that hot in the first place.
So the theory is if you could make a big difference to the hottest place, maybe that's the biggest bang for the buck.
And one of the ways that cooling off the Sahara by reforesting it, there are ideas about letting livestock just wander around on the borders.
Because apparently if you let livestock wander around on the border between vegetation and desert, they'll eat some vegetation, they'll poop in the desert, you know, 10 feet over the line, and then there'll be seeds in the feces and it grows.
So you can actually have livestock increase your vegetation and shrink the desert.
So what if you did both?
What if you turned it into a canal, built a canal, turned it into an ocean in the middle of the Sahara, let your livestock wander around, reforest it?
You would actually decrease the power of Atlantic hurricanes.
Because Atlantic hurricanes are formed because of the temperature difference between the ocean off of Northern Africa and the deserts.
The desert is super hot, the ocean is cooler, it causes the hurricane to start.
If you could decrease the difference In the temperatures by cooling off the desert a few degrees, it wouldn't take much.
Your hurricanes wouldn't have the same power.
Somebody says they need fresh water.
They need fresh water too.
That is correct. But if you have oceanfront and you have, you know, you probably have some capabilities for getting water.
You might have to desalinate, but it's possible.
The other day I told you that the president retweeted me.
My tweet that was retweeted was, if the impeachment is shit, the Senate must acquit.
Very clever, I thought.
And then the president retweeted it and got a lot of attention.
I mentioned it to my brother and he looked in the president's Twitter feed and said, hey, I don't see it there.
And I said, hey, I just saw it.
So I went and looked, and it wasn't there.
So I think the president retweeted it and then deleted it later.
I would support that decision.
In fact, I was surprised it got retweeted in the first place.
I would support it because I don't think the president needs a four-letter word in his tweets, even this president.
There's no reason for it.
But the bigger problem is, as many people said to me, By making the analogy to the O.J. trial, it makes people think, well, he might get away with something, but he's still guilty, like O.J. So even though the statement is clever, if the impeachment is shit, the Senate must acquit.
It's a takeoff on Johnny Cochran getting O.J. off.
If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit.
And so people said, no, maybe you shouldn't.
Don't compare the president to O.J. because he got off.
But maybe he shouldn't have.
So my guess is that somebody alert on the president's staff made that same argument.
And between the fact that it had a four-letter word in it and the fact that it had an OJ reference, I think it was deleted.
Somebody needs to fact check that note, but I don't think it's there now.
And I would support that decision.
So I think that was the right play.
All right. I believe, oh, then you should read today also, I will point you to, so Mark Schneider has a great thread today on how President Trump has done more for nuclear energy than anybody, which means, which means, President Trump has done more to combat climate change than any other country.
Well, no, that's not true.
Other countries are doing a lot.
I'll say it this way. President Trump has done more than anybody in this country to combat climate change.
And when you read Mark Schneider's thread, you can see that there's a whole bunch of stuff the Department of Energy has done under Trump and Secretary Perry.
Who was on his way out. But he built, for example, a nuclear fuel test facility.
Now, that doesn't mean much to you if you're not immersed in this stuff.
But what it means is that they have a way now, for the first time, to fairly quickly test a bunch of strategies for cleaner, safer nuclear models.
And if you don't have a way to test it, you just don't have a way to get there.
And the Department of Energy built that.
So that's happening right now.
So that alone, if the President had done nothing else except approve that, it would have been one of the most important things done to battle climate risk.
And if you said, hey, there's no climate risk.
It's all made up. It doesn't matter.
We still need clean energy.
We still need clean water, still need clean air.
So it doesn't matter either way, but it can be said, I think, with a straight face, that Trump has done more to improve at least the risk management of climate change than anybody in the United States.
No president has done this much.
Now, of course, You've got people like Obama banning incandescent light bulbs, and you say to yourself, well, what about that?
Well, it's not really a big deal, because, first of all, you've got the waste disposal problem, the new bulbs are harder to dispose of, but it's not that big a difference.
But building a safe, clean nuclear capability to create electricity is, I don't know, a million times more important than light bulbs?
Is that fair? A thousand times more important?
Maybe a million times more important than the light bulb thing?
There's no contest. If you were to be objective and say, who did the most?
To minimize the risk, because we don't know, we don't know which way climate change is going, so if you were still on the skeptical side, but it's just called a risk.
Nobody's done more than to minimize the risk, because you put in place the one thing that you need the most, a robust nuclear energy testing facility, so you can get to the next level.
Mitch McConnell had a great turn of phrase.
He talked about the impeachment process.
And he spoke of the Democrats and their view of Trump as, quote, Toxic rage.
That's pretty good, isn't it?
Doesn't that feel exactly like what's going on?
Because anger is normal.
You know, anger in the political realm is just, it's like oxygen.
It's just always going to be there.
People are supposed to fight for their side.
They get a little, you know, they get a little angry, etc.
But that doesn't look like this.
Does this look like people who are just angry because they're fighting for the policies that they like?
It doesn't look like that at all.
Not even a little bit. There's not even any consistency, you know, about the criticisms and what they want.
It looks like toxic rage.
Because rage can actually be useful, right?
Angry people get a lot done.
And if you're angry about an injustice, A little bit of rage is exactly what you want, to fight that injustice.
So I'm pro-rage, if it's used productively, but this does seem like toxic rage.
It doesn't feel like there's a benefit at the end of it.
And I said this before, that the Democrats were celebrating impeachment simply because it would make the president feel bad.
Right? What would you call that?
If the impeachment would make the GDP improve, I'd say, well, okay, that's a useful rage, or at least somebody's making an argument that it's a useful rage.
Nobody's making an argument about this impeachment.
I mean, nobody's making an argument that the impeachment without the removal is benefiting the country.
I mean, it's a pretty loose argument about, well, the voters need to know.
Yeah, okay. But it's just so weak.
It seems obvious to me.
Again, I don't want to mind read, but that's how it looks.
So I can only say for sure how it looks to me.
And how it looks is like toxic rage.
That's just the perfect phrase.
I might use that. Well, that's all I have for today.
And I'm going to go back...
To beginning my big week of holidaying.
Yes. Thoughts on Bernie's debate performance.
I'll just read a few of your comments here.
I did skip Bernie, so let me get back to Bernie.
I thought Bernie, as others have said, sounded like a one-trick pony.
I don't think he had a good day.
So I think Bernie, he has strong supporters.
He didn't say anything that will eliminate him.
So he just had an okay day.
I'd be surprised if the rankings on the Democratic side changed, except that I would expect Yang to go up.
So the only change I expect is Yang to approve.
Now, that has to come out of somebody, but I think it might come out of them equally, because I don't think Yang directly...
I don't think he's in anybody's lane, is he?
McAfee update, unless I missed an email, I haven't heard back from his booker.
So, so far that's the way it's gone.
So I got Andrew Yang agreed to be on my Periscope, turned me over to his campaign, and we exchanged some emails and then they disappeared.
Tulsi Gabbard also personally responded to me and said, yes, Let my campaign schedule it.
They got back to me. And then we talked and then it fell off.
It just fell off the table.
Likewise, McAfee has said yes and turned me over to his booker.
And like the other two examples, I don't expect I'll ever hear from the booker.
So I guess it's easy to get people to agree, but it's harder for their people to think it's a good idea.
I think that And I'm just speculating here, but I would guess that if Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, or McAfee heard that I was the one who wanted to talk to them, I could imagine them saying, yeah, I'd do that.
But I could also easily imagine that somebody on their staff would take a look at it and say, you know, this one might be a little dangerous.
It isn't. I don't think it's dangerous for any of them, because I would not be a jerk.
I can commit to that, that I'm not going to be the jerk, hit piece, you know, I just want to destroy you in public.
I just have no interest in that at all.
So I would give them a totally fair hearing, and I would try to make sure that I highlighted their strongest points.
But if you're the staff, do you believe that?
Well, compared to the other things the candidate might have to schedule, because they're all overscheduled, you assume, right?
So it doesn't surprise me if the staffs of any of them say, you know, maybe we will prioritize this low.
It's a mistake.
It's a gigantic mistake.
Let me say this.
If Yang or Tulsi Gabbard appeared on my Periscope, Their poll numbers would go up.
I think so. I think that I could actually make that happen.
Because I could take them under their political frame.
And like I said, I'm not going to be trying to destroy anybody on my Periscope.
That's not what I do. I'd rather do the best job I could of highlighting what makes them a good choice.
So whoever is smart enough to...
To complete the circuit and get on my Periscope, you probably would have 100,000 people at least look at you and have a more positive opinion.
All right. So that's what I got going on today.
Yeah, McAfee would just be the best.
McAfee would be full frontal entertainment from beginning to end.
I would love talking to him.
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