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Dec. 21, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:01:11
Episode 763 Scott Adams: Join Me to Impeach a Cup of Coffee While Discussing The Impeachy World
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bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum hey everybody come on in Welcome to this special holiday edition of Coffee with Scott Adams.
Now, normally what we do at this time of day is we enjoy something called the simultaneous sip.
But there's a new word that's entered the vocabulary that can be used in any context whatsoever, it seems.
It no longer means something bad.
The word is called impeach.
Now, there was a time, I'm old enough to remember, when impeach was a bad thing.
And it applied to bad people doing bad things, and it was a bad outcome.
But that seems to have changed.
And now the word impeach means something like a good fundraising technique and a bunch of bullshit.
So you can impeach anything.
And this morning... I'm going to impeach a cup of coffee.
Yes, you can join me.
You don't need coffee. You can have your own beverage and impeach the hell out of it with me simultaneously.
All right, all you need is a cup of margaritas, snifter, stein, chalice, tecran, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblet, vessel of any kind, filled with your favorite liquid.
I like my coffee.
And get ready to impeach the hell out of it.
Go! Mmm.
I can feel my fundraising...
Increasing. Yes.
Yes, that was good.
Impeached coffee right there.
Now, as you know, I've made the prediction that the word impeach and the idea of impeaching would change because of Trump as opposed to impeaching changing Trump because Trump is going to change everything we ever thought about the word impeach.
It's happening already.
I tweeted this this morning.
There was a movie review of the new Star Wars movie.
And the reviewer didn't like it.
And in the title for his movie review, he said that J.J. Abrams should be impeached.
And so you're already seeing the word impeached move from this oh-so-serious political realm into just a silly word they use because it's funny.
Impeachment has lost all of its power.
I think the funniest comment I heard was from Mitch McConnell.
He was giving a speech, I guess, in the Senate.
And he was saying, I have to paraphrase him because I can't get this exactly, but McConnell said something like this.
Well, I... I don't know what kind of leverage Nancy Pelosi thinks she has over us by not sending the articles of impeachment over.
I guess the idea is that they're going to not send us something that we didn't want in the first place.
And I have to admit, that was a really good way to couch it.
Yep, Nancy Pelosi's leverage over Mitch McConnell is that she's going to not send him something he doesn't want, which is the impeachment articles.
So that's pretty funny.
Now, the new wrinkle is that, as you heard, I think I talked about it yesterday, One of the Democrats' witnesses, a legal scholar, what is his name?
Feldman, I think?
Said that, in his opinion, until the impeachment articles are transmitted over to the Senate, impeachment has not happened.
So technically there is no impeachment according to this one scholar.
But then Jonathan Turley weighed in, and as you know, Turley is sort of a better expert than the other experts.
And he said, well, here's every part of the Constitution.
I think there were five parts of the Constitution that have some mention of impeachment.
And he writes an article, he goes, well, here they are.
Here's everything mentioned in the Constitution about impeachment.
Noah Feldman is the attorney.
And Jonathan Turley says, show me there where it says it's not an impeachment until the articles have been sent over to the Senate.
So apparently the Constitution does not say...
That your impeachment didn't happen unless it's transmitted.
But how could both of those experts be right?
Is there a way that Turley could be right and Feldman, with complete opposite opinion, could both be right?
Well, I don't know, but let me propose this.
I believe it could be said that the House has voted to impeach.
So watch my language carefully.
They voted to impeach.
I think everybody would agree that's just a true statement.
They voted to impeach.
But the process of impeaching seems to have hit a stall.
And if the House doesn't do the entire process, the voting being one part of the process, and then the transmitting it to the Senate being the other part, can it be said, That the impeachment has been finalized.
I would say no.
I would say that you could say that the House voted to impeach, but they didn't.
Until they transmit it, I would say, this is just sort of the non-legal scholar way of looking at it, because apparently the Constitution is vague enough, and no surprise there.
That's why we have a Supreme Court, because the Constitution has lots of room for interpretation.
But my personal interpretation is that they voted for impeachment, but they didn't do it.
Because until you send it, If an impeachment, you know, somebody said this on social media, probably lots of people said it, if an impeachment falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it happen?
You know, that's not really proving anything, it's just a fun thought.
But I think you could have it both ways.
I think you could say that they voted for impeachment, but they did not complete the steps of impeachment, and so therefore, if they do not transmit, I think you'd have an argument that all you had was a vote but not an impeachment.
So that's my non-legal scholar sense of it.
But isn't it a wake-up call that a step that's so central to our government, so central to the Constitution, so central to checks and balances as what is an impeachment and how does it work?
And two of the most qualified scholars that we know about have looked at it, same question, and came to opposite opinions.
Now, what's that tell you about experts?
They're looking at the same stuff.
They're looking at the same stuff at the same time.
And it's not really even that complicated.
It's not like climate science where you'd really have to be an expert in a hundred different things to really know how it all fits together.
With this constitutional stuff, there were five paragraphs, basically, out of the Constitution.
That's it. And they're not even terribly complicated.
And they still can't agree what it says.
All right. So that was interesting.
I noticed, I don't know if it's because of the end of the year or what, but it seems that the president has some major victory on the border wall funding stuff.
Not in terms of getting all the money he wanted, but getting money that he could spend in the fashion that he needs to, and I guess he's got some more flexibility about borrowing from other budgets.
But apparently the only requirement that the Democrats, maybe it's not the only requirement, but the one mentioned, that the Democrats put on that funding for the border security is, wait for it, the only way that it can be spent is according to the priorities of the border security experts and engineers.
How long have I been telling you That you could get your border funding if you're the Republicans.
Just say the words.
How long have I been saying this?
Two years, right? Just say the words.
We only want to do it where the engineers and the experts tell us to put it.
That's where we'll start.
You've just got to say those words and suddenly money will come to you.
Because you can't argue with putting the money where the experts say it needs to go first.
So what was the final compromise, if you can call it that, that allowed the president to get his money and to be able to spend it where he wants?
He just had to promise to put it where the engineers said it was most important.
That's it. You waited two years to do what I told you on day one was all you needed to do.
I'm glad there are enough people watching this Periscope that you can confirm that I have been calling for that.
All right.
There's a really scary story in the New York Times, much, much recommended.
It is talking about how the law enforcement or really anybody who has access to the data can track you by your phone.
Now, of course, you all knew that you could be tracked by your phone.
But some of the lies which you've been told that the New York Times exposes very well, I think, is that the data that you're sending to these various apps about location is anonymized, so they can't tell us you.
It turns out that's true and false at the same time.
It's true that the data is anonymized when it's sent to the database.
The not true part about it is that it's a trivial matter to figure out who you were after the fact.
For example, they can track your location without knowing who you are at first, and they can say, huh, this phone goes from this house, this address, to this work address five times a week.
That's it. That's all they need to know who you are.
If they know where you live and where you go to work, they know who you are.
They can also tell by who you travel with and everything else.
So it turns out there's no such thing as anonymous information.
Location information.
Because your location does tell you who you are.
Period. And so pretty much everybody who's got a cell phone is being tracked through one app or another.
Now, this brings me to John McAfee.
I told you before I've invited John McAfee to be on this Periscope someday.
He referred me to somebody on his team or his family, I'm not sure what, to schedule it, and I haven't had that happen yet.
But he's answering some questions on Twitter about how it is that he hasn't been found, because I guess he's on the run, from authorities in this country.
And does it seem amazing to you that the United States can't figure out where John McAfee is?
He's on social media every day.
You know, he's doing videos and stuff and we can't figure out where he is.
And he said today that he and his, I guess, his family or whoever he's with, they don't have cell phones.
Now, McAfee claims that if you have a cell phone, there isn't any way to hide the location.
You can VPN all you want, but there's just nothing you can do.
There is no way to keep law enforcement from finding you if you have a cell phone.
Now, I'm guessing he's right about that because he's pretty smart and he's looked into it and he hasn't been caught yet.
So I think he's doing all his work on something like a laptop with something like multiple VPNs and not the kind your grandmother uses, like serious VPNs that somebody like McAfee could use and you wouldn't even know how to find.
So that is very interesting.
Yeah, he uses VPNs via laptops, that is correct.
Somebody asked him why he wouldn't use a burner phone, and apparently those are not safe either.
Because even if you have a burner phone, Maybe somebody can figure out who you are by who you called and where you are and that sort of stuff.
So even a burner phone seems to be a problem.
So how do you feel about that?
How do you feel about the fact that crime is essentially getting close to 100% solvable?
Because between DNA, facial recognition, The fact that cameras are everywhere and the fact that apparently 99% of all crimes are solved by cell phone location.
Did you know that? I think that was a McAfee claim.
The McAfee claim is that law enforcement just goes directly to your cell phone.
As soon as there's a crime, they just look at the cell phones and they find you.
And it works basically every time.
So having feet on the ground to collect information is just useless these days.
Because they get you every time with your cell phone, unless you're McAfee, apparently.
Here's something else in the same kind of general information.
CNN, which was running the Democratic debate, actually went dark.
They actually turned the TVs off, the channel anyway, it went dark, when China was brought up as a critical question.
China actually just went dark.
On the democratic debate because they couldn't handle even the questions, much less the answers.
And the questions were about the concentration camps for the Uyghur Muslims.
And China just turned it off.
Now, can China succeed in keeping that kind of information away from its citizens forever?
And I'm not even sure the citizens care, frankly.
You know, maybe if you're a citizen in China, you're just worrying about your own business, and if you're not a Uyghur minority, it just doesn't bother you.
But it's kind of chilling to think that they can just turn off the TV for the parts that they don't like.
All right. Here's an update on Tulsi Gabbard.
So I told you a while ago that Tulsi had DM'd me when I asked about having her on the Periscope.
She said yes. Her team was trying to schedule it.
I mentioned again that it hadn't been scheduled, and then her team got back to me after that.
And then Tulsi DM'd me this morning just to say that, you know, sorry about the delay, and she's trying to schedule it.
So you might see that interview in the next week or two.
We're trying to schedule it.
I don't want to give you the date we're talking about because it might change.
But we have a yes.
So we have a confirmed yes.
We just have to make it happen.
All right. I tweeted provocatively this question.
How many Democrats have noticed the following pattern?
All right, here's the pattern.
That President Trump is presidential for state functions, so when he's meeting with other leaders, he's meeting with the Queen, meeting with the Pope, he's presidential.
Wouldn't you agree? And then when he does his rallies, which are basically stand-up comedy, he brings a different personality that is hilariously inappropriate.
In other words, part of his stand-up comedy is Don Rickles, it's Howard Stern, it goes too far, and that's why we laugh at it, because he goes too far.
But that personality is very specific to the rallies.
Then he goes on Twitter, And when he tweets, he comes into a completely different personality.
It's also a little more provocative, but it's a Twitter personality.
President Trump's Twitter trolling and his Twitter game is a perfect fit for Twitter.
So he adopts his personality and his style for each domain, and he excels in every domain.
I don't believe anybody has said that the president is not effective in state meetings.
In fact, maybe he's the best, because he's even been meeting with people who are enemies and frenemies and gets along with them, too.
You could argue that his state meetings, you know, leader to leaders, are among the best.
I think you could make that argument.
Now, people will say, well, what about What about those Europeans who were caught laughing behind his back at the last big meeting?
What about it?
Does anybody here think that the leaders don't all laugh about each other behind each other's back?
Let me ask you this.
So one of the people who got caught laughing behind the back of the president was Justin Trudeau.
Who had, what, two or three blackface scandals this year?
Let me ask you, do you think any of the leaders of other countries laughed behind Justin Trudeau's back about all of his blackface scandals?
No? Nobody?
You don't think Angela Merkel had a little giggle about that?
No? You don't think so?
Come on!
Come on. You don't think they laughed about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky?
Be serious. Are you kidding me?
Of course they did.
You could go all the way back to Reagan.
You don't think that they made fun of his, you know, forgetting things and his Alzheimer's and his...
His astrologist who was advising him.
You don't think they laughed about that behind his back?
Come on! Of course they did!
Do you think there are any world leaders that Trump has not laughed about behind their backs?
None. I mean, maybe he likes some of them, right?
But don't you think that Trump has made fun of Trudeau privately when talking to other leaders?
Of course he has.
Do you think he's made fun of Macron privately or even talking to other leaders?
Of course he has.
Of course he has.
The only difference is that the three douchebags who were talking about him got caught on a video camera, right?
Somebody had a phone. That's the only difference.
They all laugh about each other.
It's just like every other part of the world.
It's just like you laugh at your CEO. It's the biggest nothing in the world to say that some leaders are laughing at each other.
So, this is one of the funniest tweets.
Statistically speaking, 66% of impeached presidents were impeached for humiliating Hillary Clinton.
So that, of course, would be Bill Clinton and President Trump.
So 66% of impeached presidents were impeached for humiliating Hillary Clinton.
Technically true.
Wall Street Journal has an editorial today that every now and then I'll see a piece of news that just is like a slap in the face.
Because it's something that I should have noticed, but didn't notice.
So when people point out something that I should have noticed, and I didn't, it's really, I love those stories.
Anyway, the thing the Wall Street Journal editorial points out is that Robert Mueller's dossier report didn't say it was false.
Let me say that again. When Mueller did his testimony and did his Mueller report, he did not conclude, at least he didn't put it in the report, he did not conclude that the Steele dossier was false and was known to have been debunked well before the Mueller report came out.
Let me say that again.
The Steele dossier was thoroughly debunked before the Mueller report came out And Muller said it was beyond his purview to say whether it was accurate or not.
Seriously? Are you freaking kidding me?
That Muller clearly knew the Steele dossier was bullshit by then, and he didn't mention that.
Like, that didn't seem important.
It was the most important thing ever.
It wasn't the unimportant thing.
It was the most important thing.
You know, it kind of comes down to that, right?
Of the things that actually happened, it was the most important thing.
Of the things people imagined might have happened, those would have been more important, but they didn't happen.
They were imaginary. The longer that...
The longer that...
And by the way, do you have the same reaction to that?
Did you notice, because there's just so much noise in all this reporting, did you even notice that Mueller was silent on the Steele dossier, the most critical part of the whole story?
He was silent on it. Are you kidding me?
I mean, I don't even know what to say about that.
It's just mind-blowingly weird.
There's continued speculation on On the question of what the hell is Nancy Pelosi thinking with her strategy of delaying the, sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate until the Senate buckles down and changes their rules for the trial.
And, you know, of course, that's not going to happen.
So people are asking, what is she thinking?
I watched Dana Perito say this yesterday on Fox News.
What exactly is her strategy?
Does she have secret knowledge that we don't know about?
Is there some clever plan that only Nancy Pelosi knows but none of us can see?
Because it's not obvious.
Now, I would not rule out As Dana Perino said quite astutely, we're talking about Nancy Pelosi.
You're not talking about somebody who's new to this.
We're not talking about somebody who doesn't have a long track record of successful strategic thinking.
So given that it's Pelosi, given that we know she's a strategic thinker at the highest order, she knows how to do this stuff, why is she doing what she's doing?
Is it so clever we can't see it and nobody else can either?
There are no experts anywhere who can say, oh yeah, that's what she's up to.
You don't see this move, but here's what she's up to.
Nobody. Nobody on her side, nobody on the other side.
There's literally nobody who has a good description of why this could be a good idea.
So the speculation goes to a few different things.
One of them is she doesn't have an idea of how to make this right, so she's trying to think of one.
So the delaying tactic could be nothing but, uh-oh, we'd better put our heads together, we'd better brainstorm.
Maybe a little extra delay will give us some new strategic idea.
So it could be just a delay tactic.
Like a timeout in any sporting thing.
So it could be just a timeout.
Could be not to ruin Christmas.
Think about it.
Because if you're Nancy Pelosi, remember you're operating on a really high level of persuasion and strategy, right?
So give her the benefit that she's operating at the highest level.
It kind of does make sense.
That if you couldn't stop the Senate from overthrowing it, you can't, or whatever they do, acquit or dismiss, whatever they do.
You can't stop them from doing that.
But you might be able to delay it until after Christmas.
So everybody's going to go home and have a better Christmas if they're a Democrat.
Because what they feel like is that they're going to Christmas with a victory.
So they will get to marinate in what feels like a victory for a few weeks before the Senate turns it all to shit.
So it could be that it's just something generous for the politicians and the voters who are on that side just to let them go through the holidays.
I mean, it could be as simple as that.
Probably not. I mean, that's probably not the whole story.
And then there's the theory that the only reason that she's doing it is to get under Trump's skin to bother him.
But he raised $10 million.
He raised $10 million.
And if you've looked at the comments on Twitter, the number of people who said, I've never donated to a campaign before, but the moment the gavel came down for impeach, I went to the website and I gave him $200 or whatever.
So just person after person on social media is commenting that way.
I've never given money before, but it's not even about the candidates anymore.
It's about the Constitution now.
So it's basically a vote for the Constitution.
And people are giving a lot of money to that.
So it could be that she's just making the holidays good.
It could be she's just bugging Trump.
And then there's some speculation she might want it just to sit there so that it seems more important as long as possible, you know, get it into people's heads, etc.
But I think Trump is successfully making impeachment turn into just a joke concept.
I think people are going to be impeaching everything.
You're going to get together with your boyfriend or girlfriend or lover, and you're going to impeach each other, if you know what I mean.
I think impeaching is going to move into the just pure joke category.
It's like Jussie Smollett.
If you say Jussie Smollett, you know there's a joke coming.
You don't even have to say anything else about it.
It's like, hey, they're going to make you smile.
Jussie Smollett. And you're automatically in a jokey mood.
So I think impeachment is going the Jussie Smollett route where it used to be this solemn, important, sad thing that you would do for a country.
And now it's just funny. Because the Democrats have just ruined the word, ruined the concept.
They've taken all the credibility out of it because of being partisan instead of bipartisan.
Trump changed impeachment.
They may never change back.
You may be familiar with a publication called The Atlantic.
You might be familiar with it because it is one of the most strident anti-Trump publications ever.
There's probably more fake news in the Atlantic, in the form of opinion anyway, than anywhere else in the world.
So the Atlantic doesn't even try to be anything except an anti-Trump publication, at least in the political sense.
And even the Atlantic ran an opinion piece today mocking Paul Krugman for having Trump derangement syndrome.
Now, it's not remarkable to hear a Trump supporter say that Krugman has Trump derangement syndrome, but this is not only his own team, but this is like, you know, the captain of the team practically.
Not really. Bad analogy.
But the Atlantic is so deeply and completely anti-Trump that when they call their own most prominent economist a suffering from Trump derangement syndrome and being wrong about everything Trump, that's notable.
Makes you wonder.
It makes you wonder if even Democrats are starting to Wonder about their own approach.
Now remember I told you that what's going to be fun is at the end of the year you see all the lists.
You're going to see the lists of all the things that Trump accomplished.
It's going to be a long list.
And then you can see the list of all the fake news I'll talk about in a moment.
And the list of fake news is really long.
Like really long.
We'll talk about that in a minute.
All right. So yes, let us talk about that.
So I tweeted today asking for people for the definitive list of fake news.
And people have been putting them in the comments.
I want to just read you some of them.
So let's see.
Let's see what people have suggested.
So in my comments, so here's some of the fake news that either originated in this past year, 2019, or it was still going.
So some of these originated earlier, but they passed into 2019.
So you had the Jussie Smollett case, the Kavanaugh allegations, the Covington kids.
The Ukraine hoax, the Russia hoax, everything about the dossier, everything about Schiff, everything about the Nunes memo, everything about Afghanistan reporting that happened earlier, but we found out about it in 2019.
I hear Cheryl Atkinson has a list of the fake news that she updates all the time.
So if you follow Cheryl Atkinson, you can find links to that.
Um, there was the Army-Navy game and the kids who made the OK sign.
Now, are you as bothered as I am that when that story first broke and there were reports that the cadets were doing the, what they call a white power sign that looks like the OK sign, um, That even at the beginning of the story, there were credible people.
Representative Crenshaw, Dan Crenshaw, was one of the people who noted that that's just a game people play where they make that sign, and if somebody notices that you're making that sign below the belt, you can punch them in the arm.
Apparently, it's been around for decades.
Now, I didn't know about that, but the moment I heard Crenshaw explain that it's a common game that's been played forever...
I looked it up, and sure enough, it's called The Circle Game, and it's a common game that's been played by young people forever.
I checked it with a few young people, just to fact check, and an 11- and a 14-year-old told me, yes, they were both familiar with this as a common game that mostly the boys play.
Now, here's my problem.
I agree with the military, you know, the...
Whoever is the administrators who said they were going to research it and look into it because it was an accusation that it was a white power sign.
But even at the very beginning, we had the alternative theory.
The alternative theory that it was just that game.
I watched for the reporting to at least say there's an alternative theory.
And even Fox News didn't do that.
Now, I feel as though...
That was a gigantic media failure, probably on the left and the right.
Because I can understand that maybe the anti-Trumpers on the left would just sort of not mention that that's a game or that people are suggesting it's a game.
Maybe they just wouldn't mention it.
But how do you explain that Fox News ran stories about it and didn't even mention that there's another hypothesis?
That it's just a game and it's a common game and you can Google it and you can see that it's a game.
To me, that was a pretty major news oversight.
It's one thing to say you don't know.
It's one thing to say the accusations are that it's white power.
I guess that's okay, because that's the news.
But to not say there's another explanation and it's completely innocent, Yeah, on the 5, they did say that.
That is correct. So I'm talking about...
I forget what the article was, but it was on the website for Fox News.
And I read it just to look for that.
And the early reporting did not include that.
And I thought, man, how do you not at least include that as a possibility?
All right, what else we got here?
We got...
I'm just... Migrants forced to drink out of toilets.
That was fake news, right?
Because I think they weren't drinking the toilet water.
I think they were drinking from the thing that feeds the toilet water, which was clean water.
So, sort of true, but sort of not.
Let's see what else. Oh, the Kurds were abandoned.
So somebody's calling that fake news, that the Kurds were abandoned.
Well, that's more of a matter of opinion, I think.
But I think it is true.
We're not seeing reporting that says that Turkey is wiping out the Kurds.
And it did seem to force people into making some concessions they didn't want to make.
So I'd say that's an open question still.
Um... The thought that the IG report found no bias, when in fact they did find bias.
The thought that Comey was vindicated by the IG report, opposite.
My God, I'm just still looking at the list.
Troops deployed to Saudi Arabia.
Was that a story that...
I don't know the details of that, so I can't speak to that.
Looking at what else we got.
I would say the children in cages and the children ripped from the hands of their parents, I would say is true without the context that what was the alternative, which was worse apparently, and that Obama did the same thing.
So I would call that fake news if it's only reported that Trump was doing it and it's reported that there was a better option.
If you report that there was a better, and the fine people hoax, yes.
The king of all hoaxes is that Trump called the racist in Charlottesville fine people when the transcript says exactly the opposite.
All right, looking through some more of your suggestions here.
All right. Now, there's some saying that the OK sign was never a white power symbol, but rather it was a 4chan hoax that the media accepted.
But here's the thing.
If the media accepted that that OK sign was a white supremacist signal, even if it wasn't, Would not lots of white supremacists read the news and say to themselves, hey, it looks like we've got a hand signal now, and then start using it?
So I would think that it could be both A hoax, meaning that it started as a hoax on 4chan, but if the media reported it as true, wouldn't it very rapidly become true?
Because racists who had never heard of it would say, well, I don't use 4chan, but I'm glad the news just told me I have a hand signal.
I guess I'll start using it.
So I would think it started as a hoax that turned probably true for at least one racist somewhere.
Yeah, there was the fake news that Swalwell passed gas, but that wasn't the most important story.
There was the story of showing the shooting range that somebody said was the Kurds being killed.
I guess that was ABC. What, what, what?
So there's this discussion of two genders.
All right, let me get into this.
So there's this big left-right controversy about are there only two genders or are there multiple genders and transgenders and everything else.
I haven't really talked on that topic because it feels like a dumb topic.
Because it's mostly word thinking, where people are just trying to win the argument somehow by just defining it.
It's like, I define genders this way, and therefore there are only two.
And then the other person will say, I define genders this other way, and therefore there are lots of them.
There's no real argument.
It's just people making up their own definitions of words.
If you wanted to bring that to the practical level, the practical level being...
What do you do about it, given that people disagree with how many genders there are?
I think it depends on the situation.
And I think that, here's my opinion.
There are infinite genders.
Meaning that people are infinitely different.
So even within the, you know, let's say somebody says that they're completely heterosexual and they're male.
There's probably a lot of variance within that range.
I think there's just an infinite variety of everybody.
And if you're talking about where you personally want to define, you know, the beginning and the end of those definitions, that's just stuff happening in your head that has no impact on me.
Somebody says, biology!
So? So what?
Yes. Yes, biology exists.
Yes, biology, for the most part, determines what your genes are.
So? So what?
Like, there's no so what to that.
I hear what you're saying, it's just a fact.
Now you hear other people saying that for social reasons and for fairness and inclusion, there are people who consider themselves different things, there are people who are in grey areas, there are all kinds of distinctions, and I say those people are arguing for social purposes, and other people are just making a scientific case, and they're not even in the same conversation.
So it's a dumb argument, is what I'm saying.
The people who are arguing, it's only two!
Well, says you, under what circumstance, for what purpose, when is it good, when is it not, when is it practical, when is it impractical?
You know, the whole, it's science!
Two genders! It's just, it's so empty.
You can be completely right and completely irrelevant at the same time.
So, you know, I guess you win.
You win. Alright, those are mostly the things I wanted to talk about.
Yes, there are infinite species of humanoids in a sense.
We're all infinitely different.
Somebody says, Scott, totally sucking up to the left.
Block. That's how to get yourself blocked.
If you want to characterize me as being completely pro-Trump or sucking up to the left or any of those dumb things, I'm just going to block you.
And it's not even just because you're wrong, it's because you're boring me.
Don't just...
I'm literally in the conversation about people being infinitely different and then somebody thinks this will be a good time to label me.
How about don't?
I was reading a hit piece about me the other day.
It was actually a hit video.
By hit video, I mean not that it was popular, but that it was an anti-Scott piece of video.
Now, the bigger context was anti-Kanye West, I think, but it was using me as an example of why he's such a bad black person, according to this video, because he listened to anything I said once.
So, here's the thing.
They introduced me in this video, and here's how I was described.
As a libertarian men's rights activist.
Which of those two things is true?
None. When have I ever been a men's rights activist?
So this will give you an idea of how fake not only the news is, but even the videos and the social media.
I was described as a men's rights activist.
Do you know how that started? I once wrote a blog post, and I'm not even making this up, I once wrote a blog post in which I made fun of men's rights activists.
That's it. And because of that, you know, it turned into a telephone game where it got repeated and reported incorrectly, and then somebody repeated the incorrect reporting, until I became, according to this blogger who made a whole video about me and Kanye West and some other people, My one blog post making fun of men's rights people turned me into one.
Literally the opposite. Now, let me state, the men's rights activists have really good points, but I'm not one.
You can have lots of good points, but it doesn't mean I joined your team.
You know, the NRA has lots of good points, but I didn't join the NRA. You know, the Republicans have lots of good points, but I'm not a Republican.
The Democrats have some good points too, but I'm not a Democrat.
So that was, of course, fake news.
Then the second part was that he called me a libertarian.
Never been a libertarian.
I have in the past described myself the following way.
Libertarian without the crazy parts.
Do you see what I'm doing there?
Compare these two things.
I used to call myself a libertarian but without the crazy parts.
Currently, although I might have to change this, during the election cycle for Trump, I started calling myself Left of Bernie.
Think about these two things.
Left of Bernie and libertarian without the crazy stuff.
What do those two things have in common?
I want to see if anybody can get it in the comments.
What do those two things have in common?
It might take a while for your comments to catch up.
So I'm just going to tell you.
What they have in common is that they're not real.
I created two political categories for myself that aren't real.
You can't even imagine what they are.
Because if you say you're a libertarian but without the crazy parts, what are the crazy parts?
Most of the libertarian belief system are crazy, right?
Because the libertarians would say, ah, get rid of the government, let everybody do what they want.
That can't work. It's crazy stuff, right?
So the libertarians are, they like freedom.
I like freedom. They like, you know, the government not to be too intrusive.
I like that stuff too, but everybody does.
So if you say you're a libertarian but without the crazy parts, it doesn't mean anything.
Because the crazy parts are the libertarian parts.
Likewise, when I said I was left to Bernie, there's nothing there when I said it.
But now, the squad and AOC and Elizabeth Warren, etc., they stake down the place left to Bernie, sort of.
You know, they're more on Bernie than left of them.
But when I first started saying it, it didn't mean anything, which is what I intended.
I wanted people to say, huh, I don't even know what that means.
So I might have to make up a new category simply for the purpose of allowing myself not to be branded.
Anyway, so this hit piece describes me as a men's rights activist.
I'm not. And a libertarian.
I'm not. Not even close.
All right. Did I have some other point on that?
I don't think I did. Somebody says, I personally think you are a liberal.
I'm socially liberal.
So that part's true.
But on big policies...
They tend to be complicated and I'd like to look at them one at a time.
So I think the big mistake with being either a Republican or being a Democrat is that once you're on a team, you feel some obligation to defend even the weaker parts of your team.
It's just a natural human impulse.
So I try to avoid...
Where possible, anyway, associating with a team so that I can say, well, I like your tax rates, but I don't like your health care or whatever.
So here's a question for you.
Why did we stop talking about deficits?
Why did we stop talking about the national deficits?
Is it because it stopped mattering?
I don't think so.
Did it ever matter before?
Why did we stop talking about it?
Do you know how you can solve every problem in this country except one?
Run up the deficit.
You can solve every problem.
You can give everybody health care, free college.
You can solve it all.
You'd only have one problem.
A debt you can never pay back.
So, is it fair ever to say that anything is going right in the country while the debt's going up at the same time?
Could you honestly say that, whether it's Trump or Obama, it doesn't matter who you're talking about, can you honestly say the government is doing well if all of the things that are going well depend on this one thing, which is a tragedy waiting to happen, which is the debt?
Or is it? Because remember, for those of you who are not economists, you may not be aware, that national debt is very different than personal debt.
If you have personal debt, you've got to pay it back.
And you've got to pay back not only the interest, but you've got to at least start paying back the principal.
Or it's a very short-term debt.
The only way you can get away with not paying back the principal is if it's a short-term loan, let's say a year.
But if it's a long-term loan, And as a personal loan, you're going to be paying off some principal, probably.
You can get away with putting it off, but eventually you've got to pay back the principal.
The government doesn't.
The government of the United States could say, you know what?
We won't make any more debt, but we're not going to pay it back either.
We'll just pay interest.
Because over time, inflation will shrink the value of that debt until it's not really important.
And then you can pay off the last little bit.
So if you did nothing as a government, but say, we'll slow down the rate of our debt increase.
And that's it. We'll just slow it down.
You'd probably get to the point where you could sustain it more easily.
So I don't know that anybody is smart enough, not Paul Krugman, not me, not anybody.
I don't know if anybody is smart enough to know where this debt stuff ends up.
I just don't know where it ends up.
One way to look at the debt is that it's a stealth tax.
Would you all agree with that?
Would you agree that every time the government runs up the debt, it has raised taxes on our future selves, or some number of our future selves?
Would we all agree that that's true?
Is there anybody who would disagree with that?
That raising the national debt is a stealth tax that somebody's going to have to pay for, and it'll be citizens.
So it seems to me that, you know, I think it was Warren Buffett who said, you know, we can always inflate away our debt by just printing more money if we need to.
So there's probably not a giant risk that will default, especially since we have the biggest military in the world.
But then if it's a stealth tax, who is it a tax on?
Here's your next bonus question.
If running up the debt is a stealth tax, who is it a tax on?
Answer? It's a tax on people who have money.
Because it's not a tax on poor people.
How are the poor people going to pay back the debt with their no money?
They're not. Is it a regressive tax, stealth tax?
Well, it's probably progressive, because I would imagine that the people who have the most money are going to be asked to have the biggest impact on paying it back.
So it seems to me that when you run up the debt, you are effectively giving people free health care, but not all of them.
You're effectively giving people free or inexpensive college education, but not all of them.
You're basically taxing the rich to...
I would say you're narrowing the wealth gap.
I've never heard anybody talk about that, but I would like to hear more people say that the debt is really just a tax.
So if you said to me, has President Trump lowered your taxes or increased your taxes, Scott, I would say he has increased my taxes two different ways.
I live in California, and because I lost the state deduction, my taxes are up.
So the Trump administration raised my taxes as a rich guy who lives in one of the states that has a big state tax.
So if you lived in New York, Especially the city or California, and you're rich, your taxes went up.
Mine did. The second way that Trump raised my taxes is by increasing the deficit.
Now, I don't know that that's a good idea or a bad idea, and I'm not sure that any economists quite understand all that stuff, but it certainly raised how much I or my heirs will have to pay, I would think.
On Monday, I'm planning to have a special guest who's going to be talking about some plans for building new and better cities, ideally more efficient and lower cost.
I believe, and I've been saying this forever, that the only way to address the national debt is to make the cost of living a pretty good life much less expensive.
Which we know how to do.
It's just a design problem.
And so I imagine that you'll see lots of innovation there.
And I would say that in 20 years, if you're, let's say, a lower middle class person, you will find a way to have a completely satisfying life with healthcare and education and job opportunities.
But maybe you only make $25,000 a year.
And you have a perfectly good lifestyle.
I think we're heading toward a place where the private industry will be able to offer those options.
But you have to design a city from scratch to make it work that way.
So you've got to design out all the expensive parts.
You know, make it easy to get from one place to another.
Make it easy to get food without necessarily even having a kitchen.
Somebody says, middle class pays the highest percentage of taxes.
So, I had a little debate online about the fairness of taxes.
And somebody said, the rich might pay a lower percentage of their income, but they pay more money because it's a small percentage of a larger amount.
Which one of those is fair?
Is it fair that rich people pay the most in a dollar amount, or is it unfair because their percentage overall might be less than some middle class people?
Which one is fair? Answer, neither.
Neither of them are fair.
There is no such thing as a fair tax.
There is no way to design a tax that everybody says, oh, that's fair for me.
That doesn't exist. You can only be unfair in ways you can get away with.
That's it. Those are your only options.
Fairness is a subjective concept, and because we all have a different opinion of what that looks like, there is no way to get there.
It's a destination with no roads to it.
You can't get to fair.
All right. So satisfying, somebody says.
Wages were higher 20 years ago.
I don't know that wages were higher 20 years ago or the cost of living was much lower years ago.
Remember years ago you didn't need to have cable because it didn't exist.
So you didn't need to pay cable.
You didn't need to pay for your phone, your smartphone, because it didn't exist.
You didn't need to pay for your internet access, because it didn't exist.
So there were a lot of things that were just cheaper back then.
And people had one car instead of two.
I mean, if you think back, if you could go back to those days that you imagined were the good old days, you wouldn't want to spend five minutes there.
Because it was a terrible life compared to today where both parents have a car and they both have the opportunities to work and everything else.
All right. Yeah, the flat tax would be just a different kind of unfair tax because there's somebody who would complain it's unfair.
That's all you need. Which one is more fair?
Interesting question. So somebody says, okay, if both of them are unfair, can you at least compare them and say that one of these is less unfair?
And the answer is no. No, you can't.
That's not a thing.
There will always be people who think that whichever side is grossly unfair, no matter what.
You can't change that. Chinese organ harvesting, yeah, I tweeted around more updated information that shows that apparently the organ harvesting from effectively live people that they executed, in other words, they kill them but keep them brain dead and alive, apparently, to take out their organs and sell them because they sell for a lot.
And the report is that they're killing prisoners on demand based on organ demand.
I believe that the experts say that's now confirmed.
Let me just think about that.
How could we have an ongoing relationship with China when they're literally using their minorities for parts?
I mean, seriously.
Someday... Someday, historians will not look kindly upon us who are doing business with China.
I think decoupling is going to happen, but it might not be the government who does it.
In fact, the best way to decouple from China is to not have your government endorse it.
The best thing would be if private industry just said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not going to build a new factory in the country that's using its minority population for parts.
So I think private industry will make their own decisions, and decoupling, I think, is guaranteed, because I don't see China changing, so they're just going to have to lose any new business.
But I would imagine the companies that are already there, I have a softer opinion of people who have already put a lot of their resources there.
They might need to unwind at a much slower rate.
Somebody suggesting we put a gas tax on Eric Swalwell?
Finally, something we can all agree on.
All right. Pronouns.
Have you started blocking people who have pronouns in their profile?
I heard somebody say that.
They said that if they see the preferred pronouns in their profile on Twitter, they'll just block them.
And when I look at the people I have blocked, there's a very high percentage of them that have those pronouns.
I don't know if that's a coincidence.
But I've actually been thinking about doing that because it sort of sends a signal, doesn't it?
It's a signal that you're going to get a certain type of response.
I probably won't do that, but it does signal that I'm not going to have a legitimate conversation with somebody.
Okay, just looking at your comments.
Okay.
Oh yeah, there's a rumor that Ms.
Food, who is essential to the whole Russia collusion story, has disappeared and or maybe is dead.
Somebody says, your prednisone is showing.
I'll tell you, it is.
It is. Somebody says there will be no decoupling.
Oh, I would argue that the decoupling is already happening.
It will just be private companies, not the government telling us to do it.
Where is that beautiful, perfect Trump ad?
Well, I think you can see the Trump ad.
It's in my Twitter feed from a few days ago, but you could probably just Google it.
It would probably pop right up.
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