Content: Ambassador @RichardGrenell shadowbanned? Impeachment theater absurdity lying is allowed, HOAX videos are allowed? Alan Dershowitz on "crime-like" impeachment Laundry-list impeachment isn't constitutionally valid, game over? Making food by feeding CO2 to microbes --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
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| Oh, what good luck! | |
| You're all here, and it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams. | |
| It's really not the same without you. | |
| Glad you could come. | |
| And, are you ready? | |
| Are you ready? We're going to be talking about this impeachment stuff. | |
| Impeachment theater, as we call it. | |
| But first, you've got to get primed. | |
| You've got to get ready. | |
| You've got to be in your best frame of mind for this. | |
| And all it takes is... | |
| A cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. | |
| Fill it with your favorite liquid. | |
| I like coffee. | |
| And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip. | |
| You ready? Go. | |
| Oh yeah! Special impeachment flavor. | |
| How does it taste? | |
| Very impeachy. | |
| Somebody in the comments section is saying, white privilege with Scott. | |
| Is it always about that? | |
| I'm sorry if I'm displaying my white privilege by using a public platform. | |
| So I continue to be amazed that my trolls disappeared suddenly. | |
| And I don't know why. | |
| It could be because I was playing with the filters. | |
| So Twitter has some filters to allow you to get rid of... | |
| I think some of the filters are... | |
| You can block people who don't have a picture in their photos. | |
| I think you can block people who are new accounts. | |
| Some other options. | |
| But I don't know if that's it. | |
| They suddenly just disappeared. | |
| And I'm talking about the ones who would always come in with the same three or four comments. | |
| It happened in 2016, and then they disappeared for a while, but they would flare up now and then. | |
| But for reasons I don't know, they all disappeared. | |
| But that doesn't mean that we have reached the end of our questions about conservatives especially being throttled or shadow banned. | |
| So let me give you an interesting update. | |
| I noticed that I noticed a few days ago that when I tried to follow Richard Grinnell, Ambassador Grinnell, that I thought I had followed him, but then it suggested that I follow him on the list of suggested people to follow. | |
| And I thought, what? | |
| What's going on? I'm already following him. | |
| So I checked, and I wasn't. | |
| And I thought, huh, did I imagine that? | |
| So I followed him. | |
| So I followed him, and then It suggested that I follow him again the next day. | |
| And I thought, is it possible that twice I thought I followed him and didn't? | |
| So I tweeted out the question to my followers, and I said, have any of you tried to follow Ambassador Grinnell and found that you were automatically unfollowed? | |
| Guess what the answer is? | |
| Yes. A lot of people. | |
| A lot of people, if you look at the comments to that tweet, and I tweeted again today just to alert people to look at the comments, it's massively happening. | |
| Now, Ambassador Grinnell noticed that I was talking about this and he thanked me just for raising this issue. | |
| He did get a few thousand extra followers just because I gave him some attention. | |
| But if you look at the number of people in the comments who are quite sure they followed him and are quite sure they got unfollowed, many of them just discovering because I pointed it out. | |
| So a lot of people didn't know it. | |
| They just said, well, I'm following him. | |
| Let me check. And then they checked and they had been automatically unfollowed. | |
| Now here's the question. | |
| And I did put in a message to Jack Dorsey to ask him if there's some official Twitter response, because I don't know what the official company position is. | |
| But I'll tell you my hypothesis. | |
| And it's just a hypothesis, so don't put too much credibility on it. | |
| I think we're all confused. | |
| But I think there are roughly three main possibilities. | |
| The one would be that Twitter senior management is intentionally ordering their employees to game the system for some political game. | |
| I would call that deeply unlikely for this particular topic, the following and the unfollowing. | |
| To imagine that they're doing it intentionally and that it's coming from the top, Would imagine that they were all idiots. | |
| And that's clearly not the case. | |
| Because you'd have to be really an idiot to bet your entire company, because that's what this would be. | |
| I mean, you'd really be betting the company. | |
| Betting the entire company and your reputation that something so easily discovered by me, and obviously many of you can discover it just as easily. | |
| So if it's completely obvious and heavy-handed... | |
| Those two don't go together. | |
| Because you wouldn't do a clever political scheme to bias the elections if it were also perfectly obvious and discoverable by anybody who looked. | |
| So, what are the odds that senior management, again, we're talking about very smart people here. | |
| Not even ordinary smart people. | |
| We're talking about people who have started billion dollar companies and people who are at the top of that management heap. | |
| They know what they're doing. | |
| I don't believe, I mean it just stretches my credibility to beyond where I can take it, that it would be intentional and obvious at the same time. | |
| It just doesn't make sense. | |
| The other possibility is it's just a bug. | |
| And it's a bug that It happens to everybody, but maybe we just notice it in cases where we're looking. | |
| And it could be a case of where you think you've followed somebody, you think you've liked something, but maybe your app is not doing a good handshake with the central processors. | |
| But here, again, that would be so hard to believe because it's such a massive bug That it would certainly at least be public. | |
| In other words, if it were a bug that size that is affecting, you know, God knows how many people and it happens on a regular basis and it's been happening for years, if that were the case, it would just be public knowledge. | |
| It probably would be included in the direction somewhere, you know. | |
| If you press this, We can't guarantee it'll take, or something like that. | |
| But more to the point, do you think in the year 2020 that Twitter doesn't know how to build an app where if the app sends some information to the central processor, it doesn't have a process to make sure that the handshake happened? | |
| Seriously? I mean, maybe. | |
| Maybe it's a bug, but it seems so unlikely. | |
| So unlikely. | |
| So I'll tell you my hypothesis. | |
| Again, just speculation. | |
| But I'm looking at the main possibilities and I'm just putting some odds on them. | |
| So I think the odds that it's intentional and coming from Twitter management, almost zero. | |
| The odds that it's a bug and we don't, first of all, know about it and it isn't getting fixed, feels like zero? | |
| Again, could be. | |
| I mean, you can never really completely rule out stuff like this. | |
| But very low. | |
| Here's my hypothesis. | |
| There's somebody who has control of their system that is not in the management chain. | |
| Could be just a rogue employee. | |
| Could be somebody who took a bribe. | |
| Because one of the easiest ways to get access to somebody's algorithm is to find some programmers who have access and offer them millions of dollars to tweak something. | |
| Now, if I had to guess, of all of the possible explanations, there's one of them that's actually kind of normal and typical, and it's that last one. | |
| Unfortunately, we live in a world where It would not be hard for a motivated bad actor to find an employee in one of these big social media companies and just bribe them. | |
| How much would it cost to bribe one employee? | |
| It's not that expensive if you're talking about billionaires and maybe foreign countries and God knows what. | |
| And maybe they didn't even need to be bribed. | |
| Maybe they were just partisans who found themselves in the right job and took advantage of it. | |
| But I'm going to go with bad actor somewhere under the hood as my top hypothesis. | |
| So I've got a message in to Jack Dorsey asking if there's any official explanation. | |
| I'll be happy to share. But that's where we set. | |
| Now, I've also been keeping you updated that my Twitter feed... | |
| I'm sorry, not my Twitter feed... | |
| My YouTube videos get routinely demonetized. | |
| But apparently I have now complained about that enough that I have Google's attention. | |
| And although I haven't followed up, I did get an email yesterday from somebody whose job it is to follow up on exactly this. | |
| So it turns out Google's a big company and there's a job for everything. | |
| And apparently there's somebody whose job... | |
| Their actual job includes the responsibilities of figuring out why people like me are complaining about being demonetized. | |
| So apparently it's enough of a problem that there's somebody whose job it is to find out what's wrong. | |
| Now, a preliminary hypothesis there is that trolls are reporting it. | |
| So it could be that Google is just... | |
| Responding to the fact that there are lots of complaints and until we manually ask for a review, they don't notice that the complaints don't match up with the material until they look at it manually. | |
| Maybe. Because it wouldn't be crazy that Google's system would automatically block something if it got a lot of complaints until they sorted it down. | |
| It seems like that would be a reasonable thing to do. | |
| But it would allow just this huge gaping problem, which would be that trolls could illegitimately get you demonetized. | |
| So if I had to guess, that's my top hypothesis, is that trolls are complaining and they just figured out how to game the system. | |
| Now, there might be a workaround, so I'll talk to Google and let you know how that goes. | |
| I guess we need to talk about impeachment, A. Let's talk about impeachment. | |
| Who did you think won the first round of impeachment theater? | |
| It's turned into sort of a reality TV show. | |
| Honestly, I'm watching this impeachment stuff, and I don't even feel that it has something to do with government. | |
| Because I think both sides have acknowledged that we know how it ends. | |
| And if you know how it ends... | |
| And how it ends is not going to affect the government, at least in terms of removing a president. | |
| All that's left is the theater. | |
| And it's obvious that the participants are playing to the audience. | |
| Unfortunately, they're also boring the heck out of the audience. | |
| It's hard to watch it too long. | |
| But if you're like me, I watched enough of it yesterday that I felt as though... | |
| I felt as though I was learning a lot. | |
| It is so impressive to watch some of the best attorneys in the world argue two sides of a case. | |
| Because you may have the same experience I had. | |
| You'll hear one of the attorneys make their case, and I'll be sitting at home and I'll think, wow, that was pretty good. | |
| That was very persuasive. | |
| If I heard that argument, I'd be inclined to agree with that lawyer. | |
| And then the other lawyer from the other side gets up, And just demolishes the argument and makes another argument that's so strong you say, huh, guess I've got to change my opinion. | |
| Now I'll go with that lawyer. | |
| And then the next lawyer gets up to infinity. | |
| So it's fascinating to watch my view of reality change in real time. | |
| It's like, oh, they've got a good point. | |
| Oh, no, they don't. It looks like they've really nailed it. | |
| No, they didn't. And are you having the same experience? | |
| Now, you may be... | |
| Those of you who are a little more partisan are probably saying, oh, one side is winning every time and the other side is losing every time. | |
| But I'll tell you what's the most absurd part about this whole process. | |
| The absurdity is that it's something called a trial. | |
| And yet, there's... | |
| Apparently, there's nothing in the process... | |
| That stops people from standing in front of the public and lying like crazy. | |
| I mean, seriously lying. | |
| Now, I'm not going to say it's only happening on one side. | |
| Because of the news sources I'm watching, I'm seeing more of it, more of the accusations about Schiff lying. | |
| I don't even need to check MSNBC and CNN. I don't need to check because I already know they're saying that Trump's lawyers are lying. | |
| And they're going to show their evidence and they're going to show what they said, etc. | |
| Now, I can't necessarily sort it all out, but I can say with some confidence that people are intentionally lying in front of the public and there's no repercussions. | |
| No repercussions. | |
| They can just stand up there and say anything they want as long as they're not mean to each other. | |
| Chief Justice Roberts is going to let him go. | |
| I guess he warned them to be a little more professional. | |
| I missed that lie. | |
| But that's the only thing he warned them on. | |
| To be a little more respectful to the other side. | |
| But in terms of lying, it's just a free... | |
| It's a free market. They can just lie any way they want. | |
| And so I ask you, if there are no rules of evidence, no normal ways that you get to the bottom of whether the fact is really a fact or not, what the hell good is this? | |
| I mean, it's one thing that we all think we know where it ends, and that makes it a ridiculous theater exercise. | |
| But how could that process possibly work? | |
| In what universe Could the process as it exists possibly work? | |
| Because both sides are deeply incentivized to lie. | |
| Why would you tell the truth in that setting? | |
| It would be a losing strategy. | |
| You might as well lie because the system rewards it. | |
| It's the damnedest thing. | |
| The worst system I've ever seen. | |
| Let's talk about some of the fun, small stories within the big story. | |
| First of all, I can't tell... | |
| I don't think the public can tell who's winning or losing in any of this. | |
| People are just going to grab whatever fact they understand and say, well, I understand this one variable, so I base my decision on it. | |
| Probably that's all of us. | |
| But here's the most fun thing that came out of yesterday. | |
| And I could not enjoy this more. | |
| What I'm going to tell you next is just delicious. | |
| I've never been so entertained by the news. | |
| I mean, news has just become entertainment now. | |
| I mean, this whole impeachment thing, it's hard to see it as anything but a reality TV entertainment. | |
| But by far, the coolest, best, most entertaining thing that came out of it came from Alan Dershowitz's mouth when he was interviewed by Sean Hannity. | |
| And he said, Oh God, I love this. | |
| I love this so much I can barely even say it. | |
| Dershowitz says... | |
| That everybody's wrong about the president already being impeached and that it's a stain that will last forever. | |
| Because as Dershowitz explains, if the Senate acquits him, he's not impeached. | |
| That's the first time I've ever heard that. | |
| Is that the same with you? | |
| Have you heard anybody who actually knows what they're talking about? | |
| I'm talking about a constitutional scholar type person like Dershowitz. | |
| Has anybody but him said on an interview, no, you're all wrong. | |
| There is no impeachment if the Senate votes it out. | |
| Now, I assume that by today we'll see experts on the other side saying, no, no, no, Alan Dershowitz is crazy. | |
| It's definitely impeachment. | |
| Oh, yes, it's impeachment even if the Senate votes against it. | |
| It's impeachment. But here's the delicious part. | |
| It's not that they disagree. | |
| It's not that somebody's saying something I would love to hear, because I think it would just be amazing if that were true. | |
| I'd like Dershowitz's opinion on this to be true. | |
| Here's what's the fun part. | |
| Both positions are supportable by experts. | |
| Our two-world, you know, two movies on one screen is preserved, no matter what happens. | |
| So the vote's going to happen, And the people who say, he's impeached forever. | |
| He's got a stain on him forever. | |
| They're going to be able to say that. | |
| Because they have their argument. | |
| And the people who support the president, who don't want to say that, are going to say, well, you know, you can say that, but let's look at the constitutional expert, Ellen Dershowitz. | |
| Says no impeachment, assuming that the Senate votes that way. | |
| Now, here's the fun part. | |
| Who gets to Wikipedia first? | |
| Because that's the whole game here. | |
| Whoever gets to Wikipedia and makes their edit a stick... | |
| Wins. Because you can't trust the news to tell you if he was impeached or not impeached. | |
| I already know how that's gonna go. | |
| Fox News, he wasn't impeached. | |
| CNN, he was totally impeached. | |
| You know how that's gonna go. | |
| So nobody's gonna look at the news to find out if he's impeached. | |
| They're gonna try to find a history book. | |
| But there isn't really a history book written yet. | |
| It's too early. They're gonna go to Wikipedia. | |
| And Wikipedia is going to be a battleground of competing editors who say, here's my source. | |
| I got a source. | |
| Now, maybe Wikipedia will battle to a standstill and they'll just put both points of view and say, well, there's a controversy, so we've got two points of view. | |
| We're not going to judge it. | |
| We're just saying there are two views. | |
| They might end up there. | |
| But I love the fact that Dershowitz is very clearly giving cover to anybody who later... | |
| Later wants to make the claim that the president wasn't impeached. | |
| Do you know who else is going to make that argument that the president wasn't impeached? | |
| Assuming the Senate votes that way. | |
| President Trump. | |
| Do you think President Trump is ever going to say in public, I was not impeached? | |
| I think he will. | |
| I think he might. | |
| So that'll be a fun battle for whose reality wins. | |
| Something else that Dershowitz says. | |
| Now, I told you yesterday that Alan Dershowitz had said in 1998 about the Clinton trial that impeachment doesn't necessarily have to be a crime. | |
| It doesn't have to technically be a crime on the books. | |
| And then he's clarified, and then he said he He retracts his old statement. | |
| If it was in any way in conflict with his current views, he retracts his old views and says, I've done more research, here's my current view. | |
| And the current view is that it doesn't need to be a crime. | |
| So he's consistent from 1998 to today. | |
| He always said, it doesn't need to be a technical crime. | |
| But, based on his scholarly research, updated, it needs to be crime-like. | |
| Now what the hell does that mean? | |
| What is crime-like that's not a crime? | |
| Well, helpfully, Dershowitz gave two examples. | |
| And I thought they were excellent examples. | |
| Now, they're not exhaustive. | |
| They're just two good examples to give you the idea. | |
| One is, let's say, the... | |
| Some president had done something and it was discovered, but let's say, and I'm going to amp up his example a little bit, let's say it was one day after the statute of limitations had just run out. | |
| It was a horrible crime, but we don't find out about it until the president's in office and it's one day past the statute of limitations. | |
| Or maybe he already had to be in office. | |
| I think he would have had to do it in office and And then the statute of limitations still expires or something like that? | |
| But anyway, so one example would be society definitely means this to be a crime. | |
| It's just that for a technical reason, it wasn't. | |
| Let's say somebody got accused of a crime and they were acquitted by the courts, but only because there was some problem with collecting the evidence or something. | |
| That's my own example. | |
| Another one was, suppose he did a horrible crime, but he did it while he was overseas. | |
| He was in a different jurisdiction. | |
| You can imagine a president going to some other country, and I don't have to give you examples because you can think of your own. | |
| Something horrible happens, let's say, in his personal dealings. | |
| You can fill in with any details you want. | |
| But it's not a crime because he happens to be in the country where that's just not criminal. | |
| But maybe we want to treat it like that in this country, Because to us, it's exactly like one of our crimes, so it's crime-like. | |
| Now, I love those examples because they begin to give you a little bit of a sense of what it means to be like a crime, but not actually being a crime. | |
| So there could be those examples. | |
| And then you can imagine that the framers of the Constitution wanted to make sure that they picked up all the exceptions, so they just threw that crime-like thing understanding in there. | |
| But here's where it gets interesting. | |
| The impeachment articles do not allege a crime. | |
| So what would be crime like in terms of abuse of power? | |
| What would be the most crime like? | |
| What is a crime that's not abuse of power but is really close to it? | |
| And the answer is nothing. | |
| Nothing. There's nothing that's almost like abuse of power by the president that's also a criminal act. | |
| There's nothing there. | |
| Now, corruption and bribery, those are pretty specific. | |
| But coercing a foreign power to do something that may or may not be for the national interest, there's just nothing on the books that's sort of in that ballpark. | |
| Apparently. So, it looks like, and Dershowitz says what I've been saying, which is they should just vote on the constitutionality of it and be done with it. | |
| Because digging into the details does nothing but give Schiff lots of opportunity to show the public details in his maybe biased, lying way. | |
| And that's not good. | |
| So, I don't know why there's somebody on the President's team who's not taking Dershowitz's advice on just vote on the constitutionality of it and go home. | |
| But they must have their reasons. | |
| They're very good lawyers. | |
| One of the things that Schiff did, and then I think one of the other Democratic impeachment managers showed, was they actually showed a hoax video. | |
| Oh my God! And by hoax video, I mean it's deceptively edited to change the meaning. | |
| And it's the video where the president says in his own words, I think this is close to his own words, that I can do anything I want. | |
| And they take it out of context, so it looks like he's saying that as a president, I'm above the law, I can do anything I want. | |
| If you see it in context... | |
| He was talking about, I can do anything I want on, I forget what it was, but a specific question in which he could do anything he wanted. | |
| So what he actually said is not in dispute, I don't believe, by anybody. | |
| There's no lawyer anywhere who disputes what he actually said. | |
| But if you cut out the context, which they did, and they showed a hoax video in the Senate... | |
| Just think about this. | |
| An intentional hoax video twice on the same day. | |
| I'm being told in the comments, reminded that when he said he could do anything he wants, it had to do with whether he could hire or fire people in the executive branch. | |
| The answer is, of course. | |
| He's the boss. | |
| He can do anything he wants in terms of hiring and firing. | |
| Within reason. So, don't you wonder what Chief Justice Roberts was thinking? | |
| Because apparently he doesn't have power to jump in and manage the proceedings other than just the ceremonial parts that he's doing. | |
| What do you think he was thinking? | |
| Now, maybe he didn't know that it was a deceptive hoax video. | |
| Maybe. But he probably knew. | |
| And he had to sit there, the head of the Supreme Court. | |
| Just imagine his mindset, just for a moment. | |
| I'm not going to say that I know what he was thinking, but imagine what he was thinking. | |
| He's the person who is most, let's say, he has the greatest responsibility in the entire country for making sure that the citizens play fair with each other. | |
| Right? Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, that's his primary thing in life, is that people play fair. | |
| Now, within the legal system, of course. | |
| But he had to sit there and watch, in the Senate, the most respected, often it's said, the most respected body, governmental body, Of just about anywhere, right? | |
| And he had to watch Schiff play a hoax video and then another one play a hoax video right in front of him. | |
| And he had to just sit there and watch it. | |
| Oh my God! That would have made me crazy. | |
| I think I would have stopped it right there. | |
| I think I would have held up my hand and said, you know, I understand my role and it's not to get involved. | |
| But you just showed a video that's a hoax video in front of the whole world in the Senate. | |
| It doesn't get any worse than that. | |
| I mean, I suppose there's a lot of verbal lying in the Senate, so people are used to it. | |
| But man, showing a hoax video? | |
| That's as bad as it gets. | |
| Alright. One of the things that Schiff and company are suggesting, and this is my own words I'm putting on this, is that the President mounting a legal defense is tantamount to admitting guilt. | |
| What? Now, of course, I'm putting my own words on what they're saying, but their version of it was, and one of the impeachment managers said this, I can't remember her name, she said that she had worked in law enforcement before being in government and that she knew that anybody who had evidence that did not hurt them or show their innocence would be happy to show it to you. | |
| And therefore, because the president is not Allowing these documents and the people associated with the presidency, not allowing them to talk under the assumption of executive privilege, presidential privilege, that that alone is strong evidence of his guilt. | |
| To which I said, what country are we in now? | |
| Are we still in the United States? | |
| Because in the United States, you can fight like a wounded badger for your defense. | |
| And the smartest thing you can do is to block every, if you can, if you can do it legally, you have to do it legally, but if you can, you want to block every source of information From the prosecution. | |
| Because there might be something in there. | |
| Remember, there's lots and lots of documents, lots and lots of people whose memories are maybe different about what happened, people making assumptions. | |
| If you open all that up, you're guaranteed that the other team is going to find some snippet, a text message, an email that could be taken more than one way. | |
| Then what do you do? You just gave the other side some ammunition and it wasn't even real. | |
| It's just something that looked real because out of context you'd say, oh, if I saw that out of context, that would look kind of damning. | |
| I don't want the jury to see that. | |
| You don't want the judge to see that because it's just something they're taking out of context. | |
| So the only way you can prevent Stuff taken out of context is that you fight as hard as you can, legally, within the legal system, to prevent the prosecution, or whoever's acting as a prosecutor in this case. | |
| You want to limit all their information. | |
| It's exactly the same reason why a president with, let's say, President Trump's complicated tax return situation, people said, well, If he had nothing to hide, why wouldn't he just let us look at him? | |
| That is just so inexperienced. | |
| Nobody who has experience in the real world would say something so dumb. | |
| The reason you don't let the public and your critics see your tax returns... | |
| I mean, one reason could be you're trying to hide stuff. | |
| But an equally strong reason, and just as compelling, which has to be the first reason you consider, is that nothing good can come of it. | |
| It can only be bad. | |
| If you're totally innocent, it's only bad. | |
| Because it gives them stuff to, you know, criticize that may or may not even be valid, but it's plenty of material. | |
| You don't want to arm your enemies. | |
| So, I would say that's the most offensive thing that the Democrats are saying, is that the Trump team using the legal process, legal process, to... | |
| To put some obstacles in the way of the prosecution. | |
| Somehow that's evidence of guilt. | |
| Wow. It's amazing that we elect people who can say things like that in public. | |
| Have you noticed all of the loser think going on in the arguments? | |
| And this is both sides. | |
| Both sides have done two of the biggest loser think errors. | |
| As I read about in my Best-selling book called Loser Think, which you can see behind me here. | |
| One of them is they imagine that they can read the minds of strangers. | |
| The mind reading is massive. | |
| Once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere. | |
| And what they'll do is they'll say, and the reason he did this is to hide this, or the reason the president doesn't want to have this is because he knows we'll get the goods. | |
| No. You can't read his mind. | |
| And you certainly don't get to read his mind and put the worst possible interpretation on it when there are other interpretations. | |
| So both sides are doing it. | |
| They're both saying that they know the motives of the other. | |
| Now, they may be right, but it's just the worst thing in the world to assume that. | |
| Now, remember, one of the arguments from the president's staff is that they're doing mind-reading, about his intentions and you don't want to have a system that lets people get punished because other people are mind reading. | |
| Here's the most interesting sort of legal argument factoid I've seen and it's a little bit technical but I think I can simplify this to the point Now, Joel Pollack, one of the few people who probably read all these documents, you know, in terms of the arguments coming from the White House, pulled down one of the arguments and highlighted it in a tweet. | |
| And this is just so interesting. | |
| Listen to this argument from the lawyers for the president. | |
| So this will be my version of it. | |
| So I hope I don't mess this up. | |
| In order to get a conviction on impeachment, you have to have two-thirds of the Senate vote, meaning they'd have to agree and vote the same way, on the specific basis for conviction. | |
| In other words, they have to vote that this is specifically the reason they're impeaching. | |
| Get that? That makes sense, right? | |
| You want two-thirds of the Senate to be very specific. | |
| This stuff is why we're impeaching you. | |
| But, because of the way the impeachment has been structured, it's a laundry list. | |
| It's a laundry list of bad things the President has done. | |
| And they're trying to get the Senate to vote on a laundry list for impeachment. | |
| Now listen to this argument. | |
| It's so clever. | |
| If the Senate votes on a laundry list, no matter how convincing that list is, You cannot, at the end of it, know if any one of those things on the list caused two-thirds of the people to vote the way they did. | |
| In other words, by its structure, it's not proceedable. | |
| You couldn't proceed with a laundry list of reasons because you would never know why the senators voted the way they did. | |
| You wouldn't know if you got two-thirds for any of them. | |
| It might be, and I'll just do this hypothetically, it could be that one-third of the senators voted because of one of those points, but were not persuaded by, let's say, two others. | |
| Another third voted for another one, but were not persuaded by the other two, and so on. | |
| You could actually have 100% of the Senate vote to convict, in other words, vote to impeach and carry it through, And yet, not satisfy the Constitution. | |
| Because the Constitution requires that they know that they're voting for the same thing. | |
| Otherwise you don't know if you've got two-thirds for any one of those things. | |
| And I thought, what's the counter-argument to that? | |
| I suppose lawyers are clever, so maybe they have one. | |
| But isn't that the end? | |
| Couldn't you just say, let's just talk about this one thing. | |
| Is there even anything we have, the way it's structured, that we could vote on? | |
| Is it votable? | |
| Apparently it's not even votable. | |
| You could not constitutionally get from here to there. | |
| Very interesting. One of the things I'm liking the most about this is that the Senate has decided to literally torture themselves while we watch. | |
| Now, You could not write a better reality show. | |
| And in some ways, it was always heading this way. | |
| You know, people have joked for years that the government is just becoming a reality TV show. | |
| And then when President Trump gets elected, it looks more like a reality TV show. | |
| And then the way he manages is a lot like a reality TV show. | |
| Right down to the fact that apparently he wanted lawyers on his team who looked good on camera, allegedly. | |
| I don't know if that actually happened, but it would be consistent with his very smart way to look at the world, which is you certainly want to be good on every level. | |
| You want to be visually good, good arguments, etc. | |
| So we got to the point where the Senate is literally... | |
| Locking its members up, taking away the only thing they could save their poor bored minds, which are their electronic devices, their phones and stuff, and making them sit there for 12 hours a day and then come back. | |
| Oh my God! | |
| Can you imagine being in that room? | |
| How in the world can you listen to all that stuff? | |
| And especially all the motions about the 50 or so things that they're voting on. | |
| But, I gotta say, I like the fact that I can dip in and dip out, so if I get bored I can go do something else. | |
| But when I leave, I know they're all still locked up on their robe, and they're going to be there for God knows how long. | |
| So, it's just great that the Senate is actually torturing their own members. | |
| I mean, actual torture. | |
| I mean, not in the Not in the wartime sense, but I would feel tortured if I had to sit there for 12 hours a day within a phone. | |
| I mean, I would be pretty unhappy. | |
| I imagine it's the same with them. | |
| All right. Let's see what else we've got going on here. | |
| So we've got the question about whether or not The presidential, what's it called? | |
| I forget the word. | |
| The executive privilege. | |
| So there's some history about, I guess there are some situations in which the president's close aides did have to give up their information and did have to testify or their documents could be discovered or whatever it was. | |
| But there is some history in which that veil has been penetrated in the past. | |
| And one of the arguments, apparently the better argument about it, is that what's different about impeachment is that the stakes are so high. | |
| So that in general, you wouldn't want the president's close advisors to have to give up any of their communications because it would make it harder for any future president to get good advice. | |
| Nobody would want to do it. | |
| And nobody would even want to send an email to somebody to get some information. | |
| If they thought all their electronic communications were going to be grabbed. | |
| So the argument is that only in this very special case, where it's an impeachment, the fate of the republic rides on it, etc., that in those very important cases of impeachment, that's the exception where they can penetrate that privilege and get to the assistants and the advisors. | |
| But here's the thing. | |
| Wasn't all of that before impeachment became a big fucking joke? | |
| Sorry, that slipped out. | |
| Is impeachment this year the same as what impeachment used to be? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| I don't think so. | |
| Today's impeachment is not yesterday's impeachment. | |
| So the argument that impeachment is such a high stakes game because the fate of the country depends on it That you should make an exception and penetrate that executive privilege. | |
| That doesn't really apply to today's form of impeachment. | |
| Today's form of impeachment is literally theater. | |
| It's just a show. | |
| Do you think that the Republic is at risk with this impeachment process? | |
| Not even a little bit. | |
| Not even a little bit. | |
| There are no stakes whatsoever in this. | |
| We already know how it ends. | |
| The impeachment is a bunch of crap. | |
| It's just theater. Under the situation where impeachment has, thank you, Nancy Pelosi, she has trivialized one of the most important parts of the Constitution down to the point where it's the lowest stakes. | |
| Impeachment should be the highest stakes, right? | |
| The whole country depends on it. | |
| Not anymore. They've made a joke out of the whole thing. | |
| I mean, literally a joke. | |
| We're literally laughing about it. | |
| Every day that I watch it, I'm watching it, this is no hyperbole here, I watch it as entertainment. | |
| I don't even watch it like there's anything at stake. | |
| Because I know there isn't. | |
| I mean, not in the sense that the government will change. | |
| So I would say the best argument for why the stakes are not that high that the veil should be pierced is that there are no stakes. | |
| They've ruined impeachment forever. | |
| And guess what? If Alan Dershowitz is right, or even if he isn't, President Trump is going to credibly claim that no impeachment happened. | |
| That's how unimportant it was. | |
| Alright, I'd like to tell you news that looks optimistic. | |
| Here's one, although it could destroy the entire planet, but at the moment it looks optimistic. | |
| There's a company, I forget which country it's in, that's making food out of thin air. | |
| What? No, that's not exactly what they're doing. | |
| So they're starting with microbes and liquid and some kind of a fermentation tank. | |
| And then they can breathe these microbes into some kind of a protein that doesn't have a flavor, so you can add it to anything. | |
| But here's the twist. | |
| Normally you would feed your microbes some kind of sugar. | |
| But they found a way to grow these things by feeding it CO2. So they could actually pull CO2 out of the air, pump it into their little mixture of fermented microbes, And turn it into protein. | |
| Now, apparently they're already doing it. | |
| So we don't have to wonder if the science works, because they're already doing it. | |
| Now the question of whether it could scale up is a big question. | |
| But when I was laughing at how, I'm not sure if this is good news or bad news, because it would be really easy to imagine... | |
| That you could build these inexpensive things that make protein out of the air and that you use it to feed, let's say, African tribes or something that didn't have other sources. | |
| But what happens if it becomes the main way we get protein? | |
| How much CO2 do you want to take out of the air? | |
| Because you sort of have to have a limit on it. | |
| Because the Plants, you know, the vegetation of the earth requires a certain level of CO2. So it's one thing, you know, I've talked before about companies that are making these scrubbers. | |
| They're pulling it out of the air. | |
| But the scrubbers you could just turn off. | |
| If you're pulling CO2 out of the air just to get it out of the air, and you decide that you've got enough, and if you took more of it, it would be bad for the earth, not good. | |
| Well, you could just unplug them. | |
| But if you get people addicted to a machine that uses CO2 to produce food, and that becomes a major food source, especially if it's feeding poor people, are they going to turn it off? | |
| Or is there so much CO2 in the air that we'll never reach the limit of it? | |
| Who knows? But, as I said yesterday, it does look like President Trump has... | |
| Let's say taken a more nuanced approach to climate change. | |
| He approved the United States entering this trillion trees situation, which you wouldn't do unless you thought there was some risk of climate change being a real problem. | |
| But his take on it is that we'll figure it out. | |
| And I completely agree with that. | |
| That it's probably a problem. | |
| At least it's a big enough risk. | |
| We should treat it seriously. But We can figure it out. | |
| And maybe some of these new technologies are exactly what's going to happen. | |
| I told you that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was working with a few other people in Congress to come up with a version of, let's say, I won't call it a climate plan, but an energy plan, in which they would go to more clean energy, including nuclear, etc. | |
| And I heard from a member of McCarthy's office who offered to brief me on it, so I'm going to follow up on that. | |
| I'll get you more details on that. | |
| His announced support for nuclear... | |
| Yeah, the president said Generation... | |
| I think he said Generation 4 nuclear in his list of things we should look at. | |
| But he's not called it out as something to emphasize. | |
| Let me tell you the worst arguments for the skeptics on climate science. | |
| These are the ones you should abandon and of embarrassment. | |
| Number one, they forgot to look at the sun. | |
| It's all about the sun and the sunspots and the sun cycles. | |
| The experts on warming did not forget to look at all the elements of the Sun. | |
| Now, like anything, anybody could be wrong, but they looked at the Sun. | |
| The other one is that more CO2 is just better. | |
| No, it's not. | |
| More CO2 is good for plants, but if it's also raising the temperature to the point where you can't live or it's causing major problems, It is not a smart response. | |
| It's just not a good argument to say that we need more CO2, lots more than we have now. | |
| It just shows you haven't looked at it in enough detail. | |
| So, please abandon the bad arguments. | |
| There are plenty of good arguments. | |
| I'm not saying there are no good arguments. | |
| I'm just saying don't use the bad ones. | |
| It just makes you look like you haven't looked into it enough. | |
| And the best argument is that We'll be able to figure out how to deal with it in plenty of time. | |
| Why do I reject the sun? | |
| Somebody just asked me, why do I think the sun should not be considered the real reason of the warming? | |
| My head's going to explode. | |
| Please. Please. | |
| It goes like this. | |
| I'll just say it one more time. | |
| If you believe... | |
| That all of the experts in the world, the scientists who are looking at why the earth is getting warmer, if you believe they have not looked into all aspects of the sun, you're not a serious participant in the conversation. | |
| Of course they have. | |
| Could they have made a mistake? | |
| All of them? Yeah, anything's possible. | |
| But they looked at it. | |
| Stop saying they didn't look at it and that you know a guy who's a Who has something he posted on Twitter that says that they forgot something about the sun. | |
| That's not real. All right. | |
| Yeah, all the grand solar minimum stuff. | |
| Don't be amateur scientists and imagine that you know more than the actual scientists because you looked up at the sun and you thought they didn't think about it. | |
| Just don't. Please don't. | |
| Somebody says all the experts are lying about Really? | |
| They're all lying? | |
| If you said some of the experts are lying, or if you said the experts might be wrong, I'd say, well, maybe. | |
| Could be. But when you say all the experts are lying, you're not a credible participant in the conversation. | |
| That's just ridiculous. All right. | |
| Scott asks a question. | |
| How is it that the climate maintains itself so tightly? | |
| The answer is it doesn't. | |
| You can look at the history of the Earth and you can see that the climate has changed substantially over that time. | |
| It's just that our little human timescale is so short that we don't notice. | |
| Can you name one credible scientist that has refuted the sun? | |
| How about all of them? Maybe all of them. |