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July 17, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:03:00
Episode 1061 Scott Adams: Fake News, Fake Science, Fake Everything

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Protests, pandemics, economics, you name it.
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Well, here's my favorite story of the day.
Apparently, the simulation is winking at us again because there's a photo and a story about a fox, an actual animal, a fox, who keeps stealing somebody's Washington Post off of their porch or lawn, I guess. And so we have a literal story of Fox delivering fake news.
I don't know what are the odds that these are just coincidences, but it looks like the author of the simulation is trying to send us a message.
Do you get this one?
Do you get it?
I'm sending a fox to grab the Washington Post.
You get it, right? Does everybody get this?
It just feels like the author of the simulation is trying to send us a message.
Do you remember the story about the Twitter hackers who somehow they got into Twitter systems and took over some accounts and tweeted some scams about Bitcoin?
Well, there are some conspiracy theorists, and I'm not so sure that I'm not one of them, who think that maybe the whole Bitcoin thing was a diversion.
And that the real purpose of the hack wasn't really the Bitcoin part, although maybe they made some money too, but rather they were trying to cover up some deeper mischief which we may not yet know.
Because once somebody has access to Twitter's innards, what else can they do?
What other things can they discover?
Seems like it would be quite a playground there.
One possibility is that they had access to the direct messages of lots of famous people.
And maybe those famous people will get blackmailed?
I don't know. But let me suggest that if you are leaving messages in a private place, there's no such thing.
So be careful what you say in any digital form, because you're now at a place where you should assume, you should assume, That somebody's looking at him.
Speaking of Mary Trump, have you seen the latest, I guess, Trump's niece?
And I hate that we even have to talk about this because it's yet another unverified claims from yet another book.
So Mary Trump, the niece, her latest bombshell claim, which she was sort of badgered into saying on What's her name show on MSNBC? And what Mary Trump said was that the, I guess the Trump family, she didn't give a time frame, but that they may have used the N-word and that Trump himself at some time in the distant past had also used it.
Now you know what's missing?
Do you know what's missing from that story?
Any kind of context.
Because let me make a statement in case this comes as a surprise to people.
Did you know, and I know this might come as a shock to some of you, did you know that when people speak privately, quite often they will say all of the things you're not supposed to say in public?
No, not just some of them, but all of them.
Unless you have different friends than I do.
Have not the people that you know personally, at one time or another, maybe not all in the same day, but have not your personal conversations used every bad word that could be used, surfaced every bad idea that could be surfaced, and basically talked of every manner of bad thing, often in ways that if somebody heard you in public, you would be cancelled.
Now, in the old days, You can say private things and maybe they would stay private because nobody's writing a book about you, there's no digital record.
And I would argue that people have two distinct lives.
One is the things they say privately, and the other is the things that they would be willing for the general public to hear.
And I've suggested that if we were to have a digital bill of rights, that one of the rules we should at least consider is this, that you should at least consider that if somebody takes a private conversation and moves it into a public sphere, that the person that you should at least consider that if somebody takes a private conversation and moves it into a public sphere, that the Now, this is a hard one, right?
You don't want the person who's just reporting what happened to become the author.
But I would suggest this.
If somebody says something in public, and then it's reported in public, that's fair.
Right? That's completely fair.
Said it in public, reported in public.
But if somebody said something in private, it is universally true that we speak differently in private to people we trust.
Often saying things that are the worst possible thing you can say because that's what makes it funny.
That's what makes it funny, that you're not supposed to say it.
So people will say things in public that are outrageously inappropriate because they can.
They like their freedom.
It's not hurting anybody.
Nobody's going to hear it. It may not be a reflection of their soul.
They just like to use inappropriate words in private because it's more fun.
Is there anybody who doesn't use inappropriate words or talk about inappropriate things, or at least things you wouldn't want other people to know?
In private?
I doubt it. It's pretty universal.
So I would say, and of course this rule does not exist, but if it did, I would say that Mary Trump is the only person responsible for making us think of the N-word more than we need to.
And one of the things that, and I've said this before, but this bears repeating.
You know that a third of the country doesn't have a sense of humor.
Like, actually, literally doesn't have a sense of humor.
In the same way that maybe about the same amount of the country doesn't have musical talent.
I would be in that latter category.
So it's not an insult.
Just people have different skills or distributed all over the place.
But there are lots of people who literally don't have a sense of humor.
And one of the things that they might not appreciate from people who do have a sense of humor is what they don't appreciate is that sometimes the thing that is funny is the inappropriateness of it.
So what you're laughing at is not at the subject of the joke.
Let's say it mocks some group or person or whatever.
If you laugh privately, with an emphasis on the privately, somebody privately tells you a deeply inappropriate joke, and you laugh, you're not laughing at the target of the joke, unless you're a sociopath or you hate that person or something.
But in general, you're laughing at the fact that anybody would say that out loud.
To me, that's hilarious.
When anybody does something completely inappropriate, I always laugh.
It's automatic. But here's the deeper question.
And I've also suggested that a digital bill of rights would include that if you did something more than 20 years ago, it just doesn't count.
It just doesn't count.
Taking things from the past, moving them to the present as if our current sensibilities existed at the same time as the statement is just illegitimate to me.
So we should just ignore anything from 20 years ago.
But here's a more interesting question.
Has Mary Trump ever met the president?
This is actually the hilarious part.
Apparently there's some question About whether they've even ever been in the same room.
So we haven't seen a picture of them in the same room.
And that's funny.
Now, what's funnier is the physicality of the interview.
And I'm going to have to go there.
You know, they say, don't go there.
I'm going to go there. I'm going to go there now.
When you watch Mary Trump give the interview, she's not what you'd call a sympathetic character.
Meaning that when you look at her, she doesn't look emotionally stable, which is different from saying that she is emotionally unstable.
The only thing I know, I'm not a psychiatrist, right?
So I'm not medically diagnosing her, but as a viewer, I have an impression.
So I'll just tell you my viewer impression, because in the world of politics, the viewer impression matters.
It's not a medical diagnosis.
I wouldn't do that.
And what she looks like is somebody who has severe mental problems.
Emotional, mental problems.
Now, I'm not saying she does have them.
I'm saying she looks exactly like somebody who has severe emotional, mental problems.
So that, I think, works a little bit against her credibility.
But here's the funniest thing that works against her credibility.
Are you ready for this? And if you haven't thought of this yet, You're going to laugh when I tell it to you.
Now, let me know if you've thought of this, but here's the thought.
When you're assessing her credibility, consider that she looks like Trump with a wig.
She looks like a Trump.
So she has the face that looks like, she looks like President Trump.
There's something about it that reminds you of him.
There's a familial, you know, something recognizable.
And so you immediately think, I feel like I'm listening to female Trump talking about the other Trump.
And it's this weird disconcerting feeling that I think works against her credibility for the very part of the segment that they would like to believe in.
So I think that part's just funny.
I don't know if that really has any effect.
And then, as Mike Cernovich pointed out in a tweet, and I would agree, That if you were going to say, if you were just objectively looking at her as a stranger and you didn't know anything about who she was or what she was talking about, and the only thing you were doing is you turned off the sound and you watched her body language as she answered the question, would it look like she was telling the truth or would it look like she was concocting a lie?
And I would agree with Mike Sertovich's view on that.
Again, we're not lie detectors.
We can't see inside her brain.
But if I were to judge her from her mannerisms, it looks exactly like somebody who's making something up.
I don't know if she is making something up.
Can't read her mind. Again, it looks exactly like somebody who's not credible.
So I'm fascinated to see if this story has any legs at all.
You would think it would play into the whole, you know, the fake news view that the president's a giant racist, but I just don't know how much attention this story is going to get because Mary Trump is so darn non-credible.
And it was a long time ago, and I think everybody Probably something tells me that even the black people watching this are saying to themselves, oh, obviously.
Everybody in the 60s and 70s in private conversations, including all black people, including every other kind of person, including all people, have said things that you wish your niece wouldn't tell people you said.
Now that doesn't mean he said any of those things.
And there's certainly evidence to suggest that he didn't.
And it's not credible.
But those are all the factors I would take into consideration.
Here's a question for you.
I tweeted the other day that the closer society gets to being able to program a simulation of its own, in other words, a software world where the characters in the world believe that they're conscious and real people.
The closer you get to being able to do that, the closer you get to understanding that that's what you are.
Of course, I talk about the simulation because it's fun, but I will give you this following thought to chew on, and it goes like this.
Why would anybody who could create a simulation create one?
What would be the purpose of creating a software simulation of a world full of people who thought they were real but were not?
Why would you do it?
Because the whole theory of the simulation is that once you could do it, You would do it, and maybe you would do it lots of times.
Well, I would suggest that the creators of the simulation might do it for the same reason that we will do it.
In other words, the closer we get to being able to do it, the more we will realize, oh yeah, there is a reason to do it.
And that reason is A-B testing their own choices.
In other words, if you have, let's say, a problem you're working through in your life and you're wondering how to deal with it, you could create a simulation of yourself In an artificial world, testing a lot of different things, seeing how it turns out.
Now, you'd have to have a really good simulation to think that the things that were tested in the simulation would then translate into your so-called real world.
But if you had enough simulations, and you ran the simulation enough times, You might get closer to saying, okay, every time I do something like this, I get a better result than when I do something like this.
So, I would suggest to you to keep this in mind, that if we got to the point where we could create, in our civilization, a simulation that would test what would happen if we personally act in different ways, we'd do it.
So just think about it.
We'd probably do it.
Somebody says it would be cruel.
I wonder if it would be.
Would it be cruel to create software that felt pain?
What do you think? That's a really interesting ethical and moral question, isn't it?
Would it be ethical to create software that thought it was a real creature with real feelings and felt pain?
Maybe not. I don't know.
Anyway, I put that out there.
And the other part of that is Have you noticed that in your life, and maybe people you know, people have the same kind of problem over and over again?
Have you noticed that?
That in your life, your entire life, even though your situation, your relationships, where you live, the job, all of these things are changing, but have you noticed that you will have just the same sort of problem over and over and over again, whereas all the people around you will have that problem zero times?
And you say to yourself, How could I always have this same problem where other people don't have this problem, but yet other people also have a theme problem, meaning they have the same sort of problem over and over again, but I never have that one.
What's up with that? And that again would suggest that we are simulations testing things for Our creators.
Meaning that the challenges that I get seem to be very similar in nature.
I won't go into it. But the similarity I've noticed forever.
It's like, really? The moment I solved that problem, a new thing jumped up to give me the same problem back in a different way?
How could that be?
And it makes me think that that's how you know which problem you were simulated to work through.
Because you keep beating on the same problem in different ways.
All right. I've suggested, a lot of people have also, that the best slogan for Trump's campaign would be jobs, not mobs.
Now that was a slogan that came up in the last campaign, but I think it's more appropriate now because we're seeing more mobs.
So that contrast between jobs and mobs is now so big It's just the perfect campaign slogan.
So I'd be interested to see if the campaign tries that out.
If they like it, what you should expect is to see somebody not the president trying it out first, just to see how it does.
That would be a normal way to do it.
Although Trump has tweeted it before, so in that case you could assume maybe it's already tested.
Now, I tweeted this. I'm no political expert, and I don't pretend to be an expert on politics, but it seems to me that the Democrat strategy of effectively legalizing violent crime right before a national election is not the best strategy.
Because what it looks like to me, and it looks exactly like this to me, Is that Democrats are removing the controls on crime going into a major election.
Because that's really the whole story about New York City, right?
There's no bail, so you commit a crime, you can just be released, commit some more crimes, get picked up, get released.
If you have a court date, I guess you can just leave.
I don't know. What happens?
So couldn't you do that forever?
Is there any limit to how many times you can just say, well, thanks for arresting me, I'll see you later, and just walk away?
I don't know the details, but it sounds like you could.
So I can't see any world in which the Democrats even have a chance in November in terms of the presidency, because if you're running on a platform of increasing crime, and the news is showing non-stop images of increased crime, I just don't know how that gets you elected.
I just don't see how that could possibly work.
I've heard people say that the president basically has no chance of re-election because the polls are so slanted.
But how many people have you heard who have changed their mind from Trump to Biden?
In your life, are there a lot of people doing that?
Because I think I have encountered zero people That I personally know, although I don't know if they'd mention it to me.
But it doesn't feel like what I'm observing makes sense.
New topic. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
If you're young, you don't know.
He was one of the great basketball players of all time.
And he's kind of politically active, and he's written a few op-eds.
One of them was about systemic racism.
I think I may have criticized him for that.
I forget what, but there was something I quibbled with.
But he wrote another op-ed just recently.
And this one really got my attention.
And so I want to give a shout out and a compliment to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Because he wrote, if you didn't know, he's black, which is important to this story.
And he wrote an op-ed in which he called out Hollywood and the sports world for their anti-Semitic stuff.
That hasn't been really pushed back on enough, according to Kareem.
Now, I would consider this one of the great acts of leadership that we've seen lately.
So, keep in mind, I'm not a big Kareem Abdul-Jabbar fan.
In fact, I thought he ruined basketball for years because he was so good and so tall that watching him play other teams just didn't seem fun.
Because it just didn't seem like you could beat a guy that big and that good.
So to me, he sort of ruined basketball for a while.
So it's not like I'm a fan.
He's one of the great players of all time.
That's just a fact. But he wasn't fun to watch, in my opinion.
And I've disagreed with him on some political stuff.
But I'm going to give him a plus, plus, plus on leadership for taking what might have been a fairly unpopular stand.
I don't know. I'm not sure if he got any blowback for it, but he came out strongly against anti-Semitism.
In the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement, he said, hey, let's...
I don't want to say that he said all lives matter, because he didn't, but in effect...
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was saying, let's not over-focus on this one problem.
This anti-Semitism thing is pretty big.
If you're ignoring this, you're not really credible.
That's my paraphrasing of it.
And I appreciated that.
I appreciated the fact that he stuck up for another group.
And I think the more of that you see, the healthier the country.
So thank you to Kareem.
All right. People keep asking me why Trump is not promoting the wearing of masks.
Why is Trump not saying, and this is not my opinion, this is people talking to me, they say, you know, these masks save lives.
We'll talk about the controversy about whether they do or do not.
But people say to me, they save lives, and it's obvious, say some people.
Why doesn't Trump Say you wear masks.
It doesn't have to say that you have to.
It doesn't have to make it mandatory.
But if he just promoted it, more people would say, all right, you know, we like Trump.
He's saying wear masks. We'll wear masks.
So why doesn't he do that if you know that people would pick up on it?
I think that's safe to say.
If he promoted it, more people would wear masks on the Republican side.
I think that's fair. So why doesn't he do it?
Is it a mistake of leadership that he's not pushing masks?
Here's my take on that, because I had to think about it for a while.
Imagine if he did.
Let's say he pushed masks.
What would happen? If the president promoted the use of masks, it would be like hydroxychloroquine.
If the president said wear a mask, CNN and MSNBC would be running non-stop pieces about how they don't work, and it's making everything worse.
Now, if you don't think that's true, you have not been paying attention.
If you say to yourself, Scott, Scott, Scott, the fake news may be fake news, but they're not going to run stories that would destroy the country with bad medical advice.
Just because the President had the opposite opinion?
They're not going to go opposite just because he said it?
Yeah, they would.
That's exactly what they would do.
There's no chance.
If the President was promoting masks, and if it was very persuasive, let's say Republicans just all masked up from day one, you wouldn't see Democrats wearing masks.
They would say it was fake and he's anti-science and they shouldn't wear a mask.
But here's the other part that I haven't seen a single person say.
I have not seen a single person say this and it's the most important thing.
Trump has been painted by the opposition and the fake news as an authoritarian, as a dictator.
If Trump is being painted as an authoritarian and a dictator, How would he be treated if he told everybody they had to wear masks from the federal level?
He would be treated as an authoritarian dictator.
And even the Republicans would think so.
So it would be the first time that the Democrats would ever win a point.
Because mostly the two sides, you know, they send messages, but they don't get through.
But one of the messages the Democrats have been trying to send is, Hey, you Republicans, can't you see?
He's an authoritarian dictator.
Why can't you see it?
Why is our message not penetrating your bubble?
Get out of your Fox News bubble.
He's a dictator. He's an authoritarian.
If Trump told people to wear masks from the federal level, That message would completely penetrate the right, and the right would say, you know, actually, you got a point there.
I think you got a point.
We don't want to hear this from the president.
Now, if the president does not do it, what happens?
Well, the states do it.
And the cities do it.
Now, they don't all make the same decision.
But what do you feel about the credibility of the decisions if they're made at the local level versus the federal level?
It feels different, doesn't it?
Doesn't that feel different?
If your city has decided that you should wear masks, even if you don't like it, doesn't that feel more legitimate than the president?
This is not a president decision.
The fact that the president has stepped back from it a little bit—I wish he would say it directly, by the way—the best thing that the president could do is say, you know, I'm not your dictator.
Let your local community work it out with you.
You see what the professionals say.
You see that I wear a mask when I visit Walter Reed.
I'm not going to be the dictator.
Work it out locally, but I hope you follow the medical advice.
That would be a good message.
I don't think that he has done that well.
But when you're saying he's not doing it right, you've got to ask yourself what would it look like if he did.
If he did it Right, according to the people who say masks work, he would have made the Democrats hate masks, they would have questioned it, and they would have called him an authoritarian dictator, and it just wouldn't have worked.
So it's sort of a trap.
So here's the other thing.
How do we judge all of the conflicting science about masks and whether they work?
So I asked on Twitter, can somebody send me a good thread that talks about them?
And here's what I find.
And people will send me to an article that looks quite scholarly.
There's a PhD or a medical doctor involved.
There'll be an article that says, here's all the proof that That masks do not work.
Every study says they don't work.
And you say to yourself, wow, that's pretty convincing.
It looks like some publication that's respectable.
The person who wrote it looks respectable.
Shows all of his sources.
Every one of them show that face masks don't work.
So that's it, right?
Good source.
Credible person. Every single cited study, same direction.
Mess don't work. So we're done, right?
Except you can go six inches down your Twitter feed and find a credible person in a credible publication pointing to studies showing they work.
So here's my greater point.
The people you should not believe in any conversation are the ones who are sure.
Those are the ones you should not believe in any conversation, at least if there's complexity in science involved.
You and I don't know how to sort it through the science.
You do not know how to read those various studies and say, oh, you know, this is the good one, this is the bad one, I trust this one, I don't trust this.
We don't have those skills.
We do not have those skills.
We only have experts telling us what they've seen, because maybe they do have those skills.
But here's the problem.
Which expert are you going to listen to because they don't agree?
If the experts don't agree, how can you tell which is the good expert?
Because it just takes your problem of not being able to look at the science and come up with a good opinion.
All it does is transfer it to, well, I can't also figure out which experts are credible.
It's all just stuff that you don't have any ability to determine, but you think you do.
The think you do part is the part that makes you stupid.
If you can look at all these studies and say, well, looks like there's some people and some studies that go one way.
It looks like there's some people and some studies that go the other way.
If your opinion is anything but, I guess it's unclear.
That's the only opinion I think you could have on it.
But you still have to make a decision, right?
You don't get to say, well, it's unclear, so I'll just avoid this situation.
You're either going to wear a mask or not wear a mask.
So you've got to pick.
So what do you do? If you can't evaluate the science and you don't know which experts are credible, you are left with some kind of a low-information risk management decision.
Here's how I've made mine.
Here are the mistakes that people make when they're looking...
I'll work into it.
Here are the mistakes that the laypeople are making when looking at the studies and even the question.
The first one is, That they misunderstand the purpose of the mask.
The masks for the public are not about protecting the wearer.
It's about protecting other people.
So that's the first thing.
So you see a lot of people who are very certain about things, and they'll say, nope, masks will not protect you from getting the virus.
But that's not really the question.
So those people don't understand the question because they're analyzing the wrong thing.
The other thing is some people say the total quantity of air that comes out from around the masks is still the same.
Because if you exhale, it's going somewhere.
So if it doesn't go straight out, it's going out the side of the masks.
It might even be going out in little jets because you're forcing the same amount of stuff out of smaller openings.
And so some people say, Well, it's the same amount of air that's going in.
It's all the same. This, too, is bad analysis because the point is not to reduce the quantity of air in the room.
Nobody said that's the point.
The point is to keep it local.
The point is that your exhalations are more likely to stay local even if it's coming out of the edges.
To me that sounds reasonable, and a lot of experts say that is reasonable too.
It is also not about the masks blocking viruses, because people will point you to a lot of science that says, you know, at the microscopic level, the holes of the mask are this big, and the particles, the viruses are this big, and even the smaller water drops are this big, and they fit through.
They fit through. So if they fit through the mask, the masks do nothing, right?
Wrong. Because the air is what is mostly carrying the virus.
Some of it, you can imagine, would get stripped off.
Some of it would be on smaller droplets, etc.
But there really is no situation I can imagine in which if you can't blow out a candle that's, you know, a couple feet away from you, but you could If you have the mask off, it's doing something.
It's blocking some of the moisture that's carried in the air, and much of that moisture must have a virus attached.
You know, the worst argument I heard, somebody emailed me and said, is that it's carried on the water droplets until it reaches your mask and then the water is stripped off and then the free viruses go forward into the universe now unburdened by the water droplets.
I feel like that's not what's happening.
Again, we're not experts.
We don't know. But if virus travels on water droplets and water droplets are in any way impeded or slowed down or kept more local, I don't know any situation in which that isn't going to be good in terms of transmission.
And then there's the question about touching your face.
And a lot of people said if it makes you adjust your mask a lot, well that's just as bad as having no mask and it might be worse because your hand is always going to be up around your face.
But I don't know about you, but if I have a face mask on, I do touch my face a lot, but I'm sort of touching my cheek with my finger.
You know, I'm doing this.
And, you know, maybe my chin once if I'm doing this.
Isn't that, like, really different than touching the moist part of your mouth?
Because I would think it's sort of your mouth and your nose and your eyes, you know, your moist parts that are the problem.
So if you cover this big moist mouth and you do touch your cheek a little bit with your finger...
Is that just as dangerous as all the times you touch your mouth?
Because people do touch their mouth a lot when they're not wearing a mask, if you've watched.
So anyway, if you're totally certain about masks, maybe you shouldn't be, but you have to make a decision anyway, and I'm going to go with the piss your pants model.
The piss your pants model looks like this.
If you're standing next to somebody and they take a piss in their pants, Do you get as wet as if they were not wearing pants and they were aiming at you?
Now, it's a bad analogy because there's no virus in the urine in that bad analogy, but it's sort of how I'm thinking about it.
It must be stopping some of the virus.
Today, CNN did report on the number of coronavirus deaths.
Now, I've been mocking them because they've been Talking about the number of infections, but they leave out of that same story the number of deaths, which is clearly the more important part.
Both important, but deaths will always be more important.
But today they actually reported it, and prominently.
Why do you suppose they did that?
Because it was a record.
So as soon as the deaths were bad news, it became part of the article.
When deaths were good news, meaning that the number of deaths were low compared to the number of people infected, that actually looked kind of like good news because it made it look like no matter whether you get infected or not, we've got something going on, don't know what, maybe the way we treat it, maybe hydroxychloroquine, who knows?
Maybe it's vitamin D. I don't know.
But it looked like death was good news while infections were bad news.
Death rate falling being the good news, not the deaths.
And as soon as the death count became bad news, because it's a record, that's obviously bad news, it became a headline.
It's just so disgusting.
138,000 people dead so far from coronavirus allegedly.
Some Princeton professors They very cleverly wrote an article in which they said, maybe we should change July and August, change the months, because July and August are named after Julius Augustus Caesar.
And if Julius Caesar was a slave owner, which he was, don't you have to change the name of those two months?
Now, it was a little bit more of a challenging thought.
They weren't actually in favor of changing them.
And then they went on to say that you'd really have to change the name of the Democratic Party, because the Democratic Party up to the 1960s, when I was alive, you know, my actual lifetime, was the party of segregation and Ku Klux Klan and all that other stuff.
So is there an argument that Democrats must change their name from Democrats?
I would say yes.
Why would you be a member of a party with the same name as the party that was in favor of all these racial bad things?
One of my other favorite stories in the news is Jake Tapper having to call bullshit on CNN's own pundits for spreading fake news.
So Kayleigh McEnany was misinterpreted when she was talking about school openings.
She said that the science should not stand in the way of going back to school.
And then she went on to say that the science, and she referred to a study, a credible study, saying that the risks for children were low, and therefore the science would not stop us from going to school because the science supports it.
Of course, Jim Acosta and some other people at CNN Decided to interpret that as, we're going to ignore the science and go to school.
Exactly the opposite of what she said.
Jake Tapper, to his credit, called bullshit on it and even tweeted it bullshit.
So even he was not willing to accept the narrative which his own network had immediately adopted that the The fake news that Kayleigh McEnany was in favor of ignoring science and putting children back in school so they will die because of Orange Man Bad.
And so I will give props to Jake Tapper for fact checking his own network, which isn't easy.
There's no way anybody thinks that's easy to do.
And I will give him a second shout-out by saying he's the only one who said about the Charlottesville fine people hoax, he's the only person who said that the context should include that the president explicitly disavowed the people that the rest of CNN was saying he was talking about as fine people.
So Jake is the only person I know who has called bullshit on his own network for misinterpreting Quotes, in a fairly obvious way, they're misinterpreted.
So credit him for that.
There's a story about Portland because there are these uniformed, scary-looking people in camouflage who are showing up in rented minivans and stuff and grabbing protesters off the street and taking them away.
Now, the rumor Or the way it's being treated on social media is that these are unmarked, unnamed, unannounced.
We don't know who these camouflage military looking people are.
They have masks on.
They're just grabbing people off the street.
It's like the Gestapo. It's like death squads.
It's like Gestapo. So that's how the left is framing it.
But they also, of course, have no access to news from the right, so they don't see real news.
If they did, they would be following Jack Posobiec on Twitter, who would tell you they have DHS patches on their uniforms.
Now, it's hard to see because it's at night, but I think he's just better at spotting the stuff from experience.
And we know that the Department of Homeland Security said they were going to be operating there.
They said they would be operating there.
And people with DHS identification on their uniforms did show up there.
So there shouldn't be too much mystery about who they were.
And it should not surprise you that they were in non-military vehicles.
Because you don't want to bring in tanks and Humvees and stuff like that.
It just makes it look too military.
But here's the part I loved about it.
It is scaring the living shit out of the protesters, which to me is hilarious.
Let me read this one quote.
Let's see. So there was this protester.
He was frightened, and he said he was one of the ones that they nabbed, and they took him somewhere, but then they let him go.
After he was let go, he said this.
This is from a news reporter.
He did not know whether the men were police or far-right extremists who frequently don military-like outfits and harass left-leaning protesters in Portland.
And the 29-year-old resident He said he made it about half a block before he realized there would be no escape, because he tried to run from them and then gave up.
Then he sank to his knees, hands in the air, and he said, quote, I was terrified, Pettibone told the Washington Post.
It seems like it was out of a horror sci-fi, like a Philip K. Dick novel.
It was like being preyed upon.
To which I say, good, good.
Excellent. Excellent.
Because I think it's useful for the protesters to feel how the citizens of the city that they're abusing feel about them.
How happy are you that a protester was afraid of somebody in a mask?
It's kind of perfect, right?
The fact that the Department of Homeland Security wear masks so you can't see their faces is really funny.
Because we've been saying that one of the things that has fueled these protests is the fact that people can wear masks.
If you can wear a mask because of the coronavirus, it's recommended, then you can get away with stuff because you figure, well, nobody's got a picture of me.
I'm wearing a mask. So the masks have so far been only to the benefit of the protesters.
Well, it looks like the Department of Homeland Security just took their advantage away.
Because if the Department of Homeland Security, who do not live in the city, for the most part, they don't live in that city, and if they're wearing masks, you're not going to be able to find out who they were.
Because they probably don't have name tags.
If they do, they ought to get rid of them.
They need to get rid of the name tags.
So it's reminding me somewhat of the Untouchables.
Do you remember the Untouchables?
They were people who did not live in, I think it was Chicago...
Who are brought in from the outside and I think people didn't know their identities because then they could work on organized crime and they would not get bribed.
Because it's hard to bribe somebody if you can't find them and you don't know their name and they're from out of town.
But it's easy to bribe, let's say, a police officer who lives in your town, especially if you're threatening their family if they don't take your bribe.
So it looks like the Department of Homeland Security Are the untouchables.
The people coming in who don't have an obvious identity and you can't get back on them.
And they're scary.
Super, super scary.
Right? So I can't think of a better solution than to bring in masked, super scary people with unknown identities to clear things out of Portland.
And you have to appreciate that as a strategy.
But of course their counter strategy is to say, you're Gestapo.
People worry about we might enter World War III with any of our international foes, China or Russia, etc.
But I don't think you realize we're already in World War III. World War III, if you count war with Russia and China simultaneously as a world war, we're in it.
We're in the middle of it. Let me give you a shocking statistic.
If you added together the number of overdose deaths from fentanyl in the United States, and the fentanyl we know comes from China, Chinese fentanyl has killed X number of people.
If you add that number to the number killed by the coronavirus, those two numbers together, both caused by China, Have killed more American citizens than died in World War II. That's right.
So, if you believe that Chinese fentanyl is intentional, meaning they could stop it if they wanted to, but they don't, and I believe that it's intentional, and if you believe that they didn't tell the rest of the world about the coronavirus intentionally, Then we have already lost more people to China's aggression than we lost in all of World War II. Think about it.
Now, if you're telling me that we're not in a world war, I would say you don't know what our cyber security people are doing.
You don't know how much China is doing espionage and cyber stuff attacks against us, and you don't know how much we're doing to them.
Because I'm pretty sure it's a lot.
So, at the moment, we're in a full-out war that's just a weird war that is being fought in ways that you don't see, you know, bodies.
You just see, in some cases, you might see some protests or something that were caused by this mischief.
But the war is on.
The war is completely on.
And we're right in the middle of it.
It's just a war like none we've seen before.
Pompeo told Congress that he says Hong Kong is no longer to be considered autonomous.
Now, that doesn't come as a big surprise, right?
The day that Great Britain decided, okay, the lease is up and Hong Kong will be returned to some kind of Chinese situation with autonomous rule, pretty much everybody smart said, oh, so it'll just be China.
Because eventually, Just because of geography and because China would want control over it, it was obvious that Hong Kong would lose its independence.
There's probably nothing that can be done about that.
But apparently there's a hidden reason for Pompeo to tell Congress that Hong Kong is no longer its own autonomous thing.
And it has to do with the fact that Hong Kong is a major worldwide financial center.
And the implication is this.
That if Hong Kong is not autonomous, you can't use it as a financial center.
And if Hong Kong loses its role as one of the world's big financial centers, and it looks like that's guaranteed now, because we're not, the free markets of the world, and the free, yeah, I guess markets is the right world, they're not going to use China As their financial center.
It just wouldn't feel safe.
So if Hong Kong is no longer autonomous, as Pompeo says, then Hong Kong is going to lose their status as a financial center.
That's really big.
That's big, big, big, big, big.
So that's a big deal.
So that's part of World War III. We're in it.
Somebody asked me to rank Trump's visual persuasion I guess he had a White House event with a red truck and a blue truck, and he put these fake weights on them to represent all of the regulations he was going to cut and had the crane pull the weight out of one of the trucks, etc. And I didn't even see that on the news.
I only saw it when it was sent to me on social media.
So I would say it was a real good visual presentation, but I don't know if it worked.
Because it was sort of standard, so I don't know if it got the attention that they wanted it to get, because I didn't see it, but maybe it did.
And that is what I wanted to talk about.
If you missed my special podcast last night, I did a live stream last night, sort of spontaneously.
On how to have a socialist system within the confines of our capitalist system so that everybody can live the way they want and they would not interfere with each other.
So you don't have to have one system for everybody.
So it's not a good idea.
It's just an interesting idea.
And you might want to check that video out on replay everywhere that my videos are found.
So you can see it on YouTube, etc.
But if you'd really like to have some fun, you want to go to Locals, where my content in addition to this, I do a lot of other content on Locals.
Locals.com has an app as well as a website.
And Don Jr. has moved on to Locals, which is a big deal.
Oh, by the way, I should tell you that I'm a very small investor in Locals.
So, full disclosure, I'm on Locals, I have a small investment in it, and Don Jr.
coming over is probably going to give it a lot of attention.
Somebody wants me to talk about the double counting and the bad counting of the coronavirus stuff.
I'm not too interested in that, actually.
Because we know stuff is being counted wrong, but I think the direction of stuff is all that really matters.
And over time, all these irregularities get worked out.
They'll get scrubbed out of the system in time.
As long as we know the general direction, that's probably good enough.
All right. How many cases would the U.S. have to get for the majority of people to say, okay, let's all try masks?
Well, the problem is that people have convinced themselves that there is strong science saying masks don't work.
So in theory, as long as they believe that masks definitely don't work, and we've seen the science, and I'm not saying that, but people say that, As long as they think they don't work, or that it makes things worse, it wouldn't matter how many people died.
When policies are being implemented based on wrong numbers, we should all care.
Yes, we should, but I don't think the wrongness that we're talking about is directionally wrong.
I don't think the numbers are changing the direction of things.
And if they did, they would only do it temporarily.
Should CDC go to the White House, though?
I don't know what that means. Alright, I'm just looking at your comments to see if I missed anything.
Somebody says, Locals needs to move to a single fee for all access models.
Don't like subscribing to individuals.
Yeah, I think that's actually on the board right now.
So they're actively looking at that model.
Now that model has some implications for creators.
For example, If the main reason that you joined locals was for one creator, it's sort of unfair because your money would be distributed to the other creators who are not the reason that you were there.
So it's hard to work that out and make it fair.
Who won, Navarro or Fauci?
You know, I'm not too interested in the palace intrigue stuff.
That's just somewhat predictable and doesn't really change anything.
Talk about New Zealand and how well they've done with it.
Well, let's talk about countries in general that have done well.
Are you amazed that we don't yet know why some countries are successful and some are not?
Oh, you think you know.
You think you know, because you saw the chart that said the ones that use hydroxychloroquine early, that they all have good results, right?
So that's it. I mean, you saw the chart All the countries with hydroxychloroquine early, good result, all the ones that don't.
So that's it, right? That's the whole thing?
Well, except you may have also seen the chart that shows that vitamin D pretty much explains everything.
So could vitamin D explain everything we're seeing in the other countries when in fact hydroxychloroquine use explains everything we see in the country?
But also the graphs show that vitamin D does.
So those are two different theories.
Except that, oh wait, there are also graphs that show that the degree of mask use is the main variable.
And it very clearly shows that the ones you use mask got better results.
So what the hell is going on?
So my take on this is that we don't know exactly how much is masks, how much is better treatment, how much is hydroxychloroquine, how much is vitamin D that's in the atmosphere but also might be part of the treatment.
We really don't know.
And on top of that, you really...
Yeah, and also somebody says immunity.
We don't know about immunity.
We don't even know exactly...
The nature of the virus in terms of how it's spread.
There's so much we don't know.
Correlation is not causation.
Here's a brain test I was going to give you.
So those of you who feel you are good at analyzing the stuff you see in social media.
So you feel like you have a pretty strong decision on masks, Or hydroxychloroquine or vitamin D, whatever it is.
You've got a strong opinion.
Let me ask you this.
This is a thought experiment.
If I told you there's a city that has the most strong locks on their doors, they have the most bars on the windows, they have the most locks on the doors, they have the strongest defense of the house, and they even have a lot of firearms.
And they also have the highest burglary rate.
What does that tell you?
They do the most to protect their house, but they have the highest burglary rate.
So that proves that protecting your house doesn't work, right?
Right? Is that the conclusion?
If you have tons of locks and it's the most locked up, definitely lock your doors, bars on the window, and still...
The highest burglary rate.
Well, that proves that locks don't work.
It proves that bars on the window don't work, right?
No! It doesn't prove that.
It proves that if you have a lot of crime, people are going to improve their locks.
In fact, the dumbest thing that people say about Chicago gun control is Is that, well, it has the tightest gun control and the worst murders, so obviously gun control doesn't work.
No! They have the tightest gun control because they have the most murders.
Cause and effect is backwards.
Now, did it help?
How do you know? How many murders would there have been if things were different?
You don't know. So if you don't know how things would have been in the alternative situation, you don't know anything.
And we think we do, though.
So we think that, well, there's a correlation there.
I guess locks on doors don't work.
There's still burglaries.
And that actually, as ridiculous as that sounded, that's most of the way people are analyzing stuff.
Most of it is reversing cause and effect.
Most of it. Who are we talking about?
I know no one who has that situation.
I don't know what you're talking about.
It says, proves you don't understand burglars very well.
Proves you can't think.
Because what you're accusing me of is to say that burglars would not prefer to burglarize the less protected house.
Of course they would.
So we assume that those locks did decrease some amount of burglaries for the ones with the best defenses.
There's nobody questioning that friction works.
Friction works.
But correlation and causation are still backwards.
Do people get murdered with legal or illegal guns?
Well, if you looked at the...
The kinds of murders you would find that gun control wouldn't have as big an impact on those murders as you'd like.
For example, gun control probably would not make any difference to gang violence, right?
Probably wouldn't make any difference.
What about the hurricanes?
I don't know what you're talking about. All right.
But the gun control is ineffective.
It only stops the law-abiding.
Yeah, maybe. I don't know if we've actually studied that.
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