Episode 1149 Scott Adams: Coronavirus Data is All Wrong. Biden is Dangerous. Trump and 25th Amendment
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Content:
Plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer
Court packing could destroy our republic
Joe Biden's call to violence against Trump supporters
COVID19 death statistics for US...are REALLY WRONG
A "targeted release" of COVID19?
Pelosi and Raskin push 25th Amendment
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Okay, that's not much of a sing-along song, I guess.
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Somebody's saying that there's no audio.
That must be...
Why would there be no audio?
Let me see if I can fix that.
So it looks like YouTube can hear me and Periscope cannot.
And it doesn't look like there's any way to fix the Periscope.
So go to YouTube for sound.
Go to YouTube for sound.
So, if you can't hear me, go to YouTube for sound.
So, I'm just gonna...
I'm just gonna turn off Periscope.
All right, Periscope's not working for some reason.
That's not obvious.
Because everything's the same.
So I guess we won't be doing Periscope today.
We'll just be doing YouTube.
Because YouTube seems to be working for some reason.
Very disappointing.
Very disappointing. But I'll wait for a second.
The Periscope people will probably jump over to YouTube.
All right. There's some breaking news.
The Nobel Peace Prize Committee Has decided that the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize is going to go to the World Food Program.
That's right, the World Food Program is going to get the Nobel Peace Prize.
And this is why you should only have originalists on the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, because who exactly were the runner-ups?
Were the runner-ups Alright, I've lost my entire flow because the sound problem over on Periscope just blew my entire routine.
And we do need to have the simultaneous sip.
So let's do that and maybe I can get back on track.
I think the Periscope people are probably waiting for me to re-initiate, but it won't work if I do, so I'm not going to.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Oh, that's a little better.
Yeah, sometimes you need those anchoring things.
Somebody says I have a coronavirus misinformation warning.
Is that why the sound didn't work on Periscope?
Did I get a misinformation warning?
Interesting. Maybe.
So maybe this one will get blocked as well.
Anyway, Governor Whitmer, apparently there was a kidnapping plot, an actual plot to kidnap the governor, Governor Whitmer.
And the reporting says that the people involved in the kidnapping were Antifa and right-wingers.
What are the odds that Antifa and right-wingers were working together on a plot?
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the odds of that actually being true, that Antifa and right-wingers were working together, the odds of that being true are approximately zero.
But what if it is true?
If it is true, that should be a little tap on the shoulder if you're a governor.
If you're the governor and you find that Antifa and the right-wing have decided to get together and kidnap you, Maybe the problem's on your side.
Because how bad a job could you do that you could make Antifa and the right-wingers want to kidnap you?
That's a pretty bad job.
So that would be a signal to look for other work.
All right. Let's talk about packing the Supreme Court.
As you know, Biden and Kamala Harris refused to answer the question of whether they would pack the court.
Now, if somebody refuses to answer the question, it means they're going to pack the court.
Now, some have suggested that Biden doesn't really believe that, so the reason he's not talking about it is so that he doesn't discourage his own voters.
So the thinking is that Biden is lying to his own voters by acting as if he might do it.
But we also think he might be lying to Trump voters by acting like he won't do it.
So he's got this clever little thing where he'll just say, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do.
It's the most important question in the election because if the court is backed, It could be the end of the Republic.
Now, what are the odds that it would be the end of the Republic?
Pretty good, actually. Pretty good.
Because if any administration packs the court, one of two things will happen.
Either they will control the government forever because everything that they try to get away with, the court will back them up because they packed the court.
So it could be the end of the republic.
I would say that's at least a 30% chance if you pack the court.
And by the way, the Trump campaign should put some odds on this.
Because if you just say, court packing ruins the republic or doesn't, if you make it binary, it's definitely going to ruin the republic, or it's definitely not, pick one.
Well, it's more likely not.
Because we're actually pretty good at adjusting to just about anything.
But I'd say there's a solid 30% chance it would destroy the entire country.
So one way to look at it is you don't know what's going to happen, but there's a pretty healthy chance that that one act of government would destroy the entire republic.
And I think that you could make that case pretty convincingly.
And I don't think the Trump administration has made that case or the campaign has not made that case.
I also think it needs to be a visual.
Somebody probably needs to make whatever is the simple picture of what happens if you pack the court.
And if you see it in a picture, and maybe it's a meme or something, that might help because I feel as if you took a poll of the citizens of the United States and said, how important do you think this court packing is?
On a scale of 1 to 10, where does that live in terms of importance?
Well, I think people would only answer the question Based on whether they wanted Democrats or Republicans to have control.
I don't think they would answer the question in terms of it being good or bad for the country in the long run.
And that's because they're not educated to think of it in terms of risk management.
So if you turn that into a risk management question, and you put a solid 30% odds that it will ruin the entire country, and I feel like that's conservative.
There's at least a 30% chance that packing the court would be the end of democracy in this country, for all practical purposes.
I guess President Trump's going to do his first in-person interview since contracting coronavirus.
He's going to talk to Dr.
Mark Siegel on Fox News.
I think that might be today.
Oh, it's going to air on Tucker Carlson's show tonight.
Now, here's what I'm thinking.
Don't you agree that President Trump probably needs to do something to shake the box to get elected?
At least he's behind in the polls.
I'm not sure I believe the polls at this point because I don't believe any data in 2020.
But let's say you believe that he's behind.
Let's say you believe the polls and he needs to do something To change it.
Now, let's say that he doesn't have another debate.
What can he do?
What can he do to shake things up in a political way?
Now, of course, he could do something in terms of his job, so he could handle his job better or whatever.
You know, there might be some surprises.
Maybe Saudi Arabia comes out and says, surprise, we want to do a deal with Israel.
You could see something big.
I'll just put that out there as one example.
Maybe Saudi Arabia says, hey, we're in for the Middle East peace deal.
That would seem like a pretty big thing.
So there might be, you know, some other policy things that could be brewing that might happen.
Not necessarily that one.
But here is my suggestion for what Trump could do that's practical that would shake up the campaign.
He should do an interview with me.
Now, I would be one of 10,000 people who say he should do an interview with them.
Yeah, some people say he should do an interview with Joe Rogan.
Now, I love Joe Rogan.
I think he's approaching national treasure status as being an unusually valuable citizen of the country.
Let's put it that way. Unusually useful and positive, in my opinion.
But I could do a better interview.
Not even close.
Because I could do a better interview than anybody could.
Now, I'm not exactly modest about my capabilities.
So you need to factor that in, of course.
But there are plenty of things I'm bad at that I'll also tell you I'm bad at.
I mean, I draw cartoons for a living and I don't think I'm good at drawing cartoons.
So I'm pretty willing to tell you I'm bad at stuff.
I'm willing to tell you that I have a face for radio.
I sniff too much.
I got plenty of problems.
So if you're looking for me to be honest about my faults, I got lots of them.
How long do you want the list to be?
I'll start now, alphabetical order, all the things that I do poorly.
It's a pretty long list.
But the fact is, I could give the best interview of President Trump that would happen this political season.
And many of you know that's true.
You know that's true.
Because I wouldn't ask the same questions, and I would find out what the real issues are, and I would help the country understand them in a way that they've never seen them before.
And I'm pretty sure I could make that happen.
So if the Trump campaign wants that interview, you know where to find me.
But I do think Trump needs to do something to shake up the way we're thinking of things and what's left.
If he doesn't do a debate, what's left?
It's got to be an interview.
And it's got to be the right type.
All right. I reported Joe Biden's Twitter account.
To Twitter for inciting violence.
And specifically it's where he continues to repeat the fine people hoax even yesterday.
The most widely debunked hoax in the history of the United States.
And he repeated it again yesterday.
And the maddening thing about it is that there's no reason he shouldn't keep doing it.
Because it works.
And the news industry is so broken that they can't expose it.
So, you know, the people on the right can yell all day long, but the people on the left will just never hear it.
They will be completely unaware that this is a hoax.
And if they do hear that it's a hoax, they quite reasonably believe that the news is fake, right?
Because if you don't believe a lot of the news that you see and you don't, Why would anybody else?
If there's anybody who believes the stories they see on the internet and in the news, well, they've got some explaining to do.
I don't know why you'd believe anything these days.
All right, so I reported him for inciting violence because, in my opinion, it's pretty straightforward.
In my opinion, if you are accusing the president of complimenting neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and you're claiming that he's never denounced them, although there are compilation clips of him denouncing them all over the place, if you're selling that story, you are also selling violence.
Because you can't separate those.
If he is the person that Joe Biden says he is, And his supporters, you know, know it, which is what the Democrats would claim.
Hey, all you supporters, you know who you're supporting.
So therefore, you're no better than.
In other words, you would also be white supremacist or white supremacist supporters.
In this country, Is it acceptable to perform violence against white supremacists?
Well, it's not legal.
You know, unless they're doing some crime against you, I guess.
But it's certainly acceptable in terms of moral and ethical acceptability.
If you heard a story about a white supremacist or an actual racist who got beat up by somebody else, would you care as much as if it had been somebody else?
Probably not. And if you're a Democrat, you would think it was a good day.
You'd say, yeah, glad that white supremacist supporter got beat up.
So the accusation itself is a call to violence in a way that any other accusation is not.
If you hear President Trump say that Kamala Harris is a socialist, Does that make you want to beat her up or beat up her supporters?
Nope. Nope.
Calling somebody a socialist is not a call to violence.
Not even close.
Not even a little bit.
How about if you say that Joe Biden has some dementia problems?
Could be true. Could be false.
But it's not a call to violence.
Are you going to beat somebody up because they voted for somebody who had some mental capacity problems?
Nope. Nope, you don't beat people up for that.
But you would certainly beat somebody up if you thought they were Hitler or Hitler supporters.
That's beat up material.
So I think Twitter should remove any claims from Joe Biden on the fine people hoax on the violence level.
And by the way, just so I'm perfectly clear about this, you know, it's hard to tell when I'm joking sometimes.
There is no joke in this.
That is super dangerous language, perpetuating that hoax.
It is absolutely dangerous.
Absolutely. 100% true.
No hyperbole in this.
That is dangerous speech, and it shouldn't be on social media.
So, Jack, if you're listening, that is completely serious, and I think you should take it seriously.
And I don't think there's any other topic like that one.
There's nothing else I'd compare it to that is even slightly, you know, that bad.
All right, let's talk about the coronavirus.
So all the smart people tell us, and they're probably right about this, That how the country thinks about the coronavirus leadership in this country will determine the election and determine the fate of the United States.
So you would all agree on that, right?
That it's probably true that how people think of the coronavirus leadership will determine the fate of the United States because it will determine the presidency and maybe Congress too.
So what if we got that data wrong If the data is wrong, in a meaningful way, not in a slight way, but in a meaningful way, we would be making the most important decision in the history of the United States, or at least in recent years, in the history of the United States, and we would be using the wrong data to do it.
Here's my problem, and let me give you some context for this.
Some of you know I used to have lots of corporate jobs before I was doing cartooning and before this.
And my corporate jobs were based on my background in economics.
I have a degree in economics.
I've got an MBA. I spent most of my corporate time looking at spreadsheets and numbers and data.
Most of it, all right?
And one of the things I discovered when I first took my first serious data analysis job is that I had a boss I would hand her a spreadsheet, like literally a page with just full of numbers.
It would just be a blizzard of numbers that I'd done on a spreadsheet.
And I would go into my boss and I'd say, all right, I finished this analysis.
You want it? Here it is. And my boss would pick up the spreadsheet and in approximately two seconds, she would do this.
Well, that number doesn't look right.
Check this number.
And remember, the whole page is full of numbers.
And in two seconds, she would pick out that one number that looked fishy, and she'd say, go check this one out.
Then I'd go check that out, and it would be a typo or bad data.
And I would go back to her and say, how the heck do you do that?
Because it wasn't like one time.
It was like this regular thing she could do, like this skill she'd developed In doing this kind of work for years.
And I said, how do you do that?
And she said, I don't know. I don't know.
It's just sort of a skill, an instinct, an intuition you develop where you can just look at stuff and you can pick out the air.
Well, I did that job for a number of years after having that experience, and I started to develop that same skill.
To the point where it's a running thing that I talk about with Christina all the time, where she'll ask me to estimate the cost of something that I don't know anything about.
And I can estimate it with weird accuracy.
So she'll say something like, I'll just make this one up.
How much would it cost to send a camel to Mars?
Which I'm guessing nobody's ever estimated that cost.
And I'll sit there and I'll think, ah, camel.
Candle to Mars, that's about, well, if you start from scratch and you don't use the assets of NASA, let's say a 10-year project, send a candle to Mars, I think that's about 23 to 25 billion dollars.
And then someday somebody sends a camel to Mars and it costs $24 billion.
It's just this weird ability that you develop, and not because I'm extra smart.
The reason I brought up my boss, same reason.
If you just do the work, and I'll bet you can find this out from other people, people can smell wrong data if they've worked with data enough.
I would imagine that Nate Silver, for example, I would guess that if Nate Silver looks at a big page of data, that because of his experience he can do that.
That, that's wrong.
I'll bet he can do that all day long because it's just a skill you develop.
So today I went looking at the coronavirus death rates and let me tell you with all of the Intuition and skill that I've developed in finding BS numbers that the coronavirus death statistics are not just wrong for the United States.
They're not just wrong, but they're really wrong.
And I'm going to take a stand for that right now.
Now, I've talked at great length about why the numbers might be wrong in the past.
But this is different because I didn't realize how wrong they were until I looked at them this morning.
Our death rates are something like 10 to 20 times worse than countries that you would expect would be similar.
Now, I have been saying things like, well, we have more obesity.
We have a greater population of African-American citizens and they're greater risk.
And I've been trying to explain it by things like that and And also by financial incentives and hospitals.
Apparently you'll get a little extra money if you say you are treating a coronavirus patient and that's why they died.
But here's the new information.
The new information is if you took all of those things and said, okay, by coincidence, there's a whole bunch of things in the United States that are different.
We got the obesity.
We got maybe the different drugs.
Maybe we've got more international travel.
Maybe we have more love of freedom, so less compliance.
Maybe we started a little late, maybe with locking down.
Maybe we did bad things with the rest homes, especially compared to other countries.
Maybe it's something about the demographics.
Maybe it's our DNA. If you added all of that together, It wouldn't explain how completely wrong our data is compared to other countries.
Completely wrong. We're having a thousand deaths a day where other countries that you think would be acting somewhat similarly are having a dozen or a few dozen.
It's not even close.
All of those other effects put together, even if you can imagine that they were all valid and they all changed the numbers, It might move at 40%, right?
So everything that we've talked about, that we know of, that we can see, we can verify is true, altogether, it might make our number 40% wrong.
And that's not even in the general zip code of the universe, of the solar system, of how wrong the number is.
It's not 40% wrong.
It's somewhere like 20 times wrong.
There's something missing that we don't know about.
I don't know what it is.
I'm going to speculate. Here's my speculation.
It's based on very sketchy and non-credible information that I saw on the internet.
So you should dial back your credibility on this following point.
But if you're looking for something that's a gigantic difference, none of the things I've mentioned get you there.
None of them do. Now, a lot of you think it's because the way we code it, there's a financial incentive in the hospital, and that's the big difference.
But if you look into that financial incentive, the extra money you get for coding a coronavirus basically pays the extra cost of taking care of a coronavirus patient.
Because you can't take care of other patients.
You have to decrease your hospital usage.
So basically, it's not that you would get a windfall from treating coronavirus patients, it's that they cost more.
So all you are doing is getting paid for the fact that they do cost more.
So I'm not sure that explains it, but I did hear this explanation that in Germany, for example, and let's use that as a proxy for other countries, that in Germany, which is doing wildly better than the United States, it's not even in the same ballpark, right? That if you have cancer and you have coronavirus and you die, Germany calls it a cancer death and the United States calls it a coronavirus death.
Which one of them is right?
And by the way, if that's true, I need a fact check on that, but if it's true that Germany would count the underlying condition as opposed to the thing you just got this week, if that's true and we do it the other way, that would explain the entire difference, I think. So I need a fact check on that.
But if that's all that's going on, and we're going to make a decision about our leaders based on data that is wrong by a factor of 10 to 20, We need to fix that.
And we need to fix that right away.
And I think that might be the best hypothesis.
But if that's not the case, if it turns out that the way we record it is backwards from the way other places do it, if that's the only story, I'd be surprised.
I think there might even be something bigger.
Somebody says, if that's true, it's mind-boggling.
Let me ask you this. Take a look at the news on any major story that has a political element to it.
The coronavirus obviously has a political element to it.
Look at any story that has a scientific element to it.
The coronavirus has a scientific element to it.
In what situations do we have news about something that is both political and scientific And it's squarely in both domains.
Very political.
Very scientific. When in those situations do we get accurate information?
Maybe never. Maybe never ever.
Maybe it's never happened in the history of human behavior.
The coronavirus data is exactly the kind of stuff that we're always lying to ourselves about.
It couldn't be more perfectly the kind of thing you lie about.
So if the coronavirus data is accurate, and by accurate I mean if it's even within 40% of being accurate, I would be amazed because it would be the first time we ever had a situation like this that we were in the general ballpark.
Because usually this situation, political and scientific, that takes you to outer space in terms of credibility.
All right, here's another hypothesis.
Mike Duesberg on Twitter suggests this.
So he knows somebody, an emergency care doctor, who told him personally that, quote, what happened in March wasn't natural, and the night-day difference in the cases I see now compared to then also isn't natural.
So there's a doctor who says, um, I can't really, this doesn't pass the sniff test, because if you look at what the country is doing, you know, to mitigate the masks and the social distancing and everything, if you look at all that, it doesn't seem to be enough to explain why the cases dropped so fast.
And so his idea is that there might have been some targeted release.
Targeted release. Let's say you were a foreign adversary.
You're a foreign adversary and you learn that every country is going to get the coronavirus.
What would you do if you wanted to harm a foreign country in the context of a pandemic where everybody has more coronavirus?
What you would do is you would make sure that that country got a little extra infected.
How hard would that be?
Unfortunately, not hard.
Not hard. Because if you had access to the virus and you were a spy organization of some other country that was not friendly, it wouldn't be hard to make sure there was a little extra someplace.
Do you remember when you first heard the reports out of Iran that there were infections?
And the very next thing you heard is that some of the inner circle was immediately infected.
You know, Khomeini's inner circle.
Immediately there were top clerics who were infected.
And I said to myself, could be a coincidence, but if I were trying to take out a country, The first thing I would do is make sure that the lower level politicians got infected.
Because that would change the nature of the whole country.
So I'm not saying there's evidence of any of that.
And I certainly hope it did not happen.
But can you rule it out?
Can you rule it out?
I don't know how you can.
Because it's perfectly in the category of things that happen in this world.
All right. When I looked at the death rate by coronavirus, I noticed that we track the death rate per million is accumulative.
Isn't that exactly the wrong way to measure the death rate per million?
Shouldn't we have one number that is from the beginning of time, the death rate?
But shouldn't there be another number that's the death rate per million, say, in the last 30 days?
Because whatever you're doing lately is likely to be really different from what you did in the beginning.
So could you not have a situation where you were really bad in the beginning, but you're doing great now, and vice versa?
That missing data feels like the only one that matters.
In fact, if you said to me, Scott, we're going to only be able to measure one thing.
So you tell us what you need to be measured to handle the coronavirus thing.
And I would say, well, the only thing I care about, the only data that would be meaningful to me to see how we're doing is the death rate per million for the last 30 days and then keep a rolling 30 days.
It's the only thing that's not available.
Right? I mean, I guess somebody could calculate it, but it's not the number one thing that's reported, and I'm thinking, that's the only thing I care about.
The total number of people is misleading because of different populations, and the cumulative is misleading because you might have gotten a bad start or a good start, but it doesn't tell you what's happening lately.
So is it a coincidence that the only useful information is not reported?
Is there nobody who reports data who doesn't know what I just told you?
Of course they do. Why don't they give you the information that would be most useful?
I don't know. I don't know.
It has to be intentional.
There are two lies One by conservatives and one by liberals that seem very balanced, meaning that it's the same lie, it's just reversed for the other side, and it goes like this.
Biden claims that Trump, and Kamala Harris claimed, that Trump wants to get rid of pre-existing conditions or that he will get rid of pre-existing conditions.
But Trump says, no, I'm going to get rid of Obamacare, which includes the protection for pre-existing conditions.
So that part's true, but we're not going to get rid of all the parts.
We're going to keep one of the parts, and that part is maintaining pre-existing conditions coverage.
So the president says clearly, consistently, unambiguously, it is his intention To get rid of Obamacare, but to keep that one part of it that people care about the most.
Could not be more clear about that, and Biden and Harris say, well, you're going to get rid of pre-existing conditions.
Now, what it could mean And this would be fair.
If they were to say it this way, it would be fair.
They might say, you have not assured us that you're going to take care of pre-existing conditions.
We feel as if we don't trust you to take care of pre-existing conditions.
But it's basically a lie because he's simply only made a promise.
And you can't say somebody's promise won't be kept Until it happens, right?
Because it's certainly within the category of things he could do.
Would it be impossible to keep pre-existing conditions?
No. No, it wouldn't be impossible.
And the president's pretty darn good at keeping his campaign promises.
So that's just a lie by the Biden and Kamala Harris people in the sense that they could have said, we don't trust it to happen, but it's a lie to say you're going to do it.
Now, reversing this, because the lying doesn't all happen in one direction, the Trump campaign and people who are friendly with it are saying that Biden and Kamala Harris plan to raise taxes on the middle class.
Biden and Harris say that's not true.
We're going to repeal the Trump tax cuts, but we're not going to change the part that affected the people under $400,000 a year.
So we're saying as clearly as we possibly can, just as clearly, As Trump says, he's going to maintain pre-existing conditions.
Just as clearly as that, Biden and Harris are saying, no, we're going to get rid of the tax cuts for the rich people, but we're totally not going to touch the ones at the bottom.
Now, again, in similar fashion, you might say to yourself, I know that's what they say, but I don't trust them to do that.
I don't believe that they'll do that.
Which is the real problem, right?
So both sides are lying to you in exactly the same fashion.
But I would trust that you're smart enough to pick that out.
There's a Gallup poll that's kind of interesting.
And it said that, it's being called an incredible finding, and I think it is, that 56% of the public in the US say that they're better off today.
56% are better off than they were a few years ago.
Apparently, that's a historical record.
The number of people who think they're better off today under Trump is at an all-time high.
It's never been higher, and it's not even really close.
It's substantially higher than it has ever been before.
Shouldn't that be the only thing that matters?
Shouldn't it be crazy?
I mean, let me put it this way.
When we're measuring everything from systemic racism to income inequality to just about everything, we tend to look at how much money you're making, you know, whether you're in jail or likely to be jailed, you know, and all these things that could be measured.
So a lot of measurable stuff.
But what if everybody's about equally happy?
Is there anything to fix?
Shouldn't the goal of life be to be happy?
Right? If I gave you a choice of, I'll give you a million dollars and you'll be unhappy or I'll give you an ordinary income but you'll definitely be happy, which would you choose?
I think you'd choose to be happy.
Right? You wouldn't choose the money over the happiness.
I don't think.
So, Here we have this absurd situation where we can measure people's happiness, apparently.
We can measure it in some ways.
And it's the most important thing.
It's the thing we all want.
It's the one thing we agree on, that being happy would be a great outcome.
And yet we measure other things.
We can measure it.
We know it's the most important thing.
And we only measure other things.
Why? Why do we do that?
What is wrong with us that we don't measure the only thing that matters?
Let me ask you this.
If you measured the happiness level of, I'll just pick two groups, Asian Americans and African Americans, and you measured their overall happiness, just, are you happy?
You know, just that question. How happy are you?
On a scale of 1 to 10. Would they be the same?
I actually don't know the answer to that question.
My guess is they'd be kind of similar.
And yet the economic outcomes are completely different.
That should matter, but it doesn't.
There's another study that says that Fox viewers are less likely than CNN viewers to take preventative measures with the coronavirus.
So Fox News people are less likely to wear a mask, less likely to socially distance, less likely to want to close a business, etc.
And that's probably true.
I feel like that's true.
Now here's another question.
Which group are happier?
Are Fox News viewers happier?
Or are CNN viewers happier?
And isn't the goal to be happy?
Right? Well, if you do a little research, you'll find out that conservatives are happier, and substantially so, than people who are not conservative.
So it would be actually accurate to say, almost certainly, that Fox News viewers are happier.
They're happier than CNN viewers.
And it feels like that's true, doesn't it?
When you just see how people are responding to politics, Doesn't it, anecdotally, doesn't it look exactly like that?
It looks like the people on the left are literally unhappy.
It's not just about policy.
It's not about preferences.
They actually seem unhappy with life.
Whereas the conservatives, even when they're complaining, seem kind of happy in general.
They're complaining and happy at the same time.
So if the goal is happiness, Should the Fox News viewers who don't wear their masks as often, are they making a mistake?
Or are they doing more of the stuff that made them happy in the first place?
And they understand the risk and they know that there's a cost to it.
I know, measure all the wrong things.
Speaking of mental health, Pelosi and Representative Raskin, I guess they're going to promote, maybe today this is happening, they're pushing a bill To create a Commission on Presidential Capacity to Discharge the Powers and Duties of Office Act.
So Pelosi is going to be pushing on the 25th Amendment, replacing President Trump for, you know, fitness for office, I guess.
And I'm thinking, could that be a worse thing to do?
That's just about the worst thing I can think of when you're only weeks away from an election.
Because I don't know how long it would take to do a 25th Amendment thing, but I think we could wait till the election.
Now, here's what I would like to do instead.
I do think that there are some types of medications that should automatically 25th Amendment to you.
Now, it might cause presidents not to take those drugs, which would be a problem too, but I would think that a doctor should be able to say, you know, This president is taking this prescription drug, and this is on the short list of things, which if you're on these things, you ought to, at least temporarily, turn over, you know, maybe some of the big decisions like nuclear codes.
If you turn that over to the vice president, just while you're on that drug.
Now, that doesn't mean that you're incapable of functioning.
It just means you could be.
Again, it's risk management.
It doesn't mean there's something wrong with you.
It just means you're taking a drug where it would be hard to tell.
And you might do something that would be too aggressive, for example.
I was just reading up on President Kennedy and how many drugs he was on.
President Kennedy was on a lot of drugs.
One of them was a steroid.
Did it make him more aggressive?
Don't know. One of them was Ritalin, which was basically Adderall of the day.
So Kennedy was on performance enhancing drugs.
And he was also on something that might have made him a little more aggressive.
I'm not a doctor, but I think that would be fair to say.
The steroids he was on might have made him more aggressive.
Do you think that the Cuban Missile Crisis would have gone the same way if he had been differently medicated?
Because it's pretty ballsy to tell Russia that we're going to launch a nuclear attack if they put some missiles in Cuba.
That's pretty gutsy.
Is it exactly what he would have done if he had not been on steroids?
We don't know. We know it worked, so when we look back at it in hindsight, we could say, well, it worked, therefore it was genius, therefore it was good leadership.
But we didn't know it would work, right?
Did we know it would work?
I think maybe we didn't know it would work.
Somebody says methamphetamines too.
Yeah, they do have some effect.
So I don't know if that's the right answer, but I'm not completely against the idea that there are some medications that should just automatically take you off the decision-making tree.
And I base that on my own experience with medications, because there have definitely been medications that made me more aggressive.
If you're hearing my cat in the background, she's making noise.
Hey Boo, come on up here.
Yeah. I think one of the reasons that Trump canceled the debate is not just because it would be a virtual debate, and that actually would be reason enough, because they would be able to cut off his microphone.
I don't think it's just because he didn't gain a lot in his own debate.
I don't think it's just because I don't think it's just because of anything.
I think it's just because maybe he wants to make sure he's got a little more time to recover.
I think it would be smart for the president to not rush to a debate.
Because imagine it's a day before the debate and you're not 100%.
Do you want to go up in the debate stage not being 100%?
Worst thing that could happen.
Just the worst thing that could happen.
So yeah, I think he needs to be sure that he can handle the debate.
And I think you cancelling it for an excuse that it's digital.
That's a good play. That's a good play.
I think that's the right decision.
All right. So there you have it.
Somebody says Kennedy pulled missiles out of Turkey.
I believe the story about what Kennedy pulled out were obsolete assets.
So I think that what Kennedy gave up to Russia was obsolete.
What he got in return was taking functional missiles out of Cuba.
So I think it was reported in a way that could make Russia feel like they got something, but maybe they didn't.
