Episode 1271 Scott Adams: Kids in Overflow Facilities, Coronavirus Testing and California Schiffs the Bed
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Content:
Adam Schiff for Attorney General of California
Our political system is manipulation of voters
Study: Twitter targeted conservatives?
Subjective ban standards
HCQ and China?
Biden Executive Orders
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Everybody else, I'll just guess some names and see if I get lucky.
Hi, Kathy, Bob, Mike, Janet, Diane.
Good to see you. I'll bet somebody has those names.
Now, how can you enjoy this even more than normal?
Well, it's going to be hard, but what you're going to need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask or a vessel of any kind, and you will fill it with your favorite liquid.
My choice is coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. Mmm, yeah.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
That's the good stuff. Let's talk about the news.
Some stuff happening.
There's a rumor that Representative Adam Schiff of California, where I live, is trying to get a job as the California's Attorney General.
That's the news, anyway.
Now, I ask you, what would be the perfect job...
For the man who is famous, famous for being the biggest liar in the United States, if you don't count President Trump's fact-checking.
If you count that, I guess that's tough to beat.
But if you don't count that, The biggest liar in the country, isn't he, Adam Schiff?
Can you think of anybody who would be worse as an attorney general in terms of credibility and who you would trust to decide who goes to jail?
So here I am sitting in California, a somewhat well-known Trump supporter, And it's possible that the biggest enemy of all Trump supporters and the biggest liar and most obviously dishonest person that you've ever known of in all of life might be being considered to be the Attorney General in my state.
Now, I have not gotten involved in any California politics, other than tweeting some things.
I have not been involved in the Gavin Newsom recall, which apparently is picking up a lot of steam.
I have not been involved in really any way in California politics.
But I've got to tell you, if Governor Newsom actually did this...
And nominated Adam Schiff as my Attorney General in my state?
I don't think I could ignore California anymore.
I feel as though that would activate me, at which point I would have to do everything I could to change that situation.
So, would you like to hear the scariest threat that I've ever thought of?
I may have told you this before.
But if you ever want to really scare somebody, and they're worried about maybe what you will or will not do, and I don't mean just in a physical fighting situation, but in a business situation or a legal situation, the best threat that I've ever given is this.
Don't get me interested.
That's it. Don't get me interested.
You don't want me to be interested in this fight.
Just don't get me interested.
Try it. It's scary as hell.
Because if what you're talking...
Basically, it's thinking past the sale.
If you didn't think past the sale, you'd say, oh, I might get into this fight.
Right? But don't get me interested is thinking past the outcome.
Which is, you've made a big mistake if you get me interested.
Just don't get me interested, and you'll be okay.
Try it at home. It works.
So, I would like to...
I'm going to have to call in Dale.
Dale? You all know Dale.
He used to be the anti-Trumper, but now he's just the anti-Republican, I guess.
Dale, for this next item I'm going to be talking about, can you set the stage?
Set the stage for us.
Yes, I can. Why don't you talk about the victims?
There's nothing funny about this.
There are victims. Children.
Talk about the victims, you monster!
Okay, Dale. I will stipulate...
That in the following semi-humorous presentation, that there are real live victims, real ones, no joke, and they should be subject of all of our empathy, and we should not make light of anybody's bad situation.
Dale, do you accept that stipulation?
I'm not so sure.
I'm going to have to hear what you say.
Then I will decide.
Alright, with that said, the Biden administration is reopening what they call overflow facilities at the border.
Some overflow facilities are being opened.
What would they use these overflow facilities for?
You might put unaccompanied migrant children that you had apprehended.
In these overflow facilities.
Come on.
In the comments, people are calling them cages.
They're not cages.
Cages is what the Trump administration did.
Awful. Cages.
Nobody likes kids in cages.
These are not cages.
Because cages give you airflow and visibility, more of a view situation through the cage.
These are overflow facilities.
That means less of a view, but the same amount of containment.
I'm guessing.
Now, I would like to think that the overflow facilities included schools that were bilingual, full educational and exercise facilities, as well as medical care.
And I hope that that is the case.
But it's going to be a little cage-like in people's minds.
So watch the mainstream media turn...
The overflow facilities into wonderful first-class hotels for anybody who is fleeing a bad situation.
But don't call them cages.
No, no, no, no.
They are not cages.
So, I think all of you have been wondering what will happen when Biden gets the same problems that Trump had.
How is he going to respond that it's going to be different?
Well, I'll tell you what he's not doing is immediately freeing children.
They're not going free, are they?
So I'm waiting to see, oh, by now, let's see, this news came out yesterday.
How long does it take to travel?
Speed of light for digital things, calculating, calculating.
Yes, by today, there will be pictures of the overflow facilities.
Because it's big news, right?
Wouldn't you like to see a picture of the overflow facilities?
Checking, checking. No photographs of the overflow facilities.
I wonder why that is.
It seems like it's the big news.
You'd think there'd be a photograph.
I'm pretty sure I've seen photographs of kids in cages.
But let's see the overflow facilities, if you will.
Now, I would not be surprised if the overflow facilities...
Are a much more inviting situation than the cages.
But do you see any problem that the Biden administration has maybe not considered?
That it doesn't matter how many overflow facilities you build, if you make them kind and, let's say, kind and useful and comfortable, will you get more refugees?
Or will you get fewer?
Because it seems to me that if you make it easier to immigrate and you reduce friction, you get more of them.
So should we not see the Biden administration very quickly in the situation where they either have to release unaccompanied children, which is going to be a child trafficking problem of immense proportions, or Do what?
Put them in temporary holding facilities with chain-link walls?
I don't see how Biden is ever going to avoid just the same situation that Trump was so criticized for.
How do you avoid it? If he does, I'm going to give him credit.
If a year from now...
There are no kids being kept in inhumane cages, but rather they're in good facilities, and we can afford it, and it doesn't cause a spike in immigration that becomes a new problem, I'm going to say, hey, that's a pretty good job.
Pretty good job.
Took care of the kids, did not create a big problem for the country, that's a good job.
Do you think it's going to go that way?
In what world does removing friction not create more of the thing?
In no world. It's never happened in the historical record.
Has it ever happened that if you make something easier to do that people want, that they will do more of it?
Has it ever not happened?
So we'll see. If Biden has a genius plan, or if it was all just stupid the whole time.
But in any event, you could do better for the kids.
All right. There's a study out saying that the reason Trump lost the election is that the late deciding people, the people who hadn't decided a year ago, who they were going to vote for, that they broke for Biden, and the reason, according to one research study, is that Trump's handling of the coronavirus was not good, according to the public.
Now, if that's true, and I think that's a pretty big if, that the coronavirus was the thing that changed the election result, I don't know.
But let's say it's true.
What role would you assign to the widespread news hoax that Trump said drinking bleach was a good idea?
Which didn't happen, but it was widely reported that Trump was a scientific idiot for suggesting drinking bleach, but it never happened.
He was talking about light as a disinfectant, including inserting it into the body, which was a real thing that was being tested at the time, if you didn't know that.
And what about the way hydroxychloroquine was treated?
When the president came out in favor of it, there was no solid scientific proof that it worked.
There were lesser types of studies that did indicate it worked, but they were not the robust kind.
And I guess there were no robust studies that ever proved it worked, as far as I know.
By now we would know.
What did the mainstream media do in treating Trump's suggestion that he thought it would work?
Well, I think that they were correct in saying that it had not been proven in the right kind of test.
So to the extent that they were saying he was being a little too optimistic, I think they were on point.
If he was saying, I think this will work, and they were saying the science isn't quite there, Time has proven that the science is not quite there.
By now you would know, right?
So if you've watched my predictions about hydroxychloroquine, I told you early on that each month that we go by without proving it works really should lower your confidence that it will ever be proven.
And I kept lowering it from, maybe it's a 50-50 or whatever I started with, might have been higher, down to like 30 and then 20.
Today, less than 10%, I would say, that it makes any difference, because we wouldn't know by now.
But is that therefore a problem for the president and he's being anti-scientific?
That's the way the news spun it.
But I would say that the president was making a risk management decision, which if it had been wrong, we would have learned about it in a few months because nobody would be getting any good success with the drug.
But it probably wouldn't hurt anybody.
The number of people who would be hurt by that decision would be minimal or none.
And it would have been a good thing to try, given the number of non-perfect studies that indicated it might work.
So I think the president did a smart thing, but not executed quite the right way, because the way he talked about it was a little bit too optimistic.
But the way the media treated it was completely wrong.
They treated it like it was a yes-no, and that the experts had said no, and Trump was saying yes, and therefore he was wrong.
But that's not exactly what was happening.
It was more like, we don't know if it works.
There's not really a downside.
It's an emergency situation.
Why not give it a try?
And then later find out it doesn't work, if that's in fact the outcome.
But it was still a good try.
If we had done it and gone big with it and it didn't work, it still would have been the right decision in retrospect.
If you could look back at it from today's perspective, it still would have been the right thing to try, even though it looks like at this point it probably would not have worked.
So, I feel as though the news has pulled off the perfect crime.
Which is they painted Trump as a massive incompetent on coronavirus.
And by the way, my personal opinion is he could have done a lot better on coronavirus.
I'll give you some examples of that.
But they do have the power to frame Trump for something, cost him the election, according to this study.
I don't know how reliable that is.
But was voting important?
It seems like voting didn't matter this time.
Because the media told you what to think on the only subject that apparently mattered to the election outcome.
The media told you what to think.
And then people went and voted based on that.
And it wasn't a good view of what to think.
But it worked. So we do live in a...
It's more like a propagandocracy or something.
Where our political system doesn't depend on voters...
It depends on the manipulation of the voters.
So that whoever does the best propaganda gets to have the next president.
So that's the system we work in, a propagandocracy.
A word I just made up, I think.
Speaking of Trump's performance...
The FDA has apparently recently said that they're considering dropping the reporting requirement for home testing.
Apparently, if you had a home test, you were required to report it.
If you had a positive result, and of course, that would be a problem because if you're just testing a home, you're probably not going to report.
But now they're considering, under Biden, they're considering dropping that requirement, which would allow for cheap home testing, which would allow for the end of the pandemic.
How many times did you hear me say, during the Trump administration, why the hell is the Trump administration not dropping this requirement and making these rapid tests available?
Now, I don't know.
It's too early to say that the Biden administration will pull this off.
But the fact that under Biden, the FDA is now talking about getting rid of this requirement Which may have killed hundreds of thousands of people, in my opinion.
Just my opinion. And the reason I say that is if we had rapid testing earlier, in other words, if the FDA had earlier dropped that restriction so we could have rapid testing now, we might actually already be done with the pandemic.
So whoever died between now and, let's see, last summer probably didn't need to because we did have the technology to stop the pandemic Through rapid testing at home.
Now maybe Biden will make that a possibility.
And I'm going to say that if Trump didn't get it done, and Biden does, and it makes a big difference, then I would say that the voters got it right.
And Trump was not the right leader for the coronavirus if this happens.
My guess is that Biden won't pull this off.
But if he does, I'm going to give him full credit.
Because I said from the start it was Trump's biggest mistake, and I'm not going to change that opinion.
There's a new study claiming that when conservatives say that conservatives are being more banned on social media, that it's a false accusation.
It's false. It is not true that conservatives are more banned on social media.
Did you know that? It's a study, I think it was funded by Craig Newmark of Craigslist.
And they found out that, sure enough, Twitter is just following its own rules and that anybody who breaks the rules gets banned.
But that doesn't have anything to do with being conservative or being not conservative.
It has only to do with who broke rules.
So we're good now, right?
Everybody happy now?
We're all good. Seems fair to me, right?
Only the people who broke the rules got kicked off of Twitter, for example.
So, no problem, right?
Pretty happy, are you?
So, one question you might ask as a follow-up, and Tucker Carlson was doing this.
So, I'm drafting off of Tucker's comments on this topic.
So, So you've got this claim that conservatives were not, in fact, being targeted.
So the question you ask is, well, follow-up question.
I'd like a little context.
Can you tell me how many conservatives were banned from the platform?
And then how many non-conservatives?
Because if people are being banned for behavior...
You'd probably expect that behavior to be at least partly spread, you know, not evenly maybe, perhaps not evenly, but you'd expect a good amount of left-leaning bands along with a healthy dose of right-leaning bands, right? So in this study, obviously, it's going to tell you how many people were banned, except that it doesn't.
The only number you would want to hear from a study of this nature is, well, just tell us how many.
About the same number on the left and the right?
Because if that's true, I'd say, oh, okay, that's a pretty good point.
About the same number on the left as the right?
Doesn't look like a problem to me.
But what happens when you don't try to produce that number?
It's a study about Conservatives not being banned too much, and you don't include the number of them that have been banned?
A little bit suspicious, isn't it?
A little bit suspicious.
So, this is more like the study that proved the opposite of the study.
The person who funded this, Craig Newmark, founder of...
I've met him a few times, actually, and he's a cool dude.
I like Craig.
He is very pro-troops.
He does a lot of things for veterans and works mostly for charitable things.
He's getting a little pushback for having funded this study, and I do think the study falls short, but I would say that Craig himself is a solid citizen.
He's a good guy. And you should be happy that Craig Newmark exists.
He's a positive force.
All right. But here's the problem.
Who at Twitter gets to decide when a rule has been violated?
Would it be hate speech to say something against the trans community?
Yes, right?
That probably tweaks some kind of rule.
So if you're saying anything about people based on their gender or sexuality or any of that, that's probably hate speech.
Probably hate speech. And I would bet that people on the left and the right would equally be banned for that kind of speech.
If somebody on the left said something bad about trans people, I imagine they'd get banned.
But probably don't, because left-leaning people aren't going to be saying that kind of stuff.
But what about somebody on the left who paints all Trump supporters as a white supremacist?
What about them? What about Maxine Waters calling for harassing Trump supporters?
Now, I don't think she tweeted that necessarily, but think about that sort of thing.
Isn't that a judgment call?
It's a pure judgment call.
To say that one of them is hate, but it's okay to call Trump supporters white supremacists.
Why? Because it's true, right?
That would be the argument.
Well, it's not true that all trans people or whatever was claimed, but it's certainly true that all Trump supporters are white supremacists.
So you can see that it's ridiculous to have a standard that is subjective.
That's the most subjective standard you could possibly have.
In my opinion, every reference to white supremacists used in the general sense against Republicans or conservatives If you're not talking about somebody who actually labels themselves that way, if you're talking about other people just because they share some kind of a genetic or political outlook, that's hate.
I don't know what else it is.
Looks like hate to me. What about all the tweets for the people saying we need a list of all the people who are pro-Trump?
I think creating a list of people who are pro-Trump is hate.
That's how I see it.
So do I get to decide what is hate speech?
Apparently I don't. Because it's some group within Twitter, I guess, and other social media.
So it's a ridiculous standard because it's just purely subjective.
The media is saying that the FISA abuse that we now know took place with Carter Page and the whole Russia collusion hoax They're saying that while apparently nobody's going to go to jail for it, it looks like, that it was pretty bad, but that that stuff was not a coup.
So the Russia collusion hoax, which was our own intelligence agencies working against the elected president of the United States, not a coup.
And we know this for a fact, that these people were working against the elected president, trying to remove him from office based on what they knew to be not true.
That actually happened.
Now, we're not calling that a coup.
Likewise, the military in Myanmar, or you could call it Burma, has taken control of the government But the Biden administration, not so sure that's a coup.
Military takeover of the civilian government, not so sure.
Don't want to go so far as to call that a coup.
But the Viking hat guy and his selfie army going into the Capitol, totally a coup.
Because if you bring the Viking hat and some zip ties, that's how you conquer a major military power.
With a Viking hat, selfies, and some zip ties, you got yourself a coup.
So that's what we're actually being sold by the propagandist in charge of your life.
Amazing. Here's a little study.
So this was on Fox News' report.
That there's a new analysis coming out of some nonpartisan group, allegedly, from Wharton School.
Which found that Biden's proposal for the stimulus package would stimulate in the short run, but in the long run, because it would add debt, they say that you would reduce the GDP by 0.3% in 2040.
Does that sound credible to you?
Do you think that the Wharton School, or people from it, could actually calculate that by 2040, The effect of this specific stimulus via debt would have a 0.3% impact in 2040?
No. That's not a thing.
You can't model that.
I'm not going to say you can model this when I've been saying forever that the Climate change economic projections that go through 2080 are ridiculous.
You can't model this stuff.
This is completely resistant to any attempt to predict it.
Now, how should you look at something that is an analysis of something that can't be analyzed, basically?
Well, it can be analyzed, but it can't be predicted with any kind of confidence.
The way to look at this is not that this will happen.
The way to look at it is to simply understand that there is an interplay between the amount of debt we take on and the GDP. Now, it's good to know that, and it's good to know that too much debt should, all things being equal, it should cause a drag on your GDP. But when you're talking about, you know, 0.3% in 2040, We don't have that kind of precision.
There will be so many surprises between now and 2040 that it is absurd to imagine that you can predict this little difference in the GDP. Although 0.3 would be not such a small number when you're talking about GDP. So,
while I'm not going to tell you that the stimulus package is good or bad or what amount it should be, it is ridiculous to imagine that you can predict with that kind of accuracy.
Here's my big question of the day.
Would you like a conspiracy theory?
I know you would.
I know you would.
I give you now my conspiracy theory.
I feel like I won't be kicked off of social media if I call it a conspiracy theory, because it is.
So what follows should not be accepted as true.
What follows is speculation.
Speculation alone. Fun speculation, but speculation alone.
Don't go all QAnon on me, okay?
It goes like this.
Why is China doing so well on the coronavirus?
Is it because they do more aggressive lockdowns?
It could be.
Could be. I don't believe it.
I hate to call it common sense, because common sense is an illusion.
But my judgment, based on what I'm watching, is there are a lot of people in China, and they had a pretty big infection at one point, and the people do move around, and...
I don't understand why they're not deeply infected.
And I don't believe that the lockdown quarantine aggressiveness is really what's going on there.
Feels like something else is going on, doesn't it?
It feels like it.
Now, you have to be careful that your feelings don't actually tell you anything useful.
It feels like there's something going on, but I don't know that there is.
And I was asking, what is it that China uses for their early symptoms?
The people who have mild cases but might turn into worse cases.
Is there some way that they treat them differently than the United States?
And because I have lots of smart, well-informed people following me on Twitter, it took all of about a minute for somebody to produce the official document that keeps getting updated That tells you what China knows about it, the virus so far, and what their protocols are for treating it.
So there you go, right?
There's the official Chinese document.
They update it regularly.
There's a section there about what they use to treat it.
It said something about antivirals being used early, maybe a little bit more in China, something like that.
So there you go. We're good, right?
Maybe they use a little more antivirals.
But if that worked...
And that made a big difference.
It's right there in the document.
So wouldn't we also be using it and getting the same outcomes?
So it can't be...
That can't be the answer.
The answer can't be that the things they're using for early mild symptoms is so different than what we're doing that they're getting a whole different outcome, like wildly different outcome.
Nah, I don't think it's that.
But there was one sentence in there that caught my attention.
It was a specific sentence in this China-made document saying that hydroxychloroquine is not recommended.
Not recommended.
A direct sentence.
Hydroxychloroquine is not recommended with or without azithromycin.
So they threw that into the sentence.
So that's pretty... So that's pretty clear.
If you were thinking to yourself, hey, I think China is secretly using hydroxychloroquine and not telling anybody, well, you don't have to worry about that now.
Because their official document says they recommend against it.
So that must be true, that they don't use it in China.
Right? Do you believe that?
Here's my conspiracy theory.
Again, don't go all Q on me and believe this.
I'm just saying we live in a world in which you can't rule things out that you would like to rule out.
You know what I would like to rule out?
I would like to think I lived in a world where I could say, no, China's going to tell us the truth about this virus thing.
They're not going to lie about the virus.
That That's not going to happen.
Except we don't live in that world.
We actually live in a world in which the following conspiracy theory I'm going to describe could happen.
Completely could happen.
I don't have any evidence that it has, so I'm not claiming it as a fact.
But here's what it would look like.
Suppose you created a gain-of-function virus In other words, human beings in a laboratory, hypothetically, created a change in an existing virus to make it even more deadly.
Now, we hear that such types of research is going on in labs in various places, so we should not be surprised if it's happening.
So step number one, do you believe that gain-of-function research is being done in major labs?
I feel like I do believe that.
Even if we don't intend to use it, I would imagine that for defensive reasons alone, we would be doing that research to find out what can and cannot be done.
Because if we find out there's nothing you can do to add function to a virus, well, then we feel safer.
We don't need a defense against that.
But if our own laboratories found out, oh, gee, this is kind of easy to do, because we just did it.
I mean, we just did it.
So we'd have to worry about our enemies doing it, because we can do it.
So the question of whether such research happens in laboratories, I would say...
Wouldn't your judgment say yes?
Like, guaranteed yes?
You don't know how much of it, you don't know where it's happening, but that's got to be happening somewhere, right?
Number two, if, let's say, some country came up with a virus that had a cheap solution, a drug that could be made, let's say, easily in the country that made the virus gain a function, But could not be as easily available to their enemies.
That'd be a good virus, wouldn't it?
The ultimate virus is one where you have the antidote, or something like it, and your enemies do not.
But suppose they could also get it.
Suppose your enemies had a way to get it, maybe not as easily as you, because you make this in your own country, and maybe we don't make any of it in our country.
Well, we can still get it through, let's say, third-party countries that have a little extra or whatever.
So we can still get some.
What would you do, and again, I'm not saying this is happening, but what would you do if you were, say, this country who had hypothetically made a gain-of-function virus, hypothetically had a solution that you could make as much of as you wanted in your own country, of a cheap therapeutic, let's say, but you wanted to keep other countries, let's say your rivals, From using it to the extent that they can even get it.
What would you do?
Well, if you had control over the major media in other countries and you could insert things about what to believe and do mind control of your rival, well, you would tell them that the drug that's working fine in your country is dangerous and it doesn't work at all.
Now, could China really do that?
I mean, if they had a drug that was working in China, could they really convince Western media that it doesn't exist and that it's dangerous?
It doesn't exist in terms of it doesn't really work and that it's dangerous?
Would they have that kind of power to actually just brainwash the United States?
Yes. It's not even a close call.
Yes, yes, they have that power.
How do I know? Well, we have a little story today in the news about a woman, I think it was CNN covered it, a woman who had been drawn into the QAnon conspiracy thing.
And what was it that programmed her to believe in Q after the election?
This is someone who didn't even follow Q before the election, but got quickly brainwashed into believing it and now has unbrainwashed herself and realized she was brainwashed.
What was it that brainwashed her?
Well, according to her story, it was she must have clicked on something, a Q content on TikTok.
And then TikTok, having seen her click on some Q content, started feeding her more new content.
And she saw more of it, and she clicked more, and she consumed more, and then the algorithm fed her a little bit more.
The algorithm of TikTok, according to this person who tells the first person story, hypnotized her into believing in Q content.
Hypnotized her. Now, you could say brainwashed or mind-controlled.
It's all the same thing. But TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, which is controlled by the government.
And so a Chinese government app, according to this one anecdotal study, you have to be careful.
It's one example.
It doesn't prove the general statement.
But I feel like the generality of this is pretty obvious.
If you can program one person just by the algorithm feeding them more Q content with a Chinese app, and then she takes what she learned on TikTok and she takes it to other social media, looks for more Q stuff, their algorithms probably do the same.
Feed them more Q stuff.
In this case, in an American company case, probably not as part of some plot, but the algorithm just gives you more of what you want.
So yes, the following scenario, I have no reason to believe it happened.
And you shouldn't either.
So don't believe that what I say next is some kind of a truth or fact.
I'm just saying we live in a world where the following thing could have happened easily.
China could have created a gain-of-function virus.
They could have found a cheap, available, therapeutic, let's say, hydroxychloroquine, just as an example.
I'm not saying that it works.
The evidence is against it, actually.
But suppose they had that.
Suppose their country had not quite a monopoly, but they could make as much as they wanted.
For themselves, they could restrict it from other people.
And could they then also control the media to tell you that the secret drug that they use doesn't work?
They could do that.
Easily. Every part of this is actually completely doable, as far as I can tell.
Now, does that mean that they did that as part of an intentional plot theory?
To release a virus and get this outcome.
I would say probably not.
Right? Probably not.
I don't see China being dumb enough to intentionally release a virus to try and get some long-term geopolitical gain.
Far more likely, they were researching and maybe seeing what they could and could not do, and it just got out.
Once it got out, then they would scramble to figure out what to do about it, which might include the conspiracy theory that I explained.
But again, there's no evidence of that.
No evidence whatsoever.
But if you heard what actual Chinese doctors prescribe, do you know?
I mean, we have this document put out by the government that says what Chinese doctors are supposed to do.
But do you think Chinese doctors are doing that?
Do you think that's how they're handling it?
I don't know that we have any visibility about what Chinese doctors are actually prescribing.
Do we? I'll bet not.
Again, I don't make the claim that the virus was intentionally engineered or that it was intentionally released or that hydroxychloroquine works.
The evidence suggests it does not.
I'm just saying we live in a world where all that could have happened easily.
Amazing, isn't it? All of that could have happened easily.
And maybe it did.
I just don't have any proof of it.
All right. Let's see what else we've got here going on.
I like that on CNN, with the opinion people, that they refer to, quote, Trump's assault on democracy.
That is such an opinion-y way to describe current events as an assault on democracy.
Amazing. There's a Capitol rioter, Let's call it a rioter and not a coup plotter.
A woman who was in the Capitol, apparently, during the attack on the Capitol.
And she asked to get her vacation in Mexico approved by the court.
And the court said yes.
So she gets to go to vacation in Mexico, presumably has to come back for her court case.
Now, she was only charged with a misdemeanor.
Do you think it's reasonable that somebody charged with a misdemeanor would be allowed to take a vacation that they planned and maybe even put some money toward?
I think it's completely reasonable.
It's a misdemeanor. Is she going to leave the country for a misdemeanor?
I don't think so.
But how did the social media treat it?
White privilege. White privilege.
So the idea here is that she gets this special treatment for being white.
I don't think that's what's going on.
I'd like to think I live in a country where a black person who had a misdemeanor charge and nothing else, just one misdemeanor charge, could go on vacation.
I would hope we live in a country where that could happen.
I think it would. But, you know, if people are concerned about that, it's worth calling it out.
Keep an eye on it. Let's keep an eye on that.
That's what I like to say.
It's like we'll circle back.
The only thing as good as I'll circle back on that is, let's keep an eye on that.
It means absolutely nothing.
There's talk about a space war coming.
China and Russia and the US fighting for control of space resources, especially mining in space.
And let me tell you, if you don't think this is the biggest problem in the world, you don't understand anything.
The biggest risk to the world is the space.
Because whoever controls space controls the future.
There's no way around that.
And if we're not putting everything we can into space, we're not really planning ahead very well because whoever owns space owns the world.
It's going that way. All right.
Have you seen any of Joe Biden's executive orders?
I was complaining the other day that we don't see what his executive orders are.
We just hear that he's got tons of executive orders.
So CNN did actually have some good reporting on this.
Credit to CNN. It was just a little blurb.
It was hard to find, but it was a list of his executive orders.
And you should read them.
You should read his executive orders.
Because the first thing you learn is that a lot of them are just total bullshit.
A lot of them are, we will form a committee to make recommendations on the following topic.
Which is sort of like nothing.
Did you really need an executive order to form a committee to give you some recommendations?
I don't know. Maybe that's the way you do it.
But I wouldn't be worried about the, you know, he's not turning into a dictator by forming a committee to make a recommendation on a topic.
So a whole bunch of them fall into that category of they're not really anything.
It's the stuff you do.
If you're a big company and you know there's something you're supposed to address, but you don't want to do anything about it, you just form an exploration committee.
So you can say, yeah, we're exploring it.
I've got a committee and everything. But you're not planning to actually do anything.
So a lot of the executive orders are a bunch of nothing.
And then there's some of them that look like something but might be nothing.
For example, one of the Biden executive orders halts construction of the border wall by terminating the national emergency declaration used to fund it.
Now, if you read that without any context, you'd say, oh, Trump was building a border wall, Biden just stopped it.
But weren't we told the entire time that Trump was building his wall that really he wasn't building much extra wall at all?
That all he was doing was repairing or upgrading wall where it already existed, and even Democrats would agree it should be there.
There's some places where you just need a wall.
And if all they did was stop funding the upgrade of existing walls, Could it be said that they terminated the wall that wasn't being built?
So some of these you really have to sort of get under the hood a little bit to find out that nothing is happening.
Because I don't believe that in the long run That the Biden administration will halt fixing existing walls.
Because that was the thing that even Democrats said.
Yeah, well, you have to fix the bad walls.
You'd like good walls in the few places you want a wall.
So I feel as if that's like a big fake-out.
And that it's true that maybe he won't build a new wall, but I'll bet he'll repair the old ones.
Why wouldn't you? We'll see.
I could be wrong about that.
Then there's also the thing about Trump is reversing the Trump administration's restrictions on U.S. entry for passport holders, key phrase there, for passport holders from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Now, let's put some context on that.
Does it sound as if the Trump administration was restricting...
Who could come in from these seven Muslim-majority countries and that Biden just changed that?
Is that what you think when you read that?
Because I don't think anything changed.
Because by inserting passport holders into the executive order, don't you end up with exactly what the Trump administration was doing?
Because the Trump administration said the Problem with these certain countries is that they didn't have proper documentation.
You didn't actually know who you were letting in.
But if there's somebody in one of those countries who has a proper passport, wouldn't we let them in under a normal situation?
Is it that much of a difference?
Because remember, a number of years have gone by.
By now... Are you telling me that by now there are no actual well-vetted passport holders?
Because I think that all that happened was some of those countries got their act together a little bit better in terms of paperwork.
So that's all we required.
The only thing the Trump administration asked for was, do you have good paperwork to prove who you are?
If the Biden administration is just saying, okay, we're going to reverse everything, But you also have to have good paperwork.
How different is it?
I mean, it might be different in the sense that the Trump administration presumably might not have allowed even those people within the Muslim-majority countries to come in.
I'd say it's not much of a change.
We probably won't notice a difference.
Biden is extending the national moratorium on evictions and foreclosures.
I think Trump might have done that.
Right? I think Trump might have done the same thing.
Extend the moratorium on evictions and foreclosures.
Does that scare you?
Not so much. Directs the Attorney General not to renew federal contracts with private prisons.
Had you heard about that one?
So Biden EO says that we're not going to renew federal contracts With private prisons.
That, on the surface, without knowing the details, sounds like that might be a good idea.
Because I think private prisons may be not the right set of incentives.
Because they want more prisoners, not fewer.
Because they're a business, right?
So, I don't know. Is that a good idea or a bad idea?
I could easily imagine Trump doing the same thing.
I don't know the details, so I don't know if it's a good idea.
Um... Here's one.
The Biden executive order charges the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy with making sure that there's scientific integrity across federal agencies.
So in other words, we already have an Office of Science and Technology, so it already exists, and they're given the objective of making sure the rest of the government is Is that a bad thing?
Is anybody concerned that the government is going to make sure that all of its departments are compatible with science?
I know, that seems pretty safe.
Seems pretty safe to me.
So, of course, you're going to get a Green New Deal out of that.
So, you know, there's some subjectivity about what it is that science agrees with at this point.
But it's not the biggest problem in the world.
So here's my take on this.
If you're worried about all these executive orders from Biden, there's a reason you're not seeing much reporting about it, is that most of them are sort of empty or don't have that much effect, or Trump would have done it, or you're just studying something.
All right. That might be all I wanted to talk about today.
Are landlords going to get bailed out?
I don't know about that.
Because I have the same question.
If you let people not be evicted and skip rent, what happens to the landlords?
Do the landlords just eat it?
What if they have mortgages and they can't pay their mortgage?
Does the bank then eat it?
Because that's probably where things need to go.
I would say that the place...
The place we should cause the most pain would be at the banks, so long as they don't go out of business.
You'd have to backstop them so they don't go out of business.
But I don't think you want to push the pain onto the renter.
I don't think you want to push it onto the building owner unless they don't have a mortgage.
So maybe the banks are the place to push the pain.
Name three victimless crimes people are in prison for.
Someone asks.
I don't know why.
Why would I do that?
You'll never test your way out of COVID with 360 million people.
Yes, you could. And here's how.
If you do regular testing, you cannot, because it's too slow.
The whole point with rapid testing, even if it's a little bit less accurate, is that if everybody can test themselves every morning, you get on top of it really quickly.
You get on top of it really quickly.
Because what you would do is you would catch the You catch the people who are the super spreaders much faster.
If you caught a super spreader on day one, as opposed to day seven, it's a difference between a pandemic and a problem.
It's a big difference.
So yeah, rapid testing, if you did enough of it, could actually probably shorten the pandemic by 50%, I would think.
Any comment on the hotel takeovers in Washington?
So there's some stories about homeless people taking over some hotels in Washington.
Or trying to. I don't think they've succeeded.
But I feel as if that story is a local story.
And I don't see that as being some kind of trend that's going to spread.
And it probably has a lot to do with the fact that hotels are empty at the moment because of coronavirus.
Oh, by the way, many of you know that I went on my delayed honeymoon to French Polynesia and Bora Bora.
Just as we got back, I think it was yesterday, they closed French Polynesia to travel.
So we thought we were beating the system by getting this one trip to the one place that was going to allow us to travel there, but that just shut down.
So I don't see how the travel industry is going to survive.
I don't see any way.
I think what will happen with restaurants and the travel industry is that the current owners might have to go bankrupt.
Maybe sell their assets off for nothing to somebody who doesn't yet have any debt.
And then somebody who has no debt might have a chance of reviving these businesses because they basically get a cheap business.
And when the coronavirus gets solved, if it does, they have a good business.
They got it for cheap. So that's one way that these businesses could be revived.
But the people who own them at the moment, I just don't know how they're going to pay their debts And also keep owning the businesses.
I don't know how to do that. All right.
That is all I wanted to say for today.
I hope that the news gets more interesting because it's hard to look at the news without the Trump effect.
Every day I open it and be like, ah, there's going to be some good news here today.
But even the things that I can find to talk about...
They only make sense by still comparing them to what Trump would have done or did do.
He's just the universal reference now.
You can't get away from it.
All right. Hotels turn over a lot.
Yeah, hotels change management or change ownership a lot.
That's true. Yeah, Andy Ngo has his new book out, which, by the way, you should buy, because the people who tried to ban it cannot win.
So you see something that's going to be banned, just go and buy a copy if you can afford it.
That's what I'm going to do. So I bought Andy Ngo's book without knowing anything about it, just because they're trying to cancel him.
And I would hope you do the same.
Alright, that's all I've got for now, and I will talk to you.
