Episode 1288 Scott Adams: Talking About the Biden Townhall Dementia Telethon, Trump Insults McConnell, and Central Park Karen
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Content:
COVID "seasonality"
Texas energy management
iPhones are made to break
Legally required brainwashing
President Biden's townhall
Less racist math instruction
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Ah, yeah.
Let me say this. If you're in Texas, have some warm coffee today.
You deserve it.
Let's talk about the news.
So the mystery of COVID continues.
The mystery being, why does it sometimes subside?
So the mystery in India is deepening.
They have a dramatic drop in COVID-19.
Hospitalizations, infections, and everything else.
Nobody knows why.
Nobody knows why.
What does that tell you about our scientific understanding of the coronavirus?
Well, there is some gigantic variable that's just sort of hanging out there.
Now, it's definitely not hydroxychloroquine.
We would know that for sure, because it's the first thing you'd look for.
It literally would be the first thing you look for.
It's like, hey, India has a big drop in infections.
What are they doing differently?
So I would say, you can't say 100%, but 95, 99% odds that the answer is not hydroxychloroquine.
Now, somebody says blood type, but why would that make the infections just stop or plunge?
Because it's not as if all the people with one blood type got the thing and then you ran out of those people.
We don't have any kind of infection that's close enough to have expired an entire category of people.
I don't think. So here's another mystery to overlay on top of the first mystery.
That there is COVID seasonality.
And I had a little exchange with somebody on Twitter who knows more than I do about this stuff and sent me a list of published papers about flu virus seasonality.
And here was a little tidbit that apparently around the world Flu viruses always peak in February.
Are you confused?
Around the world, so places where it's winter and places where it's summer at the same time, whether it's winter or summer, February causes a decline worldwide in infections.
Why? Why?
Now, if it's the temperature, February should be the worst, at least in the winter places, right?
But winter and summer places all have a sharp, or at least they peak, that's the highest point.
So, if you thought that the whole reason there is seasonality, It's because of the temperature, meaning that it either doesn't kill the virus when it's outdoors, or it causes people to spend more time indoors.
If you thought it was one of those things, apparently it's not.
It doesn't seem to be related to the weather.
Somebody says it's because February is 28 days.
I would hate to think that's true, but I know what you're saying, that if you just compared it to the month on either side, it would look lower because there were fewer days, so fewer people died that month or something.
It's not that. I think we can assume that the scientists know how many days are in a month and may have adjusted for that.
So let's assume it's not because February has 28 days.
Although, I love the suggestion, because every now and then you have to remind yourself that the world can make that kind of mistake.
It's not crazy, but I don't think that's what it is.
Let me give you my speculation.
Are you ready for some non-scientific speculation?
Here's why I think February might be the low month.
Because Christmas...
Christmas is worldwide. Or-ish.
Not completely worldwide.
But no matter where you are, Christmas is still December 25th, and people still get together in ways that they would not normally get together.
So here's my speculation.
What's different about Christmas is that people get together in combinations they don't normally get together.
And so you're taking a bunch of people who are already not socially isolating well, and they just do it even worse.
But not only do they do it worse, but it's a different combination of people who have traveled from all over.
So in theory, December, January should be your worst months just because of the lack of social distancing.
By February, you've kind of hunkered down with your crowd.
Meaning that the people you see in February all month are the people you saw all month.
The people you saw in December was a whole bunch of different people from all over.
So could it be that there's literally nothing to seasonality except what it does to the mix of people coming in and mixing with each other?
Is that possible? I'll just put that out there.
I don't know that we know why there is seasonality.
Retail sales jumped 5.3% in January.
Economists thought it would be 1.1%.
So apparently the stimulus is working, and the stimulus worked so well there's a question whether you should do another one.
It might be too much.
I'm not really worried about too much stimulus.
That's the last thing I'm worried about at the moment.
But something to worry about.
So that's good news. On the bad news, still millions of people, I've seen 3 million, 4.2 million, so I don't know what it is at the moment, without power in Texas.
And, you know, unprecedented or maybe precedented.
Cold temperatures there and people dying.
People dying in their cars because they're trying to use their cars to stay warm.
And the carbon monoxide gets them in some cases.
So this is a major tragedy.
But it also has to say something about Texas, doesn't it?
Do you let Texas off the hook for this?
Do you say that the way Texas managed their energy has nothing to do with the outcome?
I don't know. Could it be that nobody could have seen this coming?
Is that true? Nobody could have seen this coming?
That you'd have an extra cold day and it would do this to Texas?
I just don't know.
But I don't think we can say Texas is this Gigantically well-managed state and California is a disaster when, at least right now, I've got electricity in California.
So at the moment, at the moment I've got a little advantage.
Let me give you a little life advice.
One day when I was in my senior year of college in upstate New York, I went to a job interview for a job I would take after college if I got the job, and it was February, coincidentally, and my car broke down on the road between college and my interview in a different city.
Now, I happened to break down on a chunk of road at night, or at least after dark, in which there was no other traffic, because it was upstate New York, and after a certain time at night, sometimes there's just no cars.
And I didn't bring a jacket.
I actually went on a trip in February without a jacket, because I was just going to go to my car and card a building, and I didn't have a nice jacket for an interview.
So I didn't wear one. So my car stops, breaks down, in the middle of winter in February in upstate New York.
Has anybody ever been to upstate New York in February?
Oh, it's cold!
It's really cold!
And I get out of my car and, you know, I thought to myself, okay, there's no other traffic and there's no other civilization Within walking distance or running distance.
And I said to myself, I know that if I try to go backwards from where I just came from, it's too far to civilization.
I wouldn't be able to find a house or any place to get warm.
But what I didn't know is if that was also true ahead of me.
So I didn't know if I were to run forward, maybe I could find a house before I died.
Now when I say before I died, I mean that literally.
Because it was really cold.
And if I didn't mention it, I didn't bring a jacket.
That's how smart I was.
And so I started to run for it.
And you can't run very far when the temperature is zero-ish or whatever it was.
Because your hands and your feet start to freeze.
And your ankles don't move.
Like they just become frozen.
And you're just like running on sticks after a while.
And everything hurts.
And you start to get numb.
And you say to yourself, I think I'm actually going to die.
I might actually die.
And I made a promise to myself that night, if you haven't heard this story before.
I promised myself that if I lived, and it was pretty iffy at that point, that if I lived, I would sell my car for a one-way ticket to California and never see another effin' snowflake again for the rest of my life.
Well, the story ended with a station wagon finally drove by.
It was a shoe salesman who had been doing some work out of town, and I stood in the middle of the road and made sure he couldn't go around me.
And he saved my life, drove me back to campus.
And a few months later, I graduated and traded my car for a one-way ticket to California, to my sister.
And it was a one-way ticket.
I wasn't planning on coming back to where there was snow.
And so I moved to California, and I live here in Northern California, and one of my survivalist methods, and I built my adult life around a survivalist kind of attitude, is that I wanted to live somewhere where I could not die because I went outdoors.
That was it. I don't want to die because I went outdoors.
I can go outdoors here in most seasons, and if I bring even a light jacket, I'm going to survive.
I might not like it on some days, but I'm going to survive.
In Texas, it's getting pretty iffy.
There are people literally dying from it.
So part of your decision about where to live should be, what happens if things go wrong?
Because if you live 100 years...
Something's gonna go wrong sooner or later.
So that's one of the reasons I chose to live where I live.
All right, so good luck to Texas.
I hope you can pull out of this.
This is just horrible. Have you noticed that iPhones are made to break?
You ever wonder about that?
You take on a brand new iPhone, and it really looks good.
I mean, the design is great, but it's slippery.
It's like they made it out of wet soap or something.
It's like, zoop, flips out of your hand.
And the only way you can actually have a phone that's not guaranteed to be cracked and broken is to put an ugly case on it.
Now, there's no such thing as a good-looking phone case, right?
So Apple gets it both ways.
They claim that they have a good design, and it's something they can show in their commercials, and it looks great.
I mean, just look at that thing.
That's a good-looking phone.
But you can't use that phone.
It's the greatest mindfuck that you think you're buying a well-designed product, but you can't possibly use it.
I mean, I know some people use it without a case.
And I hear about the people, I've had my phone three years, I've never cracked it.
Okay, that's not typical.
Most people drop their phone two or three times a week.
I mean, I do. Never broke one yet, because I'll never use a phone with one hand without a case.
So that's my rule.
Would you like to hear the rule again?
Never use your iPhone with only one hand without Unless it has a case on it.
So if before I put a case on it, I get a new phone, let's say an upgrade, I will only hold it with two hands.
Period. I will never use one hand.
I'll never do this. And I've never lost the phone.
The other thing I'll never do, I will never use my phone over a body of water.
How many phones have you replaced in your family because somebody used their phone in the pool or in the bathtub?
Yeah, or in the beach.
Never, in any circumstance, will this phone be directly above a body of water.
How many phones have I lost because I dropped them in bodies of water?
Zero. How many have my various family members lost because they dropped them in bodies of water?
A lot. That's a big number, right?
So if you're wondering if Apple makes them intentionally slippery so they'll break, I would say probably yes.
Because how hard would it be to put some non-sick surface on it?
How hard would it be to make it not breakable?
Not hard, right?
How hard would it be to make this not breakable?
They would just have to put a screen protector on it when it ships.
It would be the easiest thing in the world.
There's no way it's unintentional.
When I worked with a phone company, a local phone company years ago, and I would get to see the discussions that happened within the company, obviously, and one of the discussions was about one of our most profitable lines of business, which we called it a line of business, was late payment on your phone bill.
Because people would be penalized, a fee, For being late on their phone bill.
But since everybody needs a phone, or at least in those days you needed a landline phone, you were going to pay eventually.
Because even if you moved and tried to get new phone service, you couldn't do it until you paid your old late fee.
So it was this lock on people that if they paid late, they would have to pay the late fee or never have phone service in the modern world.
So, what happened, do you think, when I brought up the idea of maybe making it easier for people to pay on time so that the customers would not be inconvenienced by a late fee, we would get our money on time, and then everything would work the way it's supposed to work?
What do you think they said about that?
Shut up. Shut up.
Not really shut up.
But nobody wanted to hear the idea that it would reduce our profits That's it.
It would just reduce our profits.
That's all it would do for the company.
Now, for the customer, it would be terrific.
But we wouldn't even have that discussion because we liked having built a trap so that people would fall into it and we would make money.
And that actually happened behind closed doors.
That was an actual conversation in a real company about screwing the fucking customers because it was easy and It was easy, and it was really profitable.
That's real. Now, you tell me that Apple has not had conversations behind closed doors about fixing their easily breakable phone?
Of course they have.
Do you think there's no engineer who can figure out how to make these phones to not break so easily?
Of course they have those engineers.
Of course.
They just prefer it this way, for whatever reason.
All right. Racist Central Park Karen has been...
Apparently she won't have any jail time.
She's the one who...
I guess she tried to call the police or did call the police because there was a black man in the park who was a birdwatcher.
And by the way, if you've seen a picture of the black man who was the birdwatcher, he is the least threatening, most nerd-like human being you've ever seen.
If there was one person you were going to see in a dark alley and not be afraid of, it would be that birdwatcher.
If you haven't seen the picture of him, because usually you see the video of just the Karen woman complaining, but you have to see the picture of the birdwatcher to understand how completely non-threatening this guy looked.
If all you're thinking in your mind...
Your racist mind is, oh, a black male.
I can see why maybe she was afraid, if you're a little racist, you're thinking that.
But then you see a picture of him.
He's not the guy you're going to be afraid of in the dark alley.
He's just the friendliest-looking, nerdy guy, right?
So she gets released, but only after she went through, what do they call it?
A comprehensive, respectful program at the Critical Therapy Center...
Where she focused on, quote, the ways in which Ms.
Cooper could appreciate their racial identities shape our lives, but we cannot use them to harm ourselves or others.
And because she went through that program, and now she sees the errors of her ways, she was released without any jail time, and some people are arguing that that was white supremacy or something.
But what do you make of the fact...
That she avoided jail time by accepting brainwashing.
Is that a place we want to be?
I mean, do we?
Could there be anything worse than that?
I mean, it would be hard to come up with anything.
There would be worse than that.
Is that fundamentally different than what China is doing with the Uyghurs?
Sure, you know, they've got the gang rape and the other stuff that's pretty bad.
But they are brainwashing the Uyghurs.
Like, that's a part of the Holocaust over there, is they're brainwashing them.
So now we're doing that.
Now we're brainwashing a citizen.
Now, just to be completely clear...
I'm not backing the Karen in this story.
I think what she did need some kind of...
It should be addressed, let's say.
I don't think it should be a free pass for her behavior.
And I don't even mind that she maybe was exposed to some sensitivity training and maybe this could help her in some ways.
But is this a thing we want to make our thing?
Do we want this precedent to stand that you can be forced to attend a brainwashing event?
Forced to attend brainwashing.
Now even if, remember, I call it brainwashing even if it's good for you.
I call patriotism and the Pledge of Allegiance brainwashing, but I think they're really good for you.
Like it's good to have a coherent, patriotic country.
So brainwashing can be good or bad, but do we want to build it into our legal system?
Do you want your legal system to have brainwashing as a legitimate component?
I don't know if we want to go there.
I don't think so.
All right, let's talk politics.
Finally, ex-President Trump is back in the news, and it's interesting again.
If you didn't see Trump's letter complaining about Mitch McConnell, oh, you gotta see it.
Here's one line from Trump's letter about McConnell.
He called him a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.
That was just one sentence.
Just one sentence out of a long document.
A dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.
Now, Just feel that sentence.
Just feel it.
You're imagining Trump, and you're imagining McConnell, and now you're imagining Trump writing, he was a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.
That writing, that language, is just alive.
It's just alive.
It's like a creature.
And you forget, after even just a month of not enough Trump in our lives, after a month you forget how frickin' good he is at this.
This being inciting people and getting people worked up and using interesting language and being impossible to look away.
He doesn't know how to be uninteresting.
He is so naturally interesting that I'm just so happy that he's back a little bit, you know, even with just his letter.
So you have to read that just to feel just how his language excites.
And I mean excites good and excites bad.
Like, it's so active and alive.
You just don't see that from the other boring politicians.
All right. Playboy magazine, their new cover...
is a singer, an artist named Kehlani, and she's posed as both a male, a man and a woman kind of a image, so she plays two people on the cover.
Both of them are her, but one is man and one is woman, so she's the king and queen of the prom, and apparently the The backstory is that she's gender-fluid, I think is the right term that she used.
So she doesn't identify as either strictly male or strictly female.
I believe that's what gender-fluid means in this context.
And I said to myself, all right, now I totally get...
That we want to be a more inclusive society.
And as you know, nobody has been more supportive of the LGBTQ and especially the transgender community than I have.
And I mean it.
Like, I just think everybody is different from everybody else.
And that, you know, artificially saying this group of people who are different are the good ones and these are the bad ones just doesn't make any sense.
I just think everybody is infinitely different.
And let them be themselves, as much as that's practical, right?
You have to make some practical considerations.
So I'm as pro-LGBTQ as it is possible to be.
But Playboy magazine, the whole point of the magazine was to cater to a certain perspective, right?
A certain kind of man, usually.
Women read it, too, but mostly men.
And I thought to myself years ago, I don't know if you know this, but years ago when Hugh Hefner himself stepped down from active management, he put his daughter in charge of the magazine, Christy Hefner.
And as soon as Hugh Hefner put his daughter in charge of the magazine...
I thought to myself, well, it's just a matter of time.
Because there isn't any way they can survive with a woman running that magazine.
Now, you may say to yourself, you sexist.
A woman can do anything a man can do.
That's true. But do you think that a woman, any woman, should be in charge of a man's magazine that is trying to create an image for men I mean, it doesn't make sense, right?
If I told you that a man was the CEO of Cosmopolitan magazine or some women-oriented magazine, would you think that made sense?
Probably not. Probably not.
But again, you know, there are always exceptions.
So it could have been that the very best CEO of Playboy would have been Christy Hefner.
You can't rule it out because she's a woman.
But it's hard to imagine, in our world, when the whole point of diversity is that people have different perspectives, it doesn't make sense that the person with probably the least appreciation for the perspective of the magazine is in charge.
And here you end up with something that for society is a good thing.
I like it when society celebrates people being not all the same.
So I do like the fact that Kehlani is on the cover of a magazine.
So if you said to me, should she be on the cover of a magazine?
I'd say, yeah. I like that story.
Seems like she's an...
She? Yeah.
I think she goes by she.
Is an engaging person.
Why not? But Playboy?
It just feels like maybe that was a mistake.
I don't know. The story today is that there's a book out claiming that Steve Bannon, quote, realized that Trump was repeating the same stories over and over and worried that he had early onset dementia.
And then the book goes on to say that Steve Bannon thought that Trump should have been removed with a 25th Amendment situation.
for being mentally incompetent, and that Bannon himself planned to take over Trump's supporters and become president later.
Does that even sound slightly true?
Does that sound even slightly true?
Because it doesn't to me.
Yeah, I mean, have we reached the point where we could all know instantly that's not true?
Like, do you have to even talk about it?
So here's the thing.
If this had stopped, if the claim had stopped at Bannon was worried that Trump had early onset dementia, I would have said to myself, well, that might have happened.
Anybody who's a certain age, who maybe repeats a story or forgets something, isn't that the first thing you think?
Once you reach a certain age...
It's on your mind to be sort of looking for it, plus it was in the press, etc.
So if it had been true that Bannon had wondered, you know, if there was any, like, pre-dementia issues here, maybe.
I would have said, well, that could be true.
It could not be true.
But it could be true.
But when they add the part where Bannon was planning to take over his supporters and become president, I'm sorry.
That's not fucking true.
Remember I told you how to tell if something is a fake news?
And the standard is, if you can just read it and you shake your head and you say, well, that's not fucking true.
It's not. Now, you might be wrong once or twice in your life, but if you just use that standard every time, when it looks like this, this sort of story, you go, that's not fucking true.
It's not. All right.
But why do we see this story today?
Well, let's take the Tucker Carlson.
I wanted to call it like a law or hypothesis or something.
I haven't got a good name for it yet.
But Tucker Carlson always talks about the Alinsky rule kind of thing where bad people will blame you of whatever bad behavior they're doing.
Now, I don't have an opinion that this is some kind of widespread plan thing that Democrats do, but we do observe a consistency to it.
Why? I don't know.
Maybe it's just an observational oddity, confirmation bias.
Maybe there's an underlying reason for it.
Maybe it's intentional, maybe it's not.
But it's certainly, we observe it.
I don't know why. Somebody says it's projection, maybe it is.
But the town hall last night with Biden showcased Biden, and there was also a video that went around yesterday.
The video, I think, is fake.
I'm not sure. But the video looked like Biden having quite a mental episode.
He was just sort of slack-jawed, and his wife was just looking at him, and he looked like his brain had shut down.
In this video that went around.
Now, I'm going to emphasize again, I think the video is fake, or somehow enhanced in some way to make him look worse than he was, take it out of context, maybe, whatever.
But I think it's a fake video.
However, When he did his town hall, he did not look sharp, to say the least.
So the question of Biden's dementia, or mental capacity, is in the news, and then, coincidentally, there's a claim about Trump having dementia.
Oh, isn't that a coincidence?
That the moment Biden is acting like he has dementia, suddenly there's a book we're all talking about, about Bannon and Trump's dementia.
Is it coincidence?
Or is it, yet again, the Tucker Carlson observation that this is not a coincidence, that they blame you of whatever they're doing, or in this case, you know, they're smearing the story about the dementia stuff until Trump becomes the shiny object in the story, which is a good strategy if that's what they're doing intentionally.
Well, let's talk about how bad that town hall was.
And first of all, I should point out that one way to know that your political system in your country is suboptimal.
If you're having a conversation about whether your current president or the one who just left office is the one with the most dementia, that's not a good place to be.
No. No.
That would be like being in Texas in February.
It's just not a good place to be.
You don't want to be arguing about which of your potential presidents, the recent last one or the current one, is the most dementia-addled person.
That's not a good sign.
Wouldn't you like at least one of them to be maybe not?
Maybe not. That'd be cool.
But that's where we are.
Here's the thing that made me the happiest.
You know, you watched Biden when he was running for president and then after he got elected.
He continued to say that the reason he ran was in large part because of the fine people hoax that he believed, I think, was true.
Now, maybe we don't know what he believed, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt.
Let's say he believed it was true and he used it as the basis for running for office, mentioned it almost every time, and then last night, during the town hall, which follows by a few days, Trump's lawyers debunking that hoax in front of the entire world, Biden got to that point where he always mentions it, and he didn't.
I mean, it was conspicuous.
He always mentions it because you see the lead-up and where he's going, and now is the point where he throws in the fine people hoax, and he didn't.
Is that a coincidence?
Or does he know that that would get fact-checked because now the lawyers have debunked it?
I think it's intentional.
I think there was an actual conversation...
In which somebody said, you know, maybe lay off of this fine people hoax.
If we wait a few months, we can revive it, and people will forget what the lawyer said.
Maybe. Don't know.
Biden had a few fact-check problems, something about whether he knew there was a vaccination when he took office, but before he'd said that he obviously knew it, everybody knew it, it was a Trump vaccination.
So he misspoke or something.
I don't know. Or it was dementia.
We don't know. But how did CNN cover the fact-checking?
What do you think? So Stephen Collinson, one of their propaganda demons, who always does the negative Trump articles on CNN, he mentioned two of Biden's, and I'll use his exact word, missteps. So while President Trump is full of lies, when Biden says things which are not true, they're missteps.
So that's the first thing you need to know.
It's a misstep. And then Collinson says this.
He goes, False statements, bitter political attacks, and self-aggrandizement that regularly dominated Trump's appearances and rally speeches and town hall events on conservative media.
And despite his characteristic stumbling, so it's a characteristic stumbling, it's not even anything to worry about, really.
It's more like a little bit of misstep, a little bit of, oh, I'd say characteristic stumbling.
Because if it's characteristic, it's already baked in.
You know, just characteristic.
Over some precise figures.
Oh, he didn't make a gigantic error about misspeaking about the availability of vaccinations.
No, he stumbled over some precise figures.
So there was a little bit of lack of precision.
You know, and that's not so bad.
A little bit of lack of precision.
Just a little bit. Just a little bit of lack of precision.
That's way better than the hurricane of lies and false statements, bitter political attacks, and self-aggrandizement from Trump.
I mean, it's way better to have just a slight little technical irregularity, let's call it.
And nowhere in Collinson's review of the town hall did he mention China.
Which is the biggest story.
The biggest story of the town hall is that Biden basically backed China's policies against the benefits of the United States, you could argue.
And that was the biggest story.
And Collinson doesn't even mention it one way or the other.
It's like it didn't exist. They're going to make that disappear?
So here's what Biden said.
You have to watch the video to understand how bad it is.
If you listen to my characterization of what he said about China, and you say to yourself, I feel like you're spinning that.
It couldn't have been that bad, right?
Listen to it yourself.
You will hear the President of the United States...
Say that President Xi's treatment of the Uyghurs who are in concentration camps being gang raped, the Hong Kong stuff, the Taiwan stuff, and Biden saying basically that Xi has a good reason for why he's doing these things, because he needs to keep his country unified, and that Biden understands those reasons.
Now, if you were wondering if Biden is under the control of China, you can stop wondering.
Because that pretty much cleared things up.
It did. If you're wondering if China has control over Biden, I don't think you would wonder after you saw that.
Now, can I read Biden's mind?
No. Do I know his inner intentions?
No. Do I know if he's intentionally being nice to China because of any business dealings or any blackmail they might have about Hunter Biden?
I don't know any of that.
I'm not making any claim about any of that.
I'm just saying that if you watch your leader, if you're American, if you're watching your president, the appearance is that he's working for China.
I don't say that lightly, because I don't want it to be true, but it sure looks true.
Now, of course, he had to correct that, and CNN had to jump into the breach to try to fix what got broken here.
I'm not sure they made it better.
So let me see if I can find the exact quote here that's pretty funny, which I hope I didn't lose.
So what Caitlin Collins did at CNN is she ended up taking two fragments of what Biden said and trying to connect them in a tweet so that his incoherent fragments sort of made sense when you rearranged them.
That actually happened.
Doesn't it sound like I just made that up?
That CNN took his sentence fragments that weren't even complete sentences when he said them, arranged them so that one fragment would be closer to another fragment, and it would look like a complete thought that was kind of different than what he actually said.
That actually happened.
And you watch my tweet and see for yourself, right?
Use your own judgment. And ask yourself if that really happened.
That they took two sentence fragments, not even complete sentences, and arranged them to look like they were coherent.
That actually happened.
All right. So, of course, he had to walk it back when he was questioned about it.
And here's how Biden sort of explained himself better.
He said, quote, So this is after the town hall, I guess.
He said, China is trying very hard to become a world leader.
True. And to get that moniker and be able to do that, they have to gain the confidence of other countries, Biden said.
Back in January, I guess.
And he said that...
Oh, so this was in January.
So he said this before the town hall.
And he said, as long as they're engaged in activities...
That is contrary to basic human rights, it is going to be hard for them to do that.
So Biden's take on China is that if they don't manage their own brand well, that other countries will not give them the moniker of a world leader.
Well, I guess he showed them, huh?
You know, I feel sorry for President Xi when he found out that according to Joe Biden...
Other leaders around the world might not give China the moniker of a world leader if they keep acting the way they're acting.
Huh. Pretty tough on China, isn't he?
So, we definitely have a...
And I guess in another comment, he said that China would essentially pay for their human rights abuses.
So he accepts that some of that's going on, but he says that they'll pay for it in some indistinct way that has nothing to do with him, apparently.
Well, here's a little more background.
Breitbart is reporting this, that the Secretary of State under Biden, whose name is Blinken, Was the co-founder of a consulting company called Wessex Act Advisors, which according to the Washington Free Beacon, so I guess you'd have to make sure this is correct, quote, helped U.S. universities raise money from China without running afoul of Pentagon grant requirements.
Can you think of anything worse?
What would be worse than...
Trying to get Chinese money influencing US universities.
Like, literally, what would be worse than that?
That's the worst thing I can even think of.
Like, short of actual immediate violence, what would be worse than helping China get financial influence over US universities?
Now, the way it's stated is that helping them raise money But what happens when you raise money from somebody?
They have influence, right?
If somebody gives you millions of dollars, they've got a little bit of influence over you.
And our own Secretary of State, allegedly, and I feel like I would need a fact check on this.
This feels like the kind of thing that might not necessarily be true once you look into it.
But that's the reporting we have right now.
Is that he helped US universities raise money from China.
Now, what could be more disqualifying than that?
I can't even think of anything.
Like, short of actually selling nuclear secrets to China, what would be more damaging than helping them get influence over our university system?
I can't think of anything worse than that.
It's in Breitbart, but will it be in any other publication, or will it just be ignored?
Probably ignored. Probably.
Jelaine Maxwell, Epstein's partner there, is reported to be losing her hair in a withering shell of her former self, the Daily Mail says.
And was physically abused by a guard during a pat-down at Brooklyn Jail, her lawyer claims.
So the woman who was accused of serial sexual abuse is put in prison and got allegedly sexually abused by a guard.
Now, I don't even know what to think about that.
Because my first impression was...
Well, screw her.
Had it coming, or some version of that.
But I also don't want to live in a world where the prison guards are filling up the prisoners.
So, on one hand, I don't feel as bad about this as my brain tells me I ought to, so I'm not proud of that.
On the other hand, if this is true, And this guard actually sexually abused her?
You should be executed for that.
Because you have power.
Anybody who has power over somebody makes it that extra bad situation.
And why was there a male guard patting her down?
Actually, it's not mentioned, actually.
It says physically abused by a guard.
Actually, it doesn't specify whether it was a male or female guard, so we don't know.
All right, Breitbart is also reporting, and increasingly, there's a lot of news that you're only going to see on Breitbart.
If you haven't noticed that yet, there are whole topics which are interesting and matter, and they matter to the country, etc., And you don't see them anywhere else.
Nobody else reports them.
It's weird. All right.
So apparently Oregon's Progressive Department of Education, according to Breitbart, they came out with an 82-page training manual to how to make math instruction more equitable.
So it's called the Pathway to Equitable Math Instructions.
Dismantling racism in mathematics instruction.
So their problem was that they believed that math instruction was sort of a white supremacy culture kind of invention.
And so they're trying to make math instruction less racist and white supremacist.
Now, I'm not making up what I'm going to read next.
You're going to think maybe it's a joke.
This is real. These are the real words.
I'm going to quote them from the Oregon's Progressive Department of Education.
The manual enumerates the signs of what they call white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom, which include a focus on, quote, getting the right answer, an emphasis on, quote, real-world math, so, you know, things that can be applied, Teaching math in a linear fashion, quote, unquote.
Students being required to, quote, show their work, and grading students based on their demonstrated knowledge of the material.
And it goes on, quote, in order to embody anti-racist math education, teachers must engage in critical praxis.
P-R-A-X-I-S. Now, if you're reading this, Make sure you get it right.
Teachers must engage in critical praxis that interrogates the ways in which they perpetuate white supremacy culture in their own classrooms and develop a plan toward anti-racist math education to address the issues of equity for black, Latinx, and multilingual students, the manual declares.
So I would like to give this same advice to all of you.
A lot of you, I've noticed, have not been engaged in a critical praxis.
Have you? Be honest.
How many of you have been engaged in any kind of a critical praxis that interrogates the way in which you perpetuate white supremacy?
Have you done any of the work?
Probably not. You haven't done the work.
And if you haven't done the work...
Well, I feel you're sort of a white supremacist, even if you're not white.
Those are the rules.
So there you have it.
Math is racist, and we've got to do something about that.
And the way to do that, in case I didn't mention it, was to make sure that you're engaged in critical praxis.
Interregulating the ways in which you perpetuate white supremacy.
What's praxis mean?
No idea.
But it seems important.
So, we have reached a point where, you know, we've legitimately entered that 1984 territory.
You know, for my entire life, I don't remember any time in my life people were not making 1984 comparisons, but they were always kind of dumb.
It's like, yeah, it's not 1984.
Ah, you know, you're just, it's hyperbole.
But we actually have a situation in which organized governmental or government-approved entities are brainwashing.
And it's not even any kind of a hidden...
It's not a secret.
They're not doing it cleverly through their advertisements or something.
They're actually directly brainwashing to make people think right.
Somebody says slippery slope.
I may have to change my whole view on the slippery slope, but let me state my view more clearly.
Things will go the way they're going in all cases until something springs up to stop it.
So typically you can depend on some counterforce to spring up, and that's why I'm not a proponent of the slippery slope, Because there's always a response to it if it matters.
If it doesn't matter, then things will just keep slipping.
But if people care, they will mount a defense.
Now what's unique is that because of the topic we're talking about, the racial sensitivities, etc., you can't mount a defense.
Because anybody who mounts a defense becomes part of the problem, right?
So this is a slippery slope that any counter element that tries to pop up gets slapped down.
So that's a weird kind of slippery slope.
Mostly the slippery slope just goes until something happens to stop it.
But the unique situation here is that anybody who tries to stop it becomes part of the problem by definition.
So the slippery slope has built into it that if you try to stop it, you should be killed.
Basically, you're a horrible person.
You're a racist or whatever.
So that's a unique situation in which it's not the slippery slope part that's the active part.
It's the fact that they suppress anything that would normally stop it.
So it's the suppression that's the story, not the slipperiness, if that helps you at all.
Is 1984 worth reading?
I don't know. I've never read it. 1984 and Animal Farm.
I resist reading because everybody tells me to do it.
Honestly, that's why.
I feel like the crib notes are good enough.
I don't feel like I have to read fiction to get the idea.
I get the idea, right?
You don't have to read 1984 to get the idea.
Animal Farm, same thing.
We've all heard enough about it.
We all have the crib notes.
Somebody says, what? You must read them.
Do you think that reading them would add a, let's say, a new filter to my head?
Or would it just propagandize me harder?
Because if you know the concept, why does reading it in the form of fiction make a difference?
I know the concepts.
Read it anyway.
Get that propaganda.
Well, if you don't mind, I will ignore the parts that are intended to inflame my emotions, and I will take from it the facts which are actually useful.
It might blow my mind.
as fiction, it might blow my mind.
So I'm seeing here that people are saying that if you read 1984, you will learn something that you won't get from just knowing the concepts in it.
That might be true for you.
I don't know that's true for a hypnotist.
I really don't.
I feel as if it would look like territory I'd been on a lot, just organized well.
That's what it feels like.
But yeah, the Ministry of Truth, we know all these concepts, and Atlas shrugged.
So let me say about Ayn Rand, the most overrated...
Author and thinker maybe of all time.
So I've read the two big Ayn Rand books, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, I guess, and I just didn't find anything there.
It was just empty.
To me, it was just a bunch of nothing.
It was just poorly written books.
I didn't see anything of value in any of them.
Sorry. The golden age.
You said it was coming. We might be pretty close to the golden age.
I'll check my stocks, but stocks during the Biden era had been good so far.
Let's see what it looks like at the moment.
Yeah, they're just bouncing around.
So at the moment, stocks are down a little bit.
Bitcoin is at a new high.
The retail sales are up.
We have peaked in coronavirus and it's going down.
We've probably learned a ton about how to handle our next pandemic.
We are preparing to colonize space.
Thank you, Elon Musk.
And I believe that we have completely begun to rethink everything from our education system in a way we never would have before.
The worst situation would have been our school system continued on the way it was.
That would have been the Holocaust.
Okay, I won't use the Holocaust.
I'll take that back. That would have been the disaster.
But having to rethink it, losing a year, as expensive as this is in the lives of our children and their parents, as expensive as it is in every emotional and physical and economic way, we probably had to.
We probably had to break the system before we could re-engineer it.
Likewise, the idea of work has completely changed.
We've now accepted the idea of direct payments to people who don't have jobs, universal basic income.
We've basically accepted that.
We accepted it under the pandemic, but now it's sort of in our minds and it would be easier to implement in the future.
And working at home without the commute is obviously big.
Seeing all kinds of movement toward figuring out how to make it less expensive to have housing.
I think that as bad as these disasters are with the Texas power grid, etc., that these all create the good things.
When you look at Elon Musk making a $100 million prize available for whoever builds the best carbon capture, that's really big.
That's really big.
Now, that doesn't mean that's what's going to solve climate change, if you even believe there's something to solve.
But it is part of a tapestry of good things happening in that realm.
And I think that we're all getting a lot smarter about green energy versus non.
You may have heard, I think I mentioned it, that the Trump administration in December, just before they were out of power, passed through a bill that included money to develop our fusion technology.
So instead of nuclear fission, which we have, But it has some issues.
Nuclear fusion would be sort of nearly unlimited, low-cost energy.
So there's a whole bunch of stuff that happened in the last year or so that are really big.
Really big. And even though they look bad, because they are, you know, our energy problems or pandemic, that's bad.
But they've opened a doorway on each of those topics, In which we can see them more clearly for the first time.
And when humans, and I'm going to say Americans, with apologies to people around the world who are watching this live stream, I do have a bias toward the American, let's say, spirit.
Now, I don't have a lot of knowledge about the spirit in other countries, so maybe somebody's got a better one.
But the American spirit, if you will, is if we can understand the problem, we can fix it.
It's not understanding the problem is where we get in trouble.
It's like, are we supposed to be working on this climate change?
Is it really a problem?
I'm not sure. Should we fix immigration or should we just open the gates?
If you can't agree on what the problem is, then you're going to have trouble fixing it.
But when Americans agree...
Let's say the year 2000 bug.
I like to use that example all the time.
Nobody in the world wanted the year 2000 bug to destroy computers around the world and plunge us into a depression.
Nobody wanted that.
We had just this specific problem.
You've got to fix the old code that won't recognize when the year turns 2000.
Everybody recognized the same problem, and then we went and fixed it.
That's the way it works. But you first have to understand you're all looking at the same problem.
And I feel as though these recent disasters, everything from the pandemic to the energy problems, etc., are sort of opening up some visibility into all these things.
And it's a new visibility, and maybe that gets us on the same page and gets enough ingenuity going to solve things.
Yeah, I think we're in the golden age.
I do. Do you realize that, at least in the United States, by the way, correct me if this is wrong, we had our entire food distribution system attacked in a way we've never seen anything attacked.
I'm talking like Trump now.
In a way we've never seen before.
Yeah, we've seen things before.
So remove the hyperbole.
I didn't need it. And how did we respond?
By the way, I've been meaning to do this.
I would like to directly and explicitly thank everybody who worked in any part of the food distribution network, from farmer to everybody who gets the food to your plate.
All the people working on that, especially the meat packing plants, etc., you guys are heroes.
Because you guys, and women, of course, you didn't get to take time off.
You didn't get to work at home.
You had to produce the food to keep us alive.
And how'd they do?
How'd they do? Nailed it.
Absolutely frickin' nailed it.
Now, you know, lots of problems.
Things didn't work perfectly, but of course it was a pandemic.
But correct me if I'm wrong.
Give me a fact check on this.
Zero people starved because of the pandemic in the United States.
Can somebody give me a fact check on that?
I think that's true.
I think it's true that zero people starved.
Now, a lot of people had a lot of trouble, still do.
I'm not minimizing the amount of pain and suffering that's happening.
But nobody starved.
I mean, think about that.
And by the way, in hindsight, it doesn't look as impressive, but in the beginning, we didn't know if we were going to starve.
We didn't know.
And the food service people from farmers on, they pulled it off.
So here's another example.
There was nobody in America who wanted anybody to starve, right?
We were all on exactly the same side.
We've got this big food problem.
We need to solve this.
And then we did. And that's typical of what happens certainly in this country, but we saw it all around the world, is that if the problem is agreed on, you can solve it.
It's only when you don't agree.
That you've got a problem. Alright, that is all I have to do for today.
That's all I have to tell you. Yeah, that is my dog snoring.
You can actually hear that on...
Listen, that's snicker snoring.
That's what I have to listen to all day.
Alright, that's all for now.
I'll talk to you tomorrow. All right.
What exactly was the problem, somebody says.
Bridget, don't talk like that.
I don't think the protesters should have hung anybody.
But if I'm being honest, and I've said this before, I know this is terribly wrong to say, which is why it's fun to say, because it's terribly wrong.
Terribly wrong. I do think that the capital assault, while I don't promote it, I disavow it, and the people have to deal with the justice system appropriately, but I do think that your government needs to feel the people now and then.
I do think that the government needs to be reminded who they work for.
Now, if the capital assault reminded them that there are People in the country, they need to do their job in a way that the public generally will be happy.
I don't feel that they were doing their job.
Just to be extra sure, you hear me, I'm not giving any apology or support for any of the assaulters on the Capitol.
They're disowned. That's their business.
They need to deal with the legal system.
But I'm not going to say that there were no benefits.
Because I feel as if the people need to show that they control the government and not the other way around.
This was maybe the worst possible way to do it.
I can't imagine a worse way to do it.
But it might have had that effect.
And we won't know for a long time, but maybe Congress will be maybe a little bit more effective if they feel the pressure.
