Episode 1340 Scott Adams: Court Packing, Floyd Trial, Vaccination Passports, North Korea and Fun
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Content:
40% of Marines not getting vaccinated
Punished for having a different opinion
My court packing prediction
Chauvin trial, cause of death
Homicide isn't a crime
Conflating murder with homicide to create riots
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Yeah, today will be the best coffee with Scott Adams of all time.
And I don't say that lightly.
Well, what are we going to do first?
Yes, it's a simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tanker, chalice, a stein, a canteen jug, a glass, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee.
Wait, hold. Breaking news.
I'm getting breaking news.
There's a new study that shows that drinking coffee in moderation, keyword moderation, substantially reduces cancer and all cardiovascular problems.
True story, by the way.
I just tweeted it. Thank you, Ian, for pointing that out.
So, just think about this for a moment.
Just think about this.
Moderate coffee drinking reduces your cancer and your cardiovascular risk.
If that's what you can do with moderate coffee drinking, think what you can do when you just start swilling it by the gallon.
Yeah, superpowers.
That's how science works.
Join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Go. Hold on.
Hold on. Hold on. That's not enough.
We're trying to protect our health now.
One more. Go. Ah.
I feel a little bit...
I think I had a little cancer in my shoulder, but it feels better now.
Yeah. Cardiovascular?
20% better.
Oh, whoa. I'll tell you.
You don't expect it to work that quickly.
But here it is. Alright, well, I like to think that everybody who watches my content gets healthier and smarter.
And I actually think that's really happening.
You know, based on my feedback from people, you don't get to see it, so you don't see the view that I see.
But the number of people who contact me literally every day Multiple people every day, they've lost weight, they're healthier, they're happier, they're getting younger, and apparently they're drinking coffee and reducing the risk of serious illness.
So it's all working.
It's working. My plan is working.
I love the fact that every Saturday, Bill Maher is trending for something he said.
And I say to myself, Okay, I get that it's a political show and stuff, so those things make news, but every week, every week he's trending.
And I'm trying to figure out what is it he does that makes him trend every week?
And I think the answer is he sometimes tells the truth.
No, I think actually most of the time he tells the truth, like most people.
But they don't do it on TV. He actually tells the truth on TV. And everybody goes, whoa!
What the hell?
And the next thing you know, it's like trending on Twitter.
And that literally is what's happening.
He literally is just telling you the truth.
And it becomes like a national story.
It's so rare. But apparently he's joining me somewhat in this opinion that movies...
are no longer worth your time.
And this is what he said in a tweet today about the current batch of movies.
I love this tweet.
So Bill Maher says, I don't have to leave the theater whistling But would it kill Hollywood to once in a while make a movie that doesn't make me want to take a bath with a toaster?
He says, we all had a rough year.
A little escapism would have been appreciated.
Now, let me climb on that a little bit.
I've been telling you for a long time that if you willingly consume sad fiction, there's just a bunch of people with problems, because that's what a movie is.
You know, the movie arc is, I got a really big problem, and I'm going to make you look at my big problems for three hours, and maybe at the end we'll be happy, or maybe at the end a lot of people will be dead.
One of those. And, yeah, I hear Godzilla vs.
Kong is actually pretty good.
I'm surprised. I can't believe...
Honestly, I can't even imagine how that movie could be good.
Here's a spoiler for the King Kong and Godzilla movie.
So if you're going to watch the movie, I haven't watched it, so I'm going to give you a spoiler for the movie, having never watched it and never heard anything about it.
This hand is Godzilla.
This hand is King Kong.
I will now show you the entire movie, Godzilla vs.
King Kong. Rawr!
The end.
That is the entire movie.
And I believe I've saved you a little bit of money there.
And also a little bit of risk of getting COVID. So yeah, there's no reason to watch bad entertainment.
That's why I'm not trying to do a commercial for YouTube.
But YouTube gets it totally right.
Because YouTube gets you short little bits that are often educational, useful, expand your awareness, and don't hurt.
You can watch YouTube for days and never see anything.
I mean, if you want to.
You'd have to look for it.
You can find stuff that'll make you sad if you look for it.
But mostly, YouTube is about things that make you smarter or make you happy.
Why would anybody ever watch a movie again?
Unless it's a comedy, which they don't make anymore.
Yeah, sure, a superhero one is really a comedy.
When I watch these superhero movies, which I do watch those, I watch them for the dialogue in between the fight scenes, because sometimes it's really funny.
Like when the Hulk was, you know, banging Loki against the ground.
That was just funny. So, that's the closest Hollywood gets to humor now.
There's a story that 40% of Marines say they won't get vaccinated.
What do you think of that?
Do you know what would have been a good statistic to include with that story?
I'll bet it wasn't there.
I haven't read all of the reports of it, but I would like to know what exactly is the death rate for unusually healthy young people with perfect diets and zero obesity I'm thinking it's kind of low.
So isn't this exactly the group of people that you wouldn't be surprised?
Forget about what your opinion is, whether they should or should not do it.
But I wouldn't be surprised because here's what we did wrong with the Marines.
We meaning America, right?
Collectively. I've never gone through any basic training.
Or Marine training or firearms training in the military or anything like that.
But I have to make an assumption.
Is it fair to assume that teaching somebody to be a Marine includes a good dose of risk management training?
In other words, learning that this situation is more dangerous than this one, even if it's not obvious on the surface.
Right? In order to win a war, it's all risk management decisions plus violence.
That's sort of all it is.
Risk management, resources, I guess, and violence.
So, should we be surprised that the very people who have the lowest risk and, I think, this is speculative, but it seems reasonable, trained in risk management, and they've also been trained in To not be afraid of bullshit.
Now, I don't think COVID is bullshit.
I'm saying that if you looked at their specific risks, the big one is bullets and fragmentation from bombs.
That's like the big risk of going to the war.
That's like a real risk. We've actually trained this specific group of people, plus whatever they brought to the show, To not be afraid even in the scariest situation.
Should you be surprised that they're also not afraid in the least scary situation for them?
Now, of course, COVID is a very scary situation for the world, but for them specifically, it's kind of the last thing they need to worry about.
Let's say you're a Marine and you get infected.
What is the downside?
One week off with pay.
Right? Right?
I mean, maybe you're not where you want to be, but it's sort of not the worst thing in the world.
A week off with pay?
So I'm not saying that the Marines should or should not get vaccinated.
I'll leave that to them and the medical professionals and the military professionals.
There's certainly some precedent that you could Don't be surprised if it becomes mandatory.
I wouldn't be surprised, but we'll wait on that.
If I told you we're going to develop a system, a new system for the world, in addition to existing systems, and the new system would have this feature, that you could be punished because a stranger holds a different opinion.
Opinion, right?
We're not talking about anybody breaking a law or anything like that.
Would you agree to a system that allowed you to be punished because a stranger, somebody you don't even know, holds a different opinion than you do?
Would you ever agree to that?
That's our current system.
That's the system we sort of evolved into without thinking about it too much.
Because here's the setup.
If you have the opinion...
Which no court has upheld.
Actually, I can't even say this because I think I get banned from YouTube even mentioning the topic.
But there's a topic that had something to do with, let's say, electing somebody.
You can guess what that might be.
And there are some people who have different opinions about, let's say, the perfection of the system.
There are some people who think it was closer to perfect, and other people who might have a different opinion.
Now, since we haven't done a fully transparent look at everything there is to look at, both of those are opinions, meaning that nobody could know they're right.
You couldn't know which one is right, so it's just an opinion.
But our current system is that if the people who manage the various platforms Have a different opinion than you do.
They can punish you by taking you off the platform.
Because in the modern world, that is punishment.
It could punish you economically.
It could punish you socially.
It's punishment. Our current system allows a stranger to punish you for having a different opinion.
Now, it would be one thing if their opinion was confirmed by science.
You know, it was like 2 plus 2 is 4.
It's not really an opinion.
In that case, you could imagine there's some situation where, you know, the misinformation is bad for society and they have to do something about it.
But if it's a valid just difference of opinion, they can punish you for your opinion.
That's the current system.
Well, if I get punished for my opinions, you can find me on the Locals platform, subscription platform.
That's growing like crazy, by the way.
I've got thousands of subscribers now, and I'm giving them micro-lessons on improving their life with the promise that they will get thousands of dollars of life value per month.
So far, people are saying that they're getting that.
So we'll see if we can keep it up.
All right. Biden is...
Is putting together a commission of so-called independent scholars and whatnot to talk about court packing and other court reforms.
Now, what do you think of that?
Does this mean that Joe Biden is in favor of court packing and he's just putting a commission together to cover himself so that when he does it he can say, hey, all these independent people, Democrats and Republicans, they said it'd be okay.
Do you think that's what's going to happen?
I'm going to make a prediction, and it goes like this.
I, of course, and you may have noticed, have sometimes been critical of President Biden.
I've been critical of his, let's say, mental capabilities, etc.
But if you wanted to kill something with bureaucracy, And make it look like the shot was fired by someone else?
You couldn't do much better than Joe Biden.
Because it looks to me like Joe Biden is creating the commission specifically to not do court packing.
So this is my prediction.
I believe most people on the right are saying, oh no, this is the first step to court packing.
So he plans to do it, and he's just giving some cover for himself.
Totally possible.
All right? So let me say as clearly as possible, I'm not ruling that out.
If you're just looking at the surface, it kind of looks that way, doesn't it?
It looks sort of like he does plan to do it.
So I will acknowledge that it looks exactly like he plans to do it.
I'll acknowledge that that could be actually literally the reality.
But I'm going to predict the opposite.
I predict... That this is just cover, so that when the scholars, most of them or all of them, say this is a bad idea, and why, that Biden will have cover for not doing it.
Now, I think he might do some other court reforms.
I don't even know what they are. But there might, you know, it's always good to look at reforms.
Here's why I think the commission will not recommend court packing.
It's kind of obvious, isn't it?
Because the next president would just court-pack again.
And then when it changes parties again, they'd court-pack again.
Why wouldn't they?
And then where does it stop?
How big is the court?
But more importantly, it doesn't even matter how big the court is.
What matters is that would eliminate independence, or even the semblance of independence, of the judiciary.
It would effectively destroy the republic as it was originally conceived.
Now, you could argue, I'd like to destroy the republic.
But if you're not arguing that you would like to destroy the public, the republic, that's a bad idea.
Because it would. The independence of the three branches of government is the most essential part of the government.
And this would eliminate it.
It would make them basically...
It would make the court a captive of the executive of office.
So there's no point in having a court...
If the executive office pretty much, not 100%, but pretty much determines what they're going to decide before they even get a case.
So I can't believe that you would even get Democrats who are actual scholars, real scholars.
I'm not sure you can get a Democrat scholar to buy into this.
Now I was thinking the other day, and I'm going to modify a suggestion I had a long time ago.
I was thinking once, Wouldn't we be better off if you always made the court balanced?
So they actually had the same amount of conservative-leaning and right-leading people.
And that was my first thought.
I was like, well, that would be perfect.
Because then they wouldn't make any decisions unless you could get at least one person to kind of go over to the other side.
Otherwise it would just be tie, tie, tie, tie.
But if it was something important and the court really thought they need to move on it, somebody could go over to the other side.
That's what I was thinking.
I feel now that was a terrible idea.
Here's why. If it's even, your incentive to start trading It gets really high.
As in, well, we can't get anything done on anything, but you'd like to get this thing done, you conservatives.
And we liberals would like to get this other thing passed.
Why don't we make a deal?
We just need one of you.
To come over on this issue, and then we'll have one of us go over on that other issue.
Now, I don't believe that the justices have ever had a conversation like that.
I mean, I would like to believe that these are serious people who would never come close to any kind of horse trading.
But right now, they don't have to.
What happens if they had to?
It would be just like Congress.
It would just be horse training.
And then what happens if you get that situation?
Are they more susceptible to bribery?
If you take nine justices...
And expand it to any larger number, have you increased or decreased, or kept the same, the risk of bribery or blackmail?
It's more, right?
It's more. Because there are more people to bribe.
So there are all kinds of things wrong with court packing, and I think, and I predict...
That Joe Biden is using the bureaucracy and the system basically to kill it.
But he might do some court reforms that you might like.
Who knows? South Korea reportedly...
And I don't believe any news that comes out of...
I'm sorry, North Korea.
I don't believe any news that comes out of North Korea.
But the news is that there was some guy who was an official in education...
Who had been tasked with fixing education in some way in North Korea, but given no resources to do it.
And I guess he made the mistake of complaining that he wasn't getting enough resources to do his job.
And the way Kim Jong-un decided to fix this was by executing him, which is not funny.
Just the fact that I laughed.
That's just because I'm a terrible person.
It's not because it's funny.
Let's just get that clear.
It's not funny. I'm a terrible person.
So, this is what the guy said before they killed him, allegedly.
The chairman reportedly said, I don't understand why the authorities would choose to implement the act, create this commission...
And call busy professors away from their university jobs if they were not going to give the commission any resources, Park said.
Even if we make suggestions, they just tell us to keep our mouths shut, so let's go through the motions of gathering and then go home, he reportedly told his commission members.
Now, doesn't that sound like every employee of a big company?
You gave me this assignment, but you didn't give me enough resources!
And then the pointy-haired boss just executes him.
So this is a case of the simulation and code reuse.
Kim Jong-un has just become the pointy-haired boss.
Have you seen a picture of Kim Jong-un?
He is getting closer and closer to the little pointy-haired thing.
Sort of like flatter in the middle.
A little bit pointy-haired.
Code reuse. Simulation.
Alright, let's talk about the big news of the day, the Floyd trial.
And before I give you my legal analysis, here's the thing you need to know, and hear this clearly.
Number one, you should never get medical advice from a cartoonist.
Number two, don't take your financial advice from cartoonists.
Number three, Don't take legal advice from cartoonists.
Alright, we're going to do this just for fun.
Most of us are not lawyers, although weirdly I have a very large percentage of lawyers who watch this based on the messages I get.
So you people who are really lawyers, can you please keep me honest?
I'll be watching the comments as I make my ignorant and ill-informed analysis.
Are we all on the same page that what will follow will be ignorant and uninformed?
But fun. So I think one of the things I would like to do is do my analysis from a citizen perspective, not a lawyer's perspective.
Because there really are two things happening.
There's the The lawyer is doing lawyer things, and they understand that world, and they know what they're doing.
And that will create some kind of result.
But then there's this other thing, which is unfortunately bigger and more important, which is how the public is viewing it.
The public are, for the most part, not lawyers.
Just like us. Most of us.
Right? So I'm going to be talking in a way that I don't think is too far off from what this big batch of non-lawyers will be thinking and feeling.
In other words, very Approximate and inaccurate and not really understanding the law.
So I'm in that group.
So let's talk about that.
In my opinion, after watching both the prosecution and the defense do their job yesterday, I would say that the cause of death is established.
That the cause of death is established now, in my opinion.
So this is my opinion as just a person watching it, like a non-lawyer.
And in my opinion, homicide has been established by both the prosecution and the defense.
So right now the defense witness, I believe, has...
And I get the names confused of who's the...
which doctor is saying what.
But... I believe that even the defense has said that it was the police action that was the cause.
And that means homicide.
Right? So, here's the first part I want to assert.
That homicide, that question is now answered.
And I believe that even the jury will say to themselves, okay, homicide has now been proven.
And what I mean by that is that The evidence for a drug overdose, I think, has been eliminated because there's nobody who testified he had pills in his stomach or that he had immediately ingested it right before.
We had all heard that, right?
Hadn't we all heard that it looked like he had taken some pills during the arrest or something?
But there was no indication that it was in his stomach.
So we don't have evidence that he did anything that is likely in any realistic way to have coincidentally caused him to die from drugs at coincidentally the time the police were holding him down.
Now I'm going to talk about drugs being part of the cause.
They're part of the story for sure, in my opinion.
But here's what you need to know about homicide.
It's not a crime.
Did you know that? In the comments, tell me, how many of you knew that homicide is not a crime?
But homicide has been demonstrated to be true.
It's just not a crime.
And he hasn't been charged with homicide.
Do you know why he hasn't been charged with homicide?
Because it's not a crime, right?
Yeah, watch the comments.
Some people are saying, what the?
Yeah, that's what you should be saying.
I'm trying to trigger you into saying, what are you talking about?
How could homicide not be a crime?
It's not. Look it up.
Homicide simply means that a human killed somebody.
And killed is somewhat strictly defined, you know, or let's say by precedent, to mean that That a human did the last thing that pushed them over the edge.
So it could be that the human shot them, or it could be that the human did some other kind of action that was the final variable.
Now, this is really important.
If a human was the final variable in the death, that's homicide.
And I think that all of the medical people have said that if you took away the police action, it's unlikely he would have died.
Because what are the odds that he somehow had an overdose without taking drugs recently?
My understanding is overdoses happen pretty quickly after you take the wrong amount of drugs.
So it would be weird if he had taken the drugs hours before, And then just by coincidence, he happened to have an overdose death right when the police were sitting on him.
I mean, what are the odds?
So, yes, the police action resulted in his death.
That's homicide. All right, so are we all on the same page?
The homicide, at least I think from the jury's perspective, has been completely proven.
Because there is no medical person who says anything different.
There's no medical person who is saying...
The cause was an overdose, or the cause was his health.
Nobody's saying that. So it is homicide, right?
Again, I'm speaking as a non-lawyer, just like a person, just a person.
It's homicide. But that is not illegal, per se, because there are different reasons that you could be not guilty of any crime.
One would be self-defense.
If you kill somebody in self-defense, it's homicide.
It just doesn't happen to be illegal.
And I think that Chauvin has one other opportunity to do homicide without being illegal, and it goes like this.
A reasonable person would not know that what he was doing was a mortal danger.
So if Chauvin, Chauvin, whatever, And his lawyers can demonstrate that a reasonable person wouldn't have known this could kill somebody.
No crime is committed.
There has to be something in the officer's head that gets to either intention, and by the way, he's not even being charged with intentionally killing him.
Did you know that?
The charge does not include any thought that he did it intentionally.
It's just not even in the charges.
I think that'd be first degree, right?
The charge is that a reasonable person should have known that his actions would put at least a risk of death.
So that's what the prosecution has to show.
Let me give you a little more detail on this.
In psychology today, I know it's not a legal document, but there was a writer, Barrett Brogard, who did a real good job of just sort of laying out what the charges are.
So here are the charges.
His charge was second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter.
Now, here's a little bit more on that.
Now, first of all, Is this confusing?
This is really confusing stuff.
How many people in the jury are going to be capable of really sorting through this amount of nuance?
It's kind of hard. We're asking ordinary people to do a pretty tough task here, but I think they'll take it very seriously, and I have at least some optimism that they'll get it right.
So here's what we need to know.
There's nothing about intentional in the charges.
But, proving second degree, unintentional murder, this is what it would require.
Showing that the defendant, Officer Chauvin, Chauvin Chauvin, caused the victim's death, that part we know from the medical examiners, or at least that's the testimony, and had specific intent to, hold on, Inflict bodily harm short of death.
So, was the officer trying to harm Floyd, but maybe he didn't think that would kill him, but he was trying to cause him a lot of harm, and if that went too far, he would be guilty of murder.
Is that what happened? Well, how do you treat a police officer who does intentional harm in the In the act of subduing somebody.
If you tase somebody and they die with a taser, are you guilty of murder?
Because we know that a taser can kill people.
Do you know what kind of people can be killed by a taser?
People with weak hearts.
Such as, I'll just pick one example of a person with a weak heart, George Floyd.
If George Floyd had been tased, there was a pretty high likelihood he would have died from being tased.
Is tasing an ordinary thing that police do?
Well, I hate to use the word ordinary, but we see it a lot.
If you're a citizen, you've seen lots of footage of police tasing people.
And there is evidence that if you had a weak heart and you got tased, you could die.
There's some evidence a number of people have died that way.
Now, I don't believe that this situation was taser-worthy, meaning that I don't think he would have appropriately used the taser in that case, because that might have been a little bit more.
I don't know that for sure. But it seemed like it wasn't really called for.
The police had enough human power and Floyd was sort of only half resisting.
It didn't look like a taser situation to me.
But suppose you knew that within police procedure there's this thing called a taser, and it would have killed him, or could have.
You know, there's more risk with him.
That sort of gives you a context in your head, as just a citizen, that police do things that can kill people without intending to kill them.
That it's actually a normal...
Fairly routine, the police are putting, let's say, force on people in a variety of ways, and each of those variety of ways could actually kill somebody.
So I don't believe that in the context of police work, holding somebody down with the intent that it would hurt if they tried to get up, it didn't look like trying to hurt him so much as obviously trying to contain him.
Or, since we're talking about reasonable doubt, A reasonable person could say, I don't know, I can't read his mind.
I don't know if it was his intention to hurt him.
It looked like it was his intention just to keep him subdued.
So I think this part about specific intent to inflict bodily harm, short of death, is not demonstrated by any evidence.
Is it? Does anybody have any evidence from anybody that would suggest we know the officer's internal mental thoughts?
I don't think so. So it looks like the prosecution hasn't made that case.
So that one is second degree unintentional murder.
So here's another one.
Third degree murder. It requires showing that the accused, Officer Shaven, caused the victim's death and their acts were eminently dangerous and were performed with a depraved mind.
Now a depraved mind means that you're just sort of an evil person.
You're an evil person and you did things that you knew put somebody in mortal danger, but you did it anyway because you're just sort of a bastard.
Right? What evidence has been presented that would show that Chauvin has a depraved mind?
None. Right?
I don't believe there's any evidence presented to that.
Is there? Has anybody seen any evidence even...
Proposed that goes in that direction.
I haven't seen any. And that their acts were eminently dangerous.
So it's even two parts because there's the word and here.
So I'd have to be a lawyer to know that if you could really separate these ands.
But let's take it the way this writer wrote it and say that it has to be both.
Eminently dangerous. And done with this depraved mind thing.
There's no evidence of a depraved mind, no motivation in evidence, etc.
So, eminently dangerous, let's just look at that and see what evidence we have for that.
Now remember, the standard is reasonable doubt.
The standard is not, we know what happened.
The standard is, is there any reasonable doubt about the prosecution's story?
So let's see if there is.
What would...
Oh, this is interesting.
Before I do that...
So, without anybody really making note of it, the prosecution and the defense have agreed that the video has been debunked.
Do you believe that?
Is my statement true?
That as of yesterday, both the prosecution and the defense...
Are on the same page on this following fact, that the video has been debunked.
Here's what I mean.
Up until really about yesterday, 100% of the world believed that his knee was on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes.
Pretty much that's all anybody's talking about.
His knee was on his neck for nine minutes.
And now, both the prosecution and the defense, based on witnesses, agree that wasn't the case.
It looked like it, but it wasn't.
Because the video shows that his knee was in different places.
And I'm saying that the prosecution agrees because they changed the way they talked about it.
Now they're talking about the knee and the neck area.
On the back and the neck area.
They've started moving it off of the artery stuff.
And now it's just sort of in that area.
And we don't know how much pressure was on it, etc.
So, this is...
Although the fact that his knee was not on a neck did not change...
The potential liability for the officer.
Because we have medical testimony now that wherever that knee was, whether it was sort of backish or neckish, both of them could have killed him or would have been the cause of death.
So it's no defense, apparently, to say, no, it wasn't exactly on the neck the whole time.
Because the position of him with the handcuffs on, on the ground, with a guy on his back, and a bad heart, and had some drugs in him, he put all that together, and one of the medical people said he was killed, caused a death, by the knee on the neck-ish, back-ish area.
But here's the point.
It debunks the video.
It doesn't defend shaven.
Because the new theory of death about the specifics of it still would make him guilty of something if he did it with this depraved whatever and some kind of knowledge that it would be bad.
But it's important that the defense change their entire theory in the middle of the thing.
The entire world believed the one thing that we all believed to be true was that this damn knee It was on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes, and we just found out that wasn't true.
And even the defense is acknowledging it.
That's a big deal.
Here's why. It showed that you can't tell what's happening on videos.
Right? That's the takeaway.
The takeaway is we were all defense, prosecution, public...
100% of the people who saw the video initially were all wrong about a really important point.
Where exactly was that knee?
Because if the knee was on the neck the whole time, suddenly that feels like you know a little bit about his intentions, right?
Maybe you don't, but it feels like you do, doesn't it?
That feels like an intention.
But if you see that he moved it around, now you've got reasonable doubt.
But that reasonable debt would be removed, perhaps, if you thought that Shaven knew that no matter where his knee was, this positional asphyxiation thing was potentially going to be fatal.
Did he know that?
So, I think it's amazing that the video has been debunked, but it's still the evidence.
So here's how I would approach it if I were the defense.
And again, I'm not a lawyer, so just assume that I don't even know what's going to be allowable in court, right?
Doesn't mean any of this could actually happen.
I'm just giving you my human being defense, not a lawyer defense.
I would start by saying that we live in a world in which it is typical to see two movies on one screen.
And I would explain that.
I'd say, how many of you in the jury are familiar with the Laurel and Yanni situation?
And you would see the people nervously giggle in the jury, because most of them are familiar with how easily they're fooled with the Laurel and Yanni.
And then you'd say, then I'd say, and ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you know that before you came in here, every one of us, and I have to admit, even the defense, before we looked at the video in detail, We too thought that knee was on his neck for nine minutes.
That was the movie we thought we were watching.
But now that we've watched it from a number of angles and had experts testify, we know that there was another movie playing at the same time.
There was one that we all thought we saw, and there's one that's different.
So different, in fact, that the prosecution has changed the cause of death.
Still, they say it's my client, but a completely different mechanism of death.
That we're just learning now?
It was the video that got us here.
And we've all just agreed that we didn't see it right.
Video is bad evidence.
Laurel and Yanni taught you that.
You've probably seen a number of videos in your own experience.
I don't have to mention which ones.
But in your own experience, have you had, let's say in the last year or two, have you seen anything that looked real on video and later you found out it wasn't, besides this case?
And most people would be, yeah, I can think of an example.
And by the way, it's good hypnosis to let them come up with their own example.
If you give them an example, they'll fight with it and say, I'm not sure that's an example.
If you say, have you ever seen an example where people were fooled by video, and maybe you were, people will come up with their own example that they don't fight with.
So that's why you let them fill in the blank.
You don't fill it in for them.
So once I have established that the prosecution had changed their entire argument from the neck thing to the positional thing, I would say, look how easily we can be fooled.
Just to put some doubt in their heads, right?
And then I would say, if we're trying to figure out whether Derek Chauvin knew that he was putting his client at risk, here are the questions we must ask.
Number one, why did all the other police officers who were in the scene Not intervene.
Well, there's a number of possibilities, and we don't have it in evidence, right?
One possibility is they were just...
Maybe they were timid.
They didn't want to, you know, interfere with a veteran officer.
One is they were all racists.
Every one of them was a racist, and they were just happy to see Floyd killed.
I don't think that's the case.
But I'm just saying all the things that are possible.
Here's another thing that's possible.
Did you notice that all the police did nothing, but yet all of the non-police, the citizens, were quite sure that he was being killed?
But none of the police at least acted as if they thought that was a serious risk.
Why would that be?
Well, I'll give you a few possibilities.
One, you're a bum, bro.
One, I'll just get rid of you.
The best you can do is yell at me in all caps.
And by the way, you haven't heard my conclusion yet, so I'm just saying what the defense could be.
Don't assume this is my opinion.
I'm just telling you what the defense could be.
So why did all the cops stand down and the non-cops thought it looked like murder?
Here's one possibility.
Remember, we're only going for reasonable doubt.
So you don't have to agree that this is the reason.
You just have to agree it's one of the possible reasons and we don't know.
That's all I'm going for.
One of the possible reasons is police are experienced and they're trained.
Citizens are not experienced in police stops and they're not trained.
The police...
Probably are aware of the guy who is the police trainer who testified and said that, in his opinion, Chauvin used the least amount of force to get the job done and that it was not a deadly situation.
Now, is he right or is he wrong?
The police trainer.
It doesn't matter.
Here's why. The police trainer is a reasonable person.
Nobody said he's crazy.
He's a reasonable person.
If you had put the police trainer in Chavin's situation, he was saying he would have acted about the same.
And he trains it.
He not only trained Chavin, but he probably directly or indirectly was involved with the training for all of the other officers.
Could it be that the reason people who are trained...
Didn't get into it.
It's because the training told them this was safe.
But if you were a citizen, you had not been trained by that.
You've never heard this training.
Remember, they usually say they can't breathe.
They say they're in pain.
The handcuffs are hurting their wrists.
They all say it.
It doesn't mean it's true.
But the public's never had that training, never had that experience.
So I would say that the activity of the other police officers, the fact that not one of them would get involved, suggests that police are watching a different movie.
The movie they were seeing is just somebody taken down according to policy.
And it would be safe according to their movie, the way they were trained.
The citizens were seeing somebody with a knee on their neck for nine minutes as the lights were going out in his life.
They were watching a different movie.
So to imagine that these people viewed the same incident is just not true.
They weren't viewing the same incident.
It was the same facts.
But the way they filtered it had to be different.
One was filtered through training and experience.
One was filtered through no training and experience.
So there's some reasonable doubt right there.
Now, what about the way Shaven himself acted?
Do you think that if he believed that he was putting Floyd in mortal danger, that he would have continued to do it in front of lots of witnesses, in front of other police, cameras going?
Could Shaven have reasonably believed that That putting himself, just the officer himself, in a situation where witnesses would watch him end the life of a black man who's on the ground.
Do you think that Shaven thought that there would be no consequences if something bad happened to Floyd in that situation?
Not reasonably.
No reasonable person would think that he would just go about his day if Floyd died.
Is there any evidence that Shevan is a sociopath?
I don't believe so.
I don't believe there's any evidence that he's some kind of weird sociopath.
How would you feel if you held somebody down and they died?
How would you feel?
It would ruin your frickin' life if you killed somebody accidentally.
You would never get over that, even if you're a cop, right?
Cops are a little tougher.
They've seen more things, they've got training.
But even a cop, it's going to ruin his frickin' life if he accidentally kills a guy because he had his knee on him for nine minutes.
So, is it reasonable to imagine that even Chauvin knew that he was putting this guy in that much danger?
When his trainer would have done the same thing, the police around him apparently either didn't intervene or would have done the same thing.
Now, you could ask yourself, should he have known?
And that would be an interesting question, but I don't think it would be legally useful.
Because all you have to demonstrate is that a reasonable person in that same situation would have acted the same way.
A reasonable person.
And we have that proof because the trainer acted the same way, and all of the other police officers Acted the same way.
Everybody who had similar training, everybody, acted the same way.
And everybody who didn't have that training acted a different way.
Two movies on one screen, with a perfect explanation of why people are seeing the movie differently.
All right. There's also the issue that the crowd was threatening, and apparently police procedure is that you take care of the threat to the officers first, and then you treat anybody who might be having medical problems.
You could argue that it shouldn't be that way, but it is that way, and that's exculpatory, too.
But here's the interesting thing.
Oh, so here are two kinds of demonstrations that the The defense could do.
Now, I don't know if these would be allowed, so there's a question of what the judge allows.
But imagine the defense attorney takes in a bathroom scale, puts it on the floor during closing arguments, gets down on two knees, one knee on the bathroom scale and one knee on the floor.
What do you think the scale would register as weight?
Assuming That you're trying to not put your full weight on the down knee.
What would be the weight it would?
Well, have you tried it?
I tried it this morning.
I put down...
It looks like somebody tried it because they have a number there.
So with me, it was around 50 pounds.
Alright, so my weight is probably 158, something like that.
Shaven was 140.
So not too far out of the range.
And mine was about 50 pounds.
Okay? So one demonstration is just having somebody get down and about the same size as Shaven, or have Shaven himself.
I guess you could have him do it himself.
Just get down on the thing and show that it looks like about 50 pounds at minimum.
Now, Does that mean that Shaven was giving him only 50 pounds of pressure?
Or could he have been leaning right into it?
It would be hard to tell in the video, but it gives reasonable doubt.
Because now you're not sure, was he putting 140 pounds on it, or was he putting 50 pounds on it?
Because George Floyd was a big guy, right?
Let me ask you this.
Well, actually, let's take the next example first.
The other thing, and I don't think this would necessarily be allowed by the judge, but you can imagine the defense attorney giving his closing arguments handcuffed and on his stomach while three people were sitting on him, and he just talks through it.
So he could demonstrate it that way.
But let me tell you the most persuasive way to do a demonstration.
One of the things that the video lies about is the sizes of the people involved.
Remember, you know, a picture doesn't lie?
Yes, it does. Pictures lie better than anything.
There's nothing that lies better than a picture.
Pictures are the best way to lie.
But one of the things that the video doesn't give you when you're seeing George Floyd's head, basically, and then you're seeing Shaven, you can't tell how big either of them are.
Floyd was like 6'4 and, you know, probably 200-something, and he was a big strapping, youngish guy.
Shaven was 140 pounds and 5'8, I think, 5'8.
So if you did your demonstration in the courtroom and you were trying to show the jury What they didn't necessarily see on video, somebody says 6'6 and 240 pounds.
I can say that it's somewhere in that range.
So here's how you do the demonstration in the court.
You would get a very large, wait for it, white man to play George Floyd.
Got to be white, but about the same size, about the same age.
Big, healthy-looking, muscular, youngish, big white guy.
Then you get three black guys who are about 140 pounds to play the role of the police officers.
And then you could see that there was a big difference between the people on top and the person that they were subduing.
Because imagine the The jury is seeing the actual dimensions of the people, which you can't tell on the video.
It doesn't show you. Right?
Somebody thinks I'm a right-wing shill.
If anybody's new to this, I'm left of Bernie, and I don't identify with too many things that you would call right-wing.
So do your homework.
Don't be a fucking bitch.
Learn something about me before you criticize, okay?
Just don't be a bitch about it.
Just try to up your game a little bit.
Criticism's fine. You're welcome to criticize.
But just get a little bit of information before you do it.
Because if you're criticizing without even knowing who I am, you're just being a bitch.
So don't be that, okay?
All right. And it is fair and interesting to talk about the trial and how it will go.
This is not a political thing.
It's a legal thing, and it's interesting.
It's also a prediction thing.
It lets you know where things are going.
All right, so if you did that demonstration, I think people would see it, and if you reversed the ethnicities of the people involved, it would really mess up the brains of the jury, because then they would see with their own eyes that race had influenced them.
You want the jury to know that the races of the people involved bias them.
And the way to do it is give a demonstration where you reverse the races and nobody would give a fuck.
If a 140-pound black police officer put his knee for nine minutes on a 240-pound Strapping six-foot-six white guy on the ground, nobody would give a fuck.
Right? And I'm not saying that has anything to do with racism.
It has to do with there's a natural, what would you call it, revulsion toward the powerful beating up the less powerful.
It's a natural revulsion.
And you could even be a racist and you'd have the revulsion.
Because when you see somebody in power doing something bad to somebody who you think is a group that has no power, that's way worse than if you reversed it and the person getting hurt is the powerful one in other situations.
And reversing the ethnicities to do your demonstration, you wouldn't have to say any of that.
The people in the jury would get it.
They would say, why did this seem so bad when the races were the other way?
And the answer is, it is worse when the race is the other way.
It's not an illusion.
It is worse. When the powerful are squishing the less powerful, that's worse.
But that doesn't change the legal liability, the fact that it feels worse and is worse.
It is worse, right? I won't even say it feels worse.
It's just worse. You know, squashing the less powerful is just the worst.
But it's not worse from a legal perspective.
It's no worse from a legal perspective, and this is the context.
So... Let's see...
Here's a question I have.
If it takes three things to kill somebody, which one is the cause of death?
So the defense's witness said that the death was caused by a collection of three things.
That he had a bad heart.
He was on drugs, which can change your breathing.
And breathing was the issue.
And the police officers put him in a position that restricted his breathing.
Now, legally, that's homicide, as I said.
And legally... It puts the last action as the cause.
The last action was the police.
So technically, legally, the way definitions work, the way the law works, the cop killed him.
Doesn't mean it's illegal, because he maybe didn't know it.
But the important thing here is that your common sense about this is a little different than how the law treats it.
And necessarily, right?
It doesn't mean anything's broken.
My common sense goes like this.
If it took all three of those things to kill him, they were all the cause.
I get that the last thing that happens always looks like the cause, but that's an illusion.
It required all three things, or at least, wait for it, there's a reasonable doubt that he would have died without the first two things.
Is there anybody who testified that if he...
Did anybody testify that we could know he would have died short of having a heart problem and a drug problem?
You kind of don't know.
If you took those other two things away, the drugs that affect your breathing, the heart that affects your breathing, and that he died because he couldn't breathe?
I don't know. I feel like...
I get that one has to be the cause.
It's just the last thing that happened.
But our common sense says three things killed him.
Because if you took away any one of the three, he'd probably be alive.
If the police hadn't stopped him, I think he'd be alive.
If he didn't have a heart problem, don't know, but there's a good chance he'd be alive.
If he hadn't done drugs, don't know if it made a difference, for sure, but there's a good chance.
So we're only talking about reasonable doubt, right?
That's pretty reasonable in the doubt category, I would say.
Especially when we know that tasing can actually kill you if you have a heart like George Floyd's.
Actually, I shouldn't say that.
That would be a little bit too much medical certainty.
But say somebody has a weak heart would be in trouble.
So let's see what else we got here.
All right, that's enough for that.
So my take on it is that the news will be...
So far, the news is reporting this.
The news is reporting that homicide has largely been demonstrated.
What they don't tell you is what I just told you.
That that doesn't mean it's a crime.
Watch how illegitimate the press is when they describe the homicide without telling you that's not illegal by itself.
They won't tell you that.
You will be led to believe that proving it was homicide, which I believe has been proven, to my satisfaction anyway, they're going to tell you that that's the same as murder by Sort of just talking about it the same way.
They won't say it directly. They'll just conflate murder with homicide until you can't tell the difference and you want to riot over it.
That's where it's going.
Speaking of propaganda, let me give you two sentences and you tell me which one of these is propaganda and which one of these is just an accurate statement.
We'll take a hypothetical.
Hypothetically, let's say there was a congressperson who had been charged with something.
And there were two ways to describe this thing they had been, not charged with, let's say accused.
Let's say there's a congressman who's merely been accused of something.
No trial. He's been accused of something and there are two ways to say it.
One way goes like this.
The congressman is accused of having sex with a minor.
Here's the second way to say it, and both of these will be true.
The congressman has been accused of having sex with a 17-year-old.
Which one of those is propaganda, and which one of those is just the news?
Which one did CNN say?
CNN always says, sex with a minor.
Right? And they're trying to trap you into saying, Wait a minute.
17's not so bad.
Oh, what did you say?
Pedophile. It's a trap.
So, somebody says the first one.
Yeah. So, when you see propaganda like that, where the first thing that you say is the thing people remember.
Now, I think I saw Jake Tapper say he was accused of having sex with a minor and then clarified a 17-year-old.
Wouldn't it be better to say he was accused of having sex with a 17-year-old who's technically a minor?
Do those sound the same to you?
Because one of them is trying to get a result, and the other one is describing what happened, I would say.
And by the way, if you have two ways to describe something and it's only an allegation, you do have a social responsibility to use the description of That doesn't make him look guilty.
Because there's not even a charge, much less a court case.
We don't even have a victim.
And they're already talking about him like he's guilty.
Without a victim. Meaning we don't know there's a real person yet.
If there ever is.
Alright. Nate Silver was hilarious in a tweet.
You should be following Nate Silver.
He does a better job of sticking with the data and the politics than most people.
Here's what he tweeted.
I laughed for a long time over this.
He goes, 54% of people who have already been vaccinated are still very or somewhat worried about catching COVID. And...
But only 29% of people who refuse to get vaccinated are very or somewhat worried about catching COVID. And then here's his punchline.
Great job, everyone.
That's like a perfect punchline.
Great job, everyone.
It's so droll.
Basically, it doesn't matter what you do, you're going to be unhappy, I guess.
One way or another, you'll be unhappy.
All right. There's a video that I think YouTube took down, but I saw it.
I don't know. I'm not sure how took down it is since I saw it.
But there's this Dr.
Cole who's made a couple of claims, and I want to run them by you because I don't know that they're true.
And he said the following.
So fact check me on this.
He said all super spreader events have been indoors.
Can somebody fact check that?
First of all, I'm not sure we know where all the super spreader events have been.
Because I'm not sure you'd know there was a super spreader event.
You just know a lot of people are infected.
But is that true?
That all super spreader events have been indoors?
Because that would be a pretty big deal.
Yeah, all known. So the problem is whether it's just the ones that are known.
Here's the other thing he said, which I have much lower...
Opinion of its credibility.
He said there's no such thing as flu and cold season.
There's only low vitamin D season.
In other words, he's saying that in some seasons your vitamin D is low and that's why you catch things that you wouldn't normally catch otherwise.
Do you buy that? Here's the problem with the vitamin D thing.
And you might remember that, you know, a year ago I was making all kinds of noise about the fact that it looked like vitamin D was the The big correlation here?
It just seemed to be that where there was lots of vitamin D, people had better results.
And I didn't know that that was anything but a coincidence, but it was worth looking at.
And I still think that you have to be careful about that correlation, because people who are old and sick have low vitamin D. It could be just another way to know you're old and sick.
It doesn't have to necessarily...
Yeah, it doesn't necessarily have to be the vitamin D works.
It could just be a correlation that sick people don't have much vitamin D. But that said, I'm still going to keep my vitamin D up because it's good for you in general.
Here's my next speculative question.
We've all been told that herd immunity is when you get to 70-80% or whatever.
I think this virus they're thinking is higher because it's so spready.
But Does the herd immunity number in that 70% range, does that make sense when your virus attacks certain parts of the population and leaves others largely unhurt?
And when the only people who are super spreaders are the people who are pretty sick and obese and they're the ones who are getting vaccinated first?
It seems to me That the idea of herd immunity that made sense for all other things doesn't make sense in this case.
And what I'm saying is that, and this is just speculation, right?
So don't take this as anything you should believe.
More of a question, I guess, even question.
If you were to, let's say hypothetically, you vaccinated everybody over 70 and everybody over 50 who's obese, And I think we could do that, right?
Or at least you get almost all of them.
Everybody else could still get the virus and it could rage through the rest of the community, but there wouldn't be any super spreaders, right?
How fast does this virus spread if you could snap your fingers and the only kind of spread was the one-to-one type?
And that's it. And the persons getting it never got sick, because let's say they're young or whatever they are.
I don't know that 70% is necessary.
I think it's more like getting all the super spreaders and then maybe it takes care of itself.
I don't know. Just a question.
I have a second question.
Is there anything like microimmunity?
So we've heard that the amount of the viral load you get has a lot to do with how sick you get.
You know, that plus your natural health.
So what would happen to a perfectly healthy person who is exposed to just a little bit of virus?
Could they beat the virus without getting symptoms and become sort of micro-immune And you get to herd immunity just because they were exposed, but maybe they don't even test.
Could you test negative for COVID, but have antibodies?
Is that a thing?
I don't know. And if you can't get COVID outdoors, And we don't think you get it on airplanes enough to stop flights?
Where the hell are you getting it?
You know, I have this theory that I've never said before, let's say a hypothesis, that it's a sexually transmitted problem.
I'm just going to put that out there.
I just have a theory that it might be sexually transmitted.
I'm only kidding about that.
But when you see the kids are not having bad problems and the seniors are, there is rampant sex in old folks' homes and nursing homes.
A lot of people don't know that.
But there is pretty rampant, unprotected sex among seniors.
