Episode 1343 Scott Adams: Vaccinations Paused, UFOs Confirmed, Another Ruparred Video, and Lots More
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Content:
Ruparred video: Lt. Caron Nazario
Duante Wright shooting
Nate Silver on J&J vaccine suspension
Unidentified flying smudges
BLM co-founder's purchase of 4 homes
Chauvin trial persuasion key points
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Come on in. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best part of the day.
Every single time.
And today will be no exception.
Well, unless it's better than usual.
That's possible. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of Tinker, Chelsea, Stine, a kinteen jug, a flask of a vessel of any kind.
Then you need to fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine here the day thing that makes everything better except those blurry UFO photographs.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and I think you'll like it.
Go. Yeah.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
I feel my body healing in a variety of ways.
The COVID can't touch me now.
Say you need a vaccination, but maybe you just need coffee.
That's my medical advice.
So Rasmussen is reporting on some results of their polls.
Some interesting stuff.
So Rasmussen says, most voters say it's more important to prevent cheating in elections than than to make it easier to vote by 2 to 1.
So twice as many people think it's better to prevent cheating than to make it a little easier for people to vote.
They also say that just 29% of likely voters say the laws requiring photo ID discriminates against some voters, while 62% say photo ID laws don't discriminate.
Now, it seems really, really clear what the public wants.
The public wants voter ID laws.
But how much can we allow our politicians to ignore the will of the people when it's this much?
See, I'm very much in favor of our politicians overriding the public If the public is trying to discriminate, for example, is that what's happening?
Because it feels like there are an awful lot of people who are on the same page.
They must be from the left and the right to be this majority.
A majority this big has to have lots of people crossing over.
And I'll tell you again, if I ran for president, this is what I would do.
I would say, I'm just going to agree with the public.
That's it. I'll just agree with the public unless I have secret military information they don't have.
Because this is really just sort of a public confidence question, and the public is very clear.
You rarely can get a poll on anything important in which you would get a two-to-one result.
On politics? When do you get a two-to-one result?
If I were president, I would just say, I don't even think it matters what my opinion is.
Two to one is just done.
That's just done. You know, I don't think you can...
You know, unless the leaders come up with, you know, well, we have secret information or something like that, I just feel like when the public wants something by two to one, you just kind of got to do it, right?
You better have a pretty, pretty good reason not to.
And they don't. Obviously, it's just politics.
Here's a little question for you.
I would like to see your answers in the comments.
And I'm going to offer this because I think when you read stories about famous people who get accused of various improprieties, that you might not have the right context.
And so I was thinking to myself, how many times have I personally, just me, been accused falsely of a felony?
How many times do you think, just me, just one person, I'm a public figure, how many times have I been falsely accused of a felony?
Now keep in mind, I would know if it's falsely, right?
Maybe you don't know, but I would know.
I mean, you know if you did or did not commit a felony.
How many times? I can't tell if you're saying for yourself or me, so your answers are confusing.
I can think of five times right off the top of my head.
Five times that real people have made real accusations about felonies.
Like really serious stuff.
I'll just give you one example.
You know, one crazy person who believes I traveled to Canada to rifle through her house and Sexually molest her.
Never met her. She lives in another country.
Have no contact ever, even once.
That's normal for famous people.
If you're in the public eye, being falsely accused five separate times of felonies, like I'm talking about some serious stuff, it happens all the time.
You just don't hear about it.
It's just privately handled, etc.
So when I hear a story about whoever it is is accused of some crime or impropriety, I say to myself, well, they're a famous person.
Five to one, it's not true.
So right out the chute, I say, well, it's five to one, not true, just based on experience.
Recently I got Rupard.
You know, Rupard is where somebody takes something out of context.
Usually referring to a video, but today somebody came at me insisting that I have a history of being a men's rights advocate and saying terrible things about other people.
None of that ever happened.
I once wrote a blog post in which I made fun of men's rights advocates.
That's it. And because I once made fun of them, it got taken out of context by somebody who didn't understand what I was saying and turned into, I'm a men's rights activist and I apparently hate all women and stuff like that.
Who is that? So remember I told you that most news stories involve at least one person who doesn't exist.
And once you see the pattern, you can't unsee it.
It's just all the big stories have a person who doesn't exist as an integral part of the story.
In this story about me, apparently there's an imaginary person who once wrote something supportive of men's rights groups.
That person doesn't exist.
It's literally an imaginary person who is central to my story.
How about the president who was colluding with Russia to win the election, called Nazis fine people in Charlottesville, and suggested drinking bleach?
That person doesn't exist.
There's no such person.
And yet, most of the stories for the last four years were about that person.
Who is imaginary?
That person doesn't exist.
Never has. So once you start seeing the non-existent person in each story, it's hard to unsee it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, who I think does a great job of popularizing science, and because he happens to be black, I think he adds a little extra, you know, for the popularizing science, and I think he's a real good force in the world.
That doesn't mean I agree with everything he says.
For example, he tweeted that the good thing about science is that it's true, whether or not you believe in it.
For what he's trying to say, I would say that's a fair statement.
Science If you do it right, and you've repeated it, and peer-reviewed, and you've waited long enough, yeah, science is about what's true.
But here's my problem.
Here's my problem. You and I, we have no direct contact with science.
Do you know how many times I touched some science this week?
Never even got my hands on it.
Do you know how much science I'm holding in my hand?
Nothing. Do you know how much science I've got in my pocket?
None. I don't have any contact with science.
I don't do any science.
I don't even talk to a scientist.
So the only thing you and I know about science is what a human told us.
Now let me tell you about humans.
There is no less credible biological entity than a human being.
Let's do a little test.
Let's say my little remote control here.
How many times has it lied to me?
Never. Never.
How about my pen?
How many lies has my pen told me?
None. But how about human beings?
Well, human beings have a little bit less of a good track record, if you know what I mean.
And the only science I'm ever seeing is from one of those.
So yeah, science is probably true.
Unfortunately, it gets filtered through the most non-credible biological entities ever known to humanity.
People. People.
So, let me say it as clearly as possible.
Believing in science is a stupid thing.
Because you're really believing in people and trusting people is stupid.
Really believing in people and trusting people is stupid.
Can I just say that?
So, that's my opinion.
Alright, here's another Rupar alert.
If you don't know, being Rupard usually...
Usually means that somebody took a video and clipped down parts that reversed its meaning.
And that happened again yesterday.
How many of you saw the video of the military service member who got pulled over by two police people and they got into a little war of words and the next thing you know He wasn't getting out of the car, and he got pepper sprayed, etc.
How many of you saw that video?
If you saw the one that's on the news, you got Rupard.
You should see the whole video.
It reverses the whole situation.
If you watch the clip, you'll see a guy who's saying sort of reasonable things.
You know, what's this all about?
My hands are showing.
Can you explain what this stop is all about?
And he's a member of the service, and the police look a little irrational.
If you see the clips that are on the news, it's a real clear case of bad police working.
That's all. Bad policing.
But, if you happen to see the whole video, it starts where he sets up, the person who was stopped, sets up his phone before the police even come up to the car, and you can tell how happy he is, unfortunately.
You can tell that he's kind of happy about the situation he's going to create.
So, long story short, if you watch the whole video, you can see him creating a situation for an altercation.
Very clearly. I mean, you couldn't possibly watch the whole video and not believe that he wasn't intentionally creating a conflict.
The police thought to themselves, hey, this guy looks like he's intentionally creating a conflict.
And they were right.
Now, did they handle it right?
Nope. I think probably one of the police has already been fired.
I said when I saw it, I think he needs to get fired.
All the people saying, check your sound, the problem's at your end.
So just reboot. I'm not going to do anything.
So just know that when you ask me to fix the sound, I'm never going to do it.
I'm just never going to do it.
I will sometimes end the broadcast.
But if you ask me to fix the sound, I'm never going to do it, okay?
Just know that. I'm never going to do it.
I won't change anything to fix the sound once the broadcast is started, okay?
So you can stop saying it.
So, yeah, so we've got Rupard on that.
Then we've got this other tragic situation with Duane Wright.
I'm sorry, not Duane.
Duante Wright.
And he was shot by a police officer who believed that she was using her...
She believed she had her taser in her hand, but she actually had her handgun.
And you could tell from the video that it's very obvious.
And I'm glad they released the video as soon as they did.
If you watch the video, it's obvious she mixed up the taser and the gun.
And apparently that's a thing.
I didn't realize that that's happened a number of times.
So it's exactly what it looked like.
It was a mistake, a bad one.
Somebody died. But I feel like we always dance around the following thing.
I've not yet seen one of these police shootings that would have happened.
I know they exist.
There's some of that type.
But the ones that always are in the news seem to have the same characteristic.
Which is nobody would have been dead unless at least two people were stupid.
One of them being the person who died, and the other being at least one police officer doing something stupid.
We don't really have any deaths that seem to be the ones that are in the news, in which even only one person was stupid.
It's a double stupid.
The cause of death is stupidity.
Because none of it would happen without a double stupidity happening in the same place at the same time, at the same time somebody had some deadly force.
Because you can imagine any one of these cases could have been different if either the person stopped and acted differently, or the police officers had been a little smarter.
I don't think I've seen an exception to that.
There are exceptions, so let me be clear.
There are exceptions where just one person did something stupid.
In that case, usually a police officer, unfortunately.
But mostly it's the other kind.
It's the double stupid.
When a person dies, it's our natural instinct to be respectful and never say, well, I think they sort of contributed by being stupid.
Now, that doesn't mean they're stupid in general.
Everybody's stupid sometimes, right?
I'm stupid sometimes, more than I like.
So we're all stupid in pockets.
But you have to have two pockets of stupidity hitting them at the same time to end up with somebody dead most of these times.
I asked the following question because it just feels like this should be a thing.
So there's a quote from back in 2000.
And I think it's real, and it goes like this.
It is from former CIA director William Colby, and he is quoted by David McGowan, who wrote a book called Derailing Democracy in 2000.
So there's a quote reported by somebody, so you don't know, you can't be 100% sure it was really said, but it's reported.
That this former CIA director said, and I quote, the Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.
First of all, do you think he really said that?
Maybe. But do you think it's true?
Do you think that the CIA owns every major person in every major media?
In 2021?
Well, here's how to figure that out.
To answer your question, yes, the tasers do have a trigger.
Some of the tasers have the form factor of exactly a pistol with the safety in the same place and the trigger in the same place.
There's a little weight difference, especially in the trigger, I'm told, but you wouldn't detect that in a moment of chaos.
So yeah, it's a thing. Other people have pulled the trigger on the taser when thinking it's a gun, so that's actually something that happens.
So much so that there's training to avoid it.
If you have training to avoid it, it's a thing.
Alright, so anyway, if it's true that the CIA basically owns every major media figure, meaning news figure, I assume, wouldn't that extend, because this was back in 2000, would that not have extended to social media by now?
So that people who have large blue check accounts on Twitter, let's say, would they also not be owned by the CIA by now?
Or worse, a foreign entity?
It's only a matter of time, right?
And so I ask the question of any blue checks out there, for the ones who talk about politics and have lots of followers, I ask how many of them have ever been approached by a domestic or foreign intelligence agency?
As you might imagine, nobody said yes.
Nope. Now, that doesn't mean it's not happening, but it's not something somebody's going to say in a tweet.
Now, people ask, Scott, why are you asking this?
Is it because you were approached?
Well, I'll tell you, I wouldn't have a way to know, which is the sort of fascinating part about it.
Yeah, the fascinating part is that it wouldn't necessarily be somebody who's on the payroll of an intelligence agency.
It would be somebody maybe associated with or, you know, working in coordination with or something like that.
So I wouldn't know.
All I would know is that people have contacted me.
They've sent me links that they want me to retweet, which happens every day.
How would I know? So, yeah.
I mean, as far as I know, I've never been aware of anybody who got their paycheck from an intelligence agency.
I'm not aware of anything like that.
But you have to assume that you're being influenced.
You just don't exactly know how.
Yeah, he drowned mysteriously, didn't he?
Somebody says, am I a double agent?
What would that be in this case?
A double agent? Conspiracy theory much?
Oh, Paul, let me speak to that.
So it would be a conspiracy theory if I said it definitely is happening, because I don't have evidence.
But here's my point, and I've said this in a different context.
Whenever you have a situation where something can be corrupted, and doing so would be a major gain to somebody, and you have lots of people involved, That thing will always be corrupted.
Not sometimes.
Always. 100% of the time.
Because you just have to wait.
It doesn't mean you're corrupted on day one.
It means you'll eventually get there if you keep that situation.
Because always somebody is going to take the chance.
But they might fail.
Somebody else will take a chance.
They might fail. The point is people are going to keep trying until they get away with something.
You always have enough.
Where do you get the full video?
I don't have a link handy, but it's out there.
All right. That's just a question I put out there.
Because, you know, most of your opinions are assigned to you by the media, but one wonders how many of those opinions were assigned to the media by an intelligence agency.
It's not zero. I mean, I feel like I can say that.
Some of your opinions came directly from the CIA. Some of your opinions probably came directly from foreign intelligence agencies.
It just got laundered through the media.
But you think it's your opinion now.
All right, I guess the Johnson& Johnson vaccinations were paused because they had just a handful of some problems.
As Nate Silver, who, again, you have to follow Nate Silver.
There are a handful of people that are just sort of must-follows if you're going to be an informed person in the world.
And Nate Silver is one of them.
You know, even if you don't like anything about his politics or whatever, you've got to follow him just for the math, right?
Because people can't do math.
They can't do statistics.
They can't do risk management.
But he can. So follow Nate.
He says in a tweet, 6 cases out of 7 million people, what a disaster.
This is going to get people killed.
It's going to create more vaccine hesitancy.
Oh yeah, well, these people don't understand cost-benefit analysis.
There it is. So Nate is saying that this is just an obvious case of people who can't do math.
I'm saying math, but it's risk management.
How do you argue with that?
It's six people out of seven million.
I just don't see the argument for what they're doing, or at least the way they're presenting it.
But I guess the public, once they hear there's a problem, they're going to want to get an answer to it.
So I have still not taken my vaccination.
It's just still too hard to get it where I live.
We don't really have much of a hot spot here.
So I'm just sort of waiting to get more information, certainly waiting until it's available locally.
And I'll make a decision then.
Remember I told you about court packing, and I said that Biden putting that to a committee was probably a clever way to kill it.
And it turns out that Harry Reid, prominent Democrat, believes the same thing.
That the committee is not going to recommend a change in packing the court, and so it's just a way for Biden to cleverly get past the question without insulting anybody who wanted it.
So, pretty good.
I mean, I gotta say that if you're even a little bit objective evaluating Biden, there are things he said he would do that he is absolutely doing.
I used to give Trump a lot of credit for doing what he said he'd do, even if he didn't like it.
At least he tried as hard as he could to keep his promises.
He definitely tried.
And you see Biden trying too.
And I give him credit for that.
He's trying to do the things.
But in those cases where he would be trying to do the wrong thing, such as packing the court, The way he's finessing this and sort of pacing them.
Oh, yeah, yeah, we should do something.
We should do something. I'm with you all the way.
Let's do something. Hey, let's give it to this committee and then they'll come up with some good ideas because we want to get something done.
We want to do something. Oh, the committee said don't do anything.
You know, I was with you.
I was with you all the way, team.
But new information.
This committee is not so hot on it.
And listen to their arguments.
I didn't hear it at first, but now I hear it.
It's just a pretty elegant way to handle it.
I think reparations is going to go the same way.
It'll get thrown off to a committee.
The committee will say, we can't think of any way to do it.
That would work. And then Biden will look like the guy who took it seriously.
It's pretty good. It's a pretty good technique.
I mean, it's weaselly, but it works.
Apparently, the Biden administration has reached a deal with Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala to increase border enforcement so that the migrants don't leave the country that they're in in the first place.
Does that sound familiar?
Does it sound like exactly Trump's solution?
It does, doesn't it?
Because it's exactly Trump's solution.
Did I tell you that Biden would be forced to do what Trump has already done in a variety of ways and that Trump will just look better and better every year that goes by?
Well, another example.
Here's another example.
Biden is basically just recreating both the policies and the problems that Trump had at the border.
Why not use plausibility instead of conspiracy theory?
Yeah, it's a plausibility theory.
It could be true. That's a good adjustment.
The problem with conspiracy theories is that people believe them.
Whereas the proper approach would be, what are the odds?
It's plausible. It could be.
That's worth saying.
Well, once again, the headline is that the US government or the military have confirmed UFO pictures.
That sounds way better than what it really is.
And how clear do you think these pictures are?
Pretty clear, like you can see the license plate on the UFOs?
No, no, not so clear.
More like a blurry smudge.
A blurry smudge that looks like a plastic bag that just blew up in the air with the wind.
That's what it looks like.
But the news reports it as UFOs confirmed!
Yeah, they're unidentified.
That's confirmed.
But no, there are no pictures of alien spaceships.
There are some pictures of smudges that apparently fly.
Alright. There's a great article on Breitbart today from Nolte.
N-O-L-T-E. And it says, Rural Trumpers already live in tolerant...
Utopia that leftists want.
And he makes a good argument that everything that would be on the list of what the people on the left want, you know, low racism, everybody gets along, no crime, everything's clean, that that already exists.
The place that exists is wherever Trump supporters live.
The place that those things don't exist is wherever there are lots of Democrats and is run by Democrats.
And this matches my experience precisely.
In fact, it matches my experience at this moment.
How many times have I told you I'm left to Bernie How many times have I disagreed with you on transgender sports?
How many times have I disagreed with you on everything from universal education, UBI, healthcare?
A whole bunch of stuff that I disagree with you on politics.
But I've never felt more accepted or comfortable I'm kind of like an outsider, in a sense. Now, of course, we did come together on support of Trump.
But for sometimes different reasons, right?
What I liked about him might have been completely different than what you liked.
I liked, you know, he was tough on China and a few other things.
But I don't identify that as left or right.
And why is it that we can get along completely while we have different opinions?
And I think it's easy.
I show you respect and then you show it back.
Am I wrong? That's the whole thing.
And when I was reading Nolte's article, which is pretty good, by the way.
You should read it. I was thinking, well, that's like the whole magic sauce.
The magic sauce is treating everybody respectfully.
Just having good manners.
Well, that's it. It solves so many problems, just treating people with respect.
Because most, you know, I was telling you that most of their news stories are about people who don't exist.
Well, the person who doesn't exist is usually a caricature of a person who does, and then somebody just gives it bad intentions.
Right? The bad intentions are what make you hate each other.
It's not even what you're doing.
It's what you think people are thinking.
So if you get the thinking part right, and people understand your intentions, you can get along with anybody.
It's only when they imagine your intentions and they're evil that you just can't get along.
So, I make it very clear that you all understand my intentions and that we don't have any problem.
And certainly, I'm completely respectful for right-leaning opinions and quite respectful to left-leaning opinions.
But I can tell you that the left hates my guts.
And I've probably helped them as much as anybody's ever helped them.
But the right, as long as I treat their opinions with respect, as I do, I get respect back.
It's just that easy.
And it's like a magic thing.
Alright, I'm going to, speaking of respect, I would like to further my trend of defending the hard to defend.
So if there's anybody in the news who has been accused of things and they don't really have the platform to defend themselves for whatever reason, I like to help defend them.
Now that doesn't mean I'm right, so I'm going to be acting more like a defense attorney here.
Now you heard me do it in the You heard me do it lots of times with Trump.
You've heard me do it with Matt Gaetz, talking about the system, not about anything he may or may not have done.
That's up to him to handle.
But just talking about making sure that the system treats him right...
The same way you would want to be treated.
I'm going to use the same thing for the story about the Black Lives Matter co-founder who apparently owns four pieces of real estate totaling $3.2 million.
Now, the story is that she is a trained Marxist And that Black Lives Matter gets lots of donations, that there's not enough transparency about where that money is going.
And suddenly this BLM co-founder has four pieces of real estate worth $3.2 million.
And people are saying, hmm, one of the people saying that is Hawk Newsome.
So Hawk Newsome, who's part of the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter, is...
He's criticizing this co-founder now and saying a little more transparency about where this money is going, please.
Now, here's a little insider news.
This is not a new thing that Hawk Newsome just started worrying about.
I never told you this when I was Having conversations with Hawke a few years ago, I never told you that privately, and I can say it now because he's saying it publicly, privately he was always concerned about the lack of transparency, that money was coming into the organization, but he wasn't seeing any.
And when I say he wasn't, I mean his organization.
So when tons of money were going into the Black Lives Matter national or whatever, New York City, obviously one of the most important Black Lives Matter franchises, if you can call it that, he got none of it, right? Now, he probably wanted to, you know, not make a thing about that until this news story broke, and it gave him an opening, and he took it quite smartly.
And so I would backhawk 100% on this, like I would back it in the elections, like I back it everywhere.
You need full transparency to trust anything.
The only kind of trust we have in this world is transparency.
Everything else you don't trust.
So Hawk is right on target.
But let me defend the BLM co-founder.
She is a successful author with a best-selling book.
She's probably the kind of author that publishers want to give in advance and say, we'd like your next three books.
That would be very typical.
The amount that, you know, just being involved as an author, the amount that she would have been paid for a best-selling book, in the assumption that maybe she even got more money or some is coming, for future books, is pretty significant.
And certainly enough to pay for all this real estate.
Because I doubt she paid cash.
You know, she probably has loans on it or whatever.
So there is no evidence, let me say this as clearly as possible, there is no evidence...
That this BLM co-founder did anything wrong.
None. Similar, the same argument I made for the Matt Gaetz situation.
We don't know what information might come up in the future, but at the moment, I'm not aware of any evidence that Matt Gaetz did a crime.
I hear people talking from sources that we don't trust, but that's not really evidence, right?
We don't trust unnamed sources, say they know something.
Same thing here. There's literally no evidence of crime.
Now, there is evidence that as a trained Marxist, people are saying, oh, this doesn't seem very Marxist.
Shouldn't you be giving your money away instead of keeping it for yourself?
To which I say, I do not think that is a fair criticism.
It's a fair statement.
That she's not acting like a Marxist.
That's a true statement.
But I don't think it's a criticism, and here's why.
And I'm going to be really consistent about this next statement on all situations.
It's within the rules.
She lives in a system that she didn't create that has a set of rules that say you can buy things and keep it.
And so she bought things and she kept it.
I'd never blame anybody who is within the rules.
Likewise, as much as I've been critical of Governor Newsom, the one thing I did not criticize him for is going to a restaurant that was open.
If it's open, he can go there.
Now, he was maskless with too many people, and he's apologized for that, blah, blah, blah.
But as long as it was legal to go out to eat, still, he had every right to do it just like everybody else, right?
I just don't think...
That just seems so small.
To say that the person who wants the system to change can't use it until it changes.
That's just too small of a criticism for me.
So anyway, we might find out that the co-founder has done any number of terrible things, but there's no evidence of it, and I support her presumption of no crime.
Unless something changes.
All right. Let's see.
There's a fake news about the shooting of Duante Wright.
Apparently some people think it's because he had an air freshener.
It took me about five seconds from the moment I first heard that the air freshener was the cause of the confusion for me to tweet I would like to see this air freshener.
Because that was the least believable news story you've heard in a long time.
The moment you heard it was something about an air freshener, what did your brain do?
Nope. Right?
How many of you heard that and said, I can't wait to hear the details because I'm sure this air freshener had something to do with it.
Question. For Jay Foreman, I see you're using the word sophistry.
If you're referring to me, could you let me know so I can block you?
Because anybody who uses that criticism is too stupid to be on my livestream.
But if you're talking about somebody else, I don't care.
So we got that fake news about the air freshener.
We know that's fake now.
Apparently he had an arrest warrant and he resisted arrest.
I'm going to be honest, I can't generate his sympathy for people who resist arrest.
As a human being, I have empathy that's just sort of natural and certainly empathy for the family and empathy for the person who died, but sympathy is different.
You have a natural reaction just as a human, but I can't get my rational brain to see an injustice.
It's just people acting stupid.
The police, as well as somebody who took some chances they shouldn't have taken.
Alright, so let's talk about the Chauvin trial.
So the prosecution was going most of yesterday, and I thought it did a really good job.
The prosecution did.
Now, it doesn't mean anything until the defense does their case.
Because if I've told you anything too many times, it's that each lawyer is completely convincing until you hear the other one.
Who is then completely convincing until the other one talks again.
So you should not be influenced by how persuaded you were by either of the attorneys.
You just sort of have to wait until they're done.
Because if you're experiencing what I'm feeling, the sense of whether he'll get convicted is just going seesawing back and forth, as it normally would, as each attorney.
Lawyer gets involved.
But let me pull out a few key things.
Number one, George Floyd's brother, I didn't get the spelling, but it sounded like Philonis, Philonis Floyd, was really good.
His testimony was really, really good.
And what I mean by that is that he was likable, he was in pain, and he painted a very favorable picture of his brother as a loving brother, Supportive, liked sports, etc.
So effectiveness of that was extreme.
Very good. But no facts were presented.
Does it matter? When I listened to his brother talking, I said to myself, we're not even pretending that the facts will matter, are we?
And why was it even allowed?
I guess it's normal, right?
But why is a purely emotional presentation allowed?
I don't really understand that.
Could be because if you don't understand who Floyd is, you wouldn't have as much insight as to why he acted the way he acted.
Maybe. But it feels like a blatant attempt to make the facts go away and to replace them with an emotion.
As somebody in the comments said, Pointed out, if your brother is going to testify on your behalf, you hope that your brother does not have a name that reminds you of felony.
Now, like I said, I didn't see the spelling of the name, but it's something like Felonis or Felonius or something like that.
And it's an excellent name.
I mean, as names go, it's kind of cool.
But it reminded me of felony, and so that wasn't ideal.
But what can you do? That's his name.
So the The use of force expert that the prosecution had, I don't know if you caught this or if I'm imagining it, but I felt as though he said something that the prosecution didn't want him to say.
And it went like this.
The expert said that the position alone, with the knee and the neck and being on his stomach and the pressure on his back, etc., would be enough to kill him.
But that expert also said that if there were other issues, that he should have taken them into account.
And the prosecution very quickly tried to cover up, but he failed.
He tried to cover that by saying, oh, other issues such as the knee on the back.
That wasn't what his expert was going for.
The knee on the back was another variable.
But it wasn't quite what the expert was going to talk about.
And the expert, to his credit, the expert did not just take the cue from the prosecutor.
He actually finished his thought and said that since it was reported that Floyd was inebriated, that would affect his breathing.
And so the officer, Chauvin, should have known...
That a person who is inebriated would be at extra risk put in that situation.
So I don't think the prosecution wanted anybody to say that something that Floyd did, i.e.
taking drugs, could have contributed to the outcome.
But the prosecution's own witness said that.
And he tried to save it by, like, moving it over to the knee on the back.
But the expert, again, to his credit, this was a You know, a little bit of honesty that I appreciated.
See? And he just said no, the inebriation.
Now, the thing that Chauvin couldn't have known is that Floyd also had a heart issue.
And what he would have seen is a big strapping athlete.
Now, when the brother testified, he talked about how much they liked to play sports.
Apparently, Floyd was quite athletic and successful, played college, actually college basketball.
And that makes you think that Floyd looked like a big, strapping, healthy guy, which is sort of supportive for Chauvin, isn't it?
Because we have a testimony that he was on drugs, and that would have affected his breathing.
Now, this is the prosecution's case saying this.
And And that he was a big, strapping, athletic guy, which would have doubly made you think he would not be in danger if a 140-pound guy was on top of him.
So I feel like maybe even though the prosecution's case was emotionally excellent, factually I think they hurt themselves.
But I'm not a lawyer, so maybe that's just how it looks to me.
I'm trying to understand manslaughter in this case, but I think a simple definition is killing somebody because you're stupid.
So it's manslaughter if you had no intention of killing somebody, and you were also unaware that it was going to happen.
But the reason you're unaware is that you're just kind of stupid.
You just weren't thinking.
Or you didn't connect A and B. An example given of one type of manslaughter, and the specifics are different by state, but one kind is a drunk driver.
You know that if you drink and get in your car, you're putting other people in danger, and if somebody actually dies, you are stupid.
You weren't trying to kill anybody.
And you weren't immediately in a situation that was dangerous, but you were heading toward one.
Manslaughter. So I'm not sure that Chauvin can get away with at least a manslaughter.
Because the case that he acted less than smartly is looking pretty strong.
But he does have a good defense, which we'll see.
And I think you will be surprised how well it is, how good it is.
And the defense is that he was distracted by the crowd, that he didn't show any knowledge that he knew what was happening, etc.
So we'll see if there's some lower degree charge that sticks.
It feels like there will.
At this point, I think I would agree with Dershowitz that I don't see him getting away with no conviction.
But I don't see him getting third degree or second at this point.
We'll wait to see.
Now, given that the prosecution, I believe, also introduced, and the jury has seen it a few times by now, that Floyd was complaining about breathing long before he got on the ground.
Now, if somebody's complaining about breathing, credibly, because when they let him out of the car the first time, he thanked them, and it looked like his breathing problem had been at least a little bit remediated.
There's a real question of when they got him out of the car, he was on his knees, handcuffed, why they put him on his stomach.
And if it turns out that they don't have a good reason for that, looks like manslaughter to me.
We'll see what the jury says.
But let's wait for the defense.
Because the defense may say, yeah, we had to put him down, and here's the reason, and maybe it'll make sense.
We'll see. But I don't know of a reason.
So as long as he had breathing problems before he was put down, I think that...
And we also know that he lied to the officers by saying he did not take any drugs, which would have been an obvious lie to a police officer.
If they know he's lying about not taking drugs, why would Chauvin believe him when he said he couldn't breathe in a situation that didn't look like he had anything to do with breathing?
He said it was... Claustrophobic, but I'm not sure that looked quite credible because he was in a car.
He was stopped being in a car, so I'm not sure being in the backseat of a squad car is that much worse.
And it's illegal to lie to a police officer, is it?
I don't know. Is it?
Is that right? Is it illegal to lie to a police officer?
I didn't know that.
It's not a good idea.
So, yeah, we don't know if he would have died anyway.
I don't think that that can ever be in evidence.
But we can certainly know that here's where I think the case is going to have to go to.
I think you're going to have to show that a reasonable person, and that's the phrase being used, that a reasonable person could have been just as confused or made the wrong decisions just as Chauvin did, if they were wrong.
So I think that the reasonable person of defense still has some life.
We'll see how far that gets them.
I hear that science the National Academies said we must study the technology of blocking out the sun with some kind of special dust we would put in the atmosphere or some kind of chemical spray to literally reduce the impact of the sun.
And People have said quite reasonably.
That sounds like a bad idea.
Because it seems like you go too far and you destroy the earth.
I'm not as worried about it as you are.
Here's why. I'm not worried because it would be easy to test it as small.
You know, you just put a little up there and say, alright, did anything change?
And if it didn't, you put a little more up there.
See if that makes any difference.
And it would be nice to simply have the technology available so that, let's say, 20 years from now, things are getting really dire if it goes that way.
Temperatures have increased.
We're getting more bad impacts.
Well, then maybe you use it then because at some point your risk-reward changes, right?
Blocking out the sun today?
Probably a bad idea.
Blocking out the sun in 25 years, you know, taking a little edge off it in 25 years, is that still a bad idea?
If it gets into an emergency situation in 25 years?
I think it changes.
And it might take us, you know, a decade to...
To test anything and even know if we have something there.
So I'm not worried about us overdoing it.
We're not going to do it right away.
But we definitely ought to know our emergency options.
It doesn't mean it happens just because we studied it.
But I'm not as scared of it as you are because I think we could look at it small and see what happens.
What about farmers losing sun for crops?
The whole point is you would not lower it Below the point where you couldn't grow crops.
Nobody's talking about that.
We're only talking about getting rid of the hellacious heat.
Apparently, new news came out that California...
Is more likely to burn this year than any year in the past.
Meaning that even though the sky was darkened in California all summer last year, it looks like this is going to be worse.
It has to do with the dryness of the forest.
They reached some kind of extra dry state that's pretty ugly.
So California is going to burn again.
We know that.
And I don't know how we can keep our governor.
I just don't know how we can keep him.
If California catches on fire again, it's not like we didn't know it was coming.
It's not like we lack human power to go, I don't know, whatever they do, clear out the underbrush or whatever it is.
We've got plenty of labor.
Indeed, I would like to see an option where prisoners don't go to prison but go to some geography where they just can't interact with non-prisoners.
Much like the Australia model.
But I feel like the most humane solution that is in prison is to just have all the people who can't be with regular society because they're too dangerous.
Maybe just the dangerous ones.
And just give them their own island or give them their own zip code with a wall around it.
