Episode 1509 Scott Adams: Today's Coffee With Scott Adams Will Be Amazing
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
$4.6T to settle Afghan refugees in US
Chris Cuomo, old story by his ex-boss
Arizona Audit leaked draft
Climate change solved by nuclear energy
Pandemic solved with airflow
Misunderstanding "mild" COVID
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Good morning. Welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams, which you can't hear because I forgot to turn on your sound.
I'll bet you're all yelling, where's my sound?
Where's my sound, is what you're saying.
How about now? How about now?
Well, if you're on YouTube, you're saying to yourself, I hope he has sound.
And now you do. You do.
And if you'd like to enjoy today to the maximum potential, and I'm talking about the maximum, don't settle for anything less than the maximum from the simultaneous sip.
Some of you say, you know, I'll just take the minimum.
No. No, don't be that person.
Take the maximum, and all you need for the maximum is a cup or mugger glass.
Or a tanker, chalice, or sain, a canteen, and jugger, or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better except the Arizona audit.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and watch it go to work right now.
Go! Mmm.
I feel data improving everywhere.
Well, Let's look at our stories, shall we?
Look at our stories today.
You know, some days you wake up, if you do this, what I do at these live streams, and you look at the news and you say to yourself, Oh God, what am I going to do with this news?
This news is not naturally interesting.
But some days, the news is...
Naturally, interesting. Today is one of those days.
But first, an update on my cat, the most important story in the world.
Boo the cat had surgery yesterday to remove a polyp from her ear area that was causing her all kinds of problems.
And it looks like the surgery was a success.
She's recovering. I hope to get her back today, but I'll let you know.
So that's the most important story of the day.
The second most important thing that's happening is that my notes didn't...
Oh, there we go.
So I just saw a tweet before I got on about night condensation technology.
Apparently there's some kind of giant sheet you can put suspended over your crops...
And there's something about the technology of this big surface that collects all the moisture in a way that the ground itself doesn't collect it.
It's like 80% more or something.
And then after the moisture is collected, they can just release it onto the crops.
So they can basically water the crops without rain.
Now... I don't know how stable this big sheet-like looking thing is.
It looks like the wind would blow it all to hell.
But it does tell us that there's some kind of technology there that might have some promise.
Maybe not that exact one.
But we might be able to water crops without water.
At least without rain and without groundwater.
That's pretty cool. Rasmussen had a poll and asked about the $4.6 billion proposed to pay for the Afghan refugees to resettle in the United States.
How many citizens of the United States think it's a good idea to pay for these Afghan refugees to settle?
Well, 56% said, no, we do not want to spend $4.6 billion.
32% said, yes.
It's an interesting moral dilemma, isn't it?
Because if you asked...
Should we get our allies out of Afghanistan, people who helped us during the war efforts?
I think a vast majority of people say, yeah, of course.
You've got to let your allies out.
But what good does that do?
Once they get out, they've got nothing.
I mean, where are they going?
Somebody's going to have to help them.
If we're going to take them out of their country, we broke it.
Did we buy it? So that's the question.
We broke it.
And we broke the country, and we broke their ability to live in it.
So we broke it.
Did we buy it? I don't know.
It's an interesting question, but I would think that we have some obligation.
You could argue about the price tag.
You could say, you know, it costs too much.
Everything costs too much. But I feel like we do have some obligation.
That some amount of that expense we need to eat is just a question of how much.
Well, Chris Cuomo's in trouble.
His old boss tells a story from 20 years ago.
So when he worked for ABC, allegedly at some party get-together of employees and their spouses, he came in and he had just changed jobs, so his boss was now just recently his ex-boss, a woman, and he allegedly gave her a big bear hug, and then while he was hugging her, he soundly grabbed her ass-cheek And said, I can do this now because you're not my boss.
Or we don't work together.
Something like that. So I'm paraphrasing, but basically he said, I can do this now because, you know, we don't work together.
Apparently his old boss corrected his data and said, no, actually, this may come as a surprise to you.
Here I'm paraphrasing again.
This is not her exact words, but could have been.
No, no, Chris, I would like to tell you that is fake news.
She didn't say any of this, but I think she should have.
No, Chris, that's fake news.
The fact that you don't work for me, or with me, does not make it okay to grab my ass in public.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
He grabbed her ass cheek, and you're all thinking the same thing.
Why doesn't she just turn the other cheek?
What, you weren't thinking that?
Some of you were.
Well, apparently that was not called for in this particular situation, but she did step aside after this encounter to show Chris Cuomo that her husband was sitting right behind her.
That's right. Chris Cuomo grabbed a married woman's ass right in front of her husband.
Didn't know that the husband was sitting right behind her.
Now, what is the most shocking part of this story?
That Chris Cuomo is still alive, right?
What kind of a husband sits there and watches his wife's ass get grabbed by Chris Cuomo and that there's no part of the story where a fight broke out?
Chris Cuomo is a pretty big guy, right?
I mean, if we're being honest, I don't think you'd want to get in a fight with Chris Cuomo, would you?
I mean, he's got some big guns there.
I don't know how tall he is, but he looks pretty big.
I don't think you'd want to get in a fight with Chris Cuomo.
But even I would have taken a run at him.
Right? I'm like half his size, but even I would have taken a run.
I mean, it might have gotten my ass kicked, but it'd be worth it.
Wouldn't it? Is there anybody here who's a husband who wouldn't take a run at him?
I mean, the minimum I would have done is kick him out.
I would have just pushed him toward the door.
Even at my size, I could have got that done.
I would have just kept pushing him toward the door, and if he punched me, he's got trouble.
But otherwise, I'm just going to push him out the door.
And make sure he falls down when I push him the last time.
But you have to get physical in that case, don't you?
Don't you have to punch him? Now, maybe you don't want to go to jail, you don't want to cause a scene, you don't want to ruin your wife's career, but your wife just made you look like the biggest pussy in the whole fucking world.
So I would like to nominate her for worst wife in the world, although there's some argument that maybe the husband wasn't so cool either if he didn't do anything in that situation.
But everything about this is wrong.
There's nobody in this story who came out well, did they?
So Chris Cuomo looks bad in the story, that being the point of the story.
The woman who talks about it looks like a horrible bitch because she just threw her husband under a bus and that didn't need to happen.
But her husband's got some explaining, too.
Like, why isn't there part of the story where a fight broke out?
Like, where's that? Now, maybe the husband played it right, because one can imagine that the wife would prefer there was not a fight.
Right? It's the wife's career.
It's her life. Maybe she prefers that you did not defend her in that particular situation.
But... I don't know.
Nobody came out good in this story.
Now, will Chris Cuomo be forced to resign or anything because of this?
This one's a tough one.
I normally employ what I call the 20-year rule.
If you did something 20 years ago, especially if it's verbal, just let it go.
But I've also said you can't do that if it's murder.
If it's a violent rape or something, you're not going to forgive it just because it was 20 years ago.
And this one's sort of in that gray area.
I don't know. Do you forgive this one?
Do you say, well, that was 20 years ago?
That's a tough one. I don't know.
I think you could go either way on this one.
But if you wanted to be supportive of women in general, you would go the way of he needs to step down.
All right. So worst wife ever.
So we're getting reports today.
I know you want to talk about this.
So the report is there's a leaked draft, not the final report, just a leaked draft of what later apparently will be released today of the Arizona audit findings.
Allegedly, and this has been confirmed by the county, all right?
So although it's a draft...
And although it's a leak, those two things normally mean not very credible.
The county, which does know what the real answer is, the county says the draft is accurate.
So at the moment, we believe that the Arizona audit not only found no fraud that would reverse it, but actually found that Biden won by a few hundred votes more than they thought.
Now... What's the first thing you think when you hear that?
All right.
First of all, we don't know that this will stand.
Okay? Can we all...
I know... Before you jump on me, can we all agree that we're in the fog of war?
And that whatever is being reported now is deeply unlikely to be the same thing you think by the end of today.
Everybody on the same page?
Does anybody think that whatever it is that we think we know today will be the same thing we think we know at the end of today?
Probably not, right?
I don't think so. Now, I'm seeing in the comments, so let me address this.
I see some people saying that releasing the draft report...
Is spin and getting ahead of the story.
How many of you think that?
That what's happening here is that somebody's trying to get ahead of the story because the real story with the details might be more damning.
And so somebody's trying to get ahead of it and, like, get that in your mind so that it doesn't...
so you can't be moved from it when the real facts come out.
Do you think so? Here's why I think not.
You ready? It's too close to the actual release.
If your plan is to inoculate people with a fake story, you want to have more time.
So if it had been an intentional plan to get a fake story out there to spin it a certain way so the real story couldn't affect it much, you would do it much earlier.
You wouldn't do it the same day, right?
Now, I suppose if you were desperate and you weren't good at this, you might do it the same day.
Because you've got nothing else.
I don't know. Maybe. But this doesn't look like any kind of a professional spin job.
The professionals would have done it much sooner.
That's where all the benefit is.
It's the soonness that gives it the power.
Because it sinks in.
But if you just heard, hey, there's something about the Arizona audit, and then a few hours later you got the correction, I don't know if it ever sunk in.
So it doesn't look like a professional...
Propaganda job. Could be an unprofessional one.
I mean, it could be somebody's taking a whack at it and they don't know how to do it very well.
Maybe. But I'm going to say that's not what's happening.
Now, my prediction was that the audit would not turn up irregularities.
And it wasn't based on me knowing anything about the election.
It was based on the fact that it would have leaked much sooner.
If they had found the goods, it would have leaked much sooner.
So, I alone among my audience predicted, maybe there's somebody else here, but I think I alone predicted that whether or not there is fraud, that's a separate question, that the audit wouldn't find it.
Two reasons they won't find it.
They're not looking in the right place.
And if they'd found something, we would have heard it through a leak.
You can't keep that a secret.
Nobody could keep that a secret.
There isn't a chance in the world that if they had the goods, we would not have known about it a month ago.
Just no chance. Statistically, there's some chance, but very low.
So, could I still be wrong?
Everybody listen to this next part because you're going to swear I didn't say this.
Okay? Listen carefully to this next part.
I could totally be wrong.
If you can't say that about everything that you believe statistically to be likely, you're not really thinking.
You're just punditing.
So if you're thinking, then you say, yeah, I could be totally wrong about this.
By the end of today, everything I believe to be true could be reversed.
And I wouldn't be that surprised.
But I'm giving you my prediction based on a specific criteria, which is it would have leaked if they had the goods.
Now, here's the question.
There are two ways to rig an election, broadly speaking.
Right? Two ways.
One would be to put in fake votes.
Which seems to me hard and also likely to be caught.
Right? So one way to do it, put in fake votes, but it's kind of hard.
Well, maybe it's not hard to put them in, but the odds of getting away with it?
Not so good, because you can find fake votes.
The second way to do it is to throw away votes that are real votes, but you throw away just the ones that will change the election the way you want.
How do you detect thrown away votes?
Does an audit find a vote that they didn't get?
How do you count the vote that isn't there?
Was there somebody in charge of missing votes?
Okay, here's a missing vote.
That's one. How do you count missing votes?
You can't count what isn't there.
Right? And, you know, presumably they would have been thrown away long before they reached the polling place.
They would have been picked up and thrown away by operatives, the post office...
Whatever. It would have been done by areas where you knew there were a lot of Trump voters, for example.
Now, did the Arizona audit also do polling to find out if people who thought they voted really did?
I don't know. I understand that somebody was doing that kind of work, some kind of was doing that kind of polling.
But I don't know if that's the subject of whatever this draft report is.
So here's what I would expect further by the end of today.
I would expect that the audit didn't find anything, but, big but, here's a big but, and I'm not talking about the one that Chris Cuomo grabbed.
No, it's a big but, but not that one.
Actually, I don't know how big her but was, but it sounds funny, so I said it.
I don't regret it.
The big but is I believe that by the end of today we will have an argument that the Arizona audit couldn't look at the things it needed to look at.
For example, it couldn't get into the software and hardware.
It couldn't determine that there was a chain of custody in some cases.
And it couldn't determine if any votes had been discarded.
So I think that it's going to be a report that says the things we can check looked good.
The things that we can't check, we don't know.
So I think your two movies will be intact at the end of today.
Two movies. One that says the Arizona audit found no fraud and it's done.
And the other, they found lots of ways there could have been fraud.
But they didn't know how to check it.
Now here's my next question.
This one's fun. This one's really fun to me.
See if you think this is fun.
The auditors, these ninja, what are they called?
Cyber Ninjas, which is a terrible name for an election fraud auditing company.
Cyber Ninjas.
Doesn't even really sound that credible, does it?
But did we not spend months listening to the left tell us that the Cyber Ninjas could not do this work and that they were not credible, right?
Right? And then the cyber ninjas did the work and came to a conclusion that Biden had more votes than anybody thought.
Does somebody owe cyber ninjas a really big apology?
Because did anybody see this coming?
I'm not sure I saw this coming.
I mean, I didn't make a prediction one way or another.
But what I didn't see is that cyber ninjas would be so credible that they found more votes for Biden and then just reported it that way.
Yeah, and everybody's going to believe them now that it agrees.
Now that the left is getting an answer that they like, or we think, right?
It's too early to know that for sure.
But it looks like they're going to get an answer they like.
And they're going to say, well, that audit was pretty credible.
It's a good thing those cyber ninjas top shelf.
You know, if you want to know for sure whether you had any fraud, call the cyber ninjas because they'll get you the right answer every time.
So cyber ninjas went from the least credible audit organization in the world to the most.
Top of the heap. Best auditors of all time.
All right. So that will be, you know, again, just two movies will emerge from that, as we know.
Well, two of the biggest problems in the world got solved this week, and I think that's pretty good news.
As you know, climate change is largely solved, or at least now we have a plan to solve it.
An actual useful functional plan.
Because, as you know, Jennifer Granholm, the Secretary of Energy, said for the Biden administration they love nuclear energy and it's a necessary solution to the climate.
And even if you don't think there's a climate problem, I know we have some doubters watching today, even if you didn't believe that, you still need nuclear energy because you need a lot of energy and it needs to be cheap and we need it for space and we need it for all kinds of stuff.
So the debate against nuclear power as a future power source for the United States is over.
It's over. And I'm so mind-boggled by this whole thing.
I've never seen an argument that got settled.
Have you? When was the last time you saw an argument where somebody won?
Think of another example.
What is an example in which there was, you know, vigorous debate for decades, and then one side said, no, yeah, okay, I guess you're right.
I guess nuclear's good.
Let's do that. I've never seen this.
What happened? What the hell?
I mean, obviously, you know, the advocates, you know, Mark Schneider, Michael Schellenberger, you know, Bjorn Lomborg probably, throw into that mix...
I think they did a great job persuading.
I mean, amazing job.
Schellenberger, in particular, testifying to Congress, probably changed the fate of the world.
Let me say that again.
Don't know for sure, because you have many moving parts and lots of things influencing other things.
But from my perspective, it looks like Michael Schellenberger changed the fate of the world.
By being effective and knowing his stuff and testifying to Congress and telling them, you know, we need nuclear in the mix.
I think he sold them.
I mean, I think that's what happened.
Now, of course, there isn't much of a counter-argument.
The argument is not so much my point versus your point.
The argument with nuclear evolved into people who were well-informed and people who weren't.
It sort of evolved into that.
And once enough people got informed, thank you, Mark Schneider, thank you, Michael Schellenberger, once people were informed, they were all on the same side, turns out.
At least the people in charge.
So that's a gigantic thing.
I mean, I don't know how...
I just don't know how to say enough about that.
I mean, that's really the fate of the planet got decided the right way.
Now, what have I told you about the...
There's a thing called the Adam's Law of Slow-Moving Disasters.
Have you heard of it? I talk about it all the time.
If you can see a disaster coming decades ahead, such as imagining we'll run out of oil or imagining we'll run out of food or imagining whatever will happen in, you know, 50 years, if you have enough time, humans are always good at adapting.
We're really good at that kind of problem.
Oh, we got lots of time? All right, we'll fix that.
And it looks like we did.
I mean, there's a ton of work that would have to be done to develop the new models of nuclear and to build the existing ones, etc.
But we have a plan, and the plan is well within the doable channel of humankind.
Can humankind pull this off?
Make enough nuclear reactors to really get on top of climate change in the long run?
I think so. Yeah.
I mean, that doesn't mean we will.
But do we have that capability?
Yeah. Yeah, turns out we do.
So we actually have a plan that looks like it could solve climate change.
And that's like this week.
As of this week, we solved climate change going forward.
The second big thing is the pandemic got solved.
I don't know if you saw this story.
A lot of you think that we don't have a solution to the pandemic, even with vaccinations.
But no, the pandemic got solved this week.
I solved it because I had some spare time.
I know you would have done it.
But maybe your schedule was a little busier than mine.
And I looked around and I said, well, I've got some time.
What would be the thing to do to solve the pandemic?
So I did it. Now, I just released a video that was on the Locals platform only until a few minutes ago.
So I just released it from its...
It's a captive rapper.
So you can all see it now.
It's on Twitter. And in this video, I explain my plan for solving the pandemic.
Now, you have to see the video to see the visual because it's more persuasive with the visual.
But it goes like this.
Say you're in a room with good ventilation.
What are the odds of getting COVID? Masks or no masks?
Well, if the ventilation is good enough...
It would be almost equivalent to being outdoors, right?
That's what good ventilation is.
It at least gets you closer to what outdoors would be like.
But lots of places are not well ventilated, so let's talk about ventilation separately.
Everything I say after this...
Everything I say...
Sorry, I just got some news that was complicated.
Everything I say after this...
Well, I don't know what the beginning of that sentence was anymore, so let me start a new sentence.
One that I can finish with a point.
Okay? So in a room that doesn't have good ventilation...
There are lots of those, right?
A normal room.
A normal room in a house, I would say, doesn't have great ventilation.
It just has good enough.
But it might not be good enough for the coronavirus.
It might be good enough for heating and cooling and keeping you alive, but maybe not good enough for the coronavirus.
So what I'm going to talk about next has nothing to do with ventilation.
Ventilation, the purpose of it is to move your virus from inside the house to outside the house.
I am not talking about that.
Everything I say next has nothing to do with ventilation.
But your brain is going to say, he's talking about ventilation.
Let me add a point about ventilation.
You know, I see your point, Scott, but have you considered ventilation?
Corey, stop texting me during my live stream.
So, in a moment, I'm going to flip out, because in the comments, somebody's going to say, and they won't be kidding, but you know what would be even better than what you're talking about, Scott?
Have you considered ventilation?
And then I'm going to read that comment, and I'm going to say, well, I don't know what I'll say.
I'll probably flip out. No, I will flip out, Zachary.
I'm going to flip out. Because there's one thing you need to hear clearly.
Nothing I say next is about fucking ventilation.
Okay. No ventilation.
Here's the idea. Turn on the fan.
Move the air around.
You're done. That's it.
Just put fans, just regular fans, in any room that you've got a problem, that you think doesn't have good ventilation by itself, can't open a window, can't open a door, whatever.
Just put fans in there.
Here's the idea. Number one, fans will disperse your plume faster.
Actually, really fast. So the big problem with infection is if you get a big enough viral load.
If you're in a room with somebody who has COVID, and they're on one side of the room, and you're huddled in a corner on the other side like this, what are the chances that you will get COVID if the person who has the COVID is on the other side of the room, even poorly ventilated?
Even poorly ventilated.
What are the odds? Well, not that high.
Because the person standing right in front of the person talking, well, they've got a problem because of the plume.
You know, the cloud of virus and water molecules coming out of a person's mouth.
If you could get rid of all the plumes, how often would people get infected in a room with people who have COVID? No plumes.
Well, here's my hypothesis.
That 80% of the spread is from plumes.
Because we know that we don't get it from surfaces.
Surfaces basically kill the virus, apparently, because we're not that worried about surfaces anymore.
Right? We were worried about surfaces before, but surfaces seem to be a problem.
So the fan does several things.
Number one, it immediately disperses the plume.
So does it reduce 80% of what would get somebody infected?
Because they need a certain viral load for the infection to really take root, but also to get them very sick.
So if all it did was remove the option that people get very sick, because the viral load they get is a small one instead of a big one, that's gigantic, right?
But I think it would actually prevent them from getting it.
Now, the second thing that the airflow does...
If the air is enough that you can feel it, right?
Is it...
By reducing the plume, it increases the evaporation.
Now... And Anatoly, who you should follow on Twitter, gave us some stats and some science that shows that that's the fact, that moving air will reduce a plume and make it evaporate faster.
Now, if it evaporates faster, what happens to the virus that is carried by the water molecules?
The water molecule disappears, the virus falls to the ground.
So it's the water molecule that protects the virus to get into you.
If you get rid of the water molecules that protect it, The virus is less effective.
It drops to the ground. So you've got one thing that gets rid of the plume, so it gets rid of the viral load almost immediately.
So that's probably 80% of the problem.
Then you have the virus itself, less of it, because the air is moving it around and now it's evaporating faster.
And then the third thing, again, this is hypothetical.
Any of this would have to be verified, obviously.
But if you're moving the air faster...
Is the air bouncing against surfaces more often?
I think the answer is yes.
Just give me a common sense opinion here in the comments.
Does it make sense to you that if you add some airflow that the air will be bouncing off the walls and the furniture more often and we know that surfaces kill the virus pretty effectively compared to you breathing it in?
Right? Right? Now, have I given you three practical explanations that you say to yourself, well, I'm no scientist, but those probably almost certainly make sense.
Ron says the air needs to move at least 56 miles per hour.
I doubt it. I doubt it.
Imagine if you had a plume of a cigarette smoke in front of you.
And then imagine a fan on the other side of the room, enough that you could feel it on your skin.
That plume would just move sideways the moment it hit the air.
I don't think you need 56 miles an hour.
Well, actually, let me take that back.
Maybe it is 56 miles per hour at the point of the fan, but it wouldn't be once it reached the interior of the room.
Um... I hear you say dehumidifiers, and I think a fan is just an easier, quicker solution.
The dehumidifier probably makes a difference, too.
All right. So there is my hypothesis.
I believe that it's testable.
You could find out, for example, you could put fans in some classrooms and not in others.
Check again in a month to see if anybody got it.
Well, you wouldn't know if they got it in the classroom.
There's probably some way to test it.
But I would like to submit that the pandemic is over.
And if you've got a fan in the room, you should be able to take off your mask.
Eh? Are you interested now?
A little bit of science, if it could tell us that the fans do make a difference, could it be the difference between taking off your mask in a public place or not?
Let's say a classroom.
Could you take the masks off if the fan idea pans out?
Maybe. It'd be a good trade-off.
Because if I told you about the fake because...
A fake because is giving somebody a reason when they really want to do the thing that you want them to do.
They want to do it too, but they need a reason that sounds good to other people.
So instead of saying, hey, take the mask off, do you think you can sell that to people who are pro-mask?
Do you think you will ever sell to the pro-mask crowd, hey, let's just take them off?
No, no. That's unsellable.
That is unpersuadable.
Here's what isn't.
Do you know, if you had fans, they would be as effective as masks, so you can take the masks off.
Eh? How'd that feel?
It felt like a reason, didn't it?
But it's a fake because.
Because even if the fans do work...
The masks would still work a little bit more, if they work at all, right?
So if you were concerned, you'd still say, well, how about both?
But, in terms of persuasion, and both would make sense, maybe logically, if you didn't know the real risk and you were concerned, but it gives you a fake because.
Politicians need to say, I'll get rid of the masks because...
either because of vaccinations...
Because of other mitigation, because of this.
You've got to have a because. If they can't add the because, they can't get away with it.
And maybe the fans would be the because.
Because can you tell me, because, can anybody here tell me that wearing a mask would be more or less effective than just increasing the airflow in the room?
You can't, can you?
Because you don't really know how effective the masks are, but they're not like 100%.
Whatever effectiveness masks have is probably sub-20%.
Still worth doing, if that's real.
I mean, if they really reduced by 20%, you would certainly use them in some situations.
But could you tell me that a fan wouldn't reduce it by 20% as well?
No, you can't, because we don't know.
But logically, I mean, if you just looked at the reasons it should...
I don't know. Kind of looks like they'd be equivalent.
Somewhere in that sub-20% range, maybe?
I would think fans could have a higher potential, though, actually.
All right, so that's the good news.
I talked about that way too much.
I think you would agree. I should be talking about my cat, Boo, more.
Well, John Stossel, you all know John Stossel?
He's suing Facebook over censoring him for some content he had on climate change in which his content was not unscientific, meaning that he did not say something that scientists would disagree with.
He did frame it in ways that would maybe make you a little more skeptical about some elements of the claims of climate change, but he did not report an inaccurate fact, nor is he accused.
He's not even accused of having an inaccurate fact.
The thing they accused him of is something that they imagined he said and then dinged him for it.
So he got dinged for something they interpreted he said that he didn't say.
So that's bad. Bjorn Lomborg, I'll mention him again.
By the way, I'll be interviewing Bjorn Lomborg for his paperback version of his book.
That's coming up in some weeks.
And I'll let you know when that comes up.
So Facebook has some explaining to do.
Now, you notice that the censoring seems to be unique to Facebook in these stories.
Because I'm pretty sure that Twitter did not suppress either one of them.
In fact, they're talking about it on Twitter.
So, remember my rule...
If you can't say something good about something you criticize, you're probably not credible.
You've got to be able to say something good about the things you criticize.
So let me do that for Twitter.
Twitter has taken a lot of heat for censorship and shadow banning, allegedly, etc.
But in this case, it looks like Facebook got it totally wrong and Twitter got it totally right.
It's worth mentioning.
Twitter got it totally right because they didn't ban any of this content.
So give them credit for that.
All right. There's a new story that Biden's a tax cheat.
Of course. Just when he's trying to get his gigantic tax increase on the rich through, there's this story.
So here's the details. And I know this will be complicated for most of you.
So I'm going to do my cartoonist best to simplify this story.
If you are an individual who is doing a job such as giving speeches for money, which is what Biden was doing between jobs, you made $13 million giving mostly speeches.
Now, one of the things you can do, and it's very common, is that instead of taking the money as an individual and then paying taxes just like a human, you can do some paperwork with a lawyer and declare that you are a S-corporation.
There are different kinds of corporations.
The S-corp is typically for this purpose, where there's like one principal person who is the business.
Now, in that case, you still have to determine, at least on paper, how much of the money that Biden would get, in this case, would be in the form of looking like a regular salary for being the CEO of his own S corporation, which is just him.
So not only do you define yourself as a corporation, but then you give yourself the job of being the head of the corporation, which is all just you.
So it's just Biden.
But he's a corporation, but he's also a person who's in charge of the corporation.
Now, in that setup, you have to give your CEO self a salary, just like you were an employee, while the rest of the money that you don't call salary becomes income through the corporation.
Now, the reason you do this is that individuals pay more taxes than corporations.
So if you can say, oh, I'm really a corporation...
Then you pay fewer taxes, especially for the Medicare portion, 3.8%.
So the higher the salary is, the more you're going to pay in Medicare taxes.
The higher the S-corporation profit part is, that you arbitrarily define which portion is which, the higher that one is, the more taxes you pay.
So the game with an S-corp is to try to get away with Meaning that you're gaming the audit in the future?
Like, if we get audited, what is the least we can claim is the salary for the CEO. And so the question is, over two years he made $13 million.
That's, let's say, $6.5 million a year.
And he made $800,000 that he paid himself as a CEO. So it's two years, so cut that in half.
$400,000 a year to be the CEO of a $6.5 million operation.
Does that sound right? If you were the CEO of a $6.5 million business...
Meaning its profits were...
That's just the profits, not the gross, but the profit pre-tax was $6.5 million.
Is that a fair salary, $400,000, to be the CEO of that size of a business?
Yes, it is. Yes, it is.
How's the audit going to do?
Fine. Fine.
Is this story real?
Nope. Nope. I hope it's fake news.
Because if you go into an audit and say, the complexity of this business was that somebody else would make travel arrangements, maybe Jill or an assistant or something, and Biden would just show up and talk and go home.
That's the whole business.
What decisions does the CEO need to make in a business like that?
Not much. Like, the CEO job is actually an empty shell.
It doesn't really do anything.
Because the employee makes all the decisions.
The employee just happens to also be the CEO. So is $400,000 too little to pay for somebody who literally does nothing?
Not really. Not really.
If the CEO job had actually been hard, like where he had to manage a lot of people and he had to make decisions and strategic bets and stuff like that, Maybe you could argue that that CEO needs to get paid a lot of money.
But he's basically just a punch-a-ticket, fill-in-a-blank-on-a-forum CEO. He doesn't do anything.
Literally just signs a couple of forms a year.
That's it. The whole job. So I would say that he's going to fly through this audit fine.
Now, if there's somebody here who's a...
You know, a tax specialist or a tax attorney or something.
Just jump in and tell me I'm wrong.
But on the common sense level, $400,000 a year to be a CEO of a business that doesn't need any work at all from the CEO feels about right.
I don't know. I feel to get away with that.
Derek Chauvin is...
Appealing on 14 grounds.
I guess he couldn't afford a judge...
I'm sorry, he couldn't afford his own lawyer at this point.
So I think he did it himself.
But among his claims, he says that his judge abused his discretion when he denied Chauvin's request to move the trial out of the county due to pretrial publicity.
And I ask you this question.
I'm not a lawyer...
So I'm just looking at this as a human who has some sense of what seems fair and what doesn't seem fair, even though fairness is not real.
How does he lose this?
How could Derek Chauvin possibly lose this appeal?
I've never seen a clearer case where something should move to a different venue.
Have you? In the history of...
Has there ever been a cleaner case where you absolutely needed to move this out of town?
Because the people in the jury would justifiably be afraid for their lives.
Right? Dr.
Scott Adams. One of my trolls is Dr.
Scott Adams. They just refused.
I'm just looking at your comments.
Does anybody disagree with that?
Now, the argument against it would be that no matter where he went, he would get the same level of bias.
But I don't think the bias would form a physical threat everywhere, right?
If you're local to where the crime happened, I think that if you're on the jury, you're physically threatened.
But if you were in some far-flung place, and let's say it's two years from now, the appeals process moves slowly, Two years from now, in a different county where they've already forgotten the story, I don't know.
Would those people be just as afraid as the people in the local community at the moment?
It's still really, really hot in people's minds.
I don't think so.
I think it would be different.
I don't see how he loses this.
So get your seatbelts on.
I mean, I suppose a lawyer would have a different opinion on this, but just as a human, if you ask me, did this look like a fair trial the way they did it?
No. No.
I'm not saying he's innocent.
Nothing like that.
I'm not telling you he should go free.
Nothing like that. I'm just saying there's no way that looks like a fair trial to a reasonable person looking at it.
It doesn't. And we live in a country where it has to look reasonable to us.
Let me say this again.
The law has its own standards, right?
And you have to satisfy the standards of the law.
But the law has to look reasonable to us.
It has to. Because the whole system depends on that.
Reasonable people have to look at it and say, well, I might not like it.
I certainly wouldn't like it if this law was aimed at me, but I can see why you did it.
I mean, it makes sense. It's got to be reasonable to a reasonable person, and this clearly isn't.
I mean, it's not even close to being reasonable.
All right. Apparently the January 6th Select Committee...
Yes, it's not a group of losers who are studying something that doesn't need to be studied.
It's not that. It's a select committee.
Premium. Platinum grade.
It's the Platinum Select Gold Star Prime Committee.
And let me tell you, with a name like that, you know that they've got some good stuff coming.
Anyway, they've subpoenaed their first witnesses that includes...
Trump loyalists, as they're called.
Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Steve Bannon, and Kash Patel.
I feel like this is the balance to the Arizona audit.
You know, the Arizona audit, the Republicans are expecting some red meat out of that.
Gonna get some red meat and maybe they won't.
But I think, likewise, the people who think this select committee is going to find the coup fingerprints all over this and find out it's much worse than anybody thought, no.
They're not going to find anything.
I think it's just going to be a bunch of people doing what they thought made sense at the time.
That's all it's going to be. So everybody's going to be disappointed.
I saw a very informative thread...
On mild COVID by Michigan NOAH. Twitter user Michigan underscore NOAH. And you can look at my Twitter feed to find it.
I retweeted it. And he talks about how we talk about the definition of mild cases of coronavirus or COVID. A mild case is defined as something that didn't put you in the hospital.
But it turns out there are a lot of nasty cases of COVID that didn't result in hospitalization, but they're pretty nasty and they might have some long-lasting effect.
And so Noah makes the argument that we imagine that the virus is not as bad as it really is because we're misunderstanding mild and we're misunderstanding what it means to not be hospitalized.
In our minds, not hospitalized means, well, it's like a sniffle.
Right? Okay, maybe it's like a normal flu.
But that's all it is.
Right? If you hear mild, a mild case of COVID, you think sniffle.
Don't you? Or a little more than sniffle, but that's about all you think.
Turns out that that category mild, if you use it in a medical context, it includes moderate.
Right? And when you look at both mild and moderate symptoms, some of them are nasty.
It's shit you don't want.
Here's some examples.
Now, I would say none of this data is what I would call confirmed, but I'll just give it to you.
In one study, two out of three people who had COVID had at least one outpatient visit to a doctor, visit one to six months after diagnosis.
So two-thirds of the people who had COVID... A month to six months, so this is long after you should have been better, two-thirds of them had to visit a doctor for one thing or another.
Now, the first question you must ask is, how many people visit a doctor within six months of adults?
Because remember, most kids didn't have it, so you're not talking about the healthy people.
We're talking about the older people.
If you looked in the, let's say, over 40 crowd, where most of the COVID was, how many people over 40 have at least one outpatient visit to a doctor in six months?
It's got to be at least two out of three.
Isn't it exactly the same number as this?
I don't know. But I guess I'm not as scared by this because I don't know what the baseline is.
But I feel like people over 40 get to the doctor once every six months.
It feels like it. So at least two-thirds of them.
All right. But another study said out of 233 survivors, so remember it's the smallest sample, found 40% were suffering from mental illness three and a half years after...
I think this was after normal...
Normal flu. And there's, you know, chronic fatigue syndrome suggested, etc.
So the suggestion here by Noah is that the long COVID and the possible side effects might be more than we think, and makes the case that even the regular flu has longer-term implications than people realize, even just the regular flu.
So if the regular flu has long-term implications, and we seem to know that, For some people, anyway, then COVID presumably would be worse because it attacks you worse.
Well, the Pfizer booster looks like the CDC head has approved that for some high-risk people.
Ugh. That got really bad, didn't it?
So the Pfizer has...
So it's approved for a third one.
But because there's enough risk...
That they don't want to give it to low-risk people, say kids.
They only want to give it to you if you're over, I don't know, 65.
I'm not sure if you need a comorbidity or not.
But that tells you it's sort of on the edge, doesn't it?
I thought we were dealing with cleaner odds than this.
The odds of getting vaccinated versus the odds of not getting vaccinated, depending on what numbers you believe or who you trust, should be a big difference.
Now, if the numbers are accurate.
If people are making up the numbers, all bets are off.
But in theory, the vaccination is like many times safer than not getting vaccinated.
But when you get to the booster, it's like, well, if you're over 65, yeah.
But if you're 64, I don't know.
If you're 64, it might not be worth it.
But it's worth it if you're 65.
Okay. I'm 64.
So, I don't know.
To me, it feels like this is kind of marginal, depending on your age.
Maybe if you're 80, it's not marginal.
But if you're in your 60s, you're like, I don't know.
Kind of marginal. Here's my next question.
Why would you give a third Pfizer booster to these people?
Why wouldn't you give them one Moderna?
Eh? Eh?
Would you be better off or worse off with two Pfizer shots and then the booster being the Moderna?
Or would you be better off with three Pfizer's?
Because if Pfizer has the problem, you get a triple Pfizer.
Triple the potential problem.
But if you gave them two Pfizer's and they were okay so far, and then you gave them a Moderna, do you get to the same level of...
Protection. But have you diversified your risk?
I'd love to see a doctor or an expert give me an opinion on that.
Because it could be that it's just too hard to test it because it's two different companies.
It just may not be possible to test that.
But in concept, given the unknowns...
And there are lots of unknowns.
Given the unknowns, wouldn't it be safer to give them a Moderna as the booster?
Yes or no? It's just sort of an interesting question.
I don't know. And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes the best coffee with Scott Adams all day.
I mean, since midnight last night, I don't think there's been a better one.
This is it.
So, yeah, Evar.
Evar. Evar, spelled with an A. Test for antibodies first.
Sounds more logical.
Anita says, Anita Butts, are you a doctor?
No. I'm the person who's got a better track record than the doctors.
You know, there's nothing that amuses me more than when people say, Scott, you idiot.
You're not a doctor.
Why do we listen to you at all?
You're not a doctor.
Well, my track record is better than the doctors so far.
I'm sorry. It's just the truth.
I do have a better track record than the doctors.
Now, why is that?
Because I only pick up areas where I'm confident.
So when they said masks don't work, Fauci said it originally, I said, I'm no doctor, but I can spot bullshit.
So I spotted bullshit before the doctors did.
Now, do I argue with them about, I don't know, long COVID or something?
No, because how would I know?
So I'll take the doctors over my own opinion on things that I have no special knowledge about.
But if it just comes to, are you being bullshitted, I'm pretty good at that.
Pretty good. So yes, my track record of just the things I cherry-picked to talk about is better than the doctors.
It's a fact. You can look it up yourself.
Update on Boo. I'll get an update this morning, but she survived the surgery just fine and was recovering as of last night and moving around.
But I'll get more information today.
Now, that is all we've got for today, and I've got to run, and it's been a pleasure, as always.
