Episode 1670 Scott Adams: President Biden's State of the Union Speech and Latest From Ukraine
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Content:
Wisconsin something
Guessing what might be happening in Ukraine
President Biden's SOTU speech
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of your life.
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And it does everything, including stopping a Russian military convoy 40 miles long.
Yeah, that's the simultaneous sip.
Go. All right.
Well, let's talk about all the things.
You know, do you ever wonder if whenever there's a big story going on, such as Ukraine, does anybody ever try to slip a big story past the filter?
Try to just slip a big story past the people watching when everybody's looking the other direction?
Yeah, nothing like that happened.
Nothing like that happened.
There's a little story about Mark Zuckerberg's money that was funneled into the Wisconsin state elections, well, the national elections, but the state was running them in Wisconsin.
There's a little story about apparently the way the money was used to get out the vote was actually bribery and illegal.
That's right. Wisconsin...
I can't use the words to describe what happened there, apparently, or reportedly, because I would get kicked off of social media.
Seriously. I can't even tell you what the news is.
I think I would get kicked off of social media.
And I'm being serious. It's the news.
It's not something I'm making up.
I'm just reporting what the news is saying.
And the news is reporting...
That Wisconsin found that the Zuckerberg money that went in to allegedly help get out the vote was in several cases breaking the law, and really important laws it turns out.
And, no surprise, do you know why there are laws against that sort of thing?
So that this doesn't happen.
That's why they have those laws.
They have those laws so that exactly this doesn't happen.
It's not like...
I just want to be, you know, very specific here.
It's not like the Zuckerberg money did something that somebody discovered after the fact.
Wow, it technically violated a law.
It technically violated it.
No, it wasn't that.
It was just violated.
It was exactly violated.
It was, here's the law, here's the offense, yep, that fits exactly.
Now, at this point, can you make a definitive conclusion about the, let's say, the credibility of the 2022 election?
Yes, you can. I'm not going to say it out loud, because I'll be kicked off of social media, but But I think if one of the key swing states can show that their local laws were broken by the sound side money, and pretty much everybody thinks the sound side money did make a difference.
Let's see. The money made a difference in the election.
It was illegal.
You know what word somebody would use for that kind of situation?
It would start with an R, and it would end with an IGD. But I wouldn't say it.
Because, as you know, no court, no court, has found any fraud.
Well, until now.
Now, the courts haven't found it yet.
But I'm pretty sure they're going to find it, if I had to guess.
Well, so that's interesting.
Rasmussen has a poll about impressions of NATO. And people in the US had a 65% favorable opinion of NATO, which is pretty high for the United States.
And another question was, should the US continue to give more money to NATO than other countries?
Because I guess we give about a quarter of the budget.
53% said, no, we shouldn't give more money.
32% said, yes, we should give more money to NATO than other countries.
Now, Is it your first impression?
Who would be against the United States paying less and the other countries paying more?
How would you be against that?
And the answer is, I don't think you'd have as much influence on NATO if you only spend 2%.
But if you're 25% of the budget, then you get to decide what NATO does, which is sort of a bargain.
You could say. But I wouldn't compare it just dollar to dollar.
There's influence in there. All right.
So let's talk about Ukraine and try to guess what's happening through the fog of war and the haze of reality.
How much of what's coming out of Ukraine do you think is true?
I'm going to say that nearly 100% of the things that are pro-Ukraine are bullshit.
Nearly. I mean, some of it might be accidentally true.
For example, Zelensky is probably still alive.
That's probably true. But do you believe the stories of great heroism and how the Russian army has been stopped and running out of gas and all their conscripts don't even know what war they're in and all of that stuff?
Well... Maybe some of the individual stories are true, especially about the Russian conscripts.
But we have debunked most of it by now, right?
The 13 Ukrainians bravely telling Russian Navy to F you.
Well, that didn't happen.
They were just captured.
They weren't killed.
Pretty much a lot of this stuff you're seeing from pro-Ukraine is part of a very sophisticated persuasion campaign that's working perfectly.
It's really working well.
Because the West has galvanized and it's all persuasion.
Because think about the argument on the other side, which was expressed by, let's see, Colonel McGregor.
He was on Trey Gowdy's show on Fox News.
And he was basically saying...
I'm going to paraphrase, so this isn't exactly what he said, just to be clear.
Approximately, the idea is that Ukraine has basically been traditionally Russia.
Russia told us forever that if we looked to put missiles there, it would be a problem.
He did exactly what he's been saying he would do for 15 years.
It's just history.
It's fate. There's nothing you can do about it.
Stop sending weapons to Ukraine.
You'll just get more people killed.
You should hope that they surrender as fast as possible because it's just one corrupt government being replaced by another corrupt government.
So you don't really buy anything.
And Zelensky is not George Washington.
He's just another corrupt guy who's trying to keep his job.
So that would be one point of view.
Now, what part of that point of view could you debunk?
I don't know that you could debunk any of it.
Could you? If you phrase it right and you frame it right, it looks like the West provoked a war it didn't need to provoke.
It looked like the West was the aggressor by trying to turn a country that could have been neutral...
Could have been neutral, if we'd pushed for that.
Could have been neutral, and we pushed for it to be more aggressively NATO. Who exactly started this war?
I think NATO did.
I think NATO started the war by crossing a line they knew would start a war.
I mean, if somebody says, if you do this for 15 years in a row, says if you do this, it's going to be a big problem, and then you do it, well, you can't say you were surprised, right?
So I would say that there's a solid argument that NATO, the United States, the West provoked it.
But here's the counterargument.
If, let's say, Hitler...
No, I won't use Hitler.
Let's say... Let's say there was...
No, I'm not going to use an example.
As soon as I use an analogy, you'll just argue about the analogy, so I won't do that.
I'll resist the temptation to use an analogy.
But let me just say that there is a way to frame this story in which Ukraine is not a good guy whatsoever.
That Ukraine is just using the United States, has persuaded us that they're the good guys, they're a bunch of kleptocrats.
Replacing them with Putin wouldn't make any difference to the people in Ukraine because they would just go about their day with another illegitimate government.
So that's one version.
And then the other version is that, you know, Putin is basically Hitler and if he doesn't conquer, if he conquers Ukraine, he'll keep on going.
How true is that? How true is it that Putin, if he got away with taking over countries, more of it, he's already gotten away with it, but if he keeps getting away with it, he would keep doing it?
True or false? I feel like that's kind of true.
It feels pretty true.
Because Russia is a power-based philosophy, right?
If they have the power, they use it.
And when they don't have the power, they don't use it.
And maybe that's it.
There's no other nuance whatsoever.
When they have the power, they use it.
Because they think, you know, Russia is a big, strong, powerful country, and if they have the power, they use it.
So both of those narratives, I think, are 100% accurate.
So we're basically looking at two sides that are somewhat unredeemable in terms of the governments, not the people, of course.
But the governments of both sides are completely irredeemable.
So you could take either side you wanted.
I think the United States is just taking a strategic side.
Here's what I think happened.
And a little bit of this is informed by a tweet I saw by Camille Ghalive.
He seems to know something about this situation.
But he talks about how Russia operates.
And he had this observation that there's some kind of a philosophy that countries can optimize their land-based army or their sea-based army But they can't optimize both.
It's just too difficult.
It would just be too expensive to have two optimized armies.
You know, one in naval and one on land.
Now, I'm pretty sure the United States does exactly that.
I think we optimize all of it because we can.
But a normal country, Russia, Just doesn't really have the money to optimize both the navy and the land.
Now here's where it gets interesting.
Apparently the Soviet Union did have the money, so they could have land and sea optimized.
Russia doesn't, but they didn't want to give up their large-ish navy, so they kept a large optimized navy, which meant it became largely impossible to optimize their own They're a land-based army.
So the hypothesis is that however good you think the Russian army is, you're way off.
They're nowhere near as good as you think because they're not optimized.
But maybe the Navy is.
I don't know. I would doubt that too.
So the idea is that there's a little bit of smoke and mirrors going on with the Russian military and that it might be way weaker than you think.
And that the only way that Putin imagined he could win was to go in quickly and scare Ukraine into surrendering, basically.
Like, he needed a surrender.
But he didn't get one.
Because Zelensky is too good with persuasion.
And Zelensky realized, correctly, apparently, that if he used persuasion and did the George Washington fighting with the troops, leading from the front kind of thing, that he could galvanize the rest of the world, or he had a good chance to.
Apparently he succeeded. And they could hold off long enough that Russia's army couldn't sustain.
So the thinking is that Russia doesn't even have an army that could fight an army war.
They're just flooding the zone and hoping the bluff works.
Now, I do believe that Russia could level any city it wanted.
We all agree with that, right?
But if they started leveling cities in Ukraine, that's different than Chechnya, meaning that the Russian citizens are going to say, wait a minute, did you just level the city where my grandmother lives?
Did you just level the city where my friend lives?
Hold on, did you just level the city where my mother-in-law lives?
A real example. I don't know that they can.
And can you imagine holding the country if you'd leveled Kiev?
Imagine holding the country after you did that.
Now what would it take for Russia to hold the country?
To occupy it and hold it.
If the country didn't want to be in their sphere and was going to resist, what would it take to hold it?
Well, a military expert estimated, looking at all the different occupations of different armies across time, that you need about 20 military in that country for every 1,000 citizens you're trying to suppress.
That's a lot.
And it's about 20 times more than Russia has.
In other words, the Russian military is maybe an order of magnitude at least away from being able to hold the country.
So in terms of grabbing it and holding it militarily for the long term, not a chance.
There isn't any chance.
So the only way they could hold Ukraine is to decapitate the leader, put in a puppet, And hope that the citizens follow the puppet.
And, you know, that they could put pressure everywhere to make sure that that happened.
But they couldn't hold it the old-fashioned way, with power.
I'm seeing somebody say, so wrong, in all caps.
Hey, you're a so wrong guy.
The guy that says I'm so wrong, in all caps.
Russia uses threats and persuasion to hold areas.
Yes, yes. It would be a puppet.
Plus threats and persuasions and bribes and all those things.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
So they wouldn't need an occupying army if they could get that kind of cooperation.
But I don't know that Ukraine is cooperative.
Ukraine is looking pretty independent.
So it could be that Putin has himself in a situation where he can't win because he doesn't have the right kind of army to sustain a siege.
In fact, it would be sort of a race to see who starves to death first.
We'll talk about that in a minute.
The Russian army, or the people who are under siege.
I'm not sure who would starve first, because it's pretty hard to feed an army.
And they're already having problems, reportedly, but I don't believe any of the reports.
Yeah, how many Russians couldn't hold Afghanistan?
Exactly, that's an example.
It just can't be done with small numbers, and they have small numbers.
So, I'm all over the place here on this.
So, if that was the plan, Russia needs to either negotiate its way out and take what it can get, or it's got to figure something out, you know, find another way to win or something.
There are smart people saying the way this probably ends is with a partition of Ukraine, where the most Russian part that's close to the border, Russia keeps with a puppet.
And maybe the rest of it becomes a neutral country or something like that.
I don't know that that's going to fly.
So I can't see that being a thing.
But this brings us to that 40-mile convoy, which some say is a 4-mile convoy on a 40-mile road.
But other reports say it's actually a 40-mile convoy.
Now, the reports are that the convoy keeps getting bogged down.
So we see reports of Ukrainian citizens blocking the streets and trying to stop the tanks from coming in.
I don't know that that's going to work very long.
That sounds like something that would work for an hour.
And maybe if you do an hour at a time, it does make a difference.
But we're hearing reports that the Russian convoy is running out of food, Running out of gas, and maybe even some of these soldiers are sabotaging their own gas tanks to get out of fighting.
Now, do you believe any of that?
Well, the only thing I believe is that that 40-mile convoy is going slower than you'd expect them for reasons we don't understand.
That's the only thing we know.
I don't necessarily believe...
That they're starving or they're out of fuel.
That feels like more of the Ukrainian persuasion bullshit, doesn't it?
Sounds like propaganda.
Could be true. And that's why it works.
It works because you think, well, that could be true.
Now, why do you think that it could be true that the Russian convoy is running out of food and gas?
Why do you think it could be true?
Don't say that it is or is not, but why do you think it could be?
Because of Ukrainian persuasion.
The Ukrainians have given you a bunch of anecdotes of Russian soldier incompetence and lack of training.
They're showing the conscripts calling home.
They're talking stories about the Russian soldiers asking for directions from the locals.
I don't believe any of those stories.
But if some of those took hold and you believe that some of those anecdotes were true, Then you buy into the Russian army being so incompetent that they may have gone on a long convoy without enough gas and food and no way to get it to them.
But I kind of doubt it.
I feel like if there's one thing an army can do well, it's get food and gas to the place you need to get it when it's an uncontested area.
Because as far as we know, nobody's attacking the convoy, right?
It's literally uncontested on a clear road for miles, a clear straight paved road, and you're telling me that the Russians can't get food and gas in there?
Again, there's no attack on the convoy.
The weather's good enough.
It's not great, but it's good enough.
It's a paved road, and they can't get provisions in?
Does that sound real?
That doesn't sound real, does it?
It could be that they're just taking their time because there's negotiations going on and they're just part of the negotiation because they don't want to flatten or siege a city.
Imagine what would happen to the Russian economy if they lay siege to Kiev.
Think about it.
Think about...
Think about the daily stories coming out of potentially starvation inside of Kiev.
Yeah.
How many days of watching Kiev literally starve to death?
How many days like that would we go by before Europe and the rest of the country, maybe even China, just says, look, Russia, we're going to turn off your lights now.
Like, seriously? We're just going to turn off your lights.
So here's the things I think that Putin can't do.
He's sort of in a trap. I don't think he can crush Kiev.
I don't think he can hold the country with just an occupation.
I don't think it's going to work to put in a puppet.
I think only negotiating works at this point.
And I don't know that the Ukrainians are going to agree to anything.
Scott, his deep state talking points...
Match all they want to say.
Well, Sabong, Sabong, let me talk to you.
Sabong here on the comments on YouTube says that I have deep state talking points.
Well, Sabong, let me say something about you, since you've said something about me.
I would say that maybe you're a good mind reader, but you're not.
You're not.
Could it be that this is a story that is not simple?
Like your simple, shiny, smooth, marble-like brain, which is probably rolling around in your skull right now, Thinking, what the hell is going on?
I don't know what's going on now.
I thought I could just insult this guy, and he wouldn't even notice.
But I did notice.
And so, let me tell you, if the depth of your political analysis is that in a complicated story, I sometimes agree with other people, you are a fucking idiot.
Now, fucking idiots are invited to be on television.
I invite everybody.
It's a free country.
But just some advice.
If somebody, and I'm guessing, I'm just going to take a guess here, Sabong, I'm probably not the first person who told you you're a fucking idiot, am I? Am I? I mean, I feel like maybe your friends have mentioned that a few times.
Because you've got that fucking idiot vibe.
You know, fucking idiot energy.
You know what I mean? You know what I mean?
So, yes, Sabong, I will sometimes agree with other people.
You know what, Sabong?
Do you drink water sometimes?
Because Hitler did.
Hitler did. Oh, so you're just a Hitler copycat, Sabong?
Drinking water all the time, just like Hitler?
I do like to...
Yeah, quit hitting the sabong, sabong.
All right, enough on you. You're not important.
So Putin's trapped.
He can't really hold the city.
He can't siege it and starve it.
He can't crush it. What's he going to do?
I think he has to negotiate.
Now, here's a situation where I wonder how Machiavellian are the United States people who are in charge of stuff.
And let me ask you this.
Don't you think that our smartest people in our government and our military geniuses, don't we know that the worst possible thing Putin could do is keep attacking Ukraine?
It's the worst thing he could do for Russia.
Don't you think maybe on some level we didn't exactly trick him into doing it, but didn't we let this happen?
Am I wrong? I feel like we tricked him into attacking his own country.
Putin says that Ukraine is Russia.
We tricked Putin into attacking his own country and destroying it.
It looks like he's going to destroy Russia and Ukraine at the same time, which is all the same country.
So, again, I ask the question...
Are the U.S. and maybe European military and political minds, are they so Machiavellian that they knew that by supporting Ukraine going into NATO, they could cause Russia to start a war with itself?
They might even nuke themselves.
Think about it.
I mean, if they used a nuke, it could probably be in Ukraine, right?
I mean, if they were losing the war.
I suppose they could threaten other NATO countries with their nukes.
But I think we tricked Russia into nuking itself.
And that's not even a joke.
That's literally what's happening.
I think we tricked Russia into nuking itself.
We definitely tricked Russia into giving up its future control of energy, right?
At the moment, they still are selling a lot.
But I think we tricked them into destroying their entire economy.
Or was it a trick?
Did we blunder into this by luck?
Or bad luck, I don't know, because we don't know how it's going to work out.
But, you know, we have all these Russian spies.
You know, our CIA has a lot of Russian experts, probably too many of them.
So they focus on Russia too much.
I just have a feeling...
This might have been a trap.
I have a second feeling that that Russian convoy probably has resupply issues.
I don't think it's as bad as reported, probably.
But let me ask you this.
If you had this 40-mile convoy and you take out their fuel trucks, that would be bad.
But the other thing that you could do You could take out no fuel trucks, let them drive until the fuel trucks that they have are empty, and then what are they going to have to do?
They're going to have to send another fuel truck.
But the next fuel truck will not be hidden in a 40-mile convoy.
The next fuel truck will be maybe with some armed vehicles around it, but it's going to be a small unit that will be obviously full of gas...
Do you think the Ukrainians have some facility in taking out small units of Russians?
Apparently, they do.
Apparently, if it's a small group of Russians, as you would imagine guarding a truck full of fuel, it would be a smallish group.
Ukraine can take them out all day long.
They just fly their drone over there, wait for the truck, bam.
And they don't even have to shoot all of the trucks in the convoy.
Just take out the fuel truck, and the fuel truck takes out all the rest.
So, could it be that the Ukrainians are so smart that they said, the smartest thing we could do is let this entire convoy get into the country.
Let their supply line stretch.
By the way, Who is the first military genius who told you they might be intentionally stretching the Russian supply lines?
Me. I still don't know that's true, but in case it is, I want to put it out there.
It could be that the Ukrainians are so smart, they knew that all they had to do is pick off the supply chains coming in, and they don't even have to touch the rest.
Now you say to yourself, yes, Scott, but they're still going to have so many military assets right next to Kiev that they don't even need gas, basically.
They can just sit there and shoot and just put the army in, flood the zone.
Have you seen what the Ukrainians are doing to their own streets?
They have a barricade on every street.
The Russian army would have to stop to clear a barricade in an area that's the biggest kill zone anybody ever invented, which is high-rise buildings filled with people who are armed to the teeth with Molotov cocktails and guns that were handed out, you know, AKs. And they're going to have to pause to clear every obstacle.
I don't know that that city can be taken.
It can be starved, so that might happen.
What is Putin's objective?
Well, there are two versions of Putin's objective.
Somebody's asking me here. Scott is a clown.
Sonia. Sonia.
Do you know when men say, in all caps, something like you said, Scott is a clown?
When men say that, do you know what I call them?
I might call them a dick.
Might call him an asshole. Bastard sometimes.
Those are the sort of names that people typically use for men.
When women say things like that, I sometimes use a different word, which I get demonetized for.
So I'm just going to say you're a control freak.
That's all. You're just a control freak.
A... Stupid control freak.
That's all I'm going to say about that.
So... I'm always impressed by Russia's long game.
Apparently they planned things for decades.
They planned things for decades, and one of the things that they apparently succeeded at was persuading the West, or the United States especially, not to use nuclear energy.
And they also persuaded Germany not to use as much nuclear energy so that Russia could control them by selling them energy and make a lot of money.
So do you believe that?
First of all, do you believe that the reason that nuclear energy was demonized in this country is not because our left-leaning people were concerned about it, not because they had looked into it, but entirely because of Russian persuasion? .
The evidence is mounting that the entire Russian opinion about nuclear in this country was driven by Russian propaganda for years.
That's like actually probable.
I mean, you have to doubt every story at this point, but the evidence suggests it.
Now, what do you do if Russian propaganda is destroying your country by making you do the wrong things?
Well, a very interesting thing happened in this country, didn't it?
We've talked about how the opinion about nuclear energy, even before the Ukraine situation, the opinion about nuclear energy was negative, negative, negative, negative, negative, boom, positive.
And it happened all in about one or two years, it seems like.
Like it just ramped and went up.
Why'd that happen? Do you know why?
I think it's persuasion.
I think that there were people in the United States, Michael Schellenberg, right?
So I think that people like that, and Mark Schneider, of course, I think that they influenced me, and I used my powers of influence to spread their message as much as possible.
And I think that between the The knowledge that they had, and then, if I may say modestly, I feel like I've trained an army of persuaders.
Would you say that's true?
So give me an ego check here in case I'm over-claiming.
I feel like by doing this show for the last several years, I've trained people to recognize propaganda better, recognize fake news better, but also to persuade better.
And I think that the sort of collective energy from that may have made a difference.
You know, maybe Russia propaganda for 20 years got broken just by some citizens who could see past it and could penetrate it.
Now, I'm not saying like, you know, three people I mentioned did it all.
But they did a lot. They did a lot.
I think it could have been the difference.
It could have easily been the difference.
Because remember, these are people whose influence reached all the way to Congress.
I mean, they literally talked to Congress.
Michael Schellenberger in particular.
So I think they made a difference.
So when you're looking at the military, you're looking at national defense, We always make the mistake of ignoring economics and now energy.
We should have always been thinking that our economy and our energy production are just part of the defense program.
And I would argue that space needs to be in that category, too.
All of our space stuff is really national defense in disguise.
That's all it is. So I think if we were clear-eyed...
We would have known from the beginning that nuclear energy had some risks.
Everything does. But the new versions, the third version of the nuclear plants that we build now, none of them have ever melted down.
Modern technology, even before generation four, generation three, The one that would currently be built.
There's a little Generation 4 going on.
But even Generation 3 has literally had no meltdowns.
They just work.
Now there is some risk that they might, but even Generation 4 will take care of that.
Energy has always been part of national security, but I think maybe the Ukraine situation takes it to another level.
I would agree with you that it's always been in the conversation, but a weak part of the conversation.
Does Scott cover for the WEF by attacking anyone who brings it up?
Well, Kevin, in all caps, I don't even know what you're talking about.
I can't even insult you.
Yeah, the WEF wants to have control over our lives.
I get that. So here's what I think is going to happen.
In the next two or three days, if Ukraine can hold out, I think we'll have an answer to the question of whether Kiev will starve before the Russian army starves.
Now, of course, both of them have the advantage that they could get supplies by air, right?
But neither have air superiority, we're told.
Could the Ukrainians shoot into the air any, let's say, any airplanes that were trying to deliver food to the army of Russia?
You know, air lifting food.
Do you think the Ukrainians could shoot those few transport things, what would you call them, cargo planes?
How hard is it to shoot a cargo plane out of the sky?
Is it easy? I don't know.
I mean, it would have probably a fleet of other planes protecting it and stuff.
Somebody says it's not easy.
I don't know. Because they would be higher up until they drop their cargo, is that why?
I don't really know why. Depends on height, somebody says.
So I'm not so sure that Russia can do an airdrop of supplies, at least conveniently, or well enough to make a difference.
And I don't know that we could get food into Kiev either.
So who's going to...
I hate to say it, but this is going to be a question of who starves to death, isn't it?
And who freezes.
Am I right? That the war is down to who starves to death?
Because I think it is. So let me make this my prediction.
That this will be a supply chain war in the end.
That whichever side has a better supply chain, ironically, the better supply chain is going to be the one that doesn't starve and they're the ones who are going to wait it out longer.
But I think in the meantime there will probably be some negotiated settlement, I would guess.
Or somebody will take out Putin in their own country.
I would be surprised if there's actually that much pushback within Putin's inner circle.
I would say that the billionaires are probably pretty mad because this is costing them serious money.
It would be real interesting to see if any of the oligarchs go bankrupt.
I don't even know if that's possible.
But imagine if one prominent oligarch literally just went bankrupt, lost everything.
That would get their attention, wouldn't it?
I don't think we're close to that, but maybe.
So there is a weird, ironic possibility that Russia will lose the war because of a lack of gas.
That could actually happen.
Russia could lose the war because of a lack of gas.
That's a real thing. You know, their entire advantage was that they had fuel that they're the main source to Europe.
But it's possible.
They will lose the war because they don't have enough gas.
That would be the sort of perfect movie ending, I guess.
All right, I guess we've got to talk about the State of the Union.
Did any of you watch it?
I asked on Locals and almost nobody did.
All right, so on YouTube and locals, did anybody watch the Biden speech?
Okay, we got a few yeses.
All right. Well, here are the highlights, according to other people.
Of course, all the Biden-friendly people like Jake Tapper and Van Jones were saying things like, Jake said it was very solid and Van Jones declared Uncle Joe is back.
And there was him, quote, at his best.
How many of you felt that it was Biden at his best?
Is Uncle Joe back?
Did you get that feeling?
No? All right.
So... And I guess Jennifer Rubin, who of course is just a pro-Democrat, she said Biden delivered, claiming his speech was more bipartisan than one could have imagined.
How many of you thought it was bipartisan?
Did anybody hear that and say, you know, that's more bipartisan than I imagined?
Not so much. Late show host Stephen Colbert described it at the State of Union speech as a rollercoaster ride of rip-roaring reasonableness.
Did it sound like rip-roaring reasonableness?
I don't know. Actually, that is one thing that Biden is good at.
Biden is good at sounding reasonable, which is different than being effective.
But he's actually good at sounding reasonable, even when he's not.
So apparently he came out in a full-throated way to be against defunding the police.
That would be bipartisan.
Well, sort of bipartisan.
His own party doesn't like it as much.
But he said it clearly.
I'll give him credit for that. He said that inflation is robbing America.
Give him credit for that. He didn't use the words build back better.
Because apparently he thinks he might only get some parts of that now.
So I guess that went away, partly.
And so I guess he announced that we'll be closing U.S. airspace to Russian planes.
How many Russian planes were in American airspace in the first place?
I assume it was only flights back and forth to America?
So... I'm not so sure that that makes a big difference.
How many people were traveling back and forth to Russia anyway?
But credit card countries and oil companies are pulling out Apple.
Apple stopped selling products.
Imagine having an Apple phone or Apple products and never being able to get a replacement or a part.
That's really going to make the public pretty mad.
So I don't think anybody knows...
If the sanctions are going to be enough.
But we've never seen this kind of sanctions, have we?
I feel as though as long as Putin is in charge, the Ukrainian persuasion has just destroyed Russia because the Ukrainians and the US have made Putin look like such a Hitler-like character that I don't know that any big country can go back and do business with him ever again.
If Apple is waiting If they're just playing for time and they're thinking, oh, when this blows over and we consolidate control over Ukraine, everybody still needs energy, so they're going to do business with us again.
I don't think so.
I think Russia is actually done as an economically viable entity as long as Putin's there.
What do you think? Now, Keep in mind that even the top economists don't really know what's going to happen there.
It's not knowable. We had similar sanctions against Iran, but Iran was already a little bit isolated.
It was a different situation.
Am I right? I think Russia has way more international connections that they require.
I might be wrong about that.
Are economists ever sure about anything?
No. Yeah, we will keep buying oil from them, apparently.
Now, the fact that Biden did not say we were going to get our domestic energy production back online, that's like not even trying.
That is so not even trying.
Apparently, so there's something happening interesting with Russian oil.
Now, the price of oil went through the roof.
And so you say to yourself, wait, that just enriches Russia.
Because the more expensive the oil is, the more they make to fund their army.
But I need a fact check on this because I may have read something wrong.
But it looked to me like nobody's buying the Russian oil.
And that the price of Russian crude, this is not the gas, but just the oil, the price of Russian crude is actually just falling off a table.
Because nobody wants to take the risk of transporting it.
Do you think that's true?
I feel like there's so much hunger for oil that they're going to find a place to sell it to.
But at the moment, whether or not they find a place to sell it, at the moment the risk profile is so high that they can't seem to ship it out at a price that people are willing to pay.
So they actually are losing money On oil compared to where they were.
They didn't gain money. They're losing oil.
I feel like Russia's economy is just right on the edge.
And maybe already.
Because again, we don't know how strong it was in the first place.
It wasn't that strong. And like I said, Biden said that COVID is not controlling us and get back to work and he wants you to go back and Fill out the great downtowns again.
To which I say, stop telling us to do that.
That's not your job.
It's not Biden's job to tell me if I should commute or work from home.
That is way over the line.
How about I will decide where I work, and you will just go do whatever you do in your little White House?
How about you leave me alone?
How about that? How about after this frickin' pandemic, how about the public doesn't really want to get pushed around anymore?
Maybe we're done with the government telling us what to do if it's not strictly on the Constitution.
Maybe if every word of it isn't in the Constitution, fuck off!
Because we're a little bit tired of being told what to do.
And I certainly don't want to be told to commute two hours a day.
For what? For what?
For what? Biden?
Who's that good for?
Scott thinks Russia forgot how to supply an army.
Sonia. Sonia in all caps.
She says, Scott thinks Russia forgot how to supply an army.
Does that sound like what I just said, Sonia?
Is that what you heard, Sonia?
Because I'm pretty sure they do know how.
But you know what else? I think the Ukrainians know how to stop it.
Of course they know how to supply an army.
But nobody knows how to supply an army when their supply line is caught.
All right. Yeah, I think a lot of you, like Sonya, are just Russian bots.
That's true. Probably.
Probably. What will we say when Russia wins Ukraine, and Ukraine is crushing?
What will we say? Well, we'll say that's what the military told us would happen.
Let me ask you something.
Let me ask you something.
Just looking at your comments for a moment.
I think the all-caps people are all...
You're all... Can we have a vote here?
Are the people writing at me in all caps?
Are they all trolls?
They're all bots, right? Could we have a filter that just blocked anything that's in all caps?
Oh my God.
How much do you want that?
There's no filter to block somebody who writes all caps.
How much do you want that?
I would pay for that.
I would actually pay for it.
If you said, I'll pay $3 a month, then nobody can write to me with all caps.
I'd pay $3 a month.
Come on, where's that feature?
Now, you don't want to be ignorant that the message was sent.
What you want is for an automatic reply to say...
Messages in all caps are not taken seriously.
You've been blocked. But I guess you couldn't be blocked if you're responding back.
Well, you know what I mean. Something like that.
Ask for it in locals.
You've recruited 20 people to my life.
Over on the locals platform, they just went to all capitals.
I'm seeing a sea of capital letters on locals.
Apparently, all the rogues and the rebels are on locals.
So, it turns out that in addition to not wanting Biden to tell you what to do, it turns out that my followers don't want me to tell them what to do either.
Apparently I'm not telling anybody what to do.
I think America is done with being told what to do.
And that's why I love America.
That's why I love America.
Because we're very flexible until we're not.
That's how I see the United States.
We're very flexible, super flexible, until we're not.
All right. The people in lowercase are the rogues now.
All right. That's basically one of our defining features.
Yeah. So how many mandates are left in the United States from COVID? We've got flying still, right?
Yeah. You still need your mask for flying?
Has it been announced that there's an end date to the flying masks?
That's crazy, isn't it?
That's crazy. Now, I believe, was it in Canada that the healthcare workers can get their jobs back if they're unvaccinated?
And in the United States, we should have a list of the remaining mandates and dates that they're coming off.
Now, I predicted that mandates would come off and that it was temporary.
And so far, I think I'll be right, but it's taken a lot longer than I thought, so I'm wrong about that.
Yeah, public transport still needed.
So here's my experience from yesterday.
Every place I went yesterday in California, people were wearing masks.
Except me. My town is still fully masked.
Except me. Now, I say fully, it's more like half to 50% or something, but there are a lot of masks there in settings that make no sense.
All right. That, ladies and gentlemen, is everything I wanted to tell you, except that apparently Biden referred to the Ukrainian people as the Iranian people.
Not his best moment.
Or as Chris Eliza said, well, we know what he meant.
As he's up there inspiring confidence that he knows which country is at war.
And in Russia, pot smokes you, okay?
I do live in a very blue city.
True thing. So somebody said they took their mask off when they were exiting the airport, you know, before they got to the exit, under the theory, what are they going to do?
Kick you out of the airport? You're leaving the airport.
Actually, that's pretty smart.
If you're leaving the airport, let's say you've got your bags already, you should definitely take off your mask.
Because, again, what are they going to do?
Kick you out? The door's just right over there.
You're walking toward it. I mean, at the very least, it would signal to other people that there's not a danger.
You know, it would just sort of get them used to it.
it.
So it might be a good idea.
Actually, it might be a good idea anywhere to take off your mask when you're heading for the exit.
Pilots laid off or refusing the vaccination just won a lawsuit and will get back pay, somebody saying in the comments.
I don't have a source for that.
All right.
Uranium.
All right, that's all I got.
Yes, we still need masks and healthcare, but I don't think that's going to change right away.
