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Content:
Politics, AI Business Task Performance, College Application Discrimination, Tony Heller, Climate Change, NOAA Estimated Temperatures, Hunter Biden Trial, Tenet Media Funding, Division Grifters, Ukraine Paid Influencers, America First Legal, Judge Merchan Finances, Harris Tax Plan, Trump Townhall Fact-Checking, CA Social Media Moderation Law, Ukraine Flamethrower Drone, Scott Adams
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Luckily, I'm luckily I memorized all of my notes All right That's three devices that have failed so far this morning.
Let's try number four.
Device number four.
Print.
I know this is the fascinating part of the show.
Right.
Prince Do you know how close you were to watching me destroy a printer in front of you I Bye.
I had literally just decided to pick it up and destroy it when it started printing.
I had reached the end of my very short fuse for technology.
I was literally going to stand up, grab it, lift it above my head, and destroy it on the ground in front of you.
And it goes, b-bing!
Ha ha ha!
Yeah, I think you have like four or five technology failures in the morning.
After around the fifth one, you get to destroy whatever it was that was doing it to you.
All right.
Let me get the locals people up here in their own special comments.
Because I can.
So did any of you have trouble getting on X today?
My morning started with X not working all morning.
But now we're all in good shape.
All right.
I've got a, uh, I've got a recommendation for you, but, uh, I think there's something we got to do first.
Isn't there?
There's something we have to do first.
Good morning, everybody.
And welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
You've never had a better time.
But if you'd like to take this experience up to the levels that nobody can understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip and it happens now.
go. Well that was so so good.
Anyway, I have the following entertainment recommendation for you.
On Netflix, there's a series that has the worst title you've ever seen.
So don't be thrown off by the title.
The title is Wya Earp and the Cowboy Wars.
Wya Earp and the Cowboy Wars.
Now, I thought that was going to be really stupid and fictional.
It turns out it's more of a documentary, but, you know, sort of stylized documentary.
You know, so there's an actor who plays the part, but there's lots of Ed Harris talk over.
But here's what's interesting about it.
There's a story about, you know, some vendettas and some lawmen and some shootouts and stuff you'd expect.
But here's the part that fascinated me.
Apparently in the early part of our country, the judicial system was completely corrupt.
Just completely corrupt.
And also the government was completely corrupt.
And you have to watch it to see how nothing's changed.
So the takeaway is that you're looking at things that happened hundreds of years ago.
A couple hundred years ago?
Something like that.
150.
And nothing's changed.
So the richest guy in the world basically just switches out the president.
And it has something to do with Wyatt Earp.
So apparently the Wyatt Earp situation rippled all around the world.
I had no idea.
It was so connected to world events.
And the problem was, J.P.
Morgan wanted to buy all the railroads and make a lot of money shipping silver from Tombstone, Arizona to the rest of the country.
And the U.S.
sort of really needed that level of business to survive.
And they couldn't do it because it was too dangerous.
Because of the whole Wyatt Earp situation and the bad guys.
The cowboys were the bad guys in this case.
So you got to see it to look at the modern parallels.
It's basically nothing changed except we got smartphones.
Everything else was completely corrupt.
It's fascinating.
How did we ever get to this point?
Well, the Guardian reports that in England they did a study with 8,000 people and there are people who had various mental health problems and you know where this is going.
So instead of giving them pills, For their mental health issues, they organize things like a bunch of outdoor stuff and things like nature walks and community gardening and tree planting and what they call wild swimming.
I don't know exactly what wild swimming is, but I assume not in a swimming pool.
Is that what I mean?
Is that what wild means?
Or do you just swim in a funny fashion?
Is it more like instead of doing this, you're like, Oh, is it the opposite of synchronized swimming?
All right.
No synchronized swimming, people.
It's wild.
Wild swimming.
I don't know.
Must be something in England.
Anyway, guess what?
They found that it doesn't cost as much as therapy and all their feelings about everything improved.
Exactly like you think.
Now, you know what I'm going to say?
You could have saved a lot of time and money by asking Scott.
If people would feel better if they had purpose and something scheduled and it caused them to be interacting with a whole bunch of new people.
So they had a social life.
Of course that works.
Yeah.
Everything from going outdoors to moving your legs, to being social, to having a purpose.
100% of that is already known to help.
So why did they even need this?
I mean, maybe just to see how important it was.
Well, now this leads me to my prediction for the computer age.
You ready?
When people ask me, Scott, how should I prepare for my career if I'm a young person?
I say, I don't know what's going to happen.
You know, the world is a funny place.
It's pretty unpredictable with AI and robots and everything coming online.
But I've got one strong prediction, which is that people are going to find meaning in doing things with other people.
And it's the only thing that will ever have meaning to us.
I want to do things, and I almost don't care what the things are.
There's a pretty wide variety of things that I'd be willing to do, as long as I go there and there are other people.
And we meet at a certain time, and we know the schedule, and we do a thing.
I need that.
It's like a basic human need, just to have some kind of interaction with other people.
So I think if you become an organizer of events, I feel like that's something that AI will have trouble taking over, because there's too much of a human element to that.
It might help you with scheduling, you know, some of the boring parts, but I think if you just simply said hey neighborhood I'm gonna start organizing a bunch of things You know in my neighborhood Or one of our my neighbors is a organizer Now she's also the you know, the couple are the main real estate people in our area So it's it's good for them to know a lot of people But on top of that, they're just great organizers.
So our neighborhood always has block parties and events and movie nights and stuff like that.
It happens all the time, like all year, all year round, every month or so, there's something going on.
And it completely changes your experience of living in the neighborhood.
Because, you know, all the neighbors wave because we've all met.
You know, I don't know every name, but we all know each other.
They all know who I am.
So group activities, I think that's the future.
There's a study the Guardian is also reporting that researchers have found that how you think is affected by your brain.
Yeah, it turns out that according to science your brain is the thing that can change how you think.
And if your brain is different from somebody else's brain, you might have different thoughts and feelings than they do.
I know!
I know it's the most surprising thing you've heard.
You could have just asked me.
And I would have said, yes, brains are the thing that cause us to think and feel.
So if my brain is different than yours, we might get a different outcome, despite our free will.
But specifically, this research was that the people who experienced depression have a particular part of their brain network that's bigger than other people.
Does that tell you that the people with depression have no hope?
Because there's part of their brain that's different.
Probably not.
Because what we don't know is how much you can change it.
Because your brains are kind of plastic.
And if you, for example, if you were to give yourself a new habit, for example, that would rewire your brain.
So you might be able to hack around it.
But certainly your brain is what's causing you to think however you're thinking.
There's also a study by, let's see, it's written about in The Byte, that a government tested AI to find out how AI does in a bunch of work-related tasks or trials conducted by Amazon Web Services.
So they wanted to see how AI would do compared to humans in a bunch of tasks, such as summarizing things, you know, the stuff that humans do.
And you would not be surprised that AI is terrible.
Compared to humans.
Humans are much better at summarizing things, and there's some other small tasks here, we'll see.
So it says that the possibility of using AI in the business world is a big problem, because a lot of things humans still do better, and I don't know that that's going to change.
So here's my prediction.
I think that the large language models, given that you can't rely on them to know what they're going to do, even if you train them, and it doesn't look like that's solvable.
It's not solvable unless you take away the AI part and just program it to, if somebody asks this question, this will be your exact answer.
And then it's not AI.
So I feel that our current technology of AI, is very limited compared to what we think.
And I'll go further and say, if AI is not good as a replacement for an employee, are you ever going to want to have a robot in your house that's run on AI?
I'm wondering if we'll ever be able to trust it.
There's a non-zero chance that there'll never be a robot with AI.
That's more than a toy or a demonstration.
Because if you put it in your house and it had strength and muscles and the ability to open doors and all that, and you couldn't know for sure what it's going to do, how long before it does something dangerous?
Because remember, it's got arms and legs and it can operate equipment.
It can turn on your oven, right?
But what happens if it turns on your oven?
It just kills you.
Just because it was AI and it wasn't smart enough to know that might kill you.
I don't know.
Although I wouldn't know that.
I think AI would know not to turn on the oven.
Rasmussen has a new poll out on the presidential election, and they've got Trump up 47 to 46, which means a tie, statistically.
And only 3% said they'd vote for some other candidate, if it's a two-person race.
And Rasmussen says that a month ago, Trump led by five points.
But Harris is steadily reducing the margin.
So, the polls are narrowing.
That's all I'm going to say about that.
Use your imagination to imagine the rest of the things I say about polling.
Can you do that?
Can we save some time?
Can we all just stipulate that every one of us is thinking exactly the same thing about presidential polling right now?
Yeah.
Let's just stipulate.
Why is my printer just starting up and making noise?
It's going through some kind of cycle over there.
Well, as you know, there was a school shooting and that's all I'm going to say about that because I don't like to say the names or give any attention to it.
I hope you're on board with that.
We're just not going to talk about it.
It doesn't help.
It just doesn't help.
I mean, it could hurt, but there's no way it's going to help.
So I'm just let the let the other news talk about it all they want.
Laura Loomer I saw next said, Have you noticed there's always a school shooting in a swing state or a caucus state right before an election?
Well, I haven't noticed that.
I've noticed that they happen, you know, on a regular basis.
So I feel like it's been a long time since we had one.
I hate to say it was overdue, but it kind of felt that way.
I do not think that it is possible to trigger people to do school shootings on a political schedule.
If that's possible, we all have a lot to learn about brainwashing.
Because I don't think it's possible.
It's definitely possible to get somebody to do something on their own schedule.
You know, if you work on somebody for years and years, you could get them to go kill somebody.
Yeah, you'd have to work on it for years.
Kind of like Thomas Crooks.
Probably there was a long extended communication with somebody.
That's my speculation.
There's no evidence of that.
But I speculate he was dealing with some brainwasher over a long period of time.
Just speculation.
Well, according to The Hill, we have now some results.
Because the Supreme Court struck down the using race to get into college.
The Asian Americans, in particular, were interested in making sure that they had a fair shot to get into college.
And they thought that the DEI, et cetera, were causing them to be rejected from the good colleges.
And lesser qualified people were getting in, they said.
So how'd that turn out?
So colleges tried to adjust.
And as people were worried, the number of or the percentage of new applicants who are black dropped.
But not everywhere, not everywhere.
So MIT said, That black applicants went from 25% down to 16%.
That's a big drop.
It's a big drop.
Meanwhile, but this is interesting, over at Yale, they got more white people in.
So Yale as a percentage accepted more white applicants.
But it decreased the percentage of Asian Americans who got into Yale.
Now, let me just say this again.
It was the Asian American population who, in my opinion, I think this is true, were the driving force behind getting the Supreme Court to say, hey, you don't use race in admissions.
And then at Yale, the outcome is that they admitted fewer Asian Americans.
How did that happen?
I do not know.
I do not know how that happened.
But they say it happened.
But it's black and Hispanic enrollment held steady.
So Yale... I don't know how to interpret this other than Yale just found a different way to discriminate.
And they just changed who they're discriminating against.
I mean, I don't have proof of that, but the results kind of suggest that They were a little bit anti-Asian American, so maybe they have to explain that.
Anyway, so that happened.
Tony Heller, who is a notable climate change skeptic, he's mostly a skeptic, I think, more than anything about the temperature measurements.
But here's something that Tony Heller is reporting.
He says, apparently a lot of the NOAA numbers that they have for temperatures, a lot of them are estimates.
So I don't know if you knew that.
So sometimes they'll use the actual measurement, but there are some special cases, just special cases, where they have to adjust it because they know there's something wrong.
But that's no big deal, right?
I mean, if most of the temperature Measurements are okay, and then they have to do some estimates.
Let's say, for example, one of the measurement devices broke.
Well, they wouldn't want to have nothing.
So they might say, all right, well, let's just assume it's the average of the last three years or something.
So you put an estimate in there.
That wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
It wouldn't be exactly accurate.
But if you didn't do it too much, Yeah, it might give you some consistency that would be additive.
Right?
So what would be too much?
According to Tony Heller, more than half of all the data is estimated.
More than half.
Do you think that's true?
Now, I will tell you that Tony Heller is a fascinating commenter.
But I'm not a believer in all of his comments.
So I want you to know that I don't believe that everything that Tony Heller surfaces in his skepticism will all check out.
I don't believe it will all check out.
But I also don't believe that none of it will check out.
Some of it's going to check out.
But here's his claim.
His claim is half of the data On measurements from thermometers is now estimated.
So I wasn't so sure that was right, but then somebody pointed me to an article in Breitbart from 2022, Penny Starr wrote.
This is so funny.
A study that investigated the placement of the temperature stations around the world found out that a certain percentage of them didn't meet the The standard for uncorrupted measurements.
So apparently the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, they do have a standard.
And if the measurements don't meet that standard, then you've got a problem.
But what percentage of all the current thermometers do you think don't meet their own standard?
Now most of the standard has to do with how close you are to some kind of heat island.
You know, if there's too much civilization around, too much concrete, that will give you a fake reading if the wind blows in your direction.
So how many of them, what percentage do you think?
Take a guess before I tell you.
What percentage Of all the temperature measurements, do you feel don't meet the standard for accuracy?
What's your guess?
If you guessed 96%, you would be accurate.
96%.
96% don't meet their own standard for accuracy.
it. 96%. 96% don't meet their own standard for accuracy. 96%.
96%. It could be that Tony Heller is being conservative.
It might be that, well, not conservative, it's a different question.
One is whether they're accurate and then the other question is how many times do they have to use an estimate because they're aware of it not being accurate.
So, do you remember when I said to you, I'm no climate scientist but I am the Dilbert cartoonist, And if there's one thing I can tell you with complete certainty, complete certainty, humans can't measure the temperature of the Earth.
And someday that will seem hilarious to us.
Someday we will learn in school that it was hilarious that we thought we could measure the temperature of the Earth.
Now, I'm not saying that the thermometers are inaccurate.
If they're used properly.
And I'm not saying that all the satellites that measure things are inaccurate.
I'm not saying that.
I'm saying that if you add thousands of human beings who have to do certain tasks in a certain way, and otherwise you don't get the right number, you'll never get the right number.
You can't add thousands of humans to any task and get a good outcome.
That's not a thing.
Nobody's ever done that.
There's no domain in which you could add thousands of people doing things with thousands of devices all over the planet, and that would all work out.
No, there's nothing like that in human experience, and there never will be.
I'm not even sure robots can do that.
But I guarantee you, if you put flawed, thousands of flawed, lying, selfish weasels, humans, into any process, you're not going to get anything you can use in terms of data.
So I think that's where we are.
Well, Hunter Biden's on trial.
So he's on trial for his tax evasion, and he's accused of Failing to pay 1.4 million taxes while blowing his cash on strippers and porn, they say.
Now, you should know that he has paid back all the back taxes, so he doesn't owe anything.
He's just being accused of being forced to pay it, basically.
He's not paying it voluntarily.
And I guess part of it is that he was writing off as business expenses his personal habits, let's say.
So, and he has a risk of 17 years behind bars.
Wow.
So, he's got three felony and six misdemeanor charges.
Well, what do you think?
Do you think Hunter Biden, in our current world, could be found guilty, sentenced to jail, and then actually served time?
I suppose if it's 17 years, nobody really gets 17 years.
Yeah.
Um, yeah.
And then we've got Joe Biden who can pardon him.
Can he?
Can he pardon him, or are they not all federal charges?
They're federal, right?
Because it's taxes?
Yeah, but what if there are state taxes he didn't pay?
Is he only being penalized or charged for state violations or also federal or also state?
So I don't know whether it's fully pardonable, but I would expect him to be pardoned.
I wouldn't even hate it that much.
You know, I would think it's obviously two tiers of justice.
Duh.
I mean, that's what a pardon does.
A pardon gives somebody a special privilege that other people don't get.
So, if you were to get a pardon, I would have mixed feelings.
Number one, I don't want to see family members of presidents sent to jail just because we can.
That's not the world I want to live in.
I don't want to live in a world where Republicans are jailing Democrats because they can.
Now, that's not exactly what we're seeing.
I'm just saying that you don't want to creep up to that line either.
You know, I don't want to be associated with a team, even though I'm registered Democrat.
I caucus with the Republicans, you might say.
I don't want to be associated with a team that's going to put people's family members in jail.
If it would not have happened, should they not have been in politics.
So that's my standard.
It's the standard I use with Trump.
Did Trump ever do anything that was technically, could have been seen as illegal?
Probably.
Like every other billionaire, in my opinion.
Would people have been prosecuted if they'd been anybody else?
No.
No.
So you don't meet my standard.
Would Hunter be in this trouble if he were not such a high profile?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But I certainly suspect he would have flown under the radar and gotten away with it.
So even though I can be in favor of people breaking the law being, you know, getting the justice system treatment, I can also say this was a mixed bag for me.
Because if it looks like You know, anybody who was involved in taking Hunter down for political purposes, then it gives the other team incentive to take somebody down for political purposes.
I just don't want to get close to that line.
So in my opinion, I would be happier if Hunter somehow gets away with the crime.
Gets away with the crime.
I think I'd actually be happier with that.
Because I just don't want to get close to that line of making this political.
Remember, he paid back.
You know, he did pay back the money.
If he owed the money, well, that'd be a little different.
But at the moment, there's no victim to a crime, as far as I can tell.
Anyway, in exciting new news, there's a Department of Justice Going after a company which everybody thinks is Tenet Media for being influenced by Russia.
Is it Russia?
Yeah.
So Tenet Media apparently organized six conservative podcast hosts, and behind the scenes, unknown to those podcast hosts, who I'll name in a minute, the organization that was paying them, May have been getting his money from Russia, that's the allegation.
And so, they allegedly received 10 million dollars from Russian sources.
Now, the founders of Tenet Medium are Liam Donovan and his wife, who you might know, a conservative influencer named Lauren Chen.
I should mention, so you don't make the mistake I did, of thinking Lauren Chen.
And then I was thinking of Melissa Chen, who's a totally different person.
So don't make that mistake.
If you're on, if you're on X, you might see both of their names fly by.
They are not the same people, and they're not related.
Anyway.
So Lauren Chen will have some explaining to do, but the, the far right, uh, well, they call them far right.
That's not right.
Fuckers.
I didn't even notice this when I wrote it down, but they're calling the following people far-right.
Tim Poole, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and then to somebody I don't know, Taylor Hanson, Lauren Southern, and Matt Christensen.
Now, I don't know if any of them are far-right, but I wouldn't call Tim Poole, Benny Johnson, or Dave Rubin far-right, would you?
Does that fit your sense of any of those three people?
Dave Rubin, far right?
He was just barely, you know, a Republican.
I don't see how the people who read this stuff understand anything about their world, if these guys are far right.
These guys and gals.
So anyway, what we don't see is any indication that the personalities involved, the podcasters, were aware of where the funding was coming from.
There is some hint in the story that they were suspiciously overpaid, meaning that there may have been healthy cash payments for being part of this organization on YouTube, so YouTube would have a channel that would have all these people on it, I guess.
There are people who said, hmm, I am not so surprised that there's external influence on the podcasting world.
Mike Cernovich was saying, he's been saying for a while, assume all division grifters, in other words, people who are trying to stoke division in the country, are paid up or under federal control.
And he's been saying that for a long time.
Now, my problem with division grifters, as a descriptor, is I feel like that's what you call the people you don't like.
And if you like the people, they're not division grifters, they're just telling the truth.
So I've got a little problem knowing if I'm a division grifter by this definition.
Let me ask you, am I a division grifter?
Am I making money by causing division in the country?
Yes or no?
I actually don't know what you're going to say.
In your opinion, do I make money by creating division in the country?
Or do I even make division?
Do I cause any division?
I think I do, don't I?
I'm pretty sure if you have a strong opinion on anything that has anything to do with sides, it looks like we're division.
Now, do I do it for money?
Yes.
Yes, I do.
I mean, in the sense that I monetize my streams.
So am I a division grifter?
Maybe.
I mean, it's not how I think of it.
In my head, I'm not thinking, oh, I'll go create some division today so I'll make some money.
I don't think of it that way.
But if you were to look at just the outcome, maybe yes.
Maybe I have said a few things that might have created some division.
I don't know.
David Sacks asked this question.
He says, when do we get to see who's on Ukraine's payroll?
I bet there are some much bigger names than podcasters.
Well, That would be interesting.
Do you think that there are big entities or big names that are somehow directly benefiting from Ukrainian funding, directly or indirectly?
I wouldn't be surprised.
I don't have anybody in mind who I would accuse of that, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Now, does it seem to you that this Department of Justice thing was going to happen anyway, or does it look like?
It might have been something that is another way to hunt Republicans.
Was this just a convenient way to smear some popular podcast types?
Do you think this would have happened just on its own because, you know, it came up and they had some information, so they naturally pursued it, and here we are, and it's just a few months before the election?
But that's just a coincidence.
It's just a coincidence, right?
A few months before the election?
It could be.
It could be totally a coincidence.
But I don't know.
America First Legal is doing great work again.
They had tried to get from Judge Mershon, one of the Trump judges.
They tried to get his records so they could see if he'd made any financial connections to, I guess, his daughter's business.
I think that's what it is.
And they didn't get a response.
They're suing again, so they're taking a second run at it because they're getting stonewalled.
Now, why do you think they would get stonewalled on Judge Merchant's financial connections?
Well, you know, if he has no sketchy connections at all, nobody wants you to see their finances.
Yeah, very few people would be okay publicly disclosing their finances, whether you're a judge or anybody else.
So I don't know if there's like bad reason that they don't want to release them, but they are stonewalling and that would be illegal under this situation.
Here's an update on the Harris tax plan.
So part of it is this $50,000 tax benefit for new small businesses.
So as I understand it, The small business could save $50,000 on taxes, but it could be spread over multiple years, and it's only against their profits.
So they're not giving them $50,000.
They're saying, if you earn $50,000 instead of paying taxes on it, you don't have to pay taxes on it, the first $50,000.
Now, the reasoning is that new businesses often cost up to $40,000.
And then I said to myself, if I could ever open a business for $40,000, wow!
Do you know what it costs to open, let's say, a small restaurant?
One to two million dollars?
You have to build out and have a restaurant and pay the taxes until you make money and stuff.
Yeah, it's like, it's well over a million dollars.
So I'm not sure what kind of a business you start from 40.
I'm guessing maybe something like a, you know, hair and nails, massage business, maybe.
So maybe some little business where you're doing a little bit of marketing and building a website or something.
Maybe, maybe you want to be a podcaster and you need some setup costs, build a studio.
So that would be a kind of interesting idea.
I know I hate it.
Um, Harris is apparently, Dropping her long-term capital gains tax from what Biden would want, which would be over 39%, down to 28%.
That would be higher than it is now at, is it 20?
What is it now?
20?
Long-term capital gains tax.
Give me a fact check on that.
Is it currently 20?
and they want to make it 28, right?
All right.
But that would be 28% for only people making a million dollars a year or more.
But we don't know what Trump wants.
Yeah, so I think Trump's tax plan is a little unclear at this point.
The House Education and Workforce Committee, so this is members of the House, have subpoenaed Tim Walz for records Related to, I guess it was a $250 million COVID relief fraud just in his state.
So they want to find out, I guess, if he had any connection to $250 million going to the wrong people.
I thought I saw a post by Elon Musk.
He was boosting somebody's post that said something like over $200 billion a year in government spend is totally wasted through corruption.
Over 200 billion a year is wasted of government spending on corruption.
Here's the biggest thing we need to do.
I don't think politicians should ever be allowed to decide where money is spent.
It's the one thing that guarantees corruption.
As long as government entities, especially in smaller, you know, towns and stuff, if they're the ones who decide where you spend the money and what vendor you hire, you have a corrupt system.
There's no way around that.
You just can't let, you can't let the politicians decide.
It should be some kind of a transparent bidding process where the public can watch every step of it and know if something sketchy happened.
Anyway, I do wonder if this is a fishing expedition that's just purely political.
If they have some reason to legitimately believe that Tim Walz is connected to some bad behavior, then makes sense.
But if they're just saying, hey, it's a, you know, it's a political year.
So why don't we go fish around in this guy's backyard?
That's a lot less cool.
You know, there are a lot of other states, I'll bet they all had problems, but you're just going to bug this one?
I would say I'm tentatively uncomfortable with the idea that he may be getting singled out, because I'm pretty sure all the states had some kind of big, massive corruption problem from the pandemic.
Anyway, Barron Trump is going to college.
He's going to NYU, the NYU Stern School of Business, first day.
And here's the part that caught my attention.
Apparently he'll be living in Trump Tower.
So because he's going to school in New York City, it just makes sense he lives at Trump Tower.
Can you imagine being 18 years old And living in a city.
I don't know who's with him.
I mean, I'm sure he has security and, you know, there's probably some live-in help and stuff.
But where's Melania?
Is Melania going to be living in New York City?
With Baron?
Something tells me she'll spend, you know, maybe two-thirds of her time up there.
Just so she's with Baron.
I don't know.
I think it's fascinating, though, that He's 18 and he's going to be living in the Trump Tower, at least without his dad, except when he's in town.
All right, here's the fun part.
So Trump did his town hall and PolitiFact, who I believe you would say leans left, did some fact-checking.
So would you like to hear?
This is something I don't normally do.
I don't normally read all the left-leaning fact-checking because I think they're just lies.
So let's have some fun and see what PolitiFact, which I do not consider the last word in facts, let's see what they said.
Now here's what we'd expect.
What I expect is that Trump would be directionally correct, But exaggerate.
So that's different, I think, than what we see from Democrats.
Democrats will literally just make up a hoax that just came out of nowhere.
It's not directionally correct, it's just made up.
Whereas Trump has a long history of exaggeration.
So let's see if all the things that they fact-check him on would fit into the category of, well, he's exaggerating, but, you know, you can see the point.
All right?
So the first one is, He said in Pennsylvania to the Pennsylvanians, fracking is your biggest business and you get a big majority of your income from fracking.
Is that true?
Not very true.
Apparently it's actually a very small percentage of their total income.
And he said you have half a million jobs from fracking in Pennsylvania.
The real number is closer to 22,000, less than 1% of the state's overall employment.
Now, so is that an exaggeration or is that just a lie?
Well, I would say it's an exaggeration and it's directionally correct.
If you were Pennsylvania and you knew that you could prove this thing and your state's overall employment would improve by just 1%, wouldn't that be a great idea?
There's no state that won't take 1% extra employment.
1% extra employment is a really big deal.
If you ask me, that's a pretty big deal.
So, yes, fracking would be good for them.
They would make more money.
But it's not their biggest business.
And it's fewer people.
But it absolutely makes a difference to the state.
Yeah, it's not nothing.
So, exaggeration.
Trump said that under Biden, 20 million people have poured into our country, being undocumented illegal types, according to him.
What do you think is the real number?
By the way, I've seen Trump say it might be as high as 30 million.
We can't tell, but let's say it's 20 million.
Well, the fact check says this, that Biden led in 3.4 million people who were, at least they were brought in for asylum purposes and they have a hearing.
So there's 3.4 million that came in.
Through what you could call a legal process, but they're not legal citizens.
It's just that they met somebody at the gate, somebody took down their name and said, you got to appear at a hearing someday in the future.
So 3.4 million of those.
And then other numbers we have are how many people were stopped and then how many gotaways we have.
So there were around 10 million times that Immigrants were encountered 10 million times.
And then there's the gotaways.
Maybe, you know, 10 or 11 million or something.
So, but, as PolitiFact correctly says, there are some people who get caught multiple times.
So sometimes you get caught, sent back, and you just try again, you get caught.
Of the 10 million encounters, it might be far fewer people.
Let's say 20% less.
Maybe 20% of the people just tried again and got caught again.
Do you see what's missing in this data?
Remember, this is a fact check on whether 20 million people came in.
There's no check.
They simply mentioned the numbers that we can know, And if the only thing you look at are the numbers that we can know, because that's what's tracked, then it's not 20 million.
But Trump is not making the claim that we can track everybody and that it's 20 million.
He's making a claim that we can't track how many people got in.
And if you don't know how many people got in, you can't tell by the number you encountered, and you can't really tell the gotaways, can you?
Can you really tell how many got away?
I feel like we can't tell how many came through a tunnel, how many came through a passage that nobody was guarding and no drone had a video of it.
It's entirely possible that Trump is exaggerating.
It's not our imagination that cities are being impacted and that we're spending billions, hundreds of billions.
Nationwide to accommodate him.
So I would say that's, you know, he's directionally correct.
Directionally correct.
Let's see, he also said Harris was the first to leave the 2020 Democratic race, the primary.
I didn't remember this, but apparently there were 10 candidates Who left before her?
Because apparently there's just a whole bunch of nobodies in the race.
So when Trump says she was the first one to leave, it was sort of the first one of the real group of people who might have become president.
So, is that a lie?
Well, it's not technically correct, but is it directionally correct?
Of the final handful of people that were ever seriously considered for being president, the others were never really serious, at least in the minds of the public.
But she was the first of that final batch.
So, not technically correct, but again, directionally correct.
She was not the Democrats' first choice, second choice, third choice, fourth, fifth.
She just wasn't, she was not their fifth choice.
Trump says, I call her Comrade Kamala because that's what her ideology is.
Her father is a Marxist.
So they checked whether her father is a Marxist and said, first it said that he was an economics professor at Stanford.
I'd heard he was an economics professor at Berkeley.
So I have a question on the Berkeley versus Stanford thing, but don't know that.
But they do say, That in July, The Economist magazine wrote that the father's work, quote, is more unashamedly Marxist than anything in modern American politics.
So, to their credit, PolitiFact called it false that the father's a Marxist.
So they called it false that he's a Marxist, but they did.
Put in the opinion from The Economist magazine, and you'd think The Economist magazine would have a good idea who's a Marxist and who isn't, because it's The Economist.
That's what economists do.
So The Economist magazine says it's more unashamedly Marxist than anything in modern American politics.
So, is he a Marxist?
Well, probably.
He's like Kamala Harris in the sense that he still likes some capitalism.
But is Trump wrong that he's a Marxist or is it an exaggeration?
I would say it's probably a mild exaggeration, and that he simply has a bunch of Marxist ideas on top of capitalism, but probably isn't 100% against capitalism, like Kamala Harris.
So is Trump directionally correct?
Yes, directionally correct.
Here's another one that's funny.
They went to Biden and they said, we want you out.
This is what Trump said.
You're not going to win.
And it was really a coup when you think about it.
They fact checked whether it was a coup.
I'm not making this up.
He called it a coup and they fact checked whether it was a coup.
Here's the fact check.
This is misleading.
Coup d'etat is a French term that means the overthrow of a government.
Usually by illegal means and with the threat of violence.
Okay.
Okay, we all knew that.
When he said it was a coup, I think we all understood what he meant.
Was he directionally correct when he said it was a coup?
Yes!
Was it technically a coup, matching the technical definition?
No!
Does anybody care?
No!
Everybody knows what it was.
He just uses colorful language.
Then Trump said, I had interest rates at 2%, now they're 10%.
This is so Trumpian.
It's so Trumpian.
Do you think that people would get used to it?
When he says he had it down at 2%, it was really 2.7.
So he exaggerated how low it was.
But also it was low because it was a pandemic, right?
So the pandemic lowered things.
Is it directionally true?
Is 2% directionally true?
Yeah, yeah-ish.
This is the right direction.
I mean, in the sense that he's comparing it to the much higher rates now.
He says now they're 10%.
Are interest rates 10%?
No!
No, they're like 7%, you know, if you want to get a mortgage.
But is he directionally correct?
He said from 2 to 10.
It might have been 2.7 with the pandemic to 7-ish.
Is he lying or directionally correct?
Well, he's not technically correct, but directionally, of course.
Interest rates are much higher and that matters to us.
And so he said it.
Directionally correct.
He said, I shut down the biggest pipeline in the world.
Talking about Nord Stream.
That Russia was building, it was 100% shut down.
PolitiFact says that's mostly false.
It says more than... He did put sanctions on it, but the people building it worked around the sanctions.
So he did have sanctions that if the sanctions held, would have 100% stopped it.
But the reality is the sanctions weren't holding.
So is that a...
Is that in the right direction?
Well, it's the right direction in terms of showing his policy was correct, meaning that he thought stopping that pipeline was important for America.
And so he did things which were real and certainly slowed it down, but maybe wasn't enough.
So I'm going to say that one's the closest one to a failed fact check.
But even then, directionally, it shows that he was being a hard-nosed about the pipeline, and if you want somebody who's going to be hard-nosed about the pipeline, or that sort of thing in the future, directionally, he leans in that direction.
So, it's a little bit directionally true, but I'm going to say that one's closer to a, you know, problem with the fact check.
All right, so, if those were the worst things that they had on Trump, Are you afraid?
Do you fear the second Trump administration because of the monster that's coming in and all these terrible lies he's telling?
Every one of them are in the direction of something I really want.
Lower interest rates, fewer illegal people coming in.
I want all of the things he's influencing.
Anyway.
The Dallas police have now confirmed that there's a Venezuelan gang problem in at least one Texas city, probably more, according to the Daily Mail.
I don't know.
I'm just having a hard time believing any of the news about the Venezuelan gangs.
I definitely don't believe there's no problem at all, which some people are trying to sell.
And I definitely don't believe that they've, you know, taken too much territory.
They may have too much control over some buildings and some maybe streets.
And that's a big problem.
So again, directionally, directionally, the news is accurate that we've got some gang problems.
But one of the things that Trump got fact-checked on was that they're emptying their jails.
Now the fact-checkers say there's no evidence that Venezuela has let anybody out of jail for the purpose of coming to America.
Has anybody ever seen evidence of that?
Because I haven't.
Have you seen a report about the vacancies in Venezuelan jails?
Have we interviewed specific people who say, oh yeah, I was in jail, they let me out, because they said, as long as you go to the United States, you can get out of jail?
Now, I haven't seen it, so if you've seen it, could you send it to me?
And I'll give you my opinion of whether it looks credible.
Anyway, Elon Musk got a win for Axe.
California had this content moderation law.
They got challenged by X and successfully so far.
And it was that X and other social media would have to detail their definitions of what was hate speech and basically what would not be allowed on the platform.
Let's say they would want to know blah blah blah blah.
Yeah, so Axe said that they shouldn't have to do that, and you can see why.
Because the minute they say, this is our standard, somebody else is going to say, oh, I just found something that's still on the platform, and you violated your own standard.
So it's a trap.
Because so much of the speech is subjective, that the moment you say, I have this objective standard, and this is what we're using, Then it gives everybody a million pieces of artillery to say, well, what about this one?
Well, what about this one?
In my opinion, this is beyond your standard.
Why didn't you do something about this one?
So, challenging in a court is a smart thing to do, and at least so far, it looks like it's working.
Politico is saying that if Kamala Harris becomes president, she'll get rid of Garland as Attorney General because he's too soft, and that she would get somebody who is more aggressive going after the January Sixers and hunting political opponents.
Now, they don't say that last part, but that's pretty obvious.
There's a new hoax, according to the National Pulse, William Upton.
So the new hoax is that Trump once took cash from Egypt.
Have you ever seen anything more consistent?
By the way, this hoax is from 2016 and it was already investigated and debunked.
No evidence whatsoever.
Can you imagine?
That when Tucker Carlson said years ago, when he started saying this, that the Democrats accuse you of whatever they're doing, they literally have a senator, like one of their major senators, who took 10 million dollars or something from Egypt, or whatever the number was, took money from Egypt, and now they just make up a story that Trump is taking money from Egypt.
I mean, it's so consistent, whatever they're doing.
The specific thing they're doing.
The thing is, they're not even accusing him of taking it from a different Middle Eastern country.
It's like, it both has to be Egypt?
I mean, it's so on the nose.
Oh, you guys do whatever we do.
Anyway.
Well, the war in Ukraine is taking an interesting turn.
I watched a video that I'm pretty sure is real, looked real to me, nobody was calling it out, of a Ukrainian drone that has a flamethrower attached that's not like any flamethrower I've ever seen before.
So when you think flamethrower, you think, oh, so it's going to shoot what, 20 feet?
No.
And it's going to be, you know, a little, you know, maybe, uh, maybe four feet wide and it'll shoot 20 feet.
And, you know, you have to be right there to make it.
No, apparently this is using some serious fire technology, some thermite type of stuff.
And There's a picture of it flying over some positions that Russians were hiding in.
And basically, it looked like a flamethrowing dragon from the sky.
The distance it was throwing that flame was... Holy cow!
What is this?
If they have more of those, I don't know how they can lose.
My God!
It is the scariest looking weapon you'll ever see in your life.
And it was going down a row of trees where allegedly the Russians were hiding, and the flame was just basically just destroying the entire row of forest as it went, and any people in it.
That's the scariest thing I've seen.
Now, I've seen Game of Thrones, so I know that the dragons, you know, when the dragons enter the fight, then you can tell which way the fight's gonna go, because the dragons never lose.
If they've got dragons, they got robot dragons, flying with flamethrower mouths, anything could happen.
All right.
Netanyahu made me laugh.
He said that Israel will not leave Gaza border corridor until it is secure, according to Reuters.
So that's the space, little strip of land between Egypt and Gaza.
Now, the problem is that the Gazans were through tunnels, and probably tunnels mostly, they were getting stuff from outside of Gaza, like weapons and things.
So, then Yahu says, Israel won't leave that corridor until it is secure.
Do you know what that means?
It's never going to be secure.
They'll just say it's not secure.
No, they're not going anywhere.
Israel's not going to give Gaza back to the Hamas.
Anybody who thinks that's even within the realm of distant possibility, it's not.
They're just going to stay there, because it would be crazy not to until all of Hamas is destroyed.
So I think that's pretty predictable.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, those are my prepared comments.
And if you didn't know already, The 2025 Dilbert calendar is available for pre-sale.
You'd have to find the link to buy it at Dilbert.com.
It's not on Amazon and it won't be there.
In order to make it in America 100%, which is what it is now, I had to get rid of the publisher's cut and also the Amazon and bookstore cut.
Because together they take 90% of the retail price.
And if I had those cuts in there and also made it in America, it would be a really expensive calendar.
But it's still a little high because of shipping, because shipping is crazy these days.
So in order to make it up to you, there's a comic on both sides of each page now, twice the comics.
Yeah, twice the comics.
Dilbert Reborn is on the backs of each side.
Those are the newer ones that are edgier that you might get in trouble if your boss sees it, so be careful about that.
You might want to use it in your home office.
Sales are brisk, so make sure you get yours early so that we don't run out.
There is some risk That if you wait to mid-December, we might not be able to keep up with it before Christmas.
So it is very important that you order early, and it's good for me.
So if you want to do me a favor and keep me in business, a pre-order is good.
And if you want to lower your cost for shipping, they make great gifts.
So if you get more than one, your shipping won't look so bad.
All right, that's all I got for today.
I'm going to go talk to the locals people privately because they're special in so many ways.
