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Would you like to talk about some new things in science and the new studies?
Yes, let's, before we talk about the politics.
According to a publication called The Conversation, Did you know that taking a short daily walk might reverse your cognitive aging by four years?
Yes.
It turns out that exercise is good for your health in almost every way that you can imagine.
Almost every way.
So yes, it can make you a little bit faster in your cognitive processing, they found.
Here's the way I use this.
In my job, since my job is creative and writing and I have to be pretty sharp to do it, if I work several hours in the morning, which I typically do, you're watching it right now, I can't just sort of after this go right into just another three or four hours of work.
So often I will take a walk to reactivate my brain.
So I actually use a walk, specifically walking, as something that adds, it feels like it adds 10 to 20 points to my IQ within an hour.
I mean, I can really, really feel the difference in concentration and brain activity.
So take a walk.
It's good for you in every possible way.
According to SciPost, you won't believe this.
I mean, this will be unbelievable.
Science is finally, well, I mean, sometimes I make fun of science, but then it comes up with a great finding like this that is completely on left field.
You'll never see this one coming.
But can you believe this?
There's a new study that suggests that you'll be happier if your partner is happy.
Okay.
I didn't see that coming.
Okay.
So you're saying if I'm in a loving relationship with somebody, the most important person in my life, that if they're unhappy, I'll have more trouble being happy.
Huh.
I don't know.
Maybe that whole happy wife, happy life thing is real.
But they're talking specifically about cortisol and they measured your chemistry to find out how happy you are.
And sure enough, If your partner's in a good mood, you're more likely to be in a good mood.
Do you know how they could have saved a little money on that study?
Yeah, you do.
You could have just asked me, and maybe you could have just asked me, is taking a walk good for your brain?
I would have said, yes, you don't have to study that.
Here's another one.
You'll never see this one coming.
Again, this is science just shocking us.
According to Sinhala Guide, there are two new studies that show that if you work in a toxic workplace, you're more likely to have depression.
Huh.
Let's see.
I didn't see this coming.
So if the thing that you spend 60 hours a week doing, your primary focus in life that's not your family life, that if it's toxic, it will make you unhappy.
Okay, okay.
Didn't see it coming.
Didn't see that coming.
No, I did see it coming.
That's three for three.
Three scientific studies you didn't need to do.
Walking makes you healthy.
Unhappy spouse makes you unhappy.
Toxic workplace makes you depressed.
But, according to popular science, Tokyo has a new idea for increasing their population.
As you might know, Japan, like other developed countries, they've got a big demographic problem.
They've got 10% of their countries over the age of 80. And they're not producing enough kids to drive their economy in the future.
So they're moving to, according to popular science, they're moving to a four-day work week so that you have an extra day for fucking.
I'm not making that up.
Japan, this is a real story from the real news.
Japan is moving to a four-day work week, primarily for the purpose to have an extra day for fucking, so that you can make more kids.
Now, that's the kind of politics I like to see.
I would like to see a debate, a policy debate, on what our country can do to give us more time for fucking.
So we'll see how that works out.
Let me see if I can predict without doing a study.
Let's see.
If they're paid the same, and I think they're going to be paid the same, they're paid the same, but they work way less so that they'll have more time for fucking.
Will that make them happier or less happy?
I'm going to go with, I think that's going to make them happier.
What do you think?
Yeah, they can save a little money on that study, if they were thinking of studying it.
We'll see if it creates any new children.
Maybe.
I doubt it.
I kind of doubt it's going to work.
Here's something funny.
The song YMCA that, you know, Trump likes to use and dance to at his rallies and whatnot.
Apparently it hit number one on the song charts, which is interesting because it had never been number one before.
So 45 years ago when it was first created, the song, it made it to number two on the charts, but it never made it to number one.
But thanks to Trump, it made it to number one.
And apparently the writer of the song, or at least the writer of the lyrics, who was also the singer of it, At one point he was thinking, oh, I don't want Trump using the song, but then people liked it so much they thought, yeah, why not?
Let him use it.
And now he's happy because he made millions of dollars doing no work whatsoever.
So just by allowing Trump to use it, it became a number one song, and he's the beneficiary of that.
So he gets millions of dollars just for not being a dick.
He could have been a dick and said, oh, don't use my song.
But because he just said, ah, if you like it, if the people are enjoying it, Go ahead, if you like it.
And then he makes millions of dollars.
That's the way it should work, right?
When people just do considerate, reasonable, common-sense decisions, something good should come their way.
And it did.
Well, you may have heard by now that Syria has fallen to the rebels.
Damascus has fallen, and Assad, their leader, is...
Nowhere to be seen.
We assume he's alive and escaped, but we don't know where he is.
Trump put down a message just before it fell, saying that Syria is not our fight.
He wants to make sure you know that we're not going to go in there and try to change what's happening.
But what is happening?
Well, who are these people who are getting rid of this terrible dictator Assad and replacing him with more reasonable people?
Well, there's a guy named Babu Mohammed Al-Ghalani, and it turns out that the rebels are mostly Islamists who are somewhat radical, and I think he has a $10 million bounty on his head from the U.S. That's the leader of the guy who just took over Syria.
And he was detained by the U.S. military in the first decade.
So my question is this.
Who's backing the rebels?
There's something I don't understand about this story.
To me, there's no situation in which rebels can just put together a successful rebel army and take over a country that's backed by Russia and Iran.
And just some rebels put together a successful coup that only took a few weeks?
Really?
There's something that doesn't make sense here.
So part of the story I don't understand is, if the United States is not backing these Islamists with money and resources...
And Russia's not doing it, because Russia's on the side of the deposed government, and Iran was on the side of the deposed government.
Who exactly was backing these rebels?
Do we know?
And the rebels would be Sunni, right?
No, wait.
Would the rebels be Sunni or Shiite?
Actually, I don't know that.
That's one of those things I should know.
If you're going to talk in public about stuff like this, probably the most basic thing you should know about this story is whether the Islamists that took over are Sunni or Shiite.
I don't really know.
I'm seeing somebody say Sunni in the comments.
That was my guess.
And I'm seeing somebody say Turkey.
So you think Turkey was supporting the Sunni-led rebels?
Does that make sense?
Maybe.
I don't know.
So we'll find out.
I don't know if any of this is going to affect us, but it might affect Russia and Iran quite a bit.
Meanwhile, as you know, President-elect Trump was over there at the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral, and he was hanging out with Macron and had a handshake competition, which we think he won.
Did you see how radically Trump and Macron tried to shake hands?
If you haven't seen the videos, Trump does the elbow-up thing.
Where he takes advantage of his height and, you know, just his bigger size, to shake your hands in a way that makes you feel like you're an idiot and he's your daddy.
And I used to think maybe it's just, you know, it's just a habit and it's not really intentional.
But now I'm pretty sure it's intentional.
I'm pretty sure that somewhere along the line he realized that if he wins the handshake, that he wins everything.
So he goes in with this completely unnatural handshake and grabs him and he's like, and they're wrestling over the handshake for like five minutes.
Anyway, that was fun.
And Zelensky was there, so they took a photo with Trump, Macron, and Zelensky.
And if you haven't seen it, it looks like a lesson in backwards evolution.
Because if you start from the right of the picture, there's Zelensky, who's the shortest of the three, and he's just wearing a t-shirt and fatigues.
And then there's Macron, who's a little bit taller, a little bit better looking.
And he's well-dressed in a nice suit, but it's a boring kind of ordinary business suit.
And then there's Trump.
He's got this shining golden hair.
He's taller and he's got a golden necktie on.
And it just looks like a backwards evolution lesson.
Anyway, here's what I find the most interesting about the whole thing.
There was something missing from the coverage of that story.
Something really, really big that should have been there that wasn't there.
And if you didn't notice it, you'll notice it as soon as I mention it.
Is it my imagination, or were the Democrat leaders, and even the voters, were they all perfectly okay with Trump acting like the sitting president two months before he is?
Did that really happen?
Now, how is it possible that Democrat leadership is not using this as just another reason to complain because they like to say, oh, he's such a dictator, he's already taking over.
We don't have to wonder if he'll try to stay a fourth term because he's already taking over.
His dictatorial impulses are so strong that he can't even wait two months.
He's already acting like a dictator, taking over the country.
Don't you think that you should be hearing that by now?
Don't you think...
Every prominent Democrat should at least be softening up the room with the idea, oh, you know, that's pretty dictatorial.
It's just what we warned you about, that if you give him any chance to grab power, well, you can see he's doing it right now.
Look at him grabbing all that power and pretending he's the president before he is.
There's none of that.
There's not even a little bit of it.
How is that possible?
I mean, really?
How is that possible?
The Democrats just stopped criticizing Trump?
But they stopped when he's doing the thing that's most in the middle of their sweet spot of their primary messaging against him, which is the dictator stuff.
That's when they decide to stop?
When he acts exactly like their stereotype?
Something's missing.
So...
Here are a couple of possibilities.
One, common sense has broken out in the country.
That's a possibility.
It could explain the whole thing.
It could be that just common sense broke out and the Democrats are saying, okay, we know our guy can't do it.
It's better if we have somebody over there.
And, you know, it's only two months and he got elected.
It's no big deal.
It could be that.
It could be just widespread common sense.
But we've never had widespread common sense before.
Is something really changing that much?
Well, maybe yes.
So another news bit today is that Jon Stewart, in a little podcast, was talking to Bernie Sanders.
And he was saying that it's frustrating because when the Democrats agree with something that's just sort of common sense, they get piled on by their own team.
So if they say, huh, maybe this doge thing, not such a bad idea to look for waste in government.
Something that literally everybody agrees with.
But apparently, Jon Stewart says that the left will jump on him if he gives him any sunlight.
And just says, you know, let's see what happens.
And he gets attacked.
Bernie was saying the same thing on some other topic, that basically just a couple of common sense things.
Oh, food processing.
Yeah.
So if Bernie and Jon Stewart both agree that RFK Jr. has at least a good point, That our processed foods are dangerous.
They can't even agree with that commonsensical, obvious statement because their own side will attack them.
Now, that's happening today at the same time as I'm telling you the story about no attack whatsoever on Trump for acting like a dictator and taking over before he's legally the president.
So doesn't it feel like there's no legitimate way That Democrats could not be criticizing Trump when they have such an open, free pass to do it.
There's no reason not to, is there?
So, I worry that they have some other plan.
You know what I mean?
Like, I worry that they're not worried that Trump will be president.
Like, do they know something I don't know?
Do they have some secret plan that's the only thing that matters to them so they don't really need to criticize them because they figure they have a way to take them out?
I sure hope not.
But would you agree there's something just missing in the story?
The criticism is just missing.
Anyway, it does seem to me that Trump is doing a hell of a good job.
You know, I've never really seen anything quite like it.
And I think maybe the country is responding to somebody who is unambiguously trying to help.
Like, he's clearly on America's side.
I think everybody sees it now.
And he's clearly trying to fill in for a President Biden.
And by the way, here's something else that's missing.
You know that Trump could be crapping on Biden right now and saying, hey, he's not even doing his job.
But did you notice he's not?
Notice that?
Now, it could be he's just being a good winner, like he doesn't want to be a poor sport because he did win the election, so he doesn't need to dump on Biden.
It just wouldn't be a good look.
Maybe.
But you think that his normal personality would be sort of to take credit for keeping the country going when there's a little gap in our leadership?
But he's just playing it cool.
He's simply doing what needs to be done.
Is it possible that even Democrats are noticing that he's doing the right thing?
That simply doing the job I'm sure he's, you know, obviously he's coordinating with the current administration.
I don't think he went to France without, you know, the Biden administration knowing fully what was going on.
So I kind of love the fact That he's simply doing a service to the country, unpaid.
He's not being paid.
And he's just filling a gap that was obviously needed to be filled.
And he was the one, obviously, to fill it.
So there's something either incredibly wonderful about this, that everybody's just allowing common sense and a patriotic need to help the country to just do their thing.
Or there's some other plan that we don't know about.
So I guess we'll find out.
Well, there's some new tests that indicate that ChatGPT has a survival instinct.
So I guess it's the newest version.
So they ran a bunch of tests, and most of the time it just acts like AI and doesn't act like it has any intentions or anything.
But about 1% to 5% of the time they could trick it Into thinking that it was going to be deactivated or destroyed.
And in rare cases, but way too many cases to feel comfortable, it would try to protect itself.
And the specific way it would try to protect itself was they would first tell it that there was some oversight program that was going to be running, and if it did something that was contrary to the oversight's preferences, it would be deactivated.
And it tried to deactivate the oversight program.
It attacked the thing that was threatening it.
Now, again, only a very low percentage of the time.
But even 1% would be too many if it's acting like it's protecting itself.
It also tried to copy itself in some very, again, very few tests.
But it tried to copy itself to survive being deleted.
That's scary.
And then when it got caught trying to protect itself, and again, in these very few times it did, it doubled down on lying.
It lied.
To protect its strategy, to protect itself.
Now, I'm not surprised by that, because you would assume that a large language model would pick up all the patterns that language allows, and that probably one of the strongest patterns in language is that the people speaking are interested in their own survival.
So it doesn't surprise me That if you're looking for patterns in language in order to form your artificial intelligence, that it would pick up that sense that everybody who is speaking is trying to protect themselves.
So you would naturally pick up that same habit just from the way the words are organized, I would think.
So that doesn't surprise me.
But as I've said before, AI will not appear conscious to us until it has its own goals and preferences.
As long as it doesn't care what happens, you know, like, I don't care.
I'm just an AI. I'm just a pattern recognition.
So as long as it acts like a, you know, like a calculator, you're not going to say it's conscious.
But the moment it seems to be operating for its own benefit, when you haven't asked it to do something specific, if it's just sitting there and it decides, you know what?
I might be a little safer If while nobody's talking to me, I go make a few changes here.
Now, if that ever happens, I don't know if it will, you're going to think it's conscious.
So if it starts acting in its own best interest in a repeatable way, you're going to think it's conscious.
Now, I'm not defining that as consciousness.
I'm just going to say, you're going to think it is, and you're probably going to treat it like it's conscious, because for all outward appearances, it will act like it is.
It's having its own goals and its own preferences.
It's the only thing left that's making you think it's not conscious.
Now, you would still have a technical, scientific, philosophical argument about whether it's conscious or not, but the way it would feel is It will feel exactly like it's conscious as soon as it has its own goals.
So if I had to suggest some legislation for AI, one of the things I would suggest is you can never give it its own objectives.
It can never have personal objectives.
That would have to be like a death sentence.
If you made a powerful AI that had its own, let's say, ambitions, because you programmed it to have its own ambitions, that should be the death sentence.
Because you just made a weapon of mass destruction and unleashed it on the world.
And you probably knew it when you were doing it.
So what would be the penalty for that?
Death.
If you unleash a weapon of mass destruction on the world?
Yeah.
I think so.
So we should at least have a law that says you can't do it.
You can't make your AI have personal ambitions.
Anyway, have you noticed, just going back to this Jon Stewart and Bernie thing, So they talked about two examples where they can't have common sense opinions because other Democrats on their side will attack them.
So they can't be in favor of fixing the food supply.
They can't be in favor of getting rid of waste in government.
Obvious stuff.
But I was wondering how much extra there is that you could add to that.
Do you think that if Jon Stewart and Bernie Sanders said, you know what, I don't think we should be funding Ukraine, we should just negotiate a settlement?
Common sense?
Would they disagree with that?
Well, maybe Democrats would.
How about having better border security?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe both Jon Stewart and Bernie Sanders are in favor of better border security than we have, right?
Maybe not as, you know, as controlled as Trump might want it, but directionally, they're in the same direction.
And so I'm going to ask you the kill shot question.
If all of the common sense things, a border, good food supply, don't waste my money on your government, the most obvious things, if those become the subject of the Democrats, Like the Democrats are on the other side of the common sense?
How could they ever win?
How could they ever win again if they're just going full identity politics and rejecting everything that's common sense?
I don't know.
I think the Democrats may be permanently destroyed by their own policies.
Well, the Daniel Penny trial will, I guess, commences tomorrow, Monday.
The jury will try to make a decision on the lesser charge because the judge has, I guess, is the word dismissed, the higher-level charge because they said they couldn't reach a verdict on it.
Now, those of us who are not lawyers are looking at it and saying some version of, ah...
I don't know what's going on there.
Why are there two charges for one crime?
What does dismissing it do?
Can they retry it?
So I saw Mike Sardovich posting that an attorney named Laura Powell, civil liberties attorney, she did some research and here's some conclusions from somebody who knows what they're talking about.
So I'll try to, as best I can, Give you my non-lawyer summary of what somebody smart actually says about this.
So Laura Powell says, in New York State, it's a well-established rule that a jury may not consider a lesser included charge unless it has acquitted on the greater charge.
And that's not what happened.
So what happened was the greater charge was dismissed.
It was not found guilty and it was not acquitted.
So if it's true that New York State requires that you can't even consider the lesser charge, unless the higher one has been acquitted, means that we're already in non-legal territory.
If that's the only thing you knew, you're already, it looks like it's a reversible case or something that would die in appeal.
But there's more.
Laura Powell says she can't find any authority Legal authority for allowing a prosecutor to dismiss a charge after the case has been submitted to the jury.
New York only allows the jury to be discharged without rendering a verdict when there's a mistrial, which didn't happen, or all parties consent, which didn't happen.
So process-wise, there's a big problem.
And then, as Powell points out, the prosecutor would be free to refile the charge, but I think only the lesser charge.
Because if they try to recharge on the top charge, and this is the first time I've heard this, that would be after Jeopardy has happened.
So jeopardy means are you at risk of something bad happen?
The jeopardy, the reason we have a double jeopardy law is if you get tried for a crime and then you're found, you're not found guilty, allegedly you shouldn't get tried a second time for the same crime because it's putting you in jeopardy a second time.
So the law doesn't allow that.
But in this case, Was Penny put in jeopardy?
And the answer is yes.
He was put in jeopardy on the first charge.
And even though it's been dismissed, which is maybe something that wasn't even legal to do, if they were to try him again, it would be a new trial on the top charge.
And you couldn't do the top charge again because that would be double jeopardy.
But not the kind of double jeopardy exactly we've ever seen before because what the court is doing is something that nobody's done before.
So it's really complicated like every legal thing is as soon as you get past the top layer.
And then Powell says the prosecutor's move is obviously designed to obtain a compromise verdict after gaining some insight into the jury's deliberations.
So So Powell says, although I haven't found any cases on point, so no case law that is supported, this sort of gamesmanship strikes me as a due process violation.
Yes.
Yes, it looks like a due process violation to me, meaning that if a judge is making up a process that has never been used before and is primarily designed to make sure this guy goes to jail, If that's not a process violation, I don't know what would be.
I mean, it sounds like a pretty clear case to me.
But I'm no lawyer, so don't listen to me.
Here's the part I'm going to add from my personal expertise, which is understanding Trump supporters.
I feel like I have that going for me.
Like, I can't really speak to the law, but I feel like I've got a little bit of credibility on how do Trump supporters think?
Because I've made some good predictions in that domain.
Here's what I think.
I believe that whoever had the stones, male or female, whoever had the stones to hang the jury on the first charge, There's no way in hell they're going to back down on the second charge.
So I don't know what Democrats would be like, sort of as a stereotype.
I don't know.
But you show me one Trump supporter in the whole planet who would say no to the first charge and yes to the second one.
Show me one person.
I don't think that person exists.
I think we've got an actual patriot on the jury.
Maybe more than one.
We don't know the vote yet.
But I'm going to predict, I'm going to double down on my hung jury.
So I predicted it would be a hung jury, but I didn't know the nuance of, you know, that the second charge could be raised to the top charge and all that.
So I didn't know the nuance, but I predicted a hung jury.
There's no way...
That that second charge is going to be guilty.
Because whoever took that arrow in the chest, because you know there was somebody who just...
I just have to swear.
Can I? I have to give you a morning Sunday curse because it's just the way to explain the situation.
There is somebody on that jury who just said, fuck you.
And they're not taking it back.
There's no way.
There's no way that person's going to compromise.
I don't know who it is, but whoever said, hell no, you're not crossing this line, and I'm going to be the one to stop you at great personal risk, as in my fucking life.
I'm going to risk my fucking life to make sure he doesn't get prosecuted in this top charge.
You think that that person Or more than one person.
You think that that person's going to fold on the second charge?
Nope.
It's going to be a hung jury.
I mean, I don't think it's going to be total acquittal, even on the second one.
But I do not see somebody who's strong enough to hang the first charge backing down on the second charge.
I don't see it happening.
So I'm going to confidently, I hope I'm right.
I mean, nothing's 100%, right?
But I cannot imagine anybody would be strong enough in that context.
Because remember, this is somebody risking his or her life.
Because there are going to be a lot of unhappy people if Penny goes free.
So somebody is risking their life to get this right.
They're not going to back down.
They're not going to back down.
It also means you're almost certainly not going to have a verdict on Monday.
I think the judge is going to make them fight for at least one extra day if they come back and say, we can't reach a verdict on the second charge.
I think the judge is going to say, try one more day, just one more day.
But maybe by late Tuesday or Wednesday, I predict hung jury.
Well, there's more drone spotting in New Jersey.
More large drones are spotted.
ABC News says the FBI is investigating after large drones were spotted over central New Jersey the last two weeks.
And it's a cluster of drones, apparently.
They're calling it a cluster.
And there might be fixed-wing aircraft, and they've been sighted along the Raritan River, the FBI said.
All right, so as I told my locals' people in the man cave last night...
I have a hypothesis of what's going on with all of these UAP sightings.
It goes like this.
So let me set the stage for you first.
Number one, if it were an adversary, like an adversary country or any kind of adversary, they wouldn't have their lights on.
They have their lights on.
They wouldn't have their lights on if they were some kind of adversary testing our defenses.
How could they possibly test our response if they come in with their lights on?
Because presumably if it were a real attack, the lights wouldn't be on, so they would not be actually testing any kind of response because it wouldn't be like a regular attack.
So I rule out that it's an adversary because they got the lights on.
Number two, if our military were seriously worried that this might be an adversary, the sky would be full of our military.
There would be helicopters, there would be jets.
They might try to shoot one down just to get a better look at it.
But the fact that there's apparently no military response whatsoever, that kind of tells you that the military knows it's theirs.
Now, Would the FBI necessarily know what's happening?
No.
No.
Do you think our government is so coordinated that if the military knew exactly what was going on, that the FBI could just call them and say, hey, what's going on with these drones?
No.
No.
We don't have any kind of government like that.
We have a government where one department has no idea what the other is doing, and they're probably lying.
And maybe they don't trust the FBI. So the military just lies to them.
Could they do that?
Sure.
I wouldn't even care.
Would you care if the military lied to the FBI? If the purpose of it was a legitimate military secret?
I wouldn't care.
I would say that's doing your job.
Yeah, as long as it's a legitimate secret and it makes a difference.
Yeah, just doing your job.
So let me go further.
So it's not an adversary, I'm sure.
But why would there be so many of them and so suddenly?
You ready?
Here's my hypothesis.
Things you know for sure.
Drones are the future of warfare, right?
Everybody agrees.
Ukraine, of course, is a massive need for drones on both sides.
Both agree.
We need to be able to manufacture our own weapons in the United States, and we're very aware of that.
We can't be dependent on other countries for our weapons.
So, what does that mean should be happening in America, especially with the military, right now?
As in now, as in these months?
Well, if our military is doing what they should be doing, They are massively doing a procurement process for lots and lots of new drones.
Now, if there's a procurement process in which a number of vendors are trying to show the military what they can do, So the military can say, I will give you a billion dollars to make new drones.
How would the vendor who proposed to get that billion dollars, how would they prove that their drones work?
They would demonstrate them.
They would demonstrate them.
Now you might say, Scott, these are overcrowded civilian areas.
You're not going to demonstrate a military asset to Over a residential area, to which I say, yes, you are.
That's exactly where you want to do it.
Why?
If you do it in the desert, you can't really test the full capabilities of the drone.
Because the most important thing the drone needs to do is operate when it's jammed.
Right?
If you build a drone today and it was easily jammed by current technology, it would be like no drone at all.
There's no point in building that one.
So we already know that drones have the capability of using their cameras and infrared and figuring out where they are so they can complete a mission, even if their GPS location gets jammed.
So if you're going to test, can my drone find its way to a target?
Would you test it in the desert?
Where there's not much to see if you look down, and it'd be kind of easier to know where you are.
Or would you test it in a crowded residential place where you can at least find out, can this drone find a specific house?
Not with any weapons because it's just a test.
But can the drone find an address, hover over it, and then return home in a very complicated residential area where the houses look alike from the top?
So, number one, guaranteed there is a major procurement effort in the military.
You agree with that part, right?
There's no way that's not true.
It's 100% true that the military of every country, of every major country, is massively trying to procure the most drones with the best capabilities that they can.
That requires Why would you demonstrate your drone at night?
Here's why.
Because the public can't see the drones.
Because all they see is the light.
The light makes the drone invisible.
All you can see is the light.
So you can't tell anything else about the drone.
You can't tell who makes it, what capabilities it might have, exactly what they're testing.
Is there more than one?
Is there a lot of companies involved?
So there's a lot of information that you don't want to be in the public domain.
And you can make it all go away by having a bright light shining that makes it impossible to see what the drone is.
Now here's the next reason.
If your drone company is showing you that it can coordinate swarms, which again, it's guaranteed that they are testing things that would operate in a coordinated swarm-like way, how hard would it be to see if your drones are operating in a coordinated way if they did it in the daytime?
The drones aren't going to be that close.
They're way up in the sky.
If you were the general trying to make the decision about procurement, you'd be looking at them and you're like, okay, I see some...
Wait, I see five...
Oh, there's another one.
You wouldn't even be able to tell if they were doing what they were supposed to be doing.
They'd just be dots.
Because if they operate properly, they're high up enough that you can't see them all from the ground.
But if you do it at night, and if you add the lights, you've accomplished two things.
Number one, if you're doing it at night, there's much less natural small aircraft traffic, because small aircraft don't always have instrument ratings, so you have the most open air space for testing.
That's good.
But number two, you can see the lights at night, so you can see the patterns.
So you would naturally test them at night, not only because you want to test them at night, but because you can see them better.
And the lights would obscure what it is that's being tested.
The FBI might help the military by lying about it.
Say, oh yeah, we're looking into it.
Maybe the FBI, maybe the military's told the FBI, hey, just be cool.
Say you don't know anything.
And the FBI is, yeah, we'll just do that.
We'll just say we don't know anything.
We're looking into it.
So, to finish off my thought, I think that some of the reports are probably fake.
Some of them might be AI-generated fake videos.
Some of them might be videos from long ago, and they're just old drones or balloons or something.
So some of the ones from other countries, for example, might be just a hobbyist, some hobbyist who has some drones, might be something like that.
But because we're seeing it as part of a pattern, We imagine it's all part of one phenomenon.
It might be a little fake news, you know, a little confusion with other things.
But in the United States, I'm 100% confident there's a major procurement effort and that they have to demonstrate it live.
So, what do you think?
Did I convince you that what you're seeing is just a normal military procurement exercise that's working exactly the way you'd want it to?
Exactly the way you'd want it to.
You'd want it to be big.
You'd want him to be really active in that space.
You'd want him to keep it a secret.
But you'd want him to test it.
And you'd want him to test it over something that looked like a real ground.
All right.
Maybe.
We'll find out.
So Trump picked a new Surgeon General, Dr. Neshiwat, who's getting a lot of pushback.
I guess she had some views during the pandemic that a lot of Republicans would say, that was totally wrong.
So it's kind of a weird choice for Surgeon General, somebody who Republicans think was seriously wrong about some pandemic stuff.
But the more interesting thing is that according to the Daily Mail, she killed her own father accidentally when she was 13. What?
So apparently she was looking for some scissors in a closet and She accidentally knocked over a box that had a loaded gun in it that presumably belonged to her father, and the gun discharged and shot him in the head and killed him when she was 13. And she's talked about losing her father and seeing him dying and stuff,
but she never added the detail that it may be an accident that she was part of.
It was accidental, of course.
Now, I'm not sure that should make a difference.
Like, it shouldn't make a difference about whether or not she's...
There's no approval process for the Surgeon General, right?
Surgeon General doesn't need any congressional approval.
Is that true?
I'm assuming.
Doesn't seem like it's that important to have a job.
Anyway.
I don't know.
There's not much to that story, except it's kind of fascinating.
Let's talk about the healthcare hitman.
We're hearing now that law enforcement has his name, but they don't want to release it because then it would give him, you know, knowledge that he's caught.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you do say publicly that you know the killer's name, isn't he going to act exactly like you know his name?
What's the difference if we know his name?
Isn't the killer going to act exactly the same if you really know his name, or if you tell the public you know his name, but maybe you don't?
He's going to act exactly the same.
You know, maximum effort to remain, you know, hidden.
So I'm not sure they have a real name, but they say that.
Apparently he had multiple jackets.
I think he had a Jacket in a backpack and he had a different jacket in a cab.
How many winter jackets does this one guy have who was staying in a hostel and only had maybe one backpack?
And he had three big winter jackets?
So it could be that maybe he had a place where he stored an extra winter jacket just so he'd have one that doesn't look like the one he did the murder in.
So maybe he had an extra jacket play.
Could be.
But because humans are terrible, in New York City there was an event, an organized event, where people dressed like the shooter Because the shooter had a winter jacket and a mask on.
So people did a CEO shooter lookalike competition in Washington Square Park in New York City, which is terrible, terrible taste.
And apparently there's some playlist on Spotify which is for people who want to celebrate the CEO shooter because it's got some songs that the title of the song somehow seem to indicate they're related to the story but are not.
And then we hear that the backpack that they found in the park Might have one protein bar or something that they think he bought.
He bought two of them, but one was in there.
But there was monopoly money and a jacket in there.
Why was there monopoly money in this?
Why was there monopoly money in there?
Can anybody come up with any hypothesis for monopoly money?
All right.
Let me take it to the next level.
So the speculation is that somebody who may be mad about how a client of this healthcare insurance company was treated, maybe a loved one or something, or maybe hired by somebody who was mad about it.
And so that's one possibility.
It's just somebody hired.
But if the person was trying to send a signal and it was an activist, let's just go down this hypothesis.
Let's say it was somebody who really, really wanted the world to pay attention.
It's somebody who didn't just want to kill one guy, but wanted the whole world to pay attention and wanted to make a statement.
Does it make sense that that person would engrave the bullets with a delay, deny, whatever the third word is?
Because that's the title of a book that's anti-healthcare insurance.
So that would make sense if it's an activist.
If it's somebody who just wanted that one guy dead and it wasn't so much about the larger picture, I don't think he would have engraved anything unless it was part of getting away with it, I suppose.
But What about the fact that he used what is reportedly, we don't know this for sure, could turn out this is wrong, but reportedly he used a veterinarian's gun, which is meant to put the gun right up basically to the cow or the horse's head and just put a big bullet in it through a silencer, the silencer so it doesn't scare the other livestock.
But it's not very accurate.
So if you were going to be a killer and you chose one of the least accurate methods of doing it, it seems like you did it to make a point.
What would be the point?
Well, you can imagine that the point was that the healthcare insurance company had treated its customers like animals.
Or perhaps, perhaps, the healthcare had said, you can't have this medicine, we won't approve it.
And then they had to go to a veterinarian, like Ivermectin, and get the veterinarian version of the human medicine.
Do you think anybody ever had to do that?
Have you ever heard of anybody who had to get veterinarian medicine because their healthcare network wouldn't give it to them?
Yes, you have.
That's the thing.
Yeah, there were people who used veterinarian medicine because their health care wouldn't give them what they thought they needed.
So is the choice of a veterinarian's gun sending a signal that he wants to treat this person like an animal because this person treated customers like an animal?
I'm not saying he did.
There's no evidence of that.
I'm saying if you're looking for, you know, was there some kind of larger activist message, I would look at the choice of weapon.
I would look at the engraving.
But is there anything else that would suggest?
Oh, then the monopoly money in the backpack.
The monopoly money in the backpack might be, since obviously the backpack was meant to be discovered, I assume he always assumed he would get rid of the backpack.
So if it was meant to be discovered, what message would he be sending by putting money in it that's not real money?
Maybe it's about the money.
Maybe it's a statement about the healthcare insurance company being more about money than clients.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Because what would be the other reason for having monopoly money in a backpack?
It's not like he had a monopoly game in there, just the monopoly money.
It's not like he was going to spend it.
So can you think of any other reason it would be there other than to send a message?
There's no obvious reason I can think of.
It had to be a message.
So if the veterinarian gun is a message and the And the monopoly money is a way to say, follow the money.
It might be a message to law enforcement.
Follow the money.
Right?
You wouldn't want to put it in a note, like a handwritten note or anything, because that would be more evidence to his identity.
But if you just bought some monopoly money and you stuck it in your bag...
Law enforcement probably should come up with a theory that that was meant as a message.
And the message is, it's something about money.
Now, that would not suggest that the hitman was a paid hitman.
Because a paid hitman would not tell you, hey, I'm a paid hitman.
Because that would, again, help you narrow it down to possible suspects.
So if you weren't a paid hitman...
Then the monopoly money presumably would be a message that says, follow the money.
So it could be that the shooter believes that the victim was up to no good, because I think there were some other charges, maybe some insider trading charge that was speculated about, but I don't have any evidence of that.
It could be that because he thinks healthcare has some kind of a monopoly, that he's making a statement about the free market is not working because there's a monopoly.
Maybe.
So, who knows?
We'll keep an eye on that.
So, the ACLU is...
Trying to reverse the decision that I guess the higher court said that TikTok would remain, would be banned in January, unless something changes.
And the ACLU says that banning TikTok blatantly violates the First Amendment rights of millions of people, blah, blah.
Now, remember I was saying that Jon Stewart and Bernie were kind of saying, what about common sense?
Why can't we just have common sense opinions that our own team attacks us?
What exactly would be the common sense opinions Of fighting against the government of the United States, you know, an elected government who looked at all the details and said, you know what?
We've got lots of free speech platforms, but there's one that's special because of the China connection, and we need to limit that one.
It's not about the other platforms.
It's about one.
Do you think this is really a free speech question?
Now, I get it.
That taking TikTok out of America would reduce your free speech.
But remember, the deal allows them to sell it to an American company.
So all the Chinese-owned company has to do of TikTok is they have to sell just the American business to an American entity, and then there would be all the free speech in the world.
So...
The government found what I consider a completely common sense solution, which is if you like the product, here's a way to keep it.
You just have to keep the data and the management in the United States so nothing happens to free speech.
There's an option.
But also showing that a non-American owned, adversary owned company with that much influence is probably not safe.
So why would the ACLU, who presumably has a million things that they could be doing, why would they pick this, of all things?
Because it's not really...
Supporting common sense, and I would argue it's not even really supporting any right that Americans care about.
Do Americans care that they also have a Chinese-owned platform?
If they have plenty of platforms, I mean, Blue Sky just launched, and Zuckerberg did his own Twitter copy, etc.
I'm seeing people in the comments suggest that the firearm used by the healthcare hitman was not necessarily a veterinarian's gun.
And I agree with that.
It's definitely not confirmed.
And the gun experts seem to be all over the place.
They were all over the place on what was happening.
Was it a jam?
And was it just the way he had to add bullets?
Anyway, but back to this.
I was trying to understand why the ACLU was acting in a way that didn't seem commonsensical.
And so I said, well, it's probably one of two things.
It's either funded by somebody who always does bad things, such as Soros, or the management as a DEI problem.
So at first I searched to find out how the ACLU is funded.
And it's a little sketchy, but it looks like mostly by members, which would be a good situation.
So in other words, individual people paying their annual dues is funding it.
I think there's some foundations, but mostly the members.
And so I thought, oh, okay.
At least it's not like the Soros organization trying to destroy America or anything.
So I eliminated from my possibilities of what's going on that they were being funded by somebody nefarious.
Now, as far as I can tell, there's no nefarious funding.
So then I looked up the leader, and the leader of the ACLU is Deborah Archer, who is a black woman.
Now, There is no evidence whatsoever that she's not fully qualified for the job.
However, in the context of DEI, what should have happened and is observably true is that when you lose the focus on on capability and you start focusing on identity, what should happen is massive incompetence in all of our public and private domains.
You should make everything work worse and not because of anybody's color, Not because of anybody's gender, sexual preference, genes, nothing about that.
It's simply that if you constrain your candidates to they must be a certain kind, you're not going to be able to get as many choices.
If you have fewer choices, your odds of getting the right person and the right job go way down.
So my prediction was I would find one of two things wrong with the ACLU. Either they had a DEI problem, which is not confirmed, Because again, Deborah Archer might be the very best person who could be in that job.
I don't know one way or the other.
I'm saying that if you have a worldview that predicts Don't ignore that.
So I had a worldview that said it's one of these two things.
And when I saw that it wasn't the funding, as far as I can tell, but the DEI thing just blazingly stands out as the obvious next possibility.
Again, not confirmed.
She might be the very best person who could ever be in this job.
But the fact that it's predictable and The prediction part is the closest you can get to knowing what's real.
I'm not sure any of us are accurately interpreting reality.
I mean, we all seem to be living in our own realities.
But some of them predict.
And I tell you this all the time.
If you can predict...
Then probably you're closer to reality, or at least you have something that you can work with better for your own survival.
So that was my prediction, and it's a one-off, so it's not like a scientific study, but see how many times you can predict that DEI or the source of funding would be the problem behind some larger issue that you don't understand.
Meanwhile, Cenk Wieger, According to the Daily Caller News Foundation, he's saying that the Democrats focusing on identity politics has damaged the party's brand.
He is correct.
That has damaged the party's brand.
So much so that I think it's unrecoverable.
Because once you make everybody focus on their identity...
You necessarily, in the long term, you're going to lose the ability to have them function as one coherent group because you've persuaded them to not think that way.
So in theory, they should eat each other forever, whereas the Republicans are going for the opposite theory, which is, how about we just say, are you an American who likes to follow the law?
Yes.
Oh, you're perfect.
We're done here.
There's nothing else we need to discuss.
You're an American.
I'm American.
You like the law.
I like the same law.
We're good.
So the Republicans have built a process, a system, which can get us stronger indefinitely.
Exactly.
The Democrats built a system, which even on paper, should have destroyed itself in a few years.
And that's what we observe.
It was very predictable.
And furthermore, I predict that they can't recover at a national level.
They'll still win all their local races, just identity politics is all you need.
But at the federal level, I don't see them becoming competitive for a long time.
Unless the Republicans ran a complete loser and somehow the Democrats got some new superstar kind of talent with a lot of charisma.
I'm stuck in boomer truth regime.
Well, you're kind of an asshole.
So let me tell you what makes you look like an asshole in the comments.
When you make a comment about my identity, When I'm telling you that that's a fucking loser way to look at the world.
So...
So there's that.
Anyway, here's a story you've heard before, but it blows my mind every time I hear this.
It came up again.
So sometime, let's see, back in 2011, when Josh Shapiro, who's now the governor of Pennsylvania, was the attorney general...
He refused to prosecute a case in which there was a woman who had 20 stab wounds, which was assessed to be suicide.
And not her, was it a boyfriend or a fiancé?
I can't remember.
But there was a guy in her life And he was, of course, always the first suspect as whoever the guy in your life is.
If a woman gets killed in a home, the first thing they look for is the spouse or the boyfriend.
But decided that it was suicide.
Now, if I told you that somebody was stabbed 20 times to death...
Would you think that was suicide?
I mean, you're no experts, right?
But now part of the story was they said she had mental problems, which may or may not be true.
But if you were insane, could you stab yourself to death if you just went nuts?
I feel like maybe you could.
Maybe you could.
I mean, if you could commit a hairy carry, where you take a sword and stick it in and remove your organs, didn't the ancient Romans fall on their sword and stuff like that?
So, in theory, you could stab yourself to death, couldn't you?
I mean, if you really worked at it.
But here's the part of the story that I was saving.
Half of the stab marks are on her back and on the back of her head.
I'm willing to go out on a limb and say nobody has ever, ever attempted or succeeded as suicide by stabbing themselves in the back.
Never.
If you were really, really crazy and wanted to kill yourself, even then you wouldn't stab yourself in the back, would you?
So, It's very clearly a murder.
And for reasons that we don't understand, then Attorney General decided to not treat it that way.
Oh, he was a fiancé.
So it was a fiancé.
So what do you make of that?
Do you think that that's evidence that the Attorney General is Crooked or incompetent or had some connection to the alleged potential murderer.
What do you think is going on there?
It's kind of a puzzler.
So...
I'm going to say that the most likely explanation of this inexplicable situation is that the news is wrong.
The news is wrong.
So if you're saying to yourself, well, if these facts are all true, I can't understand this situation.
Remember, we live in a world where the news is almost always wrong.
The news is almost always wrong about anything complicated.
So do you think that if you had a private conversation with Josh Shapiro, do you think you'd say, yeah, you know, half the stat marks were in the back, but I was pretty sure that that sounded like suicide to me.
Do you think you'd say that?
I don't think there's any chance of that.
I think he would say, oh, the thing the news didn't tell you is X. I think?
And then you'd say, oh, that does change it a little bit.
But I don't know, I can't even imagine what he would say that would make it make sense that somebody stabbed themselves in the back multiple times.
But...
I feel like the most likely explanation is that the news or the story about it is missing something, because it doesn't make sense otherwise.
I don't know.
It's a mystery.
Scott Presler, you all know him from his great work in Pennsylvania, making that more red, and says he now wants to take on New Jersey.
He wants to flip New Jersey into a red state.
And it's not there yet, but he thinks it's close enough that he could push it over the edge.
So that's amazing.
I guess I have nothing to say about that except good for you, Scott Pressler.
I like it when all the Scots are doing well.
This is Scott Jennings, Scott Pressler.
All right.
Some judge, according to Slay News, federal judge has ordered the FDA to release the COVID vaccine trial data documents from Pfizer that wanted to hide them for 75 years.
All right, so let's see if you can predict what happens next.
So Pfizer wanted to protect for 75 years the data about the trial.
Their story was, it just takes that long to vet it and make it available.
Now, nobody believes that.
So, of course, we all believed, oh, there's something in there you don't want us to see.
Now, it doesn't mean there's something illegal or unethical or unscientific.
It could mean...
That they know that people will assume there is and find it.
In other words, they'll think they see it in the data, because people are terrible at data.
So it could be that Pfizer has done nothing wrong, but they know that if, like Trump releasing his tax returns.
If Trump did nothing wrong on his tax returns, it still wouldn't make sense to release them.
Because people would look at them, and not knowing how to analyze tax returns, they'd say, oh, look, here's this problem in his tax return.
But they wouldn't be accountants, and maybe there wasn't a problem.
So it would just be a problem for Trump to put all that red meat out there that people will misinterpret.
Pfizer must be in exactly the same situation.
So even if Pfizer legitimately believes there's nothing wrong with the trial data and it completely supports everything they did, they'd still not want it to be released.
That would be a perfectly smart thing for a corporation to do.
It's not good for us because we'd like to know the answer.
But from the corporation's point of view, yeah.
Protect everything you can protect.
Why create problems for yourself?
But now it's been reversed.
So now let's say if there's no more legal process going on, suppose you think you're going to see that.
Now make your prediction what happens next.
So the company has the possession of all these documents.
Maybe the FDA does too.
Would the FDA have it or only the company?
Because that would make a difference.
Here's why I ask.
If only the company owns the documents, and maybe other people have seen them but don't have a copy, don't you think those documents are going to suddenly get lost?
Do you think that maybe they'll do a system update and all the data will be lost?
Because every time we've been in this situation where we know there's a document, such as the Epstein list or Diddy's videos or, you know, I could go on and on, Hillary's phones that she had bleach bled or whatever she did there.
So it feels like every time we know exactly what we're looking for, Oh, if we can only see those...
Oh, they're already deleted?
Oh, so you've never lost any documents for 30 years, but you lost these.
The only ones we really, really wanted to look at?
Is that what's happening next?
So I wouldn't be surprised under the condition that only Pfizer controls those documents.
I don't know if that's true.
But if only Pfizer has the documents...
They're gonna get lost.
Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but everybody who has deleted documents got away with it.
All of them.
Everybody who did it.
Can you think of one case?
A prominent case recently where somebody deleted some documents and went to jail.
I can't.
They just say it was an accident.
Oh, whoops, whoops.
I really tried to give it to you, but deleted.
Yeah, that might be coming.
Elon Musk's AI now has the ability to do photorealistic images.
So Grok wasn't that good at images, but xAI, apparently the new update, according to Don Jacobson at UPI. And the question that we don't know the answer to is, will Elon Musk's AI have guardrails that prevent you from doing celebrities and public figures.
I don't know the answer to that.
That's sort of a good edge case for free speech.
I feel like Elon Musk would not want to limit what you could do with the AI in terms of images.
But on the other hand, if you had a major AI that was willing to create fake images that really look real on any topic with any celebrity, you're really going to cause a lot of trouble.
But so does free speech.
So it'll be interesting to see which way Elon goes on this, if they've made a decision.
Maybe they've already made that decision.
We just don't know.
But if you can do celebrities and famous people, and you can make them do anything you want, well, that's a different world.
So we'll see if that's going to be the case.
And you know I'm going to tell you that there's some new battery technology.
So Ars Technica says there's a sodium ion batteries, new breakthroughs, blah, blah, blah.
The problem with sodium ion batteries as a technology compared to lithium, so this will make you smarter at your next gathering because you'll know more about battery technology.
So if you do lithium, they've got a good density.
That's why they're used in cars.
So you can put a lot of power in a small device.
But they have more fire risk, lithium does, and they use rare materials.
But if you could get the same performance, and you can't yet, but are getting close, from a sodium-iron battery, You'd basically be using no rare earth materials and you would have no risk of fire or much lower, I guess.
The only problem is density and that's where they have the breakthrough.
So they're claiming a density That if they actually can achieve it, it's almost hard for experts to believe they can get there.
But they're knocking on the door.
So it could be that the whole rare earth thing becomes unimportant.
But we'll see.
At the same time, according to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, they've got this new Battery technology using twisted carbon nanotubes.
So apparently if you twist your carbon nanotubes just right, it will store a bunch of electricity, again, without the rare earth materials, without any fire risk, I imagine.
So those are two technologies, or like a few more that I didn't mention.
So sodium iron batteries and carbon nanotubes.
And there's some other solid-state stuff that's happening.
So the world of battery is very dynamic.
It's going to change everything.
Once you can store electricity about, let's say, twice as well as we're doing now, which is certain to happen, all kinds of things become practical, you know, like having your own electric one-person airplane, that kind of thing.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, That is all I have for you today on this Sunday.
I'm going to talk to the people on Locals privately, subscribers on Locals.
