God's Debris: The Complete Works, Amazon https://tinyurl.com/GodsDebrisCompleteWorksFind my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.comContent:Politics, LA Fires Rebuilding Permits, LA Fires State Farm, Income-Based Traffic Tickets, Greenland Unnecessary Pressure, Harry Enten Presentation Style, President Trump's Popularity Poll, Jasmine Crockett, Defunding District Courts, Signal App Drama, Jeffrey Goldberg Reputation, Mike Waltz, Epstein Files Declassification, NGO Color Revolution, NGO Indivisible Anti-GOP Ops, Fatima Goss Graves, Kari Lake VOA, EO Election Security Reform, Russia Collusion Hoax Declassification, Ukraine Negotiations, DOGE Resistant Bureaucracy, Scalpel Chainsaw Debate, Dramacrats, Scott Adams~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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 levels that nobody can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains, all you need for that is a cover of mug or a glass of tank or shells, a stein, a canteen, or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And 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. Delicious.
Well, in media news, Stephen Crowder is leaving YouTube for good.
And he's going to be exclusively live on Rumble.
Actually, I don't know if it's exclusive.
I don't know if he's on X as well.
But he won't be on YouTube.
He'll be on Rumble.
And he's the number one live stream in America, I think.
So that's not bad.
Not bad.
So I guess YouTube was not giving him what he needed.
You know, the other day I got...
Well, did you know,
according to the Daily Star, over at the British Broadcasting Company, I don't like to say BBC because I know some of you will just be sidetracked by that.
Apparently they're offering counseling to the staff to help them cope with the presidency of Donald Trump.
Now, does a British broadcasting company know that he's not even the president of Great Britain?
He's not.
So... How many of them really need counseling because of a president of another country?
That's pretty weird.
Pretty weird and pretty weak.
But I wish you well, British Broadcasting Company.
Anyway, up in Canada, you know Pierre Paulivre?
Let me pronounce that correctly.
It's Pierre Paulivre.
Paulivre. Paul Revere.
I think it's pronounced Paul Revere.
Is that even close?
It's not even close.
It's Poyle Liver.
No? Close?
Okay, I can't speak French last names, but you know who he is.
He's a very smart and very clever person on the conservative side.
He's running for something.
He says they have a common sense approach for Canada first.
So it looks to me like he has cleverly adopted Trump's best phrases and plans.
Canada first, common sense, common sense immigration.
It's a pretty good idea.
You know, normally I would say something like, oh, you're so...
Such a copycat.
You know, come up with your own campaign.
But how do you do better than common sense?
And how do you do better than your own country should come first to the politicians running your own country?
You can't really top those things.
So I suspect there's just going to be a whole bunch of politicians and a whole bunch of places saying, I've got an idea.
Hey, hey, I've got an idea.
How about common sense?
Does anybody up for some common sense?
Well, it's hard to say no to that.
We'll see how he does.
Gateway Pundit is reporting that Adam Carolla correctly called the near impossibility of getting building permits in California for the people who were affected by those LA fires.
And let me give you a little poll here.
So it's been 75 days since the fires.
How many building permits do you think have been issued?
75 days.
And fairly quickly, people knew whether their house was going to be, you know, burned down or not.
So how many building permits have been issued?
Would you say 400?
Forty or four?
The answer is four.
Four building permits for all that, you know, just acres and, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds of homes and only four building permits.
And Adam Carolla had warned us in advance that it was going to be nearly impossible to build because of all the California red tape.
Now, you are probably optimistic that red tape could be cleared a little faster because it's an emergency and, you know, we're doing the common sense thing now.
How many homes?
1,500 homes I'm seeing in the comments.
1,500.
Yeah. Now, I would be a little cautious about this 75-day thing because it could be that you couldn't really get a...
Contractor or a builder or an architect even into the area because it was too toxic.
So it might be that the first 75 days, nobody could do anything because the area itself was not as accessible as it could have been.
Not the whole 75 days.
But we'll see.
There's still some possibility that it will ramp up quickly once people see whether it makes sense to live there at all.
So we'll see.
But a related story is that the State Farm, the insurance company, is just getting wrecked by the press for what a lot of its customers say is pretty bad behavior, as in offering incredibly low-ball offers, well below the cost of rebuilding.
And why?
Well, the theory is that sometimes they can get away with it.
So if you don't hire a lawyer and fight them and just really go after them hard, apparently they'll just try to lowball you because there's so much money involved.
So State Farm has a lot of explaining to do.
I'm not there personally, but based on the press reports, it looks like something pretty bad is happening.
So State Farm, you need to explain yourself.
Meanwhile, San Francisco has rolled out this program in the city where there are cameras that can photograph your car and your license plate and issue you a ticket.
And the ticket will depend on your income.
Can you believe that?
The amount you have to pay for the ticket will be based on your income.
And it will be automatic.
There's no human involved.
They'll just take a picture and suddenly you just get a ticket in the mail.
Is that the creepiest damn thing you ever heard of?
That you would get a ticket based on your income?
Can they really determine your income from your license plate?
Maybe. What if somebody borrows your car?
Did they get the ticket based on the income of the person who owns the car?
How does that work?
This is so damn creepy.
Anyway, Blaze Media is reporting on that.
You know that Greenland visit that J.D. Vince's wife and kid were going to go to?
Well, it looks like that's not working out.
I think it worked out great.
When Don Jr. and Charlie Kirk and some of their guys went up there.
I don't know if it's because it was early in the process and there hadn't been a lot of thinking about what would happen with Greenland or what.
But they're really prickly now.
So it looks like the trip that was supposed to be sort of a general cultural appreciation sort of thing.
Turned into, well, maybe you shouldn't go where there are a lot of Greenlanders.
So instead, I think they're going to visit military base, some U.S. military base, and J.D. Vance is going to join them.
So it looks like it might have been a little dangerous or at least a little bit offensive to the locals.
But here's something that the Danish prime minister said.
He said that the scheduled visit puts completely unacceptable pressure on Greenland.
Do you think that the vice president's wife and child visiting Greenland and going to cultural events was going to put unnecessary pressure on Greenland?
Really? Apparently Greenland can't take much pressure.
What would it take to conquer the entire country?
Like, six hobos with butter knives?
I mean, if they're going to buckle under the pressure of somebody doing a vacation in Greenland, hey, the vice president's wife and young child will be visiting.
Oh, no!
Oh, no!
The pressure!
Oh, how are we going to survive the visit?
Of the vice president's wife and child.
Oh, no!
What are we going to do?
What are we going to do?
Hide the dogs.
Don't let them see our snow.
No, they're going to steal our snow.
Hide the snow.
Apparently, Greenland is ripe for conquest because they can't even take a visit from a woman and her child.
It was just too much pressure.
Too much pressure.
Meanwhile, Harry Enten on CNN continues to be one of their top two entertaining people.
He does a really great job, I have to say.
If I'm just going to give somebody a compliment on how well they do their job, Harry Enten does the polls and some of the numbers, puts them on a big screen.
But he has got down cold the presentation style.
He can take data, and Becky seems so exciting with just his body language, and he's standing, and he's waving his arms around, and his voice has all kinds of variety in it.
He is great.
He's just absolutely flat-out great at doing his job.
So, compliments to him.
But one of the things that I like about him, he's not in the bag.
Or out of the bag for Trump.
He just shows the numbers, and he's excited by the numbers if it's something unusual.
I love that.
He loves his job, looks like.
One of the things he pointed out is that Trump is at his all-time high in popularity.
So the more we hear about, you know, everything's bad for Trump and, you know, and all that.
In 2017, Trump was minus 10 in popularity.
In 2024, right around the election, he was minus 7. So he was improving by then, but still minus.
But in March 2025, which is now, he's only minus 4. So Arienton said, all we talk about is how unpopular Trump is, but in reality, he's basically more popular than he was at any point.
In term number one, and more popular than he was when he won the election.
He's more popular than when he won the election.
So, what does that do to the strategy of the James Carville strategy?
No. No, we just wait.
We just hang tight.
We just wait, and everything will be better, because we'll just wait.
Well, it turns out that waiting just makes Trump more popular.
If I had to guess what it is that's making him popular, it's that he said he would do things, and then he's very conspicuously and with very high energy doing things.
I think it is just shocking to people that somebody involved with government would say, I'm going to do this list of things, and then the moment they're in there, They do the things.
Why are people continually writing the number 4 in the comments?
What is that about?
For some reason, everybody is just writing the digit 4. Can you give me some...
Did something happen?
Is there any meaning to that, where you're just all like the number four suddenly, so you're just printing four?
Oh, okay, you're still back on four as the number of houses that got permits.
Got it.
Okay. There's a lag to it.
All right.
And then Harry Enten, also, CNN, said that according to the NBC poll, People were asked, is the U.S. on the right track?
The NBC poll was the highest since 2004.
44% said we're on the right track.
That's the highest since 2004.
And a Marist poll says that on the same question, is the U.S. on the right track?
It's the second highest since 2009.
So just imagine being president.
You've been president for a few months now, and your popularity is at the highest it's ever been, and you've been president before.
And the two polls show that the public is more optimistic about the direction of the U.S. than at any time in a really long time.
And that's CNN.
So I tend to believe that these are probably...
Realistic numbers.
Anyway, so that's how the Republicans are doing really well.
Let's check in with the Democrats.
Let's see how their best people are doing.
Let's see.
Jasmine Crockett, who's been in the news for being provocative, and she seemed to have mocked Texas Governor Greg Abbott for being in a wheelchair.
She said something about him being Hot Wheels.
And then people said, you can't, you know, that's terrible.
You can't mock him for being in a wheelchair.
And then she tried to walk him back and explain that it really was better, his policies.
What part of Hot Wheels seems like it's related to his policies?
And then she had some kind of ridiculous explanation about transportation as wheels or something.
So it started out bad and she made it worse.
And I know I can speak for all Republicans when I say, I'd like to see more of Jasmine Crockett at the head of the ticket.
She's so bad at what she does.
Just so bad.
That James Carville must be turning in his grave.
I assume he's been long dead, but just based on his appearance.
It just can't get better.
So keep going, Jasmine Crockett.
We'd like more of that.
All right, let's see.
Speaker Mike Johnson clarified something that...
For some reason I didn't know, and I was so surprised I was just finding this out.
It's one of those things where you think, where have I been?
How in the world did I not know this?
But ABC News is reporting that Mike Johnson said that Congress has the authority to stop providing funding to federal courts.
He says, we do have authority over the federal courts.
We can eliminate an entire district court.
We have power funding over the courts and all these other things, but desperate times call for desperate measures and Congress is going to act.
Is that a real thing?
That the Congress can just defund a court if the court is rogue?
Because we keep talking about, you know, impeaching a judge.
Which the smart people say that's going to take forever and, you know, you're going to get too much resistance and it's probably a bad precedent.
But what if you just said, how about we just get rid of your entire court?
I feel like I'm down for that.
Because right now the court is completely out of control.
I mean, it's just completely politicized.
It's useless.
It's more than useless.
It's just damaging.
So, that would be fun.
Now, I do suspect that this is one of those things that could go both ways.
You know, you think it's a good idea when your team does it, but what if the other team gets in power?
And then they could do it too.
But why would they ever need to?
Because all the crazy rulings are all coming from the left.
You know, even if you don't agree with the ruling that comes out of right-leaning judges, it's not crazy shit.
But the left is just way off the reservation at this point.
So I would kind of like to see this.
Just see what happens.
Just pick one of the worst courts.
And I would even go so far as to say that if even some of the judges are good on a particular court, Is that how it works?
There are multiple judges in each of these districts.
If one of them is so bad that you have to defund the entire district, I'm okay with that.
You know, it's not ideal.
It's definitely not a scalpel.
It's definitely a chainsaw.
But we're definitely in chainsaw territory.
Yeah, I'd pick the chainsaw.
Anyway, let's talk about the update on the Signal app drama controversy.
Number one, I would say that it's a 2 out of 10 in importance.
2 out of 10. Almost everything that we talk about in politics is at least a 7 out of 10, or it's not in the news at all.
So this is the most trivial thing that we've ever talked about to pretend it's big.
But the Dramacrats are sending all their best actors out.
So let me give you two ways that the Signal app story could be told by politicians.
Here's one way.
Well, it looks like somebody made a mistake on the Signal app and added a journalist.
It's very unfortunate, but we learn from our mistakes.
So we won't do that again.
Luckily, nobody got hurt.
And Mike Walz has taken full responsibility, even though he wasn't the one who added the journalist.
Apparently, that was some staffer.
But it was his staffer, so he's taken full responsibility.
And it's a good thing that what we saw was our elected representatives.
Well, not elected, but, you know, the cabinet people.
One elected.
I guess one elected.
Having a very fruitful discussion about whether we should be the ones to pay for keeping the shipping lanes open.
When J.D. Vance said something on the messages that 3% of the traffic that the Hooties were preventing would be American traffic.
Just 3%.
And 40% would be European traffic.
Now, that would be me talking about it like it's a 2 out of 10. Let me give you the Dramacrat presentation.
Oh, my God!
Oh, the level of incompetence!
oh my fucking god It's the same story.
They just add the drama.
And apparently they've all agreed that the word incompetence will be the key word.
Oh, they're gross!
And you have to say incompetence in a certain way.
So you can't say, well, it looked like there was some incompetence there, but I'm glad they got that under control.
That wouldn't be much of a story.
So you have to say, Incompetence.
Oh, the incompetence.
So much incompetence.
And, you know, probably that incompetence is all over the entire administration, just reeking with incompetence.
Incompetence all over the place.
So that's the Dramacrats.
But what else do we know about it?
And I think the dramacrafts are competing to see who gets the lead in the play because they're all trying to be more disgusted than the last person.
Then I made the comment that there was no alternative to using the Signal app because the government secure phones and stuff were not efficient.
And then a bunch of people corrected me.
They said, no, Scott.
Each of the top officials have secure phones in their offices, and so they could have done it on the secure phones.
To which I say, do you fucking think Signal is a phone?
How many of you don't know the difference between a phone call and a text message chat group?
The reason they're using the text message chat group...
So they can do things in an asynchronous way.
Somebody's playing with their kids and answering a message and checking in.
Somebody's on the road.
Somebody's on a plane.
Somebody's on the way to their office.
That's not a phone call.
If you had to get all these people on their desks with their secret encrypted phones that the government has, first of all, they wouldn't want to do any of this on a phone call.
It would just be the biggest waste of time ever.
And secondly, they're just not going to be available on fast notice.
So, no, there is no government-encrypted, fully secure chat service.
And the Signal App is approved for government use, as long as you don't do the top secrets, which we'll talk about.
And then I saw Jeffrey Goldberg get dismantled by Tim Miller, A notable Democrat.
And Tim Miller asked him, I'm paraphrasing, but he said, you know, are you going to release it?
And Goldberg goes, oh, no, I take classified information seriously.
So I'm not going to release any more of the messages that I have.
And then Tim Miller, without realizing what he was doing, I think, asked him the following question.
Well, Could you show it to some people who have security clearance, and then they can help us judge whether it was really classified in war plans?
And Goldberg's answer was, Oh, fa-blah-blah-blah.
Fa-blah.
Fa-blah-blah-blah.
Well... And he sort of decomposed.
But I'm hearing today, but I don't have confirmation, that more of the messages were released?
Or was it all of the messages were released?
So if they were all released, that would be a pretty big change from these are too sensitive to, oh, we'll just release them all.
So I need a little clarification on that.
I couldn't tell before I went live here.
Let's see, what else is going on there?
There's so much going on in that tiny little unimportant story.
And then we had a couple of folks weigh in to tell us that Jeffrey Goldberg is a highly credible and respected journalist.
Ian Bremmer said that on X, and also David Axelrod.
Now, remember I always tell you that what happened Doesn't tell you anything.
You have to know who.
Now, Jeffrey Goldberg is associated with some of the more notable hoaxes that we've seen.
So why would Ian Bremmer and David Axelrod want to go public saying that he's so credible?
What's up with that?
So I always see these things as ways to know who's...
You know, who's connected to or loyal to or, you know, on the same team.
So you can draw your own conclusions about the people who are supporting them.
Mike Walz took responsibility for it.
So you can stop, well, the critics can stop saying, nobody took responsibility.
Yeah, he took full responsibility.
He just wasn't clear how it happened because he doesn't have any contact with, he's never texted Jeffrey Goldberg, but it turns out a staffer may have done it.
But we don't know exactly, we don't know the details of how or why the staffer did it.
So more questions there.
And I love the way Trump...
Handled it during an NBC News interview.
What did he say?
He said, it's just something that can happen.
That's such a Trumpian way to handle it.
It's just something that can happen.
Mike Walsh is a good man.
Now, that's how you treat a story that's a 2 out of 10. If it were a 7 out of 10, Then maybe you would say Maury, defend it, whatever.
But it's only a 2 out of 10. It's just something that can happen.
It's just perfect.
It just minimizes it and sort of brushes it away.
It's like, nah, it's just something that can happen.
Anyway, nobody got hurt.
Time goes by.
But it's all the Democrats have.
The Democrats don't have much to talk about, so they got that.
Just so you know, Dilbert's company will be building an encrypted app.
So if you're subscribed to that on the X platform, it's the only place you can see it besides Locals.
On Locals, you'll also see some of my political stuff.
So if you don't like the political stuff and you just want to see the Dilbert comic, you can do that on X if you subscribe.
Just look for the button on my profile.
Well, Alex Jones has a scoop-ish.
According to his source, there's a whole bunch of files, 14 terabytes of what Alex Jones calls nightmarish sexual abuse of children on the Epstein files.
And it's all been given to the local FBI offices with orders to take the gloves off.
So that's Alex Jones' take on that.
Now, my take on all the Epstein stuff is I will believe anything when I see it.
I feel every time we get teased about, oh, we're going to see the good stuff, it hasn't happened yet.
So whatever it is that's preventing this from coming out, I think it's going to be like the JFK files.
Do you realize we got played in the JFK files, right?
I'm pretty sure we got played, because even Trump had said, if you saw what I saw, you wouldn't release them either.
And then we saw what seemed to be the complete files, and everybody said, oh, it looks like there's nothing new here.
Yeah, we knew the CIA was involved in a lot of stuff.
So do you think there's any chance that we saw the good stuff?
On the JFK files.
And do you think that anything we saw is something that if Trump saw it, he would have said, oh yeah, if you saw what I saw, you wouldn't release him either?
No, I think we got played.
So the Epstein files could be the same thing, meaning that at some point somebody will say, all right, these are the full and complete files.
And then you look through them and it's like...
Some people playing ping pong.
And there's Jeffrey Epstein playing the piano.
And now he's waving to people on his way to a boat.
And we're going to be like, I really thought there would be all kinds of terrible things.
No, no, that's all we have.
That's all we have.
So I don't trust anything about these secret files being released.
It doesn't matter who's doing it.
I don't trust anything about it.
Well, you know about the anti-Tesla, anti-Elon Musk protests.
Zero Hedge is calling it part of the NGO color revolution, which is how you overthrow a country.
And that's my take on it, too, that it's basically a coup attempt.
In this case, against Musk and Trump.
And attacking Musk would be very good for the bad guys because he's doing such a good job on Doge that if they can take him out, they would partially cripple Trump's ability to save the country.
And they don't care about the country.
But here's what we know.
So there's this NGO called Indivisible.
And apparently they were taking things off their website because they got caught as one of the entities funding this.
Apparently they were also one of the entities backing the Black Lives Matter movement.
Do you remember that?
Which was also a color revolution.
So apparently everything that we've learned is true.
The NGOs are being funded by the government.
To run ops against Republicans and to try to create, you know, riots in the street and unbelievable.
So Natalie Winters, a co-host of Steve Bannon's War Room, wrote an ex.
So the wife of former U.S. attorney...
Matthew Graves, so he led the prosecution of the 1500 January Sixers, is on the board of that indivisible.
Wait, what?
The guy who prosecuted, he led the prosecution of the January Sixers, is on the board of this group that backed the BLM protests and now the Tesla stuff?
I think his wife, let's say, yeah, Matthew Graves' wife, Fatima Gross Graves.
Imagine having your middle name, Gross, and your last name, Graves.
Now, I haven't seen a picture of her, but I certainly hope she's thin, because if your name is Fatima Gross Graves, You better not have an extra pound because that's just not going to work out.
But she's the director of the NGO.
So everything you thought about how every judge has a spouse who's involved in some sketchy NGO thing, it's all true.
So almost every day there's a news story about a judge rules.
There's some judge who rules against Doge doing one thing or another.
And it sounds to us, because we're not lawyers, it sounds like, what?
Why can't they do that?
And then it gets appealed.
And then the higher court says, well, they can't do that.
So whenever I tell you that something has been blocked on Doge, it's almost always going to be...
You know, the lower court.
And anytime I tell you that they've been, that the blocking has been reversed, it's an appeals court.
An appeals court.
So here's a few more.
A federal judge, so this would be a lower court, has ruled against Carrie Lake and the Trump administration, forcing them to, this is Nick Sorter's reporting on this.
To continue funding the deep state propaganda radio stations.
That's the Voice of America and the related entities to Voice of America.
And so Cary Lake and Trump were looking to just close it down because it wasn't really useful and it cost a lot of money.
So they're just going to close it down.
And then a judge tells them they can't.
What? So remember, every time it's the lower court, you know, lower court judge, Their rulings are just baffling to a citizen.
Why can't the people who run it close it down?
Like, how is that not allowed?
Like, what does a judge have to do with that?
But then here's, this is also Nick Sorter is reporting this on X. But then a Fourth Circuit just halted an activist judge called Chuang.
Who had required Doge's access to much of USAID be suspended.
So there it is again.
Lower courts blocking on a different topic.
The higher court is reversing the blocking of something about USAID.
And I would love to know the budget for all the legal actions that Trump and Musk are involved in.
What do you think the government is spending on these ridiculous legal challenges to get them reversed?
Are we talking hundreds of millions?
I'll bet it's hundreds of millions.
Maybe not right away, but over the course of Trump's term.
Incredible. But at least it's a fair fight.
At least if you tell me that Trump's lawyers and maybe Elon Musk's You know, resources.
I don't know if he's involved in any of that or not directly.
But at least it's a fair fight.
Trump signed an executive order for election integrity, but it's not the things I wanted, like some kind of, you know, you must have ID and stuff like that.
But Autism Capital is reporting on X. That the EO would do this.
Cut down on illegal immigrants on voter rolls.
So I guess we'd purge the voter rolls to get rid of illegals.
Ensure that the Department of Homeland Security has fully usable data.
I didn't know that was a problem.
A citizenship question on the voting forms, for the federal voting forms.
Cutting federal funding to states that don't take reasonable steps to secure their election.
Now, that's a little vague.
What would be a reasonable step to secure your election?
Voter ID, right?
So I don't know if this gets to voter ID or not, but maybe they could use it for that.
And then the Department of Justice, they want...
The EO wants them to vigorously prosecute election crimes, which, again, I thought was already happening.
And compliance with National Election Day rules.
What's that?
Compliance with National Election Day rules?
Is that saying that the election has to be on one day instead of three months of voting?
I don't know.
Prosecuting foreign interference in elections.
Okay, if you can catch them.
And revoking some Biden executive order that was apparently not productive.
Anyway, so all that's happening.
Now, what Trump really wants is in-person voting and voter ID and stuff like that.
So we'll see if he gets all of that.
So Trump is now declassifying all the FBI documents related to the Russia collusion hoax.
Isn't that interesting?
Years later, what are we going to learn about the Russia collusion hoax that maybe we don't already know?
So Trump says this gives the media the right to go in and check it.
You probably won't bother.
Because you're not going to like what you see.
He always throws an insult into the media.
You're probably not going to bother because you're not going to like what you see.
And then he said, this was total weaponization.
It's a disgrace.
It should have never happened in this country.
But now you'll be able to see for yourself all declassified.
Now, honestly, I don't know how Hillary Clinton avoids going to jail.
I don't think it'll happen.
But won't the documents show a clear path?
From Hillary's campaign to the creation of the Steele dossier that we know to be fake, I thought this was the most damning and well-known stuff, but imagine if there's more.
Imagine if we find out even more than we already know.
Could happen.
In other news, It was reported that there's some good news on a ceasefire deal with Ukraine and Russia, but I'm a little skeptical because the alleged agreement is not writing and it's not signed, so that's never a good sign.
But the deal is that there would be a pause on the tax on the Black Sea shipping.
And that there would be a pause on going after energy facilities.
The weird thing is they said it was retroactive.
How do you stop retroactive attacks?
Is there some kind of a time dilation thing?
Not only will there be a ceasefire starting today, but there will be a ceasefire going back in time.
Really? I must be missing something in this story, because how do you change the past?
Anyway. But they don't have details on even what they've agreed on.
They don't have start dates.
There's no comprehensive truce, etc.
And then hardly any time goes by, and Russia says that they also want their sanctions on Russia lifted before the Black Sea ceasefire.
Now, That's a whole new negotiation.
So it sounds to me like, you know, maybe the American team of negotiators went away with some confidence or some belief that there was an agreement and the Russians either never meant to agree or they decided that they had such a powerful position that they could just throw in a major thing, like the dropping of sanctions, just to try to get that for free.
So, assuming that Trump is in control of what we're offering and what we're not, he's not going to give that for free, which means that the whole deal has already fallen apart, in my opinion.
So, I don't think it's being reported that way, but in my opinion, it looks like the whole deal just fell apart.
Now, that's not surprising.
At this point in the process, you kind of expect to be a whole bunch of false starts.
You know, we think we got a deal.
Wait, they walked away.
No, now we have a deal.
Okay, not the details, but okay, the details blew up the deal.
So I'm going to stick with my three months estimate.
I do think both sides want some kind of peace, or at least the U.S. and Russia do.
But it's not going to be easy, and I don't think we're close.
So I'd be surprised if anything happens.
But let's be optimistic.
So if we were to look at things from today's perspective, Trump's at a high in popularity.
The country thinks we're going in the right direction in bigger numbers than we've seen in a long time.
And the biggest problem that the Democrats could come up with The biggest one is a 2 out of 10 in importance.
I think that they may have said some things in that text message.
Now, I'm open to hear that maybe there were some more confidential things in there.
But so far, I'm going to agree with Trump.
It's just a thing that can happen.
But just think about the fact that's the best thing they have.
And then I'm hearing Mark Cuban do the, what's wrong with Musk and Trump is that they do ready, fire, aim.
Do you think that anybody can tell from the outside if they're doing the right stuff?
I don't think so.
And I think that there are situations where firing before you measure is exactly the right thing.
I remember the shocking day that I first learned that when you're talking about software, you don't want to measure twice and cut once.
You know that old thing?
If you're a carpenter, you want to measure it twice so that when you cut it once, it will be correct.
And with hardware, same thing.
So there's a whole bunch of domains in which you definitely want to make sure you're doing the right thing before you do anything.
But not in software.
In software, you try something, and it breaks, and you try something else, and it breaks, and you try something else, and it didn't really cost you anything because it's just software.
So going fast and seeing what happens can work with startups, and it can work with software projects.
And the question is, are there applications within Doge where that also makes sense?
Certainly there are applications where the scalpel makes sense.
But do you think the doge people can't tell the difference between when to use the scalpel and when to use the chainsaw?
If the bureaucracy is fighting you, which tool do you use?
I'll put this to you.
Those of you who are experienced in management, if the bureaucracy is trying to slow you down and slow walk you and avoid you, And you want to make cuts.
Do you use the scalpel?
You can't.
Because the only way you can use the scalpel is if the bureaucracy was actively helping you.
Oh yeah, you don't know our operations, but let me tell you, you can scalpel this and you can scalpel that, and we're here to help.
But that's not going to happen.
Do you think that's what the doge people are running into?
A bunch of helpful bureaucrats?
We're like, wow, we can't wait.
We can't wait to tell you where to scalpel this.
Nope. In that case, what would be the right tool?
Chainsaw. And then as you're chainsawing, the bureaucracy starts screaming, ah, ah, ah, you don't realize you're cutting this, or you cut this, and the babies are going to die.
And you say, wait, what?
The babies are going to die.
Okay, can you give me some evidence that babies are going to die?
Yes, yes.
See, it's feeding these babies.
And then you say, oh, okay.
Now you're being helpful.
So you weren't helpful with a scalpel, were you?
But as soon as I put the chainsaw to it, you like save the babies and now I have some useful information and now I'll back off on the chainsaw.
Exactly. So when I see Mark Cuban saying, you know, sort of generic things like, yeah, they're Disorganized and they're just chainsawing things without wisely deciding what to do.
I say to myself, I'm not sure he's fully incorporated what the bureaucracy would be doing to stymie them.
If the bureaucracy is working against Doge, and I think you could just say with certainty that would be the case, then that's just chainsaw.
The scalpel couldn't possibly work in that domain.
But it might kick up a situation where you say, all right, we've chainsawed enough, but we hit a little sensitive area here.
Let's slow down and scalpel that a little bit.
So to say that scalpel always beats chainsaw is just purely dumb or inexperienced.
To say that sometimes chainsaw is the right answer and sometimes scalpel is the right answer, that will always be correct.
But to imagine that you can look from the outside and determine where they went wrong, you can't do that.
We don't have any inside information about that.
To imagine that the complaints of the bureaucracy are telling you that you should do something differently, that's not how anything works.
Because the bureaucracy would be complaining no matter what you were doing.
If it were a reorg, they'd be complaining.
If it were cuts with a scalpel, they'd be complaining.
If it were anything, they would be complaining.
So if they're all reporting that they have low morale, oh, we have low morale, that's just because there's change.
All change makes bureaucracies have low morale, or at least they'll tell you they have low morale.
So you can't tell by listening to the people bitching about it.
And you definitely can't tell what's happening and when the scalpel and when the chainsaw is being used or if there's even a sensitivity to know when to move from one to the other.
I assume they are because it's the smart people doing it.
So now let's look at the best that the Democrats have.
We've got the James Carville approach.
Which is basically give up and just roll over and hope that the other side makes a mistake.
You've got the generic complaints.
Well, I don't think that they measure twice and cut once, which doesn't really even make sense.
Because, like I said, they should be using the scalpel sometimes and the chainsaw sometimes.
And from the outside, you can't tell.
You just can't tell from the outside what's working and what isn't.
That's just not a thing.
Then you've got the Jasmine Crockett approach, which is just be really stupid in public every single day, like really stupid, and try to sell that.
All right?
All right?
We've got some stupidity going.
And then you've got the Signal app story that the dramacrats are trying to sell you with their faces.
I'm so aghast!
That incompetence!
That massive incompetence!
Rah! And those are the best plays.
You know, also yelling at their own leadership for being terrible.
So, I've never seen a more disorganized, completely broken party than this.
I don't know if there's any time in my life this has ever happened.
Did I coin Dramocrats?
No, I did not.
No, I did not.
So I stole that from a DM that I got, where somebody DM'd it to me.
But I love it, the Dramocrats.
It puts it in perspective, because I really do think that the Democrats are largely a theatrical production.
And I mean that literally, in the sense that they're acting.
About how mad they are.
They're acting about how much of a difference anything that they're talking about matters.
And that's all they have.
When I see Republicans, let's take the story earlier about Mike Johnson, when he says that the Congress has control over these courts, the funding for these courts, was that theatrical?
Not even a little bit.
It was just a matter of fact.
This is something that we might do.
It's important.
And he just tells you.
That's it.
When Trump signs his executive orders, even though he's like the greatest showman, he's largely just communicating what he's doing in an interesting way.
It's not a theater, because there are real things happening, and you can see the reality of it in the executive order.
So, it seems to me...
The Republicans have similar opinions because conservatives have similar opinions to each other, and that when they describe them, they're just talking.
But when the Democrats get involved, I think it's because they don't understand policy, or they're, I don't know, they just seem to be locked into a theatrical mode where they believe that selling the disgust on their faces is all they have to sell.
Look at the disgust on my face.
Oh, oh.
And then I'll say again, what do you think would be the reaction of the typical Democrat voter if they read a story about the signal app situation and the story was just described in just cold, dry terms?
Well, it looks like this shouldn't have happened, but luckily nobody got hurt.
Everybody learned something.
Mike Waltz took full responsibility.
Looks like his staff member did it.
How much do you think an average voter would care if they just heard it that way?
But I will bet you that for the rest of this year at least, if you bring up anything about Trump doing good stuff, a Democrat will say, oh!
But what about that massive, disgusting incompetence from that signal app?
And they will pick up the emotions and the theatrical act that they saw on TV.
They're going to see the news people do it.
They'll see the pundits do it.
And they'll just act like that.
It's definitely just acting.
And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
It's just so obvious and so pervasive on one side.
All right.
So that's all I got for today.
Thanks for joining.
I'm going to say a few words privately to the local subscribers.
And the rest of you I will see tomorrow, same time, same place.
