Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 556: METV

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

Show Notes

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. recording live from the pitch darkness of our studio, this is Cognitive Distance. Fucker! Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence. Fuck you! To any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad.

It's skeptical, it's political, and there are no lights on in the studio this is episode 556 it's been so much money different places different fucking internets and the fucking lights there's no fucking lights man that's fucking a whole building power is off just random no we just don't say sorry whoops so we have special guests on uh vin diesel from pitch black because oh man brother so i gotta tell you so i get this text message from cecil a couple hours before we were ready to record and it's just because our building, first of all, guys, when you go to our building, our building is just, it's just some little six story building like in the city. So it's not a public space office building. You have

to have a key fob to get in. Well, the key fob needs electricity to work, right? So I'm just, I'm just chilling at home a couple hours before we record and Cecil just sends me this message and it says, I have no way into the building.

The lights are off and the door thing isn't working. And I just stare for just a second. I just stared at it because I could sense the rage

behind those words. But the good thing is, is that I'm standing there and I was getting mad. The reason why I was getting mad is because I'm trying to fit my fucking key in the door. And it can't fucking fit the key. And there's no light. So it's dark. It gets dark in the fucking tundra of Chicago at fucking two in the afternoon now. Okay.

Now, ever since fucking it turned December, it fucking two in the afternoon now. Now, ever since fucking it turned December, it's two in the afternoon. You need your fucking night vision goggles to walk around. So I'm standing out in front of the building and normally the building has a light on. Well, the light's fucking clearly off and the key fob thing isn't green like it

normally is. There's no light. It's the absence of light. Was it freezing rain like it was out here? Because it was also- Yeah, and it's freezing rain, and I'm standing in a fucking freezing rain trying to fucking jam a key that is the wrong key into the top lock,

which is the wrong lock, for three straight minutes. Well, I'm just like, why the fuck does this thing fit in here? How does it fit? And it didn't fucking fit, and then finally, I figured it out. I was like, oh, it's the wrong key.

And it was after I texted Tom and I had already broke into the building by opening the door, not by pulling the door off the hinges like Tom does. That works. It does work. Tom has literally never run locked out of the building because he could just break the door down.

But I actually used the key to get in. And then as soon as I got in, I said, are the fucking lights off? And I walked over to the mailroom and I clicked the lights and they're fucking off. And I was like, God damn it. And we are on the top floor. We're on the sixth floor. So I'm thinking to myself, I know for sure that we are not recording from the studio tonight because all the lights are off. If they're off on the first floor, chances are they're off on the top floor. And so I think, well, I'll go grab a mic from upstairs

and I'll just record from home tonight. And so I start to climb the stairs and as I was climbing the stairs, Tom caught me on the third flight. So I'm like, hello, Tom. I thought somebody had murdered

a Tauntaun. I had no idea. Jesus Christ. That's what it sounded like, right? I'm fucking one of those fucking wampas just fucking screaming into the wind. So then I finally went upstairs and it's completely dark up there.

But you know, you know, there was people up there though. Where their fucking Pilates people were training someone in the Pilates studio. Fucking that is in the dark. Dude, that's like some fucking post office shit. Like neither rain nor snow nor dark of night. Right.

Can stop my Pilates stretches or whatever the fuck is going on up there. Those Pilates people are fucking legit, man. They fucking, they are, they are, they fucking know what's up and they will not skip a workout. That's it. That's it.'s it and i like meanwhile i'm trying to call the fucking landlord the landlord doesn't answer i text the landlord and he just texts back i was like hey you know we're trying to get in and the fucking can't get in the goddamn place bro and he just texts back he's like uh we replaced all the wires just this

is what he literally said. Hi. We replaced all the wires. You know how you do that, Tom? And you stick a fork in it and you just twirl it like pasta and they all come right out of the wall. Pull it all out? They just come right. They're hard to put back in though, but you can get them out real quick. And it makes that terrible scraping

sound, you know, that just runs right up your spine. He said, we replaced all the wires. We're just waiting for ComEd to connect the electricity back to the main pole. And I was just like, were you going to tell us? And he's like, oh, we'll send an email out.

Why were you going to say it? Oh, yeah, we only pay you a lot of money a month to keep our play. That's fine. Whatever. Anyway, so tonight, we are recording from our two separate homes, two separate glory holes connected by fiber optics. I don't need it much bigger

than fiber optics. I'll be honest. It doesn't need to be much bigger than that. Fiber optic would be about, let's just say it would be an upgrade no matter how you think about it.

It's a big upgrade. Either it's fast and disappointing. That sounds like fiber optic. Okay, that sounds good. That's fiber, okay. Yeah. It sounds like the internet. It's like, it was fast, but there's nothing there you want.

That's just, your life didn't get better. It just got faster. So Cecil, did you see they came very close to passing the stimulus bill? So we have been trying. This is the fucking story of the story. So we have been trying in America to pretend to care even a little bit about the health and well-being of our citizens since the pandemic began. So when the pandemic began relatively quickly, they passed an initial stimulus plan.

Because when you send everybody home and then unemployment goes to record numbers not seen since the fucking Great Depression, and unemployment claims are the highest that they've ever been since we began recording them, and everything takes a shit and people have to stay home, you got to help out a little bit. You got to help just the littlest bit. So they pass a stimulus bill. I don't even remember what month the first stimulus bill was in. Then there was a pretty quick recognition that, hey, this isn't going to be over very quickly. We should probably pass another stimulus bill.

Fast forward to whatever fucking day you're listening to this, and they still haven't passed the second fucking stimulus bill. So in America, as long as your income is below a certain threshold, you got one check for $1,200. That was the whole fucking stimulus bill. You get nothing fucking else. You get nothing else. They extended unemployment. Yeah, wasn't it your own money too? Yeah, I think you have to like pay it back

like to the government. I don't even know how it works. I don't know. I think maybe, I'm certain that you probably have to fucking pay taxes on it because fuck you, of course you do. And Tom, do you remember the people who were saying this was more money that I made in,

you know, this unemployment money that I'm getting is more money than I've made at my actual job in years? So they expanded the unemployment benefit so that your maximum weekly benefit was much more. So it was up to $2,400 a month. And there were a lot of people. So you got one check for $1,200. That was just a one-time payment. Then if you were out of work, so you got that money, you got the $1,200 as long as you were under a certain income threshold, even if you had work or didn't have work. Then if you were filing unemployment, they increased the amount of the maximum unemployment benefit. And I think maybe the minimum unemployment benefit as well. So you were basically getting

$2,400 a month if you were unemployed during the fucking pandemic times. But of course, there's a clock running on that, right? So that's fucking running out like the day after Christmas or some shit. And I'm not even like, I don't think I'm wrong. I think it's like the fucking day after Christmas. It's like, ho, ho, fuck you. It's terrible. So they extended the length and the amount. And yeah, there was a lot of people like, holy fuck, $2,400 is more than I was making at my job. And there was an argument that was being made by a lot of people on the right that was like, we can't give people more money to be unemployed than they were getting working because then there's no incentive for them

to work. And the counter argument to that is twofold. The counter argument really is threefold. One is you should always be making more than $2,400 a month. That's not enough money to live on in America and do well. That means that if a lot of people are like, holy shit, $2,400 a month is an upgrade. That is just proof after proof after proof that we are actually a much poorer nation than we've ever pretended that we were. We are a nation stricken by poverty, controlled by wealthy oligarchs. Two, the whole point of increasing the incentive to be greater during the pandemic

was to discourage people from trying to go to work so that they could and would stay home. People are not going to stay home if it means that they're suffering financially. You have to give them the ability and then the impetus to stay home because most people don't want to stay home and not do anything all day. It gets fucking boring after a while. That's just, so the whole, and the other counter argument is it's only for a short period of time. And if you don't give people enough money to live on and spend, then the production side and the demand

side of our economy will utterly collapse. People will, if people don't have money to spend, then we won't be producing goods and services. Like you have to do this work. So they extended unemployment benefits. They increased the amount that was available for people. And they gave everybody a single fucking check for $1,200. Then they dicked around for the last seven months or so, bickering, bickering, bickering back and forth about whether what the second stimulus was going to be.

The Democrats wanted it to be like a two and a half trillion dollar stimulus plan. There was also some other features of it. There were many other features of the first stimulus. The Republicans didn't want any payments at first, any payments to just regular people, just no one-time stimulus checks. That just was a non-starter. Finally, after much fucking wrangling and bitching and pissing and moaning, a bill passed the House, a bill passed the Senate, 92 to 6, which is a veto-proof majority. And it was going to give everybody a whopping 600 actual dollars, 600 whole dollars. That bill is 5,593 pages it was released to uh the congress to review two hours before they had to hold an up or down yay or nay vote on a on on basically let's read it five times

yeah that's like it's like it's it's an insane so nobody it's just so full of fucking pork. It's the fucking Hormel stimulus plan is what that fucking thing is. It's a fucking... Wilbur and Charlotte made best friends when they wrote it. It's a whole fucking thing how full of pork this fucking thing is. You have to read 1.28 pages per second

in order to... 1.28 pages per second. So... Okay, I'm a pretty quick reader, but I don't think I can pull that off. It's not per minute. It's per second. So yeah. Per second. Yeah. That's, that's, that's fairly swift. It's difficult. It's a difficult skim. So let me say it's a shit bill. Yeah. It's full of like weird pork and like all these like weird laws are stuck into it. Again, it's almost 6,000 pages. It's just, I mean, an enormous thing. And I think the reason why some of the Democrats

even voted for it, just to get some money into people's hands. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it was just like, fine, fine. And so everybody realized that this was reaching a crisis moment. And because of the crisis like nature of it they just kept adding their special projects into it because they know that

the fight is going to be less it's going to be less to get this thing or that thing right and then trump today or maybe last night i don't know he tweets out some fucking crazy shit about this isn't enough. Everybody should get $2,000. Which his whole team, his whole team for seven or eight months, his whole fucking team has been pushing back at the idea of any kind of stimulus in the hands, any kind of one-time direct payment stimulus in the hands of any citizen. And then after this thing gets passed, after it passes the House, it passes the Senate, then Trump tweets out basically like, this thing is bullshit. Everybody should get 2,000 bucks or I'm not signing anything. Now, granted, there's a veto-proof majority, but that assumes that they have to then procedurally, they're stuck right now.

Yeah, because it has to go back and then it has to get another vote or whatever. And now if you're a Republican, you're stuck between either sticking by the thing you fought for eight months. For eight months, you fucking obstructed and fought and pissed and moaned and you didn't want it. And finally you compromised, but look how hard we held them

because debt and America's children and so on and so forth and principle of the thing and blah, blah, blah. And all right, the Democrats are only at $600 out of us. And now Trump, who owns your ass, you stupid motherfuckers who are always dancing with the devil and surprised you get burned by it. Trump, the erratic motherfucker who owns you, tweets out, everybody should get 2000 bucks,000 of this thing is bullshit. So now if you're Mitch McConnell or any of these other fucking Republicans, what are you supposed to do? What the fuck are you supposed to do?

For eight months, for eight months, you've been trading on the fucking rhetoric of how bad it would be to give everybody just dollars in their pockets. Yeah. People have been suffering and you've been convincing them to suffer. You have been selling back to them their own pain and suffering because you've been selling the idea that in the long run, that giving them more money will only hurt the economy worse. And then Trump comes out and says this, and they are now forced, hilariously, they are now forced to either buck Trump, who will veto it, and then they'll have to vote on it again.

And then they'll have to go through this fucking motion about whether or not they back Trump and everyone's afraid not to back Trump because of the rabidity of his supporters. Or to be like, okay, remember how we made made you wait and we didn't want to give you two thousand well now it's a good idea now it's so fucking amazing this is what happens when you dance with that guy and and i think as soon as he said it i think the leadership of the house immediately said yes that sounds like a great idea. Let's pass this $2,000 by us. And thus cementing that position, because if I was the Democrats right now, I would just say, cool. If it comes back here, 48 of us are going to say no. 48 of us or 46 of us are going to say no. And we're going to wait for the one from the house that says 2000, because the president said he'd say that's cool. And so that's what

we're going to put through and we're going to put that through from the house and that's going to come in and we could do it really fast. Don't worry. We could get a vote tomorrow and then a vote the other day and we'll get it done. Um, but I would absolutely push them to do it because Trump is trying to throw a fucking wrench in the works with this theatrics bullshit. He doesn't care about anybody. He doesn't care about these people. He doesn't give a shit whether you fucking paid your rent. And by the way, $600, if you desperately need $600, there is no fucking way that that $600 genuinely helps you. $600, if your life hangs in the balance with $600, there's a good possibility that you are that you are just delaying something

really bad from happening. Because if you're saying, well, God, I haven't paid my rent in three months. Well, six hundred dollars isn't going to fucking help you, man. How many they were saying is not enough money. They were saying something like six hundred dollars is not even the half of the median rent price of a one bedroom apartment in many places all across the country. rent price of a one-bedroom apartment in many places all across the country. And it's not even half. So the idea that somehow the $600 is going to sweep in and sweep you off your feet and save the day is first absurd, but then they've been pushing, like you said, they've been pushing so long to stop this from happening. And now Trump basically sees they're not here to help him. So he's like, fuck you.

I'll do whatever I can to fuck anything I can before I leave. And that's what he's been doing. And that's how he's been playing it. The other day he had a fucking, let's maybe overthrow the government coup meeting at his fucking place where officials, where people who are his top aides that are in the room are running out to call the newspaper to say, holy shit,

you were the fuckers who enabled this guy, right? You enabled this guy for fucking four years. He's been a fucking disaster the whole time. But now that he's really genuinely maybe going to fuck things up and overturn the apple cart, now you're going to come out and say, oh no, we weren't with him the whole time.

And this is the question I have for you, Tom. This is the question because I don't know the answer to it. There's going to be a rats fleeing from the sinking ship group of Republicans that are going to disassociate and separate themselves from Donald Trump very soon. There is going to be a group,

if there isn't already. Now, there is a couple. Chris Christie came out. Is that his name? Chris Christie, the chunky one? Chris Christie, yeah. Yeah, the fat guy from New Jersey. That chunko, he was on TV, and he was getting grilled by a bunch of these people. And one woman even said, can you wash the Trump stink off of you? It was an amazing line. It was just unbelievable. But so you got people like him and you know he's just the first, right? There's going to be more. There's going to be more.

Do we hold their feet to the fire and kind of force them to stay with Trump forever and thus maybe bring him back into power in four years, maybe bring him back into power in two years, that sort of thing, keep him as a piece on the chessboard, or do we let them distance themselves and let Trump sink because Trump sinking is kind of a benefit to America? Yeah, that's a great question. Part of me thinks that you have to do both, but the order of operations is the thing that's going to matter because absolutely Trump is a chaos agent. That's all that he gives a shit about, right? Because he thrives on that chaos

and he lives on that chaos and he monetizes chaos. For sure. That's all this is about right now. This is about monetizing and pulling power from chaos. Trump wants you to donate some of that

$2,000 you're going to get to him. Yeah. I give everybody $2,000 and then I'll send out a thing that just says, hey, you got $2,000.

Some of that would be helpful for me to fight the fraud. You know, 70 million people, man. That's a lot of people who voted for him a lot of people a lot of people hey i only want a hundred dollars on it hey man so right i only want 7.4 billion a little bit a little bit right and and we're watching it we're watching it happen where people who, in the waning hours of the Trump presidency, have broken even a little bit with the president, have been slaughtered by him. Look what happened to Attorney General Barr.

Yeah, yeah. Attorney General Barr was a loyal soldier for, you know, three years. Sure. And then there's one comment where he's like, yeah, I mean, like, obviously, you know, the election isn't rigged. That's crazy. And he's fucking, he's gone. He's fucking done. He resigned.

He's off the fucking, he's off the job six weeks from the job not even being a job anymore. Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell has worked his ass off to be a fucking gatekeeper and fucking evil turtle guardian for the president. And Mitch McConnell recognizes vice president elect Biden as the president elect Biden as the president elect. And then, you know, he also receives, you know, mad ire from the president. So from president Trump. So what I think has to happen, Cecil, is we have to let the Republicans abandon Trump. Then we have to let them try to recreate

or a functioning party. Because I would say they don't really have a functioning party right now. They have a leadership cult right now. They don't have really a functioning party right now. They have a leadership cult right now. They don't have really a functioning party. And then once they've done that and Trump has disappeared from public view, then I think we hold them all accountable as basically Nazi sympathizers, right? That's what you do.

But you have to do it in order. I don't disagree. I think that's a good, that's a good way to do it. You do it in order. You make sure that you're showing them now, yeah, we'll let you distance yourself.

And then later on, at every chance you get, you say no, but remember when you enabled this guy who was horrible for the country. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And every press conference is like, yeah, all right, now that Trump has faded into the background and he's had his heart attack or, you know, he's like, you know, drooling on himself in some corner in Mar-a-Lago or wherever he's going to fucking fade away into eventual obscurity and crapulence. Fine. Let him do that. And then it's like, all right, motherfucker. i didn't actually forget shit right just so you know i didn't forget a fucking thing i think that's what you got to do it you got to make sure that you you you uh you know because holding their feet to the fire right now is difficult because if you do you do force them back into his his warm embrace and that is not yeah that's not

great because you and you can't deny how weirdly powerful he still is. He continues to have a stranglehold on the conspiratorial imagination of 74 million people. Yeah. Yeah. And as long as he has that, that has a tremendous amount of power associated with it. That's a huge amount of people. It's almost half of us. It's goddamn near half of us. So as long as he wields that kind of narrative control, you have to be very gentle and careful and strategic. The moment, though, he lets go of that because, you know, these people are fucking unhinged.

And once you let those dogs loose and it becomes fucking weird and it becomes unhinged. And once you let those dogs loose and it becomes fucking weird and it becomes unhinged, I think it spirals fairly quickly out of control. And even Trump won't be able to hold it for very long. Well, nobody can fucking harness a tornado forever. I will say some of my favorite shit is the way America gets saved

from all of this election chaos is through threat of litigation. That's how we get saved because we are such a litigious society that you can't say the things that they've been saying. And they had to walk so much of it back on both Fox and One American News Network. And they had to roll those things back because they were saying blatant lies about a corporation. And that corporation, it was Dominion Voting, was just like, no, man, you can't say that shit. We can prove it. And you've been saying lies. They will fuck, you'll lose everything.

And so they had to play on those stations. They had to play these big, i'm real sorry basically it's the alex jones i really love chabani speech i know yeah it was it was great and it wasn't just dominion it was also smart yeah you're right you're right which i always think of my head as smart aleck it's just which is the jeopardy guy but like not anymore not anymore he was in a lot of jeopardy actually oh god but yeah it's it was amazing to watch those videos because they're so wonderfully unequivocal because they need to be in order to try to prevent, you know, lawsuits from deepening. What I hope is that Smart Alec and Dominion don't back down. I hope they still sue.

Yeah. I hope they say, great. Thanks for the public acknowledgement that you were full of shit, but the damage has been done. The jury cannot disregard the evidence. Yeah. And we are going to continue forward with our lawsuit because damages have been done to our company's good name that's liable, and you can't do that.

You have to move away from having a system that allows for a propagation of unmitigated bullshit by the media. The media cannot be an arm of conspiratorial nonsense that exists solely for political aims. It just can't be. We can't have that. That's not our fucking country is going to fall apart. Democracy will fail. We cannot allow that. And I do think that it's a really wonderful mechanism to say, awesome. You know what? I'm going to sue you. that it's a really wonderful mechanism to say, awesome, you know what? I'm going to sue you. I will fucking come at you, bro. And it works when it's a company. If you and I were supposed to go to do that, CISO would be a disaster. Wouldn't work at all. How am I going to come at you, bro? I can't fucking come at you, bro. But that company- But a big ass fucking company? Yeah, man.

Yeah. Let's dick fight. Let's do this thing. And what I've seen time and time and time again is these weird, fringy, singularly focused blogs or a very strange paper that no one's ever heard of that's an online only release. Right. that no one's ever heard of that's an online-only release, or, you know, fringy, very, very, very hard authoritarian-right publications like One American News Network, or to a very lesser extent, some Fox News hosts that are also very hard authoritarian-right have been on the side of this voting conspiracy thing. have been on the side of this voting conspiracy thing. But every single paper or online source with any kind of integrity

has been 100% that's bullshit. Here's all the people we talk to. Here's all the ways that that's bullshit. Here's why that's wrong. Here's where that came from. That was an off the cuff remark from somebody who wasn't even involved in the process. They're just basically finding all these places where these people constantly are trying to push to say that there was voter fraud in massive numbers enough to overturn the election,

where they keep coming back with, no, that's not true. And it's always the sources that have the most to gain if it were true. Yep. They have the most to gain. They have, this would be an amazing story if it were true. And there's never been a moment where they've said, no, that's not true. We can't find any instances of it, except for this week when they found out that some guy voted for his dead mother-in-law

or something for Trump. For Trump! That was the one time. Yeah, you know, it's so funny, Cecil, because one of those bullshit sources that I keep seeing popping around online is the Epoch Times. Yes.

Which didn't exist and now it exists. And it's a fucking far right international multi-language newspaper affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement based in China. And they are a misinformation agent. That's what they are. They are, they are an, like they seriously are. They are an

influence machine. Um, a right wing misinformation influence machine owned by a weird religious group in fucking China. They popped up out of fucking nowhere and the fucking right wing loves them. Here's kind of a test about, and it's not, the test is imperfect, but if you want to know whether or not a news source even can be legitimate, can you go out and buy one? Can I buy one? I can go buy a New York Times. I can go buy The Economist. I don't have to, York Times. I can go buy The Economist. I don't have to, but I can. And part of why that matters is it costs nothing for some goofball to put up a webpage, right? They have no resources. They have no staff. They don't have any fucking journalists that work there because they're all making it up. You could be TimeCube. TimeCube was on the internet.

Just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's true. Right. So to some degree, the legitimacy of an organization is to some degree belied by the physicality of their infrastructure. Do they have a product

that they produce and that they sell that makes some sense? Does it seem like, could, I could apply for a job at the New York Times. I wouldn't get it. But I could apply for a job there. I would not. No, you wouldn't.

I shouldn't get it. You wouldn't. I shouldn't get it. They shouldn't let me fucking open the mail. They actually should cancel your subscription. That's what they should do. Yeah, right. They shouldn't even let a guy like me buy the New York Times.

The point is that they have a machine large enough to pay staff. Right. Yeah. And you know who the staff is. And you can Google. There's never a story in the New York Times that is written by, man, we're not telling you. That's not a thing.

These garbage places are just garbage places they pop up out of nowhere they're unattributed the writers don't exist you can't google their names and find out where they went to fucking college you can't buy their paper and hold it in your hand you can't apply for a job you can't drive to their fucking corporate headquarters. They're not real. They were never real. They were never real. That matters so much. I could never enter a Roman Catholic church. I'm allergic to incense and nonsense.

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All right, so enough about politics. Let's talk about some other equally horrible shit. This story comes from theage.com.au, Catholic Church's insurance company in financial trouble over abuse payouts. When I saw this story, a couple of things. I thought this was really interesting.

We've talked on this show a lot about how if you want to find an international pedophile conspiracy ring, one need not look much further than their local church, their local Catholic church, right? It is 100% guilty of that crime. And it has been internationally. I mean, it's just, it's a problem everywhere. Australia's kind of fucking dealing with it. But we have not, we've not been successful in getting the fucking Catholic church shut down. One industry that has a possibility, Cecil, of actually having a real effect on the ability for the church to continue to function

is ironically one of the most boring industries possible, and that's the insurance industry. The church can't operate without insurance. They just, they can't. Most businesses, most organizations cannot, for a variety of reasons, they cannot realistically function without insurance. The Catholic Church's private insurance company called Catholic Church Insurance, The Catholic Church's private insurance company called Catholic Church Insurance, CCI, had a $250 million loss. Wow. $250 million loss. Did somebody slip and fall outside their, is that what happened? Yeah, this is all related.

Someone bumped their elbow or whatever. Well, I mean, I think maybe somebody slipped and fell right into a kick. That's what happened. Somebody spilled hot holy water on their lap. Yeah. Somebody was definitely batting at their lap. Yes. There was a lot of hot cream.

Somebody got wet. That's for sure. Yeah. So this, I mean, the Catholic Church is having a hell of a time and they're paying out private settlement after private settlement after private settlement. That money doesn't come from fucking nowhere. That money comes from in part CCI from the Catholic church insurance payouts, uh, $250 million worth of losses. This shit continues to accelerate. This could actually be a way to take

down the Catholic Church. They could become financially ruined if they're unable to obtain insurance. Their insurance could become so expensive that they could be functionally unable to purchase it. And they would deserve that so much from all of the fucking pre-shuffling

that they've done throughout the years. You know, when you mentioned it earlier and you said they're a pedophile organization that operates across the globe, it's 100% true. And they're a secret pedophile. They are a secret organization in the sense that they keep secret the records

of these people raping children. And then they keep it secret, not just from the people around them. And then they ship the person off to a new place and they keep it secret from those people who that person is now in their congregation, possibly working with children. They have done this so many times

where they've taken a person who has raped kids in one area, sent them to a new place, and then they get in. They're now in charge of working with children. Somehow that didn't get. Oh, sorry. We didn't check that box again. And there they are.

They're now a counselor for young children. Whoops. Yeah. And they do that. They move people around. And a lot of times they move people around until they move them to areas and communities with a lot less resources they'll move people into like south american communities poor communities so they move known pedophiles into communities that are under resourced because

under resourced communities don't have the power to be able to pursue those people and send them to fucking jail and kick them out and they they also know that culturally, those are places where those priests will be better protected as they continue to rape kids. And to be honest, there's a lot of things that are bad about the internet, but this kind of shit, the reason why this kind of shit even comes about and why you can even find out these things

about different priests in different areas is because of the internet. And it's because of that quick, because back in the day, there was no way to know that a priest in Philadelphia raped somebody when they send them out to California. How do you know? Unless somebody knows somebody in that area, you just don't know. Yeah. Somebody could show up and be like, yeah, I'm from Milwaukee. And maybe they're not from fucking Milwaukee. Up until relatively recently, you didn't have a way to even know where they were really from. And if they were from Milwaukee, you're not from fucking Milwaukee. Sure. Up until relatively recently, you didn't have a way to even know where they were really from.

And if they were from Milwaukee, you're not up in the middle of the night looking at microfiche from fucking Milwaukee to find out if they fucking raped a kid. It's not going to happen, right? But now I can go to my computer and I can type a search in for Priest Diddley McDiddlerson

and it's going to pop up. Fucking. Oh, Jesus. Oh, I get it. I get it. Don't you know? mcdiddlerson and it's gonna pop up fucking oh jesus maria joseph don't you know oh jesus christ so no but i was thinking about this when i when i read the story i thought you know thank goodness but you know what's a lot cheaper than those than those uh payouts that they're paying is to pay when they fucking wind up paying lobbyists

to lobby against the statute of limitations in places. They spent millions of dollars in, we're talking $10 million in the United States over the last 15 years. They've paid and donated to different campaigns and things to stop the statute of limitations on rape of kids. Yeah, it seems insane that there's any statute of limitations on that at all. I know.

The statute of limitations thing, like part of me gets it and part of me doesn't. It's basically the rule that if you got away with it long enough right the statute of limitations is like if you got away with it a long time ago we're really not gonna man we're gonna let that one go that's on us for not catching you hopefully you've changed yeah yeah and and part of me does understand the idea that that i i would not want to be held liable for something i did when i was 19 or 20 and now i'm 42 and i am a functionally different man than i was at 18 or so like if i like fucking did some like robbed a store or something you know like i shoplifted in

in 1988 i don't want to get in trouble for that in 2022. I'm sympathetic. But fucking raping a kid? That's not a childhood indiscretion. That's not something you like grew out of. Oh, it was just a child raping phase that I went through. Well, these people are fucking adults. These are adults. These aren't like little kids, right? I get it if you're a little kid and you

did something horrible as a little kid and now you're a different person. But these people are graduates of college when they're raping kids and now you're a different person. But these people are graduates of college when they're raping kids. So it's a different story. And there's no statute of limitations on murder. And I sort of feel like you can kind of chuck raping a kid

into the same bucket. I don't disagree. I'm okay with that, you know. I feel like if we didn't catch you until you're like 93. And you're having chemo. And we catch you. And you did that when you were 26. You should still get the fucking shackles.

There's still some problems. There's still some issues. There's so many things that the Catholic Church has done to obfuscate this. And then to also shift the blame onto the victims, which they've done so many times. Where they're saying, oh, the kid, look at how sexy they look in those little outfits. I mean, come on. They really, really do. I'm not even kidding. I wish that was a joke.

They're not a joke. They said that. It's not a joke. Okay? I'm not making a joke. That's what they said, man. Yeah. Why'd they oil their asses up like that?

And you're just like, what are you? What is happening? What is even happening? Seriously, though, there is nothing more disgusting than watching this organization dig a hole every single time this happens and make the absolute wrong decision. I know we've said it on this show a hundred times, but it bears repeating. It's not difficult to have a zero

tolerance policy against raping kids. It's not. It's not difficult. It's fucking the easiest thing to ever have. Like my work has a zero tolerance policy on taking your shirt off at work. I mean, I mean, if I took my shirt off at work, I would be in the HR office. I would probably get a pink slip, right? This is zero-town. No, it's even an unwritten rule, Tom. It's not like it's in a rule book somewhere.

It's not like I flipped to page six of the HR manual and says, yeah, you really shouldn't show your bare chest in the office. It doesn't say that at all. But let me tell you, I guarantee it certainly wouldn't be great if I got into an argument with Pam from HR and I pulled my shirt off to go at her. That would not be good. That would not be good. Or if you just, you're like, it gets hot in here after six o'clock. I'm working late. You're sitting at your own desk and you're just,

you're in your underwear at your desk. Everything's gone. You're just sitting there. But yeah, so like it's super easy. It's so easy. All of this stuff is so easy. What it does though, is it damages your brand, right? If you're, if you're a fucking, if you're the Catholic church, you're getting fucking shit ton of money off of schools. You're getting a shit ton of money off daycare. You're getting a shit ton of money off a CCD. All these people come and they, and they come to these places where you are taking care of their kids for them. And the moment it comes out that you're fucking one of your fucking gross ass priests is diddling kids. That's going to ruin

your brand. So you, so instead of doing the right thing, which is fuck you. Yeah. There's one priest here. He's a fucking degenerate. We got rid of him. We defrocked him. He's gone. We're real sorry that this happened. Here's a bunch of money. We're super duper sorry.

Instead of doing that and making a fucking display about it early on, they hit it because they knew it was going to fuck their brand up. And they care more about their brand than they cared about their parishioners and that tells you that god isn't real guys if they fucking if they don't believe it it ain't real okay yeah it also you know they're not only is their god not real they're they're

what what how what kind of mental gymnastics must they be going through to be like, all right, you raped a kid. We, oh man. Okay, so we forgive you on that one. Joe, do we really have to forget? We have to forgive him? Like in the book, is it?

We do. What page is that on? Can we even fire? He's not even fired. Is that on a page? He's not even. Do you have a page number? No, I'm in the King James version.

Your system of morals is fucking crazy. I have a good friend of mine, Cecil, that works for the parks department for one of the villages in the suburbs out here. And some of the guys were horsing around. They're just horsing around. And one of the guys is climbing up out of a manhole cover. And one of the other guys takes his dick out.

And as the dude's climbing up, he slaps his little helmet against the other guy's big helmet. Okay. The guy's wearing like a hard hat. So he slaps his dick against the, that guy was fired like that. The slappy McDickerson was fired immediately. Huh, that's weird.

That's, and that's a government, like, it's actually really hard to get fired from that job. It's really, really hard to get fired from the job unless you do the wrong thing with your dick. Yeah, I mean, it's...

Like, that's... So, like, if your rule is don't do the wrong thing with your dick, if that's, like, not one of your moral codes. Right. If you're like, geez, ethically, I'm not sure if I should do the wrong thing with my dick or not.

Just don't. It's unbelievable that this goes on. But there's also news coming out, too. You know, the Catholic church, of course, horrifying institution, but it's not alone. It's not alone in its, and the reason why is when you put these people

in positions of authority, they will abuse that authority if it goes unchecked. And that's what happens in religions all the time. It happens in Islam. It happens in Catholicism. It happens in Islam. It happens in Catholicism. It happens in rando Christian churches and evangelical churches. And Tom, it happens in the Mormons.

Yeah, this story's from KUTV. Lawsuit alleges LDS Church and leaders knew of child sex abuse, but failed to report it. Again, to your point, if that sounds real fucking familiar, it's because it's the same refrain every time right you get these weird weird fucking religions that are super fucking

repressed about sex oh yeah especially those ones yeah i think that that actually creates environments that that pulls creeps to those environments because I think there's a lot of reasons for that. There's a lot of reason to believe that that's true. Sure, celibacy and creeps and repression, they're drawn to that sort of power. Yeah. Yeah. Then they show up

and then they have this position of moral authority and then they have this position of cultural and community authority. Then they're fucking left alone with these fucking kids all the time. And it's just a recipe for it. But the thing isn't the surprise. The thing that we shouldn't be out,

we should be outraged by the abuse. We should be absolutely outraged by the abuse. But just as outrageous, if not more outrageous, is that somebody who is not necessarily abusing kids would even for one second tolerate, hide, not pursue with vigor. I'm amazed at how little, when you read this story, how come we're not reading this story, Cecil? Where's the headline? Local church leader

a local church leader turns in his buddy for raping kids. I'd turn in everyone I know. I would turn in, if my kids grow up to be fucking creeps and pedophiles, I'll fucking send them

to prison the next day. If my children grow up to be pedophiles and I find out about it, I'll fucking send them to jail without a fucking blink of an eye. There isn't a person on this planet that I could think would, I can't, because it's so immoral.

Who would you protect? It's so immoral to even think that you would protect a human being like that, that you would somehow protect that person. Yeah. Where are the people who are like, wow, I am, I am not going to be a part of protecting this. In fact, I'm going to be a part of protecting kids. I'm going to make sure this doesn't happen again. I'm calling the cops. I'm calling the cops. I'm calling the news.

I'm just, this is not a, where's the not on my watch, guys? You guys are supposed to be the arbiters of moral authority. That's what you're selling to your communities. I am absolutely at a loss as to how an organization can maintain any position of moral superiority or teaching that can't get this question right. Because it's the easiest question to not fuck up. Should I do the wrong thing with my dick, pastor? What's insane, Tom, what's insane is that there were good actors at least in these lds

churches some of these bishops yeah these were and bishops in in that tradition i guess according to this article are volunteer positions bishops are very different in a uh in a catholic church so i again if you're mormon and you want to correct me i'm happy to read the email but as i as i recall from the article, there was, you know, they were saying that these are volunteer positions, but they weren't positions that felt like they had enough power to do anything about it, but they did report it. And then it was again, driven under the rug. Yep. Yep. Well, part of the problem is that they report it internally.

You cannot have these places police themselves. You cannot have these places police themselves. The police fuck it up every time. There's a big hullabaloo in our city right now in Chicago about this, the mayor and how the mayor is going to try to figure out what, get to the bottom of this bullshit raid where this poor lady is buck ass naked in the middle of her house and they fucking raided the wrong house here in Chicago. And she is standing fucking straight up naked with the blurred out the fucking film or whatever. And they're showing it on television. Yeah. It's a big, huge hullabaloo. The mayor

basically is apologizing. She got all weepy about it, but it's bullshit because she's been a cop for years too. You know, she's been a DA and she's been a cop. And so she, I don't feel like it's genuine at all, but there's, you know, the thing is, it's like when you have people internally

handle their fucking, their problems, what happens is, is that more often than not, it doesn't get fucking handled. Right. Well, you cannot report to a self-interested party activities

which, if they act on them, work against their self-interest. Like, yeah, these bishops reported internally, but why didn't they pick up the phone and just call the police? That's what you would do. That's what I would do. I wouldn't call you. Cecil, you're like,

you might have been my best friend for 20 some years. Like, if I found out somebody was having sex with a kid, I wouldn't be like, oh, I gotta call Cecil. I'm like, I'm calling the cops. I would hear about it eventually,

but no, you wouldn't call me. That wouldn't be the first number. I'd be like, holy shit, dude. I just called the cops and they're on their way to arrest this guy because they're fucking kids but first you call the cops the rules should be so simple around this it's not complicated they all pretend that it's complicated they have these convoluted systems in place for reporting and monitoring and all you don't need any of it You don't need any of it. You don't need any of it. The rule is the same rule you would apply

if you saw somebody fucking a kid in the street. You'd be like, dude, you can't fuck kids in the street. Come call home the cops. And then you call the cops. We have to say things like cultural sensitivity because as soon as we say racism or racist, the whole argument shuts down. No one said racism.

The term is racist. Stop. Okay, I'm shutting this conversation down. So this story comes from Cincinnati.com. Christian prayer group and Native Americans face off at Ohio's Serpent Mound. So Coach Dave damn near got his ass straight up Native American kicked

is what this article is about. What a fucking bunch of fucking assholes, right? So this is a really kind of horrible story. So and you shouldn't be surprised because Coach Dave is a fucking horrible person. So it's Dave, coach. Doc coach. Not a coach. coach doc coach not a coach daubenmeyer uh and his group of sycophantic idiots they they showed up weirdly to one of like a native american uh serpent mound it's a barrel route mound that is

roughly in the shape of a serpent or a squiggle could also just be the shape of a squiggle. Sure. Dave. Yeah. Just that could be a yarn shape. If you're a friend, like an errant string shape. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Just showed up at one of these things and he insisted that it's not about the native Americans,

but he did say several times that they were there to pray because they thought dark forces came out of the snake-like shape. And that when it gets really I'm not even making this up. When it gets dark out early, that's a more scary magic time. And the scary magic forces

come out of the snake shapes. So they had to show up and pray away the scary bad magic from the snake shapes when it's dark outside. And you know what, Tom? Actually, it's already started. Because of Coach Dave's diligence, we will now start seeing longer days. I know. Thank you, Coach. Thank you, Dave. That happened on the 22nd. Thank you, the coach. Thank you, the coach. You came, you saw, you conquered. Every year on the darkest day, we show up,

and the next day it's a little less dark. A little lighter. And that's proof the prayer works, man. A little lighter. And then it wears off after about six months. Yeah, well, you know, you can't. And then we have to come back in a year, you know. I'm like the Orkin, man.

It just wears off after a while. I do want to say though, Coach Dave is such, all of these fucking assholes. This guy is basically arguing with them saying, look, this is our sacred ground. What is wrong with you? You're showing up on our sacred ground.

Fuck you. They're trying to move past them. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, who's been a little too uppity lately? The Native Americans. Is there anything we can go over and show these uppity native Americans what's up? I mean, Jesus Christ, is there any more fucking clueless class of people than these dipshits that get out there? And then the native Americans start to, uh, start to pray

at one point. And this group is making fun of him. And I think to myself, I'm thinking, dude, you sound just like the Native Americans when you do it too. You don't even realize they're like self-aware wolves. They just barely, they don't understand. They don't understand. They're so close to understanding it.

It's crazy. It is exactly the same thing, just with different outfits, man. Yep. At one point, Daubenmeier's group, they climb up onto these mounds, and then the park-rangey people,

because it's actually like a state park or a national park. It's a protected space. They come on like, hey, we can't stop you from being stupid off-site, but can you not climb onto a fucking heritage site, please? Yeah.

Imagine, and I get it from the Native American standpoint, right? Like, I think their fucking magic is garbage too, but it doesn't matter. To some degree, this is ancestral. It makes a little more sense, right? Sure. went to my if you went to the grave of someone that i loved if you went to my grandparents grave and you wanted to like cast out evil spirits or do a a weird ceremony standing around the grave of my my parents or my grandparents that would feel weirdly intrusive yeah because of how weirdly fucking intrusive that would be man yeah, man. Yeah. Deeply fucking unwelcome.

Deeply, deeply unwelcome. This is one of those circumstances where it's like not everything is created equal. Dave is wrong and he's insensitive and he's just being mean and you're not accomplishing anything. You're not scaring away a snake mound, man. Absolutely, man.

And you're absolutely right. And it does have that level of, man. And you're absolutely right. And it does have that level of, you know, my ancestors were here. And also just the fact that this is yet another opportunity for some fucking asshole to push a Native American around. You know?

This is yet another opportunity for me to say, no, I decide where you are. I decide where you can have your ancestors. I can invade that space whenever I want. It's disgusting. When you wear black, you attract a color that is the opposite to love and all the things we wish to bring to the earth. But this is very hard. This is very hard on priests and nuns, isn't it? hard on priests and nuns, isn't it? Well, this story comes from abc.net.au, again, out of Australia.

As churches prove fertile ground for conspiracy theories, some pastors are taking a stand. This is actually a fairly long and involved article. It's actually a pretty good article. One of the things that I thought was particularly interesting was there's actually a quote from here from a guy named Reverend Cruz. And he says, churches can become petri dishes of this stuff, particularly if you've got really charismatic people who don't have any ethics. And I thought about that because it's true everywhere. But churches are, and I think he's really putting his finger on something that's important churches are especially prone to this because when you're at church you are encouraged to believe and without rationality that's what church requires of you so when you're in that space you are sort of required by context to open yourself up to a more gullible, more credulous

way of thinking. And I don't think that everybody is able to open themselves up to one layer of credulity without opening up doors to other types of credulity. It lays, the church is the thing that lays the foundation for magical thinking yes it's the thing that it lays everything on so when you come in you already believe that a fucking donkey talked and there was a fucking three stars in the sky and they walking it across the desert and there was a virgin pregnant girl and all these other weird shit that you're supposed to believe, right? Because there's piece after piece after piece of the Christian narrative that is just bullshit. It's just all

bullshit. And there's a lot of it that's bullshit, right? So the stuff that could be believed, yeah, sure. Yeah. Was there a council of Nicaea? Yeah, I'm sure there, yeah, there was. Okay. Yeah. We can talk about that. But when we talk about Jesus walking on water and the bread in the low, the fish in the loaves, and then the crucifixion and then rising from the dead and him resurrecting a person, all the things that make the, the, the story of Jesus, uh, supernatural, you have to believe those things. And so when you come in and you start believing those things, now you're like you supernatural, you have to believe those things. And so when you come in and you start believing those things, now you're, like you said, you called it fertile ground. You know, absolutely. You're basically saying, I'm open to believing these other things. Why shouldn't I

believe this too? And also let's consider too, that when you believe in God, you de facto believe in a lot of other supernatural things. You believe in witches. Whether you believe they're good or bad, doesn't matter. You believe that witches exist. You believe that demons exist. You believe that evil spirits exist. You believe that good spirits exist.

You believe in angels. You believe in demons. You believe in hell. You believe in heaven. There's a multitude of things that you have to accept in that package. And so now once you believe all that stuff, now you start thinking,

well, if I believe in the devil and I believe in evil spirits, maybe I also believe in Ouija boards. Maybe I also believe in seances. Maybe I also believe that you could in prophecy and in things where you can tell someone's future through cards or dice or a book or something. And then you start expanding. It's just like we talked about a couple of weeks ago when we talked about how certain things prep you to believe things. We're talking

about the Katamari reference where you start collecting bullshit. You are fucking glue. You are absolutely glue if you are religious because you can you automatically start out as a bigger fucking ball to roll down the hill and collect more shit man it just it just fucking primes the pump one thing too cecil but why conspiracy theories might be particularly connected to the idea of religion and what is because they both hold at their at their core the myth of one simple answer, right? Oh, yeah. Easy answers.

That there is a deeply complex world, that it is interwoven in all these complex ways, and that there's a certain amount of chaos. But they both solve for that variable. Conspiracy theories do the same thing. They believe in the myth of one simple answer. Yeah. do the same thing. They believe in the myth of one simple answer. And so the one simple answer being QAnon or one simple answer being, why did somebody shoot JFK? Well, this conspiracy theory explains it all. Conspiracy theories always explain it all. No matter how complex they are,

the answer is still a simple answer to a complex set of questions. And God and church and Jebus, it's all the same thing. So if you're primed to believe in a world where a complex, chaotic series of events always has one simple, unifying answer, you are primed for conspiracy. Sure, sure. And, you know, Tom, another thing, too, is that it primes you to work backwards through argument. Think about intelligent design. You always look for your conclusion first, and then you work back and try to find the pieces that fit that sort of thing. Same thing works with religion, right? You find the answer is God.

Now, how do I fit that into my life? Well, the same thing works with these conspiracy theories. The answer is, is that the Trump won. Well, how did Trump win? Well, let's try to find ways in through these conspiracy theories to figure out. Well, the answer is, is that Hillary Clinton is evil. Well, let's try to find and piece different things together to make Hillary Clinton look evil and fucking that she's trading kids for pizzas or whatever that thing was. So there's all these things that you work backwards from these answers, and then you wind up with, if that's how you're training people to think, that's on you, man. You're training them to think wrong.

You're not giving them critical thinking skills. You know, and the other thing that occurs to me is that you are encouraging a thought process about the world where the world is a series of opposing binary forces. Yeah. It's always good and evil. Yeah. Right. And conspiracy theories always have that shit in common too. Yep. Right. Is you've got a good side and a bad side. You got the light, you got the dark, you got God and you got the devil. It's all the same sort of bullshit. Yeah. Because again, it comes back to the simple answers. There's nothing simpler than a set of binary opposing forces. Yep. It's very simple. It's, you know, oh, well, the USSR was bad and the United States was good. Well, it's not any more complicated than that. Nah. Yeah. It just,

it glosses over the chaos and complexity and nuance of actuality. Yeah. It just gets rid of it all. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Hi, sexually frustrated teenager.

I'm Blue Bally. And if you and your girlfriend don't have sex soon, you're going to wind up with a serious case of blue balls. But that kind of arousal, it's only a matter of seconds before full-on irreversible blue balls. You better go to the bathroom and jerk off right now. So I love this story because it's just honest.

It's just true. It comes from E! Online. Jill Duggar's husband, Derek Dillard, reveals the TMI reason the family marries young. Newsflash, Tom. What is the big reason why this family marries young? Because they want to fuck.

They want to fuck, man. He just comes out and says it. He's like, look, we want to have sex. No one will let us have sex if we don't get married. Yeah. You know what I'll do at a super young age where I don't know anything about myself or anything about you or anything about compatibility or adulthood or life. Sure.

But I know that my dick fucking hurts from being hard all the time. Like I am aching with the desire to put this somewhere. Also, you come from a house where you could probably get no privacy because there's fucking kids on every surface. Yeah.

There's no kid-free surface in the entire... Nothing. surface yeah yeah i'm sorry man yeah absolutely you can't even wank it in a house like that you can't you're just like oh nope i'm just gonna be real real frustrated until i can move out at 14 god it's refreshingly honest though like you said it's refreshingly honest you know it is finally somebody said something but what's crazy to me is why these people are famous you know that family you're famous because you can shit out kids faster than an alien mother with a fucking ovipositor or you're you're one of the many many eggs she shat out that's why you're famous it's a weird it's such a weird fucking bar to be famous it's a honestly it's a freak show thing it's a bearded lady issue you're absolutely right that's what it is yeah

yeah it's it's the tattooed man it's the bearded lady it's just we we put them on i think they were on that tlc channel which i don't even know if that's i don't have i don't have a cable but that channel went from the learning channel to the circus sideshow channel fairly quickly it was like i eat my couch is like i eat my couch i fucked my. I'm glued to my sister. Yeah, I... It was all like, I'm...

I can't do anything except for like, I have to hump this cinder block every 30 minutes or whatever. It's such a... It's just a lineup of freak show.

You're absolutely right. Or then there's people so big they have to get the house cut open so they can leave. It's so... Or their house is full, like stacked full of garbage. And then they, and the worst part about it

is that it's this kind of, there's this voyeurism to it, right? It's like this hardship porn where they just show these people who are clearly not well, because you can't be, you can't think that this person is well and have that much garbage in their house.

Have a fucking rotting cat in the middle of your kitchen underneath 55 garbage bags. There's something a little wrong here. That's not a normal life. And so the fact is that these people come in and then they film there. And there's this sort of weird, and intervention was like that too, where there's this sort of like weird thing where people watch these people. It's like despair porn. It's weird. It's misery exploitation.

Yeah, it's exploitation for sure. Yeah. It's misery. It's me TV. Miseryitation TV. So we want to thank our patrons. Of course, we want to thank all our patrons, but we want to thank our newest patrons,

Sabrina, Yosef, Dane, from Patreon with love, and the people who upped their patronage, Spiffy Seawolf, Paul, and Darren. Thank you so much for your generous donations. Thank you. We truly do appreciate it. And we want to thank you.

And we know it's Christmas, before Christmas, we're recording this. Next week, that's going to be our New Year's Eve show. So this is our New Year's Eve show that is going to be releasing on Monday. And you won't get a new show until the new year from us. Whoa. So this is our New Year's Eve show that is going to be releasing on Monday and you won't get a new show until the new year from us. So we want to wish everybody a happy and healthy New

Year's Eve. I know people probably will not be going out and doing much, but we want to wish people a happy, healthy New Year's Eve. Brother, we are almost done with 2020. Yeah, we're almost done. I don't think anything changes, but I just need it to be over. Yeah. I do too. I do too, for sure. So we got a message from Seth and Seth sent in an image and he was talking about Kirk Cameron. Kirk Cameron, by the way, wound up doing this caroling event. He wound up protesting the stay at home order. And he sent an image in that shows Kirk Cameron and someone cut out a couple of things and changed it. So now it reads, Christian terrorist Kirk Cameron hosts another super

spreader event to protest California's stay at home order. Yeah, that's more accurate for sure. They cut out some words in there and made it more accurate. Fucking singing at people. You literally couldn't do much. Sort of like splashing your blood and spit on strangers. Exactly, right? Yeah. It's like ejaculation party on somebody.

It's like a Bukkake party would be less of a super spreader event. Got a message from Joseph and Joseph says, the Trump campaign didn't release

the Krakens, they released the Karens. That's good. That's a lot more true. That's real good. I will say though that the news thisens, they released the Karens. That's good. That's a lot more true. That's real good. I will say though, that the news this week when they were talking about

how there's so many people at his office and a lot of these people are saying, yeah, man, it's cool. Why don't you just, I don't know, declare martial law. Yeah, just, you know, if you don't win,

what you can do is violently seize control of the country with the military. Well, and now. That's what I want in my peaceful democracy. And, you know, now the Senate is saying that they won't, a couple of senators are saying they won't vote to approve. They're going to vote to disapprove of the electoral college vote. But what happens then is it goes back to the Senate and it goes back to the House and they then hold a two-hour meeting where they vote on it again. And if it doesn't clear both houses, then it just goes through. So you could,

it's all just procedural bullshit. It doesn't, it's not doing anything. You're just going to waste people's time. It's stupid. It's so that they can. It's not doing anything. You're just going to waste people's time. It's stupid. It's so that they can say they opposed it. Yeah. All it is is to create a record of their opposition. Yeah, it's a cover your ass moment. But what it really is is a moment where I hope people in the future look back and say,

wow, we had a bunch of seditious fuckers here, didn't we? Yep, right. Yeah. and say, wow, we had a bunch of seditious fuckers here, didn't we? Yep, right. Yeah. We got a message from Kyle. And last week we were talking about free bursts and they were talking about Satan.

And they said Satan referred to themselves as the bringer of light. He's always amused by these conspiracy theorists and find connections and everything when it suits their nerve. But I have no actual knowledge or understanding of the word. Turns out that the name Lucifer literally means light bringer or light bearer. I think that's amazing. That's so good. Super funny.

Kitsune sent some message in to talk last week because we had a conversation about the fixing your car. And they said, yeah, you know, I own several older cars. I don't have a lot of money. I own several older cars and I fix them up. And I never spent over, you know, a couple grand for them. And I keep them here on my place. And I've watched a bunch of YouTube videos and I've learned how to make repairs. And you can, if you can, using YouTube and making sure you can keep an old car running for a long time. And I don't disagree.

Our situation was a little different in the sense that I grew up in a time before YouTube. And so in the time before YouTube, you had to go to the library to find a book on how to repair the car. And most of those books were not actual take this screw off, do this thing. Instead, these books were just sort of a schematic view of the thing you were working on. So it would show you where everything kind of went in a sort of blown out way, but you really had to be pretty mechanically inclined back then. And the other thing too is we didn't own a house. We lived in an apartment. And so every place where we worked on the car was a parking lot or a street.

And you can't just put a car on blocks for a couple of days and work on it after work for a couple of days. Even if you are mechanically inclined enough to do it, we just didn't have the space to do it. And so there was never a moment, like I say, growing up that my parents, I remember my dad maybe changing a spark plug once in a while, or he would change the oil, the oil filter, but that was the extent of his knowledge. He just did not have, he was not mechanically inclined. And once in a while, you would hear about a friend

who would say, oh yeah, my friend can do brakes for you. And then you'd take the car over there and you'd pitch him an extra hundred bucks, but that was not a reliable person who you could go to all the time. That was sort of like a one-time favor person who you could kind of do once in a while. But it was really difficult to get your car fixed back then. I'm glad YouTube exists though, to help people nowadays to go through those how-to moments,

to figure things out that used to be sort of, you know, in a lot of ways blocked from, you know, a normal person's view. Also, like working on cars requires a pretty extensive and expensive amount of tools. Yeah, that's true. Which if you just don't have those tools, you don't have access to those tools. I mean, it's not like you just wake up one day and you've got, you know, these socket sets and everything else that you need to work on cars. Yeah, man. And they're very specific.

They're very specific too. Right. As cars get more complicated, it's less and less practical need to work on cars. That's just expensive. They're very specific too. As cars get more complicated, it's less and less practical too to work on them. Interesting Xmas pun here from Sarah. She says, I'm an atheist 11 months of the year, but in December, I'm eggnog stick. Eggnog stick. Get it?

Get it, guys? Oh, Sarah. I love it. Super good. Sarah, no. Super good. You are not, guys? Oh, Sarah. I love it. Super good. Sarah, no. Super good. You are not getting coal this year, Sarah. You are definitely getting an orange or whatever.

I don't know. What did Santa put in your stocking? I don't know. You know what you're getting? You're going to get a tube of lube from adamandeve.com. I was going to say the same thing. If you go to adamandeve.com right now, You can get 50% off almost any item and free shipping. Just go to Adam and Eve and type in Gloria Checkout,

and you will get something amazing to spice up your holiday season. And if you send us a message, I will literally send you a tube of lube in the mail. They sent us one to the office that we haven't done anything with. It's still sitting there. It's also next to a buzzing butt plug that we still need to give away on the stream sometime. We still haven't given that away.

That is used though. I will say that one's used. They wash off, whatever. Tom, last week you said, you had this amazing idea. Why don't we just instead pay younger people a little less and we pay the older people a little more. It turns out someone stole your idea many years before you had it.

Yeah, it's called Australia where like living isn't shitty. Yeah. That's where, you know. Yeah. And it's not actually, it's from, it's funny. It's from November of 2020. Yeah. Yeah. That's where that's, you know. Yeah. And it's not actually, it's from, it's funny. It's from November of 2020. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess it is relatively recent, but it is funny though. Like

you said just a few moments ago before we started recording, it took me 10 seconds to figure it out because it's not hard. Yeah. It's not complicated. What'd you hear the argument? Well, we don't want to pay kids the same as adults okay well then don't would be the solution to that i figured it out guys yeah so time comes running in time comes running in with a whiteboard with marker on it that says just don't then i i will

say cecil that happens to me in my life a lot like that happens at my job a lot of the i'm like describe the problem uh just don't have that problem yeah and then people will look at you and they'll be like you don't have to have that you made that up it's not necessary you just don't have that and then they look at you like you fixed a problem and then you get a raise that year. Oh, that's amazing. What is even happening? That's amazing. Got a message from this is from Hebrew Hooligan and he was talking about jet skis. He said, I spent a good time

of my good bit of time on a jet ski and I had one that could do 45 miles an hour. It's like if you try to go 70 miles an hour across the ocean, you have a death wish. It's like 70 miles an hour across the ocean you have a death wish it's like 70 miles an hour this is a jet ski guy saying what the fuck are you talking about he says at 70 miles an hour every few feet you would jump about 20 feet in the air

that sounds so horrifyingly terrifying it's sounds so scary. It's amazing. We got a message from Michael and he says that he has a Republican family and he's always had those discussions about jobs and how those people want a living wage and his family argues back with him. And he points out, and it's true, either they're going to get the living wage

and they're going to live with the living wage or you're going to have to pay for it anyway. Right. So they're either McDonald's is either going to have to raise the price of their Big Mac by 50 cents so they could pay everybody by, you know, X amount of dollars. So they make $15 an hour or it's going to come out of your check to pay for them because because they got to get the money somehow. We're not going to let them die. Yeah.

We're already paying it. Yeah. All you're doing is deciding that first it has to go. I love the idea that Republicans, for the most part, believe that government can't do anything right. And we want small government and anything that government has to do is inherently less efficient. Don't you understand that by not forcing corporations to pay a living wage, all you're doing is making people pay money to the government so the government can have systems to pay a living wage. All you're doing is making people pay money to the government

so the government can have systems to pay it back to other people. You're involving more government. Just doing more, doing it more. Got a message from Jay and Jay says that, you know, we hear complaints about big corporations, but mom and pop aren't always better. And yeah, that's, you know, that's true.

It's one of those things that, you know, mom and pop are not better all the And yeah, that's true. It's one of those things that mom and pop are not better all the time. And here's a perfect example. Ian works for us. He doesn't get any benefits from us. Sure, he gets a pretty good wage, but he doesn't work full time for us and he doesn't get any benefits.

And we don't actually have him as an employee. He's a contract worker for us because there's just an easier way for everybody to do the booking because we don't have an HR department because we're a tiny little mom and pop podcast. We don't even have a way to figure it out. So the fact is that the reason why mom and pop is kind of bad is that we're looking for ways in which people can get benefits. And the reason why you need benefits in our country is

because health, dental, vision, all that stuff has to be paid for from your job. If all that stuff was taken care of, then mom and pop would be the same as everything else. If we just had fucking universal health care, we wouldn't have to worry about this stupid shit. Oh, it's amazing how that works. I mean, you'd be able to run a business competitively as a small business owner against larger businesses. It's almost like larger businesses don't want that. Yeah, right? Huh. Yeah.

Anyway, well, that is going to wrap it up for this week. We are going to be back. We hope you have a wonderful, happy, healthy new year. And we're going to be back at the beginning of next year with a brand new show. Thank you so much for a wonderful year. And if you are not joining us for our live streams, this last week of the year, this is releasing on Monday,

so it's releasing before New Year's Eve. We are going to be doing our last live stream of the year, New Year's Eve Eve, so Wednesday night, 9pm Central, and then from that point on, we'll be going back to Thursdays. But please join us for New Year's Eve Eve. Tom and I will both have a cocktail, and we'll be cheering you. And so come that point on, we'll be going back to Thursdays. But please join us for New Year's Eve. Eve, Tom, and I will both have a cocktail and we'll be cheering you.

And so come join us on 9pm Central and check it out. We have a lot of fun on our streams and they're a blast. And Ian joins in and chit-chats with us. So it's a lot of fun. Come check it out. YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook and I think Twitter. So you can come check them out on any

of those places. That's going to wrap it up for this week. We're going to leave you like we check them out on any of those places. That's going to wrap it up for this week. We're going to leave you like we always do with the Skeptic's Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician,

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Expose your signs Thrust your hands Bloody, evident. Conclusive. Doubt even this. The opinions and information provided on this podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. All opinions are solely that of Glory Hole Studios, LLC. Cognitive dissonance makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information and will not be liable for any errors, damages, or butthurt arising from consumption. All information is provided on an as-is basis. No refunds.

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