Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 579: Two Pulitzer Sam

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

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 glory hole studios in chicago beyond, this is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome mat. This is episode 579 of cognitive dissonance and

cecil yeah kind of interesting today uh biden proposed his new budget you know six trillion dollar budget and it is an unbelievably I think it's an unbelievably ambitious budget. I was reading a Times article about this just this afternoon and taking a look at some of the proposed items that are a part of this $6 trillion budget. And it's not going to hit everybody's wishlist. Let me put that out there. It's not going to solve every problem. It is not a It's not going to solve every problem. It is not a progressive panacea by any stretch of the imagination. But I will say, I've become so incredibly jaded to the notion of progress over the course of the last 16 years. Yeah, me too, man. Me too, man. Me too.

That I have often thought, you know, if over the course of eight years, you get one big thing done, that's a good, that's a good term. Like that's a, like, if you don't do anything objectively evil and you accomplish in an eight year term, one big, decent thing, then I think like I have historically counted that as a success. And really it goes back, I was thinking about this, you know, it goes back to, to W, you know, W accomplished really in his, in his first term, uh, he got us into a, uh, mired us into a war, um, for no reason. The never ending wars. A never ending, a couple of for no reason never-ending wars never-ending couple of never-ending wars

the forever wars the forever wars uh so fucking like straight up crush that then he passed the patriot act um which you know severely curtailed all of our civil liberties um and then introduced the doctrine of unitary executive theory yeah he you know he half drownded some people too he did have haveowned some people too. He did half-drown some people. Half-drowned some people. And then from a legislative perspective, his big proposal was supposed to be social security reform.

And what W was pushing for, as I recall, it was to allow your social security funds to be independently invested in the stock market. And then, you know. So you could lose them in, say, 2008, for example. You could invest it all in GameStop or whatever. Yeah, right. I'm going to buy Bitcoin. I'm going to buy nothing but cryptocurrencies.

Can I get some Dogecoin? But he was thwarted. He was thwarted. He wasn't able to get that done. Then you had Obama. Obama got Obamacare accomplished. That was a series of compromises for sure. But it was still an achievement.

I mean, without Obamacare, many millions of people would be left without any insurance. That's where we were at before Obamacare, many millions of people would be left without any insurance. That's where we were at before Obamacare. So massively not enough, but massively better than nothing. And I guess I've thought of government as mostly capable of not enough, but better than nothing. And then Trump came along and really from a legislative perspective, he got nothing done except for the tax cut for the wealthy in his first year. Yeah. After his tax cuts. Yeah, that we're all going to be paying for now. Right.

Because we cut the taxes and then we all just now started paying a lot more taxes now that he's out because that was what was written in the bill. That was what was always going to be the case. It was going to be the case. But everything else he tried to do from a legislative perspective, I mean, granted, he did immigration. He wields a mighty sword as the executive. But from a legislative perspective, mostly

he was stymied at every turn. And now we're at Biden. And here in our $6 trillion budget, there are line items that, to be frank, some of these things were on my wish list as, man, I'd like to see it in my lifetime. In your lifetime. Yeah, yeah. In my lifetime. And I had very little hope that this would happen. Part of it is a total restructuring

and rethinking of what the idea of infrastructure looks like. If you ask a Republican what infrastructure is, they're going to say it's roads and bridges. It's bridges. Yeah. Yep. I've never seen a Republican build a bridge in they're going to say it's roads and bridges. It's bridges. Yeah. Yep. It's what infrastructure is. I've never seen a Republican build a bridge in my life. I'll be perfectly honest. Bridges to nowhere. Yeah. Wasn't there that bridge to nowhere that Palin had up in Alaska?

Yeah, that's right. Bridge to nowhere. That's right. I forgot about the bridge to nowhere. She had that right on her hand at one point too. I actually jumped off a bridge. For real. Like I went bungee jumping

in California a few years ago. Yeah. And we hiked through the middle of the mountains. We hiked for hours to get to this place and there was a bridge and it was also called

the Bridge to Nowhere because it was this great big bridge that spanned between these two mountains and there was no adjoining roads. They built a bridge. There wasn't any road?

They just built a bridge there. They built the bridge with the expectation that they were going to build roads. And then the rest of the project evidently got canceled. And now they just use the bridge for bungee jumping. That's like what we did. So we had to hike through like this trail through the mountains. And like,

it's like using your Lexus as a coaster. It's just so stupid. It's just a stupid thing to do. But they come to think of it, they also called that the bridge to nowhere. Wow. So I've jumped off the bridge to nowhere, actually. When you were up there, when you're at the very top of the bridge,

could you see Russia? I don't know. I was too busy wetting my pants from fear. But I do want to read a few of the items that are a part of the $6 trillion budget. It includes money for roads, water pipes, broadband internet, electric vehicles.

Let's stop there for a second. Let's stop at broadband internet. Let's stop. Because that is the infrastructure of the future, right? That's what's going to be needed. And one of the things that I learned recently in the last year is that

and it's something that I knew but it's something that doesn't get talked about a lot and it's the fact that internet service is the divider between whether or not you're able to do the things that you're able to do at school well. And Chicago is a perfect example of that. I have a friend who's a Chicago public school

teacher who would have very difficult times because some students just did not have the same level of internet that other students had. And that's a divider that was and especially now in a possible world where we could have COVID flare-ups and work from home flare-ups in the future which is something

that we've proven that we could do now right so like future pandemics could put us in a place where students are back at home that is an indicator

of whether or not your child's going to actually be able to continue on. Now, nobody's saying that Zoom class is as good as regular class, but no class is certainly nothing. That's certainly, that's a zero, right? And so, Zoom class is better than nothing. And there's students out there that are stuck in that internet divide where they don't have high-speed internet. And there's plenty of places across this country that don't have high-speed internet. And other countries, just light, I mean, lightning fast internet for cheap.

And we are stuck with, throughout this country, one choice, maybe two, And the second one always sucks. Yeah. And they're brutally expensive. And yes, stupid. I mean, like it's, you got to look at internet at this point as the same, functionally the same as delivering water to a home. It's, it is essential for just about everything that you need to do to bank, to educate your kids. You know, it's a, in fact, water is the perfect analogy because it's, it's all a series of tubes. Yeah. And water is carried through a series of tubes. Internet, obviously a series of tubes. It's not dump trucks. I know that. It's not a big truck. Don't be

ridiculous. It's not, that would be stupid. So it's just, it's really a series of twos. But yeah, I mean, internet is an equity issue. Yeah. You know, for you and I, Cecil, like, we get to just buy internet. And then, you know, we, if, oh, the internet's on my phone, the internet, I am covered in internettings all the time. But that's resource driven. Yeah.

And that's, that's also a function of like where our homes are located. We are able to locate our homes. You wouldn't buy a new house if it didn't have internet, if it didn't have good internet. If you personally found your dream home, but it happened to be in a place where the only thing you could do

was like that satellite internet that fucking has, you know, one kilobit an hour download or something, you would never do it. I would never do that. You would say, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to. I wouldn't. I don't care if this house is full of hostess cream pies

or whatever it is. Okay, wait. Now we've changed a little bit. We've changed the calculus. So this includes money for roads, water pipes, broadband internet, electric vehicle charging stations. And I read that, and at first I was like, eh. But then I thought, like, what are you ang for? If we're going to make this transition, to build their fucking infrastructure so we can drive our cars and heat our homes. If we're going to switch to electric vehicles, and I think the car manufacturers are making a really strong, good faith effort to push more electric vehicles into the marketplace.

to push more electric vehicles into the marketplace. Almost every major manufacturer has announced that they're switching to an electric or all-electric fleet in the very near future. But none of that does us any fucking good if we don't invest in the infrastructure to charge those fuckers. If the only place I can charge it is at my house, then I got to go fucking halfway out and halfway back every time. That's exactly it.

Yeah, I mean, you're a boomerang at that point. You don't have any other option. But, you know, I read a Facebook post this last week from someone I know has an electric car and he traveled somewhere and was able to use their electric charger. And that is one of the reasons why he stayed at the hotel, I think, that he stayed at. Sure, yeah, makes sense. And so there's a benefit there. And that sort of thing is necessary because we have become used to, Americans at least, and it's hard to speak for any other country because many other countries are much, much smaller.

So, you know, if we're talking about anywhere in England, you know, I think I saw someone talking about how, because I will get in the car for my hobby and I could drive, I could get up at four in the morning and I will drive five hours to get to where my hobby will be happening, hang out all day and then get in the car and drive back. So I'll be on the road for 10 straight hours in a single day and hang around for like eight at a place.

And that's a commonplace occurrence in the summer for me. I'll do that at least before COVID. I would do that at least four or five times a summer.

People in other countries will, I was hearing somebody talk about it in England. They're saying, well, if it's over an hour, I might actually get a hotel

to stay because that's a really long drive. Over an hour? Like really far away. That's super far away. An hour is, I live farther away from Chicago now than an hour. The average commute to work in America is 42 minutes. So yeah. So, but we just live in a different scale, right? So it's hard for me to speak about other countries in the same way. But at least in America, we've gotten used to the fact that I can go 900 miles if I want to. If I want to get my car and want to drive 900 miles,

damn it, I'm going to drive 900 miles. And electric vehicles don't allow that unless we get these charging stations that allow it, you know what I mean, that do something like that. Yeah. Right now, like there is a sort of tradition, a cultural tradition of the American road trip. Yeah, for sure. I mean, that is part of sort of the American ethos is the road trip. And we have a whole

culture based around the automobile. And unless we're going to make massive changes to that, which we're not, we're not. Because we built all the rest of the Eisenhower infrastructure, the highway infrastructure, right? So we've got to invest in that and there's money included to do that. And by the way, we talked about this in a previous show, but there's bridges in Illinois, in a city that both you and I know well, Joliet, there's a bridge that goes over one of those places in Joliet that's rated six out of a hundred in safety rating. I mean, six out of a hundred. How do you take 94 points off the bridge and be like, that's still good? If you add that as a character, if your character in D&D had that opportunity,

they wouldn't cross that bridge. Can you imagine coming home with like, I got a 6% on my test? That's the name and date across the top. That's what you've got. Yeah, right, exactly. Holy shit. And that's common.

Throughout the United States, there's plenty of terrible infrastructure throughout the United States because we haven't fixed it in forever. Did you see the bridge that got shut down because it had a massive crack the other day in the bridge and the inspector missed it? Did you see this? No. Oh, I got to show this to you. Hang on. This is fucking amazing. Holy shit, dude. That is a bridge. It is a massive bridge on I-40 connecting Memphis to Arkansas. It's a fucking giant like double arches, massive goddamn bridge. And it's just got a huge fucking crack in the steel.

It goes all the way through. Like if you had a break in your leg this severe, they would cut your leg off like it was the Civil War. Yeah. No, I mean, absolutely. Yeah. Holy shit. Holy shit, right? I can't even stare at that and not get sweaty palms thinking about that.

That's terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying. So we're investing in that physical infrastructure, but we're also reimagining what infrastructure is. One of the other line items on there was investing in advanced manufacturing processes, which is also infrastructure. And that's not infrastructure, not just in the manufacturing processes themselves, Cecil, but that is looking at the job opportunities that are created by keeping jobs here and making those, that's, it's jobs infrastructure. But the, some of the other items on here go a little further. It envisions funding for affordable childcare, universal pre-K, and a national paid leave program. Man, those are like, those are wishlist items that are, in my mind,

as big or bigger than anything we've seen done in the last 20 years. So pre-K is such a game changer. Such a game changer. We talked about this on the last show, but as much as it is about the kids, it's about creating and then maintaining gender

equity in the workforce. And we don't have that now. And we're not going to have that until we invest in allowing women and men to go to work that have kids. 86% of women will have children. So almost all women have children and they need to be able to go back into the workforce and not pay, what was it, like 30% of your household income in order to do it? Because then how much more money do you have to make in order to make it worthwhile? And that's what keeps a tremendous number of people out of the workforce. And the 12 weeks of paid leave, 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, they could get up to $4,000 a month while they're off with at least two thirds of their average

weekly rate wage wages replaced. How awesome is that? There's, there's a huge number of full-time jobs in America that don't have any vacation or any sick time at all. There is no guarantee. The thing is that here in the States, any time off, be it sick or vacation, is given to you at the discretion of your employer. So your employer doesn't have to give you any paid time off at all, regardless of your full-time or part-time status. They do it as a benefit to- Yeah, it's an incentive. Right, to try to get workers. So there are a lot of people like fucking working in a poultry factory right now that are very much full-time.

They don't get a day paid off. Not a single day. Nothing. And it's absolutely insane that we don't have paid family medical leave. We have no paid family medical leave. We have no paid family medical leave. So if you get sick and you need to take time off, or if you have to take time off to care for an elderly parent, or you have to take time off to care for your kid, or somebody in your family has a child, you can take FMLA. FMLA is guaranteed, but it's not paid in the States. It's not paid. Zero dollars of that is paid. And most employers don't pay that at all.

So like even employers that have other good benefits, most employers will not pay you during FMLA. They'll let you like use your disability insurance if you happen to have short-term disability. They'll let you like sometimes borrow from your vacation, borrow from any banked sick time. But many employers just don't do anything. You take time off. They're like, cool. By law, we have to give you the time off and not fire you, but you don't get shit. There's no

safety net for workers in the States. Absolutely none. Let's not forget too, I don't want to get too deep into the weeds here But I definitely want to mention One of the things that is expected Of most Americans Is that you make it easy on your work When you're gone So you do more work before you leave To make sure that

The job that you do is covered In some way And that's almost always expected in most places Even though it should never be expected of you, right? You're not paying me for the time I'm not there. I should just be able to say, I'm dusting my hands off. I'm going to go on vacation now. Instead, what most people have to do in the country is do twice as much work the week before and then go on vacation, which they're not getting paid. They might have to stay late or they're working extra fast or whatever it is, crunching to

get that time in so that they can relax for a week. That happens so many to so many people all across. There's no work boundaries in our country. We just don't have them, man. We just don't have them. And like the idea that you can't use, the fact is, is that I should just be able to walk away from my job for the day and they should be able to survive without me. That should just be how it works. But the problem is we're understaffed. People only know a certain amount of stuff about your job and there's no way they can fill in for you. Most

people just don't have that luxury. Yeah. There's, there's no, there's, there's very little redundancy. Yeah. We don't hire for redundancy. We don't, we don't hire for it because it's, it's very little redundancy across the system. Yeah, we don't hire for redundancy. We don't hire for it because it's antithetical to the American work ethos. It's not part of how we think of our workers and production and the almighty dollar. If you're an employer, typically you hire the minimum number of people to produce the amount of work that needs to be produced. And then if somebody gets sick or if somebody goes on vacation, it puts a strain on your system. And it's hard while that person is gone or until you are able to hire for the new position because there's no play at all in the system. And if you look at productivity numbers, Americans are some of

the most productive workers, some of the most productive workers in the world. We also work an enormous number of hours. Like the average work week for Americans is over 45 hours a week. That's the average. The 40-hour work week, we left that behind years ago. Years ago, it continues to creep higher and higher and higher. And the number of exemptions for hourly employees, so the number of ways you can call somebody a salaried employee, continues to climb. And what I mean by that is, if you're hourly and you fit into a certain category of employees, you have to be paid overtime. But there's a huge number of other categories of employees where you don't have to be paid any overtime. Yep.

to hire salaried employees and push them to work as many hours as possible to gain the most production, to have the smallest personnel expense on their bottom line. That's just, that's what you, it's what, like if you're managing to the dollar, it is what you are, the only responsible thing to do if all you manage is to the dollar. And America only manages to the dollar because everything is based on, for big companies at least, everything is based on quarterly profits to maximize gains, to sell shares in stock. The whole machine is not meant to produce whatever widget your company produces. Your widgets are a byproduct of your shares and your people are a byproduct of your widgets. You're like a second tier down. You are. You truly like you are. You don't fucking matter. So re-imagining using the

budgeting process to come all the way back, using the budgeting process to re-imagine workers' rights and to enshrine into law some amount of worker protection so that if you get sick, you don't go broke. You know? So, because the thing is, like, if you get sick and you have to take FMLA, you also are going to have medical bills in America. Yeah. So, like, you get fucking double whammied here.

You get sick. You don't get paid for your fucking time off. Like, if you fucking have a baby, you got to pay like the average cost to have a baby. It's, it's thousands of dollars in America. It costs thousands and thousands of dollars. You got to do that. But then also you didn't get any time. You took time off of work and none of that shit was paid. Yeah. So the cost to get sick is not just the cost of the actual illness and then the doctors and the medicine and the time. And it's also the cost of all the lost wages. Yeah. It's fucking ridiculous, man. It's outrageous. It's ridiculous. So I just,

I looked at this, at this budget proposal today and I was really heartened because some of these items, they're like, they're social safety net guarantees that we've never, I never dreamed I would see in my lifetime because I've given up on the idea of progress. And they're little, right? They're small, but they're at least something, right? You know, it's like they're little in a way because, you know, you look at how progressive other countries are when they,

like, especially when it comes to employment benefits. They're small in that sense, but they're a step in the right direction. And the more regulation we have on some of this stuff, the better off I think the American people are going to be. And the more we step in that direction, I think the better, the more appetite we will have and the more we'll break this, you know,

we have this like crazy fucking national mental illness that constantly fetishizes work. We fetishize work in America. And I mean, Midwesterners are particularly bad about it, actually. There's a Midwestern work ethic, which is its own thing. And, you know, talk to a Midwesterner about like the Californian work ethic. And it's a whole lifestyle change. It's a whole thing to like, so you're sort of like, what? You only work 40 hours. You didn't fall asleep at your desk.

You don't come in when you're sick. You sleep eight hours a night. You take care of your body. What? Ridiculous. I'm fat and die young. We all have diabetes. Never leave the office.

Always be working. They keep me here because of the candy dish. It's the candy dish that keeps me here. It's fucking killing us. It is absolutely crushing us. And for some reason, we are like, we hang on to it as if it's a national value, you know, as if it speaks to something positive

about who we are, as if like the only thing that matters is our output. Yeah. And I think giving us just a little bit of a social safety net, just a little bit, might allow us to see ourselves as more than just what we fucking produce all the time. Yeah.

Don't let Neil deGrasse Tyson fool you Cause CO2 ain't gonna hurt you Look, don't worry cause this shit ain't grim. I'm on the snowballs like my name is Jim. And pull a bass prime and those bitches can sweat. Paul, God, come on.

Yeah. So this story comes from Crooks and Liars. Rand Paul is now a COVID death toll denier. So now it's not enough, Cecil, to just deny that COVID existed and then deny that masks work and then deny that vaccines are the only effective way to thwart a virus-based pandemic. But now we're just going to say, you know what? The guys that are counting the number of dead, that's also a lie. Everything you can count or look at or see to a Republican is a lie. How many people

were at my inauguration? Well, I can count them. You're lying. Yeah, man. How many votes did we get? Well, this many votes. You're lying. How many people died? Well, this many people. You're lying. Do they not believe in counting? And it turns out they're even wrong in the wrong direction because there's studies coming out now. They're saying that it's a lot more and it makes sense that it's a lot more, right? They make sense that it's more than the 600,000 that they actually counted. It makes sense.

They're the same reason that it makes sense that we weren't able to actually accurately pinpoint all the pieces, the way in which somebody died. But if it's a contributing factor, it should have been counted. But what they want to say is, and what Rand Paul wants to say is, well, yeah, sure they had COVID, but they died for another reason. Yeah. And that's, you know, they love that line of thinking. And I think a good analogy would be this. If you have a boat and on the boat, it says maximum capacity, three. And you put three people in the boat.

That boat is at maximum capacity. And there are a lot of people who have health issues and they are at three. They are at their maximum capacity. The boat, though though is not sinking, right? They have diabetes, but it's under control. They are, you know, overweight, but it's under control. But you know, the boat is at capacity. And then you take a fourth guy and he runs off the dock and he jumps into the. And the boat sinks. Who was to blame for sinking the boat? If you ask you and I, Cecil, it's the fourth guy.

It's COVID, right? Yeah. Because without that fourth guy jumping in the fucking boat, the boat wouldn't have sunk. Max capacity three. How many people in the boat? Three. Why'd he die? Fourth guy jumped in the fucking boat.

COVID. And that's where these guys are like, well, you know, he actually died of heart failure. Yeah. Oh, yeah? Would he have died of heart failure without the fourth guy jumping in the boat without the fucking COVID? No, of course not. It's fucking nonsense. And the worst part about this is fucking Rand Paul

knows people who got COVID. Rand Paul is also a physician. Rand Paul's not going to take the vaccine because he thinks that he has a natural immunity to it. And he literally is now denying that the numbers are correct. Rand Paul is an asshole. He's a total asshole.

He's a fucking senator who's wielding his fucking, He's a fucking senator who's wielding his fucking, his MD as a fucking, it's a fucking sledgehammer that he can pound people with because he carries the weight of every MD when he swings it. I know. I know. It is absolutely fucking tragic, the intersection of that MD and this fucking politician. Yep. It is a tragic intersection. The thing is, I was thinking about why this was.

And I have to think that the reason that the Republicans have to constantly downplay both the mitigation methods, as well as the economic toll, as well as the death toll of COVID, is that if they don't, they have to admit their mistakes in managing the pandemic, right? If you are a staunch supporter of the Republican team and the Republicans were in charge during the pandemic and they fucking botched it, which they did, and it's true that at least 600,000 human beings just in America alone are dead because of your criminal negligence and mismanagement of this process, right? You have to either raise your hand and admit that or cast aspersions on the entire foundation of the pandemic. of the pandemic. So what are they going to do? They're not going to be honest because they would lose their fucking jobs.

And rather than just being fucking adult about it, being like, I made a mistake. I should probably lose my job. That's okay. If I made a mistake and it cost one human life, Cecil,

and they wanted my job. I know, man. I know. Wouldn't you, I would be like, I made a mistake and I can't take it back and somebody's dead. I'm gone. I'm out. Rand you, wouldn't you, I would, I would be like, I made, I made a mistake and I can't take it back. Somebody's dead.

I'm gone. Yeah. I'm out. Rand Paul says in this thing, I know two people who died from COVID. We knew when Herman Cain died and nobody did anything. We knew that it was going to be, it was going to be just obfuscate everything you possibly can.

We knew it from the beginning. We knew that that's how it was going to turn out. The moment Herman Cain's ghost is tweeting a week after he dies. I remember that. You know, you're just like,

okay, all right, clearly these people don't give a shit. The people who are fucking running his Twitter account didn't even care.

No, they were like, it was so ghoulish. They're like, yeah, we're going to call it the Cain gang now. It was so ghoulish.

It's so crazy. Hush little're like, yeah, we're going to call it the Kang gang now. It was so ghoulish. It's so crazy. Hush, little baby, don't say a word. Daddy's going to cure you with good wishes and herbs. And if those good wishes do you wrong, you won't have to worry because you won't last long. So this story comes from the Daily Mail. And when I looked at this, I was like, holy shit, I agree with Saudi Arabia. I've never agreed with Saudi Arabia ever. Daily Mail, Saudi Arabia launches crackdown on anti-vaxxers with anyone

refusing COVID jabs, banned from pilgrimages and overseas travel in order not to access universities, banned from pilgrimages and overseas travel in order not to access universities, malls, and offices. And because this is the Daily Mail, I'll read the subheadings. Might as well. You don't have to read the article. Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh, is accelerating a nationwide vaccine drive. Anti-vaxxers banned from pilgrimages, overseas travel, other public areas. From August 1st, vaccinations required to enter government and private spaces. So,

in Saudi Arabia, like, at least they're like, look, all right, if there's one advantage to authoritarian despotic control.

It's crazy to me too because don't the Republicans love authoritarianism? Like, why wouldn't they love it if the government said take your fucking vaccine? Like, why don't the Republicans love authoritarianism? Like why wouldn't they love it if the government said, take your fucking vaccine? Like why wouldn't they be all about it?

I mean, you know, they would if it was Trump though. You know, like they love certain autocrats, that's for sure. And they certainly like certain like rulings from the autocrats. Yeah, absolutely. I will say this though. All you have to do is look at India

and their absolute fucking cock up that they made when they allowed all those people to come for that one pilgrimage for the Hindu pilgrimage that they have there where they had all those people bathing and they had all no masks. And they were, I mean, all you have to do is look at that

and say, no, we can't do that. And it makes sense. It makes a world of sense that they're going to do something like that, that they're going to put something like that in. And, you know, like the idea that something like this is draconian is stupid though, because the argument is,

and I saw this on Facebook this week, hilariously, I just moved from Chicago and I moved to another suburb and I joined the suburbs Facebook group on a suggestion of, actually on Eli's suggestion, because I was looking for a new cat sitter. So I'm looking for a new cat sitter. I decided to, I was lamenting to him and he said, you should join your local area and just type in your local area Facebook group and be like, hey, I'm looking for a cat sitter. I said, you know, that's a great idea. Maybe somebody will pop in. I posted something. Nobody responded, but I did get in my Facebook feed this fucking lady who is, it's like a TikTok of this lady who's basically saying, you know, I can't believe all you, my body, my choice people won't

let me, won't want me to wear a mask and want me to get a jab in my arm. And my cold, dead hands. And it was called like MAGA Revolution was the place that retweeted it or something like that. And so I commented, I was like, what the fuck kind of hillbilly bullshit is this? Where the fuck am I? I was like, what the fuck just happened?

I said, how big is your belt buckle? That's what I asked. I was just like, what the fuck just happened? I said, how big is your belt buckle? And then he came back and we fought a little bit. I was just making fun of him the whole time. I was like, you're a fucking idiot. But the idea that someone is going to make a video or somebody's going to talk about it, even these anti-vaxxers, all the anti-vaxxers have the same thing. It's like my body, my choice. That's not how public health works, man. Public health doesn't work like that. You can't just have me like, yeah, you yeah, you know, I got a little bit of smallpox, but I am going to get on this plane. That doesn't work. I got a little Ebola, but I'm going to go to this fucking Knicks game. No, you're not. No, you're not. And no one would ever let you in there if you had Ebola, right?

Like the idea that we have this idea about all these other diseases that's up here where it's like there's like a full stop. Smallpox, full stop. You wouldn't let anybody near you with that. Same thing with a bull. You'd be like, full stop. But people still die from other stuff. And the idea that you have this my body, my choice. One, you never respected that in all the rest of history.

So let's just throw that out because you never respected that anyway. You're only saying it now because you think you're catching someone in some sort of logical trap. I'm using my facts and logic to destroy you. No, your fucking metaphor is stupid because it's not your choice

when it comes to public health. You don't have a choice. The reason why, the only way we're ever going to be able to have the same world that we had or a similar world that we had is if we get vaccinated and if we do, we have precautions that make it so we don't catch this thing. That's the only way it's going to work because otherwise you're just going to have super spreaders. You're going to have small pockets of people spinning this thing around. That's why we still have measles folks. Yep. Yeah. I, Cecil, I, I don't know what the alternative solution they present is, right? What is your out then? Okay. So if it's, it's sort of like that, you know, like the categorical imperative, right? Like, okay, so if everybody behaved like you, how would this end?

How would this end? It wouldn't end. It would never end. There's no way out of this other than the vaccine. And you cannot be a moral person if you are unwilling to engage in the same activities that are required that if everybody else writ your same activities larger, would it crumble society

or advance society? You're absolutely right. It's fucking simple shit. You're absolutely right. What they want is they want to not do anything and they want to ride on your coattails and they want to ride on my coattails. Fuck that noise, man. Fuck that noise.

Get in line. Get a shot. It's not even a big deal. It's a fucking miracle. Get your miracle shot. It's a modern miracle. Someone is showing up and squirting you with miracle juice. Are you kidding me?

Why don't you want a miracle? Dude, did you see there was like, I didn't see the thing, but I read about it. This guy on a TikTok was literally in tears, begging his daughter to take $2,000 to not get injected with the COVID vaccine. Oh my God. And he's bawling saying you're going to be dead in six months. It's an experimental vaccine. You're going to be dead in six months. And's an experimental vaccine. You're going to be dead in six months. It's not even experimental anymore. It's like the Pfizer vaccine is out of

the experimental authorization stage. It's a fully authorized vaccine. Oh, is it now a full-on? It was fully authorized? Yeah. I fucking hate these people so much. I wound up running into an anti-vaxxer recently

who that's what they wanted to argue about was that it's experimental use. You can't make people get it. You know, you want to pause and be like, okay, tell me what that means in real terms. What does experimental use mean to you? Tell me what that means to you because they don't have an answer.

Right. They don't have an answer. Their answer is, oh, well, it's, you know, it's just, you know, they don't know what happens. Right. They don't have an answer. Their answer is, oh, well, it's just, they don't know what happens. Like they ran the same trials they would have done otherwise. They just moved a little quicker than they did before.

That's it. They moved a little quicker. You know, I will say though, Cecil, part of this is the fault and a lot of this comes back to this problem. We are using bad nomenclature, right? We do this a lot in public health. We do this a lot in science communication. We are using bad nomenclature. We are communicating poorly. We are using words that have a colloquial meaning in a non-colloquial sense. Yep. And that allows for this kind of bullshit confusion to take place.

Yep. And that is a real fucking problem. And I don't know when fucking scientists are going to stop doing that. Like they need to never do that again. They need to never, ever, ever do that again. The mix up of colloquial terms like theory and experimental, like those are words that have a colloquial value. I don't care if they came first, by the way, in the scientific realm and have been since then been used. Then you have to change because words change.

They shift. You don't get to own the original terminology. That's dumb. The things we do should be pragmatic. Original terminology, that's dumb. The things we do should be pragmatic. Everything we do in science should be aimed at results, including the terms that we use.

And we need to communicate better. I feel like science, especially the science organizations in the United States, just feel like they just need one or two good marketers. Yes. They just need like one or two. They don't need a lot. They just need a human being who. They don't need a lot. They just need a,

they need a human being who can look at them and say, look, Igor, put your fucking pocket protector in. We're going to talk to these people

like they need to be talked to. And how they need to be talked to is they need to be reassured and they need to not be given any weasel words that they can then

wedge themselves into and hold onto for dear life. We will do none of those things. What we're going to do is say, this is a vaccine. It went through all the same things that a normal vaccine does. It just got, you know, you don't even want to use the word fast-tracked. It just got pushed to the front of the line. That's all. That's all that happened. Talk about like what we, you know like what we did is we were able to remove a lot of the bureaucratic red tape involved in the vaccine approval process

to move this safely through the normal channels that a vaccine is required to pass through in order to get it into arms right now. There's a million ways to say it better than how they do it. Stop calling it warp speed, asshole. That makes it sound quick. That lends people to be like,

ooh, fucking warp speed. Like you get rushed it. You're going to rush this medicine. Like stop doing that stuff. I hope that one of the biggest lessons we've learned from this pandemic, I hope we sit back when this is ending because it's never going to be over.

I hope we sit back when this is ending and we really spend some time thinking about the role of communication to be over. I hope we sit back when this is ending and we really spend some time thinking about the role of communication to the public. Getting scientists to stand at a podium who are right 100% of the time, but who are using terms and terminologies and phrasings which feel colloquially different to the listener than the scientist intends them, that has no value. That's an opposite value to what you intend. It's confusing. We need to really fix that problem. And I think maybe scientists just shouldn't be the same people that communicate science.

Yeah. I don't think that's a problem. I think you got to have somebody in there who talks like a human being. Yeah. That's how regular companies do things. Like, if you work at, like, a regular company, your sales rep isn't the guy making the fucking widgets. Like, he's like,

yeah, I fucking read a fact sheet about it. I really understand how these things work. But I'm not the guy who fucking invented the widget. He's not the engineer or whatever. Yeah, right. Light off an entire genre of music. The banjos are strumming and the drums are banging.

Let's get the boys together and have ourselves a hanging. Oh, damn. Now I see it. Now I see it. So this story comes from TheHill.com. Auschwitz Memorial calls Green Holocaust comments a sad symptom of moral

and intellectual decline. So here is the tweet from horrible, horrible monster of a human being, Marjorie Taylor Greene. This is what she said in her tweet. Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazis forced Jewish people to wear a gold star. Oh.

Vaccine passports and mask mandates create discrimination against unvaxxed people who trust their immune system to a virus that is 99% survivable. Okay. All right. Yeah. First of all, you don't get a vaccination logo. What is a vaccination logo, Cecil? You get a vaccine card and you put it in your wallet

and take a picture of it in your phone. You don't get a logo. You have to get a tattoo, Tom. You have to get either a P, an M, or a J and J. Those are your three options you have to get. A vaccination logo. Like what? You're wearing the fucking Pfizer

brand on your arm, like seared in like a cattle? It's ridiculous. She doesn't know what she's talking about. She does not know what she's talking about. Marjorie Taylor Greene revels in her own ignorance. She genuinely loves that she doesn't know things. That is a feature to her,

not a bug, that she doesn't understand the world, that she doesn't understand history, that she doesn't understand context of the United States in any form whatsoever. To her, that's a badge of honor. Yeah, You're not wrong at all, man. She, what, what, what excites somebody like Marjorie Taylor green is just fighting with people. She's a troll. She's a political troll. Like there's no principles involved here at all. It's just, it's attention. It's spotlighting. That's all this shit is. It's just, it's just fucking dog and pony show bullshit in order to get, i'll tell you what it gets her picked up by the hill sure it gets her picked up by you know you and i and the new york times and everybody else you know because we're

right up there with the new york times by the way this is a congresswoman who took two tries to read 14 pages two tries two tries yep this i mean and that's that's only the two that she admitted tom yeah right that she admitted, Tom. Yeah, right. That she didn't read it yet, but she would later and then she did finish. I finished your whole 14, your little 14 pages.

I finally finished it. Yeah. After I challenged you to a debate. I already decided I didn't like it before I read it. She challenged AOC

to a debate after, but she hadn't read all of the Green New Deal, which is 14 pages long. 14 fucking pages, man. And she, like, this is a woman who couldn't be bothered to read what she wanted to debate against. She didn't know it well enough going in, but was plenty ready to debate because to her,

ignorance is a badge of honor. And it's not just to her, it's to many people who would vote for her. Yep. Well, the thing is like, she doesn't need to read it to know she's opposed to it because her job is to be opposed to things. Yeah, that's exactly it. Like it's not to carefully consider the merits of an idea or proposal. Her job is to just be opposed to things. This bullshit tweet where it's like yeah and it forced jewish people to wear a gold star that's the crazy we covered somebody else saying the same thing one of these fucking crazy pastors a few weeks ago stupid this is a crazy person thing to

say not a representative of our government nothing to do with it. I mean, you're comparing yourself to a Jew in the Holocaust. I mean, just stop for a half a second and realize how in bad taste that is. You know, as a general rule,

you should never do that. Never. You know, the only time that you are like a Jew in the Holocaust is if you happened to be a Jew during the Holocaust. There's really only one time. That's it.

That's it. There are lots of other experiences that people have throughout time in history, and some of them are terrible, quite terrible, but claim that as your own. Yeah. but claim that as your own. Yeah. At no time does anyone need to lay claim to the trials and tribulations of the Jews of the Holocaust in order to make their point.

There's never been a, have you ever heard a comparison where like, you know, that is actually fairly out. That is fair. You got me on that one. Yeah. When you had to wait for your fucking frappuccino, your mocha cookie crumble frappuccino

for an extra 17 minutes, you were basically like a Jew in a cattle car. Yeah, you were basically on your way to Auschwitz. Yeah, it's one time I got called into work on a day that I wasn't scheduled to work. And that's essentially the same thing as the slave labor at Dachau. That's essentially the same thing.

What? What do you hope to gain? The only thing that you're hoping to gain is to try to emotionally twist people's mind onto whether or not they should get the vaccine, right? That's all you're trying to do is emotionally change their mind because people have strong emotions

when it comes to the Holocaust. Although when it comes to Marjorie Taylor Greene, I think she's pro. I thought, I would imagine she would be pro rather than con. But, but the fact is, is that these are all emotional ploys.

It's an emotional way to get you to, to, to try to reconsider the proposition at hand. The problem is, is she's just so fucking stupid that nobody,

that you just, you have to look at her and say, there's no connection. You have no connection at all with this. It's not even the most tenuous of metaphors. It's not even close.

It's not. It's really not. There's also an intentional misuse of the word discrimination in here. So it's kind of like your point before, right? Where people are like, my body, my choice. They're using propaganda in their minds from the left, right? So by using the word discrimination, which is often the word used to cite things like racial biases,

biases against genders, people of LGBTQ, you know, but discriminating against people for their choices is not the same kind of discrimination. It is morally reprehensible to discriminate against people for their choices is not the same kind of discrimination. It is morally reprehensible to discriminate against people for who they are. That is not okay. It is morally advisable to discriminate against people based on what they do. We do that all the time. If somebody is a drunk driver and they lose their license, we discriminated against them. We took away a privilege that they had before because they performed an action which rendered the public less safe.

We discriminate against people based on their actions all the time. That's fine. There's nothing morally reprehensible. That's morally and socially advisable. But I think it's really intentional to use that terminology, right? Like they're being discriminated against because that idea or that word, that term has been used for such a long time in association with some of the most abhorrent kinds of prejudices and biases. Sure.

So it's a really intentional play on language. So this story comes from the Friendly Atheist blogs over at Patheos. This is our old friend Jim Buckets Baker. Bacher. Bacher. Yeah, two Ks in that one. And this is him doing a little creative rewriting of history, Cecil. Exactly, right?

This is like if Batman were a bad guy or something like one of those one of those alternative universes you know Jim Baker is trying to David Barton his way into a new

he's trying to into a new revisionist history exactly it's a revisionist history you know if you rewrite your own narrative is it a revisionist autobiography what an asshole this guy is If you rewrite your own narrative, is it a revisionist autobiography?

What an asshole this guy is. All right, let's listen to him. This is Jim on his show, Old People Sell You Buckets. My experience with cancel culture, they canceled me. How'd they do that jim it was a group of preachers really worked with it but mainly it was the media okay mainly it was the police you know mainly it was the feds bro mainly it was the feds and the irs you didn't get canceled by the media the media reported your arrest for fraud the media was an innocent bystander watching it happen they weren't involved in it are you a fucking fool the media did it yes the media's fault oh man stupid media rat me, saying I'm stealing from people. Fucking media.

When you steal a bunch of stuff and then you get caught, then you get canceled by the media. I don't think that's how canceled works. It's so stupid. And the media got a Pulitzer Prize for putting me in prison. They got a Pulitzer Prize for putting me in prison. They got a Pulitzer Prize? What are they? Was that the bounty on you, Jim? There was one Pulitzer?

You could go, yeah. And all the reporters in the fucking United States, like the Hunger Games, were running at you as fast as they could to drag you to jail so they could collect the bounty of one Pulitzer Prize. Also, like the journalists didn't put you in prison, Jim Baker. Like journalists don't put people in prison.

Journalists might do some journalist thing and find out some things that are true. But then the police investigate that and then they arrest you and then you go to trial it's the facts that put you in prison dude no it's the reality that you live in that puts you in prison it's not the fucking people who said this is the reality can you imagine like the wanted post is just jim baker's stupid fucking face like wanted dead or alive. Jim Baker. Wanted for. Make something up. Reward. One Pulitzer Prize.

Canceled. Tukunk. What I want to see is, I want to see the guy who brings him in. He takes the Pulitzer. He spins it around and puts it in a holster that the Pulitzer goes in on the side of his belt. He walks around. He's like two Pulitzer Sam or something. He's got

two Pulitzers. He spins around and then puts them back. Blows the smoke off one Pulitzer after he's done. There's just like two journalists. There's like a Pulitzer Prize in the middle of a dusty street. Two journalists roll up, each with a hand on their pen.

The tense music like later on, they're playing poker. And once, once Annie up his Pulitzer, the other one, I raised you to pull it. You go to the bar.

Hey, I want a bottle of that Pulitzer. Guy just takes a Pulitzer. Guy just takes a Pulitzer. He's drinking a Pulitzer. You go to pay with the Pulitzer and some guy with like three teeth bites it to make sure it's real Pulitzer. It's a whole old timey

western town that runs on Pulitzers. The whole thing. You go to the whorehouse and you can rent a Pulitzer for the night. We should switch to an entirely Pulitzer-based economy. Just that's it. The whole thing. You're right.

You're absolutely right. Put them in your car. Still better than Bitcoin. It's true. That's what they do. They reward the enemies of the gospel. I love that. I love that in Jim Baker's mind,

him stealing from people what didn't make him an enemy of the gospel. He's like, that's one of your rules, man. That's like number seven or whatever. Thou shalt not borrow without asking. And the canceled culture, we had the largest ministry

of its type in the world. Heritage USA, millions of people came there and it was millions being saved around the world. Look at how expensive that looks. Okay, so they're showing the interior of their church

and it looks like the Mall of America. Yeah, it's like mocked up to look like a main street in a quaint old town with like exterior facades lining a thoroughfare. It kind of looks like

a Hogwarts set. Yeah. It does. It does. It looks like a hogwarts set yeah it looks like it does it looks like jim baker's fake set like he loves these fake sets and this was another example of his fake set so weird and they literally took it away put it into bankruptcy said they were going to care for it it was all lies and it was a it was a takeover plan and it was done in front of the world and that was what cancel culture is no they you they took they they they literally took your shit because you weren't paying for your you stole all the money that's how this how works. You steal all the money,

then you don't have enough money to pay your bills, and then they take your shit back. That's not cancel culture. It's not cancel culture if I stop paying my mortgage and the bank floor closes on my house. I didn't get canceled.

I didn't pay back my loan, and they took my collateral, asshole. Also, Jim Baker, if I can hear you, you're not canceled, you fuck. Right. I mean, you're fucking broadcasting just as much as Tom and I are. You have the same media powers that Tom and I have or Joe Rogan or whoever. You literally have access to all these free platforms that everyone else now, because of the democratization of the creation of these products, has.

You have access the same way all the rest of us do. And you are broadcasting the exact same way that you are receiving this podcast. You're not fucking canceled, man. I love when people go on media to talk about how they got canceled. It's so stupid. It's so great. I'm going to write an article in the New York Times about the

time I got canceled. But again, it doesn't matter because all they want to do is just bang on those emotional centers of the people who they want to reach. They don't care if it's accurate. It doesn't have to be accurate. I got canceled. Oh, man, that's bullshit.

But if you think about it for 10 seconds, you say, no, you got arrested. That's different than being canceled. And you're not canceled, Jim. You basically have the same rights to everybody else's fucking media that everybody else does. Oh, okay. Well, that's not as good a story

to tell your dipshits who watch you every week. Yep. Public shaming is the definition. And Mondo, one of the biggest agencies... Oh, my God. They had a water park?

Could you get baptized, Tom, when you come down the slide? Can you... When you come down the slide, as you come down the slide, they stuff a wafer in your mouth and then they bless you and then... bless you.

That's like a fucking conveyor belt for baptisms, man. Look at that thing. It's the fucking fast track. Like you get on the top and it's like, do you reject Satan? Yeah, I reject Satan. Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? No! Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my gosh.

It looks like a great water park. I'm not going to lie though. It looks like fun. And if they did have a guy dressed like Jesus walk across the wave pool once in a while, that would be pretty awesome. He walks out

and he starts breaking up a loaf of bread throwing at some people. He's got one fish. He makes a bunch of other fish. The problem is about halfway through the day, he turns the whole fucking place into a wine park instead. The federal government produced video from my show video and edited it and put me in prison. They said they testified yeah they put you in prison with

edited fucking video not fucking doctored like fucking ledgers and shit right yeah they put you because they recorded you saying something and and they edited it that's how they got you in jail bullshit you fucking liar they fucking caught you stealing's how they got you in jail. Bullshit. You fucking liar. They fucking caught you stealing. They caught you stealing, you asshole. It was that video that made people believe, well, something must be wrong. They made me say things I didn't say. They just put pieces together.

Thousands of pieces of my show. And so when I went into trial for the last trial. I love to see a picture of jim bayer being like hello i have love satan and he's like moving his head around all weird where he's clearly edited and he's he's being edited to say he loves satan and he wants to you know i don't know take it in the butt from Satan. After prison, after I got out of prison, I was put on trial again. And in that, the lawyers got all that tape that the government had edited. The government did it. Just like now.

This is canceled culture. It's what? Hold on. It's canceled culture. He can't even say it. He like swallowed a bug. Hold on a second. cancel culture. He can't even say it. He like swallowed a bug. Hold on a second. He got canceled halfway through trying to say cancel culture.

Just like now. This is cancel culture. Culture. And they took it apart and put it back the way it was on the show. And the lies, they made me tell lies. Listen to him. Listen to him.

He looks like he's going to cry. The idea that Jim Baker could tell a lie, huh? That'd be strange, wouldn't it? Huh? Fucking Jim Baker, the infidel.

That'd be strange, wouldn't it? Fucking bucket salesman. The infidel is telling a lie. That'd be weird. I wonder what Tammy Faye thinks. You fucking tell a lie. I remember when they like tearfully stood in front of their congregation and fucking apologized. Yeah, because they stole a lot of money. Jim Baker came under investigation from the Federal Communications Commission for allegedly misusing funds

raised on the air the FCC report was finalized in 1982 and found that Jim Baker had raised $350,000 that he told viewers would go towards funding overseas missions but was actually used to pay for part of Heritage USA and that's the early investigation

and then a confidential 1985 IRS report found that 1.3 million in ministry funds were used for Baker's personal benefit for three years, 80 to 83. You stole money, dude. Yeah. You stole money.

And then he paid Jessica Hahn $279,000 after he fucked her. And he kept two sets of books. You're a fucking liar, dude. Like, Jesus, nobody's allowed to do the things you do unless you're Trump.

That's it. He's the only one that could get away with it. That's not cancel culture. That's you. That's you fucking, that's you fucking Jessica Hahn and getting caught

and tearfully screaming that you fucking, because there is a big blubbery. I'm so sorry. Yeah. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Fuck you. You're only sorry you got caught. When you were balls deep in Jessica Hahn, you didn't give a fuck. Nope. No. When you were stealing 1.3

million dollars for your own personal use, you didn't give a fuck. You didn't care. Like, that's not about a video somebody spliced together. You didn't go to jail for saying the wrong things. The FCC doesn't give a shit. They gave a shit what you said you were going to use the money for. You said you were going to use the money for ministry.

You used the money for yourself. They didn't splice together a fucking mansion for you. Unbelievable. And when the the courts heard this...

They returned all your money, Jim? Did they return all your money? They saw the first video, but the government had edited. And then they saw the one from the original. Did they exonerate you? Yeah. Did they exonerate you? Yeah. Did they overturn your previous conviction?

Yeah. Did they do any of that stuff? Did the Innocence Project come to knock on your door to make you the fucking poster child for their broker? Somebody get some DNA and find out it wasn't you that slept with Jessica Hahn? They voted unanimously that I wasn't guilty. Nobody knows these things. It was in the paper, the same papers

that brought me down, but it was like two inches in the back of the paper. Nah, two inches in the back, that's what Lori's used to. So we'd like to thank our patrons of course we want to thank all our patrons but we want to thank our newest patrons dr shapiro's dry ass p word so good so good bowl of this water felipe britney thomas art and cody and the people who upped their pledges Bowl of this water, Felipe, Brittany, Thomas, Art, and Cody, and the people who upped their pledges, Chris and Vindus. Vindus is spelled with three exclamation points,

so we got to say Vindus very loudly. Thank you so much for your generous support. We really do truly appreciate it. You guys are the ones that make Glory Hole Studios possible, and you allow us to employ two employees. So thank you so much for helping us be job creators. You know, and real quick also on a personal note, our patrons have helped out. And we've talked about this before, how important it is.

And Cecil and I have talked about, you know, the patronage and how important it is to us personally. Our family has used the money that we've raised from this show to help offset some real serious medical bills that we had this year. And I just wanted to say thank you for it. Because America's medical system and our insurance system is fucking broken. And if I didn't have you guys to help us out this year, and we had some medical issues in our family that were real, real fucking expensive.

And we needed a little bit of help. that were real, real fucking expensive. And we needed a little bit of help. And we were able to reach into the show thanks to the support of the patrons and make that happen without hurting my family. So I just wanted to say thank you for that because it really does matter. So we want to really read a little bit of email this week.

We got a message from Jay and Jay sent this in. And I don't remember where I mentioned this or if I mentioned it on the show and it didn't come through. I don't remember, I mentioned this or if I mentioned it on the show and it didn't come through. I don't remember, but there was a Kentucky dad sobbingly promises his daughter $2,000 not to get vaccinated. It's a Reddit thread.

We're going to post it on this week's show notes. I think the thread eventually gets taken down, but it still is there in archive form. So you can watch this TikTok where this dad just starts crying, asking his daughter not to get vaccinated and says they're going to die in six months or something. It's just insane that this guy believes. Good Lord. We got a message. This

is from David. And he was saying that he had some serious issues trying to get an appraisal because he wanted to, he was looking to get an appraisal, but he lives in a, in a black area and they wouldn't come to do it. They like canceled it last minute. And it, and that sucks when something like that happens last minute, real estate wise. And so there was some serious issues with that too. So we got a message. This is from Christian. Christian sent us a YouTube we're going to post. And this is the heavy metal Kenneth Copeland remix. We're going to post it on this week's show notes. And also he wanted us to give us a shout out to Jeremy who put him onto our podcast eight years ago.

Wow. Wow. Man, shout out Jeremy. Thank you. Thanks, Jeremy. You guys should all decide to put somebody onto the podcast. Yeah. Pick somebody you don't like. Pick somebody. Yeah. Pick somebody you don't mind losing as a friend and pick that person first. We got a message from Ian who says he lives in Russia and he wanted to send us a message and basically say, look, you guys are wrong about how, when you guys talk about Russia, we mentioned Russia last week when we were talking about

whether or not they were religious and a bunch of people had sent in messages and said that they're religious, that people are religious in Russia. You seem to dispute that. But Tom, you had an interesting point. Oh, yeah. The thing is that it doesn't matter if they're wrong because the perception is what is guiding American politicians. So if American politicians, that's the whole point. If American politicians are wrong about Russia, that doesn't matter, right? It still lets them weaponize their narrative of what Russia is. And that's all that matters.

What's true on the ground in Russia makes no fucking difference to some local right-wing nut job politician. Got a message from Joseph and Joseph sent this in and we're going to post on this week's show notes. It's a picture that is a little disturbing. So not safe for work, but you can check it out on this week little disturbing. So not safe for work.

But you can check it out on this week's show notes. Not safe for work because it essentially just freezes the Senate every time it's speaking to the smell. So then no work ever gets done. We got a message from Cheryl and Cheryl said, you know, Katie Porter is one of the few legislators in this country who hasn't lost touch. But I'm always left to wonder, if anything, what happens next? I mean, to what productive end do we have? Do any of our verbal floggings come? Because to the best of my

knowledge, nothing is ever of consequences ever happens to these executives of the companies they run. That is true. It's rare you'll see any kind of backlash there. But I will say this. Someone in the comment section for our last episode said they had believed the R&D myth. So if Katie changed one mind on our show, how many minds did she change

getting that play over and over and over again? And so the knowledge of understanding that it's happening is important to let people know. And so whether or not there's a bunch of people out there who just say, yeah, I knew that already.

And that's, you know, it's fine that you're beating their ass and it's fine that you have a mic drop moment, but it's not showing anything. It is showing somebody something. And so hopefully the more people that know it, the less chance they have to use that myth. And they just have to go with the real reality, which is we're just paying people a lot of money so that we can make a lot of money. That's it. We're not

really investing in R&D and we can't use that lie anymore. We get a message from Ashes and Ashes says, hey, I just want to let you know that there is a lot of funding that comes from pharmaceutical companies in the research for universities and such. And they say that it takes about a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market. And while that does feel like a lot of money, that's not a lot of money when you compare it to the rest of the salaries. Yeah. The dollars have to be taken in context to the whole. So these are, you know, if the company had $1.5 billion worth of expenses and they spent a billion dollars in R&D, that's a huge amount. But if they spend $300 billion on executive compensation and $1 billion on R&D, $1 billion

is not a lot of money. It's always relative. So that's going to wrap it up for this week. We are live streaming. Remember to come catch our live streams. Live streams happen at 9 p.m. Central Time on Twitch, on YouTube, on a bunch of other places.

We may get banned from YouTube because Ian put a picture of a dick on there this week. God damn it, Ian. Ian does not care about our YouTube status at all. But anyway, come check us out. Check out our live streams. Ian does not care about our YouTube status at all. But anyway, come check us out. Check out our live streams. People are having a lot of fun.

We are, there's a community that's starting around these that these people are really having a blast in the chat section. We can see it happening while Tom and I are talking.

Once in a while, I'll look over and they have their own conversation sometimes going on that's tangentially related to what we're talking about and they're having a blast. So if you want to go join the community, come hang out with us on Thursday nights. Lots of people come hang out and there's all different types of communities.

There's the gamer community that joins us from Twitch. There's Facebook, there's YouTube. So you can come in your own little place. YouTube, I think is the largest audience right now. But all of them seem to have enough people that you could start a conversation so come check it out 9pm central that is going to wrap it up though 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 double bubble toil and trouble pseudo-quasi-al quasi alternative acupunctuating pressurized stereogram pyramidal free energy healing, water downward spiral brain dead pan sales pitch, late night info docutainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death in towers, tarot cards, psychic healing,

crystal balls, bigfoot, yeti, aliens, churches, mosques and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, doublespeak, stigmata nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, 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

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