Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 588: Grief Zombie

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

Show Notes   BUY A BOOK!   A picture of nachos (for an unspecified reason)

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Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly. Today's show is brought to you by adamandeve.com. Go to adamandeve.com right now and you'll get 50% off just about any item. All you have to do is enter the code word GLORY, G-L-O-R-Y at checkout. L-O-R-Y at checkout. 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 and beyond this is cognitive dissonance every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. Go ahead and open the bottle, Cecil. Don't worry about it. The mics are live.

I did it quietly. Nobody fucking heard it. I heard it. Just keep going. I heard it in my heart. In Chicago and 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 at this episode 588 of Cognitive Dissonance. Got it right this time. Good for you. I did.

Was it wrong last time? It was wrong. I don't know if you heard Ian correct you not yet no oh yeah it was good too damn it Ian

yeah you know he's incompetent most of the time but he can add one to the prior number I don't think I've made a mistake in like a hundred episodes so like I've got like a 99%

huge exaggeration you've done multiple times in a hundred episodes really yeah man well I don't remember it yeah man and if I don't remember it it didn't happen it happened Cecil You got like a 99% exaggeration. You've done it multiple times in 100 episodes. Really? Yeah, man. Well, I don't remember it. Yeah, man. If I don't remember it, it didn't happen.

Yeah, man, it happened. Cecil. All right. Oh, I just remember the things that happened. I'm Cecil. No, I just look at the notes correctly. Well, they're not up on the board. Okay.

No excuses. That's all excuses. It is excuses. And I'm going to write this one down. I need these, see? So don't take this from me. It's all I have. The reason why you didn't find him is because he's in water.

You can't find somebody. Well, it was September 11th. This story comes from the Friendly Atheist blog over at Patheos. Psychic medium Thomas John fell for a trap created by a group of skeptics. So this is great and this is interesting because I kind of I don't watch like network TV or anything anymore

and I haven't for so long that when I read this I was like holy shit these guys are still around this is one of those like TV psychic medium dudes and I I thought holy shit man how fucking late 90s early 2000s are you seriously uh remember john edward or edwards i don't know who's edward or edwards one of them's

a politician but or as a spiritual medium or whatever he had the long island medium for a while on tv uh there's a bunch of people there's a show that I've seen where there's a woman who looks like 100% like she probably worked at Spencer's Gifts back in the day. She walks around a house now, and this is on those, so there's the ghost channel, which is, I think it's Travel Channel or maybe Discovery America or something it's called. But anyway, it's like a whole channel where there's literally ghost show after ghost show after ghost show. Jesus Christ. And one of them is this woman walks around the house and she teams up with this guy who's an old, I'm an old fucking detective over here. Honey, look at me. Are you serious?

I'm a fucking old detective. I'm the grizzled hard nosed. The grizzled old detective. He questions people about the house's past and she walks around and has a fucking LSD trip telling you what happened there. And she says, oh, I see a big scary guy choking a kid or whatever.

And then he finds out, oh, there was a big scary guy who choked a kid in that house. And then they meet up at the end to do their reveal where she has a fucking guy who fucking draws for her and draws the funniest

fucking pictures of shit she sees. It's the dumbest fucking show ever, but it exists, right? And it's all based on this Christian mythology. It's all, all of it's so deeply entrenched in evangelical and Christian mythology. It's all, the only thing that can save you is Jesus. You need to get the house blessed.

There's never, they never turn around and be like, hey man, you know what you need to do? You need to go find some ancient Tibetan fucking monk and do, no, it's hey man you know what you need to do you need to go find some ancient tibetan fucking monk and deuce no it's never you know i got the knife or whatever from uh golden child or anything like that it's 100 christian mythology you have to wonder like in their minds how did these problems get solved 2050 years ago right like what was like what was there just no answers like i don't know jesus hasn't swung by yet, so it's just full of ghosts. The only thing we can do is send them into pigs. That's all we can do.

Actually, they can't even do that because that's what Jesus did. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So. Like, humanities existed for, even by, even by creationist idiotic standards, humanities existed for 6,000 years. And for 4,000 of them, they just had no answer.

They just fucking twiddled their thumbs. They just, I don't know,000 years. And for 4,000, they just had no answer. Fucking twiddle their thumbs. They just, I don't know, they're just ghosts. Aunt fucking Sally being possessed every third day or whatever. How crowded would the world be

if you believed in this ghost bullshit? It's such a stupid- Ghost bullshit is the dumbest bullshit. It's the dumbest bullshit. Seriously, there are 7 billion

living people on the planet. People are dying all the time. You have the entire history of the human population which has died. And they just go back like about a hundred years, you know, right? Oh, there's ghosts from times we have records for. Exactly.

It's never, I'm talking to somebody who literally, and it's also, they're talking to them too. That's the other thing. They speak the same language. Always speak the same language. Remember when Ramtha was channeling a fucking oh something from 50 000 years ago atlantis or whatever and you're just thinking what the fuck how the fuck do you speak the same fucking language and that's the same thing maybe they both learned dolphin it's all squeaks

but anyway uh this it's always the same language. There's no language barrier. And it's also the most boring fucking idea of what the afterlife is in the history. I mean, of all the things, the, the atheist version, when you're just done and you're done and that's it is so much superior to,

I have to sit in this dumb fucking house forever. Yeah. Right. I get to be like a, atransparent, only visible on film orb that might be able to roll a pencil if I tried really hard. Like if I'm a ghost and I work out like the fucking rock, I can knock over a candelabra during a thunderstorm. Once in a while you pull a book out of a bookcase. But it's so funny because their idea is that these ghosts just inhabit these places

and they just stay there. But then they're also kind of on loop. So they're just like this. Yes. They're like this idea where they always come back and oh,

they always recreate the death or they always come in this room and they sit and get real sad on the bed or whatever. And it's always the same thing over and over and over. It's so fucking dumb. It's such a silly, dumb idea of how the universe works. That your consciousness stays around

and then is stuck on fucking like back masking for the rest of eternity. It's like stupid. It's really- You gotta like, like some living person has to then release them back into the wild of the afterlife or whatever. Or shake them up once in a while and say, oh, do you still love your husband?

Of course they fucking still love him. What the fuck? What kind of dumb question is that? And this story is essentially the same thing. It's this guy praying off of, and this is, they use this word, this term in here called grief vampire. Yeah. And it's great, right?

And it's really so true because they pray off of these people who literally all they want in the world is to connect with this thing that they loved, whether it's a dog or a person or whatever, but it's gone. And it's only available in their memory and they want to connect to it. And they just want to reach out to it. And they just want to want it to, they just want to touch it just for a second. Right. And these people provide this bullshit for a fee and they fucking bilk people who genuinely just love something and want to love it more. Yeah. And they are not letting these people do the work that's necessary to fucking move on. You know, grief

counseling is an effective way to manage your life after a tragic loss, right? But fucking psychic mediums are not. Psychic mediums are a way to hold on to something and to never fucking, because I will tell you, like, if my wife died and I thought I could talk to her, I would never want to stop talking to her. I would never, ever, not one day, I'd save up all of my money and spend it as soon as paycheck to paycheck to try to always maintain that connection. And every moment I didn't have that connection, all that would be on my mind is how to get that back. And they fucking know it, right? It's a recurring business. And in this example, it's like they're, he's supposedly talking to kids.

Yeah. Kids, people who are even, like their fucking brains aren't even fully developed. Their ability to reason is not there yet, right? They are, kids are the easy, it's like going after

fucking dementia patients, right? Seriously, it's stealing candy from a baby, man. You can't have a more vulnerable population. It is, and it's easy. Yeah. it's stealing candy from a baby. You can't have a more vulnerable population. It is. And it's easy. Yeah. It's easy. How much how much of a tragedy is it when a when a kid loses a fucking parent? Right. They're losing not just someone they love, but they're losing the person that provides them with everything. They're losing their entire world. A guiding

figure, someone who they look to for mentorship in the world. Right. And so to prey on that, to prey on that and to try to, it's so fucking crass. It's fucking vile. Holy shit. Vile as fuck. And to be that person and to look yourself in the mirror every day and be like, I'm doing good work. And you know you're fucking lying to these people.

mirror every day and be like i'm doing good work and you know you're fucking lying these people in this in this story they talk about how this guy um this guy his name is thomas john he used to have a show where he was a cabbie where he was a psychic medium cabbie right and he would drive around and he would talk to these people in the back seat and he would tell them about their life but what they don't tell you and when these people in the back seat and he would tell them about their life. But what they don't tell you. And when these people in fucking actually did the investigative journalism to find out, they fucking talk to the station. The station's like,

yeah, they filled out a bunch of stuff. A lot of those people were actors. They were just, it's just a fucking act. It's just, it's a fucking lie, man.

It's made for TV. They're fucking lying to you, making you think that this shit is real. Cause they want you to fucking watch it. Cause if you knew it was fake, they wouldn't, you wouldn't fucking watch it it so they're lying to you every week and they're saying it's reality television right and there's there's nothing real about it's as scripted as fucking anything scripted as fuck right or they just added it down into the one part timer the two

or three times that he that a medium a fucking cold reader can fucking once in a while get a little hot right they fucking once in a while pick something little hot, right? They fucking once in a while pick something. And that's the thing that every, you know, cold readers do without editing, right? So a cold reader will walk into a room and they'll do that shit without editing because they'll make you remember and they'll remind you of the times that they were right. And they'll emphasize those times and they will move past all the misses as quickly as possible. And you generally, when you hear this, you might walk out of the room and think there was no misses

or there was a few misses, but you know, they were just, it was just trying to get them in the right ballpark. That, you know, they make these misses seem like they're hits. Yeah, they make it seem like they're narrowing a funnel. It's amazing. But what they're doing is starting with

the most general information and then they're seeing how you respond. And then they narrow the funnel and they narrow the funnel, they narrow the funnel. And now their funnel and they narrow the funnel and now their precision is confused with the size of the funnel. It's fucking nonsense. I love

this story because the skeptics were like, alright, great. We're going to take like six kids and three of them will be ours. They'll be plants. And then we're going to feed your producers this bullshit information. And just in case, because I want to be really clear,

and you made this point, but I just want to emphasize it. These guys fucking know they're lying, right? This is not a case where somebody has fooled themselves into thinking that they're psychic, right? I think that that happens, Cecil. I think there are some people

who are naturally good at reading other people. They learn the skills of cold reading sort of- Without knowing that they did it. So they're not sure and people respond and they get the feedback, the positive feedback of that call and response. I think you're right too. This is not that case.

But I also think that anybody who makes it really big knows they're lying. I think anybody who makes it really big knows they're lying. Anybody who makes it big enough to be on a television show knows they're lying. I couldn't agree more. I can't, you can't look me in the face and say they don't know they're lying. Anybody who makes it big enough to be on a television show knows they're lying. I couldn't agree more. I can't, you can't look me in the face

and say they don't know they're lying. I more meant like, like your uncle Phil or even the psychic down the road. The chick you met at Lollapalooza who fucking did your tarot cards. That guy, that gal,

those people, they believe themselves. Yes. But there is a level at which you start to make money off this and start to really and especially you start to grift bro start to grift and the grift is easy to see and they fed they basically fed this producer because these people go out and find out about you that's how they know your fucking dad died man it's because it's fucking easy to

find out public record so they find out and they don't tell us how they did it which is great because i want them to keep busting these people yes this story. They go out of their way to say, we're not going to tell you exactly how we fucking fed this producer because we're going to use it in the future. And you're like, fucking great. Keep doing it over and over. It never going to cause, it's never going to cause a dent, but at least there's going to be something you can point to when your family member comes to you and says, have you seen this guy? Yep. Yep. And the thing is like, if you are tempted to say that's mean, just remember if it wasn't a, if it's, if it's not a scam, it wouldn't work. Yeah.

It wouldn't work. It would not work if it wasn't a scam. You'd be like, wait, why are you telling me all this shit? Yeah. What the fuck? Like, I don't need to, I don't, don't tell it. Like if it wasn't a scam, it could not work. Yeah. This only works. You can only get played when you are getting caught playing other people. If it wasn't a scam, he would walk in and say, you are here to trick me. Right. He would know that they're there to trick me

instead of being willingly to take, he's willing to take hundreds of dollars from children and their parents for a Zoom consult call to talk to their dead parents. And there's a picture of this Zoom. So gross. There's a picture of this Zoom call that's in this article.

That is, this guy is on the upper right. Now they call him grief vampires. That guy looks like a grief zombie to me. He does not look like a grief vampire. He looks like the guy who's in the middle of eating another human being when you kick the door open in the zombie movie. And he just turns like, and his guts all like another mouth or something.

Like that's what he looks like. You know how you know he's not really a vampire. Every vampire is sexy. Yeah. There's nothing sexy about, this guy looks like a grief sloth. That's what he does. He is, he is, you know,

he looks like a guy who just, and I know these, I know, I fucking know that Zoom calls are a series of pictures, right? So this is, they clearly chose this bad still. I don't know, but genuinely from this still, could you imagine? This guy looks like fucking, he looks like fucking Eeyore the

Psycho, you know? It just looks so, it looks terrible, but this guy is, he's essentially stealing from children. He's stealing, you know, he's stealing from their parents, but he's stealing from children. He's trying to convince these children that their parents are talking to him. And you know, they're, they're going to ask the same questions that everybody wants to know. Like, how's dad doing? Does he still love me? Does he still remember me? You know, like all this stuff. It's so sad and it's

such, it's so predatory. It's incredible. And I can't love it enough when these people get fucking found out. I can't love it enough. It's like just the tiniest bit of justice makes this worthwhile. The thing is like when these guys get found out, they should go to jail.

Yeah. It's fraud. It's fraud. It's fucking fraud. You're absolutely right. And it makes me fucking crazy that they don't go to jail. Yeah. It's fraud. It's fraud. It's fucking fraud. You're absolutely right. And it makes me fucking crazy that they don't go to jail. Yeah. And I will say, one thing that we need to do is we need to start paying these people their psychic bullshit fees. We need to start paying these people by wire transfer because then it can be wire fraud,

right? Yeah. And the government gets people on wire fraud all the time. If you accept money via electronic transfer for fraudulent purposes, they don't have to get you on the fraud that you committed prior to that. They can get you on the wire fraud. So we need to bust these people and pay them electronically. And then fucking show up on their door with some fucking handcuffs

and put these motherfucking hucksters and charlatans and thieves and fraudsters in jail. Think about the emotional fucking damage this would do to a kid. Yeah. Fuck them up forever. Yeah. I talked to my dad and they said this thing and now I can never, you know, like...

I can never let go. Right. I can never move past my dad not being here. Wouldn't you always be looking for that next psychic who could put you in touch with your fucking mom or dad? Fucking A, man. Fucking A. Because I would. 100%. 100%. Yeah. Once in a while, I'll have dreams about my mom or crazily about a cat that died. I'll have a dream where they're alive and I'm able to be with them and touch them or whatever. And it's, when I wake up, I'm always like, fuck, I got to grieve a little bit again. Right.

Right. I got to grieve again. I got to grieve a little bit again. And that's just my stupid brain telling me that I, you know. Yeah, that you were connected from them. That I was connected to them. Right. That's my stupid brain being like,

hey, while you're sleeping, I did this thing. Yeah. I hope you like it. Oh, you don't? Because now you got to grieve when you wake up. But seriously. I'm a cruel, cruel dream. But seriously though, like, there was one recently

where I was with my mom and I'm not going to tell you the substance of the dream, but I remember hugging her in the dream, right? And then I wake up and I'm like, fuck, my mom's dead. And my mom's been dead for years. And it's like, it's another wound. Can you imagine having that conversation with somebody that, you know,

mom's still, you know, able to talk to you and you're just like, fuck that you know mom's still you know able to talk to you and you're just like fuck mom mom's still able to talk to me but she's lonely right but she's lonely now she can't talk to me all the time she can only talk to me when i pay this guy yeah you know like like what does that do to you dude it would feel like having incredibly intermittent access to a phone yeah that you could could reach out and call the person you love and miss the most. Yeah. And to hand that to somebody who's in the middle of forming their ideas about who they are. Oh, God.

And then doing that to a kid. Ugh. It's so fucking mean. It's ghoulish. We got to put these guys in jail. You have to do it. You have to do it. Because nothing else is going to stop this shit. And it goes on,

it goes on all the time, and there's no protections against it. None. None. There's been people who've long suspected that there was some sort of an interface, yet to be defined, an interface, between what's being injected in these shots and all of the 5G towers. Sister, it comes from 4WWL,

and it looks like it's CBS, maybe, affiliate, or ABC affiliate. It's in New Orleans, I guess. Out of New Orleans. So, I'm from 4WWL, and it looks like it's CBS maybe affiliate or ABC affiliate. It's in New Orleans, I guess. Out of New Orleans. So, I'm in God's hands. People give their reasons for and against getting the vaccine. And I actually just wanted to read, Cecil, some of what the people said. The against?

Yeah. So, let me get to that. These are just some quotes people had for why they chose not to get the vaccine. I'm very health conscious, one woman said. Again, I believe in holistic health and it's natural. I live my life through the grace of God. That's who put me on this earth. I read that and I grabbed this story, Cecil, because that's everything wrong with a supernatural worldview. Right, exactly. Yeah. This person, and I want to give this person some credit, they're health conscious. And I've met people like this, and they think

about their health, and they make constant decisions about their health and about their body and about what they put in their body. And the problem is that they've never been given the tools to make good decisions and to weed out good information from bad information, right? So they are people that are by and large, people who would espouse these views. My experience, there are people who really are actually concerned with their health and they are well read in the same way that the,

that the limo driver in demon heart chapter one as well. Right. But they're read up on a whole bunch of, you know, twigs and berries and bullshit yeah and crystals and you know psychic healing crystal balls like it's just a bunch of fucking bullshit right right right you know and then they just fucking put the cherry on top of the sundae with the i'm in god's hands yeah and you read that and you're like fuck you're in delta's hands yeah

yeah that's whose hands you're in now. You're in fucking Delta's hands. Yeah, and I just want to applaud the people who've been naming these variants for ruining business after business. You know what I mean? Like, first it's Corona, now it's Delta. Right. They're just keep on, and don't get me wrong,

Delta can burn in a lake of fire. I mean, it's the worst. Oh, I was thinking about the faucet company. I was saying, I didn't even think about the airplane company. I was thinking about like a Delta, turn on the Corona faucet. Yeah.

So, but there's a bunch of other quotes in here and they're all just really, you know, one of them says, I'm more concerned about the infertility and other issues that can come along down the road. I feel like you should be able to choose if you want can come along down the road. I feel like you should be able to choose if you want to get it. And I don't feel like it should be shoved down our throats. We have a real problem in this country with balancing freedom and safety.

We do it all the time. We fuck it up all the time. Guns is a perfect example of us terribly balancing freedom and safety. We do this a lot in this country. Personal freedoms outweigh public safety. They just do very often in our country. And that's how it works. And this is a perfect example of personal freedoms outweighing public safety yet again. There's nothing in this. Like thing is, what they don't get and what they don't, since they don't understand the science, they seem to think literally anything can happen from the vaccine entering them. They don't understand that the scientists know what's going in you and what can happen. And there's people that talk about how it's going to change your DNA. They don't

understand how things work. There's people talking about infertility. Again, they don't understand how things work. They don't understand how any of this stuff is affecting you. What they think is anything I can think up is what can happen to me. Right, yeah. And so they are scaring themselves into not getting this thing. The outcome of you getting the vaccine

could maybe have some long-term side effect. There's a possibility, right? We don't know. Hasn't been around that long, so it's possible. Very slim chance. Tiny, minuscule chance. There has been some side effects from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, for instance. In the

most minute, tiny amounts, there's been like six people in a million have had a problem with it. So yeah, absolutely. But the chances, not just of COVID, has sort of went through our country a little bit. And people have been like, man, I survived this long. What's the big deal? Delta is another thing. It may as well be a new disease. It's another thing. It is the viral loads, a lot larger people that are vaccinated,

are able to get it. And the problem is, is that we are in this position now where Delta, where Corona has gone through these places and these people feel like I'm fine. I got, I shook a bunch of hands last year. I'm fine. And so now Delta is coming through and it's hitting all these rural places that people were far enough away from each other before where it really didn't matter. But now you look at all these rural places are getting fucking raging hotspots and the places that are vaccinated still are, they're peaking, they're going up, but they're not having the same kind of death rate that some of these other places are because this stuff is absolutely, it's just killer. Yeah. Delta, I mean, I was listening to something today. I was listening to a news story today and a respiratory disease specialist said, this might be the most contagious respiratory disease

on the planet. We don't know the R naught number for Delta, but it's not what the Wuhan strain was, man. It's vastly, vastly higher. They're looking at with Delta, a thousand fold increase in the amount of virus replicating and available in the nose and in the throat and in the mouth. One of the reasons I was listening to a thing, like one of the, they were saying,

one of the reasons that people do get sometimes breakthrough infections, even if they're vaccinated, where they do get sick even, is because it replicates faster than your body recognizes it. It's a big fucking deal. Yeah, man. And to be like, yeah, I'm going to put my fucking faith in God's hands. If you get the vaccine, you might still get sick. Well, you know what? Getting a vaccine for measles

doesn't mean that you will not get measles and reproduce measles and shed measles. What the vaccine against measles does is similar, actually, although it's better because measles is actually less terrible. Less terrible. Delta. But it's possible to have measles, but you just don't know it. Yeah. Right? And if everybody is vaccinated against measles in a population, and I catch measles, but I don't know it because I don't get sick from it,

and then I pass it to you, but you know what? You're vaccinated too, and you don't get sick from it, then no harm, no foul. The problem is then when it moves to that person who's unvaccinated. That's where it runs into a fucking problem. That's where we need the fucking herd immunity situation. And the vaccines for the kids aren't here yet. No, 20% of our population is ineligible for the vaccine by age right now.

One in five, 20% of our population is ineligible for the fucking vaccine right now. And they're going back to school in two weeks. Yeah. At least in our area. Yeah. They go back to school mid-August. And holy shit. Yeah. And there are people, well, it's in God's hands. Yeah. The kids are going They go back to school mid-August and holy shit. Yeah.

And there are people, well, it's in God's hands. Yeah. The kids are going to go back to school. They're going to fucking catch this thing. They're going to,

maybe they get sick, maybe they don't, but they'll fucking spread that shit. Yeah. And they have parents at home. There's no reason to think they won't. And they probably have, some of them have

unvaccinated parents at home. And grandparents and immune compromised friends of their parents. And like, the idea that we're just putting this in God's hands. Well, and then God doesn't give a shit or he wouldn't have given us Delta. And then we're just, we're at this point now where we're just, we're just saying, well,

I'm done with it. It's like, okay, well, cool. You're done with it. That's great. But like, like it's not done with us. If you think God cares about, think about your God for a minute. I really, I do want to point this out. Think about your fucking God. If you're like, about, think about your God for a minute. I really, I do want to point this out. Think about your fucking God. If you're like, I'll put that in God's hands. God doesn't give a shit about 600,000 people that already died. God doesn't give a shit about 4 million people in India. God doesn't give a shit about so many.

Why would he give a shit about you? What fucking evidence do you have that your God wants to look after you special? What makes you so special? Right? Yep, yeah. Get the fuck out of here. And there's another story, nearly one quarter of white evangelicals

refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine. You know, the way this thing is tearing through these communities, and, you know, there's gonna be a lot of deaths, I think, from this. I think so. It's starting out. It's, you know, we're at right now where we were in October. Yep. starting out. We're at right now where we were in October.

We're at right now where we were in October and it's going to start getting worse. And the winter was terrible. And this is the middle of summer. And there's no white night coming this time. That's the big deal. Last time, case counts were a quarter million a day, but the white night of vaccination, we went from nothing to something. It's the worst because we could stop this and we could have stopped this a while ago if we had enough vaccinations and there wasn't people that were just kept turning this

into a new mutation. Yep. We could have easily done it. And there's no reason to think that Delta's the last mutation, right? No, absolutely not. There's already Lambda here. Yeah, yeah.

So you've got to do your part. Nearly a quarter of white evangelicals are not getting this. This is going to devastate those communities. And I do wonder what their response will be. I wonder if there will be a reckoning, a moment of great realization if the death count is high enough. And I hope that there is. At this point, my optimism that we will just suddenly snap our fingers and do the right thing and vaccination rates will just climb on their own is evaporated. That's gone, right? So my hope, honestly, is that this targets populations that have made, targets is the wrong word, but this affects disproportionately populations that have made bad choices. And I hope this

causes a reckoning, an internal reconsideration of the way that they've come to understand the reality. Yes, yes. Yeah, well, Christian, that's what we're about. I consider us like that. I said it before, like the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. I do consider us that. We're technically the same thing. We are just like they are hot fighting. I said it before, they're fighting a holy war. We're fighting a holy war for Christianity, for our race and for our people. That's what we're fighting for. This story comes from Axios.com. DC officer, it was clear the terrorists perceived themselves to be Christian. So this comes from. Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges, who testified on Tuesday for the House Select Committee

on the January 6th terrorist attack on our Capitol. And I want to read some of the things that he said. The sea of people was punctuated throughout by flags, mostly variations of American flags and Trump flags. There was Gadsden flags. It was clear the terrorists perceived themselves to be Christian. I saw the Christian flag directly to my front, and another had, Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.

Another, Jesus is king. It is not possible and not useful and we shouldn't try to pull apart the white nationalist movement from the christian nationalist movement right they are one in the same you're right um they are seeking i think to maintain their hold on American political power and American economic power. They know they're losing it day by day. All the data points this way. The feeling points this way. And their backlash against that, it's Trump. What did Trump speak to? People said like Trump spoke to the, you know, to the Rust Belt worker who was ignored. Trump spoke directly to white people who felt aggrieved at losing their sense of privilege

in this country. 100%, 100%. It's a 100% reaction to an Obama presidency. There's no way you can look at those 12 years in conjunction and think anything else. and and and the the way that they came in and the way that they changed things around and the and the the vitriol they had for president obama coming in and how much they wanted to change what he did just to just to make themselves feel like i showed that uppity you know what i mean that's what i did

that's what i did and there's and there was a glee in which they did that there was a glee in which they they they moved forward with that and so this is and this and you're right it's 100 white evangelical that's what it is it's a white christian and that is and that is what permeates this group. And when you think about it, there's a lot of religious arguments back in the day for slavery, right? There was a lot of religious arguments back in the day for segregation. I mean, there's religious arguments in the Bible for slavery. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That goes back. That goes back. That's OG. Absolutely. Yeah. That's the fucking prelude right there. But seriously, I'm talking about in this country, many people used religious arguments to continue the acts of slavery

and to fight against the abolitionist movement. The entire Jim Crow era, the failures that happened through the Reconstruction era, the fight against the civil rights movement was in large part aided by people who purposefully read the Bible in such a way as to give themselves justification for their pre-existing racism. 100% what it is. And I am happy that this guy spent his time talking about terrorists. I'm glad he spent his time saying the word terrorist over and over and over and over again. That's what they are. And you watch these fucking liars

on television. Laura Ingraham was one of them. I don't know if you saw her this week where she was basically saying, oh, and the award for best acting goes to when she was talking to oh my god talking about these guys fuck that i hate that woman this is a woman who you know while it's while it's people she don't like getting getting beat up by the police is a hundred percent behind you know and when it's people that she that she identifies with that fuck the police she's a fuck the and when it's people that she identifies with,

fuck the police. She's a fuck the police when it's people that she identifies with. Man, all these fucking people are like this. And this guy, Chris Hodges, he says, inexplicably, these guys were carrying, you know, the fucking blue line flag. The thin blue line flag. Yeah.

At the same time that they were attacking the police. There's no internal consistency. This is not, and it never was about a sense of ideals or policies. This is about the maintenance of power at any cost. Anti-Black Lives Matter is a racist.

That's what it is. It's about racism. It's always about racism. It's always trying to attack the movement because it has black people in it. Man, I sent you a story earlier this week that like, or maybe it was even last week, but I mean, I read it Cecil and I was fucking seething. And I was seething because it was an examination of the various excuses, I guess, that were being given about why the January 6th terrorists did what they did.

And they came up with every fucking thing in the book. Oh, it was the first time they ever did something. And they were caught up in a moment. And they were a good family man and all this stuff. And I read it and my fucking blood was boiling because those same motherfuckers, those exact same motherfuckers who were like, look, my guy shouldn't be judged on the actions of his worst day. The fuck you think they think that about George Floyd? You think they say the same thing about Trayvon Martin? You think they said the same thing about however many that, name the fucking person of color that was fucking murdered in this country or thrown into jail unjustly.

And they fucking besmirch those people. They find everything they can. They find, they dig up everything they can. They had a fucking, they, they, they took their dog off a lead in a park once. And that'll come up on Twitter. These guys look so favorably on their own in group, right? And now, Oh, don't judge me on my worst day. You know, that's the justice system. The justice system judges you. It's not like you go to the judge and say, today I didn't break any laws, judge. Okay, well,

that's one merit in your good point. When you get a hundred of these, you can break a minor law. When you get a thousand of them, you can break it. You get a free felony at the fucking felony bank. That's not how it works. Yeah, no, if you're white, you get a free felony. No the fucking felony bank yeah that's not how it works yeah no you're if you're white you get a free felony right yeah no shit right it is actually how it works you know but that's that's kind of the fucking bullshit and it is such a fucking transparent double standard i read it i was like i can't fucking believe what i'm reading but it's

always it's a constant bit of hypocrisy right and i'm glad that someone's, I mean, even though it's making the far right livid and they're upset now, but, you know, in the future, when they're crying crocodile tears because we're out there protesting and they're crying crocodile tears because somebody marched and the police got in the way and they got pushed back

or whatever, and they're going to cry crocodile tears, you're a bullshitter. Bullshit. You're a fucking liar. Absolute bullshit. You're a liar. Guys, I had an idea. let's do something fancy you deserve the best so let's do a microphone shootout let's go let's determine once and for all which mic is the best mic for savings an sm7b when you go to adamandeve.com and use code GLORY, you'll get 50% off almost any one item. Let's move on to a U87. And you get six free spicy movies. An RCA44. And when you do, you get a free gift for you, a free gift for them, and a free gift you'll both enjoy. and a free gift you'll both enjoy.

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Paul your time has expired and I will allow witnesses who come before this committee to respond and you are implying that what we did was responsible for the deaths of individual i totally resent that and if anybody is lying here senator it is you this story comes from right wing watch we haven't had dave coach doc coach not a coach daubenmeyer on the show in a long time but he's saying that dr fauci is an emissary of the devil sent to destroy Christians. Huh. So I actually, Cecil, before you read this, I want to give people a little bit of background because there's something in this article that I didn't know about Dave. So Dave is evidently a big believer in something called the Book of Giants,

which is an apocryphal biblical book supposedly written by Prophet Enoch that purports to explain why God had to destroy the earth with Noah's flood. According to the book of Giants, angels in rebellion against God had mated with human women, creating a race of giants known as the Nephilim, who were so wicked that God had no choice but to destroy the world.

Caliente. This is a guy who believes in the historical existence of a race of half human, half angel, evil giants. The Nephilim. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I have a Pornhub page dedicated to the Nephilim.

Okay, we all do, but we don't. I mean, it's fantasy. By the way, send Ian your links to Nephilim sex. I'm sure he'll want them. Absolutely. That's Ian at D to Nephilim Sex. I'm sure he'll want them. Absolutely. That's ian at dissonancepod.com. Just, you know, fan arts appreciated. Yeah, he loves Angel Nephilim Sex.

He's a huge fan. You know, your fan fiction of it. If you want to narrate it, sound effects included. He'll love it. Yeah, so, yeah, that's... I just wanted to read how crazy that is. Here's the thing, though. How much crazier is that than the regular bible because it's not i i know because it's not because

there's like a fucking snake that's like hey bro you want an apple i mean there's a talking donkey that is fucking pigs and fucking going crazy there's there's locusts with armor there's there's you got me you got me with more horns than heads. The Bible is just- Less horns than heads, sorry. Yeah. They're not enough horns. They didn't go to the horn store. You got it. They go, yeah, just like a bee with a sword or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. It's a fucking tiny armored locust. Absolutely. 100%. Holy shit. I mean, the Bible is fucking bonkers. But then when you're like, man, you know, the Bible, it's crazy. Yeah.

But I'll take the thing that got kicked out of the bible there's there's some stuff that's that's apocryphal that they've they've from old timey times where you think okay so there's a bunch of fucking old bearded dudes being like that's just too crazy right that's what i mean it's like that's just too crazy sorry we can't that's a bridge too far make them curse a fig tree we can't have the hot women fucking angels like what the fuck kind of story is that oh god

you know there's some old monk though drawing pictures of that dirty pictures of that that's where it all started alright so what if I was really big like

what if I had a giant I will say giantess porn seems like something that would be pretty cool you know giantess porn remember when

Heath was talking about this I remember that where he was talking about this? I remember that! I think they do forced perspective to make it look like the women are bigger than the guys. I remember watching a documentary about bespoke porn. It was really funny. It was like,

there's a whole thing where people hire a porn actress or actor or whatever it is you taste, and they're like, I want this very specific like bespoke porn right and so like one of the things that this person paid for was giant so this person they forced perspective like

a whole village and somebody like stomped around on the village like Godzilla I love it I love it that's somebody who's like jerking off to Mothra and is like that's my jam that's someone whose pants are on their ankles and they're having a good time. Right.

They got a big smile on their face. You know what I mean? They're having a ball. They might have to. You know, who knows? Go to adamandeve.com and you can have a ball. Get your giantess board.

Get your giantess board. You get your jollies off. Do what you want with your balls at adamandeve.com at our Gloria checkout. Gloria checkout. All right. So I'm going to play Dave.

This is Dave just fucking fuming about giants. So here we go. And it's not the San Francisco Giants. It's different giants. Here we go. Friends, as it was in the day of Noah. Why did he start so weird? Friends! Friends!

Friends! He starts so weird. Hold on, I gotta go back. It just sounds so weird hold on i gotta go back it just sounds so weird friends as it was in the day of anoa so shall it be the coming of son of man and if dr sherry tim penny was here what she why would she tell us that this jab is mixing and melting and working and screwing up your DNA. Wait a minute. All righty, Cecil. It's melting my DNA. It's melting your DNA, Tom.

Like the fucking RoboCop guy in the fucking Toxic Slush. Like a hot day in an ice cream cone. Sure. I don't know. I don't know exactly what. It could be melted cheese, like on a quesadilla or a tostada. I want a quesadilla. Right?stada. I want a quesadilla. Sounds good.

It does sound good. Melty. Melty cheese on like a good pizza. Not a New York style one, but a good pizza. A good pizza. No, I got you. Yeah, we already knew where to exclude immediately. In Detroit.

Melty. Melty could mean a lot of things. Melty DNA. Yeah. Melty DNA. I think that's good. One time I want to ask one of these people, like, tell me what you think DNA is. I fucking want to just put them. want to ask one of these people tell me what you think DNA is

I fucking want to just put them I want to put them on what you think DNA is I just want them to be in a room without a phone

right and just look them in the face and tell me what DNA is I want to do the same thing with the people who have objections to vaccines

be in a room without a phone be in a room without another person you can look to just look me in the face and be like what is wrong

what's wrong with the vaccine what do you think the vaccine's going to do to you? What do you think? Because you know they're going to say some crazy shit. Right. You know that you're in for a fucking ride. Yep. What do you think messenger RNA does?

Yeah. What do you think that is? Yeah. Do you know what RNA stands for? Yeah. No? Yeah. Maybe you ought to reconsider your vehemently held position.

Well, and this is one of the things that they do, and they do it in their Bible all the time, where they pick and choose, right? Right. So they'll find something that they know that they can use as a weapon to try to convince you. Right. It's a rhetorical device to try to say something quickly to make it sound like they know what they're talking about, right? I know what I'm talking about. I'm going to be forceful and say what I'm going to use technical terms, even though DNA is a fucking ridiculously untechnical term. At this point, it should be. But, you know, he's going to try to say things that make you think that he knows what he's talking about. And then he's going to try to convince you otherwise. I remember getting

into a conversation about somebody who didn't want to have the vaccine. And they said, well, yeah, it's for experimental use only or for emergency use only. And they thought that that was the thing that got them to discard it. To say, well, I'm not going to use it because it's emergency use. Of course. Why would I use it if it's emergency use? And my reaction to that should be, well, yeah, of course. I mean, yeah, it's emergency use.

Oh, yeah, emergency use. Well, who wants emergency yeah emergency i would only use that in the middle of an emergency if the vaccine doesn't come a little hammer behind glass why on earth would i use it also people are dying 600 000 people are dying that's not an emergency same thing that was going on before the hold on did somebody just fucking somebody boomed him like he just dropped a truth bomb on us melting and working and screwing up your

DNA the same thing that was going on somebody boomed him who's got an off screen boomer he's got an off screen like somebody who's on the side like Triple H doing the thing where they go right around their groin. Oh, the crotch shot.

The karate chop to their groin. Yeah. Boom. Crotch shot. Just totally 100%. Before the days of Noah, the exact same thing. And as it was in the days of Noah,

so shall it be the coming of the Son of Man. What could that even mean? He's so mad about it. They always, there's so many innuendos in the coming of the son of man. There's no other way to say that. There's no other way to say the coming of the son of man. You know, and I hope not. They constantly do this where I always, I always think, are there people in that audience

that are like, he's coming. He's coming. Cecil, I will admit, every time I drive past a salon or a spa and it says like, facials, $49. I'm like, do I pay you for it? Tom's just wiping it out

of his beard for a day afterwards. You got to use cold water, Tom. Cold water gets that out of beard. What makes you think I want it out? You can't take my fucking beard-sicle trophy. Beard-sicle? Dr. Fauci. Amen, folks. Dr. Fauci.

Oh, God, he does. He does. He has. He's got an offstage boomer lackey. He's got like a fucking hype man on the side over here. Hold on. From Noah, so shall it be coming of the son of man dr dr is an an emissary of the devil folks not just the devil that you

see on halloween not just a guy who dress up in a suit. He is an emissary of Beelzebub himself sent to deceive and destroy the seed of Christ. God, he's so worked up. Again, seed of Christ. Like, I can't hear that stuff. I know. I can't hear that stuff

and not think, Jesus, did you fucking hear you? You're gross, dude. Like you're, this is a pervy religion. I wonder if the seed of Christ, if he shoots it, does it skip on water?

It's like, he can't do it in the, he can't do it in the shower stall because it's just bouncing all over. It's like a fucking, it's like a stray bullet in an action movie. It's like,

if you get impregnated with the seed of Christ, it's always twins because it's fruitful and multiplies. Coach is so angry about all this. But again, this guy, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He's one of these fuckers who's got a platform who has no idea what he's talking about. And he's scaring people away from the fact. Now granted, I don't know how many fucking people watch this fucking guy, but you know, this is not an uncommon thought. And we hear this all the time where people are like, hey man, this guy doesn't have any followers. Why

do you play him? This isn't an uncommon thought. The idea, we talked earlier that a quarter of white Christians were not going to get the fuck, a quarter of white evangelicals were not going to get the fucking jab. So this is not an uncommon thought. Some of these people think exactly what he thinks. That it's going to melt the fuck a quarter of white event jungles we're not going to get the fucking jab so this is not an uncommon thought does some of these people think exactly what he thinks that it's going to melt your dna if your dna melts you're dead immediately yeah that you yeah that's like that's like you're staring at the elephant foot in fucking chernobyl yes exactly like if

your dna stops doing its dna stuff you're like, guess I'm in for multiple organ system failure pretty soon. Sure. Yeah. Like that's like fucking what? Wait, you wouldn't have 300 million people who've gotten a fucking jet. A billion people have gotten a shot globally at this point, which is a drop in the fucking bucket. There's 7 billion of us. It's nothing. We're way behind what we need to be. But 48% of Americans are fully vaccinated. 48% of the total population, it's 328 million people that live in America, more than that have received a single dose. I think we've delivered something like 300 million doses in America. Nobody's melted yet. Nobody. People are fine. That's the thing is like with these people who have this reservation

against the vaccine and then they're saying awful vehement shit that is just terrible. They're talking about like how it's going to kill you or hurt you. And you're just like,

point to the guy that this happened to. Just point in the crowd somewhere where this happened. You know? What the fuck? Yeah. And the problem is

that there's no proof necessary. They don't need it. No, because the goal is not to be right. The goal is to make it scary, right? The goal is, and I get why that works, because every moment of your life is a moment you're thinking about right now. And right now, in your, right now in our studio,

I feel safe right now, right? I don't think right now in this moment that there's going to be a COVIDs to get me, right? And so if I can always misjudge my risk by sort of assessing risk on a two microscopic basis, rather than assessing risk on a sort of global or timescale basis, right? I know that I have probably been exposed or will be exposed to COVID and Delta. And that's why I get vaccinated. But in this moment right here,

in this five minutes, I feel safe from COVID, right? So if they can get you to misjudge the risk by making you think that the vaccine, which I have to actively go get, even though it's relatively simple in most places, I have to actively go get this thing versus COVID, which, well, it's not here right now. I don't think I've got it right now. Right now, I feel not sick. Right now, I feel safe. Why am I going to do something a coach says or my pastor says or this other fucking idiot

on Fox says is going to mess with my DNA? I didn't do that well in science, but that sounds scary. It sounds scary. That sounds scary and I don't feel sick right now. And that's our mismanagement of how risk works. That's just part of the human animal. We're bad at managing

risk. We're constantly bad at managing risk. I're constantly bad at managing risk. I drive past, near my house, Cecil, there's a great big inflatable sheep that's appeared over the last few days. And it has something like, it says like Matthew 24-2 or something. And then it says like, don't be a sheep.

And it's an anti-mask, anti-vaccine. And it's huge. And like a bunch of fucking loonies have it on this like parcel of land. And, you know, on it's huge. And like a bunch of fucking loonies have it on this like parcel of land. And, you know, on it is a banner that says 99% survival rate.

And I thought, that's not great odds. Yeah. You just don't understand great, like, You don't understand odds. If I got in my car and there was a 1% chance

that I got, I was going to get in a fucking car accident and die. I'd be like, fuck my car. I'm not getting in my, there's a 1% chance I'm going to die? 1% car accident and die. I'd be like, fuck my car. I'm not getting in my... There's a 1% chance I'm going to die? 1% is like...

Dude, I went bungee jumping and it was safer than that. Yeah, it's fucking A. Fucking A. And you know, the other thing too is we're in a giant fucking theater right now. And there's so many people screaming fire. Yeah, man. And they got megaphones.

And they're all screaming. Some of them have different messages. They might have a different message. And they might have a different bent. And they might have a different angle and they're all screaming. Some of them have different messages. They might have a different message and they might have a different bent and they might have a different angle. They're all screaming fire in some way. Yep. And we aren't able to do anything to stop it.

All we get to do is watch them panic a group of already very panic prone people. Yep. And watch them not, you know, in this case, watch them make them, watch them convince them about inaction. Make them enact, right? Make them immobile.

Make them not do the thing that they should be doing. They are using this as a way to stop them from protecting themselves. And we're watching it happen. And I don't know how to fix it, right? I don't know what we can do besides, you know, like some really harsh sort of, you know,

I don't know, authoritarian measures that would maybe slow down that information. Yeah. But it is disheartening to watch us just let us scream, let these people scream, knowing that they're saying false, incorrect things, and then just let them do it. You know what I think? And I was thinking about this this week. I think that if after the end of the summer, if you demonstrably refuse to take the vaccine, I think your health insurance should not cover you if you get COVID.

I don't think you should lose your insurance, but I think your health insurance should not cover you if you get COVID. I don't think you should lose your insurance, but I think your health insurance should not cover you for COVID-related illnesses if you chose not to get the vaccine. I think we need to get to a point where you just have to say, anyone can opt out, right? I'm opting out of the vaccine. Great. You're opting out of the vaccine. You get sick. that's entirely on you. I think that would wake some fucking people up. Especially with our medical system here in the country. That'll wake some fucking people up. It only works in America because every other civilized country, it doesn't matter. Yeah. And I don't know, you know, I think life insurance companies should refuse to cover and drop coverage on anybody who does not get the vaccine. Why in the world would a life insurance company continue a policy? We need to do some things

to make it real fucking painfully inconvenient. And I don't mean inconvenient like, I can't go on my family vacation. We should have that too. But I mean inconvenient like, I could lose everything. Yeah. I could go bankrupt.

I think that- I could ruin my estate and my family inheritance. Once they start with this, with it being passed as a, you know, in it, in it's past that point of it being emergency use. And they finally pass it through the FDA.

Companies can a hundred percent just say, yeah, you have to get vaccinated. There's plenty of, there's plenty of jobs in this country. You have to be vaccinated for the measles for it. You have to prove it. You know, you want to be in, you want to hang around kids in a, in a daycare. Most, I imagine most daycares would require you to be vaccinated

for several different things. You can't just walk in and be unvaccinated around a bunch of people's children. Unless it's a religious daycare. Right. Which we know. But of course I'm saying, I'm talking about responsible ones. Right. Yeah. I know. I know. But I have to point out that word. Absolutely. But, but, but, you know, there is. But I have to point out that word. Absolutely. But, you know, there is this, there is a thing that can make, it can make it very inconvenient for you. Yeah.

And I think it should make it very inconvenient for you. I work in higher ed and they're making everybody get vaccinated. And if you come in and say no, if you say no, I don't want to get vaccinated, they make you test like every single day. They're going to jam that fucking thing in your nose every fucking day. They're going to, you're going to come in

and they're going to fucking rapid test you. And I think they should make you pay for it. Every fucking day. Every're going to jam that fucking thing in your nose every fucking day. They're going to, you're going to come in and they're going to fucking rapid test you. And I think they should make you pay for it. Every fucking day. Every fucking day you come in, sorry, we're going to have to rapid test you again today. We got to rapid test you again today. We got to rapid test again.

And they're going to do it. I think it might not be every day, might be every week or whatever, but still they have to rapid test them all the time. And I hope it fucking hurts. I hope it, I hope it's uncomfortable every single day. And you finally go,

fuck, this thing's fucking like poking on my fucking eyeball every day. I'm just going to go get a shot. I just, if somebody told me they were unvaccinated at my work, I wouldn't even speak to them again. I would be like, I'm never speaking to you again. You're an awful person. I've been thinking about this and I really think, and I am at that place where if you are anti-vax at this point, if you're like this, I have a no quarter for bigots policy and have for a long time. I'm the same thing for anti-vax, man. It's like, you're willing to

put other people's lives at risk. You're a selfish fucking person. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I do not watch TV. I don't watch truthers. I don't watch the internet. TV. I don't watch truthers. I don't watch the internet. I do not really even read books. So we read the second chapter of Demon Hunter World, Science and Hope. Wait, we were supposed to read that? You write it out loud. And I still forgot it. But, you know, this chapter is really about the scientific method, how important the scientific method is, the

importance of understanding that science is the best thing we have to understanding reality. Everything that we know, we understand correctly through science. There's other means to try to understand stuff, but he has great quotes in here, especially about religion, and I'll read one a little later, but essentially it's saying, look, you know, fucking other systems try to understand the world, but none are as accurate as science. And one of the biggest takeaways from this chapter, and one of the biggest things that I kept thinking about and coming back to as I was reading and kind of mulling it over, is science is the only system of thinking we have that has built-in error-correcting machinery, right? Yeah, he touches on it a lot.

And, you know, when you think about other sort of disciplines that attempt to understand the world, and there's many, right? So there's religion, that's one. Sure. But, you know, philosophy is another attempt, right? And it's sort of the precursor to science in many ways, right? But nothing else takes an idea

and then has a method for running it through the ringer, right? And then a predilection and a desire and a sort of glee for overturning really vaunted, beloved ideas. And one of the examples he gives is, you know, Einstein's theory of general relativity in some ways overturns Newtonian physics, right? When things get weird. Yeah. When these circumstances are at play, all of a sudden these laws, these sort of laws of

nature no longer apply. And if you are a scientist and you discover that I have a way to break general relativity, that's not a bad thing, right? And it's the only system of thinking I can imagine or that we have or that I'm aware of that not only encourages that,

but rewards that. And it rewards it for one simple reason, because it always aims to get us closer to what's true. Right. It has no, like, I love Einstein. He's a great guy.

Fucking who cares? It doesn't matter. What gets us closer to true? We need that, man. If we have ever needed something more than that, I can't imagine what it is. It's fucking vital. And I kept thinking too, how important was this back when your ability to interact with the world was limited to your 40 acres? Well, you know, if you got some shit wrong, eh, not that big a deal, right?

But now look at how much impact one person can have. Sure. Right? One human being right now, and we're in our second gilded age. right? One human being right now, and we're in our second gilded age, one human being can have a massive impact, not just on their local 40 acres, but I mean, and it's not a stretch on the world. On the world. Absolutely. Yeah. We have a responsibility like that, that kicks the fucking stakes up. Sure. To getting reality. Sure. Sure. You know, one of the things that, that is true about science too, and science

criticism, is that they also don't take no shit, right? So like you come in and say, well, I want to upturn, you know, you're strutting in saying, I'm going to upturn Einstein relativity. I'm going to come in and do that. And they will fucking shut you down if you don't have the proof, right? And people try this there's a you know there's there's so many people out there that say einstein got it wrong and then they'll they'll present something and these are almost always people that are not they're not scientists right these are these are these are like right yeah but they'll come in right and they'll be like yeah and they're like no you just you just don't understand the math you just don't

understand the science you just don't understand it math. You just don't understand the science. You just don't understand it. That doesn't mean it's not true. It just means your understanding doesn't grasp it. And so, but there is, you know, it's entrenched, but it's not completely, it still is vulnerable, right? It's entrenched in the sense that it will stop all the people who don't have facts from overturning it. But if there is something that we discover, and there's always new discoveries, it could be overturned. It could be changed. That's great.

That's a great point because the ruthlessness of adherence to fact and adherence to data and adherence to observation and repetition is the thing that prevents science, unlike anything else, from falling prey to that cult of personality. Exactly, yeah.

There's no Trump of science. Exactly, yeah. Right? There's no Trump of science. Right. Yeah, you can't come in and just claim something and make it so. Science has no gurus. It doesn't, it doesn't. Right?

You know, it's got people that understand it well and people who communicate well. And I think, you know, Carl Sagan was certainly a science idol or something. You know, I guess I don't know what you'd call him, like a science personality or something. But, you know, he could be just as wrong as anybody else. Sure. I want to read one, and this is something we touched on beforehand before we started talking about this, but I want to read this because

this is very prescient. I have a foreboding in America in my children's or grandchildren's time when the United States is a service and information economy, when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of the very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues, when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority, when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes are critical faculties in decline unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true we slide almost without noticing back into superstition and

darkness how fucking prescient is that in 19 and you know like this is the birth of the internet right like so this is this is this book's coming out before the internet is really like, it's not really a thing, right? It's, you know, that YouTube isn't created yet. There's nothing ubiquitous, I think, starting at this point, but there's nothing like, I mean, you've got AOL chat rooms, you've got a few things here and there, but you know, I, I like to remember that, you know, the day the Towers collapsed, I went to AOL to find out what happened. So 2001, I'm still using AOL for crying out loud. So you've got to understand that there is,

there's this feeling that he has back then before any of this other stuff that the internet has spread this ignorance. Even back then, he was cautious. I read that both out loud and then listened to it. And both times, it absolutely gutted me, man. It fucking just ripped. It just fucking gutted me.

Because it's sort of one of those like, I fucking told you so and you did it anyway. Like we are a world that has been told not to do this. Like we're locking our keys in the fucking car. We're watching it happen you did it anyway. Yep. Like we are a world that has been told not to do this. And like, we're locking our keys in the fucking car. We're watching it happen. Yep. Watching it happen. There's another one here.

He says, we've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later, this combustible mixture of ignorance

and power is going to blow up in our faces, Donald Trump. Yeah. We have, you know, we have no scientifically literate congresspeople. Right. Or if we have, I mean, I don't want to say maybe there's a handful. Right. But it is a fucking snowballs into the fucking they're talking about snowballs

on the floor they're talking about internet it's our big truck they don't fucking know what's happening yeah the people who make all the decisions they they they either know a tremendous amount and leverage their knowledge against the rest of us, right? The billionaires, the mega billionaires, you know, or the lawmakers who know nothing. Sure. They know nothing. Sure. There's another one.

I got to read this other one. I love this one. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hope and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. That's how we fail if we don't examine ourselves.

You know, it also, as you're talking, we have to understand too the difference between facts and opinions. Right. Some things, you know, it is not an opinion. Anything that can be tested scientifically has nothing to do with an opinion. Sure.

You're not mistaken. You're just wrong. Yeah. Right? And science is the way to know whether you're right or wrong. Yes. And science is the way, really, I mean, when you get into a conversation, I mean, could anything draw this into sharper contrast than the pandemic?

Right. Right. You know, I was on a call today, Cecil, and a couple of people on the call today said, God, I'm just so done with masks in this pandemic. And I thought, what does that even mean? Yeah. I mean, sure, you can be done with it, but you're not going to stop doing it. Are you stupid?

Well, I mean, they kind of want to, right? Because they are letting their hopes, right, from that Carl Sagan quote, right? They are letting their hopes get in the way of the facts. Yes. What they want to be true is clouding their ability to see what is actually true. Sure. The data right now could not be more clear, right? And their ability to see and respond to data is absolutely clouded by their desire for a thing to be true, for their hope for something to be true.

And that's so human. human. That's so human. And the thing that we have, the method that we have to guard ourselves against, to be frank, our own humanity is the inhumanity and ruthlessness of science. And the confirmation bias is something that's, it can bite us all, right? It can bite us all. And you can, you can certainly go out there and seek every single little study out there that matches your particular perspective and push away the other studies that, that chip away at the idea that you have. And I've seen it happen constantly. And I've seen people dig their feet in and fight. But, you know, one of the things is like, like you were saying, if, if, if there's nothing there, you're not even,

it's not even that it's confirmation bias anymore. It's just bias, right? It's like, it's like, you don't have anything that's supporting this. You just don't like vaccines. You just, something in your gut tells you, you don't want to get this thing. That's not anything. You just, something in your gut tells you you don't want to get this thing. That's not anything. That's your stupid fucking gut, man. That's not anything. And you can't make decisions based on whim.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. If the question is which Ben and Jerry's flavor is best, right? Because that can never be tested. Sure. That's an opinion issue, right?

And that might be fun to bandy about. But, you know, if the question is, do masks help stop the spread of a respiratory virus, then we can run a test. And then we can rely. Yeah, we have. And we can rely upon that test and repeat it. We can run it through the ringer, right? Anything that can fit in that machine, we should fit in that machine. If you can put it in the big machine of science, then it is not an opinion question. And we have to learn to make that differentiation in ourselves and realize,

yeah, look, all opinions are equal. Like if you tell me like, you like Cherry Garcia better than Chubby Hubby. Yeah, fine. Like there's, that is a one-to-one ratio, right? There's nothing, you can't be wrong about that. Right, and also Cherry Garcia is best. It's better. It just is. It just There's nothing, you can't be wrong about that. Right, and also, Cherry Garcia is best. It's better.

It just is. It just is. Okay, we can put that through the machine, but I should have picked something different. Pick something else. Pick something with a less obvious answer next time, Tom. But if you can fucking science fair this shit, then that's not an opinion.

Right. And that's not democratic anymore, right? This isn't up for a fucking vote. Yeah. So I want to talk about this last quote. The story, the chapter itself, like I said, is sort of this love affair. It's a love note to science.

Most of this, and most of this book will be. And there's a piece in here where he talks about spirituality that I absolutely love and I want to read it. Science is not only compatible with spirituality, it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and the passages of ages,

when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined is purely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music and literature. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

And I want to make sure I mention here that he's not talking about non-overlapping magisteria. The idea that science belongs in one place and religion belongs in the other. He's not talking about that. He's talking about something else. He's talking about the feeling that people get when they finally understand something,

when they finally know something. There's a bit of tape from Richard Feynman. Richard Feynman was a person who was, he was a personality, a science personality before Carl Sagan was, like personality before Carl Sagan was, like years before Carl Sagan was. And he was recorded on one of these television shows where they were interviewing him.

And he had said something like, I know how hard it is to know something. A lot of people don't know how hard it is to know something, but I understand the rigor and the difficulty to know something. There's a spirituality in that, right? There's an opening of yourself to realizing that you finally know something. You know, science provides us so many opportunities for wonder and awe. Yeah. Discovery, yeah. What else? I mean, if you can't look at the findings of science,

and not even as, even as a non-scientist, right? And just look at the general findings of science, knowing I don't know how to do that work. If you can't find wonder and awe in there, that's a moment to reflect on why. Yeah. Because there is so much to be had. I, you know, without a sense of religiosity, one of the criticisms that is sometimes leveled is,

you know, don't you miss that? Don't you miss that element of connection or interconnectedness? And I will say that sometimes I do wonder about or miss the social connection that some people seem to have. Sure, yeah. But I have no less sense of wonder or awe. Right. I would put my sense of wonder and awe against anybody with their conception of heaven and hell. Sure, absolutely. Which seems so much smaller. Absolutely, absolutely. And I feel the same way when I hear about anything that, and there's so many different science stories that really genuinely give me chills, right? Yeah.

You know, Carl Sagan does this beautiful, and it's not in this book, but he does this beautiful little essay on the pale blue dot. I get chills every time I hear it. It's absolutely stunning and beautiful. And it's when Voyager went away, when Voyager finally left the solar system, it turned back one last time. There was a fight whether or not they were going to turn it around. They finally turn it around and they take one photo of our solar system of the earth and the sun. And the sun looks like a star. It's tiny. the earth is literally one pixel and they have to point to it with a fucking giant arrow i remember this and it's just this giant vast sea of blackness and one pixel and he talks about you know it's a beautiful quote i'm not even going to try to give i'm not even going to try to

try to ad lib it right because it's just too beautiful go look it up pale blue dot quote carl sagan it's absolutely stunning but he know, that is one of those things where every time I hear it, I get chills because it's amazing. Right. And that I think is, you know, that's what I think, I think he's getting at when he talks about things like that, you know, like putting yourself into perspective, you know, what is, what is, you know, spirituality if it's an understanding and perspective. Right. And so that's, that's what it, it, it centers you, you know? Yeah, it does. It does. And it offers a sense of fucking perspective.

Perspective, yeah. So next time we are going to be reading chapter three, The Man and the Moon and the Face on Mars. So if you haven't bought the book yet, I know people are talking about whether you could buy it. There's plenty of ways you could get this book. You can buy it from like, I think Barnes and Noble and other places.

You can get it on Kindle. You can get it on Audible. There's plenty of ways to get it. There's plenty of ways you could get this book. You can buy it from like, I think Barnes and Noble and other places. You can get it on Kindle. You can get it on Audible. There's plenty of ways to get it. Join us for the next chapter. So we want to thank our patrons. Of course, we want to thank all our patrons. We want to thank our newest patrons, George, Degenerate Doggeroll, I want to thank our newest patrons, George, Degenerate Doggerol, Joseph, Mike, Michael,

Keir, Quantum Soul Juicer, Mundor Q, Carminia. Caramia. Caramia, pardon me. Caramia.

Up their pledges, Napoleon Blown Apart. Napoleon Blown Apart is amazing. Which is a genuinely amazing name. I think Caramia. I think Cara Mia, I think, I'm hoping that's from Adam's family. Okay, yeah, yeah.

I think that's what that's from. Yeah, so thanks so much for your generous donations. We really do truly appreciate it. We try to give patrons a lot of extras. Yeah. Tom writes letters to his boys

and these are heartfelt letters that are written from a father's perspective to his boys and they're really wonderful and they're really great little pieces written from a father's perspective to his boys. And they're really wonderful. And they're really great little pieces of advice that he's giving to his children. And he's writing them in a blog and he's reading them and he's passing them out to patrons. And they're really great.

They're really great little short bits of audio that we're just giving to patrons. Tom had taken a little bit of time off because we have a special project that we're working on, but Tom started recording them again. So patrons are getting them and patrons are getting them

in their podcast feed. Patrons are also getting Demon Haunted World. Tom's reading that in our podcast feed. So patrons get a little extra. We also put the live stream. Every week we do a live stream,

9 p.m. Central, and that goes into the patron audio feed. So they get that as well. So go to Patreon and become a patron. Got a bunch of messages about Demon Hunter World. We're going to hopefully encourage a little more discussion on Patreon. We're going to create, I think next week,

we're going to try to create a post so people can post their reactions to the chapter. And we're going to put that up a little early so Tom and I can actually read it before we do our book review next time. So, patrons, look out for that thread coming up maybe next Wednesday or Thursday. But we got a bunch of messages about Demon Haunted World, some really great stuff.

We read them all, and we'll start to incorporate them next week. I did want to mention, though, that a lot of people are saying how to get it. So it's available on Audible. That's one way to get it. But we got a message from Reva and Reva says, you know, you missed one really obvious way. Go to the library. It's a great point. You can go to the library. Lots of, you know,

every library is going to have it and there's plenty, I'm sure there's plenty of libraries around you. You can go to one or two or three of them and I'm sure nobody's going to get it. So you can easily check it out for a while. And can go to one or two or three of them, and I'm sure nobody's going to look at it. So you can easily check it out for a while. And most libraries, if your library doesn't have it, most libraries have interlibrary loan. Yeah.

So you can request it. They'll have it shipped to your library. Just give you a call when it's in. It's great. Don't some libraries have Kindle collections too? They do. Yeah. I've done this.

I've done that. There's an app you can download from many phones, depending on what system your library is in. You can just get, you can get audio books that way. You can get eBooks that way. Libraries have an insane amount of resources that like kind of nobody uses. And I don't know why.

And there are tons of them. So yeah, absolutely. Audible also has it. Tom is reading it for patrons. And then there also are plenty of ways you can get it online. So it's... And we said that it wasn't in print

because it's hard to get on Amazon, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not in print. It looked like somebody said sent from Barnes & Noble's this week. Has it for new copies are available. I don't know if they just have... Do you have to go in a time machine to get to a Barnes & Noble? I'm Tom to Barnes & Noble when they were a thing.

There are still like three or four. There's one down the street actually. I remember the first time I went to to Barnes & Noble when they were a thing. There are still like three or four of them. There's one down the street, actually. I remember the first time I went to a Barnes & Noble, Cecil, and they have chairs at Barnes & Noble. And I was like, wow, you could just sit here and read the books. It's amazing, isn't it? And I was blown away. Blown away by that. And there was one walking distance from the college I went to, and I would go and sit in those chairs and nap. Yeah. All the time. I'm like, I'm going to go and sit in those chairs and nap. Yeah. All the time. I'm going to go take a Barnes and Nobles nap. Just go take a nap.

That's awesome. Smell the coffee from Starbucks and just crash out. It's a great place to nap in school. I will say this too. Like what a cool idea for a store. I know that that sort of whole idea just went the way of the dodo. It's gone now. I loved it.

But I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a really great atmosphere. And there's one nearby. So they do have it. And then, you know, I thought it was a really great atmosphere. And there's one nearby. So they do have it. And then, you know, I'm sure you can find it in different places. You can buy it, use.

There's plenty of places to get this book. It's a very popular book. And I'm sure you'll, you know, you'll find a way to get it if you want to participate with us. It's a worthwhile book to read. We're two chapters in right now and we think it is absolutely worthwhile to read. Yep.

This is from JJ. And JJ sent this message and they're basically saying, look, QAnon is Christianity. It's linked to Christianity. It's just as crazy. It's got the same sort of weird prophetic stuff that's happening in it.

And here's the thing, all this stuff rhymes, all of it. Everything is connected. I feel like that kid from fucking Elway's Sunny, but it's 100% true. Everything is connected. All, I feel like that kid from fucking Elway's Sunny, but it's 100% true. This is connected. Christianity is connected to QAnon.

It plays on the same exact tropes and it plays on the same exact logical fallacies and faults in human understanding. It does it. They do it all. Every single one of these pseudosciences, every single one of these,

every single one of these conspiracy theories, they all play on the same thing. They try to go after your confirmation bias. They try to make you feel good. They try to make you feel like a hero. They try to make you feel like you're worthwhile and that you are the one that's protecting the world. Christianity does this all the time.

QAnon does this. It all plays into the same thing. It's a different skin over the same shit every time. 100%. So we got a message from D and D says, I'm listening to this conspiracy theory episode and I wonder, why don't the liberals do the same thing

with the QAnon bozos are doing? Start their own conspiracy that is actually reality. Leak stuff that makes it seem like all this stuff is happening but it's really just leaking reality and i think one of the things that you're going to do and i don't know how true this is and this is just my opinion but i think maybe if you trivialize reality that's going to be a detriment more than a benefit yeah i think i think more than trying to play the conspiracy game even using reality but sort of leaking it out in this sort of like dribs and drabs way, we need to just start calling people on their shit out loud. That's what needs that.

We need to insist upon reality. And I think one of the things that we have to do is change our education system in this country and stop people that are backward thinking from controlling it. Absolutely. That is 100% where we need to start. You need to start young and you need to teach young children the wonder of the world, the wonder of reality,

the wonder of thinking, and the wonder of critical thought. We want to thank Fred for sending in beer that we drank on stream tonight. You can't hear streams. Oh, thank you, Fred. 9 p.m. Central, and we drank a wonderful bottle of beer from Primitive

that was absolutely wonderful. Beautiful, sour, delicious beer. Thank you, Fred, for sending it in. He sent it as a gift for Tom coming back to the studio, but it took a while to get here, and we want to thank Fred on the air specifically for sending in really wonderful gifts. Honestly, Fred, this is outstanding. And this primitive brewing company is going on my list. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. They are awesome. That's money. That's absolutely money.

Yep. Tom. So we got a message. This is about the freedom phone, but we, Tom, we wanted to read this because it's written very well. This is so great. It says, Without further delay, I present to you none other than your good friend from Crappy Christian Films, Kevin Sorbo. He's made, shall we call it a Herculean effort. Clever.

Terribly clever. On his Twitter to advertise the Freedom Phone and keeping with this week's episode on QAnon, terrified boomers and right-wingers are posting that they're buying it. Man, fuck. They are. And you know, like, it's amazing, though. It's a grift. It's an

amazing grift. It's a smart grift. Got a message from Heath's Empty Scotch Bottles on Patreon and they said, back when I would drive through Kentucky and Tennessee regularly, there was QAnon billboards along the highway. Professionally made real advertisement dollar billboards

along the interstate. Wow. So people have money to spend. People are putting dough on this. People have money to spend on Q. Got a message from Stu and he says, if the feds had charged people for the vaccine, more people would have gotten it, right?

And I don't know. I don't know if that's true, but I think it's a funny joke. It's a funny joke. But I don't think so. Maybe we don't value what we don't pay for here in America. You're right. You're right. But I don't think so It's a funny joke. It's a funny joke, but I don't think so. Maybe we don't value what we don't pay for here in America. You're right. But I don't think so. I think 100%.

You have to make it free. The people that are on the margins in this country would have... And those are the working people. Those are the people who are most likely to get it. They wouldn't have had an opportunity. And Biden today suggested using some of the pandemic relief funds to give everybody $100 to take the vaccine.

Yeah, man. Do it. Just whatever it fucking takes. Do it. So we got a message. This is from Kim. She says, I just took a picture in the supermarket in Montreal today.

Made you think of you guys. Canadians love ketchup flavored things. And she took a picture of ketchup flavored Cheetos, ketchup flavored fucking Doritos. Seriously, I feel gaggy. Ketchup flavored crispers, whatever that is. And mini ketchup. It looks like rice cakes, Tom.

Oh my God. God damn it, Tom. No, I would rather light my tongue on fire. Fucking what the fuck is wrong with you? With eating this ketchup. We ate some of these fucking ketchup chips. They were horrid. They were so bad.

Like, honestly. So barbecue chips are normally sweet, a little sweet, but they have that sort of little bit of spicy in there and whatever. And I'm not a huge fan of barbecue chips,

but I could eat a few. I could choke a few down. I could eat a few barbecue chips. These I could not even eat. I ate one and I was like, that's an unpleasant food. They're just a sweet

and a vinegar. They're like sweet and weird and terrible. I just fucking awful. Everything about them a sweet and a vinegar. They're like sweet and weird and terrible. I just fucking awful. Everything about them was horrible. Fucking awful.

That was Jay who sent them in and I will never forgive you, Jay. It like, it honestly, it's shudderingly bad. And anybody who sends, don't even send your message in because you're wrong.

Just don't send it in. Just stop yourself. I know you're getting ready to type this out. I know you're psyching yourself out at your computer. You're wrong. Just admit you're wrong and stop. Just stop.

Take a deep breath. Go eat your ketchup chips and don't send the message. Ketchup is for hamburgers and french fries. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's the only reason that ketchup is. I can't think of another reason.

What else would you use ketchup for? I cannot think for another reason for it. I literally can't think of another reason. What else would you use ketchup for? I cannot think for another reason for it. I literally can't think of one. That's it. You might add a little bit to mayonnaise and relish to make Thousand Island. Yeah, okay.

Like it could be a tiny bit of an ingredient in something else. But to just... But on its own, that's the only two reasons. Like to dip something? That's literally the only two reasons. It's for fries.

We got an image from Seth and he sent in a message and it's really funny. It's very funny. It's really funny. We're going to post it on this week's show notes. It's for fries. We got an image from Seth and he sent in a message and it's really funny. It's really funny. We're going to post on this week's show notes. It's called Staying Alive is what he called it, Ian. So you can post that one. So that is going to wrap it up for this week. Come check us out on our live streams, 9pm

Central, Twitch, YouTube, Facebook. We have a lot of fun on those live streams and you're going to want to check it out. This week we watched Hippo's Shitting. Look, you cannot get quality content. You can't get quality content like that everywhere, guys. You can only get that through cognitive dissonance. So thanks so much for listening.

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, Mommy Issue, Hypno Babylon, Bullshit, Couchton, Scientician, Double Bubble, Toil and Trouble, Pseudo, 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 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, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your signs.

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