Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 775: War on Education, Priest as Supreme Court Clerk

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glorial Studios 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 mat. Today is Thursday, June 27th and Cecil it's debate

night but we are not watching the debates. The way our recording schedule works is we have to record while the debate is happening. So we were thinking of maybe watching the debate and then talking about it, but it just get done too late and Tom and I are too old to do that. It's true though. We eat at Denny's at five o'clock. Moon's over my hammy no later than 5 30. And then we go back home and we watch Maloc. And then we take a nap before we finally go to sleep. You've got to take your pre-sleep nap though. Like to prep yourself. Are you looking forward, you're looking forward to a retirement where you could take your pre-sleep nap though. Like to prep yourself into the nap. Are you looking forward, you're looking forward to a retirement where you could take your pre-sleep nap.

I guarantee it. I guarantee it. Oh, I'll sleep like I was like. I guarantee it. You're gonna sleep, you're gonna fall asleep. Tom, when you finally stop moving. Oh yeah. You're gonna sleep at probably like 20 minutes stretch, 20 minutes at a time, 13 or 14 times.

I think I will. You're gonna be like a cat. Oh yeah. Oh, I'm 14 times. I think I will. You're going to be like a cat. Oh yeah. Oh, I'm looking forward to catting it out. Yeah. I'm already at a place where like I'll eat dinner and like I'll eat dinner and then like I'll lay on the bed with Haley to watch TV. And like we've got a bed that has like the little vibrating like the magic fingers thing going on. And so like, well, like I got a full belly and it's like the TV's on, we got like a lamp and the bed is like jiggling.

And I, it is everything in me to stay awake. I doze off almost every time. And then Haley nudges me awake. She's like, come on, she's like, I just saw, I'm just getting to spend time with you. And I'm like, I'm good, I'm good. That's all right, that's all right, I'll rally. I will, after dinner sometimes,

Sarah will come upstairs and start drawing, and I have a computer desk in the same room. So I will be on a computer, and sometimes I'll be playing video games, other times I'll be doing other stuff. But if I'm playing video games, and that's a game I like, no, I will... There's times I'll be playing after dinner and I'll be like, Grrrrrrr. Grrrrrrrrr. Grrrrrrrrr. It's fucking crazy, man. It's crazy.

I can see why I know exactly why my dad used to fall asleep after Thanksgiving. It's fucking crazy man. It's crazy. I can see why I know exactly why my dad used to fall asleep after Thanksgiving. I know exactly why. I'm like, oh no, that's my body now. My body is like, you need to shut this shit down for a while. You ate? All right, time to go. Dude, I'm a fucking shark.

But it's like, if I stop moving, like I'm good as long as I'm moving. Full belly rocks me to sleep every time. Fill my belly and sit me down and I'm just like, my body's like, let's nap this out. You rub my back, I'm out. Oh, are you kidding me? Every once in a while, I'll be like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to fall asleep. So I'll like, Haley's almost always awake later than I am. So I'll be like, hey, can you rub my back for a minute?

She's like, it's never taken a whole minute. than I am so they'd be like hey can you rub my back for a minute she's like it's never taken a whole minute she rubs my back it's like I like burp twice and like I'm out you know are you the brain specialist no no I am not the brain specialist no no I am not. Yes, my brain hurts. All right. So this story is from the New Republic. Embarrassing video reveals Trump's alarming cognitive decline.

Well, I want to play this video, right? I think is that what you want to play the video? I'll play the video. I'll put it on the big screen and we'll play the video. Now, when you're listening to this, just listen to, there's going to be beep sounds. As there's beep sounds, you will hear essentially that there, he's getting a name wrong. Now, as you're listening to this, it'll be harder to know that he's actually saying a bunch of people's names wrong. So you won't be able to hear the names, but you will be able to know every single

time because they beep it every time there's a buzzer sound every time he gets a name wrong. So if you're just listening to this, that's what that buzzer means. I think you should take a cognitive test. Like I did. I took a cognitive test and I aced it. Doc Ronnie, Doc Ronnie Johnson. Does everyone. Ronnie, Dr. Ronnie Johnson. Does everyone know Ronnie Johnson, Congressman from Texas? He was the White House doctor. How good did Elise Stepanek do?

You know, we've endorsed Dr. Oz. We've endorsed JP, right? J.D. Mandel. And he's doing great. Jimmy Connors is good. He's also happy. Mike Bolton, John Bolton is here. Mike Bolton, as you know, is in Russia. And there was progress today. I look forward to solving it. Thank you, Steve. It was Trump's fault. It was Trump's fault. Can it ever be like Rick Gates's fault? Bad Gates? It's always Trump's fault, Rick. By the way, they never report the

crowd on January 6. You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, did you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything deleted and destroyed all of it, all of it because of lots of things like Nikki Haley

is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people and we have some of our great business leaders and leaders period right behind me. I may ask Marilyn Lockheed. We appreciate it very much, Tim Apple. Yeah. Tim Apple.

My favorite shit is that he names, yet they're first they write, but then he names them the last name of her Marilyn Apple Please mr. Curd He's a Kurdish reporter holy shit that name again is mr. Curd For your time, you know, it was Mr. Curd. For your time. You know what's interesting? Mr. Curd.

Joe Biden won against Barack Hussein Obama. Has anyone ever heard of him? Arrest their leading political opponent, leading by a lot, including Obama. I'll tell you what, you take a look at Obama and take a look at some of the things that he's done. And Putin, you know, has so little respect for Obama that he's starting to throw around the nuclear war, Terry. You heard that nuclear. Thanks for giving your first comments on the bill

on this show, means a lot to us. We appreciate it, sir. Thanks a lot. You have a deal. Thanks a lot. Joe Bright, this guy is just the worst. So will Christian ever run for president against you? And you heard the prime minister, you heard Ben Yahoo.

Maybe you have heard Ben Yahoo. Ben Yahoo is like if he's dating himself. It's like, it's like if you masturbate, like that's when you got to squish your first name and last name together. Portmanteau your name up. I'm going to stop it. That's it. We're already two and a half minutes in, but essentially it's the same thing. He just keeps messing up people's names over and over and over again. And I want to say this, like I will never take a news articles diagnosis of a person. I won't ever say if somebody says, oh, he's mentally declined, or you can watch it here. I'm not a doctor and you're probably not a doctor. And unless you really sit down with someone, you don't know whether

or not they're cognitively deficient. You don't know. It would take a lot. I remember you telling me stories about how long it takes just to find out if you're ADHD. It's hours and hours and hours and hours, many days to figure out if you're actually ADHD. So you can't just watch a thing and then immediately know whether or not someone has something just because you see certain things that maybe indicate to you other traits that you've seen in other places. That being said, I want to point out too, you know, Tom, you and I were talking, if we found out Joe Biden was cognitively deficient, see, I couldn't even say it, right?

So I might be cognitively deficient, because I couldn't even say it. When we get older, can we rename the show Cognitive Decline? Cognitive Decline! Yes! This is Cognitive Decline! You might want to start that. It was younger, that's for like 10 years.

It's not getting any younger, that's for sure. If I get any younger, that's for sure. But if we found out, if we found out Joe Biden wasn't all there, all the marbles were there, would you vote for Trump? No, right. And I wouldn't sit out the vote because the stakes are high. And the same thing, I think the same thing for their side. So no matter what you say, even if you were to get somebody out there, it doesn't matter the one, two, three camera person, man, woman, dog, it would still be, they would still look at it. They're still going to find a way to vote for no matter what.

And I'm still going to find a way to vote for Joe Biden because I just don't want Trump in a job. Trump is not a cognitively, a cognitively, misfunctioning Joe Biden is better than a Trump. And in their minds, the exact opposite is true. Yeah. There's, look, the thing is like, you've got really three choices. You sit it out, you vote for Trump or you vote for Biden. There's no viable third party.

That's throwing your vote away, right? So that's the same as sitting it out. So you sit it out, you vote for Trump or you vote for Biden. Those are the only three choices in this equation. Mathematically, that's it. Like, and if I found out, if a news story, if Trump's, if fucking Joe Biden's doctor came out tomorrow and said, this guy's marbles completely gone,

just completely gone, I'd be like, cool, I'm still punching whatever is not Trump. Because that's what they did for Reagan. I did, yeah. That's what they did for Reagan, man. I don't care if Kamala's driving. That sounds great actually. That's what they did for Reagan.

Reagan was fucking gone in his second term. Right. You know, I was young at the time, but if you read stories about it, everybody knew Reagan was definitely malfunctioning at that point. Well, I mean, look, let's be honest. Like George W. Bush did not have the intellectual capability

to be to do the job. So the intellectual capability to do the job. So he didn't really do the job. Dick Cheney did the job and fucking Rumsfeld did the job. A whole cadre of other neocon evildoers essentially puppeted that man and pulled all the strings. It's not that unusual. The point is like not that that's good or not that even that's acceptable. My point is the other option is Donald Trump. And you're voting for a team. Like the president doesn't just make all the decisions himself. The president has an entire

team behind him. And who do you think is a better team builder? Just ask yourself that question. Right. Yeah. I did it. I won. I won. I won the money. The money is mine. I won the money. I won, I won the money. The money is mine, I won the money. All right, this story is from MichiganAdvanced.com. Extremely low pay cited at US Senate hearing as prime reason for teacher shortage. So there is a massive teacher shortage in Michigan, but also this is a sentiment echoed

in many, many states across the country. Schools are short on all kinds of employees, from bus drivers to custodial staff to teachers. And the primary reason here is that it is very nearly impossible to make a living in many states as a teacher. You can do it as if you're the second income in a household. The guy that they're talking about in this basically says, I'm only able to be a teacher, you can do it as you're the second income in a household. The guy that they're talking about in this basically says, I'm only able to be a teacher

because my wife makes enough money that essentially his money doesn't matter that much. Like he's teaching a full-time job with a fucking college degree required. And it is a job that does not pay the bills. It doesn't pay enough. And this is a downward trend in our education system that's led on by a group of people in this country. You ask any Republican and they want to defund,

you know, defund as much as they can public schools. But my taxes don't go down. My property taxes keep going up every year. They keep going up. The costs of paying for these schools around me keeps going up, but the money isn't filtering down to the teachers, right? It's not getting down to fill these roles that are necessary to make sure that there are teachers in all these positions. And these are jobs that are sought after by people who are qualified with degrees that they spent a lot of hard earned money and a lot of time getting, they're not making sure that that's true. What they're doing is they're making this a low paying job. They're making it a job that that people don't want. And they're going to, what they're going to do is they're going to continue to make your children dumber and dumber

and dumber because that's the point. That's what they want. That is. And I, you know, it's funny because I remember my degree is in English lit and my minor is in secondary education. I was going to be a high school English teacher. And when I got out of college to do that, to pursue that career, and it's all I thought I wanted to do. Like I was very confident that that was the job that I wanted up until the very last semester of my college

experience. And part of, I had a lot of reasons, but part of the reason I didn't pursue it is I was already making more money than that selling fucking speakers at Circuit City. And it felt weird for me to take a big pay cut from my professional career when I was already making that working like a job I did while I was in college, selling fucking speakers and home theater stuff to people. And I wasn't even particularly diligent about it, you know? Like, that's wrong. A job that requires that level of education and that level of commitment

and that level of time should be paid. It's an important job. You can't build a society, if we agree that a society must have an educated populace in order to thrive, then the people who are responsible for providing that education should be compensated so that we get the best and the brightest,

that we should create incentives for people to flood themselves into those career choices so that we can have that virtuous cycle of, you know, high achieving students who are producing good quality solutions to the problems that the world faces. We can't do that work if we don't value education. That's very true. And it's got to be a top-down approach from our government. It's got to be a top-down approach. There's so many enemies of education in our government. I can't tell you the number of people who have been running for

president in the last 20 years who have said they want to either eliminate or extremely curtail the Department of Education. This is a group of people who help try to set standards and try to help the rest of the nation be on the same level so that an education in Arkansas is the same level of our education it is in the suburbs of Chicago or suburbs of New York or New York City. We have been failing students in this country for my entire life. Yes. For my entire life. Now, I think that there probably was some pretty good strides forward in our educational system before I was born. But I think that there was enough of a poison pill by these Republicans, these anti-tax people who don't want to pay taxes either locally or federally.

And they want to make sure what they do is they squeeze every bit of anything worthwhile out of government. And that's what they did my entire life. And we're seeing a system right now that is held on by a thread and people they're talking about people here that are, you know, they're not making a lot of money and then it's not going to attract people that are highly qualified individuals. Yeah. Do you remember a couple of quick things? Do you remember when Rick Perry wrote it on his fucking hand? Forgot it? Forgot it?

Yeah, he did actually write it on his hand. That was Sarah Palin who wrote it on her hand. Rick Perry just fucking forgot it. He just forgot it. He just straight up forgot it. They've been, to your point, they've been trying to get rid of this now for a long, long time.

Trying to reduce the amount of funding at a federal level. I think about some of the language change that's taken place in the last 20 plus years, you know, for all of its faults, just think about the language of no child left behind versus what we have now, which is basically fuck your kids. Now it's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Right. You know, I know no child left behind was bad. I agree with that. But at least, I mean, if you think about it, like the selling point to America was, we do care about the kids and their education, right? And here's how we're going to do it. Now they did a bad job. It was a terribly flawed plan.

But No Child Left Behind, and now it's just like, fuck your kids, man. That's the new plan. What's the new plan for education? None. Yeah. We're killing it. You'll save a dollar. It'll be great. You'll love it. Wait, wait. I worry what you just heard was give me a lot of bacon and eggs. What I said was give me all the bacon and eggs you have. Do you understand? This story is from the Daily Beast.

Trump's new promises, immunity for cops, an iron dome, cheaper bacon. When I thought he was talking about an iron dome, I thought he meant a literal dome. He puts it on top of the wall. Just bloop right over, right over America. He's talking about a missile defense system. But I was like, at first when I saw that, I was like, no. And then I read, I was like, oh, okay. I, I felt differently.

I felt like I've never wanted something that Trump wanted. Sheep or bacon, but she per bacon, she per bacon, per my ears up. She per bacon sounds good. I police, the police will have immunity stuff. They already have immunity. But here's what I don't get, right? There's all these people who are super pro police, but they're not really pro police, right?

You get all these blue lives matter people, you get all these people who are punisher shirt guys. And when they went to fucking Washington, they beat the shit out of those cops as quickly as they possibly could. Oh, they were screaming at them and calling them pigs and traitors. Pigs and traitors. They fucking smashed them. Remember that guy getting squashed in there? They were trying to break through windows when one of them shot the other one.

They were like freaking out. They wanted to kill that guy. They were talking about killing the pigs. They, they don't like police. What they do is they like that the police hurt people that they don't like. It's a way in which for them to say, I don't like minorities, but the police also don't like minorities. And when they hurt them, I feel good. So it's not a thin blue line flag. It's a hidden fucking Confederate flag. It's a way for me to wear a Confederate flag that's socially acceptable. It's a way for me to wear a Klan hood

that's socially acceptable. Cause they're beating up the people that I don't like that are stutter that I think should get the shit kicked out. Yeah. Yeah. When the police are doing the job of protecting white people and white property, then the white Republican establishment is very much pro police.

When the police are pulling over a white guy or defending the Capitol, all of a sudden they sing a different tune. Yeah, the lies in this Trump bullshit, it's just like he's talking about how he wants to have immunity for the police. The police already have qualified immunity. This is something that already exists. There's already structural legal protections called qualified immunity, which prevent the police from being pursued civilly as individuals, for example, for actions that they take while they're on the job. What Trump must be talking about then

is an expansion of qualified immunity so that even if they beat the fuck out of somebody and they're in the wrong, right? Because they can already beat the fuck out of somebody and they're in the wrong, right? Because they can already beat the shit out of you. And 99 times out of 100, everyone will be like, that was a fine beating. Yeah, we're okay with that beating. You know, Rodney King was fine. Those guys all got off.

That was adjudicated as totally within bounds. There's so many times that that happens. That happens more often than the other, which is they have to pay a little. And when they do, they often keep their job or they just move to another station. And the only thing that happens is, is that that money comes out of like the union or whatever, or the city. When the police straight up murdered Breonna Taylor in her home, asleep, in the middle of the night, those cops got off. They already have immunity from so much that they do. So to extend that is to basically say,

look, even when that violence is completely unprovoked in the most egregious possible way, we still wanna protect. You know, I watched a video, and I don't suggest anybody look for it. I watched a video a few years back where some cop, and I think we covered it on the show, some cop had a fucking rifle that said like,

I wanna kill people or some shit, scrawled or like inscribed on it. And he had somebody on the ground and they were clearly not a threat. And he was giving them screaming like contradictory orders at him until the guy moved wrong. And he shot and killed this guy. And it was very clearly a desire to murder this person.

That's all that it was. This person was of no threat for a long time. And there were many ways to have like taken that guy and like handcuffed him. Instead, he kept giving them like more and more contradictory orders until the guy moved in a way out of confusion. And they just fucking gunned him down. That cop didn't get in trouble. They don't get in trouble. They murder people. They don't get in trouble. Expanding the immunity. Well, what do we want, man? Like, what are we trying to get out of this?

What do we want, man? What are we trying to get out of this? That's a bad idea. Very bad. NBC News, Texas abortion ban linked to 13% increase in infant and newborn deaths. We called it. Yep. We called it. We said it was gonna be hurting women too,

but this is something that a lot of people, I think, overlooked when you're thinking about the problems with stopping healthcare. They overlook this sort of thing. They think, oh, this is it. They forget that this is actually going to kill more babies. Yeah. And they're happy about it. These people, they can't be happier about how this is treating women and how this is...

Because for them, I think the suffering's the point. Yeah, the suffering is because this is never, this was, and I've said it before, but this was never about babies. This had nothing to do with children or babies or life. This has everything to do with controlling women. So the fact that children- And punishing them for their autonomy.

Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. But this is all that this is about. So these kids are and always were collateral. That's all they were. They were expendable collateral in the rights war on women. That's all that any of this ever was.

There's an assumption too, that is an erroneous assumption that many people make, and I think it's very natural, to assume that if you're having a kid, if you're pregnant, that what you're gonna have is a perfectly happy, healthy, bouncing baby. And that is just not always true. It's just not.

And we have a lot of ways now to look for fetal abnormalities and to look for a variety ofalities and to look for, you know, a variety of disorders and to look for these things and to make sure that those, uh, tragedies are not born into suffering. The inability of women to get healthcare means that what we do is we create suffering. That's what we do. We create an enormous amount of suffering. That's what we do. We create an enormous amount of suffering. Not every fucking

gestational period ends with a happy, healthy, bouncing baby. That's just not how it works. And it's also the case that some children are born into homes and families that do not want those kids and are ill-equipped for whatever reason and should have gotten an abortion. Right? If they're born into a household that is chaotic or destructive or full of poverty or addiction or violence or domestic violence, like this is also how some of these kids die. The story here talks about following kids up to a year after birth, and their mortality rates go up. And they go up because these are kids that never should have been born into these unstable, violent homes. And they meet unfortunate and tragic ends as a result.

This was always collateral. It was always going to happen. And, you know, I very much recognize that having a child, you know, there's all this, there's this big roulette wheel you got to spin, and there's so many different places that it can land. And you're taking a huge chance and a huge risk. And it can be, you can have a miscarriage, you can have, you know, there's so many people that try and try and trying, they can't do it, right? They tried and they tried and they, you know, the miscarry or whatever it is, and they just can't have a child. And then there's other times that, you know,

like this happened with my wife and I, there's something in her that if she were to have a child, there's a good chance or a chance that the child might be sick, like really badly sick, like die within the first year type of sick. And that was one of the deciding factors for us to not have children, was that we didn't wanna try to have a fetus, have a pregnancy

that we were gonna have to worry, like now we went out of our way to be like, well, we're gonna do this, we're in it, right? And then you get this let down. Right. But if I can find that stuff out ahead of time, I'm going to avoid this shit out of it. 100%.

There's some stuff you just don't know. You can't find out. And then they find out what the child and they say the child, you know, could have some sort of crazy, something wrong with it really badly. Like the child will either die in childbirth or it will die shortly after. And that is not a reason for any of these people to, to, to change the laws in their, in their states to allow for women to have an abortion in that, in that, in that particular state. They don't let them do it. They wind up saying, no, they basically make you suffer. They go

out of their way to say, no, you could fix this and you would have less suffering, but we're going to make you keep it. And then you may like have a child that's stillborn or you may have a child that, that, that winds up dying within the first year, or you may deliver, you know, you, you, the child may die before then, and then you have some problems, you might have to have it like emergency abortion, because what they want is they wanna make sure that they control you all the way up

until you have that child. They control every aspect of your life. And I worked with a woman years ago who found out in her pregnancy that the baby, she ended up delivering and the baby had what's called a trisomy 13 defect. And so it's a defect that is incompatible with life. So the baby would be born,

but the baby was never going to live for very long outside of the womb, right? So it's a series of congenital problems that arise from it. And she chose to carry the child a full term and to birth that baby because that was important to her. But that was her choice. She got to make that choice. She got to evaluate for herself whether or not

that risk for her, for her health was, because it's not like pregnancy and delivery is risk free. It's actually quite risky. Absolutely right. So an abortion is way less risky than pregnancy and birth. Way less, like a lot less. But she got to make that choice. That was her choice.

And then she got to decide what was right for her family and how she wanted to deal with that unfortunate news. Sure. The fact that some bureaucrat in some state legislature would take that away from somebody and be like, I'm going to force this tragedy on you. I'm going to force this danger on you. I'm going to force these medical exigencies upon you. That's disgusting.

That's violent against women. So take these clothes, put them on, and get the fuck out of here. This story came from Wired.com. States with abortion bans are losing a generation of OBGYNs. Now this is a long article, but a really, really interesting article. And I think there's two pieces of it that are really important that I wanted to focus on. The first is that, and I didn't know this, so, and many of you will probably know this, but I did not, so I'm gonna tell you.

So when you are going to become a doctor and it is time for you to do your residency, you don't get to pick where you do your residency. You just get put someplace to go do your residency. It might be in the state that you're going to medical school, it might be in a state halfway across the country. You don't get a choice. I didn't realize that until I read this article.

So people are being put in places to do their residency and they're doing their OB-GYN residency. And it is required for many state board exams that are state licensing that they learn how to give certain types of care in order to complete their education. And that care is now illegal to perform and for them to learn in the states

where they got stuck doing their fucking residency. So it's unclear to everybody whether or not they will, after the end of their residency, have been properly trained as full OBGYNs to perform the full suite of medical services necessary because they're doing the residency against their own will in a state that doesn't allow these things to happen in order to train them. I have on the screen the states that the ones that are in orange here don't have or have limited access to abortion. And we're talking about Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska,

limited, I guess, in Iowa as well, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia. Then again, there's also possibly not in Ohio and Wyoming. So you're looking at, that's a big chunk of the country. Now, I wanna point out, it might not be half the states, but it's over half the country. I mean I want to point out, it might not be a half the states, but it's over half the country. I mean, it's, it's a huge amount of space. It's a huge amount of just volume of geography. It's fucking a big amount. And, you know, we talk about all the time about how there's nobody in these states or whatever, all the whatever, there's

not a lot of people in these states. We talk about them like they're small, right? And they are small population wise. But when we talk about the lot of people in these states. We talk about them like they're small, right? And they are small population wise. But when we talk about the size of some of these states, think about if you're into the bottom of Texas, how far do you have to go to get an abortion? If I'm the panhandler, if I'm in the bottom of Florida, how far do I have to go to get an abortion? I gotta go to Kansas or Virginia

in order to even get an abortion? Or even Illinois. I gotta, yeah, Illinois. How far, I drove to Tampa once, it's like 15 hours. That's not, and Tampa's like five hours from the tip. Yeah, man. 20 hours in a car just to get an abortion. And that's at the southern part of our state.

That's a horror. That is something that when you think about, you know, the way in which we're talking about how half of the country, a lot of those places have hospitals. Those hospitals aren't teaching people a very important skill and, and it's being lost, right? It's being lost because it's, you know, it's witchcraft essentially. Like they're treating it like it's witchcraft.

And what an amazing disservice to those young doctors who like many of them have said, oh, and this is the second part of the article, they're not gonna stay in these states. They're not gonna stay. Typically it has been statistically that most people will end up living and practicing in the state that they do their residency,

even if that's not the state that they're from. But now when you interview people, if they get put in one of these fucking,-choice hellholes, most of them, over 50%, are like, I'm not staying here. I'm leaving. So there's a brain drain. There's a skill drain that comes out of there. This impacts people's ability to get all kinds of care that's not even abortion related. Because we already have a severe doctor shortage in this country. It is a severe shortage.

I look this up as a corollary to this article. I'm gonna get the numbers a little wrong, but they're gonna be close to right, because I don't remember them exactly. We graduate more people from medical school than we place in residency. There's about 40,300 residency positions available every year.

There's 43,000 people that graduate from medical school every year. So we're already at a place where not everybody gets a slot. There are people that will wait multiple years to get slots for their residency that have graduated, have gone through the whole medical degree program and they just don't get a residency spot. Then you've got people going into these residencies,

not getting the full suite of services for training. Then they're leaving these states. There is gonna be states where there's just not enough doctors. We're already in a doctor shortage. The doctor shortage in this country is severe. It's about 175 hundred and seventy-five thousand doctors short of what we need right now. And it's growing every year as our population

ages. So we have an enormous shortage of talent. If you're living in Florida or Texas or Louisiana or Mississippi or Alabama, et cetera, you're like, they're losing doctors like crazy. It's not just abortion you're not going to be able to get. It's other critical services because like your OBGYN is just going to leave and go somewhere. Even if they don't want to perform abortion, they're just going to leave. They'll be like, my values don't comport with the values of the state. I want to perform medicine with the full suite of services. Oncology and other practices or other specialties are also affected. So there are lots of other specialties

where abortion may be necessary in order for them to provide oncology care or other types of care. And so they're like, I'm not gonna practice in a state where I can't give my patients good advice and sound medical guidance and treatment. So they're leaving these states too,

which will make it harder and harder for people in those states to get care that is not at all related to abortion. Everybody's health will be impacted, everybody. And we were talking about a story just a minute ago about babies dying. Yeah. And you're like, if you start taking away the OBGYNs

in that state, suddenly they can't have the full suite of experience so they leave and they are like, well, I want to go learn somewhere else or whatever. And then they never come back. So suddenly you have a drain of these people in your society. Suddenly you have fewer and fewer people who are able to take care of women who are pregnant. So the goal that you had, that you set out with with this goal of making sure that more people were pregnant You're suddenly what you're gonna do is you're gonna be able to be creating a Space where that isn't gonna be viable for you because of this right because of a fucking bed that you made you made this bed

You're the one who chased them all away And there's gonna be more and more infant mortality in all those places, very specifically because there's going to be this brain drain. Yeah. This is, this is predictable and preventable and we're still doing it. We're still going to do it. We're still going to fucking do it. Fuck you.

You just got pranked. Yo! Pranked baby. Ha ha. Filthy prank. Ha! Got him. The story comes from the AP,

more than 1300 people died during Hajj, many of them after walking in the scorching heat. So this is the, Hajj is the annual pilgrim to Mecca that goes through Saudi Arabia, where the temperatures are like 130 degrees. And they get to throw stones at like evil or something. And then they walk away. That's super, super weird. I'll tell you what, man, putting yourself through heat exhaustion for days on end, because you have to walk like a distance.

And then people are just dying. They're just keeling over from heat exhaustion. And it's like the hottest time of the year down there when they do it. This feels like, it genuinely feels like someone's punking you. Yeah, this is also you can throw rocks at the devil. It feels like hazing of your own religion. Like it feels like hazing. Oh, like at what temperature do proteins start to denature? They can start to denature it. Like, I mean, if you think about it, your rare steak is 131.

Yeah. This is a rare steak. If you took an egg and heated it up to 130 degrees. It'd be a coddled egg. Yeah. Yeah. It starts to denature those proteins. This is too hot. Like, that is my... This is too... Like, remember the rent is too damn high, guy. The temperature is too damn hot. Like remember the rent is too damn high guy. The temperature is too damn hot. Look, at some point, don't you just have to be like, God will be fine. I don't need to take a walk today.

These people pay a lot of money too. They have to pay Saudi Arabia money for like a temporary visa to come into the country. And Saudi Arabia, the callousness of this is amazing. They're like, oh, well, a lot of those people who died, they didn't have any, they actually shouldn't have been here. They're illegal. So they just flooded over the border. So I don't know, maybe die by the thousands.

Let me tell you, man, this is one of those moments where as a non-religious person, you look at religious people and you say, come on, man, for real. Like, look, I get it. You want to go somewhere on Sunday. You want a community. You want to do this stuff. That's between you and your community, but you are putting yourself at terrible risk doing this. Yeah. The devil can wait, man. Everybody can wait. This is insane. It's 2024 guys. Like all your superstitions can chill. Maybe stay home.

You don't need to go take a walk in a sauna in a country that doesn't care if you die outside. This isn't going to, it's not going to get any cooler down there either. So expect that in years to come, there's going to be more and more deaths from this because there's going to be people who do it. And it's not like it's going to get like, it's not like it's going to be a, you know, chilly 71 degrees down there. It's going to be hot. They did say thankfully that I guess the Hajj is a lunar holiday, which means it moves 11 days every year. And it's like in a few years, it'll move to April.

And that sounds great. But in a few years after that, it'll move to August. It'll still move back to August. Right? So it's like, they kind of made it like, oh, it'll be nice and cool in a few years. You're like, yeah, but it's gonna get hotter and cycles are, hear me out here, cyclical.

Yeah, it's gonna get hotter and then colder and then hotter and then colder. And those years that it's hotter, let me tell you, it's gonna be a lot hotter. Yeah. I mean look your God can wait You're like I'll fucking pray when it's not 130 degrees out. You'll just fucking chill You know what you want me to pray fix the temperature Well, I'll suddenly fix the fucking climb. You're walking through your fucking this this long desert with this one rock You just got got my rock

I'm gonna make my way all the way up to these stones so I can throw this stone at these other stones. How anticlimactic would that feel spiritually? Yeah, man. I can understand, like, I can understand, like, having the rock and being like, this is gonna matter so much, it's gonna feel like something.

And then there's the part of me that knows it's all nothing. And I would get there and be like, oh yeah! And then the rock, like, clicks against the other rocks and that's all it does And I would get there and be like, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the rock like clicks against the other rocks and that's all it does. There's no smoke or fire. The devil is like, oh, you got me with that one, you big fucker.

Like nothing happens. It's just click, clack, click. And then a bunch of other people are like, oh, so there is there. And then like there are a bunch of dead people are just fucking littering the sidewalk or whatever. The amount of money that's spent to do to come in too

is expensive. Like it's an expensive holiday. They do take care of some of these people. I guess there are like cooling centers for some of them. I was reading about it. There's some cooling centers, but not enough for everybody. Well, and a lot of them get grifted. Like a lot of these people get exploited.

They get like sold a, like a package that says like, oh, you're allowed to be here. Here's your like haj privileges or whatever. And it's just like nothing. It's like when you get sold like a bad ticket master ticket, it's just nothing. You're just like, yes, you're out that money. Right.

Someone else is in your seat. Yeah, exactly, right? You're like, hey, show up and you're like, your bar code doesn't work. And you're like, oh man, oh nuts. Your activities in life were so pleasing to Lucifer that he has appointed you to be his personal class. This story from the National Catholic Register Cecil, Father Reedy goes to Washington as Supreme Court clerk, Notre

Dame law professor, Father Patrick Reedy will clerk for justice Brett Kavanaugh starting in October. This feels like one of those things where somebody should just take Brett on the side and be like, they know already know that you're kind of a religious weirdo, but maybe you shouldn't have a priest as a clerk. For fuck's sake, for fuck's sake, man. Like a law clerk is not an unpowerful position that's a big deal job like if you're clerking for a supreme court justice that's a big deal job

you're doing research you're right you're helping to write briefs you're doing important work substantive work you're also influential you might help influence the thinking. What does this say, not just about who Brett Kavanaugh is and what his values are, but who he's willing to have in his ear and on his team? Yeah, right? Right? You have a guy who, you know, there's definitely a spectrum of values when you think about the Catholic Church. There's people that are far liberal in the Catholic Church

and there's people that are far conservative in the Catholic Church. I interacted with several people that were liberal Catholics for many years, right? In my old job, there was a ton of liberal Catholics. And I got a chance to interact with them and they were pro-immigration pro immigration, pro LGBT, you know, one of the, one of the churches in Chicago in fact had a pride flag that they used to fly.

So like there was definitely like wings of the church that can be more progressive. My money's on a guy from Notre Dame. Yeah, man is probably not super progressive. He's probably from a different wing. Yeah, man. Of the Catholic church that I'm not familiar with. And a Kavanaugh pick. And a Kavanaugh.

I mean, that also helps. Although I know for sure that some of these people don't pick people who are perfectly ideologically aligned with them. I know that they pick people that are clerk, sometimes their clerks are totally different than their mindset. So that is a possibility. And I've also heard that they do that specifically so they can get the best argument in the things that they're creating,

you know, in the things that they're writing. They can find out what somebody on the other side might think because they might have someone in their own pool of clerks that is of that mindset. So there's a possibility. Although with this guy, highly doubt. Highly doubt. Highly doubt. I feel like he's always an inch away from like hiring Tobin and Squee to like be his law clerks. This guy, this guy's like, look, if anybody ever questions your impropriety, just show them your calendar. Show them your calendar.

With Tobin and Squee. Here, let me introduce you real quick. Squee, I'm going to call Squee to the stand. Squee, can you come up? Where's Squee? We're allowed to call Squee and Tobin to the stand. Washington post masks are going from mandated to criminalized in some states. Lawmakers in North Carolina and New York say mask bans in response to pro-Palestinian protests

would not target medical mask wearing, but critics are skeptical. Look, critics are skeptical specifically because the one in North Carolina specifically does not exempt medical mask wearing. Yeah. I read an entire article about the one in North Carolina. They specifically are like, no exemptions for medical reasons. Yeah. I don't know about the one in North Carolina. They specifically are like,

no exemptions for medical reasons. I don't know about the one in New York, but in North Carolina, they're like, yeah, no masks. No masks. This is it. This is a confluence of the worst parts of the American right wing. The anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-COVID, nut job assholes

anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-COVID, nut job assholes, combined with the anti-freedom, anti-protest, anti-Palestine, pro-genocide wing. It's the worst of them all. Yeah. It's like, it's the worst peanut butter and chocolate of politics that could possibly exist. They were showing today, they were showing the, I was catching some pre-debate like warm up stuff and they were saying they, they, they played on the station.

They said, you know, a common question that people often ask is where are you better four years ago? Were you better off four years ago? Well, if you roll the clock back to four years ago, it's late June of 2020. Jesus Christ. It was the worst. Yeah. A couple million people at that point had gotten COVID. They were playing some of these clips from the news. And the clips from the news are, we reached another milestone today. Over 2.5 million people have COVID. And they're talking about the president disobeying all the sort of distancing laws and distancing

norms that were put in place to have a rally. And it was president Trump at the time. He went out to Tulsa to have a rally, the one where Herman Cain died. And they specifically were tearing off. So they had on the seats in this arena, put the arena itself had put a bunch of stickers, every other one that said, please don't sit here so that people could be spaced out. And they, they were walking through tearing them off. Nobody was wearing a mask to come in and they made people sign waivers. It said if they got sick, they weren't

going to sue the venue for it or the Republican Party. And then they had a big fuck all rally where a bunch of people got sick and one fucking previous presidential fucking nominee. It was a nominee. He was a presidential. But he was a presidential primary candidate. Yeah, he fucking died. I know very specifically from covid from this event. And we look back on this and we think, there were a bunch of fucking people

with their head up their own ass, screaming about masks and screaming about freedom back then while their president was in office. June of 2020 was the world. Does anybody not remember how terrible the summer of 2020 was? The summer of 2020, that's the down point

of so many people's lives. It was next level terrible. It was so like shockingly, can things be this bad? Holy shit, yes they can. Awful. Like shit was fucking on fire everywhere. The police were beating the shit out of fucking protests, like fucking harmless fucking protestors.

Cops were like driving around in vans looking for people to fuck up shooting them with nonlethal weapons. People were being abducted by fucking like state actors. Ice ice ice was abducting people off the street into fucking white vans. Like they were firing tear gas and fucking using helicopters to destroy people's first amendment rights. COVID was running fucking rampant. You couldn't wipe your ass. There was no toilet paper. You went to the grocery store. There was nothing on the shelves anywhere you went. How in the

world are we like, yeah, that was pretty good though. That was awesome. June of 2020. I was like afraid in June of 2020. I'm not a fearful guy, but I was like, shit is going down. It was not a good, you were not in a good place. But think about the mindset that came from that. This anti-mask mindset that people felt that this was a way in which to suppress them. And we talked about it on a previous show. It's a toxic trait to think that I'm so strong that nothing can hurt me. And how dare you insult me by you wearing a mask. It's look, nobody's asking you to wear a mask. Don't wear a mask. You don't

want to wear a mask. I think it's being an asshole if you don't wear a mask. It doesn't, but even still don't wear your mask, but let other people wear masks around you. And even still, they won't even do that. They won't even allow that. There's not even a level of freedom to allow you to wear your own mask if you think you need it. Like, let's say you're a cancer patient and you need that to fucking survive.

No, we won't even let you work. We will arrest you, cancer patient, if we see you in a mask. And I'm sure they would take the fucking mask from you and throw you in a jail full of people. They'll kill you. That's essentially like killing immune compromised people for trying to protect themselves

from right-wing fascist authoritarian liberty nuts. In Kazakhstan it is illegal for more than five women to be in the same place except for in brothel or in grave. This story is from the New York Times. This is a long essay. What happened to Stanford spells trouble for the election. So specifically Stanford had a research program about disinformation.

And it was a research program. That's what it was. They were researching misinformation and disinformation. And basically, because the truth is no longer acceptable by Republican right-wing nut jobs. The Stanford researchers and the students who worked on it ended up getting hauled in front of Congress and investigated and subpoenaed

for working on a research project about misinformation, Cecil. The thing that always surprises me, and I think we talk about this a lot, is whenever a Republican accuses someone else of something, that always surprises me and we, and I think we talk about this a lot is where whenever a Republican accuses someone else of something, they're confessing to something. Right? And this is the exact, exact moment of this, where they scream that the Democrats are weaponizing the government, right? Their Democrats are weaponizing the government. You're like, you

are fucking weaponizing the government. They're trying to scare these research institutions to stop doing this. They're trying to force them. And the reason why they did this, the reason why they're even doing this is because this organization went out of their way to find these instances where there was misinformation about the election. So there would be an image of like votes on fire or a fucking briefcase that, you know, they said was full of votes and a bunch of people would post and be like, crazy if true, or this is a, this is a big, if true, appalling if true. And then they would say that's false. It's a false thing. They found the fucking, they

do a reverse image search and it's a fucking somebody's fucking luggage from Kazakhstan or something. And then they say, well, that's not true. And then they notified the social media outlets that were housing this particular photo with this giant threat of people who are upset, right? They see something on social media, they get their news from social media, bad idea. They get their news from social media and then they see it and they think, holy shit, this fucking election is being stolen. And then they type a bunch of shit and then they get into a fucking, they sort of soup

each other up. They tune each other up in here and everybody's reading everybody else's comments and they reach out to the social media outlet and they say, look, you need to take this down. You got to take this down because people think this is real. And they say, well, best we can do is put a warning on it that it might not be true. Because guess what? It's getting them clicks.

It's getting them engagement. It's getting eyeballs on their platform. And you are the commodity they're trying to sell to other people. So they need you to be on that platform as often as possible so that every time you scroll past a new ad they made money off you. Yeah, social media cannot behave in socially responsible ways around this kind of stuff because it is contrary to

their business model. Yeah. They can't do it. It is impossible, I think, to build a profitable social media system that is also ethical. Because ethical social media systems will not create the same kind of engagement that is necessary to keep you on platform to get enough ads in front of your fucking eyeballs. The system is necessarily corrupt. The system is necessarily unethical. Structurally, it requires this. It needs it. So they never work enough.

They're like, we should not have the idea in our heads that social media is or can or will fix the misinformation, disinformation problem. Misinformation and disinformation is created because it is incendiary. That kind of click bait is written in a way that gets us fired up. That's its point.

It's to get us like worked up and to share it and to bitch about it, to go into the comments and br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br-br keeping with the revenue model, the revenue model of the platform structurally. They're never going to fix it. They can't. They will not do what is contrary to their bottom line. There's a part of this article I've got to read because I think it says a lot about the place that we're in. This brings us to the present. When another election looms, the 2024 rerun is already being viciously fought. Since 2020, the technological landscape has shifted. There are new social media platforms in the mix, such as Blue Sky, Threads, and Truth Social. Election integrity policies and enforcement priorities are in flux at some of the biggest

platforms. What used to be Twitter is under new ownership, and most of the team that focused on trust and safety was let go. Fake audio generated by artificial intelligence has already been deployed into European election, and AI-powered chatbots are posting on social media platforms. Overseas players continue to run influence operations to interfere in American politics. In recent weeks, OpenAI has confirmed that Russia, China, and others have begun to use generative text tools to improve the quality and quantity of their efforts. Offline, trust in institutions, government, media, and fellow citizens is at or near record

lows and polarization continues to increase. Election officials are concerned about the safety of poll workers and election administrators, perhaps the most terrible illustration of the cost of lies on our politics. That is a laundry list of oh my god. Yeah, there's a reason why it's terrifying. There's a reason why when you kick some of these sticks out that are holding up democracy, that the whole thing can weaken and fall. There's a reason why that's true.

And the closer we get to, you know, more authoritarian people being in government, the worse off we're going to be if that's true, if that happens, because the more authoritarian our government gets, the less chance you're going to have to combat any of this stuff after the fact, right? If there's a four years, even if there's two years of like a Trump administration with two houses, right? We're in a lot of trouble. You're in so much trouble.

You'll never be able to catch up. Just like global warming, you won't be able to catch up. You can't catch up anymore. It's donezo. I got to confess something. And that is that most of my life, I believed that America was, because of the ethos of America itself, that America was immune to the kind of fallibility

of democracy. I thought we were democratic just by definition. It was like in the sort of American DNA. I believed that like the idea of an authoritarian or fascist or dictatorial control of America was impossible. I really believed that. I would have believed that up until 2015. I would have said to you, I would have argued with you till I was blue in the face that it is in the soul of America. Democracy is built into our soul as a country, as a value.

Whether or not we agree on any other principles, this is the one we agree on. And I don't think that anymore. I don't think that's true anymore. I think we're inches away from losing the fabric of our nation. I've seen the authoritarian face of the right. And it's out there. It's there to be seen. They want to be authoritarian.

They want to take your rights away. They want to be authoritarian. They want to take your rights away. They want to have a top-down government. As much as they say they don't like big government, they fucking love it. They do. I think that if we don't make the right choice in November, and I am not at all convinced that we will, If we don't make the right choice in November, the fucking very existence of America as an idea that has functioned for 200 plus years, that idea, that existence of that concept is in real danger. So sorry, man. That's gonna wrap it up for this week everybody.

We have a funny show for you this 4th of July. So check that show out. This could be a lot of fun. We have a lot of funny stories to talk about. So check out if you bummed out by this one, wait until Thursday. I'm sure you're going to love the Thursday show. All right. That's going to wrap it up for this week.

We'll see you guys on Thursday and then next Monday. Be sure to put on your calendar Thursday, the 11th. I'm going to be doing a live stream where I'm going to be waiting for the Trump sentencing to come out. They're not going to play it live, but there will be news broadcasts right away afterwards. And so I'll probably watch a news broadcast broadcast after it's over. I'll probably be on for, you know, maybe a half an hour before it actually goes live and then listen to the newscast with you guys. And then we can talk and I'll be talking to chat the whole time. So if you're interested, come on by, check out our socials and all that other stuff. And I'll be live, like I say, on, on the day that Trump gets sentenced to his three days of house arrest.

All right. That's going to wrap it up for this week. We'll catch you guys next week. Until then, we're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptic screen. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician double bubble toil and trouble, pseudoudo-quasi-alternative Acupunctuating pressurized Stereogram Pyramidal free energy healing Water downward spiral Brain dead pan sales pitch Late night info-docutainment

Leo Pisces Cancer cures Detox Reflex Foot massage Death in Towers Tarot cards Psychic healing Crystal balls Bigfoot Yeti Ali, churches, mosques and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak, stigmata nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands.

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

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