Pragmatic Fallacy – FT#149

14 May Pragmatic Fallacy – FT#149

Show Notes

The Pragmatic Fallacy occurs when someone argues a course of action should be undertaken because it ‘works’, even though it may only work in certain circumstances or only if you define ‘works’ unconventionally.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump promoting hydroxychloroquine:

And then we looked at this clip of Trump defending Stop and Frisk policies:

Finally, we talked about this clip where he defends the use of torture:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about this exchange in the House of Lords about the Rwanda deal:

He followed that up with Jacob Rees Mogg’s assertion that it’s already working:

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from The Life and Times of Tim:

Then we discussed this clip from King of the Hill:

And we finished with this clip from Mork and Mindy:

 

Fake News

Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:

1. America lost 60,000 factories under the previous administration, 60,000. You wouldn’t believe that’s possible, but I know it’s true because I’ve said it 50 times and the fakers back there, they’ve never corrected me. No, it’s true. No, it’s true. If I were slightly off, if it were, if I was off by two factories, there’d be a headline, Donald Trump told a fib. Donald Trump gets to be a Pinocchio again. No, think of it, 60,000 factories, plants and factories closed, closed.
2. They went to Mexico. They went to China, 60,000. It’s not even – I… look, take a look at a map and put 60,000 little tacks – I mean, you wouldn’t believe it could be that many, but it is, it’s 60,000. Closed, gone. They’re all coming back, they’re all coming back. And right now, just in a very short period of time, we’ve added 12,000 brand new factories and many more are coming in.
3. And I didn’t need a magic wand. Obama – remember Obama said nobody could bring back manufacturing without a magic wand? Well I did, and it didn’t take a magic wand. He couldn’t do it because he’s incompetent, but all it took was some tariffs on China and Mexico, and all of a sudden I’m getting calls from the heads of Ford, and other companies saying “Sir, we want to come back, we’re sorry”, and now they’re building their factories here again.

Mark got it right this week, and is on 51%!

 

The Trump Trial is still not a logical fallacy

We talked about the most recent developments in Trump’s first criminal trial.

 

The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about

• There’s a lot of reasons why South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem isn’t suited to being Vice President, I get that, but I’m old fashioned enough to think that basic intellect, reasoning skills and the ability to respond appropriately to a crisis should be fundamental requirements. So the fact that it took Kristi eleven days to figure out that she could just stop doing her book tour, long past the point where every interview she did made it worse, even when it was on Newsmax, should be disqualifying, even if the underlying crisis hadn’t been the fact that she shot a puppy in the face and then boasted about it in a book she pretended to have written. Admittedly, once that news comes out you might think ‘how much worse can it get’, but with someone as media savvy as Kristi at the helm, the answer is ‘way’. After defending herself by admitting to triple horseicide, pointing out that she didn’t break any laws when she killed the puppy and also a 14 month old dog technically isn’t even a puppy, so I don’t know why anyone cares, she said Joe Biden’s dog Commander should be dealt with in a similar way. I turns out that Kristi had planned to write about Cricket’s final moments in her previous book, ‘Not My First Rodeo:Lessons from the Heartland,’ but her ghostwriter, editors and publicists pointed out what a stupid and terrible idea that would be, so she used a different team for this one. Kristi also had to contend with the fact that facts exist, and the story in her book which started “I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un” isn’t one. Unsurprisingly, because she kept doing interviews, journalists kept asking her about the story, which definitely didn’t happen. She refused to admit that it didn’t happen, but also didn’t claim it did, saying again and again that she met with lots of world leaders and that as soon as she was made aware of it she asked the publishers to take the anecdote out of the book. Some journalists pretended they don’t know about ghost writers and pointed out how weird it is to wait to be made aware of a thing you wrote, and other, more dogged journalists noted how weird it is that she didn’t become aware of it when she recorded the audiobook version. She brilliantly parried those questions by saying she doesn’t talk about her conversations with world leaders (you know except the ones she kept in the book). Eventually, a staffer presumably took pity on her and said “You know you don’t have to do these interviews, right?” and she called Fox News to cancel her slot on Gutfeld, citing weather warnings in South Dakota, which probably wouldn’t have affected her travel plans that much, since she was already in New York, having been on Fox Business earlier in the day.
• Okay you look at the field of available presidential material and you might have your doubts as to whether Trump will stay out of jail long enough to serve again or indeed whether Biden will stay on the planet long enough to serve again so perhaps it’s refreshing that there is an independent candidate to inject some vim and vigour into the proceedings. Until you realise that that  independent candidate is vaccine-conspiracy-touting and Tucker-Carlson-end-of-men contributor Robert F Kennedy Jnr.  You may shrug “surely anything is better than the other two”, weeee-eeelll, the New York Times recently quoted from a deposition Kennedy gave during divorce proceedings in 2012 ​​“I have cognitive problems, clearly,” Kennedy said in the deposition. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.” Some doctors thought Kennedy had a brain tumour but another said a dark spot on scans could be the result of a parasite.Kennedy explains his previous neurological problem “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”. He also cited possible mercury poisoning from all the tuna sandwiches he ate as a kid! Unphased by the revelations, RFK Jr is up for debating saying in all seriousness “I offer to eat five more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.” I guess when you’re in a three-horse race with two other candidates whose health is a cause for concern you’ve got to outdo them somehow! Now if it was a tequila worm he might stand more chance of being believed when he says he has a deep understanding of how to solve the border problem with Mexico!
• One of the many regressive shitholes determined to make America great again by winding the clock back to a much less great time is Utah, which passed an anti-trans bathroom bill in January which we might have talked about at the time, but there’s a lot of these assholes and it all blends in. Anyway, the bill, titled “Sex-based Designations for Privacy, Anti-bullying and Women’s Opportunities”, or SDPAWO – they need to get Bennie Thompson’s team to help them with acronyms – went into effect last week and makes it illegal for trans people to use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity in a public school or government building. Violators can be charged with criminal trespassing and could face jail time, and the government entity that allows it can be fined up to $10,000 a day. Of course, every good fascist state needs informants to effectively enforce their oppression, so Utah created an online form so that fine, upstanding Karens – I mean citizens, can report suspected violations. And here’s where the good news starts. Actual awesome people have been spamming the form with bullshit complaints – over 10,000 in the first week – to make any attempt to use it for enforcement impossible. Similar activism forced governments to take down a Virginia tip line set up to field complaints about teachers talking about LGBTQ+ issues, and a Missouri tip line to report gender-affirming health care clinics. Utah Auditor John Dougall calls the legislature’s approach to the issue ‘ham-handed’. He’s the guy who’s been stuck with the job of filtering through all the bullshit complaints in a fruitless attempt to enforce a law he had no role in passing, so I think it would be mean to John to bombard him with even more false reports. To help you avoid doing that I’ve set up a handy link, so if you want to abstain from the attempt to flood the bathroom bill with bullshit do NOT go to fallacioustrump.com/utah. That’s fallacioustrump.com/utah. Stay away from that link if you want to make sure you don’t accidentally send a false report that might help trans Utahns escape oppression.
• “It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him. And I hope he does that,” The words of one Nikki Haley Republican candidate nominee as she ended her campaign in the primaries in March. True to her word Trump has… of course not done any of that. How do we know? Well Haley grabbed more than 21% of the votes in the primary in Indiana last Tuesday. 1 in 5 republican voters voted for Nikki Haley and not Trump. She won 35% of the vote in Indianapolis’s Marion County and more than one-third of the vote in suburban Hamilton County. As in other states, she did best in the most Democratic areas of the state. Biden’s campaign attributed Haley’s Indiana showing to Trump’s trouble in suburbs and cited similar primary numbers in swing states such as Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The President made an open appeal to Haley supporters to back him in November. The Trump campaign claimed, without evidence, that Haley’s support came from Democrats! A Starmer-esque move might be to persuade Haley to run as Trump’s VP and hoover up all those votes for the cause. Indeed sources told Axios.com that Nikki Haley was under active consideration by Donald Trump’s campaign to be his running mate, a day later ‘natch Trump stepped in and nixed the idea on Truth Social. “Nikki Haley is not under consideration for the V.P. slot, but I wish her well!” Can’t have anyone stealing your thunder hey Donnie, I guess you got more than enough Storminess to handle already. 
• If you’re a MAGA asshole it must be pretty hard to keep up with which companies you’re allowed to like and which are infected with the kind of woke mind virus that made Mars create M&Ms that Tucker Carlson no longer wanted to fuck. Sometimes it’s hard to even figure out how a particular industry could be woke. Take real estate for instance. My dad was a real estate agent for 50 years and while he wasn’t exactly a bleeding heart liberal I can’t remember him refusing to sell someone a house if they used the wrong pronouns or insisting people install showers that slowly drip water and toilets that won’t flush. But apparently, most realtors in the US donate part of their commissions towards woke ideologies, liberal causes, and socialist, communist and extreme liberal initiatives. That, at least, is the claim of MAGA Realty, a company that promises not to do any of that. They also say they’re America’s only true patriotic conservative real estate company and to prove it, their front page features headshots of realtors Steve and Cliff along with disgraced former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn. Flynn isn’t actually part of the team. They do have a third realtor in the company, but she’s just a woman, so it would be woke to include her on the front page. Flynn isn’t just there because he looks pretty, either. One of the huge benefits you get by doing business with MAGA realty is that a portion of every sale goes to Flynn’s Political Action Committee, the Fight Like a Flynn PAC. But wait, there’s more! Every client also gets a free 25 foot flag pole and, and I know it sounds like I’m making this up, an AR15. In case you’re still not convinced they’re patriotic enough, there are photos on their site of the two male realtors with both Donald and Eric Trump, Roger Stone, and Mike Lindell! And finally,  they have services for every budget, from their top level MAGA package, all the way down to one called Biden, because it’s basically useless. Which kind of feels like they’re telling on themselves a bit.
• In another in the unending series of how-to career advice that we at Fallacious Towers occasionally offer; Number 473 – What to do if you were say Mike Johnson the House Speaker trying to re-establish your rabid right-wing credentials within the Republican party – the rabid right-wing of which just tried to oust you cos you’d done the unspeakable and actually worked across the house with the Democrats as well as the Republicans.  Well you might want to stand on the steps of the US Capitol building – you know the ones that were swarmed up by marauding insurrectionists intent on hand-delivering direct action in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. You know the one that as then lawyer Mike Johnson you led the amicus brief for, backing a Texas lawsuit, signed by more than 100 House Republicans,  seeking to invalidate the 2020 election results in four key swing states won by President Joe Biden. You might want to distract a bit from that though by creating some sort of non-startery messaging bill that would probably not go anywhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate or be signed into law by Biden. Perhaps something like an “election integrity” bill to stop noncitizens from voting and make it look like you were always all about “election integrity”. Despite the fact that undocumented immigrants voting in elections is already illegal under federal law, Johnson says “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that. It will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states. We’ll have a mechanism to prove whether they are or not.” All unprovable BS and he knows it and he’s telling us it! This Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, would make it harder to register people to vote by requiring proof of citizenship. That could include showing a U.S. passport, a photo ID showing that the individual was born in the United States, or a birth certificate — documents, voting rights advocates say, that millions of Americans do not have access to. Of course it’s another dressed-up BS move by the Right, not without parallel in the UK, to restrict the ability of ordinary people to vote cos the Right knows – probably intuitively – that the more people who can freely vote the less chance they’ll have of getting back into power ever. Don’t forget to vote folks, and remind everyone else too!  
• The list of Republican politicians who are unqualified for the job of actually governing is as long as the list of ways they’re unqualified, but Indiana voters managed to find a new one last week when Jennifer Pace won the Republican Primary in the state’s 7th congressional district. It won’t matter, because the district is very blue and the incumbent Democratic congressman Andre Carson will definitely win in November. That’s lucky, because Pace really would struggle to perform any of the duties of lawmaker. Not because she would be embroiled in scandals about insider trading, election interference, or shooting puppies, but because she’s been dead since March. The fact she beat three other Republican candidates who are *checks notes* still alive, is certainly an indictment on the electorate’s awareness of local events, but much more so on the other candidates’ inability to capitalise on the obvious benefit of voting for someone with a pulse. One of the other candidates, whose name is genuinely Catherine Ping, could at least have sent out flyers saying “Ping! Your next Congresswoman and the sound Jennifer Pace’s heart monitor wishes it could make.” While we’re at it, I have to mention that the Libertarian candidate in the district, who won his primary unopposed, is called Rusty Johnson, which almost beats former Idaho Governor Butch Otter as my favorite politician name ever.
• Just when you thought that Labour might offer a more centrist if not leftist approach to government, a Tory party member, another Tory Party member of parliament sees that Labour is sufficiently aligned to their maligned outlook to want to join it. First we had Dan Poulter three weeks ago – who, working part time as a doctor, said that Conservatives were no longer focused on public services. The Tories crowed that “cha! Labour has no plan for our NHS!”, seemingly unaware that if a Doctor from their own party saw fit to leave the party and join the opposition perhaps he might have some professionally observable grounds to think otherwise. Now this week we have Nathalie Elphicke MP for Dover who’s reasons for defecting very visibly a couple of minutes before PMQs this week, included that the Tories had become a byword for incompetence and division. Some might say that it took her long enough to spot it, and some might say she may have had something to do with that self-same incompetence and division all these years as a Truss-supporting member of the ERG, and as the MP for Dover she opposed the Labour Party motion to ban the practice of big businesses from firing and rehiring on a lower wage that caused so much distress for her constituents laid off by the P&O shipping firm in Dover. Also she gained her seat when she replaced her ex-husband Charlie Elphicke who was jailed on sexual assault charges,  and at the time she victim-blamed and perp-exonerated on the basis that he was an attractive man! Of course now she’s a member of the Labour Party she has had to apologise of course! She’s basically from the hard right end of the Tory spectrum – so how comes Labour chair Anneliese Dodds describe her as a “good, natural fit” for her party? It seems that Starmer’s calculations of the amount of reputational damage this would cause the Tory party, and the hope that rabid right-wing voters might thus vote for Labour at the next election might outweigh the reputational damage to the Labour Party what with the continued non-return of the Labour whip to Dianne Abbott who remains under investigation for what she said over a year ago despite having also apologised for her statements after being accused of anti-semitism. Hmmm Labour may be repainting itself as a broad church but aren’t differing religious opinions the basis of all wars? – just saying! Still I guess when you’re 30 points ahead in the polls you could probably shoot a man dead in the streets of New York and get away with it hey Keir?!

Create your podcast today! #madeonzencastr

That’s almost all for this week, but here’s our AI-aided and minimally hand-edited transcript which is at least quite accurate, but not totally:

Pragmatic Fallacy – FT#149 Transcript

Jim: Hello, and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of Donald von Schittz and pants to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim.

Mark: And I’m your other host, Mark. A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in bad or invalid arguments. And the logical fallacy we’re looking at this week is the pragmatic fallacy. I finally got to see what they asterisk out saying all the things. What is it? It’s quite, quite. It’s probably. That’s like Scrooge McDuck. Yeah, kind of.

Jim: Well, Jake Tapper, had said it on, like, daytime tv.

Mark: Right.

Jim: when he was reporting on the trial. And they were like, you know, you just gotta say it. And then, like, in the same segment, they were talking about all the stuff that storey Daniels was saying, which is ways, like, stronger stuff. But, yeah. Donald Vaughan shits and Pants is a, phrase that Michael Cohen used on.

Mark: Social media, entered into the legal record. So I wonder if somebody asked, you know, the stenographers. This one? Yeah. How you spelling that? Have you got a c in there as well as the h? Yeah. And, yes. And a z. Yeah. And it’s a special, here we are. This. I should say this. This birthday week.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: Because it’s two birthdays, in a.

Jim: Week ish time, kind of.

Mark: So it’s like Jim’s having one. And, we’re not talking about it anymore on that. And this is the 6th anniversary, so we thought we’d do a special. And we are, for the only the third time in our entire recording career in the same room at the same time.

Jim: This is true. Which is why it sounds. Well, it’s one of the reasons it sounds a bit different this week.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Because we’re being picked up on each other’s microphones instead of doing this through the Internet. Yeah. so I’ve almost certainly, although I’m saying this beforehand, I’ve had much more asshole editing this.

Mark: Announcing how they’ve got the whole thing.

Jim: It’s already been a nightmare.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So I hope you’re happy. And also because we’re doing this in the middle of the day instead of, after midnight, as usual. My road outside my house is a bit busier, and for some reason, filled with motorbikes at the moment.

Mark: It’s a Sunday, it’s sunny, there’s a beer festival locally, which is.

Jim: Which is part of the reason.

Mark: So that’s kind of, you know, it seems to attract that kind of thing.

Jim: So pragmatic fallacy. The pragmatic fallacy is when someone suggests a course of action or an argument that is based on the fact that it works, and they’re defining works, usually in a quite broad way, something that is convenient to their argument.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And our first example from Trump is when he was talking about hydroxychloroquine.

Donald Trump: So I took it, and for two weeks. Exactly. A two week regiment, it was no problem. And I didn’t get it. But the one thing is, it’s been tested for many years. Plus, it’s a very inexpensive drug. It’s been around for so long. And it’s incredible. On malaria and malaria countries, they say, where people take hydroxy, have an unbelievably low rate. Now, you’d have to check that. Somebody will check it, but that’s what.

Mark: I’ve heard, so I hope somebody has to check that.

Jim: His argument is that it worked for him and it works in malaria countries.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So it’s the right thing. It’s the thing we should be using.

Mark: Not based on anything other than that. And it’s cheap and it’s readily available.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: It’s been around for ages.

Jim: So, yeah. One of the things that people do with regard to medicines is check if they actually are effective.

Jim: Compared to other things that you can use. And if they have negative sides that outweigh the positives. Yeah. And when they tested that stuff, they found actually didn’t help. And people who were taking hydroxychloroquine as their main thing to try and treat Covid mostly died. not necessarily mostly, but at a higher rate than people who didn’t do that.

Mark: Yeah. Okay.

Jim: That’s the reason that we didn’t start using it. Not as Donald continually says, because he’s the one who said it and everyone’s against him. Right. And if it was, if it wasn’t, if he said don’t use it, the Democrats would have said it’s definitely the best thing ever. Yes. Because he only understands things. Nature.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: So he’s applying something that works. So the pragmatic thing is also extending something that works somewhere else to somewhere else where it might not necessarily work.

Jim: I mean, it doesn’t even work, in the places he’s talking about. Right. Because there’s no evidence that him using it for two weeks is what stopped him from getting Covid, because he also didn’t get Covid for lots of the.

Mark: Rest of the time when he wasn’t taking it.

Jim: Yeah. And also they don’t use it in the malaria countries, as he calls them, sub Saharan Africa, which is where like, 93% of malaria is.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Hydroxychloroquine has never been a frontline tool for combating malaria. And chloroquine, which is, related, hasn’t been used for years. They just don’t have. They have other things that are anti malarial. There’s a professor that looked at the countries where it is a thing that people use to prevent malaria and said that it’s not used enough. It’s used by, like, half a percent of the population in the last year will have used it at some point, and it only provides protection against malaria. Flight falls.

Mark: Okay. So they.

Jim: The number of people who would have been prevented from getting Covid by having had chloroquine.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Is ridiculously small and couldn’t possibly have an impact on the figures.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: The reality is that those malaria countries tend to be quite poor countries, didn’t necessarily have great COVID testing systems, and this was in, like, June 2020. So that’s why they weren’t showing lots of cases.

Mark: Right.

Jim: No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t work in the way that he is claiming it works.

Mark: It works.

Jim: Yeah. Right. Another thing that doesn’t work in the way he’s claiming it works is stop and frisk as a policing strategy.

Donald Trump: I’ve told them to work with local authorities to try to change the terrible deal the city of Chicago entered into with ACLU, which ties law enforcement’s hands. And to strongly consider stop and frisk, it works. And it was meant for problems like Chicago. It was meant for it, stop and frisk. And Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York City, had a very strong program of stop and frisk, and it went from an unacceptably dangerous city to one of the safest cities in the country, and I think the safest big city in the country. So it works. Gotta be properly applied. But stop and frisk works.

Jim: Yeah. Not really. So the unacceptable deal, he’s, so good at reading a teleprompter, isn’t he? You can’t tell that he’s reading. The unacceptable deal that the city of Chicago entered into with the ACLU was that the police agreed that they would make sure that their stuff and frisk searches complied with the Fourth Amendment, right.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Not trampling on people’s constitutional rights was the unacceptable deal that the city of Chicago accepted. Right?

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: Because before that they were doing that. They were shuffling on people for civil rights as they were in New York. When Giuliani came in and instituted stop and frisk. New York was quite bad, but the crime rate had been falling already for, like, three or four years before he started that. There’s no evidence that shows that it had a significant impact on crime rates. What it did have is a significant impact on people’s trust in police, especially among, minorities, because an enormous amount of people were being stopped and frisked for no good reason and because police are fucking racists. Like, 9% of people in, for example, 2011, when there was almost 700,000 frisks in New York City, 9% of those were white, the rest were minorities. Huge proportion of them were black. In 2013, there was a class action lawsuit that said, look, what the fuck’s going on with this? This is mad. And the courts went, yeah, this is mad. And came to an agreement with the NYPD that they would have to have a reason. They had to justify their stops immediately. That brought them down by 90%. They did 90% less stops and frisks when they had to have a reason for doing it.

Mark: right. Which kind of led the people to think that, perhaps she did it for no reason.

Jim: Yeah. Or the reason might not be crime based.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: When that came down, the crime rate continued to fall. They were stopping 600,000 less people a year. It didn’t mean that crime went back up, because it wasn’t that that was affecting the crime rate. What it did, it basically took some knives off the streets and a few guns and lots of drug arrests for minor amounts of drugs. It was not having a significant impact. And I. It’s continued to fall. It fell, like, from 2015 to a couple of years ago. There were less than 12,000, stops and frisks per year in New York, which is ridiculous compared to the 700,000 in 2011. But the race of those people being stopped and frisked hasn’t changed at all. In fact, it’s got worse. Last year, it was 6% were white. So it’s happening on a less big scale, but it’s still incredibly racist as.

Mark: A way of doing things. The similar thing was in the UK in the eighties, there was a, sus law, so you could stop and search people on suspicion. And basically that was, eventually it was done away with, because it was seen to be mostly race based.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: the suspicion was just because the police are white and these kids on the street aren’t, and that was. That caused the police to be suspicious.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And, yeah, you’re right. I think the impact on it is that the trust in the police diminishes. And when they repealed it or stamped it out or got rid of it, amongst police practice, the trust in the police went up and crime reporting went up and crime went down because people would trust the police.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a big thing about the loss of trust, is that people in those communities won’t go to the police when m they have an issue. And in Chicago, where he’s suggesting that they institute a similar thing to. To what New York had. They had almost identical system in that they were doing it prior to 2013. But the race thing was exactly the same. And in 2015, after the New York lawsuit, they came to an agreement where they would have to justify their stops, and it went dramatically down. But what happened in Chicago is when the pedestrian stops dropped to quite a low level, traffic stops just went up. They filled the hole, essentially, with traffic stops. And so in Chicago now, people were being pulled over for no good reason, in exactly the same way as they were just being stopped in the street for no good reason. And it’s not had an impact on the crime rate. No.

Mark: So the police had to get their job satisfaction to somewhere.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Their bullying quotient had to be fulfilled elsewhere.

Jim: So it doesn’t work, and they shouldn’t institute it in Chicago because they did that and had a lawsuit against them.

Mark: Yeah. And it’s in breach of constitutional rights.

Jim: Well, there’s all. Yeah, there’s obviously. That’s another thing. Is that part of the reason this is a fallacy is just because some, Even if something works, even if they’re not lying about the fact it works, or even if it worked on a wider scale than some people say, whereas, you know, it’s a common kind of alternative medicine thing where people say, well, it worked for me, so you should try it. But even if it works on a wider scale for most people, some things, that’s not the only reason you should choose it as a course of action, because there might be other reasons not to do that. Like morality.

Mark: Yeah, morals. Good and bad, might be involved.

Jim: Speaking of which, our third example is Trump talking about torture.

Donald Trump: I would absolutely approve waterboarding, and I’d go a lot further than that.

Chuck Todd: What does that mean? What is a lot further?

Donald Trump: I’m not going to define it to you on this program, but I would be, very much in favor of going beyond waterboarding. And believe me, in terms of getting information, it works.

Jim: No, it doesn’t. I mean, it gets information out.

Mark: Whether it’s the stuff you’re after or is it admissible on any kind of clinical basis?

Jim: Well, the admissibility is a minor issue, frankly, because, again, this is about the very, very specific definition of works. It does work to get information. You will absolutely get information. You cannot rely on that information in any way because it’s probably nonsense, because people who are being tortured will say whatever you want to hear to make you stop. Shane Omara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College, Dublin, which is a great title, he wrote a whole book about why torture doesn’t work. Part of it was that fear of torture, like, while you’re being, like, fear of more torture, you know, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, pain, all of that kind of stuff doesn’t make you think, well, it doesn’t give you a reasoned understanding of. Oh, okay. If I just tell them the thing that they actually need to know, they’ll stop. Because also, that’s not necessarily how it works because torturers will often increase the. The amount of torture if they think you’re not being upfront or if they think they’re lying, but they’re just as shit as telling whether people are lying as anyone else.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: So they’ll be doing more torture because they reckon, oh, I think there’s more to find out or I don’t think he’s telling the truth and it’s not based on the actual information being correct at all. They don’t base it on whether it’s reliable or useful information. They base it on just what they reckon and that isn’t a good system. Shane Omar had talked about one cambodian torture survivor who confessed to being a hermaphrodite, a CIA spy, a catholic bishop and the king of Cambodia’s son. none of which were true. He was a teacher. But you’ll say whatever will make them stop currently torturing you if you think it might. Just talking, just talking constantly, no matter how bullshit it is, might stop them from torturing you a bit.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So apart from the fact that it’s immoral, also doesn’t work to get information from people that you can then rely on. And now is the time, I think, for Marx. British politics corner.

Mark: So, obviously we’re going to talk about the Rwanda bill because that’s. That’s clearly something that’s working. So, in June 2022, way before the Rwanda bill was mooted, there was an agreement between the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Council of Ministers in the Republic of Albania on the readmission of persons. And this deal was struck then. And this allows for reading from the government website. It allows for the return of both albanian citizens, persons with right love abode in Albania, and third party nationals who have a verified connection to Albania where they are found to be in violation of the immigration laws, policies and procedures of the UK. And basically it’s about repatriating those citizens of Albania or with connections to Albania, back to Albania, when they’re found to be in violation of the immigration laws of the. Of the UK. So, fundamentally seems like a good thing and it can’t do it and it works, apparently. And during the safety of Rwanda debate in the House of Lords on Monday, 19 February this year, Lord Purvis of Tweed, who has great hair, said that the Rwanda bill would not work and compared it to the Albania agreement, which would. Lord Murray of Blidgeworth, you’re just making.

Jim: These names up now, fix him up.

Mark: On the effectiveness of that agreement and says it’s thus possible to apply it to Rwanda. And here they are.

Lord Purvis: The valid question is to, well, if this bill will not work, what would work? Well, we know that this bill will not work. So the better deterrent effects are, those policies such as relocation and resettlement agreements, which comply with international law, which. Have policing mechanisms attached to them, and. That is called the Albania deal. I’m sure the noble Lord will agree with me that that has been a success. 90% deterrent,

Lord Murray: saying that, the noble lord should refer, to the, effectiveness of the Albania arrangement. It’s the tangible evidence that deterrence works. And we can extrapolate from the experience of the Albania deal to say that deterrents will work more generally if we can be sure that a significant proportion of those crossing the channel in small boats are sent, to Rwanda for third country processing.

Lord Purvis: Even for the noble lord, it’s a bit of a leap to say that a negotiated relocation agreement with Albania has been a deterrent because they may have thought, we’re going to send them to Rwanda.

Mark: which is quite good, because when he said, and we can see that deterrent works and you can see it cuts back to Lord Purvis of Tweed at that point, and he’s desperate to say something like, well, no, it doesn’t lead you to that conclusion at all.

Jim: I love the fact that he said, even for the noble lord, it’s a bit of a leap. His lords are known for leaping.

Mark: Exactly.

Jim: Even for him.

Mark: Yes, even for a lord, it’s a bit of a leap. I think he misses the extrapolation, the fact that he says we can extrapolate from the experience of the albanian deal to say deterrence will work more generally. That’s the thing where he should have said, no, you can’t. No, you can’t just because it works there. And Lord, Purvis of Tweed had pointed out that there are a lot of things in place, not least of which it’s not a controversial issue, that Albania is deemed to be a safe country from which people are leaving and back to which they can go, whereas they’ve had to employ the ontological argument to say that Rwanda is, of all the places this should be the best place and it’d be better if it was safe than it wasn’t. So therefore it must be safe. On this Rwanda Bill, Jacob Rees Mogg, who’s the worst undergraduate, dress up as a Don award winner every year since 1983. And a pound shop Nigel Farage debut, noted that the Rwanda deal was working and the Rwanda deal is to act as a deterrent to traffickers shipping migrants to the UK on small boats. And Jacob proves that it’s working.

Jacob Rees Mogg: The Rwanda plan is working. Since royal assent of the safety of Rwanda Bill last week, Ireland has seen an increase in migrants crossing its border, escaping from the risk of deportation to Rwanda.

Mark: So obviously it’s working because asylum seekers. So people who are in the country awaiting the processing of their asylum claim are, likely to be rounded up and shipped off to Rwanda. So naturally, because of the porous border between Northern Ireland and the UK and the Republic of Ireland, the EU, they’re just going, fuck that, we’ll just go there so they can’t round us up.

Jim: And chip us up. The thing is, they only need to stay just over the border until this bill gets overturned because it’s obviously working.

Mark: Because the thing was a deterrent to traffickers to stop them arriving in the UK and small boats. And last week’s passing of the bill and the subsequent roundups of asylum seekers hadn’t acted as a deterrent to stop small boats coming because 1420 people crossed in the seven days up to the Sunday, the 5 May, and the highest daily total so far this year was 711, crossing on the last Wednesday in April. Of course, Rees Mogg has formed when it comes to what works. And on the 1 March 2022, he delivered a short speech for the government’s evaluation task force’s policy that works conference that identified the importance of using a strong evidence base for spending decisions and producing effective and efficient policy, saying in the summary paragraph, we must find out what works and what does not work, not only what works overall, but what works from whom, where and why. This is how we better deliver for citizens. This is how we build a modern civil service that supports us to be our best. But when, on August 3, 2022, asked by Julia Hartley Brewer on Talk TV what he could name that was actually working in the UK, the then trust supporter and Brexit opportunities minister, Reese Mogg, was ever mindful of the need for using a strong Everson’s base as he answered, what’s actually working in Britain today?

Jim: What actually works well in Britain today? Can you think of any public service.

Mark: Our Test cricketers didn’t do too badly against New Zealand. so Test matches are going reasonably well in the same way as he once said that fish were happier because of Brexit.

Jim: Jesus Christ.

Mark: What he’s stating is that we must infer that because the quicksters are doing not too badly against New Zealand, that therefore things are going well for the entirety of the UK.

Jim: I thought briefly he should be renamed minister for grasping at straws, but Brexit opportunity minister, same thing.

Mark: Same thing. I mean, you know, whatever.

Jim: Fucking hell.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I think it’s important to note that. I think it’s reasonable to say, like they were trying to say, that an evidence base is important for making policy decisions and things like that. And yes, of course. Does it work? Is one of the questions you should be asking. Yeah, it’s quite an important one. So I’m not trying to say in any way that people who base a decision on whether a thing works are wrong, but, basing it only on whether it works without questioning any of the surrounding issues or narrowly defining works to mean something that you are looking at and ignoring all the other ways it doesn’t work for other people is an issue. Yeah.

Mark: It’s like when you kind of go into planning something and the. One of the things is, okay, what does. What’s the success look like?

Jim: Yes.

Mark: What are the quantifiable measures of success? To provide us with the evidence that what we’re doing is actually working?

Jim: Yeah. If you’re doing marketing and something increases the number of calls you get and that’s one of your ways of measuring if it’s worked.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And then you say, well, it worked, but it turns out all those calls were complaints about your marketing. Horrendously racist.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Then it didn’t actually work, even though you’ve hit your target.

Mark: Yeah. The Beatles there, of course, with. We can work it out

Jim: in the. Fallacy in the wild. We like to talk about the Fallacy of a week from a non political perspective. And our first example this week comes from the animated sitcom the Life and times of Tim.

Tim: Don’t bug me now. My computer is going nuts.

Stu: Don’t bug you now. What could be more important than thinking about what we’re doing for lunch?

Tim: Come on. Do it. Come on. It’s not working. This h. The h is going berserk.

Stu: Step aside. Let the doctor take a look. All right, just don’t mess anything up. Don’t change any of the settings. I’m not gonna change any settings. This happened to me once. Okay, what you have to do. And I know this is gonna sound crazy to you, but you have to spill coffee on the keyboard.

Tim: No, no, no.

Stu: I can’t explain why, but it worked for me. Just trust me on this, okay? You said stop. Too late.

Tim: It’s my fault.

Stu: It is your fault.

Tim: You just poured coffee on my computer.

Stu: I like to think that I tried to pour a solution on your problem.

Mark: And it fixed the problem.

Jim: Yeah, I think we’ve all experienced a thing going wrong and someone going, oh, yeah, I know. This has happened to me before. And then they just hit it or something, and they have some weird solution to it that worked once for them. That might have just been a thing that, you know, it started working after they did that, and it’s not based on anything I was thinking.

Mark: Well, obviously, then it came along and took it away and gave him, a new computer, because that one was ruined.

Jim: So our, second example is from king of the hill. This is an episode where Hank has a low sperm count, and everybody in town seems to know about it.

Guitar shop guy: Truth be told, Hank, my count used to be 9 million, almost as low as yours. But the thing that worked for me was Peaches.

Hank Hill: I don’t know.

Guitar shop guy: Soak yourself in peaches three times a day, Hank.

Hank Hill: Well,

Guitar shop guy: Peaches.

Jim: Yeah. And this kind of represents alternative therapies. In as much as anything that a person tries and then gets better or has some regression to the mean or changes the course of their disease or illness or whatever that they have at any point, they then go, oh, well, that was it. That was it. It works. You should definitely try it for your thing, because if it worked for me.

Mark: It worked for you. Magazine called what doctors don’t tell you. Yes, which appeals.

Jim: Fucking Gillian McKee.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Wasn’t given her a medical title. Jillian McKeith.

Mark: M. Yeah. Which. Which is kind. It appeals to the big pharma hating, pro natural stuff. And there was an article in there about sleeping better if you tape your mouth shut. And they,

Jim: Well, you get less spiders.

Mark: They’re hot spiders. definitely worked.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark: But throughout the. It’s like two people that do it, and then they check each other, and then they, do it without taking their mouth out, for weeks after that. And then they say, well, how does that feel? Oh, I feel a little bit worse. Really? Yeah. It must be that then, at least throughout the. And it’s a huge article.

Jim: That’s how you know it’s working.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: If you either feel better or you don’t know the same.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We could be doctors. but it’s a huge article. But they do every third of the way down a page. Say, this is a very small. In the fact that it was two people. Right. Yeah, but the. But the implication that it’s in this magazine is that you can therefore extrapolate this to everybody else. And, of course, there are links to tape your mouth up with this stuff.com.

Jim: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They always sell the stuff that dramatically helps you in some way.

Mark: Yeah. I follow the link. It’s just gaffer tape. Just gravitate. It’s not beard friendly at all.

Jim: So our third example is from Mork and Mindy. And this is Mork’s crazy friend Exadore.

Exidor: Mork. I’ve got great news. I’ve written my life story. I call it Lauren Bacall by myself. Worked for her. Why tinker With success.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: She did very well out of it.

Mark: So, yeah, perfect. Yeah. Well, that, is the distillation of this fallacy.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: That’s perfectly.

Jim: You can’t argue with the fact that it did work for Lauren Beauclerc. Yeah, but you might not work for everyone.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Your mileage may vary.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: So before we move on to fake news this week, a couple of things. first of all is QED. Tickets are on sale.

Mark: Yay.

Jim: QED. If you’re not aware of it, and if you’re a been a listener for a while, you probably are aware of it, because we wouldn’t shut up about it after we went last year.

Mark: That’s right.

Jim: So, well, after I went and couldn’t make it because he had prior commitments. Yeah, yeah.

Mark: I had to go and play music with the people that make gam music.

Jim: So QED’s an absolutely amazing weekend of skepticism and fun in Manchester in October.

Mark: Yep.

Jim: And, yeah, if there’s any way that you can make it over to Manchester and you like fun, then go to qedcon.org to find out more information and get tickets. They’ve announced the first few speakers. Robin Ince is one of the people who can speak. He’s fantastic. And also Richard Wiseman, the Hertfordshire professor of weird stuff. Well, psychology, really, but he focuses on weird stuff. I’ve got a few of his books. He’s amazing. So, yeah, they’ll be there along. Will be there. Yeah. That’s kind of burying the lead a bit. We’re going to QED, so if you want to see us live, not performing, we’re not doing a thing, but we’ll be there enjoying it, and we will be alive.

Mark: We will be in our. We then do that weird thing where we’re fanboying other.

Jim: Absolutely. Yeah. There’ll be. There’ll be people we think of way better. yeah, it’s great.

Mark: It’s very good. What did I call it? A festival for the mind. Yes, that’s what it is. Yeah.

Jim: Qedcon.org is where you can get tickets now. And the other thing I wanted to say is thank you for all the people who’ve sent suggestions for titles for my book about 2000 mules. I’m still looking for the perfect thing. So if you have any ideas of a title for a book debunking Dinesh’s mad 2000 mules film and book, then please do send it in on Twitter or Facebook or Patreon or through email or whatever.

Mark: Write it on a thing and hold out your window.

Jim: You could do. Yeah, try that. Yeah. You, could paint if you really want to get my attention. Yeah. There used to be a thing I’m pretty sure that the post office would have to delete, like, something with a stamp and an address written on it. No matter what it was, you could.

Mark: Write on theory and, post it. Yeah. I guess these days, make sure you.

Jim: Use sufficient postage, because I do not want to post to go and pick that up at the sorting office. That’s right.

Mark: Yeah. No, I think it’s also probably got to fit through a machine these days.

Jim: I don’t know. Yeah, they have big machines. Pretty big stuff.

Mark: Yeah. Like mules.

Jim: Yeah. Anyway, I feel we’ve gone off track slightly.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: if you’ve got a good idea for a book title about that kind of thing, then, yeah, let me know. I’m looking for the perfect title. And if I don’t get it, I have to pick something that just works.

Mark: Work for Laura Bacall.

Jim: Yeah. Maybe I’ll call it by myself.

Donald Trump: So we’re gonna. We’re gonna play fake news, folks. I love the game. It’s a great game. I understand the game as well as anybody. As well as anybody.

Jim: Yes. It’s time for fake news. The game where I read out three Trump quotes, two of which are real, and one I made up, and Mark has to figure out which one is fake news.

Mark: See, I don’t understand why I’ve not been winning, obviously. Well, apart from obviously, it’s rigged, and because I’ve simply been doing the same thing I was doing when I did win. So it worked then. Why isn’t it working now?

Jim: That’s. Yeah. Makes perfect. Just.

Mark: Just do what you did before. It. It works.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Defined.

Jim: Guaranteed.

Mark: Yeah. I defined. I think the problem lies in I’m, Defined what it is I was doing. That would be getting it right.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: Is the bit that works, but don’t know how I got there.

Jim: Right.

Mark: And.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: which I’m defined.

Jim: No.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Yeah. So this is from a speech that Trump gave in Toledo in January of 2020 about how manufacturing is coming back. Just before COVID hit, he was talking about how great the economy was and how Obama basically killed the manufacturing industry, and he brought it back, and he’s doing, you know, it’s all him.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So, okay, statement number one. America lost 60,000 factories under the previous administration. 60,000. You wouldn’t believe that’s possible. But I know it’s true because I’ve said it 50 times, and the fakers bet there they’ve never corrected me. No, it’s true. No, it’s true. If I was slightly off. If it were. If I was off by two factories, there’d be a headline. Donald Trump told a fib. Donald Trump gets to be a Pinocchio again. No. Think of it. 60,000 factories, plants and factories. Closed. Closed.

Mark: Okay. I think that you see in there, it’s true because I’ve said it 50 times. that sounds like the kind of thing that we point out often. But that’s not to say you might not have said it. Does he know about Pinocchio?

Jim: So, statement number two.

Mark: Okay. Yeah.

Jim: They went to Mexico. They went to China. 60,000. It’s not even. I. Look. Take a look at a map and put 60,000 little tacks. I mean, you wouldn’t believe it could be that many, but it is. It’s 60,000 closed, gone. They’re all coming back. They’re all coming back. And right now, just in a very short period of time, we’ve added 12,000 brand new factories and many more are coming in to.

Mark: Did he though, did he add. No. See, now that’s got the telltale that I was alerted to last the, the stop. And it’s been change of tack. 60,000 little tax. Okay. Okay.

Jim: And statement number three.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And I didn’t need a magic wand. Obama, remember Obama said nobody could bring back manufacturing without a magic wand? Well, I did and it didn’t take a magic wand. He couldn’t do it because he’s incompetent. But all it took was some tariffs on China and Mexico. And all of a sudden I’m getting calls from the heads of Ford and other companies saying, sir, we want to come back, we’re sorry. And now they’re building their factories here again.

Mark: Now we’ve gone with sir. God, magic wand. Really? Really? Would he have said that? Okay. And it didn’t take a major one. He just took some tariffs on China and Mexico and we know that works. So, yeah. Heather Ford saying, sir, see, that’s the kind of thing we know that he does say and we know he says it anyway. And so if you were going to write that down in order to make something look convincing, then that would be the way to do it.

Jim: It does work.

Mark: Yes. Okay. 60, thousand little tax. Is it going to be the sir, or is it going to be that, that stop before the 60,000 little tax? All the fakes back there. Okay. So, well, I’m going to just apply the process that works all the time before and choose one of them. That’s, oh, I know. I’ve just got to choose one. right. 70, 50 times. See that? He kind of makes a thing of the numbers and the fact that he says something, it turns out to be true. So you ought to listen to me. And 6000 little tanks are really quite like magic wands, sir.

Jim: Oh, God.

Mark: Okay, so I’m going to go for number three, is the one you made up.

Jim: Okay. So the other two, which are you more convinced?

Mark: The 60,000 little tax.

Jim: Okay. And number two.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Is, yeah. Real.

Donald Trump: They went to Mexico, they went to China. The 60,000, it’s not even. I, look, take a look at a map and put 60,000 little tax. I mean, you wouldn’t believe it could be that many, but it is. It’s 60,000 clothes gone. They’re all coming back. They’re all coming back. And right now, just in a very short period of time, we’ve added 12,000 brand new factories and many more are coming in.

Mark: Have I added twelve?

Jim: Oh, no, no.

Mark: There’s just a weird way of quantifying the 60,000. They went to the red china. 60,000. Take a map and have a look. That’s the china.

Jim: And they have to put the tax.

Mark: In 60,000 little tanks in, in China. I know, yeah. But they way went 60,000 factories closed down. So surely it’s taking 6000 tax out of America.

Jim: Yeah, move. You have to put them in America first.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And then you put them in China and Mexico.

Mark: And if you could get paid for doing that, then that’s what he’s bringing back. Yeah, exactly. You can employ 12,000 people for that. You’d probably have to some factories full of people. Full of people making tanks.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And maps.

Jim: So that.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Yeah. So you also think that number one is real.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And number one. Yeah, is real.

Donald Trump: America lost 60,000 factories under the previous administration. 60,000. You wouldn’t believe that’s possible. But I know it’s true because I’ve said it 50 times and the fakers back there, they’ve never corrected me. No, it’s strong. No, it’s strong. If I was slightly off, if it were, if I was off by two factories, there’d be a headline. Donald Trump told a fib. Donald Trump gets to be a Pinocchio again. No, think of it. 60,000 factories, plants in factories, closed.

Mark: Closed. It just makes it about him. Yes, I know it’s true because I’ve said it 50 times. I mean, nobody’s quick.

Jim: He is slightly off.

Mark: I don’t doubt.

Jim: Shockingly. Yeah, yeah. Well, the reason he thinks he hasn’t been corrected on it is because most of the other times he said it, he said the actual fact, which is since China joined the World Trade Organization, which was 2001, not the previous administration, not since Obama got. If you look at census data, which includes factories, between 2001 and 2017, there were 60,000 less factories in the US. But using that data, he didn’t add any. In fact, he lost another 7000 during his first two years.

Mark: Okay, right.

Jim: So to get to the 12,000 that have come back, you have to look at different data. Right, which doesn’t support the other thing. So if you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics dataset, quarterly census of Employment and wages, that data rolls trippingly off of the tongue. That data shows that the United States gained nearly 12,000 additional manufacturing establishments between the first quarter of 2017 through to the second quarter of 2019. this speech was in early 2020. Under that data, there was also a gain of 10,000 factories in Obama’s second term. So he wasn’t losing. It was already coming back dramatically. But more than 80% of those manufacturing establishments employ five or less people, which is not necessarily what you’d call a factory, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts any establishment engaged in the mechanical, physical, or chemical transformation of materials, substances, or components into new products. That’s what they call manufacturing, which is, I think, pretty good definition of manufacturing, but that includes businesses that transform materials or substances into new products by hand or in the worker’s home, and those engaged in selling to the general public products made on the same premises from which they’re sold, such as bakeries, candy stores, and custom tailors.

Mark: So, manufacturing industries might be not factories.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: People who are making cupcakes are not factories, but that’s how you get to 12,000 new businesses.

Mark: So the whole drift of the 60,000, the closed down of the 60,000, did that statistic to also include those small outlets?

Jim: No, that’s the census data, which covers factories over a certain size. So, I mean, it certainly wouldn’t necessarily still be huge factories. That reduction of 60,000 over the course of that 20 year period can’t in any way all be attributed to China joining the WTO. That is part of it, because, chinese manufacturing is cheaper, essentially, having stuff made there and then importing it is cheaper than making in the US. But economists say that there’s some aspect of it is due to that, but definitely not all of it.

Mark: Hey, so that means my methodology.

Jim: It works.

Mark: It works.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: Whatever method I employed there.

Jim: Yeah, this time, certainly.

Mark: I think it was. Yes, yes, it was. The sir thing was to tell this time.

Jim: Right.

Mark: Like it’s been no other times in the past.

Jim: Well, recording in the middle of the day did not work for getting people to comment on this on Facebook, because I did. I always, at the beginning of when we record, I always post the fake news on Facebook to see if people in our Facebook group can compete with Mark and see if they can win. But no one, no one in Facebook has had the opportunity to. Has decided to. Maybe they’ve seen it, but on Patreon, we do have a few answers. One eyed Nick says 60,000 factories. You wouldn’t believe it. Nobody could believe such a number? Probably because I made it up. I reckon. Probably number two is fake because it hits every square of the bullshit bingo card I have.

Mark: Maps, tax. Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: Anders says number three is fake. Obviously, he would be called by the whole of Mister Ford, not only the head. I mean, how would that even work?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And Amber says, as I was reading, it dawned on me he must have a brain parasite, too. I assume it’s dead, of course, having long ago run out of sustenance.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So there we go. Yeah. you’ve made an increase in your score.

Mark: I made a thing.

Jim: It worked. You transformed one kind of score into a different kind of score. Are a manufacturing factory. You’re a factory, technically speaking.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Yeah. Manufacturing is coming back.

Mark: I’m adding slowly to the 12,000. Yeah. There you go. Yay. Doctor power equipment is the industry leader.

Jim: In field and brush mowers.

Mark: Their full line of machines are designed.

Jim: To clear acres of tough weeds, woody brush and saplings up to three inches thick, hour after hour, year after year, year. Just one mo.

Mark: And you’ll agree nothing stops at doctor. Visit doctor.com to learn more and shop the sale.

Jim: Today, life is full of adventures. Do you take this man to be your husband? I do. welcome home.

Mark: We did it. He has your eyes. He’s perfect.

Jim: Make the most of them all with pennfed checking and savings account. Learn more@pennfed.org federally insured by NCUA to receive any advertised product, you must become a member of Pennfed Credit Union. Life is full of adventures.

Mark: Do you take this man to be your husband?

Jim: I do. Welcome home. we did it.

Mark: He has your eyes. He’s perfect.

Jim: Make the most of them all with Penn fed checking and savings accounts. Learn more@pennfed.org federally insured by NCUA to receive any advertised product, you must become a member of Pennfed credit Union. And it’s time for the part of the episode that this week, at least, is called the Trump trial is still not a logical fallacy. Because it’s still going.

Mark: Yeah. I found myself desperately clinging on to it as a thing because I read that the stealing all the papers trial isn’t coming to trial.

Jim: Well, it never was, was it? I mean, it was. It will at some point, but, yeah, there’s been a lot of press about the fact that Eileen Cannon has done this terrible thing of indefinitely postponing the trial.

Mark: Right.

Jim: But that’s really not what she’s done at all. What she said is, you know that date that’s in the books as the 20 may, we’re definitely not hitting that.

Mark: Right. Yeah.

Jim: Which everyone knew. No one was expecting it to go through trial on the 20th of Maya February. So she’s just said, yeah, you’re right, it’s not happening. she’s pushed back a couple of sipper deadlines that they, they had, confidential document type stuff that they were talking about. She hasn’t, I don’t think, delayed it significantly any more than she already had. But, yeah, this wasn’t a surprise, I don’t think, to anyone paying attention to.

Mark: It, but it’s just a bit of disappointment.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Clinging on to the hope that at least it would be good to get three on the go.

Jim: Sure. I mean, there’s. At the moment, it’s probably one because you’ve got the Supreme Court giving their decision about the immunity question, which will then take it back probably to Tanya Shutkin, who will then have to rule stuff and that will be appealed. So that’s probably not happening because they’ve. The Supreme Court delayed that one in Georgia. The Georgia Supreme Court have agreed to take up Trump’s appeal on the question of whether Fannie Wallace should be taken off that case. So that’s going to delay that one as well. Yeah. So, yeah, it’s quite likely that either. Either nothing will happen until after November apart from this trial, or there’ll be a kind of favourable ruling. Like the Georgia Supreme Court might go, yeah, fine, she can stay and then if they can get that case moving, that could be moving in, like, late August, early fall, could even potentially be on during the election. There’s really nothing to stop them from doing it. That will be in November or in late October. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s probably going to happen, but, yeah, we might end up with this being the only one and everything else being put off.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But fortunately, if we make sure he doesn’t win, then it can all still happen. It can happen next year and we can, have plenty to talk about next.

Mark: Yes. Yes.

Jim: It’s not gonna.

Mark: Yes, we’ve reached our 6th anniversary and several people in my acquaintance. Are you gonna carry on with it? we haven’t run out.

Jim: At least until he’s dead, at least.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And then there will be the post mortem trials to prove whether he is dead.

Jim: Yeah. We’ll obviously have changed our name to posthumous Trump.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So we’re talking about the trial and starting on April 30, day nine of the trial, and we had the end of Gary Farrow, who was talking about Michael Cohen. He was the banker that set up a central consultant. Basically, he was just talking about the fact that it was within 24 hours of him setting that up, that he then wired stormy Daniels the money. So that pretty much shows that that was the reason it was set up, was to do that, which was never a question. But for some reason, well, I know the reason. I was going to say for some reason the Trump team have not stipulated to anything. They are requiring everything to be proved, even things like a, ah, deposition video where Trump admits that it’s his voice on the access Hollywood tape and they had to get an expert in to testify that that video was authentic, that that was a real video of Trump saying the things he said on video. Because normally the defense team would just go, well, yeah, obviously it’s that at one point they were fighting the date that the access Hollywood thing happened. You know, the prosecutors wanted to enter, here’s when this happened, here’s when it was recorded, here’s when it came out. And the defense were like, we don’t know that’s true.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And, and they were trying to get them to prove anything. And as it’s happened, they’ve had to fly out multiple data custodians to testify to things which normally they would just say, well, yeah, we’ll accept that as part of, you know, an exhibit. The reason is they’re delaying it. They’re trying to slow everything down because the longer he can claim that he’s being kept in the courtroom and away from the campaign trail, first of all, he doesn’t have to make horrible gaff filled campaign stops. And he can complain. He can, which is what he loves to do. His favorite thing is standing outside the court going, oh, I’ve had to be sleeping in a really cold courtroom today. It’s really, it’s awful there. They’re keeping me and I’m m not even allowed to say anything about it like this, that I’m saying I’m not.

Mark: Allowed to do this.

Jim: And the more he can complain about it, the better. So they’re dragging it out and then complaining that it’s taking too long. Yeah. So that was pretty much the Tuesday was Gary Farrow. They talked briefly to Keith Davidson, who was Stormy Daniels lawyer at the time when she was trying to do a deal with Ami M, the National Enquirer. He also brokered the deals for Karen McDougall with Ami M. And the other thing was that Judge merchant made a ruling that actually this thing that was being delayed, this trial, thats really trying to slow up at any point is going fine. Its going like, in terms of time, its fine. So you can go to Barrons graduation, right? Because initially when he made the ruling that I’m gonna decide that later on, yeah, the entire right wing was like, he’s stopping him from going to his own son, who he loves dearly. Graduation. Who would do that to a father? And it was like, well, they’re not stopping him doing that. He just said, we’ll see how it goes.

Mark: We’ll make room to do it.

Jim: So Merchant said, yeah, it’s fine. You can go on the, we won’t have court on May 17. And now Trump has to go. There was no way he was going to go otherwise.

Mark: That’s the other thing that the judge is. You can just enjoy. So when Trump complains, oh, no, you’re stopping me from doing that. Well, you can go for it. I’m not stopping you. I think you should. Yes, he’s got to spend the day, doing that and possibly trying it not to be about him, but more.

Jim: About, oh, that’s not happening.

Mark: Yeah, no, he’ll be turning up and hijacking the ceremony. Let’s hope it’s all done in Latin. They can complain about that.

Jim: Yeah. So the next day, well, the, technically, the confused, because they don’t, the court doesn’t sell on Wednesdays. They had another gag order, because initially, merchant fined Trump $9,000 for his nine gag order violations, which, incidentally, is the most they can do in New York. And a couple of weeks ago, I said, oh, maybe he can make it escalating like Ingrid did.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And maybe it wasn’t engrain, but whoever I, whoever I had in my head that was doing that, apparently it’s not a thing you’re allowed to do in this particular district or court. So, yeah, a thousand is the most he can do. And so prosecutors had already, by this, by the time he gave his ruling on this alleged four more counts of, wow. gag order violations, which would be dealt with later in the week. Well, in fact, on the confused he had the hearing about it, it wasn’t until the following Monday that he then gave the ruling on that one, which was one more $1,000 fine, and saying, these fines clearly aren’t working right. I really don’t want to have to put you in prison. You’re the ex president. It’s going to be a whole thing. But, at some point, I’m going to have to if you won’t stop doing this. And he’s really bending over backwards to try not to. And the entire reaction from the entire right wingers, he’s desperate to put Trump in prison.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. That’s not how our hypothesis works. I really don’t want to have to do that. So he’s counting it in terms of basically, if you don’t shut the fuck up, you’re gonna go to jail.

Jim: He really is. He’s treating it like a kind of naughty step thing. Like, just one more time. I’m nothing gonna be so angry if you keep doing it.

Mark: Oh.

Jim: And then at some point you actually have to do the thing that you didn’t. I’m gonna, exactly. It’s like if you’re, if you go on holiday with your kids and they won’t fucking shut up, and you’re like, right, we’re just not gonna go on holiday. If you don’t shut up. And then they don’t shut up, you’re like, fuck, I really want to go.

Mark: I did. Yeah, I was on the receiving end of that once where my parents did actually stop the car and put me on the side of the road and drove off. And I went, ah, okay.

Jim: Are they really? Yeah. Health and safety in the sixties wasn’t.

Mark: Really, and then he went around, went.

Jim: Some point merchant is saying that if he doesn’t stop doing it, then they will hat he’ll have to consider putting him in jail as an option. And if he does, it’s going to be like an hour in lockup and in the court. Jail. Yeah. He’s not going to be going to Rikers for a week or something.

Mark: They’re going to reopen San Quentin. Yeah. Just say, that would be great, wouldn’t it?

Jim: But it’s probably not going to go anywhere because actually, one of the things that it means is that he’s slightly pulled back on some of the things he was saying, because one of the times he was standing outside the courtroom and reading from a sheaf of papers that’s been printed off by his lackey who prints off good stories about him, he was reading a thing and saying, I can’t read that to you because, they’ve told me I can’t say stuff. So. Oh, wow. He has actually stopped saying some things since he’s been there.

Mark: So they’ve given, they’ve started giving him bits of paper that say, you can’t, you must not say, do not. It’s got big black tape over the top of it.

Jim: So all the while he’s saying, oh, I’ll go to jail for you. The constitution is more important than this. And, you know, I’ll take that punishment any day. And then going, oh, no, I’m not allowed to say that. On the confused, we heard more from Keith Davidson, who talked about the. Well, when in cross examination he was. He was asked about the kind of deals that he’s done for other people, like Lindsay Lohan and Hulk Hogan stuff and how, you know, he’s a lawyer who does kind of unseemly stuff.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: For people. And he was like, yeah, absolutely. I do that stuff.

Mark: Yeah. Is that kind of you’ve done. Yeah, no, I’ve done this before. Like, that’s a defense.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It’s weird. I mean, they don’t have anything to work with. That’s the thing. The defense team don’t have anything, legally speaking, that they can actually rely on. So they have to try and trash the witnesses who are already. Except, you know, everyone realizes most of these people aren’t great people and they’re all Trump’s friends, does business with and part of the prosecution cases. Look at all these assholes he works with. And the defense are going, oh, jesus, these, these people are real assholes.

Mark: Yeah. So at these points, I’m thinking, well, what must the jury be thinking is it’s slightly revelatory that I’m, not least, I guess, because you’re getting to hear all of these sleazy people say stuff, whereas before, they’ve just been names attached to national enquirer or whatever. So you think, okay, and they’d be doing these. And you go, oh, yeah, no, we did that for, Schwarzenegger for them. And you go, oh, bloody hell. Right. So that, that’s, that’s not a good thing out loud. So. Yes, so we’re getting into the, intimate details as a foreshadowing of. Of how this sleaze works. It’s not coming across. Well, it kind of, I guess the defense’s only defense is to say, well, this is not particularly relevant to the case. And, yet it is because it’s set in the context within which this stuff took place. And therefore, this is the kind of guy that would do this stuff. And what these people have done for other people before is to affect the outcome of their career as a result. And the whole of the prosecution is that this was to directly affect his career as an elected.

Jim: Absolutely member of Congress.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: Davidson described, well, as they. They heard, a recorded phone call between Davidson and Michael Cohen where Michael Cohen was saying, I can’t tell you how many times Trump has said to me, you know, I hate the fact that we did this, which I’m surprised that he hated it because it was the, absolutely made the problems temporarily go away, which is his thing. But he also talked about how basically no one likes Michael Cohen. Everyone thinks he’s an asshole, which, again, doesn’t play into the good. I mean, it’s, they’re trying to have their cake and eat it because they are trying to discredit him as a witness. But also, one of the things that on Friday, when they talked to Hope Hicks, one of the allegations was that she said that Trump told her that Michael Cohen made the payments to stormy Daniels kind of off his own back, out of the goodness of his heart. So the defense are trying to say essentially in that one instance, Michael Cohen did a good thing for his boss just on his own and didn’t tell him about it, but everything else he does, he’s a liar and an assortment.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Because that’s how, that’s how it works.

Jim: Absolutely. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So when they talked to Hap Hicks on, on Friday, which was kind of, everyone’s a surprise witness in a certain extent in this case, because Merchant told the prosecutors that they didn’t have to release their witness list.

Mark: Right.

Jim: For fear that those witnesses would be intimidated by a rogue defendant. So no one quite knows who’s coming or what order they’re coming in until it happens, or at least until it gets announced. They’ve already announced that Michael Cohen is going to be next Monday. But, yeah, hope Hicks showed up on the Friday, the end of the, was that third week of trial, technically. She was obviously reluctant to say negative things about Trump. She still views him, I guess, positively in some way. Yeah. So she was talking about what happened when the access Hollywood tape came out and how bad that was for the campaign and how they kind of were worried about it, which is all good for the prosecution. So when she said that Trump told her that Michael Cohen had done this on his own, the stormy Daniels thing on his own, and not told him about it, the prosecution didn’t ask, did you believe him?

Mark: Right.

Jim: Or do you think Trump was telling the truth? Because those would be questions that would be reasonable to object to. Because it’s like kind of looking into the mind of a person who is, who isn’t on the stand. But what they did ask her. Was, is that consistent with what you know of Michael Cohen?

Mark: Nice.

Jim: Which is great.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Because she then said, no, I did not see Michael to be an especially charitable character. Or selfless person. He’s the kind of person who seeks credit. So they absolutely got the exact answer they were looking for without any reason for the defense to object. It’s brilliant. Really good lawyering. They got that Trump knew about it because he had told her that Michael Cohen had done it. And they also got that she didn’t believe he didn’t know about it in advance. So, yeah, Friday ended with Hope Hicks. And that’s kind of, that was the jury went away having heard her testimony and her kind of getting upset that she’d had to testify against Trump, essentially. And on the Friday outside court, Trump claimed that the gag order was preventing him from testifying, which doesn’t at all. And so on Monday, the first thing that happened was the judge told Trump and his defense team, you do realize that the gag order doesn’t stop you from testifying. You are absolutely allowed to testify. Did that. And they went, yeah, yeah, we know.

Mark: Just trying to come up with an excuse for God. Let’s not put Trump on the stand, please. No, we know what’s happening. We’ve read, we’ve read Muller’s report. Yeah, we’ve read Woodward’s book. We know what happens. Do not under any circumstances came to stand up there.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: So on, on the Monday, they heard from Trump.org controller Jeff McConaughey and Deborah Taras, who was, an accountant, basically about all of the movement of the money and the checks and the stuff like that. They heard about Alan Weisselberg frequently taking notes on bank statements and kind of writing more details about what transactions were for. MacConi admitted that Weisselberg told him that the payments to Cohen were a reimbursement, which is quite key. And also they talked about how the numbers work, because essentially, like, if you’re, if you’ve ever invoiced anyone for anything, yeah, there’s different ways of doing it. And you can put, like, here’s the amount of money, like in our business for videos, you’d say this amount for filming, this amount, editing this, you know, for equipment or higher of equipment, whatever. And sometimes some people just go, yeah, I did this job and it cost you this amount of money. And it’s like one line thing. Legal invoices typically are more detailed for like, breaking down things, but not these ones. These, these were like, receipts were like, some law stuff, $180,000 or something. It was so fucking vague. And then what Weisselberg had done is written kind of notes saying, this, this doubled, grossed up too, because in order for Cohen to claim it as income instead of a reimbursement and therefore pay tax on it.

Mark: Right. Yeah.

Jim: They had to pay him more than he had paid out so that he would end up getting the right amount of money.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So they doubled the amount that they gave him because he’s in the 50% tax bracket.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So that he could pay tax and then still have the amount of money.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So they’ve just written kind of doubled up for tax purposes. And, and also there’s another payment in there of another reimbursement for money that Cohen paid out to Redfinch, who were, the people who fixed a part who kind of like released a rigged poll saying how great Trump is. And it wasn’t even, it was like a, it wasn’t a political thing. It wasn’t like, it was just like, who are the best New Yorkers? Or whatever? It was this fucking stupid thing. But they paid every 50 grand to have it say, oh, yeah, Trump’s the best. Which incidentally, it was also a campaign finance violation because the reason they did it was because it was in the campaign and they wanted it. They thought it might affect things. And that is not an okay way to spend campaign money. But, yeah, that was part of the thing that came out is the way that those, that all that money worked out. So it ended up being $420,000, which was, the reimbursement doubled up plus a bonus to Cohen. So Tuesday was the big day when Stormy Daniels testified. This was weird.

Mark: Yeah. And didnt the defense complain that they didnt know she was going to turn up.

Jim: Wait, when any of them were. Because of the reasons that I said of it not being okay to intimidate witnesses. So, yeah, first of all, they, they asked for a mistrial. A mistrial based on her being a, witness because they were saying that all of the sex stuff that she was going to talk about didn’t have anything to do with the falsifying business records? And the prosecution went, oh, it fuck. It does, though.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Because that’s why he falsified the business records. So the judge went, yeah, that’s an excellent point. They’re not missing a no mistrial.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Hello. So you’re sitting there. Yeah. It’s kind of central to the, prosecution case. Yeah.

Jim: So they, they were trying to limit the amount of detail that she was going to talk about. The judge was uncomfortable with some of the detail that she did come out with. The defense said at one point, she will, she will not be describing Trump’s genitalia, which kind of does make you think so strong on that, draws attention to it a bit. But she did describe their encounter and the defense. Do you remember when AOC became one of the youngest congresspeople and the Boomers thought the best way to attack her was using social media and like the Internet, when she was a digital native who could immediately clap back ten times as hard?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: In this instance, the Trump defense team, and in particular, Susan Nichols, the lawyer who was cross examining Stormy Daniels, thought the best thing to attack this sex worker on is being a sex worker. And she’s probably never heard any negative things about slut shaming kind of arguments before. She’ll just crumble. She fucking didn’t. She said something to everything that Nicholas brought up. She was saying, like, Nichols said, oh, you’ve been in a lot of kind of sex films and stuff, and you’ve directed them and written, so you’re very good at making up phony stories about sex. Right. And so stormy dinosaurs was like, well, I wouldn’t put it like that, because the sex is real. Just like the night I spent with Jon. And then she was saying, oh, you sell this kind of merchandise, like saint indictment candles and stuff like that on your website. You’re really trying to kind of grift and you’re a shill for this stuff. And she was like, oh, I suppose I am much like Mister Trump. Everything that she came out with, Stormy had a great answer for. And it just, it didn’t work at all because she doesn’t give a shit. She doesn’t care if you try and shame her, for doing sex work. She is not ashamed of it.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So, yeah, they just kind of kept stepping on rakes. The defense team lawyering 101 is don’t ask questions you don’t know the answer to. Two.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And so one of the things they asked her about the books that she’s currently working on, because they talked about how she’s making money off this and how, she’s written books and stuff. And she has two books that are in the works. And she was like, what are they about? And Stormy down and said, well, one of them is a non fiction book about a partner of mine who was a rock star and became a porn star. Okay. and the other one’s, a, fiction book about a girl and a horse. And the lawyer was like, and does this girl have an affair with the president at any point? Was like, no. Okay, what’s the point of that question?

Mark: Because. And again, that kind of my thought is. Right. You’re watching this like an episode of Crown Court. You are the jury and you’re sitting there thinking, how does this come across to the jury? It just makes the defense look like idiots.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: Unprofessional, unprepared, and actually defending a case that, has no defense, it’s got no, there’s no strength to the defense.

Jim: No, absolutely. And for all their argument about relevance, whether the sex happened as stormy says it did is not relevant to the case. The story that it happened was the thing that they were suppressing.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Their defense shouldn’t be, didn’t happen, or it didn’t happen like you claim it did.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: That makes no difference.

Mark: No, no. It’s the suppression of the story there.

Jim: and the falsifying business records.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: Based on the suppression. Yes.

Mark: So they’ve tried to pay her money to show up and they haven’t managed to show up. What they’ve done is got her into court, and then they’re getting her to say stuff which Trump had previously paid her to stop.

Jim: Absolutely. They spent a lot of time asking her questions about stuff. I mean, at one point she mentioned that there was a power imbalance in the relationship because he was bigger than her, twice her age. And Trump, she wasn’t saying she felt coerced or pressured or whatever into having sex with him or anything like that, but acknowledged that there was a power imbalance there. And also the fact that he had intimated that he might be able to get her a celebrity apprentice and that kind of thing, which would be good for her career and all this kind of stuff. And they, the defense team really kind of focused on the idea that there was maybe some kind of consent issue you with because of this, because of what she’d said about there being a parent balance, which she was saying now, that I consented. It was funny or wasn’t. I’m not saying I didn’t consent or anything like that, but they kept fucking asking questions about it and then tried another mistrial request based on the fact that she was claiming that she was coerced. And the judge was like, what you were asked, this is what he said. I don’t know why you went into an ad nauseam encrost examination. You drummed it over and over again into the jury’s ear.

Mark: Exactly. There you go.

Jim: And so he didn’t grant that mistrial request either.

Mark: That’s the thing. That’s the other part of lawyering 101. If there are things you don’t want the jury to hear. You don’t, you’re, you’re not the one that keeps framing it in words so that they can.

Jim: So that was confused.

Mark: Hadn’t, he got the gag order, had got to a certain level of traction with Trump that the Trump’s team didn’t. They ask whether the gag order still applies now? Well, Stormy Daniels Darwin, because he wants.

Jim: To yell about her on social media. Yeah. So there’s a few things that the defense team tried to get changed with the gag order, especially after the second gag order violation ruling. One was that they apparently came to the judge with like a stack of stuff that Trump would like to say about people to try and get him to pre approve it.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And the judge was like, no, no, just be careful. Don’t do shit. I’m, not going to look at your things and say, oh, you can say this. That’s how to try this word. No, that’s not what we’re doing. But he did say of the four alleged incidents, at least a couple of them were, the argument was that he was responding to speech from Michael Cohen because that was where Donald Schwits and pants came from, was that Cohen had posted that. So Trump was responding to that kind of thing from Cohen when he was saying some things to or about Cohen. And merchant said, basically, some of that’s allowed, right? If you’re responding directly to things people have said.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And in that vein, said to Cohen, or, I don’t know if he can’t have said it’s Cohen. Cohen wasn’t in the court, but I guess said to the, to the prosecution to tell Cohen or something. Basically, stop that for a bit. Stop having a go at Trump on social media, at least until after you’ve testified, because he’s going to come back at you and then I’m going to have to deal with the whole thing. So. So, yeah. The judges asked Michael Cohen to stop attacking Trump on social media. And in that kind of slight carve out of saying, yes, if, if he does attack you, you can say some things, but you still have to be not contemptuous. They were asking for a similar thing about stormy dance. Like, if she says stuff about her, can we call her horse face or whatever? Ah, yeah. And the judge was like, I mean, they node.

Mark: No, grow up, for Christ’s sake. It’s almost like that. Can we say this?

Jim: He’s hitting me.

Mark: When they call him over to the bench to do those kind of things, you just want him to reach out, grab their heads and bang their heads or just cuff them around the back of the head.

Mark: Oh God, I just grow up, for Christ’s sake.

Jim: So stormy, consequently, having had this, denied that they’re allowed to attack her.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: She’s been going after Trump on socials after her testimony she posted the other day, real men would testify in their own case and kind of deny allegations against them. Oh, never mind. So, yeah, someone, someone else posted on Twitter, if stormy manages to taunt him into testifying, we should put her on money.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So, yeah, Friday was much more subdued. We heard from, Madeleine Westerhoe, the Trump White House secretary, basically about the fact that he likes to sign a lot of stuff. He likes to kind of know what’s going on. So it’s essentially saying it’s not plausible that he didn’t know that these payments were going out and what they were for. So he likes to sign all the stuff himself and be aware of what Czechs are for, essentially, because as they’ve established already, he’s very cheap and wouldn’t want like just $420,000 going out of the trump.org for no good reason.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s why the notes were being made, so that he got sigh of those.

Jim: He wouldn’t. Yeah, yeah, that’s the argument they’re making. Because, because the defense is going to be, Trump didn’t know anything about this. And arguably that’s what Cohen’s testimony is probably going to establish best, is that Trump knew all about it.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: because he’s the one who was, who was the middleman who, ah, was dealing with Ami and Trump. The thing that they’ve done very well, I think, before Cohen comes in and does his testimony, apart from establishing that nobody really liked him, so you don’t need to like him to believe him is because no one likes him. He’s an asshole, is pretty much all of the stuff that they’ve been eliciting out of other witnesses, like Maconi and Madeleine Westerhoo and, hope Hicks and David Pecker from Ami, has been stuff that Cohen has been saying, right?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: They’ve been established it from other people.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Some of them, most of whom, in fact are Trump loyalists.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And so when Cohen comes in and says the stuff he’s been saying for the last couple of years, he’s already been backed up by these other, he’s probably not going to say very much that hasn’t already been accepted as evidence or established in court through the testimony of other people. So there’s going to be not much that they can try and impeach him on. They’re just going to be attacking his character, which we already know is terrible.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Because lots of people have said that, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: So I think they’ve been very smart in keeping him for later. I don’t know if he’s gonna be the last witness, but he’s probably gonna wrap up the thing and he’s gonna be in for a few days this week.

Mark: So consequently, his testimony can’t be undermined, by the defense. It’s all kind of too late because all of the stuff he’s about to talk about has been proven in air, quotes. Yeah.

Jim: They’ve established a scheme that went on. They’ve established all the people who were involved in it. They’ve looked at the paperwork, they’ve talked to Daniels about the motivation behind it. They’ve talked to Hicks about how much Trump knew at, various points during the process. Certainly by the time Trump was telling her about what Cohen had done, showing that he had awareness of it, was before some of the payments were made. It’s all been established. Cohen is just there to say, yep, I was the guy doing it all. I helped out, and Trump totally knew all the time and everything that has already been established. Here’s the kind of little details that I can fill in because I was there and I was the one involved.

Mark: And finally, some things we really don’t have time to talk about.

Jim: There’s a lot of reasons why South Dakota Governor Christy Noem M isn’t suited to being vice president. I get that. but I’m old fashioned enough to think that basic intellect, reasoning skills, and the ability to respond appropriately to a crime crisis should be fundamental requirements. So the fact that it took Christie eleven days to figure out that she could just stop doing her book tour, long past the point where every interview she did made it worse, even when it was on Newsmax, should be disqualifying, even if the underlying crisis hadn’t been the fact she shot a puppy in the face and then boasted about it in a book she pretended to have written. Admittedly, once that news comes out, you might think, how much worse can it get? But with someone as media savvy as Christy at the helm, the answer is way after defending herself by admitting to triple horseside, pointing out that she didn’t break any laws when she killed the puppy, and also, a 14 month old dog technically isn’t even a puppy. So I don’t know why anyone cares. She said Joe Biden’s dog commander should be dealt with in a similar way. It turns out that Christie had planned to write about cricket’s final moments in her previous book, not my first rodeo, lessons from the heartland, but her ghost writer editors and publicists pointed out what a stupid and terrible idea that would be, so she used a different team for this one. Christy also had to contend with the fact that facts exist, and the story in her book, which started, I remember when I met with north korean dictator Kim Jong un, isn’t one. Unsurprisingly, because she kept doing interviews, journalists kept asking her about the story, which definitely didn’t happen. She refused to admit that it didn’t happen, but also didn’t claim it did, saying again and again that she met with lots of world leaders and that as soon as she was made aware of it, she asked the publishers to take the anecdote out of the book. Some journalists pretended they didn’t know what a ghostwriter is and pointed out how weird it is to wait to be made aware of a thing you wrote, and other more dogged journalists noted how weird it is that she didn’t become aware of it when she recorded the audiobook version. She brilliantly parried those questions by saying she doesn’t talk about her conversations with world leaders, you know, except the ones she kept in the book. Eventually, a staffer presumably took pity on her and said, you know, you don’t have to do these interviews, right? And she called Fox News to cancel her slot on gut, citing weather warnings in South Dakota, which probably wouldn’t have affected her travel plans that much since she was already in New York, having been on Fox Business earlier in the day.

Mark: It’s like having a care worker come out and say, you know, you don’t have to do this.

Jim: I don’t know. Oh shit, you don’t have to put.

Mark: Yourself through with that. Oh no. Okay. You look at the field of available presidential material and you might have your doubts as to whether Trump will stay out of jail long enough to serve again, or indeed, whether Biden will stay on the planet long enough to serve again. So perhaps it’s refreshing that there is an independent candidate to inject some vim and vigor into the proceedings until you realize that that independent candidate is vaccine conspiracy touting and Tucker Carlson end of men contributor Robert F. Kennedy Juniore, you may shrug. Surely anything is better than the other two. Well, the New York Times recently quoted from a deposition Kennedy gave during divorce proceedings in 2012. I have cognitive problems, clearly, Kennedy said in the deposition. I have short term m memory loss and I have longer term memory loss that affects me. Some doctors thought that Kennedy had a brain tumour, but another said a dark spot on scans could well be the result of a parasite. Kennedy explains his previous neurological problem was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died. He also cited possible mercury poisoning from all the tuna sandwiches here. As a kid unfazed by the revelations, RFK junior is up for debating, saying, in all seriousness, I offer to eat five more brain worms and still beat President Trump and, President Biden in a debate. Well, I guess when you’re in a three horse race with two other candidates whose health is, of course, for concern, you’ve got to outdo them somehow. Now, if it was a tequila worm, he might stand more chance of being believed when he says he had a deep understanding of how to solve the border problem with Mexico.

Jim: One of the many regressive shitholes determined to make America great again by winding the clock back to a much less great time is Utah, which passed an anti trans bathroom bill in January, which we might have talked about at the time, but there’s a lot of these assholes, and it all blends in into one. Anyway, the bill, titled sex based Designations for privacy, anti bullying, and women’s opportunities, or pow wow, they need Benny Thompson’s team to help them with acronyms, went into effect last week and makes it illegal for trans people to use a bathroom that lines with their gender identity in a public school or government building. Violators can be charged with criminal trespassing and could face jail time, and the government entity that allows it can be fined up to $10,000 a of course, every good fascist state needs informants to effectively enforce their oppression. So Utah created an online forum so that fine, upstanding Karens, I mean, citizens, can report suspected violations. And heres where the good news, actual awesome people have been spamming the form with bullshit complaints, over 10,000 in the first week to make any attempt to use it for enforcement impossible. Similar activism forced governments to take down a Virginia tip line set up to field complaints about teachers talking about LGBTQ issues. In a Missouri tip line to report gender affirming healthcare clinics, Utah auditor John Dougal calls the legislatures approach to the issue ham handed. Hes the guy whos been stuck with the job of filtering through all the bullshit complaints in a fruitless attempt to enforce a law he had no role in passing. So I think it would be mean to John to bombard him with even more false reports. To help you avoid doing that, ive set up a handy link. So if you want to abstain from the attempt to flood the bathroom bill with bullshit, do not go. Go to fallacioustrump.com utah. That’s fallacioustrump.com utah. Stay away from that link. If you want to make sure you don’t accidentally send a false report that might help trans Utahns escape oppression, do not go there. Do not fallacioustrump.com utah. I accidentally, I sent one, very easy to do when you’re on the form. Yeah, you would just accidentally fill it in. And I filled it in with some stuff about the Sesame street characters visiting the White House House. And they don’t have genitals, so they might have used a bath. I don’t know. Hard to tell. So don’t do that by visiting feliciastrump.com utah.

Mark: It’s now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him, and I hope that he does that. The words of one Nikki Haley republican candidate nominee as she ended her campaign in the primaries in March. True to her word, Trump has of course, not done any of that. How do we know? Well, Hayley grabbed more than 21% of the votes in the primary in Indiana last Tuesday, one in five republican voters voted for Nikki Haley and not Trump. And she’s not even the candidate anymore. She won 35% of the vote in Indianapolis, Marion county, and more than one third of the vote in suburban Hamilton county. As in other states, she did best in the most democratic areas of the state. Biden’s campaign attributed Haley’s Indiana showing to Trump’s trouble in suburbs and cited similar primary numbers in swing states such as Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The president made an open appeal to Hailey’s supporters to back him in November. The Trump campaign claimed, without evidence that Hailey’s support came from the Democrats. A starmer esque move might be to persuade Hailey to run as Trump’s VP and Hoover up all those votes for the cause. Indeed, sources told axios.com that Nikki Haley Washington, under active consideration by Donald Trump’s campaign to be his running mate. A day later, Nag Trump stepped in and Nick’s the idea on truth social Nikki Ailey is not under consideration for the VP slot, but I wish her well. Can’t have anyone steaming or thunder. Hey, donny, I guess you’ve got more than enough storminess to handle already if.

Jim: You’Re a maggot asshole it must be pretty hard to keep up with which companies you’re allowed to like and which are infected with the kind of woke mind virus that made Mars create M and Ms that Tucker Carlson no longer wanted to fuck. Sometimes it’s hard to even figure out how a particular industry could be woke. Take real estate, for instance. My dad was a real estate agent for 50 years, and while he wasn’t exactly a bleeding heart liberal, I can’t remember him refusing to sell someone a house if they used the wrong pronouns, or insisting people install showers that slowly drip water and toilets that won’t flush. But apparently most realtors in the US donate part of their commissions towards woke ideologies, liberal causes and socialist communist and extreme liberal initiatives. That, at least, is the claim of MAGA Realty, a company that promises not to do any of that. They also say they’re America’s only true patriotic conservative real estate company. And to prove it, their front page features headshots of realtors Stephen Cliff, along with disgraced former national security adviser Mike Flynn. Flynn isn’t actually part of the team. They do have a third realtor in the company, but she’s just a woman, so it would be woke to include her on the front page. Flynn isn’t just there because he looks pretty either. One of the huge benefits you get by doing business with MAGA Realty is that a portion of every sale goes to Flynn’s political action committee. The fight like a Flynn pack. But wait, there’s more. Every client also gets a free 25 foot flagpole. And. And I know it sounds like I’m making this up. An AR 15? No. In case you’re still not convinced they’re patriotic enough, there are photos on their site of the two male realtors with both Donald and Eriche Trump, Roger Stone and Mike Lindell. And finally, they have services for every budget from their top level MAGA package all the way down to one called Biden, because it’s basically useless. Which kind of feels like they’re telling on themselves a bit.

Mark: In another in the unending series of how to career advice that we at Felicia’s towers occasionally offer. Number 473, what to do if you were, say, Mike Johnson, the House speaker, trying to reestablish your rabid right wing credentials within the Republican Party, the rabid right wing of which just tried to oust you because you’ve done the unspeakable and actually worked across the House with the Democrats as well as the Republicans, well, you might want to stand on the steps of the US Capitol building. You know, the ones that were swarmed up by marauding insurrectionists intent on hand delivering direct action in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. You know, the one that has then lawyer Mike Johnson. You led the Amarquers brief before backing a, Texas lawsuit signed by more than 100 House Republicans seeking to invalidate the 2020 election results in four key swing states won by President Joe Biden. You might want to distract a bit from that, though, by creating some sort of non starter remessaging bill that would probably not go anywhere in the democratically controlled Senate or be signed into law by, say, Biden. Perhaps something like an election integrity bill to stop non citizens from voting and make it look like you were always about election integrity, despite the fact that, undocumented migrants voting in elections is already illegal under federal law, Johnson says. We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that. It will prevent that from happening, and if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful. For within the states, we’ll have the mechanism to prove whether they are or not. It’s all unprovable bullshit, and he knows it, and he’s telling us it. This safeguard, American Voter Eligibility act, or SavE act, would make it harder to register people to vote by requiring proof of citizenship. That can include showing a us passport, a photo id showing that the individual was born in the United States, or a birth certificate documents voting rights advocates say that millions of Americans do not have access to of course, another dressed up bullshit move by the right, not without parallel in the UK to restrict the ability of ordinary people to vote. Because the right knows, probably intuitively, that the more people who can freely vote, the less chance they’ll ever have of getting back into power. Ever. Don’t forget to vote, folks, and remind.

Jim: Everyone else, too, the list of republican politicians who are unqualified for the job of actually governing is as long as the list of ways they’re unqualified. But Indiana voters managed to find a new one last week when Jennifer Pace won the republican primary in the states 7th congressional district. It won’t matter because the district is very blue and the incumbent, democratic Congressman Andre Carson, will definitely win in November. That’s lucky, because Pace really would struggle to perform any of the duties of lawmaker, not because she would be embroiled in scandals about insider trading, election interference, or shooting puppies, but because she’s been dead since March. The fact, she beat three other republican candidates who are checks notes still alive is certainly an indictment on the electorate’s awareness of local, but much more so on the other candidates inability to capitalize on the obvious benefit of voting for someone with a pulse. One of the other candidates, whose name is genuinely Catherine Ping, could at least have sent out flyers saying, ping your next congresswoman, and the sound Jennifer Pace’s heart monitor wishes it could make. While we’re at it, I have to mention that the libertarian candidate in the district who won his primary unopposed is called Rusty Johnson, which almost beats former Idaho governor Butch Otter as my favorite politician name ever.

Mark: Oh, yeah, fantastic. Well, just when you thought that Labour might offer a more centrist, if not leftist, approach to government, a Tory party member, another Tory party member of parliament, sees that Labour is sufficiently aligned to their maligned outlook to want to join it first. We had Dan Poulter three weeks ago, who, working part time as a doctor, said that the Conservatives were no longer focused on public services. The Tories crowed that Labour has no plan for our NHS, seemingly unaware that if a doctor from their own party saw fit to leave the party and join the opposition, perhaps he might have some professionally observable grounds to think otherwise. Now, this week we have Natalie Elphick, MP for over whose reasons for defecting very visibly a couple of minutes before PM queues this week included that the Tories had become a byword for incompetence and division. Some might say that it took her long enough to spot it. And some might say she may have had something to do with that self same incompetence and division all these years. As a trust supporting member of the ERG and as the MP for Dover, she opposed the Labour party motion to ban the practice of big businesses from firing and rehiring on a lower wage that caused so much distress for her constituents. Laid off by the P and o shipping firm in Dover. Also, she gained her seat when she replaced her ex husband, Charlie Elphick, who was jailed on sexual assault charges. And at the time, she victim blamed and perp exonerated on the basis that he was an attractive man. Of course, now she’s a member of the Labour party, she has had to apologise. Of course. She’s basically from the hard right end of the Tory spectrum. So how comes Labour chair Annelise Dodds described her as a good natural fit for her party? It seems that Starmer’s calculations of the amount of reputational damage this would cause the Tory party, and the hope that rabid right wing voters might thus vote for Labour at the next election might help way the reputational damage to the Labour party, what with the continued non return of the Labour whip to Diane Abbott, who remains under investigation for what she said over a year ago, despite having also apologised for her statements about being accused of anti semitism. Labour may be repainting itself as a broad church, but aren’t differing religious opinions the basis of all wars? Just saying. Still, I guess when you’re 30 points ahead in the poll, you could probably shoot a man dead in the streets of New York and get away with it.

Jim: Hey Keir, so that’s all the bad arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this week. You’ll find the show notes@feliciatrump.com and if you hear Trump say something stupid and want to ask if it’s a fallacy, our contact details are on the contact page.

Mark: If you think we’ve used fallacy ourselves, let us know. And if you’ve had a good time, please give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Or simply tell one other person in person about how much they’d like our podcast and you can support the show@patreon.com. ftrump just like our strawman level patrons, Colleen Lyella, Richard Thunder Hopkins, Will M. Scott, Ozzy on Bank, Laura Tomsick Schmootz, Mark Reiche and Amber, arm Buchanan, who told us when we met her at QED, we can just call her Amber, though another listener recognized her QED last year because we just keep using her full name all the time. And our, true Scotsman level patrons, Renee Zed, Melissa Cytex, Stephen Bichorn, Janethe, Andrew Hauk, and our top patron, Kaz Tui. Thank you so much for your continued patronage. It really is very much appreciated.

Jim: You can connect with those awesome people as well as us and other listeners in the Facebook group@facebook.com.

Mark: Groups FallaciousTrump all music is by the outbursts and was used with permission. So until next time on fallacious Trump, we’ll leave the last word to the defendant.

Donald Trump: That’s right, go home to mommy.