Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc – FT#159

15 Oct Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc – FT#159

Show Notes

Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc occurs when someone assumes or implies a causal relationship because two things happen at the same time.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump suggesting having more guns makes everything safer:

And then we looked at this clip of Trump suggesting gas prices are due to the current President:

Finally, we talked about this clip blaming Kamala Harris for Iran being close to having nuclear weapons and Hamas attacking Israel:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about Rishi Sunak taking the credit for halving inflation:

And he finished with Boris Johnson claiming staying in the European Medicines Agency would have made the vaccine rollout impossible:

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Duolingo:

Then we discussed this clip from the Ricky Gervais Podcast:

And we finished up with this clip from Bull:

 

Fake News

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

1.  They want electric planes. What happens if the sun isn’t shining while you’re up in the air? “Well Sir, those… you know, I told you there’d be problems, Sir.” No. They want electric everything. Everything. They want electric boats. The problem – the boats, they – they don’t float because the battery is so heavy it sinks the boat. They say “We don’t care we want them anyway.”
2. They want to regulate – all the companies will have to make their cargo ships, their oil ships, in electric. If you’re a shipping company you’d better vote for me, because you’re not going to have a company any more. They’ll make it so you can’t have a ship big enough for a single… you won’t be able to carry anything. You’ll have tiny ships and they’ll sink all the time. You can’t make huge ships in electric. These people are crazy.
3. We make the best tanks in the world. They want to have them – so that as we go into a country to bomb the hell out of it, we will do it in an environmentally friendly way. And, you know, with an army tank, again, the battery is very big, very heavy, and doesn’t last long. You know what it is? It’s an army tank, and it’s like you’re pulling a wagon behind the army tank. You’re pulling a wagon like a child pulls a wagon, and it’s loaded up with a battery.

Mark got it wrong again this week, and is still on 52%!

 

The Vice Presidential Debate was not a logical fallacy

We talked about the debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz.

 

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

• It seems like I’ve been going about publicising my new book all wrong. I’ve sent out press releases to journalists and contacted podcasters hoping one or two might grant me an interview, but I should take a leaf out of Melania’s new book. When CNN indicated they were prepared to talk to her on air to publicise her eponymously titled memoir, her publishers demanded CNN pay a quarter of a million dollars for the privilege! They did not agree to the terms. Meanwhile, Donald has an even more lucrative method of hawking his $60 bibles. Oklahoma State Superintendent for schools, Ryan Walters, whose church- and state-based shenanigans we’ve discussed before, has budgeted $3 million to buy 55,000 new bibles for Oklahoma classrooms, but he has some suspiciously specific criteria for them. They have to be the King James version, bound in leather or leather-like material, and they must also contain the Pledge of Allegiance, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Some early reports claimed that this excludes all bibles currently in print in the US except the “God Bless the USA” bible endorsed by Trump, but that’s not completely true. There is one other bible available which would fit the bill, although at $90, Walters would need to negotiate a bulk discount to bring it in under budget. That option is the “We The People” bible, which was promoted by Donald Trump Jr in 2022. Notably, Walters doesn’t require the bibles to be printed in the USA, since it turns out Trump’s are made in China for less than $3 a copy. Tim Wildsmith, a Baptist minister who reviews bibles on YouTube was unimpressed with the leather-like cover, found it hard to read because words were jammed together, and noted that “sticky pages ripped when pulled apart”. Fortunately, neither Trump nor any of his followers will ever look inside. But lest you think Christians were the only ones Trump was trying and failing to pander to, he visited a Jewish gravesite for a commemoration event for October 7th and when he was handed a Jewish prayer book he asked “Would you like me to sign this?”, and one of his campaign’s latest grifts is a coffee mug bearing the slogan “Latter-day Saints for Trump”. In case you’re not aware, Mormons aren’t allowed caffeine. 
• We’re coming up to that significant date in American politics next month; November – yes the anniversary of the ‘voter fraud’ press conference held in the Four Seasons Total Landscaping car park, masterminded of course by co-conspirator no 1 Rudy Giuliani. To celebrate, Jack Smith has filed documents in federal court in Washington, DC, outlining the federal election interference case against Trump detailing Guiliani’s text to Michigan lawmakers in a bid to overturn the state’s election results; “So I need you to pass a joint resolution from the Michigan legislature that states that, *the election is in dispute,* there’s an ongoing investigation by the Legislature, and * the Electors sent by Governor Whitmer are not the official Electors of the State of Michigan and do not fall within the Safe Harbor deadline of Dec 8 under Michigan Law.” At the behest  of Trump of course – who enlisted Giuliani as his personal attorney because he “was willing to falsely claim victory and spread knowingly false claims of election fraud,” according to Smith’s filings. Whilst willing and ready Rudy proved to be… hmmm not so able – he apparently texted it to the wrong number. Not such clangers as the butt dials that accidentally left two voicemails on an NBC reporter’s phone where he spoke about needing money and unleashed a verbal attack on Joe Biden, the then-Democratic presidential candidate, but nonetheless ineffective and… yeah why not – stupid! Rudy has of course pleaded not guilty but his daughter, Caroline Giuliani, spoke out to Vanity Fair about how Trump “destroys everything he touches” as she endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris.“Watching my dad’s life crumble since he joined forces with Trump has been extraordinarily painful, both on a personal level and because his demise feels linked to a dark force that threatens to once again consume America,” Yeah painful but also dare we say karmically funny?
• Jack Smith’s aforementioned court filing was unsealed earlier this month, and well, those of us who have been paying attention, and I include you in this, dear listener, already knew most of the stuff included and suspected the rest. As we’ve already mentioned, the filing contextualises all of Trump’s actions around January 6th in terms of his private status as an office seeker, not an office holder, like for example all of his attempts to get Mike Pence to just say he won. I’ll be interested to see howw Trump’s lawyers respond to this specifically, given that any argument they make that Pence had the power to choose which states to accept would presumably also apply to Kamala, who will be doing that job on January 20th next year. There were a few juicy morsels which were previously hidden, such as the un-named co-conspirator who is probably Trump’s election day Chief of Operations Mike Roman, who when told that a batch of Biden votes was legit, said “find a reason it isn’t”, and  “give me options to file litigation… even if it is.” That same co-conspirator was told this could lead to civil unrest and apparently replied “Make them riot”. Trump himself was given an update about Mike Pence being taken to a secure location for his safety and allegedly replied “so what.” And the filing also adds many more examples of Republicans telling Trump that all his claims about the election being rigged were bullshit, including Pence, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, Michigan Senate leader Mike Shirkey, and even Trump campaign spokesman and face drawn on a thumb, Jason Miller. And finally, a quote from Trump to his family members on Marine One – “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election, you still have to fight like hell.”
• Bob Woodward has a new book out – War – which though it covers the Biden presidency – details incidents at the beginning of the Trump presidency’s response to the Covid pandemic. Whilst Trump was, you know, as the actual head of the actual country, actually advocating that the populace actually shove big lights inside themselves or inject themselves and each other with actual bleach – you know under strict medical conditions of course, he was sending covid tests directly to Vladimir Putin in Russia!  Yep you heard right. Never mind that these tests were scarcely  available to the American people who could perhaps on the medical frontline have worked out whether they were posing a danger to their patients and vice versa, and perhaps that might’ve averted the deaths of many hundreds and thousands of people, as long as your sponsor to join the Russian chapter of the Hell’s Angels that you‘re so desperately prospecting to join is healthy enough not to black ball your application, that’s fine. According to Woodward, the Russian president told Trump: “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you.” Ya think!!! – give him his due Ol’ Putes knows how to read a situation. Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov largely confirmed the account of Woodward vis a vis Trump secretly sending the tests to the Russian president for his personal use despite US shortages, but draws the line at saying any phone calls between the two despots actually happened – you know ‘in case people get mad at them!”.
• I mentioned this story in the final episode of our Patreon evisceration of Dinesh D’Souza’s Police State, but it’s too much fun not to repeat here. You might remember Tina Peters, the former Mesa County Clerk who conspired with others to break into voting machines to prove they were compromised, and was charged with four felonies and three misdemeanours and still ran for Secretary of State in Colorado in 2022. (She didn’t win). As a quick reminder, here’s how she reacted to being arrested. She was a bit more calm in court last week when she was sentenced to nine years in prison, merely expressing how bad she felt for the inevitable divine retribution her accusers would have to deal with because “God doesn’t like people messing with his kids”. She did come across a bit desperate when she told the judge that she couldn’t go to prison because she needs to sleep on a magnetic mattress for her bad back, but he was unmoved. In fact, he was all out of fucks to give, telling her “You are no hero, you abused your position, and you’re a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.” Have fun in prison, Tina. Meanwhile, in Georgia, election deniers like Tina did manage to get appointed to the State Election Board, and have changed the rules with only weeks to go before the election to require poll workers in each precinct to hand count all ballots cast on election day before voting to certify the count. This is completely unnecessary, and will delay results from Georgia long enough for Trump to once again claim Democrats are doing it deliberately so they can find massive dumps of Harris ballots and foment another insurrection.
• As if the damage wrought by Hurricane Helene wasn’t bad enough, lazy politicising gamesmanship by the Republican party is adding insult to injury! One of the most prevalent falsehoods spread by Trump is the claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has used some disaster-relief funds to help migrants. Though the emergency agency and migrant-relief programs are both part of the Department of Homeland Security, their funds are in separate accounts, and money earmarked for hurricane costs can’t be transferred to cover aid to migrants. Asked for comment on Trump’s false claims, campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt repeated them. “The only misinformation is coming from the Biden-Harris administration, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre lied to the nation Friday when she said it is ‘categorically false’ that FEMA funds are being used to support illegal immigrants.” Whilst Republican Mitt Romney thankfully said during a discussion at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “I mean, he just makes it up.” House Speaker Mike Johnson defended Trump’s statements in a news conference Wednesday evening saying Trump “is expressing his frustration about the lack of resources being provided here,” and then repeated the false claims about migrants. In the same news conference, however, North Carolina Republican Chuck Edwards said that he attributes the “rumours that are out there” about FEMA funding to “good old-fashioned storytelling.” Or as we good old-fashionedly used to call them – LIES! Though on Tuesday, he issued a lengthy fact sheet dispelling falsehoods about Helene and FEMA. If that’s not bad enough – way over on the edges of actual insanity Marjorie Taylor-Greene – who else – has continued to promote her unfounded theory that “they control the weather.” In response, Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez (R-Fla.) shot back: “Humans cannot create or control hurricanes. Anyone who thinks they can, needs to have their head examined.” When asked for comment, Greene spokesman Nick Dyer said the congresswoman was not suggesting that Helene was engineered by humans. He said Greene was merely trying to bring attention to what he called “weather manipulation.” Yeah also doesn’t exist oh and also – yeah – no she wasn’t!! Dyer continues “Every one of Congresswoman Greene’s critics … want to ignore the science-based factual evidence she has shared,” “They are the ones peddling conspiracy theories about her.” Hmm pot kettle lunatics??? “Yesterday, my mother told me I needed to do ‘deep research’ because everything I know and learned about hurricanes is wrong,” University of Miami climatologist Brian McNoldy, who has long tracked storms in the Atlantic Ocean, wrote on X. “I can’t even process the ignorance and brainwashing.” Well you and MTG both Brian!
• Even though Trump is shameless enough to tell a rally crowd in Pennsylvania that he has no empty seats at his rallies while directly facing literally hundreds of empty seats, you can tell it gets to him. Particularly when his fans, many of whom lined up for hours to attend one of his rant-fueled gatherings, start getting bored and filing out before he’s even got to the bit about Hannibal Lecter. Perhaps this is why he chose his latest venue. A remote former manure farm near Coachella, California. So remote, in fact, that attendees had to leave their cars five miles away, and be bussed across the desert to the stinky get-together on coaches laid on free of charge by the Trump campaign. Thanks to this, despite temperatures of over 100 degrees, and 90 minutes of unhinged fascist bullshit everyone had to stay where they were. In fact, even after Trump left in his air-conditioned limousine, they still had to stay where they were, because the Trump campaign either didn’t bother to arrange any return transport, or refused to pay the coach firm, leaving 15,000 confused and pissed off rally goers in a hot, dark desert, five miles from their cars just as it started to rain. Sometimes writers work pretty hard to come up with metaphors to explain complex situations like, say, how Trump’s second Presidential term might go. I don’t think they’ll come up with a better one than Trump leaving his own supporters stranded on a shit farm miles from nowhere because he was done speaking and he’d got everything he needed from them.
• This week marked the first 100 days of the new labour government – one that’s lasted for two and a half Trusses or slightly over 2 lettuces, whilst the ring-wing media or as we call it here – the media – reports on the declaration by Starmer of free Taylor swift tickets, glasses, clothes and other gifts totally 76 thousand pounds odd gifted by donors, the same press fails to compare it to the completely undeclared nay utterly denied £120,000 donation from Lord Brownlow to one B. Johnson Esquire for wallpaper and other things to literally spaff up the wall of 10 Downing Street when he ascended to the office in 2019. Nor do most of the media point out Starmer’s clear commitment to nationalising the railways (and the restoration of the HS2 plan to extend to Euston and Manchester); scrapping Ofsted’s brutal, deeply damaging one-word reviews and moving away from the Tory fixation on school discipline; lifting the ban on on-shore wind and approving enormous new solar farms; shutting down the odious Bibby Stockholm and the even more odious Rwanda scheme; withdrawing some, although not nearly enough, arms export licences to Israel; and finally giving up the embarrassing imperial cosplay of holding on to the Chagos Islands. The forceful response to far-right riots also deserves a mention, although one does hope to see a longer-term approach that focuses on investment in social cohesion, not merely on punishment. Though Tim Bale over at Al Jazeera called it the worst 100 days of a new government “in living memory.” Obvs his memory hasn’t been alive long cf: another prime minister, as little as four years ago, who began his term by catastrophically mishandling the onset of a pandemic, cementing the worst possible version of Brexit into law and screwing up response to widespread flooding. (Or, you know, an even more recent prime minister who tanked the economy and failed to outlast a lettuce, barely making it to half of that magic number.) Meanwhile in the Tory leadership election James Cleverly who exhorted the Tory Party Conference to you know, “be more normal” was on the end of the party’s resounding reply when they voted not for him to go forward to the last two candidates, leaving on the right Kemi BadEnoch and on the right Robert Jenrick – the guy who erased the disney cartoons from asylum seeking children’s temporary hovels so they didn’t appear too comforting. So there’s that – one Tory grandee was reported to have voted for Jenrick in order to try to ensure that BadEnoch didn’t end up running against Cleverly adding Cleverly’s as thick as shit but would make a good leader. But it’s all academic cos Boris has rewritten history as fiction again and actually no-one’s either surprised or even noticed let alone cares.

You can now buy Jim’s book, 2000 Mules and One Big Lie: A Stubborn Conspiracy Theory

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:

Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc Fallacy- FT#159 Transcript

Jim: Hello, and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of a mad brain rudesby, full of spleen to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host.

Mark: Hello. Your 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 cum hoc, ergo, prop to hoc. Can I just ask about mad Brain Rudesby?

Jim: Yeah, full of spleen.

Mark: As opposed to something else full of spleen.

Jim: I went to see taming of the shrew at the globe the other week.

Mark: Ah, yes, yes.

Jim: And this is a thing that Kate calls Petruchio at one point, and I thought, there you go having that. That’s brilliant.

Mark: That’s, yes, you felt an elizabethan shakespearean echo. Ah, yes, mad. But let mad brain roots be full of spleen. Full of spleen, yes.

Jim: So, cum hoc ergo, propter hoc This is quite similar to post hoc ogre prop talk, which we’ve discussed before. but the difference is the temporal element. So with post hoche, which means after that, ergo, drop to hoc, therefore, because of that, because of the thing that requires one thing to have happened and then another thing to happen. And people make the assumption, or imply, if they’re trying to make an argument, that the second thing happened because of the first thing.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Kum hoc means with the thing all.

Mark: Happened at the same time, stuff that.

Jim: Happens together, stuff that happens at the same time. Then people assume a connection, a causal connection between those two things, when in fact it may be that there isn’t one, it may be that there is.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And the causal connection moves in the other direction that they’re assuming, or that there is a third thing causing both things, or that they’re not connected at all.

Mark: Right. And they’re making the argument that they are, in order to cover up a.

Jim: Shortfall in their argument, tend to do how people tend to use it is they will raise the fact that these two things always seem to happen together, or that when one thing happens, this thing happens, too, and either outright state or imply that. Therefore, m there is this connection between them and shows that the thing is bad because it’s causing the other thing. So as our first example, we have Trump talking about guns.

Donald Trump: If you take away guns, she wants to take away everyone’s gun. If you take away guns, can’t do it, because people need the guns for protection. Now, entertainment, they wanted hunting. They wanted, you know, different things, but they need weapons for protection. In this country, people live out in the woods, and they’re not going to have a gun. If you look at, some. Some countries, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to get them in trouble. But some countries have actually gone the opposite way. They had very strong gun laws, and now they have gone the opposite way where they allowed people to have guns, where in one case, they encouraged people to go out and get guns, and crime is down 29%. And remember this, what is the toughest gun law in the United States? Chicago. On July 4, 117 people were shot and 17 died. The toughest gun laws in the United States are in the city of Chicago.

Jim: You know that if anyone, incidentally, knows what countries he’s talking about, where they have loosened their gun laws and encouraged people to go out and get guns, and then crime has gone down, please let me know, because I couldn’t find.

Mark: Anything like this, could find any of them.

Jim: This is nonsense. Yeah, but he’s making the argument, whatever mythical country it is that encouraged people to go out and get guns, then crime went down. Or that’s arguably a post hoc, but he’s saying that where you have more access to guns, it is safer, crime is lower. And in Chicago, where they have the strongest gun laws, they have a lot of violence. It’s very bad. And so what you’re seeing is guns mean things are safer, whereas restricting guns, restricting guns means bad guns.

Mark: They just happen to be going along at the same time.

Jim: if it was true, pretty.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Then that was kind of the unvoiced question.

Jim: It’s always the one we have to start with, with Trump. If it was true. Yes, then, yeah, there isn’t necessarily that connection. and you can see how the. How the implication is being made in a way, in that, I suppose the argument is where everyone is armed, people are less likely to do bad things because they might get shot by all the good people with guns kind of things. So they’ll be more wary. Yeah, obviously, it’s not true at all. Where there are more guns, there is more crime, there are more handgun related homicides, suicides, every accidents,

00:05:00

Jim: everything and, yeah, this still, this is a thing that at least republicans seem to believe. In a poll that was done in 2024, Republicans say that the gun ownership does more to increase safety than reduce it by 81% of Republicans saying that, versus 18% saying that gun ownership reduces safety. Like people being allowed to own guns.

Mark: Is that the measure they’ve got of that it is safer to have a gun? Just that Republicans think that.

Jim: Republicans believe it. I mean, that’s the best evidence, right?

Mark: At, the behest of their NRA.

Jim: Paymasters, conservative Republicans go up to 88% think that it’s better to have, like, it’s safer for everyone. Not just better, but safer. Everyone is safer if there’s more guns. With Democrats, it’s the other way. 74% of Democrats say that it’s less safe if you have more guns. And, yeah, 26% say it’s safer if you have more guns. That’s the extent to which people believe this stuff, but to the extent to which it’s actually true is quite different.

Mark: Right.

Jim: One of the things he says is that Chicago has the strictest gun laws in the country. This is not true. It was true at one point in the nineties, they banned handguns in Chicago. They repealed. Well, they were forced to repeal it by the Supreme Court in 2010. I think.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Following DC versus Hellere, there are several states with stricter gun laws than Illinois. California, New York, New Jersey, Colorado, Connecticut. All make it harder to get guns or make you have to do more in registering or providing id or whatever in order to get guns. And Chicago, while the raw numbers of violent handgun related incidents are high compared to most other cities, the population of Chicago is also high. And when you look at it on a per capita basis, actually the most dangerous places in terms of handguns are places like Birmingham, Alabama, Jackson, Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, New Orleans. Those are places in states with much more lax gun laws, right?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And their populations are much smaller. So in raw figures, they have fewer gun deaths and gun related injuries. But per capita, like senois, Missouri, for example, 76.4 per hundred thousand residents, gun deaths.

Mark: Whoa.

Jim: That compares to Chicago, 23.3. So more than twice as many per capita compared to Chicago. And also in Chicago, those guns that are harder to get hold of in Chicago because there isn’t a federal effective federal gun control law. Because Republicans keep blocking it.

Mark: Because Republicans.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. 60% of guns that are recovered by police that have either been kind of seized from people or used in crimes came from outside of Illinois. They came mostly from Indiana or other states around with looser gun laws where it’s easy to get hold of guns. So even during that period where handguns in Chicago were banned, there were still handguns in Chicago and they came from other states. If he was being accurate with his figures, this still wouldn’t show a causal connection between gun owners and, safety.

Mark: Yes, that was. But that was the next thing you know, one. One running alongside the other that’s still there is you’ve been very careful not to say, therefore, a stricter, a stricter gun law has resulted in fewer gun deaths.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: because that would be committing the fallacy just as much as him using it to tell the opposite tale.

Jim: Well, to a certain extent, it would be, yes. If we were to say that if you have strict gun laws, then you have less gun violence, that would be arguably as fallacious. But it is reasonable to point out that there is a very strong correlation that holds up when you look at a lot of different cities and look at it in terms of per capita violence instead of raw figures, which means basically nothing, because obviously cities with more people and are going to have more things happening to those people.

Mark: Yeah, more people doing them. Yeah, yeah. Yes.

Jim: but, generally, when you kind of lay out all of the big cities across the US with where their gun, laws fit based on organizations that rank those kinds of things, whether it’s the NRA saying that they’re really good for allowing people to have guns, or anti gun organizations saying that, yes, these people are quite good at restricting rampant guns being allowed everywhere. When you match those two things up, they do correlate very strongly. And it also seems to make sense that there would be a causal link between those things. That doesn’t mean that there definitely is one.

Mark: Yeah, but it feels less fallacious to say if you’ve got fewer guns, you would have fewer gun deaths, gun crimes, less gun

00:10:00

Mark: crime.

Jim: And it isn’t always when you look at different countries, because there are countries that have lots and lots of guns, like Switzerland, for example, where they don’t have the same kind of issues with gun homicides or injuries or accidents. But it’s difficult to compare different the cultures of different countries in a way that means that you can then apply that to statistics when you’re looking at the US. Even then, the cultures across different cities and even urban and rural areas are different enough that that muddies the water a lot. And in fact, what you will find, if you look at the figures is that often a lot of the areas that have certainly more, suicides by guna tend to be the more rural areas, again, per capita, and that’s partly accessibility of guns and inaccessibility of mental health services. There’s a lot of factors to consider and it’s not as simple to say more guns means more gun deaths, but it’s a strong correlation with other factors to back it up, as opposed to more guns means more safety, which is.

Mark: Yeah, I.

Jim: Harder to make the argument and also not true.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, that, yes, because Trump’s argument is to more restrictive, higher gun deaths.

Jim: Yeah, stop people having guns, more crime.

Mark: Both sides of that unconnected thing are untrue from what he was saying. And, yeah, and also the fact that he’s making the two of those things that run together alongside each other, but they’re not true. He’s also making them connected and that’s not true. So it’s. Oh, my God, it’s fractally wrong, as well as being a cum hoc prop talk.

Jim: And also, just for the record, Kamala isn’t trying to take people’s guns away.

Mark: No more than Hillary was.

Jim: Yeah. So our, second Trump example is on gas prices.

Donald Trump: Under Biden, gas prices have reached five, six and even $7 a gallon in some places. In California, they’ve gone up to eight and nine. three years ago, under my leadership, we had energy independence and we were soon going to have energy dominance. All over the world, we were going to be dominant. We have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country, think of it. And we don’t know what we’re doing with it. I had gas prices at $1.87 a gallon. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Jim: I mean, it would be nice if it were true.

Mark: Yeah, there is that. Plus, the US was still importing oil.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Mark: At that point. So, you know, and it was also true that under Obama it was probably seventy five cents a gallon and under Carsa it was 35 and under, you know, Kennedy it was 15.

Jim: So sure, arguably that’s, there’s different reasons for it to have gone up so much.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Since the sixties and, yeah, we are only one presidency separating Trump and Biden. If his figures were true, though, the argument he appears to be making is that because gas prices are higher under Biden, it’s Biden’s fault.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: And gas prices were low when he was president and therefore it was good things he did that led to that. Yeah, not true. It is true that Biden’s gas prices are higher, but neither of the figures he gave none of the figures he gave were accurate in any way. So the average regular gas national price when he left office in January 2020 was $2.39 a gallon. It never got as low as 187 as an average price. There may have been areas where it was cheaper, as there are, you know, across a big country, there are all areas where it’s cheaper or more expensive. It didn’t, The average didn’t get as high as he claims it did under Biden. And he talked about places in California where it got up to, eight or $9. It never got above $7.50 in one specific place in California, a place called Gorda, which is really isolated. It’s the only gas station you can go to, this one kind of town in California that is the only place for, like, 300 miles. There’s a diner and a gas station, and they can charge what the fuck they want. And they do.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Jim: And under Trump, it was 650 at that place in California. And under Biden, it got up to 730 or 740. I think it’s a bit like the.

Mark: Gas stations on the highways. You kind of get on there and you just go, what? What are they charging? Yeah, but because they can.

Jim: That’s an inconsistent comparison. You can’t say, this is how it was at the cheapest places during my presidency, and this is how much it is at the most expensive place.

Mark: Expensive places.

Jim: And look how different they are.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So you can’t

00:15:00

Jim: do that, for one thing. But even if the averages were consistently much higher under Biden and much lower under Trump, there is very little the president can do to set those prices to make any difference. With gas prices, there isn’t nothing that the president can do. And, Biden released a lot of oil from the strategic oil reserves to reduce the prices. And it had an effect. It had an impact of a few cents a gallon, but it didn’t make that much of a difference. And it can’t make that much of a difference because gas prices are largely dependent on crude oil prices, which are based on global supply and demand, not domestic supply and demand. And during a pandemic, when no fucker was driving anywhere, it was. Demand went down. People couldn’t give there petrol away, their gasoline away. So that’s why it went down to $2.30 ish under Trump, at least in part because he did such a shit job of handling the pandemic that people couldn’t go anywhere.

Mark: Couldn’t go anywhere. Yeah.

Jim: So he was responsible, in a way, for part of that.

Mark: Yeah. That’s one of your, to be fair, to try.

Jim: And so the fact that Biden had some part, at least, in starting to bring back normality to society, arguably that resulted in a rise in gas prices.

Mark: Because people were driving again, and whoever was running the crude oil realized that they could make money from it.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: Yes. There was a certain amount of price gouging by gas stations. There was certainly an increase in the basic crude oil price because people were starting to drive again, and they were like, well, we’re putting the price up anyway. Let’s put up a little bit extra. also, Russia invaded Ukraine, and, suddenly America wasn’t gaining russian oil. So that was a bit of an issue, and, again, made those prices a bit more. There were lots of different factors that happened over that time period that had an impact on gas prices, and very few of them were connected to who was president.

Mark: And also, he’s just saying them. He’s just saying numbers and people and insinuating the connection. and. And yet people that he doesn’t need to actually say, oh, yeah, so what I did was do that. That was done to me, you know, because it. Because it’s.

Jim: Again, what did you do to reduce gas prices?

Mark: Yeah. You had nothing to do manage that. Yeah. Yeah. What? Yes, exactly. What do you do? Where’s the policy briefing on that? Yeah, I. Yeah. If only. God. Yeah.

Jim: Our final example is JD Vance at, the vice presidential debate, who said this.

JD Vance: You yourself just said, Iran is as close to a nuclear weapon today as they have ever been. And Governor Walts, you blame Donald Trump, who has been the vice president for the last three and a half years. And the answer is your running mate, not mine. Donald Trump consistently made the world more secure. Now we talk about the sequence of events that led us to where we are right now. You can’t ignore October 7, which I appreciate Governor Walts bringing up, but when did Iran and Hamas and their proxies attack Israel? It was during the administration of Kamala Harris. So Governor Walts can criticize Donald Trump’s tweets, but effective, smart diplomacy and peace through strength is how you bring stability back to a very broken world. Donald Trump has already done it once before. Ask yourself at home, when was the last time, I’m 40 years old. When was the last time that an american president didn’t have a major conflict breakout? The only answer is, during the four years that Donald Trump was president, again.

Jim: The connections that he’s drawing are, ah, that Iran is closer than ever to having a nuclear weapon. And Kamala is currently not even the president, just the vice president, but she’s in the administration and Trump isn’t. And therefore, it can only be Kamala’s fault that Iran is closer and not do Trump.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Yeah. And yet Waltz is trying to blame Trump for that. Crazy. Just because Trump trashed the agreement with Iran that stopped them from getting closer to building nuclear weapons. Just because.

Mark: Just because he pointed out that agreement.

Jim: Had a sunset clause, and therefore he said, well, this is going to stop in four years, so let’s pull out now and get on with it.

Mark: Now. Yeah.

Jim: Just because he did that. Because Waltz is blaming him for Iran having made progress towards getting a nuclear weapon. Crazy.

Mark: Four years sooner than they would otherwise have done. So, yes. Yeah. God, that’s blame. That’s blame shifting. Yeah, that is. And he goes on to say.

Jim: He goes on to say that it’s only while Kamala is in power, which, again, she isn’t. M. But that’s when Hamas attacked Israel,

00:20:00

Jim: so therefore he’s employing his fault.

Mark: It’s because. And.

Jim: Yeah, and that kind of thing wouldn’t have happened under Trump.

Mark: Not just. It happened at the same time.

Jim: Yeah. JD Vance is basically just drawing this connection between who was there at the time and the things that happened when there’s really incredibly little reason to believe that that is connected in any way or causally connected, at least.

Mark: And thankfully, nobody fact checked him at that point.

Jim: No, he got away with that one. He got very angry.

Mark: And now is the time, I think, for Marx, british politics, talking about things.

Mark: That happened at the same time as other things happened. Rishi Sunak was big on this. So this is about inflation and Sunak. And in January 2023, Sunak promised that the inflation rate of 10.7% would be halved by the end of the year. It’s one of his five pledges that he would halve inflation. And in November 2023, inflation was down to 4.6. So it was halved. So here’s Rishi at a speech given on the 20 November 2023, when he might have mentioned it once or twice.

Rishi Sunak: I made the promise to halve inflation. And the official statistics show that promise has now been met. I promised you we would halve inflation. We took the difficult decisions and we have delivered on that promise. The fact that you can even ask that question is because we took the difficult decisions to halve inflation and we delivered on that pledge. That’s why we can now move on to the next phase of our economic plan. It’s because of the difficult decisions that we took to halve inflation that we can now move on to this next phase of our economic plan. It’s because we’ve taken the difficult decisions to inflation that we are already starting to be able to make an impact to people’s cost of living. And that’s why the most important priority we had as a government was to halve inflation. A conservative party that is delivering lower taxes because we have now halved inflation. You’re here to celebrate meeting the pledge to halve inflation. It’s not just about the fact that we’ve halved inflation. The combination of that plus us delivering our pledge to halve inflation means that we are now in a position, position that we can have. All these questions about cutting taxes is a testament to the fact that we have delivered our pledge early to halve inflation. And that’s because of the responsible difference that we took. And each and every one of them were opposed by the Labour party.

Jim: I’m not clear whether it was a difficult decision to do all those things.

Mark: Yeah, no, I think. I think that it was because of the difficult decisions that they were able to halve inflation.

Jim: Oh, that’s what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I heard someone say that.

Mark: Yeah, once or twice.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: So inflation was halved. He’s not shying away from the fact that because of his difficult decisions, that inflation was halved. See, he’s actually said we were able to halve inflation.

Jim: He’s not shy. If anything, he’s leaning into it.

Mark: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Once or twice. Yeah. After a while, you kind of think, actually just, the spelling of halve pops up in your mind, do you think?

Jim: Semantic association.

Mark: Right, yes, exactly. What is that? Yeah. Yeah. But of course, as Paul Johnson, who’s the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, no less, has said, yeah, the job of cutting inflation is for the bank of England, not the government. The bank of England has been raising interest rates to try and bring inflation down towards its 2% target over this period. And the bank of England been operating independently of government since 1997. This was the self same bank of England that, acted independently to shore up the nation’s economy following Liz Truss’s mini budget in September 2022. Those acts that, Trump that trust, not Trump trust, is now blaming for her downfall, not the thing that she did to precipitate it, but the fact that they acted independently. So here’s Rishi embracing the bank of England’s independent activities, which were mainly to do. The fact that inflation came down was mainly to do with energy prices coming down. As the world recovered from the fact that they couldn’t access russian oil because there were sanctions, there was all sorts of dodgy, sanction busting imports going on. But fundamentally, the inflation has been relieved because of world events. and also, those tough decisions, those difficult decisions that Rishi made, one of them was to not pay the striking train drivers, as that would raise inflation. Which is odd, because labour has given the train drivers and the teachers and the doctors above inflation pay rises. And, yep, inflation is lower now than when Rishi made that announcement. And in fact, today it’s predicted to dip below the bank of England’s target of 2%. So just going back a bit to May 20,

00:25:00

Mark: 2024, inflation fell to 2.3%. So half what it was when he made that announcement. And Rishi was quick to pounce on that.

Rishi Sunak: When I came into this job, I made it a priority to halve inflation. We’ve delivered on that and now, as I said, it’s back to normal. That’s not just because of our plan that is working, it’s because of everyone’s collective hard work. But these things don’t happen by accident. I came into office with a plan to bring down inflation. That plan is working and if we stick to it, there are brighter days ahead. And this morning, it was confirmed that inflation is back to normal. This means that the pressure on prices will ease and mortgage rates will come down. This is proof that the plan and priorities I set out are working.

Mark: So he knew a good thing when he saw it. And in the hope that no one else saw the cum hoc, ergo propter hoc on display, he called the general election. And this interference in the background of things can only get better, is when Rishi, on the same day as saying, yeah, we’ve halved inflation again. We’ve actually quartered it from where we said, and it’s all down to us. It just shows you that good times are ahead. Called the general election that day and didn’t get back in, Doctor Orkin Sacha, the senior lecturer, in economics at the City University of London, noted that inflation dropped to 2.3% thanks to the high interest rate policy, which has now become somewhat of a norm in most of the developed part of the world. And one of his colleagues, Michael Bengad, professor of economics, said, less mentioned is the role of fiscal policy that, the UK has run substantial deficits these last few years and is expected to be 3.1% of GDP this fiscal year, significantly more than the growth rate. Absent the expectation of future surpluses, and this puts pressure on prices. So he’s basically explaining that inflation isn’t the only thing you need to look at. And paradoxically, the expectation that the Labour party will in all likelihood win the upcoming elections and rely heavily on debt to finance their spending actually contributes to higher inflation now, which is just a.

Jim: Long way of saying, actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Mark: It’s a little bit more complicated than that. Yeah. So that inflation, at that time was 2.3% and that it’s gone down and that the 2.3% was held artificially high because the markets were saying, oh, yeah, well, labor is just going to borrow from everywhere in order to pay to all the stuff like teachers and train drivers and doctors. So they will use debt for that. so that’s holding inflation artificially high now. And we’ve seen that today in the fact the bank of England is going, oh, yeah, well, it’s all worked. It is going to go below 2%. Nothing whatsoever to do with Sunak because he’s not in office now and hasn’t been since May. So. Yeah, but also, of course, I’ve got to remind you that Liz Truss took no responsibility slash credit for when the rates went up after her, unfunded, unscrutinized, uneconomic disaster mini budget in 2023. Those rates were going up anyway.

Jim: The rates have gone higher since the mini budget than they were during the time of the mini budget. I mean, we were in a fairly unusual situation of a leadership election, a period of a hiatus. Very sadly, the late queen died, so there were difficult circumstances. They’re trying to smear me with economic results.

Mark: They’re clearly not. I’m clearly not responsible. If you’re going to apply cum hoc, ergo prop talk when the numbers go in the right direction. Why is she going to such pains to say that? That’s a smear, that’s a fallacy. If you do that, you can’t do that because there’s nothing to do with me. There are all of these factors which she listed. Yes, they were all things that happened at the same time. Nothing to do with inflation at all, by the way. So she’s making use of the fallacy. They’re going, yeah, the queen died. There was a leadership election. Yeah, we know that because you got elected and all sorts of other stuff, and yet inflation was going. Oh, and inflation was going up all over the rest of the world. It was nothing to do with what she was doing. Just in this exactly the same way that, Sunak had nothing to do whatsoever with inflation going down. It just went down at the same time that he happened to be in office and that nothing to do with it.

Jim: One of the nuances, of when you’re saying that if you’re going to accept it in one way, then you kind of have to accept it in all ways, is true if you’re doing it cynically like they are. Yeah, but the nuance that there’s things that are not actually linked like these, and there’s things that are caused by a third cause, for example. But obviously this is not a fallacy when you’re talking about things that are really causally connected. Like, for example, there’s a strong

00:30:00

Jim: correlation between ice cream sales and shark attacks. And yes, one of those does not cause the other. but the fact that when it is nice and sunny, people go to the beach and they also eat ice cream.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: There is a causal connection between it being sunny and people eating ice cream. And so if you say. If you make that point that this is correlated strongly. Yeah, that’s perfectly fine. It’s not fallacious at all. But if you try and draw a comparison between the two things, that it being sunny causes an increase in and say those things are caused by each other or one. One way or each other.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: Then it’s fallacious because there isn’t actually a causal connection between those two things. So it is quite.

Mark: Makes me think of those, that website we absolutely love, furious correlations. Yes. Yeah. Where there would be graphs that just are happily and surprisingly coincidentally the same shape.

Jim: I think the price of mayonnaise and the US divorce rate, are very strongly correlated. yeah, things like that. It’s a great website. I strongly recommend it. I’m sure we talked about it on our post hoc episodes.

Mark: Oh, we have. And that’s. And actually it’s. Yes, the. The comedic value is that there is a, An unspoken cum hoc, ergo pro talk. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. It’s this fallacy at work. So our, second example, speaking of not taking any responsibility for anything that was at the root of the utterly abject failure of a premiership, well, the one immediately before Liz trusses. Anyway, Boris Johnson has published his latest work of fiction, his memoir called Unleashed Unhinged, would be more appropriate, along with unreal and untrue. And in the interviews surrounding the hawking of what amounts to a box of tissues of lies, he continues to perpetuate the cum hoche, ergo, prop to hoc fallacy. That cause Brexit was happening. The rollout of the vaccine was quicker than if it hadn’t been happening. And here he is during PMQs in, February 2021, setting up the lie.

Boris Johnson: One week he calls for us to go go faster with rolling out vaccines, when he would have stayed in the European Medicines Agency, which would have made that rollout impossible. Mister speaker,

Mark: the United Kingdom formally left the EU on the 31 January 2020, and therefore became what the EU now call a third country. And during the transition period from 1 February to the 31 December 2020, EU pharmaceutical law continued to apply to the UK from January 1, 2021. EU pharmaceutical law only applied to the UK in respect to Northern Ireland. It didn’t apply from January 1, 2021. So the European Medical Agency, the european pharmaceutical law, arbiters on the 4 January 2021. The UK became the first country in the world to administer AstraZeneca. And Brian Pinko was 82, was the first person to receive it. And this was partly down to the fact that we had it. To roll it out then was partly down to the UK ordering vaccines early, signing a contract for 100 million AstraZeneca doses in June 2020, and another deal for access to 30 million doses of Pfizer was announced a month later. So July 2020. Johnson claims that taking back control of the MHRA M medical health regulation Authority allowed the UK to approve vaccines faster. Taking back control, the meaningless phrase that was touted by people who said, yes, we should get out of the EU in order to take out control. However, regulation 174 allowed the MHRA to temporarily authorize the supply of a medicine or vaccine based on public health need and these. That rule was negotiated with the EU and became M UK law in 2012, when we were still very much part of the Eudez. So the UK would have been able to do this in emergency situations such as, you know, based on public health need, maybe a pandemic at any time since then. And the head of the MHRA, doctor June Rain, confirmed that the European law allowed the UK to authorize the supply via this regulation prior to the end of the transition period, which was still in place when the UK announced the first Covid-19 vaccine had been approved on the 7 April 2021. Incidentally, after 79 contra, indicating cases of rare blood clots following the use of astraZeneca, alternative vaccines were recommended to be used effectively. Soft banning the AstraZeneca vaccine. On April 28, the government orders 60 million doses from Pfizer. But as they were now being procured under post Brexit

00:35:00

Mark: rules, they were going to take five months. Whereas if we’d been part of the EU procurement deal, extra doses would have been redirected our way immediately. So the only reason we approved Pfizer and AstraZeneca faster than the EU, because we took a gamble on safety and gave manufacturers a waiver, on liability. So when AstraZeneca’s stuff was contraindicated, AstraZeneca was not held liable for that. And the blood clot problem shone a very harsh light on that particular biggest call. Here’s Boris on Times radio on October 10, 2024. So this week, still peddling the cum hoc lie.

Boris Johnson: It was because we were out of the European Medicines Agency that we were able to license vaccines faster and save lives.

Stig Abell: So you could have done that with the national regulator?

Boris Johnson: Sorry.

Stig Abell: You could.

Boris Johnson: But then why? Okay, here’s the question. Why did 27 other countries not do that?

Stig Abell: People may concede that point. If you will concede.

Boris Johnson: I want you to concede it.

Stig Abell: Okay, if you. If you will concede, Boris, that you could have done it.

Boris Johnson: I concede no points. What are you going to concede? What do you want me to concede?

Stig Abell: I want you to concede that you could have done it. If we were still in the EU, you could have done it using the national regulator. You could have done it. You were legally able to do it.

Boris Johnson: If you’d had a Brexiteer government, you.

Stig Abell: Could have done it.

Boris Johnson: That was on the point of leaving the EU. Finally, and formally, anyway, my point is that you would have done what we did

Stig Abell: legally and technically, you could have done it.

Boris Johnson: It would never have happened.

Stig Abell: You could have done it.

Boris Johnson: And by the way, not only that, we would have remained within the EU, because this is total, total nonsense and people need to understand. We would have remained not just in the EU vaccine licensing procedures under the European Medicines Agency, but we would also have been within the EU vaccine procurement, process, which would have been totally chaotic.

Mark: Basically, he’s saying, because this thing was running and we were reaching the end of the transition period, that enabled us to roll out the vaccine. They didn’t. They just happened to be running at the same time. In fact, as it turned out, the AstraZeneca was contraindicated. And it meant that because we were no longer part of the EMA, that the procurement process, and it’s important that people know this because, as Boris says, it was harder to get because we were a, ah, third country and the EMA serviced the EU first. Of course, all of that was hidden, continues to be hidden by Boris, who just gets really angry when. But he’s saying, well, yeah, but I. What he’s saying to the interviewer, I want you to concede this point.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And it was going, no, because it’s not true. Why would I. I want you to concede. And then Boris goes, no, I’m not that. No, no, you’re not.

Jim: Before even is. He’s like, concede.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: He’s. God, he’s so. He’s such an ass. You just want. Not many people I want to punch in the face. If I ever meet Boris, I will punch him in the face.

Jim: I will bail you out.

Mark: I will. Yeah, definitely. Right, yeah. Blizzard, patrons, please. Because he’s doing a book tour and there’s a big book shop near where I live and I will go punch him in the face.

Jim: Incidentally, the first man to get the pfizer vaccine in the UK.

Mark: Mmm.

Jim: William Shakespeare.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Not. Not the same one who came up with mad brain roots be full of spleen. nonetheless, an interesting.

Mark: Nonetheless bloody brilliant.

Mark: Phil Oakey and Giorgio Morode are there, of course, with their cum hoc masterpiece together in electric dreams.

Jim: So in the Fallacy in the wild, we like to take a look at the Fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And our first example this week will be familiar to anyone who uses Duolingo but doesn’t pay for super Duolingo because this fucking advertisement comes up every time. All the time. Every. Well, not just when you start it, every time you finish, a section. So, like, every ten things you get right, you get this.

Duo: Get more. With super Duolingo, reach your language goals fast, with premium features that optimize your learning with no limits to the mistakes you can make. And no ads, super learners are 4.2 times more likely to finish their course.

Jim: So that may be true. Let’s assume that they’ve done the research and they’ve got some kind of records that say that people who pay Duolingo extra are 4.2 times more likely to finish their course. That doesn’t mean that it was the paying that made it more likely that they would finish. It is really likely that people who are committed to learning a new language are more willing to pay for it.

Mark: Right.

Jim: People like me who casually learn a bit of korean while. While they’re waiting for their kids to come out of the house when they get picked up of a weekend, and I’m like, I’ve got. It could be. I could be here for 20 minutes till they finally fucking get their stuff together. I’m like, I just do a bit of Korean. I’m up a little bit. Anyway, people like me, I’m not paying for it, and I’m probably never gonna finish the course, but if I really, really want. If I was gonna move to another country, if I was gonna, you know.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: If I was in a relationship with someone who spoke a foreign language and I wanted to learn their language, you know, if you had a reason for learning a language and you’re committed to doing it, I absolutely would pay the extra to get rid of the fucking ads on Duolingo.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But it wouldn’t be the paying that made me finish. It would be a third. Cause it would be my commitment to finishing, which would make me both finish and pay.

Mark: Yes, exactly. Yes. That’s the. That’s the unspoken bit. They’re kind of them making a join across the top of the triangle when actually the join is independent of those.

Jim: Yeah, I’m. I’m not saying it definitely is that, but it’s at least, equally likely.

Mark: But they don’t cause each other.

Jim: Yes, it’s at least equally likely that it’s another cause that is causing those two things.

Mark: When I got the place in France used Duolingo, which is very handy, actually, when. Because things would come up in the lessons, that meant I could then talk to people about roofs and spirit levels and plumbing and things like that with. With confidence. And then so much so that I did pay to get rid of the adverts. And then, something disappeared out of my Google, Android thing. And I thought, what is that? What is that? And it turned out it was the annual subscription to dueling. I’ve used it so little that the icon is now rotting.

Jim: Just a dead owl.

Mark: Yes, exactly. Yeah. And it’s like guilting you in for that. You know, people without rotting bird icons are more. 4.2% more. More likely to.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Wow. Why did you choose korean?

Jim: I kind of. I like K dramas, I think. Yeah, I’ll give it a go. Okay, so our second example is from the Ricky Gervais podcast back in the days when Ricky Gervais used to be funny and not an asshole and, well, less of an asshole.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And this is one of Carl’s diaries.

Stephen Merchant: Ricky drew another picture of my head. We’ve given a few of them away. As prizes, but he draws so many. Of them that they won’t be worth as much anymore. Everyone will eventually have one. Like those pictures of a boy crying that caused houses to burn down in the 1980s.

Ricky Gervais: What does that mean?

Stephen Merchant: What you talking about?

Karl Pilkington: Don’t you remember the, I mean, if you’re listening in America, they might not have made it over there.

Ricky Gervais: Is it, what, this sort of like the sugary ones with kids? Like, is it Tetyakov or something?

Karl Pilkington: It’s just some kid me aunt in or had one, and it was just like a kid with like a blue jumper on and he’s. It’s like a painting. Not.

Ricky Gervais: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Karl Pilkington: And he’s just crying.

Ricky Gervais: A chocolate box. Really awful, sort of sugary.

Karl Pilkington: And what happened is it they found out that a load of houses were being set on fire or burst into flames, whatever. And the weird thing was,

Ricky Gervais: oh, it’s bollocks.

Karl Pilkington: Every house that burned down at that.

Ricky Gervais: Because every house had that picture in the fucking seventies and eighties. Idiot. It’s like we’re linking it to sinks. Every house that’s

00:45:00

Ricky Gervais: ever burned down had a sink. You’re talking shit again. Carry on.

Jim: Yeah. this, this was a thing, at least it was a claim that was made in the eighties, seemingly started by the sun newspaper about fires that burned down houses. And, and the only thing that was untouched or un, kind of destroyed by the fire was this painting of a crying child. And so they decided it was a curse and it was something that caused the houses somehow to burn down. And Ricky nails it, really. It’s just that these were extremely popular, cheap paintings that. Yeah, m my parents, I don’t think my parents had one of these, but they definitely had mass produced shit paintings in there.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. the Tretyakov artist that he’s talking about did the blue lady. I think it was kind of, sort of jungley kind of bits, but it was sort of in odd shades of blue. So they were like the thing when Athena, the poster shop was, you know, and the tennis player scratching her arsenal, that was, that was the, the thing that you would go to somewhere in order to buy a, a poster to put on your wall.

Jim: Yeah, it was. Everybody else had the, the fact that we only had four tv channels. Yeah, it was, yes, because these days you try and talk to someone about tv, a tv program. And the chances that they’ll have watched it at the same day you watched it, are basically.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Non existent. But in the old days, it was surprising, in a way, if someone you talked to at school hadn’t watched the same thing you’d watched the previous night.

Mark: Yes, because. Yes, exactly. Because it was very. It was non. It was. It was, yeah. And it was. It was episodic.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: But only.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, it would go out.

Jim: There was no streaming. Yeah. You know, you’d watch it then and that was it. That was you.

Mark: That was it.

Jim: You missed it for widespread VCR’s. Even so, people couldn’t kind of. Yeah, time shift. But with the art stuff that was prevalent in the seventies and eighties, there were a few mass produced types of paintings that lots of people would get to decorate their homes and.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So it wasn’t even one image, one painting of a crying boy. There were lots of different ones that were found in different houses, but they were all kind of the same kind of thing. Crying.

Mark: Yeah. Basically a bit like the big eyes, stuff in the states.

Jim: So they were popular paintings to have, you know, houses burned down. Someone, who did an investigation of this theorized, at least, I don’t know how much evidence they had for this, was that it had been treated with a kind of cheap flame retardant varnish.

Mark: Oh, okay.

Jim: So the thing that would mean some.

Mark: Sort of rudimentary health and safety.

Jim: Yeah. So the thing. The thing would burn first would be the string that held it on the wall, and so full face down, the flames wouldn’t get to it. in a way that could damage it. So what would end up. It would be the last thing that would still be surviving in fire.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: A few things that hadn’t been touched. So, yeah, it built up this kind of mythology of being a cursed painting, because several similar paintings, or paintings of similar subject matter, which were mass produced and in many, many houses were found after house fires.

Mark: But also, there’s also a bit of survivorship bias because the ones where that painting wasn’t found wouldn’t have been included in the.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: In the data. Yeah.

Jim: Our third example is from Bull. Bull is a legal program, and they are, The case is a restaurant owner who is being held responsible because there was a fire in his restaurant and, someone died. So the defense basically needs to find jurors who will not make the assumption that just because he had previously failed some kind of safety inspections. And then there was a fire, that those things are linked. So during the voir dia process, they’re looking for jurors who will be able to kind of pass around that obvious temporal connection of those things happening.

Benny Colón: It says here in your jury questionnaire that you played semi pro football up.

Juror: Until about a year ago.

Benny Colón: You drink a lot of sports drinks?

Juror: Sure. Gotta stay hydrated.

Benny Colón: What if I told you that there is a direct correlation between the number of sports drinks a person consumes and the increased likelihood of that person getting a knee injury?

Juror: I would say your logic is faulty. But your conclusion, it sounds,

Benny Colón: How so?

Juror: I mean, it makes sense. People who drink a lot of sports drinks are more likely to be athletes. Athletes are more likely to get injured. But sports drinks don’t cause knee injuries.

Benny Colón: This juror is acceptable to the defense. Your honor. Mister. Watson, you are a high school history teacher.

Mr. Watson: That’s correct.

Benny Colón: So let me ask you a question.

00:50:00

Benny Colón: Are you aware that in world War one, the British wore steel helmets for the first time?

Mr. Watson: I’m vaguely aware of that.

Benny Colón: so would it surprise you to hear that the rate of head and I injuries went up, not down? Do you have any explanation for that?

Mr. Watson: I can offer an educated guess. I mean, it makes sense. Having all that metal clanking around on your head is bound to bang you up.

Jim: Yeah. So that, does make sense in a way, that there would be. That that correlation of wearing steel helmets would be causative of more head injuries because it’s a heavy thing to have on your head. I guess he’s wrong.

Jim: The reason. Yeah, that those two things are correlated is that it saved people’s lives. And so, previously, the people with those head injuries would have died, but they had steel helmets on, so they survived with head injuries.

Mark: Right. Yes. More survivorship bias, isn’t it?

Jim: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. This is classic survivorship bias. I think this is a brilliant thing. I think that jurors should be picked on whether they understand logical fallacies or not, because that’s essentially what bull’s, associate is doing here.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: He’s just testing whether they are likely to fall prey to implications. Dodgy arguments backed up by the logic of them.

Mark: Yeah. yeah.

Jim: And the first guy is like, yeah, I see what you’re doing. And he’s on the journey.

Mark: Yeah. The other guy maybe not so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like it.

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, yes.

Jim: 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 M has to figure out which one is fake news.

Mark: You see, I think you’ll notice that whilst the game has been progressing, the number of episodes, and therefore the sheer number of choices has also increased. So it’s no wonder that the chances to actually win have become simultaneously more tricky to ascertain and therefore act upon. Also, I’ve halved inflation, so that proves it. Yeah.

Jim: I mean, it is true. I have asked you, in total, almost 450 different quotes.

Mark: Quite. So it’s gone, up and up and up and up and up.

Jim: Keeps going up. So every time.

Mark: Yeah. Just keeps going up. So, you know, never goes the other way. So the. The. You know, I’m, being careful to avoid the fact that the. The chances are exactly the same each.

Jim: And every.

Mark: Point that out, as you’ll see in chapter two of Boris Johnson’s memoirs that, you know, I haven’t read, neither is he, which just perpetuate the lie.

Jim: So the theme here, yeah, is electric vehicles, and Trump’s general disdain for them.

Mark: Right. Notwithstanding Elon Musk. Okay. Yeah.

Jim: Even Elon Musk. The same day that Elon Musk appeared on stage with Trump.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Trump was saying, you know, autonomous vehicles, what are they about? No one wants them. They’re shit. Right? Anyway, these are about different. Not electric cars, but different kinds of electric vehicles. So, statement number one. He says they want electric planes. What happens if the sun isn’t shining while you’re off in the air? Well, sir, those. You know, I told you there’d be problems, sir. No, they want electric everything. Everything. They want electric boats. The problem, the boats, they. They don’t float because the battery is so heavy it sinks the boat. They say, we don’t care. We want them anyway.

Mark: Right? Yeah, cuz. Cuz, yeah. Container ships, lot heavier than electric boats. Okay, well, moving on. Yeah. All right. Oh, here we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: They want to regulate. All the companies will have to make their cargo ships, their oil ships, in electric. If you’re a shipping company, you’d better vote for me, because you’re not going to have a company anymore. They’ll make it so you can’t have a ship big enough for a single. You won’t be able to carry anything. You’ll have tiny ships, and they’ll sink all the time. You can’t make huge ships in electric. These people are crazy, right?

Mark: Because he’s the world’s leading authority on nautical design. What the fuck is he talking about? You’ll have, you’ll have to, you won’t be able to carry. You’ll have kind of a ship big enough for a single mouse. Ah, what’s he gonna think of a.

Jim: Thing that ships might think of a thing, a noun.

Mark: Anything. Because you’ll have a tiny ship. Because you can’t make huge ships in electric because the battery is so heavy it sinks the boat. Yeah. He’s just basically not grasped fundamental displacement, has he?

Jim: No.

Mark: So, yeah, it’s not, he’s not, he’s not gonna have a eureka

00:55:00

Mark: moment, is he?

Jim: Statement number three.

Mark: Mm

Jim: We make the best tanks in the world. They want to have them so that as we go into a country to bomb the hell out of it, we will do it in an environmentally friendly way. And you know, with an army tank, again, the battery is very big, very heavy, and doesn’t last long. You know what it is? It’s an army tank. And it’s like you’re pulling a wagon behind the army tank. You’re pulling a wagon like a child pulls a wagon and it’s loaded up with a battery.

Mark: But, did they not have electric milk floats? You know, milk deliveries, electric vehicles in, in the fifties where he lived?

Jim: Probably not. I would think. I think electric milk floats are, a british thing, I could be wrong.

Mark: British thing.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. But at least, he’s just kind of, he’s somehow correlating steam trains with the, the, caboose with, with the fuel on it as a separate thing.

Jim: Ah.

Mark: okay, right. Well, okay, so basically we’ve got, here, we’ve got the ship. Can’t make sure who ships electric. What happens if the sun isn’t shining? Yeah, but that’s what batteries are. Okay, best tank and then a tank with a battery on the back. What I’m saying is there are red herrings everywhere you look. Okay.

Mark: We don’t care about them anyway. Okay, sir. There’s a sir in there. It’s always a bit of a worry. Okay. Can’t make big enough huge ships. Can’t make huge ships. Electricity quite like that. Okay? So the, the thing that’s worrying, troubling me in number three is we go into a country to bomb the hell out of it. We do so an environmentally friendly way that, ah, I, yeah, that’s, that’s the one I’m kind of. Yeah. So I think therefore that number three is the one that you made up.

Jim: Okay? So of the other two. Which are you more convinced by?

Mark: electric planes. Sun shining number one.

Jim: And number one.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Is real.

Donald Trump: They want electric planes. What happens if the sun isn’t shining while you’re up in the air? Well, sir, those, you know, that. I told you there’d be problems, sir. No, they want electricity. Everything. Everything want electric boats. The problem, the boats, they, they don’t float because the battery is so heavy it sinks the boat. They say, we don’t care, we want them anyway.

Jim: Even he sounds bored by what he’s saying. Yeah.

Mark: And he’s just playing to the crowd. And you think this, ah, it, it’s troubling the. Because you, whenever you get up in public and say stuff, you are effectively, a de facto teacher. So you’ve got to think carefully about what you say and what he’s doing now. It’s just pandering to the ignorance of the air. Also, what he does, he loves the uneducated because they vote for him. So he’s not going to trouble them with anything that they don’t, they don’t already think is impossible, like, you know, things flying in the air, that’s not natural. And now they want electric ones. What happens when the sun’s not shining? Well, your batteries, but. Yeah. You don’t that. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Why, why does my solar powered flashlight. Why have I got a solar power flashlight? Because it’s dark, so it’s never going to work. It’s got a battery in it, that there’s. Jesus Christ. And then, and he says as a fact that the boat is so heavy because the battery is so heavy, it sinks the boat.

Jim: Yeah. So exist.

Mark: Yeah, but he doesn’t know that they’re, you know, they’re not so heavy that they can’t propel a motor vehicle, for instance, like your buddy Elon Musk makes without any problem. You’ve just, you know, you haven’t got to have massive tractor tires or huge tracks. You can just put it in a regular car and drive it along the road without causing any damage to the road surface or the tires. Yeah, it’s, it is possible, I mean, it is possible to run boat.

Jim: In my rare attempt to make any kind of defense. Electric cars are heavier than regular

01:00:00

Jim: petrol driven cars.

Mark: But, there is some argument they sink into the.

Jim: No, but there is some argument that there is going to be increased maintenance required for roads due to the increased number of electric cars, which can be twice as heavy, even one and a half to internal combustion engine car. So.

Mark: And certainly the tyres, therefore, will wear out at a higher rate. Right, yeah, yeah.

Jim: So.

Jim: there’s an argument in the heavier vehicles, but. Yes, right.

Mark: Boats, but not so heavy that they don’t exist.

Jim: Heavy boats exist.

Mark: Yeah. Yes, yes. Because. Yes. Yeah. In fact, boats. Some boats are so successful at. At displacing water, you can drive electric vehicles onto them.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: And.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Ah, and cross a body of water.

Jim: So speaking of, electric boats. Right. You also think number two is real?

Mark: I do.

Jim: And, ah, number two, yeah. Is fake news.

Mark: Oh, man. Oh, that’s nice. I see what you’ve done there. You’ve done the kind of more sensible one in the middle.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Oh, wow.

Jim: As far as I know, made the argument that the giant ships. I mean, he has talked about making the problems with making aircraft carriers electric, although I don’t think he’s talked about making them fully electric, but he’s. He’s had issues with replacing the steam powered launching devices and things like that with electric things. In the past, we talked about that. but I don’t think he’s talked about the attempt, any attempt to make them fully electric, but.

Mark: Right.

Jim: There are giant electric ships. In fact, fairly recently, in the last few years, there’s a, container ship, called the Tesla of the seas. I mean, that’s not what some people have called it. It’s called the Yara Birkeland, but it’s a fully autonomous, electric cargo ship charged by norwegian hydropower, which is then stored in a seven megawatt hour battery, and it will carry over 100 containers. Wow. It cost about $25 million, which is about three times the price of a conventional ship. But it costs, the, running costs by 90%.

Mark: So that means that number three is real. That crazy piece of shit.

Jim: It does.

Mark: That is. Has all bears, all the hallmarks have been completely made up by you, that one is.

Jim: Which makes you think of a tank pulling a little red wagon behind it.

Mark: Yeah.

Donald Trump: We make the best tanks in the world. They want to have them so that as we go into a country to buy the hell out of it, we will do it in an environmentally friendly way. and, you know, with an army tank, again, the battery is very big, very heavy, and doesn’t last long. You know what it is? It’s an army tank. And it’s like you’re pulling a wagon behind the army tank. You’re pulling a wagon like a child pulls a wagon and it’s loaded up with a battery.

Mark: Why is that problematic? Because, well, I mean, there’s several things that are problematic in that whole thing here. He’s lightly saying, yeah, the only reason we as America go into a country is to bomb the hell out of it.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: And so now we’re going, we want to do that in an environmentally friendly way that. Because that’s the only reason to. To have an electric tank is to do, invite to reduce the environmental footprint of letting off, you know, lots of ordinance. Yeah. And that gets a laugh. Everybody goes, yeah. Ha ha. That’s very funny.

Jim: There’s a few issues with this.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: One is that this isn’t happening at all. No one is calling for electric tanks.

Mark: No reason whatsoever. Yes.

Jim: The army m. The US army does have a strategy to make all electricity, non tactical vehicles by 2027. That’s their plan. Because.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: cars and trucks to transport people or to move, ordnance or different things from base to base or around bases, dump trucks to dig things or diggers, I guess, to dig things and dump trucks to take away the stuff they dug. yeah, vans, those kinds of things. Absolutely. You can have electric. And makes that perfect sense to have electric vehicles like that. No reason why not to at all. And, and that’s. So that’s what they’re doing. There are also some tactical vehicles that they plan to have electric versions of, not tanks. And the reason for that is things like the fact that if you are

01:05:00

Jim: surveilling people, for example, an electrical vehicle is silent and doesn’t have an exhaust.

Mark: Yes. No heat signature. Yeah.

Jim: You’ve got no heat, you’ve got no smoke, and you’ve got no sound. So they make fucking great tactical vehicles for surveilling people.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: But when what you want is power, like a tank, or, you know, armor and stuff like that. No, no one’s talking about doing that. Because at that point, the thing that you’re worried about is not the. The environment or the, silence and stuff like that. You are racing towards someone to blow the shit out of them. So, I mean.

Mark: I mean, if he did but know it, that’s quite a good stand up line. So as we go into a country to bomb the hell out of it, we’ll do it in an environmentally friendly way. That’s quite a nice.

Jim: He does music. He does use it from time to time. He talks about that kind of thing sometimes, but I think this was the first time he talked about it with tanks. but he’s. He’s talked about some kind of making more environmentally friendly bombs and stuff like that for some reason.

Mark: Yeah. I wonder whether all of the golf carts, at the course of Mar a Lago, whether they just run on.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: What they race. Racing fuel.

Jim: Yeah. They take the electric, batteries out and add.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Really, polluting.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: yeah.

Mark: Massive diesel engines and things. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. yeah. All of those kind of big belching feed. Twelve diesels, with the. With the carburetors.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Two diesels have carburetors, so it’s all adjusted. So they burn a lot of oil.

Jim: They run on bunnies. They just show.

Mark: It’s like. It’s like slightly end of back to the future. But he’s got miso fusion. It’s like that.

Jim: But what it is, instead of garbage, small mammals.

Mark: And you shove them in and it grinds them up and uses that, the endocrine, adronachrine, whatever it’s called, I,

Jim: Think it’s the mitochondria. It’s the powerhouse of the cell.

Mark: Oh, yeah. That’s what it is. Yeah. That’s what powers it. Yeah. That’s all you need. Forget bits of, organic matter. Shove bunnies in. Yeah. That’s why there are no bunny holes on the golf course.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Kill two birds with 1 st. It also runs on birds.

Mark: Yeah, runs on birds. Two of them and a couple of stones. All works. It all works.

Jim: We do have a few social contestants.

Mark: Righto.

Jim: On Facebook, Andrew says Trump seems to have a recurring obsession with boats and electricity. However, I think I detect Jim’s fingerprints on number two, so that’s my choice. Very good, Andrew. Well done.

Mark: And on Patreon, how did you detect it?

Jim: On patron, Becca also thinks number two is fake. One eyed Nick says. Jesus. What? What? The actual literal fuck. None of that makes a solitary bit of sense. I think I heard one somewhere. Two is only missing him talking about sharks eating the oil. But I think three is fake because he doesn’t know what children are, never mind what they do or who they play with.

Mark: Nice. Yeah.

Jim: Richard says, I think number one is fake as the battery powered electric shark boat thing is too close to the electric airplanes here. However, I pray to everything that’s good and holy that number three is fake, because this dangerous, vile, racist, misogynist, every negative word, alienist, pathetic excuse for a human being with daddy issues can’t possibly have said that they’ll bomb the hell out of people, can he? Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Turns out, I think. Yeah. Part of that, yes. Was. Yeah.

Donald Trump: Yeah.

Mark: That was my reasoning. But, yeah, what am I thinking? Yeah, I’ve too many well, to be fair to Trump. Yeah, that’s. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Renee Z says, I’ve heard him talk about electric planes and electric tanks. Anything I’ve heard him say about electric boats included to the story about the shark. Number two has no shark story. Therefore, it must be fake news.

Mark: There you go. Good thinking.

Jim: I think Renee has a great track record in fake news. I think she does.

Mark: I know. We should be going back and measuring that. Yeah, yeah, Mark. God damn it.

Jim: Number two is fake only because I want to hear him say one and three.

Mark: Oh, no, no. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Scott says number one has to be true. He loves the electric stories and the sir stories even more. Number two, oil chips in electric what? The actual fuck? Electric what? And I want number three to be fake only because I want to hear Donald say the first two. But what do I know?

Mark: Often my driver. Yes.

Jim: Steven says, I’m going with number three. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that before. Which leads me to think it’s Jim’s attempt to fool us. He thinks it’s a cunning double bluff.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, triple by the. Damn it. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Will says, I honestly cannot tell at this point. Agent Orange has gotten too crazy with his hyperbole slash lies, and Jim’s gotten too skilled at mimicking the aforementioned taranjurine foreskin. Number three,

01:10:00

Jim: question mark.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Anders says, hey, let’s go, number two. No reason I’m late for the party and won’t waste any more time. Where’s the punch bowl? And finally, Kaz says, this is diabolical. The sun needed for electric aircraft. Has that bronzer seeped into his tiny brain? Yeah, I think so. I truly have no idea, but I really want him to say number three. So I think two is fake news.

Mark: Yeah. See, I wonder. I wouldn’t. Yes, I went the other way, saying, I can’t bear the fact that you might have said that. Yeah. So therefore, we won’t make it that one.

Jim: yeah. Well, yeah.

Mark: Good work, good work.

Jim: So, unfortunately, that’s another one that you didn’t get. 76 out of 148. Now edging closer to 51% than 52.

Mark: Oh, no. It’s slipping away, out of my grasp. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: You’ve managed to stay above 50% the whole time, basically, since, like, six or so. That’s my goal, is to get you down to 50%.

Mark: Oh, okay. Yeah, right. I saw. I saw. Take heed of all the, all our listeners theories and tried to apply some of those. I thought I was doing that, and.

Jim: It’S time for the part of the show that this week, at least it’s called the vice presidential debate, was not a logical fallacy because JD Vance and Tim Walls did find some podiums and said some stuff.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And, I think, frankly, the post debate polls seem to see it largely as a tie because walls was truthful but a bit nervous and Vance came, across surprisingly human, but lied all the time.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: And when you balance those two things out, I mean, you know, those are both equally valid vice presidential picks.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Someone who lies bumbling teddy bear versus.

Jim: A lovely man who’s on camera.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sort of unblinking serial killer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: I mean, the thing is, we’re judging it against the last vice presidential debate where Mike Pence had a flat flying and all of the, I think, seven debates. Now that Trump has been involved in, and not counting the primary debates, Trump is the most experienced presidential debater. Like most. He has been in the most presidential debates of anyone in history.

Mark: Would that count as a mass. Which would make him a mass debater?

Jim: Yeah, probably. he is the most experienced presidential debater in history and yet still put in the performance that he had in.

Mark: He’s not learned anything from the experience has given him. He refuses to learn nothing.

Jim: He’s like. He’s like Seinfeld. No hugging, no learning. That’s true. So Vance and walls, by comparison to all of Trump’s debates and Pence’s weird thing that he did this was civil. It was kind of friendly.

Mark: Yes, they were on the face. Yeah, on the face of it.

Jim: On the face of it was not underneath.

Mark: No, no, I mean it, cuz. Because ultimately, they. Neither of them answer the questions, really. They just. It was just a way of getting.

Jim: Away with just saying a thing that you wanted to say regardless of what.

Mark: Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Jim: I think werewolves avoided questions. and then they followed up. He actually then did give an answer, whereas Vance, several times just kept saying different things that weren’t anything to do with the question and were just.

Mark: Perpetuating madnesses and conspiracy theories and lies.

Jim: Lies almost the whole time. Yeah. I mean, mad lies as well. Things that. I don’t even think Trump has claimed that he saved Obamacare, has he? I don’t think so. I pay quite a lot of attention to things Trump says and I don’t remember ever claiming that.

Mark: I think if he’s got Obama in it, he wouldn’t want to be associated with perpetuating it at all.

Jim: But Vance claims that it was all going to hell. Basically Obamacare. And Trump, rescued it somehow by getting rid of it altogether, somehow ignored the fact that his, like, he campaigned on repealing it and then couldn’t even do that. So it was only his failure to get rid of it that meant that loads of Americans still had healthcare by the end of his term and. Yeah. And somehow that’s rescuing and saving Obamacare. Don’t know how that works.

Mark: No.

Jim: He kind of denied climate change in a way

01:15:00

Jim: by using the let’s, for the sake of argument, pretend it’s real.

Mark: Method, like, you know. 195. Yeah. When he was asked, when he was.

Jim: Asked about the fact that Trump had called it hoax, he, was like, look, let’s not get into details of whether it’s real. Let’s just, for the sake of, let’s pretend you’re right so that we don’t have to talk. And he said so that we don’t have to talk about weird science like climate m change being real.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or weird science like climate change isn’t real and the earth is flat and aliens live in a mountain. Yeah.

Jim: Let’s avoid all that stuff.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Let’s not talk about that bias. Let’s just go along with the fact that, okay, it might be right. So what does that mean?

Jim: Yeah, yeah. But as I talked about, the, the presidential debate, was that one I did on my own was the one I did my own.

Mark: You did? Yeah.

Jim: So I mentioned that really the people who watch this are people who have already made their mind up and are quite into politics.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So this isn’t actually going to, The debate as a whole isn’t going to make any difference to the electorate as a whole. What has even the potential to make a difference is the little sound bites that make it into social media right afterwards go a bit viral or are.

Mark: Talked about in the cats and dogs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: And so there’s a few little bits that got reported on. Most of it was, as I say, pretty civil. They agreed about a few things. They conceded a few points and said, yeah, you know, I don’t disagree on some of the things he says. I, even think maybe he wants to help people. and things like that.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Stuff that made them sound both reasonably human, but walls. his, his kind of worst moment, arguably, was when he was asked about his claim that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen square.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Thing which reporting had come out just the day before or that morning, I think that he actually wasn’t, that he wasn’t there until later that summer. So he absolutely should have been ready for that question.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: And when he was asked it, he was like, And kind of fumbled a bit when.

Mark: Right.

Jim: The moderator then followed up and said, this was actually what I asked you. He did then say, oh, yeah, sometimes I was there. Yeah, I was there later the summer. I kind of, you know, I mix things up and sometimes I say things, you know, because I’m just an idiot sometimes, which I think if he’d started with. If he’d started with, I made a mistake. I’m some, you know, just. I’m a bit silly that I think everyone. Yeah, all right, fair enough.

Mark: Fair enough.

Jim: But it came across as he was trying to avoid it a bit, so that wasn’t great. But the best thing that he said, apart from the fact that he was actively, promoting, reproductive rights and things like that, which. Which strongly was that he asked JD Vance whether Trump lost the 2020 election.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And he actually kind of made it a direct question. And Vance did not give a direct answer. He gave. He said, I want to focus. I’m here to focus on the future. Did Kamala in 2020 do this thing of, I think, stopping people from saying about COVID speaking their mind about COVID which. Which is not looking to the future. That’s immediately you’ve said, I want to focus on the future, focusing on the past.

Mark: Let’s talk about the past.

Jim: And it is conspicuously not admitting that Trump lost.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: Tim Waltz jumped on that and said, that is a damning non answer, which I think that’s, ah, probably the biggest thing that came out of the whole debate was that exchange of fans refusing to tell the truth about a thing we all know. And. And Tim Waltz saying, well, you know, you didn’t. You can’t say the truth. So that’s bad. yeah. And I think that’s pretty effective. I think that was a good.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Point for Waltz and a bad point for Vance. But it’s unsurprising that he can’t tell the truth about that because obviously Trump doesn’t admit it. So it would be very bad for him when he then sees Trump again. If he said, yeah, he did lose, that would be uncomfortable. But more than that, even this year, polls have shown that a large proportion of Republicans, more than 50% of Republicans believe that Biden did not win in 2020. So he risks losing support.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: From the Republic if he admits M tv.

Mark: Yep.

Jim: So, yeah, that.

01:20:00

Jim: And I suspect that was part of Tim Waltz’s kind of debate prep was that he was. He said, you should ask him because he won’t be able to say yes. He won’t be able to admit Trump lost.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. And, yeah.

Jim: If that was great prep, well done and good.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Move for Tim.

Mark: And I think the other. The other social media moment was the Vance getting fact checks on something and then him saying, well, you said you weren’t going to fact check me, so you think, oh, actually, that’s interesting. So you’re gonna just. You thought you could.

Jim: I was told I was allowed to lie.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Oh, you were gonna fight Jerry live. And. Yeah.

Jim: Yeah. He claimed the thing about haitiana immigrants in Springfield. he called them illegal immigrants. Yes. One of the moderators, Margaret, said, no, they’re not. They’re actually not illegal immigrants.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And, yeah. His response was, I was told there wouldn’t be any fact checking. Yeah. The rules are you’re not allowed. There’s no fact checking. So that’s. Yeah, no, the only reason to say to someone after you’ve been fact checked, I was told there would be no fact checking is.

Mark: Is if you’ve said something that would be fact checked.

Jim: To the contrary, as I was concerned, I’m allowed to get away with lying. That’s the only meaning for that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The way I understood the rules, I could say what I like, and no one.

Mark: And, no one would. Would say any otherwise, so that’s pretty bad. Yeah.

Jim: And, yeah, that did. That did go pretty viral. Also, there was. I saw some things, saying, oh, JD Vance is really in his element here, talking over women.

Mark: Right. Which was nice.

Jim: And. Yeah, they did. Which was another lovely moment. And the faces, Margaret, and Nora’s faces when they did this was just brilliant. When they muted his microphone so that he couldn’t talk over them. And then they went, to. People can’t hear what you’re saying because we’ve muted your microphone. And they just looked so pleased with themselves for doing that. And so they should, because it was great.

Mark: I said, we’ve got such a lot to get through. Yeah, yeah. That we can’t hear you.

Jim: It wasn’t because they wanted to move on to other stuff. It was because they could.

Mark: No, they just wanted to shut off. Yeah. And in fact, I think you can hear him off, Mike, saying, what’s happened?

Jim: What’s.

Mark: What’s happened? Yeah, yeah, we’ve just turned you off. You are.

Jim: and I did see some responses to that on. On social media with people saying things like, women should have disability to mute.

Mark: Men in real life.

Jim: Real life. I don’t know how we make it happen, but it has to happen.

Mark: Yeah. Oh, that’d be so good. Yeah. Because you. That would cut out, all of the fucking mansplaining that goes on. You just put them on mute. Just have a little mute button.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: I think we should make it. We could. We should make fellatious trump mute buttons. It’s just like a little thing is just. And you press it. And the rule would be that as soon as you saw the little green light go on, that was it.

Jim: You have to stop talking. You would just have to shut up. Yeah.

Mark: You have to stop talking. You can move your mouse, but you can. You just have to stop talking.

Jim: Yeah. So, ultimately, presidential debates are, rarely consequential, although there was a pretty important one earlier in the year. I don’t think this will have made any difference to anyone. No. Vice presidential debates are, the only way that they arguably, can be important is if people fuck up really badly. And. Yes.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: neither of them did that. They were both fine. Neither of them did anything amazing. Neither of them did anything terrible. So what you can expect, really, from a vice presidential debate, and. And it went fine. And it was nice to have a bit of civility, even if it was just pretend from at least one of them.

Mark: Yeah. It’s like that moment after general election here. The next prime minister questions after. It was kind of. Yeah, civil. And, you know, Soonak admitted defeat. Well, he had no choice. And, just kind of went, oh, I didn’t expect to be over here. And, yeah, good luck, mate. Yeah, it was, you know, it was all very, very pleasant, and it didn’t take long till it all went downhill. But for that moment, you think, oh, yeah, there you go. There’s the nice, nice side of it. If people just admit that, okay, what we’re here to do is to serve the people, not to serve a, erratically bronzed demagogue. That’s.

Jim: Erratically. I might have to use that. Demagogue.

Mark: Demagogue. Yeah, yeah. That’s. That’s not our purpose. What we’re here to do is to talk about things that affect the people that we are supposedly paid by and work for.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. It was almost a moment

01:25:00

Mark: of seeing that actually might come to pass, but, yeah. And then it ended.

Jim: Yeah. And all was right with the world.

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

Jim: It seems like I’ve been going about publicizing my new book all wrong. I sent out press releases to journalists and contacted podcasters, hoping one or two might grant me an interview. But I should take a leaf out of Melania’s new book. When CNN indicated that they were prepared to talk to her on air to publicize her eponymously titled memoir, her publishers demanded CNN pay a quarter of a million dollars for the privilege. They did not agree to the terms. Meanwhile, Donald has an even more lucrative method of hawking his $60 bibles. Oklahoma state superintendent for schools Ryan Walters, whose church and state based shenanigans weve discussed before, has budgeted $3 million to buy 55,000 new bibles for Oklahoma, classrooms. But he has some suspiciously specific criteria for them. They have to be the King James Version, bound in leather or leather like material, and they must also contain the pledge of allegiance, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Some early reports claimed that this excludes all bibles currently in print in the US, except the God bless the USA Bible endorsed by Trump. But that’s not completely true. There is one other bible available which would fit the bill, although at $90, Walters would need to negotiate a bulk discount to bring it in under budget. That option is the we the people Bible, which was promoted by Donald Trump Junior in 2022. Notably, Walters doesn’t require the Bibles to be printed in the USA, since it turns out Trumps are made in China for less than $3 a copy. Tim Wildsmith, a Baptist minister who reviews bibles on YouTube, was unimpressed with the leather like cover, found it hard to read because words were jammed together, and noted that sticky pages ripped when pulled apart. Fortunately, neither Trump nor any of his followers will ever look inside. But lest you think that christians were the only ones Trump was trying, and failing to pander to, he visited a jewish gravesite for a commemoration event for October 7. And when he was handed a jewish prayer book, he asked, would you like me to sign this? And one of his campaign’s latest grifts is a coffee mug bearing the slogan Latter day Saints for Trump. In case you’re not aware, Mormons aren’t allowed caffeine.

Mark: No. Yeah. Do you think that’s light on the part of Walters? That that’s a thinly disguised donation?

Jim: it’s hard to say. It could just be. Correlation. These two things are not necessarily causally related.

Mark: We’re coming up to that significant date in american politics next month. November. Yes. The anniversary of the voter fraud press conference held in the four season total landscaping car park mastermind, of course, by co conspirator number one, Rudy Giuliani. To celebrate, Jack Smith has filed documents in federal court in Washington, DC outlining the federal election interference case against Trump, detailing Giuliani’s text to Michigan lawmakers in a bid to overturn the state’s election results. So I need you to pass a joint resolution from the Michigan legislature that states the election is in dispute. There’s an ongoing investigation by the legislature and the electors sent by Governor Whitmer are, ah, not the official electors of the state of Michigan and do not fall within the safe harbor deadline of December 8 under Michigan law, at the behest of Trump, of course, who enlisted Giuliani as his personal attorney because he was willing to falsely claim victory and spread knowingly false claims of election fraud. According to Smith’s filings, whilst willing and ready, Rudy proved to be not so able. He apparently texted it to the the wrong number. Not such clangers as the butt dials that accidentally left two voicemails on an NBC’s reporters phone where he spoke about needing money and unleashed a verbal attack on Joe Biden, the then democratic presidential candidate, but nonetheless ineffective. And yeah, why not stupid. Rudy has, of course, pleaded not guilty, but his daughter, Caroline Giuliani, spoke out to Vanity Fair about how Trump destroys everything he touches as she endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. Watching my dad’s life crumble since he joined forces with Trump has been extraordinarily painful, both on a personal level and because his demise feels linked to a dark force that threatens to once again consume America. Yeah, painful, but also, dare we say, karmically funny.

Jim: Jack Smith’s aforementioned court filing was unsealed earlier this month, and, well, those of us who have been paying attention, and I include you, this dear listener, already knew most of the stuff, included, and suspected the rest. As we’ve already mentioned, the filing contextualizes all of Trump’s actions around January 6 in terms of his private status as an office seeker, not an office holder, like, for example, all of his attempts to get Mike Pence to just say he won. I’ll be interested to see how Trump’s lawyers respond to this specifically, given that any

01:30:00

Jim: argument they make that Pence had the power to choose which states to accept would presumably also apply to Kamala, who will be doing that job on January 20 next year. There were a few juicy morsels which were previously hidden, such as the unnamed co conspirator who is probably Trumps election day chief of operations, Mike Roman, who, when told that a batch of Biden votes was legit said, find a reason it isnt and give me options to file litigation, even if it is. That same co conspirator was told that this could lead to civil unrest, and apparently replied, make them riotous. Trump himself was given an update about Mike Pence being taken to a secure location for his safety, and allegedly replied, so what? And the filing also adds many more examples of Republicans telling Trump that all his claims about the election being rigged were bullshit, including Pence, RNC chair Ronald McDaniel, Michigan Senate leader Mike Shirky, and even Trump campaign spokesman and face drawn on a thumb, Jason Miller. And finally, a quote from Trump to his family members on Marine one. It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election, you still have to fight like hell.

Mark: Whoa. And also, the fact that he played YMCA M at the beginning of his, speech meant that it was an election rally, rather than him playing hail to the chief, which would have meant he was the president.

Jim: Well, there’s also the fact that he’s. He said, I had nothing to do with the organization of January 6. They just asked me to give a talk.

Mark: Yeah. So, yeah. Ah, excellent. Bob Woodward has a new book, Out War, which, though it covers the Biden presidency, details incidents at the beginning of the Trump presidency’s response to the COVID pandemic. Whilst Trump was, you know, as the actual head of the actual country, actually advocating that the populace actually shove big lights inside themselves or inject themselves and each other with actual bleach, you know, under strict medical conditions. Of course, he was sending Covid tests directly to Vladimir Putin in Russia. Yep, you heard right. Never mind that these tests were scarcely available to the american people, who could have, perhaps on the medical frontline, have worked out whether they were posing a danger to their patients and vice versa. And perhaps that might have averted the deaths of many hundreds and thousands of people. As long as your sponsor to join the russian chapter of the Hells Angels that you’re so desperately prospected to join is healthy enough not to black pole your application. That’s fine. According to Woodward, the russian president told Trump, I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you. You think? Give him his due. Old Putz knows how to read a situation. Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, largely confirmed the account of Woodward vis a vis Trump secretly sending the tests to the russian president for his own personal use, despite us shortages, but draws the line of saying any phone calls between the two despots actually happened, you know, in case people get mad at them.

Jim: I mentioned this story in the final episode of our patron evisceration of Dinesh D’Souza’s police state, but it’s too much fun not to repeat here. You might remember Tina Peters, the former Mesa county clerk who conspired with others to break into voting machines to prove they were compromised and was charged with four felonies and three misdemeanors and still ran for secretary of state in Colorado in 2022. She didn’t win. As a quick reminder, here’s how she reacted to being arrested.

<donald trump=””> The speakers in the transcript are: 1. Donal: If you’re not going to cooperate, you’ll be charged obstructing.

Mark: Let go of me.

Jim: Understand that?

Mark: You let go of me now.

Jim: No, ma’am.

Mark: Let your punish.

Jim: You’re bruising me.

Mark: Let go.

<donald trump=””> The speakers in the transcript are: 1. Donal: Stop pulling against us.

Mark: I’m not pulling against you. Let go.

Jim: Stand up like an adult.

Mark: Shut up.

Jim: What an asshole thing to say to me. I love that. Let it be is playing in the background there such like a calm song. And she’s like, fuck you.

Mark: I’m gonna find myself in times of trouble.

Jim: Yeah, so she was a bit more calm in court last week when she was sentenced to nine years in prison, merely expressing how bad she felt for the inevitable divine retribution her accusers would have to deal with because God doesn’t like people messing with his kids. She m did come across a bit desperate when she told the judge that she couldn’t go to prison because she needs to sleep on a magnetic mattress for her bad back. But he was unmoved. In fact, he was all out of fucks to give, telling her, you are.

Mark: No hero, you abused your position, and you’re a charlatan who used, and is still using your prior position in office to pedal a snake oil that’s been.

Rishi Sunak: Proven to be junk time and time again.

Mark: It was brutal.

Jim: Have fun in prison, Tina. Meanwhile, in Georgia, election deniers like Tina did manage to get appointed to the state election board and have changed the rules with only weeks to go before the election to require poll workers in each precinct

01:35:00

Jim: to hand count all ballots cast on election day before voting to certify the count. This is completely unnecessary and will delay results from Georgia long enough for Trump to once again claim democrats are doing it deliberately so they can find massive dumps of Harris ballots and foment another insurrection.

Mark: Yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep. As if the damage brought by Hurricane Helene wasn’t bad enough, lazy politicizing gamesmanship by the Republican Party is adding insult to injury. One of the most prevalent falsehoods spread by Trump is the claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has used some disaster relief funds to help migrants. Though the emergency Agency and migrant relief programs are both part of the Department of Homeland Security, their funds are in separate accounts. Accounts and money earmarked for hurricane costs can’t be transferred to cover aid to migrants. Asked, ah for comment on Trump’s false claims, campaign spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt repeated them. The only misinformation is coming from the Biden Harris administration. White House press secretary Karine Jean Pierre lied to the nation Friday when she said it is categorically false that FEMA funds are being used to support illegal immigrants, whilst Republican Mitt Romney thankfully said during a discussion at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, I mean, he just makes it up. House Speaker Mike Johnson defended Trump’s statement in a news conference Wednesday evening, saying Trump is expressing his frustration about the lack of resources being provided here and then repeated false claims about migrants in the same news conference. However, North Carolina Republican Chuck Edwards says that he attributes the rumors that are out there about FEMA funding to good old fashioned storytelling, or as we good old fashionedly used to call them, lies. Though on Tuesday he issued a lengthy fact sheet displaying falsehoods about Helene and FEMA. If that’s not bad enough, way over on the edges of actual insanity. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who else has continued to promote her unfounded, theory that, ah, they control the weather? In response, Representative Carlos A. Jimenez, who’s a Republican in Florida, shot back, humans cannot create or control hurricanes. Anyone who thinks they can needs to have their head examined. When asked, for comment, Green spokesman Nick Dyer said the congresswoman was not suggesting that Helene was engineered by humans. He said Greene was merely trying to bring attention to what he called weather, manipulation. Yeah, also doesn’t exist. Oh, and also, no, she wasn’t a dyer. Continues, every one of the congresswoman Greene’s critics want to ignore the science based factual evidence she has shared. They are the ones peddling conspiracy theories about her, m pot kettle lunatics. Yesterday my mother told me I need to do deep research because everything I know and I learned about hurricanes is wrong. University of Miami climatologist Brian McNulty, who has long tracked storms in the Atlantic Ocean, wrote on XDev, I can’t even process the ignorance and the brainwashing. Well, you and MTG both, Brian.

Jim: Even though Trump is shameless enough to tell a rally crowd in Pennsylvania that he has no empty seats at his rallies, while directly facing literally hundreds of empty seats, you can tell it gets to him, particularly when his fans, many of whom lined up for hours to attend one of his rant fuelled gatherings, start getting bored and filing out before he’s even got to the bit about Hannibal Lecter. Perhaps this is why he chose his latest venue, a remote former manure farm near Coachella, California. So remote, in fact, that attendees had to leave their cars 5 miles away and be bused across the desert to the stinky get together on coaches laid on free of charge by the Trump campaign. Thanks to this, despite temperatures of over 100 degrees and 90 minutes of unhinged fascist bullshit, everyone had to stay where they were. In fact, even after Trump left in his air conditioned limousine, they still had to stay where they were, because the Trump campaign either didn’t bother to arrange any return transport or refused to pay the coach firm, leaving 15,000 confused and pissed off rallygoers in a hot, dark desert 5 miles from their cars, just as it started to rain.

Mark: Whoa.

Jim: Sometimes writers work pretty hard to come up with metaphors to explain complex situations, like, say, how Trump’s second presidential term might go. I don’t think they’ll come up with a better one than Trump leaving his own support stranded on a ship farm miles from nowhere, because he was done speaking and he’d got everything he needed from them.

Mark: Wow. Bloody hell.

Jim: He also claimed there are a hundred thousand people there. Yeah. incidentally. Which there weren’t.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Wow.

Mark: That’s appalling. That’s worse than the fire festival thing, isn’t it? That kind of whole Coachella vibe where they had that festival and it was just awful. Oh, my

01:40:00

Mark: God, they didn’t bust them back. Meanwhile, in the UK, this week marked the first hundred days of the new Labour government. One that’s lasted for two and a half trusses, or slightly over two letterses, which the right wing media, or as we call it here, the media reports on the declaration by Starmer of free Taylor Swift tickets, glasses, clothes and other gifts totalling 76,000 pounds, oddly gifted by donors. The same press fails to compare it to the completely undeclared, nay, utterly denied 120,000 donation from Lord Brownlow to one b Johnson Esq. For wallpaper and other things to literally spaff up the wall of ten Downing street when he ascended to the office in 2019. Nor do most of the media point out starmers clear commitment to nationalizing the railways. The restoration of the HS two plan to extend to Euston and Manchester, scrapping Ofsted’s brutal, deeply damaging one road reviews and moving away from the Tory fixation on school discipline, lifting the ban on onshore wind and approving enormous new solar farms, shutting down the OGSBB Stockholm and the even more odious Rwanda scheme, withdrawing some though not nearly enough, arms export licenses to Israel, and finally giving up the embarrassing imperial cosplay of holding onto the Chagos Islands. The forceful response to the far right riots also deserves a mention, though one does hope to see a longer term approach that focuses on vestment, on social cohesion, not merely on punishment, though Tim Bale over at Al Jazeera called it the worst hundred days of a new government in living memory. Obviously, his memory hasn’t been alive long cf another prime minister as little as four years ago, who began his term by catastrophically mishandling the onset of a pandemic, cementing the worst possible version of Brexit into law and screwing up responses to widespread flooding. Or, you know, an even more recent prime minister who tanked the economy and failed to outlast a lettuce, barely making it to half of that magic number. Meanwhile, in the Tory leadership election, James Cleverley, who exhorted the Tory party conference to, you know, be more normal, was on the end of the party’s resounding reply when they voted not for him to go forward to the last two candidates leaving on the right, Kemi bad Enoch, and on the right, Robert Jemerich, the guy who erased the Disney cartoons from asylum seeking children’s temporary hovels so they didn’t appear too comforting. So there’s that one Tory grandee was reported to have voted for, Jan Rick, in order to try and ensure that bad Enoch didn’t end up running against Cleverley, adding, Cleverley’s as thick as shit but would make a good leader. But it’s all academic, because Boris has rewritten history as fiction again, and actually, no one’s either surprised or even noticed that alone cares.

Jim: So that’s all the bad arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this week. You’ll find the show notes at full, 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 the 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 podcast, or simply tell one other person in person about how much they like our podcast and you can support the show@patreon.com. ftrump just like our strawman level patrons, Lt. Colleen Lyella Richard Thunder Hopkins, Will M. Scott, Ozzy on bank, Lauren Thompson, Mark Reiche, and Amber R. Buchanan, who told us when we met her at QED, we could just call her Amber, though another listener recognised her at QED last year because we keep using her full name all the time. And our true Scotsman level patrons, Sharon Robinson, Renee Zed, Melissa Saitek, Stephen Bickle, Janet Nuesse, Andrew Hauk, and our top patron, Kaz Tui. Thank you so much for your continued support. It’s very, very much appreciated.

Jim: And, while we do have one more episode to go before the actual election, early voting is pretty much available everywhere. That early voting will be available now. So fucking vote.

Mark: Get out there and vote.

Jim: Also, you can connect with those awesome people as well as us and other listeners in the Facebook group@facebook.com. groups fallacious Trump.

Mark: 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 Donald.

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

01:44:29