Galileo Fallacy (Redux) – FT#191

21 Apr Galileo Fallacy (Redux) – FT#191

Show Notes

When someone claims that the fact that everyone called them crazy means they must be right, because ‘they called Galileo crazy’ (or some other person who was historically dismissed then turned out to be right), they are committing a fallacy.  They are forgetting that the vast majority of people in history who were called crazy weren’t misunderstood geniuses, they were, in fact, crazy.

Trump

We started out by discussing this legal argument from Trump

Then we talked about this Karoline Leavitt tweet:

Secretary @RobertKennedyJr is taking flak because he’s over the target.

The Trump Administration is addressing root causes of chronic disease, embracing transparency in government, and championing gold-standard science.

Only the Democrats could attack that commonsense effort.

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) September 4, 2025

And we finished with this clip of Rick Perry:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about this clip of Jonathan Dimbleby:

Then he looked at this clip of Zia Yusuf:

Fallacy in the Wild (Sting: Traditional punk arrangement of Sing a Song of Sixpence)

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

Then we discussed this clip from Smallville:

And we finished up with this clip from Monty Python’s Flying Circus:

Fake News

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

Mark got it right this week, and is on 48%!

Teleportation is not a logical fallacy

We talked about FEMA’s Gregg Phillips and his claims of teleporting to a Waffle House.

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

• The Pope controversially came out in favor of peace rather than war in his Easter message, and Trump took that personally. Perhaps he was already drafting his Truth Social post where he told the Iranians to “Open the fucking strait you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell”. You know, the one which ended “Praise be to Allah”, not the one where he threatened to wipe out their entire civilization – that was a couple of days later. Anyway, after seeing a 60 Minutes segment where three Cardinals agreed with the Pope that peace is cool and war is a bit of a dick move, Trump accused Bobby from Chicago of being “weak on crime”. Now we talk a lot of shit about Trump on this show, but it’s only fair to give him credit when he’s right. One of my favorite statistical quirks is the fact that the Vatican technically has the world’s highest per capita crime rate. Admittedly, that’s because there are only about 500 permanent residents and most of the crimes are pickpockets preying on the roughly 7 million tourists who visit every year, but surely the Pope can spare some of the colorfully dressed halberd wielding Swiss Guards to crack down on the rampant theft right outside his house. I imagine this situation must be tricky for JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019. Who should he side with, his dementia-riddled boss, or the infallible head of his religion, who is guided by the holy spirit and considered the earthly representative of Christ himself. Just kidding, of course he chose Trump. In fact, he tried to Vancesplain the Just War doctrine to the Supreme Pontiff, an idea developed primarily by Saint Augustine. You might think the fact that Pope Leo is literally the first Pope from the Augustinian order, and he wrote his doctoral thesis on Augustine’s philosophy puts him at an advantage in this argument, but you’re forgetting the fact that JD’s already killed one Pope, and now he has a taste for it. Trump meanwhile, conscious that there are still Catholics he hasn’t pissed off, posted a completely fucking unhinged AI image of him as American Jesus, which he deleted hours later after a backlash from his own supporters who are fine with all the crimes and suspected kid fucking, but draw the line at blasphemous AI slop. Trump claimed he thought it was a picture of him as a doctor, working with the Red Cross, but there are some telltale signs in the image that this isn’t true. First, there are no red crosses anywhere, unless they’re hidden behind the fighter jets and bald eagles, but also, he’s dressed in Jesus’s classic white and red robes, he’s laying on hands, and he’s literally glowing.
• Perhaps in a bid to increase his credibility as an advocate for the environment and the healthy part we all play as organisms in the global scheme of things, you know the way David Attenborough advocates or perhaps to present himself as the ideal candidate for the next series of I’m a Celebrity get me out of Here as a perfect jungle-dweller RFK Jr revealed in a new book RFK Jr: The Fall and Rise ol’ Robbo is quoted as having written in his journal of 11 November 2001whilst America was reeling from events a month prior “I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be,” adding  “My kids waited patiently in the car.” Being the king of exploits involving roads and bears and bicycles it doesn’t really come as a surprise. What does come as a surprise is his failure to follow a career in surgery or veterinary reproductive qualifications, let alone the continuing surprise that he is in charge of the whole of the health service for the United States! Apparently he took the raccoon’s genitals so he could “study them later”, cos yeah that explains it! I suspect that Peter Greenaway probably based his film Drowning by Numbers on Kennedy given that elsewhere in the book he talks about his fascination with the corpses of dead seagulls “I’d like to pick up some of these dead seagulls for my skull collection,” oh my god he has a collection!! What with that and that he once severed the head of a washed-up deceased whale with a chainsaw one wonders that Guillermo Del Toro didn’t sign him up as an interior designer! Still could be worse he could have been be a driving instructor in Chappaquiddick, or say given the post of secretary of health and human services despite being a leading vaccine critic and croaky idiot – oh no wait!

• Georgia’s 14th Congressional district clearly has a “type,” and that type is apparently “people who view basic reality as a personal insult.” After Marjorie Taylor Greene vacated her seat, the voters decided the best replacement would be Clay Fuller, who beat Democrat Shawn Harris by 11 points in a district Trump won by 37% just 18 months ago. Fuller celebrated the upcoming US 250th anniversary by proving he hasn’t read a history book, a map, or a sports page in his entire life. Fuller’s descent into madness began, as all great American tragedies do, with a hotel air conditioner in Maryland. After waking up in a mild sweat, Fuller took to Twitter to post a rant that managed to be wrong about more things in a minute and a half than most people are in a full session of Congress. [Audio of the Twitter rant]. OK, here we go: The Green New Deal was never enacted, so if the hotel has a policy, it’s not based on that. Georgia is named after King George II, not George Washington, who didn’t invent freedom. Ronald Acuña Jr. was born in Venezuela. Maryland isn’t “newer to the Union”, it’s one of the 13 original colonies. Maryland does have a football team. Air conditioning has not saved billions of lives, although it has prevented a lot of heat related deaths worldwide – the data I can find puts it in the range of about 2.5 million. Finally, socialism, which has nothing to do with air conditioning, hasn’t killed billions, even if you lump it in with communism, and the death toll from capitalism is far higher. Fuller’s new to politics, but already seems to have figured out the MAGA game plan: take a minor personal inconvenience, blame it on a high-profile woman of color, fabricate five centuries of history to feel superior, and then demand that everyone “double down on being awesome.” 
• When you’re a kid and innocent of all things corrupt and awful, the next best thing to meeting an actual astronaut, must surely be going to where the actual President of the actual United States of America actually lives and search for Easter Eggs and roll them about and meet the Easter Bunny and hang out in the garden, ignoring the building site over there obvs! And then some bumbling old geezer in a tie that’s too long and leaning forward too much like the front half of a pantomime minotaur in his lifted shoes and waving god knows where with hands that are smaller than the three-year-old sitting next to you on the table, comes over and your dreams are shattered cos you realise that this must be the president cos he’s not talking about bunnies and chocolate or even Jesus and Psalm Sunday but starts banging on about Joe Biden using the autopen. Banging on at length into the faces of bemused children ferchrissakes. Yeah way to read the room Donnie. In the middle of a war you chose to start you’re still talking about the previous administration in terms designed to prevent people – even fucking children apparently – drawing negative comparisons with your dumpster shit fire show kreig of what barely passes for governance. Satisfied that he’d indoctrinated the next generation enough, after he left the kids’ table, Trump fielded questions from reporters where he threatened to commit war crimes in Iran while the Easter bunny awkwardly stood nearby. Yeah Happy Easter – someone died for these sins doncha know!
• According to a bombshell article in the Atlantic last week, FBI director Kash Patel couldn’t believe his eyes when he tried to log in to an internal computer system and was locked out. Instead of doing the usual things of calling IT, or checking if he’d left Caps Lock on, he freaked out, assuming he’d been fired by the White House, and this was how they were letting him know. He called aides and allies to announce his termination, and officials and members of Congress started calling the White House demanding to know who was now in charge of the FBI. The answer, for now at least, was still Kash, as the official story is that it was a simple technical error, but based on the rest of the article, I wouldn’t be shocked to find he’d had a bit of a memory lapse regarding his password, since multiple officials told The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick that Kash is known to regularly drink to excess in clubs in DC and Las Vegas, and “On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated” and “A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors”  In response, Kash has filed a defamation lawsuit against the magazine for an eye-popping $250 million, claiming actual malice, but the Atlantic stands by their story, based on the two dozen witnesses Fitzpatrick spoke to, and the fact the Bureau, the DOJ, and the White House all failed to provide any answers to the 19 detailed questions they were sent prior to publication. Kash has spent his tenure trying to purge the FBI of “deep state leakers” by forcing agents to take polygraph tests, yet more than twenty people still felt his behavior was such a “national security vulnerability” that they risked everything to talk. If this case goes to trial, the discovery phase is going to be a bloodbath. Patel will have to prove the magazine knew the stories were false, while the magazine gets to call those two dozen witnesses to the stand to talk about the time they had to use a battering ram to get the FBI Director to a morning briefing. 
• Customs & Border Protection on Monday launched its tariff refund portal to allow importers to get money back after the Supreme Court struck down the global tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. This must be causing Trump’s ticks to tourette something awful! His adoration of money is purely one-directional – towards him. No wonder then perhaps that when logging into the online portal to reclaim all the expenditure Trump forced businesses to absorb as a result of his illegal tariffs they are presented with error messages “The system is currently experiencing high volume, please try again later,” the messages state. Yeah no shit Sherlock course there’s high volume the U.S. government now owes tens of thousands of importers a total of up to $175 billion in refunds for the tariffs imposed by Trump last year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Rick Woldenberg, CEO of educational toy maker Learning Resources whose suit filed in 2025 lead to the Supreme Court striking down the Trump administration’s emergency tariffs in February. noted “It seems like the system is overwhelmed.” Whilst Beth Benike, co-founder of Busy Baby, a Minnesota-based maker of baby products added “I can’t even get to the point where I’d receive an error message because the portal is down”. I suspect the system is running on the equivalent computing power of that which got the astronauts to the moon – no, Apollo 8! A shame the kids from DOGE aren’t still around they’d be able to hack in for sure!
• If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “What the American public health discourse really needs is a soundtrack that sounds like a skeleton having a seizure in a filing cabinet”, then you are in luck. Shit-swimming roadkill enthusiast Robert F. Kennedy Jr, is launching a new podcast. Titled The Secretary Kennedy Podcast, it promises a “new era of radical transparency,” which is government-speak for “I’m going to use taxpayer-funded microphones to tell you why your tap water is turning you into a lizard.” The teaser video for this auditory hellscape features Kennedy in a slick, HHS-branded studio, explaining that the goal of this vanity project is to bypass the “corruption and lies” of the scientific establishment. In other words, Bobby is tired of being fact-checked by people who actually went to medical school, so he’s building his own echo chamber where he can chat with likeminded deep-thinkers like celebrity chef Robert Irvine. Because when I want to know about the efficacy of the MMR vaccine, I naturally turn to the guy who lied about working on Charles and Diana’s wedding cake and now spends his time screaming at failing chefs about their walk-in freezers. Critics are already calling it a state-sponsored pipeline for dangerous misinformation, which is kind of a given for anything that involves RFK. At one point, while sounding like half a dozen tin cans being dragged behind a wedding car, he promises to “name the names of the forces that obstruct the paths to public health”, and on that point at least, we agree, because his name is right there in the title.
• Today in British Parliament PM Keir Starmer faced questions in the House about why friend-of-Epstein-and-serial-underpants-wearer-in-photos Peter Mandelson was appointed UK Ambassador to the United States. Starmer has gone from saying I didn’t know Mandelson was a friend of convicted child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein when he was appointed to oops soz yes I did, to I was never told that he had failed the security vetting process when it came to light that he did but that Mandelson had been rubber stamped as Good to Go by the foreign office anyway. Starmer argued today that he only got to hear the final result – that Mandelson had been okayed – and didn’t get to see any of the workings out in the margin and that was the fault of Sir Olly Robbins, the former top civil servant at the Foreign Office at the time, who was effectively sacked last week. Possibly deflecting accusations of under-bus throwing and the buck stops over there then does it Keir? Starmer said he should have been shown the vetting workings out and that there needs to be a serious review of security procedures cos it had been deliberately kept from him. Ex-Labour party member Diane Abbott – whip withdrawn cos she’s a bit of a leftie and asks too many questions – enquired quite reasonably, given that Mandelson had a bit of a track record with doing dodgy things sufficient that he resigned twice from Tony Blair’s administration, if it’s not enough that stuff wasn’t shown to you Keir mate shouldn’t you have just bleedin’ asked! Calls were made from all the other parties for Starmer’s resignation and for a general election to be called. Notwithstanding my reservations with this Labour Government I’d not like that to happen cos I don’t want Farage to move into Number 10, but these are the kinds of aberrant behaviours that we used to associate with the Tories, slicing ever thinner wafers of truth in order to wriggle free of blame cf Boris and his partygate covid booze-ups – indeed Starmer echoed Boris’ maintaining that he didn’t deliberately mislead parliament when he said ‘all due processes were followed’, and it’s rather a crushing disappointment that the wave of optimism that swept Labour into a landslide victory after Boris, is being squandered and sullied in so blatant a manner. More fool me for thinking that for once politics might be clean and honest and enacted for the people rather than in the protection of the vested interests of millionaire chums of billionaires with questionable CVs. Keep at it Mr Polanski (not you Roman!) all the negative press following your similar expressions of hope from the Green Party must mean you’re doing something right!!

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