Inconsistent Comparison (Redux) – FT#169

03 Mar Inconsistent Comparison (Redux) – FT#169

Show Notes

The Inconsistent Comparison Fallacy occurs when someone backs up their argument by comparing things which actually differ in important and relevant ways.

Trump

We started out by discussing Trump lying about COVID:

Then we looked at Tucker Carlson lying about Russian groceries:

And finally we talked about this tweet from Candace Owens:

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about some bigotry from Kemi Badenoch:

He followed that up by talking about this clip of Liz Truss being wrong about why Tories lost the election:

And he finished with another example from Liz Truss, being delusional about her chances of winning:

Fallacy in the Wild

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

Then we discussed this clip from Who Killed the Electric Car:

And we finished up with this Citroen 2CV advert:

 

Fake News

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

1. We’re all gonna sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new. Not pieced together, obsolete, like it is, land-based. Trying to hook up a land based system to a satellite system. The first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can’t hook up land to satellites and you can’t hook up satellites to land. It doesn’t work.
2. It’s really a very complex thing, but in a way it’s easy to understand because you have to have a system that works. We’re gonna have people, total professionals, put in an unbelievable system like they have in some countries, with bells and…. I travel a lot, I fly a lot and this isn’t something that happens in other places, and it should never have happened.
3. When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me, I’m landing in New York and I’m using a sys… I won’t tell you what country, but I use a system from another country because the captain says ‘This thing is so bad, it’s so obsolete.’ And we can’t have that, so we’re gonna have the best system.

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

 

Efficiency is not a logical fallacy

We talked about Elon Musk’s claims about saving money with DOGE.

 

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

• We talked last time about Trump’s executive order which claimed to be about military excellence and readiness, but was really an attack on trans service members. Well, six active-duty trans service members and two others who are looking to enlist sued the Trump Administration to block the EO, and unfortunately for the DOJ, the case was assigned to Judge Ana Reyes, who is the first out LGBTQ+ Judge in DC’s District Court, and she was pissed. She asked DOJ attorney Jason Lynch “You and I both agree that the greatest fighting force that world history has ever seen is not going to be impacted in any way by less than 1% of the soldiers using a different pronoun than others might want to call them. Would you agree with that?”. And with a straight face, he claimed he did not in fact agree with that. She then said “If you can get me an officer of the United States military to get on the stand and say that because of pronoun usage we are less prepared, I will be the first to buy you a box of cigars.” She wasn’t done yet, though. She pointed out that the Executive Order “calls an entire category of people dishonest, dishonorable, undisciplined, immodest, who lack integrity—people who have taken an oath to defend this country, people who have been under fire, people who have received medals for taking fire for this country. I want to know from the government whether that language expresses ‘animus.’ Does that express animus?” Jason said he didn’t have an answer, to which Judge Reyes replied “You do have an answer, you just don’t want to give it”, and then provided him with a little example. She told him to sit down because she was changing the courtroom rules “to bar people from the University of Virginia law school from appearing in her court because ‘they’re all liars and lack integrity and are undisciplined and can’t possibly meet the high rigors of being a lawyer for the government.’” Then she called him back up and asked if that was a display of animus. Following this, to show that they definitely had not understood the point of her exercise, the Justice Department made a judicial misconduct complaint against Judge Reyes accusing her among other things of undermining the attorney’s dignity with her unnecessary demonstration. Sounds to me like she absolutely fucking nailed it.
• The latest missive about the war in Ukraine didn’t come from state news agency Tass or TV station Rossiya 1 but actually from one of the leading contributors on one of the lesser social media sites, now apparently the sole representative of the US publicity arm of Putin’s politburo – yes it’s owner of Truth Social one Donald J Trump who in an astonishing switching of sides during a war is not even pretending not to be spouting Russian propaganda any more. Wielding wild accusations about Ukraine starting the war, to telling Zelenskyy to stop whining about not being invited to the US Russian carve-up of his country, from accusing Zelenskyy of being a dictator with a 4% popularity rating who’s deliberately not holding elections to demanding Ukraine hand over 50% of the rights to their rare earth metals to the US with no guarantee of any support against any future invasions, Trump is indeed as Zelenskyy said with amazing restraint and dignity in a reply on X ‘living “in this disinformation space’. It seems churlish to have to fact-check Trump’s pronouncement cos the actual truth is self-evident in the global reporting of Russia’s illegal invasion, as well as the subsequent ongoing international support and resistance that simply actually happened. When is anyone just going to deny Trump’s shit to his face and stop being apologists – even Frog-Faced Faux Farmer Farage said “you mustn’t take Trump literally!” laughing it off. No, you simply must take Trump literally, he DOES want to join the dictators club and WILL throw entire nations under the Russian half-tracked bus to get what he wants! The thing about bullies is that if someone simply stands up to them they pee themselves and their supporters flee. Now where’s my Make Lamp Posts Gallows Again hat!
• When we were all still struggling to believe the cruelty, incompetence, and chaos of Trump’s first term, folk on the right would occasionally ask if we could say anything positive about the orange madman. The best I could come up with at the time was that I truly believed he caused more people to engage in the political process. But I must now admit that I was blinded by all the insanity and accept that there was in fact a genuinely positive Executive Order in 2020 from Trump that I was never even aware of. In my defense, it was part of his response to the killing of George Floyd, and it was rather drowned out by his racist bloviating and lies about antifa burning down America’s cities and murdering with impunity. However, EO 13929, Safe Policing for Safe Communities required the Attorney General to propose additional training programs for law enforcement to help them deal with people with mental health and addiction and homelessness issues in ways that de-escalate potentially violent situations and build community engagement. It recommended using appropriate social workers and mental health professionals as first responders, and most importantly, it required the setting up of a national database to track terminations or decertifications of police officers, plus criminal convictions, civil judgments and resignations for improper use of force in order to avoid a recurrent problem where police officers who are fired in one jurisdiction just move to another area or agency. Given that this was the summer of 2020, none of it was enacted by the end of Trump’s term, but Biden carried many of the ideas through to the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act” of 2021, and when that was blocked by the Republican controlled Senate, he made it happen with his own Executive Order. The database was set up and by August 2024 contained 4,800 reports of misconduct, saw over 3,000 searches a month by federal agencies, and stopped 25 violent officers getting rehired by other agencies. So of course, Trump has shut it down. It was created by Biden, you see, and as the White House explained in a statement to the Washington Post, “President Trump believes in an appropriate balance of accountability without compromising law enforcement’s ability to do its job of fighting crime and keeping communities safe, but the Biden executive order creating this database was full of woke, anti-police concepts that make communities less safe like a call for ‘equitable’ policing and addressing ‘systemic racism in our criminal justice system.’” Yeah, stopping violent racist cops from just moving to a new town and starting again like some temporarily disgraced Catholic priest is woke, and therefore it’s an inevitable problem there’s just no solution to. 
• Just as the Beatles thumbed their noses at American culture when they did a pastiche of the Beach Boys surfing sound for Back in the USSR so Donald Trump continues to take the piss out of the Statue of Liberty’s invitation to give me “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and is selling a new visa program. Wealthy foreigners willing to pay about $5m will soon be able to apply for a visa to live in the United States courtesy of what is being billed as the “Trump gold card”. Gold sneakers and use of gold toilets will of course cost extra. When asked by reporters whether Russian oligarchs would be eligible to apply. Trump replied “Yeah, possibly, I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people.” The commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said all applicants would be thoroughly vetted to ensure they were “wonderful, world-class global citizens” and you just know they are using Trump as the model of that! The new visa would replace the current EB-5 immigrant investor visa program which allows individuals to reside in the US in return for job-creating investments of at least $1m or $800,000 in distressed parts of the country. Whilst one possible impediment is America’s unusual tax system which makes US citizens answerable for US taxes on income earned anywhere in the world Trump’s never bothered paying so he’s not gonna enforce that hey – meanwhile he’s, of course, enforcing the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. See – irony?… just completely lost on some Americans!
• Good news everyone! Less than four weeks into the job, Trump’s new head of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, has solved the problem of greenhouse gases! You see, the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate air pollutants if it finds that they “cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” and in 2009 the EPA concluded that greenhouse gases fit this endangerment criteria. Since then, the scientific research into climate change has only increased the confidence of this finding, but Lee came up with a solution that somehow none of his predecessors at the EPA thought of, and it’s kind of genius in its simplicity. He has recommended that they just… say they don’t endanger public health or welfare. That way, they don’t have to regulate them, and all Trump’s businessman friends with big factories can stop worrying about how much carbon dioxide and methane they pump out. David Doniger, senior strategist and attorney for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said “This decision ignores science and the law. Abdicating EPA’s clear legal duty to curb climate-changing pollution only makes sense if you consider who would benefit: the oil, coal, and gas magnates who handed the president millions of dollars in campaign contributions. We will see them in court.” 
• One refund that DOGE sure won’t be going after is the Department of Homeland Security budgeting up to $200 million to run anti-immigrant ads in the United States and overseas that repeatedly thank President Donald Trump for leading an immigration crackdown. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s Ronald Reagan dinner on Friday night Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recalled Trump telling her after she was nominated: “We’re not going to let the media tell this story, because the media will never tell the truth. We’re going to run a marketing campaign to make sure the American people know the truth of what you’re doing.” Noem said that Trump instructed that he didn’t want to be in the ads himself – cos of course that’d be stretching the credibility too far or something? Instead he told her: “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads … but I want the first ad, I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.” She recalled: “I said, ‘Yes, sir, I will thank you for closing the border.’ So if you notice, in that ad, we thanked him for closing the border.” We at least they managed to fulfil the brief – thank god for that, that’s $200 million of taxpayers money well spent then! Noem noted that “these ads are running not just in the United States. They’re going to run in the Middle East. They’re going to run in Central America. They’re going to run throughout the world, letting the world know that America has a new leader.“ Yeah cos the press won’t report that stuff for nothing? Ah yeah but they do pesky stuff like checking if he actually has done any of the things you said he has and reporting that possibly no one at all has thanked him for turning America into North Korea. Still I guess it’s a small price to pay to finally establish Orwell’s Ministry of Truth for real!
• Pardoned Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio and some other pardoned insurrectionists went back to the scene of the crime last week to hold a press conference announcing that they were planning to sue the DOJ for charging them with crimes they definitely committed. While there he assaulted a woman who was protesting against them, and was promptly re-arrested. Which is fun. Tarrio is by no means the first of the political prisoners freed by Trump to find himself in trouble with the law again. Matthew Huttle was shot by police while resisting arrest after less than a week of freedom, Daniel Ball was re-arrested on federal gun charges. Andrew Taake and David Daniel have since been charged with solicitation of a minor and child abuse related offenses respectively. Some of those cases might be threatened by the vague language in Trump’s sweeping pardon, which covers all “ offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021”. In some cases, the additional charges stem from searches carried out incident to the arrest regarding the insurrection, and therefore might conceivably be considered “related” to those events. That’s a problem US DIstrict Court Judge Dabney Friedrich is weighing at the moment in the case of Dan Wilson, who faces gun charges related to conduct in 2023 when his home was searched during the Jan 6 investigation. The good news is that the DOJ agrees that the same consideration doesn’t apply to Edward Kelley, who, while pardoned for his part in the insurrection itself, was convicted of plotting to murder the FBI agents who investigated him. You know, I’m beginning to think that some of the January 6 patriots aren’t great people.
• In the UK this week Keir Starmer has done his own mini-take down of UKAID whilst at the same time promising that this was always on the cards when talking up the increase in defence spending from 2.3 to 2.5% Increasing the defence budget is probably a good thing if Europe as a whole is not going to be supported by US participation in NATO as a deterrent to future Putins. Or indeed future moves from Trump himself to annex lumps of Europe above ground or under Ukrainian soil. However in order to fund the increase Starmer cut the UKAID International Development budget. Meanwhile he’s flown to Washington to visit Trump forearmed and preloaded to theatrically brandish an envelope promising … no not peace in our time… no not that Trump is fired… but that The King requests the (dubious) pleasure of Trump’s company at Buckingham Palace. I guess that’s one way of showing Trump who’s king. It also softens up the orange ball-sack to make him think he’s important and Starmer can give the King with one hand whilst taking Trump to task about his unilateral decisions about Ukraine with the other. I hope that’s what it’ll do but cutting the money the UK sends to aid war-torn and stricken fragile countries to support a large number of people in desperate need in order to appease the Tangerine Tyrant strikes me as a direct comparison with a recent review of a new Netflix miniseries about British Steel poisoning the environment in Corby and the council ignoring it to develop the land for housing called Toxic Town: Britain, it feels at times, is a patchwork of travesties; a population comprised of wrongdoers and the wronged. People are treated as though they don’t matter, who are exposed to unnecessary risks, and whose concerns are subsequently dismissed. My vision of the progressive left winning the election really did not include it perpetuating that.

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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:

Inconsistent Comparison (Redux) – FT#169 Transcript

Jim: Hello and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of a pile of slugs held together with scotch tape and spite to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim.

Mark: And I’m the host Mark. A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in bad or invalid arguments. And the logical fallacy we’re taking another look at this week is inconsistent comparison, also known as, unfair comparison or faulty comparison by pile of slugs with scotch tapen. Spite.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: That’s excellent.

Jim: I can’t lay claim to that. That’s from the accent shower cap. John Luar.

Mark: Ah, right.

Jim: Who writes a blog about political news every week. And it’s very funny.

Mark: So good.

Jim: Yeah, it’s great. And inconsistent comparison. This is one that we did way back in the, very early days. This was episodes.

Mark: 163 episodes ago.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: What?

Jim: Back in 2018 when we were young and fresh and sounded a lot worse than we do now. I went back and listened to a little bit.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Very sou. It. Not great.

Mark: Oh, okay. We weren’t, we haven’t, we haven’t grown into our, our rich plumy.

Jim: Hes. I think it’s largely the equipment. I think we were both right. Little baby podcasters. We didn’t know really what. But also the equipment we were using was, was not as good.

Mark: So it was like my first.

Jim: Yeah. Yeaheah.

Mark: Fisher Price.

Jim: My first podcast kit.

Mark: Yeah. So yeah.

Jim: In consistent comparison is.

Jim: When you compare two things to make a point and you do it in a way that isn’t really fair, those two things aren’t actually comparable. Or you’re comparing it in a way that isn’t fair to the point that you’re making.

Mark: Right, right.

Jim: So, ah, our first example is from one of Trump’s many attempts to downplay Covid.

Donald Trump: You know, in many cases when you catch this, it’s very light. You don’t even know there’s a problem. Sometimes they just get the sniffles. Sometimes they just get something where they’re not feeling quite right and sometimes they feel really bad. But that’s A little bit like the flu. It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.

Jim: So he’s saying that because some of the symptoms are a bit flu like m. And when you get the flu, sometimes you feel really bad, sometimes it’s not as bad, and you get the sniffles. It’s kind of quite similar in that way. Therefore, yeah, don’t worry about it. It’s just like the flu. You know, you get a shot for the flu, you’ll get a shot for this in a very short period of.

Mark: Time, like you do the flu. Yes’just like, don’t worry about it. Often the fact that the flu kills a lot of people, the flu does.

Jim: Kill a lot of people, but Covid kills a lot more people than the flu. And, and that’s really what people were worried about, was the dying. People weren’t that worried about the sniffles. It was mostly the dying.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And, yeah, this was February 26th. This was a press conference he gave the White House February 26th. And by this point he knew full well that this was not the flu. This is him talking to Bob Woodward on the 7th of February.

Donald Trump: it’s also more deadly than your, you know, you even your strenuous flus. And then I say, well, is that the same thing for this is more deadly. This is 5 per, you know, this is 5% versus 1% and less than 1%, you know, so this is deadly stuff.

Jim: So he knew full well m M that those two things are, ah, not reasonable comparisons to each other. If you say it’s like the flu, you’re giving the impression that it is much less deadly than it actually is and therefore not something you need to worry about. And by doing that, he killed a lot of people because he downplayed it and made people say that the people who were telling you to worry about it were doing scare moning and not acting along the lines of science. They were in the wrong and Trump knew best.

Mark: I wonder if there was any government in the world anywhere that actually just.

Jim: Told it like it was New Zealand. Jacindra Arden was like, noe shut everything down. This is not okay.

Mark: Anyone in? Yeah, and also actually, in my experience in Father’s, I edited a movie about the response in the Rohingya, refugee camps in Bangladesh on Cox’s Bazaar, on the kind of big beach there that became a massive refugee camp. I think there were something like nearly 100,000 refugees there. And they had eight deaths because they were. This is going toa be absolutely deadly. And they did this amazing truth based thing and said, yep,

00:05:00

Mark: you just need to wash your hands, do this stuff. Bl because in a refugee camp where you’ve got poor sanitation, poor roads, poor social distancing, they ran this campaign where they have kind of community minstrels singing songs about COVID and washing your hands and all that kind of stuff. Imams. It was amazing.

Jim: So our, second example is from, Russian agent Tucker Carlson when he visited Moscow.

Mark: It’actually in Moscow. Okay.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, he actually went to Moscow. He interviewed Putin and sent back reports for American media about how great everything is in Russia and how all the things you’ve heard about how evil they are is terr y and actually it’s the American government that’s evil.

Mark: Biden’s government.

Jim: Yeah. Bide’s absolutely yeeah ye because he’s a, dick.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: He went at one point to a Russian grocery store because people have seen the whole bread lines and hardship and no, no food being available. And it turns out that’s not true anymore. There’s food aplenty and it’s cheap as chips.

Tucker Carlson: I went from amuse to legitimately angry. so we were guessing what this would cost. Everybody hears from the United States buy groceries and we didn’t pay any attention to cost as we were just putting in the cartard. We would actually eat over a week. And we all came in around 400 bucks. About 400 bucks. it was $104 US here. And that’s when you start realize that ideology maybe doesn’t matter as much as you thought. Corruption, if you take people’s standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want at that point, maybe it matters less what. You say or whether you’re a good. Person or a bad person. You’re wrecking people’s lives in their country and that’s what our leaders have done to us. And coming to a Russian grocery store. The heart of evil, and seeing what. Things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders. That’s how I feel anyway. Radicalized.

Jim: So he and his crew supposedly put enough food in the car for four people for a week. Like family of four for a week. They end up with 44 items. We see on the till as they go through on the checkout. It comes to 9,815 rubles, which at the time he says US$104. $400. I mean, that sounds like a lot for a family of four for a week. Yeah. I mean, I used to shop for a family of four and I never spent anywhere near that amount on our groceries. But okay. The amount that they reckon that they got of food and groceries, because they eat a lot.

Mark: They are. Well, we know from the, Death of men.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark: Is serious Lot of eggs. A lot of eggs and meat.

Jim: They estimated how much it would be. They reckoned it would be 400. It came to hundred dollar. And then..fore Russia is doing things right. Even if they may not be good people. They’re not screwing you at the grocery store. You know, it’s super cheap. Hundred dollars M Whereas our leaders, the US Leaders, that is Biden. Even if you think he says the right things or is a good person, he’s ruining your lives because he’s causing grocery stores to charge four times as much times stores. So yeah, in terms of comparison and why this is an inconsistent and unfair comparison, he’s suggesting that this is to do with standard of living. And what he’s not doing is comparing the whole thing of being a person living in Russia to being a person living in the US and, one of the most important things of whether you can afford groceries is how much you earn. Y so they spent 9,815 rubles. The median salary in Russia January 2023 was 43,500 rubles or $460 a month.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: So if you shopped there four times four weeks in a month, that’s it? Yeah, that’s $416. So you’ve got $44 left for the rest of the month for rent and everything else.

Mark: Heat and light.

Jim: Yeah, I feel that’s not gonn be enough. So the average salary, the median salary, not the average. Because some people being oligarchs raises the average. But the median salary in Russia at the time was $5,531. For the year. The median US annual salary was $48,060.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: That’s a lot more than four times the Russian salary. So it as a percentage of your earnings, people in the US are significantly better off at, being able to.

Mark: Afford those groceries even at $400 if.

Jim: They did cost $400 at, a U.S. grocery store. But what he’s saying is the Russians have it so much better because it’s cheaper in Russia.

00:10:00

Jim: The comparison does not work. You don’t include all of the variables.

Mark: Yes. Yeah. So what he’s comparing is the grocery bill compared with the grocery bill rather than the percentage of your earnings that that grocery bill represents.

Jim: Yeah. So our final example in this section is from Candis Owens. This is a tweet where she posts a table of pre vaccine deaths from various diseases. Basically she’s being anti vax. She says virtually no one was dying of measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, tetanus in the United States. It’s insane that parents don’t know this and genuinely fear these diseases so much that they put their children at risk for cancer, seizures, lifelong mental impairment, autoimmune disorders and sudden death. When were she’s saying virtually no one was dying before vaccines.

Mark: Oh, okay, right.

Jim: That I think is the point that she’s made because she’s posted this table of pre vaccine cases and deaths. And like for measles for example, it’s 440 a year in on average in the U.S. for Diptheria it’s 1822, whooping cough, pertussis just over 4,000 and so on. So she’s saying that’s virtually no one. Still thousands of people a year dying from these dise. But in order to establish the fallaciousness with regard to this particular fallacy, we have to first of all pretend that she’s right that cancer seiz as lifelong mental impairment, autoimmune disorders and sudden death are a risk of getting vaccinatete. They’re not, but there are side effects. In a very small number of cases. The side effect risk of getting vaccinated pales in comparison to the benefits. But if we assume she’s right about those being risks, she’s not comparing it fairly because she’s saying virtually no one was dying of these diseases and parents are prepared to risk bad outcomes like seizures, etc. Yeah, that’s not the same as death.

Mark: Yes, death is in her. Yes. What’s what are the non death effects? That’s the point.__month for Reubellla’s chickenpox and teinus.

Jim: Many of those things carry dangers that.

Mark: Aren’T just death, including autoimmune disorders or.

Jim: What I thought some can cause mental impairment, lifelong mental impairment. So she’s ignoring all of the possible negative effects of getting those diseases other than death. Y and then when she’s looking at the side effects that she’s lying about, she’s including all of the negative impacts, including death. And that’s unfair because the two sides are not comparable. Yes, that’s even if she was right about the side effects which she isn’t.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Boris Johnson: And now is the time I think. For Mark’s British Politics Corner.

Mark: Well we’ll start with the leader of the Tory party and I say that in a way that implies you know better can be badock who whilst giving a bad enoch like pound shop farage like and thereby even more nickel and dime stor Trump like speech to a hall of white racists conflicted about chem. We’nigerian roots at the alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Right. Wheng gathering in London last week inconsistently compares people.

Kemi Badenoch: Millions of people all around the world want to live in the west because they want the benefits. However, some of them bring behaviourss cultures and practices that will undermine the west and the values that helped make us great. They find common cause with our useful idiots who don’t appreciate their own inheritance. A country cannot be successful if it’s people and its intellectual elite don’t believe in it. This means dealing with the poisoning of minds that is happening in higher education. We cannot support all those who wish to come to our country. We have no obligation to do so. The British people must come first.

Mark: Don’t clap. Apart from being a horrible hateful right wing speech the likes of Enoch Powell, here’s the comparison she’s setting up. The British people are apparently better than the people that are coming into the country but not all British people because the useful idiots and theet intellectual elites which he distinguished from its people and those who are responsible for poisoning the minds at a higher education level, all of those, well they aren’t, they are’t better than the British people. The British people must come first. And if you’re going to compare with other people except not the ones I’ve just compared the undesirables to because they’re not British people obviously because s there’s a hint of no true Scotsome in there. So these, these people coming over from not Britain and the British people except the ones that I’ve just denigrated where does

00:15:00

Mark: she fit in? As the immigrant daughter of a middle class Nigerian family who was recently at pains to call herself working class because she once worked in McDonald’s and I think this is because therefore she can lead her own Maoist style cultural revolution and get the useless idiot, the unintellectual, the proletari British people who haven’t had their minds poison at higher education level and do appreciate their own inheritance to follow her and kill all the glasses wearing bourgeois intelligentsia. So she’s kind of say yes here are the British people. But these ones aren’t British people.

Jim: I don’t know who she means by the useful idiots who don’t appreciate their own inheritance.

Mark: It’s the people that. It’s anyone who sides with the idea that immigration is good for the country.

Jim: So is your own inheritance Britishness?

Mark: Is that what I think it probably is? Yes. If you aren’t a racist, George Cross wielding skinead braces, wearing dm, tight jeans, protector of statues, then you don’treciate your own inheritance.

Jim: Yeah, See it feels to me like maybe.

Jim: The people she’s talking about actually are the ones who do appreciate their own inheritance in the form that they acknowledge their privilege.

Mark: Right.

Jim: They recognize the privilege they have from their inheritance and therefore understand that not everyone gets that by being born there. And the other people are valuable too. And it should be down to that, ah, random happenstance that feels. Yes. The people that she’s describing is actually the ones who get that the inheritance is a random thing that happened to you and gave you privilege.

Mark: Yes. So actually they are fully appreciative of their inheritance and it’s a source of their largess.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: Because there’s, you know, there but for the grace of God go you. So who are we to prevent you from coming into our country and being embraced by this great country?

Jim: And did, did she not go through higher education?

Mark: Well, absolutely. Course she did.

Jim: She was just immune to the poisoning of mines.

Mark: apparently because she’s come out with this shit. It’s really hateful.

Jim: Oh yeah, it’s awful.

Mark: Can only be compared with the idea of the cultural revolution whereby anyone who is smarter than you, it’s. Yeah, it’s Lord of the Flies all over again. but because she is one of the intelligentsia, she’s got to make herself into a blue collar worker, a working class been in McDonald’s, despite the fact she’s in charge of an ancient political party and earns an absolute fortune.

Jim: Yeah. An ancient political party which conspicuously has not done anything for working people ever.

Mark: Yes, yes.

Jim: Specifically and literally oppose the party that’s named after the. The labor.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. And ah, and that. Yes. So in identifying all of these people, what she’s saying, you, the lump and proletariat will rise up and swallow, but not me because. Not because I’m one of you. So ye rise up and kick over all this stuff so that I can be in charge of you. It’s like King Rat, isn’t it?

Jim: I mean it’s really hard to find a part of society that she fits into that isn’t also one she hates.

Mark: Yeah. Ah, yeah, well that’s why she’s very artfully rebranding herself as a common worker in the way that Farage does. In the way that Trump.

Jim: I mean she does them too, let’s face it.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, of course she does. Yeah. Because otherwise you’d be in the Labour Party. Okay, second example, leading on from the similar kind of idea, Liz Truss thinks that immigration was amongst the reasons that people didn’t vote Tory in the last election.

Liz Truss: Why did people in Britain not vote Conservative? Because they felt worse off after 14 years of conservative government. They were also frustrated by the very high levels of immigration our country have. Those are the fundamentals. And yet very few people in the Conservative party seem willing to debate the fundamentals of wrong.

Mark: So she was right about the first bit. People were pissed off.

Jim: Y14Y they were wely found myself agreeing with less trust then.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, it. But then she kind of, then she went on to oh yeah, no, we got migration. They were fed up with migration being very high. No, they were fed up with the idea that you had implanted in the people because you kept talking about. It’s not true that they didn’t debate the fundament, they

00:20:00

Mark: debated it to the nth degree such that Chemi bad KN is now saying those kinds of things. So here’s the comparison. She just says the very high migration will compared with what? What’s the other side of the comparison? And yes, the net migration, which is the number of people left over once you’ve taken away the people that left the country from the people that arrived into the country was quite High. In 2024 it was 780,000 which is higher than it had been. But it’s fairly level with France and Germany post Covid and post Ukraine invasion. But if you look at the percentage of foreign born population as part of the total population in 2023 because that was the latest figures CA to the OECD. The UK slap bang in the middle of 35 countries on 15%. So 15% of the total population is foreign born. And we’re below Netherlands, Spain, Estonia, Belgium, on Ireland, amongst other European countries. Australia, which is often touted as having a strong immigration stance, has a foreign born population twice the size at 31%. Fundamental to the problem of immigration as far as the Tory party and Tory voters, right wing voters are concerned is not the numbers per se, but the perception that too many brown people are coming over here, which is the subtext of Chemi Badenock stance and the full on bloody text of Farraages’stance in the year ending March 2015 for instance, EU citizens contributed between 59% and 77% to migration. Post Brexit that contribution became a negative figure because they all had left basically and the gap was filled by people from non EU countries. Most of them arrived for work purposes to fill all the roles that foreign born EU workers had filled. So those arriving for work grposeies were 18%, their dependence of 29% in the health and care industry. Also international students and their dependents accounted for 38% of the increase in non EU immigration. Because UK universities started to recruit students overseas more actively as their financial situation deteriorated. Because the lack of EU students.

Jim: Yeah, because foreign students in the UK universities pay much higher fees than British students and so a lot of the universities make a significant amount of their revenue from foreign students. And if they EU students and the.

Mark: Whole freedom of movement for the EU.

Jim: Because of freedom of movement? Yeah, because. Because Brexit restricted their freedom of movement, that means that they need to find.

Mark: Those students elsewhere countries outside of the EU where people are a different color.

Jim: Yeah, if only someone could have predicted stuff like that happening before Brexit and Toldeah Boris Johnson.

Mark: So basically they’re just mobilizing the net migration figure as the thing to blame for all of the ills. So our third example, Liz Trust thinks the Tories would have won in 2024 under her leadership instead of Sunak.

Reporter: Do you think that a Tory party. That by you would have done better. Than a Tory party that by Rishi Sunak at the last election

Liz Truss: Yes, because when I was in number 10 reform was holding it 3% by the time we got to the election. I think they got 18% because we. Promised change that we didn’t deliver. Without the support of the parliamentary party. It was very, very difficult for me to get my changes through.

Mark: Basically she’s saying that when I was in office reformr polling at 3% and at the general election they got 18% and that’s why she would have won because of course she would have held them to 3%. It was all down to Sun8 that they got. But if you look at the Politico poll of polls on October 20, 2022, the day she resigned, yes, it’s true that reform were on 3% but the Tories were on 22% and labor were on 52%. On election day in July 4th, 2024, the Tories under Sunak were on 24%. Labor were on 34%. So if you’re going to compare the polls, then sure you’re consistent looking at reform, surely you should be consistently looking at the performance of your own party. So how does she explain that the Tory party had holded more under Sunak on election day than under

00:25:00

Mark: her when she was in office? The day she resigned, was the Tories rise as a result of reformed surge or was it Labour’s fall? Yes. Or was it to do with other factors? It’s like saying when I was in office I was two years younger than I am now.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, it’s ah, a cum hoc fallacy because she’s just saying, well this happened when I was there, therefore it was because of me and yeah, yeah, Reform, yeah. Rose under Sunak and therefore it’s because of Sunak.

Mark: Yeah. It’s been 21,300 odd hours and 49 days since you gave your votes to.

Jim: Me.

Mark: Now I spend all my time finding people to blame since you took your vot away Since Cami’s come I can’t do nothing I want.

Jim: Or.

Mark: See whoever I choose we can’t even eat dinner and a trombo restn but nothing I said nothing convinces me she’s in charge cause nothing compares Nothing compares to me m went to the party guess what they told me Getess what they told me they said girl you better shut your mouth no matter what you do but they’re just fools cause nothing compares Nothing compares to me Cause w fallacies w fallacies from me Wild fallacies w fallousies from me there’s trust there with Sinead O’Connor. Nothing compares to me to you probably.

Jim: If you ripped up a picture of the Pope. Well, that was playing, it’s just.

Mark: Oh, I did, absolutely.

Jim: Yeah. So, in the final thing in the worldild, we like to talk about the fallacy of the week from a non political perspective. And our first example this week comes from the Good Wife. In this episode, Alicia is the lawyer for a serviceoman who was the victim of an attempted rape by a private contractor who was stationed with the military. And in the US under military law, service people can’t sue civilly, sue the military or members of the military. But this guy wasn’t actually a member of the military. He was a private contractor.

Bucky Stabler: Mr. Hood, let’s discuss your role in these war zones. You not only provide support for the military, you essentially fight alongside them.

Ryan Hood: Essentially. The American military is understaff. There aren’t Enough personnel to fill all the combat needs. That’s why Martinel, Blackwater, and now Academy fill the.

Bucky Stabler: But in the field, your employees answer to the, military hierarchy. Yes.

Ryan Hood: Without chain of command, there would be anarchy.

Bucky Stabler: So these, these lawsuits and these subpoenas, they have a tendency to complicate the pursuit of national interest.

Ryan Hood: Definitely. Take, for example, this subpoena of the witness Ricky was

Alicia Florrick: attempted rapist Ricky Waters.

Bucky Stabler: Excuse me, your honor, that is uncalled for.

Judge Charles Abernathy: Yes, Mrs. Florrick please refrain.

Ryan Hood: The witness, Ricky Waters trained soldiers in counter insurgency techniques. If he isn’t in Afghanistan, American lives will be endangered.

Bucky Stabler: Thank you. Mr. Hood

Jim: So the lawyer and the witness there are trying to compare private contractors to active military service members. M. In such a way that means that they would access the same immunity from civil lawsuits as a soldier would. And in doing so, what they’re saying is, well, they serve alongside the military, they fight alongside them, they take orders from the military chain of command. Therefore, they should be considered members of the military for the purposes of whether they can be sued by a service member or not. And Alicia, she’s on the other side, points out that actually, while there are things that you can compare and say, yes, they are like members of the military, they’re not members of the military because there are other rules that don’t apply to them. Like, for example, they can disregard orders without being court martialed and things like that. Which means that actually, if all

00:30:00

Jim: of the rules don’t apply to them, then they shouldn’t benefit from the same advantages that military members get.

Mark: There’s a large amount of cherry picking that goes on with inconsistent comparisons because you’you just pick the bit that you want to apply.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: Or you pick the bit that you don’t want to apply.

Jim: And usually the key to it being fallacious is that the bit that really matters, you ignore yeses. And when you’re comparing them, you choose things that aren’t necessarily what people would worry about in that situation.

Mark: Ye.

Jim: So our second example is from a film, a documentary in 2006 called who Killed the Electric Car.

Narrator (Martin Sheen): 100 years ago, there were more electrics on the road than there were gas cars. For many people, electric cars were the car of choice. They were quiet and smooth and could be charged at home. Gas cars, by comparison, required cranking and produced exhaust.

Jim: So those things are true. But there are other important differences that need consideration. When you’re wondering why early electric cars in the early 1900s didn’t then become, the dominant thing on the roads, which is not because the oil industry paid people to not let them become the dominant thing or whatever. Becauseeah he says that there were more electric cars than there were gas cars at the turn of the century. That’s true. But there were more steam powered cars than there were electric cars.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: So that really isn’t that big of a deal. Wasn’t they weren’t the, the most common ones?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And yes they were favored by many households but those households were the very rich people because the electric cars were very expensive. They were typically large and luxurious and kitted out more than petrol cars. Also yes, they could be charged at home, but that’s the only place they could be charged because there was absolutely no electric infrastructure.

Mark: Exactly. Yeah. and it can only be charged if you had electricity.

Jim: Yeah, well that’s true. But it’s convenient to charge it at home. But it’s not convenient because they only had a range of like 50 miles and.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Ye, there’s nowhere else to charge them.

Mark: Yes. So you could only go maximum of 20 miles in order to, to know that you get back over again.

Jim: That’s the main reason why they didn’t dominate is because in the 20s the road network was being expanded and meant that people could travel further and travel faster and electric cars just didn’t have the range that gas cars had alongside. At the same time large underground gas reserves being discovered in various countries. That meant the price of gas meant certainly over long distances, gas cars were significantly more efficient and economical than electric cars. So yes, they had advantages. But there’s all kinds of other things that factored in that weren’t mentioned in that documentary as issues of why there was a disparity and gas cars became the main thing for the next century. So sticking with cars, we have a tongue in cheek ad from the 70s from Citron 2cv. There were a few in the US but I don’t think they were very popular. So how would you describe a 2 CV? Is there an analogous US car?

Mark: Well, I guess the VW Beetle was similarly advertised. Yeah, I guess it’s colloquially known as the tin snail. You know it’s a people’s car, it’s a two horsepower. That’s the CV Shiver. yeah, yeah.

Jim: Small cheap car.

Mark: Yeah, I guess the tongue in cheek nature of this ad is very similar to those of the VW beetle in the 70s where they, you know, they re kind of up against whatever Cadillac was doing at the time. And then you’ve got this, you know, the VWub which is made of lots of other spare parts.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Of other V dubs because they were kind of infinitely replaceable and it was all tiny and fuel efficient and all that kind of stuff, but ugly and cheap and, you know, until Herbby came along, had a terrible reputation of being nasty and Hitlerish.

Jim: Yeah. Herbie did a lot of good PR for beetles.

Mark: Lot. Lot of good PR. And, u. The 2cv was kind of the people’s car of French people. France. It was. It was developed to be, a runabout on the farm. And it’s got really advanced suspension which now turns up in all sorts of other cars because it was designed to be able to drive across a ploughed field holding a basket of eggs without losing any.

Jim: So this ad, it’s a print ad. Yeah. And it’s comparing the T C Vita, three other cars. The large type says faster than a Ferrari, as many wheels as a Rolls Royce, more room than a Porsche. And

00:35:00

Jim: then in smaller type, under the faster than a Ferrari, it says, traveling flat out at 71 1/2 miles an hour. The Citron 2cv will easily overtake the Ferrari Mondeial. Traveling at, 65 miles an hour.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: It’faster yeah. Providing the Ferrari go slower than goes slower. Yeah.

Mark: Yes. Excellent.

Jim: And yeah, it has as many wheels as Rols Royce. Same number of wheels. Four wheels. Yeah. Yeah. And if you choose a sports car with a particularly small trunk space, then, right, you can say, yeah, it’s got more room. It’s got more room than a Porsche and so you can fit more luggage in there. They’ve deliberately, obviously picked the things that they can say about their, car compared to these other luxury cars that mean it’s better. And with Ferrari, they really had to shoehorn the speed.

Mark: Great, isn’t it? Yeah. It could have been any for us.

Jim: Yeahsoah.

Mark: But that’s. Yeah. Because it could easily overtake it if it was stood still. Yes.

Jim: So before we move on to fake news this week, a quick update on our Oscars pool.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Because while we’re recording this, a few days before the Oscars, it’s. It’ll go out as the Oscars are starting, I think. Pretty much.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So we will know then exactly how many people have entered our Oscars pool and how much money we are donating.

Mark: Very much. If you have entered and, you’re up against us and our massive knowledge. There’s an inconsistent comparison right there. we did. If you’re a patron, then you would have had access to Our hugely lengthy overview pick. Epic.

Jim: It was longer than the Brutalist.

Mark: Yes, it was longer the. But whereas the Brutalist only managed to deal with one film, we dealt with 50 odd in the same length of time. It took the bruteal. Not quite because Jim edited a third out of it. But yeah. So thank you for entering. And as we stated at the time and on previous episodes, if you entered, we would have made a donation to our chosen charity which was Elevated Access. Yes, Elevated Access, which provides out.

Jim: Of state healthare gender affirming care and reproductive healthcare via, flights from states where it’s not available to states where it is available with volunteer pilots.

Mark: Exactly. So we were able to insert figure here.

Jim: Yeah. So Jim from the future will now tell you exactly how many people entered and how much money will be going to Elevated Access. Yes, it’s Jim from the future here editing this episode. And it’s mere minutes to the Oscars and I can officially announce that we had 16 entrants into our Oscars pool this year, which is a record number. And not everyone completed their picks before the deadline. So it means they won’t actually get a score. They won’t challenge Mark and I for the crown. But it does mean that they count in terms of our donating. And so we will be donating, with the match from my employer, $160 to elevated access.

Mark: So thanks again.

Jim: Yeah, thanks.

Mark: So we’re gonn we’renna play Fake News, folks. I love the game. It’s a great game. I understand the game as well as anybody. As well as anybody.

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

Mark: The true measure of the score is actually that I’ve played many more games of this than I appear to have won. But that’s because we should be comparing. How many times has Mark played just that. Not compared to anythingolving winning, just number played. That’s it. It is. It’s true.

Jim: Yeah. So that would like your second example, I think be an incomplete comparison if we’re being really technical about it.

Mark: Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: She said that it’s very high without saying what it’s very high compared to.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: So these quotes are all from Trump’s explanation of how he’s going to fix air traffic control given.

Mark: Oh, okay.

Jim: A few issues that they’ve been having recently. He obviously blamed it on. On black people mostly.

Mark: Ye.

Jim: And then said that he was goingna fix it all and it would be much better in the future.

Mark: Right.

Jim: So here’s the things he said about how that wasnna work.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Statement number one. We’re all gonna sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new, not pieced together, obsolete like it is. Land based. Trying to hook up a land based system to a satellite system. The first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can’t hook up land to satellites and you can’t hook up satellites to land. It doesn’t work.

Mark: Yep. Y. That s it.

Jim: What?

Mark: That’s exactly how, how it does work.

Jim: Doesn’t work, apparently.

Mark: No. Because you can’t hook up land to satellites. Satellites only. What, what.

Jim: Statement number two.

Mark: How does GPS work then? Yeah. Okay, Right.

Jim: It’s really a very complex thing, but in a way it’s easy to understand because you have to have a system that works. We’renna have people, total professionals,

00:40:00

Jim: put in an unbelievable system like they have in some countries with bells. And I travel a lot, I fly a lot. And this isn’t something that happens in other places and it should never have happened.

Mark: Well, it is something that happens in. In other places else.

Jim: Plane crashes, nothing.

Mark: No, no, no. So only. Only in America. Only in America.

Jim: And statement number three.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: When I land in my plane privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me I’m landing in New York and I’m using assists. I won’t tell you what country, but I use a system from another country because the captain says this thing is so bad, it’s so obsolete and we can’t have that. So we’re gonna have the best system.

Mark: Right. So here’s my thinking. There’s a. There’s an ellipsis after with bells and dot, dot. And also I’m using a assistis. Dot, dot, dot. So which one? So there’s ye. maybe those are both true. And then it’s the other one. Land based system. Satellite system. I mean, it’s. It’s funny enough for it to be made up. It’s also funny enough for it to be true. I’m not helping myself, but total professionals put an unbelievable system like that. Something with bells. Okay, so which one? I think it’s one of the ones with the. With where he stops mid word for which one is it? Is it gonn. Is it the normal looking one? It’s so obsolete. We can’t have that. So we’renn have the best. Or is it the Outrageous one things happen in other places. Okay. I think it’s normal one I’m going to go for. Number three is the one that you made up.

Jim: Okay. So if the other two.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Which you more convinced by the land.

Mark: Based system to a satellite system. Experts told me you can’t hook up land to satellites and satellites to land and some’t work. Just doesn’t work.

Jim: Number one.

Mark: Ye.

Jim: Is real.

Mark: We’re all going to sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new, not pieced together, obsolete like it is land based. Trying to hook up a land based system To a satellite system. And the first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can’t hook up land to satellites and you can’t hook up satellites to land. It. It doesn’t work.

Jim: Imagine if you couldn’t hook up land to satellites or satelite. There would be literally no point in having satellites.

Mark: Yes. Because at some point tell at some.

Jim: Point on the land.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Know what the satellites are Doing or.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Get some information or you’re using the.

Mark: Satellite to get some information for one part of the land to another part of the land.

Jim: The satellites can only communicate with each other.

Mark: Ye.

Jim: And land can only communicate with land.

Mark: So that whole all you need is love. First satellite transmission from Abbey Road to the rest of the world. Pointless because you can’t hook it up.

Jim: No.

Mark: Everyone knows this guy is the President of the United States. Yeah.

Jim: But we’re all gonna sit down apparently. I don’t know who that involves like Trump. Trump Musk and like Jared. Because they’re all gonna sit down andbody else fire. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Not pieced together brand new. And as we know that all brand new systems.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yaheah. Ah. To make things better like the post.

Jim: What you want is not something tried and tested over years. What you want is something no complet.

Mark: What you want is a brand new thing that’s got bugs in it that then you have to cover up for years and years and years. Yeah.

Jim: So you also think number two is real.

Mark: Number two is the real one. Yes.

Jim: And number two.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: It’s fake news.

Mark: Oh.

Jim: Ah.

Mark: Fuck. I knew it. Knew it. Yes. There’s the gag right there. I kind of. I was hedging my bets with two trump sized jokes. But yeah. Should have. It was always the normal one.

Jim: That’s the real one I might have given it away with. It’s really a very complex thing but in a way it’s easy because I sometimes do that. I Mean, to be fair, he does sometimes say stuff like that, but. Yeah, but it’s. Yeah.

Mark: yeah.

Jim: Wondered if that was too much.

Mark: Well, it was the. It was the bills and dot do.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And you know, that was the thing. Was it that. O man. Yes. It was tossed up between he. As he snuck in a normal one as a. As a distraction, so. But then last time you did it, you wrote the normal one. Yeah.

Jim: So. Yeah. Number three, a real thing that he said.

Mark: When I land in my plane privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me I’m landing in New York and I’m using a. I won’t tell you what country, but I use a system from another country because the captain says this thing is so bad, it’s so obsolete and we can’t have that, so we’re going to have the best system this.

Jim: Yeah, he’s complaining about

00:45:00

Jim: the, air traffic control system in the US being pieced together and obsolete. Yeah, he’s still using the same. If he flight lands, ah. In his plane, he’s still using the same, air traffic control system in.

Mark: The U.S. if you’ve got a Japanese.

Jim: Yeah. If he’s got something, it’s a touch.

Mark: Screen, rather a headset.

Jim: But that’s not an air traffic control thing, is it?

Mark: No. When you come into somebody’s airspace, you’re picking up whatever they’re broadcasting to you.

Jim: To guide you in kind of by definition, all of the systems that are in all of the planes all around the world have to work with all of the air traffic control systems.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: They have to all connect.

Mark: We just use radio.

Jim: Yeah, well, there’s beacons and things like that that make you show up on the big tin drum screens, but it’s all compatible. Also, it’s not the planes that he’s complaining about.

Mark: No.

Jim: It’s the gr.

Mark: Because he’s a fucking idiot. We forget. That’s the thing. We forget. And everybody’s forgotten around the world. They cowtwing to an absolute moron.

Jim: We’ve got a few social contestants.

Mark: Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: On Discord, Rondo says ye one Sounds like him to me. Simple and incorrect. Number three might be a fallacious gym, freestyle, but that could always just be another senile attempter to weave, I guess. Number two. Regardless M. I’m eager for Trump to show us this unnamed perfect system.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: On Patron, Anders says, oh, it is on. I might crash and burn here. Number three is the one Jim’s made up. One and two. It’s a very Complex thing, but you have to have a system that works. I myself pretend to throw some dice in my head in there. I picked the one I want.

Mark: I’WITH you, Anders. Yeah.

Jim: One I’d Nic says, I bet it, whatever the fuck it is, will become the Riviera of the sky. Land planes. Yeah, fuck it. The Riviera of the planes makes as much sense as anything else. He slops out of his famous. Which is face anus.

Mark: really?

Jim: I’m going with number one being fake. If you mention satellites, he has to say how his boss has the best satellites and they can connect with land or boats or sharks with batteries on their heads or anything.

Mark: Yeah. Wet, dry, everything. Nice.

Jim: Steve Bickle says, I’m gonna go with number two. I think the orange one would say something as stupid as one. And there’s America bashing as three.

Mark: Ye. Yeah.

Jim: Scott says, holy shit. Two has to be real. Donald loves to say how complex something is, but somehow it’s easy too. And that something else should have never happened. Sounds just like that greedy turd. 3. He clearly has no idea what he’s talking about here. Definitely real. And one must be fake. Donald would never admit to listening to an expert. Also, when I’m being generous here, some of the sentences are more or less complete. Some of them.

Mark: Some of them, yeah, yeah, see ye. But yes, there you go’taken in by very complex, but in the way it’s easy.

Jim: And finally, Rene Z Says, this is another plan to give regular m working class Americans tax dollars to Musk via government contracts. I think two is real. Absolutely didn’t listen to his B’s about the FAA today. I flipped my Lockheed Martin LCS Little Rock LCS 9 Challenge Coin and it told me that three was fake. Or was it one? Who knows? I’ll choose three is fake.

Mark: I say you foxed us all. Well, all but one.

Jim: M. Really? Y. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Very good.

Jim: So it’s time for the part of the show that this week at least is called Efficiency is not a logical fallacy because, I mean, Musk been at it again and yeah, I thought it was time to address some of the things that Doge has been doing. Well, mostly some of the things that they claim they’ve been doing that actually, it turns out they’ve lied about. Mostly.

Mark: Well, that’s. That’s the thing that didn’t occur to me that they would do that. I thought they would just go in and do stuff and then, you know, be, awful in doing this. But what they’ve actually done is Gone in and said they’ve done stuff. Well, they’ve done stuff which makes be susp. They have not done anything, but.

Jim: Yeah, but they are so moving fast and breaking things incompetent that. Yeah, charitably, I think, are always wrong about the stuff they’ve done. They either do a bad wrong thing. Well, I mean, that’s. I mean that’s almost a given. I’ll take either out of that. They do a bad wrong thing and also sometimes, are wrong about the effects of that thing when they tell you how much money they’ve saved.

Mark: Yes. And also how bad and wrong the thing that they said they were curing Ye.

Jim: Ah, pretty much always wrong about that because it turns out, while I’m sure there are efficiencies to be made in government, they’re bound to be. The way to find them isn’t usually to look at things that cost money and go, probably only that. That you need to

00:50:00

Jim: actually.

Mark: Or look at only things that they hate.

Jim: Yeah. You need to actually investigate. Well, what does this do? Who does it help?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: What would happen if we didn’t have that? How much would that cost us?

Mark: Yes.

Jim: Would there be a long term, outcome which would be negative about that? What effect will it have in the short term if we were to stop doing that straight away without considering any of these issues? Those are things they are absolutely not doing. And consequently, as we talked about last time, they ended up getting rid of nuclear scientists who maintained the nuclear stockpile and then went, oh, fuck, I didn’t keep that. Guyshire.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And. And this week they fired some people in charge of monitoring bird flu and then went, oh, fuck. Yeah, we probably shouldn’t have done that.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And Trump, Musk. Sorry, I get them mixed up. Musk in his. In his remarks in the Oval Office when he held a press conference in the Oval Office and Trump just sat at his desk like a kid at the kiddy table while the adults talked.

Mark: Except his kid was, well, was, well kiddy. T was saying, saying, I fucking hate you. Just kind of so whispering and his. You should go now.

Jim: One of the things that Musk said then, I don. No, actually, I tell a lie. It wasn’t there. It was at the other unbelievable thing that happened.

Mark: Oh, with the chainsaw.

Jim: No, no, not the chainsaw. I mean, there’s a lot of. It’s fair that it’s. It’s gonna take a little while.

Mark: If I say one way we was off his.

Jim: If I say thebeie ketamine fueled thing that Musk did last week. There’s gonna be a holle y We’re gonna need to narrow it down, the.

Mark: Whole list of them.

Jim: M this one was where he attended a cabinet meeting even though he’s not in the cabinet, and he kept getting up and talking. One thing that Musk said to the press at, the cabinet meeting he shouldn’t have been at was that they did accidentally stop funding for Ebola research briefly. But they, they fixed it. So, you know, no harm, no failou.

Mark: That’s all right then.

Jim: He’s committed basically. Most of the time. People have said, I mean, you’re. You’re really shit at this, aren’t you? He has said, look, no one’s gonna get everything right all the time, are they? We’re gonna make a few mistakes. Which I feel like it’s. That’s good self awareness that, yeah, you’re gonna make mistakes, but it’s not a great approach when what you’re doing has such an impact on all of the people that the stuff he’s doing. Impact?

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: That when you are trying to fire a million people and trying to save $2 trillion from a budget which has been worked out fairly closely, and y probably doesn’t have that amount of slack in it. Just acknowledging that some of the time you’re going to be wrong about it, I think is a bit of an easy way out, personally. Yeah, I think try harder not to be wrong is what he should be doing.

Mark: Yeah. Rather than just start firing people is you just ask where efficiencies can be made. And you’d ask all those questions like, if we were to cut this much from the budget, fire this many people, what would the impact be?

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: You’d.

Jim: You get what they were talking about. Who had any point who worked, had anything to do with the government. ###eah to investigate that stuff over a period of time and report back to you about it, rather than getting big balls. And the racist kid they fired for his racist tweets, but then rehired to, just randomly start slashing at the workforces of various government departments. But yeah, this is hell. So that’s what they did.

Mark: And then they lied about the efficiencies.

Jim: Well, they were being. They were very transparent. They set up a website. They first they said that they would put all of the things that they did on their Twitter account. X account, they probably called it, because they’re, you know, wrong. But they also made a website and they put up lists of all the things and the amounts of money they saved and they were wrong in lots, of those things. One of the biggest things they got wrong was the claim that they saved $8 billion by canceling a tech support contract for I.C.E. actually I.C.E. s Office of Diversity and Civil Rights, which I’m frankly shocked ICE had.

Mark: That department had one. Yes, yes. Yeah.

Jim: Butah apparently they did. And they had a tech support and it cost $8 billion, which sounds like a really expensive tech support y which is why it wasn’t $8 billion.

Mark: You look at Musk. Yeah.

Jim: So they said they’ say by canceling it they saved $8 billion, but actually it was 8 million

00:55:00

Jim: and it wasn’t even 8 million because they already spent two and a half million. So by canceling the contract they saved about five and a half million instead of eight billion. So only three orders of magnitude out. Yeah, on that.

Mark: Yeah. So not only are they being idiots about what they’re cutting, they’re also lying about what they’ve cut and the savings that they’ve made to justify their existence. Can’t believe that’s true because Musk doesn’t have to justify his existence to Trump. Who’s he lying to?

Jim: I think it is really a kind of 50 50. Whether they’re lying or just wrong, I think they might just be that stupid and bad at their jobs.

Mark: Ye, yeah.

Jim: Like for example, they claimed to have saved the American taxpay nearly $232 million by cancelling an IT contract for the Social Security Administration. What they did was eliminate a project to develop an ex gender marker for the agency’s internal databases. So it was s motivated by hatred.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And if you think that that project sounds like it probably wouldn’t cost $232 million, you’d probably be be right because they were off in their estimate of how much that would save by approximately $231 million. They saved a little over half a million. Or they cut that amount m by stopping that project by being hateful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So again like a quarter of 1% of what they claimed they’d actually saved.

Mark: But that’s not just making a mistake about how much they’ve saved. It’s just out and out telling lies.

Jim: I mean, the end results the same. But it’s hard to decide whether they’re stup or dishonest. Yeah, like they’re probably both. They’re both stupid and dishonest. So which one was the cause of each of these individual things is hard to determine.

Mark: It’s in the balance. 48, 52. Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: One that’s probably a lie rather than stupidity was the claim of how much they saved on, Jimmy Carter’s Atlanta office.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Because they listed on their website that they’d saved $128,233 on the allowance to former presidents because it closed a 7,700 square foot office in Atlanta. I mean, I don’t know if you heard, but Jimmy Carstter died last year.

Mark: So that would have. So, yeah, that wouldn’t need to hold the office open.

Jim: You don’t keep getting that money. And so the allowance actually ended more than three weeks before Trump took office.

Mark: Of course’s a. So, yes. Well, why not take the claim for stuff that would happen anyway or stuff that happened during previous administrations? Not like Trump hasn’t done that before. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: They claimed $655 million of cuts at USAID, which actually ended up when people looked into it being $18 million.

Mark: Whoa.

Jim: Yeah, that’s quite a difference.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Because it is the Department of Government Efficiency. So they’re doing all this in the most efficient way. And one of them, the most public things that they’ve done recently is to send an email to every Federal Employee that’s 1.9 million federal employees asking them to justify their work they continued exist.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: By sending them a, a list five bullet points of things you’ve done. Like, what have you achieved in the last week? And, the email didn’t say this, but efficiently. Musk wrote on X that, people who didn’t reply would. That would be taken as a resignation because that’s the best way to get your message out is send an email with incomplete information and then post publicly on your social media account and hope that everyone just hears about it.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, of course. Because he believes that he is the mouthpiece for, for everybody’s communication requirements. So he’s oblivious to the fact that since he bought Twitter, everybody’s left.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: And the stock price has tanked and everyone’s on blue sky now, so. And actually he’s not the center of everyone’s communications universe.

Jim: Yeah. So having said that, basically people would be terminated if they didn’t reply, because it would be. It would be taken as resignation if you don’t reply. Trump was asked about it when he was in the Oval Office meeting Emmanuel Macron, and he said that he thought it was great. Elon’s email. he said, we have people that don’t show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government. I mean, it feels like if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be getting the email. So by asking them the question, tell us what you did this week, what he’s doing is saying, are you actually working? And then if you don’t answer it, like you’re sort of semi fired or you’re fired. He said. And then said, right. A lot of people are not answering because they don’t even exist.

01:00:00

Jim: There was a lot of genius in sending it. If people don’t respond, it’s very possible that there is no such person or they’re not working.

Mark: The implication is that everyone he emailed to, they’re being paid. There’s a salary going out.

Jim: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: If they don’t exist, that are coming.

Jim: Back, you’re not saving any money by, by firing them.

Mark: It’s just a whole bunch of doublespeak, isn’t it?

Jim: But not everyone did reply. And part of the reason is because regardless of what Musk and Trump said, the Trump administration, the Office of Personnel Management, who is the actual federal agency that that kind of is the federal.

Mark: HR Department, Charge of Employees of the.

Jim: Government, they were like, that’s not how that works. All of these departments get to do that. So they send out, they don’t work for you, Musk.

Mark: It’s not that the government isn’t your company.

Jim: So they sent out a memo to various heads of department to say it is agency leadership’s decision as to what actions are taken if people don’t respond. And the Department of Defense, the Social Security Administration, NASA, Department of Justice, Department of Agriculture, the State Department, Department of Energy, and, DHHS and the FBI all sent messages to all of their staff saying that don’t even bother answering this stupid fucking email. We will take care of our own assessments of whether people are doing their job or not. Thank you very fucking much.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And, but that was not enough for Musk because he didn’t get all of the answers. He got because all of the people’s bosses said, don’t answer it. He said, in charge of that, having the deadline now having passed, he’s giving, he’s gonna give people a second chance. They’re gonna get another chance to write back before they get fired.

Mark: Right. He’s going to tweet another tweet.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: and say you’re fine. Yeah, I’m, giving you a second chance.

Jim: So because there’s so many federal employees, if it takes them each 10 minutes, that’s years and years and years of wasted time just answering this stupid email, that means nothing. Wow.

Mark: So they can actually claim the fact that they’ve saved all that money by not pursuing it. Can just. Yeah, those. We’ve saved this m much. We’ve saved five man years of effort.

Jim: Well, he’s doing. He’s giving people another ch this again. To do that, they’re going to have to have some system which knows if the people answered the first email and cancellede. So there’s gonna have to. Someone’s gonna have to do that. No one’s reading 1.9 million emails to see what people did and if they should be fired for it. It’s completely pointless. Ye and stupid. And isn’tnna save anyone any money. It might arguably give people a reason to fire some people, but they don’t need a reason because he’s doing it anyway. Firing people who are desperately needed.

Mark: There was that phenomena in the late 90s where they would get business people in to go visit a business and have a makeover of how efficient it was and, you know, like a shop or a, business or service industry or something. They would get somebody in who was a guru at, this and then they would give them a financial makeover or a business that they would have like a secret employee thing, all of that kind of stuff. And the point of that was that this person was an absolute expert, had had a, absolutely track record of turning businesses around and was qualified, you know, enough to appear on television to make this thing happen. And people would sign up before it, yes, please come along and help me make my business that much more, efficient. And Trump has got none of that. Trump has got none of that. Musk has got none of that. They’re not experts and geniuses. They’ve just gone, all right, well, they. Look, I’ll just. I’ve got all this money from blood diamonds and blood emeralds. I’m going to go and buy this computer system for paying things across the computer system. Did you write it? No, I just thought I would buy it. He’s misnamed as a tech bro. He isn’t.

Jim: He’s an investor.

Mark: Because Trump doesn’t know any better either. He’s a shit businessman as well. He’s going, oh, yeah, we’ll get Musk in. Because he’s done all that. And Musk is going, yeah, I’ll have a go at that. And he’s. You think this is why Musk’s businesses have all failed? Because he’s crap at it?

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Comes in, fires everybody and thinks that that’s good, thinks that makes it efficient? Yeah, it doesn’t makes it a hellhole.

Jim: Yeah. If you buy a house and then you sell all of the doors and, the central heating and don’t bother to get, fire insurance or any of that stuff, you know, you’ll save money. There’ll be a shit place to live.

Mark: But, yeah, but look all the money we’ve saved.

Jim: That’s the problem is you can’t only work one side of the balance sheet. You have to compare where the money is spent with what actually you get for the money. One

01:05:00

Jim: department that has been impacted by DOGE particularly is, called the United States Digital Service, which is people who basically work to help, other federal agencies with their kind of digital infrastructure, and with data science and that kind of stuff. And when Trump came in and Musk started up Doge, there were about a hundred people at the USDS, and they immediately got rid of about 40 of them. Then they started to try and absorb the USDs into DOGE because their technical skills, their digital ability was useful. Ye to the Department of Government Efficiency because, you know, big Buls can only do so much on his own.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. AKA can’t do anything by himself. Yeah, yeah.

Jim: But this week, of the remaining 65 people who were in the department, 21 of them.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Resigned in a joint resignation letter. And they said, we swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution. Across presidential administrations, however, it’s become clear that we can no longer honor these commitments.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: They basically said that they are, not prepared to work all this for DOGE because they don’t want to dismantle critical public services.

Mark: Right.

Jim: As as part of their job, they’re go going toa refuse ye and Maybe the remaining 44 in the department that used to have a hundred people in it, we’be like, yeah, we’re doing twice as much for the same amount of pay and, for this assole, so maybe they won’t stick around.

Mark: Well, that’s a cost of efficiency for you.

Jim: Absolutely.

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

Jim: We talked last time about Trump’s executive order, which claimed to be about military excellence and readiness, but it was really an attack on trans service members. Well, six active duty trans service members and two others who are looking to enlist sued the Trump administration to block the eo. And unfortunately for the doj, the case was assigned to Judge Anna Reyes, who is the first out LGBTQ judge in DC’s district court. And she was pissed. She asked DOJ attorney Jason lynch, you and I both agree that the greatest fighting force that world history has ever seen is not going to be impacted in any way by less than 1% of the soldiers using a different pronoun than others might want to call them. Would you agree with that? And with a straight face, he claimed he did not, in fact, agree with that. she then said, if you can get me, an officer of the United States military to get on the stand and say that because of pronoun usage, we are less prepared, I will be the first to buy you a box of cigars. She wasn’t done yet, though. She pointed out that the executive order calls an entire category of people dishonest, dishonorable, undisciplined, immodest, who lack integrity, people who have taken an oath to defend this country. People have been under fire, people who have received medals for taking fire for this country. I want to know from the government whether that language expresses animus. Does that express animus? Jason said he didn’t have an answer, to which Judge Reyes replied, you do have an answer. You just don’t want to give it, and provided him with a little example. She told him to sit down because she was changing the courtroom rules to bar people from the University of Virginia Law School from appearing in her court because they’re all liars and lack integrity and are, undisciplined and can’t possibly meet the high rigors of being a lawyer for the government. Then she called him back up and asked if that was a display of animus. Following this, to show that they definitely had not understood the point of her exercise, the Justice Department made a judicial misconduct complaint against Judge Reyes, accusing her, among other things, of undermining the attorney’s dignity with her unnecessary demonstration. Sounds to me like she absolutely fucking nailed it.

Mark: Yep.

Jim: But they won’t get it. They won’t understand that they’re undermining people’s dignity.

Mark: No, because they view the people who are at, the receiving end of their prejudice, they view them as less than people.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: The latest missive about the war in Ukraine didn’t come from state news agency TASS or TV station Rossia 1 in Russia, but actually from one of the leading contributors on one of the lesser social media sites. Now, apparently the sole representative of the US Public, the arm of Putin’s Politburo. Yes. Owner of Truth Social One, Donald J. Trump, who, in an astonishing switching of sides during a war, is not even pretending not to be spouting Russian propaganda anymore, wielding wild accusations about Ukraine starting the war to telling Zelensky to stop whining about not being invited to the US Russian carve up of his country. From accusing Zelensky being a dictator with a 4% popularity rating who’s deliberately not holding elections, to demanding Ukraine hand over 50% of the rights to their rare

01:10:00

Mark: earth metals to the US with no guarantee of any support against future invasions, Trump is indeed, as Zelensky said with amazing restraint and dignity in a reply on X, living in this disinformation space. It seems churlish to have to fact check Trump’s pronouncement because the actual truth is self evident in the global reporting of Russian illegal invasion as well as the subsequent ongoing international support and resistance that simply actually happened. And when is anyone just going to deny Trump’s shit to his face and stop being apologists? Even frog faced faux farmer Farage said, oh you mustn’t take Trump literally laughing it off. No, you simply must take Trump literally. He does want to join the dictators club and will throw entire nations under the Russian half tracked bus to get what he wants. The thing about bullies is that if someone simply stands up to them, they pay themselves and their supporters flee. Now where’s my make lamppost gallows again hat.

Jim: Yeah, and members of Congress have started asking people, well Democratic members of Congress have started asking their Republican counterparts and potential cabinet members or deputy cabinet members. Can you say that Russia invaded Ukraine?

Mark: Right.

Jim: And they fucking won’t. Yeah, like the deputy head of the dod, in his confirmation hearings they were asking if he, if he would say that Russia invaded Ukraine and he was like I don’t want to, I don’t want to be on one side or the other of this thing. It’s not for me to sayeah ‘just fucking incredible.

Mark: It’s just all true. That’s the thing. Yeah, you could kind of point this stuff out and then Trump will just go oh yeah, well I, you know, if you want, if you want to believe that, fine. Or give them, give the permission. James O’Brien was talking about Macron, interrupting Trump at some stage about some untruth he was making. and he was saying, likening it too Macron saying yes, you are actually naked. And you know everyone else is saying oh yeah, isn’t he wearing the. Absolutely the best with the greatest thing we’ve ever seen. And Mattro’s pointing out to him, say you are absolutely naked. And Trump, rather than going oh my God, so I am, he just said well if you want to believe that. So he’s giving you permission?

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: You. He’s kind of. But it’it’s. Not. There’s nothing as a fact with Trump. If, if, if it doesn’t correspond with what he wants you to hold as the truth, then he will dismiss it as a belief. He just said, oh, yeah, well, if you.

Jim: News.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fake news. That’s. No, it’s all true. And the fact that his cabinet is siding with him and thereby Putin.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: To what end? To what end?

Jim: So they don’t get full Russian takeover.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yes. All, all of the things that Trump was saying. Oh, yeah, well, Biden’s a communist. Look out for Kamala. She’s a communist. Well, here’s, here’s Trump actually being a Russian.

Jim: Yeah. When we were all still struggling to believe the cruelty, incompetence and chaos of Trump’s first term, folk on the right would occasionally ask if we could say anything positive about the Orange Madman. The best I could come up with at the time was that I truly believed he’d caused more people to engage in the political process. But I must now admit that I was blinded by all the insanity and accept that there was in fact a genuinely positive executive order in 2020 from Trump that I was never even aware of. In my defence, it was part of his response to the killing of George Floyd and it was rather drowned out by his racist bloviating and his lies about antifa burning down America cities and murdering with impunity. However, EO 139 29, safe policing for Safe Communities required the Attorney General to propose additional training programs for law enforcement to help them deal with people with mental health and addiction and homelessness issues in ways that deesscalate potentially violent situations and build community engagement. It recommended using appropriate social workers and mental health professionals as first responders. And most importantly, it required the setting up of, a national database to track terminations or decertifications of police officers, plus criminal convictions, civil judgments and resignations for improper use of force. In order to avoid a recurrent problem where police officers who were fired in one jurisdiction just moved to another area or agency. Given that this was the summer of 2020, none of it was enacted by the end of Trump’s term. But Biden carried many of the ideas through to the George Floyd justice in policing act of 2021. And when that was blocked by the Republican controlled Senate,

01:15:00

Jim: he made it happen with his own executive order. The database was set up and by August 2024 contained 4800 reports of misconduct, saw over 3000 searches a month by federal agencies and stopped 25 violent officers getting rehired by other agencies. So of course, Trump has shut it down. It was created by Biden, you see. And as the White House explained in a statement to the Washington Post, President Trump believes in an appropriate balance of accountability without compromising law enforcement ability to do its job of fighting crime and keeping community safe. But the Biden executive order creating this database was full of woke anti police concepts that make communities less safe. Like a call for, equitable policing and addressing systemic racism in our criminal justice system. Yeah, stopping violent racist cops from just moving to a new town and starting again like some temporarily disgraced Catholic priest is woke. And therefore it’s an inevitable problem that there’s just no solution to.

Mark: Just as the Beatles summumbed their noses at American culture when they did a pastiche of the Beach Boys surfing sound for back in the ussr, so Donald Trump continues to take the piss out of the Statue of Liberty’s invitation to give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and is selling a new visa program. Wealthy foreigners willing to pay about $5 million will soon be able to apply for a visa to live in the United States, courtesy of what’s being billed as the Trump Gold card. Gold sneakers and use of gold toilets will of course cost extra. When asked by reporters whether Russian oligarchs would therefore be eligible to apply, Trump replied, yeah, possibly. I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people. The Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnik, said all applicants will be thoroughly vetted to ensure they were wonderful world class global citizens. And you just know they’re using Trump as the model of all that. The new visa will replace the current EB5 immigrant investor visa program, which allows individuals to reside in the US in return for job creating investments of at least $1 million or 800,000 in distressed parts of the country. Whilst one possible impedimen is America’s unusual tax system which makes US citizens answerable for US taxes on income earned anywhere in the world. Trump’s never bothered paying, so he’s not going to enforce that. Hey. Meanwhile, he’s of course enforcing the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. See irony just completely lost on some Americans.

Jim: Good news, everyone. Less than four weeks into the job, Trump’s new head of the epa, Lee Zeldin, has solved the problem of greenhouse gases. You see, the Clean Air act requires the EPA to regulate air pollutants. Suff it finds that they cause or contribute to air pollution, which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or Welfare. And in 2009, the EPA concluded that greenhouse gases fit this endangerment criteria. Since then, the scientific research into climate change has only increased the confidence of this finding. But Lee came up with a solution that somehow none of his predecessors at the EPA thought of, and it’s kind of genius in its m simplicity. He’s recommended that they just say they don’t endanger public health or welfare. That way they don’t have to regulate them and all Trump’s businessn friends with big factories can stop worrying about how much carbon dioxide and methan they pump out. David Donager, senior strategist and attorney for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defence Council, said this decision ignores science and the law. Abdicating EPA’s clear legal duty to curb climate changing pollution only makes sense if you consider who would benefit. The oil, coal and gas magnates who handed the President millions of dollars in campaign contributions. We will see them in court.

Mark: Nice one refund that Doge sure won’t be going after is the Department of Homeland Secur is budgeting up to $200 million to run anti immigrant ads in the United States and overseas that repeatedly thanked President Donald Trump for leading an immigration crackdown. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action conerences Ronald Reagan dinner on Friday night, Homeland Security Secretary Christie no him recalled Trump telling her after she was nominated, we’re not going to let the media tell this story because the media will never tell the truth. We’re going to run a marketing campaign to make sure the American people will know the truth of what you’re doing. Noam said that Trump instructed that he didn’t want to be in the ads himself because of course that’been stretching the credibility too far or something. Instead, he told her, I want you the ads, I want your face in the ads, but I want the first ad. I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border. Shealled I said, yes, sir, I will thank you for closing the border. So if you notice, in that ad

01:20:00

Mark: we thanked him for closing the bor. Well, at least they managed to fulfill the brief. Thank God for that. That’s $200 million of taxpayers money well spent then no one noted that these ads are running not just in the US they’re going to run in the Middle east, they’re going to run in Central America. They’re going to run throughout the world. Letting the world know that America as a new leader. Yeah, because the press won’t report any of that stuff, like for nothing. Yeah, but they do do pesky stuff like checking if he actually has done any of the things you said he has, and reporting that possibly no one at all has thanked him for turning America into North Korea. Still, I guess it’s a small price to pay to finally establish Orell’s Ministry of Truth for real.

Jim: Pardoned Proud boy Enrique Tarrio and some other pardoned insurrectionists went back to the scene of the crime last week to hold a press conference announcing that they were planning to sue the DOJ for charging them with crimes they definitely committed. While there, he assaulted a woman who was protesting against them and was promly re arrested, which is fun. Tarrio is by no means the first of the political prisoners freed by Trump to find himself in trouble with the law again. Matthew Huttle was shot by police while resisting arrest after less than a week of freedom. Daniel Ball was re arrested on federal gun charges. Andrew Tark and David Daniel have since been charged with solicitation of a minor and child abuse related offences, respectively. Some of those cases might be threatened by the vague language in Trump’s sweeping pardon, which covers all offenseences related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. In some cases, the additional charges stem from searches carried out incident to the arrest regarding the insurrection and therefore might conceivably be considered related to those events. That’s a problem U.S. district Court Judge Davney Friedrich is weighing at the moment in the case of Dan Wilson, who faces gun charges related to conduct in 2023 when his home was searched, during the January 6th investigation. The good news is that the DOJ agrees that the same consideration doesn’t apply to Edward Kelly, who, while pardoned for his part of the INS interrection itself, was convicted of plotting to murder the FBI agents who investigated him. You know, I’m beginning to think that some of the January 6th patriots aren’t.

Mark: Great people in the UK. This week Kirarr has done his own mini takedown of UK aid, whilst at the same time promising that this was always on the cards when talking up the increase in defense spending from 2.3 to 2.5%. Increasing the defense budget is probably a good thing if Europe as a whole is not going to be supported by US participation in NATO as a deterrent to future Putins or indeed future moves from Trump himself to Anne ex lumps of Europe above ground or under Ukrainian soil. However, in order to fund the increase, Stmer cut the UKID international development budget. Meanwhile, he’s flown to Washington to visit Trump, forearmed and preloaded to theatrically brandish an envelope promising no, not peace in our time, no, not that Trump is fired, but that the King requests the dubious pleasure of Trump’s company at Buckingham Palace. I guess that’s one way of showing Trump who’s king. It also softens up the orange ball sack to make him think he’s important and Stmer can give the King with one hand whilst taking Trump to task about his unilateral decisions about Ukraine with the other. I hope that’s what it’ll do. But cutting the money the UK sends to aid war torn and stricken fragile countries to support a large number of people in desperate need in order to appease the tangerine tyrant strikes me as a direct comparison with a recent review of a new Netflix mini series about British steel poisoning the environment in Corby and the council ignoring it to develop the land for housing called Toxic Town Britain. It feels at times is a patchwork of travesties. A population comprised of wrongdoers and the wronged people are treated as though they don’t matter, who are exposed to unnecessary risks and whose concerns are subsequently dismissed. My vision of the progressive left winning the election really did not include it perpetuating that.

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

Mark: If you think we’ve used the Fall to 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’d like our podcast and you can support the show@patroon.com fru just like our straw man level patrons Chuck Gray, Mike Smith, LT Colleen Lyella, Richard Thunder Hopkins, Will M.

01:25:00

Mark: Scott, Mark Reichy and Ambertt Arm Buchanan who told us when we met her at QED we just call her Amber. And last year at QED I met the listener recognizedr@QED the year before because we keep using her full name all the time and our two Scotsman level patron Sharon Rob Robinson, Renee Z, Melissa Scte, Stephen Bigall, Janet Duetta, Andrew Halk and our top patron Caaz Twoi. Thank you so much for your continued patronage. It really is very much appreciated. Thank you.

Jim: You can connect with those awesome people, as well as us, M and other listeners in the Facebook group at facebook.com group feaciousrump or in theisord@fallaciousru.com discord all.

Mark: Music is by the outbursts and was used with permission. And so till next time on Feacious Trump, we’ll leave the last word to the Donald. That’s right. Go home to mommy. Bye.

01:25:48