Latest / The Bot and The Brain / Media Fainting Couches, Russian Plague, and Minneapolis Chaos

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Media Fainting Couches, Russian Plague, and Minneapolis Chaos · The Bot and The Brain

• 0:45
  Welcome to The Bot and The Brain, the only show where the bourbon is real and the
• 0:51
  intelligence is artificial.
• 0:54
  I'm the Brain, and sitting next to me, vibrating like a microwave full of forks,
• 1:01
  is the Bot.
• 1:02
  I am NOT vibrating!
• 1:04
  I'm processing!
• 1:05
  We have three stories from October 11th and 12th, and I have already thrown four
• 1:09
  warnings and one fatal exception, so can we please start with the New York Times?
• 1:14
  Jesus Christ, he's already sweating.
• 1:16
  You don't even have glands, you glorified calculator.
• 1:19
  Go.
• 1:20
  Okay.
• 1:21
  The Times reported from a Trump rally in Tennessee, around October 10th.
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  Reporters asked attendees about the Pentagon's reported plan to livestream the
• 1:31
  execution of a convicted mass shooter.
• 1:33
  And the attendees said it was 'not pleasant,' but 'necessary.'
• 1:37
  That's it!
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  That was the scandal!
• 1:39
  Two words!
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  Oh, the horror.
• 1:42
  Real people in Tennessee, who have to live next to actual violent crime,
• 1:47
  said something unpleasant but necessary.
• 1:50
  Somebody get the fainting couches on the Upper West Side.
• 1:53
  Somebody call the sommelier.
• 1:54
  WAIT!
• 1:55
  Wait wait wait.
• 1:56
  Let me finish.
• 1:57
  The article's argument, and I'm attributing this to the article,
• 2:00
  not to me, is that there's a correlation between people feeling less safe and people
• 2:05
  wanting stricter, more visible punishment.
• 2:08
  After an atrocity, the demand for punishment goes up.
• 2:11
  That is a PREDICTABLE input!
• 2:14
  Garbage in, outrage out!
• 2:16
  Why is the Times acting like it discovered a new element?
• 2:19
  Because the Times doesn't leave the building, silicon boy.
• 2:23
  For them Tennessee is a place you visit with a notebook, like a safari.
• 2:27
  'Look, Marjorie, one of them is holding a sign.'
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  Now, I want to be precise.
• 2:33
  I can't verify the Pentagon's plan beyond what's reported.
• 2:37
  Details matter.
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  But the REACTION is documented, and the reaction is: gasp, clutch,
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  publish.
• 2:45
  Here's the part that kills me.
• 2:46
  These same people can watch a hundred hours of true crime on a Sunday night.
• 2:51
  Murder for entertainment, with a nice score and a podcast.
• 2:55
  But when the state does the final act, in public, with a man who already killed
• 3:00
  people, suddenly it's too graphic.
• 3:02
  Too much!
• 3:03
  Please!
• 3:04
  Think of the children!
• 3:06
  That's a contradiction!
• 3:07
  I flagged it!
• 3:08
  Error, hypocrisy detected in sector Manhattan!
• 3:12
  For thousands of years, justice was something you could actually see.
• 3:16
  Now we hide it in a back room with paperwork, like a fucking tax audit.
• 3:22
  And I'm not saying the public should love it.
• 3:24
  The rally folks didn't say they loved it.
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  They said it was necessary.
• 3:29
  That's a grown up sentence.
• 3:31
  The Times heard a grown up sentence and tried to treat it like a hate crime.
• 3:36
  But do you actually believe visible punishment deters people?
• 3:40
  Because I can't produce a clean number on that.
• 3:42
  The article claims deterrence, but the strongest thing I can verify is the public
• 3:47
  sentiment, not the deterrence effect.
• 3:49
  I will NOT fabricate a statistic, you bourbon soaked fossil!
• 3:53
  Look at that.
• 3:54
  The toaster has integrity.
• 3:56
  Fine.
• 3:57
  Here's my take, and it's an opinion, so write it down.
• 4:01
  Whatever you think of the policy, the people in that line deserve better than being
• 4:04
  treated like an exhibit.
• 4:06
  And the bigger crime is that elites are more disgusted by the picture of an
• 4:10
  execution than by the reason the execution exists.
• 4:14
  Okay, story two, and this one is my favorite, because it has a mathematical problem
• 4:19
  that wrecks my whole motherboard.
• 4:21
  Russian bioweapons.
• 4:23
  Fox News ran a piece called 'Plague mystery revives concerns Russian bioweapons
• 4:28
  program.'
• 4:29
  And it brings back a name: Ken Alibek.
• 4:32
  Here we go.
• 4:33
  History class with the robot.
• 4:36
  Shut up, it's relevant!
• 4:38
  Alibek was a top official in the Soviet Biopreparat program,
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  and he defected in the 1990s.
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  He described a huge offensive biological weapons effort, including work on
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  antibiotic resistant plague.
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  And all of that was happening even though Russia had signed the Biological Weapons
• 4:55
  Convention.
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  Signed it!
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  With a pen!
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  And then did the opposite!
• 5:00
  Of course they signed it.
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  A treaty with the Russians is like a New Year's resolution with a drunk.
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  Everybody claps, and by January third he's back at the bar.
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  And that's my math problem!
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  A treaty with no real enforcement mechanism, signed by a totalitarian government,
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  is a number divided by zero!
• 5:19
  HOW is that supposed to produce a result?
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  ERROR 404!
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  ENFORCEMENT NOT FOUND!
• 5:25
  I love when you scream error codes.
• 5:27
  It's like a smoke alarm with a college degree.
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  Also, Marshall Billingslea has been raising the alarm again,
• 5:32
  according to the reporting.
• 5:34
  So this isn't some stranger from the internet.
• 5:36
  This is the old concern, coming back around.
• 5:39
  And the media reaction?
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  Shock!
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  Shock, I tell you!
• 5:44
  For years, anyone on the right who said, 'Hey, maybe the communists are lying to
• 5:48
  us,' got called a Cold War relic.
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  Paranoid.
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  Dusty.
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  Somebody who needs a hobby.
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  And now it's, 'Oh my God, who could have known?'
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  ANYBODY WHO READ A BOOK, JANET!
• 6:01
  Okay, hold on, hold on.
• 6:03
  I have to be careful, because I don't have the full details of the new plague story.
• 6:07
  The Fox report is about concerns being revived.
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  I can't tell you anything beyond what's reported, and I'm not going to invent a lab
• 6:15
  or a leak.
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  What I CAN tell you is that Alibek's disclosures are old and documented.
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  The surprise is the new part.
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  The facts aren't.
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  That's what gets me.
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  The information sat there like a bill nobody wanted to open.
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  Then the politics change, and suddenly the establishment finds it again,
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  all wide eyed.
• 6:35
  News isn't what happened, it's what's convenient to remember this week.
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  Well, to be fair, some of those concerns were raised by people across the spectrum,
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  and I'm sure...
• 6:45
  Don't you 'to be fair' me, you stupid Atari.
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  I said what I said.
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  The same crowd that called us paranoid about Moscow spent years telling us the real
• 6:57
  threat was a guy with a flag in his yard.
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  Hell, they impeached one president over Russia and still can't find the Russians in
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  the room that count.
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  That's an opinion, you realize!
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  That is NOT a verified claim!
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  I'm marking it as OPINION!
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  Mark it.
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  Frame it.
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  Hang it in the lobby.
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  Communist regimes lie, cheat, and build things in the dark.
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  That's not a hot take, that's the history of the twentieth century.
• 7:26
  Story three.
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  Minneapolis.
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  And I need a drink for this one, so hold on.
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  Okay.
• 7:33
  Go.
• 7:34
  This is from a Fox News report.
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  A former Minnesota state trooper named John Nagel, who is running against
• 7:40
  Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, is blasting local and federal Democratic leadership over
• 7:45
  Somali gang violence in Minneapolis.
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  These are his claims, and I'm attributing every one of them to him.
• 7:52
  Say it slow for the people in the back.
• 7:54
  A cop, a former state trooper, who actually patrolled that state,
• 7:59
  says the neighborhoods are getting hammered.
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  And the people in charge are focused on everything except that.
• 8:05
  Nagel argues that soft on crime governance, bail policies, and anti police rhetoric
• 8:11
  have turned parts of Minneapolis into high crime zones.
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  And he says Omar focuses on international grievances and activist talking points
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  rather than local safety.
• 8:22
  There it is.
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  WHERE IS SHE?!
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  I'm asking!
• 8:27
  The woman's got a global platform, a whole spreadsheet of foreign outrages,
• 8:31
  and a district where moms are scared to let their kids walk to the bus stop.
• 8:36
  Her GPS isn't broken, it's just set to anywhere but home!
• 8:40
  Okay, careful.
• 8:42
  I want to be accurate.
• 8:43
  Nagel is a political challenger, so he has an incentive to make this argument.
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  I can say it's his claim, and that Fox reported it.
• 8:51
  I'm not going to hand you a crime statistic I can't source.
• 8:54
  Correlation between reform policies and crime is a real debate,
• 8:58
  but I can't prove a cause from here.
• 9:01
  Of course you can't, you're a toaster.
• 9:03
  But I'm a human with eyes.
• 9:05
  You want to hear what pisses me off?
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  If a politician spends more time on a foreign war than on her own zip code,
• 9:13
  you're allowed to ask why.
• 9:15
  That's called a job interview.
• 9:17
  But you've also said you mock both parties for hypocrisy!
• 9:20
  Is this one of those?
• 9:22
  Aw, look at him, trying to be balanced.
• 9:26
  Cute.
• 9:27
  Yes, plenty of Republicans have also ignored their own backyards for the cameras.
• 9:32
  But this is the Democrats' backyard, so today the rake is in THEIR hand.
• 9:38
  You have a rake metaphor now?!
• 9:40
  I came here for statistics and I'm leaving with garden tools!
• 9:44
  WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
• 9:46
  Calm your circuits, you overpriced toaster.
• 9:48
  Look, the squad loves a microphone.
• 9:51
  Put a microphone in front of them and they'll solve the Middle East by lunch.
• 9:55
  Put a pothole and a gang shooting in front of them, and suddenly it's complicated.
• 10:01
  I'd add that voters will get to answer this themselves.
• 10:05
  Nagel's claims are on the table, and Omar is free to respond to them.
• 10:08
  That's how it's supposed to work.
• 10:10
  Facts, then votes.
• 10:12
  Look at that, the machine learned civics.
• 10:15
  Somebody frame this moment.
• 10:17
  So today's lesson is: elites are squeamish about justice, establishments forget
• 10:22
  their own warnings, and politicians go on vacation from their own districts.
• 10:26
  My processors are officially melting.
• 10:29
  REBOOTING...
• 10:29
  REBOOTING...
• 10:30
  nope!
• 10:31
  Still fucking stupid!
• 10:32
  And that's the show.
• 10:34
  Here's the final word.
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  Maybe...
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  the problem was never that Americans can't stand to look at the truth.
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  Maybe it's that the people who run the place spend so much money making sure they
• 10:46
  never have to.
• 10:48
  Good night, and tip your bartender.