Mark dives into the folly of listening to "experts" and why they seem to always get the big stuff wrong. The Somali/Minnesota scandal follow-up: one take on why mass immigration of Muslims keeps failing. And, what's the deal on all of these weirdos who become police impersonators?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (00:29):
Today we have a Quote of the Day. We don't
have a quote of the day every day. Some days
we put the quote of the day at the end
of the program. Other days there's no quote of the
day at all. Today's Quote of the Day starts the show.
It's really good and it helps explain at least two
(00:50):
or three of the topics that we have on the show,
including the very first one. The quote is from Thomas Sowell,
the brilliant conservative economist. He's been around forever. He's in
his nineties now, I believe, long time at the Hoover Institute,
which is attached to Stamford, one of the most prominent,
(01:10):
maybe the most prominent and influential African American conservative ever.
Here's his quote. It's very old quote anyway. It is
hard to imagine a more stupid or dangerous way of
making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands
of people who pay no price for being wrong. Never recall,
(01:35):
I did a podcast I think last week dealing with
this whole concept of no skin in the game, it
means the same thing. I mean, kind of the point
that SOOL makes is don't let decisions be made by
people who don't suffer at all if they're wrong with
(01:56):
that decision. It doesn't mean that if you do have
a big stake in things, you might not make a
bad decision, but you have a lot more incentive to
make the decision correctly if you suffer terribly if you're wrong. Now,
I'm going to give you a brief example, which this
(02:18):
is not the first topic, but a very brief example
of this. The CDC is now, I don't know if
acknowledging is the right word, but is reporting data that
it's had for some time. They believe that the number
is They're saying at least ten ten children who have
died because of or in relationship to receiving the COVID
(02:46):
nineteen vaccine. Ten. No people will point out that ten
is a tiny fraction of the number of children or
all sorts of people who got the COVID vaccine, and
that's correct, none the less, the number is ten. Yet
the official recommendation of many experts was for children to
(03:12):
be vaccinated against COVID nineteen. This proved so Well's point.
All of the people who recommended the children get the
COVID nineteen vaccine, what's happened to them? Nothing? For that matter,
all the people who got everything wrong on COVID, all
of the lockdown people, all of these dumbasses that serve
(03:33):
as public health directors, and all the counties in Wisconsin.
Did a single one of these morons ever get fired.
Did Tony Evers clear out his idiots who were pushing
all of these lockdowns and closing churches, all of which
turned out to be a disaster, completely unnecessary, and none
of which did anything to slow the spread of COVID,
(03:53):
something that I think damn near everybody in America eventually got,
which is why it's still around. But we have some
immunity to it, because all of us now have immunity,
and I runs nonetheless, of all the groups that were vaccinated,
the group that simply did not need it were children.
Because children not only when they got exposed to COVID,
(04:15):
did not get very sick at all, if at all.
Childhood deaths of COVID are virtually non existent. There's this
few scattered, but in every one of those cases, those
children had numerous other health problems that contributed or may
have been the primary cause. Yet you had parents, and
I talked about this time. I just could not fathom
(04:36):
a parent being so stupid as to vaccinate their child
against a disease that can't hurt the child. And I'm
not an anti vaxer, and I wasn't even an anti
COVID vaxer. I'm an old fart. I got the COVID vaccine.
I sized it up that, okay, fine, if I got COVID,
it might not be a good thing for me, given
that people in my age group are the ones that
(04:57):
are likely or to die of COVID. I'm not against
all the childhood vaccines, although I have a more open
mind on it than I did fifteen or twenty years ago.
But the things that I see children being vaccinated for
are things the children can get real sick from, or
some can even die well. Measles, but I remember having
(05:17):
I remember having the both of them. Do you remember
having the both of them? You do remember it? It was,
and I remember it was first. It was I had
measles before I had chicken pox. They were similar because
they both itched and they both had a rash. But
I really say, I mean I get Without regard to
your thoughts on vaccines, why people would say, because kids
get it and it is painful and it can occasionally
(05:38):
cause severe complications. All the other things rebella, whooping cough, polio,
et cetera. But this, it would like be like me
getting vaccinated against pregnancy. I can't get pregnant yet experts
push this. Experts, experts, experts and the parents who followed
(05:59):
their guy for the people who actually believe these experts.
Now we're going to dive into this tendency for so
called experts to always be wrong in just a moment here,
and I've got a couple of theories one and a
very interesting essay as to why that is. First, when
it comes to shipping packaging, industrial supplies, and equipment, many
(06:23):
suppliers offer endlessiles of product. You line knows what you
can't do with endlessiles of product. Test the quality of
each product and sure everything is in stock and ready
to ship the same day, and have a team available
twenty four to seven to answer your product questions. You
line only carries supplies, it equipment they've tested, tried, and
often use in their own business experience. The you line
(06:46):
difference today visit you line dot com. The listener sent
me this. There's a website called Real Clear Politics. They've
now taken that brand and they have Real Clear this
and Real Clear That. It's a website that leans conservative
and they now cover a number of issues beyond politics.
(07:07):
And this one is Real Clear Science. But the Real
Clear is their brand. And so it's a brief essay
from a guy ex a woman named Mitzi Perdue, and
she offers a theory as to why experts in almost
any field have a tendency to get not the little things,
but the big things wrong, the real big things. Before
(07:32):
I even get into her piece, I'll just mentioned another word.
For instance, you can have an expert in, for example,
the weather. And you know we make fun of the
weather people, but often the storm that we had this
past weekend, they said the winter storm morning would end
at six o'clock Sunday morning, and I was up at
five thirty. I'm telling you, it stops snowing at six.
(07:52):
By six thirty, the skies were clear. I got up
at five thirty. At all I saw was that cloudy, misty,
snow was all gray and all all of that. I mean,
they're usually in the short term, but in the long haul,
almost every single thing they said twenty five years ago
about what would happened with climate change has turned out
to be wrong. Yet we continue to be able well
(08:16):
act their experts. They're experts, they're experts, they're experts. The piece,
This is a quote from Paul Krugman. Paul Krugman is
he's one of the most fun liberals to make fun
of because he's a big, pompous ass. He I don't
(08:38):
know if he still writes it, because I don't read
it as much. The New York Times is where he was.
He was there. He's a big economist who had a
column with the New York Times, and he's a big
time lefty and I'm big no it all and wrong always.
You could just have a cottage if you could write
a book and all of the things that Krugman has
written over the years and how none of them happened.
(08:58):
In fact, the exact opposite. This is what he wrote. Obviously,
if you did this to me and you went back
on all the things that I said over thirty six years,
I'm sure you'd be able to pull out a bunch
of idiotic things as well. I think on the overall, however,
I've spotted zillions of transit have been way ahead of
the curve, and the number of times I've been able
(09:19):
to say I told you so. Things that I thought
were fairly obvious, like nobody's gonna ride the stupid trolley
clearly turned out to be right of me. The ex
nod no, no, no, no. If he was, how would
you know? You're just a big mouth that's got a
microphone him. Yeah, you're right, That's all I am. Who
was right and who is wrong? Anyway, here's the quote
(09:40):
from Krugman again. He said so many stupid things over
the years, So she's gonna go out and cherry pick
the most, probably the dumbest thing he ever said. The
internet will have no more economic impact than the fax machine. Ha,
that's he wrote. That's okay, Krugman call on that than others.
(10:06):
US intelligence insisted the Afghan government would hold for months
after the American withdrawal. It fell in eleven days. Military
analysts around the world predicted Kaiev would fall within seventy
two hours. In February of twenty twenty two. Of course
Kaiev Ukraine. It never did. The media lined up to
(10:26):
predict that Harry Potter would flop because kids no longer
read Harry Potter sold half a billion copies. Those were
not fringe voices. These were the crowned heads of their domains, credentialed, lauded,
confident experts. Their expertise was real, but their predictions were wrong.
(10:52):
Why are experts so often and so publicly wrong? The
answer comes from the ancient Greek poet arche Lochus, whose
wisdom still matters today. Quote. The fox knows many things,
but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Hedgehogs are deep specialists.
(11:17):
They master one domain, seeing the world through a narrow lens.
Their training encourages a single track that says, double down,
go deep, defend your turf. Foxes are integrators, generalists who
(11:37):
pull ideas some different fields and adapt as reality demands.
Foxes do not just tolerate ambiguity, they thrive at it. Now,
the point that's being made here is that the hedgehog
knows one thing and knows it really really no. But
the fox, the wisely fox, I don't know a lot
(11:58):
about any particular thing. But he knows a lot about
everything and is filled with constant doubt and is open minded. Now,
the point that's being drawn here is that the hedgehog,
the one who knows the one thing so closely, that's
the expert. The experts are knowledgeable and the one thing.
But say the loudmouth behind the microphone me, I don't
(12:19):
know what am I an expert in. Look, maybe two things.
I think I'm an expert in how to do talk radio,
and I have some expertise and understanding horse racing very
very hard. Beyond that nothing, I'm a generalist, but I
have an open mind, and I'm able to take a
look at how one thing affects everything else and what
the ripple effect is. And I have common sense, and
(12:41):
I am not somebody who's tied to a decision on
the basis of having a stake in it. Back to
the piece, Psychologist Philip Tetlock spend twenty years tracking expert predictions.
What a great thing to do with this guy? He
(13:01):
tracks expert predictions. First of all, that what a great
thing to do, because I mean, you're just gonna have
a field day. I've been able to write all the
stupid things that people claim. I mean that would have
to act. If you're gonna be out there in a
field and like track things, that'd be a fun thing
to do. The downside is you got to wait a
long time to pull this stuff up. But if you're
doing it a long time, you know, if you've been
(13:21):
doing it for thirty years, you just keep up. Okay,
here's what this moron set in nineteen ninety five, and
so yeah, sorry. Philip Tetlock predictions about world events. In
his two decade study, Tetlog catalogued more than twenty eight
thousand expert predictions and found that experts were slightly less
(13:41):
accurate than a random coin toss. So what he did
after twenty eight thousand decisions and then calculate what the
experts said and so on, and he found, you know,
coin toss, you're gonna be right half the time. He
found that the experts were correct slightly less us than
(14:03):
half the time. As it decided, And I'll get back
to the piece. One of the things that some actual
experts in a certain field do is go against the
other experts, which becomes kind of problematic because now you
have a bunch of other experts, just the agriss agree
of the first experts. But here's an example of that
(14:25):
in stock market. In investing, one of the things that
so called contrary investors do is they take a look.
When they say, see on the stock market, sentiment is
overwhelmingly bullish, they say, that's the time to sell. That
the crowd is completely wrong. And there is some logic
behind this. Let's imagine all these people are overwhelmingly bullish. Well,
(14:46):
that means they're fully invested. When you're fully invested, you
don't have any more to invest. It's all in, so
there's no more new money to come in. There's only
one place for stocks to go, and that's down. Likewise,
this is hard to do. I've been correct in it
a few times in my life. When everybody is completely
negative and sour on something, that's the time to dive
(15:09):
in and be optimistic. I wrote a column and it
was either OA at our Own nine. It was after
the housing crash, when the credit markets fell apart and
so on, and I said that this is the greatest
opportunity by housing in my lifetime. I wasn't smart enough
to do any didn't do anything about it. I mean,
I talked forever and ever and ever about you know,
(15:31):
Paul and I were going on these cruises and we're
staying in Florida, and we were staying in a hotel
that it was on the North Strip in Miami Beach,
and there were all these abandoned new high rises that
they started up in stopped construction on, just just sitting
there in which they gave up because the funding dried up. Well,
a bunch of investors, mostly foreigners in South America, came up,
brought up the whole buildings or brought up three four,
(15:52):
five hundred of those condo units, and they're all billionaires
because of it. I was right in the overall, but
wasn't smart enough to do anything about it. The other
thing was, I remember my call when the stock market
bottomed out in March of nine. This was two months
into Obama's presidency. It was again during my cruise, and
(16:12):
I told the Cruiz group that I think that the
stock market has bottomed out, And it was simply based
on you know, we had, remember the credit market seized
up in seven eight. The recession occurred as a result
of that. We had twenty three months in a row
of negative economic activity. And finally there was a positive.
It was simply, there's only so bad that certain things
can get. And I remember saying this, I think we
bottomed out, And in fact that was the bottom of
(16:34):
the stock market and the beginning of the rally that
occurred during Obama. But a lot of people, particularly those
people were stock work. Is like going a rally during Obama.
There were slaves to this. No again, I could probably
come up with any number of things in which I
followed the lead of what experts were. But it's an
indication that breaking ranks from expertise and a consensus of
(16:56):
experts will usually have your right rather than wrong. Anyway,
to the piece, now, the writer is quoting this psychologist Telllock,
who pointed out that he went back and studied over
decades twenty eight thousand expert predictions and found that the
experts were slightly less than half were wrong slightly more
than half the time. Quote. The question he posed was.
(17:19):
The questions he posed were simple ones with yes or
no answers. For example, would the Soviet Union collapse in
five years? So that would have been a question probably
asked in the late eighties, would would a major war
break out again? And again the hedgehogs. The deep experts
(17:41):
failed dramatically. The generalists, however, did substantially better than chance.
Their secret was breadth of perspective and adaptability, the classic
traits of foxes. Experts failed because of tunnel vision, like
(18:01):
photographers using a telephoto lens. Hedgehogs so only a narrow
slice of reality and can go back to COVID. The
people who focused only on the one thing we have
to stop the spread of the virus and didn't consider
anything else. How actual humans behave the devastating impacts and
(18:24):
society of locking things down, the horrifying impact on education,
of keeping children out of school, the panic and depression
that's set in when you scared people to death, Not
to mention your failure to question the whole premise in
(18:50):
the first place, which is why should we even try
to stop the spread of the virus. If the virus
is out there, the virus if like every other virus
known demand The ones that are easily spread eventually effect
virtually everybody. The ones that are harder to spread, that
can only be spread saying blood to blood, contact or sex,
and so on, they affect everybody that engages in those
kinds of things, but they don't affect the general population.
(19:11):
But again they didn't question any of that. They just
stuck to their thing. This virus is dangerous and therefore
we have to stop it from spreading. And couldn't see
outside that. And then of course the problem with the
people who just knee jerk follow this, And I can
tell you who the people are that I likeliest to
knee jerk follow what the consensus of experts say. People
(19:33):
that have no self confidence in their decision making. And
this would almost entirely be liberals. No, why you've got
to think this one through. Why would liberals have no
self confidence in their decision making? The answer is because
they've never faced up to it. But deep down, back
in there, they know that they've always been wrong. They've
always been wrong. So therefore they gravitate because they think
(19:55):
that they're smart. They gravitate toward what experts say and
just glom onto that, as opposed to do like me,
who aren't smart enough to listen to the experts. Back
to the piece. The deeper someone goes into a field,
the more their framework, their one big thing, becomes their
only lens. Let me give you a horse racing analogy.
(20:18):
Do you want a horse racing analogy? There are zillions
of factors that can go into how well a horse
will do over its career or even who's going to
do well in a specific races. I'm telling you zillions.
But there are some people, the biggest single group of
you know, you talk about one issue people. One issue
(20:39):
people on horse racing are people that are slaves to
speed figures. And indeed, of all the things you look
at in a race of speed figure is probably the
most important thing. Obviously, faster horses are likely to win
the slower horses, but there's a lot of other factors
beyond simply how fast they read in the past that
apply here and there are simple I won't look at
(21:00):
anything else anything well, but there's seven other speedy horses
in the room. Nothing. Of course, it becomes complicated when
you've got a way fifty nine different factors and then
decide which one is where I add more. But they
just they'll focus on the one thing. And this is
the point that's being referenced here. Somebody that's a deep
(21:22):
expert in one particular thing focuses only on that. Let
me give you another example. This is an old one.
It's been going on forever and ever and ever. Let's
imagine you got a heart problem. You go to a cardiologist.
I'm telling you, the cardiologist is going to tell you
to put you on meds. Then you go to the
heart surgeon. The heart surgeon's gonna say you need surgery.
(21:43):
The cardiologist doesn't do surgery. They prescribe meds. Heart surgeons
do surgery. So of course they both are gonna have
the bias to recommend that you do the thing that
they're into. Practors don't for scripe medication other than maybe
(22:04):
one or two things. I don't think any I'm not
sure though, but I mean I'm to say so. Therefore,
they have a bias toward leaning against it. They may
be right in one's person specific thing, but because that's
the thing that they know, they don't see the larger
overall view of Okay, this one might actually need it,
(22:26):
whereas this one over here they just need to loosen
their muscles up. Whatever the thing. Anyway, back to the piece,
Some say, only half jokingly, that science advances one funeral
at a time. It is a good line. They say
this because once someone holds a particular view that view
can become part of their identity. Oh I point this
(22:48):
out all the time. Why are liberals liberal? Because they're liberal?
They're terrified of abandoning their liberalness because they become part
of their identity. They don't want to become like one
of us. They would rather be wrong and hang around
in their stupid lefty crowd because that's such an important
part of their identification. I think you certainly see this
(23:13):
with the very dangerous hacks and the schools in child
psychology that are encouraging boys to chop off their cladinguses
and girls that chop off their boobs. Once they've decided
that this is a good thing to do, it doesn't
matter how much evidence we have that we're destroying people's lives.
(23:35):
They're going to keep doing it. Plus, of course, the
rationalization coming in this is how they're making their money.
Every child that they chop up is dollar signs for them.
But that's no excuse, for example, for the boards of
directors of say children's hospital, to go ahead and allow
(23:56):
these people to do it. Of Course, the guy that
chops off the little girl's boom is going to be
somebody in favor of that. That's where they get their buddy,
and maybe they sincerely believe it, but it doesn't mean
they're right. Will experts say this? So what again? They're
looking at the short trip the girl thinks that she's
a boy. The longer term view would be, maybe she's
(24:16):
gonna change her mind in a year or two or
three or four or five or six or how are
you gonna pump all these hormones into a body that
was naturally producing female hormones? Isn't this gonna create one
big giant mix And the next thing you know, you've
got somebody as screwed up as say Morgan Geyser, somebody
who I think is a just a walking example of
what happens when quacks were called. Experts dive into somebody
(24:39):
with problems and make them all worse back of the bees.
When entire disciplines fall victim to this kind of thinking,
you get the worst effects of hedgehog thinking. You get
a whole field in which brilliant people are confidently yet
(25:00):
s caacularly wrong. Journalists foxes in a hedgehog world. Now,
of course, the media is supposed to be the people
that would question all of this. They're supposed to be generalists.
But most people know who go into the media are
just the opposite. They accept what the experts supposedly have
to say, rather than constantly challenging them. They are vicious
(25:23):
towards skeptics when they're the ones that are supposed to
be the skeptics. For example, when Tom Barrett's running around
saying I'm gonna rip up a bunch of streets and
put train tracks down, the few people are supposed to
challenge that, to come up with all the ideas why
that's rowing and make them instead no, no, no, no, less,
it's a good thing what the writer says about this.
(25:44):
So where do we find foxes? One place is supposed
to be journalism. The best journalists are forced to be
foxes every day. They deal with conflicting accounts, unexpected outcomes,
and situations where things they were sure of turn out
to be turnout not to be. So the piece goes on,
(26:10):
let me move to a topic that I think fits
this overall general theme at least a little bit. So
Colum in the Wall Street General Today and Barton swam
and it deals with it starts with the disaster of
Somali immigration to the United States. I mean the whole
term Somali is becoming a punchline on the High Seas.
(26:34):
When you think of Somalis, what do you think of pirates?
When you think of Somalis in America, what do you
think of about scammers? It's obviously unfair to the Somalis
and the high Seeds that aren't pirates, and it's unfair
to the Somalis who aren't scammers. Nonetheless, Burton Swim is
an interesting piece here, and it eventually goes beyond the
(26:57):
Somalis and just points out why mass immigration of Muslim
Muslim populations simply isn't going to work in the Western world,
and it's because the Western world is not premised on
the way Muslims think. It's it's premised on Judeo Christian ideology,
which is essentially secular. Whereas Muslims can't think in anything
(27:19):
other than their religious terms. They believe that only they
can make good decisions and only their thinking is tolerable
everyone else should die, which is the exact opposite of
how a Judeo Christian society that believes in openness and
freedom would think. Here's his piece. He writes, if you
wanted to invent a parable of modern liberalism's failure. You'd
(27:43):
have to work hard to top the story of Somalis,
immigrants and US citizens alike builking Minnesota's social welfare system.
So enormous and brazen was the theft that The New
York Times treated it with a competent and mostly unflinching article,
which is the only reason anybody outside the small world
of conservative punditry now knows about it. We read this
(28:04):
piece on the podcast yesterday, and as I mentioned, now,
the entire media is aware that this has been going on.
But as I said, doing that, this scandal was going
on forever and ever and ever at effort, everybody from
the governor of Minnesota to the media and everybody else
looked the other way because they didn't want to accept
the tens of thousands of Somali's who are in Minnesota
(28:25):
were out and now crooks, I don't want to accept it.
So therefore we're just not gonna look at it. Back
to the piece, the time it took for the Minnesota
story to make its way into national headlines is itself
part of the problem. Federal prosecutors have already convicted fifty
nine of the fraudsters which tells you how long the
thing has been happening. A few local media outlets, notably
(28:48):
KAI Minneapolis, Saint Paul's NBC affiliate, have covered the story
since the first indictments. Scott Johnson, the Minnesota based attorney
on power Line blog co founder, has reported on some
Malia related fraud since at least twenty eighteen. In mid November,
the journalist Arman Rosen penda superb seven thousand word essay
about the fiasco for the magazine County Highway. The Somali
(29:11):
fraud story is in some respects akin to the so
called grooming scandal in Britain, in which gangs of mostly
Pakistani men sexually abused young girls, even as the country's
government and news media looked the other way, terrified by
accusations of racism or Islamophobia. You may be familiar with
(29:31):
the grooming scandal in England. It's not happening, it's not happening.
It's not happening, and the reasons people did not want
to accept that they were happening. They did not want
to acknowledge that huge numbers of Pakistani immigrants believed it
was perfectly fine to abuse young girls sexually that's what
they think, but people didn't want to admit that. That's
(29:52):
the thing. So the fact that it was going on,
they're looking the other way, pretended it's not happening, and
it's not happened. So it's going on really right in
front of everybody, but they're just trying so hard not
to see it. Back to the peace in the Twin Cities,
state authorities couldn't rouse themselves to stop the theft hundreds
(30:13):
of millions of dollars siphoned from medicaid, housing and other
welfare programs. It is to the great credit of the
US Justice Department, under administrations of both parties, that it
didn't allow the perpetrator's race, religion, or country of origin
to hinder the prosecution of crime. Both scandals in the
UK and Minnesota raise a question most of us would
(30:33):
rather not consider, that of large scale immigration from predominantly
Muslim countries. It's true that other ethnic immigrant groups, Italians
in the early twentieth century, most famously imported forms of
criminality from the home country. It's also true that Minnesota's
roughly eighty thousand strong Somali community contains many industrious people
(30:56):
and good citizens, but an unbiased observer could be forgiven
for thinking Minnesota's Somali population is not capable of assimilation. Now,
let me interject this is part of the problem. Immigrants
who come to the United States because they want to assimilate.
They come into Ellis Island and the look at the
(31:17):
famous opening of Godfather Part two when young Vido curleone,
after you know, his father's dead, his mother's been killed,
to kill his brother, escapes, gets on the ship the
age of nine comes in and there he's looking at
the Statue of Liberty and the whole thing with all
these other immigrants that or other. The look of this
in America, it's the land of opportunity. They want to
(31:38):
be part of this. When you have people who come
into these others, not just the United States, but France,
et cetera, who hate those countries and hate their lifestyle
and hate the fact that they're moving to predominantly Jenaeo
Christian societies, you're never going to get assimilation from them.
And if they're not going to assimilate, they will never
be anything other than a terrible threat to the way
(31:59):
of life and the kind that they're going to. As
jinguistic as it sounds there's no value added in bringing
in somebody who hates the place that they're coming to.
And it's a huge portion of the problem that we've
had with illegal immigration to the United States. Those who
have come here and wanted to be here and want
(32:20):
to be Americans, they're really not much of a problem.
It's the ones that are coming here because they realize
that America is so stupid that we give away all
sorts of things for free and we don't punish criminals, etc.
That are the problem. Back to the piece from Rosen's
(32:42):
essay quote, bad actors within the community would approach potential
co conspirators without any fear of betrayal. The point he's
making his es in the Somali community. When Somalia would
go up to another Somalia and ask him, say, do
you want to get in on the scam that we have?
They never had a concern that they'd be ratted out
by this Amali that even if they'd say no, they
(33:03):
knew that the Somali would rather be loyal to the
fellow Somali crook than actually telling American authority because they
knew that these all of the Somalis couldn't give a
crap about right and wrong, or would the American authorities
want that even if they disapprove what the fellow Somali
was going to do, they would never betray them because
(33:24):
their Somali identity was far more important to them than
any kind of you know, American value that would be
in continuing. Even the people who said no to phenomenal
offers of tens of thousands of dollars in free taxpayer
money didn't inform the authorities that a major community wide
fraud against the public was in progress, potentially criminal oddities
(33:44):
when almost totally unreported to anyone in government. The FBI
learned about quote Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit that was
one of the main vehicles of fraud, from a whistleblower
in the Department of Education, and not from any of
the scam's ground level witnesses or participants. Ponders, You could
look to some of these scams that have gone on
(34:05):
in the social service community in Milwaukee, almost no whistleblowers
from within any of them. And then the folly of US,
I mean SEC is apparently finally going under. How could
that piece of crap organization have taken decades to finally
get rid of it's sort of the same thing. Back
(34:28):
to the piece here, which is dealing with this grave
difficulty in mass immigration of Muslims who do not share
the kinds of values that exist in countries that are
premise not on Muslim values but Judeo Christian values, ponders
some observations made recently by the British historian Tom Holland.
His book Dominion contends that Christianity has left an imprint
(34:52):
on the West so deep as to be ineradicable and
imperceptible even atheists and nations once Christianized thinking Christian terms
without knowing it. Only a Christian nation, I suspect, Holland
would say, would invent a social welfare system as lavish
and easily exploitable as Minnesota's. Now here's the point that
(35:16):
he's making in back in Somalia, they never have systems
like this. Why because the Somalians though, if you have
a system so easily to scam, are Somalians will scam it.
But only in the good nature, trusting West when you
set something like this up, making us obviously open season
(35:37):
for people who lack any type of value at all.
Back to the peace Essentially quote this is Holland. Essentially,
what Christianity has that Islam does not is a concept
of the secular. Let me interject, what does that mean
the secular. It's a set of values that we have
that aren't particularly religious, but that everybody should follow without
(35:59):
regard to what religion you have. See, most Muslims don't
think that way. They think of Muslim law and they
think that's what the law should be. That they can't
disconnect the two of them. This is where jihad and
indefada and all of these things come from. Back to
the pace, Holland remarked in a September podcast interview. From
its beginning, he points out, Christianity has acknowledged that some
(36:21):
parts of human society will function outside the demands of revelation.
Think of Jesus as imperative to render to Caesar what
is Caesar's and to God what is God's. Islam classically
acknowledges no such sphere. I think Islam is uniquely indigestible
for our secular mindset, he says, Minnesota Somali population plainly
(36:43):
does not think of itself as digestible, But larger scale,
large scale Muslim immigration is a far bigger problem for
Europe than for America, and in a curious way, Holland's
reflections shed light on the immigration problem of the US
does have, that of illegal border crosses from Latin America.
On Tuesday, President Trump, asked about the Minnesota fraud prosecutions,
(37:06):
expressed his disgust, quote, these people that work, these people
are these These aren't people that work. Let's go, come on,
let's make this place great. These are people that do
nothing but complain. Now, again, for people who think that
he's generalized, who's the most famous Somali American in this country?
I'd say, ilat Omar? Is this that a description of her?
(37:27):
Mary's or brothers say she can stay in the country legally,
gets in here and does nothing but rip on the
United States of America. She cops, knocks down a government salary,
and supports government assistance for everything, continuing. They come from
hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch. By
(37:49):
the way, is there anybody but Trump who would have
been the guts to say that this is why they
precisely hate of it, you know, And again, maybe it's
an over generalization. I'll admit I don't know a whole
lot of Somalia America. Plkins, it's Minnesota that they managed
to land in. But I mean, you just think of
all of the scams at so many different levels in
the Somalikan I mean, you got to admit there's a
(38:10):
lot of Somali bang for the buck, given how few
of them there are in the United States. I mean
the high Seas, that's the entire world of pirate comes flow.
No matter what part of the world is, you almost
expect that it's going to be a Somali. The President
singled out for particular score in Minneapolis's representative Ilhan Omar.
(38:31):
She is the poster child for this, isn't she put aside?
If you can Trump's failure to distinguish between criminals and
law abiding Americans of Somali ancestry, the President isn't wrong
to send something deeply amiss in a community of Americans
so contemptuous of the country that took them in. And
that's it. Instead of thanking us, they can't stand us.
(38:54):
They think that we're a bunch of dopes and suckers
to be fleeced dry. The column continues, Perhaps Trump can
turn his attention to those illegal aliens some nations that
for all their dysfunction, are not indelibly Christian. Immigrants from
Latin America work. Indeed, they have a higher labor force
participation rate than whites. Let me interject I do agree
(39:15):
with that part, as they've been pointing out for years.
It's not all of them. But when that line comes out,
there are some jobs Americans won't do. It's just true.
And anybody who denies this does not see the number
of Americans that have been sitting on their asses forever
and ever and ever. You need somebody to peel potatoes
in a restaurant, an illegal immigrant is going to do it.
(39:38):
But a bunch of lazy ass Americans living off of
fourteen different welfare programs and smoking their pott and all
this stuff, they're not going to do it. The problem
with it, of course, is that they entered illegally, which
is why I have always argued throw them out and
then if they want to try to come bang it
back in after a period of times to the front
door and legally allow them to do it. But in
(39:58):
the process, by throwing it everybody out, you're going to
get all the crooks that have come in in the process,
get them out as well. And they won't be approved
to come back into the front door because of the crooks. Now,
the point that Swam is making is maybe Prumb's Nights
needs to start drawing his attention away from some of
the Latin American illegal immigrants to all of these Somalis
and many others that are in here that just can't
(40:19):
stand America despise and lothus. Look at the number of
terror cells that we have run around here and how
they've managed to radicalize a bunch of stupid Americans. Look
at the number of people that have are radicalized. Where
do you think this is coming from? And I'll get
back to the piece and finish it off in a moment.
I think a special word needs to be directed towards
(40:39):
some people on the American right that are sucking up
to this ideology because of their own hatred of Judaism.
I don't know if Tucker Carlson falls into that category,
but I think the candae OANs is it's very very
hard to see an upside in a great concentration. And again,
maybe this would be different if when the Somalis came here,
(41:01):
they weren't all plopped into one place. If you put
a few here and a few there and a few
in the other thing. You wouldn't have this feeding thing
where they all got together to essentially scam everyone. Also,
if the Somalis had not been dropped in Minnesota, let's
imagine they were dropped in Oklahoma, very conservative state, maybe
(41:22):
there wouldn't have been such a tendency to look the
other way like you had with a buffoon like Tim Waltz,
who knew all about this but didn't want to draw
any attention to it because he didn't want to say
anything negative towards any Somalies, in part because they're all
Democrats and they're all voting for finishing off the piece.
(41:43):
Responsible people agree the criminals in the country illegally ought
to be removed, But those work in construction and agriculture jobs.
They're saying, in so many words, let's go, come on,
let's make this place great, and they don't bitch. That
column is in today's Wall Street Journal. Burton sway, all right,
attention to another story. Open Ai. That's the company whose
(42:07):
prime product is chat GPT. There are lots of indications
right now that open ai is losing its lead in
artificial intelligence. One of the things that I've noted on
almost every tech development is that the company that is
first almost never makes it. It's usually the ones that
(42:30):
come in second, third, or fourth and see how the
first one did it and figured it out, I can
do it better than them. The leaders leader of open ai, Altman,
came out and called a so called quote red this week,
essentially saying we've got to improve immediately, implying that we
are at risk of failing. Now. Obviously, the valuation of
(42:52):
open ai is in the many, many billions of dollars.
Let me quote here from a peace on substack by
somebody named Gary Marcus. Open ai lacks both profits and
a moat. What's a moat? You know what a mode
is in the business world. You should know this from
doing all these stupid financial shows that you do. A moat, well,
(43:15):
you know what a moat real is in real life.
It's like like a body water that they would put
around a castle. So somebody tried to attack the castle,
they got to get through the water to get it.
A mode is a barrier to competition. An example of
this would be the credit card business. Very hard to
compete against Visa and MasterCard and American Express. I mean
discover has a tiny little niche. What's instead happened is
(43:37):
alternate forms of payment have come up, like PayPal, but
they rely on the credit card industry, and most people
who use PayPal a tying it to their bank account
of the credit card, that would be a mote. Amazon
is a mote. It's extremely I mean, how many delivery
trucks and warehouses does Amazon have? Imagine if we tried
to compete against It's a mode. The point that's being
(43:59):
made here is opening eye. Then in a mote, somebody
else can come in and develop an AI system that's
better than this one, And why wouldn't you just go
over and use that? With no mote there? Open AI
likes both profits and the mode. The systems that they
build are hugely expensive to operate because they require massive
amounts of compute for training. Google seems finally to be
(44:22):
catching up with their Gemini model. Large language models such
as chat GPT may quickly become commodities. See what they're saying,
commodity in other words, generic. So they spend all this
money to create chat GPT, But the next thing you know,
there's fifty seven different chat GPTs. So chat GPT just
becomes worthless. Artificial intelligence itself isn't proprietary. It's using machines
(44:45):
to figure out and fastly compute things. Well, chat GPT
was the one that got there first, but what's to
stop Google from developing their own version, Gemini, which they've
done and some people believe it's already past chat GPTs up. Continuing,
we can expect price wars and profits may continue to
be elusive or modest. Mess So now the argument is
(45:08):
as nineteen other tech companies come in with their AI things,
price slashing is going to occur. So people who think
that there's going to be this mass fortune, what is
certain is all the infrastructure is going to be needed.
All the data set is if we needed, because you
need to have all of this in order to do
the AI and so on. But to think that only
one or two precise companies are going to be in,
it's going to be just the opposite. There's going to
be massive demand to get in on this, and with
(45:31):
numerous providers, the prices are going to crash and the
ability for any of them they make a lot of
money would be limited. Continuing, the basic thesis then was
that although open AI was the darling of Ai. Things
could change. Things took longer to unravel than I thought
they would, But open AI's unraveling has begun, as The
Wall Street Journal reported, the company has just declared a
(45:53):
code read. They are terrified that Google's new model has
eclipsed them. By any reasonable measure. Open Ai is clearly
squandered the sizeable lead they once had. Their war chest
is impressive, but their burn rate is terrifying. My guess
is that they have cumulativery raised on the order of
one hundred billion dollars since they launched, perhaps more than
(46:14):
any other company in history, but they have already spent
most of it, and like they don't have much more
of a year's runway left now. Another piece superior in
a post on X by someone who uses the handle
m hole, in which he points out that artificial intelligence
(46:35):
has limits, and again going back to the point that
we had earlier about experts. Experts can't see this because
what they know is artificial intelligence, and they can see
beyond artificial intelligence. I'll summarize this point before I even
read it. Artificial intelligence only knows what has been input
into artificial intelligence, and as artificial intelligence now scans every
(46:56):
piece of knowledge in order to grab things. It still
has algorithm as to what it accepts and what it doesn't.
Let's imagine AI, for example, was going to try to
figure out the packer bear game on Sunday. It still
is making decisions on what's important and what is not. Well,
what if those decisions that it is making is based
on flawed premises. Here's what he writes. Artificial intelligence doesn't
(47:23):
know the truth and it never will. It can't. All
it can know are patterns stitch together from what it digests,
and like any organism, it becomes what it consumes. Your
mother ever yelled at you, you are what you eat?
She did, Mine didn't. But I know somebody I went
on with a one. I met up with a woman
whose mother said that all the time, you are what
(47:44):
you eat. You are what you eat? Are we eat?
I just kept hearing it to get it again. Well,
that's what AI is. They are what they eat. I
know this all sounds too well from a person. I
know this all too well from personal experience. A bad
diet is bad results. But at the risk of some
owning hypocritical, I have to say AI is eating garbage,
tons of it. The people building today's AI systems choose
(48:07):
what these models are trained on and how much credibility
and each source gets. They calibrate the entire information diet,
and we see the consequences in the outputs. Take Elon Musk.
His model GROC is trained primarily on x data. Meanwhile,
models like chat, GPT and Google's Gemini gorge themselves on
(48:28):
a steady stream of Wikipedia pages and Reddit threads. The
information has been laundered, filtered from a questionable source into
a polished, authoritative, seeming format. It would be funny if
it weren't so dangerous. And no fund this piece. It's
from the co founder most people know, Almond. There's a
co founder of open ai, and he's kind of saying
(48:56):
the same thing. He says, the first battle of open
ai has essentially been solved. How do you grab all
the information that's out there in the digital world and
compile it? That they've done, But he's saying, the one
thing that hasn't done is it hasn't figured out all
the things that aren't so far in the digital world.
In other words, what about all the stuff we don't
(49:19):
yet know? So Opening Eye is basically going to be
looking at the entire world, which way in the rear
view mirror. And this is what the co founder of
OPENINGI is saying that the big challenge now is to
scale new information rather than keep regurgitating out the old.
Open AI co founder Ilia said Skiver believes the tides
(49:42):
of the AI industry will have to shift back to
the research phase. On an episode of Dwarkish Podcasts published
on Tuesday, Suitskimer, who is widely seen as a pioneer
in modern artificial intelligence, challenge the conventional wisdom that scaling
could be the key road to major and key roadmap
to AIS progress. Scaling just means getting all the stuff
(50:04):
that's out there and doing it faster and being able
to turn out scale scale scale, get everything, get everything,
get everything, get everything. And he's pointing out that the
getting everything includes a lot of bad and mostly all
conventional wisdom. Continuing, tech companies support hundreds of billions of
dollars into acquiring GPUs and building data centers to essentially
(50:26):
make their AI tools, whether that whether that's LMS or
image generation models better. The wisdom goes that the more
compute in other words, the more computing power that you have,
the more compute you have or the more training data
that you have, the smurter your AI tool will be.
Sutzkimer said, Now, I would say that if that worked,
(50:48):
all these public health experts and all these counties around
the United States, all they all, any of them did
was simply follow what the CDC's recommendation. Heaven, all of
them would make us all smoter. In fact, that made
us all dumber because none of them were willing to
simply they disagree with what the CDC was saying, say no,
we're not going to follow this. I think I know better.
Not a single one of them did this because they
all knew deep down that they're stupid people, and they
(51:09):
wouldn't have gone into such a crap field as public health.
Nobody wanted to be the one saying screw it, the
mass don't mean anything, keep your churches and schools open.
Dot A. One wanted to do that. They couldn't break
from that. And isn't that what opened? What artificial intelligence
is It's going to grab onto whatever the consensus is,
and rather than think outside the box, it's going to
(51:32):
puke out inside the box, and it's going to be
making decisions that can't be questioned because the decisions themselves
will be made by AI. Now, as they said, this
is the founderable PLANAI is saying, this is part of
the problem. Sutzgaber said in the interview that for an
interview that for around the past half decade, this recipe
has produced impactful results. It's also efficient for companies because
(51:53):
the method provides a simple and very low risk way
of investing resources and pouring money into the research that
could lead nowhere. However, Setskeeper, who now runs Safe Superintelligence Incorporated,
believes that method is running out of runway. Data is finite.
In other words, all the data that we have in
the world, there's a limit. See what happens when all
(52:14):
the AI learns every data that exists. It can't get
any smarter because it has everything in there, including obviously
a whole lot of crap, and organizations already have access
to a massive amount of computy. Said, is the belief really, Oh,
it's so big, but if you had one hundred times more,
everything would be so different. It would be different, for sure.
(52:37):
But is the belief that if you just had one
hundred times the scale everything would be transformed. I don't
think that's true. No, it goes on and again. What
all of these things are doing is they're raising things
that challenge that can sensus by thinking outside the box.
Every single person who's made the world better or came
up with a new innovation is somebody who sized up
(52:58):
what was there now and said, I think better, I
have this new way. In other words, the exact opposite
of experts who are simply going on and pontificating and
puking back everything that they already took in. I find
(53:19):
all this quite fascinating. This might be beyond your whole love?
Am I doing this at too high of a level
for like the average guy to swallow in? Or I
like you able to swallow this in? You believe you,
you believe that you can soak this up. I think
the people who listen to my show they love this
kind of stuff. I just think that the people who
(53:39):
like listen to my podcast they're open to this kind
of thinking rather than the average idiot and NPR seeing
somebody whisper wrote something that was sort of consensus for
twenty seven years ago and doesn't apply at all today.
Right way, I gotta tell this story I was. I
told this story about going to the Milwaukee premiere on
(54:01):
Tuesday night of Song Sung Blue, the movie about lightning
at thunder, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it
was an invitation only thing, and everybody showed up at
the same time. They said the doors had opened five thirty.
The doors opened at five forty five. So the line
took like the line went from the door of the
Oriental to north happened. And when I got in it
and it was fridgide, cooled out and it moved. It
(54:23):
took about thirty minutes, which isn't the end of the
world to get it. And I said, what I got right?
Do you remember me telling the story? You're not? You say,
of course, Well then what happened? Yeah, you'll remember, okay,
I said, right when I ended. I mean, maybe it
happened twenty nine different times. But I only got to
the front of the line once. And some guy got out.
(54:44):
He must have been dropped off at a Douber or something,
because he just seemed to like a pure out of
nowhere and cut in front of everybody and announced VIP
and tried to walk in and I split a minute,
and then everybody said, wait a minute. And then you
had probably told that the door there's everybody's got every
the invitation is VIP, and then pointed to the back
of the line, you know, somewhere up by Shorewood. I
(55:05):
told that story. This is just unbelievable coincident, I said,
I didn't. I don't know who the guy was. I'm
not going to name him, because I do think it's
possible it was an innocent, stupid mistake that he maybe
he thought that there were VIPs rather than what No,
(55:26):
he didn't throw a tantrum at all, he just you know,
it was I mean, I think any kind of judgment
realized that, first of all, unless you're like the governor,
who the hell are you that you think that you're
a VIP to sneak? I mean, I think it's possible
it was well intentioned sort of arrogant stupidity. So I'm
not going to name him anyway, but I didn't know
(55:46):
who he was. Would you believe that in the past day,
there's a news story about someone and there's this picture.
I'm not going to tell you the news, it's just
a story that's in the news. There's a picture of
the guy. That's this guy, the guy who went to
the game with I showed him resent that's him the
same day. He probably isn't a listener to my podcast.
(56:09):
But there's no point in out again because, as I say,
it's possible it was just an innocent I mean, it
wasn't an innocent mistake, but it could be a mistake
that it's not as ill intended as He didn't say,
don't you know who I am? He just said, is
this the VIP entrance? But I mean the line, there's
(56:30):
this whole line. Well, yeah, it wasn't like he fought
it and tried to jam as well. He wasn't gonna
work because hey, the rest of the crowd freezing out there,
like me, we're not going to tolerate this guy getting
in there. Plus we all had invitations that said VIP
in the whole think all right, this is the Mark
Belling podcast. This is the Mark Belling podcast. All right. Now,
(56:52):
I know cynical people. You think you think I'm cynical.
I am somewhat cynical, but I mean I know people
that are way beyond me, to the point that nothing's
on the up and up. I know somebody who thinks
Jiannis is faking his injury. Paul said he's heard that.
(57:12):
I mean, there's nothing in his character that would indicate
that he would do it. Furthermore, if you're going to
fake an injury, you fake the injury in practice rather
than in plain view. But I mean, I do get
the whole thing, and it's certainly true from the perspective
of both him and the Bucks. There's no upside for
the Bucks in Giannis getting hurt. If Yannis is to
(57:33):
be traded, you want to trade him and trade him healthy.
So I mean, the hall you will get back from
him is off the charts. I think only maybe you'd
have to be a rookie, say Victor Wimenyam and a
couple of others could draw as much as Giannis could draw.
The Bucks have the highest score and efficiency of any
team in the league when he's in the lineup, and
the lowest when he's not. I've never seen that the
(57:56):
Bucks score more points permitted when Yannis is on the
court than any team in the league, and fewer points
per minute when he's not of the court than any
team in the league. No, they won last night without him.
But anyway, whether or not he's going to be traded
or not. I get why Doc Rivers is so frustrated
the whole thing because there's been rumors about Yanni seving Milwaukee,
you know, for six years, and he hasn't left. But
(58:17):
I don't think he's speaking the injury. But anyway, that's
so I told this guy, I'm gonna go on the
air and say, I know a goof with you go
do that. I should name it. But then he'd like
like that. On a related note, there's just something perfect
about this story. Diego pavia. See, you don't know who
(58:38):
that is. He's the quarterback of Vanderbilt. You probably don't
know that Vanderbilt has been terrible in football as long
as there's been football, and they have a very good
team this year. They're in the toughest league there is,
the SEC, and they've been very good. He's their quarterback.
His nickname is Pissing. How many people of you know
they have the name Pissing? Is their Well, it's because
(59:02):
when he was at New Mexico State, he famously went
to the University of New Mexico, walked out to the
fifty yard line of their field and took a leak
on the logo on the field. I mean that's when
he was at another school. He transferred to Vanderbilt, but
that was in other words, he's a very competitive kind
of And anyway, Vanderbilt has no chance of making the
college football playoff because well, they had a great season.
(59:24):
They're in the SEC and they have two losses and
they're both in the conference, so they can't advance to
their conference title game and they're not going to make
it in even though probably you can make the case
they're a top twelve team. So what do you think
Pabia one is trying to do about this to salvage
their season. He's asking Trump to issue an executive order
adding teams to the playoffs. The playoffs start in like
(59:47):
a week and a half, and he's who is he
asking to fix this? Trump? Now, the two things that
make the story just perfect is I said forever, you know,
they keep expanding the playoffs because they keep saying, there's
this contract this team should be in. It doesn't matter
how many teams are gonna be in. No matter what
it is, they're gonna be teams that say that. Look
at the NCAA basketball team, sixty eight teams are in
that and you still have bitching about who doesn't get
(01:00:09):
into that. The more teams you have, the more teams
who think that they would be screwed. Remember when they
had two teams in it. You can do that this
year and have it just be cleaner. Whoever wins Ohio State,
Indiana place, whoever wins Alabama, Georgia that they play for
the national chain. You got me. He's here. Secondly, as
(01:00:34):
much as people want to rag on Trump, Pavey knows
that the one guy who actually could in an instant
fits something and just issue whether or not he should
issue an exec And I don't think Trump should be
issued an executive order in college sports and all that stuff,
But this is what it dawns on. This is a
guy that actually might do it. A Trump's story. As
(01:01:01):
you know, Trump's tariff authority may be struck down by
the United States Supreme Court. I think that that would
be a disaster. I think the TIFFs, not only by
and large, have worked, the threat of tariffs, have given
Trump incredible leverage to make the world a better place
and get the United States on better footing in any
number of areas. Trump, though, is doubling down on this.
He is now saying that based on the incredible amount
(01:01:22):
of revenue coming in from the limited tariffs that we have.
He believes that the tariffs could eventually end the United
States income tax. Now, a lot of people don't like
the notion of tariffts because they think they're bad for
the economy. On the other hand, virtually everyone agrees that
taxation is bad for the economy. Imagine if nobody paid
any federal income tax, if we kept all of our
(01:01:44):
money other than seeing the money we give to the
state and paying property taxes. For the people in this
country who pay very little in taxes, they wouldn't care.
But without regard to your status on that it would
be a fortune of money that could be pumped back
into the economy. And Trump's point is is that by
setting the tariffs high enough, by tariffing, in other words,
putting the tax only on the importation of products, without
(01:02:05):
regard to whether or not you think the consumer is
paying that tax or not, would it not be a
better way of taxing than taxing people on their income power. Furthermore,
it creates a tremendous incentive for companies to build their
stuff here in the United States rather than import them.
I don't know if Trump's numbers add up. It seems
to be to come up with the amount of money
that we pay in United States' income taxes, he'd have
(01:02:26):
to tear off everything at like ten fifteen trillion percent. Nonetheless,
the point he makes is interesting now to this story,
there's a phenomenon one of the things that you don't
know because the Internet and YouTube and all of those
things weren't around. Are there more police impersonators now than
there used to be? I mean, it just seems to
twenty years ago you never really, I won't say, you
(01:02:48):
never heard of it. It's very rare, right, the stolen
valid with military Yeah, I mean maybe forty years ago
every loudmouth in a bar was shooting his mouth offense.
But now that they're all being captured on video and
people are exposed, it's just hard to say. But boy,
I think of there's so many things that people that
weirdos get into that I just can't imagine. You Paul's
(01:03:12):
got I think I can say this, I can say what, Yeah,
Paul's son laws a cop. I don't. I haven't named
the jurisdiction. I don't think Paul minds that. I just
want to do it. Here's a cop. Okay, I just okay,
that's kind of that's a good thing that he's serving
and everything. I remember when I wanted to be a cop.
(01:03:32):
I was five. You know, you played cops and robbers.
What is it about a grown adult taking all the
risks of trouble that you can get into, running around
and actually pretending hard to be And when I say pretending,
pulling people over, putting lights in their cards, wearing fake badges,
(01:03:53):
do you get that? It just I mean there's a
lot of things I don't get that weirdos that we're
I mean, there are something that I would never do,
but I at least get what they see and do it,
you know, like any number of things that we shouldn't do.
I mean, I say, why people use drugs. They get
the buzz and the high off, but I don't do
it because of the long term after effects on the downsay,
but you can at least see, Okay, they get the bus.
(01:04:15):
I just don't get white to be good about that
given the Okay, we got another one. The story I
find in the walkaster frameman elcorn Man charged with impersonating
police officer. And listen to this. The guy's name is
Davin Stam nineteen. He's a mill Cord nineteen. Well, I
mean they're of all ages. By the way. One of
(01:04:36):
the things that you see about these these people tend
to not be First of all, you rarely get prison
time for it. They give them little offenses. Think a
lot of these people that you see in the internet
have been doing it forever. There's some guy named Jeremy.
He's a legend on YouTube. He's been caught like thirty
five times. He just keeps doing it, and he'll like
set up a business. It's quasi related to this, like
(01:04:58):
some sort of security and that. There are certain things
you can't do. And it has to do with like
the colors you can put of the lights that are
on your vehicle. Is it I actually don't even know
right now, is it blue and white? I think that
blue and white can only be law enforcement? I think,
do you know? Yeah, I don't know the right. And
(01:05:19):
then there are other things like there's no law against
carrying a badge, but you can't make it too much
like a law enforcement you know, for instance, they give
out honorary badges and that kinds of things. Any number
of things, and you can you know, you can have
an ex police car as a vehicle, but you can't
steal it. And you can even put terms on it
like security policing or something like that. There's certain lines
(01:05:40):
that and these people always tend to get right up
to the light anyway. Getting the story. Guy's nineteen charge
wensan Wakashakany Circuit Court was impersonating a peace officer, a
misdemeanor punishable buy up to nine months in jail, which
they never get, or ten thousand dollars in fine. He
is due for an initial court appeance January twenty second.
Listen to this. A criminal complaint against him, said sure.
Iff's deputies were summoned to August fifth to an area
(01:06:03):
of Interstate forty three and Moreland Road. That's a very
busy intersection that's in south central Walkershaw County and taking
an I forty three from Milwaukee toward you know, Beloit
and so on. Moreland Roads a huge interchange there, probably
the biggest one on all of the southwestern portion of
I forty three. For a report of a vehicle flashing
(01:06:25):
blue lights. Now this is dangerous because I think I'm
not sure this. I think it's blue and white that
you can't use it's white in combination of blue flashing
blue lights to get others to move over. A deputy
reported seeing a Ford Explorer matching the vehicle's description flashing
blue lights while behind another car near Guthrie rode An
I forty three. The complaint said, so he's doing this
(01:06:45):
On the interstate. A deputy found a light bar that
flashed white and blue lights when activated in the upper
portion of the windshield of Stam's vehicle. The complaint said.
When the deputy asked him why he had activated the lights,
I love this. You get pulled over, you have this?
Why did you do this? I mean, there is no
(01:07:06):
every lie that you tell is gonna sound stupid, right,
I mean you don't. I mean, I suppose they'd be
really stupid and just come out and say I was
trying to convince people I was a cop. But that
would be the only answer that would be sensible, because
any lie that you make up is just really stupid sounding.
But they have to say something. They could I suppose
just say I'm pleading the fifth You're right, I'm not
(01:07:28):
saying a damn thing, because you know, but of course
they have to say something. And remember the guy's pretending
to be a cop, so he's obviously not somebody who's
gonna like want to like screw with the cops, because
this is like his these are cops. This is what
he wants to He's thinking that, like this is a
fellow cop kind of right, Yeah, there is zero so
he watched the corp at Anyway, when the deputy asked
(01:07:50):
him why he had activated the lights, the defendant explained
that there was a Tesla in front of him driving slowly,
and he turned the lights on to make the Tesla mobile,
as opposed to what most people would do, which is
pass him. Now occasionally, at I forty three, in the
areas where it's only two lanes in each direction, you
can kind of be stuck behind somebody and so on,
(01:08:11):
I find that what you can do, if you're really
frustrated is you flash him a couple of times, right, yeah,
And the reason that you do that you don't have
blue and white lights on the top of your car
or anything like that to pull over. Well, the guy's
going too slow, so that's why I did this. Continuing,
a fake rifle was found on a passenger seat. No
(01:08:34):
often these cop cars will have a rifle. So he's
got a rifle, but it's a fake rifle. But would
you have a fake rifle for so only so you
look like a cop? And Stam denied having any other
items in his car consistent with law enforcement, like handcuffs,
a badge of the like. Stam admitted he was not
a police officer and that what he did was stupid.
See they all say it was stupid. Well, it occurs
(01:08:56):
to you that's stupid when the cop is standing here.
But forty five seconds ago, when they were run of
the lights and you were doing it, you didn't think
it was stupid. Yeah, you got It's a lot of
work to this. But I'm guessing this is like he's
into this. See I'm just first of all, I just
can't get myself to be this weird. Plus I'm just
too lazy. Well that's the other thing if you want
(01:09:18):
to be And I see some of these that are
like forty five obvious. Maybe they tried to be a
cop and got washed out, or they were chicken, or
they were too slow, there's a criminal conviction, or they
smoke pot and they and this guy's nineteen, he actually
could still be one and well, it can't be too
hard to become a cops. There's somebody in your family
that's a I know it's not that easy, but it's
(01:09:40):
not impossible. It can't be impossible. There's asillien enough I'm
running around out there. Stam admitted that he was not
a police officer and he was stupid. The complaints said.
The Nippity also learned Stam had a suspended driver's life.
I mean, okay, I could see he's not gonna make copy,
can't and even keep his driver's license in order. In
(01:10:02):
an interview with deputies, Stam said he recently bought the
lights for his car, thinking they were cool to have.
He denied any intent to impersonate a police officer, but
he said he turned the lights on to get the
Tesla to move over and it did not. Stam stated
that he activated the blue and white lights twice previously
to get other vehicles to yield or move over, and see,
(01:10:23):
that's all he can do. He wasn't going to actually
apparently pull anybody over and put him in cuffs and
so on. His whole thing was to turn the lights
on and feel like a big shot as the cars
are then pull over and then he'd drive on and
do the next thing. I just o there are people
out of the price. It's just like the same thing
with kittie porn. I can't imagine being into that. I
just can't. You know, some hot looking twenty seven year
(01:10:46):
old woman's pants that are ound in there, I get
getting turned on by that. I just can't get the
whole they're promising. Well, I could see what you'd be.
I just can't imagine this is but you're when you
watch horse races, I do well, I can't imagine. I know.
I just think, Mike is They're just a level of
It's just a weird thing, isn't it. Well, not only
(01:11:10):
is it. I'm just talking about why you'd want to
do it, all right, And know this, of the people
that are into perverts toward kids, that's it. It seemed that
a disproportionate number of them are soccer coaches. I mean, now,
part of the reason that you seem to get it,
there's azillion teachers that are getting caught up in this
(01:11:32):
is well, first of all, there's azillion teachers, and second
lay are they going into teaching because they're attracted to
young people or because all they're around is young people.
That's what they get attracted to. I don't know the answer.
Another soccer coach. Now this is a weird one. This
one's being reported in Fox six. The guy is a
local youth soccer coach. He is accused of trying to
(01:11:53):
fly overseas they have sex with children. That's a lot
of trouble. I'm not sure I want to fly overseas
to do anything. I mean, what is it that you
want enough to do that you're gonna set on a
plane for eight or night. There's got to be like
some sort of tourism or something. I mean, what, yeah,
(01:12:14):
like ski in the Alps or something. Even then, even
if I as a skier, I just think I'd rather
go to Aspen than you know, you've been on cruises.
You see how long the line of customs in some
of these foreign countries is. Do you anyway? Here's the
guy's name, Justin Kaegerbauer. He's forty six, charged in federal
(01:12:38):
court with multiple sex crimes. On Tuesday, judge out of
the forty six year old detained pending trial. Fox six
reached out to this attorney and did not get a response.
Here's the backstory. A flight bound and I'm not going
to make light of this year because this is this
guy's in our community. A flight bound for New York's
John F. Kennedy International Airport took off from Chice, oh
(01:13:00):
Here on Thanksgiving morning. Federal agents planned to arrest Haegerbauer
at the airport, but he never made it. Two hours later,
court records show the forty six year old man is
it was in US marshal's custody at the federal courthouse.
He appeared before a magistrate judged that after doing for months.
Prosecutors said, and again, the thing with this is, you
know what, with the Internet and everything, there is no
(01:13:21):
place less private in our world than the Internet. It's
the easiest thing for them to snoop on, you know,
to put a listening device into your home. They got
to bust into your host thing osten. When I watched
The Sopranos, they always seem to like try to put
those things in lamps. Well, I guess it's because who
looks under a lamp? Yeah, I was right, I mean, see,
(01:13:44):
I mean that's Carl. First of all, they gotta get
in and they gotta play the Internet. It's all it's
very easy to tap in and just go onto your
computer and see what's going on, which is good because
I mean they're good and bad things about it. One
of the good things is we're catching these cretness perverts.
So anyway, for months, the prosecutors said he had been
talking with who he thought was a woman in the
(01:14:04):
United United Kingdom with a nine year old niece. It
was actually an undercover UK cop. So this is a
Flicks guy's probably thinking I'm gonna do this overseas because
I know there's all these cops in walker Shaw and
so on posing as posing to these people. But it
certainly wouldn't be in Britain, and it's a British cop.
(01:14:25):
Court filing said he wrote he would be interested in
girls six plus. Oh my god, I mean, aside from
my moral disapproval, I'm actually serious with what's what. I
just don't get what they praction is. I I have
(01:14:46):
never in my life thought of something, and I'm you know,
we talked about the whole seventeen thing in the Woody
Ellen movie, in which nobody back. It was only you know,
forty five nineteen seventy nine when Manhattan came out. You know,
he's having a relationship with the seventeen year old in
the movie, and it was not even controversial at the time. Now,
in part the age of consent in New York State
at that time was sixteen. A lot of states have
(01:15:08):
kind of changed those rules, but it since become considered,
if not criminal, seventeen is a close call in the
laws in a lot of states. Not criminal. It's just
generally disapproved of the guy in the forties, and but
that is an attitude that's rather new. But six six
has never been acceptable unless, as they say, you're a
Pakistani immigrant. Six plus is quote as well as I
(01:15:31):
have no experience, but I would love to and it
would be a dream come true. My dream, contru would
be like winning the Kentucky Derby or something. This guy
is to go to England and have sex with a
six year old. The undercover officer and Kiggerbower chatted more
than one hundred times in March to November, reiterating plans
to visit the woman and the nine year old girl.
(01:15:52):
They some can say, it's just talk, it's just talk,
it's just the guy booked a flight to London. Blue
told federal investigators kager Bar bought a one way ticket.
Was he gonna stay there and live happily ever after?
I mean, I get I actually buy one way tickets.
It used to be you get a big discount on
the round trip. It's not really true anymore. So you know,
(01:16:16):
you can decide when to come back to he throw
Airport in London via JFK for November twenty seventh, which
is wasn't that Thanksgiving Day? What a sick day to
go do it? It's gonna get out a plane to
go overseas. They have sex with a child that he's
leaving on Thanksgiving Day. From court filings and archived websites,
(01:16:39):
Fox six News that Kaegerbauer was an architect for Heartland
Homebuilders and served as the director of tryouts and accounts
receivable for the Franklin based Croatian Eagles soccer club. Prosecutors
have not mentioned any allegations involving the club or children,
so again, there's no medication that he's actually done anything
like this. But again, how do you know? So anybody
who's if your kids have had contact, I would at
(01:17:01):
least ask, you know, do you remember this guy did
anything odd happen? And so on? Maybe it did, maybe
it didn't. Time for our weekly football preview and some
point spread picks next on the Mark Belling Podcast. This
is the Mark Belling Podcast. Unfortunately, Mike Burletta of American
Sports Analysts and Madison cannot be with us this week.
(01:17:24):
There's he's got a conflict in his personal life and
so on, and he was not able to join us
at the time for taping. So we're going to do
this a little bit shorter than normal our football preview.
I will simply share some thoughts and a couple of
big things going on in football this weekend. The biggest
college football game nobody's even when you have number one
playing number two, it's kind of a magical thing. Less
(01:17:45):
so this year, because the football playoffs are in place,
and both teams will advance to the playoffs anyway, and
they're both probably going to get first round buys. The
team that loses will still probably be ranked in the
top four. But Ohio's plays Indiana for the Big Ten championship.
And one of the things that I dislike about the
(01:18:06):
college playoffs, as I say, is this game doesn't have
the consequence if we had a shorter playoff, like a
four team thing, and it meant that the loser would
be out. It would give this game incredible meaning. Still
it's a fascinating game because both teams are unbeaten, they're
in the same league, and most of their wins were
(01:18:27):
by whiteouts. Because the Big Ten now has eighteen teams,
a lot of these teams don't even have opponents in
common where you can compare that both have tremendous offense
is ranked both ranked in the top five in the country,
and Ohio State in particular has a great defense. Indiana's
offense seems to be a little better. What makes the
(01:18:48):
game very, very hard to predict is since they both
essentially kill the teams in the Big Ten and have
similar strengths of schedule, who really is better. When we
talk talked about the Ohio State Michigan game last week,
Mike pointed out that Ohio State through the luck of
the draw. Remember when you have an eighteen team league,
(01:19:09):
you're only going to play half the other teams in
the league, and that they do it by random. Wisconsin
just got unlucky this year, and that they had no
soft Big Ten games. Every great team in the league
it seemed as though, was on their schedule. Ohio State
has a softer schedule, so Mike wasn't sure that they
would how badly they would beat Michigan. As it turns out, Michigan,
which has had Ohio State's number, Ohio State which is
(01:19:30):
so focused on the game, and Ohio State slaughtered them.
Indiana finished the season playing a very poor team. It's
cross state rival puit Perdue, and they beat him fifty
six to three. So that's an interesting game. The prestige
that comes out of it is simply being the only
undefeated team left and the title of Big Ten Championship. Unfortunately,
(01:19:54):
two weeks later, when they both start their action in
the college football playoffs, people will have forgotten the game.
On the college football playoffs. I mentioned in an earlier
segment Diego Pavia, the quarterback for Vanderbilt, asking President Trump
to intervene because the playoffs are all screwed up, and
they are all screwed up. Doesn't matter how many teams.
Pick a number of teams that you put in the playoffs,
doesn't matter what it is. Just grab a number. Just
(01:20:15):
grab any number, could be big or small. Seven. Well,
I wish you would have picked the number I higher. Well,
twelve is the current number. Okay, seven, seven is a
really whatever. The teams that are going to eight, nine, ten,
eleven to twelve at thirteen are all going to argue
whether or not they should be in that seven. If
you pick thirty two, there's going to be arguments about it.
(01:20:37):
My problem with picking so many is that it diminishes
the regular season. I think it should be really hard
to get into these things. I think that the NFL
expanding their playoffs isn't a good thing. All these sports
that make it so easy to get in the regular
season is irrelevant. The NBA now with the ten teams
make the playoffs. Some of them are on the play
(01:20:58):
in tournament. The only point of the regular season is
to not be so terrible that you don't make the playoffs.
So teams play for five months when the real season
only lasts four a couple of months when you go
into the postseason. Anyway, Pavia is right because we have
all of these conferences, and in order to craft the twelve,
they do require that of the five of the four
(01:21:19):
major conferences they get a guaranteed automatic bid. The winner
of each of the four big conferences gets in of
the five lesser top conferences. They call them the Group
of five. There's a guarantee that one team, at least
one team from the group of kive will get in,
and there's a debate about who that should be. James
(01:21:41):
Madison has had an outstanding season, but they're in one
of the group of five leagues, and some people think
that the team that wins the American Association Conference will
get that bid rather than James Madison. With regard to
Pavi's team, Vanderbilt, you have a league this year, the CC,
that has only one good team, and there are several
(01:22:04):
teams in the SEC that are better than everybody in
the ACC. But because the ACC gets an automatic bid
and you can only take so many teams from the SEC,
Vanderbilt is on the outside looking in. And you could say, well,
at least then the ACC, if it has the one
good team, they'll get in. Except guess what, the only
team that's really good in the ACC didn't make the
(01:22:26):
ACC title game. Why when you have so many of
these conferences with a zillion teams in them, you're gonna
get a lot of ties. You might get say seven
teams that are well, that's too high. Four teams that
are seven to one, so you go to the tiebreaker.
Every team lost the game, but Miami, which is the
one good team in the ACC, they lost to. It
(01:22:48):
might have been SMU. They lost to another team that
was in the tiebreaker with them, and they end up
not being eligible for the title game. Most people believe
that the two best teams in the ACC are Miami
and n You neither of them are on the title game.
Virginia and Duke are, and there isn't a single person
of things that Virginia or Duke has any chance to
do anything in the college football playoffs. Turning our attention
(01:23:10):
to the NFL, there's only one game that we need
to focus on, and that's the Packers and the Bears.
It is very interesting how heavily favored the Packers are.
The Bears have the number one seed in the NFC,
they're in first place in the Central Division, and they're
on quite the winning streak. But they're not only underdogs
of the Packers, they're underdogs by six and a half points,
(01:23:33):
which has surprised a lot of people and raised eyebrows.
On the other hand, prior to their win last week
against Philadelphia, a team that might in reality be awful.
The Bears have won so many close games in which
they've been outgained, they still have been outscored on the year.
The people that go by simply the numbers will look
(01:23:55):
upon the Bears as an average team that has a
lot of wins. The people that look at wins and
losses say, who who cares what the numbers are? That
team wins a lot. You've got a curious situation with
the Packers and the Bears, and that they play twice
in three weeks. If either team wins both of those games,
it's almost mathematically impossible that they don't win the division
(01:24:18):
if they split. The Packers in that situation, with getting
a tie earlier in the year, will either come back
to help or haunt them, depending on where the Bears are.
I would be of the opinion that Green Bay will
win the game. That's notwithstanding whether or not I think
that they would cover a six and a half point spread.
But I think that the Packers are a more complete
(01:24:38):
team than the Bears, and I think that the Packers
are playing much better now than they were earlier in
the year. Still a very interesting game, and it's nice
to once again have the Packers and the Bears playing
in games that have a very high stakes. All right,
that's enough of our preview. Let's get around to point
spread picks for this week, and the recapping has just
gotten for me to be. I started the season so
(01:25:00):
well and I have just the only bright side I'll
point out is I mentioned a lot that I'm in
a contest with some friends and we all picked three
games against the points spread. I did go two and
one last week, and I went on went three to
the preceding two weeks after starting the season on our
show here six and two. I've been wrong about everything,
but last week I just happened of the three games
that I like to pick the wrong one. I thought
(01:25:22):
Kansas State would beat Colorado by seventeen or more. They
beat him decisively, but only by the ten, so I lost.
Mike also lost. He's having an awful season with his
picks on the air. He took Tulsa over UAB. That
didn't work at all. Paul took the Bears seven point
hunderdogs against the Eagles, and that was by far the
best pick of the week, as the Bears won the
(01:25:42):
game straight up. You got it? Was it nine points
or eleven. I thought it was eleven, but maybe you're right. Yeah,
the bear, wasn't it twenty six fifteen? You're probably right, Okay,
I thought it was by eleven. Anyway, So those were
the selections, and we're all underwater, and somehow I'm still ahead,
(01:26:04):
but Paul's catching me. And anyway, for those of you
interested in what ASA has going on this week Mike's company,
go to ASA wins dot com. I don't want to
oversell something, but I believe they won their college football
game of the year this past week. And if I'm wrong,
it's just a mistake. And my memory is a little fuzzy,
but my recollection was that they did all right. Time
(01:26:28):
for picks this weekend, there are nine college games. All
of the conferences have their championship game. Every conference now
has a championship playoff game, and following that the bowl
games on the College Football Playoffs starts. So those nine
games go on. Plus in the NFL, the buys are
still going on. Four teams at buys. But that's the schedule,
all right, get my sheet here, Paul, who started the
(01:26:52):
season so terribly and has gotten hot. You're happy, You're
only you're only half game up because I have fallen up.
I mean if I just like was like Meadi yocre
over the last few weeks, I'd be were running away
from this because I started so strong. But I mean
I started six and two. I'm now six seven and one.
That means I'm on a run of er five and one.
(01:27:13):
I managed to tie one of my picks in lose
the other five. All right, which game you want the
over under end? The spread on the Packer Bear game? Yeah,
six and a half and the total is forty four
and a half. And of course the game's in Green Bay.
Paul thinks it's easy. Huh, Paul's thinking the Bears. Paul
(01:27:42):
said the Packers could win by three or lose. Now
politic the Bears last week. He's high on the Bears.
Give me, give me your other reasons here. The Bear's
average over one hundred fifty yards rushing. The Packers only
injury of no now at the moment is they lost
their best run stopper in Devonte Wyatt. Clearly that's an issue.
(01:28:06):
And Wyatt is an example of one of those guys
that you can't judge a first round draft choice the
first two years because he was useless his first two seasons,
but he's developed into well the best interior alignment, not
the best line of the best in caurior alignment on
the team. And he's out for the year and the
Bears are running the ball very well. You're right, he
(01:28:29):
thinks still control the clock by running the ball. Paul
points out that William's passing stats are not that good.
I think that their receivers are only okay. They're putting
up a lot of points. They have the downside of
not having the greatest receivers in the roum. They lead
(01:28:49):
the end well. There are turnovers are unbelievable. They are
off the charts in producing turnovers and not committing any.
And there is no better factor to win a game
than to Going back to the Packer game last week,
I can tend the Packers are really plus five and
turnovers because I think fourth down conversion or stop is
the same as a turnover. Imagine if you fumbled the
(01:29:10):
ball and third down and the other team recovered well,
fourth down and the other team getting ball at that point,
it is the effect of a turnover. I think all
of those points are valid. I do think this. I
think that the Packers defense is ten points better than
the Bears defense. I'm still not so old on the
Packer corners, but one of them has gotten better than
(01:29:32):
he was earlier in the season, and the other one
is okay. I think the Packer defense is much better.
I think the Green Bay I think they've looked very
good the last couple of weeks. I think the Packers
will win. The thing about six and a half on
a point spread is it's just like three. There are
so many games in the NFL that end by exactly seven,
(01:29:53):
and they can be really close. You can have a
game seventeen to seventeen with a minute left and a
team it's a forty five your touchdown pass and seven
point win looks like a blow away when it was
actually a very narrow game. So I just don't really know.
Mike has sent us a pick, and he's been nice
enough to give a long narrative on the pick, which
I'm guessing his clients also get, so I'll just share it.
(01:30:14):
Mike is looking at the game. I got to check
our points spread on it here. Paul reminded me to
do that and I didn't. Yeah, that's it. Seattle and Atlanta.
I think Atlanta is maybe the most disappointing team in
the NFC this year, don't you. They were thought to
be very good and they're bad. And I would say
(01:30:36):
maybe the most surprising team in the NFC is Seattle, right,
just as I mean the most surprising team in the
NFL is simple New England. New England is the best
record in football and who saw that coming. That's just
a function. And talk about this in the NBA all
the time. When you're bad for several years, you get
all those early draft picks and if you pick right, okay,
(01:30:56):
they play. In the case of New England, you think
the MVP is going to be I think it's Drake
may right. I mean it's early to say, but you
know he was the quarterback at North Carolina when they
picked him in the first round of the draft, and
he's having a spectacular season. Anyway, Mike's looking at the
game between Seattle and Atlanta, and he's looking at the total,
(01:31:18):
which is forty four and a half. And Mike's pick
is on the over, and I'll just read what he
wrote for us. Seattle has been held under twenty six
points only once in their last six games, and that
was against the Rams who have a good defense. Seattle
is averaging twenty nine points per game on the season,
which is fourth in the NFL. Last week, they scored
twenty six versus Minnesota, but they held the Vikings scoreless,
(01:31:41):
so there was no need to score more than that.
The Seattle offense wasn't pushed to score at all last week.
We think they'll be pushed to score this week versus Atlanta.
Teams that come off a shutoff win shut out win
tend to go over the following week, as we usually
get a lower total than we should in that case.
So what Mike's pointing out is because they're coming off
a shutout last week, the total gets lowered by the
(01:32:04):
odds makers a little bit, and it becomes artificially the
point he's making. In fact, he has all these stats.
These are interesting. NFL road teams who pitched a home
shutout the previous week are thirteen and one to the
over since twenty seventeen. Wow, Teams that are coming off
a shutout win at home the following week, the game
went over thirteen or fourteen times. That means that it
(01:32:26):
won't go under this week. But that's quite the trend.
Let's see what else does he have for us? Atlanta
average is twenty three points per game at home this season,
and they put up at least twenty three points in
five straight games. They started the season going under the
total and six of the first seven, but the Felcons
have since gone over in four of their last five.
Kirk Cousins is getting comfortable and has been solid the
(01:32:47):
last two weeks in his starting role with four hundred
and thirty three yards passing and completing over sixty six
percent of his passes he goes on. But the point
is is that Mike is suggests saying the over in
Seattle and Atlanta? Whaty one and a half and I'm
gonna go to You looked at all the games, right,
what's the other big game in the NFL this weekend?
(01:33:11):
And by the way, not the game fans? Do you
realize that the game on Thanksgivings the highest regular season ever,
the game between the Chiefs and the Cowboys. Now, part
of that is the time. The mid afternoon Thanksgiving game
is always huge ratings because you know the rating count
if the TV is on and people are watching, and
it's always right before, right after, even during since it's
(01:33:32):
three and a half hours of Thanksgiving dinner. Nobody's out
on the roads of those days and so on. In fact,
the Packer game early at a huge rating as well.
But people still think of the Chiefs and Cowboys as
marquee teams. They're two five hundred teams, is all they are,
Paul said, the Cowboys and the Lions. Well, you've got
a third place team going against the second, the Cowboys
(01:33:54):
and second. Yeah, they have to be because the Giants
and Commanders think and they and Philadelphia I think, still
leads as bad as they are. Yeah, the Eagles are, Well,
that's a bad division this year, the East. I mean,
it's just a marquee I see you miss this. I'm
going between a game in which two first placed teams
are playing each other, the tied for first in their
(01:34:15):
own division. But they're not marquee teams because perception. It's
just like the Patriots. Nobody thinks of them as a
marquee team. They are the best record in the league.
The Jaguars play the Colts. They're tied for first in
the NFC South. They're both eight and four. I mean,
who which are they are tied? The Ravens and Steelers
are both. That's another they're tied for first. Huh boy,
(01:34:38):
another division that's just a quagmire of mediocrity. Then you
have the end, I mean the NFC North, the only
poor team Clinton, the Minnesota In the NFC West, Arizona's
not even that bad, into the only poor team. You've
got several divisions really strong and others that are terrible. Anyway,
We're going to the NFC South game. Indianapolis is playing Jacksonville.
(01:34:58):
As I say, it's a dead heat for the lead.
Speaker 3 (01:35:00):
What did you say AFC, AFC South If I said
NFC that was clearly a mistake, which Paul quickly jumps
on to correct me, and he'll probably correct my pick
here since I've been wrong for about a month.
Speaker 2 (01:35:12):
I've been wrong, literally for a month and a half.
The game is in Jacksonville, but the Colts on the
road are favored by one and a half. You probably
didn't even think about the game, did you. Now, I
admit I'm just not a cold streak. And there's fewer
games to pick from this week in college and so on,
and what Paul's guessing, I'm taking the Colts. All year,
(01:35:33):
people have been pointing out that the Jaguar statistically aren't
that good. They were winning a lot of close games.
I'm taking Jacksonville. This is reversed over the last several weeks.
The Colts have crashed to earth and Jacksonville is as
hot as any team in the NFL. I think in
(01:35:53):
this case, perception has not yet caught up to reality. Well.
I don't think home field and manages manage just for
much of anything in the NFL. The reality is Jacksonville
is at least at home. But let me read Jacksonville's
most recent games. They had their bye in late October.
Since then, they went to Las Vegas and they beat
(01:36:14):
the Raiders. They then played a Houston team which is
really improved and lost to them by ten, followed by
they beat the Chargers by twenty nine, and then the
last two weeks were on the road, admittedly poor competition,
but on the road they beat the Cardinals twenty seven
to twenty four, and they beat Tennessee, the worst team
in the league, by twenty two. So you have a
Jacksonville team that's gotten very, very hot Offensively, they're putting
(01:36:35):
up very good numbers right now with Lawnsick quarterback, and
they're taking on an Indie team that is really cooled off.
Indianapolis last week lost to Houston, admittedly a close game.
The week before that they lost to the Chiefs. Now
you can say, well, again, that's the Chiefs, true, but
the Chiefs are a five hundred team, So I think
you have a team that has improved and is the
(01:36:56):
better team right now getting a tiny amount of points
one and a half. The only other game I thought
of is we're talking earlier about the Ohio State Indiana game.
Very hard to figure because they're both unbeaten. Ohio State's
favored by four, and I thought of taking Indiana just
because this seems to me the teams, based in everything
we've seen, are even. It's just a hard game to
(01:37:16):
read because they don't have many common opponents and they're
both slaughtering everybody. So flip the coin and I would
have leaned Indiana. But instead of doing that, I'm going
to take the one game I had any kind of
an opinion on. I think Jacksonville's going to win the
game straight up in a very close game, but I'm
getting the margin. I'm getting a point and a half
of points isn't much, but I'll take it. All right,
recapping all of our picks here, Paul is taking the
(01:37:39):
Bears to cover the six and a half points. I
hope you're wrong. Wouldn't it be great if the Packers
won by thirty seven? Oh? Yeah, I know. I'd be
happy about that too. The only downside of that is
there is some history that if you kill a team,
you have to play them back again. That whole revenge
thing comes in. I don't know if that matters anyway.
By the way, the Packer game is a late afternoon
(01:38:00):
game on Sunday, Well, they've got a marquee game. It's
actually not as important a game because it's non conference,
although the Packers tiebreakers don't. Yeah, that will as well.
But the Packers played Denver, one of the best teams
in the AFC, next week, and that's a look ahead
(01:38:20):
game because the following week they've got the Bears again,
and that's the soldier field, all right. Paul says the
Bear is to either beat the Packers and lose by
six or less. Mike says, the Falcons and Seahawks score
more than forty four points forty four and a half points,
and I'm taking the Jaguars to either beat the colts
or lose by one or tied. Those are a picks.
(01:38:40):
That's the podcast for this week, back then another one
on Monday.
Speaker 1 (01:38:46):
The Mark Belling Podcast is a production of iHeartRadio Podcasts.
Production and engineering by Paul Crownforest. The Mark Belling Podcast
is presented by you Line for quality shifting and industrial supplies.
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Listen to all of Mark's podcasts, always available on the
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(01:39:10):
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Visit you line dot com. The Markbelling Podcast is a
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Speaker 2 (00:29):
Today we have a Quote of the Day. We don't
have a quote of the day every day. Some days
we put the quote of the day at the end
of the program. Other days there's no quote of the
day at all. Today's Quote of the Day starts the show.
It's really good and it helps explain at least two
(00:50):
or three of the topics that we have on the show,
including the very first one. The quote is from Thomas Sowell,
the brilliant conservative economist. He's been around forever. He's in
his nineties now, I believe, long time at the Hoover Institute,
which is attached to Stamford, one of the most prominent,
(01:10):
maybe the most prominent and influential African American conservative ever.
Here's his quote. It's very old quote anyway. It is
hard to imagine a more stupid or dangerous way of
making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands
of people who pay no price for being wrong. Never recall,
(01:35):
I did a podcast I think last week dealing with
this whole concept of no skin in the game, it
means the same thing. I mean, kind of the point
that SOOL makes is don't let decisions be made by
people who don't suffer at all if they're wrong with
(01:56):
that decision. It doesn't mean that if you do have
a big stake in things, you might not make a
bad decision, but you have a lot more incentive to
make the decision correctly if you suffer terribly if you're wrong. Now,
I'm going to give you a brief example, which this
(02:18):
is not the first topic, but a very brief example
of this. The CDC is now, I don't know if
acknowledging is the right word, but is reporting data that
it's had for some time. They believe that the number
is They're saying at least ten ten children who have
died because of or in relationship to receiving the COVID
(02:46):
nineteen vaccine. Ten. No people will point out that ten
is a tiny fraction of the number of children or
all sorts of people who got the COVID vaccine, and
that's correct, none the less, the number is ten. Yet
the official recommendation of many experts was for children to
(03:12):
be vaccinated against COVID nineteen. This proved so Well's point.
All of the people who recommended the children get the
COVID nineteen vaccine, what's happened to them? Nothing? For that matter,
all the people who got everything wrong on COVID, all
of the lockdown people, all of these dumbasses that serve
(03:33):
as public health directors, and all the counties in Wisconsin.
Did a single one of these morons ever get fired.
Did Tony Evers clear out his idiots who were pushing
all of these lockdowns and closing churches, all of which
turned out to be a disaster, completely unnecessary, and none
of which did anything to slow the spread of COVID,
(03:53):
something that I think damn near everybody in America eventually got,
which is why it's still around. But we have some
immunity to it, because all of us now have immunity,
and I runs nonetheless, of all the groups that were vaccinated,
the group that simply did not need it were children.
Because children not only when they got exposed to COVID,
(04:15):
did not get very sick at all, if at all.
Childhood deaths of COVID are virtually non existent. There's this
few scattered, but in every one of those cases, those
children had numerous other health problems that contributed or may
have been the primary cause. Yet you had parents, and
I talked about this time. I just could not fathom
(04:36):
a parent being so stupid as to vaccinate their child
against a disease that can't hurt the child. And I'm
not an anti vaxer, and I wasn't even an anti
COVID vaxer. I'm an old fart. I got the COVID vaccine.
I sized it up that, okay, fine, if I got COVID,
it might not be a good thing for me, given
that people in my age group are the ones that
(04:57):
are likely or to die of COVID. I'm not against
all the childhood vaccines, although I have a more open
mind on it than I did fifteen or twenty years ago.
But the things that I see children being vaccinated for
are things the children can get real sick from, or
some can even die well. Measles, but I remember having
(05:17):
I remember having the both of them. Do you remember
having the both of them? You do remember it? It was,
and I remember it was first. It was I had
measles before I had chicken pox. They were similar because
they both itched and they both had a rash. But
I really say, I mean I get Without regard to
your thoughts on vaccines, why people would say, because kids
get it and it is painful and it can occasionally
(05:38):
cause severe complications. All the other things rebella, whooping cough, polio,
et cetera. But this, it would like be like me
getting vaccinated against pregnancy. I can't get pregnant yet experts
push this. Experts, experts, experts and the parents who followed
(05:59):
their guy for the people who actually believe these experts.
Now we're going to dive into this tendency for so
called experts to always be wrong in just a moment here,
and I've got a couple of theories one and a
very interesting essay as to why that is. First, when
it comes to shipping packaging, industrial supplies, and equipment, many
(06:23):
suppliers offer endlessiles of product. You line knows what you
can't do with endlessiles of product. Test the quality of
each product and sure everything is in stock and ready
to ship the same day, and have a team available
twenty four to seven to answer your product questions. You
line only carries supplies, it equipment they've tested, tried, and
often use in their own business experience. The you line
(06:46):
difference today visit you line dot com. The listener sent
me this. There's a website called Real Clear Politics. They've
now taken that brand and they have Real Clear this
and Real Clear That. It's a website that leans conservative
and they now cover a number of issues beyond politics.
(07:07):
And this one is Real Clear Science. But the Real
Clear is their brand. And so it's a brief essay
from a guy ex a woman named Mitzi Perdue, and
she offers a theory as to why experts in almost
any field have a tendency to get not the little things,
but the big things wrong, the real big things. Before
(07:32):
I even get into her piece, I'll just mentioned another word.
For instance, you can have an expert in, for example,
the weather. And you know we make fun of the
weather people, but often the storm that we had this
past weekend, they said the winter storm morning would end
at six o'clock Sunday morning, and I was up at
five thirty. I'm telling you, it stops snowing at six.
(07:52):
By six thirty, the skies were clear. I got up
at five thirty. At all I saw was that cloudy, misty,
snow was all gray and all all of that. I mean,
they're usually in the short term, but in the long haul,
almost every single thing they said twenty five years ago
about what would happened with climate change has turned out
to be wrong. Yet we continue to be able well
(08:16):
act their experts. They're experts, they're experts, they're experts. The piece,
This is a quote from Paul Krugman. Paul Krugman is
he's one of the most fun liberals to make fun
of because he's a big, pompous ass. He I don't
(08:38):
know if he still writes it, because I don't read
it as much. The New York Times is where he was.
He was there. He's a big economist who had a
column with the New York Times, and he's a big
time lefty and I'm big no it all and wrong always.
You could just have a cottage if you could write
a book and all of the things that Krugman has
written over the years and how none of them happened.
(08:58):
In fact, the exact opposite. This is what he wrote. Obviously,
if you did this to me and you went back
on all the things that I said over thirty six years,
I'm sure you'd be able to pull out a bunch
of idiotic things as well. I think on the overall, however,
I've spotted zillions of transit have been way ahead of
the curve, and the number of times I've been able
(09:19):
to say I told you so. Things that I thought
were fairly obvious, like nobody's gonna ride the stupid trolley
clearly turned out to be right of me. The ex
nod no, no, no, no. If he was, how would
you know? You're just a big mouth that's got a
microphone him. Yeah, you're right, That's all I am. Who
was right and who is wrong? Anyway, here's the quote
(09:40):
from Krugman again. He said so many stupid things over
the years, So she's gonna go out and cherry pick
the most, probably the dumbest thing he ever said. The
internet will have no more economic impact than the fax machine. Ha,
that's he wrote. That's okay, Krugman call on that than others.
(10:06):
US intelligence insisted the Afghan government would hold for months
after the American withdrawal. It fell in eleven days. Military
analysts around the world predicted Kaiev would fall within seventy
two hours. In February of twenty twenty two. Of course
Kaiev Ukraine. It never did. The media lined up to
(10:26):
predict that Harry Potter would flop because kids no longer
read Harry Potter sold half a billion copies. Those were
not fringe voices. These were the crowned heads of their domains, credentialed, lauded,
confident experts. Their expertise was real, but their predictions were wrong.
(10:52):
Why are experts so often and so publicly wrong? The
answer comes from the ancient Greek poet arche Lochus, whose
wisdom still matters today. Quote. The fox knows many things,
but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Hedgehogs are deep specialists.
(11:17):
They master one domain, seeing the world through a narrow lens.
Their training encourages a single track that says, double down,
go deep, defend your turf. Foxes are integrators, generalists who
(11:37):
pull ideas some different fields and adapt as reality demands.
Foxes do not just tolerate ambiguity, they thrive at it. Now,
the point that's being made here is that the hedgehog
knows one thing and knows it really really no. But
the fox, the wisely fox, I don't know a lot
(11:58):
about any particular thing. But he knows a lot about
everything and is filled with constant doubt and is open minded. Now,
the point that's being drawn here is that the hedgehog,
the one who knows the one thing so closely, that's
the expert. The experts are knowledgeable and the one thing.
But say the loudmouth behind the microphone me, I don't
(12:19):
know what am I an expert in. Look, maybe two things.
I think I'm an expert in how to do talk radio,
and I have some expertise and understanding horse racing very
very hard. Beyond that nothing, I'm a generalist, but I
have an open mind, and I'm able to take a
look at how one thing affects everything else and what
the ripple effect is. And I have common sense, and
(12:41):
I am not somebody who's tied to a decision on
the basis of having a stake in it. Back to
the piece, Psychologist Philip Tetlock spend twenty years tracking expert predictions.
What a great thing to do with this guy? He
(13:01):
tracks expert predictions. First of all, that what a great
thing to do, because I mean, you're just gonna have
a field day. I've been able to write all the
stupid things that people claim. I mean that would have
to act. If you're gonna be out there in a
field and like track things, that'd be a fun thing
to do. The downside is you got to wait a
long time to pull this stuff up. But if you're
doing it a long time, you know, if you've been
(13:21):
doing it for thirty years, you just keep up. Okay,
here's what this moron set in nineteen ninety five, and
so yeah, sorry. Philip Tetlock predictions about world events. In
his two decade study, Tetlog catalogued more than twenty eight
thousand expert predictions and found that experts were slightly less
(13:41):
accurate than a random coin toss. So what he did
after twenty eight thousand decisions and then calculate what the
experts said and so on, and he found, you know,
coin toss, you're gonna be right half the time. He
found that the experts were correct slightly less us than
(14:03):
half the time. As it decided, And I'll get back
to the piece. One of the things that some actual
experts in a certain field do is go against the
other experts, which becomes kind of problematic because now you
have a bunch of other experts, just the agriss agree
of the first experts. But here's an example of that
(14:25):
in stock market. In investing, one of the things that
so called contrary investors do is they take a look.
When they say, see on the stock market, sentiment is
overwhelmingly bullish, they say, that's the time to sell. That
the crowd is completely wrong. And there is some logic
behind this. Let's imagine all these people are overwhelmingly bullish. Well,
(14:46):
that means they're fully invested. When you're fully invested, you
don't have any more to invest. It's all in, so
there's no more new money to come in. There's only
one place for stocks to go, and that's down. Likewise,
this is hard to do. I've been correct in it
a few times in my life. When everybody is completely
negative and sour on something, that's the time to dive
(15:09):
in and be optimistic. I wrote a column and it
was either OA at our Own nine. It was after
the housing crash, when the credit markets fell apart and
so on, and I said that this is the greatest
opportunity by housing in my lifetime. I wasn't smart enough
to do any didn't do anything about it. I mean,
I talked forever and ever and ever about you know,
(15:31):
Paul and I were going on these cruises and we're
staying in Florida, and we were staying in a hotel
that it was on the North Strip in Miami Beach,
and there were all these abandoned new high rises that
they started up in stopped construction on, just just sitting
there in which they gave up because the funding dried up. Well,
a bunch of investors, mostly foreigners in South America, came up,
brought up the whole buildings or brought up three four,
(15:52):
five hundred of those condo units, and they're all billionaires
because of it. I was right in the overall, but
wasn't smart enough to do anything about it. The other
thing was, I remember my call when the stock market
bottomed out in March of nine. This was two months
into Obama's presidency. It was again during my cruise, and
(16:12):
I told the Cruiz group that I think that the
stock market has bottomed out, And it was simply based
on you know, we had, remember the credit market seized
up in seven eight. The recession occurred as a result
of that. We had twenty three months in a row
of negative economic activity. And finally there was a positive.
It was simply, there's only so bad that certain things
can get. And I remember saying this, I think we
bottomed out, And in fact that was the bottom of
(16:34):
the stock market and the beginning of the rally that
occurred during Obama. But a lot of people, particularly those
people were stock work. Is like going a rally during Obama.
There were slaves to this. No again, I could probably
come up with any number of things in which I
followed the lead of what experts were. But it's an
indication that breaking ranks from expertise and a consensus of
(16:56):
experts will usually have your right rather than wrong. Anyway,
to the piece, now, the writer is quoting this psychologist Telllock,
who pointed out that he went back and studied over
decades twenty eight thousand expert predictions and found that the
experts were slightly less than half were wrong slightly more
than half the time. Quote. The question he posed was.
(17:19):
The questions he posed were simple ones with yes or
no answers. For example, would the Soviet Union collapse in
five years? So that would have been a question probably
asked in the late eighties, would would a major war
break out again? And again the hedgehogs. The deep experts
(17:41):
failed dramatically. The generalists, however, did substantially better than chance.
Their secret was breadth of perspective and adaptability, the classic
traits of foxes. Experts failed because of tunnel vision, like
(18:01):
photographers using a telephoto lens. Hedgehogs so only a narrow
slice of reality and can go back to COVID. The
people who focused only on the one thing we have
to stop the spread of the virus and didn't consider
anything else. How actual humans behave the devastating impacts and
(18:24):
society of locking things down, the horrifying impact on education,
of keeping children out of school, the panic and depression
that's set in when you scared people to death, Not
to mention your failure to question the whole premise in
(18:50):
the first place, which is why should we even try
to stop the spread of the virus. If the virus
is out there, the virus if like every other virus
known demand The ones that are easily spread eventually effect
virtually everybody. The ones that are harder to spread, that
can only be spread saying blood to blood, contact or sex,
and so on, they affect everybody that engages in those
kinds of things, but they don't affect the general population.
(19:11):
But again they didn't question any of that. They just
stuck to their thing. This virus is dangerous and therefore
we have to stop it from spreading. And couldn't see
outside that. And then of course the problem with the
people who just knee jerk follow this, And I can
tell you who the people are that I likeliest to
knee jerk follow what the consensus of experts say. People
(19:33):
that have no self confidence in their decision making. And
this would almost entirely be liberals. No, why you've got
to think this one through. Why would liberals have no
self confidence in their decision making? The answer is because
they've never faced up to it. But deep down, back
in there, they know that they've always been wrong. They've
always been wrong. So therefore they gravitate because they think
(19:55):
that they're smart. They gravitate toward what experts say and
just glom onto that, as opposed to do like me,
who aren't smart enough to listen to the experts. Back
to the piece. The deeper someone goes into a field,
the more their framework, their one big thing, becomes their
only lens. Let me give you a horse racing analogy.
(20:18):
Do you want a horse racing analogy? There are zillions
of factors that can go into how well a horse
will do over its career or even who's going to
do well in a specific races. I'm telling you zillions.
But there are some people, the biggest single group of
you know, you talk about one issue people. One issue
(20:39):
people on horse racing are people that are slaves to
speed figures. And indeed, of all the things you look
at in a race of speed figure is probably the
most important thing. Obviously, faster horses are likely to win
the slower horses, but there's a lot of other factors
beyond simply how fast they read in the past that
apply here and there are simple I won't look at
(21:00):
anything else anything well, but there's seven other speedy horses
in the room. Nothing. Of course, it becomes complicated when
you've got a way fifty nine different factors and then
decide which one is where I add more. But they
just they'll focus on the one thing. And this is
the point that's being referenced here. Somebody that's a deep
(21:22):
expert in one particular thing focuses only on that. Let
me give you another example. This is an old one.
It's been going on forever and ever and ever. Let's
imagine you got a heart problem. You go to a cardiologist.
I'm telling you, the cardiologist is going to tell you
to put you on meds. Then you go to the
heart surgeon. The heart surgeon's gonna say you need surgery.
(21:43):
The cardiologist doesn't do surgery. They prescribe meds. Heart surgeons
do surgery. So of course they both are gonna have
the bias to recommend that you do the thing that
they're into. Practors don't for scripe medication other than maybe
(22:04):
one or two things. I don't think any I'm not
sure though, but I mean I'm to say so. Therefore,
they have a bias toward leaning against it. They may
be right in one's person specific thing, but because that's
the thing that they know, they don't see the larger
overall view of Okay, this one might actually need it,
(22:26):
whereas this one over here they just need to loosen
their muscles up. Whatever the thing. Anyway, back to the piece,
Some say, only half jokingly, that science advances one funeral
at a time. It is a good line. They say
this because once someone holds a particular view that view
can become part of their identity. Oh I point this
(22:48):
out all the time. Why are liberals liberal? Because they're liberal?
They're terrified of abandoning their liberalness because they become part
of their identity. They don't want to become like one
of us. They would rather be wrong and hang around
in their stupid lefty crowd because that's such an important
part of their identification. I think you certainly see this
(23:13):
with the very dangerous hacks and the schools in child
psychology that are encouraging boys to chop off their cladinguses
and girls that chop off their boobs. Once they've decided
that this is a good thing to do, it doesn't
matter how much evidence we have that we're destroying people's lives.
(23:35):
They're going to keep doing it. Plus, of course, the
rationalization coming in this is how they're making their money.
Every child that they chop up is dollar signs for them.
But that's no excuse, for example, for the boards of
directors of say children's hospital, to go ahead and allow
(23:56):
these people to do it. Of Course, the guy that
chops off the little girl's boom is going to be
somebody in favor of that. That's where they get their buddy,
and maybe they sincerely believe it, but it doesn't mean
they're right. Will experts say this? So what again? They're
looking at the short trip the girl thinks that she's
a boy. The longer term view would be, maybe she's
(24:16):
gonna change her mind in a year or two or
three or four or five or six or how are
you gonna pump all these hormones into a body that
was naturally producing female hormones? Isn't this gonna create one
big giant mix And the next thing you know, you've
got somebody as screwed up as say Morgan Geyser, somebody
who I think is a just a walking example of
what happens when quacks were called. Experts dive into somebody
(24:39):
with problems and make them all worse back of the bees.
When entire disciplines fall victim to this kind of thinking,
you get the worst effects of hedgehog thinking. You get
a whole field in which brilliant people are confidently yet
(25:00):
s caacularly wrong. Journalists foxes in a hedgehog world. Now,
of course, the media is supposed to be the people
that would question all of this. They're supposed to be generalists.
But most people know who go into the media are
just the opposite. They accept what the experts supposedly have
to say, rather than constantly challenging them. They are vicious
(25:23):
towards skeptics when they're the ones that are supposed to
be the skeptics. For example, when Tom Barrett's running around
saying I'm gonna rip up a bunch of streets and
put train tracks down, the few people are supposed to
challenge that, to come up with all the ideas why
that's rowing and make them instead no, no, no, no, less,
it's a good thing what the writer says about this.
(25:44):
So where do we find foxes? One place is supposed
to be journalism. The best journalists are forced to be
foxes every day. They deal with conflicting accounts, unexpected outcomes,
and situations where things they were sure of turn out
to be turnout not to be. So the piece goes on,
(26:10):
let me move to a topic that I think fits
this overall general theme at least a little bit. So
Colum in the Wall Street General Today and Barton swam
and it deals with it starts with the disaster of
Somali immigration to the United States. I mean the whole
term Somali is becoming a punchline on the High Seas.
(26:34):
When you think of Somalis, what do you think of pirates?
When you think of Somalis in America, what do you
think of about scammers? It's obviously unfair to the Somalis
and the high Seeds that aren't pirates, and it's unfair
to the Somalis who aren't scammers. Nonetheless, Burton Swim is
an interesting piece here, and it eventually goes beyond the
(26:57):
Somalis and just points out why mass immigration of Muslim
Muslim populations simply isn't going to work in the Western world,
and it's because the Western world is not premised on
the way Muslims think. It's it's premised on Judeo Christian ideology,
which is essentially secular. Whereas Muslims can't think in anything
(27:19):
other than their religious terms. They believe that only they
can make good decisions and only their thinking is tolerable
everyone else should die, which is the exact opposite of
how a Judeo Christian society that believes in openness and
freedom would think. Here's his piece. He writes, if you
wanted to invent a parable of modern liberalism's failure. You'd
(27:43):
have to work hard to top the story of Somalis,
immigrants and US citizens alike builking Minnesota's social welfare system.
So enormous and brazen was the theft that The New
York Times treated it with a competent and mostly unflinching article,
which is the only reason anybody outside the small world
of conservative punditry now knows about it. We read this
(28:04):
piece on the podcast yesterday, and as I mentioned, now,
the entire media is aware that this has been going on.
But as I said, doing that, this scandal was going
on forever and ever and ever at effort, everybody from
the governor of Minnesota to the media and everybody else
looked the other way because they didn't want to accept
the tens of thousands of Somali's who are in Minnesota
(28:25):
were out and now crooks, I don't want to accept it.
So therefore we're just not gonna look at it. Back
to the piece, the time it took for the Minnesota
story to make its way into national headlines is itself
part of the problem. Federal prosecutors have already convicted fifty
nine of the fraudsters which tells you how long the
thing has been happening. A few local media outlets, notably
(28:48):
KAI Minneapolis, Saint Paul's NBC affiliate, have covered the story
since the first indictments. Scott Johnson, the Minnesota based attorney
on power Line blog co founder, has reported on some
Malia related fraud since at least twenty eighteen. In mid November,
the journalist Arman Rosen penda superb seven thousand word essay
about the fiasco for the magazine County Highway. The Somali
(29:11):
fraud story is in some respects akin to the so
called grooming scandal in Britain, in which gangs of mostly
Pakistani men sexually abused young girls, even as the country's
government and news media looked the other way, terrified by
accusations of racism or Islamophobia. You may be familiar with
(29:31):
the grooming scandal in England. It's not happening, it's not happening.
It's not happening, and the reasons people did not want
to accept that they were happening. They did not want
to acknowledge that huge numbers of Pakistani immigrants believed it
was perfectly fine to abuse young girls sexually that's what
they think, but people didn't want to admit that. That's
(29:52):
the thing. So the fact that it was going on,
they're looking the other way, pretended it's not happening, and
it's not happened. So it's going on really right in
front of everybody, but they're just trying so hard not
to see it. Back to the peace in the Twin Cities,
state authorities couldn't rouse themselves to stop the theft hundreds
(30:13):
of millions of dollars siphoned from medicaid, housing and other
welfare programs. It is to the great credit of the
US Justice Department, under administrations of both parties, that it
didn't allow the perpetrator's race, religion, or country of origin
to hinder the prosecution of crime. Both scandals in the
UK and Minnesota raise a question most of us would
(30:33):
rather not consider, that of large scale immigration from predominantly
Muslim countries. It's true that other ethnic immigrant groups, Italians
in the early twentieth century, most famously imported forms of
criminality from the home country. It's also true that Minnesota's
roughly eighty thousand strong Somali community contains many industrious people
(30:56):
and good citizens, but an unbiased observer could be forgiven
for thinking Minnesota's Somali population is not capable of assimilation. Now,
let me interject this is part of the problem. Immigrants
who come to the United States because they want to assimilate.
They come into Ellis Island and the look at the
(31:17):
famous opening of Godfather Part two when young Vido curleone,
after you know, his father's dead, his mother's been killed,
to kill his brother, escapes, gets on the ship the
age of nine comes in and there he's looking at
the Statue of Liberty and the whole thing with all
these other immigrants that or other. The look of this
in America, it's the land of opportunity. They want to
(31:38):
be part of this. When you have people who come
into these others, not just the United States, but France,
et cetera, who hate those countries and hate their lifestyle
and hate the fact that they're moving to predominantly Jenaeo
Christian societies, you're never going to get assimilation from them.
And if they're not going to assimilate, they will never
be anything other than a terrible threat to the way
(31:59):
of life and the kind that they're going to. As
jinguistic as it sounds there's no value added in bringing
in somebody who hates the place that they're coming to.
And it's a huge portion of the problem that we've
had with illegal immigration to the United States. Those who
have come here and wanted to be here and want
(32:20):
to be Americans, they're really not much of a problem.
It's the ones that are coming here because they realize
that America is so stupid that we give away all
sorts of things for free and we don't punish criminals, etc.
That are the problem. Back to the piece from Rosen's
(32:42):
essay quote, bad actors within the community would approach potential
co conspirators without any fear of betrayal. The point he's
making his es in the Somali community. When Somalia would
go up to another Somalia and ask him, say, do
you want to get in on the scam that we have?
They never had a concern that they'd be ratted out
by this Amali that even if they'd say no, they
(33:03):
knew that the Somali would rather be loyal to the
fellow Somali crook than actually telling American authority because they
knew that these all of the Somalis couldn't give a
crap about right and wrong, or would the American authorities
want that even if they disapprove what the fellow Somali
was going to do, they would never betray them because
(33:24):
their Somali identity was far more important to them than
any kind of you know, American value that would be
in continuing. Even the people who said no to phenomenal
offers of tens of thousands of dollars in free taxpayer
money didn't inform the authorities that a major community wide
fraud against the public was in progress, potentially criminal oddities
(33:44):
when almost totally unreported to anyone in government. The FBI
learned about quote Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit that was
one of the main vehicles of fraud, from a whistleblower
in the Department of Education, and not from any of
the scam's ground level witnesses or participants. Ponders, You could
look to some of these scams that have gone on
(34:05):
in the social service community in Milwaukee, almost no whistleblowers
from within any of them. And then the folly of US,
I mean SEC is apparently finally going under. How could
that piece of crap organization have taken decades to finally
get rid of it's sort of the same thing. Back
(34:28):
to the piece here, which is dealing with this grave
difficulty in mass immigration of Muslims who do not share
the kinds of values that exist in countries that are
premise not on Muslim values but Judeo Christian values, ponders
some observations made recently by the British historian Tom Holland.
His book Dominion contends that Christianity has left an imprint
(34:52):
on the West so deep as to be ineradicable and
imperceptible even atheists and nations once Christianized thinking Christian terms
without knowing it. Only a Christian nation, I suspect, Holland
would say, would invent a social welfare system as lavish
and easily exploitable as Minnesota's. Now here's the point that
(35:16):
he's making in back in Somalia, they never have systems
like this. Why because the Somalians though, if you have
a system so easily to scam, are Somalians will scam it.
But only in the good nature, trusting West when you
set something like this up, making us obviously open season
(35:37):
for people who lack any type of value at all.
Back to the peace Essentially quote this is Holland. Essentially,
what Christianity has that Islam does not is a concept
of the secular. Let me interject, what does that mean
the secular. It's a set of values that we have
that aren't particularly religious, but that everybody should follow without
(35:59):
regard to what religion you have. See, most Muslims don't
think that way. They think of Muslim law and they
think that's what the law should be. That they can't
disconnect the two of them. This is where jihad and
indefada and all of these things come from. Back to
the pace, Holland remarked in a September podcast interview. From
its beginning, he points out, Christianity has acknowledged that some
(36:21):
parts of human society will function outside the demands of revelation.
Think of Jesus as imperative to render to Caesar what
is Caesar's and to God what is God's. Islam classically
acknowledges no such sphere. I think Islam is uniquely indigestible
for our secular mindset, he says, Minnesota Somali population plainly
(36:43):
does not think of itself as digestible, But larger scale,
large scale Muslim immigration is a far bigger problem for
Europe than for America, and in a curious way, Holland's
reflections shed light on the immigration problem of the US
does have, that of illegal border crosses from Latin America.
On Tuesday, President Trump, asked about the Minnesota fraud prosecutions,
(37:06):
expressed his disgust, quote, these people that work, these people
are these These aren't people that work. Let's go, come on,
let's make this place great. These are people that do
nothing but complain. Now, again, for people who think that
he's generalized, who's the most famous Somali American in this country?
I'd say, ilat Omar? Is this that a description of her?
(37:27):
Mary's or brothers say she can stay in the country legally,
gets in here and does nothing but rip on the
United States of America. She cops, knocks down a government salary,
and supports government assistance for everything, continuing. They come from
hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch. By
(37:49):
the way, is there anybody but Trump who would have
been the guts to say that this is why they
precisely hate of it, you know, And again, maybe it's
an over generalization. I'll admit I don't know a whole
lot of Somalia America. Plkins, it's Minnesota that they managed
to land in. But I mean, you just think of
all of the scams at so many different levels in
the Somalikan I mean, you got to admit there's a
(38:10):
lot of Somali bang for the buck, given how few
of them there are in the United States. I mean
the high Seas, that's the entire world of pirate comes flow.
No matter what part of the world is, you almost
expect that it's going to be a Somali. The President
singled out for particular score in Minneapolis's representative Ilhan Omar.
(38:31):
She is the poster child for this, isn't she put aside?
If you can Trump's failure to distinguish between criminals and
law abiding Americans of Somali ancestry, the President isn't wrong
to send something deeply amiss in a community of Americans
so contemptuous of the country that took them in. And
that's it. Instead of thanking us, they can't stand us.
(38:54):
They think that we're a bunch of dopes and suckers
to be fleeced dry. The column continues, Perhaps Trump can
turn his attention to those illegal aliens some nations that
for all their dysfunction, are not indelibly Christian. Immigrants from
Latin America work. Indeed, they have a higher labor force
participation rate than whites. Let me interject I do agree
(39:15):
with that part, as they've been pointing out for years.
It's not all of them. But when that line comes out,
there are some jobs Americans won't do. It's just true.
And anybody who denies this does not see the number
of Americans that have been sitting on their asses forever
and ever and ever. You need somebody to peel potatoes
in a restaurant, an illegal immigrant is going to do it.
(39:38):
But a bunch of lazy ass Americans living off of
fourteen different welfare programs and smoking their pott and all
this stuff, they're not going to do it. The problem
with it, of course, is that they entered illegally, which
is why I have always argued throw them out and
then if they want to try to come bang it
back in after a period of times to the front
door and legally allow them to do it. But in
(39:58):
the process, by throwing it everybody out, you're going to
get all the crooks that have come in in the process,
get them out as well. And they won't be approved
to come back into the front door because of the crooks. Now,
the point that Swam is making is maybe Prumb's Nights
needs to start drawing his attention away from some of
the Latin American illegal immigrants to all of these Somalis
and many others that are in here that just can't
(40:19):
stand America despise and lothus. Look at the number of
terror cells that we have run around here and how
they've managed to radicalize a bunch of stupid Americans. Look
at the number of people that have are radicalized. Where
do you think this is coming from? And I'll get
back to the piece and finish it off in a moment.
I think a special word needs to be directed towards
(40:39):
some people on the American right that are sucking up
to this ideology because of their own hatred of Judaism.
I don't know if Tucker Carlson falls into that category,
but I think the candae OANs is it's very very
hard to see an upside in a great concentration. And again,
maybe this would be different if when the Somalis came here,
(41:01):
they weren't all plopped into one place. If you put
a few here and a few there and a few
in the other thing. You wouldn't have this feeding thing
where they all got together to essentially scam everyone. Also,
if the Somalis had not been dropped in Minnesota, let's
imagine they were dropped in Oklahoma, very conservative state, maybe
(41:22):
there wouldn't have been such a tendency to look the
other way like you had with a buffoon like Tim Waltz,
who knew all about this but didn't want to draw
any attention to it because he didn't want to say
anything negative towards any Somalies, in part because they're all
Democrats and they're all voting for finishing off the piece.
(41:43):
Responsible people agree the criminals in the country illegally ought
to be removed, But those work in construction and agriculture jobs.
They're saying, in so many words, let's go, come on,
let's make this place great, and they don't bitch. That
column is in today's Wall Street Journal. Burton sway, all right,
attention to another story. Open Ai. That's the company whose
(42:07):
prime product is chat GPT. There are lots of indications
right now that open ai is losing its lead in
artificial intelligence. One of the things that I've noted on
almost every tech development is that the company that is
first almost never makes it. It's usually the ones that
(42:30):
come in second, third, or fourth and see how the
first one did it and figured it out, I can
do it better than them. The leaders leader of open ai, Altman,
came out and called a so called quote red this week,
essentially saying we've got to improve immediately, implying that we
are at risk of failing. Now. Obviously, the valuation of
(42:52):
open ai is in the many, many billions of dollars.
Let me quote here from a peace on substack by
somebody named Gary Marcus. Open ai lacks both profits and
a moat. What's a moat? You know what a mode
is in the business world. You should know this from
doing all these stupid financial shows that you do. A moat, well,
(43:15):
you know what a moat real is in real life.
It's like like a body water that they would put
around a castle. So somebody tried to attack the castle,
they got to get through the water to get it.
A mode is a barrier to competition. An example of
this would be the credit card business. Very hard to
compete against Visa and MasterCard and American Express. I mean
discover has a tiny little niche. What's instead happened is
(43:37):
alternate forms of payment have come up, like PayPal, but
they rely on the credit card industry, and most people
who use PayPal a tying it to their bank account
of the credit card, that would be a mote. Amazon
is a mote. It's extremely I mean, how many delivery
trucks and warehouses does Amazon have? Imagine if we tried
to compete against It's a mode. The point that's being
(43:59):
made here is opening eye. Then in a mote, somebody
else can come in and develop an AI system that's
better than this one, And why wouldn't you just go
over and use that? With no mote there? Open AI
likes both profits and the mode. The systems that they
build are hugely expensive to operate because they require massive
amounts of compute for training. Google seems finally to be
(44:22):
catching up with their Gemini model. Large language models such
as chat GPT may quickly become commodities. See what they're saying,
commodity in other words, generic. So they spend all this
money to create chat GPT, But the next thing you know,
there's fifty seven different chat GPTs. So chat GPT just
becomes worthless. Artificial intelligence itself isn't proprietary. It's using machines
(44:45):
to figure out and fastly compute things. Well, chat GPT
was the one that got there first, but what's to
stop Google from developing their own version, Gemini, which they've
done and some people believe it's already past chat GPTs up. Continuing,
we can expect price wars and profits may continue to
be elusive or modest. Mess So now the argument is
(45:08):
as nineteen other tech companies come in with their AI things,
price slashing is going to occur. So people who think
that there's going to be this mass fortune, what is
certain is all the infrastructure is going to be needed.
All the data set is if we needed, because you
need to have all of this in order to do
the AI and so on. But to think that only
one or two precise companies are going to be in,
it's going to be just the opposite. There's going to
be massive demand to get in on this, and with
(45:31):
numerous providers, the prices are going to crash and the
ability for any of them they make a lot of
money would be limited. Continuing, the basic thesis then was
that although open AI was the darling of Ai. Things
could change. Things took longer to unravel than I thought
they would, But open AI's unraveling has begun, as The
Wall Street Journal reported, the company has just declared a
(45:53):
code read. They are terrified that Google's new model has
eclipsed them. By any reasonable measure. Open Ai is clearly
squandered the sizeable lead they once had. Their war chest
is impressive, but their burn rate is terrifying. My guess
is that they have cumulativery raised on the order of
one hundred billion dollars since they launched, perhaps more than
(46:14):
any other company in history, but they have already spent
most of it, and like they don't have much more
of a year's runway left now. Another piece superior in
a post on X by someone who uses the handle
m hole, in which he points out that artificial intelligence
(46:35):
has limits, and again going back to the point that
we had earlier about experts. Experts can't see this because
what they know is artificial intelligence, and they can see
beyond artificial intelligence. I'll summarize this point before I even
read it. Artificial intelligence only knows what has been input
into artificial intelligence, and as artificial intelligence now scans every
(46:56):
piece of knowledge in order to grab things. It still
has algorithm as to what it accepts and what it doesn't.
Let's imagine AI, for example, was going to try to
figure out the packer bear game on Sunday. It still
is making decisions on what's important and what is not. Well,
what if those decisions that it is making is based
on flawed premises. Here's what he writes. Artificial intelligence doesn't
(47:23):
know the truth and it never will. It can't. All
it can know are patterns stitch together from what it digests,
and like any organism, it becomes what it consumes. Your
mother ever yelled at you, you are what you eat?
She did, Mine didn't. But I know somebody I went
on with a one. I met up with a woman
whose mother said that all the time, you are what
(47:44):
you eat. You are what you eat? Are we eat?
I just kept hearing it to get it again. Well,
that's what AI is. They are what they eat. I
know this all sounds too well from a person. I
know this all too well from personal experience. A bad
diet is bad results. But at the risk of some
owning hypocritical, I have to say AI is eating garbage,
tons of it. The people building today's AI systems choose
(48:07):
what these models are trained on and how much credibility
and each source gets. They calibrate the entire information diet,
and we see the consequences in the outputs. Take Elon Musk.
His model GROC is trained primarily on x data. Meanwhile,
models like chat, GPT and Google's Gemini gorge themselves on
(48:28):
a steady stream of Wikipedia pages and Reddit threads. The
information has been laundered, filtered from a questionable source into
a polished, authoritative, seeming format. It would be funny if
it weren't so dangerous. And no fund this piece. It's
from the co founder most people know, Almond. There's a
co founder of open ai, and he's kind of saying
(48:56):
the same thing. He says, the first battle of open
ai has essentially been solved. How do you grab all
the information that's out there in the digital world and
compile it? That they've done, But he's saying, the one
thing that hasn't done is it hasn't figured out all
the things that aren't so far in the digital world.
In other words, what about all the stuff we don't
(49:19):
yet know? So Opening Eye is basically going to be
looking at the entire world, which way in the rear
view mirror. And this is what the co founder of
OPENINGI is saying that the big challenge now is to
scale new information rather than keep regurgitating out the old.
Open AI co founder Ilia said Skiver believes the tides
(49:42):
of the AI industry will have to shift back to
the research phase. On an episode of Dwarkish Podcasts published
on Tuesday, Suitskimer, who is widely seen as a pioneer
in modern artificial intelligence, challenge the conventional wisdom that scaling
could be the key road to major and key roadmap
to AIS progress. Scaling just means getting all the stuff
(50:04):
that's out there and doing it faster and being able
to turn out scale scale scale, get everything, get everything,
get everything, get everything. And he's pointing out that the
getting everything includes a lot of bad and mostly all
conventional wisdom. Continuing, tech companies support hundreds of billions of
dollars into acquiring GPUs and building data centers to essentially
(50:26):
make their AI tools, whether that whether that's LMS or
image generation models better. The wisdom goes that the more
compute in other words, the more computing power that you have,
the more compute you have or the more training data
that you have, the smurter your AI tool will be.
Sutzkimer said, Now, I would say that if that worked,
(50:48):
all these public health experts and all these counties around
the United States, all they all, any of them did
was simply follow what the CDC's recommendation. Heaven, all of
them would make us all smoter. In fact, that made
us all dumber because none of them were willing to
simply they disagree with what the CDC was saying, say no,
we're not going to follow this. I think I know better.
Not a single one of them did this because they
all knew deep down that they're stupid people, and they
(51:09):
wouldn't have gone into such a crap field as public health.
Nobody wanted to be the one saying screw it, the
mass don't mean anything, keep your churches and schools open.
Dot A. One wanted to do that. They couldn't break
from that. And isn't that what opened? What artificial intelligence
is It's going to grab onto whatever the consensus is,
and rather than think outside the box, it's going to
(51:32):
puke out inside the box, and it's going to be
making decisions that can't be questioned because the decisions themselves
will be made by AI. Now, as they said, this
is the founderable PLANAI is saying, this is part of
the problem. Sutzgaber said in the interview that for an
interview that for around the past half decade, this recipe
has produced impactful results. It's also efficient for companies because
(51:53):
the method provides a simple and very low risk way
of investing resources and pouring money into the research that
could lead nowhere. However, Setskeeper, who now runs Safe Superintelligence Incorporated,
believes that method is running out of runway. Data is finite.
In other words, all the data that we have in
the world, there's a limit. See what happens when all
(52:14):
the AI learns every data that exists. It can't get
any smarter because it has everything in there, including obviously
a whole lot of crap, and organizations already have access
to a massive amount of computy. Said, is the belief really, Oh,
it's so big, but if you had one hundred times more,
everything would be so different. It would be different, for sure.
(52:37):
But is the belief that if you just had one
hundred times the scale everything would be transformed. I don't
think that's true. No, it goes on and again. What
all of these things are doing is they're raising things
that challenge that can sensus by thinking outside the box.
Every single person who's made the world better or came
up with a new innovation is somebody who sized up
(52:58):
what was there now and said, I think better, I
have this new way. In other words, the exact opposite
of experts who are simply going on and pontificating and
puking back everything that they already took in. I find
(53:19):
all this quite fascinating. This might be beyond your whole love?
Am I doing this at too high of a level
for like the average guy to swallow in? Or I
like you able to swallow this in? You believe you,
you believe that you can soak this up. I think
the people who listen to my show they love this
kind of stuff. I just think that the people who
(53:39):
like listen to my podcast they're open to this kind
of thinking rather than the average idiot and NPR seeing
somebody whisper wrote something that was sort of consensus for
twenty seven years ago and doesn't apply at all today.
Right way, I gotta tell this story I was. I
told this story about going to the Milwaukee premiere on
(54:01):
Tuesday night of Song Sung Blue, the movie about lightning
at thunder, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it
was an invitation only thing, and everybody showed up at
the same time. They said the doors had opened five thirty.
The doors opened at five forty five. So the line
took like the line went from the door of the
Oriental to north happened. And when I got in it
and it was fridgide, cooled out and it moved. It
(54:23):
took about thirty minutes, which isn't the end of the
world to get it. And I said, what I got right?
Do you remember me telling the story? You're not? You say,
of course, Well then what happened? Yeah, you'll remember, okay,
I said, right when I ended. I mean, maybe it
happened twenty nine different times. But I only got to
the front of the line once. And some guy got out.
(54:44):
He must have been dropped off at a Douber or something,
because he just seemed to like a pure out of
nowhere and cut in front of everybody and announced VIP
and tried to walk in and I split a minute,
and then everybody said, wait a minute. And then you
had probably told that the door there's everybody's got every
the invitation is VIP, and then pointed to the back
of the line, you know, somewhere up by Shorewood. I
(55:05):
told that story. This is just unbelievable coincident, I said,
I didn't. I don't know who the guy was. I'm
not going to name him, because I do think it's
possible it was an innocent, stupid mistake that he maybe
he thought that there were VIPs rather than what No,
(55:26):
he didn't throw a tantrum at all, he just you know,
it was I mean, I think any kind of judgment
realized that, first of all, unless you're like the governor,
who the hell are you that you think that you're
a VIP to sneak? I mean, I think it's possible
it was well intentioned sort of arrogant stupidity. So I'm
not going to name him anyway, but I didn't know
(55:46):
who he was. Would you believe that in the past day,
there's a news story about someone and there's this picture.
I'm not going to tell you the news, it's just
a story that's in the news. There's a picture of
the guy. That's this guy, the guy who went to
the game with I showed him resent that's him the
same day. He probably isn't a listener to my podcast.
(56:09):
But there's no point in out again because, as I say,
it's possible it was just an innocent I mean, it
wasn't an innocent mistake, but it could be a mistake
that it's not as ill intended as He didn't say,
don't you know who I am? He just said, is
this the VIP entrance? But I mean the line, there's
(56:30):
this whole line. Well, yeah, it wasn't like he fought
it and tried to jam as well. He wasn't gonna
work because hey, the rest of the crowd freezing out there,
like me, we're not going to tolerate this guy getting
in there. Plus we all had invitations that said VIP
in the whole think all right, this is the Mark
Belling podcast. This is the Mark Belling podcast. All right. Now,
(56:52):
I know cynical people. You think you think I'm cynical.
I am somewhat cynical, but I mean I know people
that are way beyond me, to the point that nothing's
on the up and up. I know somebody who thinks
Jiannis is faking his injury. Paul said he's heard that.
(57:12):
I mean, there's nothing in his character that would indicate
that he would do it. Furthermore, if you're going to
fake an injury, you fake the injury in practice rather
than in plain view. But I mean, I do get
the whole thing, and it's certainly true from the perspective
of both him and the Bucks. There's no upside for
the Bucks in Giannis getting hurt. If Yannis is to
(57:33):
be traded, you want to trade him and trade him healthy.
So I mean, the hall you will get back from
him is off the charts. I think only maybe you'd
have to be a rookie, say Victor Wimenyam and a
couple of others could draw as much as Giannis could draw.
The Bucks have the highest score and efficiency of any
team in the league when he's in the lineup, and
the lowest when he's not. I've never seen that the
(57:56):
Bucks score more points permitted when Yannis is on the
court than any team in the league, and fewer points
per minute when he's not of the court than any
team in the league. No, they won last night without him.
But anyway, whether or not he's going to be traded
or not. I get why Doc Rivers is so frustrated
the whole thing because there's been rumors about Yanni seving Milwaukee,
you know, for six years, and he hasn't left. But
(58:17):
I don't think he's speaking the injury. But anyway, that's
so I told this guy, I'm gonna go on the
air and say, I know a goof with you go
do that. I should name it. But then he'd like
like that. On a related note, there's just something perfect
about this story. Diego pavia. See, you don't know who
(58:38):
that is. He's the quarterback of Vanderbilt. You probably don't
know that Vanderbilt has been terrible in football as long
as there's been football, and they have a very good
team this year. They're in the toughest league there is,
the SEC, and they've been very good. He's their quarterback.
His nickname is Pissing. How many people of you know
they have the name Pissing? Is their Well, it's because
(59:02):
when he was at New Mexico State, he famously went
to the University of New Mexico, walked out to the
fifty yard line of their field and took a leak
on the logo on the field. I mean that's when
he was at another school. He transferred to Vanderbilt, but
that was in other words, he's a very competitive kind
of And anyway, Vanderbilt has no chance of making the
college football playoff because well, they had a great season.
(59:24):
They're in the SEC and they have two losses and
they're both in the conference, so they can't advance to
their conference title game and they're not going to make
it in even though probably you can make the case
they're a top twelve team. So what do you think
Pabia one is trying to do about this to salvage
their season. He's asking Trump to issue an executive order
adding teams to the playoffs. The playoffs start in like
(59:47):
a week and a half, and he's who is he
asking to fix this? Trump? Now, the two things that
make the story just perfect is I said forever, you know,
they keep expanding the playoffs because they keep saying, there's
this contract this team should be in. It doesn't matter
how many teams are gonna be in. No matter what
it is, they're gonna be teams that say that. Look
at the NCAA basketball team, sixty eight teams are in
that and you still have bitching about who doesn't get
(01:00:09):
into that. The more teams you have, the more teams
who think that they would be screwed. Remember when they
had two teams in it. You can do that this
year and have it just be cleaner. Whoever wins Ohio State,
Indiana place, whoever wins Alabama, Georgia that they play for
the national chain. You got me. He's here. Secondly, as
(01:00:34):
much as people want to rag on Trump, Pavey knows
that the one guy who actually could in an instant
fits something and just issue whether or not he should
issue an exec And I don't think Trump should be
issued an executive order in college sports and all that stuff,
But this is what it dawns on. This is a
guy that actually might do it. A Trump's story. As
(01:01:01):
you know, Trump's tariff authority may be struck down by
the United States Supreme Court. I think that that would
be a disaster. I think the TIFFs, not only by
and large, have worked, the threat of tariffs, have given
Trump incredible leverage to make the world a better place
and get the United States on better footing in any
number of areas. Trump, though, is doubling down on this.
He is now saying that based on the incredible amount
(01:01:22):
of revenue coming in from the limited tariffs that we have.
He believes that the tariffs could eventually end the United
States income tax. Now, a lot of people don't like
the notion of tariffts because they think they're bad for
the economy. On the other hand, virtually everyone agrees that
taxation is bad for the economy. Imagine if nobody paid
any federal income tax, if we kept all of our
(01:01:44):
money other than seeing the money we give to the
state and paying property taxes. For the people in this
country who pay very little in taxes, they wouldn't care.
But without regard to your status on that it would
be a fortune of money that could be pumped back
into the economy. And Trump's point is is that by
setting the tariffs high enough, by tariffing, in other words,
putting the tax only on the importation of products, without
(01:02:05):
regard to whether or not you think the consumer is
paying that tax or not, would it not be a
better way of taxing than taxing people on their income power. Furthermore,
it creates a tremendous incentive for companies to build their
stuff here in the United States rather than import them.
I don't know if Trump's numbers add up. It seems
to be to come up with the amount of money
that we pay in United States' income taxes, he'd have
(01:02:26):
to tear off everything at like ten fifteen trillion percent. Nonetheless,
the point he makes is interesting now to this story,
there's a phenomenon one of the things that you don't
know because the Internet and YouTube and all of those
things weren't around. Are there more police impersonators now than
there used to be? I mean, it just seems to
twenty years ago you never really, I won't say, you
(01:02:48):
never heard of it. It's very rare, right, the stolen
valid with military Yeah, I mean maybe forty years ago
every loudmouth in a bar was shooting his mouth offense.
But now that they're all being captured on video and
people are exposed, it's just hard to say. But boy,
I think of there's so many things that people that
weirdos get into that I just can't imagine. You Paul's
(01:03:12):
got I think I can say this, I can say what, Yeah,
Paul's son laws a cop. I don't. I haven't named
the jurisdiction. I don't think Paul minds that. I just
want to do it. Here's a cop. Okay, I just okay,
that's kind of that's a good thing that he's serving
and everything. I remember when I wanted to be a cop.
(01:03:32):
I was five. You know, you played cops and robbers.
What is it about a grown adult taking all the
risks of trouble that you can get into, running around
and actually pretending hard to be And when I say pretending,
pulling people over, putting lights in their cards, wearing fake badges,
(01:03:53):
do you get that? It just I mean there's a
lot of things I don't get that weirdos that we're
I mean, there are something that I would never do,
but I at least get what they see and do it,
you know, like any number of things that we shouldn't do.
I mean, I say, why people use drugs. They get
the buzz and the high off, but I don't do
it because of the long term after effects on the downsay,
but you can at least see, Okay, they get the bus.
(01:04:15):
I just don't get white to be good about that
given the Okay, we got another one. The story I
find in the walkaster frameman elcorn Man charged with impersonating
police officer. And listen to this. The guy's name is
Davin Stam nineteen. He's a mill Cord nineteen. Well, I
mean they're of all ages. By the way. One of
(01:04:36):
the things that you see about these these people tend
to not be First of all, you rarely get prison
time for it. They give them little offenses. Think a
lot of these people that you see in the internet
have been doing it forever. There's some guy named Jeremy.
He's a legend on YouTube. He's been caught like thirty
five times. He just keeps doing it, and he'll like
set up a business. It's quasi related to this, like
(01:04:58):
some sort of security and that. There are certain things
you can't do. And it has to do with like
the colors you can put of the lights that are
on your vehicle. Is it I actually don't even know
right now, is it blue and white? I think that
blue and white can only be law enforcement? I think,
do you know? Yeah, I don't know the right. And
(01:05:19):
then there are other things like there's no law against
carrying a badge, but you can't make it too much
like a law enforcement you know, for instance, they give
out honorary badges and that kinds of things. Any number
of things, and you can you know, you can have
an ex police car as a vehicle, but you can't
steal it. And you can even put terms on it
like security policing or something like that. There's certain lines
(01:05:40):
that and these people always tend to get right up
to the light anyway. Getting the story. Guy's nineteen charge
wensan Wakashakany Circuit Court was impersonating a peace officer, a
misdemeanor punishable buy up to nine months in jail, which
they never get, or ten thousand dollars in fine. He
is due for an initial court appeance January twenty second.
Listen to this. A criminal complaint against him, said sure.
Iff's deputies were summoned to August fifth to an area
(01:06:03):
of Interstate forty three and Moreland Road. That's a very
busy intersection that's in south central Walkershaw County and taking
an I forty three from Milwaukee toward you know, Beloit
and so on. Moreland Roads a huge interchange there, probably
the biggest one on all of the southwestern portion of
I forty three. For a report of a vehicle flashing
(01:06:25):
blue lights. Now this is dangerous because I think I'm
not sure this. I think it's blue and white that
you can't use it's white in combination of blue flashing
blue lights to get others to move over. A deputy
reported seeing a Ford Explorer matching the vehicle's description flashing
blue lights while behind another car near Guthrie rode An
I forty three. The complaint said, so he's doing this
(01:06:45):
On the interstate. A deputy found a light bar that
flashed white and blue lights when activated in the upper
portion of the windshield of Stam's vehicle. The complaint said.
When the deputy asked him why he had activated the lights,
I love this. You get pulled over, you have this?
Why did you do this? I mean, there is no
(01:07:06):
every lie that you tell is gonna sound stupid, right,
I mean you don't. I mean, I suppose they'd be
really stupid and just come out and say I was
trying to convince people I was a cop. But that
would be the only answer that would be sensible, because
any lie that you make up is just really stupid sounding.
But they have to say something. They could I suppose
just say I'm pleading the fifth You're right, I'm not
(01:07:28):
saying a damn thing, because you know, but of course
they have to say something. And remember the guy's pretending
to be a cop, so he's obviously not somebody who's
gonna like want to like screw with the cops, because
this is like his these are cops. This is what
he wants to He's thinking that, like this is a
fellow cop kind of right, Yeah, there is zero so
he watched the corp at Anyway, when the deputy asked
(01:07:50):
him why he had activated the lights, the defendant explained
that there was a Tesla in front of him driving slowly,
and he turned the lights on to make the Tesla mobile,
as opposed to what most people would do, which is
pass him. Now occasionally, at I forty three, in the
areas where it's only two lanes in each direction, you
can kind of be stuck behind somebody and so on,
(01:08:11):
I find that what you can do, if you're really
frustrated is you flash him a couple of times, right, yeah,
And the reason that you do that you don't have
blue and white lights on the top of your car
or anything like that to pull over. Well, the guy's
going too slow, so that's why I did this. Continuing,
a fake rifle was found on a passenger seat. No
(01:08:34):
often these cop cars will have a rifle. So he's
got a rifle, but it's a fake rifle. But would
you have a fake rifle for so only so you
look like a cop? And Stam denied having any other
items in his car consistent with law enforcement, like handcuffs,
a badge of the like. Stam admitted he was not
a police officer and that what he did was stupid.
See they all say it was stupid. Well, it occurs
(01:08:56):
to you that's stupid when the cop is standing here.
But forty five seconds ago, when they were run of
the lights and you were doing it, you didn't think
it was stupid. Yeah, you got It's a lot of
work to this. But I'm guessing this is like he's
into this. See I'm just first of all, I just
can't get myself to be this weird. Plus I'm just
too lazy. Well that's the other thing if you want
(01:09:18):
to be And I see some of these that are
like forty five obvious. Maybe they tried to be a
cop and got washed out, or they were chicken, or
they were too slow, there's a criminal conviction, or they
smoke pot and they and this guy's nineteen, he actually
could still be one and well, it can't be too
hard to become a cops. There's somebody in your family
that's a I know it's not that easy, but it's
(01:09:40):
not impossible. It can't be impossible. There's asillien enough I'm
running around out there. Stam admitted that he was not
a police officer and he was stupid. The complaints said.
The Nippity also learned Stam had a suspended driver's life.
I mean, okay, I could see he's not gonna make copy,
can't and even keep his driver's license in order. In
(01:10:02):
an interview with deputies, Stam said he recently bought the
lights for his car, thinking they were cool to have.
He denied any intent to impersonate a police officer, but
he said he turned the lights on to get the
Tesla to move over and it did not. Stam stated
that he activated the blue and white lights twice previously
to get other vehicles to yield or move over, and see,
(01:10:23):
that's all he can do. He wasn't going to actually
apparently pull anybody over and put him in cuffs and
so on. His whole thing was to turn the lights
on and feel like a big shot as the cars
are then pull over and then he'd drive on and
do the next thing. I just o there are people
out of the price. It's just like the same thing
with kittie porn. I can't imagine being into that. I
just can't. You know, some hot looking twenty seven year
(01:10:46):
old woman's pants that are ound in there, I get
getting turned on by that. I just can't get the
whole they're promising. Well, I could see what you'd be.
I just can't imagine this is but you're when you
watch horse races, I do well, I can't imagine. I know.
I just think, Mike is They're just a level of
It's just a weird thing, isn't it. Well, not only
(01:11:10):
is it. I'm just talking about why you'd want to
do it, all right, And know this, of the people
that are into perverts toward kids, that's it. It seemed that
a disproportionate number of them are soccer coaches. I mean, now,
part of the reason that you seem to get it,
there's azillion teachers that are getting caught up in this
(01:11:32):
is well, first of all, there's azillion teachers, and second
lay are they going into teaching because they're attracted to
young people or because all they're around is young people.
That's what they get attracted to. I don't know the answer.
Another soccer coach. Now this is a weird one. This
one's being reported in Fox six. The guy is a
local youth soccer coach. He is accused of trying to
(01:11:53):
fly overseas they have sex with children. That's a lot
of trouble. I'm not sure I want to fly overseas
to do anything. I mean, what is it that you
want enough to do that you're gonna set on a
plane for eight or night. There's got to be like
some sort of tourism or something. I mean, what, yeah,
(01:12:14):
like ski in the Alps or something. Even then, even
if I as a skier, I just think I'd rather
go to Aspen than you know, you've been on cruises.
You see how long the line of customs in some
of these foreign countries is. Do you anyway? Here's the
guy's name, Justin Kaegerbauer. He's forty six, charged in federal
(01:12:38):
court with multiple sex crimes. On Tuesday, judge out of
the forty six year old detained pending trial. Fox six
reached out to this attorney and did not get a response.
Here's the backstory. A flight bound and I'm not going
to make light of this year because this is this
guy's in our community. A flight bound for New York's
John F. Kennedy International Airport took off from Chice, oh
(01:13:00):
Here on Thanksgiving morning. Federal agents planned to arrest Haegerbauer
at the airport, but he never made it. Two hours later,
court records show the forty six year old man is
it was in US marshal's custody at the federal courthouse.
He appeared before a magistrate judged that after doing for months.
Prosecutors said, and again, the thing with this is, you
know what, with the Internet and everything, there is no
(01:13:21):
place less private in our world than the Internet. It's
the easiest thing for them to snoop on, you know,
to put a listening device into your home. They got
to bust into your host thing osten. When I watched
The Sopranos, they always seem to like try to put
those things in lamps. Well, I guess it's because who
looks under a lamp? Yeah, I was right, I mean, see,
(01:13:44):
I mean that's Carl. First of all, they gotta get
in and they gotta play the Internet. It's all it's
very easy to tap in and just go onto your
computer and see what's going on, which is good because
I mean they're good and bad things about it. One
of the good things is we're catching these cretness perverts.
So anyway, for months, the prosecutors said he had been
talking with who he thought was a woman in the
(01:14:04):
United United Kingdom with a nine year old niece. It
was actually an undercover UK cop. So this is a
Flicks guy's probably thinking I'm gonna do this overseas because
I know there's all these cops in walker Shaw and
so on posing as posing to these people. But it
certainly wouldn't be in Britain, and it's a British cop.
(01:14:25):
Court filing said he wrote he would be interested in
girls six plus. Oh my god, I mean, aside from
my moral disapproval, I'm actually serious with what's what. I
just don't get what they praction is. I I have
(01:14:46):
never in my life thought of something, and I'm you know,
we talked about the whole seventeen thing in the Woody
Ellen movie, in which nobody back. It was only you know,
forty five nineteen seventy nine when Manhattan came out. You know,
he's having a relationship with the seventeen year old in
the movie, and it was not even controversial at the time. Now,
in part the age of consent in New York State
at that time was sixteen. A lot of states have
(01:15:08):
kind of changed those rules, but it since become considered,
if not criminal, seventeen is a close call in the
laws in a lot of states. Not criminal. It's just
generally disapproved of the guy in the forties, and but
that is an attitude that's rather new. But six six
has never been acceptable unless, as they say, you're a
Pakistani immigrant. Six plus is quote as well as I
(01:15:31):
have no experience, but I would love to and it
would be a dream come true. My dream, contru would
be like winning the Kentucky Derby or something. This guy
is to go to England and have sex with a
six year old. The undercover officer and Kiggerbower chatted more
than one hundred times in March to November, reiterating plans
to visit the woman and the nine year old girl.
(01:15:52):
They some can say, it's just talk, it's just talk,
it's just the guy booked a flight to London. Blue
told federal investigators kager Bar bought a one way ticket.
Was he gonna stay there and live happily ever after?
I mean, I get I actually buy one way tickets.
It used to be you get a big discount on
the round trip. It's not really true anymore. So you know,
(01:16:16):
you can decide when to come back to he throw
Airport in London via JFK for November twenty seventh, which
is wasn't that Thanksgiving Day? What a sick day to
go do it? It's gonna get out a plane to
go overseas. They have sex with a child that he's
leaving on Thanksgiving Day. From court filings and archived websites,
(01:16:39):
Fox six News that Kaegerbauer was an architect for Heartland
Homebuilders and served as the director of tryouts and accounts
receivable for the Franklin based Croatian Eagles soccer club. Prosecutors
have not mentioned any allegations involving the club or children,
so again, there's no medication that he's actually done anything
like this. But again, how do you know? So anybody
who's if your kids have had contact, I would at
(01:17:01):
least ask, you know, do you remember this guy did
anything odd happen? And so on? Maybe it did, maybe
it didn't. Time for our weekly football preview and some
point spread picks next on the Mark Belling Podcast. This
is the Mark Belling Podcast. Unfortunately, Mike Burletta of American
Sports Analysts and Madison cannot be with us this week.
(01:17:24):
There's he's got a conflict in his personal life and
so on, and he was not able to join us
at the time for taping. So we're going to do
this a little bit shorter than normal our football preview.
I will simply share some thoughts and a couple of
big things going on in football this weekend. The biggest
college football game nobody's even when you have number one
playing number two, it's kind of a magical thing. Less
(01:17:45):
so this year, because the football playoffs are in place,
and both teams will advance to the playoffs anyway, and
they're both probably going to get first round buys. The
team that loses will still probably be ranked in the
top four. But Ohio's plays Indiana for the Big Ten championship.
And one of the things that I dislike about the
(01:18:06):
college playoffs, as I say, is this game doesn't have
the consequence if we had a shorter playoff, like a
four team thing, and it meant that the loser would
be out. It would give this game incredible meaning. Still
it's a fascinating game because both teams are unbeaten, they're
in the same league, and most of their wins were
(01:18:27):
by whiteouts. Because the Big Ten now has eighteen teams,
a lot of these teams don't even have opponents in
common where you can compare that both have tremendous offense
is ranked both ranked in the top five in the country,
and Ohio State in particular has a great defense. Indiana's
offense seems to be a little better. What makes the
(01:18:48):
game very, very hard to predict is since they both
essentially kill the teams in the Big Ten and have
similar strengths of schedule, who really is better. When we
talk talked about the Ohio State Michigan game last week,
Mike pointed out that Ohio State through the luck of
the draw. Remember when you have an eighteen team league,
(01:19:09):
you're only going to play half the other teams in
the league, and that they do it by random. Wisconsin
just got unlucky this year, and that they had no
soft Big Ten games. Every great team in the league
it seemed as though, was on their schedule. Ohio State
has a softer schedule, so Mike wasn't sure that they
would how badly they would beat Michigan. As it turns out, Michigan,
which has had Ohio State's number, Ohio State which is
(01:19:30):
so focused on the game, and Ohio State slaughtered them.
Indiana finished the season playing a very poor team. It's
cross state rival puit Perdue, and they beat him fifty
six to three. So that's an interesting game. The prestige
that comes out of it is simply being the only
undefeated team left and the title of Big Ten Championship. Unfortunately,
(01:19:54):
two weeks later, when they both start their action in
the college football playoffs, people will have forgotten the game.
On the college football playoffs. I mentioned in an earlier
segment Diego Pavia, the quarterback for Vanderbilt, asking President Trump
to intervene because the playoffs are all screwed up, and
they are all screwed up. Doesn't matter how many teams.
Pick a number of teams that you put in the playoffs,
doesn't matter what it is. Just grab a number. Just
(01:20:15):
grab any number, could be big or small. Seven. Well,
I wish you would have picked the number I higher. Well,
twelve is the current number. Okay, seven, seven is a
really whatever. The teams that are going to eight, nine, ten,
eleven to twelve at thirteen are all going to argue
whether or not they should be in that seven. If
you pick thirty two, there's going to be arguments about it.
(01:20:37):
My problem with picking so many is that it diminishes
the regular season. I think it should be really hard
to get into these things. I think that the NFL
expanding their playoffs isn't a good thing. All these sports
that make it so easy to get in the regular
season is irrelevant. The NBA now with the ten teams
make the playoffs. Some of them are on the play
(01:20:58):
in tournament. The only point of the regular season is
to not be so terrible that you don't make the playoffs.
So teams play for five months when the real season
only lasts four a couple of months when you go
into the postseason. Anyway, Pavia is right because we have
all of these conferences, and in order to craft the twelve,
they do require that of the five of the four
(01:21:19):
major conferences they get a guaranteed automatic bid. The winner
of each of the four big conferences gets in of
the five lesser top conferences. They call them the Group
of five. There's a guarantee that one team, at least
one team from the group of kive will get in,
and there's a debate about who that should be. James
(01:21:41):
Madison has had an outstanding season, but they're in one
of the group of five leagues, and some people think
that the team that wins the American Association Conference will
get that bid rather than James Madison. With regard to
Pavi's team, Vanderbilt, you have a league this year, the CC,
that has only one good team, and there are several
(01:22:04):
teams in the SEC that are better than everybody in
the ACC. But because the ACC gets an automatic bid
and you can only take so many teams from the SEC,
Vanderbilt is on the outside looking in. And you could say, well,
at least then the ACC, if it has the one
good team, they'll get in. Except guess what, the only
team that's really good in the ACC didn't make the
(01:22:26):
ACC title game. Why when you have so many of
these conferences with a zillion teams in them, you're gonna
get a lot of ties. You might get say seven
teams that are well, that's too high. Four teams that
are seven to one, so you go to the tiebreaker.
Every team lost the game, but Miami, which is the
one good team in the ACC, they lost to. It
(01:22:48):
might have been SMU. They lost to another team that
was in the tiebreaker with them, and they end up
not being eligible for the title game. Most people believe
that the two best teams in the ACC are Miami
and n You neither of them are on the title game.
Virginia and Duke are, and there isn't a single person
of things that Virginia or Duke has any chance to
do anything in the college football playoffs. Turning our attention
(01:23:10):
to the NFL, there's only one game that we need
to focus on, and that's the Packers and the Bears.
It is very interesting how heavily favored the Packers are.
The Bears have the number one seed in the NFC,
they're in first place in the Central Division, and they're
on quite the winning streak. But they're not only underdogs
of the Packers, they're underdogs by six and a half points,
(01:23:33):
which has surprised a lot of people and raised eyebrows.
On the other hand, prior to their win last week
against Philadelphia, a team that might in reality be awful.
The Bears have won so many close games in which
they've been outgained, they still have been outscored on the year.
The people that go by simply the numbers will look
(01:23:55):
upon the Bears as an average team that has a
lot of wins. The people that look at wins and
losses say, who who cares what the numbers are? That
team wins a lot. You've got a curious situation with
the Packers and the Bears, and that they play twice
in three weeks. If either team wins both of those games,
it's almost mathematically impossible that they don't win the division
(01:24:18):
if they split. The Packers in that situation, with getting
a tie earlier in the year, will either come back
to help or haunt them, depending on where the Bears are.
I would be of the opinion that Green Bay will
win the game. That's notwithstanding whether or not I think
that they would cover a six and a half point spread.
But I think that the Packers are a more complete
(01:24:38):
team than the Bears, and I think that the Packers
are playing much better now than they were earlier in
the year. Still a very interesting game, and it's nice
to once again have the Packers and the Bears playing
in games that have a very high stakes. All right,
that's enough of our preview. Let's get around to point
spread picks for this week, and the recapping has just
gotten for me to be. I started the season so
(01:25:00):
well and I have just the only bright side I'll
point out is I mentioned a lot that I'm in
a contest with some friends and we all picked three
games against the points spread. I did go two and
one last week, and I went on went three to
the preceding two weeks after starting the season on our
show here six and two. I've been wrong about everything,
but last week I just happened of the three games
that I like to pick the wrong one. I thought
(01:25:22):
Kansas State would beat Colorado by seventeen or more. They
beat him decisively, but only by the ten, so I lost.
Mike also lost. He's having an awful season with his
picks on the air. He took Tulsa over UAB. That
didn't work at all. Paul took the Bears seven point
hunderdogs against the Eagles, and that was by far the
best pick of the week, as the Bears won the
(01:25:42):
game straight up. You got it? Was it nine points
or eleven. I thought it was eleven, but maybe you're right. Yeah,
the bear, wasn't it twenty six fifteen? You're probably right, Okay,
I thought it was by eleven. Anyway, So those were
the selections, and we're all underwater, and somehow I'm still ahead,
(01:26:04):
but Paul's catching me. And anyway, for those of you
interested in what ASA has going on this week Mike's company,
go to ASA wins dot com. I don't want to
oversell something, but I believe they won their college football
game of the year this past week. And if I'm wrong,
it's just a mistake. And my memory is a little fuzzy,
but my recollection was that they did all right. Time
(01:26:28):
for picks this weekend, there are nine college games. All
of the conferences have their championship game. Every conference now
has a championship playoff game, and following that the bowl
games on the College Football Playoffs starts. So those nine
games go on. Plus in the NFL, the buys are
still going on. Four teams at buys. But that's the schedule,
all right, get my sheet here, Paul, who started the
(01:26:52):
season so terribly and has gotten hot. You're happy, You're
only you're only half game up because I have fallen up.
I mean if I just like was like Meadi yocre
over the last few weeks, I'd be were running away
from this because I started so strong. But I mean
I started six and two. I'm now six seven and one.
That means I'm on a run of er five and one.
(01:27:13):
I managed to tie one of my picks in lose
the other five. All right, which game you want the
over under end? The spread on the Packer Bear game? Yeah,
six and a half and the total is forty four
and a half. And of course the game's in Green Bay.
Paul thinks it's easy. Huh, Paul's thinking the Bears. Paul
(01:27:42):
said the Packers could win by three or lose. Now
politic the Bears last week. He's high on the Bears.
Give me, give me your other reasons here. The Bear's
average over one hundred fifty yards rushing. The Packers only
injury of no now at the moment is they lost
their best run stopper in Devonte Wyatt. Clearly that's an issue.
(01:28:06):
And Wyatt is an example of one of those guys
that you can't judge a first round draft choice the
first two years because he was useless his first two seasons,
but he's developed into well the best interior alignment, not
the best line of the best in caurior alignment on
the team. And he's out for the year and the
Bears are running the ball very well. You're right, he
(01:28:29):
thinks still control the clock by running the ball. Paul
points out that William's passing stats are not that good.
I think that their receivers are only okay. They're putting
up a lot of points. They have the downside of
not having the greatest receivers in the roum. They lead
(01:28:49):
the end well. There are turnovers are unbelievable. They are
off the charts in producing turnovers and not committing any.
And there is no better factor to win a game
than to Going back to the Packer game last week,
I can tend the Packers are really plus five and
turnovers because I think fourth down conversion or stop is
the same as a turnover. Imagine if you fumbled the
(01:29:10):
ball and third down and the other team recovered well,
fourth down and the other team getting ball at that point,
it is the effect of a turnover. I think all
of those points are valid. I do think this. I
think that the Packers defense is ten points better than
the Bears defense. I'm still not so old on the
Packer corners, but one of them has gotten better than
(01:29:32):
he was earlier in the season, and the other one
is okay. I think the Packer defense is much better.
I think the Green Bay I think they've looked very
good the last couple of weeks. I think the Packers
will win. The thing about six and a half on
a point spread is it's just like three. There are
so many games in the NFL that end by exactly seven,
(01:29:53):
and they can be really close. You can have a
game seventeen to seventeen with a minute left and a
team it's a forty five your touchdown pass and seven
point win looks like a blow away when it was
actually a very narrow game. So I just don't really know.
Mike has sent us a pick, and he's been nice
enough to give a long narrative on the pick, which
I'm guessing his clients also get, so I'll just share it.
(01:30:14):
Mike is looking at the game. I got to check
our points spread on it here. Paul reminded me to
do that and I didn't. Yeah, that's it. Seattle and Atlanta.
I think Atlanta is maybe the most disappointing team in
the NFC this year, don't you. They were thought to
be very good and they're bad. And I would say
(01:30:36):
maybe the most surprising team in the NFC is Seattle, right,
just as I mean the most surprising team in the
NFL is simple New England. New England is the best
record in football and who saw that coming. That's just
a function. And talk about this in the NBA all
the time. When you're bad for several years, you get
all those early draft picks and if you pick right, okay,
(01:30:56):
they play. In the case of New England, you think
the MVP is going to be I think it's Drake
may right. I mean it's early to say, but you
know he was the quarterback at North Carolina when they
picked him in the first round of the draft, and
he's having a spectacular season. Anyway, Mike's looking at the
game between Seattle and Atlanta, and he's looking at the total,
(01:31:18):
which is forty four and a half. And Mike's pick
is on the over, and I'll just read what he
wrote for us. Seattle has been held under twenty six
points only once in their last six games, and that
was against the Rams who have a good defense. Seattle
is averaging twenty nine points per game on the season,
which is fourth in the NFL. Last week, they scored
twenty six versus Minnesota, but they held the Vikings scoreless,
(01:31:41):
so there was no need to score more than that.
The Seattle offense wasn't pushed to score at all last week.
We think they'll be pushed to score this week versus Atlanta.
Teams that come off a shutoff win shut out win
tend to go over the following week, as we usually
get a lower total than we should in that case.
So what Mike's pointing out is because they're coming off
a shutout last week, the total gets lowered by the
(01:32:04):
odds makers a little bit, and it becomes artificially the
point he's making. In fact, he has all these stats.
These are interesting. NFL road teams who pitched a home
shutout the previous week are thirteen and one to the
over since twenty seventeen. Wow, Teams that are coming off
a shutout win at home the following week, the game
went over thirteen or fourteen times. That means that it
(01:32:26):
won't go under this week. But that's quite the trend.
Let's see what else does he have for us? Atlanta
average is twenty three points per game at home this season,
and they put up at least twenty three points in
five straight games. They started the season going under the
total and six of the first seven, but the Felcons
have since gone over in four of their last five.
Kirk Cousins is getting comfortable and has been solid the
(01:32:47):
last two weeks in his starting role with four hundred
and thirty three yards passing and completing over sixty six
percent of his passes he goes on. But the point
is is that Mike is suggests saying the over in
Seattle and Atlanta? Whaty one and a half and I'm
gonna go to You looked at all the games, right,
what's the other big game in the NFL this weekend?
(01:33:11):
And by the way, not the game fans? Do you
realize that the game on Thanksgivings the highest regular season ever,
the game between the Chiefs and the Cowboys. Now, part
of that is the time. The mid afternoon Thanksgiving game
is always huge ratings because you know the rating count
if the TV is on and people are watching, and
it's always right before, right after, even during since it's
(01:33:32):
three and a half hours of Thanksgiving dinner. Nobody's out
on the roads of those days and so on. In fact,
the Packer game early at a huge rating as well.
But people still think of the Chiefs and Cowboys as
marquee teams. They're two five hundred teams, is all they are,
Paul said, the Cowboys and the Lions. Well, you've got
a third place team going against the second, the Cowboys
(01:33:54):
and second. Yeah, they have to be because the Giants
and Commanders think and they and Philadelphia I think, still
leads as bad as they are. Yeah, the Eagles are, Well,
that's a bad division this year, the East. I mean,
it's just a marquee I see you miss this. I'm
going between a game in which two first placed teams
are playing each other, the tied for first in their
(01:34:15):
own division. But they're not marquee teams because perception. It's
just like the Patriots. Nobody thinks of them as a
marquee team. They are the best record in the league.
The Jaguars play the Colts. They're tied for first in
the NFC South. They're both eight and four. I mean,
who which are they are tied? The Ravens and Steelers
are both. That's another they're tied for first. Huh boy,
(01:34:38):
another division that's just a quagmire of mediocrity. Then you
have the end, I mean the NFC North, the only
poor team Clinton, the Minnesota In the NFC West, Arizona's
not even that bad, into the only poor team. You've
got several divisions really strong and others that are terrible. Anyway,
We're going to the NFC South game. Indianapolis is playing Jacksonville.
(01:34:58):
As I say, it's a dead heat for the lead.
Speaker 3 (01:35:00):
What did you say AFC, AFC South If I said
NFC that was clearly a mistake, which Paul quickly jumps
on to correct me, and he'll probably correct my pick
here since I've been wrong for about a month.
Speaker 2 (01:35:12):
I've been wrong, literally for a month and a half.
The game is in Jacksonville, but the Colts on the
road are favored by one and a half. You probably
didn't even think about the game, did you. Now, I
admit I'm just not a cold streak. And there's fewer
games to pick from this week in college and so on,
and what Paul's guessing, I'm taking the Colts. All year,
(01:35:33):
people have been pointing out that the Jaguar statistically aren't
that good. They were winning a lot of close games.
I'm taking Jacksonville. This is reversed over the last several weeks.
The Colts have crashed to earth and Jacksonville is as
hot as any team in the NFL. I think in
(01:35:53):
this case, perception has not yet caught up to reality. Well.
I don't think home field and manages manage just for
much of anything in the NFL. The reality is Jacksonville
is at least at home. But let me read Jacksonville's
most recent games. They had their bye in late October.
Since then, they went to Las Vegas and they beat
(01:36:14):
the Raiders. They then played a Houston team which is
really improved and lost to them by ten, followed by
they beat the Chargers by twenty nine, and then the
last two weeks were on the road, admittedly poor competition,
but on the road they beat the Cardinals twenty seven
to twenty four, and they beat Tennessee, the worst team
in the league, by twenty two. So you have a
Jacksonville team that's gotten very, very hot Offensively, they're putting
(01:36:35):
up very good numbers right now with Lawnsick quarterback, and
they're taking on an Indie team that is really cooled off.
Indianapolis last week lost to Houston, admittedly a close game.
The week before that they lost to the Chiefs. Now
you can say, well, again, that's the Chiefs, true, but
the Chiefs are a five hundred team, So I think
you have a team that has improved and is the
(01:36:56):
better team right now getting a tiny amount of points
one and a half. The only other game I thought
of is we're talking earlier about the Ohio State Indiana game.
Very hard to figure because they're both unbeaten. Ohio State's
favored by four, and I thought of taking Indiana just
because this seems to me the teams, based in everything
we've seen, are even. It's just a hard game to
(01:37:16):
read because they don't have many common opponents and they're
both slaughtering everybody. So flip the coin and I would
have leaned Indiana. But instead of doing that, I'm going
to take the one game I had any kind of
an opinion on. I think Jacksonville's going to win the
game straight up in a very close game, but I'm
getting the margin. I'm getting a point and a half
of points isn't much, but I'll take it. All right,
recapping all of our picks here, Paul is taking the
(01:37:39):
Bears to cover the six and a half points. I
hope you're wrong. Wouldn't it be great if the Packers
won by thirty seven? Oh? Yeah, I know. I'd be
happy about that too. The only downside of that is
there is some history that if you kill a team,
you have to play them back again. That whole revenge
thing comes in. I don't know if that matters anyway.
By the way, the Packer game is a late afternoon
(01:38:00):
game on Sunday, Well, they've got a marquee game. It's
actually not as important a game because it's non conference,
although the Packers tiebreakers don't. Yeah, that will as well.
But the Packers played Denver, one of the best teams
in the AFC, next week, and that's a look ahead
(01:38:20):
game because the following week they've got the Bears again,
and that's the soldier field, all right. Paul says the
Bear is to either beat the Packers and lose by
six or less. Mike says, the Falcons and Seahawks score
more than forty four points forty four and a half points,
and I'm taking the Jaguars to either beat the colts
or lose by one or tied. Those are a picks.
(01:38:40):
That's the podcast for this week, back then another one
on Monday.
Speaker 1 (01:38:46):
The Mark Belling Podcast is a production of iHeartRadio Podcasts.
Production and engineering by Paul Crownforest. The Mark Belling Podcast
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U line has everything and visit you line dot com.
Listen to all of Mark's podcasts, always available on the
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(01:39:10):
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