AM Show Hr 3 | Literacy Crisis, Perverse Incentives & The Cost of Bad Policy

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. I hope you enjoy our podcast as much as we enjoy making it. You can always email me through the website, Michaelberry Show.com. I do love to hear from you and I do respond to you. Tell me where you're emailing from. It's fun. Our podcast listeners are from all over. And wherever you are all over, there's a decent chance that you have or know someone who has a steel pipe that can be sold to my friend Ray Breyer's. at the pipeyard inc.com. They dispatched trucks across the country to haul one load or 300 loads of pipe. I had one listener in Georgia. His company had an abandoned pipe, an abandoned line running all the way from Louisiana. through the Southeast Conference of Football, Basketball, and Ray Breyer's, the Pipyard Inc. was able to pull all that pipe out, pay them for that pipe, and then sell it to another user. Thepipyard Inc.com. 409788 pipe. I'm on testosterone, and I encourage everybody else to be on testosterone. If you're below 350 on your testosterone level, Very good chance your insurance will pay for you to have it. You know why? There's a lot of studies that say it's very good for you, not just your sex life, but your energy, your strength, all sorts of good things. Do your own research. Don't trust me, but you should do your research, and you should get your blood panels checked, and they'll do all that for you at synergenics. Go to fixmylote.com. Fix my lowtie.com. Whether you having a big party coming up or you want to give a gift. of a special drink, specs, wines, spirits, finer foods, cigars, Houston owned and operated, the most knowledgeable staff in the industry. I go to the Midtown location, but there's one near you. Houston owned and operated, incredibly knowledgeable staff, and nobody has the selection they do. If they don't have it, in most cases, they'll get it for you. Specks, wines, spirits, finer foods, cigars, and more. It's that time. Lock and load. The Michael Bari Weiss Show is on the air. Hello, baby. A high school student in Philadelphia. It's dark. Exposed his classmates and the fact that they're practically illiterate. unable, or at least struggling mightily, to read very basic words, to comprehend relatively simple sentences. In a viral series of videos on TikTok, he's done this. It's amazing. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a moving picture, an actual video. Not a single of his high school, school age peers was able to read the sentence. She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche. Listen to this. It is heartbreaking and disappointing, but frankly, not exactly shocking.

Read the ending score for me. She wore a suit clothes that were... Who's this for? Act sure ordinary, but somewhat... Gertcher? No, explain what that mean? I don't know. She were a solot of clothes that were extra during me, whatever, bro. But somewhat, pooch. What does that mean? She wore a lot, wait, she were, bro, I don't know, bro. She took the car back, please. She wore a, oh, baby. She wore a clothes that were. This, I don't know that way. I don't even know how to read. I don't know why. She wore a silhouette of clues that were extraordinary, but somewhat cause. All right, now, what does that mean? I have wide. She were a, I don't know what she said. I don't know what she said. I don't know what she's saying. I can't read it. I can't read it. Can't read it. Can't read it. Read that in this card for me. Now, these young people are going to get their high school diploma, and they're going to go out and apply for a job. And it's going to be figured out pretty quickly. They can't really read and write, not on a decent level. And they're not going to get the job. And they've been taught you didn't get the job because you're black. If being black means you can't read, then yes, that's the reason you didn't get the job. But plenty of black people can and would get that job. Employers are struggling to find people with basic life skills. They're not looking for ways to keep from hiring blacks. They're wanting to hire people. But you've got to have, depending on the job. Can imagine this person being an admin job? Let's hear it some more. So this sentence, which they're supposed to read, is the colonel, admittedly, colonel is a tough word, C-O-L-O-N-E-L. It's one of those quirks of English. The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor's schedule. Now, these are some atypical, irregular words, granted. C-H-O-I-R should not be choir by any traditional. It should be chore. But we recognize it as choir. in the way that we recognize the irregular verbs, odd spellings. But these are kids that are not being exposed to that. They're not being prepared for life. And you'll notice that there's a lot of, well, I don't want to be embarrassed. I want to be cool. I want to keep it real. Bitch, I don't know what that means. You notice that? Yeah, because it's okay not to be able to read. Just don't be uncool. All right, here goes. The sentence, the colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor's schedule. Read the in the skirt. What the f*** that said? Why am I reading this? No, I'm not reading this.

Just say a whole bunch of... The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor's schedule. What does that mean? He's asking the choir to accommodate the governor's schedule, right? In your own words. There's a governor's schedule, and so the colonel is asking the fire to accommodate to it. In your own words? I don't know. The commoner acts the choir to accommodate the governor's schedule. What does that mean? Right, they ask the people to sing. For the governor's schedule. I don't know what this means. The colonel asks the choir to accommodate the governor's schedule. What does that mean? He asked the choir to accommodate the governor's schedule. What does that mean? He asked the choir to accommodate the governor's schedule. What does that mean? To sing with the governor. So one of the misconceptions many people have, is that the consumer of the government's services, the government provides a service that you, the investor, the taxpayer, pay for, and that the consumer of that service is the people who go there. Well, you don't, in the state of Texas, we don't have an income tax. We have a property tax, which is very expensive. And the biggest thing we fund from our property tax is our local school districts, public school, which is, quote, unquote, free to anybody to go here. Now, one of the great frustrations over illegal immigration was that we had to keep building schools because the courts had ruled if somebody is on American soil, even they came here illegally. You had to provide free school, free health care, all these sorts of things. So the taxpayer was having to pay for more schools for people whose parents hadn't paid taxes already. And since many of them were off the books and they're not getting, you know, all the governmental expenditure on Social Security and all this, none of that was being used to pay for these schools. But as a society, we understand, and this is the Western civilization notion, That it is in the interest of a community to educate people who come out of the school because that's who's going to be your cops and firefighters and business owners and doctors and nurses and lawyers and teachers. And so we, the community, must demand that our schools do their jobs. But we've seen again and again, in fact, recently. Schools closing down, protesting over illegal immigration. Teachers unions being the biggest grifters and hustlers promoting left-wing lunacy. Hell, the teachers union got very involved at the behest of the Biden administration in pushing for mandatory vaccines. It's not even a vaccine that killed people. What are they doing? Why are they getting involved in that? So you get these teachers unions that have become the most powerful political lobby in the country. They're what the Teamsters used to be. They don't care about teaching anymore. Randy Weingarten, that weirdo. And so this is what you get. So now these aren't outliers. These are typical kids coming out of our inner cities. They can't read or write. So what are they going to do for a little? Who's going to want to hire this? And when you don't hire this, now what?

So news stories tend to bury news stories and many things that when they leave the public eye lose the momentum to do anything about them. And that always worries me because the latest and greatest news cycle will keep people focused on something. But when the news cycle moves on, not so much. There were a lot more resources thrown at the Nancy Guthrie case. When it was the lead news, then when people went back to normal, probably more resources than the case deserved. It wasn't consistent with other cases of that type. There were leads being chased down that weren't even good leads, but hey, it's in the news. Everybody needs to show we're busy. Act busy, everybody. Well, the Southern Poverty Law Center was taking money from donors. And funding the Klan and other bad actors. And those people would then go commit crimes, hate crimes. And the Southern Poverty Law Center would then say, see, we told you, there's a lot of hateful people out here. Now give us money so we can keep exposing them. But actually, you were paying them to do it. Well, they have decided not to disappear amid their scandal. In fact, they've released a new ad to explain exactly who the southern poverty law center is. Here at the Southern Poverty Law Center, we hate hate. In fact, we hate hate so much. It's kind of our thing. Some people collect stamps. Some people run marathons. We, we wake up every morning pour a fair trade cup of coffee and say, how can we hate hate hate even more today? It's a calling, really. Now, over time, we've realized something uncomfortable. And our passionate opposition to hate. We had developed a very strong dislike for hate groups, and that got us thinking. Aren't we, in a way, participating in the very thing we oppose? Hate. So, we did what any reasonable organization would do. We took a step back, held a series of deeply funded workshops, and came to a groundbreaking conclusion. If we truly want to eliminate hate... We must begin by addressing the hate with ourselves. And how do you confront your hatred of hate groups? Well, naturally, by engaging with them in the most paradoxical way possible. Some might call it ironic. Others might call it confusing. We call it transformational. Because you can't just say you oppose hate, you have to really wrestle with it, fund it, study it, put it under a microscope, and occasionally wonder if you've tied yourself into a philosophical pretzel. But that's the work. So yes, we hate hate hate. We hate it so much. We're willing to go to extraordinary and occasionally bewildering lengths to prove just how much we hate it. So in an effort to end our own hatred and be the change we wish to see in the world, we've decided to fund the very hate groups we once hated. This concept is known as a rule of perverse incentives. You end up creating incentives.

for things that society doesn't want. So the people donating to the SPLC were actually getting more of what they claim they don't want. But I would argue not really, because the left needs there to be a clan. They need there to be some crazy people out there. They say, look at these people! Because then you don't notice Black Lives Matter. You don't notice Somali fraud. You don't notice the overrun of the border by the illegal aliens. But this law of perverse incentives, it's an interesting concept. There's a story about during British colonial rule of India, in the late 40s, India became independent. Their trist with destiny is Nehru called it. But before that, the British ruled it as a colony, as they had many of them. The sun didn't shine on the, didn't set on the English Empire. It was a vast empire. They didn't like the deadly cobras that were indigenous to India. So they try to plan in New Delhi, the big capital. They said, we'll pay a bounty as a government. For every cobra, you bring us. So you just bring us the head of the dead cobra and we'll give you, you know, whatever is, 10 rupees ahead. All right. And what we'll do is we'll basically outsource the killing of the cobras and there'll be no more cobras. Well, those who live under colonial rule, people who live as slaves, migrants, they learn to get very clever because you have to to survive. So the Indians began, I got this figured out. They started breeding the cobra. And so they would breed the cobras to then kill the cobra and bring the heads in. Today I brought in 10 cobras. Wow, Ramesh, only four yesterday. Yes, I've stepped up my efforts. I brought my family in. In the next day, 20 cobra heads. My goodness, Ramesh, yes, Vijay, my cousin is involved. We're getting really good at this. The next day, 40. My goodness, you're going to bankrupt us. We're going to be shed of all the cobras before you know it. But somehow, the more money they spent on killing cobras or bounties for dead cobras, it seemed like the worst the problem got. Because the guys who were breeding the cobras were also releasing some of the cobras. Because you've got to keep the fear up, right? Yes. So at some point they figured out, wait a second, we're spending 100 X what we were spending on Cobra control, and we have more cobras now than we ever did. And so it came to be known as the Cobra effect. A German economist named Hortz-Sebert in 2001. wrote an article about the cobra effect. This is known in colonial governance. It's kind of the lore of the, you know, the clever, crafty, artful dodger resident, native resident of the, of the empire's colonies.

There's also known as the, there's also the Hanoi rat bounty, which the French colonial rulers supposedly offered a bounty for rat tails. And so what ended up happening was supposedly, according to lore, according to legend, the Vietnamese would cut off the tail, bring the rat to the colonials, then breed the rats, because they can breed without the tail, and increase the population driving the French crazy. And then they'd have more rat tails and more bounties. This is known as the rule of perverse incentives. And the SPLC, rather than helping with the problem of right-wing hate, are actually making it worse. And all these perverse incentives, all this money, it's good business. You see, their job is to hate-to-hate. And when your job is to hate-to-hate, You don't want hate to go away. When your job is to hate racism, you don't want racism to go away. So you end up breathing more racism because you get paid to fight racism. And you wonder why we have more racism than ever while we spend more money and effort to eradicate it. So we were talking about what the Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said about Spirit Airlines going under. They went bankrupt. Their assets will be picked over. A lot of customers will be screwed. You can request a refund, but a lot of people won't have the time or energy to go through that. A lot of jobs will be lost. Well, what's interesting to think about as an economic phenomenon is that there are still customers who were booked on flights who needed to go somewhere. So that demand still has to be met. But maybe, just maybe, that demand is less than necessary, at least at the price they're willing to pay, to keep Spirit Airlines afloat. So when Spirit Airlines goes under, the people who are currently booked and would be in the future, their travel needs didn't change. The demand didn't change. People don't decide I want to fly based on the fact that Spirit Airlines exists or doesn't. Now, they may decide they want to fly because Spirit Airlines prices are so low that it would induce somebody to fly who says, oh, well, I would have flown for $159, but I'm not going to fly for $359. So in that sense, the demand may change, but let's assume for the sake of this argument that it doesn't. So Spirit Airlines goes away. What happens to all the people who would have flown on Spirit Airlines? But now it's not there. And it was cheaper than the alternatives. Now those people pivot. And they say, well, that $159 ticket on Spirit Airlines, I still need to get from Houston to Cincinnati. So now I'll go to. JetBlue or Continental or Southwest Airlines or United Airlines or whatever. So now all that demand floods the market. So the airline revenue management guys are saying, hey, we held back 10% of our tickets for surge pricing at the end. Now we've got all these people, some of whom can say, I don't want to, I'll just choose not to fly.

If Spirit and JetBlue merged, then that downward pressure on price would be removed everywhere that Spirit flies. JetBlue admitted that it was planning to increase fares by 25% or more after they merged with Spirit on the roots that Spirit flies. So the Biden administration stepped in and said, no, this merger is bad for- Okay, so hold there. So evil JetBlue. if they took over the unprofitable Spirit Airlines routes. How do we know they're unprofitable? There's a reason Spirit Airlines was going under. So they said, if we take over the routes and the customers who bought tickets and we'll buy tickets in the future, come on, we're going to right size, level up the prices so that we can make a profit. Oh, no, you don't. Evil business. We're not going to let you. You're not going to be able to allow to raise prices because we're the government. And raising prices is bad. Okay. So Spirit Airlines continued to operate at that rate. And they went bankrupt. So where do those customers go now? To JetBlue that charges 25% or more on each of those routes? The market doesn't lie. You can artificially affect the market. But the market doesn't lie. And by the way, there are definitely certain signs of the type of people that flew Spirit Airlines. Ladies and gentlemen, Jay! Foxworthy. Thank you. Thank you. Look at this guy in the front row. White feeder, ice cold schlitz beer, eating a cold hot dog. Hell, I think he's tailgating for the Spirit Airlines funeral. If you ever reheated crab legs before boarding a plane, you might have flown Spirit Airline. If you have a support chicken. you might have flown Spirit Airline. If you've ever given yourself a pedicure on a flight with a pair of scissors, you may have flown Spirit Airline. If a trip to Walmart is considered a vacation, you might have flown Spirit Airlie. If you call a trash bag and duct tape a suitcase, you might have flown Spirit Airline. And finally, if you booked a flight on the way to your Carnival Cruise vacation, you definitely flew Spirit Airlines. This is DJ Hicks of your fighting Texas Aggies. You're listening to my uncle czar, Michael Bari Weiss. There's a story then. It was big in Houston over the weekend. A man said his truck was stolen, and this is happening across the country. This truck is stolen, and he's frustrated with the lack of response from the Houston Police Department. He says he has a GPS device on the truck, and then he was told that because the truck was pinging on private property, there was nothing they could do. Well, it's not because it's on private property. It's because...

There aren't enough officers to assign. See, a lot of the really dumb things you hear a dispatcher say is not because that's the policy. So you don't want to waste a lot of your time arguing against that policy because that's not the policy. If an officer drives up as someone is stealing a vehicle and they see them stealing the vehicle, it's obviously they're still in the vehicle, And the person don't know, he's still in my truck. They don't go, no, no, I, I shan't stop him because of the old private property provision from the Treaty of 1741. That dispatcher is just spouting words. That's not a policy. So people get real hung up on things like that. What's really happening here? is that in Houston, I was told by one officer who has experience in this in the auto theft division that there's over 50 cars a day sold. I don't know if he was exaggerating or not, but that's what I was told. There's a lot of cars stolen in Houston every day and in every major city. And there aren't enough officers to respond. And when they're stolen, the sole purpose for an officer to show up is to make a report. And the sole purpose to get the report is to file it with the insurance. Well, we've talked a lot about pricing of late. If this is happening a lot in your zip code through no fault of your own, then the insurance company has an algorithm. It says, ah, if you live in that zip code, you're more likely to get your truck stolen. So they increase insurance rates. So again, there are all these costs that the criminal element. is passing off to you that you're paying for that you don't even notice. That's just one of them. When you go to the grocery store, some portion of every avocado, every box, every cut of beef, some portion is dedicated to recouping the loss from theft and covering lawsuits and fill in the blank. But this fellow had gone to greater lengths to protect his truck. And he's a sympathetic fellow because it looks like he's not rich. This really hurts him. This affects him to a great degree. And it appears that nobody cares. And then ABC goes into the article and goes to the story and says, hey, well, here we go. 3,282 vehicles stolen last year. 3,282 vehicles reported stolen the same time last year. And that was, oh, that's from January to March. Oh, wow. Okay. January February of March. So four times that. So it's coming out to nine vehicles per day. So, wow, I guess that doesn't change through the course of the year. But then there was something that was understood even more. It was more disturbing. And that was that. The rate that the Houston Police Department uses for cases that were quote unquote cleared shows that a vehicle is cleared before anything is actually really done. So that case isn't actually cleared. It's just marked as cleared. I learned something within the last year that I found very fascinating. Maybe you'll find an interesting. Maybe you won't. Waterburger is a very popular fast food restaurant in Texas.

and I think most people probably go to the drive-through. Partly because you see on social media, there's a lot of fights and silliness inside. You've got Democrats in there trying to kill somebody because the lady forgot to put the ketchup in their bag or they didn't supersize when they were supposed to or whatever else. Nobody wants to be around these people. So there you are in the drive-thru, and you get up there and you order your food, and they're clearly in the weeds. They're falling behind. You've come in a busy time. And they say, could I get you to pull up right over there? And you go, hmm, okay, but that seems weird, but you do. You pull up. And I asked that question on the air, and I had a woman who worked at Waterberger tell me that the reason they have you pull up is that when they report their public numbers up the chain as to how fast an order is, quote, unquote, cleared, the order is cleared. There's a camera, and that camera uses artificial intelligence. And from the time you pull up to the window to the time you drive away is measured and recorded. So let's say you're there for a minute 30. And it's clear they're not going to get you your food in time for you to drive away in less than two minutes, if two minutes is the clear time that they're shooting for. So at 1.30, they give you time to be out of there by two minutes. The AI of the system doesn't measure whether you pulled up 40 feet. And an employee had to come all the way out and hand you your food. So they wanted you to move so they can clear that. They're striving. It's all about hitting their numbers. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with having statistical analysis and goal setting and these sorts of things. But that's the reason they're moving you. Well, it's also true that major police departments play games with how they report crimes. We've had major Democrat-run cities. where they simply don't file cases and stories. Because if they did, they'd have to admit that they had more murders this year than last. Anyway, here was a story from ABC 13. It's a jab in the chest. I worked my butt off for that truck, and it's gone in less than 10 minutes. 10 minutes. That's how long Bobby Brown says it took for thieves to steal his new truck from in front of his home Monday morning. He says he called 911, one to the location of the truck's last GPS ping. even flagged down law enforcement in the area of the truck. But Brown says he was told there was nothing anyone could do. I've just been sitting here blind this whole week. Follow the report on Monday. I had to miss work Monday and Tuesday. Lucky I could go back to work Wednesday. Brown says on Thursday, Houston police told him no investigator would be assigned to the case, that the truck was listed as stolen and they would keep an eye out for it. ABC 13 called HPD on Friday. They confirmed Brown did make a report with them, but say they have no mention in the report about a GPS device being on the truck. After we called, an investigator was assigned to Brown's case. I said, you shouldn't have to have worry that the news is about to do a report, knowing that HPD isn't doing anything, and now you want to assign a detective. I think it's crazy. According to HPD data, from January to March of this year, 2,799 vehicles were reported stolen, which is less than we saw in the same time frame last year. However, more cases have been cleared so far this year. The Department of Public Safety marks a case cleared when somebody has been arrested in the case. Brown says days later, he's not confident he'll ever see his car again, but wonders if police had acted faster if that could have changed.

I feel like it's all a mess right now. I have to do all the work when I feel like it's their job. As in me going to the location of the last no pain, I shouldn't have to do that. Ray Breyer's is the pipe man. He owns Pipeyard Inc. And they buy and sell pipe all day long. And I am shocked how much business we've been able to send him across the country. Entire pipelines going across three different states where they need to get the pipe pulled out. He's like, I'll pull the pipe out, I'll sell the pipe. People buying pipe, people selling pipe. The people that buy pipe are environmental managers, pipeline project managers. Somebody that's got an abandoned pipeline that's been removed. They want the pipe yard ink. Compliance and regulatory folks. They want to get those pipes out of there. Selling pipe, folks that need carbon steel pipe, the Pipyard Inc stocks everything you need, any kind of pipe. There is stuff that people call him for, industrial stuff, that he doesn't even have, and he tracks it down. He's working his phone, and his team is working their phones all day long. He's got a yard, they've got pipe. They are working the phones to get stuff for people all day long. 409-788 pipe. 409-78 pipe. Turns out, at least according to my urologist, that all that talk about taking testosterone is bad for your prostate. That was based on one study that's been debunked. But you know what? Don't trust me. Do your own reading. Cross-reference. Learn more. Go to fixmylowtie.com. That's synergenics. That's who I use for my testosterone replacement. It makes me energetic. It makes me happy. I lost some belly fat out of it, which was really nice. And yes, it does that too. FixMylowt.com. Whether you having a big party coming up or you want to give a gift. of a special drink specs wines spirits finer foods cigars Houston owned and operated the most knowledgeable staff in the industry I go to the midtown location but there's one near you Houston owned and operated incredibly knowledgeable staff and nobody has the selection they do if they don't have it in most cases they'll get it for you specs wines spirits finer foods cigars and more