The Twenty-Third Episode of the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast, my name is Dave. The mayor of New York City, the I’m walking here place, has a podcast. The only person who has ever listened to it is me, Dave, a dogwalker in Queens.

Welcome. If this is your first time listening, there’s a bunch of different ways now that you could approach eating this exceptionally weird elephant. You could go back to the beginning, and listen to the episodes that I did about Eric Adams’ podcast, The Get Stuff Done Cast. His podcast is very strange and bad and also revealing of Adams, and, though it’s understandable, it’s something of a shame that no one listens to it, since it’s really helped me to make sense of the guy. That said, I listen to it, and have recorded something like 17 episodes about it, so if you’re looking for that level of understanding, and, I mean, you are here listening to this - the first 17 or so episodes of my podcast are a good start. But if you’re here because you’d like to listen to me melt down about how weird and unpleasant Adams is on the page, well you’re in luck there too. Two episodes back I tackled Adams’ health and wellness grift, Healthy At Last, his spectacularly half assed attempt to position himself as a diet guru. Then, in the last episode, I turned my attention to the first three chapters of Adams’ 2009 effort to terrify parents, called Don’t Let It Happen. So, you could start with either of those, and I do recommend going back at least that far, since today we’re covering several more chapters of Don’t Let It Happen, one of the worst books I’ve ever read.

But before we do so, there’s been some news.

Yet another top aide to the mayor has been raided by the FBI. Winnie Greco had be-Ray-Ban-ed, buzz cutted folks present warrants at two of her Bronx homes and, side note, how many Bronx homes does a person need? I remember having a friend in college whose parents owned a house, and then a non-winterized cabin like a 20 minute walk away that they used as their summer cottage and it’s like… go on an actual vacation? Find another place you like? Anyway, a mall in Queens out of which Greco operated a fundraising office for the mayor’s campaign was also raided. If Greco sounds familiar, she’s a top aide to the mayor who earns 100,000 a year as his Asian Affairs Liaison, and on a past episode we talked briefly about previous reporting that indicated that she may have run a couple illegal straw donor schemes for the mayor’s campaign as well as self-enriched by selling $10,000 tickets to parties at the mayor’s residence (which are free to attend) and giving people jobs with the administration in exchange for things like overseeing renovations to her home. She seems, even for this administration, particularly brazen in her corruption. It’s also worth noting that this investigation is distinct from the previously known FBI investigation that already ensnared the Mayor’s personal phones and electronics, so now two different FBI offices are circling the guy and can someone please arrest someone in power soon so I know that the system - not that it works, but that it’s invested in its own survival on a basic level, since these lunatics are, like, selling the copper they’ve pulled out of the walls? There will be nothing left for the system to brutalize if it allows Adams and Trump to steal everything the system owns.

A couple other bits of weird mayor related recent news and then we’ll get into the book.

Adams announced that he’d start a pilot program at NYC beaches of water rescue via drone. Drones may or may not be able to successfully drop a floatation device on or near a stricken swimmer, but the obvious problem here is that people who are drowning often need to be physically pulled from the water. A drowning person usually stays close to the surface of the water, but can lapse into unconsciousness, or lose enough strength to hold onto a floatation device. It’s really not clear to me at all that drones solve any problems that a lifeguard is likely to encounter. 

At any rate, best I can tell, these drones will be operated by the NYPD, so that’s who will be using them to ogle young women on beaches, which is a much more obvious use case for drones, and in line with the department’s devotion to being total creeps. It should also be noted that lifeguards are unionized members of the Parks Department, and cops are a different union and department altogether. Seems like you’re setting up a union fight, but also it seems like a lot of the complaints about policing, including from the police, have been related to mission creep. Cops are asked to be social workers, emergency psychiatrists, drug counselors, family counselors, EMTs, and now drone based lifeguards. Even if you believe in policing, it seems like it requires people who are doing policing, and not like 30 other things. 

Speaking of the cops busying themselves doing things that aren’t cop shit, or, if you like, things that are extremely cop shit, The NYPD Chief of Patrol tweeted, from his official twitter handle, that a recent arrestee (whose name and mugshot were included in the post) had been let out without bail by a judge (the mugshot shows a man whose beard has gone almost entirely white with age). The post went on to name the judge who’d done such a terrible thing, as well as praising the DA of Manhattan for at least requesting bail, though the request was denied. The cop got both the name of the judge and the name of the DA wrong. Not, like spelled wrong, they named the wrong people, so they didn’t even endanger the right judge’s family, and the DA involved was the DA of the Bronx. The post is still up as of this writing, and the Chief of Department has only said that he got some facts wrong, but not that it was wrong to do this incredibly childish and stupid thing in the first place. Your reminder, should it need saying, that being arrested comes with the presumption of innocence, and that the elderly person released pending trial has not been found guilty of the non-violent crime of which he is accused.

A small, but I think illustrating anecdote comes from the Mayor’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Jacques Jiha, who is responsible for overseeing all the cuts to the budget the Mayor has insisted upon. This includes, evidently, school lunches, where the most popular items, including dumplings and cookies, were taken off the menu. The reason, according to Jiha? Too many kids were eating. As reported by The City and Chalkbeat, Jiha said the following at a budget hearing held by the City Council: “You have a lot of kids hanging out in cafeterias now and eating more and more and more and more… So therefore what they did was, they basically cut some of the items from the menu…because more kids are eating.” The Get Stuff Done administration got stuff done. Imagine if they’d put that effort towards, I don’t know, identifying and correcting a real problem. Imagine if these people lived in our reality at all. At any rate, according to The City’s (the news org I keep reminding you to support) FAQ Podcast, the stuff got mostly undone after enough people complained, and most of the items are back on the menu

Hey, remember that group of migrants who physically embarrassed a couple cops for harassing them in Times Square? Remember how after that the entire conservative media apparatus (which includes, frankly, the mayor of New York) went absolutely insane and plastered an image all over the place of one of the accused flipping cameras off as he was leaving his arraignment. They put it in Trump’s very normal ads for his extremely normal campaign for idiot king. Remember how the mayor put on a bulletproof vest to ride along with cops on a migrant brutalization raid and how the Guardian Angels pummeled a guy live on air on Fox? Anyway, the kid who flipped off the cameras was exonerated, he didn’t assault anyone, they arrested the wrong guy.

Oopsie! Oh also the guy the Guardian Angels beat is pressing charges and suing. I hope he winds up owning all their stupid berets and Curtis Sliwa has to sell his 15 cats. I am not making up the fact that the founder and head of the Guardian Angels is a weird cat hoarder. He has 15 cats and is a fascist. Toxoplasmosis is a hell of a drug, but to be fair, Sliwa was a fascist before he went cat kooky.

Speaking of migrants, video came out of cops in a shelter electrocuting a migrant with a stun gun, and then pummelling him. The man doesn’t appear to be fighting the cops, but he does appear to be showing a great deal of concern for the one year old child he’s holding, which seems natural because, among other things, he’s the child’s father. Adams defended the actions of the police officers, because of course he did. People often retreat to the idea that the mayor must know something we don’t when things like this happen, but that’s silly. Adams doesn’t have any more information about this than I do, this incident happened a few days ago, the only people briefing him would be the police, and there’s 12 million people in the greater New York area, Adams isn’t getting briefed on this, he’s getting whatever all of us are getting, video clips recorded by migrants on their cell phones, if he bothers to watch them. The mayor doesn’t have access to secret videos the rest of us can’t see of this incident; or if he does, he should release them, but also, what do people think happens? The mayor gets word that something like this happened and is rushed to a video bunker where he’s presented clear videos of every angle of the incident, including the lead up and the events of the entire evening prior, all breathalyzer info, dossiers on the cops and whether they have a history of violence, psych reprorts and so forth? Come on, he’s a cop. He doesn’t look at evidence. He defends cops.

And everyone’s mad about them, so I guess I gotta talk about the subways. The NYC subway system is in New York City, but it’s administered by New York State, so for the first time, I think, since I started this thing, Governor Kathy Hochul enters the drama. Side note, it’s very fun to sing her name to the tune of the Cleatus the Slack Jawed Yokel song from The Simpsons, which is a thing people have been doing online since at least 2012, so I’m going to credit someone named David A. Hopkins with originating the bit then.

Anyway, Kathy Courtney Hochul, who became governor in 2021 when Andy Cuomo resigned because he couldn’t stop groping people, and who then was legitimately elected with a shockingly low 53% of the vote in one of the bluest states in the country, and running against the Onion joke about a Republican candidate that’s just a shrieking white hot sphere of pure rage named Lee Zeldin, and whose first Lieutenant Governor, Brian Benjamin, only made it about 6 months into her governorship before resigning due to being indicted, she decided this week to flood the subways with State Troopers and members of the National Guard who will do bag checks of people entering the subway stations. I’ve not seen them at mine, for the record, and it seems like they’re more or less sticking to large subway hubs. Hochul has said that you’re free to refuse the checks, but you’ll have to leave the system and won’t be allowed to use it. This is untrue and more or less the type of thing that someone who never took the subway would claim, indeed Hochul doesn’t live in the city, and as far as I can tell from wiki, never has. The thing with the subway and bag checks is that the checks happen before you go through the turnstile, so if you don’t want your tampons groped or whatever, you just nope out and walk to another station, and there’s 472 of those, most of them have multiple entrances. Another station on the same line you’d like to be taking is typically about a five minute walk away. Almost all transfers happen in the system, past the turnstiles, so once you’re in at one station, you’re in, and if you want to bring in something you don’t want some weirdo with a gun to see, you just have to find a station or entrance that doesn’t have a weirdo with a gun standing by it, and simply by virtue of the number of stations and entrances, that’s quick work. Hochul is sending 750 members of the Guard and 250 Staties, that’s 1,000 people who can work maybe 8 hour shifts. There’s almost 500 stations and they’re open 24/7. Do the math, you can just go to the next station on the line. Second, checking a bag doesn’t do anything about what’s on a person’s body or in their pockets, and cargo pants are cheap. Third, most people don’t feel safer when they see a 19 year old in camo with an M4 rifle, because, you know, the extremely mass shooting context of this country. This is before we get to the part where, although this clearly won’t work as a crime deterrent, serious crimes are already way down in the subway, on a trend that has been declining and continuing to decline since the fucking 90s! About that Hochul said "I'm not here today to talk to you about numbers and tell you stats and statistics about what's going up and what's going down. I'm here to take action.” And "Rattling off statistics saying things are getting better doesn't make you feel better, especially when you've just heard about someone being slashed in the throat or thrown on the subway tracks. There's a psychological impact. People worry they could be next. Anxiety takes hold." So, this isn’t about stopping crime, it’s about vibes. Or, possibly, about putting Hochul’s name into the press in this context, rather than the context of the re-indictment of her former Lieutenant Governor, who just this week was re-indicted for the aforementioned bribery scandal.

If you don't live in a major city and you think of them as foreign both because of the different culture and the different uh colors you'll see there, you might be tempted to deal with your perception of unrest (whether or not that's reality derived) in the way that Americans deal with unrest. Invade, which the population doesn’t like, and it’s a bad idea if you need that population to vote for you.If you’re so dim the only tool you can only imagine is a hammer, every problem is going to look like a nail, but again, Hochul won election by the slimmest margin since 1996 against an empty suit that could only shout MAGA. She specifically needed AOC to headline get out the vote rallies in the last days of the campaign, and those voters she needed were here, in Queens. You think they'll come out in 2026 after years of this bullshit? You think AOC is gonna burn more political capital on helping out Kathy? Or is she, or someone like her, gonna primary her and hopefully send her back to Erie County?

That’s some news, by no means all, related to the greatest city on earth’s extremely not great mayor, and the weirdest state on earth’s pretty lousy governor. Anyway, let’s get to the next few chapters of his terrible book, shall we?

Chapter four is called Runaways, it’s two pages long, it should be a hoot. 

Adams opens by saying, “Many times, a parent has entered my station house to report that their child has been abducted, only to find out later that the child actually ran away from home.” I haven’t mentioned this yet in this episode, so I would like to remind you that Adams insists that this book’s approach to the English language is somehow the product of a professional ghostwriter. Adams goes on to say that, “More and more children are running away in an attempt to resolve issues with their families,” a sentence that is pound for pound one of the most meaningless I’ve ever encountered. What is the source for the claim that more and more children are running away? What is the source for the claim that they’re doing so in order to resolve issues with their families? What issues are we talking about here? It’s an awesome construction, in the sense of literally inspiring awe in me, based on how meaningless it is. Adams wrote this down! He thought about it before writing it down! Looked at it before sending it to the printer. It may seem like a small thing, indeed, this sort of sentence is everywhere in this book, but it’s banal because it’s… so banal. So perfect in its meaninglessness.

Adams encourages you to contact the police if your child goes missing. Even if you’re sure that they ran away, you have to call the cops, he says. Don’t assume your kid is fine if they ran away. He spends a bunch of time working on convincing you to do this, it’s weird because a) he just got done saying that your kid probably ran away, and wasn’t kidnapped and b) I don’t think most parents are parsing the difference between child runaway and child kidnapee, they’re busy worrying about the disappeared kid.

Adams tells you to notify the cops and have them take a report, then obtain the name of the officer in charge of the investigation, give them a photo of the kid, visit local hospitals, bus stations and places kids hang out, enter their name into the missing child registry, contact a service called Child Find, question the kid’s friends and neighbors and teachers and… all of that should be done by the cops? Like, a detective should be handing over their business card and gently reminding a distraught parent to go get a photo and then handling the hospitals and skate parks? This is just super weird. It’s like Adams forgot he’s writing a book of advice for parents and started writing a book for stupid cops.

Once you get the kid back, Adams says, you should “take steps to resolve the problem that caused the child to run away.” And that is literally the end of the chapter.

Valuable. Vital stuff.

Chapter five is called Tobacco Use. It’s less than a page long.

“I have not included tobacco in the chapter about drugs because I believe it warrants its own discussion. Like truancy, tobacco smoking is often a precursor to criminal behavior, and many people fail to properly classify tobacco as a dangerous drug.”

Smoking is dangerous, but the danger, according to Adams, isn’t to your health, it’s that it’ll make you into a criminal. For those of us who aren’t suffering from terminal cop brain, smoking is bad for you, it makes you smell bad, it’s addictive and expensive, it’s a fire risk (I personally know someone who died from a mattress fire caused by a lit cigarette), but none of these things are crimes. There’s a thing about cops: they can only see things through the lens of criminality. But being concerned about crime caused by smoking? There’s no link there. None. What is it, the Roaring 20s? Is the menace of tobacco smoking turning all our brave boys into brainwashed tools of the Kaiser? Adams is 20 years behind the Reefer Madness in his moral panics. Give him another 40 years and maybe he’ll catch up to Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal.

Adams, writing in 2009, states that, “Teen smoking has risen substantially in the past 10 years” and everything I can find says that’s simply untrue. According to a survey from 2021, teen smoking declined significantly from 1991 to 2021, including through the 10 year period from 1999 to 2009, when this book was written. Adams backs his claim with the following data:

“Over 3,000 young people start smoking each day” which he doesn’t cite, and he doesn’t indicate if that’s more or less than we’ve seen in the past.

“Over 1 million young people start smoking each year.” 3000 times 365 is slightly more than a million, so congratulations on owning a calculator, but it still doesn’t indicate that this is historically unusual, nor does it define what’s meant by “start smoking.” How many of those kids tried one or two cigarettes and gave up? How many developed a habit?

“Experts believe that teen smoking routinely leads to future substance abuse.” This is again not in any way backed up in the text by anything other than Eric Adams saying it.

“Teens who smoke are more likely than non-smokers to use illegal drugs.” This is the same thing he just wrote, slightly reworded, and again, a professional ghostwriter would find a more elegant way to pad the book. Also, there’s a million reasons not to smoke, but again, Adams can’t conceive of them outside of policing. “Cigarettes make you do illegal shit” isn’t in any way supported, but that’s the reason to do or not do things. A little on the nose how many people in Adams’ orbit keep getting in legal trouble.

He manages to end the list by noting that there’s a 1 in 3 chance that you’ll die from smoking if you start. Finally, an actual consequence, though it had to be put at the very end, since it’s not illegal to die.

Adams suggests the following ways to keep your kids from smoking:

“Take your teen on a visit to a healthcare or medical facility to show them some of the health-related consequences of smoking” This is a truly insane idea. Does Adams think you can just show up to a hospital and be like “scare my kid straight” and then the doctors will ignore HIPPA and take him to gawk at a guy with a trach? Well, of course he does, because he likes to imagine that that’s what he did with delinquent kids when he was a cop, and he literally cannot fathom a solution to a problem that isn’t “be a cop at the problem” despite the fact that scared straight programs at best do not work, and, according to some data, may actually make kids more likely to commit crimes. 

More solutions from Adams: “Encourage your children’s schools to engage in anti-smoking activities.” What are anti-smoking activities? Adams doesn’t say.

“Encourage organizers of youth sporting events not to advertise cigarettes or accept sponsorships from cigarette manufacturers.” You’d think a cop would know that cigarette manufacturers ARE LEGALLY FORBIDDEN TO DO SUCH THINGS thanks to a federal law passed over ten years before he wrote this stupid book.

“Allow teens to create their own anti-smoking campaigns” sure why not. Chapter’s over, anyway.

I wrote more words about this chapter than he wrote words in this chapter. This book is such a gift.

Chapter six is called Alcohol Use.

Alcohol, like truancy and tobacco, is a gateway to destruction for the youth of today, Adams informs us. He lists a bunch of stats, all of which you’ve heard, and he tells you that you’re shocked that, like, people who drink in high school continue to drink in college.

I don’t mean to downplay the effects of drinking, or anything else that Adams has covered in this book. I drink, and because I drink any amount, I drink more than is medically advisable. Alcohol is bad for you, and alcohol is also at the center of a lot of misery, both as a driver of abuse, and as an addictive substance. In addition to knowing people who’ve died of tobacco related cancers and fires, I know people who’ve died due to alcohol related disease and accidents. Adams, once again, can look at the very basic and obvious facts and draw a series of conclusions. Some of those conclusions - booze is bad for you, our budget has a shortfall - flow naturally from the data. Some - parents are the thing that will stop kids from engaging in high risk, pleasure seeking behaviors, we need to save money by preventing children from intaking calories - are not supported by people with normal brains, or any experience of childhood most people have had, nor are they useful for parents who, even if they’re willing, aren’t able to constantly monitor their kids to keep them from engaging with their annihilation impulses due to things like needing to have jobs to keep their kids in houses and food, since the city budget can’t help with stuff like that.

Interestingly, unlike cigarettes, Adams doesn’t spend a lot of time in this chapter talking about the ways in which booze inspires and is related to criminality. Cigarettes aren’t usually drivers of crime, but alcohol very much fuels fights and assaults. One might be tempted to note that some of the criminality in question is the type that cops tend to tolerate, which is to say intimate partner violence. It’s also true that Adams doesn’t smoke, but he does drink and obviously he would never do something that would lead him on a path to a life of crime or ongoing investigations by - you get it.

Anyway, Adams wants us to know that you can get sick from over use of any booze, and then he lists a bunch of boozes, like liquor, and malt liquor and wine, and wine coolers. Adams notes that non-alcoholic beers can contain trace amounts of alcohol and oversteers into a truly weird skid:

“I believe that brewers use non-alcoholic beers and wine coolers for a more sinister agenda. Because these products can be purchased by anyone, they are an easy way for brewers to introduce young adults to alcohol.” A quick google leads me to believe that this is only true in 16 states, and that in New York you have to be over 21 to buy near beer.

Adams goes deeper on each type of alcohol, and by deeper I mean that he pulls out facts like, “you can get drunk on beer” and “the popular way… to consume malt liquor is to drink it straight from the 40 oz bottle” and “you can often tell a cheap fortified wine by its screw-off top” and that liquors include gin, rum, tequila and vodka.

He then recommends examining your child for any of the following before allowing them to drive “loose muscle tone, glossy eyes, loss of fine motor coordination, staggering walk and motion, constricted pupils, slow response time.” On top of this he tells you that you should make your kid take a breathalyzer before allowing them to drive.

So, first, if your child is staggering, whatever the cause, no, don’t let them drive. One can easily imagine, however, events where parents are not present to assess the kid or apply a breathalyzer, like when the kid is coming back home. I’m not going to get into the ethics or trust issues that are bought up by forced breathalyzer use, each family is weird and terrible in its own way, but, again, relying on parents to be the people who stop kids from doing stupid things implies, among other things, that everyone has parents, or at least parents who care and have the time, and this plan of Adams’ relies on parents who can make themselves appear at every turn of an engine’s key; that’s simply not how driving a car works.

Adams gives the advice that everyone gives about dealing with someone with alcohol poisoning. It’s still not really clear to me what he was going for when he wrote this thing. The information in it broadly falls into one of three categories: 1) Common sense advice that most everyone knows, like turn someone with alcohol poisoning on their side so they don’t choke. There’s nothing really harmful about repeating it, I guess. 2) Common conservative talking points that take it as a given that there is no role for society in all of this. 3) Complete fucking horseshit he made up.

And that’s the bottle according to Eric Adams, and I think this is a good place to wind down this episode. For reference’s sake, we’ve gotten through about 40 pages total of this book, leaving about a hundred to go. So that’s fun.

What have we learned in this episode about this unsettling man? 

The NYPD Chief of Department is a man by the name of John Chell. This is the same guy from earlier in the episode, who doxxed a recent arrestee and the wrong judge in a groping effort to intimidate a segment of the judicial system into being more brutal than it already is to people he thinks deserve brutality. This is also the same John Chell who runs an online shop where he sells branded merchandise with the Chief of Department’s logo all over it. Chell claims online that he operates this as a 501(c)3 non-profit, which is, to use the vernacular, a lie. It’s an incorporated for-profit entity, and when Hell Gate, which is where I read about this - and, as always, is well worth your subscription dollars and support - when they pulled the incorporation records and asked the department why the incorporation documents give the address 1 Police Plaza as the place the business operates from they got no particular answer, and when they asked what the money from this business is used for, the answer given was “snacks.”

When I talk about Cop Brain, and how Adams has it, I’m describing a vibe. Keep in mind, this is all just my opinion and analysis, but I’ve known cops and former cops in New York. This is the most policed city, with the largest police force, in the country and you can’t really not get to know one or two cops if you do things that are open to the public, like performing, or training for a half marathon with a running club, stuff like that. The three cops/former cops I’ve known well enough to comment on, without saying too much, have run the full spectrum from reasonably normal to Full Bore Cop Brain. I’ve witnessed the Cop Brained cops (and former cops) do things like park their civilian vehicles in front of hydrants and put out their police vehicle placards on the dash, despite the fact that they were going to, like, a book club, not doing anything cop related. When going to events with them, they used their cop entry for subways, and would swipe me in as well, despite my protestation that I had an unlimited metrocard anyway. I’ve seen them physically intimidate people just because they could. I’ve had one of them do this to me. This isn’t particularly newsworthy shit, it’s just an attitude. An entitlement. Even normie cops do some of this stuff, and if they don’t do all of it, they could. And the brass? The lifers? The Chief of Department? The guys who do 20 years and get to Captain, like Adams?

The entitlement comes with a flip side. These aren’t just people for whom the rules don’t apply, they’re people for whom the rules must not apply, because they’re Cops and cops are Good. And so there must be Evil. They must be doing what they’re doing in the service of Good. Most people go into policing because they do think they can do good. Some are sociopaths and bullies, but as you advance, whatever you were, you become more cop. For the non-sociopaths, this means that taking on the entitlements must have meaning. And if you know anything about cognitive dissonance, that means that everything you do, every compromise, and then entitlement, and then straightforward illegal act, that all becomes justified. You’re not doing something wrong, you’re doing something special. You need to be able to do this, you deserve this, you’ve seen people do much worse, anyway.

It doesn’t help when people like Adams and Chell are at the top of the chain, gleefully prying the furniture from the floor. The culture of entitlement has foot soldiers, but it wouldn’t get too far along without express approval from the top down, and those guys aren’t people who started doing this for the right reasons. Those guys are sharks. Say what you will about the military, and I do, you see discipline there. You don’t see this mafia style grifter shit, at least not until you get to the contractors and suppliers. But the thing about the guys at the top of the police department? They also have Cop Brain. The true sociopaths, the roid heads who get into cop work just to wail on kids of color and take doors and who wind up shooting more than one person, they don’t have Cop Brain, because they don’t have a mind that can consider that they might be doing something for any reason other than the release of certain hormones into their broken brains. But their behavior is self limiting in an organization as political as a city police department. You can get pretty far being kinetically brutal, but you can’t get as far as you would by being politically brutal. Typically you don’t find brutal gladhanders. I doubt Adams ever fired his gun, most cops don’t.

Adams has a terrible case of Cop Brain, and in 2009 it’s on full display in this book. You see it in the way he suggests going to a hospital to scare your kid. A cop could flash a badge and go into an ER or ICU, a regular person would get bounced. You see it when he talks about tobacco being a gateway drug; he doesn’t smoke, and therefore it can be criminal. He doesn’t talk that way about booze, but if you read his stupid health grift book, you’d hear about how he enjoys a single malt scotch or two when winding down the day. Booze is much more criminally associated than tobacco, people regularly get drunk and beat the shit out of each other, but it can’t be a criminal gateway to Adams, he is a cop, and Cop Brain says that definitionally a cop can’t be involved in something illegal, so a cop doing anything makes that specific thing not illegal or suspect, at least for the cop. You see it in the way he simply says stuff, completely untrue stuff he made up, to back justify his feelings about what things represent a danger. This is what happens when, by virtue of an unearned authority, your feelings are given a deference that is not in any way extended to the layperson. Cops are given the power to kill and the courts have repeatedly upheld the authority to empty a firearm into someone based solely on a cop feeling fear.

Speaking of cop brain, it’s on full display in, guys, Season Two Episode One of the Get Stuff Done Cast which just dropped. That’s right, everyone’s favorite podcast to not listen to is back and I promise, I’m listening so you don’t have to. I’m gonna do my best to get through the rest of this terrible book quickly so I can get back to his terrible podcast now that he’s remembered he has it, but I don’t necessarily feel like I need to hurry too much, since, if history is a guide, the next episode isn’t coming for somewhere between five days and 6 months, but also the mayor may well get arrested before anything else happens. I’ll go as fast as a guy with a whole ass other business can, I promise. Until next time, I recommend reading and supporting The City and Hell Gate. If you liked this, or thought it was interesting and want to hear more, the best way to make sure you do so is to hit subscribe on whatever podcatcher app you’re using to hear my voice right now. The best way to let other people know about this podcast is to tell a friend or enemy about it. Rate and review if you like but the weather’s been really nice lately, at least in NYC, so maybe go outside instead.

Transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at:

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My thanks, as always, to John Coyne.

See you next time.