Representative Government would be okay......

......if it weren't for the representatives. I happen to believe that the best form of government would be a benevolent dictator. Unfortunately history has shown us time and time again that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Democracy is probably the next best thing but it is terribly inefficient, primarily because it calls for the attempt to satisfy the needs/wants of conservatives, liberals, seniors, generation Xs, the affluent Knob Hill group, the sandhillers, the blue collar, the white collar, the homeless and on and on. It's really a hopeless task, at best ending up with everybody being partially satisfied and partially dissatisfied. And it's made worse when elected officials, from the President down to an alderman lose sight of the purpose of their positions.

In my view the purpose of government is straight-forward. To protect the population against external and internal enemies, and to insure the right to pursue success and happiness as defined by the individual within the bounds of societies well being. It is not the job of government to provide success and happiness...to relieve the population of their responsibility to provide for themselves. And yet in my opinion that is exactly what Biden's budget in part is seeking to do. And why I'm glad that Senator Joe Manchin has dug in his heals. I don't think that he's grandstanding or playing to his constituents. I believe that he sincerely has what he believes to be the best interests of the people and the Constitution in mind by taking the stance he has taken. 

An article I read this morning prompted this post. As I see it this isn't an article about serving the people. It's an article about people wanting to keep or win jobs in Washington. It's about the Democrats worrying about their image because of the infighting regarding Biden's budget. I think that the two paragraphs excerpted below illustrate both the socialist agenda and the focus on personal political ambition.

"I'm obviously upset -- pissed off about what happened," said Rep. Tom Malinowski, a Democrat who represents a New Jersey swing district. "We certainly are not going to win an election spending the next year bemoaning the fact that Joe Manchin didn't do Build Back Better in December. We win by sprinting out of the starting gate in January."

"I think it's imperative that Democrats pass a measure to support children and families and the economic wellbeing of the American middle class and to take steps to address climate change," said Rep. Dean Phillips, a Minnesota Democrat. "If we do nothing, it would be a terrible reflection on Democrats."

So Tom Malinowski is pissed off. Good. Maybe when he gets un-pissed off he'll look at Manchin's budget objections and see them objectively for what they are about...more steps along the path to socialism.

Citation Needed

There are several physics/cosmology forums that I enjoy reading. The posters are mostly scientists and/or educators. Most of the threads/posts are over my head but I do occasionally learn something, and part of that is due to the way in which the forums are moderated. The forums deal with fact, or at least the best evidence available at the moment.

In the thread-opening and reply posts, all assertions, allegations and opinions must be supported by a credible, peer reviewed source. The moderators are quick to edit a post, indicating where a citation is needed, or issuing a warning if a statement strays too far off-topic or is offensive, and will ban a poster permanently for repeated warnings or a personal attack. I'd like to see the news media and public figures held to the same standard. It would be so refreshing to see the political far-left and far-right, and the leaders of the seemingly innumerable special interest groups be permanently muzzled, or at least compelled to stop their unsubstantiated claims.

I've chosen at random, a portion of a recent article by Tucker Carlson...it could have been an article by any number of extremists, to illustrate what I believe would have happened had the article been posted on one of the physics forums I mentioned. Actually, the post title alone would have gotten the post deleted and the poster permanently banned. My 'moderator' comments are in red. 

Tucker: Liz Cheney is lying to you about Jan. 6

"If you live in Manchester, New Hampshire, first of all, congratulations, it's a really nice place. But second, we thought we'd give you an explanation for what you may have just seen. So if you live there and last month, you thought you saw Liz Cheney wandering around downtown Manchester, no, you were not hallucinating. Liz Cheney was there. (Citation needed) And that's pretty weird if you think about it. Not a lot of people go to Manchester, New Hampshire, in November, so it probably wasn't a family vacation. Nor is it likely that Liz Cheney went up there by accident. Manchester is an eight-hour drive from her home in the D.C. suburbs, and more to the point, it's also eight hours from the CNN studios in downtown Washington that she inhabits more often than most of us go to church and much more reverently.  (Warning)

Manchester is also, not that it matters to her, more than 2,000 miles from Wyoming. That's the state that she supposedly represents in the U.S. Congress.

So the question is: What was Liz Cheney doing in Manchester, New Hampshire, and of course, there's only one conceivable answer. Liz Cheney plans to run for President of the United States. (Citation needed)

Now, if that sounds demented, yeah, it’s because it is, but it's also real. (Citation needed) Now, you may be wondering if Liz Cheney were to run for president, what exactly would she run on? She doesn't like Trump. OK. But what would her platform be? We know the answer to that because Liz Cheney only cares about one thing and only ever has, and that is starting pointless wars in faraway countries. (Citation needed - ban warning) The more pointless the war, the farther away, the better it is. (Citation needed - warning) Droning peasants makes Liz Cheney feel powerful. It's been the great cause of her life.  (Citation needed - ban warning)

But you have to ask, do a lot of voters agree with her on that? Is there a massive national constituency for more Iraq invasions? We've seen the polling on that, and in a word, no. There's not a massive national constituency for Liz Cheney's foreign policy views. Just the opposite, in fact. People live outside D.C. do not support more pointless wars that do nothing for the United States or its core interests. (Citation needed) They're not eager to send their kids to die for eastern Ukraine, and the reason they're not is they've already done it. They fought a lot of wars like this because Liz Cheney told them to (Citation needed - warning - entire paragraph unsubstantiated) and they've had enough. 

Yet apparently, Liz Cheney is the last person who doesn't know this. She has literally no idea. She believes she has a shot at the Republican nomination for president, (Citation needed) and she believes that fervently enough to fly to Manchester, New Hampshire, in the middle of November. So what can we conclude from this behavior? Not looking at what she says, but what she's doing? And the only answer is Liz Cheney is delusional. (poster is permanently banned) She's living on another planet, and on that planet with her is the Republican Party's fading leadership class. The people who stopped assessing reality are having new thoughts of any kind, right, around 2003. That's the era in which they are frozen in amber."

                                                     *****

This article would never have seen the light of day on a professional forum. I often wonder if Tucker and those like him really believe the vicious conspiratorial spins that they spew on people and issues. Is it just a ratings game? Have they lost, or did they never have a sense of truth and decency? Do they teach their kids this kind of behavior? 

Speaking of kids, I read that Trump's own son messaged Mark Meadows on January 6th that Donald had to stop the incident. Meadows apparently replied that he agreed and was working on it. Why does a son have to go through an intermediary to appeal to his own father? As I said in my previous post, Goebbels would be proud.

Goebbels Would Be Proud

Last night we were watching Storage Wars reruns on television. We watch that program occasionally because we like to see if our price estimate on a vintage item is close to the "official" estimate. Actually, I was switching channels between Storage Wars and the Steelers/Vikings football game. I wouldn't normally do that because I am a football fanatic, but the game looked like a non-competitive rout so I kept checking back only to see if the score had changed.

It was at 9:00 PM that Storage Wars ended and we expected to see a continuation with another episode. Instead what was being shown was what I thought was the weirdest advertisement I'd ever seen, but it didn't end and instead kept going on. I felt uncomfortable, and asked Maribel if she knew what we were watching and had she changed the channel. When she answered no to both I thought that somehow the television had been hijacked and that we were being subjected to wild conspiracy theory propaganda. Ten minutes into the program - titled While The Rest Of Us Die, I realized why I was feeling unsettled.

During the years 1933 to 1945 Joseph Goebbels was the Reich Minister of Propaganda for Hitler's Nazi Germany. During that time period Goebbels utilized every source of information dissemination available to him...the news media, the arts, school curriculum, and radio and film to promote Hitler's favorite theme...that the Jews were responsible for Germany's and the world's problems and that Jews and all Slavic people were "sub humans" who should either be held in slavery or preferably eliminated. Through the use of pamphlets and film Goebbels would use misdirection, insinuation and outright lies to convince Germans of the truth of Hitler's beliefs. And it worked. The vast majority of Germans; over 90% supported Hitler. Goebbels realized that an appeal to emotion trumps an appeal to reason, and that if you tell a lie loudly and long enough people will buy it. Many of the educated Germans saw the danger and emigrated, but the average German was all-in. 

The program While The Rest Of Us Die uses the same misdirection, spins and insinuations  that Goebbels was so familiar with. Apparently Jeff Bezos's flight into space and being a billionaire takes advantage of the rest of us and perpetuates the Covid pandemic. And there is a shadow government apparently analogous to the High Table organization in the John Wick films that is controlling us, or at least the circumstances we live in. And there was so much more fluff that, if I did not know that it had worked in Germany, I would find laughable. Instead I find it disturbing.

Over the last two years a large segment of our population has demonstrated their susceptibility to misinformation, misdirection and conspiracy theory. Sowing the seeds of doubt while appealing to emotion is a powerful methodology. It worked in the 1930s and 40s, and it's working today. Goebbels would be proud.