Happy Monday fellow independent voters! Hope you had a great weekend and are anticipating a good, worthwhile, productive, and imminently enjoyable next week of your life, and if you're not, that you're dead set on making it even just slightly more that way to whatever degree it's in your power to do so.
And while you're checking in on the news cycle and keeping your finger to the pulse of the republic, if you really want to red pill yourself today, take a few minutes and try to figure out why Saudi Arabia's government could only ever shut down once, and the U.S.A has shut down 19 times since 1976.
Weird that it was on the bicentennial anniversary of the U.S. that this tradition started, eh? Oh what, did you think the shutdown kabuki theater started in 1996 with Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich? Ha!
I know that's right around the time 24-hour cable news and America's Baudrillardian television hyper-reality reached a critical mass, but you've forgotten or didn't even know about Ford and Carter's shutdown shenanigans, just like most millennials will look at you with a blank stare if you mention Newt Gingrich, and were blindsided by Trump's victory in 2016 because they had no idea what the score was with the Clintons.
The time honored perennial U.S. government shutdown tradition is and has always been stupid. Not because it's so horrible and dysfunctional like everybody says, but because it actually wants you to think it's those things, when it's not.
It's fake news about fake political dysfunction. It is designed to reinforce the status quo by making partisan voters believe there is a huge political confrontation going down in Washington.
But there's not really.
The government is going to keep taking America's money (we're up to $4 trillion federal budgets under Donald Trump and the GOP Congress, and over 20% of GDP since 2008), and spending it with powerful special interest groups with serious lobbying muscle. (That's how you get a congressman, by the way. They represent lobbyists, not voters).
And none of that will make most voters' lives better. Tragically, it probably makes life a little harder for them than it has to be with robots making almost everything and Elon Musk on the verge of inventing cold fusion or something.
But if the system can scapegoat somebody for the problems, it can continue on, so it splits in two and scapegoats itself.
It's like evil genius level design, but there's no actual evil genius puppet master who planned it out that way, just the system naturally protecting itself because there is so much at stake.
Adam Smith's invisible hand doesn't go away when you modify natural market forces into something perverse. It keeps quietly and mysteriously moving people, only now it's corrupt.
You can tell our governments shutdowns are really just a cry for attention (to misdirect your attention), because if they were actually real or really important in any way, they wouldn't happen at all.
Think Saudi Arabia or China's government can shut down more than once? When Egypt and Tunisia's governments shut down, they got a new government. Now that's a government shut down.
The U.S.A.'s partisan politics on the other hand are a made for television drama, not the real substance of what's happening in the system itself, the "deep state" if you will.
And though there are multiple 24-hour news channels, none of them are going to take the time to go into that and give you a deeper understanding of how the world and politics works, which is how you know the MSM is part of the system and why people loved the term "fake news."
Even when every word coming out of Don Lemon's mouth is technically, factually true, it's not real. It's not that the news is fake, it's that CNN itself is posing as a news company.
The Trump / Schumer shutdown was probably the lamest, fakest, stupidest shutdown yet. It's already over.
If "Dem'o'craps" and "Repugnants" (the Internet's terms, not mine) could come to an agreement that quickly and easily, why not right before the shutdown? Because it's better for the system to have the drama. And the anger. And the blame.
And none of these things are going to make your life better or the system more honest. In fact, they're designed to keep both you as an individual and the system from changing.
And that's my independent opinion about shut downs.