Here in the US, most of us shifted from daylight time to standard time over this past weekend. Most of us had the opportunity to sleep an extra hour. For free! More sleep means more health, more ability to tolerate stress, more consolidation of what we learned the previous day.
It’s a wonderful thing.
Of course, that hour was never free. We just borrowed it. We’ll have to pay it back in March. You know that. I know that.
But just for a moment, I am going to think like a Democratic Socialist:
Why not give us a free hour every night?
I mean, just think of the benefits. Who doesn’t want an extra hour of rest?
Just turn back the clocks every night of the year at 2 AM and make it 1 AM.
365 nights a year.
Viva the Greater Good!
If I were a Democratic Socialist type, I would vote for anyone who promoted it.
It isn’t on the ballot tomorrow. But that same sort of thinking is on the ballot in various states in the US. And that sort of thinking already has been adopted in New York City and much of Europe.
Doug Casey calls it stupidity.
He has two definitions for stupidity. The first definition is predicting the immediate and direct consequences of an action but not the indirect and delayed consequences. The other definition is an unwitting tendency toward self-destruction.
Tomorrow, people will go to the polls in the US to vote between two choices: giving more power to their government to do what the Republican politicians want to do, or giving more power to their government to do what the Democrat politicians want to do.
There is no viable choice on the ballots for taking power and money away from the politicians and reserving that money and the power to the individual people.
In some places, including Alaska and Maine, there is Ranked-Choice voting. You get to vote for several candidates and rank them in order of your preference.
What I would prefer is a Ranked-Disgust voting. That would be more consistent with the reality out there. Each candidate would start with 100 points (you know, equity and all) and then lose points based on the voter’s ranking of how disgusting each candidate is.
Or instead of going to vote, I can go to veto. Just changing a couple of letters around. On the ballot, I used to write-in Mickey Mouse. Everyone else was voting for a Mickey Mouse too. I just used the correct name. But voting for Mickey Mouse is not truly a veto. Most would say it’s a waste of a vote. Perhaps it’s better to give your vote for the lesser of two evils. You will still end up with more evil, sure, but less of more evil.
Who wins the election?
Not us.
Here’s some advanced math. The winner of an election is determined by this formula:
TV+FV+VSFTOG
Where TV is the number of true votes received.
FV is the number of fraudulent votes received.
And VSFTOG is the number of votes stolen from the other guy.
The winner is the one who has the highest sum of TV+FV+VSFTOG.
The math is no more complicated than that. Democracy has always been this way.
Get over it. If the Democrats cheat more than the Republicans, the Republicans need to be one helluva lot better at earning true votes. Starting wars probably isn’t the way to earn those true votes.
Tomorrow in the US we will be choosing between keeping Congress under the control of Republicans (who have been able to do little to codify the efforts of cutting the federal bureaucracy but have not gotten in Trump’s way), or putting it under control of the Democrats, who will get in Trump’s way constantly. If Democrats win, we will all be relying on Trump’s veto to prevent them from burning down the last vestiges of what was once America.
Trump is the type of guy who needs to be seen as the hero. Trump probably sees that a Democrat-controlled Congress will provide him an opportunity to be a hero. He’s had to do everything by executive order anyway, and that won’t change with a Democrat-controlled Congress. So as the new Congress starts passing stupid bills, Trump will stand as the wall preventing those stupid bills from becoming law.
Hero!
Kamala Harris, as dim as she is, was able to see that impeaching Trump would be bad for the Democrats.
But, if the Democrats win, they won’t be able to control themselves. They’ll go on an impeachment binge. Maybe some Republicans in the Senate will vote to convict Trump and the two-thirds will send him out of the White House. Maybe. If that were to happen, two things will occur.
1) Doug will win his bet that Trump won’t finish out his term, and
2) The Democrats will realize they’ve been hoisted by their own petard. They will suddenly realize they have no viable platform other than hating Trump. So they will go full-on panic to aim their well-lubricated hate machine toward Vance, jamming that throttle to the floor. I bet Vance and his wife will not enjoy that.
If Trump tries to stay in the White House after a conviction by the Senate, all bets are off.
And if Trump is out of the White House and no longer a useful target, all the Democrats have left to campaign on is the type of thinking that would lead to us setting our clocks back by one hour every night of the year.
You know, for the greater good.
Tomorrow’s election, the cheating that will occur, the wailing and the tears of the losers, the rabid celebrations of the victors, perhaps a bit of violence here and there, all of it will be there to watch on wide screen TV.
I think I will watch South Park instead. Or maybe Team America, World Police.
Or maybe just go straight to Idiocracy.
John
John Hunt, MD
Editor, Doug Casey’s Crisis Investing
P.S. Whoever wins tomorrow, the dollar will lose a little more value against everything except other crappy fiat currencies. That is an outcome I will bet on, and it is why we own gold and the companies that dig it up. If a friend forwarded this to you, join the free list. If you already read us for free, the paid tier is where we show what we own and why. Here’s where to click.
Is having Congress and the Presidency controlled by different parties the best we can hope for at this point? At least they will sometimes veto each other and prevent some of the damage.
I know you started the narrative with the stupid US custom of moving clocks to "save daylight", but this should just go to demonstrate that government propaganda has been around a supremely long time. No daylight is saved. No time is saved. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 did nothing for farmers who get up before the sun regardless of the number on some government clock, nor does it save electricity.
But alas, our choices are 99.9999% the same because the uniparty rules. There is little alternative outside the pleadings of the Declaration of Independence to throw off government when it becomes tyrannical.