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May 1, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:56
217 State Lies

Hello, they lied...

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Good morning, everybody. I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph, Pinch Punch, first day of the month.
It is the 1st of May, 2006, Monday, and I hope you're doing well.
8.34 in the morning, heading to work as usual.
But I hope you had a great weekend.
Thank you to everyone who phoned in for the call-in show on Sunday.
We had a very interesting chat about depression.
And talked a number of Free Domain Radio.
It was pretty dramatic and emotionally compelling stuff.
Christina and I, as a sort of combined psychological intervention team, did manage to talk a few people through the emotional trauma of having not received a podcast on the weekend.
And so, obviously, that was fairly intense emotional stuff.
Very difficult. The crack of free-domain radio is most addictive, naturally.
And so, we have great sympathy for that.
Of course, what I was doing this weekend was...
Well, like, you care, but hey.
I had a really bad crash on Windows.
I used Windows 2000 Professional.
And it went down, baby.
It went down like a cheap hooker.
And I had to reinstall, so that was a good chunk of Sunday, and it's fine.
I mean, I actually haven't reinstalled in about three years, and it really should happen, right?
I mean, it just gets slower and slower and slower, so that was okay.
The other thing that I'm doing is, for those who have donated $100 or more to Freedom Aid Radio, blessed be thy names, I am going to release an audiobook version of The God of Atheists.
I've actually found that I'm okay in terms of being able to read it to my satisfaction.
So it's not going to be a mammoth endeavor.
If it was going to be, you know, four hours for every hour of recording it, it would be about a 20-hour audiobook.
Maybe not quite that long, but let's just say more than five.
So you will definitely be getting some quality, quality literature, and I think pretty good reading.
I think because I know most of the people that are in the book in one form or another, I think that it will actually work out okay in terms of the reading.
I'm quite pleased with how it's coming out.
Except for some reason I'm having trouble doing an English accent.
I know that sounds strange, but it really does seem to be the case.
So we're going to talk this morning, and I did receive my first review about The God of Atheists with some interesting questions.
Of course, if you're a parent, it's going to be a very interesting read or listen at another layer.
Another layer than it's, I think, a good story with good characters.
But it's going to be, because a lot of it is about challenges that parents have in terms of setting their kids on the straight and narrow, so to speak, and keeping them that way, and the corruption of power.
I mean, I don't want to talk all day about the book, but for me, ideology always, always, always trumps humanity, because the argument for morality is so powerful.
We know that the argument for morality is so powerful because it caused the death of almost a quarter of a billion people last century, and there's various ideologies like communism and so on.
And we look throughout the Middle Ages and we see the strangulation of humanity that occurred with the medieval church and the sordid aristocrats.
So we know that the argument for morality is very powerful because it's almost impossible to resist it.
And we know that when parents are told, spare the rod, spoil the child, over and over again, they tend to beat the crap out of their kids or treat them in this sort of Dickensian fashion.
We know that when morality changes around parenting, that parents change to that.
Human beings are entirely run by the argument for morality, as I've talked about, I guess not in a couple of podcasts now, but certainly in the earlier to middle ones, quite a bit.
And so the problem with the argument for morality, well, it's incredibly powerful, which means when we do achieve an honest and true version of the argument for morality, then it's going to really take.
I mean, if human beings were not run by the argument for morality, then there would be no hope for the world, right?
Then the world would just be totally evil.
But human beings are run with the argument for morality, and so that's why I did sort of two things.
I mean, there's lots of reasons why I did what I did in the book, but sort of the two major reasons that I made these decisions is one, I did not, not, not want to show, obviously, abusive parenting.
That, to me, is far, far, far overkill, and it is something that would absolutely dilute and remove parents Now, if I put sort of...
I don't know, child beaters or screamers or people who called their kids stupid.
Then people would say, wow, I guess there are a couple of bad parents out there, but I don't do that and nobody I know does that.
So, okay, that's them over there and this is me over here.
And that certainly may be the case, but I do believe that it's very hard for us to be good these days because we're raised to be so bad, to be so corrupt and subservient.
To false things. And so I wanted to put parenting that was only corrupt in a very subtle manner.
A lot of the problems that occur when you see highly and obviously abusive parenting is that it does not connect with the majority of people other than, wow, that's really horrible.
And, oh, I feel terrible for the kids.
And I understand that. And that's, of course, a very empathetic response.
But those are not the people that we have the major problems with in society.
I don't believe George Bush was beaten when he was growing up.
He was corrupted in a much more subtle manner.
And those are the people who are the most dangerous.
The people who are beaten up a lot as kids, they don't tend to rise to become the heads of corporations and governments.
They tend to take other paths in life, not all of which are bad, but they also have somewhat...
More obvious markers, like they'll have eye rings or tongue rings or tattoos or they'll shave their head or they'll dress in some manner, right?
They can't seem to escape the external manifestation of their inner wounds.
Well, they can escape it, but it requires a fair amount of introspection and accepting of historical pain.
And so the people who are really dangerous, not the people who are beaten, not the people who are screamed at, not the people who are called stupid all the time, But the people who are really dangerous are the people who are corrupted by smiling and pleasant people using false arguments for morality around the justification for state power or corporate power or benevolent power of some kind.
Those are the people who are really dangerous.
Because they have no social markers of dysfunction.
In fact, they dress in suits, as I talk about with Dave.
They do all these nice things.
They're pleasant. They're together.
They have a certain amount of success.
They have usually financial markers of success.
They have country club memberships.
These are the people that we have to watch out for, and there's no point writing a novel saying that beating a kid is bad, because pretty much everyone believes that now.
Whether they practice it or not is another matter.
So I wanted to talk about subtle parenting problems, and so not to sort of point the finger at individual parents like you reading this, but just to get people aware that the corruption that's in society comes from the family.
And it's good that it does, because if it didn't, it would be human nature, and we would not be able to solve it.
We want parents to be responsible for the problems in society, because otherwise there's no solution to them, and we need to identify a pathogen or a virus, so to speak.
So that's part of what the novel is about.
And the other part is that there's a good chunk of it throughout the, I guess, it starts pretty much about a third of the way or a quarter of the way into the book.
And there's a character who's a grad student, and he is the one who is in university.
And university, of course, is my metaphor, for want of a better phrase, is my metaphor for the generation of the ideas within society that corrupt the children.
And the philosophers within the university, the intellectuals, the academics, the professors, are trying to corrupt the youth.
I mean, just as Socrates says that, just as Socrates is accused of, and he actually accuses This is an old argument, which is that the intellectuals have a very close relationship to the young in terms of corrupting them.
And so I have that in a sort of pretty climactic scene.
So I'm really trying to talk about the subtlety of parental corruption and how it affects children and also the decisions that you make way back at the beginning of things that end up with you in very compromised situations.
You've got to sort of start out, notice things at the very beginning.
And so, there's a very subtle bit, which I'll just sort of point out.
I noticed it while I was reading last night, where Terry, who's a young programmer who gets sucked into a challenging situation in a software company, when he's first interviewed...
The guy who interviews him, they're sitting down in Starbucks for the interview, which is indicative of something to begin with, right?
That you're not in an office with lots of other people, but you're sitting in a Starbucks.
That's one thing. And another thing is that The guy who's interviewing him, they're sitting down and they're supposed to be staying, but the guy takes his coffee in a disposable cup.
I mean, this may be way too subtle for anyone, and it wasn't exactly too subtle for me when I first wrote it, but these kinds of things, I think, sort of layer in your mind, and these are the kinds of things that you need to look for.
If somebody is staying in a Starbucks but sits down with a disposable cup, That's an indication of something that may be important about the personality.
No sense of commitment or permanence.
He always wants to have one leg out the door, always wants to have an exit strategy, and so he's not going to take a cup that he can't leave with if something goes awry or gets unpleasant.
Anyway, these are the sorts of things that I layer in to the book.
And I hope that it adds up to something that's enjoyable for you.
So if you've donated 50 bucks or more, then do give me a shout and I'd be more than happy to email you a copy of the book.
And if you donated 100 bucks or more, you can obviously get a copy of the book and my thesis.
And also, you can get the audiobook.
I'm going to start posting it today or tomorrow.
I'm not done, of course, but...
There's enough done that I think you'll find it enjoyable.
And I think that the reading is okay.
It's been a long time since I've done anything dramatic other than these podcasts, but I think it's not too bad.
So I was watching 60 Minutes last night.
I like watching it from time to time because it's an enjoyable...
It used to make me stressed and tensed and angry, but now I just find it kind of funny.
I mean, I don't know if that's good or bad, but I do find it kind of funny.
So the story was, and I won't remember all the details, but I'm sure you can find it on CBS.com.
There's someplace, I think, out near Washington that's storing 60 years of nuclear waste in 150-odd massive steel tubs of waste.
And basically the story in a nutshell is that in 1989 the congresswoman who was out there was saying, like, we've got to do something about this waste.
And she was told, don't worry, it's absolutely impossible for this waste to ever leak.
There's never going to be any issue, blah, blah, blah.
And then it turns out that, I don't know, 40% of the tubs are leaking, and it's going into the water table.
It's going to create a plume, and a plume is like a mappable extrusion or flow through the groundwater and the soil.
I can't remember which river it is, but there's some river that's really important that it's heading towards.
Is there going to be a catastrophe? All of this nuclear waste, this stuff is so dangerous that a cup of it can kill a bunch of people in a restaurant in a couple of minutes.
It's pretty vile stuff, right?
So 1989, this woman's told, there's no reason for concern, it's absolutely impossible, never ever going to have no problem with leakage ever, right?
And then of course there's leaks.
So then what the government does is it starts building this, I don't know enough about the engineering, but it seems to me like a sort of fantasy camp of...
Of filth cleansing because they're going to turn all of this radioactive goop into glass logs and then dispose of it in some manner.
I don't know why. I mean, maybe it works.
It just seems kind of like alchemy to me.
Like, we put it in the magic Calvin and Hobbes transmogrifier and out comes blah blah blah.
And so they start doing this, and like most people who build a government, you want to bill, bill, bill, bill, bill, up ahead.
You just want to plow through everything that could be conceivably problematic and just bill.
Because you don't know if the political winds are going to change, you don't know if the politician's going to change, you don't know if the person who's in charge of the project is going to suddenly fall out of political favor, or fail to pay his dues or his bribes to someone.
And so the problem with government contracts is they're always in danger.
Of being cancelled. And so the absolute incentive is to bill as much as humanly possible.
And to set up milestones which you can get additional billing for, like completion bonuses or something like that.
The Bechtel was the corporation.
I think they're also involved in Iraq, right?
So they start building this transmogrifier, and they start building it, and then they're supposed to put in all these vats and so on, and the vats are all found to be problematic, and they're leaking, and, oh, we'll fix them when we put them in, you know, if you've ever had that contract.
Yeah, we'll put them all up, then we'll straighten it.
Oh, I can't seem to return my phone calls.
But they put these things in and then they jam them in and they don't work, right?
They're just crap. They jam them in and then they say, look, we got them in on time.
Give us a $15 million bonus for getting them in on time.
And they get paid that. And of course, there's kickbacks.
And I mean, this is absolutely all complete filthy corruption, right?
I mean, don't think for a moment that this has anything to do with lawyers and paperwork.
This is all just kickbacks. I'm sorry, before they even started building this building, they said, look, this thing can't withstand any kind of earthquake.
And given that it's housing all this nuclear waste, you'd think that an earthquake might be something that it should withstand.
And of course, Bechtel says, oh yeah, no...
It'll withstand it. Don't you worry about that.
We don't live anywhere near Washington.
And so they argue about this for two years, but Bechtel keeps building anyway, right?
And of course, that's exactly what you would expect.
Bechtel doesn't get any money from the government or from the taxpayers if they don't continue building.
If they put everything on hold, then everyone they've reserved and booked and all the money they've invested to get the plans, to get the training, to move people out there, all of that goes to waste.
So while there are all these disagreements going on about whether it's safe for an earthquake or not, Bechtel keeps building the facility anyway, and then they find out, no, it's no good.
But they keep building, and so they have to stop.
Anyway, I just think it was kind of funny.
Can you imagine if Al-Qaeda ever strikes the U.S. again?
In other words, if the U.S. doesn't continue to self-destruct in the way that Al-Qaeda got the USSR to self-destruct, then if the U.S. does not continue to self-destruct, which is almost impossible and unthinkable, but then if Al-Qaeda strikes again, and what happens is that they release some radioactive waste into a major stream...
I mean, it's not funny because people will die, but it is funny because of what I'll say in a moment, which I'm sure you're fairly clear on what it is I'm going to say, but I'll pretend they're suspense anyway.
But if Al-Qaeda did release some sort of radioactive plume that hit a major artery, like a waterway, And then it sort of went down and killed a bunch of people and this and that, right?
Then it would be considered an evil, unbelievably evil and cowardly and horrendous and so on.
Weapons of mass destruction attack upon the American soil and the American people.
It would just be something that you would hear no end of horror about from the government, and it would provoke another war, and we would go and spend hundreds, 400, 500, 600 trillion dollars going to not catch the perpetrators, or as I saw on one website the other day, Osama bin Laden is still free.
How about you? And there would just be this, oh, they hate us because we're good, and this cowardly attack upon American soil, and the government will now leap to our protection.
And something like this is absolutely going to happen.
And you may have heard of Love Canal beforehand, and Love Canal is something which I'll talk about another time, is something that is always blamed upon the private citizens, but it's absolutely not the case at all.
Love Canal was entirely the fault of the government, but...
Something like this is absolutely and inevitably going to happen.
The more powerful the government is, the worse the environmental degradation goes.
That is an absolutely iron rule in the world.
And if you want to look at the greatest and most environmental horrors, this is the most polluted site in the world outside of the USSR. And the USSR is unbelievably filth-ridden and had pretty much the largest amount of environmental protections on the books.
But it's public property.
Nobody gives a crap about whether it's clean or dirty.
And so this is the agency that is letting all of this radioactive crap seep into the water table, where it's going to absolutely go out and kill people.
And the killing might be quick, and it's going to kill people, or it might be slow, and it's going to kill them in the worst kinds of ways.
It's going to kill them in the ways that are things like mutated babies in the womb, and cancers, and And just horrible genetic things that occur, and leukemia in children.
It's going to kill people in the worst kinds of ways.
And if that occurred from an outside agency, it would be considered to be stone evil and an act of war, right?
I mean, if somebody else were to do this in America, to seep this stuff into the water table, kill all these people, then it would be considered an act of war.
But of course, if Saudi Arabia decided to levy a 20% tax on Americans to fund its own troops which it used to quell its own domestic population, then that would also be considered an act of war On the part of Saudi Arabia.
So Saudi Arabia starts parachuting all these troops into America, starts holding up citizens and say, you give me 20% of your income, or I'm going to put you in some sort of detention center, some sort of gulag, and I need this money so that I can pay my troops at home to quell domestic discontent or people who want to overthrow the Saudi state.
Well, that would be an act of war.
I mean, there would just be no question about that.
If you can imagine that there was a DRO society, like a completely free society, and somebody started landing people in to take 20% of people's income to pay for their own domestic rebellion quellers, then the DRO would absolutely view that as an act of war.
And so it's always kind of funny to me that people talk about national defense when...
Because of the argument for morality, whatever the Saudi government does is exactly and morally completely equal to what the American government would do.
And so it really doesn't matter whether the American government sends troops to your house to get the money to pay for the military, or the military aid, or the military itself, which it then sends over to Saudi Arabia to help the House of Saud quell domestic disturbances.
It doesn't matter whether that's the Saudi Arabian government that does that or the American government that does that.
I mean, the argument for morality simply says that morality is universal.
And therefore, what is allowed or not allowed to the House of Saud is allowed or not allowed to the House of Bush.
This is all perfectly simple and perfectly easy to understand, but that's why I find it pretty funny that people talk about the need for the government to provide self-defense when what the government does to provide self-defense would be considered exactly what you need to defend against if another government did it, like coming in and taking but that's why I find it pretty funny that people talk about the need I just think that's kind of funny.
And that we need the government to protect us against the war on terror.
The war on terror.
And the funny thing is, of course, that what the government does to pursue the war on terror is things like the Patriot Act and things like not pursuing the containment of waste, which it has itself been put in charge of and containing and so on.
And this stuff is going to cause some horrendous liability down the road.
I mean, people can worry all they want about global warming, but let's look at something a little more tangible.
And I also think that it's quite fascinating to look at the anatomy of lies, right?
I mean, the anatomy of lies from the government.
They might as well just have the same press release over and over again and change the words, right?
Because it's always the same thing.
There's never going to be a problem.
You're crazy. We've got it under control, blah, blah, blah, right?
Then there is a problem.
But it's not a big problem, and we've got it contained.
We've put processes in place.
Mistakes were made, but those guys aren't around anymore.
I'm the new guy, and I'm going to ride in like the Lone Ranger.
I'm going to solve this problem. We're going to get processes in place.
We've got additional safeguards in place, and so on.
Now, of course, the other question which is not asked is, well, if we're paying the U.S. government God knows how many trillions of dollars a year in taxes, why, oh why, do they need to hire Bechtel to build a building?
I mean, why would it be?
Of course, the fact of the matter is that if they hire Bechtel to build a building, there's a small chance that it's going to get built, right?
But if they use government workers to build the building because of unions and because of lack of motivation and so on, and because you don't get the highest quality people working in the government, except for teachers, right?
Except on occasion on teachers.
But certainly the best engineers don't end up working for the government, right?
I mean, the best managers don't end up working for the government.
It's a place to go and hide out and fight your petty, stupid, pathetic little political battles.
To get outraged and to retire as early as humanly possible, right?
It's just this sick, sick crap house that people sit in, biting and running and cowering until they can retire.
And this is not where you get high-quality engineering work out of, to say the least.
And then, of course, when more problems occur, it's like, yes, the vendor caused problems and there was a lack of oversight.
And, of course, this never is because the people in charge find out about it themselves.
They're always caught by someone else.
And so the government loves to have vendors around because it gets bribery, right?
So the people who give the contracts to vendors get kickbacks of some kind or another.
And it has a scapegoat, right?
So it gets the work done, which it could never get done with its own workers.
It gets the kickbacks, which it wouldn't get with unions.
And it also gets a scapegoat, right?
So if there's a problem, then they go to the vendor and say, you bad vendor, you're causing all these problems.
And as a vendor who supplies the government on occasion, I know what this is all about.
And so this is the great cover-your-ass ecosystem, right, that's in the government.
I mean, everybody's just solely concerned with covering their own ass.
And so then they blame the vendor, and then people get mad at the vendor, and then the vendor says, well, we...
And it's always complicated, right?
The vendor says, look, we got these specs, and then the government changed the specs on us, and they wouldn't pay us more, so we just figured we'd build what they asked us to build originally, and we're not going to sue them, because you can't sue the government, and blah, blah, blah.
And so the vendor then gets into all of this sort of mess, but they're a handy scapegoat, right?
Well, the government says, well, we asked for this, and the vendor built that.
Like, it's not the government's fault, right?
The government's in complete control.
The poor, helpless government with all the military and all the legal power and the police and the, right, the government just can't seem to get nasty vendors to do its bidding.
I mean, because it's so hard to get everyone else to do the government's bidding, right?
Because if they raise taxes, there's always just this massive revolt and nobody pays them because the government has no power.
I just think that's funny.
I mean, it's like the Marine pointing at the toddler saying, well, he made me do it.
It's just kind of funny, right?
And then you get the new guy has to come in, right?
So people just get cycled out of the government.
I mean, they just get cycled to other places.
So they leave, and they don't mind leaving because by the time that they actually get to the position of influence where they can start making these kinds of screw-ups, they're at a position or they're old enough where they can actually retire and live fairly comfortably.
So they don't mind if they get kicked out at some point or another.
And so the new guy comes along and says, well, yes, mistakes were made.
There was a problem in terms of oversight, but I'm coming now.
I'm coming in and things are all going to be different and everything's going to be better and don't you worry your pretty little heads about anything.
We got it all under control, blah, blah, blah.
And this is, of course, despite massive cost overruns, despite a complete inattention to the issue of safety and the protection of the citizenry.
I mean, not that you'd really expect any of this stuff to occur, but it's just funny to me how the government is such a very powerful and all-pervasive structure.
I'm still working on that metaphor about violence and how it shows up in a state where everybody is very far removed from violence, but I will get there.
But, I mean, the government is such a vast, all-powerful and unique structure, right?
I mean, nobody else in society gets the power of taxation and regulation.
And yet we still focus on individuals.
I just think that's kind of funny.
We still focus on an individual, like the entire Department of Energy, the entire state structure is viciously incompetent.
And everything it says is a lie, as Nietzsche said, as somebody has their signature on the board, everything the state says is a lie and everything it has it has stolen.
But we still think that there's some individual that is going to come along and clean house, right?
I mean, this is part of the fantasy of the Wild West stuff, right?
That there may even be a corrupt sheriff, but when the new sheriff comes along, I mean, this is the great fantasy, that it's not the structure and the violence which corrupts, but there's a possibility of...
Of somebody having individual integrity within a corrupt situation.
It's like the Serpico idea, right?
Like the cop who ends up testifying against the other corrupt cops.
Which has to be a movie because it could never ever be a documentary, right?
And it has to be fiction because it could never occur in real life.
And... I mean, I know Serpico, I think, was based on real issues, but I'm pretty sure that they were heavily skewed and that the ending wasn't even close to what actually occurred.
And so... I just think it's kind of funny that people still have this fantasy that some individual is going to come along and change things.
And of course, the person who comes along, and it's pretty obvious when you see it, right?
The person who comes along is basically lying through their teeth.
And so Leslie Stahl is sitting there and saying, well, shouldn't this have happened and shouldn't that have happened?
Isn't it unbelievable that the other didn't happen?
And the guy's like, yeah, well, you know, mistakes were made, but we fixed them now.
We got oversights, blah, blah, blah, whatever you want.
And he doesn't have to say anything.
I mean, it's funny even that he came on.
But he came on.
The private corporation guys, the Bechdel guys didn't come on.
They sent a letter saying the $15 million was not a bonus for completion, but just work paid for done or whatever.
But they didn't come on board because they're still a sort of fascistic but semi-private corporation.
And so they could face repercussions, shareholders and so on.
But the government, the guy can come on and just lie through his freaking teeth.
He can just spew all of the crap he wants all over Leslie Stahl.
And what does he care?
I mean, he's like, yeah, yeah, well, what are you going to do?
Are you going to cut off my source of income?
Are you going to fight the military?
Are you going to sort of slow down taxation in some manner?
And even if you did manage to get me fired, I've already had enough bribery kickbacks and pension schemes set up that I'm set for life.
So, yeah, you can do whatever you want.
I mean, it's like your boss coming in and lecturing you when you want to quit your job the same day that you just found out you've won the lottery.
I mean, it's just kind of funny.
You're like, yeah, yeah, okay, so I made some mistakes, but who cares, right?
Fine, you know, you can have your little rant.
That's fine with me. I mean, it's not going to hit you in any particular way, right, because it's a coerced relationship.
And so there's no possibility of any alteration coming from the media.
I mean, that's hilarious.
Leslie Stahl is going to lead the revolution that's going to cut the funding off from these guys.
I mean, this is just funny, right?
And she also, I mean, this is her fantasy, right?
And it's the fantasy of a lot of people in the media.
I don't know if they believe it or not.
But if you sort of look back on things like Watergate and stuff like that, right?
I mean, it's just kind of funny.
Oh, they're all so proud, right?
Oh, we brought down a president.
We did like... Well, what the hell did you do, right?
Okay, you caught one guy doing something that, you know, he wasn't a popular guy, and he was doing something that Kennedy was doing too, right?
Which was bugging me.
Kennedy had bugs in the White House office.
He recorded everything.
He bugged his enemies.
I mean, it's the same guy, right?
It's just he was a handsome guy with a pretty wife and a cool, you know, Harvard accent.
New England, I think it was.
And... It's the same thing.
And then Richard Nixon was some sweaty guy who looked like an orangutan in a dinner jacket, and so they all go for him because he's kind of sweaty and guilty looking to get that used car salesman heir to him.
And they think they're doing something.
Like, we exposed all this corruption.
We're this, we're that. It's like, but so what?
Like, I'd rather you didn't tell me, right?
It's almost like if the doctor...
If there's some terminal ailment...
No, that's a bad way of putting it.
Forget that. But it's like if there's nothing you can do about something...
And nothing's going to change it.
That is part of being told about it.
Do you really want to hear? I mean, it's an interesting question.
I don't know. But I just think the media is funny this way.
Like, they sort of run around yapping at the heels.
They're like the little chihuahua yapping at the heels of the woolly mammoth, you know?
Splat! And so the fact that they are looking at all this stuff and saying, oh, we caught you.
We're talking about corruption, as Leslie Stahl said.
I was here in 2001, and it was exactly the same situation.
Now, five years later, it's exactly the same situation.
And of course, if I was on the government side, I'd say, yeah, and we can keep playing this game for another 20 years if you like, but I'm out of here in a couple of years, so the next idiot who's sitting here, the next jerk who's sitting here will tell you the same crap, and you'll probably be as outraged, and maybe you should deal with your relationship with your long-dead parents if you want to figure out why you're constantly trying to catch people who are corrupt who you have no power to alter.
I mean, this all goes back to childhood, right?
As I constantly say, right?
The reason that people want to trap government in falsehoods is because they want to catch their parents.
But of course, when you're a kid, you can't alter your parents' behavior any more than you can alter your government's behavior when you're a citizen.
And of course, when you're an adult, you can't alter your government's behavior or your parents' behavior either, but that's neither here nor there just now.
But I just think that stuff's kind of funny.
I mean, this is the social entity that people look to for protection or honesty or alteration or improvement.
It is just, to me, it's kind of funny.
It's kind of, kind of, kind of funny.
Like if the mafia says, yeah, you've got to pay me protection money of 50% of your profits.
But in return, I'll pick up the garbage, and then if the garbage doesn't get picked up, and you say, you know the problem with this relationship is they're not picking up the garbage?
I just think that's kind of funny.
And yeah, the media does sort of hide government corruption in this manner, and we'll talk about that another time, but I just think that stuff's kind of funny.
And I hope that you can see at least some humor in it, because otherwise you really are going to pull your hair out.
And of course, since that happened to me many years ago, it's okay if you get past the vanity aspect, it's actually pretty efficient.
So thanks so much for listening.
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