Government


Quote of the Day: A Lesson From Counterculture Economics

We were going along really well. And then the crowds came in. All the people who were looking for something….[There were] too many people to take care of and not enough people willing to do something. There were a lot of people looking fo the fee ride. That’s the death of any scene, when you have more drag energy than you have forward-going energy.”
From Blair Jackson’s excellent Garcia: An America Life, 1999, page 132 Paperback Edition

Garcia was referring to the Haight-Ashbury scene in the late 1960s. It was relatively small and crashed quickly under the weight of drag energy.

Larger societies, say continent spanning countries, will take longer to crash but the mechanism is the same and the results, well, they are likely to be much messier.


The True Nature of Senators

They are assholes

With few exceptions, US Senators are assholes. They are as pompous as they are ignorant, which is not surprising, since they are as powerful as they are unaccountable.

Well, there probably are not any exceptions; not in the senate and not in the house.
Both the above writer and Richard Posner whom he quotes at length miss a key supporting point: all these folks pretend they have some meaningful authority to tell the rest of us how we should live our lives.
They have none. The very fact that they choose to pursue and occupy these offices is all the reason we need to give them no respect.

Oh yea, anyone who thinks these congress critters are anything about representing the people in their states or districts is as foolish as the critters are arrogant.


The Mass of Government

Now that we are 4 months into the current administration’s tenure it is fairly clear that it will adhere to the basic nature of governmentium:

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 to 6 years. It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium’ s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

Thanks to the eldest modulator child for bringing this back to our attention!

Back in 2005 governmentium showed up in our humor category and was certainly created both as a little bit of truth about government and a lot of truth about the bush administration.