d how do we pay down the debt and can we just print money and can we inflate it away. And nobody knows any of that. It's just completely unknowable.

So I do understand that more debt seems worse, but it just hasn't worked out that way. Observation has not matched the theory. So I would just say having a firm opinion on the debt is a dicey situation now because even experts don't really know what's going on there.

Biden's also going to do an executive order on some voting stuff to make that more solid. And there's HR1 coming through to make some changes in voting, etc. But here's the thing. Are we really trying to make the voting good in this country or are we just watching two different entities, Democrats and Republicans, using different gaming techniques to make the system favor their side? Because that's all it looks like. It just looks like one side is gaming the system and then if the other side had control they game the system. They gerrymander and they change what kind of voting you can do, mail-in voting, etc. None of this has anything to do with democracy or a democratic republic or any of that.

We're watching a system that is so far divorced from the people's will being expressed in the vote. And nothing like that is happening. The things that determine the vote are fake news and how effectively they present the fake news, the game playing about what rules changes, money, how much people put into it, and then campaign strategy, which often maybe the candidate isn't even the one who decides what it is. So all of these things pick our leaders but none of them are even vaguely like a democracy or a democratic republic.

Our system just drifted into this sort of two organized criminal organizations competing to see who can be the better weasel in any given year. It's kind of all it is now. Trump broke the mold because he was such a strong character that all of the game playing just didn't matter for one election. But I got a feeling they're going to adjust and did for the second election.

All right. Tom Sauer asks on Twitter, you know, why bother? Why bother changing anything in the election process? Because he says he slowly realized and accepted that we don't live in a democracy or a democratic republic, whatever, at least not in any meaningful sense. Now what do you think of that? That we shouldn't try to make our — there's just no point because we live in a fixed system where the outcomes are based on things that have nothing to do with voting and democracy.

Well I get the point. So I understand the point. But here's the counterpoint. Our system, as Frankenstein monster-ish as it is — meaning it doesn't operate as a system the way it was designed — it's evolved into some weird creature of a system that does what it wants to do independent of what we want it to do. So as long as it's this big creature of a Frankenstein system that decides somehow who our leaders are and it doesn't have anything to do with us, do you ignore it? Do you get rid of it?

Here's the problem. You still need the citizens to believe they live in a system that works. Well the whole thing will fall apart, even the Frankenstein monster part. You need that because if you don't have anything you just have chaos. So weirdly we need to trust our system to make it work. But only working as two competing criminal organizations to see who's the best weasel this year. And that's the best we got. But if we didn't at least pretend that we believe that there's some kind of a democracy here and people didn't go and actually vote, we would lose this illusion that the people have some influence. And you don't want to lose the illusion because the whole system depends on that illusion. So don't lose your illusions if they're good ones.

Let's see what else we got here. Remember I told you when it was obvious that the Senate would be pretty close, you know, even Democrats and Republicans, I told you that Joe Manchin wouldn't end up running everything because the one person who's willing to vote whichever side makes sense ends up running everything because they couldn't get this through until Joe Manchin was happy or happier. And I just — I'll just put out a compliment to Joe Manchin. Why is he the only one who thought of this? There's not one other Democrat who's smart enough to say, wait a minute, is it my imagination or is Joe Manchin running the whole show here because he's willing to be a rogue