Falling back yet again to the one surviving Frank Edwards newscast, from 1954, for an example of Ockham in action.

Edwards features a recorded message from Congresscritter Wayne Aspinall of Colorado.

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What should be alarming the nation today is the sharp drop in farm income. We only have to look back to the 1920s to see that depressions, like cattle, are born on the farm. The farmer, along with the factory worker and the small businessman, make up the backbone of this country. When one begins to suffer hardship, the others are warned that they too are in danger. The farmer’s problems can be stated simply. He is forced to pay high prices for everything he buys. Farm machinery, feed and grain, clothes, food and household goods, and taxes. Yet when he takes his own products to market, he is paid low prices. This trend became noticeable two years ago. And we have been hearing so-called experts telling the farmer not to worry, that things would level off. Well, the only thing that has leveled off is the little savings money that the more fortunate farmer might have had. He too has been forced to eat into that, in order to keep living. The unfortunate thing is that the farmer doesn’t make headlines. The people are being distracted from this great and pressing problem by wild charges and countercharges on other matters that in my opinion are far less important.

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Edwards then covers the charges and countercharges in the Army-McCarthy farce briefly, only to note that a supposedly important letter turned out to implicate a D instead of an R, which threw the committee into a frenzy. The committee is still making more noise than progress.

Congress has been totally worthless since 1803. The only difference is that all of our media are amplifying the farces. There’s no Edwards in the mainstream, nobody who constantly pries back the Shared Lies to see the serious problems.

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Wayne Aspinall has also been memoryholed. He was responsible for funding most of the hydropower and irrigation dams built since the Depression, and fought hard against enviroloonies who were gaining power in the 1950s. From Wikipedia:

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His actions supporting resource development often drew the ire of the increasingly powerful environmental lobby in the 1960s. David Brower, a prominent executive director of the Sierra Club, said that the environmental movement had seen “dream after dream dashed on the stony continents of Wayne Aspinall.” The congressman returned the animosity, calling environmentalists “over-indulged zealots” and “aristocrats” to whom “balance means nothing.” This battle shaped Aspinall’s congressional career.

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We need more stony continents and less dreams.