The energy sector might be the best current example of your phenomenon. Laypeople simply have no understanding of where their electricity comes from. They turn on a lightswitch, the light comes on. They plug in their phone, it charges. What makes the electricity? Dunno. May as well be magic.
So what starts as "coal fired power plants create a lot of pollution, we should do something about that" leads to "shut down ALL coal power plants and replace them with windmills!" If one has any understanding about how an electrical grid functions, and has to continue functioning, you recognize this as laughable on its face (include nuclear & solar here for more examples). Yet western governments are falling all over themselves trying to do just that, and we see the results playing out, especially in Europe.
Things will get a LOT worse here before they can begin to get better, IF they even can.
if any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic, does the thinking about such systems and technologies become magical as well?
i suspect it does.
and magical thinking is the essence of being a rube.
But what's happening is the opposite. The technology isn't sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from magic; the populace is sufficiently dumbed down so as to not be able to distinguish current technology from magic. But your point about magic thinking is brilliant. Magical thinking becomes the norm when being a rube is the norm.
"sufficiently advanced" is a subjective term that is fundamentally a function of intelligence and education. that which might dazzle one person appear humdrum to another.
but in the end, most of us experience most of this as magic. i mean, consider steel. it's everywhere, used in anything. a bronze age king would have seen it as worth a kingdom for a cart full of swords but we see it as pedestrian, even antiquated. ironically, this seems to make us even more prone to magical thinking. i mean, how many people have any real idea how steel is made past "out of iron in some big factory."
do they know what actions might affect the ability to make it? can they tell high quality from low?
the power grid is just there. nobody considers how changing inputs to it might affect reliability. it's been so reliable for so long that having it not be so is beyond consideration.
and that's how you make really bad mistakes when you get gulled in by grifters and they make a rube of you.
I think you're giving them much more credit than they are due -- I'll bet that less than 1% of people know steel is made from iron, much less how. (Most don't even know what steel and iron ARE much less anything about them.)
Just like lots of people think hamburgers come from a hamburger tree, if they think about it at all.
That is the downside of the specialization of labor that has brought us to this incredible technological civilization -- these people get to vote. And the people they vote for, get to tell the people who do know things, what to do. This is how you get catastrophes. I think that is basically your point, si?
I don't think it's so much a specialization of labor as it is an across the board degradation of education, from kittengarden through post-doc. Basic life skills along with actual knowledge and independent thought have been replaced by narrative-drenched fictional retellings of history accompanied by a complete brainwashing with various "critical theories". Show and Tell has been replaced by drag queens.
Children and young adults are no longer educated, they are conditioned and indoctrinated into a mindless collective. Vote Democrat and be proud. Or numb.
There are plenty of older Democrats too, educated before the current round of dumbing-down. But certainly your point has merit.
Bottom line, is that a combination of complexity along with not enough real education to understand the world around us will create a class of people who will vote for Gato's rubes.
Their brains are also poisoned with vaccines, glyphosate, and the chemicals on and in foods. Classrooms today each have a couple of kids who are angry and disruptive, as my kids describe it. They require more than one adult for a class size less than 30. The classrooms I grew up in didn’t have any acting out behaviour. School is different to when I was a kid. Also, we have moved in to my husbands family home that was built in 1870 by his great, great, great grandfather who was a teacher and a minister and all of his books are in the house. Including some primary school book collections. They quality of education at the school he taught at was miles ahead of what my kids have any chance at.
I was thinking about this in regards to Sweden last night. They finally voted in a party who might be able to help them with their social problems (due to a large amount of young male immigrants from a vastly different cultural system then theirs).
The main problem with their situation and similar situations in other countries is that "it has been so reliable for so long that having it not be so is beyond consideration." They don't realize that their country could be ruined--just like Americans don't realize that printing money for every need/want can cause our country to be ruined. People basically don't realize how things work and think it will always be available. They are the spoiled 3rd generation as your article mentions.
I've thought about issues like this for many years and realized how important the study of history is. Not simply dates and such, but the why's for how things happened. I like homeschooling because I get to search out resources that do a better job on that for my kids.
There's a reason why public schools have scrapped any real teaching of history. Kids have long been learning whatever the popular political myths are and they don't know that everything can fall apart in a society and that it has happened time and time again. The work that came before they were here is all minimized.
Ooo good example. Think of all the people in the world who think mining is evil. Then think of what energy policies those same people "believe" in. This statement brought it home for me: Anything you use that is not grown is mined.
Magnetism, gravity, charge, weak and strong atomic force. Measure and model it... Then claim to understand the laws of nature. But we're only observers of a pre-existing system.
I became a Christian after I learned God exists and created this all. And I learned that by deriving Euler's Identity. The most elegant equation existed before we found it. The epiphany, where I abandoned scientism in exchange for true wonder.
makes me think of the essay i, pencil by leonard reed. There isn’t a single person that has sufficient knowledge of all the processes necessary to make a simple pencil on their own. it really makes obvious that a group, such as the government, can’t control or regulate pencil manufacturing. only the market can do this. rubes don’t stand a chance.
And if they can't make even a pencil, what then of a supercomputer, an aircraft carrier, a space launch vehicle? Precisely why Leonard Read chose such a seemingly simple, even trivial item as his subject.
Two names oft confused: Leonard Read, founder of FEE and author of I, Pencil
Lawrence Reed, economist and president emeritus of both FEE and Mackinac Institute for Public Policy
Complexity in information comes in a nested canonical format. Once you're up 3 v-Meme levels, the person down below can't even begin to understand it. There is method to the madness of confusion. https://empathy.guru/fundamental-set-of-knowledge-structures/
Most of the world around me is "magic", but I know it's not magic.
I generally know what I know, and the rest is what I don't know (or can't grasp, like electricity generation, or how that radar ball can go round and round without tangling the cord...) and is "magic". It's fascinating stuff, even simple things like how an egg gets from the chicken to the cardboard egg crate is "magic" (I used to have a chicken farmer and the processing plant as clients).
But I also know the "magic" doesn't come from pixie dust or unicorn farts.
Technology has genuinely become indistinguishable from magic for the VAST majority of people. I'm usually on the side of "holy shit people are incredibly stupid" but I'm with the lumpen on this one.
I'm over-educated and have a high IQ, but I can't explain to a child or teen how advanced technologies work: I can make broadly descriptive statements like "there's a computer in there that has been given certain instructions on doing a thing" but I can't code or explain how that code is made comprehensible to the computer in the first place. This isn't just "it sucks that no one knows how to change a tire anymore" (although it is also that), it's that systems, social and material, have gotten incredibly complex WHILE social forces have selected for increasingly less-intelligent humans.
Systems have gotten incredibly complex, but they are still vulnerable in the macro sense. I've said it before, but we are one bad solar flare pointed in the wrong direction away from 1850 (Carrington Event). And most people in so-called advanced societies have no idea where food, clean water, energy comes from. They have no idea where their sewage and trash go to or what happens (or doesn't happen) to it. Fossil fuels have built the modern world. They are the reason we live as we do. They are the reason there are almost 8 billion people on the planet.
I'm all for developing alternative energy sources as long as they're safe and environmentally sound because fossil fuels are a finite resource. One day we will run out and the world will get really ugly.
Do you remember how enraged some people were after Hurricane Katrina? It was as if they expected the government to just fix everything within a week or two, so they could get on with their lives (worrying about the size of Kim K's ass).
No, folks, this is reality. This is how humanity lived for most of history. The modern world and our modern way of life is an illusion. We need clean water and food and protection from the elements or we don't survive.
Most people are so far removed from that reality they engage in magical thinking...while drinking a double-tall decaf latte (made with coffee beans from three regions of the planet) with soy milk ('cause they care) and ethically-sourced sugar in a paper cup ('cause they care) with a plastic lid (oops) and a wooden stirrer ('cause they're good people). They took an uber 'cause cars are so yucky. They're wearing their skinny jeans made by children in some third world hell hole and nikes made by slaves in Xinjiang. They're completely up-to-date on all the proper thoughts.
Seriously, how the hell did we get here? IMO, it is 24-7-365 media psyop.
Is that an amorphous give-and-take or is it bread and circuses?
If someday the solar flare ever happens, the Amish will be fine.
The rest of western civilization... yeah. Toast.
The only long-term hope for modern civilization is an engineering breakthrough for nuclear fusion. Absent that, we've got maybe a century at most before fossil fuel depletion really starts grinding civilization to a halt, and I've seen arguments that we don't even have that long. Heck I've read arguments that we're ALREADY at the peak if not very slightly past it, on the basis that the energy cost of extracting the remaining fossil fuels on Earth is now too high to sustain what we have.
Do the amish carry guns and have their own well-regulated militia?
If not, they are even more toast if inner city populations and certain demographics can reach them.
Look at some areas of Chicago or Detroit. Now imagine a caravan of people from those areas, hungry, angry and armed descending on an amish commune.
A short while later, after the rapes and murders are done, there's no food, no nothting and the horde moves on.
Demographies which could barely invent the wheel or metalcraft despite having huge advantages in available resources and climate and environment aren't very likely to be able to build anything at all if modernity goes the way of the dodo.
I've read that we are at or past the peak. I've also read that the US has about 400 years of natural gas supply left. Who knows? It is a finite resource, though. We must increase efficiency and find ways to reduce consumption while we find true alternatives. I'm wary of nuclear power, though. I understand the the newer fission models are safer, but I haven't investigated it. While fusion reactors are safer (maybe), I'm not a fan.
I like geothermal heat pumps units for home use where possible, which has the added benefit of being more independent of the electric grid. It's a hybrid system, so you'd need a connection to the grid and perhaps a battery or generator backup in the event of a power outage. I confess I don't know enough about them, but I like the idea.
I also like hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. I am concerned about fire and explosion risk (think Challenger), but I don't know the relative combustibility of solid versus liquid hydrogen.
If deployed widely, both options would take pressure off the grid and extend fossil fuels.
I don't believe human beings are causing a climate catastrophe. It's another grift with an agenda. Higher CO2 has lead to the greening of the planet, which is better for human beings and wildlife. We definitely need to be better stewards of the planet and more mindful of our consumption and waste, though. We could literally manufacture fossil fuels if need be.
If you're interested, this company has been trying to clean up the Pacific gyre for a number of years. There are so many ways to innovate and reduce our impact on the planet and wildlife. The company was started by a Dutch kid. I think he was 24 when he first began. Nothing is perfect, but their dedication gives me hope.
absolutely past the peak. All liquids peaked in 2006, and only the 'miracle' of fracking allowed us to not notice so much.
The miracle of fracking was basically zero percent interest rates. (similar to the miracle in germany after wiemar, but that's a very different story) It made it so that you could throw any amount of 'money' at a problem to solve it, or appear to.
The important metric is really EROEI or energy returned on energy invested.
Used to be 100 to 1 in the first wells, and is now down to between three and nine, depending on the play.
The excess is what created what we had.
Anyhow, to cut a very long and very interesting point short, there is zero chance of anything like another hundred years of business as usual.
Well, I didn't mean to come off like a know it all or to demean anyone's intelligence. But your reply shows that even though you haven't dedicated the time to understanding certain advanced aspects of technology, you understand it enough to know it's not magic.
I'm fairly certain the phrase "indistinguishable from magic" was not intended to mean that people LITERALLY believe computerized devices are magic, but rather that the fundamental means by which they operate are completely impenetrable and whose function must be taken on faith- a state that would, for a non-trivial number of things in this world, include me, a not-dumb person.
I don't understand how power plants convert any variety of fuel to electricity (beyond an internal combustion engine), but I must accept and hope that they work as intended because my civilization depends on it. That doesn't make me a fool, it means my reality is too complex for me to personally master all of it.
Observation: When reality becomes too complex for people to master, they vote for those who promise to take care of them. Most of whom are liberal grifters and know no more about how to make things work than those who vote for them do. But they know how to promise.
This is more prevalent in big cities, where people instinctively know that if the systems they depend on stop, they could die.
Rural residents know a lot more about the things they depend on, because those things are simpler and in many cases, they do them themselves or someone they know and trust does them.
This is why the red/blue maps look the way they do.
The modern world is highly specialized in almost all areas. We are dependent on the labor, knowledge, expertise, and morality of thousands of people in our daily lives. It's amazing how quickly things go to hell when the trash removal people go on strike, especially in big cities.
Agree! I've found that having a high-IQ only correlates with figuring out math and science models of stuff. That's tactical thinking, in a way. The next level is strategic thinking - if you have that, it's easier to explain technology to others, to help them see it is not "magic".
Grifters excel at strategic thinking, which trumps IQ. (At least, this explains to me why so many managers are not as smart as their employees, but in a toxic workplace grifter-managers can outsmart their employees.)
A very good sign of actual intelligence as opposed to IQ is if a person is smart enough to hide that it is smart, yet still profit from living among what relatively speaking amounts to retards without being found out.
that an election can be stolen electronically. They look at the vote spikes for biden in the middle of the night and don’t even know what they’re looking at, let alone how it could be done.
That people could watch security cam footage of Atlanta, see an emptied room suddenly fill back up with only Dems in the wee hours and watch how crates of hidden "ballots" were pulled out from underneath tablecloths and tallied right around the time the spike occurred -- yet still insist "Nothing to see here, move along you conspiracy theorist." says all you need to know.
I agree but one doesn't have to understand the specifics of a technology to appreciate the broader mechanics of how things work. My observation of modern education (having worked in such) focuses far too much on specifics or isolated understanding for people to be able to make broader connections between disciplines (or things they do understand). Specifics are often unnecessary and too complex so people just give up and look for an explanation that is overly simplified (and thus taken advantage of). For instance, the immune system's reaction to a respiratory virus is uniquely sophisticated but instead of looking for a more manageable analogy that bears a strong resemblance and is within the grasp of most people, we get "antibodies=immunity". I've met some truly great educators but most seem to be narrow-minded, ideological specialists with a desire to teach others to think as they do.
My husband and I were at our neighbor's home for dinner and were talking about their new Tesla. After a few minutes, they said something that sounded like they thought electricity came magically from the plug. Like generated at the plug.
You can't very well switch on and off the light until you first charge your phone, so in a crackhead logic kinda way it makes sense. Broadcast power. (a reference to an episode of the old and very awesome Avengers with Diana Rigg).
Like how the moon is sometimes blue -- so it must be made of bleu cheese.
I’m wondering how my virtuous and insufferable SIL is enjoying her EV after 3 days with no power to charge it due to hurricane Fee-fi-fo. No doubt she blames the climate “emergency” and doubles down.
I talked to my kids a LOT about magical thinking when they were growing up. The internet has certainly made it the norm. I totally agree with your premise, but without the internet it would have taken a whole lot longer to get here. The zealots just have to push a button - "and YOU'RE cancelled, and YOU'RE cancelled, and YOU'RE cancelled". Totally removed from the realities of life. (Our family has 3 life rules based on movies: never take a shower in a random empty house, never walk down a dark alley at night, and never push the red button. More people need that last one!)
It always traces back to the DDs and I'm not referring to bra size. Division and Deceit.
United we are strong, Divided we are weak. First they Divide us by any means necessary, like the American Civil War, and that makes us weak.
Once we are weak they swoop in with the kill shot called Deceit, and because of our weakness we are easily bamboozled.
They have been refining their DD methods for many centuries and to the point where it truly does appear as magic. The greatest magic shows on earth occur regularly in our many court rooms all across our lands (that were once for common law but are now Admiralty law), where we believe we can go for justice, but are instead bamboozled with endless dog and pony shows that they pass off as justice.
Terrific article. You definitely have an ability to reach a certain mindset with your disarming playfulness. That is a rare talent these days, and in greater need than ever. Keep up the good work. May the meow be with you!
While we have a manufactured war, the covid debacle and the energy crisis scam, the Rubes are washing and ironing their shirts - oblivious that their actions/beliefs/participation and magical thinking are actually detrimental to their own interests.
This is dangerous imo. History is not kind to the sequela of magical thinking.
It is a highly transmissable infection prone to exploitation.
Well it's been like a spell from a sorceress to turn a nation from proud Yankees into America hating Yuppies in the last 30 years.
I won't quibble with your point...because it's true. But I would add that even though you may not be able to exploit the willing, you can get them to exploit the unwilling.
being a rube means not having to understand the problems, just accepting the solutions provided. The world is complex and difficult to understand, and current theories about the world are as phenomenalogical as the theory of epicycles in planetary movements were before Keppler - and for the same reason. They are observations that are made into "laws" that have exceptions due to observed results. Hardly a useful theory to be applied in novel situations.
Now, part of this is because no one wants to move off an old theory without real proof, and part of it is due to the current situation being a benefit to the people with the ability to fund any research that would contradict the current thinking.
Also, people are lazy, outside of their interests. Few people get interested in things they have been told repeatedly are too complex to understand without special training.
Ah yes, Popper's argument that a demonstrably false theory, once adopted, should be kept until something better can be proven. Part of what's wrong with science!
I make sausage and it's delicious. If you ever get to this neck of the woods, you'll have to try my venison sausage. I'd even let you help make a batch. 😁
they don't understand that nearly every product they depend on in their every day existence is a by-product of fossil fuels (which is a misnomer) Wind turbines, solar power, can't exist without it. no chapstick, lipstick, iPhone, clothes, shoes, housing materials , cars - you name it - has its start in oil & gas.
The best way I saw it worded, and it's stuck with me, is that there are four absolutely essential products for modern civilization (aka 20th century and above) to function, and NONE of them have any viable non-fossil-fuel based replacement:
Steel
Concrete
Plastic
Diesel
Remove those four pillars, and it's welcome back to the 18th century - at best.
Interesting! I had to do some looking & found this Time magazine article that lists the 4 essential articles for civilization as cement, steel, plastics, & ammonia... and their mass-scale production depends heavily on the combustion of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels remain indispensable for producing all of these materials & ev's will require MORE fossil fuels to produce them than the above 4 pillars of civilization. modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials. https://time.com/6175734/reliance-on-fossil-fuels/
petroleum in modern society is almost like oxygen, it is in everything yet invisible, it gives us all life (at least in the sense of our very rich & spoiled lives) yet no one sees it or knows anything about its contents or workings.
the radical children of the internet age are happy to tear down our wicked societies (wicked bc they havent eradicated suffering or unfairness), to destroy what they could never create, as long as it gives them the holy & self-righteous thrill of "building a new world."
they are very much descendants of puritans and other protestant millenarians as well as the Bolsheviks, who wanted to create utopia but only created a mountain of corpses.
this just seems to be part of the eternal human experience, sadly.
They also believe that coal used for power generation over in China is better than cleaner processes we have here. Apparently pollution does not happen in China no matter what they do.
Talking to people even in the lightest way about the toxicity of solar panel manufacture and disposal and they shut down. Anything at all positive about nuclear? Ditto, but angrier.
For all the talk of caring about the world and the health of the planet and the inhabitants, they sure don't act that way. Ever.
Congress is filled with incurious grubbing ghouls drunk on power and the belief that they are the masters of the universe.
Talk to the average Western citizen, and they still believe that China or India are very poor, rural countries, with negligible economies. In there view only the Western world matters, and not much has changed since 1990.
To be fair all people of all countries misapprehend life outside their own area. And I will tell you this, I spent some time in Singapore, Hong Kong and China in 1984 then returned to Singapore for work in 2000 and took a little side trip to HK and China while there. I was SHOCKED (and dismayed) by the changes. People anywhere in the world would be shocked by China and what is going on there. If you grew up in America, you saw on TV every day how the peoples of China and India were starving... so eat your dinner. Also, people out in the rural areas of China are often very very poor (even though much less than before the turn of the century). Not America poor. Poor in America means no cable. Now. We are in for a rude awakening I think.
About 50 000 swedish citizens cannot feed themselves despite welfare et c. They are below the UN's threshold for malnourishment, sometimes bordering on starvation.
These are not homeless drifters and substance abusers but normal citizens.
I meet dozens of them every week at a local free church, handing out grocery bags. Yesterday, we had received 400 kilos of deep-frozen sausages from a local meat product producer (mislabled product, may not be sold), so we could offer a real hefty bag for each and everyone.
When an adult woman, single mother of several children starts crying because of the relief knowing she can feed her kids and doesn't have to nag them to eat until they burst at school - I don't know where to put thsoe emotions.
When I tell my fellow swedes stuff like this, they look at me as if I was the guy from the "Gotta be aliens"-meme. They don't believe me. Then they always default to claiming it's just druggies and such.
No, just poor unlucky broken ground down to dust people. Ground down between capital and state, their lives grist for the mills of power and profit.
This is also true for the US. There are always people inhabiting the margins. Here, out in rural areas it is especially dire because free food is not as easy to get there. In the cities, they are set up to meet need. In the city, unless you are mentally ill it would be hard to die of starvation. In the country there are people living without electricity and running water and no way to get to the food bank. Churches and civic groups try to find them and help them.
You tuck those emotions inside Rikard. Grief of that sort is a powerful motivator for compassion. True compassion is a blessing.
Do what you can, don't burn yourself out, share the truth when it may help.
I have volunteered at a food bank in Finland, it is not what people think. Those served come from all sorts of backgrounds. Some are teachers at the school my kids went to, actors in adverts I see on TV, students, seasonal workers, pensioners, refugees, unemployed and less than 10% substance abusers.
In Helsinki there is another larger food bank, queue can stretch 3 city blocks two days a week, most people are upset when it is in the news, regular people have been programmed to accept that they are all drunks and they waste their benefits, not true, situation has been slowly getting worse since the EU or so. Government is indifferent and cuts social budgets whenever possible in spite of censure that social benefits in Finland are lowest in EU while claiming to be a welfare state.
While the rubes are in power they have no soul and they also have no incentive to assist others. To them social benefits is wasted money because it cannot be diverted to them, spending on new infrastructure is good because it causes economic activity (easier to skim a bit for friends and family).
I think I'll let the power utility use the roof on my home to support solar panels and an inverter to feed the grid. Oh, and I'll manage disposal of it when obsolete, or when it's time to replace my roofing. Think of the savings on my electricity bill!
If you look on the windy app and go to ‘more’ settings you can turn on SO2, emmisions around the world. As well as NO2 and CO and ozone. Do one at a time. You see the worst places for all are China and India by a factor of st least 100X .
My city council voted this week -- in California -- to replace all of our police cars with Teslas, making policing 100% dependent on the reliability of electric power. Near the end of the discussion, one of the councilmembers briefly referenced the fragility of the not-invariably-reliable power grid, two weeks after a series of urgent flex alerts that begged everyone to immediately turn off all their appliances. Dark comedy followed, as the rest of the council furrowed their brows at the bizarre claim that the lights might ever go out in California. What are you even talking about!?!?!?
Mass formation psychosis: one of the symptoms is ignoring anything that does not fit your worldview. The sound goes in their ear, or the light their eyes; but simply does not register. They just keep on doing what they were doing before.
Which is why getting out of mass formation is so difficult, and inevitably traumatic.
I agree with egm's theory, but there are also significant contributing factors that have exacerbated this mess: an educational system, that over a couple of decades, has indoctrinated and dumbed down students (e.g. climate change or various flavors of activism) versus providing a real education; a complicit media; Big Government and Big Tech collusion.
When I was in elementary school it was widely stated as fact that oil came from dinosaurs. Also scientists have long treated theories as facts. Go to a natural history museum and read the explainer cards. Make sure a bench is handy. You will feel weary. The BS has been going on a LONG time. Now the educators are just more out with it and are dipshits on every subject.
The problem is that the question "What makes the electricity?" is never asked.
It is just there. It is taken for granted.
A world without electricity is impossible to imagine. Thus we can do whatever we want to our power plants: it will have no impact on electricity at all.
I think some of it has to do with complexity. Parts of our life are easier, but more complex. People are concerned about things like "will billy make the football team" or "is my kids school teaching CRT" or "will I get passed for a promotion because I'm a white male," so they never even think of those other things.
It's like the CV injection. People decided not to think. It was too hard. So they trusted. Because they were worried about buying food, paying their bills and their kid going to school remotely.
And also be aware that blind trust is very dangerous. And that you already have to know a lot about a subject to be able to judge whom you can trust.
The author J.L.Borges (whom I admire) mentioned somewhere that the Argentinian gauchos (who Borges admired) had only contempt for people who did not trust their own experience and relied on the experience of others. This is the natural inclination of people who are living in reality.
We are a society living in an illusion, lead by ideologues. As Gato described.
I try to provide two web sites to the idiots on the tweety. One, Bjorn Lomborg's site because he claims the world's power loss would be backed up by batteries - for 75 SECONDS. www.lomborg.com
Two, Alex Epstein's take on battery backups. We don't have it now, and he claims the cost for a mere 3 days' worth would cost $400 Trillion which is 4.5X the Global GDP. He testified in Congress, and clearly, Tlaib (and others) didn't listen. https://energytalkingpoints.com/alex-epstein-congressional-testimony-for-june-30-2021/ Epstein is a warrior on this subject. He's written articles here
Lastly, youtube has excellent videos done by "Engineering Explained." This guy knows his facts and presents them extremely well.
Remember that this shove to green is coming from the WEF and Klaus Schwab. Most of the problems in the United States right now come from the same source. GO there in your mind, because the Democrats and RINOs are already there in reality. End goal is globalism. Now you see how CA Dems think and act - and also see the urgency to vote the incumbents out.
Food is the same. A huge percentage of the population thinks their food comes from "the store". Mix energy ignorance, food ignorance, and immune system ignorance together and what a perfect storm is on the horizon. A starving, cold and sick mass of desperate ignorant people. Heaven help us.
The long, dark, cold winter that much of Europe -- and especially Germany and Poland -- are about to head into will be a wakeup call, indeed. Hotter than usual summers like this past one are more often than not followed by colder than usual winters. Weeping about global warming while the tears freeze on your cheeks lends more credulity than credibility.
I have a Canadian friend who posted a negative comment about the truckers. "Whiny" was the term she used. I was shocked, since she's not a dummy. Her hubby has common sense, so that would have been an interesting conversation. Or fight.
Well, I can tell you a tale of what morons very smart people can be.
My now thankfully late ex-father-in-law, a professor of English and govt. bureaucrat at a somewhat high level, in a place far away where power outages/loadshedding was a feature of the hot season and the cold season, built his dream house without fireplaces because there were these handy electric heaters one could always use, right?
So what I used to do, the winter and a half I was there, when the power went out and the house was freezing, I walked down the street to the part of the family that had more brains than that and I warmed myself at their nice coal fireplaces. Everyone else had generators too, for the times they couldn't steal electricity from the overhead wires. Rich people steal most, this is a constant in life.
My husband is a chemist. He is nearing retirement. At his place of employment, he works with several people who have PHds. He also works with high level executives.
ALL are vaxxed. In fact, outside of a few minorities that work in their manufacturing plant, he is the only one who is not.
Same, basically. Work in a job chock-full of engineers and "smart dudes" all of whom are vaxxed and happy about it. Some old, like me (I am 63) and some younger (late 30s and 40s). One other guy and I are the only weird ones who questioned the whole crap from jump-street.
I worked with a lot of "smart" people most of my life. The part of the arc of the universe bending downwards, it's the weight overload of them that's doing it.
I read once that the reason those Nigerian Prince spam emails are so obviously poorly, unconvincingly written is to make sure that only the most gullible and unthinking recipients (the best marks) would bite on them. They're basically selecting for the highest quality leads like any salesman ought to.
I think something similar can happen with statist fantasy.
This has been confirmed by real scammers. The language is crude and full of errors to select for people who will ignore or not notice it.
"Raven," the recent book about Jim Jones, points out that Jones didn't attempt to persuade or win arguments against people who saw through his weird crypto-Christian cons; he politely showed them the door and banned them from future engagements.
This is, I believe, what's happening when you see politicians doing things like calling voters "baskets of deplorables" or that "MAGA Republicans" are an "army of darkness." You're not burning bridges; you never had those bridges. You're separating wheat from chaff.
To say this is knowledge I had never considered is putting it mildly. The scammers are truly playing chess while many of us are playing checkers! Makes a ton of sense. I always wondered why those notes were so poorly written and yet people still fell for them. The poor writing is part of the scam. Dayam!
I don't think the poor writing is deliberate in a lot of cases. You can tell some of them have been run through a translator app. I do agree that they are not interested in the nominally intelligent. They are playing the odds that one out of their thousands of emails will hit the one dumbass that they are looking for.
Excellent piece. I believe there is an analogous situation in academic science (at least in the field of biomedicine, which I am familiar with). Scientists almost exclusively make decisions about 1) who is accepted for graduate school, 2) who is hired for faculty and leadership positions at universities, and 3) who receives grant funding. A major criteria for 2) and 3) is having produced some ground-breaking, sensational, or “high-impact” publication(s). This is how you get grifters rising to leadership positions. Then they choose loyalists and true believers to fill the ranks beneath them. The next thing you know, you have major problems like a reproducibility crisis, whole fields that are essentially fabricated (look what’s just happened in Alzheimer’s research), and drugs that don’t actually work but are standard of care.
University vaccine mandates have effectively solidified this situation by excluding anyone who isn’t willing to be a true believer, or at least pretend to be one.
The grifting is made possible by fiat currency “printed” in unlimited amounts. This can be “spent” by people who have no skin in the game whatsoever, no consequences at all. In the old days, the gold would have left the building, and running out would pressure the People In Charge but now there is nothing holding them back, nothing.
Yep. Once the money is fake, the rest of the economy is doomed to follow because the fake economy of being friends with the literal money printers overtakes the real economy of voluntary transactions for goods and services. That's when the wheels really come off the bus, because the only 'acceptable' response is MORE PRINTING.
‘... just how it came to pass that the entirety of western governance seems to have become bereft of reality and competence and generally run by people who appear to be about as smart as a soup sandwich...’
Filling the void. Because they have no marketable skills that would get them decent jobs in the competitive, private wealth producing sector, and those that do, have jobs in the competitive, private wealth producing sector thus leaving politics vacant for parasites to infest.
On-Point with our (shared) libertarian ethic, as usual. Proposition 5 reminds me of a quote I loved from one of Robert Heinlein's classics, "A confidence man knows he's lying. That limits his scope. A successful shaman believes what he says and belief is contagious." ~ Jubal Harshaw
I don't disagree with anything that you've said, but there's another crucial thing happening without which the kind of mess we find ourselves in could not happen.
The "education system" has been captured by these same sophists. You don't need a diploma to become educated, but in this country you need one to become credentialed—only credentialed people wield any kind of power.
Our system of education is so unfit for purpose, so god-awfully, gob-smackingly corrupt and broken that just graduating high school has become an exercise in submission and humiliation. You can only "win" by memorizing and repeating back to these sophists bullet-pointed lists of demonstrably false things.
To anyone without critical thinking skills, this is no problem. For people with marginal critical thinking skills, this signals the slow death of their critical thinking skills. To anyone with robust critical thinking skills, the experience is absolutely gutting—the goal, graduation and a good job someday, seemingly impossible.
Go figure that everyone in a position of power is intellectually lazy, can't think for themselves, and defers to these other credentialed authorities who are not authorities on anything. Being an actual authority means having beliefs which make correct predictions because they are true. It has nothing to do with credentials. The correlation between one's qualifications to lead and one's ability to lead should actually be NEGATIVE in a system this bad—and indeed, it is.
The system is totally backwards, elevating the worst and least-capable people, coddling them in a sense of bureaucratic smugness, while the rest of us shake our heads (when we aren't actually doing nothing about it at all). This is by design. People who can't think for themselves are easy to control.
Im an MD. I m an ophthalmologist with over 20 years of experience. These rubes are trying to constantly take over medicine and medical care. Problem is they have no idea what is it to be a diagnostician. They hve no appreciation as to how difficult and nuanced it is to perform a surgery on an eyeball or any other body part. These people demonstrate their ineptitude and ignorance to me every day and yet I am living under their authority in the tightly regulated medical industry
Good Friday to all. An excellent article and great examples of the incestuous and corrupt behavior. As Vladimir Ilyich might ask, "What is to be done?"
I'm sat in the garden in the sunshine, on a zoom meeting, multi-tasking. Got a fridge full of yummy food. My unjabbed partner and kids are all healthy. We climbed some Welsh mountains last weekend. I'm going to Ibiza for closing parties next week. Sheesh, life's not perfect, but it's pretty good.
Be nice to Tonya. She's a talented, hard-working girl who made a mistake. She lives near me and is close to my age. The movie "I Tonya" was actually really good.
I hope I don't screw this up too badly, but I heard somewhere that the difference between a cult and a religion is that in a cult, the guy at the top knows the whole thing is a scam. In a religion, that guy is dead.
And yes, that display yesterday was disgusting as hell. The casual way in which Tlaib throws around her fascist demands is astonishing.
Brett Weinstein draws the line somewhat differently.
Religion, he says, mostly restricts behavior. Since the freedom to murder, lie, and steal would seem to provide real advantages to an individual, if religion did not (while forbidding these things) provide even greater advantages, no religion would last. Its adherents would simply get outcompeted.
Instead we see the opposite—religions enduring for thousands of years—suggesting that they really do provide a net benefit to individuals.
Cults aspire to do this too—and they *all* claim to—but time is the only test. Religions are like tested hypotheses. Cults, untested ones.
Your theory seems to align with Mattias Desmet's theory of mass formation. In other words, it is a ground up operation rather than a top down imposition. Yes, politics is a grift, and the grift attracts grifters. Yes, the smart grifters are going to cloak themselves with true believers to protect the grift.
But who selects the grifters?
Who's behind the curtain moving the levers?
Do we elect our elected leaders or are they selected for us?
I don't believe the social changes and devolution into incomprehensible stupidity (as demonstrated by Rep Tlaib) over the past several decades was a natural phenomenon.
Nature is never that stupid! You are correct in thinking it is a strategic plan. Only man could conjure up such stupidity. Question is, what is this plan? I attempt to formulate a simple answer on my web site: http://planetaryjurisdiction.org/WEGO.html
Here's an excerpt.
Mankind's efforts to build a global civilization began long long ago. First came the Babylonian empire, then the Medo-Persian empire, followed by the Greco-Macedonian empire (all three were failures) and finally the Roman empire, which is the current system of control and rulership under which we now live and work.
The key to really understanding why our current civilization is so dysfunctional is found in a proper understanding of what the English language calls jurisdiction. There are many kinds of jurisdictions and they all deal with the same thing. Jurisdiction is about who has authority or control over something. It is the very bedrock of our civilization.
The Global Estate Trust
If you've never heard of the Global Estate Trust you're not alone because few of us ever have. That's because it is the very foundation that our modern civilization is built on, sitting on top of the bedrock of our four primary planetary jurisdictions. As it is with all foundations, they are buried deep under the very structures they are designed to support. Foundations are the domain of designers, architects, and engineers, not media talking heads, politicians, or the general public. You wouldn't ask a hair dresser to fix the engine of your car now would you? Likewise the engine powering our civilization is not something the general public usually understands.
The Global Estate Trust and the system that was put in place long ago to protect, manage and exploit it, is a gigantic umbrella trust under which resides many other smaller subordinate trusts. When added together these trusts are now worth quadrillions of dollars (measured in USD). The system for managing it has recently expired and must now be rebuilt from the bedrock up. COVID-19, vaccines and vaccine passports, plandemics, bankruptcies, and several other things, are all part and parcel of the effort to rebuild this gigantic trust system. With that much money at stake, greedy, immoral, and criminal people will stop at nothing to make sure they can retain power and control over it.
You may ask; "why would such a system expire?"
Because it was designed that way. The core mechanics of the system operate like this:
The system we have operated under during our lifetime was designed with a very specific life span of 210 years measured according to the Gregorian calendar. After which time the system becomes invalid (bankrupt) and must be entirely reconstructed if it is to continue.
FYI: the 210 year span began in 1789, and ended on November 7, 1999. Since November 8, 1999 we have been in a rescission period, during which time a new system for administering the Global Estate Trust is being built, and its assets being transferred.
* This 210 year lifespan of the system is divided into three time spans of 70 years each.
* At the end of the first 70 year span, the system provides the option of going through a Reset to initiate a second 70 year span.
* At the end of the second 70 year span (at the 140 year mark), the system provides the option of going through another Reset to initiate a third 70 year span which will complete the 210 year cycle.
* However, a third 70 year reset is not permitted. Once the 210 year cycle was completed in 1999, the system had to be reconstructed. This total reconstruction is that great event that is being called The Great Reset as opposed to merely another Reset.
The energy sector might be the best current example of your phenomenon. Laypeople simply have no understanding of where their electricity comes from. They turn on a lightswitch, the light comes on. They plug in their phone, it charges. What makes the electricity? Dunno. May as well be magic.
So what starts as "coal fired power plants create a lot of pollution, we should do something about that" leads to "shut down ALL coal power plants and replace them with windmills!" If one has any understanding about how an electrical grid functions, and has to continue functioning, you recognize this as laughable on its face (include nuclear & solar here for more examples). Yet western governments are falling all over themselves trying to do just that, and we see the results playing out, especially in Europe.
Things will get a LOT worse here before they can begin to get better, IF they even can.
consider:
if any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic, does the thinking about such systems and technologies become magical as well?
i suspect it does.
and magical thinking is the essence of being a rube.
But what's happening is the opposite. The technology isn't sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from magic; the populace is sufficiently dumbed down so as to not be able to distinguish current technology from magic. But your point about magic thinking is brilliant. Magical thinking becomes the norm when being a rube is the norm.
it's the same thing.
"sufficiently advanced" is a subjective term that is fundamentally a function of intelligence and education. that which might dazzle one person appear humdrum to another.
but in the end, most of us experience most of this as magic. i mean, consider steel. it's everywhere, used in anything. a bronze age king would have seen it as worth a kingdom for a cart full of swords but we see it as pedestrian, even antiquated. ironically, this seems to make us even more prone to magical thinking. i mean, how many people have any real idea how steel is made past "out of iron in some big factory."
do they know what actions might affect the ability to make it? can they tell high quality from low?
the power grid is just there. nobody considers how changing inputs to it might affect reliability. it's been so reliable for so long that having it not be so is beyond consideration.
and that's how you make really bad mistakes when you get gulled in by grifters and they make a rube of you.
I think you're giving them much more credit than they are due -- I'll bet that less than 1% of people know steel is made from iron, much less how. (Most don't even know what steel and iron ARE much less anything about them.)
Just like lots of people think hamburgers come from a hamburger tree, if they think about it at all.
That is the downside of the specialization of labor that has brought us to this incredible technological civilization -- these people get to vote. And the people they vote for, get to tell the people who do know things, what to do. This is how you get catastrophes. I think that is basically your point, si?
I don't think it's so much a specialization of labor as it is an across the board degradation of education, from kittengarden through post-doc. Basic life skills along with actual knowledge and independent thought have been replaced by narrative-drenched fictional retellings of history accompanied by a complete brainwashing with various "critical theories". Show and Tell has been replaced by drag queens.
Children and young adults are no longer educated, they are conditioned and indoctrinated into a mindless collective. Vote Democrat and be proud. Or numb.
There are plenty of older Democrats too, educated before the current round of dumbing-down. But certainly your point has merit.
Bottom line, is that a combination of complexity along with not enough real education to understand the world around us will create a class of people who will vote for Gato's rubes.
Their brains are also poisoned with vaccines, glyphosate, and the chemicals on and in foods. Classrooms today each have a couple of kids who are angry and disruptive, as my kids describe it. They require more than one adult for a class size less than 30. The classrooms I grew up in didn’t have any acting out behaviour. School is different to when I was a kid. Also, we have moved in to my husbands family home that was built in 1870 by his great, great, great grandfather who was a teacher and a minister and all of his books are in the house. Including some primary school book collections. They quality of education at the school he taught at was miles ahead of what my kids have any chance at.
I posted this link above, but this is a teacher at a Canadian public high school. The school board defended the teacher.
https://twitter.com/mrctv/status/1572333536954155012
Well at least they were half right... as opposed to not having the faintest idea of where things come from.
I was thinking about this in regards to Sweden last night. They finally voted in a party who might be able to help them with their social problems (due to a large amount of young male immigrants from a vastly different cultural system then theirs).
The main problem with their situation and similar situations in other countries is that "it has been so reliable for so long that having it not be so is beyond consideration." They don't realize that their country could be ruined--just like Americans don't realize that printing money for every need/want can cause our country to be ruined. People basically don't realize how things work and think it will always be available. They are the spoiled 3rd generation as your article mentions.
I've thought about issues like this for many years and realized how important the study of history is. Not simply dates and such, but the why's for how things happened. I like homeschooling because I get to search out resources that do a better job on that for my kids.
There's a reason why public schools have scrapped any real teaching of history. Kids have long been learning whatever the popular political myths are and they don't know that everything can fall apart in a society and that it has happened time and time again. The work that came before they were here is all minimized.
proof of work works, proof of stake is entitlement at the detriment of others
they have programmed generations of entitled stakers by simply existing, work is foreign
Ooo good example. Think of all the people in the world who think mining is evil. Then think of what energy policies those same people "believe" in. This statement brought it home for me: Anything you use that is not grown is mined.
consider gravity and the earth's core... nobody really knows how that magic works (theoretical physicists will argue about it)
magnetism still fascinates me and i barely understand what a dipole is and i wind coils for hobby
We give it a name.
Magnetism, gravity, charge, weak and strong atomic force. Measure and model it... Then claim to understand the laws of nature. But we're only observers of a pre-existing system.
I became a Christian after I learned God exists and created this all. And I learned that by deriving Euler's Identity. The most elegant equation existed before we found it. The epiphany, where I abandoned scientism in exchange for true wonder.
makes me think of the essay i, pencil by leonard reed. There isn’t a single person that has sufficient knowledge of all the processes necessary to make a simple pencil on their own. it really makes obvious that a group, such as the government, can’t control or regulate pencil manufacturing. only the market can do this. rubes don’t stand a chance.
https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil/
And if they can't make even a pencil, what then of a supercomputer, an aircraft carrier, a space launch vehicle? Precisely why Leonard Read chose such a seemingly simple, even trivial item as his subject.
Two names oft confused: Leonard Read, founder of FEE and author of I, Pencil
Lawrence Reed, economist and president emeritus of both FEE and Mackinac Institute for Public Policy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Reed
Complexity in information comes in a nested canonical format. Once you're up 3 v-Meme levels, the person down below can't even begin to understand it. There is method to the madness of confusion. https://empathy.guru/fundamental-set-of-knowledge-structures/
Most of the world around me is "magic", but I know it's not magic.
I generally know what I know, and the rest is what I don't know (or can't grasp, like electricity generation, or how that radar ball can go round and round without tangling the cord...) and is "magic". It's fascinating stuff, even simple things like how an egg gets from the chicken to the cardboard egg crate is "magic" (I used to have a chicken farmer and the processing plant as clients).
But I also know the "magic" doesn't come from pixie dust or unicorn farts.
Technology has genuinely become indistinguishable from magic for the VAST majority of people. I'm usually on the side of "holy shit people are incredibly stupid" but I'm with the lumpen on this one.
I'm over-educated and have a high IQ, but I can't explain to a child or teen how advanced technologies work: I can make broadly descriptive statements like "there's a computer in there that has been given certain instructions on doing a thing" but I can't code or explain how that code is made comprehensible to the computer in the first place. This isn't just "it sucks that no one knows how to change a tire anymore" (although it is also that), it's that systems, social and material, have gotten incredibly complex WHILE social forces have selected for increasingly less-intelligent humans.
Systems have gotten incredibly complex, but they are still vulnerable in the macro sense. I've said it before, but we are one bad solar flare pointed in the wrong direction away from 1850 (Carrington Event). And most people in so-called advanced societies have no idea where food, clean water, energy comes from. They have no idea where their sewage and trash go to or what happens (or doesn't happen) to it. Fossil fuels have built the modern world. They are the reason we live as we do. They are the reason there are almost 8 billion people on the planet.
I'm all for developing alternative energy sources as long as they're safe and environmentally sound because fossil fuels are a finite resource. One day we will run out and the world will get really ugly.
Do you remember how enraged some people were after Hurricane Katrina? It was as if they expected the government to just fix everything within a week or two, so they could get on with their lives (worrying about the size of Kim K's ass).
No, folks, this is reality. This is how humanity lived for most of history. The modern world and our modern way of life is an illusion. We need clean water and food and protection from the elements or we don't survive.
Most people are so far removed from that reality they engage in magical thinking...while drinking a double-tall decaf latte (made with coffee beans from three regions of the planet) with soy milk ('cause they care) and ethically-sourced sugar in a paper cup ('cause they care) with a plastic lid (oops) and a wooden stirrer ('cause they're good people). They took an uber 'cause cars are so yucky. They're wearing their skinny jeans made by children in some third world hell hole and nikes made by slaves in Xinjiang. They're completely up-to-date on all the proper thoughts.
Seriously, how the hell did we get here? IMO, it is 24-7-365 media psyop.
Is that an amorphous give-and-take or is it bread and circuses?
If someday the solar flare ever happens, the Amish will be fine.
The rest of western civilization... yeah. Toast.
The only long-term hope for modern civilization is an engineering breakthrough for nuclear fusion. Absent that, we've got maybe a century at most before fossil fuel depletion really starts grinding civilization to a halt, and I've seen arguments that we don't even have that long. Heck I've read arguments that we're ALREADY at the peak if not very slightly past it, on the basis that the energy cost of extracting the remaining fossil fuels on Earth is now too high to sustain what we have.
Do the amish carry guns and have their own well-regulated militia?
If not, they are even more toast if inner city populations and certain demographics can reach them.
Look at some areas of Chicago or Detroit. Now imagine a caravan of people from those areas, hungry, angry and armed descending on an amish commune.
A short while later, after the rapes and murders are done, there's no food, no nothting and the horde moves on.
Demographies which could barely invent the wheel or metalcraft despite having huge advantages in available resources and climate and environment aren't very likely to be able to build anything at all if modernity goes the way of the dodo.
I've read that we are at or past the peak. I've also read that the US has about 400 years of natural gas supply left. Who knows? It is a finite resource, though. We must increase efficiency and find ways to reduce consumption while we find true alternatives. I'm wary of nuclear power, though. I understand the the newer fission models are safer, but I haven't investigated it. While fusion reactors are safer (maybe), I'm not a fan.
I like geothermal heat pumps units for home use where possible, which has the added benefit of being more independent of the electric grid. It's a hybrid system, so you'd need a connection to the grid and perhaps a battery or generator backup in the event of a power outage. I confess I don't know enough about them, but I like the idea.
I also like hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. I am concerned about fire and explosion risk (think Challenger), but I don't know the relative combustibility of solid versus liquid hydrogen.
If deployed widely, both options would take pressure off the grid and extend fossil fuels.
I don't believe human beings are causing a climate catastrophe. It's another grift with an agenda. Higher CO2 has lead to the greening of the planet, which is better for human beings and wildlife. We definitely need to be better stewards of the planet and more mindful of our consumption and waste, though. We could literally manufacture fossil fuels if need be.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/hydrogen-fuel-cell-vehicles
If you're interested, this company has been trying to clean up the Pacific gyre for a number of years. There are so many ways to innovate and reduce our impact on the planet and wildlife. The company was started by a Dutch kid. I think he was 24 when he first began. Nothing is perfect, but their dedication gives me hope.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq0YkhXKIKw
absolutely past the peak. All liquids peaked in 2006, and only the 'miracle' of fracking allowed us to not notice so much.
The miracle of fracking was basically zero percent interest rates. (similar to the miracle in germany after wiemar, but that's a very different story) It made it so that you could throw any amount of 'money' at a problem to solve it, or appear to.
The important metric is really EROEI or energy returned on energy invested.
Used to be 100 to 1 in the first wells, and is now down to between three and nine, depending on the play.
The excess is what created what we had.
Anyhow, to cut a very long and very interesting point short, there is zero chance of anything like another hundred years of business as usual.
Fossil fuels are not depleting any time soon
Well, I didn't mean to come off like a know it all or to demean anyone's intelligence. But your reply shows that even though you haven't dedicated the time to understanding certain advanced aspects of technology, you understand it enough to know it's not magic.
I'm fairly certain the phrase "indistinguishable from magic" was not intended to mean that people LITERALLY believe computerized devices are magic, but rather that the fundamental means by which they operate are completely impenetrable and whose function must be taken on faith- a state that would, for a non-trivial number of things in this world, include me, a not-dumb person.
I don't understand how power plants convert any variety of fuel to electricity (beyond an internal combustion engine), but I must accept and hope that they work as intended because my civilization depends on it. That doesn't make me a fool, it means my reality is too complex for me to personally master all of it.
Observation: When reality becomes too complex for people to master, they vote for those who promise to take care of them. Most of whom are liberal grifters and know no more about how to make things work than those who vote for them do. But they know how to promise.
This is more prevalent in big cities, where people instinctively know that if the systems they depend on stop, they could die.
Rural residents know a lot more about the things they depend on, because those things are simpler and in many cases, they do them themselves or someone they know and trust does them.
This is why the red/blue maps look the way they do.
The first sign of a truly intelligent person is knowing what you don't know. 🤔
The modern world is highly specialized in almost all areas. We are dependent on the labor, knowledge, expertise, and morality of thousands of people in our daily lives. It's amazing how quickly things go to hell when the trash removal people go on strike, especially in big cities.
Agree! I've found that having a high-IQ only correlates with figuring out math and science models of stuff. That's tactical thinking, in a way. The next level is strategic thinking - if you have that, it's easier to explain technology to others, to help them see it is not "magic".
Grifters excel at strategic thinking, which trumps IQ. (At least, this explains to me why so many managers are not as smart as their employees, but in a toxic workplace grifter-managers can outsmart their employees.)
So:
SQ: strategic quotient (?) >> IQ
A very good sign of actual intelligence as opposed to IQ is if a person is smart enough to hide that it is smart, yet still profit from living among what relatively speaking amounts to retards without being found out.
This is why so few people can conceive
that an election can be stolen electronically. They look at the vote spikes for biden in the middle of the night and don’t even know what they’re looking at, let alone how it could be done.
Not that they're allowed to even ask, for fear of cancellation and possible incarceration.
It gets easier and easier each day to follow the other sheep than it is to face the wolf. Or the donkeys.
They saw the vote switches caught on camera on CNN and MSNBC but won't admit something happened.
That people could watch security cam footage of Atlanta, see an emptied room suddenly fill back up with only Dems in the wee hours and watch how crates of hidden "ballots" were pulled out from underneath tablecloths and tallied right around the time the spike occurred -- yet still insist "Nothing to see here, move along you conspiracy theorist." says all you need to know.
That could have been a glitch, it wasn’t but it was possible.
I agree but one doesn't have to understand the specifics of a technology to appreciate the broader mechanics of how things work. My observation of modern education (having worked in such) focuses far too much on specifics or isolated understanding for people to be able to make broader connections between disciplines (or things they do understand). Specifics are often unnecessary and too complex so people just give up and look for an explanation that is overly simplified (and thus taken advantage of). For instance, the immune system's reaction to a respiratory virus is uniquely sophisticated but instead of looking for a more manageable analogy that bears a strong resemblance and is within the grasp of most people, we get "antibodies=immunity". I've met some truly great educators but most seem to be narrow-minded, ideological specialists with a desire to teach others to think as they do.
Another word is "child-like" thinking. The left are like children throwing a temper-tantrum against a world they do not like.
My husband and I were at our neighbor's home for dinner and were talking about their new Tesla. After a few minutes, they said something that sounded like they thought electricity came magically from the plug. Like generated at the plug.
Well it does Raptor!...you know if you can turn a smart light on/off with your phone then that means the power is coming from the phone. Duh!
Drives me nuts.
You can't very well switch on and off the light until you first charge your phone, so in a crackhead logic kinda way it makes sense. Broadcast power. (a reference to an episode of the old and very awesome Avengers with Diana Rigg).
Like how the moon is sometimes blue -- so it must be made of bleu cheese.
Dianna Rigg! My father liked her.
Didn't she say something like; why do I need a man as a friend when I regard my bed as my best friend?
I think that's how my wife feels at times...lol!
I’m wondering how my virtuous and insufferable SIL is enjoying her EV after 3 days with no power to charge it due to hurricane Fee-fi-fo. No doubt she blames the climate “emergency” and doubles down.
I talked to my kids a LOT about magical thinking when they were growing up. The internet has certainly made it the norm. I totally agree with your premise, but without the internet it would have taken a whole lot longer to get here. The zealots just have to push a button - "and YOU'RE cancelled, and YOU'RE cancelled, and YOU'RE cancelled". Totally removed from the realities of life. (Our family has 3 life rules based on movies: never take a shower in a random empty house, never walk down a dark alley at night, and never push the red button. More people need that last one!)
I’d add rule #1 and #22 from the movie Zombieland: Cardio and When in Doubt, Know You’re Way Out.
Magical thinking is endemic. The idea that a man can become a woman just by wishing it so, for example.
I think that magical thinking is somehow connected to being a feeling based rather than a logic based society.
People believe what they feel is real, and now, society has decided what certain people "feel," no matter how illogical, must be accepted.
This actually seems to run along party lines, and applies to deviants and minorities as well.
LOL - real magic isn't like that.
Sounds a LOT more like delusional thinking to me than magical....
Very true!
It always traces back to the DDs and I'm not referring to bra size. Division and Deceit.
United we are strong, Divided we are weak. First they Divide us by any means necessary, like the American Civil War, and that makes us weak.
Once we are weak they swoop in with the kill shot called Deceit, and because of our weakness we are easily bamboozled.
They have been refining their DD methods for many centuries and to the point where it truly does appear as magic. The greatest magic shows on earth occur regularly in our many court rooms all across our lands (that were once for common law but are now Admiralty law), where we believe we can go for justice, but are instead bamboozled with endless dog and pony shows that they pass off as justice.
Terrific article. You definitely have an ability to reach a certain mindset with your disarming playfulness. That is a rare talent these days, and in greater need than ever. Keep up the good work. May the meow be with you!
Yes! This.
While we have a manufactured war, the covid debacle and the energy crisis scam, the Rubes are washing and ironing their shirts - oblivious that their actions/beliefs/participation and magical thinking are actually detrimental to their own interests.
This is dangerous imo. History is not kind to the sequela of magical thinking.
It is a highly transmissable infection prone to exploitation.
How much can you really exploit the willing? Some people just need to be told what to believe. Otherwise they will be crushed by reality.
As for magic and history, what was that story about the Connecticut Yuppie in King Arthur's Court...or something?
Well it's been like a spell from a sorceress to turn a nation from proud Yankees into America hating Yuppies in the last 30 years.
I won't quibble with your point...because it's true. But I would add that even though you may not be able to exploit the willing, you can get them to exploit the unwilling.
Not good chess players, for sure
Don’t knock magical thinking. I mean, it cured the flu and saved us from the Common Covid-cold, right?
It could have been so much worse! (tm)
Well, i would have been much worse, but
(say it with me);
Thank God for the Vaccine! (Leap up and throw your hands in the air.)
More religious than magical, but ...
corollary: trying to force that magical thinking on everyone else is the essence of zealotry.
being a rube means not having to understand the problems, just accepting the solutions provided. The world is complex and difficult to understand, and current theories about the world are as phenomenalogical as the theory of epicycles in planetary movements were before Keppler - and for the same reason. They are observations that are made into "laws" that have exceptions due to observed results. Hardly a useful theory to be applied in novel situations.
Now, part of this is because no one wants to move off an old theory without real proof, and part of it is due to the current situation being a benefit to the people with the ability to fund any research that would contradict the current thinking.
Also, people are lazy, outside of their interests. Few people get interested in things they have been told repeatedly are too complex to understand without special training.
Ah yes, Popper's argument that a demonstrably false theory, once adopted, should be kept until something better can be proven. Part of what's wrong with science!
Tell me you’re a materialist without telling me you’re a materialist.
Jokes aside, yeah magical thinking just means you don’t know any better.
Or don't want to know any better.
This is a great example and excellent comment. I have owned businesses in the energy sector for nearly 25 years.
Without a doubt what you are saying is true.
I've seen the sausage being made.
I make sausage and it's delicious. If you ever get to this neck of the woods, you'll have to try my venison sausage. I'd even let you help make a batch. 😁
Love to Don. Love venison sausage!
I would gladly pay you Tuesday -- in electrons -- for a venison today.
Wimpy!
I appreciate how you always get my obscure (or at least aged) references, rendered of course sardonically.
they don't understand that nearly every product they depend on in their every day existence is a by-product of fossil fuels (which is a misnomer) Wind turbines, solar power, can't exist without it. no chapstick, lipstick, iPhone, clothes, shoes, housing materials , cars - you name it - has its start in oil & gas.
The best way I saw it worded, and it's stuck with me, is that there are four absolutely essential products for modern civilization (aka 20th century and above) to function, and NONE of them have any viable non-fossil-fuel based replacement:
Steel
Concrete
Plastic
Diesel
Remove those four pillars, and it's welcome back to the 18th century - at best.
Interesting! I had to do some looking & found this Time magazine article that lists the 4 essential articles for civilization as cement, steel, plastics, & ammonia... and their mass-scale production depends heavily on the combustion of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels remain indispensable for producing all of these materials & ev's will require MORE fossil fuels to produce them than the above 4 pillars of civilization. modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on the fossil fuels used in the production of these indispensable materials. https://time.com/6175734/reliance-on-fossil-fuels/
petroleum in modern society is almost like oxygen, it is in everything yet invisible, it gives us all life (at least in the sense of our very rich & spoiled lives) yet no one sees it or knows anything about its contents or workings.
the radical children of the internet age are happy to tear down our wicked societies (wicked bc they havent eradicated suffering or unfairness), to destroy what they could never create, as long as it gives them the holy & self-righteous thrill of "building a new world."
they are very much descendants of puritans and other protestant millenarians as well as the Bolsheviks, who wanted to create utopia but only created a mountain of corpses.
this just seems to be part of the eternal human experience, sadly.
To validate your point watch this exchange...
https://youtu.be/WP0waUUMSug
They also believe that coal used for power generation over in China is better than cleaner processes we have here. Apparently pollution does not happen in China no matter what they do.
Talking to people even in the lightest way about the toxicity of solar panel manufacture and disposal and they shut down. Anything at all positive about nuclear? Ditto, but angrier.
For all the talk of caring about the world and the health of the planet and the inhabitants, they sure don't act that way. Ever.
Congress is filled with incurious grubbing ghouls drunk on power and the belief that they are the masters of the universe.
"incurious grubbing ghouls drunk on power" Methinks you are giving them too much credit and sugar-coating it. :-)!
Talk to the average Western citizen, and they still believe that China or India are very poor, rural countries, with negligible economies. In there view only the Western world matters, and not much has changed since 1990.
To be fair all people of all countries misapprehend life outside their own area. And I will tell you this, I spent some time in Singapore, Hong Kong and China in 1984 then returned to Singapore for work in 2000 and took a little side trip to HK and China while there. I was SHOCKED (and dismayed) by the changes. People anywhere in the world would be shocked by China and what is going on there. If you grew up in America, you saw on TV every day how the peoples of China and India were starving... so eat your dinner. Also, people out in the rural areas of China are often very very poor (even though much less than before the turn of the century). Not America poor. Poor in America means no cable. Now. We are in for a rude awakening I think.
About 50 000 swedish citizens cannot feed themselves despite welfare et c. They are below the UN's threshold for malnourishment, sometimes bordering on starvation.
These are not homeless drifters and substance abusers but normal citizens.
I meet dozens of them every week at a local free church, handing out grocery bags. Yesterday, we had received 400 kilos of deep-frozen sausages from a local meat product producer (mislabled product, may not be sold), so we could offer a real hefty bag for each and everyone.
When an adult woman, single mother of several children starts crying because of the relief knowing she can feed her kids and doesn't have to nag them to eat until they burst at school - I don't know where to put thsoe emotions.
When I tell my fellow swedes stuff like this, they look at me as if I was the guy from the "Gotta be aliens"-meme. They don't believe me. Then they always default to claiming it's just druggies and such.
No, just poor unlucky broken ground down to dust people. Ground down between capital and state, their lives grist for the mills of power and profit.
This is also true for the US. There are always people inhabiting the margins. Here, out in rural areas it is especially dire because free food is not as easy to get there. In the cities, they are set up to meet need. In the city, unless you are mentally ill it would be hard to die of starvation. In the country there are people living without electricity and running water and no way to get to the food bank. Churches and civic groups try to find them and help them.
You tuck those emotions inside Rikard. Grief of that sort is a powerful motivator for compassion. True compassion is a blessing.
Do what you can, don't burn yourself out, share the truth when it may help.
I have volunteered at a food bank in Finland, it is not what people think. Those served come from all sorts of backgrounds. Some are teachers at the school my kids went to, actors in adverts I see on TV, students, seasonal workers, pensioners, refugees, unemployed and less than 10% substance abusers.
In Helsinki there is another larger food bank, queue can stretch 3 city blocks two days a week, most people are upset when it is in the news, regular people have been programmed to accept that they are all drunks and they waste their benefits, not true, situation has been slowly getting worse since the EU or so. Government is indifferent and cuts social budgets whenever possible in spite of censure that social benefits in Finland are lowest in EU while claiming to be a welfare state.
While the rubes are in power they have no soul and they also have no incentive to assist others. To them social benefits is wasted money because it cannot be diverted to them, spending on new infrastructure is good because it causes economic activity (easier to skim a bit for friends and family).
Yes, you are right, it is natural to have ignorant prejudices. I have enough of those myself.
But with the internet and Google streetview at your fingertips, it is quite easy to update them.
And to have at least a ballpark idea what is going on in the world.
I do not mind anyone who is actively ignorant about any subject, as long they are aware of their ignorance.
But the smug certainty of ignorant people who think they know it all is hard to bear. Especially if they are running and ruining the country.
Actually, I know someone who lives on the edge of poverty. He has premium cable (I don't) and a newer phone than I do.
I don't know how to define poor in America anymore. Maybe... "no dining at premium steakhouses?"
Poor in spirit. Not knowing who your neighbors are, not giving a damn about your community. That is the worst form of poverty.
I think I'll let the power utility use the roof on my home to support solar panels and an inverter to feed the grid. Oh, and I'll manage disposal of it when obsolete, or when it's time to replace my roofing. Think of the savings on my electricity bill!
Because climate change.
This. I don't know why anyone would put a panel array on their house roof.
If you look on the windy app and go to ‘more’ settings you can turn on SO2, emmisions around the world. As well as NO2 and CO and ozone. Do one at a time. You see the worst places for all are China and India by a factor of st least 100X .
My city council voted this week -- in California -- to replace all of our police cars with Teslas, making policing 100% dependent on the reliability of electric power. Near the end of the discussion, one of the councilmembers briefly referenced the fragility of the not-invariably-reliable power grid, two weeks after a series of urgent flex alerts that begged everyone to immediately turn off all their appliances. Dark comedy followed, as the rest of the council furrowed their brows at the bizarre claim that the lights might ever go out in California. What are you even talking about!?!?!?
Mass formation psychosis: one of the symptoms is ignoring anything that does not fit your worldview. The sound goes in their ear, or the light their eyes; but simply does not register. They just keep on doing what they were doing before.
Which is why getting out of mass formation is so difficult, and inevitably traumatic.
Doesn't look like anything to me.
funny how none of the gangbangers from south central drive teslas
To quote Bill Engall, Here's your sign!
I agree with egm's theory, but there are also significant contributing factors that have exacerbated this mess: an educational system, that over a couple of decades, has indoctrinated and dumbed down students (e.g. climate change or various flavors of activism) versus providing a real education; a complicit media; Big Government and Big Tech collusion.
When I was in elementary school it was widely stated as fact that oil came from dinosaurs. Also scientists have long treated theories as facts. Go to a natural history museum and read the explainer cards. Make sure a bench is handy. You will feel weary. The BS has been going on a LONG time. Now the educators are just more out with it and are dipshits on every subject.
The problem is that the question "What makes the electricity?" is never asked.
It is just there. It is taken for granted.
A world without electricity is impossible to imagine. Thus we can do whatever we want to our power plants: it will have no impact on electricity at all.
I think some of it has to do with complexity. Parts of our life are easier, but more complex. People are concerned about things like "will billy make the football team" or "is my kids school teaching CRT" or "will I get passed for a promotion because I'm a white male," so they never even think of those other things.
It's like the CV injection. People decided not to think. It was too hard. So they trusted. Because they were worried about buying food, paying their bills and their kid going to school remotely.
It is perfectly ok not to care about many things.
But one has to be aware of that.
And also be aware that blind trust is very dangerous. And that you already have to know a lot about a subject to be able to judge whom you can trust.
The author J.L.Borges (whom I admire) mentioned somewhere that the Argentinian gauchos (who Borges admired) had only contempt for people who did not trust their own experience and relied on the experience of others. This is the natural inclination of people who are living in reality.
We are a society living in an illusion, lead by ideologues. As Gato described.
Interesting take on things. I am also a Borges fan. :)
"shut down ALL coal power plants and replace them with windmills!"
There's a Don Quixote joke in there somewhere but I can't quite pull it out.
Agree with the "IF."
I try to provide two web sites to the idiots on the tweety. One, Bjorn Lomborg's site because he claims the world's power loss would be backed up by batteries - for 75 SECONDS. www.lomborg.com
Two, Alex Epstein's take on battery backups. We don't have it now, and he claims the cost for a mere 3 days' worth would cost $400 Trillion which is 4.5X the Global GDP. He testified in Congress, and clearly, Tlaib (and others) didn't listen. https://energytalkingpoints.com/alex-epstein-congressional-testimony-for-june-30-2021/ Epstein is a warrior on this subject. He's written articles here
on Substack. https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/electricity-emergency
Lastly, youtube has excellent videos done by "Engineering Explained." This guy knows his facts and presents them extremely well.
Remember that this shove to green is coming from the WEF and Klaus Schwab. Most of the problems in the United States right now come from the same source. GO there in your mind, because the Democrats and RINOs are already there in reality. End goal is globalism. Now you see how CA Dems think and act - and also see the urgency to vote the incumbents out.
Food is the same. A huge percentage of the population thinks their food comes from "the store". Mix energy ignorance, food ignorance, and immune system ignorance together and what a perfect storm is on the horizon. A starving, cold and sick mass of desperate ignorant people. Heaven help us.
The long, dark, cold winter that much of Europe -- and especially Germany and Poland -- are about to head into will be a wakeup call, indeed. Hotter than usual summers like this past one are more often than not followed by colder than usual winters. Weeping about global warming while the tears freeze on your cheeks lends more credulity than credibility.
I have a Canadian friend who posted a negative comment about the truckers. "Whiny" was the term she used. I was shocked, since she's not a dummy. Her hubby has common sense, so that would have been an interesting conversation. Or fight.
And sadly that's even a high level view, cause even most people who 'know' where electricity comes from don't know how it actually works!
Some interesting/understandable videos on the fascinating reality of electricity...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHIhgxav9LY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI_X2cMHNe0
And the funniest thing is the government buildings in DC are coal powered.
They didn't have vaxx mandates in both Houses either. The hypocrisy is mind numbing.
So true.
coking coal seems important :) making portland cement also seems important.
Watch this with gato's postulate in mind: https://rumble.com/vvvn6u-the-great-global-warming-swindle-full-documentary-hd.html ... fitting. Unfortunately.
https://www.thenewera.uk/p/hockey-sticks
awesome! thank you for posting!
Well, I can tell you a tale of what morons very smart people can be.
My now thankfully late ex-father-in-law, a professor of English and govt. bureaucrat at a somewhat high level, in a place far away where power outages/loadshedding was a feature of the hot season and the cold season, built his dream house without fireplaces because there were these handy electric heaters one could always use, right?
So what I used to do, the winter and a half I was there, when the power went out and the house was freezing, I walked down the street to the part of the family that had more brains than that and I warmed myself at their nice coal fireplaces. Everyone else had generators too, for the times they couldn't steal electricity from the overhead wires. Rich people steal most, this is a constant in life.
My husband is a chemist. He is nearing retirement. At his place of employment, he works with several people who have PHds. He also works with high level executives.
ALL are vaxxed. In fact, outside of a few minorities that work in their manufacturing plant, he is the only one who is not.
Same, basically. Work in a job chock-full of engineers and "smart dudes" all of whom are vaxxed and happy about it. Some old, like me (I am 63) and some younger (late 30s and 40s). One other guy and I are the only weird ones who questioned the whole crap from jump-street.
And I bet their "help" are still required to wear masks.
I worked with a lot of "smart" people most of my life. The part of the arc of the universe bending downwards, it's the weight overload of them that's doing it.
I read once that the reason those Nigerian Prince spam emails are so obviously poorly, unconvincingly written is to make sure that only the most gullible and unthinking recipients (the best marks) would bite on them. They're basically selecting for the highest quality leads like any salesman ought to.
I think something similar can happen with statist fantasy.
This has been confirmed by real scammers. The language is crude and full of errors to select for people who will ignore or not notice it.
"Raven," the recent book about Jim Jones, points out that Jones didn't attempt to persuade or win arguments against people who saw through his weird crypto-Christian cons; he politely showed them the door and banned them from future engagements.
This is, I believe, what's happening when you see politicians doing things like calling voters "baskets of deplorables" or that "MAGA Republicans" are an "army of darkness." You're not burning bridges; you never had those bridges. You're separating wheat from chaff.
To say this is knowledge I had never considered is putting it mildly. The scammers are truly playing chess while many of us are playing checkers! Makes a ton of sense. I always wondered why those notes were so poorly written and yet people still fell for them. The poor writing is part of the scam. Dayam!
I don't think the poor writing is deliberate in a lot of cases. You can tell some of them have been run through a translator app. I do agree that they are not interested in the nominally intelligent. They are playing the odds that one out of their thousands of emails will hit the one dumbass that they are looking for.
Wow 909 deaths include 300kids. kool-aid laced with cyanide.
Hmm, like JJ, these people seem to be comfortable with their own demise as long as they take many down with them.
Coffee is for Closers!
“Build Back Better”...spouted by politicians who’ve never built anything.
More like Bumble Back Broker.
Build Back Better
Take Back More
Excellent piece. I believe there is an analogous situation in academic science (at least in the field of biomedicine, which I am familiar with). Scientists almost exclusively make decisions about 1) who is accepted for graduate school, 2) who is hired for faculty and leadership positions at universities, and 3) who receives grant funding. A major criteria for 2) and 3) is having produced some ground-breaking, sensational, or “high-impact” publication(s). This is how you get grifters rising to leadership positions. Then they choose loyalists and true believers to fill the ranks beneath them. The next thing you know, you have major problems like a reproducibility crisis, whole fields that are essentially fabricated (look what’s just happened in Alzheimer’s research), and drugs that don’t actually work but are standard of care.
University vaccine mandates have effectively solidified this situation by excluding anyone who isn’t willing to be a true believer, or at least pretend to be one.
Read this article that came out yesterday.
Your posting is spot on. I think you'll find this interesting;
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/tyranny-of-the-specialists-fauci/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_campaign=5b77477f0e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_09_22_05_24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_edf2ae2373-5b77477f0e-154845787
Thank you! I will give it a read
What Alzheimer’s research?
The grifting is made possible by fiat currency “printed” in unlimited amounts. This can be “spent” by people who have no skin in the game whatsoever, no consequences at all. In the old days, the gold would have left the building, and running out would pressure the People In Charge but now there is nothing holding them back, nothing.
Yep. Once the money is fake, the rest of the economy is doomed to follow because the fake economy of being friends with the literal money printers overtakes the real economy of voluntary transactions for goods and services. That's when the wheels really come off the bus, because the only 'acceptable' response is MORE PRINTING.
‘... just how it came to pass that the entirety of western governance seems to have become bereft of reality and competence and generally run by people who appear to be about as smart as a soup sandwich...’
Filling the void. Because they have no marketable skills that would get them decent jobs in the competitive, private wealth producing sector, and those that do, have jobs in the competitive, private wealth producing sector thus leaving politics vacant for parasites to infest.
“Parasites to infest”....... is key here. ....how do we detox?
#DementiaJoe is the grifter, but his staff is filled with true believers. God help us all.
And he and his staff are pikers compared to Obama and his staff, who paved the way for FJB.
On-Point with our (shared) libertarian ethic, as usual. Proposition 5 reminds me of a quote I loved from one of Robert Heinlein's classics, "A confidence man knows he's lying. That limits his scope. A successful shaman believes what he says and belief is contagious." ~ Jubal Harshaw
I don't disagree with anything that you've said, but there's another crucial thing happening without which the kind of mess we find ourselves in could not happen.
The "education system" has been captured by these same sophists. You don't need a diploma to become educated, but in this country you need one to become credentialed—only credentialed people wield any kind of power.
Our system of education is so unfit for purpose, so god-awfully, gob-smackingly corrupt and broken that just graduating high school has become an exercise in submission and humiliation. You can only "win" by memorizing and repeating back to these sophists bullet-pointed lists of demonstrably false things.
To anyone without critical thinking skills, this is no problem. For people with marginal critical thinking skills, this signals the slow death of their critical thinking skills. To anyone with robust critical thinking skills, the experience is absolutely gutting—the goal, graduation and a good job someday, seemingly impossible.
Go figure that everyone in a position of power is intellectually lazy, can't think for themselves, and defers to these other credentialed authorities who are not authorities on anything. Being an actual authority means having beliefs which make correct predictions because they are true. It has nothing to do with credentials. The correlation between one's qualifications to lead and one's ability to lead should actually be NEGATIVE in a system this bad—and indeed, it is.
The system is totally backwards, elevating the worst and least-capable people, coddling them in a sense of bureaucratic smugness, while the rest of us shake our heads (when we aren't actually doing nothing about it at all). This is by design. People who can't think for themselves are easy to control.
I'm sure you'd get no arguments from the Gato on this one!
Im an MD. I m an ophthalmologist with over 20 years of experience. These rubes are trying to constantly take over medicine and medical care. Problem is they have no idea what is it to be a diagnostician. They hve no appreciation as to how difficult and nuanced it is to perform a surgery on an eyeball or any other body part. These people demonstrate their ineptitude and ignorance to me every day and yet I am living under their authority in the tightly regulated medical industry
Good Friday to all. An excellent article and great examples of the incestuous and corrupt behavior. As Vladimir Ilyich might ask, "What is to be done?"
Always look on the bright side of life?
I'm sat in the garden in the sunshine, on a zoom meeting, multi-tasking. Got a fridge full of yummy food. My unjabbed partner and kids are all healthy. We climbed some Welsh mountains last weekend. I'm going to Ibiza for closing parties next week. Sheesh, life's not perfect, but it's pretty good.
Be nice to Tonya. She's a talented, hard-working girl who made a mistake. She lives near me and is close to my age. The movie "I Tonya" was actually really good.
True. Both of the ladies were victims. Details matter.
Agree. Ty for posting this.
I hope I don't screw this up too badly, but I heard somewhere that the difference between a cult and a religion is that in a cult, the guy at the top knows the whole thing is a scam. In a religion, that guy is dead.
And yes, that display yesterday was disgusting as hell. The casual way in which Tlaib throws around her fascist demands is astonishing.
How dare you call her a fascist SC! The only fascists are those called out in Joe-bamas red speech. 😅😉
Brett Weinstein draws the line somewhat differently.
Religion, he says, mostly restricts behavior. Since the freedom to murder, lie, and steal would seem to provide real advantages to an individual, if religion did not (while forbidding these things) provide even greater advantages, no religion would last. Its adherents would simply get outcompeted.
Instead we see the opposite—religions enduring for thousands of years—suggesting that they really do provide a net benefit to individuals.
Cults aspire to do this too—and they *all* claim to—but time is the only test. Religions are like tested hypotheses. Cults, untested ones.
1. ⅔ functionally Illiterate & Innumerate (5th grade level) => "A #Republic if you can keep it," Dr Benjamin Franklin (Ratchet Effect, Gibbs)
2. 1913 Banker's Coup d'Etat (IRS, FED, IncomeTax, Senatorial Popular Election) => #Oligarchy (Iron Law of)
3. FDR 3-Letter Agencies (US Stasi, FBI) => #Fascism (F A Hayek)
4. USDA (Low Salt, Low Animal Fats, High Seed Oils, HFCS, sugar) => Obesity Epidemic (Chronic Inflammation & Mental Fog, 90% Metabolically impaired citizenry)
5. GWB (TSA, Patriot Act) => #Nazism
6. JRB (#MedicalTyranny) => #Faucism
7. #RatPark (#RatUtopia = #Behavioral Sink & #BeautifulOnes — #CatParadise, John B Calhoun).
8. #Collapse.
You're so optimistic. It's worse than that.
Tailor made to attract narcissistic psychopaths. Now add stupid and you have a jackpot.
Your theory seems to align with Mattias Desmet's theory of mass formation. In other words, it is a ground up operation rather than a top down imposition. Yes, politics is a grift, and the grift attracts grifters. Yes, the smart grifters are going to cloak themselves with true believers to protect the grift.
But who selects the grifters?
Who's behind the curtain moving the levers?
Do we elect our elected leaders or are they selected for us?
I don't believe the social changes and devolution into incomprehensible stupidity (as demonstrated by Rep Tlaib) over the past several decades was a natural phenomenon.
I think it was a strategic plan.
Nature is never that stupid! You are correct in thinking it is a strategic plan. Only man could conjure up such stupidity. Question is, what is this plan? I attempt to formulate a simple answer on my web site: http://planetaryjurisdiction.org/WEGO.html
Here's an excerpt.
Mankind's efforts to build a global civilization began long long ago. First came the Babylonian empire, then the Medo-Persian empire, followed by the Greco-Macedonian empire (all three were failures) and finally the Roman empire, which is the current system of control and rulership under which we now live and work.
The key to really understanding why our current civilization is so dysfunctional is found in a proper understanding of what the English language calls jurisdiction. There are many kinds of jurisdictions and they all deal with the same thing. Jurisdiction is about who has authority or control over something. It is the very bedrock of our civilization.
The Global Estate Trust
If you've never heard of the Global Estate Trust you're not alone because few of us ever have. That's because it is the very foundation that our modern civilization is built on, sitting on top of the bedrock of our four primary planetary jurisdictions. As it is with all foundations, they are buried deep under the very structures they are designed to support. Foundations are the domain of designers, architects, and engineers, not media talking heads, politicians, or the general public. You wouldn't ask a hair dresser to fix the engine of your car now would you? Likewise the engine powering our civilization is not something the general public usually understands.
The Global Estate Trust and the system that was put in place long ago to protect, manage and exploit it, is a gigantic umbrella trust under which resides many other smaller subordinate trusts. When added together these trusts are now worth quadrillions of dollars (measured in USD). The system for managing it has recently expired and must now be rebuilt from the bedrock up. COVID-19, vaccines and vaccine passports, plandemics, bankruptcies, and several other things, are all part and parcel of the effort to rebuild this gigantic trust system. With that much money at stake, greedy, immoral, and criminal people will stop at nothing to make sure they can retain power and control over it.
You may ask; "why would such a system expire?"
Because it was designed that way. The core mechanics of the system operate like this:
The system we have operated under during our lifetime was designed with a very specific life span of 210 years measured according to the Gregorian calendar. After which time the system becomes invalid (bankrupt) and must be entirely reconstructed if it is to continue.
FYI: the 210 year span began in 1789, and ended on November 7, 1999. Since November 8, 1999 we have been in a rescission period, during which time a new system for administering the Global Estate Trust is being built, and its assets being transferred.
* This 210 year lifespan of the system is divided into three time spans of 70 years each.
* At the end of the first 70 year span, the system provides the option of going through a Reset to initiate a second 70 year span.
* At the end of the second 70 year span (at the 140 year mark), the system provides the option of going through another Reset to initiate a third 70 year span which will complete the 210 year cycle.
* However, a third 70 year reset is not permitted. Once the 210 year cycle was completed in 1999, the system had to be reconstructed. This total reconstruction is that great event that is being called The Great Reset as opposed to merely another Reset.
Hari Seldon, is that you???
No.