The best English professor I ever had was a chain-smoking, Yoda-like figure who made us *think* about what we were writing by asking one simple question: So what? Meaning, ok, you've constructed this elaborate word salad to describe Catherine's motives regarding Heathcliff...but...so what? Is that what Bronte *really* was after? Or are you just making this argument because you *think* that's what I want to hear? What is really at play here? Does this add or detract from your understanding of the characters' motives and desires? Always question, question, question until you can have a proper response to "so what"?
It was a lesson I've never forgotten, and so when these "experts" bloviate and spew their bilge about "safety" and the dangers of "misinformation", my instinct is to ask, so what? So what if I know this to be true when you tell me isn't? This is what you want me to think? So what? That's the mental response that prevents me from capitulating.
A high school teacher would walk us down the path of justifying why the US did one thing (ex: dropping the bombs on Japan) and then invert the argument. His lessons were more profound than any law professor I had.
Ah yes, the good old days when the 'teachers' were actually REAL. I had an Indian Mr Raju, with wild eyes, and Medusa hair (Social studies of course) and he would scream at us.. do you know whats in your *ucking toothpaste? Its killing you! STOP USING IT! Amoung other things. He set me up for life. Have never trusted an 'institution' since! Incredible isnt it! The power of leaders. Now all we get is what (in schools)... I will not go on
There are glimmers of hope. When my son was in 7th grade, the task of providing the anti-drug, anti-tobacco indoctrination fell to his slightly off-kilter English teacher. At that time tobacco was under full assault in California. My offspring was tasked with writing a position paper about tobacco use. Genetics, no doubt, led him to ponder the question can I write a paper defending or even advocating tobacco use? Instead of killing the idea his teacher was intrigued. Give it your best shot, he said, but be prepared to be graded on your logic and presentation of fact.
We discussed. I expressed skepticism. He researched. California had recently increased the tax on tobacco products significantly. This new tax was sold as a way to fund healthcare programs for children. He had his hook and went for it. Save children, buy tobacco. He researched further. He detailed other programs the state claimed were funded by tobacco and alcohol tax. His paper presented the conflict of interest in the state's position: tobacco and alcohol are bad, but the state makes billions on them to do what it purports to be good, even essential, things.
He got an A. His teacher praised his unorthodox approach. He used it to build credibility with the 7th graders. The state's conflict of interest is not a solid rationalization to ignore the health implications for YOU. It was a private school, so the teacher wasn't fired immediately. They waited until the end of the term.
They fired a teacher for teaching true critical thinking? At my son’s private religious school a teacher taught English through Marxism. I didn’t complain because I want more thinking not less but I think my logic was a mistake.
I had a physics professor who would laugh when people used the phrase "laws of physics". He'd snort and say "we have no idea what those are". We have vague but useful notions amounting to gentlemen's agreements which change when they become less useful.
He's dead now, but I wonder what he would say to someone asserting that "all the scientists agree". Probably another hearty laugh and observe that a room full of scientists can't agree on where to go to lunch. Why expect them to agree about science?
Most things aren’t knowable. That is the reality. Most important things are nearly infinitely complicated. At best we are moving in the right direction. At best.
“Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known.”
What systems do you currently trust? Government, Food, science, academia, money, religion, medicine and even science have become corrupted. The result is all loss of trust in our systems. This is devastating for society and our #1 problem we need to fix.
Trust in a system is only based on 2 factors:
1) Transparency
2) Results
Our systems are getting bad results by nearly every metric, and are not transparent so we as people cannot see the problem in order to fix it.
The solution is 2 parts:
1) We fix trust by decentralizing it like eBay and Amazon did, peer-to-peer. To eliminate ai and bots from our online systems. We make new transparent, high trust systems 100% controlled by the citizens that we all migrate to in order to solve problems in groups.
2) We plug our new systems into the current corrupted ones to fix them.
That was my first thought as well when reading this. But I would suggest that critical thinking has been dying a slow death for the better part of a century and in a death spiral since the turn of this one. The COVID collective insanity was certainly a grand mal seizure from which it never recovered, and these past 3 1/2 years have been hospice care.
Actually, March 13th, 2024 (I think you meant) may well be the date that critical thinking was reborn in the hearts and minds of many/most formerly gullible Americans/world citizens!
For instance, did the "burial" precede the funeral? If so, what does that tell us?
A single teacher can have a profound impact for the better. Which no doubt is why teachers like your English professor are being (or have been) weeded out. Teach students to "think properly" and not to think independently, that's the mandate today.
I had a history teacher in Jr. High who taught us about the constitution by looking at tactics used by the British to suppress opposition to the crown. Today the constitution is banned from textbooks and any discussion is limited to the approved interpretation. In my undergraduate studies, I had a history professor who told us to read the correspondence between the authors of our constitution, rather than anything in a history book. His advice led to seeing what was on the minds of those architects, and gave insights into their motivations. He did not dictate an interpretation, but instead challenged us to make our own and defend it articulately in class. He said the only invalid argument was one badly made..
Such challenges to the student are strictly out of bounds today.
I had an amazing 4th year stats prof whose first words to the class pasted on large screen were the words STATS LIE. The entire year was spent examining this issue in the context of the real world. He was brilliant. Talk about making stats interesting. All through the Covid operation I borrowed on his lessons. There is nothing like having a great educator!
Highly doubt it. For one thing she entered the academy in an era when studying texts didn't require 'confronting' and 'deconstructing' texts in the endless Foucault-ian death-spiral that has resulted in literature becoming "hegemonic" versus artistic and individualistic. I think she was an anachronism even then (c. 1993).
“what’s fascinating is that we’re all getting a good laugh out of jokes about what abject mendacity merchants these people are and how you cannot trust a word they say.”
Indeed, and what is also fascinating is that we start to question whether we have gone crazy or whether the world we live in has really lost all pretense at being honest or real. And then we have our sense of accurate perception validated by some guy pretending to be a cat and we feel comforted.
This is not a real cat? This is some guy pretending to be a cat? But the lack of capital letters is conclusory! Tell me this cannot be true...we have so many pictures of him. Another scam? Oh my...
YES, and the only way they can do this is to keep pumping those bizarre realities. Hence the absolute key part of the overal coup in taking ownership of the media and hollywood etc.
My job was affected by the Crowdstrike outage, and as I chatted with the IT help-desk for an hour while my laptop rebooted about 100x we both agreed that it was hard to believe such an outage was a "mistake," it was obviously some kind of "attack" or "warning," and also we'd never know the truth because the government would just make something up, lol. For the curious, we had to reboot my laptop in safe mode then get to the Crowdstrike system files and delete just one of them. Crazy. IT was simple and I could have done it myself if I had systems access and knew which one to delete.....
Microsoft blamed the outage on the EU and its lawsuit which resulted in Microsoft being forced to allow third-party access to Windows' OS kernel. So that is what Crowdstrike's update was doing.
I was just thinking about how fantastic the citizen journalism has been for the Trump shooting and the subsequent Biden drop-out. We used to just sit around, waiting for Big News to tell us what was happening. Now WE make the news. WE break the stories, and Big News struggles to catch up. Sure, there are plenty of loony theories in the mix, but I'll take that any day over carefully curated lies. The Powers that Be still managed to snowball many during the 2020 election and the start of the pandemic. But we've all learned so much since then about how to communicate and build news stories together. I keep imagining the CIA/FBI analysts sitting stunned at their desks as details about the shooting literally pour in from all sides. Despite my native Gen X cynicism, I can't help but be a little hopeful here.
I'll never forget the feeling of breaking news of the shooting (complete with video) 10 minutes before the MSM decided to go with "Trump falls at rally."
I saw that moments after it went up! There was nothing much anywhere for a while. I got home and told my BF “Trump got shot…sort of”. He looked it up and found all the BS headlines. The real details were pouring in all over the Substx I follow. It was amazing!!!!
"faith in experts" [may be] "in short supply"...but 'experts' are becoming like a locust plague. They're everywhere...under the floorboards....in your sleep. Everywhere. "In 2024 it feels like we now have ‘experts’ advising you (always for your own good mind) on every single aspect of your daily life from the moment you can talk till the moment they carry you out of the care home in a box. And it seems like you cannot get more than two sentences into an MSM article or broadcast these days without an ‘expert’ being invoked as an authority on whatever is being discussed....." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
LOLOL they are just like cocroaches. You smack one and there is the next. I subscribe to Epoch times and Slay but every day they both publish articles 'the experts say' and I am thinking of unsubscribing. Epoch needs to stay because I love their games tho, but probably will unsubscribe from their health page.
No shit! I am old enough to remember Kool cigarettes - "Nine out of ten New York doctors recommend Kool cigarettes!". Even the Ad agencies relied upon your trust in institutions so that they could frag you with lung cancer. I preferred to "walk a mile for a Camel...".
Believe in that statement! Reading comments on substacks has proven FAR more substantial and provided more reasonable and fact based explanations than most " expert " analysis's I've seen, which are generally pushed by establishment for sheep to read.
I loved what your typo/spellcheck “locus plague” did to your sentence. In addition to meaning a ‘place ot location’ locus also means ‘a center or focus of great activity or intense concentration,’ or ‘The set or configuration of all points whose coordinates satisfy a single equation or one or more algebraic conditions.’ A configuration of expert propaganda pointing to approved points of view indeed!
I actually have a real expertise in one area. And a pretty good expertise in another. The first area, which is my real skill set, I know enough to know I have barely scratched the surface. My second area, where I have some good expertise, but less so than the first, I have MORE confidence in my ability! I should have less. Weird, eh? Any expert I know, a real one, does not confidently state opinions on open system questions as they know there is infinite information coming in by the second.
And the question is, how does one get to become an "expert" these days? It is definitely not what it used to be. Now an "expert" has to agree with preferred narratives. Otherwise they are simply "misinformation spreaders" who should be disdained and ignored.
Status-seeking and truth-seeking are too often antagonistic. This is why experts in any field, especially those protected by politics and industry, are viewed with a high degree of skepticism by anyone with a modicum of logic
So. I guess Marshall McLuhan was right. "The medium is the message".
This article is profound because it is simply put and exactly what is happening, no matter the political side, economic view, ideas about technology as savior or destroyer. We have been lied to and gaslit about most everything for all our lives and the marvelous digital technology makes it easier for them, but is also our way to see through it all. The people they have as front men and women don't matter so much anymore. they are mostly just teleprompter readers just as the news media talking heads are.
It does not matter if Biden is dead. He has been dead to me since he "won" election from his basement without campaigning. Similarly Cackles Harris who dropped out of the 2020 campaign before there were any votes was Peter Principle selected to be vice president. Now the Border czar was never the border czar. and she was a brilliant (insert descriptor here).
I watched Biden's self eulogy last night. It was fantastic! (fantastic /făn-tăs′tĭk/
adjective
1 Based on or existing only in fantasy; unreal.
2 "fantastic mythological creatures; the fantastic realms of science fiction."
3 Strange or fanciful in form, conception, or appearance. Unrealistic; irrational. )
Biden showed his true narcissist's colors, as he squinted to read the teleprompter. The writer got the message out clearly , but it was probably not the message they wanted us to come away with.
Obama really didn't know what to do with Scranton Joe, so he appointed him the country's Cancer-cure Czar. Biden's ghost-written self eulogy obliquely alluded to it.
We are rapidly approaching that horizon, I fear. Not so much from jack booted government thugs as from our fellow citizens -- along with their "newcomer" allies.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
That went deep. I doubt enough have the courage or even the will to put up a fight. There's far too many asleep willing to trade their freedom for safety, even if it means incarceration and death. Lambs to the slaughter.
Two things have become obvious. One is that the lying and gaslighting have become so ridiculous that they are completely and transparently false to a large number of people. For example, we see many of the top Democrats coming out with versions of the statement “This has been the best presidential administration in US history!” Even the TDS sufferers out there know that this isn’t remotely true. These liars are shameless.
Secondly, it seems that these people now truly believe they can still create an alternate reality just by saying so. And in addition to the “good news” you write about, I would add another “good news” observation--that we are finally seeing evidence, perhaps for the first time ever, that there is a limit to what propaganda can accomplish. The system is finally OD'ing on too much unreality.
The worrisome part is that, as you say, it IS like the old Soviet Union, and we all know how THAT ended. We are in for some rough sledding for a decade or two at the least, even if the ship finally manages to right itself. "Not a joke...."
Now we just have to pair that skepticism with the courage to disobey, suffering, enduring consequences. And to embrace the rudeness that disobedience entails, "Don't you care about others?" And "They're just doing their job, no need to be rude." The emotional pressure points that authoritarians rely on in populations to enforce their lies-based rule.
Like the 17yo hostess telling the 65yo doctor to "mask up, above the nose" for their 20 foot walk from the hostess stand to the dining table. Met with a "Not gonna happen little girl" or "How about you go f yourself?" Or the hospital receptionist. Or the flight attendant. Or, or, or.
It's one thing to know they're lying. It's another thing to disobey their lies and the demands of those who believe them.
I walked into a corner store near my home. I had stopped going as they were COVID Nazis. But my wife said she really needed some whipping cream for a desert she had planned for our dinner party that evening. Okay, I will do it. I walk in unmasked, during mask rule time. I walk to the dairy case, grab a cream, and walk to the counter. I hand my credit card to the young girl behind the cash. She was fine. Another young woman runs up. “Sir. You need to wear a mask”. I say “a what? A mask! Why?” She says because of COVID, and I say “what is Covid?” This was 18 months into the nonsense. She says “COVID. The pandemic.” “What is a pandemic?” She explains. “How long has this been going on?” She says 18 months. My face lights up. “Oooh. That makes sense. I have been in a coma for 18 months. I woke up two days ago. When I left the hospital I was seeing everyone in masks. I wondered why. But I was really out of it. I thought maybe that is always what goes on in hospitals.” By now the cashier has rung me up and handed me the machine. I completed my transaction. Second young woman hands me a mask. She says I have to wear them now everywhere. I say “Nah. I don’t wear masks. They’re utter nonsense.” Cash girl laughs. Second one is really cheesed off.
Gosh, I hope you're right but I'm worried. Here in NH, Biden signs started going up after the disastrous debate and now I hear of people being in support of Harris. It totally boggles my mind. These liberal towns are going to be hard to crack. Love your posts.
After my daddy died (I was his full caregiver for 11 years) here in Virginia. It took us two months to move allof his treasures out of his apartment. I was instructed by my father (he made me take aphoto of him standing in his office pointing to the correct cabinet) to remove the papers from the cabinet, and the filed from the file cabinet and bring them home.
I was at the apartment, with my husband... boxing up the most important pertinent things to go over with my siblings. I texted my brother in NH that we were gathering those things and would call the stupid lawyer daddy hired via advice from the dumb bank (whole nother story) After I texted my brother, my phone rang, it was my brother. He yelled "tell Rex (my husband) to get the fuck out of dad's papers"
Where was he? On Lake Winnepesaukee on his big boat in his stupid boat with his silly family. Yelling at me.
I asked my brother if he was "okay?" and he said he was not. I told him we would talk about this later, but we needed to gather and provide many papers and accomplish a number of things immediately. How stupid. liberals are really dumb assholes.
This is just a smalllll tiny tidbit of my great adventures over the past 11 years. Good times, messed up selfish siblings
The Trump signs in my NH area (Candia/Raymond/Epping) far outnumber the one or two Biden/Harris signs. Most of those are on the Seacoast. When are they going to update their signs removing the Biden part, lol?
Cognitive dissonance is real. It builds up though. As it does people double down on their delusion, for awhile. But when it breaks through it is catastrophic for the person for awhile.
Spot on. We must laugh at the demoralized “expert” commissars and bootlickers. They are the human centipede of regurgitating regime lies and disinformation.
Yes! Sadly, my sister reads Heather every day. Sometimes she will forward an article to me because she thinks it’s so good or explains everything that is in current news. I read it and find nothing 😕
Yes.. I have tried a few times. You would think if I take the time to understand her point of view, she would do the same for me. But no. She won’t look at anything I think is interesting or important. She doesn’t “like my sources.” She thinks I’m a crazy anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist. Sometimes I will explain that documents have been released through FOIA requests, or an article may be explaining a court case, but she thinks only her left-wing pundits tell the truth.
UGH. I truly feel your pain. I have tried, in vain, to get my daughter to read the non main stream studies until she finally told me to stop sending that information. She will argue to the death that childhood vaccines don't cause autism AND she has given both her son (14) and daughter (19) the HPV poison. Trying to maintain the relationship is difficult at best and painful at worst. I have never asked outright if she jabbed the kids and herself because it is just too painful to think about. I struggle each and every day.
I hear you too. The self-censorship we have to do with my daughter and son-in-law to keep a relationship is painful. Superficial chat is all we really get anymore. How can smart kids raised right turn into such morons? "Stupid smart people" I call them (not to their faces).
Thank you. The self-censorship is the worst as it feels so very wrong. My adult son has cut ties with me although I feel his wife shares a lot of the responsibility behind that (not to let him off the hook). So my daily question to myself, do I continue to self-censor? And yes, that is the question of this age - "How can smart kids raised right turn into such morons? " and I would add become so close minded. Scary and sad.
Thank you Rosemary B. Substack is not only a source of good information but also support from like minded individuals. My daughter thinks I'm drinking some kind of voodoo kool-aid and seems to have lost sight that you need discernment in all things. I appreciate your comments and reaching out.
(1) There is a reason that the Woke Left despises comedy, and is trying to destroy it. It's the same reason a vampire would hate a garlic-encrusted crucifix. Ridicule and Satire are unbelievably powerful weapons, and they can easily trigger a preference cascade that completely undermine's an authoritarian's "legitimacy". And our sad, modern crop of would-be experts, who see the world as a giant game of Sims 4, deserve all the ridicule they can get.
(2) There's one particularly dangerous element to conspiracy theories, that makes me wonder if our Elected Dunderheads secretly love them. A conspiracy theory implies above-average competence. If the Obama Star Chamber is secretly running America, or Klaus Schwab and the rest of the Lizard Overlords are setting economic policy, then there's a danger of attributing far too much cleverness to these stooges. Not to say that our amoral elites aren't capable of such ambitions, but the only way things like this can work is through a strongman's brutish naked force. That's something to watch out for, but the current clown show ain't it. The DC elite are far more Michael Scott than they are Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
The State han incentive to encourage speculation that turns out to be false. When we awakening types speculate openly that "Joe Biden" is dead, the State benefits in several ways. First, we devote time to the speculation instead of to the apparent fact that one faction of the State just tried to kill the leader of the opposition (crowding-out effect). Second, when "Joe Biden" emerges the State can discredit those who suggested that he might be dead and thereby discredit other statements by the same people (the ad hominem). Third, confusion is its own reward; for the President to go AWOL is disconcerting, destabilizing, and demoralizing. There may well be other ways, and I welcome suggestions.
A probability the founders recognized and answered with the Second Amendment right behind the First. Hunting my ass except in the form of a sniper. Our current crop of ass clowns know and fear this possibility just like their predecessors. Vicious venal buffoons in power and their stooges are nothing new unfortunately.
Ya know, the authors of that game series are responsible for an immense amount of hurt in the world -- promulgating the notion that (a) controlling others is fun, and (b) if you just get the "policies" right everything will work well.
They're not smart, but they do have the "playbook" (Mao, Stalin,etc.) That can not be said about the inverse....neither for offense or defense.
It would be like a football team that has bigger, stronger and faster athletes playing a weaker team...and losing to them because they didn't have a "play sheet".
At the end of the day they rely on two things:
1. Disassembling The T5thruth, piece by piece, by giving the appearance that standing up against the lies and propaganda are too "costly"...or that it's hopeless. In other words they disassemble courage through the vehicle of social tyranny.
2. Disassembling The Truth, piece by piece, through language and repitition. It is not as much about destruction of The Truth as it is to control the individuals thought process by eliminating reference.
Both these phenomena start as trickles, slowly at first, and then run downhill eroding The Truth like the first brooks arranging in tributaries and eventually carving out the grand canyon because the "resistance" to the flow can no longer hold up against the volume, velocity or acceleration of the tributaries forming into one giant river dumping into a sea of lies.
“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.
A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies.
With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”
—Hannah Arendt, German historian and philosopher (1906–1975)
This was the original purpose of satire. Memes have taken over. And because they penetrate the truth, the Globalist Establishment has no answers. So let's keep asking the questions?
I agree about the laughter. But the grim reality is that things could be very dark for many years before we get back to normal. BTW, my new t-shirt: Team Normal.
The best English professor I ever had was a chain-smoking, Yoda-like figure who made us *think* about what we were writing by asking one simple question: So what? Meaning, ok, you've constructed this elaborate word salad to describe Catherine's motives regarding Heathcliff...but...so what? Is that what Bronte *really* was after? Or are you just making this argument because you *think* that's what I want to hear? What is really at play here? Does this add or detract from your understanding of the characters' motives and desires? Always question, question, question until you can have a proper response to "so what"?
It was a lesson I've never forgotten, and so when these "experts" bloviate and spew their bilge about "safety" and the dangers of "misinformation", my instinct is to ask, so what? So what if I know this to be true when you tell me isn't? This is what you want me to think? So what? That's the mental response that prevents me from capitulating.
A high school teacher would walk us down the path of justifying why the US did one thing (ex: dropping the bombs on Japan) and then invert the argument. His lessons were more profound than any law professor I had.
Ah yes, the good old days when the 'teachers' were actually REAL. I had an Indian Mr Raju, with wild eyes, and Medusa hair (Social studies of course) and he would scream at us.. do you know whats in your *ucking toothpaste? Its killing you! STOP USING IT! Amoung other things. He set me up for life. Have never trusted an 'institution' since! Incredible isnt it! The power of leaders. Now all we get is what (in schools)... I will not go on
I only use toothpaste from India
apparently coconut oil is good. Or... just eat meat.
Yes! Oil pulling with coconut oil then Ayurvedic toothpaste lol.
There are glimmers of hope. When my son was in 7th grade, the task of providing the anti-drug, anti-tobacco indoctrination fell to his slightly off-kilter English teacher. At that time tobacco was under full assault in California. My offspring was tasked with writing a position paper about tobacco use. Genetics, no doubt, led him to ponder the question can I write a paper defending or even advocating tobacco use? Instead of killing the idea his teacher was intrigued. Give it your best shot, he said, but be prepared to be graded on your logic and presentation of fact.
We discussed. I expressed skepticism. He researched. California had recently increased the tax on tobacco products significantly. This new tax was sold as a way to fund healthcare programs for children. He had his hook and went for it. Save children, buy tobacco. He researched further. He detailed other programs the state claimed were funded by tobacco and alcohol tax. His paper presented the conflict of interest in the state's position: tobacco and alcohol are bad, but the state makes billions on them to do what it purports to be good, even essential, things.
He got an A. His teacher praised his unorthodox approach. He used it to build credibility with the 7th graders. The state's conflict of interest is not a solid rationalization to ignore the health implications for YOU. It was a private school, so the teacher wasn't fired immediately. They waited until the end of the term.
They fired a teacher for teaching true critical thinking? At my son’s private religious school a teacher taught English through Marxism. I didn’t complain because I want more thinking not less but I think my logic was a mistake.
So sorry for that teacher.
Tribulation time
Excellent. Would have loved to have had a HS teacher such as this.
All my teachers were like that
But then again, I went from 1948 to 1960. Things were better then
We old folks had it good. Teachers taught, Girls were girls. Guys were guys. What the hell happened?
I learned to ask early on ‘can this person know this?’ If not, on what authority are they stating it? And, the big one, is it knowable?
That last one will get you in trouble.
I had a physics professor who would laugh when people used the phrase "laws of physics". He'd snort and say "we have no idea what those are". We have vague but useful notions amounting to gentlemen's agreements which change when they become less useful.
He's dead now, but I wonder what he would say to someone asserting that "all the scientists agree". Probably another hearty laugh and observe that a room full of scientists can't agree on where to go to lunch. Why expect them to agree about science?
Most things aren’t knowable. That is the reality. Most important things are nearly infinitely complicated. At best we are moving in the right direction. At best.
“Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Brilliant William
Thank you.
I am still trying to find out what "perts" are and why so many of them have quit!
They are people who used to be pertinent, but are now just experts.
Once defined as a “has been drip under pressure.” Ahh, those were the days…
Reminds me of a T-shirt my brother had, way back in the 70s (?): "Be Alert, the World Needs More Lerts!"
Mrs. "the Knife"
It is baby boomer perts retiring. This was predicted 20 years ago.
LOL. Really, that hurt. Took a second but then it hit (hard).
Well done!
Da pain, Boss! Da pain!
Good advice.
They don't make profs like that anymore.
Sadly true!
Well... sometimes a few of us sneak through, but then we get fired.
They don't allow profs like that.
I know a few made like that, but they want to remain professors and know to suppress their true nature and tow the party line.
What systems do you currently trust? Government, Food, science, academia, money, religion, medicine and even science have become corrupted. The result is all loss of trust in our systems. This is devastating for society and our #1 problem we need to fix.
Trust in a system is only based on 2 factors:
1) Transparency
2) Results
Our systems are getting bad results by nearly every metric, and are not transparent so we as people cannot see the problem in order to fix it.
The solution is 2 parts:
1) We fix trust by decentralizing it like eBay and Amazon did, peer-to-peer. To eliminate ai and bots from our online systems. We make new transparent, high trust systems 100% controlled by the citizens that we all migrate to in order to solve problems in groups.
2) We plug our new systems into the current corrupted ones to fix them.
Read more:
On fixing trust in all systems: https://joshketry.substack.com/p/fixing-trust-online-and-in-person?utm_source=publication-search
On fixing government: https://joshketry.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-corrupt-government-in
You forgot 3 and 4.
3) Inertia
4) Laziness
People rarely improve things for the sake of it. Problems need to surpass a certain "pain threshold" before people will act on them.
I trust my dog. He is transparent.
I trust my 1911A1. And my Glock.
I trust gravity. Don't always like it, but I trust it.
Critical thinking. It's seldom seen these days but can still be learned.
Not if you are a person who is really comatose
That was my first thought as well when reading this. But I would suggest that critical thinking has been dying a slow death for the better part of a century and in a death spiral since the turn of this one. The COVID collective insanity was certainly a grand mal seizure from which it never recovered, and these past 3 1/2 years have been hospice care.
@Fred 🤕🔨 🎯💯
(There's no emoji for nail)
Actually, March 13th, 2024 (I think you meant) may well be the date that critical thinking was reborn in the hearts and minds of many/most formerly gullible Americans/world citizens!
For instance, did the "burial" precede the funeral? If so, what does that tell us?
My "like" is really a sympathetic thought
Bronte was out to make a buck..
Like!
A single teacher can have a profound impact for the better. Which no doubt is why teachers like your English professor are being (or have been) weeded out. Teach students to "think properly" and not to think independently, that's the mandate today.
I had a history teacher in Jr. High who taught us about the constitution by looking at tactics used by the British to suppress opposition to the crown. Today the constitution is banned from textbooks and any discussion is limited to the approved interpretation. In my undergraduate studies, I had a history professor who told us to read the correspondence between the authors of our constitution, rather than anything in a history book. His advice led to seeing what was on the minds of those architects, and gave insights into their motivations. He did not dictate an interpretation, but instead challenged us to make our own and defend it articulately in class. He said the only invalid argument was one badly made..
Such challenges to the student are strictly out of bounds today.
Hah! Excellent. I used to push that on my students.
I had an amazing 4th year stats prof whose first words to the class pasted on large screen were the words STATS LIE. The entire year was spent examining this issue in the context of the real world. He was brilliant. Talk about making stats interesting. All through the Covid operation I borrowed on his lessons. There is nothing like having a great educator!
I wonder what happens to people like your Yoda prof today? Would he even be welcome in today's university?
Highly doubt it. For one thing she entered the academy in an era when studying texts didn't require 'confronting' and 'deconstructing' texts in the endless Foucault-ian death-spiral that has resulted in literature becoming "hegemonic" versus artistic and individualistic. I think she was an anachronism even then (c. 1993).
Magnificent, I am stealing that! For life! Your Yoda prof lives on.
Terrific advice.
“what’s fascinating is that we’re all getting a good laugh out of jokes about what abject mendacity merchants these people are and how you cannot trust a word they say.”
Indeed, and what is also fascinating is that we start to question whether we have gone crazy or whether the world we live in has really lost all pretense at being honest or real. And then we have our sense of accurate perception validated by some guy pretending to be a cat and we feel comforted.
This is not a real cat? This is some guy pretending to be a cat? But the lack of capital letters is conclusory! Tell me this cannot be true...we have so many pictures of him. Another scam? Oh my...
"the lack of capital letters"
Cats can't extend their pinky toes to the SHIFT key.
I was wondering why he does that...
Evolution, in its infinite wisdom, has clearly bestowed Felines - uh,... _f_elines with some Advantage in the Fitness Landscape in exchange.
Do you mean a cat pretending to be a guy?
oh yes. rely on the gato malo
agreed... lol!
That's because he feels the same way we do.
YES, and the only way they can do this is to keep pumping those bizarre realities. Hence the absolute key part of the overal coup in taking ownership of the media and hollywood etc.
My job was affected by the Crowdstrike outage, and as I chatted with the IT help-desk for an hour while my laptop rebooted about 100x we both agreed that it was hard to believe such an outage was a "mistake," it was obviously some kind of "attack" or "warning," and also we'd never know the truth because the government would just make something up, lol. For the curious, we had to reboot my laptop in safe mode then get to the Crowdstrike system files and delete just one of them. Crazy. IT was simple and I could have done it myself if I had systems access and knew which one to delete.....
this is just the testing process for November
"Dry Run"
I agree Rosemary
Ugh 😣
Microsoft blamed the outage on the EU and its lawsuit which resulted in Microsoft being forced to allow third-party access to Windows' OS kernel. So that is what Crowdstrike's update was doing.
And why didn’t you have access? Just curious.
"Because we don't trust End Users (that's what we in IT call _you people_) to use the the Local Administrator Account privileges responsibly."
- CrowdStrike Sys Admin
I always like to hear how other companies phrase it. Being one of the very few Macs in a PC environment had its advantages.
Yes
We are all mac
Or they needed to scrub evidence of their involvement in...
I was just thinking about how fantastic the citizen journalism has been for the Trump shooting and the subsequent Biden drop-out. We used to just sit around, waiting for Big News to tell us what was happening. Now WE make the news. WE break the stories, and Big News struggles to catch up. Sure, there are plenty of loony theories in the mix, but I'll take that any day over carefully curated lies. The Powers that Be still managed to snowball many during the 2020 election and the start of the pandemic. But we've all learned so much since then about how to communicate and build news stories together. I keep imagining the CIA/FBI analysts sitting stunned at their desks as details about the shooting literally pour in from all sides. Despite my native Gen X cynicism, I can't help but be a little hopeful here.
I'll never forget the feeling of breaking news of the shooting (complete with video) 10 minutes before the MSM decided to go with "Trump falls at rally."
I saw that moments after it went up! There was nothing much anywhere for a while. I got home and told my BF “Trump got shot…sort of”. He looked it up and found all the BS headlines. The real details were pouring in all over the Substx I follow. It was amazing!!!!
The propaganda almost writes itself.
The magnitude and velocity of your snowball will be something to marvel at next November as the vote-count gets underway. Fasten your seatbelts.
"faith in experts" [may be] "in short supply"...but 'experts' are becoming like a locust plague. They're everywhere...under the floorboards....in your sleep. Everywhere. "In 2024 it feels like we now have ‘experts’ advising you (always for your own good mind) on every single aspect of your daily life from the moment you can talk till the moment they carry you out of the care home in a box. And it seems like you cannot get more than two sentences into an MSM article or broadcast these days without an ‘expert’ being invoked as an authority on whatever is being discussed....." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
Their proliferation is in direct, inverse proportion to their utility.
Or ability.
*Peter's Principle has entered the chat*
LOLOL they are just like cocroaches. You smack one and there is the next. I subscribe to Epoch times and Slay but every day they both publish articles 'the experts say' and I am thinking of unsubscribing. Epoch needs to stay because I love their games tho, but probably will unsubscribe from their health page.
"Top Doctors"is another one I just loath!
No shit! I am old enough to remember Kool cigarettes - "Nine out of ten New York doctors recommend Kool cigarettes!". Even the Ad agencies relied upon your trust in institutions so that they could frag you with lung cancer. I preferred to "walk a mile for a Camel...".
Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.
Remember the Marlboro man?
"You've come a long way baby"
Yeah. Sad story.
🤣
Maybe oneday each and every one of us will (Andy Warhol-style) be an expert for 15 minutes!
Believe in that statement! Reading comments on substacks has proven FAR more substantial and provided more reasonable and fact based explanations than most " expert " analysis's I've seen, which are generally pushed by establishment for sheep to read.
That or to make money. There are a dozen experts with a dozen different "cures" for my ailments. Each one is trying to sell me something.
...or at least think that we are an expert.
It says I am right here on my card:
"Pi Guy, Expert at Large
- SME, all subjects"
And if its printed on your card, it must be true. N'est-ce pas?
I don't joke about Subjects.
common sense will stand out from the crowd...
Oh brilliant Ingrid!!
The self-proclaimed "disinformation expert" (whose job is to parrot the establishment line at the moment) comes prominently to mind.
I loved what your typo/spellcheck “locus plague” did to your sentence. In addition to meaning a ‘place ot location’ locus also means ‘a center or focus of great activity or intense concentration,’ or ‘The set or configuration of all points whose coordinates satisfy a single equation or one or more algebraic conditions.’ A configuration of expert propaganda pointing to approved points of view indeed!
Thanks for the typo alert....corrected!
Ohhh my - well, it was good either way…I understand. Carry on 🙂
Expert: Someone more than 20 miles from home with a brief case.
As noted elsewhere on this thread, it says I am right here on my card:
"Pi Guy, Expert at Large
- SME, all subjects"
And a laptop. Don't forget the laptop.
I actually have a real expertise in one area. And a pretty good expertise in another. The first area, which is my real skill set, I know enough to know I have barely scratched the surface. My second area, where I have some good expertise, but less so than the first, I have MORE confidence in my ability! I should have less. Weird, eh? Any expert I know, a real one, does not confidently state opinions on open system questions as they know there is infinite information coming in by the second.
Most of us *jabs chest with own thumb* Online Experts are both Dunningy and Krugery.
I understand there's a pharmaceutical remedy for that. (Dunningy and Krugery)
But the "You might experience oily stool" side effect makes it so that most people just prefer to put up with the affliction.
My favorite: “Homeschooling Expert”
"Your Neighborhood Epidemiologist" is still advising people about covid: when to test, wear masks, quarantine, get more shots.
And the question is, how does one get to become an "expert" these days? It is definitely not what it used to be. Now an "expert" has to agree with preferred narratives. Otherwise they are simply "misinformation spreaders" who should be disdained and ignored.
Having mates in the MSM is one sure way....going to the same parties etc.
Status-seeking and truth-seeking are too often antagonistic. This is why experts in any field, especially those protected by politics and industry, are viewed with a high degree of skepticism by anyone with a modicum of logic
"Man will not be free until the last technocrat is beheaded by the blade of the last zero emission windmill."--Denis Diderot (I think...)
So. I guess Marshall McLuhan was right. "The medium is the message".
This article is profound because it is simply put and exactly what is happening, no matter the political side, economic view, ideas about technology as savior or destroyer. We have been lied to and gaslit about most everything for all our lives and the marvelous digital technology makes it easier for them, but is also our way to see through it all. The people they have as front men and women don't matter so much anymore. they are mostly just teleprompter readers just as the news media talking heads are.
It does not matter if Biden is dead. He has been dead to me since he "won" election from his basement without campaigning. Similarly Cackles Harris who dropped out of the 2020 campaign before there were any votes was Peter Principle selected to be vice president. Now the Border czar was never the border czar. and she was a brilliant (insert descriptor here).
I watched Biden's self eulogy last night. It was fantastic! (fantastic /făn-tăs′tĭk/
adjective
1 Based on or existing only in fantasy; unreal.
2 "fantastic mythological creatures; the fantastic realms of science fiction."
3 Strange or fanciful in form, conception, or appearance. Unrealistic; irrational. )
Biden showed his true narcissist's colors, as he squinted to read the teleprompter. The writer got the message out clearly , but it was probably not the message they wanted us to come away with.
I raise my glass to you, el gato malo.
You don't bother chasing mice around
You slink down the alley, looking for a fight
Howling to the moonlight on a hot summer night
Singin' the blues while the lady cats cry
"Wild stray cat, you're a real gone guy
I wish I could be as carefree and wild
But you got cat class and you got cat style"
Meow
Everybody wants to be a Cat.
https://youtu.be/4rrXR6n0RTY?si=liXCe1p4yWqGjTqS
Thanks. I had just finished watching an animation webinar in Clip Studio Paint. I love the old animation work.
Obama really didn't know what to do with Scranton Joe, so he appointed him the country's Cancer-cure Czar. Biden's ghost-written self eulogy obliquely alluded to it.
Which is weird because Biden already beat cancer in TWO state of the union addresses!
and he beat Cornpop several times, too.
I think we all know where this is going. When the regime lies stop working they will use force, just as they've always done. Get ready.
“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.” ― George Orwell
We are rapidly approaching that horizon, I fear. Not so much from jack booted government thugs as from our fellow citizens -- along with their "newcomer" allies.
Welcome to the real Alien Nation.
Keep your Hammers and your Pokers Dry.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/34738-and-how-we-burned-in-the-camps-later-thinking-what
That went deep. I doubt enough have the courage or even the will to put up a fight. There's far too many asleep willing to trade their freedom for safety, even if it means incarceration and death. Lambs to the slaughter.
Courage can be contagious, and I think at this point, someone will resist and will become easier for the rest of us.
Good point. Thanks for that.
Sheep and Sheepdogs....
Two things have become obvious. One is that the lying and gaslighting have become so ridiculous that they are completely and transparently false to a large number of people. For example, we see many of the top Democrats coming out with versions of the statement “This has been the best presidential administration in US history!” Even the TDS sufferers out there know that this isn’t remotely true. These liars are shameless.
Secondly, it seems that these people now truly believe they can still create an alternate reality just by saying so. And in addition to the “good news” you write about, I would add another “good news” observation--that we are finally seeing evidence, perhaps for the first time ever, that there is a limit to what propaganda can accomplish. The system is finally OD'ing on too much unreality.
The worrisome part is that, as you say, it IS like the old Soviet Union, and we all know how THAT ended. We are in for some rough sledding for a decade or two at the least, even if the ship finally manages to right itself. "Not a joke...."
Now we just have to pair that skepticism with the courage to disobey, suffering, enduring consequences. And to embrace the rudeness that disobedience entails, "Don't you care about others?" And "They're just doing their job, no need to be rude." The emotional pressure points that authoritarians rely on in populations to enforce their lies-based rule.
Like the 17yo hostess telling the 65yo doctor to "mask up, above the nose" for their 20 foot walk from the hostess stand to the dining table. Met with a "Not gonna happen little girl" or "How about you go f yourself?" Or the hospital receptionist. Or the flight attendant. Or, or, or.
It's one thing to know they're lying. It's another thing to disobey their lies and the demands of those who believe them.
I walked into a corner store near my home. I had stopped going as they were COVID Nazis. But my wife said she really needed some whipping cream for a desert she had planned for our dinner party that evening. Okay, I will do it. I walk in unmasked, during mask rule time. I walk to the dairy case, grab a cream, and walk to the counter. I hand my credit card to the young girl behind the cash. She was fine. Another young woman runs up. “Sir. You need to wear a mask”. I say “a what? A mask! Why?” She says because of COVID, and I say “what is Covid?” This was 18 months into the nonsense. She says “COVID. The pandemic.” “What is a pandemic?” She explains. “How long has this been going on?” She says 18 months. My face lights up. “Oooh. That makes sense. I have been in a coma for 18 months. I woke up two days ago. When I left the hospital I was seeing everyone in masks. I wondered why. But I was really out of it. I thought maybe that is always what goes on in hospitals.” By now the cashier has rung me up and handed me the machine. I completed my transaction. Second young woman hands me a mask. She says I have to wear them now everywhere. I say “Nah. I don’t wear masks. They’re utter nonsense.” Cash girl laughs. Second one is really cheesed off.
Gosh, I hope you're right but I'm worried. Here in NH, Biden signs started going up after the disastrous debate and now I hear of people being in support of Harris. It totally boggles my mind. These liberal towns are going to be hard to crack. Love your posts.
My brother lives on New Castle Island (spoken in Thurston Howell III voice)
I am pretty sure his Biden sign is up!! and perhaps the neighbors, he hates so viscerally are planting those despicable Trump signs
It makes his blood boil
"(spoken in Thurston Howell III voice)"
"Lovey?!"
OMG
for real,.
After my daddy died (I was his full caregiver for 11 years) here in Virginia. It took us two months to move allof his treasures out of his apartment. I was instructed by my father (he made me take aphoto of him standing in his office pointing to the correct cabinet) to remove the papers from the cabinet, and the filed from the file cabinet and bring them home.
I was at the apartment, with my husband... boxing up the most important pertinent things to go over with my siblings. I texted my brother in NH that we were gathering those things and would call the stupid lawyer daddy hired via advice from the dumb bank (whole nother story) After I texted my brother, my phone rang, it was my brother. He yelled "tell Rex (my husband) to get the fuck out of dad's papers"
Where was he? On Lake Winnepesaukee on his big boat in his stupid boat with his silly family. Yelling at me.
I asked my brother if he was "okay?" and he said he was not. I told him we would talk about this later, but we needed to gather and provide many papers and accomplish a number of things immediately. How stupid. liberals are really dumb assholes.
This is just a smalllll tiny tidbit of my great adventures over the past 11 years. Good times, messed up selfish siblings
The Trump signs in my NH area (Candia/Raymond/Epping) far outnumber the one or two Biden/Harris signs. Most of those are on the Seacoast. When are they going to update their signs removing the Biden part, lol?
well, I would be confused if I were a liberal too.... !!
I have not seen any Biden signs here in Loudoun County but there are bound to be soon.
Trump signs get destroyed over night by vandals.
Cognitive dissonance is real. It builds up though. As it does people double down on their delusion, for awhile. But when it breaks through it is catastrophic for the person for awhile.
Spot on. We must laugh at the demoralized “expert” commissars and bootlickers. They are the human centipede of regurgitating regime lies and disinformation.
Sadly there are many people who are too far gone, like those who read HCR - the #2 largest substack: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/heather-cox-richardson-karen-tds-historian
Mockery is powerful. Memes especially.
Wow, “The View” in written form
lol, like
Yes! Sadly, my sister reads Heather every day. Sometimes she will forward an article to me because she thinks it’s so good or explains everything that is in current news. I read it and find nothing 😕
I hope you share back. This would be a good one to start with.
Yes.. I have tried a few times. You would think if I take the time to understand her point of view, she would do the same for me. But no. She won’t look at anything I think is interesting or important. She doesn’t “like my sources.” She thinks I’m a crazy anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist. Sometimes I will explain that documents have been released through FOIA requests, or an article may be explaining a court case, but she thinks only her left-wing pundits tell the truth.
It’s so sad!
UGH. I truly feel your pain. I have tried, in vain, to get my daughter to read the non main stream studies until she finally told me to stop sending that information. She will argue to the death that childhood vaccines don't cause autism AND she has given both her son (14) and daughter (19) the HPV poison. Trying to maintain the relationship is difficult at best and painful at worst. I have never asked outright if she jabbed the kids and herself because it is just too painful to think about. I struggle each and every day.
I hear you too. The self-censorship we have to do with my daughter and son-in-law to keep a relationship is painful. Superficial chat is all we really get anymore. How can smart kids raised right turn into such morons? "Stupid smart people" I call them (not to their faces).
Thank you. The self-censorship is the worst as it feels so very wrong. My adult son has cut ties with me although I feel his wife shares a lot of the responsibility behind that (not to let him off the hook). So my daily question to myself, do I continue to self-censor? And yes, that is the question of this age - "How can smart kids raised right turn into such morons? " and I would add become so close minded. Scary and sad.
not alone.
I was very picky as a mom, choosing which vaxxines and when and if
I refused the HPV for my girls but college talked them into many medical interventions. They are compliant too
Thank you Rosemary B. Substack is not only a source of good information but also support from like minded individuals. My daughter thinks I'm drinking some kind of voodoo kool-aid and seems to have lost sight that you need discernment in all things. I appreciate your comments and reaching out.
it is sad, but you are not alone. This is our life as well.
Just enjoying life, but certainly the dead pan face when in the company of others. It is just not worth the reactions
How many jabs did she take?
A couple of thoughts:
(1) There is a reason that the Woke Left despises comedy, and is trying to destroy it. It's the same reason a vampire would hate a garlic-encrusted crucifix. Ridicule and Satire are unbelievably powerful weapons, and they can easily trigger a preference cascade that completely undermine's an authoritarian's "legitimacy". And our sad, modern crop of would-be experts, who see the world as a giant game of Sims 4, deserve all the ridicule they can get.
(2) There's one particularly dangerous element to conspiracy theories, that makes me wonder if our Elected Dunderheads secretly love them. A conspiracy theory implies above-average competence. If the Obama Star Chamber is secretly running America, or Klaus Schwab and the rest of the Lizard Overlords are setting economic policy, then there's a danger of attributing far too much cleverness to these stooges. Not to say that our amoral elites aren't capable of such ambitions, but the only way things like this can work is through a strongman's brutish naked force. That's something to watch out for, but the current clown show ain't it. The DC elite are far more Michael Scott than they are Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
i'm aiming more for a garlic encrusted wooden stake...
And I’m almost done assembling my portable guillotine with its wood chipper accessory…
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-up-and-take-my-money
lol, I want one.
The State han incentive to encourage speculation that turns out to be false. When we awakening types speculate openly that "Joe Biden" is dead, the State benefits in several ways. First, we devote time to the speculation instead of to the apparent fact that one faction of the State just tried to kill the leader of the opposition (crowding-out effect). Second, when "Joe Biden" emerges the State can discredit those who suggested that he might be dead and thereby discredit other statements by the same people (the ad hominem). Third, confusion is its own reward; for the President to go AWOL is disconcerting, destabilizing, and demoralizing. There may well be other ways, and I welcome suggestions.
"has an" not "han."
A probability the founders recognized and answered with the Second Amendment right behind the First. Hunting my ass except in the form of a sniper. Our current crop of ass clowns know and fear this possibility just like their predecessors. Vicious venal buffoons in power and their stooges are nothing new unfortunately.
> giant game of Sims
Ya know, the authors of that game series are responsible for an immense amount of hurt in the world -- promulgating the notion that (a) controlling others is fun, and (b) if you just get the "policies" right everything will work well.
They're not smart, but they do have the "playbook" (Mao, Stalin,etc.) That can not be said about the inverse....neither for offense or defense.
It would be like a football team that has bigger, stronger and faster athletes playing a weaker team...and losing to them because they didn't have a "play sheet".
At the end of the day they rely on two things:
1. Disassembling The T5thruth, piece by piece, by giving the appearance that standing up against the lies and propaganda are too "costly"...or that it's hopeless. In other words they disassemble courage through the vehicle of social tyranny.
2. Disassembling The Truth, piece by piece, through language and repitition. It is not as much about destruction of The Truth as it is to control the individuals thought process by eliminating reference.
Both these phenomena start as trickles, slowly at first, and then run downhill eroding The Truth like the first brooks arranging in tributaries and eventually carving out the grand canyon because the "resistance" to the flow can no longer hold up against the volume, velocity or acceleration of the tributaries forming into one giant river dumping into a sea of lies.
“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.
A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies.
With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”
—Hannah Arendt, German historian and philosopher (1906–1975)
It began in the Garden of Eden when Satan convinced Eve and then Adam to believe the greatest lie ever told-that they could be their own god.
Exactly. Half-truths are camoflauge against distinguishing between truth and lies.
This was the original purpose of satire. Memes have taken over. And because they penetrate the truth, the Globalist Establishment has no answers. So let's keep asking the questions?
I agree about the laughter. But the grim reality is that things could be very dark for many years before we get back to normal. BTW, my new t-shirt: Team Normal.
Define 'normal'.
👆perfect! 👏👏
Teem normal is very apt. I'm going to have one made for myself.