The Narrative Industrial Complex

Posted on May 2, 2023 by thezman

One analysis of the Roman Empire says that it reached a point where the cost of maintaining the empire exceeded the benefits of empire. The investments required to maintain the complex social and political structures to maintain the empire continued to rise while the benefits slowly fell to zero. This is the general thesis presented by Joseph Tainter in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies. Complex solutions eventually reach a point of diminishing marginal returns.

We may be seeing a similar issue with the Global America Empire. On the one hand, we have the massive amount of debt accumulation to maintain the global military presence required to maintain the empire. The official United States military budget exceeds the combined total of the other great powers. No one really knows what the actual cost of the military is, as so much of it is off budget. Of course, this allows many of the rulers to get rich in the process.

On the other hand. Enormous amounts of time and energy are invested in maintaining the rationale for the empire. Unlike the Roman empire, which was ruled by a small number of men, democratic empire must continue to provide energy to the spring of democracy, which is moral certainty. Rome conquered because it could, while America conquers because it has a moral duty. “Our democracy” requires an endless war against those who resist being crushed by “our democracy.”

What this means is that in addition to the trillions spent on weapons and armies, trillions are also spent on maintaining the moral framework. This cost is not strictly a government expense, but the system requires it, so corporations are as engaged in narrative maintenance as government entities. Companies embrace degenerate social fads, like crossdressing, because they support the system. They support the system because it is the system that makes them possible.

The most obvious example is the media. Thirty years ago, much of what a newspaper did, even the big broadsheets like the Washington Post and New York Times, was report on the mundane affairs of the world. They promoted left-wing causes on the editorial side, but the news side was the boring stuff of the news. Today, the entirety of the mass media is engaged in the support of narratives. These entities are staffed with content creators and storytellers.

Here is an example in the Washington Post. Three people were assigned the job of creating a story to explain the mass shooter phenomenon. The plot here is that crazy white people are irrationally paranoid about crime, so they are going shooty all of sudden, for no reason at all! You see, crime is just fine. In fact, under the patient rule of Dear Leader, crime is better now. The real problem is these heavily armed white people and their racism.

Of course, the mass shooter phenomenon is a narrative created by the same people now trying to explain it. The fact is, America is a big country. That means there are lots of potential crackpots, compared to a small country like Norway. When you look at the numbers on mass shootings, America is doing better than most. Norway, on the other hand, seems to have a problem. While “per capita” is a racist trope, it is the best way to understand crime data.

Enormous amounts of time and money are directed by the regime into gun grabbing and concealing the color of crime. The Mexican national who went on a killing spree in Texas had his picture whitened by the news media. This is a thing that started with the “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman who did the world a favor and killed Trayvon Martin ten years ago. Every media company now has people whose sole job is to whitewash criminals this way.

The color of crime is just one tiny area of the narrative support system. The New York Times had a whole floor full of content creators pushing various aspects of the Russian collusion hoax during the Trump years. Thousands of people in the media are now used to push the Ukraine story. Think about the cost in time and money that is required to fake a Joe Biden press conference. The entire media complex is now employed in the creation and support of narratives.

Again, the media has always been run by regime toadies, but thirty years ago most of what they did was reporting. The bigshot columnists and editors were allowed to put their thumb on the scale in terms of what got promoted. The rest of the people produced mundane news accounts. What we see today is an industrial bullshit machine that exists only to crank out new narratives in support of the regime or new tales to promote existing regime narratives.

This is just one small part of the narrative industrial complex. Tens of thousands of people in government have been repurposed to the task. Corporations have whole floors of people dedicated to the job of pushing the latest thing. Hollywood is just another marketing arm of the regime. Of course, the big tech platforms have dedicated themselves to protecting and promoting regime narratives. More people engage in censoring the internet now than in maintaining it.

The Twitter experience offers some insight into the cost of this. When Musk took over, he fired waves of people. His rule was that if you wrote code, you stayed, but if not then you were gone unless you could explain yourself. He eventually fired eighty percent of the staff. The website was unaffected. The reason is those fired people were employed to police and promote the current narratives. They did nothing to keep the site running or make the business profitable.

What all of this suggests is that the cost of maintaining the rationale for the Global American Empire has reached the point of diminishing returns. Just as the Roman empire’s investment in complex systems to maintain itself reached the point of diminishing returns, the cost of the imperial bullshit system has reached that point and maybe blown way past it. The more they try to sell the latest narrative, the less likely people are to accept the next narrative.

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The Future Of Virtual Society

Posted on February 23, 2023 by thezman

At the dawn of the internet revolution, it was common for big-brained public intellectuals to talk about what it meant for the nature of society. As is always the case, they confused what they wanted to happen with what would happen. That usually meant some form of “as information is democratized, more people will have access to information and therefore come to agree with me on everything.” The internet would bring about the glorious egalitarian future.

Most of the predictions about the impact of the internet turned out to be wrong, but the internet has changed society. In fact, it has changed people by changing the selection pressures within society. For example, the phenomenon of the digital grifter is something that could not exist in the past. These people certainly existed in some form, but the digital age rewards their behavior, while the analog age did not, so they now flourish, while in the past they were suppressed.

That is how to think about it. Virtual reality is not reality. Life on-line exaggerates certain features by removing constraints or offering incentives. The solitary nature of on-line life removes the social signals that people rely upon to figure out what they can say and what they should not say. When you are on-line, you are by yourself in the physical realm, even though you are interacting with others in the virtual realm. Those people, however, are mere avatars of people.

Of course, things that get the user attention are rewarded with likes, clicks and views, so this encourages more of that behavior. It does not take long before the weak minded are consumed with attention seeking. Twitter is full of hollow people who amplify the current thing as a way to get attention. In the hours after every cable news actor was sporting a Ukraine pin and chanting “keev”, the internet personality was pulling down her Covid stuff and putting up Ukraine stuff.

Years ago, Dave Chappell did a skit where the internet was a real place. What made the skit amusing, in addition to Chappelle’s delivery, was the fact that the internet is such an absurd place compared to reality. Imagine walking through a store and everyone in the store is doing whatever they can to get your attention. Imagine the day after the war started, everything at the store is in Ukraine colors and all of the employees are chanting “keev” at the top of their lungs.

Another novelty that the digital age has brought is the clout chaser. This is a person who spends his days scanning the internet looking for the next thing so he can seem like the first person to get on it. These people front-run trends in order to present themselves as trendsetters. They will often glom onto a person, positively or negatively, who has a big following on-line. This lets them free-ride off that person to gain attention and followers for themselves.

This is not something that could exist in the analog age. Famous people had flunkies, but the flunky was never going to use their association with the famous person to make himself famous independent of the famous person. Mike Cernovich could never have become a thing in the analog age by stalking famous people. On Twitter he was able to build a huge following mostly by front running trends he had no role in creating and glomming onto big Twitter accounts.

Another version of this is the manufactured influencer. If you watch YouTube, you will have noticed that Lex Fridman was always in your suggestions. You could only watch woodworking videos, but YouTube would suggest to you a Fridman video. The reason is the people backing him paid YouTube to do it. A similar thing is now happening with Jordan Peterson, who signed up with the Ben Shapiro operation. They are now paying to have Peterson promoted on YouTube.

They did the same thing with Ben Shapiro. The people behind the Daily Wire made a Mortimer and Randolph Duke type of bet to see if they could make this obscure hobbit man into a star. How they did it was social media. They paid to have Ben Shapiro pushed heavy to middle-class whites on Facebook. He was what they hoped young people were really thinking. It worked. This helium voiced nobody is now a household name and a major influencer of old white conservatives.

Tim Pool is another version of this phenomenon. Spend some time watching his YouTube channel and ask yourself why he has a huge audience. There are hundreds of people doing some version of the same act. The answer is he has the backing of an influencer production company. Richard Hanania is the most recent example of the manufactured influencer. The guy suddenly appears on-line and before long all the other influencers are mentioning him.

This deranging of the public culture to now has mostly been about rewarding qualities and people that existed but were suppressed in the analog age. What we see with the Zoomers is a whole generation of people raised in this culture. This post in the New York Times, of all places, is a good read on the subject. Those born around the turn of the century are the first generation raised on the internet. This is their normal as they never knew a world without the internet.

One result of this cohort being raised on-line is they lack the normal social skills that have defined human life for ten thousand years. People have noted that in real life, this cohort is shy, awkward and quite weird. On the other hand, they are the exact opposite as their on-line persona. Meet Nick Fuentes and you are not all that impressed as his social skills are non-existent. Turn on a mic or pull out a camera and he goes from shrinking violet to boisterous and confident.

This is why this generation was not upset by the lockdowns. They did not complain about Zoom school because that was better than having to be around those talking meat sacks on campus. They prefer life on-line to life outside. They have grown up with the chat room as their playground. Instead of playing games with their friends in the physical realm, they played games on-line. Their peer group was the collection of avatars and personalities in the chat.

Everyone has their opinion on this stuff, but the important question that no one seems to be considering is if society is possible under these conditions. China’s heavy-handed censorship is viewed as a defense of the regime, but it could simply be a way to tamp down the negative selection pressures of the internet. American censorship is driven mostly by ethnic paranoia, which is another negative quality that is being amplified by the forces of the digital age.

It could very well be that the newly diverse Western societies cannot hold up under the selection pressure of the internet. The digital age amplifies the differences, which amplifies the natural reaction to those differences. This has the effect of bringing diverse civilizational outlooks into virtue contact. The result is hostility. The West may be forced to choose between the glories of diversity or the virtual public square. The answer may be a segregated internet in order to keep the peace.

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The Unreality System

Posted on January 26, 2023 by thezman

The mainstream media has always been biased, but it was never monolithic, as part of the claim of objectivity was to include alternative opinion. The main newspapers during the Cold War made sure to include critics of American Cold War policy along with conservative critics of progressive social policy. The television chat shows made sure to have at least one conservative on the panel. There was always a bias and a lack of balance, but alternative voices did have a place.

Somewhere after the Cold War this ended. It is hard to pinpoint the exact date, but pretty much every terrible media trend started with the Clinton Crime Family blowing into town, so that is a good bet. In the first Gulf War, CNN worked hard to be a legitimate news organization. A few years later they converted themselves into the Clinton News Network and they have never recovered. Outside of staged debates, the mainstream media is a monolith now.

You see that with the Ukraine war. Here are some headlines Drudge has been pushing the last few days. “Russia Tank Fury!” is linked to this post in the Daily Mail, claiming the Russians are going crazy about the latest wonder weapons. Under that one was this post labeled by Drudge as “Nazi Scumbags!” Beneath that one was this one labeled “Nuke Berlin!” which links to this post in the UK Mirror. In the top right was this CNN post, “Fierce New Step By The West.”

On the one hand, these absurd stories can be dismissed as the work of people who know very little about their topics. People working in the mass media are jarringly obtuse and usually assigned to topics about which they have no knowledge, so it follows that their “reporting” is childish and stupid. They have bosses though and they must know that these whoppers about Ukraine are nonsense. Someone in these organizations knows how to use the internet.

More importantly, every mainstream news outlet has at least one government intelligence officer inside the organization. Hundreds of former secret police agents work in American cable news channels. They may be retired from the secret police, but they still have connections, which is why they were hired. On top of the secret police, there are hundreds of retired generals on contract. In fact, there are more retired generals in media than active generals in the military.

That means an airhead like Allison Quinn can pen nonsense stories for the Daily Beast, but CNN has people on staff to check the work of Nick Paton Walsh. There are people hired by the company who had long careers in the military and they can explain to Paton why a handful of tanks is a meaningless gesture. They can use the last year of such gestures to explain this to him and his editors. In other words, there is no excuse for these nonsense stories about miracle weapons.

Of course, this latest batch of just-so stories come at a time when things are looking rather grim for the Ukrainians. Their third defensive line, they have four lines, is about to crumble in the city of Bakhmut. German intelligence is warning the government about the heavy losses the Ukrainians are suffering in this battle. In the south of Ukraine, reports are coming in about Ukrainian units defending positions with nothing but small arms as they no longer have working equipment.

Getting firm numbers on the losses in this war is difficult, but the best estimates say that the Russians have lost up to twenty thousand men. Ukraine may have lost ten times that number, based on their own accounting. They started the war with about 300,000 soldiers. They have had multiple mobilizations over the last year and they now say they have 200,000 soldiers. Then you have the thousands of pieces of equipment Ukraine has lost, which is why they need new equipment.

The question that naturally arises is why is the mass media unanimously repeating this latest batch of fantasy tales? There must be people inside these organizations who know what is happening in Ukraine. There have to be plenty of generals that could explain the idiocy of sending modern tanks to Ukraine. There has to be someone working at these places who can use the internet and check this stuff. Yet, it is an amen chorus across the English speaking media.

The standard argument is that this is intended to keep the people in the dark about this latest bloody boondoggle. The trouble with that is the media hates the people and takes pleasure in mocking the rubes. The people in charge certainly have no concern with public opinion. If they wanted to sway public opinion, they would return to the old model of mock debates in which their preferred side looked the best. This was the Cold war model and it worked reasonably well.

Instead, we get something closer to Soviet media model. Colonel Douglas Macgregor went off script early on and was sent packing. He now does YouTube shows with other former cable employees who went off-script. In other words, it is not just that the media sings with one voice now. They are enforcing the narrative on their own people. Is it fear of the secret police minders in their ranks? Is it access journalism? Are we simply seeing the full blossoming of the hive mind?

Maybe all of those things play a role, but there may be something else going on that reaches beyond the mass media. Across the managerial class, we keep seeing confusion between narrative and reality. Someone produces a pleasing explanation for something and everyone jumps on it. That narrative to explain some vexing event becomes reality. In other words, in this increasingly insular world, narrative has replaced reality as the standard of truth.

Every system has a selection pressure. A system is rules and the rules favor some things and disfavor other things. Over time, the favored things will increase and the disfavored things will decrease. If you live in a system disconnected from reality, like the political-media complex, the rules can also be disconnected from reality. The resulting selection pressure can favor that which is odds with reality. Over time, you get more unreality and less reality.

Given that this is a human system, it means the system has been selecting for people who favor unreality over reality. Over time, it ceases to be a competition around specific reality but reality itself. The people who prefer spinning and embracing fantasy get rewarded while those stubbornly clinging to reality are boiled off. We may have reached the point where unreality is the benchmark. The story that is most pleasing and least truthful is what wins the fitness battle.

Another good example of this is Covid. During the panic, the mass media was like a murmuration of starlings, darting from one fanciful story to the next. The whopper that best flattered the people inside the media bubble was the winner. It was if there was a contest to see who could come up with the most ridiculous claim. That may have been what was happening. The selection pressure for unreality drives these people to the most fanciful narratives.

Whatever you favored explanation, we have reached a point where the mass media is mostly self-parody. If you want to know what is happening in the world, you are best to ignore the mass media. Maybe you start there in order to first find out what is not happening in the world. At least you narrowed the possibilities. Otherwise, our media is not even propaganda. It is a weird game of make believe designed to please the people inside who seek a life of unreality.

The Survival Problem

Posted on January 10, 2023 by thezman

For generations, there has been a debate outside of progressive circles about the self-awareness of the people in progressives politics. Conservatives have held onto the belief that the people spouting progressive claims know that what they are saying is nonsense, but they see advantage in supporting the current fads. This recent Paul Gottfried post is a good example. He thinks the FBI is simply making an alliance of convenience with the crazies.

Outside of conservative circles, there are those who think the people telling us their pronouns really do think their genitals are imaginary. It is not an act in order to gain some advantage, but a genuine belief. They may not entirely understand what it is they claim to belief, but they believe it, nonetheless. The woman claiming her small child is another sex may be motivated by a desire for attention, but her determination to mutilate her child is driven by belief.

We have a bit of a test case in the Brazil unrest. The crazies have hated Bolsonaro since he first turned up on the scene. At first, they hated him because he opposed the left-wing Lula da Silva. Now they hate him because he was nice to Trump, which made him Hitler Junior. Now they are comparing the recent riots to the patriotic protests following the 2020 election. They seem to think this is proof that both Trump and Bolsonaro are enemies of our democracy!

The thing is, Lula is clearly worse for the American regime than Bolsonaro. A few minutes looking at his career makes that clear. When he was in office, he was not very friendly toward America, preferring to align with China and Russia. He now promises to push ahead with BRICS, which has become a vehicle for Russia and China to counter the Global American Empire. Brazil and Russia are about to ink an important trade deal now that Lula is officially in office.

From the perspective of the American regime, Lula is a problem. Brazil is a big and important country in the Western hemisphere. They have a great deal of influence over the rest of South America. Having them move from the American camp to the Russian camp should be viewed as a catastrophe. It opens the door for both Russia and China to forge tries with other countries in America’s backyard. Despite this, the media is cheering the ascent of Lula over Bolsonaro.

Another good test case is the Russia collusion story. To normal people, the claims from the Clinton people were obvious nonsense. Strip away the heated rhetoric and what they were saying is that the Russians used some form of mind control to cause people to vote for Trump. If that were true, the Russians would have used this ability to convince the media that Trump was a great guy. The whole thing was ridiculous, but the media acted as if they believed every bit of it.

This exchange between Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald is telling. Greenwald links to a study that claims the Russians do not have a mind control device. To his credit, Greenwald has made this point for years. Taibbi, on the other hand, chimes in with the claim that the media simply got it wrong. This suggests there was a reason to think that the Russians had the mind control device. In other words, Taibbi thinks it is reasonable to think such a device exists.

Of course, the ongoing lunacy in Western media about the war in Ukraine offers a great look into this topic. Every day we see stories in Western media about how the Ukrainians are winning the war. Then there are the stories about how Russia is ready to collapse at any minute. Are the people writing these tall tales liars? Do they really believe what they are writing? Are they just vessels being filled by lairs or true believers in the content creation system?

Here is a story quoting former General Ben Hodges, who claims the Ukrainians will conquer Crimea by this summer. Then they quote someone named Matthew Schmidt, who is the director of international affairs at the University of New Haven. He claims that Hodges is a bit optimistic, but with the right strategy, the Ukrainians could maybe be in Moscow by Christmas. That is a bit of an exaggeration, but his claims are so absurd that one has to wonder if he is taking drugs.

Now, one can dismiss the guy working at a fifth tier state college as nothing more than an attention seeker. The former general is another matter. Ben Hodges was the commanding general of the U.S. Army Europe. He not only should understand the realities of war, but also be informed about what is happening. For example, he would have to know that the Ukrainian army is about to collapse in northern Donbas after a long and foolish defense of the city of Bakhmut.

If the former general lying? Does he believe what he is saying? Has he simply gone insane or taken up drug use? How about the people creating the content? Can any of them use the internet and check to see if any of these claims are true? A few minutes on-line would show them that Sevastopol is a major Russian naval base. Without a navy, Ukraine has no chance to take that port, thus making it impossible to conquer Crimea or even make an assault on it.

Like the conspiracy theories about Trump or the Russians and their mind control devices, the Ukraine war content in the media is easily disproved nonsense, but none of it is ever questioned by the media. Is this because they know it is all lies, but it serves the interests of their masters or do they believe it? Why is there no one in these media organizations asking basic questions? The unanimity in the media strongly suggests they are a hive of true believers.

This may sound academic, but it is an important question. If these people are simply craven liars, then they are open to reason. If on the other hand, they are true believers, then they are beyond reason. The former can be set straight and convinced that their interests lie in the truth. The latter can never be convinced to accept reality. A society run by true believers can only be reformed by first removing the believers. That is not a facts and reason problem. That is a survival problem.

The Culture of Deceit

Posted on July 13, 2022 by thezman

A recent Gallup survey reports that confidence in institutions has fallen to an all time low among Americans. The only institutions trusted by a majority of people are small business, the military and the police. The last two are dropping quickly, which makes sense given the behavior of these institutions. A military full of drag queens and a police force siding with barbarians does not inspire confidence. Faith in small business simply reflects the fact that people continue to trust good people.

The normal reaction from the usual suspects is to blame their favorite bogeymen for the collapse in social trust. They will not use the term “social trust” as that risks entering a forbidden zone, but that is the topic. Trust in institutions is a proxy for social trust, how much people trust the people they do not know in their community. A big driver of the collapse in social trust is a generation of open borders. When your neighborhood is full of strange aliens, it is hard to trust anything or anyone.

As is often the case, the flood of aliens into your neighborhood is a symptom of a much bigger problem that lies at the heart of it. The people in charge simply cannot stop lying, which reflects on the institutions they control. The obvious example is the news media, which is approaching single digits in the Gallup poll. The fact that anyone trusts the media is an argument against universal suffrage. Many people, at least ten percent based on the survey, are too stupid to vote.

Putting that aside, the media has become a torrent of lies. Since the very beginning, the media has been partisan. In colonial times, newspapers were known to be advocates for one faction or another. This is what you should get in a society with a free press, free speech and a culture of debate. The partisans in the media make their case for their cause, often cherry picking the facts that work best for them. This is no different from what happens in a courtroom or a business meeting.

That is a vastly different thing than what we see today. Only a complete idiot trusts anything he reads or hears in the media. The starting assumption is not only that the facts are wrong, but the people behind them know they are wrong. It is not partisan zeal or human error, but a deliberate effort to deceive. The people endlessly going on about disinformation are the primary source of disinformation. They either promote the lies of government or they create their own lies.

This story about the war in the New York Times is a good example. Some version of this story has been floating around since the start of the war. It was cooked up by the usual suspects who have been championing war with Russia. The central claim is they have inside access to Putin’s inner circle is obviously false. His one source is not an independent Russian analysist, but a paid anti-Russian activist. The source makes this clear in his own bio.

The author of the New York Times piece is a notorious liar who runs interference for the neocon cult. Despite being a proven liar, he maintains a spot at the main news site in the empire. Certainly, his bosses know he is an activist and a liar. They keep him on because he tells the lies they like to promote. The point is, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying. No wonder trust has dropped to zero.

The media is an easy example. They are simply mockingbirds mimicking the sounds from the institutions they allegedly cover. Notice trust in medicine has dropped over the last year, which should surprise no one. They willingly went along with the Covid farce and the vaccine mandates. When people raised reasonable questions about the side effects of the vaccine, Big Medicine was right there to tell the media that those doubters were hooligans and troublemakers.

The fact that those concerns were legitimate and proven correct is a big reason people are now more skeptical of medicine. More important, telling the truth would have served the interest of medicine. Medicine is nothing but trade-offs between the risk of disease and the risks that come with the cure. Chemotherapy is terrible, but it is better than dying from cancer. Instead of being honest about this, they chose to lie which suggests these are people who simply enjoy lying.

No one expects the institutions to be honest all the time. Men are not angels and as long as the institutions are controlled by men, they will have all of the vices that are part of the human condition. What is new in this age is the culture of lying that has taken hold of the managerial class. They seem to take pleasure in lying to the general public, as if it is a status marker. If you cook up some outlandish whopper you get points in the social credit system of the ruling class.

In this regard, it makes sense why they selected Biden for president. In addition to his stupidity, Biden is a notorious liar. A big part of his affable simpleton routine while in the senate was his penchant for telling outlandish whoppers. Of course, he was always the hero of his tall tales. He is a man who has done nothing useful so he made up for it with glorious tales about himself. In a system increasing defined by a culture of deceit, it makes sense to have a notorious liar as the figurehead.

There is a cost to lying. The drop in trust is one consequence. The main cost is that a society low in social trust is harder to maintain than one with high trust. The cost of keeping America together is reaching a tipping point. Then there is the transaction cost of everyday life. In a world where no one trusts anyone, the cost of doing even simple things goes up. A big part of the drop in the standard of living is due to the collapse in social trust due to the constant lying.

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The Lying Liars

Posted on April 20, 2022 by thezman

Most of what we consider public life in modern societies is public reactions to things done by the powerful. The New York Times makes up a new hoax and the week is spent on the hoax. The usual suspects swear by the obvious lies and normal people spend days picking apart the lies. Occasionally, we get the reverse where some uncomfortable truth gets loose and the usual suspect go bananas trying to “debunk” it while normal people cling to it as blessed relief.

This is the news cycle in a nutshell. There is very little news. It has been at least a generation since the major news outlets in America have done reporting. Most of it is just stenography. The “journalist” copies what a government spokesbot has sent to them and dresses it up with some commentary. Then there are the narratives that are designed to give the public a way to repeat the official truth that sounds convincing to them and their acquaintances.

The source of this is the “new journalism” that emerged in the 1960’s. The late British reporter Chris Munnion chronicled this in his book Banana Sunday. He spent most of his life covering Africa for the Telegraph. In the 1960’s he noticed Americans showing up with pre-written narratives. They would seek out quotes and pictures to fill out the story they had prepared for the trip. Even if the facts contradicted the narrative, they stuck with the narrative because that was the new journalism.

Narrative journalism is just accepted these days. The “news” has always been a form of passive-aggressive political activism so its evolution into story telling on behalf of powerful interests seems natural. When you think of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal as propaganda arms of their respective clients in the managerial elite, it all makes sense. Instead of the Ministry of Truth we have the mainstream media “speaking truth to power.”

That last bit gets mocked by normal people on this side of the great divide because they have woken up to the reality of this age. As if often the case, however, there is a kernel of truth locked in this media fabrication. The people inside these disinformation operations genuinely fear the public. When they say “speak truth to power” they mean broadcast their truth to you in the hopes that you will buy it. Modern mass media is mostly a defensive weapon of the elites.

That is why it is worth thinking about what goes on inside these operations and what types of people work there. For example, here is a post in the Washington Examiner from someone calling himself Jaimie McIntyre. The Examiner bills itself as a conservative news outlet, but McIntyre is a far-left conspiracy theorist who has spent most of is career at operations like CNN and NPR. His post is a story comparing the suicidal holdouts in Mariupol to the Alamo.

Now, the “facts” in this tale are supplied by a group called the “Washington-based Institute for the Study of War” which sounds quite serious. When you look them up you find they have a web site and a staff listing. That staff listing is a who’s who of neoconservative warmongers. There is Kimberly Kagan of the infamous Kagan clan and Bill Kristol, the head loon at the Never Trump clan. These are the people responsible for the disaster unfolding in Ukraine.

Jaimie McIntyre is a crack reporter and he has access to the internet, so he surely knows the nature of his primary source. He makes no mention of it as that would have deflated the narrative. In other words, he is lying and he knows he is lying. Most likely the bulk of the narrative was supplied to him by the neocons. They have been pushing this theme since the start of the war. They think Americans will fall for the claim that the Ukrainians are innocent victims of the evil Putin.

In the Washington Post we have another version of the Alamo narrative. This one is authored by a someone named David Stern. The Post identifies him as a journalist based Ukraine. In reality he is most likely an operative of the American foreign policy establishment charged with peddling their narratives in Western media. Note that his copy does not mention that the holdouts are Azov fighters. The Post does not want anyone noticing those guys in the story.

If you scan the Washington Post, what you quickly see is that most of their Ukraine “reporting” relies on operatives from NGO’s and the intel community. They know that the information they are being fed is from partisan sources. That would be fine if they made that clear, but they go out of their way to conceal this truth. Their job is to sell the official lies and they take that job seriously. They are lying and they know they are lying but they keep lying because that is their job.

Of course, a real journalist would be curious about these sources that all seem to say the same things about current events. For example, a story on the “Institute for the Study of War” and who pays their bills would be interesting. It would provide the public with some understanding about who is trying to convince them that nuclear war is the price we must pay to defend Ukraine. Instead, they investigate a popular Twitter account called The Libs of TikTok.

That last bit is another good example of the mendacity of the media. This story was created by the Washington Post. They assigned credit for it to a vulgar dingbat calling herself Taylor Lorenz. This woman is so dumb she could count her boobs twice and get the wrong number both times. The real source was German intelligence who employs a former Twitter employee named Travis Brown. He works for the Protoype Fund, which is funded by the German government.

Again, like the Examiner piece using the “Institute for the Study of War”, the real story her is a foreign government attacking an American citizen. A real news organization would want to know who facilitated this. The Post surely knows that Taylor Lorenz is too stupid to work a phone so she did not call Travis Brown. Of course, that story will never happen because that idea would never cross the minds of the editors. Their job is to sell the official lies and they take that job seriously.

That is the main point of this exercise. At all levels of what is called journalism you will find people who lie with enthusiasm. The selection pressure is all in favor of people who enjoy lying to the public. They like the scheming and the deception. Like all sociopaths, they are shameless about it. Shame requires a soul. As Solzhenitsyn put it, “We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”

The Latest Thing

Posted on April 19, 2022 by thezman

Yesterday a federal judge struck down the CDC mandate requiring passengers to wear ceremonial face coverings on public transport. For the last two years airplane passengers have been required to wear masks at the airport and on the plane, unless they were eating or drinking. Of course, this has allowed the petty dictators to harass people while traveling. The mask-marms have been looking for reasons to fly just so they could harass people. Now that is over.

The CDC appears to have conceded the point and will not appeal. They tried to front run the news by announcing the mandate has ended. The media has made sure to put the name and picture of the judge on all of their attack channels probably hoping that one of their lunatics goes bonkers over it. The public reaction has been celebratory, based on what has been posted on-line. Normal people are sick of the ridiculous charade over Covid and just want to be done with it.

To the dismay of the Covidians, the public is ready to close the books on the whole thing and just forget about it. Most normal people are a bit angry at having gone along with this lunacy. There is certainly some shame involved. This is to be expected as everyone feels shame after having been taken for a fool and not having said anything against this stuff. That is why this will be memory-holed by the summer, so people can just move on.

It is a little hint as to why the sociopaths in the media keep getting away with these mass hoaxes that have become a feature of life. People wake up and see that everyone is now into the latest thing. Maybe that thing is outrage over a police shooting or maybe it is some new abstract concern. All of the right people are on their soapboxes and all of the best people are following along with them. It is only normal for people to want to do the right thing and support the latest thing.

Of course, the latest thing always turns out to be the latest fraud. Some go longer than others, depending upon the agenda. The crusade against Islam launched by Republicans and cheered by conservatives ran for a long time. It is not easy building out a police state so they needed that fraud to run for years. Covid was part of the color revolution launched against Trump and quickly became a convenient tool of control by the petty tyrants that terrorize daily life.

The facts are becoming clear at this point. The lockdowns had no impact on the course of the virus or its impact on the public. There was never any data to support the policies and now we know it caused more harm than good. Similarly, idiotic things like social distancing and mask wearing were useless. In the fullness of time, we will learn that the vaccine was a massive boondoggle. It was just a money transfer to Big Pharma and the health care rackets.

There is another angle here. The courts have struck down almost all of the Covid polices by now. The ceremonial mask wearing on planes was the last big item to be cancelled by the courts. All of these could have been knocked down by the courts when they were enacted, but it took two years for judges to remember that we have this thing called the law. It is a reminder that the courts are just another ruling class institution run by the maniacs of the new religion.

Notice that even dissidents struggle to remember the Bush years. That was a fraud on the public of epic proportions. Millions of people voted for it and supported it, but now they have stashed it in the shadows of their mind. The reason is none of us want to be reminded of our blunders. Failure, no matter how instructive, brings a sense of shame so we put our failures out of minds. Just as the Bush years have faded from our minds the Covid fiasco will soon fade too.

This is how these frauds keep working. It is the Gell-Man amnesia effect scaled up to the whole of society. This is the phenomenon where you read something in the media and see it is total nonsense. You know the subject of the article and you quickly see that the article is full of falsehoods and mistakes. You then go to the next article about which you know little and accept what is presented. You completely forget that the previous article was all nonsense.

This is what is happening in America. People see the latest thing trending on Twitter and start learning about it through the media. When they see the latest thing is a fraud, they get mad about it. Then they see the next thing trending and forget all about the fraud of the previous thing. The Covid fraud is now the previous thing while Ukraine is now the latest thing. People are accepting the latest thing from the same people they know sold them the previous thing.

This pattern works as long as the vast bulk of people are supplied with plenty of food, safety and entertainments. You may not be able to lift your arm due to a reaction to the vaccine your employer mandated, but you do not want to be that guy who goes against the grain. After all, you look around and see that everyone is enjoying the current thing. As long as everyone is excited for the next thing, why be that guy who mentioned what happened with the previous thing?

The lesson of Covid is that reason is of no use on the public. Abductive reasoning will always triumph over deductive and inductive reasoning. The only thing that can break this cycle of madness is when the latest thing is a bad thing that cannot be jawboned away by the media. At that point, their efforts to sell a new distraction turns around on them and becomes a liability. When the current thing is real suffering, people will remember all the previous things were lies.

View From The Road

Posted on February 25, 2022 by thezman

Note: No show today as I am traveling this week. I will be posting travel logs behind the green door for those interested. Here is the first installment. I also have a lengthy book review ready to go and once that is posted, I’ll update this with a link.

One of the funny things you experience when traveling to another English-speaking country is their version of your news. I first experienced this in Dublin half a dozen years ago when I popped on the BBC in the hotel. When I travel, I never turn on the television, as the room is just a place to sleep and shower. It was pouring rain so I decided to check out Irish television for the first time. I was greeted by two actors confidently spewing out laughable nonsense about the news.

One guy was talking about Trump as if he had grown up with the man and knew him like a family member. The trouble was, the things he was saying were so absurd that it felt like satire of a crazy MSNBC talking head, but it was serious. The person on the other side of this was an over-the-top version of the pompous news anchor. He was an English version of Ron Burgundy from the movie Anchorman. I was sitting there cackling like Kamala Harris while watching it.

I clicked around the many versions of the BBC and then found Sky News. I had never consumed this product, but my understanding was that it was the Fox News Channel for the rest of the English-speaking world. In reality, it was just another version of the BBC, without the same level of smugness. They had a different actor pretending to know the mind of Donald Trump, telling the audience for this stuff what they needed to hear to get through the trauma of the election.

After I recovered from the hysterical fits of laughter, I realized I was watching the modern version of the freak show. The difference is the freak show never tried to normalize the freaks. The modern freak show seeks to normalize the weirdness in order to open the mind of the viewer to the messaging. Then I realized that like all Americans, I had grown up in the same freak show, with different freaks. In other words, American mass media was worse than I noticed.

This week I have been busy with a million things and I am on the road in Orlando, so I have not been following the news very much. I caught some bits about the war in Europe, but I have not had time to look at the inevitable commentary or watch the chattering skulls on television. What I know about what is happening comes from what I know about the history of the area, prior analysis and the many e-mails I have been getting from readers in Eastern Europe.

At the airport, they had CNN on and it was all war news, but I saw no one watching is so I followed the mob and ignored it too. I’ve been in a lot of airports during tranquil times and turbulent times and the airport crowd is always a good gauge of whether something is resonating with people. In the 2016 election cycle, people stopped to watch Trump news at the airport. Even people busy living their lives knew it was a big deal so they stopped and watched the man.

Putting the news out of my head meant I missed all the talk and analysis until I arrived in Orlando Thursday evening. The Uber driver asked me about it, but it turned out his reason had nothing to do with the news. He is just a huge Putin fans so this is like seeing his favorite sports team in the championship. He wanted to talk about it because it makes him feel good to talk about it. That said, his analysis would turn out to be the most sensible I’d hear that day.

After checking into the hotel, I decide to see what the news was saying about the great Slavic invasion of Europe. War is good television and the pioneer in modern war television was CNN. They are down on their luck these days and this is the sort of thing to boost their ratings, so I hit CNN first. Memories of the freak show from Dublin rushed into my mind as one lunatic after another came on to make sure they said “Keev” several times, rather than “kee-ev” like a normal person.

Luckily, MSNBC seemed to be in a commercial loop, so I broke free and went over to Fox News, which has fallen into an alternative reality. In this new reality, it is the year 2000 and the chicken hawks are at their zenith. Instead of Saddam Hussein as the next Hitler, it is Putin. They are all saying “Keev” now too. The amusing thing is that when these simpletons say it, they stumble, because they have not had enough time to practice saying this weird new word in front of the mirror.

Like the goofy English pundits on the BBC claiming to know the mind of Trump, the current pundits all claim to know the mind of Vladimir Putin. Of course, they tell us that he is the evil monster they need to justify the warmongering. You see, if Americans do not accept ten-dollar gasoline and breadlines, Putin will march all the way to Paris, just like you know who, in what always feels like yesterday for these people. You must sacrifice for their principles.

It really is a freak show. The one exception is Tucker Carlson, which is the great irony in all of this. The people trying to understand what is happening and maintaining healthy skepticism and objectivity are cast as mindless puppets of evil. The people suddenly saying “Keev” like they have contracted a new form of Tourette’s are the deep thinking, worldly servants of all that is holy. This is not propaganda. It is an alternative reality used to impose mass psychosis.

What is amazing about the Fox News coverage is it all sounds like the stuff you see on CNN and MSNBC. It is just various ways of repeating whatever the White House is saying, but with a hint of Biden criticism. They try to compare him to Neville Chamberlain when the opportunity arises. In other words, they are following the lead of the ratings losers, instead of the most popular man in the mass media. It just shows the real face behind those masks they wear.

One final observation about Fox News. Sean Hannity was never a guy working math problems in his free time, but he seems to have gotten dumber. He always looks like he is going to snap and fly into a Chris Farley-like tantrum. His show is angry stupid man interviews stupid people pretending to be smart. You have to wonder about the audience for such content. You can excuse people for wanting to see the Siamese twins or wolf-boy, but what is the excuse for watching Hannity?

There are many theories of the mass media. They usually revolve around the Orwellian propaganda angle. When you can look at it from the proper distance, you get the sense that maybe the real point is to fill the air with the sounds of weirdos and lunatics, so the sober voices cannot be heard. A guy like Tucker lives like a serious lecturer employed by the traveling circus. Even if you like his content, it is hard to appreciate it over the sound of freaks and carnies.

It is not entirely spontaneous, of course. You see that with the vapid repetition of the word “Keev” from these airheads. There are people behind the curtain injecting phrases and opinions into the system for the freaks to repeat. On the other hand, it is a system that operates by the logic of people who think the purpose of life is to win the catchphrase contest each day. The mass media is the freak show populated with credentialed members of the managerial elite.

Managerial Menticide

Posted on February 21, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. The subject of it and today’s post is the new way to look at the system ruling over us. Of course, Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for those needing audio stimulation. Much of it is about the situation in Europe and the evolving Canadian dictatorship.

One of the problems with the Opposite Rule of Liberalism is that it relies on the old Left-Right dichotomy of American politics. This framing persists despite the fact that it is a vestige of a bygone era that no longer works today. The political divide is now between those who adhere to the basket of ideas called Western liberalism and those who defend the post-Marxist managerial state. The latter group is made up almost entirely of members of the ruling class.

In other words, we now live in a world divided by those in the system of control that hovers over the West and those who live under it. The Dirt People versus Cloud People framing is a much more honest, if a bit sarcastic, framework for the world. The ruling system is like a miasma that hangs over society, infecting the minds of the people and their relations with one another. We can see the elites at the top, just barely, but the system they control is all around us.

A big part of what ails society is this sense that things are not as they seem, but it is hard to get a read on why. That noxious miasma that lingers in every aspect of society often leads people to doubt their own senses. Their experience tells them things about the world and people in it, but everywhere they look they are getting messages telling them that what they think they see is not true. Instead, they are to believe something that is often the opposite of what they experience.

This is where the Opposite Rule continues to work. Those who are aware of the contradictions of daily existence can apply the rule to the information stream that comes from the system, filling the area around them. Whatever is in the air at the moment, start from some version of the opposite, and the truth will be near. The Opposite Rule of Liberalism is best restated as the Opposite Rule of Managerialism. This organic, self-aware system that rules over us is the opposite of truth.

A useful example comes from the daily barrage of “information” from the system about the crisis in Ukraine. Here is a story from the New York Times headlined, “Russia has been laying groundwork online for a ‘false flag’ operation, misinformation researchers say.” Note that this story is not behind the usual paywall, as they want wide circulation of it. Note also that the writer is one of the infants they employ to copy and paste material into “news reports.”

This news report starts with a news report from a European based group called European Expert Association, which is described as “a research group that focuses on security in Ukraine.” When you take a look at who these people are, it becomes obvious that they are Ukrainian activists. These are not neutral observers searching for the truth about the crisis. More important, when you look at their resumes you see all the familiar NGO’s that are pushing for war with Russia.

Of course, this is the New York Times, the first draft of history and the leader in the American news media. They do not just take this at face value. They hand it to a group called the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit “research” group. These are the go-to guys for the Times reports on misinformation and disinformation. To the shock of no one in the Times offices, the researchers at Global Disinformation Index confirmed everything said the European Expert Association.

The reason the Times was not surprised by what they heard back from the Global Disinformation Index is the person running it is Anne Applebaum. She is a notorious warmonger and neoconservative. Here she is advocating for the liquidation of the Afghanis and the Syrians as a “solution” to those problems. Applebaum is a big believer in what Stalin supposedly said about people causing problems for the regime. No man, no problem. Applebaum just scales it up.

Her partner in this enterprise is a Ukrainian activist named Peter Pomerantsev, who is probably on the payroll of a Western intelligence service. His biography does not pass the laugh test. His role in life has been to seed Western media with anti-Russian information dressed up as Ukrainian nationalism. The rest of the staff of the Global Disinformation Index all have an axe to grind with some enemy of the neocons, past, present or in the future.

The point of this walk through the swamps behind the ministry of disinformation is to illustrate how the new rule works. If a media outlet is claiming to root out disinformation, you can be sure they are not doing that. Instead, start with the assumption that they are waging a disinformation campaign. That is what you see in the New York Times story and any story containing the words “Global Disinformation Index.” Then you can begin to figure out what is really going on with the story.

Of course, the entirely new obsession with misinformation and disinformation by government and mass media is a big lie. Since forever, people have known that governments lie all the time. They have known that the media is partisan, a form of activism more often than not. Yet suddenly we are being told that the media and the government are now declaring war in false information. Since they are the only possible source of disinformation, this means war on themselves.

The big lie, for those unfamiliar, is a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. This is now the default tactic of the managerial state. They tell us that Eskimo truckers protesting vaccine rules are white supremacists. Then they bring in a “hate expert” to claim that freedom is a form of violence. These outlandish whoppers are then signed off on by new experts who sagely tell us the moon is made of cheese.

Unlike normal propaganda techniques, this new tactic is not to further a cause, although it can be used that way as we see with Ukraine. The neocons are simply taking advantage of a defense mechanism that has evolved since the Cold War. By flooding the zone with outlandish nonsense, the system prevents cogent analysis of what it is doing or contradicting it in any way. It is a form of menticide to paralyze the people by suspending them in a solution of false narratives.

This is the utility of the Opposite Rule. It helps clarify the new relationship between the leviathan and the people. Instead of viewing society as a hierarchical structure that is responsive to the will of the people, you see that it is an adversarial relationship between a ruling organism and the people. This ruling organism is the vast administrative state made up of government, corporations, the academy, non-profits and the mass media. It is a fully integrated organism.

The endless waves of information, mostly false information, is its primary defense mechanism against what it sees as a threat. That threat is the people over whom it hovers like a noxious cloud. The point of the false information is to keep the people in a fog of confusion about who really rules over them. You cannot rebel against that which you are not even sure exists. Menticide is the primary defense mechanism of this system of social control we call managerialism.

Regime-ology

Posted on December 14, 2021 by thezman

Back in 2014, Rolling Stone published a story about an alleged rape on the campus of the University of Virginia. Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus” story was a bombshell story that became a national controversy. It seemed to confirm everything the Nth-wave feminists were saying about the scourge of white males raping white women on the college campus. All of the usual suspects rushed to the nearest outlet to display their outrage over the incident.

Of course, this later became known as the “Virginia Rape Hoax” as the story was completely fake. The only things about it that were true is the star of the story was a human who attended the university and the writer used her real name. Otherwise, the story was a total fabrication and a ridiculous one at that. Sensible people noticed huge problems with it from the start. The two big clues that it was fake were that it read like a bodice ripper and the villain was named Haven Monahan.

In retrospect, this story was a turning point for mass media. By the old rules, everyone involved would have been shamed out of the public eye. The writer, Sabrina Erdely, would have been drummed out of the profession. Jackie Coakley, the coed who was the fake victim, would have been destroyed by an angry media. Erdely faced no repercussions and still works in the media. Coakley was mostly ignored and has gone on with her life, not having suffered from it.

The news was always biased and lots of reporters fabricated stories to fill up their stories, but there was always risk to being a fabulist. Stephen Glass, the guy who cooked up legendary whoppers while at the New Republic was drummed out of the business and the reputation of the magazine was destroyed. Jayson Blair. the black New York Times reporter was fired for making up stories. Imagine a black reporter being fired today for anything, much less for slandering white people.

Prior to the Rolling Stone story, a reasonable person knew the media was biased toward left-wing causes and left-wing institutions. They would favor the Democrat over the Republican, for example. They would promote left-wing causes and ignore or dismiss right-wing issues. After the Rolling Stone hoax, the prudent person assumes that everything in the media is fake. The question is, what is possibly true and what is the agenda behind the proposed narrative.

In other words, reading the American media has taken on the same quality as reading the Soviet media in the Cold War. You read it like you read any piece of fiction in that you are looking for clues in the narrative to discovery the deeper meaning. Instead of Kremlinologists, Americans have to be regime-ologists. The regime media offers clues about what is going on behind the veil. Those clues help understand the workings of the inner party and what they are plotting.

Take this story in Yahoo News about a high-tension cloak and dagger affair that supposedly happened in Washington during the Trump years. The story has a female heroine named Ali Watkins, who is a strong independent female journalist working for the New York Times. It has a villain, a shady character named Jeffrey Rambo, who worked at a secretive Customs and Border Protection division. The two of them engage in a high stakes game of cat and mouse in the capital.

The story seems ridiculous and oddly familiar. The reason for that is it is ripped from the ham-fisted television shows about rogue government agencies. Of course, the main character is described like someone from female fantasy literature. Instead of the villain being named Haven Monahan, he is Jeffrey Rambo. The story does not describe him as having a thick New York accent or dropping from helicopters with a bayonet between his teeth, but you just know it happened!

There are some things about the story that are true, like the names of the two main characters, but the story is most assuredly fake. The first clue the story is made up is that this fantastic story is in Yahoo News, rather than the New York Times where the protagonist works. Instead, it is at a C-list outlet written by a nobody whose prior work was reporting on the FBI. Dumping these stories on nobody reporters is standard practice for the regime. It is part of the subterfuge.

Another clue is the main character. She is not the strong independent female journalist speaking truth to power. She is the tramp who was having sex with James Wolfe, the Security Director of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee. He was busted for giving her information that she used in her stories. She denies it but this is not an issue in dispute, so we can add liar to the morals charges. Watkins at the time was in her mid-20’s and Wolfe was in his late-50’s.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Wolfe was the Security Director of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee for 29 years. This means he was one of a small number of people seeing the nation’s most sensitive intelligence data. In other words, he was a professional spook who knew the game. Most likely, in addition to getting some young flesh ,he was also using Watkins to peddle disinformation. This is not a new game between “young reporters” and old DC hands.

Using our regime-ology skills we quickly see that the drama of the story is mostly fake and intended to get attention. The real story is the FBI is peddling a story to the media that both damages another agency and helps their friendly media. They picked Jana Winter because she has nothing else going on, is desperate for a break and has been a willing stenographer in the past. She will not ask too many questions. Again, this is old hat in the game of media manipulation.

That raises the question as to why this story was planted by the FBI. There is the special prosecutor glacially investigating the Russian collusion hoax and the FBI’s role in promoting it. The Trump people did use the “rogue agency” in question to uncover the Wolfe-Watkins operation. It is possible Durham is using the same assets to investigate the FBI or allies. It could also be another smear job against Trump that will be later used in the campaign against him.

At this point, it is hard to know, but it is good practice in reading the media in order to tease out what is happening behind the veil of secrecy. Given the effort put into writing this whopper, it will come up again at some point. All we can know is there is trouble inside the security operations. One branch is not happy with another and is now taking their war to friendly media. Perhaps soon people will be airbrushed out of official photos, a practice popular in authoritarian regimes.

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