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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Our regime is a branch of the folks at the very top, the private owners of the world’s central banks are attempting to aggregate all wealth in their own hands and turn the world’s population into dirt-poor serfs, or worse;
This process is only warming up with much worse to come, and if their plans continue it will likely result in the complete destruction of western civilization and possibly of humanity itself.
General admiration: I’m pleased that Zman generates such high quality essays as today’s, as often as he does, especially given the other demands upon his time. Well worth the $5 per month I send his way to defray the cost of keeping the night light aglow in his hallway bathroom. 🙂
I agree entirely agree Layabout. I too pay the 5 bucks monthly. I’m sure Z will raise it soon citing inflation. I’ll also point out that Z recently missed webcasting a podcast. He had some lame excuse about the editing time, background noises, throat fatigue, cats…blah, blah, blah. If he doesn’t go up too much I’ll continue with the service. After all, I canceled Fox Nation immediately after they fired Tucker. Oh, and on that note, I was not crazy, even Tucker made comments about the functionality of the website being shit. I thought it was just me. I only dealt with it to see his interviews and some of his specials.
What Z is describing is the Power Structure. It consists, in the main, of FedGov, Hollywood, Big Media, Big Bidniss (including Silicon Valley), and education, with higher ed in the van. The job of the Power Structure is to fool the sheeple, the better to fleece them. And to do that, it must not only have a monopoly on the right to use violence, it must have a near monopoly on the dissemination of information and narrative. Our Democracy, peace be upon its name, is a postmodern totalitarian state.
Propaganda, in other words. Severely retarded propaganda, to be precise. The Banana Empire sill controls much of the world and will be lucky to have running water in two years. Not only are the sheeple fooled, the garbage tier cretins who run this shitshow have convinced themselves their own retarded propaganda is gospel truth. IDIOCRACY was overly optimistic. The low rent oligarchs stupidly will look up as nukes descend on us, their mouths agape like the dinosaurs who watched the meteors race across the sky. Although, to be fair, the dinosaurs were able to distinguish between males and females.
Jack-
So you’re saying people should just run out and max all of my credits cars and attempt to finance the most ridiculous off-shore powerboat possible?
Asking for a friend…
Basically. And the typo “credit cars” is absolutely spot on.
See this: https://tinyurl.com/ha72rmn3. Every person residing in the lower 48 knows she’s lying. Her job is to lie. It’s the best job she’ll ever have. She understands this, so she lies. The people she works for invented the dynamic. As Z noted they even provide scripts for the show. We’re in the “Farce” stage of History now.
It’s hilarious watching the left pretend not to notice that they have to trot out the old white dude for the stuff Jean Pierre is too dumb to handle
She actually looks like a clown. I can’t stand to watch her. I think Biden picked her specifically to offend whites because she is so freakishly African-looking and because she is in an inter-racial lesbian marriage.
Marlin Fitzwater, she ain’t…
She does look like a clown, like one on a circus poster from the Thirties. You nailed it.
She’s a schvartzer, a foreigner, and a carpet muncher. Trifecta! So special!
The Biden regime has no choice but to turn the BS meter to eleven. It is an illegitimate regime installed through a transparently stolen election. It cannot govern by consent, so it has no choice but to rule by force. As always, propaganda is a huge part of ruling by force.
The fix is already in for 2024. It certainly appears that the Republican party will play the role of stooge and will rig the primary so Trump cannot be on the ballot, in which case Republican turnout will be so bad that there will be no need for the Democrats to steal the election. But in the unlikely event that Trump is the Republican candidate the election fraud will be epic and transparent to even the dumbest normiecon. The crackdown on dissidents, including most of us here, in 2025 will make Stalin look like a piker.
“It is an illegitimate regime installed through a transparently stolen election. It cannot govern by consent”
Well, it cannot govern Red states by consent. in Blue shitlib cities it has 90%+ support. Don’t kid yourself about that.
Thus the fact that separation of states or possible civil war is now being discussed openly.
I sometimes wonder if the time is coming when I will turn in my U.S. Passport (which I think has expired anyway) for a Florida passport 😡
Same here, soon. I wonder if Florida abides by a color-blind rule of law, will it keep the riff-raff out and/or imprisoned? Will Florida’s position on abortion, stand your ground, and say no Tranny training of youngsters keep high-minded progressives out on principal alone thus eventually slowing the population growth of the state? I hope so.
Re: the mass shooter phenomenon, I like to quote from Sundance on this point:
““The FBI was fully aware of the Boston Marathon bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, before they executed their plot. The FBI took no action. The FBI knew about the San Bernardino terrorists, specifically Tasfeen Malik, and were monitoring her communications before her and Syed Farook executed their attack killing 14 people and leaving 22 others seriously injured. The FBI took no action. The FBI knew Colorado grocery store shooter Ahmad Alissa before he executed his attack. The FBI took no action.
The FBI knew in advance of the Pulse Nightclub shooter (Omar Mateen) and were tipped off by the local sheriff. The FBI knew in advance of the San Bernardino Terrorists (Tashfeen Malik). The FBI knew in advance of the Boston Marathon Bombers (the Tsarnaev brothers) tipped off by Russians. The FBI knew in advance of the Parkland High School shooter (Nikolas Cruz). The FBI knew in advance of the Fort Hood shooter (Nidal Hasan), and the FBI knew in advance of Colorado grocery store shooter Ahmad al-Aliwi Alissa. The FBI took no action. Consider the case of the first recorded ISIS attack on U.S. soil in Garland, Texas in 2015. The FBI not only knew the shooters n advance, the FBI took the shooters to the venue and were standing only a few yards away when [they] opened fire. Yes, you read that correctly – the FBI took the terrorists to the event and then watched it unfold. “An FBI trainer suggested in an interview with “60 Minutes” that, had the attack been bigger, the agency’s numerous ties to the shooter would have led to a congressional investigation.”
Remember, shortly before the 2018 mid-term election, when Ceasar Syoc – a man living in his van – was caught sending “energetic material that can become combustible when subjected to heat or friction”, or what FBI Director Christopher Wray called “not hoax devices“? Remember how sketchy everything about that was, including the child-like perpetrator telling a judge later than he was trying to walk back his guilty plea because he was tricked into signing a confession for a crime he did not create. Or more recently, the goofball plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer that involved 18 suspects, twelve of them actually working for the FBI as the plot was hatched? And we cannot forget the January 6th. DC protest turned insurrection effort, which is clearly looking like an FBI inspired and coordinated effort. Have we forgotten the Atlanta “Olympic Park Bombing”, and the FBI intentionally setting up transparently innocent, Richard Jewel? Then, there’s the entirety of the FBI conduct in “Spygate”, the demonstrably evident FBI operation to conduct political surveillance against Donald Trump using their investigative authorities; and the downstream consequences of a massive institutional effort to cover up one of the biggest justice department scandals in history…”
From:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/12/22/elon-musk-perplexed-as-twitter-begins-widespread-suspensions-of-accounts-critical-of-u-s-funding-for-ukraine-and-zelenskyy-grift/
The FBI basically wrote the manifesto of Buffalo race shooter Payton Gendron. Read it. No 18-year old community college kid wrote that, I can assure you.
Why else would the kid invite an (ahem) “retired” FBI agent to watch the shooting live on Discord?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10859677/Retired-federal-agent-known-Buffalo-supermarket-shooters-plan-ahead-massacre.html
As soon as I heard about the FBI’s involvement at Garland TX, it wasn’t hard to make the leap that a similar level of involvement would have been the case at some non-zero number of other mass shootings.
You know it. I know it. The MSM knows it. But unlike us, they can’t or won’t talk about it. How do they live with themselves
Don’t forget Colleen Rowley and other FBI agents were all over the 911 hijackers months in advance.
I said it on another thread: believing Musk isn’t part of the narrative machine is misguided. He is a DoD employee after all and his companies were founded by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel program. He’s merely swinging the pendulum back to “capitalism” and “freedom” for anyone dumb enough to think there’s more than one side to this chess game.
That adds up, but I don’t know if they can swing it back. They created such a monster while they were swinging it the other way.
Speaking of Norway, Brevik was the only right wing mass killer to date that actually picked his targets logically, targeting the regime and the children of the elites being processed into activists at that summer camp. He didn’t shoot up a jewish deli or a black church, which is what the media prefers as it feeds into preestablished normie bad guy narratives.
Noteworthy though is that he accomplished next to nothing in the end. Hunting one future AOC for sport in the woods may be fun, but two more are waiting to take her place as cogs in the regime. Also his spergy manifesto was something like 1000 pages long, ensuring no one was going to read it. The moral is that doing stuff in minecraft isn’t effective, it just presents the regime with an opportunity to cry out in pain as they strike back.
The other moral is that narratives need to be nice and simple for normie. The left wing story is almost subverbal, just a series of scenes in movies and cartoons throughout a normie’s life where the black guy is good and the white guy is mean. On the right, well, the other day I listened to an audiobook by Mordekai Moldberg, and while the Orson Welles deepfake voice was pleasant most of what I got out of the text is how much Moldberg wants you to know that he’s a smart boy who can emphasize his point with foreign phrases. “Si la chatte sent le fromage, il ne faut pas y mettre le nez.”
One of the kids he didn’t kill is the mayor of a city that I’ve had to change my retirement plans to avoid.
AB’s lasting accomplishment was the erasure of the phrase “cultural Marxism” from history. Since the release of his manifesto—in which he airs some grievances against the “kulturmarxists”—it’s officially a “conspiracy theory.”
Some of us are old and remember that that’s what many academic philosophers used to call themselves. A few of us own a book named Cultural Marxism written by two of them. And the phrase was in the subtitle of a hundred other books.
Imagine making a normal person believe it. A dozen Libraries of Alexandria have been destroyed to conceal it.
he accomplished a lot; he created a template for success.
Brilliant stuff today Zman, thanks for all you do
Interacting with friends of various political persuasions, I find myself unable to break their wall of denial about how fake it all is. Even when the manipulation is obvious and out in the open, government officials and media members planning together what stories to break and when to break them, govt officials controlling what is on social media, fake press conferences, none of that is secret information or hard to know about, but they just can’t bring themselves to admit the truth that it is one big informational panopticon. They can’t seem to make the mental connection that if that one is fake, then these others are probably fake too. It’s like a mental bridge too far. Until these things are acknowledged by the anchorman with the anchorman voice, they aren’t real.
Was it always this way? Were 80% of people always willfully blind idiots? Mencken would definitely say yes. But I seem to remember a time when people were more thoughtful, more discerning, when there wasn’t anything that could be called a mind virus. About most things. But about GAE militarism, the mind virus was real even in the conservative white place where I grew up. Back then I was afflicted with it too. It took many years to shake it off.
Perhaps it is literally impossible to live without a social narrative. For the nobodies of this world, like 99% of us, that narrative is second-hand, at best (more like third hand) The ‘news’ gives us that narrative. There are alternatives to that narrative (‘conspiracy theories’), but while those alternative narratives may be true or false, they are unlikely to be consistent, because a) honest men will disagree and b) most alternative narratives are no-more honest than the ‘news’. Plus, being unconstrained by truth, the mainstream news can be a lot more consistent than can honest seekers of the truth (who may have honest grounds for disagreement)
It’s asking an awful lot of most people to break from the mainstream narrative. Maybe even asking the impossible.
“It’s asking an awful lot of most people to break from the mainstream narrative. Maybe even asking the impossible.”
I do not disagree with your premise.
What I will say is that, where there was defined a distinction between ‘”push” and “pull” marketing, when email was in its infancy, a though occurs.
Most people only receive the “push”, what is put under their noses. They are not intellectually curious. They are non readers. they are both. We will call them the “sheeple” as a working term.
Others, fewer, embrace the “pull” approach. They are, by definition, intellectually curious. They read, baseline all the classics. Have some specialty that requires seeking a lot of information, the broader the spectrum the better. They FIND information because they seek it. Thirst for it.
It is this last that MIGHT self cure from the mind virus. They have a frame of reference, a nose trained for other purposes, or simply their nature … to sniff out the lies. The intellectual horsepower to process the lies.
Agree, and this ties in with my other comment, below. Propagandizing the non-reader is easy. Put it on the box, repeat it three times a day, and you’re done. It’s the ‘pullers’, as you put it, who are hard to deal with. I suggest a huge part of the burden of the narrative industrial complex is about the dealing with the ‘pullers’. They will go and actively seek out the truth. The truth can’t be wholly hidden, but it can be obscured by a million and one false signals. Signals, ideally, elaborately structured to draw in and exhaust the patience of the ‘puller’. That’s what the New York Times, ‘policy’ magazines and much of the rest of intellectual life are about: chaff, to deflect the self-guided, truth-seeking mind. Much of the ‘alternative’ media too no doubt. The key to a career in media is to be interesting, but wrong.
If I remember right, if you go back to say to the polio scare in the early 1900s, you’ll find Time Magazine (with their famous iron lung cover) had all the machines in the whole US shipped in for the photo. Not one was actually in service but they said hospitals were being overwhelmed. After the photo they shipped them back but the illusion had been created that an epidemic was occurring.
The media and politicians have been lying since time immortal, to varying degrees, but something has changed: the population is far more stupid, so everyone does it everywhere all the time. I find it difficult to talk to most people these days because everything’s a scam and a racket or some stupid ass gimmick.
The propaganda acceleration is simultaneous with the IQ decline. I believe that is a statement of fact. The time I recall when people were more discerning probably isn’t just wishful thinking or a rose tinted rear view mirror. They most likely really were smarter.
I’m only an amateur scholar of history so take this for what it is but when you filter out the works of Great Men and look at documents made by the hoi polloi (a great resource for understanding the past), you get the sense they were way smarter in more than one way.
I think it was always this way. As a teen 40 years ago I heard the expression “The masses are asses” and it made sense to me. If anything there is a lot more information available today that counters official narratives but only a minority of us bother to explore it. In that sense people are worse now.
The decline of this system is hastened because it’s also no longer permitted by the state religion to select for skills, competence, or intelligence. Aisha with a 91 IQ and a flare for bossiness captaining the $3B Arleigh Burke destroyer is indicative of this nonsense.
The system necessitates high levels of highly capable people for it to run. On the aggregate, this means that the outputs will decline rapidly as the able and exceptional are replaced by the stupid and politically connected. But it’s ok, because the decline is the cost of “who we are” and we cannot change “who we are.”
Couple this with the rather rapid decline of the dollar as a reserve currency and we are in for a drastic reduction in standard of living. US now has an average IQ of 97.5 and this will probably fall to the low 90s by 2035. We will get an economy, a country, and a system that reflects this reality. Closer to Queens than it will be to Fairfax County. And the powers that be simply don’t care. They’ll take away your rifle, your gas stove and your meat. But they’ll have all of those things and live in Fairfax while telling us how racist and evil we are.
“But it’s ok, because the decline is the cost of “who we are” and we cannot change “who we are.”
Depends who we are.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/29/opinion/stacey-abrams-georgia-governor-election-brian-kemp.html
as the dirt shrinks, so does the cloud. lot of (currently) privileged people will find themselves returned to earth.
Will the US finally get a Navy Destroyer named after George Floyd? Maybe an aircraft carrier called the Trayvon Martin?
The USSR is a great example of this. Something you don’t have to reach back 200 years to a different time to see. By the mid 1980’s everyone knew it was morally bankrupt except for most hardened communists. The ones who saw communism as a religion the way the purple hairs see things today. But everyone shuffled along and did their thing because the ruble did indeed still buy a bottle of vodka, a loaf of bread, and a pack of terrible cigarettes. The people themselves considered it to be a net win, barely, because they still had things like heat. It wasn’t until the currency failed circa 1991 that it all crashed down.
The vast majority of human beings can be bought, and cheaply. It’s only when they can no longer be bought when the real problems start for a regime. One thing I admire about the French, is at least they demand an ever so slightly higher price to be bought. “I’m not just a whore, I’m a French whore and you will pay me the value of being a French whore.” Americans on the other hand, even with vast amounts of firearms, could likely be bribed with free Taco Bell coupons.
Americans…could likely be bribed with free Taco Bell coupons
—
QUIT JUDGING ME!
Correct. The facade can (and will) be maintained as long as the money is good. The system may be blatantly, ludicrously dishonest, profoundly unfair, morally depraved, and even scorned, even scorned by a majority, but as long as most everyone has a couple of bucks and the well stocked HugeMart is just down the street, why kick up a fuss? I just bought a nice big flat screen TV for $200.
“But everyone shuffled along and did their thing because the ruble did indeed still buy a bottle of vodka, a loaf of bread, and a pack of terrible cigarettes.”
A standard Soviet quip at the time used to be, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”
Opening part of Adam Curtis’s “Hypernormalisation” has some good stuff from 80s Russia.
The narrative industrial complex reminds me of an army of Winston Smiths, laboring away in various departments of the Ministry of Truth. Whereas, Orwell’s Winston Smith diligently altered the records of the Party’s past in Oceania, the media apparatchiks of our current regime assiduously work to alter perceptions of the present.
Oswald Spengler: “Whereas, Orwell’s Winston Smith diligently altered the records of the Party’s past in Oceania, the media apparatchiks of our current regime assiduously work to alter perceptions of the present.”
In the immortal words of Saint Joseph Djugashivili: “The future is known; it is the past which is in doubt.”
===============
Z: “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.”
At some point, our society’s timeline ventured through a “singularity”, and everything got flipped around backwards & upside-down, with the Normies being largely oblivious to what had happened.
I don’t know when this occurred exactly – you could argue that it was as early as 1896, when the Ochs family seized control of the NY Times, or as recently as September 11, 2001, when the Ochs family conspired with a number of other prominent families of their acquaintance, to bring down a pair of skyscrapers in downtown Manhattan [which had conveniently just been re-insured for acts of terrorism, netting a post-terrorism payout of almost FIVE BILLION DOLLARS].
The more I think about it, it occurs to me that two other signature events were of crucial importance in the timeline:
A) The premeditated murder of Charles Lindbergh’s child, and the subsequent character assassination of Charles Lindbergh’s reputation [after all, who can trust a man who can’t even successfully defend his own family?]
B) David Sarnoff’s absolute decimation & destruction of Philo Farnsworth [this is also where you would file the contributions of Edward Bernays, who lived to be 103, dadgum that adrenochrome tastes good!!!]
So there’s your timeline: I suspect that the singularity could have been traversed as early as 1896, or as recently as 2001.
But after passing through the singularity [whenever it was that the passing occurred], the result was a society with a media which no longer reported largely factual information, with blood kinsmen of the populace doing the reporting, but which instead began to mount ceaseless neverending nigh unimaginable psychological warfare campaigns, delivered by a foreign tribe which sought to destroy the populace.
And here’s my point: After we passed through that singularity, the media no longer answered to the government, but rather the government answered to the media.
The government, as we understand the term [the president, the speaker of the house, the senate majority leader, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, etc etc etc], the government is NOT in charge.
The media is in charge, and the government is merely a serfdom which answers sycophantically to its media overlords.
==========
PRO-TIP: Never forget that it was a QUAKER, named Henry Alloway, which facilitated the sale of the New York Times to the Ochs family.
The cost of empire for the US has been the loss of a huge portion of our industrial base. To keep the dollar as the global reserve currency means running big deficits, particularly with industrial countries who need the dollars to buy energy, which means that our trade deficit is heavily in manufactured goods.
The cost of empire has been a hollowing out of the Rust Belt. It also means that we had huge government debt. Both of those are needed to keep the system running and GAE afloat. Just Rome needed to conquer new territories, we need to keep running big deficits.
But with the rise of China, that cost is being exposed. Europe was willing to accept our dollars for manufactured goods. China is getting tired of that deal and is starting to use our dollars to buy things instead of treasuries. China also wants to develop its own domestic demand.
If the world slows (not stops, just slows) its purchases of treasuries, we’ll discover very quickly the true cost of empire.
Do you have any thoughts on how that would connect to the fed’s new crypto?
Well, Fedcoin would be a pretty terrifying development for many reasons, but not sure that it can impact the Eurodollar system and the global debt problems.
The US govt (and many other countries) has a debt and deficit problem. Once a country gets past ~100% debt to GDP, it has problems. A Fedcoin doesn’t change that.
We have to hold interest rates below inflation to keep the debt from spiraling out of control. The question is whether the world (investors, businesses, private banks and central banks) will accept that or even if they don’t like, have to accept it.
Somebody has to buy our debt knowing that it will lose them money over time. You can say that’s crazy and that no one will do it, but they may not have much choice. If you need dollars to do day-to-day business, to pay back a dollar-denominated debt or to protect yourself in times of crisis, you need to either hold actual dollars or an asset that can be sold in the Eurodollar system for dollars when needed.
Dollars don’t pay interest, but treasuries are dollars with an interest rate. Sure, the rate is lower than inflation, but it’s better than nothing.
The question is can I hold another asset that can be converted into dollars at a moment’s notice? Because when the shit hits the fan, I’m going to need dollars right now, and I don’t want to sell my assets as a huge discount to get those dollars. Treasuries fit that bill perfectly. Immediate dollars at no discount.
Can another asset take the place of treasuries? Maybe. Central banks are definitely hoarding gold, but is the market for gold big enough that it will handle a mass selling of gold in a crisis?
Commodities don’t fit the bill that well. You have to store them, which is costly. Their price is volatile. What will the market for them be in a crisis? Etc. Bitcoin is even worse as a store of dollar value.
Everyone says that they want to de-dollarize, but no other currency can take its place. Everyone says that they don’t want to hold treasuries that earn less than inflation or that can be seized, but if the dollar remains the GFC, you need a reserve asset that can access dollars at a moment’s notice with no to little loss in value. Well, outside of treasuries, what asset can do that?
Really, the only asset that comes close is gold, but the size of the gold market is a joke compared to size of the treasury market.
But the US debt to GDP continues to grow, making the Eurodollar system less and less stable. The whole thing is a mess.
Dollars don’t pay interest? I have some that are earning 4% in a money market account.
Same. I had invested in TIPS right as they stopped paying interest for 6 months. A money market account I can understand. Still losing to inflation, but by 4% less.
You’re proving my point. What does a money market invest in? T-bills.
Putting your dollars in a money market is investing in treasuries to earn interest that you wouldn’t get by holding dollars in a checking account. The same is true for you and everyone around the world, except that they don’t have access to US-based money market, so they buy the treasuries directly.
Thank you for the education Citizen
“If the world slows (not stops, just slows) its purchases of treasuries, we’ll discover very quickly the true cost of empire.”
I’m curious: how do you square this statement against them as the last and most liquid collateral on the planet? Where would anyone else go? You’re about to see near zero rates again before end of year due to the banking crisis.
That’s the question. What else can foreigners hold?
Well, they’ve been buying something else because foreign holdings of treasuries has been flat for nearly a decade. They still hold a lot of treasuries, but they’re not buying more. China is the main player. They seem to be using their dollars to buy gold, commodities and to build infrastructure around the world.
The slack has been picked up by the Social Security trust fund, US institutional investors (pension funds, endowments, etc.), US banks and the Fed. But the Fed and SS trust fund are no longer buying treasuries.
So, just when the need for buyers has skyrocketed, the number of treasury buyers is dwindling. Not good. Don’t get me wrong, if the treasury market ever started to look shaky, the Fed would step in a buy treasuries. But now you’re monetizing the debt, which is inflationary.
But even if private investors and central banks do buy all those treasuries, that means that other lending gets crowded out. All those dollars going to treasuries means less dollars for other debt, which means less spending elsewhere, which likely slows global growth.
This is a problem, and it’s not going to go away. Govts around the world have too much debt. In fact, everyone has too much debt. It can’t be serviced at anything like normal interest rates. If US govt somehow manages to get investors to buy its debt at below inflation rates, that leaves fewer investors for other debt, which means much higher rates, which can’t be serviced.
But coming back to the dollar, so long as the world uses dollars to trade and to make loans, there will be a need for assets that reasonably hold their value and that can be sold for dollars quickly and without a discount. If investors can find something better than treasuries, they’ll use it, which means the Fed has to buy treasuries to keep the interest rate down, which means inflation.
” If investors can find something better than treasuries, they’ll use it, which means the Fed has to buy treasuries to keep the interest rate down, which means inflation.”
We probably disagree on a lot of this but you may want to look more closely at how things function with the Eurodollar markets. Interest rates are already below the Fed’s rate. I’ll leave you to figure out what that implies.
Well, govt bond rates in Europe and Japan are well below US rates and, certainly, inflation.
What it says is that these countries/economies are in even worse shape than our and have even less ability to handle “normal” rates. We can’t handle them either, at least not for very long, but they can’t handle those rates at all.
I mean, European banks are pretty notorious. Credit Suisse has been a mess for a while.
But this is why a crisis – if there is one and there probably will be – will likely start outside the US. Things always start in the periphery and work inward.
And take a wild guess what investors and central banks will want if a crisis hits? Dollars.
It’s not just the media and Hollywood. The universities and public school systems are an integral part of the “industrial bullshit machine.”
The universities are all subsidized by the government, and K-12 is compulsory. You might be one of the few who is willing to turn the media off but not until you’ve been subjected to 12 years of forced indoctrination, and strongly encouraged to submit to another 4 years. And after all of that if you are still willing to turn the media off you are probably going to be regarded as some sort of freakish anti-social oddball..
“Freedom,” my ass.
Yes, the public schools, colleges and universities are simply media companies. Furthermore, due to their addiction to government funding and supination before adverse regulations like Title IX, they are even more captured by BigGov than a broadcast corporation like Fox or CNN is.
But, for a host of reasons, when Conservatives label the media ‘the enemy of the people,” they give the Uni’s a complete pass. Until we eradicate this blind spot, we can never really reform the lying media in America.
Speaking of 🤣
https://youtu.be/osXyIrWnxkM
That’s great! The United States Attorney barfing out the preferred narrative almost is as funny as the guy being honest about so-called “diversity.”
This happened ten years ago
Trying to convince people that ever more preposterous lies are true gets exponentially more expensive as time goes on. This empire is obviously collapsing, but I never thought of it in terms of the cost of lies.
Right. It also gets more difficult for the narrative makers. I don’t have any confidence at all that Normie will develop an effective bullshit detector but that ability to keep pumping out more and more narratives, some contradictory, at an increasing rate may prove impossible.
I didn’t consider the off-the-rails lying as part of the collapse, either, but, yeah.
i don’t think normis is the target audience. it’s not like there is anything that would get him off the couch. the narrative is for the true believer cadres; they are the ones that need constant reassurance.
That’s the old philosophy “The beatings will continue until morale improves”.
Much of it is a never-ending circle jerk, to be sure. But the same inability to reset and maneuver applies to the narratives created for the True Believer class.
“they are the ones that need constant reassurance.”
Even moral certainty turns out to be a con, right?
“i don’t think normis is the target audience.”
It’s for normies as well. The narratives are the blue pills for an addicted population. Give them a red pill and they’d go insane.
I think this is true. The insane cost of all this elaborate narrative maintenance is massive overkill for 99% of the population, who are happy literally with ‘Orange Man Bad’. The rest, and by far the most expensive part, is for the 1%, the senior managers, the upper middle classes. Guys who must make a serious cognitive effort to internalize the reality of the world around them (in order to make correct decisions) *and* internalize the narrative that says it all makes sense. Fortunately, they are very, very well paid for that effort. I suspect a lot of the economic inequality we see around us is about keeping this 1% on-side. It’s an expensive operation. Remember, these guys aren’t the elite (that would be the 1% of the 1%), and there are millions of them. They’re the regular senior managers and lawyers, the guys who run vast organizations on the day-to-day level. Every one of us (outside the underclass) has some kind of personal relationship with at least one of those people. If those guys flip the whole boat turns over, so vast sums are spent keeping them onside. Both in indoctrination, and in more-or-less outright bribery.
I suspect this is why they maintain the pretense of voting, and also why they reacted so much to the accusation that the elections are rigged. The middle management caste needs to believe in the system, as in the Gervais Principle.
The making of examples is really intended for the 1% you are talking about. They have a LOT to lose.
It’s why I think an example will have to be made out of RFKJ, sooner or later
If we only had the technology of the 60’s, they would not be able to lie so brazenly and communicate the new narrative so seamlessly. Modern social media has created the emergence of a powerful hive-mind that we haven’t found the anti-bodies for yet.
Once the social media craze starts to crash, it will be interesting to see how the dopamine addicts survive. We’re already down in attention span to one minute Tik-Tok videos of people making crazy faces, and soon attention span will be too low to send any clear signals at all.
I think it is quite the opposite, actually. Slower dissemination of information allowed the narrative to be more carefully crafted and maintained. “Keeping the story straight” is easier when the Current Thing has been the Current Thing for a long time.
I do agree that the near-non-existent attention span is proving counterproductive to the narrative makers. I’ve even seen instances when they forget what the most recent narrative is.
Yes, it is a Hive Mind, one that waits eagerly preprogrammed for reception of each forthcoming Hive Command, the latest even more destructive and transgressive than the last.
The Hive is largely a female/feminine entity because human females are collectivist creatures operating under syndicalist natures. Put ’em in a house together they all start menstruating as one.
When the latest luciferian decree issues forth from Goddess Columbia’s District, the bees thrill to receive the latest tool of power with which they can dishearten, demean, and destroy those outside the Hive. This is why when you meet a Hive member, very soon he/she/zir will pose a question designed to ascertain immediately whether you are Hive or Not Hive.
As the OP points out, social media technology sent the dronies into frenzy, stimulated constantly by dopamine hits and the unique thrill of being on the dominant/winning team, with others under your power.
The ever-shifting lies on the world stage are exacting a heavy toll on the GAE’s credibility. It is rather like when police lock somebody into a lie, and then they’ve got ya. It takes a whole lot more energy and inventiveness to keep track of previous lies, and somehow embelish just enough to not totally falsify the initial lies. The GAE is well past that point in the Rest of the World. A little white lying could be forgiven, but not the totality of the self-dealing falsehoods vomited forth on an ongoing basis. The ROW is looking for an exit from thralldom to the globalist economic hitmen.
Very well put.
Sometimes quantity does not have its own quality.
Here’s an example of (I assume) people pushing back against the rot. I’ve heard it said that ridicule is one of our most potent weapons. Surely this is a textbook example. Probably I’m stating the obvious, but here goes: Here’s a white male claiming to be a different flavor. What is the Leftist to do? If xhe calls him out as a fraud, it calls into question all the other imaginary race and sex changers. If xhe acknowledges his “choice,” it just adds to the absurdity of the whole drama.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/05/indiana-councilman-comes-out-as-woman-of-color.php
Question if you will, Z: what changed over that 30-year period? The costs or something else? I agree that it did change, but remain unclear as to why. If the costs of maintaining empire have increased, and they most certainly have, I don’t see off hand how that translates into the requirement to switch from some narratives to all narratives.
As an aside, it will be impossible to keep changing and updating narratives since technology has increased the velocity and availability of information. Orwell was right in his concept of endless present but that presupposed information disseminated at a slower rate as has turned out. There is an attempt at an eternal now but it seems unworkable as things have turned out.
Anyhow, thanks if you can answer.
That’s also my comforting thought when comparisons to the Roman Empire come up. “Well, Rome took hundreds of years to fall, so this will go on for ages and we won’t live to see the end of the GAE.” Yeah, but in Rome information moved at the pace of a horse, and commerce at the speed of an ox cart. I don’t think our decline and fall will be so leisurely.
collapse of AINO won’t be one big event. there will be multiple partial collapses followed by periods of equilibrium. and the collapse of the regime is a political phenomena, for the most part. the private sphere may very well prosper (locally) as fedgov dies and retreats its tentacles.
For a decline and fall, I like the metaphor of falling down a very long flight of stairs. There are landings every so often between the various flights of stairs. As a result, things seem to coast along or at least are a bit gentler than the rolling down the steps.
And wait till AI gets it’s tentacles into everything.
Tech and demographics would be my guess. The internet and widespread technology adoption meant that what was way too much work before to even command became just as easy as sending an email. At the exact time more weight (in every way) was being added to the government, competency began decreasing for all the usual reasons. Now you have California sending an email to ban diesel trucks using an army of mystery-meats to implement their dreams.
I think it goes well past 30 years. I remember the kvetching about how people are reading less newspapers in the 80s. A lot of the consolidation started back then.
It has always been truly amazing to me how they could blame the readers for falling circulation as they became ever more progressive and ever more anti-white. You would think there would be even one major newspaper that would change and just try being normal and covering stuff people want to read about and without all the moralizing and anti-whiteness. But this is too much to ask.
I think the urgency of the Cold War kept the ruling class locked into a combination of the covenant and the creed. They had the duty to defend the free world, but the duty not to blow it up in a war with Russia. This necessitated keeping the fanatics on a tight leash. There was a time, believe it or not, when the Democrat party was embarrassed by people like Schumer and Pelosi. These types took off when the Cold War ended and the old restraints were relaxed.
I wish I could say it will burn itself out and we return to normalcy, but I do not believe it.
Thank you. Yeah, the Cold War united the leadership across the board, not just the so-called “conservative movement.” I think that very well may be it as the time corresponds as well.
I don’t think the clock can be reset, either, and that is a terrible loss, particularly for those of us who lived at the height of empire.
Religions often consume/sacrifice enormous portions of the GDP before they flame out. I imagine the Catholic Church held probably half the wealth of Europe at one point in time. We are far from that tipping point.
Although it’s set in the mostly 18th century and like many of his writings somewhat fanciful, Voltaire’s “The Man of Forty Crowns” recounts the flight of a poor peasant having to support Church and other free riders. M. Voltaire lived a long time but checked out before the French Revolution. But writings like this one vividly show the social factors leading to such a revolution.
The overwhelming bureaucratic government, corporate and academic bloat dedicated to bull*** narrative engineering and driving those who can see to darker and darker thoughts around here is off the charts. And about 99.9% needs to be put out of our misery. It’s like those monstrous fat slobs on “my 600/1000 lb life”. They’re not going to meaningfully reform, so…
“The more they try to sell the latest narrative, the less likely people are to accept the next narrative.”
I want to believe that. I really do. However, a stroll over to a normie con site like dailywire makes one a bit depressed. You have plenty over there that shouted about the lies of covid, and then turned the page and believed the media was telling the stone cold truth about Ukraine. It’s remarkable really. Maybe I should look be more optimistic and see that while the majority bought into things like Iraq, now the majority (even there) seems skeptical of this war.
Normies are psychologically incapable of grappling with the possibility that EVERYTHING their political, cultural, and economic superiors tells them may be suspect. Normies can handle the idea that 25 % or even half of what they’re expected to believe is bunk. But the possibility that ALL of it demands their utmost skepticism? That’s apparently a terrifying place where normies fear to tread.
“Normies are psychologically incapable of grappling with the possibility that EVERYTHING their political, cultural, and economic superiors tells them may be suspect.”
This × 2. In my experience with older relatives, born before World War 2.
They went from ‘I don’t trust the government’ to total trust in “the vaccine.”
Recent wars bad (starting with Vietnam) but World War 2, “we won that” and it was the good war to them.
However, unlike discovering someone you know is a liar, then re-assessing every word that comes out of their mouth, and HAS come out, it seems if they look back with a critical eye, somehow their entire lives would be invalidated.
And thus they take the comfortable, safe route to protect their psyches. It is sad, but they’ll take their programming to the grave.
You’d be shocked at how much of what the average person believes is utter bullshit. I’m not talking just about today’s topics either. Modern man laughs at the ludicrous rites of some primitive tribe. Our distant ancestors were no better, though: Draw pictures on the cave wall and the hunt will be successful. Dance and chant a certain way, and the crops will be plentiful. Etc. Yes, we’ve made some useful discoveries in science and the like and it’s given us civilization with all its plusses and minuses. But did you know that biologically, we are nearly identical to those primitive humans of 100,000 years ago? Nietzsche and no doubt others say that many beliefs, even wrong ones, are useful and perhaps even necessary for life. I didn’t mean to get all philosophical here, but it’s a fact that much of what we believe in — is not fact.
“Normies are psychologically incapable of grappling with the possibility that EVERYTHING their political, cultural, and economic superiors tells them may be suspect.”
There’s a reason. It’s not that individual facts have to be replaced but that the whole conceptual framework has to be changed. The fake framework of lies that the establishment provides comes ready-made. The replacement of it by another more authentic framework requires individual cognitive work of the kind most people are not capable of. The sheep are many and the goats relatively few.
Stroll over to a normie church (no 🌈 flags), a.gun range, hardware store, etc. And see who is buying all the bs. .
The problem the narrative makers have isn’t gullible and stupid Normies but the ability to put out and maintain new narratives at an increasing rate due to the velocity of information. It is the old saw about keeping the “story straight,” sort of. Orwell’s concept of an endless present has proved true like much he suggested, but he could not anticipate the technology would outstrip the ability to maintain a narrative, I think. I’m not optimistic about Normie, either, but the likely inability to maintain the pace of narrative now required offers some hope.
Saw that over the course of 24 hours on Fedi servers when that tranny shot the kids in Kentucky. The regime sock puppets started at “ban all guns”, to (interestingly) “trannies are making gay people look bad”, to finally “police were too violent and the victims did something to deserve it anyway”. Even they were exhausted carrying that much water so that with that last shooting it was mostly quiet with a “wait and see” approach.
Even if by the end of June ALL of Ukraine is overrun by Russia, I don’t think Normie will break free of his normalcy bias. If you point out to him that the same people who lied about Russiagate and the southern border are the same people who lied about Ukraine, it will make no difference. “Russia/Putin is evil” is a mantra so firmly ensconced by the Lügenpresse that most simply will not be able to reach escape velocity from this strange attraction to the Narrative/Industrial complex. It will take something more catastrophic to blast out of that bubble.
Milošević is mustache man. Saddam is mustache man. Putin is mustache man. Trump is mustache man. They lack any type of intellectual nuance, so they sound like toddlers. When my daughter was first learning words, all birds were ducks. A swan is a duck. A goose is a duck. A pigeon is a duck.
My daughter too. Everything was “cat”. A car, a tree, a shoe – all nouns were “cat” to her.
Jazzhands McFeels calls that “light-switch brain.” On—-off, Good Guy—-Bad Guy.
I once took my nephew to the zoo – he must have been 18 months or so, just saying his first words.
Zoo bored him to hysteria so we quickly left and sat on a bench outside, where he immediately peaked up by the sight of the cars zooming by. “Car!” he’d exclaim and point. “Car! Car!” pointing and staring excitedly at each vehicle. A fire engine rumbles by: “CAR!” he screams and stares at me incredulously, like “are you seeing what I’m seeing, bro?” We sat there a good half hour and he never got tired of it.
Yessir, boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.
Evidently you have not followed any of President Putin’s recent well reasoned and presented speeches; toddler he is not.
No one said he was. You misread the comment.
If it eats crumb and shits on statues like a duck, coos like a duck, and is called “squab” on hoity-toity menus, it’s probably a pigeon. 🙂
and what are you? a retarded moron that thinks that being wrong/unclear about something is a good thing.
overcomplexity is a sign of stupidity/being wrong/not knowing, not of intellect.
you think you are smart. in reality you are extremely stupid and especially dangerous. a typical retarded American. 99,999 procent of your polulation.
I have friends who are reluctantly starting to come around to the idea that 9-11 was an inside job probably done with assistance from at least one of our so called allies.
They cannot however accept that the Ukraine bilge put out by the media is all a lie. To me very strange psychology.
“Industrial bullshit machine.” What a glorious phrase! It distills the systems of the modern West to their essence about as succinctly as possible. Zman really crushed it with this essay today. It puts me in mind of the following quote:
“America’s leading industry is still the manufacture, packaging, distribution, and marketing of bullshit. High-quality, grade-A, prime-cut, pure, American bullshit.”
– George Carlin
Though Carlin was a leftist, he at least exhibited skepticism/cynicism toward the system. He is among those leftists of yesteryear whom I (sort of) miss, no matter how wrong-headed they may have been about a lot of matters. The spirit of rebellion is somewhat admirable even when it’s misguided. Today’s progressives have devolved into mindless lackeys.
And yet the leftists still think of themselves as bold, independent free-thinkers, while WE are the docile servants of authority. After all, Trump was an “authoritarian”, right? And so everyone vaguely on “his side” is just searching for a martinet to swing into position behind, and longing for the sharp crack of the whip. I can’t talk to these people anymore; I feel offended and grieved on behalf of the English language, that such perversion of words can exist.
Suppose I’ve resigned myself to leftists demonstrating rather breathtaking self-unawareness. I consequently find it perversely amusing that they can essentially control all the major apparatuses of our culture yet still consider themselves radicals in the vanguard of righteous resistance. There appears no limit to the ability of humans to delude themselves about themselves. Ego is quite the manipulator. That applies to ALL of us, not simply leftists. Beware.
Leftists are about to experience cognitive dissonance if RFK Jr’s campaign gathers some momentum. He polls at 19 percent currently.
Since he’s a Kennedy, the leftists should like him, right? Yet he’s talking about things like corporate control of government. In the recent past, the leftists would be on board with that.
But now things have changed. Since the corporations (really BlackRock) push DIE and ESG scores, they’re the Good Guys to the left. So it’s confusing. But it’s going to be amusing to watch.
The best outcome of a RFKJr candidacy may be his AGW lunacy could cause the rest of the Left to back off theirs. Everything is Column A and Column B to them. Even Normiecons can wander off the reservation a wee tiny bit from time to time, but leftists, not a centimeter. So if RFKJr=bad, his climate alarmism=bad. Greta will be unavailable for comment, which is unfortunate given the bind it places her in.
“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”
For the System as a whole, yes. For the Elite at the top, no. They can just tax us at gunpoint and force tribute by way of debt, military threats and seigniorage on foreign peoples. Just as in Rome, this can go on for a long time before the inexorable forces of Thermodynamics assert themselves.
The narrative system is the Psyop that accompanies this process. The plunder requires moral justification. Enter the media toadies.
Yet the system does require occasional victories and a good Caesar every now and then. We’ve had a few Caligulas and Neros recently, so you would think we might get a Marcus Aurelius at some point. Or could the Persians capture Uncle Joe at some point?
I been around now for about 2/3rds of a century, and to the best of my knowledge, have never known anyone who read the NY Times or Washington Post. Nor have I read so much as a single article in either of these publications EVER. Any yet, I am continually assaulted by references to them in other media (like this blog), which is the only exposure to them that i ever get. The experience is like stepping in dog shit diarrhea while out for a pleasant walk. I DON’T CARE ABOUT MANUFACTURED NARRATIVES BY PEOPLE WHO ARE INSANE AND MALICIOUS. And I can’t stop it, so the best I can do is to proactively avoid it.
And I think a lot of people are just like me, i.e. fed up with the permanent stink of narratives that permeate everything and everywhere. It’s like living next to a sewage treatment plant and being downwind.
But this is another problem that is cured by collapse. All the worthless shit mongers will be out of work and likely starving because the demand for shit shovelers will fall to zero.
When you are exposed do you have fantasies of cutting out forked tounges? I do.
Does that make me a paranoid crazy white man or am I one of those by default?
What about the fact that I’m always armed? Some might say that proves their point. Others consider being armed prudent.
I live in rural Pennsylvania. I do not think I have encountered a single person in the last two years who supports Biden or anything his cabal is doing. In fact, most people with whom I have social intercourse do not hesitate to express their disdain for him and his crew as well as a great deal of concern for the direction we are being taken by that crew. When one uses the term “normie,” I can’t think of a group of people who fit that definition better than those in my immediate surroundings, yet none of them merit the scorn heaped on them by those who, like Wkathman, seem to believe they are unaware of what is transpiring and/or too passive to do anything about it. I mean no offense, but I would not be so quick to judge everyone who fails to pass some ideological purity test. Such a reflexive condemnation is something more suited to those on the left.
“…I can’t think of a group of people who fit that definition better…”
IMO, there you are wrong. And enjoying NOT living among the “Normie” types. Using the term of an enemy combatant, I dare say you are instead describing the “deplorables.” Dastardly Trump supporters.
On the other hand, I live within 100 miles of a blue shitlibopolous. About 75% of the people around me fit the “Normie” tag to a tee. Even the ones that are ‘concerned about the direction of the country’ regurgitate all the known tropes and will swallow and spit back up whatever new ones come along.
It’s not reflexive, it’s observational.
somebody in that state voted for fetterman.
Go into Pittsburgh or Philadelphia and you’ll find them all. The Trump people are just as bad as the biden people. Both cling to their extremes because their life depends on the current system and they can’t imagine any other way of living.
“I don’t know a single person who voted for Nixon!” It’s almost like we’re two separate people groups, two different cultures, two different religions, two different dialects of English, two different subgroup ethnicities, who have been forcibly mashed together against their respective wills via the bloodshed of hundreds of thousands of our ancestors and the continuing subjugation of one people by violence and force of the other in the name of “our values” of collective salvation.
Exactly,Tom.
They say the biggest lie ever told was that the Devil doesn’t exist.
But that’s a piker compared with the real biggest lie ever told. The ‘biggest lie” ever told is that the bullshit produced by MTV, MSNBC, the DC-oriented reassurance machines, and the captive schools is American Culture.
They do not represent Americans’ dreams, urges or traditions. They exist to misrepresent Americans to themselves and to antagonistic foreigners. Their products ARE NOT America.
I personally have known, in recent years, at least two NYT subscribers, one of them an insane (literally insane, bipolar) trust fund baby, the other a recognized “war hero” who reads it cover to cover daily to “keep his mind sharp” in his old age. I probably know more than that, those are just the two I know for sure. Moreover, I don’t associate with many people, so from my perspective two is a big number. I deduce that there are plenty of NYT readers out there.
But I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone who reads the Washington Post.
I read the NYT to see what they’re planning. They tell you in advance. The great thing is they can’t execute on it, so it just ends up being anarchy. But that’s fine too.
Also I like Wordle.
I recently saw a quote (Jefferson’s maybe) the gist of which was: If the press is mostly lies, then a man is literally closer to the truth by reading nothing.
If one were truly blackpilled, one would see the firings of the Narrative-makers at e.g. Twitter as the Empire’s “saving throw.” Stick with me here: People are always asking what’s to become of all the people thrown out of work by the Robot Revolution. Since we’re Reality people, when we think about this problem, we think about the average-or-slightly-lower IQ guy who had a good factory job in the 1950s, but is now on the dole.
But the AI revolution is putting the Laptop Class out of work equally fast. Musk can fire those people because they did nothing technical; but they can’t get new jobs because why does any other company need them, when ChatGPT can do their “jobs” — Narrative Maintenance — better than they can, faster, and for free?
One traditional method for soaking up excess labor is: Cannon Fodder. And if we’re going to have a big war with China — currently scheduled for Summer 2025, per the Pentagon itself — we’re gonna need a much bigger army. It seems weird — the Laptop Class are NOT, to put it mildly, physically fit — but consider that the ones scheduling the war are True Believers, who really think that men can become women, and vice versa, just by declaring their pronouns. Why not put them all in the infantry? If Bruce is really Caitlyn — and of course he is, you haters! — then Snowflake Mc iPad really is an infantryman; just look at all the army stuff she’s wearing in her selfies!
They also can convince themselves everything is fine and prosperity either is here or right around the corner, too. That doesn’t preclude the South China Sea boogie, of course, since they can entertain many fantasies at once.
The average make-work “professional” can be slotted directly into one of those new licensed-to-kill IRS jobs. There’s no skill they’re lacking. Cops are panic shooters. All a soy-troon with a 9mm he can barely lift needs is the *desire* to mag-dump into your kids (and environs). They all have it.
I would suggest that the unfettered importation of “fighting age males” across our Southern border is less about replacing whitey (which may be a side benefit to the elites) but more for stockpiling warm bodies for the upcoming global war. We’ve probably imported enough hispanics in the last 3 years to sustain at least 2 years of open warfare with China. God knows young white males wont be motivated…and rightfully so.
Beyond the diminishing returns of complexity, there is also the issues of diversity, distrust, and bad faith actors.
The complex society we live in was built under a more homogeneous demographic, high levels of trust and better overall moral behavior.
We are taking this hugely complex, intricate machine and substituting in off-brand parts from various sources that were never meant to work together. The parts are then feeding bad functionality into the system and requiring more maintenance.
Overlaying this is the dishonesty and lies that are pervasive under which the system must be maintained. The elite may now the real score, but the low to mid level managers who must keep the machine running are basing their decisions on outright falsehoods.
A severe reduction in complexity is almost inevitable unless certain AI scenarios play out.
Like trying to repair your car engine with a bicycle. “You have two giraffes-the government requires you to take harmonica lessons.”
“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.”
Twas always so. Remember Walter Duranty, NYT reporter, dissolute living in Moscow and telling the world that there was no famine in Ukraine? Robert Conquest detailed it in ‘Harvest of Sorrow.’ Duranty’s Pulitzer has never been rescinded.
Then there was Herbert Matthews, the NYT reporter who invented the mythos of Fidel Castro and happily fed State Dept. propaganda to the culterati.
Judith Miller, pushing Cheney’s lies about yellow cake so Cheney could go on the Sunday talking head shows and push his own narrative that got front paged. Kristof’s lies about Steven Hatfill and the anthrax killer. Jayson Blair.
I could go on but you get the point.
And we can go even further back; at least to 1898. That was when we got Hearst’s, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”
Mass media has always been just a propaganda machine.
Broken Glass is weirdly one my favorite movies. It’s just a biopic of Stephen Glass in his time at The New Republic, starring Anakin Skywalker. They highlighted a few of his completely fake stories that were obviously made up, but they fit the narrative, so they weren’t even fact-checked. As the movie tells it, he only got busted because a reporter at Wired was dressed-down by his bossm wondering why Wired didn’t break a tech story, so the Wired guy started digging.
We need to look at Mexico as a decent example of how the culture won’t be able to support widespread complex systems except for those that seriously impact the elite.
The rest of the populace will get used to substandard products and services whether utilities, law enforcement, building quality or car maintenance just to name a few.
Life will go on. Yes, white people expect more but our replacements don’t.
If we complain about the deteriorating conditions that will just be our white privilege talking
I imagine they will also Hamilton the history so that we have no right to complain because we didn’t build it n sheeeit
All these tent poles to prop up this corrupt and debauched empire. You can even see it in the funding sent out to foreign NGOs and others to promote the evil GAE agenda.
Look at this little innocuous tidbit in the news:
‘’ Biden administration is offering a $500,000 grant to help teach the English language in Pakistan, in part by providing “intensive professional development courses for Pakistani transgender youth.‘’
Not really that much but imagine different forms times thousands across the globe and you can see an infrastructure being being developed.
Tent poles.
Reporters also used to come from the dirt people. I remember when every city newspaper had some disheveled townie barfly who would report on petty corruption and the goings-on in the halls of power and in the courts. He got to know contacts over decades. He wasn’t going anywhere. He had a bias, but he was doing legwork and making calls and hanging around drab buildings.
Though back then, college cost about $1000 so even a dirt person who wrote well could join a city newspaper as a cub reporter, eventually becoming a well-known columnist. Nowadays you have to go to J-school and it costs north of $100K, so only the cloud people (or diversity picks) can get a foot in the door. And you know the kind of biases they have, and none of them would dare work for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for more than a couple years.
The university indoctrination system was not yet nearly as refined, nor had the regime media yet begun to curate new “talent” more or less exclusively from select approved university sources, from which the new employee arrived pre-indoctrinated to a degree that his propagation of the cloud message was instinctive.
Just as the Romans left Britain first during their long withdrawal, I wonder where the US a will leave first? Africa? SE Asia?
They’ve already left California.
It will be the Middle East and Central Asia. Afghanistan was the start of the long withdrawal. The GAE is in retreat. We still have an enormous military, but the peak is past.
We’re sending arms to Ukraine but we’re not occupying it, and we certainly haven’t formally declared war on Russia. Because we can’t and we won’t. All we can do is send arms.
As for Taiwan, it will be similar. If China invades, our media will just get the Taiwan pins out and send arms. But Taiwan is an island fortress and China has the patience of Job. Nothing to see there.
There’s your daily whitepill.
this same lack of abiiity to enforce their will applies to their domestic plans; they can’t build a police state because they can’t build.
I went to find some specific septic system regulation for my state and came upon a training manual for those hoping to get state certified to do septic work. 125 pages, of septic regs. It’s not light reading either as it’s basically a long list of sentences where the reader can see that at some point someone thought it was a bright idea to install his system under a power pole, or discharge all the storm water runoff through it, etc. It’s self-defeating now as getting one installed is now so prohibitively expensive (if it can be done at all) that, as I “joke”, one is better off finding an Amish guy to pay cash to and getting it installed in the middle of the night (backhoe usage would be tricky though).
where I live there is literally no one available (within a one year out time frame) to do affordable and reliable repairs of a septic, electrical wiring, house painting, roof repair, chimney cleaning or washer repair and they don’t even call you back to tell you they cannot help you. If I want gravel for my driveway it isn’t a stretch to saying we might have to break the rocks ourselves. This also contributes to the general deterioration of properties as the older people occupying them can no longer afford or be physically able to do these things. When your 30 year old metal roof rusts through, just throw a blue tarp over it and put a couple tires on top to hold it down.
We in fact painted and repaired a metal roof a few years earlier than necessary precisely because it seems likely that workers and materials may not be readily available, if at all, in another few years.
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