Note: There is no show today, but for those who need to hear my voice, I was on a couple of popular programs over the holidays. I was on with Paul Ramsey and his lovely new cohost, Alicia Bittle. Rumble link. I was also on with Mike Farris. The Rumble link for that is here.
One of the strange aspects of the so-called information age is how little information there is relative to what was expected at the start of this age. At the dawn of the internet, everyone assumed we were on the cusp of a great democratization of information, where everything was available to the public. Not only would the sum of all human knowledge be made available to everyone, but the ability to conceal information, like government secrets, would be near impossible.
It has not turned out like that at all. In many ways, people are more ignorant now than fifty years ago, despite having access to the great data stream. It turns out that you must want the information in order to have it and most people just want to be told what to think. Faced with the great firehose of information called the internet, most people simply find a narrative source to trust. Instead of gathering up the available facts to understand what is happening, people just trust the news.
This was always true, but prior to the internet there was some competition inside the media for an audience. That meant doing genuine reporting. The local newspaper had lots of information about what was happening. One unexpected result of the internet is a mass convergences of mainstream news sources and a narrowing of what is presented to the readership. Look at a aggregation site like this one and you can see the echo chamber that is mass media quite clearly.
The internet killed off local news and the organs that provided it. The days of making a career as a newspaperman covering local events are gone. Along with it the apprenticeship system has disappeared. People entering media as a career now step into a narrow, vertical world where the major regime outlets are at the top and everything below is aimed at feeding people into those major outlets, while echoing everything that comes from those outlets.
It is why we know so little about the Jefferey Epstein case, relative to what should and could be known about it. The major media outlets have little interest, beyond parroting government statements, so there is nothing for the rest of the system to echo and amplify. For example, the two guards that night have been ignored by the media, despite being the second to last people to see Epstein alive. The NY Times does not care about the case, so no one else cares about it.
This is a pattern with most big stories. The lunatic they caught outside of Trump’s Florida villa should be great tabloid fodder. The guy’s internet profile alone makes for great clickbait, but the major media has no interest in him. In the analog age, camera crews would have tracked down everyone who met him. In this age of a trillion cameras, no cameras show up anywhere interesting. The same is true for the kid who allegedly took shots at Trump in Pennsylvania.
There are many ways to describe the modern mass media, but one label that fits is “deliberately uninterested.” There is a weird lack of curiosity in the modern media that defies easy explanation. Sure, the people running the Post or the Times coordinate with the government, but one would think a small outlet would see this gap as a chance to grow their audiences. Instead, even C-list outlets follow the lead of the Times and Post into the great darkness of modern ignorance.
Look at the New Year’s Day terror attacks. Now that the identity of the two people involved are known, it should spawn a million questions. The obvious place to start is the fact that neither man fits the profile. According to the government, for no reason at all, two military men went crazy on the same day. The Vegas guy’s back story makes no sense whatsoever, but so far no one in the mass media has found anything weird about it, much less questioned the government about it.
Both guys were attached to Fort Bragg, which is a pretty big coincidence all by itself, but this is not the first terrorist attached to that base. This alone should spark some curiosity by the media, but when you look closer you see there is a lot of violent crime attached to this base. It is the sort of thing that in a prior age would be the basis for a big expose in a major news outlet. Reporters would have been tasked with asked the government about it, but today it gets ignored.
Even if the Fort Bragg connection is mere coincidence, we will never learn anything about these two cases. The “journalists” will cut and paste some government press releases into their sites and a week from now it will be forgotten. Like the Trump assassins, the major media outlets will simply ignore these stories and so the rest of the media system will ignore them too. In their place will be the latest conspiracy theories around Trump that the Post and Times are peddling.
The great leaving alone that now defines official media is, in part, due to the professionalization of media. In the analog days, the news was a working-class job, so there was a degree of distrust between the media and the ruling class. Today, every journalism student imagines herself as part of the ruling class and one day she will do her part to further the mission of the ruling class. To reach the top of the media system, one must be an unusually good toady.
There is also the fact that the interests of the ruling elites have consolidated, which has resulted in confluence in the media. In the old days, the guy who owned a major newspaper saw the guy who owned a factory or the guy who owned the bank as a rival, so he was fine with his people poking around in their business. He also looked at the government as a potential problem, so maintaining an adversarial relationship with the political class was in his interests.
Financialization has resulted in a narrow economic elite. They are all in the same boat when it comes to how they view society, so they no longer see each other as rivals, and they all depend on the managerial elite to run things. In the media, the result has been a shift in skill selection. In the old days, getting dirt on a banker and a politician doing deals would make your career. Today, what makes your career is building a relationship with them, so they trust you with information.
The shift to access journalism has come with new selection pressure. In the old days, noticing patterns and having a curious mind were rewarded. Today, those are qualities that get you weeded out early in your career. What matters today is the right LinkedIn profile and the right relationships. It a world where curiosity can get you expelled from your social group, in addition to our profession, it is no wonder that everyone in the media is good at never noticing anything.
This also explains the obsession with narratives. Now that the media is absorbed into the managerial class, it is assumed that controlling the narrative is the key to pushing the programs and initiates of the managerial class. As you see inside every large corporation, everyone feels the need to support the latest things and be seen promoting the latest things, so what little imagination and creativity remains, flows into creating and promoting the narratives that support the latest things.
The result of this is we now live in an age of ignorance. The objective facts are often more readily available than in the prior age, but they are so layered in pejorative narratives that they are difficult to locate. With no institutional support in finding and assembling the facts, we are left with narratives that often serve no other purpose than to make the participants feel like winners. The great leaving alone that defines the public square has created an age of ignorance.
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I had an inside view of DC journalism in the 1990s and early 2000s. What Z writes about was already evolving but not yet set in stone. There were still a few old-timers, some who didn’t even have a college degree, but they were on the way out. Btw, the no-college or state college older guys always worked the DC bureau of a regional paper not one of the big players, NY Times, WaPo, LA Times and a few others. However, even then, newspapers were starting to feel the pinch from the internet, so the regional papers were starting to… Read more »
The internet destroyed the business model of newspapers – classified advertising. It also dented regular advertising. All editorial independence collapsed (the remaining advertisers were all corporate) and resources for actual reporting (which is expensive) vanished. Were it not for the fact that the major newspaper companies diversified into local TV, cell phones and baseball teams etc, they would have gone bankrupt long ago. The NY Times is the only major paper that didn’t meaningfully diversify and still survived.
Yeah, the writing was on the wall, though the papers couldn’t figure out how to deal with it.
I’m more talking about the DC journalism scene than the newspaper business in general, though they definitely overlapped. A lot of the DC reporters switched to PR for the various organizations around DC.
I disagree. This is the fantasy the media tells itself, but they forget the newspaper industry began the collapse in the early 80s. If they had a quality product, they could sell it either digitally or paper based. Lots of people still buy paperback books. Millions of e-books are sold for a profit every year. The problem with the newspapers, at least, is they have a crappy product tailored to a small slice of people in a national audience. They should be primarily focused on local news and stories aimed at a general local audience rather than a progressive audience… Read more »
Tars: why are you disagreeing with me? It’s straight facts regarding the revenue base of major city dailies. Meanwhile, local newspapers have been gobbled up by national chains like Gannett (USA Today), Hearst, Lee and McClatchy (Sacramento Bee etc). All these companies diversified into TV/Radio also and that’s why they survived. They have executed the exact strategy you suggested. Those who didn’t (Knight-Ridder in Philadelphia) went bust. Affiliated (Boston Globe) had enormous holdings in McCaw Cellular (now ATT) and that’s how it kept going before selling to the NY Times.
You’re looking at the symptom and not the cause. They cannot sell the ads at a high enough price because they don’t have the audience. The newspaper industry was not healthy when the internet came along. Sure, the internet would have hurt the industry at least a little had it been healthy when the internet came along. But it was already in free fall and bleeding readership and subscriptions. I remember all the ridiculous excuses they made back then, primarily that people didn’t want to read. No, they didn’t want to read progressive propaganda and pay for the privilege. Why… Read more »
“My local papers are The Daily News and Inquirer ({Philadelphia). I would read at least one if they weren’t awful progressive rags. I would either get the paper delivered or use paid digital. “ I would pay for solid and concise, local news. I can’t get it. My choice is being screeched at by off the charts liberals who mix in current events while doing their best to hide who actually did the crimes, etc or nothing. I’ve chosen the later. We had connections in the newspaper business for a while. Absolutely agree that it was on the decline before the… Read more »
Their audience went to cable TV and to the internet. I have agreed several times with you that their model was already under pressure before the Internet. Their diversifications allowed them to stay in business longer than otherwise would have been possible. I offered you a local example of a company (Knight Ridder) that did nothing and went bust.
No they didn’t. Cable TV by its very nature is a national news service which, at its best, compliments a local news source. It absolutely cannot replace a local newspaper. TV news had been around for quite a while. Cable didn’t even exist in Philly until like 1988. The Philadelphia Bulletin went out of business in like 82. PNI is still around, AFAIK. Their papers (Inquirer and Daily News) certainly are. I ask you again, respectfully, what other business requires separate profitable businesses to prop up the other? The example you gave was a newspaper company “diversifying” into a cellular… Read more »
Good point, but the New York Times didn’t survive. It is owned by Carlos Slim, the guy who owns Mexico.
Yes Mow, but you understood my point.
The news business model also changed from trying to make a profit with a wide viewership, to regime funding in return for supporting the narrative. CNN or the NYT could have no viewers or subscribers, lose millions, and stay in business indefinitely.
I know I’ve posted before about the regime laundering taxpayer funds into the msm, right out in the open, through MIC ad buys and pharma ad buys. It’s remarkable how few (if any) people question why Lockheed Martin, which sells zero consumer products, and whose only customers are governments, is advertising on tv.
And of course the Pharma companies.
The media was already in its current state by the early 2000s and was already in consolidation. I don’t think it was the internet that caused the collapse of the newspaper industry. Remember, before internet really started catching on, they were blaming all their problems on the readers with ridiculous claims like people don’t want to read. What really happened was SJWs took over the media. This happened a long time ago. Who the hell wants to pay for a paper to be lectured by SJWs? Newspapers really started collapsing in the 80s. They are less than half the size… Read more »
Yes, on my old site I did an analysis of the daily circulation of the LA Times. It peaked in about 1985 and then started to decline. Long before the internet.
Hispanics don’t read papers and mostly don’t read. Book sales in Mexico are dwarfed by those in Finland, which has a much bigger translation and print barrier. Demographic changes alone would make readership decline, but …
SJW started in the 1980s and drove readers away even above demographic decline.
“Hispanics don’t read papers and mostly don’t read. Book sales in Mexico are dwarfed by those in Finland …”
Yes, that jibes with what I’ve seen on my two visits to Mexico. Bookshops are few and far between, and often it’s difficult to even find a place to buy a newspaper.
The decline in newspaper journalism antedates the internet. “Two newspaper towns” were disappearing in the 1980s as television “journalism” was ascendant. Along with the emphasis on televised journalism came the feminization of journalism. In a visual media it is far more important to be good-looking than inquisitive or smart. Women are the ultimate go-along-with the crowd animals, completely a different species than the ugly, H.L. Mencken-type misanthropes and cynics who populated print journalism in the early-to mid- 20th century, sustaining themselves almost entirely on coffee and cigarettes. There is no such thing as “in-depth” reporting on television, it is all… Read more »
True, but the loss of advertising to the internet and classified ads to Craigslist was devastating. But, yes, television, especially cable TV like CNN was already hitting the newspapers hard.
Since you mention loss of ad revenue, there is at least a partial reason for this. Waay long ago the (progressive) newspapers here began to censor ad’s. For example, none could be placed for (legal) firearms transactions. There were other “social ills” that would not be accommodated as well. They were so adamant, that the morning paper which owned the printing presses used by the afternoon, conservative paper insisted they would not print the afternoon paper if it contained the forbidden ad’s.
It was then I let my subscription lapse.
Absolutely. The inflation of the 70s and the spike in paper costs hurt them severely. Some of them even bought stakes in paper mills and got screwed doubly when paper prices collapsed in the early 80s. But I agree with Citizen that the classified losses were the nail in the coffin.
Classified ads were pretty inexpensive. I sold a few cars on classifieds and they were like 15-20 bucks for a few days. Aside from the full, half and quarter page ads, the big money maker was probably help wanted. The first time I was involved in hiring someone, I was shocked at the price. It was hundreds of Dollars.
This tracks with the resentment of Keir Starmer. He hit up some rich people for a couple of hundred thousand for new clothes. Apparently he felt he needed that. Even though he’d be a regime capo for years, brushing Rotherham under the rug years ago. FWIW Elon Musk is at war with Starmer and Labor. He’s funding Farage, blasting Starmer and his minions over Rotherham, which has errupted again, and has called for regime change there, and in Germany also (backing the AfD presumably to save his Tesla plants in Germany). Maybe Labor should not have picked a fight with… Read more »
Seeking truth is always the last casualty of unbridled decadence…
‘Fate of Empires’ by SirJohn Glubb
p.20
“Decadence is a moral and spiritual disease, resulting from too long a period of wealth and power, producing cynicism, decline of religion, pessimism and frivolity. The citizens of such a nation will no longer make an effort to save themselves, because they are not convinced that anything in life is worth saving.”
There is also the fact that the American population has become noticeably dumber, as test scores have demonstrated…Less intelligent people are less curious about the world….
It’s not so much that the native population is getting dumber, but that they are getting replaced with dumber races.
It’s both.
I have one friend from high school with better grades than I did who had two kids.
The rest of my “elite” cohort? Never married, married no kids or married one-kid.
By the grace of God my smoking hot wife is also really smart, so my kids are smarter than I am, but they will still be much dumber than their maternal grandparents.
The typical estimate is a decrease of 2-3 points per decade decline or a generational move of about 10 points (25 years per generation). Now if the typical IA comes across the border with an 80-85 IQ…it might seem not like much, but it will skew the curve quite a bit to the low end.
I wish that were the case, but…
That quote fits very well with my fellow countrymen (English).
They seem quite happy with a Muslim race baiter in charge of their Capital and Pajeets and Nigerians as heads and potential heads of their government. They recently elected a total c#nt.
The country is being invaded from France by thousands of fighting age illegals, mainly Muslims, and they seem more concerned with crap on TV or sportsball.
Most English people did not vote for Starmer. If you lived in the UK and spoke to English people you would know how angry the average person is about the effeminate sociopaths running our country.
I will admit that there appears to be a solid 30% who are cattle and just live on corporate slop.
My understanding is that Labor had a governing majority because English Tories refused to vote in this last cycle. Without another Trump in the next election cycle and another 4 years of ignored promises, that might well be us too.
“If you don’t read the news, you’re uninformed. If you read the news, you’re misinformed.”
It’s not just sad; it’s dangerous. Governments getting away with starting wars or getting caught exploiting children for blackmail material (Epstein) just encourages to new heights of depravity.
Highlights if the UK Pakistani rape gangs are making the rounds in X. Sickening. Why don’t the British public “do something?!”
Turn that gaze on yourself, American.
sigh.
Ryan Routh, the Trump assassin-wannabe visited fort Bragg over 100 times. I am sure that is a coincidence or otherwise fbi and media would be all over it (sarc).
147 times to be precise
https://x.com/TonySeruga/status/1870474697676325217
Which is pretty incredible considering that the guy was a convicted felon. I’m not military but I have relatives who are, I’ve been to Ft. Bragg (or Ft. Fagg or whatever they call it now) and a number of other installations. Bragg had pretty tight security compared to others. It was armed contract security, but you had to sign in, tell them where you were going and what authorized personnel you were with, scan your “Real ID,” potentially submit to a vehicle search, etc. etc. I got the definite impression these guys weren’t fucking around and if anything was out… Read more »
No one and no vehicle is getting on base without ID and a sticker on said vehicle. After 9/11 these rules were put in place and strictly enforced. ‘Strictly enforced’ means they will shoot your ass if you try to rush the base, end of story.
So, if it is true that he was on base that many times, he was allowed to be. Of course, we will never definitively know if he was on base or not for the reasons Zman states above.
Sticker and ID required was around long before 9/11. Sometimes just the sticker, but often ID too.
Stickers are a thing of the past and have been for years. They were such a security vulnerability.
Now you have to show your ID card to get on base.
Jeffrey MacDonald was stationed at Bragg. If anybody here besides me remembers that. Must be something in the water.
Perhaps Ft. Bragg is where they do all the MKultra now
“Precise,” is it? And who is this Seruga guy when he’s at home?
That is astounding…Fort Bragg is quite some distance from Pennsylvania, so that virtually proves that it was an MIC operation…
Ryan Routh’s ex-wife, who he claims bankrolled his trips to Ukraine, etc., works for a security contractor located not far from her former CIA employer in Langley, Virginia. Cell phone tracking data shows someone who regularly visited Thomas Crooks’ home and work also frequented a building in Washington, DC where an FBI office is located. It should hardly surprise anyone to find connections of such to the military, as well. So many coincidences!
Well, at least a lot of *reported* coincidences.
Of course, we could just accept the unnamed FBI sources telling us that the Iranians were behind it. Now, why would they be saying that? Most likely, it will all get quickly memory-holed.
(Shhh. Routh was the Florida golf course guy. Cook was PA.)
But either one will be 14-16ish hours away, driving from Ft. Fagg, I think.
I don’t have my ancient Dist-o-map handy, so a very rough estimate from a rusty memory.
Probably got an MK unit at Bragg. Bragg’s one of the biggest military installations on the planet.
There are a number of military production facilities for manchurian candidates across America. It’s a well-honed program by this time.
I only was at Bragg once. It’s a giant base with units across the spectrum from regular support and airborne training, to spooky stuff like Special Forces and beyond.
Good place to hide stuff. Like the Smithsonian.
Not to mention Dr MacDonald.
I dunno if we’re missing anything with the death of the media or not, Z. In today’s day and age it seems to me that ignorance is pretty much a deliberate choice with people in the triple digit IQ range. i was there during the Golden Age Of Journalism and honestly…it wasn’t that great. Back in the day they wrote at a grade 7 level in order to be understood by the common dirt people. Politics were reported at a grade level one or two years lower. Consider the political cartoons of the time…every second meme-wank or shit poaster on… Read more »
Reporters of old didn’t need to be well educated. They followed a template to convey actual events. Hemingway started as a reporter, which is why his writing is so succinct. Today’s reporters are much better writers, but they no longer convey the truth.
They aren’t better writers either. The typos are off the charts without proof readers. School educations back in the day were much more rigorous. Modern college graduates, who probably could not make it through senior level high school back in the day, just like the idea that they are writers. That sort of writing is easily the worst type of material to read.
They write embarrassingly badly. Very little understanding of punctuation, erroneous word choice, fragments, run-ons, you name it. I’m no Dostoevsky, but I was writing better at 16 than they write at 46.
“The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.”
Oscar Wilde
I really HATE the now-universal adoption of “they” instead of “he” for a singular pronoun, and the capitalization of “black” when referring to the colored race.
To add to your point, journalism was only seen as respectable sort of profession post WWII. I recommend to anyone watching the movie His Girl Friday for a very dark view of the newspaper business before WWII. The “happy” ending kind of was it appeared that a pair of married news junkies got back to together. In movie The Philadelphia Story, the happy ending afforded to the “B story” was two people getting out of the newspaper business to do something real. My husband recounted a tale of working in IT right before the death of the local newsroom. It… Read more »
Recommend the one with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Best part (for purposes of this discussion) is the scene where each reporter is phoning in his version of the “story” that just broke full of ridiculous exaggerations.
Check out The Front Page, the play and the movie His Girl Friday was based on. One of the great comments from TV Tropes is under “Blatant Lies”:
The reporters phoning their editors about Williams’s capture – an event that they are currently watching – describing it as a blood-filled firefight.
“…second to last people to see Epstein alive”.
Very droll, Z.
What Z describes is the consolidation of a unitary power structure. The components of the Power Structure are the media, academia, corporations, Hollywood and FedGov. As Z notes, in the bygone years, there was usually some degree of distrust and antagonism between those components. Now they function as a Hydra whose sole purpose is to advance an agenda. The twin fulcrums of that agenda are rank greed and anti-white racism.
It’s not quite anti-White racism specifically. I would call it greed and the wish to live forever while hating HBD. The PTB don’t like Japan or even the Chinese anymore than us. We see the ant-white angle of transhumanism for obvious reasons.
Maybe – but the PTB can’t do much about China, and only to a lesser extent can they do much to Japan. Neither of those have the same immigration death wish that plagues the West. Because they have more access to the West, they focus their efforts on us.
“Neither of those have the same immigration death wish that plagues the West. Because they have more access to the West, they focus their efforts on us.” – The US specifically has been settled recently so it’s harder to justify stopping the party. However, at no time has open borders ever been popular with any native population. Only one or two generations, brainwashed by their TVs and schools, even thought it was a good idea. We are going to feel it more because it’s directed to us. We maybe even be more of their efforts overall. We not all of… Read more »
“It’s not quite anti-White racism specifically.”
Yes it is, as a simple, straightforward matter of fact.
Explain why UBISoft, based in France, put a black protagonist in their upcoming Assassins Creed game based in “historic” feudal japan if it’s just against Whites? I can dig up other examples of those sorts of actions.
The global elites don’t have to hate just Europeans to make this bad.
Why? Because, in addition to their searing hatred of the Blue-Eyed Ice Devil, Leftists possess an unhinged adoration of the Hutu. That’s why.
I think I need to clarify a bit. Assassins’ Creed is an older video game line that has prided itself on letting people go on military type missions in historical eras. At one point they were marketing to schools for history lessons. The newest Assassin Creed video game, which is scheduled to be released in February, is supposed set in feudal Japan where people will play as a samurai. And UbiSoft, the maker, decided to go ahead and make the main playable “samurai” a black man. So yes really, a huge muscular black man will be in dubious position relative… Read more »
One guy in a video game doesn’t connote generalized hatred for the Japs. The broadbased and constant vilification of whitey proves abhorrence of the white race.
“One guy in a video game doesn’t connote generalized hatred for the Japs. ” The outcry in Japan was huge, something UbiSoft should have anticipated. Japanese gamers, of which there were many, had wanted to play themselves, not a ghetto guy in samurai outfit. They even “ghettoized” the sound track (really!). Anyone with any working brain cells should have known that would be a big deal and highly disrespectful to Japanese history and culture. Apparently there was even talk of the government getting involved, it was that big of an event. It’s been suspended for now because the video game has… Read more »
I’m not knowledgeable about video games; what kind of demographic is most likely to buy and play that game?
Broadly, men of all ages and demographics. Video games have movie demographics and a larger audience modernly. If we want the largest demographic in the West, it is the 13-55 White male one.
Video games have been crashing the last several years thanks to “diversity” pushes into the game that make them boring and unattractive to play. A movie is just 2 hours of interaction. Big video games take days to complete.
It really started with Watergate, where the FBI, CIA and Washington Post colluded to bring down a president. But that was more the exception in the 70s.
That coalescence was certainly symptomatic. However, I think the real root was the takeover of academia by the postmodern Left, which then used the professorate to indoctrinate Leftist change-agents who went thither into the media, Hollywood, big bidniss and FedGov, where they multiplied like the rats and cockroaches they are.
Add to this the fact that search engines intentionally divert people to desired sources and they conceal undesired sources. You have to be exceptionally good at web searches, and extraordinarily patient scrolling through the first 15 pages of results, to find something that isn’t state-approved. in the last couple of years I’ve also noticed the problem of repeating search results. You get a page or two in, and Google just starts re-showing you the first page of results. Where the web really shines is places where you can learn how to do things. I fix tons of stuff now that… Read more »
I’m inclined to believe they laundered his death in Ukraine through the Vegas incident, but the purpose of the Vegas incident remains unclear
We’ll never know. We never do.
I’m not sure if it’s a strategy or an effect incidental to some other aim, but the narrative template of the everyday reportorial news is “unresolved cliffhanger.” They show us an event or phenomenon, in a blur of contradiction and lies and political hectoring, and follow it with…nothing.
“Did we ever find out what happened with [____]?” We did not.
Seems extravagant and the wife said he was home Christmas Day. People are weird and suicide is a wildly irrational and emotional act. If his wife is a shitlib, as some are reporting due to her anti-Trump Facebook posts, in his warped mind dying in a blaze of fireworks glory at Trump’s hotel in a Tesla (instead of at home with her) could very well been his way of saying where his true loyalties were. ie not her The guy in NOLA strikes me as a garden variety “Maj Hassan” type. Once they get radicalized, they quickly go critical and… Read more »
I read the Tesla attack at Trump’s hotel the opposite way. It’s a way of showing disapproval of both Trump and Musk while going out in a blaze of glory. It was quite clever really. If the guy really was in Ukraine, he may have felt that Trump’s desire to end the war quickly was a betrayal of his “mission” there, sort of the way Vietnam vets often felt that the politicians “didn’t let us win” in Vietnam.
I agree, it could go either way. The regime has to be careful because if he was one of the many US combat troops fighting illegally in Ukraine, they may not want to admit this to the public…such as if he put that in a suicide note. “I fought side by side with Ukrainians and we can’t abandon them!” that sort of thing. The other thought I has due to the Tesla connection is he could have been making some crazy point about the H1B problem. But in general, I agree you could be right about it. The fact that… Read more »
Or so we are told.
There’s a podcaster saying he got an email from the Vegas guy claiming it’s really about a cover up of some crazy gravimetric propulsion arms race with China and drones, and that he was actually on the run from the CIA. The FBI apparently thinks the email was from the Vegas guy.
So there’s something for everyone. A crazy questionable suicide, marital infidelity, fireworks, powerful handguns, a cyber truck, and links to UAP’s and alien technology.
Cracker Jack!
They did do that with a Marine General who “died suddenly” after returning from Europe. This sounds different.
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/usmc-general-mullen-found-dead/
The purpose is to steamroll resistance to infinity Pajeets via B visas. It was a Tesla, and it is self-evident that if Pajeets had built the thing it would not have dared to explode; indeed, it would have been impossible. But it was built by lazy American white men and jocks and assorted prom queens, so infinity H1B Pajeets are indicated. To save us from our Bad White selves.
I agree with you. When I heard the driver of the car was dead, I had assumed suicide first. He just wanted to make a point about Musk/Trump somehow along the way.
” … my first thought was ‘suicide’ … .”
Las Vegas med examiner said he’d been shot in the head. Had shot himself in the head. ‘T’s what was being reported last night anyway.
The suicide epidemic in the military is very bad. I should clarify to say that my first thought was suicide once I heard he was in the Army 10th SFG. Prior to that, I was like everyone else wondering if it was related to the NOLA attack despite it being a fairly harmless explosion in comparison.
We used to have a wide swath of people who were “news buffs” meaning they read up on current events and could opine on them. This was the mark of an educated or successful person. You see this with Boomers…they still watch and read mainstream sources because for most of their life, it was legitimate information, much of it borne from guys with a “nose for news”, plus veteran court house and city hall scribes, cynical, modestly paid, and often drunk. Grizzled war correspondents for the international stuff. In short, there were many people who liked to write about the… Read more »
So true. There used to be a bar across from my city’s major newspaper. The reporters who hung out there were middle class common men getting drunk and mingling with their customers. Today’s reporters go to private cocktail parties and never interact with anyone but each other.
This is why I come to websites such as the Zblog – the national media is nothing but garbage, peddling governmental lies day in and day out. I believe nothing that comes from either of them. Unfortunately, many people I interact with unquestioningly lap up the crap – really amazing, the lack of critical thinking. However, I will admit to watching the local news for the going’s on in town and the weather – that I’ll typically buy.
Not to point out the glaringly obvious, but most commenters here seem to believe what somebody-or-other has reported.
this situation has consequences re: the nation state. who will fight for globohomo? no one. look at ukraine, where people are deserting en masse, rather than fighting for zelensky’s cocaine stash. think anyone will fight for britain? fukk no they won’t. if such a country isn’t out right conquered, it will splinter.
Any thoughts on Germany?
I was surprised by the quietude after Nordstream went kaboom.
There is no such thing as Germany. But the tamed, re-educated, npc-ized descendants of the German people still exist there. Probably to be obliterated within another century or two.
Well, there’s this:
https://www.youtube.com/@Deutschlandretter/featured
There was a video on this site only last night–ganz erstaunlich in der Tat!–with beautiful blond(e) Aryans–veritable in-your-face Sonnenkinder–but I was too stupid to download it, and today it’s gone. Weggegangen. Abgesagt. Should have had the presence of mind to save it, but … . (BTW, here’s the defunct link: deutschlandretter24.fun
But there’s life in the Germans yet. And when the gravy train finally derails in that cold and broke land, maybe Hermann will swoop down from the Teutoburger Wald …
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A couple things:
1) Propaganda can create motivated soldiers, especially out of normies.
2) Things can change quickly, and people can get riled up fast.
3) Technology can enable mass violence without the need for personal bravery (drones) – an abomination, but a fact nonetheless.
The media has largely been replaced by people who talk about the news, not generate it. We used to call these people talking heads. All of the “independent media” people are always talking about are not in fact independent media, they’re talking heads. In my mind, the guy reporting from the scene of an accident or fire or a crime, whether in front of a camera or a typewriter is the media. An investigative reporter is also, in my mind, the media. Far too much is national or even international. A British newspaper has a story about a “polar vortex”… Read more »
“Most of the English language media is propaganda. I mean that in the true sense of the word. It’s reported in a narrative form with lots of emotional manipulation and extremely one sided.”
In that, the generations that abandon the “news” will be happier and probably better informed about the world.
Something to keep an eye out for: Anytime you see a sob article about the welfare state, they’ll always talk about single moms and women. Bet on it.
The national outlets and local outlets experienced consolidation of ownership simultaneously. There is no independent local station left, nor will a new one be permitted. They are now all part of corporate conglomerates, controlled from the top. Concurrently, the process through which new “reporters” were curated became more refined. The national outlets mostly hire from the same few “journalism” schools which are the most pozzed examples of a nationally pozzed institution. These pozzed schools self select for the type of “talent” that is being sought. For the national outlets, you aren’t getting anybody who isn’t a trust fund baby from… Read more »
“ They arrive for employment fully indoctrinated and not requiring any direction from above to stay “on message,” nor to refrain from asking uncomfortable questions. They’ve already learned not to do that, similar to your jab taking npc friends and family members.”
People quite often come up with wild theories about how the modern media has all the same message. It’s only as complex as a school of fish swimming together. They all turn some new direction seemingly all at once and who knows why. But each fish has volunteered to stay with the group direction.
A quibble on journalism, media ownership consolidation was happening before news consumption started to shift online. Gannett had bought up a big chunk of the newspaper industry by the early 90s and local TV stations stopped being locally owned around the same time. They were already pushing conformity in reporting and closing off promoting routes to people who didn’t do it their way by the time the internet boom happened. Also the pay at lower level newspaper and TV stations is comically low. It self selects for either low quality reporters or people with delusions of grandeur. What do you… Read more »
Barnard- Important points you’ve made. The gobbling up of newspapers by Gannett, Knight-Ridder (later purchased by McClatchy), along with the new law allowing unrestricted ownership of radio stations in the 90s struck a blow to independent voices.
A friend’s daughter is in the reporting business. She has moved up from small market to mid-market and is now a reporter for one of the major network affiliates in Chicago. Besides having a somewhat gregarious personality, she’s just a run-of-the-mill, left-leaning person in real life. Conforms well to the TV news culture.
A major side effect of unrestricted ownership of radio stations was the death of rock & roll. Creative musicians could lobby local radio stations to play their music, and hope it caught a wave across the country. What gets airtime now is generic crap decided by corporate committees.
Hi Zman. you wrote “deliberately disinterested.” i think you meant deliberately uninterested cause they sure ain’t disinterested.
let the Zman have his alliteration, damn you!
Considering his staggering output, I’m constantly astonished at the consistently high quality of Z’s writing and his clarity of thought. In our insane times, too!
Journalism and media once consisted of LMC and LC men who tended towards swearing and drinking. But they could investigate and write. Being adversarial (with everybody, including your editor) was prerequisite to the gig. Occasionally a Dorothy Kilgallen would come along, and room was made for exception-by-merit. Females were not a Protected Class back then. Journalism and the media now are upwardly mobile MC and UMC women, largely. Corporate spokes-faces typically are women, because implicitly we TRUST MOM, hmm? I mean, MOM wouldn’t lie! As you write, instead of working-class, journalists now are part of the sub-elite (or ‘management’) and… Read more »
From twitter, re the Paki rape gangs controversy: “We have to face the dark truth….women can not be trusted with positions of power. I don’t think they do it on purpose, but it’s clear that their inclination to follow groupthink and compete for “empathy status” makes them bring disastrous consequences onto our society.” Some Guardian twit named “Ella Cockbain” is claiming “studies show ‘Paki grooming gangs’ is a far right stereotype”, because Elon is castigating Starmer for the coverup when Kier was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) from 2008 to 2013. Men compete, women trash other women. (Ella versus… Read more »
Refugees Welcome my ass. Those posers are saying “go rape my competition and raise hell with the nasty nationalists.”
A luxury belief is just a fad unless it lays a cost on one’s lessers.
Ella Cockbane. :O) And they say God has no sense of humor. Placing women in positions of power, and subjugating men to women, is the big cosmic no-no that leads to nasty, cold doomage. The State, schools, colleges, LE, corporations, media and courts love feminism, effecting a massive and on-going transfer of wealth from males to females and to the above-named interests. The dads of daughters love feminism because largely it absolves them of their traditional responsibilities towards their daughters, including preparing her for marriage (NOT for career) at a young age, combing through potential suitors, and handing her over… Read more »
Maybe the 2 New Year’s killers were upset at Fr. Bragg being renamed Ft. Liberty.
On the news this morning, the reporter referred to it as “The Army base that used to be called Fort Bragg”. I like the one I learned on this site today: Fort Fagg.
Named after Marcus Liberty, no doubt…
Technology has also made journalism a profession for lazy people and the local tv news business has become a Ford assembly line with multiple newscasts to fill for the day. Its easy for producers to cut and paste stories from one newscast to another, a litte edit change, a little spice and the same story appears again in the next newscast filling the time required by the news beast and giving more avails for shady lawyers and car salesmen to buy. Another problem is young people do not watch a lot of local news so in past ages a newspaper… Read more »
“The objective facts are often more readily available than in the prior age… With no institutional support in finding and assembling the facts…” It’s both better and worse than before. More information is available but the incurious don’t seek it out. Re-installing the gatekeepers (‘institutional support’) won’t help. The spike was always used by legacy media to control the narrative. At least, now, there are parallel channels to circumvent the gates. The problem is more fundamental. As Derb quotes, “The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.” The problem lies with liberal democracy, where convincing the masses… Read more »
Yes, it’s ultimately just a different set of circumstances that we must adapt to.
Not anymore. Try to convince Romanians of that. Or Georgians. Or Ukranians. Or Frenchmen, Swedes, or Germans. Or people like us.
The informational narrowing extends to non-news sources. A few years back, I was researching a 19th Century historical couple for a work of historical fiction I was writing. Every online article about them contained essentially the same regurgitated information. Was that due to laziness, I wondered, or was the more interesting info all copyrighted? I did find references to a book, but unfortunately it was out of print and thus too expensive for me to order.
This is why I find the archive.org project to be useful. Researching topics from the past seems to have become impossible when relying on standard internet searches. Reading scanned books, long out of print and impossible to find, is usually very valuable. That being said I have no way of knowing if AI is somehow altering the original text in sinister ways.
“It turns out that you must want the information in order to have it and most people just want to be told what to think.” Most people just watch porn. Yes, most. Or spend days at a stretch in front of the tube for the sole purpose of watching some Negroes play with a ball. “According to the government, for no reason at all, two military men went crazy on the same day.” The operative words being “according to the gov’t.” We know only what we are being told. “The Vegas guy’s back story makes no sense whatsoever, … .”… Read more »
Of course, in a world of lies—some at the highest level—one has a hard time believing anything. However, short of complete “to ashes” cremation, the “Tesla bomber” can be positively identified. All US soldiers submit to a DNA registry. Not sure how long the analysis takes, but an ID based upon DNA should clear the air.
If he really had TBI, it excuses almost all inconsistencies.
I think some important things are being missed. People are adapting to the lack of real news by seeking it on X, on Rumble, on Substack, all having an end-run around the lack of real news on the MSM. People want/need real news because society is no longer stable and old rules no longer apply. Simply something as mundane as the bird flu being the excuse for eggs to be both scarce and now $12 a dozen in my local Supermarket (Stater Brothers) alllows those who know its coming to stock up and maybe get some chickens for eggs Big… Read more »
“Today, every journalism student imagines herself as part of the ruling class and one day she will do her part to further the mission of the ruling class” Even more apt is that they are all now immigrants or members of a group that has always defined itself in opposition to Westernkind and Our civilization. Given that The Regime’s ultimate goal is the destruction of these things they are already furthering the mission of the ruling class. It is kind of like the big thing that has been revealed by this Musk/King-Cobra fiasco. It isn’t just non-White immigrants who are… Read more »
Worth noting that newspapers made a huge chunk of their money from classified ads which the Internet has completely looted. Historically no consumer has ever (*ever*) paid what it costs to generate actual news so there was no way to make up that gap in funding.
Good point, the revenue was always heavily weighted to advertising, not the loose change people paid for the paper. The news reporting industry has been flawed since its inception, the people who chose to work for it have never been noble truth tellers. A reporter who would give honest treatment to any story no matter who was impacted was about as real as a unicorn.
Also, the dirty secret of newspapers for many years was that the sports section sold the newspaper. The “real” journalists in the news section didn’t like admitting this. Today, when you can get sports scores, stats, and highlights on your phone, why bother with papers? Before the interwebs and sail foams, the advent of 24 hr sports television also cut into this.
I acquired my daily newspaper habit as a 7 year old during Pete Rose’s 44 game hitting streak in the summer of ’78. Stuck with it for about 3 decades.
Beginning at the age of 11, and continuing to roughly the age of 33, one of my greatest pleasures was plumping down on the couch with a mug of black coffee and the sports page of a Sunday morning, and reading about college football. As I got older in that period, I also began to savor the Op/Ed page, where my ox would assuredly be gored, and I’d have to dash of an incendiary Letter to the Editor.
Today, big pharma is the great majority of ads on TV news. And it’s to buy favorable coverage, not to sell more drugs. How many people who know they have diabetes see a commercial and say, hey, there’s a treatment for this?
The result of this is we now live in an age of ignorance. This is so, so very true and a great line and observation. It almost offsets this howler: Instead of gathering up the available facts to understand what is happening, people just trust the news. Objectively people don’t trust the news at all and long ago tuned it out. It really isn’t a matter of distrust, either, but total indifference. People in this sphere ridicule Normie and Grillers, and mostly rightfully so, but in one respect they are far more rational than we. They are apathetic because it… Read more »
‘They are apathetic because it is the proper response to date.’
As an adaptation to insanity, or to cog dis. Insightful.
Two instances of ignorance come to mind: The Las Vegas shooting, and the Benghazi debacle. Everything went silent about the Vegas shooting just when is started getting weird and interesting. Now it’s off the radar except for kooks like the one I heard recently saying it was commandos in helicopters doing the shooting. Why no military help/air support arrived to assist the beleaguered folks at Benghazi is still a mystery. There is rumor the Admiral who wanted to help got cashiered. Weird and interesting, but no one in the media seems to care. “At this point, what difference does it… Read more »
The list of “weird” events that have gone silent, with no probable hope of resolution/justice/truth within the last 10 years: -Epstein murder -Shooting of democrat whistler blower (Seth somebody) -Las Vegas shooting (felt bad for the local law enforcement when I saw on camera) -Benghazi -Bombing of Lebanese port -Blowing up a TN Internet hub from the outside -Recent murder of health care executive (that was an insult to everyone’s intelligence. I hope the video game character got paid enough to be a patsy. ) -Every single event involving a Muslim or POC It’s gotten so bad that hardly want… Read more »
“… despite having access to the great data stream.”
That “great data stream” is mostly garbage, just dross. If you want real information, real analysis, you have to pay for it. Ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. I think Orlov described it some years back as just garbage moving at the speed of light. In Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel, “Fall”, what’s available to the proles is just advertising, propaganda, and disinformation. The good stuff is either behind paywalls or you need substack subscriptions. To read Taibbi, Hersh, or Tooze, you have to pay.
I seem to recall a window in time when internet search results were useful and informative. It was brief. Maybe it was just my imagination. But it’s definitely gone now.
I hate to completely disagree, but here it goes. In the 2000’s during the Iraq adventure I began following Michael Yon’s reporting. On the ground rational informative reporting. Convinced the old man to follow along. The old man said he wished he had this kind of information during the Vietnam era. I get more information on the Ukrainian War than my grandfather EVER got about WWII. Within minutes of the attack on Bourbon Street I knew the Mohammedan was flying the freak flag of ISIS. Corporate media may not be interested in Epstein, but there’s not a soul in this… Read more »
“…most people just want to be told what to think. Faced with the great firehose of information called the internet, most people simply find a narrative source to trust. Instead of gathering up the available facts to understand what is happening, people just trust the news.” I think what you have here is the lack of critical thinking on the part of the public coupled with a lack of ability to filter through all the information being thrown at them. TV watching seems to address these two points. Thus it was always so. When I was a child, we had… Read more »
Good points – well made.
If it isn’t in the mass media, it “must be” trivial; if the mass media makes a fuss – it must be significant, and “everybody” talks about it – even in private.
It’s all sad and pathetic – but the manipulated masses seem pretty happy about it all.
This is what happens, inevitably, when there is nothing deeper or more significant in life than comfort, convenience; and passing the time as pleasantly as possible until a (hopefully) painless terminating annihilation.
“If it isn’t in the mass media, it “must be” trivial; if the mass media makes a fuss – it must be significant, and “everybody” talks about it”.
Leaving the television off for the last twenty five years has been a blessing. How much television can one consume about the death of Michael Jackson, Whitney Huston, George Floyd, Jimmy Carter… Who cares?
The great question of the Technocracy will be whether it is ultimately centralized or atomized. Mainframe or PC, to put it in 80s lingo. Centralization seems to have the upper hand at the moment, as it is most amenable to concentrated power, but there is nothing in theory preventing personal scale supercomputers, AI and robotic manufacturing. It would probably take a conscious societal value decision to decentralize, either quasi-religious like the Butlerian Jihad in the Dune backstory, or a hard learned aversion to networked computers like in Battlestar Galactica or the Terminator flicks. Maybe both. In any event, Technocracy will… Read more »
Been reading Neal Asher sci-fi novels for a while. In his future universe there are no politicians, for-real benevolent AIs run the government.
When I first read one of his novels a decade ago, I was “hell no”. Now… sounds good to me – particularly since his universe has an ungoverned frontier if you don’t like it.
Heh. There’s a Bruce Sterling story, I think it’s called “The Bicycle Shop”, where an AI is caught on record ranting about the stupid Joe Biden-type politician speaking without his script: “Oh hell! Who let that idiot loose? Where’s his handlers? This is a disaster!”
News editor from “the old days” here and I think this column efficiently sums things up — The way I’ve often described the situation is that MSM news outlets now actively work to bury stories, not break them. How else can you explain the astounding lack of curiosity toward glaring issues such as Biden’s mental capacity and who is really making the White House decisions. The only point I might quibble with is that news owners and publishers would not see a bank or factory as a rival, they would see it as a potential advertiser. I was fortunate to… Read more »
The very term news “outlet” kind of gives the game away. Outlet. A point through which something is released, implying control, implying that there is something that is not released, implying function as part of a system which controls the release (or retention) of a reservoir of some kind. A system that is implicitly hierarchically governed. An outlet by definition being a node in such a system and certainly not an independent entity.
Until “AI” finishes its work, we can look at some old news and see what we’ve lost. It’s about as we remember, somewhat less dumb than today’s, slightly less dishonest, a little less crazy. Commentary was much better, a profession of middle aged white men who knew things—how to lie intelligently, for example. And they were often funny. Remember? That’s gone. We get a good Tim Dillon or Sam Hyde video once in a while, but they’re just comedians. They’re very smart—observant—but they don’t know anything. Our only guy who works in the style of our old newspaper columnists, Bronze… Read more »
This is off topic but I found it important to share. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08wadxp9FnQ&pp=ygUSa2FycCBkcnVja2VubWlsbGVy Not that around the 48 minute mark, he talks about targeting people. Effectively amongst all the talk of ethics and morals and, “Western Values”, he is essentially talking about the end of privacy and state sponsored terrorism. This isn’t coming it is here now. One thing I think is interesting is how embedded he is with another nation state. (https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-palantir-ceo-flies-company-board-to-israel-in-show-of-solidarity/) What is even more sickening is Druckenmiller. Note how he does his own narrative formation by telling the audience that we just took out one of the greatest… Read more »
The decline of newspapers coincided with the decline of the middle class who were the main subscribers. I still subscribe to the local big city paper (the only major paper left in town), mostly out of habit and to follow local sports (their editorial policy is establishment liberal). The subscription is not cheap but I can afford it and I understand that it would be a luxury for many. When the old guys like me who like to read and prefer a paper format are gone, the newspaper will doubtless go to an online only format and eventually disappear.
No new show? You slowing down old man? It happens to all of us. You were able to keep up a blistering pace much longer than I thought you would. You deserve the break.
[…] ZMan pulls back the curtain. […]
An outstanding summation.
What happened to his last co-host?
People come and go.
“talking of Michelangelo”…
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons
(nicely done pyrrhus!)
yes, but Misha was/is his gf/wife…
Oh my.
Paul Ramsey is a little old to keep having lovely new cohosts.