I had no intention of watching the debate as I’ve seen enough of them to know they will always be “two-on-one moonbat fun.” The moderator will gang up with the Democrat to attack the Republican. Even mild nothing-burgers like Mitt Romney got the business from that fat woman on CNN. But, friends told me Trump was beating the old bag up, so I tuned in just in time to see him put the saddle on the fat cow and ride her around the debate stage. I did not watch a lot of it, but it was fun seeing the good guys win.
The thing that crept into my mind was how weird it all felt. As a normie, I know that the two airheads installed as moderators are way out there where-the-buses-don’t-run. In all probability they have been working with the Clinton campaign to try and setup Trump. Similarly, the audience questions would be hand picked and designed to help Clinton. I knew all that and I’m sure everyone watching knew it too. Yet, I got the distinct impression that the two moonbats really thought they were fooling us.
The same was true in the after debate programs. I ran through the cable channels and I saw chattering skulls swearing that Clinton had a great night. I saw others grudgingly saying that Trump did some things well. What everyone in America saw was a complete and total beat down. Even the squirrely guy with the bad wig, Frank Luntz, could not get his phony-baloney focus group to pretend it was close. I was left wondering if these people are insane and really believe this stuff, or they are just paid to lie so they lie.
Having had my fill of that nonsense, I flipped over to the sportball games and I saw an ad from the fat cow featuring a person claiming to be a Republican voting for the fat cow. The claim in the ad is Trump has autism so she is not going to vote for him. Think about that for a second. The man has been in the public eye for over three decades. He has been doing business deals all over the world. By now someone would have noticed that he has autism. Yet, they run the ad hoping that someone will believe it.
Steve Sailer has a post up about how everything the media tells us with regards to Hispanics and their voting habits is largely nonsense. If you went solely by what is broadcast by the media, you would think America is about to tilt majority Hispanic and their vote is critical. In reality, Hispanics are about two-thirds the black population and their votes don’t matter very much because they tend not to vote. As Sailer says, the media does not seem to know much about Hispanics. Alternatively, they are lying.
I think there is a third option. The media reports on the America they imagine, not the actual country. They stuff the news events into their model of reality. It’s why the British press runs laps around the US media when reporting on America. The people immersed in the American media eventually come to believe the model of the world and can’t imagine any other. The result is the people screaming at us through the megaphones often sound like crazy people, ranting about imaginary things that either don’t exist or can’t exist.
It’s not just the media. That’s the window through which we glimpse the managerial class. I’ve recently had reason to spend time among the Cloud People and I had the same feeling I get when traveling abroad. I was in a strange land with strange people,so I was much more restrained in my speech and movement. Even though I speak the language, I really can’t read what’s behind the eyes anymore. They look like me and they make the same sorts of noises, but there’s a barrier between myself and these people.
Within living memory, professionals regularly interacted with the working and lower classes. Poor people got to see how middle and upper middle people lived. I grew up poor and had many examples of middle class people I could emulate to get out of poverty. Today, the Cloud People are increasingly insulated from the Dirt People. To the typical managerial class type, the great bulk of America is outside their field of view. In the case of the media, it is to the extreme as they live and work in the media centers.
When the “experts” pondered the Brexit result, they sounded like primatologists puzzling over why the monkeys they were observing suddenly acted in a new way. In the current US election, I’m often struck by the feeling that the people in the media are puzzled as to why Clinton is not up by fifty points. Because the answer is outside the set of things that sit inside their model of the world, they are left to either pretend she is up by fifty points or assign dark motives to the deplorable Dirt People outside the perimeter.
We are a nation of two worlds now. The Cloud People are in their world, which is just about divorced from our world. Increasing they speak in their own argot that uses English words, but with alien meanings. They don’t live where we live or live as we live. We have been colonized by pod people, who are only vaguely aware of the rest of us. Unlike the British Colonial officers of old, our rulers don’t have much interest in us. We’re just a bad smell to them, something they tolerate while dreaming of the day when will be rid of us.
This is similar to the Brazilian model, except that in Brazil, the ruling elite is at least a full standard deviation more intelligent than the lower classes. In the American model, the world of the Cloud People is something similar to the Marching Morons, except that the extraction system on which it is based insulates them from the consequences of their own actions. Hillary Clinton is a dangerously incompetent boob, but she may be elevated to the top job simply because the system protects her and repels even well-heeled challengers.
One of the lessons of Africa in the mid-20th century is that people prefer to be ruled poorly by their own, rather than expertly by strangers. The Managerial class spends all of its time debating how to expertly manage the economy and how to replace the Dirt People they find inconvenient with imported Dirt People they believe are more compliant. Meanwhile, the Dirt People slowly begin to realize that they are ruled by strangers. When the Africans were barred from taking command of the machinery of rule, they smashed it. That’s another lesson to remember.
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As an interesting point, i’m vice chair for Trump in my (very large – 650K voters) county. When I use the terms Cloud People and Dirt People, the Dirt People get it immediately without needing a single word of explanation.
I always, ALWAYS, have to explain the point to the Cloud People.
“Even though I speak the language, I really can’t read what’s behind the eyes anymore. They look like me and they make the same sorts of noises, but there’s a barrier between myself and these people.”
I feel this way all the time. I did not grow up poor, but I did grow up patriotic. Joke’s on me!
It’s very easy to understand how the Cloud People can so easily believe in a fantasy world when you realize that they are, emotionally, still children.
The “Marching Morons” reference is very good. Have been reminded of that story many, many times over the past few years.
Reports that a tape will drop next week showing Bill clinton “in action” on Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous “orgy” island!
“…I got the distinct impression that the two moonbats really thought they were fooling us.”
They’re fooling many of us in many ways. James Comey is no more FBI than Ash Carter is Army/Navy/Marine Corps/Air Force. Both are political appointees and share none of the Esprit de Corps of their respective organizations.
Hillary had a national security problem and Obama’s appointee made the criminal aspects of the problem go away. The media goes on to tout that the FBI exonerated Hillary. I try to keep in mind Thomas Gray’s poignant earning: “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise”
Thanks for your excellent observations.
Voting was originally a way to keep from having to vote our way out of something diabolical to begin with.
It isn’t going to matter who “wins” come 11-8, because the truth is none of us dirt people win through voting, we all all already lost long time ago when the fundamental process of will of the governed was hijacked so the political class and the associated influential powers that be had the final political say in who runs this country.
We are going to have to literally wrench the levers of power from the hands of the elites to change all this.
If by peaceful means or violent redress, if we want to change this situation, it is going to be a fight between a myriad of entirely different kinds and groups of people. It is a unmitigated disaster in the making. Either that, or the statist fossilization of this country reaches it’s nadir and then it becomes a fight of utter survival for those who refuse to bend a knee or submit to total administrative tyranny.
The managerial elite has so enmeshed its interests with perpetuating certain lies and fabrications that they are cognitively incapable of distinguishing between simple truth and falsehood. Minds that wobble with angst and guilt before the imaginary terrors of “climate change” or thrill to the prospect and the attendant bureaucratic busywork of “promoting diversity in the workplace” are closed to empirical realities by these infantile but lucrative fanatacisms. Worse, they are self-reinforcing, so that if one is inclined to one bit of nonsense the more likely one is to biting off and swallowing the next – since habits of flabby thinking offer no defense to a mind primed to ingest subsequent waves of hogwash. These people then actively promote and cherish their craziness as a badge of membership in the cult and as a means to identify and isolate those deplorables in need of reeducation.
Our elites are ever so pleased to think of themselves as the educated, the enlightened, the bearers of truth, yet they remain deliriously ignorant that their heads are crammed not with wisdom, but with childish fantasies. Even into this circular and self-satisfied world reality has a way of asserting its primacy. A day of reckoning is nigh.
When the paycheck depends on the falsehood, it is easy to justify that falsehood in one’s own mind. Remember, people largely create the “reality” that they live in.
I think the reason the Cloud acts as it does is that they are (for now) able to exempt themselves from the consequences of personal or organizational failure. That is, by constantly expanding the government and NGO world they have temporarily been able the suspend the consequences of The Peter Principle. IOW, it used to be that as organizations accumulated those risen to and performing at their level of incompetence those organizations would sicken and die from deadweight at the top. In would come the Romney’s of the world and the incompetent would be cut in the ensuing restructuring. Since the reputation of their previous organization would precede them, they’d be hard pressed to find another position at anything like the level they’d become accustomed elsewhere. Salutary examples were easy enough to see to add some circumspection to fellow elites’ conduct in the more static confines of the pre-expansion 5%.
But now, due to the expanding universe of non-private sector senior roles with deliberately obscure job descriptions but splendid salaries, they pay little to no price for f’n up. Evidently by flashing the elite school lodge ring (I guess) they now circulate freely between all sectors, privet, public and ‘charitable’. Credentials and connections are now THE key, so it is no surprise that this is the actual value added by elite universities: Definitely not actual learning.
A stratosphere economy- above borders, and thus above laws within those borders- is the Other World, the Cloud World.
That’s what the courtiers are listening to; the players have a hand in the cattle pen, but their eye is on the sky above.
Their reality is indeed different from our own.
They aren’t talking to us; they listen to the alphas in the top of the tree. (And sh*the rolls downhill)
Guest wrote:
“[in the future] The only meaningful event in the presidential election will be which candidate wins the Democratic Party nomination. All else will be a sideshow.”
Yeah, well, New York City has been like that for fifty years at least. Other than the brief interlude of Guiliani, we’ve nothing but Dem mayors, as well as 80% of the City Council being Dems. [Bloomberg hardly qualifies as conservative or republican; just another liberal Dem in disguise.. in fact he had previously run in the mayoral primaries as a Dem].
There are opportunities for shenanagins, for those of us of the out-party persuasion; but you have to cloak yourself by registering as your opposition’s party.
Way back when Guiliani was running for re-election (1997), I tried to help his chances by voting in the Dem primaries for the most unwinnable candidate .. Al Sharpton!
Back in ’89 Guiliani had lost his first attempt to win the mayoralty against Dinkins in a close race; about a million votes on each side, Dinkins elected by a very narrow margin. Guiliani’s second attempt in ’93 saw him win against Dinkins, again by a narrow margin with about a million votes each (this is considered a large turnout in NYC).
So, when Guiliani was up for re-election in ’97, the Dem primaries had Al Sharpton running against Ruth Messinger, a long time extremely leftish Dem hack. In my view, Sharpton was not electable in the general elections, but Messinger, if she became the candidate.. could possibly win against Guiliani. The only reasonable course of action for a Guiliani supporter was to register as a Dem, and vote for Sharpton in the primary. That would guarantee a win for Guiliani in the general election.
Although Messinger did win the nomination, the Dems still had a tough time; four years of Guiliani had changed enough New Yorkers leanings that he won his re-election. It was once again, a large turnout, and very close results.
More recently, in the 2013 election, Bill DeBlasio (his real name … Warren Wilhem) beat Joe Lhota 750,000 to 250,000 (3-to-1 ratio!) .. half the turnout of Guiliani’s elections.
What happened to the other 750,000 voters that Guliani had? They stayed home, for no reason at all except maybe their sense of futility. Living in a one party state becomes exasperating and frustrating, but you must overcome your ennui and disillusionment, you must go out there and Fight The Power!
It has been two worlds for quite some time. Shifting demographics don’t matter to the elites as the world of deplorables is only used to maintain the elite world. That they are out of touch with the common folk is only natural as is the result of inbreeding, group think, and kool aid drinking. They live on a virtual island as if electronic media did not exist and talk only among themselves, council themselves and award themselves accolades for squeezing more for their tribe.
Your comment about the US Hispanic population is, however, wrong. Hispanics, which includes many nationalities besides Mexicans, are twice the population of Blacks (24% vs. 12%) and is growing much faster. While stats vary by source, I believe this to be fairly accurate:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/03/31/10-demographic-trends-that-are-shaping-the-u-s-and-the-world/
And I offer “The Covenant” by one of my favorite authors, James A. Michener. In this historical novel, he paints a picture of the development of the land, tribes, colonization, and change in Africa, South Africa in particular, until the time when apartheid was eliminated and self governance realized.
From this side of the pond I am fascinated by what I see in the States over the forthcoming election.
The Democrats want to win because they think they have to win, ought to win, can’t think of anything else but winning, so they plump for someone who has more than a hint of criminal connections, doesn’t seem all that healthy, speaks only in vague rhetoric by ignoring the elephant(s) in the room, has so many question marks against her record of ‘public service’ and repels even those who want to vote Democrat.
The Republicans meanwhile must want to win in November because of their haunting fear of sliding into an abyss of continuing failure they can never escape from, but they actively don’t want the one person who might be able to win it in their name — a man who embodies many of the positive aspects of being American in that he works hard, speaks clearly on relevant issues and makes money (and thus gives employment to others).
So, neither of these parties want to win, is that right?
Sums it up rather well.
They won a long time ago. They’re pulling up the drawbridge.
I hope to gosh Trump starts our UKIP.
Well, close but using the party labels is misleading. Globalists think life is just dandy. They think anyone opposed to them is a raspiest and worse. Populists thinks we are desperately off track and it may already be too late.
Remember, Hillary said the enemy she is proudest of are Republicans.
Nailed it.
What if Trump pulls a majority out of disaffected GOP and DEM ex-voters? It really look like he has the makings of a new party. Not a 3rd party because I think the GOP is dead now. I personally will never vote for another GOP candidate at any level. But I would vote for whatever party emerges from this year’s shenanigans.
You can vote for whomever you want in the future; if Hillary Clinton wins your vote will no longer matter. The Democrats will grant amnesty to the 11-15MM illegal aliens living in the US and with one stroke of the pen the US becomes a one-party state. We’ll still have elections, much like China and the former Soviet Union, but the outcome will be predetermined. The only meaningful event in the presidential election will be which candidate wins the Democratic Party nomination. All else will be a sideshow.
The GOP is not going to die in any formal way. The Democrats will gain seats in both houses of Congress as Trump supporters abandon the GOP. But as the de facto ruling party the Democrats will need a controlled opposition. The GOP has played that role for the past thirty years and will continue to play that role, albeit in a much diminished fashion.
And as much as I would like to believe that Trump is going to pull a surprise victory out of his arse, all evidence from the polling data indicates that Trump is losing. Badly. RCP has nine states identified as toss-ups this morning, and Trump has to win every single one of them to win the election. Hillary is leading in six of the nine states. Barring some sort of divine intervention Hillary is going to win in a landslide. The takeover of the US is all but complete.
My advice to conservatives: keep your head down, make as much money as you can, network off the grid, stockpile food, guns and ammo, and consider places like Australia, New Zealand, or Eastern Europe as possible destinations.
And you believe the “polls?” Are you serious? You need to get your head out of the sand that the MSM is putting on you and taste the wind. That is the breeze of freedom … clean, crisp, cool, refreshing … better than any favorite beverage that might come to mind just now!
As Z says above, the Hildabeast has been stagnant in her “polling” for quite some time and we all know the polsters and the media are in the tank for her! So why isn’t she up by 50 points? If she were ahead, they would be screaming it from the mountain tops.
I expect a blowout for Trump. Trump 2016. MAGA.
I’d love to agree with you, but I can’t ignore the evidence. Conservatives made the same error in disbelieving the polls with Mittens in 2012. Carl Rove made a complete fool of himself pumping the hidden conservative voter theory in 2012.
Go click through the electoral map on RCP. Hillary has 260 electoral votes. She needs 10 more to win. Hillary is leading in *all* recent polls in most of the battleground states, and her lead is growing. If she keeps her 260 and wins any *one* of Florida (29), Ohio (18), North Carolina (15), or Minnesota (10) she wins the election. She’s leading comfortably in all four of those states.
To state it another way, if Hillary keeps her 260 and wins Minnesota (10) then she wins the election with 270 electoral votes. Clinton is up by 4.3 in MN. The last time Minnesota went red in a presidential election was 1972–Nixon v. McGovern. Do you really believe Minnesota is going to break a 44 year blue streak to go with Trump?
Barring some sort of divine intervention Hillary is going to win the election, and it is most likely going to be a blowout. Refer to my previous post for what happens after that.
We aren’t voting our way out of this mess, people.
4-chan found Podestra’s passwords to his iCloud account in the email dump. Turned out that he hadn’t change them. So they have his current emails. One was internal polling in CO. They are tied and the Dems are freaked.
All I can say is that we are in “uncharted” waters my friend. And believing the polls when there are so many forces at work “for” Hillary minimizes the pent up frustration and desire to change the course of the past eight years, well actually much longer, but the last eight are still stuck in the craw! Maybe mine is hope beyond hope but I guess I am still an optimist at heart and would like to salvage what we can of what was a great thing.
Hillary is up by 9 points in early voting in Ohio. If she wins Ohio it’s over.
https://pjmedia.com/election/2016/10/12/clinton-opens-9-point-lead-in-ohio-as-early-voting-starts/
You know they forced us to stay in the Union. I wonder if we could get up enough votes to throw out a few States?
Agree, Honypickle, except that I would vote for a down ticket Repub who has not shunned Trump. In my case in Nevada, there are none. None. But that is the test. I am going to vote to fill Reid’s Senate seat with a woman who is a cross between Nancy Pelosi and the Senator she is replacing. Homie don’t play this game no more. Romney McCain Bush Bush Dole Ryan Rove. The great problem with the Republican Party is that it has not had a leader since Reagan, and lest we forget, Reagan dragged them kicking and screaming into being anything resembling an opposition party. Trump is not the answer because he is not right wing nor even conservative, but at least we know that the man who talks about pussy is not one.
Yeah. No real leader ever even thought about, much less talked about pussy. Real leaders are metrosexual nonentities still very attached to their mothers in middle age. Like McMuffin.
“We are a nation of two worlds now”
This.
Living smack in the middle of the Cloud world and in a town with a heavy bias towards media types, you are spot on. The self reinforcing aspect of the bubble can’t be overestimated. My poor spouse made the mistake of suggesting on Facebook one day that she was frankly disgusted by both candidates and gave good and objective reasons for her decision not to vote for either. The Cloud people descended on her like a pack of starving feral cats. Did have some fun this morning with a journalist neighbor on the train platform…hadn’t seen each other in a week and after pleasantries he said something about how unfair it was that Trump brought the four women to the debate. I just leaned in and said, “well, they are lucky there wasn’t a fifth, since there were two insured settlements paid, not just the one to Paula Jones. And the facts were remarkably adverse in both”. It was fun to prick the bubble a little, since he knew my employment provenance and thus the information was accurate.
On “Morning Joe the day after the debate, even Scarborough and Zbignew Brzezinski’s little girl were laughing in Danny Deutch’s face as he said the reason for Trump’s trouncing of Clinton in the Sunday debate was, of course, sexism.
On Tuesday, the orders had come down, and their usual assembled panel of cloud people mouthpieces was unanimous in declaring the Trump presidential candidacy over, and how Trump was now embarking on a “scorched earth” campaign to obliterate the Republican party,
This meme was immediately unavoidable in every single media outlet.
I know and they know and they know we know that they are bald faced liars, but kissing the rich & powerful’s asses is where the money is modern journalism.
Either nothing at that level of national politics happens by accident, or Trump is indeed the siren song of us blue eyed devils in the last election where the popular vote will still really matter.
Still, as entertaining as Trump has been, I can’t shake the sneaking suspicion that we’re being played.
Is Donald Trump’s campaign an elaborate set up for Trump TV?’
https://www.tremr.com/james-aldridge/is-donald-trumps-campaign-an-elaborate-set-up-for-trump-tv
This would also explain the metamorphosis of Alex Jones and Infowars into the Trump Campaign Network over the last few months. Jones has been expanding and adding staff over that same period and the campaign has obvious ties to Jones; Roger Stone appears at least twice a week.
I see a likely Jones-Trump association and the launch of a new news/media organization after the election is over and the smoke clears. Rightly or wrongly, many Trump supporters will assume it was stolen, and that perception in combination with the seething rage at the installation of the fat cow will insure a solid, loyal base to launch the enterprise from.
Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh both launched careers founded on the attacking the Clintons. I think we’re going to see history repeat itself. In fact, I think it already has and we just haven’t recognized it yet.
Well, everybody has been saying, “Where is the billionaire that will launch media to counter the counter-culture?” Once again, Trump is looking far beyond the immediate objective.
It’s called Plan B. No Wharton grad worth his salt would not have one;-)
I’m really hoping that the polling here is just as flawed as it was for Brexit. I think there are a lot of us normal people who will tell a pollster on the other end of a phone call or their wife’s 300 facebag “friends” that they are undecided or pro-hag but will pull that lever in the voting booth. I think there is a critical mass of people who are sick of being barked at and pushed around by a small minority of circus freaks and rap video wannabee gangstas. I hoe I’m right.
This time 36 years ago, Carter had the same lead on Reagan as Clinton has on Trump. This is a good thing to read.
The past is not prologue, but Clinton has been stuck at 43%-ish for a year. There’s a reason for that.
I certainly hope so. I had to send a brief but tersely worded email to my piss-boy senator rob portman, that If he was turning his back on Trump, then I would be voting for another senator. I’m finished with these clowns who would stab their own mother in the back if they thought there was a chance that it might help them curry favor with the feckless soccer moms, who are probably one of the most dangerous types of harpy infesting Ohio.
I know a guy whose Facebook profile rates him as a liberal because of the public persona he has cultivated, but who is a white nationalist. I suspect there’s a lot more like him. By the way, I’m not talking about myself; I’m not on Facebook.
My kid brother is married to a gal who is just soooooo offended by that stupid tape and refuses to vote for Trump now. Never mind that her husband has an FFL and their lives are going to get very interesting in January if the hag wins. Some of these fools have been sheltered from how men really talk when they are amongst themselves that it knocks them out of their safe space when they actually hear it. Especially when alpha males are alone and the subject of women comes up. But hey, sis…make sure you have your biting stick and get ready to be on a first name basis with the BATF agents in your area.
Um, who do you suppose buys those millions of copies of “50 Shades of Gray”? It ain’t guys, folks. And many women, among themselves, talk trash with the best of ’em. Personally, I think the future of our Supreme Court, and thus our Liberties, is way more relevant. Ultimately, I just lament what’s coming for our children and grandchildren for the next generation or so unless and until the innate spark in our souls is again rekindled to critical mass… Molon Labe, y’all…
I keep trying to find a historical analog for this ruling class and keep failing. Their spawn, the SJWs roaming our university campuses, defy anything that I had ever contemplated.
I keep getting a Masque of the Red Death vibe these days, even in my dreams. Everyone keeps writing about what happens in the event of a food shortage. Lately I’ve started to wonder what it’s going to look like if the anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and other trifles run out.
Imperial Rome? They still went through the motions of a Republic even though everyone knew it was over. The Patriarchs were their Cloud People and were exempt from the taxes and rules they imposed on the Dirt People. The Middle Class was effectively extinguished through crushing taxes and imported (slave) labor.
Even the worst of the Emperors made some pretense of leading campaigns against the barbarians and performing the duties of pontiff and censor. I get that the outcomes are similar, but there is something in our elites’ bethavior that defies easy explanation. Whatever it is is even more manifest in their SJW kids.
It could simply be above our pay grade, that is, good vs. evil. Maybe this is why the liberals love the terrorists so much.
18th century Europe feels like a closer analogy. The European aristocrats had become so insular, they often did not speak the local language.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the effete Hapsburg and Bourbon courts, but I do think that the anti-depressants have something to do with it. They may be contributing to this bizarre confidence in the face of serial failure that so many in the cloud display.
James is probably right. It is a kind of evil, but a bland, I feel great about myself because I’m stuffed to the gills with Prozac kind of evil. My step father is like that. He consistently voices opinions that are firmly in the police state space but says it in the nicest, mellowest way you can imagine due to his personal psychotropic prescription load. He seems genuinely confused and hurt that I respond passionately to his suggestions that we imprison his (and his class’) political opponents for daring to disagree with the general line of the party. I don’t doubt for a second that if things ever got that bad, he’d report me as a crimethinker. But he’d fill great about it the next day because his eyeballs are floating in Zoloft.
My exact experience with certain relatives as well. I think you are on to something.
Step father should read “step father in law.” My old man is not of the cloud.
Hey El, best comment ever, and likely plays out millions of times daily.
I do too. A criminal friend, sharp enough to have never been caught, tried mood suppressants. He said one feels nothing- no emotion at all, detached from everything. That smells like chemically induced sociopathy to me (no empathy).
Add to that the elevated isolation of ADHD stimulants and the saturation of ‘meds’, and you’ve got a drugged populace packed into hives.
High school “cocktails” and every convict on Elavil disability.
Their environment is artificial enough, the pharma makes it unreal.
The son of a mafiosi said his dad was a psychopath who smoked 5 packs and drank 2 quarts of whisky a day. I see Bill Bennetts like that everywhere in the ruling institutions.
Please, Senators, wash down the lithium with a taxpayer paid six martini lunch while you write another drug law.
Oh, and Z wondered where the drug explosion came from?
Wisner’s Wurlitzer- the CIA created many or most of the radical groups in the 60s; their civil allies were happy to create “demand” for mutually beneficial expansion in many ‘markets’.
One hand washes the other, economic war is what crown corps like the CIA do.
Al Z: A friend who was experimenting with anti-depressants without a prescription told me the same thing: he just felt blank, nothing bothered him enough to make him sad.
The French Revolution makes more sense to me now when I look at it in juxtaposition to our own situation. Specifically, I used to wonder why revolutions like that seemed to so often descend into rampant bloodletting. I think a large part of it was because the Dirt People had a sense of inchoate rage, so suspicion would simply have to do in place of more precise information. They lacked precise information about the who, what, and how of their predicament, but they knew they were being screwed and had a pretty good idea of who was allied with the ones doing the screwing.
To borrow the frog in a pot analogy, if the frog does suddenly become aware of his predicament he will thrash about in his effort to extricate himself, and that will take priority over subtle nuances. He won’t know the precise information about where the heat is coming from or who turned it on, he just knows someone did this to him and he has some vague-but-mostly-accurate ideas about that.
I often read liberals snarkily responding with “Oh yeah? So just who exactly do you nuts plan to start shooting then?” when the subject of open resistance comes up. Well that’s just it, isn’t it? They seem to think their rhetorical question has ended the discussion, but events from history indicate that people are quite willing to find answers to that question when they are pushed to it.
I get a deja vu of 18th century Britain aristocratic attitudes. The ruling class simply could not understand why the Americans were so disgruntled and rebellious with their rule.
I don’t think most of them ever even really figured out why the Revolutionary War was fought. People in America weren’t starving. People in America weren’t evicted from their homes, so what was their beef?
The elites this go ’round don’t understand either.
It all boils down to a battle between those who wish to control their own destiny and those who wish to control it for you. The control freaks are convinced that they can run your life better than you can.and will NEVER understand why you don’t share their view.
Rose, in my experience, the Control Freaks have a lot of personal issues. For whatever reason, they are incapable of a “live and let live” attitude. It seems like they need to work out their personal issues by taking it out on others. Obama certainly meets that description, and Hillary appears to do so as well. It would be very nice to be able to choose between candidates who have policy prescriptions backed by a coherent philosophy of the role of government, rather than dealing with people who are playing out their mommy and daddy issues on all of us.
The “Obey Daddy! and behave” conservatives vs. the “Down with Daddy! brother and sister will help me” liberals.
You’re right, they do. They seek to control because they cannot cope with an unpredictable life. If they are setting the rules and controlling the dialogue, then there is less risk that they will have to face anything they might rather not deal with. (they can squish it instead of having to listen to it).
I think the modern day SJW types are very much like the Puritans. The Puritans had enormous hangups. Reading their journals is a a glimpse into mental hell as they forever wrestled with whether they were saved or not (they thought being damned or not was predestined and so spent much of their lives looking for a sign one way or the other to indicate whether they were gonna rise to heaven or burn in hell). This created a fundamental insecurity that is downright crazymaking: whatever kind of person you were, no matter how hard you tried to be good, you might be damned anyways just because you were born that way. In modern terms, it would be much like a child in an abusive family not knowing if today is the day mom is going to hug them or beat them, and nothing they do has any affect on which one it might be.
The Puritans were ruled by fear of their eternal destiny and thus forever internally insecure, so they sought to control every last aspect of life, even going so far as to do inspections of people’s homes to make sure they were dusting and washing the floors enough! Not surprisingly, their obsessions grew exponentially and ultimately ended in hangings and burnings and persecution of anybody (mostly the poor Quakers) who dared to question the madness or buck the trend. Theirs became an incredibly closed society, anybody with innovative ideas or different views fled for greener pastures like the much more tolerant and freewheeling Middle Colonies (PA, etc).
What we are seeing on college campuses today is not much different. I strongly suspect that unfettered, the hardcore SJW types would be quite happy to throw us Deplorables on a bonfire. And, similarly, as their madness overwhelms, rational and logical people will bail on the SJW controlled institutions/locales and seek greener pastures, either in new institutions or abroad.
It is a shame that you have such a distorted view of much of what the Puritans believed and how they lived. Faith in the providence of God coupled with personal knowledge of eternal security is incredibly freeing. One can then choose the better path. Your caricature of a life of faith is sad. Ultimately when you deny God, when you deny the fundamental fallen nature of man, and when you believe that everything is going to be “just fine if,” you are no different from your ‘cloud people.’ You are exalting man, but seeing your own solution as superior to ‘theirs.’ You just have a different “IF” in mind than the cloud people. Because the “IF” is simply your own utopian dream.
True freedom comes only from God. Molecules in motion do not produce ideas or information. They do not produce objective morality. They just are. It is the immaterial God who has given us our own immaterial dimension (your mind, your soul, whatever word you like). This is NOT some happenstance byproduct of atomic interactions (=chemistry). We are far more than that.
Deny your Creator at your own peril, and go the way of the French Revolution. One tyranny replaces another, accompanied by much pain and suffering. Such is the destiny of man living for himself.
No, the Council of the Elect were totalitarian fanatics.
The Pilgrims came here to escape the Puritans.
Pilgrims befriended Indians, while Puritans murdered them in the Massachusetts Bay massacre.
Um, I’m not denying my Creator, I very much believe in God. What I don’t believe is that some people are damned from birth and others are saved, and that nothing we do on this earth (like being Baptized and living a just and righteous life) can change that fact.
You really need to read some primary source material by Puritans, especially their diaries. They very much thought that God had predetermined who was saved and who wasn’t, and they agonized over which camp they were in as individuals. They did NOT have any of the security of eternal security that you refer to, because they did not believe that any person could know the status of their eternal soul’s destiny. They had to wait until they stopped breathing to find out of they were going to rise or burn. In times of high mortality, especially of children, that had to have been horrifying. Their writings reflect this uncertainty, they truly tortured themselves mentally over it and lived in a great deal of fear.
The Puritans were fanatical nuts, not that different from the Taliban or any other hyper religious people. My husband’s ancestors were Quakers who came here in the 1630s. One was hung as a witch, others were whipped, fined to the point of utter impoverishment etc. It was brutal, like American sharia law.
You’ve put your finger on the way it seems to me that my friends and family in Australia seem to think. From my American upbringing, I have a very hard time understanding how they can place such faith in government.
Then I remember that they are subjects. They are not sovereign citizens, and their country was never won through revolution; when their government issues an edict, (e.g. the gun “buyback” which was confiscation) they may grumble, but take up arms? Never. There wasn’t even a political party there which disagreed with this unprecedented action, they all want more power for the government. Australia’s Constitution is modelled on our own, very closely; but there is nothing resembling a Bill of Rights.
When Australia’s elected PM was “sacked,” in 1975, his goverment dismissed, by an appointed (not elected!) official, some Aussies had some angry words- but no action was taken. Same thing when a new PM was recently elected, but then replaced by his party (sort of what the GOPe is trying to do with Trump,) no one there said, “the government is illegitimate, this PM wasn’t elected, he was installed using dirty tricks in the backroom!”
I am astounded that things like this occur but no one does anything. I suppose voting there is just registering a preference, it doesn’t really count for much. I wonder why it’s illegal not to vote?
Most Aussies are convinced that their government is making decisions for them that they, themselves, are not qualified to make. And they’re happy with that, and don’t understand us fractious Americans who want less government in our lives.
Many of my decisions haven’t been the best ones that could have been made; I’m not rich, or famous; but I demand the right to make my own decisions about my own life!
Back in the tech bust, there was a forum I used to participate in. One of the guys was out of work and was eating every meal at McDonalds. He did not know how to cook. (People gave him a lot of goof advice on how to make some simple meals. I hope the guy learned how to manage.)
If there’s a major financial event, people will starve.
Yeah, Masque of the Red Death, that’s a good description. I am reminded of Honoria:
“Justa Grata Honoria, commonly referred to during her lifetime as Honoria,[1] was the older sister of the Western Roman Emperor Valentinian III — famous for her plea of love and help to Attila the Hun, which led to his proclamation of his claim to rule the Western Roman Empire.”
A self serving idiot of the ruling class who stupidly helped destroy her nation for selfish gain.
Women are peculiarly disloyal and ready to jump in bed with invaders, as numerous studies have shown.
But women, too, can be the fiercest defenders of a culture’s honor. Shaming the men who straggled home from the US Civil War, defeated in battle and emotionally scarred, I think a lot of these women then formed societies to uphold the honor that their men had failed to do. I’m thinking of the UDC and GWTW. Their worshipful stance to men like Robert E. Lee became a kind of religion. I remember happening upon the tomb of REL at Washington and Lee University many years ago when our son was doing his college visits. A little white haired lady was keeping dimly-lit vigil at the marble sarcophagus of REL. Meanwhile, bedlam at the Admissions Office with the nasal voices of the New Jersey parents ringing out over the dulcet Virginian staff’s murmurs as their progeny were interviewed. Kind of comical, actually;-)
The SJWs are more or less Mao’s Red Guards, though they haven’t yet gotten to killing the thought criminals….
Like Venezuela. Starving psychotics with no meds are roaming the streets there now. We might know more if our Media weren’t so busy tracking down audio of Trump passing gas in someone’s general direction.
Living in the UK for a while back in the mid-’80s, I was struck how many of the people lived in a dream world where Margaret Thatcher was absolutely evil, and how everything would be brilliant if the likes of her would take a hike. Similarly, I recall how so many people in this country have believed over time that things would be so much better if Nixon/Reagan/George W Bush would just go away. I have come to believe that people create their own realities, often significantly divorced from the facts on the ground. But I have never seen the levels of mass hypnosis (self-hypnosis?) being foisted on the American public as we see today. A society so completely divorced from reality cannot last long, can it?
I tend to think of Trump as a living, animated version of walking and talking truth. He goes a bit off in some of his speeches and arguments, but he is the human manifestation of the facts of things that cannot be wished away. To the extent that he is politically broken over the wheel in this election, it will represent a victory of delusion over reality. I fear the delusional people with power will seize the moment to make sure that any evidence of “truthiness” will be erased from our culture. It will be quite a thing to witness.
In the last debate, I kept waiting, hoping that he would conger up the words of the great one and tell the audience … “Well, there she goes again!” But he keeps missing some prime opportunities.
I agree, and have also been waiting for him to say those words in a Reaganesque tone. So far the closest we have gotten was Pence saying “there you go whipping out that Mexican thing again,” which certainly seemed to have a bit of double entendre to it.
It is heartwarming to see the way people respond to being told the truth in the midst of our culture of lies. I am very disappointed in the (R)s, that they did not follow his lead.
However you describe what the media does, and whatever motive you attribute to them, what it comes down to is they are liars. I don’t believe anything they say. Why? Because I can think for myself and know how much they have lied since I started paying attention. The same goes for the federal government. The Russians hacked the DNC. Really? Lynch and Clinton discussed golf. Really? The “unemployment rate” is 5%. Really? The ice caps are melting. Really? The “inner cities” need more money. Really? The divide is between the liars and those of us who are tired of being lied to, who see the world as it is and want to deal with it from that starting point.
Too many people act as if they can get to the truth by listening to liars. Maybe it’s a “big ego”/ overeducated thing? Myself I think someone who tries to scam me will likely succeed sooner or later, and I’m not inclined to spend much effort sorting through bullshit to get truth. To me, it looks like the MSM are eagerly cutting their own throats by destroying their credibility – but I guess too many people prefer the delusions the media are selling, the excuses for looting the normal citizens and masturbating their egos about being “nicer and smarter”
At least now – finally! – I understand Liberals’ obsession with magic, magic words. They’re financially able to create this little bubble-reality for themselves, which they then invent words to describe…. and since those words can only describe that particular reality, consigning all else to outer darkness, they really come to believe that words shape reality. Thus they can say, and apparently believe, that Trump is winning because “patriarchy,” because that word means something on campus — no “male” they know would ever be so crude as to vote in his own interests! Whereas to the rest of us, it sounds like “Oooga booga Trump bad, ooga booga vote Hillary! ooga booga racist.” And if you disagree, that’s false consciousness, comrade. 🙂
You were doing well, right up until you said that Africans overthrew their colonial governments. This is hilariously untrue. In reality, that “overthrow” was the power shift of Harvard taking over the former colonial possessions, Harvard which today still rules the continent, through the arming, organizing, and funding of rebels, similarly to what what we see in the U.S.’s present-day meddling in the Middle East.
I do wonder if you wouldn’t elaborate on the language and person-to-person cultural habits of the Cumulonimbys in the future.
Two things regarding Africa. One is numbers count for everything. A minority can rule over a majority as long as the minority is willing to do what is necessary to remain in power. See Syria and Rhodesia. The ruling elites back home stopped supporting the colonial governments. The other piece of the puzzle is the first wave of post-Colonial rulers were all educated and trained in the West. They came back with something much more powerful than guns. They had knowledge. They knew the West was losing its will to fight. Guys like Kwame Nkrumah figured this out.
That said, Kwame Nkrumah also knew that Africans were terrible at running things, relative to the colonials. He hoped the Africans would learn once they had power, but that was wishful thinking.
Having lived in Rhodesia I think I should comment. The fall of the Smith government would not have happened when it did, and probably not for a long time thereafter had there not been foreign influence. The dude is right about Harvard. He is using it as a stand-in for global elites. UN sanctions, the USSR and China supplying arms and educating African leaders, the World Council of Churches giving terrorists food and medical supplies and paying for arms shipments, the coup in Portugal cutting of access to ports, having worthless leaders in the US and UK, you name it. The Rhodesians themselves were great people. Highly competent. By the way, there was no apartheid in Rhodesia. The voting franchise would have gradually extended to more blacks over time and it would have been a highly successful liberal democracy given enough time. Thirtynor forty years would probably have done it. Today, in fact. Look at what you have there now.
The pattern I’ve noticed in these post-Colonial nations, is that they have no patience with the concept of taking time, developing expertise and institutions, practicing good habits. It has to be NOW — or else. Next you see the grinning chiefs riding around in Mercedes and the machetes covered in blood. Flash comes first. Sad.
I dare say what you are describing is in fact a biological trait of people from that part of the world, because they evince this same trait in their diaspora. High time preference, no capacity for delayed gratification, very much a “what do I have an urge for right here and now?” sort of people. It’s for these same reasons that they are disproportionately criminal, they can’t project forward in time and see the likely sequence of events that will follow indulgence in the urges of Right Now.
We’re not supposed to notice that pattern in these parts. Just keep bringing ’em in and keep payin’!
I am somewhat intrigued by you. I have known two Doctors who were close participants in something very like the “Tea Party” back in 1994. One of them was a Neurosurgeon who spent quite a lot of time in Africa. I don’t want to say very much because I assume you value your anonymity just like the rest of us.
But does 1994 sound familiar to you?
I was never in the Tea Party. I took this name out of respect for the people in it.
No, numbers don’t count for everything. You say it yourself: a minority can rule over a majority. This was true even back in the era of the rifleman, which was perhaps the time when the power of the individual relative to the mass was highest. Our crew-served weapons now are far more powerful and far more technical. A 70 IQ tribesman can maintain an AK-47 even though he is 2000 years from the social capability to build it. This is not true of aircraft, JDAMs, or even artillery.
Returning to the point of the article: I’d much prefer to be ruled expertly by strangers. The problem with modern progressives is not that they are strangers to “the people” (meh) — that’s arguable — but that they are eager victims of a mediated feedback loop in which their worldview can and has detached from reality. That is, they are not experts because they are ignorant; as such, they cannot rule expertly.
The British ruled India for two hundred years with very little staffing and the natives had access to weapons because they made up greater numbers in the military than the tiny number of British soldiers. They had no interference from outside, and the Quit India campaign began within the UK itself.
The British ruled India very successfully by ruling largely through the native Maharajahs and a bureaucracy made up of the highly competent top 2 castes. Virtually every Indian you know in the US is from those 2 castes. The average Indian saw mostly Indian faces, and his lot wasn’t too bad… But the massacre at Amritsar in 1919, ordered by a British general, turned the whole country against its formerly inconspicuous rulers
200 British to run all of the vast Sudan.
No Belgian Congo “Heart of Darkness” crap, either.
>A 70 IQ tribesman can maintain an AK-47 even though he is 2000 years from the social capability to build it.
I have a minor niggle (is that word still allowed?): you are using Western civilization’s curve in your projection to arrive at the 2000 year estimate. If you used the tribesman’s curve you might have found yourself in the realm of Hyperbolic Geometry. More specifically, the part that states that while two parallel lines might converge, it would only be at infinity.
You are allowed to use the word “niggle” as long as you don’t over do it. Be niggardly in using it.
You are very kind, Mr Z, to say the British press reports better on America than your own. While this may be true I can’t verify it as apart form a few visits years ago, I haven’t seen much of the States recently other than through the lens of TV and movie dramas, many of which involve zombies or superheroes crushing white people. There may be a connection here that i am missing.
The one thing I would say is that the British press mostly get their stories from news agencies, which tend to be pro-Democrat, so there is always a flavour of anti-Trump mixed in. The larger electronic news organisations such as the dire BBC have their own correspondents who comfortably reside in Washington and NY though I suppose they have people available in places like Chicago and LA. Being the BBC and being utterly left-wing (after all, they wouldn’t exist without the state machine to threaten people with jail in order to pay for it) they naturally scowl at anything but the Democrat point of view. Even deplorable Sky News (and not deplorable in a pro-Trump way) has all-too-obvious Democrat leanings and often if there is the shooting of a black man by police will lead with that story as if this is of vital relevance to British law and order. As most of our cops don’t carry guns, it’s hard to see why we need to be on the alert for a rise on cops murdering the innocent who have been freed from oppression for nearly two centuries in these islands, but there we are. It is either virtue signalling, or they are looking for a job at the Beeb.
One hopes however they are black, muslim or LGBT to get on with Al-Beeb, who have recently declared that they are really going all out to ‘balance’ the organisation to ensure these groups have plenty of exposure, rather than employing whites. I can’t wait to see the first BBC news show with a woman in full burqa, especially if she (or he, for who knows?) is obliged to report on yet another pathetic England footy game featuring (gasp!) men with uncovered legs. “Look away now, if you don’t want to see naked knees”
It isn’t just that we live in interesting times, it is more that we aren’t allowed to be informed about just how interesting our times are.
The TV news piped into British homes is hilariously awful. We get BBC America which not good, but still better than our domestically produced TV news.
Maybe we should trade news teams.
The British press has many of the same prejudices as ours, but less skin in the game. The distance gives them the appearance of less bias, and while they share the same basic thought patterns as our own stupid journalists, what they write is automatically less strident. Not caring as much makes them more objective. The founders would have called this disinterestedness.
try RT NEWS
The Telegraph, and even the Red Guardian, frequently lead stories, embarrassing to the left, about the US that are followed weeks later, if at all, by the US NSDWP propaganda aparat.
One thing about Fleet Street is that the British broadsheets make no mystery of their editorial slant. American media outlets, particularly the dinosaur newspapers, have the nerve to make pretenses of objectivity. For a long time Americans believed them, too. Every single one of them had a Leftist slant, of course, so Americans consumed what was essentially Left wing propaganda while thinking it was the sober and dispassionate assessment of the facts by unbiased reporters. In other words, it was and is a particularly insidious combination.
Sometimes I wonder if the power they wield over the American perception of reality can ever be broken, or if the world as we know it is simply going to have to end before that moment can be reached.
Both of my grandfathers started out working in machine shops and eventually ended up in management. One of them actually worked for Lincoln Electric Company – which used to be a business school case study subject because they made all management new hires work on the production floor for a year before letting them act like managers. When I was in college, I worked on the production line of a GM plant every summer – good money and a glimpse at how stuff gets done (not done well at GM in the 80’s).
There was always something very American about the guy who worked himself up from the bottom. In the Marines, we always had an extra degree of respect for the Mustangs (Officers who were former enlisted men). I have an instinctual suspicion of leaders / managers who never had menial, entry level type jobs and never worried about having enough money for gas and food. They are missing a big piece of a normal education.
This post really resonates. In 1965 I started out sweeping the floor in a factory. I didn’t quite make the corner office but when the guy in the corner office needed to know something I was the one he asked.
It is generally agreed that Officers in the Heer were of superb quality and were responsible for the cohesion of the German Army which fought admirably until the end. What is not publicized is that prior to the beginning of the war the budding German officers actually spent a year as an actual Soldat (Offizieranwärter).
Dan Kurt
My Dad started out as a truck driver for the Milwaukee Journal and worked his way up to circulation manager in other newspapers. Probably helped him in dealing with the teamsters…
The first computer company I worked for, Floating Point Systems, required every design engineer hired to first spend time on the test floor bringing up machines. I’m pretty sure that was a very cheap way to reduce poor designs, as well as making connections between them and test floor technicians.
The world of politics and business now operates in the opposite way. Yeah you can get away with that for a while, but eventually it will come back to bite you. We’ll know we are there when the financial whiz-bangs start jumping off buildings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yge311sFhC8