Interesting read. The bureaucracy climbers you describe are, of course, epitomized by our current VP. It's the only thing Biden learned from Obama. Choose a VP so useless that no one their right mind would try to impeach or assassinate you.
The short answer to Kirn's question is that the public is starting to mumble about how perhaps the emperor is naked, after all. The idiocy is so evident and so pervasive that the public is starting to notice. (Increased difficulty maintaining a standard of living makes even casual observers pay attention to government)
I think this is one on of the most straightforward and simple yet incredibly astute observations you've made in general, but this in specific: "But through all of that amazing emptiness, it’s getting easier and easier to see."
The peasants have "learned to read Latin" and now they know the priests were lying. And I suddenly have more hope than I've had a in a while.
exactly. How much does the cabal care, however? Not one bit, I don't think. Their agenda has been going on for so long it's mostly on autopilot. They're doing what they've always done. The difference is now we're awake, see the game, and have stopped playing along. I don't think they'll know they've lost until it's truly game over day.
The problem is that same autopilot has blinded the current crop of elites to the actual mechanisms at play, as well. They grew up assuming the production techniques were infallible and so didn't bother to maintain them.
During 1993 I was on a long flight from Amsterdam to Chicago - I had a lot of time to think. I was great a keeping a journal back then and I wrote, on that flight, about two things - China and how the US was emasculating men.
On the China front I posited that it was the sleeping giant that may have the good fortune to awaken without civil war and proceed to conquer all its geopolitical rivals.
On emasculating men I did a review of the 1993 Calvin Klein jean ads where the men were intentionally androgynous. The ads really struck me because the male models were feminized and it stood out like a sore thumb. I wondered why anyone would think that a feminine male model could sell anything, especially jeans. I grew up with the Marlboro Man, not a sexually fluid version of 'man'.
Looking back, I now know that maybe the two points were synchronous. To win, China's first goal was to destroy the American man...by 2001 Universal/NBC was Chinese owned and they kept marching on Hollywood, our routers and TikTok. China has created a cancer that is rotting our brains and we better pull out of this nose dive fast.
That’s why I was always into Southern Rock. All the people I hung out with in San Francisco were as well. We went camping and partied our asses off. The SF people see now, is NOT SF. It’s another planet. I was born in 1963.
I know, I grew up with those bands, but they were all about sex, drugs and rock n' roll, and I don't recall any of them being androgynous - not with songs like 'Girls Girls Girls' by Motley Crue. I could be wrong.
But you had Bowie and many of the Glam rockers going way back as far as the late 1960's. And it was some great music. Robert Smith of the Cure looked so strange with all that makeup. And yet I loved their sound.
We've seen the emptiness of these so-called leaders. Imagine a Venn diagram of the Peter Principle, Idiocracy and Fear of Flying - Kamala Harris is in the middle.
It's causing panic in the circles of power, yes and that's as should be, but it's also causing panic among the comparatively powerless - especially the segment dependent on the stability of said circles of power.
The family with a home mortgaged to the weathervane, the business-owner at the end of a long global supply-chain, the normal average worker, labourer, prole, happy and satisfied with bringing home a paycheck as long as some predictable order of normalcy exists in and as society.
This segement too panics now, when truth is something you must go seek, sifting and filtering and thinking for yourself instead of simply reading the paper on the way to work and going to sleep after watching the evening news.
Reasons are surely many and varied, but I think the claim has merit, that a lot of the panic among the powerful is due to the emerging panic among the (conditioned to self-identify as) powerless mass of people.
It is when that mass panic and then turns panic into anger and hate, that the old holders of power may be turned into culprits and scapegoats by the new and rising stars, seeing an easy and obvious sacrifice-play to emerge as the glorious saviours (and whatever power they seemingly dismantle or give up during and right after the revolution, they can quickly and incrementally regain by claiming it necessary so as to safeguard said revolution).
You've got it backwards, the powerless who suck of the tit of the current power structure are panicking because they see the powerful panicking. Those that suck of the tit of the power structure stopped thinking for themselves around the time of high school, when they learned what its like to be on the outside looking in.
Look at the Covid response: first, media makes people panic (or claims people are panicking which is pretty much the same thing communication-wise), then politicians consults captured experts and the people doing surveys on focus groups for them and so on with the proverbial wet digit in the wind so said politicians can be appearing as Doing Something(tm), and then the whole thing starts feeding itself like a runaway neutron splitting more and more nuclei...
It's beautiful to see the underlying spiritual framework. I'm Buddhist, Tucker is a strong Catholic, Tate a Muslim. Courage - or the lack thereof - is what I think about all the time. Yes, the keeping one's head down to get along is ; Jordan Peterson talks about how once that starts and the longer one lets it play, the more impossible one's position.
Tate must know that sexual allegations is standard CIA playbook. If his understanding of the case is as he states it, how similar to Assange?! And the point is that no one can go anywhere to be safe from the reaches of the CIA. It looked pretty clear that Tucker gets that point too.
We're still playing catchup to my main man hero, so many similarities to Tate: Malcolm X. Another man of total masculine integrity. The battlelines are forming and sitting it out is not a real option.
"Sitting it out is not a real option" - Very true! Unfortunately. But is that not what most of us in the so-called 'Western Liberal Democracies' have been doing? For over fifty years?
I suspect that donating a few hundred bucks to the Donkphat or Ellekey parties, or voting for the candidate who promises the most "free stuff" just ain't gonna cut it. That system is broken. Intrinsically flawed. And probably - beyond repair.
As long as we have access to the communications tools, (not guaranteed!), we can rant at the stupidity of it all. We can panic, as Chris says, as we watch the "emptiness and the transparency colliding". And we can support the folks who can bring us together - like Carlson, or Peterson.
But ultimately, we, each one of us, has to throw the bike back into the limo, and determine how we can join with other sane people to work our way back to a world with a future.
I'm 'bout the same age as you and one of the many books I read in high school was Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". His detailing of the Romans was meticulous and thorough and listed all the many strengths and weaknesses that they developed over time. But he made the point that it wasn't that it fell, but that it took so long to do so. It lasted for 1000 years. All the points you made are 100% accurate and valid: the rot and corruption we see in almost all our institutions and the individuals who run them is palpable and very obvious to most anyone who has a pulse and can read or understand English. As you say, how does all this end? Maybe it doesn't. As Bismarck said, God watches out for drunks and the United States of America. As bad as our leaders of all political parties are, and as bad as the people who run our government schools are, and as venal and greedy as the business community is, and as dishonest as the legacy media is at most every level, there are many great and wonderful people out there who are either Christians and adhere to those traditional values, or come from other groups who share the same. Plus, look at the competition: they are an amalgamation of gangsters, pedophiles, straight and not, corrupt, stupid, racist, ethnocentric, and generally incompetent. Just look at all 68 of the Muslim majority countries. Their citizens would rather live here or another western Christian-based society than their own. And we have people like you and Wolf and Malone and Kirsch, and McCullough and a plethora of other great thinkers, with great values and courage, who are willing to step up and state the obvious, challenging these cretins. The greatest obstacles we have are the lethargy and inertia of large parts of the populace, and the second, this administration stumbling into a world war with the Russians or the facists in China, or both. As Lord Protector Cromwell said, we should place our faith in God, but keep our powder dry. Which is to say, pray for deliverance, be thankful for any blessing received, but be prepared to fight the evil ones, here and elsewhere.
"Their citizens would rather live here or another western Christian-based society than their own."
The first thing moslem migrants does when they become numerous enough, is to start turning the host-nation into a copy of what they left. Always, no exceptions. Look at France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Finalnd, Netherlands, Britain and compare them to Poland, Romania, Hunagry.
I wonder sometimes if the people who are putting on the show even know they are putting on a show anymore. Could it be possible that these empty vessels who have box-checked their way to the top actually confuse act for substance? I think it may be possible.
The traits selected for in modern leadership include socialization for credential maximization, a poor capacity for individual thought and reflection, and a total reliance on 'best practices' and consensus. Taken together, these signify a group that believes that if the right actions are performed, as defined by the authorities that legitimize them, then right results will follow- I say X on the paper, I get an A, I get the internship at the WEF, I shake the right hands, I get the right grants, I get the job in the bureaucracy, I check all the boxes of success, I get promoted, etc. Everyone in leadership has always been told what the right act to perform to get ahead is and have done it. Riding your bike the length of a football field isn't hypocrisy or idiocy to them. I think these people might actually believe that their performance has some real world effect. After all, performance got them where they are; they must think it does something.
I know that not every politician and bureaucrat is a vapid performer, but plenty are. It would be pretty cool if we could separate the wheat from the chaff in a simple and efficient fashion.....PRIOR to going to the ballot box. This is not a call for "expert opinions", just a thought on how we might recognize the difference between true public servants and true public poseurs
Sounds to me like Chris mentioned just such a way in this particular post -- a now relatively easy group project that could be carried out at all geographic and political scales in the US.
The problem is that as executive and regulatory function, government is the nervous system of the state, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system. With public government and private banking, the banks rule. So the only real job those flunkies have, is running up the debt the banks need. "The real money is in bonds"
When the medium enabling markets is privately held, we are all tenant farmers to the banks.
When Warren Buffet trades a few billion for Yellowstone park and a couple thousand miles of interstate 70, because the US can't afford the interest anymore, you will understand just how it all works. Welcome to the new feudalism.
When they do it to poor people, it's called predatory lending. Then they do it to third world countries, it's called disaster capitalism.
Or we will look back on this as the banks having their "Let them eat cake." moment.
"The emptiness and the transparency are colliding. And yes, it’s causing panic. It should."
A good friend of mine cross posted this article on her Substack and I'm glad I stopped to look at it. Yuval Noah Harari, the brain inside the brain of Klaus Schwab, has talked about how special this time is for tyrants and other totalitarian leaders. He said that Hitler, Mao, Stalin etc. would cream in their jeans if they had access to the technological advances currently available. While the psychopathic geopolitical and corporate leeches in WEF high society cheer him on, they forget who and what we are which that they so wish to snoop, silence, control or eliminate altogether. Many of them can't even recognize that we see through their sick agenda - And the ones who can see it know that their plans are worthless without a vast number of us going along with it willfully.
Through no particular talent or strength of my own, I was a part of the five percent of people who could see this madness unfolding well before the shit show that is Stupid 19 began. And when St Tony Fauci, Time Magazine's Guardian of the Year 2020 was being worshipped as Science itself, it could at times feel very lonely. I also lost a fair number of friends because I refused to play any of the ridiculous games and certainly wasn't about to turn my body over as an experiment in Fauci-DARPA Inc's mRNA holocaust. Wasn't easy knowing what I did and often wondered if my life would have been better off and less complicated if I just closed my eyes and ears and walked alongside all of the ignorant gullible sheep.
But years of inner speculation and a spiritual quest wouldn't allow me to close my heart and now hope can continue to burn. And reminds me that I am a creation of something way more powerful and loving than the creators of this nauseating future.. And it's most heartening to see so many other folks waking up beside me. Believe me, it's the one thing they wish they could stop but can't. There is much to learn and a lot we still still need to unlearn - I feel that we are moving forward. What other way is there to proceed? The only thing I can recommend to anyone is to hold your head up and be thankful hat you are a human being and you aim to be a kind decent one. They shiver knowing how many of us there are.
I realize this isn't quite the main point of your article, but:
"What strikes me at this moment is that an entire culture of fierce competitors have climbed ladders to nowhere, rising as empty people in ruined systems. "
It seems to me that competition is necessary but not sufficient. If the nature of the game is flawed, then winning it leads to flawed results.
I will never be able to beat Andrew Tate at his game - but then, do I want to? What prize do you get for winning a meth-smoking competition, or a game of Self Lobotomy?
The last couple of paragraphs: Last week I read Here Comes Everybody, a very early (2008) look at the social structures developing through and with social media. Clay Shirky's premise was that new technologies (including just-created Twitter) were creating a revolution in the ability of ordinary people to organize and gather on their own, and spread information.
What happened? Why, in 2020 and 2021, were governments able to convince people that covid killed 5%, 10% of those it infected? And now, why do so many people still believe the vaccines are infallible?
Dorothy Parker, challenged to use "horticulture" in a sentence: "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." Governments were able to convince some of the people, for a while.
Have you ever read Martin Dressler? For some reason, that book keeps haunting me lately. The theme of it being the pursuit of an ideal, and on to the bigger and better...leading to emptiness and isolation and hollow accomplishments.
I did not appreciate it at first because it seems to critique the American Dream as being a hollow pursuit. Which I don’t exactly agree with. But still.
But I do wonder if our vapid and empty pursuits now are a result of the flipping of our ideals- the liberals were supposed to keep the pursuit of power and money in check by advocating for the powerless and poor. Instead, liberals have married giant corporate greed and government control with liberal ideology, which turned it into a brain dead and unstoppable monster mowing down everything. We lost our balance.
Interesting read. The bureaucracy climbers you describe are, of course, epitomized by our current VP. It's the only thing Biden learned from Obama. Choose a VP so useless that no one their right mind would try to impeach or assassinate you.
The short answer to Kirn's question is that the public is starting to mumble about how perhaps the emperor is naked, after all. The idiocy is so evident and so pervasive that the public is starting to notice. (Increased difficulty maintaining a standard of living makes even casual observers pay attention to government)
…or especially when a loved one has been murdered by that biotoxin.
Injecting… or merely dusting with a light aerosol soupçon.
https://anamihalceamdphd.substack.com/p/c19-unvaccinated-have-same-blood
I think this is one on of the most straightforward and simple yet incredibly astute observations you've made in general, but this in specific: "But through all of that amazing emptiness, it’s getting easier and easier to see."
The peasants have "learned to read Latin" and now they know the priests were lying. And I suddenly have more hope than I've had a in a while.
exactly. How much does the cabal care, however? Not one bit, I don't think. Their agenda has been going on for so long it's mostly on autopilot. They're doing what they've always done. The difference is now we're awake, see the game, and have stopped playing along. I don't think they'll know they've lost until it's truly game over day.
The problem is that same autopilot has blinded the current crop of elites to the actual mechanisms at play, as well. They grew up assuming the production techniques were infallible and so didn't bother to maintain them.
Then again, debt doesn't matter, until it does.
Perhaps
During 1993 I was on a long flight from Amsterdam to Chicago - I had a lot of time to think. I was great a keeping a journal back then and I wrote, on that flight, about two things - China and how the US was emasculating men.
On the China front I posited that it was the sleeping giant that may have the good fortune to awaken without civil war and proceed to conquer all its geopolitical rivals.
On emasculating men I did a review of the 1993 Calvin Klein jean ads where the men were intentionally androgynous. The ads really struck me because the male models were feminized and it stood out like a sore thumb. I wondered why anyone would think that a feminine male model could sell anything, especially jeans. I grew up with the Marlboro Man, not a sexually fluid version of 'man'.
Looking back, I now know that maybe the two points were synchronous. To win, China's first goal was to destroy the American man...by 2001 Universal/NBC was Chinese owned and they kept marching on Hollywood, our routers and TikTok. China has created a cancer that is rotting our brains and we better pull out of this nose dive fast.
All the big hair 80’s bands wore makeup... it’s been going on for a lot longer
That’s why I was always into Southern Rock. All the people I hung out with in San Francisco were as well. We went camping and partied our asses off. The SF people see now, is NOT SF. It’s another planet. I was born in 1963.
Eagles, America, Steely Dan, Doobie Bros all amazing. But I loved David Bowie
I’ve been lucky to have seen many bands, growing up in SF! I took it for granted. And I saved most of my ticket stubs-lol!
I visited SF a couple of times in the late 80’s... great music scene! It was a little rough around the edges then but loved visiting!
THE 80’s were the BEST! I graduated high school in 1981. Damn I miss the 80’s! I don’t live in the past, but it was a better time in every sense.
SF was a magnificent city…gone now.
Everything has gone downhill faster since Gregg Allman died.
I know, I grew up with those bands, but they were all about sex, drugs and rock n' roll, and I don't recall any of them being androgynous - not with songs like 'Girls Girls Girls' by Motley Crue. I could be wrong.
But you had Bowie and many of the Glam rockers going way back as far as the late 1960's. And it was some great music. Robert Smith of the Cure looked so strange with all that makeup. And yet I loved their sound.
Dude looks like a lady...
Laugh out loud funny! I saw Aerosmith during 1977 and AC/DC opened for them. Bon Scott was wonderful!!
BINGO! This is exactly why I want to get the hell out of Commifornia. I remember when CA was red. It was NOTHING like it is now. It’s frightening!
We've seen the emptiness of these so-called leaders. Imagine a Venn diagram of the Peter Principle, Idiocracy and Fear of Flying - Kamala Harris is in the middle.
🎯😂
It's causing panic in the circles of power, yes and that's as should be, but it's also causing panic among the comparatively powerless - especially the segment dependent on the stability of said circles of power.
The family with a home mortgaged to the weathervane, the business-owner at the end of a long global supply-chain, the normal average worker, labourer, prole, happy and satisfied with bringing home a paycheck as long as some predictable order of normalcy exists in and as society.
This segement too panics now, when truth is something you must go seek, sifting and filtering and thinking for yourself instead of simply reading the paper on the way to work and going to sleep after watching the evening news.
Reasons are surely many and varied, but I think the claim has merit, that a lot of the panic among the powerful is due to the emerging panic among the (conditioned to self-identify as) powerless mass of people.
It is when that mass panic and then turns panic into anger and hate, that the old holders of power may be turned into culprits and scapegoats by the new and rising stars, seeing an easy and obvious sacrifice-play to emerge as the glorious saviours (and whatever power they seemingly dismantle or give up during and right after the revolution, they can quickly and incrementally regain by claiming it necessary so as to safeguard said revolution).
"....a lot of the panic among the powerful is due to the emerging panic among the (conditioned to self-identify as) powerless mass of people."
Interesting thought.
“conditioned to self-identify as powerless“
🎯
Emphasis on “conditioned”.
Jacquerie revolt, anyone?
You've got it backwards, the powerless who suck of the tit of the current power structure are panicking because they see the powerful panicking. Those that suck of the tit of the power structure stopped thinking for themselves around the time of high school, when they learned what its like to be on the outside looking in.
Could very well be a chicken/egg-type thing.
Look at the Covid response: first, media makes people panic (or claims people are panicking which is pretty much the same thing communication-wise), then politicians consults captured experts and the people doing surveys on focus groups for them and so on with the proverbial wet digit in the wind so said politicians can be appearing as Doing Something(tm), and then the whole thing starts feeding itself like a runaway neutron splitting more and more nuclei...
It's beautiful to see the underlying spiritual framework. I'm Buddhist, Tucker is a strong Catholic, Tate a Muslim. Courage - or the lack thereof - is what I think about all the time. Yes, the keeping one's head down to get along is ; Jordan Peterson talks about how once that starts and the longer one lets it play, the more impossible one's position.
Tate must know that sexual allegations is standard CIA playbook. If his understanding of the case is as he states it, how similar to Assange?! And the point is that no one can go anywhere to be safe from the reaches of the CIA. It looked pretty clear that Tucker gets that point too.
We're still playing catchup to my main man hero, so many similarities to Tate: Malcolm X. Another man of total masculine integrity. The battlelines are forming and sitting it out is not a real option.
Tucker's an Episcopalian. But yeah, he believes the Trinity is real.
"Sitting it out is not a real option" - Very true! Unfortunately. But is that not what most of us in the so-called 'Western Liberal Democracies' have been doing? For over fifty years?
I suspect that donating a few hundred bucks to the Donkphat or Ellekey parties, or voting for the candidate who promises the most "free stuff" just ain't gonna cut it. That system is broken. Intrinsically flawed. And probably - beyond repair.
As long as we have access to the communications tools, (not guaranteed!), we can rant at the stupidity of it all. We can panic, as Chris says, as we watch the "emptiness and the transparency colliding". And we can support the folks who can bring us together - like Carlson, or Peterson.
But ultimately, we, each one of us, has to throw the bike back into the limo, and determine how we can join with other sane people to work our way back to a world with a future.
I'm 'bout the same age as you and one of the many books I read in high school was Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". His detailing of the Romans was meticulous and thorough and listed all the many strengths and weaknesses that they developed over time. But he made the point that it wasn't that it fell, but that it took so long to do so. It lasted for 1000 years. All the points you made are 100% accurate and valid: the rot and corruption we see in almost all our institutions and the individuals who run them is palpable and very obvious to most anyone who has a pulse and can read or understand English. As you say, how does all this end? Maybe it doesn't. As Bismarck said, God watches out for drunks and the United States of America. As bad as our leaders of all political parties are, and as bad as the people who run our government schools are, and as venal and greedy as the business community is, and as dishonest as the legacy media is at most every level, there are many great and wonderful people out there who are either Christians and adhere to those traditional values, or come from other groups who share the same. Plus, look at the competition: they are an amalgamation of gangsters, pedophiles, straight and not, corrupt, stupid, racist, ethnocentric, and generally incompetent. Just look at all 68 of the Muslim majority countries. Their citizens would rather live here or another western Christian-based society than their own. And we have people like you and Wolf and Malone and Kirsch, and McCullough and a plethora of other great thinkers, with great values and courage, who are willing to step up and state the obvious, challenging these cretins. The greatest obstacles we have are the lethargy and inertia of large parts of the populace, and the second, this administration stumbling into a world war with the Russians or the facists in China, or both. As Lord Protector Cromwell said, we should place our faith in God, but keep our powder dry. Which is to say, pray for deliverance, be thankful for any blessing received, but be prepared to fight the evil ones, here and elsewhere.
Danny Huckabee
"Their citizens would rather live here or another western Christian-based society than their own."
The first thing moslem migrants does when they become numerous enough, is to start turning the host-nation into a copy of what they left. Always, no exceptions. Look at France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Finalnd, Netherlands, Britain and compare them to Poland, Romania, Hunagry.
I wonder sometimes if the people who are putting on the show even know they are putting on a show anymore. Could it be possible that these empty vessels who have box-checked their way to the top actually confuse act for substance? I think it may be possible.
The traits selected for in modern leadership include socialization for credential maximization, a poor capacity for individual thought and reflection, and a total reliance on 'best practices' and consensus. Taken together, these signify a group that believes that if the right actions are performed, as defined by the authorities that legitimize them, then right results will follow- I say X on the paper, I get an A, I get the internship at the WEF, I shake the right hands, I get the right grants, I get the job in the bureaucracy, I check all the boxes of success, I get promoted, etc. Everyone in leadership has always been told what the right act to perform to get ahead is and have done it. Riding your bike the length of a football field isn't hypocrisy or idiocy to them. I think these people might actually believe that their performance has some real world effect. After all, performance got them where they are; they must think it does something.
"Could it be possible that these empty vessels who have box-checked their way to the top actually confuse act for substance?"
They do. I don't think it's even a question.
And than again let me explain AI
There are two letters A and I.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
I know that not every politician and bureaucrat is a vapid performer, but plenty are. It would be pretty cool if we could separate the wheat from the chaff in a simple and efficient fashion.....PRIOR to going to the ballot box. This is not a call for "expert opinions", just a thought on how we might recognize the difference between true public servants and true public poseurs
Sounds to me like Chris mentioned just such a way in this particular post -- a now relatively easy group project that could be carried out at all geographic and political scales in the US.
The problem is that as executive and regulatory function, government is the nervous system of the state, while money and banking are blood and the circulation system. With public government and private banking, the banks rule. So the only real job those flunkies have, is running up the debt the banks need. "The real money is in bonds"
When the medium enabling markets is privately held, we are all tenant farmers to the banks.
When Warren Buffet trades a few billion for Yellowstone park and a couple thousand miles of interstate 70, because the US can't afford the interest anymore, you will understand just how it all works. Welcome to the new feudalism.
When they do it to poor people, it's called predatory lending. Then they do it to third world countries, it's called disaster capitalism.
Or we will look back on this as the banks having their "Let them eat cake." moment.
Another brilliant observation Mr. Bray, as always.
"The emptiness and the transparency are colliding. And yes, it’s causing panic. It should."
A good friend of mine cross posted this article on her Substack and I'm glad I stopped to look at it. Yuval Noah Harari, the brain inside the brain of Klaus Schwab, has talked about how special this time is for tyrants and other totalitarian leaders. He said that Hitler, Mao, Stalin etc. would cream in their jeans if they had access to the technological advances currently available. While the psychopathic geopolitical and corporate leeches in WEF high society cheer him on, they forget who and what we are which that they so wish to snoop, silence, control or eliminate altogether. Many of them can't even recognize that we see through their sick agenda - And the ones who can see it know that their plans are worthless without a vast number of us going along with it willfully.
Through no particular talent or strength of my own, I was a part of the five percent of people who could see this madness unfolding well before the shit show that is Stupid 19 began. And when St Tony Fauci, Time Magazine's Guardian of the Year 2020 was being worshipped as Science itself, it could at times feel very lonely. I also lost a fair number of friends because I refused to play any of the ridiculous games and certainly wasn't about to turn my body over as an experiment in Fauci-DARPA Inc's mRNA holocaust. Wasn't easy knowing what I did and often wondered if my life would have been better off and less complicated if I just closed my eyes and ears and walked alongside all of the ignorant gullible sheep.
But years of inner speculation and a spiritual quest wouldn't allow me to close my heart and now hope can continue to burn. And reminds me that I am a creation of something way more powerful and loving than the creators of this nauseating future.. And it's most heartening to see so many other folks waking up beside me. Believe me, it's the one thing they wish they could stop but can't. There is much to learn and a lot we still still need to unlearn - I feel that we are moving forward. What other way is there to proceed? The only thing I can recommend to anyone is to hold your head up and be thankful hat you are a human being and you aim to be a kind decent one. They shiver knowing how many of us there are.
Let’s hope that they do, in fact, shiver.
I realize this isn't quite the main point of your article, but:
"What strikes me at this moment is that an entire culture of fierce competitors have climbed ladders to nowhere, rising as empty people in ruined systems. "
It seems to me that competition is necessary but not sufficient. If the nature of the game is flawed, then winning it leads to flawed results.
I will never be able to beat Andrew Tate at his game - but then, do I want to? What prize do you get for winning a meth-smoking competition, or a game of Self Lobotomy?
The last couple of paragraphs: Last week I read Here Comes Everybody, a very early (2008) look at the social structures developing through and with social media. Clay Shirky's premise was that new technologies (including just-created Twitter) were creating a revolution in the ability of ordinary people to organize and gather on their own, and spread information.
What happened? Why, in 2020 and 2021, were governments able to convince people that covid killed 5%, 10% of those it infected? And now, why do so many people still believe the vaccines are infallible?
Dorothy Parker, challenged to use "horticulture" in a sentence: "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." Governments were able to convince some of the people, for a while.
Edit button not working! Substitute "can" for "could."
I should've written "the coronavirus."
Have you ever read Martin Dressler? For some reason, that book keeps haunting me lately. The theme of it being the pursuit of an ideal, and on to the bigger and better...leading to emptiness and isolation and hollow accomplishments.
Haunting.
Haven't read. Ordering a copy.
I did not appreciate it at first because it seems to critique the American Dream as being a hollow pursuit. Which I don’t exactly agree with. But still.
But I do wonder if our vapid and empty pursuits now are a result of the flipping of our ideals- the liberals were supposed to keep the pursuit of power and money in check by advocating for the powerless and poor. Instead, liberals have married giant corporate greed and government control with liberal ideology, which turned it into a brain dead and unstoppable monster mowing down everything. We lost our balance.
It’s a thought.
“it seems to critique the American Dream as being a hollow pursuit“
Didn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald cover that ground awhile back?
Among others, sure. Haha.