145 Comments
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Rather Curmudgeonly's avatar

Mencken didn't make up his bit about an endless series of hobgoblins for no reason. What was true then is even more so with the 24hr news cycle.

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Ryan Gardner's avatar

Exactly. Oldest trick in the book.

Look at this new "warning" out of The EU:

https://fortune.com/2025/03/26/eu-citizens-stockpile-food-water-essentials-72-hours-hadja-lahbib/

exactly what Mencken was talking about.

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Rather Curmudgeonly's avatar

Anyone who's ever seen an EU standard refrigerator knows you aren't stockpiling 72 hours worth of perishables.

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Pat Robinson's avatar

Except for Soylent Green

That fits

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carily myers's avatar

LOL, lived there. The regular refridgerator is like our "dorm fridges". Why do you think they shop daily for perishables?

The electricity charges are so high most people can't afford a big unit plugged in 24/7. Ever seen their "normal" washers/dryers?

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Mitch's avatar

I've seen a lot of miniature combined washer/dryers in Europe that do neither function well. I've also seen a lot of air drying of laundry since so few have dryers.

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suannee's avatar

Not to disagree, but an apartment we rented in Italy had a cool washer that turned into a dryer after the clothes were washed. No need to take out of one machine and put them into another. It was small though.

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Ryan Gardner's avatar

The towels are even smaller. They're like hand towels

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Margaret's avatar

😂

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Lydia Lozano's avatar

The 24-hour news cycle would have driven him mad.

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James M.'s avatar

These kinds of nonsensical superlative-laden narratives also provide journalists and nonprofits with work, and they distract from the real social issues (crime, immigration and its aftermath, bureaucratic expansion and increasingly terrible social services), information about which is available to anyone with an internet connection and a modicum of open-mindedness and curiosity. That last clause is essential. By keeping 30-35% of the nation (disproportionately educated professionals) chasing their tail they can distract from scandals involving politicians and government waste and the growing realization that our bureaucratic system is parasitic and malignant.

They would rather hyperventilate about Musk than consider the child rapists released back into the community ion Boston or the trillions of dollars wasted or our profoundly failing public education system. I imagine it's even a bit fun, if not very psychologically healthy.

https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/horizontal-information-flow

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Skenny's avatar

They never seem to be having fun, though. They seem needy and desperate. From the foot soldiers to the megaphone wielders.

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George Williams's avatar

"...disproportionately educated professionals..." We must keep in mind that most of those "educated" since 2000 have degrees in post-modernist nonsense, with no understanding of economics, history, or science. They are expert in infantile tantrums and hyperventilation.

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Betsy Lynch's avatar

It was "educated" people who built gas chambers, designed and managed transport systems to murder many millions, justified in media coordinated propaganda, fear based manipulation. They will keep trying. Pay attention to tantrums which need extinguishing, those that call for violence, retribution, in particular against voices they don't like to hear. The oppressive silencing of dissident opinions in the last decades has been horrific , damaging.

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montanaoutlaw's avatar

Is that what today's "journalists and nonprofits" actually do, is "work?"

Well, ok. I guess keeping people distracted and hating on each other is a full time job.

I stand corrected.

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Mitch's avatar

nailed it

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Reggie VanderVeen's avatar

This "and everybody died at least four or five times" was gold. The "interest over time" graphs were platinum.

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Clif McFeely's avatar

We are going to need one more graph. The Signal leak may be worse than Watergate!

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Chris Bray's avatar

I'll check in a month

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Betsy Lynch's avatar

As compared to, say, the sale of uranium to our enemies, or the manufacture of fake stories to imprison one's political opponents? The misuse of courts, NGOs, government funds...asking for a friend.

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Renee Marie's avatar

It’s all manufactured.

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Hugh Wayne Black's avatar

It’ll go away REAL fast when the hoax is revealed…like all the other hoaxes the Atlantic has unleashed.

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CStone's avatar

😂😂

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Ryan Gardner's avatar

If the goal of the Marxist wanna be crowd is to wreck havoc and destroy their own party, by all means - go for it. The more chaos they create, the more people they will alienate and drive away from what’s left of the moderate Democrat political base.

They are losing in the "attention economy ". And because of that we should expect the gnashing of teeth to become more unhinged like this:

https://x.com/ScottPresler/status/1904561295329788291?s=19

Tge Democrats’ self-inflicted wounds present an opportunity for conservatives to solidify their dominance. We must consistently expose their anti-American agenda. We should continu to leverage platforms like X and Substack to highlight moments of hypocrisy, ensuring every instance of their disdain for American values goes viral

That said, we need to keep our foot on their throats. We need to enhance the GOP’s media advantage by investing in alternative platforms that challenge the left’s narrative, ensuring we define the terms of the debate.

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Frontera Lupita's avatar

And challenge some of “the Right’s narrative” as well!

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Mystic William's avatar

Like what? The vax is a public health disaster? Climate Change is a hoax? Ukraine lost the war two years ago? Biden has dementia? Kamala is stupid? What else?

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James Gang's avatar

For some reason, when the autopen was running the country, the news media didn’t find a new unprecedented crisis every 3rd day.

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Steponbugs's avatar

I ignore the media with extreme urgency.

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CSFurious's avatar

I would suggest not watching/reading any legacy media at all, it frees your mind. I am very informed by authors like this one and by also using X. I then supplement with watching YouTube.

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Ryan Gardner's avatar

In other words you're using your own brain to separate fact from fiction

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Andy G's avatar

Well, I’m not convinced you are net informed by using X (whether you find it entertaining or not is a different point not for me to judge). But agreed on the rest.

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CSFurious's avatar

X is uncensored news. Far more informative than watching legacy media.

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Andy G's avatar

That it is uncensored is indeed goodness. I don’t want it censored.

That most of the legacy media is biased, I concur 100%. (Though the WSJ remains good and informative.)

Getting your information from Substack authors like this one, I support 1000%.

But there is also plenty of misinformation on X (NOT that I wanted it censored, to be very clear), and the fact that external links are basically downgraded now means that it is much tougher to get or verify high quality information from X. Not impossible, but tougher.

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Amy Kennedy's avatar

I am so much happier now than I was when I was continually propagandized by the mainstream media.

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DC's avatar

One way to see if something is a real crisis is to see how long the public continues to discuss it, even though the institutions of power refuse to acknowledge it. By that standard, Covid and its policies constitutes an ongoing crisis.

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Chris Bray's avatar

Yes

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Lydia Lozano's avatar

I got an email today claiming that the CDC is "recommending" that I get a "second dose of this year's Covid vaccine," (I did not get an earlier one, so that would be impossible.) A huge "Moderna" logo was prominent in that ad. I wonder if RFK Jr. knows about this, or if Walgreens is lying. So, to your point, they are trying their best to prolong it.

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DC's avatar

Tucker Carlson's interview with Dr. Soon-Shiong is very enlightening.

https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1904941620283253060

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CB's avatar
Mar 27Edited

As Foreigner sang back in 1981 (but without the graphs):

Make it urgent, urgent, emergency

Urgent, urgent, emergency

Urgent (Urgent), Urgent (Urgent), emergency

Urgent (Urgent), Urgent (Urgent), emergency

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Brandon is not your bro's avatar

They want to create confusion and fear porn . Stay strong 💪🏼

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Pithy Thoughts's avatar

Turned off the news when 9/11 happened. Never turned it back on. Best thing I ever did.

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Renee Marie's avatar

I threw my television away 20+ years ago.

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Frontera Lupita's avatar

I agree…that’s when the ‘fear porn propaganda’ and the ‘surveillance state’ really got ramped up and into our face. Priming all for the Scamdemic/Plandemic Psy-Op!

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Renee Marie's avatar

The true pandemic was/is FEAR. With fear, there is no freedom.

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Mike Mags's avatar

You know what, thanks for the reminder , I’ve been angry again and I told myself I wouldn’t do that. You’re right , it’s easy to get wrapped up in all this crap. After all , it’s just crap.

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Steve Campbell's avatar

And now cometh the end of the really, truly great crisis the existential crises of Climate Change. No longer on the agenda of the Democrats, their media lackeys or the UN. Wonder when the wind turbines start coming down?

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Navyo Ericsen's avatar

And what happened to Greta Thunberg? Once she was seen with Great Reset Prince Charles and Klaus Barbie Schwab she was taken offstage never to be seen again.

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Vermont Farm Wife's avatar

Nah, she's kicking around the Free Palestine! crowd these days. She'll never go away, what other skills does she have?

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Michael L's avatar

But since she's given up the Climate Change cause, that means it's fixed. Because (as some told me) she trained herself to be an expert in climate science, she must know that it's no longer an existential threat.

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Steve Campbell's avatar

She plays a credible waif.

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Mystic William's avatar

All these Free Palestiners. None would last a week there without being raped and beheaded.

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Mystic William's avatar

She could play a munchkin at a Wizard of Oz theme park.

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Brian DeLeon's avatar

“How dare you!”

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Hugh Wayne Black's avatar

“The Existential Threat of Climate Change” is so old and passé. The latest threat is “Elon Musk is Actually the President! We MUST burn all Teslas!”

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Steve Campbell's avatar

The irony of the Democrats is stunning to watch. Not to mention the hypocrisy.

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Michael L's avatar

Somebody likened it to the Population Explosion Crisis that was a great concern in the wake of Paul Erlich's 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Forgotten a few decades later.

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Richard Parker's avatar

AIDS was going to end all human life by 2000. Really. There would be no one left to turn off the lights.

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Steve Campbell's avatar

If you live in NYC there is a population density problem. If you live in West Texas you could use a neighbor or two. It’s all relative

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Sue Kelley's avatar

Please tell me I won't have to wait a couple decades....

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Michael L's avatar

I think we're already a couple of decades into it. Thunberg abandoning it for Palestine might be an indication of the tide receding.

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AndyinBC's avatar

One suspects that "Learning to ignore most of the news" is, and has for some time, been the de facto norm.

Neither of CNN's two remaining viewers disagree.

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Josh Dean's avatar

The Signal thing will fade like everything else, but it irks me as someone who was active duty for ten years. We weren't even allowed to discuss our schedule over texts. The top layers of the national security establishment shouldn't be doing it either. It's incredibly stupid, doubly so since they invited a journalist, and triply so since it was Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic. What an incredibly stupid unforced error.

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Anne Emerson Hall's avatar

When my father was on active duty as a 3-star, we took him to Dulles Airport for a trip he was taking to Italy, IIRC. His traveling companion had him paged with his name and rank. Whoops.The entire trip was scrubbed. That experience became one of the (many) reasons that the Hillary email server episode infuriates me to this day.

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Josh Dean's avatar

And the people who rightly criticized her for that shouldn't be excusing the same actions happening now. We need competence, and this is a stunning lack of it.

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Chris Bray's avatar

It looks like a significant display of incompetence, but I'm waiting a week to see how it plays out. I do hope they take the lessons.

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Chris Bray's avatar

Agreed. I thought this was a good discussion:

https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-signal-i-was-waiting-for

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