There’s a recurring theme in the comment threads that I want to talk about in one place. It’s the “it’s not an accident, they planned it that way” comment, in all its iterations: The school district police chief in Uvalde let the killings go on unimpeded because he was on somebody’s payroll, and it was
A bit of a straw man, although I understand how it must feel to get an onslaught of "Conspiracy!" responses day after day.
Cycles of causation are a lot more complex. Once you (the Leader) understand how bureaucracy works, you can engineer lots of stuff.
You just set up incentive structures.
You buy up the media, for example. Now they stop covering stuff, now they start spinning. Curating. Lying.
You fund the scientific journals.
You buy the Hospital systems.
Chris I spent a good two weeks interrogating a doctor and scientist last summer.
She regurgitated every single MSNBC talking point, AND vouched for Big Pharm as a good.
She said the jabs were "94% effective! Better than polio!" She demonized a teacher for shedding the virus to her class, even though we already knew that the injected were shedding as well.
She hated Trump, but was hands off Fauci. Her head might explode if one were to point out that the Shitty Jabs came courtesy, Trump's Op. Warp Speed.
Kamala, Fauci, and Biden all opposed mandates.
They all flipped in the space of months.
190-nations regurgitated slogans, "Build Back Better". "The Great Reset". "Two weeks to flatten the curve." "Safe and effective".
The shootings are a lot more complex. Agreed.
But Chris. Gulf of Tonkin. You have, I assume, seen the false flag testimony that provided the stimulus for Iraq War ONE, before the more widely publicized Iraq War TWO yellow cake uranium etc. bullshit.
The "socially awkward dorks" are just the modern day Oswalds, or Sirhan Sirhans.
I don't know to be sure.
But I think framing it as "a cabal" of twelve people does a disservice to the greater argument.
I did post on Yuval today, and in the comments, I made the point he is a comic book character.
Gates is the real Insidious Villain. Gates is how Evil Gets Done.
Evil gets done with the bureaucratic incentive structure of people who are paid not to see.
All that said, I look to you as a truth seeker, and reliable. Gonna read it again.
But this is how we end up in pointless war after pointless war.
Chris' essay wasn't an exegesis on the malice and misdeeds of the powerful, he was addressing a very narrow and specific topic: a not-insubstantial subset of conservatives (online at least) see their ultimate political ideological opponents not as a massive political force with hundreds of millions of constituents all across the West whose representative leaders and NGOs and power-brokers and propagandists conspire to harness and utilize both the energy of their constituents and the mechanisms of the state that they largely control in order to attack their opponents and to attain and maintain power, but rather as a small, shadowy, all-powerful cabal who control *everything,* even random and tragic on-the-ground events.
The people who still think Sandy Hook was a conspiracy orchestrated by malicious players at the top are an extreme example, obviously, but IMO a not-insubstantial percentage of run of the mill comments at conservative sites evince a similar world-weary assertion that ALL things are out of the hands of individuals on the ground because there's a "they" who are pulling the puppet-strings.
Past a certain point it's disordered thinking, and a lot of people too-comfortably step over that line.
Hey y'all, today I want to address a ::checks notes::
" a not-insubstantial subset of conservatives (online at least) see their ultimate political ideological opponents not as a massive political force with hundreds of millions of constituents all across the West whose representative leaders and NGOs and power-brokers and propagandists conspire to harness and utilize both the energy of their constituents and the mechanisms of the state that they largely control in order to attack their opponents and to attain and maintain power, but rather as a small, shadowy, all-powerful cabal who control *everything,* even random and tragic on-the-ground events."
Well, it wasn't my intention to put words in his mouth – they were my own – but to my credit, I guess, I did manage to stay on topic and not toss off a laundry list of mostly unrelated concerns.
What I took to be the host's subject matter, one he subsequently elaborated on and qualified, was framed at the outset:
"There’s a recurring theme in the comment threads that I want to talk about in one place. It’s the 'it’s not an accident, they planned it that way' comment, in all its iterations: The school district police chief in Uvalde let the killings go on unimpeded because he was on somebody’s payroll, and it was useful to the globalists to have those children die; or there wasn’t really a shooting, but instead there was just a bunch of crisis actors who staged it; or there was a shooting, and children died, but it was an op, and they planned it."
That's what I was addressing. The worldview that sees things like school shootings as top-down conspiracies perpetrated by a small shadowy cabal is surprisingly common -- or at least, it always surprises me, just a bit, in its extent, because it's evidence of disordered thinking, IMO.
One odd thing I've noticed: people who hold views that are *not* ridiculous conspiracy theories but that have been denigrated as such by corrupt pols and the media tend to get instantly defensive at the sight of the word "conspiracy": "Are you saying *this* is a conspiracy theory too? What about this one?"
I consider things like the Gulf of Tonqin incident or the criminally false pretext for the Iraq war to be unrelated to the Sandy Hook conspiracy or the latest "information" released by the Qanon-tards.
Amazing. I literally just got through reading this fine piece. You may enjoy it. I certainly did.
Here is a pull quote:
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Midwits are high enough intelligence that they build proto-systems of information. These protosystems are neither coherent nor comprehensive, but the general schema of them is there. The midwit is thus fooled into thinking the information processing he is doing is no different from that of the genius, but in reality, it is nothing alike. The midwit is incapable of drawing on multiple streams of information, from many different domains, to understand the novel information in the broader context of a system. To compensate, the midwit turns inward, focusing with increasing resolution and detail into the confines of the information itself. To the midwit, this is nuance. To the genius, he is missing the forest for the trees. To the idiot, he is gullible.
The midwit does not like to take anything to be true unless he can see hard evidence of it. To put it another way, the midwit despises deductive logic. Because he cannot do it. The trick of taking a series of datapoints and deducing from what hypothetical model those datapoints emerged is reserved for the genius. To the midwit, it looks like sorcery; today generally referred to as a conspiracy theory. The midwit despises the Sherlock Holmes novels because he is incredulous that anyone could ever piece together a mystery based on a series of loosely related clues with incomplete information, as Detective Holmes can. To the midwit, it is nothing more than guesswork and sheer speculation. To the idiot, it is magic, but compelling magic. To the genius, it is just systems thinking.
Sage Hana further "nails it" with this sage observation: "Cycles of causation are a lot more complex. Once you (the Leader) understand how bureaucracy works, you can engineer lots of stuff."
Yep. Those who understand how the system works, and how to manipulate it, can accomplish just about any of their goals (their "agendas").
I suspect that framing social engineering, which is complex, but clearly explained by Dr. Mattias Desmet, and given numerous historical example, such as Stalin... as an oversimplified cabal... may be a psychological distancing technique.
Because what we are living through is a historic nightmare, and that's enormously tough to deal with, esp. for the heretofore "winners of the race" in a societal structure.
It does, although modern day polio is caused by the vaccine. The history of polio is very interesting (e.g. The Moth and the Iron Lung by Forrest Maready — I may not have the surname spelled correctly), and an[other] example of a set of symptoms with multiple causes said to be “cured” by a vaccine of dubious efficacy.
But those incentive structures are themselves complex and are the result of decades worth of administration by people whose goals not only weren't always aligned, but were sometimes completely contradictory. Just look at the post-9/11 security state: that was supposed to be aimed at the muzzies, not the Fox News crowd.
May 31, 2022·edited May 31, 2022Liked by Chris Bray
Of course the security state has to preserve itself, but the target it uses to do so will differ over time, and while the incentive structure will remain the same - find a mark, set him up, arrest him* - that the target is now 180 degrees different from the one it started with is a material change. And the current manifestation of the security state, you can draw lines as far back in American history as you care to go and you'll find its justification. My own expertise of this country, such as it is, extends only as far back as the Civil War. I'm sure something from the War of 1812, the Revolution, or even the colonial era could presage it further.
The point I'm making is that there's no one corrupt group, no one corrupt person, no one (sorry Chris, stealing this) Wannsee Conference that we can point to. It goes back ages, it's embedded in the system, and that it's worse now than it was is a consequence of its scale and the comparative impotence of the citizenrry, not of the actors who are running it now. Is anyone going to say with a straight face that this present corruption begins and ends with its personages? For my money, the most capital-e evil President of the 20th century, by a considerable margin, was LBJ. (One wonders what he'd do with today's toybox of state.) A lot of our recent presidents, Trump included, have been positively benign by comparison. So why is it worse? The complexity of the system is why, and that's down to historical factors more than it is the people currently in power.
*The "plot" against that Michigan woman, and the bathetic attempts of the feds to justify it in court, would have been in a functional polity front page news for weeks. Instead the original "crime" got wall-to-wall coverage and the denouement... well, put it this way: a family member of mine who angrily emailed me about the original "plot" didn't know about the outcome until weeks after the fact, and only because I told him at a barbecue.
On the contrary. If you focus primarily on individuals you're just playing Whack-A-Mole. (An excitable friend of mine, newly converted to internet communism a few years ago, went on a wild tear about Jeff Bezos and said he should be executed. I pointed out that that would neither make Amazon nor his personal fortune disappear, and more pertinently, these things would still be in the oligarchbclass, only now they'd have even more motivation to hold onto them.)
I was a teenager, living thousands of miles away, when 9/11 happened. My sincere apologies, o secret king, for not being blessed with your boomer insight.
Re Uvalde; I could see one or two cowards. But the whole damn force; particularly after just having undergone an "active shooter" training two months before? Something doesn't smell right.
Fair, but one complete idiot and coward at the top, giving direct orders to people in a rank-structured organization, can cause a lot of harm. And the Uvalde police response looks to me exactly like the way the Broward County Sheriff's Office responded in Parkland. We have other school shootings to compare this to -- police have behaved this way before.
"Fair, but one complete idiot and coward at the top, giving direct orders to people in a rank-structured organization, can cause a lot of harm."
Yes. Accurate. And in a roundabout and perhaps unintentional way you are revealing how it is not that complicated to set in motion trains of events. You just handle it at the Human Resources level, and find the "good fit" to lead the troops.
see also: Hire Wokesters like Akela Lacy at The Intercept and DOD rich kids like Klippenstein and turn them loose.
The local police are being co-opted by the Federal DOJ for some time. (No, this wasn’t false flag).
Part of this and indeed Federal Law enforcement leadership as well has been purging men or women of honor and replacing with creatures. This has been known within law enforcement and the military for years (much of it from fear of lawyers, in the military JAG functions as Progressive Commissars).
Yes, and "we" responded the same way, with wide, bulging eyes, gaping mouths, and the same phrase, "WTF!" Derogatory remarks about the "lazy, cowardly, cops." Did they learn nothing? Did they expect it to stop? In the intervening years could they not have changed their training? Maybe the cops need to go through military training in addition to their regular training. Maybe having a couple of people on each shift that question authority, to try and balance things out. Otherwise, it does look suspicious.
Once you are threatened Legally by Lawyers or clerks if you do your job you’ll go to Jail, you have 2 choices.
1) Surrender to the system silently, you will freeze, as happened in Uvalde.
2) Utter Lawlessness and the Thrill of the Crime of defying the cowards who cripple and betray us all - and the criminal mindset and joyful, lawless soul of the Pirate.
Is it that surprising that they would obey the orders given to them? My understanding is the Border Patrol officers who ultimately breached the room were in defiance of orders.
Seems more believable to me that the officers were just sheep, rather than some plot.
The Border Patrol officer went in to save his own wife and children - which is what every other parent should have been allowed to do. They would have had to shoot me.
It is not surprising and much like Chris you reveal how shockingly easy it is to manipulate and engineer responses. You simply hire and place the order givers. The plebes, whether they are cops or Gleaming Talking Head Fraud media will then do their jobs.
I don’t see much of it because I have long been rid of cable tv, but what I’ve seen of interviews with the supposed relatives is bizarre. The affect simply doesn’t track. I don’t know the absolute truth. I only know it supremely weird and weird always in the same direction toward…evil. Ot ain’t organic.
I always pay attention to whether the media puts a spotlight on it or not. There's atrocities committed every day including mass shootings that are systematically ignored. The vast majority of these I suspect happened as the local news report said it did. Police scanners are interesting to listen to. But the ones the media shines a spotlight on, whether it's the Ukraine war or the Texas shooting, always looks made for TV to me in some way. It's almost be ome my lazy way of sorting planned and coordinated events versus real organic tragedies: did the media cover it? Then it's fishy
If the Corp. Propaganda networks are pushing something in your face, why?
Can anyone really watch Leana Wen on CNN post Boston bombing, or those crisis actors shedding no tears about their dead child, or those people getting off the subway in NYC and not feel like they are watching a shitty made for TV movie?
The Monkey Pox actors in this simulation are more believable than Leana Wen against the green screen interviewed by Jake Tapper.
The root argument in these tragedies is are the leaders incompetent (i.e. event went down as described) or evil (it was planned). Then is media coverage just opportunistic vultures or your average whore bought and paid to say what they're told to say. Most interesting are big media events that disappeared as Las Vegas in 2017 did. I suspect there it was planned-too many randos packing heat-aborted-fallback on patsy-bury the story before randos get traction
I wish I had the time to reply at length, citing evidence in depth. Maybe this evening, but it's a holiday and I've got family stuff going on.
Instead I'll be brief and address what I think is the core of your argument, which is sometimes called Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." It's a reasonable dictum, on its own. Unfortunately, showing that an explanation is adequate is hard work, and it's easy to cut corners or skew an argument, especially when one has limited access to the facts of the matter. So much more so when that access has been purposefully limited and disguised. Don't tell me you don't believe in psy war! It's as old as warfare itself.
My counter to Hanlon's Razor is what I like to call Hanlon's Shave Cream: "Incompetence can be used to amplify and disguise malice." We're not just talking about some monolithic conspiratorial bloc, but networks and hierarchies and organizations and infiltration and long games. There's plenty of room useful idiots. In fact they're essential, both as apparatchiks and as cut-outs. Nor need there be a single unified conspiracy: there is plenty of room for competing factions in an invisible government, and plenty of evidence for that.
Catherine Austin Fitts has some good material on how malice is disguised as incompetence. It's as established and universal a play as "confession by projection". You should get to know her work, she's got quite a pedigree.
You're sort of a professional historian, right? I can respect that, and I understand there's a professional taboo against oversimplification, and no doubt for good reasons. You're a military historian, too? Have a look at this recent video, made with your tax dollars, to promote the work of the 4th PSYOP Group, under the 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne): of Fort Bragg: https://youtu.be/VA4e0NqyYMw
Maybe meditate for a moment on that opening quote from Sun Tzu.
I would consider myself a "conspiracy realist", and I've arrived there well before any of this Covid ops shit of the past couple of years, but it sure fits a pattern. For a serious look at the evidence for a "plandemic", I would direct your attention to the careful work of the Berlin Corona Investigative Committee and Dr. Reiner Fuellmich. You remember the Volkswagen emissions fraud story from a few years ago? He was the lead prosecutor. Serious guy.
I think your post is mostly attacking strawmen. Acknowledging the reality of hidden power structures doesn't make anything simpler or easier: we have to deal with the entire structure, not just the top. And it's not just a handful of these people, at the top, either. These are families, lineages, factions, successions, alliances... it's complex stuff. And as long as they hold narrative supremacy, some heroic Rambo style vigilante action would be completely futile. (Also, you don't just get to skip to the boss battle, but anyhoo...) In fact, they are desperate to provoke a violent response right now. That's why they staged the whole Jan 6 op and have been milking it so hard... another long story, but here's a teaser for those with short attention spans: https://www.bitchute.com/video/DYlb92zMkj41/
What you really want is a serious, historical argument, and this is not the venue for me to deliver one. I recommend Carroll Quigley for starters. And then Anthony Sutton. Perhaps William Cooper's book Behold A Pale Horse. And if you want to follow up on your Jim Jones book, Dave MacGowan is quite readable: https://centerforaninformedamerica.com
I'm quite sympathetic to your grand thesis about performative narcissism and in-group signaling spiraling out of control and bringing down calcified institutions. But I don't think it's the whole story, by any means. It's a social phenomena that, while no doubt can occur spontaneously under some conditions, can also be used to further political or military ends -- no less than fire and disease. (And it's a blurry distinction for these folks. They're the people that Clausewitz and Machiavelli were writing to.)
They’re the coward and frankly sub mediocrity great grandchildren of the New Dealers, cringing behind Hobo Chic clothing their parents ill gotten wealth, picking subordinate leaders who are non-threatening, that’s an ever lower bar.
We’ve gone from German Shepherd Generals who often you know were geniuses (Patton, Macarthur, Nimitz) to Pomeranians.
Dumb ones at that.
Remember the riots when Petreaus (America’s last General kiddies) went down for not endorsing the dumbest story ever?
Me neither.
You voted America.
Deal with it.
> see Milley, Dempsey, all the Police Chiefs that rush to betray their cops before any facts are established.
A small core of malice and greed - who happen to be mediocrities at anything but corruption and being malicious- surrounding themselves for decades with yes men, then mediocre yes men, then idiot yes men, then their idiot coward cringers grandchildren ; who now are known as The Current Professional Managerial Class.
I had never heard of this person before. The final line of her Wikipedia article has cemented in me a desire to read her work, since it's clear she's got a brain in her head and hopefully has receipts to go with it.
(Rather than being coy, I'll just say: if the Washington Post went to the trouble of giving her a prissy, fussy fact check, then she's probably worth listening to. That plus her track record in the public sector means she probably knows of what she speaks. Thank you for the recommendation!)
Also, just gotta say, Wikipedia is and has always been info war battlespace under enemy control. The entrances to the rabbit holes, but never their depth.
Oh, for sure. When I read Wikipedia pages of people I'm very familiar with, it's basically like reading oppo research. But what can I say? I'm lazy, it's accessible, and it loads well on mobile.
This is more or less how I see the situation. There are conspiracies, but they're mostly petty and opportunistic, they don't usually work out as planned, and the people responsible are the same incompetents who eff everything else up.
What we're seeing is mostly down to a general collapse of virtue arising from entirely too comfortable conditions, combined with unforseen technological consequences, combined with a seriously broken way of looking at reality that has everyone feeling alone and alienated and depressed. The pathocrats are exacerbating the situation, not directly causing it.
As was the JFK assassination, Oklahoma, the first twin tower bombing, and so on. The CIA was at the root of most of them, but now the FBI is up to the same tricks. I hate to disagree with Mr Bray, but from all I’ve read and watched, all of the mass shootings have been false flags — I believe all of the shooters have been groomed (the latest 2 by the FBI, taking a page from the CIA playbook). You cannot look at the various declassified ops, Paperclip, MK-Ultra, Mockingbird, et al, along with the contemporary tabletop scenarios and not see a conspiratorial group (or groups) acting as puppet masters.
There are no coincidences. While circumstances may afford opportunistic actions, I think it unwise to dismiss the agenda driven manipulative hand. All of what I categorize as false flags have a clear objective — the destruction of CIA/Vietnam files in Oklahoma, a similar destruction of files and the cover-up of missing billions (trillions?) in 9/11 (building 7, Pentagon) and the excuse for a 20 year war (towers 1 and 2), and so forth.
The mass shootings all forward gun confiscation and the repeal of the 2nd amendment. So far, these efforts have been unsuccessful, logic and statistics have prevailed. But these events are progressing to more inhumane and incomprehensible killings — that the conspirators are willing to murder little children in hopes of an emotional response resulting in fewer legally held firearms only speaks to the evil of those who are in a position to engineer such an unspeakable crime.
Maybe that is the key — to see an event as a false flag, one must believe that evil exists in the hearts of man, and that such men (and women) will stop at nothing to achieve their ends.
Conspiracies are very real. They're just only PART of the story.
Conspiracy theory is a useful lens but as with any lens, if it's used to the exclusion of all others you end up blind to important features of reality.
"Conspiracy theory" is a psy op term itself created by the CIA to prevent people who didn't buy the JFK narrative.
see also: "Anti-vax" which is a psy op term created and given wings by the Propaganda Networks, to brand ALL vaccines as "good"...and now if you oppose MANDATES, you are "anti-vax", since the psy op term has life.
Everything that happens involves conspiracy by definition, unless it is a true lone wolf who wakes up one day and...shoots up a school, or...creates an injection that kills people and...this ex. is impossible.
But the term itself has been effectively hijacked to mean, "Batshit crazy cuckoo stuff", and then any incidence of actors conspiring can be lumped in.
Technically, the CIA didn't invent the term; they did however popularize it and for exactly the purpose you describe.
"Conspiracy theory" is also inaccurate. "Conspiracy hypothesis" is closer to the use of the term to describe a narrative. Now if used in the sense of, a general theory of conspiracies, now we're getting somewhere.
As (almost—lol) always a powerfully expressed position blending erudition and great practical experience.
Your example of the Wannsee Conference supports your general position even more than you know—and also illustrated the seductiveness of broad conspiracy theories as comforting explanatory models.
The historian Arno Mayer shows how the Final Solution was not some masterplan conceived at the very beginning and executed with diabolical industrial mastery to its grisly conclusion. Instead, it was a series of ad hoc measures to cope with the huge number of Jews captured in Eastern Europe as the Nazi’s Operation Barbarossa against Russia ground down into defeat. Faced with a logistical and operational nightmare the Nazis developed increasingly expansive and industrialized solutions to achieve mass murder on the widest possible scale.
But it was actually the result of a series of surprises and blunders that forced Hitler and his evil minions to conceive of this vast mass murder at the Wannsee Conference. Although Wannsee was the key moment, it was not some coolly planned master plan, but a desperate attempt to invent an integrated strategy to unify a series of increasingly unworkable ad hoc mass murder crimes.
So Wannsee itself isn’t actually an example of an almost-successful conspiracy.
So strongly invested were many Holocaust scholars in the perversely comforting model of successful conspiracies that Mayer was absolutely vilified for his (very persuasive) case that the Nazis, who were certainly callous murderers and committed anti-Semites from the beginning, did not plan at the beginning for a mega-death scale machinery of mass murder, but kept making it up until the reality they confronted forced them to scale up to that level of heartless crime at the Wannsee Conference.
Congratulations on another courageous, apposite and timely post!
I've never read that book but Ian Kershaw's work on Hitler implies* similar - one of his big contributions was that the apparatchiks of the Nazi Party were always "working towards the Fuehrer." In other words, in the absence of a clear directive, in the absence of a bullet-point list of the day's tasks, "What Would Adolf Do?" was the order of the day.
That this ended up in the reversal of the Wannsee Conference - a post-hoc justification of genocide - would be darkly comedic if it wasn't so fundamentally, disgustingly inhuman. The higher-ups ended up working towards the grunts, who were in turn working towards the august personage of Hitler! Thus proceeded one of the most terrible crimes against humanity - as a bureaucratic note, as an action point on a meeting summary, as another task between sips of mineral water and scribbles on note paper.
The 20th century, ladies and gentlemen!
*I use the word "implies" because I think Kershaw would markedly disagree with your conclusion. I personally agree with it. But I'm not a famous, erudite historian. So... my agreement and five bucks will get you a Happy Meal. :-)
Thanks for your insightful comment and support—I’ll remember it in the unlikely event I ever darken the door of a McDonalds! lol
Seriously, unless Kershaw weighs into this thread I find your analysis persuasive. It reminds me of the dynamics that led to the murder of Thomas Becket—the King merely said out loud “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” and two hot-heads departed
Immediately and galloped to Canterbury where they murdered Thomas Becket during Mass.
This is true. My conspiracy minded friends oversimplify everything and reduce all human motivations to a simple single dimension. "Follow the money" is an example of a heuristic that my conspiracist friends like to use. This is a saying that is true to a point, but would be much more meaningful if my friends where forensic accountants. These sayings are followed to the exclusion of all other human motivations.
Conspiracies often get the mythology of present day issues correct, but tend to reduce the believers personal responsibility for the state of society by blaming everything on distant third parties. If 80% of Americans had intelligence, integrity, and basic virtues most of the problems we face would evaporate. Being diligent at home and in the community is where the solution begins, if there is a solution.
P.S. I finished Raven. Great book suggestion. There's a lot to unpack there.
Intentionally or not, you have set up a false dichotomy between incompetence / societal collapse on the one hand and elaborate conspiratorial plotting on the other.
In fact incompetence and societal collapse makes it far easier for conspiratorial plotting to function; given enough incompetence, the plotting gets increasingly simple. If the Powers That Be want to arrange a school massacre, choosing a school with a police force more concerned with protecting their own lives, pensions, and reputations rather than student lives is going to be a good target.
I'll grant everything you say about incompetence with Uvalde, but I still want to know how a 17 year-old was able to afford two AR-15s, including a top-line Daniel Defense, and an expensive EO Tech sight, as well as the magazines and ammunition. The Feds should be thoroughly investigating the money trail; if they are not, something is fishy.
I find it interesting that you mentioned Uvalde but did not even give a head nod to Buffalo. Is that because an FBI agent being in the chat room makes Buffalo too awkward an example?
But let's skip this and go right to Covid. Covid's potential Rosetta Stone is The Lancet paper demonizing HCQ. That entire paper was a fraud, a fraud that involved Harvard University and passed peer review at Britain's most prestigious medical journal. It should have revealed the complete corruption of the medical establishment. https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/08/lancetgate-why-was-this-monumental-fraud-not-a-huge-scandal/
As Peter McCullough realized early on, the entire goal of the medical establishment was to push the vaccines, not to help patients. We can argue until the cows come home whether the vaccines were intended as bio-weapons (as Richard Fleming believes) or whether they were "dismal failures from corporations that were in a hurry to come up with a lucrative product." But even if the latter, the suppression of HCQ (and now IVM, pace Berenson) shows that the people pushing the vaccines were willing to kill for profit. And each ongoing dump of the FDA data reveals more of the Establishment's callous disregard for human life and suffering,
May 31, 2022·edited May 31, 2022Liked by Chris Bray
"If identifiable actors are tearing things apart, you can know where to put your hands to stop them; you can act."
The identifiable actors are those who CANNOT be investigated.
Remember Chuck Schumer saying the quiet part out loud with Rachel Maddow:
"Let me tell you. You take on the Intelligence Community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."
Now ask yourself. Was anyone in the I-C elected? No.
Can they be held accountable and scrutinized? No.
So we can duly elect officials. And even the MOST SENIOR ELECTED OFFICIALS IN OUR LAND understand that THEY CANNOT CROSS this group, the American Security State.
edit: And they are always near the scene of every crime, are they not? Lurking there.
Has it ever *not* been the case that you can beat the rap but not the ride, though? I'm not disagreeing with the substance of what you say - what Chuckie said is accurate, and all the more chilling for it. But when was it not thus? All that's changed is the uniform. Did the Securitate and the Stasi need to give the accused their day in court before they tortured them?
I believe a lot of this is the nature of bureaucracy. A few elected officials are leaders but most are just managers. And as managers, their focus is "process," not reality or results.
I remember reading a paper by prosecuting attorneys. They posed the situation of a man tried, convicted, and condemned to death. Shortly before his execution some evidence is uncovered that shows he is "actually innocent." Should the execution continue as scheduled? To silly people like me, it's simple: you don't execute an innocent man. But they focused on the process. Since the process had been followed, perhaps it's best to execute him to protect the integrity of the process. To their credit, in their conclusion they suggested that ultimately, society probably shouldn't execute a man whose innocence has been demonstrated. But they didn't treat it as a foregone conclusion. They felt that the fact that the process had been followed, even though it had clearly failed, was strong justification to execute an innocent man.
In this case, you have a police chief whose life comes down to process. Process is the shield that managers use to evade responsibility when things go wrong, regardless of the underlying reason. "I followed the process" is as close to a "get out of jail free" card as a government bureaucrat can find.
When the process breaks down, or worse, when there is no defined process to address a situation, this is paralyzing to a bureaucrat. Now everything he does and every decision he makes is on him. For a true leader, this goes with the territory, but for a politician/manager, this is a near-death experience. Unfortunately, the police chief chose to do nothing rather than do something wrong, something that might get him in trouble or create liability for him or for the department.
Add to that the quality of the SWAT team. Small town SWAT teams are not well trained. Their training officer will be someone from the department who has no more real world experience than anyone else. He will have been to a few courses but that will probably be it. They'll have been called out a few times a year to stand by or to break down a door to arrest a suspect who doesn't resist. They have probably never really been tested. An active school shooting is the Super Bowl of SWAT. It would scare the crap out of a well-trained, well-disciplined, experienced team, much less these guys. Yeah, they had all the tacti-cool gear but the police chief most likely had no real faith in their ability to get the shooter without shooting each other or more of the children.
There’s definitely been “a failure of courage”. I’ve never considered myself even faintly brave by any standard. It’s my colleagues who’ve lost the courage to stand in truth.
BUT & this is very dangerous, you’re mistaken if you don’t recognise this is a coordinated plan, really.
In 2019 & earlier, each G20 nation had a pandemic preparedness plan. So did the WHO. The main measure was “if you’re sick, stay home” & “wash your hands more often” (because route of transmission isn’t known early on).
Nothing else. No masks, no lockdowns. No mass screening or business closures. No border restrictions or vaccination certificates.
The pandemic preparedness plans explicitly excluded all of these “NPIs”, because they were known not to work.
Remember what happened in March 2020? One nation after another went into lockdown. No one questioned it. Well, very few of us did. We were deplatformed.
I don’t believe there’s any other explanation for the uniformity of lunatic responses than a supranational organisation.
I’ve many other pieces of evidence, but this needs solving before needing to consider it.
No. This was planned. Not only is the above to my mind unequivocal evidence of it, but this kind of authoritarian response to an alleged pandemic has been rehearsed repeatedly for well over twenty years.
First, when I reply to you, everything I say starts from the view that your warning to people about the injections had a value that can't be exaggerated. You, and a few other people, sounded a loud and clear alarm that enabled people all over the world to protect themselves in a dangerous moment. So let's start there: Thank you for speaking up. My teenaged daughter doesn't have this shit in her body -- neither do I, but I'm less worried about that -- and I'm glad I was able to hear the warning. I have family members who won't speak to me anymore, because I'm a monster who refused to protect my child, but those family members also assured me that vaccination would end the threat of infection forever, so whatever. The evidence to support a decision I made last year has come in, and I'm happy with it.
Second, I ride this bus with you about 85% of the way there. I think the entire discussion that's happening here is between people who accept that we've experienced a great evil and a decision to cause harm, and the remaining discussion is about the "why." I'm open to any argument anyone wants to make, and I'm here for the discussion.
So my question is this: "This was planned." By who? Can you give their names, and the time and place where they planned it? Can you identify the equivalent of their meeting at Jekyll Island, the moment where they hatched the plan?
May 31, 2022·edited May 31, 2022Liked by Chris Bray
Thank you, Chris.
I too lost all my friends and half my family.
I can have a reasonably good shot at answering your good question. However, I point out that even if I could not, I’m starting from pointing out that a crime is being committed. Imagine I call in to the police that I can see what appears to be a crime in progress. The duty Sargent stops me & asks me to say who they are. I cannot, because I don’t get a good look at them. I don’t think it’s on me to establish who the crooks are for my observations of a crime to be taken seriously. It helps if I can, of course!
1. Please check the Paul Schreyer video. Everyone he identifies as present in any of the simulations and is still involved in the field is suspect.
2. Event 201. I believe there’s no justification for any tabletop simulation of severe respiratory pathogen based pandemic, because I don’t believe it’s possible to have higher IFR AND high transmissibility. This because high IFR agents tend to make their victims unwell & this causes them to stay home, sick. The R0 value falls. We saw this with Ebola, SARS & MERS. They’re not stupid. They know there’s never been one global pandemic of respiratory illnesses that was also severe (killing very many people). Even Spanish flu 1918 was thought atypical, with many, young men dying, probably of secondary bacterial pneumonia. So why do they repeatedly run these simulations? They never talk about early identification of potential therapies. Instead, all the exercises focused on authoritarian responses.
3. Pressed, I’d name Gates, Fauci, Farrar, Tedros, Drosten & several others. Every one I f them have in my opinion behaved very oddly for years prior to 2020. As to where did the idea for misusing PCR come from, this is a good candidate.
May 31, 2022·edited May 31, 2022Liked by Chris Bray
Chris, bloody good as always. This is where Eugyppius is coming from too. While it's true that half of us has below average intelligence, I find Eugyppius smacks of arrogance, like he's smarter than everyone else, including the so called elites. Now, he probably is, and I do love his writing and insight, but I think it's naive to not attribute a significant shift in our culture to a deliberate agenda. Yes, our culture is decaying but I would go so far as to suggest that this is intended. A harnessing and amplification of our tendency for self-destructive perversion of truth. Globalists deliberately undermining social unity and self-sufficiency to remove all barriers to their endless pursuit of economic growth.
Good points. The entire planet is overrun with decadent under whelming money grubbers intent on frivolous pursuits. Most people I read seem to be worried they will take everything, I recently quipped the Davos crowd is both physically and mentally weak from those purchased lifestyles and won't last a decade.
Never attribute evil when simple stupidity will do. Of course, it begs the question of why the “elites” are actually elite if they are thoroughly mediocre and generally stupid.
That's the big question, yes. As a person who lives in a state where Gavin Newsom is the governor, I wonder about the ascension of obvious mediocrities every day.
My sense is also that so many jobs today have no hard, objective criteria for success or failure. Think tanks, academia, most government roles, even many professional jobs within big companies. So a person with the right credentials already starts out on second or third base and has to work really hard to fail; doing nothing gets you promoted, so they become risk averse. And resigning is the worst thing, which might explain why not one person within military leadership resigned after the Afghanistan fiasco. It’s all just a big game of pass the buck, with nobody taking ultimate responsibility. Mediocrities rise to the top and so do sociopaths.
At least Newsom has great hair and teeth, to distract you from his incredibly blinding incompetence.
Chris, great discussion and thanks for providing the forum to have it.
Okay, I broached this the other day, Meritocracy. This would appear to be the guiding principle that is being exploded in front of you.
Roughly: "How does Gavin survive and thrive? He sucks..."
Now. Consider what would happen if Gavin came out and said, "The exp. mRNA injections are dangerous and ineffective. The lockdowns didn't work. Masks don't work I myself, Gavin Newsom, contracted Bell's Palsy from the injections, and I still got COVID."
How long do you think "Mediocre Gavin" would last?
If your answer is, "Not very long..." ask yourself why? What is now different?
Yes, it is a mix of Hanlon’s Razor and the superiority illusion. Everybody thinks they are smarter than they actually are. And the conspiracy theorists think other people are actually smarter than they are. The key is to realize that everybody is pretty dumb, including yourself. And since everybody is fairly dumb and prone to making dumb decisions, you are necessarily going to end up with dumb people running things. This is why technocrats are the worst.
Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity is fond of quoting "once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action" which is something Goldfinger said to Bond, James Bond. with so much going wrong at once, it's easy to believe that Soros or Gates or some other evil mastermind is at the helm. but a simpler explanation is probably as Naomi Klein once said, before she lost her moorings over covid, "never let a good crisis go to waste." certainly things just happen and actors behind the scenes are there waiting to turn them to their advantage. did we really elect an incompetent, demented old guy to serve as President now of all times? or did some power crazed genius install him in office to bring us down? it's hard to tell.
and yet, i don't believe that people are that diabolically organized and Hanlon's razor seems to better explain our predicament: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." there's an awful lot of Peter Principal going on.
interestingly, all the firing of unvaccinated people (i'm one) has sort of bred a compliant, docile, unquestioning labor force. we've gotten rid of the doctors who think creatively and do what is right for their patients and kept the fools who will do whatever Fauci says to protect their hides. we've gotten rid of the genius scientists who see things that no one else notices and kept the ones who's best skill is grant writing. we've gotten rid of inspired passionate teachers and kept those who won't ruffle a feather or risk actually challenging their students.
I have reached a similar conclusion. It has left me with one question, why bother?
If the situation is as you say it is, i truly dont see any way for any of us to make any difference. So why do you keep doing what you are doing? Not meant as a critique, I truly would like to hear your reasoning.
Why not just focus on the things you can change, like the length of the grass on your lawn?
A bit of a straw man, although I understand how it must feel to get an onslaught of "Conspiracy!" responses day after day.
Cycles of causation are a lot more complex. Once you (the Leader) understand how bureaucracy works, you can engineer lots of stuff.
You just set up incentive structures.
You buy up the media, for example. Now they stop covering stuff, now they start spinning. Curating. Lying.
You fund the scientific journals.
You buy the Hospital systems.
Chris I spent a good two weeks interrogating a doctor and scientist last summer.
She regurgitated every single MSNBC talking point, AND vouched for Big Pharm as a good.
She said the jabs were "94% effective! Better than polio!" She demonized a teacher for shedding the virus to her class, even though we already knew that the injected were shedding as well.
She hated Trump, but was hands off Fauci. Her head might explode if one were to point out that the Shitty Jabs came courtesy, Trump's Op. Warp Speed.
Kamala, Fauci, and Biden all opposed mandates.
They all flipped in the space of months.
190-nations regurgitated slogans, "Build Back Better". "The Great Reset". "Two weeks to flatten the curve." "Safe and effective".
The shootings are a lot more complex. Agreed.
But Chris. Gulf of Tonkin. You have, I assume, seen the false flag testimony that provided the stimulus for Iraq War ONE, before the more widely publicized Iraq War TWO yellow cake uranium etc. bullshit.
The "socially awkward dorks" are just the modern day Oswalds, or Sirhan Sirhans.
I don't know to be sure.
But I think framing it as "a cabal" of twelve people does a disservice to the greater argument.
I did post on Yuval today, and in the comments, I made the point he is a comic book character.
Gates is the real Insidious Villain. Gates is how Evil Gets Done.
Evil gets done with the bureaucratic incentive structure of people who are paid not to see.
All that said, I look to you as a truth seeker, and reliable. Gonna read it again.
But this is how we end up in pointless war after pointless war.
Chris' essay wasn't an exegesis on the malice and misdeeds of the powerful, he was addressing a very narrow and specific topic: a not-insubstantial subset of conservatives (online at least) see their ultimate political ideological opponents not as a massive political force with hundreds of millions of constituents all across the West whose representative leaders and NGOs and power-brokers and propagandists conspire to harness and utilize both the energy of their constituents and the mechanisms of the state that they largely control in order to attack their opponents and to attain and maintain power, but rather as a small, shadowy, all-powerful cabal who control *everything,* even random and tragic on-the-ground events.
The people who still think Sandy Hook was a conspiracy orchestrated by malicious players at the top are an extreme example, obviously, but IMO a not-insubstantial percentage of run of the mill comments at conservative sites evince a similar world-weary assertion that ALL things are out of the hands of individuals on the ground because there's a "they" who are pulling the puppet-strings.
Past a certain point it's disordered thinking, and a lot of people too-comfortably step over that line.
Really? Strange that he didn't lead with:
Hey y'all, today I want to address a ::checks notes::
" a not-insubstantial subset of conservatives (online at least) see their ultimate political ideological opponents not as a massive political force with hundreds of millions of constituents all across the West whose representative leaders and NGOs and power-brokers and propagandists conspire to harness and utilize both the energy of their constituents and the mechanisms of the state that they largely control in order to attack their opponents and to attain and maintain power, but rather as a small, shadowy, all-powerful cabal who control *everything,* even random and tragic on-the-ground events."
Well, it wasn't my intention to put words in his mouth – they were my own – but to my credit, I guess, I did manage to stay on topic and not toss off a laundry list of mostly unrelated concerns.
What I took to be the host's subject matter, one he subsequently elaborated on and qualified, was framed at the outset:
"There’s a recurring theme in the comment threads that I want to talk about in one place. It’s the 'it’s not an accident, they planned it that way' comment, in all its iterations: The school district police chief in Uvalde let the killings go on unimpeded because he was on somebody’s payroll, and it was useful to the globalists to have those children die; or there wasn’t really a shooting, but instead there was just a bunch of crisis actors who staged it; or there was a shooting, and children died, but it was an op, and they planned it."
That's what I was addressing. The worldview that sees things like school shootings as top-down conspiracies perpetrated by a small shadowy cabal is surprisingly common -- or at least, it always surprises me, just a bit, in its extent, because it's evidence of disordered thinking, IMO.
One odd thing I've noticed: people who hold views that are *not* ridiculous conspiracy theories but that have been denigrated as such by corrupt pols and the media tend to get instantly defensive at the sight of the word "conspiracy": "Are you saying *this* is a conspiracy theory too? What about this one?"
I consider things like the Gulf of Tonqin incident or the criminally false pretext for the Iraq war to be unrelated to the Sandy Hook conspiracy or the latest "information" released by the Qanon-tards.
Amazing. I literally just got through reading this fine piece. You may enjoy it. I certainly did.
Here is a pull quote:
-----
Midwits are high enough intelligence that they build proto-systems of information. These protosystems are neither coherent nor comprehensive, but the general schema of them is there. The midwit is thus fooled into thinking the information processing he is doing is no different from that of the genius, but in reality, it is nothing alike. The midwit is incapable of drawing on multiple streams of information, from many different domains, to understand the novel information in the broader context of a system. To compensate, the midwit turns inward, focusing with increasing resolution and detail into the confines of the information itself. To the midwit, this is nuance. To the genius, he is missing the forest for the trees. To the idiot, he is gullible.
The midwit does not like to take anything to be true unless he can see hard evidence of it. To put it another way, the midwit despises deductive logic. Because he cannot do it. The trick of taking a series of datapoints and deducing from what hypothetical model those datapoints emerged is reserved for the genius. To the midwit, it looks like sorcery; today generally referred to as a conspiracy theory. The midwit despises the Sherlock Holmes novels because he is incredulous that anyone could ever piece together a mystery based on a series of loosely related clues with incomplete information, as Detective Holmes can. To the midwit, it is nothing more than guesswork and sheer speculation. To the idiot, it is magic, but compelling magic. To the genius, it is just systems thinking.
-----
https://theredqueen.substack.com/p/its-a-midwit-world-and-were-living?s=r
"Past a certain point it's disordered thinking, and a lot of people too-comfortably step over that line.". What is that certain point?
Is this Chris-splainin’?
Oh, that's funny.
And to be abundantly clear, I love and respect Chris, who is plenty fine clearly expressing his ideas!
My thoughts exactly!
Excellent comment.
Sage Hana further "nails it" with this sage observation: "Cycles of causation are a lot more complex. Once you (the Leader) understand how bureaucracy works, you can engineer lots of stuff."
Yep. Those who understand how the system works, and how to manipulate it, can accomplish just about any of their goals (their "agendas").
"Never let a good crisis go to waste."
I suspect that framing social engineering, which is complex, but clearly explained by Dr. Mattias Desmet, and given numerous historical example, such as Stalin... as an oversimplified cabal... may be a psychological distancing technique.
Because what we are living through is a historic nightmare, and that's enormously tough to deal with, esp. for the heretofore "winners of the race" in a societal structure.
She still believes polio exists?
It does, although modern day polio is caused by the vaccine. The history of polio is very interesting (e.g. The Moth and the Iron Lung by Forrest Maready — I may not have the surname spelled correctly), and an[other] example of a set of symptoms with multiple causes said to be “cured” by a vaccine of dubious efficacy.
You nudge Cass “Nudge” Sunstein to think and write about nudging.
But those incentive structures are themselves complex and are the result of decades worth of administration by people whose goals not only weren't always aligned, but were sometimes completely contradictory. Just look at the post-9/11 security state: that was supposed to be aimed at the muzzies, not the Fox News crowd.
The principles of democracy are irrelevant when you are ruled by Corrupt Power.
The primary motivation of the Security State is to preserve its own power. It is a virus that has taken over the host.
Power wielded to use against your enemy which belies the principles that you purport to stand for? Will be used against you.
This is the whole reason for the principles of freedom and liberty to begin with.
Of course the security state has to preserve itself, but the target it uses to do so will differ over time, and while the incentive structure will remain the same - find a mark, set him up, arrest him* - that the target is now 180 degrees different from the one it started with is a material change. And the current manifestation of the security state, you can draw lines as far back in American history as you care to go and you'll find its justification. My own expertise of this country, such as it is, extends only as far back as the Civil War. I'm sure something from the War of 1812, the Revolution, or even the colonial era could presage it further.
The point I'm making is that there's no one corrupt group, no one corrupt person, no one (sorry Chris, stealing this) Wannsee Conference that we can point to. It goes back ages, it's embedded in the system, and that it's worse now than it was is a consequence of its scale and the comparative impotence of the citizenrry, not of the actors who are running it now. Is anyone going to say with a straight face that this present corruption begins and ends with its personages? For my money, the most capital-e evil President of the 20th century, by a considerable margin, was LBJ. (One wonders what he'd do with today's toybox of state.) A lot of our recent presidents, Trump included, have been positively benign by comparison. So why is it worse? The complexity of the system is why, and that's down to historical factors more than it is the people currently in power.
*The "plot" against that Michigan woman, and the bathetic attempts of the feds to justify it in court, would have been in a functional polity front page news for weeks. Instead the original "crime" got wall-to-wall coverage and the denouement... well, put it this way: a family member of mine who angrily emailed me about the original "plot" didn't know about the outcome until weeks after the fact, and only because I told him at a barbecue.
"So why is it worse? The complexity of the system is why, and that's down to historical factors more than it is the people currently in power."
Yes. And some people figure out how to manipulate the system.
That was a whole lot of words to say, "Shit's bad, whaddyagonna do?"
On the contrary. If you focus primarily on individuals you're just playing Whack-A-Mole. (An excitable friend of mine, newly converted to internet communism a few years ago, went on a wild tear about Jeff Bezos and said he should be executed. I pointed out that that would neither make Amazon nor his personal fortune disappear, and more pertinently, these things would still be in the oligarchbclass, only now they'd have even more motivation to hold onto them.)
“Just look at the post-9/11 security state: that was supposed to be aimed at the muzzies, not the Fox News crowd.”
I wouldn’t be so sure of that.
Do go on. (As one of the Fox News crowd, I'm genuinely curious.)
Inside job.
No.
If you did not even sense it instinctively on that very day, then I’m afraid you will need to seek for yourself.
I was a teenager, living thousands of miles away, when 9/11 happened. My sincere apologies, o secret king, for not being blessed with your boomer insight.
Yikes. Wrong on a coupla counts there.
Is there even a Fox News crowd anymore?
OK - Tucker crowd. (I think the Fox News crowd still exists but they're largely comatose and drooling applesauce while Hannity's on.)
Are you referring to Biden?
Re Uvalde; I could see one or two cowards. But the whole damn force; particularly after just having undergone an "active shooter" training two months before? Something doesn't smell right.
Fair, but one complete idiot and coward at the top, giving direct orders to people in a rank-structured organization, can cause a lot of harm. And the Uvalde police response looks to me exactly like the way the Broward County Sheriff's Office responded in Parkland. We have other school shootings to compare this to -- police have behaved this way before.
"Fair, but one complete idiot and coward at the top, giving direct orders to people in a rank-structured organization, can cause a lot of harm."
Yes. Accurate. And in a roundabout and perhaps unintentional way you are revealing how it is not that complicated to set in motion trains of events. You just handle it at the Human Resources level, and find the "good fit" to lead the troops.
see also: Hire Wokesters like Akela Lacy at The Intercept and DOD rich kids like Klippenstein and turn them loose.
Watch the magic happen.
Those same types are picked as Generals and Police Chiefs.
I’m not kidding.
The local police are being co-opted by the Federal DOJ for some time. (No, this wasn’t false flag).
Part of this and indeed Federal Law enforcement leadership as well has been purging men or women of honor and replacing with creatures. This has been known within law enforcement and the military for years (much of it from fear of lawyers, in the military JAG functions as Progressive Commissars).
You want cowards in charge?
You got ‘em.
Yes, and "we" responded the same way, with wide, bulging eyes, gaping mouths, and the same phrase, "WTF!" Derogatory remarks about the "lazy, cowardly, cops." Did they learn nothing? Did they expect it to stop? In the intervening years could they not have changed their training? Maybe the cops need to go through military training in addition to their regular training. Maybe having a couple of people on each shift that question authority, to try and balance things out. Otherwise, it does look suspicious.
The training is gone when JAG tells you you’ll go to Jail. (Military).
If you take a pistol self defense course you’ll likely spend half of it being lectured on Law.
The fear of jail and omnipresent investigations choke off the ability to shoot. I have been observing this since Bosnia in 1996.
If you think it’s different for the police; it is- its WORSE.
Its Law or CRIME kids. Been there, done that.
Once you are threatened Legally by Lawyers or clerks if you do your job you’ll go to Jail, you have 2 choices.
1) Surrender to the system silently, you will freeze, as happened in Uvalde.
2) Utter Lawlessness and the Thrill of the Crime of defying the cowards who cripple and betray us all - and the criminal mindset and joyful, lawless soul of the Pirate.
So America;
Lawyers or Criminal Pirates with uniforms?
The Lawyers - you see your fate.
The Pirate 👮🏻♂️ and Soldiers?
🤔
Gee.
Can we 🏴☠️ get back to you?
Is it that surprising that they would obey the orders given to them? My understanding is the Border Patrol officers who ultimately breached the room were in defiance of orders.
Seems more believable to me that the officers were just sheep, rather than some plot.
The Border Patrol officer went in to save his own wife and children - which is what every other parent should have been allowed to do. They would have had to shoot me.
I agree, but I don’t think that goes against my point (not sure if that’s what you were getting at).
Typo: "just" not joint.
Not at all; joint pointing out that he was motivated by other factors.
It is not surprising and much like Chris you reveal how shockingly easy it is to manipulate and engineer responses. You simply hire and place the order givers. The plebes, whether they are cops or Gleaming Talking Head Fraud media will then do their jobs.
The media is not threatened daily with Jail. Police and soldiers are - and its real.
If they had shot that kid in the lot when he walked up with the AR the Civil Rights machine would be living outside their houses.
Sure, but you are just describing a sliding scale of consequences for wrong think.
Lol a sliding scale of wrong think lol lmao , your on your own think and tweet your way outta that one 😂☠️😂
Both.
The Border Patrol I think you’ll find went in because of the Border Patrol agent who got his kid out.
As for coward mediocrity in Command;
Did you think the police and military could swim against society forever?
I don’t see much of it because I have long been rid of cable tv, but what I’ve seen of interviews with the supposed relatives is bizarre. The affect simply doesn’t track. I don’t know the absolute truth. I only know it supremely weird and weird always in the same direction toward…evil. Ot ain’t organic.
Acting is hard.
I always pay attention to whether the media puts a spotlight on it or not. There's atrocities committed every day including mass shootings that are systematically ignored. The vast majority of these I suspect happened as the local news report said it did. Police scanners are interesting to listen to. But the ones the media shines a spotlight on, whether it's the Ukraine war or the Texas shooting, always looks made for TV to me in some way. It's almost be ome my lazy way of sorting planned and coordinated events versus real organic tragedies: did the media cover it? Then it's fishy
Amazingly effective heuristic, is it not?
If the Corp. Propaganda networks are pushing something in your face, why?
Can anyone really watch Leana Wen on CNN post Boston bombing, or those crisis actors shedding no tears about their dead child, or those people getting off the subway in NYC and not feel like they are watching a shitty made for TV movie?
The Monkey Pox actors in this simulation are more believable than Leana Wen against the green screen interviewed by Jake Tapper.
https://sagehana.substack.com/p/they-are-telling-you-what-they-are?s=w
The root argument in these tragedies is are the leaders incompetent (i.e. event went down as described) or evil (it was planned). Then is media coverage just opportunistic vultures or your average whore bought and paid to say what they're told to say. Most interesting are big media events that disappeared as Las Vegas in 2017 did. I suspect there it was planned-too many randos packing heat-aborted-fallback on patsy-bury the story before randos get traction
Check out interviews with Armstrong, Aldrin and Cooper. No way they were telling the truth.
Yup. My normie neighbor is flying his flag at half staff.
TV and media are built around tragedy and blood, that’s the script. They just fill in some blanks.
I wish I had the time to reply at length, citing evidence in depth. Maybe this evening, but it's a holiday and I've got family stuff going on.
Instead I'll be brief and address what I think is the core of your argument, which is sometimes called Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." It's a reasonable dictum, on its own. Unfortunately, showing that an explanation is adequate is hard work, and it's easy to cut corners or skew an argument, especially when one has limited access to the facts of the matter. So much more so when that access has been purposefully limited and disguised. Don't tell me you don't believe in psy war! It's as old as warfare itself.
My counter to Hanlon's Razor is what I like to call Hanlon's Shave Cream: "Incompetence can be used to amplify and disguise malice." We're not just talking about some monolithic conspiratorial bloc, but networks and hierarchies and organizations and infiltration and long games. There's plenty of room useful idiots. In fact they're essential, both as apparatchiks and as cut-outs. Nor need there be a single unified conspiracy: there is plenty of room for competing factions in an invisible government, and plenty of evidence for that.
Catherine Austin Fitts has some good material on how malice is disguised as incompetence. It's as established and universal a play as "confession by projection". You should get to know her work, she's got quite a pedigree.
I'm very open to an argument about "networks and hierarchies and organizations and infiltration and long games."
You're sort of a professional historian, right? I can respect that, and I understand there's a professional taboo against oversimplification, and no doubt for good reasons. You're a military historian, too? Have a look at this recent video, made with your tax dollars, to promote the work of the 4th PSYOP Group, under the 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne): of Fort Bragg: https://youtu.be/VA4e0NqyYMw
Maybe meditate for a moment on that opening quote from Sun Tzu.
I would consider myself a "conspiracy realist", and I've arrived there well before any of this Covid ops shit of the past couple of years, but it sure fits a pattern. For a serious look at the evidence for a "plandemic", I would direct your attention to the careful work of the Berlin Corona Investigative Committee and Dr. Reiner Fuellmich. You remember the Volkswagen emissions fraud story from a few years ago? He was the lead prosecutor. Serious guy.
https://grand-jury.net
I think your post is mostly attacking strawmen. Acknowledging the reality of hidden power structures doesn't make anything simpler or easier: we have to deal with the entire structure, not just the top. And it's not just a handful of these people, at the top, either. These are families, lineages, factions, successions, alliances... it's complex stuff. And as long as they hold narrative supremacy, some heroic Rambo style vigilante action would be completely futile. (Also, you don't just get to skip to the boss battle, but anyhoo...) In fact, they are desperate to provoke a violent response right now. That's why they staged the whole Jan 6 op and have been milking it so hard... another long story, but here's a teaser for those with short attention spans: https://www.bitchute.com/video/DYlb92zMkj41/
What you really want is a serious, historical argument, and this is not the venue for me to deliver one. I recommend Carroll Quigley for starters. And then Anthony Sutton. Perhaps William Cooper's book Behold A Pale Horse. And if you want to follow up on your Jim Jones book, Dave MacGowan is quite readable: https://centerforaninformedamerica.com
I'm quite sympathetic to your grand thesis about performative narcissism and in-group signaling spiraling out of control and bringing down calcified institutions. But I don't think it's the whole story, by any means. It's a social phenomena that, while no doubt can occur spontaneously under some conditions, can also be used to further political or military ends -- no less than fire and disease. (And it's a blurry distinction for these folks. They're the people that Clausewitz and Machiavelli were writing to.)
They’re the coward and frankly sub mediocrity great grandchildren of the New Dealers, cringing behind Hobo Chic clothing their parents ill gotten wealth, picking subordinate leaders who are non-threatening, that’s an ever lower bar.
We’ve gone from German Shepherd Generals who often you know were geniuses (Patton, Macarthur, Nimitz) to Pomeranians.
Dumb ones at that.
Remember the riots when Petreaus (America’s last General kiddies) went down for not endorsing the dumbest story ever?
Me neither.
You voted America.
Deal with it.
> see Milley, Dempsey, all the Police Chiefs that rush to betray their cops before any facts are established.
Psst. Hanlon was working for the CIA.
Correct.
Its both.
A small core of malice and greed - who happen to be mediocrities at anything but corruption and being malicious- surrounding themselves for decades with yes men, then mediocre yes men, then idiot yes men, then their idiot coward cringers grandchildren ; who now are known as The Current Professional Managerial Class.
You really need to add cowardice to the list;
Hanlon’s After Shave?
This is a fine statement. Thank you for making it.
I had never heard of this person before. The final line of her Wikipedia article has cemented in me a desire to read her work, since it's clear she's got a brain in her head and hopefully has receipts to go with it.
(Rather than being coy, I'll just say: if the Washington Post went to the trouble of giving her a prissy, fussy fact check, then she's probably worth listening to. That plus her track record in the public sector means she probably knows of what she speaks. Thank you for the recommendation!)
Here's a good start on CAF (and some others): https://planetlockdownfilm.com/full-interviews/
More hot tips over here: https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/why-eve-really-ate-that-apple/comment/6860146
Also, just gotta say, Wikipedia is and has always been info war battlespace under enemy control. The entrances to the rabbit holes, but never their depth.
Oh, for sure. When I read Wikipedia pages of people I'm very familiar with, it's basically like reading oppo research. But what can I say? I'm lazy, it's accessible, and it loads well on mobile.
This is more or less how I see the situation. There are conspiracies, but they're mostly petty and opportunistic, they don't usually work out as planned, and the people responsible are the same incompetents who eff everything else up.
What we're seeing is mostly down to a general collapse of virtue arising from entirely too comfortable conditions, combined with unforseen technological consequences, combined with a seriously broken way of looking at reality that has everyone feeling alone and alienated and depressed. The pathocrats are exacerbating the situation, not directly causing it.
For the cause, we all need to look in the mirror.
(All that said, 9/11 was an totally inside job lol)
As was the JFK assassination, Oklahoma, the first twin tower bombing, and so on. The CIA was at the root of most of them, but now the FBI is up to the same tricks. I hate to disagree with Mr Bray, but from all I’ve read and watched, all of the mass shootings have been false flags — I believe all of the shooters have been groomed (the latest 2 by the FBI, taking a page from the CIA playbook). You cannot look at the various declassified ops, Paperclip, MK-Ultra, Mockingbird, et al, along with the contemporary tabletop scenarios and not see a conspiratorial group (or groups) acting as puppet masters.
There are no coincidences. While circumstances may afford opportunistic actions, I think it unwise to dismiss the agenda driven manipulative hand. All of what I categorize as false flags have a clear objective — the destruction of CIA/Vietnam files in Oklahoma, a similar destruction of files and the cover-up of missing billions (trillions?) in 9/11 (building 7, Pentagon) and the excuse for a 20 year war (towers 1 and 2), and so forth.
The mass shootings all forward gun confiscation and the repeal of the 2nd amendment. So far, these efforts have been unsuccessful, logic and statistics have prevailed. But these events are progressing to more inhumane and incomprehensible killings — that the conspirators are willing to murder little children in hopes of an emotional response resulting in fewer legally held firearms only speaks to the evil of those who are in a position to engineer such an unspeakable crime.
Maybe that is the key — to see an event as a false flag, one must believe that evil exists in the hearts of man, and that such men (and women) will stop at nothing to achieve their ends.
Who voted in the mediocrity?
That picked yes men as police chiefs and Generals?
Americans don’t control much with their votes.
But who commands Force; President’s, Governors, Mayors they do vote for-
And yes you knew who and what you were voting for-
Reap the consequences.
And this is The Chauvin Effect; you’re on your own.
There are conspiracies only when the stakes are low. Are you familiar with the death of JFK?
Sure. And the assassination of Caesar.
Conspiracies are very real. They're just only PART of the story.
Conspiracy theory is a useful lens but as with any lens, if it's used to the exclusion of all others you end up blind to important features of reality.
"Conspiracy theory" is a psy op term itself created by the CIA to prevent people who didn't buy the JFK narrative.
see also: "Anti-vax" which is a psy op term created and given wings by the Propaganda Networks, to brand ALL vaccines as "good"...and now if you oppose MANDATES, you are "anti-vax", since the psy op term has life.
Everything that happens involves conspiracy by definition, unless it is a true lone wolf who wakes up one day and...shoots up a school, or...creates an injection that kills people and...this ex. is impossible.
But the term itself has been effectively hijacked to mean, "Batshit crazy cuckoo stuff", and then any incidence of actors conspiring can be lumped in.
The power of words, the power of branding.
Technically, the CIA didn't invent the term; they did however popularize it and for exactly the purpose you describe.
"Conspiracy theory" is also inaccurate. "Conspiracy hypothesis" is closer to the use of the term to describe a narrative. Now if used in the sense of, a general theory of conspiracies, now we're getting somewhere.
I suppose "invent" means "co-opt and create the new connotation."
Animal Farm stuff, basically.
Yeah, those two assassinations are equally germane to the present moment.
Caesar's assassination is probably more germane than you realize.
Sure.
As (almost—lol) always a powerfully expressed position blending erudition and great practical experience.
Your example of the Wannsee Conference supports your general position even more than you know—and also illustrated the seductiveness of broad conspiracy theories as comforting explanatory models.
The historian Arno Mayer shows how the Final Solution was not some masterplan conceived at the very beginning and executed with diabolical industrial mastery to its grisly conclusion. Instead, it was a series of ad hoc measures to cope with the huge number of Jews captured in Eastern Europe as the Nazi’s Operation Barbarossa against Russia ground down into defeat. Faced with a logistical and operational nightmare the Nazis developed increasingly expansive and industrialized solutions to achieve mass murder on the widest possible scale.
But it was actually the result of a series of surprises and blunders that forced Hitler and his evil minions to conceive of this vast mass murder at the Wannsee Conference. Although Wannsee was the key moment, it was not some coolly planned master plan, but a desperate attempt to invent an integrated strategy to unify a series of increasingly unworkable ad hoc mass murder crimes.
So Wannsee itself isn’t actually an example of an almost-successful conspiracy.
So strongly invested were many Holocaust scholars in the perversely comforting model of successful conspiracies that Mayer was absolutely vilified for his (very persuasive) case that the Nazis, who were certainly callous murderers and committed anti-Semites from the beginning, did not plan at the beginning for a mega-death scale machinery of mass murder, but kept making it up until the reality they confronted forced them to scale up to that level of heartless crime at the Wannsee Conference.
Congratulations on another courageous, apposite and timely post!
This is the relevant link: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Did-Heavens-Not-Darken/dp/184467777X
Very interesting -- thanks for the book link.
"...as the Nazis' Operation Barbarossa..." (Sorry, I'm an editor.)
Fascinating comment. I appreciate the clarity and eloquence of your writing. I might read your novel.
Thanks for the edit! Would love to know what you think of Crisis Deluxe, too!
I've never read that book but Ian Kershaw's work on Hitler implies* similar - one of his big contributions was that the apparatchiks of the Nazi Party were always "working towards the Fuehrer." In other words, in the absence of a clear directive, in the absence of a bullet-point list of the day's tasks, "What Would Adolf Do?" was the order of the day.
That this ended up in the reversal of the Wannsee Conference - a post-hoc justification of genocide - would be darkly comedic if it wasn't so fundamentally, disgustingly inhuman. The higher-ups ended up working towards the grunts, who were in turn working towards the august personage of Hitler! Thus proceeded one of the most terrible crimes against humanity - as a bureaucratic note, as an action point on a meeting summary, as another task between sips of mineral water and scribbles on note paper.
The 20th century, ladies and gentlemen!
*I use the word "implies" because I think Kershaw would markedly disagree with your conclusion. I personally agree with it. But I'm not a famous, erudite historian. So... my agreement and five bucks will get you a Happy Meal. :-)
Thanks for your insightful comment and support—I’ll remember it in the unlikely event I ever darken the door of a McDonalds! lol
Seriously, unless Kershaw weighs into this thread I find your analysis persuasive. It reminds me of the dynamics that led to the murder of Thomas Becket—the King merely said out loud “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” and two hot-heads departed
Immediately and galloped to Canterbury where they murdered Thomas Becket during Mass.
Similar dynamics in a nutshell.
This is true. My conspiracy minded friends oversimplify everything and reduce all human motivations to a simple single dimension. "Follow the money" is an example of a heuristic that my conspiracist friends like to use. This is a saying that is true to a point, but would be much more meaningful if my friends where forensic accountants. These sayings are followed to the exclusion of all other human motivations.
Conspiracies often get the mythology of present day issues correct, but tend to reduce the believers personal responsibility for the state of society by blaming everything on distant third parties. If 80% of Americans had intelligence, integrity, and basic virtues most of the problems we face would evaporate. Being diligent at home and in the community is where the solution begins, if there is a solution.
P.S. I finished Raven. Great book suggestion. There's a lot to unpack there.
There is an element that will over simplify things and there is also an element that will false flag oversimplify things.
If this sounds crazy, consider that New Knowledge made fake Russian bots to swing the Alabama Senate race and smear Tulsi Gabbard.
There is a doctored video of Bourlas that even Mark Crispin Miller fell for.
What are the odds that video is a false flag put up to use as evidence of fakery?
https://theintercept.com/2019/02/03/nbc-news-to-claim-russia-supports-tulsi-gabbard-relies-on-firm-just-caught-fabricating-russia-data-for-the-democratic-party/
Money is just a ubiquitous and generally effective form of control. Blackmail and ideological narrative also make fine puppet strings.
Follow the lines of control.
Intentionally or not, you have set up a false dichotomy between incompetence / societal collapse on the one hand and elaborate conspiratorial plotting on the other.
In fact incompetence and societal collapse makes it far easier for conspiratorial plotting to function; given enough incompetence, the plotting gets increasingly simple. If the Powers That Be want to arrange a school massacre, choosing a school with a police force more concerned with protecting their own lives, pensions, and reputations rather than student lives is going to be a good target.
I'll grant everything you say about incompetence with Uvalde, but I still want to know how a 17 year-old was able to afford two AR-15s, including a top-line Daniel Defense, and an expensive EO Tech sight, as well as the magazines and ammunition. The Feds should be thoroughly investigating the money trail; if they are not, something is fishy.
I find it interesting that you mentioned Uvalde but did not even give a head nod to Buffalo. Is that because an FBI agent being in the chat room makes Buffalo too awkward an example?
But let's skip this and go right to Covid. Covid's potential Rosetta Stone is The Lancet paper demonizing HCQ. That entire paper was a fraud, a fraud that involved Harvard University and passed peer review at Britain's most prestigious medical journal. It should have revealed the complete corruption of the medical establishment. https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/08/lancetgate-why-was-this-monumental-fraud-not-a-huge-scandal/
As Peter McCullough realized early on, the entire goal of the medical establishment was to push the vaccines, not to help patients. We can argue until the cows come home whether the vaccines were intended as bio-weapons (as Richard Fleming believes) or whether they were "dismal failures from corporations that were in a hurry to come up with a lucrative product." But even if the latter, the suppression of HCQ (and now IVM, pace Berenson) shows that the people pushing the vaccines were willing to kill for profit. And each ongoing dump of the FDA data reveals more of the Establishment's callous disregard for human life and suffering,
"If identifiable actors are tearing things apart, you can know where to put your hands to stop them; you can act."
The identifiable actors are those who CANNOT be investigated.
Remember Chuck Schumer saying the quiet part out loud with Rachel Maddow:
"Let me tell you. You take on the Intelligence Community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."
Now ask yourself. Was anyone in the I-C elected? No.
Can they be held accountable and scrutinized? No.
So we can duly elect officials. And even the MOST SENIOR ELECTED OFFICIALS IN OUR LAND understand that THEY CANNOT CROSS this group, the American Security State.
edit: And they are always near the scene of every crime, are they not? Lurking there.
Has it ever *not* been the case that you can beat the rap but not the ride, though? I'm not disagreeing with the substance of what you say - what Chuckie said is accurate, and all the more chilling for it. But when was it not thus? All that's changed is the uniform. Did the Securitate and the Stasi need to give the accused their day in court before they tortured them?
I believe a lot of this is the nature of bureaucracy. A few elected officials are leaders but most are just managers. And as managers, their focus is "process," not reality or results.
I remember reading a paper by prosecuting attorneys. They posed the situation of a man tried, convicted, and condemned to death. Shortly before his execution some evidence is uncovered that shows he is "actually innocent." Should the execution continue as scheduled? To silly people like me, it's simple: you don't execute an innocent man. But they focused on the process. Since the process had been followed, perhaps it's best to execute him to protect the integrity of the process. To their credit, in their conclusion they suggested that ultimately, society probably shouldn't execute a man whose innocence has been demonstrated. But they didn't treat it as a foregone conclusion. They felt that the fact that the process had been followed, even though it had clearly failed, was strong justification to execute an innocent man.
In this case, you have a police chief whose life comes down to process. Process is the shield that managers use to evade responsibility when things go wrong, regardless of the underlying reason. "I followed the process" is as close to a "get out of jail free" card as a government bureaucrat can find.
When the process breaks down, or worse, when there is no defined process to address a situation, this is paralyzing to a bureaucrat. Now everything he does and every decision he makes is on him. For a true leader, this goes with the territory, but for a politician/manager, this is a near-death experience. Unfortunately, the police chief chose to do nothing rather than do something wrong, something that might get him in trouble or create liability for him or for the department.
Add to that the quality of the SWAT team. Small town SWAT teams are not well trained. Their training officer will be someone from the department who has no more real world experience than anyone else. He will have been to a few courses but that will probably be it. They'll have been called out a few times a year to stand by or to break down a door to arrest a suspect who doesn't resist. They have probably never really been tested. An active school shooting is the Super Bowl of SWAT. It would scare the crap out of a well-trained, well-disciplined, experienced team, much less these guys. Yeah, they had all the tacti-cool gear but the police chief most likely had no real faith in their ability to get the shooter without shooting each other or more of the children.
That's my two cents. I may be wrong.
Chris,
There’s definitely been “a failure of courage”. I’ve never considered myself even faintly brave by any standard. It’s my colleagues who’ve lost the courage to stand in truth.
BUT & this is very dangerous, you’re mistaken if you don’t recognise this is a coordinated plan, really.
In 2019 & earlier, each G20 nation had a pandemic preparedness plan. So did the WHO. The main measure was “if you’re sick, stay home” & “wash your hands more often” (because route of transmission isn’t known early on).
Nothing else. No masks, no lockdowns. No mass screening or business closures. No border restrictions or vaccination certificates.
The pandemic preparedness plans explicitly excluded all of these “NPIs”, because they were known not to work.
Remember what happened in March 2020? One nation after another went into lockdown. No one questioned it. Well, very few of us did. We were deplatformed.
I don’t believe there’s any other explanation for the uniformity of lunatic responses than a supranational organisation.
I’ve many other pieces of evidence, but this needs solving before needing to consider it.
No. This was planned. Not only is the above to my mind unequivocal evidence of it, but this kind of authoritarian response to an alleged pandemic has been rehearsed repeatedly for well over twenty years.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d3WUv5SV5Hg
There’s plenty of potentially unplanned components, but the smashing of the economy & of the will of the people wasn’t one of them.
Dr. Yeadon,
First, when I reply to you, everything I say starts from the view that your warning to people about the injections had a value that can't be exaggerated. You, and a few other people, sounded a loud and clear alarm that enabled people all over the world to protect themselves in a dangerous moment. So let's start there: Thank you for speaking up. My teenaged daughter doesn't have this shit in her body -- neither do I, but I'm less worried about that -- and I'm glad I was able to hear the warning. I have family members who won't speak to me anymore, because I'm a monster who refused to protect my child, but those family members also assured me that vaccination would end the threat of infection forever, so whatever. The evidence to support a decision I made last year has come in, and I'm happy with it.
Second, I ride this bus with you about 85% of the way there. I think the entire discussion that's happening here is between people who accept that we've experienced a great evil and a decision to cause harm, and the remaining discussion is about the "why." I'm open to any argument anyone wants to make, and I'm here for the discussion.
So my question is this: "This was planned." By who? Can you give their names, and the time and place where they planned it? Can you identify the equivalent of their meeting at Jekyll Island, the moment where they hatched the plan?
Thank you, Chris.
I too lost all my friends and half my family.
I can have a reasonably good shot at answering your good question. However, I point out that even if I could not, I’m starting from pointing out that a crime is being committed. Imagine I call in to the police that I can see what appears to be a crime in progress. The duty Sargent stops me & asks me to say who they are. I cannot, because I don’t get a good look at them. I don’t think it’s on me to establish who the crooks are for my observations of a crime to be taken seriously. It helps if I can, of course!
1. Please check the Paul Schreyer video. Everyone he identifies as present in any of the simulations and is still involved in the field is suspect.
2. Event 201. I believe there’s no justification for any tabletop simulation of severe respiratory pathogen based pandemic, because I don’t believe it’s possible to have higher IFR AND high transmissibility. This because high IFR agents tend to make their victims unwell & this causes them to stay home, sick. The R0 value falls. We saw this with Ebola, SARS & MERS. They’re not stupid. They know there’s never been one global pandemic of respiratory illnesses that was also severe (killing very many people). Even Spanish flu 1918 was thought atypical, with many, young men dying, probably of secondary bacterial pneumonia. So why do they repeatedly run these simulations? They never talk about early identification of potential therapies. Instead, all the exercises focused on authoritarian responses.
3. Pressed, I’d name Gates, Fauci, Farrar, Tedros, Drosten & several others. Every one I f them have in my opinion behaved very oddly for years prior to 2020. As to where did the idea for misusing PCR come from, this is a good candidate.
https://eumeswill.wordpress.com/2020/08/11/faith-in-quick-test-leads-to-epidemic-that-wasnt/
Thank you for this. A very clear answer.
Chris, bloody good as always. This is where Eugyppius is coming from too. While it's true that half of us has below average intelligence, I find Eugyppius smacks of arrogance, like he's smarter than everyone else, including the so called elites. Now, he probably is, and I do love his writing and insight, but I think it's naive to not attribute a significant shift in our culture to a deliberate agenda. Yes, our culture is decaying but I would go so far as to suggest that this is intended. A harnessing and amplification of our tendency for self-destructive perversion of truth. Globalists deliberately undermining social unity and self-sufficiency to remove all barriers to their endless pursuit of economic growth.
Good points. The entire planet is overrun with decadent under whelming money grubbers intent on frivolous pursuits. Most people I read seem to be worried they will take everything, I recently quipped the Davos crowd is both physically and mentally weak from those purchased lifestyles and won't last a decade.
Never attribute evil when simple stupidity will do. Of course, it begs the question of why the “elites” are actually elite if they are thoroughly mediocre and generally stupid.
That's the big question, yes. As a person who lives in a state where Gavin Newsom is the governor, I wonder about the ascension of obvious mediocrities every day.
My sense is also that so many jobs today have no hard, objective criteria for success or failure. Think tanks, academia, most government roles, even many professional jobs within big companies. So a person with the right credentials already starts out on second or third base and has to work really hard to fail; doing nothing gets you promoted, so they become risk averse. And resigning is the worst thing, which might explain why not one person within military leadership resigned after the Afghanistan fiasco. It’s all just a big game of pass the buck, with nobody taking ultimate responsibility. Mediocrities rise to the top and so do sociopaths.
At least Newsom has great hair and teeth, to distract you from his incredibly blinding incompetence.
Also remember, "good looking" people are more likely to be promoted and move up. This despite the quality or amount of work completed.
Chris, great discussion and thanks for providing the forum to have it.
Okay, I broached this the other day, Meritocracy. This would appear to be the guiding principle that is being exploded in front of you.
Roughly: "How does Gavin survive and thrive? He sucks..."
Now. Consider what would happen if Gavin came out and said, "The exp. mRNA injections are dangerous and ineffective. The lockdowns didn't work. Masks don't work I myself, Gavin Newsom, contracted Bell's Palsy from the injections, and I still got COVID."
How long do you think "Mediocre Gavin" would last?
If your answer is, "Not very long..." ask yourself why? What is now different?
Gavin is Covid-positive ten days after his second booster, but he's grateful for the protection provided by vaccination.
I wonder if he ever jabbed his daughter?
Jesus, how dark is all of this?
Do you know the origin of that term, "meritocracy"? Worth a deep dive.
How easily we forget.
I recently saw him described as 1619 Sulla, which caused me to chuckle for a second, and then go very, very quiet for the next hour.
Yes, it is a mix of Hanlon’s Razor and the superiority illusion. Everybody thinks they are smarter than they actually are. And the conspiracy theorists think other people are actually smarter than they are. The key is to realize that everybody is pretty dumb, including yourself. And since everybody is fairly dumb and prone to making dumb decisions, you are necessarily going to end up with dumb people running things. This is why technocrats are the worst.
Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity is fond of quoting "once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action" which is something Goldfinger said to Bond, James Bond. with so much going wrong at once, it's easy to believe that Soros or Gates or some other evil mastermind is at the helm. but a simpler explanation is probably as Naomi Klein once said, before she lost her moorings over covid, "never let a good crisis go to waste." certainly things just happen and actors behind the scenes are there waiting to turn them to their advantage. did we really elect an incompetent, demented old guy to serve as President now of all times? or did some power crazed genius install him in office to bring us down? it's hard to tell.
and yet, i don't believe that people are that diabolically organized and Hanlon's razor seems to better explain our predicament: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." there's an awful lot of Peter Principal going on.
interestingly, all the firing of unvaccinated people (i'm one) has sort of bred a compliant, docile, unquestioning labor force. we've gotten rid of the doctors who think creatively and do what is right for their patients and kept the fools who will do whatever Fauci says to protect their hides. we've gotten rid of the genius scientists who see things that no one else notices and kept the ones who's best skill is grant writing. we've gotten rid of inspired passionate teachers and kept those who won't ruffle a feather or risk actually challenging their students.
what kind of world will this lead to?
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
Klein's disappearance into Branch Covidianism was disappointing, almost as much as Noam Chomsky's.
Chomsky's a gatekeeper from way back. Controlled oppo. Sorry.
“When you hear hoofs, think horse, not zebra.”
I have reached a similar conclusion. It has left me with one question, why bother?
If the situation is as you say it is, i truly dont see any way for any of us to make any difference. So why do you keep doing what you are doing? Not meant as a critique, I truly would like to hear your reasoning.
Why not just focus on the things you can change, like the length of the grass on your lawn?