I think Havel called it post-totalitarianism. Moscow doesn't need to send tanks down your street, because your neighbor and your boss are enforcing Moscow's diktats. His "Workers of the World, Unite" banner, displayed by the go-along-to-get-along merchant on Main Street, is today's "Hate Has No Home Here" or "In This House, We Believe in Science," or whatever the hell is popular up North this week. We don't have that garbage in Daytona, and it's a blessing not to have to keep up. It's kind of neat how (just like in Shakespeare!) the jesters are the only ones publicly speaking the truth, and allowed to get away with it. Jon Stewart with the pangolin jokes last year, and now Woody (who has been publicly anti-corporate "food," etc., for quite some time). Guys like Kory and McCullough have to be hounded out of their jobs, but our artists and comedians are allowed to be honest. For now. When the PTB start shutting down the comedians, then we'll be in 1977 in Prague. Of course, Havel said we'd end up here; he told us over and over again that having lots of choices at the mall doesn't mean you're free, but that your ruling class is made up of corporations, rather than Communist apparatchiks.
I recently read Power of the Powerless, and I swear, so much of what Havel said in 1977 about Czechoslovakia could just as easily be describing today's America: the whole business of sloganeering, everyone pretending the slogans are true statements about the world when everyone knows they're really not, and everyone pretending that nobody's pretending. Our culture is wrapped up in so many interlocking layers of bullshit that nothing about it is real anymore. It's just pure bullshit, all the way down.
A lot people are truly confused. They read the media without thinking.
I was talking over dinner to a friend about the miserable state of US public schools, which he recognized. But any positive mention of "maybe school choice in red states will work out" was met with "I believe in public education", as if "public education" means government schooling. It means education for the public. How is it not public education when everyone can go to school but has a choice of where? Answer: When you read the New York Times. This guy is a math professor...
School choice laws differ from state to state, so it's hard to make an overall comment about this, but I will say that in Pa., where I used to live, charter schools get taxpayers' money, without any provision for what happens when parents at any particular public school choose to enroll their kids in charters. The result is that the costs for taxpayers go up, because they have to maintain (with lower student counts) the same number of public school buildings and public school classrooms, because not enough kids leave to justify shutting down a whole school building or even cutting a classroom (with associated teacher costs). Your friend is pointing to a real issue: The way many states laws are written, districts must maintain the official government schools unless enough kids leave to justify closing them. Taxes go up, and public schools end up cutting programs like foreign languages other than Spanish in order to avoid raising taxes even further. The idea of dollars following kids around is problematic; I've always argued that parents should be able to deduct the cost of their child's non-public education from their state income tax. I don't want the taxpayer to pay for my personal choices, but I should at least get credit for the fact that I paid for those choices, myself. In general, discussions about public education are significantly hampered by the fact that "US public schools" differ greatly from state to state, from district to district, and even within districts. I covered public education in my former school district for years, so I actually know quite a bit about the details in that district and in that state. Things are very different, though, in other places, like NYC and Chicago.
"The idea of dollars following kids around is problematic" - The current system is even more problematic. In any case, the words "public education" mean education of the public. They imply nothing about how this is accomplished. I'm sure interested parties can invent a million reasons to support their preferred solution while calling alternatives "problematic".
The problem is that the laws in at least some states (including my own former state) were written to benefit charter school companies, not students. So for example, in Pa., if you're an online charter school, your cost to serve students is roughly $4000 per year. However, you can bill the taxpayers of the "sending" districts **the average cost to serve a student in person,** which in my old district was $14,000 for regular ed and $25,000 for special ed. That's problematic. That money came out of my wallet, as I homeschooled my own child at my own expensive. It's possible to think that many public schools under-serve their students and to recognize that charter school laws in at least some states do nothing to solve that problem. And crummy charter school laws are pretty hard to get people to rally behind. Beyond the unfairness to the taxpayer, there is the issue your friend raises, which is: What do we do for kids whose parents don't opt them out? If a "government school" is truly doing a poor job, what do you do for people who don't choose to leave? Current laws don't answer that question. It doesn't sound as if your friend is answering it, either, but "Smart, aware parents get to choose, and less intelligent or aware parents don't, while the taxpayer continues to pay more every year" doesn't sound like a great answer to me.
The problem is that the laws in at least some states (including my own former state) were written to benefit charter school companies, not students. So for example, in Pa., if you're an online charter school, your cost to serve students is roughly $4000 per year. However, you can bill the taxpayers of the "sending" districts **the average cost to serve a student in person,** which in my old district was $14,000 for regular ed and $25,000 for special ed. That's problematic. That money came out of my wallet, as I homeschooled my own child at my own expensive. It's possible to think that many public schools under-serve their students and to recognize that charter school laws in at least some states do nothing to solve that problem. And crummy charter school laws are pretty hard to get people to rally behind. Beyond the unfairness to the taxpayer, there is the issue your friend raises, which is: What do we do for kids whose parents don't opt them out? If a "government school" is truly doing a poor job, what do you do for people who don't choose to leave? Current laws don't answer that question. It doesn't sound as if your friend is answering it, either, but "Smart, aware parents get to choose, and less intelligent or aware parents don't, while the taxpayer continues to pay more every year" doesn't sound like a great answer to me.
Sure there will be companies that try to game the system in their favor. But parents looking out for their kids are a powerful constituency. Focusing on semi-corruption in a not-really-trying state makes for an unconvincing argument.
Yep. I read it in 2020, and could not believe how dead-on it all was. *Animal Farm* is another one that makes you laugh with how exactly the current PTB use the playbook. I remember reading lots of articles about how if you didn't get your kid the MMR right on schedule, "Polio will come back." Yep, just like Jones. Orwell's "Notes on the Spanish War" has one note of hope, though, which is that at some point, the PTB won't be able to lie about reality. The problem is that when that happens (Geert's predictions come true, and 65% of Americans over age 5 die), there won't be enough people left to stand up. This would all be much harder to take if I were not a person of faith.
I used to laugh at Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World. I’m not laughing any more. I remember reading them when young (I’m 66), and smugly thinking ‘that’d never happen in real life’. Like I said, no longer laughing.
And the great thing is that it was reissued in a lovely new edition because of Trump, but then they had to hide it because of what ended up happening. I bought my copies online from a UK bookstore.
Not all the good students decide to go in this direction but there are many who will sell their souls for pretty baubles (and the cocktails too of course. )
Your last sentence explains what we've been observing over the past 3-5 years, with the influence of the World Economic Forum and its close ties to the United Nations, using the phony "climate emergency", among other sloganeering, to "nudge" public compliance with their diktats.
And that's just the obvious stuff, the past few years. I graduated from Harvard in 2000, and during the welcome day in September of 1996, my parents and I sat through a speech by one of the university bigwigs (Rudenstine? Knowles? I think it was Rudenstine) during which he mocked the people who denied the undeniable global warming, while praising the smart folks present, all of whom he assumed knew we were going to (if we didn't give up our Edison lightbulbs) "frizzle up and die." That was literally the expression he used. The message has become both more apocalyptic (the planet will be completely underwater!!!) and more vague (at some point in the future!!!), but the fact that WEF, etc., say this stuff completely out loud, not just when they think they're among friends, is (probably) due to the fact that they've got it all sewn up. Faceless bureaucrats you've never met and never had a chance to vote in or out can decide whether we get to keep our gas stoves. Worse-than-worthless drugs get approved over the objections of serious scientists and stockpiled to the tune of billions of taxpayer (and future taxpayer) dollars. We no longer need to declare war to spend billions on war. It doesn't matter which party is "in power"; the bureaucrats are happy to do whatever they can for Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, and whoever mines cobalt for EV batteries, and Bob and Susie next door put up a sign proclaiming how happy they are about it. "In this house, we read in the dark!" "In this house, we fund proxy wars!" "In this house, we revel in our ignorance of the innate immune system!"
If only our artists were honest. Taken as a group, they're mostly hypocrites, cadging for "likes" just like us. This here, what we're doing, is the opiate of the masses—because it strips you of agency by lulling you to sleep with the feeling of agency.
I respectively disagree. I had never participated in social media until almost two years ago when I thought it was absolutely critical. The only digital social network platform I participate in is on the Stacks.
My objective, and I believe many of the authors, is to get people to think they're bench pressing 180lbs. when it's actually 200 lbs.
I have seen a marked difference made by the people amongst these stacks over the last 2 years.
We have partially changed the zeitgeist. Tides do not rise all at once.
They start as small concentric circles that eventually crash in a wall of force on the shore.
You make a great point about how the doctors are demonized, censored, and fired; while the celebrities get to say whatever they want. Such total and blatant bullshit.
Last night my wife and I went out for a stroll. A few houses in our neighborhood have retarded Leftist yard signs. “ In this house we believe: love is love, science is real, blah blah blah. “ Very enlightening stuff. The yard signs, in fact all of the virtue signaling dialogue in every medium, besides asserting social dominance and stifling dissent, is designed to conceal and obfuscate urgent, dangerous problems in our society. I mean, wtf does “science is real” mean? Did anybody, anywhere claim that science doesn’t exist? Did somebody claim that black lives don’t matter, other than the hair shirt sporting phonies who ignore the massacres going on every hour in black neighborhoods throughout the USA while wallowing in fake guilt about the legacy of slavery? I actually appreciate these signs. They tell me who to avoid.
What was more real to me during my walk was the police helicopter making a tight circle over a near neighbor’s house and the 7 police cruisers surrounding it while I tried to preemptively work out the calories from some tomahawk ribeyes yet to be seared. Having some situational awareness, but not carrying at the time, I tried to get my blissfully oblivious better half to slow down so I could make sure we weren’t about to wander into an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire type of newspaper appearance. The police on the chopper megaphone demanding somebody come out because “ your house is surrounded...” were more real to me than the yuppie poseur signs pledging alliegance to the DNC sanctioned drivel these tautological imbeciles are broadcasting from their gravel. We don’t get much crime in my neighborhood, although we are not far from some less affluent zones. But violent crime is on the uptick in the city and and it’s ugly stuff. Fentanyl deaths, homeless panhandlers, drug cartel shootouts, people losing their minds and doing bad things - it’s nearly every day now. And it’s all over the country. Not to mention the economic debacle just getting started, the criminal migration invasion, the general distrust we now have for each other.
But nobody in the ruling junta or their accomplices wants to acknowledge any of the actual critical problems we have. They want to conjure obedience with imaginary bogeymen. Putin’s gonna get you. The “white supremacist transphobic “ mom who wants her 7 year old to grow up a little longer without a pornography indoctrination at school. She’s gonna get you. Math is racist. Excellence is racist. An excellent mathematician is gonna get you. No doubt.
These are silly fuckers. And they will fail. One way or the other. But they are dangerous in their games and they are dragging a lot of us down. They are just clever enough to use us to break their fall. And they will dust themselves off and walk away while the rest of the country lies fractured and bleeding on the pavement. There is no soft totalitarianism beneath the surface. They killed millions with COVID and they are killing more with the vaccines. There were no accidents. It’s not bombs and firing squads yet. They fear armed resistance. So they’re using hybrid warfare to subdue us.
The bitch of it is "silly fuckers" connected to "killed millions." I agree, but the bridge across that chasm is a big one. How have THESE IDIOTS done so much harm, is my daily question.
Yes, how did we hand the keys to the kingdom to such awful people? Many people have noticed that they fail at everything they touch, but they don’t get evicted. I thinks it’s just plain corruption.
The signs have long been around if you wanted to see them. The War on terrorism, Iraq and Afghanistan, the patriot act, and before any of that, jettisoning an entire class of people from society by offshoring the industries they worked in because the profits were no longer big enough and could be bigger with slave labor in asia. Tanto, where were you when the 2008 "great financial crisis" happened? Were you not angered at that and how it was handled? Was it really handled all that different then covid?
Your point is well taken. However the main differences between the financial shenanigans and mathematical risk management Mongolian clusterfunk of 2008 and the COVID episode is that while 2008 was a massive financial disaster perpetrated by the “smartest guys in the room” on the American public while rescuing their plutocrat peers, in 2020 they started murdering people all over world with a synthetic virus and then with faulty”vaccines”, while denying the efficacy of widely available, cheap repurposed extremely effective medications and supplements, and suspending everybody’s civil liberties while doing it. So that’s next level totalitarianism. The hubris, corruption, and incompetence were there in 2008, and certainly the permahawks have been killing people in pointless wars forever, but now they’re just indiscriminately offing people all
over the world, including their own citizens, and so far getting away with it.
"but now they’re just indiscriminately offing people all over the world"
you're rationalizing past misdeeds and saying they were ok but now they arent. Do you now understand the phrase "give them an inch and they'll take a mile"?
Isn't it entirely possible, that the lies and misdeeds that took place in 2008 are the direct cause for why we are where we are now? You admit that leadership in 2008 lied and cheated and so broke the law. So why wouldn't you expect that same leadership to do the same thing in the future? You never wondered why they kept printing money years after 2008 and kept interest rates at 0%? The REPO crisis broke out in the summer/fall of 2019, if you'd been paying attention since 2008 and knew what they were spewing since then were lies, wouldn't that cause you to maybe question covid?
This is what i struggle to get. I was just as outraged by the 2008 crisis as i was to covid. What is the difference? Can anyone here explain that to me? How are they not connected? Once i saw how they handled that, i knew things were just going to get worse (though i never expected covid, brilliant really).
Well color me shocked. Anytime you hear "national security" just assume that it means they've been abusing and breaking the law and to such an extent that if the truth got out we'd have a revolution.
How about, "we don't have an f#%@ing clue as to who that is". It often feels as if our whole society has fallen into the middle of an exceptionally bad dystopian novel.
We look around - and see nearly EVERYTHING is broken. And every time we try to fix ANYTHING, something else breaks.
In my more pessimistic moments I feel inclined to tip my tinfoil to who, (or what), ever, is so successfully destroying the freest, richest culture the world has ever known.
The interesting thing is that SNL’s regular writers scripted the monologue. There’s nothing spontaneous about SNL. That’s why it’s not, and in my view never has been, funny.
The monologue got blessed at high levels. So this is all just performance art -- kabuki in service of the shift in narrative to set Pfizer up for the royal pfisting.
I’m 66, and started watching SNL in 1975 when it first aired. It was so good (and funny) back then...they made fun of everyone. In recent years it became shamelessly woke, one-sided and disgusting...especially, of course during the Covid19 crap. For that and other reasons, for me it became absolutely unwatchable. Recently, they’ve been doing what I call the subtle, fake backpedaling re: Covid. That’s what Woody Harrelson’s monologue thing was about, I believe...yet another Corrupted Corrupted Media test balloon. I say, too little, too late...and where were all these celebrities during the past three years? Hiding in their luxurious mansions and keeping their mouths shut, methinks. To Hell with all of them...we’re not that stupid.
SNL stopped being funny at least 25 years ago. Because it was co-opted into unilateral political commentary. I wouldn’t turn on my TV set to watch Leon Trotsky or SNL. Comedy is Запретный in the gulag archipelago.
Exactly like the "lab leak," likely an op from the start. The goal was to make it seem like forbidden fruit so when they eventually come out and "admit" exactly that, we all froth at the mouth about how right we all were. There's a reason trusty folks like Tucker Carlson and Woody Harrelson are 3 years late to the party and another why it's highly unlikely you'll hear their breaking stories and strong opinions about the DOD and its countermeasures. 🙄
The world is led by idiots who are screwing up the plan they're executing on purpose.
Part of that plan was using algorithmic skinnerboxing to mold the laptop class into reflexive hall monitors who know which narrative to enforce without being told. Since this turns them into absurdist automatons, it is backfiring - the wokescolds are predictable, therefore boring and distasteful. Yuval Harari might not be correct in general about humans being hackable animals with no free will, but he's quite on point about the lickspittle stasi ... and that hackability goes both ways, which is why we keep running circles around them.
Feb 27, 2023·edited Feb 27, 2023Liked by Chris Bray
“Squishy totalitarianism”, for now. It isn’t going to be so squishy where they are taking us. My personal belief is that nothing on SNL is unscripted. There is intent behind this and it has to do with walking back the official narrative, which is no longer sustainable in its original form. We are now allowed to talk about the origins of COVID, but we aren’t allowed to talk about Big Money capturing the government, something we used to be able to talk about before this engineered Big Event. After all, Big Pharma paid billions in punishment for their crimes (and that is to the government they own). Only willfully blind don’t seem to know that people who own BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street,..., own and control Big Pharma, Military Industrial Complex, Big Media, and every other Industrial Complex. That such concentration of power would leave “our” government unmolested, instead of capturing it for their own benefit, must be the ultimate naïveté. The only reason Big Media is still relevant is because there are still people plugged into it. The way to take away their power is to unplug from them and ignore them. As long as the critical mass of people remains plugged into the propaganda, things will continue as they have been.
But things get complicated now that over the past 2.5 years, Substack and similar sites have allowed the truth to continue being disseminated without censorship--so all the usual suspect propaganda outlets are now in full damage control mode. Not only are they having to walk back their assertions we're all "conspiracy nuts," they're having to casually SAY some of those same positions to simultaneously push us into a war with China and Russia--while still villainizing Putin and compromising Biden's chances of winning another term.
Why else would Dept of Energy start coming out today confirming the Wuhan Lab leak? The entire "concentration of power" group really seems to want us in WW3. It not only continues to enrich them, but it decimates our social structure--because this war would be fought here as well. The more they can distract over minutiae, the more they hope the masses' short term attention span will forget how badly they demonized those of us who spoke truth to power from the start of the Covid lockdown & vax/mask mandates nonsense.
The SNL monolouge was step 1 in allowing the (mostly ignorant) masses to start turning on a couple of drug companies "the powers" would gladly sacrifice to start WW3. It's going to take a lot of outrage at Pfizer/Moderna/Biontech to gather public support to "punish" China.
What's most ironic (to me) is that much of the anger the concentrated powers are trying to encourage, will ultimately wind up being directed at them. Just as Chris did in this article, there's no shortage of proof as to what the media said then vs. what they're saying today. Every single time we point that out, the propagandists lose another person taking them seriously. Share, share, share in your own networks of influence!
i'm choosing to think that the audience didn't laugh for Harrelson's bit about the drug cartel because they recognized suddenly that they had been had and were feeling pretty stupid. they had laughed and cheered heartily up until that point. i would have been on my feet cheering. as someone commented yesterday "watching the dike fail in real time" or something like that.
it's unbelievable to me that anyone believes anything out of the government or MSM. he's the right guy to speak the truth- he doesn't give a fuck.
the EPA saying the water and air are safe in Palestine is a warning to me that they are poisoned and dangerous as hell. the NYTimes writing that the event is fodder for a culture clash between left and right just tells me that they didn't want to cover the story at all and are resentful that they had to. Biden saying he's doing all he can for the people of Palestine tells me he's doing less than nothing.
if that doesn't make someone question the false assurances of the vaccine roll out, i have to write them off as brain dead.
I just came here to say I send my friends and family “They Live” gifs and memes constantly. I’m doing my part! (Also a fun gif/meme). Humor is arguably my most potent weapon. Mocking idiocy is necessary right now. So what if some of my family won’t speak to me anymore? Life uh, finds a way. Thanks Chris
Wish I could say something witty and intelligent about your article, Chris, but I'm not as fine a writer as you. Instead, just let me say it was brilliantly expressed.
You toss words into your sentences that make me think of chefs expertly flipping their skillets up and down the so ingredients toss perfectly into the air and then land right back in the pan where they're supposed to. Or the salad chef who throws in this and that but when that mixture is presented on the plate the textures, colors and flavors are so unique and yummy, patrons return because—maybe it's the dressing—but the salad they try to make never tastes the same.
In this case, I'm one of those salad tasters. I'm thinking if I read and read and read your columns, maybe some of that cleverness will be absorbed by osmosis. Til then, I'll continue to write what I believe is very thoughtful and sometimes very wise missives but without the flare you have.
Went a long way around the subject to finally say that I love your stuff.
Just because totalitarianism is "squishy" now doesn't mean it won't get hard later. They are laying the groundwork, rolling over rights and due process, and ignoring citizens. Wasn't it Solzhenitsyn who regretted they hadn't acted in the beginning when they had a chance? I think we will too.
It's not squishy in the sense that it doesn't seek power or assert dominance -- it's squishy in the deniability of its forms, and in the degree to which it allows those who seek dominance to respond to resistance with gaslighting. If you ever spend any time on social media, you can see the "they're upset because they had to change their lifestyle for a few months!" theme all over the place. Lockdowns!?!? What are you even TALKING about??? We never had lockdowns, you moron!
It's hard now. It's hard dominance dressed up as culturally soft disagreement. We didn't send you to a prison camp, you just lost your livelihood and your friends and all your social media accounts, and your kids can't get into college. But stop being PARANOID, see, 'cause no one's doing anything to you.
What I worry about is how far we (including me) bend in order to avoid the inconvenience of resisting, and the difficulty of discerning where we are along that continuum, as we’re both being gaslit and lured over the line.
As is clearly explained in Orwell's instruction manual. Newspeak removes "subversive" terms from the language. If you can't say it, you can't think it.
I was just talking about this today with a friend: our political system today is, “Either you stand with the Obamas or you can go hang out with Randy Quaid in the RV fixing the shitter.” That’s it. And nobody respectable want to be Randy Quaid.
Kudos once again to you, Chris! I am more and more coming to the conclusion that you are super-human! You've just lost your father and yet you continue to churn our superlatively well-written essays that are fully supported by outside references with links to those references. And you always offer a straight-forward explanation for the absurdities we are immersed in. God bless you, my friend, and the insights you offer. I can't wait to read about your observations regarding the latest Scott Adams cancellation, based on his rather direct conclusion drawn from the latest survey showing 47% of African-Americans believe it's not OK to be white.
I think Havel called it post-totalitarianism. Moscow doesn't need to send tanks down your street, because your neighbor and your boss are enforcing Moscow's diktats. His "Workers of the World, Unite" banner, displayed by the go-along-to-get-along merchant on Main Street, is today's "Hate Has No Home Here" or "In This House, We Believe in Science," or whatever the hell is popular up North this week. We don't have that garbage in Daytona, and it's a blessing not to have to keep up. It's kind of neat how (just like in Shakespeare!) the jesters are the only ones publicly speaking the truth, and allowed to get away with it. Jon Stewart with the pangolin jokes last year, and now Woody (who has been publicly anti-corporate "food," etc., for quite some time). Guys like Kory and McCullough have to be hounded out of their jobs, but our artists and comedians are allowed to be honest. For now. When the PTB start shutting down the comedians, then we'll be in 1977 in Prague. Of course, Havel said we'd end up here; he told us over and over again that having lots of choices at the mall doesn't mean you're free, but that your ruling class is made up of corporations, rather than Communist apparatchiks.
I recently read Power of the Powerless, and I swear, so much of what Havel said in 1977 about Czechoslovakia could just as easily be describing today's America: the whole business of sloganeering, everyone pretending the slogans are true statements about the world when everyone knows they're really not, and everyone pretending that nobody's pretending. Our culture is wrapped up in so many interlocking layers of bullshit that nothing about it is real anymore. It's just pure bullshit, all the way down.
A lot people are truly confused. They read the media without thinking.
I was talking over dinner to a friend about the miserable state of US public schools, which he recognized. But any positive mention of "maybe school choice in red states will work out" was met with "I believe in public education", as if "public education" means government schooling. It means education for the public. How is it not public education when everyone can go to school but has a choice of where? Answer: When you read the New York Times. This guy is a math professor...
School choice laws differ from state to state, so it's hard to make an overall comment about this, but I will say that in Pa., where I used to live, charter schools get taxpayers' money, without any provision for what happens when parents at any particular public school choose to enroll their kids in charters. The result is that the costs for taxpayers go up, because they have to maintain (with lower student counts) the same number of public school buildings and public school classrooms, because not enough kids leave to justify shutting down a whole school building or even cutting a classroom (with associated teacher costs). Your friend is pointing to a real issue: The way many states laws are written, districts must maintain the official government schools unless enough kids leave to justify closing them. Taxes go up, and public schools end up cutting programs like foreign languages other than Spanish in order to avoid raising taxes even further. The idea of dollars following kids around is problematic; I've always argued that parents should be able to deduct the cost of their child's non-public education from their state income tax. I don't want the taxpayer to pay for my personal choices, but I should at least get credit for the fact that I paid for those choices, myself. In general, discussions about public education are significantly hampered by the fact that "US public schools" differ greatly from state to state, from district to district, and even within districts. I covered public education in my former school district for years, so I actually know quite a bit about the details in that district and in that state. Things are very different, though, in other places, like NYC and Chicago.
"The idea of dollars following kids around is problematic" - The current system is even more problematic. In any case, the words "public education" mean education of the public. They imply nothing about how this is accomplished. I'm sure interested parties can invent a million reasons to support their preferred solution while calling alternatives "problematic".
The problem is that the laws in at least some states (including my own former state) were written to benefit charter school companies, not students. So for example, in Pa., if you're an online charter school, your cost to serve students is roughly $4000 per year. However, you can bill the taxpayers of the "sending" districts **the average cost to serve a student in person,** which in my old district was $14,000 for regular ed and $25,000 for special ed. That's problematic. That money came out of my wallet, as I homeschooled my own child at my own expensive. It's possible to think that many public schools under-serve their students and to recognize that charter school laws in at least some states do nothing to solve that problem. And crummy charter school laws are pretty hard to get people to rally behind. Beyond the unfairness to the taxpayer, there is the issue your friend raises, which is: What do we do for kids whose parents don't opt them out? If a "government school" is truly doing a poor job, what do you do for people who don't choose to leave? Current laws don't answer that question. It doesn't sound as if your friend is answering it, either, but "Smart, aware parents get to choose, and less intelligent or aware parents don't, while the taxpayer continues to pay more every year" doesn't sound like a great answer to me.
The problem is that the laws in at least some states (including my own former state) were written to benefit charter school companies, not students. So for example, in Pa., if you're an online charter school, your cost to serve students is roughly $4000 per year. However, you can bill the taxpayers of the "sending" districts **the average cost to serve a student in person,** which in my old district was $14,000 for regular ed and $25,000 for special ed. That's problematic. That money came out of my wallet, as I homeschooled my own child at my own expensive. It's possible to think that many public schools under-serve their students and to recognize that charter school laws in at least some states do nothing to solve that problem. And crummy charter school laws are pretty hard to get people to rally behind. Beyond the unfairness to the taxpayer, there is the issue your friend raises, which is: What do we do for kids whose parents don't opt them out? If a "government school" is truly doing a poor job, what do you do for people who don't choose to leave? Current laws don't answer that question. It doesn't sound as if your friend is answering it, either, but "Smart, aware parents get to choose, and less intelligent or aware parents don't, while the taxpayer continues to pay more every year" doesn't sound like a great answer to me.
So it's ok if your family can choose to homeschool, but not ok for other parents to choose private schools? Talk about sophistry.
Anyway, I mentioned red states, which is not I think PA. Arizona's system with $7000 following each student is growing enormously. https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/programs/arizona-empowerment-scholarship-accounts/
Sure there will be companies that try to game the system in their favor. But parents looking out for their kids are a powerful constituency. Focusing on semi-corruption in a not-really-trying state makes for an unconvincing argument.
Yep. I read it in 2020, and could not believe how dead-on it all was. *Animal Farm* is another one that makes you laugh with how exactly the current PTB use the playbook. I remember reading lots of articles about how if you didn't get your kid the MMR right on schedule, "Polio will come back." Yep, just like Jones. Orwell's "Notes on the Spanish War" has one note of hope, though, which is that at some point, the PTB won't be able to lie about reality. The problem is that when that happens (Geert's predictions come true, and 65% of Americans over age 5 die), there won't be enough people left to stand up. This would all be much harder to take if I were not a person of faith.
I used to laugh at Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World. I’m not laughing any more. I remember reading them when young (I’m 66), and smugly thinking ‘that’d never happen in real life’. Like I said, no longer laughing.
In 1984 I jumped with joy because Orwell had it wrong. Well, it was just a matter of time...
Yeah, he missed the year. But not by much!
"Thought Obstruction".
"Caught Up" becomes Caught.
Welcome to paradise!
And the great thing is that it was reissued in a lovely new edition because of Trump, but then they had to hide it because of what ended up happening. I bought my copies online from a UK bookstore.
Daniel D - hear, hear!
I think the "locksteppers" have weak character and they place the highest value on getting invited to all the desirable cocktail parties.
They are the best students, always memorizing the correct answers and rewarded with delicious cocktails amongst other good memorizers.
Not all the good students decide to go in this direction but there are many who will sell their souls for pretty baubles (and the cocktails too of course. )
Yes, they REALLY DO think those things. They're not like you & me....
Your and Daneil's comments illustrate why the early-2022 Van Morrison song "Pretending" was so timely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJgiSQxcIYs&ab_channel=VanMorrison My commentary on it is here: https://pomocon.substack.com/p/carls-rock-songbook-no-128-van-morrison
Your last sentence explains what we've been observing over the past 3-5 years, with the influence of the World Economic Forum and its close ties to the United Nations, using the phony "climate emergency", among other sloganeering, to "nudge" public compliance with their diktats.
And that's just the obvious stuff, the past few years. I graduated from Harvard in 2000, and during the welcome day in September of 1996, my parents and I sat through a speech by one of the university bigwigs (Rudenstine? Knowles? I think it was Rudenstine) during which he mocked the people who denied the undeniable global warming, while praising the smart folks present, all of whom he assumed knew we were going to (if we didn't give up our Edison lightbulbs) "frizzle up and die." That was literally the expression he used. The message has become both more apocalyptic (the planet will be completely underwater!!!) and more vague (at some point in the future!!!), but the fact that WEF, etc., say this stuff completely out loud, not just when they think they're among friends, is (probably) due to the fact that they've got it all sewn up. Faceless bureaucrats you've never met and never had a chance to vote in or out can decide whether we get to keep our gas stoves. Worse-than-worthless drugs get approved over the objections of serious scientists and stockpiled to the tune of billions of taxpayer (and future taxpayer) dollars. We no longer need to declare war to spend billions on war. It doesn't matter which party is "in power"; the bureaucrats are happy to do whatever they can for Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, and whoever mines cobalt for EV batteries, and Bob and Susie next door put up a sign proclaiming how happy they are about it. "In this house, we read in the dark!" "In this house, we fund proxy wars!" "In this house, we revel in our ignorance of the innate immune system!"
Exactly
Drivil-laden-duties-of-the- day.
The goal is to eliminate acronyms, nuances and subtleties.
"Shrink-wrapped" minds...
Comedians are at risk of being cancelled. Ask Dave Chappelle.
The menace of MIND SHRIVEL
Staring a new grunge band Ryan?
If only our artists were honest. Taken as a group, they're mostly hypocrites, cadging for "likes" just like us. This here, what we're doing, is the opiate of the masses—because it strips you of agency by lulling you to sleep with the feeling of agency.
I respectively disagree. I had never participated in social media until almost two years ago when I thought it was absolutely critical. The only digital social network platform I participate in is on the Stacks.
My objective, and I believe many of the authors, is to get people to think they're bench pressing 180lbs. when it's actually 200 lbs.
I have seen a marked difference made by the people amongst these stacks over the last 2 years.
We have partially changed the zeitgeist. Tides do not rise all at once.
They start as small concentric circles that eventually crash in a wall of force on the shore.
BUT I DEFINITELY GET YOUR POINT.
I don't have any illusions that commenting on Chris's Substack is Resistance work. I do what resisting I can, but it's not online.
It's both imo.
You make a great point about how the doctors are demonized, censored, and fired; while the celebrities get to say whatever they want. Such total and blatant bullshit.
'rather than' or 'as well as'?
Ha ha.
Last night my wife and I went out for a stroll. A few houses in our neighborhood have retarded Leftist yard signs. “ In this house we believe: love is love, science is real, blah blah blah. “ Very enlightening stuff. The yard signs, in fact all of the virtue signaling dialogue in every medium, besides asserting social dominance and stifling dissent, is designed to conceal and obfuscate urgent, dangerous problems in our society. I mean, wtf does “science is real” mean? Did anybody, anywhere claim that science doesn’t exist? Did somebody claim that black lives don’t matter, other than the hair shirt sporting phonies who ignore the massacres going on every hour in black neighborhoods throughout the USA while wallowing in fake guilt about the legacy of slavery? I actually appreciate these signs. They tell me who to avoid.
What was more real to me during my walk was the police helicopter making a tight circle over a near neighbor’s house and the 7 police cruisers surrounding it while I tried to preemptively work out the calories from some tomahawk ribeyes yet to be seared. Having some situational awareness, but not carrying at the time, I tried to get my blissfully oblivious better half to slow down so I could make sure we weren’t about to wander into an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire type of newspaper appearance. The police on the chopper megaphone demanding somebody come out because “ your house is surrounded...” were more real to me than the yuppie poseur signs pledging alliegance to the DNC sanctioned drivel these tautological imbeciles are broadcasting from their gravel. We don’t get much crime in my neighborhood, although we are not far from some less affluent zones. But violent crime is on the uptick in the city and and it’s ugly stuff. Fentanyl deaths, homeless panhandlers, drug cartel shootouts, people losing their minds and doing bad things - it’s nearly every day now. And it’s all over the country. Not to mention the economic debacle just getting started, the criminal migration invasion, the general distrust we now have for each other.
But nobody in the ruling junta or their accomplices wants to acknowledge any of the actual critical problems we have. They want to conjure obedience with imaginary bogeymen. Putin’s gonna get you. The “white supremacist transphobic “ mom who wants her 7 year old to grow up a little longer without a pornography indoctrination at school. She’s gonna get you. Math is racist. Excellence is racist. An excellent mathematician is gonna get you. No doubt.
These are silly fuckers. And they will fail. One way or the other. But they are dangerous in their games and they are dragging a lot of us down. They are just clever enough to use us to break their fall. And they will dust themselves off and walk away while the rest of the country lies fractured and bleeding on the pavement. There is no soft totalitarianism beneath the surface. They killed millions with COVID and they are killing more with the vaccines. There were no accidents. It’s not bombs and firing squads yet. They fear armed resistance. So they’re using hybrid warfare to subdue us.
Keep speaking up.
The bitch of it is "silly fuckers" connected to "killed millions." I agree, but the bridge across that chasm is a big one. How have THESE IDIOTS done so much harm, is my daily question.
Yes, how did we hand the keys to the kingdom to such awful people? Many people have noticed that they fail at everything they touch, but they don’t get evicted. I thinks it’s just plain corruption.
The signs have long been around if you wanted to see them. The War on terrorism, Iraq and Afghanistan, the patriot act, and before any of that, jettisoning an entire class of people from society by offshoring the industries they worked in because the profits were no longer big enough and could be bigger with slave labor in asia. Tanto, where were you when the 2008 "great financial crisis" happened? Were you not angered at that and how it was handled? Was it really handled all that different then covid?
Your point is well taken. However the main differences between the financial shenanigans and mathematical risk management Mongolian clusterfunk of 2008 and the COVID episode is that while 2008 was a massive financial disaster perpetrated by the “smartest guys in the room” on the American public while rescuing their plutocrat peers, in 2020 they started murdering people all over world with a synthetic virus and then with faulty”vaccines”, while denying the efficacy of widely available, cheap repurposed extremely effective medications and supplements, and suspending everybody’s civil liberties while doing it. So that’s next level totalitarianism. The hubris, corruption, and incompetence were there in 2008, and certainly the permahawks have been killing people in pointless wars forever, but now they’re just indiscriminately offing people all
over the world, including their own citizens, and so far getting away with it.
"but now they’re just indiscriminately offing people all over the world"
you're rationalizing past misdeeds and saying they were ok but now they arent. Do you now understand the phrase "give them an inch and they'll take a mile"?
Isn't it entirely possible, that the lies and misdeeds that took place in 2008 are the direct cause for why we are where we are now? You admit that leadership in 2008 lied and cheated and so broke the law. So why wouldn't you expect that same leadership to do the same thing in the future? You never wondered why they kept printing money years after 2008 and kept interest rates at 0%? The REPO crisis broke out in the summer/fall of 2019, if you'd been paying attention since 2008 and knew what they were spewing since then were lies, wouldn't that cause you to maybe question covid?
This is what i struggle to get. I was just as outraged by the 2008 crisis as i was to covid. What is the difference? Can anyone here explain that to me? How are they not connected? Once i saw how they handled that, i knew things were just going to get worse (though i never expected covid, brilliant really).
Speaking of the patriot act:
https://epic.org/supreme-court-refuses-to-hear-case-challenging-nsa-surveillance/
Well color me shocked. Anytime you hear "national security" just assume that it means they've been abusing and breaking the law and to such an extent that if the truth got out we'd have a revolution.
Yes, there’s somebody pulling the strings. But we don’t know exactly who that is.
How about, "we don't have an f#%@ing clue as to who that is". It often feels as if our whole society has fallen into the middle of an exceptionally bad dystopian novel.
We look around - and see nearly EVERYTHING is broken. And every time we try to fix ANYTHING, something else breaks.
In my more pessimistic moments I feel inclined to tip my tinfoil to who, (or what), ever, is so successfully destroying the freest, richest culture the world has ever known.
The interesting thing is that SNL’s regular writers scripted the monologue. There’s nothing spontaneous about SNL. That’s why it’s not, and in my view never has been, funny.
The monologue got blessed at high levels. So this is all just performance art -- kabuki in service of the shift in narrative to set Pfizer up for the royal pfisting.
I’m 66, and started watching SNL in 1975 when it first aired. It was so good (and funny) back then...they made fun of everyone. In recent years it became shamelessly woke, one-sided and disgusting...especially, of course during the Covid19 crap. For that and other reasons, for me it became absolutely unwatchable. Recently, they’ve been doing what I call the subtle, fake backpedaling re: Covid. That’s what Woody Harrelson’s monologue thing was about, I believe...yet another Corrupted Corrupted Media test balloon. I say, too little, too late...and where were all these celebrities during the past three years? Hiding in their luxurious mansions and keeping their mouths shut, methinks. To Hell with all of them...we’re not that stupid.
SNL stopped being funny at least 25 years ago. Because it was co-opted into unilateral political commentary. I wouldn’t turn on my TV set to watch Leon Trotsky or SNL. Comedy is Запретный in the gulag archipelago.
Exactly like the "lab leak," likely an op from the start. The goal was to make it seem like forbidden fruit so when they eventually come out and "admit" exactly that, we all froth at the mouth about how right we all were. There's a reason trusty folks like Tucker Carlson and Woody Harrelson are 3 years late to the party and another why it's highly unlikely you'll hear their breaking stories and strong opinions about the DOD and its countermeasures. 🙄
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy to note that every damn thing is now sponsored by Pfizer.
This response brought to you by Pfizer. Know, plan go!
The world is led by idiots who are screwing up the plan they're executing on purpose.
Part of that plan was using algorithmic skinnerboxing to mold the laptop class into reflexive hall monitors who know which narrative to enforce without being told. Since this turns them into absurdist automatons, it is backfiring - the wokescolds are predictable, therefore boring and distasteful. Yuval Harari might not be correct in general about humans being hackable animals with no free will, but he's quite on point about the lickspittle stasi ... and that hackability goes both ways, which is why we keep running circles around them.
Love this, and I don't know why I'm not using "skinnerboxing" way more often.
It came to me a week or two back when I was wasting time on the bird site, and I've been using it ever since.
The one with the blue bird.
“Squishy totalitarianism”, for now. It isn’t going to be so squishy where they are taking us. My personal belief is that nothing on SNL is unscripted. There is intent behind this and it has to do with walking back the official narrative, which is no longer sustainable in its original form. We are now allowed to talk about the origins of COVID, but we aren’t allowed to talk about Big Money capturing the government, something we used to be able to talk about before this engineered Big Event. After all, Big Pharma paid billions in punishment for their crimes (and that is to the government they own). Only willfully blind don’t seem to know that people who own BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street,..., own and control Big Pharma, Military Industrial Complex, Big Media, and every other Industrial Complex. That such concentration of power would leave “our” government unmolested, instead of capturing it for their own benefit, must be the ultimate naïveté. The only reason Big Media is still relevant is because there are still people plugged into it. The way to take away their power is to unplug from them and ignore them. As long as the critical mass of people remains plugged into the propaganda, things will continue as they have been.
But things get complicated now that over the past 2.5 years, Substack and similar sites have allowed the truth to continue being disseminated without censorship--so all the usual suspect propaganda outlets are now in full damage control mode. Not only are they having to walk back their assertions we're all "conspiracy nuts," they're having to casually SAY some of those same positions to simultaneously push us into a war with China and Russia--while still villainizing Putin and compromising Biden's chances of winning another term.
Why else would Dept of Energy start coming out today confirming the Wuhan Lab leak? The entire "concentration of power" group really seems to want us in WW3. It not only continues to enrich them, but it decimates our social structure--because this war would be fought here as well. The more they can distract over minutiae, the more they hope the masses' short term attention span will forget how badly they demonized those of us who spoke truth to power from the start of the Covid lockdown & vax/mask mandates nonsense.
The SNL monolouge was step 1 in allowing the (mostly ignorant) masses to start turning on a couple of drug companies "the powers" would gladly sacrifice to start WW3. It's going to take a lot of outrage at Pfizer/Moderna/Biontech to gather public support to "punish" China.
What's most ironic (to me) is that much of the anger the concentrated powers are trying to encourage, will ultimately wind up being directed at them. Just as Chris did in this article, there's no shortage of proof as to what the media said then vs. what they're saying today. Every single time we point that out, the propagandists lose another person taking them seriously. Share, share, share in your own networks of influence!
The majority of us are utterly unaware they are waging a multi-layer and multi-front war on Humanity.
Martin Bassani: well said!
i'm choosing to think that the audience didn't laugh for Harrelson's bit about the drug cartel because they recognized suddenly that they had been had and were feeling pretty stupid. they had laughed and cheered heartily up until that point. i would have been on my feet cheering. as someone commented yesterday "watching the dike fail in real time" or something like that.
it's unbelievable to me that anyone believes anything out of the government or MSM. he's the right guy to speak the truth- he doesn't give a fuck.
the EPA saying the water and air are safe in Palestine is a warning to me that they are poisoned and dangerous as hell. the NYTimes writing that the event is fodder for a culture clash between left and right just tells me that they didn't want to cover the story at all and are resentful that they had to. Biden saying he's doing all he can for the people of Palestine tells me he's doing less than nothing.
if that doesn't make someone question the false assurances of the vaccine roll out, i have to write them off as brain dead.
You have to be vaxxed to get into the SNL audience........
i wonder if you have to be vaxxed to be their special guest. i'm sure
I just came here to say I send my friends and family “They Live” gifs and memes constantly. I’m doing my part! (Also a fun gif/meme). Humor is arguably my most potent weapon. Mocking idiocy is necessary right now. So what if some of my family won’t speak to me anymore? Life uh, finds a way. Thanks Chris
So the obvious meme, relative to Chris, is when the female alien says, "I've got one that can see."
Wish I could say something witty and intelligent about your article, Chris, but I'm not as fine a writer as you. Instead, just let me say it was brilliantly expressed.
You toss words into your sentences that make me think of chefs expertly flipping their skillets up and down the so ingredients toss perfectly into the air and then land right back in the pan where they're supposed to. Or the salad chef who throws in this and that but when that mixture is presented on the plate the textures, colors and flavors are so unique and yummy, patrons return because—maybe it's the dressing—but the salad they try to make never tastes the same.
In this case, I'm one of those salad tasters. I'm thinking if I read and read and read your columns, maybe some of that cleverness will be absorbed by osmosis. Til then, I'll continue to write what I believe is very thoughtful and sometimes very wise missives but without the flare you have.
Went a long way around the subject to finally say that I love your stuff.
Just because totalitarianism is "squishy" now doesn't mean it won't get hard later. They are laying the groundwork, rolling over rights and due process, and ignoring citizens. Wasn't it Solzhenitsyn who regretted they hadn't acted in the beginning when they had a chance? I think we will too.
It's not squishy in the sense that it doesn't seek power or assert dominance -- it's squishy in the deniability of its forms, and in the degree to which it allows those who seek dominance to respond to resistance with gaslighting. If you ever spend any time on social media, you can see the "they're upset because they had to change their lifestyle for a few months!" theme all over the place. Lockdowns!?!? What are you even TALKING about??? We never had lockdowns, you moron!
It's hard now. It's hard dominance dressed up as culturally soft disagreement. We didn't send you to a prison camp, you just lost your livelihood and your friends and all your social media accounts, and your kids can't get into college. But stop being PARANOID, see, 'cause no one's doing anything to you.
What I worry about is how far we (including me) bend in order to avoid the inconvenience of resisting, and the difficulty of discerning where we are along that continuum, as we’re both being gaslit and lured over the line.
Have you been talking to my sister? How is she by the way?
Squishy new definition: Hard.
The vocabulary will get "smaller" every year
As is clearly explained in Orwell's instruction manual. Newspeak removes "subversive" terms from the language. If you can't say it, you can't think it.
Agree.
I was just talking about this today with a friend: our political system today is, “Either you stand with the Obamas or you can go hang out with Randy Quaid in the RV fixing the shitter.” That’s it. And nobody respectable want to be Randy Quaid.
Yeah, everything has become binary. No nuance.
Randy Quaid is based. 😏
I love Randy! Lol. He lives near me sort of in Vermont, but I don’t think he gets out much.
Kudos once again to you, Chris! I am more and more coming to the conclusion that you are super-human! You've just lost your father and yet you continue to churn our superlatively well-written essays that are fully supported by outside references with links to those references. And you always offer a straight-forward explanation for the absurdities we are immersed in. God bless you, my friend, and the insights you offer. I can't wait to read about your observations regarding the latest Scott Adams cancellation, based on his rather direct conclusion drawn from the latest survey showing 47% of African-Americans believe it's not OK to be white.
I have no terribly original observations about the Scott Adams thing, and I usually try to write when I think I can add something new. TBD.
We have always been at war with East Asia.
working hypothesis: "ableism" was invented to demonize those of us who are fully functional.
and as a way to slow-walk the process of replacing the legislature, judiciary, medical profession, academia, etc with computers
As usual, another astute observation and thought provoking article. Thank you!
The brahmans of our Karentocracy demand the other castes to obey them: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-visit-karenland-fupaz-part