More Tehran

Iranians walk in front of a large anti-US billboard featuring US President Donald Trump and the Strait of Hormuz, at Valiasr Square in Tehran, Iran [File: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA]

Islamic Street Art

A woman in Tehran, Iran, walks past a mural featuring Iranian drones on May 26 [File: Majid Asgaripour/West Asia News Agency via Reuters]

I like this picture though I'm not sure why, possibly because we've been watching Tehran and I'm seeing everything through Trumpian glasses.

War with Iran

Press conference with a couple of missile mockups

Couple of pieces of Iranian propaganda, for your amusement.

Anti-U.S. mural depicts American military aircraft being caught in a fishing net by Iranian forces

These are from the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think tank and discussion forum.

Doom

The Presidents of the United States of America - Peaches (Official HD Music Video)
The Presidents of the United States of America

It just occurred to me that conservatives are not going to prevail in blue cities. The majority of people, somewhere between 60 and 90 percent, operate on the 'get along to go along' method. Logic and reason have no effect on these people, they operate on feelings. Charlatans make use of this to get into power and enrich themselves. As long as we have free speech we are not going to be able to shut them down, and free speech is kind of essential to freedom. If you don't like living in a blue city the only solution I see is to move to the country, which reminded me of this tune. Blue cities are just going to continue to get worse until they are like Latin American cesspools.

Oh, How Wonderful The Media

JMSmith on the media:

The Longest, Strongest Hurricane of Lies

“It is a rather serious thing that an ordinary intelligent human being should have to rely on everything else except the public press for his information about public affairs.”

G.K. Chesterton, “A Parenthesis on Minorities” (1926)*

We must at the best of times make do with a diet of very dubious information, what with the fatuous wheedling and whining of our neighbors and relations, the insouciant dishonesty of hired mouthpieces of rapacious commercial interests, the slick mendacity of politicians who propose, with well justified confidence, to remain in office by bamboozling their voters. And to this unwholesome stew we must add the spurious meat that is manufactured for a price by the Ministry of Truth that we call our media. It appears to be the creed of this perfidious rabble that he who blows,

“The longest, strongest hurricane of lies,
May have the highest seat in Paradise.”**

And this, as I said, is the character of the chefs who furnish our food for thought in the best of times. These rascals really get down to business in times of war. This is because they are, for the most part. meretricious salesmen who work on commission. As the great historian Harry Elmer Barnes long ago explained, to no effect whatever:

“If we can but understand how totally and terribly we were ‘taken in’ between 1914 and 1918 by the salesmen of this most holy and idealistic world conflict, we shall be the better prepared to be on our guard against the seductive lies and deceptions which will be put forward by similar groups when urging the necessity of another world catastrophe in order to ‘protect the weak nations,’ ‘crush militarism,’ ‘make the world safe for democracy,’ ‘put an end to all further wars,’ etc.”***

But very few ever understood how totally and terribly they were taken in and many of these inquiring minds soon forgot it. So, when it became desirable to market the next “most holy and idealistic world conflict,” the salesmen were not taxed with fabrication of new “seductive lies and deceptions.” They just once again stirred up the yokels with the old story that a damsel (a “weak nation”) was being distressed by a dragon (“militarism”), and that, upon the death of this one last dragon, the damsel and all yokels would live happily ever after.

Continue here

Propaganda

Propaganda

It seems that Trump is trying to reverse many of the trends brought to us by recent Democrat administrations. That is all good and well, but he needs to bring the smack down on the legacy media. The one voice behind the bulk of legacy media is what has made so much corruption and perversion possible. Whose voice are we hearing? That's who he should be targeting. Perhaps the big television networks should lose their broadcasting licenses. The Washington Post seems to have gone down in flames. That's a good start. 

Not Funny

Rot in Europe

Keir Starmer Prime Minister United Kingdom outside 10 Downing Street London July 5, 2024

Introduction to story from ZeroHedge:

Clandestine Campaign To Defund ZeroHedge, The Federalist & Breitbart Traced To Kier Starmer Operation by Tyler Durden

Very early into the COVID-19 pandemic, ZeroHedge suggested that a little-known Chinese lab in Wuhan might know something about the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe. As a result, and as you know, we were subject to an intense demonetization / deplatforming campaign that included getting kicked off of Twitter, PayPal, Facebook and other platforms, dropped by our advertisers, and targeted by MSM hit pieces which colluded with foreign 'watchdogs' to inflict maximum damage. 

These same groups also targeted outlets including The Federalist and Breitbart over various reporting, which suffered similar fates. 

Now, thanks to a new book by investigative journalist Paul Holden that builds on reporting by Matt Taibbi, Paul Thacker and others, we learn that the origin of these campaigns, launched years before the pandemic, was none other than UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer's political machine, which began targeting left-wing outlets speaking critically of Starmer such as The Canary, and then went after conservative outlets in America - just in time for the 2020 US election.

Follow the link to read the whole thing.

More on AI Slop

Robot

I think this explanation of AI slop is pretty good:

AI Spam and the Crisis of Digital Trust: How Synthetic Media Change Political Visuality by Yuri Kolotaev

AI spam doesn’t directly distort facts. Rather, it fills information gaps, replacing reporting when factual evidence is scarce or difficult to obtain. As a result, millions of users receive the illusion of presence, a picture credible enough to elicit an emotional response.

An 'emotional response' is what all good propaganda strives for. No logic or reason for me, I want to feel something. 

The Journalist - Netflix Series

The Journalist | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix Malaysia

It's like watching a scandal unfold from behind the scenes. I'm guesstimating the whole thing unfolds over a period of a year, give or take any number of months. Somebody approves a grant and in exchange somebody becomes the owner of a substantial piece of property and only pays a fraction of its market value. At least I think that's what the scandal is.

Anyway, questions get asked, an investigation starts but is quickly squashed and it's all set to quietly fade away until the miscreants decide they need to cover their tracks. They put together a small group of guys and set them to work editing the records to eliminate any reference to the Prime Minister's wife.

Mr. Matsuda is hanging with the miscreants when they cook up this scheme and he files a formal complaint. Shortly thereafter his complaint is withdraw and he mysteriously falls ill and ends up comatose in the hospital where he remains for the rest of this story. His sister is The Journalist and she is distraught by what happened to her brother, but she has no evidence of what happened to him being anything other than an act of god.

Meanwhile the DCB (Dedicated Career Bureaucrat), one of the guys on the crew rewriting the records, is not happy about this work. He has always prided himself on doing a good and proper job that would be beneficial to the people, and this business of altering records has got him mentally crosswise. It gets so bad that he eventually kills himself, which causes a small scandal. What's going on with this guy? Happily married, career bureaucrat, commits suicide? He leaves a suicide note, but his wife keeps it quiet, for a while.

Now we have Ryo, the handsome young college student, nephew of DCB, who starts to become politically aware and runs into Ms. Matsuda, The Journalist, who wants to interview his aunt, the widow of DCB.

DCB kept meticulous records of the alterations he made on the official records. He put his record of alterations on a flash drive and gave it to his supervisor before he died.

Ms. Matsuda gets hold of some dirt and gets the story published, This irritates the miscreants and they unleash an army social media warriors on her. The have a secure room full of cubicles with a couple of dozen people in there, all bent to the task of raising cain on social media.

6 episodes, 45 minutes each.

I'm watching this show and I'm thinking this is exactly what's going on in the US, and has been since forever. Shoot, the same thing is going on all over the world.

Cast

I've been thinking I should include the cast of characters from these shows, because we watch so many, and there are so many actors that some of them are bound to appear in other shows. But putting together a cast list is a fair amount of work. Most of the cast listings found on the internet give the actor's name and the character's name, which is great, but they don't tell you their role. With foreign films the character's name doesn't help much because they are mostly unpronounceable. We hear what they are calling other characters, but often times the spoken version of the name is just a breath or a grunt and are incomprehensible. When my wife and are talking, trying to figure out what's going on on-screen, we mostly refer to characters by the role they are playing - the fat thug, the skinny detective, the girlfriend, terms like that.

So I decided to ask Google: Can you tell me the names of the actors in the Japanese TV drama 'The Journalist', their characters names and their roles? And presto, this very cool list appears:

The cast of the 2022 Japanese TV drama The Journalist, available on Netflix, includes Ryoko Yonekura as an investigative reporter, Go Ayano as an elite public servant, and Ryusei Yokohama as a student intern. The series is based on the 2019 movie of the same name and the book by Isoko Mochizuki, but features different characters.

 

Main cast and characters

• Ryoko Yonekura as Anna Matsuda (The Journalist): A determined and seasoned investigative reporter for the Toto Newspaper. She is known as a "maverick" in the news industry and is tenacious in her pursuit of the truth behind government corruption scandals.
• Go Ayano as Shinichi Murakami: An elite bureaucrat in the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. He becomes entangled in the government conspiracy.
• Ryusei Yokohama as Ryo Kinoshita: A university student working as a newspaper deliveryman. He becomes motivated to uncover the truth and finds himself drawn into the scandal.
• Hidetaka Yoshioka as Kazuya Suzuki (DCB): A public servant who was initially involved in the corruption but takes his own life after providing the original documents to the Ministry of Finance.
• Shinobu Terajima as Mayumi Suzuki: Kazuya Suzuki's determined wife. After her husband's suicide, she joins Anna to expose the corruption.

Supporting cast

• Yusuke Santamaria as Shinjiro Toyoda (nasty, creepy villain): A political public relations strategist and special adviser to the Prime Minister.
• Tetsushi Tanaka as Tomoya Tada: An official who serves as the bureaucratic voice for the Cabinet.
• Tokio Emoto as Daiki Sato: A former colleague of Shinichi Murakami.
• Kaho Tsuchimura as Harumi Yashiro: A member of the opposition party in the National Diet who pressures for a reinvestigation of the corruption scandal.
• Masato Hagiwara as Kohei Matsuda: Anna Matsuda's late father, also a journalist.

So maybe AI (Artificial Intelligence) has some use after all.

Propaganda & Religion

Best summation of the British Press ever, and still as painfully true today as four decades ago.
Jaka Parker

I wanted to write something about propaganda & religion & and how we mostly just do what we are used to doing, and we picked up most of that in childhood. We're constantly being shaped by our experiences, but by the time we are adults our character is pretty much fixed. But then I came across this video and he does a good job of covering the topic so I'll post it instead.

And while I am here, I don't want to hear anyone exhorting people to think for themselves anymore. I just can't imagine that it does any good. Most people are too busy being themselves to think. There are a few people who think for themselves. Neither group is going to be affected by such exhortations. Are there any people who ever get persuaded by exhortations to think for themselves?

Be Careful What You Are Reading There, Comrade

I like this paragraph:

What an exciting time to be alive. The world is changing, shifting before our eyes. You won’t find signs of the real changes in DC or New York, or London or Brussels. The international event of this year is the Shangai Cooperation Organization (the SCO), meeting now in Tianjin, China. You won’t hear much about the conference from Western news outlets. There are plenty of places where you can learn about it, however. Or why not go to the official government outlets themselves, such as RT, TAAS, or Global Times? I know that is heresy here in Babylon the Great. Propaganda, you say? Okay, but then don’t respond by quoting the NYT, the WSJ, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, the Telegraph, or the Economist; for you are deep into goose-meet-gander territory then. - Introduction from A Tale in Two Pictures

but then I'm a big consumer of heretical media. The rest of A Tale in Two Pictures is about how Asia is overtaking the west, and if you are looking at gross economic clout, that is probably true. But USA is still way ahead of the rest of the world in terms of freedom. Asia has been under the thumb of authoritarian rulers since forever, I'm not sure they could change if they wanted to. We are currently having an argument here about freedom and civilization, because civilization is incompatible with unlimited freedom. I am confident we will sort it out eventually. But then some new mental disease will take hold of the population and noisy ones will start making a fuss, so then we'll have a new argument that we'll have to sort out. And so it goes. At least it keeps a large section of the populace entertained.

Guts - And The Living is Easy

Guts - And The Living is Easy
Wiska UptMusic

Borepatch posts about Porgy & Bess, the Cold War and Summertime. The tune reminds me of this one, which I really like. Funny, when Guts sings 'living' it sounds to me like 'left hand'. My wife says it's just his accent, but if that's it, it's a really weird accent. I can't imagine any explanation for saying 'the left hand is easy' though, so maybe it is an accent.

The Cold War? Well, yes, from Wikipedia:

A historic yet tense premiere took place in Leningrad in December 1955; it was during the Cold War and the first time an American theater group had been to the Soviet capital since the Bolshevik Revolution. Author Truman Capote traveled with the cast and crew, and wrote an account included in his book The Muses Are Heard.

Capote's book might be interesting. Well, the first paragraph is:

Chapter 1: Staging Diplomacy 

The cultural mission behind the theatrical tour to the USSR The theatrical tour to the USSR, as depicted in Staging Diplomacy, transcends mere artistic endeavor, it becomes a microcosm of the Cold War's broader cultural battleground. The mission, ostensibly cultural exchange, is profoundly intertwined with political maneuvering and ideological posturing. The very selection of the play, the composition of the touring company, and the performance itself become carefully orchestrated acts within a larger geopolitical game. The emphasis isn't solely un artistic merit, but on projecting a sperifie image of American enlture one carefully curated to resonate (or at least not overtly offend) with Soviet audiences, while simultaneously reinforcing a desired narrative back home. The performees become a stage for satt power, a subtle yet potent form of influence designed to nounter Soviet propaganda and showcase the perceived superiority of Amerium artistic freedom and individual expression, albeit within a framework of controlled narrative. This simply a cultural exchange; it is a carefully calibrated performance of national identity, The choice of the play itself is far from arbitrary.

It's not a long book, but the rest of it just seems to be an embellishment of the first paragraph.

The Newspaper Business

I've been reading A Flash of Green by John D. McDonald. I picked it up from Powell's back in January. I'm a little slow. The first half of the book was definitely slow going, talking about all the characters and their comfortable suburban life style, but the second half is starting to pick up. Or maybe I've just developed an interest in the story, not because of the first half, I only know the name of a couple of characters: Jimmy Wing, newspaper reporter, and Kat, works at a bank or something. Maybe something just changed in my head. Anyway, round about page 207, pursuant to a local political dispute over whether to dredge and fill the bay in order to build a new subdivision, Jimmy explains the newspaper business to Kat. I thought his explanation was spot on. Remember, this was back in the 1960s and local newspapers were still a thing.

"Kat, are you comfortable? Can you listen to a lecture?"

"I’m stretched out across my bed," she said, "but don't you

want to dry off?"

"I brought my towel along. Feet on my desk. Cigarettes

handy. Now listen carefully, dear. You're an intelligent woman. I

went into journalism out of a sort of idealism. I fell in love with

a glamorous gal called the newspaper game, and after I'd lived

with her a few years I found out she's a whore. She talks big,

sometimes, but she's bone-lazy, cynical, greedy and perfectly sat-

isfied with herself. Do I sound like a college sophomore?'

"Maybe . . . a little."

"So let's look at the facts. I think these figures are close. There

are seventeen hundred and sixty-one daily newspapers in this

country. Sixty-one of them are in cities with more than one

newspaper. The other seventeen hundred are monopoly- papers.

The Record Journal is a monopoly paper. Now here is the crazy

thing about a monopoly paper. It is the only form of monopoly

not subject to regulation. Regulation would be interference with

the freedom of the press. The A.N.P.A. would never let that hap-

pen. So, in seventeen hundred cities of America, including this

one, the publisher decides exactly what he will give the public.

We present the cheapest, dullest possible coverage of national and

international news, and all the bargain syndicate items. In con-

trast, our local news coverage is maybe a little better than average.

But the publishers—Ben Killian included—look on news as a

tiresome but necessary evil, and they resent the public for expect-

ing it. It's the only game in town, Kat, and its main, basic, pri-

many, unchangeable purpose is to sell advertising and make

money. Follow me?"

“Yes,” she said hesitantly.

“Actually this is a better paper than the average, because Ben

Kilhian doesn’t have any particularly strong opinions. Our politi-

cal stance is conservative Democrat on a local level, Republican

on national issues, which precisely reflects the point of view of

the advertisers. Suppose, as is true in many unhappy areas, Ben

Killian was a confirmed John Bircher, a witch-hunter, an Oppres-

sor of every variety of liberal thought and viewpoint. Then,

with no regulatory checkrein, no holds barred, he could make

happen here what has been happening in, for example, Boulder,

Colorado. He could have an outraged citizenship, indomitably

ignorant, purging their community of everything which did not

fit their standards of mediocrity. But Ben and Borklund have

merely the simple touching desire to make the maximum amount

of money with the minimum fuss. To do this, the paper must go

along with the viewpoints of the advertisers. So, if Ben showed

any sign of deviation, it is natural that the advertisers would ar-

range to move against him in the direct way of cutting their bud-

gets for newspaper advertising as much as they dare. Because they

can’t cut it completely and survive themselves, they move against

him in other ways, through the pressure they can generate

through their indirect control of the agencies of local govern-

ment. Clear?”

“It sounds so... cut and dried.”

The business about The John Birch Society in Boulder is a little curious, but Google found nothing. It could just be a stand-in for anytown where a firebrand got the local folks all fired up about something.

I quoted another passage in an earlier post.

Update June 2, 2025. In response to an inquiry I made, Caroline Woodiel, the Archive Manager of the Boulder Public Library sent me three clips from their archives. They don't really shed any light on the subject, other than you can see that the John Birch Society was active in Boulder back then. You can see them here.

Temples

A rendering of the eastern approach structure from the 2014 report shows the complications involved with the massive project. OGS Project S6574

A story in the New York Post caught my eye yesterday. New York wants to rebuild the steps leading up to the entrance to the capital building. There are 77 steps, which is like four big stories, so it's substantial, and it's outside in the weather, so it needs to made of stouter stuff than your typical indoor staircase. However, rebuilding these stairs, which is essentially what they are doing, on account of they have been neglected for decades and were even fricking condemned back in 2015, rebuilding these stairs is going to cost like $80 million dollars, which is like a million dollars a step. So I had to look into a bit to see just what the deal was. As you can see in the above drawing, it's big and complicated, and it's all made of rock. So it's gonna cost.

Isaac Perry staircase drawing, ca. 1892

The building was originally built in 1899 for a cost of twenty-five million dollars. Back then gold was $20.67 an ounce. Gold is somewheres around $3,500 an ounce now, which means in today's money that building would cost four billion dollars, so maybe that $80 million isn't out line.

Fancy government buildings, built out of stone, from a hundred years ago are very impressive, especially if you consider all the work that went into cutting, hauling, finishing and fitting all those big stone pieces. Well, I'm impressed. Don't particularly like being in them, they frown on spitting on the floor.

Why would anyone do this? Because we're building temples, that's why, and we believe in what we are doing. What we believe in is not so important as the fact that we believe in something. In addition most everybody also needs to hold the same beliefs. How do you get a large population to all believe the same thing? You make sure everybody goes to a state school, and if the church and state are in cahoots, all the better.

Look at the pyramids. I wonder how they got all those people to work together for all that time, and now I think primary school indoctrination in their belief system is the answer.

I was looking at the pyramids recently, and I'm reading about all these passages, tunnels and secret compartments, both verified and speculative, and I'm having a hard time making a mental model of this thing (I guess most of this is about the big pyramid), and I got to thinking a scale model would be a big help. It would need to be a big one, like 4 or 5 feet across. Some of those passages are pretty small. A larger model would mean you would be able to see them, they wouldn't  be just pixelated into oblivion. Great idea, but I haven't gotten anywhere with it.

The Failure of the Expert Class…Again

Stolen entire from American Greatness.

Archive Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

The Failure of the Expert Class…Again

David Zweig argues America's expert class failed during COVID, revealing a deeper flaw: the belief that expert opinion should always outweigh the will of the people.

By Stephen Soukup

April 19, 2025

This past week, The Atlantic ran an excellent, helpful, and important piece by David Zweig, excerpted from his forthcoming book An Abundance of Caution, which is, at least superficially, about the coronavirus pandemic and the school closures it prompted. Zweig denies that it is about the pandemic specifically, saying that it is, rather, about “the failure of the expert class.” Whatever the case, Zweig is unsparing in his criticism:

Without sufficient acknowledgment of the harms of school closures or adequate planning for unwinding this intervention, officials showed that their decisions to close were simply reactive rather than carefully considered. The decision makers set a radical project in motion with no plan on how to stop it. In effect, officials steered a car off the road, threw a cinder block on the accelerator, then jumped out of the vehicle with passengers still in the back. No one was in the front or even knew how to unstick the pedal.

The main point of Zweig’s case is that the so-called expert class was not particularly expert in this instance, which is to say that the damage it did was predictable and therefore preventable. Those in charge, whom we were all urged constantly to “trust,” were either ignorant of existing literature warning of the consequences of the actions they were taking or arrogant enough to think that they could produce outcomes different from those previously forecast. In the end, the “experts” failed the nation and especially its children, who suffered disproportionately from their arrogance.

Zweig is right, almost inarguably, and I look forward to reading his book. Nevertheless, I would take his case even a step further, suggesting that the problem is bigger than an arrogant and out-of-touch expert class. The problem, rather, is the largely unique American tradition that insists that expertise and politics must be distinct from one another, and that when they clash, the narrowness of expertise must take precedence over the girth and depth of the democratic crowd.

The COVID pandemic is not the first time that the American people have been let down and dragged down a dark road by their purportedly brilliant experts. Indeed, the defining event of the Baby Boom generation is, perhaps, the greatest (though hardly the only) example of previous “failures of the expert class.”

Americans’ faith in experts and the expert class likely hit its zenith in the 1950s, a decade in which almost anything seemed possible. America had defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japanese. It had rescued Europe from its war and the post-war destruction. It was strong and tough and, of course, it possessed the brightest scientists and the mightiest weapons in all of human history.

On his best-known solo album, The Nightfly, Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen reminisced about those days and the promise they held. For example, in “I.G.Y.,” he muses:

Standing tough under stars and stripes

We can tell

This dream’s in sight

You’ve got to admit it

At this point in time that it’s clear

The future looks bright

On that train all graphite and glitter

Undersea by rail

Ninety minutes from New York to Paris

Well by seventy-six we’ll be A. O. K….

A just machine to make big decisions

Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision

We’ll be clean when their work is done

We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young….

The I, the G, and the Y in the title of Fagen’s song refer to the “International Geophysical Year,” which was an 18-month-long scientific exchange celebration that ran from July 1957 to December 1958. The project was meant to take advantage of a reprieve in Cold War tensions to demonstrate to the world how science could produce lasting peace and harmony. The Soviets spoiled the peace and harmony bit by launching Sputnik three months later, sooner than the Americans could launch their satellite propelled by the rockets of Project Vanguard. In a fitting twist to the utopian agitprop of the IGY project, in response to Sputnik and to Vanguard’s failures, the United States turned, at last, to one of its greatest “experts” on rocket design, the erstwhile Nazi Wernher von Braun.

Of course, most Americans didn’t know about Braun, and so their illusions about the “experts” remained unshattered. In 1960, they elected a man and an administration that would come to epitomize the hope and the faith they placed in their experts. David Halberstam put it as follows in his classic The Best and the Brightest:

We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good… It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation.

As the Fates and Nemesis would have it, however, it was the best and brightest who, in their arrogance and insularity, eventually shattered the expertise illusion with their debacle in Vietnam. Again, Halberstam wrote:

There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.”

The battle between the “rule of experts” and the rule of the people dates, like most of the dreadful battles in our society, to the dawn of the Progressive Era and the musings of Richard Ely and Woodrow Wilson. The expert class they envisioned proved to be a disaster, just as the Best and the Brightest did—and just as the health and education experts did during COVID.

As I say, the problem here isn’t expertise per se. Expertise is invaluable, obviously. Rather, the problem is the belief that expertise conveys both infallibility and moral superiority and, therefore, should—always and everywhere—be considered superior to the will of the people. Again, this is an artifact of Progressivism, and as important and insightful as books like David Zweig’s may be, they will not alter the dysfunctional operation of our system until we address this original sin.

Stephen R. Soukup is the Director of The Political Forum Institute and the author of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital (Encounter, 2021, 2023)

Quote of the Day

From The Scratching Post: 

Tariffs As An Example

In the tariff wars, Trump said he wanted to eliminate trade deficits. In retrospect, I think even Trump knew that was idiocy. However, it was way beyond where he was willing to accept. Everyone took him at his word and went into spasms of horror. 

Incidentally, I did, too. That's what I mean when I say it's very hard to escape the zeitgeist generated by the Super Smart Set Who Don't Actually Know Much Of Anything And Who Have Been Wrong About A Lot Of Things For Decades (SSSWDAKMOAWHBWAALOTFD).

Brave New World

Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment

Excellent story about political propaganda in the USA in the 21st century.

It's a little long. It talks about the collapse of traditional media and the rise of social media.

How Barack Obama Built An Omnipotent Thought-Control Machine... And How It Was Destroyed by David Samuels

Excerpt: 

When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves. . . .

What I did not imagine at the time was that Obama’s successor in the White House would not be Hillary Clinton but Donald Trump. Nor did I foresee that Trump would himself become the target of a messaging campaign that would make full use of the machine that Obama had built, along with elements of the American security state. Being physically inside the White House, it turned out, was a mere detail of power; even more substantial power lay in controlling the digital switchboard that Obama had built, and which it turned out he still controlled. . . .

A key technique used in the Obama's 'digital switchboard':

permission structures - is most commonly defined as a means of providing “scaffolding for someone to embrace change they might otherwise reject.” This “scaffolding” provides:

• social proof (most people in your situation are now deciding to) 
• new information
• changed circumstances
• compromise

As one author put it, “with many applications to politics, one could argue that effective Permission Structures will shift the Overton Window, introducing new conversations into the mainstream that might previously have been considered marginal or fringe.” 

Later on we get this: 

The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia, . . . 

Samual's essay names a bunch of people and books, some of whom I knew and some I didn't. I collected them all in a spreadsheet.

Note: The first time I opened the essay, all I got was a plain orange screen. There is supposed to be a giant image there, but for some reason it didn't load. Anyway, scroll down a bit and you will get to the text.

Sweet Emotion

Aerosmith - Sweet Emotion
Aerosmith

Looking at the mess we (meaning the USA) have fallen into, and I'm wondering how did this happen? I think I have an answer. 

• Part 1 is that people are emotional animals and logical thinking is hard work. 
• Part 2 is 'sharing is caring'. It's very easy to be seduced by stories about how this program or that is going to help, the poor, miserable disadvantaged souls in our midst. 
• Part 3 is these feelings tend to grow. You feel a little sympathy for the poor, miserable wretches, and that feeling makes you feel better, so you sign on with that campaign because you like feeling better.

As long as there is money to be had, this will continue. After all, feelings are what make us feel alive.

The problem is that no one wants to hear the cold hard facts. They are boring and devoid of warmth. There's no feeling involved, so no one cares. The trick then is to wrap up your rational, conservative approach to government spending in some kind or warm fuzzy blanket that will make people feel better. And that's what President Trump has done. Well, he's making some people feel better, at least a majority.

Soviet Wired Radio

How This Soviet Wired Radio Clung to the Hearts of Millions
Railways | Retro Tech | DIY

More strange stuff from the Soviet empire. Who'd a thunk it? Certainly not me.