alarm the populace

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

-- H.L. Mencken (1921)

Political correctness effects

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

-- Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It  (2005)

self-righteous left

I never thought I’d live to see the day when the right wing would become the cool ones giving the middle finger to the establishment, and the left wing becoming the sniveling self-righteous twatty ones going around shaming everyone.  

-- John Lydon

Leftist Zealotry

Today the problem of zealotry is resoundingly on the side of the political left.  That is to say, the political left is now the side that is most appealing to narcissists, sociopaths, the emotionally unstable, etc., and this attraction is forming a mob that can be easily exploited by the establishment.  What I find interesting is that leftists actually believe that THEY are the underdogs and that they are fighting a “revolution” against the establishment. This is a bizarre disconnect from reality. Every major institution of power and influence in the US is on the side of the political left. How can you be rebelling against the establishment if all your values coincide with the establishment’s agenda? Leftists are not the rebels they think they are; they are not the heroes – They are the villains. They are the empire.

-- Brandon Smith (alt-market.us)
https://alt-market.us/for-leftists-your-freedom-is-their-misery-your-slavery-is-their-joy/

open your eyes

 

Video games train the kids for war
Army chic in high-fashion stores
Law and order's done their job
Prisons filled while the rich still rob

Assassination politics
Violence rules within our nation's midst
Ignorance is their power tool
You'll only know what they want you to know

The television cannot lie
Controlling media with smokescreen eyes
Nuclear politicians picture show
The acting's lousy, but the blind don't know

 

Open your eyes, see the lies right in front of you
Open your eyes....

They scare us all with threats of war
So we forget just how bad things are
You taste the fear when you're all alone
They gonna get you when you're on your own

The silence of conspiracy
Slaughtered on the altar of apathy
You gotta wake up from your sleep
'Cause meek inherits earth six feet deep

 

-- Bators / James (Lords of the New Church) 1982

End foreign wars

The American people are tired of our ‘endless wars’ and seem to understand that long-term military commitments like those in Afghanistan and Iraq don’t serve our national interests and aren’t worth the costs. With nearly 70 percent responding in favor of bringing our troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s clear that our approach to the Middle East doesn’t square with the will of the American people who bear the human and financial costs of these decisions. Unfortunately, the Washington foreign policy establishment, including many in government, has resisted real change....

Americans look ready for a more thorough-going rethink of our foreign policy and shift away from the military-first strategies that have seen trillions in tax dollars spent and thousands of American lives lost. The president’s instincts on ending endless wars are with the American public’s. He should work to withdraw our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and forge a different path forward in the Middle East—one that employs the many other, less expensive, and more effective tools in the statecraft toolbox.

[W]e need to stay focused on what America’s long-run national interests require and define our approach... based on that.... [A] full and speedy withdrawal of our troops is imperative. Our national interest isn’t served by continuing to wage a futile battle, but by exiting it. 

-- William Ruger (Koch Institute) January 23, 2020

The Undrainable Swamp

The establishment’s concerns have less to do with peace and security than raising sales, earnings, and stock prices in the Atlantic-area's military industrial complex. And the establishment won’t abide any threat to its power.

The Swamp is so undrainable that it will end up making mincemeat of Donald Trump.... The ultimate causes of his demise are anchored deep in the failing status quo. America is so addicted to war, debt, and central bank driven false prosperity that even the most resourceful and focused challenger would be taken down by its sheer inertia.

But [Trump] is so undisciplined, naïve, out-of-touch, thin-skinned, unfocused, and megalomaniacal that he is making it far easier for the Swamp critters than they deserve. To a very considerable extent, in fact, he is filling out his own bill of indictment.

-- David Stockman (The Daily Reckoning) August 4, 2017

profound political disunity

[A] nation ruled by Imperial kleptocrats is intrinsically destabilizing, as there is no longer any moral or political center to bind the nation together.  The public sees the value system at the top is [to] maximize personal profit by whatever means available (e.g., complicity, corruption, monopoly, and rentier rackets), and they follow suit by pursuing whatever petty frauds and rackets are within reach: tax avoidance, cheating on entrance exams, gaming the disability system, lying on mortgage and job applications, and so on.  But the scope of the rentier rackets is so large, the bottom 95% cannot possibly keep up with the expanding wealth and income of the top 0.1% and their army of technocrats and enablers; so a rising sense of injustice widens the already yawning fissures in the body politic....

When the system is rigged, "democracy" is just another public-relations screen to mask the unsavory reality of Oligarchy....  The conventional markers of democracy -- elections and elected representatives -- exist, but they are mere facades; the mechanisms of setting the course of the nation are corrupt, and the power lies outside the public's reach.  History has shown that democratic elections don't guarantee an uncorrupt, functional government. Rather, democracy has become the public-relations stamp of approval for corrupt governance that runs roughshod over individual liberty while centralizing the power to enforce consent, silence critics, and maintain the status quo....

-- Charles Hugh Smith (Of Two Minds blog)

Trumped

[Donald Trump] is now fully at war with the mainstream media and the national security apparatchiks of the Deep State — and nothing could be more conducive to exposing the folly of Washington's imperial adventures abroad and its fiscal bankruptcy at home.... [T]he "Trump is soft on Russia" meme is nothing more than the desperate attempt of the Deep State to protect its dirty secret that America has no real enemies that can militarily threaten the homeland.... The ruling elites are determined to take the Donald down, and whether they succeed or not, it is extremely probable that Washington will grind to a halt — Watergate era style — by early spring....

[E]conomic recovery and the restoration of honest democracy in America depend upon a plunge in the wildly inflated stock market. It is that event which would finally discredit the monetary central planners at the Fed, destroy the insidious regime of Bubble Finance they have created, [and expose] the financial fraud which has permitted the Imperial City to fund the nation's bloated Warfare State and Welfare State with reckless abandon. Fiscal rectitude will only return when a thundering financial trauma demonstrates to the American public that a money printing central bank is its mortal enemy and that the Fed's charter to buy government debt and rig interest rates and stock prices must be forever revoked.

-- David Stockman (The Daily Reckoning) Feb. 21, 2017

American Corporatocracy

One little-remarked consequence of central banks' policies of near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing is the unrivaled dominance of mobile global capital.  The source of corporate political power is the ability to borrow essentially unlimited sums for next to nothing: what I have long termed free money for financiers.  Armed with central-bank supplied unlimited credit, global capital can outbid local residents and businesses. Over time, profitable enterprises and assets end up in corporate hands....

The same dynamic — the unparalleled power of cheap credit — then funds corporate dominance of the political process.  As corporations buy up productive assets, they consolidate these assets into cartels and quasi-monopolies that can be protected from competition by lobbying and campaign contributions.  Governments come and go, candidates come and go, and political movements come and go, but the Corporatocracy remains in charge. 

-- Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds blog (edited)

Goodhart's Law

"Once a social or economic indicator is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role.  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
-- Charles Goodhart, 1975



Humans naturally optimize what is being measured and identified as important.  This is the result of humanity’s highly refined skill in assessing risk and return. The problem with choosing what to measure is that the selection can generate counterproductive or even destructive incentives.  The process of selecting which data is measured and recorded carries implicit assumptions with far-reaching consequences. 

If we accept that growth as measured by gross domestic product (GDP) is the measure of prosperity, politicians will pursue the goal of GDP expansion.  If rising consumption is the key component of GDP, we will be encouraged to go buy a new truck when the economy weakens, whether we need a new truck or not.  If profits are identified as the key driver of managers’ bonuses, managers will endeavor to increase net profits by whatever means are available.

There is a growing dissatisfaction in the economics field with the current measures of economic activity: GDP, unemployment, and so on. This dissatisfaction reflects a growing awareness that these legacy metrics do a poor job of capturing what is actually important in fostering sustainable, broad-based prosperity, what many call well-being.  If we choose counterproductive metrics, we build perverse incentives into the system, incentives that guide the goals, strategies and behaviors of participants.

Rather than measure consumption and metrics that incentivize debt, what if we measure well-being and opportunities offered in our communities? What if we measured doing more with less rather than consuming more? What if our primary measure of economic well-being was the reduction of inputs (resources, labor, capital, etc.) that resulted in higher output (increased well-being)?  Systemic success or failure arises from our choices of what to measure and what thresholds we set as meaningful.

-- Charles Hugh Smith (The Daily Reckoning)

abortion politics

During my time in Congress, I regularly introduced legislation forbidding organizations that perform abortions from receiving federal funding. The US Government should not force taxpayers to subsidize an activity they believe is murder....

The federal government has no constitutional authority to permit, fund, or even outlaw abortion. Therefore, efforts to make abortion a federal crime are just as unconstitutional as efforts to prohibit states from outlawing abortion. A Congress that truly cared about the Constitution would end all federal funding for abortion and pass legislation restricting federal jurisdiction over abortion, thus returning the issue to the states....

One factor hindering the anti-abortion movement's ability to change people’s minds is that too many abortion opponents also support a militaristic foreign policy. These pro-lifers undercut their moral credibility as advocates for unborn American lives when they display a callous indifference to the lives of Iraqi, Iranian, and Afghan children....

[A]ll those who wish to create a society of liberty, peace, and prosperity should join me in advocating for a consistent ethic of life and liberty that respects the rights of all persons, born and unborn.

-- Dr. Ron Paul (from his website) Aug. 2, 2015

endless war profiteering

"[T]he insidious increase in power, and the influence over foreign policy that the military has, is very dangerous.  And maybe in the long run it's even more dangerous than a coup.  Because what happens is, the power shifts gradually, and gradually, and incrementally, over to the war-making side, to where you wake up one morning and all you're doing is making war.  And you have so many people, from Lockheed Martin to the Congress of the United States, to the Armed Forces, to you name it, who are making so much money off that war-making, that you can't stop it.  That's not a coup, but it is something worse in my view.  It is ultimately the destruction of our Republic."  
-- Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (U.S Army, retired) 2012 interview

spirits in the material world

There is no political solution
To our troubled evolution
Have no faith in constitution
There is no bloody revolution

Our so-called leaders speak
With words they try to jail you
They subjugate the meek
But it's the rhetoric of failure

Where does the answer lie?
Living from day to day
If it's something we can't buy
There must be another way

We are spirits in the material world

--Sting (1981)

policy short-sightedness

"The fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences ... is the persistent tendency of man to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups."
-- Henry Hazlitt, Economics in one Lesson (1946)

stand or fall

Crying parents tell their children
If you survive, don't do as we did.
Son exclaims there'll be nothing to do too
Daughter says she'll be dead with you.

While foreign affairs are screwing rotten,
Life morale has hit rock bottom.
Dying embers stand forgotten
Talks of peace were being downtrodden.

Is this the value of our existence?
Should we proclaim with such persistence?
Our destiny relies on conscience
Red or Blue, what's the difference?

An empty face reflects extinction
Ugly scars divide the nation
Desecrate the population
There will be no exaltation

-- The Fixx (1982)

witch hunt

The night is black, without a moon.
The air is thick and still.
The vigilantes gather on the lonely torchlit hill.

Features distorted in the flickering light,
Faces are twisted and grotesque.
Silent and stern in the sweltering night,
The mob moves like demons possessed.
Quiet in conscience, calm in their right,
Confident their ways are best.

The righteous rise with burning eyes of hatred and ill-will.
Madmen fed on fear and lies to beat and burn and kill.

They say there are strangers who threaten us --
Our immigrants and infidels.
They say there is strangeness to danger us
In our theatres and bookstore shelves,
That those who know what's best for us
Must rise and save us from ourselves.

Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand --
Ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand.

Neal Peart (Rush) 1981

a change is gonna come

I was born by the river in a little tent
And just like the river, I've been running ever since
It's been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

It's been too hard living, but I'm afraid to die
I don't know what's up there beyond the sky
It's been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

I go to the movie, and I go downtown
Somebody keep telling me "Don't hang around"
It's been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

Then I go to my brother and I say, "Brother, help me please"
But he winds up knocking me back down on my knees

There've been times that I've thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long time coming
But I know a change is gonna come

-- Sam Cooke (1964)

throwing the election

Don't even waste the man-hours on us
We are finding no solution
Call all the boys in from the fighting fronts
We have lost the revolution
None of the soaring flight we dreamed
Is any closer to perfection

Make me an offer, I don't waste them now
We have no more fixed intentions
Give all the faithful a deserved rest
We've abandoned our dissensions

I've got a feeling it's all rigged
I've got a feeling it ended a long time ago
But nobody tells me
I've got a feeling it's over now

-- Scott Miller (Game Theory) 1988

older, more conservative

"If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."
-- variously attributed to Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Disraeli, Otto von Bismarck, and others