Stressed out, dumbed down, drugged up, malnourished, manipulated, extorted, bribed, threatened, coerced, bedazzled, terrorized, addicted - portrait of the 'murkan public. Imagine, if you can, the complete absence of any and ALL advertisements/infomercials, public service ads, visual and verbal stimuli, religious cautions and promises and definitions about 'everything.' Just facts, ma'am. We would be forced to become un-forced. It would terrify us for some time, actual suicides would mount quickly. Withdrawal is actually incredibly painful, on so many levels. But after some weeks, or months, of the good stress of each person having to actually, in real time, clears the BS out of their memory circuits and allows us to carefully comprehend what actual phenomena are real and which are fake. Propaganda is more contagious than measles, more addictive than fentanyl, more deadly than Cesium 137. This is what must happen to each of us, me included, even though I have practiced scientific method and critical thinking/deductive reasoning for decades. No one is immune from sinister propaganda, and all of it is sinister. We are emotive beings, but we Can Manage our Own Lives, with clear and clean assistance from others who have gone through the same PTSD.
American delusionism is still pretty rampant— “you too can become a millionaire fantasy” lives. And so does the racist ideology that blames immigrants and all people of color when that delusional dream doesn’t come true, as it doesn’t in 99.9% of the cases.
That's the context of one of the most famous statements on race ever attributed to President Johnson, an off-the-cuff observation he made to a young staffer, Bill Moyers, after encountering a display of blatant racism during a political visit to the South. Moyers tells it in the first person:
We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. "I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it," he said. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Unquote.
GOP voters lack common sense, a sense of their self-interest.
Trump/Musk are anti-veteran. Dems lost by 1 vote. Republicans Thomas Massie and Warren Davidson voted no. Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris voted present. Rep. Andrew Gabarino (R-NY) missed the vote.… Garbarino missed the vote because he was sleeping: “I fell asleep in the back. No kidding.”
3 Dems have died or it wudda lost.
i'm hoping the senate parlimentarian will kill all the non budget items.
Hawley, Johnson say it's dead on arrival, but.....
55,000 Americans dead. Hundreds of thosuands adversely affected. Agent Orange.
At the risk of being unkind, these old sick people need to step-off. RBG, Connolly, Lee, Grijalva, and on and on. It's altruistic and that is part of the job.
Nothing is more important than your health. Quit on a high-note---biggest mistake Biden made was running again. He kicked ass at his last State of the Union. Wish I could remember that instead of the debate.
I fell for the BS until The Shrub lied us into Iraq. That was when I was forced to examine my beliefs and concluded that I could no longer vote for any Republican ever again. While I was in the Air Force from 64 to 84, we were fed so much propaganda, in retrospect, it should have been obvious but my critical thinking skills abandoned me.
Yesterday I told a friend of mine, who does not read any substacks, if anything, just hears the news on the TV, about how the govt changed thousands of websites to eliminate record of minority and female outstanding contributors, she just looked at me. She didn’t say anything, but I could see from her expression, but she really did not believe me. She thinks I’m off on some extreme track. So I conclude that people who only hear the news on the TV are living in a different world, and those of us who are worried about a dictatorship are the extreme ones.
As many of you who read this blog daily,a large swatch of Americans have no idea what is going on. They don't know about the Hitler"Nazi" movement in Germany 1933-41,the Planatation owners in America who thought they had the right to have slaves.Nor do they know the history Thom has laid out today. It is hard to tell when people will wake up.Doing anything may be fruitless if you read the article in the NYTimes on 5/15/" The Forecast for 2027-Total AI Domination" I think we have been warned by many really smart people that "AI"is a massive threat to our existence,but only Europe is pushing back. Trump and his Techno Fascist buddies want to make all us stupiid and controlled.Let's all encourage every organization that believes in the future to make all this information as public as possible.
Assuming there will be mid-term elections next year. That's a big assumption at this point, especially in view of yesterday's message that a desperate loser will pull off a last-ditch gambit with a war or other manufactured crisis.
Most of us had the misfortune of missing general education, which teaches people to make change, manage a checkbook make a budget, fill out tax forms, etc.
Unfortunately, I find that a lot of that bullshit is taught in business school. AI says 90% of economists are "Keynesian."
"Psy Ops Economics" refers to the intersection of psychological operations (PSYOP) and economic psychology, where PSYOP uses behavioral insights to influence economic behavior. PSYOP, often associated with military operations, leverages psychological principles to shape attitudes and behaviors, while economic psychology studies how psychology affects economic decisions and behaviors.
I read that "every word had its origin in an image." We will not untie this Gordian Knot we have created. It will be CUT!! Stories, myths, and metaphors have led us into this quagmire; they will lead us out of it. Thom is an extremely well-read intellectual, but he speaks a dead language. He needs a muse to speak and draw for him.
The Clayton Act, specifically Section 3, makes it illegal to enter into tying arrangements where a customer is required to purchase a second product in order to get a desired product if it tends to lessen competition. It also prohibits exclusive dealing contracts and requirements contracts under the same condition.
In diplomacy, this is worse, because our national security is at stake.
I envision the image of Trump/Musk tieing their own shoelaces and falling on their noses.
The only conclusion that I can see is there's not going to be a fair election, they are clamping down and planning on martial law and planning on scaring the public into compliance. The DHS new surveillance of Americans leaving the Country is a bad sign.
Thanks Thom for pointing out how we’ve been systematically and exponentially dumbed down for the last 50 years by now billionaire so-called conservatives. Surely not conservative about themselves, just the rest of us.
You are pissing up a rope, Thom. You're speaking in the dead language of the Enlightenment. You need to become more Shakespearian, more metaphorical!! If you want to tell America they have sat on their ass as gluttonous consumers while their democracy and capitalist economy was being destroyed. . .Ya gotta give them an image, a poet!!
Bitch Nation dances til the break of dawn
long after the last of the guests has gone
a tumbleweed tumbles across her front lawn
then she sleeps with the TV on oo
then she sleeps with the TV on
There's a puddle in the driveway from last night's rain
a car up on blocks and a dog on a chain
it's actually simple but it's hard to explain
oo she sleeps with the TV on
oo she sleeps with the TV on
The sharp smell of gunpowder in the air
means meat on the table means Tienemien square
it's hard to know which though if you're not from there
oo she sleeps with the TV on
oo she sleeps with the TV on
There's a rock concert poster thumbtacked to her door
Yes, right-wing Americans still worship rich entrepreneurs. This legacy goes back to social Darwinism in the 1890s and, more recently, to Schumpeter's move-fast and break-things economics.
The details you provide to what I already "know" are awesome, Thom, thank you. The specifics are mind boggling.
I saw then bought The Panama Papers, which featured a segment in which it was articulated that hidden from all of us, untaxed and unknown (so, tax free) is a subterranean river of money that circulates out of view. There really isn't even an effort to rein it it, identify it and quantify it. So much money avoids taxation, leaving the increasingly beleaguered and shrinking middle class to shoulder the weight of taxation with which to run the country. Making us pawns and paupers; SLAVES.
Not much ever came from what was revealed. Government itself is enslaved, and part of the hidden system. Again, I "know" this, but can't back up with actual facts and figures. I do know that Democrats have done far too little to course correct, and Republicans keep moving the needle to advantage the REAL deep state at the very top of the food chain.
Meanwhile, people really DO idolize the rich. There is a loudening drumbeat of EAT THE RICH talk, but there is shockingly little in the way of assessing the real blame where it belongs: Government is enabling all of this, on purpose and WITH purpose now, accelerating the wealth transfer into hyperdrive with, as you say, little effort to hide it. They lie, but they cannot refute it and they really don't try. Fuck you indeed.
I guess this phenomenon has deep roots, has played out over history. After so much time here in America, it appears to have become uncontrollable during my lifetime. Capitalism cannot sustain itself without guardrails and methods and means to regulate it, and all of the remaining ways are being snuffed out FAST. It is very hard indeed to find optimism and blue skies. Ominous dark skies are getting blacker. I was angry before Trump in 2016. This is a whole new league.
Will the "MSM" (Mainly Servile Media" learn the fallacy and report it?
I personally doubt it. We have so much evidence that "low taxes on the rich do NOT create jobs", but the MSM lets the Republicans get away with perpetuating that myth. Consider:
It SHOULD be widely known that our most annoying deadbeat billionaire, and So-C.E.O.Path, Elon Musk - has proven the Republican centerpiece of economic policy to be a gigantic fraud, scam, and lie: "Low taxes on the wealthy creates jobs."
With favorable tax loopholes, government subsidies, special rules used mostly by the ultra wealthy, and the lowest tax rates of the millennia, Elon Musk accumulated a massive fortune. Meanwhile, America piled up the debt, and regular taxpayers subsidized his fortune by giving him money from our wallets.
But Instead of reinvesting this tax break revenue to hire workers to grow businesses, such as make a better EV, tame AI, or mitigate climate change, he hoarded billions for himself.
Then with $44 Billion of “spare wealth”, Elon purchased Twitter.
And immediately he killed 80% of the jobs at Twitter!
Thousands of jobs destroyed.
Thousands of employees' lives upended… thrown onto the unemployment lines. Elon has shown the ultra wealthy to be mass job killers. Elon Musk proves low taxes on job creators kills jobs, but no one seems to notice.
We could sure use a new name for this fraud-scam-lie, something that stings, and is more current than voodoo, supply side or trickle-down economics.
we can all give a big fat thank you to Reagan starting this and for the past 45+ years of shit we're now fully in because of him and the GOP.
Stressed out, dumbed down, drugged up, malnourished, manipulated, extorted, bribed, threatened, coerced, bedazzled, terrorized, addicted - portrait of the 'murkan public. Imagine, if you can, the complete absence of any and ALL advertisements/infomercials, public service ads, visual and verbal stimuli, religious cautions and promises and definitions about 'everything.' Just facts, ma'am. We would be forced to become un-forced. It would terrify us for some time, actual suicides would mount quickly. Withdrawal is actually incredibly painful, on so many levels. But after some weeks, or months, of the good stress of each person having to actually, in real time, clears the BS out of their memory circuits and allows us to carefully comprehend what actual phenomena are real and which are fake. Propaganda is more contagious than measles, more addictive than fentanyl, more deadly than Cesium 137. This is what must happen to each of us, me included, even though I have practiced scientific method and critical thinking/deductive reasoning for decades. No one is immune from sinister propaganda, and all of it is sinister. We are emotive beings, but we Can Manage our Own Lives, with clear and clean assistance from others who have gone through the same PTSD.
Love your comment! So true on so many levels.
American delusionism is still pretty rampant— “you too can become a millionaire fantasy” lives. And so does the racist ideology that blames immigrants and all people of color when that delusional dream doesn’t come true, as it doesn’t in 99.9% of the cases.
Quote:
That's the context of one of the most famous statements on race ever attributed to President Johnson, an off-the-cuff observation he made to a young staffer, Bill Moyers, after encountering a display of blatant racism during a political visit to the South. Moyers tells it in the first person:
We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. "I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it," he said. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Unquote.
GOP voters lack common sense, a sense of their self-interest.
They're ignorant. And hateful.
LBJ. Memorial Day. On another site I bemoan the fact that General Don Bacon et al did not come through yesterday. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/01/02/breaking-down-the-number-of-veterans-in-the-119th-congress/
Trump/Musk are anti-veteran. Dems lost by 1 vote. Republicans Thomas Massie and Warren Davidson voted no. Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris voted present. Rep. Andrew Gabarino (R-NY) missed the vote.… Garbarino missed the vote because he was sleeping: “I fell asleep in the back. No kidding.”
3 Dems have died or it wudda lost.
i'm hoping the senate parlimentarian will kill all the non budget items.
Hawley, Johnson say it's dead on arrival, but.....
55,000 Americans dead. Hundreds of thosuands adversely affected. Agent Orange.
This is what I remember. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcI-O3FdZZs
At the risk of being unkind, these old sick people need to step-off. RBG, Connolly, Lee, Grijalva, and on and on. It's altruistic and that is part of the job.
Nothing is more important than your health. Quit on a high-note---biggest mistake Biden made was running again. He kicked ass at his last State of the Union. Wish I could remember that instead of the debate.
I fell for the BS until The Shrub lied us into Iraq. That was when I was forced to examine my beliefs and concluded that I could no longer vote for any Republican ever again. While I was in the Air Force from 64 to 84, we were fed so much propaganda, in retrospect, it should have been obvious but my critical thinking skills abandoned me.
Yesterday I told a friend of mine, who does not read any substacks, if anything, just hears the news on the TV, about how the govt changed thousands of websites to eliminate record of minority and female outstanding contributors, she just looked at me. She didn’t say anything, but I could see from her expression, but she really did not believe me. She thinks I’m off on some extreme track. So I conclude that people who only hear the news on the TV are living in a different world, and those of us who are worried about a dictatorship are the extreme ones.
As many of you who read this blog daily,a large swatch of Americans have no idea what is going on. They don't know about the Hitler"Nazi" movement in Germany 1933-41,the Planatation owners in America who thought they had the right to have slaves.Nor do they know the history Thom has laid out today. It is hard to tell when people will wake up.Doing anything may be fruitless if you read the article in the NYTimes on 5/15/" The Forecast for 2027-Total AI Domination" I think we have been warned by many really smart people that "AI"is a massive threat to our existence,but only Europe is pushing back. Trump and his Techno Fascist buddies want to make all us stupiid and controlled.Let's all encourage every organization that believes in the future to make all this information as public as possible.
Assuming there will be mid-term elections next year. That's a big assumption at this point, especially in view of yesterday's message that a desperate loser will pull off a last-ditch gambit with a war or other manufactured crisis.
No doubt bullshit works. Psy ops does, too.
Most of us had the misfortune of missing general education, which teaches people to make change, manage a checkbook make a budget, fill out tax forms, etc.
Unfortunately, I find that a lot of that bullshit is taught in business school. AI says 90% of economists are "Keynesian."
"Psy Ops Economics" refers to the intersection of psychological operations (PSYOP) and economic psychology, where PSYOP uses behavioral insights to influence economic behavior. PSYOP, often associated with military operations, leverages psychological principles to shape attitudes and behaviors, while economic psychology studies how psychology affects economic decisions and behaviors.
I read that "every word had its origin in an image." We will not untie this Gordian Knot we have created. It will be CUT!! Stories, myths, and metaphors have led us into this quagmire; they will lead us out of it. Thom is an extremely well-read intellectual, but he speaks a dead language. He needs a muse to speak and draw for him.
Speaking of "untie," Trump/Musk is accused of a classic Clayton Act "tie in," requiring countries to buy Starlink.
https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/media-entities/2025/05/us-pushes-nations-facing-tariffs-to-approve-starlink-cables-show
The Clayton Act, specifically Section 3, makes it illegal to enter into tying arrangements where a customer is required to purchase a second product in order to get a desired product if it tends to lessen competition. It also prohibits exclusive dealing contracts and requirements contracts under the same condition.
In diplomacy, this is worse, because our national security is at stake.
I envision the image of Trump/Musk tieing their own shoelaces and falling on their noses.
The only conclusion that I can see is there's not going to be a fair election, they are clamping down and planning on martial law and planning on scaring the public into compliance. The DHS new surveillance of Americans leaving the Country is a bad sign.
Thanks Thom for pointing out how we’ve been systematically and exponentially dumbed down for the last 50 years by now billionaire so-called conservatives. Surely not conservative about themselves, just the rest of us.
You are pissing up a rope, Thom. You're speaking in the dead language of the Enlightenment. You need to become more Shakespearian, more metaphorical!! If you want to tell America they have sat on their ass as gluttonous consumers while their democracy and capitalist economy was being destroyed. . .Ya gotta give them an image, a poet!!
Bitch Nation dances til the break of dawn
long after the last of the guests has gone
a tumbleweed tumbles across her front lawn
then she sleeps with the TV on oo
then she sleeps with the TV on
There's a puddle in the driveway from last night's rain
a car up on blocks and a dog on a chain
it's actually simple but it's hard to explain
oo she sleeps with the TV on
oo she sleeps with the TV on
The sharp smell of gunpowder in the air
means meat on the table means Tienemien square
it's hard to know which though if you're not from there
oo she sleeps with the TV on
oo she sleeps with the TV on
There's a rock concert poster thumbtacked to her door
cat litter scattered all over the floor
she hears the rumors of famines and wars
as she sleeps with the TV on
oo as she sleeps with the TV on
Bitch Nation dances til the break of dawn
long after the last of the guests has gone
a tumbleweed tumbles across her front lawn
then she sleeps with the TV on
then she sleeps with the TV on
Songwriters: Dan Reeder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utn477DBGz0
Yes, right-wing Americans still worship rich entrepreneurs. This legacy goes back to social Darwinism in the 1890s and, more recently, to Schumpeter's move-fast and break-things economics.
The details you provide to what I already "know" are awesome, Thom, thank you. The specifics are mind boggling.
I saw then bought The Panama Papers, which featured a segment in which it was articulated that hidden from all of us, untaxed and unknown (so, tax free) is a subterranean river of money that circulates out of view. There really isn't even an effort to rein it it, identify it and quantify it. So much money avoids taxation, leaving the increasingly beleaguered and shrinking middle class to shoulder the weight of taxation with which to run the country. Making us pawns and paupers; SLAVES.
Not much ever came from what was revealed. Government itself is enslaved, and part of the hidden system. Again, I "know" this, but can't back up with actual facts and figures. I do know that Democrats have done far too little to course correct, and Republicans keep moving the needle to advantage the REAL deep state at the very top of the food chain.
Meanwhile, people really DO idolize the rich. There is a loudening drumbeat of EAT THE RICH talk, but there is shockingly little in the way of assessing the real blame where it belongs: Government is enabling all of this, on purpose and WITH purpose now, accelerating the wealth transfer into hyperdrive with, as you say, little effort to hide it. They lie, but they cannot refute it and they really don't try. Fuck you indeed.
I guess this phenomenon has deep roots, has played out over history. After so much time here in America, it appears to have become uncontrollable during my lifetime. Capitalism cannot sustain itself without guardrails and methods and means to regulate it, and all of the remaining ways are being snuffed out FAST. It is very hard indeed to find optimism and blue skies. Ominous dark skies are getting blacker. I was angry before Trump in 2016. This is a whole new league.
Will the "MSM" (Mainly Servile Media" learn the fallacy and report it?
I personally doubt it. We have so much evidence that "low taxes on the rich do NOT create jobs", but the MSM lets the Republicans get away with perpetuating that myth. Consider:
It SHOULD be widely known that our most annoying deadbeat billionaire, and So-C.E.O.Path, Elon Musk - has proven the Republican centerpiece of economic policy to be a gigantic fraud, scam, and lie: "Low taxes on the wealthy creates jobs."
With favorable tax loopholes, government subsidies, special rules used mostly by the ultra wealthy, and the lowest tax rates of the millennia, Elon Musk accumulated a massive fortune. Meanwhile, America piled up the debt, and regular taxpayers subsidized his fortune by giving him money from our wallets.
But Instead of reinvesting this tax break revenue to hire workers to grow businesses, such as make a better EV, tame AI, or mitigate climate change, he hoarded billions for himself.
Then with $44 Billion of “spare wealth”, Elon purchased Twitter.
And immediately he killed 80% of the jobs at Twitter!
Thousands of jobs destroyed.
Thousands of employees' lives upended… thrown onto the unemployment lines. Elon has shown the ultra wealthy to be mass job killers. Elon Musk proves low taxes on job creators kills jobs, but no one seems to notice.
We could sure use a new name for this fraud-scam-lie, something that stings, and is more current than voodoo, supply side or trickle-down economics.
Now, if we can just get our bevy of corporate Democrats to go spend more time with their families, or at least STFU…