Let me know how I can help. You have my number.
2 Likes
Now there’s an interesting little factoid I didn’t know… 
(Or had just forgotten)
1 Like
I’m kind of a fan of revoking corporate charters for corporations that have forgotten the fundamental tenets of what it means to hold those charters.
You know, so they can experience the consequences of misguided corporate personhood.
5 Likes
This is one episode where I jotted down notes & time stamps. I’m usually not that organized, but this time around it made sense. Here are some notes and comments, numbers are minute marks.
16: “Audience indifferent” – what a broken business model! But I kind of see what’s behind the curtain now, and why the gears still turn… for now.
38: Describing a self-organizing system of omission, this brought to mind an old episode of the Philosophize This! podcast about mass media, Noam Chomsky, and all that. From the transcript ( Episode #148 - Transcript — Philosophize This! ) –
Like, is W. Blitz coming to work every day choosing news stories himself, choosing them because of the direction he’s getting from some cabal of corporate overseers he has secret backroom meetings with? How about every other anchor, journalist, reporter, editor, columnist, blogger? Are these people all on the payroll? Are they all getting an email in the morning from the Monopoly guy telling them what to report on?
The answer to Chomsky and Herman is no. The problem is much more insidious than that. Chomsky writes in his book Media Control, “Journalists are not normally kept under control through top-down intervention but by journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.” But he actually illustrates it even better in an interview he did with a reporter in the 1970s.
The reporter asked Chomsky, “Do you really think that I’m self-censoring right now?” clearly, the reporter knowing that every day the only intent when he does his job is to get to the bottom of what the truth is and not to peddle some narrative that’s been given to him. Chomsky says back to him, “I’m not saying that you think you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe every word that you’re saying. What I’m saying is that if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
Combining the self-organized omissions with the messed-up audience-indifferent business, it all makes a sort of twisted sense now. Man oh man, it’s so tangled.
49: re generational class warfare, this brings me back to a Tom Woods podcast from last spring, Ep. 2753 Where Did Trump’s Poll Numbers Go? - Tom Woods FWIW, I’m a quarter-way through the interviewee’s new book, Burn It All Down: What the Polls Say Young Americans Really Want. (the podcast gives a fair taste of the book) Yep, generational warfare. I think my boomer-con much older brother going to be shocked out of his barcolounger this November.
58: The water/money analogy is enlightening. The trouble is, how does the Next Great Thing get funded if the visionary-industrialist can’t plow his obscene proceeds from (for example) PayPal into something as way out there as SpaceX? I don’t really trust the government to tax it up and spend it nearly as wisely. But that’s a problem for another day, just pointing it out here. There’s a lot of insight in the ice-water-steam analogy.
108: Enshitification, and now with a side-order of provoked class/generation/race division! Now that is some industrial-grade 5th Gen warfare society solvent. We have our work cut out for us to reform Western Civ.
This “Is it too late?” series is some of the best work at PP since the original Crash Course. Drilling down with these (former) insiders highlights the depths of the problems, and occasionally points a way towards solutions. Keep ‘em coming, please.
One last request, can you post an audio-only file too please? Good to have for those long drives and work-outs. Thanks.
11 Likes
Audio version is up now. Sorry for the delay, there was a technical issue with the audio hosting provider and we didn’t want to hold the whole episode while it was sorted.
3 Likes
Thanks. For a first listen-through, it was so engrossing that I sat at my desk computer anyway and took notes, something that I never do. But for that long drive today, much appreciated.
4 Likes
IMO it’s too late. Not even repealing the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act legalizing the propagandizing of the US is going to stop this train wreck. We are on a one-way ticket to The One World Globalist Technocracy, just passing through the psychological States of Demoralization and HyperNormalisation. All aboard!!!
5 Likes
How can a fiction achieve so much?
I would argue that it can’t. Because it’s not a fiction. It’s the first artificial intelligence, and they played better than humans did in the game of politics.
There’s too much essential chaos in the system. Enshitification is a fundamental process of the universe. The only way out is purification. This can be famine, war, death jabs, deportations or even founding a colony of likeminded people.
Sadly, we’re so far corrupted that we even need a purification of the western gene pool - straight up deportations would be grossly insufficient at this stage. There may be some relatively healthy Asian pools that are fewer than 2 generations of prosperity down the path of decadence and are capable of civilization, but otherwise the price of admission is extremely brutal now.
Not making a moral case here, merely stating the minimum to recover first world civilization. I’m willing to accept whatever price (short of extinction risk), but that’s me. It can start with an organization of like-minded people, but it has to be exclusive or else economic migrants will overrun it gleefully.
2 Likes
You’re describing eugenics, not strategy. “Purification of the gene pool” isn’t the path to restoring “liberal” Western civilization, it’s the path to becoming the thing that destroyed it.
Every regime that tried purification didn’t restore civilization. It collapsed into barbarism. Nazi Germany. The Soviet purges. Pol Pot killed a quarter of his own people trying to purify Cambodia back to an agrarian utopia. The result was a graveyard, not a golden age.
You say you’re “not making a moral case.” But you’re also not making a strategic one. Purification doesn’t work. It never has.
I will agree that our system is too far gone, which is why Chris’s effort is valiant. And it’s also why Jiang and Fuentes believe we need a dictator. But most likely, if we follow the trajectory, the dictator will be designated by the same elites who got us into this mess. A dictator doesn’t break the power structure. He becomes its new face. The same class that built the machine will pick the man who inherits it.
If you’re saying a diverse population is intrinsically faulty, I disagree. Diversity isn’t the problem, how it’s managed is. Open borders, forced assimilation, and DEI brainwashing are policy failures, not proof that human difference is a defect. We can manage it better without pretending everyone is identical or sorting people by bloodline.
My goal is simple: however far they get, the technocrats are managed either through reinvigorated legal channels, or at minimum identified for all to see. No more hiding behind shadow organizations. No more “brutal price of admission.” No more sorting humans by quality.
That’s the only path that doesn’t end with the same people in power, just with different names.
We need an American version of Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore had an easier racial mix, but they also started with four languages and found harmony. He acknowledged the “primeval” differences and managed them pragmatically and unified under a shared language, integrated housing, merit over identity.
2 Likes
On the subject of the U.S. healthcare system being demented, I’ve been experiencing something new recently. I don’t have health insurance, by choice. I did a cost-benefit analysis and decided that I’m better off just paying for stuff outright and saving myself the monthly insurance fee with deductible anytime I actually want to use it.
A week ago, I had a medical procedure that wound up costing a few thousand dollars. Not an insignificant amount of money, but also not surprising, considering there was anesthesia and at least half a dozen doctors and nurses involved. What’s been weird is how aggressively the hospital has been pushing their “financial assistance” on me, when I have never once expressed an interest in financial assistance. I pay my bills with them in full with no delay.
When I checked in for the routine exam that wound up getting me the referral for the procedure, both desk workers encouraged me to apply for assistance. They BOTH said that they work at the hospital full-time, have insurance, but ALSO receive the assistance (wait, what?). When I went to the lab, the guy who checked me in there urged me to apply for assistance. A couple of days ago, I got a brief voicemail from someone at the hospital, asking me to call her back. Not knowing if it was related to test results or what, I called her back. With no preamble, she started launching into questions about how many people live in my house, what’s my job, what’s my monthly income… I was taken aback and a little offended. I cut her off and said I’m not seeking assistance. I also got a letter in the mail, asking me to call so they can give me assistance. There’s got to be something funny going on here, what with all the hospital staff clearly being instructed to “upsell” the “assistance”. It reminds me of working at KFC as a teen, and we were told to always try to get the customer to spend more than they were planning by suggesting fries or a drink to go with their chicken.
9 Likes
I don’t blame you. Have you looked at cost sharing plans like CrowdHealth to guard against catastrophic expenses? They’re not insurance plans per se, but rather a month-by-month group cost averaging pools. My 30-something son dumped his $500/mo Obamacare insurance for this and it’s now around $100-$150/mo. Costs vary a little, depending on the group outlays each month.
Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying, along with Tom Woods advertise this on their podcasts. They have very positive things to say, through various high-cost medical problems including a motorcycle crash and a difficult pregnancy.
As for the upsells, hoo-boy have I ever encountered those. Most infamously, a $900 “air purifier” with $150/mo replacement filters to help my allergies from the ENT’s office. My fix: $10 box fan and a $15/mo 3M HVAC filter from the hardware store. Works like gangbusters.
6 Likes
Oh, I do have CrowdHealth! The black plan, or doomsday plan, I forget what it’s called. It costs less than their regular plan, but only provides coverage if you have an issue that exceeds $15K. Maybe I should have mentioned that. But in the ads, they always make a point of saying “CrowdHealth is NOT insurance” lol.
6 Likes
I have sunk a half hour into writing a post about this very topic, but you nailed it. Thank you!
Media consolidation in radio, broadcast TV, cable TV, internet sites matches a parallel process in newspapers, magazine, books, concerts, movies, stage plays.
The instant consumer choice raises a market participant to political/economic relevance the participant is destroyed or absorbed.
Recognized very early in the numerous machinations by different grounps who’ve attempted to control the entire globe - is the primacy of the capture and direction of the mass of people in a given population of humans.
Well, they have got us now.
3 Likes
No, eugenics is technocrat-deployed genetic focusing. Natural selection is nature-deployed genetic focusing. I talk about purification because too much entropy has crept in - it’s a subclass of “focusing”. This focusing I’m talking about can come from anywhere - it just needs to reward winners relative to losers across generations - and do so dramatically to correct from the easy breeding we’ve had for multiple generations. I favour war, on account of its honesty. But as I said, even death jabs that you’re pressured/tricked into taking count as a form of purification.
Ed Dutton (aka The Jolly Heretic) has done some serious intellectual work on this matter. I don’t claim to present it as well as he can, nor accurately represent his views. But what I’ve seen was compelling.
Unity is strength. Diversity is flexibility. Depends on what you need. Best case with this much diversity is Brazil.
If you think a good dictator can fix this without a purification happening first, you’re missing the fundamental nature of what’s happened. Famine, civil war and then a good dictator would be fine, and he wouldn’t even need to do anything mean to the populace himself. The famine and civil war would likely take out the ineffective elites disproportionately, so it’s a good “change in trajectory”, too. Wouldn’t make it any more sustainable than Singapore, though, unless the civil war got really intense.
1 Like
Agree to disagree.
From where I stand, “focusing” and “purification” is the same proposal: some people die so others can flourish. That’s not natural selection. War doesn’t select for quality, it kills indiscriminately, by luck and geography. Two world wars didn’t purify Europe. They left a continent of orphans and widows.
I also think you’d get the opposite of what you predict. Look at the white middle class I grew up with, their kids are often softer than my Gen X cohort. Meanwhile the Hispanic kids I see are scrappy, adaptable, willing to endure. They have fire. That’s not a gene pool problem. That’s a comfort problem. You don’t fix softness with slaughter.
And culling the herd doesn’t touch the actual problem. The problem is the architects, the parasitic class that harvests from the population while hiding behind foundations, NGOs, and shadow networks. My focus is on them. Expose them. Name them. Hold them accountable. No more “brutal price of admission.” No more sorting humans by quality. We may in very short order see many of our young men die if Trump orders a ground war on Iran. I vehemently oppose them dieing for Israel.
That’s where I stand.
3 Likes
Does anybody know what happened at Quest Diagnostics yesterday?
As far as I can tell there was a nationwide outage of internal systems.
No updates from the company or coverage in the media. Perhaps more to it than ‘it’s a system update they didn’t warn us about’ the medical tech explained.
Lasted several hours and turns out it is impossible to draw blood or accept samples without turning on a nationally connected computer…
2 Likes