The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[Matt Allison]

I never trusted James Comey and I've never trusted Christopher Wray. WTH is going on at the FBI? This has got to be a major quandary for Biden.

 

In an email written to then FBI Associate Deputy Director Paul Abbate a week after the Capitol attack, the author warns that “a sizeable percentage of the (FBI) employee population…felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol.” 

 

https://www.justsecurity.org/83891/the-missing-review-of-fbis-january-6-intelligence-and-law-enforcement-failures/

[John Cotter]

8 hours ago, Chris Barnard said:

Perhaps the third position is occupied by those who can see how we move forward from all of this. 

Yes, those who don’t identify with “woke”, “left”, “right”, specific political parties or religions etc – in other words, those who avoid groupthink and try to figure things out for themselves. The only hope for humanity lies with these people.

Unfortunately, these people, as always, are in a minority, a sad fact which was documented 2,500 years ago by Plato in the Allegory of the Cave (the more realistic adult version of the Emperor’s New Clothes), which was based partly at least on the fate of his mentor, Socrates, who was condemned to death for challenging authoritarianism in Athens.

Authoritarianism is still the default mode of thinking of the majority, as evidenced for example by the Milgram obedience experiment and the covid psyop.

One of Samuel Beckett’s characters said, “People are bloody ignorant apes”, which is a literally true statement. The above-mentioned minority try to mitigate that condition by using their critical faculties, but the majority are condemned to the condition of gibbering baboons.

[Matthew Koch]

 

[Douglas Caddy]

Will he face prosecution?

Federalist Society leader's 'lavish' lifestyle under scrutiny after $43 million dark money transfer (msn.com)

[Douglas Caddy]

 

China leading US in technology race in all but a few fields, thinktank finds | China | The Guardian

[W. Niederhut]

12 hours ago, Matt Allison said:

I never trusted James Comey and I've never trusted Christopher Wray. WTH is going on at the FBI? This has got to be a major quandary for Biden.

 

In an email written to then FBI Associate Deputy Director Paul Abbate a week after the Capitol attack, the author warns that “a sizeable percentage of the (FBI) employee population…felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol.” 

 

https://www.justsecurity.org/83891/the-missing-review-of-fbis-january-6-intelligence-and-law-enforcement-failures/

      Yeah, Matt, something is rotten in Denmark, but not in the way that Tucker Carlson has claimed.  In reality, the FBI is infested with right wing goons, as in the case of Tony Ornato and the Secret Service.

      People tend to forget that Christopher Wray was the flying monkey appointed by Trump to replace James Comey and Andrew McCabe, after Trump fired both men in 2017 in an effort to shut down the FBI investigation of unregistered foreign agent Michael Flynn's illegal 2016 contacts with Sergei Kisylak.

       I also wondered after January 6th if Wray's FBI goons may have been complicit in obstructing proper security for the Capitol during Trump's coup attempt.  If the FBI had inside information about Trump's plan to block the certification of Biden's election, why didn't their intel result in heightened Capitol security on J6?

       Russian foreign agent Charles McGonigal and the FBI also played a role in sabotaging Hillary Clinton's 2016 candidacy.

       Wray also later obstructed the FBI investigation of Brett Kavanaugh's sexual assault history during Kavanaugh's Senate SCOTUS confirmation hearings.

       And, finally, Wray's FBI goons dragged their feet in Trump's Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.

       Mark Sumner published a good summary of Christopher Wray's rotten FBI tenure yesterday.

FBI agents undermined Russia investigation, downplayed Jan. 6, tried to block the Mar-a-Lago search (dailykos.com)

[Matthew Koch]

Real talk.. 

https://www.businessinsider.com/boomer-greed-ruined-economy-gen-z-millennials-labor-shortage-inflation-2023-3

The Great Boomer Bottleneck

Their greed destroyed the economy — and now millennials and Gen Z are paying the price

Parents: Is there anything we can't blame on them? They bear the responsibility for our neuroses, the less flattering aspects of our appearance, and, now, the worst inflationary crisis since the 1970s.

The story of our inflation headache is one of scarcity: not enough people, homes, or ships. But while the arguments about post-COVID price chaos have focused overwhelmingly on short-term, pandemic-created triggers — such as closed factories and government rescue spending — inflation is also a story of larger tectonic shifts within the population. 

Boomers, who were for a long time the largest generation in global history, are entering their twilight years. And as they ride off into the sunset, they're leaving behind an economy that isn't really built to accommodate the demands of the 21st century. Boomers have spent the past few decades shaping the world in such a way that has made the current crunch more painful and sets up future generations for continued deprivation.

The boomers' economy is brittle, stingy, and built on undersupply. While inflation may be cooling a bit, future prosperity for millennials, Gen Zers, and beyond depends on reversing this economywide bottleneck created by boomers.

Forget quiet quitting — let's talk about loud retirement

Among the more intensely discussed economic disruptions of the pandemic has been the widespread lack of workers. At the start of the COVID-19 emergency, there were too many potential causes of this labor shortage: loss of childcare, fear of illness, and surprisingly strong consumer demand that scrambled staffing needs. Many economic conservatives also blamed generous pandemic welfare measures like stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment insurance, which they claimed discouraged work. The shortage of labor pushed up wages for people able to keep a job and led the more obnoxious bosses and friends of your parents' to complain that "no one wants to work anymore."

Three years on, even after the programs that shouldered the blame for there being "no workers available" faded away, the labor shortage remains. The labor-force participation rate — the percentage of adults in the US who are either employed or actively seeking work — remains well below pre-pandemic levels. And researchers have determined the core source of this labor shortage: a wave of retirements in the generation complaining that young people lack a work ethic. The labor-force participation rate among people in their prime employment years, 25 to 54, is incredibly close to its pre-pandemic level, while the rate for those 55 and older is still down significantly. A working paper from researchers at the Federal Reserve found that a surge in retirees accounted for almost all of the decline in the labor-force participation rate up to October. A breakdown by the think tank Employ America in November found that a decline in participation by part-time workers 70 and older accounted for more than half the fall in employment of the older cohort.

It's a good thing that people over 70 are able to retire. But the flood of boomers now kicking back and relaxing has created a world with fewer people to replace them or to take care of them in their dotage. Experts at the Bank for International Settlements have concludedthat over the history of modern capitalism there's been an extremely strong relationship between a population's age structure and inflation. The connection makes intuitive sense: If inflation is caused by a mismatch between supply and demand, then a surge in the number of retired people simultaneously increases the demand for certain kinds of labor-intensive, low-paying work like home-care aides or hospitality while shrinking the overall labor force. These dynamics will cause labor-force churn and drive up costs.

Boomers shrank the labor force they need now

 

 

[W. Niederhut]

6 hours ago, John Cotter said:

Yes, those who don’t identify with “woke”, “left”, “right”, specific political parties or religions etc – in other words, those who avoid groupthink and try to figure things out for themselves. The only hope for humanity lies with these people.

 

John,

     A friendly word of advice.  You really need to stop posting about subjects that you don't understand.

     Among other fatal flaws in your thesis here, you don't seem to realize that the "Anti-woke" movement in contemporary right wing American politics is focused on banning books and obstructing the teaching of true American history-- about slavery, Jim Crow, voter suppression, white supremacy, misogyny, etc.

    If you're truly concerned about toxic "groupthink" in the U.S., you need to focus your attention on the anti-woke right wing goons who are currently banning books and threatening to arrest librarians and schoolteachers.

[Guest]

6 hours ago, John Cotter said:

Yes, those who don’t identify with “woke”, “left”, “right”, specific political parties or religions etc – in other words, those who avoid groupthink and try to figure things out for themselves. The only hope for humanity lies with these people.

💯%

6 hours ago, John Cotter said:

Unfortunately, these people, as always, are in a minority, a sad fact which was documented 2,500 years ago by Plato in the Allegory of the Cave (the more realistic adult version of the Emperor’s New Clothes), which was based partly at least on the fate of his mentor, Socrates, who was condemned to death for challenging authoritarianism in Athens.

Wasn’t Socrates charged with radicalising the young? Anyone effective today at opposing government experiences similar. 
 

The Soloman Asch experiments show the conformity. 

6 hours ago, John Cotter said:

One of Samuel Beckett’s characters said, “People are bloody ignorant apes”, which is a literally true statement. The above-mentioned minority try to mitigate that condition by using their critical faculties, but the majority are condemned to the condition of gibbering baboons.

Given the above, one of the greatest challenges a relatively intelligent person faces is the temptation to think like these sociopaths running the world. What makes you feel like that is the almost insurmountable struggle to wake the “gibbering baboons” up. They would rather outsource their thinking to others, and put their care and fate in the hands of authoritarians. The baboons think the minority of enlightened thinkers who don’t conform, are a plague on the earth. The enlightened thinkers see the baboons as a danger, as they are so easily influenced by authority and the crowd. Authority sees the baboons as useless, slavish, servant class, that is a sub species of human kind that will be thinned out when robotics gets to that point. The ruling class knows that all are threat if not controlled, coerced and supplied with necessary illusions. The biggest threat to the hegemony is the free thinkers, outside of the supplied illusions. When a genocide happens, or a dictatorships takes hold, its always those types that are the first to be put in chains or executed. That’s no different throughout history. 
 

The great con is that masses believe that authoritarians care about their wellbeing and survival. The absolute opposite is true. The higher the echelons you rise through in society, the more the constant is ‘survival of the fittest’, or the eugenics mindset. 

 

[Matthew Koch]

Good rule to remember if @W. Niederhutdoesn't cite a source you know it's not accurate. 

The same people who can't define what a woman is are telling us that the "Patriarchy" is the source of all our problems. Leftists have now turned public education into Conversion Therapy Centers for for the teaching of the false god; Equality. Perhaps the most disturbing cultural trend I have seen in the last 5 yrs is the destruction of childhood innocence in an attempt to validate adults. 

Stories like this are becoming more and more frequent and it's because propaganda like the 1619 project seek to demonize children who had nothing to do with slavery. When I lived in Hawaii the history of colonialism was being taught to my roommates 4 & 6 year old and they would wake of with nightmares. Just look at what William said: the teaching of true American history Slavery, Jim Crow, voter suppression, white supremacy, misongny.. These used to be taught at the college level because they have no baring in basic educational skills, now the youth don't have basic educational skills and now have unneccary prejudices against people who never did anything to them.. sounds alot like mental slavery. Unfortunately with out an actual education it will be extremely difficult for these people to emancipate themselves from this. 

 

[Roger Waage]

Adlai Stevenson and the True Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis (foreignpolicy.com)

[John Cotter]

4 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

John,

     A friendly word of advice.  You really need to stop posting about subjects that you don't understand.

     Among other fatal flaws in your thesis here, you don't seem to realize that the "Anti-woke" movement in contemporary right wing American politics is focused on banning books and obstructing the teaching of true American history-- about slavery, Jim Crow, voter suppression, white supremacy, misogyny, etc.

    If you're truly concerned about toxic "groupthink" in the U.S., you need to focus your attention on the anti-woke right wing goons who are currently banning books and threatening to arrest librarians and schoolteachers.

William,

Why do you feel the need to begin your post in a condescending insulting manner? This is a regular feature of your posts on this thread.

Ironically, in such cases, this behaviour is symptomatic of a psychological deficiency in the aggressor rather than in the target of the aggression.

Contrary to what you imply, I did not in any way endorse in my post an “anti-woke”, “right-wing” or any other movement. Therefore, your post is essentially a strawman argument.

A strawman argument is a logical fallacy. A logical fallacy is literally nonsense. But, as I’ve said previously, posting such gibberish is another regular feature of your posts on this thread.

Indeed, it bears out what I said in my post about gibbering baboons.

[Paul Cummings]

4 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

John,

     A friendly word of advice.  You really need to stop posting about subjects that you don't understand.

     Among other fatal flaws in your thesis here, you don't seem to realize that the "Anti-woke" movement in contemporary right wing American politics is focused on banning books and obstructing the teaching of true American history-- about slavery, Jim Crow, voter suppression, white supremacy, misogyny, etc.

    If you're truly concerned about toxic "groupthink" in the U.S., you need to focus your attention on the anti-woke right wing goons who are currently banning books and threatening to arrest librarians and schoolteachers.

Seeing this in our hometown in our school district. It's disturbing hearing and seeing it.

Edited March 2, 2023 by Paul Cummings

[Matt Allison]

yep.

 

 

[Benjamin Cole]

3 hours ago, Roger Waage said:

Adlai Stevenson and the True Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis (foreignpolicy.com)

Nice to see a fresh face with a worthy post.

I like discussing the Deep State in current context---with lessons learned from the Kennedy Administration and the JFKA. 

I hope you become a regular, and wear a "suit of armor" to fend off flak.