“I will send my faithful old wise man to the weavers,” said the Emperor at last. “He will be best able to see how the cloth looks. He is a man of sense. No one can be better for his job than he is.”
So the faithful old wise man went into the hall where the thieves were working with all their might at their empty looms. “What can be the meaning of this?” thought the old man, opening his eyes very wide. “I cannot find the least bit of thread on the looms.” However, he did not say his thoughts aloud.
What!” thought he again. “Is it possible that I am a fool? I have never thought so myself. No one must know it now if I am so. Can it be, that I am unfit for my job? No, the Emperor must not know that either. I will never tell that I could not see the stuff.”
“Well, Sir!” said one of the weavers still pretending to work. “You do not say whether the cloth pleases you.”
“Oh, it is excellent!” replied the old wise man, looking at the loom through his spectacles. “This pattern, and the colors, yes, I will tell the Emperor without delay, how very beautiful I think them.”
And the Emperor was told that the non-existent fashion suit was beyond spectacular. No General threw his rank on the table. Nor did the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor resign in the name of telling the truth. Nope. They rallied like a quintessential Greek Chorus and grunted their approval of demented Joe’s claims.
But this party does not last forever. The naked Emperor, convinced that his hallucination is reality, parades before the public:
“I am quite ready,” said the Emperor. He appeared to be examining his handsome suit.
The lords of the bedchamber, who were to carry his Majesty’s train felt about on the ground as if they were lifting up the ends of the mantle. Then they pretended to be carrying something for they would by no means want to appear foolish or not fit for their jobs.
The Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital. All the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, “Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor’s new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!” No one would admit these much admired clothes could not be seen because, in doing so, he would have been saying he was either a simpleton or unfit for his job.
“But the Emperor has nothing at all on!” said a little child. “Listen to the voice of the child!” exclaimed his father. What the child had said was whispered from one to another. “But he has nothing at all on!” at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was upset, for he knew that the people were right. However, he thought the procession must go on now! The lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold, and the Emperor walked on in his underwear.
We are being governed by a senile Baghdad Bob. The point of Andersen’s fairy tale is not that the Emperor is a crazy man. He is. But his ability to do what he does is enabled by a horde of strap hangers more worried about keeping their sinecures than giving a damn about the welfare of the people they are supposed to serve.
Larry,
Biden’s just another in a long of Emperors with No Clothes we’ve had. From What’s the Meaning of Is Bill Clinton to Mushroom Cloud Bush and then Hope & Change Obama & MAGA Trump. All charlatans. Let’s not forget Star Trader Nancy & CCP bookie McConnell. All on the gravy train with All Narrative All The Time!
They got some of the most malevolent people running the show from Rubin, Summers, Paulson, Geithner to Greenspan, Bernanke & Yellen. And of course Brennan, Clapper, Bolton, Gates, Nuland, et al. All the guys running DOJ & FBI couldn’t have been more crooked.
The problem is not them. They’re just taking advantage of being in the Club. The problem is us. We keep playing Tweedle Dee vs Tweedle Dum while getting reamed. For 50+ years. That’s some level of masochism.
How or when did we become a nation of strap-hangers led by foolish kings? Why does my minds eye see King Fauci and the one stripped naked before us but still met with solid mummerings of praise and approval.
Did this transitions into lemmings start in the 1950-60’s: TV – the dominance of the visual medium – the 15 second sound bite – mass marketing – persona consultants- PR management- the medium is the message –From Nixon-Kennedy forward – The Selling of the President.
We now use our eyes more than our ears, when we make our voting choices. Does that explain the superficial harvest we now select for our country’s executive leadership? I propose changed voter expectations have played a major role in the increasingly superficial aspects of our choices, as much as only flawed candidates who are ultimately selected.
Was the outburst of the 1960-70’s only temporarily reactive to authority, but not fundamentally transformational? Or was it part of a cycle moving between authority and rebellions, and we are now at the bottom trough of the authority cycle?
Do we really want an imperial/infallible presidency or a human being Everyman?
Was a critical mass in America hungry for authority at this particular point in the above cycle, for any authority when they capitulated so readily for “covid”?
Or do they just like and prefer authority in their lives right now. Was this a positive, choice, a negative choice, or a choice made in a vacuum of no other authority bedrock in their lives: such as religion, family, institutions.
I wonder what will be the psychic impact ……should scovid be revealed as a hoax cover for a regular flu season. How will those so eagerly dependent on authority figures react to such news.
Not unlike ….should the AZ audit reveal what we think/assume it will reveal, how does a nation deal with mass deception coming from authority figures at the top?
I think a lot of cancel culture willingness comes from people who simply do not want to believe their current chosen authority figures (the government, “science) lies to them. Yet since the rise of TV and digitalized visual entertainment mediums, we have been, or can be, lied to on a daily basis now for at least three generations, with increasing difficulty discerning the real from the lies.
The little boy only had his own eyes in real time to use as his reality filter. Today we have digitized fantasy and AI.
“Or was it part of a cycle moving between authority and rebellions, and we are now at the bottom trough of the authority cycle?”
It certainly seems so. Technology advances but human nature never changes, the powerful try to retain power at all costs in never ending cycles.
Perhaps the old Hopf quote is an overview
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” Is it weak men that capitulated so readily for “covid”?
Great Hopf quote – thanks for passing it on. It will save a lot of extraneous typing, trying to say the same thing.
Deap,
“How or when did we become…..”
Look in a mirror California Boomer.
(1) Sunshine, (2) drugs, and the (3) teachers unions – the California Downfall story. Plus the post 1960’s in-migration of every other state’s nut cases. Be glad California is the Nation’s primary sponge for dysfunction.
Meanwhile my own Calif story today is more the little Dutch boy who tries to stick his finger in the dike, to hold back the sea. No SF play on words allowed on that one.
Words from the musical Gigi flood me now …. “Pray we will be Wellington, not Bonaparte”…… as the countdown quickens for the Sept 14 Gov Newsom recall attempt.
In the drugs and sunshine ethos of California, nothing is gaining much traction for this upcoming recall; except Factor Three – the teachers union and SEIU are out in force to defeat it, dropping leaflets, running ads, and getting elections departments aligned with “neutral” GOTV efforts.
Will this recall election prove there is a stealth GOP force in this state after all? Can anything beat the embedded SEIU- Dominion vote counters? Or as a state trendsetter, is the rest of nation doomed to go down into the Democrat super-majority rat hole along with us?
Be kind, some of are really trying to bring back the California we knew and grew up in …many, many decades ago. The one taken away by the mass migration of east coast liberals in the late 1960s’ It wasn’t our fault – we were pretty conservative and did give you Nixon and Reagan …for a while.
Deap
Are you a native or from “back east?”
Native Californian, but lived “back east” in DC during the Watergate years, four years living abroad and then back to Calif again in the 1970s. I have live both sides of the coin out here in California – pre-1960’s and now post 1970’s. From being the Golden State to now being clearly the fool’s gold state.
The steepest decline in the state took place in the early 2000’s, after we put in term limits, ironically to get rid of Kamala Harris’s old boyfriend Willie Brown who was a political force of nature with anSF constituent the would never turn him out.
Little did we know what we had gotten into with term limits, which makes Willie Brown now look like he should have been given a Nobel Prize for pragmatic politics.
You simply cannot open the back door to high birth rate illegals which turned a state designed for 20 million almost overnight to become a state of 40 million with zero infrastructure improvements and a public K-12 system that has been forced now to become bi-lingual at best or Spanish only at worst with gradual introduction of English from kindergarten on -even if you are a native English speaker..
Whiiiiiiiiiine goes the boomer. The right term limit is an election.
A long but fascinating read.
http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy-systemic-collapse-and-pandemic-simulation/
There are more hidden forces than is plain to see. I recall well the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis and then the “rescue” of the big speculators while the Mom & Pop speculators who got in on the real estate frenzy were foreclosed. Followed up with large Wall St pools of capital buying residential property.
If one looks we can see who has benefited financially from the pandemic. A huge cost has been Liberty. However the division and distraction to keep the focus elsewhere continue with each cycle of “crisis”.
If this is a pandemic, why then don’t we have serious and transparent investigation into the origins? The fact that we don’t have it speaks louder than all the flying rhetoric.
Sam
I came across that essay and was skeptical when I saw the author was a professor of Critical Theory (Frankfurt school). However, if one is happy to ignore the small amount of Marxist terminology therein, I agree it is well worth a read. The following excerpt is a good summary of the author’s key thesis:
“The mainstream narrative should therefore be reversed: the stock market did not collapse (in March 2020) because lockdowns had to be imposed; rather, lockdowns had to be imposed because financial markets were collapsing”
Of course this sounds like Alice in Wonderland nonsense, that is until you put it into the wider context of the dire state of global financial system – which the author attempts to do. I believe the pandemic and the extreme response to it cannot be properly understood without an appreciation of the crisis in the US economy. Just one example; the Fed’s balance sheet has increased from 5.4% of GDP in 2007 to 36% today and it is increasing at a parabolic rate. The 2008 financial crisis has merely been swept under the carpet and the Fed’s gargantuan asset purchase programs are the only thing keeping the economy from imploding. Something had to be done before someone cried out that the economy has no clothes.
And before the screams of “conspiracy theory” drown out rational discourse we must again bear in mind the WEF’s public position that the pandemic is an opportunity to bring free market capitalism to an end: “To build back better, we must reinvent capitalism“. Of course the WEF don’t call the “better” system what it is; neo-feudalism, instead the term used is “Stakeholder Capitalism” – it’s just that the stakeholders will not be you and I.
Is it so hard to believe that the extraordinarily powerful global banking elite who run our world have exaggerated the pandemic via their influence in bodies like the WHO & other national public health regulators (many of which are funded by the WEF)? I do not think so. To the skeptics who doubt the degree of influence this group have, please watch the following montage before commenting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkcaeaD45MY
Barabara Ann,
The most important thing about “Build Back Better” is that the same people will be in charge.
Fred
Yes, from their POV. From ours the important things are to recognize that the Great Reset means the enslavement of mankind; that it is underway already and that it must be stopped at all costs.
“the Fed’s gargantuan asset purchase programs are the only thing keeping the economy from imploding.”
Imploded economy means ousted leaders, the WEF didn’t have to twist any arms to get Western leaders to join “Build Back Better” to retain power at our expense.
Barbara Ann,
Debt globally is on an exponential growth curve. It has to be. Cash flows from productive assets cannot even redeem interest, let alone principal. So debt growth not only has to roll over maturing debt + interest on that debt but even more is required to keep the leveraged asset values from deflating or else the whole credit edifice collapses.
One of the big problems is that the productivity of debt continues to decline and in some ways has already reached negative values.
https://hoisington.com/pdf/HIM2021Q2NP.pdf
We have now reached the stage that central banks have to continue to create liquidity and monetize debt at faster rates and at even larger scale. As you note the growth in the size of the balance sheet of a central bank relative to size of the economy. The Fed is accelerating. However the ECB, BOJ & PBOC are already at stratospheric heights. There are no real markets in most government debt as the central bank owns most of it.
A Great Financial Reset is no doubt coming. And we know who will be left holding the bag. What we don’t know is when it happens and what those holding the bag will do. At this point the bag holders are too busy with circuses.
Larry – may I add just a postscript to the autopsy? –
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-58454434
This applies to the Biden adminstration as well. They planned for one exit scenario – it didn’t come off. They shifted rapidly to another. I see no failure here.
I know little about General Sir Nick Carter. I haven’t liked some ot the statements he’s nade in the past. But this statement rings true.
And I must say I feel rather more pro Sir Nick after hearing this statement. Together with Angela Merkel he’s about the only prominent figure this side of the Atlantic who hasn’t shoved the “blame” onto “the Americans”. That was impressive.
E. O:
re: Carter: “The chief of the defence staff told the BBC’s Andrew Marr that nobody predicted how “fragile” the Afghan government was.”
Such statement show, IMO, either prevarication or incompetence. Your pick.
Ishmael Zechariah
Mr Zechariah,
I’ve no idea whether this Afghanistan withdrawal heralds a rethink of neocon activities generally by the Biden administration or whether they’re just cutting their losses in one area in order to push harder in others. Have to wait and see whether they stop wrecking the joint in Syria and Iraq, or carry on with trying to destabilise Russia.
If it’s the first, if Biden’s now going for a true America first policy and wants to tend to his own country rather than wrecking others, then that’s what I was hoping Trump would be able to do. Not only is there no doubt that America is in need of a lot of tending to at the moment, it’d change the picture over here.
That’s because what the governments of my own country and of other European countries get up to in the wrecking line is often done on the back of the American neocons.
As said when I was first permitted to submit comments to the Colonel’s site, several years ago now, the European mini neocons ride on the back of American military power. They are the jackals that come in after the kill and feast on the scraps the lion leaves for them.
It’ll certainly cramp the style of the European mini-neocons if they can no longer get at those leavings. Most of the dismay and indignation seen in Europe over the Afghanistan business is due to just that fear that the lion might possibly pull out of the neocon business. What a disaster for the jackals! They’d have to kill their own prey and they just aren’t up to it. They’re indignant in case Uncle Sam stops killing it for them.
So there’s any amount of bullshit flying around at the moment my side of the Atlantic. The Americans are letting us down, they say. We can no longer rely on them and must therefore beef up our own independent military forces.
That’s the context in which the manner of the Afghanistan withdrawal is spoken of in Europe. We’re supposed to believe that the Americans are so played out, so incompetent, that they can’t even organise a workmanlike withdrawal.
Rubbish, and the more honest among the Europeans say so. There was a plan A that all the countries involved, not just the Americans, were on board with. It didn’t work so they switched to the messier and more difficult plan B.
I know little of military matters and am of course particularly conscious of that lack of knowledge on this site. But I looked as closely as I was able at what’s come out about those extensive pre-withdrawal discussions and negotiations between all the parties involved, at how a consensus was arrived at on the manner of that withdrawal, and how the plans for withdrawal were quickly and expertly changed when circumstances changed. I see much to lament there but little to object to.
I’ll bet it was pretty frantic, coordinating a withdrawal in those quickly changing circumstances and with so many moving parts to worry about. I’m still amazed they pulled it off without a full scale disaster. But they did so; and it ill becomes the many European allies who were on board with the American plans all the way along to now turn round and claim that the Americans screwed up.
Mr. E. O.;
Please save some bandwidth and call me IZ. Most do.
I have no issues w/ your latest post. I also think that US forces handled the withdrawal reasonably well. The fates of collaborators, LBGTQX degenerates, various governmental “NGO” proselytizers, feminist freaks, etc. are not issues as far as I am concerned. Those who really care can suit up and dance w/ the Talibs. I will cheer them on.
OTOH, when someone with flag rank says “nobody predicted how “fragile” the Afghan government was”, I call this a deliberate prevarication of the CYA variety. Quite a few, including our Colonel, foresaw this exact end give or take a few weeks.
As our fellow pilgrim, Fred-the- ex-submariner recommends, those who lied for the past twenty odd years should be given the Admiral Byng treatment. You might include Tony Bliar among these. That would gladden my heart.
Pax.
Ishmael Zechariah
IZ – ” I also think that US forces handled the withdrawal reasonably well.”
We agree, though given that it could have been a total disaster after Ghani’s flight we might perhaps upgrade “reasonably” to “very”?
On the Byng treatment, if we gave those who lied for the past twenty odd years that treatment we’d have to shoot most of Her Majesty’s Government for the past twenty odd years.
Sounds good but I doubt her Majesty would approve. She could reasonably complain that it was us who voted the bastards in in the first place.
IZ,
If one compares the overall US withdrawal with the Soviet withdrawal (not just the ultimate weeks) the evidence says incompetent.
First, an astounding quantity of military hardware was abandoned which I would guess is already on its way to China and Russia.
Clearly the plan was to use Afghanistan after withdrawal as a base to harass China (and probably Russia) under a friendly and strong Kabul gov’t. The sudden collapse of this plan can be presumed to have stranded assets in the Afghan hinterlands, some likely captured, and under great persuasion to provide info on assets in the Stan’s and China.
Marine’s raw footage of the Kabul evacuation proves it was as well managed as a Black Friday sale at Walmart: minus the babies, guns and the barbed wire.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/marine-kabul-evacuation-afghanistan-withdrawal-video
The Admiral Byng treatment would solve that leadership problem.
Larry
Alice in Wonderland meets George Orwell is exactly right. This passage from Alice Through the Looking-Glass is the origin of the phrase “Humpty Dumpty language”. Language like this, where words have lost all objective meaning, describes well the 24/7 BS used to persuade us all that the “Biden” presidency is not utterly naked:
Lol.
Karl Rove; “We create the reality. You just write about it.”
I think the conceptual issues go much deeper than politics and sociology. Usually most people don’t have time to go too deep, but the fact is that the current breakdown goes to the nature of our reality. After a few hundred thousand years of “go forth and multiply,” we are reaching the edge of the petri dish. Trying to apply our linear, goal oriented, narrative based models to a reality that is circular, cyclical, feedback driven and thermodynamic has reached its breaking point.
Our modern ideal is efficiency, which is to do more with less, so the ideal state will be when we can do everything with nothing.
We assume nature to be cruel, but predators only take what they need, not all they can. That is one of the many lessons to be learned.
Yes, large numbers of people are susceptible to hive mindedness, but that’s the nature of the beast. The problem is that we all want rights, but not responsibilities. Even democracy tends to focus on the rights and leave the responsibilities to someone or something else, like parents or religion. Which prove a weak barrier, when everyone wants theirs.
The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement.
To be politically incorrect for this blog, but Chinese society, through all its permutations, has been evolving for some four thousand years. They understand the ups and downs are both necessary, if not always pleasant. When we had the choice of Jimmy Carter saying to put on a sweater, versus Ronald Reagan saying to put it on the credit card, our current fate was sealed. Debt doesn’t matter, until it does.
As Putin is showing, the bull is power, the matador is art.
https://twitter.com/isaacstanbecker/status/1434140352227729420?s=21
This is the Party of Davos.
After 04 in the US military today it doesn’t reflect anything that looks like 04 and below. I witnessed it and wanted nothing to do with it. Pure politics, nepotism, crony capitalism on tap. It should all be set on fire and burnt to the ground at this point. There is no fixing this situation. The depravity has reached a level of no return.
Babeltuap
“After 04 in the US military today” After “04” what?
He might want to signal: after the US won? Bush 43 famously declared victory in mind?
Mission accomplished speech, May 1, 2003. Then followed by an orderly withdrawal?
But yes, cryptic:
After 04 in the US military today it doesn’t reflect anything that looks like 04 and below.
Assuming admittedly ‘below’ signals ‘after’
LeAnder
I usually understand your English but not this time.
English Outsider, is this news or fake news. Australia no longer pursuing Covid-Zero, but is now demanding Injections-100%?
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/09/06/australian-premier-announces-all-non-vaccinated-citizens-will-be-locked-out-of-economy-freedom-only-permitted-to-vaccinated/
Deap – The situation with Covid in Australia I don’t know about. Maybe the best country to keep an eye on as we trudge towards Omega is Denmark.
Uniformly good health service, fit population, high level of genomic testing, fast reaction times by the government and high level of compliance with control measures. They also have most of their people vaccinated. They’re now coming off control measures except for foreign travel.
So we may regard Denmark as the test bed for the “orthodox” or “mainstream” control measures that you and very many others object to or consider unnecessary. If, after all their efforts, it goes wrong in Denmark then your objections to that orthodox approach will be validated. If they do better than the rest of us then we’ll know that mass vaccination and carefully calibrated control measures do in fact work.
My layman’s guess is that they will do better than the rest of us, a lot better – but there’s a hitch. I gather that Danish epidemiologists have been concerned for a year or more about vaccine escape. They were concerned about it well before most others were even thinking about it. If one of the variants emerging as we head towards Omega manages vaccine escape in a big way, and if that variant proves more deadly than the disease Covid has been up until now, then all that hard work in Denmark goes for nothing.
So well worth keeping an eye on Denmark. Probably the most well constructed test bed we could find, as the dispute between the “Covidians” and the “Covid deniers” rages on.
FYI: “Covidian Deniers” are not necessarily Annual Flu Season-Deniers.
That changes the dimensions of the “covid” arguments, and their attendant election year hyper-hysteria. Cannot force just two categories: (1) Pro-covidians and (2) Covidian-Deniers
Please make room for (3) Covid-Cynics, in any current bi-polar world view.
Sorry Deap – I think I used the wrong terms. Really only meant to refer to those on board with the “Orthodox” or “Mainstream” take on Covid as opposed to those who believe it’s either being handled wrong or doesn’t need handling.
Should have said so, but it’s a bit of a mouthful. No overtones intended.
I’m one of the ones still on board but am still very concerned about the civil liberties side.
EO,
I don’t believe there are many “Covid-deniers”. That’s a strawman.
There are many however who object to vaccine mandates and passports to deny employment & public services especially in light of the fact that the vaxxed are also spreaders. None are objecting to those that want the vaccine.
There are also some who believe that the covid policies of lockdown & masks were more theater than based on any scientific evidence. Clearly there is much to debate on these policies that disproportionately affected the working class and school-going children. The Zoom & pensioned class were much less impacted as their checks kept coming.
Harvard epidemiologist & professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff says it well.
https://twitter.com/MartinKulldorff/status/1340352565481975812?s=20
The control group is actually another Nordic country, Sweden. Low vax rates, no lockdown & mask mandates. Zero covid deaths over the past several weeks.
We already see results from highly vaxxed places – Gibraltar, Israel & Cornell University. The vax is not preventing infection & those vaxxed are also spreaders. The logical conclusion is that even if you get to 100% vaxxed there will still be infection & spread. On the other hand those previously infected are demonstrating a higher resistance to re-infection than the vaxxed. Since the current vaccines are non-sterilizing and we have a mutating virus, what are the implications of vaccine mandates? This vaccine rollout has been more political than any previous vaccine or therapeutic. We should also note that considering the enormous costs of current policies there has been much less effort and money for therapeutics especially if the virus will remain endemic.
The concern that folks like me have are the authoritarian policies not backed by any evidence. If as some say it is like the flu and regular boosters will be required, then the corollary is that we have not had lockdowns or flu-shot mandates, even as some die of the flu.
Thanks. The points you raise worry a lot of people, me too.
On control groups, are there not too many variables to do country by country comparisons? As Mr Newhill pointed out some time ago it’s even difficult to draw conclusions within a country, given the very different conditions obtaining within different areas of a country.
It was more that in terms of the application of what I’ve termed “mainstream” medical thinking Denmark comes out ahead – so should the “mainstream” approach fail there we’ll know it was unlikely to have worked anywhere.
“We should also note that considering the enormous costs of current policies there has been much less effort and money for therapeutics especially if the virus will remain endemic.”
Yes, bit of a fail there. We put money and effort into vaccines and should have done a lot more on therapeutics too. But I see the subject of the handling of the disease has just been raised above.