unable to consume material as rapidly as they did in the distant past
It's almost as if time slowed down around them the more they eat...
To put it bluntly, everything in the US public debate is a PR show far removed from reality. There is not a singe word, concept, talking point, and line of thinking that has not been captured, hollowed out, and hijacked by being incessantly used to push some agenda or another. Among other things this has resulted in a general populace that is overwhelmingly unable to think and talk about politics without falling into, reproducing, and disseminating the government/party line. This line, as witnessed by the state of the union, is a very dead end indeed.
And politics, being financed by private interest, is completely captured by it, with zero chance of anything happening against it. Trying to get anything done in the country is picking a fight with everyone who has any power in the country. Anything that gets fielded against private interests gets massively lobbied, advertised, and propagandized against, and ultimately, won against. The only things that get passed successfully are things that make someone a lot of money, either at voter expense, or at government dime.
My call is that this system is beyond repair. Any attempt to change any corner of it will instantly meet the overwhelming opposition of the rest of it. To repair it one would need to replace all of the people, institutions, and legislation in the country, as all of it by now only knows how to serve private interest, and this system will not go down without a fight. Therefore the country can only collapse, blow up, or devolve into a repressive police state to try to keep the public under control. Possibly, all three. Ever since GWB, both parties have been speedrunning the surveillance state and arming the police with military gear, so we can have some idea what they are planning for. My call is, get out or get ready.
It rarely happens that the school curriculum is up to date. Back in the days of the New Deal, a lot of the politicians did indeed work for the voters, but...
When Clinton shipped the jobs overseas, I guess he was working for the voters. When Bush ushered in the surveillance and eternal war era, I guess he was working for the voters. When Obama saved the banks instead of the voters in the economic crisis, and went on a bombing spree, I guess he was working for the voters. When Trump gave the rich the biggest tax cut ever in his first term, I guess he was working for the voters. When Biden went full genocide mode, I guess he was working for the voters. And now that brownshirts are roaming the streets, I guess Trump is again working for the voters.
Or maybe
Calling things memes is a meme, too. How many DC critters do we have that did not party with Epstein? And if we should find some that did not, have any of them taken a stand against any of it, or are they but mere enablers? Is it then a stretch to call them all pedophiles?
According to this study from Cambridge https://doi.org/10.1017/S15375... voter preference has no correlation with policy outcomes in the US. But money does. To rephrase it in the context of your post, politicians only care about the issues people with money have. And that's not really a surprise. The primary concern of getting power is getting financed to run your campaigns. The financing does not come from the voters. So your actual campaign is made to secure donor support, and you do that by promising, and having a track record of, working for their interests. Once you have the finances, you use them to create and advertise messaging you think will resonate with the voters. But as the study shows, that resonance of messaging does not translate into policy outcomes for the voters.
My call is that far from making voters powerless, admitting problems is the first step towards solving them. Thus, the most important empowering there is.
Seems to be the voters have become an universal excuse to not do the right thing.
"I don't want to sign this thing, but voters won't like me not signing it."
"Universal healthcare is a good idea, but voters don't like it."
Voters don't like minimum wage, student loan forgiveness, the social safety net, well, it seems, the voters maybe don't like the way the US is right now, but most importantly, supposedly, they decisevly and categorically reject any improvement to anything.
Or maybe the politicians do what they want, invent whatever half-plausible excuses to cover their asses, and if they can find a way to blame the voters for their own doing, well that would be the cherry on top.
Hey, look, a squirrel!
Western countries are run by people who like to rape children. Sometimes they also take time off to e.g. starve half a million Iraqi children to death, and call it "worth it" back in '96. These people belong behind bars. These people have no right to say anything about children anywhere, they have no right to concern themselves with children anywhere, and they have no right to exist in any other way but as the locked-up disgraced pedophiles they should be.
Because what kind of a new regime would the West even create when they succeed in getting rid of e.g. the Iranian one? One in their own image, of course. A child raping one. And this is not even a philosophical issue. The US-backed Afghanistan police was a child raping institution. All it did was shake down locals, sell drugs, and feast on that sweet sweet little boy butt. 20 years of that, and every other form of fucked-uppery imaginable going on in the country. Everything that went on under the US regime was so bad that leaving the country to Taliban was an actual non-controversial improvement.
Whatever our elites do and say in desperation to draw attention away from the fact, do not allow yourself to be distracted. Western countries are run by people who like to rape children. Let that sink in. And then understand that you need to fix your own country before you have any hopes of fixing another.
One of the best questions about the this clusterfuck that all of this is. Maybe Trump though he'd get some cheap PR out of it like when Obama did Osama in.
Khomeini was at home doing his regular routine. He could have chosen to get in the bunkers, but he did not do so. It would appear he wanted to be martyred. He was also old, accomplished, and possibly outdated. And by staying alive he would have probably had to live through Israel bombing his family members instead.
What is important for what follows is that Khomeini was a dove that refused to get nukes despite decades of obvious evidence confirming the fact that Iran does, in fact, need nukes. Now he's dead his fatwa about that does not need to be kept around, and it's very likely his replacement will be much more a hawk. So now it is just about certain that Iran will be starting their nuke program again, and finishing it, too.
You can write a small letter to Grandma in the filename. -- Forbes Burkowski, CS, University of Washington