"How many of us would buy a car, a truck, or any other technology if we were told the new tech would last only 40% as long as roughly comparable older tech?"
This is off-topic re the F-35, but let's face it: pretty much NO new versions of anything last as long as older models. Most items we have are disposable, or nearly so. Cars are literally designed so as not to be fixable by shade-tree mechanics. One sensor glitch, and bam! the vehicle is out of commission. My husband sees this all the time in the heavy trucks he drives for a living. With some products---e.g., refrigerators, TVs---it's a wash when it comes to repair versus replace. Again, by design. Meanwhile, 1950s-era cars and appliances, if properly maintained, still function., albeit without some modern bells and whistles.
Regarding the F-35, from what you've told us, Bill, it seems to have been proposed as a universal solution to most of the military branches' needs, which, to this civilian, seems a losing proposition on its face. And yes, if it's been on the drawing board for over 20 years and still can't perform adequately, how could it be anything but a boondoggle?
THE TOTALITARIAN DYSTOPIA IS ALREADY HERE by Caitlin Johnstone 041623
I had a nightmare that I leaked some classified information and got arrested and waterboarded by New York Times reporters.
###
The goal is to keep us fighting with as much hostility as possible over issues which inconvenience our rulers as little as possible. It's really amazing how successful they are at this.
The other day I saw a video of a guy angrily running over a case of Budweiser with a monster truck for reasons that made no sense to me, and everyone was excitedly yelling their opinions about it, and I was just like, oh my god we are so fucked. They've got us totally wrapped up.
###
You couldn't design a more effective totalitarian dystopia than the one we're in right now. One where everyone's brainwashed by propaganda without even knowing it, where everyone thinks, acts, votes and shops exactly as their rulers want them to, all while thinking they are free.
People worry about technocratic escalations like increasing surveillance, digital IDs, central bank digital currencies etc, and rightly so; those measures do give the powerful a greater degree of power over the populace. But many incorrectly imagine that a future technocratic dystopia created by those measures would look a lot different from the dystopia we're in right now, and it simply would not. Those measures would be used to help keep this current system locked in place, not to create a new one.
People imagine totalitarian dystopia as some dark threat looming in the future because they don't understand how profoundly unfree we already are right now. They think we're free because we can choose what to buy at the supermarket and call the president "Brandon", but we're not. They imagine that our rulers have some grand conspiracy to create a dystopia where they can force us all to do as they wish, not realizing that we're already in a dystopia where we are doing exactly as they wish. It really can't be improved upon. They're just locking it in.
Seriously, think about it: what could the rulers of western society possibly extract from us that they're not already getting? There's no meaningful political opposition, no antiwar movement, no anti-capitalist movement, very little critical thought — they've got total control. Everything we do in this dystopia is designed to funnel profit into the coffers of the oligarchs and power into the hands of the imperialists, and all efforts to resist and change these funneling systems have been successfully quashed by mass-scale psychological manipulation.
This totalitarian dystopia looks like freedom because they let us more or less do what we want, while controlling what it is that we want to do using mass-scale manipulation. They further bolster this by creating systems where what we do has little or no meaningful effect. Even if we had actual software in our brains that gave our rulers total and complete control over our minds, they'd have the masses think and behave in more or less the same way they do right now.
The primary weapon of our totalitarian rulers is not surveillance, police robots, digital IDs or CBDCs — their primary weapon is propaganda. The system of mass-scale psychological conditioning they've created is unlike anything that has ever existed in history. The ability to detect and suppress an emerging revolution is vastly inferior to the ability to use psychological conditioning to prevent people from even thinking about revolting in the first place. That's what real power looks like. That's total control.
This is a dystopia whose inhabitants all move fully in alignment with the will of their rulers, without ever even thinking that they are unfree or should try to become so.
Try to design a more effective totalitarian dystopia than this.
You can't. It's perfect.
Propaganda is the real mechanism of control, and that's what we're going to have to fight if we're ever to become free. The only way out of this giant matrix of psychological control is to show people how unfree we are, how they're being deceived, how much better things could be. Awaken people to the lies, to the real nature of the political, educational and media institutions designed to keep us enslaved, weaken public trust in the propaganda machine, and then we might have the beginnings of the possibility of real change. Until then, we're locked in.
###
Who you think of as an anti-authoritarian hero says a lot about you as a person. If I ask you to picture someone fighting the power and you think of Tank Man or Navalny or some historical figure instead of the living people fighting the power structure you actually live under, it means you have swallowed the lie that your own government and its allies are good and virtuous in the here and now, and that "fighting the power" is something that could only happen for noble reasons in other countries or back during other points in history.
In reality, the need to "fight the power" is greater under the US-centralized empire which rules over anyone who's likely to be reading these words, because the US-centralized empire is the most murderous and tyrannical power structure in the world right now.
So when I ask you to picture an anti-authoritarian figure who comes to mind, if you are lucid you won't picture someone like Tank Man, Navalny, Gandhi, Mandela or MLK. You'll picture someone like Julian Assange: someone who's fighting the real power where it stands here and now.
Let me ask another question: Is there some way on Substack [or WordPress] to view all the comments that somebody has made over time in one place?
On Disqus, every comment someone has made is collected and viewable [along with "Likes" and response Comments] at one's Profile. i don't see anything like that on Substack or WordPress.
Hey Bill: Do You know how and why Dennis' comments were deleted? And by whom? Who else can delete Comments besides the original poster and [i assume with just cause] You? Can somebody at Substack?
i just got a e-mail from BV showing that he had just made the following comment: "Bill and Jeff, for some reason this morning my comments in this thread have been deleted. Dennis." But when i click on the "View comment" button, his comment is not shown.
Any idea what's going on? One of the deleted comments was "Liked" by You.
Caitlin Johnstone’s April 18 headline says it all: FREE THOSE WHO EXPOSE GOVERNMENT MISDEEDS, JAIL THOSE WHO TRY TO CONCEAL THEM
She concludes:
As Julian Assange once said, "The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security."
People shouldn't be punished for revealing the secrets of the government, governments should be punished for keeping secrets from the people.
It shouldn't be illegal to expose the abuses and deceptions of your government, it should be illegal for your government to abuse and deceive.
The government says it needs secrecy in order to win wars and protect freedom. History says the government needs secrecy in order to start wars and restrict freedom.
The amount of power you have should be inversely proportional to the amount of secrecy you're allowed. Those with the most power should be a completely open book who aren't permitted to hide anything from anyone, while those with the least power should have complete unimpeded privacy. Instead it's the exact opposite: ordinary powerless people are getting more and more surveilled, while governments get more and more secretive and unaccountable.
And as a follow-on to the earlier Caitlin Johnstone and Jeff Thomas pieces on the realities of living in America today, here is the inimitable George Carlin back in his 2005 HBO special "Life Is Worth Losing" to tie it all together.
As Robert Scheer put it: "Carlin includes one of his most iconic bits critiquing America's consumerism, education, politics and the myth of the American Dream. In order for the American Dream fantasy to work, Carlin said Americans have to be smart enough to get the jobs but just dumb enough to not question the status quo. As the iconic line goes, 'It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.'
"'They got you by the balls!' Carlin exclaims as he lays out the total control of wealthy elites in the U.S. from local politics to big media in this short clip. Carlin continued, explaining that the American Dream also works by having a population devoid of critical thinking skills, a population willing to 'passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with lower pay, longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears as soon as you go to collect it...'"
Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-54c0IdxZWc with immediate links to the rest of the HBO special and other Carlin rants that are even more spot on today than they were 18 years ago.
As a follow-on to the earlier piece by Caitlin Johnstone… :
THE ELIMINATION OF REASON by Jeff Thomas / Doug Casey’s International Man 041723
Recently, I paid for an item with the exact amount requested, including 89 cents in change. The salesgirl stared at the coins and clearly wasn’t sure what to do. Eventually, she reached for a calculator and began to total them up one at a time: 25 + 25 + 25 + 10 + 4. Having been schooled in the age prior to calculators, I’m accustomed to doing arithmetic in my head, but this particular instance evidenced a level of "dumbing down" over the last fifty years that was beyond what I had realised.
Since the dumbing down has been so consistently prevalent over the decades, it’s clear that this is no accident, nor is it an experiment in "alternative education" that hasn’t worked out as was intended. It’s clearly the result of a conscious effort to diminish the average person’s ability to think. As such, it’s had a long gestation period and was expected to require generations, but was nevertheless a conscious goal.
But why on earth would the controlling elite of any country seek to diminish the power to reason? Surely, reason is the basis of all independent thought – the catalyst for new ideas and improvement on existing goods and systems.
The answer, in a word, is control. Independent thought is the prime enemy of those who seek to dominate a people. For that reason, those who rule will happily sacrifice technological and social progress if it means that their dominance can be increased.
CONTROLLING BOTH THE ANSWERS AND THE QUESTIONS
It’s the nature of humans to question their situation and their surroundings. However, a clever leader will surmise that that means he needs to not only provide the answers, but the questions. If he can keep the people preoccupied with questions that are of little consequence to him, and provide answers that are easy for the people to absorb, he will control the areas of thought and, in so doing, will diminish the likelihood that he or his actions will be questioned.
Since time immemorial, successful leaders have understood that, in order to take the attention off their actions, carefully constructed distractions are called for.
For centuries, when leaders have been under criticism by their minions, they’ve used the distraction of war. War not only tends to unify a people, it also helps them to accept the removal of their basic rights for an "emergency" period. (Of course, most leaders don’t replace the rights after the emergency has ended. War therefore is also a good tool to increase tyranny, generally.) As Ludwig von Mises observed:
"War was not an affair of the peoples; it concerned the rulers only. The citizens detested war, which brought mischief to them and burdened them with taxes and contributions."
However, in modern times, propagandists have become far more sophisticated. Let’s look at a few. Adolf Hitler said,
"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually, they will believe it."
Vladimir Lenin was a great believer in the idea that,
"The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive."
Two of the greatest inventions in making propaganda easy to sell have been political parties and television. In the days of kings, it was common to hate the king and want his downfall, but, with political parties, it’s possible to get one half of the people hating one party and the other half hating the other party. Then, all that’s necessary is to assure that each party has roughly the same amount of apparent power and the people will focus all their attention on the hatred of the opposing party and fail to notice those who are pulling the strings equally for both parties. The kings thereby remain the kings forever, whilst remaining invisible. The idea is not to defeat the anger of the people, but to redirect it. As Friedrich Hayek commented,
"The skillful propagandist then has the power to mold their minds in any direction he chooses, and even the most intelligent and independent people cannot entirely escape that influence if they are long isolated from all other sources of information."
That last phrase is key. In today’s world, we possess the most significant propaganda tool that has ever been invented: television.
Through this medium, we can create a major issue out of a minor incident, create two opposing viewpoints, each designed to appeal to one group or the other, and then repeat the propaganda unceasingly until the people have become thoroughly polarised from each other on the issue. In this fashion, we can begin with a minor incident, such as the one in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Arrange for one set of pundits to state unequivocally that the problem was racist Caucasian police, whilst presenting another set of pundits who just as vehemently proclaim that the problem is lawless blacks. Then, as Brother Adolf states, repeat the message endlessly – in this case, on the news seven days a week, from morning till night, for over six months.
Mission accomplished. The conservative group has redoubled its belief in the necessity for an increased police state, whist the liberal group dug in its heels on its perception of class warfare and the need for increased collectivism to combat that class warfare.
Once this issue has played itself out, it can disappear completely from the television and a new issue takes its place.
As stated above, in creating this means of propaganda, we have first created the question in the mind of the people, then we have spoon-fed two opposing answers – one designed to appeal to those who are by nature conservative and one to those who are by nature liberal. If we do our job well, the groups will become so blindly polarized that no social gathering, such as a dinner party, will contain both liberal and conservative invitees, or it will be a disaster.
All liberals will be unified in their thinking, just as all conservatives will be. Of course, those who are libertarian will be vilified by both of the other groups, as they represent a third alternative. (The success in indoctrinating a people and destroying their ability to reason can be measured by their vehemence in rejecting a third choice of reason.)
However, reason must be blocked out on a continuous basis, or there’s danger that it may return over time. As early as 600 BC, Lao Tzu had figured this out:
"The muddiest water is cleared as it is stilled."
Hence the importance of the endless repetition of the message. As a news item, Ferguson was deserving of a minor mention, perhaps once a week. But by suspending the outcome (whether charges would be laid against the officer), fuel could be added to the rhetoric fire day in, day out, for months on end. When it had finally outlived its usefulness, it was time to create another event. Of course, one shooting every six months in a population of 320,000,000 is a minor blip, but, through the continuous carpet-bombing of the viewer’s brain with the same rhetoric, two such events a year would seem like an epidemic.
Once we reach this level of thought control, it’s possible to offer utterly unacceptable candidates for public office and still have them gain election. All that’s needed is that they parrot the same rhetoric the people have become dependent on as a replacement for reason.
Whether it be Communist Russia, Nazi Germany or Fascist America, once the people have been successfully conditioned to allow Big Brother to dictate thought, the next step has always been totalitarian rule.
“How many F-15s would it take to replace one F-35 in combat? Also; Has it been designed in such a way that the airframe can be somewhat easily replaced?
My understanding is that the F-35 would rule the airspace in combat against any other known aircraft.” Question from a relative regarding this article.
as i recall f-16 has an 8000 hour airframe life, i may be wrong.
f-15 has advantage of 2 engines which gives enough thrust to remove weighty mass/durability 'cost trades'.
and 2 engines means higher mission reliability and better chance of safe return.
why us navy rejected f-16 and went f-18 which now seems to be unretireable!
all that said f-35 enjoys the 'benefits' of a pratt and whitney super engine similar to that enjoyed by f-16 in its early years.
the f-35 engine must be run near thermal limits to fail to meet the propulsion specifications, main advantage over f-16 p&w-f100 is f-35 has not created as many smoking holes....
I was around a tac hq during engine wars when the usaf re-developed the ge competitor and split buys based on certain metrics the engines among new f-16 buys in the mid 1980;s, the drawback was one engine brand had to populate a whole fighter wing as the logistic chain was vast different.
f-35 needs a new engine and a beefed up computer architecture, massive upgrades to meet performance set in 1996!
"How many of us would buy a car, a truck, or any other technology if we were told the new tech would last only 40% as long as roughly comparable older tech?"
This is off-topic re the F-35, but let's face it: pretty much NO new versions of anything last as long as older models. Most items we have are disposable, or nearly so. Cars are literally designed so as not to be fixable by shade-tree mechanics. One sensor glitch, and bam! the vehicle is out of commission. My husband sees this all the time in the heavy trucks he drives for a living. With some products---e.g., refrigerators, TVs---it's a wash when it comes to repair versus replace. Again, by design. Meanwhile, 1950s-era cars and appliances, if properly maintained, still function., albeit without some modern bells and whistles.
Regarding the F-35, from what you've told us, Bill, it seems to have been proposed as a universal solution to most of the military branches' needs, which, to this civilian, seems a losing proposition on its face. And yes, if it's been on the drawing board for over 20 years and still can't perform adequately, how could it be anything but a boondoggle?
Spend spend spend
Kill kill kill
Sanction sanction sanction
Usa usa usa
THE TOTALITARIAN DYSTOPIA IS ALREADY HERE by Caitlin Johnstone 041623
I had a nightmare that I leaked some classified information and got arrested and waterboarded by New York Times reporters.
###
The goal is to keep us fighting with as much hostility as possible over issues which inconvenience our rulers as little as possible. It's really amazing how successful they are at this.
The other day I saw a video of a guy angrily running over a case of Budweiser with a monster truck for reasons that made no sense to me, and everyone was excitedly yelling their opinions about it, and I was just like, oh my god we are so fucked. They've got us totally wrapped up.
###
You couldn't design a more effective totalitarian dystopia than the one we're in right now. One where everyone's brainwashed by propaganda without even knowing it, where everyone thinks, acts, votes and shops exactly as their rulers want them to, all while thinking they are free.
People worry about technocratic escalations like increasing surveillance, digital IDs, central bank digital currencies etc, and rightly so; those measures do give the powerful a greater degree of power over the populace. But many incorrectly imagine that a future technocratic dystopia created by those measures would look a lot different from the dystopia we're in right now, and it simply would not. Those measures would be used to help keep this current system locked in place, not to create a new one.
People imagine totalitarian dystopia as some dark threat looming in the future because they don't understand how profoundly unfree we already are right now. They think we're free because we can choose what to buy at the supermarket and call the president "Brandon", but we're not. They imagine that our rulers have some grand conspiracy to create a dystopia where they can force us all to do as they wish, not realizing that we're already in a dystopia where we are doing exactly as they wish. It really can't be improved upon. They're just locking it in.
Seriously, think about it: what could the rulers of western society possibly extract from us that they're not already getting? There's no meaningful political opposition, no antiwar movement, no anti-capitalist movement, very little critical thought — they've got total control. Everything we do in this dystopia is designed to funnel profit into the coffers of the oligarchs and power into the hands of the imperialists, and all efforts to resist and change these funneling systems have been successfully quashed by mass-scale psychological manipulation.
This totalitarian dystopia looks like freedom because they let us more or less do what we want, while controlling what it is that we want to do using mass-scale manipulation. They further bolster this by creating systems where what we do has little or no meaningful effect. Even if we had actual software in our brains that gave our rulers total and complete control over our minds, they'd have the masses think and behave in more or less the same way they do right now.
The primary weapon of our totalitarian rulers is not surveillance, police robots, digital IDs or CBDCs — their primary weapon is propaganda. The system of mass-scale psychological conditioning they've created is unlike anything that has ever existed in history. The ability to detect and suppress an emerging revolution is vastly inferior to the ability to use psychological conditioning to prevent people from even thinking about revolting in the first place. That's what real power looks like. That's total control.
This is a dystopia whose inhabitants all move fully in alignment with the will of their rulers, without ever even thinking that they are unfree or should try to become so.
Try to design a more effective totalitarian dystopia than this.
You can't. It's perfect.
Propaganda is the real mechanism of control, and that's what we're going to have to fight if we're ever to become free. The only way out of this giant matrix of psychological control is to show people how unfree we are, how they're being deceived, how much better things could be. Awaken people to the lies, to the real nature of the political, educational and media institutions designed to keep us enslaved, weaken public trust in the propaganda machine, and then we might have the beginnings of the possibility of real change. Until then, we're locked in.
###
Who you think of as an anti-authoritarian hero says a lot about you as a person. If I ask you to picture someone fighting the power and you think of Tank Man or Navalny or some historical figure instead of the living people fighting the power structure you actually live under, it means you have swallowed the lie that your own government and its allies are good and virtuous in the here and now, and that "fighting the power" is something that could only happen for noble reasons in other countries or back during other points in history.
In reality, the need to "fight the power" is greater under the US-centralized empire which rules over anyone who's likely to be reading these words, because the US-centralized empire is the most murderous and tyrannical power structure in the world right now.
So when I ask you to picture an anti-authoritarian figure who comes to mind, if you are lucid you won't picture someone like Tank Man, Navalny, Gandhi, Mandela or MLK. You'll picture someone like Julian Assange: someone who's fighting the real power where it stands here and now.
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-totalitarian-dystopia-is-already
It will be an even shorter lifetime once the F-35 is converted to an all-electric version.
Strange but interesting, eh?
Let me ask another question: Is there some way on Substack [or WordPress] to view all the comments that somebody has made over time in one place?
On Disqus, every comment someone has made is collected and viewable [along with "Likes" and response Comments] at one's Profile. i don't see anything like that on Substack or WordPress.
Hey Bill: Do You know how and why Dennis' comments were deleted? And by whom? Who else can delete Comments besides the original poster and [i assume with just cause] You? Can somebody at Substack?
i just got a e-mail from BV showing that he had just made the following comment: "Bill and Jeff, for some reason this morning my comments in this thread have been deleted. Dennis." But when i click on the "View comment" button, his comment is not shown.
Any idea what's going on? One of the deleted comments was "Liked" by You.
Caitlin Johnstone’s April 18 headline says it all: FREE THOSE WHO EXPOSE GOVERNMENT MISDEEDS, JAIL THOSE WHO TRY TO CONCEAL THEM
She concludes:
As Julian Assange once said, "The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security."
People shouldn't be punished for revealing the secrets of the government, governments should be punished for keeping secrets from the people.
It shouldn't be illegal to expose the abuses and deceptions of your government, it should be illegal for your government to abuse and deceive.
The government says it needs secrecy in order to win wars and protect freedom. History says the government needs secrecy in order to start wars and restrict freedom.
The amount of power you have should be inversely proportional to the amount of secrecy you're allowed. Those with the most power should be a completely open book who aren't permitted to hide anything from anyone, while those with the least power should have complete unimpeded privacy. Instead it's the exact opposite: ordinary powerless people are getting more and more surveilled, while governments get more and more secretive and unaccountable.
Full article at https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/free-those-who-expose-government
And as a follow-on to the earlier Caitlin Johnstone and Jeff Thomas pieces on the realities of living in America today, here is the inimitable George Carlin back in his 2005 HBO special "Life Is Worth Losing" to tie it all together.
As Robert Scheer put it: "Carlin includes one of his most iconic bits critiquing America's consumerism, education, politics and the myth of the American Dream. In order for the American Dream fantasy to work, Carlin said Americans have to be smart enough to get the jobs but just dumb enough to not question the status quo. As the iconic line goes, 'It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.'
"'They got you by the balls!' Carlin exclaims as he lays out the total control of wealthy elites in the U.S. from local politics to big media in this short clip. Carlin continued, explaining that the American Dream also works by having a population devoid of critical thinking skills, a population willing to 'passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with lower pay, longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears as soon as you go to collect it...'"
Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-54c0IdxZWc with immediate links to the rest of the HBO special and other Carlin rants that are even more spot on today than they were 18 years ago.
As a follow-on to the earlier piece by Caitlin Johnstone… :
THE ELIMINATION OF REASON by Jeff Thomas / Doug Casey’s International Man 041723
Recently, I paid for an item with the exact amount requested, including 89 cents in change. The salesgirl stared at the coins and clearly wasn’t sure what to do. Eventually, she reached for a calculator and began to total them up one at a time: 25 + 25 + 25 + 10 + 4. Having been schooled in the age prior to calculators, I’m accustomed to doing arithmetic in my head, but this particular instance evidenced a level of "dumbing down" over the last fifty years that was beyond what I had realised.
Since the dumbing down has been so consistently prevalent over the decades, it’s clear that this is no accident, nor is it an experiment in "alternative education" that hasn’t worked out as was intended. It’s clearly the result of a conscious effort to diminish the average person’s ability to think. As such, it’s had a long gestation period and was expected to require generations, but was nevertheless a conscious goal.
But why on earth would the controlling elite of any country seek to diminish the power to reason? Surely, reason is the basis of all independent thought – the catalyst for new ideas and improvement on existing goods and systems.
The answer, in a word, is control. Independent thought is the prime enemy of those who seek to dominate a people. For that reason, those who rule will happily sacrifice technological and social progress if it means that their dominance can be increased.
CONTROLLING BOTH THE ANSWERS AND THE QUESTIONS
It’s the nature of humans to question their situation and their surroundings. However, a clever leader will surmise that that means he needs to not only provide the answers, but the questions. If he can keep the people preoccupied with questions that are of little consequence to him, and provide answers that are easy for the people to absorb, he will control the areas of thought and, in so doing, will diminish the likelihood that he or his actions will be questioned.
Since time immemorial, successful leaders have understood that, in order to take the attention off their actions, carefully constructed distractions are called for.
For centuries, when leaders have been under criticism by their minions, they’ve used the distraction of war. War not only tends to unify a people, it also helps them to accept the removal of their basic rights for an "emergency" period. (Of course, most leaders don’t replace the rights after the emergency has ended. War therefore is also a good tool to increase tyranny, generally.) As Ludwig von Mises observed:
"War was not an affair of the peoples; it concerned the rulers only. The citizens detested war, which brought mischief to them and burdened them with taxes and contributions."
However, in modern times, propagandists have become far more sophisticated. Let’s look at a few. Adolf Hitler said,
"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually, they will believe it."
Vladimir Lenin was a great believer in the idea that,
"The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive."
Two of the greatest inventions in making propaganda easy to sell have been political parties and television. In the days of kings, it was common to hate the king and want his downfall, but, with political parties, it’s possible to get one half of the people hating one party and the other half hating the other party. Then, all that’s necessary is to assure that each party has roughly the same amount of apparent power and the people will focus all their attention on the hatred of the opposing party and fail to notice those who are pulling the strings equally for both parties. The kings thereby remain the kings forever, whilst remaining invisible. The idea is not to defeat the anger of the people, but to redirect it. As Friedrich Hayek commented,
"The skillful propagandist then has the power to mold their minds in any direction he chooses, and even the most intelligent and independent people cannot entirely escape that influence if they are long isolated from all other sources of information."
That last phrase is key. In today’s world, we possess the most significant propaganda tool that has ever been invented: television.
Through this medium, we can create a major issue out of a minor incident, create two opposing viewpoints, each designed to appeal to one group or the other, and then repeat the propaganda unceasingly until the people have become thoroughly polarised from each other on the issue. In this fashion, we can begin with a minor incident, such as the one in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Arrange for one set of pundits to state unequivocally that the problem was racist Caucasian police, whilst presenting another set of pundits who just as vehemently proclaim that the problem is lawless blacks. Then, as Brother Adolf states, repeat the message endlessly – in this case, on the news seven days a week, from morning till night, for over six months.
Mission accomplished. The conservative group has redoubled its belief in the necessity for an increased police state, whist the liberal group dug in its heels on its perception of class warfare and the need for increased collectivism to combat that class warfare.
Once this issue has played itself out, it can disappear completely from the television and a new issue takes its place.
As stated above, in creating this means of propaganda, we have first created the question in the mind of the people, then we have spoon-fed two opposing answers – one designed to appeal to those who are by nature conservative and one to those who are by nature liberal. If we do our job well, the groups will become so blindly polarized that no social gathering, such as a dinner party, will contain both liberal and conservative invitees, or it will be a disaster.
All liberals will be unified in their thinking, just as all conservatives will be. Of course, those who are libertarian will be vilified by both of the other groups, as they represent a third alternative. (The success in indoctrinating a people and destroying their ability to reason can be measured by their vehemence in rejecting a third choice of reason.)
However, reason must be blocked out on a continuous basis, or there’s danger that it may return over time. As early as 600 BC, Lao Tzu had figured this out:
"The muddiest water is cleared as it is stilled."
Hence the importance of the endless repetition of the message. As a news item, Ferguson was deserving of a minor mention, perhaps once a week. But by suspending the outcome (whether charges would be laid against the officer), fuel could be added to the rhetoric fire day in, day out, for months on end. When it had finally outlived its usefulness, it was time to create another event. Of course, one shooting every six months in a population of 320,000,000 is a minor blip, but, through the continuous carpet-bombing of the viewer’s brain with the same rhetoric, two such events a year would seem like an epidemic.
Once we reach this level of thought control, it’s possible to offer utterly unacceptable candidates for public office and still have them gain election. All that’s needed is that they parrot the same rhetoric the people have become dependent on as a replacement for reason.
Whether it be Communist Russia, Nazi Germany or Fascist America, once the people have been successfully conditioned to allow Big Brother to dictate thought, the next step has always been totalitarian rule.
Source: https://internationalman.com/articles/the-elimination-of-reason/
“How many F-15s would it take to replace one F-35 in combat? Also; Has it been designed in such a way that the airframe can be somewhat easily replaced?
My understanding is that the F-35 would rule the airspace in combat against any other known aircraft.” Question from a relative regarding this article.
as i recall f-16 has an 8000 hour airframe life, i may be wrong.
f-15 has advantage of 2 engines which gives enough thrust to remove weighty mass/durability 'cost trades'.
and 2 engines means higher mission reliability and better chance of safe return.
why us navy rejected f-16 and went f-18 which now seems to be unretireable!
all that said f-35 enjoys the 'benefits' of a pratt and whitney super engine similar to that enjoyed by f-16 in its early years.
the f-35 engine must be run near thermal limits to fail to meet the propulsion specifications, main advantage over f-16 p&w-f100 is f-35 has not created as many smoking holes....
I was around a tac hq during engine wars when the usaf re-developed the ge competitor and split buys based on certain metrics the engines among new f-16 buys in the mid 1980;s, the drawback was one engine brand had to populate a whole fighter wing as the logistic chain was vast different.
f-35 needs a new engine and a beefed up computer architecture, massive upgrades to meet performance set in 1996!
while stealth may be pass'e