It has been many years since any of us bought the narrative: literally or figuratively. Though I’ll point out that I spent ten minutes, this morning trying to figure out if I should subscribe to the local newspaper — in paper.
Why, in heaven’s name? you ask? Well, because I’ve found it’s easier to clean the quail housing — the trays underneath at least — if I line them with newsprint. And for a hot minute there, it looked like the newsprint would be cheaper from the local rag, with print on it. It might still be. But I’ll let it ride another month and then figure out.
Anyway, so this is where official means of information, aka “Main Stream News” is at with me, and I suspect it’s more or less the same for all of us.
And yet, you know, we still sometimes find ourselves defaulting to the narrative, because — well, because honestly it’s what we grew up with, and old habits die very, very hard.
So, take the fact that we of course know most of Antifa and BLM is lily white. (No, seriously, these people are more of the Legion of the Pale than the Mormon church whom my Mormon friends jokingly call that.) And yet, you’ll hear people, even thinking people on our side rant on about how black people are torching things, and falling for communism.
Honestly, I don’t even know how many black Americans voted for Obama. I know what it looked like, but I also know right after the elections they tell us both that the youth/minorities voted en masse for the leftist, and that they didn’t turn out to vote. So, what’s the truth? I don’t know.
I know in the end, whoever voted, the fraud won and won by miles. I mean, unless you truly, in your heart of hearts believe that black people turned out in massive numbers to vote for Biden. Because, you know, Biden is such a call to their hearts and minds. (Rolls eyes.) Yeah, sure thing, Kamala. I have yet to talk to a single black person who considers that creature black. (Mostly because she isn’t unless you are what you eat.)
Now, of course, in my circles, all black people were 100% for Obama. And Biden. And whoever the leftmost candidate is. But my circles are writers and intellectuals. (Excluding political commenters, who are also intellectuals but at least theoretically right. And those weren’t for Obama or Biden, but were still against Romney and Trump. Because that’s required to be “intellectual” after all.)
But almost everyone will still start ranting about black people and torching neighborhoods.
While I’ve said that if the EBT cards stop, the recipient of welfare will torch their own neighborhoods then sit around looking photogenic waiting for the TV cameras, note that this is EBT users of all races.
Are they mostly black? I doubt it. The majority of people in this country, despite all the tales about the demographic replacement are still white. And a high portion of them, relatively, are still on welfare.
Do we know? Well, no. Of course we don’t.
We know a lot of what we’re told are lies, but we have no way of figuring out the truth. Like, for instance, we know that “every black person” was for Obama, and is all in on CRT. This is supported by the people shown on TV, etc.
But then we remember Tea Parties, which were considerably less white than Antifa. (Or BLM.) And we remember that to paint this picture, the MSM must pick and choose very carefully. And always avoid showing the truly angry black parents fighting CRT. You’ll only see those online. And there are a lot of them. (And they’re right. Because it’s poison particularly aimed at their kids.)
However, do we know what proportion of black people are as painted by the media? No. How would we? When the media picks and chooses whom to show; our voting is corrupt and insane and no one knows what the true votes are; and our polling is a joke?
Take a non-racial thing: how big is your city?
This is relevant to me, because the city I moved to feels — AT MOST — half the size it claims to be. Maybe less. And people say “Well, it’s spread out.” Not as much as Denver it’s not. I’m used to sprawled-out cities. But even taking that into account, this feels much smaller than advertised.
As I mentioned it other people started talking about the size of their cities….
So?
It seems like not even the census is very good at counting city population. It seems like at some point there was a guesstimate, probably in the 50s or 70s, and since then it’s all adjustments, based on move ins and move outs, but no one knows for sure. Franky because there are several fudge factors on all censuses.
But wouldn’t people know based on who pays taxes? Yeah, you’d think. But if they know, the population is enough smaller than advertised that no city wants to confess it. They just like doggo.
Someone found how many people a grocery store serves on average to be viable and we ran that times the grocery stores in our towns, and it would be consistent with about half the population. But the fudge factors in that are inside including “How many small towns come here to shop?” and “How many people actually shop for food?”
So, how can we know? We can’t.
And that’s the problem. We know the stream is polluted, but we must still drink. So even people who know better default to MSM assumptions when talking about something they’re not experts in. It’s like a form of Gell-Mann amnesia.
If you find yourself talking about all the looters as being black and all the defenders as being white — which of course is what the MSM projects, because all leftists are enormous racists — remember that Kyle Rittenhouse is mixed race, while the three terrorists he had to take down were considerably whiter than most of us.
And if you find yourself saying some part of the country deserved what “they voted for” remember you’re buying by implication that Biden got 81 million votes (my ass.)
And if you find yourself buying that there are just so many people everywhere and that the underclasses are overtaking the productive, remember that a) we don’t know how many people are being born. b) we don’t know what people are what race, or even identify as it. c) we don’t know how many people are working, particularly if they’re smart (but we know there’s a war on the productive and the working) d) yeah, there’s a ton of children born to people on welfare, because you get more of what you pay for. But these are usually short lived/impaired. e) all statistics and polls are suspect. f) we don’t even know how many of the illegals coming in stay. We know since Obama caused la Grande Salida that there’s a flow the other way too, but we don’t know how many stay, or what percentage.
Now, is it insane that we don’t know? Sure. Did I say it wasn’t? It’s like the thing in Puppet Masters when the aliens have captured the means of mass information, and people can’t even tell there’s an alien invasion going on.
But the truth is we don’t know. We just don’t know.
And turning what the MSM tells us on its head is probably just as wrong as buying it wholesale.
The information stream is corrupted. We can’t trust it. Before you cite it for anything, think on it. And think of any signs against it.
DON’T trust. And verify.
According To Hoyt 
I’ll give people in real life plenty of leeway but online leftists are more annoying than mosquitoes.
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Northeastern liberals. I was scarred for life listening to my in-laws casually dismiss Bob Dole as being simply, “Too silly,” to vote for. (More accurately, maybe, that it was just, “too silly,” to think of voting for such a person.) Really. Being a Republucan automatically made him a moron, so far as they were concerned. I haven’t seen most of them since then, and that’s fine by me.
Honestly, so many alleged “urban elites,” seem very, very parochial.
As far as population, I think the Huntsville estimate is probably pretty good because the Feds have been packing agencies in there for the last 70-plus years. It looks like the latest wave is expected to want apartments/condos, or maybe the PTB want newcomers concentrated. A somewhat run-down area is being, “gentrified,” and stick-built apartment complexes are appearing around the city. But I’d just as soon stay out of anything bigger than Huntsville.
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I like to check the national “news” to get a sense of what is going on but that is just a first step. I also look at several sources and compare stories as well, trying to check local sources where the story happened. Reading about a “big story” covered by American news, BBC, Haaretz.com, etc. will often provide a more complete but not full picture.
I’ve also found that local small town papers and neighborhood news letters can be very informative on what’s going on at least within their area – however use caution as many, many papers are actually owned by a huge national company and you have to really read carefully and don’t trust anything beyond the local interest. The same goes for your local radio and TV news.
Some on-line neighborhood groups can also give you a bit more intelligence on the local goings on but be aware of the source used for neighborhood “news” as well. Going to a school board meeting now and again attending that HOA board meeting and attending a city government or county meeting or two will also expand your information base. First hand information not filtered by a “reporter” can be eye opening. So while the information stream is indeed corrupted, filtering will help and always boil before consuming!
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If you have cable, and if you still have a cable access station, it probably plays school board and other city/town meetings. But of course you meet people by actually going to meetings yourself.
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Problem with local boards and meetings is that trying to attend every meeting is more than a full-time job.
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That’s because they have nothing better to do than yammer at each other in endless useless meetings.
———————————
It has been brought to our attention that nothing ever gets done around here because everybody is always in meetings.
There will be a meeting at 10:00 to discuss the issue.
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So true! You have to pick and choose here and there on those meetings but going to a few over the year helps your perspective on things.
True story: I was once called into my boss’s office and told that I had been assigned, for our division, to be the representative on the Committee for Committees. There were so many committee meetings that it was decided they needed to be managed. I attended one meeting of said group, reported back the foolishness that transpired and boss said not to bother any more.
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Why, in heaven’s name? you ask? Well, because I’ve found it’s easier to clean the quail housing — the trays underneath at least — if I line them with newsprint. And for a hot minute there, it looked like the newsprint would be cheaper from the local rag, with print on it. It might still be. But I’ll let it ride another month and then figure out.
At that point, go with Epoch Times and you actually get some reading out of it.
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Fewer people here than before Wright-Patt was downsized, but still a ton of people here.
Amusingly, it turns out that our small hospital over in Beavercreek (Soin, named for an Indian from India family that donated a ton of cash to build it, and one of whose sons is a hot stuff back doctor who has helped my mom and other people a ton) is always crowded, because people like it over a very large area. Apparently people are coming over from Indiana, and from way south and east and north of us too.
It’s small but very convenient. Some of the staff are… um… not great… but most of them are very good, and a lot of the doctors and surgeons are pretty hot stuff. Going to the ER varies a lot by shift.
(It’s part of the local Kettering Hospital System founded by Boss Kett and his daughter Virginia Kettering, which religiously is a Seventh Day Adventist hospital system. Not that it usually matters, but just to be clear.)
Comfiest waiting rooms that I have ever been in, and pretty nice hospital rooms. Maybe that’s part of it.
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Anyway… Beavercreek is full. Even after the tornado, it’s full. People keep moving in, and there are more and more developments (full of people, not vacant) where fields and woods used to be. Lots of kids at all the schools, lots of people at Wright State (albeit fewer than before the financial scandal a few years back).
People supposedly are moving out of Ohio a lot, but you couldn’t prove it by Beavercreek.
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Fairborn is a little emptier than Beavercreek… but the foreclosed houses I know about, have mostly got people living in them now. I don’t know if they’re rentals or bought, but they sure aren’t empty unless it’s a more recent foreclosure.
And the apartment houses seem pretty full, too.
Centerville also seems to have expanded, much as Beavercreek has, except that they have more doctors’ offices, mini-malls, etc.
Even Xenia seems to have that full feeling, although they’re not as prosperous as some other towns.
Dayton proper isn’t as full of people as it used to be; but if you ride the bus during school hours, there’s still a ton of kids living in town and going to Dayton Schools.
I think mostly there are fewer kids, because not as many people are getting married and having kids (or even not getting married and having kids), but it’s not at danger levels yet. (And of course, where I work I see tons of big families.)
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Ahhh another Hun in the area! I’m in the southern burbs close to the KMC main campus. Howdy neighbor!
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There are more of us in the Upper Midwest. Hoosier here. In my neck of the woods, we’re seeing A LOT of people relocating from Chicago to the tonier suburbs during COVID, and more than a few from California in the past three years.
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Butler county, OH here. We are seeing lots of new homes and apartment and/or condos being built. The I75 corridor between Cincinnati and Dayton is filling up.
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Harrison Township, here, Just a stone’s throw from where Hara Arena used to be, and Trotwood. There is not so much here anymore. The tornado in 2019 took out a lot, including Hara, but the area was dying before that. They put a national monument on Third Street, and people complained about the crime, so over the years, the cops pushed crime north and west into my neighborhood. Thanks guys. So, moving to Fairborn before winter.
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“But the fudge factors in that are inside including “How many small towns come here to shop?” and “How many people actually shop for food?””
There are also factors such as variation in the size of the grocery store (the one closest to my parents is quite a bit smaller than the one I frequent, and therefore likely can’t service as many people), and people who use places like Target as their grocery store.
As for the census, I figure the absolute latest that it went off the rails is when they started fudging to account for homeless who didn’t get counted.
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The census was corrupted as soon as it became the basis of government implementing redistribution of wealth based on population counts.
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“Don’t buy the narrative? I want to get rid of this stuff, but it’s like some weird combination of road tar and mild acid. It sticks everywhere and burns.”
Seriously. You listen to the news and when you start grabbing other sources, it’s like they’re two different sources of information are involved. I know Dad tries to triangulate his news, but his triangulation is based on CNN, BBC, MSNBC…and anything close to the center might as well be Rush Limbaugh/FOX News/Epoch Times…
Because the Mainstream Media has this huge amount of clout, because they’re built to deliver the “news” and they have this history and legacy that’s all built around…a sort of self-verifying process with their fellow “big” networks.
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The way you describe the tainting of data streams puts me in mind of the way Pournell`s CoDo intelligence suppressed military research (i.e. all scientific research) by among other things injecting bad information into all databases, historical and scientific.
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Once you start investigating the data, cross check, do the legwork and the analysis, the narrative around many issues falls apart. Elections, criminal saints, wars, education, spending, history, just name any subject and the narrative is probably 180 degrees from the truth.
Being in a red state that has had a massive influx of population over the past couple of decades I tend to believe the official counts are reasonable due to the corresponding degree of commercial and residential development along with an insane increase in traffic. A decent guesstimate/SWAG on immigration can be done by looking at school ESL demands, hospital records and ethnic stores.
Covid did cause some interesting local demographic and crime shifts shifts from some blue big city cores to the redder suburbs. The lockdowns in the cities had gangs move out to the ‘burbs in search of more open opportunities…
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You really got me there, I hesitated a long minute before clicking on the link to your ass. I mean, I knew surely it had to go to some news site article or something, you know… right? Nowadays, you never can tell!
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LOL
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As for my own little patch of Paradise, on the fringe of a biggish city in Texas – there is a huge boom in apartment complexes going up within a few miles of the little suburb where I live and have a teeny little cottage all but paid for. No kidding – three or four enormous ones, in what was scrub land and cow pasture when we first moved here in the mid 1990s. Curiously, the front end of one of the apartment complexes is about half apartments, and the back half are small, rather attractive individual cottages, I would guess 500-700 square feet. It’s interesting, in that they would be very nice little starter houses, were it profitable to build them for sale. (For various reasons, it seems that developments of teeny houses in that range – 1,000SF or smaller just aren’t tempting for developers to build. It’s all ginormous houses on teeny, teeny lots.)
My daughter, the real estate agent says that the rental market for houses is very tight now, very demanding.
Interestingly, as far as the racial component in my neighborhood goes, I would estimate about 45% Anglo (white), 45% Hispanic, and 10% Black, although from the accents of those of that last are anything to go by, they are from the Caribbean, rather than native Black.
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I wonder if some of those apartments are aimed at the 50+ age group. My city has a bunch of new “senior living” and “adult garden apartments”. I presume some of those that are not also nursing facilities will eventually become general apartments, once the demographics shift.
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Eugene has a huge growth of multi apartment type buildings. Some are retirement condo/apartments aimed at the 50 – 55+. Some are expensive condo/apartments, some of which are suppose to be low rent (yea, right, not a chance). Others are what are being termed “opportunity” tiny housing condo villages (about 700 – 900 sq ft). Those qualifying can earn equity through paying or sweat equity. Once they’ve “paid” the value, they own it, can sell it, or not. There are also standard housing.
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c4c
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There is no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia.
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Yep, one needs to look at the media the way those in the Soviet Union and other Iron Curtain countries looked at theirs. At least in most cases Soviet media had the excuse of fearing being literally being put up against a wall and shot if they did not push the party line. Media here is one of the biggest cheerleaders of the party line.
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“Buy the Narrative”
I was surprised this wasn’t the fundraiser post.
(Vanishes into the underbrush….)
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Hey, now.
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“It seems like not even the census is very good at counting city population. It seems like at some point there was a guesstimate, probably in the 50s or 70s, and since then it’s all adjustments, based on move ins and move outs, but no one knows for sure. Franky because there are several fudge factors on all censuses.”
Reminiscent of your point a while back about global population being a complete fudge because poorer countries always overcount due to foreign aid; and of course depopulating countries like Russia and China don’t want anyone to think they’re actually, you know, depopulating.
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In God We Trust
(All others pay cash up front)
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Every single article I have had any personal knowledge of has had an error.
Most recent was a smaller freeway side fire. I knew for sure when it had started by: I was taking a kid to a class when I saw it. Definitely, it was going. People were there trying to stop it with shovels and whatever. I drove past it on a surface street, then had to pull over multiple times for responding fire trucks.
Newspaper claimed it started an hour after I saw it. Not a huge error, in the grand scheme of things, just sloppy.
However, if they can’t be bothered to not be sloppy in the little things, how would they learn to not be sloppy in the big things?
In nearby SmallCity and LargeTown, there are a number of new developments of Large Family Homes. These are not being built for Large Families, however, after talking to some of the folks living in them: they are mostly built for Empty Nesters who want rooms for the grandkids to come visit for a week. Six bedroom houses with two residents. Not any sort of moral problem, but it does mislead the demographic guesses.
School enrollment numbers may be available. Our district is trying to sell voters on approving a bond to rebuild part of a burned (through their own carelessness) high school. Slight problem: declining enrollment. Selling that the building needs to be rebuilt better and fancier (and what guarentee do we have that they’ll maintain the fire suppression systems this time?) for fewer students is an interesting option for them to pursue.
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Small town news fillers frequently screwed up reporting who, what where when why. They usually got the organization name right.
The biggest tooth grinder I ran into was when AF Times did an article on our unit, and I had several quotes attributed to me, by name, and I wasn’t even there that week. (The OIC and Commander either conspired with, or just plain lied, to the reporter; so it might not technically be the fault of the reporter, save they didn’t follow up with me when I got back.)
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I haven’t been able to listen to any President blather on since Reagan (the man had charisma and could string coherent sentences together). And I haven’t had any tolerance for TV talking heads since watching Dan Rather over and over again replaying the Challenger explosion video while holding his Shuttle model upside down.
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I have little doubt that Biden got 81 million votes. What I doubt is that the votes were knowingly cast by the people at the return address, or that the ballots were even ordered by them. I doubt that there were no people who submitted more than one ballot, in more than one precinct. I doubt that every ballot was cast for a living person. I doubt the voting machines accurately and without bias, counted all the ballots correctly in every precinct in this country. I doubt the elected officials had any desire for a clean honest vote in many of those key states. I doubt the judges in those key states had any respect or desire for a clean honest vote; nor were they supportive of finding out if there were crimes committed. I doubt the legislatures in those states had any desire for a clean honest vote, as none of them fought their governors who broke the laws they had established. And I doubt the governors in those states wanted a clean honest vote since they fought so hard to keep from obeying the laws on how to conduct their own elections.
And I doubt that anything has been done to change the world’s greatest fraud machine since then.
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One of my liberal writer friends ranted about how Kyle Rittenhouse was going to be a hero to the white supremacists for taking his assault weapon and gunning down three black people in the Kenosha riots. I responded that the three people Kyle shot in self-defense were all white felons. He posted no more on the topic. I’m sure he was astonished when he tried to correct me and discovered the truth. I still have hope for him to wake up.
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I am to the point right now where in my opinion we need a Liberal Politician Hunting Season. Tongue in Cheek
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Main Stream Media Season!
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How about we just say that one day a year, military veterans are authorized to use lethal force against domestic enemies of the Constitution? Permit consists of a single page, double-spaced, clearly spelling out the crime.
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We are close to the correct population here, but in part because a lot of the overcount is compensated by the shipyard workers living in motels who are not counted.
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C4c
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And if you find yourself saying some part of the country deserved what “they voted for” remember you’re buying by implication that Biden got 81 million votes (my ass.)
Votes for? No.
Continue to consent to? Yes. And as long as we pretend voting will fix it and engage in the sham elections we are actively consenting to it but giving it legitimately.
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At this point, the sole reason to bother with the elections is to make the fraud obvious enough that Joe Normal can’t say it isn’t happening.
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PRECISELY.
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