There’s this famous Russian talk show host, the Russian Oprah (this is not his name, it’s what I call him to make things clearer). And one of his segments some years ago was dedicated to the recent murder of a famous Russian bandit / oligarch.
(Please understand that I’m using the word “Russian” here in reference solely to citizenship. Aside from the talk show host, nobody in the story is actually Russian.)
So all of the guests on the show were other bandits / oligarchs. They are sitting there, passionately discussing who could have put out a hit on the murdered fellow.
“You gotta understand, dude was smart,” says one bandit. “Nobody could have gotten one over on him. He was so smart.”
“Yeah?” interrupts the richest of the bandits / oligarchs on stage. “If he’s so smart, how come he’s so dead?”
There’s oft-repeated truism that the people in charge don’t mean to create the chaos we are seeing. They are just inept. Silly, dumb, bumbling little fools. Strangely, nobody seems to wonder how come these bumbling little fools are so fabulously rich while the people who snicker at their ineptitude are so fabulously not.
What if the chaos is there by design? Example: ah, those vaccine passports in NYC are never going to work. It’s all such a mess. Nobody will comply, people will buy fakes, you can’t enforce it, I just went to a restaurant and nobody hassled me, ha ha.
But that’s precisely where the mistake lies. You assume that the goal is what was declared and then when you see chaotic execution, you decide that the process was messed up out of incompetence. And maybe it was. But what if it wasn’t?
Remember the rollout of Obamacare? Ha ha, what a mess! Strangely, it’s only a mess when you need something. When they do, things work just fine.
The war in Iraq, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, COVID, defund the police – ha ha, what are they, stupid? Don’t they see it’s not working. But it is working. For them.
Stupid Biden, he’s so demented. He’s the president of the US and owns mansions, yet he’s somehow the fool in all of this. And so on. Stupid Trump, stupid Kamala. Poor inept little fools. In the meantime, we are so smart yet we are struggling to pay bills and figure out how to protect the little we do have from being taken away by these fools.
Sorry for a long post. I’ll shut up now.
Clarissa's Blog 
Russian Oprah? Is it ‘Пусть Говорят’ с Малаховым?
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“What if the chaos is there by design?”
In other words: Chaos is a ladder (game of thrones reference)
Or more literally, chaos is a license to print (and/or steal) money.
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I’ve often wondered about this, with just ordinary day-to-day bureaucratic idiocy. You run into so many things that are so poorly designed– and have been poorly designed for a very long time– I have to conclude that the poor design is serving a useful purpose for someone. Just not me. There are so many problems I’ve had to approach in terms of “People dumber than me succeed at this every day. How would I do this if I were 50% dumber?” This approach works amazingly well. What it nearly always works out to is: the stated rules are not the actual rules.
When you apply for state medical assistance (been there a couple times), the stated rules are: apply on our website! It’s fast and easy! That’s impossible. I’ve done it in two different states now, and the electronic forms are so glitchy and poorly designed that it is impossible to fill them out unless you have inside information on how to navigate around the errors. The actual rules are: Go down to the medicaid office, find out what documents you need, get them, return to the medicaid office, and tell them you don’t know how to use the electronic form, and you need help. They will do it for you.
I’ve thought about this a long time: why don’t they fix it? Because the department works with a fixed budget. The bad forms guarantee that more of that fixed budget goes to the office staff, and less of it goes to people who need financial assistance. It does this by filtering out a large number of applicants, who give up when they can’t get past the form, while guaranteeing job security for the office fauna– who of course have to be there to help dumb poor people navigate the application process. More office staff, to serve fewer customers. Which is how government offices always function.
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Exactly! People say I’m too suspicious and paranoid, it’s all simple incompetence, etc. But there are clear patterns in this supposedly accidental stuff that it’s hard not to notice.
I’m from the USSR. I know how this works.
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To be clear, I don’t think the forms were designed that way on purpose. But I think this is the reason they never get fixed.
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“What if the chaos is there by design? ”
Interesting idea here (I have no idea about the ebb and flow of the international drug trade so I don’t know how feasible it is) but…. this makes a kind of sense whereas competing explanations don’t.
Bonus: With their funds frozen the new government will need to raise money in any way they can….
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Read cliff’s tweet link in entirety and found a book by Daniel Estulin (an award-winning investigative journalist and the host of two radio shows in Spain, have you heard of him?) you may like:
// Shadow Masters: An International Network of Governments and Secret-Service Agencies Working Together with Drugs Dealers and Terrorists for Mutual Benefit and Profit
This investigation examines how behind-the-scenes collaboration between governments, intelligence services and drug traffickers has lined the pockets of big business and Western banks. Beginning with a last-minute request from ex-governor Jesse Ventura, the narrative winds between the author’s own story of covering “deep politics” and the facts he has uncovered. The ongoing campaign against Victor Bout, the “Merchant of Death,” is revealed as “move/countermove” in a game of geopolitics, set against the background of a crumbling Soviet Union, a nascent Russia, bizarre assassinations, wars and smuggling.
This sounds a bit outstretched, but since huge sums are involved, who knows…
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