We seem to have a few new participants at c99%, so I thought I would review some recent history about America's sorry state of affairs. First, a blast from the past a little over a year ago:

Global Collective Insanity

The constant media assault with its cacophony of killing mayhem, spectacles staged as reality, and propaganda passing for news has thoroughly brainwashed many people into a state of uncomfortable numbness.

. . .

The media brainwasher/propagandists have powerful bullhorns and are always hard at work to keep their vast audience either uninformed, anxious, and feeling powerless or entertained. The news cycle has to spin so fast that critical thinking is never an option.

https://caucus99percent.com/content/global-collective-insanity

And let us not forget that Power Causes Brain Damage. From a comment I made in a post by Feminista a few months back:

"Hubris syndrome,” as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.”

Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust—an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.

https://caucus99percent.com/content/trump-be-crazy-democrats-gambling-bi...

And last, but not least, a post from over a year ago of what I thought was an excellent description and analysis of the Duopoly Kabuki Dance:

Here’s how it works. Each group of players is assigned one of three roles: Victim, Persecutor, or Rescuer. The first two roles are allowed one move each: the Victim’s move is to suffer, and the Persecutor’s move is to make the Victim suffer. The Rescuer is allowed two moves: to sympathize with the Victim and to punish the Persecutor. No other moves are allowed, and no player is allowed to make a move that belongs to a different role.

That may seem unduly limited. It’s not, because when a group of people is assigned a role, all their actions are redefined as the move or moves allotted to that role. In the Rescue Game, in other words, whatever a Victim does must be interpreted as a cry of pain. Whatever a Persecutor does is treated as something that’s intended to cause pain to a Victim, and whatever a Rescuer does, by definition, either expresses sympathy for a Victim or inflicts well-deserved punishment on a Persecutor. This is true even when the actions performed by the three people in question happen to be identical. In a well-played Rescue Game, quite a bit of ingenuity can go into assigning every action its proper meaning as a move.

What’s more, the roles are collective, not individual. Each Victim is equal to every other Victim, and is expected to feel and resent all the suffering ever inflicted on every other Victim in the same game. Each Persecutor is equal to every other Persecutor, and so is personally to blame for every suffering inflicted by every other Persecutor in the same game. Each Rescuer, in turn, is equal to every other Rescuer, and so may take personal credit for the actions of every other Rescuer in the same game. This allows the range of potential moves to expand to infinity without ever leaving the narrow confines of the game.

https://caucus99percent.com/content/rescue-game

[The Archdruid Report has closed down]

Unfortunately, the global and military disaster colloquially known as The American Empire has undergone significant additional deterioration in the past year. How we move forward from this sorry state of affairs is highly problematic.

[Edit: I ran across this story about Edward Herman, author of Manufacturing Dissent, and had to throw this link in the mix:

Manufacturing Consent was a kind of bible of media criticism for a generation of dissident thinkers. The book described with great clarity how the system of private commercial media in America cooperates with state power to generate propaganda.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/matt-taibbi-on-the-death-o...