A few more stray thoughts.....................

......................from Martin Gurri's The Revolt of the Public:

"Propaganda was the totalitarian's admission that his power wasn't total."

"It is perfectly possible for the elites to lapse into paralysis while the public staggers into nihilism.  Indeed, this could be our future."

"Modern governments can keep an eye on a thousand moving parts, but they can't predict discontinuity.  They can't comprehend phase change.  Then the crisis arrives, they are slow to grasp its dimensions.  When the effects become palpable, they reflexively reach for the crude tools they have at their disposal, whether or not these will improve the situation.  In essence, governments can throw money at unwanted change, or they can hurl bombs and policemen."

"The public, in command of the information sphere, has found corruption everywhere at the Center, and has wielded its new persuasive power to attack the legitimacy of every authoritative institution."

(Concerning 2008 and the beginning of the Great Recession) "In the economic carnage that followed, the expert and political elites betrayed astonishing levels of cluelessness, and did so at center stage, where the whole world could see.  Bankers and regulators, politicians and bureaucrats—all turned out to have made drunken-sailor bets on the future, in effect helping to push the US economy over a cliff of illiquidity and bad debt.  The consequences were immediate and devastating."

"Put in simpler terms:  governments craved control, and the experts, in exchange for a place in the hierarchy, offered to demonstrate how it could be imposed."

"The bankruptcy of the expert class was a bipartisan affair."