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A booming GDP headline, a hot price index, and a sober question: who gets to define reality when institutions write the score and audit themselves afterward? We start with the data, then chase the incentives that shape what we’re told to believe—robots walking into restaurants to do dishes, SNAP dollars flowing through corporate balance sheets, and career bureaucrats leveraging process to overrule elected decisions. It’s less conspiracy than calculus: pay structures and perverse incentives that create the outcomes we keep seeing.
From Arctic maps to city halls, the theme repeats. Greenland gets pitched as national security as Arctic lanes crowd with Russian and Chinese ships. In Chicago, a resident stares down a board and says aloud what many feel: stop blaming ghosts when the power is in the room. The conversation threads through education standards, the corrosion of civic literacy, and the grit required to do the unglamorous work—homeschooling, local audits, showing up—to rebuild trust from the bottom up.
Election integrity anchors a long middle stretch: sworn testimony on remote connectivity and logging gaps, the seduction of ranked-choice voting as a “reform” that complicates audits, and the reminder that if you can’t verify it, you can’t trust it. Layer on a Secret Service charity probe, defense contractors preferring buybacks to factories, and homelessness budgets that fatten nonprofits while streets get worse, and a pattern emerges. Systems follow their incentives. If we want different outcomes, we have to realign the incentives and restore accountability.
We don’t stay in the doom loop. There’s a countercurrent of action: cartels pressured at sea and in their finances, fusion suddenly moving from sci-fi to strategy with a bet that could upend energy costs and industrial capacity, and a renewed insistence on transparency around archives that elites would rather bury. Through it all, we return to a simple compass: truth over narrative, process that can be audited, and citizens who refuse to outsource their conscience. If that resonates, subscribe, share this episode with a friend who cares about substance over spin, and leave a review to help more people find the show. Your support keeps this community sharp, persistent, and hard to gaslight.
Support the show
https://1776live.us
www.PeasantsPerspective.com
www.LeftBehindandWithout.org
www.DollarsVoteLouder.com
buymeacoffee.com/peasant
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By Taylor JohnatakisSend us a text
A booming GDP headline, a hot price index, and a sober question: who gets to define reality when institutions write the score and audit themselves afterward? We start with the data, then chase the incentives that shape what we’re told to believe—robots walking into restaurants to do dishes, SNAP dollars flowing through corporate balance sheets, and career bureaucrats leveraging process to overrule elected decisions. It’s less conspiracy than calculus: pay structures and perverse incentives that create the outcomes we keep seeing.
From Arctic maps to city halls, the theme repeats. Greenland gets pitched as national security as Arctic lanes crowd with Russian and Chinese ships. In Chicago, a resident stares down a board and says aloud what many feel: stop blaming ghosts when the power is in the room. The conversation threads through education standards, the corrosion of civic literacy, and the grit required to do the unglamorous work—homeschooling, local audits, showing up—to rebuild trust from the bottom up.
Election integrity anchors a long middle stretch: sworn testimony on remote connectivity and logging gaps, the seduction of ranked-choice voting as a “reform” that complicates audits, and the reminder that if you can’t verify it, you can’t trust it. Layer on a Secret Service charity probe, defense contractors preferring buybacks to factories, and homelessness budgets that fatten nonprofits while streets get worse, and a pattern emerges. Systems follow their incentives. If we want different outcomes, we have to realign the incentives and restore accountability.
We don’t stay in the doom loop. There’s a countercurrent of action: cartels pressured at sea and in their finances, fusion suddenly moving from sci-fi to strategy with a bet that could upend energy costs and industrial capacity, and a renewed insistence on transparency around archives that elites would rather bury. Through it all, we return to a simple compass: truth over narrative, process that can be audited, and citizens who refuse to outsource their conscience. If that resonates, subscribe, share this episode with a friend who cares about substance over spin, and leave a review to help more people find the show. Your support keeps this community sharp, persistent, and hard to gaslight.
Support the show
https://1776live.us
www.PeasantsPerspective.com
www.LeftBehindandWithout.org
www.DollarsVoteLouder.com
buymeacoffee.com/peasant