Nearly a century after the boob tube was called a vast wasteland it is growing alarmingly closer to state control media.

The Riddle of the Man Pretending To Be a Madman

A  man pretending to be a madman is on a balcony pissing on  everyone who passes below him on the sidewalk when a real madman walks out to the balcony and stands next to him.

The pretending madman says to him, "Try pissing on every passerby so everyone thinks you're crazy.  That's been working well for me, for everybody does what I wish them to do so I don't start pissing on them too."

Here is some food for thought that captures something people often miss: not glorifying contrarianism, but diagnosing a failure mode in human thinking.

These points at overlaps with what modern psychology calls groupthink and social conformity. When a belief is widely shared, the social cost of questioning it rises while the perceived need to question it falls. That combination is dangerous. We don’t just inherit a belief, we inherit the confidence of the crowd along with it.

With the watchful protection of the Russian Navy's Yasen Class Nuclear-Powered Attack Submarine, Putin's Russia delivered approximately 100,000 metric tons of oil to Cuba this week, offering short-term relief to the island’s worsening energy crisis and signaling continued support for a longtime ally.
The tanker Anatoly Kolodkin docked on March 30, marking Cuba’s first oil shipment in roughly three months. Fuel shortages have triggered widespread blackouts of up to 20 hours a day and strained supplies of food and medicine for the country’s 10 million people. The crisis intensified after oil flows from Venezuela, Cuba’s main supplier, were disrupted earlier this year following political upheaval there.

The richest and most populous city in the wealthiest nation on the planet is taking steps to clean up its act.

individuality instead of conditioning, truth instead of engineered happiness, freedom instead of stability, emotional depth instead of contentment. In Brave New World, social control is achieved through pleasure, conditioning, and the suppression of individual thought, creating a population that willingly accepts its own oppression. By contrast, 1984 portrays a society maintained through fear, surveillance, and coercion, where citizens comply under constant threat. The true opposite of Huxley’s vision, however, is not merely a harsher dystopia, but a society grounded in individuality rather than conformity, truth rather than manufactured happiness, freedom rather than enforced stability, and emotional depth rather than artificial contentment. A new world where intellectuals are persecuted and prosecuted.

The US crime rate can be one of the deciding factors of where families settle down. Based on each city's murder and property crime rates per 100,000 people, determined by FBI crime reports, these are the most dangerous places to live in the United States. Then there is affordability.
Guess which one is the worst Affordability: 25
Economy: 33
Education & Health: 48
Quality of Life: 30
Safety: 49