“They are us.”

“They are us.”  This article bemoans the know-nothing politicians running for President (in both parties) and then drops the hammer of doom by saying:

They are us.

Yes, they are.  Which is why I'm not optimistic about the U.S. maintaining its leadership in the world over the long term, and not optimistic about the world in general over the longer term.

 Many years ago I read a science fiction story (I've forgotten the name of the story or its author) with the premise that human society was becoming increasingly stratified between a small educated, intelligent group of elites and the masses of relatively stupid, celebrity-addled, substance-less drones.  The latter survived only by mooching from the former, and eventually the elites got tired of it and started shipping all the drones off to Venus.  The mechanism wasn't practical, but the motivation certainly was plausible.

One of the passages in that story talked about how the drones' desire for fast, sporty cars was satisfied in part by electronically generated sound that simulated the engine noise they expected.  A few years ago I first read that car manufacturers are actually doing that today.

Maybe our elites should start shipping the drones somewhere...