Worked most of my life on a late 2nd shift went in at 4pm and which ended between midnite and 4am depending on what was happening each night. I settled on sleeping mostly 3am to 11am to have a regular schedule. Now retired and sleep generally 1:30 am to 8:30 am as 7 hours does it fine now. Still night owl and feel most energy in late evening.

I think the word you’re looking for is Gleichschaltung. Literal meaning = coordination, alignment, or phasing (in electrical engineering). Historical meaning at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung.

You’re right: we’ve been seeing it in action in this country over the past decade or so. Along with another word from a different totalitarian system: Nomenklatura. That has been going on for a while longer, though. At least since the end of the Cold War.

I’ve seen more than one internet post on that phenomenon of welcoming terroristic government control. Australia comes to mind.
It truly is frightening.
Makes you really wonder how complicit the Germans and Russians were in their own oppression, even aside from China and the Middle East.

@ Bryan Lovely – I hope you and I are not in for another all-nighter. I don’t get around to reading the internet until after 7 or 8 MST most days.

COVID has taught us what all of us knew but have too often forgotten: if you give petty bureaucrats a taste of unrestricted power, there’s a good chance that they will become morally corrupt and abusive. Exhibit A for today is what happened to Lynn Savage. Her disabled, non-verbal daughter was frightened and near death after brain surgery — and the hospital had Ms. Savage [70 years old] arrested for insisting on staying with her child.
…
I am not calling anyone at the hospital a Nazi for what that institution’s employees did to Ms. Savage. Nevertheless, I want to discuss an important conclusion Hannah Arendt reached after witnessing Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961.

What Arendt realized is that, for the most part, evil people aren’t the Hitlers and Charles Mansons of the world. They are petty bureaucrats, ostensibly normal people, who got power and justified their unutterably immoral actions as “doing their job” or “following orders.” In this context, Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil.”

We have been seeing a lot of that lately. Mostly, the mindless pettiness of power-crazed bureaucrats is an inconvenience (masks, social distancing, etc.). At least last year, everyone had the excuse of ignorance about COVID. This year, though, Biden seems to have greenlighted an escalation. Even as we have both affordable and expensive treatments for COVID, and even though we know it’s not a high-risk disease for most people, the establishment, from the president down to Nurse Ratched in Jacksonville, Florida, is becoming evil in its demands.

Take the vaccine even if might kill you, or is unnecessary, or offends your deeply held beliefs — and you’d better ignore the fact that the vaccine doesn’t do much good and carries great risks. And if you don’t take the vaccine, you will lose your job, your insurance, your benefits, and even your unemployment payments. [ and your organ transplant surgeries]

By the way, your children, none of whom are at risk any more than the sad few who inevitably succumb to the annual flu, must wear masks and be socially isolated. And in California, if you want to send them away to school, they’d better take an unnecessary and, especially for them, dangerous shot.

And of course, we’re going to continue to make sure that your loved ones suffer and die alone. If you fight back, our banal, petty, evil little bureaucrats will destroy you.

I’ve never seen the movie Network, but I have seen the “mad as Hell” scene, which seems especially pertinent during an era of masks and lockdowns:
…
We Americans are mostly nice, agreeable people. We’ll follow rules and want to stay out of trouble. But it’s time for us to get mad as Hell — but please, do a lot more than just yell.

We’re not going to be like leftists, who burn cities, loot stores, and beat and kill people. But we’re going to say, “Stop.” We’re going to be the Southwest pilots and Lynn Savage, and the parents at the Loudoun School Board meetings. We need to be mad as Hell and stop taking this anymore.

Guess you and I are the only ones still up at this hour, eh?

Anyway, Richard Fernandez has been talking about how the elites around the world have been “corrupting the database” for, oh, ten or fifteen years now. Inflation is just one more way to do it.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/empty_christmas_stockings_dont_blame_covid_blame_california.html

The conventional wisdom from the left is that COVID is the reason that shipping containers are in the waters off California with no stevedores or truckers available to take care of them. The implication is that if people would stop being selfish and take the vaccines, the whole problem would magically vanish. That’s nonsense. As a couple of astute articles explain, the problem is that California has passed two laws — one for “climate change” and the other as a sop to the unions — that destroyed much of California’s trucking industry. Add in woes unique to the industry and COVID payments that discourage people from working and…voilà!…empty Christmas stockings.

Stephen Green, at PJ Media, explains some of what’s going on. As a preliminary matter, truckers are aging out of the job, and new ones aren’t coming along. Because federal law requires that truckers be at least 21, kids who leave school at 17 or 18 get involved in other careers, leaving trucker shortfalls. Women don’t offset this problem because, as is typical for most physically difficult jobs, it’s not their thing. Those are long-term problems.

The short-term problem, though, is that California has passed laws taking trucks off the road:
… [RTWT – it’s really bad]

That’s Problem No. 1.

Problem No. 2, again according to Green, is California’s infamous AB-5, the law that, as a sop to the Democrats’ beloved unions, killed the gig economy:

But under AB-5, “California has now banned Owner Operators.”

Just like the union longshoremen, union truckers work under a whole host of work rules that simply can’t accommodate crisis conditions like the ones in Los Angeles.

All of this means that Biden’s grandstanding about having the ports operate 24/7 won’t make a difference. The greenies and the unions killed the infrastructure to unload those ships, with COVID restrictions, trucking restrictions, and free money landing the coup de grâce that led to this situation. Biden does have the emergency power to order those California laws in abeyance, but you know he’s not going to do so.

But the more serious underlying problem is that, in a distant, wonderful past, America didn’t need to rely on containers from Asia to fill her store shelves and Christmas stockings. America was a manufacturing dynamo that fulfilled American needs and still had enough left over for the rest of the world. Those things were well made, too.

Thanks to our Devil’s bargain with communist China, we have no manufacturing sector and are utterly dependent on China, both for things we like and things we need. Biden’s inflationary politics and crackdown on fossil fuels mean that it will be virtually impossible for a renaissance in American manufacturing. Trump tried to stop this situation, but China owns so much of America’s political and industrial class that the pushback shackled his presidency and pushed him straight out of the White House.

Ho, ho, ho.

Despite Biden’s comically inept efforts to gaslight you over inflation – AKSHUALLY skyrocketing prices and empty store shelves are good! – the truth is that inflation is bad even when it doesn’t outstrip wage growth. It’s a corruption of the economic data stream, a virus.

Inflation further divorces money from value, which makes it harder for average workers and consumers to compare the value of goods to make intelligent purchases and investments. It’s like your cable modem suddenly downshifting to dial-up speed due to a corrupted signal.

This is most obvious in hyperinflationary socialist hellholes like Venezuela or Zimbabwe, where people simply ignore the currency because it’s useless for measuring value. Venezuela just lopped five zeroes off its currency because money totals no longer fit into spreadsheets.

Money is data. Transactions help us decide how to allocate resources, develop opportunities, and make investments. Inflation fouls up that data stream and makes it incomprehensible to ordinary people. It creates huge fiscal voids where bloated government costs can be hidden.

Once prices and wages have been inflated, government can chip away at your earnings in countless ways, from direct taxes to hidden and pass-through blood-sucking concealed as “business taxes” or “regulations.” You’re less likely to notice these assaults when money is distorted.

The more zeroes get tacked onto everything, the harder it gets for average people to compare the value of goods and their own labor – and the harder it gets for them to measure the cost and value of government. Analysis becomes a privilege of the rich and powerful. /end

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1447617485172318216.html

DNC Media will spend the next year telling you that you were evil and selfish for liking what you had under the Trump economy, and learning to live with less is the height of virtue. Resisting decline will be framed as rapacious greed.

If the Dems get wiped out in the midterms, the messaging might shift – but if they don’t, the full-court press to bully and gaslight you into accepting decline will continue and intensify. They’ll end up telling you it was selfish to think electricity would be available 24/7.

This kind of messaging is constant – we’re ALWAYS getting lectures that the Little People are selfish for desiring pleasures and benefits that should be reserved for the socialist elite. But it’s intensifying sharply as Biden craters. It’s going to be EVERYWHERE.

You’ll be clubbed into submission with constant editorializing against “materialism” and “consumerism.” You’ll be told things are better now that goods are more scarce and expensive. I guarantee you’ll see “weight loss is the silver lining of Biden’s skyrocketing food prices.”

You were using too much gas anyway – you’ll get more fresh air and exercise when you can’t afford to drive everywhere. You didn’t really need the gizmos you can’t get. Every business that folds up will be portrayed as superfluous. Those overstuffed store shelves were decadent.

“Funemployment” is coming back in a big way – you’ll see retreads of Obama-era flapdoodle about how living on the dole is a great way to spend more time with loved ones and discover your hidden artistic potential*. If you do have a job, you’re not paying enough in taxes.

Get ready for one of the biggest full-court gaslighting campaigns in history, as you’re told to abandon your memories of a bigger, stronger nation before Joe Biden, before the Wuhan coronavirus. Your memories will be deemed incompatible with political reality and replaced. /end

*How are those Cowboy Poets doing these days, anyway?
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/03/028545.php