Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy - their own population.

[Health-care system] is largely privatized and unregulated. So of course it's highly inefficient and costly.

You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

If [climate change ] became a serious proposal in the United States, there would be a huge propaganda onslaught by the business community, the energy corporations and many others, to try to frighten the population into opposing it - claiming that if they have it, all sorts of terrible things will happen, like you won't be able to heat your home, or whatever the story is.

The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country - far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.

That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

The world is a very puzzling place. If you're not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else's mind.