Joe Biden has announced that he is dropping out of the presidential race.
He endorsed Cacklin’ Kamala Harris as his successor.
For those inclined towards Schadenfreude, the next few months of political news should prove richly entertaining.
Well, I woke up today, and the reports on Butler fiasco just got worse and worse. The evidence for (at best) massive, unbelievable incompetence on the part of the Secret Service keeps coming in, to the point that the Director Chick, a diversity hire named Kimberly Cheatle, has found it expedient to blame local law enforcement for allowing a marksman with a high-powered rifle to gain access to a rooftop with a clear line-of-sight shot at Mr. Trump’s head:
According to MSN:
The Secret Service said local police were supposed to secure the rooftop from which gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump.
The federal agency noted the area was outside its designated perimeter for protection.
Local Pennsylvania police officers were responsible for securing and patrolling the factory grounds of American Glass Research, situated approximately 130 yards from where Trump spoke on Saturday, Secret Service representative Anthony Guglielmi said, according to the New York Times.
The Secret Service was assigned to oversee the area where Trump’s rally was held, while local police were brought in to support those efforts and ensure security outside the rally site.
Additionally, CNN reported that one of two local counter-sniper teams was supposed to cover the building where the gunman was positioned.
Neighbors living near Butler Farm Show Grounds claimed they never received visits from any law enforcement agencies, local or federal, in the days before or during the rally despite expecting such security measures as part of the operation, according to the New York Post.
The Secret Service said that relying on local law enforcement for support is a common practice when managing event security.
OK, support by local law enforcement, that’s fine. But depending on them to make sure that a crucial rooftop is clear — that’s not their job; it’s the Secret Service’s job.
So now we have the unseemly spectacle of the director of the Secret Service blaming local law enforcement for her agency’s failure to do its job. Which means that they DELEGATED crucial parts of that job to other actors, which in turn violates the statutory definition of their task. Their job is to protect the president, not to delegate the task to someone else.
Even if the local cops messed up, the responsibility for any failure to protect may be laid solely at the feet of the United States Secret Service.
In a normal, rational political system, Ms. Cheatle’s color coordinated epaulettes would already have been ripped from her uniform, and she would have been forced into immediate retirement while being stripped of her pension. She would be lucky to avoid prosecution for dereliction of duty, or whatever the charge would be for the head of a civilian agency.
But it gets worse.
According to The Daily Mail (hat tip Conservative Tree House), there was no Secret Service sniper stationed near Thomas Crooks’ roosting spot because the slope of the roof was considered too steep:
In his customary pithy fashion, Mark Steyn asks the pertinent question:
Let’s cut to the chase — the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?
He then provides an excellent (and witty) analysis of what we know so far about the fiasco at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Excerpting it wouldn’t do it justice; go over and read it yourself.
The thing is, more news about the shooter on the roof has been coming in all day since Mr. Steyn posted his notebook item, and none of it makes the Secret Service look any better. First there’s this story from NBC News (hat tip Vox Day):
Rooftop Where Gunman Shot at Trump Was Identified as a Security Vulnerability Before Rally: Sources
The rooftop where a gunman shot at former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally was identified by the Secret Service as a potential vulnerability in the days before the event, two sources familiar with the agency’s operations told NBC News.
The building, owned by a glass research company, is adjacent to the Butler Farm Show, an outdoor venue in Butler, Pennsylvania. The Secret Service was aware of the risks associated with it, the sources said.
“Someone should have been on the roof or securing the building so no one could get on the roof,” said one of the sources, a former senior Secret Service agent who was familiar with the planning.
Understanding how the gunman got onto the roof — despite those concerns — is a central question for investigators scrutinizing how a lone attacker managed to shoot at Trump during Saturday’s campaign event.
[…]
Investigators will want to examine the Secret Service’s site security plan for the rally, said Cangelosi, the former Secret Service agent. He expects they’ll discover one of two things: Either officials failed to make an effective plan for keeping potential shooters off the building Crooks fired from, or officers on the ground failed to execute the plan.
“I don’t like making any assumptions, but it does look like some mistakes were made, that this was preventable,” said Cangelosi, now a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Although it’s common to task local law enforcement agencies with patrolling outside an event’s security perimeter, Cangelosi said, the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that all vulnerabilities are covered rests with the Secret Service. [emphasis added]
This is absolutely clear: The ultimate responsibility for ensuring that all vulnerabilities are covered rests with the Secret Service. Which means that even if local law enforcement screwed up, the Secret Service is responsible for the catastrophic failure that led to President Trump’s Van Gogh ear, a dead fire chief/hero, and two other gravely wounded civilians.
Responsibility, yes. But is it accountable?
One may be forgiven for doubting that anyone with a high level of authority will be held to account. This is, after all, Washington D.C. we’re talking about.
I’ve heard various panjandrums of the Biden administration express their confidence in Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, a diversity hire par excellence. I’m not sure what their confidence is based on — it seems to me that there are two possibilities: either (1) Ms. Cheatle is as massively incompetent as her subordinates who botched the Butler rally, or (2) she has no real control over her agency, and those subordinates acted without her supervision.
Neither of those is a good look.
Chances are, however, the congressional hearings and “independent” investigation will run their course, and Kimberly Cheatle will be given only the mildest of reprimands before being shunted off into some other well-paid high-level sinecure. That’s the way Washington works.
And new black marks against the Secret Service just keep coming in. According to the Pittsburgh TV station WPXI (hat tip Conservative Tree House), local law enforcement were aware of the presence of the man on the roof half an hour before the shooting started:
With yesterday’s assassination attempt on former President Trump, we’ve arrived at a hinge of history. It’s a chaotic moment, in a mathematical sense — impossible to reliably predict what will come next. The differential equations describing the current flow of events have no exact solutions, and the successive approximations have not yet converged on a new basin attractor.
I can’t possibly keep up with the rapid flow of new information, so I won’t be live-blogging any of this.
For the best coverage, I recommend (as usual) Vlad Tepes. Scroll down to the comments for new updates, which he has been adding fairly frequently.
Simplicius has posted some very good site diagrams from Butler, including maps and aerial photos with lots of useful annotations, better than anything else I’ve seen. He also closes his post with these remarks:
It’s clear things are on the brink for the globalist deepstate as they see no further way to tread water without simply eliminating all ascendant resistance leaders; their backs really are against the wall. We are entering a time of great troubles but also great hope, because given their desperation levels it’s clear the final battle is approaching and a grand turning point or realignment is almost upon us.
The big question is whether the Secret Service was guilty of gross incompetence, or something much worse. I don’t have any opinion yet on the matter, but these data points should be noted:
| 1. | A building whose rooftop provided a clear sniper shot at the stage was left outside the security perimeter, and had no Secret Service agents on top to guard it. | |
| 2. | The former president’s security detail had repeatedly requested additional security from the Department of Homeland Security, but was denied it. | |
| 3. | The Secret Service sniper team on the rooftop opposite the gunman had him in their sights, but did not squeeze off any shots before he winged the candidate and killed a bystander. | |
| 4. | More than one eyewitness reported that they had seen the man on the roof and attempted to alert law enforcement and/or the Secret Service, but to no avail. |
Make what you will of those facts.
According to The New York Post, the shooter has now been identified as Matthew Crooks. However, that may not be the final word, because there are uncorroborated reports that it was different guy named Maxwell Yearick. I assume that there are massive amounts of disinformation being injected into the media and the web by players that have a vested interest in pushing the narrative in one direction or another.
The MSM is, of course, useless. Legacy media outlets went out of their way to avoid using the word “assassination”, and even delayed reporting “gunshots” for as long as they could.
And then there the many example of prominent politicians and media people calling for Trump to be liquidated, with varying degrees of explicitness. Keep an eye on Vlad’s place for those, but they are all over the place on other sites.
I expect Conservative Tree House to have extensive coverage today, and WRSA is a great place to keep up with the memes.
Feel free to leave further links in the comments. If you paste a quote that is at all controversial, please include a link showing where you got it.
Below is a BBC interview with an eyewitness to tonight’s attempted assassination of former President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Many thanks to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for uploading this video (originally from Twitter):
A recent report from a Pittsburgh TV station:
Former President Trump Rushed Offstage After Gunfire Erupts at Butler Rally; Shooter, Bystander Dead
BUTLER, Pa. — Secret Service swarmed the stage as former President Donald Trump was speaking Saturday afternoon at a rally in Butler after gunshots rang out over the crowd. The Butler County district attorney told Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 that two people, the shooter and a bystander, are dead.
Trump could be seen being led offstage to a vehicle by his security detail. It appeared that Trump had been injured, with Associated Press photos showing blood coming from the right side of his face near his ear.
A spokesperson for Trump said, “President Trump thanks law enforcement and first responders for their quick action during this heinous act. He is fine and is being checked out at a local medical facility. More details will follow.”
Trump was less than 10 minutes into a speech when he reached for his head and then ducked behind the podium for cover. The crowd began to scream and cover their heads.
Surrounded by the Secret Service, the former president eventually stood back up, pumped his fist and was escorted from the rally.
Hat tip: Vlad Tepes.
Electoral fraud is a venerable tradition in these United States, with a history going all the way back to the founding of the Republic.
With control of the public purse, representative government provided lucrative opportunities for both elected officials and the corporations that did business with them. Baroque levels of corruption became the norm, and public policy was devised to maximize profits for all involved while concealing the dirty deals behind a scrim of public rectitude.
Controlling the outcome of elections was essential for the smooth operation of the political machinery, in order to make sure that lucrative enterprises continued to generate lucre for everyone involved. The political cartoon below by Thomas Nast features William M. “Boss” Tweed, the head of Tammany Hall and the most powerful man in New York City in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Boss Tweed was able to guarantee results through an elaborate patronage network, lavish bribery, and his control of the ballot-counting process.
So how has the ballot-counting process evolved in the century and a half since the heyday of Boss Tweed?
There is widespread concern among elite opinion-makers that the current electoral process poses a threat to Our Democracy™. One of the most recent public figures to sound the alarm is Rob “Meathead” Reiner, according to Variety:
“It’s time to stop f***ing around,” Reiner wrote. “If the Convicted Felon wins, we lose our Democracy. Joe Biden has effectively served US with honor, decency, and dignity. It’s time for Joe Biden to step down.”
Whether Joe Biden steps down or not, it’s obviously important to elect the Democrat, whoever that might be. Our Democracy™ is in danger if voters are allowed to vote for the wrong candidate (in this case, Donald Trump). With so much at stake, we must do whatever it takes to ensure the election of the approved candidate.
In my previous posts I highlighted the role that propaganda and the suppression of dissent play in this process. But these alone are not sufficient to guarantee the desired outcome — hence the imperative to control the voting process itself.
This requires a multi-pronged approach. The traditional emptying of the cemeteries to produce votes on election day is still part of the effort. But the implementation of the widespread use of absentee ballots and “mail-in voting” — for which we can thank the Wuhan Coronavirus — created an opportunity for ballot fraud at an unprecedented level. The vote-counting process in major cities is controlled by Democrats, with vestigial or non-existent Republican supervision. The Democrat precinct workers — in most cases part of the African-American political machine — are able to ensure that a reliable supply of ballots marked for the correct candidate can be delivered as needed.
The methodology used to produce the necessary results is complex. To gain a better understanding, I highly recommend Conservative Tree House, where Sundance has done extensive research on the intricacies of the ballot-counting process. Here’s an excerpt from a recent post:
I posted on Friday about the consternation expressed by bien-pensants all across the West about dangers to “our democracy”. If you pay attention to what the globalists who claim to represent our interests tell us, the survival of Our Democracy™ requires us to follow the directives of people and organizations that are collectively identified as “stakeholders”. Stakeholders include a fairly large cabal of organizations, political leaders, and representatives of various corporations, NGOs, and charitable foundations. It goes without saying that ordinary voters are not considered stakeholders.
“Stakeholders” is a buzzword that has emerged in the last couple of decades to describe the dirigistes who plan for the future of Our Democracy™. If we were referring to Russia, they would be called “oligarchs”, or further afield in the Third World, perhaps “warlords”. But since these estimable folks are here in the enlightened West, they are simply “stakeholders”.
And we know, of course, that they have our best interests at heart.
The problem is: those pesky voters don’t always understand what their best interests are. When confronted with the difficult issues posed by our advanced technological society, they often make the wrong decisions. That’s why they need the help of those stakeholders, who are better informed about the nuances of our high-tech 21st-century civilization.
On the other hand, it’s important to maintain the polite fiction that the ignorant voters are the ones making the decisions. They’re guaranteed a voice by the universal franchise that was so painstakingly won more than a century ago. It is their right and duty to decide the direction of their affairs via the ballot box.
So what is to be done?
The stakeholders have developed three major strategies for directing the hoi-polloi in their electoral choices.
1. Propaganda
Up until 2016 this was the principal method used to generate the desired result in any given election.
First of all, it’s crucial that the major media be brought under stakeholder control. In Europe and Canada the process is simplified by state ownership of all the major television and radio outlets. In the USA the situation is somewhat more complicated, since most media are ostensibly in private hands. Funnily enough, however, all the major outlets move in lockstep on the most important issues, reliably promoting the line pushed by the stakeholders. Even Fox News is controlled opposition — it is set up as the despised right-wing alternative, yet it never veers far from the acceptable center. And that center has been moving inexorably leftwards since the end of the Second World War.
Various agencies of the permanent administrative state can bring pressure to bear on media outlets to persuade them stick to the preferred narrative. The explosion of official media regulations over the past few decades has guaranteed that every media corporation is breaking multiple laws every day, whether it intends to or not. Selective prosecution is an effective tool to keep the MSM in line. Those who stay within the accepted boundaries are left unmolested, while any outfit that strays too far from the narrative risks being hauled into court and tied up for months or years for violating various FCC regulations. The federal government’s pockets are bottomless, and any media corporation that runs afoul of it will eventually be slapped with a big-time fine, and will have to pay its own legal expenses. So it’s much easier just to stick within well-understood limits.
That’s the stick. The feds can also deploy multiple carrots: subsidies, tax breaks, lucrative contracts, concessions granting exclusive coverage of major public events, etc.
I don’t know all the exact ins and outs of this control system. All I can say with certainty is that the results are obvious: we have compliant media that move in lockstep on every important issue. This was made abundantly clear during the COVID-19 “pandemic”, when all major print and broadcast media simultaneously got with the CDC/NIAID/WHO program and never veered from it. It was uncanny.
The media control system generally worked well up until 2016. One of the legacies of the Second World War was that people had developed an ingrained trust of their national governments, which were perceived as beneficial institutions. As long as that reservoir of good will was still sufficiently deep, people could be herded and “nudged” into the desired behavior patterns, and would vote for candidates that were considered acceptable. The cherished illusion of the ballot box in Our Democracy™ could thus be maintained without having to resort to obvious coercion and fraud.
During every election the democratic process ran its course. The stakeholders would guide the selection of the candidates, and voters would be allowed to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. It didn’t matter which one they voted for — both were considered acceptable to the Powers That Be, otherwise the stakeholders wouldn’t have put them in place.
Relentless media propaganda would always demonize one of them as “far right”, however — otherwise the center couldn’t be pushed relentlessly to the left. Statistically speaking, the media barrage had its intended effect: on balance, voters opted for more state control, more socialist policies, and more destruction of traditional cultural practices. And the bright shiny progressive Utopia thus drew ever closer.
Unfortunately for the stakeholders, the usual process got derailed in 2016. Tweedledum and Tweedledee were supposed to be Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Hillary would have won easily, but it wouldn’t matter if the voters resisted the leftward ratchet and chose the “far right” Jeb instead — the latter was fully captured, and posed no threat to the system.
But Donald Trump upset the applecart. He was not under the stakeholders’ control, and it wasn’t supposed to be possible for him to win the nomination, let alone the general election. When he did, the system was threatened. A tremor ran through the foundations of Barad-dûr.
And Mr. Trump wasn’t the only threat: Brexit also caused the earth to shake under the rules-based order of the West. The ignorant, turbulent voters on both sides of the Atlantic had gone against their programming and made choices they weren’t supposed to make.
The stakeholders closed ranks after 2016 and pulled out all the stops to make sure that nothing similar could ever happen again. In the process they were forced to reveal themselves — they had to step out from behind the curtain and wield an iron fist with its velvet glove removed. It was a salutary moment: what had once been a vague outline in the shadows now stood out sharp and clear, red-eyed and fanged.
People became aware they had been manipulated. As a result, the customary propaganda began to lose its effectiveness. It was no longer so easy to fool the Lumpenproletariat. Different tools for control needed to be selected from the stakeholders’ toolbox, which brings us to…
Last night’s debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden has fully occupied the memespace of the Internet. Everybody is discussing it, especially the talking heads of the MSM, but also all the pundits and bloggers and social media mavens.
I’m staying away from it as much as possible. One of the main reasons is that it is all so deeply, deeply insane. It’s disturbing, and comic, and demonic, all rolled into one.
I feel like I’m living in a planet-wide madhouse. And if I watch too much of this stuff, I’ll get sucked into the vortex of lunacy myself, and never find my way out.
So I won’t be blogging debate-related matters. There will be items about it in the news feed, and I recommend Conservative Tree House for comprehensive coverage. This post is especially interesting. Power Line is also doing in-depth analysis.
This brief snip from Mark Steyn fully aligns with my own take on what’s really going on:
You have to figure that that’s greatly to the advantage of the Deep State, and that’s why they’d like to keep it that way. It’s quite something to teach the people the lesson that representative politics is just a meaningless joke, third-rate dinner-theatre in which all the faux-combat is an obvious sham. In the Soviet Union, the point wasn’t to persuade you to believe the lie but to force you to live with the lie. Reducing the two-year US election cycle to the same state inflicts an even more brutal humiliation on the masses.
So why weren’t they able, after a week-and-a-half of dosage experimentation, to shoot the stiff enough of the juice to pass him off as being back in his State of the Union top-of-the-game mode?
As my former GB News colleague Neil Oliver observed long ago on The Mark Steyn Show, formulating a useful rule of contemporary politics:
This is happening because they want it to happen.
Karl-Olov Arnstberg is a Swedish writer, ethnologist, and retired university professor. His essays are posted at his blog, Invandring och mörkläggning. Below is today’s installment of his “Sunday Chronicle”. Many thanks to our Swedish correspondent LN for the translation:
Sunday chronicle: Liberal hegemony
by Karl-Olov Arnstberg
At the international level, the liberal order is characterised by economic openness, i.e. low barriers to trade and investment, relations between states being regulated by laws and institutions such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and multilateral alliances such as NATO.
At the national level, the liberal order is synonymous with:
- Democratically elected leaders
- The rule of law
- Market economy
- Religious and social tolerance
- Human rights
Proponents of a liberal world order do not believe that this dream society arises spontaneously or automatically sustains itself. On the contrary, they believe that the liberal order requires active leadership. They also agree the United States, as the only superpower, is uniquely qualified to take the lead. Because it faces no threats in the Western Hemisphere and is shielded from the rest of the world by two vast oceans, it can intervene in distant countries without jeopardising its own survival. The two fundamental beliefs of liberal hegemony:
- The United States must remain far more powerful than any other country.
- It should use its superior military power to defend, spread and deepen liberal values around the world.
In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, history seemed to be moving in the US direction and it was considered easy to spread the American version of liberalism. The victory in the Cold War, the so-called Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe and a wave of democratic transitions in Latin America convinced many that liberal democracy was the only logical end point for modern or even postmodern societies.
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the United States ‘the indispensable nation that sees beyond what others do.’ The Washington Post hailed US foreign policy as ‘the landmine that protects civilisation from barbarism.’ Only so-called rogue states, led by dictators and international troublemakers, opposed the exercise of US power, but they were comparatively weak and politically isolated. In any case, they were assumed to be heading for the dustbin of history.
The political scientist Francis Fukuyama captured the zeitgeist perfectly when he argued that the great ideological battles of the past were now behind us and that humanity had reached the end of history. In the future, he said, there would be no struggle or conflict over major issues and consequently no need for generals or statesmen. Fukuyama warned that boredom could be the greatest danger of the future.
The enlargement and deepening of the EU in 1992, and the introduction of the euro as the single currency, fitted into this optimistic narrative. The EU was further proof that democracy, and the gradual development of international institutions, could bring lasting peace between countries that had previously fought bloody wars with each other. Overall, the future seemed bright not only for the United States but also for much of the world. Liberal values were on the rise and seemed to be inexorably pulling the world in the direction American leaders wanted it to go.
MC’s latest update from Sderot is prefaced by some historical musings and a look at the larger political context.
Think No More
by MC
Over a hundred years ago Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew, was stripped of his rank and imprisoned. The world was happy that “the Joo done it” and no more questions were asked.
Whilst it was obvious the Dreyfus had not done ‘it’, the alternative was not thinkable; thus Dreyfus remained ‘guilty’ until Émile Zola forced a reinvestigation to prove him innocent.
Largely as a result of the Dreyfus affair, Theodor Herzl realized that Jews could not overcome anti-Semitism and would always be unacceptable in European circles. Thus he gave birth to the Zionist movement, the essence of which was to provide a homeland where Jews could be Jews.
The word ‘Zionist’ has changed meaning over the last 129 years, and has been turned into an epithet of all that leftists hate about Jooz.
Zion is the ancient name of Jerusalem, but like most Hebrew words carries a much deeper meaning, that of a place with a direct connection to Yahovah.
The word Yahovah itself has the meaning “I was, I am, I will be”. But unfortunately its meaning is lost in the translated Greek of the New Testament; see John 8 v 5. ‘Yahovah’ is a word of power and caused the Pharisaic arrest team to fall over.
There is a reason why Satanic forces continue to attack Jews, and Romans 10 & 11, oft ignored or glossed over, explains.
One must apply Occam’s Razor to both Judaism and Christianity to try and cut away the pagan influences and get to the TRUTH of Creation. Satan knows this so much better than we do, and thus continues to attack Jews.
Palestinian propaganda has been wildly successful, and even the White House is quoting the Hamas Gaza ‘Health’ Ministry (GHM) unchecked and verbatim.
Thus the canards of ‘starvation, Aid Worker protection and Rafah’ go both unresearched and unchallenged.
The UK called in the Israeli ambassador solely on the basis of a propaganda statement from the GHM — folly, considering the GHM’s past performance.
There are no ‘lies’ as such in Islam, and any fabrication is permitted if it hurts the enemies of Islam. It is incredible stupidity to trust any statement originating from the depths of the GHM.
But, of course, if that information is useful to pacify the residents of Dearborn (and help them vote Democrat), then think no more…
This also explains why the feminist left had such problems condemning Hamas’ (sexual) violations of female Jooz (and males). They had to make some decisions, and the thought of supporting ‘colonialist and oppressive’ Jewish women in the face of non-colonialist and non-oppressive Muslims proved too much. Rape is not a crime if the victim is deemed to be an oppressor.
So now, October 7th having been forgotten, they are free to support ‘Palestine’ and the institutionalized slavery of Muslim women — toujours c’est la même chose…
The burka is very pleasant to wear, you know — it stops men looking at you!
Some of the things that President Biden and the Democrat Party have been doing over the past few months are pretty bizarre, considering that this is an election year.
Hispanics and even blacks are shifting away from the Democrats. Young people — the parti-colored Zoomer TikTok generation — are increasingly drawn towards Donald Trump. The way things are going, there won’t be enough dump trucks available to haul in the “found” ballots required to put Joe Biden over the top on the night of November 5th. The Democrats are virtuosos at rigging elections, but even in the dystopian twilight of 21st-century America, elections can only be stolen at the margin. The race has to be at least somewhat close in order to pull off an effective steal.
The Democrat apparat seems utterly unconcerned with making sure the race is a tight one. One unpopular policy after another is being pushed — open borders, criminals released without bail, the promotion of sexual perversion, the war against the internal combustion engine, uniformed soldiers with pink hair mincing around in high heels…
And, to top it all off, there was the “Transgender Day of Visibility” on Easter Sunday. Don’t they even want to win the election?
Well, maybe they really don’t.
I’d been thinking along those lines for a while, and then last week I happened to read something similar at ZeroHedge, an essay saying that they’re going to let Trump win.
These are the key paragraphs:
Let Trump back in, and fight him on home turf — in the maze of the executive bureaucracy. Some of his backers have announced their intention to become politically competent in the event that he wins — but compared to the alternatives, that’s a very manageable risk.
More importantly: let Trump hold the bag for the all-but-guaranteed economic calamity of the next four years. The regime could skate for another decade if they succeed in pinning the collapse on a dangerous, erratic right-wing upstart. [emphasis added]
Everything I say here tonight is pure speculation. I’m not an expert on any of these matters, and especially not on financial issues. I’m just a reasonably well-informed layperson who reads a lot of information from diverse points of view.
It’s undeniable that the country is headed towards some form of fiscal calamity. As I mentioned last month, money-printing is being taken to new extremes:
I swore off making specific predictions after the previous great fiscal crisis in 2009, when my prognostications were so completely wrong. I never would have thought they could keep the racket going for another fifteen years, but here we are. The Powers That Be have managed to do a lot with derivatives and real estate bubbles.
But the debt graph can’t keep going up with a steadily increasing slope — it just can’t. Someday the pyramid scheme will come crashing down, and the chickens will come home to roost. Based on the current debt acceleration, it won’t be much longer. It might take a week; it might take a decade. But the chickens will be roosting relatively soon.
The thing is, the people who keep the Ponzi scheme afloat know exactly what’s coming. They know the money-printing tactic will eventually stop working. It’s a complex process, what with cryptocurrencies, CBDCs, derivatives, paper and digital “futures” of precious metals, and now the BRICS alternatives. Keeping those plates spinning must surely be a tricky business.
And the people in charge know that a collapse of the dollar will eventually come. In order enrich themselves fully, and assure themselves an unbroken hold on the levers of power, they will need to time the crisis carefully. At exactly the right moment they will topple the pillars supporting the dollar-based economy, after having thoroughly prepared the replacement system that will be built on the smoking ruins of the old one.
So which patsy will be nominally in charge when the house of cards comes tumbling down? Who will preside over the Great Collapse?
Whose face will be on the Zimbabwe-style trillion-dollar bill?
For a long time I thought Brandon was being set up as the fall guy. He was always obviously a disposable president, a non-re-electable senile geezer who could be pushed aside when he was no longer needed. The people who crafted his policies and wrote his speeches clearly didn’t try to make him more popular. I assumed that when the time was right, he would be gently eased out (and Kamala, too, although that part would be tricky), and a substitute such as Gavin Newsom or Big Mike installed to run in 2024, someone who was at least plausible enough that the election could be rigged on his behalf.
But it never happened. And the scripts that Brandon has been following have been so damaging to him that it’s obvious that his handlers don’t really want him to win re-election. It is intended that he go down in flames, taking the Democrat Party with him.
Our English correspondent Seneca III addresses his latest remarks to his American cousins.
A Letter to the Cousins
by Seneca III
On this side of the pond and then on over the ditch to Europe, there is increasing chaos. The political classes, the academics and the politicians we have elected are scrambling around and promoting this DEI excrement which has turned so much of our national socio-economic landscapes into moral wildernesses by selling out to these ‘new citizens’, the so called ‘immigrants’ and ‘refugees’ who are in fact illegally-entered black and brown criminals (mostly Muslim) from every failed country on earth. They are slowly and violently taking over the streets, public spaces and public transport across the continent.
Stabbings, street robberies, rape gangs and shootings are now an unwelcome integral part of our way of life, and parts of several major cities such as Londonistan, which is now minority white, are infested with dangerous no-go areas unsafe even in daylight. At night they become war zones where different factions, races and gangs fight it out for control. Europe, with a couple of notable exceptions, is much the same.
In Aberdeen, Shell’s headquarters were targeted today with orange paint as Just Stop Oil activists claimed responsibility. They seem not to understand that the Universe, even if only to the extent of the thirteen-billion-year time/distance limited horizons we can presently observe, is huge beyond our comprehension. It is deep, complicated, profoundly mysterious and interconnected in ways we do not yet understand… if we ever will. That Extinction Rebellion and its various analogues should presume to tell us how it works on our cosmological microscale and that we are responsible for perfectly natural events smacks of the destructive knee-jerk response of simple-minded children.
We still do not know if solar activity and climate are constructive partners or destructive antagonists, for our collective life span is too short compared with that of Mother Sun. Homo sapiens sapiens still has a long way to go to complete its evolution into Homo solaris and even further to Homo stellaris, but one wonders how those far-distant descendants of ours will look back and view the twitterings of these gullible drones so taken in by the great global warming/carbon tax scam.
With much time on my hands these days, this redneck from over the pond has used it to keep a beady eye on you guys and I have a subliminal feeling that a major geopolitical sea change is underway over there. It’s hard to pin down amidst the furore surrounding Trump, the November presidential election and what will happen after, but there are some clues to be found in these snippets I have picked up during my interweb meanderings:
The two videos below are unrelated; I just happened to encounter them both today. They seem somehow emblematic of the apocalyptic times that we Americans are forced to live through.
The first clip shows remarks made by Peter Navarro at CPAC. Mr. Navarro is an economist who served as a presidential advisor during the Trump administration. After the “election” of 2020 he, like so many other Trump associates, became a target of the January 6 Inquisition when the Democrats were in control of the House. He refused to comply with a congressional subpoena to provide documents and testimony, and was charged with two counts of contempt of Congress. After being convicted on both counts, he was sentenced to four months in prison. He is appealing the verdict, but the judge ruled that he must serve his sentence in the meantime.
I don’t have any opinion on Peter Navarro, nor any idea on the merits of the legal cases against him. However, I know that the treatment of him is shameless political persecution. The mickey-mouse stuff he was accused of doing would have merited no notice if he had been a Democrat, or served under an elected pol with a “D” after his name. He is being persecuted because he had the temerity to hitch his star to the evil Orange Man.
He made the following remarks just prior to beginning his prison sentence:
The second video is an excerpt from Tucker Carlson’s interview with the inventor and entrepreneur Steve Kirsch. Mr. Kirsch has great expertise in statistical methods, and since early 2021 he has been investigating the statistics on the adverse effects of the experimental mRNA treatment intended to mitigate infection with the Wuhan Coronavirus. He has done great service to his country by digging up and exposing to public view the ghastly figures on the adverse effects, especially deaths, caused by the vax. The CDC and the other panjandrums of the political-corporate power structure are doing their utmost to marginalize and shun him so that the general public will never become aware of the harm the government has done by coercing them to get jabbed.
I watched the full interview, which is almost an hour long, but it has since been taken down, presumably because TCN is zealously protecting its copyright. The video below shows only the first eleven minutes, but it will at least give you a taste of what Steve Kirsch had to say:
Hat tips: Vlad Tepes and Steen.