Political Rants & interesting thought pieces

[Crafty_Dog]

Our Parasitic Generation
Yes, there is a lot of ruin in great nations. But even America is by now running low on it.
By Victor Davis Hanson

December 11, 2022
"Be assured young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation."
— Adam Smith

Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?

We are $31 trillion in collective debt. The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits. The military is politicized and short of recruits. We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies’ cynical stereotypes.

Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections. We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it. The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware—and hard-earned deterrence.

We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and baby formula. Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or stroll at dusk in many major American cities. Medieval London’s roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco. Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.

The Breakdown of Basic Society
Our California always is a preamble to America’s future. Our present is likely your tomorrow.

Each summer here we impotently expect forest conflagrations. Millions of acres of flames pour more millions of tons of smoke and carbon and soot in the skies. Tens of millions of hated combustion engines cannot begin to match the natural blankets of aerial dirt.

The state seems to shrug it off, saying wildfires are both inevitable and natural. Old-fashioned forest management and fire-fighting strategies, honed over centuries, are deemed obsolete by our green experts. So, we let fiery nature take its better course. What is the implicit message to those in the way of fires that devour homes and trees? Nature’s way? Natural wood mulch? Or that such fools should not build their cabins or homes where they are not wanted?

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What was bequeathed to us from a state of 15 million—magnificent aqueducts, once brilliantly designed freeways and airports, superb universities and schools, perfectly engineered reservoirs, and downtowns of majestic skyscrapers—in a California of 41 million are frozen in amber or in decay. They have few updates and even fewer replacements. The decrepitude recalls the weedy forums and choked fountains of Vandal-era Roman cities, which is what happens when a later parasitic generation mocks but still consumes what it inherits but cannot create.

Our own generation’s pale contributions are multibillion-dollar, quarter-built, graffiti-defaced high-speed rail Stonehenge monoliths. We prefer to shut down rather than build nuclear plants. Our solar battery plants are as prone to combust as they are to store electricity. And our urban streets reek of feces. All seem testaments to our incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance. We fear the idea of homelessness, and so cede to the homeless our downtowns and avoid what follows.

Our great universities, once the most esteemed in the world from Berkeley and Stanford to UCLA and USC, grow burdened with commissars, too many of their outnumbered faculties are weaponized, and their students have never been more confident in their abilities, and with so little reason for that confidence.

A return to syllabi and grading standards of just 30 years ago would result in mass flunkings. Failure on tests apparently means the test, not the test taker, is found wanting.

What follows is the erosion of meritocracy and competence. And that reality is starting to explain the great unraveling: why our bridges take decades to build rather than a few years, why train tracks are not laid after a decade of “planning,”and why to drive down a once brilliantly engineered, but now crammed and dangerous road is to revisit the “Road Warrior” of film. Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are the apt characters of our age.

Institutions That Went Rogue
The FBI has imploded. It has all but become a Third World retrieval and investigatory service for the Democratic Party. Its last four directors either have lied, misled, or pleaded amnesia while under oath.

In 2016, the bureau with the Democratic National Committee sought to destroy the integrity of an election by fabricating a Russian collusion hoax. Its continuance and coverup ultimately required FBI agents and lawyers to alter legal documents, to lie under oath, to destroy subpoenaed phone data, and to outsource illegal suppression of First Amendment rights to Silicon Valley contractors. The nation now fears there isn’t anything the FBI might not do.

As we became hyper-legal with Trump, we are more sublegal with the entire Biden family. For a decade, with impunity, it gorged multimillion profits from selling the “Big Guy”/Mr. “10 Percent” Joe Biden’s name and access—sums for the most part hidden and likely not completely taxed. We all know it is true, and we all know the FBI and Department of Justice know it is true, and we know further that the truth means nothing.

This self-satisfied generation constantly brags of transforming elections. But it will be known more as the destroyer of a once hallowed Election Day. Not so long ago 70-80 percent of the electorate took the trouble of voting under transparent protocols. We replaced it in most states with 60-70 percent of the votes without audit and the product of vote harvesting and curing. Our generation, in just a couple of years, destroyed Election Day voting and Election Night counting.

The New Medievalism
Despite different calibrations, various data reveal what is self-evident to the naked eye. The American middle class is shrinking, if not insidiously sliding into indebted peasantry. Westerners are regressing and by design, now deciding daily whether to top up the tank, turn up the heat, or buy beef.

Society is also bifurcating. A tiny powerful minority has more leverage than any other elite in the history of civilization. And a large underclass of subsidized poor shares with the wealthy a disdain for the struggling middle class, the old bulwark of democracy.

In place of knightly penances and chivalric oaths, our elite takes Bankman-Fried-like vows to “fight climate change,” support “transitioning,” and ensure “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” But like their Medieval brethren, they do so only by first enhancing, not endangering, their own careers.

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For the ruling class, prep schools, alphabetic certifications from tony universities, and revolving-door résumés are modern versions of having an abbey on site, a stately coat-of-arms, or taking vows from the correct religious orders. Otherwise, it is the same medievalism masked by pretension.

Our Rhine and Danube
America is rapidly resembling something like wide-open fifth-century A.D. Rome, when its traditional inviolable northern borders on the Rhine and Danube rivers vanished. Thousands of unassimilated tribes crisscrossed as they pleased on the premise that no one among their overripe, soft hosts could or would dare stop them.

Joe Biden just remarked that he is too busy to visit the southern border. And why not? There may have been roughly 5 million illegal aliens who have crossed it since his inauguration. He earns contempt both from those who try to enforce the border and those who cross illegally over it.

Biden surrealistically trashes Trump’s supposed archaic idea of a wall—always without noting self-evident truths about it: anywhere Biden stopped the wall or has not replaced prior rickety fencing, there are the most porous and trafficked entry points.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ various mendacities that the border is “secure” translate to allowing as many million aliens as possible to break the law to enter the United States in the four years of the Biden experiment. The administration sees itself in a race to create a one-off window of historic laxity through which millions can pour in—before a comatose nation wakes up and shuts it down.

We are approaching an historic 50 million residents who were not born in the United States, and of various legal and illegal statuses. In a sane world, we might survive the challenge—if newcomers had all come legally, learned the customs and language of their desired new home, were audited and queued by some logical meritocratic process, and were quickly assimilated and integrated by a confident host population that assumed any who wished to live in America surely desired help in becoming an American and felt gratitude to their hosts.

Instead, there is only chaos—and it is by design.

The legal immigrant waiting in line to enter the United States is considered a fool, while illegal aliens and residents instead quickly absorb three messages from their hosts. First, illegal residents will often be treated better than American citizens, at least in terms of lax law enforcement, various legal exemptions and amnesties, and unaudited entitlements.

Second, many will soon learn they can assume immediate moral claims against the majority population of their new home, who can be seen as racist oppressors and obligated to offer reparatory concessions in terms of hiring, admissions, and entitlements.

Third, too many will quickly learn, Ilhan Omar-style, to harbor a quiet derision for their benefactors. Their contempt is not due to Americans’ dearth of magnanimity and generosity, much less to “systemic racism.” Instead, their American hosts are silently assumed to be naïve, timid, overly solicitous, malleable, easily manipulated, rolled, and conned—especially when it is understood that if the roles were reversed and the entrants were the hosts, they would have a different notion of borders.

The idea of 330 million American citizens of different incidental races and ethnicities united by a common American identity of shared values, customs, and traditions is all but mocked. In its place is arising something like the former Yugoslavia—an undefined mishmash of competing and increasingly hostile tribal interests, with residents sorting themselves out into red and blue states that eventually will lead to two antithetical Americas.

So once assumed services, customs, institutions, and expectations are eroding—from a safe walk to a government office in a large city’s downtown, to a visit to the local public emergency room in extremis for humane, rapid, and competent care, to a clean, safe subway ride in a major city, or watching election returns conclude on Election Night.

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A Nation of Thieves?
In a nearby Home Depot the other day, there were two long lines to check out. The other six were closed, as was the largest exit with several self-check-out counters.

Why? When asked the clerk whispered that the theft rate is high in the store and that from time to time it shuts down various exits to limit stealing or perhaps to confuse calculating thieves. I added that I had learned that almost any large item in a box purchased at Home Depot had to be first opened to ensure that key parts like knobs, wires, and screws had not been ripped off.

A local Walmart stopped its 24-hour service; again, the clerk said it was due to unsustainable looting during the early morning hours.

I also went to Walgreens and Rite-Aid recently. Much of what anyone wanted, from razors to antihistamines, was under lock-and-key. None of this was true just a decade ago. I live in a rural area among small towns—a world away from Los Angeles and San Francisco where smash-and-grab robberies and unapologetic looting have caused the mass closures of pharmacies and all-service stores.

Exemptions given thefts under $950 in some states may be the culprit. Others cite the post-George Floyd riots and the climate of unpunished street criminality. Maybe years of mask-wearing made us forget who normally had used masks and for what reasons.

Weaponized activist district attorneys and virtue-signaling mayors also signal to criminals that property crimes don’t warrant arrest, much less conviction, much less incarceration.

But whatever the cause, a once famously lawful America has become a veritable land of thieves. The criminal is all but exempt. And the middle class and poor suffer as a result from poor services, higher prices, reduced hours, and fewer stores.

We know the solution is to deter crime by assured punishment for the guilty. But the majority of Americans either cannot or will not demand a return to sanity for fear of some sort of undefined pushback from their elites. Pick your charge: “racism,” “privilege,” “bias,” “discrimination.” Any will do.

We have seen lots of cultural revolutions in this country, but never one that was so singularly focused on razing the foundations of America—until now. Yes, there is a lot of ruin in great nations. But even America is by now running low on it.

[ccp]

The legislation lays out terms of a plebiscite as well as three potential self-governing statuses - independence, full U.S. statehood or sovereignty with free association with the United States

https://news.yahoo.com/puerto-rican-independence-bill-goes-000300579.html

hopefully independence .........

[ccp]

state most want compromise:

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/lawmakers-congress-republicans/2022/12/15/id/1100655/

Haven't republicans been doing that for 60 yrs

[Crafty_Dog]

December 16, 2022
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On Jet Lag
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
As I mentioned to some of you in our ClubGPF discussion this week, Meredith and I spent the past six weeks traveling. We went to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Germany, Italy, Abu Dhabi, Canada (twice) and several places in the United States. In the months before this trip, we went to Europe twice, including stints in Poland, Hungary and Austria. Incidentally, this is why I have not been able to answer your email comments, which I apologize for and will reform.

The purpose of these trips was always to converse with selected audiences who were under the illusion that I had valuable thoughts to impart. I am arrogant enough to believe this is true, but over the course of weeks, the arrogance falters. There is a ditty, I believe from Disney, claiming that it’s “a small world after all,” but on all these trips I discover that’s a lie. The world is vast, filled with any number of hopes and fears and anger.

I didn’t get to confront any of these on this trip, or on most of the trips I have taken since leaving my bell bottoms at home. I meet what I call members of the managerial class. They have much to offer, but I suspect they are more like me than they are like their countrymen. For one thing, they all speak English. Even in Hungary, whose language does not resemble any other human tongue, and which I can actually speak, I delivered my speeches in English. The managerial class may not “own” the country, but they make it work, whether they are in business, government, academia or shop-lifting. They are of their country, but I am not sure they embody their country.

The managerial class follows America meticulously. America is their trading power, their military ally, a place they visit regularly. In some countries, America is a land to pity; in others, it is a land to dread. But everywhere it is a land to watch. The managerial class cannot manage without knowing what the Americans will do next.

Their view is amusing to Americans because they seem to think that the U.S. has grand designs on all the things they care about, and they explain those plans with care. Their articulation of America’s cleverly planned intentions always leaves me sad. I have to explain that the vast and chaotic United States may have some guy at a gray, metal desk thinking about them but that normally no one cares what he thinks. He is at his crummy desk precisely because he peaked in high school and has been lurching downward ever since. There is no one plan but a dozen potential plans that no one can agree on. America is so vast and sufficiently self-absorbed that government and corporations struggle to manage themselves, let alone the world. Yes, American plans could transform these countries. But the founders did not want an efficient government, and many American corporations don’t plan past next month – or, if they do, the plans tend to be unrecognizable after six months. Americans fixate on the next moment, which limits their ability to organize around and execute a single plan.

Thus is the profound fault line of our times. The global managerial class has modeled itself on the leading managerial culture at the moment: America’s. It is so taken by American culture that it imputes a level of Machiavellian intentions and execution to a nation that was designed to be disorderly. They speak perfect English but can’t understand that Americans have enough wealth and depth to survive irresponsible clashes that would sink other countries. They expect an intentionality from the United States, and when it is not obvious what it is, they invent one. They need us to be something we aren’t.

When I return home from my travels, my brain disconnects from the reality of my life. This is called jet lag, but I don’t believe that traveling itself causes it. There is a wrenching difference between the life I lead in America and what the global managerial class thinks I do. In my travels, I cannot allow myself to stop thinking. When I’m home, my brain is unmoored from the things I was asked and the answers I gave, and I enter a world where random and absurd thoughts carry no consequences. Here, my wife and I can have a satisfying argument about nothing worth arguing over.

America is the land where it mostly doesn’t matter. The rest of the world doesn’t have that luxury. I am free to wonder if Trump is going to jail or if Biden is actually senile – things that don’t really affect my life. In the rest of the world, the stakes are higher.

And this is the origin of jet lag: the transfer from countries that dread what the U.S. plans to do next – places that cannot fathom a world in which Americans don’t think in ways others presume they do – to a country that cushions everyday life.

[ccp]

Left wing MSM labels those who oppose drag shows for children as Facist

notice no similar BS moniker given to the other side :

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/neo-nazis-leftist-gun-groups-face-off-during-protest-at-grand-prairie-drag-show/ar-AA15qgBZ

****"Protect Texas Kids, which was founded by University of North Texas alumna Kelly Neidert, seeks to ban children from viewing the performances. Over the past six months, the organization has staged protests outside drag shows in Dallas, Arlington and Roanoke. They were joined at Saturday’s protest by two religious organizations: the Christian nationalist New Columbia Movement and the neo-fascist American Nationalist Initiative.

The right-wing groups were opposed by a coalition of counterprotesters, including the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and heavily armed members of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, who were openly carrying rifles that they said were intended to protect the show and those in attendance.****

I looked every one of these and NONE ARE FASCIST!
Nada

The word Fascist is thrown around against Conservatives by the Liberal media all day long
and at no time does it even fit the description of who they are labelling.

And some of the left wing groups are self described Socialists / Marxists yet they never get this accurate label

God, I do hate the lying BS MSM.

[Crafty_Dog]

Hey, conservatives, gazillionaires are ruling you

Soros, Gates, Zuckerberg and Schwab (to name only a few)

By Rowan Scarborough

Old Twitter’s big operation to methodically choke off conservative thought drives home the new reality in America: We are being ruled by unelected, super-rich left-wing ideologues.

The pantheon: Bill Gates, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Lauren Powell Jobs, Tom Steyer, Tim Cook, the trillion-dollar woke manager BlackRock,Google, Facebook, Old Twitter, Disney, Comcast, and Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum billionaire’s club.

They are not just different from you and me. They are different from your grandfather’s industrial dynamos. Those old-school fat cats largely shaped American lives through inventions. Better electricity, railways, cars, airplanes, rocket ships, phones, appliances, banking and the oil to run them all.

That’s not enough for today’s Big Tech, investment houses and other Democratic Party financiers. Yes, they invented the next generation of neat stuff to advance the human experience. But then they corralled it and its immense stream of cash to try to micromanage us — what we should read, say and think; how we travel; what food we can produce and eat; and how we vote.

Ironically, thanks to the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, Americans got our first real peek at just how much mind control Old Twitter exerted. Neo-Twitter Musk is more your grandfather’s industrialist. Mr. Musk built colossal successes in banking (PayPal), the auto industry (Tesla) and space travel (SpaceX). Missing was a desire to look down on the average American.

Mr. Musk liberated Old Twitter by first launching the “Twitter Files” exposing how deeply the woke rigged the town square.

The blacklisting (they called it by the fancy cyber nomenclature “visibility filtering”) came with a great cost to our country. They did not just banish debate; they banished the truth. It was not solely about delisting a conservative activist’s Twitter account. It was about erasing a thought as unfit to be discussed — anywhere.

The billionaires’ tightening grip on American society flows in two channels.

Old Twitter, Google, Google’s YouTube and Facebook attack free thinking.

Channel 2 is the remaking of daily life, stripping it of enjoyment and implanting it with guilt.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his $100 billion fortune (says Forbes) is such a man.

There is probably not a gazillionaire who has a more expansive agenda to run our lives than Mr. Gates and his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ($56 billion).

Mr. Gates has parlayed COVID-19/climate change into experiments to block our only sun, vegan eating, insect-eating and fake meat eating — while he buys up farmland. He is the No. 1 private funder of the World Health Organization. Its pet project these days is some digital vaccine “passport,” which would require a massive database and travel control.

The Gates Foundation sent a grant in 2012 to All Things Bugs LLC. The stated purpose: “To develop a method for the efficient production of nutritionally dense food using insect species.”

All Things Bugs raves about its cricket powder and larva sausage, which I don’t use.This year, it won the world’s first U.S. patent to mass-produce bug food, Yahoo News reported.

Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum is the globe’s most annoying insect proponent. Its menu especially endorses mealworms. Yummy. Overall, Mr. Schwab wants a total revamp of Earth.

The Land Report news magazine estimates that Mr. Gates, at 242,000 total acres, is the single largest owner of U.S. farmland. For what purpose? I asked the Gates Foundation press shop and received no answer.

Mr. Gates has invested in a Harvard experiment on solar geoengineering. Special cloud dust would dim the sun and reduce Earth’s temperatures.

“This Bill Gates-funded chemical cloud could help stop global warming,” said a CNBC story.

Mr. Gates has decreed that all “rich countries” should be 100% synthetic meat. It has to do with cow methane and climate change.

One way Mr. Gates publicizes all his dreams is by funding a list of prominent journalism organizations. Have you noticed all the insects-as-food stories?

A 2020 analysis by author Tim Schwab in Columbia Journalism Review found that more than $250 million in Gates grants have gone to influential outlets such as BBC, NBC, ProPublica, National Journal, The Atlantic and The Guardian.

As the bespectacled, studious Mr. Gates issues edicts on climate change and diet, there is an American plutocrat who is less polite. Democratic Party partisan George Soros utilizes the brute force of political money to get want he wants.

What he wants is no less than a restructuring of America, casting off U.S. sovereignty for some type of global rule.

“The sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions,” Mr. Soros has said. And also, “We need a new international authority that transcends the sovereignty of states to promote an open society.”

He has funded hundreds of left-wing activist groups, such as Demand Justice ($4.5 million in 2021). It is led by Brian Fallon, former Hillary Clinton campaign press secretary and one of the most prominent defund-the-police advocates.

Mr. Soros’ most impactful current investment is the election of ultra-left prosecutors in deepblue urban America. His motive is to help the poor by releasing impoverished criminals after their arrests.

I would total up Mr. Soros’ grand criminal justice plan as more crime, fewer police.

(BTW, Mr. Soros lives quite comfortably in gated compounds in a town that has its own police force.)

Conservatives say Mr. Soros is destroying America, piece by piece. Democrats take his money and run. Then there is the southern border. Mr. Soros’ Open Society Foundations hands out the financial goodies. One recipient is Alianza Americas. Last year, it called for eliminating the U.S. Border Patrol and enforcement — in other words, a completely open border.

President Biden wants more Democratic voters, so he has discarded his oath to protect America and is doing Alianza’s job for them. Murderous Mexican drug cartels now come and go as they please. They are flooding our country with deadly drugs such as Chinese-designed fentanyl and trafficking criminals and sex slaves.

Why did Mr. Biden do this? Mr. Soros was the top donor by far for the just-completed midterm elections, with over $128 million directed to Democrats and aligned groups.

That’s why.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDEuBR87N-s

[Crafty_Dog]

How the Left Became What It Once Hated
Jeffrey A. Tucker December 23, 2022

In the final scenes of the book and film “The Hunger Games,” Katniss Everdeen has the opportunity finally to kill the hated dictator President Snow, but instead, turns her bow on the leader of the rebellion armies, namely President Coin.

The plot twist is remarkable because it adds an element of realistic complexity to the dynamics of power. Katniss has come to realize that the rebels had gradually become the thing that they hated the most. They had begun to crave the very power that they were trying to overthrow.

Indeed, there was no reason to think that the regime under rebel control would be different than the status quo. The emoluments of power would be newly available to a new group of managers. Coin would replace Snow just as Snow had replaced the person before him. What Katniss really wanted was a completely new system of freedom, not just a new public face to the old tyranny.

Her insight is profound here. When hatred becomes focused, boundless, and obsessive, the hater gradually comes to emulate the very thing it opposes. That’s what happened to the rebel armies and to Coin.

So too, this is what Trump Derangement Syndrome has done to the left in this country. It began in 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency over Hillary Clinton, who was somehow supposed to win. After that, the single-minded focus of opposition became to grind him and his presidency into the ground and oppose everything about him, including his supporters and even the system that brought him to office.

The bitter irony here is that the left has become the very thing that they warned against. They said Trump was an authoritarian and brutal, a financial racketeer who lived off manipulation. They warned that he would use his personality cult to impose a quasi-dictatorship.

And here we are six years later and what do we see of the left in this country? Especially during the COVID crisis, they embraced censorship, authoritarianism, imposition on bodily autonomy, and attacks on the freedom of association. For a time, the word freedom itself became a bad word to them. People who were merely trying to get schools open or the freedom to run a small business became the object of their loathing, even to the point that the left began to label as fascist those who wanted freedom.

Someone coming of age right now would never have any idea that the left once had some central principles that revolved around themes of freedom. They were free speech, bodily autonomy, peace, small business over large, the poor and middle class over the rich, freedom of expression and art, and opposition to ruling-class manipulation of the system on behalf of the privileged instead of the common good. They were deeply suspicious of the national-security state, corporate elites, and arbitrary uses of executive power. They were against corruption in government.

They were once for human rights and against segregation based on medical compliance. Probably today, no one younger than the age of 25 would believe this, but trust me: These used to be central principles of the left.

So far as I can tell, every single one of these principles has been thrown out. In the COVID crisis, all major lefty journals of opinion pushed mask and vaccine mandates, argued for more statist power to muscle people, favored large businesses over small, crushed the working classes and poor, and even threw out their traditional defense of public schools, which they seemed to want to be closed for longer periods of time.

They rallied around the segregation of whole cities by vaccine status, even though doing so meant excluding nearly half the members of minority populations from access to public accommodations such as restaurants, museums, libraries, and theaters. Not a peep of protest among the center-left!

They completely disregarded one-time liberal precepts such as a woman’s right to work as millions of married women with kids were thrown out of corporate life to take care of kids. The day cares and schools were closed, so women had no choice about it. The result is that women’s participation in the workforce has been set back 34 years! We’re nowhere near pre-pandemic levels and it’s still falling!

Have you heard even one peep about this problem from the left-wing press? Has The New York Times or Washington Post even covered this? I don’t think so. It’s an absolute scandal and a great measure of just how many principles the left has thrown out in their crazed and maniacal hatred of Trump. They’ve been willing to utterly destroy social and economic life in the single-minded pursuit of killing Trump as the one and only goal. And in pursuit of that goal, they’ve embraced an authoritarian biosecurity state that robs people of personal autonomy.
And let’s not forget the one-time centrality of science in the leftist vision. Since at least the Monkey Trial, American progressives have rallied around science as opposed to religion and faith. But when it came to COVID, they completely threw all science out the window. They would hear nothing as the evidence kept pouring in that COVID was not a threat to kids, that it had an infection fatality ratio that compares to the flu for anyone younger than the age of 75, and that even the overall death rate was 0.2 percent. But instead of dealing with this reality, they screamed panic so that the whole population would fly into fits of rage.

As for the vaccines, even as evidence mounted that they protect against neither infection nor transmission and that the adverse effects are inordinately high even against the target population of the elderly, they still wouldn’t hear it. They’ve pushed these grotesque human rights-destroying mandates and segregations.

Even this wild D.C. obsequious deference to the Ukrainian president from last week has roots in Trump hatred. They spent so long trying to prove that Russia was somehow responsible for Trump’s election in 2016, despite the complete absence of evidence to that effect, that they even came to believe it. So the stupid logic goes this way: Russia equals Trump and therefore anyone who’s against Putin is a friend, no matter the corruption. As a result, even the one-time penchant for favoring peace over war has been tossed out.

So too, the strange lack of interest in the FTX scandal and the targets of this fake company’s “effective altruism” has roots in Trump hatred. The company passed out millions and billions of dollars to nonprofits and candidates that backed the Democrats and various lockdown measures, and all we get now is silence. That’s rooted in the very same corruption: The left has become the very thing they once claimed to hate.

In other words, the left in the United States has adopted all the practices that they once warned that Trump would bring to the United States! I say this too, not as a Trump fan personally at all. I was warning that his presidency would be unhinged as early as 2015 because his ideological impulses departed too far from constitutionalism and Reaganite suspicions of government.

All that said, unhinged hate is a dangerously distorting emotion. The left’s single-minded focus on grinding Trump into the dust has turned the left into the mirror image of their most paranoid worries about him.

At some point, the left in this country is going to have to do a serious self-examination of what it has become. To return to “The Hunger Games,” the pursuit of President Snow has turned the followers of President Coin into what they once claimed to oppose. And this has become so obvious to the public that they’ve even turned against the public, demonizing middle-class values as inherently dangerous and science itself as misinformation worthy of censorship.

Be careful what you hate. Too much focus, too much attention, and too much study will cause the object of your hatred to be the most compelling pedagogue. If you take a close look in the mirror, you won’t recognize yourself anymore. That, in short, is what has become the left in America today.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Website

[ccp]

"So too, the strange lack of interest in the FTX scandal and the targets of this fake company’s “effective altruism” has roots in Trump hatred"

I don't understand why the MSM does not cover more
I mean the guy's political donations were  "BIPARTISAN"

 

they went got him and brought him here ASAP . had to shut him up
I mean the politicians themselves were involved

and big shot celebrities

that is a lot of money and power ....

[Crafty_Dog]

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/forecast-2023-get-out-of-the-way-if-you-cant-lend-a-hand/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter-post-title_2

[ccp]

"America’s economy largely hinges on finance now that financialization replaced manufacturing as the basis for prosperity. Alas, financialized prosperity is false prosperity, since it consists mainly of borrowing ever greater amounts of money to keep up the mere appearance of prosperity. In real life, prosperity requires producing things of value, not just trading increasingly abstract financial instruments purporting to represent money."

Exactly - we hear bitcoin et al are backed "by nothing"

just a ponzi scheme

while  fiat money is backed by

"the full faith and trust in the government that issued it."

faith and trust = nothing.

 Steve Forbes -> at least go back to gold standard

long article but very good.
haven't finished it yet

[ccp]

Interesting character
He thinks outside the Republican - Democratic "boxes" if you will

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Howard_Kunstler

[DougMacG]

Biggest story of the year (IMHO) is the Elon Musk release of the Twitter-FBI and other agencies information suppression collaboration proof, probably best documented by Matt Taibbi at substack in many posts.  A couple of samples:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/note-from-san-francisco?utm_medium=email
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/12/a-twitter-files-preview-2.php

Way below that in any order you like are inflation, election, war in Ukraine, pandemic continued, border surge continued, blowing up the pipelines, the 100+ attacks on our electric grid and the mysteriously unexplained failure to prosecute the boldest insurrectionist Ray Epps.

Almost every one of these are still largely uninvestigated, unexplained and not understood.  In the so-called age of information, we have a Sgt. Schultz level of understanding.  ("I know nothing!")

Who blew up the pipeline?  Who attacked our grid?  Who's winning in the war?  How much cheating was there in the election?  Where?  How?  How many came across the border last year?  What was the effect of the vaccines?  Who pulled Ray Epps off the most wanted list?  Why?  Which country has tighter state control of media, Russia, China or US?  What caused the new, record inflation?  Ok, that last one I know the answer but can't say aloud in the presence of a liberal - and they're all around me.
-----------------------------
Update, Quote of the Year:

Rep. Jim Clyburn:  "...all of us knew..."

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/10/20/top-democrat-admits-all-of-us-knew-their-partys-policies-would-cause-inflation-n1638723

These policies, this spending causes inflation.

How could it not?  More money.  Fewer goods.

Direct quote: 
“Well, let me make it very clear. All of us are concerned about these rising costs, and all of us knew this would be the case when we put in place this recovery program. Any time you put more money into the economy, prices tend to rise,”     - Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), House Majority Whip,

[DougMacG]

https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2023/01/05/the-coup-we-never-knew-n2617915

[Crafty_Dog]

One of his best-- VERY strong!

[DougMacG]

One of his best-- VERY strong!

VDH (Prof. Hanson) for Speaker.

[Crafty_Dog]

What Caused the Political Hysteria?
Karma, Nemesis, payback . . . and all that stuff.
By Victor Davis Hanson

January 11, 2023
The Left has gone mad over Donald J. Trump—past, present, and future.

The current Democratic Party and NeverTrump “conservatives” assumed that Trump was and remains so obviously toxic that they do not have to define exactly what his evil entails.

Accordingly, they believe that any means necessary are justified to stop him. And furthermore, these zealots, when out of power, insist such extraordinary measures should not be emulated and institutionalized by their opponents, much less ever boomeranged back upon their creators.

In this context, the Republicans retaking control of  the House of Representatives once again raises the question whether they should reply in kind.

Given the current investigation following the Mar-a-Lago raid, should there also be a mirror-image special prosecutor to examine President Biden’s lost stash of classified documents in his insecure office following his vice presidency?

Can House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) ever be considered too inflammatory, given that his predecessor, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tore up the president’s State of the Union address on national television?

How many Democratic House members should be denied committee assignments to remind the Congress that Pelosi’s rejection of Republican nominees was a terrible precedent?

How many congressional subpoenas with threats of criminal prosecution and performance-art arrests should be issued to Democratic politicos to stop the criminalization of political differences?

In our current age, will all former president’s private homes, closets, and drawers now be subject to FBI raids to ensure that “classified” documents were not wrongly stored there?

Are Joe Biden’s current homes also a logical target, given his sloppy handling of classified foreign policy papers—eerily reminiscent of an abandoned laptop belonging to son Hunter Biden and daughter Ashley Biden’s lost diary?

Was it ever a good idea to impeach a first-term president the moment he lost his party’s majority in the House—but without any hope of a conviction in the Senate? Would such a similar impeachment send a warning to Biden to honor his oath of office and start enforcing U.S. immigration law?

Does a phone call now an impeachment make, on the grounds that Trump mixed domestic politics with foreign policy?

But was Trump’s Ukrainian call that much different from Barack Obama’s 2012 quid pro quo in Seoul, South Korea, where he asked the Russian president to convey a deal to Vladmir Putin: stay calm and give Obama space during his reelection bid while Obama in turn would be flexible on missile defense.

Putin did just that and put off invading Ukraine until Obama was reelected. And Obama made sure there was no joint missile defense projects in Eastern Europe. Was that deal in America’s interest, or Obama’s own and thus similarly impeachable?

Or consider Joe Biden mixing foreign policy and politics on the eve of the midterm elections. For example, he kept draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to dangerously low levels while begging hostile foreign dictators to pump more oil.

Thereby Biden sought to win votes from angry commuters buffeted by high fuel prices. And he also appeased the Left by not ordering more drilling for gas and oil. Was that gambit in the nation’s—or Joe Biden’s—best interest?

What is wrong with the House investigating whether the FBI infiltrated and contracted social media companies to warp news coverage and suppress free expression of American citizens?

The Left certainly thought it was necessary in 1975 for the Church Committee to investigate the CIA. That committee found the agency was contracting new organizations to front for its covert operations, while partnering with telecommunications corporations to monitor the data of citizens on CIA watch lists. Sound familiar to today’s FBI?

Was it a good idea for the Democratic House to release Trump’s tax returns?

If the Republican House were to do the same with the Biden consortium’s tax records, would the result be far more incriminating?

There was much talk once in Congress of evoking the 25th Amendment to remove a supposedly mentally impaired Trump. A Yale psychiatrist was even paraded before Congress to attest the president was dangerously unbalanced. Calls for aptitude testing resulted in Trump acing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.

Should the House now follow the Democrats’ precedent? Should medical professionals review all of Biden’s incoherent utterances, his fantasy biographic tales, and his often physical fragility and determine whether he is non compos mentis? Is that a precedent we wish to follow?

When a defeated first-term president leaves office and vows to return in four years, is it wise to impeach and try him as a private citizen?

Did not the House impeach Trump in part because he warned the Ukrainians that Joe Biden, a possible opponent in 2020, was likely corrupt? Do the endless Democratic efforts to go after Trump, a possible Biden opponent in 2024, constitute far more than a Trump single phone call to the president of Ukraine?

Somehow supposedly worldly and sophisticated partisans in their self-righteousness ignored ancient laws of what goes around comes around, of Karma, of Nemesis, of payback’s a bit—h, and all that stuff.

[ccp]

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/what-the-democratic-trifecta-hath-wrought

[ccp]

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/01/15/dem-strategist-biden-wh-should-have-seperate-spokesperson-for-the-classified-docs-questions-n2618299

well I rather thne criticize her for doing what she is told, I

criticize her bosses.

The press briefings have become a total farce anyway

[Crafty_Dog]

Getting the whole article requires subscribing and I already have far too many things to which I subscribe, but even this teaser intro has merit IMHO:

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-military-industrial-complex-doesnt?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Military-Industrial Complex Doesn’t Run Washington
Something else does

N.S. Lyons
Jan 12
Osprey-Pentagon.jpg

A little while ago I found myself interested to read a frustrated Glenn Greenwald argue that, given the context of the “enormous” $858 billion U.S. defense budget recently passed by Congress along with an additional $44 billion in military aid for Ukraine, the only thing anyone can now inevitably rely on from Washington D.C. is that “the U.S. budget for military and intelligence agencies will increase every year no matter what.”

I felt this merited some reflection. Greenwald’s explanation for why perpetual growth of the defense budget is an inevitability (which it basically is), and for why American foreign policy is relentlessly hawkish more broadly, is a popular one: that the American arms manufacturing industry, the military, and our politicians are all engaged in a circle of corruption and collusion to make each other rich. The big defense contractors bribe the politicians with large donations and the generals and other government officials with board seats and other lucrative positions, and they in turn come up with reasons to justify shoveling ever-increasing piles of taxpayer money into buying new weapons from the arms makers. This, Greenwald says, is precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower gravely warned our country to guard against in his famous farewell address some 62 years ago.

Eisenhower was, I must point out, attempting to draw attention to an even broader issue, i.e. the rise of an unaccountable technocratic administrative state, which accelerated in the wake of the technological-managerial revolution produced by WWII, and the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” The influence of this transformation of American republican governance, of which a military-industrial complex was but one part, was likely, he predicted, to be “economic, political, even spiritual” in scope, and threaten to change “the very structure of our society.” But I will leave all that aside for the time being, as “military-industrial complex” is the phrase that stuck in public memory, along with the narrower, more common understanding of what Eisenhower was warning about that Greenwald is using in this case.

As described above, this understanding of the military-industrial complex – and a common understanding of how politics in Washington works in general – is essentially conspiratorial. Its primary mechanism is individuals, or groups of individuals, cynically manipulating the procedures of the state to advance their material self-interests. Thus Washington has turned into a “multi-tentacle war machine,” Greenwald says, because “No matter what is going on in the world, they always find – or concoct – reasons why the military budget must grow no matter how inflated it already is.” (Emphasis mine.)

Let’s call this the Corrupt Conspiracy Model of how Washington functions (or dysfunctions). It is a model that can be powerfully convincing, because it taps into the truth that people really are naturally flawed and self-interested creatures, demonstrably prone to corruption. Applying Lenin’s maxim – “who benefits?” – appears to provide players (the “they”) and the motive. Combine that motive with the means and opportunity produced by systems of collusion, and you seem to have a straightforward explanation for most of the policy that comes out of Washington: it’s all basically a con game led by a pack of greedy psychopaths. As Greenwald notes with some frustration and confusion, this used to be a characteristically left-wing critique of government and corporate power, but following the Great Political Realignment it’s now become common to the disaffected right instead.

Reading his argument made me recall how, back when I was younger and left-leaning, I too believed in this model, at least implicitly. As noted, it can be quite persuasive, even satisfying, in its simplicity. It’s also actually a subtly idealistic and optimistic theory: the American system would work great, just as it was designed to do, if not for all the selfish bad actors taking advantage of the system, etc. The only problem was that, after enough time in Washington, I had no choice but to reevaluate. Because what I found is that the swamp is populated almost wholly not by cynics, but by true believers.

True believers in what? Answering that will require trying to nail down a second, more complex model to explain how people in the Imperial City make decisions – and why it’s still always a good bet to invest in Lockheed Martin.[1]

First, let me qualify by acknowledging that yes, Washington is indeed awash with lobbyists, corrupt politicians, psychopathic executives, cynical operators, and backstabbing climbers. It is a veritable hive of scum and villainy. They just aren’t what really makes the place tick. In fact all of these people conform themselves parasitically to that which does.

The real issue to contend with is that almost no one in Washington actually thinks in the terms of the Corrupt Conspiracy Model. I.e. they don’t think “I will advocate for a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy so that the resulting wars will benefit the arms industry and make me and my friends rich…” – even the people with seats on the boards of defense contractors. The reality is more disturbing than that, honestly.

What runs Washington is a Spirit. Or, alternatively, a Story. Let me try to explain.

Share

There is a useful saying in Washington, which is: “Where you sit is where you stand.” This refers to how individuals’ interests, and even their values, almost inevitably come to be determined by their position within and among bureaucracies. Whatever motivations they may enter with, they soon find themselves defending and advocating for whatever will most benefit the bureaucracy of which they have become a part. It is a relatively common phenomenon for even loyal top-level political appointees, dispatched by a new president to head a particular department or agency specifically so as to bring it into line with the president’s policy goals, to quickly be coopted into acting against that president’s wishes and working to advance their bureaucracy’s self-interests instead. Even those who enter and discover the truth that “the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy,” as Oscar Wilde memorably quipped, find they desire nothing so much as to help it do so. Their own interests and incentives have been subsumed by the bureaucracy’s interests and incentives.

How does this happen? And what is a bureaucracy, really? How is it that, as the critic Brooks Atkinson once wrote, bureaucracies are organizations “designed to perform public business,” but seemingly “as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy”?

[ccp]

https://www.ochrance.cz/uploads-import/DISKRIMINACE/Vyzkum/Hate_speech_on_the_Internet_and_decision-making_of_Czech_courts__Survey_2020_.pdf

[Crafty_Dog]

BLM’s Bloody Bill Comes Due
By WILFRED REILLY
January 27, 2023 2:22 PM

The movement failed in a way that got lots of people hurt and killed because its core premise is wrong — but there is a better way to help our countrymen.

Less than a decade back, Black Lives Matter arrived on the national scene with a two-part message: A near-genocidal campaign is being waged against black Americans, and virtually all contemporary problems in the black community are the fault of white people.

This is no exaggeration. BLM spokesman Cherno Biko appeared on prime-time Fox News to argue that a totally innocent, presumably unarmed black person is “murdered” (his words) roughly once per day. Ben Crump, perhaps the nation’s most prominent attorney, published a best-selling 2019 book actually titled Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People. At one point, as I noted in my own book Taboo, the Black Lives Matter website called for “re-payment to Blacks of all wealth ever extracted from a majority-Black community” by means of “racism, slavery, food apartheid, housing discrimination . . . and capitalism.” And so forth.

Now, the receipts for the effect of this movement are in. And what they show is the remarkably complete failure of a Narrative. As crime-data resources like Disaster Center and the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program make clear, murders in the United States increased from a low of 14,164 in 2014 — the year Black Lives Matter truly kicked off — to at least 22,900 in 2021, just seven years later.

This surge can be directly tied to the BLM-linked “Ferguson Effect” and “Floyd Effect.” In 2021, University of Massachusetts researcher Travis Campbell found that cities that experienced Black Lives Matter protests and riots — and surely often attempted to accommodate the demands of the marchers — did see some decrease in police homicides . . . but also experienced “a huge overall increase in murders.” The resulting murder surge was at least 10 percent overall, “equaling 1,000 to 6,000 additional murders” when expanded to the nationwide level.

Using more prosaic but equally effective methods, Jason Johnson of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund found exactly the same thing: a direct and statistically significant correlation between declines in the kind of proactive policing hated by BLM and surges in homicide. In New York City, arrests of criminal suspects dropped by 38 percent while murders rose by 58 percent — increasing by more than 100. In my hometown of Chicago, arrests declined by 53 percent, while the corresponding surge in homicides was 65 percent. In the metroplex city of my new Kentucky home, Louisville, arrests plunged by 42 percent and stops overall by 35 percent; murders rose by a staggering 87 percent.

Even more remarkable than the existence of what is sometimes just called the “crime wave” was how targeted its effects actually were. While I have seen few mainstream pundits bold enough to discuss specific trends here — perhaps because very heterodox writers like Steve Sailer have — the United States has not in fact seen a rise in total crime since the last decade. Per the report “Criminal Victimization, 2021,” based on the victim-reported Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey (the BJS-NCVS), which is widely considered the gold standard of American crime data, crime overall did not increase significantly that year.

As presented in Table 14 of the authoritative report, 2,734,700 Americans were victims of serious (“index”) violent crimes — as compared with 2,599,620 in the Covid-19 lockdown year of 2020, 3,059,060 in 2019, 3,254,250 in 2018, and 3,106,346 back in 2017. Felony property crime also did not increase across this set of years, and neither did white-on-black or black-on-white crime (with this analysis beginning in 2018). Even black crime overall, heavily concentrated in the South, wasn’t really up: Contra internet memes of the “13/50” variety, identified blacks committed 974,378 — or just about 25 percent — of the 3,995,668 total violent crimes that took place in 2021. All of this data, which is totally noncontroversial, can be read in the report.

What did increase was hyper-violent, specifically black-on-black crime — murders, public shootings — concentrated in large and mostly blue cities that basically gave up on the idea of enforcing the law (“white” cities that did the same, such as Portland, Ore., saw similar results). Between the late 2010s and 2022, black Americans went from being responsible for less than 50 percent of 14,000–17,000 murders annually to being responsible for 60.4 percent of the 22,900 annual murders sourced above. Per easily available FBI data, the black homicide rate increased by roughly 50 percent in just the few years since the death of George Floyd. This is, notably, a purely “culturalist” result that has nothing to do with genetics or racism. It is, also, one of the most significant legacies of BLM.

I present all this statistical wonkery because I am a statistical wonk, but it shines light on a deeper point. Black Lives Matter’s solutions (“pull back the cops in dangerous neighborhoods”) failed in an obviously predictable way that got lots of people hurt and killed because BLM’s core premise is wrong. In 2023, contemporary racism is simply not the main barrier holding back black folks, or any other groups of Americans — whether Chinese, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, Indians, Nigerians, or anything else.

Evidence of this is all around us. We would see it if we stopped slap-fighting our countrymen, who are often wearing the same designer shirts and shades as we are, long enough to look for it. Today, either seven or eight — depending on how you decide to count South Africans — of the ten richest ethnic groups in the U.S. are nonwhite, including some of the populations I just listed. For that matter, East and South Asians — and probably Jewish Americans and West Africans, who are harder to break out of broader racial categories — outperform Anglos on today’s meritocratic SAT, averaging close to 1200 as versus an 1118 for “whites overall.” Over on the physical side of things, high-dollar professional sports are among the most integrated enterprises on the planet, with Major League Baseball and the NFL being diverse in the literal sense and the NBA clocking in at around 72 percent black.

Of course, none of this changes the brutal reality of history. “Systemic minority barriers to college admission,” and the like, obviously don’t exist these days — rather the opposite for that one — and in the United States of 2023, most people can make it. People sail here on bedroom doors to try. But it empirically is harder to achieve financial or social success if you start out poor. And owing to past conflict and race war and oppression, many more black kids, proportionately, are poor than is the case for white kids.

But here’s the thing: That’s also accurate almost verbatim for immigrants from Ukraine or Bosnia, or güero Mexicans, or plain Appalachian folks (trust me!) — and the actual non-secret path to achieving success is identical for all of these countrymen. It’s easy to mock the hokey old Success Sequence that almost every single ’80s or ’70s kid heard from a coach or priest/rabbi or (coughs) their father, but it really is true that you have a 1–2 percent chance of ever ending up poor if you do just four things at the start of life.

Those are: Take any job and work until you get a better one, wait until marriage (or age 25, for the cynics) to have children, avoid getting convicted of a felony, and graduate high school with any marks that make that possible. It’s also literally true that the biggest group-level predictor of success in school — again, contra both racialists and hereditarians, and per the Brookings Institution, of all places — seems to simply be how much kids study for class. Who knew?

Banter aside, the answer is that every sane person knew that. In Reality World, much of what the critical Left insists on calling “whiteness” — like showing up for business meetings on time — is prevalent in Japan and Nigeria, and in every minority-owned business I have ever worked at, and in what could more efficiently be called “civilization.” It would be a mitzvah indeed to start teaching this reality instead of fake oppression narratives, which lead nowhere or to chaos, to all of our kids and fellow citizens. Looking at the results BLM actually produced, let’s start . . . now.

[G M]

CLUSTERFUCK NATION – BLOGJanuary 30, 2023
The War Against Us

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy ” – Chris Hedges

    The question you might ask these days: how did we weaponize everything in American life against ourselves? Can you name an institution that is not at war with the people of this land? The exact mechanisms for all that bad faith stand in plain sight these days, and persons responsible can be easily identified. What’s missing are discernible motives. For now, it just looks like the greatest collective act of ass-covering in history.

     It’s pretty clear, for instance, that all the criminal misconduct in the FBI / DOJ — continuing to this moment — emanates from the years-long effort to cover up the seditious campaign to nullify Donald Trump starting well before Nov. 8, 2016. All the players in the agencies, and their news media accomplices, stand to lose at least their reputations, if the public cared about how dishonestly they acted. Many of those still working would lose their jobs and their livelihoods too, and quite a few would lose their freedom in prison. So, their motive to keep up the skullduggery is simple self-preservation.

     The Covid-19 pandemic looks like a pretty large-scale racketeering operation gone awry with plenty to hide. You have the reckless, symbiotic relations between the US public health bureaucracy and the pharmaceutical companies, and tons of money at stake, plus the colossal ego of hapless Dr. Anthony Fauci wishing to pose as an historic world-saver, another Louis Pasteur or Alexander Fleming. And then you have the amazingly foolish act of imposing an untested, dangerous “vaccine” on the world, and years of lying and covering-up its repercussions of injury and death. And then the opaque and nefarious roles of other actors in the story ranging from the CCP to the WEF to the Bill Gates and George Soros empires of money in what looks a genocide.

     It’s harder to unpack the enigma of the obviously unfit “Joe Biden” getting installed in the White House. My guess: the Obama claque behind him knew that “JB” was easily manipulable, and that his lame rivals, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Liz Warren, and especially the proud socialist Bernie Sanders, could not be counted on to do exactly what they were told. The Obama claque especially needed a president to appoint agency heads who would cover-up its creation of an Intel Community Frankenstein, and all that monster has inflicted on the American public.

     Of course, the main device the claque had for pulling “Joe Biden’s” strings was the flagrant record of his many years of bribery and treason. The major effort to cover-up all that criminality was the DOJ and FBI’s suppression since 2019 of the Hunter Biden laptop, and the most stunning upshot was that the incendiary evidence of bribery and treason came out anyway, because so many copies of the laptop’s hard-drive got distributed. And absolutely nothing was ever done about it, nor about the actual persons — Christopher Wray, William Barr, and Merrick Garland — who worked to squash it, making themselves accomplices to ongoing bribery and treason.

      All this criminal misconduct is connected in a foul matrix of lawbreaking. The fact-patterns are well-established. Dozens of excellent books have catalogued the misdeed of RussiaGate and scores of websites daily dissect the shady intrigues around the “vaccine” crusade. The infamies of gross election interference have been systematically laid-out in the Twitter Files of the past two months. Many books, published essays, and videos substantiate the reality of massive ballot fraud in 2020 and 2022, including the felonious role of Mark Zuckerberg’s front org, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, and the election law manipulations of Lawfare goblin Marc Elias.

      There’s an understandable wish that upcoming hearings in Congress will lead to a reckoning for all of this. To banish consequence from public life, as we have done, is a pretty grave insult to nature, but who can tell whether accountability might restore our institutions at this point. We may be too far gone. The US is visibly collapsing now: our economy, our financial arrangements, our culture, our influence in world affairs, and our basic consensus about reality. We’re entering a phase of disorder and hardship that is likely to moot the further depredations of a government at war with its people. For one thing, it’s becoming impossible to pretend that this vicious leviathan has the money to carry on because the money is only pretending to be money.

      It’s no wonder that the collective ability for sense-making has failed. It will be quickly restored by each of us in the scramble to survive these disorders and hardships. The bewildering hypotheticals of recent years begin to dissolve like mist on the mountain and things come back into focus: your health, your daily bread, your shelter, your associations with other people close to you, your values, and most of all the power of your own choices. Nature, much insulted and maligned, will sort out the rest.

[Crafty_Dog]

Why the Right Turned Left
They bought into the progressive idea of History with a capital H, says George F. Will, but couldn’t stand to see the other side having all the fun.
By Barton SwaimFollow
Feb. 3, 2023 5:33 pm ET

Washington

On the American right, from 1980 to 2016 the basic principles held: limited government, low taxation. There were departures, to be sure. “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move,” George W. Bush said in 2003, shortly before signing into law a Medicare expansion passed by a GOP Congress. But the ideal toward which conservatives were striving—that remained.

The rise of Donald Trump signaled something new. Mr. Trump himself had no interest in philosophical arguments for or against state intervention, but he won in 2016—or so a lot of Republican politicos told themselves—by promising to bring industrial production back to the American homeland. Suddenly high-level Republicans rediscovered the virtues of central planning. Sen. Marco Rubio, who in his 2015 presidential campaign announcement had bewailed “the weight of more taxes, more regulations and more government,” was soon able to proclaim the virtues of industrial policy. Several of his GOP colleagues in the Senate—Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance most vocally—are now doing the same. For the first time in many decades, Congressional Republicans don’t even claim to care about slowing the growth of mandatory social-welfare programs, which together comprise two thirds of the federal budget.

A vocal and not negligible number of conservative intellectuals, most of them marching under the banner of “national conservatism,” gleefully scorn the postwar right’s “libertarian” or “neoliberal” veneration of markets. National conservatism is a baggy term—for some it means traditional conservatism with a particular concern for the American nation-state; for others it signifies collectivist social policies combined with social conservatism.

George F. Will, columnist for the last half-century for the Washington Post, has traveled in the opposite direction. In “Statecraft as Soulcraft,” published 40 years ago, Mr. Will, now 81, made the case for government’s ability, and therefore duty, to encourage virtue in the citizenry. Readers of Mr. Will’s columns from the 1990s to the 2020s, however, are likelier to think of him as a proponent of the free market. His most recent book, “The Conservative Sensibility” (2019), makes a cogent case for the removal of government, to the extent possible, from social and economic life.

I came to D.C. to ask Mr. Will about the transition from ordinary American conservatism to the big-government variety, or vice versa.

At the Peacock Cafe in Georgetown—he arrives precisely on time, wearing a navy jacket of superior quality and red tie—we talk about the craft of writing. He is a great writer of what journalists call “ledes.” On his iPhone he shows me his latest column, posted that morning online. Its opening words: “When her parents gave her an appealing adjective for a first name . . . ” The second word, I note, is a pronoun; the reader has to keep reading to find the antecedent. “Exactly,” he says. (The antecedent is, of course, Winsome Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governor.)

After lunch we walk several blocks to his office. I am a devoted walker 31 years his junior, but there is no need to take it slow for the old-timer. We arrive at the place, a handsome two-story townhouse, all the walls lined with books, framed letters and baseball paraphernalia.

Once we’re seated, I put to him the question I came to ask: What changed? What moved him from a kind of Burkean communitarianism to an outlook much friendlier to—let’s call it—lightly regulated capitalism? Mr. Will acknowledges the change but insists he hasn’t departed altogether from the fundamental argument of “Statecraft.” He notes the book’s three-word subtitle: “What Government Does.” “Not what it should do, but what it cannot avoid doing.”

Government, he says, “shapes the characters of the citizenry by the habits, mores, and dispositions the legal regime encourages.” There’s something to that, even for a hidebound free-marketeer like me. Reading “Statecraft” again, I take its author to be challenging the looser rhetoric of early-’80s Reaganites. On page 123 he reprimands Reagan himself for saying more than once in his 1976 campaign, “I’ve always thought that the best thing government can do is nothing.” The younger Mr. Will: “But surely the truth, regarding every significant aspect of social life, is that the one thing government cannot do is ‘nothing.’ ”

(Not that Mr. Will is anything but an admirer of the 40th president. One of the framed shapshots displayed in his office shows Mr. Will and the Gipper, the latter clad in a white dinner jacket, watching fireworks from the Truman Balcony of the White House. That photograph is mounted near the front door.)

“What I did not fully appreciate when I wrote ‘Statecraft as Soulcraft,’ ” Mr. Will says, “was that a market-based capitalist society of spontaneous order—I’m using Hayekian language—is good for the soul. People used to say ‘An armed society is a polite society’—if everyone had a Colt on their hip or a dagger on their belt, they’d be polite to each other. Well I think a commercial society is a polite society.” Here Mr. Will does what he is famous for doing in his columns; rather than elaborating a nuanced explanation for what he’s just said, he puts it concretely in a line: “What’s the first thing you hear when you walk into a store? ‘How may I help you?’ ”

He says the word “help” slowly, gesturing with an outstretched hand. “The market is a cooperative culture.”

The usual question in conversations like this one: Why is our politics so embittered? Mr. Will begins with what I would term a more proximate answer:

“There was a qualitative change when Newt Gingrich became leader of the Republicans,” he says. I am skeptical of this interpretation, if only because it’s asserted so often by precisely the people—liberal journalists and academics—one would expect to offer it. He acknowledges the argument can be overdone but thinks there’s truth in it. “Forty years of Democratic control of the House of Representatives, which Gingrich to his great credit ended, was bound to produce this kind of vinegary politics. But Gingrich took it to another level.”

He asks if I remember Bob Michel. “The wonderful, sweet-tempered Peorian” is Mr. Will’s description of the man who led House Republicans from 1981 to the year Republicans took the House. “That’s what Republicans were before 1995. But they decided—many Republicans did, including Joe Scarborough and some others—that people like Michel were the problem. So they went the Gingrich way.”

But Mr. Will has a far more expansive explanation for the “vinegary” nature of our politics, too. “The other reason, the bigger reason, is that the stakes are higher than they ever have been before,” he says. “They’re not what we used to understand as political stakes—who gets what, all that distributional stuff. I think our politics today is part of the long reverberation of the most important thing that’s happened in Western politics in the last two centuries. That is that consciousness itself has become a political project.”

He lets that last statement linger. I wait for more.

“You can blame Marx, or his precursor Hegel,” he goes on. “Once you decide that human nature is a fiction, that human beings are merely the sum of impressions made on them by their surrounding culture, then politics acquires an enormous jurisdiction. Consciousness becomes a political project, and the point of politics becomes the control of culture in order to control the imposition of proper consciousnesses.”

Consciousness in the Marxian sense refers to the working class’s awareness of its revolutionary future; the proletarians’ consciousness is “false” until they understand their position as tools manipulated by the capitalists and bourgeoisie. In the American circumstance, if I understand Mr. Will, the struggle takes place between knowledge-class progressive elites and more or less everybody else.

Mr. Will thinks Vladimir Lenin, not Marx or Hegel, is the key figure here. Lenin “understood that the party is everything, and the party is everything because it’s a vanguard—it understands the ineluctable unfolding of the laws of history,” he says. “Conservatives don’t often speak of being ‘on the right side of history.’ Progressives say it all the time, because they’ve figured out that History is an autonomous proper noun, capital H, and people who don’t understand ought to get out of the way. One way to make them get out of the way is to tell them to shut up, or make them change their language.”

Progressives really do think, he says, that “consciousness is to be transmitted by the government. And they’re working on it, starting with kindergarten. The academic culture, from the Harvard graduate school of education to kindergarten in Flagstaff, Ariz., is the same now, coast to coast, as far as I can tell.” A core mission of K-12 education, in the progressive view of things, is to inculcate the values of diversity and equity. This Marxian project of consciousness-formation is “all over the country now,” he says. “Think of the DEI statements you’re supposed to make. It’s the threshold step in being considered for a faculty position. You express support for, enthusiastic support for, a political agenda. It’s quite explicit.”

I point out that it isn’t recognized as a political agenda. “That’s right,” he agrees. “A political agenda is contingent. But if History is unfolding, it’s not a choice, it’s not contingent.”

This is all very appealing, he thinks, to a certain kind of conservative or tradition-minded person who’s grown weary of the choices and contingencies of modern America. “I think the national conservatives envy the progressives for having all the fun. The progressives are having all the fun because they have a great and stately mandate, a project, which is to purge the world of false consciousness.” The last thing we need, he thinks, “are a lot of conservatives trying to get in on the fun.”

Mr. Will’s belief in the old “liberal” ideals of free speech and the settling of disputes by compromise has a corollary: He’s suspicious of too much concord. “On policy,” he says, “I’m much more alarmed by the consensus than the discord.”

One form of consensus he finds particularly destructive. “I think the political class is far more united by class interest than it is divided by ideology. From Elizabeth Warren on the left to Ted Cruz on the right, they all subscribe to the permanent powerful incentive to run deficits—peacetime, full-employment, large deficits. Because the perception that they won’t be here when the crash comes.”

He has a point. I once worked for a politician whose entire political persona was premised on the coming of a crash. It never came. Well—in a way it came, in 2008. But it wasn’t the sort of cataclysm a rational person might have expected from the practice of running ever-larger trillion-dollar deficits year after year. What happens when the crash finally happens?

“I don’t know,” Mr. Will says. “I noticed during the kerfuffle over Kevin McCarthy and the speakership, the Republicans said, ‘We are really serious about spending.’ Well, 67% of the budget is entitlements. Show of hands,” he says, “everyone who’s gonna take on Social Security and Medicare? Not gonna happen.”

Mr. Will is fond of an old joke: The first law of economics is, scarcity is real; the first law of politics is, ignore the first law of economics. “Everyone’s agreed on that,” he says. “They say Social Security’s trust fund will be exhausted in 10 years, at which point there will be a mandatory cut of 18% for all benefits. No there won’t. We’ll use general revenues, we’ll go on borrowing.” He ends this polite tirade against the political consensus with a perfectly Willian formulation: “People always ask, ‘What’s the biggest threat to American democracy?’ The biggest threat to American democracy is American democracy. It is the fact that we have incontinent appetites and no restraint on them.”

As we descend the steep staircase of his upper-floor office, the 81-year-old advises me to watch my step. When the crash finally happens, will George Will still be around to write two columns a week about it? He just might be.

Mr. Swaim is a Journal editorial page writer.

[Crafty_Dog]

The Botfire of the Humanities
Kurt Hofer
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-botfire-of-the-humanities/?utm_campaign=American%20Mind%20Email%20Warm%20Up&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=245468541&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--rFg4unWVSBuywU7-STWzzw95Kcl4KpERf9GoaRZiFdgnK-HYDykD-KJelimRHSXKREB7NIt1W2RPmqzJ_NquD38P6PA&utm_content=245468541&utm_source=hs_email

Not all teachers luxuriated in our year and change of working in pajama bottoms during the lockdown. Despite the negative press we got for postponing our return to the classroom, no one among my peers wished to go back to the Zoom or “hybrid” teaching model. Perhaps what we educators thought was our guilt nagging at us for staying home was in fact the acute sense of our pending obsolescence. 

The lesser-told education story of the pandemic is that while some people—many, in fact—took the pandemic as an opportunity to head to what they hoped were greener pastures, the ones who stayed gained a newfound appreciation for the traditional classroom and school campus. And even, in some cases, for our jobs. For teachers and, I can attest, a great number of students, schools were often the first place where a sense of community was rekindled from the ashes of social isolation. This has been my experience in Lockdown La-La Land, Los Angeles.

It seems even more ironic, then, that as I approach the halfway mark of my first truly normal post-pandemic school year—no mass testing, masking optional—I was greeted during a department meeting by the news that something called ChatGPT, an open platform AI resource, could be used to summarize articles, respond to essay prompts, and even tailor its machine-made prose to a specific grade level. Marx got plenty of things wrong, but this quote from the Communist Manifesto (1848) has aged remarkably well: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”

I used to joke with my students that they would one day realize they could simply replace me with YouTube videos, but computer scientists have found something even better. A friend of mine, also a history teacher, offered up the example of photography supposedly unleashing a healthy wave of creativity and innovation in painting as a possible analog to the history teacher’s nascent predicament—which will only be compounded, by the way, as we feed the AI beast more and more free data with which to perfect itself. But what if, in keeping with larger trends across the national economy for the last 30 years or more, this “gain” in educational productivity is not offset by newer, better-paying jobs?

Unfortunately, sometimes Marxist analysis is right, even if its remedies aren’t. Our Silicon Valley/Big Tech bourgeoisie—and its allies across media, the globalized economy, and education public and private—has, in one fell swoop of an AI bot, revolutionized the instruments of intellectual production and, in doing so, revolutionized not merely the way knowledge is produced (“the relations of production”) but also the way people relate to and interact with one another (“the whole relations of society”). Just as social media has transformed the way our youth interact (or don’t), AI-aided education will likely have a heretofore unforeseen impact on the way students, parents, and teachers all relate to one another.

Big Tech and its tribunes will insist that this is all inevitable and that students and teachers will be “liberated” for tasks more meaningful than “rote memorization,” and skill sets that, this time, they really promise will not be automated. “Skills such as identifying context, analyzing arguments, staking positions, drawing conclusions and stating them persuasively,” as the authors of a recent Wall Street Journal editorial claim, “are skills young people will need in future careers and, most important, that AI can’t replicate.”

But this brings us back to Marx: the bourgeoisie would not be the bourgeoisie without “constantly revolutionizing the means of production.” I used to think that I, who spent four years in college and five more in grad school earning an MA and PhD, had nothing in common with the coal miners in West Virginia or the steel mill workers in Ohio who never saw it coming until it was too late. Now I’m not so sure. But if AI has taught us about the inevitability of obsolescence and creative destruction, the pandemic has equally taught us that history takes unexpected turns. Who could have predicted that the wheels of the globalized supply chain would fall off and a nascent bipartisan consensus to bring manufacturing closer to home would emerge from anywhere but the mouths of (supposed) far-right cranks like Pat Buchanan?

Human beings have agency, and sometimes when the arc of history bends them out of shape, they bend the arc back in turn. From what I have seen over the past few years, the “marvel” of online learning in the Zoom classroom has been almost universally rejected. True, learning loss played a part in this, but I would wager that the loss of face-to-face interaction and socialization was, at least for the affluent, the bigger concern.

All this is not to say that someone like me, a history teacher, can successfully fight the bots any more than the Luddites succeeded at smashing the machine looms. But I fear that without forceful intervention on the side of humanity—that is, without backlash and righteous popular anger—the Marxist narrative will gain momentum. As our tech overlords continue to revolutionize the means of production, many heretofore in the ranks of the bourgeoisie—like myself?—will fall into the cold embrace of the proletariat. For children, as for the economy at large, the gap between rich and poor will grow; the former will shrink and consolidate while the latter balloons, to the point where face-to-face education will become a luxury good. The wealthy will still know the company of teachers and the joys of in-person discussion. Private tutors and upstart backyard schools mobilized by the wealthy at the height of the pandemic are perhaps a foretaste of what’s to come. As with hand-made fedoras or craft beer, the “bougie” will always find a way to workaround the banal products of mass production and automation. Why should education be any different? As for the poor—Let them have bots!

The lesson for the Right, it seems, is one we’ve been hit over the head with for the better part of decade; this moment in history does not call for free-market fundamentalism but for the confrontation of what Sohrab Ahmari has called “privatized tyranny” and the lackeys carrying their water across all levels of government. For once it’s time to let the Left continue—as it has done under President Biden—to take up the mantle of creative destruction and endless innovation. To borrow another Marxist turn of phrase, let the fanatics of the neoliberal consensus—on the Left and Right—become their own grave-diggers as they feed the endless appetites of the bots. In turn, clear the stage for a reinvigorated nationalist-populist conservatism that can stake a claim for what it is to be human in the age of unbridled AI.

[ccp]

indeed maybe we will be posting AI search results on this board in the future

OTOH we may not be since all AI is from Leftist Democrat companies who will of course be biased against us...........

[G M]

indeed maybe we will be posting AI search results on this board in the future

OTOH we may not be since all AI is from Leftist Democrat companies who will of course be biased against us...........

https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/thumbnail_1676024556769blob.jpg

[G M]

https://dcenquirer.com/chatgpt-ai-predicts-2nd-american-civil-war-probability-is-actually-100/

[G M]

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/a-star-is-born/

A Star is Born!
“Everything that can be engineered is being engineered dishonestly.” —Truman Verdun
Clusterfuck Nation

For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

And thanks to all my Patrons for your support

     If you think the reasons behind the First World War were incomprehensible, imagine what historians of the future — pan-fraying peccary loins over their camp fires — will think about World War Three. Some people started something in Ukraine… and then the USA blew up the main energy supply line of its NATO ally, Germany… say, what…?!?

    Weird, a little bit.  A sane person in a sane world would call sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines an act-of-war against a friendly nation, since the result was to virtually destroy the basis of Germany’s industry, not to mention the domestic comfort of German citizens. Now, thanks to 85-year-old Seymour Hersh, the independent investigator who uncovered the My Lai Massacre in 1969 and reported on the depraved antics of American jailers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, we have a pretty good idea how the Nord Stream caper went down.

     For a year before the op, “Joe Biden” and Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland — architect of the 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine, which kicked-off the present fiasco there — blabbed about “ending” the Nord Streams. Curiously, the Germans said nothing. Meanwhile, the US made a deal to beef up military bases in Norway, an original NATO signatory (1949), for staging the Nord Stream sabotage op. Of course, Norway, being Western Europe’s sole remaining oil-and-gas exporter, had an interest in eliminating its competition.

    In June of 2022, under cover of an annual NATO naval exercise in the Baltic Sea, US Navy divers attached mines to the Nord Stream pipelines. The mines had triggers that could be activated remotely at any chosen time, and that moment came on September 26… kaboom! Ms. Nuland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken gloated publicly. Naturally, the US blamed Russia. America’s news media — catamite of the Intel Community — amplified the charge, despite the absurdity of Russia blowing up its most lucrative source of export revenue. The New York Times has so far made no mention of Mr. Hersh’s recent update of the Nord Stream sabotage.

     Germany, too, has hardly made a peep, nor did the rest of Western Europe, which now faces a future that looks, energy-wise, like a fairly swift return to the Fourteenth Century. Maybe they’re all jaded with modern life, all that tiresome bathing and malingering in the brightly-lit cafes. Under the sagacious guidance of the WEF they were all going “green,” anyway — but was that green like the heart-shaped leaves of the linden tree or green like the moldy veins in Roquefort cheese? I guess they’ll find out.

     Luckily, America had the Chinese balloon to distract them, and then “Joe B’s” State-of-the-Union extravaganza where the nation learned that we are living in the most extraordinary economic boom since the days of Babe Ruth and Charlie Chaplin. The perpetually-vacationing Leader of the Free World has apparently made America great again, despite the dastardly plots and ongoing insurrections of his far-right, white supremacist adversaries. Did the annual SOTU smell a little bit like a reelection pitch, though? I hope so.

     Speaking of insurrection, the House commenced hearings this past week, debuting with the Oversight Committee’s witness panel of Twitter execs who carried out a years-long censorship campaign against the First Amendment in cahoots with the FBI, CIA, DOD, DOJ, DOS, DHS…. Well, you get the picture: a more arrogant crew of dedicated fascists would be hard to find in any other corner of the world today, except perhaps Canada, than the likes of Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, Anika Collier Navaroli, and James Baker, former chief counsel of the FBI. They “moderated” speech on the chat app for the good of the American people, you understand, lest the public succumb to “misinformation” — otherwise known as reality.

     One reality being that the sedulously-repressed news of Hunter Biden’s crime-stuffed laptop represented interference in the 2020 election. James Baker told the committee he “could not recall” whether, at the time (October 2020), he spoke to anyone back in his old haunts at the FBI about the matter — though there is no question that, as chief counsel, he knew the agency had possession of the laptop since 2019, and what was in it. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) warned the four former Twitter employees that “this is the investigation part, later comes the arrest part.” Let’s hope so on that one, too.

     Meanwhile, the House Special Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a lively colloquy with four “experts” including former FBI agents Nicole Parker and Thomas Baker, GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley, and one Elliot Williams, former DOJ Assistant AG and currently shill for DC Lawfare tank the Raben Group. The theme, generally, was the change-in-mission in the FBI-DOJ nexus from law enforcement to harassment of US citizens who oppose Democratic Party policy.

     Most instructive in Thursday’s session, though, was the political debut of Democratic Rep. Daniel Sachs Goldman (real name), newly elected member for New York’s Tenth District (which encompasses Wall Street). Among other distinctions, Mr. Goldman is an heir to the Levi-Strauss blue jeans fortune, and was lead counsel during the 2019 impeachment hearings against Donald Trump in the House Intelligence Committee. This vicious prick, an apt replacement for the inveterate liar and seditionist, Rep. Adam Schiff (CA), put on a florid demonstration of hectoring witnesses, cutting them off, and re-directing the committee’s attention at every opportunity to the so-called “insurrection” at the Capitol of 1/6/21.

      Mr. Goldman is a man to watch, especially as the House actually does give its complete attention later this year to the 1/6/21 matter and the true facts behind the FBI’s engineering of the event, including the nefarious actions of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Capitol Police. When it comes, I can’t wait to watch Mr. Goldman unwind like one of those cheap counterfeit Rolex watches that peddlers hawk on Wall Street’s sidewalk.

[Crafty_Dog]

This analysis leaves out the rather significant part wherein Germany was backstabbing its NATO allies to the east and Ukraine too by cutting the Nord Stream deals with Russia.

[G M]

This analysis leaves out the rather significant part wherein Germany was backstabbing its NATO allies to the east and Ukraine too by cutting the Nord Stream deals with Russia.

So we were justified in our act of war against Germany?

[Crafty_Dog]

No need to be argumentative.  You already know well the big picture of my point of view on all this.

I was stating a fact.  The article in question left out a major, and obvious, point of great relevance in its analysis.

Period.

A reasonable inference is that the author cannot be counted upon to present facts inconvenient to his argument.

Period.

[G M]

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/oh-lightning-i-command-thee-to-smite-my-foe/


Oh lightning, I command thee to smite my foe!
“When we see a completely insane public policy which has become a universal dogma — such as liberal internationalism in postwar US foreign policy — we are usually looking at the rotten, ossified ghost of a strategy which in its youth was sane and effective.” — Curtis Yarvin, The Gray Mirror
Clusterfuck Nation

For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

And thanks to all my Patrons for your support

     After Commander-in-Chief (ahem) “Joe Biden” demonstrated our ability to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon leisurely wandering the jet stream clear across North America, he loosed the Air Force on every other menacing aerial object hovering in our sovereign skies and… Ira Tonitrus… mission accomplished! It took the President another week to admit sheepishly that the three other targets were “most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions,” not alien invaders from another galaxy, as regime spoxes hinted and the news media played-up for days. Note to America’s hot air ballooning community for the upcoming spring launch season: be very afraid!

     If Russia was impressed by the successful balloon op, it didn’t offer any comment. Russia was busy neutralizing America’s pet proxy palooka, sad-sack Ukraine, sent into the ring to soften-up Russia for a revolution aimed at overthrowing the wicked Vlad Putin — at least according to our real Secretary of State (and Ukraine war show-runner), Victoria Nuland, in remarks this week to the Carnegie Endowment, a DC think tank.

     Speaking of tanks, our NATO allies are getting cold feet about sending those Leopard-2 war wagons into the Ukraine cauldron. Something about it had a discouraging act-of-war odor, as, by the way, did blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, alleged by veteran reporter Seymour Hersh — though that caper was actually against NATO member and supposed US ally, Germany. WTF? Are the doings in Western Civ getting a little too complex for comfort?

     Anyway, it turns out that the thirty-one Abrams tanks America promised to Ukraine have yet to be bolted together at the tank factory. It’s a special order, you see, because we don’t want to send the latest models built with super-high-tech armor that the Russians might capture and learn from… so Mr. Zelensky will just have to cool his jets waiting on delivery, say, around Christmas time… if he’s not singing Izprezhdi Vika somewhere in Broward County, Florida, by then.

     The biggest problem Russia has in resolving this conflict on its border, is doing it in a way that does not drive “JB” and his posse of war-mongers so batshit crazy that they resort to a nukes-flying, world-ending, Thelma-and-Louise type denouement. In effect, America put a bomb on Russia’s front porch and now Russia has to carefully defuse the darn thing. The prank itself was just the last in a long line of foolish American military escapades that have ended in humiliation for us, most recently the Afghan fiasco. At best, this one in Ukraine — which we started in 2014 — is on-track to sink NATO, plunge Europe into cold and darkness, and put the USA out of business.

     In the meantime, America is rapidly disintegrating on the home front. Is it attempted suicide or murder? It’s a little hard to tell. Things are blowing up from sea to shining sea — food processing facilities, giant chicken barns, regional electric grids, oil refineries. The latest, of course, is a chemical spill from the Norfolk-Southern train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, set ablaze by a conclave of government officials purportedly to keep the toxic liquids from seeping into the Ohio River watershed and beyond. Of course, in the dithering prior to lighting it up, enough vinyl chloride leached into streams feeding the big river to kill countless fish. And then torching the remaining chemical pools sent up a mushroom cloud of dioxin and other poisons that killed wildlife, pets, and chickens in the vicinity before the evil miasma wafted eastward on the wind to the densely-populated Atlantic coast.

     One has to wonder whether an army of saboteurs is on the loose across the land. Considering the border with Mexico is wide open, why wouldn’t America’s adversaries send whole wrecking crews over here to mess with our infrastructure? There’s no question that people from all over the planet have been sneaking across the Rio Grande. Surely some of them are on a mission. America is filled with “soft” targets, things unguarded and indefensible — not least, tens of thousands of miles of railroad track. Of all the reasons to be unnerved by “Joe Biden’s” open border policy, this one is the least discussed, even in the alt-media. But it seems like a no-brainer for nefarious interests who might want to bamboozle and disable us.

     The sad truth of this moment in history is that the USA has too much going sideways with our own business at home now to be dabbling in any foreign misadventures — and we couldn’t have picked a worse place than Ukraine to do it. The sheer logistics are implausible. The geography is lethally unfavorable. The place has been inarguably within Russia’s sphere of influence for centuries and Russia has every intention of pacifying the joint at all costs. Peace talks are apparently out of the question for our leaders. Something’s got to give, and that something is probably Western Civ’s financial system. It’s primed to blow anyway, and when it does, we’ll have other things to think about.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.revolver.news/2023/02/america-lost-hardworking-men-who-held-her-together-and-now-she-is-crumbling/

[G M]

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/well-soon-find-out/

We’ll Soon Find Out
The crown of America sits in a gutter begging someone to pick it up before the nation collapses— Auron MacIntyre, The Blaze
Clusterfuck Nation

For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays

Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

And thanks to all my Patrons for your support

      In an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier last Tuesday, FBI Director Chris Wray said, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.” Like so much else in America’s tortured, distractible life these days, the meaning larded into that utterance went clear over the collective heads of just about everybody.

     What was the key part of that statement? “For quite some time now….” Gee, really? Like, how long? One year? More than that? Maybe since March 2020? And you didn’t say anything, Mr. FBI Director? You didn’t do a thing to dispel the Covid-19 miasma of confusion that swaddled Washington DC like a smallpox blanket of yore? The question of where the novel coronavirus came from has been a ferocious national controversy since late 2019, you understand. Several government agencies, including the CIA and all the offices under the gigantic National Institutes of Health (NIH) – including the NIAID run for decades by Dr. Anthony Fauci — plus the FDA and CDC, tucked into the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)… all of these outfits have pretended to not know the true origin of Covid-19 for over three years. And the FBI Director, who could have shed some authoritative light on the matter by stepping up to a podium and weighing in, just let all that chaos roll?

       And by-the-by, let’s not forget that the whole time Chris Wray knew with moderate certainty that Covid-19 came from the Wuhan virology lab, he was in charge of a battalion of FBI agents assigned to managing Twitter, Facebook, and Google — that is, the apps that comprise the digital Public Square — to make sure that anyone who opined about Covid coming from the Wuhan lab got censored, banished, cancelled, reputationally destroyed.

     So, why did Mr. Wray make this statement on Tuesday… “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed…” Probably we’re hearing the old Modified Limited Hangout strategy, a venerable ruse, which is when a criminally culpable government throws the public a bone of admission about something that is common knowledge anyway — the thing everybody knows — while pretending that they were in on the common knowledge all along — which just adds another layer of perfidy to the giant matrix of lies laid down by US agency officials in this disgraceful episode of US history.

        What Mr. Wray left out of his statement this week is any hint that a gang of US scientists and doctors under Dr. Fauci were directly and intimately involved in the activities at Wuhan that produced the virus that killed millions around the world, and led to the warp speed production of a “vaccine” mere weeks after the organism appeared — which will probably end up killing and maiming more people than the disease itself.

      It happened also this past week that a team of distinguished medical warriors including Drs. Martin Makary of Johns Hopkins, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford testified before the opening session of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Dr. Makary began his remarks stating boldly: “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government….”

…. Misinformation that…

Covid was spread through surface transmission
That vaccinated immunity was far greater than natural immunity
That masks were effective. Now we have the definitive Cochrane review. What do you do with that review? Cochrane is the most authoritative evidence body in all of medicine and has been for decades. Do you just ignore it and not talk about it?
That myocarditis was more common after the infection than after the vaccine. Not true, it is 4-28 times more common after the vaccine.
That young people benefit from a booster, misinformation. Our two top experts on vaccines quit the FDA in protest over this particular issue, pushing boosters in young, healthy people. The data was never there. That’s why the CDC never disclosed hospitalization rates among boosted Americans under the age of 50.
That vaccine mandates would increase vaccination rates. A George Mason University study shows that it didn’t. It did one thing, it created “Never-Vaxxers” who are now not getting the childhood vaccines they need to get.
     “Over and over again, we’ve seen something that goes far beyond using your best judgment with the information at hand. We’ve seen something that is unforgivable, and that is the weaponization of medical research itself. The CDC putting out their own shoddy studies, like their own study on natural immunity looking at one state for two months, when they had data for years on all 50 states. Why did they only report that one sliver of data? Why did the salami slice the entire database? Because it gave them the result they wanted.

     The same with the masking studies. The data has now caught up in giant systematic reviews, and public health officials were intellectually dishonest. They lied to the American people.”

     This week, Edward Dowd, the former BlackRock trader-turned-Covid-statistician — and author of the new book Cause Unknown — released preliminary fourth quarter 2022 “excess deaths” numbers for group life insurance death claims compiled by the International Society of Actuaries (SOA).

     For the age group up to age 44 excess deaths rose above the baseline (normal): 13 percent in October, 21 percent in November, and 43 percent in December. For the age group 45 to 64, the death rate above baseline rose 4 percent in October, 16 percent in November, and 35 percent in December. Mr. Dowd says that he is told the rates moving into the first quarter of 2023 are higher still. This is what’s known as a trend, and a pretty ominous one.

      It boils down to an awful lot of people in the prime of life dying off, and more every month. Nobody in any of the US public health agencies is talking about this. One very prominent official, Rochelle Walensky, head of the CDC, is still busy arranging to dispense more Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines to America’s school-children — the “vaccines” being the prime suspects causing those stunning excess death rates among the young and employed demographic. Nice work, Rochelle!

      How do the approximately 70 percent of vaxxed-up Americans deal with this reality? Many, of course, are noticing vaxxed family members, friends, colleagues, sports figures, acquaintances getting sick and dying of sudden heart failure, strokes, aggressive cancers, strange neurological problems, and other mystifying syndromes. The aggregate reaction so far seems to be a numb despair. But then, the still-living vaxxed also have to contend with the anxiety over what is going on in their own bodies. Perhaps they’ve heard whispers from the more extreme voices on the margins of this discussion that every single person who got vaxxed might be subject to an early death one way or another. That’d be a reason to withdraw into the first stage of the Kübler-Ross Transect of Grief, which is denial… and just hunker down there… for now. It’s an awful lot to contend with.

    What’s next then? Consider that around 30 percent of Americans are not vaxxed, and are free of the anxiety that they are designated goners — notwithstanding the basic limits of the human condition. That 30 percent of Americans, and perhaps even some of the 70 percent vaxxed, will possibly be concerned with the other enormous threats to our national life: the insane Ukraine project, which looks like the overture to World War Three (no thank you); and the collapsing US economy, with features such as unaffordable food and fuel, scarcity of parts for fixing anything that’s broken, and a pretty good chance that retirement accounts will be wiped out in a coming equity-and-bond market “correction.”

     All of which is to ask: when will the people of this land finally get pissed-off at the managers who are running everything? And when will the people start to express their new-found rage? I’ll make a wild-hair guess. By May, when the weather really starts lightening up, the people will be out in the streets looking to smash anything that appears to represent authority. Welcome to the season of real chaos and crisis, possibly many seasons, maybe years. Take great care of yourselves and your situations. Prepare if you can. How does it feel…to be on your own? the bard sang sixty years ago. We’ll soon find out.

[G M]

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/everything-all-at-once/

Everything, All at Once
“There’s a lot of stupidity in public discourse, and most of it is not worth paying attention to. But once in a while, there is a kind of stupidity that is so grotesque that its very existence to any substantive degree tells us something about our culture.” — Richard Hanania
Clusterfuck Nation

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     Time, they say, is nature’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t happen at once. Whoever “they” are — and these days it is liable to be just one person — obviously hadn’t tried living in the USA in 2023, because now everything is happening at once. The cosmic weirdness has left some observers, such as the formidable and admirable Naomi Wolf, to wonder if we are under the sway of something supernatural, and not a good something.

     The old movie Poltergeist comes to mind. Remember? Every evil entity in the pop culture universe came spewing out of a TV all at once to disorder a perfectly banal and serene suburban neighborhood, representing all of us, of course. These days, when I drive to the supermarket to behold the astounding price of tomatoes, I half-expect to see a giant projection of Joy Reid, piggyback on a hoofed-and-horned Klaus Schwab, ride across the sickening red twilight sky, her shrieks making the leafless trees cringe and the asphalt crack. The shadow-side of everything in American history and posterity is loose upon the land, and our country has finally come to look exactly like Dylan’s Desolation Row: They’re selling postcards of the hanging, and painting the passports brown, all right. The beauty parlor’s filled with sailors, the circus is in town.

      The defining moment of the week was the White House ceremony with Dr. Jill Biden and her side-piece, Tony Blinken, presenting an International Women of Courage award to Ms. Alba Rueda of Argentina, a biological man. But, of course! Kisses all around. Mattias Desmet, author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism, pointed out some time ago that a psychotic political regime would require the people to swallow ever-greater absurdities as things played out in its death-wish drive toward national nullity.

     But was that little scene more absurd than the regime’s campaign in Ukraine to do… uh, to do what, exactly? To punish Vladimir Putin, or something like that. Or is it nuclear war they’re really after? A war, they’re telling themselves, that we would surely win, as if being a continent-sized ashtray is winning. Meanwhile, our Intel Community has discovered that it was… well might have been… Ukraine, after all, who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines — with help from some outside parties (namely, America’s Intel Community).

      But waitagoshdarnminnit! How does that get anybody off-the-hook for the costly caper? NATO supposedly backs Ukraine, right? And Germany is the European leader of NATO, right? So you’re telling me Ukraine blew up a systemically-important asset of a leading country that supports Ukraine? Something doesn’t add up in that-there rebus puzzle. I’ll spare you the mental labor. The US Spook Industrial Complex is just laying another trip on you. And the “you” includes poor bamboozled Germany, led by arguably the biggest sap ever elected by a supposedly advanced nation, Olaf Scholz, whose name will evermore ring through history as a synonym for “chump.”

     Sooner or later, one or both of the following must happen: the German people will dump this chump and / or his replacement will find a way to bow out of Germany’s commitment to America’s foolish proxy war against Russia, leading post-haste to the disintegration of NATO, and leaving America’s army of vaccine-injured transsexuals to reconquer the Donbas and Crimea, led by Tony Blinken in an off-the-shoulder cocktail dress.

     Anyway, by the time that hallucination comes to pass, all the other things that are happening at once will be so vividly in America’s face that the epic sleepwalk of the Walking Woke ends with a jolt like unto a cattle prod upside the brain-pan. For instance, the implosion of our financial markets along with a sudden, shocking expiration of the US dollar as a credible currency. The mighty “woosh” heard from sea to shining sea will be the sound of capital going up in a vapor. The event will halt all that jabber about debt ceilings, budgets, and billions for Ukraine. A nauseated silence spreads across the land. Then, what?

    I heard a rumor this week (yes, it’s just a rumor) that the Federal Reserve is bailing out WalMart, the Krogers supermarket chain, and other national food distributors in a stealth overnight lending operation. Their business model is shot. Nobody has the scratch to buy stuff. The never-ending Blue Light Special has finally gone dark. Make of it what you will. Could be some kind of fake news. But if it’s not, we’re talking about not just giant businesses in deep trouble and possibly going down, but also about a big problem with food moving around the country. Do you suppose that might get people’s attention?

      Two other big deals are ripening now: America is discovering just how played the country was by the Covid-19 stunt, including the “vaccine” fraud, now burgeoning into a nightmare of escalating injury and all-causes death. Just this week the nation learned how the previous chief of the CDC, one Robert Redfield, was left entirely in the dark by Dr. Tony Fauci and his minions in discussions of how the novel coronavirus came to be, and who, exactly, was responsible for this fiasco. Something went very wrong in American public health officialdom. Indictments, anyone?

     The other shock will come when somebody at the FBI — if not Director Chris Wray himself — will finally be forced to disclose to a congressional committee that the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol was fomented by a substantial band of US government agents working the crowd of hapless protesters to produce the perfect Trump-ending fiasco. That will be the end of “Joe Biden.” But then, what?

[Crafty_Dog]

GM:

Should America do as you advocate

a) What happens in Ukraine?
b) What happens in East Europe?
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage?
d) What does China do?
e) What does Iran do?
f) What does North Korea do?

[G M]

GM:

Should America do as you advocate

a) What happens in Ukraine? Not our problem
b) What happens in East Europe? Not our problem
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage? 

We have credibility? With whom?

d) What does China do? If we onshore our manufacturing, the PRC is pretty scroomed
e) What does Iran do? Not our problem
f) What does North Korea do? South Korea can figure it out

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvCzWoiRLg0&t=7s

[ccp]

https://dnyuz.com/2023/03/18/a-four-decade-secret-the-untold-story-of-sabotaging-jimmy-carters-re-election/

 

as though James Earl was really a great prez and he only lose because of the hostages.

me: CONSPIRACY THEORY !

Reagan election - won fair and square

[G M]

SVB + FTX + SBF = WTF?

“Deny, deflect, minimise & mock your enemies questions. Don’t engage them in good faith, they’re attacking you with a view to undermining you. Don’t fall for it. Don’t give them an inch.” — Aimee Terese on Twitter




     The net effect of all the lying propaganda laid on the public by the people running things lo these many recent years is a peculiar inertia that makes us seemingly impervious to gross political shocks. Momentous things happen and almost instantly get swallowed up by time, as by some voracious cosmic amoeba that thrives on human malignancy. Case in point: the multiple suicide of several giant banks just days ago that prompted “Joe Biden” to nationalize the US banking system.

     As if all the operations around finance in this land were not already unsound and degenerate enough, the alleged president just cancelled moral hazard altogether. It’s now official: from here forward there will be no consequences for banking fraud, poor decision-making, fiduciary recklessness, self-dealing, or any of the other risks attendant to the handling of other people’s money. Bailing out the Silicon Valley Bank and Barney Frank’s deluxe Signature Bank means that the government will now have to bail out every bank every time something goes wrong.

     The trouble, of course, is that the government doesn’t have the means to bail out every bank. Its only resort is to ask the Federal Reserve to summon new money from a magic ether where the illusion of wealth is conjured to paper-over ever greater fissures in the splintering matrix of racketeering that America has become. That will quickly translate into US dollars losing value, that is, accelerating inflation, which is how nature punishes you when your government lies and pretends that it has a bad situation well-in-hand.

     Be advised: the situation is not in-hand and is going to get a whole lot worse as new and subsidiary shocks thunder through the weeks and months ahead, until the whole wicked business blows. Likewise, the reactions of our government will only get more tragi-comically pathetic. The harder this gang of feckless, wannabe control freaks pretends to control events, the faster events spin out of control.

     Money dies when it loses its direct connection to the generation of wealth from the real things of this earth: fuels, crops, metals, materials, labor, and the value-added products made from them. Since that divorce has already happened, the need arises for something else that can function as money (a store of wealth, an index of value, and a medium of exchange). The government will pretend that a Central Bank Digital Currency is that something else. Since banking is now nationalized by the Federal Reserve backstopping everything and everybody, then theoretically all the wealth of the nation is under its command. That would be another illusion.

    This CBDC would not be “money” representing wealth because America’s wealth is going, going, gone, pissed away, falling apart, de-laminating, oxidizing, rusting in the rain, going up in a vapor. Think of all those mortgaged cars on the road racking up the mileage until they’re worthless and all those mortgaged suburban houses built out of particle-board and vinyl smeared all over the landscape, decomposing into their constituent chemicals — over time, a dead loss. And that’s what’s left of our American Dream: coldcocked by entropy and, by extension, the laws of the universe. The CBDC would just be a computerized tracking apparatus for zombies lurching pointlessly around that dead zone… a final insult. The CBDC is already DOA, only the CB doesn’t know it.

     One big mistake so many commentators and observers are making takes us back to the matter of cancelled moral hazard, and of consequence in general: it is the failure to appreciate how much disorder will manifest from the farrago of mindfuckery and misconduct we’ve been subjected to. By which I mean things stop working, including the elemental things like your ability to get food, fix whatever breaks, and keep the lights on.

      The potential disorder is why our government will probably not be able to fix itself. The disorder may go on for quite a while, but eventually the survivors will synergetically fix their circumstances themselves working in-step with the emergent mandates of reality. Having lived through a reality-optional period of history, it will come as an ecstatic shock to learn that the world requires us to pay attention to what is really happening and to act accordingly. We’ll find ways to get food, make some things work, and shine some lights in the darkness, if perhaps not by means we’re familiar with now.

     In the meantime, expect more disordering tragi-comedy from the “Joe Biden” led psychotic regime ruling over us with its drag queen commissars, lawless Lawfare vandals, race hustlers, agents provocateurs, informers, censors, prosecutors, inquisitors, jailers, and propagandists — the worst collection of imbeciles, grifters, and villains ever assembled into political party.

[Crafty_Dog]

Perspective on lost Reaper drone

Bureaucratic incompetence puts America’s safety at risk

By Newt Gingrich

As you watch the newly released, declassified video of Russian pilots harassing and colliding with a U.S. Reaper drone over the Black Sea — and the dire media reports warning that the U.S.-Russia conflict could heighten — it’s important to keep things in perspective.

This incident is an expensive but minor challenge in a long-term, nuanced contest with Russia, whose leader is still operating with a Cold War mentality. At the end of the day, we lost an unmanned aircraft. It was valuable (in terms of monetary cost to produce, information gathering, and technological capabilities), but it is not something to go to war over.

This is especially true when you consider the more than 200 U.S. airmen who were shot down and lost while surveilling the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s and 1960s. These were patriots who risked and ultimately gave their lives so that we could have a better understanding of Soviet radar and nuclear capabilities. Many were killed in combat, some were likely tortured and interrogated by KGB operatives, and others were sent to Soviet labor camps in the hinterlands of Siberia.

Some of their families didn’t even learn of their deaths or whereabouts until the 1990s. In many other cases, families never learned the fates of their loved ones. If you are unfamiliar with the sacrifice these brave patriots made, Smithsonian magazine has an excellent feature on their service.

So, the downing of an expensive piece of spy equipment does not concern me too much.

I am far more concerned that our Defense Department leadership doesn’t have a larger long-term strategy to deal with Russia, the war in Ukraine, or any of our other major

challenges. Further, I’m concerned that they don’t have a real grip on what’s happening in the present. Remember: More than one year ago, our top military official, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, publicly said that Russia would take Kyiv in three days. This is the same general who said the Afghan military could potentially withstand the Taliban’s takeover of the country after the U.S. surrender. (Set aside the moronically disastrous decision to give up Bagram Airfield as our primary eyes on Chinese activity.)

After these two decisive failures, I am amazed Gen. Milley has not been retired. What must our adversaries think about the quality of U.S. intelligence? How does this repeated, demonstrable incompetence affect Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping’s plans for Taiwan? What if we are as wrong about the Chinese threat to Taiwan as we were about the Taliban’s threat to Afghanistan or the Russian threat to Ukraine?

I am picking on Gen. Milley, but in some ways, he’s a symptom of a much bigger problem. We have 18 intelligence agencies. Apparently, they were all wrong. My suspicion is they were wrong not because they have bad personnel but because they are part of a large bureaucratic system that rejects new ideas, punishes dissent, and is primarily concerned with protecting itself rather than American interests.

The impact is that these highly educated professionals bury their heads in the sand. They favor what they learned in graduate school — and what their peers say at cocktail parties — over what is really happening in the world. Our political leaders then get briefed on ideological rather than pragmatic intelligence. Consider that less than five years ago, many people in the Washington establishment did not think China posed a significant threat. In 2019, then-candidate Joe Biden brushed off concerns over competition with China, saying, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man!”

About two years later, he said exactly the opposite.

Bureaucratic incompetence is the biggest risk to America’s safety.

Congress needs to get serious about modernizing our defense systems. One could likely reorganize our 18 intelligence agencies into about six. I often tell audiences that the Pentagon could be turned into a triangle and become much more efficient and effective at defending American interests.

With regard to the war in Ukraine and the long conflict with Russia, we need to learn from the failures in Afghanistan. Democracies don’t fight long wars well. We need to develop and successfully implement a strategy that results in the fastest, most decisive Ukrainian victory possible.

From China to Iran to North Korea, our adversaries are watching. America must not continue to fail.

[G M]

"We need to develop and successfully implement a strategy that results in the fastest, most decisive Ukrainian victory possible."

Narrator's Voice: It's not possible.

[ccp]

"We need to develop and successfully implement a strategy that results in the fastest, most decisive Ukrainian victory possible."

Narrator's Voice: It's not possible.

agreed  , just more nonsensical grandstanding

I like Newt but sometimes he is all talk

we need to do this we need to do that
we need to ....

we need a strategy such as ?
we need a plan such as ?

MORE F 16s !!!
blah blah blah

we could send them napalm - that worked well 55 yrs ago

[Crafty_Dog]

At this point in his very interesting life, Newt is chattering class.  Though thanks to the viscitudes (sp?) of age he may not be a step slower, but he still brings plenty to the conversation.  His point here about the sheer blithering feckless incompetence of our command chain is quite on target and, I would suggest, an additional worthy rejoinder to those who advocate "more"-- even though Newt is advocating "more" haha.

[G M]

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/16/are-we-the-byzantines/

[G M]

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/16/are-we-the-byzantines/

https://voxday.net/2023/03/26/america-is-not-byzantium/

[ccp]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-pull-back-from-values-that-once-defined-u-s-wsj-norc-poll-finds-df8534cd

no mention of the progressive push as being the root cause

of course - but the rise of Donald Trump is mentioned as a cause - 

WSJ as usual falls short

we have academics teaching to hate the US

were racist
not enough diversity
sexual preferences most important thing
spending so far into debt we can never get out of it
the declining value of family and religion
dividing the country into favored voting blocks
lying
CRT
DEI
trans
endless open borders with people coming here for the bucks who have no clue or concern for the Republic and its founding ideals
leaders of minorities stoking self hatred
  racism
the free shit mentality
lack of responsibility for one's self
country sucks so why would any one want to protect it

ALL THIS COMES FROM THE LEFT

but WSJ does not mention

because they profit from it.

[G M]

WSJoke

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-pull-back-from-values-that-once-defined-u-s-wsj-norc-poll-finds-df8534cd

no mention of the progressive push as being the root cause

of course - but the rise of Donald Trump is mentioned as a cause - 

WSJ as usual falls short

we have academics teaching to hate the US

were racist
not enough diversity
sexual preferences most important thing
spending so far into debt we can never get out of it
the declining value of family and religion
dividing the country into favored voting blocks
lying
CRT
DEI
trans
endless open borders with people coming here for the bucks who have no clue or concern for the Republic and its founding ideals
leaders of minorities stoking self hatred
  racism
the free shit mentality
lack of responsibility for one's self
country sucks so why would any one want to protect it

ALL THIS COMES FROM THE LEFT

but WSJ does not mention

because they profit from it.

[G M]

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/did-they-light-up-a-cigarette-afterward/