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James Howard Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation blog is updated Mondays and Fridays. The KunstlerCast podcast and Eyesore of the Month are monthly features. Content from the former website is in the process of migrating here. Read & comment here.
The dapper Hasan Piker, dressed for successYou can’t overstate the power of ideas, especially bad ideas, and super-especially bad ideas that are really just manifestations of emotional states such as envy, vengefulness, enmity, sloth, and greed. Did somebody say communism? A lot of people are saying it lately. This garbage barge of management nostrums for the ills of advanced industrial society has steamed back into New York Harbor and is busy now dispatching its agents across the land.
It’s yet another youth movement in an America which cultivates them at regular intervals associated with Fourth Turnings. I happened to be in college during the last one, the hippie rebellion of the late 1960s. It was mostly adolescent sexual energy tinged with resentment over the military draft and the war that went with it, plus a lot of marketing opportunities for music and clothing.
The US economy back then was still a roaring industrial engine. The comforts of that bygone time are legendary. You could easily support a family on an assembly-line job. College was cheap as hell — my State U charged about $500-a-year for tuition and room-and-board. (Imagine that!) You could hide-out from the draft there, too. The new birth-control pill turned campus life into a non-stop orgy with classes for R & R. Is it any wonder that the hippies morphed so easily into hedge funders?
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This time around it’s pretty ugly for the youth demographic. College for them turned out to be a life-altering swindle, burdening the young with unpayable loans that can’t even be escaped via bankruptcy. Even the sex angle was ruined by vindictive feminism and the trans fad. Work is scarce and it’s nearly impossible to make a living at it, that is, pay for food and a roof over your head (and, ugh, those loan repayments!). Plus, work is mostly found only in meaningless service to despotic corporations. The most enterprising might land a job in an NGO, but the work there is “activism,” which is pretend work, productive of nothing but the acting-out of grievances.
These grievances, it has been noted by many high-toned observers like VDH, are real enough to provoke a desperate reach for remedies, and communism is a ready-made portfolio for all that. In the 1960s, we still had the reverberations of the civil rights crusade setting a basic moral tone for hippiedom. But fifty years later, that has all mutated into a race-and-gender hustle that adds so much piquancy to the recycled communist agenda. (Note that a hustle is a low-grade racket, and a racket is an effort to get something for nothing.) So, today’s communist program is not just a war against the injustices of capital, but a jihad against the Western Civ horse that capital rode in on, and most particularly the white horseman up in the saddle.
Hasan Piker, the present guru and demigod of the movement, put it pretty plainly in a Twitch-stream a few years back when he was rising to stardom on Uncle Cenk Uygur’s Young Turk Network. “We want more immigrants to come into your countries and then they’re gonna fuck your sisters and then your daughters — we’re here to destroy the White race, bitch.” Piker is also a leading amplifier of Jew-hatred and other calumnies such as the USA “deserved” the 9/11 attacks. Apropos of our action in Iran, Piker quipped, American soldiers should be shot at like cattle (link).
Piker is rumored to have earned over $6-million on Twitch. He’s quite tall (6’4”) ripped, and a snappy dresser, often sporting old-fashioned sport-jackets with a necktie (dress for success?) and is probably catnip to the cat ladies of Gen Z, who comprise the bulk of the activist corps of the rising Gen Z Democratic Socialists — as the communists have styled themselves to avoid stimulating any action around the Communist Control Act of 1954 (50 U.S.C. §§ 841–844), which categorizes the Communist Party per se as “an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States.”
Altogether, Hasan Piker and the Democratic Socialists pose quite a vexing problem for the pathetic, old, square, bloviating chuds in the Democratic Party of the Chuck Schumer / Cory Booker ilk. Other bloggers (e.g., Jeff Childers at Coffee & Covid) have observed that Democratic Socialism is the monster that the Dems have been working on sedulously for more than a decade in their Frankenstein lab of Gramscian cultural overthrow. The monster has escaped and is now out on the highways and in the hedges terrorizing the public.
You are surely aware that the entire regular agenda of the Democratic Party has for some time been patently insane. They are still wasting the nation’s patience with debates over the self-evident idiocy of men in women’s sports, resistance to the deportation of illegal immigrants, and their obviously evil opposition to voter ID. Communism is just the icing on that fruitcake. The recent primary election victories of such prodigies as Abdul El-Sayed, Melat Kiros, and Darializa Avila Chevalier, along with the ongoing capers of Mayor Zohran Mamdani pretending to govern New York City, must be giving the old guard the vapors.
And yet, the most pathetic actual commie among them, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the Jewish, Israel-hating alte kocker, abides and even thrives in his new role as Godfather to this hatch of larval communist youth. This is Bernie’s revenge on the party that robbed him of two presidential nominations. He’s doing what all good Jacobins do — what they live for! He has sentenced his old comrades of the DNC to death. He’s stuffing his old enemies into the tumbrel and carting them off to the public square for execution. They can see it coming and it’s giving them the heebie-jeebies. And finally, of course, the Mamdanis and El-Sayeds and their spawn will come for Bernie, too, leaving only AOC in the ensanguinated ruins to become America’s Eva Perón. Wait for that!
JHK’s newest novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Luncheon on the Grass Updated (after Édouard Manet)
One way, or another, we’re gonna find you, we’re gonna gitchya gitchya gitchya. . . .The days might still be long, but this is a dark season in our country’s politics. Everybody’s nervous and many are furious, and yet all that emotion goes nowhere, just eats you up while you watch and wait for signs that help is on the way. What would that help even look like? Maybe a concerted effort to bum-rush a whole lot of bad ideas out of American life and replace them with better ideas that are worth building a life around.
Of the two political parties that used to vie between the interests of property and of labor, there is almost nothing left — nothing coherent, anyway. Mr. Trump & Co. still stand outside a feckless Republican establishment that can only say “no.” That is bad enough, when it comes to vital matters like election reform and sound fiscal policy. But the President is methodically wearing them down with tactical work-arounds such as this week’s use of State Department visa control to prevent foreign visitors coming here just to drop birthright citizens.
Things will get super-serious when the president has to manage the government’s functional bankruptcy, the bond market crack-up under our impossible debt-burden, and all its knock-ons. It’s coming for sure, and will require a stringent reorganization of American finance, probably even of our money itself. That will be a moment when the nation understands what leadership really means, not just endless deception and fakery.
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This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com
Speaking of which, you have the other party, the Democrats. The Dems, unmoored from the interests of labor (whatever is left of it), are now strictly just the party of bad ideas and crime. The party is also, at this juncture of history, caught in a gruesome four-way squeeze that could easily drag it into extinction. Let’s count them.
First, is the basic basket of ideas that comprise the party’s platform, readily identifiable for some years now as the “Woke” catalog. Virtually all of them are ideas that a majority of the public rejects as insane. A wide-open border. We tried that for four years under the fake president “Joe Biden.” Didn’t work out so well. Added many millions to the free everything dole that actual citizens resentfully have to pay for. Took jobs away from said citizens. Got a lot of (mostly) women murdered and raped. Let in Gawd knows how many foreign terrorists.
“Woke” also includes the DEI products of manufactured race animus and gender confusion, especially as applied in school from K all the way to PhD. Apart from the sheer hatred and idiocy these things generated, they also led to the scrapping of merit and excellence as organizing principles for civilization. Americans increasingly reject all of that.
The second squeeze point is the Democratic Party’s criminal portfolio. The Covid-19 operation was basically theirs. It killed and injured millions, wrecked the integrity of medicine, and brought on the deliberate perversion of our election procedure. It gave us fake President “Biden” and the autopen gang that ran him. Along the way, the party weaponized the law and produced one hoax after another: RussiaGate, Impeachment, J-6, the 2024 Trump trials — treason, sedition, deprivation of rights under color of law, obstruction of justice and much more. These crimes are a huge burden for the party and they are in the process of being adjudicated, and a lot of the party’s heroes will end up in prison.
The third squeeze is the party’s widespread and atrocious racketeering operation. The process of uncovering it has been going on since Jan 20, 2025, but still has a long way to go in terms of courtroom action. The Somali Learing Center in Minnesota, fake hospices by the hundreds in California, Medicaid fraud in state after state. It was generally allowed to go on by state officialdom. We await the eventual indictments of Governor Tim Walz, Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Janet Mills and many other Democratic politicians.
The Democratic Party racketeering apparatus also included the money-laundering system that kicked back millions of dollars from a matrix of NGOs that washed taxpayer money into the party coffers. USAID was a major mechanism, and has been mostly shut down, but thousands of NGOs still exist and function as employment centers for young party “activists” who otherwise would have to work the espresso machines. A lot of that activism depends on funding from the likes of George Soros, the Tides Foundation, Bill Gates, Neville Roy Singham, and other criminally-tinged philanthropy outfits. Justice is coming for them now, too.
Which redounds directly to the fourth squeeze: the rise of communism and jihad as the Party’s new rallying cries while the other three squeezes work to put the party’s old guard out of business. Communism is the fad-du-jour among Democratic Party youth because the over-production of elites (i.e., college graduates) are increasingly closed out of cushy jobs in the besieged NGO matrix, threatened further by the advent of artificial intelligence, and have been trained-up by the lefty-left college faculties to fall in love with the utopian nostrums of Karl Marx.
Communism is the Party’s last resort and most of America will not buy it, no matter how heartfelt the youth faction appears these days. Americans believe in property rights. They want to own things. They don’t really enjoy being pushed around by kommissars. They want to keep Thanksgiving and Christmas.
As for jihad, it’s hard to imagine a less likely route to the hearts and minds of America. No matter how pissed off you are about Israel, jihad is not the answer to America’s problems. No, Dorothy, Kansas will not be joining the Ummah. You will not have to don the burka. Sharia will not replace English common-law. This is a hill that somebody’s going to die on, and in America it’s not going to be Americans.
Personally, I don’t see how the Democratic Party as currently configured survives this four-way squeeze. If President Trump can succeed in starting to reindustrialize the country — even considering A-I and robots — there will still be a need for human labor and labor will seek some kind of political representation. Maybe they can find it in the hollowed out husk of the thing that used to be the Democratic Party. Otherwise, fuggeddabowdit. The party is toast.
JHK’s newest novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Luncheon on the Grass Updated (after Édouard Manet)
Dr. David Martin is a businessman, professor, author, inventor, and global foresight specialist. CEO of RASA Energy, M·CAM International, Partner of Fully Live Productions, Creator of the M·CAM CNBC IQ100 Index, and advisor to governments in over 120 countries, Dr. Martin specializes in putting humanity back into humans and business. His work can be followed at davidmartin.world, and @DrDMartinWorld on social media. For more information about the economic and social issues in this podcast, feel free to read his blogs at invertedalchemy.com.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
This podcast is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals. For more than 50 years, McAlvany Precious Metals has helped investors learn about and own physical gold and silver as part of a long-term approach to wealth preservation.
To explore their market insights, educational resources, and see whether precious metals make sense for you, visit: mcalvany.com.
We continue the summer disquisition on a very particular issue of urban design: the fence — because it is the small details that add up to a big picture of how your town presents itself — and how that presentation makes you feel. Last month, it was the stockade fence around the front of a house, sending all the wrong messages about the relationship between private property and the public realm. This month it’s the issue of plastic fences, such as the one above.
There is a mechanism in our neurology that revolts against fakery, especially things made of plastic when they are deployed among things found in nature. Is there anything more depressing, for instance, than a child’s discarded once-brightly colored plastic plaything deployed in the weeds of a neglected yard? A trike or a deflated wading pool. The colors are faded from exposure to ultraviolet light, and coated with a creeping patina of mold.
You sense that even in decomposition it is not returning-to-nature because it is not a natural thing in the first place. It will ultimately deteriorate into micro-plastic particles that get into the eco-system as alien material and end up lodged in the workings of living organisms: bugs, fish, mice, ‘possums, and on upward in the chain. Eventually, a lot of micro-plastic ends up in you!
Behold the plastic fence above. Like a lot of things in this world, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Cheap. Effective for preventing walked dogs from shitting in your flowers. Looks like an old-timey wooden picket fence. It’s trying hard to say that it’s charming. (Fail.)
But then the years pass. The casual pedestrian comes by. He sees the green algae spreading on the pickets, he sees the broken pickets. His mind no longer registers charming picket fence. It registers decrepitating plastic junk. Another thing we register subconsciously is the essential lie that comes with the sales pitch: maintenance not required. This is the basic lie of all plastic material; that you don’t have to take care of it. You don’t have to paint it periodically or replace parts here and there — as in the pickets or posts of a wooden fence when they rot out. You can observe this vividly in houses with vinyl siding. Because vinyl promises no maintenance it doesn’t get maintained, not even cleaned once in a while. That’s why such houses collect those automobile exhaust emissions in grimy streaks and patches under the soffit and the eaves, and pieces fall off or dangle.
Yes, it’s a complex and perhaps esoteric dynamic between materials used to build things and human cognition, but it’s for real. So, the bottom line is: don’t do it. Don’t buy plastic crap if you can possibly help it. Every little bit of it contributes to the degradation of our culture. Buy better. . . do better. . . be better!
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
Dr. Fauci Swearing to Tell the TruthThe baleful afterburn of Dr. Fauci’s one-sentence testimony (“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer. . . .”) seeps over the land like some ghastly pestilence now. You couldn’t have seen a more vivid demonstration of manifest evil than the master bureaucratic grifter formerly self-styled as “The Science” stonewall his way through that fateful reckoning in Sen. Rand Paul’s committee hearing last Wednesday.
The score so far: over a million dead in America from the Covid-19 virus that Dr. Fauci helped develop starting as far back as the 1990s, with Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina. Tens of thousands left with serious, lasting injuries from the vaccines they promoted. The exact number of vaccine-connected deaths unknown because the public health agencies refused to report honestly on an operation that they caused to happen. There are whole legions of high officials and doctors behind Dr. Fauci now desperate to cover their asses.
Along with the mendacious news media. HHS Sec’y Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. happened to be on Dana Bash’s CNN Sunday morning program. By the way, Dana Bash used to be married to one Jeremy Bash, Chief-of-Staff to CIA-Director Leon Panetta under Barack Obama. CNN lied consistently to the American people during the years of the Covid emergency. You have to wonder if CNN takes direction from the CIA, or maybe rogue elements in (or retired from) the agency. Sunday, Dana Bash went on offense against RFK,Jr.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com
Didn’t work. RFK, Jr. kept his cool. The harshest thing he said to Bash through all her hectoring was “you were part of the problem,” a startling understatement. Ms. Bash otherwise only wrecked herself, over-speaking her guest at every opportunity, pettifogging, and filibustering. Everybody could see what she was up to. Imagine how desperate CNN was to think that Dana Bash could bluster her way over Mr. Kennedy. He helped her expose herself as a tool.
The news media has been a very active co-conspirator in the Covid operation. You’d think Senator Paul might want to subpoena some network executives from CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNOW (especially), plus Executive Editor Joe Kahn of The New York Times (and his predecessor during Covid, Dean Baquet) to find out why they reported so much pure falsehood around the so-called pandemic. How did they happen to become the propaganda department for the Democratic Party, and what was the party’s interest in the Covid operation? D’unh. . . .
Everybody knows. Even the super-hyped-up cat ladies, nose-rings, NPR stars, and moiling transsters of the lefty-left know. They have kin and friends who either died on respirators with IV lines of remdesivir in their arms, or were gifted by the vaxx shots with turbo-cancer or myocarditis or neuromuscular disease or immune system failure or some mystery illness. They have been harmed even more than those of us who declined to get vaxxed. Sooner or later, that’s got to mean something.
As for Dr. Fauci’s motive in this huge fiasco. . . it’s got to be clear both from the record of his career — nicely reported in RFK,Jr’s 2021 book The Real Doctor Fauci — and from the 1000-plus-page personal diary he recorded on the HHS computers, that Fauci was doggedly in pursuit of glory. Glory! And that his personal holy grail was to find a “universal vaccine” that could defeat any virus, so as to be acclaimed by all mankind! Glory! Glory! Glory! Given what is understood now about viruses and their interaction with vaccines — for instance, the flu vaccine which uniformly fails to adapt to annual virus mutations — that Dr. Fauci’s quest was quixotic, very basically foolish. All he ever produced, from the AZT wonder-drug for AIDS he developed back in 1986 (that probably killed as many people as died from the disease itself) to the Pfizer / Moderna mRNA shots for Covid in 2021 . . . all that frantic, questing “science” just ended up killing and harming the credulous in large numbers. The buttoned-up little fellow appears to be guilty of mass-murder on an epic scale.
Of course, he is presumed to be protected by the autopen-signed peremptory pardon he received from minions of “Joe Biden.” Perhaps Dr. Fauci’s invoking the Fifth Amendment under those circumstances will prompt an overdue look at just how this autopen thing really worked. In any case, Dr. Fauci is liable to be voted in contempt of Congress this week for not answering any questions put to him. The connected legal procedure will keep Dr. Fauci’s misdeeds under public scrutiny for at least months to come.
It’s also a fact that the autopen pardon does not shield him from charges brought in state courts. The AGs of Florida, Louisiana, Alabama have declared investigations. Louisiana and Missouri have already made Dr. Fauci sit for depositions, and now they can compare his answers with the entries from his diary. It is obvious that on countless occasions and on many vital issues, Dr. Fauci told the public one thing while he believed (and recorded) the opposite in his diary.
One question that the public badly wants Secretary RFK,jr. to answer: how come you haven’t pulled the mRNA Covid vaccines altogether? They don’t work and they harm people. Why are they even still available? Would such a move amount to an admission that the whole emergency was a fake and a failure? And that the government’s own public health agencies are culpable? Would the survivors of the 268-million Americans who got the shots be a little pissed-off? What, then?
JHK’s newest novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Luncheon on the Grass Updated (after Édouard Manet)
However you cut this Fauci business, one thing Americans have learned is how slippery and treacherous this thing called The Law has become. You saw it in the sundry Trump prosecutions of 2024, too — a marvelous demonstration of how to play Hide-the-Salami with the truth about anything and everything. You saw it in the structured failure to adjudicate election fraud in 2020. You saw it in the Jan-6 prosecutions and the Congressional Jan-6 Committee charade that followed. And much more.
And one thing it’s good for is demoralizing the whole citizenry to the max. Who in this land was not mortally depressed watching Rand Paul’s Senate hearing Wednesday starring Dr. Fauci? (One last time, the center of attention!) We have become a procedural republic, slipping into an impotence of legalistic self-fuckery the way old folks slip into dementia, one lost memory at a time. There sits the murderer of millions cloaked in the banality of his evil — as it was at Nuremburg eighty years ago — and this time, you just have to lump it, America. The law can’t touch him at all.
Dr. Fauci ran his own titanically corrupt fiefdom out of the nation’s public health complex. Half-a-million a year wasn’t enough for — let’s call him what he was — an executive bureaucrat. He doled out millions in grants to universities, drug companies, and putative public service orgs, and extracted his vig, about a million bucks in prize money during the Covid-19 episode, not counting his share of royalties from drug patents. A modest million. He must have thought: who will even notice. . . who would ever be bothered by that tiny number when Congress, the Federal Reserve, and everybody else is drowning in numbers with so many zeros it gives them tachycardia just to glance at the balance sheet.
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This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com
Plus, the thoroughly dishonorable news media was busy making Dr. Fauci a rock-star. He had everything but the stadiums. The grand old gals of Hollywood were going all moist over him. “Julia Roberts sent me flowers today,” he typed into his government-issue diary. Barbra Streisand called him on the phone. “I told her that I work listening to her songs on ALEXA,” He gushed. His work resulted in the deaths of millions and the injury of millions more. Neverminding that, he carefully tracked and marveled at his burgeoning fame:
“Big front-page article abut [sic] me appeared in the Washington Post, [Dr. Fauci wrote]. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world.”
Did Dr. Fauci know that his work-product, the Covid-19 episode and the operations around it, were aimed at setting up conditions to get President Trump bum-rushed out of office in favor of the vacant and pliable tool that was “Joe Biden?” Did others on the White House Covid Task Force know how that would work? Did they know who or what they were in league with?
Anyway, it didn’t turn out as well as they’d planned, of course. The four years of “Joe Biden” only proved how much that coalition of Deep Staters, globalists, and domestic riffraff hated the old American republic and its pain-in-the-ass Constitution. But when they foundered in 2024 — when old Joe-from-Scranton finally gave away the game on that fatal debate stage — and the party had to stuff his idiot veep into the nomination, the Democratic Party crossed an event horizon into total detachment from reality, where they remain to this day.
So then, where did the Democratic Party get the idea that going balls-out Bolshevik-Jacobin would be their salvation after what they already did to try to wreck our country? And by Bolshevik-Jacobin I mean the marriage of murderous envy with civic psychosis. The line it is drawn; the curse it is cast, Dylan prophesied half a century ago. They’re in your face now. Just listen to them. They mean it. They want all your stuff and they want you dead. They want to put your sons in a cocktail dress. They want mutts from savage lands slavering on your daughters in a drainage ditch. Will half the people in this country really vote for that again?
Yet great forces unseen just now are driving the nation to an autumn reckoning, and the main thing to be reckoned is the survival of the USA as a functioning republic with the credibility of law restored and the demons of lawfare crushed. The possibility of legislated election reform slips away day by day, it’s true. But, please understand, this president will not allow the coming election to get pounded down a rathole. If nothing else, we are going to get an intervention under a national security executive order, on the president’s constitutional duty (and his oath) to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
The ensuing fight over this will be short and decisive. These mad dogs will be put down, as mad dogs must be. We are going to take our country back. Depend on it.
JHK’s newest novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Luncheon on the Grass Updated (after Édouard Manet)
On this summer break podcast. Dennis Morrisseau is an interesting friend of mine with a political history worth recounting.
He was the only US Army officer in the USA who refused orders to Vietnam after several in-uniform protests — including one at the White House gate, noted by Walter Cronkite on CBS-News at the time — and he beat the court-martial that resulted. Dennis went on to run for Congress in Vermont 3 times 1970, ‘71, 74 . Bernie Sanders was on Dennis’s campaign staff in the ‘71 election, and we’ll hear more about that.
After politics, Dennis went on to found and run the popular Burlington, VT restaurant: Leunig’s Old World Cafe (since renamed Leunig’s Bistro).
He lives in West Pawlet, VT in an art gallery on the Indian River called LOST & FOUND ART. He Winters in Belize.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
This podcast is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals. For more than 50 years, McAlvany Precious Metals has helped investors learn about and own physical gold and silver as part of a long-term approach to wealth preservation.
To explore their market insights, educational resources, and see whether precious metals make sense for you, visit: mcalvany.com.
Dr. Anthony Fauci in Covid RegaliaRemember Covid-19? Seems like long ago in a world that time forgot. Well, you get to revisit the whole sketchy business on Wednesday, July, 29, when Dr. Anthony Fauci is called to testify about it to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). Though half the USA is still psychotic and unable to process reality, the other half of the country understands that Dr. Fauci has some ‘splainin’ to do.
Dr. Fauci was initially invited but declined to appear (didn’t feel like it), so the committee issued a subpoena compelling him (under penalty of up to a year in jail for failure to show). Because Dr. Fauci was given a peremptory pardon by “Joe Biden,” he cannot legally invoke the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. He will have to answer the questions. Of course, Dr. Fauci has demonstrated in previous appearances that he is a world champeen of failing-to-recall stuff and, at age 85, one might expect him to work that angle to the max.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com
One big question hanging over the whole proceeding is whether Covid-19 was concocted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology or “jumped from animals to humans” as Dr. Fauci posited around the 2:14 mark (near the end) of this video from a White House press conference, April, 13, 2020:
The Intel Community now kind of leans toward the lab leak theory. Anyway, that all leads to another question as to whether Dr. Fauci directed his agency, the NIAID, to arrange funding for gain-of-function research at Wuhan on coronaviruses found in Asian bats. IOW, did they make the chimeric virus on-purpose? In past testimony, Dr. Fauci has equivocated and dissembled about that, played word games that led to raised voices between himself and Sen. Paul.
As it happened, then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard recently unearthed the paper trail of emails and memoranda between Dr. Fauci and his colleagues / partners in other corners of the epidemiological world that show how, at the time, they were all scrambling to cover their collective asses in the Covid-19 business. One partner in particular, Peter Daszak of the New York based EcoHealth Alliance, which had channeled many grants to Wuhan since 2014, was especially active in fabricating alibis and ruses — including a major paper in the UK’s leading medical journal, The Lancet (the article was later nullified).
Behind that smokescreen of confabulation lies the wreckage of American society by the evil Covid-19 business. It was even evident at the time (spring 2020) that President Trump suspected he was being played by the committee of “experts” that had been set up to make Covid-19 policy. His body language suggested as much in news conferences where he shifted uncomfortably from side to side, watching while others spoke at the podium, as if rehearsing his later YMCA dance. At one point, April 23, 2020, (Fauci wrote in an email) President Trump called advisor Deborah Birx (“Scarf Lady”) into the Oval Office and yelled at her: “You and Fauci have destroyed the country and the economy. I should never have listened to you. You have completely destroyed us.” (Thanks to @JeffreyTucker on “X” for citation.)
And that was only the beginning of an event that led to a more momentous string of operations against the welfare of the American people, including the mass shutdown and ruin of small businesses, the orchestrated George Floyd riots, the year-plus of no school, and the mass mail-in ballot policy that enabled widespread voting fraud, ushering-in the election of Deep State tool “Joe Biden,” with the epic fuckery his handlers later laid on the body politic — including the open border, universal DEI, transsexuals celebrated on the White House lawn, the Ukraine money-laundry, weaponization of law and intel, build-out of the USAID-NGO grift matrix to fund Democratic Party operations, and much more.
Note, too, the concurrent disgrace of the medical establishment that went along with Covid policy. The doctors of America ganged up against the patients of America and broke the Hippocratic oath that says first, do no harm. The doctors went along with the fake mRNA vaccines long after it was evident that the shots didn’t work to prevent the disease and, in fact, induced widespread serious injuries, often fatal. The doctors, who followed the jive treatment protocol of ventilators along with remdesivir, the drug that destroyed patients’ kidneys in a matter of days and killed them. The doctors, whose hospitals collected as much as $35,000 per patient documented as dying from Covid (which was often a lie). The doctors who played dumb about the efficacy of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. The doctors who still won’t admit that the vaccines are producing increased rates of cancer deaths and immune system failure. Sane Americans today now regard their primary care doctors as no better than 18th century quacks operating out of barbershops. Nice going, docs! (Apart from the colossal racketeering operation that you have enabled medicine to become.)
One abiding mystery in the bigger picture is why Donald Trump never really addressed the evil trip that was laid on him about Covid-19 by Fauci and many others. . . why he has not denounced the whole wicked business. . . why he has not already allowed HHS-Sec’y Robert Kennedy, Jr., to withdraw the Covid vaccine from approval. . . why one David Morens, a Fauci “advisor” is so far the sole official indicted for attempting to cover-up the funding chain for bat coronavirus research?
Perhaps after Dr. Fauci does his ‘splainin’ this Wednesday, President Trump will feel free to come clean about what happened in March and April of 2020 and do some ‘splainin’ of his own. If he does, prepare for possible widespread head explosions.
JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Luncheon on the Grass Updated (after Édouard Manet)
The polycrisis of 2026 whirls like a demon-infested storm overcoming this human project of ours like a medieval panorama of the world’s end. Everything is fraught, tilting toward hazard, menace, ruin. Even under a summer sun, the mind sees only darkness everywhere it looks. Apocalypse now, it seems like. You almost can’t blame the doomers, the black pill-ers, lost in their transports of dread. But I tell you, we will get through this.
Is it a surprise that the IRGC has a death wish for its host, Iran? They’ve been advertising it loudly for half a century, yearning for martyrdom, the bliss of paradise, marriage to multiple perfumed virgins, all the pomegranates you could ever want, and perpetual dreamtime beside a gently burbling fountain in the palace of eternity. Trouble is, to get there you must have your head blown off.
That’s exactly what the IRGC is asking for, though the millions of ordinary Iranians probably have their doubts about the ask. They are hostages of the IRGC regime, which refuses to just stop being a problem for the world. Mr. Trump’s proffer for Iran still abides: become a normal nation, sovereign and all, only without atom bombs. Let ships sail through Hormuz unmolested. Sell your oil, make some money, trade with the other fellas across the Persian Gulf, have a nice civilized life with all the refinements of age-old Persian culture, even with its Islamic overlay. Be happy!
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The USA does not seek to occupy Iran, steal its resources, subjugate its people, force them to buy Minnie Mouse plush toys, play baseball, eat Jimmy Dean sausage for breakfast, strum banjoes, or wear cowboy hats. Just stop projecting violence and discord all over the Middle East.
You can’t make us, the IRGC says. Yes, we will, the USA replies. And so it goes. Next up: bridges and power plants. Plus, every ship you damage, we’ll deduct the cost of repair from your frozen assets held in our banks. This is where things stand after the thirteenth night of strategic bombing against the IRGC’s launch sites, drone factories, missile storage caverns, and shoreline military installations. Iran prepared assiduously for this death-scene for decades, building hidey-holes here, there, and everywhere. But every time they launch something now, our satellites mark the coordinates, and boom, now there’s one less hidey-hole.
Iran’s currency, the rial, has an exchange rate against the US dollar of about 1,900,000 to one dollar. There is hardly a functioning economy left. The people are flat broke. Everyday life must be hell now. Could be the IRGC was getting tons of munitions and material for free from China, but days ago we blew up the railroad bridge at Aq Tekeh-Khan that was China’s main connection to Iran, so that’s over with.
You must doubt that Russia is capable of sending arms to Iran at this point. Russia needs every drone and missile it can fabricate now that Ukraine is sending drones clear into Moscow and St. Petersburg on a regular basis. Of course, that war is being stoked by NATO, which perforce includes the USA. A bill (H.R. 2913 — the Ukraine Support Act) that would furnish $1.3-1.8 billion in direct security, military, and reconstruction assistance for Ukraine plus $8 billion in loans was passed by the House in June, but languishes in the Senate. President Trump has threatened to veto it, as running counter to the administration’s preference for negotiations with Russia to end the Ukraine War rather than extend it.
These two conflicts must seem intractable for now, but the mojo driving them has clear and present limits. If the USA does not underwrite Ukraine’s war effort, then that leaves the EU nations, who are increasingly broke, and for all their idle talk are really incapable of mounting a major arms production campaign. The UK especially is skating on thin ice these days as Mr. Trump methodically cancels its long-running command and control of global finance through the City of London (as its “Wall Street” is called). In fact, it looks as if the floundering UK — with dopey Andy Burnham rolling in as Britain’s seventh Prime Minister in a decade — has passed the ball of globalist leadership to its forward striker (and all-purpose fixer) Mark Carney the Prime Minister of Canada.
Carney, who was previously chief of the Bank of England, has played a series of losing games against President Trump the past year, while Mr. Carney is busy wrecking the Canadian economy for the sake of the globalist “green” flimflam, a sustained high volume of third world immigration, and outlandish DEI activism that includes giving vast tracts of real estate back to Canada’s First Nations people, their Indians. Carney has also very actively played footsie with the CCP to a degree that is seriously pissing off Mr. Trump. Among all the other shocks and surprises upcoming, you might imagine him having to send the 82nd Airborne up to Ottawa to inform PM Carney that there will be no globalist seat of operations in North America.
Yes, things are getting that strange. And then, continuing the clean-up operation south of our border, there is Cuba to straighten out. Cuba is obviously next. Our patience with that failing state’s communist export project is particularly thin, now that the Democratic Party here is entertaining Marxist-Leninist dreams of glory.
On top of all that, we have serious concerns with the financial markets and the widening income inequality that drives the younger generations’ yen for “socialism” (free rent, free medicine, free stuff). Financialization concentrates and compounds wealth while the salary-mule class stagnates, suffers, goes broke, and nurses its grievances. We’re pushing into the season of financial train wrecks. AI has cornered all the free capital in the land — for something that appears to be an existential menace as much as any potential economic benefit — and it is wildly perverting the equity market. The bond market groans under the debt burden and the impossibility of fiscal prudence. Capitalism that can’t self-correct invites financial and political violence.
It’s probably a greater threat to us than the faraway wars, bad as they are. Mr. Trump, Secretary Bessent, and others in charge surely know this — that the American ownership class has become tiny, and that the cure for that is getting the vast dis-owned, forsaken middle-class back into businesses that they will own, in an economy based on production of real goods, not on playing games with money. There is so much to be done and we can get it done if we screw our heads back on.
JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Luncheon on the Grass Updated (after Édouard Manet)
Iran. . . message receivedYou ask: Why did Achilles drag Hector around the city of Troy three times?
Answer: He was just that pissed.
So it goes with President DJ Trump and the intransigent jihadi maniacs running Iran down a rat hole. Mr. T is just that pissed, too. “War is Hell,” the savvy Union general WT Sherman observed after he torched Atlanta, setting a precedent for moral clarity in the service of tactical fortitude. And thus, a century-and-a-half later, this is Iran’s hard time. Iran can make it stop at any time by. . . stopping. But the catch is, they really have to stop it, no more head fakes, ruses, jukes, dodges, and ploys. Just stop it.
Don’t doubt that they will have to stop it. We are going to make them stop. In the meantime, there is plenty else to concern those of us who care about our country, and Western Civ more generally, on the home front. Here comes the Insane Clown Posse of the Democratic Socialists. Their platform: abolish the police; no more jail for criminals; open borders; amnesty for all border-jumpers; abolish the Senate; Abolish the electoral college (House of Representatives to elect the president); defund the War Department; voting rights for all non-citizens; “wealth” taxes; free housing, food, medical care for all; green new deal laws; free Palestine (which is more important than any place else on Earth)!
Oh, and they are quite out-front about merely using the Democratic Party as a means to acquire power. Yeah, you noticed that already? Nobody actually had to read the quiet part out-loud. (Well, it wasn’t all that quiet.) Question is: how is all this going to work in practice (or in the praxis, as the Gramscian Marxists like to say — because it sounds like some occult power), as they roll over every institution in the land.
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This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are our own jihadistas. They aim to make their program work by jamming it down America’s throat, starting with the throats of the plain old Democratic Party, the party of FDR, JFK, and HRC, currently fronted by Hakeem Jeffries (the House) and Chuck Schumer (the soon-to-be-abolished Senate). These two appear to be totally buffaloed by the DSA’s Insane Clown Posse. It’s their own Frankenstein monster, stitched together in their laboratory from the tatters of the 20th century. And like in the original by Mary Shelley, this monster is fixing to abolish its maker. Hakeem and Chuck are just standing by like a couple of credulous clucks waiting to see how things develop as the calendar marches implacably toward the catastrophic midterm election.
Last week’s Maine Senate primary debate was instructive. A more pitiful conclave of political losers had not been observed on continental US soil since Millard Fillmore led the Know-Nothing party into oblivion in 1856. (And, of course, five years later the American Civil War ignited.) Remember the old maxim: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Well, Gawd help us, then. See for yourself (click image):
The Maine Senate Primary Candidates DebateThe fellow on the right pretending to be a woman is one Ashley Webb (formerly James Charles Webb) who cited “her” reasons for joining the race as: running for office before (unsuccessfully), being a songwriter, writing books, and being an “angry citizen” who would be an “angry senator.” Perfect! You might ask: why wasn’t Punch the Monkey onstage with the rest of this bunch?
Here is your very picture of Progressivism, the larval form of DSA — and, as you read this, there are Progressive larvae yet metamorphosing into full-blown DSAs all over these fifty states. Mamdani in New York. . . Brandon Johnson in Chicago. . . Katie Wilson in Seattle. . . Michelle Wu in Boston. . . Karen Bass in LA, etc. And here come DSAs Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, taking House seats in New York and Melat Kiros out in Colorado (yes, the lady who likes to wipe her hands on the US flag) who are expected to join The Squad (AOC, Jayapal, Pressley, Tlaib) next January. Plus, over on the soon-to-be-abolished Senate side, one Dr. Abdul El-Sayed running in Michigan. They all promise to keep the punishment coming until American morale improves!
Looming over this Insane Clown Posse of — oh, let’s just say it — feckless communists, is the ancient visage of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleburg — the old war-horse’s long-cherished dreams finally coming true. Remember, in 1988 Bernie took his new wife on a honeymoon to the Soviet Union? Like. . . to witness how well that system was working. . . exactly three years before it collapsed. You can say the Democratic Socialists of America have got exactly the avatar they deserve.
The question is: will the DSA drag the Democratic Party into oblivion? Most assuredly they will. We are going to get election reform one way or another this year. There will be no more mail-in ballot harvesting or voting by non-citizens or vote tabulation machines. It might be that a substantial demographic in our country is insane, say, generously, maybe forty percent. But a firm majority of Americans are not insane and they are going to put a stop to this communist insurrection just as President DJ Trump — who is really pissed — will put an end to the forty-seven-year Iranian jihad. What a week it has been!!! More thrills and chills ahead, you can be sure.
JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Luncheon on the Grass Updated (after Édouard Manet)
President Trump Reads the Riot Act on the Deep StateStrange to relate, in last night’s speech to the nation on election chicanery, President Trump managed to both overwhelm and underwhelm public expectation. He touched on voting machine shenanigans, registration skullduggery, cyber-fuckery, labor union toolery, ballot fraud, and especially China meddling.
Internal CIA / FBI docs at the time said that China’s policy around the 2020 US election was to “leverage all domestic and foreign elements” opposed to the President to prevent his re-election. The Intel bunch never sent that memo to the White House. They were too busy pushing fake Russia meddling, fake impeachment, and a fake Covid-19 pandemic. Then they declared that the 2020 was “the most secure election in history.”
As of yesterday, the President de-classified many thousands of Intel agency documents for the public (and news media) to peruse. And naturally, the major cable news networks (except Fox) declined to broadcast the speech. As of Friday morning, The New York Times leads the offensive to disparage the actual news.
He’s Obsessed, that Trump! The actual news: China hacked over 220-million voter registrations, plus social security files; manufactured and shipped tens of thousands of fake US driver’s licenses to be used in motor-voter states; and paid favored US journalists to write negative articles about Mr. Trump. The Department of Homeland Security reported 278,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in federal elections. But that number was compiled only from states that complied with DOJ demands for voter rolls. California, New York, and Illinois and many other states refused, so the number is probably more than double the DHS figure.
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The big take-away was that US Intel agencies withheld all this intel from the President of the US, Mr. Trump, in the lead-up to the 2020 vote. Yes, there really is a Deep State, as seen starkly in a now-declassified memo from the then-chief of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, one Nikki Floris, who wrote “I’m basically running a shadow government at this point” by hiding information from POTUS. Ms. Floris is now employed as Microsoft’s Director of Insider Risk (former Deputy Attorney General under “Joe Biden,” Lisa Monaco, is President of Microsoft Global Affairs.)
According to the NY Post’s Miranda Devine, in August 2020, Nikki Floris also tried to hoodwink Senators Chuck Grassley and Rob Johnson, telling them the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian op — a gag later ratified by fifty-one former intel officers (including five former CIA Directors) who signed the notorious October letter to the news media. All of this activity, Mr. Trump averred, amounted to a cover-up of a conspiracy by members of the permanent bureaucracy to overthrow the government. And that is exactly why more than one federal grand jury is convened in Fort Pierce, Florida, right now, to sort out who, exactly, is going to account for these rather grave crimes. The new document release is apt to accelerate the work of US Attorneys there, since declassification is the biggest routine holdup in the process.
On the “underwhelming” side of the president’s speech, there was little mention of the swing-state ballot fraud enabled and conducted by local election officials in Fulton County, Georgia, Maricopa County, Arizona, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Antrim County, Michigan, Mesa County, Colorado, and Philadelphia, PA. But you know that the FBI raided Fulton County election headquarters months ago and seized around 700 boxes of evidence, and then reassigned 260 FBI agents to examine all the material. All that might still be to-come.
Then there is the question of the millions of dollars that Hunter Biden winkled out of China over the years before the 2020 election — records of which were stuffed in his infamous laptop, along with photos and video of his sexual exploits there — and whether Hunter’s father, Joe, was a blackmail captive of China leading up to that election. Stay tuned on that.
Altogether, Mr. Trump’s speech and document drops are obviously an effort to move election reform, the Save America Act, through Congress, where it has languished in a procedural miasma for months due to one man: Senate Majority Leader John Thune. The President’s emphasis last night on China’s election meddling is purposeful in ways not broadly apprehended, but I will tell you:
If Congress does not find a way to vote that bill out to Mr. Trump’s desk before they recess for the rest of the summer in late July, Mr. Trump will invoke an executive order under the National Emergencies Act (NEA) — Public Law 94-412; codified at 50 U.S.C. §§ 1601–1651 — requiring the fifty states to employ all the same provisions that are in the SAVE America Act for the 2026 midterm elections. Under the NEA, the federal courts cannot be used to fight or strike down the executive order; it can only be stopped by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate.
If that is the course that this takes, you can expect Antifa and the Democratic-Socialist foot-soldiers to take to the streets this fall in a violently-amplified episode of “No Kings” demonstrations — because fair and honest elections with citizens-only voting will mean the end of the Democratic Party, and they know it. Last night’s move by President Trump is only the opening bid of a quickening game against the Deep State, and their partners-in-sedition. The game is gonna get rough now.
JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Luncheon on the Grass Updated (after Édouard Manet)
Eric Metaxas is the author of seven New York Times Bestsellers, including his newest: Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World. His earlier books include Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy and Martin Luther, as well as thirty children’s books. His works have been translated into 25 languages. Eric is the host of Socrates in the City and the Eric Metaxas Show (on Apple Podcasts), where he has interviewed Dick Cavett, Ron Howard, George Foreman, Mel Gibson, Morgan Freeman, and many others. His humor has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
This podcast is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals. For more than 50 years, McAlvany Precious Metals has helped investors learn about and own physical gold and silver as part of a long-term approach to wealth preservation.
To explore their market insights, educational resources, and see whether precious metals make sense for you, visit: mcalvany.com.
Where do the enemies of our country — including the ones inside our country — get the idea that Iran is winning this war? They wish it into existence. The wishing is necessary to put across the talking points that President Trump and his advisors don’t have a plan, don’t know what they are doing, that the USA is persecuting and oppressing Iran for no good reason.
We pounded Iran over the weekend for a very good reason: Iran needs to learn the hard way that there are consequences for breaking agreements. For instance, at around 7:15p.m. local time, Iran fired a projectile at the Cyprus-flagged container ship GFS Galaxy, managed by Dubai-based Global Feeder Shipping, in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran claimed it was “a warning shot,” but it was a direct hit on the ship’s engine room, disabling the vessel. The crew had to abandon ship in lifeboats — and were soon rescued by a combination of other commercial ships and Omani navy vessels. One crew member went missing.
Hours after the attack, Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. And soon after that, President Trump asserted that the Strait was open to commercial traffic, with US forces positioned to ensure freedom of navigation, contradicting Iran’s announcement of closure “until further notice.”
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This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com
It’s not the President and his advisors who are confused, it’s the situation, and for a good reason: Iran’s leadership is confused. It’s as if Mr. Trump has to stand between Abbott & Costello doing their Who’s on First routine. All the while the IRGC fulminates and fires what remains of its ordnance at ships and other countries in the region, Iran’s putative civilian leadership, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Foreign Minister Seyyed Abbas Araghchi, and Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi, are talking desperately on the phone to mediators in Qatar and Pakistan about how to implement “technical issues” in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
All of this indicates that Iran’s leadership is badly split between its civil government and the IRGC (Revolutionary Guard) forces that operate as a competing Mafia-style command structure with an attached military of its own, separate from Iran’s regular army. The major discord between the two entities is that the civil government would apparently like the conflict with America to resolve in a way that will allow their country to salvage its economy and return to normal relations with the rest of the world, while the IRGC remains obdurately bent on jihad, no matter what it means for their country and its people.
The problem with jihad is that it must be waged against all infidels, meaning the people of Western Civ — a major part of the rest of the world — and now even many states around the Persian Gulf region who have joined President Trump’s Board of Peace — Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan — that might qualify as targets of jihad, too. Why? Because Israel was one of the initial signatories, making the Board of Peace a creature of The Great Satan (the USA) and Little Satan (Israel).
Of course, a key precept in jihad is taqiyya, which prescribes lying and deception in the service of jihad, which further suggests that, for the jihadist IRGC, there can be no real understanding in the Memorandum of Understanding that Iran’s civil government signed. Taqiyya requires the IRGC to lie, which it has demonstrated it is determined to do. . . like, firing missiles at commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz after it promised not to. How can such conduct possibly produce mutual understanding?
And so, if you picture the negotiations as a carrot-and-stick type process, you see that Iran’s IRGC is oblivious to carrots. Only the stick might avail, and Mr. Trump is obliging them with it. By the way, rumors circulated the past twenty-four hours that the IRGC’s newest commander, Ahmad Vahidi, was killed in his bunker by an American bomb over the weekend. True? Dunno. We’ll probably learn soon enough. Vahidi became the IRGC Commander in March of this year after his predecessor, Mohammad Pakpour, was successfully blown up. Who’s available to step-up into the job now? I guess we’ll find that out soon enough, too.
Speaking of targets, we also learned that President Trump was targeted for assassination by Iran (surprise surprise) upon leaving last week’s NATO confab in Turkey — Israeli intel informed him — necessitating that switcheroo between the new Air Force One gifted by Qatar, and the good old baby-blue Air Force One just recently retired from service going all the way back to Bush One. The old plane had better defensive weaponry aboard, our officials explained.
If I were president of our country, at this point in the quarrel with Iran, I’d consider just dropping Graham Platner over Tehran. And if that fails to get their minds right, follow-up with Rosie O’Donnell and Ana Navarro.
JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Luncheon on the Grass Updated (after Édouard Manet)
Seth Rich, when he was alive, at his leisureThe scene: February of 2027, a federal courtroom in Fort Pierce (St. Lucie County), Florida, the third day of trial in the RussiaGate matter. Defendants seated on the right (from the judge’s vantage) are so numerous they require two tables, including John Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, Strzok & Page, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Monaco, Mary McCord, Christopher Wray, Marc Elias, and seven other former federal officials.
Former President Barack Obama and former Sec’y of State Hillary Clinton, named as “unindicted co-conspirators,” are not present in the courtroom for the sake of decorum. Former MI6 agent, the slippery Christopher Steele, purveyor of the infamous “dossier,” is on-the-lam, whereabouts unknown. The charges against the bunch are Seditious Conspiracy (18 U.S. Code § 2384), Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice (18 U.S.C. §§ 1503, 1512, 1519), Conspiracy Against Rights / Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law (18 U.S.C. §§ 241, 242), Perjury (18 U.S.C. § 1621), Concealment (18 U.S.C. § 1001).
At 10:00 a.m., a “surprise” witness is ushered into the room. Gasps erupt from all angles. The witness is immediately identified by his snow-white hair and beard. Everybody sees it is Julian Assange. He is a surprise witness for security reasons. He has been flown from Sydney to New Delhi to Frankfurt, and finally to Miami in a US government airplane, the lone passenger.
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This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com
Recall: in June 2024, Assange reached a plea deal with the US DOJ: guilty on one count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defense information. He was sentenced to sixty-two months (time served), crediting the approximately five years he had already spent in Britain’s Belmarsh prison while fighting extradition — but not counting the six years and ten months he was holed-up before that in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. There was no additional jail time, supervision, or financial penalty.
Assange is sworn and seated, led through preliminary questions as to his identity, place of residence, his former occupation running the news service known as Wikileaks, blah blah. The prosecuting federal attorney will now turn to the subject of one Seth Rich — remember him? The twenty-seven-year-old was working for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016 as Voter Expansion Data Director. At 4:00 a.m. July 10, 2016, Rich was found dead, shot twice in the back, on Flagler Place NW, in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in what police called “a botched robbery.”
Rather bizarrely from a police procedural standpoint, Rich’s wallet, stuffed with money, his watch, and his cell phone remained on his person. Only his laptop was taken in the “robbery.” It has been a “cold,” unsolved case all these years.
Sometime before the murder, as early as Spring 2016, well before the Democratic party’s nominating convention, Assange’s Wikileaks received a large packet of information containing as many as 58,000 emails hacked out of the account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The emails detailed many curious machinations inside the DNC that year, including sketchy efforts underway to derail Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders, excerpts from Clinton’s paid private Wall Street speeches (e.g., to Goldman Sachs), references to Clinton’s health problems, her private email server issue, various Clinton foundation dealings, and a lot of strange chatter about “pizza” and other mundane food items that would eventually spawn the “PizzaGate” story alluding to alleged child sex cult activities centered around John Podesta and his brother Tony.
It was quite a juicy load. But Wikileaks sat on it until just before the election. That spring and summer, Hillary was already laboring under the scandal about the private email server she had set up in her suburban Chappaqua, NY, home. She had apparently used it casually when she ran the State Department to conduct official government business, including classified information, instead of her official government email address. That itself was against the law, apart from what else the content of the Podesta email trove revealed. The FBI had been working the server case that spring, and just weeks before the convention, FBI Director Jim Comey made a big public show of exonerating Hillary, declaring incorrectly that he declined to prosecute — since it is not the FBI’s job to prosecute, only investigate, and for the DOJ to actually decide whether to prosecute. But he did add for the record that her doings had been “extremely careless.”
Anyway, Comey’s blunder became a low-grade scandal unto itself, colored by the suspicious meeting a month earlier between Bill Clinton and then Attorney General Loretta Lynch in her official airplane parked on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport. Both claimed they just talked about their grandchildren. Hence, Comey letting Hillary off the hook in July had the odor of a set-up. She was duly nominated July 26, 2016.
In October, 2016, Wikileaks began dribbling out the hacked Podesta emails they had obtained earlier that year, just in time for the election. To complicate things, the FBI and the New York City police were just then investigating former Rep. Anthony Weiner, husband of Clinton’s closest aide Huma Abedin, for sending sexually explicit messages to a minor. In the course of things, they obtained Weiner’s laptop, which was stuffed with 140,000 additional emails between Ms. Abedin and Hillary. Yikes!
On October 28, 2016 (eleven days before the election), Comey sent a letter to Congress notifying them that the FBI was reviewing these newly discovered emails to determine if they contained classified information (they did), in effect re-opening Hillary’s private server case. Comey later testified he felt obligated to inform Congress to avoid accusations of a cover-up close to the election. He called it a “no-win situation.” On November 6, 2016 (two days before Election Day), Comey announced the review found no new evidence warranting charges, reaffirming the July conclusion.
All of this intrigue revolved around the question of who, exactly, hacked those DNC emails. In June 2016, a cyber-security outfit called CrowdStrike, run by former FBI agent Shawn Henry, identified two Russian intelligence-linked groups — Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear — as responsible for the DNC hack. By that time, the Steele Dossier was already circulating between the CIA, the FBI, and the White House. The Russia collusion story (the RussiaGate hoax) was busy being born. Russia Russia Russia !!! It was all the people of the USA heard the whole four years of the first Trump term.
Which brings us forward to the courtroom scene, February, 2027, Julian Assange in the witness chair. The young lead federal prosecutor (one of several) in the room, finishes his preliminary questions and asks Assange: “Are you willing to tell the court now, who exactly was your source for the DNC emails?” Assange has kept it secret for all these years. But he had been very badly abused by some of the very US government officials who are sitting at the two defendant’s tables, and he is rather sore about all the years he had to hide out in the Ecuadorean embassy in London before the Americans induced the British authorities to stuff him in Belmarsh prison for another five.
“Yes,” he says placidly. “It was a young man named Seth Rich. He copied it onto a thumb-drive directly from the DNC.”
And that is how all the bullshit about RussiaGate finally dissolves into a rancid cloud of sedition for the folks slumped in their seats on the defendants’ side of the courtroom.
Shout out to the valiant podcaster Mel K for pointing us in the right direction on this one.
JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Luncheon on the Grass Updated (after Édouard Manet)
Uh-oh. . . Stockade Fence Under ConstructionLurching into high summer, we take a break from the monumental grandiosity of High Architecture and focus on a small, but not unimportant, matter of civic design that applies especially to the American small town. What’s wrong with the picture above? I will tell you.
The everyday built environment is not just a collection or succession of things sitting on the terrain. It consists of relationships between them. A window is not a mere hole in the wall of a building, it is a relationship between the inside of the building and the outside. It is a transition between the two.
Likewise, a fence is a device of transition. It informs the citizen-at-large that the public realm of street meets and transitions into the private realm of the front yard, and ultimately the house. There are better and worse ways of doing this. A stockade fence is one of the worse ways because it is brutal and crass, like sticking your hand in the face of someone trying to speak to you.
Ideally, in the small town setting, you would want gentle transitions between public space and the private realm. And also, ideally, the private realm would show some generosity toward the street. It would share something of itself to the public, something worth sharing. All of which explains why the best fences in residential neighborhoods are semi-transparent.
You can see through (and over) this fence. The property owner shows some generosity to the people on the street. You are allowed to see the house, and if the house contains some design grace notes, so much the better. The one above is rather austere. Its chief virtue is its clean, classic proportioning. But you are allowed to look through and over the pickets to see it. Don’t you like to see the houses along the street as you pass by? Of course you do.
Now, I will tell you why you see so many stockade fences in American towns: the automobile creates chaos in the street, even in a small town residential street, low-grade chaos. Even that much dissonance in your environment prompts self-defense. The house (the home-owner, that is) does not feel generous toward the street. He doesn’t want to share anything with the street and these menacing things moving in it. He wants to block it out, pretend that it’s not there. It’s a simple as that.
Bottom line: the people who manage your town and write the design codes must be careful to code the residential streets in favor of fences you can see through, and code against stockades and high walls, except under special circumstances. The outcome, I promise you, will be better looking towns. . . places you will enjoy walking around. Now, onto summer and all its pleasures!
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Eyesore of the Month is sponsored by Sage Restoration.
The Chief and his haremNow that the grand 250th USA birthday party is over — the speeches, the shrieking warplanes, the dazzling fireworks, the speeches and strawberry shortcake — there is only one way this thing can go. What thing? The war for the soul of the nation. Some mysterious somebody is behind the surging “Democratic-Socialist” craze. Somebody is paying for it. It’s a last-ditch drive to marshal the disaffected, under-employed young voters, choking on their college loans, deranged by anomie, and get them marching in solidarity with X-million illegal aliens to act-out an election jihad so as to squeeze out House and Senate majorities and, ultimately, wreck the nation.
That mysterious background “somebody” is not so mysterious. It just doesn’t self-identify under a banner, but you can easily tell who they are: the slippery closet-Marxist Barack Obama and, behind him, the American Deep State nomenklatura desperate to stay out of prison, along with the unelected EU Commission led by the grandmotherly sadist Ursula von der Leyen (plus the banksters behind her). Some call them “globalists.” They are a loose coalition of convenience against the populist threat of Mr. Trump in America and similar populist movements in Europe: AfD in Germany, the two parties of Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe in the UK, and LePen’s National Rally in France.
The EU, with its front-men Macron, Merz, and whoever will replace Starmer this month, is currently preoccupied with its stupid effort to provoke Russia into a wider war, using their proxy, Ukraine. Mr. Putin, still advancing through the Donbas, refuses to get drawn-in deeper with the EU despite the drone and missile sorties lately banging-up his oil depots. Mr. Putin is actually a defender of Western Civ — yes, ironic, isn’t it, considering what his country escaped out of in 1991 — but it’s so. Russia has become our natural ally in this struggle as the EU goes all werewolf on both Russia and us. File under strange-but-true.
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This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com
Contrary to Deep State propaganda, and the IRGC’s bullshit, Mr. Trump has the Iran situation in-hand. We have bigly reduced Iran’s capacity to make trouble in the world and our satellites watch everything they do now, so there will be no Iranian military re-build, no matter how the MOU talks go. They still do have the option of dropping their jihad fixation and acting like a normal nation, but we’ll just have to stand by on that.
What has to happen now in the USA is a summer of accountability. Perp walks. Indictments. Preparation for trials. Many of you are discouraged about this, I know, but please put those black pills back in the medicine chest. Accountability is coming. The mills of the law grind slowly, and it’s especially difficult since the Deep State has corrupted select precincts of the law, such as the US District Court for the District of Columbia, where rogue judges Boasberg, Chutkan, Sullivan, Howell, Meta, Reyes, Cooper, et al., have made an industry of paralyzing Mr. Trump’s executive branch.
Nevertheless, accountability might also be coming for Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the dodgy majority opinion on the SCOTUS’s June 30 “Birth Citizenship” decision (Trump v. Barbara), an epic fail for Justice Roberts (joined by Amy Coney Barrett and the three DEI gals). The 14th Amendment was written to mitigate the disruptions of the Civil War. Section One is clearly aimed at defining the full citizenship of former slaves, and that’s all, not the offspring of casual visitors and border-jumpers. There was considerable clarifying debate on the record about all that in June, 1866, with skeletons still being cleared off the battlefields. The 2026 decision looks like a debacle for reasons also obvious.
What motivated Mr. Roberts to do such a harm? Perhaps he’s just an idiot, but there’s more lurking there. It’s widely known that the Chief Justice made at least one week-long visit to Norm Eisen, after Eisen had been appointed Ambassador to Prague (2011) by his law school classmate, President Barack Obama. In these final years of Obama-in-office, Norm Eisen was busy plotting so-called Color Revolution in Europe, which climaxed in the 2014 Maidan operation in Ukraine. The purpose was to make Ukraine a proxy to weaken Russia, and would come to entail massive money-laundering and the setting up of bio-weapons labs there. This was also the period when then-Veep Joe Biden was given the “Urkaine Portfolio” and was busiest with his own grifting enterprise, through son Hunter.
Norm Eisen went on to become the chief lawfare ninja coordinating against the Trump administration with his field captains: Marc Elias, Mary McCord, Andrew Weissmann, and others. All have been involved in suspiciously seditious activities through both Trump terms. What was the Chief Justice confabbing about with Norm Eisen in Prague then? About vagaries of US / EU legal cooperation? Or were they deliberating on tactics for dealing with Barack Obama’s as-then-undeclared successor? Or possibly on bringing color revolution to the US, if Barack Obama’s posterity declared it necessary?
Consider the strange situation that one Sheldon Snook was appointed Special Assistant to Roberts in 2014. Snook is married to lawfare ninja Mary McCord, who served as Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, DOJ (2014–2016) and Assistant Attorney General for National Security, DOJ (2016–2017). She was involved in the initiation of the RussiaGate operation and in 2019 was appointed Special Counsel to Jerrold Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee during the 2019 impeachment inquiry into President Trump — the impeachment that was all about Ukraine. . . and what might have been going on there under Obama, especially Joe Biden shenanigans.
Consider, too, that a scandal has just emerged involving CJ Roberts’s wife, Jane, and the enormous commissions she received working at the DC law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, and then the legal recruiting outfit Major, Lindsey & Africa (through 2019), and then another legal recruiting firm, Macrae, for placing eminent attorneys into law firms with active Supreme Court case practices. Her income from all this recruiting surpassed $10-million. CJ Roberts did not recuse himself from the cases involving these relationships. This is a still-developing story. . . .
And, of course, an investigation of California Governor Gavin Newsom begun, irony-of-ironies, by the Biden DOJ, has just blossomed into a florid scandal involving shell companies set up by Gov. Newsom’s busy wife, Jennifer, through which millions of dollars were laundered under various fake social and health service initiatives. Newsom appointee Alexis Podesta “wore a wire” during the period and is cooperating in the case. Buh-bye presidential hopes, Guv, and don’t let the cell door whack your ass on the way in.
These are just a few possible appetizers. The main course is coming up.
JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Luncheon on the Grass Updated (after Édouard Manet)
DSA on the March shoulder to shoulder with the Pride BrigadeWho are all these Democratic Socialists of America, anyway?
“We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” one of their spoxes declared on Instagram in 2024.
Hmmmm . . . . I wonder if you can be a little more specific. Like, including democracy and socialism, two western civ constructs? Kind of looks like a baby / bathwater situation, followed by burning down the house where the baby lived. Do we get a chance to debate this proposition in the midterm election?
Likewise, a St. Paul, Minnesota, school board member, one Chauntyll Allen offered the following policy recommendation on the We Love Our Dog Park Facebook page:
A bad moon is rising on our nation’s 250th birthday. The country is in a rancid mood. You begin to see what happens when political ideas are carried to their last limits. Question is: does all this add up to a winning party platform? You must suppose that higher-ups in the Democratic Party are asking themselves the question now. What do Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer think when they see these Angels of Death on the march (or in flight) over the midterm battlefield?
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This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com
Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and Melat Kiros are going to Congress to link arms with “The Squad” — AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley — and they will bring their cargo of DSA policy ideas with them: racial, gender, and social justice; abolish ICE (no more deporting anybody); defund the police; end incarceration (no more jails); free housing and medical care; green this-n-that; government ownership of business; abolish the Senate and the electoral college; pack the SCOTUS. . . .
The platform apparently has a lot of appeal to a certain demographic — which, I suspect, includes the many young recent graduates of the diploma mills who are pissed-off that Mr. Trump & Company are methodically shutting down the NGOs that were supposed to furnish these young race-and-gender studies majors with cushy, six-figure jobs doing “activism.” Alas, that pathway is increasingly blocked and the country only needs so many baristas. What to do then? Take it to the limit! Be communists. . . with all that entails. What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, too.
This new gen of Democratic Socialists is arguably worse than the Confederates of 1861. Those Rebs only wanted to secede from USA and go their own way in one corner of the land. They didn’t want to piss on Johann Sebastian Bach, Leonardo DaVinci, Jane Austen, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson as they walked out. The Democratic Socialists of our day are fully aligned with their avatars: Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, who operated human meat-grinders at scale to tamp down the opposition. Not a great look to align with the great mass-murderers of history.
It must be agony for Schumer and Jeffries. Eradicate Western Civ. . . ? Piss on white people’s corpses. . . ? Are they really going to get behind that? No-o-o-o-o. But they will try to wriggle around this steaming pile for some weeks to come until it is obvious that the Democratic Party has blown itself up, hoisted itself on that old petard. It may be too late for the party’s old guard. No matter how many rain-dances Elizabeth Warren does, nothing will put out this dumpster fire.
Another question for the months ahead: can that party control its increasingly maniacal street warriors, the Antifas, the Pink Pistols, the Transgender Armed Defense forces, and whatever remains of BLM. There is still a lot of money in circulation for public demonstrations and disruptions from George Soros and other sponsors. And apart from that are the forces of jihad, with their own foreign patrons. Gawd knows how many jihadis came into the country during “Joe Biden’s” orchestrated alien invasion. Not just a few, you can be sure.
By the way, can somebody at the Office of Management and Budget do an audit of the $370-billion that “Joe Biden” handed over to John Podesta in the fall of 2024 to administer “climate-related provisions” of the Inflation Reduction Act, and figure out how much of it bounced right back into Democratic Party-adjacent NGOs and down to party capos like Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Brandon Johnson in Chicago, and Karen Bass in LA?
Meanwhile, the big celebration of America’s 250th is only hours away. There will be a lot of bangs and flashes the next couple of days. Let’s hope they are not really big ones. Stay alert and safe out there. And happy 250th birthday to you, America — if you can keep yourself.
JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Luncheon on the Grass Updated (after Édouard Manet)
Mel K is an investigative writer, host, and producer. Her new book, Infiltration Instead of Invasion: America Betrayed 1944–1954, examines how intelligence networks, financial institutions, and supranational structures reshaped American sovereignty in the decade after World War II. Mel was a producer and screenwriter in Hollywood until she was cancelled by the Woke Rebellion. She reinvented her self as a podcaster and is now host of The Mel K Show, where she has been killin’ it with her commentary on the American political traumas and psychodramas of the day. She also happens to be the producer of Roaseanne Barr is America, which streams on Apple TV and other venues.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
This podcast is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals. For more than 50 years, McAlvany Precious Metals has helped investors learn about and own physical gold and silver as part of a long-term approach to wealth preservation.
To explore their market insights, educational resources, and see whether precious metals make sense for you, visit: mcalvany.com.
And the Lord made Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever A punishing heat-dome creeps over the eastern half of the country just in time for the gala Fourth of July week. The days are brutal, but anything and everything crawls out of the woodwork when that blazing sun goes down and the moon comes out. Everyone’s on edge, but the edge of what? I will tell you.
First, could there be a richer (or more obvious) target for bloody mischief than this year’s national holiday, the 250th birthday of a nation that millions lucky enough to live here have been trained-up to hate on? Even the sons and daughters (including pretend “daughters”) of millionaires have gone mad-dog on America, the poster-boy being Marxist-jihadi New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Left’s new avatar-general.
Since no one is more hated than the, ahem, Celebrator-in-Chief, you might want to steer clear of conspicuous public celebrations this week. Antifa and even worse gangs are out there right now, making plans and laying traps. Maybe not so much in places like Texas, where eight Antifas were just sentenced collectively to 450 years in the slammer for shooting up the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado. . . but here in the Empire State and other Blue-ish jurisdictions, all bets are off. Be careful ‘out there’ among the smokin’ ribs, the fireworks shows, and big music venues.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com
You can see how this summer, and the nauseating slide down to the midterm elections, are shaping up. The party of “Our Democracy” is desperate to an extreme now, all disfigured by a communist leprosy eating away at its public face (and a cancer of fraud metastasizing through its innards). It has become such an obvious monster, raging with its hair lit-up, that anyone with half a functioning brain is shying away, stealing off into the gloaming. The party has nothing left but chaos and, in the weeks ahead, anything that might be disrupted probably will be.
The objective is to create so much havoc and distress throughout the country — especially the big cities — that Mr. Trump will have to invoke the Insurrection Act, and by doing so, the Lefty-left hope to create conditions so adverse that an orderly Election Day cannot happen. The Insurrection Act would be the Left’s cue to declare Mr. Trump the very “king” whose coronation they have busily rehearsed all year, and then, voila, you get a new French-style American Revolution 2.0, complete with guillotine and transgender Jacobins turning the country upside-down.
You might consider the theory that the nation actually needs to suffer a genuine nightmare to wake up from. The Revolution 1.0 we celebrate this week was, after all, a nightmarish struggle rife with hardship and loss. Nine signers of the Declaration of Independence died from war-related tribulations. Five were imprisoned and tortured. Twelve had homes ransacked and burned. And then, of course, the military action itself, including travails such as the winter at Valley Forge, the disastrous New York Campaign, and the never-ending logistics crisis, no food, no clothing, no munitions.
In the present summer of travail we face, you can expect at least some major wake-up calls issued by the bloc in the country that has not gone insane — which happens to include many in Mr. Trump’s executive branch. I’m serenely confident that real evidence of 2020 election fraud will finally emerge, coincidental with indictments. Do you think that the Fulton County, GA, election records were seized last winter for no reason? Say goodbye to that old “baseless” talking point.
There are, of course, a whole lot of other seditious and treasonous Beltway villains nervously awaiting administration of the law. You know their names. It appears that the new supervising US Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, Joseph DiGenova, is reorganizing the so-called “grand conspiracy” case against this large cadre of coupsters into a folio of discrete cases — RussiaGate, Fake Impeachment #1, the Mar-a-Lago raid, etc. — to make them more manageable and move them more speedily forward. Don’t be surprised if one or more of these cases happens to drop before the midterms. (Democratic Party true-blue loyalists could be surprised, even shocked to their socks, since these indictments will refute everything that has become essential to their identities as the good and righteous people of this land.)
Just one more item for now in the wake-up folder, coming a little out of left-field: things are looking eerie in the region of the San Andreas fault that runs through California, and perhaps the Seattle fault as well. The earth’s geology even seems to be manifesting a degree of chaos. It’s been shaky along the Pacific Rim “Ring of Fire” for many months. Significant earthquakes have struck Japan (7.4 offshore Honshu/Miyako area), Indonesia (7.4 near Bitung), the Philippines, Tonga, Vanuatu, Chile, Papua New Guinea. The Venezuela “doublet” (June 24, Mag 7.2) occurred in a separate tectonic zone, but all zones are essentially connected by the movements of magma deep in the earth, solar activity (flares, etc), gravitational tidal forces, and so on.
On June 24, a Mag 5.6 shook Redwood Valley, in Mendocino California, a Mag 5.8 near Pistol River, Oregon, and a Mag 5.1 struck 40 miles west of Petrolia in Humboldt County, CA. The east side of the Pacific rim (America’s West Coast) has been unusually quiet for some years now. Be alert. Things seem to be livening-up. Just sayin’.
JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.**
Buy Autographed
Buy at Amazon
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)
Meme credit: Jamie Glazov on XOkay, convince me that gay-Islamic-race-communism is a “progressive” political program America is going to buy like corn flakes. The Lefty-left wants to think so, as it lurches from one peak of mental illness to an even greater one in the 130 days to the midterms. Look how successful they’ve been with open borders, defunding the police, men in the girl’s swim lane, no cash bail, sex-change surgery for kids, free-for-all elections, hatin’ on white people, and open Medicare fraud. The new re-branding strategy as “Democratic Socialism” only tells you that reality has ceased to interest them.
No, winning electoral districts stuffed with illegal aliens in bright blue cities with tiny overall voter turnouts won’t sweep the nation like love. More likely it’s a harbinger of the party’s approaching death, like the Whigs going down the drain in 1852, gurgle-gurgle. Advocating to destroy American society is a poor sales pitch. The party’s old-line leadership frantically seeks some way to neutralize the rising influence of Zohran Mamdani and his disciples, but so far nothing works. An odor of desperation fills the air.
One thing you can say about the gay-Islamic-race-communists is that they are well-organized, which is understandable since their political program resembles an ant farm, a dis-individuated collective with insectile characteristics, workers and soldiers toiling in mindless solidarity to occupy more electoral territory so as to vanquish their “oppressors,” Trump and the big feet of his capitalist minions.
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This blog is sponsored by McAlvany Precious Metals, helping investors learn about and own physical gold & silver as part of a proven, long-term wealth preservation strategy. To explore their market insights, educational resources, visit: mcalvany.com
Meanwhile, though, the money flows dry up as the old Big Donor Dawgs freak-out at the prospect of having their fortunes confiscated, eaten by this advancing ant-swarm, while Scott Bessent and Todd Blanche work to disassemble the giant, hive-like matrix of NGOs that, for years, laundered US taxpayer dollars through the Democratic Party’s patronage system. In New York City, Philly, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, Portland, the NGOs furnished comfortable salaries for young activists churned out remorselessly by Higher Ed, but all that’s starting to look like a bygone Shangri-la, a lost world.
“Many Democratic primary voters, however, are in no mood for defensiveness. As they see it, they’ve been failed by a cautious, compromising establishment, and they’re going to overthrow it.” —Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
Of course, the loss of those cushy jobs and perqs has pitched that young demographic into a yet greater rage, prompting them to wreak vengeance and havoc on the system that took their “entitlements” away. Activists want to do activism, which is not necessarily the same as working for a living. It’s working for an ideal, a cause — to abolish the very society based on working for a living and replace it with a parent-like, hovering, all-powerful government that provides your every need by “seizing the means of production.”
The trouble is, this has been tried before, many times in the previous century, and the track-record is discouraging, exhibit-A being the old Soviet Union, the experiment that failed. Why? Because after seizing the means of production, the state bureaucracy lacks the skills, the spirit, and the creative juice to produce much of anything, and especially to do it well. All it can actually contribute to the process is its intrinsic bureaucratic entropy and, to put it ultra-simply, entropy is just not a force for good in this world.
The Republican Party is laboring through its own parallel, but rather different sort of crack-up, a breach based more on pure enmity to President Trump’s personality than necessarily to ideas or policy. The Right still uniformly subscribes to personal liberty and economic enterprise, but factions on the right have a long-running investment in the Deep State apparatus and its protection against Mr. Trump’s impending prosecution of the so-called “grand conspiracy” (the ongoing seditious coup), as well as his dismantling of the money-flow architecture that keeps Beltway types rolling in dough. Former AG Bill Barr is exhibit-A for that faction, as when he concealed the FBI’s possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop through Trump Impeachment No. 1, when he refused to investigate ballot fraud after the 2020 election, and when he managed to let Jeffrey Epstein off himself in the Manhattan federal lockup.
Then there is Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the emptiest suit to ever occupy that job, who refuses to explain his aversion to common-sense election reform or his failure to allow confirmation of the president’s nominees to important federal posts. He is so committed to doing nothing that he makes “Joe Biden” look like a prodigy of action. They say Sen. Thune represents the old-school “country club” Republicans, but he looks too dim to even tote up an 18-hole golf card.
There are also Tucker, and Candace, and Nick Fuentes, and MTG, and other pouting and shouting former MAGA superstars throwing down against the president and his program. Tucker has exposed facets of his personality that seem every bit as cuckoo as the beliefs of the Democratic Party — his Bible literalism, his romance with space aliens, and especially his vehement antipathy for the Jews. It has all become rather unappetizing, though rumors swirl of Tucker seeking to build a whole new party to replace the GOP and MAGA. As Homey de Clown might put it: I don’t think so. . . .
Candace Owens, of course, seems clinically insane, with her year-long program of intense defamation and vilification of Charlie Kirk’s widow, as well as her fleering Jew hatred. MTG just looks like a sore loser, and Nick Fuentes. . . ? He’s like something that crawled out of the kitchen baseboards after the lights went out. I doubt that any of them will succeed in destroying MAGA, but they’re making the movement uncomfortable. Let’s face it: they’re embarrassing.
On the other hand, the Party of Algae and “Our Democracy” is incapable of being embarrassed, and that has been obvious for a long time based on the absurdities they attempt to foist upon our country. The Iran War seems to be fading in the rear-view mirror now, despite all their yelling about how we lost it. Oil is hovering just below $70-a-barrel as I write. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are reduced to a pitiful vaudeville act in the face of Mamdani-ism. Bernie Sanders is lost in a rain-dance for Utopia. And James Carville is on-track for a three-week vacation in the Rubber Room. Don’t bother praying for them. Just wait for gurgle.
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You must have noticed by now how this Fourth Turning bidness disorders the collective mind. The churning zeitgeist is hard on the nerves, while something strange is birthed by mankind, the end of one way of life and the beginning of another. Everybody’s got a story, and most of them are pretty spooky — A-I Globalist hell. . . de-pop and neo-slavery. . . chemtrail death. . . lizard people. . . caliphate on-the-march across Western Civ. . . World War Three. . . escape to Mars. . . . Mercy!
The last thing you might imagine is a tranquil evening in the town square among happy and prosperous neighbors, the dogs frisking and the children chasing each other as lights begin to twinkle against the lovely violet sky. Rather, you have to wonder just when is that hard rain a’gonna fall? When will some obdurate enemy try to bust a cap in your country’s ass? And at the center of this psychic maelstrom, the provocative visage of Mr. Trump.
So, let’s stipulate that it’s natural to be alarmed by events. But must you lose your mind? Many did during the Covid set-up, and they have not recovered. Most particularly the political Left. The Covid operation was supposed to rid the world of DJ Trump for good, and it flopped. What it accomplished politically for four years was to demonstrate that the Left cannot be trusted to run our national affairs. That, and the cumulative failures of lawfare, have made the Left crazier than ever — while the Democratic Party goes broke and bleeds out support-wise.
Meanwhile, the political Right struggles to hold things together, especially the morale of the people. The great national megaphones — CNN, The New York Times, et al. — are no help at all. They only multiply the mental disorder. And they will do everything possible to undermine the efforts of MAGA to reform a system that foundered under corruption and delusion. Where there is not gridlock these days, chaos breaks out. . . violence of action and opinion.
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The focus of all this angst for the moment is Israel. Suspicion runs deep that Israel “owns” America, bends us to its will, treats us like a mere lackey in its quest to dominate the world. It does this, they say, through AIPAC, its chief lobbyist, stuffing money into every pocket and every campaign treasure-chest in DC. In reality, political payoff-wise, AIPAC, at $3.3-million (according to OpenSecrets.org) doesn’t hold a candle to the National Association of Realtors at $63.5-million, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, at $30-million, and the US Chamber of Commerce, at $29.6-million.
Of course, the AIPAC suspicion tends to redound upon plain-old, age-old hatin’ on the Jews. (Full disclosure, yours truly is one.) It’s true enough, for such a low percentage of the US population, Jews seem to run an awful lot of things here: Wall Street firms, Ivy League universities, medical research, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Broadway, the news media. How to account for that? Well. . . it is said that in the shtetls of old Europe, the richest fathers married off their daughters to the smartest young men in the village. Hence, their offspring sailed into Ellis Island with a certain advantage. It could be as simple as that. What else might it be? Luciferian magic, some seem to think.
So now, obviously, Israel is engaged in trying to beat the crap out of Iran in order to persuade them to discontinue that country’s quest for deliverable nukes. Every other means of persuasion has failed, you understand, while Iran has never ceased to advertise its wish to “wipe Israel off the map” — a leitmotif not subject to disambiguation. Strange to relate, this has utterly inflamed the political Left against Israel and the Jews. Strange especially because until the day-before-yesterday the political Left in America was dominated by Jewish orgs, Jewish money, and Jewish individuals.
As we speak, Jewish Democratic Party lawyers run the Lawfare endeavor: Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, Benjamin Wittes, Michael Bromwich, Brooke Goldstein (Exec Director of The Lawfare Project org). Marc Elias has served as the Left’s chief election law finagler through three national elections, while Norm Eisen coached Special Counsel Jack Smith, New York AG Letitia James and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg in mounting their cases against Donald Trump.
Now, ironically-to-the-max, The Lawfare project is battling against the wild outbreak of antisemitism on Ivy League campuses (surprise, surprise) — Harvard, in particular, where the antisemitic frolics are presided over by the university’s Jewish president, Alan Garber. So, now it’s Jew-on-Jew, which is just another angle on the political Left eating itself alive. In case you’re wondering, I consider the Jewish lawfare ninjas a disgrace to my ethnic group, for the simple reason that their years’ long exploits against Mr. Trump have been altogether garishly dishonest. The lawfare gang has done much more damage to our country than AIPAC ever has.
And also now, at this inflection point in the Fourth Turning, Mr. Trump stands by in Israel’s campaign to put Iran’s nuke project out-of-business. This dilemma has inflamed both ends of the political spectrum. Looks like Mr. Trump is very reluctant to commit the US to an act of war. He is apparently unconvinced that our bunker-buster MOABs can successfully penetrate Iran’s nuclear Fordo mountain stronghold. For the moment, he is playing for time, probably hoping that Israel alone can “finish the job” (de-nuke Iran) somehow without US intervention. There is even some reasonable hope that Iran’s mullah theocracy can be tossed out, at best by the Iranian’s themselves.
Israel is much-resented for beating up on its enemies. It left Gaza for dead after the horrific Oct 7, 2023, rape, murder, and hostage attack. The American Left has labeled Israel “Hitler 2.0” for that. The American Left is insane of course. The news media is working the story hard that Israel is now hated by everybody in the world, even Ol’ Tucker Carlson. The Jewish lawfare ninjas are just layin’ low on this one, which seems a bit churlish for such otherwise combative punks. Only Alan Dershowitz dares speak up for Israel, and he’s not associated with the Left anymore. It remains for Mr. Trump to keep a clear head about this while everybody else runs around with his and her hair on fire.
I will make a bold prediction: Iran will be successfully de-nuked. The world will be better for it. Eventually, world opinion about Israel will shift. The world will be grateful that Israel dared to take on this problem. Eventually, too, the lawfare ninjas will find themselves in court — but, this time, sitting at the defendant’s table on a seditious conspiracy rap. That will toast my bagel.
Saturday morning, we toodled over to the next town, Salem, New York, (pop. 2,612, per capita income $19,499) fifty miles northeast of Albany, to catch one of the hundreds of “No Kings” demos across the nation sponsored by Shanghai-based software billionaire Neville Roy Singham, Walmart heiress Christy Walton, Paypal partner (and Linked-in founder) Reid Hoffman, and father-and son team, George and Alex Soros.
Speaking of Alex Soros, Saturday also happened to be his wedding day, to Huma Abedin, former Hillary Clinton sidekick and BFF (and ex-wife of disgraced congressman and convicted sex offender Anthony Weiner.) The nuptials happened at the Soros’s Hamptons estate. Cable news covered the fabulous cavalcade of black Escalade limousines conveying the super-elite of Progressive-Wokery to the glorious event. The New York Times, with its habitual lack of self-awareness, styled the event thusly:
“Liberal royalty?” Say, what. . . ? There is such a thing? In the party of No Kings? What’s the deal, then? Just princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, earls, viscounts, baronets, lairds, marquis, knights and dames, and so on. Yet, no king? Well, if you asked the fortunate wedding guests, they might aver to Hillary Clinton as a sort-of Queen of the party, or maybe just Queen Bee. As for former president Bill, he appears to be undergoing slow-motion mummification, so he currently occupies an ambiguous zone between this world and the next, with no mojo left for kingly duties. Anyway, it rained that day down on the South Fork.
Meanwhile, back upstate, cloudy and cool but no rain, some two-hundred wrathful plebeian souls gathered at the one-stoplight-intersection in little Salem, these days mainly a farm community, the old railroad engine repair shop defunct, and many good non-farm jobs with it, the usual story in this corner of the country. The hopped-up crowd was well-supplied with signs and placards, many avouching Down with Oligarchs! — which, oddly, seemed a sort of backhanded reference to billionaires of the very type underwriting the day’s festivities, not to mention the super-rich “liberal royalty” gang gathered for the Soros-Abedin royal wedding.
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But that was only one of the many incongruities haunting the mass protest against the abhorred president, Mr. Trump. For instance, one poor fellow on the southeast corner of South Main and East Broadway inveighed mournfully against the suppression of free speech, apparently unaware of the epic efforts 2021 to 2025 by “Joe Biden’s” underlings to censor the Internet and de-platform the regime’s critics (including yours truly, whose website was mysteriously destroyed in October 2024).
The moiling mob was overwhelmingly geriatric, perhaps reflecting the backwater demographics of a region with few job opportunities for young folk. A spirit of revival bubbled among them as they reenacted old rituals of the hippie halcyon, the grand old days of the Vietnam War protests, when thousands gathered to levitate the Pentagon. Only now, their sentiments and beliefs exhibit a striking and peculiar inversion of the ancient 1960s credos that drove the beloved Movement.
I know because I was there, on campus, between 1966 and 1971. Back then, the Left opposed the wicked “establishment” and all its nefarious operations, from the war in Vietnam to the FBI’s underhanded suppression of political dissent. These days, strange to relate, the Left stands in staunch defense of the Deep State, big government (and its prodigious corruption), and the politicization of the FBI and CIA.
Original thinking among the WokeTheir placards lament the withering of “our democracy,” yet they were just fine with “Joe Biden” selecting a 2024 presidential candidate for them — with no customary vote by party delegates, or anything approaching an open democratic process. They shout for the “rule-of-law,” except when it concerns special persons such as the former president’s crackhead, bag-man son. They’re all for the colossal grift around the war in Ukraine. And don’t forget they supported vaccine mandates, the closing and ruination of small businesses (while Walmart and Taco Bell were allowed to thrive), and all the other hypocritical, fraudulent, lethal actions of Covid-19 policy.
The object of the “No Kings” shuck and jive, you might suspect, was to prepare so many friction-points around the country that violence was apt to erupt in order to create a George Floyd-type martyr figure, so as to re-energize the Left for another sustained summer of riots. There was plenty of mayhem around the country but, alas, no martyr emerged, no apotheosis of “progressive” victim-hood. . . only the peculiar murder of two Minnesota legislators by an apparently deranged Democratic party fringe character, the sometime evangelist and Tim Walz appointee, Vance Boelter.
$65-million is a plausible number for the money spent by billionaires and political NGOs on the nation-wide “No Kings” project. A lot of that was paid directly to protesters for just showing up. (They ran ads on Craig’s List to enlist players.) None of them showed up in the Hamptons, though, where “liberal royalty” assembled for their special event. You’ve got to think that they missed something rather bigly there.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
The Falls of Northumberland at Clark’s Mills, NY
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
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If you seek a general theme in this moment’s tempestuous events, try No submission. It’s behind events in the Middle East and in the USA — and across Western Civ ultimately. No submission to what, you ask? To willful evil. Of course, the willfully evil will not see it that way, and great quarrels will arise over who-and-what represents the evil abroad in the world.
Iran advertised countless times its resolve to wipe Israel off the map, in so many words. Israel was not inclined to submit to that outcome and it closely monitored Iran’s practical steps to acquire deliverable nuclear bombs. Israel, in turn, advertised that Iran’s nuclear program would not be allowed to succeed. The world stood by waiting to see who’s advertising jibed with reality.
Now you know. Never Again is not an empty slogan. The Shiite jihad has been put down, and the effort will continue until the answer is beyond dispute, days, maybe a week or more. Iran’s civil leadership was willing to talk, or at least pretend to talk down to the last hour, but the mullahs above them obdurately pushed ahead toward nuclear jihad. Not going happen, Israel assured them. And so, here we are.
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The world situation amounts to a set of jihads of different varieties. In our country, the Democratic Party has been waging jihad against order, liberty, truth, and decency. You can tell it’s jihad because it’s irrational, frankly, insane. Americans are asked to submit to propositions that will destroy the country and its traditions, and they have had enough of the hustles aimed at that outcome.
Too many of us do not believe that uncontrolled illegal immigration is okay, that government should replace the family, that all journeys in life can be equally favorable, that men can become women by wishing it, that our history must be erased, that censorship is required to keep the jihad going, and that the punishment against citizens will continue until morale improves.
That is the program of the American left and lately of the Democratic Party it has taken over. They demonstrate it by their deeds. The Party represents a dwindling cohort of the populace, but its forces have already marched through and captured many institutions crucial to our national life. The opposing force, loosely called Populism, will not submit to that program, is now actively putting a stop to as much of it as possible, shaking out those institutions.
The Left and the Democrats have lost a lot of ground in recent months, especially their control on the levers of power. And since power is really all they care about — the power to make everybody else submit — they are growing desperate, seeking to induce as much chaos across the land as they can possibly generate. Hence, the outbreaks of civil disorder in the cities, using illegal immigrants as one set of shock troops and mentally-ill youth as another phalanx.
The object of the chaos is to provoke the Populist opposition to exert its authority to control that chaos, and therefore — in the insane reasoning of the leftists — to prove that authority itself is an intolerable wickedness. This is only possible, of course, in minds that do not comprehend boundaries, differences between right and wrong, up and down, inside and outside, reality and fantasy. That is the mentality that drives itself toward chaos. So, it remains for the Populists to demonstrate that authority is not innately wicked, that it can have a beneficent purpose in the scheme of civilized humanity. Order is not necessarily tyranny.
The other once-great nations of Western Civ — Britain, Germany, France — slump towards collapse, having already submitted to the EU, run by an unelected, dictatorial, bureaucracy, under the occult influence of megalomaniacs such as Bill Gates and the Soros family. The newly-arrived hordes of Islamic immigrants in these countries demand submission of the Europeans, and the Europeans have so far failed to resist. But an inflection point draws near, and the latent ferocity of the indigenous population has yet to express itself. It may be too late to avert some kind of violent civil conflict across the continent. Governments will surely fall. Mighty empires die of old age and are conquered, alas.
Here in the USA, we await the “No Kings” actions planned for hundreds of cities and towns across the land, meticulously organized by a host of NGOs, even funded by grifts run through government itself, such as the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), gifted with $34-million from California taxpayers. Billionaire Walmart heiress Christy Walton is allegedly behind the NGO that styles itself as “Indivisible,” the principal org promoting Saturday’s “No Kings” actions. You can suppose that the idea is to flood-the-zone with so many demonstrations in so many places that at least some of them will get yeasty with violence — tempting populist authority to assert itself. . . so that the left can call them “fascists.”
That label has probably lost its mojo. The Populist opposition has drawn a line against this shuck-and-jive, just as Israel drew a line against its declared enemy acquiring nuclear weapons. The lines, you see, are clearly drawn. The game is on.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fisherman and the White Boat, Hudson River at Clark’s Mills, NY
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed from Battrenkill Books
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Mostly Peaceful ProtestersAnd pretty soon, expect action in a dozen other states, you can be sure, because just as it was in the scorpion’s nature to sting the frog crossing the river in the old parable, it is likewise in the Party of Chaos’s nature to sow chaos in an American summer.
The operation to cue riots over the removal of illegal immigrants has been well-planned in advance. Chief lawfare artists Norm Eisen and Mary McCord have engineered the legal strategy to oppose enforcement of US immigration law. They will clog the courts with lawsuits to prevent it and enlist their allied federal judges to issue injunction after injunction paralyzing the deportation process. They will work day and night to get their violent street cadres out of jail, just as they did in the 2020 George Floyd riots, so that these mutts can go back into the streets to loot and burn some more.
It is, of course, the most cynical operation imaginable. The Democratic Party hustled XX-millions of border-jumpers into the country under the authority of their phantom president, “Joe Biden” for one purpose: to flood the swing election precincts with enough new voters to keep the Party of Chaos in power permanently. Now that the illegals are here, the party will do anything it can to foil their removal. All the hand-wringing and crocodile tears over “fearful families and communities” is just stage-business to dress-up the CNN videos.
The ultimate goal of this operation is to goad President Trump into declaring some kind of national emergency to put down the violence, and the objective of that is to point at him and holler, “Behold the fascist tyrant!” That’s the game. The catch is, the Democrats are mistaken in thinking they can replay the George Floyd hustle.
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This time around, more than 70-percent of the American public is not-insane. They are not fooled by the term “undocumented” — as if some mysterious clerical error was made by the federal bureaucracy in processing these millions. The actual error was allowing them to stroll freely across the border in the first place, with massive assistance from NGOs that provided smart phones loaded with helpful apps, plus free plane and bus tickets, plus freshly-minted debit cards for walking-around-money, plus posh hotel reservations.
You can blame former Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas — since “Joe Biden” was demonstrably non compos mentis during his term in office — for what was a patently treasonous act. How is it possible that Mr. Mayorkas remains unindicted? By the way, before he was sworn in as Secretary of Homeland Security, he was a board member of one of the most aggressive NGOs actively assisting the recent massive wave of illegal immigrants: the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). The org, founded in 1881 under very different circumstances, has been enlisted to serve the Democratic Party’s program for flooding the voter rolls — just as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center have been transformed into attack dogs against the Democratic Party’s political opponents.
So, you watch now as the streets of Los Angeles fill with violent mobs waving Mexican and Palestinian flags burn cars, fling missiles and fireworks at police, and interfere with the deportation process of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. They are coming close to presenting themselves as a foreign enemy army and, as such, would invite a response from the defending US military.
It has the odor, at least, of insurrection, while Democratic Party politicians pretend that this is all just “peaceful protest.” LA Mayor Karen Bass skates at the edge of sedition as she orders her city’s law officers to “not cooperate” with federal authorities who seek to find-and-deport illegal immigrants. In her youth as a leftist activist, Ms. Bass joined the Cuba-sponsored Venceremos Brigade. She traveled to Cuba eight times in the 1970s for training in regime change operations. (She claims it was only to do “humanitarian work.”) Ms. Bass is also alleged to have been affiliated in the 1980s with the Oakland-based Maoist organization Line of March.
California Governor Gavin Newsom appears to be just recklessly grandstanding, looking for a kayfabe fight with Donald Trump as he primps for his party’s 2028 nomination. You have to wonder whether the citizens of California — that is, documented citizens with bona fide US birth certificates — have noticed how Governor Newsom managed to wreck the state during his terms-in-office (and before that, as Mayor of San Francisco). By now, even the steadfast, Woked-up Democratic voters of Pacific Palisades must be a little bit suspicious that Governor Newsom does not really have their best interests at heart as he blusters at the president.
There’s another angle on the current violence, you understand. As the old song goes, Summer’s here / and the time is right / for dancing in the streets. Or fighting in the streets, as the Rolling Stones famously updated the idea in December 1968 — after the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August that year. Street fighting is one of the capital amusements of the sore-beset Gen Z, stuck with unpayable college loans, faced with a daunting job market, reduced to living in Mom’s basement, addled with sexual bamboozlement, and jacked-up on prescription drugs and other mind-altering substances.
All of that feeds a lack of purpose and meaning, one of the more baleful plights of the human condition, in turn, feeding mass delusion, mob violence, and social upheaval. But it’s also party time, an opportunity to get outside in nice weather and consort with your peers, Z’s among fellow Z’s, illegal immigrants with fellow illegals. It affords opportunities for intrepid acts of derring-do — taunting the cops, flinging bricks, doing wheelies and “donuts” with motor vehicles — in order to impress potential sex partners. In other words, looking for fun and excitement, as youth will.
Alas, none of this works too well in an era of profound boundary problems — exploited very deliberately by the Democratic Party, which has erased the moral boundaries between decent behavior and crime, just as it tried to erase the boundary between the United States and Mexico. All of that needs to be fixed. Mr. Trump is aiming to fix it. It is liable to be a heck of a struggle, perhaps even as bad as a new civil war.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fisherman and the White Boat, Hudson River at Clark’s Mills, NY
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed from Battrenkill Books
Buy at Amazon
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In this age of info overload, when everybody’s brain has become a memory hole, we’ll see how long anyone remembers Elon Musk’s epic tantrum. The latest news is that Mr. Trump and Wonderboy have scheduled a phone convo for today, Friday, supposedly to “make-up.”
The whole psychodrama looks like an episode out of the Batman movie that America has become. You could see the current plot twist from a thousand miles away. Even back in the summer, Elon’s spastic cavortings on the campaign trail looked suspiciously drug-edged. He’s reported to use ketamine, which induces mood changes from euphoria to anxiety and agitation, as well as slurred speech. Also, altered judgment and disinhibition that might provoke risky behavior. You just have to kind of wonder.
Meanwhile, the fabled Fourth Turning enters full churn. Western Civ, of which we are part, continues to go sideways into history. In case you are distracted by Mr. Musk’s histrionics, we are on a path toward World War, political crack-up, and global bankruptcy.
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This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
Among the strange doings, note former CIA Director Mike Pompeo showing up a week ago at a “Black Sea Security Forum” in Odessa, Ukraine, where — say, what? —he called for called for a "complete victory" over Russia, and advocated for Crimea to be recognized as part of Ukraine (which is not in the folder labeled “Reality”).
A call for “victory” implies that we’re at war with Russia, or seek to enter such a war. Granted, the US neocon-intel-blob sparked the Ukraine-Russia War, starting in 2014, when State Department Cookie Monster Victoria Nuland set off the Maidan color revolution. And “Joe Biden” kept stoking the conflict with cash and ammo — and inflammatory rhetoric. But Mr. Trump has been working this year to put out the fire, difficult as that is, with the EU and the rest of NATO beating war drums offstage.
What was Mike Pompeo up to in Odessa? You can make the case that he was violating the Logan Act: attempting to make freelance foreign policy outside government, and in a rather dangerous way, calling for war, however obliquely. And then you have Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal flying to Kiev to confab with the unelected coke-head running Ukraine’s war machine. . . and alakazam, the next day Ukraine pulls off its long-distance bombing prank deep into Russia, destroying some of its strategic nuclear force. Surely, the purpose of that was to provoke a response that could amount to a casus belli for the EU to launch its (insane and suicidal) longed-for war against Russia.
Why were Pompeo, Lindsey Graham, and Blumenthal not arrested when they flew back to the USA? Everything they were up to in Ukraine had the odor of serious mischief. Mr. Patel of the FBI, a former US attorney who knows how to manage such things, should have personally hauled all three of them into a windowless room for depositions. Who, exactly, does Mike Pompeo purport to represent these days? Who paid for his trip to Odessa, and who went with him? And why isn’t anybody asking these questions?
Elon Musk’s bout of intemperance was supposedly provoked by his disgust over the “big beautiful bill” before Congress, not a budget, really, but a mandatory spending reconciliation package with lots of bells, whistles, and kazoos attached. Of course, you have to ask: what legislation coming out of that animal farm is not a monstrosity? Maybe it takes a monster to fight a monster.
Maybe America needs to transition out of its Batman phase into something like King Kong versus Godzilla. The multitude of little folk underfoot are getting trampled, anyway. And the bankruptcy of America is already presenting itself as a sort of systemic sepsis driving ordinary people and small businesses to ruin, even while the stock and bond markets manage to levitate. No one can feel comfortable in the present situation.
The Democratic Party played the Joker the past ten Batman years, working overtime to throw the country into chaos. That movie’s over. Now, strange to relate, it’s looking more and more like the USA (King Kong) against Europe (Godzilla). Russia is the lady in peril down among the ferns watching the brutes roar at each other. China is something like Ming-the-Merciless from a distant planet (and another movie), waiting off-stage to see what happens.
Europe has a death wish. Its economy is cratering. It’s sacrificing two-thousand years of culture to a new barbarian invasion. The governments of the UK, France, and Germany, have gone full Orwell against their own citizens. The unelected EU has turned into a tyrannical machine grinding up anything that looks like enterprise. And the war drums they’re beating can only bring on a hard rain of Russian hypersonic “hazelnuts,” destroying the only thing they have left: their once-charming cities. If that’s not enough to finish Europe off, wait for the banking and bond market implosion.
Mr. Trump knows that Godzilla is fixing to fall off a cliff. He’s more inclined to take up with that lady down in the ferns and march back into the humid, welcoming jungle. If you really want to rescue what’s left of Western Civ, Russia in its current form, would be your natural ally, not your opponent. Nobody knows how we will get through this movie, but time does not stand still and some day we will be back in a world of nations that have given up acting like monsters. . . and maybe the next movie is something light-hearted like Carey Grant and Kate Hepburn with a pet leopard.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fisherman and the White Boat, Hudson River at Clark’s Mills, NY
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed from Battrenkill Books
Buy at Amazon
BUY FROM BATTENKILL BOOKS
BUY FROM AMAZON
Author Mike McCormick was a stenographer with the White House Press Office from 2002 to 2018. His duties included being a world traveler on Air Force One and Air Force Two, even into combat zones. He saw the presidency up close, with Oval Office and West Wing duties 24/7.
His books, available on Amazon, include The Case to Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden, and An Almost Insurmountable Evil.
He is determined to testify under oath about the Joe Biden crimes he witnessed.
His Substack Midnight in the Laptop of Good and Evil led to him being interviewed by congressional investigators looking into the Biden Crime Family.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com/JHK**
Do you hear those alarm bells ringing? Looks like June is bustin’ out all over, as the old Broadway ditty goes. Bedlam is in the air, and in more varieties than Heinz has pickles. Take your pick: civil war blooming in France and the UK, maybe even Germany — if it can shake off its psychotic stupor. World War III flutters over the continent like an answered prayer coming in for a landing. And here in the USA, genuine insurrection ripens with the summer’s peaches.
The Champs Elysees was a battlefield Saturday night as a soccer celebration went all Jihad, leaving two rioters dead and hundreds arrested (unreported inThe New York Times, of course, because. . . reasons). The two Alexanders at The Duran report that a plot is underway in London to deep-six (not eighty-six) Labour PM Sir Keir Starmer, who enjoys the lowest poll ratings in the history of British polling. Ol’ Keir likes to throw grannies in jail for rude Facebook posts while Islamic rape gangs do their thing and knife attacks multiply on the indigenous population. Not a good look. Perennial nationalist irritant Tommy Robinson was released from prison the other day, too, and you can expect fury arising around him, and at him, as the sceptered isle day-by-day disappears under a burqa.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
Starmer, Macron, new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, plus the unelected EU apparatus under Ursula von der Leyen all seem to be avid for war with Russia. They are insane, of course, and not just because their combined militaries are a joke. They stirred the pot badly over the weekend, helping Ukraine carry out drone attacks against Russian air defense bases as far afield as Siberia and outside Murmansk, way up north on the Barents Sea. The bold attack was apparently carried out after a year-and-a-half of planning, using tractor-trailer trucks to transport concealed drones in on-board shipping containers deep into Russia. The drones took out Russian aircraft enabled to launch cruise missiles and long-range radar detection planes, all tolled estimated at $7-billion damage. The gambit would have required NATO satellite targeting assistance.
You might recall a week ago, Chancellor Merz declared that Germany gave Ukraine “permission” to carry out long-range strikes into Russia. Smooth move, Friedrich. He is, apparently, unaware that in so-doing he automatically gave Russia permission to strike deep into Germany as well, which Russia has not yet done. Instead, it replied with missile strikes against Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kyiv, little more than a routine smack-back, but perhaps an ominous prelude to worse in the offing.
You understand that things are escalating steeply now in this conflict. A lot of high ranking officials in Russia have lost patience with Mr. Putin’s slow-moving, on-the-ground grind and refusal so far to inflict more serious damage on the Ukrainian capital, which he could turn into an ashtray on a half-hour’s notice, if required. You might suppose he has sought strategically to avoid the total destruction of this cousin-country so that it would not be a failed state in the aftermath of war. It would be to Russia’s advantage if Ukraine could function as a neutralized, sovereign, self-supporting buffer state rather than an ungovernable basket-case / money pit region harboring non-state terrorists of various stripes. The former outcome is surely still preferable to the latter, despite the most recent provocations.
All of this puts Mr. Trump in a bind. His efforts to negotiate peace are on-the-rocks for now, as is his (America’s) ability to control the maniac globalist warmongers of NATO. Many in the US, and Mr. Trump himself, make noises about backing off the big mess altogether and dissociating from a NATO alliance that has lost its purpose and meaning, becoming, in fact, a menace to our interests.
Against all this expanding havoc, peace talks are still scheduled for Istanbul today. Ukraine and Russia have both exchanged ceasefire proposals. Mr. Trump reportedly conferred with President Putin about it. The finalized memorandum said, “Russia is ready to work with Ukraine on a memorandum on a possible future peace treaty defining a number of positions." Take-away? Russia wants to conclude this war. Mr. Trump wants to end it, too. Mr. Zelenskyy, maybe not so much, since his fate is only secure as long as the war keeps going and he is not overthrown by his own wing-men.
Neither the US nor the NATO / EU axis will participate in the Istanbul peace talks directly, but you can suppose that Merz, Macron, Starmer, and von der Leyen are looking to stir-the-pot in the background. You might conclude that war is all they’ve got left as summer draws near and each of them face a European population primed to explode at its feckless, noxious, incompetent leadership. I would expect much more fighting in the streets of the European capitals going forward, and falling governments. It could prove hard to put these Humpty-dumpties back together, with years of political chaos following.
Things are heating up in the USA, too, as an Egyptian national torched a crowd of pro-Israel marchers with a home-made flamethrower in Boulder, Colorado, on Sunday, while “Trans-tifa,” as it styled itself, went to work on Christians assembled in a Seattle park last week. The Democratic Party — like the EU’s warmonger parties — has nothing left but violence against anything that looks like nationalism and traditional values. It’s so bad, and Democratic leadership is so demented, that they are liable to turn Donald Trump into another Abe Lincoln.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fisherman and the White Boat, Hudson River at Clark’s Mills, NY
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed from Battrenkill Books
Buy at Amazon
BUY FROM BATTENKILL BOOKS
BUY FROM AMAZON
President Trump AloneWhile Jake Tapper leads the Mea Culpa Chorus singing Kumbaya in a minor key, absolutely nobody is fooled that the grotesque psychotic deformities of US politics can be reduced to a few White House factotums lying to the news media about “Joe Biden’s” cognitive abilities. For one thing, the news media was not lied to. The news media (including Jake) lied to the nation, consistently, flagrantly, mendaciously, for years, and most of all they lied about the gigantic racketeering operation that government had become in the age of Anything Goes and Nothing Matters.
Cases-in-point, as reported by Alex Krainer, the $93-billion barfed out of the Department of Energy between the November election and January 20 to scores of hastily-formed NGO gangs with no business model or record of competency. . . and the staggering $375 billion spread around similarly out of the EPA from a slush fund run by John Podesta (as Senior Adviser to the President for International Climate Policy and Clean Energy Innovation).
That was pure grift, you understand, and it was how the Democratic Party kept its activist troops of the so-called “marginalized” paid and happy. As it happened, the “marginalized” who dwell on the edge of society — and also just beyond the set of agreements that define reality — are out-numbered by the rest of us, who voted against the tyranny of the margin and their hallucinations. And so now, the country goes through a convulsion attempting to readjust to reality — for instance, the unhappy fact that all that money was unreal, mere bookkeeping entries by dishonest accountants.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
One reality we struggle with is the doleful fact that there is no work-around for the nation’s monumental debt. Since it can’t possibly be paid off, there are two stark paths for it: default and ruinous deflation (that is, money vanishes and the nation goes broke); or a futile attempt to inflate it away with more fake money creation (you’ll have money, but it’s increasingly worthless, so you’re effectively broke). Either way, you’re broke. In the meantime, the remorseless interest that has to be paid on $36.2-trillion squeezes out everything else we’re supposed to care for as relates to the common good.
Every broke-ass family or individual person knows how debilitating money-worries can be. And since unpayable debt is the common denominator across all of Western Civ, this perhaps explains the gross, suicidal mental disorder displayed lately by leadership all across Europe, North America and Anglo-Oceania. Europe, especially, exhibits behavior that is completely cuckoo — inciting war with Russia, inviting in murderous hostiles from foreign lands, and sadistically policing their own citizens.
The exception is Mr. Trump, a businessman-outsider to government trying to pull off an escape from the deadly debt quandary. It’s probably impossible, but he is trying nonetheless. It has three main features: 1) to readjust trade relations that, in theory, would restore industrial production across the land — a bootstrapping operation to kick off “growth.” 2) to engineer a severe re-set of the money system that would effectively amount to defaulting on debt but somehow without the feature of disappearing money. At best, this would induce some kind of fall in living standards, but mostly among the small sector of financial buccaneers who thrive on swindles and the Boomers living on investment accounts (figment wealth), who are now dying off anyway — which is to say, Great Depression Lite. And 3) the least understood feature of Trumpism: to decouple the USA from the resource scarcity in the rest of the world, and the consequent strife it’s inducing, and withdraw into a sort of Fortress North America that can somehow carry-on self-sufficiently while everybody else collapses.
As big pictures go, this is a pretty wild one, stupendously ambitious, risky, and perhaps improbable. But what do Mr. Trump’s domestic opponents have to offer? To go back to their asset-stripping operation with its insane sideshow of race-and-sexual hoaxes and hustles? Let’s face it, the Democratic Party has utterly shot its wad. If it tries to start another civil war, it will have its ass handed to it. Despite all the desperate, rear-guard lawfare underway now, the party is already withdrawing into the political thickets to hide while it considers some drastic reorganization of its purpose and personnel. It may skulk there for many years, just as it did between James Buchanan (1857) and Grover Cleveland (1885).
And despite his daunting agenda, Mr. Trump at least presents a sense of confident determination to get the country righted in some fashion, to recover a sense of purpose and enterprise after years of feckless, dissipative drift into the hallucinatory madness of the Left. You must give him a chance. There is no one else right now with no other way.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fisherman and the White Boat, Hudson River at Clark’s Mills, NY
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed from Battrenkill Books
Buy at Amazon
BUY FROM BATTENKILL BOOKS
BUY FROM AMAZON
It’s pretty universally acknowledged that America’s recent wars — say, starting with Vietnam — have been stupid, pointless, and fake in instigation. And yet the soldiers we sent into these fiascos acted bravely and honorably for the most part. So, it has felt a little weird to celebrate their sacrifices minus any sense of political justice, victory, or meaning in the endeavors they sacrificed for. Ergo, the holiday is lately reduced to a celebration of grilled meat.
This Memorial Day, for a change, the USA is not actively at war in some distant land, only against ourselves. One faction in this as yet cold civil war seeks to Make America Great Again (MAGA), and the other side seeks what. . . ? To do the opposite of that? Make America Disintegrate (MAD). It’s hard to come to another conclusion.
MAGA is led, of course, by Mr. Trump, president again after the strangest executive interregnum in our history. At its plainest, MAGA means returning to an economy based on producing things of value. To many, this might conjure up the image of humming factories, good pay for honest work, and a well-ordered, content, patriotic populace grateful for their prosperity, in other words, something like the America of 1958, when Mr. Trump was entering puberty.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
It’s a comforting vision. Parts of it seem possible to achieve. Maybe we can rebuild an industrial infrastructure of up-to-date factories. Didn’t we voluntarily deep-six all the old ones only a few decades ago? And for what reason? So that faraway nations rising out of darkness could make all the stuff we wanted at a fraction of the cost? Turned out to be a bad bargain based on supremely foolish short-term thinking.
It also came with a set of very corrosive financial arrangements based on the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. These are pretty abstruse, but suffice it to say they enabled us to rack up phenomenal debt that we will never be able to pay off. We even fooled ourselves into thinking that we could replace that old economy of factory production with financial games based on jiggering interest rates and innovating ever more complex swindles. That merely produced a fantastic divide between the financial gamesters raking in billions while the former factory workers were left broke, demoralized, sick, and strung-out on drugs.
As a basic proposition, it’s doubtful that we can return to anything like a 1958 disposition of things based on rising continental-scale enterprise, as in the Big Three automakers and General Foods. It all seemed like a good idea at the time, and the zeitgeist pushed it, but we can see where it landed us: in the ghastly suburban sprawl clusterfuck and the overall ill health of the people. Also the scale of things is done rising; is, in fact, contracting.
And yet we are surely lurching into a new disposition of things, probably featuring a reduced population (disease and infertility induced by the Covid vaccine op), falling energy production (despite the whoop to drill-baby-drill), and much smaller-scaled, re-localized production of goods and food — if we’re lucky. (Events are in the driver’s seat, not personalities, even gigantic ones like Mr. Trump’s.) If we’re not lucky, the disorders of change itself may overwhelm our ability to remain civilized.
The MAD faction is led by the Democratic Party, the party of Hoaxes, Hustles, and Hatred. Being more a religious cult (of envy, grievance, and revenge) than a political faction, this Memorial Day they celebrate their patron saint George Floyd, a fake martyr whose death by fentanyl overdose sparked a summer of looting, arson, and homicide followed by a fraud-saturated election.
The Black Lives Matter operation proved to be hustle, that is, an effort to extract money dishonestly. But it morphed into the even more pervasive DEI op, seeping into every institution of American life and contaminating each of them with incompetence and grift, larded with sanctimony. That’s over now, but what is the MAD Democratic Party left with? It has put itself at the service of the depraved Deep State, the rogue permanent bureaucracy that has developed a malevolent hive-mind dedicated to maintaining its perquisites at all costs. In other words, it is vested solely in power. . . power over the people of this land. . . to dominate, regulate, asset-strip, and punish for the crime of wishing to be civilized.
The MAD party is on the wane now. Its insanity has become so exorbitant that no one of healthy sensibility can bear to be associated with it. Those who remain involved in Democratic Party politics are largely those liable to prosecution for manifold crimes against the country, now using the most unprincipled dregs of the legal system to keep them out of prison. The party will be defeated utterly.
The Deep State it served is getting disassembled systematically by MAGA, deprived of funding, de-staffed, shut down. It has nothing left but lawfare and a claque of judges who will lose their battle with legitimate law and the Constitution. If it attempts to revive its street-fighting proxies this summer, that too will get shut down swiftly and harshly. Lessons will be learned. All of which is to say that the Deep State’s war against the American people could be drawing to a close. That is something to be grateful for this Memorial Day.
MAGA will then be left to battle with the forces of nature, which basically means physics, especially as applied to the mechanisms of money. MAGA could easily founder if it fails to face the current deformities of finance, namely the gross, untenable debt hanging over the country. I’m not so optimistic about how that might work out.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fisherman and the White Boat, Hudson River at Clark’s Mills, NY
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed from Battrenkill Books
Buy at Amazon
BUY FROM BATTENKILL BOOKS
BUY FROM AMAZON
Saint Jake TapperBad as it was, “Joe Biden,” the figment president, was merely one manifestation of a nation made mad by power-seeking demons, real-live, ill-intentioned human beings driving a runaway political machine, the party of hoaxes, hustles, and hatred. The country is just now struggling to exit a convulsion of mass mental illness. The demons are still there, though, and still hard at work trying to drag you all back into mass formation.
A central mystery is how the news media made itself the enemy of the people, and this conundrum is not at all explained by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in their book Original Sin. It’s actually just another hustle with overtones of hoax, like everything else in the evil cavalcade of narratives spun out in the news media’s war on reality. Tapper and Thompson want you to believe that a faceless collective they call “the White House” managed to conceal “Joe Biden’s” well-advanced disintegration from the voting public, and that was. . . that. The media wuz fooled! Goll-lee!
Of course, that fails to explain a whole lot — such as: how come anybody watching daily video clips of “Joe Biden” in action, could not fail to see the broken old puppet he is. Alex Thompson, receiving his “award for excellence” from the White House Correspondents’ Association weeks ago said, “We just missed it.” Yeah, sure. . . . They also apparently missed the programmatic devastation to American society that was carried out in the old stumblebum’s name.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
I will give you the key to that conundrum, and then you will understand why all this happened, and why the many lingering demons are still at it in their self-styled “resistance” to America-in-recovery. Mr. Thompson lied, you understand. The media connived with the demons. They were in on the gag the whole time.
If there is any “original sin” in the story, it revolves around Hillary Clinton. This monster emerged as the junior partner to her husband, political wonder-boy Bill Clinton. From the get-go, the narrative painted her as a wife sore-beset by her charismatic husband’s infidelities. (Forget that her only child, Chelsea, is a dead-ringer for her former law partner, Webb Hubbell.) However their connubial affairs worked, Hill and Bill had a deal: when he was done, she would eventually rise to become the first woman president, and they would go down in history as two era-defining, Boomer gen, political wonder-geniuses.
It was a flawed plan. For one thing, Hillary utterly lacked Bill’s political charisma, which was his ability to avidly engage with other people and their issues. Hillary didn’t care much for other people, and only pretended to be interested in their issues. Also, people could easily read that in her demeanor. Nobody was fooled. If anything, she had negative charm, anti-charisma. Her own interests were strictly limited to obtaining power and riches. With enough power, Hillary noticed, you didn’t need charm or charisma. You could simply order people around. But the power couple left the White House broke in 2001, and were caught trying to spirit away some of the presidential dinner-ware.
The next phase of Hillary’s career was fortune-building. The Clinton Foundation was set up in 1997, ostensibly to fund Bill’s presidential library. It would become a fantastic grift magnet in the years to come, taking them from broke-ass-broke to demi-billionaires. Her launching pad was a seat in the US Senate. (She ran and won in New York when she was still First Lady in the 2000 election.)
2008 was supposed to be Hillary’s apotheosis from senator to president. The setup was perfect. The country was tired of Double-ya Bush. The time was exactly right for a woman president. Hillary was the obvious choice by a country mile. Except that she was edged out in the primaries by the Democratic Party’s alternative play for something even more amazing, in a contest of historic firsts, than a woman president — a black president, proving to the world how morally upright the USA had become. America liked how it felt. We were good people, after all!
Barack Obama liked playing his role, and he seemed to have more charisma than Hillary (though he didn’t care much for other people either, really). His sketchy background included a lot of people tinged with Marxism, such as his mentor in Chicago, Bill Ayers, an infamous Sixties radical, rumored to have ghost-written Obama’s books. And he was ensorcelled by big bankers like Robert Rubin of Citigroup, and by Globalist bigshots orbiting Davos and the WEF.
Yet, Senator Hillary Clinton was still aggregating power as leader of Democratic women voters, a massive base. It was clear that she would remain in the game, aiming for her eventual “turn” in the White House. So, Mr. Obama made a deal with her: he would elevate her to Secretary of State, further fortifying her credentials, and then stand behind her in a 2016 run.
Hillary used her years at State to also fortify the Clinton Foundation’s coffers in various pay-to-play schemes — such as the Skolkovo tech deal with Russia and the Uranium One deal that netted the Clinton Foundation combined pledges of over $275-million, according to Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer. The 2010 Haiti earthquake crisis was another bonanza for the foundation and its partners. One might also surmise, from the recent DOGE reports, that the fabulous armature for grift that USAID became, spawning countless NGOs, was engineered by Obama appointees like Samantha Powers and Hillary’s State Department machine.
In 2015, Hillary, off-and-running, came to the rescue of the Democratic National Committee. The party was foundering in debt. It entered a joint fund-raising agreement with a PAC called Hillary for America (HFA) and the Hillary Victory Fund. The agreement gave Hillary control over the DNC’s finances, strategy, and staffing decisions that enabled her to snake out Senator Bernie Sanders for the nomination. Hillary’s nomination, the drive toward her “turn,” was when the trouble really blossomed.
Pitted against the rising outsider, Donald Trump, in 2016, Hillary’s lack of charisma was sinking her campaign. So, with a little help from John Brennan at the CIA, Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS political media company, the FBI under Director Jim Comey, and lawfare ninja Marc Elias at the Perkins Coie DC law firm, the Russia collusion hoax was dreamed up and put into action.
That was the “original sin” that set up the Party of hoaxes, hustles, and hatred to become the greatest lie-spewing operation in US history, with reverberations for the decade-to-come. It also became the greatest ass-covering op in US history, with each successive raft of lies — the Mueller Investigation, impeachment #1, the stolen election of 2020 and installation of “Joe Biden,” the J-6 op, impeachment #2, the Trump prosecutions of 2024 — all requiring successive layers of cover-up and lies.
Since the news media despised Donald Trump, and was convinced by its own bullshit that Hillary would win the 2016 election, they all ran with the Russia collusion story and turned it into RussiaGate. They miscalculated, of course. Mr. Trump won, a stunning surprise, a shock really to everyone, including Mr. Trump himself, who utterly lacked experience running a government and was bamboozled, sand-bagged, and eventually hoaxed into defeat — Covid-19 being the coup-de-grace. The news media had to continue lying to the country throughout and beyond all of that to pretend that they were not equally culpable for all this mischief.
And so, they ran with every deception of “Joe Biden’s” ruinous term in office. Alas for them, the indefatigable Mr. Trump rallied, persevered through the concocted prosecutions cooked up by Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, and the rest of lawfare ninjahood, and is now back in power with an assembled team of appointees who are the Left’s worst nightmare.
What kept it all going — all the lying, gaslighting, deception, prevarication, and sedition — was the lack of accountability. It was a fatal intoxicant. That’s over now, though turning in the direction of justice is necessarily difficult and delicate, considering the elevated level of derangement among the public, the fragility of the national psyche, and the danger signals emanating from the zeitgeist.
It looks like the accounting will begin in earnest now. We are going to find out who was acting behind the empty figure of “Joe Biden,” and who ran the auto-pen. And working backward from there, this will all unspool in one, long, appalling thread of treason.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fisherman and the White Boat, Hudson River at Clark’s Mills, NY
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed from Battrenkill Books
Buy at Amazon
BUY FROM BATTENKILL BOOKS
BUY FROM AMAZON
Ray Jason has been writing the Sea Gypsy Philosopher blog, for the last twelve years largely touching on politics and social issues. His commentary is filtered through his unusual lived experience of being a longtime ex-pat open water sailor living on his boat, the Aventura.
Ray’s greatest contribution to the blogosphere is his Sea Gypsy Tribe concept — his belief that small bands of ocean-dwelling cruisers can both survive and flourish after any type of catastrophe which is the main thrust of our conversation here Ray’s personal life path has been quite out of the ordinary. Right after college graduation, he was drafted and ended up in Vietnam on a U.S. Navy ammunition ship.
Post-service malaise steered him away from the so-calleed Real World and he spent the next 20 years as a highly successful San Francisco street performer — juggling, his specialty. When that scene began to deteriorate, he commenced his sea gypsy life and has not lived on land since 1992.
We speak with Ray today aboard his sailboat somewhere in the Banana Latitudes of Central America.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com/JHK**
If the slithering denizens of Okefenokee-on-the-Potomac were nervous about their fates before Sunday — and I’d say they’ve been rather jumped-up since Nov. 4 — then Maria Bartiromo’s Sunday morning session with FBI top dawgs Patel and Bongino must have been a near-death experience for them. Something Roto-rooterish this way comes, officialdom must be thinking, if you can call utter hysteria “thinking.”
Washington is nervous because there have been zero leaks from the agency, a condition heretofore unknown in that haunted, pestiferous, reeking marsh. There’s plenty of the usual background noise, of course: the insectile hum, the croaking, trilling, buzzing, staccato peeps, chirps, and squeals of the squirming lesser creatures. . . the occasional roar of an ancient gator. . . the guttural cry of the night heron, the sharp yelp of some furry prey meeting its doom, the pulsating, primordial, chthonic cacophony of creatures suffering to mate in the frightful darkness. . . but that’s just the news media doing their thing.
We’ve remarked more than once here in recent weeks about the ominous silence emanating from the FBI leadership amidst all that other noise, and now you know: a mighty information dump is coming, bales of documents that Christopher Wray sat on for years will be publicly released un-redacted, spells will be broken, names will be named (with imputations of crimes committed), and abiding mysteries unraveled — like, what was the FBI actually doing around the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and much more.
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Prepare for some disappointment. Alas, most non-capital federal crimes (acts short of treason and murder) have a five-year statute of limitations (18 U.S.C. § 3282), so the multitudinous felonious misdeeds of RussiaGate will go unpunished. Stzrok, McCabe, Rosenstein, Pientka, Ohr (and wife Nellie), Thibault, Baker, Atkinson, Halper, Horowitz, Lynch, Yates, et al., will skate off into the sunset, but not without lasting reputational damage. Mr. Obama’s presidential aura will surely lose a lot of its luster.
But there is plenty to keep the DOJ busy with more recent turpitudes carried out with the election of “Joe Biden,” including perhaps the 2020 election itself in the months before November, 2025, when the statute of limitations kicks in for that caper. Mainly, what looms is a reckoning over “Joe Biden’s” fake presidency and the momentous question as to who was really running the executive branch of the government, most particularly who was using the devious “auto-pen” to sign off on executive orders and perhaps even on legislation.
It is a wonder of modern times that this affront to the public trust somehow remains an abiding mystery. But it shows just how fake Jake Tapper’s new book is — Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Jake blames the whole fiasco on “the White House” without ever stating who in that building was actually acting in “JB’s” place as shadow president. Tapper, allegedly a reporter, apparently never bothered to ask. But neither did anyone else at CNN, the other TV news networks, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and every other outpost of OG journalism.
Nor does Jake conclude the obvious: that his entire profession sold out the country to act as the Democratic Party’s damage control agency — rather than its traditional duty to act as a powerful check on corrupt, runaway government. Which is to say that the news media Jake represents is at least as corrupt as the government itself.
It’s for certain now, anyway, that we are going to find out exactly who was behind the fabled auto-pen, and it will probably turn out to be a cabal composed of Chiefs-of-Staff, Ron Klain and Jeffrey Zients, Dr. Jill, NSA Jake Sullivan, Deputy AG Lisa Monaco, Domestic Affairs advisor Susan Rice, and ultimately to some degree former President Obama, holed-up a few blocks away in his Kalorama mansion those four years of “Joe Biden’s” term in the oval office. Why wouldn’t Mr. Obama, now a private citizen, be called to some official forum, say a courtroom or a congressional committee, to answer questions about that? He’s not any sort of God with God-like privileges.
What we’re just beginning to see now is a furious divorce struggle between the OG news outfits and the Democratic Party, both fighting for their very lives. They are both already mortally wounded, even as they turn on each other, and liable to drop dead in the onslaught behind whatever Patel & Bongino fire at them in the weeks ahead. And even while all those RussiaGaters skate from out-of-date charges, plenty of other officials (and non-officials, like the lawfare ninjas, Eisen, Elias, and Weissmann) could go down for what went on since inauguration day, 2021.
Then there is Ed Martin, lately tossed aside as US attorney for the DC district, doing an adroit lateral arabesque into Main Justice as (simultaneously) the US Pardons Attorney, Director of the Weaponization Working Group, and Associate Deputy Attorney General. We are going to find out whether any of those preemptive pardons signed with the auto-pen in the last hours of “Joe Biden’s” presidency have legal credence. They include the pardons issued for the whole House J-6 investigation committee. House members are not immune from prosecution for crimes committed in connection with their official duties. That means you, Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Jamie Raskin, and Bennie Thompson.
And so, also amidst all that deafening noise roaring across The Swamp, we get the sad news over the weekend that former president, now plain citizen Joe Biden, has got aggressive Stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer spreading into his very bones. Strange to relate, this is one of the very “turbo-cancers” said to be induced by the Covid-19 mRNA “vaccine” shots that “JB” exhorted Americans to take — and supposedly submitted to himself. What can you say, besides boo-hoo?
Update: Listening to Scott Adams’ (Dilbert) podcast on my noon hill climb today, hours after posting my Monday blog, Scott announced to his listeners that he has the same metastatic prostate cancer as Joe Biden and expects to pass away by the coming summer. Quite a shock. Scott brought the same sane overview to the subject of his fateful illness as he has brought to so many other vexing issues in-the-news in this age of psy-ops and broken authority. He was quite brave about it. The pain, he reports, is severe. He says he’ll continue speaking on the Internet as long as he can manage it. I confess, I feel differently about Scott Adams’ plight than I do about Joe Biden’s. “JB” did enormous damage to our nation, and with a certain kind of demonic glee. Scott did everything he could to repair the ongoing damage — at least the damage to our consensual reality. Alas, Scott also took two doses of the Covid vaccine by early 2022. Two years later he expressed regret for doing it. Generally, Scott’s instincts were right-on but somehow, on the vaxx, they failed him. Listen to Scott while you still can: link to Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fisherman and the White Boat, Hudson River at Clark’s Mills, NY
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed from Battrenkill Books
Buy at Amazon
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“Cool shell formation on my beach walk,” Jim Comey, former FBI Director, wrote on Instagram about the message “86 47” laid out in seashells on the sand that he came across, innocently. You’d have to ask yourself: what was “cool” about that, exactly? Especially if, as Mr. Comey claimed on X soon after, that he didn’t know what it meant. Are things that you don’t understand “cool”? Is it just “cool” to learn that you can spell stuff out with seashells? (Who knew?)
Maybe he was surprised to learn that people other than Jim Comey fans might see his cute coded clip and conclude that it wasn’t such an innocent little gag. “47,” of course, refers to Donald Trump in the cavalcade of US presidents. Among the not-strrictly-fans was DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who went on TV hours later and said that Mr. Comey should go to prison for it — in so many words. You must suppose she meant after the appropriate procedures: an FBI deposition, a grand jury, an indictment, a trial. After all that, we’d probably get to the bottom of what JC meant by “cool.”
Now, it happens that in this new milieu of memes flying around every which way, the code “86 47” is not a complete mystery. It is apparently employed casually in settings where angry citizens gather to denounce the president. “86” is a term in restaurant kitchens when there is no more of an item that a waiter just brought in an order for. “Eighty-six on the monkfish, Carla,” the line-cook might yell. Apparently, mobsters like the phrase, too, for its pithiness: “Ay, somebody, go eighty-six that stronzo Rocco Vaselino, already! He ain’t paid da vig in a munt.” Soon, there will be no more of Rocco, you see. He will be food for the hellgrammites in the soil of the Jersey pine barrens. . . .
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As DNI Gabbard pointed out — in case no one noticed — there have been two recent assassination attempts on Mr. Trump. It is a fact well-known to police psychologists that would-be assassins are curiously suggestible to prompts floating around in the zeitgeist. They tend to take them as commands. Go do this. And if anyone was a commanding figure, it would be Jim Comey, towering hero of the early anti-Trump resistance. Thus, it appears that Mr. Comey called for there to be no more of Mr. Trump. Not cool.
Also, not so cool, in the grand annals of the resistance, is the new book Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by journalists (cough cough) Jake Tapper (of CNN) and Alex Thompson (Axios). The book purports to explain how the entire governance apparatus of the USA hid the mental decline of “Joe Biden,” the phantom president. Realize, please, that the news media is a vital part of that apparatus, and has been since the invention of the printing press, with its crucial role (until lately) as a regulating mechanism on the engine of public affairs.
In fact, it is precisely the role of the news media to notice things that public officials try to hide, so as to keep citizens apprised of what is really going on. And that is exactly what the news media intentionally declined to do during the four years of “Joe Biden.” But then, at least half the country, seeing “Joe Biden” in action on video, did not fail to notice his ever-worsening feeble bewilderment. Tapper and Thompson seek to shift the blame for this game of Pretend onto the gremlins behind the scenes in the White House who ran the “Joe Biden” show.
Tapper and Thompson are lying, of course, and in exactly the same brazen way as the bigwigs in the Democratic Party who sponsored this treasonous fraud. Jake Tapper, for one, stated repeatedly on-the-air from 2021 onward that “Joe Biden” was a capable and effective chief executive and denounced anybody who tried to argue otherwise. Just as Thompson, while accepting the Award for Overall Excellence at the White House Correspondents’ Annual Dinner in April, lied saying, “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story.” Really? Then what, exactly, was “excellent” about his reporting?
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/10/18/sotu-lara-trump-full.cnn
They also missed the story as to how the White House gremlins behind “Joe Biden” were wrecking the country with open borders, election fraud, drag queens in kindergarten, censorship, lawfare, and a colossal stream of secret grift from taxpayers through USAID-linked NGO’s to Democratic Party foot-soldiers like Stacey Abrams. The more plausible story — the truth, actually — is that the companies many reporters worked for, the old big newspapers like The New York Times and the WashPo, and the cable-news channels such as (especially) CNN and MSNBC were losing their audiences until they discovered that Trump Derangement was the only way to stave off complete failure.
Once they got going with that business model in 2016, they wrecked the news media’s credibility. And virtually everything after that has been an ongoing cover-up for their dishonorable malfeasance and the crimes of the party they fronted for. But the levers of power are in other hands now. There will be consequences for government officials who go to war against the people of this land, committing sedition and treason. Suggesting the murder of a president on social media is no light matter. By the time this blog is up, officers of the Secret Service may be visiting Mr. Comey at home. No need to batter down the front door with guns drawn, though. That would be so un-cool.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fisherman and the White Boat, Hudson River at Clark’s Mills, NY
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed from Battrenkill Books
Buy at Amazon
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One baseline truth in current American life is that our bodily well-being gets worse as the so-called health care industry gets ever-larger — it is now 17.6-percent of the economy (GDP). This is clearly the basis of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) campaign that attached itself to the Trump 2.0 program. You hear almost no arguments against MAHA itself, even from the Party of Hustles and Hoaxes, but plenty of calumny and objurgation against MAHA’s chief advocate, Robert Kennedy, Jr.
Mr. Trump’s initial nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, was pulled last week just before her scheduled Senate confirmation hearing. Her credentials looked a bit sketchy — med school on the tiny Caribbean island of St. Maarten (say, what. . . ?) and other irregularities — which she confabulated about anyway. Plus, she was a Covid vaccine cheerleader and an avid advocate of the censorship campaign to slam down debate over it.
Which leads directly to a glaring quandary in President Trump’s current order-of-business: he has avoided engagement with the whole Covid fiasco that unspooled in the last year of his first term. Now, it is the opinion of this blog that Mr. Trump was played on Covid by blob-marshaled “experts” Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, who led the White House Covid “team,” and then snookered the president into Operation Warp Speed, appealing to his vanity to play the superhero. You can also surmise that the Covid operation was hatched to run Mr. Trump out of office by enabling epic election fraud, making a chump of him.
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Other aspects of the Covid hairball are now finally getting unraveled, such as the lab origin issue and Dr. Fauci’s nefarious and vast operations to fund bioweapons. But the awful subject of the Covid mRNA vaccines, and all the monkey business around their development and deployment, remains taboo, even as Trump 2.0 sets records in smashing bureaucratic idols and radically shifting all sorts of policy — for instance, today’s monumental move to lower drug costs by 30 to 80 percent, using the Most Favored Nation trade policy device, which ties U.S. drug prices to the lowest prices paid by other high-income countries (e.g., Canada, Japan, or European nations) for the same medications.
But the Covid vaccine shots loom over the land like an ominous miasma that no one wants to talk about. The evidence has mounted steadily that the shots were ineffective and deeply harmful to many of the people who took them, especially those who got multiple boosters. The result, apparently, is a shocking rise in rare and aggressive cancers, immune system dysfunction, damage to the heart and blood vessels, neurological disorders, and much more. The CDC under “Joe Biden” worked desperately to hide all that, but it came out, anyway, because it was too big to hide.
81-percent of the US population submitted to the Covid vaccine shots. So, you can suppose that all that would be an extremely touchy matter. To admit all that scary information to the public arena would likely set off a politically dangerous fury. You can see why Mr. Trump would avoid going near it in the early going of his second term. But eventually he must come to terms with it.
Likewise, sooner or later, Bobby Kennedy, Jr., will have to take some kind of stand on the Covid vaccines, namely stopping the shots altogether. Whatever you think of the childhood vaccine schedule — a red-hot issue these days — it seems quite insane that the Covid mRNA vaccine is still included on it. It is still officially recommended by the CDC. Among the “much more” effects of the shots is damage to human fertility. You must ask: by giving these shots to kids as young as six-months, are we setting up a nation that won’t be able to have children? Pretty spooky.
Casey Means, the new nominee for US Surgeon GeneralSo, the new nominee for Surgeon General is one Casey Means of the brother / sister team, Calley and Casey Means, known primarily as food safety advocate sidekicks to Bobby Kennedy. The Meanses were already under some suspicion for rising too rapidly into prominence from out of nowhere since the summer of 2024 when Mr. Kennedy began to swing over to the Trump campaign. They were suspected and criticized as the shills for some sort of sinister alliance between Silicon Valley, Big Pharma, and the US intel blob. The Meanses have adroitly avoided taking a position on the Covid vaccines. Hmmmm. . . . That’s the chatter, anyway — whether there’s any truth to it, we will have to stand-by to discover.
You’d have to ask yourself whether Mr. Kennedy would ally himself with people of supposedly sketchy character. Is he being used or played? Or maybe, it’s just not so. The nomination of Casey Means sent out shock-waves through MAGA and MAHA. Her credentials seemed a little sketchy like Janette Nesheiwat’s before her. Ms. Means dropped out of her five-year medical residency in Oregon a few months before completing it, apparently due to disillusionment with conventional medicine. She does not have an active medical license, supposedly required to serve as Surgeon General.
Instead, she transitioned into what is loosely called functional medicine, which rejects the oppressive “standards of practice” dictated by insurance companies and reliance on pharma products to alleviate symptoms rather than treat the causes of disease. Ms. Means also became a medical entrepreneur, starting Levels, a glucose-monitoring tech company, and is an Instagram “wellness influencer” with 750,000 followers. Given the gross racketeering aspects of conventional medicine and its failure to deal with the shocking rise in chronic disease, you might argue that Ms. Means made the right career moves, weird as they might seem superficially.
It’s pretty much a miracle that RFK, Jr., managed to land safely as Secretary of HHS and that he was able to enlist “medical freedom” advocates Jay Bhattacharya to run the National Institutes of Health and Marty Makary to run the Federal Food and Drug Administration. This represents a stupendous turnaround in government policy. It’s also plausible that this new public health team has been preoccupied with personnel and administrative re-org in the first months of Trump 2.0. They’ve begun to nibble around the edges of the national health crisis, such as banning toxic food coloring.
They have yet to face the big, nasty legal questions such as revoking Pharma’s liability shield against lawsuits for its defective products, ending TV advertising of Pharma products — which is just an extortion racket for managing cable news content to protect Pharma — fully confronting the autism calamity and its connection to childhood vaccines, and, of course, pulling the Covid shots.
There is also chatter that RFK, Jr., is “managed” by hidden persons or forces. One not-so-hidden character in that psychodrama is Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA). Sen. Cassidy, a medical doctor, chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee that ran Mr. Kennedy over-the-coals in his confirmation hearing. Political pressure caused Sen. Cassidy to cave and vote “yes” for RFK, Jr., then. Louisiana has since changed its election rules so that Democrats can no longer vote in the GOP primary, and Cassidy is vulnerable. His base is restless. He voted to impeach Mr. Trump in January 2021 over the Capitol J-6 riot.
So, the chatter says that Mr. Kennedy made a deal with Sen. Cassidy to avoid taking certain actions — like, anything that might hurt Pharma and its profit-stream — or else Mr. Kennedy would be dragged back in front of the HELP Committee and raked over the coals again. If that were to happen, I suspect Mr. Kennedy would handle himself very capably in any public hearing. He has always been in command of the facts. As head of HHS, he has had access to a deep trove of information that he had no access to previously. He must know by now exactly what sort of mischief has been perpetrated in US public health over the decades and will not be shy about disclosing it publicly. You should also not be surprised if Mr. Kennedy begins issuing criminal referrals before much longer.
As for Casey Means. . . give her a chance to demonstrate that she is on the right side of MAHA and willing to fight in what has become a biomedical war on the American public.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Click to view the page!
Fisherman and the White Boat, Hudson River at Clark’s Mills, NY
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed from Battrenkill Books
Buy at Amazon
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The funny part is that this swarm of Jacobin botflies from Norm Eisen to Sen. Thom Tillis thought (and acted) as if Ed Martin was the only MAGA lawyer capable of uncovering the steaming pile of seditious poo festering, lo these many years, in the DC federal district (i.e., the Swamp). Like, get rid of Ed and our troubles are over. Really? Don’t you suppose that there are dozens of other capable, patriotic, seasoned lawyers, seething over the corruption that is Swamp crime, who can effectively occupy the office of US Attorney for the District of Columbia?
The second funniest part is apparently the Jacobins thought that Ed Martin would just skulk off into the gloaming like a whipped dog and be gone — when, in fact, Mr. Trump folded him at once into three jobs in the Department of Justice that don’t require confirmation by the Senate, and will allow him to attend to exactly the same set of grave problems afflicting this republic from a position of power. Mr. Martin will now serve as Director of the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group, Associate Deputy Attorney General, and Pardon Attorney reviewing the legitimacy of “Joe Biden’s” auto-pen signing of important documents — meaning, he’ll have the power to bring cases on his own and make criminal referrals to the US Attorney for DC.
You must also imagine that in his 100-plus days as Interim US Attorney for DC, Mr. Martin assembled quite a portfolio of evidence around the manifold blob wrong-doings of the past decade, but especially the treachery of the J-6 / 2021 blob operation at the US Capitol, and the ensuing cover-up of all that, including the intel community’s role in it, the perfidy and perjuries of Chris Wray, Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi and others, and the gong show of lies and villainy that was the House J-6 committee chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), (with remedial support from Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Jamie Raskin, and, backstage as always, lawfare ninjas Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, Marc Elias, Ben Wittes, and Andrew Weissmann).
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On the ostensible defeat of Ed Martin’s nomination, the president instantly turned around and installed Jeanine Pirro as Interim US Attorney for DC. Before retiring into a career as a TV talking head, Ms. Pirro was a Westchester County, New York, judge, and then elected District Attorney, so she knows how to work criminal cases. The interim appointment runs 120 days. In theory, Mr. Trump can appoint a new Interim US Attorney every 120 days, and keep rotating them until the cows come home — each successive one with the same support staff of assistant US attorneys underneath, the same cases ongoing, and the same trove of evidence catalogued.
All of which is to say, the blob officials and lawfare stormtroopers are mistaken to think that their ongoing circus of legalistic monkey business has somehow gained immunity from appraisal, investigation, and prosecution by de-railing Ed Martin. The cases themselves are bigger than any one particular US attorney and have a momentum of their own as the nation struggles to overcome the organized assault on the law itself that lawfare represents.
For instance, the case just opened against New York Attorney General Letitia James, who campaigned for office on the express promise to get Donald Trump on. . . something. . . anything! Which she did. . . bringing a bogus case against him in 2024 for allegedly mis-stating the value of his property collateral in a loan negotiation with Deutsche Bank. Of course, the bank did its own due diligence, which is standard practice, and the deal was concluded to the satisfaction of both parties, meaning no complaint of fraud was ever lodged by a plaintiff.
Instead, AG James cooked up a cockamamie narrative to launch the Deutsche Bank case. It was in every sense a malicious and false prosecution. Judge Arthur Engoron behaved maliciously and improperly throughout the trial, and leveled an absurd half-billion-dollar judgment on the guilty verdict. AG “Tish” James sat in the courtroom smirking at the proceedings for the benefit of the TV cameras. The spectacle was obscene and unjust. It may yet be overturned by a higher New York State court. The decision is expected imminently.
So, now, Letitia James herself is under formal investigation, prompted by a referral to the DOJ from the Federal Housing Authority. It alleges a series of mortgage frauds — oh, really? That? Among the allegations: she declared a home in Virginia as her principal residence, meaning she would have to vacate her post as New York AG. The other charges could send her to prison. The evidence is lodged in signed contracts and documents already made public. Doesn’t look good for Tish, despite the fact that unknown persons recently erected a statue of her in Times Square.
The Statue to Universal Strong Black Womanhood, Times Square, New YorkFor years now, the hustles and hoaxes have seemed never-ending. I know it is more than a little tiresome to point out that nobody has gone to jail, or even to court, over any of this since 2017. Looks like that lucky streak is coming to an end. Tish is just the beginning of a new trend. And the action will be moving from turbid backwater of New York State to the main Okefenokee-on-the-Potomac.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Kayak Parade, Battenkill River, Shushan, New York
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
Click to view the page!
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed from Battrenkill Books
Buy at Amazon
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Behold: The new home for the Milwaukee Public Museum — to be renamed the Nature & Culture Museum of Wisconsin — in downtown Milwaukee. Kind of looks like four laundry hampers, though the official PR says “the rock formations at Mill Bluff State Park in central Wisconsin served as design inspiration.” Credit the architectural firms of Ennead Architects (New York), with Kahler Slater (Milwaukee).
Like many state museums, this one is a hodgepodge of history, nature (what used to be called natural history), ethnography (i.e., Indians), DEI nonsense (hey, it’s Wisconsin), and a miscellany of artifacts and freakish stuff that was the stock-in-trade of old-time Midwestern raree shows: a stuffed ivory-billed woodpecker (extinct). . . the William J. Uihlein Postage Stamp Collection. . . a deck of “Apache playing cards”. . . the skeleton of a mammoth found by farmer John Hebior in Kenosha County. . . costumes from Deakin's Lilliputian Comic Opera (a theater company of midgets circa 1880s). . . The DeFlores Collection of Disney Memorabilia, 1965-1987. . . and a clay seal imprinted with a hieroglyph signifying the name Tutankhamen (a.k.a. King Tut). Heck, I’d pay ten bucks to see all that!
Below is an artist’s rendering of the lovely public plaza attached to the laundry hampers — as usual in American landscape design, an ambiguous zone with no formal elements, arbitrary tree plantings, and apparently no seating (homeless magnets). It’s how we roll!
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It’s vain and futile to suppose that the disordered minds of Western Civ’s entrenched Wokester Jacobins might ever be subject to polite persuasion about anything they believe. They believe only in the power of pushing their fellow citizens around, and so, alas, the only persuasion that might conceivably work to stop their infantile assaults on liberty, truth, and decency is to push back harder until they suffer and break.
This is something that most parents with young children instinctively understand. You don’t negotiate with two-year-olds. You tell them how things are and what sort of behavior is required of them, as plainly and simply as possible. Mr. Trump, having been the father of many two-year-olds over time, appears to get this. It has been apparent for years that Mr. Trump’s symbolic role as a father figure is the most deeply resented feature of his role in US politics.
It also appears that many men in this country likewise get this, perhaps because nature conditions them early on to understand that some day they might have to play the role of father, meaning they will have to push back hard against emotional disorder, hysteria, illogic, and untruth, and violence.
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Hence, you might see the peril of living in a land with so many fatherless households. This lamentable state of things defines the Democratic Party, where raging, inchoate, resentment-driven Jacobinism dwells, a party now with no leader, a household with no father, no one to regulate its frenzied, power-seeking behavior. This also tells you how the Democratic Party has become the party run by women, and by particular types of women — women who have traded the management of children and households for bureaucratic careerism, women too lacking in feminine appeal to attract mates, women attempting to become the men missing in their lives — and men wishing to become women, or pretending to be women.
And so you see how these disorders play out in the ongoing melodrama of men in women’s sports, a proposition so obviously insane that no healthy society has ever abided it for a moment until the American Jacobins ran with it as a cardinal political irritant to vex their opponents (and really for no other reason). The state of Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, clashed openly with Mr. Trump over his executive order to desist from allowing biological men in women’s sports. The matter is currently making its way through the courts.
This week, a “trans” athlete named Soren Stark-Chessa, beat the field of females in a Maine track-meet by a country mile in the 800-meter and 1600-meter runs. No one, except the political leadership of Maine, was fooled about the fairness of this, of course. Fairness is not the point. Intransigent defiance of reality was the point. It is always the point for Jacobin politicians.
Soren Stark-Chessa in full strideWhat is most obviously insane in matters like this, is that the female governor is so eager to punish and humiliate her younger fellow females in order to merely press a political point — that she is the boss of Maine, and nobody can tell her what to do, even if she deranges the cultures of schooling and sports. This illustrates, by the way, a principal difference in the way men’s and women’s brains work. Men typically understand boundaries, where things begin and end. It is a necessary cognitive device for regulating behavior in the household and for acting in the face of danger when required.
Sports is just a microcosm of our politics. The whole gestalt of Woke-Jacobin politics is driven by the wish to dissolve boundaries. That is, it is driven by female minds, and what the Woke-Jacobins might call female-adjacent minds. That is why the open border fiasco was another point-of-principle for the Democratic Party — and why “Joe Biden” the phantom president (actually the shadowy figures behind him) pretended that nothing could be done about it.
Mr. Trump demonstrated that was a lie in a New York minute. The damage from four years of a wide-open border is immense, much worse than men running in girls’ races. The motive for it is also obvious: to jam as many illegal aliens as possible into the country so as 1) to disorder the next census count in swing states to keep congressional districts safe, and 2) to install a base of new “voters” — qualified to vote or not — who will be eternally grateful to the Democratic Party for letting them flood into the country and gifting them with housing, social services, transportation, free meals, and walking-around money.
And now, a Woke-Jacobin judiciary, assisted by an infrastructure of Lawfare ninjas, led by the outlaw Norm Eisen, and financed by George Soros, and what remains of Soros-adjacent NGOs, is using the courts to keep all those illegally-admitted aliens in place here at all costs. So, you see, they are attempting to dissolve a boundary crucial to the Republic’s survival: who is a citizen and who is not a citizen, and what are the privileges entailed? The objective is to keep this dispute alive in the courts long enough to affect the 2026 midterm elections in the hopes of winning Congress back.
You can also see how this will oblige Mr. Trump to marshal the most aggressive legal force possible to crush this seditious legal insurrection. He has executive powers and perquisites in reserve that he has not used yet, or even revealed. He will defeat these monsters in the end just as he is methodically disassembling their scaffold of psychopathic ideology and their pipelines of funding. It will really be something to see.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Kayak Parade, Battenkill River, Shushan, New York
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
Click to view the page!
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed from Battrenkill Books
Buy at Amazon
BUY FROM BATTENKILL BOOKS
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Meryl Nass is an internal medicine physician and was the first person in the world to prove that an epidemic (anthrax in Rhodesia) was due to biological warfare, in 1992. She has given 6 Congressional testimonies regarding anthrax, biological warfare, Gulf War syndrome and vaccine safety, and has consulted for the Cuban Ministry of Health, the World Bank and the Director of National Intelligence. She blogs at Meryls Chaos Newsletter on Substack
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com/JHK**
When a claque of deep state shills such as Norm Eisen, Chuck Schumer, Bill Kristol, David Brooks, and Larry Summers holler about Mr. Trump’s attempt to reform a depraved political culture as “an assault on norms,” are you not prompted to wonder what, exactly, those norms might be?
Looks like they are describing a colossal matrix of racketeering operations in concert with an epic program of crypto-Marxist mind-fuckery, mountains of money purloined under color-of-law, swindles galore of practically every public enterprise, the capital city of a so-called republic fogged in gaslight to conceal a Satyricon of pedophilia, sodomy, and sado-masochism in every closet, cabinet, and pigeon-hole of the political class.
So, along comes Mr. Trump for the second round, with a supernaturally able clean-up crew this time, and the monsters feeding off that depraved normality commence to shriek in mortal panic as the scaffold of their crimes gets methodically disassembled and secrets are revealed.
Many of you have been pouting over the lack of criminal prosecutions these first hundred days. Why is AG Ms. Bondi preening on Fox News when she should be banging-out subpoenas and arrest warrants, you ask? And what broom-closet is Dan Bongino hiding in over at the Hoover Building? How is Hillary Clinton still at-large in the land? Does Alejandro Mayorkas still make his Saturday excursions to the boutiques along M Street? Looks like the months of May and June are setting up to be the season of shocks and consequence.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
Item: James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas (he was cancelled from it) and now running O’Keefe Media Group, put out a mighty strange eighteen-second video this week. Looks like it was filmed in a basement somewhere. “I’m going dark,” he says ruefully. “I’m not suicidal. Pray for me. This one scares me, guys.”
Click to play
A week earlier, O’Keefe announced that he had bombshell recordings of public figures breaking the law, involving billions of dollars, which he expected would lead to indictments. What spooked him in the week since then? I guess we’ll have to stand by to find out, or see if JO’K was bluffing.
Meanwhile Virginia Giuffre, a former Jeffrey Epstein teen sex slave, likewise said just over a week ago: “I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape, or form am I suicidal. If something happens to me, for the sake of my family do not let this go away and help me to protect them. Too many evil people want to see me quieted.” This was a month after she was injured in a traffic accident with a school bus in Western Australia. On April 24, she reportedly committed suicide at home, after release from the hospital. What do you suppose changed her mind?
An ominous silence surrounds the promised release of the Epstein case material, whatever it consists of: depositions, flight logs, photographs, video recordings of prominent people in compromising situations. Remember, not long after inauguration day, the FBI’s New York field office was found to be sitting on a huge trove of previously hidden Epstein case evidence. The DOJ swiftly “retired” the chief agent of the office, James Dennehy, who additionally had failed to cooperate with requests to disclose the names of agents involved in the Jan-6 investigations. Supposedly, since the discovery of the Epstein trove, a thousand agents were assigned to “process” it, redact the names of the innocent victims, so they say. Are the close to finishing?
Speaking of the J-6, 2021 matter, pressure is building for the Republican majority in Congress to hold hearings on exactly what went on that fateful day. FBI Director Patel has yet to disclose how many government agents (not just FBI), and how many “confidential human sources” (i.e., provocateurs), were in the crowd around and inside the US Capitol. It’s getting to be past time to ask Mr. Patel for a straight answer on that in an official proceeding, and continue from there to related business, such as Nancy Pelosi’s failure to reinforce the Capitol Police with National Guard troops that day, and the strange doings around the DNC pipe bomb ploy a few blocks away. Personally, I doubt that Mr. Patel is inclined to lie or dissemble about all that. But the natives are getting a little restless.
Mr. Kennedy at HHS is already pretty frisky in his role supervising the enormous cluster of agencies that have done so much to wreck the nation’s health in recent years. Goodbye fluoride in the drinking water. Hello to placebo testing for new drugs and vaccines. Welcome to a vigorous six-month campaign to determine a likely cause of the autism epidemic. RFK is even asking what exactly is in those aviation contrails that folks have been observing and complaining about for so many years. And then there was the bomb he dropped during this week’s cabinet meeting: that under Joe Biden, HHS acted as a major vector for the trafficking of children. Say, what??? Lotta people wondered, did Bobby really say that? And does he know exactly who in HHS is responsible. . . like, names attached? I guess we’ll find out.
On a brighter note, not only did Klaus Schwab, the comic book villain who leads the World Economic Forum (WEF), resign last week, but he stands formally accused of misusing its funds. An inquiry ensues. Mr. Schwab’s daughter, Nicole, supposedly revealed to possibly sketchy alt-journalist Medeea Greere, that the WEF sought to reduce the global population by billions, and not in a nice way. Standing by on that one. . . . But, at least old Klaus is gone. His temporary replacement is Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, former CEO of the Nestle conglomerate, with a record of nefarious activity in the marketing of infant bottle formula in the third world and other turpitudes. Prediction: the WEF is toast. It was always a bit too bizarre to be taken seriously, but its demise signals real trouble for the foundering Globalist endeavor.
So, the month of May is shaping up to be merry as all get-out, and then June will be bustin’ out all over. That thing you felt. . .? That was the ground shaking and the earth moving. Strap in.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Kayak Parade, Battenkill River, Shushan, New York
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
Click to view the page!
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed copies from Battenkill Books.
BUY FROM BATTENKILL BOOKS
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Woke liberalism is exactly what Christopher Lasch predicted in The Revolt of the Elites, published in 1995, the year after his early death at 61. Lasch saw how the juvenile idealism of Boomer hippiedom would slide into the narcissistic, sado-masochistic degeneracy of open borders, drag queen story hours, Covid-19 despotism, DEI racism, showbiz Satanism, censorship, forever wars, and now, the legal insurrection of lawfare.
In doing so, Lasch also predicted the “mass formation psychosis” described by Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet, spawned by a crisis of meaning and purpose in the thinking classes of Western Civ. And now you know exactly how come a place like Boston, with its concentration of “elites” in universities, computer tech, and medical research displays a batshit-crazy dedication to ideas bent on destroying our political culture: the American republic.
The word republic derives from the Latin, res publica: the public thing, the idea of a state dedicated to the common good. By “state” you can infer both a group of people in a certain place, but also the set of conditions they dwell in. You can’t have a common good without a common culture, which means a general agreement among citizens on values in that certain place — which is our country, the USA.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
You can’t overstate the importance of shared ideas and values in that enterprise of being a nation, we-the-people in our particular place. The juvenile idealism of Boomer hippiedom wrecked the crucial idea of a common culture, and I will tell you exactly how that happened. Two crusades: first, the civil rights campaign, and second, stopping the War in Vietnam, defined the era.
The first of these climaxed in twin landmark legislative acts designed to abolish Jim Crow racism: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination in public places, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited unfair obstacles to voting. The idealism in that moment of history was extreme. The dominant old-school Liberal ethos displayed a sense of triumph. Its cardinal belief in human progress was validated in the new law-of-the-land. We were supposedly entering a utopia of racial harmony.
It proved to be a huge disappointment, a failure. In some fundamental ways, black and white America could not agree on certain values, especially language and behavior. These matters were so hypersensitive that discussing them became taboo, and when someone dared to — such as the rogue journalist Tom Wolfe in his book Radical Chic, which made fun of the cultural elites trying to socialize with the Black Panthers — he was buried in the most extreme censorious opprobrium by the elite good-thinkers of politics, academia, and the cultural media. They couldn’t believe old Tom dove clear through the Overton Window the way he did, head first.
In fact, a big segment of black America after 1965 became much more overtly separatist and oppositional, while white America became more frantically confounded and depressed by it. The result was the elite’s solution to that quandary: multiculturalism! Which basically meant: we don’t need a common culture in the USA. (We don’t need an agreement about values, language, and behavior.) Each group in America can have its own menu of these things. This accomplished two ends: it allowed criminal behavior to explode; and it allowed the elites to excuse themselves from any serious further attempts to manage the res publica. The people of the ghettos were free to do their thing; while the elites turned their full attention to Boomer careerism and Gordon Gecko style financial moneygrubbing.
As for the crusade to end the War in Vietnam, that was also an epic failure, never properly acknowledged. In fact, no one in the USA, no party or faction, ended the war. We simply lost the War in Vietnam. We just never said so, and still don’t. It ended in ignominy, with the last remnants of US officialdom in Saigon having to be rescued by helicopter from the roof of the American Embassy. The so-called “gooks” in their black pajamas beat the giant American “grunt” army with its bottomless supply of attack helicopters and napalm. Chalk up another “L” for old school Liberalism.
You can’t overstate how demoralizing this was. And so. . . the serial reenactments of our forever wars of recent decades, mostly botches and failures despite our vaunted “defense” establishment, our glorious war technology, and our fake commitment to “spreading democracy.” We simply need to prove that we can’t possibly lose wars against more primitive people — though we have lost repeatedly, the fiasco in leaving Kabul in 2021 being even more ignominious than the flight from Saigon. This can only be understood, finally, as a species of national neurosis.
As was absolutely everything about the George Floyd riots of 2020, Wokery-in-action, with the torching of cities, the looting flash-mobs, and the tearing down of statues honoring American heroes. Try understanding that as the latest chapter in civil rights egalitarianism gone awry, starting with the sanctification of the druggie thug George Floyd, who so perfectly personified the failures of multiculturalism. (What were his values? Ever ask yourself that?)
Now, try (if you can) to understand what the election of Mr. Trump represents: the drive to restore a viable American common culture, to re-set our agreement on values, to repair the broken res publica. And note how wildly that is resented and opposed by this corrupt and degenerate residue of idealism gone to hell (literally), this ragtag and bobtail of Democratic Party elites, consumed in their mass formation psychosis, addicted to lying and violence, and furious that they are no longer in command.
So, now you know how all this works. An American common culture matters, and if we can’t put it together, we’re sunk. This is our chance to put it together.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Kayak Parade, Battenkill River, Shushan, New York
JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .
Click to view the page!
"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." —James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
Autographed copies from Battenkill Books.
BUY FROM BATTENKILL BOOKS
BUY FROM AMAZON
Jeffrey Tucker is founder and president of Brownstone Institute and Senior Economics Columnist at Epoch Times. He is the author of 15 books, most recently Life After Lockdowns. Senator Rand Paul says, “In Life after Lockdown, “ Jeffrey Tucker paints a picture of the living hell that was the government lockdown and outlines a roadmap for never again allowing such a police state to occur.” Please take the time to visit the Brownstone Institute’s excellent website and its stable of fine writers
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com/JHK**
The exorcism of the USA just keeps revving up. You can tell by the number of revolutions-per-minute Elizabeth Warren’s head spins while she spews pea soup at the cameras. Who knew what a demon-infested slough USA Management Central was? And yes, I would like some insight as to how humble civil servants like Liz Warren accrue a $12-million fortune . . . and $30-million for Samantha Power (ex-USAID-chief) . . . and more than $150-million for Nancy Pelosi. Could it be as simple as just good stock-picking? (Is that how they spend their time?)
You have reason to suspect that what goes on in Washington DC is the greatest racketeering operation ever run on God’s green earth. “A threat to our democracy!” the Party of Chaos spouted incessantly during the election campaign in re: Donald J. Trump. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The Washington Post still declares on its name-plate. Yet, who exactly kept the lights off the past four years? Who scrambled the brains of the nation’s management and thinking classes? Who made mental illness aspirational?
You begin to detect that by “our democracy” they actually meant “our everlasting grift.” And it didn’t die in darkness — it thrived, grew, and spread in the moist bureaucratic darkness like the Devil’s own slime mold. And now it is being revealed, to the astonished disgust of slightly more than half the nation that was not on-the-take. Turn over a log in the woods and you have the metaphor for “our democracy.” Countless hundred-footed things slither around under it, their feeding interrupted . . .
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
The political left’s success springs from its dedication to organizing its member ranks and their activities. Organizing has been the key to their grand plan for arriving at Utopia. Except, sometime near the dawn of this century, with the torch of communism burning out, they realized that Utopia was a destination unlikely to be reached. Instead, they could turn their organizing talent to directing the money flow from their ever-expanding roster of world-saving NGOs into the bank accounts of their own member ranks.
USAID was the poster-child for that, a flowering of mutually-referential dollar feedback loops providing six-figure “jobs” and non-stop cocktail partying for the elite surplus churned out of the left’s training academies, Harvard, Brown, Yale — with a whopping vig paid to congress-persons and senators who disbursed massive taxpayer funding for each newly-sprouted org dedicated to the uplift of the “marginalized and oppressed.”
Of course, that was merely the feeding frenzy of the small fish on the surface. Deeper down, the money-flow was going to much more demonic enterprises: the color revolution gang in the CIA, State Department, and God knows what other surreptitious agencies. . . Antifa and BLM (the Democratic Party’s shock troops) . . . the news industry (now completely corrupted into a global mind-fucking operation) . . . Hollywood’s zeitgeist-shaping dream factory of girl-boss fantasies. . . book publishing (with its zillion-dollar “advances-on-royalties” to political celebrity authors, who could never possibly earn-out that windfall on book sales) . . . the school systems at every level . . . the medical-pharma matrix . . . the military procurement racket too vast to even quantify (and the probable cause of the Pentagon’s consistent audit failures) . . . and, we’ve learned recently, the care-and-feeding of twenty-million illegal aliens ushered into our country by the “Joe Biden” / Al Mayorkas travel agency.
This colossal worm-farm lies exposed now with its slithering denizens drying up under the DOGE sunlamp. The response by the political left’s clown troop fronting for all these scams is the most pathetic performative cluster-B psychodrama ever enacted on the streets of our nation’s capital: Schumer, Maxine Waters, Ayanna Pressley, Liz Warren, and every other mewling loser in Wokedom singing that old union ditty Which Side Are You On for the cameras — as if they were reenacting the 1907 Monongah Mining Disaster. They are crying— as the old saying goes — all the way to the bank.
The histrionics of the past three weeks are only the beginning, you understand, since USAID was just a mole-hill beside the mountain range of past turpitudes yet coming into view as Mr. Trump’s generals deploy in the battle-space. Yesterday — mirabile dictu! — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was sworn-in for Health and Human Services, to oversee the empire of fraud that public health became during the rogue reign of Tony Fauci and his cohorts. The flip-side of MAHA is Make Medicine Truthful Again. Everything about health-care in America slouches in disrepute and ignominy, from the doctors hostage to their private equity taskmasters to the faked drug trials at FDA to the deliberate data mismanagement at CDC to the grant-and-kickback game at NIH and NIAID, to the hellscape of medical insurance fraud, to the revolving door between pharma and government —RFK faces one of the most onerous tasks of filth-clearing since Hercules shoveled out the Augean stables. And then there’s the giant hairball of poisoned American food.
The solitary figure who remains absent on the playing field is Kash Patel, and you can tell by the delaying tactics employed by the Party of Chaos that they (and their blob allies) dread the coming day that he gets confirmed to lead the FBI. That’s when the combined forces of avalanche, tsunami, earthquake, and fire send forth an exterminating spewage of long-suppressed information about the 1960s assassinations, RussiaGate, the Epstein matter, the Ukraine money-laundry, and any number of other unresolved treasonous scandals. It’s going to happen. And, if by some quirk of fate, Mr. Patel fails to get the votes, somebody else eventually will, somebody equally capable of fumigating that rat-hole. When that day comes, I’m sure Chuck Schumer will sing Kumbaya from the Capitol steps, expecting to make it all magically go away.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
The Beach at Moreau Lake, Saratoga County, New York
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
“It is axiomatic that those who are beneficiaries of waste, fraud and unnecessary government spending will be the most threatened by the cuts that DOGE is making in these programs. These beneficiaries of waste and fraud are also extremely worried about the reputational, legal and potential criminal risk they will suffer by being exposed by DOGE” — Bill Ackman
I’m so glad that The New York Times explained what Kendrick Lamar was up to in his Super Bowl half-time act because all I could make out was a grown man dressed-up like an eight-year-old hollering nursery rhymes in front of a flash-mob. Apparently, KL is engaged in a feud with another rapper named Drake, whom KL styles as a child molester. So, you see, the whole thing was just a bit of wholesome family entertainment. Thank The NY Times, for putting a grad-school spin on it:
Speaking of metanarratives — and apart from the private vendettas on Planet Rap — a nice one is developing at center-stage of US political life: the Party of Chaos using federal judges to oppose the dismantling of their gigantic grift scaffold. In other words, more lawfare to obstruct any earnest effort to effectively reform the management of our country. So, last week, you get Judge Carl J. Nichols in the DC District arguing that the DOGE shutdown of USAID was unauthorized and potentially illegal, lacking congressional approval.
Then, late Friday (when most citizens are checking out of the week’s struggles) Judge Paul Engelmayer out of the Southern District of New York blocked DOGE and other executive branch officials from accessing US Treasury records of expenditures. The injunction, comically, prevents Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent from seeing what his agency doles out money for — that is, from managing anything his department does. The suit that prompted the ruling was brought by nineteen states’ Attorneys General led by NY AG Letitia James. So, you see how this works.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
You must also imagine that the White House was prepared for these lawfare shenanigans, though they haven’t shown their hand in response so far. This is a constitutional quarrel, of course, since it concerns who has authority between the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary over agency spending and, in particular, who gets to audit it. The actual objective by the plaintiff in these cases (the Party of Chaos) is simply to delay any corrective action.
The DOJ under Pam Bondi can designate the US Solicitor General to petition the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) for certiorari — to expedite the resolution of this constitutional issue as to whether Mr. Trump, as chief executive, and his bona fide appointees, can carry out executive functions. The arguments against that appear to be weak.
It is the President’s duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed, meaning that the departments under him do their jobs correctly, which would give him inherent authority to audit and restructure agencies like USAID. Both judges Nichols and Engelmayer are arrogating executive and legislative functions on policy-making to themselves, triggering a separation-of-powers dispute that the SCOTUS must adjudicate promptly.
What matters most in these cases is that SCOTUS has an opportunity to put up new guardrails against the hijacking of the federal courts for the purpose of lawfare — that is, for political dirty-fighting under color-of-law. The law is slow-moving, arcane, and incomprehensible to most non-lawyer citizens and that is why the Party of Chaos has misused it so liberally.
In any event, DOGE is moving ahead on many other fronts and the next battleground looks like the US Department of Education, an agency which, since its creation in 1979, has only presided over an epic degeneration in the academic performance of young people. The agency has grown since 1979 to 4,400 employees overseeing a $238-billion budget. Otherwise, what it’s mainly accomplished is to enrich the various teachers’ unions and to raise the cost of college tuitions astronomically while degenerating the purpose and value of higher ed. The fifty states were arguably doing a better job on their own without any DOE on the scene.
Meanwhile, it’s satisfying to see the security clearances revoked from Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Andrew Weissmann, Mark Zaid, and Norm Eisen. The reason: among other crimes, they all dabbled in election interference. And “Joe Biden” lost his, too, on account of being too feeble-minded to be trusted with classified information. Who knows what other legal complications lie in waiting up ahead for that whole gang? Lawfare giveth and lawfare taketh away. Or FAFO.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
The Beach at Moreau Lake, Saratoga County, New York
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
If you wondered since 2016 how come the blob and the Democratic Party were aligned so exquisitely in their operations to destroy populism (personified by Mr. Trump) and to permanently entrench single party power in America for all time to come, it’s because an endless font of taxpayer money was streamed into countless non-governmental orgs creating a shadow civil service of Democratic Party activists that melded seamlessly with the big policy-making agencies.
The money was laundered through manifold layers of these orgs and their sub-orgs to pay for an ongoing “color revolution” in the USA — lawfare, election fraud, propaganda, censorship, career cancellation, medical fuckery, open borders, and other totalitarian ploys — while enriching political players at all those manifold layers from multi-millionaire congressmen and senators to thousands of NGO officials making six-figure salaries to street hustlers like Patrisse Cullors of Black Lives Matter and “anti-racism” racist Ibram X. Kendi and his $50-million Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University (recently axed) — and, of course, ultimately the former Potemkin president “Joe Biden” and his family.
It was all this money that drove eight years of sponsored insanity. Mainly, it kept the hands of the Democratic Party firmly on the levers of power so that nothing could be done about the insults and injuries they were inflicting on our country. So, is it a mystery now that nobody was prosecuted for burning the cities in 2020, or for magically creating millions of extra “Joe Biden” votes out of nowhere that year, or setting up the kickback machine from Ukraine to Congress, or forcing millions to get a janky vaccine?
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
Pam Bondi is going to be a busy girl. The DOGE has uncovered a government racketeering operation of which the USAID scandal is but one cog in a colossal engine of grift. What the public, including you readers, may not appreciate is how much planning went on over the past year to mount the DOGE effort, and how comprehensively the work of its many hundreds of computer techies (not just six whiz-kids) has laid bare the money-trails out of previously impenetrable government computers. Their algorithms have pierced the firewalls, revealing decades of fraud and deceit.
Mr. Trump’s cabinet officers have started the job of dismantling the machine by getting rid of the employees who set it up and worked for it. By Thursday, Secretary of State Rubio fired all but 300 of the 10,000 people working for USAID. CIA Director Ratcliffe offered the agency’s entire workforce a “deferred resignation” option that will allow them to bail out and still collect their salaries until September. Look for straight-up firings to ensue. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the acting FBI director to terminate eight senior FBI officials and asked for a review of up to 5,000 involved in J-6 investigations (including, presumably, agents who engaged in abusive SWAT-team deployments).
Many lawsuits have been mounted by blob-adjacent attorneys to make all this stop. But one big problem for them is that their gigantic legal fees — hundreds of dollars an hour on the meter multiplied by x-hundreds of lawyers— were previously paid by exactly those NGOs that are getting shut down now. So, perhaps you see exactly how those levers of power worked. The money will have to come from somewhere else, and I doubt that Silicon Valley billionaire blob-supporter Reid Hoffman wants to piss away the rest of his fortune on this.
Some actual persons will have to be held accountable for all the mischief carried out in rogue agencies over many years. It has to start somewhere. I nominate Samantha Power as a first test case. She was in charge of USAID for nearly four years — until Jan 20, 2025 — including the duration of the Ukraine War. She was also personally very busy hands-on in arranging attempted color revolutions in Hungary (failed, against Viktor Orban), Georgia (failed), Mexico (failed), and Brazil (succeeded against Jair Bolsonaro). Ms. Power provided money from USAID-connected NGOs to foster instability in many more countries, including our country. It must have come as quite a shock to her that Kamala Harris did not win the 2024 election. USAID will not be paying for Ms.Power’s legal representation.
Much more will come to shock the blobsters and their legions — though just now, as the reformation of government begins, it’s comforting just to think of all those dedicated seditionists, Wokesters, Marxians, and Jacobins unable to make their rent payments or buy groceries all of a sudden. The paychecks have stopped coming for thousands who wanted to turn American life upside-down and inside-out. This happened most colorfully at the fake-news outfit called Politico this week. Turned out they were a subsidiary of the blob. Who knew? (Everyone who was paying attention to the jive they published.) Management had to send out a memo that reporters and editors would not get paid this week, or maybe ever again. Boo hoo.
It was also revealed this week that the Reuters News Agency, the Associated Press, The New York Times, the Wash-Po, and around 700-other news outfits altogether had been receiving financial support from USAID, the CIA, and other government entities. Now do you understand why the Democratic Party voters are so obdurately deluded and deranged?
Besides the perfunctory lawsuits filed against DOGE and the agency chiefs, the response to all this corrective action has been surprisingly feeble. You might conclude that they couldn’t marshal the rioters this time because the money for rioters has been cut off. Instead, you saw a motley pack of political creeps — Jamie Raskin, Ayanna Pressley, Liz Warren, Chuck Schumer, Maxine Waters, Jasmine Crockett , Ilhan Omar —crying crocodile tears outside USAID HQ at 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. They looked like roaches after the exterminator’s visit.
The reform of our gone-rogue government is barely underway, notwithstanding these mighty initial actions. Yet to come, you have the whole filthy underbelly of the public health agencies who brought you Covid-19. The terrified Democrats are holding back confirmation of Patel, Gabbard, and RFKJr, but even if they fail to get confirmed, the new administration will put capable figures in those jobs at FBI, ODNI, and HHS. The party of Chaos must know that they cannot stop the dismantling of their evil machine.
Beyond these grifts lies the Okefenokee of treason, bribery, conspiracy, and sedition deriving from RussiaGate, the impeachment of 2019, and all the shenanigans emanating out of Ukraine since the Maidan Revolution in 2014. Turns out, it was all of a piece. The same cast of characters were involved in all these nefarious events. I believe we’ll see those “Joe Biden” preemptive pardons tested in the SCOTUS. You haven’t begun to hear about the cases that AG Bondi will have to consider in that giant hairball. It’s only her second day on the job. Have mercy.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
The Beach at Moreau Lake, Saratoga County, New York
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
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Peter Golden is an award-winning journalist, novelist, and historian. His novels include Comeback Love, Wherever There Is Light, Nothing Is Forgotten , and Their Shadows Deep, just published, in which John F. Kennedy is a major character. During the course of his career, Mr. Golden has interviewed Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush; Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, George Shultz, and Lawrence Eagleburger; Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Shamir; and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. He lives with his wife near Albany, New York.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com/JHK**
Concerning President Donald Trump’s executive order requiring new federal buildings to show a preference for "classical architectural style" which includes Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco, referencing the architectural traditions of Greek and Roman antiquity. . .
Behold (above) the federal building and courthouse in Tuscaloosa, Alabama by HBRA Architects. And, no, it was not conceived when Andy Jackson was fighting the Battle of Emuckfaw against the “Red Stick” Creek Indians in 1814. Rather, it went up in 2012, a rare example of neoclassical design executed in our time.
For the most part, though, the decades-long trend in American civic architecture has been for sui generis one-off, tortured-genius, para-metaphysical, high-tech, in-your-grille stunt buildings commissioned to shock and confound the middle class (Épater le bourgeois, as the French dubbed this maneuver).
These generally horrified the public (as intended), as well as perplexing and confusing them, making their interaction with the building a form of punishment. Often it was difficult to even discern where the entrance of the building was, or where to go once you managed to get inside. For instance, the recent San Francisco Federal building by Tom Mayne of Morphosis Architects, below, designed in the style of a dashboard from an alien spacecraft:
At its worst, you got the conjunction of malign form and evil function, as concretized in Washington’s J. Edgar Hoover Building, home office (mother ship) of the FBI, below:
Kind of looks like a giant stroopwafel jammed under a coffee table. You can be sure that little good came out of it, especially the past four years, and probably the whole six decades of its miserable existence. FBI-Director nominee Kash Patel went so far as to propose it be turned into “a Museum of the Deep State.” Well, yes. Perfect!
Below, see another new-ish civic structure dressed in neo-Georgian formality: the Alpharetta, GA, City Hall by David M. Schwartz architects — granted, not a federal building, but proof that trad proportions and details can be done well, where there’s a will to get’er done. Nice, huh. Dignified. Serene, confident, legible. . . reflecting what is to be desired in a polity, sanity and grace.
Why trad design, you might ask? Initially, with our nation’s founding, there was a wish to express our national ethos in architecture that denoted the democratic spirit of Ancient Greece melded with the order of the early Roman republic. And so, you got this bold neoclassicism for over a hundred years, climaxing in the US Supreme Court’s headquarters, completed in 1935, below:
There are hidden charms in this neoclassicism. You may notice that the building is organized with a base, a middle and a top (or capitol). Indeed, not just the whole, but its parts ( e.g., the columns) express this tripartite organization. This expresses the organization of the human body, with feet and legs, a trunk, and a head. Thus, it reflects our essential humanness back at us and confers dignity in the works of man and mankind itself.
Sure there are other ways of making buildings, but are they expressing what we want to say about ourselves? Might we want to suggest that there is a sacred order to the human project, and be reminded of it forcefully in our monumental buildings?
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
Eyesore of the Month Since 1998For the first time ever, you can now binge-read and comment on the complete “Eyesore of the Month” archive going all the way back to this feature’s debut in March 1998. That’s more than 300 architectural blunders, abortions and abominations to make you chortle, snort and guffaw. Click here to read them all.
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“In private meetings and at public events, elected Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided. They disagree over how often and how stridently to oppose Mr. Trump. They have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future.” — The New York Times
Maybe that’s because the four years of “Joe Biden” was little more than a vaudeville show in front of the curtain, distracting you from what was going on backstage — the world’s biggest political racketeering operation as conducted by a vast bureaucracy gone wild and mad: the blob in florid, mature efflorescence, doing its blob-thing to the max, looting and punking the nation. Now it is all being uncovered, disclosed, unmasked.
Think of the Democratic Party as the entertainment arm of the overall operation. Its aim has basically been to induce you to doubt your sanity. You were asked to swallow one fabulous absurdity after another — lockdowns, vaccines that don’t prevent illness, mostly-peaceful arson, US soldiers in puppy masks, pronoun police, shoplifting-is-reparations, the wide-open border — an epic acting-out of manifold mental illness in living color. The climax was drag-queens in the primary schools, obese men in fright-wigs presenting nightmare varieties of Mom-as-monster, often with some exposure of their male junk as part of the act. Suburban mothers watched approvingly, insisting on video that this was all wholesome, edifying fun for the kiddies (while some of the more insane moms went even further at home, coaxing their little kids toward medical “transitioning”).
Can you grok how insane all this was? So, if you were a Democratic Party strategist, perhaps the first thing you’d consider these days is to stop being insane. Second, at this particular juncture, you might consider apologizing to the people of this land for your heinous antics of recent years — like an alcoholic parent who has acted very badly against the family — and promise to make the effort to get your shit together. This is obviously the part that Democrats are struggling with now, and it explains why they pretend to be at such a loss to make course corrections. Of course, any further failure to come to grips with all this will lead to the death of the Democratic Party. Never in history has a political faction gone out in such pathetic ignominy.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
Yet it is not just this feckless party that needs to expiate its shame, it is also America’s thinking class as a whole, its “experts,” its managers, its educated elites, its doctors and lawyers, its curators of “news” and opinion, and most of the denizens of showbiz. For the moment, they are all cowering and shuddering before the juggernaut of Mr. Trump, who they so grievously underestimated.
They know — they can see in plain view — that he is coming for them, and many might find themselves called to account in a rebalanced justice system. Many of them committed crimes against the nation and its citizens. The raft of lawyers fired out of the DC federal district this weekend for cause —namely, for conducting overtly malicious prosecutions under dubious predication — are an early sign. Ditto, the warning issued to Chuck Schumer concerning his 2020 incitement of violence against Supreme Court justices. Imagine, too, how many officials in the public health agencies need to answer for their roles in Covid-19 — the creation of it in their labs, the worthless vaccines, and the deadly treatment protocols they insisted on.
Now, the fate of the blob itself is a thing somewhat apart from the fate of this evil vaudevillian Democratic Party fronting for it. A purge of the blob is pretty clearly underway. USAID was shot dead like a rabid dog over the weekend. The agency had gone completely rogue, serving (Mike Benz explains) as the pivot between every nefarious operation coming out of the CIA, the DOD, and the State Department’s many black box units. The billions of dollars laundered out of USAID went to support hundreds of NGOs, many of them dedicated to harming the life of this nation, such as the orgs that handed out money to illegal aliens and advice on evading detection in-country. And these many NGOs represented an employment racket for the “elite overproduction” of grads coming out of universities with useless degrees and Maoist political training. There was, of course, a giant revolving door between these NGOs and the activist ranks of the Democratic Party.
The country needs a functioning, sane, opposition party to whoever is in power, since power inevitably corrupts. Like any other powerful office-holder, Mr. Trump needs a governor and guard-rails on his actions. Something will have to take the Democratic Party’s place, maybe even a group that uses the same name for convenience and the sake of tradition. But it will have to jettison just about everything the party stands for in its current incarnation, its insane ideas and policies. It might also consider the value of not lying about everything it does.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fishermen at Factory Ruins, Clarks Mills, New York
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
Was it the miasma of cognitive dissonance blackening the air-space over the DC swamp that caused the deadly collision of AA Flight 5342 and a Blackhawk Helicopter this week — an impenetrable fog arising from the fetid exhalations of so many hyperventilating swamp creatures brooding between the urges of fight-or-flight as Mr. Trump deploys his chosen pest-controllers across the Potomac Basin?
Altogether, these many parasitical swamp creatures make up the greater DC blob, and the blob convulsing and fibrillating is what you witness in these committee hearings with Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. For instance, fake “progressive” Bernie Sanders (D-VT) faced with the reveal that he leads his colleagues in pharma “contributions” (just under $2-million) . . . or fake Cherokee Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in a fugue state over the perceived threat of Mr. Kennedy to pharma profits . . . or presidential pardon recipient Adam Schiff (D-CA) lecturing Mr. Patel on ethical behavior. . . or Ms. Gabbard enduring the meltdown of Senate Intel Committee tool Michael Bennet (D-CO).
Behind these histrionics by the big gators and peccaries of the collapsing Democratic Party is pure scintillating fear. They are afraid that all of their hoaxes and lies of recent years will be exposed in the months ahead. And they fear that such exposure might lead eventually to legal complications for them. All of that implies loss-of-power, the single element that demonically drives their careers.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
The fact is they have already lost their grip on the levers of power and, for the moment, that is all that matters. They especially no longer control the Department of Justice, its subsidiary, the FBI, the many public health agencies under Health and Human Services, and the many-footed intel “community,” as it styles itself. These agencies are where the truth about our national affairs has been locked up. Now, the citizens will either see what’s there, or find out what has been deliberately destroyed — such as the internal agency email correspondence over RussiaGate, the Covid-19 operation (and the deadly vaxx campaign), the J-6 affair (and the pipe-bomb sideshow), the weird, documented irregularities of the 2020 election, the Ukraine War money-laundering shenanigans, the manifold janky DOJ prosecutions of Mr. Trump, and much more.
Every day now since January 20, heads explode all over DC as the executive orders roll out and the insanity of whatever lurked behind “Joe Biden” gets systematically expunged from the order of things. And as this happens, the more plainly deranged the past four years looks. Did they really believe that men dressing-up as women would improve the US military? Or was it a traitorous effort to weaken and demoralize our armed forces? Was DEI a public ethics exercise or a massive jobs program for incompetents?
In what way did “Joe Biden’s” Department of Homeland Security imagine that funneling known criminals, certified lunatics, and saboteurs across the border squared with their duty to protect and defend the country? And how did it happen that US taxpayers’ money got shelled out to fake “religious” NGOs in Mexico minting debit cards for border-jumpers, handing them wads of cash, cell phones, airplane tickets, fully-equipped backpacks, and apps for evading arrest? In effect these NGOs took over the exact job description of “coyote” formerly performed by the criminal cartels — leaving the cartels free for the more lucrative rackets of dealing fentanyl and trafficking women and children.
The corruption in all this has been supernatural, and the fact that, until late 2024, seventy-million Democratic Party American voters thought this was all okay is extra-supernatural. What happened to their minds? The cliché of “Trump derangement” doesn’t really answer that. What it probably comes down to was the stunningly successful mind-fucking operation run by the blob (the CIA and the darker elements of the DOD in particular), in league with captured news media, to bend and distort the consensual perception of reality — all of which leads to the question: why?
The two main answers to that seem to be 1) Some organized entity seeking to destroy the country for instance, the Chinese Communist Party, or the World Economic Forum, or 2) that the blob had evolved into such an overt criminal racketeering operation that it increasingly and desperately needed to keep covering its mighty ass. Thus, the Democratic Party became the blob’s enforcer and the news media became its propaganda arm. And the “thinking class” of America especially got ignominiously hosed by all that.
There’s a pretty good chance that blob agents in the Senate will successfully block the confirmations of Bobby, Tulsi, and Kash. They are all superlative candidates for the particular jobs at HHS, ODNI, and the FBI. But know this: excellent as they are, there are a great many other worthy, dedicated, and stalwart warriors in this land who can take their places if necessary. The blob has already lost in the political battle-space. All they can manage at this point is some rearguard action.
Coffee and a Mike Podcast with JHK, Dave Collum, and Mike Farris recorded Wednesday — The ERA of V-SHAPE RECOVERY IS OVER
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fishermen at Factory Ruins, Clarks Mills, New York
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
That’s the sound of a swamp being drained. And much fetid water is still backed up over the 68.3 square miles that comprise the District of Columbia. You might be just realizing that the “Joe Biden” regime was not a government at all, but rather, a colossal racketeering operation. And let’s be clear and precise: racketeering is making money dishonestly. Thus: the grubby Biden Family itself at the top of that putrid food-chain, and their smalltime harvesting of mere table-scraps. Where trillions got creamed off by the big gators, the Bidens risked all for a measly few million, like newts gorging on gnats in a drainage ditch.
Are you so cynical— as the Marxians are in their so-called “critique” of capitalism — that you think all human transactions of making-and-doing are dishonest? That is yet another misreading of reality, which the recent years of nonstop official propaganda and gaslight have catastrophically aggravated to the degree that half of America can no longer think at all.
Capitalism is not a political ideology despite the “ism” incorrectly attached to it, like the tail pinned on a donkey. Capitalism is simply the management of surplus wealth. The catch is, in a hyper-complex society, the management itself becomes complex to an extreme. And that can easily lead to mismanagement, which will deform and pervert the very mechanisms that superintend wealth, sometimes so badly that the wealth disappears altogether.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
These are the dynamics faced by the newborn Trump command. Both political parties, per se, have fallen into a dismal habit of racketeering in this sclerotic state-of-empire. But now Mr. Trump has seized control of the Republican apparatus, at least, and the Party’s entrenched ol’ crocs and pythons descry that under DJT the regular feeding frenzy is over. Hence: the hand-wringing over Pete Hegseth setting foot in the Pentagon, as he will sometime this dawning day. The dollars pounded down that rat-hole in this century could have funded start-ups of several empires, but instead the swag just landed in the index funds of countless board members parasitically lodged in a dark cosmos of G.I. procurement circle-jerks. A lot of that can and will be stopped. And the ones who just won’t quit are liable to be found out.
Now, the Democratic Party faces more perplexing quandaries. It, too, is constructed as a gigantic grift machine. But if you subtract the employees of the multitudinous NGOs and non-profit orgs set up in recent years to receive government largess — which have spawned like smelts in the San Joaquin delta — you would eliminate much of the party’s rank-and-file. (The rest are apparently embedded in government itself and the teachers’ union.) A whole lot of activists would lose their platforms for activism in the process.
These crypto-bureaucracies have become the places where the Democratic Party stashes the “elite over-production” of Woked-up Marxian semi-morons from America’s diploma mills — in which orgs they are lavishly paid to conduct the aforementioned propaganda and gaslighting operations that wrecked so many American minds. The funding spigot to many of those is getting shut down. It will result in an employment crunch for a large cohort of professional crybabies. They could possibly adapt to their new circumstances by ceasing to be crybabies, and finding other, more useful things to do. That would portend some very significant cultural shiftings, which might include the death of the Democratic Party as we’ve known it. Or, they could all just join Antifa (if they’re not already in it) and go make trouble in the streets.
The first seven days of Mr. Trump have been sheer razzle-dazzle. He and the people around him have torn through the zeitgeist like front-end-loaders through a homeless encampment. He has yet to meet a crisis. Some of the obvious traps are avoidable. For instance: seeking further injury to Russia as a way of ending the stupid Ukraine war — started by us in 2014, thanks a lot Victoria Nuland & Company — since both the US and Russia are just about unconditionally desirous of stopping the damn thing as soon as possible. It’s had no benefit for anybody but the Raytheon war lobby and the Zelensky regime’s legion of grifters. Mr. Trump’s recent tough talk has been entirely for show, just a mass of rhetorical lube to un-stick the lingering “Joe Biden” stasis in that sad-sack corner of the world.
If crisis awaits, it’s probably lurking in the financial realm, where the operations of debt have put nearly every country on Gawd’s Green Earth behind the eight-ball. There is just too much of it that everybody knows can’t possibly be paid back — or soon even serviced — and the grand managers of these matters are finally out of tricks for pretending things can go on. Nor, here in America, can Mr. Trump cut spending fast enough to rebalance accounts. And if he somehow could, government employment has become such a big piece of the total economy that we would land post-haste in a new great depression That predicament is yet-to-be faced, but hold your breath because it is hard upon us.
Meanwhile, this is the week when the most hardcore of Mr. Trump’s cabinet warriors go ‘splainin’ before committees in the US Senate: Bobby Kennedy, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel. Prepare for some heat and light. And then, the deluge.
Gallery 16 is UP! Paintings from the 2024 season
Fishermen at Factory Ruins, Clarks Mills, New York
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
These paintings of the landscape around Washington County, New York, were made in 2024. I hung out often around an island in the Hudson River between the river itself and the Champlain Canal, created originally in the 1820s to bypass the Falls of Northumberland a mile north of Schuylerville. The canal towpath has lately been connected to new walking trails which afforded many opportunities to get human figures in the scene. I often encountered fishermen there. I also haunted a particular stretch of the Battenkill River (tributary of the Hudson) in the hamlet of Shushan, New York, about ten miles east of the Hudson. It is popular with bathers and kayakers.
Interested buyers can contact me at jhkunstler@mac.com for sizes and prices.
Fisherman at Factory Ruins, Clark’s Mills, New York
Fisherman and Children, the old Canal, Springtime, Schuylerville, New York
Spring on the Towpath, Schuylerville, New York
Fisherman (with Wild Rose) on Sand Bar at the Old dam, East Greenwich, New York, May
Battenkill Bathers at Shushan, June
Fisherman and the White Boat, Hudson River
Fisherman and the Falls of Northumberland
The Falls of Northumberland from the Dix Bridge
Falls of Northumberland from East End of the Dix Bridge
Bathers and Kayakers on the Battenkill, Shushan, New York
Kayak Parade on the Battenkill, Shushan, New York
Bathers at Lake Lauderdale Beach, Cambridge, New York
Beach at Moreau Lake, Saratoga County, New York, in September
Strollers on the Old Champlain Canal, Schuylerville, New York, in October
Battenkill River from the Route 372 Bridge, Greenwich, New York, August
Looking South on Riverwalk Trail, November
House in Fort Miller, New York, Fall
The Backwater behind the H & V Factory, Clark’s Mills, New York
THE BOOKText within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
*You can own Jim’s paintings in book form. For information,* click here.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
This, as they say, is one of those weeks when decades happen. You realize that under the fiends fronted by “Joe Biden,” the US government became a demon-driven machine for wrecking lives, perverting the law, and demolishing all scaffolds of decent behavior. And now, it all has to be fixed, cleaned up, fumigated, rectified, rehabilitated.
Scores of executive orders flew out of the Oval Office, rescinding four years of “Biden” regime lunacy in every direction: Censorship, dead. . . Gain of function research, killed. . . CBDCs banned. . . CBP-app for aiding illegal migrants, discontinued. . . border fortified. . . homicidal alien mutts deported. . . World Health Organization, no thanks. . . Paris Climate Accords, fuggeddabowdit. . . DEI, vacated through all of government. . . Green New Deal, scrapped. . . “pride” in mental illness, cancelled. . . Ukraine War, headed for the negotiating table. . . all in four days and so much more coming.
The DEI flimflam is particularly illustrative of the hazards still lurking. The DC blob is desperate to hide its chaos agents by switching their job titles and shuffling them around to hidey-holes in obscure precincts of this-or-that bureaucracy. Being federal employees, of course, they all have searchable names and payroll accounts, so you may be sure they’ll be discovered wherever they’re hiding-out and placed, as ordered, on “administrative leave.” Since DEI was essentially a program to promote incompetence, these employees represent a monumental cargo of dead-weight. So, the next task will be finding a way under the civil service codes to cashier them for good. For instance, reclassifying their job status to render them fire-able.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
his blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
This is sure to be a major friction-point for the so-called “resistance,” the huge cadre of “activist” Wokesters embedded in the agencies. Cue the army of Democratic Party lawyers who will be filing suits to prevent the chief executive from coherently managing the departments of the executive branch. But there’s a catch: this time, the White House will not be funneling scads of money directly to the NGOs that pay for these blob-adjacent lawyers, nor will they be able to redirect money out of the DOJ, FBI, and CIA for that purpose. The president may also find a way to interrupt the flow of money from foundations financed by malign freelancers such as George Soros and Linked-in founder and billionaire Reid Hoffman (who financed the E. Jean Carroll “rape” trial hoax and many more Democratic Party pranks ).
Another friction point: release of the pardoned J-6 prisoners is being loudly opposed by DC District federal judges such as Tanya Chutkan and Amy Berman Jackson. They don’t enjoy any privilege or prerogative for voicing prejudicial opinions about vacated cases, nor for failing to comply with paperwork needed to discharge them. They can be impeached for that in the House of Representatives. Or, if they actively obstruct releases, the new-and-improved Department of Justice might consider 18 U.S.C. § 242 - Deprivation of rights under color of law.
Meanwhile, goons at the DC jail detained pardoned prisoners unlawfully this week after years of the grossest mistreatment, including solitary confinement in basement “holes” without beds, blankets, or water, and direct physical assault that could be described as “torture.” All of this was countenanced by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, despite plentiful public reports of abuse over the past four years. That is, she knew all about it. This is an argument for finally rescinding Washington DC’s “home rule” status and placing the city and all its departments back under federal management.
Last night, Mr. Trump signed an order to declassify government files relating to the murders of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. Of course, the intel agencies holding these files have had a half-century to expunge anything in the files that might reflect poorly on the intel agencies — such as, the long-trafficked rumor that the CIA was behind the killing of all three. Why would you expect to get anything like that? How could the remaining material be anything but a cover-your-ass file? Well, now we shall see. At some point in his first term, Mr. Trump allegedly saw what was in the files and demurred from his promise then to release them. Was it too shocking? Or was it the well-groomed nothingburger described above?
That’s not to say that there’s any shortage of weird, tantalizing documentation around all those cases, inexplicable doings. . . sketchy characters like Oswald, Jack Ruby, Howard Hunt, Clay Shaw, Sirhan Sirhan, Thane Eugene Cesar, James Earl Ray, “Raul” (Ray’s alleged “handler”), Frank Liberto, Loyd Jowers. . . . and curious circumstances like the so-called “magic bullet” that supposedly exited JFK and wounded Texas Governor Connolly, and was later found oddly intact on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital. I guess we’ll find out shortly.
Now, we await the confirmation of Mr. Trump’s cabinet. Pam Bondi’s USAG nomination was held up for a week by peevish freshman Senator Adam Schiff, after she called him out for being censured last year in the House for “reckless” statements — that is, she reminded the committee and the public that Mr. Schiff is a chronic liar. There are rumblings that he will be kicked off the Senate Judiciary Committee (maybe not such a good fit for someone incapable of telling the truth). The preemptive pardon he received last week from “Joe B” might be tested through the courts in the years just ahead. The Judiciary Committee announced that it will convene an inquiry into the whole J-6 fiasco. Do you sense that there is much to discover in that hairball of enigmatic events, hidden actions, concealed motives, and buried evidence?
All this (plus a lot I left out) and the first week isn’t even over yet!
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
Charles Hugh Smith founded his blog Of Two Minds in 2005 after 17 years of free-lance journalism in the San Francisco Bay Area. His 4,500 posts on the economy, society, housing and technology have logged over 150 million page views. He is the author of nine novels and nineteen non-fiction books on socio-economic-political dynamics, including "The Mythology of Progress." His work can also be found on Substack and Patreon. He lives by Winston Churchill's dictum that "Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com**
If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda. The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. — Jack Goldsmith, The New York Times
Thus spake one Shawn McCreesh of The New York Times, America’s all-wise, all-knowing font of everlasting rectitude. But to answer his question, why blah blah: Donald Trump is glaring because he means bidness. His bidness is to shift the paradigm on the mendaciously sanctimonious managerial class of the USA, of which The New York Times is the principal mouthpiece. DJT looks stern, does he? All that really tells you is how nervous the Old Gray Lady is. A million or more brains, from sea to shining sea are about to get vacuumed out and redecorated
Readers of The New York Times — in their various C-suites, ivory towers, ateliers, yoga parlors, tasting rooms, bioweapon labs, and other haunts — remain utterly baffled about what is to begin today. No amount of ‘splainin’ seems to suffice. They behold the Golden Golem of Greatness (DJT) doing his dance onstage behind the cop, the Indian chief, and the cowpoke and all they can really see are their own careers going up in smoke (along with vested pensions, reputations, possibly even chattels, marriages, and health).
As I write, long before dawn, “Joe Biden” remains President of the US. You must wonder, as the hours dwindle to noon, what pardon power magic he’s saving for the final minutes of his term, while the whole nation is distracted by the spectacle in the Capitol Rotunda, the moiling dignitaries and celebrities, the solemn arrival of the elect, the snarky palaver of the cable news jockeys, the electric charge of history in the large room. . . .
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
It is a fact, perhaps missed by some of you, that Rep. James Comer’s House Oversight Committee just last week issued criminal referrals on James Biden (“Joe’s” brother) and First Son Hunter. Wait-a-minute, was not Hunter already pardoned for Gawd-knows how many misdeeds dating back to 2014, and (supposedly) preemptively for any alleged crimes to come ever hereafter? Part B of that may yet have to be adjudicated. A pardon is not intended to be a get-out-of-jail-free card. Anyway, would it be difficult for a federal attorney of average ability to draw a connection between the newly referred crimes of those two and the departing President? Hence, will “Joe Biden” pardon “Joe Biden” at 11:30 this morning?
Not to mention about 1000 other current and former public officials quaking in their Beltway McMansions this frosty morning. This is part and parcel, you understand, of the massive Cleanup in Aisle Four that must happen if the agencies of our federal government can ever be trusted again. For instance, the Department of Justice.
At the end of the workday, Friday, AG Merrick Garland made a triumphal final exit from the building past a throng of cheering and clapping employees, including dozens of federal attorneys who zealously persecuted their fellow citizens under color-of-law for no good reason, or real legal predicate, and ruined many lives and households in the process. Do you suppose they get a free pass on that? And what of the three bears of Lawfare: Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, and Mary McCord, all of them present at the creation of serial affronts against the Constitution (and decency) lo this past decade. Do they just skate? I doubt it, though it might take a while to shine a light on their turpitudes.
Will “Joe Biden” wave his pardon wand over Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, Scott Gottlieb, Deborah Birx, Rochelle Walensky, and dozens of other public health officials who sprung the Covid-19 operation and the deadly vaccinations on the country? Or Ralph Baric, hunkered out of sight in his Carolina lab? You realize, of course, that the orgy of illness and death from that is hardly over. For four years under “JB” the truth has been obfuscated and buried, because none of those characters has really had to answer for anything.
So, today another door opens. The To-Do list for Mr. Trump and his aides-de-camp is dauntingly long, the corrections needed are monumental. You might have even noticed that such corrections are badly needed all over the other countries of Western Civ, and strangely many are already following suit. The WEF-inflected governments of France, Germany, and the UK are already a’wobble, and Justin Trudeau threw in the towel two weeks ago. An Arctic blast could not be more fitting for what will move through the DC Swamp at high noon today. That is, if Mr. Trump manages to survive the hours until his swearing-in. Godspeed Number 47! And everybody else: put your tray tables up! A patch of turbulence ahead!
Update: I posted the above blog ten minutes before “Joe Biden” issued his raft of pardons for Fauci, the J6 Committee members, and others. We will have to stand by to see whether a “preemptive” pardon is a legitimate legal instrument. My guess is that it is not.
Further update: About fifteen minutes till noon today, “Joe Biden” preemptively pardoned the rest of his family, brothers Jim and Frank, a sister, various wives and husbands. What crimes did he have in mind, you must wonder. Money laundering? That would be my guess. Note: “JB” apparently did not pardon himself. Bribery and treason are still on the table then.
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
You’re aware, I’m sure, that a lot of people thought “Joe Biden” was being play-acted in the White House over his four years there by a series of look-alike actors. You saw those news items comparing “JB’s” earlobes to the old gaffer who showed up at the podium on a given day. Hmmmmmm. . . . I was not persuaded by any of that. “Joe Biden” has simply been impersonating himself — play-acting the role of “president.” The mystery is how he got there.
You can expect very shortly, probably only a matter of weeks, to see a raft of news stories, soon-to-be big-money books, revealing the utter sustained chaos that churned behind the pathetic, half-animate figure pretending to be “chief executive” of the US government lo these dismal four years past. You will learn who was pulling his strings day-to-day since 1/20/21, probably a gang of 25-year-old, ambitious, Cluster-B staffers too disorganized to even amount to a cabal — but sufficiently united in their mission to destroy the country by any means necessary.
Whose idea was it, anyway, back in the spring of 2020, to retrieve this broken hack from the dumpster of discarded Democratic Party primary candidates and jam him into the role of nominee for president? You’d suspect Barack Obama, of course, since the former president had set-up a war-room across town from the White House during the Trump interregnum, and had openly bragged that he’d love nothing better than to someday kick back in a warm-up suit and phone-in governing orders to a stand-in dummy occupying the oval office.
Except Mr. Obama famously disdained his former veep. The few duties “Joe Biden” had in that role (under poor supervision apparently), he converted into a money-laundering and grift operation — most notoriously his adventures in pre-war Ukraine, where First Son Hunter played bag-man from his seat on the Burisma gas company board. That racket evolved quickly and neatly so that at just about every airport around the world that Air Force Two landed, Hunter and “Joe” were clocking-in fat bribes, supposedly for “influence.” That was the joke, of course, because “Joe Biden” had no influence with his President Obama, who regarded him as an idiot, a bumbling Inspector Clouseau, of whom he famously said, “Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up."
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This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
Yet, somehow, the old crook got maneuvered into “winning” the 2020 Super Tuesday multi-primary — abracadabra! Ballot magic! — while some little birdie flew around and persuaded Elizabeth Warren, Mayor Pete, Amy Klobuchar and the rest to drop out. Meanwhile, the Deep State blob had delivered the gift of Covid-19, whatever it was, a lab creation, a seasonal flu, or just a mass of PCR-test fake positives, and Mr. Trump was snookered into lockdowns by the same public health blobsters who engineered the “pandemic” crisis: Fauci, Birx, Francis Collins, Alex Azar, et al., with Bill Gates, Ralph Baric, and Klaus Schwab lurking somewhere in the background.
You can’t overstate the fervency of the Democratic Party in 2020 to eject Mr. Trump from office, considering the threat he represented to all of DC’s business-as-usual — especially after he escaped the perfidious impeachment trap engineered by legal assassins Mary McCord and Norm Eisen. Ergo, The USA slid haplessly into an ethos of grotesque institutional lying and election fraud because, you see, something else had evolved ominously backstage since 2016: the criminal activities of the FBI, CIA, DOJ, and Pentagon (major blob tentacles) in the drawn-out RussiaGate scam. Many people needed to shield themselves from potential prosecution.
“Joe Biden” hit the campaign trail like he was Rutherford B. Hayes, back in the day when candidates for president barely strayed beyond the front porch of their home. To say he hid in his basement was only a slight exaggeration. The few public events his handlers dragged him into attracted the public in embarrassing double-digits. He was already widely suspected of being in clinical dementia. Despite the blob’s best efforts, the content of Hunter’s laptop was already leaking onto the Interwebs, photos of Hunter naked with whores, guns, and drugs, deal memos between shadowy foreigners and Hunter’s Rosemont-Seneca money laundromat. But, of course, the news media buried all that and social media censored it.
And so, more election magic! The blob’s “Big Lie” trope — employed to this day even in the latest cabinet confirmation hearings — was itself the biggest lie, a complete inversion of the truth, which is that the 2020 election was a total and comprehensive fraud. It was an orgy of crime carried out across many states. Those of us who stayed up late the night of November 3-4, 2020, watched the numbers slip-and-slide from one column to the other right in our faces, saw the videos of fake ballots in Fulton County, GA, the shenanigans in Philadelphia, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Mark Zuckerberg had laid nearly half a billion dollars on swing states to switch-out election officials with Democratic Party activists and to fund ballot “harvesting” ops. Yes, you can state with certainty that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen for “Joe Biden.”
The four years of “Joe Biden’s” term-in-office that followed have induced the most severe disordering of the collective American mind in our history, lost in a fog of perfidious mendacity unmatched in scope by the Civil War, or any other national crisis. “Joe Biden’s” government went to war against the people of this land, at the same time it sold-out our vital national interests to the CCP, the WEF, the WHO, and other parties seeking our nation’s destruction. For years, we have been forced to swallow absurdities such as unsafe and ineffective vaccines, drag queens in the grade schools, borders wide-open to saboteurs (declared to be “secure”), and a stupid war against Russia that has destroyed the sad-sack nation of Ukraine.
“Joe Biden” has been a disaster and an embarrassment, easily the most damaging character to ever creep onto the US political scene. His one talent was for fakery. Even with sclerosis eating through his brain, he was able to go through the motions of faking it, reading his script off the teleprompter — though he was no longer up to casual questions in a news conference setting. The slime trail of crimes he leaves behind would be easy to follow by law enforcement officials actually interested in crime. He’s likely to pardon himself at the last moment, and pardon a long roster of federal officials who have committed crimes with and behind him. One way or another, they are going to be found out, even if many manage to evade prosecution. But at least we are going to learn a lot more about who was pulling “Joe’s” strings, and exactly what they did, and how — including the trick of making the news media hostage to their crimes.
So, adios, “Joe Biden,” you miserable, treasonous bastard. History will record you as the one president so far who was consciously a villain outright, in true self-knowledge of his own wickedness. You left your country a wreck in every dimension: in national security, national bankruptcy, national pride, and national confidence. Go back to Delaware and sit in the dim light of your room with the curtains drawn so you won’t have to hear about the gruesome discoveries to come of what you left behind. And when the day arrives for your funeral, be advised that it will not be much better than your campaign stop in Darby, PA, in June 2020, when you maundered pointlessly to a nearly empty room. . . before going out for ice cream with your secret service detail.
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
“So-called progressives finally achieved what they supposedly warned of but in truth wished for: the eviction of the affluent descendants of colonizers, the incineration of their homes, and the destruction of a city that, more than any other, represents our bloody history of white supremacy and conquest.” — Michael Shellenberger
For those in the USA with an interest in collapsing the USA, the Los Angeles fire is the gift that will keep on giving, and George Soros hardly had to cough up a dime to make it happen. From the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion angle, the fire got‘er done, cleansing nearly the entire PacPal population of snooty, rich, white “allies” of the oppressed and marginalized — who will now have LA to themselves. Chez Whitey is “closed for renovations,” and it might be twenty years before it can re-open, if ever.
Probably never, if the California Coastal Commission has anything to say about it. And why wouldn’t they? They do not generally approve of stuff getting built right up on the beach. They were probably all down on their knees Sunday in the Church of Luxury Belief thanking Climate Jeezus for sweeping Malibu and the hills above it clean.
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
Ronald Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, rent her garments in The New York Times Sunday op-ed page, wailing:
“My anger over what we have done to this fragile, exquisite Earth was muffled by grief until the other evening when I was watching a news program that had a panel of commentators. The subject was Los Angeles on fire, and one person mentioned climate change as a cause. Another commentator smirked and said he didn’t believe it was the cause.
I felt rage surge up past my grief.
My first thought was: “You think you know more than scientists?”
Of course, my first thought reading that was: Who is paying those scientists? The same question you might ask of the scientists at the CDC, NIH, FDA, and NIAID who declared that Covid-19 was definitely not created in a Wuhan lab, and the mRNA vaccines were “safe and effective.” My second thought was: could you possibly find a better example of elite Utopian-Woke performative acting-out? My third thought was: since when are “experts” infallible? My fourth thought was: doesn’t science advance on the basis of continuous argument? My fifth thought was: if Patti Davis is watching the news, she must be in some comfortable and probably luxurious place that did not burn down. So much for my thoughts, entertained without the rending of garments.
More to the point of the fire itself, you must wonder what is happening to those tens of thousands of displaced persons and families right now? How many of them are sleeping out on their smoldering properties, or in their cars, or just shivering on a sidewalk somewhere. It does not seem possible that they all found a place to go, certainly not at their neighbors’ houses, who were all burnt-out, too. . . and there are just so many hotel rooms not occupied by “the undocumented.” Anyway, how many families can stay in hotel rooms that go for $1,000-a-night, and for how many nights? How many of them lost absolutely everything, including the possibility of a future?
Which gets you to the realization that we have barely begun to see the knock-on effects of this catastrophe. Those tens of thousands of the burnt-out will not be reporting to work anytime soon. They will have all they can do to find a roof over their heads while they hassle with FEMA officials, State of California bureaucrats, insurance company claims agents, and other “helpers.” The rebuilding quandaries have already been rehearsed in the news. Even if politicians suspended all the building and zoning codes, and the tax issues, where will so many contractors come from in any reasonable time-frame? And where do you put all that melted plastic goop and toxic ash that remains on-the-ground where peoples’ lives used to be?
If you lost a house valued at $5-million, it will cost you at least $10-million to replace it. Good luck, even if you were a mid-level movie star. Of course, if your insurance got cancelled lately — or you just didn’t have any because it cost too much — then there is zero chance you will get to even fantasize about living in the hills above Malibu ever again. And that job you’re not able to go to right now due to the pressing needs of sheer survival on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. . . you might never go to that job again. The business you worked for might not be there anymore, either.
If there was ever a proverbial last-grain-of-sand-in-a-landslide, the Great 2025 Los Angeles Fire must be a sure thing vis-a-vis the US economy, especially the financial side of it. An awful lot of homeowners will not be paying their mortgages on a smoldering empty lot. The banks are not in super-fabulous condition these days. How many loans-gone-bad will it take to wreck already unstable banks? And, by the way, the collateral isn’t even there anymore. The re-po man is out of the picture.
What happens to the insurance companies? And the re-insurance companies who theoretically stand behind the insurers? I’ll tell you what happens: they will be backstopped by the government, which doesn’t have the money to backstop them. . . but will create it out of pixels on screens. . . which means expect a considerable uptick in inflation (i.e., a downtick in the purchasing power of the dollar), which will be a black eye for the new Trump administration. How does all this thunder through the US economy as a whole?
Nobody really knows just yet, but the signs are not reassuring. You can infer countless chains-of-consequence. Friday’s action in the financial markets felt like a tremor of things to come. The Bubble-of All-Bubbles abides. . . for how long?
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
“Life imitates art,” Oscar Wilde quipped, a most insightful glimpse into the human condition delivered as a wise-crack. Very Hollywood. Too bad there were no late-night talk shows in Oscar’s time. It took more than eighty years, but the apocalyptic burning of Los Angeles depicted at the climax of Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust has finally come — the city of dreams turned into one big flaming nightmare. The adumbrations of this fiasco will darken our national life for years to come.
Who knew that the best way to convert Utopian Woke Democrats back into a reality-based thought system would be to burn their houses down? The wealthy showbiz folk occupying the moral high ground of the Pacific Palisades voted Democratic by 90-percent. They were fully on-board with the agenda of the Party of Chaos, especially Diversity-Equity-and-Inclusion (DEI) and the open border that allowed a deluge of mysterious strangers to flood the country.
Now, reports come across the “X” wires that these mystery folk are cruising the wreckage in the canyons on scooters and in cars to loot anything left of value. The police are shown on video capturing a mystery migrant with a blowtorch suspected of starting the latest outbreak named the Kenneth Fire on the edge of the San Fernando Valley. Loud-and-proud DEI firefighters were stymied in their work by neighborhood fire hydrants that were disappointingly not “full of water,” as they put it. Is that how it works? Each hydrant is supposed to get filled up on a regular schedule by water pixies?
Clusterfuck Nation is a reader-supported publication. Subscribe to this blog on Patreon or right here on Substack!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
You know by now that LA Mayor Karen Bass was unavailable for the early innings of the conflagration, having flown to the West African nation of Ghana for the inauguration of the new president John Dramani Mahama. But she managed to scramble back in time to mourn the smoldering ruins of Malibu. Governor Gavin Newsom dallied on a smoke-filled street with CNN’s disaster specialist, Anderson Cooper, pretending to manage the situation, which was, in fact, completely out of control. Among the things the governor has been criticized for is poor forest and brush management. Mr. Newsom has been lately working to pass a $25-million bill to fund measures for “Trump-proofing” California. For that same $25-million, he could have hired 500 workers at $50,000-a-year to cut brush around Los Angeles County. That is, if he didn’t avail himself of work-gangs from the California penitentiaries.
Even “Joe Biden” was in town, to announce the creation of a new national monument, the Chuckwalla National Monument, south of Joshua Tree National Park — 125 miles out in the Mojave Desert from LA. But he had helpful phone conversations with Governor Newsom. . . promises of federal funding to build Malibu back better. I wonder if the folks still camping out in tents back in the Mountains of Carolina heard about that. This same week “JB” also announced another $500-million aid package for Ukraine. Anybody wondering why “America First” helped get Mr. Trump elected?
You can’t overstate the amount and degree of family devastation to be endured in the months and years ahead. For one thing, many homeowners recently had their fire insurance cancelled. Decades of punitive bureaucracy made rate increases difficult in wildfire-prone areas, so companies like Allstate decided to quit doing business in the state. So, many of the thousands of lost houses will be total losses. A great many of these were multi-million-dollar houses, even modest ones built in the 1960s, due to the extreme desirability of neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades, the Hollywood Hills, and Malibu Beach. Some middle-class people had their entire nest-eggs vested in these houses.
Comedian and podcaster Adam Carolla put out an insightful video rant about just how difficult it will be to rebuild, even if you had homeowner’s insurance — or happened to be a very wealthy Hollywood actor. He put a spotlight on the monumentally obstructive permitting process in Los Angeles County, including additional onerous environmental agency hurdles that anyone would meet attempting to construct a new building in California. Also consider: where are the thousands of competent building contractors going to come from to work on so many replacement houses in one locality at the same time? The bottom-line is that an awful lot of formerly middle-class and even well-off people will be homeless possibly for years ahead. You have not begun to hear about this.
You also have to wonder how this disaster will end up affecting the movie industry. Show business in LA had been on-the-ropes for quite a while preceding the big fire. Woked-up management putting out woked-up movies did enough damage on top of momentous changes in movie exhibition and distribution, writers’ and actors’ strikes, and super high-priced union labor for movie technicians. The movie business started in LA mainly because of its beautiful Mediterranean climate. You could shoot film outdoors year-round. The industry has been stealthily bailing out of California for years, moving to places like Vancouver and Atlanta. Now, in the smoking ruins, how many showbiz people are ready to run shrieking from the Golden State? And how much is the economic impact of this local disaster a harbinger of a more general national downturn to come? Probably a lot, I’m thinking.
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
Could this possibly be real? It was on a Trulia real estate site in a New England town not to be named. I cannot be more specific, to avoid legal hassles. It’s 10,000 square feet on 6 acres, 9 BRs, 9 baths. Priced at $3,670,600. (What could that final $600 possibly signify?) Some builder gave steroids, Mescaline, and ketamine to the notion of a neo-Georgian house, and this is what you get in that state of “dissociative anesthesia.” (Or perhaps more like aphasia.) Note the three fountains arbitrarily deployed so as to defeat their purpose as focal points. Note the unnecessary brick planting boxes for the cedar shrubs. Note the chimney runs interrupted by windows. Note the blank wall first floor beneath that. Note the triplex fake Georgian windows above the front entrance (scary!). Note the fanlights at left with no windows in them. We have absolutely lost it.
Thanks to Wayne Maglione for the nomination.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
Eyesore of the Month Since 1998For the first time ever, you can now binge-read and comment on the complete “Eyesore of the Month” archive going all the way back to this feature’s debut in March 1998. That’s more than 300 architectural blunders, abortions and abominations to make you chortle, snort and guffaw. Click here to read them all.
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Poor “Joe Biden” can’t help himself as the sun sets on his ignominious career. He ordered the American flag to fly at half-staff into January 20, inauguration day, to signal grief and distress at Donald Trump’s swearing-in — not realizing, apparently, that Mr. Trump’s first act in office will be to order the flag raised back up, signaling symbolically the end to America’s grief and distress under “Joe Biden.”
You might wonder: what other sort of vicious mischief the Party of Chaos has in store in the final ramp-up to a momentous change of government? Well, no sooner had ol’ “JB” draped the Wegovy-slenderized neck of Hillary Clinton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, than Bill Clinton went on ABC’s The View to declare he was “open to talking with [‘President Biden’]” about a preemptive pardon for Hillary.
Say, whu. . . ? What crimes did Bill have in mind that such a pardon might avail? Skolkovo? Uranium One? The Clinton Foundation’s sketchy activities in Haiti after the earthquake there? Bill preemptively mentioned the old emails bidness as a ruse. Nothing to see there, folks, he protested. (Just don’t look anywhere else!)
You must imagine that the incoming Solicitor General, John Sauer’s, first act in office will be to ask SCOTUS for a ruling on the legitimacy of preemptive pardons — blanket pardons for crimes alive perhaps in guilty consciences but nowhere extant as yet in the legal system. The justices might detect a certain logical incoherence in that proposition. “Joe Biden” should have just draped wreaths of garlic around the necks of Mrs. Clinton, Liz Cheney, and Alex Soros (standing in for ol’ George).
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Judge Juan Merchan did not get a medal. He’s warming up for his January 10 stunt of sentencing Mr. Trump for the “felony” of recording a payment to lawyer Michael Cohen as a “legal expense” (times thirty-four) so Democrats can holler “nyah nyah, felon!” as Mr. Trump re-enters the Oval Office. Judge Merchan himself has racked-up an impressive list of federal offenses around deprivation of Mr. Trump’s civil and due-process rights as well as judicial misconduct, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. Justice may await the judge.
Today, January 6, of course, is electoral vote certification day in a joint session of Congress. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has been making noises about contesting certification on the grounds that Mr. Trump is an “insurrectionist” under the disqualification clause in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Don’t be surprised if Jamie makes a show of it to justify all his loose talk, but it will only be a performance. He might as well bring a chicken into the chamber and bite its head off.
The shadowy claque behind “Joe Biden” has been super-busy cooking up documents for the demented old bird to sign before leaving office, anything that supposedly might discommode the incoming Mr. Trump. “JB” is like a bandit fleeing the scene of a crime, throwing his stolen booty into the road off the back of his truck to trip up the police closing in. Close down offshore oil drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts for evermore. . . ban gas-powered water heaters. . . any old thing to make life more uncomfortable for the people of this land. The shadowy claque seems oblivious to the fact that the people won’t appreciate these pranks, that they just give more reasons for them to drive a wooden stake through the heart of the Democratic Party — as if it even had one.
Prank-of-the-week, though, goes to Tony Blinken’s State Department. No sooner had Congress defunded his agency’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) — that is, its censorship coordination hub — than the muppets at State redistributed GEC’s personnel to other corners of the agency and scared up new funding for their censorship activities from some dark hidey-hole of sequestered money. Do they suppose no one will find out where these employees went? All that’s necessary is to look up who was on the GEC’s payroll in 2024, and earlier in the hub’s heyday, and see if they remain on the State Department’s payroll now — and then fire the whole lot of them for cause: abrogating Americans’ First Amendment rights. Buh-bye. . . .
You are not out-of-order worrying, of course, that the political Left and the deep state blob behind them might look, in desperation, for other ways to prevent Donald Trump from getting sworn in. There’s the president-elect’s rally in DC the night before the inauguration. Not a few MAGAs are wondering if that’s really a good idea. And the recent garish drone swarms around the USA have put folks ill at ease about a swearing-in on the west front of the US Capitol, out in the open air. I’d even be a little concerned about the mechanicals of Mr. Trump’s airplane as he flies north from Mar-a-Lago to the big event in Washington.
Nobody will be surprised if “Joe Biden” does not show up on the dais at the Capitol that fateful day. He at least has one final snub left for Mr. Trump as “JB” departs office with the pardon he will preemptively lay on himself in the wee hours of January 19 — in case anyone might inquire into all those shadow companies that First Son Hunter was running over the years to receive money from China, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, and Gawd knows who else, to be redistributed (i.e., laundered) through the innumerable bank accounts of Biden family members. There is that to consider.
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Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
Bill Moyer calls himself a radical solutionary. He’s the author of the book Solutionary Rail, a people powered campaign to electrify US railroads and open corridors for a clean energy future. He also hosts the new podcast Reconnect America and posts essays on Solutionary Railat Substack. The campaign has evolved into a national effort to put US rail infrastructure back in service of the public interest over Wall Street profit. He lives with his wife and daughter in the woods of Vashon Island, WA in the Salish Sea.
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com**
I hope that the first lesson of the Bourbon Street massacre is not lost on you: There is no end of opportunity now for Jihadis and other maniacs to attack soft targets across the land. Americans are sitting ducks. And there is no shortage of jihadis and maniacs at large in our land, thanks to “Joe Biden” and Alejandro Mayorkas.
Do you have any idea how much carnage can be created with what are called small arms, meaning, light weapons, guns, rifles, grenades, and improvised explosives used tactically in public places by enemies of our country? It looks like we are going to find out. And just regular motor vehicles, too, as in New Orleans and Las Vegas. Among the millions of foreign vagabonds ushered across the border illegally are perhaps tens of thousands fanatically avid for mayhem, many of them surely organized into cadres trained to carry out atrocities, just hanging back with their US government-issued debit cards, enjoying DoorDash deliveries in their government supplied hotel rooms, waiting for the signal to activate themselves.
Do you think we can harden the millions of targets out there, make them secure? Forget about it. Many of these are plain old streets in the cities, countless bridges and tunnels, endless runs of railroad track and highway, hundreds of airports, not to mention malls, schools, big box stores, office buildings, restaurants, sports venues, cruise ships, skating rinks, theaters, churches. It would only take a couple-three more episodes like the New Orleans incident to paralyze public life in America just as badly as the Covid-19 op did. Are tourists rushing back to Bourbon Street now? Will they return for Mardi Gras on March 4?
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This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
And now, of course, the matter of drones has been brought to your attention. How many thousands (millions?) of these ingenious toys have been sold over recent years. You can walk into Best Buy today and get one, ranging from a couple of hundred bucks to models with advanced guidance electronics at several thousand bucks. Timers are cheap. C-4 and Semtex plastic explosives are easy to purloin from military bases, or just traded on black markets. Drones can be launched from anywhere, including out of windows anywhere. They can be launched in swarms.
You must also imagine that these Jihadis and other maniacs are primed to let loose on the imminently incoming Trump admin. The “Joe Biden” regime years were just the set-up period. Why open up with terror ops and show your hand prematurely while “JB” offered so much free and easy assistance in preparing the battlefield? And anyway, since so much of what “Joe Biden” was up to on his own initiative was obviously damaging to the USA in three dimensions — economically, strategically, and psychologically — then why interrupt all that serendipitous mishchief?
In the twilight of his twilight presidency, “Joe Biden” makes his final moves — that is, the people in the shadows behind “Joe Biden” make their moves — to fortify the progress he made working to destroy his own country, really anything that might hamper Mr. Trump’s ability to correct the deliberate desecration of our national life. And, of course, to shelter any of those persons responsible from a legal reckoning in the future.
In a most garish example, “JB” awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to former Rep. Liz Cheney for her role on Congress’s J-6 committee. This, you understand, was done in defiance of what is already known and alleged about the treasonous misconduct of that body — withholding and destruction of evidence, tampering with evidence, coaching witnesses, lying to the media about testimony received, and obstruction of justice. You might lay a conspiracy charge over all those misdeeds, since they involved the formal agreement, discussion, and knowledge of it all among committee members. That is, it was done clearly in concert. This is howThe New York Times put it:
The plea there is transparently and obviously mendacious, yet The Times, being the mouthpiece of the nervous DC blob, can’t resist laying out the game: how can you prosecute somebody for acts they’ve been given a presidential award for committing? Of course, a pardon will signal that Liz Cheney is, ipso facto, a criminal. And would “Joe Biden” then have to pardon every member of the J-6 Committee — since, being a conspiracy, are they not all culpable for the same crimes? But then, the J-6 Committee crimes against the people of America comprise only a small portion, a side dish, to the many other crimes committed by the officials working under “Joe Biden.” If he pardons Liz Cheney, won’t this president also have to pardon hundreds of other officials from Mayorkas, Wray, Garland, Fauci, Walensky, Austin, Blinken, Sullivan on down?
“Joe Biden” will no doubt wait until the morning of January 20 to issue those pardons, if he dares to, and he might well include himself in the package as having committed bribery and treason. Since his dementia is not total, he probably has enough brain left to reason fallaciously that the country will be too distracted by the Trump inaugural to notice what he did. He will think that he has acquired magic powers of invisibility. Not to history, of course. And history will resume at noon on January 20. From that moment on, “Joe Biden” is certified as the most odious villain in our nation’s history.
New Coffee and a Mike episode with Mike Farris recorded Thursday Jan 2
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things keep disappearing. . . .
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right: her. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
It must be obvious that the incoming government under Mr. Trump has one primary duty overall: sorting out truth from lies so the nation can reestablish a baseline reality to function upon. America is so punch-drunk from official lying that many intelligent people who ought to know better now proclaim that reality is unknowable, which is just a surrender to nihilism — the rejection of moral principle, a belief that the human project is meaningless.
This awful condition has led to the point where you know for sure that “Joe Biden” cannot possibly discharge his duties as chief executive, and yet nobody cares enough to investigate who is running things behind the front he puts up. That would generally be the job of the news media, which is supposed to function as the public’s auditor. Now, of course, you are persuaded that this was never really their job, that it was a sham, but that is just another lie.
The news was not flawless, but neither was it presented as nothing more than opinion. The news existed to register what happened day-to-day. It was not so much concerned with why things happened, which was much more difficult to establish, and usually reserved for the pages labeled “opinion,” so that you knew it was somebody’s conjecture. I know this because I worked as a newspaper reporter in the 1970s. I actually found out what was going on about this-and-that, wrote it up, and saw it in print hours later. The facts.
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This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
Journalism had some simple rules for reporting the facts about anything — and it’s hilarious that anyone thought it required a graduate degree from some credentialing mill like the Columbia U. School of Journalism. The news was often meddled-with by interested parties, government and business, but they did not completely overwhelm the ant-like labors of x-thousands of reporters in the field, and the stream of fact they circulated. Not all of it was subject to dispute, meddling, or opinion because it was self-evident: Joe Blow got shot. . . a helicopter crashed in Ohio. . . a volcano erupted in Peru. . . .
Only over time, the past thirty years especially, our government grew and grew and one of the things that grew out of it was the nefarious “blob” dedicated to protecting the self-enlarging perquisites and interests of that government. Blobs will absorb things they encounter, and in a predatory way, the US government blob absorbed the US news media. The blob transformed the news into an engine for suppressing the facts or spinning them narratively when they could not be suppressed, in order to maximize the advantage of the government and to protect the operations of the blob itself.
It is also a fact that this blob is aligned mostly with the Democratic Party, because that party is most avid for the continuing growth of government, and its members overwhelmingly dominate in the officialdom that dwells inside the DC Beltway. The numbers speak for themselves on the DC voter rolls.
So, a new government under Mr. Trump is feared cringingly by the news media. For one thing, the incoming government has tasked itself with reducing government substantially, eliminating many of its perquisites, and surgically excising the nefarious blob that is draining the purpose, meaning, and vitality out of our national life. The news media is terrified of being found-out for having acted as the blob’s chamberlain. We may find out exactly how that worked — how, for example, professional liars such as Joy Reid and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC were paid. What accounted for the amazing coordination of talking-points from day-to-day across all networks and newspapers?
We are about to find out how a whole lot of mystifying things have happened in recent years. For instance, those fantastic vote switcheroos in “Joe Biden’s” favor that occurred visibly right on TV in the wee hours of November 4, 2020? How did William Barr conceal the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop from Mr. Trump’s defense attorneys in the 2019 impeachment over a phone call to Ukraine? Who really has been making “presidential” decisions behind the false front of “Joe Biden”? Who in the White House news reporters’ pool among the Cable News networks, The New York Times, and The Washington Post happened to know which officials were running the White House operation (did they not have sources)? How did the FBI engineer the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and with how many agents and operatives on-site? Who was in charge of the DNC pipe bomb caper? How has George and Alex Soros’s network of money-dispensing NGOs been allowed to buy law enforcement offices all over the country? How did Merrick Garland’s errand boys get to New York Attorney General Letitia James and Fulton County DA Fani Willis? What has been done with the billions of dollars sent to Ukraine? Why is the CDC still advertising and promoting mRNA Covid vaccines that they must know have killed and disabled millions of people? Who thought it was a good idea to fill the ranks of the US military with transsexuals? How did the order to throw the US-Mexican border wide open move through the chain-of-command, exactly? Things like that.
It is going to be a great shock for many to hear the facts about these things and a lot more and to learn that we don’t just dwell in some matrix of tales told by idiots. The nihilism will eventually dissipate. Many enterprises in the news business won’t survive this, but human beings will insist on being informed, and the news business has been very busy rearranging itself. Even the body politic is capable of self-healing
Meanwhile, the “Joe Biden” Catering Company, Inc, has been busy preparing a whole lot of shit sandwiches to serve at the Trump inauguration, mostly in the form of financial chaos. The catering staff better be cognizant that their pranks will be found-out, too, along with all the other treasonous business of the wicked times we’ve lived through.
In case you missed it, the 2025 Forecast is available HERE !
Another rousing novella to amuse you in the drear winter twilight. It is the summer of 1963 and Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, is mysteriously going under. People and things are disappearing.
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
JHK’s Roman a Clef overlooked novel about a heroine who is a media goddess of hearth-and-home, living the high life in Connecticut. Anyone come to mind? Yes, that’s right. Only in this story, her life is falling apart and her epic struggle to paste it back together ensues. A comedy of manners for our time!
Order Autographed From Battenkill Books
Order From Amazon
“Many Democrats were considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Mr. Trump from carrying out a right-wing transformation of American government. Others turned inward, searching for why the nation rejected them. They spoke about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda” — The New York Times
In July 27, 1794, the non-insane members of the Convention, or national legislative body in Paris, suddenly turned on the rabid Jacobin leader Maximillian Robespierre and overthrew his ruling tyrannical bunch — who had killed 40,000 of their fellow countrymen in the paranoid orgy known as The Reign of Terror. The next day, Robespierre rode the tumbrel to his own appointment with “the national razor” and the Thermidorian Reaction was on!
By the way, in one of their many acts disordering French society, the Jacobins had changed the calendar, renamed all the months, and changed the weeks from seven to ten days (to eliminate Sundays as a holy day of rest in their anti-church crusade). Thus, Thermidor, the month of mid-summer. This was but a small part of their proto-communist agenda, but you see in it the flavor of their radical extremism.
The Woke Democrats of recent times were our Jacobins, and the election of November 5, 2024, marks the kick-off of America’s Thermidorian Reaction. The crazies have been overthrown and our country awaits a restoration of norms in culture and law. No more sexualizing of children, no more flood of criminal mutts across the US border, no more furtive censorship of public speech, no more creative lawfare, no more women on the battlefield, no more “anti-racist” racism in the workplace, no more intel takeover of everyone’s private life. . . you get the picture.
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This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com
Many abiding mysteries about how this happened — even of what exactly did happen — remain to be sorted out by law and by history. That is probably because so much of the Woke Revolution was provoked by state-of-the-art mind-fuckery out of the giant intel blob’s psy-ops lab. This blob, you understand, had grown to be a colossal racketeering operation with many branches and ever-spreading roots, and it cast its spells over the populace to protect these interests — which, of course, involved huge revenue streams.
Perhaps its most potent spell was the manipulation of women’s emotion, harnessing female psychodrama as the propellant for mass social discord. In a nation of absent fathers, damaged children, and broken male-female relations, Donald Trump was painted as the ultimate archetypal tyrant Daddy figure to deflect the public’s attention from the actual tyranny growing under the US intel blob and its Globalist sidekicks. Case in point: RussiaGate, a long-running hysteria of fabricated accusations, a fabulous medley of scurrilous gossip, engineered at the highest levels of our government for the express purpose of wrecking Mr. Trump’s first term in office. “Witch hunt” was exactly the right term.
Many more psychodramas followed, all of them artificially cooked up by various branches of the blob: impeachments #1 and #2; the FBI-induced J-6 riot and the fake House J-6 inquiry that followed; the roll-out of DOJ-inspired fake criminal and civil cases that tied-up Mr. Trump in courtrooms through the year, and most especially the hostile news media’s presentation of all these things as one great big everlasting frenzy of on-screen women shrieking at the Daddy-figure, Donald Trump, like thirteen-year-old girls in fugues of hormonal disruption.
The voters, subject to years of trips laid on them, were eventually able to see through all this induced psychodrama as to how they were being manipulated, and on November 5, they finally revolted. Their quandary was probably epitomized by the absurdity of watching men in women’s sports — spiking volleyballs on the girls’ heads, bashing them on the lacrosse field, humiliating them in the swim lanes — and, more to the point, being helpless to do anything about it, because the officials in-charge under “Joe Biden” said it must be, no matter what you think and feel about what you are seeing.
The New York Times, your field-guide to blob-think, is warning its dwindling readership of psychodrama addicts that Donald Trump will now take out his “grievances” on the noble, self-sacrificing bureaucracy that manages things so well in this land. As usual, The Times misleads and misinforms. These are the grievances of the nation that has seen its law and its culture twisted into new orders of wickedness that leave daily life in the USA perverted, dishonored, and grotesquefied.
So now Mr. Trump has picked a cabinet that scares the blob to death — for good reason. They are aiming to systematically disarm and disassemble the blob. They are a team of serious and intelligent warriors and they mean business, in particular Gaetz, Gabbard, Kennedy, Ratcliffe, and Homan, with Elon and Vivek riding shotgun. (A new FBI Director has not yet been named.) You must wonder how the blob is planning to defend itself, for it surely will resist.
Many of us believe that the two recent assassination attempts against the now-President-elect were blob-sponsored operations. Everybody expects they’ll try again. But it’s possible that the American system still has enough mojo to self-correct. A whole lot of public officials have a whole lot of ‘splainin’ to do. It looks like they will be compelled to now, including the public health officers who brought us Covid-19 and the mandated, ineffective-and-harmful mRNA vaccines.
There’s every reason to believe that the ‘splainin’ can take place in correct proceedings according to law: hearings, grand juries, courts. We do have actual laws against racketeering, abuse of power, election fraud, bribery, malicious prosecution, sedition, treason, and conspiracy to commit all those crimes. Pay attention: all that is distinct from lawfare, which is making-up crimes, faking crimes, and faking procedure. You are going to see a demonstration of how law differs from lawfare. It ought to have a salutary effect on our national esprit. And that should motivate us to get on with the job of repairing the damage done to our country.
Note to Readers: We are finally rebuilding the Kunstler.com website on Substack — which was taken-down a month ago on another host platform by nefarious parties — so please direct your attention to the new navigation bar at the top of this blog-page where you will find the other departments and pages. There’s some work still to do. You can click on the montage of my book covers below to get to the reconstructed page of my published books.
You must admit, it’s a little spooky how quickly and rigorously Mr. Trump intends to deconstruct those parts of the government at war with the people: clean out “rogue bureaucrats,” firehose the malignant agencies, release and expose their document trails on spying, censorship, lawfare, and abuse-of-power. The consequence would be the return of consequence in our national life. It’s been absent for so long you can hardly imagine its power to get people’s minds right.
There are already reports of frenzy among the culpable DOJ lawyers, and FBI Director Wray is set to resign before Mr. Trump can fire him. Attorney General Merrick Garland has gone radio-silent for his own good since Election Day. Expect many abiding mysteries to get unraveled, such as exactly how many federal agents did work the crowd around the Capitol on J-6, 2021 — which Mr. Wray has pretended to not be able to discuss “due to ongoing investigations.” Expect to learn more about the pipe-bomb caper at the DNC HQ a few blocks away that same day. Prepare to be amazed at how deeply criminal these schemes were. You must wonder if the document-shredding party is already underway, despite calls to preserve all the emails, memos, and texts.
Then there are the poisoned realms of the intel blob located at CIA, DHS, State, DOD, and elsewhere being subject to inquiry and overhaul. Think: John Brennan, James Clapper, Bill Barr, Michael Atkinson, Mayorkas, Judge Boasberg, Mary McCord, Col. Vindman, Senator Warner, Avril Haines, Victoria Nuland, Samantha Power, Gina Haspel, Marie Yovanovitch, Jen Easterly, all their deputies, and many more unknown to the public. Some of these names may yet seem obscure to you. They were all neck-deep in what looks a lot like sedition, treason, real conspiracies, not theories. Even state officials such as New York AG Letitia James, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, and Fulton County, GA, DA Fani Willis, would be subject to federal charges under 18USC Section 242: willful deprivation of constitutional rights acting under color of law. That is exactly what the Trump lawfare cases amounted to.
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And then, of course, there are the long-running rumors of pedophilia and human trafficking networks among the elite, the Jeffrey Epstein list and the P. Diddy list. If these things exist, and they are released, history would shudder. Think: the Clinton Foundation.
These people are looking ahead 70 days with visions of shoes dropping and hammers falling. If the mysteries are revealed, it’s hard to imagine that criminal proceedings would not be far behind. You can also imagine that the motivation across a broad and powerful elite class runs white-hot to stop Mr. Trump from entering the Oval Office. So, these days ahead will be fraught with threats, schemes, plots, ploys, and deceptions. The paranoia must be out of this world among people who still have the resources and hold the levers-of-power needed to undertake nefarious deeds.
There is chatter about “a coup” being considered among as-yet-unnamed parties in the Pentagon to prevent Mr. Trump from rising back into power. It’s unclear how that would work among our high command of transsexual generals and admirals and their hapless DEI adjutants. The strata of colonels beneath them might have different ideas. But it could be the starting gun for actual civil war. We would find out what the Second Amendment is all about. “Joe Biden” likes to say that the citizenry can’t go up against his F-16 war-planes, but he evidently does not understand how much mischief can be made with small arms — rifles, grenades, rockets, drones — despite examples of it all over the world lately. That is hypothetical for now, of course.
In short, these are dangerous times. Mr. Trump would be advised to stay out of airplanes until inauguration day and to be extra-careful who he puts himself around, especially in public. You also must expect more lawfare of the most extreme sort going forward to January, every possible stone unturned to find procedural tricks to prevent certification of the election. Do you think Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, and Andrew Weissmann just laid back and watched football this weekend? They are probably quarterbacking efforts to finagle ballots for the remaining contested seats in Congress, in order to game-out Rep. Jamie Raskin’s well-publicized block-Trump play this coming Jan. 6.
These are the darkest and most explosive parts of Mr. Trump’s admirably deep to-do list for fixing the many things that have stopped working in American life. The simplest picture of our current predicament, and why people voted as they did, is of “things going in the wrong direction,” Well, what direction is that, exactly? The tyranny of giant forces over our little lives and communities. It’s a leviathan government seeking to invade and dominate everything — and to do it with maximum malice when resisted. It has left American men and women mentally disordered, demoralized, stolen their sense of purpose, deprived them of roles in society that provide meaning, alienated them from each other, and from their history. And it has left them, as Robert Kennedy points out, catastrophically unhealthy.
All of which is to say, we have more to clean up and reorganize than just our government. We’re going to get it done, you may be sure, even if the zeitgeist has to drag us kicking and screaming out of the malaise we’re stuck in. All of this points to some very different new arrangements to be made in our everyday life, beginning with the realization that the era of getting something-for-nothing is over.
Note to Readers: We are finally rebuilding the Kunstler.com website on Substack — which was taken-down a month ago on another host platform by nefarious parties — so please direct your attention to the new navigation bar at the top of this blog-page where you will find the other departments and pages. There’s some work still to do. You can click on the montage of my book covers below to get to the reconstructed page of my published books.
“Let folks cast their votes for Trump if that’s their choice. But mark my words, we won’t be certifying the election. He might win, but we’ll ensure he doesn’t step foot in the Oval Office.” — Jamie Raskin (D-MD)
At last, it appears that the Party of Chaos got its fondest wish: it aborted itself in the 2024 election. “Joe Biden” was the coat-hanger it used: this miserable, grifting, now-senile hack politician who will be remembered only for driving his country to the verge of ruin. And for what? All in an effort to cover-up a long train of crimes and abuses against the American people perpetrated by a permanent bureaucracy gone rogue that was the party’s partner-in-crime. And now it’s over.
The childishness of the Left — AOC whining about “fascism” — is under-appreciated. Note how the party’s most august mouthpiece, The New York Times, pretends to soul-search in the aftermath of the election debacle.
“Many Democrats were considering how to navigate a dark future, with the party unable to stop Mr. Trump from carrying out a right-wing transformation of American government. Others turned inward, searching for why the nation rejected them. They spoke about misinformation and the struggle to communicate the party’s vision in a diminished news environment inundated with right-wing propaganda” — The New York Times
The New York Times diminished itself. It drove itself crazy with narratives — just as a crazy person with disordered thoughts can’t discern what’s real and what’s not. What they need is a serious mental health check. The time for incessant lying, hoaxing, and performative hysteria is over. On Thursday, in a three-minute speech, the President-elect set out a clear list of measures to reconstruct a national consensus based on reality. It includes firing a lot of people in the agencies, dis-embedding all the inspector-generals from the departments they oversee, establishing a “truth and reconciliation commission” to declassify and publish documents “related to alleged deep state activities, including spying, censorship, and corruption,” and finding out who exactly at the CIA / FBI / DHS / and other places has been leaking fables and falsehoods to the news media. In other words, clear away a shit-ton of untruth that burdens the consciousness of the country.
Though the statement omitted to say so directly, it’s very likely that a number of public officials will find themselves before grand juries in the years ahead. If you haven’t figured it out already, you’ll learn that the term “misinformation” was just the gas in the gaslight used to confound the country about what has really been at stake — which is your personal liberty in what is supposed to be a free country. The Democratic Party and the Deep State blob really did try to steal that from you.
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As they stole the 2020 election — which is probably one of the things to be revealed in the process. Look at this bar graph. Note how many millions more votes were cast in the 2020 elections than in the two previous and now in the 2024 contest. How did that happen? Where did that surplus supply come from? The Covid-19 scam provided the cover for a profligate mail-in ballot operation. They deluged the country with paper. Mark Zuckerberg provided $450-million through his cut-out charities to hire thousands of party activists to harvest and fill-out fraudulent ballots, and stuff them in drop-boxes by the hundredweight, with special attention to the crucial precincts in swing states — and that’s what landed the basement-cringing candidate, “Joe Biden,” in the White House.
It was that simple, and that much in-your-face, and for four years the official organs of the news swatted the truth away claiming they were “false, baseless, conspiracy theories” — and half the country was credulous enough to believe that. Or mentally ill, not able to tell fantasy from reality, especially in the newsrooms. Even more shamefully, this half of the country was led by the better-educated, credentialed, managerial class of citizens, who, amazingly, managed to turn intelligence into a new kind of personal liability. (The simplest explanation for that astounding failure is that people who consider themselves “experts” eagerly believe other experts and credentialed authorities, making them easiest to dupe. That’s why the faculty lounges are full of Jacobins.)
The winning side in this contest didn’t vote against Kamala Harris so much as they voted against the Democratic Party, the Party of Chaos, of BLM riots, of drag queens in the school library, of men in the women’s swim lane (and locker room), of forced vaccinations (your bodily autonomy, sister?), of locking up grandmothers who walked through the Capitol rotunda, of state-driven censorship, of malicious political prosecutions, of ruinous proxy war, of flooding the country with criminal alien mutts, of Mao Zedong style erasing of history, of FISA court surveillance, and, finally, of the same sort of self-loathing for the nation that a three hundred pound sophomore with a nose ring and sleeve tattoos feels for herself.
Indeed, the page is turning, but the story has suddenly changed. It remains to be seen whether the Democratic Party blows up altogether now in what’s shaping up to be a time of harsh recrimination, or whether its front-line activists, Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco and Company skulk in the background hatching new schemes to try to drive the republic insane. They’ll have to work fast because the law might be coming after them in January. But they surely know that.
Between now and then, prepare to put your shoulder to the wheel. It’s not just the US government that begs for reform, but many of the secular operations of daily life in America, especially of an economic scene dominated by freakishly gigantic monopolies that have impoverished so many local communities, destroyed livelihoods and whole ways of life, and made slaves of citizens. That story has hardly begun to be told.
NEW: Post-election Coffee-and-a-Mike Podcast with JHK / Dave Collum / Mike Farris
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The master collection of JHK blogs 2017 to 2024. For your reading pleasure.
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Elizabeth Nickson was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in its last years of monthly publication, and during that time, acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoir before he was released from the Robben Island prison. She went on to write for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Her first book The Monkey Puzzle Tree was an investigation of the CIA MKULTRA mind control program. Her next book, Eco-Fascists; How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, was a look at how environmentalism, badly practiced, is destroying the rural economy and rural culture in the U.S. and all over the world. She is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Center for Public Policy, fcpp.org. Her excellent blog is Welcome to Absurdistan at Substack.
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These paintings of the landscape around Washington County, New York, were made in 2023. I am searching for the right balance between the way nature presents itself and the denatured industrial detritus we humans introduce to the scenes. Sometimes the right chord is struck and something beautiful emerges, even from the strangest arrangements of things.
Interested buyers can contact me at jhkunstler@mac.com for sizes and prices.
Clematis and Hollyhocks through the Garden Gate
Abandoned Railroad Trestles, Clarks Mills, NY
Halloween on John Street
Outside the H & V Factory
The Spring Hole in August, Shushan, New York
1952 Desoto off Wilbur Road
High Corn, Black Creek Road
Wreck on Cozy Hollow Road, Early Spring, Greenwich New York
Egret on a Sand Bank, Battenkill River, Greenwich, New York
O’Donnell Hill Road, May
The Hollow Core Dam, Clarks Mills, Spring
Battenkill River off Skellie Road
THE BOOKText within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
*You can own Jim’s paintings in book form. For information,* click here.
These paintings of the landscape around Washington County, New York, were made in 2022. As the season wore on, I was drawn to groups of human figures (and supernatural beings) in the landscape. Or maybe I just happened to find myself where they were by some odd instance of synchronicity. It was a tough year psychologically for our nation — though, not for me, personally — and I think that is reflected in the subject matter.
Interested buyers can contact me at jhkunstler@mac.com for sizes and prices.
Corn and Cars, Route 64, Cambridge, NY
Ghost House, Springtime
Barrel Racers, Cambridge, NY
Deconstruction of the Shushan Bridge
with Bonnie Reading
Lock Six of the Champlain Canal with Sailboat
Boys with Float Tube on the Battenkill
The Family Outing
(Fishing on the Old Champlain Canal, under the Catalpa Tree)
Logging Operation on Spraguetown Road
Halloween is a Happy Holiday
Lock 6 of the Champlain Canal with Bridge
The Hollow Core Dam at Clarks Mills
Springtime, Middle Falls Road
THE BOOKText within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
*You can own Jim’s paintings in book form. For information,* click here.
These paintings of the landscape around Washington County, New York, were made in 2021. I am increasingly interested in the human detritus on the landscape. The contrast between all that and the natural beauty of this region, can be startling. All were painted sur le motif.
Interested buyers can contact me at jhkunstler@mac.com for sizes and prices.
Parking at Pook’s Swimming Hole
The Slate Bank at Shushan — SOLD
The New Bridge at Clark’s Mills
The H & V Factory Center Falls, February — Sold
Shushan Springtime — SOLD
The Bridge at Center Falls, April
The Battenkill Behind the Georgi Museum, Shushan —SOLD
The Sand Bar on the Battenkill, Shushan
Burton Road in the Fall
Bonnie Reading by Fish Creek, Springtime
The Horse Ring, Shushan
The Historic Schuyler House, November
The Shushan Bridge, Fall
The Slate Bank, small —SOLD
Back Hoe in Landscape
THE BOOKText within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
*You can own Jim’s paintings in book form. For information,* click here.
Young Man Blues: Notes on a Nervous Adolescence by James Howard Kunstler is not merely a recollection of adolescent hardships but a profound exploration of the complexities of entering adulthood amidst personal and societal turmoil.
In Young Man Blues, Kunstler does not merely recount the trials of his youth; he offers a contemplative and often humorous look at the rites of passage into adulthood. The book is both a personal memoir and a broader commentary on the societal shifts and cultural challenges that shape the journey from youth to maturity.
“This is not a sob story. It's a story about the difficulties of growing into manhood and my own particular struggle with disabling anxiety that came along with it, and how I managed to find my way. That was more than fifty years ago. American life was more comfortable and comprehensible than it is now as we face the discords of what I call the long emergency. I still had a hard time. I observe that boys today are up against a whole lot more in their quest to become fully functional adult men.” — JHK
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"I started my blog, Clusterfuck Nation, almost twenty years ago to chronicle the week-by-week process of our collapsing civilization… What I had not anticipated in The Long Emergency was how badly the process of collapse would disorder the minds of the whole American population and, with that, the consensus about reality." -James Howard Kunstler, CrazyLand
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These paintings of the landscape around Washington County, New York, were made in 2020, except for two that date from back to 2016-18 I hadn’t posted before. Sometimes it takes me a long time to decide whether I consider them worthy of publication. I am increasingly interested in the human detritus on the landscape. The contrast between all that and the natural beauty of this region, can be startling. All were painted sur le motif.
Interested buyers can contact me at jhkunstler@mac.com for sizes and prices.
Portable Platform Machine with a View, Dunbar Road
Lock 5 of the Champlain Canal
Logging Operation, McCormack Road, Spring
Earthmover and Car, Center Falls
The H & V Dam on the Battenkill
The Swimming Hole at Pooks, Shushan — Sold
The Ruins of the RailRoad Bridge, Greenwich
Sacred Heart Lake in September
Ruins of the Railroad Bridge, Greenwich 2
Redfield Road, Early Evening —SOLD
Looking East from Scotch Hill
Ruined Railroad Trestles in the Fall
The Hollingsworth & Vose Factory, Clarks Mills, Spring — SOLD
THE BOOKText within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
*You can own Jim’s paintings in book form. For information,* click here.
James Howard Kunstler is an American author, social critic, and public speaker known primarily for his work on urban planning, architecture, and the built environment. Born on October 19, 1948, Kunstler gained widespread recognition for his book The Geography of Nowhere (1993), which critiques the sprawl, automobile dependency, and poor design of suburban America. He has also written several other books, such as Home from Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, and The Long Emergency, the last of which discusses the potential consequences of peak oil and the decline of industrial society.
Kunstler is a vocal advocate for walkable communities, sustainable devel-opment, and a return to traditional urban design principles. He has been a frequent guest on various media outlets and has delivered numerous talks on these subjects.
In addition to his work as an author and social critic, Kunstler has pursued his passion for painting. Kunstler's artwork often focuses on landscapes, town-scapes, and other scenes that reflect his interest in the built environment and traditional urban design. In this collection of paintings, you will find most of his artwork, which showcases his paintings along with a personal description of the artwork subject matter, historical context, and artistic significance. His dual talents as a writer and painter contribute to his unique perspective on urban planning and the importance of creating sustainable, aesthetically pleasing communities. Interested buyers of the original artwork can contact James Howard Kunstler by visiting: kunstler.com/gallery
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Buy on Amazon | Buy from Battenkill BooksForget the speculation of pundits and media personalities. For anyone asking "Now what?" the answer is out there. You just have to know where to look.
In his 2005 book, The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler described the global predicaments that would pitch the USA into political and economic turmoil in the 21st century—the end of affordable oil, climate irregularities, and flagging economic growth, to name a few. Now, he returns with a book that takes an up-close-and-personal approach to how real people are living now—surviving The Long Emergency as it happens.
Through his popular blog, Clusterfck Nation, Kunstler has had the opportunity to connect with people from across the country. They've shared their stories with him—sometimes over years of correspondence—and in Living in the Long Emergency: Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward*, he shares them with us, offering an eye-opening and unprecedented look at what's really going on "out there" in the US—and beyond.
Kunstler also delves deep into his past predictions, comparing and contrastingt hem with the way things have unfolded with unflinching honesty. Further, he turns an eye to what's ahead, laying out the strategies that will help all of us as we navigate this new world.
With personal accounts from a Vermont baker, homesteaders, a building contractor in the Baltimore ghetto, a white nationalist, and many more, Living in the Long Emergency is a unique and timely exploration of how the lives of everyday Americans are being transformed, for better and for worse, and what these stories tell us both about the future and about human perseverance.
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Buy on Amazon | Buy from Battenkill Booksames Howard Kunstler’s critically acclaimed and best-selling The Long Emergency, originally published in 2005, quickly became a grassroots hit, going into nine printings in hardcover. Kunstler’s shocking vision of our post-oil future caught the attention of environmentalists and business leaders alike, and stimulated widespread discussion about our dependence on fossil fuels and our dysfunctional financial and government institutions. Kunstler has since been profiled in the New Yorker and invited to speak at TED. In Too Much Magic, Kunstler evaluates what has changed in the last seven years and shows us that, in a post-financial-crisis world, his ideas are more relevant than ever.
“Too Much Magic” is what Kunstler sees in the bright visions of a future world dreamed up by optimistic souls who believe technology will solve all our problems. Their visions remind him of the flying cars and robot maids that were the dominant images of the future in the 1950s. Kunstler’s image of the future is much more sober. With vision, clarity of thought, and a pragmatic worldview, Kunstler argues that the time for magical thinking and hoping for miracles is over, and the time to begin preparing for the long emergency has begun.
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Buy on Amazon | Buy from Battenkill BooksIn The Long Emergency celebrated social commentator James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production, combined with climate change, had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. In World Made by Hand, an astonishing work of speculative fiction, Kunstler brings to life what America might be, a few decades hence, after these catastrophes converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is nothing like they thought it would be. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy, and the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president, and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. Their challenges play out in a dazzling, fully realized world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers, no longer polluted, and replenished with fish. With the cost of oil skyrocketing—and with it the price of food—Kunstler’s extraordinary book, full of love and loss, violence and power, sex and drugs, depression and desperation, but also plenty of hope, is more relevant than ever.
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Buy on Amazon | Buy from Battenkill BooksAmerican people are sleepwalking into a future of hardship and turbulence. James Howard Kunstler, one of our shrewdest and most engaging social commentators, tells what to expect when we pass the tipping point of global peak oil production and enter the long arc of depletion - economic, political, and social changes on an epochal scale - sooner than we think.
The Long Emergency will change everything. Globalism will wither. Life will become profoundly and intensely local. The consumer economy will be a strange memory. Suburbia - considered a birthright and a reality by millions of Americans - will become untenable. We will struggle to feed ourselves. We may exhaust and bankrupt ourselves in the effort to prop up the unsustainable. And finally, the United States may not hold together as a nation. We are entering an uncharted territory of history.
The Long Emergency is a startling vision of what lies ahead, bringing new urgency and accessibility to the critical issues that will shape our future, and which we can no longer afford to ignore.
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Buy on Amazon | Buy from Battenkill BooksThe Geography of Nowhere traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots.
In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness. The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good. "The future will require us to build better places," Kunstler says, "or the future will belong to other people in other societies."
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You thought Halloween was over, but somehow the horror show won’t stop, and it’s not so much fun anymore. Those oversized ghouls, werewolves, and dead souls you erected in the front yard, like shrines to wickedness, represent something truly roiling and moiling around the zeitgeist of this troubled land: the ruling Party of Chaos. Look at what they have done to you and what they are still doing. Hoaxing you, sucking the life-blood out of you, and lying about everything. Wrecking the country.
Why does it seem that the Democratic Party is in it solely to remain in power? I will tell you: because it controls the money-flows to the vast cadres of a vicious parasitical bureaucracy and its support system of outside orgs that commit crimes and make war on the rest of us. It’s called “the blob” for a reason. It’s exactly like that monster out of the 1950s horror movies, a shape-shifting leviathan that devours everything in its path with only one purpose, to grow ever larger until it consumes. . . everything.
In my state of New York last week, the DEC authorities sent a swat team to seize a man and woman’s pet squirrel and raccoon and then killed the animals. Why? Because they could. How is that different from the DOJ swatting and seizing a grandmother for walking through the US capitol building and then stuffing her in prison for the rest of her natural life on misdemeanor charges? It’s not different. They are both demonstrations of deliberate cruelty — and that’s why the squirrel story resonated so widely around the country. You know exactly what it says: we can take whatever is dear to you. . . your pets. . . your livelihood. . . your freedom. . . your life.
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Who failed to notice that candidate Kamala Harris was unable to articulate any coherent notion about how her government might manage its business beyond some empty nostrums about “joy,” and “turning the page”? Because the party’s actual purpose, which it hides and lies about, is just to push you around, tell you what to do and what to think, and to punish you if you don’t comply — in other words, to exercise despotic power. It can’t do anything else with that power.
It lacks the competence to manage an economy from the top down, and it certainly won’t allow the countless volitional transactions of people at liberty to produce and sell things of value on their own. It will go to war against anything to steal more money: some pitiful foreign kleptocracy of a country. . . the liberty-minded people of our own country. . . against sound ideas, proven principles, standards of decency, and, not unusually, against reality itself.
And now you and I face the ordeal of an election that, by design, will be nearly impossible to audit, will remain inconclusive for weeks, and subject to endless dispute. Why, because it serves the purpose of the Party of Chaos, which is. . . chaos! The scheme was to introduce so many devices of uncertainty as to guarantee political paralysis. Why else would you use batteries of hugely expensive computerized vote-counting machines that can be easily hacked, untraceable mail-in ballots with no chains of custody, the automatic registration of non-citizens, and laws (as in California) to literally forbid the requirement of voter-ID?
This was the work of lawfare terrorist Marc Elias — with hundreds of millions of dollars at his disposal, some from the government itself, a bunch from the party, and some from rogue billionaires such as George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman, and then disbursed surreptitiously through hundreds of NGOs — to elect officials such as Secretaries of State and district attorneys who will ignore or bend the law, to pay off state legislators around the country to change voting rules, to hire brigades of ballot “harvesters,” and to file ruinous lawsuits against anyone who objects to these pranks. It is an enormous, dastardly machine designed to deprive you of your consent to be governed. It is the work of political psychopaths.
You’ve no doubt heard about one of the blob’s instrumental players, Rep. Jamie Raskin’s audacious plan to un-do the election, should Donald Trump happen to generate a landslide vote that overwhelms Marc Elias’s ballot-box-stuffing operation. The Raskin scheme is to disqualify Mr. Trump as an “insurrectionist” by an act of Congress before the January 6 certification ceremony. Of course, that would suppose a Democratic majority in Congress, which is unlikely to be the case.
But Mr. Raskin put his foot in his mouth so deeply that he nearly choked to death last week when, discussing election matters with entertainer Bill Maher on TV, Mr. Raskin stated that he would accept the results only of a free and fair election — with himself left to determine whether it was free and fair. This, you understand, is exactly what he accuses Donald Trump of doing in 2020: thinking-and-saying that the election might not have been free and fair.
The problem for Mr. Raskin is that this sort of “election denial” he exhibits is exactly the basis for accusing Mr. Trump of “insurrection” in the first place. Thus: Mr. Raskin has just made a potential “insurrectionist” of himself. What’s more, as if the Jack Smith Case in Judge Chutkan’s DC court was not already compromised enough by the SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity, Mr. Trump’s lawyers can now call Jamie Raskin as a witness in the case, play the video of his remarks to Bill Maher, and ask him how expressing doubt about the freeness or fairness of an election amounts to “insurrection.”
One way or another, looks like we’re in for a hard, anxious winter. Threats galore loom concerning possible blob / Party of Chaos mischief ahead, designed to disorder our national life: false flags prompting the imposition of martial law. . . aggressive censorship and cancellation of free-speaking regime opponents. . . deployment of Antifa mobs against civil order, with violence, looting, arson. This symbiotic enemy of the people is desperate to evade accountability for the crimes they’ve already committed as officials running institutions: abuse of power, conspiracy to deprive many citizens of their civil rights, perhaps even treason. They’re capable of anything. They must be defeated.
The master collection of JHK blogs 2017 to 2024. For your reading pleasure.
Autographed copies from Battenkill BooksOr order from Amazon**
Also, while my website is being reconstructed, have a look at JHK’s paintings with interview (click here):
Along about now, you’re probably wondering what sort of mayhem the Party of Chaos is set to unleash on our democracy after their mighty ballot fraud operation fails to overcome the yet more powerful instinct of the voters to expel them from the seats of power they seized by fraud in 2020 and 2022. You can be sure they’ve gamed-out a playbook aimed at paralyzing the nation one way or another if the effort to install Kamala Harris in the White House face-plants, as it appears to be doing in these final days before the reckoning.
Rioting, arson, and looting in the cities? Not so much. Probably some, but only because it’s an excuse for 100-percent-off sale “shopping,” plus the need for hordes of dopamine-deprived youth to seek a little dangerous excitement — in a society that gives them nothing meaningful or purposeful to do. It’d surely reflect poorly on the regime clinging to power in the months before January 20. Anyway, “Joe Biden,” Kamala, and company would be blamed for letting the cities get wrecked again, and then double-blamed by their own partisans if they try to stop it with the national guard. It’s a no-win deal for them.
More likely, the Party will hijack the nation’s legal machinery to cancel the election ex post facto. They’ve done a swell job in advance setting up conditions that make it difficult if not impossible to sort out legal ballots cast from the frauds. So, expect the Party’s chief lawfare ninja Marc Elias, and his zillion-dollar-funded cadre of pettifoggers, to contest the swing-state precincts where their ballot-harvest somehow fell short a few bushels. They’ll file enough lawsuits to gum up the courts until the sun becomes a red dwarf.
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If the actual numbers add up to a Trump victory, the Democrats will re-brand that as the new “Big Lie” and commence a strenuous campaign in the old media to gaslight the public into believing the vote-count isn’t what it looks like. After all, numbers are math and math is racist. That will provide the rationale, and furnish the game-space, to stop Trump by other means.
Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has already advertised his scheme to knock Mr. Trump off the game-board by using Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to declare him an “insurrectionist,” disqualified from holding office. Of course, Mr. Trump has not been charged, indicted, or convicted for insurrection, nor was anyone involved in the J-6 protest and riot.
Insurrection was supposed to be established as fact by the House J-6 Committee, but it died of illegitimacy after destroying all its accumulated records last year, including documents in evidence and the videos of all the witnesses it deposed. Whoops. The Jack Smith prosecution in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s DC Federal District court was a backup plan for that, but the July SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity has, so far, gummed up that ploy. Mr. Raskin would need a Democratic House majority to pass such a resolution, in any case, and it looks unlikely that he will have that.
A rather desperate gambit to oust Mr. Trump with a military coup, first advanced by former Pentagon official Rosa Brooks in a February, 2017, op-ed in the high-toned journal Foreign Policy, and reiterated by Nancy Pelosi in January, 2021, has been resurrected now that Mr. Trump is firmly branded as Hitler by the Party of Chaos — meaning he can be eliminated by any means necessary. “Joe Biden’s” woked-up generals might be game for a coup, but they’d have to overcome a lot of counter-coup-minded, not-so-woked-up colonels to get there.
Anyway you cut it, the hysteria in the body politic is running at a pitch — as Mr. Trump himself might say — that has never been seen before, at least not since Fort Sumter. The Democrats complain that a Trump victory means the Department of Justice will be weaponized against them. Is that rich, or what? It actually tells the whole story since you know the Party always accuses its opponents of exactly what it is already doing.
Speaking of which, we must look forward to Judge Juan Merchan’s November 26th sentencing of Mr. Trump in DA Alvin Bragg’s “Stormy Daniels hush money” case. It’s out there, looming, and it ain’t going away. Judge Merchan is going to have to do. . . something! The jury has pronounced Mr. Trump guilty of those 34 “felonies” (based on 34 book-keeping entries, originally misdemeanors, and beyond the applicable statute of limitations).
I’d like to see the Judge stash the president-elect in the Rikers Island lockup for a few hours. It’ll be a better stunt than Mr. Trump’s shift serving fries at McDonald’s, or riding the garbage truck after “Joe Biden” called more than half the country that supports him “garbage.” Because a few hours after Mr. Trump settles into his Rikers cell and enjoys his first boloney sandwich, the SCOTUS is going to turn a flame thrower on Judge Merchan and Alvin Bragg and vacate the absurd case and every half-assed procedure that was used to arrive at it, and refer Merchan and Bragg for disbarment for professional misconduct, malicious prosecution, and failure to uphold the law.
Which means, if Juan Merchan has an ounce of sense, on or before November 26th he will find an excuse to dismiss his own case (yes, he can) on the grounds of procedural irregularities, or insufficient evidence. . . or some other Mickey Mouse grounds. . . and suck up the humiliation. . . and get on with his life. . . hoping (and maybe even praying) that sometime after January 20th, 2025, he does not find himself under indictment, along with several other Biden-era lawfare ninjas, for conspiracy to deprive the once and future president of his civil rights.
The days just ahead will be filled with tension and angst, I know. Make sure you vote. After Tuesday, our country will be politically fogged-in for a while. Hunker down, keep your heads screwed on, and have faith in each other. The cause is a righteous one. MASA: Make America Sane Again.
JHK and Dave Collum on the Coffee and a Mike Podcast with Mike Farris. Recorded on Wednesday.
Listen to Coffee and a Mike Podcast
The master collection of JHK blogs 2017 to 2024. For your reading pleasure.
Autographed copies from Battenkill Books
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Also, while my website is being reconstructed, have a look at JHK’s paintings with interview (click here):
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Mike McCormick was a White House staff stenographer for fifteen years in the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. He spent many years assigned to Veep Joe Biden and went on many overseas trips with him. His task was to record conversations between Joe Biden and members of the press to ensure accurate reporting, but he was also present at meetings with global leaders. He’s the author of Joe Biden Unauthorized, The Case to Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden, and Fifteen Years A Deplorable: A White House Memoir. He blogs at: Midnight in the Laptop of Good and Evil on Substack.
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What were they thinking after they shoved “Joe Biden” into the abyss, like an old refrigerator over the edge of the landfill, and afterward settled — instantly it appears, with no process at all — on Kamala Harris to lead the party to victory in the fall election? I will tell you: they were not thinking at all. The collective mind of the Democrat elite was a vast vacuum devoid of thought, mass, or light, like a corner of deepest space, lacking even a particle of cosmic debris to evoke the existence of existence.
Such mindlessness was the consummate expression of a party that for eight years worked every angle of political mental illness toward the loss of its mind, driven by whatever dark energy seeks escape from truth, life, and God — whatever is opposite of creation and being. What you are witnessing is a colossal act of being un-born. The party put out a call to the universe and the universe ordered. . . an abortion of the Democratic Party! You are reminded again: be careful of what you wish for.
And so do things stand one week before the election. You have not seen such a vivid demonstration of slowly-and-then-all-at-once since the implosion of Lehman Brothers as the collapse of the Democratic Party this fateful October. Poor Kamala is just collateral damage at this point. She goes out before some manufactured audience and seven-minutes onstage delivering a door-dash order of precooked blather is all she can stand before being overwhelmed by the emptiness and futility of her task. . . and then she flees back to the waiting limousine (and the chardonnay bottle).
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Meanwhile, her allies — that is, the Democratic Party’s allies — play their own roles in this political abortion. The LA Times and the WashPo declined their usual proforma endorsements, two kisses of death. Those actions last week provoked nervous breakdowns in both newsrooms, cries of anguish, resignations, professional suicides. The news media find themselves in a peculiar position, having gone along for years with the gathering mental illness of the Democratic Party, like incompetent parents in a large dysfunctional family, offering unconditional support for their kids’ intolerable and unacceptable behavior.
They are flying to pieces now on the CNN chat panels. James Carville, the party’s shriveled Gollum, has gone to IV infusions of Jim Beam, seems like. Jake Tapper gets Sunday schooled by JD Vance and turns into a mewling cat-lady right before your eyes. Anderson Cooper goes all waxy and mute. Joy Reid surrenders to echolalia as her MSNBC fans are subjected to the guest list of P. Diddy’s “freak-offs,” ranting about Hitler. Lawrence O’Donnell is looking more and more like Vincent Price in Return of the Fly. Reality-optional hardly suffices to describe cable news these days.
You’ve got to ask: can they just let it be? Can they just let go of their insane Jacobin rebellion now and let it fade into history? Then, kick back, recuperate, get their minds right, put their house and family in order, and move on as a legit political faction in a functioning republic? Or, do they burn the asylum down?
The signals are troubling. They are chattering about Mr. Trump “using the military” against them in the months to come — as if the Abrams tanks were going to roll up to DNC headquarters and blast away. By now, you know that such thoughts expressed by Democratic pols and news pals are always projections of their own wishes. The New York Times published just such a classic paranoid projection exercise last week “. . . telling Americans that if he [Trump] wins, he plans to bend, if not break, our democracy.”
Surely it is too late, with early voting well underway, to stop any ballot harvesting and other election shenanigans as engineered by master fraudster Marc Elias. In fact, frauds are already being discovered (e.g., Lancaster County, PA). Not a good look. It is exactly what a conspiracy (to commit election fraud) means in law, and the actual people who cooked the ballots and transported them are going to rat-out those who instructed them to do it. Wait for that, and wait for it to pop up elsewhere around the country. This time, watchers are watching, much more carefully.
Of course, you know there will be long delays, perhaps a week or more, before definitive election results will get posted. The country’s in a bad way, really frightened of what these desperate Democrats with their mitts still on the levers of power might do. Judge Merchan is scheduled to deliver his bit of mischief November 26 in the New York “Stormy Daniels hush money” case. You can bet that the Supreme Court will squash him like a sow-bug five minutes later and vacate his stupid case.
Reasonable observers (Rickards, Armstrong) are whispering about martial law and blood in the streets following the election. Yet Mr. Trump’s MAGA legions appear supernaturally confident now, fortified with a sense of mission. They’re righteously pissed-off about all the hoaxes, the lawfare, the swarming illegal migrants, their squandered tax dollars, and much more. But they are ready to go to work, eager to put their shoulders to the wheel to fix whatever they can and, as they do, the death of the Democratic Party is one abortion they will not shed any tears over.
Another reminder of who we are as Americans and the mysterious workings of Providence: Father Mapple’s sermon — Orson Welles in the John Huston movie version of Melville’s Moby Dick:
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“Normally, Western politics gives us actors who are trying to play the role of politicians. Walz is like an actor who is trying to play the role of an actor trying to play the role of a politician. Almost everything about him is just a few degrees off-centre. He’s like what would happen if you endowed Chat GPT with a human body and sent it off to campaign for political office.” —Eugyppius on Substack
Tuesday night’s veep palaver could be the last time you see the frightened animal known as Tim Walz for the duration of the campaign. He’s famous for his wild body language — jumping around on stage, flapping his arms — but this time the action was all concentrated in his face. You saw his eyes bug out, dart left and right, as if something fierce was coming at him (it was), and more than a few times, his head jerked around sideways so hard you wondered if it might do a whole three-sixty. His mouth, a pain-inflected frown in repose, turned down so deeply it looked like he had sashweights hanging from the corners. Altogether, his face said more than the embarrassing mishmash of mangled English that came out of it. I expect to see a few Tim Walz masks on the little goblins begging for Kit-kat bars the night of October 31.
That same obvious void of conviction you see on Tim Walz’s labile face is on display with the feds’ response to mass tragedy in the Appalachian hurricane zone. It was a point in my book, The Long Emergency, that our national government would become increasingly impotent, ineffectual, and incompetent as conditions worsened — and now here it is. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), could not bestir itself to aid stricken citizens around the flood-ravaged region in North Carolina and Tennessee. Sec’y Mayorkas of Homeland Security said that FEMA was out of money which, in this season of political weirdness, is especially weird, seeing as how the nation’s fiscal year began Oct 1, and Congress’s continuing resolution for funding US agencies should assure that FEMA’s checkbook is full. What was up with that?
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Well, everybody and his uncle has heard by now that FEMA (and many other agencies under Mayorkas’s DHS) commits tons of money to pamper the millions of mutts from foreign lands sneaking over the US border, with lots of assistance from NGO cut-outs funded by your tax dollars, who marshal groups of aliens south-of-the-border for the crossing, and then fly or bus them around our country for the special purpose of distributing them in swing voting districts to then coordinate with other NGOs devoted to registering non-citizens to vote in order to “harvest” their ballots. Quite an operation. Completely lawless and corrupt. And official!
So, no aid for you, baskets of deplorables, shivering in the dark in your hills and hollows of Appalachia, your houses splintered, scant chattels lost, and your beloved hound-dogs carried away in the roaring torrents. The money that might have helped you begin to recover from the complete devastation of your lives is paying for Guatemalans to bunk in the Roosevelt Hotel and order-in quesadillas and churros, and refill their government-issued debit cards so they can afford a few nice things as they wait for mysterious others to cast ballots in their names.
This is the work of your Democratic Party, the party of chaos, party of the Woke mentally ill, party of wrecking the country, of America’s end times. And you’re going to vote for more of it? Of course not. And despite the attempts to knock him out of the arena with scores of utter bullshit lawfare cases, and efforts to shoot him dead, Mr. Trump keeps coming at them, an implacable, relentless force, the true Golden Golem conjured up by their catamite news media. Their inability to destroy him has wrecked their minds.
One surprising October surprise is advanced by whistleblower Mike McCormick on Substack (Midnight in the Laptop of Good and Evil). Mr. McCormick was White House stenographer under Presidents Bush II, Obama, and Trump. His job was to transcribe meetings, speeches, and interactions between major political figures. He was the proverbial fly-on-the-wall for years and years. He has seen and heard a lot and still hears a lot from people who know a lot. He says the Obama-Biden-Harris faction of the Deep State blob is anti-Israel and that Israel understands what this means. He says that Benjamin Netanyahu has told “Joe Biden” (or, let’s say, told errand-boys Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan) that if the blob engineers a phony victory for Kamala Harris, he will blow up the oil fields in Iran and the anti-Israel Democrats will have to pick up the pieces.
There it is, raw power politics, like so much meat on the table. “Joe Biden” cannot control Bibi. “Joe Biden” is too far gone and two weak, and Israel does not aim to let itself get wiped off the map, as Iran’s leadership never tires of saying. The blob, McCormick says, has to ask itself: does it help rig the election for Harris or stand down on all its ballot harvesting and other trickery and actually allow a real election to roll out? Surprise! Now, take your Kit-kat bar and go home.
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Halloween on John Street
Thus spake the Haircut-in-Search-of-a-Brain who ran for president in 2004. Something must have been amiss in Conception Central the night God made John Kerry. Maybe they were low on inventory up there for the stuff that goes inside the head, so they overdid it on the roofing material. Maybe they assigned him an extra testicle, too, in compensation. It certainly took balls (but not brains) to assert from the stage of the World Economic Forum (WEF) that free speech is cluttering up America’s march to totalitarianism.
Mr. Kerry’s hapless utterance tells you all you need to know about how the party of John F. Kennedy turned years later into a demon-driven cult seeking to smash everything that was once noble and upright about our country. If there is any such thing as disinformation — and the claim is dubious since, really, there is only truth and untruth — then the chief dispenser of it is our own depraved government. Every morsel it issues is some species of Orwellian counter-think.
Just yesterday, former Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking of Mr. Trump returning to office, told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki: “They will use the mechanisms of the DOJ to go after people who are their political foes. This is something that has never really happened in the history of this republic.” Mr. Holder may have been born at night, but probably not the night before last. Apparently, he has not noticed the uses to which current AG Merrick Garland has put “Joe Biden’s” DOJ, bending heaven, earth, and the law to put Mr. Trump behind bars and bankrupt him — not to mention the scores of Trump-adjacent lawyers prosecuted in cockamamie cases based on their efforts to pursue ballot fraud in the 2020 elections.
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Hillary Clinton was similarly on-point last week with Margaret Hoover on PBS’s Firing Line, declaring: “The press needs a consistent narrative about the danger that Trump poses.” Of course, she asserts this incessantly — and the media parrots her — without ever specifying what that danger is. So, I will tell you: Hillary Clinton and hundreds of Democratic Party affiliated officials past and present fear that they will be subjected to legal process in crimes ranging all the way up to treason for their conduct the past decade, including the mass murder and injury of millions with their Covid policy, their deliberate abetting of millions crossing the border illegally, their use of several government agencies to abridge the First Amendment, their abuse of DOJ and FBI power in malicious prosecutions, their shell games funneling taxpayers’ money to hundreds of crony NGOs, and their use of Ukraine as a money laundry for the entire Beltway criminal cartel. Surely even more than that.
It was the last item on that list that prompted impeachment No. 1 of Mr. Trump, who came uncomfortably close to inquiring about it in that fateful 2019 phone call to President Zelensky. And, of course, it was exactly in that maw of corruption that the Biden family helped itself to millions of grifted dollars while Joe was out-of-office, and his bagman-crackhead son gamboled about the globe shaking loose more millions from exotic money-trees wherever he landed. All of which is to say that the “danger” Mr. Trump poses is to them personally and directly, certainly not to “our democracy,” their phony war-cry. So, now you know.
Many of these players have gone to ground the past year or more. You don’t hear much these days from the likes of Jim Comey, John Brennan, Jim Clapper, Andy McCabe, Tony Fauci, Peter Hotez, and many more who were so active shooting their mouths off on cable news after the blob managed to install “Joe Biden” as its “beard” in the Oval Office. Now, they all lie low in terror as the immense battery of lawfare against Mr. Trump failed spectacularly to stop him from running again, and the first two attempts on his life went awry. Meanwhile, Garland, Mayorkas, Christopher Wray, remain in the trenches, reduced to stonewalling every and all efforts to get straight answers out of them as to how badly they are running things. And out in front of all of them you have their supposed protector, Kamala Harris, the most feckless candidate imaginable. No wonder they’re so desperate.
In contrast to all this low-down treachery in-and-around the craven Party of Chaos and, its corrupt, depraved agents fearing the turn of genuine law against them, there was the Rescue the Republic event on the mall in Washington Sunday. The intelligence and honesty on view there was a startling reminder of the sentiments that birthed our country in the first place. RFK, Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Taibbi, Senator Ron Johnson, Del Bigtree, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Robert Malone, and many more figures aligning with the Trump campaign, delivered one stirring message after another informing us that the cardinal virtues of honor, fortitude, courage, and justice are still alive in the background of this sore-beset nation. I’ve never heard a more eloquent extempore appeal to our shared human virtues than the speech delivered by UK national Russell Brand, supposedly a comedian. It was Shakespearean.
And so, tomorrow we slot into October, the month of promised “surprises” and generally not the happy kind. Hillary alluded to that in her Firing Line palaver. Does her posse (Huma, Alex Soros) have something up their sleeves? Fake Special Prosecutor (illegally appointed and unconfirmed by the Senate) Jack Smith is coming into Judge Tanya Chutkan’s DC federal courtroom with a big fat brief detailing his superseding indictment cooked up to replace the previous case derailed by the Supreme Court decision earlier this year on presidential immunity. Teams of assassins are roaming the land hunting Mr. Trump. And those are just the known unknowns.
But there’s something else in the air little more than a month away from this fateful election day. It feels like just enough Americans have recovered their senses to act against war, censorship, wide open borders, and the despotic rule of a malevolent bureaucratic blob nobody voted for. Mail-in ballot fraud is already being discovered. Mr. Trump might survive this campaign ordeal after all despite his enemies’ best efforts. The nation could climb out of this slough of self-destruction and despair after all. We used to say proudly this is a free country. It can be that again.
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You have to wonder: has there ever been a country that marched off to war with no head-of-state at the top of its war machine? It’s exactly that bad in our country, with a broken animatronic Halloween scarecrow popping in-and-out of the White House to yell incoherently at election campaign events for a putative successor too scared of the predicament she’s in to think straight. Really, no one is in charge — and if any of the leading actors on the scene really were, the situation could easily get worse.
Hence, the brainless wish roiling through the NSC, State Department, and the various shadow councils of the intel emeriti to lob long-range missiles into Russia, apparently heedless of any consequences. America, you are a headless horseman riding blindly into chaos.
In fact, the entire Democratic Party and its Deep State intel blob partners have melted down into a desperate mob of political criminals frantic to evade accounting for their acts. So then, setting the world on fire is all they have left, a fitting act of revenge for a faction thwarted in its mad drive to merely wreck the United States for the sake of “social justice” and “equity.”
The Democrats of 2024 made exactly the same mistake that their predecessors, the Jacobins, made in France back in 1794: they just couldn’t tell when they’d gone too far with their insults against the public interest and common decency. Their insults derived from the age-old human impulse to demolish society due to life being unfair, later codified in Marxian doctrine, and then made into a play-book by Saul Alinsky (with annotations by Antonio Gramsci, Richard Cloward, and Frances Fox Piven).
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As the French Revolution ground on and on, by 1793 the Jacobins gained control of the Committee of Public Safety which actually carried out policy, while endless quarrels occupied the National Convention — the then-current legislative body. The Jacobins’ policy was insane, just as the policy of open borders, lawfare, war, censorship, pharma-terrorism, climate hustles, and drag queens in the schools is insane under our modern Jacobins, the Democrats. (Notice the Democrats’ constant invoking of “safety” and “safe spaces” as a similar rhetorical device for justifying their deeds and cowing the public.)
The Committee of Public Safety sought to remake French society by turning its cultural norms upside-down and by killing as many of its political opponents as possible. Thus, the Reign of Terror when, for a whole year, heads rolled and rolled off the guillotine in the Place de la Concorde, usually without benefit of a trial. The ghoulish extravaganza of gore and death grossed-out those in the country who had not lost their minds.
One night in July 1794, as the Jacobin boss, Robespierre, took to the rostrum in the Convention for the umpteenth time to denounce his enemies and announce new death sentences, members in the chamber commenced throwing food at him. That was the turning point, and it turned so hard and fast that France was amazed. Within forty-eight hours, Robespierre and many of his cohorts got beheaded under the “national razor,” and that was the end of Jacobinism and all its insane measures to wreck what was left of society after five years of revolution.
Our Democratic Party Jacobins have been harder to defeat because government these days is vastly larger and more complex, and the equivalent of the Committee of Public Safety is now a huge network of cadres toiling in scores of federal agencies and associated NGOs financed by those agencies (or by their billionaire henchmen such as George Soros, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Reid Hoffman). Insane as they are, many public officials understand their culpability for the treasons and insults of recent years. They live in fear of prosecution and, short of that, of losing their cushy sinecures in the colossal bureaucracy that is bankrupting us.
There are many in our country today who are also not insane, just as in France circa 1794. This is actually the chief appeal of Mr. Trump, though he often expresses it clumsily, coming, as he does, from the rough and exacting world of property development, which is full of rough people in rough building trades using rough language. Secondarily, Mr. Trump represents leadership — the sheer idea that an actual person should be an executive-in-charge of a national polity — and it appears that a majority of the people in this land are finally sick of a faceless blob ruling madly from the shadows. Thirdly, Mr. Trump has become a national father figure, a titanic offense to a party run by women with daddy issues and to their Marxist allies dogmatically bent on destroying the family (along with every other institution). As it happens, countries need fathers, both actual and symbolic. What a surprise!
In the mad effort to evade judgment for their acts, the Democrats and their blob cadres are either trying to kill Mr. Trump directly, or are looking the other way while other nefarious parties attempt the wicked business. So far, no cigar. Who knows what they’ll try next: a surface-to-air missile at his airplane. . .a directed-energy weapon. . . a poisoned cheeseburger. . .?
The candidate himself seems a little tinged these days with the same aura of dauntless resignation that was seen in Martin Luther King and the first Bobby Kennedy in 1968 — who both went about their business trying to rescue our country from war and wickedness despite the threats against them. Many upright, intelligent, bold figures stand with and behind Mr. Trump this time, people capable and willing to pick up the flag in the event it becomes necessary. Do not fear.
Meanwhile, you have to also wonder: what on earth possessed the Democrats to maneuver Kamala Harris into this race? Everyone in the party and the blob must know she doesn’t have an agile mind — beyond some ability for reciting parboiled slogans — nor much acquaintance with the workings of the world besides her dwindled wiles in political amour, and that she may actually have a drinking problem. She is left, finally, with no one to cheerlead for her but the harpies on The View and the degenerates on CNN and The New York Times who all know the score but are too invested in years of their own mendacity to even attempt to come clean.
Chatter arises that the awaited “October surprise” will involve “Joe Biden” resigning from office to make way for Kamala to become the First Woman President just before election day, affording her, supposedly, a magisterial prestige in the final leg of the race. Don’t bet on that. When he resigns, “JB” loses his power of the pardon. If he exercises it on the eve of resignation and lets son Hunter, brothers James, Frank, and other family members (including himself) off the hook for their global money-grubbing exploits, it will only besmirch Ms. Harris by association. He has to hang in office until after Nov 6, no matter how the election turns, and then he can pardon what’s left of his brains out.
Before we even get to that point, all you have to worry about are unaccountable government factotums doing something over in Russia that will make Mr. Putin want to turn the USA into an ashtray.
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Donald Jeffries is the author of many books investigating the strange anomalies of recent American history. The titles include his latest, American Memory Hole, Survival of the Richest, and Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics. He has a particular interest in the assassination of president John F. Kennedy. His “I Protest” blog and podcast can be found at donaldjeffries.substack.com.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
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Today’s blog, Monday Sept 23
What could go wrong? Probably more than you might imagine. We have just turned the corner into autumn. Now, things get serious, even gravely dark. America has never been so into dancing skeletons and morbidity. The small-town yards are filling up with inflatable signifiers of hell and death. Don’t you wonder what all this signifies besides good old family fun? The zeitgeist maybe having a little sport with us, you think?
We are chiefly preoccupied with our badly dysfunctional self-governance, of course, and the method for periodically revising it, which we call an election. Nobody has confidence in the process, which has acquired so many layers of absurd, needless complexity for the sole purpose of perverting the outcome that every lawyer in the land will have a hefty guaranteed annual income in the probably futile effort to sort it out come November 6. There is your hell-scape, with overtones of death on a pale horse. . . and all. Chaos. . . riots. . . anarchy. . . civil war.
The threat of World War Three may have abated for the moment, but in a peculiar and disconcerting way, viz. a coup in the executive branch. The gadfly Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, long ago chief-of-staff to Sec’y of State Colin Powell, reports that the Pentagon has cancelled “Joe Biden,” that is, taken him out of the decision-loop for anything. Well, you ask yourself, how is it possible he had even remained remotely close to any decision-loop this long, in any case, given the problem of his obviously broken brain? But now, it is unofficially official: just eat your mint-chocolate ice-cream and shut up, and let Dr. Jill run those “cabinet meeting” photo ops.
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According to Col. Wilkerson, Sec’y of Defense Lloyd Austin told the “president” to his face that there will be no flinging of US-supplied long-range missiles from Ukraine “deep into Russia,” as the neocon-infested White House has been chattering about endlessly. Wiser heads deep in the DOD HQ have decided the matter. Lump it, if you must, Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan. The Russians’ “red-line” on such a caper is so wide you can see it from the International Space Station — that is, if you’re an astronaut marooned up there due to combined NASA/Boeing incompetence. . . but that’s another story.
Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was all revved up for the missile operation and flew to Washington for a one-to-one meet-up with “JB” to get the go-ahead. The Brits are avid for another World War. The last two went so well for them that they kissed their vast empire goodbye. Now they want to kiss goodbye their sceptered isle itself, which has almost no economy left and is overrun by cultural hostiles who are not into Shakespeare. The Brits’ floundering government is a posse of monomaniacs fixated on defeating Russia which, at this point in history, is like a dormouse (Glis glis) facing down a brown bear (Ursus arctos).
“Joe Biden,” reportedly “furious” at losing his executive power, was constrained to tell Mr. Starmer that the missile strike op was off, which left the UK PM miffed that he had crossed the ocean for no reason. Who knows, the Brits are so nuts these days that perhaps they’ll try to pull it off on their own. Mr. Zelensky, the no-longer-elected leader of Ukraine was begging them to try it because Ukraine has nothing left. NATO as a whole really has nothing left, either. Not much of a combined military, scant munitions left in the cupboard, and no will to wage war among the depressed citizens of its member nations.
There is nothing left except to come to terms on a settlement that will leave Ukraine not a member of NATO. The entire affair has been a humiliation for NATO and America, especially for the “Joe Biden” management team (whatever it actually consists of these days). The longer they refuse to engage in talks, the less of Ukraine will be left as a sovereign entity — having proven to the world that its sovereignty rests solely on its capacity to be used as a catspaw by the American neocon / intel blob. You’re reminded that for seventy years prior to 2014, Ukraine was not a problem for anyone until we made it a problem on-purpose — our purpose being idiotic and malicious — and Ukraine could, in theory, revert to not being a problem for anyone again. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
The neocon / intel blob’s other catspaw (domestic version), candidate Kamala Harris, is promising all kinds of good things “when [she] is in-office.” For some reason, nobody on The New York Times’s enormous staff of Ivy League germinated journalist-geniuses has informed Ms. Harris that she is actually in-office now, and has been since 1/20/2021. Why no good things for us plebes all these many months? No rainbows, unicorns, tax cuts, or ten-pound blocks of government cheese? Nothing but a disintegrating dollar, floods of savage mutts crossing the border and landing everywhere from Springfield, Ohio, to Nantucket, and endless raging bullshit about fighting “misinformation” — i.e., any idea that contradicts the Democratic Party’s agenda for assisted national suicide.
Ms. Harris’s gaslight-powered campaign has lost its loft in recent days, its most newsworthy event being last week’s cuddle hour with America’s official Care-Bear, Oprah. . . because, you see, there is nothing left except to pander to the emotional void induced by Woke-ism in the desperately needy minds of X-million voters of the birthing-person persuasion — especially among those unhappy souls who never got around to the birthing. Ms. Harris’s loathsome accessory, Tim Walz, has performed so discordantly that the campaign had to hang him in a closet somewhere, along with all his assorted skeletons, and lock the door. As ever, October surprises await: monsters, demons, ghouls, shrieking ghosts, the walking dead, and all the paid-up minions of the teachers’ union.
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If anything like civil war ignites in this country, the sides will not be the political Red and the Blue but the sane and the insane. Now it happens, unfortunately, that the insane are driving the engine of government. They have been at war with the people of this land for years, depriving them of livelihoods, stuffing them into prison, breaking the social contract, wrecking the country’s relations with the rest of the world, and belaboring the peoples’ minds with one insulting absurdity after another.
They comprise a bizarre coalition of the permanent bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, and the news media. The permanent bureaucracy includes its own machine for making war on citizens: the intel blob, whose tentacles reach into other agencies: Homeland Security, the State Department, the so-called Justice Department, the Pentagon, the myriad Public Health offices, and the shadowy clique that stands-in for a disabled president in the White House.
You can tell they are insane because they are driven by a single motivation: to remain in power for no other purpose than to escape responsibility for their many crimes against the people. This is insane behavior because it depends on the proposition that reality does not matter, that reality is optional, that there is no such thing as truth, and if it happened to exist, to be a thing, it would have no greater value to the human project than its opposite, untruth.
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The greatest absurdity of the moment is the idea that Americans might desire to continue under the rule of this evil coalition devoted to unreality and untruth, that is, to vote for candidates of the Democratic Party. Its greatest crimes, of course, are the lawless measures taken to pervert the very elections that might allow them to retain power in office.
Some of it is well-hidden and abstruse, such as the machinations of election lawfare manager-in-chief, Marc Elias, who for many years has used the courts and the state legislatures to fiddle election rules that make it impossible to account for who is actually casting the votes. This, you understand, is insane. What sovereign people would seek to institutionalize election fraud?
Some election crime is just in your face. The open border policy may have many nefarious angles, but an obvious one is stuffing the voter rolls with live bodies that have names attached, which can be bundled and harvested in ballot form like so many sheaves of oats. No one is fooled by this. Yet the Democratic Party has its heavy hand on the lever of power that controls entry to the country. Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, allows this to happen and bullshits Congress in open committee hearings. Congress has impeached him for this affront and the Democratic majority Senate has declined to hold the attendant trial — because stuffing the voter rolls with illegal immigrants allows them to remain in power.
The remedies for this dastardly mess are pretty simple and straightforward: return to paper ballots cast on one election day, requiring voter ID that amounts to proof of citizenship. Everything else — computerized (hackable) ballot-counting machines, mail-in ballots, early voting, automatic voter registration by means of other government transactions that have nothing to do with elections (motor-voter acts) — only insures election fraud. Sane people do not seek to defraud themselves.
It is widely suspected by the not-insane that even the attempt at massive voter fraud may not avail to put over the paramount candidate of the insane: Veep Kamala Harris. Nobody believes that she is capable of being president. But the insane don’t seek a capable president — in fact, the opposite. They want a president who can only function with direction and management of the blob, by the blob, and for the blob. The blob’s motives, besides seeking to avoid responsibility for its prior crimes, are a license to commit new crimes, especially crimes that expand the many perquisites and privileges of being in power. These include the fortunes to be made in control of the nation’s wealth, and the sadistic pleasure derived from punishing and humiliating their not-insane opponents. For instance, running the insane Ukraine war, with its fabulous kickbacks for the military contractors and office-holders. . . and making you witness more drag queen story hours.
Due to the possibility that sane citizens, despite calculated election fraud, might elect Mr. Trump, who opposes all that psychotic, criminal nonsense, the coalition of the permanent bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, and the news media appears to have few options left besides murdering Mr. Trump. The first two would-be assassins show a train of association with the intel blob. Thomas Crooks (or, at least one of his many cell phones) traveled repeatedly to a downtown DC building adjacent to the FBI HQ; Ryan Wesley Routh has alleged links to the Arlington, Va., Maximus Company, a CIA cut-out — perhaps explaining how the otherwise indigent Routh funded his global travels. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla) disclosed yesterday that the DHS knows of five assassination teams targeting President Trump, three connected with foreign governments, two domestic.
The most mystifying element in the coalition of the insane is the news media — that is, the cable news networks plus The New York Times / WashPost axis —who have tirelessly broadcast the mantras that Mr. Trump seeks to quash our democracy and that he is a new Hitler who must be stopped at all costs. The inflammatory barrage has had an obvious effect. But the mystery is: what’s in it for these news companies to go along with their insane and desperate partners: the blob and the Dems?
What’s in it for Joe Khan, Executive Editor of The Times? His paper lies and spins unreality incessantly. He surely makes a comfortable salary, but he can’t be getting rich. . . that is, really rich. . . millions. Apparently, he publishes unreal stories because he’s insane. He believes things that are not true. Nor are his reporters getting really rich. They just appear to be blinded by sheer hatred — rising to insanity — and perhaps also by the lurking fear that their many published lies, dating back to RussiaGate, will eventually disgrace them professionally if allowed to be pursued and revealed by the sane.
The temperature is rising in this political crucible. Something is going to melt down. It’s looking pretty clear now who can take the heat, and who can’t.
For new Substack readers who have not seen the actual person (me) lurking behind this blog, here is my interview Monday 9/19 with the Swiss national Piero San Giorgio:
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“Donald Trump is looking increasingly likely to be the winner of the presidential race. I have long held that the globalists will wrap up an economic collapse or a world war and throw it in Trump’s lap.” — Brandon Smith
This time, the shooter lives to do some ‘splainin’. Do you wonder if he might get around to ‘splainin’ his role with the shady non-governmental orgs (NGOs) supported by the CIA who enabled his travels to Ukraine and his efforts there recruiting global mutts to fight for the Nazi-ish Azov Battalion? Perhaps he might rat-out actual government officials who assisted him in his colorful misadventures? As Ed Snowden remarked on “X”, wannabe Trump assassin Ryan Routh has “something of an Oswald vibe” — meaning, well-groomed by the intel boys, to be used as required.
Perhaps we’ll find out — if nothing fatal happens to befall Mr. Routh while in custody — how exactly he learned Mr. Trump would be on the links that afternoon? The candidate’s round of golf that day was supposedly a snap decision known only amongst his innermost circle. Or how did Mr. Routh figure out the most advantageous fairway to lay at for a clear shot? The FBI is on the case, you may be reassured to know.
Things political are speeding up with the autumnal quickening. The blob is truly and deeply a’fright. So many blobsters will be liable to pay for their multitudinous crimes against the people of this country if Mr. Trump squeaks back into power that such a future is unthinkable to them. And yet, nothing has worked to deactivate this. . . this golden golem stalking the land. Nothing to show for the immense catalog of lawfare cases concocted to drain his wealth and stuff him into a prison cell — and astounding how amateurish they all were! Engoron and Merchan, two boobies hatched out of Judicial Error Central. Fani Willis, a walking-talking banana peel! Merrick Garland, saving democracy one abuse of power at a time!
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The Butler, PA, head-shot op came awfully close to eliminating their, uh, problem, but no cigar. The Palm Beach golf course ambush had a Peter Sellers vibe, wouldn’t you agree? With the rifle muzzle poking through the shrubbery behind a fence. What next? A pizza with pepperoni, mushrooms, and cyanide? Maybe try to drop an anvil on Mr. Trump’s head from a passing airplane? (Beep-beep. . . woosh!)
Somebody do something!!! The blob is shrieking to its minions from the sub-basement bunkers at Langley to the salons of Georgetown, to the US Embassy in Ukraine. Well, there’s always World War Three! And it looks like just such a romp is about to be instigated. You may have seen the photo last week of “Joe Biden” meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer at a big conference table, talking-up a plan to give Ukraine the green light to rain long-range missiles deep into Russia. Meaning, let NATO technicians work the targeting console to send US or British made rockets any old place over there? Like, Red Square? Or the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg? Find an actual Ukrainian to push the launch button.
How is that not a direct attack on Russia by NATO? Well, of course it is exactly that. Russia’s chief executive, Mr. Putin, clarified it for the Globalist Neocon cohort infesting NATO that such an action would bring. . . “consequences.” That is a word the Neocons are no longer acquainted with; it has been such a long time since they’ve crossed its path, like its boon companion, “truth,” also missing-in-action these days. And, to be fair, Mr. Putin did not specify what the consequences might be, not even a simple metaphor like a mushroom cloud, or an ashtray.
How did they even get “Joe Biden” off the beach for that photo op? It is understood by everyone over ten-years-old in America that “JB” is not available for duty anymore. The “out-to-lunch” sign hangs permanently on the doorknob of the Oval Office now. The USA does not have a functioning chief-of-state for the first time in 235 years. After 2021, some sort of unelected, informal Politburu that self-assembled in the White House, like a clot from a Covid vaccine shot, is running our affairs. Maybe Kamala Harris has a clue who is in that outfit. Or somebody in the news media could ask her (if she ever gets around to holding an actual news conference, where the questions are not previewed or scripted.) Anyone dare ask?
Kamala Harris is strangely missing from the front page of The New York Times this morning. Is that a little ominous? The debate is behind her. There will not be another, apparently. There is nothing about her schedule on the official campaign website. Has she entered fade-away mode? Is it all over now except for the ballot harvesting and the, uh, little adjustments to the Dominion vote-counting machines? Has the drinking started again?
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By now, you’ve probably heard enough debate about The Debate, so I’ll spotlight only a few points everybody else left out. You might know this, but Hollywood plays a larger role in the Kamala campaign than just stuffing the endorsements of celebs such as George Clooney, Taylor Swift, and John Legend into the corporate media tank. In fact, much bigger playas, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, are producing and directing things backstage at Kamala Central, so what gets in the Kamala news plays as a Spielberg movie like The Color Purple. Just so you know. . . .
Ms. Harris had the advantage Tuesday night of being able to speak in declarative sentences, while her opponent, Mr. Trump, is given, shall we say, to a more choppy, telegraphic speech delivery. It lent Ms. Harris the appearance of being intelligent. The catch was, everything she said was disingenuous or an outright lie.
One whopper — more significant than you might realize — was her stating that she was in the US Capitol building when the J-6 riot happened. You’d think she’d want to be on-hand there, seeing as a joint session of Congress was about to certify her as the first female veep in US history — a chance to be joyful and shine! But, in fact, at 11:15a.m. on 1/6/21 — hours before protesters breached the Capitol — Kamala Harris was spirited away a few blocks to 430 South Capitol Street, the headquarters building of the Democratic National Committee, where a pipe bomb (or facsimile of one) had been planted hours before by some DC law enforcement person (Capitol police? FBI? DC Metro Police? A paid “contractor” to the preceding outfits?). The exact identity of the culprit has never been released by the FBI, though they have all the perp’s cell phone data and closed circuit TV footage.
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The plan, you see, was to disrupt the election certification process underway at mid-day in the House chamber by creating a furor over the discovery of the pipe bomb planted to assassinate veep-elect Kamala Harris — a joint blob / Democratic Party operation. The pipe bomb ruse, it turned out, was never needed because the FBI-instigated riot at the Capitol created a big disruption just in time to send the politicians scurrying for safety and cancel scrutiny of various state’s electors’ reports.
After that scare, the Senators and Congressmen did, in fact, drop the certification challenge and returned to hurriedly finish the certification process later that night of 1/6/21. The pipe bomb story barely made the news, and the scant news about it was expeditiously memory-holed thereafter. After nearly four years, as averred to above, the FBI has come up with. . . nothing. It is important that you understand just how nefarious your federal agencies are, and how corrupt the news is.
Now, as for the Harris-Trump debate, otherwise, and given the rigged features of the exercise, it’s obvious that Mr. Trump muffed several major scoring opportunities. When Ms. Harris dredged up the notorious hoax about “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, Mr. Trump could have addressed the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis and asked them why they did not “fact-check” the utterance, which had been thoroughly debunked by the Left-wing site Snopes.com, advertising itself as “the definitive Internet reference source for researching urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.” Nor did they fact check the likewise debunked “suckers and losers” hoax about US soldiers supposedly uttered by Mr. Trump at the Normandy D-Day cemetery. Actually, Muir and Davis “fact-checked” Mr. Trump over thirty times and Ms. Harris hardly at all.
In any case, Mr. Trump blew many other chances to pin Ms. Harris with her own lies and hypocrisies — like, failing to state plainly that in nearly four years she never actually visited the Mexican border (whatever her designated title was: “Border Czar,” “Root Causes Detective”) . . . failing to clarify that the president has been removed from the abortion debate altogether and has no role in telling women what to do with their own bodies under current law. . . that Ms. Harris’s voteless selection as nominee was a paradigmatic affront to “our democracy” that even her own fellow party members ought to recognize . . . that the War in Ukraine was actually started in early 2014 by Barack Obama, Victoria Nuland, and the CIA, not by Mr. Putin . . . and omitting to state that all — every last one — of the 2020 election lawsuits across the nation were dismissed on procedural grounds and not on the merits of their arguments, which were never heard in court. That’s just a short list. It is also rumored that Ms. Harris got the debate questions beforehand, since her husband, Hollywood lawyer Doug Emhoff, is a close friend of Dana Walden, Co-chair of the Disney Corporation board of directors (Disney owns ABC-News.)
Anyway, that much-awaited event is over now and we are into the homestretch of this election. Kamala Harris has still shown no disposition to meet the press, to answer any questions impromptu and unscripted. The voting public seems to be losing patience with that. Her poll numbers are sinking, despite her admirable ability to speak in declarative sentences and lead joyful laugh-fests.
What remains for our sore-beset country beyond that vortex of nefarious blobbery and balloting lawfare is the interesting development that our government is now pressing to commence World War Three before the election can happen. “Joe Biden,” of course, is lately as absent from the public consciousness as Rutherford B. Hayes, but whoever acts in the president’s name these days just gave permission for Ukraine to strike targets inside Russia with long-range missiles. So far, the UK and the Netherlands have officially jumped in on that decision.
Note that the Ukrainians have no ability to actually do the targeting of said missile themselves, which involves satellite technology, meaning whatever missiles happen to get fired into Russia will be done by NATO personnel. Mr. Putin has made it clear that such action will have consequences. We might infer that means Russia will strike back at some NATO targets. I must imagine his primary target will be NATO headquarters in Brussels. Other targets would probably follow, perhaps even in the USA. Prepare to duck-and-cover, or possibly to put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.
When The New York Times tells you that the United States Constitution is a threat to democracy — As it did on the front page of its August 31 edition — you know that you are in thrall to exceedingly subtle minds. The Times only employs persons, both birthing and other, of the subtlest minds. You can tell because they are credentialed by our country’s finest institutions of educational credentialing.
They come to The Times fully equipped with the armamentarium of advanced, progressive, innovative, nuanced, cutting-edge modes of understanding our world — which, you’ll agree, is a pretty goshdurned complex place, and rather niggardly in yielding its secret workings. Hence, The Times has concluded that the Constitution is flawed, perhaps fatally, because it allowed for the election of Donald Trump once, and now, possibly, a second time:
"It’s no surprise, then, that liberals charge Trump with being a menace to the Constitution. But his presidency and the prospect of his re-election have also generated another, very different, argument: that Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution, making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.”
The Constitution does not stipulate a particular election day, but subsequent US law established the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the day for federal elections (the states can establish their own election dates for state and local offices). This changed beginning in the year 2000, when Oregon legislated to conduct all elections by mail-in ballot and other states followed with alterations to voting methods beyond a single election day. The Covid-19 pandemic prompted states to permanently relax rules on absentee ballots and expand mail-in voting, under guidance from the federal agencies such as the CDC, while the CARES Act of 2020 provided emergency funding to implement procedures for mail-in voting in order to reduce in-person voting that might enable the spread of Covid-19.
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All of that followed orderly legislative procedure. The result was widespread ballot fraud, especially in crucial swing voting districts, much of it arrant. Contrary to official narratives out of the “Joe Biden” administration and the salient organs of corporate news, the allegations of widespread fraud were not “baseless” nor were they “conspiracy theories.” Subtle minds schooled in nuanced, cutting-age modes of analysis agreed to ignore documentary evidence of ballot fraud because it disfavored their preferred candidate, “Joe Biden.” Subtler judicial minds subsequently dismissed challenges to official tallies.
Other shenanigans such as the $400-million that Mark Zuckerberg (Meta and Facebook) injected into swing districts for “election administration and voter turn-out,” via his Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), was not adjudicated in any court. The upshot of the “Zuckerbucks” prank was that polling offiicials in many precincts were replaced by Democratic Party activists who ended up counting the votes. The Federal Election Commission (after “Joe Biden” became president) decided that under federal campaign finance law, the contributions were not seen as illegal — though the “Zuckerbucks” scandal did lead to legislative reform in several states.
You might suppose in the years since the 2020 election that opportunity would be seized to materially correct the weaknesses of mail-in ballots, early voting, ballot “harvesting” practices, giant “balloting centers,” and the use of vote-tallying machines (Dominion, etc.) with modems allowing for Internet hackery. The best and simplest reform would be a return to paper ballots cast only on one election day, with voter ID and proof of citizenship (accomplished prior in voter registration), conducted in smaller, distributed precinct polling places that make hand-counting of ballots practical. Alas, this was too difficult for Congress, while the subtle, nuanced, cutting-edge minds working in news media were not interested in such straightforward reform and did not advocate for it.
Rather, the news media advocated for further laxity in voting rules. And so, now they are actually arguing about whether it is desirable for non-citizens to vote. The “Joe Biden” administration allowed at least 10-million people to enter the country illegally since 2021 and have gotten a million or more of them registered to vote via motor-voter laws — automatic registration when an illegal alien gets a driver’s license, and ditto when they apply for various social services. Alejandro Mayorkas’s Department of Homeland Security has shrewdly distributed large numbers of these illegal aliens into swing districts of states crucial to the Democratic Party’s election chances.
The inquiring mind is prompted to wonder whether it is the US Constitution that is a “menace to democracy” or the Democratic Party. Mr. Trump is issuing communiqués on “X” (Twitter) that his party is paying special attention to voting fraud in the current election, with imputations of very severe punishment to cheaters and fraudsters. You might think that the Kamala Harris campaign would declare likewise. I expect Mr. Trump will put the proposition to her in their Tuesday debate.
Note to readers: My regular website, www.kunstler.com, is down Monday morning (hacked? dunno) and I have no estimate as to when it might go back up. So today only I am allowing comments here on Substack. . . and when my home site is back up, we’ll return to the usual commenting procedure there.
How is it that our country turned into some kind of theme park spook ride, a cheesy-looking haunted house of programmed frights, howling holograms, phantoms with their hair on fire, doors slamming open on glimpses of hell, ill-winds and foul odors, climaxing in a tableau vivant of death-in-life neverending?
I’m sure that this will surprise you, but you can choose to be sane. How? You take care of your business conscientiously; you steer in the direction of what is true and away from what is false; you find purpose in your existence by discovering your talents and using them in ways that do not bring harm to other people; you seek the company of kindred spirits. . . love the one you’re with. . . work hard so you can rest easy. . . express your gratitude for being here. That’s a start.
If you prefer being insane, there’s always the current incarnation of the Democratic Party, dedicated to gaslighting the nation into ruin. Of course, at this point — the point of extreme desperation — the Dems are just running interference for the distraught intel-Globalist blob. The blob’s agenda has been thwarted, overwhelmed by runaway debt and drinking too much of its own propaganda Kool-aid. A great deal of that has entailed the commission of crimes, which always implies the possibility of having to pay for them.
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Russia is about to roll up on what’s left of Ukraine. Our State Department neocon division thought it was wicked-smart to start a little action there in 2014, to provoke Russia into a ruinous war against NATO (the game: “Let’s You and Him Fight”) in order, theoretically, to wreck Russia and depose Mr. Putin. Didn’t work. Do you know why? I will tell you (it’s really simple): Russia’s leadership is more intelligent than ours, and far less psychopathic. They perceived correctly that we were only wrecking ourselves.
Ten years later, the Ukraine caper draws to a humiliating end for our neocons, and a ruinous end for NATO and the EU. So far this year, it appears that “Joe Biden’s” party has ceased paying attention to Ukraine. The pretty yellow and blue flags have all but disappeared — except in Massachusetts, we noticed, the most highly “educated” and most deeply insane state in the union. I’ll be interested in how Kamala Harris explains our Ukraine war policy in Tuesday’s presidential debate. Defending democracy, I suppose.
The governments of the major EU nations stupidly followed the bidding of America’s psychopathic neocons and now they ‘ll have to answer for it as their people awake to the destruction of the EU nations’ economies. Early elections will be called and globalist stooges will be swept away. The turmoil will rhyme with the chaos of 1848, a year of revolution. NATO, finding itself not just purposeless but toxic to Europe’s well-being, must dissolve as members on the periphery withdraw, some seeking to join the BRICs economic bloc. Germany, France, and the UK get sucked helplessly into a new great depression and social turmoil as they contend with many millions of hostile migrants.
Here in America, you can already hear the fake anguished cry of “Russia, Russia, Russia” echoing out of Merrick Garland’s fake Justice Department. We’re to understand that the Russians are coming for our election — more gaslight — when it’s actually the Democratic party, led surreptitiously by its lawfare cadres, Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, Andrew Weissmann, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, et al. Their many of their courtroom pranks have failed against Mr. Trump. Judge Chutkan was bloviating in the DC federal court this week to generate a little heat on MSNBC, but her case has a wooden stake through its heart and Xs where its eyes used to be.
Up in New York, Judge Juan Merchan pretends to wrassle with whether or not to start Civil War Two by remanding Mr. Trump to Rikers Island on September 18 (I doubt that happens). In the event, though, I believe Mr. Trump might simply say, “No thank you,” and go about his business running for president. That would be a counter-prank I’d be eager to see. Who gets in the act then? Federal marshals? The FBI (ha!)? The Supreme Court term begins the first Monday in October. They could have something to say about the steaming pile of horseshit that was Alvin Bragg’s and Mathew Colangelo’s case. (Also, Weissmann’s, Eisen’s, Monaco’s, and McCord’s.)
Gawd knows where things might stand after next Tuesday’s great debate. The rules are pretty stringent. No candidates questioning each other. No audience. No confab with staff during commercial breaks. The mute buttons will be on. Without her “I’m speaking” routine, Ms. Harris has. . . zotz. All Mr. Trump really has to do is be polite for 90-minutes.
More than a few people, meanwhile, are beginning to ask who is running the country, since “Joe Biden” is mostly off-duty, beaching it, not attending cabinet meetings, and probably not being consulted on any number of matters being carried out in his name. Are you comforted to know that the US government is on auto-pilot, a colossal, menacing machine run by ghosts?
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COLUMBUS — Columbus Municipal Airport is getting a unique and futuristic-looking air traffic control tower. Airport officials unveiled the designs, made by Marlon Blackwell Architects, for the new tower on Thursday. Airport officials say the new control tower is designed with Columbus’ rich architectural history in mind.
Our heads are stuffed with assumptions about “the future,” mainly that it will be more futuristic — meaning, at least, that things must look different than they look now. In the world of architecture, that means buildings must be wildly different, even shockingly different. We must believe in a future that contains no recognizable human touchstones. It will be obvious, when the future actually arrives, that this was essentially a psychopathic Jacobin-type movement to upend the culture of Western Civ. And for what end? For what benefit? For the aggrandizement of the architects playing a dumb game of one-upping each other in how violently they can disturb the cultural consensus. Any game played at the gigantic scale can turn into a racket, and that is what this Modernist Futurism (let’s call it) has become.
As I see the future, I would not assume that commercial aviation persists as a feature of daily life very far into the future. In fact, it is already disintegrating visibly at the margins — in the ability of airplane manufacturers to produce planes that work dependably; of airlines being able to maintain their planes reliably; of passengers being able to afford the air-fares; of the level of service to remain acceptable (meaning, delays, cancellations, poor cabin comfort, safety, available competent pilots); in the availability of affordable jet fuel derived from oil. There’s already a lot to be concerned about.
The building pictured above is certainly striking, but mostly because it fails to signify any comprehensible idea of what the building is for. It doesn’t really help humans to be confronted with incomprehensible objects. At best, this air-control tower looks like a hybrid composed of a computer server and a very large robot. And the scale is necessarily domineering. I believe that not only do we not want or need to be dominated by computerized A-I, and any sort of robots, BUT, I’m serenely convinced that the future will not be able to deliver either the robots or the A-I very far ahead because our electric grid is too flimsy to permit it. I’m also persuaded that if A-I and robotics become too dangerously intrusive to daily life, citizens will band together to destroy the distributed hardware of the electric grid. They will shoot out the transformers and the relays rather than submit to robotic fuckery. Chew on that this month.
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You might wonder, as I do, whether Kamala Harris can even stay in the race until November 5. Based on her grim appearance in last week’s “interview” with Dana Bash, slumped at the table of a crummy Georgia café under poor lighting, her trademark cackle suppressed, she looked psychologically wilted. Don’t be surprised if late this week she “catches Covid” and asks to “postpone” the September 10 debate with Mr. Trump.
Consider the depressing reality of her situation, lately cloaked by the farcical “joy” motif put out by her party’s campaign spin doctors: First, the cabal running the White House bum-rushed “Joe Biden” out of the campaign, just hooked him offstage like a broke-down vaudevillian annoying the audience with his tired antics. Then, the same gang buffaloed Kamala onto center stage by some mystical process that disregarded her lack of preparation, her proven unpopularity in the 2020 primaries, and her near-invisibility in 3.5 years as veep.
For a couple of weeks her head must have been spinning with sheer intoxication at the amazing turn of events. Who wouldn’t be amazed to find him or herself unexpectedly selected to run for president? But now, post the artificial hoopla of the convention, the dread steals in. If she was previously used to self-medicating with chardonnay during the irksome veep years, imagine the pressure now on those campaign bus trips.
She has a lot to be afraid of. She’s not nimble of mind in the spotlight, and she knows it. When she tries to riff on anything off-the-cuff, all that comes out are laughable tautologies. She really doesn’t know much about the world, even about simple geography, certainly not the complex interplay of national interests. Her economic notions are a kind of Frappuccino® of processed Marxian sludge from the Berkeley cafés. If exposed regularly to even friendly reporters, she’d ignite howling embarrassment for herself (and the party). And, after all, there’s her record, including hundreds of videos on the Internet showing plainly the crazy policies she supports and now has to pretend to dissociate from.
Lurking behind her is not only the American intel blob of dark forces and sinister figures, but an international blob made up of malevolent groups within and throughout Western Civ, clearly working to bring it down — the Eurocrats wrecking their own countries’ agriculture and their industrial economies while jailing their opponents for thought crimes; the WEFers pushing the demented climate change agenda and ruinous migrant invasions; the bankers looking to seize the “collateral” (property, chattels, investment portfolios) of a billion everyday citizens when the bond Ponzi scheme blows up, as it must; the WHO steered by Bill Gates seeking to inject unsafe vaccines into everybody in order to greatly and quickly reduce the population; the Soros NGO legions working to subvert the public interest here, there, and everywhere; the NATO warmongers trying like hell to start World War Three. . . . Kamala Harris surely understands — if she understands anything — that she has become their chosen pawn, and is at their mercy (they have none).
She should be afraid especially of the American blob. That combine of higher-ups in the CIA, the DOD, the FBI, the DHS, the State Department, and Gawd knows how many lesser-known agencies and “black op” back offices, knows that it is in great danger if Mr. Trump happens to get elected (despite their best efforts to rig things). After all the trips laid on him, all the way up to attempted assassination, you can be sure that Mr. Trump will be coming after the cabal for committing real and serious crimes. They are running scared now. Despite all the power seemingly at their command, nothing has availed so far — not lawfare, not bullets — to stop Mr. Trump’s implacable march back into the Oval Office, where he could possibly succeed in turning the USA back into a functioning republic
Poor Kamala Harris is the blob’s wholly inadequate instrument to fend off this fate. If she continues to perform badly, the blob might not hesitate to try getting rid of her. That may be the blob’s last chance of stopping the election from happening altogether. The nation has never been in the predicament of having the head of a ticket resign or die in the homestretch of an election campaign. There is no provision in the Constitution for it because there are no provisions in the Constitution for political parties per se. It would all be a kind of improv.
And then, of course, America would be stuck with the unfit and incapable “Joe Biden,” heading the government, at least until something else can be worked out. Maybe that working out would just be the final stage of the coup that has been in motion, really, since 2016 when John Brennan, Barack Obama, and James Comey attempted to oust Mr. Trump with RussiaGate. Some kind of “interim commission” might be formed to “solve” the problem of the cancelled election. They’ll look for someone with “proven ability” to serve as provisional president — maybe, someone who has already been president. . . say, Mr. Obama. Voila and fait accompli! If he finds himself appointed rather than elected, he would not be in defiance of the 22ndAmendment. Okay, now try re-thinking how scared Kamala Harris must be.
The post Is Kamala Very Very Afraid? appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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She was speaking, you understand, but the main thing you noticed was the musical quality of her voice: sonorous, resonant, like one of the more obscure woodwind instruments, an alto clarinet or a basset horn, producing a sound like unto creamy dressing over the familiar word-salad of iceberg lettuce.
It would be ungentlemanly to bang on the particulars of Kamala Harris’s CNN interview performance, so I’ll proceed. The nocturne was 18-minutes long, all that survived from the 41-minutes CNN actually recorded, so you might wonder a little about the notes not played. The leitmotif throughout was “my values have not changed,” meaning, disregard any dissonance you might detect in the velvet honk of my voice. Mind the significance of the passage of time, not the music, Altogether, as nocturnes should, it had a soporific effect.
And now candidate Kamala Harris will go back to hiding on her campaign bus, which makes a different statement than, say, hiding in the basement a la “Joe Biden,” 2020. It’s the difference between going nowhere fast and going nowhere at all — though both concepts apply to the condition of the USA during the four years of “Joe Biden” (loved and revered by his comrades in the Party of Chaos, who threw the president under the very bus Kamala is hiding in).
Did you think Kamala would still be rising on the joyful billows of hot air that blew out of the Democratic Convention? Like so many of the magic tricks in the party’s repertoire, that one was a spoof of artificial levitation, to give the appearance of something holding up, like, say, the US economy, when there is actually nothing underneath. Nothing real, that is. What’s giving the economy its appearance of loft has been “Joe Biden” pouring government money into scores of party-connected NGOs as pure grift. The main effect of that is the inflation that everybody notices. Meanwhile, nobody gets hooked up to promised broadband and only eight EV charging stations get built for $7.5-billion allocated to the Department of Transportation.
The current prank, though, is to artificially pump-up Ms. Harris in the polls in the attempt to justify the coming ballot fraud to be executed two months from now, as engineered by election lawfare maestro Marc Elias, now on the Harris campaign payroll. That is, an effort to obviate any apparent discrepancies between actual poll numbers and harvested ballots flooding in at two o’clock in the morning on Nov 6.
As it happens, Ms. Harris’s poll numbers have begun to sink the past week, as the tactic of hiding the candidate from the press has backfired. As of August 29, Nate Silver has her chance of winning down at 42.7 to Mr. Trump’s 56.7. Voters have begun to notice that the candidate represents nothing except whatever happened the past four years in Biden-Land — which is to say, open borders, war for the sake of arms profiteers, flagrant censorship, inflation, cratering business activity, and overt DOJ political persecutions. Martin Armstrong, for instance, has estimated Kamala Harris’s true polling number in the ten percent range. Yikes.
So, what was the net effect of the CNN interview with Ms. Harris? It couldn’t have helped. They had to get her out of hiding, considering the significance of the passage of time in an election campaign. Even the in-the-tank news media was starting to complain about her holing-up on the bus. Dana Bash was surprisingly harsh at times when the veep confabulated about her plans to “fix” America’s problems, like asking, “Why haven’t you done that already?” The answer was the bizarre, “We can do what we’ve accomplished so far.” Roger that.
You’re probably wondering: how Mr. Trump will play this? He’d best be polite about it and assume that the voters can see and understand the obvious: that the Democrats have put up an especially inadequate candidate who can’t explain away the fiascos of the past four years. He doesn’t have to rub in so hard that it seems cruel. His own policy intentions are a quite clear alternative to four years of hoaxes, pranks, trips, gaslighting, and grift. Installing Ms. Harris without any input or votes from the party rank-and-file was about as desperate an affront to “our democracy” as anyone could imagine, like something straight out of the old Soviet politburo, picking an Andropov or a Chernenko. Mr. Trump should remind audiences of this at every opportunity if the Democrats keep yapping about “our democracy,” which seems to be all they’ve got.
Something is slip-sliding out there, perhaps the solidarity of the news media. Even The New York Times dissed Kamala Harris — Bret Stephens called her interview “vague and vacuous” the day after. One thing you have to give CNN credit for: they didn’t show a whole lot of Kamala Harris cackling in her trademark manner — to cover that mental vacuum. The cackle has been getting very mixed reviews, anyway, when you disconnect it from the fake “joy” trope. Maybe a laugh-riot is what’s in the missing 23-minutes that CNN edited out of the 41-minute recording.
The post The Significance of the Passage of Time appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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The alliance between Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Donald Trump is many things. But first it’s an all-clear signal to a large class of less-than-fully brain-damaged Americans that it’s okay to quit being insane. As you know, this election is no longer a battle between the political Left and Right. It’s an epic struggle-session between the sane and the insane.
You just witnessed the Democratic Convention nominating an empty pantsuit whose only record as a high government official is failure to protect and defend the nation and to support its constitution. All arranged without any real votes cast. Pretty neat trick, pulled off under the banner of Saving Our Democracy. Please understand that it was the result of hypnotizing so many vulnerable personalities into a mass formation psychosis. They were vulnerable because they are scared stiff by propaganda specifically targeting their deepest archetypal fears — in this case, fear of Daddy, meaning fear of behavioral boundaries, in short, of being civilized.
Thus, the advocacy for Hamas terrorists (Israel = Old Testament = moral boundaries), abortion (no more babies = die-off of cultural line), drag-queens (“mother” = demonic imposter), open border (border = nation’s boundary), the Ukraine War (“Let’s You and Him Fight”), censorship (hatred of fairness), mandates and lockdowns (destroy purposeful, meaningful, productive life), and so on. The propaganda engineered to produce this madness surely comes from our intel blob. They have devoted all the years since the founding of the CIA in 1947 to developing and refining their methods of mindfuckery. They have unleashed it lately at full force because they fear that Mr. Trump will deconstruct their intel blob and possibly prosecute some of its current and former officials for serious crimes such as treason, misprision of felonies, and murder.
The final ingredient in all that is submission of the populace to these programmatic suggestions. Simply put, they yield to the fears induced in them. Try to enter the mind of a committed Democratic voter. You’ll discover that you are locked out. Sharing of thoughts is impossible because there is no thought in there, only disordered emotion.
Ask a Democrat what they think Donald Trump actually did as president for four years. I guarantee you they will say only one thing: he cancelled abortion. Which is actually not true. He nominated several Supreme Court Justices who ruled that abortion properly belonged under the jurisdiction of the fifty states. (It was the act of ruling that drove them nuts because rules = boundaries.) Of course, all the single batshit crazy cat-ladies of Boston, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Denver, and Los Angeles now raging over the issue are free to abort themselves to their hearts’ content, should some unlikely accident of misfortune find them pregnant.
So, Kamala Harris emerges from this Cluster-B personality disorder exercise in hypnosis (the convention) as the avatar of . . . “joy” . . . in the absence of any ideas about actually running the government of a country which, for the moment, is run by nobody because the current president (“Joe Biden”) is both mentally unfit and on permanent vacation. None of this is very promising. The raptures of “joy” tend to obscure the idea that there is a future to be concerned about. Enter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
He explained his view of the situation and his role in it with unsurpassed clarity last Friday in a powerful and moving speech outlining a decision that must have been very painful for him. As I averred he would do last Friday morning, he denounced the party of his ancestors in unequivocal terms for coming to militate against its own traditional principles — opposing war, fighting for free speech, helping poor working people, and against weaponizing government agencies. He threw his support to Mr. Trump because it’s become obvious that Mr. Trump’s aims and ideas are more in-tune with those forsaken principles of Mr. Kennedy’s father and his uncle, JFK.
And now he’ll campaign on behalf of Mr. Trump, with the expectation that he will play an important, well-defined role in the next Trump administration — in charge of a range of public health issues that he is deeply familiar with from decades of litigation and researching the books about pharmaceutical racketeering actually written by himself.
It’s Monday after the convention. What’s on the candidates’ campaign schedule today. CNN’s “Campaign Latest” page says that Mr. Trump will give a speech in Detroit today to the National Guard Association where he is expected to greet the endorsement of former Rep. (and Lt. Col. In the National Guard) Tulsi Gabbard. Kamala Harris has no public appearances scheduled, but CNN reports that she has raised a fabulous $540-million since her launch a few weeks ago. Isn’t that nice? Boolah boolah, lotsa moolah. On Wednesday, Ms. Harris and her veep sidekick, Tim Walz, embark on a bus tour around Georgia. Bus tours will be the signature of their campaign.
Let me tell you what that means: instead of flying expeditiously between campaign stops where they might have to state some positions on public issues, Harris & Walz will eat up many hours on long bus rides from Point-A to Point-B, hiding from the public and the press.
Bobby Kennedy, meanwhile, is cramming as many media appearances as possible into his schedule, submitting to questions about everything, including the latest barrage of accusations about his fully-disclosed personal history. Fox has had him on several programs, though the other cable news stations are ignoring him, as are The New York Times and the WashPo, except to publish scurrilous stories from his mindfucked siblings and cousins — the latest being that he cut the head off a dead whale on the beach at Cape Cod with a chainsaw. Readers are supposed to construe that to mean he murdered a whale with a chainsaw.
The post “RFK, Jr. Murders Whale with Chainsaw!” appeared first on Kunstler.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_408.mp3David McAlvany is CEO Of McAlvany Financial Services, which includes wealth management and precious metals advisors for retail investors. David’s own excellent podcast, the McAlvany Weekly Commentary comes out Tuesdays and is available at Apple Podcasts. Full disclosure, David’s company is a sponsor of this podcast. And fuller disclosure, I invited him on because he offers some of the clearest views of financial doings to be found on the Internet. His company website is https://mcalvany.com.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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“The entire Democrat campaign will now be focused on gaslighting the country into believing Trump has been president for the last 4 years and Kamala has been an innocent bystander the whole time. They can’t run on her record, so they’re going to invent one and lie about it.” — Sean Davis, The Federalist
*
Get this: there is one thing, one lurking terror, behind every fake and desperate move the Democratic Party has made this dire election cycle: the fear that hundreds of high officials might have to pay for their crimes of recent years if they lose on November 5. That’s why they lie about everything, and work so hard to construct false narratives, and struggle to obliterate the memory of Joe Biden’s ruinous term in power.
Of course, they can’t talk about it. It’s like the darkest secret in a wrecked human soul that has lost itself in mental illness, some abscess of shame and guilt sealed off in the mind’s attempt to protect itself — like the memory of an incest or an unsolved family murder — which explains the rich display of various derangements actually highlighted at this year’s Democratic Convention, their Cluster-B personality disorder freak show. It is an anguished, guilt-ridden collective mind leaking clues to its own disordered debasement.
So, the deed is done now. The odious “Joe Biden,” fake president, is dumped in the ditch of history, and a mighty operation is mounted to put over Veep Kamala Harris, who ignored “JB’s” incapacity to head the US government for four years, carrying out no duties meanwhile, hiding from the public, answering nothing, going nowhere, abetted by a treasonous news media bent on hiding her as she drank away the months in the old Naval Observatory.
The conventions are over and the contest is on. Have you heard enough of their fake war-cry: “defending our democracy?” From a party that has tortured the law to jail and silence its critics and scrape its challengers off every ballot. The pretense is perfect. Their “democracy” is actually a colossal “spoils” system — to the victor go the spoils! — a grotesque political machine funneling trillions of federal dollars to their client voter groups, and especially to the non-profit orgs and NGOs that form a sinister secondary bureaucracy accountable to nobody. And all done with direct connivance of the federal intel blob at war with everyone outside this matrix of turpitude. And, by the way, the money is gone. Trillions. And nothing to show for it.
This is what Mr. Trump opposes, and has been fighting against since 2016. No wonder it wants to stuff him in prison or kill him. It is a mighty enemy because it holds the levers of official power, especially the federal prosecutors and the state and county prosecutors put in place by the Democrats’ chief “influencer,” the George and Alex Soros NGO empire. And the big picture includes the monumental crime against our country — against all the countries of Western Civ, really — which was the Covid-19 operation that left millions disabled or dead from a phony, poisonous “vaccine.”
And now we hear — as I write early this Friday morning, hours before any official announcement — that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is about to suspend his campaign, kneecapped by the Democratic Party so busy “defending our democracy,” and perhaps throw his support to Donald Trump in order to defeat this mafia of the mentally ill. I hope he does that. And I hope he denounces the party of his ancestors in the most vividly opprobrious terms so that no one can misunderstand the gravity of what has been going on.
I’d also look forward to Mr. Kennedy playing an important role in the second Trump government. Mr. Kennedy knows probably better than anyone in America exactly how the gigantic racketeering operation was constructed that grafted pharma onto the US public health agencies, the FDA, CDC, NIAID, and others. This monster that has left so many Americans dead and injured, and wrecked the health of the nation’s young people especially, must be slayed. It must be disassembled and its pieces reconstructed into institutions that actually serve the public. This includes the hospital holding companies, the private equity pirates out to asset-strip medicine, the insurance-driven, overgrown doctors’ practices, and the mendacious medical boards, professional orgs, and journals that unjustly punished dissident doctors and nurses who tried to oppose the extralegal Covid-19 vaxx mandates.
If it happens that Mr. Kennedy joins forces with Mr. Trump, it could be a momentous turn in an election so far marred by Democratic Party hoaxes, coups, and lawfare ops. Naturally, The New York Times played the story this morning in a tiny headline below-the-fold, saying nothing about the rumored stunning alliance between the Kennedy and Trump campaigns.
We await the Sept 18 sentencing hearing of Judge Juan Merchan in the Alvin Bragg book-keeping error (“34 felonies”) fake case that threatens to jam Mr. Trump into a Rikers Island jail cell. I’d like to see them try that. I’d like to see Mr. Kennedy explain to readers of The New York Times and viewers of CNN how all that worked. Those news agencies, in turn, will not be able to get around the fact that “X” (Twitter) has become the dominant source of news for Americans, a platform the old news orgs have no control over, and may not be able to ignore.
Mr. Kennedy has the chance to elevate the argument against the now-debased party of his father and his uncle that has weirdly become a national wrecking crew. He has the ability to remind the voting public exactly what has gone wrong, in language that won’t be misunderstood or twisted, and to point a way back, with Mr. Trump, to being a country worth caring about.
Update: Mr. Kennedy did what I proposed he would do, and pretty much exactly as I predicted. He did it in a speech that was direct, heroic, and quite moving to behold. I hope he can now persuade Mr. Trump to directly address the fiasco of the Covid vaccine, and come clean about how he was hosed by Fauci, Birx, & Company back in 2020. I expect Mr. Kennedy to campaign on his own in venues apart from Mr. Trump and JD Vance, opening a kind of third front against the soulless Democratic Party.
The post End of Hoaxes appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Looking a little insurrection-ish at Chicago’s United Center all of a sudden as Illinois Governor Jabba the Pritzker orders a wall built around the perimeter to protect the Democratic Party from its very own basket of deplorables — the pro-Hamas, Antifa / BLM nose-ring-for-lunch bunch — with the state’s National Guard “on standby.” The New York Post and other news sources report 100,000 anti-Israel protesters migrating there to liven-up a convention that also has the potential to go off-script inside the arena — since the script was written by a handful of party mandarins, with the gamed consent of the convened delegates, who might be a little ticked off about the deal.
What the party needs most this week is a plausible aura that it is firmly in control of events, having pulled off coup-after-coup on its own rank-and-file. Most recently, Pelosi & friends passed the black spot to “Joe Biden.” (The easy way or the hard way.) He took the hint and dropped out. But then, how exactly did Veep Kamala get plugged into his slot? Five minutes prior, they were, like, yccchhhh, her? And then, two seconds later, somebody arranged a pre-convention Zoom call “virtual vote” of the delegates — like a Las Vegas David Copperfield magic trick — followed by “certification!” (By whom? Answer: the certifiers.) Badda bing, badda bang! Their “democracy” got rolled.
So, you can imagine that things might fly out of control in exact proportion to the Mandarins’ desperate need to seem legitimately in control — when they are just a clique of scared-stiff tyrants running scams on their own people — and the result looks like the Democrats’ certified metamorphosis into the Party of Chaos.
Why scared-stiff? Because of a long list of serious crimes against the American people over the past decade, various treasons committed under color-of-law, for which they fear prosecution and punishment if the wrong person gets elected.
Just in the normal course of things in Chicago, local ABC-7 News reports, “At least 23 shot, 5 fatally, in weekend gun violence across city” over the pre-convention weekend. You have to wonder whether this ordinary background lawlessness will wash over into the political turmoil certain to roil the streets. Lootin’, anyone? Businesses in the downtown “Loop” district have boarded up their windows. As if a measly sheet of plywood can keep them out.
I happened to be at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, more in the role of a larval journalist than an activist, but right there in the action. I drove to Chicago from upstate New York with my college pal Bill Murphy in his beater Rambler — the car with reclining seats you could sleep on! (We did, in various parking lots.) Prior to the event, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s brother, an avowed anti-war candidate, marched methodically through the primaries collecting delegates, giving hope to the vast Baby Boomer college demographic that he would end the stupid war in Vietnam and the military draft with it. When he got shot in the head at the Ambassador Hotel June 5, the night he won the California primary, everything changed.
The then-mandarins of the party looked to cram in the pro-war veep Hubert Humphrey to run against Richard Nixon. Left on the battlefield were two anti-war knights, Minnesota Senator Eugene (“Clean Gene”) McCarthy, a cranky poet without much fight in him, and George McGovern, a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time prairie socialist from the nowhere state of South Dakota. You might be amazed to hear that the mainstream media of the day was against the war, and pretty hostile to the political establishment that ran things from President Lyndon Johnson on down to Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago — with the CIA and FBI lurking darkly in their shadows, busy assassinating folks. Walter Cronkite had a shit-fit on-the-air watching Mayor Daley’s thugs push around network journalists (esp. Dan Rather) working the convention floor. The party emerged from the convention in a very bad odor. Humphrey lost in November.
Daley and his police were a rough bunch, and treated the hippie mobs in Grant Park and down on Michigan Avenue quite harshly, with tear gas and billy-clubs. The National Guard was poised visibly on the roof of the Art Institute with rifles trained down at the hippies below. Things got pretty yeasty. It’s a wonder nobody got killed. The party went ahead and nominated Humphrey with ruthless efficiency. In the end, the 1968 convention riots were an act of futility. The ’68 convention was the public debut of the organism that we call the blob today — the Deep State in action. And it was the twinkling-out of hippie idealism. The Vietnam War ran another seven years until it ended ignominiously under Gerald Ford, followed by disco, inflation, and the offshoring of US industry.
This time around, the news media has been fully absorbed into the blob, doing all its bidding, like the blob’s personal Chat GPT, while the blob itself has grown to be a larger and more potent governing entity than the flimsy scaffold of elected officials who front for it. But the Democratic Party has faltered badly in its years’ long efforts to cover for the blob, mainly by lying to the American people about everything. Running “Joe Biden” in 2020 was a dishonest act of desperation that only worked with a rigged election and then prosecuting anyone who attempted to complain. The party knew that “JB” was a mental phantom four years ago, and they had the effrontery to try running him again in ’24, until ol’ “Joe” made it impossible with his demented public behavior.
They also know that Kamala Harris is an empty vessel with a drinking problem, but they’ve desperately pulled out all the stops to make her appear legitimate. Her performance the past three weeks has not exactly been reassuring. Her running mate, Governor Walz, comes off straight-up insane. Why would they now not attempt to dump them with the same bad faith they installed them?
Gawd knows what mayhem might rock the streets outside the United Center. Recent years of degenerate USA life have produced a youth cohort with a staggering rate of mental illness. You’ve already seen plenty of how dark Antifa can get with its murderous trans cadres itching for action. But you’ve also got to wonder how the formal speeches by the party nabobs will go over? Might there be any booing of the elite? How will the crowd greet Mrs. Pelosi, the party’s consiglieri who arranged things as they are now? What on earth can Hillary Clinton say about the nominee she openly loathes? Will Bill Clinton, painted as a sexual predator by the Me-Too caucus, get a love-bath or a cold-shoulder? How false will the party’s unity seem? Will surprise motions arise from the floor to change-up the pre-scripted program? There are many more ways for things to go wrong this week than the simple dynamics that were in-play fifty-six years ago in Chicago.
Note: Updates will be added to the Monday blog as needed this week.
The post Let the DNC Frolics Begin appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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It’s fun to muse on the torrent of panicked, deranged texting between Democratic Convention delegates as a runaway train of malignant fates, bad choices, insane policies, delusional ideas, and feral emotion drives them to nominate a moron for president. The confusion and self-doubt must be epic. Are we really gonna do this? Is this really happening? You must imagine this is the same state of mind as, say, a car-full of drunken bridesmaids fishtailing down the highway at 70mph toward a telephone pole.
The mis-plays and subterfuges that brought them to this pass cannot be undone: the insult of letting “Joe Biden” front for a criminal blob government, the many hoaxes and the exorbitant lawfare lawlessness, the gross mismanagement of public affairs, wreckage of institutions, ruined economy, devalued dollar, destruction of households and communities, sexual lunacy and programmed mental illness — this is the party’s legacy. Are none among them even a little bit ashamed of the damage they’ve done to this nation? And maybe wondering about it between one another? Perhaps even anxious to make it stop?
And so, the delegates head to Chicago, a city in civic freefall, to either pretend to celebrate the capricious selection of utterly dubious leaders imposed on them by unseen hands, or, just maybe, to revolt against the evil cabal affecting to “defend our democracy” by squashing it. Of course that’s inside the convention. Lord knows what hijinks are being concocted for outside the United Center arena by the various tribes that run on hot yellow bile these dog days of summer — the Hamas mob, the sex freaks, Antifas, BLMs, assorted Bolsheviks, anarchists, utopians, climate change sob-sisters, Gramscian culture stompers, Spartacists, Trotskyites, Jacobins, Fabians, and plain old riffraff out for fun and loot. The gigantic parking wasteland surrounding the United Center on West Madison Street has the look of a perfect battlefield.
All that commences on Monday. In the meantime, much misdirection zings around the Trumpian opposition and the outlier Robert F Kennedy, Jr., as the intel blob that runs mainstream media attempts to seed dissension and confusion amongst them. It includes rumors that Mr. Trump made “a deal” with the blob to go all flabby in exchange for getting let off the hook on his many blob-contrived lawfare problems. The chance of that being true must be zero, even though New York Judge Juan Merchan has an opportunity to send the former president to jail on September 18. I would like to see him try that. It will surely prompt the most momentous and memorable tableau of symbolic resistance in US history since John Paul Jones yelled to the British ship Serapis requesting his surrender, “I have not yet begun to fight.”
As for RFK, Jr., stories circulate that Mr. Trump tried (and failed) to make a deal that would have got Bobby on-board as veep, or some other juicy assignment, if he would drop out of the race. But it’s hard to see exactly how that discredits either of them, since just about everybody expects Mr. Trump, if elected, to employ Bobby for, at least, cleaning up the public health and pharma sectors of the blob — an epic task he’s ideally suited for.
Then, there was malicious chatter late this week that Bobby had approached Kamala Harris with a proffered endorsement in exchange for a key position in her government — assuming that massive ballot fraud ensures her victory November fifth. Mr. Kennedy denied the rumor and went on to denounce the current incarnation of the Democratic Party as utterly inimical to everything it used to represent when his father and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, were in office, especially on matters of free speech and censorship.
As that quarrel rolled out, Judge Christina Ryba kicked Bobby off the New York ballot for supposedly mis-stating that he was a New York resident on his own voter registration. He intends to appeal. New York has become a judicial sewer under Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul.
So, stand by now to see whether Kamala Harris and Tim Walz come out of next week’s convention Mixmaster the same way they went in: as bona fide candidates. At some point Ms. Harris will have to demonstrate some fitness for high office besides being a go-go dancer and a laugh riot. Tim Walz acts so unhinged in front of every audience that I expect the campaign to stuff him in a broom closet when the convention is over — should he actually still be on the ticket when all is said and done.
It seems at this point that the brooding Matron of Chappaqua will never get her “turn” in the White House after all. It must gall Hillary to see history change her out for an equity hire with half a brain. Politics is a cruel business. You’ll see just how cruel the next time they try to whack Mr. Trump in this No Prisoners, End of the Road election campaign. It will almost certainly get crazier from here.
The post The No Prisoners, End of the Road Election appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Does anybody know what this shape-shifting chimera passed off as “our democracy” actually is? I will tell you. Like everything else in the Democratic Party’s tool-bag these days, it’s the opposite of what it appears to mean, namely: You, the demos, give us, officialdom, the power to take whatever we like from you: your savings, your liberty, your stuff, your identity, and your posterity — because we are the boss-of-you, and don’t you forget it. . . and, by the way, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
It’s really that simple, though the deceptions cooked up to hide it are convoluted to the max. Like: engineering the illegal entry to the US of millions from other lands and then using procedural hocus-pocus such as motor-voter registration and public assistance applications (free money + automatic voter registration) to stuff the election drop-boxes with the ballots of non-citizens — who, get this, don’t even have to be the ones casting those ballots, which can just be harvested, like so many oven-ready pullets, by lowly hired shills. If you catch onto the ruse, you’ll be instructed that borders are arbitrary roadblocks to social justice thrown up by the old white male patriarchy, and that these are “free and fair elections.” And if you object loudly enough, you lose your job, your livelihood, your Facebook account, and maybe get thrown into solitary confinement for a year. Our democracy.
Meanwhile, we’re enjoying the spectacle of this evil party’s candidate selection tour with their joyful warriors/avatars, Harris and Walz — joyful because they laugh and laugh in the absence of articulating any actual views on the particulars of governance, and it’s infectious to witness all that mirth. There is, of course, an air of strenuous artificiality about all this hoopla. It rolls out in an alternative reality like one of those summer techno-pop raves where everyone is stoned on MDMA. The dream girl gets launched into center-stage by invisible forces and is joined by her prom king, and it’s just so heartwarming to get waved at by the grinning, hand-holding couple nobody voted for. This is your demos-free ticket!
Will anybody at the imminent Democratic National Convention notice how this all mysteriously came to be? And might there be any active consternation over it? Perhaps even a welling movement to pull the plug on this rave? You may be apt to wonder what is going on in the Chappaqua redoubt of She-Whose-Turn-Has-Been-(so far)-Thwarted, HRC, boss-of-all-girl-bosses, putatively retired from public life. She’s been awfully quiet since that night over a week ago when she was obliged on-stage somewhere to hug and air-kiss Ms. Harris, and made a face seconds after as if she had thrown up in her mouth.
Is she stewing in the broth of grievance but still and nonetheless tirelessly working her phone to canvass the delegates of that looming party meet-up? She might remind them that the DNC (that is, the Democratic National Committee, Inc), went broke in 2016 and got bailed out by the Clinton Foundation checkbook, and, Jeez, we can’t seem to find any repayment check from all’y’all. It seems maybe you owe us. . . something.
And, by the way, HRC could remind said delegates: you have allowed a laughing hyena who drinks her lunch to land at the head of the ticket for the worst reasons (viz., DEI) minus any votes from the party membership, and then managed to duct-tape a China-owned, Cluster-B head-case to her as the veep sidekick. . . and maybe when all the hee-hawing and hooting dies down, you’ll discover what a pair of losers you’ve allowed to be undemocratically implanted to (ha!) represent you. And also, by the way, I happen to be available as her capable-and-experienced replacement. . . whom you can actually vote for on the convention floor, if you manage to get your shit together. . . you know. . . our democracy, and all. Just sayin’.
That is, I’m just sayin’ what She might be thinkin’ (and sayin’). I am in no position to predict any actual outcome, but it’s hard to imagine any winning moves by the Harris & Walz team in actual play-by-play. In case you have forgotten amid all the week-long laughter and euphoria, there are important national issues to discuss about how to manage the malevolent leviathan the federal government has become, and many dilemmas and threats the people face. And there are very different records of each team’s views on these things, party by party.
Some of that discussion could happen in the (so far) one scheduled September 10 debate. If Mr. Trump can manage to be polite, he can press Kamala Harris to explain herself on things like the wide-open border, failure to negotiate with the Russians to end the Ukraine War, her party’s antipathy to public safety, her party’s promotion of gender identity insanity, its Gestapo-style lawfare operations, its endless hoaxes, and its disgraceful documented efforts to censor free speech. The record is pretty clear on all of that, and there’s a fair chance that Ms. Harris can’t possibly explain it away. Or laugh it off.
Mr. Trump has requested two more head-to-head debates, which Ms. Harris apparently wants to forego. Mr. Trump has come up with an excellent alternative: two “town hall” format appearances in which he fields questions from citizens, or from news reporters, or some combo of both. That would be much to his advantage, without Ms. Harris on stage to defend her positions — or, more likely, to dodge any coherent reply by repeating “racist racist racist,” and laughing her head off.
That is, if she even remains the nominee. Let’s see how it goes this week leading to the convention. For instance, if she and Mr. Walz can still weasel out of taking any questions from the news media. Or whether the White House (remember “Joe Biden” still lives there) and his blob compadres can engineer a major escalation into world war, to take everybody’s mind off the election race. Or if any tremors of apprehension emanate from the delegate corps packing their rolly-bags for the dreaded party confab in Chicago. You have to kind of wonder if they’re bringing any riot gear.
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Behold, the ghost of a formerly charming streetscape superimposed over a brutal Toronto skyscraper! Does it remind you of Canada’s current government: the ghost of political dignity over the brutal tyranny of Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland — ? As a matter of pure urban design, this pentimento of antique buildings informs us how much human scale matters. The human eye really only takes in how a building meets the street and the few floor above. Within that spatial frame, the parts of the building can communicate profound ideas about civilized life, such as the need for decorum and aspiration (towers and finials). The windows are treated not as holes-in-a-wall, but relationships between the inside and the outside of a building, embellished with suitable grace-notes (decorated lintels, arches with keystones). The windows are vertical, expressing the dignity of the human figure (buildings are anthropomorphic). The actual skyscraper behind this display achieves none of this.Rather, it presents as a titanic act of brutality — which is exactly in-synch with Canada’s current national spirit.
Shout-out to Demetrius Kappos for the nomination. (Yes, we were rather late this mont. Apologies….)
The post August 2024 appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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You might well wonder: how does the Democratic Party rank and file sustain such fervor for the wrecking crew of Harris & Walz conjured up with zero input from the Party’s demos? Just plopped onstage as by the old MGM studio heads casting a pair of iffy contract players in a “B” movie musical called Our Pronouns Are Cash and Carry.
So far, Harris and Walz levitate in fake polls on gusts of idiot wind from the Party’s unofficial public relations team of the The New York Times / MSNBC / CNN / NPR media matrix. But it’s already obvious that Veep Kamala Harris’ brain is just a laugh generator triggered by anything that sounds like an idea from the material world: the economy? Hee-haw. . . Ukraine? Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha. . . The border? Tee-hee. . . Transitioning minor children? Yuk-yuk-yukity-yuk. . . The Middle East? Cackle cackle. . . .
You are well aware, I’m sure, that the veep has yet to be exposed to a single unscripted interchange with anyone outside her promotional circle. It’s been kind of a neat trick to behold, like watching a barking terrier walk around the stage on its hind legs — but after a while the audience might be thinking, What else can you show me?
You must not suppose this liminal moment in history between the defenestration of “Joe Biden” and the apparent selection of Harris & Walz is anything but a transient psychotic episode in American politics. The tell is that nobody in the Dem fold is inquiring as to how it happened, and especially who is behind it. Has the Dem Party become just Speaker emeritus Nancy Pelosi’s personal mafia? It appears that she was the one who delivered the black spot to “JB.” Do Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries even matter in that supposed hierarchy, or is Mrs. Pelosi sole proprietor of the org now?
There must be a few unfettered souls among the Dem delegates who detect that, without the smoke and mirrors of the media matrix, Harris & Walz can’t possibly make the case for getting elected honestly. And the odds of successfully rigging another national election seem to be on-the-fade, too, with such obvious pranks as registering 371 illegal aliens (non-citizens) to vote using an address that turns out to be a Walmart parking lot. Yesterday, Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia signed an excutive order requiring paper ballots and voter ID along with other new regs. Is a trend underway among the states to clean up their acts?
The so far railroaded national Dem delegates have ten more days to watch the Harris / Walz tag-team get vivisected on “X”, which, like it or not, has become the sole open conduit for news and commentary in a nation ruled by a psychopathocracy. You can say that because the policies they promote are obviously inimical to our country’s well being — open borders, harassment, arrest and censorship of political opponents, the pointless Ukraine war, sexual mutilation of children, mass digital surveillance, medical quackery, and a policy of lying about absolutely all of it. Many still recognize insanity when they see it in action. These matters are not defensible and, deep down, they must know it, and maybe enough of the delegates will decide to do something about it — like revolt against the candidates foisted on them.
One possible result, of course, is that such a revolt will rip the party to shreds. You can easily imagine chaos in the streets of Chicago among the disaffected delegates and the Antifa shock troops called forth to punish them. Chaos for its own sake is highly valued by so-called “progressives” looking to progressively destroy the entire armature of civilized life in order to create out of the ashes a nirvana of sadomasochistic persecution and punishment — their Hieronymus Bosch Wokester utopia.
I’m guessing that there will be untoward discoveries about, and mortifying blunders galore by, Harris & Walz these ten days ahead, and they will go into the Chicago convention like two pitiful creatures marked for sacrifice. Gawd knows what will emerge from the turbulence that ensues — but I’m still dogged by the feeling that the only plausible outcome is a giant flying reptile with a face like Hillary’s swooping into the arena on her great, flapping, leathery wings crying, Caw caw caw, I own you all now, you miserable cat ladies, incels, nose-rings, and sundry victims of hateful offense! Follow me once more into the glorious rapture of defeat! And it shall be done!
The post “Who Elected YOU Boss of This Outfit?” appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays
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Note: Forgive formatting oddities. . . Writing on clunky iPad away from home. . . .
That two-by-four upside our country’s head you’ve been waiting to get whomped with? Looks like it’s landing now. We got a banger in 2008, but it didn’t make an much of an impression. Maybe you don’t even remember these people, but then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke came in like a code blue squad and hooked up the banks to an IV-drip speedball of cocaine and heroin, i.e., “money” that didn’t actually exist (a.k.a. “liquidity,” hallucinated capital), and that crew kept it coming for years.
And then Janet Yellen and her posse kept it coming with never-ending zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) until the national debt canceled America’s future. And that left Jerome Powell pretending there was a way out of this doom-loop. Then came the repo market spasm in September 2019 that freaked out the blob so badly they shut down the whole world with Covid and locked-down economies. And everything since then has been a waiting game. The financial world was in hospice.
The wait is over. Everything that can break is breaking: stock markets, bond markets, the galaxy of derivatives — bets on this and that, which will never be honored. Banks are next. Gold and silver are hanging in there for dear life just now, because they’re actually worth something. (And because they are worth something, they‘ll eventually sell off some too, to cover margin calls on other stuff hemorrhaging value. But they will not go to zero like a lot of other stuff, and they’ll come back stronger.)
You understand this can’t play out like it did in 2008-9. The authorities are out of tricks and out of fake money. They can try the emergency interest rate cut, but it won’t change what is actually happening: the epic revaluation of everything humans make and own — with much of it losing value and quite a bit losing all value because it never really had any. The spooky catch is that there will be an attempt, in this wild and terrifying process, for certain devious, unprincipled parties to take possession of many things shaking loose — what remains of collateral. . . real things. . . commodities. . . facilities. . . properties. . . chattels. . . artworks. . . and, of course, whatever securities still have a relationship to realities of production.
This brings a sharp end to the current political sitcom, especially the situation of the Democratic Party. They will get blamed for the economic carnage left behind by the shattered money system. They lied about everything for years, every number, every index, every supposed “policy”.
Kamala Harris won’t be cackling her way out of this. It’s hard to see how she might remain the party’s nominee. She can’t even speak to the massive catalog of prior failures to govern our country coherently and effectively. And it’s equally hard to figure how “Joe Biden,” still presiding emptily over this fiasco, can get Twenty-fifthed out of the way for his feckless veep. More likely, the coming convention will be a desperate, bloody mass cage fight and somebody else will stagger out of it to go through the motions of campaigning in a hopeless cause. Hillary might even decline the role in this horror show.
Now, I began writing this post well before dawn, eastern time. The action in Asia, across the international date line, was a slaughter. Europe got smacked hard, but not catastrophically. Maybe the Wall Street wonderboys can stop the bleeding here, but the futures numbers sure look grim. I’ll come back later when the US markets have spoken and add a few observations on the situation.
Oh, and you’ve probably noticed that World War Three is shaping up to kick off today.
Interesting times. . . And I’m supposed to be on vacation this week.
Wednesday morning: After a modest bounce-back Tuesday of roughly 300 on the DOW, the US markets look temporarily stabilized . . . While the Bank of Japan suffered a major anxiety attack, declaring it would turn-around the very modest 25 basis point interest rate lift that crashed their markets for three days by 20 percent — and also stated they would no longer even try to raise interest rates again. That means the yen gonna crash — big inflation for Japanese people — so sayonara purchasing power. Bigger picture suggests that a gigantic armature of derivative bets rests on the yen carry trade. The whole thing is a setup for an even worse bout of global financial instability. And just remember: the American on-the-ground economy is sinking rapidly. That’s real business and real paychecks and real trouble.
The post And Suddenly Things Change appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Have you noticed yet? — the weird thing about Veep Kamala Harris is how weirdly brisk her transfiguration was from a sit-com character to Wonder Woman, overnight in the reality-optional news media. In a party burdened with complex ideology, she was known only for tautology: “The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time,” she repeated solemnly on a tour of a Louisiana library in 2022. “So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.” Yes, ma’am. You nailed that ol’ coonskin to the wall, all righty!
Suddenly her time has come! Everything is Kamala Kamala Kamala. Lights! Camera! Action! But, as you have already been informed, time does not stand still. If it did, then everything would happen at once, which would be a great inconvenience to all. In what seems like a magically extended moment since someone told “Joe Biden” to go dangle, Kamala acquired a lance and halo and rode forth to save our democracy.
Yet, it’s a long way to the grand meet-up of Democratic Party delegates in Chicago, August 19, and that journey is cluttered up with long moments like the one we’re in now, moments when delegates are liable to stew, and maybe even think about more moments to come when the magic of the current moment has passed — because that, after all, is the significance of the passage of time! Here today, gone tomorrow! Hope and change! Go through enough passages of time and things can happen, or even un-happen, such as, perhaps, the rise and fall of the Veep as the champion of this figment known as our democracy. It’s kind of like what they used to say sixty years ago in Vietnam about having to destroy the village in order to save it. Only this time around, it’s democracy in America.
At the convention in Chicago, apropos of whoever selected Kamala Harris, someone might blurt out: “Say, who elected you boss of this outfit?” The answer, of course: nobody. Delegates may share their gnawing doubts in the hallways and state caucus breakout rooms. Metaphysical conundrums will arise. All that sub rosa chatter might even coalesce into. . . a movement! In the name of democracy, someone screeches, a public roll-call vote must be taken! Say, what? We thought that was settled two weeks ago when the virtual roll call happened. Nuh-uh, nah, no way, more delegates chime in. Here is your teachable moment: the virtual is not an adequate substitute for the authentic.
Meanwhile, riots in the streets outside the convention center. Antifa! Black Lives Matter! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free! The police, successfully defunded, stand aside and let youth go apeshit. Inside the hall, pandemonium! And so, the momentous roll-call is induced to happen right there on the convention floor with all those colorful hats bobbing amongst the standards of the fifty states — plus a bunch of territories — swaying to the rhythm of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinkin’ About Tomorrow)”.
Things grow complicated. There is the matter of the superdelegates, bought and paid for ages ago by. . . the Clinton Foundation! The passage of time goes from elongated to compressed. As good ol’ V. Lenin used to say: There are years when nothing happens and moments when decades happen — or something like that. Also, somebody recalls, it takes a village to . . . what. . . ? Why, to nominate a candidate.
And thus, ever so democratically, does Hillary seize the moment and the convention, and swoop to the podium on her great leathery wings crying “caw caw caw abortion!” The news media will go into super-overdrive shaping the narrative about the Democratic Party rank-and-file marshaling democracy to save democracy. The story will make the marginalized weep and the lame leap for joy. She-Whose-Turn-It-Is will not be denied! The pussy-hats come out again. The patriarchy runs for its life. . . .
At least that’s the dream. In the passage of time from August through September and October, something else happens. Reality creeps back onto the scene after a long sojourn in the nether regions of human vicissitude. The economy goes to shit, the markets tank, and war breaks out. A new consensus congeals through what’s left of the nation: thank you Democrats for wrecking America. Now, go dangle! Mr. Trump, having survived three more attempts on his life, gets elected and inaugurated. A great sorting of the mentally ill and the just plain criminal happens. Weirdly, we move forward into the weird. Wait for it. (Things take time.) That is the significance of the passage of time, after all.
The post Into the Weird! appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Did we just witness the suicide of Wokery? I think you saw what’s called, in the argot of progressive thinking, the “queering” of the Olympics. That was some spectacle. First, Death on a Pale Horse came galloping down the Seine River so that no one would miss the point of the symbolism to follow: the beheaded Marie Antoinette portrayed singing in the window of a flaming palais (revolution anyone?). . . . Then, a tableau vivant of DaVinci’s The Last Supper “queered” to-the-max with a tattooed land-whale in the Jesus seat offering a Satan hand-signal among the swaying drag queens, plus one child ostentatiously in the mix (say, whu?). . . followed by a blue Dionysius crooning about nudity (“Nu”) on a giant fruit platter, with his ball-sack clearly on display among the cherries and nectarines. . . . It rained. . .tant pis. . . . The power went out and Paris ceased to be the City of Light. Finis. . . .
Not all of Western Civ was amused by these. . . antics. Many complained that the show portrayed Christianity in a less than favorable light. Ya think? The next day, the Paris-24 organizing committee offered the world an apology of sorts. Spokesperson Anne Descamps explained that the idea was “to celebrate community tolerance.” Or, shall we say, to test it? Apparently, it flunked the test. Director of the extravaganza, Thomas Jolly, said (translation), “Our intention was never to be impertinent.” Of course, he lies, and of course it is the foundational premise of those in the Satanic fold to lie about everything. (Just as America’s Democratic Party lies about everything.) Within hours, sponsors revolted and pulled their support for the games altogether. Lord knows what the BRICs nations make of all this. Probably something like pity.
Two-hundred-thirty years ago in Paris the Jacobin faction behind the Reign of Terror was put out of business, suddenly, all in one night, really, after turning French daily life upside-down and inside-out for one year, to the huge annoyance of the French public. On July 27 (9 Thermidor), 1794, chief Jacobin activist Maximillian Robespierre made a speech before the Convention (national assembly) denouncing those who were denouncing him (theories of conspiracy!), and the audience commenced to pelt him with fruit, vegetables, and opprobrious invective. Cries rang out for his arrest. Before long: pandemonium in the chamber! The Jacobins fled and took refuge in the city hall (Hôtel de Ville), but it was too late. The whole city had turned on them. Robespierre got shot in the jaw, possibly by himself. The Jacobin gang were declared “outlaws.” The following evening, The Jacobin leaders were all executed by guillotine in the Place de la Concorde.
Thus began the Thermidorian Reaction — called that, because the Jacobins had added an extra mid-summer month, Thermidor, to their cuckoo calendar. Now, one might ask, was July 27, 2024, the start of the revolt against progressive Woke-ism? It’s hard to imagine what kind of public spectacle the Left could come up with to beat the Olympic opener. Maybe human sacrifice, say Hillary Clinton eating a parboiled toddler in front of three thousand shrieking cat-ladies at the Democratic National Convention. Has it come to that?
It’s hard to escape the feeling now that our own reign-of-terror, the Woke-Marxist psychopathocracy, has played out its string. A month of garish events and revelations has left the USA a hot mess: the momentous Supreme Court decisions, the debate horror show, the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump and the many loose ends still hanging from it, the (probably) coerced election withdrawal of “Joe Biden” and the shocking discovery (to many) that he’s only partly still there, and the elite selection process that “nominated” Kamala Harris — these strange doings have rocked the American Zeitgeist. The artificially-induced rapture that attended the apotheosis of Veep is sputtering out as the internet explodes with memes putting her clueless vacuity on laughable display.
We’re informed (in great detail here by Naomi Wolf) that the Veep’s handlers haven’t even bothered with the required Federal Election Commission filings to be a candidate (nor has “Joe Biden” submitted his official withdrawal paperwork). So, you can surmise that the whole thing is another Democratic Party prank, leading to more shenanigans as the August 19 Convention cometh.
Do you think the repulsive Olympic opener was unconnected to what has been going on in our country? And do you doubt that the tide is now going out on all that?
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_407.mp3“Eugyppius” is a former academic who blogs about the pandemic aftermath and the pathological politics of modern Germany. He spent much of his life abroad and over a decade in American universities as a grad student and a teacher. He writes in English on Substack. He is very careful about revealing more of his identity given the extreme censorship and cancellation action in his country these days. You can find him at Eugyppius.com.
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Direct Download: KunstlerCast 407 — Eugyppius on the Political Crises of Europe
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Clusterfuck Nation
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However it happened this week, “Joe Biden” passed the blowtorch to a new generation and got himself gone from the political battlefield. Delegates to the coming Democratic National Convention (August 19) were duly notified of the selected replacement, Veep Kamala Harris, and ordered to line up behind her. Not a peep of disagreement was heard among them. Amazing that no one had a different idea. Thus, is democracy saved.
The curious details around this event remain shrouded in mystery. Reporters for The New York Times and the WashPo could not be bothered to inquire, and their readers are not inclined to ask how all this came to be. It just is. In a culture with no sense of consequence, things just happen or un-happen. It is your duty to recognize that the wind now blows from another direction and bend with it.
One thing was obvious: the long-running prank of pretending that President “Joe Biden” is sound-of-mind fell apart after his mortifying appearance on the debate stage June 27th. Apparently, every last captain and foot-soldier in the Democratic Party ranks was taken completely by surprise to see their champion flicker out in real time, like a forty-watt bulb that has done years of duty on the front porch and suddenly leaves you in the dark. Three weeks followed with “Joe Biden” boldly campaigning as if nothing had happened. (Perhaps his mind did not register that things had changed.)
And then there was the weird tweet on “X” Sunday afternoon when the whole country was outside waterskiing, grilling weiners, carjacking, and yelling at ballparks, and the deed was done. Someone, possibly even “Joe Biden” himself, wrote a letter pasted into the tweet that declared he was bowing out of the race. The White House staff didn’t even know until it was up-and-posted. Rumor had it that Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama read the riot act to “JB”, who was refusing to follow the script. There were plenty of carrots-and-sticks to finally lever his obdurate ass into motion: not least must have involved any pending legal outcome of the family’s influence-peddling operations, whispers of new whistleblower accusations about offshore bank accounts, perhaps with sweeteners in the deal as to how much schwag the clan could still hold onto in the end.
Then, the valedictory speech on Wednesday, sort of a proof-of-life exhibition, to verify that Sunday’s janky tweet to the nation was for real. You heard a Homeric recitation of “JB’s” signal achievements in office, every one of them demonstrably false. He did not keep our country out of war, or grow the economy, or keep inflation down, or beat Big Pharma, or build anything, or defend personal freedoms, or “make it clear there is no place, no place in America for political violence or any violence ever.” (In fact, the very next day, Thursday, pro-Hamas mobs attacked US Park police and vandalized federal property at Washington’s Union Station, and on Friday all charges were dropped against them — while scores of J6 Capitol trespassers rotted for years in the DC jail.)
What “Joe Biden” actually accomplished in office was the near-total wrecking of the USA. He torpedoed the authority and legitimacy of just about every federal agency, turned the Department of Justice into a Gestapo, seeded the federal court benches with Woke lunatics, allowed an invasion of perhaps 20-million border-jumpers (including many thousands of professional terrorists), coerced injections of an ineffective and injurious vaccine into millions of citizens afraid of losing their livelihoods, promoted gross medical experiments on sexually troubled children, invited drag queens and mentally-ill degenerates to cavort in the White House, spent borrowed money at a rate that propelled the national debt past the event horizon into a black hole, made the seeking of incompetence the number one priority of the Pentagon, provoked a war in Ukraine that now teeters on the hazard of a nuclear exchange, and allowed the CIA to complete its takeover of the US government. “Joe Biden” will go down in history as the worst of all 46 US presidents.
And, of course, in the rush of cascading events the past several weeks came the attempted assassination of the Democratic Party’s nemesis, Mr. Trump, an operation festooned with loose threads, suspicious agency failures, and intimations of Deep State blob engineering. You’ll have to stand by on any of that resolving soon. But many Democrats expressed disappointment that Mr. Trump was not killed, since that would be saving our democracy.
Also not quite resolved is the case of who the Democratic Party truly intends to run for president this year as the days dwindle down to Nov. 5. The current delirium over Kamala Harris is like a relief rally in the financial markets when a crisis has been averted — or, at least, stalled. You have reason to doubt that the Democratic Party’s leadership crisis has actually been averted. Despite sedulous efforts to wipe her record, too many Americans know Kamala Harris as a hee-hawing ninny with a predilection for hapless Marxist fantasies. I’m not persuaded that she is at all comfortable in her sudden role as the party’s avatar. She is rumored to hit the bottle in moments of stress.
The Party of Chaos will supposedly run a “virtual roll call” of delegates August 1st in order to meet the requirements to get on the ballot in several states. But then comes the actual convention with live bodies in murmuration on the floor of the arena, and in the back rooms and hallways, and there are more than three weeks between now and then for Kamala Harris to remind the world what a cackling lightweight she is. A lot can happen between now and then.
The post Saving Our Democracy appeared first on Kunstler.
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“Life imitates art,” Oscar Wilde was fond of saying. And so, all of a sudden on Sunday, the USA became an episode of Veep, after President “Joe Biden” had that fateful sit-down with God he’d hinted at a week or so ago:
God: Yeah, it’s me again. What I told you ‘bout dis ‘lection bidness?
“JB”: (cough cough) I gotta finish the job. (cough cough.)
God: Job, my ass. You ain’t done nuttin’ but eat ice cream cones, spend money dat don’t exist, and sniff up every chile come near you.
“JB”: No, you don’t understand! I’m defending democracy.
God: Oh yeah? Since when my will subject to some pissant caucus? In my mansion dey’s many doors, and this one is da exit, son. What I say, go. And when I say, ‘go,’ dat mean you git yo’self gone! I done wrote the letter and you signin’ on da dotted line right now.
“JB”: What if I won’t?
God: I’ma have to smite yo’ ass.
“JB”: Well, since you put it that way. . . but, say, do you happen to also have that pardon document we talked about. . .?
And so it went in the study at Rehoboth Beach Sunday afternoon. And all of a sudden, Veep Kamala Harris is elevated to be the putative nominee of the Party of Chaos going into the August convention. Most of the other talked-about replacements instantly endorsed her — Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Pete Buttigieg, et al. — as a convocation of mullahs might bless a goat about to be sacrificed. Kamala issued a stirring war cry: “Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.” Yawn. . . .
It was all pretend, of course, or, shall we say, a continuation of the pretend that is the core operating principle of the party. Everything it does is fake. Case in point, the marvelous statement by HRC (a.k.a. She-Whose-Turn-it-Ever-Is or Rodan the Flying Reptile), who put out this smarmy gem:
President Biden has capped his extraordinary career of service with a Presidency that has lifted America out of an unprecedented pandemic, created millions of new jobs, rebuilt a battered economy, strengthened our democracy, and restored our standing in the world. By any measure, he has advanced our founders’ charge to build a more perfect union and his own stated goal of restoring the soul of our nation.”
“Joe Biden” did all that? Hillary, you see, is buttering up the cloacal vent of the party so that she can wriggle up there and eat its brain, like one of those parasitical wasp larvae that get into a caterpillar. She’s supporting Kamala until it becomes opportune not to, which is to say when the Deep State blob gets the heebie-jeebies about failing to steal the election, losing its positions of power and perqs, and very possibly facing prosecution for serious crimes. Of course, the weekend developments suggest that “Joe Biden” will have to vacate his position as Commander-in-Chief altogether. It’s too self-evident to even rehearse the particulars. It’s only a matter of when, and that probably hinges on his negotiated severance package — basically something that keeps his various family members out of prison. Kamala will then rise to the Oval, ha ha ha.
In this moment of maximum uncertainty, then, the Party of Chaos will pretend to go along with Ms. Harris for a week or two, allowing the first woman president of-color many chances to utter world-scaring inanities and fall into cackling fits so as to demonstrate she can’t possibly be taken seriously. Suddenly you will see the long knives come out slicing and dicing Kamala like a daikon radish on the hibachi table, and anyone else besides HRC who dares to step up will get the same treatment. Notice that Mr. Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Hakim, and Chuck (Nine-Ways-From-Sunday) Schumer haven’t chimed in for Kamala. They will, by God, get their convention free-for-all, though every bit of it will be scrupulously managed by the Big Dawgs. And out of that pandemonium will fly the indomitable Hillary, screeching, “Caw caw, abortion! Caw caw, Russia!” Could it work? No way. In a truly fair election, Hillary would be run over by the Trump-Vance convoy and left a bit of smoldering roadkill, drawing flies, a sad end to all that coruscating ambition.
Not to change the subject too abruptly, but here goes. . . have you caught that little convo on YouTube between George Gammon and Robert Barnes on the Trump assassination attempt? Woo-wee, this one will rock your weltanschauung. Here it is in a nutshell:
The attempted rub-out at Butler, PA, (Mr. Barnes theorizes) was a NeverTrumper / blob / neo-con joint operation that was supposed to work as follows: Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo, Deep Staters both, are on the outs with a GOP solidifying around Mr. Trump. Before the Milwaukee GOP Convention opens, they are chatting-up delegates in preparation for a kind of coup. The Butler, PA, op is timed before any nomination can occur. It’s (obviously) intended to eliminate the former president for once and for all and make sure there’s no veep candidate to step into his shoes. The blob then blames the Trump assassination on Iran, instantly conjuring up a fresh new war to distract the nation. The GOP Convention nominates war goddess Nikki for president and Pompeo for veep. The DC war party carries on in triumph. Fait accompli.
Notice, Mr. Barnes says, that CNN and other news networks that usually avoid broadcasting Trump rallies, are actually covering the Butler, PA, event live. They want all of America to see Donald Trump’s head explode like a Crenshaw melon on TV — sending the message: this is what happens to anyone who challenges the blob. Many other observers and investigators unconnected with the government are busy looking into the site forensics, lines of fire, shot acoustics, the strange facts around the alleged “shooter” (possibly patsy) Thomas Matthew Crooks, the stupendous failures of the Secret Service. A picture is resolving.
The old Sicilian adage goes, revenge is a dish best served cold. Surely, Mr. Trump knows a thing or two about what really went down July 13. His adversaries know he knows, and he knows they know he knows. Notice Mr. Trump is not jumping up and down going woo-woo-woo over all this. Rather, he’s sitting tight and calmly holding his cards close to his chest. He will eventually be coming to settle accounts. So, you must suppose they’ll try again. Or figure out a way to postpone the election indefinitely. Nothing is beneath these fiends. Strangely — a lot of people have noticed — it seems that God is on our side. Stand by and keep your hats on.
The post Only Half Gone appeared first on Kunstler.
There was a lot of talk about divine intervention at the Republican Convention this week. The country has witnessed a rush of seemingly providential events since the fateful night of June 27th when, to universal horror, “Joe Biden” was unmasked as The Phantom of the White House. The attempt on Donald Trump’s life Saturday, with its intimations of blob involvement, was only the latest of countless trips, hoaxes, capers, and ops that smacked of demonic inspiration laid on the public, so you can’t blame them for feeling that “God is among us now.”
A huge piece of this dynamic has been the Right’s amazing impotence in the eight-year-long march of insults to the republic — especially the failure to find relief for any of that in the courts of law, until last month when the SCOTUS finally kneecapped Democratic Party lawfare operations. A paramount example of that impotence was being unable to find one jurisdiction willing to adjudicate election fraud in 2020 on the merit of the arguments.
But there was much more, starting with collective helplessness in the drawn-out RussiaGate psychodrama, even when all the players and their many nefarious acts were exposed by the alt news media, and extending to the mendacious roguery of the two-year Mueller (Weissmann) Investigation, followed by fifty-one former intel higher-ups labeling Hunter Biden’s laptop Russian disinformation, followed by Rep. Adam Schiff’s Ukraine “whistleblower” prank featuring CIA/NSC/DOD/DOJ moles Eric Ciaramella, Colonel Vindman and IC Inspector General Michael Atkinson, and then the FBI-instigated J-6 riot with the ensuing faked-up House J-6 committee . . . plus you can throw in the stupid Ukraine war, the drag queens in the kindergartens, the bumbling Durham investigation, ten million unvetted illegal migrants flowing into the country and this year’s four show-trials put on to finally break Mr. Trump.
For many in this land, it has been like the classic nightmare of being paralyzed in the presence of evil. So, it’s no wonder that the Republicans came into their convention with a tremendous tailwind of relief when events suddenly broke their way in June. Now, everyone knows that the current president is a vindictive invalid who will be tossed overboard by his own terrified party in a matter of hours now. And the entire scaffold of lies supporting “Joe Biden” and his party is wobbling badly, too.
You could see it in the deranged terror on Rachel Maddow’s increasingly contorted face last night as she rehearsed all the hoaxes she has helped to perpetrate, along with her mentally-ill posse of Jen Psaki, Joy Reid, Nicole Wallace, and the strangely mute white male Ari Melber. It seemed that any minute Rachel’s head would spin and start spewing pea soup at the camera. When will an exorcist finally pay a visit to MSNBC?
As the sun sets on “Joe Biden’s” career, what’s left of his campaign runs an ad in which he promises “to finish the job.” Sounds kind of sinister now, doesn’t it, like something a crime boss might tell his caporegimes? And for sure the country is suffering from this three-year-plus reign-of-terror against common sense and common decency. The wreckage is everywhere, all over this land. “Defending our Democracy,” my ass.
The party big dawgs have paid their terminal visit to the old grifter bringing the sad news that it’s over. Of course, this excites several new headaches for them. Foremost: how can “JB” bow out of the election on account of mental infirmity but still remain president? Even if they call it something else, make some other excuse, the whole world knows now that the president is gone in the head. There are six months remaining to the end of his term and a lot of urgent issues requiring a president’s attention. You can be sure that pressure will rise to shove him out of office altogether. And it may come before the Democratic Convention in late August — if we want to be taken seriously by the rest of the world.
Of course, that would elevate Kamala to the White House. Would getting to be the first female president of-color for six months be her consolation prize for graciously declining an automatic nomination to run in “JB’s” place, so that the party can stage an “open convention” free-for-all? Or would she better serve the party as a sacrificial goat to head the ticket and get buried in what’s shaping up to be an election landslide for the Republicans? Anyway, which of the various replacement politicians — Newsom, Whitmer, Pritzker, PA Gov. Shapiro —really wants to squander a political future in an election that’s as much a vote against the Democratic Party itself as any particular figure in it? Let the party go down so it can be purged of Green Woke Satanic mentally-ill communists and reorganized on a sane and decent basis.
But then there’s always HRC. She’s been laying back alertly, waiting for an opening to swoop in on her leathery wings and cast a fresh spell over the batshit-crazy women who, in recent times, comprise the party’s base. At one point, not many years ago, the party was broke and had to be bailed-out by the Clinton Foundation. To what extent does that entity still own the DNC, and especially its cargo of super-delegates? I guess we’re going to find out.
The post Slowly, Then All at Once appeared first on Kunstler.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_406.mp3Dmitry Orlov is a Russian-American engineer and author of many books on culture and politics. He emigrated to the US with his parents at age 12 and as a young adult sojourned in Russia, where he witnessed the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. He spent many more years back in the USA living on a sailboat in Boston Harbor and later in South Carolina. His books include Reinventing Collapse, which compares the Soviet fall with the prospective crackup of the USA, followed byThe Five Stages of Collapse, and many books of essays. Dmitry moved back to his native Russia in 2016, citing a desire to return to his roots and to live in a country he felt was more stable and aligned with his values. He blogs at Club Orlov.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
Direct Download: KunstlerCast 406 — Reinventing Dmitry Orlov in Russia
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The post KunstlerCast 406 — Reinventing Dmitry Orlov in Russia appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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You can’t deny that “Joe Biden” did his goodest last night facing down a half-dozen pre-selected reporters representing blob-adjacent news orgs such as Reuters and NPR at the post-NATO meetup damage-control event billed as a “news conference.” Only a week after he declared himself to be the “first black woman vice-president,” he pivoted to correct the record, telling the DC press corps that he’d “picked Vice-president Trump to be vice-president. . .” and everyone in the room saw that they were back in that mortifying scene in The Caine Mutiny when the confused and incompetent Captain Queeg reaches for the ball bearings in his pocket.
At the end of the harrowing hour, he minced his way offstage, leaving his Party of Chaos evermore sore perplexed as to how they might lever this burnt-out old hack out of the nomination they foolishly secured for him months ago. It ain’t gonna be easy, as “JB” repeatedly insisted he had no intention of stepping aside, despite the forces mustering against him in Congress, the media, and Hollywood. Even CNN is turning on him. Meanwhile, the #VeepTrump clip went viral on social media. So much for damage control.
You understand, don’t you, what a fiasco the 75th Anniversary DC NATO meetup itself was? Everyone in the room, including the key prime ministers and presidents, could sense how flimsy the alliance now appears, as led by our maundering near-zombie president. Like “Joe Biden,” NATO’s raison d’être has been exposed as badly out-of-date and dangerously unhinged. Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg kicked things off declaring that “Ukraine is on an ‘irreversible’ path to NATO.” This controverts what everybody in NATO knows is Mr. Putin’s clearest red line, and is therefore either a jape or a bit of recklessly provocative idiocy.
The truth of the matter is this: following its transition out of the failed Soviet experiment thirty years ago, Russia was never a threat to its European neighbors. All the talk of Vladimir Putin seeking to reassemble the old USSR empire was knowingly false, as is the chatter now about Russia looking to invade Europe. What Russia actually sought was to be regarded, once again, as a normal European nation able to conduct normal business with the rest of Europe. The USA wouldn’t allow it.
Exactly why remains partially mysterious. Surely, post-1991, it was in the interest of US military contractors to maintain their Cold War revenue streams. To do that, a foreign hobgoblin had to be invoked — and perhaps China was not the best candidate, since it had begun manufacturing everything on sale in the Walmart — so Russia, with practically no export economy, was cast in that role. And the politicians, too, surely liked creaming off their share of that military-industrial revenue stream, so they went along policy-wise, with figures like John McCain and Lindsay Graham leading the charge. But the US intel blob and State Department had darker motives, driven by an animus that has slowly revealed itself to be insane — just as the Democratic Party has turned obviously insane, adopting a playbook that could have been written by Franz Kafka.
Being likewise insane, the intel blob and the neocons at State harbored an unappeasable hatred toward Russia that, since the Soviet collapse, allowed no accommodation and gelled into a naked avarice for seizing the resources of Russia with a long-term plan to subvert the Russian state, break it up the way they broke up Serbia in the 1990s, and direct a corporate looting operation of Russia’s oil and mineral riches. Ukraine was the doorway they had to go through to get that done.
And so, the blob and State neocons overthrew democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, and installed Poroshenko followed by Zelensky. Veep “Joe Biden” was given the Ukraine “portfolio,” making him a sort of viceroy, and he took full advantage, plopping his son Hunter on the board of Burisma, the huge Ukrainian natgas company that American oil and gas companies drooled over. Hunter managed to milk the Ukrainian government for tribute to the Biden Family bank accounts far above the roughly million-dollar-a-year salary he grifted from his no-show job on the Burisma board. (Hunter also apparently dabbled in a set of bioweapons labs set up in Ukraine by the CIA.) Thus, along with the sheer insanity of the CIA and State Department, the Biden family had a deep and criminal involvement in Ukraine that had to be concealed.
That degenerate relationship has been revealed since the discovery of the laptop that Hunter stupidly left in a Wilmington computer repair shop, and all the disclosures that have followed — including the sedulous recovery of bank records for the many shell companies the Bidens used to conceal their moneygrubbing in Ukraine and other foreign lands. When Mr. Trump first scented it in the fall of 2019, they impeached him for it. But now that he threatens to return to the White House, the blobists and the Bidens are running out of options to evade an accounting for all this mischief. That desperation is what drives disintegrating “Joe Biden” to remain president and to continue pressing the malevolent and foolish proxy war against hobgoblin Russia and its vilified president, Mr. Putin. So, now you know.
The post The Cover Your Ass Olympics appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays
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You can’t deny that “Joe Biden” did his goodest last night facing down a half-dozen pre-selected reporters representing blob-adjacent news orgs such as Reuters and NPR at the post-NATO meetup damage-control event billed as a “news conference.” Only a week after he declared himself to be the “first black woman vice-president,” he pivoted to correct the record, telling the DC press corps that he’d “picked Vice-president Trump to be vice-president. . .” and everyone in the room saw that they were back in that mortifying scene in The Caine Mutiny when the confused and incompetent Captain Queeg reaches for the ball bearings in his pocket.
At the end of the harrowing hour, he minced his way offstage, leaving his Party of Chaos evermore sore perplexed as to how they might lever this burnt-out old hack out of the nomination they foolishly secured for him months ago. It ain’t gonna be easy, as “JB” repeatedly insisted he had no intention of stepping aside, despite the forces mustering against him in Congress, the media, and Hollywood. Even CNN is turning on him. Meanwhile, the #VeepTrump clip went viral on social media. So much for damage control.
You understand, don’t you, what a fiasco the 75th Anniversary DC NATO meetup itself was? Everyone in the room, including the key prime ministers and presidents, could sense how flimsy the alliance now appears, as led by our maundering near-zombie president. Like “Joe Biden,” NATO’s raison d’être has been exposed as badly out-of-date and dangerously unhinged. Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg kicked things off declaring that “Ukraine is on an ‘irreversible’ path to NATO.” This controverts what everybody in NATO knows is Mr. Putin’s clearest red line, and is therefore either a jape or a bit of recklessly provocative idiocy.
The truth of the matter is this: following its transition out of the failed Soviet experiment thirty years ago, Russia was never a threat to its European neighbors. All the talk of Vladimir Putin seeking to reassemble the old USSR empire was knowingly false, as is the chatter now about Russia looking to invade Europe. What Russia actually sought was to be regarded, once again, as a normal European nation able to conduct normal business with the rest of Europe. The USA wouldn’t allow it.
Exactly why remains partially mysterious. Surely, post-1991, it was in the interest of US military contractors to maintain their Cold War revenue streams. To do that, a foreign hobgoblin had to be invoked — and perhaps China was not the best candidate, since it had begun manufacturing everything on sale in the Walmart — so Russia, with practically no export economy, was cast in that role. And the politicians, too, surely liked creaming off their share of that military-industrial revenue stream, so they went along policy-wise, with figures like John McCain and Lindsay Graham leading the charge. But the US intel blob and State Department had darker motives, driven by an animus that has slowly revealed itself to be insane — just as the Democratic Party has turned obviously insane, adopting a playbook that could have been written by Franz Kafka.
Being likewise insane, the intel blob and the neocons at State harbored an unappeasable hatred toward Russia that, since the Soviet collapse, allowed no accommodation and gelled into a naked avarice for seizing the resources of Russia with a long-term plan to subvert the Russian state, break it up the way they broke up Serbia in the 1990s, and direct a corporate looting operation of Russia’s oil and mineral riches. Ukraine was the doorway they had to go through to get that done.
And so, the blob and State neocons overthrew democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, and installed Poroshenko followed by Zelensky. Veep “Joe Biden” was given the Ukraine “portfolio,” making him a sort of viceroy, and he took full advantage, plopping his son Hunter on the board of Burisma, the huge Ukrainian natgas company that American oil and gas companies drooled over. Hunter managed to milk the Ukrainian government for tribute to the Biden Family bank accounts far above the roughly million-dollar-a-year salary he grifted from his no-show job on the Burisma board. (Hunter also apparently dabbled in a set of bioweapons labs set up in Ukraine by the CIA.) Thus, along with the sheer insanity of the CIA and State Department, the Biden family had a deep and criminal involvement in Ukraine that had to be concealed.
That degenerate relationship has been revealed since the discovery of the laptop that Hunter stupidly left in a Wilmington computer repair shop, and all the disclosures that have followed — including the sedulous recovery of bank records for the many shell companies the Bidens used to conceal their moneygrubbing in Ukraine and other foreign lands. When Mr. Trump first scented it in the fall of 2019, they impeached him for it. But now that he threatens to return to the White House, the blobists and the Bidens are running out of options to evade an accounting for all this mischief. That desperation is what drives disintegrating “Joe Biden” to remain president and to continue pressing the malevolent and foolish proxy war against hobgoblin Russia and its vilified president, Mr. Putin. So, now you know.
The post The Cover Your Ass Olympics appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Imagine: President “Joe Biden,” on the deck behind his Rehoboth Beach house Sunday evening before a most consequential week. He just declared to the nation that only an “act of God” will prevent him from running for re-election. Dr. Jill has gone inside for another martini, extra-dry, no vermouth, no ice, no olive. . . no glass. Chief advisor, Hunter Biden, just drove into Wilmington “to pick something up,” he said. Chocolate chip ice cream melts in the bowl on “JB’s” lap as he endures another Parkinsonian frozen rapture. His gaze is fixed on the gray-green Atlantic, a blank horizon, much like his current career prospects.
As happens often these days, he slips off to sleep. In his dream, a red phone is ringing.
“Who’s this. . .?” he says.
“Me, God. Thought it was time you and me had a little chat. You can’t be serious ’bout this re-election thang.”
“I’m defending our democracy. Gotta stay in. Defeat Hitler.”
“Democracy my ass! You channelin’ Hitler yourself a little too much lately. How it is you laid ninety-seven indictments on my dawg DJT? You done George Floyded da man!”
“But. . . but. . . the insurrection—”
“Insurrection my ass! Why you keep sayin’ dat.”
“If you repeat stuff enough, people believe it.”
“Who told you that?”
“Andrew Weissmann.”
“Oh, really? I kicked his ass outa my house more’n four thousand years ago. He ain’t nothin’ but trouble. Who told you to listen to him?”
“Lisa Monaco and Mary McCord.”
“Oh? Them two! Just so you know, I canceled they retirement plan up here with me. They goin’ to the other place wid Weissmann. Now, I got news for you, Joey: Ima have to take yo’ ass out dis election.”
“But why? I’ve accomplished so much. Did you see me at Gettysburg, beating those insurrectionists?”
“I see everything. Didn’t see you around dat day.”
“What about when I stormed the beaches at Normandy?”
“Naw. You was in a playpen, going goo-goo-goo. Look, Joey, here’s the deal: remember you said ‘God bless America’ in all them speeches you made?”
“We all say that. Anyway. . . .”
“Maybe y’all go through the motions, but I got responsibilities, know what I’m sayin’? I been tryin’ and tryin’ to bless dis land but yo’ bunch making’ it mighty difficult for me. So, news flash: yo’ ass is out de race. Official act from yours truly. Sorry.”
“But. . .but. . . that’s. . . that’s racist!” the President stutters as his dream dissolves in a vapor.
Dr. Jill is shaking his shoulder, rather harshly.
“I heard that! Don’t even dare think of dropping out,” she says. “Or you’ll never get another bowl of ice cream ever again! Do you read me?”
“Yeah, Okay! Okay!” Anyway. . . .”
And so it goes in the twilight hours of our forty-sixth president. At least Rob Reiner hasn’t asked him to step aside. At this point, it looks like nobody’s in a position to save our democracy until and unless they do something to save the floundering Democratic Party. All hands are on deck in our nation’s capital. Congress is even coming back from vacation today. So much desperate chatter is rising out of the Potomac Swamp that it’s like a deadly miasma infecting everyone! What on earth to do now?
There are Plans A, B, C, D, E . . . . Only one problem: they all look like variations on a Chinese fire drill. Let the demented bastard run and hope for the best? Please! You thought the debate was bad? And the Stephanopoulos colloquy was unnerving? Imagine the gaffes and flubs to come in the months ahead. For instance, the convention in Chicago. . . “Joe B” freezes up for five long minutes at the podium mid-acceptance speech like a defective android in a sci-fi movie. . . “Joe B” takes a header off the stage at a Midwest state fair. . . “Joe B” challenges a quadriplegic veteran in a wheelchair to a push-up contest. . . .
Then there is. . . the Kamala question. Could she, uh, step into the breach, if it. . . you know . . . had to be? She comes with a dowry of over $250-million in campaign contributions, which no other candidate has dibs on. Quite a temptation. But the cackling. . . ? The vapid word-salad. . .? The record of accomplishment. . . ?
Would Hillary even allow that? I said uh-hey (hey), you (you), get offa my cloud! Hillary is lurking so quietly in the background she’s like one of those self-camouflaging bottom-feeder fish pretending to be a rock, with a coy little tendril dangling in front of her garage-size mouth to lure the little fishies in . . . before . . . chomp chomp! But, has she plumb worn out her welcome in American politics? Is she a fazed cookie? You can’t help but see a big, bold letter “L” on her forehead lately. She might, arguably, be even more loathed by more voters than Mr. Trump at this point.
Then there’s the idea put out just over the weekend to stage an insta-bliz primary before the August Dem Convention. With the condition of “positive-only” campaigns. Does that mean no Hitler-talk? Can’t wait to see how that works out.
Finally, there’s the novelty solution to this fine mess: “Joe Biden” stays in the race, bumps Kamala, installs Barack Obama in the veep candidate slot, they romp, then somewhere around January 21, 2025, “JB” bows out. . . and cazart! It’s back to the Good ol’ days with President Obama again! What a play! Genius! You see, the 22nd Amendment only says: No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice. Doesn’t say anything about getting elected veep and then being elevated to president by happenstance. If that doesn’t save our democracy, I don’t know what will.
We’re in for fast-moving developments this week. I’ll update here as necessary.
The post In It to Spin It appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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There’s a reason that the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes is so potent: it describes a mentally ill society that retreats into abject unreality, to avoid contending with truth. Alas, this archetypal human quandary shoves such a society towards nemesis: downfall and punishment. And that is exactly the consequence of our news media’s craven, dishonorable, degenerate behavior the past decade.
They have disordered our nation’s consensus about reality with peremptory lying about everything, in service to a political party that lies to its citizens about everything. The big question is: who or what recruited them into serving the Party of Chaos, and why did they go along?
You can explain the media’s initial repugnance to Donald Trump going back to his 2015 debut in politics. Much about him had a low-class odor, despite all the gold-plating — his origins in tawdry Queens, his career as a builder in Manhattan where the trades are mob-controlled, the Atlantic City casino debacle, bankruptcy, ditching Ivana and his mid-life playboy reputation, the tacky TV show, the increasingly mystifying hair-doo, his rough, jumbly manner of speech. Everything about him repelled the Ivy Leaguers who increasingly filled the ranks of national-level journalism.
Despite all that, Mr. Trump raised five kids successfully. The grown ones had careers and they all visibly loved him. With that and his overt masculinity, he assumed the lineaments of the archetypal Daddy, which enflamed the enormous cohort of feminists who had taken over the Democratic Party behind their avatar Hillary Clinton. And when he squeaked out an electoral victory over her in 2016, they were sure it was a cheat. The menace of Daddy in da (White) house pushed them over the edge psychologically.
Daddy was all about setting boundaries, which was the antithesis to the “progressive” (and transgressive) agenda of the Dems, and was probably the reason that his talk of “building the wall” along the Mexican border drove them nuts. It signaled patriarchal control of a whole lot of other things, too. Boundaries galore!
Now, it happened that the Democratic Party was also the favored party of the DC permanent bureaucracy, which had been growing and growing for decades and had become overtly politicized during the eight years of Barack Obama. Mr. Trump threatened to downsize this leviathan government, meaning many patronage jobs might be lost. (Boundaries would be imposed!) The warrior branch of this Deep State was the Intel community. The FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the State Dept, and elements of the military were commissioned by the Democratic Party to destroy Mr. Trump.
They used the machinery of the law to lay one trip after another on the president and effectively hog-tied him — RussiaGate, the Ukraine phone call impeachment, the George Floyd anarchy — and when those operations failed to oust him, they ran the Covid-19 caper (with enormous collateral damage to the people and their economy), which enabled rigging the 2020 election with mail-in ballots. Once Mr. Trump was squeezed out-of-office, the FBI turned the J-6 protest at the Capitol into a riot, which Nancy Pelosi then converted into an “insurrection” using the House J-6 committee. The J-6 incident, they dearly hoped, would rid them of Mr. Trump once and for all.
The news media went along with every bit of that, year after year, converting each mendacious act of the party and the bureaucracy into consumable narrative, and lying either overtly about all the ops, or just omitting to report on the dark truth behind it all. Any reality-based thread that happened to leak into public view from independent alt-news reporters was branded by CNN, The New York Times, the WashPo, and many others as “misinformation” — a newish concept produced by a cadre of language Stasi skilled at inverting the meaning of anything to bamboozle the public. It appears that the news media became so invested psychologically in its own dishonest product that it began to believe its own bullshit.
Or, at least, they wanted to pretend to believe it. One of the big problems was that absolutely everything they labeled “misinformation” or “conspiracy theory” turned out to be truthful, and that was becoming an inescapable embarrassment. And then the biggest blunder they made was going along with the Deep State’s selection of “Joe Biden” in the very sketchy Super Tuesday primary of 2020. The old grifter had next-to-zero support in all the preceding preliminaries and somehow (abracadabra !) he swept the field.
By then, the Democratic Party, and its public relations arm in the mainstream media, had descended into florid mental illness. Everything they stood for post-World War Two flipped to its opposite. Suddenly, they were against free speech. They weren’t coy about it. They just made-up some new bullshit about free speech being “hate speech.” Similarly, they were against a free press. They went along with all the misinfo / disinfo bullshit the government cooked up and supported its role in suppressing the news. They were no longer anti-war, the party-of-peace. They were now pro-segregation and pro-discrimination (white people need not apply) according to Critical Race Theory (a childishly sketchy doctrine). Most of all, they were no longer skeptical of anything that the leviathan establishment wanted to do, including abridging the liberties of American citizens.
Then there was the campaign to use the most powerful human instinct, sexuality, as a weapon to disorder the minds of American children, leading even to the mutilation of their bodies — a program that unmistakably tipped toward genuine evil, suggesting that actual psychosis lay behind the Cluster-B crypto-Marxism used to justify it.
“Joe Biden” was fine with all of that, and the news media was fine with “Joe Biden” and whoever was using him as a front. Of course, it was evident during the 2020 campaign that “Joe Biden” was not up to a job as demanding as Chief Executive of the US government — and that was even apart from the dense criminal web of influence peddling discovered around him and his family, which the news media ignominiously ignored. But now the years have gone by and there’s no hiding “Joe Biden’s” rather gravely diminished mental abilities.
Last week’s debate gave away the game. It had the effect of finally turning off the gaslight that the news media has been shining over the republic lo these many years. They can no longer pretend that this president is anything close to okay in body and mind. They can’t annul the gaslighted public’s delayed realization that they’ve been subject to a concerted program of deliberate lying for a long long time.
So now, inveterate pretenders and liars, such as Jake Tapper of CNN and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times — and many others — have to pretend that they were innocently duped into supporting all the turpitudes of the Democratic Party / Deep State axis-of-evil. It is really hard to imagine that they can successfully rehabilitate their reputations. They have done immense harm to our country. It’s hard to see how the Democratic Party might survive, too, no matter who they finally put up for election this year. Of course, there’s still plenty of time left for them to destroy the country altogether. Just keep giving American missiles to Ukraine to fire into Russia and see what happens.
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Another humdinger from Architecture central. . . behold: the new Deschutes Library at Steven’s Ranch, Oregon, designed by Miller Hull Architects, a giant corporate practice ruled by DEI with dual headquarters in Seattle and San Diego. What you see (and get) are the fad tropes of the moment: alt energy to “reduce greenhouse gases” (cuz “climate change’); a “holistic framework of sustainability goals and performance features designed to achieve LEED Silver” certification; and an exterior design based on “[r]eflecting the nature of its surroundings. . . the library’s base is made of regional stone and dry-toned metal, while its staggered roof line mimics the mountains in the distance with its undulating roof plane – human-made peaks and valleys.”
This last part, the actual look of the building, follows a popular grad-school metaphysic that has become a tiresome and pointless cliche. The actual reason for it is that most people not mentally-ill do not like contemporary architecture, so the trick is to pretend that the building actually springs out of the landscape, the local ecology — it’s nature you see! You can’t hate it. . . plus it’s totally original, one-of-a-kind, never been thought of, conceived, seen before!
The interior, below, just suggests a fantastic waste of space that could have been devoted to galleries, reading rooms, lecture halls — and still have afforded a grand ceiling height of up to 20 feet. By the way, heat rises. It will require elaborate duct-work and fans to push the heat around that atrium in the cold Oregon winter (January temperatures average high 35, average low 19).
Shout out to Everett Dial for the nomination !!!
The post July 2024 appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Just before the weekend, a political prairie fire raced across a nation buffaloed, blind-sided, and buried deeply in bullshit, and the little critters who inhabit the landscape are still running around with their fur smoldering. What a surprise that “Joe Biden,” the mentally-disabled pretend-president, fell apart in the debate spotlight for all to see, like Captain Queeg in his fateful witness chair, or William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial (1925), or the Wizard of Oz when little Toto drew the curtain back — a brutal revelation of stark truth about how things actually are.
Since his hiding-in-the-basement campaign in 2020 “Joe Biden’s” Party of Chaos has pretended that he is fit and alert for the job and now all of sudden they pretend to be shocked to see how far gone in the head he really is. The bullshit shovelers of the mainstream news media were especially rocked, not by the truth of the situation per se, but at being unmasked as the contemptible, confabulating tools that they’ve become. The New York Times wheeled around on a dime from their servile lionizing of the presidential hologram they helped create to its editorial board abjectly yelling for him to drop out and get gone. They were joined instantly by a long list of other opinion-shapers, campaign donors, political celebs, and Beltway players.
Right after the debate, First lady Dr. Jill led a cheerleading session before a roomful of partisans that went beyond cringeworthy into uncharted territory of mortification. (“You were great, Joe! You answered all the questions!”). By the time the entourage moved to a pre-planned event at a nearby Atlanta Waffle House, “JB” had gone full-on zombie. If all that was intended to be reassuring, the effect was the opposite. Someone handed the blank-faced old grifter a milkshake and they beat it out of there.
Dr. Jill roaring in support of President “Joe Biden.”
The Bidens flew off to the Hamptons Saturday to milk the showbiz cows and hedge-funders for a campaign that might not still exist. “Everyone paid in advance. . .so it could be an opportunity to encourage him to drop out,” an invited guest told a New York Post reporter. “I wanted to go and see the train wreck,” another donor said. “I’d rather choose someone from a phone book than have Biden.” That was generally the tone among the woke-gay-communist echelons all over the land — surprisingly vehement, considering that just forty-eight hours before they were all in on re-election. Some could probably see their lucrative hustles whirling around the drain, and others might fret about just how far and wide prosecutions under a Trump Attorney General might loom.
“JB” and his family circle attempted to regroup over the weekend at Camp David where first son, Hunter (“the smartest man I know,” the president often says), led the buoying-up session, perhaps mindful of the many bank accounts set up by his lawyers in the name of Biden family members (including little grandchildren) for receipt of influence-peddling revenue gathered sedulously from entities abroad during “Joe Biden’s” post-veep high-earning years. The family emerged from that meet-up triumphantly, ready to forget the one bad evening and jump back into the election game.
Next, the biggest Dem dawgs — Obama, Schumer, Pelosi — stepped up with fulsome support for “Joe Biden” continuing to steer the party’s war canoe straight over Niagara Falls on November 5th. What possesses them? Misguided love for the monster they created? Fear of being called out as traitorous liars? Desperation to preserve the gigantic racketeering operation of the party they lead, with consideration for their big cuts of the action? Or are they just determined to complete the job of wrecking our country?
And where was She-Whose-Turn-It-Is, HRC, the only possible replacement candidate with name-recognition and no ruined state hanging over her as is the case with Newsom, Pritzker, and Whitmer (California, Illinois, Michigan)? Mrs. Clinton has so far stayed out of it, laying low, probably thinking that the party poohbahs will eventually have to come around to seeing she’s the obvious viable alternative. Since the Clinton Foundation bought and paid for the DNC some time ago, she might be able to get the nominating machinery lined up in her direction. There are myriad problems, for sure, with many state election laws that discourage switching-out a nominee who has already captured a winning share of party convention delegates — but Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, and the Lawfare gang are already tasked to that set of problems now that their work is done cobbling together all those janky court cases to hamstring Mr. Trump.
We enter high summer with countless consequential things afoot. A grand new momentum is expressing itself throughout Western Civ against the Globalist insanity. Sunday, Marine LePen’s National Rally (RN) thrashed President Macron’s Renaissance Party, a shock equal to the “Joe Biden” debate fiasco here. British elections follow Thursday July 4, with PM Rishi Sunak sucking wind and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party ascending rapidly. Sunday July 7 France’s runoff election happens. A widened war threatens the Middle East as Iran and Turkey line up with Hezbollah in Lebanon against Israel. Ukraine cries for a negotiated settlement with no help from our own State Department. ISIS terrorists (among many other dangerous cadres) circulate on-the-loose around the USA, ready and able to perp atrocities.
Still hanging over the “Joe Biden” crisis — and it is a crisis — is the question as to how somebody no longer capable of leading a party in an election can also be capable of leading the executive branch of the USA as Commander-in-Chief. That quandary has been shoved aside for the moment but it still lurks ominously in the background.
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Maybe ninety-seconds into last night’s long-awaited debate spectacle, the consensus must have jelled among the woke-and-broken news media mavens that their champion, “Joe Biden,” was not quite killing it out there at the podium. CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash acted like witnesses at a ritual sacrifice. And afterward, the CNN post-mortem panel seemed genuinely shocked that months of playing pretend had skidded to such an ignominious finish.
Which raises a great many questions, starting with: why on earth did the Democratic Party and its media handmaidens persist in pretending month-after-month that “Joe Biden” was a fit candidate for another four-year term? Last night, he didn’t appear capable of even finishing the current term. Why did they usher him so jauntily into the nomination? And what are they going to do about that now? And what were their motives for all that pretending? “Joe Biden” circulates among scores of astute officials every day. Did they all fail to notice his incapacity? Or has the whole thing been a sham and a lie all along? Was this just the culminating hoax by the Party of Hoaxes of a long string of hoaxes against the nation going back to 2015?
To the question of motives, the answer is obvious: the news networks have worked tirelessly (and with stunning dishonor) to hide their collusion with the government in gaslighting the public. More to the point, they’ve concealed the appalling truth that the CIA, DARPA, and their many intel blob subsidiaries conducted a silent coup over the USA and have been running our country’s affairs disastrously behind the “Joe Biden” façade — and that the coup actually started well before Mr. Trump’s 2016 inauguration. You know it, and they know that you know it.
More acutely, now that “Joe Biden” has been revealed as a hoax president, whole legions of public officials appear liable to criminal charges of the most serious degree: sedition, treason, mass murder, fraud, malfeasance, and in the case of the president himself, influence peddling and bribery. They must be desperate to avoid accounting for all that, losing their accrued fortunes to legal fees and going to prison (or worse). For example, outed just this week: news that then-CIA Director in 2020, Gina Haspel, knew about and participated in the infamous operation using 51 former Intel officers to cover up the veracity of Hunter Biden’s laptop days before the election.
They knew the laptop was real. Their colleagues over at the FBI knew it was real. They all knew it was stuffed with deal memos, legal memoranda, and emails that clearly laid out a long-running bribery operation among Biden family members and their lawyers. They knew it in 2019 when the Democratic Party moved to impeach Mr. Trump for inquiring about the Biden family’s money-grubbing activities in Ukraine — where, by the way, we may have fomented the war with Russia in part to cover up the culpability of all involved, including especially the State Department and their embassy staff in Kiev. The FBI and its bosses in the DOJ also withheld the laptop from Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers during the 2020 impeachment, though it contained massive exculpatory evidence to explain just why he made that fateful phone call to the newly elected Zelensky.
It’s obvious that the ruling blob now has to deep-six “Joe Biden.” The problem is they must induce him to renounce the nomination of his own will. The party’s nominating process is so bizarrely complex that it would very difficult to just shove him out. Another problem is that the party had to peremptorily declare “JB” their legal nominee before the August convention in order to keep him on the ballot in Ohio with its 17 electoral votes (due to some arcane machinery in the state’s election laws).
As per above, the debate fiasco calls into serious question whether “Joe Biden” is competent to even serve out this term. He (or shadowy figures pulling strings behind him) are making profoundly hazardous decisions right now, such as last week’s missile attack that killed and wounded civilians on the beach in Crimea. Are you seeing how easily “Joe Biden” might start World War Three? All of which is to say that pressure will soon rise to use the 25th amendment to relieve him of duty, leaving you-know-who in the oval office. If Joe Biden actually has to resign as president, he also loses the ability to pardon his son, Hunter, and peremptorily his other family members who shared bribery money received from China, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
If he won’t resign, and the party can’t force him off the ticket, the blob could have no choice except to bump him off. I imagine they would get it done humanely, say late at night sometime, in bed, using the same method as for putting down an old dog who has peed on the carpet one too many times. Or, if that can’t be managed and he clings to his position, maybe the party could cobble up some new nominating rules impromptu. And then, who could they slot in from the bench?
The usual suspects are like the cast of a freak show, each one displaying one grotesque deformity after another. Gavin Newsom we understand: the party’s base of batshit-crazy women may all want to bear his child, but that limbic instinct to mate with a six-foot-three haircut-in-search-of-a-brain might not work with any other voter demographic — and Newsom has the failed state of California hanging around his neck. All Mr. Trump would have to do is broadcast the scene from a San Francisco street-cam on “X” (Twitter) 24/7.
Hillary has been stealthily flapping her leathery wings overhead for weeks as this debacle approached. She may still own the actual machinery of the Democratic Party — having purchased it through the Clinton Foundation some years back when the party was broke and needed a bailout. She could just command the nomination by screeching “Caw Caw” from the convention rostrum. Whatever happens, it will look terrible.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan? An inveterate and notorious intel blob tool, Whitmer has allowed herself to be used repeatedly by the FBI to frame and persecute conservatives in her state as well as using her state AG Dana Nessel to go after political enemies there, especially poll workers who cried fraud in the sketchiest Michigan voting districts.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. Like Dreamboat Newsom in California, Mr. Pritzker is busily running Illinois (and especially Chicago) into bankruptcy and chaos. Looks aren’t everything, but if Dreamboat gives the vapors to Karens across the land, the Illinois governor will get them shrieking in terror as from the sight of King Kong on Skull Island
Who else is there? Michelle O, of course, who will be instantly branded as a catspaw for her husband seeking a fifth term — as Barack himself has averred in so many words: just hanging out in the background, managing things in his jogging suit. That would be the ultimate Banana Republic set-up for us and I don’t think the voters will go for it. It all boils down to the Party of Chaos being thrust into chaos. Can it even survive “Joe Biden?”
Then there is Mr. Trump himself. He remains the object of widespread rabid loathing, yet more and more American are coming to appreciate his opposition to Woke Marxist chaos and intel blobbery-gone-wild in our land. His performance last night featured his usual jumpy locutions and incomplete sentences, but in contrast to the current president, he looked neither senile nor an agent of sinister forces dedicated to bringing our country to its knees. Had Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. been present both of the others would have been badly outclassed verbally and intellectually. If Mr. Trump survives the blob’s efforts to delete him before November, I’m sure Mr. Kennedy will play a prominent role in another Trump administration. He knows exactly where the rot is and how to roust it out.
The post Joe Biden Catches Cold appeared first on Kunstler.
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Now that the gunplay and colorful flash-mobbery of Juneteenth has concluded, it’s on to next week’s big debate between the two major party candidates — if debate is even the right description for what is more like a joint press conference conducted by one candidate’s PR firm. What does the reality-starved public think it will see? Probably anything but a fair fight.
It’s hard to imagine what possessed “Joe Biden” to decide this was a good idea for him (unless he wasn’t the decider). Since we’re in an era of archetypal psychodrama, the event looks more like a ritual sacrifice. His recent public performances have been, shall we say, less than reassuring in both utterance and physical poise. He comes off as Captain Queeg meets Mr. Magoo. So, you have to wonder if some ancient tropism-of-the-mind steers him to certain destruction, egged on by those of his own faction who will benefit from his exit.
The sordid spectacle of the Alvin Bragg prosecution has backfired spectacularly as even the president’s own cheerleaders begin to perceive the frightful dishonesty of a politicized DOJ that could just as easily be turned on them. Rachel Maddow and Joy Behar rehearsed their persecution fantasies for all to see on air this week — and, of course, and as usual, it was a sheer psychological projection of what their own party has been up to for eight long years.
One supposes that “Joe Biden” will follow exactly that script next Thursday, as he accuses Mr. Trump of being “a dictator,” Adolf Hitler 2.0, seeking to use the levers of power to terrorize the defenders of democracy. It’s hard to see how he might get away with that. All Mr. Trump has to do is aver to the long list of malicious prosecutions, including the ones aimed at himself, launched lately against “JB’s” opponents. And he might throw in the regime’s lust to suppress free speech and truth itself — as in the Hunter Biden laptop monkey-business and hiding the facts around the Covid-19 fiasco.
Speaking of which, this would be the best opportunity for Mr. Trump to come clean, if he can, about his role in the mRNA vaccine roll-out that has now morphed into what looks like the biggest disaster in modern medicine. It appears obvious that, as president, Mr. Trump was buffaloed by “the experts” in a culture that worships expertise. How exactly would he have opposed the White House Coronavirus Task Force headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci? And backed by the combined forces of the CDC, the FDA, the NIAID, the NIH, and every medical board from sea to shining sea? Should he have just said, Nah, we’re not gonna do that? I don’t think so. But there won’t be a better moment, or a bigger audience, to explain how all that actually worked, and went wrong.
Since Mr. Trump’s temperament has drawn the most intense objurgation from his detractors, the easiest thing he can do in this debate is just mind his manners, and not allow himself to be baited or taunted. The roster of “Joe Biden’s” failures is so deep that all Mr. Trump has to do is remind the audience what they well-know adds up to an apparently deliberate effort to wreck the nation: the open border and the growing record of atrocious crimes committed by illegal aliens plus the immense anxiety about the intentions of jihadists and other nefarious foreigners ushered in by Homeland Security; the idiocy of our role in the Ukraine War and how easily the conflict could be concluded by willing negotiation; the cratering on-the-ground economy of goods and services (minus government hand-outs, bail-outs, subsidies, and statistical shell games); the out-of-control Deep State intel blob that is eating away at our basic liberties; the insane race-and-gender hustles aimed at sowing hatred and disordering normal modes of human relations; and much more that has been done to insult and humiliate the people of this land.
In short, the record of “Joe Biden” and the claque behind him is unequaled for demolition of our national principles, institutions, traditions, and aspirations, and if it’s not already plain to see all around you, Mr. Trump is in a position to calmly make the case next Thursday night without resorting to any histrionics. There will also be opportunities for him to use the old Muhammad Ali “Rope-a-Dope” play on “Joe Biden.” Let the old grifter start yapping “convicted felon” and Mr. Trump can offer a review of the many cash gifts from foreign entities received into Hunter Biden’s dozen or so shell corporations, with a recitation of bank records, deal memos, and testimony-under-oath already in evidence, with hearings still ongoing.
There’s also the fair chance that, despite the Adderall lighting up what’s left in his brain-pan, “Joe Biden” will quickly melt down altogether into a pathetic, gibbering zombie, spouting inanities about his Uncle Brosey amongst the cannibals, his victory over the arch-villain Corn Pop, his conquest of Mt. Everest side by side with Xi Jinping, his growing-up Latinx and Jewish in Scranton, PA, his rescuing Martin Luther King from a mob of Ku Kluxers and . . . well . . . the nabobs of the Democratic Party will finally have what they’re longing for: the excuse to dump this perfect ass of a fake president and throw the window wide open for Hillary Clinton to fly in on her leathery wings (Caw! Caw!) and lead the dwindling number of her deranged admirers to another humiliating election loss.
What does this party have to run on besides the utterly empty, mendacious battle cry about saving our democracy? It offers nothing but ruin. The debate might even spell the death of the party itself. Oh, but also don’t rule out “Joe Biden” canceling at the last moment. Reasons.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_404.mp3Dr. Sid Rohrscheib is a general surgeon in central Illinois. His career spans the period from the 1990s to present and he has witnessed the changes wrought by the financialization of medicine. We have corresponded for a while about the problems in health care and he kindly consented to come on the podcast.
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Direct Download: KunstlerCast 404 — The ruinous Financialization of Medicine
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Clusterfuck Nation
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You realize, don’t you, that everything going on around the Ukraine fiasco on the NATO side is completely insane? The folks running the US government — Barack Obama and his witches’ coven — started the whole thing over there in concert with a gang of corporate players (BlackRock, sundry oil-and-gas companies, Haliburton types, arms-makers, bunch of big banks), plus the dastardly WEF for “guidance” (ha!), looking to grab the mineral wealth of Ukraine and, ultimately, of Russia itself. Nice try. Didn’t work out. Tons of money pounded down a rat hole.
Now, the chatter is that we (NATO) “can’t afford to lose.” Yeah? But we’re losing. Russia will hold the eastern Ukraine provinces and what’s left in the rest of Ukraine will be a failed state drained of men under sixty able to work at anything, bankrupt, broken. It will take a century, if ever, for Ukraine to recover from all that and the West will have gained nothing. Anyway, that’s the true prospect. And so, the West’s “solution” to that humiliating quandary appears to be: start a bigger war, right up to and including nukes. That’s good thinking there, Butch, said Sundance.
Why the European members of NATO wanted to go along with this nickel-plated clusterfuck is an abiding puzzle of history now, like who exactly bumped off JFK in 1963. Germany, the Euro club’s biggest economy, stood by listlessly while America blew up its supply of affordable natgas (the Nord Stream pipelines), which was an act of war by us against Germany. Apparently, Olaf Scholz went to our CIA station in Berlin for a haircut one day and came out with a lobotomy, staring blankly through the whole affair like a Hinterwälder steer on the killing floor. Meanwhile, goodbye industrial economy! Nice knowing you. Looks like it’s back to the fourteenth century, living on rough black bread, sleeping with the cattle under your house for heat in winter, fighting jihadis inside your town walls. . . .
What is the purpose, you ask yourself, of this new world war we’re itching to start? And why now, exactly? The stupid answers may be the correct ones. To furnish an emergency pretext allowing “Joe Biden” (Barack Obama & Co.) to “postpone” the election? If so, I guess they want a hot civil war even more than WWIII, because that’s what they’ll get. Or is it just to complete the destruction of the USA, turning us into a failed state run by a tranny Mamluk-ocracy? Or is it, as Ed Dowd has averred, to cover up the imminent implosion of the US / Euroland debt debacle?
To provide cover for all that, the West held a fake peace conference at a five-star resort in Switzerland last week — flutes of Louis Roederer Cristal Brut with langoustine mousse in puff pastry boats . . . to die for! (and you just might) — and you know how serious the USA was because we sent our ace problem-solver Veep Kamala Harris, who cackled and hee-hawed her way through a session or two and then. . . just. . . split the scene, mysteriously. Russia, was conspicuously not invited, by the way. Whose idea was that?
Mr. Putin marked the occasion by issuing a sane proposal to commence peace negotiations so plain, simple, and straightforward that even “Joe Biden” might have gotten the drift: 1) withdraw Ukrainian troops from Donbas territory that has joined the Russian Federation, and 2) agree that Ukraine not join NATO. The US and NATO instantly rejected it, on grounds unspecified. According to The New York Times own search engine this very morning (June 17), the newspaper hasn’t published a news story on the Ukraine War for the past five days. Go figure . . . .
While Veep Kamala Harris was yukking it up over the peace hilarity in Switzerland, “Joe Biden” went to the far more important celebrity fundraiser out in Hollywood, headlined by the likes of actors George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and late-nite snarkist Jimmy Kimmel, that is, certified experts on geopolitical conflict, united in the cause of “saving our democracy” from “the dictator Trump.”
“Joe Biden” declared that Donald Trump was bent on “retribution. . . he’s gonna get back at the people.” Roger that. But I think he meant that Mr. Trump might open some inquiries into how come the Democratic Party and its Intel blob ran one debilitating lawless hoax after another on our country for the past eight years while bankrupting it and destroying the medical system, the legal system, the currency, higher education, and the US military, not to mention jailing thousands on fake criminal charges and letting ten billion alien mutts into the country, many of them jihadis with dubious intentions.
But never mind all that. $30-million got raised in Hollywood to continue the game of pretend that “JB” is running for reelection. Pretend is what actors actually do, you see. They’re really good at it, and your job is to play along, suspend your disbelief. That’s the essence of showbiz. Of course, that chunk of the US population no longer mesmerized by CIA-sponsored disinfo ops is somehow rising implacably in every poll. World War Three might be the only answer for that, after all. In any case, Barack Obama himself even came out of the woodwork to lead the cheerleading among the stars in LA. And when the time came, he took the dazed, vacantly grinning “President Joe Biden” gently by the elbow and assisted him in shuffling offstage, demonstrating to the whole world how things really work in the United States of America.
The post The Unites States of Go Figure appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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They’re kidding, right? That “Joe Biden” is capable of being president? Not just for another four-year term, but right here and now? This has got to be the most pitiful case of national gaslighting since 218-AD when the Romans installed 14-year-old Heliogabalus to front for their empire. Like “JB,” he reigned for four years (before the praetorian guard offed him). The Danish historian of ancient Rome, Barthold Niebuhr, said of him: “. . . [He] had nothing at all to make up for his vices, which are of such a kind that it is too disgusting even to allude to them.”
Lately, even the news media has begun to report “Joe Biden’s” senile mishaps. On Thursday at an outdoor photo op during the G7 meet-up in Italy, the ol’ dawg just wandered off from the assembled pack of world leaders until Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni went and reeled him back in.
Earlier in the week at a Juneteenth party, they rolled him out on the White House lawn like a cigar-store Indian where he stood utterly frozen while all around him boogalooed and clapped to the music of jubilee.
Do you think that folks are starting to notice? Even many mind-fucked Democrat Party regulars who have been just fine with the controlled demolition of our country under this human door-stop of a president are murmuring ominously that the scam has become too obvious. Not Rachel Maddow, though. America’s Woke lunatic-in-chief reigning on MSNBC warned this week that the return of Trump would lead to her (and millions of her fans) getting jammed into “concentration camps.”
Maybe you’ve already noticed that Rachel Maddow lives in a concentration camp of-the-mind located inside her own batshit-crazy skull. Dunno about you, but for the first time in a life lived through many decades of purportedly rational post-war Modernity, I’ve developed a sympathetic view of how come people in earlier eras resorted to burning witches. They are obdurate public nuisances. Their “magic” lately is the ability to provoke a mass formation psychosis, an actual “threat to our democracy” or, more precisely, to our republic. Maddow, the proudly out-front lesbian non-breeder is living proof that renouncing motherhood is a predictor of Cluster-B personality disorder — the condition that defines the “progressive” Wokery of these times.
I’m a little sorry to go all quasi-supernatural with you about this, but we are truly faced with the fact that the devastation in sexual relations and failures of family formation in recent decades has produced a very particular form of anomie in Western Civ’s female population — and the dynamic has badly deranged increasingly feminized men, too. Covid-19 was basically a Munchausen-by-proxy event, which ChatGPT describes accordingly:
. . . a psychological disorder wherein a caregiver, typically a parent, exaggerates, fabricates, or induces illness or injury in a person under their care, usually a child. The primary motive is to gain attention, sympathy, or praise from medical professionals and others, rather than any tangible benefit like financial gain.”
Actually, ChatGPT was wrong about the financial gain part. There were billions made off Covid by Big Pharma, including hundreds of millions in royalties doled out to public health employees. The government played the role of “mother” in the Covid caper, keeping you (her “children”) safe. You’ve noticed, I’m sure, that claims about safety and safe places have been major themes in Wokery both before and during Covid. Anyway, as usual with Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, the “children” (i.e., the US population) were injured badly by the “treatment,” the mRNA vaccines. And also as usual with mothers displaying Cluster-B personality disorder, the “bad” children who refuted the narrative and refused the specified “treatment” were punished severely. (Cluster-B is sadistic.)
One thing this suggests is that the cabal running things behind the empty suit “Joe Biden” is dominated by women, and my guess would be the women directly associated with Barack Obama: Susan Rice, Lisa Monaco, Kathryn Ruemmler, Sally Yates, Valarie Jarrett, Samantha Power, Avril Haines, Torie Nuland, give-or-take some combo of them, et al. I have alleged for years that the motif driving batshit-crazy, Cluster-B Democratic Party women is that Donald Trump represents Daddy’s-in-the-house. In their boundaryless state-of-mind nothing threatens the Cluster-B ladies as much as the imposition of boundaries by a fearsome daddy figure. Daddy = the monster of monsters to them.
Thus, the “Biden” regime’s remorseless persecution of Mr. Trump — like the village rabble hunting down Frankenstein with torches and pitchforks — and the fantasies, were he allowed to live, about being sent to concentration camps by the likes of Rachel Maddow. There’s nothing like barbed-wire and sentry towers to vividly suggest the imposition of “boundaries” on your behavior.
I have strayed a bit from my initial theme concerning the grotesque game of “pretend” being played around “Joe Biden’s” re-election candidacy. Let’s say this: it is the terminal op being run by an out-of-control Deep State blob now losing its mojo in big gobs each day as its epic dishonesty gets exposed. This blob had some very potent tools at its command to jerk around the people of this land, especially the legacy news media. Most of that consisted of deception which is to say the tactical application of untruth. The op was tragically effective for some years, but its victims — US citizens — are onto the game now and they are angrily flipping over the game board. Mark this essential fact of life: truth is sturdy and lies are fragile. So, now you know what must, in the end, prevail.
“Joe Biden” is not long for this world as a token in that game. Mere days, I’d say. There is no way that the Democratic Party can afford to put him in a debate arena June 27th with Mr. Trump. Two minutes in, “JB” would be leaking sawdust and stuttering incoherently. The Party would be revealed as a fraud for the ages. And then, by the time you’re scarfing down blueberry pie on the Fourth of July, Hillary Clinton (better known here as Rodan the Flying Reptile, or She-Whose-Turn-It-Is) will be flapping her leathery wings on-high in triumph as “JB’s” emergency replacement. I am here to save our democracy, caw caw—! Wait for it! Trouble is, batshit crazy women are exactly what our country is sick of and done with.
The post Sick Of and Done With appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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This is the most significant reality of the world picture now: the wishes of the manager class are going in one direction while the actual dynamics of economy and politics go in the opposite direction. The managers wish for their management of systems to become as centralized and top-down as possible; but the very systems they manage are breaking down and seeking to reorganize at smaller scale, distributed locally. The tension entailed is explosive.
Forgive me for reiterating a basic principle driving this moment in history: everything organized at the gigantic scale is steaming toward failure: big governments, giant companies, the huge capital investment firms, global shipping, energy production, chain retailing, mass motoring, big electricity, big medicine, big education, big anything. They are all fixing to fail while our politicians and economists make plans based on consolidating them into one super-gigantic mega-system that will run flawlessly on computer tech magic.
The failures of each giant system will only amplify and ramify the failures in all the other systems. Take that as axiomatic. For instance, the fantastic failures in higher education now on display, largely due to the Marxian defeat of excellence, will implant a generation of incompetents in all hierarchies of management. That will result in an insidious matrix of bad decision-making. The Pareto 80-20 principle will ensure that 80-percent of all institutional energy will focus on propping up failing institutions with bad decisions that add up to broken business models (while 20-percent goes into actually carrying-out the bad decisions as policy). That explains how Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation spent $7.5-billion to build seven electric car charging stations.
Similarly, if you have an urgent medical problem, the 80-percent of administrative clerks in your primary care doctor’s overgrown practice (with an assist from the health insurance company cohorts they must coordinate with) will actually manage to delay your treatment as long as possible, with a fair chance of disallowing it altogether. And if you happen to get treatment, there’s also an excellent chance you will be misdiagnosed and subjected to iatrogenic injury.
The 80-20 principle explains the stupendous mismanagement of the Covid-19 event, especially the “marketing” of mRNA vaccines as miracle remedies that turned out to be the opposite of beneficial. The result of that chain of bad decision-making will ensure that any widespread health crisis arising from the long-term effects of the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines will destroy the hospital system. (It is already underway.) You can extrapolate that grandiose failure of competence to the World Health Organization and its efforts to orchestrate a new pandemic crisis.
You might have noticed that it is increasingly difficult to get replacement parts for any machine, most particularly cars. That’s a symptom of failure in several integrated systems that are breaking down now: the manufacture of products in distant lands, price disorder in the container-ship business, the collapse of the US trucking system (and with it, the just-in-time inventory model), and the inability of auto dealers to find competent mechanics (while the sinking middle class can no longer afford to buy the cars they sell under the most liberal financing schemes). Expect all that to intensify.
You’ll see similar dysfunction in the system that delivers food to the people of our country. Even as currently operating, with the supermarkets amply stocked, the triumph of poor decision-making has led to 80-percent of the products sold being some form of processed corn syrup and GMO grains marketed as “fun” snack-foods that have destroyed the health of a great many citizens (and overwhelmed the medical system with chronic illness). The breakdown of the US food system is now proceeding with idiotic policy from our government (actually every government in Western Civ is doing it) undermining farm operations, and most especially small farms, with egregious regulation. The pretext for this is the delusional hysteria over “climate change.” It gives the managers something to manage badly.
The large-scale farmers are also affected, of course, but their business model is already broken in other ways, mainly the gigantic cost of their “inputs” — fuel, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides, and borrowed money to get the crop in. Political and economic management has arranged matters so that, in theory, the failed small farmers will be consolidated into the giant farms (which are also failing), but you can see how that’s going to work out. Before long, all farms will be unable to produce and, after a period of food shortage, perhaps famine, you will see the emergent reorganization of farming at the small scale minus the dead-weight of government regulation.
The dead weight will be gone because government will have destroyed its own legitimacy by making so many bad decisions that led to ramified systems failure of the kind described above. Government will also be starved operationally by the failure of its funding system (taxation) as its economists and their managerial counterparts in finance destroy our money via their remorseless attempts to create fake capital by main force (Modern Monetary Theory).
The upshot of all this is that actual dynamics in human affairs matter more than the grandiose wishes of mega-managers. They can wish for maximum control of everything all they want, but history is taking the world in another direction. Our broken systems for food, medicine, education, commerce will self-reorganize after a period of uncomfortable disorder, perhaps even epic disaster. I hope you see how this works.
The post If Wishes Were Fishes — a Teachable Intermezzo appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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The most astounding part of America’s “Joe Biden” three-plus-years thrill ride is that the Party of Chaos and Hoaxes was able to pretend until just a few days ago that this political phantasm could run for re-election. Now, regime insiders are forced to confess that they can’t hide it anymore. They spilled the beans as “unnamed sources” this week in a huge Wall Street Journal article. The president is going necrotic in full view of the whole world. His mind is gone. He looks ridiculous when he shuffles in front of the cameras. He utters obvious absurdities and lies. His wife has to lead him around like a dog on a leash. Everyone can see it. He’s got to go. ASAP.
The embarrassing ineptitude has been on view since the 2020 campaign, yet his handlers managed to flimflam half the country ever since, thanks to a news media captured by intel blob gaslighters and to half the country’s susceptibility to mass formation psychosis — fear driven thought disorder — that gave cover to treasonous actors seeking to save their asses even if they had to wreck the USA doing it. Who were these actors? The Clintons and the coterie around them, steeped in financial crime and sex trafficking; the Obama coterie of anti-white racists and bungling Marxists; the batshit-crazy Woke race-and-gender hustlers working to derange the merit-based social order (and get paid for doing it); the congressional grifters living off Pharma and Pentagon loot; the agency top bureaucrats who became a corrupt praetorian guard for all the above players, now desperate to evade accountability.
Everything they’ve done since 2020 has been in the service of covering up their crimes, and each hoax has just compounded the damage done to our country. The Covid-19 prank was pulled to enable mail-in ballot fraud so as to assure a permanent government-by-blob, of which the Democratic Party is now a mere tentacle. We don’t know yet whether the mRNA vaccine module of the prank was a deliberate effort to kill a lot of people or a grievous blunder by greedy drug-makers, or some wicked combo — with assistance from the WEF or China.
They can’t afford to lose their grip on the levers of power 2024 election — lose control of the Justice Department, the FBI, and the so-called “national security” apparatus, especially. The open border is just an effort to illegally import and enlist a vast wad of potential new voters to ensure an election victory. More than twenty states have “motor-voter laws” that automatically register anybody with a driver’s license. And these enrollees don’t even have to cast their ballot. Their names can just be “harvested” systematically, attached to voting documents, and bundled to be submitted for them. Millions have entered the country illegally since 2021 at “Joe Biden’s” direct invitation. There’s nothing hidden about this — but all you see is the learned helplessness of actual US citizens unable to stop it.
And yet, even that prank may not work to keep the Party of Chaos and Hoaxes in power. Designated candidate “Joe Biden” is obviously so far gone that even actual citizen voters under the mass formation spell can’t be counted on anymore. His poll numbers look abysmal. He’s scheduled to debate his opponent, the outlaw Donald Trump, on June 27. If his handlers allow that to actually happen, it will be like the unmasking scene in The Phantom of the Opera: brain-ringing horror, from sea to shining sea! Of course, an insult to the zeitgeist that severe will force the party leaders into some ‘splainin’, and I personally doubt they will be able to ‘splain their way out of it. Did all of you Democrats not notice?
The putative replacements for him — Newsom, Hillary, Pritzker, Whitmer, Harris — are political creatures at least as loathsome to voters as “JB” has become. And the obvious pitfall for Michelle O is that her husband looks like a wannabe American Caesar seeking a fourth term. What else have they got? Nothin’. Some utterly unknown governor they can primp up in a few months? Fugeddabowdit. They’ll have to run one of the loathsomes, take the “L,” and hope for the best, perhaps make a get out of jail “deal” with dealmaker supreme Mr. Trump.
Or, they could attempt another mighty prank: kill him. You can imagine they’ll try it, having exhausted all other gambits. If they succeed, and it doesn’t provoke an instant civil war, Mr. Trump’s faction has a pretty deep “bench” of capable figures who can step in and run against the Party of Chaos, Hoaxes, and now Murder. If the assassins botch the job, I wouldn’t want to be them on that dreadful day.
The bottom-line for now: “Joe Biden” is about to wave bye-bye. They’ve already put the question to him. He’s resisting. The one coherent thought in his failing mind is that he has pardon power as long as he is president. It’s not so much Hunter and that silly-ass gun case in Wilmington, which he’ll surely wriggle out of. It’s more about the brothers Jim and Frank and all the spouses and offspring who received wire transfers of Chinese money, Ukraine money, Russian money, Kazak money, Romanian money. . . .
If necessary, the party and its blob masters could bite the bullet and run the 25th Amendment on the old fraud, git’er done fast, down-and-dirty, virtually overnight any night now. More likely, they’ll “leak” some document from the blob vaults that incontrovertibly incriminates the president on one of the already well-trodden bribery angles. That is, they’ll pretend to discover that not only is “Joe Biden” hopelessly senile, but, turns out, he’s been crooked all along! What a shock! We never suspected ‘til now! Such a seemingly well-intentioned, kindly, patriotic old man! Stand by. It’s going to be a helluva month.
Note to Readers: I’ll be appearing at Market Block Books, 290 River Street, in Troy NY, this Saturday morning starting at 11:00 to talk about my new book CrazyLand.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast403.mp3Steve Murray is Chief Information Security Officer of a large medical company. He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army commanding a Cyber Defense Battalion, providing offensive and defensive cyber operations for the United States Pacific Command and US Army Pacific Forces, the National Security Agency, and other military offices.
He was deployed to Iraq in Operation Enduring Freedom, where he was awarded the Bronze Star.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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The ninnies of Bidenworld seem to not understand that by subjecting Mr. Trump to a kangaroo court they’ve made him the kind of outlaw that Americans revere above every other archetypal hero. He’s the new American Robin Hood, the people’s outlaw — with “Joe Biden” relegated as the wicked Sir Guy of Gisbourne, master of foul play and servant of the evil regent Prince John (Barack Obama). The galvanizing moment in this melodrama was not the verdict in Judge Juan Merchan’s kangaroo corral of a court, but the next day in the White House when “Joe Biden” was asked to comment on it as he shuffled away from the podium, halted, turned, and smirked silently at the cameras, a gesture that is sure to live in infamy.
The fun should really kick off when the judge gets to sentence Trump-the-Outlaw July 11, a few days before the Republican convention. Life in some New York state pen? A year on Rikers Island? House arrest? Who knows. But you can bet that just like Robin-of-Locksley, Donald-of-Mar-a-Lago will manage to slip out of his captors’ clutches and cleverly vanquish them. In a sane world, of course, the US Supreme Court would be entreated to adjudicate this gross insult to due process as spelled out in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
But you might have noticed that this is not a sane world, at least not these days, and not a few supposedly sober analysts, such as Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, claim that that a SCOTUS review is a long-shot — which only confirms the reigning insanity since it’s hard to imagine a more compelling moment for the SCOTUS to carry out its fundamental duty: to elucidate the meaning of our Constitution and resolve disputes arising therefrom.
Now, it looks like what we’re seeing after a few days for the shock to wear off, is a mighty righteous rage arising among the faction designated as “Red” — that is, the anti-Woke, anti-Globalist, anti-neoMarxist, anti-Deep State blob, anti-Lawfare, anti-Democratic Party chunk of the adult US population. It amounts to a recognition that we are already in some kind of civil war, and that the tactics of “Joe Biden’s” party must and will be opposed by all means. The SCOTUS is the last resort of legal means for redress in this matter, and they would punt this duty at great peril to the country.
To clarify just what this matter is: “Joe Biden’s” White House and Department of Justice conspired with New York County (Manhattan) authorities to maliciously construct and execute a court case made of patently false charges against their principal political adversary, and with a cavalier disrespect to both state and federal law.
As such, the “Stormy Daniels Payoff Case,” as it’s known, is just the latest ploy in a long train of lawless gambits starting with RussiaGate in 2016 (the “Steele Dossier” and all) that have left hundreds of high appointed officials in the federal bureaucracy (plus many retired from it) liable to severe criminal charges ranging as far as sedition and treason. RussiaGate may have started its life as a typical campaign prank by doofuses in the Hillary Clinton organization, but it turned seriously sinister when it was adopted by the FBI and the CIA to execute a plan to harass and defenestrate the elected president, Mr. Trump.
With each subsequent prank, to distract from and cover-up their crimes, the same group of officials has committed more crimes, to the point that the federal government now behaves like a gigantic mafia, dedicated to nothing but crime of one kind or another. The Democratic Party has become this mob’s protective order; the old mainstream media its mouthpiece; and the people of this country increasingly its victims. Naturally, these criminals are now desperate to avoid having to account for their crimes, which is exactly and explicitly what Mr. Trump promises to do.
So, there it is: a criminal regime versus the people defended by their outlaw hero. Does the SCOTUS want to aid and abet this gang of criminals — led by the way, and just so you know, by Barack Obama and his Kalorama coterie, John Brennan, Mary McCord and her Lawfare coterie, Hillary and Bill Clinton and their henchmen, and scores of additional DC lawyers, fixers, and judges — or, will the SCOTUS avert an epic crisis of legitimacy by stepping in to quash the ridiculously fake New York case just concluded?
If they demur in some cowardly blur of excuses, then it’s onto the next truly nation-ending stage of this game. The “Joe Biden” regime would like nothing more than an outbreak of civil violence they can blame on “right-wing extremists.” In fact, they could and probably will gin that up themselves, just as they transformed the Jan-6-21 mass protest against widespread ballot fraud into a “MAGA insurrection.” You are also certainly aware of the sinister millions, mainly young men from faraway lands, who “Joe Biden” imported across the border the past three years. And you might imagine how they could be put to use against American citizens, along with the Democratic Party shock troops known as BLM and Antifa. Summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the streets. And, of course, even if the SCOTUS puts an end to this latest bit of Lawfare fuckery, the “Joe Biden” crew can always opt to just up and kill its opponent. Nothing is beneath them now. But when that happens, we’ll be in a very different kind of movie.
Note to Readers: We’ve just come through the time of year when credit cards expire. My Patreon revenue is down and I doubt it is because you’re disappointed in this blog’s content. Plus, it comes to you absolutely reliably twice-a-week, without fail. You can continue reading it for free — there’s no pay-wall — but just know that I depend on this support to make a living. Back in the day, a newspaper would pay me a salary, but this is no longer that day and now public voices like mine must perform like buskers on the street. Acknowledging that times are tough and getting tougher, if you are a regular reader here, please consider kicking in maybe two bucks a month for the eight blog-columns you’ll get and probably appreciate, just as I will be grateful to get paid for the work I do putting them out there. Just sayin’. . . .
Another Note to Readers: I’ll be appearing at Market Block Books, 290 River Street, in Troy NY, this Saturday morning starting at 11:00 to talk about my new book CrazyLand.
The post Which Movie Will It Be? appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Credit: Joshua Lisec on “X”
In the pre-gloat hours before the verdict in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, Lawfare caporegime Andrew Weissmann (“Mueller’s Pitbull”) confessed Valley Girl style from his MSNBC clubhouse perch, “. . . I mean, I am, like, now I have a man-crush on him, he is such a great judge!” Bromance on, looks like! If the two happen to frequent the same athletic club in downtown Manhattan, Judge Merchan better be careful in the post-workout shower when he bends over to pick up the soap. The Pitbull cometh!
Of course, the Alvin Bragg victory in the artfully constructed “Stormy Daniels Payoff Case” decided late Thursday calls to question how come the Mueller Special Counsel Probe into 2016 election interference (actually run by Mr. Weissmann, due to Mr. Mueller’s declining cognitive ability) failed to spot the same web of evidence — hard as they toiled, and they had a good two years and millions of taxpayer dollars to git’er done?
My guess: too many white lawyers on the Mueller staff. Everybody knows now from watching the latest crop of television commercials that white people are unusually stupid and helpless and cannot cope with common problems without assistance from helpful people of color (POCs). So, God bless Alvin Bragg for finally fixing what Bob Mueller’s fifteen bloodhounds led by a pitbull somehow botched.
The former president is now convicted on thirty-four counts of book-keeping errors in furtherance of an alleged 2016 federal election violation that the Federal Election Commission declined to charge — that is, paying a porn star to sign a non-disclosure agreement about a sexual liaison — because it is not a crime under federal election law, and about which the head of the FEC, James E. “Trey” Trainor III, was barred by Judge Merchan from testifying on during the course of the trial for reasons yet unknown.
Of course, that is but one of a great many points of law that will merit appeal in what everybody — even some white people (people of non-color, PONCs) — knows was a case so crookedly contrived that it is fated to get tossed in the higher courts, and probably with harsh remonstrance to the degenerate officers of the court who brought it and adjudicated it. But you will have to wait on that because the mills of the law grind slowly.
Now, in the radiance of the full Woke gloat, we await Judge Merchan’s sentence, to be announced a mere few days before the Republican Convention in Milwaukee in early July. Jail time at Rikers? Home confinement (with ankle bracelet)? Severe travel restrictions? Reporting to a parole officer? Drug tests? Hey, No one is above the law! It is hard to imagine that the judge will demur from inflicting maximum humiliation on this wanton repeat violator (thirty-four times!) of book-keeping errors. It would tend to interfere with the presidential candidate’s campaign schedule, but so what? Where does it say in the Constitution that an election must be fair?
Or Judge Merchan could suspend all that pending appeal and just allow Mr. Trump to go about his election business free on bail. But why would he? After all the trouble he went to. And all the glory he’s reaping for it. “Joe Biden’s” party has Mr. Trump exactly where they want him, they think: pinned down like a moth in a shadow-box, inert and pathetic. (But, in reality, more like King Kong, chained in the rank basement below the stage of a Broadway theater before busting loose in midtown and upending subway cars so as to devour the little humans tumbling out like so many tic-tacs.)
Expect Mr. Trump’s lawyers to file writs to the SCOTUS requesting expedited attention to the denial of due process issues and the election interference question. The situation is comparable to the year 2000 presidential race, where the SCOTUS stepped in on probable cause that the lower court (in Florida that time) had violated the Equal Protection clause of the constitution.
In the meantime, through the luminescent fog of gloat, perhaps you did not notice that “Joe Biden” took a giant step yesterday toward commencing World War Three. The move was framed as the US gives Ukraine permission to use American missiles to strike deep within Russia. That was a bit disingenuous, you see, because Ukraine’s military lacks the know-how to actually launch the missiles, so American military “advisors” will have to be on hand to do it, meaning US military personnel will commit an act of aggression upon Russia.
Voila! That world war you’ve all been clamoring for. . .? The perfect climax to “Joe Biden’s” catastrophic, fraudulently-acquired term in office. I scent the acrid, burnt-flesh odor of miscalculation here, as of a bunch of American cities get turned into radioactive bonfires that will blot out that sublime luminosity of gloat.
Apparently, the “Joe Biden” team has never seen a Clint Eastwood movie — too lowbrow, I’m sure — and they don’t grok the role of the underdog in the American psyche. They have succeeded in making Donald Trump the greatest underdog in US history under the direst circumstances the nation may have ever faced — worse than Valley Forge, Bull Run, or the Ardennes Forest. Sinister forces are driving the country straight into a communo-fascist despotism alien to our nation’s very soul, demonic forces bent on depriving Americans of their rights, their property, and their liberty. This is the “all-is-lost” moment in that movie. This is where the hero comes back from the edge of eternal darkness, raging like Kali the Destroyer to smite the cowards arrayed against him, against the country’s honor, against the people. You asked for it. Now you’re going to get it.
The post Gloat While You Still Can appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Surely it was the right thing to do for President “Joe Biden” to remind the nation of the tragic loss of George Floyd four years ago this Memorial Day weekend. At the time, the man known as “the Black Thomas Edison” was rumored to be this close to achieving an economically viable system for producing electricity via atomic fusion using the fentanyl molecule (C22H28N2O) combined with the nuclei of alcohol (C2H6O), releasing enough energy from one gram to power a city the size of Minneapolis for a day. The math he left behind on his chalkboard spells it out:
17.6 MeV×1.60218×10?13 J/MeV?2.82×10?12 J
You see how that works? Alas, Dr. Floyd had apparently ingested a small amount of these experimental substances accidently before leaving his lab May 25, 2020, when he encountered the white supremacist police officer Derek Chauvin outside a Cup Foods convenience store in Minneapolis’s “Powderhorn” neighborhood. For reasons never understood, despite manifold judicial inquiries, the officer dragged the Great Man out of his car — where he was polishing some of the requisite algebra in his notebook — and for no reason at all placed one knee, and all his weight, on Dr. Floyd’s neck, constricting his airway and causing his death. The nation erupted in violence, and you know the rest of the story: no cheap energy for you, you nation of white supremacist asswipes!
And so it has gone since that fateful day: one darn thing after another. Luckily though — and with a little help from Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) — the vigilant “Joe Biden” presides in the White House, keeping America safe for democracy, by democracy, and of democracy. The country has never experienced so much democracy. The Brookings Institution even warns that the country might be close to a democracy overload, in which the popular will is so immense that everyone in all fifty states thinks the same morally correct thoughts all day long without giving offense or making any space unsafe or dis-including any diverse category of human (except white supremacists) from his, her, or they’s share of the nation’s limitless wealth.
“Joe Biden” has been especially effective at containing the Grand Golem of all white supremacists, Trump, from deconstructing our utopian democracy. This Trump uttered perfidious misinformation that the 2020 election was less than fair and upright. He is under indictment in Fulton County, GA, for conspiring to transmit this incorrect thinking to other white supremacists and creating an unsafe space for GA Sec’y of State Brad Raffensberger by asking him to “find” additional votes. What log was Bradraff supposed to look under, anyway (ha ha!)?
The case is being guided by Fulton County DA, the indomitable Fani Willis, at least for now, as she awaits a process known as getting the bidness from a white supremacist so-called ethics committee in the Georgia State Senate, where she has been falsely accused of mis-spending state money on vacations with erstwhile special prosecutor Nathan Wade. These trips were, of course, fact-finding efforts. One fact found is that the white supremacist cruise ship directors attempt to kill black people by luring them into all-you-can-eat buffets at sea, from which escape is impossible.
“Joe Biden” also got Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint Lawfare paladin Jack Smith to prosecute this nefarious Trump in the most upright of all federal court districts, Washington, DC, for instigating what “Joe Biden” recently called an “erection” against our democracy. Trump, you see, told a gigantic mob of white supremacists to penetrate our nation’s capitol building so as to obstruct certification of the 2020 electoral vote and murder then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, if possible, along with all congresspersons of color. Legal experts at MSNBC, Andrew Weissmann (of the Mueller Special Counsel office), and Andy McCabe (former Deputy Director of the FBI), have already found this Trump guilty, and they know about these matters better than anybody, so the trial under Judge Tanya Chutkan may be unnecessary.
Things are not going quite so well for SC Smith in the Martin County Federal Court of Judge Aileen Cannon, where this Trump stands accused of fobbing off with classified government documents, claiming some fabricated sort of presidential privilege — unlike “Joe Biden” who got his classified docs before he was president and therefore does not have to claim any such privilege (and was understandably “forgetful” when asked about the docs by the other SC Robert Hur). In any case, AG Garland can always dispatch an FBI SWAT team to Judge Cannon’s home to spur an attitude adjustment on the bench, if required.
Hopes really rest, though, on the current case against the Grand Golem Trump in Judge Juan Marchan’s Manhattan courtroom, where the most supreme of all white supremacists stands accused of book-keeping irregularities in furtherance of federal crimes so unspeakable that they have never actually been spoken. The case, engineered by veteran DC Golem hunters Mary McCord, Norm Eisen, Lisa Monaco, and Matthew Colangelo, fronted by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, goes to the jury after final arguments this week.
Judge Marchan is expected to instruct the jury to vote guilty because no other conclusion is possible. Thus, Judge Merchan will be celebrated far and wide for saving our democracy. But that’s not all. After the most excellent verdict of guilty X-23-Plus, he will have the pleasure of sentencing this Trump to life in the Rikers Island prison complex, where it will be difficult for the Grand Golem to organize any white supremacist activities and will be relegated to a diet of baloney sandwiches for the duration of his term.
The only downside for this scenario is that Trump might get elected President of the USA despite conviction, and on January 20, 2025, commence operations to put “Joe Biden” and all the others in his train of officials in jail for the rest of their natural lives. You have to wonder if they’re thinking about that this holiday weekend.
The post Saving our Democracy This Memorial Day appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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There comes a time when the rigors and exertions of being insane just aren’t worth it anymore. You end up in a deadly Pareto distribution in which 80 percent of your energy gets wasted on hallucinating and the rest is barely enough to get yourself dressed, comb your purple hair, and choke down a granola bar.
Verging on a long, hot summer, the party behind “Joe Biden” looks like a 1950s horror movie, complete with lurching ghouls, evil scientists in white lab coats, and the sore beset denizens of Anytown USA screaming down the streets. Only it’s the actual life of our nation now, and it looks like an awful lot of the people who live here lawfully have had enough of it.
The mysterious cabal in power knows that they must ditch the old stumblebum pretending to run for president, and time is running out to get the dastardly deed done. They are staring down a month of dread days that lead to the proposed great debate between the major party candidates, which is doomed to play like a combo of the classic horror movie endings — the unmasking of the phantom with a wooden stake driven through his heart, with Donald Trump cast as Prof Van Helsing. Can our resourceful intel blob instead maybe find a way before that to make it look like the “president” passed away peacefully in his slumber? Or perhaps it would suffice to just leak the voice recording of his interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur and allow people to compare what’s in it with the already-released printed transcript.
Here’s just how crazy the party is: rumor has it that they might just rudely shove oId “JB” aside and try the Hail Mary pass of inviting RFKJr back on-board from exile to head the ticket. The Kennedy name alone used to be synonymous with the party’s brand, is their thinking, you see. Trouble is, the Democratic Party is, in reality, synonymous with the intel blob that infests it, and protects it in the service of protecting its own sorry ass. You might recall that RFKJr has publicly stated that his father and uncle were murdered by that selfsame intel blob, which he has promised to treat very harshly were he actually elected. So, scratch that gambit.
Beyond that, you’re back to the maddening rotation of Gavin Newsom, Michelle, and Rodan the Flying reptile, a.k.a. She-Whose-Turn-It-Is — all of them appallingly impossible. Gavin might have been Mr. Dreamboat incarnate — that hair! that height! those teeth! — prompting a pandemic of The Vapors among ladies who lately predominate in the Democrat rank-and-file. But, alas, under his charge California degenerated into a Woke bedlam of diseased homeless junkies shitting all over his cities, with non-stop flash-mob looting, carjacking, and drag queen promenading in the background, and there’s no way of hiding it. Gavin Newsom has a big “L” carved on his forehead the way that Charlie Manson used to sport a swastika.
The Michelle ploy might tempt them, but let’s face it: it’s really just Barack getting a fourth term in the White House — really his fourth-and-a-half, since the Obama intel blob cabal was behind all the RussiaGate roguery that beset, preoccupied, thwarted, and overthrew Mr. Trump’s turn in office. Behind the still-charming Obama façade lurks a penumbra of menace. It begins to look like maybe he really did want to destroy our country, to complete the Cloward-Piven downfall that dedicated Marxians deem the necessary step to creating their nirvana of equity and inclusion. And there are still those dark tales of his coke-fueled cruising nights in Chicago. . . and the mysterious death of his paddle-boarding chef-pal on Martha’s Vineyard. . . and those persistent rumors that what you see in Michelle is not what you get. Can you really see Barack hosting kaffeeklatsches in the East Room while Michelle plans drone strikes in the Oval?
So, finally there is. . . Hillary. After all, she still stalks this earth. She still pops up on TV regularly pronouncing this and that, mostly in the name of. . . women. . . who just can’t get a fair shake in this land, despite running all the elite universities, the foundations, many corporations (especially MSNBC), and the new misinformation-squelching commissions. She’s still reminding all and sundry that the country owes her the Big Prize in this era of historic firsts. She also happens to own the DNC, the apparatus that actually runs the party’s affairs. Her last time around (2016) she simply shoved primary election leader Bernie Sanders off-the-plank when convention time rolled around and there was nothing else left to do. Personally, I’d love to see the rematch. It would be the end of the party, which apparently doesn’t grok just how much America loathes her.
Much more, I daresay, than even the Golden Golem of Greatness who is metamorphosing day by day into an archetypal hero that the ancient Greek myth-makers would be proud of as he survives one tribulation after another thrown at him by Nemesis. Now, as he awaits conviction in the shuck-and-jive court case under mad dog Judge Juan Merchan, he ventured onto Democratic Party sacred ground up in the South Bronx to a surprisingly warm welcome by exactly the hard-up people the Democrats pretend to care about (as long as they stay down on the plantation and don’t get too uppity).
Will Judge Merchan actually try to send the candidate to jail? Or maybe confine him to Trump Tower under some sort of house arrest? With maybe a big clunky ankle-bracelet for additional humiliation? That will be ripe. Let me proffer some advice to the Judge: the last thing you want to do with an archetypal hero is give him a prison to break out of so he can come roaring out for vengeance. In the end, Mr. Trump could accomplish something truly remarkable: bringing our country back together as a people united against being fucked-around by their own government.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_402.mp3Meryl Nass is an internal medicine physician and was the first person in the world to prove that an epidemic (anthrax in Rhodesia) was due to biological warfare, in 1992. She has given 6 Congressional testimonies regarding anthrax, biological warfare, Gulf War syndrome and vaccine safety, and has consulted for the Cuban Ministry of Health, the World Bank and the Director of National Intelligence.
Since the COVID pandemic began, she has written detailed articles regarding the suppression of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for treatment of Covid, the coverup of COVID’s lab origin, and how the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty and amendments will lead to more pandemics. She is an advisor to Children’s Health Defense.
Her medical license was suspended in January 2022 for providing early COVID treatment and spreading alleged vaccine misinformation. She has been writing and speaking on all things COVID, and is now focused on the BioSecurity Agenda of the W.H.O. and its goal to wrest sovereignty from individual nations under the guise of pandemic preparedness.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
Direct Download: KunstlerCast 402 — Dr Meryl Nass on the W.H.O. Pandemic Treaty, the Covid Fiasco….
*Please send questions and comments to jhkunstler@mac.com*
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted,an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States.
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The post KunstlerCast 402 — Dr. Meryl Nass on the W.H.O. Pandemic Treaty, the Covid Fiasco, and the Decline of Health Care appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Really, you must agree: just about anything can happen now, and probably will, and possibly all at the same time — war, sickness, a disordered economy, chaos in money and finance, savages pouring across the open borders, assassination, mayhem in the streets, systems failure, mental illness everywhere you look. You have a sinister, blob-infested government acting like a desperate, cornered animal, fronted by a venal phantasm trailing a personal history of crime. What could go wrong? All of it.
The doings in Judge Merchan’s Manhattan present the rectified essence of America’s authority problem. You will stipulate that judges are authorities in a pretty pure sense of the word. Their role is to determine what is right and what is wrong, or, at least guide the proceedings that would result in such a fair determination. And, of course, the officers of this court, the District Attorney and his prosecutors, are also entrusted with bringing comprehensible cases that follow the facts fairly, and the laws pertaining to those facts.
This maliciously misguided prosecution has only accomplished one thing so far: to demonstrate to the American public that the authority of our law has been contorted to become a sick joke. That is a ruinous lesson for the country. The free-for-all of our national life has required reliable adjudication of all the quarrels and inequities that arose out of it. For a long time, the rule of law was America’s great draw. If that goes out the window, all you’re left with is the free-for-all which pretty soon devolves into Thomas Hobbes’s nightmare existence in the state of nature where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The current Trump trial in Manhattan will likely resolve this week, one way or another, though there is no way that the candidate will land in jail, even if he is convicted and sentenced to go there. That will only be another quandary for the foundering rule of law, and a dreadful challenge. Altogether this trial has alerted even the deranged news channels that the nation is still capable of feeling grossly insulted by its own rulers, and insults will be answered.
Tribulation may be the only answer that will avail to correct America’s tragic capture by blobs foreign and domestic. And you must understand that our nation’s bad choices have brought these tribulations upon ourselves. Fugazy finance is finally hitting the wall it has been seeking. Wealth based on pretense eventually runs out of hallucinatory mojo. Zooming gold and silver prices signal that the US dollar is in distress. The eagle is flying upside down.
A system based on credit is one thing, when credit can plausibly be paid back. But that system is gone. Finally, you must learn what truth or consequences really means, and the truth is that our debts are unpayable and everybody knows it. The consequences await. Any way you slice that — bond market blow-up, raging inflation, bank failures, stocks cratering, a “great taking” of collateral (your property) — the effect is the same: a crashing standard of living. That will get everybody’s attention in a way that Pride Month marches won’t. If “Joe Biden” thinks he will put over a central bank digital currency to cover for all this failure, he and the blob he rode in on will be in for a rude surprise.
Fugazy war isn’t working either. When did Ukraine become a problem for Western Civ? When Victoria Nuland & Company in the US State Department decided to make it a problem in 2014. Before that, going back into the mists of history, Ukraine was not a problem. It was a rather poor frontier province of Russia, and for a while was badly mistreated by Stalin, but it was not a problem outside of Ukraine and, frankly, it was none of our business. And in a matter of months, as Russia rolls up on the Zelensky regime, it will cease to be a problem for anyone.
The notion that the USA and NATO can reverse this now is insane. The nations of Western Civ won’t draft troops to battle on the ground there. There’s no will to fight in Ukraine among the young people of Europe and America. And we have no more guns or ammo to give. The war will end in humiliation for all concerned in the West, especially the “Joe Biden” regime, which has been recklessly flirting with nuclear aggression — as if this would accomplish anything but turning Western Civ into an ashtray.
Fugazy pandemic sponsored by a Globalist pharmaceutical cabal has shot its wad. It has already accomplished a great deal in the way of bringing death and injury to millions. Dim as the people have become in their fog of TikTok mind-fuckery, they have started to notice the dead and dying around them. And the people who stupidly or maliciously caused it to happen — Deborah Birx, Robert Redfield, all the treasonous news-readers like Chris Cuomo and Andy Cooper — have commenced their modified-limited-hangouts to try to escape culpability. They won’t, of course. There’s a fair chance that they will hang, and many others with them. But don’t expect the public to line up in the parking lots for more shots. And in the event of another bioweapon outbreak, the doctors may even remember their Hippocratic oaths and actually treat people with existing anti-virals. But do expect the public to get extremely pissed-off, if it happens again.
What has the blob (or blobs foreign and domestic) got left after those biggies. They can gin-up their Antifa mobs again. This time, though, they might be met by a million Kyle Rittenhouses. They can stuff every ballot box in land, and surely will try with all their might and all their wiles. But I wouldn’t want to be a blobist the week after a fugazy election. They can signal their beloved “newcomers” to blow up bridges and power stations and shoot up a stadium or a mall here and there, but it won’t save their blobish necks. A lot of bad things are likely to happen over the year ahead, but it looks like America will finally refuse to become Fugazy Land.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_401mp3.mp3Jeff Rubin is a Canadian economist, an expert on trade and energy, and author of the newly released book, A Map of the New Normal. His previous best-selling books are: Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, The End of Growth, The Carbon Bubble, and The Expendables. His website is jeffrubinssmallerworld.com. On “X” he is @JeffRubin
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
Direct Download: KunstlerCast 401 — Jeff Rubin and A Map of the New Normal
*Please send questions and comments to jhkunstler@mac.com*
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted,an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States.
To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
The post KunstlerCast 401 — Jeff Rubin and A Map of the New Normal appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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While our country sleepwalks through the deadly aftermath of the evil Covid-19 operation, the World Health Organization (WHO) puts the final touches on a nice bit of fuckery called its Pandemic Treaty on International Health Regulations (IHR) or “One Health” initiative, a Globalist power grab disguised in the saintly white robes of public health medicine. The agreement, to be finalized at the end of this month, will cede what’s left of your liberty to this unelected bureaucracy for the sake of global “equity and inclusivity,” meaning more lockdowns, constant surveillance, forced “vaccinations,” restrictions on medications, and censorship of anyone who voices a contrary opinion of these actions.
Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s Covid-19 all over again, a second crack at controlling everything you do and every choice you might make by a cabal of governments and corporations, in other words, an international gang of fascists. The WHO is an agency of the United Nations, run out of Switzerland. You might recall this is the same place where the World Economic Forum (the WEF, a.k.a. “Davos”) has its headquarters. For years, the WEF has been issuing blueprints for a techno-fascist global regime under which, they state baldly, “you will own nothing and be happy.” (And eat bugs.)
These birds are not kidding around, though anyone can see the megalomania on display, the grandiose will-to-power that seeks to subjugate the plebes of the world — and radically decrease our numbers — so that a remaining tiny elite can enter into a post-modern, techno-transhuman utopia uncluttered with us “useless eaters.” The corporate money and organizational mojo out of Davos is behind what amounts to a homicidal racketeering scheme masquerading as disease prevention.
Of course, the pharmaceutical companies are front-and-center in the mix. They stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars distributing their mandated “vaccines” — which, you know by now, will not be properly tested, and, as currently being demonstrated by the Covid shots, are covertly designed to kill as many people as possible over a long period of time by switching off the natural defenses of your immune system, guaranteeing bewilderment and compliance by the hoodwinked masses. This might sound like a paranoid sci-fi movie, but, alas, the first phase has already happened starting in 2020. And since the pharma companies provide most of the advertising revenue for cable news media, you have been successfully mind-fucked into not seeing what is going on all around you: a whole lot of sickness and death.
Fortunately, it is the nature of megalomania that it always thinks too highly of its power and reaches too far. For one thing, this WHO “treaty” has to be signed by its member nations. Not all of them are eager to do that. One was Slovakia, whose prime minister, Robert Fico, was gunned down a few days after he announced his country would opt out. The coterie of the USA behind the senile and incompetent “Joe Biden,” is avid to sign us onto the treaty, largely because much of global Big Pharma operates out of our country, and rents so many members of Congress, especially most of the Democratic Party.
Under the US Constitution, the president can’t follow through on an international treaty without the Senate’s approval by two-thirds of its members. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) has been the most active figure in that body investigating the crimes of the Covid-19 op and organizing votes against the treaty, which he declares to be all 49 Republican senators. Thus, there can be no two-thirds majority ratification of the WHO treaty.
But note that the shadow government running “Joe Biden” has been doing all kinds of things in overt defiance of the Constitution and the rulings of the US Supreme Court on what is permissible under the Constitution, for instance, cancelling colossal sums of college loan debt. The “Joe Biden” regime is lawless. Anyone following the malicious prosecutions of candidate Donald Trump and the mass round-up of J-6 protestors can see how that works. So, you are advised to call and write your elected representatives in Congress to make sure that the executive branch (the White House and its agencies) gets the message: no deal on the WHO treaty.
There are other trends underway at this time that may assist us in escaping what amounts to a globalist coup d’état. One is that the economic and political crack-up of Western Civ is tending in the opposite direction of the extreme centralization of power that the WHO represents. Things are breaking down, especially things organized at the gigantic scale. Just look at the chaos overtaking corporatized doctor practices and conglomeratized hospitals in America. The corruption and degeneracy of national governments, with their colossal bureaucracies, has reached the stage that few among the people subject to them can fail to notice. That has sapped their legitimacy and prompted citizens to non-compliance with their increasingly insane diktats.
Under the Constitution, the duties not spelled out under federal authority are left to the states. Public health is one of these. Accordingly, the attorney-generals of twenty-two US states have declared their objection to the WHO treaty in a letter to “Joe Biden” and their intent to ignore its commands. What remains to be seen is whether the Globalists can use a new engineered pathogen out of their many bioweapons labs to stir up another pandemic scare to terrorize the world population into being pushed around. Don’t doubt that they will try it, especially in a year when many nations will be holding elections. And don’t get fooled again when they do.
The post An Urgent Matter appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Did you notice that it took just a little bit of internal chaos to alert the Party of Chaos that maybe chaos wasn’t the greatest thing to be the party of? Something went awry the past two weeks when thousands of creamy coeds on every campus across America donned the keffiyeh and, in effect, demanded submission to history’s most notorious misogynist cult. It struck a most cacophonous chord among progressives, like Kumbaya as orchestrated by Karlheinz Stockhausen. To awaken from Wokery, you see, is a brutal shock to the brain.
And so, over the weekend every big dog in the Democratic Party’s doghouse came out barking against the current direction of the Democratic Party — that is, over an electoral cliff, lemming-style. Bill Clinton lamented at the Milken Conference that “the political rewards of grievance politics and name-calling and being negative have been so immense that nobody could give’em up. That’s what this whole shebang has come down to now.”
James Carville had a veritable nervous breakdown on X: “It’s going the wrong way, it’s not working. Everything we’re throwing is spaghetti at a wall, and none of it is sticking, me included.” Fareed Zakaria over on CNN confessed that “None of this is playing out the way I thought it would.” Gee, really?
None of them could bring themselves to actually name the doddering donkey in the room, “Joe Biden.” Nor did they dare call out the stage manager behind the old Joe-from-Scranton show, Barack Obama, not exactly coasting into his fourth term, as expected. They’re all surprised the way things are turning out. And, of course, “JB” himself did not come out of his Rehoboth Beach hidey-hole after declaring no more bullets and missiles for you, Israel, which landed amongst the Party’s donor class like a tear-gas bomb.
Hillary Clinton popped up on the Morning Joe show wearing royal purple to remind the audience that Donald Trump is another Hitler, threatening “the sanctity of the Constitution” and adding “maybe this will be our last election.” If she’s putting herself up as possible last-minute replacement for the ever more ghostly “Joe Biden,” she was not so crass as to say so. The party will have to come pleading to her on its knees, hoping she can once again muster the legions of indignant women to oppose the wicked Golden Golem of Greatness — who was, that very day, on display in a Manhattan courtroom having to endure the jibes of the paradigmatic wronged woman, porn-star Stormy Daniels.
What else have they got, really? Gavin Newsom? If Mr. Trump is Hitler, then think of Mr. Newsom as Godzilla with hair gel. Imagine what he could do to the whole USA after trashing California, as he has managed to do. Sorry to tell you, but in an election contest between Hitler and Godzilla, Hitler would probably win. It’s a rock-paper-scissors deal. Any other ringers they might throw in? The only name that ever comes up is Illinois governor JB Pritzker, who actually looks a bit like King Kong, and has certainly done a Kong-job on Chicago. And, by the way, that’s where the Democrats’ convention will happen in August. Wouldn’t it be something to see King Kong versus Godzilla there?
All of which is to say that something beyond desperation has set in amongst the Democrats, an emotion so dire that Elizabeth Kubler Ross couldn’t find a word for it on her transect of grief. They don’t know what to do at this point. They have only a few months to figure it out and there is more at stake than a mere turnover in administrative duties. The shadow of the gibbet looms in their nightmares. Their lawfare schtick was one thing, a kind of fun-and-games compared to what’s coming at them: the actual law, trials for more serious crimes than mere book-keeping errors and mis-pricing real estate valuations. Think: sedition, treason, bribery and tack on conspiracy to commit all the above.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump provided a further shock to the awakening Woke with a Saturday evening fan meetup down-the-shore in Wildwood, New Jersey. Somewhere between eighty to a hundred-thousand voters showed up in what is said to be among the bluest states in the country. Bruce Springsteen must have been weeping into his avocado toast over in Red Bank. Then, across the Sunday morning news digests there was talk about “a landslide win,” and even more amazed chatter about RINOs and Never-Trumpers returning to the folds of the Golden Golem’s heavenly garment, as though Mr. Trump had virtually Jeezified himself through a year of tribulation.
Will the Democrats just go through the motions the next six months, awaiting execution? Naw. One way or another, they are going to jam Hillary into this psychodrama. Stay tuned for a couple of medical emergencies. First, Kamala Harris will resign on account of a sudden “health problem” that prevents her from attending to her duties. Cancer will be implied but not spelled out. “Joe Biden” will appoint HRC of the Purple Pantsuit as veep. Three weeks later, “JB” will submit his resignation for medical reasons, and nobody will need to ask why. Voila! The first woman president, she-whose-turn-has-finally-come, flies triumphantly out of the Democratic Convention in her hometown, Chicago, like Rodan the Flying Reptile emerging from the mythic volcano, cawing her battle-cry across the land. The Golden Golem answers with a roar. The great re-match is on!
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Clusterfuck Nation
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The miasma of anxiety befogging so many brains in our troubled land begins to lift as every narrative served up by the US fascist intel blob goes annoyingly stale and impotent. The worst media meme — that a vicious officialdom is “defending our democracy” — gets laughed out of the room now when repeated incessantly by such shills as Jen Psaki and Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC. Everybody understands they want to “defend our democracy” by cancelling your freedom of speech, pounding you into bankruptcy, and stealing whatever remains of your stuff.
Likewise, everything else, namely: that our doings in Ukraine are a “fight for freedom,” that “white supremacy” lurks just out of sight getting ready to pounce on the “marginalized” (who are actually running things, and doing it very badly), that “Joe Biden” turned around the economy, that “voting rights” equals non-citizens getting to vote, that election fraud is a “big lie” (and that the J-6 riot over it was an “insurrection”), and that the Covid vaccines were “safe and effective.”
None of these dishonest persuasions work anymore, and all of the persuasion machinery stands in plain sight like so many nauseating carnival rides. One by one, the rides are flying apart, scattering debris and body parts of the poor slobs who were on the rides all over the fairgrounds. And so, the fear rises in the ones running the carnival. The county sheriff stands by looking to round up the sleazeball carnies with their missing teeth and needle tracks inside their elbows. Before long, they will find themselves in the courtroom. . . .
The vicious officialdom put up the carnival and all of its rides to distract the public from the crimes they committed during and after the 2016 election. Donald Trump’s idle talk about putting Hillary Clinton in jail struck nerves throughout the federal bureaucracy, the halls of Congress, and the strongholds of the Clintons and the Obamas.
The Clintons had literally bought the Democratic Party apparatus under the DNC, using the money they grifted into the Clinton foundation from such operations as the Uranium One deal, the Skolkovo war-tech transfer deal, and the Haiti earthquake relief effort. They were sure that ownership of the DNC guaranteed the election for Hillary. It did guarantee that she would overcome Bernie Sanders’ primary election victories and the delegates that came with them, even after Julian Assange’s Wikileaks release informed the world just how the Clintons bought and paid for the DNC and the whole Philadelphia convention. Call this the birth of the “misinformation” cult, in which everything true was converted into a “big lie.”
The problem was, Hillary lost that election. What a surprise! Buying the convention was not enough, it turned out. Those “deplorables” did the unthinkable: cast enough of their stinky votes in just the right rust belt precincts to elect the Golden Golem of Greatness, who was as surprised as anybody, and really unprepared to cobble together an actual governing administration — in the process of which, Donald J. Trump was completely buffaloed by the outgoing Obama gang. They plotted by the lights of the White House Christmas tree to go after the interloper with all they had, starting with the surgical removal of a most dangerous appointee, National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, who knew all the secrets. . . and from there onto four years of Russia, Russia, Russia. . . .
It’s hardly a mystery anymore how “Joe Biden” got elected. It’s perfectly obvious despite the “big lie” narrative that the 2020 election was stoked with a veritable orgy of ballot fraud and direct election interference by agency rogues, especially the ones leaning hard on Facebook, Twitter, and Google to manipulate what the public actually saw. Don’t believe your lying eyes they told the nation. What is a mystery is why they chose “Joe Biden” to front for the cabal around Barack Obama actually running the show. Never before in US history was there a president who left such a slime trail of bribery and corruption. Just as they had spent all their energy the previous four years in undermining Mr. Trump, they had to spend the next four years propping up and defending “Joe Biden,” and then desperately trying to save their own asses from a Trump return. Meanwhile, they set out on their mission to wreck the country sufficient to clear the way for establishing a transhuman public-private utopia of crypto-Marxian “equity” (theft of property).
All of this political legerdemain summoned up the miasma of anxiety that beclouded the people of this sore-beset republic, and the nearly final blow to them was the Covid-19 operation, set in motion with the phony PCR test, that has now left a substantial number of citizens, vaccine-injured, disabled, and on-course for an early death — a pretty grotesque affront to our democracy. The victims are beginning to realize it.
The battery of Trump trials and lawsuits meant to put him totally out of business are now all simultaneously collapsing. Special Counsel Jack Smith is left doing Chinese fire drills around his office Keurig coffee machine. When the prank-fest in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom concludes, whether the jury sees the show for the farce that it is, or not, the Golden Golem of Greatness will be at large again among the voters. If he is clever enough to pick a capable veep that represents something like “assassination insurance” — say, Vivek, Tulsi Gabbard, or JD Vance — then the Obama cabal and the blob that has been protecting it will be swept out of power and into a dragnet of a kind of law actually associated with the word justice.
They are running out of ways to avoid it. All they’ve got left are the direst resorts: war, crashing the economy, another bio-weapon op against their own people, or an outright coup d’état. And even those probably won’t work.
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The austere glass box sited on a ridge in New Canaan, Connecticut, is the iconic Glass House designed by Philip Johnson (1906-2005). Born to a fortune, he helped finance New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and was made curator of its Architecture Department in the early 1930s, where he would publicize the work of the Modernists — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Walter Gropius, who would soon flee Germany for America. By a strange irony, Johnson became an admirer of Adolf Hitler. He soon quit MOMA and started writing magazine articles praising the Nazi program. After attending a Nuremberg rally in 1932, he remarked to his biographer, Franz Schulze, “You simply could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of it, by the marching songs, by the crescendo and climax of the whole thing, as Hitler came on at last to harangue the crowd. . . all those blond boys in black leather” marching past the Führer.
That venture didn’t work out so well, and after the big war, Johnson made another career move back into architecture. The Glass House (1948-49) was an early stunt in that phase of his life, garnering Johnson adulation for his purity and simplicity. Mid-20th century Modernism worked tirelessly to wipe the slate clean of any architectural reference to history (and, of course, the Nazis had promoted an aerodynamic neo-classicism that was a type of Art Deco, now verboten). Journalists have noted that Johnson’s Glass House was likely a rip-off of Mies’s design for the also-iconic Farnsworth House in Illinois, designed around the same period but built a few years later.
What you see here is symptomatic of the cultural neurosis that has corroded Western Civ in the decades since: a house that does not make a distinction between the inside and the outside — that is, a house that explicitly states it is “not shelter.” This has been understood as “cutting edge” and “progressive” for three quarters of a century. The confusion was so brazen that at one point, Johnson had to hire an off-duty policeman to stand by and chase gawkers away. A sign on the driveway said: “This House Is Now Occupied Please Respect the Privacy of the Owner. It will be Open to the Public on specified days.”
Similarly, the house tries to demonstrate that views of “nature” are an adequate substitute for the neurological imperatives of humans to seek shelter. (Even campers have walls on their tents.) Or for buildings to express decorum artistically on their exteriors. Rather, what ends up on display in the Glass House is human behavior inside with no decorum whatsoever — only made possible by the aristocratic privilege of being surrounded by a large wooded estate.
Johnson actually died there in 2005 — he must have truly loved it — and left the building and its 52-acre property to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The interior had all the charm of an airport lounge. Easy to vacuum the floors, though.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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Wasn’t it cute how the youngsters who “occupied” Columbia U’s Hamilton Hall — and were busy smashing things up inside — demanded restaurant-grade meals sent in to avert “starvation and dehydration” amongst their dauntless ranks? You could imagine a colossal mommy breast with three hundred nipples descending from the sky over upper Manhattan to nourish them back to action. “Feed me. . . !”
It turns out, actually, that at least half the troops inside were not students at all, but rather semi-pro activists paid up to $7,000 each by George Soros’s Open Society Institute and other overtly insurrection-themed orgs, so you’d think that the troops could afford to load-up their ever-ready backpacks with Clif bars and bottles of Smart Water. The order-in food and beverage gambit suggests we should understand that this is not so much politics as the acting out of a game — which is exactly what you might expect of people who spend more time on video screens than in the real world — in which something like a half-time intermission for refreshments is de rigueur.
Alas, they were not obliged with DoorDash servings of Alitcha (“Ensemble of potatoes, carrots, collard greens, and cabbage baked in turmeric,” $22.30) from the nearby Massawa Ethiopian bistro, or Firecracker Chicken from Junzi Kitchen over on Broadway and 113th Street. And then, when the cops came to roust them out into the big buses now used as paddy-wagons for such events, the occupiers were heard to whine, “I have finals and I need to go home!” You’ve got to wonder how they’ll make out when “Joe Biden” drafts their ass to go fight the Russians out on the Ukrainian buzzard flats, about which the White House is just now sending out early signals.
It has been observed that a clear majority of the pro-Hamas activists are young women — which makes sense considering that they are the largest demographic evincing mental illness on America’s social landscape these days. Thus, they are marching in support of a sect that specializes in the rape, mutilation, and murder of young women like themselves, or at least treats them as chattels, hidden under black bag-like garments. The group psychology on display has more occult angles than any movie by the Wachowski sisters.
Among the marching Columbia students who are not paid outside activists, a few are apparently Jewish, such as spokesperson Johannah King-Slutzky (actual name, hat-tip Alex Berenson, who ID’d her), the winsome creature who complained about the lack of order-in meals at Hamilton Hall. Another observer on “X” who styles himself @J9_ATX identified the syndrome in play as “oppression envy,” among women seeking compensatory validation for occupying such a privileged niche on Planet Earth as a cushy Ivy League college — featuring international cuisine stations in the dining halls — while their third world sisters trudge through the burning sands of Al-Kufra carrying water-jugs on their heads as they dodge the odious “wind scorpions” of the region.
Higher Ed in the USA was already chugging down the suicide track before this spring’s eruption of pro-Hamas fury. The college loan racket (government-backed) had the perverse effect of pumping up tuition costs beyond what even many pretty well-off families could afford, while loading up young people with life-wrecking obligations (debt which “Joe Biden” is now shifting onto the creditors, US tax-payers). Decades of DEI have filled the faculties with incompetents and assorted malcontents teaching fantasy curricula with no real-life value, and burdened the schools with cadres of overpaid diversity busybodies and thought-police. Diversity college presidents are very publicly failing to cope. The whole rotten train is going off the rails.
I’m not at all sanguine that the society we are becoming will need this vast infrastructure for babysitting young adults who could otherwise make themselves useful and productive on-the-ground in lines of work that actually keep civilized life going. This is too self-evident now to belabor, though there is an awful lot of confusion about what kind of society we might become.
I doubt that it is to be the utopia of robots, A-I, and non-stop sexual titillation that the techno-narcissists dream of. Rather, it will be a society struggling to keep too much complex stuff running with insufficient energy resources and capital — that is, a society falling apart, losing knowledge, technical know-how, comfort, and convenience while having a hard time feeding itself.
The campus Hamas zealots ironically (and tragically) represent exactly the sort of rough medievalism that the citizens of Western Civ countries would be chary of sliding into. You’d have to sadly conclude that many young people really can’t take much more Modernity, and are now pretty avid to opt out of it, even as they gaze into the magic, glowing pixels of their iPhone screens.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_400_2.mp3Mike ter Maat
Mike ter Maat is a candidate for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination. In 2021-22, he campaigned as the LP candidate in the January special Congressional election in Florida’s District 20. Mike served as a police officer in Broward County from 2010 through 2021, including as a field training officer for several years, all as a registered Libertarian. Mike’s prior career in finance and economics included work with commercial banks, the White House Office of Management and Budget and international & federal agencies. He advocated for more competitive financial services industries for nine years before starting a professional education and consulting business for bank executives in 2002, which he ran until 2009. Mike has traveled in thirty-five countries, taught economics at three universities and substituted at dozens of Broward public schools. He has one wife, two kids and two stepdaughters, two dogs and one truck, a BS in Aeronautical Engineering and an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and MS and PhD degrees in Economics from The George Washington University.
Twitter: @terMaatMike https://twitter.com/terMaatMike
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Websites: www.MiketerMaat.com and www.GoldNewDeal.org
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The post KunstlerCast 400 — You might Not Know That Mike ter Maat Is Running To Be the Libertarian Candidate for President in ’24 appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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You realize, don’t you, that what’s going on in our country is the collapse not just of an empire, or an economy, but a comprehensive paradigm of human progress. The hallmark of post-war life in Western Civ was supposed to be a return to sanity after the mid-twentieth century fugue of mass psychotic violence. The wish for just and rational order was not entirely pretense. But that was then. Now that we are going medieval on ourselves, the not-so-ironic result will be our literally going medieval, sinking back into a pre-modern existence of darkness, superstition, and penury, grubbing for a mere subsistence in the shadow of scuffling hobgoblins, our achievements lost and forgotten.
What’s most appalling is that our governing apparatus is visibly willing that to happen. When Barack Obama warned America to not underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up, was that some kind of joke? After all, it was Mr. Obama and his fellow blobsters — the cabal of Intel spooks, covert Marxist bureaucrats, lawfare ninjas, globalist megalomaniacs, post-liberal think tankers, weapons grifters, degenerate billionaires, and assorted mentally-ill camp followers — who inflicted Joe Biden on the body politic. And then ran him on the country like some demon algorithm designed to wreck the USA as fast as possible.
The source of anguish in all that is the struggle to understand why they would want that to happen. What debauched sense of history would drive anyone to such lunatic desperation? It’s a cliché now to say that the Democratic Party has turned its traditional moral scaffold upside down and inside out. It acts against the kitchen table interests of the working and middle classes. It’s against civil liberties. It demands mental obedience to patently insane policy. It’s avid for war, no matter how cruelly pointless. It’s deliberately stirring up racial hatred. It despises personal privacy. It feeds a rogue bureaucracy that has become a veritable Moloch, an all-devouring malevolent deity. And now, rather suddenly, it aligns itself with a faction that seeks to exterminate the Jews.
And how did the opposition to that epic divergence into bad faith turn so flabby? How did the Republican Party roll over and wheeze so feebly while the FBI ran amok swatting grandmothers in dawn raids, and the US attorney general made justice a whore, and a Republican Congress allowed the Frankenstein agency of Homeland Security to flood the country with its enemies and give them gobs of operational cash? If Mr. Trump was unappetizing to them as a leader, why were they unable to produce an alternative figure of standing and stature at least equally resolute? They look like traitors and cowards.
For the moment, the country lies mired, inert, and demoralized in the face of in those terrible mysteries. But events are still tending and the hidden hand of emergence still operates backstage, preparing surprises for us. You are necessarily aware that the center did not hold. It’s even hard to locate where the center used to be with the action so heavy on the far-out margins. You’re watching drag queens importune young children to shove all the Jews into the sea. And the kids are sitting next to their mommies. What happened to the mommies’ brains that permits them to think this spectacle is okay? How will the mommies ever get their minds right?
In some quarters, a great rage is building. Not a few resent the overthrow of common sense, common law, and common decency. You better believe they will be aiming to do something about it. They will stand up for their dignity, their culture, their history. Virtue isn’t dead; it’s just broke down on a lonely highway waiting to hitch a ride back to where the lights are still on. Don’t forget that this really is the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Meanwhile, prepare for action. It’s obvious that the enemies of the people don’t intend to rest. They are going to try to play out this string to the last move because otherwise a lot of them will be going to jail, or might even hang for their wickedness. Once they turned criminal, there was no turning back. They have dishonored themselves and they’re trying to dishonor their country.
It’s true nonetheless that we’re moving into a new disposition of the human project. It’s going to be smaller and leaner, and not nearly as complex as the tottering Rube Goldberg apparatus we’re currently trapped in. We don’t know yet what the shape and texture of that America is going to be. As the sage Yogi Berra observed, our whole future is ahead of us. If you’re not among the insane, have faith. We’ll get there and everything is going to be all right.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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The plum blossoms are ready to pop here. You can feel your blood rising. The evening sun lingers a little longer every day. Normally you’d celebrate, but not this year of roaring portents and evil juju. History doesn’t stop to catch its breath for a moment. The tiny glowing diode deep in “Joe Biden’s” brain dims a bit more each day (pause) while low men and women in high places trifle with the fate of the nation. Everyone dreads what’s coming.
Which, judging by events of the week just past, looks like a worse summer of civil chaos than 2020 was. Some entity — say, the checkbook of George and Alex Soros, maybe? — has funded the spring mustering of student mobs in support of Hamas seeking to drive wicked Israel into the choppy Mediterranean. What you’re seeing, though, is probably not what you think you are seeing in all that. The kids are mere digits in a cultural algorithm playing out as New Age dumbshow.
I doubt that three-quarters of them actually give a flying fugazy about the Palestinians, and even fewer could find Gaza on a map if you water-boarded them. They affect to be intersectional victims of the universal oppressor, but in so far as many of the rioters are girls of the Ivy League, or comparable redoubts of privilege— little blue-eyed, blonde-haired muffins raised on pony club, Hermes, and artisan granola — there must be something else going on. That something else is probably sex, which is so problematical now in any traditional frame of a man getting it on with a woman that the American birth-rate is going to zero.
How does a young woman get it on with so many collegiate men vying for gay brownie points these days, or going for the grand prize in transitioning? Why, it’s a non-starter. So, instead, you go slumming among the savages, those hairy, dumb brutes on twerk-alert, dripping testosterone — illegal aliens, student third-worlders, BLM alumni, hardcore hoodlums. They don’t know nuthin ‘bout no pony club, but they will rut like Bilberry rams until the ladies fall away crosseyed. Affecting to be a lesbian only makes the game more piquant. And if you forgot your birth control, for some reason, there’s always the abortionist.
Any time there are brownie points at stake, you know the game is actually for status, and where status is the game, fashion is the currency. Thus, the dress-up in Arab keffiyehs, the charming head-scarf denoting allyship with Hamas. Beats the heck out of those flitty N-95 masks from the 2020 Covid nights of roistering in the Seattle CHOP and trying to burn down the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse in Portland.
Rioting gives young men of the toxic persuasion opportunities to flaunt their moxie in acts of derring-do, brawling with the cops, dancing on top of cars, ripping down chain-link fences, flinging gasoline bombs. So much the better for getting the ladies’ attention. Look what I can do! And the keffiyeh accessorizes well with black bloc riot garb. For the muffins, wearing it is great practice for the utopia-to-come when they must don burkas under submission to Sharia. Will Hermes put out a burka?
So far, the spring rioting has mostly been fun for the rioters. Unlike the J-6-21 “paraders,” locked up in the putrid DC jail for years pending trial, the Hamas frolickers are at near-zilch risk of any serious consequences. Few will even be suspended from school. They are doing exactly what the schools trained them up for: destroying Western Civ, one acanthus leaf at a time. According to the shadowy stage-managers behind “Joe Biden,” this will save our democracy.
That and stuffing Donald Trump in jail for the rest of his natural life. Alas, the lawfare cases cooked up toward that end appear defective to a spectacular degree. It really says something about the true authors of these beauties brought by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fani Willis, and Jack Smith. I speak of the behind-the-scene blob lawfare ninjas Norm Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, Matt Colangelo, and Mary McCord, who wrote the scripts for all four of this year’s big elephant trap cases against the former president. You have to wonder how that bunch made it through their law boards. The current extravaganza in Manhattan that centers on alleged book-keeping errors in furtherance of an unstated federal offense is due to go on a few more weeks. The howling errors of both the prosecution and Judge Juan Merchan are so extravagant that the proceeding looks like it was cribbed from the pages of Lewis Carroll.
Yet, there is near unanimous sentiment that the Trump-deranged New Yawk jury will convict, no matter how much more idiotic the case turns out to be. By then, we will be verging on summer. The college campuses will be shuttered and the youth-in-revolt action will necessarily move to the regular streets. Whichever way the verdict goes in the Alvin Bragg case, epic looting and rioting will commence.
Sometime this summer, I predict, the Mar-a-Lago documents case will get tossed on something like malicious prosecution. Jack Smith’s DC case, kneecapped by SCOTUS, won’t start before the November election (or maybe ever) and ditto the Fani Willis fiasco in Atlanta. George and Alex Soros will pour millions into box lunches for the kids burning down what’s left of the cities and the demure gals of the Ivy League Left will find plenty of love in the ruins.
The two major party conventions in July (Republican) and August (Democrat) are sure to out-do the 1968 lollapalooza in Chicago (I was there) in mayhem and property damage. “Joe Biden” — really the blob behind him — will ache to declare a national emergency, perhaps even a second emergency after the recently unveiled “climate emergency” supposedly pending any day. The USA will be in an historic horror movie you could call Emergency-O-Rama. If you think the financial system, and the US economy that has become the tail on the finance dog, can survive all this, you will be disappointed. The army may have to step in and put an end to these shenanigans. Don’t think it can’t happen.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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Did it warm your heart to see all those blue and yellow Ukrainian flags waved by our elected officials in Congress Saturday night with the passage of the $60-plus-billion aid bill to the Palookaville of Europe? You realize, don’t you, that the tiny fraction of that hypothetical “money” — from our country’s empty treasury — that ever reaches Ukraine will rebound on the instant into Mr. Zelensky’s Cayman Islands bank account. The rest of the dough enters the recursive shell-game between US weapons-makers and the very hometown folks in Congress waving those blue and yellow flags, who will receive great greasy gobs of fresh “campaign donations” from the grateful bomb and missile producers. No wonder they’re cheering.
What the $60-plus-billion won’t do is provide any fresh arms and equipment to Ukraine’s sad-sack army soon enough to prevent Russia from bringing this cruel, stupid, and unnecessary war, which we started, to a close. Yes, we started it, not Russia, in 2014 with our Intel blob overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych in the so-called “Maidan Revolution of Dignity” (what Wikipedia calls it). And for what reason? To jam Ukraine into NATO as a prelude to “weakening” Russia sufficient to bust it up and gain control over Russian oil, ores, and grain.
Yes, that was actually the neocon’s game, equal parts megalomania and hubris, a fiasco as strategically ill-fated as Hitler’s push to gain control of Russia’s oil fields via Stalingrad in 1942-3. With failure and humiliation looming in Ukraine, the blob’s objective for now, in theory, is the vain hope of prolonging the hostilities just long enough to get its hologram president, “Joe Biden” re-elected, so that said blob can continue its amoebic digestion of what’s left uneaten by it in our sore-beset republic. You’ve got to wonder, of course, what this blob thinks will remain to rule over when it’s done gobbling up everything and jailing everyone from sea to shining sea who objects.
You tell me what conceivable way Ukraine can prevail in this proxy war now without just tripping off the civilization-ending nuke exchange? America does not have enough tactical missiles and artillery shells at hand to send over there. What we did have is gone. NATO never had much to begin with. Ukraine has run out of available cannon-fodder to conscript from its dwindling population. Despite Mr. Macron’s recent bluster, NATO can’t raise a credible army, or even agree on which country would send what. Nobody is riding to the rescue. Instead, Russia is fortifying its home-grown armaments industry and its military while systematically turning off the electricity all over Ukraine by blowing up the power stations. Very soon, Ukraine will be reduced to medieval living conditions — no lights, no phones, no Internet, no shopping, no ability to conduct modern warfare. End. . . of. . . story.
This is apt to play out much faster than America’s blob-controlled news media will be able to lie about. I’d guess it can be functionally over before mid-summer. The result will be yet another humiliation on the “Joe Biden” scorecard. When it’s over, you can be sure the Russians will abstain from an end-zone dance so as not to provoke America’s genius-losers into some final petty grand act of requital. Russia will just soberly declare what is self-evident: that for centuries Ukraine has been in its sphere-of-influence, as Mexico is in ours, and that they have reestablished the natural order of things in that corner of the world.
After that, America and the rest of Western Civ can get on with the collapse of their financial system and very likely a period of profound political and economic chaos in which governments fall, nations change boundaries and shapes, and their populations suffer dramatically from an imploded standard of living. That process may actually play out somewhat slower than the end of the Ukraine war over the coming years. It will look like a combined game of musical chairs and hot potato, with the opportunities to get a seat steadily fading, and the losers left holding things they can’t handle.
In the meantime, our country — remember it, the USA, when it had its once-enviable mojo working? — is busy being insane and finding sixty ways to Sunday to commit suicide. How do you suppose the Democratic Party will actually pretend to put up “Joe Biden” for re-election when the Ukraine failure is completed? Answer: they can’t. This dumbshow of the old gaffer hiding at his beach house and avoiding direct engagement with reality is also drawing to a close. Instead of calling “a lid” on “JB’s” activities, some humid morning in the swamp his handlers will call in “a medical alert” instead, and that will be the last we see of that dreadful apparition.
It’s also looking more and more as though the Republican Party faces its own civil war, especially after Speaker Mike Johnson’s perplexing flipperooski on the Ukraine aid vote. You recall, just weeks ago he said no dice to such a deal without a stop to the invasion coming across our Mexican border. Then, the intel blob boys lured him into a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) where they showed him . . . something. . . ! Everyone’s dying to know what. A secret signed agreement making Ukraine our 51st State? Photographs of Mike engaged in unwholesome recreations with Gawd knows who or what? Or did they just have a little talk with him about how stuff is supposed to work? Whatever it was has made Mike Johnson untenable in his position. And he has explained nothing. He’s got to go.
At the other end of all that stands — or, rather, sits at a defense table — Donald Trump, the seemingly inevitable leader of a party seeking to cough him up like a hairball stuck in its craw. And yet, every week that passes, the various lawfare traps set up to snare him look more amateurish and gauche — while the Golden Golem of Greatness somehow manages to power through all that adversity. A big faction of the party he leads is in on that nefarious game. The wild card is the increasingly inflamed mood of the American people, in whose name the game is supposedly being played. With absolutely everyone lying to them about everything, it’s turned into some kind of bad faith olympics.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast399.mp3Catherine Austin Fitts is the president of Solari, Inc., publisher of the Solari Report. Catherine served as managing director of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. Inc., as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration, and was the president of Hamilton Securities Group. She blogs for the Solari Report at solari.com.
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Direct Download: KunstlerCast 396 — Catherine Austin Fitts Versus the Globalist Blob
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This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted,an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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Before the saints come marching in, the human archetypes strut down the avenue in their revealing regalia. Do you know why the archetypal batshit crazy women of the Democratic Party adore “Joe Biden?” I’ll tell you: because he represents perfectly and exactly the “patriarchy” they revile in his floridly comic senescence. “Joe Biden” is the patriarchy disabled, feeble, feckless, impotent, and reduced to inanity. He would be pitiful if the patriarchy itself were not so contemptible. This is exactly how the batshit crazy women want it to look.
Do you wonder why “progressive” (i.e. batshit crazy) elite class women seem so unperturbed about the conspicuous number of rapes committed by “newcomers,” as they style illegal border-jumpers these days, who are by an overwhelming percentage “military-age men”? Because, having functionally transformed the ranks of American men into eunuchs, they relish the arrival of so many wild and lustful fellows on the scene, as long as — post the imagined bodice-ripping exploits — they can be dominated and domesticated and turned into so many swimming pool cleaners and busboys to be ordered around.
Of course, much of that archetypal psychodrama is only played out in the batshit crazy mind of batshit crazy women; for the sake of decorum it is never acted-out. The lurid, shameful fantasies are instead displaced onto Donald Trump, the archetypal “Big Daddy” who so insolently evaded the castration shears of Hillary Clinton — with the help of Russian arch-rapist “Putin” — and keeps on coming at the batshit-crazy women like Jason Voorhees, the psycho-killer in the Friday the 13th horror series (Qu’est-ce que c’est, ladies?)
Proof of Mr. Trump’s rapey-ness has been finally and formally declared in the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial. It’s certified, you see, though the trial itself was a joke of performative pretense. All you really need is a cast of characters, including the judge, Lewis Kaplan, who are sufficiently deranged and degenerate to carry out the performance.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James was up next to attempt the financial castration of Mr. Trump with an artfully concocted civil case that magically transformed a normal real estate transaction into a victimless fraud (say, what?), prompting the Rumpelstiltskin-like Judge Arthur Engoron to declare an unprecedented cash penalty of $354-million, designed to enable the confiscation and forced sale of Mr. Trump’s buildings.
That hasn’t quite worked yet, and may never work, given how appeals courts up to SCOTUS might view the malicious prosecution based on Ms. James’s repeated campaign promise to. . . pin something on Trump. Batshit crazy “progressives” have managed to not notice how inconsistent with American legal precedent this case was — because they held all the levers of power in New York State: governorship, legislature, and AG’s office, and their power to do whatever they liked was all that mattered.
For the moment Judge Juan Merchan presides over Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s fake case of 34 clerical misdemeanors (past the statute of limitations on them), repurposed as felonies committed for the intention of breaking some federal election law (unspecified). Last time I checked, county courts have no jurisdiction over federal law, most particularly unspecified federal law, which is to say no law at all. The question nobody has asked or answered is: what is the flaw in our system of jurisprudence that allows such an insane and preposterous case to play out so harmfully? I can only suppose that this is what happens when ethics and moral codes are brutally excised from the larger culture that law is but one part of.
It is the way of Homo sapiens that moral codes derive generally from the supervision of fathers in the upbringing of human young and, later on, as children develop into adults, these codes are archetypally re-enacted and enforced by men in the greater social matrix. Why? Because it requires a strong sense of boundaries. Boundaries are the essence of the “patriarchy.” Remove men from the scene, or castrate them politically, and you are sure to end up with a problem knowing right from wrong. We’re apparently subject now to the misrule of women with boundary problems who, for one reason or another, rebelled against Daddy and never got over it. It’s a peculiar irony — so far unexplicated by the hierophants of social theory — that the more affluent and successful Daddy was, the more he was hated for it by his female offspring.
The result of all that is the Democratic Party of our time as run by the batshit crazy women, fearful of sex and its consequence (babies), paradoxically subject to biological promptings and unable to find suitable mates among the men they’ve turned into eunuchs of one sort or another; resentful of the dull managerial jobs that have replaced the anathematized “jobs” of motherhood; filled with rage and revenge fantasies which, because of their boundary problems, have now extended to willing the destruction of our country. It’s an uninviting view of what’s happened to us, but there it is, like so much meat on the table.
The post Batshit Crazy America appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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What fascinates us about sex, I suppose, is that most everyone wants it and seeks it, driven by irresistible natural impulses, and yet the act itself is such an affront to civilized decorum that it inspires both comedy and horror, two states of consciousness that are themselves irresistibly compelling. Add lawyers to all that and you find yourself entering the realm of opera bouffe, which is to say, kitsch, human expression reduced to its most self-consciously ridiculous.
Enter Stormy Daniels, that notorious pair of cumulus clouds attached to a person, who made a career in the sex industry and later on, at the age when sex workers generally face retirement, had a fresh start as a political gadfly buzzing around the mystifying hair-do of President Donald Trump. Stormy first encountered Mr. Trump in 2006 when he was a mere TV star who played in a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. She was hanging out there with two porn-star girlfriends. Golf nuts all, must’ve been.
Stormy managed to blow into Mr. Trump’s hotel room there, so her story goes, where she apparently teased him into a state of florid desire, while mocking him, and then obliged his advances, even developing a sort of friendship that, over a few years, included more hotel room meet-ups and promises of revamped stardom on his “The Apprentice” TV show, alas, never consummated. Strange to relate, around that time Stormy launched her own political career way before Mr. Trump made the leap into government.
But once Mr. Trump jumped into the 2016 presidential primaries and began to terrify the establishment by winning one contest after another, Stormy finagled a $130,000 hush-money payment through Trump attorney Michael Cohen to keep her big yap shut about their doings. By 2018, she hitched herself to California lawyer Michael Avenatti (now in prison) and filed a lawsuit against then-President Trump attempting to invalidate the non-disclosure agreement that came with the hush-money. Stormy also engaged a publicist, and, what do you know, The Wall Street Journal published a story about the alleged romance. By then, Stormy had launched a “publicity tour” and got herself booked on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show to discuss the allegations.
In December 2018, Stormy lost a defamation suit against President Trump filed by Mr. Avenatti, and was ordered to pay over $300,000 to Mr. Trump. Five years later, an appeals court ordered her to pay an additional $122,000 to Mr. Trump to cover his legal fees. By then, Michael Avenatti, her lawyer, was in jail in California for embezzling client funds. Various letters had emerged allegedly signed by Stormy stating that she hadn’t engaged in sex with Mr. Trump, along with Facebook conversations on her account saying the same thing.
Also, in 2018, Mr. Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, was busted by the FBI for tax evasion and eventually plead guilty. He was interrogated by the Mueller special counsel operation which, by a convoluted route, earned Mr. Cohen a conviction for perjury in congressional testimony. Stormy Daniels then sued Mr. Cohen for defamation but the case was dismissed. Mr. Cohen eventually served a year in prison but was released to home confinement due to the Covid-19 event.
These doings did not go unnoticed by the politicized Southern District of New York office of the DOJ and by then Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr. Both tried to construct some kind of case against President Trump on all this monkey business, but gave up because the payment of hush-money was itself not illegal between consenting parties and they could not torture the facts into a theory that would make it a crime. Also, by then, their chief witness, Mr. Cohen, had been disbarred and was officially branded a perjurer and liar.
Fast-forward to the 2020 election. “Joe Biden” manages to charm swing-state voters from his basement hide-out, moves into the puppet-theater known as the White House, and unleashes the dogs of lawfare on former president Trump so as to knock him off the political game-board for once and for all. “JB’s” Attorney General, Merrick Garland, sends Deputy AG Matthew Colangelo to work in DA Alvin Bragg’s office, to construct some kind of case out of the Stormy Daniels / Michael Cohen debris.
The result is an improbable farrago of 34 counts of falsifying business records relating to the Stormy Daniels hush-money payments, converted from misdemeanors to felonies on the theory that the falsifications were intended to conceal other election law crimes, including “influencing the 2016 election.” Each count for which Trump is convicted could result in a prison sentence of up to four years, to be served consecutively, meaning 136 years in jail.
Mr. Trump thus becomes the proverbial ham sandwich that an ambitious DA can convince a grand jury to indict. Now, Mr. Bragg has to persuade a trial jury to convict, in a courtroom presided over by one Judge Juan Merchan, Democratic Party activist and donor, whose daughter, Loren, has raised $93-million in campaign money for Democratic candidates in this November’s election. The Judge has, so far, refused to recuse himself.
The DA’s chief witness will be Michael Cohen. Donald Trump will be the first US president indicted on criminal charges. He’ll be in the courtroom many days as the trial proceeds, likely into June. Even if the trial becomes a dumpster fire for the prosecution, Mr. Trump could be convicted by a Trump-deranged New York jury. Then it’ll be onto the appeals courts. Then, the three other lawfare cases await in Georgia, Florida, and DC. Do you suppose that Americans actually take comfort in the re-election of “Joe Biden”?
The post Crib Notes for the Trial of the Century appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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This is that part of the movie where the hero — you — tumbles off the cliff on Kong Island in a lightning storm with a canyon full of tarantulas down below where you’ll soon be landing. I know, not a pretty picture. The cliff is our country’s financial quandary; the lightning is us getting sucked directly into war; and the tarantula pit below is the emerging peril of Covid vaccine injury and death coming on hard, like your landing.
Gold and silver are vaulting up suddenly like nobody’s business (literally). This may be fun to see if you are sitting on a pile, even a small pile of the stuff. But to everybody else it’s a signal that something is messed up in the complex engine of the economy. You know, of course, that our money is debt. So, debt is the fuel that drives that engine. Debt is a promise to pay back money with interest to take advantage of the time-value of money. The time-value of money means it’s better to have the money now (to keep the engine running) than to wait until your work produces money (if it even can).
The trouble is, debt loses its credibility if there is no plausible way of paying it back, or even just to keep paying the interest. That’s exactly what is happening now. Everybody can see that the US government can’t pay the interest on its debt, which is Treasury bonds, notes, and bills (from long duration to short). That debt is running at well over $1-trillion a year. That’s a thousand billion, which is a thousand million, altogether a million million. See, it’s impossible to grok how more than a trillion dollars gets produced in an economy based on selling fried chicken nuggets and streamed movies to people with no jobs.
When the Treasury holds an auction on a new issue of bonds (needed to pay off the interest on old bonds) and nobody shows up to buy because they doubt its ability to pay interest on the new paper, our country’s debt becomes worthless. As a last resort, the Federal Reserve swoops in and buys that worthless paper by creating “money” on its computer. That “money” goes out into the economy. The Fed pretends to get paid interest. It’s all fakery, a swindle. It’s like putting water in the gas tank of your engine. You know that the engine is going to throw a rod. When it does, it’ll be such a shock that the vehicle it’s running in is liable to hit a bridge abutment or something else hard. That’s what tumbling off the cliff is like.
The dopes running US foreign policy are so foolishly obsessed with taunting Russia (“poking the bear”), that they can’t give up their sponsorship of the war in Ukraine, which Ukraine is losing because they never had the mojo for the fight. That should have been obvious, but for some reason our “best-and-brightest” overlooked that. No amount of free weaponry and ammo can make up for the fact that Ukraine has run out of young men to pointlessly get shredded by Russian artillery. Russia is unwilling to get rolled by NATO and the US in a part of the world Russia has controlled for centuries. Yet, “Joe Biden” keeps hinting about sending America’s tranny army there, and even gearing up the military draft for the nose-ring and blue hair generation. Good luck with that.
Nor does “JB” exercise any control over what Israel does over in the Bible Lands. Bibi gonna do what Bibi gonna do. Israel can’t be persuaded that the current war is not a struggle for its existence. As Scott Adams points out, Israel has decided to pawn off its Holocaust cred in order to treat its enemies as harshly as possible, so as not to get wiped off the map. Israel has treated the Palestinians very harshly. (The October 7 Hamas raid was pretty darn harsh, too.) In any case, world opinion went all rancid on Israel. That hasn’t stopped them. Now Israel faces its ultimate foe, Persia, a.k.a. Iran, these days. Persia has a big army and a lot of weapons, and all sorts of wing-men in the neighborhood. . . as a practical matter, most of Islam right now. This week, Persia made noises about an imminent attack on Israel. Didn’t happen so far.
Let’s get real on Islam. Its core principle is to exterminate the humans on this planet who are not of Islam. Islam has been pissed-off at Western Civ since the Crusades, its animus renewed in 1683, when Islam’s advance into Europe was halted at the gates of Vienna, and then again in modern times when Islam got pushed around because Western Civ wanted its oil. Islam is overrunning Europe again and penetrating the USA through our southern border. Islam means business. It wants to wreck us, kill us, and take our stuff. And it dearly, sorely, wants to deep-six Israel, which Islam contemptuously refer to as “the Zionist entity,” as if it were some crypto-insectile space alien.
America (and Europe, too) wants to play this both ways: to grudgingly help Israel survive while at the same time pretending not to notice Islam’s true aims. Looks like Israel has decided to go for broke on this one whether we ride to rescue or not. Israel may have to go “Mad Dog” in its neighborhood. They may lose this thing anyway. The rest of the world will affect to hate them for it no matter how it ends. Meanwhile, all over Europe the Islamic birth-rate way outpaces the Euro peoples’ birth rate. And how many angry, determined “sleepers” has Islam snuck into the USA the past several years across “Joe Biden’s” open border. It’s a bit disturbing to contemplate. Also, never under-estimate the damage that can be wreaked with small arms against “a pitiful, helpless, giant,” as Dick Nixon once described our country in an earlier time of distress. There’s your lightning storm.
At the bottom of the cliff is the vaxxed-up population of the world waiting for their spike protein infested bodies and dysregulated immune systems to enter fatal break down. Many already have injured organs, hearts, brains, blood, ovaries, etc. Many others will get in trouble when a more efficient Covid-19 mutation goes lethal on them. The public health authorities are desperately trying to conceal the damage. Some organized groups of people are clamoring for the data on vaccine injury and death from places like the CDC, only to discover that the public health agencies not only won’t disclose it but probably avoided even collecting it over fear of what it would show. Horror creeps on little tarantula feet.
This is how the movie is going as of April. Spring is hardly fledged. Portent looms at every compass point. You’re in a tight spot. (We all are.) In modern times — and I mean going back to the first twinges of the Enlightenment — faith in the people running things has never been lower. It’s still an election year, har har! It makes you wonder if this movie is actually a comedy.
The post The Beauty Parlor’s Full of Sailors and the Circus is in Town appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Have you checked if your hair is on fire today? Here comes an eclipse of the sun. Our moon will cast a totality of its shadow in a path about 100 miles wide arcing from Del Rio Texas to Bangor Maine, with lesser effects outward on each side of the path so that night will seem to fall at mid-day over most of America east of the Big Muddy. This event typically freaks out primitive peoples, and brings out the latent archaic terror even in supposedly civilized minds, reminding us in a powerfully spooky way that the cosmos runs things, not us puny humans.
You might ask: Are we hostages to cycles, Astronomical, Kondratieff, the Maunder Minimum, Fourth Turning, the Great Wave. . .? Considering the feckless doings of our own society, we seem to be yielding to some final act of cosmic punishment. What is not falling apart? Our livelihoods? Our politics? Our money system? Our morals? Our common sense, our families, our relations with other societies, our infrastructure, our culture, our business models, our education, our medicine? Alas, our government still lurches along, gone mad-dog on its citizens as it desperately sucks all power and resources unto its inner engine like a red giant star preparing for death.
Today is also the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting, prayer, atonement, and reflection. What follows this pause in the troubled Middle East, a.k.a. Armageddonville? I daresay most adult citizens of sore-beset America actually don’t care. . . can’t care, because they have trouble enough of their own keeping a roof overhead, a car on the road, and food on the table. The Woke-Marxist college kids are wailing over the actions of Israel in Gaza — as they will for anyone within their dumb-ass equation of victims-and-oppressors, especially involving brown and white people. It is a brutal operation in Gaza, for sure, but so was the Hamas act-of-war on October 7 that many want to forget about now. They still hold and torture hostages, you know.
I doubt that Israel wants to exterminate the Gazans, but at this point they would probably like to export them to other nations that share their Arab culture. Those other Arab nations are not eager to take in the Gazans. The fractious minority in the USA who militate against Israel because, you know, the Jews, never ask if the Palestinians have some other plan, some other position other than From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free! — meaning Death to Israel. Can you name any alternate proposal they have proffered? No, because there is none.
Not only have they no intention of getting along somehow with Israel, but they give every sign that they prefer to continue making war on her one way or another: rocket attacks, café bombings, rape and murder ops. Because they’re oppressed. They might have turned their 40 kilometers of Mediterranean beach-front into a world-beating resort, but instead they spent billions in international aid building a tunnel network and purchasing arms to wage war against Israel. And with October 7, they got war.
So, the rest of the world is very concerned now that this will lead to World War Three, world wars being the grand prize at the end of many historical cycles. Of course, the Iranians have been chanting Death to Israel in so many words for decades, so no one can mistake Iran’s intentions. And Iran has funded and deployed Hezbollah military bases on Israel’s northern frontier with Lebanon. They are said to have thousands of high-tech rockets capable of decimating Tel Aviv. Everybody knows that launching such an operation could result, ten minutes later, in Tehran becoming an ashtray.
And what if Mr. Netanyahu launches a peremptory attack against southern Lebanon to destroy those bases? Does Iran ride to the rescue? And does Russia ride to Iran’s rescue? And does China rush in to secure the sea lanes in the Persian Gulf and the oil refineries of Iran that Israel doesn’t manage to blow up? And what does the USA do? Or Europe (watching much of its oil supply go off-line)? Looks World War Three-ish, a little bit.
There is also, lest we forget, the mess in Ukraine, another world war flashpoint. There, the stark reality is that Russia is in control of the tactical situation on the ground. The WEF syndicate’s project — fronted by NATO — to weaken Russia and eventually loot its resources is a flop. The indignities heaped on Russia in sanctions and foolish objurgations will not be forgotten. There will be a Great Reset for Europe, but not the one it ordered. Not the nirvana of transhumanism and social control; rather a cold plunge into neo-medieval poverty, the breakup of large states, and a shocking simplification of daily life.
Everything that the USA and NATO are doing these days is pretense: pretending that they have the military mojo to directly enter the Ukraine War; pretending to continue pouring money into the hopeless and unnecessary conflict; pretending that the ill-conceived project even matters. The hidden truth now is that the USA war blob needs to cut its losses in Ukraine and wants to bug out. The trouble is: how to do that in a way that does not amount to another gross American strategic humiliation? That’s Russia’s problem, too: how to adroitly work the conclusion of this fiasco in a way that doesn’t humiliate the USA to the degree that we resort to some new act of geopolitical insanity in compensation. Do you remember the half century when Ukraine was indisputably within Russia’s sphere-of-influence and was not a problem for the world? I assure you this was so, and will have to be again. It will be all right.
So, if you are among those who believe that the cosmos seeks to convey an occult message in this eclipse that will supernaturally darken half our country today, maybe it’s this one: just stop it, America! Stop meddling in every flashpoint across the planet. Look to yourself and your own monstrous problems: your jive-tragic government, your fake economy, your breached borders, your sick-and-depressed population, your racketeering corporations, your broken banks, your buggered election methods, your faithless news media, your political mental illness. Or else, get ready for bang-and-whimper.
The post Bang-and-Whimper appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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If your situational awareness is well-tuned, you can put together a political weather report from the swirl of events that otherwise seem to confound the degenerate simps who pretend to report the news. Events are tending in the direction of self-reinforcing, ramifying chaos, and the people running the show are obviously insane as they do everything possible to hurry chaos along.
Case in point: Antony Blinken, our Secretary of State, who announced yesterday that Ukraine will get rushed into NATO ASAP. Do you understand that would mean a direct, automatic, peremptory declaration of war against Russia, requiring all of NATO — that is, their combined militaries — to go kinetic inside Ukraine and theoretically inside Russia, too, (a move that has not worked out well for anyone in all of history), because Article Five of the NATO charter states that an armed attack against one is an attack against all, and must be answered with counter-attack? Thus, you see, Mr. Blinken just announced World War Three.
You might also consider that NATO does not have the capacity to fight that war. The European members don’t have sufficient troops and equipment, or financial reserves for that matter. And there is, of course, America’s under-recruited DEI army of transsexuals and video-gamers, with equipment that has already proven inadequate on-the-ground in Ukraine, and a logistical route for delivery of all that which runs 5,000 miles across an ocean and then another continent. . . whereas our opponent (Russia) is right next door to the battlefield and churning out munitions like there is no tomorrow (which there might well not be for all concerned). Even Adolf Hitler, the last fool to attempt a conquest of Russia, wouldn’t like those odds.
And why would Russia desist from firing hypersonic missiles at Berlin, Paris, London, New York and. . . ? You get the idea. In which case the USA, backstopping NATO, would lob swarms of our nuclear missiles into Russia. . . and the whole shootin’ match ends up twenty minutes later a smoldering, civilization-ending mess. Smooth move, Tony Blinken. In political weather terms, this is like an arctic shear cutting across the northern hemisphere.
At the same time, you might notice a financial la Nina forming out over the salty sea. Gold chugged up above $2,300-an-ounce the past ten days, a record. That’s a coded message from Reality Central. My de-coder ring says it means the bond market is about to fall on its ass, taking the dollar down with it, which would swiftly domino into the way-overpriced equity markets, and Gawd knows what kind of maelstrom all the derivatives flotsam would get sucked into. Notice, too that Bitcoin goes up $3,000 one day and down $2,000 the next. Kind of sketchy. But that’s just my take. If you have one, I’d like to hear it. In any case, it looks like stormy financial weather which, if nothing else, is not exactly an advantageous accompaniment to a world war. In fact, it could beat a path quickly to something like empty supermarket shelves — and you know what they say about a population being a few missed meals away from anarchy.
Then there’s the immense cluster of twisters moving ominously across the planet in the form of the Covid vaccination dysregulated immunity fiasco I wrote about in last Friday’s blog (This Is Not an April Fool’s Gag), as predicted by virologist Dr. Vanden Bossche. Translation: a lot of people getting sick and dying because their mRNA shots and boosters have so screwed-up their immune systems that they are sitting ducks for an emergent variant of Covid gestating in the vaxxed population. By the way, there is apparently a gross breakdown in medical services world-wide now, especially a shortage of doctors and nurses. Now you’re starting to see some serious stormy weather: a war, a financial train wreck, and a global public health disaster all at once.
While all that is churning things up, the next round of Trump trials are set to kick off in Alvin Bragg’s New York and Fani Willis’s Fulton County (Atlanta), GA. Both cases have publicly wrecked themselves. In the New York case, you have the daughter of Judge Juan Merchan, Loren Merchan, 37, a Democratic Party consultant who has multi-million-dollar contracts with Rep. Adam Schiff, the nation’s leading RussiaGate hoaxer, and working partner of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, a chief witness in the matter of a hush-money payment made to porn-star Stormy Daniels (hush money, you might note, not being illegal). Any political motivation to see in that cast of characters? And that is apart from the sheer bullshit nature of the case, as packaged for Mr. Bragg by US Attorney Matthew Colangelo, who was swapped out of the Main DOJ HQ in Blobville to the office of Soros-connected DA Bragg in Manhattan specifically to engineer a political prosecution.
The Fani Willis case down south, another political prosecution by a loudmouth “Get Trump” DA, now goes forward with a compromised government attorney who has demonstrably committed enough offenses against the law to merit disbarment. Her lover and, until recently, “special prosecutor,” Nathan Wade, on top of probably perjuring himself about his financial entanglements with DA Willis, was just cited for contempt in his own divorce case (failure to pay child support). Note, too, that the idiotic substance of the case — a racketeering charge for conspiring to voice opinions about the veracity of the 2020 election — was likewise constructed by Lawfare ninjas in Washington DC (my guess, by Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, and Norm Eisen), and mentored to Willis & Wade in a series of meetings held in the White House office of Veep Kamala Harris (with Lawfare ninjas improperly not logged-in — also my guess).
If the blob’s desired outcome, a conviction, comes to pass, and Mr. Trump is hauled off to Riker’s Island, say, to mingle with X-hundred homicidal mutts, and, say, for some reason he does not come out of there alive. . . well, say hello to an extra-especially bad set-up for civil disorder in the home of the brave — while we do World War Three, financial pandemonium, and Vaccine death. It’s a lot to take in, I know. But it’s all really right out there, and it’s all vectoring right at us. Just so you know.
The post Vectoring Dangerously appeared first on Kunstler.
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Behold the monument rising in Jackson Park on Chicago’s south side: the Barack Obama Presidential Library (estimated cost, $500 million). Every president since JFK has one. With all these grandiose temples to our past leaders, The USA is getting to be like Pharaonic Egypt in the time of Amenhotep IV, who changed his name to Akhenaten, after an obscure sun god, and turned the kingdom’s culture upside-down not unlike the way Barack Obama has done in America, establishing the new religion of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. And it happens that after the death of Amenhotep IV-Akhenaten, Egypt was invaded by Libyan Berbers and proto-Phoenecians (“the sea people”), and pretty soon that was all she wrote for the Egypt of the Pharaohs. Just as, maybe, this will be all she wrote for the good ol’ USA after Barak Obama’s “MiniMe,” Joe Biden, shoves 20 million illegal aliens from all over the world across the Mexican border
The ziggurat that is the central structure is the Obama museum. Goodness knows what the sprawling complex of offices outside it will be devoted to — some sort of jobs program. By the time all of this is finished, the USA will have imploded from its debt burden and its irresolvable political quarrels. When the Chinese take over, they can convert the ziggurat into the world’s biggest dim-sum parlor.
Below, a rendering of the finished project. The rectangle on the top left is a grid of words fashioned in steel. I dare you to figure out what they say. I looked hard at an enlargement and couldn’t parse it out.
Thanks to Justin J Perrault for the nomination!
The post April 2024 appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Did you have a fabulous Transgender Visibility Day, uncluttered with any loose talk about one Jesus Christ and his travails in the Roman Levant some 2000 years ago? The Easter Bunny desisted from twerking on the White House lawn this time around, but the Party of Chaos still nailed down the vote of the .000429 percent of the population that identifies as opposite the clerical error made upon their sexual assignment at birth. All in all, this may be the last grotesque frivolity the political class indulges in for a long time to come, and I’ll tell you why.
I had the honor of interviewing the Belgian virologist Geert Vanden Bossche on Friday for my podcast, and he had quite a sobering message. “What I am predicting,” he said, “is a massive, massive tsunami” of illness and death among highly-vaccinated populations with dysregulated immune systems.
“You commit errors or even crimes at the very small scale, you can hide them,” he said (at around 47:00 minutes into the hour-long discussion). “I have seen this happen with the Ebola vaccination with Africa a number of years ago. . . . However, if you do this at the very large scale, like what has happened with this mass [Covid] vaccination campaign, the truth will surface. And those who have committed these crimes who have been lying to the people, who have not been taking care of the health and safety of the people, will be severely, severely punished. . . . If these people would now go out and say, ‘Yeah, wait a minute, we have been making some mistakes, it wasn’t all right, we have to correct them, we have to revise our opinion,’ these people will be stoned in the streets. . . . They can only hope that something will happen that will distract from this issue, but it won’t. . . . The truth will surface: this has been a large-scale experiment of gain-of-function on the very human population. This will be something that will be reported in history for many many generations to come.”
A bit further on (around 55:20 minutes) he says, “You will see what will happen, for example, in the next coming weeks. . . is more and more cases of more serious long Covid. . . . They will start to replace the surge of the cancers. . . now we have a more chronic phase. It will end with a hyper-acute phase, a huge, huge wave. . . I’ve been studying this now for four years. I know what I’m talking about. I’m probably the only person, in all modesty, who understands the immunology behind this. . . . (At 1:00:12) The thing I want your audience to understand, what we will be facing in the hyper-acute Covid crisis that is imminent, is that we will have to build a completely new world. . . . It is very very clear that when this starts, our hospitals will collapse. And that means the chaos in all kinds of layers of society — financial, economic, social, you name it — will be complete. And that is what I’m very clearly predicting. . . . It’s very strange for me to make such statements, but I’m not hiding it because I’m two hundred percent convinced that it will happen.”
Now that you’ve had an ice-cold shower, consider some further implications of this scenario. One is that the government and its public health officials may try to attribute the blame for this to the “Disease X” story they’ve been peddling for about a year, the “next pandemic,” something entirely new. That will not be true. They will be trying to cover their asses. Rather, this next episode will be the result of the epic blunders they already made, beginning in 2020, with the emergence of Covid-19. The variant that causes the coming hyper-acute crisis will be quite different from the original “Wuhan” strain, but it will be a direct descendent of it, having mutated in the bodies of the vaccinated. It was, after all, Dr. Vanden Bossche who declared at the outset of the Covid vaxx melodrama in 2021 that vaccinating into the teeth of an ongoing pandemic disease was absolutely the wrong strategy from an immunological point-of-view, and sure to produce a grievous outcome.
What, if anything, can you do to prepare for this? Dr. Vanden Bossche is also very clear: “What I can advise. . . to all these vaccinated people: they need to avoid reinfection. It is the reinfection of vaccinated people that is responsible for this situation. . . . Well, the only thing they can do — it’s very simple — is take anti-virals, of course. The only difference is, you will not be able to wait to take anti-virals until you have symptoms. . . . As soon as people see that in one of the other countries, or one of the other states in the United States, when this starts with hospitalizations going up very rapidly, they need to take anti-virals prophylactically, not wait until they have any symptoms. I’m in Belgium. If it starts in the US, or starts in Israel, or starts in the UK, I bet you that within a few days, you will see the same scenario in many of the highly-vaccinated countries.”
By “anti-virals,” Dr. Vanden Bossche means specifically Ivermectin, the Nobel Prize-winning drug that the FDA and the CDC demonized brutally in order to distract the public from knowing that there was a safe and effective treatment for Covid. To acknowledge that would have vacated Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Emergency Use Authorization, which allowed them to make tens of billions of dollars on a very poorly tested pharma product while enjoying blanket protection against lawsuits.
“I have been predicting already a half a year ago, that the public health authorities are finally going to have mandates for ivermectin.” Dr. Vanden Bossche said. “The results with ivermectin are fabulous. It is very safe. It is the only anti-viral that is cost-effective, that is widely available, that can be supplemented in sufficient quantities. . . . There is simply no alternative.”
Note that just last week, as a result of a lawsuit brought in the Texas Southern District federal court, the FDA agreed to finally take down the social media messages it had put up to lawlessly block the use of ivermectin. Remember the mocking tweet: “You’re not a horse, you’re not a cow, come on y’all.” The truth was that the FDA had no authority to tell doctors how to practice medicine; nor to block FDA-approved drugs (including ivermectin), even for off-label treatments. Off-label treatment with approved drugs is routine in medicine. Instead of ivermectin, US public health officials pushed the use of unsafe remdesivir with intubation, resulting in many thousands of avoidable deaths. This is only one of the crimes they will have to answer for.
If Dr. Vanden Bossche’s scenario comes to pass, the “hyper-acute Covid crisis” will intersect with the elections of 2024, and not just in the USA. You would naturally expect some extreme despotic hysterics out of the “Joe Biden” government. They will surely try to run their “Disease X” ruse. But they have already lost the trust of the people they made war against in their own country. In which case, expect resistance among the un-sick. No more trips will be laid on us.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_398.mp3Geert Vanden Bossche is a globally renowned virologist working in Belgium. He predicts a “hyper-acute crisis” of Covid-19 illness among highly-vaccinated populations emerging shortly across the world. He argues that scientists and politicians have turned a natural viral pandemic into a crisis of disastrous immune escape. The author’s arguments are compelling and indicate that Nature will correct this mistake, but at a substantial cost to human lives in highly-vaccinated countries. He is the author of The inescapable Immune Escape Pandemic. Dr. Vanden Bossche’s papers and talks can be found at the Website Voice for Science and Solidarity dot org.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
Direct Download: KunstlerCast 396 — Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche and the Coming Acute Crisis of Covid
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Clusterfuck Nation
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Who was not impressed seeing the sudden and total collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge after getting its pylon bonked by the container ship Dali a few hours before the dawn’s early light in Baltimore harbor? In America’s ongoing death-of-a-thousand-cuts, that one literally severed a major artery, but it may take a while to know how badly the wounded colossus known as the USA is bleeding out.
“Joe Biden” emerged from his crypt pronto to state that the federal government would pony-up the cost of building the bridge back better, meant to reassure the public, you’d suppose. But perhaps the real reason was to obviate an otherwise requisite investigation of the crash by ship-owner Grace Ocean’s insurance company — since legal wrangling over responsibility would add more years to the already years-long estimated bridge replacement time-frame. And Gawd knows what else they might discover about how the darn thing came to pass. . . rumors of a Ukrainian captain at the Dali’s helm. . . stuff that the ruling intel blob might not want to get out there, especially given the still-murky role of the joint USA-UK black-op blobs in the Moscow Crocus Theater Massacre just a week earlier.
The Crocus op, you understand, was probably the worst clusterfuck qua Three Stooges blob operational procedure in memory, since four of the six surviving Tajiki shooters were nabbed in a car enroute to the Ukraine border (where they would’ve been whacked into silence, since they failed to martyr themselves at the scene-of-the-crime), and by now had surely sung their hearts out to persuasive interrogators of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) — the take-away being that President VV Putin has got to be mighty pissed-off and itching for revenge. Was the FSK Bridge take-down the first repayment for that, lots of people inside and outside Blob Central were probably wondering?
You’d also have to wonder, qua the bridge disaster itself, about the implied reverberations through the insurance industry. Consider that the insurance industry is a major cog in the machinery of finance and banking, since insurance company reserves are traditionally allocated in supposedly safe sovereign treasury bonds. Liquidations anyone? Maritime insurance was already groaning under the burden of all that monkey-business in the Red Sea, thanks to Houthi rocket and drone attacks on the shipping of Western Civ. Are the banks quaking harder now? Many across Western Civ were already trembling before the FSK Bridge job.
While the awesome spectacle of the bridge collapse traumatized the country, it also brought to mind the fantastic flow of ten-thousand illegal border crossings a day, stage-managed by the “Joe Biden” Homeland Security team. Did you kind of wonder how many in that 10K-a-day flow might be the same species of Central Asian mutts who volunteered to slaughter over 150 (so far) Russian concert-goers? Nobody is checking who they are, you realize. They just step on US soil, get issued smartphones, loaded debit cards, walking-around cash money, airplane and bus tickets and, voila, there they are in your home town tomorrow, looking for something to occupy themselves. Thanks a bunch, Alejandro Mayorkas!
Are you wondering what sort of mayhem they might be capable of unleashing any place from Bangor to Burbank in the weeks and months ahead? (And, while you’re at it, think about all the food processing plant fires, train wrecks, and other mysterious tribulations around the country the past couple of years.) Consider that this very week alone, following the FSK Bridge disaster, absolutely nothing has been done by our government to stem that flow of countless potential saboteurs into the country. The news media isn’t even talking about it (of course).
The prospects might look a bit unnerving, wouldn’t you agree? Things catching fire, blowing up, and falling down here, there, and everywhere. . . more of those thousand cuts adding up. Just maybe, the dazed-and-confused (possibly hypnotized) American public, a.k.a., the “voters,” might put together that “Joe Biden” and the Party of Chaos that owns him, are actually responsible for the on-going take-down of our country. After a certain point — now apparently passed — sheer incompetence is no longer a plausible explanation for what you are seeing.
Oh, one other thing, look out for on-the-ground economic reverberations from the FSK Bridge disaster. For instance, Baltimore is the USA’s top port for importing and exporting automobiles. Also, earth-moving and large farm equipment, fertilizer, lumber, coal, and steel. Other arrangements must be made, for years ahead, considering the trucking links. It’s especially an interruption for trucking between the mid-Atlantic / New England states and much of Dixieland. It will affect the transport of fruits and vegetables to the Washington-Boston corridor. Things are going to cost more and we are already in an inflationary trouble-zone. How will this thunder elsewhere through an economy which, despite the japes of “Joe Biden’s” statisticians, is actively disintegrating? The fluttering wings of this black swan already throw a chill on spring’s incoming zephyrs.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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You’ve got to ask yourself: really, who seems to hanker more for a red-hot World War Three, “Joe Biden” or Vlad Putin? Since “Joe Biden” is only a figment of American politics, first you’d have to ask: a figment of what? Answer: A figment of our greater intel blob, led, of course, by the Central Intelligence Agency. Which is to say, the blob is our government now; there is no government except the blob. We are the United Blob of America! In Blob We Trust should be printed on our money.
That being the case, blob policy rules. And since deception is one of the blob’s chief duties, we mere sniveling citizens should expect to be deceived at every turn about everything. So, when the blob’s news cut-out, The New York Times, serves up a comprehensive history of the gang known as ISIS-K Monday morning after the Moscow Crocus Concert Hall Massacre, you might suspect that some deception is afoot.
ISIS-K immediately took credit for the Crocus Massacre. K stands for Khorasan, a set of provinces in eastern Iran, leaking over into Afghanistan and Pakistan. ISIS-K supposedly evolved out of the original ISIS that sought to establish an Islamic caliphate out of Iraq and Syria. After Mr. Trump broke it up in 2019, the gang regrouped in K-land, deeper in central Asia. Curiously, this ISIS-K has carried out attacks against Iran, where it lives. Go figure. . . . Its progenitor, the plain old ISIS-no-K was responsible for the horrific Bataclan Theater massacre in Paris, 2015 and the suicide bombing of the Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena, UK, 2017. They’re sort of the Concert-Massacres-R-Us of terror orgs — you really couldn’t find a better patsy for the Crocus op.
Is it as simple as that? Not if you consider Scott Ritter’s theory that the first ISIS was a creation of the CIA, with the mission of ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, considered by the blob to be an uber-bad dude, largely for enlisting Russia’s help in ending Syria’s civil war. And if you can actually figure out what Syria’s civil war was about, other than a US blob op to gain control of Syria and its oil, you could win a MacArthur Genius Prize. But you might also ask: did the United Blob of America hire ISIS-K to slaughter 137 Russian civilians Saturday night? And also: did it do so directly or indirectly, through cut-outs?
One blob weakness is that it can’t resist the impulse to telegraph its plans ahead of some dastardly act. Both “Joe Biden” and State Department war-hawk Victoria Nuland verbally signaled the op to blow-up the Nord Stream gas pipelines well before the act. Before “retiring” (or getting cashiered) from State this month, Ms. Nuland warned Russia to expect “some nasty surprises” in the days ahead. Was she fired for opening her big mouth? Now, a photograph has surfaced of one of the captured Crocus perps, Shamsidin Fariduni, posing in the Crocus concert hall date-stamped March 7. A set-up? A deep fake?
In any case, on March 8 the United Blob State Department issued a warning to Russia’s foreign ministry that something wicked was coming their way, and likewise warned our diplomatic personnel to steer clear of concert halls and other public venues. Was the Crocus op already well in motion? And was the blob trying to cover for Ms. Nuland’s big mouth by warning about something that was too late to stop?
Whatever else you think about the Russians, they are not dumb bunnies. You can be sure they are carefully putting together the puzzle pieces, having already been careful to take the suspects alive. They were, incidentally, all in one car driving toward the Ukraine border when apprehended by Russian police. That is being considered “a clue” as to who their handlers are. But then, who is Ukraine’s handler? (Cue: thinking music.)
Shooter Shamsidin Fariduni
At least one of them — Fariduni — confessed that his gang received all their instructions over a Telegram social media channel. The gang, by the way, were all natives of Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic. Its population is 98 percent Muslim, around 97 percent of them Sunni and 3 percent Shia. Neighboring Iran is militantly Shia, for what it’s worth. The four Crocus perps were living as immigrant workers in Russia. How hard would it be to track who was the proprietor of the alleged Telegram messaging site that offered payment and sent orders to the perps? I’m guessing that would not be so difficult.
The United Blob sent lavish condolences to President Putin on Sunday. We’re so sorry. . . boo-hoo. . . . The directorate of the CIA was awash in crocodile tears, I’m sure. Russia was already busy answering Ukraine’s attempted Belgorod incursion of the previous week by turning off the lights in Kharkov. Meanwhile, Polish, French, and German regular army troops have moved directly by rail and air inside Ukraine to Cherkassy, south of Kiev. The mental defectives running Poland, France, and Germany seem avid for NATO to jump with both feet into ground action in Ukraine, that is, go directly to war with Russia. It’s hard to imagine an act with a potentially worse outcome for NATO, for Europe, and, by extension, for Western Civ. Despite all their posturing, Euroland’s armies could not be less prepared to go up against Russia on the Ukraine battlefield, and are therefore begging for an epic ass-kicking. They’ve already sacrificed their industrial economies at the United Blob’s bidding, so why not just get Europe’s ticket punched for an express trip back to the 11th century?
How about “Joe Biden,” front-man for the United Blob of America? What’s in it for “him?” We might surmise that the “Joe Biden” re-election campaign seeks a big, fat, juicy major distraction from its so-far pathetic effort to keep a near-mummy in the White House. Well, how about that World War they’ve been itchin’ for? Plus, they probably calculate, it’d be great for business! Besides, considering the poll numbers, this might just be the blob’s last stand, since they know as soon as Mr. Trump gets back in the White House (if the blob can’t manage to kill him first) the words “You’re fired!” will echo so thunderously between Foggy Bottom and Judiciary Square that every last critter in the DC Swamp will light out for the territories to avoid the prosecutions sure to follow.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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Can you feel it? The tension rising to the red-line? It runs clear through all of Western Civ. We are ruled by governments of fiends. But now, the sun rides higher in the sky. The sap is rising in the northern forests. The earth heaves. The buds swell and blush. Something is in the air. The animals are waking from their long winter sleep. The natives are restless.
The two traditional political divisions, liberal and conservative died with Covid. Now there are simply the sane versus the insane. The sane have had enough of being pushed around by the insane. The insane don’t register much of what reality tries to tell them. They have a body of insane ideas to comfort and protect them from reality’s rigors. To call that body of ideas an “ideology” is way too polite.
That the insane call themselves “progressive,” is a signature of their insanity. Progress toward what better state of things? Toward a supremacy of fiends, sadists, degenerates, and morons seizing riches and power by every dishonest means possible outside the rule of law and common decency? It’s not even suitable to call them “communists.” They lack the necessary idealism for that. They don’t expect to put their shoulders to the wheel with their fellow man. They just want to grab your stuff and then kill you so they don’t have to hear any complaints.
The insane do not believe any of the theoretical bullshit they want to force you to swallow. They don’t care about climate change. It’s just a cudgel they use to beat everyone over the head so they can steal your stuff. They don’t care about “democracy.” It’s just a line of bullshit to cover up their election-stealing. Do you suppose that sane people would keep using electronic vote-tabulating machines that were demonstrably connected to the Internet, and thus hackable, if they cared about election integrity? Of course not. They would arrange p.d.q. to junk them and use paper ballots, and only in person at polling places, with “absentee” exceptions only for people out of the country.
The insane do not care about public health. Everything that is known about the Covid-19 vaccinations tells you that they are unsafe and don’t prevent infection or transmission of a flu-like illness that might not even be what it was officially labeled as. Our public health officials in the FDA, the CDC, and in other corners of the Department of health and Human Services, lie about everything they’re responsible for. This week, the CDC (under Director Mandy Cohen) released a 148-page study on myocarditis reactions to mRNA shots. Every word on every page of the document was redacted. The CDC printed countless copies of the report with 148 utterly blank pages, and then proffered them to the news media. How is that not insane?
The insane do not care about the rule of law. The conduct of “Lawfare” is the subversion of the law by dishonest means. It is a species of racketeering. And that is why Lawfare rogues such Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, Matthew Graves, and Merrick Garland, should be charged under the federal RICO statutes for conspiring to deprive sane citizens of their rights and property in the many cases related to the 1/6/21 riot at the US Capitol.
It is, so far, an abiding mystery of contemporary history as to how New York Attorney General Letitia James managed to get away with prosecuting a real estate case against Donald Trump that was no more than victimless business-as-usual between a borrower and his lenders. Ms. James ran for that elected office promising to “get” Mr. Trump on something, anything. That is not how the rule of law works. Under the rule of law, first you determine that there is a crime and then look for who did the crime.
Letitia James must be insane and/or pretty stupid. The short-term gain of stealing Mr. Trump’s property under a false color-of-law and creating impediments to his election campaign, will, sooner or later, blow back at her as a matter of malicious prosecution and, plausibly, racketeering as well. (With whom did she conspire to bring this case? We shall find out.) She will eventually be disgraced publicly as her teammate Fani Willis has already been disgraced in Fulton County, Georgia. I’ll tell you something that all sane people now know but won’t talk about for fear of being crushed by the levers of Lawfare: this looks like a concerted effort by people-of-color to railroad people of non-color. If you think that is a good thing for race relations in our country, then you are insane.
Here are a bunch of other things that are insane: Re-litigating the first amendment is insane. It means what it says, and states it plainly. The open border is insane. No credible sovereign polity would allow it. It would be opposed with force, if necessary. Turning children into transsexuals on a wholesale basis is insane, and fiendishly so. Everybody knows that it is not good for the children or for our society as a whole. But fiends got to fiend, and if you try to deprive them of being fiends then you are guilty of “hate.”
The war in Ukraine is insane. We certainly didn’t ignite it in the service of “democracy.” Our pawn there, Mr. Zelensky, canceled the national elections last year. The war was arguably an effort by our CIA to deprive Russia of its market for natgas in Europe, and thus deprive Russia of a great deal of money, that is, of prosperity. The project failed. Russia overcame NATO’s proxy army and found other markets for its gas. Blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines only served to impoverish and weaken our NATO allies, who no longer have affordable gas to run their industries. The leaders of those allies were too insane to recognize that the Nord Stream op was an act-of-war against them. They were also busy destroying themselves, like the USA, with open borders. They will end up in a new medievalism, ruled by savages. You’d have to be insane to arrange that for yourself.
What’s most obviously insane in our country is that the insane party is pretending to nominate the mentally unfit White House place-keeper, “Joe Biden,” for reelection. You would think that if this party wanted to retain power, they would run a candidate who, though insane, was not also visibly senile. But the rank and file of this party are too insane to see that this dodge is not working. They are pretending with all their might that this is okay, that the growing faction of the sane don’t notice.
Sensing the growing impatience with insanity among the voters, the insane party has reached its point of terminal desperation. What will they try next? Murder? Why not? Nothing else seemed to work. They are too far gone in their insanity to understand that winter is over. We’ve entered the season of rebirth and renewal, starting with a renewed appreciation for being sane and for that indispensable ingredient that makes liberty in a free society possible: good faith. Really, the only question left is: how rough do they intend to play to prevent the return of sanity and good faith?
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Clusterfuck Nation
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Have you noticed how quickly our Ukraine problem went away, vanished, phhhhttttt? At least from the top of US news media websites. The original idea, as cooked-up by departed State Department strategist Victoria Nuland, was to make Ukraine a problem for Russia, but instead we made it a problem for everybody else, especially ourselves in the USA, since it looked like an attempt to kick-start World War Three. Now she is gone, but the plans she laid apparently live on.
Our Congress so far has resisted coughing up another $60-billion for the Ukraine project — most of it to be laundered through Raytheon (RTX), General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin — so instead “Joe Biden” sent Ukraine’s President Zelensky a few reels of Laurel and Hardy movies. The result was last week’s prank: four groups of mixed Ukraine troops and mercenaries drawn from sundry NATO members snuck up to the border of Russia’s Belgorod region to capture a nuclear weapon storage facility while Russia held its presidential election. I suppose it looked good on the war-gaming screen.
Alas, the raid was a fiasco. Russian intel was on it like white-on-rice. The raiders met ferocious resistance and retreated into a mine-field — this was the frontier, you understand, between Kharkov (Ukr) and Belgorod (Rus) — where they were annihilated. The Russian election concluded Sunday without further incident. V.V. Putin, running against three other candidates from fractional parties, won with 87 percent of the vote. He’s apparently quite popular.
“Joe Biden,” not so much here, where he is pretending to run for reelection with a party pretending to go along with the gag. Ukraine is lined up to become Afghanistan Two, another gross embarrassment for the US foreign policy establishment and “JB” personally. So, how long do you think V. Zelensky will be bopping around Kiev like Al Pacino in Scarface?
This time, poor beleaguered Ukraine won’t need America’s help plotting a coup. When that happens, as it must, since Mr. Z has nearly destroyed his country, and money from the USA for government salaries and pensions did not arrive on-time, there will be peace talks between his successors and Mr. Putin’s envoys. The optimum result for all concerned — including NATO, whether the alliance knows it or not — will be a demilitarized Ukraine, allowed to try being a nation again, though in a much-reduced condition than prior to its becoming a US bear-poking stick. It will be on a short leash within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, where it has, in fact, resided for centuries, and life will go on. Thus, has Russia at considerable cost, had to reestablish the status quo.
Meanwhile, Saturday night, “Joe Biden” turned up at the annual Gridiron dinner thrown by the White House [News] Correspondents’ Association, where he told the ballroom of Intel Community quislings: “You make it possible for ordinary citizens to question authority without fear or intimidation.” The dinner, you see, is traditionally a venue for jokes and jibes. So, this must have been a gag, right? Try to imagine The New York Times questioning authority. For instance, the authority of the DOJ, the FBI, the DHS, and the DC Federal District court. Instant hilarity, right?
As it happens, though, today, Monday, March 18, 2024, attorneys for the State of Missouri (and other parties) in a lawsuit against “Joe Biden” (and other parties) will argue in the Supreme Court that those government agencies above, plus the US State Department, with assistance from the White House (and most of the White House press corps, too), were busy for years trying to prevent ordinary citizens from questioning authority. For instance, questioning the DOD’s Covid-19 prank, the CDC’s vaccination op, the DNC’s 2020 election fraud caper, the CIA’s Frankenstein experiments in Ukraine, the J6 “insurrection,” and sundry other trips laid on the ordinary citizens of the USA.
Specifically, Missouri v. Biden is about the government’s efforts to coerce social media into censoring any and all voices that question official dogma. The case is about birthing the new concept — new to America, anyway — known as “misinformation” — that is, truth about what our government is doing that cannot be allowed to enter the public arena, making it very difficult for ordinary citizens to question authority. The government will apparently argue that they were not coercing, they were just trying to persuade the social media execs to do this or that.
Maybe one of the justices might ask how it came to be that a Chief Counsel of the FBI, James Baker, after a brief rest-stop at a DC think tank, happened to take the job as Chief Counsel at Twitter in 2020. That was a mighty strange switcheroo, don’t you think? And ordinary citizens were not generally informed of it until the fall of 2022, when Elon Musk bought Twitter and delved into its workings.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/kunstlerCast_397.mp3Matt Bracken graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training class 105 in Coronado California. He served on east coast UDT and SEAL teams, taking a Naval Special Warfare detachment to Beirut in 1983. Mr. Bracken left active duty after Lebanon, upon completion of his obligated military service, but he remained in an active reserve status through the remainder of the 1980s. Since then he has lived in Florida, Virginia, South Carolina, Guam and California. Matt is the author of a half dozen novels, available at his website enemiesforeignanddomestic.com. He’s a self-described freedomista who loves ocean sailing for the pure freedom it permits. He is a constitutionalist who believes in the original intent of the founding fathers of our country. He lives with his family in North Florida and longs for the wide blue ocean.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
Direct Download: KunstlerCast 396 — Matt Bracken, Navy SEAL, Views The Field Of Operations
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Clusterfuck Nation
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The rewards of civilization have come to seem rather trashy in these bleak days of late empire; so, why even bother pretending to be civilized? This appears to be the ethos driving our politics and culture now. But driving us where? Why, to a spectacular sort of crack-up, and at warp speed, compared to the more leisurely breakdown of past societies that arrived at a similar inflection point where Murphy’s Law replaced the rule of law.
The US Military Academy at West point decided to “upgrade” its mission statement this week by deleting the phrase Duty, Honor, Country that summarized its essential moral orientation. They replaced it with an oblique reference to “Army Values,” without spelling out what these values are, exactly, which could range from “embrace the suck” to “charlie foxtrot” to “FUBAR” — all neatly applicable to our country’s current state of perplexity and dread.
Are you feeling more confident that the US military can competently defend our country? Probably more like the opposite, because the manipulation of language is being used deliberately to turn our country inside-out and upside-down. At this point we probably could not successfully pacify a Caribbean island if we had to, and you’ve got to wonder what might happen if we have to contend with countless hostile subversive cadres who have slipped across the border with the estimated nine-million others ushered in by the government’s welcome wagon.
Momentous events await. This Monday, the Supreme Court will entertain oral arguments on the case Missouri, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al. The integrity of the First Amendment hinges on the decision. Do we have freedom of speech as set forth in the Constitution? Or is it conditional on how government officials feel about some set of circumstances? At issue specifically is the government’s conduct in coercing social media companies to censor opinion in order to suppress so-called “vaccine hesitancy” and to manipulate public debate in the 2020 election. Government lawyers have argued that they were merely “communicating” with Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others about “public health disinformation and election conspiracies.”
You can reasonably suppose that this was our government’s effort to disable the truth, especially as it conflicted with its own policy and activities — from supporting BLM riots to enabling election fraud to mandating dubious vaccines. Former employees of the FBI and the CIA were directly implanted in social media companies to oversee the carrying-out of censorship orders from their old headquarters. The former general counsel (top lawyer) for the FBI, James Baker, slid unnoticed into the general counsel seat at Twitter until Elon Musk bought the company late in 2022 and flushed him out. The so-called Twitter Files uncovered by indy reporters Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others, produced reams of emails from FBI officials nagging Twitter execs to de-platform people and bury their dissent. You can be sure these were threats, not mere suggestions.
One of the plaintiffs joined to Missouri v. Biden is Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and professor at the Harvard Medical School, who opposed Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates. He was one of the authors of the open letter called The Great Barrington Declaration (October, 2020) that articulated informed medical dissent for a bamboozled public. He was fired from his job at Harvard just this past week for continuing his refusal to take the vaccine. Harvard remains among a handful of institutions that still require it, despite massive evidence that it is ineffective and hazardous. Like West Point, maybe Harvard should ditch its motto, Veritas, Latin for “truth.”
A society hostile to truth can’t possibly remain civilized, because it will also be hostile to reality. That appears to be the disposition of the people running things in the USA these days. The problem, of course, is that this is not a reality-optional world, despite the wishes of many Americans (and other peoples of Western Civ) who wish it would be.
Next up for us will be “Joe Biden’s” attempt to complete the bankruptcy of our country with $7.3-trillion proposed budget, 20 percent over the previous years spending, based on a $5-trillion tax increase. Good luck making that work. New York City alone is faced with paying $387 a day for food and shelter for each of an estimated 64,800 illegal immigrants, which amounts to $9.15-billion a year. The money doesn’t exist, of course. New York can thank “Joe Biden’s” executive agencies for sticking them with this unbearable burden. It will be the end of New York City. There will be no money left for public services or cultural institutions. That’s the reality and that’s the truth.
A financial crack-up is probably the only thing short of all-out war that will get the public’s attention at this point. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it happened next week. Historians of the future, stir-frying crickets and fiddleheads over their campfires will marvel at America’s terminal act of gluttony: managing to eat itself alive.
Note to Readers in the Hudson Valley:
JHK will Sign & Yak about
CrazyLand and Young Man Blues
Saturday, March 16 at 2:00pm
Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza
1475 Western Ave.
Albany, NY 12203
518-489-4761
https://www.bhny.com/event/bh-james-howard-kunstler-signs-and-discusses-his-newest-books-crazyland-dispatches-great
The post Consequences Minus Truth appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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HG Wells concocted a marvelous trick ending to his classic tale The War of the Worlds (1897). Remember: the colossal Martian tripod “fighting machines” swarm all over the planet zapping cities with “heat rays”. . . it looks like all-is-lost . . . but finally the darn things just quit marching, stop zapping, and stand down . . . the alien protoplasms at the controls (surprise ending) turn up dead and rotting inside from the action of our tiny invisible allies: the earth’s one-celled, disease-causing bacteria, to which the Martian blob creatures have no immunity!
The Gaian overtones in that story resound today as we Earthlings devise ingenious new methods to wreck terrestrial life, including ourselves. The planet seems to have some teleological drive to save itself, a kind of immune system. Notice: in all the ongoing debates about the wonders and dangers of A-I, and Bitcoin, and suffocating surveillance, nobody ever talks about the sketchy condition of the electric grid that all these worrisome phenomena utterly rely on. In our chatter over Peak Oil, there’s little awareness of oil production’s utter dependence on steady capital flows. In all the guff about centralized control emitted by Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum, there’s no mention of the centrifugal forces driving human affairs to re-localization, dis-aggregation of large states, and down-scaling of many activities. In our zeal to become Gods, we miss a lot.
Imagine: Bitcoin shoots up to a million dollars. You’re a zillionaire! Uh Oh. . . somewhere outside Zaneseville, Ohio, a squirrel takes a final chaw through some old insulation on a wire coming out of a transformer. His head blows up in a blue arc flash, and in a few seconds all the electricity goes out from Chicago to Boston. It turns out that seventeen substations in ten states have blown relays, transformers, and switchgear. Some of those components were forty years old and are now manufactured twelve thousand miles away in a country that doesn’t like us anymore. The replacement parts get held up in a Chinese port. The power doesn’t come back on for weeks. Nobody who lives in the eastern USA can get to his Bitcoin wallet, which is just a virtual entity made of computer code residing in a digital “cloud,” i.e., nowhere real.
Of course, in an event that bad, a lot of other things would fail — really just about everything that comprises modern life — but for sure you could kiss your Bitcoin goodbye, perhaps forever, because by the time the juice comes back on (if it even does), nobody will ever again want to invest their wealth in digital “money” they can’t access, and Bitcoin will go back to whence it came: zero.
Likewise, the financial system we depend on is a gigantic apparatus grown extremely janky from over-elaboration and hyper-complexity — to the degree that all kinds of things denoted as having “moneyness” are simply hallucinations of the markets that trade them. How many quadrillions of dollars do “derivative” financial instruments represent on the landscape of “money” these days? Most of these things amount to little more than bets that some number — an interest rate, a currency, a revenue flow — will change either up or down. That is, they are figments.
Under Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the evolution of figments can theoretically go on forever. Derivatives can be ever more abstracted from what they purport to represent, until they fly up the system’s cloacal vent. MMT has become popular economic dogma, but its theory remains to be substantiated. Since the formula relies on the unlimited “printing” of money by central bank proxies for governments, you might bet that something will go wrong with such a system — and it kind of looks like something is about to go wrong in the system we’ve built for regulating and distributing capital. And do we need to state what “capital” is? (Real wealth, not figments, wishes, bets, and hallucinations. . . hard things like good land, ore pockets, installed machinery, railroad tracks, and so on. . . .)
Bitcoin has gone “hockey stick” the past month, meaning on a chart the move up looks nearly vertical. Do you know why it’s going up? I’ll tell you: it’s going up . . . because it’s going up. People and groups of people (wealth funds, banks) see the up-trend and deduce that Bitcoin is going “to the moon.” Meanwhile, they view the tea leaves of the currency scene and see a lot of brown, crumbly debris where there used to be “capital.” The money itself is losing its “moneyness” all over the place. The most vulnerable module of the system now is the bond market.
The bond market is based on the idea that borrowed money will be reliably paid back, the key word there being reliably. One crucial condition, though, is that money has to stay “money.” People have to regard it as possessing value. And now all kinds of money is visibly losing value. Approaching the $35-trillion mark in our national debt, there is reason to doubt that the USA can plausibly pay off its debt, or even service it anymore — that is, keep paying interest on it. The more money we “print” under MMT, the more value the money loses. The interest rate on the borrowed money has to go up to compensate for that loss of value, and all of a sudden you’re borrowing a shit-ton of money to pay the interest on the money you owe, the gross volume of which is only increasing . . . moving rapidly toward critical. . . . Uh-oh.
Many sentient beings viewing the scene warn us that the bond market is liable to blow, and with it most of the other modules in the current MMT-driven system. That will be the magic moment when a big theory gets disproven rather vividly and injuriously. The price of everything will vaporize in a mushroom cloud of malinvestment and when the dust settles — which might take a long time — everything will be priced differently, including many things to zero.
This is the kind of world we’re in now, and all this is why I don’t worry quite so much about the machinations of the various blobs that have self-assembled to defend their particular special interests while doing harm to many of us: the military-industrial blob, the censorship blob, the fake news blob, the intel blob, the corporate monopoly blob, the medical blob, the central banking blob. The systems we depend on to make all things blobish function are looking pretty ill, like they’re not going be working a whole lot longer.
The result will be a beneficial time-out from blobbery. I’ll venture to predict that it will be a rather long time-out. A lot of the scary things going on around us, tyrannizing us, stripping our assets and our freedom, will not find their footing easily in the aftermath, perhaps never again. We’ll have decades, maybe centuries, to think about the hubris that brought all of that on, and in the meantime, we’ll have to live the earthly life as the earth allows and abide with it. And maybe dote on some new dreams of what a perfect world would look like.
Note to Readers in the Hudson Valley:
JHK will Sign & Yak about
CrazyLand and Young Man Blues
Saturday, March 16 at 2:00pm
Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza
1475 Western Ave.
Albany, NY 12203
518-489-4761
https://www.bhny.com/event/bh-james-howard-kunstler-signs-and-discusses-his-newest-books-crazyland-dispatches-great
The post Twilight of the Blobs appeared first on Kunstler.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/Jasun_Horsley_aud_2.mp3Jason Horsley produces theChildren of Job Blog and Podcast. He is the author most recently of Big Mother: the Technological Body of Evil, and many other books. He was born in Britain and has lived in Morocco, British Columbia, and now Spain. Jasun’s work is an excursion into the uncanny valley of philosophy where good and evil battle on a landscape of linguistics, technology, demonology, crime, transgenderism, liquid modernity, identity politics, the surveillance state, virtual reality, transhumanism, Satanism, medical totalitarianism, and a new world religion of scientism.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
Direct Download: KunstlerCast 396 — Jasun Horsley Explores the uncanny Valley
*Please send questions and comments to jhkunstler@mac.com*
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted,an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States.
To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
| Order now! Jim’s new bookAbout the tribulations of growing upClick here for signed author copies from Battenkill BooksOrder from AmazonOrder from Barnes and Noble | Order now! Jim’s other new bookA selection of best blogs 2017 to now!Click here for signed author copies from Battenkill BooksOrder from AmazonOrder from Troy Bookmakers |
The post KunstlerCast 396 — Jasun Horsley Explores the uncanny Valley with “Big Mother” appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Let’s face it: as pure theater, the president’s annual address to Congress has become a disconcertingly shabby affair, bursts of gloatish barking wedged into an hour of nearly continuous hand-clapping, as if drowning public utterances in applause might divert the audience from the empty, vicious bluster “Joe Biden” served up Thursday night. You couldn’t help but be reminded of the old Supreme Soviet in the twilight hours of Konstantin Chernenko, whose country’s renowned mortuary experts managed to embalm a year or so before his actual decease and interment.
The Ruskies back in the day had a secret recipe for premature mummification of their leadership; our pharma-driven experts prefer to mummify not the body but the personality with a cocktail of adderal, clonazepam, and prednisone — the latter responsible for the ‘roid rage on view whenever “Joe Biden” is hauled out of his catacomb for public performances.
The Kid from Scranton’s most memorably mendacious line got front-loaded, so as not to be lost on the watching millions already nauseated by “JB’s” pre-speech triumphal journey from the entrance down the aisle through the mob of his elected admirers clamoring for selfies:
“Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today,” the president squawked.
True dat. The part he left out was that said assault emanates entirely from the very government he pretends to head. It’s reported (in The Epoch Times today) that since the start of this year the FBI has rounded up 93 new suspects in the event of 1-6-21 touted as “the insurrection” — most of the years-old charges related to trespassing, disorderly conduct, and parading, conduct now regarded as nation-threatening. He also left out the prodigious three-year-long campaign of his inter-agency flunkies to abolish the First Amendment by capturing all the transmitters of free speech. And never mind the regime’s banana republic style lawfare op to jail “JB’s” chief political opponent on spurious charges before the November election — rank, in-your-face election interference.
Also up front in the show: the regime’s lust to start World War Three by asserting falsely that Russia intends to invade and overrun Europe at any moment, in order to continue justifying our insane proxy war in Ukraine, now on its last legs. Putin Putin Putin is “sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond,” the president barked to hearty applause, as if anyone in the chamber really believes it. The truth is that our country, now effectively the Intel States of America, has sown all that chaos.
The feckless Ukraine project has failed. The end of the Zelensky fake-out is near. The CIA announced it in last week’s Sunday New York Times, and all that’s left to do is cover-up the Biden family’s private racketeering activities in that notorious money-laundry and then somehow escape the massive national humiliation that will ensue when this fiasco is concluded, finalizing America’s loss-of-standing in the world. It’s all on “Joe Biden” and everybody knows it.
Now, the catch to the adoring hoo-rah ginned up on the left side of the chamber last night is that all the wildly applauding ninnies are plotting desperately to find some way to ditch “Joe Biden” before the party’s August convention, to avoid the embarrassment of having to toss him overboard at the last minute in a smoke-filled back room there — which would be an admission that his entire reelection campaign has been a ruse all along.
As of this week, they’ve lost on the simple expedient to get Mr. Trump erased from blue state ballots. The biggest court actions against Mr. Trump are collapsing spectacularly. Fulton County DA Fani Willis has so wrecked herself that she’ll certainly be dropped from the case, could be kicked out of her job altogether, and stands to lose her law license for committing crimes ranging from perjury to conspiracy with White House lawyers to interfere with the coming election — and then lying about it under oath. The case itself is now so tainted with prosecutorial misconduct that any sane jurist would dismiss it on summary judgement
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s main case (the “insurrection” rap) is getting batted around in the sure-thang DC federal district court, and could be defenestrated altogether by the Supreme Court any day now. I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that the so-called Mar-a-Lago document case will get tossed by Judge Aileen Cannon on the grounds of gross procedural misconduct as “discovery” reveals that the FBI raid was a dishonest pursuit of documents other than the ones logged on Jack Smith’s warrant — namely, Mr. Trump’s archive of RussiaGate crimes committed by the very DOJ that is going mad dog on him, an obvious gross embarrassment for them.
It remains to be seen what other sort of election interference mischief can be cooked up by the Party of Chaos. We know that Rep. Jamie Raskin is grandstanding to concoct a bill to kick Mr. Trump off the ballot by an act of Congress. It’s already fulfilled its purpose of getting Jamie’s puss on MSNBC to impress the home folks in his Maryland district. Short of the CIA or some other clandestine outfit from the fathomless depths of the Intel Community gunning down Mr. Trump outright, the party’s best bet probably is to bring on the chaos needed for martial law and cancellation of the election by activating sleeper cells of the jihadists, “military-age men,” Maoist agents, convicts, and mental patients they’ve illegally ushered across the border to join with Antifa and BLM in an extravaganza of street violence as warm weather sets the stage for rioting and mayhem.
All of that could easily be mooted by what looks like a dollar and bond market crisis shaping up on the financial scene in the spring days ahead. Why do you think Bitcoin and gold have made record leaps in recent weeks? I’ll tell you why: because a bunch of really rich people are fleeing desperately out of the dollar and things denominated in it for safe harbors as a financial ill-wind blows in from offshore. Alas, the BRICs are about to dethrone the world’s reserve currency. The value of our dollars could sink thirty percent or more overnight. The “unthinkable” approaches. So, maybe you better start thinking about it.
Note to Readers in the Hudson Valley:
JHK will Sign & Yak about
CrazyLand and Young Man Blues
Saturday, March 16 at 2:00pm
Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza
1475 Western Ave.
Albany, NY 12203
518-489-4761
https://www.bhny.com/event/bh-james-howard-kunstler-signs-and-discusses-his-newest-books-crazyland-dispatches-great
The post The Fate of the Union appeared first on Kunstler.
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This month, I must dispense with the usual ridicule that is the stock-in-trade here. Spring is coming and we are enjoying a warm spell in the upper Hudson Valley. Today, a yellow colts foot was blooming by the side of the country road I hike up most days — a hopeful sign, and don’t try to annoy me with your climate change bullshit. Sometimes there are warm spells at the end of winter. These days, our country, the USA, languishes in miasma of anxiety and despair. It’s a sad time and this is a sad photograph. The house, a glorified shack, is about seventy years old, a wreck. Two years ago the people who owned the property started to renovate the house. They got a new roof on, but I’m informed that they ran out of money and haven’t been back to work on it since 2022. Our country, and many of the people in it, are running out of money. They’ve also run out of faith in the people who are in charge of every institution: the government and its labyrinth of agencies, the health care system, the courts, the schools, the banks, the arts, their church, you name it. Many can’t find the faith to believe that we will ever again fix these things, which form the scaffold of our lives.
The red arrow points to the horse that lives on the property. Her name is Angie. She is 29, which is quite old for a horse. Angie has easy access to about five acres of pasture that slopes down to a small pond about 100 feet across. Some days she hangs out in the barn and watches the action on the road. She used to have a companion horse, but the companion died two years ago and now Angie is alone. A lady comes over here regularly and brings Angie hay and grain, and brushes the cockleburs out of her mane. I used to bring Angie carrots, but she has lost some teeth, and I can tell it hurts her mouth to chomp them. Lately, if she’s anywhere near the road, I just go down to the battered fence and give her a few strokes along her cheek muscle. She seems to appreciate that more than the carrots.
Horses are social animals. The herd is their society and Angie is without her society. I suspect a lot of people in this land are isolated and alone these days, cast outside a society that is falling apart like the house in the picture. It’s not a good thing. Personally, I believe we’ll pass through this hard time to a new disposition of things and this project of being human will continue. I’m even inclined to think there will be more horses in our lives when that comes around. In the meantime, I admire Angie’s lonely fortitude. We cheer each other up. I keep moving and she keeps browsing in the grass that has begun stirring back to life. Next month, we’ll get back to comedy.
Angie, close up
| Order now! Jim’s new bookAbout the tribulations of growing upClick here for signed author copies from Battenkill BooksOrder from AmazonOrder from Barnes and Noble | Order now! Jim’s other new bookA selection of best blogs 2017 to now!Click here for signed author copies from Battenkill BooksOrder from AmazonOrder from Troy Bookmakers |
The post March 2024 appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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The USA is a runaway train with a dead man in the engineer’s seat. The conductor goes through the cars assuring the passengers that everything is fine. . . never mind the screeching wheels on the curves. . . or the blinding strobe effect of low sunlight passing through the trees out the window at a hundred and forty mph. . . or the bump that made half the stuff in the overhead luggage rack jump out. More than half the people on-board are at tachycardia levels of fright — some are wailing — but the other less than half just remain fixed on their phones and laptop screens. They can’t be bothered to look out the window. . . .
Okay, that’s a metaphor. But if you’re a citizen of our country and care about it, these are the matters you’d better pay attention to, because they are all going off the rails:
The war in Ukraine. We started it in 2014 to mess with Russia and Russia is going to finish it. Who knows what our real motives were. A resource grab? A desperate ploy to erase our national debt by creating a global fiasco? Sheer psychopathic hatred of this Putin fellow? We can’t bring ourselves to acknowledge the failure of this ill-conceived venture. Instead, our feckless allies in Europe are foolishly rattling their sabers, apparently forgetting that you don’t bring a sword to a nuclear missile fight.
Mr. Macron in France affects to offer up his army for slaughter on the blood-soaked plains of Ukraine, just as the Ukrainians offered up a half a million of their young men so that Victoria Nuland could feel good about herself. Mr. Macron is insane, but the society he presides over is collectively insane, so perhaps he represents them well. Similarly, Olaf Scholz in Germany, whose top generals were caught on a leaked recording last week discussing their plan to blow up the Kerch Bridge that connects Crimea to Russia. Do you understand that this would be a direct attack on Russia, an act of War by NATO? And what the obvious consequence would be?
The phantom government of “Joe Biden” is too weak and mindless to join any negotiation. Ukraine and Russia are up to some kind of cross-talk down in Riyadh with Prince MBS. Even Mr. Zelensky went down for a day, though video appears to show him coked-up, sniffling and snarfling, not a good sign. If ever there was a time to end this stupid conflict, it’s now, before the Russian election. After that, terms will only be more difficult for Ukraine, up to direct custodial supervision instead of remaining a nation. It was never any of our business (though the Biden family, BlackRock, and the CIA saw fabulous opportunity to profit there).
Next is the border. You saw last year how the blob elite greeted the transfer of illegal immigrants to their happy little island of Martha’s Vineyard. (They were not amused by Governor DeSantis’s prank, and off-loaded the mutts post-haste.) But that same smug demographic doesn’t care if hundreds of thousands are distributed to the big cities, which are now fiscally destabilized by them to an extreme, probably to bankruptcy.
Of course, that is not the main thing to worry about with what altogether amounts to millions of border-jumpers flooding our land. The main reason to worry is what the blob that invited them here intends for them to do, which, you may suspect, is to unleash mayhem in the streets, malls, stadiums, and upon our infrastructure just in time to derail the election — perhaps even to make war on us right in our homeland. The US government is paying for this whole operation, you understand, funneling our tax money to international cut-out orgs who set up the transfer camps in Panama, and buy the plane tickets for the mutts to cross the ocean, and coordinate with the Mexican cartels to shuttle this horde of mystery people among us to work their juju for the Democratic Party. The pissed-off-ness of the public has passed the red line on this treasonous scam.
A third FUBAR is the lawfare campaign of the Democratic Party and its regime in power against the citizens of this land. This folder includes overt and obvious political prosecutions by DA’s and AG’s who make election promises to “go after” individuals without such niceties as probable cause. It includes the gigantic new scaffold of inter-agency censorship and propaganda. It includes the psychopathic struggle sessions mandated by “diversity and inclusion” policy. It includes election-rigging directed by the likes of Marc Elias and Norm Eisen, getting states to fiddle laws on voter ID and mail-in ballots. It includes the political protection of rogue groups ranging from looter flash-mobs to Antifa anarchists who bust up things and people and burn buildings down. It includes state officials who peremptorily kick candidates off the ballot. It includes a nakedly biased judiciary, and especially the use of the DC federal district court to punish people extralegally, unjustly, extravagantly, and cruelly. In short, lawfare is the complete perversion of law, and we-the-people are entreated by reprobate officials such as Merrick Garland and Letitia James to accept it.
A fourth item on this list is the US economy which has been overwhelmed by maladministration of an overgrown monster bureaucracy, and the gross (perhaps fatal) mismanagement of the government’s money. The people of this land are not being allowed to do business, to find a livelihood, to transact fairly. “Joe Biden’s” shadow string-pullers are messing as badly with the oil and gas producers as they have messed with Ukraine. And they are doing it in pursuit of a laughable mirage: their “green new deal.”
John Podesta, the “clean energy czar” who replaced the Haircut-in-search-of-a-brain called John Kerry, sits on a $370-billion slush fund that can be used to just dole out to anyone and everyone as a political patronage payoff, especially to janky “community” orgs and NGOs with fake agendas. This really just amounts to an asset-stripping operation that will leave the American people busted and with broken supply chains for everything. Instead of annual budgets, Congress raises the US debt ceiling by “continuing resolutions” to keep the government from shutting down. The national debt races to the $35-trillion mark. As interest rates on debt rise, our debt payments now exceed our military spending. You can be sure that our country will break down financially very soon.
The capper on today’s list is the nation’s health, the racketeering system we’ve set up to care for it, and the public health agencies of the government that enabled the Covid-19 operation to happen. The CDC continues to push vaccines that have killed millions of Americans and more millions around the world, and has probably compromised the well-being of millions more going forward. Corporate medicine — that is, your doctor, and your hospitals — is a sinking Titanic of grift and chaos. Try to get an appointment to even see a doctor for an emergency. Try to avoid being bankrupted by your treatment. Try to get out of a hospital alive. Yeah, it’s that bad.
The doctors have surrendered your trust in them with their lying and their bullshit. The current director of the CDC, Mandy Cohen and her predecessor, Rochelle Walensky, have knowingly presided over the mass killing and injuries imposed on the mRNA vaccinated. Hundreds of their deputies should be liable for prosecution, and so should many of the other prominent characters in the Covid Saga: Fauci, Birx, Collins, Baric, Bourla, Daszak, Califf, Woodcock, Hahn, and many more.
What are we going to do about any of this? Return to the metaphor. The runaway train is still picking up speed. You can’t just jump off at 150 mph. If you’re one of the passengers watching this in horror, maybe you can decouple your car, or get the conductor to do it by any means necessary. Let’s say that each car behind the engine of this train is a state of the United States. Let the engine up front with the dead man at the controls ride that runaway to its terrible conclusion. Cut loose the cars behind it to take care of themselves, to slow down, get a grip on their situation, and make plans to find a better engine to pull the train. Decouple. Cut loose. It’s the only way.
Note to Readers in the Hudson Valley:
JHK will Sign & Yak about
CrazyLand and Young Man Blues
Saturday, March 16 at 2:00pm
Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza
1475 Western Ave.
Albany, NY 12203
518-489-4761
https://www.bhny.com/event/bh-james-howard-kunstler-signs-and-discusses-his-newest-books-crazyland-dispatches-great
The post The Five FUBARs appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Did the Blob get vaxxed and boosted? Does that explain the severe neurological damage it displays now as its hologram of lies about Ukraine and Russia Russia Russia flickers out in the blinding daylight of reality? First, there was the gigantic New York Times article published last Sunday blowing open the decade-long secret shadow war by the CIA in a sprawling network of underground bunkers on and around the Russian border.
The story was a direct feed from Blob Central in Langley, VA, to Times errand boys Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz, longtime RussiaGate hoaxers, and obviously intended to get ahead of the real news that the neo-con project to turn Ukraine into a NATO forward base against Russia has collapsed. Read closely, the Times story appears to be an effort by current CIA chief William Burns to hang-out-to-dry his predecessors John Brennan, Mike Pompeo, and Gina Haspel for the failed eight-year-long operation. Why? Because it looks like Russia is fixing to shut down the war ASAP, before its March 15 presidential election.
As it happened, Russian diplomats and Ukraine President Zelensky took turns visiting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) in Saudi Arabia this week, sparking rumors that these were peace talks with MBS playing mediator. The situation is delicate for all concerned. Ukraine itself verges on collapse with its army decimated, its ammo used up, and its coffers empty, awaiting the $60-plus-billion aid package that is stalled in Congress, meaning no salaries for Ukraine govt employees and no pensions.
It’s delicate for the US because “Joe Biden” has declared our country won’t negotiate over Ukraine, despite the fact that there is nothing else to do now, or the end of the war will be negotiated without us. And remember, not many days ago Mr. Putin told Tucker Carlson that he was ready to talk to anybody. What this will demonstrate is that America has neither the ability to continue its proxy war nor the will or sense to engage in peace talks — all due to “Joe Biden’s” abject intransigence, and not a good look for someone pretending to run for re-election.
It’s delicate for Russia because such a humiliating loss for America could provoke “JB” and his NATO allies to some reckless and foolish act, say, sending NATO members’ ground troops directly into battle or a missile strike on Russian territory, setting off nuclear war. At the very least, the situation has already prompted the US government propaganda machine to kick-start Russia Russia Russia 3.0, the threadbare narrative that has been the accelerant of Democratic Party hallucinations about Russia interfering in US elections since 2016 — when it has actually been US spooks collaborating with a motley assortment of Ukrainian stooges, plus Marc Elias’s lawfare corps, plus the Intel Blob coercing social media to work its will. The majority of the voters don’t seem receptive to a replay of this scam but the US government is at war with those voters, so anything goes in the struggle to retain power.
While we await news out of those peace talks, a political firestorm rages around illegal immigrants from all over the world swarming across the US border. Nothing about that seems even remotely comprehensible, let alone defensible, anymore, as women fall prey to rape and murder by mutts released on-purpose into the US population, and cities groan under the financial burden of housing and supporting them. And so, it looks like the person directly responsible, Alejandro Mayorkas, might be riding his House impeachment bill into a senate trial — another bad look for the Democratic Party (of Chaos) going into the heart of election season.
Speaking of bad looks, did you happen to read the transcript of Hunter Biden’s testimony to the conjoined House Committees yesterday on the matter of the Biden family’s global bribery business? It’s available at this link, all 229 pages of the hours-long session. I read over 120 pages of the dang thing in the wee hours overnight and it’s really a fabulous soap opera of First Son Hunter Biden copping a plea over his various addiction problems (boo-hoo), and repeating endlessly, against a blizzard of incriminating documentary evidence, that his “dad” had no knowledge of his business deals with Ukrainian, Chinese, Russian, Kazakh, and Romanian parties, and did not receive any money filtered through the network of Hunter’s many fake companies (multiple Rosemont Senecas and Hudson Wests) that had no other business except routing payments into Biden family bank accounts.
The DOJ arm of the Blob has worked double-overtime, of course, to keep the mighty paws of the law from mauling poor, addiction-victim Hunter, most recently last month trotting out veteran “trusted” FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, arrested as “a liar” for having purveyed info about multi-million dollar bribes to the Biden family from the Ukrainian Burisma natgas company where Hunter was a board member (at roughly a million dollars a year), supposedly to get then Veep Dad to grease the exit ramp for Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was famously investigating the company and its oligarch owner Mykola Zlochevsky.
One conclusion you can draw from all these matters is that they are not going away. Rather, they are leading to a set of gruesome showdowns not just for the ever more pathetic looking “Joe Biden,” but for his Party of Chaos heading toward a possible extinction event in November. The big question really is, will that party blow up the United States of America in the process?
Note to Readers in the Hudson Valley:
JHK will Sign & Yak about
CrazyLand and Young Man Blues
Saturday, March 16 at 2:00pm
Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza
1475 Western Ave.
Albany, NY 12203
518-489-4761
https://www.bhny.com/event/bh-james-howard-kunstler-signs-and-discusses-his-newest-books-crazyland-dispatches-great
The post The Blob Quivers appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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The Arrest of Robespierre, The Night of the 9th to 10th Thermidor, Year Two, 27th July 1794
What’s most amazing about the fiasco that was the French Revolution is that it happened at exactly the same time that the United States successfully organized themselves into an orderly and effective government following the American Revolution. George Washington was elected and sworn-in by April of 1789, with the backing of an exemplary constitution assembled by the best minds in the land. The Bastille fell in July that same year. France then fell into a years’ long orgy of beheading and chaos that went nowhere until 1799 when an artillery officer named Bonaparte put an end to it by sheer force of personality.
Of course, France had assisted America in concluding our revolt against King George — surely you remember the Marquis de Lafayette from your high school history class (or has he been replaced by George Floyd?). There were plenty of Frenchmen still on the American scene during the years following the British surrender at Yorktown in the fall of 1781. Some of them must have kept tabs on the Constitutional Convention, May to September, 1787, out of which came our blueprint for managing national affairs, and not a few of these Frenchmen were active in their own revolution which kicked off two years later.
By the way, Thomas Jefferson was in Paris from 1784 until autumn of 1789, months after the Bastille fell. He succeeded Ben Franklin as minister there to negotiate trade agreements (Ben went to London as ambassador). John Adams was also on-the-scene in Paris as our ambassador there when Jefferson arrived. These Americans met daily and chatted endlessly with France’s political players. The American Articles of Confederation were in effect then, to be replaced by the improved US Constitution in 1787. The people of France, including the various elites involved in public life, royal, haut bourgeoise, lawyers and generals, might have taken a lesson from the American experience of how to successfully come out of a political tribulation. Alas, they simply could not get their shit together.
Rewind a little to 1793 in Paris, the revolution in full swing: King Louis XVI went to the guillotine in January. The National Convention had replaced the National Assembly as the furnace of political action. The radical Jacobin faction, led by Robespierre and Saint-Just, coalesced into a power-seizing majority there. They took their name from a political club founded by anti-royalists, but their platform became increasingly extreme as the revolution lurched toward pandemonium.
During their year in power, the Jacobins turned the life of the nation upside down in their zealous quest to create a perfectly equitable society. They abolished the church (and replaced it with their own “cult of the supreme being”). They changed the week from seven days to ten days, they changed the names of all the months of the calendar. (1792 was denoted “the Year One.”) They put in price and wage controls while churning out money (paper assignats) which triggered (voila) monetary inflation! They confiscated grain from farmers all over the country. They condemned thousands (estimate: 20,000 to 40,000) of political enemies to the guillotine in their “Reign of Terror.” In short, the Jacobins made a bloody mess of things and pissed-off a lot of their countrymen.
By the summer of 1794 (in their renamed month of Thermidor), everybody else finally had enough of the Jacobin nightmare. On July 27, Robespierre was at the rostrum once again denouncing his enemies and crying for blood when the out-group members present started throwing food at him and shouting him down. That was the magic moment when everything flipped — the shock of recognition that the Jacobins had lost power. Just like that! The chamber fell into a melee, a lot of shoving and shouting. . . Robespierre and his cronies were chased across town to the city hall (Hôtel de Ville) and barricaded themselves inside. The mob broke through and arrested them. Somewhere in the confusion a policeman shot Robespierre in the face, shattering his jaw (no more speeches for you!). . . and the very next day, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and twenty of their associates had their appointment with “the national razor.”
This event became known as the Thermidorian Reaction. The insane Jacobin program of terror and social derangement was swiftly abolished. Nothing like it was seen again until the Bolsheviks, the Maoists and the Khmer Rouge came along in the 20th century, and now, in our time, The Party of Chaos as led by “Joe Biden” (or whoever and whatever is behind him), with their open border, their lust for another world war, their drive for censorship, their sadistic lawfare, their race and sex hustles, their compulsive lying, and their sick destruction of every norm and boundary in daily life.
America is headed for its own Thermidorian Reaction. It’ll end up being called something else, of course, because it is a different time, place, and set of circumstances. But it feels close, doesn’t it? Everybody I know or correspond with mentions this feeling that something is going to blow in our country, and pretty soon. The air is alive with it, just as the air is alive with portents of spring. Are you waiting for it?
Note to Readers in the Hudson Valley:
JHK will Sign & Yak about
CrazyLand and Young Man Blues
Saturday, March 16 at 2:00pm
Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza
1475 Western Ave.
Albany, NY 12203
518-489-4761
https://www.bhny.com/event/bh-james-howard-kunstler-signs-and-discusses-his-newest-books-crazyland-dispatches-great
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit:Kunstler.com/vaulted
| Order now! Jim’s new bookAbout the tribulations of growing upClick here for signed author copies from Battenkill BooksOrder from AmazonOrder from Barnes and Noble | Order now! Jim’s other new bookA selection of best blogs 2017 to now!Click here for signed author copies from Battenkill BooksOrder from AmazonOrder from Troy Bookmakers |
Paintings from the 2023 Season
New Gallery 15
The post Comes Thermidor appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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The florid carbuncle of Woke-Maoist lawfare weeps its vile effluvium across the social landscape, poisoning whatever it touches, and nothing in the armory of reason, principle, or good faith avails to heal it. Sickness rages through the body politic. You have lost faith in all the doctors, and they have lost faith in themselves. The fever intensifies. The crisis is upon us. Which way will fate turn us? Toward death or recovery?
The poison killing our country is pervasive untruth. Every institution we have relied on to run the public interest has become a factory churning out lies, evasions, and misdirection — not unlike the way mRNA “vaccines” turned the cells in your bodies into tiny generators of spike proteins destroying your organs. Likewise, half the population, apparently, thinks this is a good thing, that we need more lawfare — the perversion of law by attorney perverts — and that we need ever more lies, evasions, and misdirection (just as the degenerates who run Harvard declare their student body needs more mRNA boosters to remain in school).
Since the doctors have all failed — miserably and dishonorably — America needs an exorcism. The poisons in our system are actual persons carrying out their programmed assignments, just as the spike proteins in the bodies of millions act as individual agents of destruction in your body. What possible invocation can drive out the likes of Mayorkas, Christopher Wray, Avril Haines, William Burns, Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Jack Smith, Jake Sullivan, Mark Zuckerberg, Mandy Cohen, Rachel Maddow, Daniel Sachs Goldman, Jamie Raskin, Mitch McConnell, Charles “Chuck” Schumer, “Joe Biden” (the remnant of a person, after all), and a thousand others in high places behaving in a way indistinguishable from demons?
What explains their devotion to untruth? What motivates them? Can it possibly be the mere perqs and comforts of their positions? Are they answering a call? And who is issuing that call? Or are they just trapped by their many years of lying continually, fearful of getting cast into prison? Are you asking yourselves: what will satisfy these maniacs? Anything short of the ruin of our country? What will their coveted power be worth in a ruined country?
Mr. Trump volunteered to play the role of exorcist in this grand psychodrama. Whatever else you make of him, he has shown a lot of fortitude. Eight years ago, when he came on the scene, he appeared to not know that his opponents were actually demons seeking to wreck the country; rather just low persons sunk in the most common venal corruption, and others mere zealots steeped in futile utopian fantasies of perfecting the flawed human condition. He learned eventually that the situation was more dire than he ever imagined. His opponents came after him hard from the get-go and keep coming at him. Russia is the knout they use in the attempt to flay him alive.
“Russia Russia Russia” has been one long, elaborate lie. They’re going at it again, pretending that Mr. Trump seeks Russian help interfering in the fall election, despite the plain fact that all previous invocations of “Russia Russia Russia” were revealed to be untrue, and maliciously so — and that all the actual election interference originated with the gang shouting “Russia Russia Russia.” It looks like more than half the country is refusing to fall for it this time. Thus, the resort to lawfare, the five cases (so far) designed to bankrupt Mr. Trump and gain a felony conviction for objecting to the election shenanigans of 2020.
The lawfare claque around “Joe Biden” — Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, Marc Elias, Norm Eisen — tutored the likes of Letitia James, Fani Willis, and Alvin Bragg to bring these cases in jurisdictions ruled by the votaries of Abraxas, the gnostic demon-God that drives the Party of Chaos. New York Attorney General Letitia James won the first round with an utterly truthless case, decided despotically by Judge Engoron without a trial, that, for now, has created awful tactical problems for Mr. Trump. He may adroitly overcome the $355-million judgment to bring his appeal, and at some point up the ladder of review, Ms. James will be subject to the disgrace and punishment she deserves. Ms. Willis already has been wrung through her tribulation and revealed herself to be an experienced and dedicated liar unfit to bring the case that was gifted to her by the lawfare orcs. Mr. Bragg’s idiotic case based on a tortured chimera of state and federal law, will be served up soon with a pre-determined outcome.
What all these cases have in common is that they were concocted as if no such thing as consequence exists. The first consequence for the stupid office-holders duped into bringing these cases is that they will be dishonored and broken by their bad choices. The second consequence is that they will deepen the suppressed racial animosity in our country — as designed heinously to do by the white leftist elitists manipulating these black state and county attorneys — and possibly drive us into tragic race war to complete the destruction of our country they’ve wished and worked for.
The special counsel Jack Smith’s federal cases, on the other hand, look like a complete bust. The one in the DC federal district court under Judge Chutkan is unraveling on its obvious lack of merit, its misapplication of the statutes cited, and Mr. Smith’s illegitimate appointment under the rules governing special counsels. The so-called Mar-a-Lago document case in Florida appears to have been a smokescreen for the FBI’s attempt to repossess documentary evidence of its own criminal role in the 2015-to-2019 RussiaGate caper. I predict Judge Aileen Cannon will end up dismissing the whole thing as, in effect, a DOJ-sponsored hoax on the court.
This battle has a long way to go. It is clearly a battle of good against manifest evil. The evil side has done its thing — waged war on the American people — by working overtime to systematically derange your minds. Next, they will seek to go after whatever money you still have, whatever things of value you possess, and whatever remaining liberties you enjoy. Pay attention as events unspool.
Note to Readers in the Hudson Valley:
JHK will Sign & Yak about
CrazyLand and Young Man Blues
Saturday, March 16 at 2:00pm
Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza
1475 Western Ave.
Albany, NY 12203
518-489-4761
https://www.bhny.com/event/bh-james-howard-kunstler-signs-and-discusses-his-newest-books-crazyland-dispatches-great
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit:Kunstler.com/vaulted
| Order now! Jim’s new bookAbout the tribulations of growing upClick here for signed author copies from Battenkill BooksOrder from AmazonOrder from Barnes and Noble | Order now! Jim’s other new bookA selection of best blogs 2017 to now!Click here for signed author copies from Battenkill BooksOrder from AmazonOrder from Troy Bookmakers |
Paintings from the 2023 Season
New Gallery 15
The post The Dark and the Light appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Do you think that more than half of the US public may be getting a little irked with “Joe Biden’s” lawfare elf, AG Merrick Garland, as he rolls one innocent J-6 protester after another into decades of hard-time for strolling through the US Capitol building — while the special counsels assigned to only a few of the Biden family crimes play hide-the-salami with due process?
For all their cheap talk about “our democracy,” it’s a little scary to see what Democratic Party lawyers actually think of the legal system that is supposed to allow a society based on liberty to function fairly. Court filings last week indicate that Special Counsel David Weiss is about to indict Hunter Biden on that gun charge they have used as the joker in a three-card Monte game for going on five years.
Last time, they ran the game before Delaware federal judge Maryellen Noreika, she detected a teeny-weeny, sneaky clause in the plea agreement to a watered-down gun charge that would have granted immunity to Hunter B from any other past wrongdoing, including, of course, the entire alleged Biden family racketeering operation that had the First Son acting as prime broker and bag-man for tens of millions of dollars in bribes from foreign actors in countries less than friendly to US interests, funneled into any number of Biden family shell corporations. Judge Noreika nixed the plea agreement.
Now, Mr. Weiss’s crew seems to be saying that the immunity clause is still tied to any plea deal answering a forthcoming September 29 indictment. The move would appear to be timed to exactly the moment that a House impeachment committee would begin its inquiry into the Biden family’s moneygrubbing activities. In ordinary House committee hearings, DOJ officials like to use the excuse of “an ongoing investigation” to demur from answering questions. Merrick Garland has done this dozens of times. Will they now try to upgrade that to “an ongoing prosecution?” Could that move lead to a constitutional impasse, requiring the Supreme Court to rule? Or does a House impeachment panel enjoy special privileges of inquiry?
It also appears that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FLA) intends to force the issue of opening an impeachment ASAP against “Joe Biden.” In last January’s maneuvering to seat a new Republican House majority, Mr. Gaetz pushed through an agreement that the process to remove and replace the Speaker of the House could be activated by one vote. Mr. Gaetz reiterated last week that he means business. He’s the one vote.
The argument that Republicans should leave hands-off “Joe Biden” so they can run against the feeble old grifter in 2024 is preposterous because there is no way that the “JB” can possibly run for reelection under any circumstances. It’s just another trip being laid on the American public — and one that illustrates how tragic and dangerous is the absence of an honest news media for challenging such insolent gambits. The President can barely totter into a room now without making some embarrassing pratfall or gaffe. He couldn’t possibly survive a debate, especially with all the new records of his crimes unearthed since the last time around in 2020 when he pretended to know nothing about his son’s business dealings.
Anyway, the actual issue is not whether it’s politically advantageous to lay off “Joe Biden,” but the irrefutable fact that he (and the shadowy figures running his regime) are wrecking the country. He (they) can do a lot more damage in the many months leading up to January, 2025, especially around the dangerous idiocy that the US foreign policy gang pursues so blindly in Ukraine. You might argue that the “president” would never be convicted (actually booted out) in a Democrat majority Senate trial following a productive House impeachment. But both procedures would be televised and recorded for play on a thousand Internet channels, despite the connivance of a complicit legacy news media. And the public will finally see the case against “Joe Biden” and his family laid out carefully, precisely, and coherently, with high and grave decorum. Even some percentage of ring-fenced Democratic voters may have to finally conclude that something has gone very wrong in our country and in their own party.
The post The Mills of the Gods appeared first on Kunstler.
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Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss was a bigger shock to the Washington DC deep state Blob than Donald Trump’s victory. But the dynamics of this trauma operated at many levels. At the most superficial level was the hysterical response of Democratic Party rank-and-file women who regarded Donald Trump as the most extreme and horrifying embodiment of an archetypal “bad daddy.” This was all sheer psychodrama of course, but women are engrossed with psychodrama — generating it and relishing it — which men often fail to appreciate.
In cases of madness, there is often a dark, sordid secret behind the weird behavior that presents outwardly. In the group madness provoked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, the dirty secret was that she had actually bought the Democratic National Committee in 2016, meaning the machinery that runs the party. She used lavish contributions to the Clinton Foundation to accomplish that. And Hillary along with her foundation — and husband Bill, who had been reduced by late career misadventure to a kind of political fashion accessory — had committed any number of grave crimes against our country over the years, especially during her service as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Think: Skolkovo… Uranium One…. In 2016 Hillary used her ownership of the DNC to underhandly de-rail the likely Democratic primary winner, Bernie Sanders, from being nominated.
The initial act of madness by the “Resistance” on Mr. Trump’s inauguration day was the women’s march of pink pussy-hats, so called, a symbolic exhibition of fleering female genitalia in Mr. Trump’s face, so to speak, as an act of defiance against the new national daddy figure (and his millions of deplorable supporters watching the ceremonies on TV). This proved to be a mere overture to the more extreme sexual acting-out that evolved in the years to follow, overall a campaign to horrify people of normal appetites, beliefs, and moral codes, culminating in the drag queen story hours aimed at maximally inducing outrage among people organized as families.
All of that psychodrama was hijacked, of course, by the serious neo-Marxists lurking among the Left, who used it in the usual neo-Marxian way: to overthrow everything in the established social order. And who were these? The circle around Barack Obama. And who was Barack Obama exactly? Good question. This mysterious figure who rose so swiftly from being, briefly, a mere state senator in Illinois, then to the US Senate — for only a few years, accomplishing next to nothing there — then to being nominated for president, and actually winning the 2008 election!
Since we’re speaking in terms of psychodrama, Mr. Obama was liberalism’s wish-fulfillment: a half-century after the Civil Rights movement, America elects the first black president (half-black, anyway)! Liberalism needed, above all, a sense of moral superiority, to heal an imperfect world, to be ahead-of-the-curve in mankind’s implacable march of progress toward perfection, and especially to set an example for how to live for all those gun-loving, bible-thumping, meth-smoking, opiate-scarfing, racist, rapist flyover rubes who would dare to vote for such misogynistic vermin as the TV-clown Donald J. Trump.
It was known, at the time, that Mr. Obama was a close associate (probably an apostle of) Chicagoan Bill Ayers, a former leader of the 1960s domestic terrorism group called The Weathermen. But by 2008, Mr. Ayers had managed to rehabilitate himself into professor of education at the U of Illinois Chicago campus, and hitched himself to Chicago school czar Arne Duncan, who would be appointed Secretary of Education by Mr. Obama, opening the doors for a neo-Marxist coup in the public schools — now on display in the battles raging over race-and-gender-Marxism installed in the Common Core State Standard Initiative.
To what degree was Mr. Obama a tool of other forces lurking in the deep background of world politics, and what are these forces? Many of the non-Left will say they are a loose consortium of corporate and financial actors desperate to keep in motion a set of rackets that magically stabilize business-as-usual, which asset-strips the remaining wealth of the middle classes and transfers it to the already super-wealthy.
I’m not so sure about that, though the role of Davos remains persistently murky. Why, after all, would the super-rich invite as front-man a crypto-Marxist, as Mr. Obama is alleged to be, dedicated to destroying the existing social order that is the very ecosystem of the super-rich? Is it possible that Mr. Obama is fronting for nothing more than Mr. Obama now, desperately, as they say, weaponizing the “Joe Biden” government against its own people just to save Barack Obama from discovery, infamy, and loss of power?
Mr. Trump proved to be easily controllable in office. With the Blob and all its primary agencies marshalled against him, he was systematically disabled and humiliated by serial Blob hoaxes during his tenure, culminating in the bizarrely successful criminal plot to launch Covid-19 as an election-rigging device. Mr. Trump was thereby neatly disposed of in 2020. Of course, RussiaGate, The Mueller business, Impeachment No. 1, and Covid-19 were all essentially acts of treason and perfidy — that is, high crimes committed by the Democratic Party.
“Joe Biden” was Mr. Obama’s device for wresting control of the DNC from Hillary Clinton’s gang. But now “Joe Biden” has criminal problems of his own that threaten to take down not only his own presidency, but everything connected to it, namely his controller, Mr. Obama & Company, and the Democratic Liberal order itself driven insane by its own criminality. Meanwhile, his nemesis, Donald Trump has proven to be extraordinarily resilient in the remorseless war against him. And now that has culminated in the (so far) four cockamamie criminal cases cooked up by Obama / “Biden” as the final line of defense against the Golden Golem of Greatness — who obviously has no intention of surrendering.
It looks like Mr. Obama is now in the process of being “outed” as something other than the suave performer he was for two terms in the White House. The Tucker Carlson interview with one Larry Sinclair, a gay cruiser and druggie who claims to have frolicked with Mr. Obama before he was a celebrity, was met with ominous silence in the mainstream media. They didn’t even dare denounce it to avoid drawing more attention to it. And the mysterious “drowning” of the Obama family’s chef, Tafari Campbell, paddleboarding at night in the shallow bay off the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, remains woefully under-investigated. Will Barack Obama and “Joe Biden” end up sinking each other and the Democratic Party with them? And then, Will Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. be called in to rescue the darn thing while driving all the demons out of it?
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Behold, Royal Caribbean International’s new ship, Icon of the Seas. Well, okay, but icon of what, exactly, of the seas? Of the wretched excess that the cruise industry is sending forth to sail the oceans blue? I remind you: societies build their most extravagant monuments just before they collapse. This looks like the perfect vehicle for partying at the end-of-the-world (that is, the world as we know it). This monstrosity is so huge — equivalent of a 20-story building — that the promoters say it has “neighborhoods.” Below is the Royal Bay Pool in the new “Chill Island neighborhood.” Very posh, indeed. Excludes all the waddling, land-whales of the lower decks with their slushies and burritos in-hand.
Below: the ship’s Thrill Island Waterslide neighborhood, looking a little bit like the gastro-intestinal system of someone who subjected themselves to six days of round-the-clock, all-you-can-eat buffets.
This beast sets sail in January of 2024. Ask yourself: what sort of economy supports a venture like this? And what if it isn’t there anymore when this thing is ready to launch?
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Clusterfuck Nation
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If you are shocked and bewildered that totalitarian tyranny creeps through our country without opposition, the reason is simple: there is no official opposition. The capture of government looks nearly complete by a party that lusts to punish its citizens for the pleasure of watching them suffer, while it steals everything they’ve worked for and forecloses their future. At least half the country objects to this. Where is a party that stands for them?
In the natural order of the American system, a Republican Party would have stepped up to check the wretched excesses of a Democratic Party bent on breaking everything that has allowed people to thrive in this land: property law, economic liberty, free speech, now even your physical health. This Labor Day Monday is the last moment in this epic political psychodrama that the Republican Party has an excuse to kick back and do nothing about the parade of insults flung in the nation’s face by persons who believe in nothing, and who will stop at nothing.
These insults lately include especially the perversion of law to harass and hinder political opponents, the prosecution of a foreign war by proxy in a corner of the world where America has no explicable national interest, the deliberate failure to defend the country’s borders against hordes of invaders, the rigging of elections with ballot fraud and hackable machines, the censorship of information of all kinds, and the weaponization of public health authority against the people. These are all campaigns carried out by the Democratic Party.
This fall season will be a dreadful time of testing whether the country can endure any more of this. Congress is back in session this week. Congress is the only place in the federal government where an opposition party has the authority to direct events. Mr. Comer who chairs the House Oversight Committee has assembled enough evidence of bribery and treason for Speaker Kevin McCarthy to commence an impeachment inquiry right away into the conduct of President “Joe Biden.”
I’ve used quotation marks around Mr. Biden’s name since he ascended magically to this office in 2021 because it is obvious that he is only pretending to run the executive branch, and has been since day one on January 20, 2021. His March 5, 2020, Super Tuesday victories, after a drubbing in the Iowa Caucuses (4th place) and New Hampshire primary (5th place), had an odor of supernatural contrivance. His campaign from “the basement” was a joke, and it’s still entirely possible, despite three years of massive gaslighting, that his victory in the 2020 election was a fraud.
I believe the reason “Joe Biden” was installed in the White House was to allow Barack Obama to run the executive branch and all its agencies in secret from his headquarters across town in the DC Kalorama district, and the reason he is allowed to do this is because the Democratic Party has committed so many crimes against the country that a tremendous effort had to be made to cover them up, or else scores of figures in high places could have been subject to investigation and prosecution, including Mr. Obama.
It’s also possible that an impeachment inquiry in the House will lead to evidence of Mr. Obama’s role in the Biden family’s bribery adventures abroad, including the participation in one way or another of high diplomatic officials under Mr. Obama such as US Ambassadors to Ukraine Jeffrey Pyatt and Marie Yovanovitch — as well as their nefarious roles in the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Expect former Secretary of State John Kerry to surface in that mix, too. His stepson, Christopher Heinz was in business for a time with Hunter Biden and Devon Archer during the Burisma caper.
You might hear a lot about the coming fiscal year 2024 spending crisis again starting this week. It must be resolved by the end of the month or the government supposedly runs out of money to pay for all the things that government wastes our money on, from underwriting drag-queen story hours to paying the pensions of retired Ukrainian government officials. Wouldn’t that actually be a fine opportunity for some vigorous de-funding of government activities, such as the DOJ’s special prosecutor operation, Homeland Security’s censorship office, every dollar apportioned to Ukraine, the FBI’s continuing Jan 6 witch-hunt, the Department of Health and Human Services Covid-19 hoodoo, and probably a hundred other trespasses against the public’s sense of decency and good faith?
Or else, isn’t the country ripe for a new party that actually represents the interests of the country? More than a year remains before the 2024 election — if it is even allowed to happen. We can’t go on with no party opposed to the degeneration and destruction of the thing known as the USA. Take this final day-off of the summer to think about that. And think about the emblematic frozen face of Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, a human deer-in-the-headlights waiting to collide with an implacable force. You are that force.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_385.mp3 Lucas A. Klein, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist who has been in private practice for 14 years. He has been a criminal and civil forensic psychologist, and now runs Real Clear Podcast He grew up in upstate NY not far from Jim, moved to the west coast, and now spends an inordinate amount of time trying to understand why humanity is so irrational. You can find his show here:https://www.realclearpodcast.com
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger
Direct Download: KunstlerCast 385 —America’s Thought Disorders with Clinical Psychologist Lucas Klein
*Please send questions and comments to jhkunstler@mac.com*
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“Even Americans who have no particular interest in freedom and independence in democracies worldwide, should be satisfied that we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment.” — Sen. Richard Blumenthal
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“While [AG Merrick] Garland seems incapable of imagining any crime involving the president, he has made a conclusive — if unintended — case for an impeachment inquiry.” —Jonathan Turley
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“Georgia could determine who is our next president. A TEAM of lawyers needs to watch them count every single vote. They can start in Fulton County where we are having water leaks.” — Fulton County DA Fani Willis, Nov. 4, 2020
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“Good faith people are willing to be corrected (because the Truth is important); not so the liars of course (they know they are wrong) or the ideologues. So the ideologues therefore don’t act in good faith, though they think they do.” — Truman Verdun
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“This voter is not convinced by virtues or statistics. He is convinced by dreams, visions, stories and jokes.” — Curtis Yarvin
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” It’s Not Left Vs Right Anymore, it’s Anti-Establishment Versus Pro-Establishment.” — Glenn Greenwald
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“The idea that our Justice Department can indict someone, especially the sitting president’s main political rival, over speech that’s protected by the First Amendment is simply insane … Simply put, this indictment is nothing more than a declaration of war against American voters and their constitutional right to free speech.” — Alistair Crooke
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“The West can’t do diplomacy in general, it can’t run its cities or countries except into the ground, its high-tech projects fail almost as a rule, its infrastructure is crumbling, its economies are crumbling, and all public policies seem to have a civilizational suicide as a final goal.” — Gaius Baltar
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“There is only one way to explain this shambles: Every one of these crises traces back to the Democratic Party’s obsession with taking and holding power more or less indefinitely to suit its hubristic, end-of-history “narrative” of righteous liberal triumph.” — Patrick Lawrence
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“Biden has restored the integrity of the Department of Justice” — Dan Goldman, Congressman from New York
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“…you put me right smack in the middle of the Diversion Agreement that I should have no role in… and you say Your Honor, don’t pay any attention to that provision not to prosecute?” — Federal Judge Maryellen Noreika
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“I have a dream that the people we elect to run the government will be the ones who actually run the government.” — Vivek Ramaswamy
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“If it weren’t for double standards, the Democrats would have no standards at all.” — Jeff Childers of the Coffee and Covid blog
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“All across the board, illness, disability, cancer, heart, autism, fertility…WeFkdUp !!!” —The Ethical Skeptic on Twitter
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“NATO has lost this war. Biden has lost this war. The lunatic Democrats have lost this war. The uni-party warmongers have lost this war. The EU has lost this war. Ukraine and Zelensky have lost this war.” — Kim Dotcom
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“…the Permanent State lacks the courage to take hard decisions – to say to Moscow, ‘Let us put this unfortunate episode (Ukraine) behind us. Dig out those draft treaties you wrote in December 2021, and let’s see how we can work together, to restore some functionality again to Europe’.” — Alastair Crooke
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“If cocaine is so prevalent in the West Wing that there is somehow ‘extra’ cocaine just laying around, when is the White House going to start drug testing its employees.” — Margot Cleveland
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Neocon war is unpopular, ugly, venal. Worst of all, it is unsuccessful – meaning instead of ending in triumph and celebration, it persists as a confusing, contradictory and costly problem multiplier. …Neocons are the Dylan Mulvaneys of American politics, albeit with less sincerity and self-awareness. — Karen Kwiatkowski
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“Vladimir Putin is clearly losing the War in Iraq.” — “Joe Biden,” US President
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“At exactly the point of the AFU’s weakest moment and near-collapse on the battlefield he chose to strike Russia in the back as if obviously driven by a hidden hand.”— Simplicius on Substack
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“In the wake of the Hunter Biden sweetheart plea deal, calling D.C. a swamp is an insult to swamps and frankly to all wetlands in general. We need to redefine the Clean Water Act to include all Biden adjacent areas.” — Margot Cleveland, Lawyer and legal analyst
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“Team Brandon has also made the USA utterly toxic to 80% of humanity. Sort of what they accused Trump of doing but they actually did it! LOL. They are the gift that keeps on giving.” — Jacob Dreizin
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“Modern states are powerful things, vast machines built of human components that act according to their own logic and towards their own ends.” — Eugypius on Substack
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“You give me a piece of ground and a sword and I am going to take back this country with your help and the help of all the homeless Democrats and Republicans who are Americans first.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
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“Whenever Biden says ‘I’m not joking,’ he’s lying. Whenever he says, ‘I’m joking,’ he’s telling the truth.” — Margot Cleveland
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Clusterfuck Nation
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What’s next? You must be wondering because the psychopathic regime running our national affairs seems to be fresh out of trips to lay on us. One thing for sure, as the sweet zephyrs of springtime merge into the punishing infernos of summer, is that the collapse of the USA continues apace. You can debate whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, but above all it is the thing.
Have you forgotten our Ukraine project (Let’s you and him fight)? The idea was to bleed Russia dry because, you know… Russia! (They meddle in our elections… they collude with Trump… they tamper with our hopes and dreams….) It was years in the making, impeccably gamed-out in the State Department’s sub-basement. Secret Agent Man Hunter Biden, the then vice-president’s son, was even installed in the dark heart of Ukraine’s power center to… to do what, exactly? Never mind, because what secret agent men do is… secret!
The Ukraine bear trap was supposed to put Russia out-of-business for the foreseeable future. Didn’t work out. The crowning act of boobery was our demolition of the Nord Stream natgas pipelines, which had the predictable effect of putting our NATO allies out-of-business, while Russia turned around and found other customers for its gas. The sound of teeth gnashing down in Foggy Bottom might have kept “Joe Biden” up at night — except he was a hundred miles away on the beach in Delaware, medicated unto dreamland where it’s always 1964 and you’re tooling among the saguaros in your beloved Corvette, getting your kicks on Route 66.
So, let’s face it: Ukraine flopped. The main result of the Ukraine project is that it destroyed the tiny shred of what was left of America’s reputation for acting the global hegemon. In fact, Ukraine revealed that Russia has better weapons than we have (China, too) and that, given the emergence of hypersonic missiles, our gazillion-dollar aircraft carrier fleets are as obsolete as Roman triremes and liburnae. So, what’s our Plan B for defending Taiwan? (Hint: there is none.)
What’s next? Western Europe, facing its own collapse, will turn on America and refuse to continue pretending it can help out in Ukraine. NATO falls apart. (What to do with those vacant office buildings and idle employees?) Europe will have enough problems with its cratering industries and banking system. It may even be obvious to a few heads-of-state that the best outcome is to simply allow Russia to pacify and demilitarize the age-old borderland. After all, for the rolling decades since World War Two, Ukraine was not a problem for anyone until America made it one.
There will be no face-saving for the “Joe Biden” regime, either, which is reaching its own collapse phase. Last week’s face-plant at the Air Force Academy was the harbinger of things-to-come. Today (Monday), FBI officials must walk over to the House oversight Committee an internal FD-1023 document revealed by a whistleblower to contain allegations of a Biden family $5-million bribery scheme with foreign actors. Of course, the substance of this criminal mischief is not news. What’s news is that the allegations contained in the doc come from a “trusted” confidential human source, meaning that, according to the FBI’s own rules, the allegation should have been dealt with expeditiously. Instead, the Bureau sat on it for three years. The FD-1023 doc is dated 2020, months before that year’s presidential election. The source is also alleged to be from Ukraine.
Will committee members be allowed to photo-copy the doc, or transcribe what’s in it? Wouldn’t it be amusing if Committee Chairman James Comer personally walks it over to the Xerox machine? What would the FBI officials do? Body check him? What if it turns out that the doc is full of redactions — blacked out. Like a big, fat practical joke from FBI Director Christopher Wray. (They’ve done it before.) Remember, Mr. Wray is already under threat of a contempt citation for stalling on this matter. But he’s obviously caught between that old rock and a hard place, since the doc appears to prove that, at least, the FBI has obstructed justice, and of the worst sort, a potential case of presidential treason. Mr. Wray may even be colored as an accomplice in it.
Or maybe it will all amount to nothing because all bad deeds go unpunished in the degenerate era that precedes collapse. Even so, it seems the regime is running out of insults to launch against the people who consent to be governed by it. The national transexual struggle-session draws to a close with SecDef Lloyd Austin canceling the upcoming drag shows on our military bases. What else have they got? Slavery reparations? Rep Cori Bush (D-MO) has introduced a bill to pay $14-Trillion to the descendants of slaves. I’m sure that’ll work, both as a unifying action to bring together the quarrelsome diverse peoples of our land, and as a purely fiscal measure.
The fate of the financial system will probably shove all of that aside, anyway. Everybody with more than half a brain is waiting for it to crack up, meaning a generalized vanishing of American wealth as expressed in cratering markets, failing banks, and a broken currency, in some vicious combo. Nothing else, it seems, can quite get the people’s attention.
Please contribute to Kathie Breault’s legal defense fund.
GiveSendGo
In April, 2023, Certified Nurse Midwife (CNM) Kathie Breault was indicted in the Eastern States District Federal Court for “Conspiracy to Defraud the United States” for giving vaccination cards to people who did not receive Covid-19 vaccinations. Her defense is that the vaccinations were ineffective and harmful, and to administer them would violate the Hippocratic oath of health professionals (First do no harm). Her legal battle against a dishonest and vindictive federal government will require lawyer’s fees that exceed her ability to pay — a reminder that “the process is the punishment.”
Kathie has also been accused of “professional misconduct” by the New York State Licensing Board for prescribing Ivermectin via telehealth visits in July 2021. Many other medical practitioners across the United States have been similarly persecuted and some have lost their licenses to practice. Kathie has been under investigation by New York’s Office of Professional Discipline since March 2022. No decision has been reached as of May 2023.
Please contribute to Katie Breault’s legal defense fund.
GiveSendGo
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“I’m sick and tired of hearing Democrats whining about Joe Biden’s age. The man knows how to govern. Just shut up and vote to save Democracy.” — Rob Reiner, Hollywood savant
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Clusterfuck Nation
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An anxious silence falls over the land this Memorial Day as we discern increasingly that those we put in charge of this shape-shifting thing called the public interest are running out of trips to lay on the people. Something grotesque is revealing itself: a bankruptcy not just of money but of national purpose, meaning, and legitimacy. You realize this day, with a breaking heart, that your country has been stolen by psychopaths.
Brace for impact. We’re already off the road and now it’s only a matter of how this vehicle comes to a stop in the ditch. Then, it’s a question of how each of us emerges from the smoldering wreckage. The main thing, though, is clear to everyone: What we were riding in is no more. We’re out there stumbling around in the dark, in shock, trying desperately to assess our whereabouts and what has happened to us.
Now, the trouble with being ruled by psychopaths is that they don’t care about other people. They are actually incapable of imagining the lives of others, especially the fact that these others care about each other, and what happens to them. You may have noticed, for instance, that the psychopath Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) went to Ukraine last week and declared, “Russians are dying. We have never spent money so well.” Only a couple of months ago, he called for the assassination of Vladimir Putin. He stopped short of dissing Mr. Putin’s mother.
Ukraine, of course, is a lost cause, and it was never a good cause in the first place. Contrary to Lindsay Graham’s untoward utterance, American money has killed far more Ukrainians than Russians. He overlooked that because he doesn’t care about the Ukrainians, for whose sake our “folks” in charge supposedly undertook this clusterfuck. Lindsay Graham also may not have noticed that our country is collapsing and Russia is not. That’s must be because Lindsay Graham does not care about Americans, either.
As for our money, it looks like most of the rest of the world — the nations that still produce things of value — are so turned-off by American pathocracy that they are seeking every way possible to stop using our money in international trade settlements. That money, our dollar, became the world’s reserve currency because our country ended up on top in the previous world war and for the better part of a century afterward dominated the planet militarily. Naturally, as our leadership turned more pathological and pathocratic, so did our military endeavors — until lately they amount to little more than just smashing up other countries to show we can do it.
These other countries must wonder which is the next place that America will try to smash up? Two of these other countries, Russia and China, are coming around to the realization that they are possibly better equipped to do the smashing than America is. There is no indication that our pathocracy recognizes that the next smash-up may be World War Three, and that we may not emerge from it victorious.
Hence, our anxiety this Memorial Day as we reflect on America’s military exploits generally, and must perforce contemplate our less-than-glorious prospects ahead. How will our pathocrat neo-con strategists greet the debacle of our failure in Ukraine? Will they dream up yet another misadventure as reckless and absurd? You have good reason to be concerned.
Pathocracy always marches toward totalitarianism because pathocrats can’t imagine a management of public affairs by a people who care about each other (and their country). Therefore, everyone must be subject to incessant coercion and punishment, especially for their thoughts (and especially for thoughts of opposition to pathocracy). However, there are certainly more people who care about each other than there are psychopaths in America. I’m not a big fan of quantification but, for the record, psychiatric meta-analysis estimates that 1.2 to 4.5 percent of the population displays psychopathic personality disorders.
How that tiny fraction of the citizenry came to take charge of our affairs is surely the big mystery of the moment. My guess is that under conditions of economic-social-and-political collapse, the people who care about each other become preoccupied with their mutual caretaking duties while the psychopaths, unburdened by such cares, can go about other business — such as plunder, murder, and the sowing of chaos.
Sometimes in history, the pathocrats are simply overthrown by the majority of humans with functioning emotional equipment. It’s not easy, though, because in most other places around the world, the pathocracy become the sole owners of the guns and have armies and police at their disposal to put down revolts. That’s not quite exactly the case here in the USA with our Second Amendment to the Constitution. The putative president, “Joe Biden,” cracked some time ago that anyone seeking to oppose him better bring some F-15 fighter planes to get the job done. As the good book says: Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
This Memorial Day is the pregnant moment before history gives birth to new and astounding events. Everyone senses it. The rough beasts are out there slouching across the fruited plain. Attend to your duties courageously, as those before us did, who we remember today.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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I’m sure you’re asking yourself: what’s up with the company CEOs like Anheuser-Busch’s Brendan Whitworth, Target’s Brian Cornell, and North Face’s Todd Spaletto? Did they green-light the disastrous transgender-activist Pride Month marketing campaigns that are suddenly wrecking their businesses? Or do these things just happen down the chain-of-command while the top dogs are otherwise occupied, knocking golf balls around or reviewing their stock options’ strike prices?
I’ll tell you what you’re not seeing and hearing: the red-faced shrieking in the board rooms as boycotts kill sales and directors face the wrath of the share-holders. Are the capital market overseers, Vanguard and BlackRock, stifling the commotion as they carry out a controlled demolition op to cover-up the misdeeds of a political cabal? It was one thing when Bud Light hitched trans “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney to the beer wagon in place of the traditional Clydesdale horses. After all, every state has a drinking age, though it’s pretty astounding that anyone at Anheuser-Busch thought “Ms.” Mulvaney’s cringy Instagram antics would sell beer to grown men moving appliances and fixing pot-holes.
It’s another thing, in the case of Target, to aim sexually-loaded gear to little children, for instance a line of T-shirts that proclaim “Satan Respects Pronouns” made by one Erik Carnell’s Abprallen company out of London. “Mr.” Carnell expounded on that idea on his company’s website (now taken down):
Satanists don’t actually believe in Satan, he is merely used as a symbol of passion, pride, and liberty. He means to you what you need him to mean. So, for me, Satan is hope, compassion, equality, and love. So, naturally, Satan respects pronouns. He loves all LGBT+ people. I went with a variation of Baphomet for this design, a deity who themself is a mixture of genders, beings, ideas, and existences.”
Baphomet, the goat-headed demon associated with Satanism and the occult
Would it surprise you to learn that children well beneath the age of puberty are not inclined to think about sex at all? In a well-ordered society that recognizes children as different from adults, they don’t. And if something sexual comes to their attention, they are generally perplexed by it. Unless they’re born into an era when adults are busy erasing boundaries, guard-rails, and cultural inhibitions, in which case I must imagine that young children exposed to, say, pornography in a chaotic household find it traumatically sinister. So, why the gleeful celebration about sexualizing children now?
I’ll tell you why: because we are living in a very badly-ordered society these days, a society in which anything goes and nothing matters, which is a poor principle for civilization. It’s the same principle that has people shitting all over the sidewalks of San Francisco, looting Walgreens stores in broad daylight, pushing ineffective and unsafe vaccines (and lying about it), and arresting people for thought crimes. It’s a degenerate society. Morally bankrupt. Wicked.
You might ask, how did it get that way? The concise answer is that a broken business model for daily life and a collapsing economy have so disordered millions of minds that values are seen as having no value. The scaffold for truth, beauty, honor, dignity, courage, prudence generosity, etc., folded some time ago, in slow-motion, so we didn’t notice.
The keepers of our culture have replaced it with a tacky system of ritual virtue-signaling fakery that they don’t really believe in, that persists simply because the moral vacuum it stands for provokes such unbearable anxiety. The main lesson of the recent Durham Report — missed by even the most punctilious observers — is that our country does not want to fix itself, indeed the whole broken apparatus of fixing it is in the hands of the people who broke it.
This epic negligence leaves the doors wide open for the broad range of lower-order criminal mischief we’re seeing expressed all around us. Now I will venture into shadowland. There is a rumor floating around the Internet that this seemingly coordinated campaign to sexualize children and initiate them into marginal behaviors was started to soften up the public for forthcoming shocking revelations contained in the much-whispered-about Jeffrey Epstein archive of videos that show eminent international figures caught in compromising sexual situations that include sexual acts with children.
I wouldn’t commit to saying there’s anything to that, but there have been an awful lot of signs and portents pointing in that direction, and so I also wouldn’t dismiss it altogether. There can be little doubt that the videos exist, or did exist — we know that Epstein’s various mansions were rigged to the eaves with cameras, and that he was an “asset” of more than one nation’s intel service trafficking in blackmail — and I’d expect that there are at least a few copies of the videos out there, just like there are many copies of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard-drive out there.
There’s something definitely programmatic about the way the drag queens were rolled out into the kiddie korners the past year. It doesn’t feel organic, shall we say, but rather directed, like a sinister grand opera. And the effort to enlist and initiate schoolchildren into a psychodrama of hyperbolic sexual confusion looks absolutely orchestrated.
What we might be seeing is the convergence of a world-beating political scandal with an economy-killing financial crisis that will destroy the entire post-WW2 armature of money and credit. That event would usher in a period of appalling turbulence in our everyday life, severing supply chains, killing businesses, and disturbing every imaginable social arrangement as well as public order. If that comes to pass, and it’s looking likely, then that will be the last we hear about personal pronouns and trans influencers for a thousand years.
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Have you noticed that the president of Ukraine (or, governor of America’s fifty-first state), Mr. Zelensky, has been globe-trotting for weeks: London, Helsinki, Paris, Hiroshima? That’s because this is one of those months when years happen; the world is changing at hyper-speed. He seems to be running scared, a little bit, trying to keep ahead of the changing game. What sounded like a great idea to a certain claque of so-called neo-cons in our country — to use Ukraine as a bear trap — has instead rather suddenly revealed Europe’s and America’s manifold bankruptcies and revolted the whole rest of the world outside of Western Civ. Oh, the wonder and nausea!
Try to imagine Mr. Zelensky’s predicament. Mighty America and redoubtable Europe conned the former comedian to thinking that if he went along with a genius scheme to ruin Russia and knock Vlad Putin off the global gameboard, his sad-sack country would be transformed into something like Ukro-Disneyworld, while he, Mr. Z, would be lionized and made rich beyond his wildest imaginings. His backup was the greatest hegemonic power the world has ever seen. The game was called Let’s You and Him Fight.
The poor schlemiel fell for it. He let NATO (that is, the USA) set-up, equip, and train the largest army in Europe, including battalions of bad-ass, hard-core Ukro-Nazis — who had previously been so useful in the American-sponsored 2014 Maidan “color revolution.” Mr. Z followed the US State Department’s orders to rain down rockets and artillery on Russian-speakers who lived in his own eastern provinces. He formally applied for membership in the NATO club. His country received billions of US dollars without audit oversight, just screaming to be creamed off by Ukraine’s leadership — who, after all, deserved a little something for all these goings-along. What could go wrong?
Thus, Western Civ kicked off Europe’s biggest hot war since the 1940s. So, in February, 2022, Mr. Putin had enough of the monkey business on his “front porch” and sent in a clean-up crew. Game on! The US neo-cons were ready to feed countless Ukrainian troops into a meat grinder that would, theoretically, exhaust the will and resources of the execrable bear and yield countless benefits reinforcing our dominant position in the world. Our hapless NATO “partners” went along with the program, despite being asked to commit economic suicide for the greater good of the alliance (or something like that). Anyway, they didn’t need that filthy Russian nat-gas. They were going “green” (Klaus Schwab said so, didn’t he?)
Meanwhile, the citizens of our country were groomed to perfection by the US Propaganda-Industrial Complex screaming “Russia, Russia, Russia,” at the behest of opinion-leader Hillary Clinton, a wannabe president. The news media demanded crucifixion for her opponent, Mr. Trump, who had idly tossed out the heinous idea that the USA and Russia could cultivate a friendly relationship, seeing as how the bear was no longer flying the red flag. Aye-yi-yi!!! He actually said that!?! The clueless orange boob!
Well, the folks running things in America — that is, the scores of unelected bureaucratic satraps guarding their nests throughhout the Okefenokee inside-the-Beltway, especially the gator-pit known politely as the Intel Community — decided to subject Mr. Trump to a one-man version of the exquisite torment intended for Russia, Russia, Russia: pain, ignominy, and ruin. They’re still at it six years later, since the relentless Mr. Trump will not give up his crusade to take back the White House and defenestrate all those attempting to defenestrate him. His enemies have captured all the levers of legal power, and yet, amazingly, they can come up with nothing but the most rinky-dink charges to railroad him in captured jurisdictions.
This internal political conflict in the USA has driven the populace plumb insane, while it has rendered our institutions rancid and left us subject to a pathocracy hiding behind a laughably fake chief executive. After a year-plus of America’s genius scheme to maintain world dominance, Russia is doing really well, thank you, in constructing a geo-economic framework for trade that will not be subject to the pranks of USA-led Western Civ. Russia is a nation of people who regard themselves as men and women, the toils of gender confusion happily absent. Ditto race hustles. Ditto banking Ponzis.
After two-plus years of “Joe Biden” — well, our country is bypassing the banana republic stage of dissolution and depravity and steaming quickly into a Hieronymus Bosch dystopia of financial, social, psychological and moral ruin. Every official utterance is a lie. Everything’s broken or breaking. And seemingly, on-purpose. The nagging question, of course, is on whose purposes?
And why is Mr. Zelensky flitting from one country to another the past month? Because the game of Let’s You and Him Fight is drawing to a close and Mr. Z may find himself fatally unpopular back on the home-front. He has managed to send upward of a hundred-thousand young Ukrainian men to their deaths in the meat-grinder, and perhaps a million more have hightailed it for other countries. Ukraine will now be a land of mostly women, children, and old folks — with just enough surviving soldiers left looking to hunt down the comedian who turned Ukraine into another one of history’s sick jokes.
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Historians of the future, boiling up a nice spring bouillabaisse of nettles, cattail tubers, and frogs over their campfires, will pore over John Durham’s mystifying RussiaGate report for clues as to what begat the smoldering wreck of the legal system that once girded all the rough-and-ready ways of the old America, turning us into a land of simpering zombies. There was, apparently, a strange, Satanic cult called the FBI that cast a spell over the land, giving license to wickedness and depravity that transformed a once-upright folk into liars, until nobody knew what was the right way to do anything anymore….
Of course, we do not live in the future, only on the thrilling edge of it, and it is still possible to see through the fog of mystification creeping over our lives. Though one Rachel Maddow yet raves on, and the FBI still sends SWAT teams hither and yon to cow the righteous, and an evil mummy resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, our country knows the score. It was hoaxed, played, bamboozled. A trip was laid on us. The law was turned against the people by the very officers of the courts: the lawyers. Shakespeare had the right idea — and forgive me for not spelling it out (but consult Henry VI, Part II Act IV Scene II at your leisure).
Yes, John Durham’s report was a disappointment, but isn’t it obvious that he was already done-in by the bootless prosecutions last year of Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko in the gangrenous DC district federal court, which sent the message: Hey, why bother, pal? Any additional cases against the likes of James Comey, Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, and the rest of the gang would have resulted in the greatest exhibition of memory-loss ever seen in the annals of jurisprudence. And, as to expecting the government to produce documents in evidence… well, who amongst us can hold his breath for, say, seventy-five years?
It is impossible for now to know the constraints placed on Mr. Durham by Attorney General Merrick Garland — though it appears that Mr. Garland is just the latest initiate into the years-long shuck-and-jive that amounts to a seditious conspiracy against the republic. That is, add Mr. Garland to the long list of officials who have a lot at risk and a lot to hide, so he’s used his vested powers to hamstring Mr. Durham. But the heart of the story is out, despite all that, and pretty baldly stated: Hillary Clinton started the whole RussiaGate gag to take the heat off her own turpitudes. The federal agency heads and their lieutenants avidly used Hillary’s concocted falsehoods to foment malicious prosecutions and drive the naively accommodating President Trump out of office, and stopped at nothing until they succeeded.
There it is. We will now have to muddle through and go forward, a savagely deformed polity. Still, it will be edifying to see Mr. Durham testify before The House Judiciary Committee next week, as Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has requested. Mr. Durham may even wish to use the opportunity to redeem his tarnished reputation. Some items for review: Why did Mr. Durham omit to investigate the deceitful Mueller team (especially its actual director, Andrew Weissmann), which was an obvious cover-up operation? Ditto: the role played by President Barack Obama in the scheme to interfere in the 2016 election? Ditto: the operation to hide and then discredit Hunter Biden’s crime-stuffed laptop during the 2020 presidential election? Ditto: what has been the CIA’s role in all of this? I believe Mr. Durham will provide many interesting answers to these queries. It may be the only forum that will ever avail him to speak honestly.
Presumably the House Judiciary Committee members are lawyers, and have a host of aide lawyers to fall back on for legal advice. Can someone please ask Mr. Durham why he did not bring a charge of conspiracy to commit sedition under the RICO act against the whole gang of RussiaGate players based on the “enterprise rationale” that the evidence suggests they were all vested in an effort to defenestrate a sitting president?
We will go forward from this whether we like it or not, of course, because the arrow of time flies only in that direction. What is the best way out of this wilderness of dishonor and disgrace? Take a lesson from the campaign, so far, of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The way Mr. Kennedy has been straight-talking — around the coordinated slanders and scurrilities of an ignoble news media — he makes the current leadership of the Democratic Party look like the most pathetic claque of rascally whack-jobs ever assembled under a gonfalon. Keep your eye on RFK, Jr. He’s moving downfield, even without blocking.
Side-note or post-script, for those interested in how the vaccination story is going: A close friend went into the CVS pharmacy looking for a “get well soon” card. There were none. A clerk on-hand right there in the aisle said, “we can’t keep them in stock.” No “sympathy” cards either. Draw your conclusions.
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This is the dirty secret of our time: the device that the Woke / Progressive elite used to finally get rid of Donald Trump — Covid-19 — shoved them over a cliff Wile E. Coyote style. And now, as they freefall off that cliff, the supposed antidote to Covid-19 — getting vaccinated — is blowing up in their faces, again, Wile E. Coyote style. The elite now have to wake up every day and wonder if the vaccines they rushed to get will end up killing them prematurely. This is what has finally driven them crazy. And, of course, crazy people will do crazy things: like destroy their own country.
I decided early-on to not get vaccinated for a simple reason: as the vaxx program got up to speed in the late winter and spring of 2021, reports came out that the spike protein in it attacked the endothelial lining of the blood vessels and led to unusual blood-clotting. As someone who had bypass surgery some years earlier, that was all I needed to hear. This was before any Censorship Industrial Complex formed to attack “misinformation.” The news was still getting out.
By then, Mr. Trump was out, too, deposed in a janky election rigged with Covid-19 ballot “innovations” that made fraud easy. He was replaced by a fake chief executive too impotent to even campaign, but useful as a front for the gigantic “security” bureaucracy that was actually running things. This naturally raises the question: what exactly is the relationship between the political elite and this security state?
The elite are the useful idiots of the security state. They enable it and protect it with their divisive antics. The dirty secret of the security state is that it’s not about the security of the state, that is, of the nation known as the USA. It’s about the security of the people running the security state, the agency heads and their officers in the Intel Community and all its spinoffs, the State Department, the Justice Department, and the Defense Department and their accomplices in Congress and the federal judiciary.
What does this security state need protection from? From accounting for all its prior cumulative crimes against the nation. These crimes slowly accreted over the decades after the Cold War and then blossomed in 2016 — slowly, and then all at once — when the security state was rocked by the election loss of its avatar, Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton had many crimes of her own to conceal, most of them committed with the help of the security state, such as the Uranium One grift, the Skolkovo transfer of US computer tech to Russia, and the Clinton Foundation’s financial escapades following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, to name a few biggies.
The person who beat Mrs. Clinton had averred publicly and shockingly to her crimes during the campaign, going so far as to label her “Crooked Hillary.” That is why the Russia Collusion hoax became the centerpiece of security state harassment during Mr. Trump’s term in office. The Democratic Party was enlisted as the praetorian guard for the security state. The public had to be conditioned to believe any number of things that were the opposite of true.
Like myriad institutions in recent decades, the Democratic Party had come to be dominated by women. Women, being hard-wired for safety-seeking, were easily manipulated by the security state into an hysteria fixated on Donald Trump, who was made to represent everything that seemed unsafe. They gave the game away on Mr. Trump’s inauguration day with their women’s march that featured thousands wearing the emblematic “pussy hats.” Message: don’t think you can have your wicked way with this!
The hysteria hasn’t let up since then, and now that Mr. Trump is resurging from a thousand attempts to kill him off like some implacable axe-murderer in a horror movie, the corps of useful idiots is showing signs of nervous exhaustion. The Democratic Party’s front-man, “Joe Biden” (or the claque behind him backstage), has screwed the pooch on just about every matter of vital public interest at home and abroad, and now this president stands revealed as the head of a racketeering operation that specialized in bribery. Yet, oddly, it is Mr. Trump who has been fed into the cogs of the judiciary on an unending set of Mickey Mouse charges. There’s a pretty fair possibility that none of that will work.
The Democrats must suspect this, and their nemesis has declared his intentions for a return to power pretty clearly: fire all the seditionists in the security state, pardon all the people on the Right who were unjustly prosecuted, and commence some righteous prosecutions against people who actually deserve it. Thus, the Left plunges ever-deeper into mental illness — celebrating it at every opportunity and even shoving it in America’s face, Joker-style, in defiance: Here, have another drag queen….
A big part of the Left’s mental illness is the inability to even notice their own self-destructive trajectory. There’s a way out for them but it’s pretty drastic. That would be turning to RFK, Jr. for leadership. Trouble is, Mr. Kennedy intends to go after the Democrats’ patron, the security state itself, which he’s publicly blamed for the deaths of his father and uncle. Bobby Kennedy also happens to be an enemy of the US public health agencies and especially a critic of the Covid-19 vaccines that the Left has hung its identity on. They still can’t admit that getting vaxxed and boosted was a tragic mistake.
But an election contest between RFK, Jr. and Donald Trump would be a most salutary exercise for our country. Both of them want to dismantle the overgrown surveillance apparatus and severely reform the agencies under the executive branch. That is, they are both intent on disarming the security state and the Censorship Industrial Complex it spawned. They are both against the stupid Neo-con wars. Trump versus RFK, Jr. would bring the people of this country together and refocus the nation’s attention on things that matter. It would also be the Baby Boomers’ last stand.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_377.mp3#377 — John Michael Greer blogs at Ecosophia, subtitle, Toward an Ecological Spirituality. JMG has been an astute observer of Western Civ’s arduous economic and cultural descent, and is the author of many books, both novels and non-fiction, including Green Wizardry, After Oil, The Wealth of Nature, and Not the Future We Ordered. Star’s Reach, is a novel set 400 years ahead in America’s neo-medieval future, The King in Orange, a meditation on the relationship between archetype psychology and the occult as acted out in politics and culture. Things are getting weird in America, wouldn’t you agree? Even a bit supernatural. To help us navigate through this wilderness of the weird, JMG and I talk about magic and the re-enchantment of daily life.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.
Direct Download: KunstlerCast 377 — John Michael Greer
*Please send questions and comments to jhkunstler@mac.com*
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Reality has become so elastic in America now that it stretches to a cosmic event horizon deep in the Twilight Zone where everything is magically transformed into its opposite. Note The New York Times report on Thursday saying that the House Oversight Committee showed “no proof” in its disclosures of the Biden Family’s international money laundering and racketeering operations.
In fact, the committee outlined a shit-ton of documentation in the form of bank records detailing exactly how gobs of money from foreign lands were washed and rinsed through a dozen shell companies and disbursed to everyone in the immediate Biden family down to the president’s grandchildren. The committee’s preliminary report was precise as to the money’s exact origins, its journey through the laundering apparatus, and the owners of the bank accounts it landed in. Thus: No evidence of wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, another whistleblower from the FBI emerged claiming that an unclassified FBI document called an FD-1023 report exists detailing the Biden Family moneygrubbing scheme. Rep James Comer (R-KY) formally requested it from FBI Director Chris Wray, who has declined to furnish it on the grounds that the doc contains info from a “confidential human source” (CHS), and the bureau can’t compromise an investigation, blah blah….
Here’s an interesting take from a reader of this blog for your consideration:
I have had a theory that the FBI made Hunter Biden a Confidential Human Source.
They can pretend that they were monitoring CCP figures in the US and that Hunter
was in a position to provide them with counter intelligence. As with Whitey Bulger,
the whole business was just a scam to keep him out of jail on legitimate charges.
This would explain why the FBI’s Wray is claiming national secrets now that Comer
is closing in on Biden family corruption and influence peddling.It would also help to explain why Hunter Biden has been untouchable despite clear evidence of firearms felonies, money laundering and influence peddling crimes. All in plain sight for years. This CHS bullshit has been used repeatedly by the FBI and DOJ to shield Democrats and their henchmen from legal jeopardy. Stefan ‘Hamburger’ Halper, Christopher Steele and various other foreign election meddlers have been shielded by the FBI under the pretense of protecting sensitive intelligence, methods and foreign sources.
Would they dare pull this one with Hunter? Why not? The DOJ and the FBI spent years sitting on his laptop stuffed with incriminating docs and videos, obviously shielding him. The people running these agencies must be liable now for a range of crimes running from obstruction of justice to interfering in a presidential election, to acting as accomplices in the Biden Family bribery crimes. Mr. Comer’s Oversight Committee has only just started. Soon, they will be hauling in witnesses, and even if the cable news networks and the big newspapers don’t report about them, there are too many alt-news outlets that can only be stifled by a Carrington Event.
Does the Party of Chaos actually suppose they can keep pretending “Joe Biden” will run for a second term? Articles of impeachment await for bribery, at least, and perhaps treason. At this point, the case couldn’t be more clear-cut. The House is solely in-charge of the impeachment process. The hearings will be brutal. A bill of impeachment would then go to the Senate for trial, as we’ve seen twice before recently. Do you think the mainstream media can avoid covering that?
You must conclude that there is no way that “Joe Biden” will run for president again. He may resign rather than face impeachment. And then what? I’ll tell you what: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. starts making-over the Democratic Party the way that Donald Trump transformed the Republican Party in 2016. Bobby Kennedy has the tremendous advantage of standing completely outside the matrix of corruption, lying, and Woke mental illness that the Dems have made of themselves, and the voters are going to notice, even if The New York Times doesn’t.
The people of this land are also going to notice how much damage “Joe Biden” and those running this fake president have done to our country. A federal judge in Florida temporarily stayed the lifting of Title 42 — the rule put in during the Covid-19 emergency that allowed border officials to turn away migrants on the grounds of preventing the spread of the virus. (Of course, they should be turned away for entering the US illegally, in the first place.) Do you think those tens of thousands waiting now on the Mexican side care about the legal niceties of all that? Watch them bum-rush the border starting today and keep coming for weeks on end, whatever our government says it’s doing.
Beyond that “Joe Biden” induced fiasco loom the ongoing banking collapse, the cratering on-the-ground economy, the humiliation of the failing Ukraine project, and the exposure of the vast harms done by the Covid vaccine crusade.
The post The Smell of Goose Cooking appeared first on Kunstler.
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Now that the charm has worn off the transsexual craze — the idea that a person’s emotional distress can be cured by identifying as the opposite sex — we await the next ploy out of the Woke Transhumanist game-plan to destabilize the human project on earth. People-of-color, brown, indigenous, Pacific Islander, gay, lesbian, plus-size, differently-abled, all women (of course), have taken their turn in the batting order of intersectional oppressed minority groups, and each has walked off with a participation trophy. Who’s left now?
The dead! Their needs have not received sufficient attention. Inclusion has not come to them… yet. They are systematically kept out of all current activities and ceremonies. They are segregated in ghettos of grass and granite. The legal system stigmatizes them. Numerically, through human history, they are by far the largest demographic. Yet, they are routinely ignored, overlooked, disrespected. If anyone deserves to be Woked-up from the sleep of oppression, it’s them.
Don’t despair, a great grooming is underway. The next new thing will be for most of us to transition into the dead. Do you think it’s an accident that Hollywood has churned out zombie movies by morgue-full in recent years? Obviously, more and more Americans have come to identify as the walking dead. (And, judging by the behavior in our land, a lot of people’s brains have been eaten.) Even our businesses and banks have a walking dead kind of look to them.
Our project in Ukraine has been a tremendous grooming aid in preparing people to become dead. But that experiment is nearly complete now. Hence, we must seek a much bigger global project for transitioning humanity into the satisfactions of being dead. A war with China would be the ideal grooming opportunity. They outnumber us about ten to one. They’ve developed hypersonic missiles that can deliver nuclear payloads anywhere in our country, with the potential of transitioning millions of Americans at a time. And when they’re done with that, they can send an army over here to work the luckless survivors to death out in the soybean fields and the corn rows.
Perhaps in anticipation of this, America elected (so they say) a president in mid-transition to being dead. “Joe Biden” is celebrated for staying mostly out-of-sight, underground, for speaking a dead language that resembles 20th century American vernacular English, for lurching one way and another, zombie-like, on his way off-stage in fleeting public appearances, and for taking large sums of money from Chinese officials who support America’s transitioning program. Best of all, the president personally empathizes and identifies with the dead, encourages more Americans to become dead, offers cash incentives to hospitals that expedite death, and makes pharmaceuticals available — both legal and illegal — for inducing efficient transitions to the bliss of non-being.
In fact, there seems to be a rush now to transition, with the pace being set by professional athletes in their twenties and thirties who keel over in mid-play on the football pitches, by movie actors who undergo conversion as the cameras roll, TV news-readers who drop away from the mic with eyes rolling down like window shades in full view of multitudes, and other celebrities who surprise their loved ones by simply waking up dead in the morning. These are the edgy avatars of the next big thing. So hallowed are their transitions from living to dead, that the process is spoken of only in whispers, as in a church or a sepulcher. Doctors who come upon the scene are mesmerized to the point of silence, too much in awe to speak of what brought on the fateful transition — certainly nothing they did.
As the people go, so goes the nation. The USA is transitioning from a dynamic system of economic liberty, endeavor, and law to an entropic dystopia of chaos, corruption, and inertia. As suits a country of the walking dead, nothing works: telephone calls go dead, the bank won’t give you any money, your duties on-the-job have been eliminated, your food store has closed down, there are no parts available for your broken things, your flights are cancelled, your Facebook archive has been erased, your opinion is not wanted, your vote is meaningless, your children no longer need your permission to do anything, and, final insult, a martini now costs fifteen dollars.
Death is everywhere in America now, hovering over everything we do. Don’t fight it — celebrate it! Foster it wherever you go, among all you consort with! Welcome it as you slough off all the annoyances of being here and rise to your blessed platform in the perfect gnostic Elysium promised by the theurgists of Wokery. Become the dead you long to be!
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Behold, the new Richard Gilder Center for Science — an addition to New York’s American Museum of Natural History, designed by Jeanne Gang, the most-published architect on The Eyesore of the Month!
Here’s what you get when you ask computer aided design (CAD) to give you a “bat cave.” CAD is universal now in the architecture biz. This technology has aggravated the feedback loop between the human tendency to seek novelty and the bizarre-ness of every new building produced in our culture. Even before CAD arrived on the scene, novelty-seeking drove post-World War Two building design. That itself derived from the accelerated sense of “progress” induced by our turbo-charged cheap oil economy, which brought on dizzying technological innovation, another feedback loop. The net result was the buildings that represented human endeavor — especially, public buildings, museums, courthouses, libraries — had to look like nothing ever seen before. This programming also served to demolish people’s sense of history, of which the thinking classes were increasingly ashamed, especially after the fiasco of two world wars and Auschwitz.
What was wrong with this grand cavalcade of novelty-seeking, you might ask? It was creative… innovative… diverse! Well, yes. But it also tended to ignore the archetypal symbolic language that buildings need to project in order to inform people what each building means and what its role is in human endeavor. You could no longer distinguish a school from an insecticide factory. It also obliterated the anthropomorphic element in architecture that fitted buildings into a design ethos that reflected human form, in particular the “tripartite” configuration of top, middle, base (head, trunk, feet) which is the basis of many so-called classicisms.
Yet another consequence of perpetual novelty-seeking for the sake of “progress” is that buildings no longer relate to the other buildings around them. Each is a one-off, and so there is no continuity or unity in the urban pattern. The result is an unfortunate urban cacophony which only ends up expressing the disordered condition of our society.
Now you know.
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The creatures of the underworld running our country must think the public is awfully stupid. You are expected to take at face value the claim that “Joe Biden” is actually up for re-election. Could it be more obvious that he’s pretending? (Just as he’s been pretending to serve as CEO of our government.) Meanwhile, we are not supposed to notice that the entities behind him are scrambling to dismantle, demolish, and asset-strip what remains of the USA in body and spirit. But enough of us are noticing to make it a problem for them.
First, who are these entities? They are exactly who you think they are. What you see around you is not just a complex system (Western Civ) unwinding and breaking apart — though that is part of the story. It is also the appearance of a controlled demolition by desperate, frightened, and crazy people who want to be the ones left standing when the demolition is complete. The catch is, they are pretending, too. They are control-freaks who cannot keep things under control.
This power underworld is a coalition of large public and private organizations, here and out there in the world, and the folks in charge of them, and they are all out of control, too, pretending that their operations are coherent and efficacious. For instance, the vast consortium of intelligence agencies in our country, the CIA, DIA, ad nauseam, their multitudinous spin-offs, and their international partners (e.g., MI6, Mossad, the World Health Organization). If you want to see how they actually work, watch the Coen Brothers’ movie Burn After Reading. You will see a bustle of perfectly hapless, frantic, and insanely self-destructive activity performed by clueless clowns in nice business suits.
There is also the matrix of banking, including the international regulatory agencies such as the IMF, the World Bank, the Fed, the European Central Bank, and the banks themselves. And the bankers — Powell, LeGarde, Dimon, et. al — and the money managers, Fink, Soros, and their nefarious activities. They are all pretending to be in charge of a money system so burdened with fakery and legerdemain that it’s in the process of flying up the cosmic wazoo and vanishing, leaving Western Civ, functionally, broke.
My guess is that the nominal leader of this underworld in the USA — more like a master-of-ceremonies than an actual director — is Barack Obama. He has been running “Joe Biden” since the 2020 coup against Mr. Trump. The Clintons wanted to be in the mix somewhere, but it appears they’ve lost the fight for dominance — what with Bill in a perpetual doghouse and Hillary wearing that “loser” sign plastered on her back. For now, “Joe B” is a place-holder for the Party of Chaos. Who else have they got? Gavin Newsom? I’m sure. Hair and teeth only get you so far. Just wait until they roll the footage of San Francisco. Kamala Harris? Discussion unnecessary. Elizabeth Warren? (Grandma Oatmeal, we call her.) A bunch of governors no one has ever heard of? For now, they’ll just try ignoring RFK, Jr., since he wants to turn the Democratic Party upside-down and inside-out while rinsing it with Draino.
Who will they slot in when “Joe B” gets the hook? Michelle Obama, of course. Seems ridiculous, I know. (Actually, it’s completely ridiculous.) But our country has become so marinated in recycled products, celebrities, and narratives that Mr. Barack Obama (and cohorts) might just be bold enough to try it. Michelle is just another product at this point, like a can of Bud Lite, or a Hostess Ho-Ho, and that’s how they will try to sell her. The public’s collective mind has been successfully disordered to the degree that unreality no longer registers. If they pull this off, it will be Mr. Obama’s fourth term — and the coup-de-grace for the nation.
I don’t think the public will stand for it, but the condition of our country is so grave now that the actual contest underway is not between political personalities but between economic collapse and civil war. In the latter race there will be a winner and a runner up, and it looks like the economic collapse is already well advanced. Inflation is crushing the middle-class and business activity of every kind — except maybe drug trafficking — is falling into a coma.
Meanwhile, the escapades of the “Joe Biden” crime family inch towards critical mass. It’s another sign of the public’s disordered collective mind that so much evidence of grotesque criminality could already stand revealed before them without anyone in authority (hint: the heads of the DOJ and FBI) feeling the pressure of public opinion to act. Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray have foolishly made themselves accessories in all that crime by working to cover it up. Everyone knows it and that is arguably the most demoralizing of all the manifold failures ongoing. Real justice is AWOL.
You’re aware, no doubt of the situation on the Mexican border. Just days from now many tens of thousands of people from foreign lands waiting there will be ushered illegally across the Rio Grande by agents of the US State Department working with a whole bunch of NGOs and the United Nations to enable that rush to the entrance. The inflow will continue indefinitely. The operation has got the blessing of the “Joe Biden” regime, and everybody knows that, too. My guess is that’s what will set off a new civil war: when citizens of the border states eventually take up arms against this invasion, and our government tries to stop them from defending their own country.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_376.mp3Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a candidate for president running for the Democratic Party nomination. He’s a long-time environmental lawyer, author of the book The Real Anthony Fauci, which has sold over a million copies — and still hasn’t made the New York Times bestseller list for some mysterious reason. He’s the founder and chairman of the Children’s Health Defenseorganization. His father, Robert F. Kennedy, Sr,.was Attorney General of the United States and US Senator from New York, and his Uncle, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was elected president of the United States in 1960.
I recorded Bobby on his cell phone and the sound quality isn’t the greatest. He’d had a rugged week after announcing his bid to run, and we were lucky to get him on the podcast. Next time, we’ll get him on a good mic.
His campaign website is: www.kennedy24.com
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz* written and performed by Larry Unger.*
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*Please send questions and comments to jhkunstler@mac.com*
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted,an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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Historians of the future, poaching ‘possum snouts in sorrel sauce over their campfires, will trace the fall of Western Civ in the 2020s to the dissolving hallucination that was called the financial economy. It was a phantom parasitical organism that thrived on the back of a real economy based on making-and-doing things derived from the natural world, turbo-charged by fossil fuels.
The orgy of making-and-doing went on for two-hundred-plus years. Even with cyclical “recessions,” the making-and-doing always increased in the aggregate, while its products got ever more plentiful, elaborate, and complex. The phantom financial parasite clinging to its back got used to this “growth” and it, too, developed ever more ingenious ways to suck the life out of its host organism, until it became a greater entity than the host itself, breaking its back.
The whole of this chapter in the long-running human project had strange effects on human minds that had not changed much since the late days of hunting and gathering. After the first hundred years of fossil fuel plentitude, humans had a hard time telling the difference between the host and the parasite. Both of them seemed to thrive equally. The real economy produced food and useful things and the financial economy produced money, which could buy food and useful things.
People made things incessantly, especially better and better tools and engines. That allowed people to grow more food and make more useful things that provided comfort and convenience. The financial economy made more and more money. It also produced myriad new ways for money to represent itself. At first, these things such as stocks and bonds (ownerships and loans-at-interest) were firmly attached to activities in the real economy — that is, they were sucked directly out of the host’s makings-and-doings.
Later on, the things which represented money became more numerous and more detached from real makings-and-doings, more abstract, more based on promises, hopes, and wishes than on things derived from nature. That is to say, these newer representations of money tended ever more to a realm of the unreal. After a while, it became very hard to tell the difference between money-things that were real and unreal. The financial economy furnished plenty of mystification to blend the two. This confusion prompted plenty of fraud, a brisk commerce in unreality that produced winners and losers.
Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, of course. As the fossil fuel supply drew closer to its end and further from the long, happy middle time of plenty, the business model for making-and-doing started to shudder and crack. It didn’t fall apart all at once, but it put many makers-and-doers out of business. They stopped making-and-doing. By then, the financial economy was a colossal phantom parasite that dwarfed its host. It was burdened with so much unreality, so many workings dissociated from nature, that it could no longer pretend to be anything but a phantom.
To keep the host alive, it upchucked some of what it had sucked out of the host, adulterated with money based on unreal promises, hopes, and dreams. This turned more and more into a spewage of money so debased by broken promises, hopes, and dreams that making-and-doing just about stopped altogether. That is when the phantom parasite of finance began to dissolve and humans began to regard it as an hallucination that had gone away, dissolved into mist. What remained were a lot of humans embedded in nature.
And that is the place where the humans of Western Civ find themselves in the 2020s. Western Civ was the first region of the world that tapped into the fossil fuel orgy and it is now the first region exiting this phase of history. Even when the financial hallucination melts into air there will be a lot of real things around that were made before the great age of making-and-doing stopped.
Humans are ingenious animals, enterprising and resilient, though there will surely be fewer of us around. These fewer humans will likely be healthier, working more directly in nature and no longer compromised by the pernicious by-products of all the bygone making-and-doing. We will figure out how to use the left-over useful things to get food out of nature and keep making other useful things. The new making-and-doing will happen at nothing like the former pitch or scale. It may represent a time-out from the lost experience of the old, ever more elaborate and complex makings-and-doings. After a while, humans may discover a new way to get more out of nature. Or maybe not.
In the meantime, lodged as we are in the present, in the moment of this epochal transition, anxiety besets many millions of minds. Not a few minds have grown disordered watching all this go on around them, dreading the journey from one disposition of things to the next. Some have made themselves obnoxious. Let them do what they will until they tire themselves out. Keep your own well-ordered minds on the tasks ahead, your own makings and doings within the bounds of what is real. Take some time out to make some music. There are still plenty of good instruments around, and you can always sing. Put a meal together with your friends and loved ones and sing out. It’s all right, Ma, Bob sang out long ago, It’s life and life only.
The post Econ 101, a Fable appeared first on Kunstler.
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The weird part the news media isn’t telling you about World War Three is that America’s main enemy in this struggle is… the US Government itself! America is looking like that crazy person on the street, punching himself in the head. How else do you explain this epic act of national self-destruction?
The “Joe Biden” regime is “standing up for our democracy” by trying to silence all and any public speech about what it does in the world and how it treats its own citizens. Meanwhile, the entire scaffold of American life crumbles and you are supposed to not notice it’s happening. The funny part is that the Democratic Party thinks this is an election strategy. The funniest part of the funny part is that we bother holding elections at all.
You understand, “Joe Biden” is only pretending to run for president again, in the same way that he only pretended to be president the past two years. Are we to believe, for instance, that the old zombie has become a fervent Maoist? Or that he follows any known structured political philosophy at all, other than cashing checks that favor-seekers from all nations send his way? “Joe Biden” is pretending to run — no matter how preposterous it seems — because his handlers know that only a titanic pretense of political strength can stave off the reveal of his family’s awesome criminality and the fall of everyone hitched to that wagon.
So much for the funny stuff. Things are getting to the point where we stop laughing. It’s only a question now of how the calamity rolls out. There are so many more parts to it and they are all out-of-hand in the most disastrous way. The Ukraine project is a big part. It was prodigiously stupid to provoke a war there and the side we backed, the Nazi-ish Zelensky regime, has already lost. You just don’t know it because the American news business is a joke on the American public. It reports nothing honestly.
Ukraine is the last in a string of hapless military adventures that has exhausted America’s credibility in the world, especially as regards our military superiority. (Think: Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missile.) There will be many unexpected consequences of that failure. One will be the crack-up of NATO, which has only been a false front for American military power. Germany couldn’t fight its way out of a duffle bag with what it’s got, and it is supposedly Europe’s leading economic power. The sad truth is that it will stop being any kind of power without the cheap Russian Natgas it was running on, and later this year Germany will be in a panic to try and restore its horribly damaged trade relations with Russia to get that natgas. Since NATO’s essential mission is to oppose Russia on everything, that will be the end of NATO. Europe will return to what it has always been: a region of squabbling national interests. Let’s hope Europe does not become again the slaughterhouse it was in the last century.
The failure of the Ukraine project could easily stimulate a collapse in Europe’s banking system, which would instantly spread to America’s banking system as obligations dissolve and payments stop. The net effect of all that will be the vanishing of a whole lot of capital, including the money in bank accounts, the money invested in stocks and bonds, the money lodged in pension plans, and the money controlled by insurance companies. As I’ve mentioned before — it’s worth repeating — you can go broke two ways: you can have no money, or you can have money that’s worthless. We’ve been steadily following the latter path through the “Joe Biden” years, but we’re close to simply not having money at all. Being broke will get Americans’ attention. And the first place they’ll look is the party in power.
Multiple scandals have finally caught up to “Joe Biden” and are escaping the formidable suppression apparatus erected by the Deep State’s legal department. Attorney General Merrick Garland himself is now directly implicated in obstruction of justice by an IRS whistleblower. The allegation is that Mr. Garland interfered in the case against Hunter Biden in the Delaware US attorney’s office and lied about it to Congress. On top of that comes a new allegation, with hard documentary evidence (testimony by former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell), that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan arranged, as “Biden” campaign officials in 2020, for fifty-one intel officers, including five retired CIA directors, to sign a phony letter denouncing the Hunter laptop as a Russian disinfo project, knowing it to be untrue. A case can be made for that amounting to election interference.
All that is fairly fresh news. For many months, it’s been known that Rep. James Comer (R-KY), Chair of the House Oversight Committee, has possession of bank records that show more than a hundred instances of the decanting of millions of dollars from foreign lands into various Biden family accounts. Doesn’t look good. Looks impeachable.
On top of all that, observers are reporting that more than ten thousand illegal immigrants a day will be crossing into the USA from Mexico in the weeks ahead. Alejandro Mayorkas’s Dept. of Homeland Security and Mr. Blinken’s State Department have made arrangements with international NGOs working through the UN, to systematically conduct these immigrants across the border, furnishing them with pre-cooked phony asylum documents. This week, Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) introduced legislation to allow unrestricted immigration to any person claiming to be LBGTQ. Co-sponsors of the bill include Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. How is any of this a re-election strategy?
It’s not. If these matters are not adjudicated, it will be a civil war strategy.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_375.mp3Neil Howe is a renowned author and speaker on economic, demographic, and social change in America. He is the nation’s leading authority on social generations—who they are, what motivates them, and how they will shape America’s future. Howe is the originator of the term “Millennial Generation” and has written over a dozen books on generations and generational research, a ?eld of research he single-handedly invented. His landmark 1997 book The Fourth Turning (co-authored with the late William Strauss), has become an indispensable lens for viewing world political history. Neil’s new book, The Fourth Turning is Here, will be out this summer.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz* written and performed by Larry Unger.*
Direct Download: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_375.mp3
*Please send questions and comments to jhkunstler@mac.com*
This podcast is sponsored by Vaulted,an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. Vaulted is backed by McAlvany Financial Group, which owns ICA, one of the largest and longest continuously operating full-service gold brokerage firms in the United States.
To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
And also by:
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The post KunstlerCast 375 — Neil Howe on How’s the Fourth Turning Going So Far? appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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“If you’re going to lie,” Joseph Goebbels used to say (in German of course), “make it a whopper.” How did that work out for the Third Reich? Today, The New York Times says “Joe Biden” is revving up to run for president again in 2024. Is that so? One DNC strategist, Maria Cardona, was quoted saying, “Democrats complain that he might be too old. But then, when they’re asked, ‘Well, who?’ There is no one else.”
There you have the sucking chest wound at the center of the Democratic Party, a malodorous vacuum where, as they like to say, democracy dies in darkness. You understand, this is exactly what you get when all you do is tell lies, always and everywhere, about everything.
Now I will tell you the truth: “Joe Biden” will not be running for president ever again. “Joe Biden” will either be impeached for real high crimes and misdemeanors, or he will be bum-rushed out of the White House on some medical pretext before Independence Day. “Joe Biden’s” crimes have finally caught up with him. He sold out his country.
The facts have been out in plain sight since before a coalition of rogues and frauds stuffed him into the Oval Office, January, 2021. As vice-president under Mr. Obama, “JB” was allowed to run a global grifting operation that netted his family tens of millions. (Mr. Obama received plenty of his own sanitized grift in the form of absurdly large book deals and TV contracts, enough swag to lead the deluxe life of a senior panjandrum. His job, post-presidency, was to feed the Woke hustle with an occasional speech and otherwise shut up.)
The coalition of rogues and frauds, a.k.a. the permanent bureaucracy or the Deep State, had committed so many crimes since 2016 that its sole agenda turned to driving the one-man wrecking-crew called Donald Trump out of office and making sure he never got close to a lever of power again, by any means necessary. That is still all that animates this gang. They managed to roll enough of the American public in the process to maintain power and influence over them via control of the news, censorship, and use of their captive legal system to harass and punish their enemies. And now it’s all falling apart.
How many Americans with the capacity to pay attention actually doubted the veracity of Hunter Biden’s laptop? Very few, I’d guess, deep down, thought millions pretended it was not for-real because the contents were so obviously incriminating. So, they had to lie to themselves. But then, what’s wrong with lying to yourself when all the authority figures in your society set the example of lying to you about everything, always, and everywhere? Do you see where this habit of lying gets you?
The trouble with lying, of course, is that it requires a never-ending struggle of covering up prior lies, and then that task requires the invention of new lies, which, in-turn, induces more fabrication of lies in a self-reinforcing feedback loop subject to the implacable law of entropy (a wearing-down to zero), until you have flown up your own cloacal aperture — the place where souls go to die. And now, maybe, you see why the regime in power has made itself so deeply and heinously soulless, which is to say: evil.
By the way, this is why the “Joe Biden” regime sent out a pack of drag queens to perform for the cameras the past two years. They needed a device so insulting to the sensibilities of people equipped with a normal moral compass that it would create a distraction from much greater insults such as stealing elections and concocting a lab-engineered pandemic to deploy deadly vaccines — these matters in themselves entailing giant matrices of lies.
Even with the stolen 2022 midterm elections in Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, the Republican Party managed to squeak into a House majority, and now a non-captive faction of that party is methodically taking steps to reveal the giant scaffold of lies America has lived under for years. One rather significant event was the prank now unspooling about the fifty-one “folks” (“JB” called them) from the Intel Community who branded Hunter’s laptop a Russian disinfo operation. Those “folks” included five living former CIA directors, wouldn’t you know? It was an obvious lie at the time, but now it’s a certified lie, since one of the five, Michael Morell, spilled the beans testifying under oath to the House Judiciary Committee that he rounded up the other fifty at the direction of “Joe Biden’s” campaign advisor, Tony Blinken, now Secretary of State.
On another side of the Biden family mischief, there is the emergence of the IRS whistleblower (as yet unnamed), who complained through formal agency channels that the IRS and the DOJ were mishandling various cases emanating out of Hunter’s laptop. A “high government official” unmasked as Attorney General Garland is accused of lying to Congress. He apparently has been leaning on the US attorney in Delaware, David Weiss, to hold off prosecuting a case that Mr. Weiss’s office finished investigating a year ago.
Doesn’t look good. Also looks like Mr. Weiss probably will be forced to lodge some actual charges against the First Son, and that these will be Mickey Mouse tax evasion raps to distract from and conceal the greater issue of the Biden family conspiracy to extract large payments from foreign governments. And then there is the matter of the handgun that Hunter acquired under false pretenses of lying about being a drug user, plus disposing of the gun in a dumpster. They’ll hope that these charges might be like some raw meat thrown to the animals. As RFK, Jr. quipped recently in a separate instance of Dem Party mischief: nice try.
These various dodges to lessen the impact of Biden family criminal culpability are likely to fail. The Bidens are caught and “Joe Biden” is about to go down, one way or another. Looks to me like a lot of this adds up to impeachable offenses, which I doubt the party will allow “JB” to go through. Today’s announcement about running for president again in 2024 is just another ruse to hold-the-line, but it won’t work either. They’ve lost control of the narrative — and the action itself. Mr. Blinken and Mr. AG Garland also look like they’ll be squeezed out of power like a couple of watermelon seeds between your fingers.
What happens when “Joe Biden” creeps off into the sunset? Use your imagination about the dark place that leaves our country, and the flavor of further shenanigans ahead.
*
PS: Breaking late morning Monday: ZH reports: Tucker Carlson, the highest rated cable news host in history, is out at Fox News. The network posted this: “FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor. Mr. Carlson’s last program was Friday April 21st. Fox News Tonight will air live at 8 PM/ET starting this evening as an interim show helmed by rotating FOX News personalities until a new host is named.”
Do you wonder what kind of serious repercussions this move will provoke?
Expect Tucker to be back on another platform, soon.
The post Big Lies and Bigger Lies appeared first on Kunstler.
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Of course, Yahoo News, and all the rest of the in-the-tank news media greeted Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s presidential announcement by branding him a “noted-anti-vaxxer,” as if that’s a bad thing. Yes, noted, thank you very much. Reuters elaborated: “Kennedy has been banned from YouTube and Instagram for spreading misinformation about vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic.” By now, whenever you see the agit-prop platitude spreading misinformation, does your brain not instantly translate that into telling the truth? And by now, does banishment from social media not tell you that certain guilty parties recognize a truth-teller when they see one?
Bobby Kennedy stepped up on Wednesday and gave a long and comprehensive speech so rich with historic resonance, intelligence, and flat-out bravery — in the face of, let’s face it, a Satanic opposition — that he made every other figure in this land aspiring to high office within memory look like quality-control rejects from evolution’s Homo sapiens assembly line. For 90-minutes in a Boston ballroom, RFK, Jr. told America the truth: that its entire matrix of leadership has laid one trip after another on our country going all the way back to the murders of his father and uncle, and he did it plainly, gently, humorously at times, but with an unmistakable gravitas and decorum that must scare the beJeezus out of the low life-forms currently running things.
Most of all, Bobby demonstrated that there is a way out of the bad-faith wilderness America has been lost in for years. He spoke to the audience in the ballroom, and to the country, in an adult conversational tone, without notes, as if he expected that voters would actually understand the problems we face: the wicked partnerships of corporations and governments to swindle and gaslight the public; the reckless military adventurism-for-profit campaign that has bankrupted the USA, now culminating in the Ukraine fiasco; the botched response to the Covid-19 episode and the chicanery that induced it; the insults to our ecosystem that are destroying the other organisms who live with us on this planet; and the financial chicanery that is driving America into inflation and bankruptcy. He reminded the nation of the good-faith efforts sixty years ago to end racial injustice — which has lately turned into a series of dispiriting hustles to promote antagonism and separation.
Bobby’s entry onto the national stage is already a shock to the political system, which is why the captive news media is trying so hard to squash the news about it. They know that he brings something to this game that can trip-up the players currently on-the-field and take the contest of 2024 in a wholly different direction than the owners of the game expected. Bobby’s confident adult demeanor at the podium alone is a reassuring and sharp contrast to the spookish mental vacancy of “Joe Biden” and the egotistic childishness of Mr. Trump. Voters will not fail to notice the difference, possibly even Woke Democrats lost in vaccine raptures and other cultish transports of self-righteousness.
I think RFK, Jr. sees very clearly the historical moment he represents. He’s keenly aware of the shade thrown over this land by the murders of his father and President Kennedy, and he has said flat-out in so many words that our own CIA was behind the dastardly acts. He was in a position to know the animus between JFK and the founding director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, and the reckless blunders of the agency and its partners in the Pentagon who buffaloed President Kennedy into the Bay of Pigs farce and then tried to drag him deeper into the Vietnam quagmire. JFK resisted that, threatened to shred the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the four winds… and Allen Dulles whacked him. He got away with it the same way that today’s Intel “community” got away with RussiaGate and all their subsequent crimes. In short, Bobby Kennedy knows what it looks like when a government is at war against its own people.
Everybody I know is justifiably worried that the Intel spooks might have no qualms about whacking Bobby Jr. He is at least as dangerous to the establishment today as his father and uncle were back in their day. Thus, his bravery in stepping up now, knowing what he knows. At the least, he will drag a set of issues into the political arena that his rivals would prefer to keep out in the cold and dark. He’ll get some assistance from events themselves, which are spooling out fast now.
The Neocon’s Ukraine project had gone south. The result, which should be hugely embarrassing to our State and Defense departments, will be the paradox of Russia restoring order to a region that we wrecked on-purpose at great cost to the denizens of Ukraine — and, as Bobby pointed out, at great cost to the shattered American middle-class. America will also have to face all the criminal activities around the Covid-19 story: the machinations of Dr. Fauci and company in developing the virus and then the vaccines that proved to be so harmful and deadly; the stupid, disastrous lockdowns; and the government-directed censorship campaign against all and any voices in opposition to medical tyranny.
Most of all, the Democratic Party faces a severe reformation. It’s about to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the diabolical Woke hall-of-mirrors it gamboled into under the Clintons and Barack Obama. How those characters deal with the uncomfortable reality of RFK, Jr. will be something to behold. Finally, there is the news, straight from The New York Times, that “Joe Biden” intends to announce his reelection plans within days. The idea is preposterous, of course, the old grifter visibly oxidizing a little more each day in plain sight of the whole world.
In fact, it’s just another one of their lies, another trip they’re laying on America. The establishment Dems are actually prepping Gavin Newsom to run, another haircut-in-search-of-a-brain, like John Kerry before him. Governor Newsom: the man who almost overnight proudly turned California into a third world shithole. That’s who Bobby Kennedy will be debating, one way or another, in the many months ahead.
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You might be among those who have noticed that the people in authority in our country appear increasingly insane. It ought to be self-evident that this is deeply disturbing, but I will explain anyway to allay any residual mystification. In a sane human society, authority is granted to those who are trustworthy. People earn trust by demonstrating their allegiance to reality. Things generally work better when the people running them maintain cordial relations with reality. Now, you understand why so many things don’t work in the USA.
What more subtle minds are asking these days is: when does this insanity tip over into evil? Especially the insanity evinced in our authority figures. How about when someone positively refutes reality in the act of doing harm, for instance Rochelle Walensky, Director of the CDC. Ms. Walensky is, to this moment, still proffering mRNA Covid-19 “vaccines” for children despite the reality that reams of evidence exist showing these products to be harmful, even deadly — and, in particular, by the previously exacting standards of the CDC’s sister agency, the FDA, which hold that just a few demonstrated injuries will lead to a drug being withdrawn from medical practice. (Ms. Walensky is a medical doctor, by the way.)
Is it possible that Ms. Walensky is unacquainted with the genuine news all over the Internet about mRNA injury and death? Rate that hard-to-believe… that is, at odds with reality. If, for some reason, it escaped her attention, do you suppose that somebody among her ten-thousand-plus CDC employees might have alerted the director about all this? I would suppose so. The unappetizing conclusion is that Rochelle Walensky, in her very important role as a national public health officer, has tripped over the line from insane to evil.
As a general rule, human societies give individuals and groups permission to act in certain ways. Is it not obvious, for instance, that the deans and college presidents have issued blanket permission for students (and faculty) to mistreat invited speakers who purvey ideas contrary to the Woke campus consensus? Or that many big city mayors give permission to young people to create mayhem in the streets, steal from retail shops, and even injure or kill other people? Hence, college no longer works to expose young adults to the reality of competing ideas and the public realm in our cities is one big danger zone.
The college deans and presidents do this knowingly as do the big city mayors. When the predictable results manifest — abused speakers and urban chaos — the people in authority do nothing to discipline those who act-out, and so permission is granted to get more of that behavior. After the injuries are committed, the same authority figures offer insincere rationalizations to excuse the entire insane permission-granting dynamic, thus revealing their complicity. In short, they lie, employing complex confabulations. That seems evil.
The political Left these days is determined to promote sexual confusion as a crucial component of the common good. Politicians, agency officials, corporate executives, the chiefs of NGOs and public interest organizations all support public demonstrations of ignoble and sinister sexual acts, often involving the inversion of sexual roles between male and female. Here’s an interesting specimen posted Saturday, April 15, on Twitter.
Cmon, with a goose?! pic.twitter.com/cxue9PuaYx
— Hodgetwins (@hodgetwins) April 16, 2023
If you object to this behavior, you may be subject to extreme punishment (loss of career) for “transphobia.” The Left is taunting America with exhibitions like this (notice the child in the background at center). Is it not clear that this is some sort of insult to decency? The Left wants the non-Left to respond with acts of violence so that the Left can proceed to disarm the non-Left and prevent any opposition to the Left’s more serious plans to abolish personal liberty, such as a Central Bank Digital Currency that will monitor all your spending, punish you for your economic choices, and confiscate your earnings. The Left does these things in the name, they say, of “our democracy.” It’s a lie, of course. Democracy is the last thing they really care about. They do it in the name of pushing everybody around because all they really care about is coercion and punishment (applied with maximum sadism). Here’s one of the Left’s thought-leaders expressing this ethos the other day:
From The Guardian
Robert Reich was Labor Secretary in Bill Clinton’s cabinet. He is a much-published author, including a recent book titled (ominously) The Common Good. He’s been a professor at Brandeis and UC Berkeley. He’s an eminentissimo among the Left’s authority figures. His insistence that the non-Left seeks to bring about a tyrannical marriage of corporate-and-government interests (fascism) is contrary to the reality that this is exactly the program currently carried out by his own Democratic Party. Look no further than the Twitter files and the censorship campaign of collusion between Woked-up government agencies and Woked-up social media executives (who, by a more than 90-percent ratio contributed campaign money to the Democratic Party). Robert Reich’s party is against free speech. Democracy requires freedom of speech. That’s why Madison, Hamilton and the others put it in our constitution. Robert Reich is a liar. He is against freedom of speech.
Human religious lore has it that the figure of Satan is the Father of Lies. Satan is the personification of evil. The political Left and the vehicle it rides on, the Democratic Party, with phantom president “Joe Biden” in the driver’s seat, has become the Party of Satan. We are in the presence of evil. (Call them psychopaths, if you’re more comfortable with that.) Whether you are religious or not, it represents a force at war with reality, and it happens to be at war against the rest of us. You can’t negotiate with it. It lies always and everywhere about everything. It must be vanquished.
Democratic Party Authority Figure (Nuclear Energy)
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How long do we have to wait before Volodymyr Zelensky opens a disco in Boca Raton? That’s one of the questions raised by the secret CIA documents leaked last week, supposedly by a 21-year-old National Guard airman in Massachusetts named Jack Teixeira. Since that’s about the lowliest rank in the whole US military, you have to wonder how Jack got his mitts on all that embarrassing info, and what it says about the Pentagon’s command structure and its relations with the Intel “Community.”
I guess our cyber-security isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. But then, neither is our war effort in Ukraine. Yes, our war effort. We own this war from tail to snout, lock, stock, and barrel, the whole shootin’ match. We started it (in 2014, when we began the preps there), we goaded the Russians into it in bad faith, and now we’re losing it. Why? Because it was a stupid venture from the get-go. Now, it’s really a matter of how psychotic our government’s reaction will be when the Russians restore order to the place.
Restore order? That’s right. I believe that’s what they’re aiming to do. Our country went into Ukraine to create disorder in that corner of the world — which has been within Russia’s sphere-of-influence for over three hundred years, you understand. Sowing disorder is what we do, usually with very bloody consequences plus a bad outcome. Except for our stunning victory in the Caribbean island nation of Grenada, 1983, this has been our country’s practice in recent decades.
The mysterious “Joe Biden” regime, in its brief two-plus years of service, has proven especially adept at creating fiascos. Are they aiming for the gold ring in this Ukraine gambit, that is, nuclear war? People seriously wonder. Or is something else going on? Blogger and ex-CIA agent) Larry Johnson says the leak was done for a specific purpose, namely to shove “Joe Biden” out of the White House. Yes, our Deep State is at it again. Why, because “Joe Biden” can no longer be trusted to even pretend he’s chief executive. (Well, maybe they shouldn’t have installed him in the first place.)
Larry also reminds us that, conveniently, an Obama-era whistleblower named Mike McCormick, who accompanied Veep Joe Biden’s delegation to Ukraine in 2014, has stepped forward to detail Biden family grifting operations there, with the help of then-aide (now National Security Advisor) Jake Sullivan. It’s like somebody is laying out a case for impeachment — or resignation. One really off-the-wall theory floating “out there” has Veep Kamala Harris being induced to take Diane Feinstein’s senate seat (DF, 89, is very ill), and “Joe Biden” then appointing Barack Obama to be Veep — with BHO stepping back into the White House when “JB” exits (or gets exited). Note, the XXII Amendment only prohibits a person from being “elected” president more than twice. No mention of appointment. Now there’s a real Catch-22!
The blogger who styles himself as “Sundance” at the excellent Conservative Tree House website has another theory. He writes, The Leak Was the Op, saying its purpose was to help get the Restrict Act passed. This loathsome legislation, pimped by Senate Intel Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA), would essentially allow the government to censor everything and anything on the Internet, including blogs and comments on blogs and all websites generally — that is, the entire Alt Media. Senator Warner, you might recall (if you followed the immensely tangled story) was one of the prime movers behind the RussiaGate hoax. What a daisy he is!
Where is all this going? I will try to tell you. Since disorder is the order of the day, be aware that things will be going non-linear and chaotic. A lot of events are converging and colliding in the weeks ahead. Whatever the Mike McCormick whistleblower matter means, it’s only an additional layer to the rotten onion of Biden family corruption, the millions of dollars flowing into their bank accounts from all over the planet. This treasonous business has been right in America’s face for three years. The Hunter Biden laptop alone is crammed with hard evidence of felonies that the federal justice system has willfully managed to ignore. Rep. James Comer’s House Oversight Committee sits on a raft of Biden family bank records detailing hundreds of flagged suspicious transactions.
Impeachment hearings can commence at any time. It would only require a 51-percent majority in the House to pass any particular article of impeachment, equivalent to an indictable charge. The hearings alone may be damaging enough to force “Joe Biden’s” resignation. If any articles or charges pass, the matter moves to a trial in the Senate. We have already seen how that works in the trials of Mr. Trump. Given the Democrats’ Senate majority, it might be difficult to get a two-thirds vote for conviction on anything. But the damage is already done.
In the meantime, though, we’re likely to see the collapse of the Ukraine war effort. The recriminations from that should be huge, with calls for General Milley and SecDef Austin to step down just for starters and turmoil through the Pentagon command. Imagine also the confused rage of American voters who watched over $100-billion squandered on this stupid misadventure, including the estimated $300-million that Mr. Zelensky stuffed in his pockets.
Also, in the meantime, watch the rapidly accelerating move away from the dollar in global trade settlements as many other nations lose confidence in the floundering USA. That, of course, will affect the value of the dollar. The Federal Reserve will be helpless to manage the consequences of that, and the problem will be hugely aggravated if other nations start dumping the US Treasury bonds and bills they hold. In short, at the same time the Ukraine is lost and the “Joe Biden” regime falls apart, we get a king-hell financial crisis combined with a cratering on the-ground economy. Things stop moving, including food.
Triple-also, in the meantime, the spooky question of Covid vaccine deaths rises to the previously resistant public’s attention, and they realize that they have been poisoned by their own government, now in ominous convulsion. All of this will make starkly clear that America suffers a dangerous leadership vacuum. This is not civil war. This is something else. But what?
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_374.mp3 Dr. Michael Rectenwald is the author of twelve books, including The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda (Jan. 2023), Thought Criminal (Dec. 2020); Beyond Woke (May 2020); Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (Sept. 2019); Springtime for Snowflakes: “Social Justice” and Its Postmodern Parentage(an academic’s memoir, 2018)
A former Marxist, Professor Rectenwald is a champion of liberty and opposes all forms of totalitarianism and political authoritarianism, including socialism-communism, “social justice,” fascism, political correctness, and “woke” ideology. In 2016, he was famously subject to a Woke witch-hunt at NYU and, after a long struggle, left the University.
He writes for many journals, newspapers and websites and does guest spots on political TV shows, including Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Larry Elder.
Follow him on Twitter @GreatResetProf. And his website: Michael@MichaelRectenwald.com
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On Easter Sunday, fate put me on the Jersey Turnpike at 5:30 in the morning. I was motoring home from our nation’s capital where I traveled for the memorial service of a favorite aunt who passed away last month at ninety-five after a richly rewarding life. Her husband, my favorite uncle, enjoyed a long and colorful career in America’s Intel Community, and passed-on back in 2002. They recruited him at the founding of Spooks Inc in the late 1940s, since he came out of the army intel corps in Southeast Asia during World War Two.
In the 1950s, Uncle “B” and his family were posted to Africa, first Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. In the early 1960s, with colonialism crumbling, “B” operated all over Africa, making subtle arrangements in one new country after another for things to come out in America’s favor. For all his spookish doings, “B” was an artistically inclined soul. On one assignment to West Africa, he noticed the hotel staff were pilfering some of his belongings. He took some rocks up to his hotel and, cognizant that magic ruled in the region’s culture, painted eyes on the rocks and deployed them around the room. The pilfering stopped. “B” was famous for such insights about world’s exotic peoples. (He also played piano capably, specializing in the tunes of Gershwin and Cole Porter.)
Periodically the family sojourned in New York. With each US presidential election, the IC brought some spooks back to the homeland as the new team reassessed the global game-board. One Thanksgiving around 1961 after JFK came in, we were all gathered in the family’s rented Greenwich Village townhouse when three mysterious African gentlemen, ostensibly “from the UN,” were admitted briefly to the proceedings for a confab with “B”. I learned later that they were a delegation from Angola, where a war of independence from Portugal was catching fire. The men were in New York seeking help from our side (that is, weapons).
After that year, Uncle and the family enjoyed long deluxe postings in Rome and Paris, where “B” followed a career, he would tell me, in “public relations.” My three younger cousins were privileged with colorful childhoods overseas. After Richard Nixon came in, “B” was permanently brought home and posted to Spook Central in Washington, where he completed his career. In retirement, he turned to painting full-time and often played piano for his fellow retired spooks and diplomats at their hangout, the Cosmos Club on Mass Avenue, Washington’s Embassy Row.
My cousins, all aging baby boomers now, all turned up, of course, at Auntie’s memorial service, a warmly graceful affair, well-attended by the network of friends she maintained so late in life, and my cousin’s children with their own children, and all the flowering trees in bloom, and lovely spoken remembrances of the great lady. The crowd was very largely of the Washington insider liberal Democrat persuasion, you understand, but there was close-to-zero political chitchat in the cocktail session that followed. Back during the 2020 election, all three cousins had sent me archly opprobrious emails objecting to my support of Mr. Trump against the charming and dynamic “Joe Biden.” They were super-pissed off that their writer-cousin had turned into a right-wing extremist. But all that was put aside, possibly even forgiven, this day of sweet memoriam.
That out of the way, my more pertinent point du jour is about the journey from where I live in upstate New York to Washington DC and back. I made the trip by car because the affordable airplane routes all involved absurd hours-long connecting layovers in far-flung cities at fantastic prices, and there were no seats left on the soviet-grade Amtrak train service at any times that worked. It’s been a while since I traveled the New York to Washington corridor on-the-ground in a car, and the experience was maximally horrifying.
The various Departments of Transportation of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland are working out there at heroic scale to upgrade their stretches of the interstate highways involved. The amount of concrete, steel, and asphalt getting laid down now boggles the mind, considering the essential bankruptcy at all levels of government. But more to point, they are doing this at the very time when the age of mass-motoring is drawing to close.
Government itself is now militating against it, with its poorly thought-out crusade against the internal combustion engine and its promotion of electric cars that Americans can’t afford to buy, while the electric grid can’t possibly support all that proposed battery-charging at the mass scale. (Let’s leave aside for now whatever nefarious influence the World Economic Forum exerts on all this). In any case, the standard of living is crashing in Western Civ now. Incomes are down, or lost altogether, inflation is up, and with it the price of cars. The car industry has reached its limit for trick loan schemes that enable the tapped-out middle-class to regularly replace their vehicles. Not to put too fine a point on it, the system is fucked.
And yet, here we are, building ever more motoring infrastructure as if none of this is happening. The reason, naturally, is that immense bureaucracies like the DOTs have minds of their own. They are not responding to conditions as they are; they are carrying out plans that were made years ago when conditions and assumptions were different. Those plans have implacable momentum. You can see how all this is going to end badly.
Now, I planned my return trip with a layover night outside Philadelphia, so I could leave before the crack-of-dawn Easter Sunday, when few other cars would be on the road. That proved to be the case. But even nearly alone on the highway, and with pretty good navigational skills of my own, plus the help of GPS, I made several wrong turns. This was mostly because the signage contradicted the lady robot’s voice issuing instructions, as well as my own geographical heuristics, especially in the long stretch north up the whole length of New Jersey. There were a few times I felt I barely escaped getting killed making last-second turns. There were extended moments when I thought: I’m in Hell.
Anyway, I made it home alive and undamaged. I’d never want to do that trip again, and the way things are going, I may not have to. The Easter holiday was a strange hiatus in a year that promises fantastic turbulence in public affairs, including especially American politics and our wobbling economy. Financial markets and banks managed to levitate through the first weeks of springtime, but there is a bad odor of imminent failure in the air, at the same time that government’s war against its own citizens shows signs of hardening into the threat of digital currency, renewed efforts at censorship, persecution of political opponents, and a growing awareness of “vaccine” caused death. The natives are restless, the animals are stirring. Events creep toward criticality.
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More proof — as if you needed more — that we live in a mentally ill society is the apparently broad acceptance of the idea that “Joe Biden” will run for president again. It’s so obviously preposterous that you have to wonder whether mRNA “vaccines” really do (as rumored) switch off activity in the frontal lobes. Did you happen to see this degenerate catspaw step up to the White House microphone to deliver scripted remarks on the Nashville school shooting only to drift into several minutes of unscripted badinage about how he came downstairs looking for chocolate chip ice cream? There’s your current Leader of the Free World.
We need not belabor the trail of destruction “Joe Biden’s” regime has cut through our country in just over two years. But you must sense nervously that we’re about to reap what this cabal has sown. America is falling apart. “JB” has allowed a rogue bureaucracy to make us a viciously un-free country. Our sleazy Ukraine project is wrecking Western Civ. The rest of the world has noticed and is fast dissociating from us, especially from using our dollar for trade and investment.
They’re engineering an economic smash-up worse than the Great Depression. They’ve torpedoed the rule of law. The Woke Marxist social nuttery they’ve unleashed has disordered millions of young minds. They work overtime to destroy language so that we don’t know what we’re talking about. Their race and gender hustles have made us a clown nation. The worst of us is valorized and the best cancelled. They’ve perverted the election process. And it’s increasingly clear that they’ve disabled and killed at least a million people with their medical tyranny.
You may have noticed that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced he is running for president as a Democrat. I might be wrong, but just now it seems to me that this changes everything. First, let me tell you something interesting about RFK, Jr. Despite the family name and all the baggage that comes with it, he is not the least bit imperial. He’s unpretentious. He communicates in plain English (and with a damaged larynx). I doubt that he entertained any idea of running for office until the current moment. Sometimes the zeitgeist calls, though, and you have to step up, even understanding very clearly that you might get killed for doing it.
Mr. Kennedy’s life has been a rocky hero’s journey. He was a troubled young man, at times lost in drugs. He had a marriage end as badly as possible (wife’s suicide). He’s dedicated the past twenty-five years to fighting the growing menace of Big Pharma and doing it pretty valiantly, considering the US government assists Pharma’s depredations. He wrote THE book about Dr. Anthony Fauci, and it is a helluva book. He’s running in opposition to just about everything that the Democratic Party stands for these days. This must seem strange, but I suspect a substantial portion of rank-and-file Democrats may be secretly anxious to cast off the Woke / Deep State despotism that cloaks the party like a smallpox blanket. For many, it will be like waking from a nightmare.
Now I’m going to tell you something that will blow your mind, something that maybe lurks in a quiet corner of your own brain, something which for my generation, has been hiding inside there for decades, and it is this: There is a deep, primal wish in the American psyche to correct the damage to our country caused by the murders of John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. November 22, 1963 was exactly where this nation went off the rails, and many Americans understand that. RFK, Jr. has stated unambiguously that he believes the CIA killed his uncle, the president. And he recently supported the parole of his father’s killer, Sirhan B. Sirhan, suggesting that there was a whole lot more to Bobby’s assassination than that patsy.
Here’s the heart of the matter: that wish to correct the abominations of history is a sentiment much stronger than anything else currently whirring in the fog of emotion that grips a nation in extremis, certainly stronger than all the bullshit embedded in equity, diversity, and inclusion and the bad faith aspirations of the climate change / Great Reset claque. RFK, Jr., represents a way out of all that. He may be strong enough and honorable enough to make that our new national realty.
Then there is Mr. Trump. He’s been on his own even stranger hero’s journey, considering his origins in real estate and showbiz, and his personal peccadillos. Mr. Trump also recognized the evil afoot in our country and he set out to correct all that. He was attacked unfairly and incessantly by people of bad character and ill intent, even to this day as he faces an absurd political prosecution in Manhattan. You have to admire his fortitude and resilience in the face of such massed official bad faith. His first time around in the White House, though, Mr. Trump kind of muffed the job. He had many opportunities to disarm and fire antagonists like Christopher Wray and the perfidious generals who kept backstabbing him, but he just didn’t do it. He got played on the whole Covid fraud and still hasn’t renounced the killer “vaccines” developed in the Warp Speed flimflam.
While I consider the New York case brought by DA Alvin Bragg to be a disreputable shuck and jive, over which Mr. Trump will prevail, and while I recognize him as the current leader in the battle against a Globalist putsch, I think Mr. Kennedy would be a far better choice to clean up the mess that has been made of us. I was particularly unnerved by Mr. Trump’s speech at Mar-a-Lago the night of his indictment. I know many find his manner charming, but to me his mode of speaking seems childish and weirdly inarticulate — and the last thing this country needs is more rhetorical confusion. And I’m also disturbed by the histrionic trappings that went with it — the grandiose music, the myriad flags and seals. It actually has a banana republic flavor.
Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, brings a solemn humility to the scene. Even in his quavering voice, he speaks clearly and with insight. He’s an excellent writer. He reminds me much more of what was good about our country and the men it once produced than the flamboyant Golden Golem of Greatness. I’m aboard for the ride. It’s going to be goshdarn interesting and I hope the bastards don’t try to kill him, because that will really be the end for us.
In his own words:
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It’s in the ironic nature of futuristic icons that the closer you get to the putative future’s arrival time, the more these icons look like yesterday’s tomorrow. That’s certainly the case with Disney World’s Tomorrowland, which seemed maxi-awesome in 1960, with all its tropes about space travel, robots, and never-ending progress. But the moon-landing is now so far in the past that not many people living remember seeing it happen (assuming it actually did happen, and was not an extravaganza staged by the late-and-great Stanley Kubrick, as rumored lo these many years). Nowadays, Tomorrowland is little more than one big Star Wars commercial — Disney bought the franchise lock-stock-and-barrel from George Lucas in 2012.
Anyway, behold, above, Dubai’s Museum of the Future. Dubai is the Emirates’ Tomorrowland, a city so extravagantly cuckoo that it invokes a kind of giddy reflex nausea. (Or maybe it was just the ferocious Arabian heat.) I was there once, as a speaker at a city planning conference run by the global business consultancy McKinsey for the Emir, Sheikh Mohammed ibn Rashid Al Maktoum, who incidentally also heads the town’s biggest property development company. That conference was nuts, too. At least half the speakers and panelists were computer imagery wizards from Hollywood. After the first morning session, it was obvious that McKinsey knew zip about urban design. The conference was all about projecting movies on buildings, the kind of thing you saw in the movie Bladerunner, and not much else. There was literally no talk about streets or frontages or building codes or any other hardcore particulars of assembling a place to live. It was all just showbiz.
Hence, it’s not surprising that the basic design ethos of Dubai is like Wilshire Boulevard in LA bumped up a couple of orders of magnitude: much bigger, much taller, way hotter, and with every street as broad as an interstate highway. Chalk that up to the stupendous accumulated oil wealth of the region. The place gave me the heebie-jeebies. I spent every spare minute swimming laps in the hotel pool. I passed on the opening cocktail party at the top of the Burj Khalifa, the half-mile high, needle-like skyscraper currently billed as the world’s tallest building. (The damn thing slowly sways in the breeze up there… no thanks.)
As to the Museum itself… the torus-shaped shell was designed by the British firm of Buro Happold. It’s touted as “platinum green,” meaning super-duper environmentally correct. The Arabic inscription on the exterior is supposed to be a poem composed by the Emir himself. The exhibition spaces inside opened with a WEF-inspired show about climate change and related globalist propaganda. The sad truth of the matter is that when Arabia’s oil wealth runs out in not more than a few decades, Dubai will no longer have a future. Rather it will only then embark on its true destiny — as history’s most incongruous ruin. Of course, reenforced concrete and plate glass won’t age as well as Rome’s limestone and marble… but Dubai is like the proverbial fraternity house food-service: not very good, but there’s a lot of it. It will take centuries for time to consume the debris.
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How’s the war going? Huh? Do you mean the war over in Ukraine? Or the US government’s war against its own people?
Well, the first one, the Ukraine War, is mostly destroying Europe — though, apparently, they haven’t figured that out yet. Europe’s industrial economy is toast without affordable Russian natgas. We turned off their pipeline for that in September and nobody in Europe objected. They just sucked it up and went back to smoking cigarettes at their café tables. A year or so from now, nobody in Europe will have enough money for a cappuccino (or cigarettes) and maybe then they’ll start asking the mental mollusks who run things there some questions — if they don’t just leapfrog all that politesse and burn the joint down.
The main thing about the Ukraine War is that the US doesn’t want it to end. You understand, it is not about any airy-fairy principles such as freedom for Ukraine. It’s about antagonizing Russia no matter how many dead Ukrainians it takes, because US officials developed a delusional psychosis about Russia after years of using it to mind-fuck American citizens, and we have to justify that antagonism by pretending we have vested interests in Ukraine, which we don’t, by the way.
So far, everything we’ve done to promote the conflict has backfired on Western Civ. Most of the rest of the world recognizes that the US has gone insane and they are taking careful steps to decouple from us — mainly to stop using our money for international trade. Really, would you want to have anything to do with a crazy person? No, you’d put as much distance between you and him as possible and stop even trying to communicate. If the world stops using the dollar in trade, the dollar will lose value, and so will the trillions in US bond paper held by other countries, which said countries will seek to unload as quickly as possible. Can you spell sovereign debt crisis? Look out below….
Americans, apparently, are not emotionally exercised over the Ukraine War because we don’t have any troops coming home from there in body-bags (not yet, at least). Many have probably noticed that we’ve blown over $100-billion on the project, and, along with the aforementioned debt crisis, that might just plant a seed of resentment as prices in the supermarkets and at the gas pumps shoot up and the mass job layoffs surge, and the re-po man comes a’knocking, and more banks wobble.
Of course, our Ukraine War project (based on the mind-game Why-Don’t-You-and-Him-Fight?) could end pretty suddenly if, as rumored, Ukraine runs out of cannon fodder and artillery shells (despite all our assistance). And then what? You’re left with “Joe Biden” looking like history’s all-time champeen loser, and watch out in the Taiwan Strait, where the US Pacific Fleet could get transformed into the world’s biggest set of floating ashtrays….
You get the picture? Now how about that other war: our government’s war against us? What canny reporters (Taibbi, Shellenberger) are calling the Censorship Industrial Complex has been pretty well outed. Everybody knows that the FBI, CIA, DHS, and many other agencies, via hijacked social media, have worked tirelessly to confound and bamboozle the public debate about, really, everything that matters. The odd part is that roughly half of America doesn’t seem to care. Of course, that is the same half of the country that has fallen in love with surveillance, censorship, political prosecutions, election monkey business, mandated mRNA shots, and other excursions into bad faith. Their auditors in the mainstream news media actually seem to relish their roles as enforcers of unreality.
This degenerate wickedness has been escalating since one Donald Trump stepped onstage years ago. The “Joe Biden” regime affects to have trapped him finally in the lair of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. Now the game gets interesting. Since the charges are the sheerest vapor, the actual aim of this prosecution, as Tom Luongo and Martin Armstrong point out, is to goad Mr. Trump into a civil contempt citation that will allow the New York authorities to lock him up. The judge in the case will impose a gag order on Mr. Trump speaking out about the proceedings against him, and when he opens his yap — as he is certain to do — they’ll throw a net around him and drag him off to the hoosegow, and try to keep him there indefinitely, as they kept the Jan 6 suspects in the DC jail. That is, if the Bragg operation in New York City can extract the former president from the state of Florida, which may not be so easy, now that Governor DeSantis has indicated a disinclination to allow it.
As to the case itself, a judge with any self-respect would toss it in a pre-trial hearing like a six-day-dead carp at the slightest prompting by a defense attorney — based, as it is, on multiple specious novelties of criminal law, not to mention being well beyond the statute of limitations. If it can actually get to trial, the prosecution will be a jurisprudential joke for the ages. If they get a Big Apple jury to go along with the joke, it will be short-listed through the appeals process clean up to the Supreme Court in a New York minute.
And if that whole thing falls apart like the janky jenga tower it is, there are two other cases in the wings — the bullshit case in Fulton County, Georgia, where the grand jury process was already compromised by a jury fore-person, self-identified as a “witch,” shooting her mouth off to the press; and the operation out of the DC Federal District run by one Special Counsel Jack Smith in the Mar-a-Lago classified papers matter — another loser case, considering all the other high officials currently entangled in similar complaints, as yet unmolested by any official charges.
Sound like a plan? Yes, it sounds like a plan to foment a civil war. Especially considering all the other crap our country is being subjected to by a bureaucracy-gone-wild, the regime fronting for it, and its legions of mentally ill useful idiots disturbing the peace all over the land. Probably more than half of the people in our country realize that the legal system has been hijacked by the same rogues who infiltrated social media and the state boards of election. They are getting good and goddam sick of it, along with all the mental twerkery around transgenderism, race hustling, climate change, and Ukraine. I’m sure it means we’re in for a thrilling spring and summer.
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Re: Google Blacklisted Me
Readers may have noticed my brief experiment with third-party advertisements on this blog. Although I was working with an independent ad management company, the ads ultimately originated from Google’s AdSense program.
(Click to Enlarge)
It wasn’t long before Google shut down ads on my site and permanently blacklisted my domain from their program.
According to Google, Clusterfuck Nation violates their AdSense rules by publishing what they deem to be “Unreliable and harmful claims.”
The verboten content of my blog, in Google’s opinion, includes “claims that are demonstrably false and could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process,” statements that promote “harmful health claims or relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative scientific consensus,” and content that “contradicts authoritative scientific consensus on climate change.”
The good news is the DOJ is suing Google’s ass with an anti trust suit over its ad market monopoly and is calling for a corporate breakup. We’ll see if Google follows the Get-Woke-Go-Broke trend.
In the meantime, the cost of everything—including running this website—is going up. The number of tech support and tech feature requests has increased drastically over the last few months. I have to pay a small team to manage these requests.
Your support via Patreon is critical to help cover those costs. I don’t want to do it, but I might have to limit personalized tech support to patrons only.
I remain committed to keeping the content of this site free to anyone. However, without that extra ad revenue, I need to ask you to consider supporting the website by making a contribution via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/JamesHowardKunstler
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The New York Times enjoyed its long-delayed tantric Trumpgasm so much today that it rolled out the full-page banner headline format usually reserved for the commencement of world wars. (They took the banner down before seven o’clock this morning.) For many of the cat-ladies employed as “reporters” at the once-august paper, it was the first Trumpgasm they’ve ever experienced in a lifetime of emotional displacement, over-eating, and furious knitting of pink polyester hats for the crusade to root out patriarchal wickedness.
This fulfillment of a years-long psychodrama, starring the feared and loathed occult persona of a gold-coiffed “Daddy” figure who once presided in the political household, came at the hands of dragon-slayer Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, archetype of the many long-oppressed victims worked to death in the bilges of our slave ship of state — now turned righteous Woke deliverer of cosmic vengeance!
This, of course, is brought to you by the party of hoaxes, flimflams, and mandated death shots, so it’s amusing here on the sidelines to see The Times’s op-ed writers squirm with post-coital pleasure underneath the full-page Trumpgasmic headline. The lead editorial declares: “Even Donald Trump Should Be Held Accountable”— overlooking the utter absence of accountability that has been the norm in every recent insult to the nation’s dignity from wholesale and repeat election fraud, to six years of lawless depravity in the FBI, to overt support of Antifa and BLM street havoc, to the forced, deceitful administration of deadly “vaccines.”
“How a President’s Arrest Can Strengthen a Democracy,” honorary cat-lady Nicholas Kristof opined, repeating the bad-faith trope that his legions of Wokery have an interest in political rectitude — when, in fact, they are solely preoccupied with coercing, censoring, cancelling, persecuting, punishing, and defenestrating anyone who objects to their grifts and hustles. “Only love and a leap of faith can break through distrust. That is why a credible form of patriotism is so important right now,” explained The Times’s official Superintendent of Platitudes, David Brooks, to soothe consciences grated by this loutish gambit to shove a political adversary off the game board in advance of an election. “Joe Biden may not be your cup of tea,” Mr. Brooks summed up his civics lesson, “but he’s restored sanity, effectiveness and decency to the White House.”
Oh, really? That will surely come as news to casual observers who are watching the “Joe Biden” wrecking crew in wonder and nausea as they dismantle every institution and undermine every norm in American life. A more credible form of patriotism would be, say, a general strike against this cabal of degenerates, serving to remind them that at least half of the public still cares about the Constitution, the rule of law, and actual decency (not a depraved simulacrum of it). Otherwise, why would “Joe Biden’s” DOJ lock-up scores of Jan 6 protesters in the DC Jail for years on misdemeanor charges without taking them to law? Why does the “Joe Biden” State Department persist in destroying Ukraine and pounding billions in taxpayer money into the place to accomplish it? Why has the “Joe Biden” regime adopted the drag queen as its mascot? What part of all that evinces “sanity, effectiveness and decency”?
It’s a little early to assess the knock-on effects of the Left’s ecstatic Trumpgasm. A common theme flying across the Web is that Alvin Bragg’s jerry-rigged case will only make a martyr of Mr. Trump, neatly illustrating and personifying the government’s apparent war against its own citizens — making it clear that they will stop at nothing and no one to enforce the corrupt bureaucracy’s will against the public — and that the net result will be to ensure Mr. Trump’s reelection in 2024.
This comes at a time when that government — the “Joe Biden” regime — presides over the collapse of what’s left of America’s economy, the crack-up of the banking system, and the shocking loss of our country’s influence in the geo-political arena. All of that is manifesting as increased general hardship across the US population: a whole lot of citizens going broke, going hungry, losing their property and chattels to bankruptcy, losing their children to Woke-induced psychopathology, and — the final insult — being subjected to a medical racketeering operation that ruins and murders them when they get sick.
The Party of Chaos looks pretty smugly secure for the moment. If Alvin Bragg’s flimsy case in New York falls apart, as many expect, they have grand juries lined up against Mr. Trump in other jurisdictions, waiting patiently to take their turns at the political assassination of this supposed “threat to our democracy.” Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared yesterday that Mr. Trump “has the right to prove his innocence.” She apparently forgot how our legal system works, which is that defendants are presumed innocent and it’s the government’s task to prove someone guilty.
As to qualifications to be president, the Constitution simply states: a presidential candidate must be a natural born citizen of the United States, a resident for 14 years, and 35 years of age or older. There is no language in Article II that might legally prevent someone convicted of a petty crime, fairly or otherwise, from running for the job.
Attention: Some Notes for Readers about Website Issues.
Re: Google Blacklisted Me
Readers may have noticed my brief experiment with third-party advertisements on this blog. Although I was working with an independent ad management company, the ads ultimately originated from Google’s AdSense program.
(Click to Enlarge)
It wasn’t long before Google shut down ads on my site and permanently blacklisted my domain from their program.
According to Google, Clusterfuck Nation violates their AdSense rules by publishing what they deem to be “Unreliable and harmful claims.”
The verboten content of my blog, in Google’s opinion, includes “claims that are demonstrably false and could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process,” statements that promote “harmful health claims or relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative scientific consensus,” and content that “contradicts authoritative scientific consensus on climate change.”
The good news is the DOJ is suing Google’s ass with an anti trust suit over its ad market monopoly and is calling for a corporate breakup. We’ll see if Google follows the Get-Woke-Go-Broke trend.
In the meantime, the cost of everything—including running this website—is going up. The number of tech support and tech feature requests has increased drastically over the last few months. I have to pay a small team to manage these requests.
Your support via Patreon is critical to help cover those costs. I don’t want to do it, but I might have to limit personalized tech support to patrons only.
I remain committed to keeping the content of this site free to anyone. However, without that extra ad revenue, I need to ask you to consider supporting the website by making a contribution via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/JamesHowardKunstler
Re: Patreon Annual Contribution
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After wolfing down a heartburn-inducing Popeye’s Shrimp Tacklebox Combo for supper, Manhattan District attorney Alvin Bragg retires to his four-poster Sleep Number bed beset with anxiety about the grand jury he has convened for fulfilling his campaign promise to stuff Donald Trump into a state prison cell. From the wall-mounted flat-screen across from his bed, the specter of a of giant rabbit emerges, gaunt and grizzled, draped in chains and weighty padlocks.
“Who are you, spirit?” Bragg asks.
“I am the ghost of prosecutions past,” it moans. “This night you will be visited by three other spirits: The ghost of what you wish to be, the ghost of what should be, and the ghost of actually what-it-is.”
Oh, Gawd,” Bragg groans, his esophagus on fire with acidified hot-sauce residue.
The DA falls back into a febrile sleep, but wakens minutes later. The bedroom of his condo has transformed itself into a sunny street scene. He is riding an open limousine down Broadway through a blizzard of tickertape, the sidewalks filled with cheering citizens. Beside him sits a nubile person of the birthing persuasion, with supernaturally large infant-feeding glands, not unlike a certain star of adult films at the center of his brilliant case against the former president.
“I am the ghost of what you wish to be,” she says, her breath warm in his ear. “You’re a bigger star now than ever I was in life, and without all the mess.”
“Yeah? What’s that up ahead?” he asks.
“The steps of City Hall where you will receive your Nobel Peace Prize and be handed the nomination for governor, your stepping stone to the White House.”
“We gonna have to change the name of that place,” Bragg grumbles.
Suddenly a box appears on Bragg’s lap. It contains two McDonald’s Sausage, Egg, and Cheese McGriddles® plus an apple fritter and a caramel macchiato. No sooner do his teeth close on that first delicious bite, when the confetti in the air turns to pixels, which dissolve along with the street scene, and then Bragg is back in his bed. Laughter rings across the big room, but with a demonic dissonance. A large white man with a silvery mane of hair and a nose like an Appalachian dulcimer, draped in black judicial robes, sits up behind a lofty bench, wearing a scowl of privilege.
“What do you want?” Bragg asks.
“Your law license, asshole.”
“Who do you think you are?”
“I am the spirit of what should be,” the judge-like figure growls.
“This is a racist ploy!” Bragg barks back. “Plus, you got no standing!”
More fiendish laughter from the bench, joined suddenly by a chorus of a million other laughers, people of all sizes, genders, and colors, a collage of Manhattan humanity, each one pointing a finger at Bragg, who retreats in terror under his king-size duvet. The laughter dissolves into Bragg’s own blubbering wails of despair.
The DA wakes a third time, trembling, to the sound of the doorbell, which he tries to ignore, but it keeps on ringing and ringing. Finally, Bragg kicks off the duvet, plods over to the door, and throws it open. A tall, stout, white man with a mystifying platinum hair-doo stands framed within.
“DoorDash, at your service,” the ghost of actually what-it-is says.
“Oh, no….” Bragg cries out, as he is handed a paper bag. He opens it and peers in, only to loose a nauseating stench that instantly fills the room. “Hey, this is not the Build Your Crème Brûlée Pancake Combo from the IHOP,” Bragg complains.
The DoorDash looks at his phone. “It says here you ordered the shit sandwich.”
Bragg feels like his head will explode. He reaches out to strangle the malevolent specter but wakes up choking his Saatva premium pillow instead. Eventually, he comes back to his senses, but feeling utterly drained from the night’s visitations. He washes the night-sweats away in the shower, dons a fine chalk-strip suit the size of a Coleman six-person tent, and meets his driver waiting at the end of his building’s canopy. In the backseat of his city limo there is a bag with his usual breakfast: two Starbuck’s Double-Smoked Bacon, Cheddar & Egg Sandwiches, a blueberry scone, a glazed donut, and a Starbuck’s Reserve® Hazelnut Bianco Latte. He horses it all down in traffic on the way to the DA’s headquarters on Hogan Place.
It is Monday morning, of course, roughly a week after the world was expecting him to issue an indictment against former president Donald Trump for writing off payments to a porn star as a campaign expense. But there was much to think about as the week marched along, much to mull over, many options to consider…the future to assess. The office is spookily quiet as Bragg strides in. An attractive blonde of a certain age approaches him warily.
“Ready to rock and roll, boss?” asks Lisa DelPizzo, Chief of the Trial Division, expecting Bragg to make his historic announcement shortly to the dozens of assembled reporters waiting in the press lobby.
“Get me a ham sandwich,” he grunts. “And bring it down to the grand jury chamber. We got work to do!”
The post An Eastertime Carol appeared first on Kunstler.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlertCast_373.mp3Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recentlyLiberty or Lockdown. He is also a columnist at Forbes, founder of the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy, and Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, Austria. He is the editor of The Best of Mises [economist Ludwig von Mises]. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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Of course, the newspaper USA Today chose transgender activist Leigh Finke for its Women of the Year award because in the USA of the here-and-now (today, for instance), boundaries are a thing of the past, and if a woman of the year happens to come with the “package” that signifies male-of-the-species, you’d better ignore that incongruity and go along with the gag — or prepare for the punishments that will rain down until your morale improves.
The transgender movement has crystalized into the Party of Chaos’s favored instrument for enforcing its ethos of unreality on a population obdurately stuck on thinking in categories, on making hateful distinctions between things. Better to live in a protective miasma of undifferentiated sensation than a cruel state based on pattern recognition where one is incessantly prompted to understand how objects and life-forms around us differ, where things begin and end, and what all that means relative to your own supposed amorphous existence.
Mattias Desmet, Belgian author of the 2022 book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, proposed that a political faction subject to “mass formation psychosis” — the group hysteria that sets the scene for tyranny — would demand that the public swallow a cavalcade of increasingly absurd ideas in order to soften up their brains, so as to make it easier for leaders (influencers) to push them in any desired direction. I would propose that we have probably achieved peak brain-softening in this land.
The only thing left to challenge is the distinction between being alive or dead, which is exactly what you would get in Zombieland, a place that the Party of Chaos (and its mentors in the World Economic Forum) long to take you to, where you will have nothing and be happy! And never think a hateful thought, or any thought not pre-cooked for you and served up by The Party like so much dim sum. Choose that or it’s the nothingness and bliss of the grave. It’s all the same to the Party leaders. Voila: the totalitarian nirvana!
Folks are beginning to grok how all this works after a years-long epic mind-fuck by the increasingly malevolent permanent bureaucracy running a nation on the glide-path to destruction. Not a few people around America still-capable of independent thought are less than avid for liquidation. And certainly not willing to be absorbed into the amoeba-like blob of redundant, undifferentiated protoplasm that a totalitized population must be in the end-state of political Wokery.
Now, in the spring of ’23, Woke is suddenly mutating into a general wake-up call. The animals are stirring from their long sleep of compliance as ruin stalks the land. The season of concentrating the mind is here. When it becomes a matter of sink-or-swim, people once again remember the difference between being dead or alive. The test is on.
Expect three evolving dynamics to define our country’s zeitgeist in the stirring months to come. First, the collapse of our lunatic project for using Ukraine to destabilize Russia, an enterprise so feckless it could have only been conceived by the dead-of-brain. Our geniuses of foreign affairs screwed the pooch on this one. It’s almost too obvious that they never cared about the people of that sore-beset land. Notice, they do not even use the word “peace” in any of their confabulations about what’s going on there, because it is the opposite of what they seek, which is…chaos unending.
Thus, others will end this vainglorious project for us — namely, our antagonist there, Russia — and the regime of “Joe Biden,” for the second time in its mortifying two years-plus of rule, will be left holding its limp, generative member in its collective hand, another humiliation for our over-reaching imperial soldiery — and the deluded empty suits commanding it. Will they be able to pretend this time, as they did in Afghanistan, 2021, that there’s nothing to see here, folks? Just a blizzard of press-releases declaring “mission accomplished” or some-such other craven bullshit? I don’t think so. The reaction may be enough to bum-rush “Joe Biden” and Company out of office. His grotesque family rackets (including the Ukraine grifts) will finally and magically come to the public’s attention, and that’ll be all she wrote for “JB”— except for the historians waking from their own long catatonic spells to record the disaster they will swear they couldn’t see coming.
Next, we will go through the tipping-point where a critical mass of the population — not just in America, but throughout Western Civ, and even beyond — realizes that they have been poisoned and injured by the mRNA “vaccines” they were so eager to line up for. It will produce a special sort of collective agony centered around a raging despair that leads with astonishing speed to prosecutions. The torpor and uncertainty of the past three years evaporates and the machinery of law actually starts cranking again, and in the right way — not as a mere instrument of coercion and intimidation, but to actually seek justice.
Third will be the transformation of a raging inflation into a ruinous debt deflation that leaves Americans, one way or another, with no money. At the same time, the people will wake to the wrecking of their energy and food supply. A line will appear drawn in the ground from sea to shining sea, as by a cosmic power, and everybody… the formerly Woke, the unvaxxed, the penitent and unrepentant, the middle and lower orders especially, who suffer most harshly… will find themselves all on one side of that line in opposition to the wicked who have brought a hard rain upon them. And there you will finally see the beginning of your long-promised hope and change. No need even to wait for it. At long last, it’s upon us.
The post The Season is Here appeared first on Kunstler.
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And it will stop because, as the old wag Herb Stein laid down in his law years ago: Things that can’t go on, stop. Which raises the question: which things? And the answer is the things Western Civ is doing in its attempted suicide: inciting war, recklessly running up debt, persecuting its own citizens and stealing their liberties, subjecting them to medical malfeasance, destroying their goods production and food-growing capabilities, and subjecting the public to incessant mind-fuckery in a campaign to falsify and disfigure reality.
A consortium of public and corporate bureaucracies has institutionalized the falsification of reality under the pretense of saving the human race from a pack of hobgoblins led by climate change, racism, and normal sexual reproduction. They have been driven insane by the actual reality of pending economic collapse, which has only been accelerated by their own suicidal activities. What they apparently really want to save is their own positions, perquisites, and power. Their enabling mechanism is the digital computer and its many ways of assembling and controlling information, and thus controlling people, especially those who object to totalizing control. They do it because they can.
You can see how bad it got by reading the Twitter Files #19, assembled by independent reporter Matt Taibbi and released on March 17: The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine, Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of “True Stories” . The thread tells of the campaign led by Stanford University called the Virality Project, marshalling government agencies, academia, Big Pharma, and NGOs, such as several financed by George Soros, to suppress “misinformation” on social media, including “stories of true vaccine side effects.” Hence, truth became misinformation.
You might see in that how anyone on the side of falsifying reality is playing at a disadvantage. If that is your first principle in a political struggle, you are fighting not just against your opponents but against the laws of the universe. The only recourse of a faction at war with reality is tyranny, forcing the people to accept your bullshit and do your will, whether they like it or not. That is exactly what you get in America’s Democratic Party and other regimes currently in power around Western Civ. Being at war with reality places them at war against their own citizens.
The Covid-19 release seems to have been an act motivated by multiple players for their own reasons which, combined, amounted to crimes against humanity. Anthony Fauci, America’s infectious disease czar, apparently sought a crowning career triumph, which would have been a successful vaccine against a dangerous virus. So, he arranged to engineer the organism that he could then triumph against. Like all of Dr. Fauci’s projects over the roughly forty years that he ran the NIAID agency, the mRNA vaccines — subcontracted to the US Military and manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna — turned out to be an epic fiasco.
Covid-19 also happened to be a convenient device for ridding the government of the troublesome President Trump, who threatened to disassemble major parts of the permanent US bureaucracy. If you revisit the many videos of Mr. Trump appearing in the White House Covid crisis room in early 2020 with Dr. Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, and other public health officials, I’m sure you will notice his discomfort, as if he suspected he was being played (he was). And conveniently, right after that, the locked-down public’s attention was galvanized by the George Floyd, BLM, and Antifa riots until the 2020 election was upon us. (Another grotesque prank against the people, never adjudicated.)
It took more than a year after the “vaccines” came out for the disturbing actuarial data to emerge from the life insurance industry that many non-elderly people were being killed and disabled by the shots’ adverse effects. (I think the censors were caught by surprise that the truth leaked out from there.) Meanwhile, any able investigator could understand how the half-assed “vaccines,” along with the denigration of off-label early treatment medicines, the reckless use of dangerous remdesivir combined with enormous government payments to hospitals for mis-treating patients with it, the gaming and hiding of CDC statistics, and the obvious censorship of all that information in the corporate news and social media (with help from the CIA and FBI), all added up to a monstrous criminal offense against human decency.
The government, now led by the career criminal “Joe Biden,” needed another distraction from intrusive reality in 2022 — including the emergence of the Biden family’s crimes — so it arranged to start a war in Ukraine by threatening to turn that country into a forward NATO base on Russia’s border. Russia was exceptionally clear and straightforward that it wouldn’t accept such an arrangement and the US proceeded anyway. Our country was exceptionally dishonest in its positioning for this conflict. (And our NATO allies were astoundingly credulous going along with it, even after we fatally damaged the EU’s economy.)
Now, entering the spring of 2023, all of this sordid untruth is unravelling along with something else that the news media will have trouble lying about: the collapse of the money system in Western Civ. Unlike Covid-19 and the Ukraine War, a banking collapse has no propaganda value to the regimes in power. There is no narrative they can concoct out of it to their advantage. The public will do what they always do to a government that plunges them into penury and hardship. They will turn it out or pull it down.
Since money and banking are subject to the laws of physics, we are going to get the ultimate payback for messing with reality. A lot of things that can’t go on will stop.
The post This Has Got to Stop appeared first on Kunstler.
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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 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.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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Money is all theoretical… until it’s not. Paper money is bad enough, as France learned under the tutelage of the rascal John Law in the early 1700s. The nation was broke, exhausted by foolish wars, and heaped under unbearable debt. Monsieur Law, a Scottish genius-wizard (the Jerry Lewis of political economy), landed in Paris, cast a spell on the regent Duc d’Orléans, set up a magic credit engine fueled by dreams of untold riches-to-come burgeoning out of the vast, new-found lands called Louisiana up the Mississippi River, and modern finance was born!
The stock-and-money schemes known as the Mississippi Bubble soon ruined France and put finance in such a bad odor that the word “banque” could not be used in polite society there for a century to come. Monetary inflation became a thing for the first time since Roman days — a much easier trick with printed paper banknotes than with silver coins — but the effect was the same: the evaporation of “wealth” (which is what money supposedly represents). At the height of the crisis, trading in gold was criminalized, though that was so easily worked-around due to sheer custom and habit that the Crown had to re-legalized it. The frenzy from start to finish lasted only a few years, but the nation was set on the path that would eventually lead to revolution. Law ended his days dolefully running card games in Venice.
Likewise, the creaking polity called the USA in our time, spawned many new incarnations of John Law as it transitioned from being “the arsenal of democracy” — you know, making real things — to a land of make-believe, where unicorns galloped over rainbows conjured by computer magic and utopian wishes of equity, diversity, and inclusion. The overhang of previously amassed wealth kept those dreams going long after we discontinued the rough and messy business of making stuff, and thereby generating real wealth. But now a klaxon blares, signaling the end of dream-time, and the nation wakes up in a ramshackle house with the floor giving way under the bed.
The rot was plain to see in the banking architecture built on US treasury paper (bills, notes, bonds) as rising interest rates undercut the price of all the debt paper issued previously at lower rates. And this was the collateral that banks generally held the depositor’s money in. So, when it became necessary to declare a problem with the balance sheet, and cash had to be raised to cover it, the treasury paper could only be sold at a loss, liabilities exceeded assets, word got out, depositors rushed to secure the money in their accounts, and that was all she wrote for yon bank, in this case, Silicon Valley Bank, the first to crumble.
Since banks today exist in a vast matrix of interconnected obligations — promises to pay this-and-that — fear grows that the rot from one bank, such as SVB, will infect many other banks that are no longer able to keep their promises about paying this-and-that, leading to a daisy-chain of things not getting paid. For an economy, that’s about the same as the blood ceasing to circulate in a body.
The practice in situations such as this (say, as in 2008-09) is for the governing authorities — who supposedly rule over the banking world like gods — to rush to rescue these outfits with “liquidity,” money (or representations of it) as required to re-balance things, or, maybe provide the impression of re-balancing until something else can be figured out. The Jupiter and Minerva of American banking, Jay Powell and Janet Yellen, were faced with just that sort of call for divine intervention over the weekend as fear seeped into every nook and crevice of the money world that wealth was flaring away in the long-feared-of conflagration out of the dumpster banking had become.
Sunday morning, Ms. Yellen told CBS News “bailouts, no way” but by the afternoon Mr. Powell cried “bailouts, way,” and they had to get their story straight. They offered up $25-billion to bail out depositors for a smoldering system that will arguably require a trillion dollars or more of liquidity to quench the spreading fires. One thing looks for sure: the interest rate hikes that Mr. Powell spoke of so confidently only days ago just got stashed into his folder labeled “Fuggeddabowdit.” So, the campaign to control inflation must now yield to the urgent need to create a whole lot of money to spray over those fires.
You may have noticed that the value of your money has been slip-sliding away the past year or so. Peanut butter at five bucks a jar, and all. The situation at hand kind of guarantees that we’ll be seeing a whole ole lot more of that. And then the gods of money will have lost control of the interest rate console altogether. No more tweaking the broken knobs. More inflation will prompt US treasury paper holders to dump what they can while there’s still some value to retrieve. But the US has to issue more debt for all the bail-outs and theoretical buyers of new debt will perforce bid up the rates to keep up with inflation… and yet the US can’t possibly bear the burden of paying higher interest on its debt. Looks like the business model for running the USA is breaking down before our eyes.
Luckily, Cap’n “Joe Biden” is at the helm of this steaming garbage barge. His conference room full of geniuses is ready with the solution to our predicament: the long-mythologized Central Bank Digital Currency — a dream-come-true for would be tyrants… the Godzilla of unicorns whinnying atop the biggest rainbow of all: the promise of endless magic money for everybody, forever. All you have to do to get it is: surrender your decision-making power over your own life. The government will amalgamate your few remaining assets in a CBDC account, tell you exactly what to spend it on, and shut off your little card if you show any contrary impulses.
Well, they can try it. I doubt it will work. Instead, the government will melt down in its own rancid puddle of insolvency, the meta-grift will grind to an end, and it will be everyone for his / her / they self in the broke-down Palace of Chaos for a while… until things emergently reconstruct. But I get a little ahead of myself. It’s not even ten o’clock on Monday morning.
Oh, and then there’s Ukraine….
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast__372.mp3I’m doing another lap with Dr. David E Martin the Founder and Chairman of M·CAM Inc., the international leader in innovation finance, trade, and intangible asset finance. He’s been among a select band of international thought-leaders investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular the relationships between US public health officials, the pharmaceutical companies, and a number of shadowy organizations behind the development of hugely profitable vaccines with a poor record of safety and viability.
He was the founding CEO of Mosaic Technologies Inc., a company that developed and commercialized advanced computational linguistics technologies, dynamic data compression and encryption technologies, electrical field transmission technology, medical diagnostics, and stealth/anechoic technology, and launched many other ventures here and overseas.
He’s currently working directly with sheriffs and district attorneys to bring criminal cases against the perpetrators of this historic fraud — including negligent homicide, premeditated murder, and reckless endangerment charges against doctors, hospital groups, managed care groups, et cetera, for the deaths of the vaccine-injected and deaths from treatment with the drug remdesivir. He has found 25 sheriffs and DAs willing to take prosecutions forward. Anyone seeking to inquire about adjudicating deaths of family members can go to www.prosecutenow.io.
Direct Download: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast__372.mp3
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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 of 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?
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Clusterfuck Nation
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Imagine that on an April evening in 1912, the captain of the RMS Titanic had announced a grand ball at which the male passengers were asked to wear their wives’ clothing and vice-versa…. That was approximately the condition of Western Civ verging on springtime in 2023: preoccupied with silliness while the iceberg awaits.
But who would have thought the sinking of civilization would occur with such fantastic comic ornamentation? Men, in more ways than mere costuming, pretending to be women… incompetence honored, feted, even worshipped… intellect reduced to anti-thinking… anything of value thrown overboard in some weird post-modern potlatch ceremony of twisted moral righteousness…? But the hour is late, the party is near its end, and the iceberg is struck. The rest of the story will be you holding onto a few valuables, including your life, while the lifeboats get lowered.
From here forward, things get pretty interesting. And from here on, nobody is really in charge. The vacuum of leadership we’ve been living in becomes impossible to ignore, and nature (it’s rumored) hates a vacuum. For the moment, circumstances are in charge, not personalities.
Look no further than the fiasco in Ukraine, engineered by geniuses of the US foreign service in some daft exercise to show the world who’s who and what for. And, remind me: what was the basic idea there? To hamstring and hogtie Russia so badly that her people would overthrow the only rational head-of-state in Christendom, a figure who makes the presidents, chancellors, and prime ministers of Western Civ look like a troop of gibbering mandrills, with painted faces and blue butts, the ass-clowns of geopolitics.
Something tells me that this gang will not make it to the lifeboats. They’ll be left on deck gripping bottles of single malt scotch whiskey, singing Don’t Cry for me Argentina as the band plays, while the whole wicked colossus slides beneath the moonlight-tinted green waves. All of which is to say: these perilous and confounding times we live in are coming to a climax. Events are afoot now, choices must be made, truths will emerge, no one will be untouched, be careful who your friends are.
We’re waiting for financial markets, banks, and monies to blow, as an engine will when submerged in water. It can’t not happen, though every known device has been deployed to keep up appearances. The credibility of finance was thrown overboard a long time ago. Capital was sloshing around in the bilges as the ship heaved and pitched in the angry waters, and it had to go somewhere. The next turn will be when you go looking for where it went and you discover to your nauseated chagrin that the capital is just… gone! Through some legerdemain of physics, it disappeared… turned into a kind of anti-matter… fell through a black hole (possibly ripped by that iceberg), or up the smokestacks, like it was never there at all.
When that happens, our collective attention finally gets galvanized as by no shock before. When capital is truly gone, transmogrified into a whole lot of nothing, the time for standing by making faces and whining is over. By the way, this is the way the world ends for the vacuum known as “Joe Biden” and the Party of Chaos he is propped up to represent. Chaos, we will be astounded to learn, is not your friend, is not the solution to anything, least of all a polity that is floundering in lifeboats over cold, dark, deep water a thousand leagues from dry land. What’s more, there are no ships coming to the rescue. Guess why they put oars in the boats. Get set to pull, me hardies!
Yes, we’re at sea now, without a compass. Yet the stars sparkle dazzlingly above, and some aboard can actually read what they say and what they point to. If safety and sanity will not find us, maybe we can pull together toward wherever they wait. My gawd, it’s going to be a long haul, but have a little faith — remember what that is? (It’s the conviction that all of us together stand in some meaningful relation to existence.) Even if you’re too mentally drained to believe it, act as if it is so. Or, in post-modern parlance, fake it till you make it.
Didn’t think it would come to this when you signed on to the voyage? I guess so. You were comfortably ensconced one winter night in the mini-McMansion, on the overstuffed sofa, entertained by some Netflix inanity, scarfing down the microwaved cheeze morsels… when the wife said, “Hey, let’s book a cruise!” Seemed like a good idea at the time, which is what everything in the annals of history is and was. And now, look at where you are!
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This insta-cliche of a new WEF-inspired “15-Minute City,” called Telosa, pushed by WalMart e-commerce billionaire Marc Lore, is based on a philosophy he calls “Equitism.” That says it all, if you’re tuned into the finer vibes of Woke utopian megalomania. “We’re on a mission to create a more equitable and sustainable future,” Mr. Lore declares. Sound familiar? “Starting with a clean slate we have this really unique opportunity to focus on what’s really most important…. a new model for society!”
The clean slate is another giveaway. The stuff of history is just so much clutter. Don’t bother with it. We’ll get it just right from inception and the darn thing will run as cleanly and precisely as an atomic clock, a perfect machine-for-living. “Telosa is founded on inclusivity, openness, and fairness,” the promotional video says. But of course: the DEI kit-bag….
This exercise in grand-scale virtue-signaling is in its conceptual development phase. At least a bunch of architects and engineers are getting paid. Believe me, they’re not going to stop this gravy-train with any pain-in-the-ass reality-testing. Enjoy the video. They’re pretending… play-acting. No actual geographical site has been selected. But in so far as it will require 30,000 acres, the choices are pretty slim… mainly desert land so useless that it’s already massively unoccupied.
The backstage machinery behind this fantasy is the usual mash-up of innovative technologies we’re endlessly hearing about, especially the alt-energy schemes which — sorry — just don’t pencil out, given the ominous state of the oil industry and other hard limits. Mr. Lore and his team clearly have no idea what kind of economy we are actually moving into as The Long Emergency (or Fourth Turning, if you prefer) gather’s momentum. It is not going to resemble in the least the kind of computer-generated eye-candy scene depicted above — a society of exquisitely-tuned multicultural leisure. Rather it is going to be a hardscrabble existence somewhere between the The Grapes of Wrath and the Thirty Years War.
If Marc Lore really wants to kick off some equitism, I suggest he forget about this boondoggle and just give fifty-thousand-dollar gift envelopes to as many poor Americans as he can line up before his fortune runs out. At least he’ll give a bunch of people with low impulse-control a few weeks of happiness.
Thanks to Gregory Michaud for the nomination!
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Clusterfuck Nation
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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, distractable life these days, the meaning larded into that 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 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 batallion 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 a 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 Wallensky, 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 on 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.
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“It’s Coming.” That’s what Elon Musk said a while back apropos of the Twitter files that show all the US government suppression of Covid-19 information mis-labeled as “misinformation.” Think of whatever the truth is as mis-misinformation. Get it? You might have to read that sentence more than once to comprehend what went wrong with the American consensus the past three years. And then you’ll begin to understand why the operation is called mind-fuckery.
“It” comes out in weird ways now. For instance, Woody Harrelson’s little prank on Saturday Night Live. The A-List actor opened the show acting stoned, talking about how much he likes weed and getting stoned, and, at the very end of his routine, spoke of a “movie script” that spun out in his stoned head:
The Biggest drug cartels in the world get together, and buy up all the media and all the politicians… and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes… and people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drug… and keep taking them over and over. I threw the script away. I mean, who’s gonna believe that crazy idea?”
One can also imagine the NBC lawyers’ iPhones lighting up and emitting a cacophony of ring-tones in the late-night hours following Woody’s little gaucherie. After all, this is the TV network that still employs the likes of Rachel Maddow, Misinformation-Informer-in-Chief of the whole USA who, for years, has performed as the icon representing how the political Left thinks of itself, and what it thinks. What the Left thinks of itself, of course, is that it’s collectively the smartest person in the world. And what the Left actually thinks is exactly what Woody’smovie script implied: believe everything that the government, the news media, and the drug companies tell you, and act accordingly, and destroy anyone who says otherwise.
Woody’s gag offended the news media hugely and instantly, said media being scaffolded on the Internet. The response was wildly censorious. Vanity Fair’s insta-bulletin said, “Uncle Woody… taking the stage to float conspiracy theories disguised as provocative humor is both intellectually dishonest and tedious.” Tedious? As if you’ve heard that come out of A-list actors’ mouths a thousand times? I doubt it. Who is being “intellectually dishonest” exactly?
Rolling Stone, likewise headlined: “Woody Harrelson Spreads Anti-Vax Conspiracies During SNL Monologue.” (Just how anti-anti-establishment now is the old counter-culture rag I once worked for?) The Daily Beast, The Left’s house organ, echoed that: “Woody Harrelson Spews Anti-Vax Conspiracies in Rambling SNL Monologue.” Notice, “spews,” as in the most vile and disgusting bodily function imaginable, you revolting piece of filth….
Now, what Woody actually didn’t say in that little riff, if you’re paying attention, is that the vaxxes in question are ineffective and dangerous. Yes, he actually left that part out, though there were enough dots in the monologue to connect that message, if you were of a mind to. The problem for the smartest people in the world is that their minds stopped working about five years ago — mainly when a certain DJT stepped onstage to declare that the Left’s management of national affairs was corrupt, depraved, and dangerous. This enraged the management class to the max
Graduates of Yale, Brown, Harvard, and the rest of the elite service academies went nuts over that and, in a bizarre switcheroo for the ages, became the staunchest defenders of anything the government decided to impose on the people of this land, starting with a series of political hoaxes — RussiaGate, Ukraine phone call impeachment — cresting with the Covid-19 hysteria and its vaccination cherry-on-top. The smartest people in the world were all-in on all of that, and knocked themselves out enforcing and defending it.
And now… its coming… out. They were played. Absolutely snookered. All. These. Brilliant. Morally unassailably upright. Good. People. Taken for a ride. Spoofed. Put-on. Conned. And they sold out their country in the process. And now they cower on the verge of being unmasked for the mendacious fools they are. One might empathize at how horribly painful this is, the ethical wreckage of a whole social demographic! But don’t confuse empathy with sympathy. They are about to sink in historic disgrace and ignominy, and that’s why their official interlocutors react so harshly.
Another part Woody left out is what happens after the suckered people take the cartel’s drug over and over. They get sick and many of them die. We are just getting started with that chapter of the story and, as statistical investigator Edward Dowd said recently, the mRNA “vaccines” have already killed more Americans than all the wars this country ever fought. This is the kind of mis-misinformation that the managing elite really don’t want to face. But get ready. It’s coming.
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The post It’s Coming appeared first on Kunstler.
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If you think about it at all, can you come up with any good reasons why our country has involved itself in the Ukraine war? To defend democracy, many say? An emptier platitude does not exist in the vast slippery lexicon of spin. To thwart Russia’s imperial overreach? You apparently have no clue about Ukraine’s history, ancient or modern. To incite an overthrow of the wicked Putin by his own people? The Russian president is more popular there now than even John F. Kennedy was here in 1962.
There actually are no good reasons for what we are doing in Ukraine, only bad reasons. Mainly, stoking the war there diverts Americans attention from our own problems, which is to say the titanic failures of America’s political establishment. The USA is falling apart from a combination of mismanagement, malice, and negligence. Our economy is a tottering scaffold of Ponzi schemes. Our institutions are wrecked. The government lies about everything it does. The news industry ratifies all the lying. Our schoolchildren can’t read or add up a column of numbers. Our food is slow-acting poison. Our medical-pharma matrix has just completed the systematic murder and maiming of millions. Our culture has been reduced to a drag queen twerk-fest. Our once-beautiful New World landscape is a demolition derby. Name something that hasn’t been debauched, perverted, degenerated, or flat-out destroyed.
And so, the “Joe Biden” show is busy ginning up nuclear war hysteria because that’s all it has left for manipulating public emotion. The Covid-19 derangement lost its mojo in 2022 and the population has only just begun to grok the all-causes death disaster underway courtesy of Pfizer and Moderna (and the CDC with the FDA). Did you notice, by the way, that the CDC just added those unapproved, still-experimental shots to the childhood vaccine schedule, considered official “guidance” that is followed by virtually every school system in America. Rochelle Walensky did that despite massive evidence that the “vaccines” damage childrens’ hearts, nervous systems, reproductive systems, and immune systems.
Do you know why Ms. Walensky did that? Because adding the mRNA shots to the childhood schedule supposedly confers permanent immunity from legal liability for the drug companies, even after the current emergency use authorization (EUA) runs out. The catch to that cozy arrangement is if there was any fraud committed on the public in the release and administration of those products, the companies lose their immunity and can be sued until there is nothing left of them but the paperclips. Plus, the executives may be liable for criminal prosecution. Hard time.
One Brooke Jackson, a technician involved in the sketchy Pfizer drug trials, and who directly witnessed the procedural violations as they occurred, is currently suing Pfizer under the False Claims Act (31 U.S. Code § 3729) saying that the company defrauded the government. Pfizer’s lawyers have asked the judge to dismiss the case on the grounds, they said in court, that, “We did not defraud the government. We delivered the fraud that the government ordered.” So now, millions of schoolchildren in this land will be subject to compulsory harmful mRNA shots in order to cover the Pharma companies’ multi-billion-dollar asses. Doesn’t that sum up our national predicament nicely? Way to go, Rochelle. Don’t think nobody noticed.
It’s also worth pondering whether we are neck-deep in the Ukraine morass because Volodymyr Zelensky is blackmailing “Joe Biden” over the mysterious Biden Family business operations that took place there directly following the US-orchestrated Maidan revolution that overthrew Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovich in 2014. Remember “The Big Guy’s” earnest efforts to get rid of the Ukrainian state prosecutor who was looking into the affairs of the Burisma gas company that invited Hunter Biden and his associate Devon Archer onto the board of directors. Of all people in Western Civ… these two Americans… with no knowledge of or experience in the natgas industry. Weird, a little bit. Do you suppose Mr. Zelensky still has the prosecutor’s files in his possession?
Then, of course, there is the bizarre matter of the Nord Stream pipelines caper, lately disclosed by the scrupulous reporter, Seymour Hersh, as a US naval operation. We blew them up. Four EU member Nations (also US NATO allies) held a combined half-ownership in the pipelines (the other half held by Russia). European industry and households depended on a steady supply of that reasonably-priced gas to continue modern life there. Both President “Joe Biden” and Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, promised the news media (and the American public) that the pipeline would “be no more” if a Russian military operation crossed into the Donbas. Well, sonofabitch, the pipelines were “no more” as of last September.
Was that an injury to Russia? Well, yes, though Russia has found work-arounds for selling its natgas elsewhere than northern Europe. Do you realize, though, that it was every bit as much an act-of-war against our supposed allies. None of the NATO countries with a stake in the North Streams have made a peep so far about the shocking disclosure. Which made lead a casual observer to ask whether Western Civ has gone plumb insane. Maybe so, in which, case perhaps, it deserves to suffer. After a while — not such a long while, either — modern life will be but a memory in northern Europe.
Somehow the specter of unintended consequences looms over all this mischief. My guess is we just haven’t seen them yet… and when we do, they will be ferocious. For starters, NATO will be another thing that is no more. And our country will have to go about our blustering war-hawkery without any back-up or convenient staging-areas for fomenting more shenanigans in a far-away region where we have no real national interest, just a certain zeal for creating unnecessary trouble and hardship in a world that already has more than it requires.
Remember what his old boss, Barack Obama said about the former Veep: “You can never overstate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” What a prophet that man is! Under “Joe Biden,” the USA has been slip-sliding sideways and backwards into a realm of darkness unimaginable a few years ago. But now, something is heaving through the public sensibility, as spring marches north in America. It feels like a sharp change in attitude, a refusal to continue acting like a reality-optional society. It’s crackling through the air like a rumor of liberation in a hostage crisis. Can you hear it?
The post The World Has Enough Trouble appeared first on Kunstler.
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Secret Agent Man “Joe Biden” turned up in Kiev Monday morning after landing in Poland and riding an overnight choo-choo train across the Ukraine frontier to avoid the hazardous pomp of landing Air Force One in a war zone. One might try to guess the message Victoria Nuland sent her errand boy to deliver. My guess is that “JB” was there to tell Wolodymyr Zelensky the USA stands behind him one hundred percent — an obvious whopper — being exactly the opposite of the developing reality that, short of setting off nuclear Armageddon, there is really nothing the USA can do to prevent Russia from concluding our ill-conceived project on its own terms. Who better to deliver an arrant falsehood than the master, “Scranton Joe,” he who once battled and vanquished the tyrant Corn-Pop!
Remember, last week Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, speaking out of the aperture between his butt cheeks, announced that Russia had lost “strategically, operationally and tactically” in Ukraine. This was after NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg announced rather clumsily that Ukraine’s army was out of ammo, especially artillery shells, and the only remedy for that was for Europe to rebuild an armaments industry — which was a sideways-and-backwards way of saying… fuggeddabowdit.
One might also suppose that, behind all this cognitive dissonance, the US would be engaged in secret talks with Russia to arrive at some face-saving device for getting out of this mess. But really, what is our leverage for that? Can we threaten to put US boots-on-the-Ground in Ukraine? That would be a little like channeling Gen. George Armstrong Custer, don’t you think? Apparently, all we’re left with is a game of pretend, using the Pretender-in-Chief as the front.
I’d also venture to say that American voters are not so enthused about this Ukraine pageant as they seemed to be last summer when the yellow and blue flags popped up on front porches at every Woked-up clam-bake from Edgartown to Bar Harbor. Our Ukrainian proxies sure seemed to be giving those Ruskies what-for along the front lines in Donbas, payback, you understand, for helping Donald Trump steal the 2016 election from She Whose Turn It Was Supposed to Be… America’s Amazonian Caesar-in-a-pants-suit, HRC.
The fall offensive by Ukraine was an illusion, alas, setting up its army for methodical decimation, now nearly complete. So, too, is all the talk of sending tanks in to save the day. And so, too, is the very existence of NATO as anything other than window-dressing on an empty storefront. If blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, as recently alleged by independent reporter Seymour Hersh, smells like an attack on our supposed ally, Germany, then how was it not an attack on NATO, in which Germany is the centerpiece? And, finally, why would Germany not be engaging in secret talks of its own with Russia, behind America’s back?
Intrigue must be rife now throughout Europe, and Americans will not hear anything about it from its Deep State-owned news media. Is there any reason why Europe could not live with a neutralized Ukraine? Of course not. Ukraine is in uproar now simply because geniuses in the US State Department thought it would be a good way to annoy and antagonize Russia. The project was insane from inception. The main result is that Europe will no longer have the natural gas it needs at a rational price to continue being an industrial society.
One must conclude that NATO is looking for a way out of this. But there is no way out except to declare by word or deed, directly or otherwise, that NATO has outlived the reason for its existence. Any sane analysis by Europeans would arrive at the unnerving realization that the USA has become the enemy of NATO, not Russia. If all that is so, then a seismic shift is underway that will leave America hung out to dry on the Ukraine project. Germany will have to make a deal with Russia to rebuild the Nord Streams. What could the US do about that? Impose sanctions on Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the rest of the bunch? Where does that leave Western Civ?
I’ll tell you: it leaves Western Civ diminished. It leaves our country to stew in its own rancid economic and financial juices in abject isolation from, basically, the rest of the world. (Fare-the-well hegemonic dream; hello multi-polarity!) It leaves Ukraine neutralized and no longer a problem… It leaves Russia able to feel secure in its borders and free to get on with being a normal nation… and it leaves Europe the hope that it can resume modern life a while longer with the familiar comforts and conveniences.
The end of the Ukraine conflict also exposes the rotten web of Globalist schemers who planted their operators in every niche of American life and all around Western Civ — George Soros’s empire of meddling NGOs, Bill Gates’s World Health Org puppet show, the ridiculous World Economic Forum’s network of stooges in high places from Justin Trudeau to BlackRock’s Larry Fink.
The end of the Ukraine conflict reveals the submission of the Democratic Party to nefarious interests intent on wrecking this country. Even the most benign end to the Ukraine conflict — such as, by default, Europe and Russia settling-up on their own to stop the fighting — will be another humiliation for “Joe Biden” and the crew behind him, as bad as the last days in Kabul. Their other crimes await full disclosure, everything from treasonous bribery to the fraud and genocide around Covid-19. There will have to be a severe political realignment in America. But before that can happen, expect many seasons of terrible disorder.
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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 arial 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.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/Kunstlercast_371.mp3Dmitry Orlov, the author of “Reinventing Collapse,” moved to the USA as a boy when his dissident parents managed to get out of the Soviet Union. He spent most of his life here, went through school and college, but ventured back to Russia for a while in the 1990s out of curiosity after the fall of the USSR. He returned to the USA where he worked in IT and eventually moved onto a boat in Boston Harbor. He’s published many other books, including “The Five Stages of Collapse,” “Shrinking the Technosphere,” “The Pitfalls of English,” and has put out the Club Orlov Blog for more than a decade. I’m a big fan of his writings.
After the Great Financial Fiasco of 2009, Dmitry divided his time between Boston and wintering on the boat in Central America. For several years after he started a family, he sojourned in the waters off Beaufort, South Carolina. Finally, before the Covid Melodrama, he up and resettled in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he is establishing a new phase of his literary career writing in the Russian Language. He continues to blog in English. He is a keen observer of the political and technological scene.
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Didn’t you get the feeling this weekend that we’re living in HG Wells’ classic tale of the earth invaded by sinister alien spacecrafts? Our government is playing the story like a bassoon concerto. “American officials do not know what the objects were, much less their purpose or who sent them,” The New York Times reported, poaching a line from every horror movie of the 1950s. When do the giant ants show up on Fremont Street in Las Vegas?
Looks like they’ll keep up the suspense as long as possible, too. Oh, we can’t retrieve that thing up in Alaska due to white-out weather conditions… Oh, that other thing — the eight-sided silver tic-tac — it fell into Lake Huron, glug glug… and that first one, the big balloon payload, lies deep in Davy Jones’ Locker now. You’ll have to stand by, folks….
Let’s face it, all the other mindfucks set in motion by the folks-in-charge are not just losing their mojo — they’re generating a lot of nasty blow-back in the way of widespread distrust of authority and institutional collapse. Even Woked-up Democrat voters begin to suspect that the vaxxes they greeted like a holy deliverance might not be so good for you after all. I’m waiting for Rob Reiner’s head to explode when he starts to notice how many young SAG-AFTRA members are waking up dead in West Hollywood.
More to the point, you are now correct to suspect that the entire Covid-19 episode, from the design of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus to the gene-modification shots put out by Pfizer and Moderna (erroneously labeled “vaccines”), was a joint Intel-DOD operation, not really a public health crisis. The abiding mystery is… why? Why turn Western Civilization upside down and inside out and then try to pound the whole thing down a rat-hole?
Frankly, the only angle that makes sense is that our government is captive to a hostile force. The WEF, the WHO, and the UN are the most obvious culprits, certainly the most talked-up, the most active on-the-scene. But until a few years ago these organizations had no real influence on the world. They were bad jokes… only pretending to protect the global community’s interests… actually completely incapable, utterly incompetent. Klaus Schwab, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus? Please! What Muppet factory were they made in? The UN was a mere collective of Third World hustles and rackets. And everybody knew it, but the developed world played along as a sop to these sad-sack nations and their greedy officials because the grift was chump-change.
You’d have more reason to suspect that those outfits were fronting for something else, and that something might be the CCP. The Marxist culture war against American manners and values is unmistakably a re-play of China’s cultural revolution, with all its insults against reason, tradition, custom, common sense, and due process of law. The titanic wave of Woke lunacy was hatched in the universities over many decades — places easily infiltrated by malign agents — and seeded into political activism on the Left, especially among the Democratic Party — which now has a figurehead president implicated in bribery and treason.
How and why else has the evidence of those crimes been so sedulously suppressed when it should have been served up to a grand jury post-haste in 2019, as soon as Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced? The darn thing was absolutely stuffed with a rich documentary record of crime from the lowest (drugs and whores), to the highest (payoffs from foreign actors). The extraordinary lengths that the DOJ and FBI traced to hide it, or pretend to not look inside it, is one of the most transparently degenerate acts ever seen in US history — and continues to this day.
And now, all of it unwinds rapidly, all the organized deception and lying. You could argue, perhaps, that US government agencies, this aggregation of interests we call the Deep State, just went plumb insane from guilt, fear, and shame over its own long-running, rampant criminality, but even that fails to answer how come, for instance, the CDC is still pushing booster shots of a toxic bio-engineered cocktail that maims and kills people. Are they aiming to reduce the US population on-purpose — at the same time that the DHS is ushering millions from other countries across the border illegally? Is the Deep State working China’s will against us and the rest of the West? Did we collaborate with our adversaries in our own collapse?
All the usual totemic tropes the Deep State employs to intimidate its opponents — Russia, white supremacy, right-wing extremism, racism, misogyny, transphobia, blah blah — have lost their power to scare the non-insane. Fewer Americans believe the official bullshit about keeping America “safe” from “misinformation.” It’s perfectly obvious now that “misinformation” is a synonym for “the truth.” So, what have they got left? A UFO invasion? Is that what it’s come to? I guess so.
Forces are aligning now to shake this creaking system down to its foundation. The moment of criticality will most likely come when the financial markets crater and the US dollar gets broken by international ridicule to a near-worthless token of decrepitude. The public can apparently take an awful lot of gaslighting, double-dealing, and derogation. But that all changes when you can’t buy food anymore. The Superbowl is over. Here we are now, in the heart of the heart of winter, waiting for the ground to shift. Reality is out there howling against a cold moon, fixing to run our enemy down, like so much frightened prey. Before long, you’ll see blood on the snow.
The post War of the Worlds appeared first on Kunstler.
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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 remaining sole 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 time of choosing, 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, hardly made a peep, nor did the rest of Western Europe, which now faces a future that looks, energy-wise, like a 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 at the time (October 2020) whether 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 Raban 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 Rep. Danial 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 1/6/20.
Mr. Goldman is a man to watch, especially as the House actually does give its complete attention later this year to the 1/6/20 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 watchers that peddlers hawk on Wall Street’s sidewalk.
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Have you forgotten the Chinese balloon incident yet? Don’t worry, you will. It was just a momentary distraction from the slow-motion crack-up of our country. And it came along with a boffo jobs report, led by hiring in “leisure and hospitality.” Oddly, the same month saw a record car re-po number, even higher than it was in the depths of the 2009 Great Financial Fiasco — raising the question: how will all those people without cars actually get to Disney World? And if they do, what will they use for money there?
America was bundled up last week, huddled beside space heaters and wood-stoves against an Arctic super-blast that also distracted us from the global warming scare-talk which the agit-prop industry has ramped up to replace the disintegrating Covid-19 story in the public’s attention-space. Lesson: The more impotent and inept our government gets, the more it will seek the appearance of exquisite control over everything… employment… the weather. The key fallacy of the climate change crusade is that there’s nothing our government can do about it except posture and pretend — and issue more idiotic regulations that prevent people from doing business and leading their lives.
The citizenry, a.k.a. the public, has been successfully divided and groomed into two political factions. On the Left: those who believe anything government officials tell them, no matter how absurd. Most of that faction’s senior members used to be people who believed nothing the government told them, but then they got “Woke.” Now, they believe that mRNA vaccines are really good for you… that basing all social conduct on skin color will exorcise racism from society… and that sexual confusion is the highest-and-best psychological state of being. If you try to debate any of these points with them, they’ll block or cancel you. If that doesn’t work, they’ll orchestrate a new episode of political chaos as an excuse to push you around.
On the Right: those skeptical and worried about government overreach, those opposed to meddlesome official censorship, those who resist the manipulation of language to invert and subvert a formerly coherent value-system, those who recognize a hustle when they see it and coercion when they feel it, those who respect the long struggle of mankind to construct a comprehensible view of reality and mechanisms for testing it. Those who insist on a certain degree of personal liberty under a fair and upright rule-of-law.
Nothing is more self-evident than how implacably at-odds these two factions are. The ascendance of the Left follows exactly our glide-path into collapse. The so-called mass formation phenomenon rises as a function of suppressed panic over America’s wobbling business model, especially among the managerial class and the “experts” who are supposedly in charge. The more their management and expertise fails, the more desperately they seek to control every lever of daily life. Pretty soon, their policies become mindless — in the pure sense of the word.
The Right perceives that its opponents have lost their minds, but there is no arguing with people who are literally insane. What must be done is to wrest political power away from them. In the madness of the Left, power is solely a destructive force, and coercion is a form of pleasure-seeking. Unable to control the dynamics in-play, they seek to wreck the dynamics, to induce as much chaos as possible, so as to punish the non-insane.
That is exactly what the Green New Deal does. Unable to control the dynamic disruptive changes in the global oil-and-gas industry that our high-tech economies depend on, the Left pretends that there is work-around “Green” energy system that can replace fossil fuels with wind and solar devices that don’t scale up and which require fossil fuels to make and deploy. It’s slick and grandiosely hypothetical (i.e., wishful thinking), and the net effect of this major crusade will be to hasten the collapse and impoverishment of our society (ergo: the punishment).
Keep all this in mind as you watch the Congressional inquiries now just getting underway. Much as they are likely to reveal the insane and arguably criminal machinations of a panicked bureaucracy, and the figures who run it, the Left will remain impervious to any truthful revelations that emerge. Of course, many of these officials are culpable for actions extremely damaging to the people of this land, and the masses on the Left who supported those actions — such as mandatory vaccinations — will be among the most damaged. These True Believers will find it hard to admit that they did it to themselves.
So, the hearings upcoming, such as the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, will probably not change the minds of your friends and relatives stuck in the mass formation of Jacobin-Wokery. But the hearings will be a step in wresting power away from these maniacs. Part of that step must be to demonstrate the dishonesty of recent elections, so as to remove the implanted mechanisms that enabled that dishonesty: mail-in, no-ID ballots, “motor-voter” laws, electronic vote-counting machines. If that can be fixed, the left can be voted out of power.
The hearings will take place against the back-drop of our deteriorating charade over in Ukraine. The Zelensky regime that we employed to foment this conflict with Russia is losing its mojo for creating chaos in that corner of the world. The newly-announced tank caper will amount to nothing. Russia’s war-aim is simple: the elimination of chaos on its border. This rational objective is something that America’s Party of Chaos can’t understand. How will it react when chaos gets cancelled in Ukraine? Probably by attempting to foment chaos in another corner of the world, or on the home front — another reason that power must be wrested away from it.
Also, of course, there is the deteriorating economic scene in the background of things political. The insolvency contagion is spreading now among the big boys — the global corps, the national brands, the car-makers, the giant retailers who are shuttering their outlets by the hundreds. This change on the economic landscape is actually a positive trend. As the giants fall, their roles in daily life will be assumed by the smaller organisms occupying niches in local economic ecologies. This is one bright horizon for young people otherwise sunk in hopelessness. Get ready to do business! Opportunity awaits! When you embrace it, your insanity will dissolve and the world will look meaningful again.
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The New York Times — indicted this week as a chronic purveyer of untruths by no less than their supposed ally, The Columbia Journalism Review — is lying to you again this morning.
This whopper is an artful diversion from the reality on-the-ground that Ukraine is just about finished in this tragic and idiotic conflict staged by the geniuses behind their play-thing President “Joe Biden.” By the way, it’s not a coincidence that Ukraine and “JB” are going down at the same time. The two organisms are symbionts: a matched pair of mutual parasites feeding off each other, swapping each other’s toxic exudations, and growing delirious on their glide path to a late winter crash.
The point of the war, you recall, is “to weaken Russia” (so said DoD Sec’y Lloyd Austin), even to bust it up into little geographic tatters to our country’s advantage — that is, America’s dominance in global affairs, and especially the supremacy of the US dollar in global trade settlements.
The result of the war so far has been the opposite of that objective. US sanctions made Russia stronger by shifting its oil exports to more reliable Asian customers. Kicking Russia out of the SWIFT global payments system prompted the BRIC countries to build their own alternative trade settlement system. Cutting off Russia from trade with Western Civ has stimulated the process of import replacement (i.e., Russia making more of the stuff it used to buy from Europe). Confiscating Russia’s off-shore dollar assets has alerted the rest of the world to dump their dollar assets (especially US Treasury bonds) before they, too, get mugged. Nice going, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, and the rest of the gang at the Foggy Bottom genius factory.
All of which raises the question: who is liable to bust up into tatters first, the USA or Russia? I commend to you Dmitry Orlov’s seminal work, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects, Revised & Updated. For those of you not paying attention the past thirty-odd years, Russia, incorporated as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. The USSR was a bold experiment based on the peculiar and novel ill-effects of industrialism, especially gross economic inequality. Alas, the putative remedy for that, advanced by Karl Marx, was a despotic system of pretending that individual humans had no personal aspirations of their own.
That business model could be reduced to the comic aphorism: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It failed and the USSR gurgled down history’s drain. Russia reemerged from the dust, minus many of its Eurasian outlands. Remarkably little blood was shed in the process. Mr. Orlov’s book points to some very interesting set-ups that softened the landing. There was no private property in the USSR, so when it collapsed, nobody was evicted or foreclosed from where they lived. Very few people had cars in the USSR, so the city centers were still intact and people could get around on buses, trams, and trains. The food system had been botched for decades by low-incentive collectivism, but the Russian people were used to planting gardens — even city dwellers, who had plots out-of-town — and it tided them over during the years of hardship before the country managed to reorganize.
Compare that to America’s prospects. In an economic crisis, Americans will have their homes foreclosed out from under them, or will be subject to eviction from rentals. The USA has been tragically built-out on a suburban sprawl template that will be useless without cars and with little public transport. Cars, of course, are subject to repossession for non-payment of contracted loans. The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies. These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it after it’s harvested.
There’s another difference between the fall of the USSR and the collapse underway in the USA. Underneath all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a national identity and a coherent culture. The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which is actually just a hustle aimed at extracting what remains from the diminishing stock of productive activity and giving the plunder to a mob of “intersectional” complainers — e.g. the City of San Francisco’s preposterous new plan to award $5-million “reparation” payments to African-American denizens of the city, where slavery never existed.
As for culture, consider that the two biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video game industries. The drug business might be a close third, but most of that action is off-the-books, so it’s hard to tell. So much for the so-called “arts.” Our political culture verges on totally degenerate, but that is too self-evident to belabor, and the generalized management failures of our polity are a big part of what’s bringing us down — most particularly the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes.
This might change, at least a little bit, as the oppositional House of Representatives commences hearings on an array of disturbing matters. Meanwhile, be wary of claims in The New York Times and other propaganda organs that our Ukraine project is a coming up a big win, and that the racketeering operations of the Biden family are a right-wing conspiracy theory. These two pieces of the conundrum known as reality are blowing up in our country’s face. It will be hard not to notice.
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Surprise Surprise! Everybody and his/her/zhe’s uncle sent this in nomination, and seeing as February is Black History Month…
Behold: the new monument to Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta Scott King. The sculpture, called “Embrace,” was installed weeks ago on the Boston Common at the spot where Dr. King gave a speech in 1965. It depicts the hug that husband and wife enjoyed at the announcement he had won the Nobel Peace Prize — minus heads and bodies. The artist is Hank Willis Thomas, who said: “This work is a reminder that each of us has in us the capacity to be either of those two people or actually something inspired by and more influential.” Uh-huh, well, okay….
Alas, the unveiling provoked a furor, largely over the illegibility of the thing. What’s going there? Kinda looks like Mrs. King is wrasseling with a giant moray eel. I’m unaware that deep-sea diving was one of Dr. King’s enthusiasms. Personally, I like it for the abiding mystery it will induce in passers-by. Thousands every year will mutter to themselves, WTF?
A Bostonian complained: “I know the design came from a photo of MLK and Coretta hugging each other. But why not have a sculpture of their faces instead? We see Paul Revere’s face in 2 locations. Yet for MLK, we get arms? I live here, and I’m honestly disappointed, Boston.”
Another said: “I’m sorry but this new MLK sculpture in Boston is the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Coretta Scott King’s cousin, Seneca Scott, 43, of Oakland, CA, averred that the statue seemed to depict an heroically large male generative organ. “If you had showed that statute to anyone in the ‘hood, they’d have been like, ‘No, absolutely not’,” Mr. Scott said.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_370.mp3Stephan Sanders-Faes is an historian of Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Bergen, Norway. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Graz in 2011 and obtained the Habilitation in Early Modern and Modern History from the University of Zurich in 2018. Before joining the Bergen faculty in 2020, he taught for ten years at the history departments at the Universities of Zurich and Fribourg, as well as held the István Deák Visiting Professorship in East Central European Studies at Columbia University in 2018.
Stephan’s research focuses on post-medieval Central and Eastern Europe (c. 1350-1850), with a particular interest in urban-rural relations, administrative, bureaucratic, and constitutional changes (“ABC history”), and state transformation — that is, the emergence, and change over time, of the European national state. He’s the author of two books: Urban Elites of Zadar (2013); and Europas Habsburgisches Jahrhundert (2018). His next book will be Lordship and State Transformation: Bohemia and the Habsburg Monarchy from the Thirty Years War to the War of the Spanish Succession, expected in 2022.
He blogs on current events at https://fackel.substack.com. Fakel means “torch” in German.
Currently, Stephan is investigating the diffusion of state authority into the rural periphery of Habsburg Lower Austria from the late eighteenth century to the advent of constitutional rule in 1860s, exploring the role of non-state actors as state-builders, the patterns of transition, and the social factors influencing them.
His other contributions to the field includes consulting for the EU Commission’s Research Executive Agency (Marie Curie-Sk?odowska fellowships), the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki), and the Swiss National Science Foundation, as well as serving on the international editorial board of Atti (published by the Center for Historical Research in Rovinj/Rovigo, Croatia), and as peer-reviewer for Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Archivio Veneto, and the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, among others.
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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 discernable 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 the repercussions of injury and death from it. 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 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 or 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.
The post The War Against Us appeared first on Kunstler.
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I doubt that many Americans — even the masses sunk in vaccine smuggery and obsessive Trump-o-phobia — believe that America’s Ukraine project is working out for us. Of course, to even begin thinking about this debacle, you must at least suspect that our government is lying about virtually everything it has its hand in. Name something it is not lying about, I dare you.
So, what was the Ukraine project? To use that sad-ass country as a vector to disable and destroy Russia. You can’t over-state the stupidity of that objective. And why did we want to do that? Because… reasons. Oh? And what were they? Well, Russia was… there. Oh? And what was it doing? Trying to take over the world? Uh, no. It was actually just trying to be a normal European nation again after its traumatic 75-year-long experiment with communism, which ended in 1991.
And then, after that, coming along pretty well under Mr. Putin. Did I say that? Yes, I did, because it is a fact. Russia wrote new private property laws, made commerce legal again, and allowed its citizens to do business. Russia wasn’t threatening any other nations, most particularly its former province, Ukraine. It had even invited Ukraine to be a sovereign member of its trade association, the customs union, with a bunch of other regional states who had rational interests in good regional relations. That’s what set off the maniacs at the US State Department — under Secretary John Kerry, a.k.a. the haircut-in-search-of a-brain — who, in 2014, decided to overthrow Ukraine’s government.
The project since then was to use the US-controlled Ukraine government to antagonize Russia and, finally, to draw Russia into a military operation intended, SecDef Lloyd Austin said more than once, “to weaken Russia.” Well, everything we’ve done there, from eight years of shelling the Donbas, to kicking Russia out of the West’s banking system, to pouring billions of US dollars into Ukraine’s corrupt government, has only strengthened Russia internally, earned the approbation of many other nations who object to US interference in their regions, and steered poor Ukraine into the graveyard of failed states.
We are losing this unnecessary proxy war about as steadily as possible, and actually making Russia look good in the process. Russia could have ended the war in five minutes by turning Kiev into an ashtray, but it spent the first eight months of the operation trying to avoid busting up Ukraine’s infrastructure, so as not to turn it into a failed state (that would present new and worse problems). Mr. Putin made many overtures to negotiate an end to the conflict, all rejected by Ukraine, the US, and its NATO “partners.”
So, now Russia is grinding on-the-ground to reduce Ukraine’s ability to continue making war by systematically killing the troops Ukraine foolishly throws into the battle line, and destroying Ukraine’s heavy weapons. Ukraine is about out of its own soldiers and weapons. Russia is maneuvering to roll over what’s left there and put an end to these pointless and needless hostilities. Contrary to US propaganda, Russia has no ambition to conquer NATO territory. Rather its aim is to restore order to a corner of the world that has been its legitimate sphere of influence for centuries — and more than once been used as a doormat for European armies to invade Russia.
Apparently, we can’t allow Russia to clean up this mess we made — or we pretend that we can’t, even though it’s happening anyway, whether we like it or not. So now, the US promises to send thirty-one M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. A bold move, you think? Not exactly. By the time these tanks get anywhere in the vicinity of Ukraine, this war is likely to be over. Never mind the difficult business of training the few remaining eligible Ukrainian men between sixteen and sixty how to operate the tanks, and train maintenance crews, and deliver inventories of spare parts — you see where this is going — not to mention the certainty that the Russians will simply blow them up as fast as they appear on the premises. Anyway, a measly thirty-one tanks that can barely be operated is meaningless compared to hundreds of T-72s backed by newer T-14 tanks the Russians can muster from just over their border with Ukraine.
The tank proffer is, sad to say (for the dignity of our country), a joke, kind of a last feeble pretense before the whole thing ends in ignominy for the “Joe Biden” team — whoever that actually is. The repercussions are liable to be ugly for our country, not necessarily more military trouble in other lands (which we probably lack the capacity to engage in now), but something more personal: the collapse of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and a vicious loss of purchasing power here at home. That would provoke a situation worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, and that’s probably where things are going.
The Ukraine misadventure will disappear from America’s collective consciousness in a New York minute and a Fourth Turning jamboree of serious domestic political disorder will commence in short order. If you think “Joe Biden’s” term in office has been a disaster so far, just wait. You ain’t seen nuttin yet.
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The big annual World Economic Forum meet-up concluded last week with a mighty “So, What?” as the world struggled with some success to get its mind right after years of relentless WEF-inspired psy-ops. Own nothing… eat bugs… great re-set… yeah, right. These days, fewer sovereign individuals believe der Schwabenklaus bullshit about the necessity of becoming menials for the “fittest 0.1 percent” of mankind who comprise the WEF’s cabal of elite “strategic partners.” News reports pegged the attendance in Davos this year at a shocking mere half of invitees. Did the absentees quail at the risk of all being together in the same auditorium (what with all those drones and missiles available on the black market)? Or could they not find enough unvaccinated pilots to fly their private jets?
By no strange coincidence, one of the WEF’s most sadistic leadership implants, PM Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, dropped out of office the same week, declaring she had “no gas left in the tank.” Old George Orwell had a pretty keen eye for the arc of history, but it never occurred to him that Big Brother would turn out to be Big Sister. Ms. Ardern was the one who said of her regime, “We will continue to be your single source of truth… Unless you hear it from us it is not the truth.” Polls indicated her party would get thrashed in this year’s parliamentary election. Next door in equally vaxxed-to-the-max Australia, the government had to confess last week that the country had more Covid-19 deaths in the first half of January this new year than in all of 2021.
Europe is starting to emerge from its Covid coma, France especially, where disgruntled masses marched in the streets last week, evincing growing disgust with WEF poodle Emmanuel Macron. Germany, not so much. Is it possible they really haven’t learned anything from what went on 1933-1945? Great Britain, a basket-case of Woke double-think and economic tribulation, is crumbling over excess all-causes mortality and a public health officialdom addicted to lying. British doctors are in revolt against the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, the UK equivalent of the FDA.
A wake-up is underway in these sore-beset United States. It was no small thing, for instance, that former “vaccine” cheerleader, Scott Adams, the podcaster of the Dilbert comic strip fame, admitted pretty forthrightly that he was wrong about all that. “The thing that [the unvaxxed] don’t have to worry about is what I have to worry about: what happens with this vaccination five years from now? All my fancy analytics took me to a bad place.”
Elon Musk shocked the Twitterverse (and beyond) by confessing that he only took the vaxxes because international travel for business required it, and his second shot was a near-death experience (while his cousin developed myocarditis from it). Meanwhile, the UN issued a warning to him through a WEF mouthpiece, EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency, Vera Jourova: comply and regulate speech on the platform, or else….
We have the rules which must be complied with and otherwise there will be sanctions. I think that the confidence has been weakened, and I had quite a high level of confidence when it comes to Twitter. I have to say that we worked with knowledgeable people, with layers, with sociologists, who understood that they have to behave in some decent way. Not to cause really big harm to society…” she said.
Something tells me that Mr. Musk will invite these busybodies to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. As the Tweeter @BlackFlagExpat explained: “Musk can simply set up the server capacity outside of EU jurisdiction (UK, Andorra, Switz, Russia?) and move all data to those physical and virtual servers. Then lay off all European employees and stop paying rent on all leases.” Nice!
That old rats-from-a-sinking-ship feeling emanates from the hazy region where “Joe Biden” dwells. Chief of staff Ron Klain is handing over his duties to former Covid-19 “czar” Jeff Zients — who did such a swell job keeping Americans mis-and-disinformed through the heart of the “vaccine” campaign (January 2021 to April 2022). Every thread of the Covid-19 narrative promulgated by this ass, and the sachems of the CDC and FDA, are shredded, proved to be not only lies, but deadly lies. Every angle of Covid policy was wrong, and treasonously wrong. This is who will soon be, ostensibly, leading the country — since you can be sure that “JB” is not. Nobody will believe a word that Jeff Zients utters. The mainstream media is even turning against this coterie of evil nincompoops.
The sociopathic Political Left and its international managers have lost control of the ball in this game. They can insist on any sort of absurdity, but the people have stopped buying it. Resentment over all this is breaking out. Nobody wants any more boosters. The running dogs of official propaganda, such as Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel, await their career executions. The years of Reality Consensus Disorder draw to a close. The counter-revolution finally begins.
Remember this?
(As “Joe Biden” likes to say: Not a Joke !)
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlertCast_369.mp3C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and political satirist, and author at The Consent Factory blog. His plays have been produced and have toured at theaters and festivals including Riverside Studios (London), 59E59 Theaters (New York), Traverse Theatre (Edinburgh), Belvoir St. Theatre (Sydney), the Du Maurier World Stage Festival (Toronto), Needtheater (Los Angeles), 7 Stages (Atlanta), the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Adelaide Fringe, Brighton Festival, and the Noorderzon Festival (the Netherlands), among others. His writing awards include the 2002 First of the Scotsman Fringe Firsts, Scotsman Fringe Firsts in 2002 and 2005, and the 2004 Best Play of the Adelaide Fringe. His political satire and commentary has been published by OffGuardian, ZeroHedge, ColdType, Rubikon, RT.com, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, and many other publications, and has been widely translated. His dystopian science fiction novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant.
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Of course, the “Joe Biden” classified document scandal is less about the documents per se than it is about the Biden family business, which was accepting llarge sums of money from shady foreign interests for unspecified services rendered. “Joe Biden,” the brand, is owned, perhaps to the degree that he can be called “a sell-out.” Selling out your country is kind of serious.
For instance, our country is right now deeply involved in a war between a Biden family client, Ukraine, and its angry relative, Russia. The USA has pumped more than $100-billion into Ukraine just this past year. That’s quite a return-on-investment for the million or so Hunter Biden grifted out of the Burisma gas company. It is alleged that Ukraine has operated as a gigantic international money laundry, especially since our State Department and Intel Community overthrew Ukraine’s government in 2014 and put in a series of errand boys.
Ukraine did not have to become a geopolitical hot-spot. We made it a problem on-purpose. The strategy, if you can call it that, was stated explicitly by SecDef Lloyd Austin: “to weaken Russia.” That was based on the NeoCon game theory that the USA had to maintain at least the appearance of dominance over as much of the world as possible — a.k.a. hegemony — at the very moment in history that America’s economy, culture, and institutions had entered a state of collapse, visible to everyone in the world. By the way, our efforts in Ukraine against Russia have only strengthened Russia — its currency, its balance of trade, its own internal political security, and its military defenses.
The Ukraine fiasco has surely benefited America’s military contractors and the parasitical ecosystem that feeds off it. Ukraine has benefited not so much. To be blunt and concise, Ukraine will come out of this a much-diminished entity, with no ability to cause any more problems in that region of the world. The money laundry will be closing down. As that happens, recriminations will pour out of Ukraine, implicating many American officials in the laundry operations, including former Ambassador Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch and her circle. Wait for that.
So, the tussle over the docs is a smokescreen for those artful machinations. The appointment by praetorian Attorney General Merrick Garland of a special counsel, Robert K. Hur, to investigate the doc affair is the insurance policy. Mr. Hur’s job is to prevent any witness from testifying on these matters before a congressional committee on the grounds of protecting “an ongoing investigation.” You can bet that whichever committee takes on this hairball, it will find workarounds to overcome that gambit and start unraveling the grift behind the docs. It will get ugly.
The evidence for all that is neatly packaged in the notorious laptop computer that Biden family bag-man Hunter Biden dropped off in a Wilmington, DE repair shop and then “forgot about,” so the story goes. I wonder about that. My armchair psychiatrist’s take is that Hunter harbors a not-so-well suppressed wish to destroy the Big Guy, his father, who has sinned grievously against his son and made a monster of him. (A monster of depravity.) The classified docs that the Big Guy stashed in his various properties are quite secondary to the gigantic trove of deal memos with purchasers of influence (and photos of them with the Biden gang) stashed on that radioactive hard-drive.
I’ll never understand — and neither will you — how “Joe Biden” got propelled out of ignominious defeat in the earliest presidential primaries, to sweep the field on Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020. Around the same time, all his rivals magically dropped out of the race for the nomination. Some kind of message must have gone out from Deep State Central. Who wanted this licentious old grifter in White House? Well, probably his old boss, Barack Obama, and just about everyone in officialdom connected to the shenanigans in Ukraine dating back to 2014, and then the RussiaGate illegalities that ensued from it, especially former CIA boss John Brennan and his cronies. Under Mr. Obama, the whole US government had become something like a rotten log infested with sowbugs of grift, deceit, and malfeasance. Installing the dotty old bird in the White House would give Mr. Obama a stealth third term. Mostly, it would prevent the dreaded Golden Golem of populism, Donald Trump, from bringing any harm to that cabal and its, ahem, interests.
We do understand how “Joe Biden” won the 2020 election: via massive fraud engineered by fraud-master Marc Elias, king of the Lawfare trolls, who fine-tuned the mail-in ballot operation during the likewise engineered Covid-19 public health ruse. That wicked election business, of course, is just another grave matter requiring the utmost protection to prevent any inquiry from ever gaining traction. And yet all of it, the monumental government crime spree of recent years is all unraveling before our eyes — even before Jim Jordan or anyone else has even said boo from a House committee chair.
It’s all falling apart — along with America’s economy, our institutions, and our culture. The Biden family’s cover stories are collapsing, the government’s censorship and propaganda machine has thrown a rod, the Covid-19 story looks day-by-day like organized mass murder, election fraud issues still stalk the land despite every effort to squash them — and the grim reality coalesces that Russia is going to clean up the mess we made in Ukraine, and, in the aftermath, probably produce a shit-ton of evidence of American corruption and villainy there.
“Joe Biden,” the phantom president, has entered the air-lock, waiting to be jettisoned into the deep space of ignominy, chocolate mint chip ice cream cone in hand. Kamala Harris watches the action offstage in a fugue of anxiety and depression. She does not want to become president — and, guess what, nobody really wants her to be, either. She won’t even have to be induced to step aside. Her hysteria will be so great that not even the hypnotists of the Intel Community will be able to calm her down. She’ll run shrieking from it back to California. The levers of control finally fail. By a caprice of history, and the genius of the founding fathers, Kevin McCarthy lands in the White House. A page turns. The coup is finally over. That’s my fantasy du jour.
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So many calamities, quandaries, and mysteries swirl in the zeitgeist these days that life in the USA feels like swimming against a rising tide of poisoned guacamole. Nothing has been able to stop that green spewage from the political Left, especially as it desecrates our very language to turn everything up, down, and everything inside, outside. You end up drowning the consensus about reality under the muck. Now, finally, there are political forces gathering to oppose all this deliberate malice and deceit and they will need something like a fire-hose to clean the joint up.
The outstanding feature of this political illness has been the utter lack of accountability for gross insults against the public interest — that is, things that really matter. As Congresswoman Ilhan Omar once put it so obliquely, “some people did some things.” Yes, people are at the bottom of all this mischief against the country and none of them have had to answer for any of it yet. Will it matter if they do? It may not correct all the disasters of recent past years, but it may prevent more disasters ahead as the nation struggles with epic changes to the business model for running everything in this land. Some people will have to do a lot of things to straighten out our agenda.
Everyone is aware by now that the new Congress is assembling several committees to attempt just that. One is the aptly-named panel on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. That’s an excellent name for it because the officials running the engines of state have carried out a war against the people. It is, after all, supposed to be a government of, by, and for the people, not a government against the people. Where to even start?
Former US attorney and chief-of-staff to the SecDef, Kash Patel, had a good idea: start with the latest insult to the country. Haul in the newly-appointed special counsel assigned to the “Joe Biden” purloined document scandal. His name is Robert Hur. He was a top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the height of RussiaGate, and liaison to the Robert Mueller operation. Mr. Hur participated in filing falsified warrants based on Steele Dossier nonsense to the FISA court. He should have been accountable for that. He’s not fit to serve as any sort of legal arbiter in a national scandal. He was not appointed to shed any light on the issue, but to bury it under a load of procedural horse-shit, in particular, the dodge that questions about “ongoing investigations” can’t be answered. Let’s disarm that weapon from the get-go. And why not appoint Mr. Patel chief counsel to the Weaponization of Government Committee?
Another person who must answer right away is CDC Director Rochelle Walensky because her agency is still aggressively pushing mRNA shots strongly implicated in causing injury and death among the American people. There are no more obvious weapons against the people than these deadly products retailed by Pfizer and Moderna. The government’s “vaccination” crusade has to stop ASAP. Not one more dose of the stuff should be given to anybody. An audit needs to be run on the CDC’s data base to determine exactly how it was manipulated to hide the facts about “vaccine” injuries and deaths.
The public should also hear why Ms. Walensky’s CDC promoted “incentive payments” to hospitals for each patient who died testing positive for Covid-19 (not necessarily from Covid-19). The payments per patient ranged wildly, state by state from $18,000 (NJ) to a whopping $471,000 (WVa). Why was that? The payments amounted to a bonanza for hospital administrators, who were incentivized not only to misattribute cause-of-death — the proverbial motorcycle crash victim who tests positive — but to let people die on ventilators.
The Weaponization of Government Committee might also subpoena FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf and his two predecessors during the Covid-19 event, Janet Woodcock and Stephen Hahn. The country needs to hear what they knew about the operation that produced the “vaccines” with such astonishing speed — as if these products were somehow in development before Covid-19 even appeared on the scene. They also need to answer about the shenanigans behind the following: the fudged and expedited “vaccine” trials; the demonization and virtual outlawing of existing safe and effective FDA-approved drugs for early treatment, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and other meds; the promotion of toxic remdesivir as a primary therapy for C-19; and the initiation and extension (for three years) of an emergency use authorization that shielded the drug companies from liability while injuries and deaths mounted.
Obviously, there are many other channels of inquiry waiting to be explored in the government’s war against the people, especially the lingering questions about election interference and the official censorship of news. The excellent writer who goes by Sundance at The Last Refuge website made some capital suggestions for going forward with these inquiries: one is to rely primarily on witness testimony rather than on documents that federal officials will surely do everything possible to hide. Don’t turn this into a futile battle over the docs. Let’s just hear what the people-in-charge have to say. Secondly — and this may be hard for many angry, injured people to swallow — immunize witnesses against prosecution, to give them no incentive to hide what they know, what actions they carried out, and who told them to do it. Give them this immunity, Sundance wrote, in the interest of maximum transparency — because punishment of these characters is less important than showing the people of this country how far off the rails we have gone, and how to get back on. It may not be optimally satisfying, but it’s an argument worth pondering.
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You thought the Titanic sinking was an astounding spectacle? Looks like the ship of the Deep State got some holes ripped in its hull and may be fixing to go down sometime in 2023. The fun-and-games about voting for Speaker of the House are over. Time to get down to bidness and compel some folks to do some ‘splainin’ under oath. You don’t know for sure who will be chair exactly of which congressional committee, but there will be several of them running at the same time, looking to shake out some verifiable truth from the dumpster of misrule, sedition, and perfidy that America fell into the past decade. Here are a couple of my top outlines for inquiries.
Covid-19. Forget about Fauci for the moment. First, subpoena the various deputies working under him going back as far as the twentieth century and see what they know about the twisted path that gain-of-function research on corona viruses traveled from the DOD’s DARPA to the labs of Dr. Ralph Baric at the U of North Carolina, to labs in Canada, Ukraine, and finally to Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Then put Dr. Fauci’s ass in the witness chair and wring out the ‘splainin.’ Ask about the patents on the various parts of C-19 and on the mRNA “vaccines” cooked up to fight it, and who got the royalties emanating off all of that. Ask him how he continued gain-of-function research post-2014 after the White House directed it to stop. Ask him to ‘splain’ his relations with one Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance.
Ask Deborah Birx to ‘splain’ exactly what was going on in that White House C-19 task force. Why did the public health officers demonize early treatments with known, safe, drugs and censor anyone who spoke out against their insane policies. What did the task force know about Pfizer and Moderna’s “vaccine” trials. Ask Rochelle Walensky how come she and the CDC kept pushing mRNA shots and boosters long after a broad array of injuries and deaths presented from their use. Put Bill Gates’s ass in the chair and have him ‘splain’ the labyrinth of funding mechanisms he set up to push “vaccines” all over the globe and how his tentacles happen to penetrate into the World Health Org (WHO). Ask him if he ever had conversations with the leadership of the WHO and the World Economic Forum (WEF) about population reduction and methods for achieving it.
Weaponization of Government. Time for FBI Director Christopher Wray to ‘splain’ how come he sat silently in possession of the Hunter Biden laptop — stuffed as it was with deal memoranda about payoffs from Ukraine and other foreign lands — through the first impeachment of Mr. Trump in late 2019 and early 2020, from the initial House hearings through the Senate trail… when said laptop was full of exculpatory evidence proving that Mr. Trump had a good reason to inquire about those matters in a phone call with V. Zelensky. Ask Mr. Wray what he knows about the roles of “whistleblower” (CIA agent) Eric Ciaramella and Intel Agency Inspector General Michael Atkinson and their relations with former House Intel Committee chair Adam Schiff. Ask Mr. Wray how many federal agents were involved in the January 6 riot at the Capitol building, both inside and outside. Ask him why one Ray Epps was never indicted for incitement captured on video. Ask him why the FBI never made a murder or manslaughter referral in the death of Ashli Babbitt. Don’t let him bullshit the committee about “ongoing investigations” blah blah. Ask Mr. Wray if he directly ordered his agents to monitor and censor social media companies, and, if not him, who did?
Summon the ghost of James Comey to ‘splain’ the finer points of RussiaGate: how he fell for Hillary Clinton’s Steele Dossier prank, how he used Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman to leak info about confidential meetings with Mr. Trump, whether he ordered Peter Strzok’s sandbagging operation on Gen. Mike Flynn. the FISA court shenanigans, the hiring of Crowdstrike instead of using FBI forensic experts to vet evidence, the run-up to “Crossfire Hurricane,” the roles of International men of mystery Stefan Halper and Josef Mifsud in the operations to incriminate Trump appointees, Nellie Ohr’s role as a DOJ-FBI go-between with the Fusion GPS company.
Let’s hear from former CIA director John Brennan about the “17 Intel Agencies” who swore Russia was behind 2016 election interference and then about the 50-odd distinguished intel officers and other high officials who swore that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russia put-on job. Ask former Attorney General Bill Barr to ‘splain’ if he was informed about the Hunter Biden laptop when the FBI got it in 2019. Bring back former AG Jeff Sessions to ‘splain’ how the Mueller Special Counsel’s office was stuffed with Democratic Party activist Lawfare cadres, and how he determined if Mr. Mueller was mentally up to the job. Bring in Mr. Mueller to ‘splain’ how he testified that in the two-year course of his inquiry he never heard of the company Fusion GPS.
Find a special booster chair for Merrick Garland to ‘splain’ how come so many January 6 suspects are being held indefinitely pre-trial in the DC lockup on rinky-dink charges under the harshest conditions (solitary confinement, denial of medical care) in defiance of due process of law, in particular the constitutional right to a speedy trial. Ask Mr. Garland why he’s devoting vast resources of the DOJ to pursue ever more January 6 protesters on rinky-dink charges. Ask him to ‘splain’ how it came to pass that he went after parents protesting at school boards about indecent sex ed for little children and racist anti-white indoctrination. Ask him about sending SWAT teams on predawn raids to the homes of investigation targets whose lawyers volunteered to deliver them to the FBI offices. Ask him why he appointed a RussiaGate-involved lawyer, one Robert K Hur, as Special Counsel in the “Joe Biden” classified document matter.
That’s just my short list of areas to begin excavations. The Biden Family influence-peddling operation would be a fertile ground for a dedicated inquiry of a special committee. So would the adventures of Democratic Party Lawfare election engineer Marc Elias, along with the election funding activities ($400-million) of Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Technology and Civic Life in 2020. I’m sure readers can think of a thousand other matters worth airing in the public arena.
One somewhat disconnected thought, a sort-of postscript: The World Economic Forum’s annual jamboree at Davos, Switzerland, opens this coming Monday. Der Schwabenklaus, Bill Gates, and an international cast of global Big Machers will be in one room for the opening plenary session all at the same time. Think about it. Just sayin’.
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Insurrections galore spark off all of a sudden, and 2023 was just born days ago! Want to know why? Because the business model of the global economy is broken and the supposed remedy for that is centralized control of populations and super-strict regulation of all their activities — that is, techno-tyranny (with Marxist characteristics, as the Chinese like to put it). Not everybody wants to ride that bus, and so an epic economic problem becomes an arduous political struggle, here and elsewhere in the world.
A great mob of many thousands went apeshit in Brazil over the weekend in that country’s weird, geographically isolated capital, Brasilia, a horror of 1960s-style Modernist city planning. They stormed the national congress and trashed the offices within to protest the fishy election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva over the former incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. As in our own country, the quarrel was over the mysterious behavior of voting machines and the unwillingness of election officials or courts to verify the results. The New York Times offered a thumbnail of Mr. Bolsonaro, who is sitting out the current action in Florida:
The resulting picture showed an elected leader, first as a congressman and then as president, who has built a narrative of fraudulent elections based on inaccuracies, out-of-context reports, circumstantial evidence, conspiracy theories and downright falsehoods — much like former President Donald J. Trump.”
Get it? There’s no way fraud could have happened, just like in our country. And Bolsonaro is another Trump. It explains everything. All complaints are “baseless,” “false,” and “conspiracy theories.” End-of-story…. Are these shopworn tropes maybe losing their mojo? And is The New York Times embarrassing itself, a little bit, to trot them out as if they are actually arguments against anything?
The truth is more that Mr. Lula is another Hugo Chavez, poised to wreck Brazil with a fresh attempt at nationalizing all enterprise, ramping up a Marxist police state, and inviting China to partner-up in the action, including new Chinese military bases in the western hemisphere — an interesting challenge to the Monroe Doctrine (if anyone remembers what it says). And so, Mr. Lula has arrested hundreds of protesters and declared a national emergency.
Don’t expect it to stop there. The protesters are asking the army to intervene, as Brazil’s constitution actually obligates them to do in election disputes. Also, unlike the USA, Brazil has plenty of prior experience with the army removing elected leaders. Sometimes, electing yourself into tyranny is not the best way to solve economic problems. For the moment, Mr. Lula borrows a page from the American Left’s playbook for destroying a society. It will matter a lot if he doesn’t get away with it. That’s why the US political Swamp, and its errand boys in the news media, look on the action in Brazil with alarm. Unlike the January 6 protest in Washington, the Brasilia mob represents a genuine insurrection aimed at overthrowing a communist seizure of power.
Likewise, the US Swamp endured a rebellion in the House of Representatives last week. The 20-odd reps who revolted against Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker — Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and others — sought written guarantees — which they won – to prevent such legislative insults as the passage of a 4000-page omnibus spending bill that nobody could possibly read prior to voting, along with many Swamp-draining changes in rules. One rule change makes it much easier to remove Speaker McCarthy from leadership if he reneges on any of his agreements. The House can now proceed to multiple inquiries into the vast matrix of rot, malice, and deceit that has set the federal government at war against its own citizens.
One example of this despotic malice, of course, is the open border with Mexico that has enabled millions of unvetted migrants to enter the USA illegally with the federal immigration apparatus recruited (also illegally) to disperse them all over the country. “Joe Biden” traveled down to the border last weekend in a pretend show of concern for the disorder the stage-managers behind him have instigated there. They stupidly took him for a photo op to one of the few places on the border where he wouldn’t have to actually witness mobs crossing the Rio Grande: a stretch of wall that his predecessor, Mr. Trump, built. Hey, no unsightly foreign riffraff cluttering up the picture there!
Before long, the House is going to impeach Mr. Biden over this fiasco and quite a few other matters. He may not be convicted in the Senate, with its slim Democratic Party majority, but they will be compelled to hold a trial, at least, where a lot of dirty laundry will get aired, and pressure will mount for the old grifter to resign. Ms. Harris is sworn in and five minutes later suffers a “nervous collapse” that the public is not informed about. It sets off a wild series of events around the selection of a new vice-president — Barack or Michelle Obama? — that could burn the whole joint down. Stick around in ’23, unless the spike proteins have got your number. It’s going to be a humdinger of a year.
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The doctors of this country — of all Western Civ, really — owe their citizens an apology and an explanation, and even then, they might not be able to save modern medicine. The doctors have dishonored and disgraced their profession. They promulgated a Covid- 19 vaccination program that is now clearly killing a lot of people early in life and unnaturally. To this day, no established professional group of doctors, or formal association, or major journal, has called for an end to the vaxx program.
The signal has been clear for the better part of a year. The mRNA products made by Pfizer and Moderna did not stop transmission of Covid-19 and were causing widespread harm, especially in the working-age population between 25 and 64 who were forced to take the shots to keep their jobs. For the whole population all-causes deaths and disabilities were still rising at the end of 2022.
The trend appeared to start with the unnatural deaths of professional athletes dropping dead on their playing fields. Then, in early 2022, life insurance companies issued reports that the death rates of policy-holders employed by companies with insurance plans were up 40 percent. The numbers were confirmed in mid-2022 by the Society of Actuaries — the professional org of people who actually parse the statistics that the insurance industry bases its business model on. In fact the number of excess deaths in younger age groups had grown dramatically — Covid vaccination produced a 78-percent increase in excess deaths among the 25-34 age group, a 100-percent increase in excess deaths among the 35-44 age group, and a 80-percent increase in excess deaths among the 45-54 age group.
These signals arrived special-delivery and gift-wrapped to the medical profession and, amazingly, no corresponding warning to the public came back out. The doctors continued to push the vaccines. The public health officials (many of them doctors) in all the agencies under the US Dept. of Health and Human Services withheld information about the harms that were being done and continued to run advertisements promoting the vaccines at the same time these officials must have noticed the alarming news incoming. As late as this new year, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky appeared in TV ads promoting mRNA booster shots.
In short, a professional class the public depends on to define reality have done everything possible to conceal and distort reality. The cable news networks and the newspapers amplified the distortions to prevent the public from understanding what was happening to them in an epic world health crisis. Social media, managed backstage by government intel agencies, reinforced the information blackout. The crisis was coming not so much from the Covid-19 virus itself, which had a death rate well under one percent of those infected; the crisis came from the supposed remedy for the virus, the vaccines pushed on the uninformed and misinformed citizens.
Outside a small circle of apostate doctors — Malone, McCullough, Kory, Cole, Risch, Bhattacharya, and others — the practicing physicians of America went blindly and stupidly along with the government’s vaccination program. My own primary care physician told me he was “a hundred percent confident in the vaccines” when he attempted to persuade me to take the shots. (I declined.) In the next year’s physical exam he didn’t even mention the vaccines. How about your doctors? Do you wonder what they’ve learned? Or if they’ve learned anything.
And what are they going to do now? Pretend that none of this is happening? Continue to demonize, discredit, and punish the few doctors who won’t pretend? My PC doc doubles as Chief Health Officer of his group practice. He’s fired doctors and others on the staff who refused to take the shots his company mandated. He’s dishonored his Hippocratic oath. He’s in mid-life with, one would assume ordinarily, many working years ahead of him. The information about vaccine deaths and disabilities is going to get worse, and his own behavior around the crisis is going to look worse, probably even to himself. There are hundreds of thousands of doctors like him. As of now, early 2023, there is no general movement among them to explain or apologize for their actions. What will happen?
I’ll tell you what will happen: medicine as we’ve known it is going to collapse, along with most other activities in our society. Apart from ethical offenses against the public in the single instance of the Covid-19 emergency, doctors and their administrative cohorts have stealthily surrendered to a racketeering business model that had already badly damaged the practice of medicine before Covid-19 came on the scene.
Remember: as a general principle, organisms and systems often assume their greatest size just before the go extinct or fail. That’s exactly what you’re seeing in the conglomeratization of hospitals in the USA. If the idea was to remove redundancies for the sake of “efficiency,” then they did exactly what destroys ecosystems. Anyway, the net effect of all that hospital consolidation was just to make access to health care much more difficult for the average citizen, and the only benefit was to make multi-millionaires of the executives who run the hospitals.
Then Covid-19 came along and they decimated their own workforce with vaccine mandates. Now, many hospitals can barely function, and many have had to shut down specific services. Quite a few hospitals are going bankrupt, which only feeds the predatory consolidation still ongoing. When the financial, banking, and insurance disorders ahead start to bite later this year, hospitals will be shutting down. In the meantime, a lot of people will lose their lives to the disastrous side-effects of the vaccines. It is already the case, that the vaccine-injured who seek help from the medical system are lied-to, mis-treated, or ignored. Some of these are the doctors themselves and other health professionals who collide with reality the hard way.
Something will emergently replace this monster we call “health care.” Maybe it will still think of itself medicine, but it will operate at a much smaller scale, minus a lot of the expensive and rather miraculous high-tech developed in our time, but also minus a lot of hazardous high-tech interventions, especially pharmaceuticals, that were used as revenue streams despite the adverse blowbacks they induced.
Will the doctors recover the trust of the public? It’s going to be a slog for them. They’ll have a long way to go just to recover their own honor and self-respect. Some sort of organized act of apology and repentance will have to happen first.
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Behold: 111 West 57th Street — no name yet, but I would call it The Last Gasp Tower. 57th Street itself has come to be called Billionaire’s Row in this age of degenerate financialization that has enabled supernaturally huge fortunes to accrue via a combination of epic asset-stripping and capital market fuckery. Now of course, we’re at the end of the road for all that. And, readers have learned here, societies facing collapse paradoxically produce their most extravagant architectural monuments just before they founder.
At 1,428 feet high, this one’s only the second tallest residential building in the western hemisphere — the older Central Park Tower up the street beats it at 1,550 feet — but Last Gasp is at least the world’s skinniest tall residential building. The designers, SHoP Architects (exterior) and Studio Sofield (everything else) put the building on a keto diet with intermittent fasting. Pets are allowed and it’s close to shopping.
it’s understood in the annals of psychology that some human personalities delight in feelings of danger. They climb up sheer-faced rock walls without safety ropes, jump out of airplanes, crawl into the deepest hidden recesses of underground caverns, surf on fifty-foot Atlantic rollers…. But these are a very small percent of the population. Think you could sleep in one of these upper-story apartments on a windy night — which, at that altitude, would be most nights? Now, imagine on the floor above you the intoxicated wife of a Kuwaiti sheik expires of a Xanax overdose in her gold-plated bathtub with the water running…. Oh, the humanity…!
Thanks to Neil Rollinson for the nomination.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_368.mp3David Collum is the Betty R. Miller Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. He moonlights as an Internet gadfly offering commentary on culture, politics, finance, and technology, He publishes a massive Year in Review essay every Christmas season and it’s available at Chris Martenson’sPeak Prosperity Website. It’s a humdinger. In this chat, we reference the Christmas battlefield hiatus over in Ukraine — but we recorded this before the Jan 2 missile attack on a Russian barracks in Donbas that killed many Russian soldiers. Hope we don’t nuked for that.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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The exhausting toils of the holidays are behind us; the mischief that could be done by the lame ducks in Congress has been done ($1.7 trillion Omnibus Spending Bill); and the time has come for the citizens of this land to get some answers about the escalating trips laid on them by their own government. The House of Representatives is in new hands. You’ll know in pretty short order whether they are capable, trustworthy hands, or just a blur of fast fingers running another three-card-monte table.
The most pressing questions abide around justice, and the gavel of the Judiciary Committee passes from the barely-alive Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) to the very animated Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). He needs to ask FBI Director Chris Wray how it came to be that the Bureau sat in possession of the Hunter Biden laptop during the impeachment of January 2020 and did not offer up to the defense the exculpatory evidence it abundantly contained in the way of business deal memos between the Biden family and officials in several foreign lands, Ukraine in particular. After all, the impeachment hinged on a telephone inquiry Mr. Trump made about just those matters. Was there anything to it all, or not? Obviously, there was, and Mr. Wray’s conduct looks like obstruction of justice in the highest degree.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY) comes in as chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. He announced months ago that he would hold hearings on interesting issues such Hunter Biden’s taxes and exactly who paid to support his new career as an “artist.”
We’ve got national security concerns with respect to Hunter Biden. We want to know if you remember who bought that expensive artwork when he was an artist for about three days and sold the artwork for half a million dollars. We want to know why the Russian oligarchs who paid Hunter Biden money were mysteriously left off the sanctions list when Joe Biden started putting sanctions on Russians and Russian oligarchs. We’ve got a lot of questions about shady business dealings that Hunter had and whether or not they impacted the Biden administration.
Next Mr. Wray has to answer for the FBI’s infiltration of social media. How did the top lawyer at the FBI, Jim Baker, come to be employed as the right-hand to Twitter’s chief censor, Vijaya Gadde? How did all those former FBI agents land at the company along with Jim Baker, and what did Mr. Wray have to do with the FBI demands to censor news and persons on matters of critical national importance such as vaccine safety and election fraud? How did more than a hundred former federal agents land on Facebook, Google, and other platforms? How did Mr. Wray decide to shut down the avenues of the First Amendment to the Constitution?
Next up: Attorney General Merrick Garland. On what grounds are pre-trial January 8 Riot suspects being held in the decrepit DC federal lockup without bail on rinky-dink charges two years after the event? How does that square with American due process of law? What did he know about the existence of the Hunter Biden laptop and the evidence it contained? What is he doing about it? How did Mr. Garland happen to target for prosecution parents protesting school board policies on race and sexual matters? Of course, Mr. Garland is going to evade answering by using the ploy that all this “pertains to ongoing investigations.” Mr. Jordan had better hire a chief counsel with some brains to penetrate that bodyguard of lies.
If the Special Subcommittee on the January 6 Riot is disbanded, turn the matter over to the Andy Biggs’ Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. Let’s hear from Nancy Pelosi’s staff as to how come her office (of the Speaker) turned down offers from the Trump White House for national guard protection that day. Let’s also hear from the then-chief of the Capitol Police, Steven Sund, who resigned from that job two days later — in consternation or disgrace? Bring back Mr. Wray and Mr. Garland. How many federal agents were circulating in the crowd the night before and day of the January 6 riot? Why was one Ray Epps never indicted for his much-recorded incitements to enter the Capitol? Who opened the magnetically-locked doors from the inside of the building? Stuff like that. What was the decision process for not charging officer Michael Byrd in the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt?
I hope its not too impertinent to suppose that the January 6 Riot was engineered by our government to embarrass and punish its political opponents — taking advantage of the First Amendment “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances,” which was what that crowd had come to do in Washington DC that day. Interesting how a little tweaking here and there turned that into a convenient fiasco. And how government control and interference over social media and corporate news was used to reinforce the narrative that the event was “an insurrection” — one of many actual “big lies” of our time nurtured by our government against its citizens.
A few other inquiries in this new Congress to commence ASAP: Can we hear from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as to how come the US-Mexican Border is absolutely wide open; why his employees are transporting illegal aliens all around the USA; why he is running a program in Mexico to give Venezuelans and other select alien nationals “advanced authorization” and “two years parole,” then sneaking them into the USA through regular ports-of-entry?
Then there is the enormous looming storm-cloud of questions over Covid-19: the origin of it; the botched trials of the mRNA “vaccines;” the conduct of the emergency in 2020 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and many others, including the two principals hiding in the shadows for three years, epidemiologist Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, and Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth alliance; the demonization of early treatment protocols with safe and FDA-approved Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine; the relation of all that to the Emergency Use Authorization that protects the pharma companies from liability; the fudging of numbers and scrapping of web pages containing incriminating data at the CDC under Rochelle Walensky; the rising cases of disability and death now presenting via insurance company statistics in the absence of agency reporting; and, again, the coercion of social media platforms to conform to official narratives about the so-called pandemic. (Was it really?)
Then there’s all the darkness surrounding Ukraine, our 51st state, as measured by the amount of taxpayer money funneled into it…. A lot of someones got a lot of ‘splainin’ to do about a lot of things in the weeks and months ahead. We’ll be a better country when we start getting some answers.
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“The powerful are panicking, and so they should. Their secrets are leaking.” —Miranda Devine
“It’s all just snake oil. We want to save the planet, and the life upon it, but we’re not willing to pay the price and bear the consequences. So we make up a narrative that feels good and run with it.” — Raul Ilargi Meier
“2023 could be a pivotal year for USA if the pervasive lies can be exposed, digested, and believed. All that exposure has to happen amidst continuing boondoggles toward the Great Reset agenda.” – Truman Verdun
“More borrowing only ever makes sense if you are expecting a larger economy in the future. All economic expansion is based on energy. Countries with energy can expand, those without cannot.” — Chris Martenson
“To be an enemy to America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” — Henry Kissinger
“The incorrect narrative provided by mainstream media (MSM) is that climate change is our worst problem. To lessen this problem, citizens need to move quickly away from fossil fuels and transition to renewables. The real narrative is that we are running short of fossil fuels that can be profitably extracted, and renewables are not adequate substitutes. However, this narrative is too worrisome for most people to handle.” — Ugh Bardi
Clusterfuck Nation
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It’s hard to contemplate 2023 without spiraling into nausea, tachycardia, and cold sweat. But it is an inescapable duty here to lay out the probabilities ahead. I’ve been doing this forecast thing for some years now, and, of course, I am often wrong, so take some solace in that and relax. Maybe the new year will be all unicorns, rainbows, talking gerbils, and candied violets.
2022 sure was a cold shower. The long emergency I talk so much about finally got up to cruising speed, with the ectoplasmic “Joe Biden” revving our country into economic, political, and cultural collapse — a hat-trick of calamity — and he did it more swiftly and directly than any emperor managed in late-day Rome, with policies and actions 180-degrees contra to America’s public interest — cheered on by a thinking class that had obviously lost it consensual mind.
Was it simply to do the opposite of what the loathed and detested Mr. Trump would do? Could it be that simple or that automatic? The thinking class’s eyes have a zombified glaze these days. It’s obvious, you might agree, that “Joe Biden” is not in charge of anything, really. He’s an animatronic figure programmed to read a teleprompter and not much else. Half the time, he can’t even find his way off-stage after doing that one trick. The claque pulling his strings just may be the crew you see around him (you know, WYSIWYG): Susan Rice, Ron Klain, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and company. Ms. Rice has kept herself completely hidden backstage at the White House for two years. Nobody ever hears about her or sees her. Weird, a little bit, for the Director of the Domestic Policy Council.
Or else, are there puppeteers deeper in the shadows, say, “JB’s” former boss Barack Obama, Der Schwabenklaus and his WEF retinue, Bill Gates and other tech billionaires, the “systemically important” bankers, George Soros…? Or some coven of super-elite warlocks we’d never heard of? The US leadership dynamic is truly mystifying and has been for two whole years. Will mysteries be revealed in 2023? Personally, I think so. Things are lining up in that direction, though who knows whether the damage can even be reversed at this point. And now onto the shape of things to come….
Economy
All you can really say is that the folks running things have hijacked every module of our nation’s interests and tilted them down into decadence and ruin. They’ve tanked whatever’s left of the US economy with an array of surefire idiotic maneuvers. By spending trillions of dollars that don’t exist to buy votes, they’ve inflated away our money’s purchasing power — an Econ 101 level mistake. The “Green New Deal” is a swindle, an out-front, in-your-face nefarious operation to subvert Western Civ by the WEF, and its stooges, laid out explicitly in its house publications.
There is no way we can run our society as currently outfitted on any combination of alt.energies. All the Greenies can really accomplish with this crusade is to destroy the complex systems we rely on faster than would happen in the normal course of things, foreclosing any chance of an orderly retreat to a plausibly downscaled arrangement for daily life. We are exiting the current system anyway, like it or not — the thesis of The Long Emergency.
This gets to the heart of the conundrum we face. Ill-intentioned as the WEF and its allies may be, the world is heading toward a Great Re-set. The catch is, it won’t be the WEF’s version of it, their schematic techno-nirvana with a tiny comfortable elite lording over the bug-eating hoi-polloi. They somehow miss the point that the energy required to run their precious transhuman tech won’t be there. By the way, the WEF’s core idea of central control by a coordinated world government is at odds with the core reality of the times ahead, which is that life is about to get much more local and downscaled — the opposite of centralized. Everything organized at the giant scale is veering into failure, empires, global corporations, hypertrophic cities, giant universities, giant farms, you name it. Their business models are broken. The activities these things represent have to get smaller, finer, and more regional. Depending on what we’re able to salvage and re-purpose from the fabricated leftovers of Modernity, we’ll be lucky to land back in life lived at the level of the early 1800s. Or else, if we really mess up, we’ll plunge haplessly into a dark age in a resource-stripped world.
The “Green New Deal,” based on a combination of wishful thinking and self-destructive malice, includes the deliberate undermining of what’s left of America’s oil industry by cancelling pipelines, drilling licenses on public lands, draining the strategic petroleum reserve, and other efforts to sabotage what’s left. America still has a lot of oil in the ground, yet much of it is hard to get at and uneconomical to produce at the scale required. It’s a money-loser and losing money consistently doesn’t pencil out for any real business.
This is especially true of shale oil, which had a good run production-wise 2009 to 2022, though the producers could barely make a dime at it. The shale oil “miracle” was largely a byproduct of near-zero interest rates. Investors flocked to it after 2009 because they couldn’t get any yield from bonds. Shale oil was played-up as a sure thing. It took investors a decade, and over a hundred oil company bankruptcies, to catch on — and now shale oil can’t attract enough new investment to keep up the giant operations at scale. The main shale oil regions, the Permian Basin in Texas and the Bakken fields of North Dakota, have entered permanent decline as they run out of “sweet spots” to drill and frack. Considering the new era of capital scarcity ahead, money for shale oil companies will be even harder to get and we’ll get less shale oil every year, while conventional oil continues its own remorseless decline. The catch here is that oil prices are just as likely to go down as up because the foundering economy creates substantial demand destruction — customers drop out of the market.
Natural gas involves similar dynamics. There seems to be a lot of it for now in the Marcellus formation spread over the Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and into New York (where fracking has been prohibited for years). Natgas is very useful for electric generation, home heating, and some manufacturing, but not so much for transportation. Shale gas production is also based on “sweet spots” for drilling and there are fewer of them every year. The depletion curve for natgas is even more extreme than oil’s is: it stops all at once. The early shale gas plays in the southern US — Haynesville, Fayetteville, Barnett — have been in decline for years. As with shale oil, producing shale gas is expensive, with all the trucks ceaselessly delivering fracking sand, water, and chemicals to the drilling pads, and then transporting waste liquids off-site. Prediction: in 2023, we’ll hear the first rumblings about nationalizing the oil industry, which will be a giant step toward killing it altogether, given the all-around incompetence of government.
The strategy of changing out oil-based cars and trucks for electric vehicles (EVs) is a loser on several counts beyond the disruption and instability facing US oil production. One, it’s premised on the idea that we can continue living in a suburban sprawl arrangement by other means. Two, the electric grid is too inadequate and fragile to support the charging of so many millions of EVs in addition to anything else we ask it to do. Three, the middle class is being decimated, so there are fewer credit-worthy customers for cars priced out of their range anyway. Four, far less capital will be available for consumer loans. The car industry itself may not survive the re-possession orgy coming in 2023 for defaulted auto loans. That will infect banking, too. The economy is already hurting. The “Green New Deal” will cut its wobbly legs off.
Similarly, the new mandates against the use of nitrogenous fertilizers (made from natgas). European countries are already on-board with this WEF folly. The Netherlands, Europe’s leading food producer, is going so far as to forcibly shut down thousands of farms and limit fertilizer use on the remaining ones. Germany is likewise limiting fertilizers. Canada fell in line next. Prediction: in early 2023, “Joe Biden” will set in motion anti-fertilizer policies in the US. There will be plenty of squawking in the big farming states, rising to angry protests. The tractor convoys may invade Washington. The situation sets up a grim prospect for the US food supply: scarcity, high prices, and hunger ahead.
The Ukraine bread-basket is out of the picture in 2023, unless military action ends well before planting season. Europe can’t depend on Russia, another world-leading grain producer thanks to “Joe B’s” stupid sanctions policy. By summer, the projected harvests all over Western Civ will be inadequate to feed the existing populations. Routine exports to the poor nations of the “global south” will stop and a lot of people will starve in those countries. By then, it will be too late to fix anything. The price of food will soar throughout Western Civ, aggravating other economic crises that will amount to metastasizing poverty. Populations will get very restless. Governments will fall (candidates: France, Germany, UK, Australia, the USA). In some places they will not recover in their prior form.
As a general proposition, Globalism is done. That got that underway in earnest with the Covid shut-downs. Now, geopolitical friction gets worse and trade relations deteriorate further. There will still be trade between nations, but much reduced. Global supply chains are already wrecked, especially for specialized mechanical replacement parts and electronic components. It will be harder to fix cars, trucks, turbines, really any sort of machine, including computers and things run by them. A lot of commercial activity will just stop.
Europe has already blundered into buying its one-way ticket to Palookaville. Germany and the rest paid for that ticket by going along with feckless US policy to “weaken” Russia with sanctions (mission not accomplished). The coup de grace was the US wrecking the Nord Stream pipelines. So, Euroland has inadvertently decided to ditch its industrial base, which means they go medieval or worse. They have committed economic suicide. They’d better hope reincarnation is for-real. Anyway, they’re not coming back from this fiasco the way they went into it, that is, the way things were. When the shock of winter is over in early 2023, strife will be the new leitmotif in the Old World. People grow desperate in the six-weeks-wont of springtime. Nations crack up.
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. I’ve discussed this enough in books, prior blogs, and previous forecasts. Suffice it to say we’ve run out the string on this stunt. All we’re left with now is the debt markers, documents that purport to represent wealth. The collateral is all the stuff we produced previously that is still standing: buildings, developed properties, public works. A lot of this stuff is deteriorating quickly, losing its value, for instance the tens of millions of suburban houses built with shitty, short-lived materials like strand-board and vinyl… all the cars….
Financialization led to the current inflation in our debt-based money system. More borrowing becomes more money going into existence, chasing a declining amount of goods as production falls off and supply lines choke. Services also suffer. People can’t afford to eat out, get acupuncture, visit hair-dressers. When the inflation is bad enough, say more than ten percent annually, it will cause enough economic damage to provoke a big contraction in activity, bringing on a deluge of loan defaults on mortgages, car payments, and corporate obligations. Loan defaults cause money to disappear from the system. This flips inflation into deflation. The bond-market is blowing up as this occurs, because bonds are debts and they’re not being serviced or paid-off. The imploding bond market infects the stock markets and they crash, too.
Before long, nobody has money, except people who invested in gold and silver. Prediction: the change-over from inflation to deflation comes in summer of 2023 and gathers momentum into the fall. It leads to economic conditions worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s because our social and family arrangements have disintegrated along with our towns and cities. Civil disorder ignites. The government attempts lockdowns, this time without a disease to blame it on. It’s no longer safe to be a politician.
The Covid-19 Story Backfires Badly and Hell Breaks Loose
Against the backdrop of a developing new economic depression, the public can no longer avoid seeing the calamity that the mRNA vaccines have instigated. Early death is in the news daily now and from exactly the adverse effects that have been derided as “conspiracy theory” by public health experts since 2021: myocarditis, blood clots, organ damage, neurological illness, unusually aggressive cancers, damaged immune systems. Meanwhile, America’s public health aristocracy — Dr. Tony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, Francis Collins, Deborah Birx, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and many, many others will be compelled to testify under oath before newly re-constituted House committees and finally answer for all their dishonesty in the Covid-19 response saga. They lied about everything, especially the “vaccines?” It will go worse for them as public sentiment turns from submission to official bullshit to rage over a deadly fraud.
By then, the past efforts of this gang to mislead the public on Twitter and other social media will be well-documented. The exposed slime-trail of money and corruption between Pharma and federal bureaucrats will finally make an impression on the long-bamboozled nation. The mainstream media will be dragged into this morass and the public will begin to understand how the newspaper editors and TV news producers, too, were bought off by Pharma and controlled by the national security state to pimp for the Democratic Party and globalist interests outside the USA. This exposure could be the end of the great legacy news organs, The New York Times and the rest of the gang. Their executives will have to testify along with everyone else. They might not be prosecuted — in a gesture of respect for the First Amendment — but rather will suffer badly from their loss of credibility.
All of this will aggravate the animus against the government and the Democrat Party’s “Joe Biden” regime — which will be under assault from separate inquiries into the Hunter Biden laptop and the evidence of bribery and treason it contains, and hearings about the wide-open border, payments to Ukraine, and the gestapo-like behavior of the FBI.
Here’s a scenario for you: The Justice Department will be drowning in criminal referrals. The FBI will be in a state of paralysis, unable to carry out more insults against US citizens as its systematic crimes are revealed. When the DOJ dithers about bringing action, the public will be even more enraged. The current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, gets dragged into Congress to answer for his misconduct and the resulting humiliation will run him out of office. “Joe Biden” may be forced to resign, drowned in a sea of troubles and scandals revealed. A deal will be made to let Veep Kamala Harris off the hook in exchange for her resignation.
That will leave the Republican Speaker of the House, whoever it is, to become president. He will fire every political appointee in the executive branch and replace them with people who will follow the law. It will look like a promising return to decency and the rule of law. But the damage to America’s prestige will have been so gross by now that the federal government has lost legitimacy. The financial crisis, meanwhile, will put the government into something that smells like bankruptcy. The country is in a ferocious depression, the people have no money, but neither does the government. Real authority devolves to states and localities. The playing out of these dynamics also depends on what is happening outside the USA.
Europe in Macro
Don’t forget, this used to be an important part of the world with an aggregate GDP greater than even the USA’s or China’s. Europe is the birthplace of Western Civ, a division of the human project the past few thousand years that yielded tremendous advances in science, art, music, philosophy, and organized intelligence generally. Now it is on the rocks. Europe, in the aggregate, as represented, say, by the European Union, or NATO, made a grave error going along with the USA’s foolish Neocon project to make a heap trouble in Ukraine in order to “weaken” Russia.
Russia was no longer a threat to the USA after 1991. Once the USSR was done as a political entity, and after Russia recovered from the daze of collapse, it wanted to be treated by the West as a normal European nation. Russia became a market economy, like all the others in Europe. It held elections like the others, had a legislature, a new body of property law, a private news media, regular banks, and all the other trappings of modern political normality. Russia even requested early-on to become a member of NATO. The USA and Europe refused NATO membership, but also refused to admit Russia into European normality. Instead, led by the USA, the West conducted an asset stripping operation which hampered Russia’s redevelopment.
Otherwise, the West mostly ignored Russia, and in spite of all that Russia got back on its feet, got some industries going, especially oil-and-gas, and enjoyed two decades of relative stability. Russia eventually began reaching out in the world and made trade agreements with other countries. It built those Nord Stream gas pipelines. It organized a regional “customs union” among its Eurasian neighbors that functioned rather like the Eurozone.
As that was all happening — pay attention — around 2010 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat on a State Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), that threatened to block the sale of a Canadian company, Uranium One, to Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation on the grounds that Uranium One’s assets included 20-percent of the USA’s uranium supply. Selling all that American uranium to Russia looked kind of bad, you’d think, and you’d be right. But then, suddenly, about $150-million dollars poured into the Clinton Foundation — much of it from Uranium One’s owner, one Frank Giustra — plus Bill Clinton happened to get a half-million dollar speaking gig in Russia, and… whaddaya know, CFIUS ended up approving the sale. The public hardly heard a peep about it. (Where was the US new media?)
During that same period, Hillary Clinton also helped facilitate the transfer of American bio-medical, nuclear, and Info technology to the high-tech consortium called Skolkovo, Russia’s version of Silicon Valley. Much of the tech at issue was dual-use, good for civilian and military applications. Again, tens of millions of dollars gushed into the Clinton Foundation from the corporate participants in the Skolkovo deal. Crickets from the news media again.
In 2011, relations between the US and Russia soured when President Putin accused the US of fomenting protests in Russia over its parliamentary elections. And from there, our State Department decided that Russia and the USA could not even pretend to be friendly.
Jump ahead to 2014: Neocons in the Obama administration figured it was time to cut Russia back down to size. That effort crystalized around the former Soviet province, Ukraine, and blossomed into the US-sponsored-and-organized Maidan Revolution, utilizing Ukraine’s sizeable Stepan Bandara legacy Nazi forces in the vanguard, to foment violence in Kiev’s main city square. The US shoved out elected Ukraine President Yanukovych — who angered America by pledging to join Russia’s Custom’s Union instead of the EU — and installed its own puppet Yatsenyuk, who was ultimately replaced by the candy tycoon, Poroshenko, replaced by the Ukrainian TV star, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Ha Ha. Who’s laughing now? (Nobody.)
From 2014-on, Ukraine, with America’s backing, did everything possible to antagonize Russia, especially showering the eastern provinces of Ukraine, called the Donbas, with artillery, rockets, and bombs to harass the Russia-leaning population there. After eight years of that, and continued American insults (the Steele Dossier, 2016 election interference), and renewed threats to drag Ukraine into NATO, Mr. Putin had enough and launched his “Special Military Operation” to discipline Ukraine. Once that started, American Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated explicitly to the world that America’s general policy now was to “weaken Russia.”
That was accompanied by America’s policy to isolate Russia economically with ever more sanctions. Didn’t work. Russia just turned eastward to the enormous Asian market for its oil and gas and utilized an alternate electronic trade-clearance system to replace America’s SWIFT system. Sanctions also gave Russia a reason to aggressively pursue an import-replacement economic strategy — manufacturing stuff that they had been buying from the West, for instance, German machine tools critical for industry.
Russia did sacrifice more than $50-billion in financial assets stranded in the US banking system — we just confiscated it — but, ultimately, that only harmed the US banking system’s reputation as a safe place to park money, and made foreign investors much more wary of stashing capital in American banks. Net effect: the value of the ruble increased and stabilized and Russia found new ways to neutralize American economic bullying.
Europe was the big loser in all that. For a while, Europe could pretend to go along with the US / NATO project, pouring arms and money into Ukraine, and at the same time depend on Russian oil and gas imports. Eight months into the conflict, the US blew up the Nord Stream One and Two pipelines, and that was the end of Europe’s supply of affordable natgas, to heat homes and power industry. In a sane world, that would have been considered an act of war against Germany by the USA. But it only revealed the secret, humiliating state of vassalage that Europe was in. Europe had already made itself ridiculous buying into the hysteria over climate change and attempting to tailor its energy use to so-called “renewables” in history’s biggest virtue-signaling exercise. Germany, the engine of the EU’s economy, made one dumb mistake after another. It invested heavily in wind and solar installations, which fell so short of adequacy they were a joke, and it closed down its nuke-powered electric generation plants so as to appear ecologically correct.
So now, Germany, and many other EU member states, teeter on the edge of leaving Modernity behind. They managed to scramble and fill their gas reserves sufficiently this fall to perhaps squeak through winter without freezing to death, but not without a lot of sacrifice, chopping down Europe’s forests, and wearing their coats indoors. Now, only a few days into Winter, it remains to be seen how that will work out. We’ll know more in March of the new year. France had been the exception in Europe, due to its large fleet of atomic energy plants. But many of them have now aged-out, some shut down altogether, and “green” politics stood in the way of replacing them, so France, too, will find itself increasingly subject to affordable energy shortages.
Prediction: Europe’s industry will falter and close down by painful increments. The EU will not withstand the economic stress of de-industrialization. It will shatter and leave Europe once again a small continent of many small fractious nations with longstanding grudges. Some of these countries may break-up into smaller entities in turn, as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Russia did in the 1990s. Keep in mind, the macro trend world-wide will be downscaling and localization as affordable energy recedes for everyone. Since the end of World War Two, Europe was the world’s tourist theme park. Now it could go back to being a slaughterhouse. The Euro currency will have to be phased out as sovereign bankruptcies make the EU financial system untenable, and animosities and hostilities arise. Each country will have to return to its traditional money. Gold and silver will play a larger role in that.
The USA poured over $100-billion into Ukraine in arms, goods, and cash in 2022. That largesse will not continue as America sinks into its Second Great Depression. In any case, much of that schwag was fobbed off with. The arms are spent, the launchers destroyed. A lot of weapons were trafficked around to other countries and non-state actors. Russia is going to prevail in Ukraine. The news emanating from American media about Ukraine’s military triumphs was all propaganda. There was hardly ever any real doubt that Russia dominated the war zone strategically and tactically. Even its withdrawals from one city or another were tactically intelligent and worthwhile, sparing Russian lives. The Special Military Operation wasn’t a cakewalk because Russia wanted to avoid killing civilians and refrain from destroying infrastructure that would leave Ukraine a gutted, failed state. Over time, the USA proved itself to be negotiation-unworthy, and Ukraine’s president Zelensky refused to entertain rational terms for settling the crisis. So, now the gloves are off in Ukraine. As of December 29, Russia shut off the lights in Kiev and Lvov.
The open questions: how much punishment does Ukraine seek to suffer before it capitulates? Will Zelensky survive? (Even if he runs off to Miami, he may not survive.) What exactly will be left of Ukraine? In 2023 Russia will decide the disposition of things on-the-ground. Failed states make terrible neighbors. One would imagine that Russia’s main goal is to set up a rump Ukraine that can function, but cease to be an annoying pawn of its antagonists. Ukraine will no longer enjoy access to the Black Sea; it will be landlocked. The best case would be for Ukraine to revert to the agricultural backwater it was for centuries before the mighty disruptions of the modern era. Perhaps Russia will take it over altogether and govern it as it had ever since the 1700s — except for Ukraine’s brief interlude post-USSR as one of the world’s most corrupt and mal-administered sovereign states.
Bottom line: Ukraine is and always was within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, and will remain so. The USA has no business there and it will be best for all concerned when we bug out. Let’s hope that happens without America triggering a nuclear World War Three. (Yeah, “hope” is not a plan. Try prayer, then.) Mr. Putin’s challenge going into 2023 is to conclude the Ukraine hostilities without humiliating the USA to the degree that we do something really stupid.
Asia
The enormous region where most of the world’s people live is swirling with quickly changing dynamics. It’s hard to tell what kind of shape China is actually in at the close of 2022. The CCP capitulated on its extreme lockdown policy and now the country seems gripped by a new and severe outbreak of the Covid virus. It’s killing a lot of people, including quite a few higher-ups in the CCP. The world saw the beginning of a popular revolt in China through the fall of 2022 as demonstrations erupted. The political side remains opaque.
The economic side, less so. China’s wealth since year 2000 has derived from its immense factory capacity and cheap labor force. Globalism is wobbling, and with that the world’s supply line network. If trade relations with the USA continue to sour, both China and the USA will suffer. China will find itself at over-capacity, even for the giant Asian market. And they are competing with several other quickly-industrialized nations in the south, plus India, plus the old stalwarts South Korea and Japan.
The main problem for China, and indeed all the Pacific Rim nations on the Asian side: energy. China doesn’t have very much oil in the ground and is utterly dependent on imports. It has a lot of low-quality coal. It’s building coal and nuke plants like mad. Will that suffice? Electricity is great, but you need fossil fuels to run heavy industries. In the great shiftings of 2022, China made deals for getting more oil and gas from Russia. That might work for a while. But Russia’s energy resources are probably near peak production now. What happens on the way down from that peak? Maybe Russia will be less avid for sharing its fossil fuels with its neighbors. Maybe that will cause political friction. Maybe a desperate China will reach out and try to grab resources from Russia’s vast Siberian territories? Not next year, though….
The Neocon-led US foreign policy establishment is insane for sure, but the CCP is only not-crazy during times of great stability. Throw in some popular dissent and some economic distress, and the CCP could go cuckoo. Uncle Xi shows very Mao-like tendencies for creative despotism. The party must have a long game for Taiwan, but a distressed and crazed CCP, and an agitated Uncle Xi, could turn that into a short game out of desperation — and then what? We’d have two really crazy governments ginning up the Eastern theater of World War Three. The upshot of this depends top some extent on how delicately Mr. Putin can organize America’s exit from Ukraine.
Prediction: For 2023 internal friction will preoccupy China as it attempts to square its operations with those pressing trends of our time: downscaling and relocalization. All this could easily lead to regional strife in China. The CCP is the glue between its regions now. It may prove to not be superglue.
Japan remains as enigmatic as ever. It has drifted economically for nearly forty years. Now it looks like it’s drifting into a sovereign bankruptcy as it loses control of its deeply-gamed bond markets. I’ll stick to my old predication that Japan is en route to going medieval. Its pre-industrial culture was very charming and worked well for long periods of history. Industrial modernity demoralized them. Japan imports all its oil. Without it, you can’t even begin to run a modern war machine, so there won’t be a second reaching-out for resources as in the 20th century. They will not be alone in the new medievalism when this era completes itself.
The Deep State, an Appreciation
America is at a crossroads, a threshold, a tipping point. Every vital institution in the land has been at least partially wrecked, most especially the ones in charge of the rule of law, which was the best thing we had going for us. The Deep State is for real — the weaponization of a national bureaucracy against the nation itself. Yet, it’s certainly not just an American thing; it’s happening across Western Civ. Is it some natural process of self-destruction? An auto-immune disorder of a giant cultural organism, with parts attacking the whole? The USA, Great Britain, and Australia took such special pride in being open societies and now they are consumed in censorious lunacy. Continental Europe had a sketchier history with liberty, the enlightened individualism of everyman, though they actually birthed its principles. But now the whole works is infected and ailing, and by what? It’s as if some cosmic spike protein came among us all and got into our hearts.
Most major religions feature some version of the idea of death-and-rebirth, and it’s a fact that we see ourselves embedded in cycles, especially seasons. Things turn and return, are born, develop, degenerate, pass away. This was the brilliant application of Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning theory to the study of history, and by those terms we are have entered a deep secular winter of the human project. One can appreciate how the onset of winter spooked our prehistoric ancestors. They developed their prayerful ceremonies for bringing back the sun, and warmth, and new growth, dancing around the fire in the skins of animals, often making blood sacrifices to the mysterious forces in charge of… everything. The modern way of reenacting all that seems to be industrial-strength warfare. Many of us are praying right now that we don’t have to go through that.
More likely, I think, we’ll forego the nuclear fire and simply go through a collapse of the socioeconomic organization that our governance rests on, and the Deep State illness with it. It’ll come with plenty of hardship, but it will purge the poisons that have disordered us, and when we get through it, we’ll make new arrangements for daily life. I’ve been calling this process a long emergency for some years, and now we seem to be right in the thick of it. I believe in the natural process called emergence. Systems transform themselves organically from one state to another when acted upon by the circumstances of time and place. The outcome is usually a surprise, and not all surprises are bad. So, adios 2022 and hello little baby 2023. Lead us where you will and let’s go forward into it bravely. As Bob said so many years ago, it’s all right, Ma. It’s life and life only….
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What’s most appalling about the Twitter revelations of the Intel Community’s years-long strangle-hold on social media is not just the evil fuckery itself of the FBI, CIA, and others colluding to gaslight the US electorate, but the fact that there is no institution in the land that can intervene to adjudicate or discipline these rogue agencies. Nobody expects the FBI’s parent, the Department of Justice, to look into any of this.
Not so many years ago, the force counter-balancing criminal misconduct in the government was the news media, even if the reporters and editors claimed to be on the political Left. Or, shall we say, especially if they were on the Left, because the Left in those days fervently championed free speech. Reporters of that long-ago day (Seymour Hersh, John Sack, and Michael Herr) would be out digging up the true facts of a big event — say, the US Military’s deadly blunders and scams in Vietnam — and editors would plaster screaming headlines about it on the front page: GENERAL SAYS “WE HAD TO DESTROY THE VILLAGE TO SAVE IT!” When the venerable news-spieler Walter Cronkite of CBS began to hint that the war was a fiasco, public opinion across the country shifted decisively against it.
Of course, those crimes and sins were committed against people in distant lands. Now, the administrative weight of the US is rolling over its own citizens, and over the Constitution — and the news media is uniformly and enthusiastically in favor of suppressing the news about it. How that happened is one of several cosmic mysteries of our time, along with who exactly runs “Joe Biden,” and how did the many nations of Western Civ adopt in lock-step Covid-19 policies aimed at harming their own people?
No reporter even of the alt.news division even tried to get inside the head of New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet during the years of RussiaGate. Did he believe all that crap his paper was putting out? Now, you realize, it’s established fact (in the federal court record) that the Steele Dossier and everything spun off of it was a flim-flam confected by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But even at the time, say 2017 to 2019, independent journalists were reporting the truth about it — for example, the FBI’s long-running fraud in the FISA Court — while The New York Times ardently inveighed against any emerging fact-pattern that broke through its wall of propaganda. The Times was showered with awards for that, including the Pulitzer Prize for its completely fallacious RussiaGate coverage.
One easy answer is that The Times and many of its “legacy” cohorts — The WashPo, CBS, NBC, and ABC — have volunteered to be the public relations office of the Democratic Party, covering-up anything and everything the Party does against the public interest. And while that appears to be the case, it still doesn’t explain how these outfits became the enemies of truth itself, and by extension, enemies of reality.
The easy answer to that is the psychological derangement provoked by Donald Trump when he entered politics, and the absolute fugue state of deranged fury that blossomed among the “elite” when Mr. Trump had the temerity to actually win a national election — since he was perceived to be the avatar of all the sub-human boobs dwelling in the Great Darkness between New York and Los Angeles.
But that explanation has an odor of contrivance. Those benighted boobs were the very people who most deserved the Democratic Party’s sympathy, the folks who had toiled in the great factories, now shuttered and off-shored, who volunteered for America’s wars without complaint, who were suffering now in idleness and poverty. The party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman suddenly wanted to crush these “deplorable” people. Huh…?
Could it be that the educated and creatives of the coastal cities — the thinking class, the politically active on the Left — had become so callous and arrogant as to dismiss the suffering “little people” they once worked to protect and defend — or had that also been an act? One thing for sure: the Democratic Party lost this group as core constituents and they had to search elsewhere for a voter base.
Another thing had changed along the way: the Democratic Party became dominated by activist women, who exhibited two outstanding behavioral tendencies: they tended to make decisions on the basis of emotion… their feelings about this-and-that; and they were much more ruthless in political battle than men — their emotions eclipsed age-old principles, such as the ideas of fair play. In short, they resorted almost automatically to dirty fighting.
That is probably at the heart of what is most confounding and vexing about the great political division in America these days. We are under a vile spell of pervasive dirty fighting. Dirty fighters have no respect for reality or for principle; they do whatever they can do to win the fight. Bad faith is the order of the day. Hence, the battle over how elections will be conducted and who gets to vote. You can read about it in Monday’s (Dec 26th) New York Times, an above-the-fold story titled: Democrats, Feeling New Strength, Plan to Go on Offense on Voting Rights. (As long as it stays up.) The story says:
Now it is Democrats, who retained all but one of the governor’s offices they hold and won control of state legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota, who are ready to go on offense in 2023. They are putting forward a long list of proposals that include creating automatic voter registration systems, preregistering teenagers to vote before they turn 18, returning the franchise to felons released from prison and criminalizing election misinformation.”
Note the last three words. The Times boldly announces that opinion about elections should now be subject to criminal prosecution if it deviates from whatever the official story is — as determined by whom? Well, that would be a juridical apparatus controlled by the Democratic Party. Who else might it be? The Times doesn’t venture to say. You can also see that the Party doesn’t believe in any principle that states who or why somebody should be qualified to vote. Sign up people who manage to get a driver’s license, whether they are citizens or not. Sign up the convicted criminals and the children. Dirty fighting = dirty elections.
This is the direction our country has been going in. I can offer only one note of consolation about what looks like a pretty demoralizing predicament: what you’re seeing is the end product of the late-stage in the life of a society. Obviously, it is ending badly. The catch is we are entering a new era of American life, an era of deep economic disorder, especially, that will go very hard on the nation, that will rearrange many of the social categories we now take for granted, that will compel people of all classes to pay attention to reality, to what actually works and who actually knows how to work what works. In that disposition of things, dirty fighting will be recognized for what it is.
Perhaps the biggest part of that unspooling event will be the bankruptcy and the failure of the government in Washington, its consequent loss of legitimacy, and the end of its ability to control and harass the people who live under it. Think I’m kidding? Stand by now and wait for it.
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Santa… Satan…? Notice, they’re spelled similarly. Weird, a little bit….
The Santa we know came from a mashup of ancient pre-Christian Teutonic and Norse folk figures (Wotan, Odin) with the 4th century Greek bishop, St. Nicholas, a humble giver of gifts to children. That evolved in 19th century Anglo-America, with help from Washington Iriving, Charles Dickens, and Clement Moore, into the jolly fat man in a fur-lined cloak, chortling merrily amid the platters of roast goose and baskets of sugarplums.
And then, of course, the Santa character was retooled and stylized by the big advertising mills of mid-20th century Madison Avenue into the red-suited icon who functioned as a cosmic delivery-man to suburban houses where the little ones dwell, efficiently distributing Red Ryder BB guns and Barbie Dolls from sea to shining sea out of his reindeer-powered express vehicle, circling the entire globe in a single breathless night of glittering snow and shining stars, plangent with countless wishes from little hearts.
Strange to relate, in some corners of Europe, St. Nick acquired a traveling companion named Krampus. The two went from house-to-house in the dark hours of St. Nick’s name-day (Dec. 6) interrogating children as to their conduct. Dark and hirsuit, with horns, cloven hooves, and a darting red tongue, this monster acted the “bad cop” of the roving pair, badgering the little ones about their naughty or nice doings, and whacking them with a birch rod if he didn’t like their answers. If especially displeased, he stuffed kids into a basket for transport to Hell.
A Krampus-like character reemerged in America this pre-Christmas week in the figure of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine, who flew halfway around the world in a US government-issue magic sled to meet up with his chum, the new Santa Claus, “Joe Biden,” alleged current president of our land. Mr. Z, still tricked-out in his wartime olive-green togs and scrufty beard, was here to lecture the boys and girls of Congress about being naughty or nice vis-à-vis “democracy” in his distant land, lately under a siege of angry bears. Ukraine did nothing to make the bears angry, you understand. They just lumbered in from the forest one day and started busting stuff up, as bears will.
Ukraine has already received many gifts from Santa’s workshop, formerly known as the USA, toys much more impressive than any Red Ryder BB gun, for sure: howitzers, Javelin missiles, Stinger missiles, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), Phoenix Ghost tactical drones, Switchblade tactical drones, Puma surveillance drones, Vampire anti-drone systems, Mi-17 helicopters, Harpoon coastal defense systems, and much more. (How did Santa fit it all in his sack?)
Mr. Z and fellow officials of the bear-besieged country have also received plenty of “walking-around money,” much of which has walked-around so far and wide in the world as to park itself in sundry obscure bank accounts, real estate investments, or just plumb vanish into thin air. It wasn’t enough, Mr. Z complained upon arrival here. You must pony-up more… or else! And you must punish the bears harder!
“Joe Biden” promised another fifty-billions of dollars to Mr. Z’s bear-extermination project, with the further objective of dethroning the king of all bears, the wicked Putin, who glowers at the world from the mouth of his faraway Kremlin Cave. Then, in Congress Wednesday night, before a coast-to-coast TV audience, Mr. Z tuned-up our elected boys and girls in the great House chamber, forked tongue darting, to tell heart-wrenching tales of bear-provoked terror. He played them like the very keys of a harpsichord — a trick he has performed before with an interesting twist on Ukrainian television. The elect of our land stood and cheered, ready to proclaim Ukraine the fifty-first state. Mr. Z stole a smooch from the ruler of Congress, the winsome Ms. Pelosi, and then disappeared in a puff of smoke that left a tang of sulfur wafting on the stale air.
To underscore his seriousness, and using his secret powers, Mr. Z arranged for a bomb-cyclone storm to roar out of the North Pole a few days after his departure to give Americans a little taste of what it’s like to sit in the cold and dark at Christmas time — because the USA is such a blessed land as to have no problems of its own, and needs to be reminded about the sufferings of the less fortunate. And so it goes this Yuletide of 2022 in our charmed and exceptional country. The elves at Clusterfuck Nation wish you all a merry little Christmas!
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As the Yule log burns down, and the trivialities of the season melt into air, the nation might ask itself how the authorities who run things went to war against the citizens of this land. I will tell you and it will probably make you angry: It started when the women of the professional and managerial class watched their avatar, Hillary Clinton, lose the 2016 election against a man who seemed the quintessence of everything they hated about Daddydom.
Donald Trump, flawed to perfection, wrecked the chance of the amalgamated successful women of America to run the national household. Out came the pussy-hats, the Wiccans, and the celebrities threatening to “blow up the White House.” Out came a savage animus against men generally, and a campaign to feminize them in retaliation — and then punish them for objecting to it. Up rose a social movement, Wokery, that had the earmarks of a histrionic religious mania, with Satanic overtones. Up rose the demons, the Antifa louts, the BLM arsonists, the drag queens.
Thus unrolled a national psychodrama that continues to spool out as every system, every business, every institution in our country wobbles and flies apart now. The men embedded in the professional and managerial class tried in 2016 to chivalrously protect their womens’ avatar and her steadfast followers and, failing ignobly that grim November day, then turned to actually attack their adversary, Donald Trump, with the explicit intent to destroy him by all means necessary. In the years-long process, they devolved into criminality, and in so doing they entered a vicious cycle of lying about everything they did to escape the consequences of their ostensible exercise in gallantry.
In effect, the people running things went from a war against a particular person to a war against reality and its twin sister, truth. Now they are deeply invested in unreality and untruth to the point where they have forgotten how this whole thing started and all they can do is desperately patch the dike they had to construct against a deluge of information composed of truth and reality coming at them like a tsunami rolling across the sea. The harder they work at this futile task of defense, the more absurd they make themselves, leading to ridicule, humiliation, and, finally condemnation in whatever remains of the legal arena, where their deeds will finally be judged.
The first stage of that outcome for them is pretending that none of it is happening. That’s why The New York Times and Washington Post ignore the news that the gallant knights of the FBI and several other tentacles of the Intel octopus mounted a ferocious, long-running psy-op through the new phenomenon of social media — that happened to rise in importance through this whole period of national discord. In effect, the intel agencies seized the transmitters (as Fidel Castro might put it) and used them very effectively to control their hallowed narratives.
The second stage is deploying a ruse to distract the public’s attention: That’s why CNN allowed Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the most accomplished liar in all of American politics, to set the stage on Sunday for this week’s criminal referrals against Mr. Trump to be issued out of the House Special J-6 Committee he sits on. That will give America something else to talk about than how they’ve been gaslit and deceived for years. If The Party of Chaos can only bring back The Insurrection to the spotlight, they will feel safe for a little while during the Christmas holiday — because shortly after the new year, there will be a different crew running the J-6 committee and, for the first time in a couple of years, they will be looking into neglected matters such as the FBI’s actual role in that event, and Nancy Pelosi’s failure to honor the then-president’s request for national troops to protect the Capitol building.
Between then and now, we must expect to see the release of Elon Musk’s Twitter files regarding the interactions between federal public health officials and the social network during the years of Covid-19. You understand that these officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, CDC chief Dr. Rochelle Walensky, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and many others, lied about absolutely everything concerning the pandemic and continue lying to this moment about the putative remedy for it: mRNA vaccines, which happen to be killing a lot of people these days. That will be very serious business. Soon will come congressional inquiries, subpoenas, compelled testimony, and perhaps even criminal referrals.
Of course, the professional and managerial class also happens to be the most stalwart group of vaccine champions in the land and thus the most psychologically invested in thinking they did the right thing taking all those shots — while forcing as many others to submit, whether they consented or not. The psychology of previous investment is a prime generator of self-delusion. It looks like that class of people will be proven incorrect the hard way. It turns out, after all, that the mRNA “vaccines” were very effective at being deadly. The excess mortality has already kicked in. It’s 18 percent above normal, for instance, in Australia right now, because they’re keeping track. Our officials don’t want to keep track. They don’t want to know, and they certainly don’t want you to know. This is what you get when you make war against truth and reality.
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Even if NBC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, The WashPo, and the rest of the Big News Media mafia ignore the Twitter Files story, the revolution at Twitter is going to shake their windows and rattle their walls. There will be free debate in 2023 on this social media platform. News and ideas will be set loose across the landscape, and, for the first time in years, reality will have a chance to compete with the bad faith narratives of a regime at war against its own people.
We’ll have to see how long this window remains open before the Intel Community tries to shut Twitter down, ramp up a campaign to defame it, or blow it up as a viable business. Or make a move to, shall we say, neutralize the person behind the revolution there. The more that free speech is actually permitted on Twitter, the more every other platform will look like a lame organ of propaganda, especially when it comes to issues that really matter such as the deadly consequences of the mRNA “vaccines,” the shady doings around recent US elections, the actual condition of the US economy, the perilous folly of “Joe Biden’s” war in Ukraine (and the family grifting operation that prompted it), and the evil machinations of the Intel Community itself.
In about three weeks, the Party of Chaos will be swept out of power in the US House of Representatives. Their opponents will take control of all the House committee chairs, with subpoena power to compel the testimony of public figures who have managed to avoid answering questions for years. The Big News Media may not be able to avoid reporting on it, especially with Twitter loosened up, and their lying attempts to spin events are going to look pathetic when instantly contrasted with free analysis and informed debate in the public arena.
You can’t overstate what an advantage the insidious takeover of social media gave to forces seeking to wreck the country, though the effects have barely been explored yet. The people remain bamboozled over the Covid-19 operation especially. The pandemic certainly wasn’t some random act by Mother Nature, not with US public health agencies supporting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses from Ukraine to North Carolina to Wuhan, China. And the subsequent damage caused by the government’s response to the outbreak was either an epic fiasco of inept officialdom, or something that smells like mass murder.
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s little trick so far to avoid answering questions about these matters was simply to not use the term “gain-of-function” in his correspondence arranging grants for it — especially after President Barack Obama banned that type of research by its name in 2014. So when asked about gain-of-function, he could just lie with abandon. After that simple ruse is exposed, the patent and royalty benefits enjoyed by Dr. Fauci — who doubled his net worth after 2019 — will be dragged into the light of day.
It’s doubtful that Merrick Garland’s uber-corrupt DOJ would follow-up on any referral for criminal prosecution issued by a House committee. But guess what? There are fifty states attorneys general who have standing to prosecute Dr. Fauci over injuries to their state’s citizens. It appears that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, for one, has identified that legal avenue and this week asked Florida’s top court to convene a special grand jury to consider exactly that.
The other players in Team Covid have plenty to answer for, too. Rochelle Walensky’s CDC has deliberately concealed, misled, obfuscated, or opted to not even collect information about injuries and deaths from the Covid “vaccines.” Her agency did nothing to update the inadequate, difficult-to-use VAERS reporting system, or even communicate the very bad news that managed to land on it. The CDC is still aggressively pushing vaccines on children, knowing full well that it damages young hearts, brains, immune systems, and probably the kids’ very DNA.
Probably few would recognize the name Dr. Robert Califf in his second go-round as Commissioner of the FDA (served one year 2016-17 under Obama; confirmed again in Feb. 2022). Dr. Califf has been a tool of the pharma companies for decades. Earlier in his career as a professor at Duke University, he specialized in organizing drug trials. His operation there was supported by over $150-million in grants from pharma. Even despite Deep State control of social media prior to Elon Musk’s cleanup of Twitter, a lot was already known about the botched and faked drug trials that led to the FDA’s conditional emergency approval of Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA Covid-19 products — along with the official suppression of existing anti-viral drugs that could have saved a million lives, which was done strictly to preserve the liability shields of the “vaccines.” A finding of fraud in all this would vitiate the Pharma companies’ protection against lawsuits, and there was fraud galore in the whole wicked business.
Others have to be called to face the new music in Congress: self-styled “humanitarian” Bill Gates, whose fingerprints are all over the Covid-19 story, from the “pandemic war game” (Event 201) he sponsored, held in the fall of 2019, to his vested interests in pharma, to his connections with the shadowy operations of the World Economic Forum and its stated population-reduction initiative. Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, indisputably the preeminent expert on Coronavirus gain-of-function research, and knee-deep in the Covid-19 episode — who has magically been able to hide under a rock the past three years — could shed a lot of light in public testimony on what happened. And Peter Daszak, head of the CIA cut-out org, EcoHealth Alliance, which helped enable the move of gain-of-function research to the Wuhan lab, explicitly explained years ago — in a notorious recording from a symposium — how to create profit opportunities from a pandemic response.
There are countless high officials of the deputy director and commissioner rank, unknown to the public, who could be called to testify about their agency’s contribution to the catastrophe that the Covid-19 response turned out to be. Almost all of them have been laying low since the whole thing started.
Meantime, Mr. Musk has announced that Twitter is preparing the release of all its archives containing communication with federal agencies that sought to control and suppress truthful discussion of the pandemic 2020 to 2022. He added snarkily that his personal pronouns are “prosecute / Fauci” — in case there’s any misunderstanding about what he’s learned from the files.
What’s liable to come out of this uncorking of evil spirits in 2023 is a grotesque spewage of info about official corruption and misconduct that will make the projectile vomiting from The Exorcist look like a mere Satanic loogie in comparison. You have to wonder how the nation will handle it, especially along with the extremely uncomfortable fact that “Joe Biden” still occupies the White House.
The post Truth And Consequences appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Startling fact of the week: Twitter’s senior ranks of content moderators included over a dozen former FBI and CIA agents and analysts who let child porn run loose all over the app while surgically removing any utterance contradicting the government’s claim that mRNA “vaccines” are “safe and effective” — not to mention the effort this elite crew expended against anyone objecting to the Woke-Left’s race and gender hustles. Wouldn’t you like to know how much they were paid? Probably more than government work.
Here’s another awful reality (better fasten your seatbelts): What also emerged in the tweet record of Yoel Roth, the company’s chief censor (former “Head of Trust and Safety”), begins to look like a gay mafia assault on the collective American psyche. Having gained official federal government sanction and protection, a statistically tiny homosexual demographic left in charge of the country’s main public forum has been out for revenge against their perceived enemy, political conservatives — Americans disinclined to join the cheerleading for drag queen story hours, “minor-attracted persons,” transsexuals in the military, and other LBGTQ cultural pranks.
In the process, that gay mafia running the public dialogue supported every lie that the government, its protector, put out, to keep it happy and well-fed. Shocking, I’m sure… but there it is. That means they also promoted the most-deadly psy-op in world history: the Covid-19 scare and the mass “vaccination” crusade that will end up killing many millions world-wide, after destroying the economies of the Western Civ nations. The whole package looks like an attempt to turn the world upside down and inside out. Is it any wonder that so many feel the USA has gone crazy?
Of course, that aroused the widespread suspicion that these now-exposed nefarious operators in social media were merely tools for some murky plutocrat elite led by the likes of the WEF, Bill Gates, and George Soros. Could that be the greatest “conspiracy theory’ of all? More likely, I hesitate to suggest, all these characters in one way or another are merely tools of history itself, as the world enters the darkest days of a Fourth Turning secular winter. As TS Eliot observed: “Humankind cannot bear too much reality.”
Thus, so many sense we live in dangerous times. Everything appears to veer out-of-control, including thought itself. Disorder incites more disorder. While all this madness is going on in-country, the US government, led by the phantom president “Joe Biden,” continues to prosecute its insane proxy war in Ukraine in order to antagonize Russia. Lately the US has sent drones hundreds of miles inside Russia to blow up military airfields. How is that not an escalation of hostilities, and exactly how far do the American people want their government to take this crazy project?
Not a goshdarn inch further, the opinion polls indicate. We are apparently not quite so insane as to welcome nuclear annihilation, and we seem to recognize what might bring it on. And so, the dreadful realities of time still stand before us, unmoved by all the mental illness they provoke, uninterested in our excuses for behaving so badly. Is there any way to face them? To incorporate them into a truth-based narrative that Western Civ can use to rescue itself from something that looks like suicide?
Elon Musk, alone, apart from, and in defiance of all the cowards running things in America —the corporate sell-outs, the craven college presidents, the bought-off politicians, the bad-faith media fabulists, the vindictive denizens of Hollywood — is moving to inject some therapeutic truth into the American lunatic asylum. He came out pretty hot over the weekend, branding Dr. Anthony Fauci as a criminal, calling for his prosecution, and promising the release of Twitter files that will demonstrate just how deceitful and untrustworthy the old Twitter acted in all the medical melodrama surrounding Covid-19 and the “vaccines.” On Sunday, Elon tweeted, “Now things get spicy.” Will the reveal of all that wickedness make any impression on half the people of this country still deranged by the many previous salvos of official propaganda? Maybe not all of them. Maybe only twenty percent. But that would be enough to tip the consensus of opinion in the right direction: a recognition of the harm that has been done… and the will to quit doing more of it.
Beyond that, even, Elon has put the basic question to America: Are you in favor of free speech or not? Especially now that you know that “moderating” free speech is an invitation to live in lies. And lying all the time really does bend that old arc of history toward evil.
The post The Alarm Bells Go Off appeared first on Kunstler.
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https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast367.mp3Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. For over three decades, her research interests have always been at the intersection of biology and computation. She has published over 170 refereed articles on these subjects. In recent years, Dr. Seneff has focused her research interests back towards biology, especially the relationship between vaccines and autism; the harmful effects of the agricultural herbicide glyphosate (sold commercially as “Roundup”); and study of the spike protein associate with the Covid-19-virus and the mRNA vaccines developed for it. She has published several papers on that with Dr. Peter McCullough and others.
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The post KunstlerCast 367– Chatting with Stephanie Seneff of MIT about Covid-19 and other Modern Health Fiascos appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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James A. Baker
At what point in his arduous take-over of Twitter did Elon Musk realize that the package came with a joker in the deck: James A. Baker, formerly general counsel of the FBI? Did he wonder: what is this guy doing here? Were there any conversations between the two? Or did Mr. Musk just quietly observe his presence at a remove in nervous wonder, as one might, say, upon discovering a scorpion in the corner of his hotel room?
Mr. Baker, you understand, was notoriously at the center of the FBI’s FISA court fuckery that got the ball rolling in the Crossfire Hurricane operation, Act One of RussiaGate, as well as the Alpha Bank caper concocted by Hillary Clinton (disclosed this year by special counsel John Durham), and probably every other sedition pie the FBI cooked in its oven in those years, considering Mr. Baker’s position as chief legal advisor to Director Chris Wray. When the alt-news media caught onto Mr. Baker’s nefarious activities, he became inconvenient to the agency, was re-assigned to some nebulous task (polishing Mr. Wray’s cuff links?), and quit in May, 2018. He landed temporarily — or was he, rather, parked out-of-sight? — at the shadowy R Street Institute, an Intel Community cut-out, one of its countless PR channels in the DC Swamp.
But then, mysteriously, Mr. Baker got hired by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in June of 2020 — the heat of a presidential election — to work under Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s general counsel (and chief of “legal, policy, and trust” [ha!]), where he remained until just the other day. Is it a stretch to imagine Mr. Baker’s former employer, the FBI — which, let’s face it, operates as a sort of blood-brotherhood — purposely installed Mr. Baker in that sensitive job at Twitter to help “moderate” the national conversation in the central forum that public debate had moved to in our time?
If so, he apparently did a crackerjack job, and just at the right time, too, after the FBI discovered, in emails they ripped off Rudolf Giuliani’s purloined cloud account, that Donald Trump’s attorney possessed of a copy of the laptop hard-drive of one Hunter Biden, son of presidential candidate Joe Biden — said computer (the FBI knew full-well by then) being stuffed not just with pornographic photos of crack orgies and other personal infelicities, but also a trove of emails and deal memos laying out a bribery and money-laundering scheme that the younger Biden was running all over Eurasia as a family business.
Of course, the FBI had that selfsame computer in its possession for the better part of a year when The New York Post broke the news of its existence days before the election of 2020. In fact, the Bureau had had possession at the very time that Mr. Trump was busy getting impeached for daring to suggest to Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, that the Bidens were involved in some shady business worth investigating with the Kiev-based Burisma gas company. Evidence of that and much much more — including way-bigger shady deals with CCP cut-outs — lay moldering in the laptop the FBI just silently sat on. Isn’t it a little strange that during the dragged-out impeachment ordeal neither Attorney General William Barr nor FBI chief Chris Wray volunteered to Mr. Trump’s legal defense that they held exculpatory evidence on that laptop for the very thing he was impeached on?
That was January, 2020, many months before The New York Post took the laptop’s existence public. And whaddaya know… by June of that year, James A. Baker was in place at Twitter, ready to serve! As election day approached, he apparently succeeded in stifling transmission of the Post’s laptop story plus any-and-all conversation about it in the Twitterverse, and was careful not to leave a memo trail of his heroic interventions. Do you suppose he might have had some conversations about all that with his old colleagues at the FBI? At the same time, you understand, the FBI was leaning successfully on that other social network giant, Facebook, to likewise smother the laptop story. And Google, too, having become an Intel Community tool, was avid to tailor its search algorithms to steer the curious away from Hunter’s laptop. And so was fortune’s fool Joe Biden inserted into history….
Amazingly, after all that huggermugger, James A. Baker still remained in place last week at Twitter — even as his putative boss, censor-in-chief Vijaya Gadde got drop-kicked out the door — just as Elon Musk prepared to release a trove of information detailing Twitter’s censorship activities of recent years. Yes! And, evidently, Mr. Baker functioned as a sort of one-man clearing house for all the documents getting shoveled to independent reporter Matt Taibbi, whom Mr. Musk had designated to be the news conduit for these awaited revelations. And, yes, there is every reason to suspect that Mr. Baker censored, or perhaps even tried to destroy, the very documents that Mr. Musk ordered released.
Was that not like leaving a wolverine in Twitter’s henhouse? How could Mr. Musk not know how absurd it was for Mr. Baker to moderate that release? Well, the chatter is that Mr. Musk was seeking a way to encourage Mr. Baker to inculpate himself, so as to foreclose any lawsuits he might think to bring against Twitter for wrongful termination. I have to say, Mr. Musk would be an idiot if he did not have copies of the server that James Baker had access to and had the opportunity to delete stuff from. I guess we’ll find out.
But there is one other matter that has been left out of all the sound and fury about the Twitter doc release: the meta story of the US government’s rogue agencies’ greater war against the public interest. Not just the Intel Community but all the public health agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services: the FDA, CDC, NIAID, NIH, and more.
Consider that James A. Baker — formerly the FBI’s consiglieri — was in that job at Twitter most of the time that Covid-19 was raging across the land. How much did he have to say about censoring the life-and-death information surrounding the pandemic? Did he stifle debate about the early treatment medications — ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, Vitamin D, etc. — that could have saved many thousands of lives otherwise sacrificed to the medical establishment’s Moloch of intubation-and-remdesivir?
Did he advise the blackballing, silencing, and cancellation of doctors who opposed Dr. Fauci’s regime of lockdowns, masks, and “vaccines”? Did he prevent the public from learning how ineffective and harmful the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA shots are? Did he help promote every government-sponsored untruth about Covid-19, meaning just about everything public officials have uttered about it for three years? Did he, in sum, in his machinations at Twitter, so pervert the national conversation through an epic crisis that he has contributed to the collapsing US economy and a genocide-like campaign against the people of this country. I think he probably did. That’s how serious this matter is.
The post The Tool of Tools appeared first on Kunstler.
Clusterfuck Nation
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Have Americans grokked that virtually all of the mis-and-dis-information bombarding them lo these many years actually comes from the government and the news media channels that serve it? What we’ve got now in this country is a Mind-Fuckery Industrial Complex waging a psy-ops war on the people of this land. Why is that?
Essentially, to cover-up past crimes against the country by public officials. Twitter, pre-Musk, was a major accomplice and enabler of all that, and suddenly it’s not — to the horror of everyone in charge at our nation’s seat of government. The main crimes revolve around selling-out America’s future one way or another — “Joe Biden” and Company being only the most blatant perps in the big picture.
Before them was Hillary Clinton, with her purchase of the Democratic National Committee and previous lucrative ops during her turn as Secretary of State, like the Uranium One deal, the Skolkovo military tech transfer op, and then the Russia Collusion op to insure none of that would ever come to light. The whole Intel Community behemoth was neck deep in it, too, amping up the Russia prank into a four-year coup d’état. Remember, The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that Hillary’s little hoax was for-real. It’s all just gotten more grotesque since Mr. Trump was ejected in the souped-up 2020 election, with sideshows such as the ongoing race-and-gender hustles, the climate con, and the Green New Deal bullshit.
Covid-19, surely released on-purpose, was, as Ed Dowd avers, a cover for global bankruptcy. Nothing else explains the astounding coordination of so many governments acting the same way against their own citizens: lockdowns, vaxx mandates, vaxx passports, and all. The icing on that poison cake, of course, is that everything the public health officialdom told you about Covid-19 was patently untrue, and dishonestly so, not via omission or plain incompetence. In fact, the virus was made in a Chinese lab with the help of Dr. Fauci and colleagues. Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine did work effectively against it. The “vaccines” were not tested properly and turned out to be harmful. And now the Covid-19 melodrama is ending in a discernable death-of-the-vaxxed and the reveal of all those aforesaid lies, while, anyway, despite their gaslight and smoke-screens, the global bankruptcy approaches its nauseating climax.
Watching the post-election political vaudeville during the lame-duck Christmas intermezzo, one can’t escape perceiving that just about everything in the USA is now heading south toward breakdown and ruin. The on-the-ground economy craters, inflation rages at the supermarket, supply lines break, the oil and gas industries get strangled, health care goes down smoking and burning, public education folds in disgrace and failure, Wall Street ends with a bang and a whimper, and John Fetterman prepares for his place in history.
Our government’s Ukraine op is ending in disaster for that sad-sack former Russian province and, surprise-surprise, for the European Union, NATO, and us, too. We finally played the Russia card like we’re the proverbial patsy at the poker table. Our hand turns out to be a pair of deuces with the five-of-diamonds high. Russia rakes in the chips with its massive natural resources and the world’s most stable currency, soon to be backed by gold. How’d that turn out, Victoria Nuland?
The EU was already functionally bankrupt. Now it has lost its entire industrial base for a lack of fuel to run it — self-Epsteined, shall we say, on the national scale — and faces not just a return to the medieval standard-of-living but also to the competitive savagery of many small nations soon to be fighting among themselves, making bad conditions worse. So sad. Euroland was a nice place to visit at the turn of the millennium and now the lights will blink out, like seeing a fond relative expire, eyes going vacant, on her deathbed.
Western Civ is, after all, a kind of family. And now the family is disintegrating — as old families will — in a malodorous fog of receivership, vice, and imbecility. Here in the USA, it’s hard to have faith in the supposed political opposition, the Republican Party. Not with Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy still riding herd. They preside over their own coterie of extravagant grift and disgusting privilege. Don’t be shocked… shocked… if they just stand by while America crumples into history at the hands of “Joe Biden.” If there is any saving of this nation, these two must be defenestrated — though saving the nation from penury, depravity, and senility looks increasingly improbable, at least in the form of the old federal republic we knew and loved.
The macro trend is quite clear, as laid out in The Long Emergency: what’s coming is the opposite of global government; rather, national governments become increasingly impotent and illegitimate, and smaller regions by necessity must retreat into autarky to keep anything going. For us that means Washington DC sinks into irrelevance while the states, or perhaps mere parts of the states, have to take charge of their own affairs.
That recovery process might have been jump-started by the Elon Musk revolution at Twitter. It will be a lot harder for the Mind-Fuckery Industrial Complex to operate with this key player in revolt. Lies will be contested now on the grand scale in ways that were formerly subverted. Things blurry will come into focus. Fresh air will blow in on chill winter winds. New ops against the people, such as the threatened central bank digital dollar, will be laughed off the stage. Some lights go out, but others get turned on.
The post Some Lights Go Out, Some Lights Go On appeared first on Kunstler.
“I have had enough of this insanity and lack of national media attention or regulatory attention to this clear and present danger and tragedy.” — Ed Dowd
The post How’s the War on Truth Going? appeared first on Kunstler.
“We want to save the planet, and the life upon it, but we’re not willing to pay the price and bear the consequences. So we make up a narrative that feels good and run with it.” — Raul Ilargi Meier
The post The Four Fuckeries appeared first on Kunstler.
The post KunstlerCast 366 — Conversation with Chris M and Chris S of the New Revenant Society appeared first on Kunstler.
“Sooner or later, there will be push-back against the Dems attempt to turn the USA into some kind of obese transgender liberal Wakanda run by crooks, freaks and thugs.” —The Vineyard of The Saker
The post A Light in the Darkness appeared first on Kunstler.
“Ultimately, the Democratic Party is a criminal organization; and to support it is to be a criminal. And since it is the ruling party, unless you oppose it, you support it.” —Curtis Yarvin, The Gray Mirror
The post The Solemn Stillness Before Winter appeared first on Kunstler.
We have pretty much burned our bridges at this point. Unless you’re prepared to mindfuck yourself, and gaslight yourself, and confess, and convert, there’s no going back to “normal” society (which we couldn’t go back to anyway, on account of how it doesn’t exist anymore) — CJ Hopkins
The post A Smoldering Fuse appeared first on Kunstler.
“Normally it would be considered a tell when one political party loses its mind any time someone suggests we should have basic election security procedures common in every other civilized country.” — MartyrMade on Twitter
The post The Aftermath and After That appeared first on Kunstler.
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. — Marcus Aurelius
The post Showdown Slow Down appeared first on Kunstler.
Threat to “our democracy?” The effrontery! In a fair and just world, the Democratic Party of Chaos would slouch into the donkey’s graveyard — but since when is the USA part of a fair and just world?
The post Low Down on the Showdown appeared first on Kunstler.
The post KunstlerCast 365 — A Conversation with David McAlvany appeared first on Kunstler.
Shuck-and-jive from America’s broken thinking class, the people who pretend to know better than everybody else.
The post Emily Oster’s Plea Bargain appeared first on Kunstler.
All the narratives spun by the Party of Chaos are falling apart now, but this final fiasco, a mere week before the midterm election, is a humdinger with a cherry-on-top.
The post Cockamamie Story appeared first on Kunstler.
The death of the faithless state is as natural and lovely as a melting snowflake…All the broken things will start to be fixed. And all the crazy things will go away, immediately. —another one from Curtis Yarvin
The post An Election, If You Can Hold It appeared first on Kunstler.
When this future becomes the present, that present will look obvious. It always does. And from that present, this past we are living in will look ridiculous…. — Curtis Yarvin
The post Chaos Is As Chaos Does appeared first on Kunstler.
The people who run things in this country don’t deserve your respect or allegiance. They are at war with you. They want you and your children dead.
The post The Authorities Are Our Enemies appeared first on Kunstler.
The thinking classes in America want to emulate the theocratic lunacy of the Sixteenth Century. They have become everything they used to despise as cruel, unjust, and crazy.
The post American Inquisition appeared first on Kunstler.
Slip slidin’ away… Slip slidin’ away… You know the nearer your destination… The more you’re slip slidin’ away…. —Paul Simon
The post We’re Coming For You appeared first on Kunstler.
Last night I had a dream… Everyone that I knew… And everyone that you know was in my dream… I saw a vampire… I saw a ghost… Everybody scared me but you scared me the most… In the dream I had last night… — Randy Newman
The post You Can Always Dream appeared first on Kunstler.
Who blew up Nord Stream? Which country is on whose side? The midterm election looms. Global lunacy rises… a shoot-out of ideas about the global game-board.
The post KunstlerCast 364 — Wild Western Civ Shoot-out with Tom Luongo appeared first on Kunstler.
Can you picture what will be? So limitless and free… Desperately in need of some stranger’s hand… In a desperate land…. — The Doors
The post November Surprise? appeared first on Kunstler.
“Joe Biden” screws the pooch on Western Civ. He can’t help himself. His helpers can’t help him. Who will help us?
The post Developing Developments appeared first on Kunstler.
“There is a dark craving for rot… as if decay were an escape from the limits, the oppressive fears and the pains of an individual existence.” — Eric Hoffer
The post Slouching Toward Endgame appeared first on Kunstler.
Feel like we’re on the ragged edge of something new and awful? You are not alone….
The post This Is the Way the World Ends appeared first on Kunstler.
That thing that many of you have worried about, and some of you have prepared for — well, it’s here. We’re in it now.
The post “Joe Biden’s” Last Stand appeared first on Kunstler.
My guest, Jacob Dreizen, a new face on the blogging scene… His commentary can be found at www.thedreizinreport.com and his Rumble and Odysee channels….
The post KunstlerCast 363 — Chatting with Jacob Dreizin of the Dreizin Report appeared first on Kunstler.
The Leftist system is not meant to produce political stability or prosperity, and feels a lot like it is entering a death spiral. Getting the lunatics out of power, before they crash the entire West with no survivors, is the most urgent problem we face. — Eugyppius at Substack
The post A Walk on the Wild Side appeared first on Kunstler.
A mighty struggle grinds on behind-the-scenes that may determine the fate of the “Joe Biden” regime and the Deep State horse it rode in on….
The post Rope-a-Dope appeared first on Kunstler.
Beware: Ukraine’s touted Kharkov offensive is probably not what the US news media cracks it up to be….
The post Is War What You Asked For? appeared first on Kunstler.
The frolics of summer are done, the day shortens, the sky darkens, the suspense deepens….
The post Here It Comes appeared first on Kunstler.
Uncertainty rules at the top of our slide into the dark half of the year….
The post Labor Day Assessment appeared first on Kunstler.
I knew Abe Lincoln, and that was no Gettysburg Address….
The post Soul Man appeared first on Kunstler.
The autumn leaves will soon be trembling, and you should be, too….
The post The Wild West appeared first on Kunstler.
Something’s coming… everybody feels it…
The post An Ill Wind appeared first on Kunstler.
The post KunstlerCast 362 — Chatting with Ray Jason, the Sea Gypsy Philosopher appeared first on Kunstler.
Economic and cultural suicide is hardly the only option, and certainly not the best…
The post Crazyland appeared first on Kunstler.
We’re witnessing the destruction of every institution in the land and nobody knows how to stop it….
The post The Meaning of Incredible appeared first on Kunstler.
Former president Trump is not without resources and recourse in all this. Though the news media does not follow it, the Trump v Clinton lawsuit trial continues, and it might not go so well for Mrs. Clinton and her friends….
The post A Different Sort of Warrant appeared first on Kunstler.
Despite all attempts to disable him in office, Mr. Trump, as president, got to see an awful lot of classified material, including all the evidence of Hillary Clinton’s Russia Collusion hoax, abetted by the FBI, the DOJ, CIA, and DOD, plus all the lawless shenanigans that took place in the FISA court….
The post Gestapo the Steal appeared first on Kunstler.
The regime must know that the next Congress is going to rip the face off the deep state and likely impeach “Joe Biden” for accepting bribes from countries hostile to the USA.
The post The Sickening Quickening appeared first on Kunstler.
Satan is the father of lies and we have become Satanic, being and doing evil, most especially to ourselves….
The post A Glance Ahead appeared first on Kunstler.
The post KunstlerCast 361 — Yakking with David Collum as the World Turns and Burns appeared first on Kunstler.
As in the USA, the governments of Euroland have declared war on their own people….
The post Atonement appeared first on Kunstler.
…The Senate is scheduled to be in recess August 6 to September 6 for politicking back home. Maybe after that Senator Grassley will actually produce his whistleblowers in open session….
The post Playing Chicken with the Fates appeared first on Kunstler.
In keeping with the principles of mass formation psychosis, the maliciously insane people in charge of national affairs will expect you to swallow ever-greater absurdities to maintain their control (and protect themselves).
The post The Wrecking Crew Will Be Overcome appeared first on Kunstler.
Pretty soon, it’s going to be every country for itself in this main event of the fourth turning (a.k.a. the long emergency)….
The post People, Get Ready appeared first on Kunstler.
Whose idea was it to send the wind-up doll president called “Joe Biden” to Saudi Arabia…?
The post The Last Days of “Joe Biden” appeared first on Kunstler.
Has anyone noticed, by the way, that the US is under an invasion of breakfast tacos…?
The post A Tale of the Taco appeared first on Kunstler.
…if you’re reading this personal lamentation, consider bending toward simplicity….
The post It’s Not Working appeared first on Kunstler.
These quandaries and conundrums form a toxic cloud of cognitive dissonance blanketing America like a cosmic miasma of wickedness. We have got to turn the tables on these ghouls running things….
The post Ignition… Lift-off! appeared first on Kunstler.
This birthday of the republic we are on track to going medieval, or something that at least rhymes with it….
The post A Great Endeavor appeared first on Kunstler.
Life for us will get simpler, for sure, but it doesn’t have to be a trip back to the eleventh century….
The post Independence Day appeared first on Kunstler.
We have not been so ripe for regime change since 1776. A ruling Party of Chaos is doing absolutely everything to disorder our lives and there really is no generous interpretation for its motives
The post The Time of Our Time appeared first on Kunstler.
So, they press on now with shots for little children that are certain to harm the kids’ immune systems and produce an array of consequent serious disorders ranging from hepatitis to myocarditis to sterility to brain damage….
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…perhaps, you can see how the dangerous mischief of RussiaGate, Hillary Clinton’s spoofish punkery that Russia “interfered” in the 2016 election, mutated into a foreign policy psychosis….
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The post KunstlerCast 359 — A Conversation with Mattias Desmet; Mass Formation and the Totalitarian Mind appeared first on Kunstler.
Lots of things are going south all at once….
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Five-year-old children generally have no idea what adult sexuality is about….
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It’s a dangerous game trying to beat down the population this way, and to what end, exactly?
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At least half the public is already onto the extravagant damage inflicted on our national life by the beneficiaries of the 2020 election….
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Consider that, if nothing else, John Durham knows a lot more about all this business, and that might include some things that we don’t know….
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They screwed-the-pooch on the Covid-19 caper and now the data is biting Klaus and Company on the ass….
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America has become a malfunctioning pageant without feasible roles that children can realistically project themselves into….
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Now, we’re finding out the hard way how much daily life must change, and is changing, and how disorderly that process is in every way from the imperative daily life adjustments to our spiritual attitudes about them…
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So, in 2016, schlubby lawyer Michael Sussmann from Perkins Coie, the DC law firm representing the Hillary Clinton Campaign, asks for a meeting with his old DOJ colleague, Jim Baker, now General Counsel (top lawyer) for the FBI….
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The post KunstlerCast 358 — A Conversation About Ukraine with Larry C Johnson appeared first on Kunstler.
What will avail in the face of these treacheries and hardships? Oppose. Refuse. Resist. This is getting personal….
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…there are roughly six months of nice weather to get through, meaning conditions that are favorable for action in the street, starring the shock troops of Progressivise Wokery….
What’s out there, rather, is a model of breakdown and collapse which the Woked-up, globalist neo-Jacobins are doing everything possible to hasten….
Behind all this is the growing panic in the Left that they are culpable for an enormous raft of crimes committed against their own country, and will eventually end up in court, in prison, or worse….
It’s one thing to lose your dignity as citizens, and another to just lose your country altogether….
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support! Joni McGary is the mother of a college junior and the co-founder of NoCollegeMandates.com, a coalition of more than 2500 college stakeholders working to end college Covid-19 vaccine mandates. She’s worked in business development in the food, pharmaceutical more »
None of these shocks can be postponed anymore. The Left’s war on America’s psyche is over….
America is a drama queen, like the Queen Bee in one of those Real Housewives shows on cable TV, whose entire purpose in life is creating colorful conflicts within her circle of sisters….
America has had enough of being in thrall, especially to figures and forces dedicated to our destruction….
Half the nation doesn’t believe anything it is told by those in authority and the other half revels in its reckless abuse of authority….
These dangerous currents amount to a huge riptide in global events that will carry many people and whole societies out to sea….
Everything about America is looking more and more medieval….
What you don’t see in the pre-occupancy photos is the behavior that the homeless will bring with them when they move in….
You have been boldly lied-to by them with absolute consistency for years now….
March of 2022 sure was a humdinger. And, of course, April always begins with a joke, before the serious fun starts.
Money money money everywhere along the trail for the Biden Family….
You see, there are real people behind all these disorders of our national life. Many more besides just the notorious Dr. Fauci…
New Paintings from the 2021 Season The H & V Factory on Route 29, February Click here for Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books Click here to order from Amazon The Jeff Greenaway series of novellas. These rollicking, short books depict the misadventures of an eleven-year-old boy growing up in New York City in the early more »
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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 The defining moment last week in America’s ongoing mental health crisis was U Penn swimmer Lia Thomas’s record-setting win in the NCAA women’s 500-yard freestyle championship race. It was celebrated more »
The regime behind “Joe Biden” appears to relish the prospect of dragging out this crisis as long as possible, despite the fact that we have about zero national interest in the fate of Ukraine, except perhaps for our fears about the dark secrets that reside there….
Would our country be disappointed if Russia actually solved the problem of Ukraine? You have every reason to think so.
Yes, life in the early twenty-first century looks more and more like a bad horror movie. And now the critics are moving in, savaging the production.
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page And thanks to all my Patrons for your support! #355 —Nick Corbishley is the author of Scanned: Why Vaccine Passports, Mandates, Digital IDs Will Mean the End of Privacy and Personal Freedom. He’s been an editor at Wolf Richter’s Wolf Street website and currently writes for Naked more »
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Time, they say, is nature’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t happen at once. If that’s so, then maybe time has stopped because all of a sudden everything seems to be happening at once. Three things, actually: 1) a Russian military operation in Ukraine that a lot of people in America want to turn into World War Three; 2) an epic crack-up of the world financial system; and 3) the breakdown of the fishy Covid-19 affair and especially the story behind its holy avatar: the mRNA vaccine.
In a sane society, that might be enough to trip the institutional reality-test apparatus, but we are not a sane society these days, so we plunge ever-deeper into a hurly-burly of wrongful endeavor vectoring toward self-destruction. The immediate problem is a nation (us) that is powerfully bamboozled, led by a figurehead nobody believes in, backed by a hidden coterie of actors who appear to hate our country enough to try to sink it.
Forgive me for re-stating the premise of the Ukraine situation but one must counter the propaganda emitted like poison gas by a perfidious news media: Russia objected to the expansion of NATO to its very border, based on long-standing prior agreements about it. “Joe Biden” had every chance to formally recognize that reality and stupidly demurred. The Ukrainian government, ditto. Our side (the USA) had already created enough mischief there in mounting the 2014 coup against a government friendly with Russia, and then arming its replacement to harass Ukraine’s own citizens in its easternmost provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk. Two weeks ago, Russia moved in to forcefully correct all that. After all, Ukraine had been a part of Russia since they wrested it from the Ottoman (Turkish) empire in the 1700s, and in any other sense Ukraine is within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, as such things are defined in geopolitical history.
The US-led response to the Russian op was an attempt to dismantle the complex interbank payment systems of the global economy in order to punish one region (Russia) of the global economy — that is, cutting off your leg to punish yourself for walking into harm’s way. The result of that now is mayhem in the financial markets and in currencies, with global commodities like grain, oil, and ores acting as hostages. This hostage-taking has far-reaching effects because the nations of the world can’t operate without food, energy, and stuff to make products out of. Interfere with the rational distribution of them and you’ll get chaos and death.
Financial markets are averse to threats of chaos and death. These conditions tend to interfere with formal promises between parties to service loans, which is the basis of finance. If finance destabilizes badly, standards of living plummet, and pretty soon people are stuck being hungry in the cold and dark — which is the opposite of being happy and civilized. So, maybe jamming an I-beam into the machinery of global finance isn’t the splendid idea it seemed to be a few days ago when the geniuses behind “Joe Biden” swung into action pretending to be super-heroes fighting an imagined nemesis. Standing by to see how all that works out….
Then there is the resolving picture of all the mysterious puzzle-pieces in the Covid-19 story. Sunday night, America’s premier propaganda vessel, CBS’s 60-Minutes, ran a puff-piece on the CDC starring the warm-and-fuzzy Mom figure, Rochelle Walensky. It is hard to overstate just how dishonest the segment was, starting with its subtle effort to keep America in a state of alarm (“new variants” coming!), proceeding to a deceptive cartoon of how the mRNA “vaccines” work wonders (“white memory cells patrol the body,” no mention of spike proteins), and concluding with exhortations for Americans to continue vaxxing and boosting up — despite an avalanche of news coming from elsewhere than 60-Minutes about the CDC withholding critical information from the public it’s supposed to serve throughout the two-year-plus crisis, not to mention new data from alt-media on extensive injury and death rates among the vaccinated, including shocking info from the court-ordered recent release of Pfizer’s own records.
Was this 60-Minutes segment corporate media’s attempt to cover-up the emerging crimes of America’s public health agencies in concert with Pharma and media itself? That is, to get ahead of the story, as has lately been the strategy for all the cable channels and legacy newspapers with more and more citizens asking themselves if they have been played? Meanwhile, the Big Kahuna of Covid-19, one Dr. Anthony Fauci, has gone-to-ground, made himself scarce, skipped the scene, vamoosed… amid all the new controversy. Word has apparently come down from on-high in the Party of Chaos that his ubiquitous puss on the nation’s flat-screens is no longer helping to sell the mass vaxx directive. Too many people, perhaps, suspect that he caused the whole thing to happen in the first place and then botched his attempt to play savior over it.
It would be a pity for the Party of Chaos (starts with a “D”) and its accomplices in the Covid frauds if the events playing out in Ukraine actually concluded with a reduction of danger and chaos in that corner of the world. It is surely the last thing they want. Yet the possibility exists that Russia will pacify the country, disarm it, neutralize its most corrupt and obdurately degenerate factions, and set it up as a properly governed backwater that will not threaten to upset the peace of the world again for some time ahead. Then, the spotlight will be back on the Covid crime against humanity and the folks who perpetrated it. And there will be nowhere for them to hide….especially with financial markets crashing down on their ears.
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Say what you will about Russia’s Cleanup-in-Aisle-Four operation in Ukraine. It sure changed the subject from the murderous Covid-19 madness — cooked up by political therapists who have all the answers for our salvation — to the hard realities of power politics. And at just the right time, too, as ever more hard data leaks through the bastions of captured corporate media to morally indict the criminal public health establishment and their elected enablers throughout Western Civ.
In other words, the whole Covid story was falling apart. Though the CDC and the FDA were hiding and fudging all their numbers as best they could, the insurance actuaries and the humble morticians had no such inhibitions about reporting an upsurge in strange deaths. Whistles were blowing over the botched Pfizer approval trials. The world was beginning to grok how dishonest, deadly, and sinister the whole Covid caper really was — from the engineered and patented origins of the disease, to the lethal mechanisms of the “vaccines”— when it became necessary to divert the world’s attention. Plus, the oaf Justin Trudeau badly tipped his hand on the West’s tilt into tyranny… and now American truckers were revving up their convoys… someone, please, do something! Get Russia back in the center ring!
And so, the floundering establishment activated the still-potent workings of mass formation to fire up what looked like Act One of World War Three. Forgive me for saying what I will about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The US authorities wanted it. They set it up nakedly by replaying the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse, and they refused to negotiate in good faith as to their using Ukraine as a forward base for NATO on Russia’s border. The Russians couldn’t have been plainer about their intentions. They’ve been telling the US to keep Ukraine neutral for over a decade, to not outfit the place for military shenanigans. What part of that did America not understand? Every part, apparently — and on-purpose.
It raises the question, of course, as to whether we actually have an interest in that faraway land. I think the answer is: not hardly, except as a utensil of control and antagonism against Russia. As to the people of Ukraine, let’s be honest: we put them in harm’s way, and then we cried crocodile tears over them — most mawkishly in the increasingly bizarre ritual we call the State of the Union Message. All those yellow and blue lapel pins and fashion accessories. What bathetic pretense.
Who in the US government, from our founding in 1789 to 1991 — while Ukraine was part of Russia in one way or another — gave a passing thought to Ukraine? Answer: nobody. And then, after the crack-up of the USSR, Ukraine was “in play,” culminating in the 2014 CIA-sponsored “color revolution” that ousted then-president Viktor Yanukovych, who was inclined to join Russia’s Eurasian Customs Union of trade relations rather than the US wished-for NATO or EU. And ever since then it has been one American intrigue after another — including a brisk trade in grift and bribery by the Biden family, the Clinton syndicate, the next-gen of Kerrys, and other entitled elites from over here selling their influence.
And now the economic sanctions on Russia, which are sure to blow back on the countries issuing them. Europe has to pretend that it doesn’t need Russian oil and gas, that it doesn’t need cheap uranium to run their nuke power plants, that they don’t need the Baikonur Cosmodrome to launch their satellites, and so on. More likely, these moves will accelerate the collapse of Western Civ’s banking system, stock and bond markets, and erode the US dollar’s role as the global reserve currency — a longstanding “exorbitant privilege” for getting stuff from all over the world in exchange for promises to pay some Tuesday in the distant future.
The reader may ask: why does this blog appear to take Russia’s side in the current conflict against the US and our supposed allies? Answer: Why would you trust a government (ours) and its captive news media after years of their blatant lying and tyrannical over-reach? These parties appear to be at war against their own people, that is, against us — certainly more than Russia is. Especially in the historic moment when all our mendacious “narratives” are being exposed as false? Russian Collusion? Indictments underway and more to follow. Covid-19? A mega-crime of mass homicide spawned by a matrix of pharmaceutical racketeers, corrupt government officials, and accomplice news organizations. Stolen elections? Don’t, for Gawd’s sake, even try looking at the slime trail of evidence. I won’t bother listing the many transgressions of Wokery against our culture and history. And all of a sudden, it appears a lot of American citizens have had enough of being fucked around. I’m with them.
Now consider this: What if it turns out that Russia can complete its Cleanup-in-Aisle-Four operation relatively quickly, with a minimized loss of life and damage to the everyday infrastructure of Ukraine, and arrange things there afterward so that Ukraine is not a menace to anyone, either Russia or the West? I sincerely believe this is their intention — just as I sincerely believe that their leadership is actually sane, and ours appears not to be. Perhaps Russia will even offer Ukraine (or its re-arranged regions) assistance in recovering from the foolishness it played along with to its own sorrow? What if Russia actually has no intention of starting World War Three? Will we keep trying to start it anyway?
Whoever is behind “Joe Biden” has done all they can to derail American Life, and the feckless leadership of Euroland has also seemed avid to trash its future. There is a welling movement, in America, at least, to resist all that, to sweep these degenerates out of power, and make a concerted course correction in the direction of sanity, rectitude, liberty, and generosity of spirit toward each other. An awful lot of trouble has already been set in motion by the idiots running things. There is a difficult slog ahead. Is your head screwed on? Where will you stand?
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| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
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After many months of the macro, let’s step down to the micro. Behold the many layers of renovation of an ancient (by US standards) house on Main Street. See the original corbel that braces the fragment of pediment above the door. It was but one small grace-note among what were many grace-notes in this humble vernacular building when it was built (1850 -1870, I’m guessing). Grace-notes endow a building with the reminder that humans, at our best, deserve to be loved. They convey the message that the building was built lovingly, with care for its details, which derive from the grand spectacle of life on earth. Nature, that is. The humble corbel did not have to be curved — but somebody cared enough to do it that way. It took some skill to, at least, design and proportion it, even if it was fabricated by machines at a millworks.
It appears that the building has been given at least two 20th century exterior renovations — “skin jobs” — first with aluminum siding slapped over the original wood, and secondarily with vinyl some time after that. These materials are always marketed as “maintenance-free!” It’s a lie of course. Houses still require care, but these materials actually repel the instinct to care for them. They are without grace and they invite neglect. Of course they age badly, and as they do, they defeat our instinct to love the things that our town is made of and care for them.
Below, note the condition of the eaves. The renovators saw some value in saving the brackets, plus the original wood of the soffit and the frieze board. But see how violently the corner of the building was assaulted by industrial progress — as if technology had gone to war against beauty — and how nature (a trumpet vine, I think) fought back against that insult.
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Did “Joe Biden’s” handlers actually want to start World War Three? They are the same posse who contrived the Russian Collusion hysteria of 2016-19, then launched Covid-19 — and the even more deadly mass “vaccination” response to it — and have now successfully goaded Russia into cleaning up the international hub of grift and mischief known as Ukraine. One thing established for sure as fact: the “Joe Biden” family received plenty of cash off that grift wagon, and those “handlers” have neatly ring-fenced it from official scrutiny. Where does that leave the so-called president of the US in the current crisis?
The scant news coming out of Ukraine is so infected with propaganda that it’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on there these early days of the Russian invasion. Some interested parties say that Russia is getting its ass kicked by a Ukrainian resistance. More temperate reports suggest that Russian forces are proceeding methodically to capture and neutralize Ukraine’s meager military assets. Apparently, Ukraine and Russia are holding a diplomatic parlay today at the Belarus border. You might style that as “peace talks,” but who knows? There are no real functioning international news agencies anymore.
The current CIA-approved narrative wants you to believe that Vlad Putin seeks to reassemble the old Soviet Union and will move next to capture the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. I doubt this since all those countries have their own cultures rather emphatically hostile to Russia and required onerous operating subsidies from Moscow back in the Soviet day. Ukraine will surely be enough of a burden for Russia going forward.
An alternate narrative to the CIA’s scare story would follow the Occam’s Razor rule that the simplest explanation is probably the truth — namely, that there was no other way to stop Ukraine’s shelling and mortar attacks against the ethnic Russian population in the Donbas which, by the way, was carried out with US-gifted armaments. And there was no other way to disabuse the USA from the idea that Ukraine should join NATO and thereby become a missile launching base on Russia’s border.
Western Civ’s response so far is to cut off its nose to spite its face. A sidebar to the CIA-approved narrative is that the West should shut-down Russia’s export economy in response to their action in Ukraine. Of course, the EU members know that they can’t take a pass on Russian oil and natgas, unless they want to eat cold bratwurst and linguini in the dark. But this reality hasn’t stopped the USA from militating for that. Likewise, shutting Russia out of the SWIFT money transfer system will only achieve chaos in global trade and international banking — but chaos is what you get with “Joe Biden’s” Party of Chaos running things.
These are the folks who worked tirelessly to drive America insane since 2016 and now they’re capping their “hat-trick” of mind-fuckery with the specter of World War Three. Notice how neatly their engineered mass formation psychosis segued from Trump/Russia to Covid-19 and now the threat of going nuclear over Ukraine. My theory of the case would be as follows: America’s Deep State provoked Russia in Ukraine to cover up its own massive crimes against American citizens which now verge on being fully exposed.
The timing on Ukraine couldn’t have been more seemingly fortuitous. America — indeed the whole world — has awakened to the apparent reality that mass vaccination is killing off a lot of people before their time. The news is out, coming not from the public health bureaucracy but from such unexpected sources as actuaries in the insurance industry who collate quarterly death rates and morticians observing unusual morbid oddities in the bodies they prepare for burial. This comes at the very same time as reports that the CDC deliberately falsified Covid-19 death and injury statistics, both for the disease itself and for the mRNA “vaccines.” The FDA is also implicated in approving falsified “vaccine” trial data. One result of all that is the crash of Moderna and Pfizer stocks, as the geniuses on Wall Street suss out the mountain range of litigation that looms in the distance.
But they must know — and hundreds of appointed and elected officials must know — that the blowback from Covid-19 doesn’t stop with mere civil lawsuits but extends to criminal cases of supreme consequence: deliberate mass murder, extending to the highest levels of officialdom in many countries. To this day the CDC and state health departments are pushing “vaccines,” despite massive mounting evidence that the shots cause organ damage and mess up immune systems at a rate, and to a degree, astronomically above any previous vaccines. They must know that the official standard-of-care using remdesivir and intubation was overwhelmingly likely to kill hospital in-patients. They must know that early treatment protocols using cheap off-label drugs were highly effective and that banning early treatment — to maintain Emergency Use Authorization for killer “vaccines” — amounted to mass homicide.
It will get harder and harder to ignore widespread untimely death going forward as the “vaccines” work their vicious hoodoo on the boosted population, and even the most obdurately spellbound “vaccine” cheerleaders will have to endure such surges of cognitive dissonance that heads are sure to explode. So, the Ukraine invasion was the best means at hand to cover-up all that, and the longer the US government can feed that monster, and keep it going, the more they can shift the focus off the monumental frauds and homicides they carried out and will be criminally liable for.
Secondarily to all that, of course, is the emerging picture of pervasive corruption and crime among the three-letter agencies that special counsel John Durham is getting ready to feed to the dumpster fire of institutional failure that US politics has become. Ukraine is a manageable localized problem in a distant part of the world and Russia is going to manage it. The American crisis of confidence in its own operating system is something else.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
New Paintings by JHK 2020
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It is fair to say that the “Joe Biden” government dearly wanted a Russian invasion of Ukraine in order to divert attention from the “Joe Biden” government’s war on its own people in the United States. The table was nicely laid for it over many years, including, by the way, Mr. Trump’s vaunted gift of weaponry to Ukraine, which enabled and emboldened the Kiev regime to harass the Russian-speaking population of Donbas without relent. And the situation was aggravated by the deliberate negotiation-unworthiness (Russian term) of “Joe Biden” and Company, who refused to discuss the chief issue between the US and Russia, namely, the dishonest effort, in violation of written agreements dating from 1990, to enlist Ukraine in NATO, and thereby to place missiles on Russia’s border. The US disallowed something very similar in 1962, when the old USSR tried to put missiles in Cuba.
You are also seeing payback for the Maidan color revolution of 2014, engineered by John Kerry’s State Department and John Brennan’s CIA. We have been managing Ukraine backstage since then and, alas for that poor country, quite deceitfully. If you bother to read the recent statements of both “Joe Biden” and Mr. Putin, you will see exactly why and how the situation developed. You will also see an appalling difference in the quality of public utterance — as, say, the difference between Zippy the Pinhead and a Metternich.
I’ll get back to all that presently, but first let’s be clear about what “Joe Biden” & Co. seek to divert public attention from: the complete implosion of all the narratives that support the “Joe Biden” regime — and the campaign against Western Civ more generally by the sinister likes of Klaus Schwab and his global gang of Great Re-setters, including Bill Gates, George Soros, and many actors in America’s own Deep State.
The Covid-19 story is blowing up, and in a very ugly way for the American people. The news is finally wriggling free of our combined news media / social media censorship machine and that news is as follows: Covid-19 was a trip laid on the world to get rid of the irascible Mr. Trump and usher-in a system of digital social controls. The mRNA “vaccines” were all patented and ready to go before the virus even took off. The mRNA “vaccines” turned out to be ineffective and arguably more damaging than the Covid-19 virus. That last bit of news is now coming out in reports from the life insurance and funeral industries, which are showing an alarming increase in all-causes death, especially in people under 60 years of age.
It is also coming out that the CDC has wildly and recklessly falsified its own data throughout the Covid crisis, and that the “vaccine” safety trials were a complete fraud — which has led to the prospect of Moderna and Pfizer losing their liability shields, and, recently, to the crash of their share prices. The public is also learning that they were cruelly denied early treatments with well-proven off-label drugs that might have saved millions of lives. And yet, knowing all this, “Joe Biden” and his Democratic Party are to this day urging Americans to “go out and get vaccinated, get boosted,” in the words last week of the US president. You can’t be faulted if you suspect that they are deliberately trying to kill a lot of people.
The blow-up of the Covid-19 story will come to horrify even those Americans hypnotically locked into mass formation, and will lead to countless lawsuits and prosecutions. But in the meantime, we will be preoccupied with the blow-up of the financial system and the economy it is supposed to serve. The inflation horses are out of the barn and running wild. The Federal Reserve has finally succeeded in destroying the value of the dollar and, consequently, destroying the little that is left of middle-class life in the USA. At the same time, they have unleashed forces that will also destroy the fortunes of many upper-class people, too, as the stock and bond markets go south. Financial collapse is at hand, and “Joe Biden” doesn’t want you to pay attention to it. The Ukraine melodrama is a compelling distraction.
The John Durham special counsel operation gains more disturbing visibility each week. The public has been informed by his court filings that there is no longer any question as to who set the Russian Collusion game in motion (Hillary Clinton), how the FBI, DOJ, and the news media were enlisted to play their roles in it, and how the whole thing amounted to a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the chief executive. It is extremely serious stuff, the worst scandal and the grossest institutional failure in our history. There will be prosecutions and punishments, and half of America will have to process their own guilt in swallowing the story and going along with it.
Then there is the 2020 election narrative: that it was the fairest and most error-free contest in our history. The evidence that the opposite is true waits in several states, hidden in cardboard boxes, thumb-drives, routers, and stacks of depositions. At this late date, it can’t be corrected, but there is a fair chance that the public will realize it was played on that, too, and if we are very lucky, future elections will be held without dastardly Dominion vote tabulation machines or anything like them.
The Party of Chaos, “Joe Biden’s” Party, doesn’t want you to pay attention to any of that, or to a thousand other political insults they have inflicted on the country from BLM / Antifa riots to their dirty deals with social media, to their perversion of law enforcement, to their surveillance and persecution of loyal citizens as “domestic terrorists,” to the gender disorders in schools and sports… and on and on. And so, they invited with open arms the Russian operation against Ukraine to put an end to reckless provocations emanating from there. “Joe Biden” didn’t have to do anything, really, except pretend in bad faith to take part in a diplomatic solution, and then he stopped doing even that. The sanctions he imposed amount to the flimsiest window-dressing.
And now here is what I think is happening and will happen in Ukraine. The Russian aim is to neutralize Ukraine’s military capability — the means for harassing the eastern provinces known as the Donbas. That has been accomplished. Ukraine no longer has an air force, a navy, or a whole lot of weapons and munitions. It is surely in Russia’s interest to complete this operation in as few days as possible to minimize harm to civilian lives and property. The Ukrainians appear to understand that, too. The politicians and NGO organizations groomed by American sponsorship in Ukraine will be deactivated, relieved of their responsibilities, and put out of business. If Mr. Putin is prudent, he will not murder or persecute them. A regime friendly to Russia will eventually be installed. Keep in mind, Ukraine had been a province of Russia one way or another for more than two hundred years — except for the calamitous past thirty years — and Ukraine doesn’t really represent much more than an administrative and fiscal challenge. Russia’s ultimate interest in this matter is to stabilize its border.
We in the USA perhaps can’t appreciate that because our current government shows no interest in stabilizing our own border. (We will in the future, when the Party of Chaos is swept out of power.) I’ll refrain from speculating much on the broader geopolitical repercussions of Russia’s Ukraine operation, since it’s not over and there is still a chance for much to go awry. The general proposition that it represents a milestone in America’s loss of global power and credibility is probably correct. We have spent the last thirty years since the fall of the USSR invading and harassing one country after another, not always with altogether bad intentions, but always with disastrous results. It looks like we will have to take a break from that activity.
We have too much to look after and clean up with our own act. The Ukraine blow-up is more a humiliation for “Joe Biden” and his faction than for the US per se, for the truth is that we have scant interest in that corner of the world and what goes on there is none of our business, and never was, until we started meddling in it in 2014.
In the awakening underway here and now, Americans will see how so many of the ills and derangements of recent years are products of our own Deep State aligned with a perfidious party of the Left and other global actors. We have harmed ourselves terribly and can’t seem to stop — and we must stop it, beginning with calling off the Covid-19 “vaccine” crusade. That will come any day, I predict, and then the people who brought all of this grief on are going to have to answer for it.
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Woo-wee, that was a close call, huh? But remind me: what was the war supposedly about? Protecting Ukraine’s hallowed border? Bwahahahaha…! Borders? We don’t care about no steenkin’ borders (especially our own border). Upholding the sacred honor of NATO? Really? Who exactly would be punished if the US tries to shut down the Nord Stream-2 pipeline that will send much-needed Russian natgas to gasless Germany? (Did you guess our NATO ally, Germany?) Would Germany suddenly discover that the pipeline is none of America’s business? I think so.
Anyway, what’s the beef in Ukraine? Its easternmost Donbas region has rebelled against administration by Kiev. At America’s direction, Kiev harasses the majority ethnic Russian population there with US-made weaponry. Yet Ukraine’s president Zelensky claims he doesn’t want to antagonize Russia, and certainly wants his much-stomped-upon country — the doormat of Europe — to not get stomped-on all over again in any hypothetical war. Ukraine is already an economic basket-case, supported only by CIA-sponsored grifting operations.
Enter Monsieur Macron of France. After two years of antagonizing his countrymen with lockdowns and put-downs, he needs a boost for the national election forthcoming in April. So, he has heroically sued Mr. Putin of Russia for a Ukraine “ceasefire.” Note: the Russians haven’t fired. Anyway, that opened the way for a proposed “summit” meeting between “Joe Biden” and Mr. Putin — when the Russians feel like it. They’re playing it a little coy for the moment, letting the West twist slowly, slowly in the wind. If a summit does happen, what will the two summiteers talk about? Mr. Putin will reiterate that the US and NATO made a solemn promise (in writing) to not expand NATO along Russia’s borderland in 1990 when the Soviet Union fell apart, and y’all reneged on that… and now it stops with Ukraine… really… got it?
“Joe Biden” will not have a coherent response. Maybe he’ll want to talk ice cream flavors or dogs. He is, as the Russians say, not negotiation-worthy, though he can be trotted out for photo ops. But “Joe Biden” needs a big win so he can brag on something in his State of the Union address. His Democratic Party is looking every day more and more like some hell-born spawn of Satan bent on wrecking what’s left of the old USA. Everything they’ve done since 2016 has degraded the life of the nation — weaponizing the “Intel Community,” queering a national election, besetting the people with race-and-gender mindfuckery, and inflicting the deadly “vaccines” on the population to “fix” the Fauci-created Covid-19 crisis. Never has the country seen a president so obviously incompetent and unpopular. The people backstage running him like an animatronic automaton are in a panic.
By default, then, the summit meeting will be game-set-and-match, Mr. Putin, only both parties will pretend that it’s some kind of moral victory for “JB,” while Russia gets exactly the terms it seeks: Nord Stream-2 will be completed and Germany will get natgas; there will be no additional stupid sanctions and get rid of the old ones; and the US will close up its CIA shop in Kiev and quit all the pointless antagonism. There will be peace in that corner of the world. And then, on cue, the West’s financial system will implode.
Yes, that’s what is actually going on in the background. That roar you hear is bad credit whooshing out of the banks. It looks like we’re going to get both a ripping inflation and a collapse of equities and assets all at once — with a side-dish of disappearing livelihoods, vaporizing pensions, and sinking standards-of-living. One surmises that all the meshugas over Ukraine was designed as a distraction from the financial disorders now at hand. The news media has faithfully played the Ukraine story to the max while ignoring the growing disarray in North America.
The Toronto Star barely even reported today on the weekend dispersion of truckers in Ottawa — like it never happened… a kind of national hallucination. The big rigs are gone from the streets around Parliament Hill, but one suspects the action isn’t over. Mr. Trudeau’s stupid vaxx mandates are still in place and every passing day more is known about their inefficacy and ghastly after-effects. Nor has the national legislature of Canada voted, as required, in support of the Emergencies Act — meaning that the financial punishment inflicted on the truckers and their supporters was arguably illegal.
Down here in the Land of the Free our truckers are marshaling for the Great US Trucker Convoy of 2022 outside of Barstow, California, to proceed eastward-ho Wednesday morning for our nation’s capital. The notorious fences are back up around the Capitol building. No doubt, the feds will try to shut down the bridges across the Potomac, but there are plenty of back doors into the District. Will “Joe Biden” resort to the same financial intimidation tactics that Mr. Trudeau pulled on his truckers — go after their bank accounts and confiscate assets? Let’s hope the US truckers learned that lesson from the Great White North and have made other arrangements. What if the DC police attempt an Ottawa-style beat-down against our badass truckers? To paraphrase the old American folk song: I wouldn’t want to be them on that dreadful day….
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O Canada, the Great White North, hovering ominously above Niagara Falls somewhere, is a winter wonderland, and one of the great pleasures of the season there, apparently, for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is skating on thin ice. Why is that? Perhaps in all the hollering you have forgotten how Mr. T has kicked off a civil war: by forcing government-mandated shots on his country’s working class of an alleged “vaccine” that doesn’t work and harms people, at the dwindling end of a worldwide disease scare that scientists in Canadian labs may have helped to create.
The great truckers’ convoy that converged on Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, has exposed the ugly truth at the heart of this historic moment for Western Civ: that governments have declared war on their own citizens. It happens that PM Trudeau represents his country’s Liberal Party, which is suddenly the party of unchecked government power to interfere in the lives of citizens, the party of speech suppression, news management, forced unsafe vaccinations, and the seizure of citizens’ property outside due process of law.
Under the Emergencies Act, Mr. Trudeau’s police have now arrested the leaders of the trucker’s revolt, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, on charges of “counseling to commit mischief” (O, dear…!), and seized their bank accounts, while also freezing the bank accounts of anyone who donated money to the truckers’ cause. That action led, naturally, to runs on Canada’s major banks, leading to bank shut-downs on Wednesday — d’uh… what do you expect when the authorities send the message: your money is not safe in Canada’s banks, and might not even be your money if we say it’s not?
And now everybody — including alert citizens watching from many other countries — waits to see what the next moves are. Let’s also note that it’s not just the truckers in revolt against insane government mandates; it’s also at least half the population of Canada who stand behind the truckers and against the new fashion for tyranny in what used to be called the Free West. I’d venture to guess that the next move will be a general strike that paralyzes Canada and forces its parliament to overrule the Emergency Act and get rid of PM Trudeau.
Meanwhile, like a coronavirus itself, the trucker protest movement has infected America. A “People’s Convoy” is assembling around Barstow, California (the capital of the Mojave Desert, where there’s plenty of room to assemble), with a launch date of February 23, next Wednesday, destination: Washington DC. Won’t that be… interesting? What will the government of “Joe Biden” do? Likewise invoke some sort of emergency powers? Declare yet another “insurrection” as with January 6, 2021? Mess with the truckers’ bank accounts, and those of the people who support them? Do they want to inspire a run on US banks at a juncture where the extreme fragility of the global banking system threatens to blow up financial markets? Standing by on that.
The US government, like Canada’s, has likewise been at war with its citizens. At least half the country has awakened to this unappetizing reality — even while somewhat less than half the country still catatonically follows whatever idiotic diktat the despotic bureaucracy spews out. Why, for instance, do so many still go about in face masks even where local regulations are lifted? (And especially in light of the overwhelming evidence that masks don’t work?) Answer: to signify that they are still against Trump, the evil leviathan said to be responsible for all the woes and injustices in the world and who threatens their ”safety”— meaning, their status as oppressed victims of “white supremacy,” including the guilty-and-penitent self-oppressed white people of the Left themselves. Yeah, it’s just that simple because we are in an epic episode of human social hysteria.
Except that the hysteria is dissipating for all except the most psychotic or the most politically cornered due to their record of perfidy and bad faith — the David Frums, Max Boots, and Rachel Maddows of our world, the cable news outfits, the Democratic Party hierarchy, the criminally psychopathic swine running the US public health agencies, and the craven doctors who have fecklessly murdered patients at the behest of Dr. Anthony Fauci & Company. Despite the sedulous efforts to suppress the data (O, the sacred data!) about the failure of their “vaccines,” the real news is getting out: the “vaccines” don’t prevent transmission or infection of Covid-19, and they pose lethal side-effects for the vaxxed. There it is, in plain English. And yet, “Joe Biden,” putative president of the US, is still telling the country to “go out and get vaccinated, get boosted” — ???
The companies who produced the “vaccines’ are even on the run. Pfizer withdrew its application for an emergency use authorization in India, where the public health agency insisted on seeing the safety records Pfizer was obliged to furnish — and refused to. India is a big market for pharmaceuticals, some 1.39 billion. Pfizer’s stock has crashed nearly 10 percent the past two weeks. By the way, some of the states of India are notable for having battled Covid-19 with the mass distribution of early treatment kits containing cheap anti-virals such as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, Vitamin D, etc. The program was famously successful in reducing deaths there.
The CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, has sold off $400-million of his own stock in the company and deleted his Twitter account on rumors that all-causes deaths reported by US life insurance companies show a shocking and mysterious rise in mortality that just may be attributed to the “vaccines” causing strokes, heart attacks, cancer cases, and immune system failures. (Moderna’s stock is also sinking.) Neither the mainstream news media nor the US public health agencies are making any effort to investigate this now well-documented occurrence.
We’re in the midst of a tremendous shift of public opinion. Winter is not over but the truth is budding now in a thousand places. The people are done kneeling docilly to be silenced and killed. They will not let this country, and many other nations in the Western Civ club, be destroyed without a fight. The unmasked are unmasking their masked antagonists. Stand by, now, to find out who has been behind all this deadly mischief. We will rip off their masks and the rule of law will be restored.
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If the ads on the Superbowl each year are like a Rorschach test for the nation’s mental condition, then this year’s ad-roll was a cavalcade of frantic hallucinations suggesting a near-complete detachment from reality for an audience of ADD-disabled cell phone slaves locked into a Big Tech induced consensus trance. You could barely tell what these advertisers were trying to sell in their commercials, the psychotic dazzle of half-second jump-cuts was so ferocious. One interesting note, though: people of non-color (PONCs) seem to have been magically sucked out of the universe. There, that fixed things for everybody else.
Snoop Dog’s half-time house party — Hollywood’s G-rated version of a BLM riot — heralded a real riot later on in downtown LA after the Rams’ victory. Fans lit-up a metro bus and tagged it with spray-paint. The police moved in… objects were thrown at them. I’m just sorry that Snoop didn’t bring out his friend and sometime co-star Martha Stewart to twerk for the multitudes — while, say, whipping up a pumpkin mousse. That might have brought the country together after all these months of rancor. But, like I said, sorry, PONCs need not apply. Nor did Da Dawg invite onstage my favorite new pop star, Ski Mask the Slump God, composer of the hits “Faucet Failure” and “Foot Fungus.” Maybe next year… if there is a next year….
All this hearty good fellowship marks the journey of our country from a convocation of be-wigged founding fathers wielding quill pens in defense of liberty to a security-and-surveillance state of hebephrenic zombies lurching to a kind of failure that will make the fall of the Roman Empire look like a lawn sale of someone’s dead uncle’s chattels and effects. The drain-pipe beckons… but will America answer that call… or take a different turn?
Things are turning, indeed, out there… out in the truck stops and the households fending off repossession and the small businesses struggling desperately for survival — even in the degenerate halls of government, state-by-state. The armature of Covid-19 tyranny is getting rapidly dismantled by politicians close to running for their very lives. The home-folks have had enough of their insolence and they’re sharpening the tines of their pitchforks. Events also conspire to put the schnitz on the alleged Globalists’ dream of digital tyranny — if there even is such a cabal of Globalists, which I’m not sure about, or just a coterie of feckless hacks swept along by a malefic zeitgeist, Canada’s Justin Trudeau being the poster-boy for that breed.
The timing has gone all awry on them. The Covid-19 hysteria draws to a close against their wishes to drag it on forever. Even the triple-vaccinated are sick of it — and not a few of them are sick because of it. Governments and the corrupt medical establishment won’t touch this info with a stick, but the morticians and insurance execs are hopping up and down about what looks like a supernatural die-off of folks between 18 and 60 generally not susceptible to early death. Kind of worrisome, a little bit. Anybody with half-a-brain left is declining the offer of yet another booster — though Dr. Fauci was still tirelessly selling them last week.
Mainly, though, the window-of-opportunity has closed, in the USA, anyway, for anymore vaccine passport nonsense, and with that goes the dream of roping every last citizen into a corral of total social control, including central bank digital currencies that would turn everyone into a yo-yo to be jerked-around by government.
“Joe Biden” has so far failed to deliver that war with Russia over Ukraine he promised us — which would be like two Craig’s List customers fighting over a twenty-year-old Jeep Wrangler up on blocks with the engine missing. Ukraine president Zelensky is a professional comedian, of course, so one must admire his gag of inviting “Joe Biden” to visit his country, the Gem of Eurasia, “in the coming days,” Mr. Zelensky said, “which will be a powerful signal and contribute to de-escalation.” Plus, all the pierogi and cabbage the US president can eat. All this made National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan gnash his teeth for the trouble he has gone to in prepping the sore-beset American people for World War Three.
But Mr. Sullivan has, perhaps, other things to think about. Like… what are all these offstage noises Special Counsel John Durham is making in the grand jury chambers? Something about Hillary Clinton, and the helpmeets surrounding her in the 2016 election (including especially Jake Sullivan), alleged to have fabricated the Russian collusion whopper that deranged the nation for four years and disabled a sitting president. They even managed to enlist the FBI and the CIA in that task. How’d that happen? Could Hillary have been that peevish? Anyway, it looks kind of bad for the National Security Advisor to “Joe Biden” having such an epic political fraud tacked onto his resume, with perhaps an indictment to follow. Standing by on his resignation….
Our NATO allies must be enjoying the rise of natgas prices beyond the level that many middle-class households in Euroland can afford to keep the heat on in the dead middle of winter, since they have to get so much of the stuff from Russia. Maybe jamming Ukraine into NATO, as America’s Deep State has been wishing and hoping to do, wasn’t such a great idea after all. Maybe NATO itself isn’t such a great idea anymore.
If World War Three doesn’t pan out for “JB,” there’s always a global meltdown of financial markets, banks, and currencies waiting in the wings to amuse and distract everybody from the post-Covid call for a long, hard look at what the pandemic was actually about. The story, in all its multiple, gruesome levels, has gotten away from them. So many public officials are standing naked that Washington looks like a nudist colony.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
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The whopping untruths launched onto the people of Western Civ by their governments reformatted the brains of millions so badly that they shuffled obediently into a mass formation and ran over a buffalo jump. What a stampede it has been!
But suddenly, the remaining buffaloes are balking at the cliff’s edge, seeing the bodies pile up below. Some of the bulls have even turned the other way and started charging back across the darkling prairie at the creatures driving the herd with their klaxons of deceit. All authority, from Vienna to Vancouver, stands revealed as psychopathic — it apparently seeks to kill and injure as many as possible. Talk about the needle and the damage done! Why else persist with vaccines that don’t work and which provoke the most lethal disease mechanisms as side-effects?
The most mysterious element of the story, of course, is what motivated the various actors in this accursed melodrama. You could start by asking Dr. Anthony Fauci why he suggested this week the need for yet another round of the same mRNA booster shots that already proved completely ineffective against the omicron generation of Coronavirus. People are dropping dead from the boosters. Each successive shot sends a fresh cargo of toxic artificial spike proteins into the bloodstream, which remain at work for more than a year, insidiously gumming up the capillaries of vital organs and throwing toggle switches in the coded proteins of immune systems that turn off the body’s natural defenses against a panoply of diseases, including cancers. The life insurance companies are starting to notice and squawk about the astounding rise in all-causes mortality. Nobody else in the loop dares to speak up, most conspicuously the doctors, except a brave few… McCullough, Malone, Kory, Bhattacharya, Kheriaty, Cole, Risch, Marik, Urso….
Dr. Fauci, of course, has an entire career of public health malpractice to cover up. In his quest for medical immortality, he bungled the institutional response to the AIDS epidemic, introducing toxic drug protocols still inexplicably in use today — namely, AZT, which got FDA approval despite its botched 1986 Phase II trials. Next, Dr. Fauci attempted a miracle cure for the terrifying Ebola virus: remdesivir. More botched trials. Anyway, the drug didn’t work against Ebola. But he hauled it out again for his crowning creation, Covid-19, and got the NIH to anoint remdesivir as the standard-of-care for hospital in-patients — at the same time that he got the bureaucracy to ban and demonize effective early treatment protocols, including ivermectin and HCQ — while pushing his next-gen miracle cure, the mRNA vaccines, which also flunked their rushed and inept trials.
Remdesivir provokes renal failure in five days, leading to fluid build-up in the lungs, and the doctors were unable to discern the deadly side-effects from the supposed symptoms of Covid-19 itself. What’s more, the public health authorities gave a $17,000 bonus to hospitals for each course of remdesivir given, and additional cash for reporting deaths as Covid-related. Quite a racket. The net result is hundreds of thousands of deaths from mass medical malpractice, and ultimately the ruin of the entire racketeering-based US medical system.
Henceforth, doctors will have to battle strenuously against being regarded as dangerous quacks, while the entire scaffold of conglomerate hospitals and group practices founders and falls. You have no idea what a shitstorm of lawsuits is barreling toward the medical establishment when the fog of propaganda finally lifts and the public can see what has been perpetrated against it. Criminal indictments against Dr. Fauci and some of his colleagues should follow in a sane world, and there’s a chance that the world is beginning to swerve back a little closer to sanity — where a respect for truth and the rule-of-law can re-energize the collective public conscience.
The Democratic Party rode this public health fiasco into power in the USA and has abused its prerogatives exorbitantly in its quest for power without purpose… other than for more power to push people around. The Democratic Party used Covid to enable the ballot fraud that drove its nemesis, Mr. Trump, from office — and dearly wanted the same excuse to use it again this year. For weeks now, the party has been dithering between a quadrupling down of its insane Covid mandates and the fretful recognition that too much news of its Covid crimes and turpitudes has gotten out.
Tens of millions heard the three-hour Joe Rogan interviews with Doctors McCullough and Malone, in which they laid out the shocking facts about the rise of medical tyranny, the propaganda campaign supporting it out of the old news media networks, and the obscene machinations of a rogue pharmaceutical industry drunk on profits. Those two long and thoughtful conversations with McCullough and Malone have shifted the public’s perception of what has gone on, and their participation with other doctors in Senator Ron Johnson’s recent hearings, have thrown the Party of Covid and Chaos completely off-balance.
The uprising of Canadian truckers inspires a general resistance to being pushed around by over-reaching elected officials and their bureaucratic subalterns, and the truckers’ example is being followed all over Western Civ. Wait until the American truckers get in the act, representing a vast class of citizens who have taken a beating for more than two years and, increasingly, have nothing left to lose.
Following the lame, coordinated campaign to discredit Joe Rogan, the Democrats and their accomplices in the news media went into a desperate pivot this week, attempting brazenly to pretend that they can walk away from what amounts to their abetting of mass murder. The midterm elections loom darkly. Not only can they be kicked out of legislative power, but there’s an excellent chance that their hapless, grifter president, “Joe Biden,” can be impeached and convicted by a new Congress for bribery and treason, and the vice-president along with him for high crimes, leading to the installing of a new speaker of the house (not a Democrat) as president. Between the congressional investigations that would follow, and the appointment of a new attorney general, the prosecutions can commence and the country can begin the rehabilitation of its conscience.
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https://traffic.libsyn.com/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_354.mp3 Mark Hurst is an early Web pioneer who has become one of Big Tech’s sharpest critics. Hurst’s Creative Good newsletter and Techtonic radio show chart the spread of Big Tech into all areas of life and work. His GoodReports.com site lists alternatives to Big Tech platforms. Earlier in his career, Hurst founded the Gel (“Good Experience Live”) conference, which debuted projects like Wikipedia and Khan Academy. He is the author of two books about technology: “Bit Literacy” (2007) on information overload, and “Customers Included” (2nd edition, 2015) on building customer-friendly digital products.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz* written and performed by Larry Unger.*
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How many times have I reminded you that history is a prankster? Who would have guessed that Canada, demure, inoffensive, shrinking violet among nations, would rise to lead a world-wide revolt against the Satanic dominion of digital neo-Bolshevism? I mean, what else can you call it — this political Saint Vitus Dance sweeping Western Civ that seeks to destroy every constitutional liberty, deprive citizens of life, property, and even language, and reduce every individual to an internet-surveilled and controlled automaton… this global megalomaniacal mental illness posturing as “government?”
Well, now it has happened, and the head of Canada’s government, Justin Trudeau — arguably the most fatuous would-be tyrant in the former “Free World” — has failed to emerge from his hidey-hole for the better part of a week, perhaps afraid of seeing his shadow like the groundhog of legend, and it begins to look as if his days as Prime Minister grow short. It’s rumored that the Canadian military told Mr. Trudeau in plain un-Woke Canadian English to fuck-off, they will not take orders to put down the truckers’ protest, and even the Mounties are wobbling, so it’s left to the Ottawa police, who threaten to arrest anyone aiding the truckers with food, water, and fuel. Wait and see how quickly that will turn to fighting in the streets. Constitutional crisis, ay?
Meanwhile, a dozen or so other members of the Western Civ Club of Nations are ditching their Covid-19 mandates and restrictions. The reason: despite the mighty forces of deliberate organized mind-fuckery and resulting mass delusion, the Covid-19 “vaccines” are finally revealed as a criminal fraud, a danger to all who submitted to them, and an insult to the age-old accrued intelligence of the human race as used-to-be represented by science, ethics, and law.
And still, America’s own putative leader, the empty suit known as “Joe Biden,” had the temerity to go on TV last week and once again tell his sore-beset people to “get vaccinated… get your kids vaccinated!” Who does he think he’s speaking to? The counter-information to Tony Fauci’s criminal bullshit is flooding the zone, despite America’s sinister Intel Community attempting to control the captured and discredited legacy news media.
Just last night CBS’s 60-Minutes told its audience that our hospitals are overwhelmed by the unvaccinated with Covid, which is an outright lie. Maybe we should start asking: who are the individual producers and network executives responsible for this arrant mendacity? Would it be interesting to see them in a court of law, having to answer whether they believe their own bullshit? Or is someone telling them to sell it?
Some powerful counter-information to The Official Narrative emerged last week from the US military’s own Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) when several whistleblower doctors revealed to attorney Tom Renz heretofore suppressed statistics on the shocking increase in vaccine injuries among young, otherwise able-bodied soldiers. Have a look at the list reported out of Dr. Robert Malone’s Substack newsletter.
- Total Number of Diseases & Injuries Reported By Year (Hospitalization) up 37%
- Diseases of the Nervous System By Year up 968%
- Malignant Neuroendocrine Tumor Reports By Year up 276%
- Acute Myocardial Infarct Reports By Year up 343%
- Acute Myocarditis Reports By Year up 184%
- Acute Pericarditis Reports By Year up 70%
- Pulmonary Embolism Reports By Year up 260%
- Congenital Malformations Reports By Year up 87%
- Nontraumatic Subarachnoid Hemorrhage Reports By Year up 227%
- Anxiety Reports By Year up 2,361%
- Suicide Reports By Year up 227%
- Neoplasms for All Cancers By Year up 218%
- Malignant Neoplasms for Digestive Organs By Year up 477%
- Neoplasms for Breast Cancer By Year up 469%
- Neoplasms for Testicular Cancer By Year up 298%
- Female Infertility Reports By Year up 419%
- Dysmenorrhea Reports By Year up 221.5%
- Ovarian Dysfunction Reports By Year up 299%
- Spontaneous Abortion Reports By Year DOWN by 10%
- Male Infertility Reports By Year up 320%
- Guillian-Barre Syndrome Reports By Year up 520%
- Acute Transverse Myelitis Reports By Year up 494%
- Seizure Reports By Year up 298%
- Narcolepsy & Cataplexy Reports By Year up 352%
- Rhabdomyolysis By Year up 672%
- Multiple Sclerosis Reports By Year up 614%
- Migraine Reports By Year up 352%
- Blood Disorder Reports By Year up 204%
- Hypertension (High Blood Pressure) Reports By Year up 2,130%
- Cerebral Infarct Reports By Year up 294%
This is not the first time the nation has learned about vaccine injuries — the CDC’s VAERS registry has reported out massive problems with the Moderna, Pfizer,and J & J “vaccines” since early summer of 2021. (In fact, adverse events are notoriously under-reported by perhaps 100-times.) Now the FDA has gone and issued a full approval of the Moderna vaccine, without convening the customary expert advisory panel. The documents explaining the FDA’s decision were scrubbed from the FDA’s website. The FDA spox responded to questions about it saying, “We are aware of the issue and hope to have the document reposted as soon as possible.” So far, the docs are still missing-in-action. The primary objective of this approval seems to be adding the Moderna mRNA vax to the protocol for children, which would permit the disabling and murder of millions of innocents. This is exactly what “Joe Biden” is calling for. And by the way, adding it to the children’s vaccine schedule supposedly continues Moderna’s shield of immunity from lawsuits. Just remember: in law, fraud vitiates that protection.
We now enter a period of danger as the sleepwalkers of America awaken from their induced consensus trance and begin to understand how they were harmed, swindled, and robbed by a corrupt, criminal officialdom. It will hurt badly because the public wanted so desperately to believe that vaccines would make them safe from the mysteriously conjured Covid-19 virus — and, more than that, would cure their gnawing anxiety over the wreckage of American life caused by what appears to be leadership hostage to sinister forces.
I must say, I believe the truth of our predicament will grow a whole lot weirder as we stumble into springtime. The weirdest part of all will be when America learns exactly who and what have been the prime generators of our disorder. The disillusionment will be cosmic.
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Reality is the kryptonite of the Left, sapping its superpowers of coercion and persecution which — get this — are the only abilities it cares about. The Left only pretends to want to make the world a better place. It doesn’t care about governing, y’know, managing national affairs, and it wouldn’t know how — as no one has demonstrated better than “Joe Biden” and the shadowy wrecking crew running him behind the scenes. The Left actually just seeks to punish its adversaries, and it generates ever-new adversities and animosities in its quest to lay on more punishments, the more sadistic the better. Thus, the never-ending Covid-19 melodrama, which provides such an excellent excuse for torturing the populace. The Left’s motto: the beatings will continue until morale improves!
Reality is intruding now, though, with the help of its twin sister, Truth. Particular truths are emerging to fortify reality and weaken the Left’s efforts to beat-down the peoples of Western Civ. For instance, the implacable truth that the mRNA vaccines don’t work and that they gravely injure people. In the face of this obvious reality, government and corporations persist in their irrational campaigns to vaxx-up every last man-woman-and-child. Why, at this point, despite all the free Kit-Kat bars you could stuff down your craw, would any sane employee of the Hershey’s Chocolate empire opt for a vaxx that could make you stroke out at your desk? The ridiculous official answer, of course, is: to protect the already-vaccinated. Sshh-yeah, right….
Ditto, the unfortunate, put-upon citizens of Austria, such a tidy little country, too, and so hopelessly lost in its daze of mass formation psychosis. This week, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, the UK, and Ireland are dropping all Covid-19 restrictions and impositions, while Austria makes its vaxx mandate a national law. (How many Austrians are secretly studying Hungarian now?) The cognitive dissonance must be unbearable, like a kind of 5G-induced tinnitus that afflicts an entire population, making them want to bang their heads against the nearest wall.
Likewise, the absurd government of Canada, led by the clueless ponce Justin Trudeau, who refuses to take his patent-leather go-go boot off the neck of Canadian truckers. The truckers aren’t having it anymore, of course, and neither are the towing services that the government is trying to enlist to get rid of the truckers’ trucks. Meanwhile, the premiers of Saskatchewan and Alberta provinces have thrown in the towel on Covid-19 restrictions, leaving Mr. Trudeau in his fortress-of-solitude, exact whereabouts unknown, desperately hurling objurgations at the “racists, Islamophobes, and transphobes” seeking to end his career as a turbaned, cross-dressing, blackface political entertainer.
And also likewise, the “progressive” sadists on the Loudoun County, VA, school board, who refuse to lift their cruel and stupid mask mandate on schoolchildren, despite Governor Glenn Youngkin’s recent executive order to cut it out. The school board sadists surely don’t care about the kids. Everybody from the Johns Hopkins Med School to The Atlantic magazine — to even the lost-in-space CDC —have admitted that wearing face-masks is pointless. Not to mention that Covid-19 has been reduced to the wimpy omicron variant, plus the truth that the incidence of serious illness in children from Covid-19 of any kind is near-zero. So, why keep the kids in masks? For the pleasure of making them miserable and flaunting their power over the kids’ parents. This is how the Left rolls.
Now, as a general proposition, you can bet that the reason the Left wants to keep the Covid-19 scare going as long as possible is in order to keep in place the “emergency” mail-in voting allowances that so easily enable ballot harvesting and other election frauds. Alas, the timing on this doesn’t look good for them. The rapid omicron up-spike has turned into a rapid down-spike. The goldurned thing is vanishing in the winter mist. By early March there may be no actual Covid on-the-scene… omigosh… and then what? The midterms are yet months away, and if there’s no emergency….
Well, I dunno. It’s not beyond imagining that the Left and its mysterious sponsors out there in the mythical matrix of sinister global interests will send yet another new coronavirus variant down the chute to keep the worldwide scare going so as to complete the ruin of Western Civ. It’d have to be a humdinger, though, something, say, that made folks bleed out of their ears, nostrils, and eye sockets — because otherwise, at this point, the people are done with lockdowns, forced vaxxes, mask mandates, green passes, and other social control nonsense, and would opt to just get on with what remains of normal life in this twilight of empire.
Looks like the backup plan is for “Joe Biden’s” geniuses in the foreign affairs and intel bureaucracy to start a war with Russia over Ukraine, our dearest ally in the whole wide world (not). Yesterday, State Department spox Ned Price floated up a raggedy balloon about Russia pulling a “false flag” stunt in Ukraine’s Donbass frontier to get things going. It sounded like he was just making shit up. And he was conspicuously short on details. “Our intel people something something, blah blah….” Skeptical reporters shot the balloon down with a few barbed remarks — the darn thing just zinged around the press room with the air rushing out and crashed on the spox’s podium — suggesting that even the news media is tired of its role in the controlled demolition of our country.
More likely, though, the financial scaffold of Late Modernity gives way under the burden of rackets and Ponzis it has been asked to support. This week, Facebook (a.k.a. Meta) scored the world record for biggest single-day market value drop ever, shedding $232-billion in capital losses. You go, Zuck! The Everything Bubble has achieved supernova scale and everybody knows she’s gonna blow as soon as Jay Powell lifts the Fed Funds rate twenty-five basis points. When that finally happens, things get realer than real and Truth comes marching in like the saints with bells on. It’ll be the Left’s Masque of the Red Death… ashes, ashes, all fall down.
The actual global economy itself — the thing that sends, you know, products from one place to another — is seizing up like the engine on a beater 1998 Buick Regal. Long about right now, lots of things are not going from point A to Point B, including stuff of a food nature. It’s starting to irk the home-folks. When all that goes south, you’ll hear no more about Covid-19, systemic racism, the patriarchy, the drag queen story hour, and all the other hobgoblins that infest the Left’s gospel garden of Wokery. The kryptonite is coming on hard. They are done… and for the moment we are stuck with them running the country.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
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Behold, the promotional image for the 2023 EcoCity World Summit, to be held in London next year. The simpleminded idiocy in play befits a foundering civilization incapable of realistically imagining its future. As usual with shallow eco-urbanism, sociopolitical conditions are assumed to be exactly the same years ahead as they are now. Daily life is portrayed as a perpetual coffee break in an orderly milieu.
Get this: urban life will be anything but orderly in the future. London will not be a city of cafe layabouts diddling on their phones. It will be desperately attempting to cope — and perhaps failing to — with social disorder, economic collapse, ethnic conflict, and political paralysis.
The sole idea depicted above is the “greening-up” of the street and its buildings. Plant life is imagined to be the sovereign remedy for all the ills of imploding modernity. It represents nature in its most inert and unthreatening form. It just sits there softening the hard-scape. In fact, nature is rather cruel, including human nature. How much of London’s thirty-two boroughs, thousands of streets, and 671 square miles will get this treatment? Or will it be limited to a few special streets like the one in the picture, for the remaining toffs who have somehow escaped the wrath of the plebes?
How do you propose to marshal the army of gardeners needed for the maintenance of all these plantings? Will it employ half the population of London — the ones replaced by robots and artificial intelligence in all the other jobs? Do you see how silly this is? And how pathetically limited our collective imagination is?
What it comes down to is an inability to face the eco-truth: namely, that our great cities have exceeded a scale that comports with the realities of the future — resource and capital scarcity — and that they cannot be made sustainable in anything like their current form. These mega-cities have to contract substantially and severely and the process will be pretty hideous, including massive losses in real estate value, battles over who gets to inhabit what’s left, and awesome decay in the abandoned districts. Virtually all of the oversized infrastructure will be un-maintainable — skyscrapers, megastructures, the Underground transit system, gas, water, and sewage service. Decorating the streets and buildings with “parsley” will not come close to solving any of this. By the way, who owns the sole car in the picture? And why is it not standing forlornly on its rims with the windows shattered and the interior torched?
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The Canadian trucker rebellion, rolling east across the vast, frozen Canadian prairie, blew into the country’s Woked-up capital city, Ottawa, like the scalding wrath of history, forcing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to skulk off punkishly under cover of night — after bad-mouthing the big-rig invaders as “a fringe minority” in a nation of otherwise obedient hypnotics sleepwalking into Big Pharma’s spike-protein fun-factory of all-causes early death.
The news media is working super-hard to avoid reporting the event, of course. Canada’s leading paper, The Toronto Star, put up a peevish little item complaining that a protester hung an upside-down maple leaf flag on a statue of national hero Terry Fox (a cancer-stricken athlete who ran across most of the country on a prosthetic leg in 1981 to raise cancer-awareness). The paper also mentioned that “[a] discordant symphony of truck horns blared across downtown Ottawa as demonstrators geared up for their second full day on local streets.” Beyond that, the paper lost interest.
Canada under the Trudeau government has been more restrictive on Covid-19 than the Big Gorilla to its south, with the population compliantly following all the insane, economy-wrecking rules, until a recent mandate to vaxx-up every last trucker in the land finally sparked-off a revolt. Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party failed to win a parliamentary majority in last September’s federal election, and he heads a flimsy coalition potentially facing a no-confidence vote that would drive the PM out of office.
For now, the truckers seem determined to stick around and disrupt the Canadian capital. Their estimated 50,000 rigs could surround the city and create siege conditions, where food supplies and other goods won’t get in, starving the government into surrendering on its mandates and restrictions. So far, the local Ottawa police have stood by with a very light hand, and there are rumors that they are on the same page as the truckers against federal overreach.
Will Mr. Trudeau resort to using the military to break up the revolt? Good luck with that. Like virtually every other “advanced” nation, Canada depends on trucks and truckers to move everything needed for everyday life. The truckers can just say no… we don’t feel like working this month. No poutine or Cornish pasties for you, Ottawa! Then what? Throw them all in jail? How will that help move stuff from Point A to Point B? It kind of looks like they have Mr. T over a Molson barrel. For now, it’s a stand-off, but it looks to me like the Prime Minister must resign and whoever takes charge next will have to rapidly rethink the country’s entire Covid-19 policy in a not-insane direction.
The Canadian revolt appears to be inspiring similar operations in the US, where a movement has started for a massive trucker convoy from California to Washington, DC — the swampy pivot-point of Covid tyranny under the phantasm known as “Joe Biden” — as a very general way of saying we’ve had enough of being pushed around by political grifters and their bureaucratic subalterns.
The Covid-19 saga gets darker every day, while the official alibis, cover-stories, and disinfo ops bend ever deeper toward an arc of criminality. The US government has lied about every plot-line in the two-year horror show. In fact, a conscientious observer would have to conclude the following: That the government’s highest-paid employee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, led surreptitiously in the creation and release of a bioweapon; that he and his cohorts, along with the pharma companies, and other interested parties such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization, enabled the release of so-called “vaccines” (genetic treatments) that were at least as deadly as the disease itself; that as a result of the shots many people of all ages will die before their natural time; that the process is already underway as documented in the all-causes death data tallied by insurance companies; that the same government officials maliciously suppressed viable, inexpensive, FDA-approved treatments for Covid-19 in order to herd the populace into receiving dangerous “vaccines”; that said officials have worked strenuously to muddle and fake the statistics that would show who is actually dying of what; and that the entire fiasco appears to have been ginned up in order to systematically control the population in ways contrary to our natural rights while killing off a substantial number of us.
Let the trucks roll from Fresno to DC if they still want to play rough. Think the “Joe Biden” gang will try to divert attention by starting a war in Ukraine? They don’t dare. Think the financial markets will tank? Well, of course they will, no matter what, because the markets and the money are detached from reality. Face it: what America needs most of all is to reconnect with reality, and you can be sure that the process will be uncomfortable, having sojourned so far from it for so long. (“Let’s Go, Brandon!”) And Let’s go, Canadian truckers!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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| New Edition It’s that time of the year !*A child is born… but not exactly the way he thought it happened. And now he must leave home at Christmas time. *$7.50 — Cheap! |
| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
New Paintings by JHK 2020
**Other Books by JHK
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| Book 1: | Book 2: | Book 3:
| Book 4: | | | | | |
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Rock’n’roller Neil Young’s conniption over having to share the Spotify platform with Joe Rogan affords a glimpse into the glutenous mire that is a mind bethinking itself “progressive” these drear days of American unraveling. For those of you not tuned in: Joe Rogan is a comedian and martial arts maven who runs the most popular podcast in the world, renowned for long-form interviews (three hours sometimes!) often with high-powered intellectuals. A month ago, he interviewed the mRNA developer Dr. Robert Malone, who has become an outspoken opponent of the Covid-19 mRNA “vaccines,” and of the US-led world pandemic policy in general under Dr. Anthony Fauci, going as far as to call for an immediate end to the world-wide vaxxing program because, Dr. Malone says, the vaxxes don’t work and they kill and disable people. Hearing that, Mr. Young called for Joe Rogan to be cancelled for spreading “misinformation.”
It’s worth paying attention to just how disordered Mr. Young’s thinking is because it summarizes everything that has gone awry on the political Left: He is wrong two ways: 1) morally, and 2) on the facts of the matter — which is as wrong as you can be. Like virtually everyone on the Democratic Party / Woke / Progressive axis, he is obviously in favor of suppressing free speech. Since when did that become okay for old hippies?
If I remember correctly (cuz I was there) the youth movement of the 1960s was all about freedom to say pretty much anything, except yell “fire” in a crowded theater — based on the idea that ordinary people were equipped to sort out the truth. During the War in Vietnam, we hippies were especially averse to the official lying that emanated from the Department of Defense, the FBI, the CIA, and the White House under both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. We founded “alternative” newspapers in defiance of the establishment’s propaganda. We applauded Daniel Ellsberg’s purloined Pentagon Papers, revealing the mendacity of the war effort. Altogether, this activity made it more difficult for the government to prosecute that war, and to defend the strategy behind it.
Today the Left is not only all-in on speech suppression, but also censorship of print and broadcasting, and is especially avid for the diverse punishments of cancellation — ruining careers, reputations, livelihoods, and families of anyone who opposes Woke right-think. Alternate views are not tolerated, labeled “unacceptable” (Mr. Young put it exactly that way), and flagged as “misinformation” (ditto Mr. Young). It’s gotten to the point where the word misinformation has acquired a distinct odor that signals bad faith in everyone who flogs it. These days, the charge of misinformation is deliberate misinformation.
Today, the Left is all-in for FBI home invasions, DOJ malicious prosecutions, CIA manipulations of public opinion, a fake president fronting for an unseen cabal, and a news media that wouldn’t know the actual shape and substance of reality if it jumped up and bit Jim Acosta on the lips. Ideas and principles don’t really matter to the Left; they’re just window-dressing for their sole interest, which is pushing other people around, in a word: coercion. That is the moral quagmire the Left is in and, having captured so many institutional transmitters of our polity, that is the nature of the evil they represent.
On the facts of Dr. Malone’s public statements about Covid-19 public health policy and the “vaccines,” Neil Young doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s just dead wrong, uninformed, possibly ignorant. The vaxxes have been a disaster from the start and the damage gets worse every week that the insane policy of coercing more vaxxes goes on. The vaxxes are a false magic talisman for a psychotic cargo cult of disordered minds who cannot face the actual quandaries in this momentous Fourth Turning of our foundering civilization — namely, our dwindling energy resources, the economics based on them, the malfunctioning operations of money, our over-investments in techno-complexity, and the out-of-scale dynamics of just about everything in daily life.
Fortunately, enough Americans now see through this matrix of bad faith and mendacity that the opposition is poised to wipe up the floor with the Left in next November’s election. The Left has screwed things up so completely that the end of Covid will expose every broken thing on the landscape — and now it’s up to others to try to repair it all, if possible. One thing is certain to happen a little less than a year from now, the day a new Congress is sworn in: “Joe Biden,” if he is still alive, and still in office, will be impeached. And unlike his several predecessors — Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump — “Joe Biden” will be convicted in the Senate, too, and of serious crimes against his country, not just trivialities because the evidence is there. He’ll be convicted of the very things spelled out in the constitution: treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
The laptop computer belonging to the Biden family bag-man, Hunter Biden, is not only still in the negligent possession of the FBI, but many faithful copies of its hard-drive were mindfully distributed to safe hands outside the agency. The email, contracts, and memoranda on it contain a clear record of bribery from foreign nations and money laundering to conceal the trail of all that grift. “Joe Biden’s” deliberate open border policy, and the purposeful transport of unvetted illegal aliens from scores of foreign countries to cities all over the USA, certainly represents an arrant and treasonous failure to uphold the law. It remains to be seen what kind of fiasco his misadventures in Ukraine may foment, but we’ll know presently.
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Wonder much about the eerie blank demeanor of Erin Burnett, who delivers the 7:00 o’clock news on CNN? I sure do. It’s a creepy kind of fraught blankness, like what the Vietnam grunts used to call the thousand-yard stare, denoting their guilty involvement in a morally odious enterprise. Of course, one must follow CNN in order to discern what fresh bullshit the governing regime is serving up day-to-day from its steam-table of perfidy and bad faith. Does the lady hate her job that much? Or does that farbissiner face signify mere simmering contempt for the audience of deplorable elderly gorks receiving said bullshit over their pitiful TV trays of Ensure on Froot Loops? Or maybe a miniature Donald Trump lives in her head dressed in a little red devil suit with horns, stabbing her parietal lobes with his tiny pitchfork?
Seeing as how Ms. Burnett is the mouthpiece for the Progressive Woke news media in the primest evening slot, does that glowering visage represent the peculiar joylessness of the political Left, a movement steeped in a special kind of shame induced by the irritating failure of its ideas to comport with reality? This is the joylessness of people bunkered too deep in anomie to even find pleasure in their own sadism. Thus, the hint of bored indignation: how dare you not believe the bullshit I am delivering on behalf of your betters… who know what’s good for you?
Or maybe the girl is just on quaaludes.
Anyway, nothing serves as a better barometer of how things are going in the struggle over the fate of this tortured land than Erin Burnett’s scowling puss. And where is this country going? I will tell you: straight into a dark passage of the profoundest political discord, an epochal nightmare of loss and death brought on, it begins to seem, deliberately, by the folks in charge. They are being found out, and the fact that they remain in charge spells ever more obvious danger among all concerned as the truth of their crimes emerges.
Sunday, at the March Against Mandates in our nation’s capital, the resistance to Covid vaccine tyranny laid it out, none with plainer eloquence than Bobby Kennedy:
We love the United States Constitution. And we have witnessed over the past 20 months a coup d’etat against democracy and the demolition, the controlled demolition of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And starting with the censorship. James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson all said the same thing: we put freedom of speech in the first amendment because all of the other rights that we were trying to protect relied on that right. If you give government the license to silence its critics, you have given them the capacity to commit any atrocity they want, and to obliterate all the amendments and rights in the constitution.
The message is getting through and the tyrants are running scared. They are perhaps having bad dreams involving torches and pitchforks. Naturally CNN took the lead in attempting to defame Mr. Kennedy as an anti-Semite for mentioning the name of Anne Frank in alluding to the Nazi insanity of the last century and people’s desperate efforts to escape it. CNN said:
The son of former Attorney General and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy has a long history of spreading vaccine misinformation…. Sunday’s event, billed as a protest against vaccine mandates, featured speakers repeatedly spreading misinformation about vaccines and showcased several bigoted comparisons to the Holocaust. At least one man was seen displaying a yellow Star of David, which Jews were required by law to wear as an identifier in Nazi Germany.
So, wearing a Star of David now makes you an insurrectionist in the twisted logic of Wokery. How stupid and confused are they? Anyway, heroes emerge out of adversity. Let them pile it on, insulting history and reality. In fact, Bobby Kennedy stood in the cold at the Lincoln Memorial as a heroic figure for these times, giving a speech that carefully and succinctly denoted the stupendous criminality of the US public health bureaucracy and the corporate-government fascist partnership with Pharma Inc. that has poisoned hundreds of millions of Americans in a medical experiment that has only begun to kill possibly more people than the Nazis ever dreamed of murdering. There has not been a more important public utterance in this land than RFK Jr.’s since this century began.
Meanwhile, the Covid tyranny collapses across Western Civ. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the UK tossed his country’s entire Covid restriction program into the dumpster last week as the truth about vaccine failure and injuries became impossible to avoid. The Czech Republic and Ireland followed. France made noises about lifting her policies in February. For now, Germany and Austria remained locked-into their Teutonic obedience neurosis, but how much longer can that last? Or does it finally break up the EU? Large street protests rocked European cities Sunday, too. The vaccines have lost their credibility as sacred totems against the accelerating chaos in the advanced nations of the world, who stand to lose the very advancements in prosperity, comfort, and convenience they enjoyed in the centuries of energy super-abundance.
What awaits now is mayhem in the financial markets, the banking system, and national currencies — underway even as you read this. It’s not enough that the people of Western Civ have been battered by a contrived assault on their physical health; now they’ll watch themselves go broke and hungry. Maybe even the monsters of idiocy behind president “Joe Biden” can cook up a world-beating hypersonic war over a country we have next-to-zero national interest in just to make things perfect. I can’t wait to see the look on Erin Burnett’s face as the history of the future unspools.
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Clusterfuck Nation
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They all hate us anyhow…
…so let’s drop the Big One now.
— Randy Newman
The world is waiting to know: will “Joe Biden” bomb Guatemala back to the stone age for sending incursions of its (very fine) people across America’s southern border? All of a sudden borders are sacred again, you know. Of course, there’s that old problem Colin Powell used to raise back in the Iraq War days of you break it, you own it. But, hey, don’t we already own Guatemala? And isn’t it already sort of broken?
Well, you can own a dog, say, a pitiful, broke-down, half-lame, scrofulous, rheumy-eyed, junkyard kind of old dog, and that doesn’t stop the dog from taking a dump on the neighbor’s property across the street. Anyway, the only thing Guatemala is dumping in Texas and Arizona is new voters, and that just means more democracy for us — a “win-win” as they say in the cabinet room! (Though, Yamiche Alcindor might still want to ask “JB” at the next presser if he would risk the US supply of bananas. We’re having enough trouble getting auto parts, fer chrissake.) Such are the quandaries of US foreign policy.
Then there’s this Shangri-La called Ukraine. Can anyone find it on the map? It’s nowheres around here. Let’s face it: Ukraine is not sending us any new voters or bananas. What good are they? You might argue: they exported the Vindman twins to America (win-win); they supported Hunter Biden’s cocaine habit for six or seven years and paid the mortgage on The Big Guy’s beach house. So, maybe we do owe them.
But then, it’s said that Russia is lurking on Ukraine’s border like a hungry bear at the edge of a sheep pasture, licking its chops, fork and knife in its fisted paws, napkin tied around its throat, visions of mutton-filled perogies dancing in its head. The whole DC foreign policy establishment says we should take a few potshots at that bear, teach it a lesson. I say, just throw Guatemala over the fence, let the bear chew on that, including a few bananas for dessert. There it is: problem solved.
Another possibility, which the “Joe Biden” admin seems to favor a little, is World War Three. We couldn’t lose that, could we? Well, at worst it would be a “lose-lose” so at least nobody else would win. Would the US be any worse off without New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and a few more population centers teeming with homeless junkies? (Who rarely show up at the polls to vote, by the way… and if you asked, could they even tell you who’s running for president?) World War Three begins to look like our silver linings playbook. London, Paris, and Berlin are not our problem, to be blunt about it. Even as you read this, “Joe Biden” is striving to explain his thoughts on these vexing matters, but he’s talking out of his ass so much it’s hard to tell whether he is setting forth actual policy or just breaking wind.
Isn’t it refreshing to not have to lede with Covid-19? It looks like “Joe Biden’s” effort to change the channel is working. Even so, there is some interesting Covid-19 news, like: the whole endless, heartbreaking, demoralizing episode is winding down. Whoa! That’s a shock! What will Western Civ do without it? In the UK, Boris Johnson put a stop to all restrictions, mask mandates, and vaxx passports, just like that (snap) on Wednesday. Then France announced it would lift most Covid-19 restrictions in February, which is a little more than a week from now, for those of you who haven’t mastered the new maff. Then, on Thursday, Austria’s parliament voted to approve mandatory vaccinations for everybody in the country — say, what? — leading the casual observer to wonder whether half of everybody in that country is maybe super pissed-off at their government, seeing how France and the UK are going the opposite way.
Let’s be honest: it’s getting laughable to seriously advocate vaxxing up a whole goshdarn population when it’s perfectly obvious now that the vaxxes don’t work and are making a lot of people sick with everything that can go wrong in a human body, plus Covid-19. Are nations such as Austria and Germany not looking plumb insane now? Can the European Union endure such wildly contradictory policy among its member states, and not make itself ridiculous? Let’s just say, the situation in Europe is in flux and events are moving fast.
Here in our exceptional nation, it is lately discovered — to the chagrin of the elite managerial classes — that The Science personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci is not medical science after all but rather political science. Ah! I see now why so much confusion has been sown over Dr. Fauci’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic. If he actually represented medical science, he might not have killed several hundred thousand people in this country by withholding and suppressing effective treatments and promoting deadly vaccines. He might not have disgraced the entire medical establishment and half-wrecked the system it works in. But, to paraphrase another eminent political scientist of yore, Josef Stalin, while one death is a tragedy, a half-million is a mere statistic. There’s science anyone can understand!
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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| New Edition It’s that time of the year !*A child is born… but not exactly the way he thought it happened. And now he must leave home at Christmas time. *$7.50 — Cheap! |
| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
New Paintings by JHK 2020
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Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays
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Do you know what most of America wants? I will tell you: America wants Daddy to step up and say, “Okay, you can stop being insane now. Really, enough is enough.” Trouble is, America is short on daddies these days. That’s what happens when you throw The Patriarchy on the old garbage barge. Mr. Trump was a kind of daddy, but to many women, especially, he was the wrong kind, Bad Daddy, the worst kind of daddy, the kind who makes you clean up your room and come home before midnight. They traded him in for demented Grampa. He just wants to fondle you — and not in a good way — but family decorum requires that we don’t talk about that. In the meantime, we can do whatever we feel like.
It’s a fact that more-educated folks are most susceptible to mass delusion, and the reason will surprise you. It’s because of status-seeking. Yes, even more than money. We’re hard-wired for it. And status is liable to send money in your direction, anyway. Among the educated managerial class, going along with everybody else is crucial because careerism in a bureaucratic system, public or private, demands it. If you seek to rise in the hierarchy, or are just angling for brownie points, you must appear to subscribe to the reigning beliefs-of-the-moment, no matter how crazy, and the punishments are severe for appearing to not go along— like losing your career and livelihood, and all prospects of a comfortable life.
The main belief-of-the-moment is that battling the invisible menace called Covid-19 requires the most extreme measures, and anyone against that is an enemy, a domestic terrorist! Thus, it is most urgent to “vaccinate” every human being in the nation. Why? Because Dr. Tony Fauci, America’s doctor, says so. Why does he say so? Because the Covid-19 “vaccines” are the crowning achievement in his long vainglorious quest to bring forth a world-saving magic cure for a dread disease. And since Dr. Fauci is The Science incarnate, and The Science must be followed (because…come on… we are modern people in a modern world ruled by Science), we must follow Dr. Fauci!
But it’s obvious now, after a year on-the-scene, that the vaxxes work poorly at best to protect against infection or control the spread, and, at worst, induce terrible long-term damage to organs, blood vessels, and the immune system. The vaxxes can kill you or gravely disable you. The statistics in the CDC’s VAERS registry show this in no uncertain terms: 1,003,992 Covid vaxx adverse event reports including 21,745 deaths linked to them through January 7 — and these figures are said to be deeply understated due to the poor design and difficulty using the VAERS website with its clunky, out-dated code that the CDC refuses to fix.
Dr. Fauci has avoided addressing these adverse reactions and the negative efficacy of the “vaccines.” He simply states that the vaxxes are “safe and effective.” That so many Americans believe him, despite all the evidence, and go along with the crusade to vaxx-up everybody, is proof that they are insane. But now that the whole story is unravelling, they are ever more determined to stick to the script. Covid-19 has been their security blanket for two years. As long as it was in the picture, raging and killing as an invisible demon, it could be the focus of all their free-floating terror.
Terror of what, you might ask? Of the meaninglessness, alienation, and debility induced by the managerial class in its own sick institutions and corporations… in short, the 21st-century America that the managers evolved in and supported — a culture of junk food, junk work, junk art, junk environments, junk government, junk economics, and, lately, junk science… a sickening panorama of systems out-of-control and entering failure mode. Confronting the disaster of its own incapacity to sustain a healthy culture and an economy with a future, the managerial class went nuts. Its insane actions now are killing people while seeking to punish those who refuse to walk sheepishly into America’s version of the gas chamber, the Anthony Fauci “vaccines.”
One way out of a trap like this is to follow your insanity into all-out Götterdämmerung, chaos and destruction. That’s the Hitler way (preceded by a period of psychotic totalitarian social control and sadistic scapegoating). I don’t recommend it. When it’s over, there’s not much left to assist the continuity of the human project. But we are led, at the moment, by a very Party of Chaos that is making all those moves. Check the boxes: social control freakery, check… punishment unto the unvaxxed, check… loony war-drumming, check….
The cries for more lockdowns and punishments grow shrill as omicron burns across the land, presenting a fair chance of putting a stop to Covid 19. We’ll know in a couple weeks where this is going. Will those tell-tale “all-cause deaths” mount in the insurance companies, suggesting that the “vaccines” seeded millions with lurking illness? Will the public turn on Dr. Fauci and run him from public health to rough justice? Will the inept “Joe Biden” regime start World War Three in Ukraine, a place of no real interest to us, or the South China Sea, just to change the channel?
You can feel the paradigms straining to shift under your feet now. For that degenerate managerial class, and its psychotically woked-up minions on the campuses and in the news-rooms, this thing would likely go the Schopenhauer way: the new paradigm is at first ridiculed, then violently opposed, then accepted as self-evident. Snap your fingers and they’ll come out of it, just like that.
The managerial class will try to pretend that they never did the things they did. A few will offer weak apologies. But the damage is done. Before long, an economic rip-tide takes the drowning out to sea. The rest of us left on dry land have a lot of work to do. It’ll be no time for crybabies.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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| New Edition It’s that time of the year !*A child is born… but not exactly the way he thought it happened. And now he must leave home at Christmas time. *$7.50 — Cheap! |
| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
New Paintings by JHK 2020
**Other Books by JHK
The World Made By Hand Series:**
| Book 1: | Book 2: | Book 3:
| Book 4: | | | | | |
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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
So much chatter in the news media these days about who will be “Joe Biden’s” running mate in 2024 — not that there’s anything wrong with his current sidekick — but I’ve got half a mind to throw my own hat in the ring. That’d make two of us with half a mind and a shot at the so-far elusive ideal to govern least… and therefore govern best!
Alas, I lack the connections and the ground-game of a seasoned pol such as Liz Cheney, the current favorite, who dragged her esteemed old daddy, Dick Cheney (“George W. Bush’s brain”) up to Capitol Hill this week, for to schmooze up the Progressive caucus and raise morale among the walking dead. Where Dick Cheney treads, you know war can’t be far behind. That must be what America really needs to pep her up in these days of sagging poll numbers and inflating dollars. War, the ivermectin of politics!
But shall it be a foreign war or a civil war? Isn’t that the question? From the looks of things around “Joe Biden’s” White House, where a weird concrete fortification is being hoisted up on the north lawn as I write, it looks like they’re planning for action on the home front, perhaps a full-out assault by the lurking forces of white supremacy — painted savages in horned head-dresses screaming MAGA-MAGA-MAGA as they loot Dr. Jill’s walk-in closet.
The Attorney General, Mr. Garland, has been warning us about this Satanic host of backward-facing demons. They breed like botflies in the red state hills and hollers, swarm and buzz in the school board meetings, caress their AR-15s in prostrate worship of their Trump bobbleheads, scheming to deprive BIPOCs of their votes. They’d like to tie Democracy to the back bumper of a Ford Alpha F-150, drag it over seven miles of broken Southern Comfort bottles, and feed whatever’s left to the hogs. They must be stopped!
Except… what if they fail to materialize? Maybe a foreign war would play better on social media and The View. Our arch-enemy, Vlad Putin, election-meddler supreme, is fixing to invade Ukraine, we’re told. Obviously, that would interfere with “Joe Biden’s” plan to make Ukraine America’s fifty-first state. When Sec’y of State Tony Blinken mentioned that to Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister blew mineral water through his nose all over the conference table. Would a friendly little tussle over that sad-sack country lift America’s animal spirits… like, get the economy firing on all cylinders? Roust up all those work-force dropouts who disdain fine jobs waiting for them in the Amazon warehouses and the fry-lanes of Mickey-D? Put the brakes on all this fentanyl snorting…? All this porn-watching…? Turn around America’s long sickening slide into its own Hollywood fantasy of the zombie apocalypse?
Well, I must be frank: probably not. Probably only hasten America’s journey to the political pits of hell (and Ukraine’s to its special sub-hell). What would be our strategy in this war over Ukraine? Arm Ukraine with all the latest US gee-whiz fighting gear and let them have a go at the Russian army poised along the border of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts? That’ll work, I’m sure. Call it Operation Russian Roulette, only with a bullet in every chamber. You see, it is not a generally-accepted fact among world military professionals that Ukraine has — how you say? — a well-disciplined, experienced fighting force. I hope that does not offend.
If that doesn’t seem like a viable game-plan, do “Joe Biden,” Tony Blinken, and Lloyd Austin really suppose we would transport x-number of US troop divisions six thousand miles from Kansas to slug it out with those Russian divisions poised at the edge of their own homeland? Have a look at the world map and contemplate the logistical picture. Not so favorable for us, wouldn’t you agree? A long way to re-supply our boys, gals, and theys in uniform with fresh Kit-Kat bars.
Okay, say that dog don’t hunt, what else then? Default to our trusty old ICBMs, waiting patiently in their rusty silos lo these many decades for the chance to do their thing? That is, turn the world into an ashtray? I give you: Dr. Strangelove re-made as a documentary…. We are livin’ the dream, all right.
How’s this for an idea: just leave Ukraine alone. If Russia intends to dominate it, so what? For most of our lives Ukraine was a virtual province of Russia, so to speak, and it didn’t hurt us none. Ditto our grandparents and all the ranks of our ancestors. And now it’s a problem? Could it be possible that Ukraine is just none of our business (in the most literal way)?
Meanwhile the business of Covid-19 flares spectacularly in omicron drag — but not vary harmfully — around the world, presaging a welcome end to this contrived global emergency, and yet the member nations of the Western Civ club (including many also enlisted in NATO) drive deeper with their experiment in tyranny even as the end of Covid is in sight. Despite overwhelming proof that the mRNA vaccines don’t work, and actually induce much serious harm to people, Western Civ still strives insanely to vaxx-up every last citizen. The Supreme Court shot down “Joe Biden’s” vaxx mandate for businesses yesterday, and the “president” actually declared that companies should ignore the decision and compel employees to get vaxxed anyway.
If that is not something like peak insane, what is? At least, among the cohort in our land who are susceptible to that madness, which is actually not a majority of the people in this land. Hence, I have news for you: we are now at the turning point. Americans are rejecting blue insanity. We are fixing to drag that old blue dog to the doghouse, where it can cool out for two years before we put it down for good. And a couple more things: “Joe Biden” is done running for president, and Liz Cheney is done running for Congress, or anything else. Welcome back to reality. Let the sun shine in.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_353.mp3 Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recentlyLiberty or Lockdown. He is also a columnist at Forbes, founder of the Atlanta Bitcoin Embassy, and Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, Austria. He is the editor of The Best of Mises [economist Ludwig von Mises]. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz* written and performed by Larry Unger.*
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We are at a strange pass in The Saga of Covid. It seems the spikey virus wants to leave center stage… is weary of all the attention… wants to fade into the eternal parade of microorganisms that cozily coexist within the human life-stream — like Tony Fauci’s HIV, a fellow traveler in the old-time throng of human viruses, now semi-retired, and yet still every bit as mysterious in the actual mechanism of AIDS as it was when Dr. Fauci pinned his NIAID distinguished service medal on its elusive bosom, so to speak (but you’d have to read Bobby Kennedy’s book on Fauci to get the drift of that).
Omicron is sweeping the country, as love once did in George Gershwin’s day. (We are a different country now, as anyone tuned into the Turner Classics Movie channel can discover.) Omicron: the 36-hour head cold that Covid-19 has been demoted to. Omicron: a mere wise-cracking gecko compared to the roaring dragon that was Covid-19 in the winter of 2020. Omicron: kind of an embarrassment to “vaccine” tyrants who still seek to jab every arm on earth, and at ever-shortening intervals — like a med school version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, only with syringes running amok instead of brooms.
The Party-of-Chaos (the one headed by the ectoplasmic “Joe Biden”) does not want to let go of Covid-19, its Swiss army knife of destruction. With Covid-19, you can push people around and mess with their lives every which way, shut down their businesses, lock them in their homes, screw them out of their livelihoods, delete their reputations, board-up their social venues, cancel their careers, revoke their licenses, drag them into court, fine them into penury, cram them into prison camps, and much more.
If Covid-19 actually does make that move to exit the scene, the Party-of-Chaos will have to find a new focus for its anxiety-driven lunacy. And if the front page of The New York Times is the party’s id, a signifier of intent, then the focus will shift to fomenting war with Russia. Notice today’s lead headline, top left above the fold (as we used to say when the darn thing was printed on paper).
“…in a bid to avert war in Ukraine…” the headline declares. Dunno about you, but to me that suggests the USA sees war as a possibility, something we’ve already gamed into our plans, like it would be something we could… handle. Forgive the rather glum reality-test, but war with Russia over Ukraine is for sure something that the USA probably can’t handle. The most likely outcome would be a king-hell embarrassment on the battlefield, not just because we would be fighting on Russia’s door-sill where sheer logistics favor our adversary (with ready re-supply and all), but because our pussified military — with gal bomber pilots in pregnancy flight-suits and other novelties of “diversity & inclusion” — will result in the most ignominious ass-kicking in our history… following a 50-year string of prior embarrassments. The second most likely outcome of this face-off with Russia would be that old familiar nuclear World War Three, with everything from Bangor to Pacific Heights turned into one big smoldering ashtray.
Underlying this lunacy is The USA’s perverse wish to enlist Ukraine in NATO — Ukraine, that mighty economic powerhouse (not). What Ukraine is… is a super-sized version of Detroit, a hollowed-out shell of a place whose mojo left on the 9:10 train to Palookaville decades ago, and has been on international life-support since the DC Deep State ran its 2014 “color revolution” in the Maidan Square. The Russians object to American huggermugger in Ukraine because following the implosion of the Soviet Union, we promised the Russians no expansion of NATO in the direction of their border. Yes, we did. We said that.
Well, sure, you may be thinking, countries make all kinds of insincere cockamamie agreements all the time, in the darkness of bad faith, and so what? This is geopolitical hardball. Grow up! We want Ukraine on our side now and Russia can just go pound sand…. Okay, forgive me… that may be what Secretary of State Tony Blinken and his genius deputies in Foggy Bottom are thinking… not you. But is it really a good idea? Ukraine, when not actually a part of greater Russia, has been in its acknowledged sphere-of-influence since before George Washington even thought about chopping down any cherry trees. Russia, which has been invaded and torched by European invaders twice in modern history (Napoleon, 1812; Hitler, 1941), does not want NATO lodging missiles, troops, and Gawd-knows-what-all else right on its border.
And, by the way, does the USA need another faraway failed state to support? We can’t even take care of the junkies, psychotics, and misbegotten lining the sidewalks of a dozen American cities, and now we propose to adopt the poorest country in that remote corner of the world? While beating down our own once-productive people, inflating away our savings, taking away our natural liberties to work, move about in a free society, and the right to decide what pharmaceuticals we can decline to put in our bodies?
Which brings us back to the virus. In The Saga of Covid there is a monster under the bed. The ballyhooed and mandated vaxxes apparently have the ability to kill and maim people who have taken them long after Covid-19 exits stage-left. We don’t really know how this works out, but we have plenty of clues: kids dropping dead of heart attacks, pro athletes, ditto, the VAERS numbers reporting over 21,000 vaccine-implicated deaths (out of a grossly under-reported actual figure) plus over a million adverse reaction reports (ditto under-reported). The time may not be far off when we make the ghastly discovery that the “vaccines” actually killed more Americans than the virus did.
Meanwhile, a report out of Indianapolis-based the OneAmerica Life Insurance company, a $100-billion outfit, announced last week that all-causes deaths in working age Americans between 18 and 64 were up 40 percent in the third quarter of 2021 and keeping the same pace in the fourth quarter. The number was described as “huge, huge… greater than a three-sigma event… unheard of,” according to company CEO Scott Davison, who added that even those figures are probably under-reported. What’s killing these people? Could it be Dr. Fauci’s prescription for vaxxing up everyone in the land? I guess, sooner or later, we’re going to find out.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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| New Edition It’s that time of the year !*A child is born… but not exactly the way he thought it happened. And now he must leave home at Christmas time. *$7.50 — Cheap! |
| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
New Paintings by JHK 2020
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What you’re actually seeing in the rhetorical hoo-ha over the January Sixth capitol riot is the main cattle-prod driving mob madness — fear of Covid-19 — losing its power to terrorize the public. The Party-of-Chaos put on a grand opera of lamentation Thursday to celebrate its unity in victim-hood — we wuz so traumatized by the riot! — but in the background, they can see their dearer dream of total vaccination — and total control of the population — fade in the winter mists.
This is the crisis of a managerial class that has lost its ability to manage anything, including all of us. Thus, the hysteria in the blue precincts of America, where they are concentrated. And, as I’ve averred before, the madness probably has its roots in the slow-motion train wreck of our techno-industrial economy. The managerial class can surely sense it and see it coming, but they don’t have a clue what to do about it. So, in desperate need of some signifying ritual, they’re left performing a grand-scale Chinese fire drill like drunken sophomores of yore — a flurry of pointless, attention-seeking activity.
You see, this total vaccination fantasy is meant to compensate for that inability to govern in a time of epic turbulence. It provides an illusion of control. But the obvious insanity of it stands out in the demonstrable facts that the vaccinations don’t work, and that they are racking up an impressive record of harming people. These two facts must be ignored by the vax-happy Blue Team, even as the immunizing and pretty harmless Omicron variant spreads speedily across the land conferring superior natural immunity on those who survive it — which is, functionally, everyone.
The virus looks like it’s on that ol’ exit ramp, but the disintegrating economy will still be with us, and no amount of political degeneracy disguised as virtue will stop it. We still have to manage our lives individually and collectively going through it. It’s going to be a tough slog. The federal government in its current iteration is looking like more of an impediment than a help to any of us. Its current hysterical flounderings send a clear message: You can’t depend on us to do anything right. Instead, select a favorable place to plant your flag, and figure out what you can do locally to rebuild some means of productive activity, fortify basic institutions of law, public safety, and money, and restore credible authority.
You will have to be nimble and resourceful. The Covid lockdowns of the past two years have destroyed many small businesses, but think of that as the tide going out before the blowback of a tsunami that will sweep away the large businesses next. The WalMarts, the automobile industry, the airlines, trucking, Amazon.com, major league sports, the fast-food empires, the oil industry, the mega-banks — all these systems have gone into speed-wobble and most of them will crash hard.
It’s an issue of scale. The broken giants will have to be replaced by lower-scaled systems for producing stuff, moving it, and selling it. That includes food, especially, by the way. How are you going to be part of that where you live? What role can you imagine yourself in? What are you good at? What do you dream of being good at? Can you assemble a social network for yourself? Do you have any ability to look after the public interest? Can you speak coherently? Do you mean what you say? Are you grounded morally in right-and-wrong? Can others depend on you to keep your word? These are the questions that will matter going forward, not whether you were vaccinated, or voted for Mr. Trump, or know the lyrics to God Bless America.
It looks like the disorders of economy and community are heading to center stage as the Covid-19 melodrama closes down. Since human nature is perverse, the current mass formation psychosis may transfer its energy onto new hobgoblins. But the mass of Americans — putting aside blue and red insignia for a moment — might simply be tired of lunacy. They may even begin to show some impatience with those who generate it, for instance the cable TV news channels. Some of the most practiced conveyors of lunacy are heading out the door in the months ahead. Joy Reid of MSNBC is reportedly on her way off-camera (not by choice), and a while back the redoubtably dishonest Rachel Maddow announced her exit for April of this year, probably in anticipation of all her beloved narratives falling apart.
Lunacy is exhausting. Soon enough, even the crazed governments of Euroland and Australia will suddenly drop their lockdowns and vaccination tyrannies as reality presses on the bubbles they occupy. In the face of the Omicron fade-out, they’ll turn 180-degrees and try to pretend that the episode of madness never happened. I doubt they will get away with it. Many politicians in these lands will be bum-rushed from office at the first opportunity.
Even our earnestly malicious Dr. Fauci is back-pedaling furiously, perhaps hearing the bloodhounds of justice yapping out in the gloaming. This week, he finally admitted that half the hospital cases of Covid were actually some other illnesses with the label “Covid” slapped on — in effect, to bribe corrupt hospital managers with big wads of federal subsidy money for using the killer drug remdesivir and intubating hapless Covid victims. Sounds like a racket, a little bit, but then the word racket defines the totality of Dr. Fauci’s career. The decisions he made about banning early treatment of Covid and suppressing information about cheap and effective drugs — in the service of preserving the emergency use authorization and the concomitant liability shield for his deadly “vaccines” — arguably led to the deaths of several hundred thousand people. If he doesn’t live to see prosecution, bear in mind that he had plenty of deputies and associates throughout the public health agencies carrying out that policy who deserve to spend some time in courtrooms.
Meanwhile, the prudent will save their energy to get through the rigors ahead and make plans for a changed economic landscape that will require all the classical virtues they can muster for creating a life worth living.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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| New Edition It’s that time of the year !*A child is born… but not exactly the way he thought it happened. And now he must leave home at Christmas time. *$7.50 — Cheap! |
| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
New Paintings by JHK 2020
**Other Books by JHK
The World Made By Hand Series:**
| Book 1: | Book 2: | Book 3:
| Book 4: | | | | | |
| | |
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Behold the Bel Air (Los Angeles) real estate venture called The One. (There is no other One… it’s the only One). This exercise in wretched excess on steroids (with sugar on top) is a house, in case you couldn’t figure that out. It’s 105,000 square feet clad in white marble, has five pools, a large nightclub, 40-seat home theater, bowling alley, tennis court, running track, putting green, a 30-car garage, and a moat! All on three little acres. Views of distant downtown LA. One could easily imagine Christopher Walken ranging through the austere chambers with a Glock “Nine,” firing potshots at the art.
The developer, a sometime film producer named Nile Niami, lost control of the project when he missed a payment to an outfit called Westlake Finance, known to be an aggressive lender with a bent for hair-trigger foreclosures. Niami’s company, Crestlloyd LLC, went bankrupt and The One veered into receivership. Originally priced at $500-million, to make it the most expensive private home in America, it goes on the market this month priced at $295-million. The outstanding debt on the place is $165-million. If no one snaps it up, it goes to auction.
Note of interest: when the project got into trouble, Mr. Niami rented The One out as an “event space.” The nightclub was used to put on shows featuring holograms of Whiney Houston and Michael Jackson performing their hits. Holograms are lovely people. They don’t fight over their pay or make outlandish demands for exotic snacks in the Green Room.
If you happen to be in LA this month, go visit the place on its cut-de-sac, Airole Way off Stradella Road (map below).
Thanks to Joey King for the nomination.
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The year of sickening global psychosis ended with virologist and vaccine-uberspecialist Dr. Robert Malone truth-bombing the Internet with three hours of straight talk about the US health authorities’ campaign to destroy the lives of at least half a million US citizens (so far) and, leading by example, to harm multiples of that number of innocent people across all of Western Civilization. Podcaster Joe Rogan assisted skillfully in an interview that is finally rocking the world out of an epic consensus trance. (Listen.)
By health authorities I don’t just mean Dr. Anthony Fauci, the designated National SARS-CoV-2 Coordinator, or his accomplices in the Dept. of Health and Human Services agencies, CDC, NIH, NIAID, etc., but also the purblind US medical establishment of actual doctors in clinical practice, researchers, hospital administrators, and pharma executives who acted with a collective stupid malevolence not seen since the crematory-stuffers of the Nazi bureaucracy carried out their final solution.
We know what you did. You engineered and patented a gain-of-function virus at the same time you conspired with pharma companies to devise and patent pseudo-vaccines, and then you loosed both of them on the public. You didn’t just fail to adequately test the “vaccines” cooked up by Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, but you deliberately botched the trials and lied about it. You created rich $$ incentives for hospitals to mis-treat Covid patients by failing to use known, safe, effective anti-virals. You conspired with social and news media to suppress information about those common anti-viral drugs that would have informed many patients’ decisions and saved thousands of lives. You treated late-stage patients dying of Covid-induced vascular disorder with the ineffective and toxic drug remdesivir that Dr. Fauci had developed unsuccessfully for an ebola outbreak years ago. (Nurses turned so cynical about the remdesivir protocol that they nicknamed it “run-death-is-near.”) You prompted government officials to lockdown society, force useless masking, and now to coerce “vaccination” by threatening to deprive citizens of their livelihoods.
The US Supreme Court will entertain arguments this Friday, January 7, to enjoin against “Joe Biden’s” mandates to coerce “vaccination” in companies that employ more than a hundred people and a separate mandate forcing vaxxes on staff at Medicare / Medicaid certified “providers” (meaning most hospitals and doctors’ offices). There’s a pretty good chance the court will decide against the mandates. They’re expected to rule Monday, January 10, the day that the mandates are supposed to take effect.
The government’s actions around the Covid-19 event look more and more to be deliberately and maliciously intended to harm lives and cause social and economic breakdown. In the last weeks of 2021, federal public health officers even blocked shipments of monoclonal antibodies around the country, despite their proven efficacy. The CDC scheduled the use of PCR tests for Covid-19 to end on December 31, after declaring them unreliable in August. Why the five-month lag? (To keep case numbers jacked up, that’s why.)
Every effort is being made to extend emergency use authorizations for unsafe and ineffective “vaccines” in order to sustain shields against liability for the benefit of their manufacturers. Pfizer refuses to release in the USA its FDA-approved comirnaty version of the EUA-protected BioNTech product for that reason. The Pentagon has lied and confabulated its use of the two Pfizer products in order to illegally force unapproved BioNTech vaccinations on enlisted men and women. Hospital directors, doctors, and their professional associations continue to persecute colleagues who speak publicly against the “vaccines.” The “vaccine” makers refuse to disclose the exact contents of their products, and were permitted to withhold data on safety trials until a half-century into the future. The obvious conclusion is that they don’t want the public to be informed about any of this. The net effect is that medicine in the USA has destroyed its own authority. Who can trust his doctor knowing that they’ve gone along with all this epic dishonesty?
The country is heading into an agonizing reality-test at a scale and speed never seen before in world history. You can already assume that government has lost control of the Covid-19 story. The Omicron scare is failing miserably. Lots of cases, few deaths, mild symptoms. Government’s credibility is shot. In the months ahead, we’ll learn just how harmful those “vaccines” were — especially among American children — as deaths mount from damage done to people’s organs and immune systems.
The perfidious news media is scrambling now to adjust its narratives, but they won’t escape the record of falsehood they’ve sedulously laid down. They can’t delete or rewrite every story in their archives, and many of these are printed out in hard-copy anyhow. Next, they’ll try apologizing. (“Sorry, but the pandemic drove us a little nuts.”) That’s hardly enough. They have to answer in courts of law — or else we must just declare the USA a lawless state.
The Covid-19 crimes against our fellow citizens amount to only one piece of a package of reality-tests coming our way in 2022. Do you think Special Counsel John Durham skulked off to drink pina coladas in oblivion after indicting a couple of errand boys (Danchenko and Sussman)? He is a hypersonic force orbiting over a well-known cast of political criminals who are headed for prosecution. Next up will be the train wreck of the US economy. Do you think the crimes around the 2020 national election are buried and forgotten? You’re in for some harsh surprises. Things have truly flipped. You just don’t realize it yet.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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| New Edition It’s that time of the year !*A child is born… but not exactly the way he thought it happened. And now he must leave home at Christmas time. *$7.50 — Cheap! |
| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
New Paintings by JHK 2020
**Other Books by JHK
The World Made By Hand Series:**
| Book 1: | Book 2: | Book 3:
| Book 4: | | | | | |
| | |
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page
Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays
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If 2021 was the year of maximum corruption, political decadence, and mind-fuckery in US history, 2022 is looking like a convulsive snap-back to the harrowing rigors of reality, spiked with shocking losses, reckonings, and not a little retribution for the rogues and reprobates who drove our country into a ditch. Quandaries abound now in the wreckage of economy, culture, and polity. The years of anything-goes-and-nothing-matters have ended — though you might not know it yet, at this very advent of Twenty-Double-Deuce. Welcome to the banquet of consequences. Soup’s on!
The American people have been played backwards and forwards, inside and out, through and through, and up and down; driven to the very edge of national suicide by a combine of enemies within and without. If China’s CCP wanted to take maximum advantage of a weakened, confused USA, they couldn’t have found more zealous help-mates than the seditious Democratic Party, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s treasonous public health empire, the murderous pharmaceutical companies, the recklessly dishonest news media, and a demonic host of federal agencies, especially the three-stooge “Intel Community” — the CIA (Moe), DOJ (Larry), FBI (Curley) — plus the many secret horror chambers in the Pentagon. Throw in the Big Tech tyrants, the Marxist mandarins on campus, and the satanic narcissists of Hollywood. Oh, and let’s not forget the evil principality of grift and swindling that is Wall Street.
We still don’t know exactly what role the CCP and its Peoples’ Liberation Army played in the origins of Covid-19, and we don’t know because the US government doesn’t want us to know — because they had a role in it — and the news media won’t lift a finger to find out, either, because they are the propaganda arm of the regime in power. We do know an awful lot about the operations of Dr. Fauci and his colleagues in funding the development of the virus in Wuhan for the purpose of introducing a wildly profitable set of “vaccines” which, if anything, prolonged and exacerbated the pandemic, and harmed or killed millions all over the world.
We also know that this same set of players in public health and Big Pharma gamed the clinical trials that preceded the emergency use authorizations that loosed the “vaccines” on the people, and that they deliberately obstructed and suppressed proven treatments with inexpensive off-patent drugs that would have saved many hundreds of thousands of lives if they had been allowed within so-called standards-of-practice that rule medicine these days. The same gang fudged their statistical reporting wherever possible, especially by failing to fix the kludgy CDC VAERS website for listing adverse reactions to the “vaccines,” but also in creating conditions that made it impossible to discern actual Covid deaths from “vaccine” deaths, and deaths either caused by co-morbidities or extraneous occurrences such as highway accidents or gunshot killings.
In 2021, a mountain of evidence was accumulated about all this criminal mischief, capped by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s massive book about Dr. Fauci’s unholy career at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a virtual prosecution manual, meticulously annotated, that will be used in countless lawsuits against Dr. Fauci, his colleagues who outlive him, and the many agencies and NGOs — and perhaps in actual criminal trials of these very well-known perps.
This is where things stand at the turning of the new year 2022. Who doesn’t want to know where this historic game goes from here? A lot of story-lines are changing and quickly. It’s obvious that the “Joe Biden” admin wants to run the pandemic for at least one more year, most particularly to keep in place the “emergency” mail-in ballot scam that perverted the 2020 election. But more than half the country is onto that con and I predict that we’ll see more rigorous voting rules and regs in place — or, if those reforms meet resistance, a battle so fierce over them that the elections may not even take place on schedule.
Just now, too many Americans are already fed up with being pushed around by public officials supposedly for their own good. They see through the evils of the Covid-19 racket. They’ve watched the rape of the public interest. They understand that the “vaccines” were a disastrous experiment run lawlessly. They’ve witnessed the harms done to themselves and their loved ones. They’re appalled at the hijacking of science by people as scientifically profane as the necromancers, astrologasters, and inquisitors of yore.
They won’t submit to any more lockdowns, to any more attempts to interfere with and destroy small business. They’ve had enough of the race-and-gender hustles that have disordered society, ruined cities that were already struggling, traduced the basic principle of public safety, and forced people to play pretend around obvious psychopathology and depravity. They are not going to play along anymore. They are going to resist and fight — in the city councils, in the school boards, in the courts, and on battlefields, if it comes to that.
Ol’ Man Pandemic
He just kept rollin’ along. The weaker but more infectious Omicron variant of coronavirus currently ripping through global populations looks like a signal that the end of this vicious melodrama is in sight. Let’s predict that the actual disease phase of Covid-19 burns itself out by spring at the latest, unless malign actors have more lab-grown monsters they can release into the general population whenever they feel like it. But the demonically-installed harms built into the vaccines will keep killing and disabling people for a long time to come.
We know that the spike proteins have been clinically observed lurking in human bodies as much as fifteen months after a shot of mRNA, and that they induce a lot of damage to blood vessels, organs, and immune systems. We’re just coming into the first anniversary of the vaccines — not to mention that millions have gotten additional shots and then boosters right up to this week — so those harmful spike proteins will be working their hoodoo all of 2022 and beyond.
As the Thai-German doctor Sucharit Bhakdi warned recently, the compromised immune systems of the vaxxed may provoke a large-scale revival of age-old killer diseases like tuberculosis that are ever-present in small amounts in our bodies and usually suppressed. The people of Asia and Africa are particularly susceptible because public sanitation and clean water there is sketchier. The vaccines are also said to provoke the expression of lurking cancers, especially among those in remission from illness. The residual mortality from the vaccines may end up being greater than the deaths from the virus itself.
In the background of all that lurks that ominous prediction made by the Deagel military analysis company several years ago that estimated the population of the USA would crash to 99-million in 2025 — down from over 330-million now. Deagel never even explained that, and they took down the web page last year when their alarming forecast suddenly started looking plausible. Just sayin’.
Any way you cut it, the Covid-19 episode will thunder through the lives of many millions of people, especially in the nations of Western Civ, which has taken the hardest hits in terms of self-destructive government policy. The pandemic has accelerated the collapse of industrial economies, a process I call the long emergency, and eventually it will end up affecting all nations, even if the West happens to go down first. Societies will be propelled through a period of disorder, surely longer and more difficult in some places than others, depending on local resources. The destination of this journey is a place where the human project is run at much lower scale and pitch than we have gotten used to in our time, with far fewer “modern” comforts and conveniences, and shocking losses in knowledge and applied science. It won’t be the first time this has happened in human history, but the wreckage will be much greater.
Economy, Finance, and Money
Our economy is hitched to our energy resources. The business model for providing fossil fuels to the global economy is broken in many ways, and therefore the business model of a high-tech industrial production economy is also broken. The shale oil industry was launched on a high tide of near-zero financing and over a decade since then it produced an enormous quantity of oil (though less-than first-rate, short on heavy distillates such as diesel and heating oil). In the process, shale oil producers proved they could not make any money on these very expensive operations, and we now enter a period of capital scarcity that will make it harder for them to attract new investment and continue performing. Besides that, they are exhausting the “sweet spots” for drilling and fracking.
What’s left after you subtract shale oil are the conventional fields that were in steep decline in 2008 when the shale campaign got underway. In 2022, expect US oil production to fall below 9-million barrels a day. We consume just under 20-million barrels-a-day, and import the difference. You would have every reason to expect that a more disorderly world scene may interfere with our oil imports in 2022. Expect consumption to drop too, as economic activity weakens. Let’s predict consumption will fall to 15-million barrels-a-day. The oil markets will therefore be disorderly, with price oscillation as shortages and demand destruction push and pull each other. Remember the basic equation: oil over $75-a-barrel weakens economies; oil under $75-a-barrel crushes oil companies.
The wish persists that we can run the complex systems of modern life on alternative energy sources, but that wish is just not panning out. The realization that this is so will spread through western civ in 2022 and create more anxiety, more disordered thinking, cultish behavior, and breakdown of social norms. For now, the public arena is entirely occupied by the mass formation psychosis that first erupted around Donald Trump and then shifted to Covid-19. The stresses and tension of these demoralizing dynamics may lead in 2022 to the outbreak of political violence that will make it even harder to reach consensus on a way through our economic quandaries.
Let’s agree to compress our recent economic history, since I’ve rehearsed it many times in weekly blogs at Clusterfuck Nation: We replaced our on-the-ground goods manufacturing activities with so-called financialization, essentially the manufacture of debt — borrowing from the future to run our complex systems today, to compensate for the losses accrued by our broken energy business model. It was all a swindle, since you can’t create prosperity with the sheer management of instruments purporting to represent wealth if there is no real production of material wealth behind it. Debt is not wealth. You can play games with it in financial markets, buy and sell it, manipulate interest rates and prices to give the appearance of things functioning. But that only goes so far — specifically to the point where reality overcomes artifice, and that’s where we are now. Substituting debt for wealth introduced perversities into the economy. Now you can’t tell the real value of anything — “price discovery” is disabled — and that bleeds into socio-economic behavior, too. Now, many business activities, including the supposedly self-consciously ethical fields of higher-ed and medicine, have become dreadful rackets, which is to say efforts to make money dishonestly. We can’t pretend that all this is okay anymore. We’re left with a gigantic edifice of debt that will never be paid back and a whole lot of bad behavior that is corroding our humanity.
After two decades of papering over our inability to pay for running our society, the Federal Reserve has finally achieved old-school inflation — the destruction of money itself — not just the pumping up of share prices, their specialty for so many years. They kept inflation at bay all that time by exporting it to other countries who sent us real stuff in exchange for our paper promises: treasury bills, notes, bonds. Covid lockdowns and the destruction of business finally killed that longstanding equilibrium and then growing ill feeling between the US and China starting killing supply chains. Now, globalism is on the ropes and with it our ability to export US treasury paper. All the “helicopter money” flushed into the system during Covid now chases goods that have a tougher journey to their points-of-sale. Parts of machines, cars, and many other things become hard to get. Prices go up. Systems break down and their failures ramify in other systems.
With inflation running officially around 8 percent, and unofficially more like 15 percent, the real interest rate on a ten-year treasury bond is the nominal 1.49 percent minus between 8 and 15 percent, a deeply negative number. Owning that paper is a dead loss. If the rate of inflation continues merely apace of 2021 in 2022, the loss will steepen. If inflation continues greater than apace of 2021, treasury paper will be like so many smallpox blankets on the global bond market and America will be verging on Weimar-style runaway inflation. We won’t be able to offer any more bonds in return for stuff. The Fed will have to eat them. We’ll be importing inflation, the prices of goods will keep going up. America is in a hole of our own digging. What can be done?
The Fed has two choices, both of them unpromising. 1) “Tightening.” By measured increments, the Fed quits QE, (quantitative easing, buying bonds, a.k.a. “monetizing debt”) not just US treasury paper, but also corporate bonds, and mortgage-backed securities. They move to raise interest rates to above par with real inflation rates to give people back the old reality-based incentive for buying bonds in the first place, which is a reliable stream of interest greater than inflation. The last time inflation threatened America, 1981, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker jacked up fed fund (short-term) rates to 20 percent, which put the schnitz on borrowing for a time, caused a recession, but got-er done. The catch is, the national debt and the balance sheet of the Fed were minuscule then compared to the incomprehensible trillions on-board now. And there was still a lot of actual productive industry left in the country.
An end to quantitative easing combined with raising interest rates would recalibrate markets to equilibrium — which is to say, crash them, because the end of near-zero interest would mean no more using leverage (borrowed money) to buy stocks, which are wildly overvalued after years and years of these shenanigans. The bid on stocks would end. Not enough buyers to meet sellers. Markets go down. That prompts more selling… a rush to the exits… look out below….
Tightening would crash the value of bonds, too, because bond value has an inverse relationship to interest rates — as they rise, the tradable price of bonds goes down. So, bond-holders would take a bath. Tightening actually makes money disappear — phhhtttt! — because it causes defaults (people not paying off their debts). In our system, money is loaned into existence and welshed-on loans sends money out of existence. People and corporations go broke. Higher interest rates also will make corporations default on their bond payments. Without access to more debt, many big companies may have to shut down, go out of business, perhaps forever. Government, buried under massive debt, would choke on higher interest payments. As money goes out of existence, capital becomes scarce and small business, which desperately depends on revolving credit, goes broke. The net effect of all this damage in financial markets is of deep economic depression, in this case, the long emergency case, probably a depression that becomes permanent since the basis of this particular high-energy economy, the oil industry, collapses along with everything else.
The Federal Reserve’s choice number 2) is: Don’t tighten. Rather, continue to print money like crazy, maybe even more than before, and keep trying to suppress interest rates. Keep buying bonds, notes, whatever debt paper the system pukes up. This is just the tired old scheme called kicking the can further down the road. The problem is, we’re at the end of the road. Old-school inflation had already kicked off in 2021 from two decades of QE, which was then greatly aggravated by the massive government spending to mitigate Covid. There’s no more jiggering with bond-buying and finagling the interest rates, and playing hide-the-salami with bank reserves, and stashing money in “special purpose vehicles” and other banking hidey-holes that will avail to keep things stable and happy. From here on, printing money like crazy only destroys the value of our money. You’ll have plenty of money, only it’ll get more worthless by the day — which is just another way of going broke.
Then, as the dollar purchases less and less stuff, dollars held overseas get dumped in exchange for whatever stuff is on offer: ores, grain, finished products, US real estate, precious metals, other less-damaged currencies, what-have-you. Better to own things of actual value than dollars that are fast-losing their purchasing power. Foreigners dump US treasury bonds, too, since inflation destroys their value. As foreigners do this, the dollars return home to the US provoking yet more inflation. Before long, America is awash in dollars and short on goods that you can buy with those dollars. You’re rich in dollars yet broke at the same time.
The outcome in both cases is substantially the same: the standard-of-living in America goes way down. What I predict for 2022 is that the Federal Reserve will embark on a much-heralded tightening program — and then abandon it at the first sign of trouble, the inevitable stock market downturn. Then the Fed will be back to buying our own debt paper and attempting to stuff interest rates back down, if they can, which may not be possible anymore. The Fed soon loses all control over American money. They may try to retire “old” dollars and replace them with “new” dollars backed by something, gold and silver being the obvious candidates. That will lead to a severe upward re-pricing of both metals. Let’s predict gold at $5,000 and silver at $200 by the end of 2022.
There may be a half-assed attempt to establish some kind of official US digital currency (this has been rumored for years). The experiment will fail. Americans will resist being herded into that corral where their every financial transaction is traceable, taxable, and punishable. They will have learned their lesson about that from the Covid-19 tyrannies. They are sick of being pushed around. They no longer trust the authorities in money, government, medicine, or anything else. Anyway, as a practical matter, too many Americans operate on the fringes of the system already and depend on cash for doing all their business. Many of these are what’s called “un-banked.” They cannot participate in computerized payment systems. They will remain outside the digi-loop doing business with silver, gold, or various kinds of stuff. They’ll operate like 14th century Venetians.
I kind of doubt Bitcoin and its imitators will survive a whole lot longer after the financial system is forced to recalibrate to reality. They have thrived solely as targets of speculation. The block-chain is very clever, but ultimately Bitcoin and its ilk represent… nothing… no-thing(s). They attracted a lot of money that was just sloshing around the system during the years of artificial pseudo-prosperity, and that’s over. Anyway, they depend utterly on a stable Internet and electric grid to function and you’d be surprised at the fragility lurking in both those systems. Early 2022 may be your last chance to get out of Bitcoin with anything to show for your adventures in it.
Politics and Society
The mass formation psychosis described by Mattias Desmet of the University of Ghent is behind much of what we’ve been seeing in US politics for some years now. It was apparently triggered by the election of Donald Trump. But it seems to me the syndrome was groomed and cultivated by America’s “deep state” security, surveillance, and intelligence apparatus for decades before. Liberal Democrats didn’t have to go batshit crazy over Trump. Rather, they were manipulated into it by the deep state’s agents in the major media, starting with the preposterous RussiaGate collusion psy-op and extending through four years of nefarious schemes to disable and oust Mr. Trump. Though portrayed as the arch-enemy of the pets and pet projects of the Left — identity Marxism, open borders — as president, Mr. Trump was really much more a threat to the deep state itself, and to its matrix of wealth, power, and privilege, and they pulled out all the stops except assassination to shove him off the game-board.
His perseverance and resilience in the face of all that, was remarkable. But in the end, his enemies engineered an election marinated in various flavors of fraud, and managed to get rid of the Golden Golem of Greatness. How “Joe Biden,” the empty husk of a grifting, ward-heeling pol, came to be nominated by the Democratic Party is one of the abiding mysteries of modern times. His victory in the Super Tuesday primary, which cinched the nomination for him, was surely rigged by the DNC. His campaign, from start to finish, was a sham of hiding from the public. If the voters had been allowed to see the material on his son, Hunter, and the slime-trail of bribes recorded in hundreds of emails, contracts, and other documents on the “laptop from Hell,” “Joe Biden” would be in federal prison rather than the White House. But Facebook, Twitter, and Google conspired to censor all mention of that, and the people never got the news. So, now what?
Well, moving into the early winter of 2022, Americans are discovering just how badly they have been played on Covid-19, and how badly “Joe Biden” & Co. have handled economic matters and other things, like the daily invasion across the Mexican border, and how poorly “JB” & Co. have managed our foreign relations — the Afghan withdrawal fiasco, etc — and generally what a pathetic a figure “JB” presents to the world… and all this is looking like the ghost dance of the Democratic Party. Let’s predict the party will not survive the 2022 midterm elections intact as a coherent political faction.
I’ll give 70 / 30 odds that “Joe Biden” steps aside “for health reasons” well before the midterm election. He’s falling apart before our eyes. He can barely utter a comprehensible sentence. He embarrasses himself and the country every day. His poll numbers are in the sub-basement…. So, okay, he basically takes a dive and retires from the scene. Kamala Harris is sworn in. President Harris nominates Barack Obama as vice-president. Say, what…!
Mr. Obama is back in charge — like, was he ever not in charge since Jan 20, 2021, really? — going so far as to brazenly occupy the Oval Office as Veep for daily business — consigning Ms. Harris to a broom closet. Democrats clamor for Ms. Harris to resign and officially hand the reins to Mr. Obama. (Presidents are limited to two elected terms in office, but the constitution does not stipulate such a circumstantial appointment to office.) Kamala graciously steps aside. For the sake of “unity” and gender balance, Mr. Obama nominates Liz Cheney as the new vice-president. That’s one possible scenario. Rewrite that play with Hillary Clinton instead of Barack Obama. The Democrats are going to have to try some desperate move to retain power.
Even so, it’s hard to imagine any circumstances in which the Democratic Party retains effective control of the government. In the event that the midterm election is actually held, let’s predict Republicans regain majority control of the House and Senate, with many new faces of the MAGA persuasion among them. The Dems hopes and dreams for transformative change get flushed down the toilet. Government at the national level becomes impotent, ineffectual, unable to discharge its duties or manage anything — all this predicted explicitly, by the way, in The Long Emergency (Grove-Atlantic, 2005). Will our foreign adversaries take advantage of the situation? Can the fifty states manage their affairs without subsidies from Washington DC? Governors had better be planning for strange times.
The political right has been careful and cautious since the debacle of the January 6, 2021 march on the Capitol building. The poor boobs cajoled by FBI plants to break into the joint have been treated abominably by their government, and probably extra-legally. But mainly, the Jan. 6th caper put a damper on any more right-wing street action during “Joe Biden’s” year in office. That may change in 2022. The mood of politically-motivated people on either side of the spectrum has got to be aggravated by the tanking economy. And as the year rolls on, it will just be hungry, angry Americans of all sorts raising hell because they don’t know what else to do.
All the anxiety driving the mass formation psychosis that had first focused on Trump, and then on Covid-19 (and the unvaccinated), may now finally shift its energy at the actual source of our woes and sorrows: the DC establishment. The decline and fall of Covid-19 is going to leave a big hole in the nation’s anxious, wasted soul, and it will have to be filled with something. We’re thrust into a scene that resembles Civil War, but it becomes harder and harder to determine who is on what side, or what the sides even are — or as Mick Jagger famously hollered at Altamont CA in ’69, “Who’s foit-ing an’ whut faw?” It’s sheer clusterfuck. Murphy’s Law meets Zombieland during Seven Days in May.
Geopolitics
Gawd, who knows…? The Russians are sorely pissed because thirty years ago after the Soviet system clocked out, and eventually Vlad Putin tried to paste some kind of functioning nation back together out of the debris, we promised them in plain talk to not expand NATO, and then, year after year, we proceeded to add more countries to NATO including former Soviet Republics hedging right up to Russia’s border. Then, the US under Mr. Obama ran the “color revolution” in Ukraine, attempting to strong-arm that pathetic punching bag of a state to come over to our side… and having done that, we’re now threatening to bring them into NATO, meaning we would like to station rockets and perhaps troops and all kinds of other military stuff on what has been the doormat for every attempted invasion of Russia in modern history. Are you surprised that Russia has drawn a line in the sand there?
One can’t have a whole lot of confidence in Anthony Blinken’s State Department or in General Milley’s Woked-up, transsexual army that calling Russia’s bluff on this might work out well for the USA. Considering how economically weak we are now, how tragically disunited we are, how pussified and squishy we’ve become, maybe starting a war over Ukraine isn’t such a hot idea. One can only hope.
On the other side is China, Uncle Xi’s re-born Middle Kingdom, with gleaming skyscrapers, dazzling new airports and highways, the fabulous social credit system for controlling her huge population Orwell-style. China has a lot going for her, but what’s going against her isn’t so obvious, starting with the fact that she’s hurting for long-term fossil fuel supplies. China just doesn’t have that much oil or natgas, and she’s using ever-lower quality coal to drive her industry. Her oil imports have to travel through two global choke-points, the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca. In short, despite China’s great strides moving from the twelfth century into dazzling modernity, she might stumble on the energy quandary — like all the other “advanced” nations.
It’s no secret that under the ambitious Marxist emperor Xi Jinping, China wants to occupy the World Hegemon role that America is struggling not to abandon. Hegemon-ship usually requires geographical expansion. We’re certainly concerned about a takeover of Taiwan, which is, effectively, America’s offshore microchip facility. China could conceivably gain control over Taiwan by a thousand tiny steps without firing a shot — as the CCP has infiltrated US politics, media, and education — or by force, if only to make a theatrical point, but why invite the possibility of a nuclear exchange?
China has been adventuring in many remote parts of the world for years without drawing much international attention, buying farmland and mining sites throughout East Africa, and now she is eyeing openings in several resource-rich South American nations that recently elected friendly socialist presidents. China was awarded contracts to operate ports at both ends of the strategically important Panama Canal over twenty years ago, and Panama signed a memorandum of agreement to join China’s Belt-and-Road initiative in 2017. That got the attention of the Trump administration, which was meeting China’s expansionism with tariffs and sanctions. Mr. Trump caused several Chinese infrastructure projects for bridges, high-speed rail, and port improvements in the Canal Zone to be suspended. “Joe Biden,” a major Chinese client, is now looking the other way.
Can China actually control the unruly lands of Central Asia vital to her Belt-and-Road ambitions? For instance, Afghanistan, where China looks to establish giant mining operations, but has yet to tangle with the feisty Taliban. Let’s predict that China in 2022 is stymied in expansion and hamstrung by her energy problems. And add to that trouble in her export markets of the USA and Europe, as they begin to implode financially and the demand for Chinese manufactured goods declines.
Then there is China’s banking morass, bazillions of loans gone bad, giant businesses wobbling, and collateral in the form of a thousand skyscrapers built out of cement so inferior that it’s a miracle the buildings still stand up. How will China’s fragile banking system contend with contagion from the financial problems of the US and Europe? Let’s predict that China finds herself in enough economic difficulty that domestic disorder breaks out, the government over-reacts to it, and she becomes too paralyzed with internal political problems to make any mischief beyond her border for now.
Finally, Europe. Oh, lovely Europe, the tourist theme-park of my lifetime with its beautiful cities, tidy landscapes, its cafes, cathedrals, girls on motorbikes, its fabulous deep culture. Looks like the whole shebang is going down the chute now, with intimations of a return to 20th century political upheaval. Somehow, Covid-19 has provoked Austria and Germany to return to behavior that smells a little bit like what went on in the Hitler years. Hard to believe, I know, but look at them! Police state tactics! Forced vaccinations! Lockdowns! Harsh punishments for those who resist. It’s sickening, and looks like it’s getting entrenched.
Euroland’s economy is a mess. Its energy problems are worse than China’s. Except for Norway, with its dwindling North Sea oil fields, and some played-out coal mines, Europe has next to nothing for fossil fuels. Germany’s feckless “green” wind-and-solar project hasn’t worked out. She is more and more dependent on Russian oil and gas, and Germany’s position in NATO subjects her to the machinations of the USA against Russia, which has stymied the opening of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea. They may end up freezing this winter, and starving the following winter. The European banking system is a laughable fraud, since the EU has no control of the fiscal decisions made by member governments that issue increasingly worthless bonds. It’s going to be a rough year there with governments coming and going — stumbling as they go. Perhaps France gets a little lucky. The maverick journalist Éric Zemmour wins the election as president and spurs a revival of French national spirit. He’s still stuck with the rot in financials, but at least he bolsters the country’s morale. And unlike the Germans, France did not choose to close down its nuclear power industry, so the lights stay on there.
There you have it, ye denizens of Clusterfuck Nation. I can do no more with this. I wish you all fortitude in the twelve months ahead, and courage, and kindness, and all the good things that we are capable of. We’ll need that. There is still a lot to cherish about this country of ours, the good old USA, and I believe we’ll rediscover that in Double-deuce, along with some ability to tell ourselves the truth about things that matter and act consistently with it! Excelsior, brave hearts!
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Reality is penetrating the fog and fury of propaganda spewed out over cable-TV news in what may be the last desperate full-out campaign to sell “vaccines” to the credulous. Omicron is a bust, despite the shrieking about overstuffed hospitals (they’re not) in The New York Times.
Just as there is a crack-up boom in the final stage of a financial crisis, there is a climactic surge of hysteria in the Covid-19 war against Western Civ. Now, Dr. Anthony Fauci is pushing proof-of-vaxx for US air travel because, “[a] vaccine requirement for a person getting on the plane is just another level of getting people to have a mechanism that would spur them to get vaccinated…” as he laid it out on ABC News’s This Week show Sunday with Jonathan Karl.
Monday morning on NPR, Dr. Fauci was beating the drum about the unvaxxed being a menace to society as maxi-spreaders of omicron. Is it possible he hasn’t heard that the vaxxed are catching it at a greater rate despite their vaxxes than the unvaxxed? Do you know why? Because their previous vaxxes have de-tuned their immune systems, that’s why. By the way, so far, one death has been attributed to omicron in the US — and even that case is a muddle. And Dr. Fauci is beseeching the twice-vaxxed to go get boostered? Is he determined to wreck absolutely every immune system in the land? Kind of looks that way, a little bit.
I confess I am torn between two views of this fiasco. The first is that the notoriously incompetent Dr. Fauci and his colleagues (read RFK, Jr.s book) simply blundered through the Covid-19 disaster making a series of reckless choices, and about halfway through the crisis made the dastardly decision to cover-up their errors by doubling and tripling down on these mistakes. For instance, the policy to suppress and ban cheap and effective treatments that would have un-horsed their stupendously profitable “vaccines” from the emergency use authorization that got the mRNA cocktails into the public’s arms without proper testing. Some months down the road we will learn that this Fauci combine caused millions of people to die unnecessarily both from treatments withheld and from the adverse effects of vaxxes themselves.
The other view — that is becoming ever-harder to disregard — is that the Covid-19 pandemic was a deliberate program by a gang of powerful international adventurers to install a regime of surveillance and extreme control over formerly free citizens — all in the service of “re-setting” the ailing global financial system, reducing the population of elder pensioners to relieve the West’s payment obligations, and stifling industrial economies as a cure for climate change. It has sounded a little preposterous to me that such manifest evil, as otherwise seen only in James Bond movies and newsreels of the Nazis, could actually be true. But it is looking more and more of-a-piece with actions like the years-long mischief between Dr. Fauci and the Wuhan lab; the preparatory positioning of the pharma companies for just such a pandemic, including patent filings, to enable the quick release of their dubious “vaccines”; the janky mail-in ballot election of 2020 with the installation of an obvious puppet President “Joe Biden”; the insane legislation agenda of the Democratic Party; the long-running Woke insurrection against Western culture, values, and common sense; and the arrant bad faith of the news media reporting all the above as dishonestly as possible.
It may turn out to be various combinations of both views, with a uniting overlay of mass formation psychosis. In any case, I’m serenely convinced that we will learn the truth about all this, and perhaps not too far down the line. At this point, the official narratives are crazier than anything out of Alice in Wonderland, leading with the nakedly absurd idea that the vaxxed must be protected from the unvaxxed — though all are susceptible to Covid and equally capable of spreading it.
Do the doctors actually still believe this fucking nonsense? The ones on TV, maybe, but the rank-and-file must be getting rather nervous about what they have been responsible for in following the diktats of corrupt public health officials. (Keep your eye on suicides among them.)
On Sunday night, a monster of stupidity named Dr. William Schaffner, professor of infectious disease at Vanderbilt University, came on CNN and importuned Americans to get their children vaxxed. Do you suppose he is unaware of what these mRNA shots will do to children’s hearts, brains, and immune systems (nothing good, in case you haven’t been paying attention) as weighed against their near-zero risk of getting sick from Covid? Wouldn’t you like to know how much grant money this rascal’s lab is getting from the NIAID, NIH, or from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?
This traditionally blank week between Christmas and New Year’s, when almost nothing gets done, is the opportunity to stop-and-assess the situation. Do you not see what is going on? Will you allow yourself to keep getting hosed by illegitimate authorities? Do you want your personal sovereignty back? Do you want your country back? Will you go along with obvious malevolence just to avoid standing out and risking your status, your livelihood, your special privileges? Do you actually believe in what’s known as your sacred honor? And what relation it has to reality? Do you understand that periodically in history the human race goes crazy and does terrible things that it later regrets? This is one of those times.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
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You understand, of course, that Western Civ’s mass formation psychosis, like a horror movie franchise, requires the constant re-invention of its monsters and hobgoblins, and a constantly refreshed arsenal of weapons to defeat them. Covid is our mutating monster, but Big Pharma’s silver bullets and wooden stakes have proven quite lame. So, the resourceful superhero, Dr. Fauci (“The Science”), has induced his magic messenger, Santa Claus (a.k.a. the FDA), to deliver two brand-new light-sabers to humankind to keep millions of disordered minds churning with hope of slaying the object of their fear.
Enter stage-right-and-left: Paxlovid from Pfizer and Molnupiravir from Merck. The names alone sound like mysterious invocations from a druidical rite of redemption. How many times have you muttered Mol-Nu-Pir-a-Vir opening the fridge in hopes of finding at least one last beer tucked away behind the mayonnaise and miso?
Paxlovid, you see, works as a DNA polymerase inhibitor, the same as (sshhhhh) ivermectin, except that, unlike ivermectin — which is considered about the safest drug in the world, and which won a Nobel prize for its inventor — Paxlovid is hardly tested at all. It is actually a two-drug treatment, requiring the HIV-drug ritonavir to give it a buddy-boost. The FDA calls it an “investigational drug,” meaning it is subject to Murphy’s Law, as the “vaccines” have proved to be. Nor has it passed through any approval process so far. It’s being released under an FDA emergency use authorization, which relieves Pfizer of any liability problem if people are harmed by it.)
Molnupiravir is a nucleoside agonist (that is, an ersatz component that can be plugged into nucleic acids….both RNA and DNA…. so that it’s availability causes nonsense RNA and DNA to be synthesized and that in turn mucks up reproduction of viruses (albeit with risk as well to mammalian cells…hence it’s limitation to 5 days of use only.
Molnupiravir will cost $700 for a five-day course of treatment (ten pills) compared to $20 for a course of ivermectin. The US government bought $2.2 billion worth of Molnupiravir. The US government bought $5-billion worth of Paxlovid.
And so now we see why US public health officialdom and the non compos mentis “Joe Biden” & Co. worked so hard, along with social media and cable news, to outlaw all the other cheap and highly-effective Covid early treatment drugs on the scene. Not just ivermectin but fluvoxamine, hydroxychloroquine and so on. They’ve even interfered with deliveries of monoclonal antibodies to stifle their use. You can see clearly what a racketeering operation this has been all along between the FDA, the CDC, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID and the pharmaceutical industry.
There is also the shell game currently being played by Pfizer and its two “vaccines” — the one still under an emergency use authorization called BioNTech, and Pfizer’s replacement for that, Comirnaty, which has received an FDA approval under shady circumstances. The catch is, Pfizer refuses to release Comirnaty in the USA because approved drugs do not enjoy that shield against liability. Pfizer’s BioNTech vaxx has injured and killed many thousands of people the past year. If the two vaxxes are the same, you can expect Comirnaty to kill and injure plenty of victims, and Pfizer will be sued up its pfizoo.
Therefore, Pfizer is also working hard to confuse the public about whether the two drugs are actually the same or not. Ohio University tried to pull a switcheroo with its vaxx mandate, saying they’d made Comirnaty available to students, which is obviously untrue, since Pfizer won’t release it. They are using the unapproved BioNTech. Ohio law (HB 244, in effect this past October) prevents Ohio public schools from mandating vaccines not approved by the FDA. Hence, students at Ohio University are suing the school over its vaccine mandate.
Alas, the Omicron variant has turned into the Grinch that is stealing their Christmas. Omicron is so mild an illness that there has been perhaps one death from it in America — and who knows how chronically ill that patient was? (They won’t say, of course.) All week long, as it became increasingly evident Omicron was nothing to get worked-up about, the “Joe Biden” regime went into overdrive trying to cow the nation into another round of submission and more booster shots.
On Tuesday, the worked-up so-called president rolled out the phony trope that this latest act in the melodrama is a “crisis of the unvaccinated” — despite the fact that both vaxxed and unvaxxed are equally susceptible to Omicron, and the additional fact that Omicron spreads so effectively that in just a month it is displacing all the previous and more deadly Covid variants. Notice, though, that “Joe Biden” didn’t dare lay any lockdowns on the country, while the Supreme Court is preparing to give “JB” his second colonoscopy of the season when they reconvene after New Year’s to hear the cases against his vaxx mandate.
You can infer that this might mean the end of the Covid 19 pandemic extravaganza that has so benefited the party in power. It has given them free rein to the only policy exercise they know: pushing people around. If there’s any lesson that Americans need to draw about the Democratic Party’s motives during this two-year Covid horror show it is that “progressives” are determined to punish, coerce, and persecute the people of this land, while stealing as much of their wealth as possible, and driving our culture into a ditch.
So, with Omicron on the scene like an unexpected reality-test, the Democrats may be fresh out of monsters to terrify the populace. As the horror movie ends and the screen fades to black, the audience is apt to walk out from under that mass formation spell into the winter sunlight, blinking and gasping at the insane ordeal they’ve been subjected to. It’s already happening in a bunch of blue cities whose Democratic bosses have discovered that de-funding the police was a shuck-and-jive they now have to answer for.
Plenty of other matters await answering too, including perhaps the fate of Dr. Fauci and his many co-conspirators in the operation to kill more than a million Americans — when you figure in both Covid deaths and vaxx-related deaths, not to mention suicides and deaths by drugs and despair, not to mention countless injuries that people will not recover from. Robert F. Kennedy’s excellent book, The Real Anthony Fauci, is a comprehensive manual for bringing Dr. Fauci and dozens of his cohorts and accomplices into a court-of-law.
Get this: the SARs Covid-19 episode has been an engineered mind-fuck from start to finish. Western Civ has been taken for a ride, fleeced, shot in the head, and left in the trunk of a car abandoned on a lonely stretch of highway. As we turn the corner into 2022, millions of surviving, de-programmed Americans may get a little worked-up about what has been done to our country and just who is responsible for it.
This Christmas Eve, along with the valiant RFK, Jr., we can’t omit great thanks to some of the other brave medical researchers and doctors across the country who have sacrificed livelihoods to fight both for the peoples’ health and against the torrents of bad faith and dishonesty spewed out against the people of this land by their own government and its propaganda legions. Kudos to Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCollough, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Dr. Scott Atlas, Dr. Chris Martenson, Dr. David Martin, Steve Kirsch, Dr. Bret Weinstein, Del Bigtree, Alex Berenson, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, and many many others who are standing up against tyranny and coercion.
Correction: an earlier edition had Molnupiravir as a DNA polymerase inhibitor, but actually that is the action of Paxlovid. Molnupiravir is a nucleoside agonist. Thanks to Dr. Eric Zelnick for the assist.
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My guess is that Americans, by and large, cherish Christmas more than they fear the latest Covid-19 government-sponsored terror campaign, and that the globalist tyrants — or whatever you want to call them — behind “Joe Biden” have now gone a mind-fuck too far. Omicron is all they have left, and it’s not much to work with. Spreads easily, mild presentation, immunizes naturally. What’s not to like about this variant of SARS-CoV-2? Kind of looks like an off-ramp from the Covid-19 mass formation psychosis nightmare.
Of course, the last thing the authorities want is an end to the pandemic panic. The Emergency Self-Authorized President Anthony Fauci was all over cable news Sunday night with dire warnings about a winter-of-death! “We have a tough few months ahead,” he warned. “Get boosted!” A CNN blonde told the nation: “The case for boosters has never been stronger.”
Is that so? Omicron supposedly started in South Africa some weeks ago and Covid deaths there are at an 18-month low. The existing “vaccines” appear to be completely ineffective against omicron, so how is more of that stuff going to help? And then why all the hysteria about vaxxing up the vaxx-resistant? Insofar as the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines present not insignificant risks of harmful-to-fatal side effects, plus being ineffective, what is the prudent bet there? Speaking of which, will the public even be able to discern whether the alleged winter death surge is a result of Covid or of adverse reactions to the vaxxes? My money would be on adverse vaxx events.
Why is there absolutely no talk — except in the state of Florida, run by Governor Ron DeSantis — about comprehensive early treatment of Covid? Why is the CDC not setting up early treatment centers around the USA, where people with symptoms can receive monoclonal antibody infusions and kits of well-known, cheap, safe and effective oral medicines that can be used easily at home to defeat the virus? (Those medicines have been surreptitiously outlawed by our own CDC, you know.) Is it outlandish to suppose that the official “Joe Biden” government objective is to allow as many people to die as possible in order to keep the public terrorized? Meanwhile, they’ve provoked the public to line up for Covid tests using a PCR system so discredited for Covid detection that months ago the CDC scheduled it to go offline on December 31st, (And, uh, why the long time-lag between the decision and the action? Answer: it allows the CDC to falsely jack up case numbers until the year’s bitter end.)
With the apparent defeat of the Build Back Better boondoggle, following a long list of other failures, the “Joe Biden” regime’s main chance for retaining any power is to keep the Covid panic going long enough to re-run the mail-in voting scams of 2020 in the 2022 congressional elections. It’s a weak play, though, since the opposition is fully onto it. And if the Democratic Party loses as many seats in Congress and the Senate as it deserves to lose, not a single piece of their toxic legislation will see daylight until the mastodons come home in the next ice age. Also consider that Democratic Party operatives by the limousine-load will be hauled in to testify before opposition-controlled committees and many of these will be subject to criminal referrals.
Anyway, that election is a long ways away while events are moving fast and furiously. Chiefly, the regime’s favorite narratives are falling apart along with its poll numbers and the collapsing economy. “Joe Biden” is programmed to make a pitch for Christmas lockdowns on Tuesday night. I’m sure that’ll go over well (not), on top of the renewed threat of vaxx mandates that will get millions of working people worried and pissed-off about losing their livelihoods — as they go about their frantic last-minute Christmas shopping while making plans for family gatherings that may be cancelled (including airline tickets). Let’s go, Brandon!
One useful idea floating around the Internet lately is for a nationwide general strike to take place on January Fourth, the first back-to-work day after the holiday. It’s simple: don’t show up for work and don’t spend a nickel. The message will be clear: Just stop it! Stop the coercion, stop the lying, stop the shenanigans, and stop the mind-fuckery. If that event comes off, a lot of people will be free for the day — maybe a few days — to take to the streets and demonstrate their principled opposition to illegitimate political leadership. ”Joe Biden” and company will jump up and down, calling it another “insurrection.” Guess what: nobody will believe them.
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The public health bureaucrat who styles himself as “the Science” is at it again. In his quest to eliminate the control group for his experiment in hazardous mRNA injections, Dr. Anthony Fauci reiterated his warning that the nation faces “a crisis of the unvaccinated.” Omicron is upon us, he told a US Chamber of Commerce meet-up this week, and the hospitals will soon be overwhelmed by the unvaxxed.
Oh really? In fact, the gravest threat to America’s public health is… Dr. Tony Fauci and his debauchery of medical science. This will surely come as a surprise to readers of The New York Times, who see in the two-year (so far) Covid-19 event a splendid opportunity to hasten the destruction of the US economy and our culture in order to consolidate their own power to coerce and control the population. Clear the offices! Shut down the social spaces! Make ordinary business as difficult as possible! Cancel Christmas! That’ll git’er done!
In fact, Dr. Fauci is likely responsible for a preponderance of the total 802,000 US Covid deaths — putting aside the number of people who actually died from highway accidents, cancer, diabetes, old age, and other causes, but were listed as covid deaths by hospital accounting personnel avid for federal subsidy cash.
It was Dr. Fauci who organized the suppression of easily marshalled and inexpensive early treatments for the disease, namely hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, budesonide, azithromycin, monoclonal antibodies, Vitamin D, etc. It was Dr. Fauci who promoted the protocol of sending sick patients home from the ER without any treatment to await the further development of fatal clotting in their lungs. It was Dr. Fauci who designated the drug remdesivir — which he developed years ago for hepatitis-C (it did not work) with a financial stake in the patents — as the primary inpatient treatment for Covid-19. And then it turned out that remdesivir destroys patients’ kidneys and is ineffective anyway in late treatment of the disease when viral loads wane and spike proteins have already created the fatal capillary clots in the alveoli of the lungs and in other organs.
It’s Dr. Fauci who is responsible for the emergency use authorization on the mRNA “vaccines” that may have killed hundreds of thousands more Americans — based on the CDC’s VAERS system and statistical analysis of its inherent under-reporting at only 2.2 percent of all actual events— and you can add multiples more in non-fatal adverse reactions, including permanent disabilities. It’s Dr. Fauci who finagled the inadequate and botched trials of the mRNA vaccines in order to rush them into use. And now it’s Dr. Fauci who wants to vaxx up all the children in America, despite evidence that the mRNA shots permanently disable children’s innate natural immune systems and can cause lasting heart, blood vessel, brain, and reproductive damage, and also despite the fact that few children are susceptible to serious Covid illness in the first place.
The omicron moment may be the power-mad little weasel’s last stand. Reports so far indicate that omicron is a mild form of the virus. The one death reported to date did not include any information about the patient’s co-morbidities. For all we know, it was a motorcycle wreck with an omicron-positive label slapped on.
Dr. Fauci is now warning that America’s hospitals will be overwhelmed (and that it will be the fault of the unvaxxed). Consider this: He predicted the same thing for the first wave of the virus in the winter of 2020 and then the giant emergency hospital set-up in New York’s convention center was never used, nor was the US naval hospital ship brought up for Covid duty. Consider also: going forward, there may be more deaths from the delayed pernicious effects of the vaxxes — namely, the spike proteins which are now observed to linger in the organs and blood vessels as long as fifteen months after the shot — than deaths from the Covid-19 virus itself.
By the way, while Dr. Anthony Fauci may represent the leadership of the corrupt US public health bureaucracy, we cannot let the medical establishment itself off-the-hook for this epic fiasco of crisis mis-management. There are roughly a million doctors in America, and all but a tiny fraction of them have gone along with Dr. Fauci’s wrongful and harmful edicts. The doctors were the ones who flushed sick people out of their ERs without treatment. The doctors had to be forced by court orders to administer useful non-vaxx treatments to sick patients. The doctors continue to administer remdesivir despite its obvious toxicity and uselessness. US doctors went along with the lockdowns and the destruction of livelihoods, households, and futures. Doctors appear to support vaxx “passports” and other coercive measures. And now US doctors are going along with the malevolent effort to vaxx-up all the kids.
American doctors have proven to be cowards, cravens, zombies, and fools facilitating Dr. Fauci’s evil campaign — in concert with the rapacious pharmaceutical industry and a government in thrall to sinister forces that seek to destroy the country. The doctors have disgraced and dishonored themselves. The doctors have probably undermined their own vocations, as well as the entire armature of US health care, which they have allowed to become history’s worst racketeering operation. You can be sure it is going to collapse now, along with the equally degenerate financial system and, alas, much of the on-the-ground daily business of our country. For that you can also blame the geniuses behind “Joe Biden.”
The question is: will the people of this land submit to continued coercion and to the engineered demolition of their lives? So far, we have not rolled over like the pathetically servile Europeans and Australians. Here, there is apparently some will to resist further pushing around by this demonic elite. Several federal judges recently defined clear constitutional red-lines in their published decisions against the vaxx mandates.
Plenty of ordinary citizens are furious over the insidious and insane incursions of the political Wokery hitched to the Covid emergency — the race and gender hustles, the efforts to rig elections, the absurd spending programs aimed at countless grifting operations, the disastrous monetary inflation, and the invasion of opportunists from all over the world across our border with Mexico. Even at Christmas time, with all its transient preoccupations, it’s not too much to ask: where do you stand?
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| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
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The frenzy around the Christmas holiday conceals deeper currents running through advanced techno-industrial societies like froth on the surface of a raging river that surges with dangerous, hidden flotsam. We’re informed that the next James Bond might be a transsexual. But, you see, it’s not just that Hollywood is running out of gimmicks for its floundering “franchises,” but rather that there has been no place for men these days in the struggle to prevent civilization from drowning. The lifeguards are cancelled. All that’s left in the commotion of the flood is the shrieking of women.
Thus, the hysteria over Trumpism. America actually needed a rescue operation and, defective as he was personality-wise, Mr. Trump rose above the surge and called for exactly that, and was pulled under for the effrontery of saying so. It was a bad time to be a man standing out among men. The torrent is in charge now, not the people bobbing and flailing in it. Ride it out, if you can. By and by, the flood will subside and the survivors will be cast back on shore. The shrieking women will also subside, because the men will tell them to cut it out. And then the men and women will go forth reconstructing the human project here in North America.
The landscape will not look the same and we will not act like we did before, when we were just carried along helplessly in the flood. There will be fewer of us. All the giant things, too large to save themselves — the corporations, the institutions, the agencies — will be swept away, but we’ll back on dry land, with a lot of debris to sort through, some of it useful for rebuilding a way of life. We’ll be too busy for any more shrieking and hand-wringing, and crybabies will get whapped upside their heads.
That is what you can expect in the decade ahead. For the moment everything is just froth and noise, and most everybody is in too much of a panic to make sense. Humans don’t do well without sense-making. What makes sense is having a roof over your head, something to eat, some purposeful activities to provide those things, some other people to exist with and care for, and some ceremonies to honor our efforts and declare our gratitude for being here in the first place.
Christmas, most of us understand, is as much about the world descending into cyclical darkness as it is about the birth of a religious figure who signifies our recognition of the very light that makes darkness visible. You also understand, of course, that demons and monsters dwell in the darkness, that they spawn in it. This year, the darkness seems darker than any darkness we remember, and so we may be astonished when the light returns to our world. Eventually, we’ll memorialize the monsters and they will frighten children for generations to come.
I know it’s hard to even imagine generations to come at this moment in history. There is even some question whether human beings will be able to reproduce after the dastardly things we’ve done to our own chemistry. But this isn’t the end of us, not yet anyway. Let’s act as if it’s not, at least. We don’t know for sure where our story goes from here, but we have some say in it depending on what we do. Just knowing that there is a difference between story-telling and story-making is a good start in rediscovering what men are for.
One thing men are responsible for is bringing order to the world. They don’t always succeed, but it must be their duty to make the effort, and it’s not wise to distract them with histrionics when they attempt to do that, or shame them for trying. You are not excused from your duty in any case, American men. It’s not okay to pretend to be women to escape your duty. The women must not allow the men to hide among them and pretend to be them. They must insist that you be men.
One of your duties as men is to oppose false realities to preserve meaning, and you do that first by insisting on being upright yourself and speaking of things as they really are so that you can do with them what you must do. And this is the meaning of authority, which has been submerged in the flood we’re riding on, this flood of false realities drowning the meaning of everything.
I know this makes for a harsh Christmas. It is where we happen to be: the flood-tide of darkness. Do what you can with it, knowing that it marks some kind of turning. I promise you, the light is coming.
This website is scheduled for maintenance Tuesday, December 14, to address some of the technical issues you may have encountered.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
New Paintings by JHK 2020
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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/kunstlercast/KunstlerCast_352.mp3 I’m doing another lap with Dr. David E Martin who is among a select group of international thought-leaders investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and in particular the relationships between US public health officials, the pharmaceutical companies, and a number of shadowy organizations behind the development of the hugely profitable vaccines, which have a poor record of safety and viability.
David is the Founder and Chairman of M·CAM Inc., the international leader in innovation finance, trade, and intangible asset finance. He’s been among a select band of international thought-leaders investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular the relationships between US public health officials, the pharmaceutical companies, and a number of shadowy organizations behind the development of hugely profitable vaccines with a poor record of safety and viability.
He is the developer of the first innovation-based quantitative index of public equities and is the Managing Partner of the Purple Bridge Funds. Dr. Martin has founded several for-profit and non-profit companies and organizations and serves of several boards. He was the founding CEO of Mosaic Technologies Inc., a company that developed and commercialized advanced computational linguistics technologies, dynamic data compression and encryption technologies, electrical field transmission technology, medical diagnostics, and stealth/anechoic technology.
He was a founding member of Japan?s Institute for Interface Science & Technology. He founded and served as Executive Director of the Charlottesville Venture Group. He has served as a board member for the Research Institute for Small and Emerging Business (Washington D.C.), the Academy for Augmenting Grassroots Technological Innovations (India), the IST (Japan) the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce (Virginia), and the Charlottesville Industrial Development Agency (Virginia). Actively engaged in global ethical economic development, Dr. Martin’s work includes financial engineering and investment, public speaking, writing and providing financial advisory services to the majority of countries in the world.
The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz* written and performed by Larry Unger.*
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Has the illustrious Dr. Fauci not just plumb shot his wad now? Made himself — how do you put it delicately — something less than…uh… helpful… in the public health sphere? Worn out his welcome, a little bit? We have been a kind and generous nation through our history, after all, patient to a fault with all sorts of public rascals. I’m sure you would agree: an apology and discreet withdrawal from the scene might buy him a few years of elder peace at some ocean or desert retreat, dandling the grand-kids on his tender lap, even while the prosecutors construct their case… and by then, of course, the spike proteins moiling in the conus arteriosus of his shriveled heart — gift of his own marvelous science project — will have worked their hoodoo and punched his ticket to the great gain-of-function Palookaville up yonder.
Or is he, rather, begging for the rope at the end of the lamp-post now (along with a few thousand other public figures around the world)? I mean… moving the goal-posts yet again the other day right there on CNN with the ever-glowering Kate Bolduan, saying it was “not a matter of if but when” conscience would provoke him, Dr. Fauci, a.k.a. The Science, to declare the already-vaxxed, even the multi-vaxxed and once-boosted, unvaxxed! The horror! I’d calculate that the internet campaign to purchase the aforesaid rope would take about ten seconds flat, including the log-in.
It’s beginning to look like Americans have had enough of this monkey business, losing their livelihoods, their futures, their reasons to live. And now this malignant dwarf of a government witch-doctor wants to come for their children? Homey don’t play that. And, by the way, Omicron is no Darth Vader and Dr. Fauci is no Obi-Wan Kenobi. Omicron is a punk-ass computer iteration of the original “SARS CoV-2” computer model of a frightful pandemic agent engineered to drive the Western advanced nations batshit crazy (literally) so as to distract them from the criminal ineptitude of their financial managers. And now that the virus narrative is unspooling it’s showtime for the terminal financial follies of the age.
How long could the folks over in accounting hold back the tides of default and bankruptcy? How many millions of fingers would you have to find to plug all the holes in that dike? For many years — probably as many as Kate Bolduan has been scowling — the damage has accrued as the industrial nations grappled with the conundrums of wealth production vis-à-vis the decline of primary energy resources, and they are fresh out of tricks. All that legerdemain with the suppression of interest rates and self-dealing in bonds, gaming the equity markets with surrogate shadow-bidders, playing hide-the-salami in structured investment vehicles and special purpose entities, and kiss-the-lizard with collateralized debt obligations, leveraged ETFs, credit default swaps, interest rate swaps, commodity swaps, currency swaps, binary options, subprime this-and-that, National League RBI futures, gentlemen’s bets and side-bets on bets, and plain old thieving bought the advanced nations a few decades of breathing room before the whole reeking scaffold of folly groaned and blew.
CBS-News reports this morning that “household wealth has surged an astonishing $36 trillion.” Our Federal Reserve says so in a 205-page statistics dump. Oh, really? Do you know what that is? It’s called air. Something you can see clean through because the thing that is supposed to be there is not there, namely, what money is supposed to represent. This is the financial narrative, cousin to the virus narrative — making manifest the non-manifest… a ghost story around civilization’s campfire. Any minute now, the air is going to come out of the family rooms in these hypothetical millions of suddenly rich households and the people within will suffocate financially. The New York Times will report them as Covid-19 deaths, I’m sure.
The now-notorious Chinese real estate giant Evergrande missed the coupon payments on its bonds the other day. Evergrande builds sixty-story apartment towers made (mostly) of sand. Somehow, the bag-holders even in China, where buying real-estate has enjoyed the rush of novelty in recent years, begin to scent the odor of failure in that bloated corpus of fraud. Who among the twelve regional Federal Reserve bank presidents here in the USA happened to short those bonds, I wonder, and is the Biden family operation sitting on any of that paper? Hunter would be dumb enough to take bundles of it in lieu of cash payment for, ahem, services rendered. Does Evergrande’s distress set off a financial contagion in China now, and does it spread around the world like a novel coronavirus?
Anyway, there’s enough foul air coming out of America’s own overleveraged house of financial horrors and Europe is a veritable Hindenburg of flammable gas waiting for a mere spark of static electricity to go kerblooey — even while it ramps up an epic persecution of its unvaxxed populace, at Christmas-time no less. What geniuses!
The authorities everywhere in Western Civ are suddenly short on legitimacy and at every level of every department and agency. What happens when nobody believes any of their bullshit anymore? I’ll tell you what happens: Hillary Rodham Clinton gives a “Master Class in Resilience” on YouTube. (Check out the “trailer” for it here.) Weep along with the old gal as she marinates in her special puddle of narcissism. She’s aiming to come back into the arena, you see, just as the phantom president “Joe Biden” fades into the woodwork, moaning as he vaporizes like Jacob Marley in chains. And so HRC seizes opportunity, emerging like Rodan the Flying Reptile from her smoldering volcano of political slumber. She wants to share with you the heartwarming victory speech she failed to deliver in November of 2016, when Russia cheated her of her grand prize. She’s as sincere and authentic as a loaf of Velveeta. Her stepping on stage like this signals the end of something big. Batten down your Christmas tree. It’s going to be a bumpy ride into the holiday.
*
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Clusterfuck Nation
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The thesis called mass formation psychosis put forward lately by the Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet — a good digest here in text, not video — goes a long way to explaining the disgraceful mindfuckery that Western Civ has fallen for in our time, promulgated by a thinking class that descended into abject madness. It’s well worth reviewing.
The descent was provoked by the existential anxiety over the collapse of techno-industrial economies and the end of progress as-we’ve-known-it. (Have you noticed: it was the self-styled “progressives” who went the craziest?) As Dr. Desmet lays it out, the disconnectedness of contemporary life, its lack of meaning or purpose for many, leads to unendurable anxiety. All that inchoate fear seeks desperately to attach itself to some real object, some thing or some force that can be comprehended, fought, and triumphantly overcome. Finding such a target produces an intoxicating sense of communal connection, purpose, and meaning, driving actions that are often crazy and also absolutely impervious to rational debate.
The angst in America was well established by 2016. A beaten-down middle-class suspected that left-of-center politicians did not have their interests at heart after years of off-shoring their jobs, and they managed to elect their avatar, Donald Trump, over the obviously unsympathetic globalist, Hillary Clinton — who snootily tagged her opposition “the deplorables.” Even so, the polls had her ahead by a mile. Then, by some weird twist of fate, she lost a few crucial counties in midwestern states she hadn’t bothered to visit, and was reportedly too plastered after midnight on election night to come down and console the troops at campaign headquarters. The shocking election outcome instantly deranged the nation’s entire managerial class and its thinking-out-loud interlocutors in the news media and on campus.
The Golden Golem of Greatness, as I liked to call Mr. Trump, was the perfect target for their animus. Threatening to “drain the swamp,” he would shatter their hard-won power privileges and deprive them of their well-worn grifts — such as the various revolving doors between big money and its regulators. Plus, his rough personality offended their own pretense of decorum (in pursuit of that power and grift). They decided that he had to go, and fast, and the whole managerial class and their allies closed ranks to get it done, not least the vicious agents of the Intel “Community,” which force-fed all the federal legal machinery — the official instruments of punishment.
If they could only knock Mr. Trump off the game-board, America’s troubles would be over. We could get back on track to becoming a utopia of inclusion, diversity, equity, and self-driving electric cars. For four years the FBI, the DOJ, and other distributed players (such as the CIA mole Eric Ciaramella and his NSA co-seditionist Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and such ignoble rogues in Congress as Rep. Adam Schiff and Senator Mark Warner) beat President Trump like a piñata, casually breaking the very law that they supposedly represented in the process. This punishment was accompanied by a growing repertoire of cult-like rituals — especially around race-and-gender hustles — with rich opportunities for the new behavior called virtue signaling, which was essentially a game of collecting brownie points for status-seeking purposes in the new moral hierarchy of the “Woke.” The social networks, Facebook and Twitter, amplified every insane strand in the Woke messaging. As Dr. Desmet says, “The more absurd the rituals, the more they buy into it.”
This demonic opposition to Mr. Trump, and all the games issuing from it, produced the characteristic intoxication of mass formation psychosis. That is, the Left became a big cozy community of people initiated into a catechism of sacred truths. The important part is that they felt united in their struggle. Folks in the grip of this belonged to something at last, a solidarity of certitude, a social organism one could lose one’s anxious, fretful self in. No more loneliness and ennui. They were imbued with a sense of purpose: the ritual killing of the monster called Trump — millions of heroic Captain Willards stealing up-river to behead the renegade Colonel Kurtz. The news media’s role was to reinforce all that, with as much bad faith and dishonesty as they could get away with, in the service of fashioning a consensus that was eventually named “the narrative” — a self-reinforcing catalog of approved thought. The anti-Trump news posse garnered brownie points galore, including Pulitzer Prizes for their completely mendacious reporting.
The trouble was, for all their epic exertions, they weren’t exactly winning. The whole RussiaGate extravaganza fizzled — and may even eventuate in some criminal convictions if independent counsel John Durham turns out to be for-real. The Mueller Report came up plumb empty, to thundering disappointment, embodied in Rachel Maddow’s frantically bobulating Adam’s apple. The UkraineGate impeachment flopped. It was nice to have a sense of purpose and feel like a member of an exclusive club, but the Wokesters were unable to “nail that ol’ coonskin to wall” (as Lyndon B. Johnson once put it about winning the Vietnam War, which we lost). By January of 2020, it looked like Mr. Trump might even win re-election — the horror indeed! — considering the Democratic Party primary candidates were the most forlorn pack of has-beens, nobodies, kooks, and damaged goods ever assembled for such a contest. But whaddaya know? Along came Covid-19.
What a lifesaver the ‘Rona was for wobbling Wokedom, a cornucopia of boons, the gift that kept on giving! It provided an opportunity for perhaps the most craven public-private cartel in all the land, the CDC / FDA / NIH / NIAID / Big Pharma gang, to work some amazing hoodoo on the Golden Golem of Greatness and eventually all the nations of Western Civ. It put the perfidious, money-grubbing, and medically incompetent Dr. Anthony Fauci at the elbow of Mr. Trump as, in effect, the National Covid-19 Coordinator. He played the President like a Flugelhorn through most of 2020 — and, as the year ground on, Mr. Trump looked like he painfully suspected as much in all those ghastly televised daily briefings.
We will not go into the appalling mRNA vaccine boondoggle in detail here, except to say it reaped zillions for those with a stake in the patents, including Dr. Fauci. But Covid-19 also provided an excuse to relax the election regulations and pave the way to colossal ballot fraud in November, with Marc Elias of the Lawfare gang (and also a partner in the DNC’s pet law firm, Perkins Coie) scurrying from state to state tuning the electoral machinery in key swing precincts for a “Joe Biden” victory — and with hundreds of millions of dollars in help from Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg. Till then, nothing in all the weaponized legal machinery across the land had succeeded in expelling the hated object of the managerial class’s loathing, but the election would git’er done.
Remember: the Progressive-Woke-Marxist-Jacobins liked nothing better than inflicting punishment. In fact, when you swept away all their ideological bullshit and the associated hustles, the movement was strictly about coercion, about pushing other people around, making them do as the Woke commissars willed. And there was a clearly sado-masochistic edge to all that. They relished cancelling people, wrecking careers, destroying reputations, livelihoods, marriages, families. Their political leaders had no qualms about exterminating hundreds of thousands of small businesses in Covid-19 lockdowns orchestrated by Woke heroes like Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City and Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Jay Inslee of Washington State. And, of course, their darlings of the streets, BLM and Antifa, bashed-in shopfronts, looted all the merch, and burned down the buildings with mad glee.
But, most importantly, Covid-19 gave the political Left something else to focus its angst on once Mr. Trump was finally swept off the scene in the janky election. And until just the last few weeks of 2021, the virus has furnished endless opportunity for ever greater enactments of coercion and tyranny. Except now, suddenly, it’s all falling apart. In America, the claque behind the phantom president “Joe Biden” pulled the trigger on mandating vaccinations — complete with harsh punishments for the vaxx-averse — but then two things happened: 1) Federal Judge Terry Douglas in Louisiana issued an injunction against the mandate that applies in all fifty states; and 2) the news finally started leaking out — despite every effort of the US public health officialdom to hide it — that the vaccines carried an unprecedented risk of harm for medicines enlisted so casually into emergency use among so many millions of people, in addition to their negligible efficacy in preventing illness and contagion.
The Europeans, on the other hand, slid ever-deeper into despotic measures not seen since the Gestapo terrorized the continent. The Europeans face the same primal source of anxiety that the Americans do: the running down of their techno-industrial economies, except their predicament is arguably a little bit keener than ours is, since they have hardly any oil and natural gas of their own to run things on, and suffer terrible uncertainty about who will furnish it for them. If they had not gone out of their minds over what has turned out to be a pretty punk-ass virus — when treated early with a menu of cheaply available drugs — and hadn’t deified the false savior vaccines, they might be a whole lot more concerned about how they are going to heat their homes, fertilize their crops, and produce things of value — in short, remain civilized.
The catch is, they’ve given themselves until February to enforce their foolish vaccine mandates. The Omicron variant may help, too, since it is proving so far to be a grossly over-hyped development, discrediting the paranoia ginned up in the media. Can their courts act as ours have and put a stop to the madness? Between now and then we’re likely to see the defeat of the mass formation psychosis in America, at least, as the country is forced to face the truth of what it has done to itself.
Or, at least it will be the end of this chapter of that story. Perhaps the Europeans will snap out of it, too, as they see the narrative collapse in America. Or are they just too far gone? Standing by on developments.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
New Paintings by JHK 2020
**Other Books by JHK
The World Made By Hand Series:**
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Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays
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And thanks to all my Patrons for your support
If anything, political pressures may prevent the White House from going far enough, Binghamton University political science professor Olga Shvetsova argued.
In order to halt the virus, she said vaccines must not only be mandated but that fully vaccinated people need to be tested regularly to stop the emergence of new variants.
“We cannot allow people to be sick but not too sick,” Shvetsova said. “That’s what created delta, and that’s what created omicron. It’s not only about preventing people from being terribly sick. It’s about preventing them from being sick in invisible ways.”
— As reported in the Washington Examiner
Of course, Ms. Shvetsova is not a medical doctor, and it’s reasonable to doubt that politics represents any kind of science at all, but just a pretense of it in order to affect some academic respectability. Which prompts one to wonder: what shreds of respectability remain in the universities run by Jacobin maniacs? (Answer: almost none, and zero cred, too, lately, and note that having surrendered entirely to this kind of intellectual racketeering, higher ed is just another major institution whirling around the drain.)
There’s a lot to marvel at, though, in the manifold insanity of Ms. Shvetsova’s quoted views, starting with her overall totalitarian gusto. No ambiguity there about the need for coercion, for pushing people around, with no reference to legal niceties. (Note, political science is a field apart from the study of law, which doesn’t pretend to be science.) The bit I love most is: “It’s about preventing [citizens] from being sick in invisible ways.” Huh…? You know what else is invisible? Your thoughts. You could be harboring hostile thoughts about the folks who seek to push you around, which could lead to the accusation that you are an enemy of the state!
Prof. Shvetsova was not the only one out of her lane in the Covid thunderdome this week. Wall Street shill Jim Cramer took a few minutes off of pimping stocks on his CNBC-TV show to declare that the US army should be used to force vaccinations on the vax-resistant. “Acting President” Anthony Fauci and his political advisor, “Joe Biden,” used the hatching of Omicron to beseech the multiply-vaxxed to booster-up — overlooking the perhaps embarrassing reality that the mRNA vaccines do nothing to stop the spread of Covid, though they do have quite a downside in relative harm from adverse reactions.
For instance, a new study and warning from the American Heart Association concluded that mRNA vaccines dramatically increase risk of developing heart disease between 11 and 25 percent. Twitter slapped an “unsafe” warning on anyone attempting to transmit this news on its sacred app. Unsafe to whom, or what? Why, to the sacred narrative, of course, which is that the USA must be kept in a never-ending paranoid uproar over Covid — certainly until at least past the 2022 elections, in order to maintain all the emergency mail-in ballot provisions that enable voting fraud.
Meanwhile, the emerging reality of Omicron is that it has a much lower transmission coefficient than its predecessor, the Delta variant, and produces only mild symptoms of illness. Someone should tell Acting President Fauci that Halloween is over and he can stop trying to scare everybody. Anyway, two federal judges rendered decisions striking down Acting President Fauci’s vaccine mandates. The second ruling, penned by U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty of Louisiana’s Western District, featured a particularly lusty and detailed diagnosis of the mandate’s constitutional impropriety, and extended the injunction against vax mandates to all fifty states.
This leaves the USA in a distinctly exceptional position among the other nations within the loose confederation of Western Civ. Thanks to manifestations of sanity on the federal bench, the vax mandates appear DOA here now, while Austria and Germany have rushed into full-blown psychotic fugues over Omicron, announcing harsh punishments for their unvaxxed and, coincidentally, wrecking another Christmas season among people whose Teutonic devotion to the ancient pagan solstice rites runs hot and deep. There is obvious awareness among German vax protesters, as seen on their T-shirts and placards, that 2021 is looking like a nauseating rerun of 1933. Is it not amazing that the German politicians don’t see that in their diktats?
The Covid psychosis is just a reassignment of the Trump derangement, which was provoked by the generalized anxiety about collapsing industrial societies. The reasons for the collapse are not hard to grok: a declining resource base, especially affordable, economically plausible oil, a financial system purposefully detached from on-the-ground material reality, and sets of grossly foolish over-investments in complexity in the techno-narcissistic effort to work-around all that.
The epic Trump and Covid hysterias (with a side-dish of climate neurosis) managed to distract the masses from those essential economic quandaries. But now the breakdown in all the channels of production, trade, and money is roaring in our faces, and just at Christmas time, too, when the sore-beset people seek just a few weeks’ respite from their travail and despair. Don’t be surprised by their rising fury over this in the days ahead.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Kunstler.com/vaulted
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Your Fall Reading ! ! !
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| New Edition It’s that time of the year !*A child is born… but not exactly the way he thought it happened. And now he must leave home at Christmas time. *$7.50 — Cheap! |
| At Ponsonby Hall, a new Hampshire prep school for screw-ups, things are far from all right. “Audaciously hilarious”$7.00 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt | New York City at Halloween time, 1962, and Count Zackuloff rules the airwaves hosting the Friday Night horror movies…. He is not quite who he seems to be….$7.50 —Cheap — Buy! | Something Strange is going on at Camp Timahoe in Lost Indian, Vermont, summer of 1962. “Rollicking fun” $7.50 — Cheap! Buy! (Read Excerpt) |
New Paintings by JHK 2020
**Other Books by JHK
The World Made By Hand Series:**
| Book 1: | Book 2: | Book 3:
| Book 4: | | | | | |
| | |
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page