Something we can do here that we can’t do at Effby. Feature two major links with graphics in a single unified post. The links have equal import. The first corresponds to something we’d do at the other place with a Reel. No need to send people scurrying just because a few seconds of video is involved…
Obviously borrowed quotes eliminate the threat of real violence. Why Reels are cool.
The source material is an item from Gateway Pundit:
FTA: << President Trump on Monday announced that he is filing an amended complaint in which he will “lay out, in extreme detail,” numerous offenses in his $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times.
This comes after US District Judge Steven Merryday declined the Times’ request to toss the case out on Monday.
Trump said the Times “failed again in their desperate attempt to have our powerful Defamation Lawsuit against them dropped….
“As we requested, the Highly Respected Judge has called for an updated complaint, which will lay out, in extreme detail, all the ways in which The Times has repeatedly and consistently acted, with actual malice in defaming me, my family, our Great MAGA Movement, and America, itself,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
“ We will continue to hold The Times and their “comrades” in the Mainstream Media accountable for publishing, promoting, and dealing in Fake News.”
As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, Trump’s original $15 billion lawsuit, filed in a Florida federal court, against the New York Times was struck down in September. Trump refiled the lawsuit in October.
Last month, Trump went off on the New York Times in a statement, writing that he would add their “FAKE & MADE UP” coverage of the Iran war to his lawsuit. He further labeled the authors of a piece “criminals,” slamming them for “TREASONOUS” coverage of the war.>>
In a postscript, Gateway added, <<President Trump on Sunday responded to a piece in the New York Times, slamming the outlet as “corrupt and unethical cowards” after a report claiming the war accomplished none of its objectives. The Times ran a headline on Sunday, titled, “What Changed After Almost Four Months of war?”>>
What Indeed? Fewer casualties than any major military operation in American history. Biggest delay factor? The President’s clear and humane aversion to inflicting massive civilian Iranian casualties, an aversion the theocratic jihadists don’t share. Even so, the military damage and the death toll among the most evil actors has been unique in the 47 year history of American and allied reticence to confront a huge terrorist nation head-on.
In his response Trump nuked the “Corrupt and Unethical Cowards” at the New York Times.
Which is a fine lead-in to one of our favorite activities here — taking credit for taking the measure of the NYT’s utter collapse as a reputable newspaper years ago. The time they have been sort of living on is a lot like the present gang of Ayatollahs in Iran, loud, meretricious, and treacherous to all standards of human and patriotic decency…
Don’t worry. You don’t have to read the graphic. Just click it.
Why do we like it, especially now? because it’s funny, something sorely lacking in the media atmosphere now, and it’s truthful in the scathing way that only satire can offer.
Today is July 19th. As a Cassandra long on record, permit me to share the provocative predictions of a very rich man who is not generally believed but who does have a track record for being right that can be measured in dollars and cents. Why is the date important? Because I just discovered a post at Gateway this morning I’m inclined to take seriously. Because I pay attention when the universe is responding to questions I have been losing and asking for myself. I also pay attention to significant numbers. Here’s my briefest ever post at Instapunk Returns:
No one called or commented. It’s a Cassandra thing.
Lately I’ve been making some dark predictions about where we’re headed as a nation. I’ve been describing the reasons why it is obvious to me that we are on the verge of catastrophe and decrying the seeming silence by those who should be discussing this instead of preaching their shallow opinions on trivialities. I’ve written about both here at this young, crisis-inspired website. Take a look.
Today I have something additional to offer. Another voice, this one focused on the near and medium term financial impacts of the cliff we’re presently falling off of. It’s a sponsored (meaning read by no one?) post at Gateway Pundit. Here’s their teaser:
If you voted for Trump… or you’re just skeptical about politics…
You know many people are furious.
A year-plus into Trump’s second term…
We’ve seen ZERO insiders arrested.
Not a single deep state crony.
Or member of Biden’s team.
The question is – why?
We just met up with a 50-year Washington insider who has a wild theory on what’s really going on… and what will happen next.
“Behind the scenes,” he told us, “the Trump team has been planning a counter-attack unlike anything we’ve seen since the Civil War.”
And it won’t just re-shape Washington…
He added:
“The last time anything like this happened, the stock market lost more than half of its value. And by the time it hits the headlines, it will be too late for most people to prepare.”
That’s why we sat him down and got the whole thing on camera — his theory, the counter-attack he says is coming, and what it could mean for your money.
We’ve made it free to watch, while there’s still time to react.
You can see it for yourself, right here…
The man making the predictions is Jim Rickards, I have known about him for years, enough to know that his claims of successive past correct predictions are true. The first 20 minutes of the video are an excellent backgrounder of what he believes specifically and why. I was further persuaded by his description of the source of his perspective on big picture matters, one I have relied on myself. It’s called Complexity Theory, a late 20th Century outgrowth of Chaos Theory, both of which I have devoted time to understanding. Here’s an excellent book I found helpful:
In simplest terms, there are tipping points at which what appeared to be stable and incremental change in markets and other complex systems turns suddenly chaotic. The resulting collapse is swift and unstoppable. The one last snowflake that precipitated a devastating avalanche. My own analysis suggests that there are multiple snowstorms underway from more than one compass direction that are building to the same avalanche. The Rickards video focuses on the most explosively public of these storms, the economy, and makes dire short term predictions that can forearm some as many millions of others suffer irreparable injury.
I am encouraging you to watch his video as patiently as you can manage to hear all of the major factors he has identified as a huge economic tipping point. The ramifications of his financial perspective go far beyond stock portfolios and pension plans. Those other impacts you can work out for yourself.
But here’s the link and the video’s opening screen. Please take the time to watch and listen…
Click the graphic…
I’m not telling you what to think. We all have to do that for ourselves.
This album appeared from no known source in my dorm room closet in 1968.
No cover, plenty of visible scratches, but it always played. My intro to the Stones.
This is actually an animation. Derived from a Hopper painting obviously. Probably two Hopper paintings. I made this gif file 18 years ago. I don’t remember how exactly. And now, even with access to AI, I can’t figure out how to loop it.
Found it in an old post at the original Instapunk site. What’s interesting is that the issues and topic discussed are receiving fresh news coverage all these years later. The decline of population replacement rates in formerly Christian nations and the continuing discoveries being made at Gobekli Tepe. Which are NOT being discussed as related topics now as I discussed them then. Proving we still haven’t faced up to our massive spiritual problems.
Pay attention to the graphic as the file opens, or you’ll miss the morph. The internal links in this one all seem to be working as well. Sometimes, the Wayback Machine is still willing to show you how my mind works.
Here’s some of the latest on smoldering controversies at Gobekli Tepe.
Makes all of those old Discovery Channel snuff films about erasing human history and restoring the Virgin purity of Earth look kind of pitiful, doesn’t it?
I’ll be more willing to accept the pronouncements of official science about where we came from and how when they have a good explanation for where the moon came from and how.
Cosmological physics has not advanced much as a science since the automotive industry consisted mostly of Model T’s. They’ve had runaway growth in speculative fantasy peddled as science though. Their self-promoting record for infallibility is crumbling in a lot of disciplines at the moment. If you had asked the smartest scientists of the day what motor vehicles would look like in a hundred years, do you think they’d have shown you an image like this?
Well, maybe they would. I just saw one of those in person for the first time a few days ago. I’ll have more to say about that at a later date, maybe soon, under the topic category ‘Wrong Turns.’
The truth? I don’t want to be writing about politics anymore. What I want to spend my remaining time on is preserving my existing works now held hostage on the Internet and finishing works in progress that complete my MS in a Bottle to a future generation. That’s been my real mission since the NY Times refused to review The Boomer Bible, a book so innovative, complex, and prophetic that the decision not to review it was all the proof needed that I had correctly identified and understood exactly where western civilization stood at the end of the 20th Century. Since then, there are two ways to view my writing career.
This would be the obvious one.
I’ve been knocked down a lot in the world of American Publishing. It took The Boomer Bible 30 years to sell out its 100,000+ (U.S./U.K.) first printing. The second book manuscript I submitted to my publisher was rejected with a postcard by an editor who had proclaimed me a genius three years before. Why? I had dared to write another innovative work that satirized both feminism and popular social science literature. All women could see was the outlandish pseudoscience I’d made up to describe what’s wrong with the female sex. They missed the fact that I had also provided a telling picture of the ‘sociologists’ who had formed the male resistance, recently divorced men who worked from research facilities called “The Garage” and “The Lodge.” They drank quite a bit and thought up multiple compelling theories to debate amongst themselves.
The Naked Woman manuscript made the rounds of every major (and not so major) American book publisher and got only one strong nibble from a house whose publisher loved the book but left the buy/no buy decision to his twenty-something editors, all of whom turned thumbs down on it. At the time I had no way of knowing that of the two surviving nationwide bookseller chains, Borders and Barnes & Noble, both had female chief buyers and were actively involved in providing input to the publishing houses on what they would promote and not. By the time three different agents had returned manuscript partials to me, I was persona non grata in the industry.
So I came back with another huge work that was part video game, part prophetic satire from the standpoint of 11:59:01 pm on December 31, 1999. How the world looked and occupied itself at the precipice of a new century no one was prepared for. I used a brilliant drawing package built into Microsoft’s Word97 application to combine text, sound, graphics and multiple hyperlinks from individual graphic frames to let readers wander through a universe of 3,500+ graphic screens that included 100,000+ words of text, including two spin-off books. I finished it in two years time and made the Y2000 New Year’s deadline only to discover within months that the Microsoft update called Word2000 was not backward-compatible with Word97 and could not display its graphics intact on screen. I was out of the water.
It goes on like this. I found a way to get an HTML version of Shuteye Town 1999 and its equally ambitious sequel Shuteye Nation on free websites I coded myself, but the free site deal was a bait and switch deal terminated by acquisitions that left me hanging with less than two weeks to pay up or be shut down. Still working on getting them fully up and accessible online.
I turned to blogging and was part of the initial rush toward conservative blogger celebrity along with the likes of Instapundit, Hot Air, Michelle Malkin, Powerline,Pajamas Media, Ace of Spades, Michael Smith, et al. Instapundit in particular linked a lot of my posts from InstaPunk.com, until in 2009 I accepted Barack Obama’s challenge to write openly about race. I even dared to discuss the N-word using the actual word to suggest that black people used it promiscuously, white people couldn’t use it at all, and the result was a divisive double standard that served no one. I proposed removing the stigma, so that the insult could be worn out by repetition until it became as ineffectual as words like Kike, Wetback, Dago, Pollock, Chink, Nip, and Redskin, rarely heard anymore because robbed of punch power. Instapundit led the charge, condemned me as a racist and banned me, followed by a general piling-on that got me reams of death threats and a deadly hack of my email account that continues to cause access problems even now after it exists only as a dead end recipient of new password attempts elsewhere.
But I have come back from every knockdown over the years. I continued writing voluminous blogs, published books through Amazon.com, generated video and audio content on my own YouTube channel, and have now spent more than 10 years as a prolific Facebook contributor.
During all that time I have written about a wider variety of topics, in more styles and genres than anyone you can name, producing in total somewhere between 3 and 5+ million words of writing (fiction, poetry, cultural and political commentary, reviews, etc), plus many thousands of graphics, including photoshops, cartoons, and videos.
Which makes me the other thing I am, the father of punk writing and the secret Rolling Stones of American letters. The Stones have worked in every genre of popular music, from blues to country to hard rock to borderline acid rock to disco to rap. No matter what genre they work in, they are still always the Stones. Unique. They have lasted longer than anyone else. I am one of their biggest fans and have definitely written a book’s worth of essays explaining why they are the preeminent satirists in entertainment media from the late 1960s on.
Using the same criteria that enabled them to call themselves the Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World before the world recognized it, I am not shy about claiming, famous or not, that I am the Most Important Living American Writer. There is no one competent to critique my entire oeuvre, because it is wider and deeper and more voluminous than anyone who presumes to know enough to dismiss or disrespect it. I have tried things no one else has yet identified as things, opened doors no one knows are there, and I am confident of being recognized after my death by a future generation looking for new ways to create literature now that the novel and even short stories are as dead as doornails.
I’m saying all this because it no longer matters if any of you like me. The TekLords are squeezing me constrictor-like into silence. It’s almost impossible for me to type or edit text at Facebook. When I try to comment on the posts of others, the page scrolls away from my typing and even from any attempt to backspace, which has to be done by counting clicks blindly, then scrolling to check the result. FB will not accompany my links to my own work elsewhere with lead graphics from those pieces, so that the FB post will be brief and featureless. My own computer and iPhone are by now maxed out with all the gyrations (and duplicate files) now required to acquire and finalize graphic materials in particular. I am also presently being blocked from generating FB reels using AI animation apps because certain names and other words in headlines are labeled NSFW and rejected for use by me. The NSFW label is even applied to images of individual faces the algorithm has been programmed to protect from humorous contexts.
That’s the definition of a crossroads. I survived a very blatant phase of censorship during the Biden administration when I was suspended for ‘fact-checks’ that were anything but. Told I could appeal but given no space in which to refute censor errors.
Now the censorship has returned with a vengeance, subtler, more pernicious, and more difficult to identify because it involves invisible (to me) customized notification delays to ‘friends,’ retroactive AutoCorrect insertions of typos (incredibly often in first lines of posts) and an aggressive interruption of keying by AutoCorrect algorithms determined to finish words and names incorrectly as I type.
All of this is also true to a lesser extent at my many Blogger sites, which are subject to a new kind of attack within the last week, in which I am forced to alternate between two different browsers to get a post written and illustrated. There’s the Google browser that wants to hijack my FB page so I can’t post on it under my own name and refuses to access my image files in my blog sites. I need a separate browser, though, to maintain my presence in Facebook, which means I’m going round and round in my interfaces on my phone and my iPad.
Blogger has huge deficiencies it refuses to correct. It isn’t possible to order posts oldest first, which would make book writing on the application possible without ridiculously intricate gymnastics. It does provide an option to pin one post as the first one people see in perpetuity, but not all of its blog templates actually permit this feature to be used. You can specify it; it just doesn’t work. Other aspects of site functionality and housekeeping are too complicated to use as well. My Instapunk Returns blog has had 350,000 visits in 6 active years and it has just one follower: me. Doesn’t seem likely that none of my visitors would check a box allowing them to be notified when there’s a new post without some intervening obstruction I can’t see. And despite years of wrestling with Blogger’s version of html, it’s still impossible for me to add more than one hyperlink to a graphic, let alone define parts of individual graphics as linkable. Why I can’t use Blogger to edit, add to, or build a multi-site sequel to Shuteye Town 1999.
Plus, all the software everywhere, including yours, is gradually falling apart in a labyrinth of conflicting password algorithms, systems handoffs, traffic overloads slowing response times, dozens of variations on the incompetent, now AI-poisoned AutoCorrect, and the danger of having passwords and credit cards hacked during what should be routine, secure transactions.
And users don’t seem to be noticing any of this. Facebook, for example, has implemented one subtle change after another to prevent actual discussion and conversation between friends. Intro text to a hyperlink post (say to a controversial news article) is omitted in sharing, so readers of the shared link don’t know why the originator posted the link in the first place. Paragraphing and hyperlinks in comments on others’ Facebook posts don’t work. Identities of those who have shared one of your posts are often concealed. FB insists on hiding comments from view unless summoned and then offers options of “most relevant” and “all,” which does not include showing replies to individual comments. They don’t want friends talking with one another.
Dead end. A prolific writer like me finally cold-cocked on the ground? Yes and no. I’ve been describing a personal crossroads thus far. My conflicting priorities about serving a contemporary audience vs serving a future audience. But we have also reached a critical crossroads as a nation,which makes the contemporary political scene a continuous strong attractor for my time and attention. Much as I want to work on the legacy stuff, the ominous nature of where we’ve arrived in our public discourse is nearly impossible to ignore.
Me and Michael Corleone have the same kind of problem…
I have a pinned post up at my Facebook page that has received virtually no likes or comments. It’s a more important post now than it was when I wrote it, and the Instapunk Returns post it links to should be even scarier. Because that was written almost a year ago, and its predictions are all coming true. I have a very good record as a prognosticator, and I don’t selectively edit my past. What I’ve written is all still there unless censored by others (including the ones that got me death threats, as well as the few times when I have been dead wrong).
Now would be a great time to read it. For the first time if you haven’t already. Again, if you think you have read it: With My Fortuneteller Hat On…
Me in my old incarnation of TruePunk
Where my personal crossroads meet the nation’s crossroads. I don’t believe we are going to weather this storm. In my view we are headed into a true Dark Age. In just a few months we’ve moved from endangered to a state of imminent catastrophe. Assassination talk of all kinds is increasing exponentially. Hard left political activism is growing aggressively and openly as an open enemy of the Constitution and the nation. AI and the incompetent management of its overlooked risk factors will result in either a recession in the short turn or a depression in the long run. Voters have never been more uneducated and suffering from consequent pandemic ADHD. The nation’s lower, podunk courts are increasing their arrogant overrulings of the policies the President was elected to implement. The nation’s news media have moved into the operating realm of open sedition by contemptuously affirming their own authority to ignore the President of the United States on the question of what is news and what isn’t.
Take a look at this poll teased by the suddenly confused editorial policy of Citizen Free Press, who aren’t so sure about this Trump fella anymore: Socialists top MAGA in CNBC poll.
The Iran War has become direly important because even mainstream Americans have forgotten that long term national security against a deadly enemy of 50 years standing is more important than gas prices at the pump this week.
The midterms are likely to be a disaster for Trump 2.0 because the RINOs in the Senate want him to fail, and even the pro-Trump pundits, opinion makers, and influencers aren’t talking about the psychotic mentality that’s pervading the country right now. It’s insanity on a national scale. What do they talk about instead? What little men always talk about — their own superior insight about what Trump must do here, here, here, here, and here [sigh]
to satisfy them [superior headshake], ad nauseam.
Throughout, the conservative abdication of leadership with their own constituencies has made it easier for anyone and everyone to decide that Trump really is at fault for all of this crisis stuff. A Jeb Bush presidency wouldn’t have brought us so close to the edge of civil breakdown and worse. (“Let’s all go back to that pleeease…”)
Which might even be true. Which also misses, tragically, the big picture. The catalytic effect of Trump has been to expose just how sick all our institutions are and how corrupt the supposedly wise class of elites who have been running them into the ground. He is showing us that all the utopians and cynical empty-promisers have forgotten the first rule of national survival. Which is that the prime directive is survival.
Why successful civilizations stumble repeatedly into Dark Ages. When men forget how to survive they have to relearn that lesson the hard way.
That’s where we are. On the brink of that process, which will be long and bloody and less prosperous than anyone alive here remembers.
My temptation right now is to shut up and let all that happen without comment. Go back to working on my legacy. Nothing I can write or do will change anything. QED…
…except there’s the old gunfighter dilemma. I can let all the bad dudes shoot it out and probably kill that attractive young teller with a Glock to her head, or I can draw my weapon and trade my own life for (maybe) hers.
What does the attractive young teller think? From where I sit it sounds like she’s saying, “I’ll just wait for a female-identifying gunfighter to save me instead, thank you.”
I’ve mentioned him before, but we’ve had a fun morning. More fun anyway than reading stories about the morally superior people among us who are busy celebrating the death of Lindsey Graham, laying in party favors for the upcoming death of Mitch McConnell, making up new scenarios about how the Israelis killed Charlie Kirk instead of the confessed shooter, and saying their daily prayers for the assassination of the President of the United States. Impressive focus but it gets old, you know. Too much of a good thing gets stale after a while.
Why I’ve wandered over here to talk about something less lofty than the violent deaths of my political enemies. Maybe that’s what this new network is really going to be about.
Another use for this site, now that the immediate danger of FB page hijacking has been quelled, is to serve as a get away from it all refuge, kind of like my old Deerhound Diary site. Which this post reminds me of pretty directly. It’s not about sighthounds and the iconic pug Eloise, but cats. Cats who have invaded our rural retreat courtesy of people who are at least above drowning the feral felines they wish to be rid of. There were a couple of Toms on the Orange side and a gray female of feisty mien, all of whom were smuggled in downstairs (where I am only a pass-through these days in Marge’s life); they settled in, the gray grew pregnant by-and-by, and now we are buried in cats, downstairs and upstairs.
Mama. She likes to roost on the back of the couch.
The one we call ‘Missy’ or ‘Mama’ depending in her mood had four good looking boys, Peter, Ben, Franklin (since adopted to Marge’s brother), and Terwilliger. Plus Skeezix, who was a walk-in. Mama and the last two spend their time upstairs with us. I think Terwilliger and Skeezix have different names downstairs, but as long as they respond to what I call them I don’t care. Pretty sure I have a different name downstairs too.
Terwilliger is white with an orange saddle. He has two modes. Placidly dignified and screaming at the door, which he does to get in and get out of the 2nd floor family room.
Terwilliger. Catjacking Mama’s roost.
They all three want to be there, right behind where my wife sits reading up on doings in Hungary and Russia. Mostly, Mama wins out and is actually becoming gentler than she used to be. No doubt that she’s had her feral times before arriving here, and she still has unexpected bouts of the crazies, when she rockets from one end of the room to the other like a runaway missile. She’s very pawsy and can snag your hand or finger with ease, though she’s learned not to claw you but pull your appendage to her tongue and lick. Endearing.
Skeezix is not her boy. Why I gave him the name, which means orphan. He’s not as big as Terwilliger, but he’s the most orange of all the cats and he has that orange swagger and self confidence. He’s been known to push Mama off the top of the couch when he wants to be there. Usually, she defers and finds other thrones to settle on.
Tommy the terrier ignores all this maneuvering. He does try to steal their food when he can, but otherwise he snoozes through even the crazies. Until last night that is.
I had nodded off at my keyboard and was violently awakened at 2:30 am by a tremendous crash. Tommy was as alarmed as I was. Skeezix had pulled a lamp off the coffee table, as well as a box full of old computer plugs obsolete remotes, and sunglasses no longer cool enough to wear. I had to turn on the lights to see what was going on. Skeezix was preparing some new attack on my book stack, which is when I barked the one word I’ve been able to reach him in addition to his name.
“No! No, dammit!”
He glided off the table and wandered away. I nodded off again, restored lamp still on, and slept for maybe another hour when I was awakened again, this time by Mama, who had exhausted her usual patience with Skeezix. He was in her place on the back of the couch and she wanted it back. Her quick paws were trying to land on Skeezix, who was lying mostly on his back, parrying her swipes at his head.
That’s his best thing actually. Fighting on his back, like the early MMA star Boyce Gracie, happiest seeming vulnerable on the ground before wrapping you up in a vise that made you tap out instantly, of course, Skeezix does it all with head feints and quick-quick paws. I watched him land about four times on Mama’s cheeks, just to sow her he could keep it up all day. She relented and retreated to an old speaker behind where I was sitting. She was still watching him. She didn’t like it. Not one bit.
Something I never do. Involve myself in a cat fight. Once had an orange boy named Webster, many years ago, and he taught me how to spar in a paw-finger fight. I was in a mood myself, awakened for the second time by cat antics, not acceptable to a dog person like myself. I intervened on Mama’s behalf. We went at it for a full minute or so. He lay on his back, trying repeatedly for my jabbing finger and missing. He got to a half sitting position, his balance on couch back not ideal. I alternated between pokes at his face and pushes at his side, until he got whopper-jawed on the edge of space and I shoved him off onto the floor. He made a noise, not pleased, but didn’t jump back up.
I looked over at Mama. She had been watching intently. She cocked her head at me and a waved a finger indicating she should reclaim her spot. She seemed to be thinking about it. Somehow I lapsed back into a doze before she moved. When I woke again, about an hour later, some time after sun-up, she was sleeping regally on the back of the couch and Skeezix was nowhere to be found.
Then I saw him, sleeping on my wife’s old desk, rarely used anywhere. The morning light showed him stretched out with his head on a book. It looked like one of my books. I quietly grabbed my iPhone and sneaked up on him, but he lifted his head as I took my first picture.
One of my better books. What’s that on binding? Tape?
Of course I assumed he had decided to do some research on this human who had outboxed him. Wrong book, I thought. This would have been a better choice. Curious about strip that looked like tape, I tugged on it. He gave me room but didn’t leave the desk, just resettled himself when I’d identified it and smoothed it out.
It turned out to be a rare find. A 40-some year old
manuscript page from a favorite story of mine.
Couldn’t resist. Let him go back to sleep on the book and I took a photo for posterity of the beat-up old page.
Then, you guessed it. Fell asleep again. I told you I keep the same kind of hours ‘That Man’ does. Everyone’s happy now. All’s well that ends well.
Personally, I think the patriotism and loyalty of anyone who has spent a significant amount of his career in the U.S. Intelligence community is automatically suspect. This is the ultimate secret society, full of code words and subtle handshakes, old boys more unified by their membership in the club than their allegiance to cornball naïfs in the flyover states.
Trump’s two attempts to replace the outsider Tulsi Gabbard with a Director of National Intelligence who can penetrate that black box without being subsumed or destroyed by it were doomed. Intel is the chess master of the Deep State, playing intricate games designed from the outset to produce stalemates and standoffs between the global players who have their own secret handshakes to offer in return.
I have actually imagined the look on Trump’s face when he is forced to name a new figurehead for positions like DNI, Director of the CIA, and the various military chiefs of black ops and elaborately misleading reports to the eternal Temp called the President of the United States. Whatever they think they’re doing, their prime directive is covering up the endless screwups perpetrated by corner-cutting spies no one can outwit when it comes to the dirty stuff.
Somebody suggested Pulte, who was a bust because not a professional creep. Warner saw right through him too:
Next came Jay Clayton, who just blew his cover spectacularly under questioning by one of the Senate’s most grandiose phonies.
Gateway’s pretty upset about how that encounter went:
Sorry everybody, but both these guys are empty suits, overdue to be given their fifties shirts and relegated to yacht clubs in gated TDS Senior centers.
Hot buttons? Wall Street (Bloomberg), University of Pennsylvania (CHYOS), Cambridge University (Oxbridge), and the Commonwealth of Virginia (See Mark Warner).
Oh yeah. Mark Warner. Senator from the state that just elected the most shameless TDS hooker occupying any of the 50 statehouses. She said she was a moderate and didn’t even wait for the Inaugural hangover to wear off before she proved herself a liar on every single position she took. Warner was a Governor of Virginia, too, at one point, which is how he became a Senator, but here’s the background nobody looks into too deeply:
Highlights? He’s been an insider in DC politics since he was in college. He interned with Chris Dodd, the eminent statesman most famous for being Teddy Kennedy’s partner in 3-way sex with waitresses. He has worked for the government, specifically the Democrst Party, for 50 years. He has never practiced law.
Why is that important? The man has somehow accumulated three doctorates in law just by showing up for the various ceremonies.
Showing up and mouthing off in Democrat-approved ways is all he has ever done.
Now who cares about a supposed showdown between the lackeys Warner and Clayton?
I’m guessing Trump does. But where in the hell do you find a spy you can trust in this global cesspool of mindless welfare states called Western Civilization? If you have an answer, please pencil it in in the Comments…
Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) encouraged members of her party to embrace the term “socialist.”
Moore made an appearance on C-SPAN, where she claimed that Republicans argued that any government regulation of any industry — particularly for environmental reasons — amounted to “socialism,” and said that Democrats needed to stop being “shy” about owning that.
“Regulating industry so that they don’t dump poison into the water and the air, they want to call that socialist,” she said. “To try to have alternative energy sources and to diminish our fossil fuel imprint, they call that socialist.”
“So I think that Democrats have got to stop being shy about that term,” she said…
In the same segment, Moore was asked to respond to a caller who’d said that all Democrats had become socialists — and to the fact that socialism, across the board, had failed everywhere it had been tried.
Moore responded by referencing a comment from former President Bill Clinton, saying that he’d pointed out the fact that “if we were in Europe as Democrats, we would be five different parties. We’d be the Labor Party, we’d be Democratic Socialists, we’d be the Progressive Party, we’d be the Liberal Party, so we are a big tent.”
But while some within the Democratic Party — like Moore — defend the rise of socialism in the ranks, others are sounding the alarm. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has been a vocal critic of the socialists in the party, as have Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), former Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), and even comedian Bill Maher.
The self-described Democratic Socialists aren’t hiding their agenda, either: targeting established Democrats in safe blue cities and states, they are rapidly taking control of the party from within. And according to the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America — a group with which many of these candidates are affiliated — the group’s goals include major changes, such as abolishing the United States Senate to make the nation “more democratic.”
There you go. Gwen Moore doesn’t know she’s the point of the spear in a textbook Communist Revolution. She’s just repeating her talking points. There’s absolutely no secret about the playbook from here. Capture the whole party from within by making bigger fancier promises than obsolete Progressives have been unable to deliver on in the cities and states they’ve been running (down) in this young century. Intimidate and sabotage any of the Old Guard who are too timid to blow up the Constitution outright. Win elections with millions of illegal immigrant and soft-brained ‘Look at Me!’ female and other niche victim votes. Then systematically destroy the careers and, if necessary, the lives of everyone on the Left who isn’t towing the Marxist line.
Absolutely nothing new or crazy conspiratorial about that playbook description. Those of you who still know how to read should buy this book and get one of your Ivy League literature professors to explain it to you:
“Some animals are more equal than others.”
Since this is the inaugural post of the refuge Facebook has driven us to, it’s a good time to point out what can be done here that antique FB software won’t do. We can easily hyperlink anywhere from inside the post (like this ref. to the latest at Instapunk Returns); We can use boldface and italics and font changes within posts. We can give you more than one graphic in a single post. We can title a post.
What we can’t do, or do as easily, as Facebook — Show you pics of all our friends; Notify you automatically when there’s a new post; Show you our location in the social network you belong to with a single click.
Those may be important criteria to you. But for the hangers-on at Facebook, here’s the bad news. Facebook is falling apart, More and more rapidly as junk AI “enhancements” are piled on top of a creaky software infrastructure that has never been upgraded except by ad hoc tweaks that keep making it more complicated and confusing to use. Eventually, you will discover that AutoCorrect is blowing up even your own attempts to post your thoughts.
Think about it. Remember how to get here: robertlaird.blogspot.com.
One more thing. We can also give you footnotes and endnotes and sidebar material without having to offload it to a Comment the MetaBosses don’t really want you to find or see. For example, here’s the explanation of the asterisk we included in the caption of our top graphic.
*Slobbovia. The map of the mindspace where the dim, dumb journeyman lefties follow their faceless leaders to Obblivia.
