Original, in English, here.
Tradução, para português, aqui.

The psychiatric profession prefers to ignore the possibility of mass insanity and to focus on individual disorders in spite of a mass of historical evidence of societies and entire nations being gripped by mental disorders of one sort of another. Be that as it may; the Napoleon Complex, so named after Napoleon Bonaparte, who was much too short for a national leader of his time and also incredibly nasty and quite full of himself to compensate, is not a recognized medical diagnosis in any case.

It is a certain mental condition or set of character traits that affects men of low physical stature, causing them to be overly aggressive and self-assertive, to wear platform shoes in order to look just a bit taller and to chafe at being called "short stuff," "little man," "knee-biter," and other such belittling epithets.

Here is a fairly generic psychologist's description of the Napoleon Complex:

More…

END

With the acquiescence of the EU’s comprador elites,
the US is de-industrializing Europe.

   Next on the agenda,
      to destroy European agriculture.

Gilbert Doctorow • September 22, 2023 · 4 minutes read · Has comments | Received 13:04 Lisbon Time

We can be thankful that domestic electoral considerations sometimes lead to good outcomes on the foreign policy level, not only to the awful outcomes we see in Mr. Biden’s America.

I have in mind the dramatic spat between Poland and Ukraine over that country’s grain exports which was brought before the world media and diplomatic community at the United Nations General Assembly this week.

On the dais of the General Assembly, President Zelensky slammed unnamed East European countries which a week ago defied the EU’s lifting of a temporary ban on Ukrainian grain entering the EU on the 15th and said they will unilaterally continue to refuse entry of these commodities. Even before his UN appearance, Ukraine had said it will take the offenders, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, to court at the World Trade Organization for violation of trade rules.

For his part, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki responded on Polish television, saying that his country will no longer supply weapons to Ukraine. Jaws at the editorial board of The Financial Times and other mainstream Western media dropped upon hearing this decision. As we all know, Poland has been the most ardent supporter of the Ukrainian war effort, prodding other EU members to do their part.

Poland has taken in by far the largest number of Ukrainian refugees from the war. It has supplied substantial amounts of military materiel to Kiev from its own arsenal. And Poland has been the main transit country delivering NATO weapons and munitions to Ukraine from its domestic marshalling points across the border from Lviv.

No one had any doubts why the Polish government has done this policy reversal: it is facing a close election in less than a month and it needs the full support of Polish farmers to achieve a win. Those farmers have been demonstrating vociferously against the Ukrainian grain entering the country ostensibly for destinations abroad but de facto remaining on their home market and being sold at prices far below the Polish farmers’ production costs.

“Close election”? I mentioned this issue several weeks ago on these pages and one comment came back from a reader who insisted that the incumbent rabidly anti-Russian and nationalist Law and Justice Party is projected to win the elections handily. However, the latest polling information that I have heard on CNN yesterday indicated that the Law and Justice Party will garner just over 31% of the votes, while the leading Opposition party, Civic Platform will garner 28% of the votes. Law and Justice is tipped to form the next government only because it has in the wings a coalition partner with which they can put together a majority in parliament. Under these circumstances, I think it is fair to call the election “close” if Law and Justice were to lose the support of farmers, who are rather well organized politically in Poland.

*****

It is especially interesting that in his fury over the impertinent and insulting speech of Zelensky, Morawiecki let out an observation that you otherwise would not have heard or seen in Western media: namely that the grain Ukraine is exporting is on behalf of the Ukrainian oligarchs who own the farmland.

Though he was incensed, Morawiecki nonetheless did watch his words, because he omitted saying that the Ukrainian grain being exported is also substantially produced by American agricultural behemoths who now own about 28% of the farmland in Ukraine and are raising their stakes all the time.

It would be fair to say that the whole scandal over Ukrainian exports of grain via its EU neighbors is not that the grain does not end up in the ports of the world’s neediest countries, it is that the beneficiaries of the exports are US corporations and Ukrainian crooks, not the Ukrainian people and its small holding farmers in particular. The main losers are the farmers of small, medium and large holdings in the EU, who cannot compete on price with the Ukrainians both because of the natural advantages of their ‘black earth’ lands, the most fertile in Europe, and because of the industrial scale that has been introduced in Ukraine by the new corporate owners, domestic and foreign.

In the midst of the dispute over Ukrainian grain, Western media have picked up tidbits of information about other Ukrainian agricultural commodities that have raised heckles among EU farmers. The longest list probably has been compiled by Hungary, which seeks to ban virtually all produce from Ukraine. For their part, Bulgaria and Romania have complained over cheap Ukrainian honey.

And yet the complaints over predatory pricing of Ukrainian farm products have come from as far west as France, where the main issue is Ukrainian poultry meat, priced at less than half producer costs in France. In part, this is due to the same cheap grain issue, since chickens are walking sacks of grain: two kilograms of wheat give you one kilogram of broiler chickens. But the additional driver of Ukrainian export prices is scale of production. French television recently brought out the fact that the biggest exporter of poultry meat to France that is being purchased by the school lunch programs as well as by major retail grocery chains is a Ukrainian complex that raises one million chickens at a time and has vertical integration from the grain inputs, to the hatcheries, to the slaughter and chilled packaging of eviscerated chickens. By contrast, the average chicken farmer in France keeps just 50,000 birds. It would be interesting to know who exactly owns that industrial scale chicken complex in Ukraine.

If the French do not ban such imports, their domestic farming will suffer greatly. Simply put, farms will go bankrupt. Whether or not American capital is behind the chicken war on France, you can be sure Washington is not concerned over the damage to French agriculture that will result from the ‘free trade’ with Ukraine in all commodities that it and the EU institutions in Brussels are promoting.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

END

The New York Journal and New York World, owned respectively by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, sensationalized the Maine incident with intense press coverage, employing tactics that would later be labeled “yellow journalism.” Both newspapers exaggerated and distorted much of the information they obtained, sometimes even fabricating news to fit their agendas. For a week following the sinking, the Journal devoted a daily average of eight and a half pages of news, editorials and pictures to the event. Its editors sent a full team of reporters and artists to Havana, including Frederic Remington, and Hearst announced a reward of $50,000 “for the conviction of the criminals who sent 258 American sailors to their deaths.”
   …   …   …   …   …   …   …

Hearst’s reporting on the Maine incident generated support for military action against the Spanish in Cuba regardless of their actual involvement in the sinking. He frequently cited various naval officers saying that the explosion could not have been an on-board accident. He quoted an “officer high in authority” as saying: “The idea that the catastrophe resulted from an internal accident is preposterous. In the first place, such a thing has never occurred before that I have ever heard of either in the British navy or ours.”

— USS Maine (1889): Yellow journalism. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This page was last edited on 11 September 2023, at 20:10 (UTC).

Attack on Pearl Harbor

Walter at Pearl Harbor

Richard Foley • Tn Unz Review • September 11, 2023 • 2,700 Words • Has Comments

My father Walter “was at Pearl Harbor.” Almost everyone in Youngstown, Ohio, back in 1941 soon knew about that. He had been a football star at Struthers High before turning down more than a half-dozen scholarships to Big Ten powerhouses. Instead, he enlisted in the Navy and forwarded the better part of his pay to support his father, mother, and five younger siblings, struggling through the Depression.

By the time he retired from his twenty-year enlistment in the US Navy, he and my mother Jane had decided to move our family from his last posting at Quonset Point naval station in Rhode Island to the idyllic mountains in Vermont. To build their dream house and live life more fully as civilians.

In 1959 during a family outing to Vermont to scout for potential house sites in the southeastern corner of the state, we had lunch at what we learned later on was the iconic Quality Inn in Manchester.

On the way out to pay for the meal, I tagged along as Walter stopped at the marble-topped soda fountain counter and chatted with the middle-aged waiter at the cash register. Walter eyed the waiter, gazed at a large painting prominently displayed behind the counter and then suggested that the fellow looked like a dead-ringer for the young soda jerk in that very painting. The waiter smiled and admitted that indeed, he was that young fella’. In fact, that Mister Norman Rockwell, the painter down in Arlington, had asked him to pose from behind the counter, recreating the time he had been listening to the radio on that fateful day, December 7th, 1941.

Walter just nodded in recognition, “I was there that morning.”

Although I had come to know some bits and pieces of Walter’s service in World War II, Walter had never mentioned Pearl Harbor. I was 12 years and found myself in shock. It would be another 35 years before Walter would refer again to that Day of Infamy.

And it would be another 64 years before I managed to identify that painting as Norman Rockwell’s ‘War News’ and begin to unravel its own mysterious role in the efforts to sell war through the dual strategies of myth-making — censorship and propaganda.

Walter, like so many of his WW II comrades, had never really talked about his war experiences while I was growing up. Like so many veterans who have survived wars’ multiple forms of evil, he lived in a prison of secret torment. Only Walter’s family and painfully few close friends acknowledged privately that my dad, the man who returned from the War, was not the same person they had known growing up. From the scattering of comments over the years, I gathered that consensus had it that Walter left Struthers, Ohio in 1939 at the top of his game. Fun? Walter was the life of the party. Telling stories, center of attention, just being himself. It didn’t hurt that your dad was — whoaa — handsome! Better looking than that Paul Newman, more like a cleaner, sharper version of Marlon Brando. Athletic? Unbelievably gifted and tough. A shifty halfback on offense, a hard-hitting safety. He went both ways, back when football was the real deal. He collected scholarship offers, all Big Ten schools.

And he had money. He owned a truck for delivering coal. That was during the Depression, mine you. Without him, we don’t know how his family got by. His dad only worked now and then. Six children. Your Aunt Micky told me once that if not for Walter, she and her sisters would never have had money for even one new dress. Walter chose the Navy over college because he could send most of his pay home. Steady, one month at a time. And the Navy boasted a couple of dozen football teams that were all tougher than those college kids’ squads. Men against boys, he’d laugh.

After putting in his twenty years, Walter retired from the USN and atrophied into the anonymity of civilian life, first in Vermont and following my mother’s passing, later on in Meadville, Pennsylvania. I watched Walter’s limited, uneven interactions with ‘civilians’, he would often respond with annoyance to everyday interactions with politely preoccupied neighbors, busy sales clerks or officious town employees; he would excuse himself and quietly grouse about why his generation had made its sacrifices.

Decades later during my conversations with Walter about current events, he would clench his jaw between short outbursts. More often than not dismissing the War in Vietnam as evidence of “the stupidity and arrogance of armchair generals.” When the gruesome fireworks of sophisticated US military might illuminated the television version of Persian Gulf War, Walter shook in head in pity for the Iraqi soldiers. “That’s not a real war. It’s a fake. A turkey shoot. The poor bastards don’t stand a chance. We’re there just to get at their oil.”

By the time the cancer had started squeezing the life out of his 74-year-old body, I had only collected bits and pieces of his role in “the action.” But over the course of my last summer with him in 1997, he opened up. A minute here, 15 minutes there, a couple of days later, four sentences there. So it went for 14 weeks, one continuous stream-of-consciousness with space for him breathing it out and for me to breath in all in, between the sequence of revelations.

The first of our exchanges revealed that on the morning of that Sunday in December back in 1941, Walter was serving as a non-commissioned damage control officer on the Battleship Pennsylvania. But he was better known on-board as the star halfback of the Pennsy’s Pacific Fleet championship football team. In fact, that morning he had dressed up to attend a special event on the sister ship, the Battleship USS Arizona — as the Arizona’s football team’s solo guest of a honor. He never made it.

The Arizona was struck by a 1,700 pound bomb that triggered a massive explosion that sunk the ship and killed 1,177 sailors and marines aboard. Walter lost more than thirty shipmates during the attack. Most to one bomb that came through one of the Pennsy’s imposing stacks. Luckily, she had been berthed in dry dock so the repairs went quickly and the great battleship sailed into the Pacific theater in time for the Battle of the Coral Sea, carrying Walter and those crew members who realized that that the entire Seventh Fleet and the garrisoned army air force at Pearl had been offered up to history as sacrificial lambs. They had been betrayed.

Dad, tell me more. “Pearl? That Sunday morning, I got up early, oh-five hundred hours, not that early back then, showered, shaved and put on my dress whites. The Arizona football team had invited me to their end-of-the-year banquet. Most respected opponent award type-thing since we beat them for the championship and I scored the two touchdowns. But halfway down the gangplank to the launch that would ferry me over there, I got this funny feeling. I thought it was because I felt that sitting down with the Arizona’s team might be disrespectful of my teammates. After all, our Pennsy team won because we were a team. So I had the launch signal the bridge to congratulate the Arizona team and let them know I wouldn’t be coming on board. I walked back to my berth, put on my khakis and grabbed some chow. Some of us were topside when the first planes flew over. As soon as we saw the markings, we looked at each other and said, “hell, we’ve been set up!”

“How did we know — it was no surprise attack. Listen, we were the real Navy, the old-time Navy, we were professional sailors. We knew the Japs had aircraft carriers, big battleships, heavy cruisers. And submarines. If you knew your stuff, you knew they were very capable sailors. They had been sailing the Pacific for hundreds of years. We respected their fleet. They had copied ours. That and we knew they were coming.”

“Just a few weeks before Pearl got hit, the Pennsy led a battle group out into the North Pacific. We were at General Quarters nearly the whole time. Know what that means? Four-hours-on, four-hours-off. Full battle gear, at your station, no matter how cramped. Then grab a few winks. A cook might bring you some hot coffee and sandwiches every so often. It wears you down.

But we all kept our eyes glued to the horizon or looking up for a signal from the lookouts up top. Looking for strange masts or their planes, looking for us. Pretty tense. We figured they would be on the lookout for us and they would have the firepower. Geez, huge sigh of relief every time a plane we spotted turned out to be one of ours returning. We had planes out there all the time, beyond the horizon. You couldn’t tell us we weren’t already at war.”

“Then we get orders to return to Pearl. Not from the Captain, not from the Admiral — it’s his flagship remember. But from Washington. Washington! When we get back to Pearl, our crew was stunned to find our nine sister battleships lined up at anchor in that narrow harbor. Just like some decoy ducks!”

They had emptied the ships. ‘Weekend pass? Take as many as you want. Two week pass? Yup. Wanna’ 30-day leave, wanna’ go Stateside? Sure. Your mom is ill? How about an extended emergency leave?’ You name it.”

“They put the Pennsy in drydock. They kept the other nine battleships up in that sliver of a harbor. No torpedo nets. Skeleton crews. You don’t just sail outa’ there like that. It takes time to build steam, you have to take on a harbor pilot before you make for open water. That would take as much as 36, 48 hours. Even then no destroyers left to run interference for us, to keep the subs away. The carriers were long gone, so forget air cover. But once we’re well out at sea, at least we’d have a fighting chance.”

“See, we were set up. They lined us up like sitting ducks. When a fleet’s in a war, it’s gotta’ be at sea! It can’t be sitting at anchor!”

“The hardest part for me, for anybody onboard, was that when we got Stateside, you couldn’t tell anyone what had really happened. I tried. But it was always ‘the dammed Japs this, sneaky Japs that. Pearl Harbor — the surprise attack. You couldn’t say a thing. It was unthinkable. What our guys died for.”

“The truth? They just covered it up.”

In retrospect, I thanked the gods that I had been preparing for that last summer with Walter. As a history buff I had trolled the literature for years to help get my mind around the Great Wars and the controversial aspects of America’s subsequent military and economic aggression, especially my generation’s war in Vietnam War. Along the way I found Admiral Theobald’s The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor and John Toland’s Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath. Enough information for me to see that the full story around the Pearl Harbor had not been reported, that the truth had been suppressed through a series of three carefully compromised hearings. In short, by the time Walter told his story, I was open, if not hungry to hear about his war experiences.

Among the many ironies that haunted my father’s life, Walter passed away before a comrade’s reasoned voice corroborated my father’s personal story, validated his theory about ‘Washington’s conspiracy’ to start the war, and echoed his pain at the betrayal. Robert Stinnett’s Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, a superbly researched book was published in 2000. Stinnett, a WWII Pacific Theater veteran, conducted an exhaustive, 17-year study of the pre-Pearl intelligence gathering networks — dozens of interviews with radio operators and reviews of over 200,000 original source materials and recently released FOIA records.

Stinnett proved unequivocally that Walter’s intuitions were straight on. President Roosevelt, with the support of a small group of confidants, including key military personnel, developed an eight-step strategy to provoke Japan into striking first in order to dislodge the American public’s well documented reluctance to engage in another war overseas. Despite the myth of Japanese “radio silence,” US cryptographers listened to and deciphered hundreds of the enemy’s military and diplomatic transmissions. US intelligence tracked the Japanese Task Force across the north Pacific from the time it set sail from Hitokappu Bay on November 26th to its strike position just west of the Classical Composer Seamounts on December 5th. FDR and his inner circle withheld this information from Admiral Kimmel and General Short, the officers in charge of Pearl Harbor.

The deception worked to perfection. The US forces “got caught with their pants down.” Dramatic still photographs and filmed images filled newsprint and theater screens, and the American majority’s isolationism flipped to seamless patriotic outrage overnight. On December 8th Congress declared war on Japan (only one dissenting vote) and three days later Germany and Italy honored their commitment to defend their allies.

Nor did FDR and his inner circle limit their action to nuanced suppression of information. On numerous occasions Washington went as far as to directly intervene and compromise the ability of US Pacific forces to confront the enemy. Washington did, in fact, order Kimmel to break off from Exercise 191 on November 24th — the tense search that Walter had endured at General Quarters and that had positioned his battle group over the exact same Seamounts from which the Japanese launched their planes two weeks later.

Walter, like so many of his WW II comrades, never really talked about his war experiences. Like so many comrades in arms who have survived wars’ multiple forms of evil, he lived in a prison of secret torment. What no one knew was that for 55 years my father would also wrestle with the terrible knowledge that the attack on Pearl Harbor was not a surprise.

There’re more chapters to Walter’s stories of war, but at least I’ve respected his account as a participant, a witness to the events on that Day of Infamy.

It took 59 years before Stinnett cracked the Pearl Harbor myth of an unprovoked ‘surprise attack’ and revealed FDR’s orchestration of initial deceptions and subsequent cover-ups — a litany of shredded documents, kangaroo court hearings, intimidated witnesses and the standard suppression of secrets under the “national security” seal. A process that continues to this day to reinforce that myth, despite the wealth of yet more corroborating information. Evidence that investigative reporters have presented in numerous publications, in print and online, but those efforts have been ignored by mainstream media.

The history of these cover-ups attests to the ability of the Federal government and mainstream media to dismiss objective research and investigations that undermine manufactured myths — as the stuff of crazies and their conspiracy theories,

Not that Stinnett’s impeccable research and subsequent investigations have tarnished, let alone destroyed the Pearl Harbor myth. But what if we Americans had come to grips with FDR’s decision to provoke Japan into an overt act of aggression? How would we, as legitimately informed citizens, have regarded subsequent investigative reporting and so-called conspiracy theories in general?

Would the American public have bought the subsequent mythic distortions that justified:

• Vietnam War (the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin incident).
• the first Persian Gulf War (invasion of a sovereign state).
• the ensuing UN sanctions against Iraq (WMD’s).
• the fast-tracked response to the attacks on 9/11, the declaration of the unending Global War on Terror that spun out lethal, mind-boggling aggressions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
• the multi-trillion dollar ‘investment’ of US taxpayers monies in delivering terror across swaths of the globe in the name of America’s sovereign right to national defense.

That said, as I write this piece in September, 2023, I have continued to follow dditional, definitive evidence revealing President Roosevelt’s strategies to ensure Japan’s first strike, to orchestrate the US involvement in WW II and to replace British as the world’s number one imperial power.

In 2023, we American civilians find ourselves captive to a planned permanent war economy based on perpetual warfare.

To read other comments from other readers click here.

END

Superheroes Decadence, by Donald Soffritti

The US Presidential Comedy

Dmitry Orlov • August 13, 2023 at 12:40

I have long maintained that the US is not a democracy and that it doesn’t matter who is president; the US is getting flushed down the same golden toilet regardless. More recently, I have been raising the question of whether there is even going to be an event worthy of being called a “national election” in the US in 2024, seeing as the outcome of the last one hinged on the blatantly falsified, fraudulent results in just one state (Georgia, as the case may be) accounting for an infinitesimally small percentage of the popular vote. The late, great Vladimir Zhirinovsky, fearless leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, who had been prescient about a great many things, had stated, with his characteristic bombast, that there won’t be a national election in 2024 in the United States because there will no longer be a United States.

As with most predictions, the timing may turn out to be rather inexact, but the trend toward national decay, degeneracy and dissolution is unmistakable. Still, in spite of the pervasive stench of corruption and deceit, I believe that some elements of the US national election circus should be salvaged and immortalized in the form of comedy. The proper subgenre for it, I believe, is Commedia dell’Arte, in which a fixed cast of characters, well-known to the audience, improvise based on a fixed thematic framework as the audience boos and cheers them. These improvised skits can be delivered at county fairs, trailer park festivals and roadside attractions throughout the former United States, to keep the memory of the late, great America alive in people’s minds.

Here, then, is the Commedia dell’Arte called “US Presidential Election”.

THE SET
The comedy is acted out in the ORAL OFFICE, the Oval Office having been so renamed in honor of the former President Clinton and his eager consort Monica Lewinsky. It is set up with an executive desk, sofas, a coffee table, flags, paintings, statuettes and various other bits of bric-à-brac and memorabilia americana.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
HUNTER: the reining president. So that the audience is informed of his status, he always makes a grand entrance together with the UNDERAGE UKRAINIAN PROSTITUTES who march proudly onto the stage, form a chorus line and, marching in place, sing:

Hail to the chief
We have chosen for the nation!
Hail to the chief!
We salute him one and all!
Hail to the chief
As we pledge cooperation
In proud fulfillment
Of a great noble call!

HUNTER waves to the audience, sits down behind the presidential desk and proceeds to lounge about the ORAL OFFICE in his underwear, feet up on the presidential desk, drinking booze and smoking crack. His utterances are random and incoherent, the only consistently intelligible phrases being “Where’s the money?” and “Give me my money!” addressed to no one in particular. His antics include getting up, getting the spins and falling down with the SECRET SERVICE rushing to his aid and helping him back to his seat; staggering drunkenly about the stage with a lascivious grin while groping and feigning sex with the UNDERAGE UKRAINIAN PROSTITUTES and periodically getting the fantods and rushing about the stage in a daze shouting “Spiders everywhere! Don’t you see them?” or plaintively calling for his mommy (“Mommy! Why don’t you love me?”) with one or the other of the UNDERAGE UKRAINIAN PROSTITUTES rushing to his side to comfort him. The variations are endless.

KAMALA: the reigning vice-presidentress, as indicated by a beauty pageant contestant ribbon over her shoulder, labeled “THE VEEP”. As the only one sober enough, she is entrusted with the NUCLEAR FOOTBALL, which is an actual football stickered with radiation symbols. She sometimes delivers philosophical-sounding but utterly imbecilic little speeches, which she inevitably screws up badly, then cackles madly at her own mistake, sometimes dropping the NUCLEAR FOOTBALL, which causes a blinding flash of light, a firecracker to go off off-stage and everyone on stage to drop dead momentarily. Her typical speeches, delivered with great pathos and gravitas, are: “You know, time, it always moves BACKWARDS, not forwards… I mean, it moves FORWARDS, yeah… Hyuck-hyuck-hyuck!” or “You know, spacetime, it is NOT continuous… I mean, it IS continuous, yeah… Hyuck-hyuck-hyuck!” She also shouts out what seem like campaign slogans, of sorts, such as “We must open all the borders, now!” or “Mandatory abortions for all, now!” or “Everybody must change your sex, now!” Once in a while, she shouts out “I am the first woman-president… I mean VICE-president… yeah… Hyuck-hyuck-hyuck!!

THE GHOST OF HUNTER’S FATHER: this is a withered-looking apparition that wanders about the stage trying to shake hands with invisible beings, periodically executing pratfalls or tripping and falling down prone, then shouting “I’m OK!”. He periodically attempts to make a speech, clenching his fists in front of himself and staring fixedly into the audience with a hollow-eyed grin, but, after an uncomfortable silence, thumping his head and proceeding to shake hands with invisible beings. He is generally ignored by everyone.

TRUMP: the perennial presidential candidate, a bombastic character who rushes into the ORAL OFFICE in the middle of each performance, dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, being ineffectually restrained by the SECRET SERVICE, and makes an impassioned campaign speech about Making America Great Again. He then tries to strangle HUNTER, calling his presidency illegitimate, and is then dragged away by the SECRET SERVICE, kicking and screaming about “draining the swamp” and about how he’ll lock them all up once he wins “tomorrow's election” while HUNTER waves his crack pipe at him and shouts “get out of my ORAL OFFICE!” TRUMP is the only one who acknowledges the existence of THE GHOST OF HUNTER’S FATHER, accusing him of stealing the election from him, but all he gets in response is a failed attempt to shake his hand sometimes followed by a pratfall.

THE UNDERAGE UKRAINIAN PROSTITUTES: these are two or more girls dressed in négligées who lounge about the ORAL OFFICE in lascivious poses, sometimes doing little cabaret acts and generally doing whatever HUNTER wants of them, such as rubbing up against him or squatting on his face. When HUNTER passes out, they hop off the stage into the audience, pick some unsuspecting male victim and attempt to pull him onto the stage, shouting, with a fake Ukrainian accent, “You be the PRRREZIDENT!”

THE SECRET SERVICE: two or more agents dressed in black suits and wearing dark sunglasses, mumbling into their thumbs and gazing about menacingly.

ZELENSKY: a miserable-looking khaki-clad man who rushes onto the stage, drops down on his knees before HUNTER and tearfully begs him for a missile that can hit Moscow or an aircraft carrier or a chemical weapons stockpile or a trillion dollars in cash. While being dragged away by THE SECRET SERVICE, he makes a lunge for KAMALA’S NUCLEAR FOOTBALL, which he fumbles and drops to the floor, causing it to go bang as described above.

NULAND: a frumpy, bug-eyed woman who wonders around the stage with a bag labeled “POISON” offering cookies from it to whoever wants one. Those who take a bite of one of her cookies start making the Hitler salute and shouting “Glory to Ukraine!” before going into convulsions and dropping dead.

FOREIGN OLIGARCHS: a random assortment of exotically dressed characters whose cameo roles consist of walking into the ORAL OFFICE to deliver flowery greetings in exotic accents along with suitcases of cash and making outlandish requests, such as “We’d like to buy Texas!” or “We’d like to buy California!” which HUNTER always grants with a dismissive wave of the hand.

end

Decadence, by Marian Kamensky

Trump is soooo Trump-licious!

Dmitry Orlov • August 26, 2023 at 19:58

Yesterday I forced myself to watch Tucker Carlson’s interview of Donald Trump on X (formerly Twitter). I was pleasantly surprised: it was more entertaining than painful. Trump was actually somewhat funny, especially when eviscerating Biden and Harris, and even somewhat charming. The role of a martyr, assigned to him by the hopelessly corrupt American establishment, suits him well, allowing him to mix and match his usual combativeness with the new elements of serenity and tranquility, which are new to his character and typically develop with advancing age. Speaking of advancing age, although in a few instances he repeated himself almost verbatim several times (not a good sign) he did seem together enough, unlike Washington’s various living cadavers like Biden, Pelosi or McConnell, who would best be put in a home for similar-minded people.

About the only really interesting question from the generally fawning Carlson was whether Trump thinks it likely that they (the establishment) would try to kill him. This put the martyrdom theme front and center. Trump didn’t say “Yes” — that would have been too much, verging on “This is my blood, the blood of the new testament” — but he didn’t clearly say “No” either. What he did say is that his foes are crazy and passionate enough to try. So is he now the new Lamb, ready to be sacrificed and by so doing to wash away the sins of an America gone all Sodom and Gomorrah?

This is heady stuff, eschatologically speaking, and probably the reason the interview has been watched over 250 million times. But what is equally interesting, to me at least, is what has been left out. To touch on just a few of these…

1. Trump spoke about how he “got along great” with Kim Jong Un. Well, that certainly hasn’t helped things, because quite recently North Korea’s defense minister General Kang Sun-nam gave a speech at the Moscow International Security Conference in which he stated that nuclear war is inevitable and that North Korea plans to win it. “Now, the question is not if a nuclear war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula, but who starts it when,” Kang warned. You could take this to be mere bluster, but it isn’t: North Korea’s position is superior to that of Washington because it can strike Washington’s forces more or less with impunity, being assured that Washington will not strike back, being justifiably afraid of pulling both Russia and China, which border North Korea (a rather small target and easy to miss) into a nuclear conflict. Trump is not unaware; he did say that North Korea has lots of nuclear bombs and that 40 thousand US servicemen stationed in South Korea could die. But what he didn’t say is what must be done to prevent that from happening: the US must stand down. Nor did Carlson ask any follow-up questions. Perhaps speaking the full truth is antithetical to running for the US presidency.

2. Trump also said that the war in the (former) Ukraine is a disaster and must be ended immediately. What he didn’t mention is what the US would have to do to end it: cut off military aid to the Ukrainian side from the US and from the rest of NATO (that’s the easy part), and then accede to the demands Russia made in November of 2021, which stipulate NATO pulling its forces back to where they were in 1997, prior to NATO’s eastward expansion, restoration of the Ukraine’s neutrality (a condition of its independence from Russia, which it has violated) and several more such conditions (that’s the harder part). Add to that the demand for full demilitarization and denazification of the former Ukrainian territory — a tall order, since that would probably involve rounding up all of the Ukrainian war criminals, including the previous and the present Ukrainian presidents and organizing an international war crimes tribunal for them and for all of their accomplices, both foreign and domestic. But then again, one doesn’t win the US presidency by admitting such things.

3. Trump accused Biden of ruining the US energy industry. That may or may not be the case, but what he failed to mention is something far more important: that the US is tapped out, drilled out and generally fracked. The US is still the world’s largest oil producer, but for how much longer? Fracking is what’s responsible for that glut of oil, and production from fracked wells is now on an undulating plateau and nearing the edge of an escarpment. What’s more, even the current glut is still not enough to satisfy absolutely inordinate US demand and the US still has to import oil. What’s going to happen when the fracking episode ends as swiftly as it began less than two decades ago? Well, please don’t expect poor old Trump to mouth the words “horse and buggy” — at least not before the election!

4. This last point dovetails nicely with two stunning bits of news out of the recent BRICS conference in Johannesburg just last week. First, the existing five BRICS members have succeeded in de-dollarizing their trade with each other to such an extent that less than a third of it involves the US dollar. Their goal is to get rid of the US dollar altogether, thus making US sanctions, or the threat thereof, completely toothless, and the ever-growing US federal debt unnecessary to invest in and very necessary to sell quickly. Second, six more nations, including Saudi Arabia and Iran, two major oil producers, are going to become BRICS members as of January 1, 2024. The new members have the same goals as the existing members: to de-dollarize their trade relationships. How is the US going to buy the oil it needs once fracking has run its course? Hint: not with dollars. And how will it manage to earn whatever currencies BRICS members will be willing to accept? Hint: it won’t. And what chance is there that such weighty matters will be voiced by anyone in the course of the 2024 US presidential campaign? Shhh!

5. Another point Trump failed to mention is that the US is bankrupt and that no US president, whether he or someone else, will be able to do anything about that. The combination of a ridiculously huge debt, now at nearly $31 trillion, much higher inflation and, consequently, much higher interest rates, means that just the interest payments on the US federal debt will soon top $1 trillion a year. Without major cuts to defense, medicare and social security, they will swallow up the entire federal budget — unless the US drastically increases its borrowing. But will there be international demand for all this new US debt? No; see point 4 above. But isn’t the Social Security Trust Fund in a “lock box”? No, that was presidential candidate Al Gore’s idea, but then the US Supreme Court elected somebody else.

It is possible to add a few more items to this list. For instance, there is the likely fiasco in Taiwan, where, if the Guomintang (國民黨 / 国民党— the nationalists in favor of reunifying with the mainland) get elected, the People’s Liberation Army will end up with all of those overpriced though somewhat obsolete weapons the US has been sending to Taiwan. Trump did mention the Chinese military bases being built on Cuba but didn’t say what he would do about it other than furrow his brow in sincere consternation.

In all, I think that Trump would make a fine next and last president of the US. His job will be to fume, harrumph, express umbrage and bemoan his country’s fate. Or maybe he will rise to the occasion, strike a majestic pose and declare with his usual pomp and bombast that America is over: that’s all, folks, Washington is permanently closed for business, constitutional authority devolves to the states, the show is over, thank you all for coming and please drive home safely.

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Decadence Comics – Decaying Forms and Abstract Comics

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Balkanization or Balkanisation is the fragmentation of a larger region or state into smaller regions or states, which may be hostile to, or uncooperative with, one another. It is usually caused by differences in ethnicity, culture, religion, and some other factors such as past grievances. The term is pejorative; when sponsored or encouraged by a sovereign third party, it has been used as an accusation against such third-party nations. Controversially, the term is often used by voices for the status quo to underscore the dangers of acrimonious or runaway secessionism. The Balkan peninsula is seen as an example of shatter belts in geopolitics, and Balkanization is a type of political fragmentation.
— Balkanization. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Page was last edited on 9 September 2023, at 07:01 (UTC).

Fourth America is Almost Over

— Americans Want a Divorce

Andrew Tanner • Published in GEN · 12 min read · Jul 16, 2021 • Original

The breakup of the United States is well underway, driven by the profit-driven poison of partisanship.

Since 2016, I have watched America’s slow march over a cliff with a mix of fascination and horror.

But the results of recent polls by Bright Line Watch have provided the first hard and frighteningly conclusive evidence that Americans are moving fast down the road I predicted—towards a national divorce.

I have unfortunately been right about almost every major development in America since Trump won the Republican Party nomination in 2016.

Like many observers, I didn’t take Trump’s campaign seriously at first. His first attempt at a campaign in 2012 collapsed before the first primary. The second defied every rule I had learned across a lifetime of observing and privately studying American politics. I assumed that the Republican Party leadership would find a way to block his ascension.

Turns out, I underestimated their craven cowardice and lust for power at any cost.

When he did win the GOP primary, I wound up devoting a substantial part of that summer — when I was supposed to be getting ready to write a doctoral dissertation — doing a deep dive into the polling data and assumptions being made by national political analysts.

And what I discovered terrified me: evidence of a systematic polling error that understated Trump’s appeal in Rust Belt states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Being just a lowly doctoral student, nobody was willing to listen to me when I tweeted to Hillary Clinton that she needed to camp out in Pennsylvania until the end of the election.

Then came that awful night in November when Americans around the country were shocked — but not me. I instead had real-world confirmation that I understood what was happening better than most experts.

Since then, I’ve been right so often it’s frankly painful — not that it has mattered.

I predicted that Trump’s tenure would start out in chaos but he would eventually surround himself with dangerous sycophants when mainstream pundits were telling Americans to “give Trump a chance.”

When the anti-Trump “resistance” embraced the narrative that Russian hacking had swayed the election and the Mueller investigation would bring Trump down, I couldn’t agree — and I was right.

I correctly anticipated that Trump would do everything he could to start a war with Iran short of ordering a bombing campaign out of the blue. He pulled out of the hard-won nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration and ultimately killed IRGC Commander Soleimani in Iraq in an operation that defied international law and technically started a war with Iran — that the mullahs thankfully chose not to escalate beyond injuring American service members with a carefully orchestrated missile barrage the United States military was powerless to stop.

I knew that the polls were off again in critical rust belt states in 2020, that pollsters had not solved their problem with under-sampling Trump voters. I knew 2020 looked like a repeat of 2016 — and again I was proven right.

And throughout 2020 I warned that the Trump administration was going to try and subvert the election if it were remotely close. The focus would be on using state legislatures and the Supreme Court to throw out Biden votes then gaming the normal certification process in an attempt to stay in power.

It all happened pretty much as I predicted. And here America is, in 2021, right where I feared it would be.

And I’m afraid the nation’s near-future is now all but set in stone. Powerful forces have been unleashed, and events are proceeding as they must.

Americans have been educated into a set of dangerous myths about their country and its permanence. After the Second World War the influencers and trend-setters of the day realized the past 15 years had been so traumatic the America they themselves had been born into was gone forever.

America has, in fact, died and been reborn a few times in its 250-year history.

First America, Colonial America, lasted from about 1619 with the importation of the first African slaves to 1776 and the War of Independence.

Second America, the Founders’ America, emerged out of a need to unite thirteen very different colonies under some kind of federal structure. A debate raged between federalists — supporting the new Constitution — and anti-Federalists, who preferred the looser Articles of Confederation.

The Federalists won, and from 1789 to 1861 Second America grew, embracing westward expansion and maintaining an increasingly tenuous balance between pro-slavery and pro-abolition groups. These were not exclusively Southern and Northern, either — when Civil War came many counties in the new Confederacy voted to remain part of the Union.

And a few Northern Union states like Delaware and Maryland were slave states. Whose laws allowing slavery were not repealed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation for brutally political reasons — his administration hoped to spark slave uprisings in the South to support the Union war effort.

Third America, Imperial America, was born in 1865 as the Confederacy was finally smashed, but the divides of the past were not so easily forgotten. Jim Crow and the KKK replaced the Confederacy, the Union effectively abandoning the freed slaves to their fate in order to prevent a second Civil War from breaking out — as it threatened to on several occasions.

Third America focused on westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, using the tools of genocide to secure a national push to the mineral rich Pacific. This was the America of the gilded age, when powerful barons in control of major industries colluded together and began dispatching the American military — before the Civil War not a truly permanent force — on foreign adventures.

Third America lasted from 1865 to 1945, ending in another near-collapse of the country after the Great Depression averted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s stabilizing efforts during his four-term administration and, ultimately, the outbreak of the Second World War.

Fourth America is the version that is dying right now. Lasting from 1945 to 2020, it has been characterized by the old divides between Federalist and Anti-Federalist re-emerging as part of the hardening of the two-party system.

All complex systems like countries, go through a regular four-step cycle of fast growth, slowing growth, collapse, and reorganization.

The pace can vary dramatically, but is ultimately a function of changing social values as older generations give way to younger, shifting economic incentives, and the balance of power between political parties. The cycle never ends, and the shift from one phase to the next can only be deferred, never halted.

Change comes during the reorganization phase when — and America will likely soon reach this critical point — people self-sort into groups who start adapting to the new reality and building new structures to cope with it.

Fourth America is collapsing as the postwar global international order decays, the digital generations — Xers, Millenials, and Zoomers — become the majority, and wealth inequality within and between nations reaches the same extreme levels they did back in the Gilded Era, during Third America before the Great Depression.

On top of it all, carbon pollution has caused the climate to begin an inexorable shift to a new, warmer regime. A process that will magnify every other kind of dysfunction already afflicting the world.

In times like these, trust between people goes way down. People stop feeling confident they know what will happen next. Disasters and catastrophes mount, driving collective anxiety.

And so people begin to re-sort themselves into tight-knit groups based on common shared values — like how to appropriately respond to a global pandemic.

There is an old folk curse allegedly from China: may you live in interesting times.

Welp, these are those.

But in the words of Gandalf — “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Fourth America is dying — but the shape of Fifth America is still unwritten.

And in a way, that’s kind of exciting.

Because anyone with a brain between their ears knows the status quo in America is not working. The evidence is everywhere:

• Mass shootings almost every day
• Inability to agree on basic concepts like the germ theory of disease
• Half the population living just $400 away from bankruptcy
• Widespread housing shortage forcing people onto the streets
• Complete separation between white and blue collar jobs
• A university education is required to get a good job, but is expensive
• 600,000+ dead from a disease other countries did a better job at fighting
• 50% of income tax revenues flow to a military that can’t win wars
• Climate disasters burning and flooding whole towns
• Shortages of critical supplies and wildly varying prices

If you go back and look at the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, the pattern should jump right out at you.

The country is falling apart, and the billionaires and political hacks running the show are selling inadequate solutions. Linear treatments to exponentially growing problems.

And this is why between 30% and 44% of Americans depending on the region support outright secession — an issue thought to have been fully resolved 150 years ago.

If you asked Americans whether they were willing to legally separate, as opposed to pursuing secession, these numbers would jump even higher.

And what is more, what is so devastating to President Joe Biden’s effort to unite Americans by, mostly, telling them they’re united in every other speech, is that these numbers have increased since January and the Capitol riot.

Even among Democrats, particularly in Pacific America — the West Coast states of California, Oregon, Washington, Hawai’i, and in this survey design Alaska — support for outright secession is incredibly high.

45% of Democrats — who are more than half of the voters out here — want to be free from D.C.

That’s only surpassed by Republicans and Independents in the South — the heart of the old Confederacy — at 66% and 50%. That’s not a surprise, given the region’s history and Republican rejection of the 2020 Presidential Election.

But that even with a Democrat in office Pacific Americans are becoming more supportive of secession — that should come as a dire warning.

There is a reason that, back in 2020 when a group of senior Democrats and Republicans gamed out how a disputed election might go, one of the main outcomes was California, Oregon, and Washington seceding.

The powers-that-be back East might not say it out loud, but they know full well what’s coming.

Trump’s ability to come within 45,000 votes of winning the electoral college — while still losing the popular vote by more than 7 million — is what powers his continued false claims to have won the election. To have come so close, to have turned out a truly unprecedented number of people — that is why Republicans believe Trump’s lies.

As I also predicted, Biden’s public outreach across the aisle has failed. Sure, he may get a watered-down bipartisan infrastructure bill passed yet. And it is even possible that reconciliation will give him a big win.

But the cost will be high. He is going to lose the House to Republican gerrymandering and the normal decline in support for the incumbent President’s party that almost always happens in midterm elections. No matter how small a reconciliation spending bill might be, the centrist mood has shifted strongly to fears of inflation and the rising national debt. Republicans will cast Democratic spending as socialism, and their voters will turn out in 2022 to fight it.

The Republicans more or less want the Articles of Confederation back. And they’re willing to rig elections to ensure the federal government can never tell their states what to do.

That means by 2023 the Biden administration is toast unless it is willing to move right. Which would upset the progressives the Democrats must get to turn out in 2024 — an option the Dems might well chose, though it will be fatal.

But 2016 and 2020 have both offered strong evidence that American elections are, in the electoral college, bound to be close. Barring the emergence of a strong third party, 2024 will be a repeat of 2020, which was a repeat of 2016, but lacking a deadly pandemic the incumbent utterly bungled in responding to.

And that means once again Republican-controlled states will be in a position to impose a second Trump term on America.

In 2020, they chose not to. Elected officials in Georgia and Arizona defied Trump and safeguarded the free and fair election.

And their party punished them for it. The laws being passed across the Red States right now are legalizing Trump’s attempts to steal the last election. Their voters want this — there is no way they’ll hold off now.

So unless the Democratic candidate somehow wins in a landslide on the back of massive public support that doesn’t seem likely to materialize, it is probable that Trump will be President again in 2025.

Americans are exhausted by politics and strife and just want to go about their lives. With mail-in voting being curbed, turnout will be lower in 2024 than it was in 2020.

This will affect both parties — Trump is unlikely to get 74 million votes again, just as Biden is unlikely to hit 80 million. The negative partisanship is too high, and after 2020 the “this is for democracy” argument won’t motivate as many people as it did.

15,000 vote margins in Arizona and Georgia are easy to wipe away with changes in voting rules. If in 2020 Biden got 1 million votes and Trump 990,000, then in 2024 Biden sheds 20% of his voters and Trump loses just 15%, the margin of victory shifts in Trump’s favor by over 25,000 votes. That’s more than his margin in Wisconsin, and thanks to the census results it’s enough to put him over 270 if he can maintain his grip on the other states he actually won.

And that’s not even taking into account the probability that in any close election Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin officials will be GOP partisans by 2024.

If they do what their GOP voters expect of them and make sure Trump wins a second term, I expect the country will fracture.

And the way the rhetoric is escalating on the right, if a Democrat won again the Red states — which is half of them — may very well choose to actually secede.

One way or another, the 2024 Election is going to be brutal. It will heavily determine the shape of Fifth America.

It is absolutely vital to preempt this awful scenario, which could produce a split in the federal government that forces the military to take sides.

Or worse, the armed forces could fracture, creating warring factions within the wreckage of America. This would fast escalate to ethnic cleansing and likely bring in foreign powers.

After all, the United States has over 2,000 nuclear weapons ready to use. What happens to America will impact all the world.

The best option America has now follows from what the Bright Line Watch polls indicate is happening anyway: a split of the country into smaller and more culturally coherent regions.

But this must not come after a disputed election and a total collapse of the federal government.

Instead, the federal government simply needs to be formally split up.

Secession is unconstitutional — but Amending the Constitution is a basic democratic right.

The challenge is developing an Amendment both Red and Blue legislators — at the state if not federal level — can accept.

That means it has to be simple, straightforward, and reflect the real regional divisions cleaving America apart.

The Constitution must be Amended to split the federal government into at least five, if not eight, Autonomous Federal Regions made by states self-grouping.

Each AFR must be given the existing Constitution, all the federal laws and bureaucratic rules and caselaw, and invested with the right to interpret and further amend it according to the will of the regional electorate.

ALL existing federal roles except declaring war and maintaining a common currency and the right of travel between regions will be ported down to the new sub-federal governments. This includes military formations.

Each region will directly elect a single President to serve on a supra-national Presidents’ Council in D.C. They will be charged with appointing Federal Reserve bank chairs and the leaders of the remnant of the United States Armed Forces, which will only be activated in times of declared cross-region crisis.

Everything else must be done on a regional level going forward. The United States is a continental federation just like the European Union. It is full of different cultures, different perceptions of shared history.

Separation is sadly the only remaining way to keep America as united as it can be while giving different regions the flexibility their citizens demand to build the government they want.

The alternative is a messy divorce, perhaps even open civil war.

And the clock is ticking.

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