Category: Historical Commentary
Twisted Up in Our Own Shoelaces

Twisted Up in Our Own Shoelaces

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“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” — George W. Bush

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” — George W. Bush

It’s a sad day when we have to go back to former President George W. to illustrate how befuddled our current so-called “leadership” is, but somehow his linguistic faux pas seem to best encapsulate the current confused state of affairs in this country. Besides, the present occupant of the White House, once King of the Gaffe, now seldom makes enough sense to even come up with a colorful misquote. He just presents as ornery and mean and overwhelmingly somnolent, and most of his words, such as they are, are fed to him by others on a teleprompter. At least George W. made a stab at it on his own, as ill-fated some of those attempts were. If you want to hear equally nonsensical statements, you have to turn to our allegedly second in command (sic), VP Kamala Harris.

As I write this, we’re seeing the results of our feckless approach to dissuading Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. There are reports of explosions, likely from Russian cruise missiles landing in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, as sirens sound and tens of thousands of people flee the city, removing the doubts and questions of recent weeks whether Putin planned on invading Ukraine or not. Now we know.

While a masked Harris, looking more like some comical representation of a cartoon dog than a leader of the Western world, prattled on about “unity” in the aftermath of a security meeting in Munich a few days ago, Putin was lining up his ducks and getting them ready to quack. In a big way. Following a diplomatically polite meeting with Harris, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky laid out the reality in more clear terms.

“We don’t need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen,” Zelensky said, “and after our country will be fired at or after we will have no borders or after we will have no economy or parts of our country will be occupied. Why would we need those sanctions then?”

The prescience of Zelensky’s fears have now been made manifest. Whether the Nightmare Scenario I postulated previously will come to pass remains to be seen, but clearly Russia and China are in close touch, and China is observing closely what transpires in Ukraine. But as I predicted, Putin held back until after the Beijing Olympics had ended to make his move.

Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy

Biden (shown in the photo above with photos of media representatives, the friendly ones he was “supposed” to call on circled, at a rare press event) has done everything possible to aid and abet Putin’s plans while hindering our own ability to counter, in real terms, Russia’s threat, not just to Ukraine but to the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Right from the beginning of his administration, Biden deliberately took America from the energy independence that had been a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s economic policy to returning the country to dependence on foreign sources of oil, including Russia. In 2021, the U.S. imported about 250 million barrels of oil from Russia, tripling the 2020 amount and setting a new record. While canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried Canadian oil to refineries in the U.S., and now  canceling oil leases on U.S. public lands and blocking all new drilling in this country, Biden lifted sanctions and greenlighted Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to carry Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany.

Given that petroleum and gas exports are key elements of Russia’s economy — which, with nearly two and a half times the population, is smaller than Italy’s, or with nearly five times the population, is smaller than that of Texas — there is little Biden could have done that would not have been a bigger help to Russia and bigger hurt to the U.S. While Trump argued Germany and Western Europe should not be dependent on Russia for their energy needs, Biden encouraged it. Good work, Squinty Joe. Now we know who Putin’s real pooch is.

While Americans are now paying $4, $5, $6, and more for a gallon of gas — often spending north of $100 to fill their tank — compared with under $2 while Trump was president, Biden has cautioned that sanctions against Russia will incur further costs in the form of still higher energy costs to this country. Brilliant plan. With fuel prices at an eight-year high and inflation at a 40-year high, now Americans are told to buck up and pay up. And of course, the usual media toadies are blaming all this on the Ukraine situation, when in fact those issues were well underway and established long before Ukraine popped up as a crisis. Along with Russia, OPEC, and Iran, the real beneficiaries of this administration’s obtuse policies are the special interests who stand to profit from a so-called “green” economy, much as they did under Obama, when Biden was Vice President.

Biden’s strategic failures are numerous, but none bigger or more notable than his disastrous and scandalous surrender and withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was like giving a green light to Putin, Xi — with his eye on taking back Taiwan — and every other power-hungry despot in the world. And don’t forget: Biden declared climate change (when he wasn’t blaming white supremacy) as the biggest threat to U.S. security. I wonder how many Ukrainians, or even Americans, would agree with that assessment.

We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. The same old merry band of morons that were in charge the last time Russia took a bite out of Ukraine, annexing the Crimea in 2014, is back in charge, and Putin knows that. And he knows he can play them like a balalaika.

I’m reminded of the game of chicken we used to play when I was a kid. One kid draws a line in the dirt with his foot and says, “I dare you to cross this line.” The other kid goes, “Oh, yeah?” He steps across the line and says, “There– what are you gonna do about it?” The first kid laughs and announces, “Now you’re on my side.”

What are Russia’s Real Objectives?

Putin and Russia couldn’t be more clear about at least some of Russia’s priorities and how sanctions won’t deter it from pursuing those priorities.

“Excuse my language, but we don’t give a shit about sanctions,” Russia’s ambassador to Sweden, Viktor Tatarintsev, told the Swedish daily Aftonbladet earlier this month. “The expansion of NATO is the biggest threat to Russia.”

Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, using more polite language, reiterated the same point to CBS’s Face the Nation this past Sunday.

“We would like to put everything on the paper, we would like to see legally binding guarantees for Russian security,” Antonov said. “We sent our package of proposals, what should we do? We don’t want to see next wave of expansion of NATO. We would like you not to use any Eastern and Central European countries, as well as Baltic states, to deploy their new weapons. We don’t want INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] missiles deployed in Europe.”

The INF Treaty was signed between President Ronald Reagan and then-Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987, but President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the treaty in 2019, citing Russian non-compliance, and also concerns about a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific, since China is not a signatory to the treaty. Subsequently, Putin also suspended Russia’s treaty obligations.

Some in this country, such as former Democratic Congresswoman and one time presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, adhere to the theory that making it clear that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO would have caused Putin to back off on his threat to the country. If one puts the current crisis in the context of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, where the U.S., under President John F. Kennedy, faced down Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles to Cuba, 90 miles off our shores, Russia’s concern about NATO expansion on its borders makes sense. A little heralded part of the resolution of that crisis was the unpublicized agreement by the U.S. to withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Turkey, on the Soviet Union’s border, revealing the reciprocal nature of not placing nuclear threats right on an adversary’s border.

Russia’s concerns about NATO expansion certainly are real, but whether they tell the whole story or are simply a red herring for concealing Putin’s expansionist aims may have been answered by Putin himself during a lengthy monologue, delivered on February 21. In that monologue, described by some as “surreal” and historically “revisionist,” Putin claimed that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent country and merely is part of the old Russian empire. In the same speech, Putin announced he was recognizing two predominantly Russian rebel regions in the eastern part of Ukraine, the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic.” Putin later ordered troops to cross the border to those two districts, under the guise of being “peacekeepers.”

For his part, Biden issued an executive order putting sanctions, not on Russia, but on the two breakaway regions. You can’t make this stuff up.

“Ukraine is a test of western resolve. It’s not just about Putin,” said former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley. “The Chinese communists and Iranian jihadists are watching too. It’s a major leadership moment for Biden. So far, he’s failing.”

Following launch of his invasion of Ukraine overnight, Putin issued the most dire threat yet to the U.S. and the West.

Speaking at 6 a.m. Moscow time this morning, Putin threatened “consequences greater than any you have faced in history” should Western countries become involved in Ukraine.

What these “consequences” might consist of were left deliberately ambiguous. Might they include massive cyber attacks? Invasion of the Baltic states? Nuclear retaliation? It is relevant to recall that, following resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, both Kennedy and Khrushchev said they had madmen on their side urging them to push the nuclear button. One has to wonder, given his increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior and his twisted world view, whether Putin would not have been one of those arguing for nuclear Armageddon. Or that he is not now capable of it.

How much further Putin’s view of returning Russia to what he sees as its former greatness will go, we will have to wait to see. We don’t have to wait to see Biden’s failure. We’ve seen plenty of evidence of that, all through this administration. Now we’re seeing more of it, and where it leads.

Featured image: Twisted Shoe Laces. Pixabay. Used with permission.

Befuddled Biden with press photos. EPA/Oliver Contreras/Pool Photo. Used under Fair Use.

Putin and his pooch. Reuters, from Esquire.com. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.
Finally, Something That *Is* Bigger Than Watergate

Finally, Something That *Is* Bigger Than Watergate

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For half a century we’ve heard one political scandal after another called “bigger than Watergate.” None other than Watergate co-reporter Bob Woodward has uttered those words over and over as he peddled his various books across the years, relying on the famed laurels he earned at the early pinnacle of his career. And now, finally, thanks to the plodding but relentless investigation of Special Counsel John Durham, we’re getting details of a scandal that, if substantiated, really is bigger, far bigger, than Watergate.

A recent 19-page court filing made by Durham’s team contains clear indications that the now nearly three-year-old investigation is looking past — far past — indicted Hillary Clinton presidential campaign legal advisor Michael Sussmann. Three times in the submission Durham informs the court that he is conducting “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” not limited to defendant Sussmann. Sussmann, for his part, has pleaded not guilty to lying to the FBI, and has answered with his own six-page filing accusing Durham of being wrong about key facts and attempting to prejudice the jury pool.

Part of Durham’s allegations is that Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was spied on by Sussmann, working with cybersecurity experts, and  touting the information to the media and government agencies, including the FBI and CIA, hoping to spur an investigation of Trump. Which, we may recall, is exactly what eventuated, in the form of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation and the subsequent ill-fated, but costly and highly destructive, investigation conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

While the Watergate burglars physically broke into Democratic Party headquarters, Durham’s allegations imply an electronic break-in to the Trump campaign. Those kinds of dirty tricks might make the scandal as big as Watergate, but not necessarily bigger. The bigger issue, the one that — again, if substantiated — would make this scandal not only bigger than Watergate, but substantively a direct threat to national security, is that a government contractor, referred to as “Tech Executive-1” in the Durham filing but reported to be early Internet industry pioneer Rodney Joffe, may have been gleaning and passing on data from White House communications during Trump’s presidency. Joffe has not been charged in the case.

Was Trump Right?

Trump has alleged all along that his campaign and, subsequently, his presidency, was spied on. He called the campaign spying “Spygate” and alleged it was conducted by his opponent, who is called Crooked Hillary. He clearly feels, if prematurely, vindicated by Durham’s filing. In an exclusive interview earlier this week Trump told Fox News Digital, “It looks like this is just the beginning, because, if you read the filing and have any understanding of what took place, and I called this a long time ago, you’re going to see a lot of other things happening, having to do with what, really, just is a continuation of the crime of the century. This is such a big event, nobody’s seen anything like this.”

In a prior statement, Trump said, “What Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left Democrats did with respect to spying on a President of the United States, even while in office, is a far bigger crime than Watergate.” He called for further criminal charges and implied that the perpetrators, in an earlier time, would face the death penalty, which is what his opponents would have called for were he the offending party.

“Can you imagine,” Trump said in his statement, “if the roles were reversed and the Republicans, in particular President Donald Trump, got caught illegally spying into the Office of the President? All hell would break loose and the electric chair would immediately come out of retirement.”

Asked by a Daily Mail reporter to respond to the allegations contained in the Durham filing, Clinton first ignored the question, walking masked past the reporter and waving. She later came out with a tweet to blame Trump and Fox News for “spinning up a fake scandal.”

“Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it’s a day that ends in Y,” Clinton tweeted. ‘The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.”

To back up her denial, she linked to an article in Vanity Fair written by Democratic Party toadie Bess Levin and subtitled, “In less breaking news, Donald Trump remains a moron.”

Aside from the two former candidates sparring, part of the issue revolves around the value of the data mined by Joffe’s group. According to Durham’s filing, the investigation has approximately 17,000 documents related to Tech Executive-1’s companies, including approximately 226 emails relevant to Sussmann’s defense. While it is not clear whether any specific information was gathered from White House communications, it appears that Joffe’s efforts “exploited” the communications to garner what is called DNS — Domain Name System — information indicating which computers White House computers connected with in an effort to garner derogatory information about Trump. One objective, which failed, was to tie Trump to the private Russian bank, Alfa Bank.

Durham Has the Clinton Campaign in His Sights

It’s been known for some time that the Clinton campaign and the bogus Russian dossier, which contained numerous unsubstantiated and false accusations that attempted to tie Donald Trump to Moscow, has been under investigation by Durham’s team. On Nov. 3 of last year the primary source for the infamous dossier, Igor Danchenko, was arrested and charged with lying to federal officials about his Russian contacts during his 2017 interviews with the FBI.

Along with supplying fabricated information to Christopher Steele, the former British intel operative who provided the dossier to the Clinton campaign, Danchenko had lied about never speaking with what was identified as “PR Executive-1,” described as a “long-time participant in Democratic Party politics.” It was later revealed that PR Executive-1 is Charles Dolan, Jr., a former executive director of the Democratic Governors Association who advised Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and also volunteered for her 2016 campaign. It is alleged that Dolan supplied Danchenko with information and Danchenko’s deception about his contacts with Dolan “was highly material to the FBI’s investigation of these matters.”

One key thing revealed in Durham’s recent filing is that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz had not been fully forthcoming about his activities that are relevant to Durham’s probe of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. For one thing, Horowitz had failed to disclose that he met with defendant Sussmann in March 2017. A focus of that meeting was discussion of how the computer of an employee of the Office of the Inspector General had been detected connecting to a virtual private network in another country, information Sussmann had gathered through his connection with Joffe.

Also revealed was that Horowitz had failed to turn over two cell phones belonging to FBI General Counsel James Baker, the official Sussmann is accused of lying to, claiming he was not advising the Clinton campaign while peddling stories of Trump-Alfa Bank connections. Durham has sought possession of a number of FBI phones, including the Baker phones, and is “working diligently” to review relevant materials on them for presentation to the court.

Unindicted Co-conspirators

During the Watergate festivities we heard a lot about “unindicted co-conspirators.” Well, there are plenty of them in the current imbroglio. Not the least of them are the media miscreants who spouted the lies about the alleged “Russia-Trump” conspiracy as if they were fact (and in most cases, still do, and who are now covering up the latest Durham revelations), and Democratic Party apparatchiks, not the least of which are California Representative Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who almost certainly knew, and know, the allegations about Trump were bogus. Working in tandem, those co-conspirators wasted the country’s time, trust, and resources for the better part of five years, and are continuing to squander the national trust and treasure in an effort to drive a stake in Trump’s heart.

There are plenty of guilty parties who may or may not ever be indicted by Durham or anyone else. These include not just Hillary Clinton herself, but also the current occupant of the Oval Office who, along with his boss Barrack Obama, was informed of the phony efforts to defame Trump and allege collusion with Russia to distract attention from Clinton’s illegal use of a private server for conduct of classified government business. They also include former CIA Director John Brennan, who informed Obama and Biden of the plot, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who knew the allegations against Trump were unsubstantiated and who lied to Congress, former FBI Director James Comey, who approved of false filings to the national security FISA Court, his deputy, Andrew McCabe, and former FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, all of whom furthered the bogus plot.

We know all this went on thanks to former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Clapper’s successor, who held multiple conversations with Durham and confirmed there was sufficient documentation of all this rot. Perhaps most explosive and damning is a CIA Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL) that the CIA forwarded to Comey and Strzok stating that Clinton allegedly approved in the 2016 election “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Does it get any clearer than that? I don’t think so. Now the question is, will any of these big names, whether it’s that of Hillary Clinton or Comey or Brennan or Obama or Biden, wind up in any indictments? I doubt, and have doubted for a long time, that our dual system of justice will bring justice to the biggest offenders. As I said about three years ago, in March 2019:

“But do I see it happening? Do I believe that tomorrow the sun will come up in the West and set in the East? The depth of corruption, the extent of the collusion, and the two levels of justice we live with in this country all make prosecution of Hillary and most of the other guilty parties about as likely. Sure, there might be some low-level functionaries punished, beyond the resignations and firings that have already taken place. Maybe. But the worse offenders? The most egregious actors? Not likely.”

I hope I’m proven wrong. But I doubt I will be. The better chance is that we’ll see Hillary again vying to be crowned to what she sees as her divinely ordained place as President of the United States. May that divinity have mercy on our souls.

Featured image: Hillary Shocked, source unknown, from BizPacReview.com. Used under Fair Use.

Donald Trump, source unknown, from HuffingtonPost.com. Used under Fair Use.

John Durham, source unknown, from NeoNettle.com. Used under Fair Use.

Adam Schiff, Getty Images, from DailyCaller.com. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.
Cracks Form in the New World Order

Cracks Form in the New World Order

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The Beijing Olympics have helped focus world attention on China’s concentration camps where it interns, rapes, tortures, enslaves, and otherwise abuses its Uyghur minority. But it’s not just China that has concentration camps. The former democracy known as Australia has them, too. Other countries, including both the U.S. and Canada, have considered setting them up, and a number of countries, including another former South Pacific democracy, New Zealand, have maintained draconian quarantine and border controls.

The modern plague known as coronavirus, AKA SARS-CoV-2, AKA COVID-19, for more than two years now has served as the perfect pretext for petit dictators and power hungry politicians to pursue very undemocratic agendas. Not just the virus, but autocratic and dictatorial attitudes and techniques more associated with Communist China than Western democracies, emerged and flourished across the globe over the course of the pandemic.

Some looked to the pandemic to usher in what can be called a New World Order. One book, co-authored by the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum and a colleague at the same organization, is titled COVID-19: The Great Reset, which tells you how many so-called global influencers and elites have seen the pandemic. As most ordinary people wanted nothing more than to get back to their normal lives, those people and many in positions of power saw it as their chance to reshape the world in their own vision.

Read some of the reviews of the book and you’ll see how readers, both in the U.S. and overseas, have seen through the book’s premise.

“Know your enemy,” one reviewer warns, “this is their manual. I think they have greatly underestimated the fact that populations will return to their own normal, or close to it, naturally. Opportunistic malfeasance by the Davos ‘elites’ will be their own downfall.”

More succinctly, another says, “Technocratic Totalitarianism on a Global scale. This was horrifying, and they’re using this pandemic to do it .”

Events on the ground, almost anyone now can see, confirm that this has been the agenda being pushed by not just governments, but by Big Tech, Big Pharma, and, almost universally, the complicit media establishment.

Cracks Appear, and Spread

Now stunning events of the past few weeks are showing that serious cracks are forming in the push toward the New World Order. Mass demonstrations in places as far-flung as Australia and Western Europe and Africa were the first harbingers that people had had enough. And then, on Jan. 21, Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin announced the country was lifting most of its COVID restrictions, effective the next day. In short order, the U.K. — prompted by the scandal of PM Boris Johnson being caught violating his own rules, which was far from the first time the COVID autocrats put their hypocrisy on full display — lifted its restrictions, followed by the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Norway, and Sweden. Even Greece loosened some of its rules.

Meanwhile, holdouts remained. Along with China and the repressed Antipodes, Democrat-controlled states in the U.S., and our neighbor to the north, Canada, remained among the most restrictive stalwarts. And then a convoy, reportedly 43 miles (69 kms) long, of Canadian truckers began their journey from the West Coast to the national capital in Ottawa, igniting the spirit of freedom-loving people not just in Canada but around the world, and the cracks really began to spread. What started out as a protest against a Canadian government mandate requiring truckers crossing the U.S.-Canadian border to be vaccinated or go into forced quarantine morphed into a more broad-based protest against all COVID restrictions and mandates. While not all Canadians support the truckers, the country’s mass media, like good toadies to the power structure, have painted the truckers as right-wing crazies.

Once the convoy, now called the Freedom Convoy, entered Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cowardly fled the capital to an undisclosed location, and then attacked the truckers, implying that they were racists — this coming from Monsieur Visage Noir lui-même — and neo-Nazis. This now seems to be the language of discourse, on both sides of the border, as employed by the autocratic left to discredit anyone who disagrees with them.

The truckers appear to have started a movement as other convoys have blocked border crossings between Alberta and Montana, shut down the busiest international crossing, the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, and invaded Québec City. Meanwhile, other trucker convoys sprang up in the Netherlands and New Zealand, truckers in the latter threatened with arrest in just three days by the dictatorial government there. At the same time, New Zealand’s autocratic PM and media darling Jacinda Ardern announced that the country would reopen its borders, sort of, to returning Kiwis and some others, after vying to be a Hermit Kingdom for most of the pandemic.

The truckers have made an impact, with four provinces — Alberta, Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island, and Québec, Trudeau’s home province — lifting all or some restrictions, with Ontario and Manitoba saying they are considering following. At the same time, a number of repressed blue states in the U.S., led by New Jersey and California and spreading to include Oregon, Illinois, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, and Pres. Biden’s home state of Delaware — most red states, such as my own state of Florida, have already been free — loosened, almost in unison, the bulk of their own restrictions. As they do, some of the same idiotic inconsistencies that were hallmarks of the restrictions throughout the pandemic were left in place. One of the biggest sources of discord remains over masking mandates of school children, still existent in some states, even as other restrictions are lifted.

Retrenchment

All these developments might be viewed positively, and for the moment they are. But given the hunger for control that the elites and autocrats have developed throughout the pandemic, and some of the more insane and irrational and often counter-productive restrictions they put in place, it would be a mistake to think that they’re going to quietly give up the field to the common rabble without a fight. The current phase might be better seen as a strategic retreat, and actually it would not be the first time such a retreat (anyone remember “two weeks to stop the spread”?) has been made over the course of the past 24 months.

The elites can sense the prevailing winds, whether it’s the Freedom Convoy in Canada or parents and students raising hell and staging walkouts in the U.S., or massive street demonstrations in other countries. They see the polling numbers, and can feel the winds blowing against them that those numbers represent. But they also know the power of fear, and how they’ve managed to instill it in a large proportion of the population. They count on that segment to push back, to call for continued restrictions, to keep those elites and autocrats in power and calling the shots.

See the photo at the head of this section? That’s one of Australia’s COVID concentration camps. How, one wonders, can such a thing come to exist in a democratic country unless there is a significant number of Quislings ready to carry out the repression for the autocrats? And who, during this ordeal, has not run into a Mask Nazi or Vaccine Commissar?

The real irony — a better word would be tragedy — is how most of the restrictions imposed on people have had little to no positive effect and have resulted in massive social, economic, and human costs. One of the points I’ve made since the beginning of all this is that costs need to be balanced against benefits: The cure can’t be worse than the disease. But what we’ve seen is that, more often than not, the costs have been worse, far worse, than the benefits obtained. We now have the Johns Hopkins University study – widely ignored by the mainstream media — which looked at 24 different studies. The Johns Hopkins researchers concluded that lockdowns, which did so much economic and personal damage, prevented just .2 percent — two tenths of one percent — of COVID deaths in the U.S. and Europe. Clearly the benefits did not outweigh the cost.

“We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality,” the researchers said in the report.

It’s been known from the beginning — even the revered if thoroughly erratic Dr. Anthony Fauci said it — that cloth masks have little or no effect in blocking the virus. And now, after all the mask sturm und drang of two years, finally the CDC has come out and said it: Cloth masks don’t work. Meanwhile, many states and school boards continue to force school children — the segment of the population least vulnerable to COVID — to wear masks in schools, even when it is known, and has been for at least a year, how much damage masking does to kids. This is but one negative consequence that results when the media and Big Tech conspire to block any information that deviates from the official orthodoxy, no matter how wrong that orthodoxy is.

As for closing borders, it has been clear to me for some time that the draconian measures taken in Australia and New Zealand were only postponing the inevitable. And we’re now seeing the evidence of that as cases surge in both New Zealand and, especially, Australia (look particularly at the charts at the bottom of those linked pages to see the dramatic trend graphically depicted), with deaths trailing as the case load grows exponentially.

At this juncture, let’s hope the forces of sanity and freedom prevail and they make those cracks grow bigger and more durable and life all over can return to some semblance of normalcy. Sometimes People Power does hold the autocrats in check. Maybe it will now. Nothing less than the future of the world depends on it.

Featured image: Ottawa police come down on truckers’ peaceful protest. Image taken from New Freedom Media video. Used under Fair Use.

Truckers demonstrate for freedom in Ottawa. Dave Chan/AP via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Australia COVID concentration camp. Rotter News. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.
Russia and China: The Nightmare Scenario

Russia and China: The Nightmare Scenario

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Imagine this scene: A week or so after the closing ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Russia invades Ukraine, its forces quickly rolling across the country, taking its capital city. At the same time, China launches a full-scale attack against Taiwan, intent on taking back what it views as a renegade province. The U.S. is then faced with three unsatisfactory choices: Engage in a two-front war, on opposite sides of the world, to counter Russian and Chinese aggression; pick one theater or the other, Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from moving past Ukraine and threatening its NATO allies, or the South China Sea to honor its commitments to protect Taiwan; or do nothing except bluster without effect in the U.N. and other fora as China and Russia reveal an ineffectual America to the world.

It’s what I call the Nightmare Scenario, and it’s not entirely implausible. I envisaged it independently, but a cursory review of informed opinion reveals it’s far from a unique view of what might ensue in coming days or weeks. And there really is no waking up from this nightmare, should it unfold. Regardless which of those unsatisfactory choices the U.S. makes, the world becomes a much more dangerous place, the threat of wider war, including the threat of nuclear war, grows exponentially, and a new power axis combining two of the world nuclear super powers, China and Russia, possibly augmented by Iran, emerges as a monster threat to the rest of the world.

While the U.S. re-positions a small number of troops, 3,000 compared with the 100,000-plus Russia has put in place, virtually encircling Ukraine, and China brazenly flies hundreds of sorties into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, the real problem is that it has already lost, strategically. Beginning with the Biden administration’s catastrophic surrender and evacuation from Afghanistan, and continuing with its focus on such demoralizing distractions as vaccine mandates and gender and race training within the ranks of the military, the country’s enemies have methodically evaluated Washington’s weakness.

Checkers v. Chess

Both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are masters at assessing and sizing up their opponents. Both know that Biden isn’t quite there, doesn’t have a clue of his own what to do when faced with a crisis, has a back field of losers carried over from the Obama days, who for eight years oversaw American power being inexorably pushed back, and is seriously compromised in both Kyiv and Beijing. While Biden plays a feckless game of checkers, Putin and Xi are playing a high-level game of chess.

It’s been said so many times by so many observers that a weak America spells a dangerous world, and seldom has this been more apparent than at present. Any realistic assessment of the former Trump administration showed a real and determined show of American power that no one, least of all Putin and Xi, could easily dismiss. That all changed with the change of administration, and any doubts that might have remained in the minds of America’s enemies evaporated with the fall of Kabul last August. The events currently unfolding in the snows of Eastern Europe and over the waters of the Taiwan Strait, while in both cases anchored in decades of history, can be traced in the instant directly to America’s massive fail in Afghanistan and its feckless leaderless wandering since.

A relevant question, not one that can easily be dismissed, is why Biden is more concerned about Ukraine’s border than America’s own border. While every ilk of border jumper, including known terrorists, drug runners, sex traffickers, and a range of other criminals, is allowed across a virtually undefended Southwest Border and then sent, at taxpayer expense, all over the country, Biden emptily trumpets his commitment to the sanctity of Ukraine’s border, even to the point of alarming the country’s president, raising fear that Biden’s rhetoric might in fact invite a Russian attack.

Not the First Time

With Russian tanks and troops virtually encircling Ukraine, not just in Russia itself on Ukraine’s eastern border, but also to the north in Belarus, the south in Russian-annexed Crimea, and the west, in Moldova, it’s hard to imagine that it isn’t Putin’s plan to invade and crush the country. I don’t adhere to the idea that history repeats itself, but there are some lessons that can be learned from history.

Many of us remember the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and how Soviet tanks (the Russian war vehicle of choice) and 200,000 Soviet troops crushed Hungary’s push for independence from the Soviet sphere. After encouraging Hungarians to seek their liberation through incessant broadcasts on America’s Radio Free Europe, then-President Dwight Eisenhower, no dithering fool like the current occupant of the White House, fresh off the Korean War, decided it was fruitless to do anything to help the Hungarians and risk a nuclear confrontation, leading the freedom-seeking Hungarians to feel betrayed by America. Lyndon Johnson, already on his way out of office after his Vietnam fiasco, made a similar calculation in 1968 when the Soviets again used tanks and 200,000 troops, including those from several other Warsaw Pact countries, to crush the Prague Spring uprising in then-Czechoslovakia. And here we are again.

The Bigger Threat

With so much attention directed at Ukraine, the much bigger strategic threat posed by China has largely flown under the radar. China has increasingly made it clear its intent to take back Taiwan. Along with ratcheting up its rhetoric, it has taken increasingly provocative overt actions, including holding naval war games not far from the island and flying hundreds of military sorties over the course of recent months, including by fighter jets, H-6 strategic bombers, intelligence-gathering aircraft, and air freighters, into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. And just last Friday, Jan. 28, China’s ambassador to the U.S. warned that Taiwan’s continued push for independence would “most likely” lead to military conflict between the U.S. and China.

“If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road to independence, it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in a military conflict,” Ambassador Qin Gang told National Public Radio.

Keep in mind, as I’ve discussed in this space before in my reviews of the novels 2034 and Ghost Fleet, every simulation of conflict between those two “big countries” run in recent years shows China handing the U.S. its ass on a platter. This is not encouraging, even less so if the U.S. is pulled into a global two-front war, for which it is not prepared.

Especially given the controversy swirling around the Olympics, now under way, with Putin and XI shoulder to shoulder in Beijing, I tend to believe that any conflict, either in Ukraine or Taiwan, is unlikely to begin until after the Olympics. Of course the Olympics didn’t stop Putin from invading Georgia on the very eve of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics or taking Crimea from Ukraine shortly after the 2014 winter games, held in Sochi, Russia, or planning cyber attacks to disrupt the postponed 2020 Tokyo Olympics. China has denied U.S. claims that Xi asked Putin in December not to invade Ukraine during the current Beijing Olympics, and given the growing affinity between the former rivals Putin may not wish to take any glory away from Xi. But that doesn’t preclude action immediately after the games.

A Dangerous New Reality

Regardless whether the Nightmare Scenario I postulated plays out or not, it is clear we’ve entered into a new and dangerous reality. We can expect to see growing coordination between China and Russia, and especially expanding Chinese economic and political influence and presence on a global scale. We’re already seeing its stifling influence on American corporations, universities, sports leagues, and other institutions, the culmination of a process more than three decades in the making.

Meanwhile, Biden’s green lighting of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, to carry Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea, makes Germany dependent on Russia for a major source of energy, enabling Putin’s threat in Eastern Europe to drive a wedge between NATO allies. And, if all that is not worrisome enough, we have a world-class grifter in the White House thoroughly bought off and compromised to China.

It is hard to imagine a more dangerous and precarious time than the one into which we’ve entered.

Featured image: A Chinese H-6K bomber is seen from a Russian aircraft during a joint patrol over the Western Pacific, Dec. 22, 2020. Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

Russian tanks on the move in Belarus. Copyright Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via Associated Press. Photo taken from video and released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2022. Used under Fair Use.

Chinese Navy conducts live-fire exercises in waters near Zhoushan Islands north of Taiwan, August 2020. Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

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Disgrace

Disgrace

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In a normal country in normal times, those responsible for such an enormous debacle as what those at the top in our country caused to happen in Afghanistan in recent weeks would resign in disgrace. And if they didn’t, steps would be taken by those charged with oversight to remove them from office, even try and punish them. But this is not a normal country and these are not normal times, and there seems to no longer exist any sense of shame, disgrace, or even admission of failure. Instead, as the alleged president just did, again, they take a victory lap and spew lies and distortions touting how brilliant and insightful they are, and hope everyone is as imbecilic and full of guile as they are.

Listening to Biden’s words a short while ago made me more angry than I can ever remember any political figure, in my entire life, make me. And that is saying something. I shouted out my anger, and I struck my head wondering how a single human being — as despicable and useless as this rotten excuse for a human being is — can be so profoundly stupid. And arrogant. Surely it has to be a team effort. And the ulterior motive a powerful one.

The insult I used as the title of my last piece on this subject — Ignorance With Impudence — barely touches the level of ignorance nor that of impudence put on full display today.

You see those hands in that photo above, showing a collapsing Biden last Thursday when he was challenged by Fox News’s Peter Doocy on his attempt to blame his Afghanistan catastrophe on his predecessor? Look carefully and you’ll see that they’re drenched in blood. The blood of 13 of our service people killed at Hamid Karzai International Airport last week. The blood of hundreds of needlessly dead Afghans in the same attack. The blood of the Americans, the blood of the Afghans who risked their lives to support us, deliberately left behind while surrounded by rabid terrorists intent on rooting them out and killing them. Also there is the blood of the hundreds, thousands, who will die in Afghanistan, in the United States, and elsewhere in the world as a result of the incredibly bone-headed and callous decisions made by this incompetent and those who allowed and facilitated him to make and carry them out.

If ever there was a time to say there is plenty of blame to go around, this is it. But since Biden is at the top of this heap of excrement and claims the buck stops with him — as if he actually means it, as Harry Truman did — he bears ultimate blame and responsibility for what happened, what will happen. To paraphrase the immortal 1988 words of Senator Lloyd Bentsen, back when Democrats still had some honor and a tad of sense, to vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle, Mr. President, I served with Harry Truman. I knew Harry Truman. Harry Truman was a friend of mine. Mr. President, you’re no Harry Truman.

Stalemate

Once more I find my post taking a different direction than I initially intended. The news continues to come in so fast, and it’s so awful, it’s impossible to keep up with it. I’m not a news service and this is not intended to be either daily reporting or a book. Any one with a fair mind and open eyes can see the reality, the actual events and people creating them, the results of those events and those people, and they don’t need me to continually point them out. My job, as I’ve executed it for more than four years now, is to put the pieces together, to analyze them, and to do what I can to bring people a clear view of the reality. To the extent many of my readers already have a clear view, they read my pieces and nod their heads and occasionally let me know they agree. And I try to give clear views to those readers who don’t see, or don’t want to see, the reality, and I hope I can bring some around to at least consider views other than those they are fed by what I’ve come to call the State Media, the corrupt and biased mainstream media and Big Tech whose lies and coverups in large part brought us to the terrible place we’re now at.

Initially I was going to call this piece Stalemate — the point in a chess match where a player has no legal moves left that won’t land his king in checkmate. It’s a draw, and the game is over. As a nation, we’re now in stalemate, and there are no legal moves left that will get us out of it. As a nation, we’re forced to live in this stasis, which was engineered by the Dem strategists and whoever is calling the shots behind the scenes of the party, and one has to hand them kudos for that achievement, as despicable and dangerous as it is. We have a clearly mentally incompetent president who, by almost any measure, the 25th Amendment was written for. But then, even if he could be removed from office either through that amendment or impeachment, we have a poison pill, the repulsive and dangerous Kamala Harris, as vice president. We get rid of the top guy, and we’re left with what might be an even worse substitute. And below her is the power hungry and vicious Nancy Pelosi. So, three layers deep, we’re left with no good legal moves, and that was the plan all along.

Those same Dem power brokers counted on what they see as the stupidity of the American people, for whom they have no respect other than to use them for their own purposes, and then along came the gift that keeps on giving — the COVID pandemic — which allowed them to flaunt and just plain throw out constitutional protections of our vote. That fraud allowed them to engineer a victory for a doddering old fool you wouldn’t trust to drive your kid’s school bus, let alone head the most powerful country on earth. And they knew that, even in his dementia, given the chance to grab the top accolade of his long and feckless political career — the presidency — Jello-O Joe would put the interest of the country aside and go for it. For this he won my top Profile in Cowardice award.

As I point out in that piece, it wasn’t always this way in American politics, even among the Democratic Party. Read the piece and see, if you forgot or weren’t around at that time, how Thomas Eagleton — a far more capable figure then Joe Biden — stepped down from being George McGovern’s running mate in 1972 when details of some issues with depression Eagleton had dealt with came out. At that time, the good of the country took precedence. That now seems like a prosaic concept.

An Unmitigated Disaster of a Presidency

For anyone who voted for Joe Biden — and, to be perfectly frank, you have to bear some responsibility for this debacle — I defy you to name one single thing Biden has done, one decision he’s made, that has made life better for ordinary Americans. I’ll go one further, and defy you to name one single thing, one single decision, he’s made, that hasn’t made things much worse for this country and its residents. We are so far beyond fucked at this point, it’s hard to even find a suitable word to describe it.

Whether it is throwing open our southwestern border to every ilk of criminal, drug runner, COVID-carrier, and terrorist who cares to cross it, in thorough disregard for our laws and well being — now being augmented by thousands of unvetted Afghans arriving and being sent willy-nilly around the country — taking our focus from competence and merit to attempting to inculcate divisions and distrust in our military, in our corporations and other institutions, and in society at large, to flaunting the Supreme Court and the rule of law to undermine the ability of property owners to pay their bills and stay afloat, to creating what can only be described as confusion on the coronavirus front, this president and his puppet masters have done what they can to sew discord and disorder in the nation. Crime is allowed to spiral out of control, unbridled federal spending is driving inflation, and he took us from energy independence to once more being dependent on the Middle East for our energy.

On the international stage, he has now shown this country to be weak and untrustworthy, and as we’ve learned, weakness breeds instability and tempts bad actors to take chances they would not otherwise. Despite the lies Biden told today — and there is no other word to describe his ridiculous and readily disprovable assertions — we have now created a terrorist nation in Afghanistan, and given a safe haven to not just the Taliban, but their close allies, al Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, and ISIS, among others. Even more mind-boggling, by leaving behind $83 billion in military hardware, we’ve made this terrorist state the fifth best equipped military in the world. The Taliban now have more Black Hawk helicopters, as just one example, than Australia.

Make no mistake. The same bunch of misguided idiots — Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, child-moron Jake Sullivan who purports to be National Security Adviser, throw in Joint Chiefs Chairman and blowhard Mark Milley, and other members of the Obama foreign policy (sic) team — that brought us the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq and the Iranian nuclear deal have now undone 20 years of progress, as difficult as it was, in Afghanistan, and created a mess and a threat that will be our nemesis for decades to come.

Perhaps most poignantly telling are the comments of the parents and spouses and siblings of the 13 slain service people, who spoke of Biden’s insensitivity, his self-absorption, his incessant talking about the death of his son Beau — who did not die in combat — his checking his watch each time, 13 times, a coffin came off the aircraft at Dover Air Force Base. I’ll end this piece with the words of Kathy McCollum, the mother of 20-year-old Marine Rylee James McCollum, killed in the attack on HKIA, who says it better than I ever could.

Calling in to a talk show Friday, McCollum said this:

“My son was one of the Marines who died yesterday. Twenty years and six months old — getting ready to come home from freaking Jordan to be with his wife and witness the birth of his son. And that feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap just sent my son to die. I woke up at four o’clock this morning, two Marines at my door telling me my son was dead. So, to [have White House Press Babbler Jen Psaki on] right before me and listen to that piece of crap talk about diplomatic crap with frickin’ Taliban terrorists who just freakin’ blew up my son and no, nothing, to not say anything about, oh my god, I’m so sorry for families. So, my son is gone.”

McCollum’s son is gone. And as tragically, so is our national honor, and very possibly our security and our future with it.

Featured image, Biden’s Collapse, Al Drago, Bloomberg News via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

Stalemate, from rutrackerpulse.weebly.com. Used under Fair Use.

The Three Heads of the Poisonous Serpent, Jim Watson, Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears in my Substack community, Issues That Matter. Please subscribe here, and there.