Open Thread

Mark Noonan117 Comments

The Experts are still talking up how Trump is doomed…but:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) continues to bring in lots of money thanks to the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

The RNC’s fundraising platform has brought in over $30 million in three months since it launched in June. Officials credit the impeachment inquiry.

That’s a lot of scratch…and while we can’t say for certain what it means, the fact that its happening does say that Trump and the GOP are popular somewhere in the country. Trump is already teeing up general election ads and its more than 13 months from election day…and Democrats won’t get started on a general election campaign for at least five months. You ask anyone who really does politics and if he gets to pick which situation he’s in, he’s going to pick Trump’s.

Meanwhile, our Matt takes note other another aspect of it:

Democrat Senators from red states have expressed concern that the impeachment process started by Nancy Pelosi “may spin out of control and destroy any chance their party might have of winning back the majority next year,” according to a report from The Hill. These Democrats believe that if their party doesn’t act quickly, Trump could “turn the tables on them.”

Would Manchin or, especially, Jones (who is up for re-election next year in a Trump +30 State) really vote to convict?

In case you were wondering how our liberals are dealing with things:

Recently, I went to dinner at the home of Rebecca Kee, a preschool principal in San Francisco who turned to Maddow in her depression and confusion over the 2016 election. I brought a bottle of rosé, and she poured it into glasses decorated with charms that featured Russia-investigation figures on one side and characters from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” on the other. I sipped from the Hope Hicks/Beverly Crusher glass, and we watched Maddow’s show over veggie enchiladas. “I think of her as a news doula: You know the news is going to be painful no matter what, so we might as well have someone who helps us survive it,” Kee told me. Last year, Kee had a Maddow-themed birthday party, at which her friends and her two young sons put on big black glasses and slicked their hair to the side. Also in attendance was a life-size cardboard cutout of Maddow, which is now in storage so as not to startle guests.

These people have lost it. If we don’t win next year, then we deserve every bit of what’s coming to us.

Report indicates that red meat isn’t all that bad for you – which is another “of course”. The campaign against red meat – like previous campaigns against eggs or coffee – were ridiculous efforts by various puritan scolds who got fixated on a thing and then tried to force us all to go along. The key to human diet is moderation – eat the red meat; have the cake; drink the beer…but don’t eat ten pounds of red meat a day; don’t have the whole cake; after two or three beers, ease off. We’re built – by God or Nature, take your pick – to eat pretty much everything there is. My view is that we must have a varied diet to be healthy. To tell anyone to entirely eliminate a food or heavily concentrate on only one thing seems to me rather insane.

A Clean Break

Mark Noonan47 Comments

As the last few weeks have played out in politics, it has forced me to do a complete re-assessment of how I’ve looked at the world for my entire adult life. To be sure, this reconsideration has been ongoing for about a decade, or maybe a little more, but it has really crystalized out recently. It is time for a complete, clean break with what went before and to chart a new path forward.

What Hunter Biden did is nothing new; it isn’t in the least remarkable. He was merely the recipient of what people in his position routinely receive: a special deal which allows him to be very rich for little or no effort. This way his life can be devoted to what really matters: hanging around with other rich people, attending conferences and galas and generally having a swell time. And if he decided to follow in Daddy’s political footsteps, the way would be cleared for him in some safe seat. If you start looking into it – as Matt and I did in our 2007 book, Caucus of Corruption – you just see that it is everywhere. In that book, for political reasons, we concentrated on the Democrat side of the aisle (given that our goal was to show the absurdity of the Democrats 2006 campaign against a so-called “GOP culture of corruption”), but we could easily have written it about politics, in general.

What it really shows is that people who go into politics – with a few very rare exceptions – are in it for themselves. They want power and money and attention and fame and praise and so they go into politics – and almost invariably, if they are even modestly successful at winning office, wind up richer than they did when they started. And it has been going on for a long time, folks; throughout the Western democracies. Just a small quote from Chesterton about 1910 will suffice to show it:

There are, I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy. It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep some thirty years ago over the day’s newspaper and woke up last week over the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same people. In one paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. In the other paper he would find a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine what it is. I suppose it is being governed by extraordinary democratic coincidences.

Funny, huh? How people from the same family can keep winding up on top. Either they are families of geniuses, or someone is making things happen. What are the odds that the son of an American Senator would be just the person an oil company needs to pay $50,000.00 a month to? That the daughter of a President would be just right for that $600,000.00 news gig? Or that another daughter of a different President would prove to be perfect to host the fourth hour of the Today show?

You know that is all bullsh**. I know it is, too. They know it as well. But, it just keeps happening and happening because, well, that’s just the way it is. And it wouldn’t be so bad if they were at least any good at being an oligarchy! Back in Chesterton’s day, there was the cold, hard reality that Winston Churchill was at least as talented as his father, Randolph. There was something there – there was, that is, a justification for Winston getting a leg up (and he did) to enter politics based on his father’s previous efforts. These days, you get to benefit even if the previous person in line was a complete, rotten failure. And rotten failure is all we’ve gotten – and I’m getting very ecumenical in that, by the way. I’m not excusing anyone on partisan grounds any longer.

To be sure, the Republicans I voted for in the past were at least better than the Democrats I voted against (with the exception of McCain: knowing that I’m the co-author of Worst President, please understand that I believe McCain would have been even worse than Obama proved to be). But they were only better in degree, not in kind. I mean, let’s face some cold, hard facts here: President Bush the Younger was re-elected with 51% of the vote in 2004 and came into his second term with high approval ratings and a Republican Congress. With all this, he couldn’t even manage to de-fund Planned Parenthood or NPR! It could have been done, easily, in a budget reconciliation between House and Senate and there would have been nothing the Democrats could have done about it. This was “better” than a President Kerry who probably would have increased PP funding, but not really better in that the taxes of pro-life Americans were still going to fund something they consider abhorrent…and which Bush and the entire GOP campaigned on getting rid of.

I know some will say that this is just our GOPe screwing it’s base and that the Democrats don’t do that. But, they do. Obama was elected in 2008 with 53% of the vote and came into office with a Democrat Congress and a filibuster-proof Senate majority…and he couldn’t even get the single payer health system Democrats say they want. It would have been easy. The GOP could have done nothing to stop it. Enact a 10% payroll tax to fund it and just start passing out the cash to people who need health care. That you and I know it would have been a disaster is neither here nor there – our side had lost the election and the Democrats won all the power they could possibly need to make all Democrat dreams come true…and they couldn’t do something like that. They instead wound up with the abomination known as Obamacare which even if it had worked as planned would still have left millions out in the cold and cost like the devil – but they couldn’t even write something that worked! Meanwhile, not only did Obama not end the wars they campaigned against in 2008, he started new one’s…droning the living sh** out of every poor, brown skinned person they could target (well, those they weren’t letting in as unvetted refugees, that is). A public works bonanza that didn’t create any public works. A slew of new spending which improved nothing. This is what the Democrat voters get for investing their time and effort? Yep – in other words, nothing: but lots and lots for whomever is the crony. Democrat cronies made out like bandits. But your average purple-haired Democrat wanting more safe spaces? Not much.

And as far as the social disintegration we’ve seen over the past 60 years – we’ve been blinded by the Democrats pushing the disintegration that we haven’t noticed the Republicans letting them do it. And when they have power to roll it back, doing nothing of the sort. And now we see in the Epstein case the reason why it might have all been allowed to happen: Lord only knows how many of the high and mighty are caught in that web…but what better way to get out from under that rock than by making the rock legal? By making you, a normal person, the bad guy if you point out some of the disgusting actions?

Illegal immigration to provide votes for Democrats and cheap labor for Republicans. Wars which don’t end in victory or defeat. Enforcing immorality against popular wishes. Providing government sinecures to anyone who will toe the line – and who won’t be got rid of no matter how corrupt or stupid they prove. Accepting money from foreign entities who want the United States destroyed. Both sides, all the time – and on top of being this stupidly destructive, raking it in for themselves, their families and their friends. It is time to bring an end to all that. By peaceful means if possible but, ultimately, by any means necessary. Our peaceful means are President Trump.

Trump isn’t part of the system, you see. Dimwits look at his billions and go, “he must be one of them”. But, the bottom line is that he’s not. He’ll hang out with them. Be friends with them. But he never was of them. He made his own way and got his pile of money…and then looked around and saw, from the 1980’s, what was happening to his country and started to wonder why, and if there were anything he could do about it? He essentially first let Bill Clinton have his chance. Then Bush the Younger. Then even Obama. But he found out something – it didn’t matter who was in charge, they were all in on it, together. That is, regardless of stated political philosophy, the primary goal of nearly everyone in politics was personal enrichment and making sure no outsider pushed his or her way in. Trump decided to push his way in.

And now he’s there – and outside of a precious few (Cruz, Paul…and, oddly, McConnell), he’s nearly alone fighting for one thing: us. The United States of America. We, the people. And everyone inside is furious and terrified and so are lashing back as much as they can hoping that something, anything will turn up to get rid of Trump. And, make no mistake about it, they are already planning on punishing us for electing Trump. They don’t propose to allow this sort of thing to happen again.

I’ve mostly stopped arguing with liberals these days – first off, it is pointless but, secondly, I’m starting to pity them; nearly as much as I pity that shrinking number on the right who still stand aloof from Trump: they simply can’t shake free from the line they’ve been fed. And none of us can get high and mighty about that: to one degree or another, all of us were suckered at one time or another. All of us believed in some aspect of the con being used to keep us confused, frightened and divided while the Ruling Class stays fat and happy. But for those of us who have awakened from the con, it is time for a clean break – a refusal to accept that anything over the past 60 years was any good…a desire, that is, to move forward in an entirely new way, unshackled to whatever we might have said or done in the past. We can see what happened; we can see what needs to be done – we can’t trip ourselves up (nor allow our opponents to slow us down) by fussing over what views we might have expressed previously. Our desire is a Constitutional Republic of free people – our means of getting there must be “whatever works”, not adherence to a dogma which might, upon review, only have been a means whereby the con artists kept us in line in the past. I, for one, will only defend what I find defensible and will attack whatever I see as wrong.

We still have a magnificent window to win this thing and fix our nation – naturally, the first requirement is protecting President Trump. But the next step is just as important: a complete review of everything and asking the question, “Is this good?”. We’ve already learned that so-called “Free Trade” wasn’t what many of us thought it was – take that as your template and ask yourself, “is this thing I’ve adhered to really in the interests of a free people? Or is it something which only serves the well-connected?”. As Lincoln once said, it is time to think anew and act anew: not to create something different (nothing can be more magnificent than the United States, as far as human effort allows), but to recreate what we had, but even better than before. And if that mission requires us to knock a few off their pedestals, then that’s just what will have to happen.

Trump Impeachment, Continued

Mark Noonan41 Comments

There are wonders if Pelosi really had 218 votes for impeachment – my guess is that she does; but that would probably entail about a dozen House Democrats walking the plank; ie, almost ensuring their defeat for re-election next year.

This whole thing is a set up, of course. Seems that someone in the Deep State altered the whistleblower rules about a month back to allow hearsay to be reported – used to be you had to have some direct knowledge of the event. If I were Trump, I’d order that no rule changes are valid unless he, personally, signs off on them. That aside, this is a crafted plan…but, to do what? I mean, of course the Democrats would love it if Trump’s support collapses and the GOP committed suicide by voting to remove him. But, so far there has been no drop in Trump’s support (even Nate Silver is saying that Trump is as popular as Obama at this point in his Presidency – and this, keep in mind, with relentlessly negative coverage rather than the daily MSM tongue bath that Obama got). The GOP is raking in money off the impeachment issue (last I checked, $15 million in the 72 hours after Pelosi’s announcement). Mitt is being Mitt, of course, and a few other wets in the GOP are making their high-minded statements, but there doesn’t appear to be any real crack in the ranks…so, what does this accomplish? Not sure.

And that’s before we get to some really cold, hard facts. From what I’ve read, I guess that a very large portion of Democrat voters – perhaps a majority – believe that if the House impeaches, Trump is removed. They are unaware of the whole Senate trial aspect of it. But that is what has to keep Democrat leaders up at night – a trial in the Senate means a trial conducted under whatever rules McConnell decides upon (and the Senate could just vote to dismiss the charges without a trial, guys). Anything that Trump and McConnell would like to be revealed would be – sure, the Chief Justice presides and, in theory (no one really knows), could make rulings from the bench on what is admissible…but the Senate can override the Justice by simple majority vote. In short, an actual trial would be a nightmare for the Democrats and while operating under McConnell’s rules, they’ll have the task of talking 23 Republican Senators into removing Trump – and that’s if all the Democrats stay on board (Manchin would be a likely “no”, absent rock-solid evidence, I think). It’s an insurmountable obstacle – and only real criminal activity and Trump dropping to an average of 30% in the polls would make it possible.

It could be, of course, that they are just toying with this – willing to move if things go their way, but mostly just placating their base while hoping that something turns up to separate Trump from his supporters (that is what all of this has been about since Day One, by the way: the Democrats know that to win in 2020, they have to convince three or four million of Trump’s 2016 voters to abandon him…doesn’t matter how much they run up the score in CA and NY, if they can’t get back PA and MI, they’re toast…and they know it).

As for our side: don’t know about you guys, but I coldly furious about the whole thing. It is, now, only incidentally about Trump: this is a very large portion of people – including many in leadership – who are saying that I’m not allowed to participate in my own governance: that I’m not allowed to vote for someone disapproved of by the Ruling Class. I’ve come across some rather ardently anti-Trump people over the past three days who are now determined to vote Trump just on that principle: that we get to decide and what we decide is what will happen until we decide differently.

Trump Impeachment

Mark Noonan106 Comments

It is less than it seems so far – for there to be a real impeachment inquiry, the House would have to vote to do so, and so far Pelosi isn’t making that move…and it can’t be for lack of votes: such a thing would garner 218 (at least) votes in the House because too many Democrats would face a primary challenge if they didn’t go along with it. So, why isn’t she moving forward? My view is that the far left base of the Democrats – mostly upper class, urban whites – are the only people on fire for impeachment and Pelosi is trying to thread the needle: make it seem like she’s doing it, but not actually doing it.

The trouble is, these things have a way of just growing on their own. People in the Democrat ranks are already staking out extreme positions and in an election year, the need to one-up on it will make it more likely that nearly everyone stakes out such a position. Democrats are caught in a vise – their attempt to separate Trump from his base – that is all Trump/Russia was ever about – has failed but their own stalwarts have taken it as Gospel. And if you really believe that Trump is a Russian agent placed in office by Putin – and that is what they believe – then there can be no reason not to impeach. To try to hold back from the last step might prove impossible.

No one can tell how this will play out: we know Trump is innocent and so any airing of the facts will help Trump. But the political dynamic is unprecedented: we’ve never had a President actively seeking re-election while an impeachment plays out. Get ready for a wild ride.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan60 Comments

I’m getting some feedback on “Mirrors” and I have to say I’m pleased – people are liking it. Wish it would sell more, of course! But, the main thing is that I’ve written a story that people like. And I’m very grateful for that.

So, the Ukraine thing – looks more and more like it is another self-own by the Democrats: it is the Bidens who might be in jeopardy, not Trump. My view: in any controversy regarding Trump, always work on the assumption that he’s the guy who didn’t break the law. We’ve long heard about Biden’s son getting sweet heart deals in Ukraine…and my bet is that this NSA “whistleblower” was a desperate rear-guard to try and keep it from coming out. RSM has thoughts.

Patriots ditch Antonio Brown after a mere 11 days with rising allegations of bad behavior. I don’t know what is true in this – it’ll come out over time, I’m sure.

We’re close to flipping the 9th Circuit – this is why we elected Trump and why we have to re-elect him. Once the Courts are firmly in the hands of judges who will enforce the law not only will the left no longer be able to impose their policies via judicial fiat, but we’ll be able to start rolling back the previous, unconstitutional rulings liberal judges made. All those years the Tru-Cons told us they’d do this…and they never, ever did: Trump has nearly done it in three years. All that was lacking was the will.

“Ad Astra” has a good review. I might have to go see it – and as the Progs are simply hating Sallone’s latest “First Blood” installment, I’ll probably have to check it out, too.

Trump’s approval rating is better than Obama’s at this point in his term. And this with, I’m very certain, polls cooked to make Trump look worse than he is.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan95 Comments

Polls are meh, but there is a poll which says that Trump’s approval among Hispanics is at 37% and African-Americans at 26%. If so, the Democrats are doomed. But, once again, it is a poll. On the other hand, I’ve seen various news stories indicating that Team Trump is rolling out a very sophisticated voter outreach program…not just designed to do the usual stuff, but do things like bring people into voting who haven’t voted before or not very often. If they can really pull off something like that, then the 2020 results might be the shocker of all shocks…and other than a few bits and pieces fed to MSMers (some of which will be deliberate misdirection), most people won’t see it until it happens.

Beto decided to hand the GOP a gift in the form of admitting that liberals like him are after gun confiscation. Beto knows he won’t be the nominee – and he also knows that he has no real future in Texas politics. So, he’s just setting fire to things because it will generate attention and money and allow him to live well. But the bottom line is that a Democrat President for candidate has called for confiscation…and you can rely on it that none of the others will really dissent from that view. They can’t: they’ve told their mostly-mindless base that guns are bad and for a Progressive, all bad things must be utterly destroyed. Just that one assertion might get Trump two or three million more votes in 2020.

Democrats want to impeach Trump – because they’ve been told that Orange Man Bad and, once again, all bad things must be destroyed. However, the Democrat leaders know that doing such a thing absent a half dozen GOP Senators willing to vote with them is political suicide…and that wouldn’t happen unless Trump’s approval among GOP voters drops below, say, 75% (latest poll shows him at about 94% approval among GOP voters). So, they are trying to have it both ways – telling their base that they are super serial gonna get that guy Trump, but behind the scenes not actually doing anything. Well, Trump’s DOJ is calling them out on it – essentially telling them to sh** or get off the pot; which boxes the Democrats in nicely. They’ll eventually either have to drop it or drive forward…either way it would be a political disaster for them.

Abortion “doctor” kept body parts of his victims…you know, like serial killers do. This is not at all surprising – no decent doctor would perform an elective abortion. Only the dregs of the medical field would go into that as a primary means of making money…and the dregs tend to be low caliber people. Like this house of horrors abortionist.

China has some food problems:

…lifting the tariffs, China has just admitted it cannot produce enough protein for national consumption, both as a staple or as a preferred meat. Imagine a US shortage of wheat and chicken, with no real access to corn or beef, and a couple dozen urban areas of 20 millions or more with just a third arable land as now. That’s China.

So, what’s the problem with China’s agricultural industry? Basically, they simply do not have enough land to grow the volume of soy they need; and, their pork production is highly diffused and is ravaged by a massive and seemingly uncontrollable swine flu epidemic. In fact, it is estimated that up to 60% of China’s pigs are infected with the flu.

To compound a bad situation to worse, Chinese officials are both incapable of enforcing a quarantine and too corrupt to stop the spread of the flu.

China is a giant on spindly legs. We have far more leverage over them than we suspect – and we’ve never used it, until just recently. We’ll see how Trump does.

9/11 at 18

Mark Noonan50 Comments

Hard to believe it has been that long. People are becoming adults in our nation who have no memory of it. But, if they join the Army we will send them to fight in Afghanistan! And then accuse them of being war criminals.

I can no longer get weepy about 9/11 – it has been burned out of me. I used to feel anger about it, but now I know if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. Bin Laden picked his target well – he must have been an avid reader of the American MSM. No nation that allows the garbage it puts out is in a healthy state. We managed to whack bin Laden – something he knew was a risk – but at the end of the day, we’ve done nothing against the ideology he supported and we are even more riven by faction and self-hatred than we were on 9/10/2001.

I pray for the souls of the departed, and that our nation is cured of it’s errors, and becomes, once again, a nation which can respond to an attack like 9/11.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan38 Comments

The Democrats really do seem to want to go all-in on leftist insanity – what was just a couple years ago the fringe is now the center for the Democrats. One excellent example is the way Democrats are treating the 2018 Georgia governors race:

While Beto is not the only Democratic candidate for president who has kissed the Abrams ring by indulging in the fantasy that she would be governor had Brian Kemp not allegedly committed election fraud, he has perhaps embraced the myth more than the rest.

All of us are old enough to remember when Democrats said questioning the election results was a horrible thing – but what really makes this sick and twisted is that the Democrats routinely engage in voter fraud. Now they are claiming to be victims of it, without the slightest bit of evidence…and only to pander to a far left base. My theory going into 2020 is that there is a line – which none of us can see – which if crossed will result in a Trump landslide. There is a point so far left that the Democrats will alienate 60% of the electorate. They may have already crossed it – once again, the line can’t be seen because you can never fully appreciate how things work out in the public mind over the course of time. But if the Democrats keep pushing this way, they will cross it.

Vegans got their butts kicked when they stormed a Spanish rabbit farm. Yeah, I laughed.

Brit MP’s checked with their masters in Brussels about delaying Brexit – because that is what this is all about: the British Ruling Class wants to turn all power over to the EU while retaining all the perks of power in the UK for themselves. It is really nothing more than that – just a Ruling Class wanting to abdicate and stay in office.

China is working against Trump’s re-election – which is a big no-brainer. China wants and needs an American President who will kowtow to China’s wishes. Every US President from Nixon to Obama did…which was amazingly stupid. Only a madman would want to help build up the power of a nation which has 314 million men fit for military duty. A couple centuries ago Napoleon was asked what to do about China and his words were, “let China sleep”. He knew what you could do with manpower…all it takes is intelligent leadership and they’d be off to the races. China now has intelligent leadership. Our job is to contain China, not help her out. But China is still 20-30 years away from having the technical ability to successfully fight us – they could definitely stop a US invasion of China, but they can’t project their power far outside China. Yet. Our job is to make sure “yet” never arrives.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan50 Comments

I got into a gun control argument with a Brit on Twitter the other day – very unusual in that it wasn’t nasty. But, it also didn’t really have a conclusion…the guy simply stopped responding. This was after I pointed out something which most don’t think about these days:

To love someone is to do what is best for them – if I am to show love for my fellows then certain things are required of me. One is that I never permit someone to be unjustly attacked. Another is that I restrain the wrongdoer from carrying out his plans. The former is far more easily understood than the latter, but neither are really thought of these days.

What my interlocutor was on about is that my Christian faith – which he claims to share – is about mercy and turning the other cheek and so forth; so, it isn’t really right for me to have a gun to shoot the burglar. But the reality is that it is almost a moral requirement that I be armed – as I’m physically capable of bearing arms – because if I am unarmed I can neither defend my neighbor nor attempt to prevent the burglar from doing his evil deed. I can only sit helplessly by…while my neighbor is robbed and maybe killed and the burglar risks his immortal soul in the commission of his crime. How can I be said to be showing love to either of them by doing nothing? There is much we’ve lost: most importantly our sense that justice and mercy go together. Its not one or the other – and, in fact, if you try to do either in isolation, you’ll get neither.

Germany’s Populist-Conservative AfD did well in regional elections – so well, in fact, that Germany’s other major parties (CDU, SPD and Greens) are thinking of a partnership with the German Communist Party (now called Linke, because “Communist” sounds bad). This is the mask fully dropping: all the parties were simply about who gets to slice the pie, not about what the pie shall be. And the Ruling Class in Germany – and around the West – wants the pie to be about open borders and only the Elite getting to decide what happens. We’re all in this together, folks: as goes AfD goes Brexit goes Trump. Either we all win, or we’ll all be destroyed.

John Hindraker is probably like most of us these days – watching what’s happening and figuring the Democrats are completely out of touch with reality. Of course, he also notes that he could be the guy out to lunch. We’ll all find out next November – but, I’m betting it is the Democrats who are busily alienating 60% of the electorate.

France’s Macron is offering a $15 billion bribe to Iran to keep it in the nuke deal – which we’re out of and Iran never had the faintest idea of abiding by. I don’t really understand this: is Macron that stupid, or does Iran just have so much dirt on Europe’s Ruling Class that they have to play ball?

South Dakota Democrat Party closes its last two offices for lack of funds. One down, forty nine to go…

Open Thread

Mark Noonan18 Comments

Looks like Hurricane Dorian may miss the USA…this after liberals went all gleeful at the prospect of it hitting Trump properties. Seems that MAGA has been granted a special dispensation.

Greece is seeing a new surge of migrants from the Muslim world – a lot from Afghanistan. By land from Kabul to Athens is 3,591 miles. That is quite a trip. It took Alexander the Great years to make it…and somehow I don’t think most Afghans own an SUV to make that trip go faster. Someone is organizing and supplying this migration. And government must be involved as before they get to Greece, they’ve crossed at least two international borders.

And here’s the sort of upstanding citizens Greece and Europe are getting:

A … asylum-seeker was arrested in Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, France, on Saturday after he allegedly killed a 19-year-old and wounded nine others at a subway stop.

The suspect, armed with a knife and a “skewer” of some sort, was arrested at the scene. He is reportedly a 33-year-old Afghan citizen who was hoping to gain asylum in France.

The bad news: I bet his attack will probably not be held against him at his asylum hearing.

Mickey Kaus talks Epstein:

We’re in the middle of a global populist surge. There’s a sense that elites are not playing by the same rules as everyone else. They might not even be playing the same game. It’s pretty clear that Epstein was running some kind of a sex ring for the rich and well connected. How big a ring? We don’t know until we try to find out. But there are reports out there [click if you dare] that it’s bigger than we might think — bigger than old, familiar Prince Andrew, involving a non-trivial cross-section of business and entertainment leaders, plus some prominent Anglo-American families and maybe a handful of nation states.

Read the whole thing – there are circles within circles going on here. I started out figuring someone handed him the hemlock (as it were) to protect some other interest of his…but I’m starting to wonder if he was killed? We don’t really know what he was doing all those years when the very top of the global elite were at his beck and call; even after his conviction. And sure in heck the global elite doesn’t want us to find out. But, we must: we have to know. We need to know how Epstein got his money; how he got his connections; who protected him; who was involved on all levels. Chips fall where they may – we need to find out every last detail…and then start arresting everyone who committed even the least crime related to it all.

Still lots of talk about the Hong Kong protests – but, in the end, the people of Hong Kong have no weapons. They are doomed, unless the rest of China rises…and from all accounts, the people of China don’t want to rise.

There was some renewed talk of the way the CIA backed modern art stuff in the middle of the 20th century. The official word is that the CIA felt we needed to have some cool, new art to show the world that we were hip and with it…what I think actually happened is that the CIA was penetrated from the beginning and the USSR used the CIA to push cultural garbage (like modern art) as a means of tearing down the West.