Open Thread

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.

Hurricane Irene Open Thread

Seems a bit of a fizzle – and Real Science is saying that it came ashore with only 33 MPH winds.  I don’t know about that – not nearly enough in the know to make a judgment.  So far, it does seem like the wall-to-wall news coverage is overblown…but, then again, what else is there to report?  Not like there are any wars involving American soldiers to report about; nor is it like there are any ongoing major revolutions and civil wars to cover; we know darn well that the economic news is boring because there is no risk out there of any sort of downturn…so, might as well cover the storm.

I know we have a bit of a national psychosis because of Katrina, but we should really understand what happened…it wasn’t a big storm so much as grossly incompetent government.  The city of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana (under weak executives who were no more than mouth pieces for a corrupt Ruling Class) failed, and that is why so  many people died…under non-corrupt government both New Orleans and Louisiana have weathered post-Katrina disasters with no mishaps.  The bottom line is that the chances of a Katrina-like event happening again can only be calculated as the day by day odds of a major storm hitting an area long under liberal-Democrat control…if you don’t have both sides of that, then you’re not going to have too much trouble unless it is a truly gigantic Category 4 or 5 storm.

At any rate, my prayers for those under the storm – even a modest hurricane can cause quite a lot of damage and disruption and I hope everyone gets through it ok.