Pressure builds within the Democratic Party for radical action
It has been widely noted that there GOP does not intend to offer any real resistance to Donald Trump as it believes that between the gerrymandering, race baiting and anti-GOTV operations that they can run with Donald Trump and Russian support - there is no way it can lose the upcoming elections. Even in the limit where there is a massive public tilt away from the GOP, the GOPers themselves will pocket a significant chunk of cash and be protected by armies of lawyers against accountability for their actions. This is the "Red Wave" phenomenon that Trump keeps tweeting about and Russian bots keep amplifying.
This may actually be true, though not everyone (even Republican) agrees with it.
The Democrats (especially the older and established ones) are under a great deal of pressure to do more. A lot of people attribute Donald Trump's "victory" to the inability of the Democratic party leadership to inspire confidence in younger radical voters. The argument made is that while Sanders was a Democratic version of Donald Trump, his message resonated with young voters who felt drawn to the vision of radical change.
Whether the GOP likes it or not, the Democratic Party may be forced to take a page out of the GOP's book. Essentially repeat the GOP's Tea Partyism and McConnellism - clearly they have been shown to work in the past - so there is at least that going for them.
The victory of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is indicative of the rising tension within the Democratic Party.
Trump seems to see this as a signal that the Democratic establishment will become more malleable to his point of view. But as with all things Trump - this is most likely a case of him trying to find solace in a world that increasingly seems to make him inconsolable. With conviction by Mueller seeming increasingly likely - it is difficult to see how Trump won't jump at any random indicator of victory.
It is possible that the RIS would be able to run an interference operation in the Democratic Party - clearly the DNC leaks were effective back in the day at polarizing the Bernie Bros, but the corrosive nature of even indirectly supporting Trump will soon become obvious as the US economy reels under the twin blows of cutting access to cheap illegal Mexican labor and imposition of counter tariffs.
In other news Emin Algarov* has a made a catchy music video,
You Got Me Good.
I will hand it to you KGB boys - you definitely have balls! but it seems to me that Putin has told Trump to either end sanctions or end his presidency or both...
What else can one read into the words,
"The things that you told me, Made it so hard to read your mind."
and
that last scene with the poker table with Trump, HRC, Stormy Daniels and Emin (representing Putin)?
I don't understand what you are doing, but hopefully Trumpers are ready for when Julian Assange drops the dime on Trump. It is going to look very bad coming a month before the 2018 elections.
Also are you absolutely certain that your nuclear missile forces are at a sustainably high level of alert? because we all know unless you can launch all your nuclear missiles at once, there is no hope of you prevailing against the BMD system.
And are you planning to plant nuclear device along the cables that carry the vital signals between the US nuclear command networks? Is that why your research ships and diplomatic envoys keep getting so close to the buried cables?
* Emin is Trump's partner in all his "no business" in Russia. His dad is a Jefe in the Putin Cartel. Putin can't survive in Moscow for much longer unless he can get the sanctions lifted at least a teensy bit.
Investment in Gorsuch finally returns a dividend
With the Supreme Court upholding Donald Trump's Muslim Ban and trampling on women's rights in the same exact day - it seems Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell's investment in Judge Gorsuch has returned a dividend.
I guess the ultimate payoff will come on the day that the court exonerates both McConnell and Trump on high crimes, but until then we can all enjoy these tender mercies.
Who knows when that will come but for now lets watch as SCOTUS 5-4s the gentle people of Mt. Pleasant Wisconsin.
Revisiting Ghost Stories
This post is more of a mental note to myself and others like me who seem to be losing our minds with the relentless torrent of Trump bullshit.
There is ample evidence to suggest that Putin managed to turn Trump against the USIC. The total extent of collaboration between them is being investigated by Mueller et al. and hopefully in the process all the evidence will be reviewed and a clear picture of events obtained.
Looking at this purely from the perspective of a war between intelligence communities in Russia and the US is helpful as it allows us to distill out some of the biggest pieces in the puzzle.
The last major public victory the USIC achieved against RIS was when 10 Illegals were picked up during Operation Ghost Stories. There is very little clarity in the FBI's public information releases as to what the exact targets of these 10 illegals were. Two sets of illegals (Chapman and Murphy/Guryeva) were allegedly targeting people in the US political spectrum. Some of the others were using their positions to identify IC recruits in US undergraduate colleges.
It also does not appear that this was a ring - as in the agents were not clustered or operated in a fashion that supported each other beyond their cover identities. There was only one point where Chapman and the Murphys/Guryevs touched - Chapman was intimate with a USMC linguistic cryptologist turned realtor named Bill Staniford and the Murphys/Guryevs were his accountants. (I am unsure how much the FBI has really screened Staniford [
2]).
This means that the only way the FBI could have uncovered so many at a time, is if there had been a high level defection from the SVR Illegals directorate. In Russian press accounts of the events, Col. Alexander Potoyev [
1] was proposed as the source of the leak and Russian audiences were promised that a "Mercador" was sent to take care of things. (Ramon Mercader was the name of the NKVD agent who killed Trotsky). Reports also mentioned two unnamed agents of RIS escaping to Russia before the FBI got them.
The part that bothers me about this, is that none of the Illegals caught had very deep legends. The legends were barely one layer deep. If the FBI (or RCMP or anyone else) had just followed up on one of the identities, they would have discovered the lack of backstopping. This suggests to me that whatever this group was - they were not the deeper
There was a suggestion by Bill Gertz that the "ring" was actually a support structure for one or two deeper Illegals inside the NSA's Fort Meade facility. But that too was never confirmed by other sources.
The captured Illegals were exchanged for four US spies in Russia. One of those exchanged was
Sergei Skripal. As far as most of the world was concerned - the matter ended there. For the USIC - there was a victory - an SVR illegal organization that was attempting infiltration was contained. And for the Russians there was pain - an expensive operation had just been terminated on unfavorable grounds.
I fear Ghost Stories left behind a wounded lion, one that swore to even the score in a way that few of us could imagine.
Significance of the Battle of the Red Hen at Lexington
In the Shenandoah Valley between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountain ranges sits the little known town of Lexington.
Though named after the place in Massachusetts that sparked the American War of Independence, the town had led a very quiet life, hosting the complex history of the American Civil War but somehow largely staying out of the limelight.
Last week, the Red Hen, a tiny restaurant in this town changed all that.
As a form of protest against the Trump policy of separating children from families at the border, the owner of this restaurant refused service to Sarah Sanders, Trump's Minister for Propaganda and Lies.
This was entirely expected.
In America - most restaurants employ illegal immigrants (usually Hispanic) as cooks and janitorial staff. And the waitstaff and front of the house people are usually students or young artists (with a disproportionately large representation of LGBTQ people).
When Trump's immigration bullshit backfires, most restaurants will go out of business - they will simply not be able to meet labor costs.
So it is only natural that the first sparks of the revolution appear in a family owned American restaurant.
The fact that the owner refused service sent shock waves through the Trump establishment and their followers in "Real America" (wherever-the-fuck that is). What on earth could be more "American" than a restaurant called the Red Hen* in a town called Lexington in Virginia of all places?
Even in the Fox News-"Brietbarf"-Alex Jones-QAnon controlled news bubble that Trumpers live in, there was a slow stinging realization of the fact that there would be unavoidable personal consequences for supporting Trump that would outlive any joy that came from supporting him.
This sense of realization lit a fire that seriously chapped Trumper asses and the resulting Trumper Tears nearly drowned the Eastern Seaboard.
But most Trumpers do not appear to have grasped the full import of what I call the Battle of the Red Hen at Lexington.
In America - most vegetable farms, dairies, meat packing, grain processing facilities also run almost exclusively on *illegal* immigrant labor. Most hotels, restaurants that cook the food run on the same thing. Most janitorial services are run by the same.
Can all these illegal immigrants be replaced by "Real Americans"? NO they cannot - because NO REAL AMERICAN would work for such poor wages and social mobility possibilities. With unemployment currently at 4%, there aren't any "Real Americans" to take such jobs, and even at the height of 2008-9 when unemployment was skyrocketing - NO REAL AMERICANS wanted to take these jobs. Even if we force "Real Americans" to work these jobs - the quality will be shit. Just as the farmers in Alabama or the Crab Industry in Maryland what happens when you do that.
Can all these illegal immigrants be replaced by robots? Sure - in about fifty to a hundred years. That is how long it will take to make the robots to replace them.
So there will be a shortfall and an economic contraction will result from this kind of batshit crazy interference in the flow of labor into the US. There will be a fucking famine.
In India that there are Yoga Masters who can reduce their body's metabolic rate and breathe ten times less air and slow their heart rate to the 10 beats/min level. But if you suddenly step on some random person's neck - they aren't going to spontaneously transform into a Yoga Master - they will fucking die before that happens.
That is where the US economy is right now - between the tariffs and whatever this separation madness is - we are looking at the death of the largest economy in known history. I have never seen a nation put a gun to its own head and pull the trigger like this.
Trump staff seem to have forgotten the law of unintentional consequences.
If you take away their kids - what is to prevent them from taking away yours?
Have kids ? ever use a housekeeper or maid? Ever send them to a place that uses a housekeeper or maid?- say a day care? or a school? or a mall? or a hotel?
Kids want to go to Cancun or Punta Cana for vacation? Ever take a vacation in those places? Is there some reason why CDG/Zetas/MS13 won't reciprocate? Or are we in that same stupid mindset we were in the 80s where we thought that we could waltz around Lebanon pissing all over the Shias and never face a riposte?**
* IIRC this is an American breed of chicken, I don't think they are as popular outside the US. Please correct me if I am wrong.
** Remember
this?
"Col. Timothy J. Geraghty, the man who commanded the Marines in Beirut 25 years ago. Geraghty wrote an article last year for the U.S. Naval Institute’s publication Proceedings: "The Marine and the French headquarters were targeted primarily because of who we were and what we represented. … It is noteworthy that the United States provided direct naval gunfire support — which I strongly opposed for a week — to the Lebanese Army at a mountain village called Suq-al-Garb on 19 September and that the French conducted an air strike on 23 September in the Bekaa Valley. American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality, and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision."
This Immigration/Separation Craziness - what is most likely going on.
After reading Trump's latest tweet storm and Melania's bizarre visit to Texas, I think I finally have a bead on what may really be going on with this immigration stuff.
Let's briefly recap where we are right now. The 2018 election is coming up, and the GOP wants to make sure that it make a crap ton of money regardless IMHO of whether it actually wins. This 2018 election is basically a shakedown of all the traditional GOP voters. The GOP boomer brass knows the pickings will be slim but in order to ensure legal bulwarks against all the criminal stuff they have pulled, they *have* to squeeze as much juice as possible out of their own voters.
The immigration policy shift - i.e. separating kids from parents at the borders - was a calculated move towards that end. It was designed to shore up faltering support in its base while ensuring that the GOP still looked like it was a competent group of people. For this stunt to work - the whole racket had to have an "off" switch something that would reset the problem - i.e. re-unite the parents and the kids.
But this appears to be where everything has fallen apart. Between the incompetence of the DHS (if I am reading Secy Nielsen's words correctly), and Donald Trump's own agenda's the reset/off switch is completely broken. And the GOP is now taking massive hits for a poorly implemented policy.
No one in their right mind would want illegal immigration but there are sensible ways of implementing a policy that protects the interests of all human beings involved. The way this shit show has been run - there are simply no winners here... that is apart from Trump himself.
It appears that while the GOP was scheming up ways to shakedown its constituents in 2018, the Trump was trying to find ways of protecting himself from the OSC Mueller after the 2018 elections.
Trump's approach appears to have been simple, he basically created a situation where the GOP's traditional funding sources would run for the hills due to the complete mishandling of the separations issue. The objective here was to asymmetrically suppress the GOP's independent sources of funding and to make it more dependent on him personally for funds.
This part is critical if Trump is to survive in power till 2020 and stay out of jail beyond that.
If the GOP wins in 2018, they will have no need of him in 2020. They might seek to impeach him in order to secure 2020. Russia might find a different engagement point inside the GOP - all sorts of stuff could go on. After the impeachment the GOP might try to convict Trump - who knows.
If the GOP loses badly in 2018, unless the GOP lays down the tracks (like McConnell did during Obama years) to save Trump - Democrats will impeach & convict Trump before 2020.
So in either scenario having the GOP hogtied in Trump's basement in a gimp suit is the only option that works for Trump.
Unfortunately I don't think that works for the GOP.
So I am not sure where this will lead us going forward. I did not see this part coming. I knew that the GOP and Trump would have a show-down after 2018 - but I thought they would remain aligned on the idea of looting their supporters.
This is a different dynamic than what I had anticipated.
Baffled by Secy Kristjen Nielsen
I am baffled by Kristjen Nielsen's behavior.
She came highly recommended by the Bush Administration and she had positive reviews even among Obama era Nat Sec officials.
Why is she behaving like this?
Trump is clearly proud of his policy. Sessions and Miller can't stop masturbating in public and Bannon's busy on every TV channel telling his Old Racist White Male supporters what an awesome job he has done delivering on their repressed desire to kill brown children.
There is a long US history of taking children from POC, Native Americans, Asians, the indigent and mentally handicapped etc.... from their parents and slaughtering them for sport.
All manner of justifications are concocted for this and every effort was made at the time to hide the full impact of what was being done from the public. (c.f.
Carlisle Indian School,
Tennessee Children's Home Society,
Japanese child separation during internment, just about anything related to
Charles Davenport, and so on.)
So why would a person so highly recommended, deny evidence that is plainly staring everyone in the face?
Why gaslight like this?
What is the point of doing this?
She has now put her own department in a horribly compromised position.
This makes the department more vulnerable to infiltration by hostile forces and subversion.
What possible gain could come from that?
By acting like the entire program that Trump initiated doesn't exist - she has created a legal vacuum in which anything goes and the agents in the field have NO reasonable expectation of official sanction.
This is the strategic equivalent of taking an axe to ones own head. It is madness.
In this climate when stories of abuses leak out - she will be forced to use Nat Sec sedition laws to achieve any measurable information control.
And that will not stop anything - when eventually it all comes out, the entire thing will be blamed on her. Not on Trump. People will say she failed to recognize the abuses and failures and guide the department in its hour of need. They will say the leadership failed the staff.
This doesn't make any sense.
"Migration" v/s "Invasion"
The Rakhigarhi data is now out. There is little to no evidence of DNA markers corresponding to the Steppes people, there is some evidence of mixing with Iranian agriculturists. This new finding supports the ideas proposed in earlier papers about the mixing of Indian out-of-Africa indigenous peoples' with Iranian agriculturalists prior to mixing with people of Steppes genetics (the canonical "Aryans"). As the Rakhigarhi remains are dated via consistent stratigraphy and carbon dating, we can now safely say that the IVC itself was a "pre-Aryan" civilization.
Quite naturally there is considerable upset in the Out-of-India crowd and so an attempt is being made to slant the interpretation of the results. (see
this piece in ET).
A red flag in this piece is the use of the word "Invasion" to describe the influx of Aryans.
There has *NEVER* been any evidence of an Aryan invasion. There are linguistic peculiarities such a sudden shift in grammatical structure in Southern India but these are NOT evidence of an "Invasion". India was invaded by the British - no one changed the grammatical structure of any languages on account of that. There were shifts and vulgarization of various terms - the English language blended with Indian languages and vice-versa but no one changed grammatical forms because British Queen declared herself Emperess of India!
The term "Invasion" is a deliberate misrepresentation by vested interests - principally in the RW spectrum today - to cook up an excuse/justification for a genocide.
The Indian RW (and their allies in various groups) basically want to delegitimize any claims that Muslim & Christian Indians have to the land by birth while shoring up their claim of being the "original owners". The keenness to dismiss an "Aryan Invasion Theory" is merely part of an effort to legitimize their sense of ownership while declaring all Muslims and Christian invaders illegitimate. (again thanks to Paul Staniland for putting this out there so eloquently).
The RW studiously avoids the use of the "Migration" term. In their vocabulary "Aryan Migration" is redubbed "Aryan Invasion" - this is because they want to criminalize migration. Just as every Bangladeshi migrant in India is automatically labelled a terrorist by them and every Rohingya refugee is viewed as Jihadi in the making.
This is a terrifyingly misanthropic world view (not surprising when you consider their love of Hitler) but it is best if the sane people call this out where they see it.
Sane people should completely refrain from using the "Aryan Invasion" term and replace it with "Aryan Migration".
While it will not shift the vocabulary of those that seek to promote genocide, it will however allow us to recognize those genocidal intent easily.
And every little bit helps.
Trump and the stock market
Obama made the stock market go up by 200% over his time as President. Trump has made it go up by 50%. Bush had made it drop by 20%.
Somehow Trumpers complain about Obama's 200% rise as being nothing really, and Trump's 50% as being a huge big deal. They also don't talk about Bush -20% at all because they think Obama was an absentee president during Bush's term in office. (c.f. Katrina Pierson's comments
about 9/11).
This indicates an obviously racial slant to Trumper perceptions of reality. They don't want to admit a Black President could do a better job of managing the economy cause their ego is too fragile to accept the reality that black people can be better than white people.
I prefer to look at the handling of the economy without race tinted glasses.
I am drawn to Ben Bernanke's comment about the "Willy Coyote" moment in 2020.
Here is what I suspect he is talking about.
The entire economy is a debt trafficking operation. In order for me to pass one instrument of debt on to another person in the economy (i.e. a transaction) - I need to be able to able to convince the other person that the instrument I am passing holds value. I am effectively borrowing from the person I am passing on the debt instrument to, and the debt has to be effectively collateralized.
If I can't adequately offer collateral on the transaction, the counter-party risk rises and the entire transaction becomes unstable. This commonly happens in a bubble.
A bubble is driven by misperceptions of value of the collateral. We see a huge increase in the debt trafficked during a bubble (you sell a lot but also have to keep buying a lot) - the easiest thing to do in such a situation is become over-leveraged. I.e. borrow more than you can pay debtor's insurance on. Bubbles can be extremely destructive - they can destroy actual productivity.
What we are seeing in the economy today is a bubble riding on the recovery that Obama put into place. Obama put into place the mechanisms that developed a deep level of productivity in the economy. He could not prevent the immediate loss of productivity after the recession, but he put in place the ladders we would need to climb out of that hole. Not everyone was able to climb out the hole or forget how they ended up in there in the first place but the ladders were put in place.
What Trump is driving is the bubble - he is making it seem like he put in the ladders and that they extent to heaven itself. This is a misrepresentation of the facts. Trump does not have the vision to drive real growth (he has singularly failed to do so in his own corporate ventures numerous times). He is however quite famous for driving bubbles that rob from the poor and give to the rich.
This is what is going on right now. He is driving a bubble in the stock market and that is acting as a giant siphon that is taking wealth stored in people's retirement accounts and transferring that into the pockets of the rich. This is why we are seeing all the stuff going on at CFPB. Mulvaney is killing the canary in the coal mine.
Really afraid of what we are eventually going to find out here...
I am sure you have all heard of this piece of news.
I am beyond shocked.
For reference - At Treblinka, when trains filled with Jews would roll in - the SS guards would go to great lengths to calm down the Jews by telling them that this was only a temporary halt where they would be given a change to get cleaned up and rest before continuing their journey onward to their ultimate resettlement in the East. The entire train station was deliberately made up to look like a transit halt with SS personnel operating a fake ticketing station, a fake Red Cross first aid station and even the way to the "bath houses" was lined with tall bushes and trees and made to seem extremely peaceful.
There were no bath houses - those were gas chambers. After the Jews had stripped down, they were herded into the gas chamber and killed. The entire system was set up to delay the second group of Jews to be slaughtered in such a way that they could not heat the screams of the previous batch as they were murdered.
I am too old and jaded to believe this cannot happen again.
Our country has an unfortunate history of horrible stuff happening.
Here are some examples
1)
MK(ULTRA)/(NAOMI)/(DELTA) - All undertaken with a variety of national security and intelligence objectives, these programs quickly devolved into a series of illegal human experiments where people were treated as medical subjects without informed consent. The worst part of this was that given the scope of these projects and attendant secrecy, there was a proliferation of the projects and oversight became impossible. The infiltration of pedophiles and sex criminals into the program management led to numerous occasions where mentally and physically handicapped people including children were sexually exploited under the guise of government sponsored psychological testing.
2)
Abu Ghraib/Iraq Torture Scandal - Another program started with noble sounding aims of dismantling imminent terrorist attacks, this program again quickly devolved into a "torture and rape for no real reason" affair. The worst known aspect of this came to light during the Abu Ghraib scandal where it turned out the children of detainees were being raped by US interrogators to secure the cooperation of the parents.
In these past cases, the culprit has always been a metastasis of the program itself and reliance of poorly vetted private partnerships to achieve national security objectives. As the program grows in size, the vetting and oversight fails dramatically. It is a full time job keeping the government free of criminal infiltration, but as the oversight fails - it is just a matter of time before pedophiles and sex criminals infiltrate such setups.
I am not stupid enough to believe that history is not repeating itself.
How many good Germans continued to believe that the Jews were merely being resettled? how many accepted their own government's lies only to find out the truth when the liberating armies came?
I am not that sort of person.
I can't ignore these events, or the fact that the guards at a
ICE facility calling the police on a sitting Senator. I can clearly see something is being hidden from us.
I am afraid of what knowledge lies in store for us in the not too distant future.
Looking past the Blue Wave/Red Dawn nonsense.
With the onset of 2018 elections, people are getting excited about what will happen. Some believe that the Democrats will sweep in to Congress and Senate and impeach Trump. Others believe that the Democratic Party will be routed in a Red Dawn and the "Trump of A Thousand Years" will be inaugurated and the USA will officially be renamed the T.U.S.A etc.. etc...
Both views appear ridiculous to me. I have been wrong before, I didn't actually believe US voters would be stupid enough to elect Trump so bear with me as I share my idiotic thoughts on the issue.
The Democrats are justifiably rattled by the Trump phenomenon. It isn't just Trump's malignant personality that worries them. Yes - that is a problem - but it is a separate problem from the Trumpers themselves. The ability of the Trumpers to deflect blame for own actions on to others and to ruthlessly mirror Trump's malignancy is equally worrying.
Most Trumpers are open about their malignant thought process.
- The "Family Farm" Trumper admits that they only supported Trump because he talked about removing the Estate Tax.
- The "Coal Miner" Trumper talks about how they voted for Trump because he said he "digs coal" (who cares what happens to the planet).
- The "Supermacist" Trumper openly admits that they only voted for Trump cause he was going to make it okay to kill POC and Mexicans.
- The "Misogynist" Trumper plainly says that they voted for Trump cause HRC was a woman and Trump was man.
- The "Pedophile" Trumper says they voted for Trump cause they think he would make it easier for them to rape "fucktoys" without consequence (Nathan Larson)
- The "I am Stupid" Trumper says they voted for Trump cause they are stupid and proud of it...
- The "Guns" Trumper says they voted for Trump cause he was going to let them by 50Cals to take to Church or Schools and shoot up "Libruls".
With such a large percentage of the population showing overt signs of dementia - one has keep to keep a more open strategy that embraces the following outcomes
0) That regardless of whether there is Red Dawn or Blue Wave, the economy will collapse under the weight of Trump's incompetence. And there is no way to dodge that bullet. Trump ofcourse will characteristically try to shrug off responsibility for the carnage by blaming it on the Democrats and Globalists but all his Trumpers will be the hardest hit by his mismanagement. And as always they will constantly look to outsource blame for "The Great Collapse" on others.
1) That when Trump visibly fails - Trumpers will lash out and launch pogroms against vulnerable people. The most likely targets here will be Trumper women and children who will be assaulted and killed by Trumper men who feel let down. POC/Religious/Sexual minorities will be second in line and so on.
2) That even after the Great Collapse - Trumper dregs will cling to the idea that Trump was stabbed in the back by the "Swamp"/"Establishment"/"Democrats" etc...
This is a difficult framework to proceed under for any party but at least the GOP can simply move to Russia with all the money they have robbed from the US Treasury, the Democrats unfortunately will never get Russian visas and will have to stay here and clean up this mess, while their GOP/Trumpist colleagues live it up with cheap whores, cocaine and lap up the beach at Cape Idokopas.
It seems to me that GOP strategy is pretty clear at this point - burn it all.
Democratic Party strategy has to be more nuanced. JMHO.
Are #backyardbrawl and USAReally activities related?
The Trump operation has demonstrated remarkable ability to link up with RIS activities in the past. Bellingcat has a nice article on the latest IRA activity
"USAReally" . Simultaneously there appears to be a separate operation mounted by alumni of the
Bundy Ranch/Malheur affair in Tuscon a few weeks ago. This Malheur redux is being boosted via
#BackYardBrawl on twitter.
The objective of
#BackYardBrawl appears to be to reinforce
QAnon spouted memes of the Democrats, HRC and George Soros being part of a worldwide child trafficking operation. This meme is targeted at shoring up faltering support in Trump's base. Trumper support has been collapsing as the tsunami of evidence of criminal conduct by Trump and family has hit America's psychological shores.
While traditional techniques like dissing the MSM, accusing the FBI of criminal behavior by investigating Trump etc... have failed to shore up the core of the base, weapons grade psyops like QAnon appear to be making a deep impact at manipulating Trump voters.
As I had indicated in earlier posts, Trump base is slowly grasping that apart from doing harm to immigrants, POC and women, Trump will do the greatest damage to them. These is a growing sense of weariness as they are realizing that they will personally pay the price for Trump's reign long after it has ended. This has corroded their enthusiasm quite a bit, and a growing number are looking to check out of the Trump coalition. As these people are easily manipulated by their "feelings" - the likelihood of a mass revolt against Trump in his base is growing. And things will become very difficult once the rubber hits the road with Canadian, Mexican and EU tariffs on US goods kicking in by the end of the month.
Another sign that Trump's magic isn't working in his base is the low scores racked up by overtly Trump friendly Republicans in the California congressional primaries. Even with gerrymandering working to GOP favor in these places, the lack of financial contribution from core supporters will create huge problems in keeping a unified GOP in the upcoming race in November. With the take down, the battles for internal supremacy will get more brutal and even if GOP holds the seat, the senator or congressman will be hurting for cash badly. One sees the concern over this mirror in utterances of professional GOP brown nosers like Ryan and McConnell. Even they have had to lift their head out of Trump's rear and wonder whether the sun really shines from there.
To stem this bleeding of core support, I feel Trump has turned on all the usual taps.
While the identity of QAnon and the origination of the memes at this time remains mysterious, I wonder the boosting/amplification of QAnon memes on social media is driven by RU based contractors. It would not surprise me if this was actually the case.
Bibi has turned the volume up too loud.
Periodic jousting between Israeli defense forces (IDF) and Palestinian militias is normal. Every time around Israel tries to change the global perception of who controls Jerusalem, the world reacts and Hamas/PIJ/Hezbollah get money from the usual places to make trouble.
Over the last decade, IDF has managed to damp down the potential for adverse consequences. The tiniest action by Hamas/PIJ/Hezbollah etc... is met with overwhelming force. The resulting collateral damage of course strengthens the hands of Hamas/PIJ etc... because it makes the Palestinians even more depressed and suicidal.
The fond hope of some Israelis (of the Bibi variety) is that since Palestinians can't leave and they can't live in their "ghettos" (yeah that's pretty much what those places are) - they will simply die (preferably commit mass suicide like Jonestown). This is what other Israelis like Gen. Yair Golan* refer to as Judeo Nazism.
A lot of people in the Middle East often compare Zionism to Nazism. They usually hold out the
Haavara Agreement that the Zionists and the Nazis entered into as exemplary behavior and they also point to the
Nabka. I think we can safely add Bibi's present conduct to this list**.
The biggest risk to Israel now is that this Nazi-Shit-Hill that Bibi seems intent on sliding around on is a lot more slippery than even he realizes.
Last week we saw the revelation by ex Mossad Chief Tamir Pardo that he had heard Bibi wanted to have Shin Bet monitor Mossad telephones. Apparently Bibi was unhappy that Tamir Pardo had consulted Mossad's internal lawyers about the legality of Bibi's "Strike Iran" commands. Luckily for everyone - Yoram Cohen (then head of Shin Bet refused).
Unfortunately this points to a poorly captured dynamic that is at play in many near-authoritarian setups (i.e. with a political leadership that is intent on playing "grab ass" with the instruments of the state -i.e. military, civilian intel agencies etc...) . Once the attempt at "grabbing ass" fails - the wannabe autocrat (i.e. "idiot") is left with persistent misgivings about the loyalty and reliability of his own intelligence services. The idiot starts to get high on his own crack and it catches up with the rest of the nation.
For the most part this is just something the idiot thinks about when shaving in the morning - but in a crisis situation (such as the one Israel finds itself thrust into thanks to Bibi's own doing) - this can lead to several misinformed decisions being made. The situation paradoxically self-reinforces as with each miscegenation of non-vetted (by IC) strategy and military maneuver - the idiot ends up taking on more and more strategic debt as the military becomes over-extended.
A case study in this is Hitler in his last years. Having become convinced that the OkW was full of untrustworthy people and that his own intelligence services were giving bad information - he proceeded to undertake disastrous military operations that precipitated the collapse of the Nazi regime (and I thank God for that every day!).
Today the IDF is being operated at an extremely high level of alert. Bibi is worried that his own IC thinks (quite correctly) that is is a moron and is arranging a strategic humiliation for him. With that in mind he is stuck in a cycle of operating the IDF in crisis mode for extraordinarily long periods of time.
The IDF today has to be ready to simultaneously jump
a) in the direction of Gaza or West Bank for pacification operations,
b) at Damascus to slice Bashar down to size
c) at Iran's throat to disable any rush-to-the-bomb efforts they might attempt.
d) at RUNAV in the Med in case they decide to interfere in Israeli ONG supply chains
and so on.
This is an unsustainable level of alert. It is going to wear people down - the number of false alarms and mistakes are going to render the entire gamut of operations irrelevant.
This is very fucked up from the perspective of Israeli national security.
* No prizes for guessing that I completely agree with him.
** People like me who think highly of the efforts of Simon Wiesenthal and Efraim Zuroff at this point typically reach for our temples and slowly start massaging them.
