While I was driving through a seedy area of San Francisco, I noticed that, sandwiched between a strip bar and a liquor store sat a storefront with all of its windows suspiciously blacked out.
Over the door was a sign that proudly declared; "Welcome to Kinko's.”
“We have nothing to do with office supplies."
*.*
The minister drove into a sand trap. He picked up his golf club, broke it but didn't say a word.
Then he picked up the golf bag and tore it to shreds but didn't say a word.
He then took out all the golf balls and flung them into the woods but did not say one word.
Finally he muttered, "I'm gonna have to give it up."
"Golf" asked the caddie.
"No" he replied. "The ministry."
*.*
Musician Jokes
A young child says to his mother, "Mom, when I grow up I'd like to be a
musician."
She replies, "Well honey, you know you can't do both."
Q: What do you call a beautiful woman on a trombonist's arm?
A: A tattoo.
Q: What's the difference between a banjo and an onion?
A: Nobody cries when you chop up a banjo.
Q: What did the drummer get on his I.Q. Test?
A: Saliva.
Q: What do call a guitar player without a girlfriend?
A: Homeless.
Q: What's the similarity between a drummer and a philosopher?
A: They both perceive time as an abstract concept.
Q: What's the difference between a jet airplane and a trumpet?
A: About three decibels.
Q: How do you get an oboist to play A flat?
A: Take the batteries out of his electronic tuner.
Q: What's the difference between a SCUD missile and a bad oboist?
A: A bad oboist can kill you.
Q: Why do clarinetists leave their cases on the dashboard?
A: So they can park in the handicapped zones.
Q: What's the difference between a saxophone and a chainsaw?
A: You can tune a chainsaw.
Q: What do a viola and a lawsuit have in common?
A: Everyone is relieved when the case is closed.
Q: Why are harps like elderly parents?
A: Both are unforgiving and hard to get into and out of cars.
Q: What's the difference between a Wagnerian soprano and a baby elephant?
A: Eleven pounds.
Q: Why are violist's fingers like lightning?
A: They rarely strike the same spot twice.
Q: What's the difference between alto clef and Greek?
A: Some conductors actually read Greek.
Vibrato.
Used by singers to hide the fact that they are on the wrong pitch.
Q: What's the difference between a Lawnmower and a Viola?
A: Vibrato
Q: How can you tell when a singer is at your door?
A: The can't find the key, and they never know when to come in.
Q: What's the difference between a dead chicken in the road, and a dead trombonist in the road?
A: There's a remote chance the chicken was on its way to a gig.
Q: How do you get a guitarist to play softer?
A: Place a sheet of music in front of him.
Q: How do you get a three piece horn section to play in tune?
A: Shoot two of therm.
Q: What's the difference between a bull and a band?
A: The bull has the horns in the front and the asshole in the back.
Q: Why are violas larger than violins?
A: They aren't. Violists heads are smaller.
Q: How are trumpet players like pirates?
A: They're both murder on the high Cs.
*.*
"Do not meddle in the affairs of cats, for they are subtle and will piss on your computer." -Bruce Graham
"There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast."-Unknown
"Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow." --Jeff Valdez
"Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia."
-Joseph Wood Krutch
"Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well." --Missy Dizick
"You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats."-Colonial American proverb
"Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want."-Joseph Wood Krutch
I had been told that the training procedure with cats was difficult. It's not. Mine had me trained in two days.
*.*
The day I started my construction job,
I was in the office filling out an employee form,
when I came to the section that asked:
Single____, Married____, Divorced____.
I marked single. Glancing at the man next to me,
who was also filling out his form,
I noticed he hadn't marked any of the blanks.
Instead he had written, 'Yes, in that order.'
Quote of the Times;
The fact that the postmodernists dare to be Marxists is also something that I find I would say not so much intellectually reprehensible as morally repugnant and one of the things that – one of the things that the post modernists – postmodern Neo Marxists continually claim is that they have nothing but compassion for the downtrodden. And I would say that anybody with more than a cursory knowledge of twentieth century history who dares to claim simultaneously that they have compassion for the downtrodden and that their Marxists are revealing either their ignorance of history. That’s so astounding that it’s actually a form of miracle or a kind of malevolence that’s so reprehensible that it’s almost unspeakable. Because we already ran the equity experiment over the course of the century and we already know what the Marxist doctrines have done for oppressed people all around the world and the answer to that mostly was imprisoned, enslave, work them to death or execute them. – Petterson
Link of the Times;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB6p5QPVhPI&t=19s
Issue of the Times;
How Catering To Mentally Ill Transsexuals Is Making Our Whole Society Crazy by John Hawkins
When someone is clinically depressed, we’re not encouraged to say, “You should be depressed! No one will ever love you because you’re a bad person!” If we run across someone with Narcissistic personality disorder, we’re not supposed to go, “We are all inferior to you great and mighty one!” If we talk to someone who believes the CIA is reading their thoughts through their teeth, no one suggests feeding their delusion by going, “Yes they do. In fact I know they do because I’ve been listening to your thoughts and knew you were going to come ask me about it.” As a matter of fact, not only do we not do these things, if we are compassionate people, we can recognize that it would be CRUEL to encourage someone’s mental illness instead of helping them back in the right direction.
Believing you should be the other gender is a mental illness. We seem to have no problem recognizing this even in very similar cases. For example, people with Body integrity identity disorder believe they should be missing limbs or paralyzed. They often ask doctors to mutilate them in this way and they are TURNED DOWN because it’s considering unethical for a doctor to destroy a healthy body part. Furthermore, there are people who believe they are Jesus Christ, a Raccoon, and alien or a planet (Yes, really). We don’t just roll with that and say, “Oh you’re a planet! Well, we need to get you into space where you belong” or “You’re a Raccoon, huh? Well, I’ve got a tasty garbage can you can get into in my back yard.”
People who are transsexual deserve our compassion and sympathy because they are living with a mental illness that has a high suicide rate and often leads to a lot of unhappiness. However instead of acknowledging that transsexualism like the mental illness it is and considering it to be a problem for poor individuals inflicted with it and their psychologists, we are treating them like the sane ones and acting like the rest of our society is crazy for not accepting their delusional beliefs as fact. Worse yet, because we’ve wrapped this mental illness in the cloak of Civil Rights, we’ve warped our behavior in bizarre ways.
We’re allowing men, with testicles, that are often sexually interested in women, into bathrooms and changing rooms where women and little girls are in various states of undress. This has already led to numerous incidents (Here’s a far from complete list). Then, if women quite naturally complain about this, they’re treated like they have the problem for not wanting to share that private space with the opposite gender. Yet, the whole purpose of having men’s and women’s bathrooms instead of just bathrooms is so that women don’t have share bathrooms with men.
We are now starting to see men posing as women dominating in certain women’s sports. For example, transgender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard who transitioned a few years ago has now qualified for the women’s Olympics. This is not a big surprise because men are bigger, stronger, faster than women and everything from men’s hearts, to the length of our legs to our bone structure tends to give us a competitive advantage in sporting events. Yes, you can chemically force down the level of testosterone in a body, but that only takes away a small percentage of man’s advantage. Again, this is why we have “men’s sports” and “women’s sports,” but not just “sports.” It’s because we all know it’s not fair to women to make them compete with men. Yet the women who lose out on chances at scholarships or are defeated in athletic contests they’ve spent years training for because they’re beaten by men are treated as the ones with problems when they’re simply asking for a level playing field.
We’re now regularly seeing small children being allowed to “choose” their gender. Just as one example out of many, Charlize Theron claimed her son came out as transgender at 3. Since when do we allow small children to make massive, life altering decisions like this? We even have some people claiming TODDLERS can change their gender. Despite the fact that “80 to 95 percent of children with gender dysphoria will come to identify with and embrace their bodily sex,” 15 states have already made it illegal to have therapy that tries to reconcile them with their gender. In other words, we simultaneously note than transsexuals struggle with their mental health and have a 41% suicide rate, yet we are working overtime to steer young children towards life altering surgeries, hormones & identity changes despite the fact that many of them would just grow out of it if left alone. This the moral equivalent of child molestation, but we simply shrug our shoulders and ignore it.
Just as we don’t consider it ethical for doctors to chop off the healthy arms and legs of people with Body integrity identity disorder, it should not be considered ethical for a doctor to mutilate a person to look like the opposite gender. Yet not only are we allowing that, increasingly we as a society are paying for it. There are multiple states that pay for the enormous cost (150k is a very rough estimate) of these surgeries and some others even pay for prisoners to get sex changes. Right now there’s a trans employee suing his employer for refusing to pay $40,000 for a surgery to fix his mannish face. But of course, his face looks mannish because he’s a man. So now the big ask is for taxpayers to pay for mentally ill people to mutilate themselves and there are supposedly sane people going along with it.
We can go on and on with this. Have you heard of “deadnaming?” That’s another name for calling transsexuals by the names they were born with. There is a lawsuit over that in Britain. Similarly in Canada, there is – and no, this is not a joke – a guy suing to force women to wax his scrotum. He claims he’s a “she” and apparently has right to have women touch his junk. We now have states changing the name and gender on the birth certificate for a child decades later, as if lying on the birth certificate will make it reality. There is also now a regular argument being made that men who won’t date transgender women are “transphobic.” So the argument is now that straight men who don’t want to date other men pretending to be women are the ones with the problem, not the mentally ill men that have surgically mutilated themselves to appear to be the other sex.
By taking a mental health issue and pretending that it’s a civil rights issue, we’ve turned the mental issues of a tiny slice of the population into mental health issues for everyone else. Suddenly, if Tom decides at 30 years of age that he’s really a woman, it’s your responsibility to pay for it, call him by his new name and send him into the locker room with your daughter to watch her change. All in the name of what, exactly? Having the rest of us act like head cases doesn’t have an upside and there’s really not much evidence that these “sex changes” are helping transsexuals as a group either either.
…”There is huge uncertainty over whether changing someone’s sex is a good or a bad thing,” said Chris Hyde, the director of the facility. Even if doctors are careful to perform these procedures only on “appropriate patients,” Hyde continued, “there’s still a large number of people who have the surgery but remain traumatized-often to the point of committing suicide.”
…The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over 30 years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to 15 years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers.
It’s almost like asking mentally ill people what they want to do and then just rolling with it even though you know it’s an extremely bad idea doesn’t work out very well for anyone.
Catering?
Mock?
There were two old men sitting on a park bench. A blonde woman walks by.
One old man says to the other one, "Ever sleep with a blonde?"
The other old man says, "Many a time. Many a time."
A brunette then walks by. The old man says to the other, "Ever sleep with a brunette?"
The other old man says, "Many a time. Many a time."
A redhead walks by, and the old man says to the other, "Ever sleep with a redhead?"
The other old man says, "Not a wink."
*.*
Two highway workers were busy working at a construction site when a big car with diplomatic license plates pulled up.
"Parlez-vous fran?ais?" the driver asks them. The two workers just stared.
"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" The two continued to stare at him.
"Fala portugu?s?" Neither worker said anything.
"Parlate Italiano?" Still no response.
Finally, the man drives off in disgust.
One worker turned to the other and said, "Gee, maybe we should learn a foreign language..."
"What for? That guy knew four of them and what good did it do him?"
*.*
Capitol One announced Monday that some 100 million accounts have been compromised. Apparently, the crooks no longer need to wonder, "What's in your wallet?"
They're experimenting with "tickling" therapy, saying that it can actually slow down the aging process. This, according to Dr. Goochie Goochie-Goo.
To be fair, President Trump may have dissed Baltimore, but you should hear what the rats and rodents there are saying about him.
There have been two shark attacks in the past few days in Florida. How do they know it's Shark Week?
A study says too much time on the smartphone could make people fat. I read that on my phone the other day at the all-you-can-eat ice cream buffet.
A Singapore engineering company has built a robot that makes noodle dishes in seconds. I suppose now that we've knocked that out, we can get back to working on that cancer thing.
A report says 43 Million Americans struggle with reading and writing. We should probably throw in "tweeting" in there, too.
Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have created a robot cockroach, that can apparently stand the weight of a human. OK, NOW can we get back to cancer research? I had no idea there were concerns of a cockroach shortage.
*.*
Later, Grandma says, "Boy, I'm really worn out.
I remember being exhausted when our kids were babies, Ben.
Now, with grandkids, I'm exhausted all over again!"
Grandpa replies, "It's to be expected, Bea.
Why do you think they call folks our age re-tired?"
*.*
Those guys at Disneyland who have to wear character costumes ought to form a union.
I'm not really all that concerned about their working conditions.
I just think the picket lines would be a hoot.
Quote of the Times;
If you are capable of understanding that the survival of the British red squirrel is threatened by the mass immigration of the North American grey squirrel, how can you consider it it even remotely objectionable to observe that the survival of the European nations are threatened by the mass immigration of foreign populations considerably larger and more fecund than they are?
Link of the Times;
https://www.neonrevolt.com/2019/07/26/the-biggest-heist-in-american-history-exposing-the-kingston-groups-nefarious-activities-with-usattyhuber-and-genflynn-qanon-greatawakening-neonrevolt/
Issue of the Times;
The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition
Ace made a really good point yesterday in the comments, that "weaklings turn into vicious monsters when they have a little power over someone else granted by the state. Weakness is an important part of cruelty"
It's why they mock masculinity, because they cannot fathom what it means, and they conflate the real strength of masculinity with what they see themselves doing if they had personal power, and that is where they get the idea of 'toxic masculinity."
But real masculinity is the antithesis of what is exhibited by most of those in power. Helping a woman with her heavy suitcase or opening a door for others or stopping to help change a tire or carrying a few grocery bags to the car is not sexual dominance or the dominant patriarchy or any such ridiculous post-modern idiocy. It is the quiet recognition of reality, and the decision to do one's part in making that reality as pleasant and good as possible. But so many of them are helpless in the face of that reality, and resent and hate those who can help.
And that is why the Left sees an armed America as some sort of dystopian playground combat, in which those toxically masculine men run around flaunting their sidearms and shooting anyone who looks at them funny. The truth of course is that most armed Americans are very careful to avoid situations that require their weapons, and see them as a last resort, when all other options have been exhausted.
But that's how the soi-boys of the Left would behave, and they cannot imagine anyone who wouldn't take advantage of the power and control that they imagine a gun grants to its user. Because deep down inside (and recently not so deep!) they are not confident of themselves and desperately need the validation that they get when they dominate others. It's their most basic and base instinct, and the mark of a less highly evolved being.
That's why they are dangerous, and that's why we must confront them at every turn.
One old man says to the other one, "Ever sleep with a blonde?"
The other old man says, "Many a time. Many a time."
A brunette then walks by. The old man says to the other, "Ever sleep with a brunette?"
The other old man says, "Many a time. Many a time."
A redhead walks by, and the old man says to the other, "Ever sleep with a redhead?"
The other old man says, "Not a wink."
*.*
Two highway workers were busy working at a construction site when a big car with diplomatic license plates pulled up.
"Parlez-vous fran?ais?" the driver asks them. The two workers just stared.
"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" The two continued to stare at him.
"Fala portugu?s?" Neither worker said anything.
"Parlate Italiano?" Still no response.
Finally, the man drives off in disgust.
One worker turned to the other and said, "Gee, maybe we should learn a foreign language..."
"What for? That guy knew four of them and what good did it do him?"
*.*
Capitol One announced Monday that some 100 million accounts have been compromised. Apparently, the crooks no longer need to wonder, "What's in your wallet?"
They're experimenting with "tickling" therapy, saying that it can actually slow down the aging process. This, according to Dr. Goochie Goochie-Goo.
To be fair, President Trump may have dissed Baltimore, but you should hear what the rats and rodents there are saying about him.
There have been two shark attacks in the past few days in Florida. How do they know it's Shark Week?
A study says too much time on the smartphone could make people fat. I read that on my phone the other day at the all-you-can-eat ice cream buffet.
A Singapore engineering company has built a robot that makes noodle dishes in seconds. I suppose now that we've knocked that out, we can get back to working on that cancer thing.
A report says 43 Million Americans struggle with reading and writing. We should probably throw in "tweeting" in there, too.
Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have created a robot cockroach, that can apparently stand the weight of a human. OK, NOW can we get back to cancer research? I had no idea there were concerns of a cockroach shortage.
*.*
Later, Grandma says, "Boy, I'm really worn out.
I remember being exhausted when our kids were babies, Ben.
Now, with grandkids, I'm exhausted all over again!"
Grandpa replies, "It's to be expected, Bea.
Why do you think they call folks our age re-tired?"
*.*
Those guys at Disneyland who have to wear character costumes ought to form a union.
I'm not really all that concerned about their working conditions.
I just think the picket lines would be a hoot.
Quote of the Times;
If you are capable of understanding that the survival of the British red squirrel is threatened by the mass immigration of the North American grey squirrel, how can you consider it it even remotely objectionable to observe that the survival of the European nations are threatened by the mass immigration of foreign populations considerably larger and more fecund than they are?
Link of the Times;
https://www.neonrevolt.com/2019/07/26/the-biggest-heist-in-american-history-exposing-the-kingston-groups-nefarious-activities-with-usattyhuber-and-genflynn-qanon-greatawakening-neonrevolt/
Issue of the Times;
The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition
Ace made a really good point yesterday in the comments, that "weaklings turn into vicious monsters when they have a little power over someone else granted by the state. Weakness is an important part of cruelty"
It's why they mock masculinity, because they cannot fathom what it means, and they conflate the real strength of masculinity with what they see themselves doing if they had personal power, and that is where they get the idea of 'toxic masculinity."
But real masculinity is the antithesis of what is exhibited by most of those in power. Helping a woman with her heavy suitcase or opening a door for others or stopping to help change a tire or carrying a few grocery bags to the car is not sexual dominance or the dominant patriarchy or any such ridiculous post-modern idiocy. It is the quiet recognition of reality, and the decision to do one's part in making that reality as pleasant and good as possible. But so many of them are helpless in the face of that reality, and resent and hate those who can help.
And that is why the Left sees an armed America as some sort of dystopian playground combat, in which those toxically masculine men run around flaunting their sidearms and shooting anyone who looks at them funny. The truth of course is that most armed Americans are very careful to avoid situations that require their weapons, and see them as a last resort, when all other options have been exhausted.
But that's how the soi-boys of the Left would behave, and they cannot imagine anyone who wouldn't take advantage of the power and control that they imagine a gun grants to its user. Because deep down inside (and recently not so deep!) they are not confident of themselves and desperately need the validation that they get when they dominate others. It's their most basic and base instinct, and the mark of a less highly evolved being.
That's why they are dangerous, and that's why we must confront them at every turn.
Baltimore?
Mr. Parker saw his son's shiner and demanded, "Jimmy, who gave you that black eye?"
"No one," replied the spunky child. "I had to fight for it."
*.*
SAN DIEGO, CA - A polar bear at the San Diego Zoo has apologized to black bears, brown bears, and all other mammals of color for his "problematic whiteness."
The bear "got woke" after a leftist protesting the zoo for keeping animals in captivity bravely leaped into the bear's exhibit. After eating the protester, the polar bear picked up the book on critical race theory the woman had in her pocket and devoured it, first figuratively, then literally.
"Wow," he said. "I never realized how problematic my existence was before. I really need to think about this."
Shortly after reading the book, the polar bear, whose name is Chad, held a press conference in which he apologized for his many years of not being "woke" to the struggle of non-white animals.
"I am so sorry for everyone I've hurt," he said. "I am hereby canceling myself. Please listen to black and brown bear voices." He also announced that he was donating his remaining walruses to minority bears in need. "The overwhelming whiteness of the polar bear community should give us all paws."
The bear escaped the zoo, devoured several people, and cast himself into exile on an ice floe for his crimes.
*.*
I went out for a run this morning, but I came back after a couple of minutes because I forgot something.
I forgot that I can't run for more than a couple of minutes.
*.*
As told to me by my music teacher....
This guy goes on vacation to a tropical island. As soon as he gets
off the plane, he hears drums. He thinks "Wow, this is cool." He goes to
the beach, he hears the drums, he eats lunch, he hears drums, he goes to
a luau, he hears drums. He TRIES to go to sleep, he hears drums.
This goes on for several nights, and gets to the point where the
guy can't sleep at night because of the drums. Finally, he goes down to
the front desk.
When he gets there, he asks the manager "Hey! What's with these
drums. Don't they ever stop? I can't get any sleep."
The manager says, "No! Drums must NEVER stop. Very bad if drums
stop."
"Why?"
"When drums stop... bass solo begins."
*.*
Game of Thrones received 32 Emmy nominations yesterday.
Hopefully, fans will like how this ends.
Quote of the Times;
In Movie One, President Trump is absolutely, definitely a racist, and any honest person can see it in the way he talks, the people who support him, and his policy proposals. For the viewers of this movie, Trump’s alleged racism is a fact, not an opinion. Therefore, logically, all Trump supporters must be racists because they support a racist president. This view of reality is promoted by CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, NPR, and essentially all of the left-leaning press. In Movie Two, President Trump promised the country he would not be politically correct if elected, and sure enough, he is not. He goes hard at all critics, with uncautious language, and that makes it easy for his political foes to cherry pick the times he criticizes women and people of color, framing those instances as some sort of pattern. Viewers of Movie Two are confused about whether the viewers of Movie One are lying, stupid, brainwashed, or mentally ill. – Adams
Link of the Times;
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/a_health_care_system_thats_the_envy_of_the_world.html
Issue of the Times;
The real reason Democrats defend Baltimore by Liz Peek
Democrats and the liberal media are incensed that President Trump has criticized the mostly-black city of Baltimore, but not for the reasons you might think.
When Trump calls “Charm City,” as it was described by advertisers trying to boost its reputation in the 1970s, “FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than the situation at the Southern border, he highlights Democrats’ Achilles Heel - the wreckage left behind by their liberal policies, and most especially the damage done to minority communities.
They are terrified that black voters will tune in.
When Trump asked black voters in the 2016 election, “What have you got to lose?” he struck a nerve. One of the most startling elements in his unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton was that he won a higher percentage of the black and Hispanic vote than Mitt Romney in 2012, despite incessant media accusations that Trump was a racist.
It used to be that calling someone a racist was a serious and important charge. No longer. Today some Democrats have determined that not only is the president a racist, but so are all of his supporters. Joe Lockhart, CNN contributor and former press secretary for Bill Clinton, tweeted recently, “Vote for @realDonaldTrump and you are a racist.” That kind of over-the-top insult could get Donald Trump reelected.
People who support the president do so for a wide variety of reasons, but Trump voters whom I know mostly support his economic agenda, convinced that growth in jobs and incomes is essential to delivering opportunity for all Americans. Many believe in the power of free enterprise to deliver the American dream, affording those willing to work hard the chance to improve the lives of themselves and their children.
Trump supporters think that Democrats’ push to increase the role of government through higher taxes and more regulation takes away from America’s vibrant entrepreneurship, which attracts ambitious people the world over.
Trump supporters are also fed up with the kind of mindless political correctness that leads to truly idiotic policy-making. Allowing men to compete in women’s sports in the name of gender neutrality is just plain stupid. You don’t need a blue-ribbon committee of medical experts to know that men are stronger and faster than women; they simply are.
Standing by while thugs throw water on our cops, as has recently taken place in New York City, undermines respect for law enforcement and the safety of our citizens. Does that make sense? Berkeley, California, banning gender-sensitive names is also ridiculous. Changing “manhole” to “maintenance hole” does not move mankind forward.
Every day a story comes along that makes millions of Americans roll their eyes, and renew their commitment to voting for President Trump.
Meanwhile, the left accuses the president of racism for inartfully pointing out that the city of Baltimore is a mess. They are incensed - not at the numerous ways in which that city fails its citizens, but rather because President Trump has suggested rather crudely that the legislators in charge of the city and the district are not getting the job done.
He is right, of course. And, he is not the only politician who has pointed out Baltimore’s failings. Bernie Sanders in 2015 described the city as looking like a “Third World country.”
But because the city is largely black, Trump’s criticisms have been cast as racist. In a recent column, New York Times columnist Charles Blow asserted (again) that Trump is a racist. His proof is the frequency with which the president uses the word “infest.” He claims that Trump’s use of the word, as when he tweeted that Baltimore is “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” or, earlier, when he described the presence of MS-13 “in certain parts of our country” as an “infestation,” is evidence of racism.
The Merriam-Webster definition of “infest” is to “spread or swarm in or over in a troublesome manner,” or, in other words, nothing to do with race. But that is irrelevant.
What is relevant is that Trump’s critiques of Baltimore are on the mark. The past three mayors, all Democrats, have left office in disgrace.
As Seth Barron pointed out in a recent piece, the New York Times Magazine last May ran a cover article entitled “The Tragedy of Baltimore.” The piece cited the breakdown of law and order in the wake of the 2015 riots, which the author describes as “nothing less than a failure of order and governance the likes of which few American cities have seen in years.” As Barron notes, Baltimore has the highest murder rate in the nation.
It also has one of the worst school districts, in which, a couple of years ago, one survey showed that in 13 mostly black high schools, not one kid was proficient in math. In 2018, Prosperity Now research revealed that Baltimore’s black unemployment rate was triple that of whites, while a third of blacks in the city had zero net worth and a median income slightly more than half of that claimed by white citizens.
This is the city the left is defending.
Democrats are opposed to charter schools, which families know offer a rare beacon of hope to inner-city kids, and they want to raise the minimum wage, which will eliminate jobs. Moreover, they raise money through soft drink taxes and lotteries that mainly fall on the shoulders of low-income and minority families. These are among the many reasons black voters, who traditionally vote Democratic, could turn to Trump.
That scares the heck out of Democrats, and that’s why they are so angry that President Trump has dared to pull back the curtain on Baltimore. Racism isn’t calling out the failures of Baltimore; racism is not caring enough to do anything about it.
"No one," replied the spunky child. "I had to fight for it."
*.*
SAN DIEGO, CA - A polar bear at the San Diego Zoo has apologized to black bears, brown bears, and all other mammals of color for his "problematic whiteness."
The bear "got woke" after a leftist protesting the zoo for keeping animals in captivity bravely leaped into the bear's exhibit. After eating the protester, the polar bear picked up the book on critical race theory the woman had in her pocket and devoured it, first figuratively, then literally.
"Wow," he said. "I never realized how problematic my existence was before. I really need to think about this."
Shortly after reading the book, the polar bear, whose name is Chad, held a press conference in which he apologized for his many years of not being "woke" to the struggle of non-white animals.
"I am so sorry for everyone I've hurt," he said. "I am hereby canceling myself. Please listen to black and brown bear voices." He also announced that he was donating his remaining walruses to minority bears in need. "The overwhelming whiteness of the polar bear community should give us all paws."
The bear escaped the zoo, devoured several people, and cast himself into exile on an ice floe for his crimes.
*.*
I went out for a run this morning, but I came back after a couple of minutes because I forgot something.
I forgot that I can't run for more than a couple of minutes.
*.*
As told to me by my music teacher....
This guy goes on vacation to a tropical island. As soon as he gets
off the plane, he hears drums. He thinks "Wow, this is cool." He goes to
the beach, he hears the drums, he eats lunch, he hears drums, he goes to
a luau, he hears drums. He TRIES to go to sleep, he hears drums.
This goes on for several nights, and gets to the point where the
guy can't sleep at night because of the drums. Finally, he goes down to
the front desk.
When he gets there, he asks the manager "Hey! What's with these
drums. Don't they ever stop? I can't get any sleep."
The manager says, "No! Drums must NEVER stop. Very bad if drums
stop."
"Why?"
"When drums stop... bass solo begins."
*.*
Game of Thrones received 32 Emmy nominations yesterday.
Hopefully, fans will like how this ends.
Quote of the Times;
In Movie One, President Trump is absolutely, definitely a racist, and any honest person can see it in the way he talks, the people who support him, and his policy proposals. For the viewers of this movie, Trump’s alleged racism is a fact, not an opinion. Therefore, logically, all Trump supporters must be racists because they support a racist president. This view of reality is promoted by CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, NPR, and essentially all of the left-leaning press. In Movie Two, President Trump promised the country he would not be politically correct if elected, and sure enough, he is not. He goes hard at all critics, with uncautious language, and that makes it easy for his political foes to cherry pick the times he criticizes women and people of color, framing those instances as some sort of pattern. Viewers of Movie Two are confused about whether the viewers of Movie One are lying, stupid, brainwashed, or mentally ill. – Adams
Link of the Times;
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/a_health_care_system_thats_the_envy_of_the_world.html
Issue of the Times;
The real reason Democrats defend Baltimore by Liz Peek
Democrats and the liberal media are incensed that President Trump has criticized the mostly-black city of Baltimore, but not for the reasons you might think.
When Trump calls “Charm City,” as it was described by advertisers trying to boost its reputation in the 1970s, “FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than the situation at the Southern border, he highlights Democrats’ Achilles Heel - the wreckage left behind by their liberal policies, and most especially the damage done to minority communities.
They are terrified that black voters will tune in.
When Trump asked black voters in the 2016 election, “What have you got to lose?” he struck a nerve. One of the most startling elements in his unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton was that he won a higher percentage of the black and Hispanic vote than Mitt Romney in 2012, despite incessant media accusations that Trump was a racist.
It used to be that calling someone a racist was a serious and important charge. No longer. Today some Democrats have determined that not only is the president a racist, but so are all of his supporters. Joe Lockhart, CNN contributor and former press secretary for Bill Clinton, tweeted recently, “Vote for @realDonaldTrump and you are a racist.” That kind of over-the-top insult could get Donald Trump reelected.
People who support the president do so for a wide variety of reasons, but Trump voters whom I know mostly support his economic agenda, convinced that growth in jobs and incomes is essential to delivering opportunity for all Americans. Many believe in the power of free enterprise to deliver the American dream, affording those willing to work hard the chance to improve the lives of themselves and their children.
Trump supporters think that Democrats’ push to increase the role of government through higher taxes and more regulation takes away from America’s vibrant entrepreneurship, which attracts ambitious people the world over.
Trump supporters are also fed up with the kind of mindless political correctness that leads to truly idiotic policy-making. Allowing men to compete in women’s sports in the name of gender neutrality is just plain stupid. You don’t need a blue-ribbon committee of medical experts to know that men are stronger and faster than women; they simply are.
Standing by while thugs throw water on our cops, as has recently taken place in New York City, undermines respect for law enforcement and the safety of our citizens. Does that make sense? Berkeley, California, banning gender-sensitive names is also ridiculous. Changing “manhole” to “maintenance hole” does not move mankind forward.
Every day a story comes along that makes millions of Americans roll their eyes, and renew their commitment to voting for President Trump.
Meanwhile, the left accuses the president of racism for inartfully pointing out that the city of Baltimore is a mess. They are incensed - not at the numerous ways in which that city fails its citizens, but rather because President Trump has suggested rather crudely that the legislators in charge of the city and the district are not getting the job done.
He is right, of course. And, he is not the only politician who has pointed out Baltimore’s failings. Bernie Sanders in 2015 described the city as looking like a “Third World country.”
But because the city is largely black, Trump’s criticisms have been cast as racist. In a recent column, New York Times columnist Charles Blow asserted (again) that Trump is a racist. His proof is the frequency with which the president uses the word “infest.” He claims that Trump’s use of the word, as when he tweeted that Baltimore is “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” or, earlier, when he described the presence of MS-13 “in certain parts of our country” as an “infestation,” is evidence of racism.
The Merriam-Webster definition of “infest” is to “spread or swarm in or over in a troublesome manner,” or, in other words, nothing to do with race. But that is irrelevant.
What is relevant is that Trump’s critiques of Baltimore are on the mark. The past three mayors, all Democrats, have left office in disgrace.
As Seth Barron pointed out in a recent piece, the New York Times Magazine last May ran a cover article entitled “The Tragedy of Baltimore.” The piece cited the breakdown of law and order in the wake of the 2015 riots, which the author describes as “nothing less than a failure of order and governance the likes of which few American cities have seen in years.” As Barron notes, Baltimore has the highest murder rate in the nation.
It also has one of the worst school districts, in which, a couple of years ago, one survey showed that in 13 mostly black high schools, not one kid was proficient in math. In 2018, Prosperity Now research revealed that Baltimore’s black unemployment rate was triple that of whites, while a third of blacks in the city had zero net worth and a median income slightly more than half of that claimed by white citizens.
This is the city the left is defending.
Democrats are opposed to charter schools, which families know offer a rare beacon of hope to inner-city kids, and they want to raise the minimum wage, which will eliminate jobs. Moreover, they raise money through soft drink taxes and lotteries that mainly fall on the shoulders of low-income and minority families. These are among the many reasons black voters, who traditionally vote Democratic, could turn to Trump.
That scares the heck out of Democrats, and that’s why they are so angry that President Trump has dared to pull back the curtain on Baltimore. Racism isn’t calling out the failures of Baltimore; racism is not caring enough to do anything about it.
Gate?
An older couple is playing in the annual club championship. They are playing in a playoff hole and it is down to a 6-inch putt that the wife has to make.
She takes her stance and her husband can see her trembling. She putts and misses; they lose the match.
On the way home in the car her husband is fuming, "I cannot believe you missed that putt! That putt was no longer than my dick."
The wife just looked over at her husband, smiled and said, "Yes dear, but it was much harder!"
*.*
We were helping customers when the store optometrist walked by and flirted with a co-worker.
Of course, we all had to stop what we were doing to tease her, but she quickly dismissed the notion of a budding romance.
"Can you imagine making out with an optometrist?" she asked. "It would always be, 'Better like this...or like this?'"
*.*
The world's leading expert on European wasps walks into a record shop...
He asks the assistant “Do you have ‘European Vespidae Acoustics Volume 2? I believe it was released this week.”
“Certainly,” replies the assistant. “Would you like to listen before you buy it?”
"That would be wonderful," says the expert, and puts on a pair of headphones.
He listens for a few moments and says to the assistant, “I'm terribly sorry, but I am the world's leading expert on European wasps and this is not accurate at all. I don't recognize any of those sounds. Are you sure this is the correct recording?”
The assistant checks the turntable, and replies that it is indeed European Vespidae Acoustics Volume 2. The assistant apologizes and lifts the needle onto the next track.
Again the expert listens for a few moments and then says to the assistant, "No, this just can't be right! I've been an expert in this field for 43 years and I still don't recognize any of these sounds."
The assistant apologizes again and lifts the needle to the next track.
The expert throws off the headphones as soon as it starts playing and is fuming with rage.
"This is outrageous false advertising! I am the world's leading expert on European wasps and no European wasp has ever made a sound like the ones on this record!"
The manager of the shop overhears the commotion and walks over.
"What seems to be the problem, sir?"
"This is an outrage! I am the world's leading expert on European wasps. Nobody knows more about them than I do. There is no way in hell that the sounds on that record were made by European wasps!"
The manager glances down and notices the problem instantly.
"I'm terribly sorry, sir. It appears we've been playing you the bee side."
*.*
Congrats to John and Phyllis Cook, who fell in love at an Ohio nursing home and got married. He's 100-years-old, she's 102.
Although, she undoubtedly gets kidded about robbing the hospital bed.
Heard they spent their honeymoon walking to the dining room.
And not a day goes by that they don't say those three words to each other: "What? Huh? What?"
*.*
Fear of that long awaited "Big One" has inspired panic buying in Southern California.
I know my mom and sister went out and cornered the bubble-wrap market.
Need to protect the earthquake wine supply.
Quote of the Times;
Some have asked, “who needs 100 rounds?” If 6 brave, trained, and alert police officers with professionally maintained weapons fired 58 rounds to subdue the Dayton shooter, I’d say my wife deserves at least that many chances to protect herself and my kids when I’m not home. - Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) August 7, 2019
Link of the Times;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazino_affair
Issue of the Times;
John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate by Ron Unz
The death of Sen. John McCain last August revealed some important truths about the nature of our establishment media.
McCain’s family had released word of his incurable brain cancer many months earlier and his passing at age 84 was long expected, so media outlets great and small had possessed all the time necessary for producing and polishing the packages they eventually published, and that was readily apparent from the voluminous nature of the tributes that they ran. The New York Times, still our national newspaper of record, allocated more than three full pages of its printed edition to the primary obituary, and this was supplemented by a considerable number of other articles and sidebars. I cannot recall any political figure other than an American president whose passing had ever received such an enormous wealth of coverage, and perhaps even some former residents of the Oval Office might have fallen short of that standard. Although I certainly didn’t bother reading all of the tens of thousands of words in the Times or my other newspapers, the coverage of McCain’s life and career seemed exceptionally laudatory across the mainstream media, liberal and conservative alike, with scarcely a negative word appearing anywhere outside the political fringe.
On the face of it, such undiluted political love for McCain might seem a bit odd to those who have followed his activities over the last couple of decades. After all, the Times and most of the other leading lights of our media firmament are purportedly liberal and claim to have become vehement critics of our disastrous Iraq War and other military adventures, let alone the calamitous possibility of an attack upon Iran. Meanwhile, McCain was universally regarded as the leading figure in America’s “War Party,” eagerly supporting all prospective and retrospective military endeavors with gleeful fury, and even making his chant of “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” the most widely remembered detail of his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. So either our major media outlets somehow overlooked such striking differences on an absolutely central issue, or perhaps their true positions on certain matters are not exactly what they seem to be, and merely constitute elements of a Kabuki-performance aimed at deceiving their more naive readers.
Even more remarkable were the discordant facts airbrushed out of McCain’s history. As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and two George Polk awards, the late Sydney Schanberg was widely regarded as one of the greatest American war correspondents of the twentieth century. His exploits during our ill-fated Indo-Chinese War had become the basis of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, which probably established him as the most famous journalist in America after Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, and he had also served as a top editor at The New York Times. A decade ago, he published his greatest expose, providing a mountain of evidence that America had deliberately left behind hundreds of POWs in Vietnam and he fingered then-presidential candidate John McCain as the central figure in the later official cover-up of that monstrous betrayal. The Arizona senator had traded on his national reputation as our best-known former POW to bury the story of those abandoned prisoners, permitting America’s political establishment to escape serious embarrassment. As a result, Sen. McCain earned the lush rewards of our generous ruling elites, much like his own father Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., who had led the cover-up of the deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, which killed or wounded over 200 American servicemen.
As publisher of The American Conservative, I ran Schanberg’s remarkable piece as a cover story, and across several websites over the years it has surely been read many hundreds of thousands of times, including a huge spike around the time of McCain’s death. I therefore find it rather difficult to believe that the many journalists investigating McCain’s background might have remained unaware of this material. Yet no hints of these facts were provided in any of the articles appearing in any remotely prominent media outlets as can be seen by searching for web pages containing “McCain and Schanberg” dated around the time of the Senator’s passing.
John McCain and the POW Cover-Up
SYDNEY SCHANBERG • MAY 25, 2010
Schanberg’s journalistic stature had hardly been forgotten by his former colleagues. Upon his death a couple of years ago, the Times ran a very long and glowing obituary, and a few months later I attended the memorial tribute to his life and career held at the New York Times headquarters building, which more than two hundred prominent journalists mostly from his own generation, including those of the highest rank. Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. gave a speech describing how as a young man he had always so greatly admired Schanberg and had been mortified by the unfortunate circumstances of his departure from the family’s newspaper. Former Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld recounted the many years he had worked closely with the man he had long considered his closest friend and colleague, someone whom he almost seemed to regard as his older brother. But during the two hours of praise and remembrance scarcely a single word was uttered in public about the gigantic story that had occupied the last two decades of Schanberg’s celebrated career.
This same blanket of media silence also enveloped the very serious accusations regarding McCain’s own Vietnam War record. A few years ago, I drew upon the Timesand other fully mainstream sources to strongly suggest that McCain’s stories of his torture as a POW were probably fictional, invented to serve as a cover and an excuse for the very real record of his wartime collaboration with his Communist captors. Indeed, at the time our American media reported his activities as one of the leading propagandists of our North Vietnamese foes, but these facts were later flushed down the memory-hole. McCain’s father then ranked as one of America’s top military officers, and it seems likely that his personal political intervention ensured that the official narrative of his son’s wartime record was transmuted from traitor to war-hero, thereby allowing the younger McCain to later embark upon his celebrated political career.
John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President
RON UNZ • MARCH 9, 2015
The story of the abandoned Vietnam POWs and McCain’s own Communist propaganda broadcasts hardly exhaust the catalog of the major skeletons in the late Senator’s closet. McCain was regularly described by reporters as being remarkably hot-headed and having a violent temper, but the national press left it to the alternative media to investigate the real-life implications of those rather suggestive phrases.
In a September 1, 2008 Counterpunch expose later published online, Alexander Cockburn reported that interviews with two emergency room physicians in Phoenix revealed that around the time that McCain was sucked into the political maelstrom of the Keating Five Scandal, his wife Cindy was admitted to her local hospital suffering from a black eye, facial bruises, and scratches consistent with physical violence, and this same situation occurred two additional times over the next few years. Cockburn also noted several other highly suspicious marital incidents during the years that followed, including the Senator’s wife appearing with a bandaged wrist and her arm in a sling not long after she joined her husband on the 2008 campaign trail, an injury reported by our strangely incurious political journalists as being due to “excessive hand-shaking.” It’s an odd situation when a tiny leftist newsletter can easily uncover facts that so totally eluded the vast resources of our entire national press corps. If there were credible reports that Melania Trump had been repeatedly admitted to local emergency rooms suffering from black eyes and facial bruises, would our corporate media have remained so uninterested in any further investigation?
McCain had first won his Arizona Congressional seat in 1982, not long after he moved into the state, with his campaign bankrolled by his father-in-law’s beer-distributorship fortune, and that inheritance eventually elevated the McCain household into one of the wealthiest in the Senate. But although the Senator spent the next quarter-century in public life, even nearly upsetting George W. Bush for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, only in late 2008 did I learn from the Times that the Phoenix beer-monopoly in question, then valued at around $200 million, had accrued to a man whose lifelong business partner Kemper Marley had long been deeply linked to organized crime. Indeed, close associates of that latter individual had been convicted by a jury of the car-bomb assassination of a Phoenix investigative crime reporter just a few years before McCain’s sudden triumphal entrance into Arizona politics. Perhaps such guilt-by-association is improper, but would our national press-corps have remained silent if the personal fortune of our current president were only a step or two removed from the car-bomb assassins of a nosy journalist who died while investigating mobsters?
As I gradually became aware of these enormities casually hidden in McCain’s background, my initial reaction was disbelief that someone whose record was so deeply tarnished in so many different ways could ever have reached such a pinnacle of American political power. But as the media continued to avert its eyes from these newly revealed facts, even those disclosed in the pages of the Times itself, I gradually began to consider matters in a different light. Perhaps McCain’s elevation to great American political power was not in spite of the devastating facts littering his personal past, but because of them. As I wrote a few years ago:
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
In physics, when an object deviates from its expected trajectory for inexplicable reasons, we assume that some unknown force has been at work, and tracing the record of such deviations may help to determine the characteristic properties of the latter. Over the years, I’ve increasingly become aware of such strange ideological deviations in public policy, and although some are readily explained, others suggest the existence of hidden forces far beneath the surface of our regular political world. This same situation may have occurred throughout our history, and sometimes the political decisions that so baffled contemporaries eventually came to light decades later.
In The Dark Side of Camelot, famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claimed that secret blackmail evidence of JFK’s extra-marital affairs probably played a crucial role in having his administration overrule the unanimous verdict of all top Pentagon advisors and award the largest military procurement contract in U.S. history to General Dynamics instead of Boeing, thereby saving the former company from likely bankruptcy and its major organized-crime shareholders from devastating financial losses. Hersh also suggests that a similar factor likely explains JFK’s last-minute reversal in the choice of his Vice President, a decision that landed Lyndon Johnson on the 1960 ticket and placed him in the White House after Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
As I recently mentioned, in the 1950s Sen. Estes Kefauver shifted the focus of his Organized Crime Hearings after the Chicago Syndicate confronted him with the photographs of his sexual encounter with two mob-supplied women. A decade later, California Attorney-General Stanley Mosk suffered much the same fate, with the facts remaining hidden for over twenty years.
Similar rumors swirl around events much farther back in history as well, sometimes with enormous consequences. Well-placed contemporary sources have claimed that Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy Jewish lawyer, purchased the secret correspondence between Woodrow Wilson and his longtime mistress, and that the existence of that powerful leverage may have been an important factor behind Wilson’s astonishingly rapid rise from president of Princeton in 1910 to governor of New Jersey in 1911 to president of the United States in 1912. Once in office, Wilson signed the controversial legislation establishing the Federal Reserve system in 1913 and also named Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish member of the U.S. Supreme Court despite the public opposition of nearly our entire legal establishment. Wilson’s swiftly changing views on American involvement in the First World War may also have influenced by such personal pressures rather than solely determined by his perceptions of the national interest.
Without naming any names, since 2001 it has been difficult to avoid noticing that one of the most zealous and committed supporters of the Neocon party-line on all Middle Eastern foreign policy matters has been a leading Republican senator from one of the most socially-conservative Southern states, a man whose rumored personal inclinations have long circulated on the Internet. The strikingly-sudden reversal of this individual on a major policy question certainly supports these suspicions. There have also been several other such examples involving prominent Republicans.
But consider the far different situation of Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who in 1987 became the first member of the Congress to voluntarily admit that he was gay. Not long afterward, a notorious scandal erupted when it was revealed that his own DC townhouse had been used by a former boyfriend as headquarters for a male-prostitution ring. Frank claimed to have had no knowledge of that sordid situation, and his liberal Massachusetts constituents apparently accepted that, since he was resoundingly reelected and went on to serve another 24 years in Congress. But surely if Frank had been a Republican from a socially-conservative district, anyone possessing such evidence would have totally controlled his political survival, and with Frank spending several years as Chairman of the very powerful House Financial Services Committee, the value of such a hold would have been enormous.
This demonstrates the undeniable reality that what constitutes effective blackmail material may vary tremendously across different eras and regions. Today, it is widely accepted that longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover lived his life as a deeply-closeted homosexual and there seem to be serious claims that he also had some black ancestry, with the secret evidence of these facts probably helping to explain why for decades he stubbornly refused to admit the existence of American organized crime or focus his G-men on efforts to uproot it. But in today’s America, he surely would have proudly proclaimed his sexuality and racial ancestry in an New York Times Magazine cover-story, rightly believing that they enhanced his political invulnerability on the national stage. There are lurid rumors that the Syndicate possessed secret photos of Hoover wearing a dress and high-heels, but just a few years ago Rep. Mike Honda of San Jose desperately placed his eight-year-old transgendered grand-daughter front-and-center in his unsuccessful attempt to win reelection.
The decades have certainly softened the effectiveness of many forms of blackmail, but pedophilia still ranks as an extremely powerful taboo. There seems to be a great deal of evidence that powerful organizations and individuals have successfully managed to suppress credible accusations of that practice for very long periods of time if no group with substantial media influence chose to target the offenders for unmasking.
The most obvious example is the Catholic Church, and the failings of its American and international hierarchy in that regard have regularly made the front pages of our leading newspapers. But until the early 2000s and the breakthrough reporting of the Boston Globe as recounted in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight, the Church had routinely fended off such scandals.
Consider also the remarkable case of British television personality Sir Jimmy Savile, one of his country’s most admired celebrities, eventually knighted for his public service. Only shortly after his death at age 84 did the press begin revealing that he had probably molested many hundreds of children during his long career. Accusations by his young victims had stretched back across forty years, but his criminal activities had seemingly been protected by his wealth and celebrity, along with his numerous supporters in the media.
There is also the intriguing example of Dennis Hastert. As the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House in U.S. history, holding office during 1999-2007, Hastert was third in line to the Presidency and even ranked as our nation’s top Republican elected official during some of that period. Based upon my newspaper readings, he had always struck me as a rather bland and ordinary individual, with journalists sometimes even strongly hinting at his mediocrity, so that I occasionally wondered just how someone so unimpressive could have risen to such extremely high national office.
Then a few years ago, he was suddenly thrust back into the headlines, arrested by the FBI and charged with financial crimes relating to what apparently had been his past history of abusing young boys, at least one of whom had committed suicide, with the federal judge who sent him to prison denouncing him as “a serial child molester” at sentencing. Perhaps I’ve led an overly sheltered life, but my impression is that only a tiny sliver of Americans have had a long record of child molestation, and all things being equal, it seems rather unlikely that someone of such a background but who possesses no other great talents or skills would rise to near the absolute top of our political heap. So perhaps not all things were otherwise equal. If some powerful elements held the hard evidence that placed a particular elected official under their total control, making great efforts to elevate him to Speaker of the House would be a very shrewd investment.
At times the unwillingness of our national media to see major stories in front of their very noses reaches ridiculous extremes. During the summer of 2007, the Internet was ablaze with claims that Sen. John Edwards, a runner-up in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries, had just fathered a child with his mistress, and those reports were backed by seemingly-credible visual evidence, including photos showing the married senator holding his new-born baby. Yet as the days and even the weeks went by, not a whiff of this salacious scandal ever reached the pages of any of my morning newspapers or the rest of the mainstream media although it was a top conversation topic everywhere else. Eventually, the National Enquirer, a notorious gossip tabloid, scored a journalistic first, by receiving a Pulitzer Prize nomination for breaking the story that no other outlet seemed willing to cover. Would our media have similarly averted its eyes from a newborn baby Trump coming from the wrong side of the bed?
Over the years, it became increasingly obvious to me that nearly all elements of our national media were often quite willing to enlist in a “conspiracy of silence” to minimize or entirely ignore stories of tremendous potential interest to their readership and major public importance. I could easily have doubled or tripled the number of such notable examples I provided above without much effort. Moreover, it is quite intriguing that so many of these cases involve the sort of criminal or sexual misbehavior that would be ideally suited for blackmailing powerful individuals who are less likely to be vulnerable to other influences. So perhaps many of the elected officials situated at the top of our democratic system merely reign as political puppets, dancing to invisible strings.
Given my awareness of this remarkable track-record of major media cover-ups, I’m ashamed to admit that I had paid almost no attention to the Jeffrey Epstein case until it exploded across our national headlines earlier this month, suddenly becoming one of the biggest news stories in our country.
For many years, reports about Epstein and his illegal sex-ring had regularly circulated on the fringes of the Internet, with agitated commenters citing the case as proof of the dark and malevolent forces that secretly controlled our corrupted political system. But I almost entirely ignored these discussions, and I’m not sure that I ever once clicked on a single link.
Probably one reason I paid so little attention to the topic was the exceptionally lurid nature of the claims being made. Epstein was supposedly an enormously wealthy Wall Street financier of rather mysterious personal background and source of funds, who owned a private island and an immense New York City mansion, both regularly stocked with harems of underage girls provided for sexual purposes. He allegedly hobnobbed on a regular basis with Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, and numerous other figures in the international elite, as well as a gaggle of ordinary billionaires, frequently transporting those individuals on his personal jet known as “the Lolita Express” for the role it played in facilitating illegal secret orgies with young girls. When right-wing bloggers on obscure websites claimed that former President Clinton and the British Royals were being sexually serviced by the underage girls of a James Bond super-villain brought to life, I just assumed those accusations were the wildest sort of Internet exaggeration.
Moreover, these angry writers did occasionally let slip that the fiendish target of their wrath had already been charged in a Florida courtroom, eventually pleading guilty to a single sexual offense and receiving a thirteen month jail sentence, mitigated by very generous work-release provisions. This hardly seemed like the sort of judicial punishment that would lend credence to the fantastical accusations against him. If Epstein had already been investigated by law enforcement authorities and given the sentence one might expect for writing a bad check, I found it quite unlikely that he was actually the Goldfinger or Dr. No that deluded Internet activists made him out to be.
Then these same wild, implausible claims previously found only on anonymous comment-threads were suddenly repeated as solid fact on the front pages of theTimes and all my other morning newspapers, and the former federal prosecutor who had signed off on Epstein’s legal slap-on-the-wrist was forced to resign from the Trump Cabinet. Epstein’s safe had been found to contain a huge cache of child-pornography and other highly suspicious material, and he was quickly rearrested on charges that could send him to federal prison for decades. Prestigious media outlets described Epstein as the mastermind of a huge sex-trafficking ring, and numerous underage victims began coming forward, telling their stories of how he had molested, raped, and pimped them. The author of a long 2003 Epstein profile that had appeared in Vanity Fair explained that she had personally spoken to some of his victims and included their highly-credible accounts in her article, but that those portions had been stricken and removed by her timorous editors.
As presented by these media outlets, Epstein’s personal rise also seemed rather inexplicable unless he had benefited from some powerful network or similar organization. Lacking any college degree or credentials, he had somehow gotten a job teaching at one of New York City’s most elite prep schools, then quickly jumped to working at a top investment bank, rising to partner with astonishing speed until he was fired a few years later for illegal activity. Despite such a scanty and doubtful record, he was soon managing money for some of America’s wealthiest individuals, and keeping so much of it for himself that he was regularly described as a billionaire. According to newspaper accounts, his great specialty was “making connections for people.”
Obviously, Epstein was a ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustler. But extremely wealthy individuals must surely be surrounded by great swarms of ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustlers, and why would he have been so much more successful than all those others? Perhaps a clue comes from the offhand remark of Epstein’s now-disgraced prosecutor, saying that he had been told to go very easy on the sex-trafficker because he “belonged to intelligence.” The vague phrasing of that statement raises questions about whether the intelligence service may not have been one controlled by the U.S. government.
Philip Giraldi, a highly-regarded former CIA officer, put things very plainly when he suggested that Epstein had probably been working for the Israeli Mossad, operating “honey traps” to obtain blackmail information on all the wealthy and powerful individuals whom he regularly plied with underage girls. Indeed, longtime Canadian journalist Eric Margolis recounted his early 1990s visit to Epstein’s enormous NYC mansion, in which he had barely crossed the threshold before he was offered an “intimate massage” by one of the many young girls there, presumably in a bedroom well-stocked with hidden cameras.
Given my personal lack of interest in the Epstein case, then or now, perhaps a few of these details may be garbled, but it seems undeniable that he was exactly the sort of remarkable renegade often faced by Agent 007 in the movies, and the true facts will presumably come out at his trial. Or perhaps not. Whether he lives to see trial is not entirely clear given the considerable number of powerful individuals who might prefer that hidden facts remain hidden, and the Friday newspapers reported that Epstein had been found injured and unconscious in his prison cell.
When one seemingly implausible pedophilia scandal has suddenly jumped from obscure corners of the Internet to the front pages of our leading newspapers, we must naturally begin to wonder whether others might not eventually do the same. And a very likely candidate comes to mind, one that seemed to me far better documented than the vague accusations being thrown about over the last few years against a wealthy financier once given a thirteen-month jail sentence in Florida a decade earlier.
I don’t use Social Media myself, but near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, I gradually began seeing more and more Trump supporters referring to something called “Pizzagate,” a burgeoning sexual scandal that they claimed would bring down Hillary Clinton and many of the top leaders of her party, with the chatter actually increasing after Trump was elected. As near as I could tell, the whole bizarre theory had grown up on the far-right fringe of the Internet, with the utterly fantastical plot having something to do with stolen secret emails, DC pizza parlors, and a ring of pedophiles situated near the top of the Democratic Party. But given all the other strange and unlikely things I’d gradually discovered about our history, it didn’t seem like something I could necessarily dismiss out of hand.
At the beginning of December, a right-wing blogger produced a lengthy exposition of the Pizzagate charges, which finally gave me some understanding of what was actually under discussion, and I soon made arrangements to republish his article. It quickly attracted a great deal of interest, and some websites pointed to it as the best single introduction to the scandal for a general audience.
Pizzagate
AEDON CASSIEL • DECEMBER 2, 2016
A couple of weeks later, I republished an additional article by the same writer, describing a long list of previous pedophilia scandals that had occurred in elite American and European political circles. Although many of these seemed to be solidly documented, nearly all of them had received minimal coverage by our mainstream media outlets. And if such political pedophile rings had existed in the relatively recent past, was it so totally implausible that there might be another one simmering beneath the surface of today’s Washington DC?
Precedents for Pizzagate
AEDON CASSIEL • DECEMBER 23, 2016
Those interested in the details of the Pizzagate Hypothesis are advised to read these articles, especially the first one, but I might as well provide a brief summary.
John Podesta had been a longtime fixture in DC political circles, becoming chief of staff to President Bill Clinton in 1998, and afterward remaining one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party establishment. While serving as as chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, his apparent carelessness with the password security of his Gmail account allowed it to easily be hacked, and tens of thousands of his personal emails were soon published on WikiLeaks. A swarm of young anti-Clinton activists began scouring this treasure-trove of semi-confidential information, seeking evidence of mundane bribery and corruption, but instead they came across some quite odd exchanges, seemingly written in coded language.
Now use of coded language in a supposedly secure private email account raises all sorts of natural suspicions regarding what might have been under discussion, with the most likely possibilities being illegal drugs or sex. But most of the references didn’t seem to fit the former category, and in our remarkably libertine era, in which political candidates compete for the right to be Grand Marshal at an annual Gay Pride Parade, one of the few sexual activities still discussed only in whispers would seem to be pedophilia, with some of the very strange remarks possibly hinting at this.
The researchers also soon discovered that his brother Tony Podesta, one of the wealthiest and most successful lobbyists in DC, had extremely odd taste in art. Major items of his very extensive personal collection seemed to represent tortured or murdered bodies, and one of his favorite artists was best known for paintings depicting young children being held captive, lying dead, or suffering under severe distress. Such peculiar artwork obviously isn’t illegal, but it might naturally arouse some suspicions. And oddly enough, arch-Democrat Podesta had long been a close personal friend of former Republican Speaker and convicted child-molester Dennis Hastert, welcoming him back into DC society after his release from prison.
Furthermore, some of the rather suspiciously-worded Podesta emails referred to events held at a local DC pizza parlor, greatly favored by the Democratic Party elite, whose owner was the gay former boyfriend of David Brock, a leading Democratic activist. The public Instagram account of that pizza-entrepreneur apparently contained numerous images of young children, sometimes tied or bound, with those images frequently labeled by hashtags using the traditional gay slang for underage sexual targets. Some photos showed the fellow wearing a tee-shirt bearing the statement “I Love Children” in French, and by a very odd coincidence, his possibly assumed name was phonetically identical to that very same French phrase, thus proclaiming to the world that he was “a lover of children.” Closely connected Instagram accounts also included pictures of young children, sometimes shown amid piles of high-value currency, with queries about how much those particular children might be worth. None of this seemed illegal, but surely any reasonable person would regard the material as extremely suspicious.
DC is sometimes described as “Powertown,” being the seat of the individuals who make America’s laws and govern our society, with local political journalists being closely attuned to the relative status of such individuals. And oddly enough, GQ Magazine had ranked that gay pizza parlor owner with a strange focus on young children as being one of the 50 most powerful people in our national capital, placing him far ahead of many Cabinet members, Senators, Congressional Chairmen, Supreme Court justices, and top lobbyists. Was his pizza really that delicious?
These few paragraphs provide merely a sliver of the large quantity of highly-suspicious material surrounding various powerful figures at the apex of the DC political world. A vast cloud of billowing smoke is certainly no proof of any fire, but only a fool would completely ignore it without attempting further investigation.
I usually regard videos as a poor means of imparting serious information, far less effective and meaningful than the simple printed word. But the overwhelming bulk of the evidence supporting the Pizzagate Hypothesis consists of visual images and screen shots, and these are naturally suited to a video presentation.
Some of the best summaries of the Pizzagate case were produced by a young British YouTuber named Tara McCarthy, whose work was published under the name of “Reality Calls,” and her videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Although her channel was eventually banned and her videos purged, copies were later reloaded to other accounts, both on YouTube and BitChute. Some of the evidence she presents seemed rather innocuous or speculative to me and other elements were probably based upon her unfamiliarity with American society and culture. But a great deal of extremely suspicious material remains, and I would suggest that people watch the videos and decide for themselves.
Around the same time that I first became familiar with the details of the Pizzagate controversy, the topic also started reaching the pages of my morning newspapers, but in an rather strange manner. Political stories began giving a sentence or two to the “Pizzagate hoax,” describing it as a ridiculous right-wing “conspiracy theory” but excluding all relevant details. I had an eery feeling that some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch causing the entire mainstream media to begin displaying identical signs declaring “Pizzagate Is False—Nothing To See There!” in brightly flashing neon. I couldn’t recall any previous example of such a strange media reaction to some obscure Internet controversy.
Articles in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times also suddenly appeared denouncing the entirety of the alternative media—Left, Right, and Libertarian—as “fake news” websites promoting Russian propaganda, while urging that their content be blocked by all patriotic Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Prior to that moment, I’d never even heard the term “fake news” but suddenly it was ubiquitous across the media, once again almost as if some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch.
I naturally began to wonder whether the timing of these two strange developments was entirely coincidental. Perhaps Pizzagate was indeed true and struck so deeply at the core of our hugely corrupted political system that the media efforts to suppress it were approaching the point of hysteria.
Not long afterward, Tara McCarthy’s detailed Pizzagate videos were purged from YouTube. This was among the very first instances of video content being banned despite fully conforming to all existing YouTube guidelines, another deeply suspicious development.
I also noticed that mere mention of Pizzagate had become politically lethal. Donald Trump had selected Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as his National Security Advisor, and Flynn’s son served as the latter’s chief of staff. The younger Flynn happened to Tweet out a couple of links to Pizzagate stories, pointing out that the accusations hadn’t yet been actually investigated let alone disproven, and very soon afterward, he was purged from the Trump transition team, foreshadowing his father’s fall a few weeks later. It seemed astonishing to me that a few simple Tweets about an Internet controversy could have such huge real-life impact near the top of our government.
The media continued its uniform drumbeat of “Pizzagate Has Been Disproven!” but we were never told how or by whom, and I was not the only individual to notice the hollowness of such denunciations. An award-winning investigative journalist named Ben Swann at a CBS station in Atlanta broadcast a short television segment summarizing the Pizzagate controversy and noting that contrary to widespread media claims, Pizzagate had neither been investigated nor debunked. Swann was almost immediately purged by CBS but a copy of his television segment remains available for viewing on the Internet.
There is an old wartime proverb that enemy flak is always heaviest over the most important target, and the remarkably ferocious wave of attacks and censorship against anyone broaching the subject of Pizzagate seems to raise obvious dark suspicions. Indeed, the simultaneous waves of attacks against all alternative media outlets as “Russian propaganda outlets” laid the basis for the continuing regime of Social Media censorship that has become a central aspect of today’s world.
Pizzagate may or may not turn out to be true, but the ongoing Internet crackdown has similarly engulfed topics of a somewhat similar nature but with vastly stronger documentation. Although I don’t use Twitter myself, I encountered the obvious implications of this new censorship policy following McCain’s death last August. The senator had died on a Saturday afternoon, and readership of Sydney Schanberg’s long 2008 expose quickly exploded, with numerous individuals Tweeting out the story and a large fraction of our incoming traffic therefore coming from Twitter. This continued until the following morning, at which point the huge flood of Tweets continued to grow, but all incoming Twitter traffic suddenly and permanently vanished, presumably because “shadow banning” had rendered those Tweets invisible. My own article on McCain’s very doubtful war record simultaneously suffered the same fate, as did numerous other articles of a controversial nature that we published later that same week.
Perhaps that censorship decision was made by some ignorant young intern at Twitter, casually choosing to ban as “hate speech” or “fake news” a massively-documented 8,400 word expose by one of America’s most distinguished journalists, a Pulitzer-prize winning former top editor at The New York Times.
Or perhaps certain political-puppeteers who had spent decades controlling that late Arizona senator sought to ensure that their political puppet-strings remained invisible even after his death.
She takes her stance and her husband can see her trembling. She putts and misses; they lose the match.
On the way home in the car her husband is fuming, "I cannot believe you missed that putt! That putt was no longer than my dick."
The wife just looked over at her husband, smiled and said, "Yes dear, but it was much harder!"
*.*
We were helping customers when the store optometrist walked by and flirted with a co-worker.
Of course, we all had to stop what we were doing to tease her, but she quickly dismissed the notion of a budding romance.
"Can you imagine making out with an optometrist?" she asked. "It would always be, 'Better like this...or like this?'"
*.*
The world's leading expert on European wasps walks into a record shop...
He asks the assistant “Do you have ‘European Vespidae Acoustics Volume 2? I believe it was released this week.”
“Certainly,” replies the assistant. “Would you like to listen before you buy it?”
"That would be wonderful," says the expert, and puts on a pair of headphones.
He listens for a few moments and says to the assistant, “I'm terribly sorry, but I am the world's leading expert on European wasps and this is not accurate at all. I don't recognize any of those sounds. Are you sure this is the correct recording?”
The assistant checks the turntable, and replies that it is indeed European Vespidae Acoustics Volume 2. The assistant apologizes and lifts the needle onto the next track.
Again the expert listens for a few moments and then says to the assistant, "No, this just can't be right! I've been an expert in this field for 43 years and I still don't recognize any of these sounds."
The assistant apologizes again and lifts the needle to the next track.
The expert throws off the headphones as soon as it starts playing and is fuming with rage.
"This is outrageous false advertising! I am the world's leading expert on European wasps and no European wasp has ever made a sound like the ones on this record!"
The manager of the shop overhears the commotion and walks over.
"What seems to be the problem, sir?"
"This is an outrage! I am the world's leading expert on European wasps. Nobody knows more about them than I do. There is no way in hell that the sounds on that record were made by European wasps!"
The manager glances down and notices the problem instantly.
"I'm terribly sorry, sir. It appears we've been playing you the bee side."
*.*
Congrats to John and Phyllis Cook, who fell in love at an Ohio nursing home and got married. He's 100-years-old, she's 102.
Although, she undoubtedly gets kidded about robbing the hospital bed.
Heard they spent their honeymoon walking to the dining room.
And not a day goes by that they don't say those three words to each other: "What? Huh? What?"
*.*
Fear of that long awaited "Big One" has inspired panic buying in Southern California.
I know my mom and sister went out and cornered the bubble-wrap market.
Need to protect the earthquake wine supply.
Quote of the Times;
Some have asked, “who needs 100 rounds?” If 6 brave, trained, and alert police officers with professionally maintained weapons fired 58 rounds to subdue the Dayton shooter, I’d say my wife deserves at least that many chances to protect herself and my kids when I’m not home. - Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) August 7, 2019
Link of the Times;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazino_affair
Issue of the Times;
John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate by Ron Unz
The death of Sen. John McCain last August revealed some important truths about the nature of our establishment media.
McCain’s family had released word of his incurable brain cancer many months earlier and his passing at age 84 was long expected, so media outlets great and small had possessed all the time necessary for producing and polishing the packages they eventually published, and that was readily apparent from the voluminous nature of the tributes that they ran. The New York Times, still our national newspaper of record, allocated more than three full pages of its printed edition to the primary obituary, and this was supplemented by a considerable number of other articles and sidebars. I cannot recall any political figure other than an American president whose passing had ever received such an enormous wealth of coverage, and perhaps even some former residents of the Oval Office might have fallen short of that standard. Although I certainly didn’t bother reading all of the tens of thousands of words in the Times or my other newspapers, the coverage of McCain’s life and career seemed exceptionally laudatory across the mainstream media, liberal and conservative alike, with scarcely a negative word appearing anywhere outside the political fringe.
On the face of it, such undiluted political love for McCain might seem a bit odd to those who have followed his activities over the last couple of decades. After all, the Times and most of the other leading lights of our media firmament are purportedly liberal and claim to have become vehement critics of our disastrous Iraq War and other military adventures, let alone the calamitous possibility of an attack upon Iran. Meanwhile, McCain was universally regarded as the leading figure in America’s “War Party,” eagerly supporting all prospective and retrospective military endeavors with gleeful fury, and even making his chant of “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” the most widely remembered detail of his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign. So either our major media outlets somehow overlooked such striking differences on an absolutely central issue, or perhaps their true positions on certain matters are not exactly what they seem to be, and merely constitute elements of a Kabuki-performance aimed at deceiving their more naive readers.
Even more remarkable were the discordant facts airbrushed out of McCain’s history. As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and two George Polk awards, the late Sydney Schanberg was widely regarded as one of the greatest American war correspondents of the twentieth century. His exploits during our ill-fated Indo-Chinese War had become the basis of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, which probably established him as the most famous journalist in America after Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, and he had also served as a top editor at The New York Times. A decade ago, he published his greatest expose, providing a mountain of evidence that America had deliberately left behind hundreds of POWs in Vietnam and he fingered then-presidential candidate John McCain as the central figure in the later official cover-up of that monstrous betrayal. The Arizona senator had traded on his national reputation as our best-known former POW to bury the story of those abandoned prisoners, permitting America’s political establishment to escape serious embarrassment. As a result, Sen. McCain earned the lush rewards of our generous ruling elites, much like his own father Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., who had led the cover-up of the deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, which killed or wounded over 200 American servicemen.
As publisher of The American Conservative, I ran Schanberg’s remarkable piece as a cover story, and across several websites over the years it has surely been read many hundreds of thousands of times, including a huge spike around the time of McCain’s death. I therefore find it rather difficult to believe that the many journalists investigating McCain’s background might have remained unaware of this material. Yet no hints of these facts were provided in any of the articles appearing in any remotely prominent media outlets as can be seen by searching for web pages containing “McCain and Schanberg” dated around the time of the Senator’s passing.
John McCain and the POW Cover-Up
SYDNEY SCHANBERG • MAY 25, 2010
Schanberg’s journalistic stature had hardly been forgotten by his former colleagues. Upon his death a couple of years ago, the Times ran a very long and glowing obituary, and a few months later I attended the memorial tribute to his life and career held at the New York Times headquarters building, which more than two hundred prominent journalists mostly from his own generation, including those of the highest rank. Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. gave a speech describing how as a young man he had always so greatly admired Schanberg and had been mortified by the unfortunate circumstances of his departure from the family’s newspaper. Former Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld recounted the many years he had worked closely with the man he had long considered his closest friend and colleague, someone whom he almost seemed to regard as his older brother. But during the two hours of praise and remembrance scarcely a single word was uttered in public about the gigantic story that had occupied the last two decades of Schanberg’s celebrated career.
This same blanket of media silence also enveloped the very serious accusations regarding McCain’s own Vietnam War record. A few years ago, I drew upon the Timesand other fully mainstream sources to strongly suggest that McCain’s stories of his torture as a POW were probably fictional, invented to serve as a cover and an excuse for the very real record of his wartime collaboration with his Communist captors. Indeed, at the time our American media reported his activities as one of the leading propagandists of our North Vietnamese foes, but these facts were later flushed down the memory-hole. McCain’s father then ranked as one of America’s top military officers, and it seems likely that his personal political intervention ensured that the official narrative of his son’s wartime record was transmuted from traitor to war-hero, thereby allowing the younger McCain to later embark upon his celebrated political career.
John McCain: When “Tokyo Rose” Ran for President
RON UNZ • MARCH 9, 2015
The story of the abandoned Vietnam POWs and McCain’s own Communist propaganda broadcasts hardly exhaust the catalog of the major skeletons in the late Senator’s closet. McCain was regularly described by reporters as being remarkably hot-headed and having a violent temper, but the national press left it to the alternative media to investigate the real-life implications of those rather suggestive phrases.
In a September 1, 2008 Counterpunch expose later published online, Alexander Cockburn reported that interviews with two emergency room physicians in Phoenix revealed that around the time that McCain was sucked into the political maelstrom of the Keating Five Scandal, his wife Cindy was admitted to her local hospital suffering from a black eye, facial bruises, and scratches consistent with physical violence, and this same situation occurred two additional times over the next few years. Cockburn also noted several other highly suspicious marital incidents during the years that followed, including the Senator’s wife appearing with a bandaged wrist and her arm in a sling not long after she joined her husband on the 2008 campaign trail, an injury reported by our strangely incurious political journalists as being due to “excessive hand-shaking.” It’s an odd situation when a tiny leftist newsletter can easily uncover facts that so totally eluded the vast resources of our entire national press corps. If there were credible reports that Melania Trump had been repeatedly admitted to local emergency rooms suffering from black eyes and facial bruises, would our corporate media have remained so uninterested in any further investigation?
McCain had first won his Arizona Congressional seat in 1982, not long after he moved into the state, with his campaign bankrolled by his father-in-law’s beer-distributorship fortune, and that inheritance eventually elevated the McCain household into one of the wealthiest in the Senate. But although the Senator spent the next quarter-century in public life, even nearly upsetting George W. Bush for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, only in late 2008 did I learn from the Times that the Phoenix beer-monopoly in question, then valued at around $200 million, had accrued to a man whose lifelong business partner Kemper Marley had long been deeply linked to organized crime. Indeed, close associates of that latter individual had been convicted by a jury of the car-bomb assassination of a Phoenix investigative crime reporter just a few years before McCain’s sudden triumphal entrance into Arizona politics. Perhaps such guilt-by-association is improper, but would our national press-corps have remained silent if the personal fortune of our current president were only a step or two removed from the car-bomb assassins of a nosy journalist who died while investigating mobsters?
As I gradually became aware of these enormities casually hidden in McCain’s background, my initial reaction was disbelief that someone whose record was so deeply tarnished in so many different ways could ever have reached such a pinnacle of American political power. But as the media continued to avert its eyes from these newly revealed facts, even those disclosed in the pages of the Times itself, I gradually began to consider matters in a different light. Perhaps McCain’s elevation to great American political power was not in spite of the devastating facts littering his personal past, but because of them. As I wrote a few years ago:
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
In physics, when an object deviates from its expected trajectory for inexplicable reasons, we assume that some unknown force has been at work, and tracing the record of such deviations may help to determine the characteristic properties of the latter. Over the years, I’ve increasingly become aware of such strange ideological deviations in public policy, and although some are readily explained, others suggest the existence of hidden forces far beneath the surface of our regular political world. This same situation may have occurred throughout our history, and sometimes the political decisions that so baffled contemporaries eventually came to light decades later.
In The Dark Side of Camelot, famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claimed that secret blackmail evidence of JFK’s extra-marital affairs probably played a crucial role in having his administration overrule the unanimous verdict of all top Pentagon advisors and award the largest military procurement contract in U.S. history to General Dynamics instead of Boeing, thereby saving the former company from likely bankruptcy and its major organized-crime shareholders from devastating financial losses. Hersh also suggests that a similar factor likely explains JFK’s last-minute reversal in the choice of his Vice President, a decision that landed Lyndon Johnson on the 1960 ticket and placed him in the White House after Kennedy’s 1963 assassination.
As I recently mentioned, in the 1950s Sen. Estes Kefauver shifted the focus of his Organized Crime Hearings after the Chicago Syndicate confronted him with the photographs of his sexual encounter with two mob-supplied women. A decade later, California Attorney-General Stanley Mosk suffered much the same fate, with the facts remaining hidden for over twenty years.
Similar rumors swirl around events much farther back in history as well, sometimes with enormous consequences. Well-placed contemporary sources have claimed that Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy Jewish lawyer, purchased the secret correspondence between Woodrow Wilson and his longtime mistress, and that the existence of that powerful leverage may have been an important factor behind Wilson’s astonishingly rapid rise from president of Princeton in 1910 to governor of New Jersey in 1911 to president of the United States in 1912. Once in office, Wilson signed the controversial legislation establishing the Federal Reserve system in 1913 and also named Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish member of the U.S. Supreme Court despite the public opposition of nearly our entire legal establishment. Wilson’s swiftly changing views on American involvement in the First World War may also have influenced by such personal pressures rather than solely determined by his perceptions of the national interest.
Without naming any names, since 2001 it has been difficult to avoid noticing that one of the most zealous and committed supporters of the Neocon party-line on all Middle Eastern foreign policy matters has been a leading Republican senator from one of the most socially-conservative Southern states, a man whose rumored personal inclinations have long circulated on the Internet. The strikingly-sudden reversal of this individual on a major policy question certainly supports these suspicions. There have also been several other such examples involving prominent Republicans.
But consider the far different situation of Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who in 1987 became the first member of the Congress to voluntarily admit that he was gay. Not long afterward, a notorious scandal erupted when it was revealed that his own DC townhouse had been used by a former boyfriend as headquarters for a male-prostitution ring. Frank claimed to have had no knowledge of that sordid situation, and his liberal Massachusetts constituents apparently accepted that, since he was resoundingly reelected and went on to serve another 24 years in Congress. But surely if Frank had been a Republican from a socially-conservative district, anyone possessing such evidence would have totally controlled his political survival, and with Frank spending several years as Chairman of the very powerful House Financial Services Committee, the value of such a hold would have been enormous.
This demonstrates the undeniable reality that what constitutes effective blackmail material may vary tremendously across different eras and regions. Today, it is widely accepted that longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover lived his life as a deeply-closeted homosexual and there seem to be serious claims that he also had some black ancestry, with the secret evidence of these facts probably helping to explain why for decades he stubbornly refused to admit the existence of American organized crime or focus his G-men on efforts to uproot it. But in today’s America, he surely would have proudly proclaimed his sexuality and racial ancestry in an New York Times Magazine cover-story, rightly believing that they enhanced his political invulnerability on the national stage. There are lurid rumors that the Syndicate possessed secret photos of Hoover wearing a dress and high-heels, but just a few years ago Rep. Mike Honda of San Jose desperately placed his eight-year-old transgendered grand-daughter front-and-center in his unsuccessful attempt to win reelection.
The decades have certainly softened the effectiveness of many forms of blackmail, but pedophilia still ranks as an extremely powerful taboo. There seems to be a great deal of evidence that powerful organizations and individuals have successfully managed to suppress credible accusations of that practice for very long periods of time if no group with substantial media influence chose to target the offenders for unmasking.
The most obvious example is the Catholic Church, and the failings of its American and international hierarchy in that regard have regularly made the front pages of our leading newspapers. But until the early 2000s and the breakthrough reporting of the Boston Globe as recounted in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight, the Church had routinely fended off such scandals.
Consider also the remarkable case of British television personality Sir Jimmy Savile, one of his country’s most admired celebrities, eventually knighted for his public service. Only shortly after his death at age 84 did the press begin revealing that he had probably molested many hundreds of children during his long career. Accusations by his young victims had stretched back across forty years, but his criminal activities had seemingly been protected by his wealth and celebrity, along with his numerous supporters in the media.
There is also the intriguing example of Dennis Hastert. As the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House in U.S. history, holding office during 1999-2007, Hastert was third in line to the Presidency and even ranked as our nation’s top Republican elected official during some of that period. Based upon my newspaper readings, he had always struck me as a rather bland and ordinary individual, with journalists sometimes even strongly hinting at his mediocrity, so that I occasionally wondered just how someone so unimpressive could have risen to such extremely high national office.
Then a few years ago, he was suddenly thrust back into the headlines, arrested by the FBI and charged with financial crimes relating to what apparently had been his past history of abusing young boys, at least one of whom had committed suicide, with the federal judge who sent him to prison denouncing him as “a serial child molester” at sentencing. Perhaps I’ve led an overly sheltered life, but my impression is that only a tiny sliver of Americans have had a long record of child molestation, and all things being equal, it seems rather unlikely that someone of such a background but who possesses no other great talents or skills would rise to near the absolute top of our political heap. So perhaps not all things were otherwise equal. If some powerful elements held the hard evidence that placed a particular elected official under their total control, making great efforts to elevate him to Speaker of the House would be a very shrewd investment.
At times the unwillingness of our national media to see major stories in front of their very noses reaches ridiculous extremes. During the summer of 2007, the Internet was ablaze with claims that Sen. John Edwards, a runner-up in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries, had just fathered a child with his mistress, and those reports were backed by seemingly-credible visual evidence, including photos showing the married senator holding his new-born baby. Yet as the days and even the weeks went by, not a whiff of this salacious scandal ever reached the pages of any of my morning newspapers or the rest of the mainstream media although it was a top conversation topic everywhere else. Eventually, the National Enquirer, a notorious gossip tabloid, scored a journalistic first, by receiving a Pulitzer Prize nomination for breaking the story that no other outlet seemed willing to cover. Would our media have similarly averted its eyes from a newborn baby Trump coming from the wrong side of the bed?
Over the years, it became increasingly obvious to me that nearly all elements of our national media were often quite willing to enlist in a “conspiracy of silence” to minimize or entirely ignore stories of tremendous potential interest to their readership and major public importance. I could easily have doubled or tripled the number of such notable examples I provided above without much effort. Moreover, it is quite intriguing that so many of these cases involve the sort of criminal or sexual misbehavior that would be ideally suited for blackmailing powerful individuals who are less likely to be vulnerable to other influences. So perhaps many of the elected officials situated at the top of our democratic system merely reign as political puppets, dancing to invisible strings.
Given my awareness of this remarkable track-record of major media cover-ups, I’m ashamed to admit that I had paid almost no attention to the Jeffrey Epstein case until it exploded across our national headlines earlier this month, suddenly becoming one of the biggest news stories in our country.
For many years, reports about Epstein and his illegal sex-ring had regularly circulated on the fringes of the Internet, with agitated commenters citing the case as proof of the dark and malevolent forces that secretly controlled our corrupted political system. But I almost entirely ignored these discussions, and I’m not sure that I ever once clicked on a single link.
Probably one reason I paid so little attention to the topic was the exceptionally lurid nature of the claims being made. Epstein was supposedly an enormously wealthy Wall Street financier of rather mysterious personal background and source of funds, who owned a private island and an immense New York City mansion, both regularly stocked with harems of underage girls provided for sexual purposes. He allegedly hobnobbed on a regular basis with Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, and numerous other figures in the international elite, as well as a gaggle of ordinary billionaires, frequently transporting those individuals on his personal jet known as “the Lolita Express” for the role it played in facilitating illegal secret orgies with young girls. When right-wing bloggers on obscure websites claimed that former President Clinton and the British Royals were being sexually serviced by the underage girls of a James Bond super-villain brought to life, I just assumed those accusations were the wildest sort of Internet exaggeration.
Moreover, these angry writers did occasionally let slip that the fiendish target of their wrath had already been charged in a Florida courtroom, eventually pleading guilty to a single sexual offense and receiving a thirteen month jail sentence, mitigated by very generous work-release provisions. This hardly seemed like the sort of judicial punishment that would lend credence to the fantastical accusations against him. If Epstein had already been investigated by law enforcement authorities and given the sentence one might expect for writing a bad check, I found it quite unlikely that he was actually the Goldfinger or Dr. No that deluded Internet activists made him out to be.
Then these same wild, implausible claims previously found only on anonymous comment-threads were suddenly repeated as solid fact on the front pages of theTimes and all my other morning newspapers, and the former federal prosecutor who had signed off on Epstein’s legal slap-on-the-wrist was forced to resign from the Trump Cabinet. Epstein’s safe had been found to contain a huge cache of child-pornography and other highly suspicious material, and he was quickly rearrested on charges that could send him to federal prison for decades. Prestigious media outlets described Epstein as the mastermind of a huge sex-trafficking ring, and numerous underage victims began coming forward, telling their stories of how he had molested, raped, and pimped them. The author of a long 2003 Epstein profile that had appeared in Vanity Fair explained that she had personally spoken to some of his victims and included their highly-credible accounts in her article, but that those portions had been stricken and removed by her timorous editors.
As presented by these media outlets, Epstein’s personal rise also seemed rather inexplicable unless he had benefited from some powerful network or similar organization. Lacking any college degree or credentials, he had somehow gotten a job teaching at one of New York City’s most elite prep schools, then quickly jumped to working at a top investment bank, rising to partner with astonishing speed until he was fired a few years later for illegal activity. Despite such a scanty and doubtful record, he was soon managing money for some of America’s wealthiest individuals, and keeping so much of it for himself that he was regularly described as a billionaire. According to newspaper accounts, his great specialty was “making connections for people.”
Obviously, Epstein was a ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustler. But extremely wealthy individuals must surely be surrounded by great swarms of ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustlers, and why would he have been so much more successful than all those others? Perhaps a clue comes from the offhand remark of Epstein’s now-disgraced prosecutor, saying that he had been told to go very easy on the sex-trafficker because he “belonged to intelligence.” The vague phrasing of that statement raises questions about whether the intelligence service may not have been one controlled by the U.S. government.
Philip Giraldi, a highly-regarded former CIA officer, put things very plainly when he suggested that Epstein had probably been working for the Israeli Mossad, operating “honey traps” to obtain blackmail information on all the wealthy and powerful individuals whom he regularly plied with underage girls. Indeed, longtime Canadian journalist Eric Margolis recounted his early 1990s visit to Epstein’s enormous NYC mansion, in which he had barely crossed the threshold before he was offered an “intimate massage” by one of the many young girls there, presumably in a bedroom well-stocked with hidden cameras.
Given my personal lack of interest in the Epstein case, then or now, perhaps a few of these details may be garbled, but it seems undeniable that he was exactly the sort of remarkable renegade often faced by Agent 007 in the movies, and the true facts will presumably come out at his trial. Or perhaps not. Whether he lives to see trial is not entirely clear given the considerable number of powerful individuals who might prefer that hidden facts remain hidden, and the Friday newspapers reported that Epstein had been found injured and unconscious in his prison cell.
When one seemingly implausible pedophilia scandal has suddenly jumped from obscure corners of the Internet to the front pages of our leading newspapers, we must naturally begin to wonder whether others might not eventually do the same. And a very likely candidate comes to mind, one that seemed to me far better documented than the vague accusations being thrown about over the last few years against a wealthy financier once given a thirteen-month jail sentence in Florida a decade earlier.
I don’t use Social Media myself, but near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, I gradually began seeing more and more Trump supporters referring to something called “Pizzagate,” a burgeoning sexual scandal that they claimed would bring down Hillary Clinton and many of the top leaders of her party, with the chatter actually increasing after Trump was elected. As near as I could tell, the whole bizarre theory had grown up on the far-right fringe of the Internet, with the utterly fantastical plot having something to do with stolen secret emails, DC pizza parlors, and a ring of pedophiles situated near the top of the Democratic Party. But given all the other strange and unlikely things I’d gradually discovered about our history, it didn’t seem like something I could necessarily dismiss out of hand.
At the beginning of December, a right-wing blogger produced a lengthy exposition of the Pizzagate charges, which finally gave me some understanding of what was actually under discussion, and I soon made arrangements to republish his article. It quickly attracted a great deal of interest, and some websites pointed to it as the best single introduction to the scandal for a general audience.
Pizzagate
AEDON CASSIEL • DECEMBER 2, 2016
A couple of weeks later, I republished an additional article by the same writer, describing a long list of previous pedophilia scandals that had occurred in elite American and European political circles. Although many of these seemed to be solidly documented, nearly all of them had received minimal coverage by our mainstream media outlets. And if such political pedophile rings had existed in the relatively recent past, was it so totally implausible that there might be another one simmering beneath the surface of today’s Washington DC?
Precedents for Pizzagate
AEDON CASSIEL • DECEMBER 23, 2016
Those interested in the details of the Pizzagate Hypothesis are advised to read these articles, especially the first one, but I might as well provide a brief summary.
John Podesta had been a longtime fixture in DC political circles, becoming chief of staff to President Bill Clinton in 1998, and afterward remaining one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party establishment. While serving as as chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, his apparent carelessness with the password security of his Gmail account allowed it to easily be hacked, and tens of thousands of his personal emails were soon published on WikiLeaks. A swarm of young anti-Clinton activists began scouring this treasure-trove of semi-confidential information, seeking evidence of mundane bribery and corruption, but instead they came across some quite odd exchanges, seemingly written in coded language.
Now use of coded language in a supposedly secure private email account raises all sorts of natural suspicions regarding what might have been under discussion, with the most likely possibilities being illegal drugs or sex. But most of the references didn’t seem to fit the former category, and in our remarkably libertine era, in which political candidates compete for the right to be Grand Marshal at an annual Gay Pride Parade, one of the few sexual activities still discussed only in whispers would seem to be pedophilia, with some of the very strange remarks possibly hinting at this.
The researchers also soon discovered that his brother Tony Podesta, one of the wealthiest and most successful lobbyists in DC, had extremely odd taste in art. Major items of his very extensive personal collection seemed to represent tortured or murdered bodies, and one of his favorite artists was best known for paintings depicting young children being held captive, lying dead, or suffering under severe distress. Such peculiar artwork obviously isn’t illegal, but it might naturally arouse some suspicions. And oddly enough, arch-Democrat Podesta had long been a close personal friend of former Republican Speaker and convicted child-molester Dennis Hastert, welcoming him back into DC society after his release from prison.
Furthermore, some of the rather suspiciously-worded Podesta emails referred to events held at a local DC pizza parlor, greatly favored by the Democratic Party elite, whose owner was the gay former boyfriend of David Brock, a leading Democratic activist. The public Instagram account of that pizza-entrepreneur apparently contained numerous images of young children, sometimes tied or bound, with those images frequently labeled by hashtags using the traditional gay slang for underage sexual targets. Some photos showed the fellow wearing a tee-shirt bearing the statement “I Love Children” in French, and by a very odd coincidence, his possibly assumed name was phonetically identical to that very same French phrase, thus proclaiming to the world that he was “a lover of children.” Closely connected Instagram accounts also included pictures of young children, sometimes shown amid piles of high-value currency, with queries about how much those particular children might be worth. None of this seemed illegal, but surely any reasonable person would regard the material as extremely suspicious.
DC is sometimes described as “Powertown,” being the seat of the individuals who make America’s laws and govern our society, with local political journalists being closely attuned to the relative status of such individuals. And oddly enough, GQ Magazine had ranked that gay pizza parlor owner with a strange focus on young children as being one of the 50 most powerful people in our national capital, placing him far ahead of many Cabinet members, Senators, Congressional Chairmen, Supreme Court justices, and top lobbyists. Was his pizza really that delicious?
These few paragraphs provide merely a sliver of the large quantity of highly-suspicious material surrounding various powerful figures at the apex of the DC political world. A vast cloud of billowing smoke is certainly no proof of any fire, but only a fool would completely ignore it without attempting further investigation.
I usually regard videos as a poor means of imparting serious information, far less effective and meaningful than the simple printed word. But the overwhelming bulk of the evidence supporting the Pizzagate Hypothesis consists of visual images and screen shots, and these are naturally suited to a video presentation.
Some of the best summaries of the Pizzagate case were produced by a young British YouTuber named Tara McCarthy, whose work was published under the name of “Reality Calls,” and her videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Although her channel was eventually banned and her videos purged, copies were later reloaded to other accounts, both on YouTube and BitChute. Some of the evidence she presents seemed rather innocuous or speculative to me and other elements were probably based upon her unfamiliarity with American society and culture. But a great deal of extremely suspicious material remains, and I would suggest that people watch the videos and decide for themselves.
Around the same time that I first became familiar with the details of the Pizzagate controversy, the topic also started reaching the pages of my morning newspapers, but in an rather strange manner. Political stories began giving a sentence or two to the “Pizzagate hoax,” describing it as a ridiculous right-wing “conspiracy theory” but excluding all relevant details. I had an eery feeling that some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch causing the entire mainstream media to begin displaying identical signs declaring “Pizzagate Is False—Nothing To See There!” in brightly flashing neon. I couldn’t recall any previous example of such a strange media reaction to some obscure Internet controversy.
Articles in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times also suddenly appeared denouncing the entirety of the alternative media—Left, Right, and Libertarian—as “fake news” websites promoting Russian propaganda, while urging that their content be blocked by all patriotic Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Prior to that moment, I’d never even heard the term “fake news” but suddenly it was ubiquitous across the media, once again almost as if some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch.
I naturally began to wonder whether the timing of these two strange developments was entirely coincidental. Perhaps Pizzagate was indeed true and struck so deeply at the core of our hugely corrupted political system that the media efforts to suppress it were approaching the point of hysteria.
Not long afterward, Tara McCarthy’s detailed Pizzagate videos were purged from YouTube. This was among the very first instances of video content being banned despite fully conforming to all existing YouTube guidelines, another deeply suspicious development.
I also noticed that mere mention of Pizzagate had become politically lethal. Donald Trump had selected Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as his National Security Advisor, and Flynn’s son served as the latter’s chief of staff. The younger Flynn happened to Tweet out a couple of links to Pizzagate stories, pointing out that the accusations hadn’t yet been actually investigated let alone disproven, and very soon afterward, he was purged from the Trump transition team, foreshadowing his father’s fall a few weeks later. It seemed astonishing to me that a few simple Tweets about an Internet controversy could have such huge real-life impact near the top of our government.
The media continued its uniform drumbeat of “Pizzagate Has Been Disproven!” but we were never told how or by whom, and I was not the only individual to notice the hollowness of such denunciations. An award-winning investigative journalist named Ben Swann at a CBS station in Atlanta broadcast a short television segment summarizing the Pizzagate controversy and noting that contrary to widespread media claims, Pizzagate had neither been investigated nor debunked. Swann was almost immediately purged by CBS but a copy of his television segment remains available for viewing on the Internet.
There is an old wartime proverb that enemy flak is always heaviest over the most important target, and the remarkably ferocious wave of attacks and censorship against anyone broaching the subject of Pizzagate seems to raise obvious dark suspicions. Indeed, the simultaneous waves of attacks against all alternative media outlets as “Russian propaganda outlets” laid the basis for the continuing regime of Social Media censorship that has become a central aspect of today’s world.
Pizzagate may or may not turn out to be true, but the ongoing Internet crackdown has similarly engulfed topics of a somewhat similar nature but with vastly stronger documentation. Although I don’t use Twitter myself, I encountered the obvious implications of this new censorship policy following McCain’s death last August. The senator had died on a Saturday afternoon, and readership of Sydney Schanberg’s long 2008 expose quickly exploded, with numerous individuals Tweeting out the story and a large fraction of our incoming traffic therefore coming from Twitter. This continued until the following morning, at which point the huge flood of Tweets continued to grow, but all incoming Twitter traffic suddenly and permanently vanished, presumably because “shadow banning” had rendered those Tweets invisible. My own article on McCain’s very doubtful war record simultaneously suffered the same fate, as did numerous other articles of a controversial nature that we published later that same week.
Perhaps that censorship decision was made by some ignorant young intern at Twitter, casually choosing to ban as “hate speech” or “fake news” a massively-documented 8,400 word expose by one of America’s most distinguished journalists, a Pulitzer-prize winning former top editor at The New York Times.
Or perhaps certain political-puppeteers who had spent decades controlling that late Arizona senator sought to ensure that their political puppet-strings remained invisible even after his death.
Later?
A woman visited a psychic of some local repute. In a dark and gloomy room, gazing at the Tarot cards laid out before her, the Tarot reader delivered the bad news: "There is no easy way to say this so I'll just be blunt: Prepare yourself to be a widow. Your husband will die a violent death this year."
Visibly shaken, the woman stared at the psychic's lined face, then at the single flickering candle, then down at her hands. She took a few deep breaths to compose herself. She simply had to know.
She met the Tarot reader's gaze, steadied her voice and asked, "Will I get away with it?"
*.*
Signs You've Chosen a "No Frills" Airline
You can't board the plane unless you have the exact change.
The Captain asks all the passengers to chip in a little for gas.
You ask the Captain how often their planes crash and he says, "Just once."
The Captain yells at the ground crew to get the cows off the runway.
No movie. Don't need one. Your life keeps flashing before your eyes.
You see a man with a gun, but he's demanding to be let off the plane.
All the planes have both a bathroom and a chapel.
*.*
SACRAMENTO, CA - In a special press conference called Friday, Governor Jerry Brown proudly announced the passing of brand new legislation that will allow the state to begin issuing fines on churches for each little plastic cup served during the Lord’s Supper.
The legislation forms a new Communion Enforcement Unit, which will visit churches undercover and fine pastors for every little plastic cup they serve in Communion.
“Once again, California shows itself to be at the forefront of both environmental and religious issues with the passing of this legislation,” Brown said as cameras flashed. “Other states are always playing catch-up with our fantastic laws as we move forward.”
Brown suggested that churches instead use one communal cup, a low-impact Starbucks coffee cup, or just pour the wine or juice into one large trough for easy access for all parishioners. “The time for common-sense Communion reform is now, and we’re happy to be pioneers on this issue.”
The governor also hinted that the Legislature may be close to passing fines on credobaptist churches for wasting so much water on immersion, when pouring or sprinkling would do just fine.
*.*
"Thanks for the harmonica you gave me for my birthday," little Joshua said to his uncle the first time he saw him after the holidays. "It's the best present I ever got!"
"That's great," said his uncle. "Do you know how to play it?"
"Oh, I don't play it," the little fellow said. "My mom gives me a dollar a day not to play it during the day and my dad gives me five dollars a week not to play it at night.
*.*
Yesterday, my wife and I enjoyed a quiet morning while our kids slept in.
Thank you, Ether Bunny!
Quote of the Times;
“Every third thought shall be my grave.”
Link of the Times;
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/08/03/baltimore-cannot-account-millions-federal-funding/
Issue of the Times;
The Borg 30 Years Later, A Reflection From Miles O'Brien, Transporter Chief of USS Enterprise-D
Personal Log, stardate 72761.9.
Looking back, it's amazing we survived at all. Meeting the Borg, to paraphrase captain Jean Luc-Picard, jolted us out of our complacency. But our unpreparedness was our own fault.
We were silly enough to believe that the collapse of the Klingon Empire meant Starfleet no longer needed to maintain a strong military arm. It would be easy to blame the parasite conspiracy that infiltrated Starfleet Command, yet that would ignore the culture of appeasement in the decades following the Khitimar accords.
I witnessed it first hand while fighting against the Cardassian border incursions. Imagine watching the spoonheads commit genocide and enduring decades of attacks, and still refusing to rearm! (Having been inside the mind of a Section 31 operative, I suspect we have them to thank for the Bajoran resistance's success in tying down the Cardassians and for the Romulans' "matters more urgent" that kept those powers from attacking us with full force.)
But I never thought I'd find myself thankful to Q. I have to admit that we owe him an eternal debt of gratitude for what he did 30 years today.
Picard's confidence had turned to arrogance, so much so that he was willing to ignore Q's warning that the Federation was "moving faster than expected, further than they should" and that we were "not prepared" for what awaited us. Q told us: "You judge yourselves against the pitiful adversaries you have encountered so far. The Romulans, the Klingons. They are nothing compared to what's waiting. Picard, you are about to move into areas of the galaxy containing wonders more incredible than you can possibly imagine, and terrors to freeze your soul. I offer myself as guide only to be rejected out of hand."
Picard's answer was "we are resolute, we are determined, and your help is not required." Q had had enough. "We'll just have to see how ready you are," he said, and with a snap of his fingers he sent us to System J-25 - on the far end of the Beta Quadrant (two years, seven months away from the nearest starbase at maximum warp). As Q vanished, Picard turned to our enigmatic El-Aurian bartender, Guinan. "Your people have been in this part of the galaxy," he said, "what can you tell us?" "Only that if I were you," she responded, "I'd start back now."
To listen to Picard's log from that day is humorous, in a macabre way: "Captain's log, stardate 42761.9. Despite Guinan's warning, I feel compelled to investigate this unexplored sector of the galaxy before heading back." Guinan wasn't just some chatty talk show host. Her's was a voice of wisdom to be heeded, and she was terrified. But Picard decided to ignore her. We did indeed discover a Class M planet. "There is a system of roads on this planet," said Data, "which indicates a highly industrialized civilization. But where there should be cities there are only great rips in the surface." ("It is as though some great force just scooped all the machine elements off the face of the planet," added Worf.) This meant that whatever tore its way through the Neutral Zone with Romulus - leaving similar scars on the colonized planets - was nearby. It was at that very moment that a giant cube appeared onscreen. We asked Guinan if she recognized it. "My people encountered them a century ago," she said. They destroyed our cities. They scattered my people throughout the galaxy. They're called the Borg. Protect yourself, Captain, or they'll destroy you."
The next log states as follows: "Captain's log, supplemental. We have been attacked without provocation by an alien race which Guinan calls the Borg. It appears that we have neutralised their vessel. Commander Riker is leading an away team in an attempt to learn more about them." This was sent after the loss of eighteen shipmates before successfully blasting the Borg cube's cutting and tractor beams. Picard decided to once again ignore Guinan and beamed an away team over to the cube. The countless bipedal lifeforms with cybernetic implants were hooked into machines on the walls, while others roamed around paying no heed to the Enterprise crew.
Commander Riker reported on his discovery that "the Borg have developed the technology to link artificial intelligence directly into the humanoid brain" and "the Borg seem to be using their combined power to repair the ship." At this, the captain ordered me to beam the away team back to the Enterprise and "get the hell out of here."
The last log has a more familiar tone when dealing with Borg encounters - Panic and Fear. "Captain's log supplemental. We are unable to maintain the gap between the Enterprise and the Borg ship."
Q appeared on the Bridge to taunt us as we futilely tried to run for our lives. He told us: "They will follow this ship until you exhaust your fuel. They will wear down your defences. Then you will be theirs. Admit it, Picard. You're out of your league. You should have stayed where you belonged. You can't outrun them. You can't destroy them. If you damage them, the essence of what they are remains. They regenerate and keep coming. Eventually you will weaken, your reserves will be gone. They are relentless. Where's your stubbornness now, Picard, your arrogance? Do you still profess to be prepared for what awaits you? I'll be leaving now. You thought you could handle it, so handle it."
I have been critical of captain Picard throughout this log, but let it never be said that he didn't always come through for us in the end. With a fate worse than death closing in, Picard humbled himself before Q and begged him to save us: "You wanted to frighten us. We are frightened. You wanted to show us that we were inadequate. For the moment, I grant that. You wanted me to say I need you. I need you!"
With a snap of his finger, Q brought us back to where we started, safely out of range of the Borg. Reflecting on these events with Guinan, Picard expressed gratitude to Q. "Maybe Q did the right thing for the wrong reason," said the captain. "Perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency, to prepare us for what lies ahead."
For a long time I did not want to admit it, but Q was right. We weren't ready, and we had to be forced to recognize that. Nevertheless, if I live to be 500 years old, I will never forget the first time I heard the harsh, collective voice of the Borg: "We have analyzed your defensive capabilities as being unable to withstand us. If you defend yourselves, you will be punished."
This begs the question: what if our "defensive capabilities" were able to withstand them? What if, instead of naive pseudo-pacifism, we had spent the previous decades continually working to improve our capacity to defend ourselves? What if, upon first contact, we were strong enough to blast those Borg bastards into space dust?
Consider: until they encountered Species 8472, the Borg never showed fear of anything. But faced with an enemy they couldn't defeat, the Borg ran scared. After they survived this encounter - thanks to Admiral Janeway - they never messed with 8472 again. But the Borg were not afraid of the Federation, because the Federation were pacifistic and lightly armed. Had Starfleet crushed the Borg at System J-25 - or at Wolf 359 - the Borg may well have left the Federation alone. But the military weakness caused by decades of pacifism signaled to the Borg that the Federation was vulnerable to invasion and assimilation. Had it not been the sheer luck of Voyager being lost in the Delta Quadrant and learning how to fight the Borg, the entire Alpha and Beta Quadrant would have fallen to the Collective.
Even after Wolf 359 we still had not learned our lesson! We were supposed to have had an entire Battlefleet of Defiant-class ships, but once the Borg threat momentarily subsided we dropped the project - and had only one prototype by the time the Dominion invaded.
And for all our Federation talk about no longer being "obsessed with the accumulation of things" and having "eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions," to be faced with real existing collectivism was horrifying. In the future, captain Picard, who used to scoff at all things capitalistic, would be forcibly assimilated into the collective for just a short time, but long enough to be permanently traumatized when his individualism and free will were taken away.
When I visited my fellow history buff Dr. Bashir the other day, he showed me something from an old physical book he had. It was a quote from a 20th century leader at a war memorial of his fellow countrymen: "We will always be prepared, so we may always be free." Sure, we laugh at their intellectual "infancy" now, but maybe they were on to something.
Visibly shaken, the woman stared at the psychic's lined face, then at the single flickering candle, then down at her hands. She took a few deep breaths to compose herself. She simply had to know.
She met the Tarot reader's gaze, steadied her voice and asked, "Will I get away with it?"
*.*
Signs You've Chosen a "No Frills" Airline
You can't board the plane unless you have the exact change.
The Captain asks all the passengers to chip in a little for gas.
You ask the Captain how often their planes crash and he says, "Just once."
The Captain yells at the ground crew to get the cows off the runway.
No movie. Don't need one. Your life keeps flashing before your eyes.
You see a man with a gun, but he's demanding to be let off the plane.
All the planes have both a bathroom and a chapel.
*.*
SACRAMENTO, CA - In a special press conference called Friday, Governor Jerry Brown proudly announced the passing of brand new legislation that will allow the state to begin issuing fines on churches for each little plastic cup served during the Lord’s Supper.
The legislation forms a new Communion Enforcement Unit, which will visit churches undercover and fine pastors for every little plastic cup they serve in Communion.
“Once again, California shows itself to be at the forefront of both environmental and religious issues with the passing of this legislation,” Brown said as cameras flashed. “Other states are always playing catch-up with our fantastic laws as we move forward.”
Brown suggested that churches instead use one communal cup, a low-impact Starbucks coffee cup, or just pour the wine or juice into one large trough for easy access for all parishioners. “The time for common-sense Communion reform is now, and we’re happy to be pioneers on this issue.”
The governor also hinted that the Legislature may be close to passing fines on credobaptist churches for wasting so much water on immersion, when pouring or sprinkling would do just fine.
*.*
"Thanks for the harmonica you gave me for my birthday," little Joshua said to his uncle the first time he saw him after the holidays. "It's the best present I ever got!"
"That's great," said his uncle. "Do you know how to play it?"
"Oh, I don't play it," the little fellow said. "My mom gives me a dollar a day not to play it during the day and my dad gives me five dollars a week not to play it at night.
*.*
Yesterday, my wife and I enjoyed a quiet morning while our kids slept in.
Thank you, Ether Bunny!
Quote of the Times;
“Every third thought shall be my grave.”
Link of the Times;
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/08/03/baltimore-cannot-account-millions-federal-funding/
Issue of the Times;
The Borg 30 Years Later, A Reflection From Miles O'Brien, Transporter Chief of USS Enterprise-D
Personal Log, stardate 72761.9.
Looking back, it's amazing we survived at all. Meeting the Borg, to paraphrase captain Jean Luc-Picard, jolted us out of our complacency. But our unpreparedness was our own fault.
We were silly enough to believe that the collapse of the Klingon Empire meant Starfleet no longer needed to maintain a strong military arm. It would be easy to blame the parasite conspiracy that infiltrated Starfleet Command, yet that would ignore the culture of appeasement in the decades following the Khitimar accords.
I witnessed it first hand while fighting against the Cardassian border incursions. Imagine watching the spoonheads commit genocide and enduring decades of attacks, and still refusing to rearm! (Having been inside the mind of a Section 31 operative, I suspect we have them to thank for the Bajoran resistance's success in tying down the Cardassians and for the Romulans' "matters more urgent" that kept those powers from attacking us with full force.)
But I never thought I'd find myself thankful to Q. I have to admit that we owe him an eternal debt of gratitude for what he did 30 years today.
Picard's confidence had turned to arrogance, so much so that he was willing to ignore Q's warning that the Federation was "moving faster than expected, further than they should" and that we were "not prepared" for what awaited us. Q told us: "You judge yourselves against the pitiful adversaries you have encountered so far. The Romulans, the Klingons. They are nothing compared to what's waiting. Picard, you are about to move into areas of the galaxy containing wonders more incredible than you can possibly imagine, and terrors to freeze your soul. I offer myself as guide only to be rejected out of hand."
Picard's answer was "we are resolute, we are determined, and your help is not required." Q had had enough. "We'll just have to see how ready you are," he said, and with a snap of his fingers he sent us to System J-25 - on the far end of the Beta Quadrant (two years, seven months away from the nearest starbase at maximum warp). As Q vanished, Picard turned to our enigmatic El-Aurian bartender, Guinan. "Your people have been in this part of the galaxy," he said, "what can you tell us?" "Only that if I were you," she responded, "I'd start back now."
To listen to Picard's log from that day is humorous, in a macabre way: "Captain's log, stardate 42761.9. Despite Guinan's warning, I feel compelled to investigate this unexplored sector of the galaxy before heading back." Guinan wasn't just some chatty talk show host. Her's was a voice of wisdom to be heeded, and she was terrified. But Picard decided to ignore her. We did indeed discover a Class M planet. "There is a system of roads on this planet," said Data, "which indicates a highly industrialized civilization. But where there should be cities there are only great rips in the surface." ("It is as though some great force just scooped all the machine elements off the face of the planet," added Worf.) This meant that whatever tore its way through the Neutral Zone with Romulus - leaving similar scars on the colonized planets - was nearby. It was at that very moment that a giant cube appeared onscreen. We asked Guinan if she recognized it. "My people encountered them a century ago," she said. They destroyed our cities. They scattered my people throughout the galaxy. They're called the Borg. Protect yourself, Captain, or they'll destroy you."
The next log states as follows: "Captain's log, supplemental. We have been attacked without provocation by an alien race which Guinan calls the Borg. It appears that we have neutralised their vessel. Commander Riker is leading an away team in an attempt to learn more about them." This was sent after the loss of eighteen shipmates before successfully blasting the Borg cube's cutting and tractor beams. Picard decided to once again ignore Guinan and beamed an away team over to the cube. The countless bipedal lifeforms with cybernetic implants were hooked into machines on the walls, while others roamed around paying no heed to the Enterprise crew.
Commander Riker reported on his discovery that "the Borg have developed the technology to link artificial intelligence directly into the humanoid brain" and "the Borg seem to be using their combined power to repair the ship." At this, the captain ordered me to beam the away team back to the Enterprise and "get the hell out of here."
The last log has a more familiar tone when dealing with Borg encounters - Panic and Fear. "Captain's log supplemental. We are unable to maintain the gap between the Enterprise and the Borg ship."
Q appeared on the Bridge to taunt us as we futilely tried to run for our lives. He told us: "They will follow this ship until you exhaust your fuel. They will wear down your defences. Then you will be theirs. Admit it, Picard. You're out of your league. You should have stayed where you belonged. You can't outrun them. You can't destroy them. If you damage them, the essence of what they are remains. They regenerate and keep coming. Eventually you will weaken, your reserves will be gone. They are relentless. Where's your stubbornness now, Picard, your arrogance? Do you still profess to be prepared for what awaits you? I'll be leaving now. You thought you could handle it, so handle it."
I have been critical of captain Picard throughout this log, but let it never be said that he didn't always come through for us in the end. With a fate worse than death closing in, Picard humbled himself before Q and begged him to save us: "You wanted to frighten us. We are frightened. You wanted to show us that we were inadequate. For the moment, I grant that. You wanted me to say I need you. I need you!"
With a snap of his finger, Q brought us back to where we started, safely out of range of the Borg. Reflecting on these events with Guinan, Picard expressed gratitude to Q. "Maybe Q did the right thing for the wrong reason," said the captain. "Perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency, to prepare us for what lies ahead."
For a long time I did not want to admit it, but Q was right. We weren't ready, and we had to be forced to recognize that. Nevertheless, if I live to be 500 years old, I will never forget the first time I heard the harsh, collective voice of the Borg: "We have analyzed your defensive capabilities as being unable to withstand us. If you defend yourselves, you will be punished."
This begs the question: what if our "defensive capabilities" were able to withstand them? What if, instead of naive pseudo-pacifism, we had spent the previous decades continually working to improve our capacity to defend ourselves? What if, upon first contact, we were strong enough to blast those Borg bastards into space dust?
Consider: until they encountered Species 8472, the Borg never showed fear of anything. But faced with an enemy they couldn't defeat, the Borg ran scared. After they survived this encounter - thanks to Admiral Janeway - they never messed with 8472 again. But the Borg were not afraid of the Federation, because the Federation were pacifistic and lightly armed. Had Starfleet crushed the Borg at System J-25 - or at Wolf 359 - the Borg may well have left the Federation alone. But the military weakness caused by decades of pacifism signaled to the Borg that the Federation was vulnerable to invasion and assimilation. Had it not been the sheer luck of Voyager being lost in the Delta Quadrant and learning how to fight the Borg, the entire Alpha and Beta Quadrant would have fallen to the Collective.
Even after Wolf 359 we still had not learned our lesson! We were supposed to have had an entire Battlefleet of Defiant-class ships, but once the Borg threat momentarily subsided we dropped the project - and had only one prototype by the time the Dominion invaded.
And for all our Federation talk about no longer being "obsessed with the accumulation of things" and having "eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions," to be faced with real existing collectivism was horrifying. In the future, captain Picard, who used to scoff at all things capitalistic, would be forcibly assimilated into the collective for just a short time, but long enough to be permanently traumatized when his individualism and free will were taken away.
When I visited my fellow history buff Dr. Bashir the other day, he showed me something from an old physical book he had. It was a quote from a 20th century leader at a war memorial of his fellow countrymen: "We will always be prepared, so we may always be free." Sure, we laugh at their intellectual "infancy" now, but maybe they were on to something.
Several animals were savagely beaten in the making of this page, including but not limited to; kittens, rabbits, zebu, skunks, puppies, and platypus. Also several monkeys where force fed crack to improve their typing skills.
And someone shot a duck.
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And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.