2024 Year in Review: What Is a Fact? – Part II

Click here for a PDF version of this report!

Part 1

• Contents
• Introduction
• My Year
• Podcasts
• Healthcare
• Gold and Silver
• Investing
• Inflation
• High Valuations and Broken Markets
• Electric Vehicles and Green Energy

Part 2

• News Nuggets
• Paris Olympics
• Law and Order
• Trump Assassination Attempts
• COVID-19 and the Vaccines
• College
• Climate Change
• World War II and FDR: A Revisionist History
• The Election
• Books

Part 3 (Coming in January of 2025)

• Free Speech
• Woke Culture and Rising Neo-Marxism
• Borders and Illegal Immigration
• Transgenderism
• Human Trafficking and Geopolitics

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News Nuggets

There are events that bring us brief moments of jocularity and DNC-levels of joy before they are memory holed by the 15-minute news cycle. Here are a few.

Boeing. In an event as historical as the launch of New Coke, Boeing made the strategic decision to replace their aeronautical engineers with financial engineers. If they had done this decades ago too there would have been no 9/11. Maybe this is the consequence of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon or what I call the green van effect in which you only notice how many there are after you buy one, but the only thing guaranteed on Boeing flights is that they will have adequate fuel to get to the crash sites.

• A Virgin Air flight made an emergency landing while nearly ripping roofs off houses en route back to London.^{ref 1}
• A Southwest Airline flight lost a chunk of the plane, forcing a return to Denver for some duct tape and WD40.^{ref 2}
• A Delta flight’s emergency slide popped open in midflight, apparently anticipating that it would surely be needed at some point.^{ref 3}

• Malaysia Airlines made an emergency landing after an engine malfunction, which is airline lingo for “caught on fire.”^{ref 4}
• Passengers reported a wheel was peeling off their plane during takeoff and then spotted bolts missing from a wing.

Boeing was charged with having “defrauded the FAA”. Its shareholders face substantial fines paid for by state pension funds, but there will be no consequence to management’s compensation packages.^{ref 5} Employees were caught on film saying that they would not fly in the jets they are assembling. “Many employees are addicted to drugs and no one cares,” the reporter wrote.^{ref 6}

Several whistleblowers went public to describe the pathologies causing so much trouble at Boeing.^{ref 7} They died. Their complaints of a “hostile work environment” were obviously not overstated. One 32-year veteran of the company told a friend not to believe it if he committed suicide.^{ref 8} The authorities declared his death a suicide.^{ref 9} Whistle blowing is more deadly than North Sea crabbing or being friends of the Clintons.

At least Boeing can fall back on its lucrative space program. Well, that’s not working out so well either. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams went to the International Space Station planning for an 8-day adventure or as the jingle on TV would say “A three hour tour…a three hour tour.” They have now been stranded for five months owing to a failed “oscillation overthruster”^{ref 10} because Boeings Starliner was deemed too unsafe, after which it touched down in the New Mexico sans astronauts.^{ref 11} Astronaut recovery has been pushed back to March 2025. This is silly. We all watched Sandra Bullock get back to Earth on her own in the movie Gravity. Ya gotta figure that the Boeing satellite that exploded sending shards of loose bolts into geostationary orbit was not confidence building.^{ref 12} It is rumored that Boeing was not allowed to hitch a ride home on Musk’s SpaceX flight in an election year. Meanwhile, I suspect that a few staples might be in short supply. Food and potable water come to mind, but ya gotta wonder if Suni brought a year’s supply of feminine hygiene products. I would think the air has reached levels of rancidity familiar only to mothers who dare enter their teenage sons’ bedrooms.

Boeings backstop was to use their overpaid financial engineers to solve their financial problems. A $900,000 donation to the Clinton foundation proved to be poorly spent.^{ref 13} Boeing shares peaked at nearly $450 in 2019 propelled by $43 billion in share buybacks over the preceding six years. By 2020, Boeing was $25 billion in the hole, which, non-coincidentally, is the size of the bailout requested during the Covid lockdown grift. By December 2023 the share price had cut in half, and then it halved again by December 2024. That $43 billion of capital returned to shareholders was great, but only for those who became ex-shareholders by selling to gullible buyers—state pension funds. At a P/E of >60^{ref 14}—possibly a forward 2030 P/E—my crystal ball says there could be more share price halvings in Boeing’s future.

All is not lost, however. The Boeing rocket surgeons are now planning to raise bigly capital by taking on new debt and selling those recently purchased shares back to the market at a steep discount. Boeing bought high and will now sell low. Alas, a company-wide strike including its four remaining Boeing engineers delivered a 38% payraise that could cost Boeing up to $5 billion.^{ref 15} Despite what appears to be stage IV cancer, Boeing is confident it can raise the cash from the highly liquid Deep State LLC because sovereigns buy lots of Boeing jets to bomb other sovereigns who also buy lots of Boeing jets.

Study Shows 9 Out Of 10 Astronauts Choose To Be Stranded In Space Rather Than Board Craft Built By Boeing

~ The Babylon Bee

Francis Scott Key Bridge. A container ship caused a total collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge outside Baltimore,^{ref 16} clogging an important harbor.^{ref 17,18} Estimated costs soared into the billions. Biden was quick to the podium, recalling fond memories of taking the train over the bridge^{ref 19}—the bridge doesn’t have any train tracks—and offering a Federal rescue (no doubt inspired by insurance lobbyists.)^{ref 20} Besides clogging an important port for an indeterminant period of time, the truck traffic rerouting increases the drive time fourfold. The bridge was built specifically to move hazardous petrochemicals and oversized cargo unfit for the tunnels. The economic consequences could, at least in theory, be substantial.^{ref 21} The port was the largest importer of cars and trucks for the last dozen years with a shutdown risking up to 140,000 jobs.^{ref 22} A potential irony was that the infamous 1920’s real estate bubble described in Bubble in the Sun was pricked when a beached ship clogged Miami’s Harbor for 38 days.^{ref 23} At a human level, four people died (presumably cars plummeting into the drink). The port’s Marine Unit was sunk by the ‘defund the police’ budget cuts, so no boats or divers were available.^{ref 24}

The hows and whys of the collision and collapse are also sketchy. The ship is said to have had a dubious record of collisions,^{ref 25} and the plot thickened as experts reminded us that these ships are particularly susceptible to hackers.^{ref 26,27} Whether the incident was a beta test for the hackers has been the topic of considerable speculation.^{ref 28,29} Sparks along the top of the bridge captured some imaginations but were probably just power cables snapping.^{ref 30} The ship’s owner is based in China and said to have an expertise in “remote system monitoring”. I watched the footage repeatedly; I swore the ship cleared the pylon and then backed into it. (Nobody else seemed to think this.)

When the FBI recovered the ‘black box’ the two minutes of critical recording data right before the ship veered off course and hit the bridge was lost. I have four questions: (1) Does this sound like a Jeff Epstein prison-camera fail or what?; (2) Since the ship didn’t sink, does “recovered” seem hyperbolic?; (3) Why wasn’t the black box autonomous of the ship’s power system?^{ref 31} and (4) Shouldn’t a shipping company with a sophisticated “remote monitoring system” be uploading all critical data to the cloud, not a black box?

Gephyrophobia—an irrational fear of crossing bridges—may have to remove “irrational” from the definition. I happen to get very gentle heebie jeebies crossing bridges and even driving along water. Check out this pre-collapse video (or the still shot below) of what it’s like (errata: was like) driving across the Francis Scott Key Bridge.^{ref 32} Were those guard rails adequate?

Supreme Court. The Supreme Court continues to follow its Constitutional mandate to give everybody a reason to say, “Well that fucking blows.” They ruled, for example, that a quid pro quo—OK, a gratuity—paid to a politician is OK provided it arrives after the legal shenanigans are over. I think capitalists call that paying COD.

In a case that may ultimately dwarf the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the court overturned the Chevron Deference Doctrine, potentially emasculating Woodrow Wilson’s Bureaucratic State. Until this year, unelected bureaucrats exercised the power to operationally create laws outside their constitutional mandate provided that their rulings were not forbidden by legitimate laws passed by Congress.^{ref 33} In theory, massive numbers of regulations were enforced with both fines and jail sentences because the Congressional statutes don’t forbid them. They can now be fought in the courts as unconstitutional.^{ref 34,35} I am shocked but not surprised—there are no coincidences—that this ruling came the day after the controlled implosion of Team Biden. Now imagine if every regulation not explicitly written into law by Congress was deemed unconstitutional.^{ref 36,37}

Hurricane Helene.

Hey Elon, update here on site of Asheville, NC. We have powered up two large operating bases for choppers to deliver goods into hands. We’ve deployed 300+ Starlinks and [our opinion] is it has saved many lives. The big issue is FEMA is actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping. We are blocked now on the shipments of new Starlinks coming in until we get an escort from the fire dept, but that may not be enough.

Hurricane Helene hit Appalachia, destroying lives of those who Hillary called “deplorables” but were downgraded to “garbage” by Biden. FEMA met my expectations that I had described in the context of Hurricanes Irene and Katrina:^{ref 38} They utterly fail in every way imaginable. Sending electric chainsaws to a devastated region lacking electricity is a Saturday Night Live skit. In a repeat performance of their turf war killing countless victims in Hurricane Katrina^{ref 39a,39b}—“Heck of a job, Brownie!”—FEMA turned away help that could have saved hundreds of lives in Appalachia—“Heck of a job, Petey.”^{ref 40} (As is often the case in catastrophes like the Lahaina Fires, Wikipedia lowballs politically sensitive stats, quoting only 44 fatalities.^{ref 41}) Kamala promised the victims $750 to buy goods and services that did not exist simply by downloading an app to their powerless and signal-free phones. Some suggest the failure to help was politically motivated because right-leaning “garbage” could not make it to the polls if they remained unassisted. If only those in need were illegal immigrants or Ukrainians. In the spirit of the Cajun Navy that towed their boats to Houston in the aftermath of a hurricane, the Hillbilly Airforce took to the skies to bring supplies to their brethren in North Carolina.^{ref 42}

The narrative that the administration couldn’t help owing to the depletion of FEMA’s funds to pay for illegal aliens crossing the border^{ref 43,44,45,46} was politically devastating, but only on Fox News. One hopes that Elon and Vivek will raze FEMA like it was Building 7. In a pure coincidence, the night I finished the first draft of this paragraph I had dinner and with a woman who organizes hundreds of non-profits for disaster response. She had nothing good to say about FEMA. F-bombs flew. FEMA is Darwinian selection in reverse: the competent cannot stand it and leave. Burn…it…down. Alas, layed off FEMA workers are unqualified to join the private workforce.

Meanwhile, Kamala sat for a photo-op on Airforce Two working diligently for an upgrade to Airforce One. She was intellectually grinding through the challenges posed by Helene using blank sheets of paper while listening to her emergency response team through headphones that were not plugged in. The Twitter meme machine had a field day. Meanwhile, transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was bombing social media, urging the populace not to fly drones over the carnage to avoid obstructing the non-existent rescue efforts.^{ref 47}

If you think the problem is just democrats think again….

On a more serious note, Helene might have knocked out the Spruce Pine Mine, the world’s only high-purity silicon (quartz) mine used to make critical microchips.^{ref 48}

Hurricane Milton. A week later Hurricane Milton arrived to great fanfare, but it was a dud to hurricane watchers. The high-water mark was a character right out of Forrest Gump nicknamed Lieutenant Dan claiming that God told him to weather the storm in his boat. Lieutenant Dan survived, but the scent of a grift surfaced soon thereafter.^{ref 49}

We’ve been arguing about this for 20 years, and I think this nails it. I think we’ve ended the debate on whether the inner core moves, and what’s been its pattern for the last couple of decades.

~ Dr. John Vidale, Dean’s Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California

Pole Shifting. For those of you who cannot take much more of this, cheer up. Stories are circulating that the magnetic poles are shifting at breathtaking speeds. This is a controversial subject in which the USGS says the poles reverse every 700,000 years^{ref 50} while others with less stellar resumes say that they move markedly every 6,000 years and dramatically so every 12,000 years.^{ref 51,52,53,54} A number of sleuths are tracking this story, and they do not all agree on the details. Probably the most visible is Ben Davidson aka @sunweatherman.^{ref 55,56,57} This interview of Ben with Brett Weinstein is a good primer.^{ref 59} I hasten to add that several prominent and, to me, credible solar physicists up to their asses in the climate change debate do not sign off on Davidson’s theory.^{ref 58}

So why should you care? Well, the magnetic field protects the Earth from electromagnetic radiation spewed out by sunspots. The most famous and catastrophic failure is called the 1859 Carrington Event when solar flares fried the US’s entire fledgling telegraph system.^{ref 60} It is said that during big field shifts, a direct hit could wipe out anything that includes microcircuitry, which means everything. We would be eating cats. We would be eating dogs. And, as an aside, this same effect would occur if the Rooskies or other commie dogs detonated a thermonuclear device at high altitude over the Continental US.

Nuggets. To wrap this chapter up, I offer some random events for your entertainment…

• A high school football team in Pittsburgh lost 11 players from their team after a fight and went on to win the city championship the next week.^{ref 61}
• The magazine Deadspin decided a kid wearing the team colors at a Kansas City Chiefs game should be demonized for wearing black face, noting “on Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, a Kansas City Chiefs fan found a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time.”^{ref 62} A Delaware judge refused to throw out the libel suit. Deadspin has found a way to look like assholes and lose money at the same time.^{ref 63}

• Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankrupt Fraud’s girlfriend and partner in crime at the collapsed FTX crypto fund, was sentenced to two years in prison that was shortened to three months. The light sentence for laundering billions of dollars is understandable given that the DNC was a major recipient of the laundered cash.^{ref 64}
• Ben Shapiro became the number one rapper in the nation in January thanks to a collaborative effort with Tom MacDonald.^{ref 65}

• The CEO of Starbucks proudly announced that he takes no calls after 6 p.m. He is now unemployed and not taking calls at any time.^{ref 66}
• Super neocon Max Boot’s wife, Sue Mi Terry, is a former CIA analyst and National Security Council official. She appears to have also been an unregistered foreign agent and now an indictee.^{ref 68}
• Speaking of power couples, Huma Abedin (ex-wife of Anthony Weiner) and Alex Soros (son of George) are getting married. We should pray that Huma is past menopause, because the spawn of Moloch and Baphomet would be existential risk for humanity. (I guess I’m paranoid having watched Rosemary’s Baby on acid in high school.)
• Victoria “The Hutt” Nuland has retired. Good riddance, you warmongering neocon.

• A guy tried to make his court date with the judge by a Zoom call from his car. The judge patiently waited for him to find a parking space. The man’s charge? Driving without a license. The irony was not lost on the judge.^{ref 69}
• Political prisoner Julian Assange got out of jail. Deals must have been made—the DNC needed some messes cleaned up—but he made some strong statements after release. Julian was not happy that Pompeo planned to assassinate him.^{ref 70} What risk did he pose to the Deep State? Wikileaks released this 8-minute montage.^{ref 71} I suspect that files containing evidence of elite pedophilia networks were in play.^{ref 72} The age old question remains unanswered, however: who wears it best?

• Jake Knapp was working as a bouncer at a nightclub, trying to save money and keep his golf dreams alive. This year he won the Mexican Open, pocketing $1.5 million and opening the door to automatic invites to tournaments next year.^{ref 73}
• A oddly-shaped iceberg floated off the coast of Dildo, Newfoundland.^{ref 74}

• A couple running an abortion clinic got got caught on camera describing how to maximize profits from the body parts.^{ref 75} I remain pro-choice, but shit like that makes me tilt starboard.
• An angler in 2022 broke the New York State smallmouth bass record pulling a ‘lunker’ out of Cayuga Lake. This year, the New York State largemouth bass record was crushed when a different guy hauled a 12-pound, 6-ounce critter out of Cayuga Lake within a quarter mile of my dock.^{ref 76} How bow dah? Some attribute these mutants monsters to the appearance of an invasive bottom-feeding fish called a round goby.^{ref 77} Anglers seem to have recovered from their initial horror of the goby invasion. The irony? I have caught thousands of pounds of bass in my life, but I have never fished Cayuga Lake.

• Gazillionaire Larry Ellison purchased The National Amusement Company, the parent company of CBS and Paramount.^{ref 78} I guess somebody with serious wealth must own these companies, but the centralization of power and influence is disquieting.
• A Wells Fargo employee died in her cubicle and was discovered four days later. Gotta wonder about the bank’s janitorial service.^{ref 79}
• Kristy Noem claims to have killed her 14-month-old dog named Cricket for spoiling a pheasant hunt and attacking a neighbor’s chickens. She then supposedly capped a goat for being unruly. Either the DNC is up to no good, or self awareness is not Kristy’s strong suit.^{ref 80} It is possible the anti-gun activists think that the beast with huge antlers is a goat.

• Lauren Boebert followed Noem’s lead by choking her date’s chicken in a movie theater.^{ref 81} A picture of Boebert in a bikini with a tattoo that looks like a Harley gas tank surfaced, putting the global chicken population at risk.

• You may recall that Paul Pelosi had a few scuffles with the law, including a particularly odd case in which his gay lover assailant attacked him with a hammer while Paul managed to not drop his drink for the police cameras. The story smelled of political hijinks enough for me and others to call bullshit.^{ref 82} At his sentencing in what appeared to be a case of double jeopardy—same charge, second trial—his assailant’s rantings suggested he was stark raving bonkers. He got life in prison with no chance of parole.^{ref 83} Let’s add some context. John Hinkley was unconditionally paroled two years ago after shooting Ronald Reagan.^{ref 84} Rand Paul’s 2017 assailant who broke several of his ribs and inflicted enough damage to require several surgeries, got 30 days in the hoosegow.^{ref 84a} As an aside, I chatted with a worker at a facility in Tupper Lake that houses violent adults who were deemed not mentally competent enough to stand trial. He said the horrors that lurk behind those walls are unimaginable.
• A couple is brawling in court over whether the trans female partner should get her frozen testicles back—what Trader Joes would call frozen Rocky Mountain Oysters—along with $6,500 in damages for freezer burn.^{ref 85}
• Malia Obama changed her last name to Malia Ann for a new stage project.^{ref 86} Barry and Big Mike were supportive.
• CEO of United Airlines, Scott Kirby, has spruced up the corporate image…

• The East Palestinians—the ones in Ohio—got $600 million out of Norfolk Southern because of the 2023 train derailment.^{ref 87}
• As if San Francisco was not already a dubious tourist destination, it has now become the favorite destination of 20 pound rodents called nutria (which sounds like a California food supplement). They “produce up to 200 offspring annually, consume up to 25% of their body weight daily”, and are excellent vectors for tuberculosis and septicemia.^{ref 88} The illegal migrants say the streets are no longer inhabitable and refuse to leave their hotel rooms except to catch a couple for dinner.

• The House passed a bill automatically registering 18–26 year olds for the draft. The growing and substantial population of the trans-male community was decimated by a rush to de-transition.
• The pseudo-white supremacists called the Patriot Front discussed in previous years^{ref 90} reappeared briefly. As y’all may recall, these particularly buff, tattoo-free cretins that look and act like Feds are released into the public to stir up trouble. Official papers show the Patriot Front-FBI connection is real.^{ref 91,92,93} A fascinating interview of the unmasked founder, Thomas Rousseau, probed the mind of a white supremacist.^{ref 94} The host and pundit of color, Patrick Bet David, brilliantly orchestrated the interview.
• This photo of yet another chemical explosion^{ref 95} shows that drivers have no clue that they should haul ass in the opposite direction.

• Body cam footage of a cop shooting and killing a dog was disturbing.^{ref 96} It was a two-year-old lab-mix, all rubbery with a tail wagging and barking. His superiors justified it. No way. The cop needs to find another career requiring different skills.

First they came for the squirrels

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a squirrel.

Then they came for the raccoons

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a raccoon.

Then they came for the my dogs

And I lit ‘em up like Baghdad.

Paris Olympics

The Olympics always brings the world together to enjoy a few weeks of comradery. Within the Olympic villages, for example, it is claimed that stores can run through upwards of 100,000 condoms as the highly pumped and isolated Olympic athletes fill the dead time between events with aerobic conditioning. Paris 2024 was a different kind of venue and with it came a uniquely Parisian flavor. Before we get to the good stuff, lets start with the light anecdotes.

• This year’s Olympic Games were said to be the “greenest” in history, relying on solar power for the Olympic Village. The Olympic committee generously allowed the individual delegations to provide air conditioners for their athletes.A grid glitch blanketed 85,000 residents of Paris in a blackout.^{ref 1}
• Simone Biles became the oldest gymnastics all-around champion in 70 years. Recall that she pulled out 4 years ago when doubts—the twisties—camped out in her head. As a former gymnast having contacts with 6 broken necks in the sport, doubts are to be respected.^{ref 2} She is a beast!
• Cornell wrestler and Ithaca homie, 33-year-old Kyle Dake, won a bronze at the ripe old age of 33.^{ref 3} He was Time Magazine’s college sportsman of the year after winning four national titles in four weight classes, having competed as the underdog against a former national champions in every case. RIP to his dad who was coach and died weeks earlier.
• While Cornell commandeered four medals, Stanford students and alums snagged a record-setting 39 medals.^{ref 4} The campus is littered with student-athletes.
• Moloch-mongering Free Masons juiced up for this 33^rd Olympics took a break from sacrificing children and skinning goats heads to admire the all-seeing Satanic eye on the leotards of the Israeli rhythmic gymnasts.^{ref 5} (The eye not her butt, FFS.) Moloch returns in Part 3.

• The Australian entry to the new Olympic breakdancing, a woman named “Raygun”, no doubt donning plenty of pronouns, emphasized the “cultural politics of breakdancing.” She was so SNL-bad that the Australian government requested that people stop making fun of her (now deleted).^{ref 6} Here she is juxtaposed on the performance of one of our home-grown 8-year old break dancers.^{ref 7} I must admit her big Zoolander-esque move is inspiring…

Breaking’s Olympic Debut Was a Little Goofy, But That’s OK.

~ Rolling Stone headline

• Noah Lyles won a bronze in the 200 meter sprints and then tested positive for Covid.^{ref 8} Four years ago he would have been disqualified.
• In the pistol shooting competition in which competitors have more high-tech eyewear than Captain Piccard as a Borg, a Turk with his hand in his pocket (but at least he had no cigarette butt sticking out of his mouth) took the silver medal.^{ref 9}

• A French pole vaulter ripped down the bar with his “manhood”. It is rumored that he became rather popular among the ladies of the Olympic Village. “We better get on Amazon for more condoms!”

• Serious rain swept millions of gallons of sewage into the Seine, which roughly translates to English as “Big Sewer”, causing the triathletes to bag their training. When they finally took their dip, a video of one athlete hurling a dozen times went viral.^{ref 10} He was heard muttering the famous movie line, “I love the taste of shit in the morning.”

• A couple of transgender women made it past screens like East Germans of yore to compete in women’s boxing.^{ref 11}

There are claims that one was technically female at the chromosomal level, but neither was eligible for the World Championships.^{ref 12} The Olympic Committee President claimed to have no way to distinguish men and women,^{ref 13} a view supported by French President Emanuel Macron.^{ref 14}

Whatever. The pair beat the ovaries out of a bunch of women en route to the finals,^{ref 15} prompting one to exclaim, “I’ve never taken a punch like that.” Whether ironically and coincidentally or by design, the two met at the finals. I’m not done with commenting on the clash of transgenderism and women’s sports, but I suspect that OCB (Olympic Chick Beating) may represent some sort of social Apex, what market analysts call a blow-off top.

Report: Diddy Enjoying Successful New Career As Female Olympic Boxer

~ Babylon Bee headline

Saving the Big Story for last, the Paris Olympics opening ceremony featured a panoply of LGBTQLMNOP actors. A nearly buck-naked blue smurf with “a lumpy dad bod” was the appetizer. Behind him was a host of characters who would make the Village People blush. A portly woman—although portly is clear the gender is a guess—by the name “Barbara Butch”—I kid you not—was showing the hand sign connoting either the Illuminati or “I Love You” heart. Any doubt that they were mocking the last supper was put to rest when Ms. Butch posted it on her Instagram count, clarifying their intent before deleting it.^{ref 16} The internet never sleeps. A guy obviously had some part of his genitalia hanging down, but my wife and I cannot agree on which part. Phalloplasty is still on the table…or the floor.

Social media platforms began deleting posts that attacked the ceremony, but the blast of critiques came in with Hurricane-Helene-level force.^{ref 17} The ad bundler, a company called C Spire, could not pull ads fast enough as they expressed shock over the “the mockery of the Last Supper during the opening”.^{ref 18} A Catholic Cardinal called it a “Theatre of Satan…We witnessed an unbelievable manifestation of the darkness and sin in our world…It is difficult to imagine anything more debased and blasphemous.”^{ref 19} Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former papal nuncio to the United States who has been none-too-kind to the Vatican (see Part 3) for their role in trafficking children, called it “the latest in a long series of vile attacks on God, the Catholic Religion and natural Morality by the antichristic elite holds that hostage Western countries.”^{ref 20,21} He was able to fill in considerable details about the meaning of the imagery for those who regarded it all as an unfortunate coincidence. Crazy Carlo couldn’t pass on the opportunity to call French President Emanuel Macron, an “emissary of the World Economic Forum, who passes off a transvestite as his own wife with impunity, just as Barack Obama is accompanied by a muscular man in a wig.” Big Mike was not available for comment. On a personal note: I was on a Zoom call with Carlo, which checks quite a few boxes on my Pagan Bucket List.

They pissed off a billion Catholics, the entire Catholic Church, and probably another billion generics who think kinky smurfs should be left on XHamster. Even the Iranians weighed in, summoning France’s ambassador for some Middle-Eastern whoopass. I never would have guessed the Iranians cared that much about the Last Supper.^{ref 22}

Maria Zakharova from the Roosky Ministry of Foreign Affairs piled on noting the “obvious Satanism”.^{ref 23} She further noted that “The only thing worse than the opening of the Olympic Games in Paris could be their closing.” One could argue she was a little butt-hurt about overtly poor treatment of the Russian athletes. What was that allusion to the closing ceremonies? First, as a former gymnast, I can say authoritatively that the tumblers sucked.^{ref 24} The closing ceremony also featured bizarre if not more subtle bull-headed figures that would be recognized by anyone acquainted with the shenanigans of Moloch aka BAAL and Baphomet that go by the common name Satan. And you thought I was joking about the Free Masons.

The World Olympics organizers eventually removed the official post of the opening ceremony from YouTube and apologized for the ceremony.^{ref 25} Meanwhile, the art director, Thomas Jolly,^{ref 26} was given full credit and eventual blame for the fiasco that must have left hundreds of others scrambling for cover.

The entire Olympics opening ceremony was a Satanic occult ritual. Right there, in your face. As blatant and shameless as the St Gotthard tunnel ceremony. And They don’t even care that we can see it.

–James Delingpole, blogger

Well, at least this was just a one-off event, right? Not so fast. The 2022 Commonwealth Games in England were also Satanic with the worship of bull-headed BAAL front and center.^{ref 27} OK, but two points is a coincidence. Welp, the 2012 London Olympics was a real treasure with Satanic creatures haunting children in their beds (below).^{ref 28,29} Are you getting the heebie jeebies yet? Just wait. I am not done.

Law and Order

You don’t actually need to change the law; you only need to change the way they are enforced… In my opinion, he fundamentally hates humanity…he is doing things that erode the fabric of civilization.^{ref 1}

~ Elon Musk on George Soros

Law and order, whether on a microscale of raising children or the macroscale of keeping city streets safe, depends on a bluff. Once the miscreants realize they can overwhelm you, the bluff has been called. California is the dagger aimed at the heartland of America, governed by a greasy 80s porn star look-a-like. That brilliant idea of decriminalizing shoplifting threw stores open to looting. The populace now realizes that any store in any city can be stormed by a flash mob. The facial cover common to robbers of the past is now socially accepted Covid masks. Stores have resorted to locking up their goods like multi-dealer antique malls. That added transactionable friction for an Urban CVS with razor-thin profit margins dooms the business model. Franchises pulling out of cities is an ongoing story that will be tough to reverse, especially with defunded police forces that are having trouble rebuilding. Deincentivizing looters by capping a few in their asses is frowned upon by corporate lawyers, and small business owners fear that they will find themselves facing Soros-funded prosecutors. You may be sensing the slippery slope to anarchy. Like so many topics, however, the Red Wave of 2024 leaves you wondering if the solution may be nearer than we all thought.

Squatters. This year’s hot story was the problem of squatters. You come back from vacation to find somebody broke into your house, changed the locks, and somehow the police lack the authority to kick them out.^{ref 2} The claim is that this is happening in “tens of thousands” of instances,^{ref 3} and one could imagine it getting worse with the estimated 4 million undocumented tourists coming north this year alone. Homeowners find themselves homeless, while squatters destroy their houses and belongings.

Let’s bullet a few points here:

• A woman failed to flush visitors out of her $1,000,000 house in Queens, NY. that was for sale. When she changed the lock, the squatters returned, and she got arrested. Landlord-tenant laws prevent you from changing the locks on your own house after the squatter has logged in 30 days.^{ref 4,5}
• Pinon Hills, CA squatters moved in while the tenant was hospitalized. In this case, the sheriff’s department seemed happy to kick their squatty little asses out.^{ref 6}

• One serial squatter pulled off double scams by first squatting and then subletting the house and pocketing the $3,500 rental deposit.^{ref 9}
• Squatters have, however, discovered that if you move into a house, make sure you do not beat the owner to death and stuff her in a duffel bag.^{ref 10} That is illegal even in California.
• Beverly Hills is not immune. Houses near Lebron James have been hit.^{ref 11} Losing your $6.5 million, 10,000 square foot cottage in Hollywood Hills would suck, especially with the interior spruced up with value-added street art.^{ref 12} LeBron, however, may be distracted by Diddy issues^{ref 13} that could turn Satanic very quickly.^{ref 14}

There ain’t no party like a Diddy party.^{ref 15}

~ LeBron James

• One LA-based Airbnb-renter-turned-squatter has accused the owner of extortion and is demanding a “$100,000 relocation fee.”^{ref 16} This was not her first squat. There are creative ways to make it her last.
• One squatter lived in a house for five years, did a little renovation work, and then successfully sued for ownership.^{ref 17} In this case, the home had sat abandoned, so it is a rare example of the system working.
• An elderly couple have been cohabitating with squatters in an awkward truce because the seniors lacked the tools to remove them.^{ref 18} This is a common problem for seniors when the squatters are their kids who studied sociology in college.

In many municipalities, castle doctrine is gone. You have no idea if defending yourself and your dwelling will land you in prison. Even when the police clear the squatters out, they reappear,^{ref 19} but there has been some progress. An entrepreneurial group called Squatter Squad inflicts a little crowd-sourced justice.^{ref 20} The Squatter Squad often starts with the legal system to require a home inspection, which is then followed by a little muscle to make the squatters leave but not before being ‘coaxed’ into cleaning up their mess. Only they are allowed to let the door hit ‘em in their asses. The police stand by snarfing down donuts, entertained by this new form of justice.

Another intrepid homeowner turned the table by squatting on the squatter, which brought the legal machinery on his side.^{ref 21} The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) underscores the reluctance of authorities to prosecute squatters. OK then, but don’t be surprised if you find yourselves prosecuting homeowners who turn to violence. It may be not legal to harm a squatter, but you can hang a jury.

The profound problem is that while your generic sociopath may respond to the business end of a Louisville slugger wielded by a Squatter Squad, such tactics are suicidal when used on Venezuelan gangs that have taken over houses and entire apartment complexes.^{ref 22} A Venezuelan TikTok influencer provided a tutorial on how to identify a home that is empty and got 4 million views.^{ref 23} He notes that “If a house is not inhabited, we can seize it.” Internet chatboards on how to squat are proliferating. “We have a housing crisis in this country. And it’s only getting worse. People are going to do what they have to do. You can’t stop it.” That quote is not from the authorities.^{ref 24}

The Venezuelan problem was highlighted at the Vice Presidential debate by an exchange between ABC’s brain-dead Martha Raddatz and JD Vance:^{ref 25}

JD Vance: People are terrified by what has happened with some of these Venezuelan gangs.

Martha Radditz: Senator Vance, I am going to stop you. The incidences are limited to a handful of apartment complexes.

JD Vance: Did you hear yourself?

Daniel Penny. Last year I wrote extensively and irately about the prosecution of ex-marine Daniel Penny who subdued a crazy subway rider in New York City threatening to kill everybody. Penny’s arrest was absurd at so many levels including the initial failure to indict Daniels accomplice, a belated indictment, and subsequent dropping of all charges. Why the kid gloves? Daniel’s accomplice was black, and that did not fit the narrative of Alvin Bragg, a Soros-funded prosecutor and shill for the Democratic Machine. In any other era, had Daniel delivered a dose of “leadicillin” with a Ruger Redhawk applicator, he would be considered a hero. The case was a fiasco. The judge made some very odd calls that makes me wonder if he intentionally set up a mistrial for Penny if needed. Justice was done; Penny was acquitted. But they stole a big chunk of Daniel’s life and sent a chilling message to all citizens: never intervene because “good Samaritan” protection died that day.

But then it happened. OMFG! Team Trump pulled off yet another galaxy-class move by honoring the ex-marine who served our country twice…

Daniel will be OK provided the Alt-Left doesn’t lose their shit. I am guessing he will be provided opportunities that will change his life in a positive way.

Weaponizing the Department of Justice. The Biden administration got off to a quick start. A parody account under the pseudonym “Ricky Vaughn” with a Charlie Sheen avatar got Douglass Mackey a seven month prison term for “conspiracy to interfere with an election” by posting the following meme on Twitter:^{ref 26}

So what does this tweet from 2016 have to do with Corn Pop and Biden’s hairy legs now? MacKay was charged years later just days after Biden took office. The Wikipedia page tells it all: it wreaks of authoritarian propaganda.^{ref 27} Would MacKay have been charged of anything if he memed Trump? In case you’re a complete idiot, the answer is “no”. How stupid did you have to be to think this meme was real and to think this was election interference? Here is Ricky’s avatar. Does that look like a pro-Hillary account?

If you think so, then you should not be voting. Harvard Review did an excellent summary of the problems and authoritarian undercurrents inherent to this case:^{ref 28}

While Douglass Mackey may be a largely unsympathetic character, his trial and conviction raise troubling concerns regarding free speech… Section 241 requires the mere existence of a conspiracy, not any demonstration of actual harm…there is a poor fit between the new-age communication method of memes and the 150-year-old Enforcement Act of 1870.

~ Harvard Review

• Alex Jones got whacked by the court for $1.5 billion dollars because of his theories on the Sandy Hook shooting. Let’s ignore the possibility that all these shootings have a background story, the malarkey about freedom of the press, and even accept the idea that emotional damage should be compensated. But $1.5 billion? Let’s not forget the CIA contractor Gavin O’Blennis admitting they “cut Jones’ financial legs off” and “took his money away.”^{ref 29}
• Tara Reade, Biden’s rape victim who had contemporaneous corroboration, is in exile because the DOJ is going after her.^{ref 30,31}
• Many have refused to appear in front of congressional Kangaroo Courts, including the former Attorney General Eric Holder. Grok had no trouble listing 20 people who said some variant of “Fuck that” to congressional subpoenas. The only case of a punishment was in 1934 when William McCracken got 10 days to ponder the error in his ways. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro spent four months in prison. Their crime? Trump adjacency. Bannon has now served his country twice, and I don’t think the DNC should underestimate Bannon’s determination to get revenge.

January 6^th Scuffle. I cannot believe I am returning to January 6^{ref 32} and the abomination of the DOJ’s treatment of the political prisoners. Hopefully, some injustices will be undone on Day One of Trump’s second presidency. I want a clean sweep. I will never forgive Joe Biden for his State-of-the-Union address in which he bragged about putting January 6 defendants in prison for a total of 840 years…and still counting to this day.^{ref 33} He had the power to call off the dogs but didn’t. The festering of the J6 wound is all on Joe Biden. Joe: your family and inner-circle could and should be sent away for longer than the protesters.

I think our persecutions prosecutions have made clear of what we think about people who try to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power…

~ Merrick Garland

• The J6 pipebomb story that was central to the insurrection narrative has now completely fallen apart. Who planted it is unclear, but the authorities’ fingerprints are all over it.^{ref 34,35} This has raised the ire of Representative Thomas Massie (one of my favorites).^{ref 36}
• John Sullivan, the putative member of Antifa but denounced by Antifa as a Fed^{ref 37} and filmer of the Ashli Babbitt murder, got sentenced to 6.5 years for entering the Capitol.^{ref 38,39} I made what I thought was a very strong case that he was a Fed or at least Fed-adjacent.^{ref 40} If so, he got written out of the plot just like Ghislaine Maxwell.
• I believed the Ashli Babbitt shootings had errors and inconsistencies all over it, but since my case was based on video footage and on advice of confidants who weren’t sure, I wrote a short blurb with lots of links and let it go.^{ref 41} Recently, Sharyl Attkisson grabbed two Federal agents and went over the footage to make the same case on Full Measure.^{ref 42} She missed some good stuff, but it was exonerating. The shooter, Michael Bird, went uncharged and got a promotion and a $36,000 bribe bonus^{ref 43,44}
• Representative Clay Higgins explained to Tucker Carlson how many FBI agents were in the J6 crowd.^{ref 45} Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, used his exceptional FOIA skills to pry 88 pages of ATF records from the DOJ and discovered that the CIA was crawling around the Capitol Building on J6.^{ref 46} Cue up some perjury charges for high-ranking FBI bureaucrats.

We don’t monitor protests.

~ Chris Wray, FBI Director, on whether FBI agents were at January 6

• Arrests for the January 6 event were up 43% in 2024. There are still over 100 J6 cases awaiting prosecution. The number of protestors incarcerated is difficult to assess. Steve Baker of Blaze Media was arrested this year, handcuffed, and charged with four misdemeanors for entering the Capitol.^{ref 47,48,49} All charges should be vaporized by January 21
• The conviction rate of J6 defendants is at an unheard of >99%.^{ref 50}
• Adam Johnson, the guy carrying the lectern on J6, spent 77 days in jail. I have watched his social media feed, and he is a sweetheart and emotionally resilient. His prosecutor will do jail time for an assault.^{ref 51,52} I hope he becomes Bruno’s love muffin. This graphic makes me proud…

• Liz Cheney conspired with Cassidy Hutchison, the star witness of the J6 hearings, on her testimony about Trump’s behavior.^{ref 53,54} There is either a perjury charge or Hell waiting for them. The J6 committee has been accused of burying evidence.^{ref 55} You should not be shocked: she is a Cheney.

I don’t recall what brought former Capitol police officer Michael Fanone back on my radar. Michael offered up iconic moments in the J6 hearings, testifying about how horrible it was and how much he pee’d his pants facing off against the most cop-friendly mob in history:

His world went south when Trump got elected,^{ref 56} but why? He was just a DC police officer. Well, he had become one of the cool kids, or so he thought:

Election night was not a happy time for Mikey. He got shitfaced and offered his drunken election-night utterances to the Post‘s Kara Voght^{ref 57}…

He tried to get me killed. Better fucking arm yourselves. I didn’t vote for that motherfucker, and I fought tooth and nail to prevent this day from fucking coming. I’ll die right here in my fucking house. I’m not going to be in some ‘Apprentice’ fucking military tribunal.

~ Michael Fanone

After a brief network gig he had gotten what was called “The Blasey-Ford Treatment” having outlived his usefulness to The Blob. His new tattoo says, “I’ll take the money, but these fools don’t own me.” (That is not a joke.) He then failed to land a job at Walmart, Costco, and Cabela’s and attributed it to being viewed as a traitor. Indeed, Michael. We do view you as a traitor. He further noted, “Those are hours, days, and weeks of my life that I’ll never get back. I would have better spent them fucking watching Pornhub.” Hey: don’t go knocking Pornhub. They are always looking for new talent.

January 6th was a disgraceful riot but not an insurrection…Now, the protest that became a riot has been elevated from an insurrection to a terrorist attack.

~ Jonathan Turley

The Supreme Court just downgraded ‘the insurrection’ to trespassing.^{ref 58}

~ Headline, The Hill

In the case of Fischer vs. the United States, the Supreme Court overruled a J6 “insurrection” charge, which operationally downgrades it to trespassing.^{ref 59} This is likely to result in the overturning of many J6 convictions, according to Jonathan Turley. That offers little consolation to those who have been rotting in prison for years looking forward to their daily ritualistic singing of the National Anthem at 9:00 PM.^{ref 60}

I’ve been waiting for this: trespassing on the Capitol grounds.^{ref 61}

~ Nancy Pelosi

Miscellaneous. Let’s finish with a few random crimes and creative solutions…

• Delivery drivers in California now have armed guards.^{ref 62} It may be time to pull our ambassador from the California embassy.
• A California democrat revived a bill that could allow for release of prisoners serving “life sentences without the possibility of parole.” I’m OK with this. Life sentences without parole suggest an infallibility of the legal system and the ability to project the future that do not exist.^{ref 63} Of course, California will find a way to fuck up in ridiculous ways.
• Oakland has taken out traffic lights as the entreprenurial homeless find value in the copper.^{ref 64}

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

~ Edwin Abbey

• Over 300 fire hydrants were stolen in Los Angeles. The water company’s district manager noted, “We’re really alarmed about this happening.”^{ref 65} A repeat of the 1992 LA riots could give LA that Gaza look.
• The mayor of LA has had her house burglarized twice.^{ref 66} The perks of being an elite ain’t what they used to be.
• Civic leaders in Baltimore, NYC, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Austin have targeted the carjacking problem by suing car manufacturers for inadequate “crime prevention technology.” I kid you not. When asked to clarify this stroke of genius, they noted the these hooligans “are young people, and, when issued a challenge, they like to take it up.”^{ref 67}
• Retail giant Target’s name became prophetic when the Sacramento City Attorney’s Office threatened the company with “public nuisance charges” if store managers continued to call the cops to report thieves. Gavin Newsom wants good stats for 2028.^{ref 68} Newsom’s record in California should disqualify him for the top-dog position. Gavin’s profound ties to China described by Peter Schweizer in Blood Money also should give voters pause.^{ref 69}

• Illinois legislators are trying to legally change the name of ‘offenders’ to ‘justice-impacted individuals”.^{ref 70} It has been suggested that it would receive republican support with an amendment that changes “Democrat” to “Low-Intelligence Impacted Woke Progressive Fear Monger.”
• A 75-year-old pro-lifer got 16 months in federal prison for a peaceful protest outside an abortion clinic under the FACE Act to protect clients from violent actions.^{ref 71} A pro-life activist and mother of a young daughter got a 3.5 year sentence for unlawful assembly.^{ref 72} A third pro-life activist facing 11 years in prison was acquitted.^{ref 73} These could be complicated stories, but the FACE Act is coming under scrutiny as possibly unconstitutional in its application to peaceful protests. As a pro-choice libertarian, I am sensitive to both sides of this argument. In a previous era, I would instinctively defer to the courts’ wisdom. Those days are over.

Conclusion. I bet you are picking up hints of anger in my tone. I could have edited it away but didn’t. The thin veneer of civilization is peeling, and it is very hard for me to believe that this is by chance. My natural instinct now is to look abroad for State actors, but the real enemy may now be within. Watch for “conspiracy” charges: they were abused on the January 6 political prisoners—Yes, they are political prisoners in my opinion. Using conspiracy charges to elevate misdemeanors to felonies is authoritarianism. I believe the weaponization of the Department of Justice by the Biden administration is treasonous because it risks, by design, destroying the Nation. Whether the damage can be repaired or a backlash emerges under the current administration is unknowable.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

~ Walt Kelly

Trump Assassination Attempts

It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.^{ref 1}

~ Joe Biden, to donors on a private call, a month before the shooting

JD Vance: do you understand why there was a sudden job opening for running mate on the GOP ticket? They tried to kill your predecessor!^{ref 2}

~ Representative Jamie Raskin at the Democratic National Convention

Donald Trump Jr. noted that the mistake we made is believing there was some line “they” would not cross, and there is no such line. Carlson predicted the assassination, and then the attempts commenced.

It’s interesting to notice who it is we assassinate…It’s always people who’ve told us to live together in harmony and try to love one another. Jesus, Gandhi, Lincoln, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, John Lennon. They all said, try to live together peacefully. Bam. Right in the fucking head.^{ref 3}

~ George Carlin

Thomas Crooks fired the first salvo. I thought it was fake because I couldn’t see how they missed the orange head of a Macy’s Day Parade float, but that plotline never thickened. We heard the odd lament that American exceptionalism is so far gone that we can’t even pull off an assassination anymore. A potential second shooter, Ryan Routh, looks like a made-for-TV movie plot—a psyop to gaslight us. It never reached the “attempt” level—it was more of a “plan”—but even that seems generous. We got rumors of more plans^{ref 4} that had no substance whatsoever but seemed to leave the option open for another crack at it. Rumors of Iranian plots^{ref 5} were twofers; it set up the perfect patsy—some guy named Sirhan Sirhan would do it—and it would give us reason to bomb the shit out of Iran, which seems to be a key blank on the Deep State’s bingo card.

When looking at the circumstances in favor of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the identified alleged suspect in the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, PA, it’s hard to see how the guy failed.^{ref 6}

~ Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater

Routh looks like a disposable criminal patsy while Kimberly Cheatle, the head of the US Secret Service, was the political patsy. Having gone full DEI prior to the shooting was chum for the Right. What was notable throughout is that the focus of all coverage with precious few exceptions was on fuckups and incompetence by those who were responsible for protecting Trump. Hanlon’s Razor urges you to “not attribute malice to something that can be explained by stupidity or incompetence.” Collum’s Razor says, “Hanlon was a CIA cutout.” A survey of the legacy media showed the post-assassination-attempt coverage to be 95% negative on Trump.^{ref 7} Apparently, Trump was asking for it by triggering Godwin’s Law^{ref 8}—the degeneration of arguments to Hitler analogies—too many times. They wonder why many of us detest them, and why the careers of so many talking heads are about to get more than ear piercings by management looking to rebuild their brand.

Biden Promises Next Trump Assassin Will Be a Woman of Color

~ Babylon Bee Headline

The complicity on the part of the US Secret Service and Homeland Security should have been scrutinized by isolating all the players immediately and questioning them under bright lights. Of course, they did not do that, which is the tell. The irony is that their failure to cap his ass helped Donald Trump win the election and quite possibly sent him on a personal quest—a vendetta—to ferret out the Deep State once and for all. But I am getting ahead of myself. First, what is known? I am taking the liberty of calling Crooks and Routh “snipers” and those defending Trump “marksman”. The media kept calling them both snipers. I’ll also use the term “Deep State” because the roles of the various 3- and 4-letter agencies including the DNC, RNC, CIA, NSA, and USSS (US Secret Service) are not known.

Shooting: Prologue. The Deep State has a nasty habit of de-weaponizing the Secret Service. Multiple requests for secret service protection from RFK Jr. fell on deaf ears repeatedly even though he satisfied all of the requirements as a contending presidential candidate.^{ref 9} Then there’s the irony that the protocols were installed after his father got whacked by the Deep State. (I got that from the horses mouth in a Zoom call with Kennedy in which I first learned of the absurdities in the case against Sirhan Sirhan.^{ref 10}) Protection for Kennedy was added 48 hours after the Trump shooting.^{ref 11}

Efforts to expose Trump to danger surfaced when Democrat Bennie Thompson introduced legislation that would remove Secret Service protection from anyone convicted of a felony. Trump goes to prison and has no secret service protection?^{ref 12} Tell me how that was supposed to work. Dan Bongino thinks Secret Service lapses have been evident all along,^{ref 13} including at Mar-a-Lago when they stepped back and let the FBI raiders charge in.^{ref 14} That seems OK at first blush, but the Secret Service never should have allowed it. How do they know the raid is legit? Their job is to protect Trump. Period.

It’s awfully odd, in a case of such importance, that there would be a rush somehow to cremate the body.

~ Dan Bongino, former Secret Service agent

The setup to cap Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania was perfect…well, not quite perfect, apparently.

Trump’s regular Secret Service team was given the day off for the Butler rally, and potential substitutes were assigned to Jill Biden—Doctor Jill Biden—at a rally 54 miles away.^{ref 15} Trump was left with untrained locals and some Federal miscreants.^{ref 16} Representative Josh Hawley says the Federal agents that were on site were not Secret Service but rather Homeland Security. They had been prepared for the event via a 2-hour webinar^{ref 18} and were no-shows at the pre-rally meeting.^{ref 19} One agent (of some flavor) left her post to breastfeed. So if I have this right, she was protecting the President while carrying a kid in a Snuggly?^{ref 20}

We have an affidavit from a Secret Service whistleblower that they were supposed to be there, but they were told to stand down.^{ref 17}

~ @MikeBenzCyber, on Butler, PA assassination attempt

The most obvious vantage point to shoot DJT was the roof left unguarded and ultimately occupied by Thomas Crooks. Federal agents were said to be inside the building. This gets relevant. The head of the Secret Service (Kimberly Cheatle) suggested the 7.5 degree slope made it unsafe for her marksman. That angle happens to precisely match the ADA’s recommended slope for a wheelchair ramp.^{ref 22} There was no direct channel of communication open.^{ref 23} The cops watching the scene could not communicate with the marksman or with the Secret Service agents proximate to Trump.

I fucking told them to post guys over here. I told the Secret Service Tuesday! They were inside.^{ref 21}

~ Cop on a body cam seconds after the shooting

Thomas Crooks-The Shooting. The suspicious behavior of Crooks was first noticed well in advance. Some accounts say 20 minutes others say two hours, either of which offered plenty of response time. Multiple videos showed rally participants spotting Crooks on the roof and screaming for somebody to do something.^{ref 24,25} One cop is claimed to have looked up on the roof and then backed away when he saw Crooks with a weapon; an overly generous interpretation is that he thought Crooks was on his team. Bodycam footage from several cops showed they knew Crooks was there and were concerned.^{ref 26} Videos of Crooks running along the roofline right before the shooting are not subtle.^{ref 27} Crooks took his shots at Trump with “iron sights” (no scope). Seems a little silly for an assassin. Cheatle admitted that the Secret Service was notified of a suspicious person “somewhere between two and five times.”^{ref 28}

Post-Crooks-Shooting Investigation. The gravity of the day’s events cannot possibly be overstated. The former and future president was shot, and a spectator in the stands behind Trump was murdered while others were shot. Clearly, this calls for the most careful analysis of the crime scene, causes, motivations, and mistakes made. The Secret Service interviewed none of the local cops after the shooting.^{ref 29} Other problems were captured in a letter from Representative Clay Higgins describing his role in the investigation. Higgins expressed a number of serious concerns in a letter, but I read it suspiciously:^{ref 30}

• The FBI scrubbed the crime scene, cremated Crook’s body, and released the entire crime scene quickly.
• Unprecedented protocols of assigning marksman at such an event were noted;
• Interoperable radios were provided but not used;
• Rumors of muzzle flashes from inside the building on which Crooks took his shots were rejected as unfactual as were the claims of a ladder on the backside of the building and evidence of the water tower being used by a potential shooter;
• Crooks was said to be well concealed by his placement below the peak;
• The crime scene was released within three days and cremation 10 days later was “obstruction of justice” and “quite troubling”.

There is some serious bullshit in Clay’s letter. Well concealed? Dismissing the muzzle flashes? My read of the full letter is that he is assuring the public he is all over it but has no intention whatsoever of challenging the narrative. It was blather for public consumption. A declassified sketch of the crime scene highlights the unanswered questions:

Trump’s proximate Secret Service protection detail and top advisers were baffled that they got no alerts about risk.^{ref 31} The FBI is withholding information from the Senate Intelligence Committee.^{ref 32} A photo taken by State police was sent to the command center 20 minutes before the shooting, but there were no direct channels open.^{ref 33} After lying about denying Trump more agents for the event,^{ref 34} the Secret Service went silent.

Bullet trajectory analyses were crowd sourced because the authorities likely wanted none of that. There is some disagreement. John Cullen’s detailed analysis concludes there were several shooters including one in charge of taking out the two marksman on the roof near to Trump.^{ref 35,36,37} John’s analysis made it to Congress.^{ref 38}

Chris Martenson’s independent ballistics analysis from audio recordings does not wholly agree with Cullen’s, but shows there were shots fired from two different locations.^{ref 39,40} Jesse Watters and Ron Johnson confirmed that the two marksmen on the roof said they heard bullets wiz by their heads (a mini sonic boom like effect) that hit the grandstand, which is consistent with a second shooter designated to take them out first from an altogether different location than Crooks.

Thomas Crooks-Background. A brief look at Crooks’ history doesn’t exactly alleviate concerns that something more than a lone nutball was at play. It starts with his role as an extra in a 2022 Blackrock Commercial.^{ref 41} Blackrock scrubbed their ad pronto.^{ref 42,43}

Crooks went to the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club 43 times prior to the shooting, with evidence somebody accompanied him four times. Clairton just so happens to be a range where the Department Homeland Security practices, and they were there on the day of the shooting. Names of the other visitors got redacted.^{ref 44}

So the person who came very close to blowing Trump’s head off was just some wayward 20-year-old with no political views or online footprint, and it almost happened because of absurd ‘errors’ by the Secret Service?

~ Glenn Greenwald

Amateur sleuths found that Crooks had encrypted accounts in Belgium, New Zealand, and Germany, prompting one astute politician to ask, “Why does a 19-year-old kid who is a healthcare aid need encrypted platforms?”^{ref 45,46} The sleuths found nine digital devices that tracked to Crooks’s home, workplace, and Butler PA, which narrows it pretty much down to Crooks. Those devices also tracked to a few curious places in Washington DC.^{ref 47} Senator Ron Johnson (a rare good guy inside the Beltway) notes that Kimberly Cheatle refused to testify how many shell casings were found on the roof leading one to wonder if she was waiting for the shot count to be reported. Testimony eventually claimed there were 8 casings near Crooks body,^{ref 48} but Crooks did not appear to take 8 shots.

We reached out immediately to local law enforcements seeming that Federal officals were not being transparent…Unfortunately, and this is sad, we can’t trust the Secret Service and the FBI. We just can’t do it…The higher ups in the FBI are corrupt. I think the Department of Justice is corrupt. The high level of the Secret Service is probably corrupt.^{ref 49}

~ Senator Ron Johnson

They’re now making up excuses [blaming] the pitch of the roof. My source says to me that no one knows why the post didn’t show up. I was also told that the USSS director has been given instructions from the administration and the DHS secretary: “If you wanna keep your job, you’ll keep your mouth shut about this.”^{ref 50}

~ Dan Bongino, former Secret Service

Crooks Shooting-The Weird Stuff. Trump’s digital media corporation (symbol: DJT) was a popular target for short sellers before the shooting for whatever political or investing reason you wish to imagine.^{ref 51} The 120,000 put options the morning of the shooting, however, raised a few eyebrows.^{ref 52} Seems unlikely Thomas Crooks had that much loot. The options were traded via Austin Private Wealth LLC and represented a huge position for a typical customer.^{ref 53} They were gone soon after the assassination attempt failed.^{ref 54} Initial guesses went straight to Larry Fink at BlackRock (of course) accompanied by innuendo about Austin’s connections to the Bush family.^{ref 55}

The price of DJT had been getting pounded pretty hard during the week leading up to the shooting, which was followed by an immediate short squeeze the Monday after the assassin failed.

This is straight out of the Project Prophesy AI algo I co-developed for the CIA. Massive put buying in American Airlines and United in the three trading days before 9/11 was the tell. This time it was Truth Social stock. (In response to put buying before assassination attempt.)

~ Jim Rickards

Here is the random but even weirder stuff:

• Doug Mills has captured iconic photos of presidents for a long time.^{ref 56} He happened to be in Butler that day to capture the path of the bullet.^{ref 57} Must have been a gut instinct.
• Google was up to its usual bullshit when Not the Bee reported an attempt to search for the assassination absolutely refused the most obvious autofill imaginable.^{ref 58,59} I replicated the experiment. Google waffled in a public statement about how the failed autofill is for our own safety.^{ref 60}

• Hang with me here on this one. A guy named Vincent Fusca has been said by the most fringe conspiracy theorists to be JFK, Jr. in disguise.^{ref 61} It is full-blow QAnon theory that exceeds even my flexible brain.^{ref 62} Forget about whether the JFK Jr. part is true or not, Fusca was sitting right behind Trump when Trump got shot,^{ref 63,64} and he didn’t even flinch when the shots rang out.^{ref 65,66} Of all the possible rallies, Fusca chose that one. He was also at the RNC convention.^{ref 67} He gets around.

• Two different witnesses in the stands made throat-slit motions prior to the shooting. They are not ambiguous, and they are stylistically identical.^{ref 68}
• A video shows Crooks’ father walking around with someone Crooks’ size covered from head to toe and wearing a mask.^{ref 69}
• Crooks’ parents hired gun-slinging lawyers.^{ref 70} One could imagine legitimate reasons, but there are other reasons too. We’ll come back to that shortly.

The House committee investigating the shooting blames poor preparation by the Secret Service.^{ref 71} The claim that it was “preventable” seems particularly factual if the guys trying to kill Trump were Feds.^{ref 72}

Ryan Routh: Assassin 2.0. Two months later, Ryan Routh planned a second assassination, but Ryan left a manifesto!^{ref 73}

This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, but I failed you. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It is up to you now to finish the job; and I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job.^{ref 74}

~ Ryan Routh’s, post assassination attempt letter

That is a curious letter to leave behind: how did he know that he would fail? That is a generous bounty offered by a guy with a self-stated net worth of $1,000 and grand total of $68 in the bank. He decided to camp out at The Donald’s golf course for 12 hours.^{ref 75} It was a “long shot” in that Trump supposedly decided to play a “round” with little warning. Somebody spotted a muzzle sticking through a fence. Routh fled the scene by car and was apprehended minutes later. Phew. That was a close call. He looks stunningly happy, and those backpacks and the gun left behind. don’t exactly look discretely placed, unless finding them was important.

Ryan Routh-The Early Years. Routh’s background story is very odd. This is my shocked face :<O He had an extensive albeit eclectic digital presence. In his earlier years Routh became a hero—a “super citizen”—by subduing a suspected rapist.^{ref 76}

Here he is being filmed by local news about being a lowly construction worker dealing with flooding in Maui.^{ref 77} Is that a Porsche in your driveway, Ryan?

Ryan’s Porsche and house in Maui seem inconsistent with him claiming to have $68 in his bank account while stiffing his wife out of child support.^{ref 78} He did, however, cohabitate with putative smoking-hot girlfriend, Kathleen Schaffer,^{ref 79,80} who is a former model with Leslie Wexler’s Victoria Secret. Why a hot throbber would date Routh is worth pondering, although women have been known to pick questionable mates. You also may recall that Leslie Wexler ran a modeling operation while having ties to Epstein and the Mossad and then got suicided.^{ref 81} That plot thickened fast. For those who are curious, Kathleen has no ties to former intelligence officer and occasional confidant, Tony Schaffer;^{ref 82} I checked. Routh’s house occupied in 2020 was owned by Kathleen Shaffer. Her husband (ex?) works at Kaena Point Tracking Satellite Center, a DOD installation on Maui^{ref 83} and has gone digitally quiet since 2021.^{ref 84}

Ryan was not always a superhero battling sexual assaults. In 2002 he was arrested after barracading himself in his own shop called “United Roofing.”^{ref 85}

Ryan has over 100 charges against him that never made it to a conviction, kinda like Charles Manson as described in the book Chaos.^{ref 86,87} Here is a rap sheet for various gun violations that never seemed to lead to serious consequences.

In contrast to Thomas Crooks utter absence of social media presence for a kid of his age, Ryan left a swath of digital debris. His Twitter feed is loaded with odd posts that look like an AI creation to me.^{ref 88} “Billboard Chris” noted that they are very formulaic.^{ref 89} Ian Carroll, a self-taught social sleuth of a higher order, noted the Twitter feed was “pretty automated”, and Ryan’s roofing company looks “pretty sterile” (a front).^{ref 90} Ian also noted that Ryan’s first Twitter follower was Soo Kim, an ex-CIA/Rand Corp person with a protected account. Facebook deleted Routh’s account faster than you can say, “CIA assassin!”^{ref 91}

The bulk of attention was on his role as a mercenary recruiter for the Ukraine war, which includes videos of him recruiting Afghan/ISIS troops who had found a home in Ukraine^{ref 92} to fight for their new homeland.^{ref 93} Routh was interviewed by a Roumanian Newsweek reporter explaining why he was in Ukraine.^{ref 94} He is front and center in a promotional video put out by the Azov Nazis in May 2022.^{ref 95,96} The New York Times also viewed his recruiting efforts as newsworthy.^{ref 97} CBS News admitted they had known about him for well over a year before he decided to ambush Trump.^{ref 98}

Sean Davis, CEO and founder of the web magazine The Federalist, ponders how Ryan Routh met with intelligence and and foreign policy analyst Malcolm Nance, Former Director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council, Alexander Vindman, and “the entire Vindman clan”, and everyone associated with the Helsinki Commission headed up by 18 Congressional Representatives and Senators.^{ref 99} The particularly incisive and seemingly connected Mike Benz says that Routh is a CIA cutout—an operative kept at arm’s length to maintain plausible deniability.^{ref 100}

Ryan’s son was subsequently arrested for having child porn.^{ref 101} This seems to be standard protocol. Scott Ritter got it immediately after testifying to Congress that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.^{ref 102} They also did this to the brother of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock^{ref 103} and even threatened to do it to the husband of elite journalist Sharyl Attkisson.^{ref 104} Family members must be silenced. Maybe that’s why the Crooks family lawyered up.

Ryan Routh-The Investigation. There is shockingly little visible follow-up by the authorities after the initial flurries of clickbait. Federal prosecutors asked for an indefinite delay of Ryan Routh’s trial because “a massive trove of evidence” suggests the case is “complex,” or as they say at the DNC, “weird.” Four thousand terabytes is a lot of data for a generic loon. The latest (as of 12/20/24) is that the Florida Attorney General is accusing the Federal Government of stonewalling their investigation into Routh:^{ref 105}

It was made known that they intended to shut down our investigation and invoke federal jurisdiction in doing so.^{ref 106}

~ Ashley Moody, Florida Attorney General

Ryan’s 2023 book, “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen-Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea, WWIII and the End of Humanity” seems a little out of context.^{ref 107,108} His job as a mercenary recruiter for Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense and his official rank in the Ukrainian army ought to seem odd.^{ref 109}

Conclusion. As the many efforts to bring down Trump showed his antifragility to be legendary, the attempted assassinations may have also lit an inferno under his ass to assemble an A-team of young brawlers to fight a domestic war (or so many of us hope). In yet another Trumpian stunt, he returned to Butler, PA, stood at the podium, and uttered a classic line: “As I was saying…”^{ref 110} As many have now said, “Take Trump seriously but not literally.”

COVID-19 and the Vaccines

I can’t trust anything anywhere… I am mind-boggled that the medical literature is adulterated and that the press is completely nonsense now.^{ref 1}

~ Dr. Drew Pinsky

We were given bad information about Ivermectin. The real question is, why?

~ Chris Cuomo

Evolution of the Plot. We are all suffering Covid fatique at this point. I first wrote about Covid-19 in 2020 expressing serious reservations about the dominant narrative including the suppression of open debate amongst the scientific community and the population at large.^{ref 2} The complete shutting down of appropriate treatments that included Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was clearly tied to the full-court press to release a vaccine. I did not know until after publishing my 2020 YIR that the reason for stepping on medicinal treatments was profound: according to Federal law, the vaccines could not be released on an emergency basis “unless there was no alternative.”

The evil surfaced unambiguously in late 2020 when they immediately released the vaccine to pregnant women with no data to support it. In the early 1960s thalidomide taught us that you never—never!_—release experimental drugs to pregnant women. Thalidomide was given to pregnant German women starting in 1959; evidence of profound birth defects appeared by 1961. (Newborns with flippers instead of arms and hands were a subtle hint.) Yet, the drug wasn’t pulled from the market until 1969. Some things never change.

Let’s state this early and without ambiguity:

I believe that the Covid-19 vaccines maimed and killed more people than did the virus. The lying by the authorities makes them accomplices to crimes against humanity. Without fundamental changes at the highest levels of the biomedical community, I will never take another vaccine. Nobody knows what’s in them.

I must admit a sense of relief by the end of 2020, however, that the release of the vaccine would bring the long Covid-19 nightmare to a close. By my 2021 YIR it was clear from anecdotal data that the vaccine was no panacea, whereas the global authoritarianism was profound. I was forced to choose between giving up my job and getting vaxxed. I took the jab. I had a vision of sitting with my wife years later trying to explain why the Bank of Dad or the Bank of Grandad couldn’t financially help our kids or our grandkids because I had a hunch about a vaccine that subsequently went on to save the World. Only through death would I find peace. If you have not figured out by now that every authority on the planet lied to us, there is little I can do to help you.

Somewhere between 10 and 20 million people have been killed by these experimental vaccines worldwide, and it’s still going up.^{ref 3}

~ Andrew Bridgen, UK parliament

In 2023, I wrote a lot about the psychopathic liars pushing the vaccines but left several dozen pages unpublished. It was time to move on. Alas, I cannot seem to move on. I am failing to cauterize this festering wound.

A sentence to sum up the Covid era: The government censored dissidents to suppress public realization that the government was the primary source of pandemic misinformation.

~ Dr. J. Bhattacharya, Stanford Medical School and new head of the National Institutes of Health

The Pfizer Papers. I couldn’t stop reading books on the topic. This year I added Sharyl Attkisson’s fabulous Follow the Science and my friend Eddie Dowd’s Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022 and 2023. Ed’s is very pictorial, giving it a dual purpose as reference guide and a coffee table ornament to replace Life Magazine’s Pictorial History of Frontal Lobotomies.

Since 2021, the vaccine rollout, we have 1.1 million excess Americans dying, 4.0 million disabled—we estimate another 28.6 million injured that are missing work from time to time due to chronic illness. So, it’s about 33 million Americans have been injured, disabled, or died from this vaccine.^{ref 4}

~ Ed Dowd, ex-Blackrock manager and author of Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022 and 2023

Naomi Wolf’s The Pfizer Papers, however, deserves—no, requires—special attention. As a refresher, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for Pfizer’s vaccine data was stonewalled by the FDA by requesting 50 years for Pfizer to get its shit together. Fortunately, the judge said “Fuck that” (or something like that) and made them spill their guts, which led to the release of more than 500,000 pages. Naomi Wolf asked for help, and a cavalry of 3,200 doctors and scientists showed up anxiously awaiting orders. Enter Amy Kelly, an expert at managing such projects who became the unsung hero. She organized the campaign to review the documents like General Patton. The Pfizer Papers is more of a reference document not meant to be read and is almost impossible to consume in audio format. The book is complex because it also smuggles in data mined from the VAERS database that chronicles vaccine injuries.

Here is my Readers Digest version of some critical points. Curiously, I scanned my 2023 notes that went unpublished and it was all largely described, but now it is documented and archived for posterity. I do not include the dry statistics about injuries and deaths that made it so tedious, but they are unimaginably large at times. This is what Pfizer (and presumably the other vaccine providers) knew before and after the release of the vaccine:

• Pfizer added 2,400 new employees to the group handling vaccine injury reports after the release, responding to a serious overload.
• Prior to the FOIA release, scientists and doctors had detected and started documenting anomalous strokes, cancers, clots, heart damage, autoimmune diseases, aggressive cancers (nicknamed turbocancers), and other diseases that are normally quite rare. Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS) became a thing and an excellent keyword search term on Twitter. The papers show that Pfizer knew all of this. They knew every organ was being invaded, and they knew it before applying for the EUA (Emergency Use Authorization) vaccine release.
• Pfizer had gazillions of tables of problematic data and simply pretended that it was not problematic. Many Pfizer reports shared a common catchphrase: “there are no new safety issues.” It is disarming until you realize that “new” means relative to a previous report identifying them.
• A chronic problem throughout the documents of losing track of trial participants is not fathomable in the digital world. Profound incompetence seems too unlikely, leaving nefarious intent as the default.
• The data clearly shows the younger cohorts with the least risk from Covid-19 and the least to gain from the vaccine were being hit the hardest.
• There was no evidence of follow up by Pfizer on obvious vaccine injuries and deaths contrary to Federal law mandating such follow ups. There was no evidence that they probed for mechanisms by which these health problems arose.
• The protocol for the vaccine preparation was changed with a minimalist clinical trial and high adverse-event counts. Residues from vials were tested and shown to be very rich in DNA fragments.
• Pfizer grouped “recovered” and “recovering” vaccine injuries into a single category, providing no data on if any recovered completely.
• The injuries included many children long before they were cleared for the jab or even the proper dosage could have been determined. It was unclear if the children were intentionally injected prior to authorization or just victims of the sloppy, rushed campaigns. Either way, kids were getting severely injured and dying. The reports on kids were also particularly erratic, contradictory, and thin on details: why?
• Pfizer cited ethical reasons for vaccinating the control group several months after beginning the most important clinical trial in history. Although the non-vaccinated population of the world could, in theory, serve as a control group, the termination of the formal study truncated what looked like a disaster for Pfizer: the entire vaccinated group was marching toward 100% of them getting Covid. Infection of the entire vaccinated group would have negated all claims of efficacy, which is now widely known from anecdotal data anyway. You could show it is the vaccine causing the infections using sound statistical methods if the clinical trial had continued.
• Critically, they stopped monitoring potential consequences of the vaccine after 90 days. Did you die from turbocancer, a stroke, or a heart attack? Sorry but if it happened four months after vaccination, it ain’t Pfizer’s problem. This is illegal—they were obligated to keep monitoring the effects of the vaccine—and inexcusable.
• Naomi’s Army also dug through the VAERS reports in which doctors are supposed to upload potential vaccine injuries. These filings are notoriously hard to do. It has been long known that VAERS only catches an estimated 2% of the vaccine injuries and deaths, but that is an adequate signal to raise a red flag. Here is the money shot: Wolf’s researchers claimed that the computer code in VAERS was intentionally and “diabolically” corrupted to make routine database searches impossible. That would explain why the authorites turned down a new-and-improved software developed at Harvard. The CDC also had a safety monitoring system called V-safe.^{ref 5} It got awkward when a video leaked showing that 7.7% of its 10 million users needed medical care after vaccination, and many of those needed repeated help.^{ref 6}
• Pfizer relied on antibody titer rather than a more holistic approach, which is the kind of garbage science revealed in other treatises on the corruption of clinical trials as delineated in John Abramson’s Sickening. The company leaned heavily on Macaque monkey trials, which Wolf’s investigators inferred stemmed from the vaccine working better on Macaques.
• Rat studies showing severe reproductive issues were dismissed because the sample sizes were considered too small, leading to statistical insignificance. Larger sample sizes would have resolved the statistical-significance problem, but that may not have been the desired outcome.
• Evidence of destruction of the human female reproductive system was profound. Have we neutered a substantial fraction of a generation of women? Global birthrates are dropping, but that could be their iPhone and social-media obsessions as described in Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (see “Books”). OB-GYN offices should be seeing problems. Here is an OB-GYN from a five-doctor practice—call it Fifty Fingers—who seems to have no axe to grind describing miscarriages and fertility problems at unprecedented levels.^{ref 7}
• The almost total absence of autopsy data is a tell. Autopsies easily distinguish the damage by Covid-19 centered on the respiratory system and from the broadly based damage caused by the vaccine. The precious few that were done, admittedly with widely varying quality controls, showed a number of interesting problems including markedly reduced male sperm counts.
• The vaccine was making its way to the fetuses through the blood stream and into newborns via breast milk. This is fully consistent with the well-known passing of natural immunological protection via breast milk. The Zoom group, Medical Doctors for Covid Ethics, that I would drop in on, discussed a mysterious phenomenon called “shedding” in which the vaccine risks appeared to pass to proximate individuals by casual contact.

I want to share some caution on this. We just don’t know the long-term side effects of modifying DNA and RNA to directly code in ones DNA and RNA.^{ref 8}

~ Mark Zuckerberg, on leaked video about the vaccine

During a prolonged chat with Ryan Cole, he mentioned the sourcing from the vat of vaccine brew that hit me like a truck. Resurrecting old memories from biochem, I recalled that you damage RNA and DNA by simply stirring it. How do you stir a vat of this brew without the sheer forces shredding the mRNA? If you can’t vigorously stir it, sampling from the vat would be like using oil and vinegar salad dressing without shaking it. Vaccine samples from the top of the vat would get the oil (the mRNA and lipid nanoparticles) in high dose. Samples from the bottom of the vat would get the vinegar (the saline). As an aside, there is zero chance that the vaccine can be scrubbed from your carcass as described on the internet; you are being scammed. Meanwhile, the authorities continue to concoct countless alternative explanations for the rapid rise in vaccine injuries…

The long-term effects of the vaccines are unknowable, but a well-documented batch-dependence possibly arising from the mixing problem suggests that those who dodged the bullet by getting symptom-free jabs have reason for optimism, but there is no way to know. Those who got whacked but seemed to recover may not be out of the woods. Myocarditis damages the heart, and hearts do not repair themselves. If the vaccine got reverse transcribed into your germ cell DNA, it is anthropogenic “epigenetics”. The spike protein sequence will be passed to your offspring (if you can).

My doctor refused to treat Covid. And I quote: “Go home and sleep it off. You should have gotten the vaccine.” He (and the state medical board) all belong in prison. He died of sudden cardiac death two months ago.

~ @EthicalSkeptic

Was the virus a bioweapon? It is clear that it came from a lab and with high probability was developed by US scientists in the Wuhan labs to avoid scrutiny. The wet market theory was a distraction that refuses to die. Is it possible that the virus was the distraction from the real bioweapon, the vaccine?

The Courts. I thought there was no chance that the courts would find justice in this Covid narrative, but the dam is beginning to break, and there are tens of thousands of cases ready to flood the global courts. Many will fail on “standing” (tossed out on a technicality). Here is a discussion by John Beaudoin within my doc Zoom group on how hard it has been to push the cases through.^{ref 9} But cases are making it to adjudication, and lawyers are figuring out how to win.

Why workers fired for refusing Covid vaccines are starting to win in court.^{ref 10}

~ Reuters Headline

• A UK court has found Pfizer “guilty of bringing discredit to the pharmaceutical industry.” This is a serious breach under the UK Code of Practice rules, but I have no fookin’ idea what that means.^{ref 11}
• A Federal court green-lighted a lawsuit against the Mayo Clinic that claims five employees fired for refusing to vaccinate because of their religious beliefs had their constitutional rights violated.^{ref 12,13}
• The FDA messages such as “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it”^{ref 14} and urging people not to use Ivermectin to treat Covid-19 were slapped down by a Federal Court.^{ref 15} The agency was told that it exceeded its authority—”You are not physicians. You are authoritarians. Seriously, y’all. Stop it”—when it directed health professionals and patients against using the drug. In the settlement, the FDA claimed it committed no wrong doing, which is both standard settlement lingo and perjury. The data is strong: Ivermectin works wonders against Covid-19 and other viral infections.

The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government.

~ Dr. Marty Makary, Johns Hopkins Medical School and Trumps pick to head the FDA

• A school injected a kid with a Covid-19 vaccine against the parents explicitly stated wishes and after he reiterated his parents objections. The administrators distracted the kid with a stuffed animal and then went in for the jab. The Vermont Supreme Court ruled that the school was protected against litigation from claims by the PREP act.^{ref 16} If somehow Dad ended up in court for doing a sex change on those administrators with a rusty butterknife, I would hang that jury.
• A story that Bill Gates was indicted for murder in the Netherlands has been heavily fact-checked, which is always suspicious, but the fact checkers probably got this one right. Such a shame.
• I can hear New York’s dads muttering, “Touch my kid like this, and it will be the last medical procedure of your truncated existence”…

• A landmark legal ruling found that the PCR-based Covid tests were not suited for detecting a virus.^{ref 17} Kary Mullis told us this years ago. Anyone paying attention knew this.
• A court ruled that four Germans were illegally quarantined in Portugal after one tested positive. Evidence was cited that the 35-cycle PCR protocol gave a 97% probability of a false positive. I learned from my Zoom group that flushing your nose with dilute hydrogen peroxide to drop the viral load will not only beat the test—my son used that trick to return from Costa Rica—but it is curative for respiratory viruses that camp out in your snot.^{ref 18}

• A Federal Court ruled that AstraZeneca was not immune from liability in a case involving an injury during the clinical trial. It was deemed a breach of contract.^{ref 19}
• A New York judge forced the NYC Department of Education to reinstate with back pay 10 plaintiffs who completed the administrative steps to request a vaccine exemption.^{ref 20}
• Three teachers in Rhode Island inked a deal to get their jobs back and grant them back pay after they were fired for refusing the jab.^{ref 21}
• Almost two dozen Chicago unions representing city workers fired for not jabbing filed suits for unfair labor practices. Their personnel records were expunged, and they received back pay plus 7% interest.^{ref 22}
• Japan has banned the mRNA vaccines.^{ref 23}

I have generated a Hierarchy of Guilt for this disturbing chapter of history. The hierarchy has fuzzy boundaries but captures my angst.

1. Joe Sixpack is without guilt. One can imagine heated debates at the dinner table over whether to vaccinate tearing at the social fabric. Imagine the shame in the event of a vaccine injury. Imagine if you injured your child. It is not your fault.
2. Those who took the jab to keep their jobs knowing it could be a problem, which includes me, maybe did not take the highest possible road, but it was a rational risk-reward calculation that never should have been mandated.
3. Healthcare professionals giving the jab despite lingering concerns likely are feeling some guilt. I cannot in good conscience, however, blame them for the same reason I took the jab. They were mandated to participate. Hesitation got them fired. Is it fair to ask them to give up their careers on a hunch?
4. The Zealots—the cultish pro-vaxxers—who applied peer pressure and scorn to those around them annoyed the shit out of me. Demanding others vaccinate to protect you when you have been vaccinated was not just scientifically illiterate; it was delusional. The at-times insufferable sanctimony was inexcusable, destroying friendships and splitting up families. They are Hofferian True Believers. Go back to throwing tomato soup on paintings.

5. The rank-and-file scientists who work in bioweapons labs are lower on my hierarchy than you might expect. If you accept the premise that studying biowarfare is a legitimate pursuit—a necessary evil—that’s what you get.
6. The several dozen scientists studying biowarfare who knowingly lied about the origin of the vaccine in an open letter to the Lancet were profoundly destructive. While the world struggled to understand what was happening, they concealed critical information. Minimally, they should be stripped of all research funds for life. People probably died because they were kowtowing to Tony Fauci.
7. Heads of organizations of pediatric and obstetric societies publicly signed off months before the first “Covid Baby” would be born. They knew they were lying, and their reach was huge. They probably thought those were noble lies. No: they were just lies, and babies died both in and out of the womb. They should carry guilt to their graves.
8. Those who knowingly, shut down all scientific debate to keep the narrative going are pathological liars. Period.
9. Those who pushed the vaccines from the highest positions of authority knowing they were lying their asses off—Justina Ardhern, Rochelle Wallensky, Lena Wen, Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Peter Hotez, Paul Offitt, and a whole pile of others—have committed crimes against humanity. The punishment should be proportional.
10. Those who knowingly squashed the use of Ivermectin and HCQ to promote the vaccines are mass murderers. This includes those promoting the mRNA Covid vaccines to children to this day.

Somewhere going down this list I pass the point of forgiveness. The zealots keep popping up and demanding we give up our civil liberties because of their angst over social causes. Further down the list I would like to place the players in front of grand juries provided that, within a reasonable interpretation of our juris prudence, they committed serious crimes. Toward the bottom of the list I would send them to an international tribunal to prosecute them for Crimes Against Humanity. Midazolam would be an ironic demise because of its dual use on death row and to euthanize Covid patients who were “unruly”.^{ref 24} Maybe the accused committed no crimes, but we should find out. Rumors of blanket pardons by Biden for Fauci suggest that somebody thinks he and his friends are guilty.

Unfortunately, we are not in the clear. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced nine new appointees, all of which have financial conflicts owing to ties with vaccine makers.^{ref 25} The good news is that there are new sheriffs heading for town. RFK could become head of Health and Human Services, Jay Bhattacharya in charge of NIH, Marty Makary as head of the FDA, and Elon Musk and Vivek the cost-cutting Czars would be transformational. Those nine new Biden appointees should pack their bags and sign up on LinkedIn, because their positions could be euthanized. Persistent health problems that appear to be vaccine-related are being reported now.^{ref 26,27} Here’s a website with more than 3,500 studies about the adverse effects of Covid vaccines.^{ref 28} A typical paper absurdly begins with the requisite bowing to the Gods of Pharma, which is then followed with a truth bomb:

The Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine is extensively used worldwide, and its safety has been proven. Herein, we report a case of an acute necrotic disorder in the small intestine post-COVID-19 vaccination. The patient developed severe abdominal pain the day after the first vaccination.^{ref 29}

~ excerpt from a scientific paper trying to tell the truth and get published

We are still administering the vaccine liberally, including to infants as young as 6 months despite the profound evidence it is lethal. You are mass murderers. (I know I said that already.) But there is more. Pharma continues to push drugs of little or no efficacy^{ref 30,31,32,33} and potentially much higher risks since so much low lying fruit was already picked over the last century. Ironically, the accepted anti-Covid drug paxlovid is looking like one of these nearly worthless drugs.^{ref 34,35,36,37} It is also time to revisit the autism story,^{ref 38,39,40} which, I hasten to add, seems likely given the current political climate. Here is a prominent vaccinologist under oath being deposed by Aaron Siri: does she leave you confident that the MMR vaccine was fully tested?^{ref 41}

We are headed for serious trouble if we don’t get in front of the bioethical questions. Scientists are rumored to be developing methods to spread vaccines through agricultural products.^{ref 42} Farmers are reporting mass livestock die-offs from mandated vaccinations. Self-disseminating vaccines are being developed, which means that some nutcase anywhere in the world could infect the global population with whatever toxic stews they manage to formulate.^{ref 43} This month, Yale researchers announced successful vaccination of mice using an aerosol, the kind you could deliver from a plane. They are preparing for human trials.^{ref 43}

I am at great risk of being Jeremy Rifkin 2.0, but until pharma and the medical community clean up the messes left in the field by stepping out of the shadows to vigorously debate, I will not take another vaccine. Their integrity is shot. The response to Covid was a singularity in the loss of public belief in experts and the rise of populism. Do I sound angry?

College

High-level academia has been around for 800 years, and hopefully it will be around for another 800 years because it is, contrary to growing beliefs, where the first seeds of innovative ideas are planted. But there is trouble requiring remediation.

The crisis that besets our civilization is fundamentally psychological. Specifically, we are shot through with ingratitude for the miracle. Our schools and universities, to the extent that they teach the western tradition at all, do so from the perspective of resentful hostility towards our accomplishments.

~ Jonah Goldberg

Damaged Goods. My all-time favorite TED talk is by Sir Ken Robinson about the creativity of children. It has great wisdom about the profound creativity of children, what we do to stifle it, and what we can do to nurture it, all slathered with the funniest jokes.^{ref 1} If you don’t think there is talent out there, watch (with awe) 15-year old Zev Weinstein being interviewed by Lex Fridman about Zev’s opinion of some of the greatest scholars of the millennia.^{ref 2} If you wonder where he got his brains from, you might ask his father, Eric, or his Uncle Bret.^{ref 3}

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

~ Thomas Sowell

Many blame Team Mensa holding faculty positions for destroying the impressionable minds of the students with neo-Marxist tripe. Author Camille Paglia lamented to Charlie Rose in 1995 about the destruction of American Universities.^{ref 4} Indeed, there are plenty of neo-Marxists and more generic liberals on any major campus, with a left-right ratio estimated to be as high as 50:1 in some disciplines.

The problems actually begin, however, with the students. If a kid shows up on campus with a strong grounding in logical thought and a strong family influence—if that kid sat at the dinner table with my dad night after night—no pinko commie dog on the Arts Quad (term of endearment) is going to shove that kid into the abyss of authoritarian thinking. However, many freshman arrive to campuses with the dents and scratches of having been indoctrinated from daycare with ideas that sound great but are shaped over the dozen years into extreme Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) narratives, cult-level beliefs in climate change, and a penchant for turning to authorities—the State—as the arbiter of fact versus mis-, mal-, and disinformation. High school teacher Warren Smith was confronted by a student suggesting J. K. Rowling was trans-phobic and masterfully dismantled the argument like a boss. More than 40 million views later,^{ref 5} Warren got fired.^{ref 6}

The only institution that can do more economic damage is the Luftwaffe.

~ Tim Price

There is a widely held belief among faculty as described in the section “My Year” that something had changed by 2014: they have been damaged by iPhones and social media.^{ref 7} Their peripheral vision is measurably reduced. Psych tests measure precipitous declines in attention spans. FMRI brain scans reveal measurable losses of connectivity and deficiencies of neurotransmitters in parts of the brain used for active thinking.^{ref 8}

Causality aside, not a single student in 53 Illinois schools can do math at grade level despite ginormous per-student spending.^{ref 9} Mohamed Elmasry, author of iMind Artificial and Real Intelligence, says that ‘tweens go straight to their smartphones when asked “What’s one-third of nine?”^{ref 10} Neuropsychologists have known for decades that the brain is on a use-it-or-lose-it operating system. Our students wonder why learning subject matter is necessary if they know they can look it up. The short answer: to think creatively and problem solve you need to roll ideas around in your skull.

A number of elite schools that had previously dropped the SATs are in the process of bringing them back.^{ref 11} I support that reversion; sometimes standardized tests reveal brilliance that does not show up in their transcript. There is, however, a valid argument that the utility of the SATs is limited: the costly Kaplan courses allowed those students with financial resources (rich parents) to game them. You are allowed to take them three times and use your best score. Why? Because the company putting out the test triples their profits that way. In the olden days, we didn’t prepare for them. We just showed up to the gym on a Saturday and took the damned things, sometimes hungover or stoned. (Funny anecdote: As a high school junior I took a senior’s ACTs to get him a Texas football scholarship. He scored very well—99% in science—and I made $15!)

Although this data is anecdotal, arriving in grad school with a fellowship in tow may be a contra-indicator of success. Why? The fellowships often demand that you describe how you donated an organ to a Guatemalan orphan after having saved at least one endangered species of color. In short, the evaluation criteria no longer select for focus and hard work. The Med schools appear to be suffering similar fates. Aspiring doctors may have attention deficits and gotten extra time on exams that is not annotated on their transcript. Tell me how that works out for ya when they request extra time for your surgery.

Freedom of Speech. Universities are hubs of both good and bad ideas. Campuses are littered with youngsters off their parental leashes for the first time running around trying on new personas. The number of rainbow, Ukrainian, and Palestinian flags per square meter may seem odd to alums, but they are tame when compared with 1960s campus blanketed with totally baked hippies squealing about the atrocities of the world.

Liberal and democratic institutions have become captives of their youngest, least-experienced people.

~ Walter Kirn, author and journalist

Back to the plot. Cornell gets beaten up on free speech issues, and I’m not sure why. The now-former president (Pollock) organized a symposium on Free Speech in the Classroom. As one of the only non-humanists in the room, what I learned was eye opening. I step on a few egg shells in class training chemists while spewing off-topic life maxims uncontrollably. Meanwhile, the humanists are teaching activists and are scared shitless that they will step on a bouncing betty. You could be a one-legged, multi-gendered Aztec with more pronouns than the Oxford Dictionary, and you are still not safe teaching their students. The lunatics are running the asylum. The faculty generally supports free speech, although I am sure there is a Trump-exclusion clause in the bylaws somewhere.

I have a self-imposed personal gag order on the Israel-Palestine conflict for two reasons: (1) I have no clue what the backstory really is (although I know there is some fibbing going on from both sides), and (2) I don’t have a death wish. That conflict on the other side of the World has cost universities fortunes as the free-speech and academic-freedom mandates crash onto the shoals of fabulously wealthy alums threatening to pull their support. Republican US Senators are proposing to put university protestors on no-fly lists.^{ref 12} That is some seriously crazy thinking.

Israel Withdraws From Gaza After Learning Of Protest By 19-Year-Old Fine Arts Major Roxy Barnett.

~ The Babylon Bee

If you’ve been supporting your alma mater assuming there are no bed wetters on the faculty and the students have fully formed frontal cortexes, you need a CT scan. Parents hand us their 18-year-old kids and pay us big bucks to escort them to adulthood with all their appendages. Society hands us young, over-educated faculty that are off the far-end of every spectrum, and expects the university to prevent them from doing tangible harm in the real world. The challenges often seem insurmountable.

Graduate Student Unionization. I must return to the issue of grad student unionization because of the practical consequences. There were so many reasons why graduate students are not the proper group for unionization. Well, the unions looking for $1+ million revenue stream from dues came back to Cornell for the third time, and the union movement won in a 1,873 to 80 trouncing.^{ref 13} My two hard-fought victories of yore were for naught. Now we will find out what happens when a union rep inserts themselves between a graduate student and their research advisor.

Schools with existing unions foreshadow problems that Cornell may soon confront. Well-timed strikes—late August and early January, for example—are common and make it impossible to staff a laboratory course without teaching assistants. Prior to signing Cornell’s first union-negotiated graduate student contract, every graduate student in chemistry gets free tuition and a $45,000-per-year stipend, which is close to the median salary of an adult in the Town of Ithaca. Here is where it gets confounding. Graduate students are expected to make progress toward their degree: it is an academic, not a labor, issue. That means if they are on strike, they continue working toward their degree but without pay. That is not a typo: by striking they forfeit only their pay. (If only the NTEU, the union that includes IRS workers, would go on strike.)

Elevated salaries are a certainty or the union achieved nothing. I also suspect that, over time, the push toward a 40-hour work week may be impossible to resist. (I got my two masters degrees and a PhD in two and a half years—yes, I just bragged—and I don’t recall any 40-hour work weeks.) How about weekends: will they soon be anachronistic? Cell cultures in bio-labs die if unattended over the weekends. Not unlike the unanticipated consequences of minimum wage laws, if graduate students become less productive and more expensive, the market will respond:

Graduate students are primarily students and trainees, not ordinary workers. Academia is a calling. I suspect unionization will tip the balance so faculty prefer, at the margin, to hire post-docs to do research in their labs rather than students.

~ Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis), Yale University

Soaring Costs of Education. As faith in credentialed experts gets pummeled, the value of the credentials drops. Surveys show that high school kids now view college educations as less important.^{ref 14} Declines in enrollments nationally from 18 million to 15 million students in just a few years are attributed to the erosion in trust and heightened awareness of the student debt trap.^{ref 15} The era in which Henry Blodget can leverage his Princeton English major into fabulous wealth on Wall Street has passed.

Just what I need, a college boy. What’s your degree in? Sociology. You’ll go far with that.

~ Dirty Harry

Sociology–A Case Study. The humanities are at great risk. They are vestiges from an era when wealthy kids filled the classrooms unconcerned about the return on their much-lower investment. Which of the following majors are worth $300,000?

I stumbled across a goldmine of insights about sociology. I am a believer that you get back what you put into your studies, and that is true even in subjects that allow you to put in very little and still get a degree. However, I am now about to become persona non grata in our sociology department by having some fun at their expense. This smattering of emblematic quotes from a much larger set is precious:^{ref 16,17}

Sociology has self-destructed; and yet, something like sociology will have to be rebuilt again, by another name, to achieve the goal of having a true science of human societies…. Justice Warriors have won the battle, but with many casualties. Activism is driven more by ideology than science.

~ Jonathan Turner, Professor of Sociology

If you want to call yourself “Doctor” and have the IQ of a sponge, get a PhD in sociology.

~ a student (referring to Dr. Jill Biden)

This sorry state of theoretical affairs in sociology is probably the clearest evidence of the discipline’s intellectual bankruptcy. But intellectual bankruptcy never spelled the end of an academic discipline…. Those within it are professionally deformed not to recognize it, and those outside of it could care less.

~ Pierre van den Berghe, Professor of Sociology

The hidden characteristics of sociologists include their lack of interest in other disciplines and totalitarian assertions.

~ Daniel Burnier, Professor of Sociology

Nowadays, sociology is just a political tool of the Left. They seem to do the opposite of most sciences. They have a conclusion (i.e. America is systemically racist), and then find evidence that they think backs it up. But a lot of times they, ironically, just don’t take into account any other information. They just come to conclusions to make crazy people seem normal.

~ a student

Sociology has largely become a repository of discontent, a gathering of individuals who have special agendas, from gay and lesbian rights to liberation theology….

~ Irving Louis Horowitz, Professor of Sociology

Harvard. Columbia and Harvard were competing to see which could piss off the richest alums. Harvard’s donations dropped 14% year over year^{ref 18} and seems to have special problems that are either systemic or the result of its elite name drawing fire. They managed to dethrone last year’s reigning College of Disaster, Stanford.

Nobody cares about your race. This isn’t Harvard.

~ Konstantine Kisin

Harvard’s former president, Claudine Gay stepped down after looking like an asshole in Congress last year, which is hard to do by Congressional standards. It was then revealed she plagiarized pretty much every black scholar in academia. Well this year Claudine was graced with a “Leadership and Courage” award.^{ref 19} That, plus her $900,000 annual salary as a generic professor, ought to pay the bills.^{ref 20} Unfortunately, she had to resign, but not before blaming the whole bruhaha on racism.^{ref 21}

We should note that Claudine Gay has not been accused of stealing anyone’s ideas in any of her writings. She has been accused of sort of more like copying other people’s writings without attribution. So, it’s been more sloppy attribution than stealing anyone’s ideas.^{ref 22}

~ Matt Egan on CNN

“More like copying other people’s writings?” Matt must be a Harvard grad. Taking a cue from Claudine, Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer was hit with dozens of plagiarism charges, which included pinching work from her husband.^{ref 23} According to Chris Rufo, yet another Harvard DEI administrator—a third one—plagiarized more than 40 passages in her PhD thesis.^{ref 24}

Harvard’s medical students put out a spoof video displaying an unfathomable lack of self awareness.^{ref 25} Harvard’s 2023–24 course offerings include such timely topics as “trans monks,” “cross-dressing,” “genderless angels,” and “intersectionality in the Byzantine Empire.”^{ref 26} The Art and Film group is sponsoring a documentary entitled, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.”^{ref 27,28} It is marketed as “timely exploration of the energy of young bodies when they are set for political action.” The professor won a prestigious award sponsored by NATO. (That NATO part is a lie, but I had you going there for a second, didn’t I?)

Harvard “Considers” $1.65 Billon Debt Sale After Gay Resignation Fallout^{ref 29}

~ Zerohedge Headline

Bill Ackman has been howling about Harvard as have other billionaires. Jeff “The New Bond King” Gundlach thinks Harvard is “illiquid”, and Harvard may not be alone.^{ref 30} Illiquid does not mean broke, only that 100,000 acres of quality timber in Ukraine does not help make payroll. Early in the 2008–09 crisis I had the assistant provost of Harvard in my office fessing up that they were illiquid, which was born out by the facts not long after that.

Great stuff. Thank the lord we’re not university presidents.

~ Jeff Sachs email

Nuggets. And now for some truly random shit that will make you wonder what the hell is going on inside academia.

• The Columbia University President noted, “This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in our community.”^{ref 31} Columbia donations dropped nearly 29% in the aftermath of their pro-Palestine protests.^{ref 32}
• Following Harvard’s lead, Columbia University Medical Center’s chief DEI officer was charged with massive plagiarism, including stealing from Wikipedia and 27 other writers. I am beginning to wonder where in this universe was the Big Bang in which somebody actually wrote an original DEI-focused thesis from which all other theses were stolen.^{ref 33}

This is going to be a bloodbath in academia, and I suspect at some point they will claim they care more about “diversity” than honesty.^{ref 34}

~ Mark Hemingway (@Heminator), Senior Writer at RealClearInvestigations.

• A professor at the University of Kansas said that non-supporters of Kamala Harris should be “lined up and shot.”^{ref 35} Ya shoulda just called ‘em “punk-ass bitches”.
• Cornell’s Russell Rickford was not barred from teaching for saying he was “exhilarated” by the Hamas attack. Cornell’s President Martha Pollock did, however, denounce Rickman because his views do not reflect “Cornell’s values.” She added she has only denounced two faculty for such outbursts. Who the hell was the first to be denounced? Me.^{ref 36} I supported the police in a Tweet, and I was correct.^{ref 37} Here is my gripe: I do not believe Cornell has “values” per se. The president can voice her values backed by the gravitas of her position, but she can’t speak for others. Pollock resigned after 8 years at Cornell,^{ref 38} and I know the backstory. ‘Nuff said.

• Rice University is offering a course in “Afrochemistry.”^{ref 39} The catch phrase is clever: The Study of Black-Life Matter.
• Law Professor Ann Wax was suspended from the University of Pennsylvania for a year at half salary for uttering “inequitably targeted disrespect”, which has been sent through the Harris Word Salad AI Translator with little success.^{ref 40} Best I can tell, Amy was pretty unfiltered.^{ref 42} The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) jumped to her defense;^{ref 43} I provided moral support but not promptly.

…It’s dangerous out there.

~ Amy Wax email

• At the Thomas Jefferson College graduation, the woman calling out the names mispronouced every one incomprehensibly.^{ref 44} The president had to apologize.
• The University of Mississippi NAACP chapter wants three students expelled from the university for “racist remarks” that were unsupported by evidence.^{ref 45}

The administration is not monitoring our health. They are not keeping track of our vitals. They are not at all taking care of us. We will continue to starve until they meet our demands.^{ref 46}

~ A Princeton hunger striker

Unfortunately, Snowflake is not morbidly obese, which totally undermines the obvious snarky comment. Hopefully, Princeton will introduce a mandatory psych exam.

Bankruptcies. The Birmingham-Southern College baseball team advanced to the DIII College World Series, playing their first game of the series on the same day the school ceased to exist.^{ref 50} The good news is that those school athletic records are secure. The entire business model of academia is looking like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.^{ref 47} You’ve got to wonder where all this leads us. A Cornell economist who is an expert in university finance told me that “the Golden Era of Academics is over.” I know many scientists discouraged by the course academia has charted. You cannot find old fogies who are envious of the young punks. There are almost 6,000 institutions of higher education of which almost 4,000 grant degrees. (I got that from AI, which easily clears Harvard’s ethical bar.) There are 56 that have closed since 2020.^{ref 48} The formerly all-girls school, Wells College, is right up the Lake from Cornell and is the latest victim.^{ref 49} (When I was a freshman we called it the Home of the Handjob, but I should probably not say that.) Wells was located in scenic Aurora, NY, but it is unclear what you do with that facility. It costs a small fortune to keep unoccupied buildings from falling into their foundations, and Wells obviously does not have a small fortune.

Does college pay? They do if you are a good open-field runner.

~ Will Rogers

You could cut the number of colleges in half and lose little, possibly even gain as a society. The elite universities will survive, and the community colleges also should survive. Trade schools would proliferate and flourish. The expensive schools in the middle, however, could be toast. It will get gruesome if Elon Musk gets the Department of Education in his sights. It’ll be a bloodbath, which I guess you are not supposed to say…but Trump won so….I said it.

Climate Change

…I have to give a special shout out to the Climate Change section. We are linking to it twice in our Top Stories of the Year.

~ Catherine Austin Fitts, Founder and CEO of Solari, email

In what could have been a very sleepy year for climate change, my activity levels were a little elevated. A ranting podcast with Tom Nelson^{ref 1,2} led to a Nelson-Farris podcast.^{ref 3} Both preceded the release of Tom’s masterful creation of the documentary, “Climate—The Movie” with Martin Durkin.^{ref 4} A local Ithaca resident and retired tech CEO, Thomas Kurz, reached out to me stunned that there was a climate denier on the Cornell faculty. That lunch led to a detailed analysis of the underlying science in a podcast of Kurz and Nelson.^{ref 5} Kurz’s analysis is now headed for book form to be released in 2025 with the tentative title, “Why There is No Climate Crisis?—Examining Climate Change Using the Scientific Method.”

In November, Liam Cosgrove of The Grayzone organized a ZeroHedge debate between Steve Keen and me on the climate change narrative moderated by Bill Fleckenstein.^{ref 6,7} I’m biased, of course, but the comments section echoed my opinion that I did not win the debate; Steve lost.

After spewing my concerns about climate change in 2019,^{ref 8} addenda in subsequent years are basically epilogues to create a living document in which the cumulative narrative is not reiterated at least in detail. Climate change is a profound issue given estimates to address it approach $200 trillion dollars (excluding utterly ridiculous estimates spewing from Al Gore’s and John Kerry’s mouths.)

I have no delusions of converting True Believers in this year’s epilogue. It adds a few anecdotes and addenda for my own edification and entertainment. I can no longer even take the debate seriously. In no particular order but still for your viewing pleasure…

• A 1992 video of Greta Thunberg’s predecessor speaking to the UN show the same language and style of St. Greta.^{ref 9}
• Leonard Nimoy narrated a 1977 documentary on the coming ice age. This happened to coincide with the global cooling streak in the 1970s.^{ref 10}
• Biden intended to declare a “climate emergency” that would have granted him “Covid-like powers” to impose rules on American behavior.^{ref 11} With the help of Mother Nature and Father Time, that risk got nipped in the bud.
• National Geographic has jumped the shark by noting that the plants will “suck the land dry”…

• More than 99.9% of studies agree: Humans caused climate change.^{ref 12} This came out of Cornell. The public is not gullible. The writeup notes that “the Pew Research Center found that only 27% of U.S. adults believe that “almost all” scientists agreed that climate change is due to human activity.” The authors finish, noting “This pretty much should be the last word.”
• And from the lesbian community…

• Michael “Climategate” Mann sued Mark Steyn for calling bullshit on Mann’s discredited “hockey stick”. Mann showed up with no witnesses, the Steyn lawyers destroyed the accusation, yet the jury levied a $1 million fine on Steyn because “we are so fucking brainwashed that Steyn deserves to pay” (paraphrased, of course.)^{ref 13}

• A montage shows Al Gore’s trope about the accumulated heat would be the equivalent of “dropping 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hrs”… “500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs every 24 hrs”…“600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs every 24 hrs”…“750,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs every 24 hrs”.^{ref 14} They gave this clown the Nobel Prize, and he didn’t even make it to “one gazillion Hiroshima-class atomic bombs every 24 hrs”.

That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, the rain bombs, sucking the moisture out of the land, creating the droughts, melting the ice, raising the sea level, and causing these waves of climate refugees.

~ Al Gore, Hyperbole Hall of Famer

• Congressman Scott Perry reams out John Kerry for proposing a $1.6 quadrillion program to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere and then schooled Kerry with a plot showing temperature dropping.^{ref 15} When Kerry rhetorically asks why so many world leaders sign off on the problem, Scott responded, “Because they are grifting, like you are sir.”

The climate crisis is killing people. It is knowingly, wittingly allowing people to die and infecting them with disease and providing them with air that kills people because we’re not willing to take the steps necessary to do what we know we need to do…Every year now millions of people around this planet are dying because fossil fuel and methane emissions called greenhouse gas pollution. Not just gas, pollution…now those methane emissions, CO₂ emissions and nitrous oxide and other emissions are escaping into the atmosphere, being fed by the way which we continue to choose to fuel our vehicles, propel our vehicles, heat our homes, light our factories.^{ref 16}

~ John Kerry, former Climate Czar and forever Deep-State nitwit

• Epoch Times reporter, Alex Newman, describes how distruptive climate change papers are breaking through the Wall of Silence put up by the Climate Change Community.^{ref 17}
• The tripling of the polar bear population that takes some of the punch out of the starving polar bear meme is attributed to a hunting moratorium on polar bears in the 1970s.^{ref 18}

• Here is a cool timelapse photographic montage showing the sea level not budging in 44 years.^{ref 19}
• A consortium of European scientists have concluded that the non-linear response of the so-called greenhouse gas effect cannot possibly elicit and increase the temperature of the Earth because the influence of CO₂, while relatively low compared with previous eras in Earth’s history, is already at saturation.^{ref 20,21} CO₂ levels above 400 ppm have no additional effect.

Snake Steak Could Be a Climate-Friendly Source of Protein.^{ref 22}

~ Scientific American headline. (They have become a political rag not worthy of wrapping fish.)

• Tony Heller shows us how they have manipulated the data from 1999 to 2019 to make the hot 1930’s decade to not look so hot.^{ref 23} Tony, wryly notes that “90+% of ‘climate science’ papers are of no scientific value.” It is my experience trying to sort through this narrative that the field has no shortage of charlatans.
• Scientists are mystified that after a record warmth there might be global cooling.^{ref 24} Kanneman covered the principle of “regression to the mean” in Thinking Fast and Slow.

• The President of Guyana got attacked by a BBC reporter for the influence Guyana’s fossil fuels are having on global warming. The President’s response, loosely translated by the President to English, was “Fuck off, you twit.”^{ref 25}
• Bill Gates blames cow farts (methane) for global warming.^{ref 26} He would never lie.

• In the spirit of Mithras, who sacrificed sacred bovines to the sun god 1,800 years ago,^{ref 27} Ireland’s Department of Agriculture proposed killing 200,000 cows to fight climate change. Proposals to do the same with the sheep met stiff opposition from lonely older shepherds.
• UCLA geniuses have concluded that same-sex couples are at greater “risk of exposure to the adverse effects of climate change” than straight couples because they live on the coasts and cities and are more likely “to live in areas with poor infrastructure, worse-built environments.”^{ref 28} (Read: San Francisco.)

Climate change is having a disproportionate effect on black communities.^{ref 29}

~ Admiral Rachel Levine, noting that dark complexions are not adaptive to hot climates?

• Global warming is predicted to slow the earth’s rotation. We may have to introduce a negative “leap second”, which apparently is horrific compared to the positive “leap seconds” added every several years.^{ref 30}

• Nearly 1,000 pages of rules by the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) describe how companies must report consequences of climate change.^{ref 31} Legal challenges came in hot and heavy.^{ref 32} Good news: the overturning of the Chevron Deference case this year by the Supreme Court might make the vast majority of rules like this unconstitutional.^{ref 33} Regardless, they are absurd.
• And in breaking news from Wuhan, Daszak and coworkers have made a critical connection between climate change and the biosphere…

• Former head of the CIA and life-time commie dog, John Brennan, supports chemtrails to control global warming, which shifts the focus away from his treasonous actions.^{ref 34}
• Speaking of the CIA…

• Almost 90% of Ivy League graduates said they would favor the strict rationing of gasoline, meat, and electricity to control climate change.^{ref 35} They also want to ban gas stoves, gasaoline-powered vehicles, air conditioners, non-essential air travel, and vacations, but only for graduates of “safety schools”. A whopping 84 percent of these budding Ivy League scholars approved of the job Joe Biden is doing as president.

• The Atlantic is cooling, leaving scientists baffled that it doesn’t just heat to a boil like Al Gore promised. “We’ve gone through the list of possible mechanisms, and nothing checks the box so far.”^{ref 36}

Doesn’t mean that the trends aren’t there. But they’ve just not emerged from the data.

~ Steve Koonin, Caltech physicist, feebly trying to humor the climate cult

• Greenland has been a ‘canary in the coal mine for climate change’. Recall where all those ice cores come from. The ice mass shows the canary is alive and well.^{ref 37}
• An impressive report by David Archibald traces all climate change to solar cycles.^{ref 38} The absence of solar physicists on the IPCC board and my inability to locate any who subscribe to the narrative also support this case.
• As a control experiment, I asked Grok to name “twenty prominent scientists who deny the climate change is a crisis and got twenty recognizable names, I then asked the following question using nearly identical wording:

Me to Grok: Provide names of solar physicists who believe climate change is a serious problem.

Key Grok response: “Direct Statements: There are no direct names or quotes from solar physicists explicitly stating climate change is a serious problem from your provided data.”

• Scientists studied the “heat island effect”, which is when buildings and structures retain the heat collected during the day. Decades ago thermometers were placed in the sticks but near enough to the cities to provide easy access. Those thermometers are now in the burbs or the city proper. Because of the retention of heat, they may have overestimated the temperature rises from 1880–2020 by >40%: “The corrections reduce the calculated warming of the land surface temperatures since 1880 from 1.43 °C to 0.83 °C”, which confirms similar conclusions by NASA scientists.^{ref 39,40} Kary Mullis knew this decades ago.^{ref 41} The technical term for that is “a big fuckup.” NOAA’s data suggest that the rising average temperatures stem from rising minimum temperatures at night owing to the heat island effect with little change in maximum temperatures recorded at midday.^{ref 42}
• In the 18^th century, California’s Tulare Lake was the largest lake west of the Mississippi.^{ref 43,44} It is now bone dry, occasionally puddling up during a wet spell. Land management, not climate change, boned it. It also shows California can screw up anything.

Support For Climate Change Skyrockets After Computer Models Show It Will Flood California.^{ref 45}

~ Babylon Bee Headline

• Two loons were sentenced to two years in prison for throwing soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting.^{ref 46} The judge noted, “The pair of you came within the thickness of a pane of glass of irreparably damaging or even destroying this priceless treasure, and that must be reflected in the sentences I pass.” To their credit, they might have known there was no risk of damaging the paintings. It would have been ironic if they had, instead, targeted Andy Worhol’s Campbells Soup masterpiece.

• NatWest Bank of London monitors customers’ spending and alerts them when they buy too much meat and dairy products.^{ref 47} A run on NatWest bank cannot come soon enough for me.
• Three booming years across the entire expanse of Australian Great Barrier Reef have been mucking up doomer warnings of existential risk.^{ref 48}

• Melissa Fleming, UN Undersecretary for Global Communications, told the “elites” at the WEF that the UN partnered with Google to influence climate change search results.^{ref 49} I kid you not: they call themselves “elites.” These ‘elites’ think nobody else is paying attention, or they don’t care.
• Mark Zuckerberg pontificated about “stopping climate change before we destroy the planet” from the deck of his 387-foot mega-yacht.^{ref 50}

• Nikolov and Karl Zeller concluded from satellite data that the Earth absorbs more sunlight with reduced global cloud cover.^{ref 51} “The warming of the last 24 years was entirely caused by the observed decrease of Earth’s albedo and not by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations as claimed by the IPCC.”
• The new CEO of Starbucks will commute from Southern California to Seattle by private jet three times each week.^{ref 52} His picture shows a book on his bookshelf, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”.

One hopes that cooler heads will eventually prevail. The Covid story has taught us that credentialed experts can be collectively full of crap. If the authorities were really sweating the risk of climate change, they wouldn’t have made John Kerry our Climate Czar—he is an idiot—and then try to replace him with Pizza-loving John “All the Toppings” Podesta.^{ref 53} The populace has had it up to their hot, sweaty asses with being told about bullshit threats that only seem to threaten the masses. I expect that the new-and-improved President Donald Trump and his Keeper of the Fiscal Machete, Elon Musk, might trim some fat off the climate grift. Would Elon do this despite being ass-deep in the electric car market? I think he just might be that nuts. Hopefully legitimate climate scientists will not be hurt by policy changes leading to a major shakeout, but many failed to speak up and shovel out the Augean stables of climate science when they had the chance. Now you babies may get thrown out with the bathwater.

World War II and FDR: A Revisionist History

America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these, America will collapse from within.

~ Joseph Stalin

My serious interest in the War in Ukraine led me to reexamine World War II (WWII) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). The cornerstone of this personal edifice under construction was my profound training en route to B’s in social studies and subconscious osmosis of shards of info over the intervening half century.

My decidedly Yankee Narrative was simple: Germany was still pissed off about its post-WWI hobbling by the other Western powers when psychopath Adolf Hitler grabbed control. Soon Germany was toppling countries across Europe, and Hitler was slaughtering Jews by the millions. Of course, we did everything we could for our BFF, Great Britain, by creating the lend-lease program while constrained by our isolationist commitment to staying in our hemisphere. Alas, an unprovoked and unanticipated attack on our naval fleet at Pearl Harbor—”a day that will live in infamy”—caused us to reverse our isolationism and carry the American Standard into battle. It was the high-water mark of American exceptionalism, a term ironically coined by Joseph Stalin. We rid the world of tyranny!

The problem with American history is that it changes so often.

~ Byron King, Editor, Whiskey and Gunpowder at Agora Financial

As a fan of conspiracy theories and alternative plotlines, I had detected a few foul odors from this narrative over the years. US industrialists like Armand Hammer were rumored to have helped the Nazis.^{ref 1,2} The cult favorite, The Creature from Jekyll Island, asserted that the multinational banks funded both sides of every war. The official Pearl Harbor story began faltering when it became clear that Pearl Harbor was both “provoked” by our blockade of Japan and was “anticipated” from unusual levels of radio chatter within the Japanese fleet. The chatter from the Japanese airwaves required some doublespeak to explain how we failed to put people in guard towers at Pearl Harbor; even F-Troop had guards watching the Hekawi Indians.

World War III is when two historians disagree on how World War II started.

~ Mark LaMoure

The warm, fuzzy feelings about the lend-lease program died years ago while copyediting and, thus, carefully reading Benn Steil’s The Battle of Bretton Woods.^{ref 3} Benn described how we jammed the terms of the program so far up the Brits’ asses that the Brits were destined to exit WWII as a fully neutered second-rate power. Benn also pointed out that the enigmatic Harry Dexter White, the US delegate at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference charged to do battle with John Maynard Keynes over the post-war currency regime, was a Soviet spy. That seemed odd.

The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened.

~ Joseph Stalin

I picked up the trail’s scent again with Michael Malice’s The White Pill,^{ref 4} which described in highly readable prose unfettered by excessive details describing the brutality of Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union. I knew that the Soviets killed tens of millions of their citizens, but how this happened had not crossed my mind. It was, as Stalin said, a statistic. Did they just shoot them? Malice’s primer describes how these ruthless authoritarians got a society to consume itself while the US media, including some legendary reporters like Walter Duranty, whitewashed the Soviet atrocities with their accounts describing the pre-War Soviet Union as largely sunshine and Skittles rainbows. Why would the media do this? Imagine the embarrassment of the US propagandists in 1953 when Stalin’s lovable replacement, Nikita Khrushchev, fessed up to atrocities that were gruesome even by Soviet standards and urged his compatriots to never let that happen again.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

~ Joseph Stalin

Enter Diana West’s American Betrayal^{ref 5} recommended by my brother, which rewrites the WWII narrative by delineating how Stalin shaped the US response to the war. (Wikipedia prompts us to not confuse Diana West, a prominent journalist frequenting mainstream media and a regular on Lou Dobb’s show, with Diana West the “lactation consultant.”) Diana estimates there were at least 500 Soviet operatives embedded within our government—the building blocks of Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare. About 100 pages in I called my bro and interrogated him about why Diana’s story isn’t just a McCarthy-esque commie-behind-every-curtain hallucination. I finished the book and Diana convinced me that the WWII narrative, as told, is bullshit. She had mentioned in passing the Pentagon’s #1 Islam expert—the GOAT—named Stephen Coughlin.^{ref 6} I happen to know Stephen, and, with lingering concerns, I reached out. He confirmed that American Betrayal and Diana were profoundly credible. He also said she was viciously attacked by the neocons who did not appreciate her alternative narrative.

Harry Hopkins was one of the most important Soviet wartime agents in the United States.^{ref 7}

~ Iskhak Akhmerov, a Soviet intelligence officer

Trying not to steal Diana’s thunder, here are a couple of nuggets to pique your interest. In 1933, FDR officially recognized the Soviet Union despite their tyranny. The bullshit spigots of the media were cranked wide open. FDR’s right-hand man—a guy who was inseparable from FDR and often stood between FDR and prying eyes—was Harry Hopkins, yet another full-blown Soviet spy. Hopkins vetted everything and always sided with Stalin. It is horrifying how much Stalin controlled the US’s role in WWII via both his diplomatic prowess and by having Hopkins keeping FDR and Churchill at arms length. The US lend-lease program to the Soviets, which FDR ran autocratically in the shadows, was an order of magnitude more generous than the much ballyhooed lend-lease program to Britain. Stalin got everything he asked for while the Brits begged for scraps.

If I give him everything I can and ask nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.

~ FDR on Joseph Stalin

What Stalin’s army lacked in tactical prowess—a non-trivial deficit—we made up for with millions of tons of weapons, supplies, and basic materials to run their war machine. Stalin’s master plan was to let the western powers destroy each other, which eventually allowed the Soviets to grab big swaths of real estate in the post-war era using US weaponry and without opposition from the US. Here’s another gem. At the end of the war, official stats suggested the Soviets had several dozen US soldiers in captivity (read: gulags) to be used as bargaining chips. Stalin did not rescue our troops expected of a normal ally. Americans found in Russian territory were sent to gulags. Careful research into primary sources upgraded the numbers of Americans in gulags to 15,000–25,000, and we abandoned them at the end of the war. Prisoner swaps failed because Stalin didn’t want the Soviet soldiers back. Rumors of US servicemen in the gulags surfaced for decades.

When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.

~ Joseph Stalin

The Soviets committed countless atrocities before, during, and after the war. The Katyn Massacre of thousands of Poles is one of the more infamous examples.^{ref 8} Many more of these atrocities should have been revealed when the Soviet Union collapsed and the archives were pried open, but that never happened. A few intrepid investigative journalists, most successfully Vladimir Bukowsky,^{ref 9} dredged up some dirt, but the notion of wide-open archives is largely fiction. (Bukowsky, by the way, wrote a glowing review of American Betrayal.^{ref 10}) It would take 10,000 Bukowskys to dig through the hundreds of millions—possibly billions—of documents. Of course, many of the former Soviet leaders were still alive and not thrilled about fessing up to what they had done. And the US Deep State wasn’t champing at the bit to have its nefarious activities exposed. Both sides let sleeping dogs lie and moved along. One must now ask: was Joe McCarthy right? In a nutshell, he probably was, but he was marginalized like everyone else who defies the narrative and may have been driven a little nuts. I have a book on Joe in my Amazon queue.

I still had questions, and my friend Mike Farris set up a three-way podcast with Diana.^{ref 11,12} On the US prisoner of war issue—a surreal concept given the Soviets were supposed to be allies—I pushed her for clarification. She was unsure but suspects that these unused bargaining chips became embarrassing for both sides once too much time had passed. Was Churchill, while clearly marginalized by the FDR-Stalin diumvirate, the rockstar in this story? You could infer that Churchill had no fight left in him. However, another revisionist historian, Darryl Cooper, blogging under the pseudonym “Martyrmade”, hammers Churchill as well.^{ref 13}

In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.

~ FDR

Noticing my growing relationship with Diana, Sean McMeekin, author of Stalin’s War,^{ref 14} urged me to give his book its day in court. This is a tougher read—it forced me way over my “skis”—but it was worth it. Sean deserves a lot more ink than I am giving him here. He does a masterful job of detailing how Stalin masterfully manipulated FDR, who was both sympathetic to the Soviets and a dupe. (It is hard to statistically weight those two contributions.) Sean thoroughly fleshed out how Stalin got everything he asked for from FDR without forfeiting any concessions. Stalin’s psychopathy was also chronicled in detail. During the post-war repatriation of Soviet soldiers to the Soviet Union by the Western Allies—ironically named Operation Keelhaul—many (possibly millions) of Soviet Soldiers ended up in gulags while others avoided that fate by committing suicide. During FDR’s final days of faltering at Biden-levels of decay and Churchill exhausted by years of fighting Germany and battling Stalin, both Western leaders turned a blind eye as Stalin ravaged the Germans with horrific atrocities, possibly killing millions. Stalin’s desire to exterminate the remaining Germans malincentivized what was left of the Wehrmacht to fight to the death rather than surrender.

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

One can debate who beat the Germans in WWII. Our lend-lease program certainly bailed out tactically incompetent Soviet troops. As to who won WWII, the answer is clear: the Soviet Union won, and FDR is culpable. West and Bukowsky are of one mind on this one.^{ref 15} The Europeans and US defeated one tyrant and left a more lethal one intact.

The Soviet Empire is one of our own creations.^{ref 16}

~ General Albert C. Wedemeyer

I have another troubling question that pertains to Hitler’s motives to exterminate the Jews. Of course, he was a psychopath and a meth head.^{ref 17} (As an aside, other leaders showing evidence of substance abuse in the modern era include Chrystia Freeland,^{ref 18,19} Volodymr Zelensky,^{ref 20} and Jucinda Ardern^{ref 21} according to the internet and a Canadian intel officer I know.) Creating a unifying foe is often cited as a common tactic, although that argument seems weak to me. Ethnic cleansing gets a lot of press. A Jewish friend recommended a 2,500 page biography of Hitler^{ref 22}—an order of magnitude too long—and suggested that Hitler’s antisemitism was dwarfed by members of his inner circle. Here is my question: Was there a tactical gain for the genocide rattling around in Hitler’s head? A hint comes from Feargus OConnor Greenwood’s 180 Degrees: Unlearn The Lies You’ve Been Taught To Believe.^{ref 23} Feargus claims that the Rothschild banking dynasty funded the rise of the Soviet Empire,^{ref 24} possibly in the spirit of The Creature from Jekyll Island. Could Hitler have been trying to destroy the financial powerbase funding the Soviets? While this bizarre concept camped out in in my head, I stumbled upon an odd quote unrigorously attributed to Vladimir Putin:

Our future generations will be born without Rothschild’s chains around their wrists and ankles.

~ Vladimir Putin

That Putin quote was fact-checked by Reuters by asking the Rothschilds, who denied its origins.^{ref 25} That is not a fact-check, but back to the plot. Diana and Sean left me with a few more sacred cows to slaughter. McMeekin described how Stalin kept Japan off his own ass via diplomatic channels and his exceptional deception skills. In direct conflict with my social-studies-level narrative, diplomatic brinksmanship between Japan and the US was occurring right up to the Pearl Harbor attack. One of the US’s last diplomatic contacts with Japan before the fateful attack was via Harry Dexter White. A Soviet spy negotiating with Japan. How convenient.

According to McMeekin, the Soviets also knew that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor. To claim that we didn’t know stretches credulity and flies in the face of stories I had heard. I closed that circle by reading Robert B. Stinnett’s, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor,^{ref 26} which delineates how we had cracked all the Japanese codes, knew everything the Japanese were up to in the Pacific, and adeptly kept that critical information from prying eyes of the high command stationed at Pearl Harbor. We knew they were coming, when they were coming, and why it was tactically what FDR wanted. Stinnett endorsed the oft-stated idea that such brutal decisions to sacrifice thousands of lives concealed by countless lies are the brutal decisions that a strong leader must make. Was FDR a strong leader? Not against Stalin, but it was worse than that.

My next sacred cow to slaughter was FDR’s role in the Great Depression. Largely based on a hunch, I had asserted in a number of podcasts that FDR’s welfare state that is so hated by the political right may have been a tactical compromise to keep the commies in check during the Great Depression. During capitalism’s greatest crisis, did FDR decide he had to take it to the hoop by throwing a bone to Amity Schlaes’ The Forgotten Man^{ref 27} to repel Trotskyites? Obviously, this theory is now perched on sand given FDR’s Soviet ties.

The architects of the “New Deal,” including FDR himself, consciously intended it as the beginning of socialism in America.^{ref 28}

~ Vladimir Bukowsky, Russian historian

That brought me to Burton Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal?,^{ref 29} which sends the last fragments of FDR’s reputation through a wood chipper. Folsom describes FDR’s total incompetence in his youth and that politics was the only pursuit in his life in which he showed any aptitude whatsoever. FDR was a compulsive liar, offering promises that he never intended to keep—a poster child for Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door.^{ref 30} Burton spent a small fraction of the book discussing the subjective merits of economic theories behind the New Deal. With that said, even FDR’s economic guru and acolyte, Henry Morgenthau became disillusioned.

I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started….and an enormous debt to boot.

~ Henry Morgenthau

FDR’s interventions in the economy not only failed to end the Great Depression, but they also set a precedent for government overreach that remains with us today.

~ Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man

The core of Burton’s story is that the freebies were handed out to political cronies to win elections. It was graft and grift on a scale that would make modern-day politicians whince, and in the middle of it all was that commie dog, Harry Hopkins. I now stand corrected; FDR appears to have been a total douche bag. His legacy is that his policies are invoked everytime somebody calls for more government.

Fascism is capitalism in decline.

~ Vladimir Lenin

I am almost done. Diana followed her 2013 American Betrayal with a very short and quite engaging epilogue entitled, The Red Thread,^{ref 31} to bring us from the 2013 American Betrayal to the present. Two curious features jumped out at me: First, while the role of communist/Marxist forces persist to this day, there was very little mention of external actors (such as Putin). Given my interest in the War in Ukraine, I pressed her to ascertain if external forces are no longer important and if the “ideology had entered the host”. In Hollywood parlance, is the call coming from inside the house? Diana lacked hard evidence but was decidedly leary of Putin et al. Another entertaining character is John Brennan, everybody’s favorite ex-CIA head. John has gotten some bad press from an admission that he voted for a communist^{ref 32} when he was a youthful stoned hippy. Diana fillets and backfills this story by describing the depths of his communist leanings that may persist to the present and make you wonder how he cleared the security checks. Are we to believe this zebra changed his stripes? It gets worse. Folks like Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod also have vodka breath as does FBI director James Comey, who has openly claimed to have been influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr during his days at the seminary. Reinhold is a Marxist—a “solid socialist”—who paradoxically is said to have opposed the communists.

The neo-Marxist movement spreading across the globe as I type was mobilized by offspring of the Frankfurt School founded by Herbert Mercuse, which was geographically located in Germany but created by the Soviets. It has now camped out in the United States. Richard Clarke, the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-Terrorism in the George W. Bush administration, wrote Against All Enemies^{ref 33} that was highly critical of the Iraq War. He finished the final chapter with a cliff hanging question asking if our “enemies are within.” I repeat the title question of the 2024 YIR: What is a fact?

If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.

~ Theodore Dalrymple, psychologist/author/historical pundit

One might wonder why this alternative narrative has been stonewalled. Why did the neocons attack Diana West with such vitriol? The two highest water marks in US history were the founding fathers and our defeating of tyranny in World War II. We do not want to let these go. If the real story of WWII were to attract the public’s scrutiny, how many other woven narratives will come under scrutiny? All of them.

The Election

Write drunk; edit sober.^{ref 1}

~ Not Ernest Hemingway

I must admit to being fried and my brain being rag dolled as I punch out this last section of Part 2. I have 100–200 pages of notes on the dozens of cast members in the epic drama of Election 2024. There was only one way out of that mess that would not have led to carnage: Trump and Vance would have to undeniably, uncontestably mow down Harris and Walz (Hairy Balls). Those extracting wisdom from Mika and Joe in the Morning or Rachel Maddow howling at the moon at night saw the race as tight. However, Harris insiders knew the polls were misleading,^{ref 2} which explains the palpable fear and extreme measures taken by the campaign. Their joy was gone long before election night. I thought I detected the media pulling away as well. Pre-election chatter of all the election fraud that would ensue and Merrick Garland threatening another J6-like round-up^{ref 3} in a decidedly authoritarian tone if protests erupted were for naught. The election came and went without a hitch or a glitch. There was no election rigging nor even accusations of election rigging. Did you behave yourselves? Was it too big to rig? I don’t know, but it is all quiet on the Western Front for now.

Bill Whitaker of 60 Minutes: You’ve changed your positions so much that no one believes anything.

Harris: Well, I’m the Vice President, and I travel a lot.

In many ways, November 5^th prematurely brought 2024 to a close and ushered in 2025. Immediately following the election the white supremacists—the group previously known as ‘right of center’—were basking in the glow. It has been surprisingly enjoyable for many including myself. The neo-Marxists—what is less pejoratively referred to in an alternate universe as those ‘left of center’—are not happy. Many are licking their wounds, which is how you heal wounds in the animal kingdom. If you wonder how the media got it so wrong, you are overlooking the obvious: they have long since given up their role as investigative journalists and taken up the oldest profession to pay the bills.

Stephen Colbert to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: I know you guys are objective over there, that you just report the news as it is.

Audience: Uncontrolled laughter

Kaitlan Collins: Was that supposed to be a laugh line?

Colbert: It wasn’t supposed to be, but, ah, I guess it is.^{ref 4}

(NB-I’m not done with Stephen). The message of the 2024 election was not so much that Trump won but that the Democratic Machine—I’ll call it the DNC but it is much, much more than that—totally self-destructed. But before I begin riffing on that, I want to walk down memory lane. Since the dawn of civilization, elections have been biased—influenced by unseen forces pushing preferentially—and outright rigged via explicit ballot stuffing. Some serious post turtles^{ref 5} have occupied the Oval Office. Years ago I set out to examine US history by way of presidential biographers. I am not done yet—some are almost unworthy—but I even hit Chester Arthur. To those unfamiliar with Chester, he was one of our presidents. I have been reflecting on the election for 6 weeks trying to place the events leading up to November 5^th, 2024 in a historical context.

Here is my decidedly opinionated analysis of our Paths to the Whitehouse in the modern era, which I define as starting in 1912 with the election of Woodrow Wilson.

1912 and 1916. Woodrow Wilson ushered in the Administrative State. It was Bill Bonner’s disdain for Woodrow’s administrative bloat that first caught my attention. Woody also got us into WWI after promising not to keep us out. The war was bankrolled by the fledging Federal Reserve—The Creature from Jekyll Island—that was formed on his watch and marketed as “bank reform.” Gotta chuckle at that one.

1920 and 1924. Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge were presidents, but only historians like Amity Schlaes care enough to know the details.

1928. Herbert Hoover inherited the Roaring Twenties that became the Great Depression as the gigantic consumer credit bubble burst. He is the most underrated president in history; he is my pick for the most qualified. Bad break, Herb. Shit happens. (NB-You can still see signs advertising ‘Children for Sale’ along the Southern Border…and at the headquarters of the Clinton Foundation.)

1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. The previous chapter of Part 2 describes a deep dive—Ok, not a deep dive but a half dozen books that represent my journey—into FDR and World War II. I made my best case that Frank was arguably the worst US President in history. He was a sociopath, compulsive liar, and a lazy grifter who discovered his one skill: politics. His flawed economic policies were sold as care and comfort for the downtrodden but were executed to buy votes and retain power. He caused the unnecessary loss of millions of lives in WWII unnecessarily owing to his unusual and highly suspect relationship with Stalin. But Amity Schlaes’s Forgotten Man loved him, and those who like bloated government embrace his legacy.

1948. Well, the polls were wrong. Where have I heard that before? A classic biography cleverly titled Truman by David McCullough described a decent guy, although nuking Japan remains controversial.

1952 and 1956. I recall as a kid hearing Dwight Eisenhower was a mediocre president. Either my read of the conventional wisdom was wrong or the wisdom itself was wrong. He knew the horrors of war and avoided them, created the transcontinental highway system after seeing the Autobahn in action, and was the real leader of civil rights movement. He also warned us about the Military-industrial Complex. Ike’s warning went unheeded or the Complex was unstoppable. His biggest mistake was failing to keep his chief spook, Alan Dulles, out of mischief.

1960. John F. Kennedy (JFK), although a world-class horndog, was a breath of fresh air. JFK illustrated the importance of television in political campaigns when he outgunned Nixon, who profusely sweated in the hot lights of the televised debates. (History seems to have missed a great opportunity of naming Nixon “Sweaty Dick”, which seems way cooler than “Tricky Dick.”) JFK was a chick banger like all the Kennedys and is said to have beat Nixon with help from the Chicago mob, which ultimately proved a fatal move in the non-metaphorical sense.

Sidebar: The Kennedy’s had the potential to be the first and potentially never-to-be-matched presidential dynasty. It is stunning that one family could put out six spawn with the potential to satisfy Joe Senior’s dynastic wet dreams by reaching the US presidency, were it not for an unusual mortality rate.

• Joe, Jr., the patriarch’s first son and first choice for the highest office, got taken out by WWII.
• JFK made it but got taken out by the Deep State, probably with help from the CIA head Alan Dulles and Vice President LBJ. And the patsy, Oswald, got taken out by Jack Ruby (aka Jacob), who was a product of the CIA’s MKUltra program.^{ref 6} Nothing weird here. Moving along…
• RFK also got taken out by the Deep State. Sirhan Sirhan, the patsy, never made it to trial because the case would have collapsed in court.^{ref 7}
• Teddy, the family fuckup, self-destructed owing to maximal drinking prowess, limited driving skills, and the mortality of his date. The National Lampoon astutely noted he would have made it to the Whitehouse if he was driving a Volkswagen.

• JFK, Jr died in a suspicious plane crash days before he was to announce his candidacy for New York’s open Senate seat. Hillary got the nod. Yet another notch for the controversial Clinton Body Count that now teeters in the many dozens. Here is the claim^{ref 8} and the fact-checked denial.^{ref 9} The sheer numbers of fact checks are always the ‘tell’.
• RFK, Jr might have beaten Trump in 2024, but the DNC’s Big Pharma donors wanted nothing to do with that. (The joke may still be on them.) In the trade of the century, the DNC traded Gabbard and Kennedy to the RNC for Kinzer and Cheney. Rumors abound that the DNC might swap John Fetterman and NYC’s mayor Eric Adams for RNC veterans Mitch McConnell and Denny Hastert.
• Technically, I could have included Rosemary Kennedy (Joe’s unruly daughter) on the list. Her rebellious streak could have made her, at least in theory, a dominant feminist world leader. Alas, they lobotomized her, which left her intellectually at the level of those occupying Congressional seats.

1964. LBJ won the election legitimately without killing anybody except millions of Vietnamese. He was notoriously tough and, according to a detailed treatise on narcissism,^{ref 10} was more narcissistic than Donald Trump. Something prompted his premature departure; the pressures of Vietnam are the patsy. His habit of hoisting his dogs up by their ears was familiar to junior senators as well.

1968 and 1972. Nixon won fair and square, best I can tell, and he had high approval ratings. In a story I was unfamiliar with, Tucker Carlson claims Nixon didn’t self-destruct but rather was explicitly taken out by the Deep State,^{ref 11} possibly owing to an awkward conversation about the Kennedy assassination.^{ref 12} The Watergate burglars were CIA, Deep Throat was FBI, and, Bob Woodward was a former Naval Intelligence officer who, miraculously, became a journalist just in time to break the story.^{ref 13,14}

1976. Jimmy Carter seems like a decent guy. He inherited some bad situations such as the Iran Hostage Crisis and double-digit inflation. No administration could survive those two crises. I imagine many of us from both sides of the aisle would like him back. By modern standards, he is still not too old for a comeback, and he doesn’t have the Biden stare yet. (Actually, he does but the picture was too grisly and sad for me to show.) Errata: Well, he died today, but I am not sure that takes him out of the running.

1980 and 1984. Ronald Reagan was a transformational gunslinger—the right guy for the job at the right time. Corporate America had been beaten up by powerful unions and inflation, banana republic dictators had been spitting in our faces. A half-century bull market described in the section “High Valuations and Broken Markets” was about to begin regardless of who occupied the Oval office. While he outspent our budget, he also outspent the Russian’s budget. His plan to weaponize space was nicknamed ‘Star Wars’ by his critics who dismissed it as science fiction. Maybe so, but it’s removal was at the top of Mikhail Gorbachev’s bucket list, and my deep dive into directed energy weapons last year convinced me it is no longer fictional.^{ref 15} The stagnating and asymmetric US labor-management imbalance was pushed back in favor of management when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and held his ground. Sassy miniature dictators got attitude adjustments when Reagan sent fighters to delivered a personal message to Ghaddafi and the Marines to extract Noriega. Message received; we’re good. Many of these Reagan-derived course corrections have since overcorrected, but they were needed at the time, and he was revered. (NB-In case you are wondering, that sassy little dictator screeching at Reagan in the Oval Office is the infamous Roy Cohn.)

1988. Despite an inaspicious start as the son of a US Senator and member of Skull & Bones at Yale, George H. W. Bush rose to become the heir apparent to Reagans’ Morning in America. His credentials as former Head of the CIA probably should have gotten more press. I intend to finish Bush Family Secrets after years of hiatus now that I am emotionally ready to handle the truth. The Gulf War looked like a clean military move, and showed who was The Boss. Evidence that we tricked Saddam Hussein into attacking Kuwait with subtle green lights from our State Department are troubling, although Scott Horton’s Enough Already casts doubt on whether it was completely intentional or State Department bunglings.^{ref 16} (See “Books”.) Saddam had been a friend with benefits and got pegged.

1992. With Bush polling at a 91% approval rating, the DNC threw a little-known hick from Arkansas into the race as a disposable candidate. Everybody underestimated the impact of the 1991 recession as well as Bill Clinton’s and James Carville’s gravitas. Clinton had cut his chops running a small crime syndicate while governor of Arkansas as described in the low-budget documentary The Clinton Chronicles.^{ref 17} (NB-If you need to find shit like this, Google is worthless; go to Yandex.^{ref 18}) Bill was a natural politician and also ushered in the modern era when he went on Arsenio Hall Show and played the saxophone.^{ref 19} It seemed silly at the time. I should add that Bill was a pretty good president, although his “misogyny” got the best of him. He set a new low bar by showing that no matter what you get caught doing, do not give up. (Gary Hart could have used this advice.) His deregulation of the banks will probably go down in history as an epic disaster, although there are darker skeletons in that boy’s closet, and I am not just talking about rapes and Epstein. That’ll have to wait for part 3. As an aside, I taught Juanita Brodrick how to ‘pin’ a Tweet and she pinned a doozy about Bill and Hillary.^{ref 20} As another aside, is nobody else troubled that young Bill found his way to meet Kennedy? Nothing happens by chance in this Game of Thrones.

2000 and 2004. We finally went dynastic when George W. Bush, Jr was anointed the RNC candidate. You can spot these preordained candidates by watching debates. The candidates will be lined up, but the real candidate is in the middle and has a slightly different color suit. They did this with Mitt Romney in 2012 and again with Jeb Bush in 2016. Jeb looked like a lock in 2016 to achieve a Bush presidential hat trick until his glass jaw was shattered by Trump. After Al Gore got hung by his chads, the Bush administration’s 9/11 false flag—I’m a 99% “Truther”^{ref 21}—got us into a catastrophic war in Iraq. It was unconscionable, and The Shrub should have been sent to the bench in 2004, but there he was winning a second term as society got hung by its chads. The scope of the damage done to humanity by the neocons is difficult to enumerate, but 5 million dead Middle Easterners in two decades is where I would start.

2008 and 2012. They grow up so fast. The Clintons were poised to fulfill their destiny—“First Bill then Hill”—but the DNC recognized that Barack Obama was a better candidate. Some on the right really are appalled by Obama, but I was more agnostic. His greatest weakness was the advanced payment of a million bucks by the Nobel Prize committee before Obama bombed seven Muslim countries. I may be old school, but I expect some aversion to war from a Liberal Democrat. Hillary’s consolation prize as Secretary of State allowed her to turn the Clinton Foundation into a global crime syndicate.

2016. It took a high body count, but Hillary’s time had at long last arrived. The Clintons made sure Hillary got the nomination over Bernie Sanders by a multi-million dollar takeover (bailout) of the DNC. They also did everything possible to ensure that Donald Trump was nominated because he cleary had no chance of winning. Well, they underestimated The Donald, and he did a karmic repeat of what Bill Clinton had done to Bush in 1992, but with a General Sherman-esque slash-and-burn panache. I didn’t think Trump would win, but something was changing. This was the sea change I was seeing and wrote about in the aftermath…

The weirdest subplot of them all is still off most radars and may never fully take form: minorities seemed to start supporting Trump. Mind you, it was just a flicker, but The Donald courted them as the Democrats lethargically assumed they would lose zero votes from the minority community from here to eternity. Trump, of course, had given plenty of reasons for Hispanics to dislike him, but black Americans were visibly showing support. Blacks for Trump rallies were appearing: I don’t remember Blacks for Mitt. Ice Cube articulated Trump’s appeal, falling short of endorsing him. Dave Chapelle, before his legendary post-election SNL appearance, seemed intriqued with Trump. Shaquille O’Neal, Mike Tyson, 50 Cent, Sean Diddy Combs, and other prominent blacks openly supported Trump. Football legend Jim Brown said Trump “is going to be for all the people.” Malik Obama, Barack’s brother, supported Trump. Quanell X, the head of the New Black Panther Party, told us to ignore the package and listen to the message. Quanell X’s message was simple: we have given the Democrats our love for half a century, and what do we have to show for it? The head of Blacks for Bernie, undoubtedly still smarting from the abuse Bernie took from Team Clinton, threw his support for Trump.

~ 2016 Year in Review

As a Reagan Republican, I pondered the possibility of voting for Bernie because Trump was just so idiosyncratic, but the DNC removed that choice. Hillary scared the hell out of me, plus she was unlikeble. I was not ready for the win but had studied the process. Trump probed the Washington corridor the way the Tyrannosaurus probed the perimeter of Jurassic Park. He entered the Whitehouse not knowing where the spoons and forks were stored—the protocols of bare-knuckle politics—forcing him to turn inward to family. His first term was economically fine but witnessed few other successes thanks to the constant warfare over fake dossiers and ginned up Russia Collusion scandals ginned up and funded by the Clinton Mob backed by the bipartisan Deep State. His presidency was capped off with an anthropogenic pandemic created by the US bioweapons program and a vaccine supposedly generated via Operation Warp Speed but likely created years earlier. Critically, the 2016 election witnessed the DNC’s first baby steps toward the abyss.

2020. In her youth, Dr. Jill Biden babysat for Joe’s kids. Sounds like a Pornhub setup. Oh well, this was the year that the DNC death spiral began in earnest. The Iowa Caucus was filled with characters straight from a Star Wars bar. Joe Biden was on the left side appearing to be decorative and adding the perception of adult supervision. Tulsi Gabbard inflicted a withering evisceration of Kamala Harris’s lack of qualifications, causing Kamala to drop out of the race with the same number of primary votes that I got: zero.

At that moment, what would the odds at the Polymarket betting parlor have been of a Biden-Harris Administration? 1000:1? Well, Joe was the top candidate according to the DNC, Kamala Harris was installed as his #2 in the event they couldn’t hide his infirmities, and off Joe went to his basement to start campaigning. Miraculously, despite sophisticated algorithms showing he was behind in all seven swing states at 1:30 AM of election night, Joe won! You did it Joe. From then on, it was garbled fuckups and armies of handlers to keep the USS Biden afloat for four years. Profoundly incompetent appointments were made, borders were thrown open under the careful eye of Border Czar Harris, who never visited the border…or Europe either (cackle cackle), and vast sums of cash were sent to Ukraine to escort a half-million Ukrainians to the Light and help FTX launder much of it back to the DNC coffers. Meanwhile, on the home front, you were thrown in jail for misdemeanors (bad ones I guess), for being a good Samaritan on a subway, protesting at the Capitol, or praying near a Planned Parenthood.

The damage done by the rig has left many feeling disenfranchised. I watched the videos showing ballots being shipped in. I read Molly Hemmingway’s Rigged. I dug deeply into Smartmatic’s rigging of the vote originating via a series of shell companies from Beijing. The topic of the rig, however, was a bipartisan forbidden zone for the mainstream media because, quite simply, every last politician elected that day was elected by that voting protocol, and neither party was fond of this bullshit MAGA thing. The election was biased, and the vote was rigged. The frustration boiled over into January 6. It was a shameful chapter in American history because the wrong people got sent to prison.

2024. What a mess. OK, a total clusterfuck. We started the election cycle with no democratic primary, just a presumption that the guy who couldn’t form a coherent thought would be the DNC’s starting pitcher. Everybody except the mainstream media and all their experts admitted Biden was throwing intellectual knuckleballs.

When I look at these polling numbers, it’s like walking in on your grandma naked. You can’t get the image out of your mind…If you do a focus group, the first thing out of anybody’s mouth is ‘Old,’ so how do you say we’re going to act like this doesn’t exist?

~ James Carville

They pulled the debate against Trump forward, probably swapped out the Adderall with saline, watched Biden tank, and feigned shock. You know it was a set-up because in those first few moments after the debate, the TV pundits showed no hand wringing, no waffling, no confusion. They all immediately and rhythmically began chanting and pounding both fists on the table in perfect unison, “Joe must go” like some Skull & Bones child sacrifice. An unsigned letter announced that Joe had pulled out.^{ref 22} Even Pelosi muttered about its lack of authenticity.^{ref 23} Somebody pulled the plug on the Team Biden social media feeds, and the DNC grabbed his war chest. Biden was told to turn out the lights and lock the Oval Office door on his way out.

As the DNC searched for a Cy Young Award winner to substitute into the game, Team Biden had one more pitch in ‘em: they cast their support to Kamala. A meme of Biden telling Obama how he paddle boarded his game plan said it all.^{ref 24} In a fateful Tweet, Team Kamala said something to the effect that, “they are going to bypass another black woman,” bludgeoning the DNC Blob with its own stick.

The Democrats have been telling us Trump’s reelection is a threat to democracy. In fact, they were so concerned of this threat, they staged a coup, ousted their democratically elected incumbent, and installed Kamala Harris.^{ref 25}

~ Jim Gaffigan

A 48-year streak with a presidential ticket containing a Bush, Clinton, or Biden was finally broken as Kamala was handed the most pathetic running mate imaginable, Tim Walz. Kamala’s Koronation had begun. The media began droning on about how Kamala is a woman of color, not Donald Trump, and not ‘weird’^{ref 26} like the Republicans. Her backers included the IRS Labor Union, P-Diddy’s best buddies, Liz Cheney, and even Vladimir Putin. (The campaign tried to claim support from the Border Patrol, but that surreal lie got some serious pushback from the Border Patrol.^{ref 27})

I told you, our favorite, if I may say so, was the current president, Mr. Biden. He was removed from the race, but he advised all his supporters to support Ms. Harris. So we will do it as well, we will root for her. She laughs so contagiously and expressively, it shows she’s doing well.^{ref 28}

~ Vladimir Putin (@ROTFLMAOinRussia)

Well, I could spew dozens of pages of stream-of-consciousness blather, but the rest is history. No party—not the DNC, RNC, or CCP—wanted Trump doing his Leeroy Jenkins impersonation again, but that is what they got. Team Harris memed Trump as Hitler and his supporters as Nazis. Kamala was participating in fawning interviews that were akin to bumper bowling, yet she still managed to throw gutter balls. Bill Whitaker and 60 Minutes had to commit journalistic fraud by splicing answers to different questions to cobble together 18 minutes of word salad from this intellectual anorexic.^{ref 29} She needed a teleprompter for a Town Hall-structured meeting.^{ref 30}

Anderson Cooper: Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?

Kamala Harris: Yes I do. Yes I do.

Trump did his right of passage on Joe Rogan, and it went fine. Kamala passed on a Joe Rogan interview, presumably knowing that he would eat her lunch and, instead, did one with a feminist porn site, Call Her Daddy. She needed no teleprompter for that one, and it generated the  “Hoes for Harris!” meme. (That is not bad, but it likely came from the right not the left. Grok didn’t know.)

JD Vance is a venture capitalist cosplaying as a cowboy. I don’t even know what a venture capitalist does.

~ Tim Walz

Meanwhile, Walz was looking like Chris Farley living in a van down by the river. His record began fraying at the edges and rotting in the middle. He put off a creepy vibe,^{ref 31,32} had minor fibbing issues, had a wife who acted batshit crazy,^{ref 33} and was burdened by potentially serious connections to China.^{ref 34,35} It culminated with JD Vance brutalizing him in the debate with his intellect and civility.

I’ve become friends with school shooters.

~ Tim Walz, debate

While the Hairy-Balz ticket got darker, Trump was having a blast running McDonald’s spoofs. He also appeared to get a total makeover. They cut back on the orange coloration, let his hair grey, trimmed back the reverse ducktail (duckbill?), and he minimized outbursts that were his hallmark. He looked more presidential and less like an SNL caricature.

Message to the Memers: There is a phenomenon that many watched but few grasped its importance. The political right has a monopoly in the world of memes on social media. I swear if the left came up with clever memes to hammer Trump I would have seen the merit, but none surfaced. (Hitler memes, by the way, are not clever.) I’ve consulted with many podcast hosts on this, and they all agree: the left may claim ‘joy’, but they have no sense of humor, only anger and victimhood. You can’t be a victim and laugh at yourself. The world likes winners not whiners. Years ago social psychologists examined the political left’s and right’s ability to walk around in each other’s shoes—to steel man arguments if you will. The left fails miserably at this task. By example, Trump supporters understand at some level why the left finds Trump unacceptable, even repulsive. We get it. I have seen no evidence, by contrast, that the left understands why some of us like the man, his candidacy, and his resilience. James Carville did: “The damage that this decade has done to the democratic brand is almost unfathomable.”^{ref 36} For reasons that may seem abstract, the following meme is what planted this idea in my head:

This single meme flipped the 34 felony convictions and a potential talking point against the VP. In wrestling lingo, it was a two-point reversal. Did the left put out a meme about voting for the slut? Of course not. “OK, Dave, but why is this so important? Why would this”…Hey: I was talking, so STFU and listen! The last calendar year witnessed a fusillade of non-stop attacks in the press and in the courts against Trump that were criminal levels of legal mischief.^{ref 37} Trump displayed a stunning resilience, but the relentless attacks were worrying, infuriating, and demoralizing to his supporters. We could have lost heart and hope, but throughout all this @drefanzor, @Catturd, @WarlordDilley (Brenden Dilley), and the other memers just kept banging away, making us laugh. Here are two of my favorite memes that I must have watched a dozen times: Harris asking Walz to be her running mate,^{ref 38} and a Trump campaign ad with a finale that makes me tear up.^{ref 39} The Meme Team battled day and night. They kept us in the game, poking fun at political opponents and at ourselves. They were common men battling the Democratic and Judicial Machines. They were heroes.

Did Team Trump notice this? I think so. I cannot even rule out the possibility that the Meme Team was on payroll; that would be classic Trump. Here are Brenden Dilley (left) and Catturd (right) at the election-night Trump rally meeting in person for the first time. Look at Brendan’s expression. I know what he was thinking: We did this. We fucking did this.

Message to Trump Supporters: Trump is trying to put together an A-team. It is a young bunch of brawlers, each with a personal stake in success: the system left bite marks in every one of their asses. They won’t all get confirmed, but Trump’s game of 52 Pickup means that what precious little political capital Trump’s opponents have remaining will be inadequate to trash them all. If one gets trashed, put a puppet at the top and the gunslinger in the number two position. (Think Medvedev and Putin.) Problem solved. And, as Thomas Massey pronounced, “Recess appointments!” Time will tell if they can be used.^{ref 40}

Some of appointments might disappoint you. Instead of soiling your adult diapers over these putative disasters, assume that they have been vetted by Trump’s inner circle and ask yourself some simple questions: Why have they been appointed? What will be their roles? What deals were cut? Don’t repeat the mistake of underestimating Trump.

Beyond the appointmets already announced, there are others that I believe might or must be in the queue waiting to run out of the tunnel onto the field. Douglas MacGregor? Mike Flynn? Jonathan Turley? Jeff Sachs? Liz Crokin?(!) By February, I will sense of the depth of Trump’s convictions (personal, not from the courts!) Negotiations with Putin better be started. The Bastille filled with J6 political prisoners better be empty. At least a few useless government agencies better have gotten guillotined, looking up from wicker baskets thinking, “Oh shit!” I suspect that a year from now the country will be very different, for better or worse. America didn’t need change; America needed a revolution, and we got one. I hope it goes well.

Message to the DNC: Let me be clear. I am talking to the political machine, not the voters. The Machine needs to be razed and rebuilt from scratch. In 2016, Trump showed you he was a human wood chipper. You jailed his inner circle, jailed his supporters by the hundreds, and, when that failed, you tried to kill him. I don’t think you could have possibly anticipated Trump’s antifragility. Trump 2.0 is not the same man you opposed in 2016. You failed to take Trump seriously but not literally yet again.

Here is an example of the man with balls the size of melons and the delivery of Bill Burr that you underestimated. After Judge Merchan had ruled against him repeatedly in just one of his many politically motivated court cases after the following exchange ensued:^{ref 41}

DJT: What a moron!

Judge: $1,000 fine!

DJT: $1,000 dollars?! I said three words.

Judge: Those three words were contempt of court, and that’s a $1,000 fine.

DJT: (looking through his wallet)

Judge: You don’t have to pay now.

DJT: No, I’m just checking to see if I have enough cash on me for two more words.

Maybe you thought Trump was playing checkers and you were playing chess. Well, he just kicked your ass in checkers. You failed because you failed to adapt.

Considering how woke your party has become, if Kamala loses, you still have a chance to become the first woman president.^{ref 42}

~ President Trump to Chuck Schumer

The Nation needs at least two strong parties; you were not credible sparring partners. The redneck vote that is historically a DNC stronghold has abandoned you. They don’t like being called Garbage. You have now lost a major portion of the black vote. I suspect they don’t like being told that voter ID is racist because blacks aren’t capable of getting an ID. I suspect that imprisoning people without due cause doesn’t sit well with a group that has a history of unfair treatment by the courts. You used the courts to bankrupt political opponents, while sending Trump adjacents Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon to prison for refusing to cooperate with your treasonous tribunal. A mobile abortion clinic was set up at the Democratic National Convention.^{ref 43} Are you kidding me? I’m pro choice, but who the hell is calling those shots?

While Trump began assembling an inspiring A-team, Harris built nothing. Biden’s A-team was filled with total losers whose common denominator was that Biden won the DEI Bingo Championship. They looked like the cast from the Rocky Horror Picture Show or this more recent Jaguar commercial.^{ref 44} Voters couldn’t give Harris the benefit of the doubt that she would be better than Biden. She confirmed their worst fears by admitting she would be just like him. Even her running mate couldn’t get it right by DEI standards: could you have possibly assembled a whiter staff than this?

Could you DNC brain trusters not see any of these problems? You chose unfunctional candidates (plural) to lead our country. You pretended Biden’s brain wasn’t dying when it was clear in 2019 that it was. You pretended Harris was a gifted leader when she had no ideas of her own and no moral compass. You focused on finding a path to victory rather than choosing a person of character who could lead the country. You better pray that the Trump team is too busy trying to fix the damage you have wrought to exact revenge. My emotions were mixed on this point, but when you declared that Trump would weaponize the justice system after doing exactly that, you left me with one recurring thought, “Take them down.” By attacking him viciously using all means imaginable, you pulled off the impossible: You turned Donald J. Trump into a victim. Let me repeat:

You pulled off the impossible:

You turned Donald J. Trump into a victim.

Message to the Media: You were granted special constitutional protections because you have a foundational role in a functional democracy. You could not have been more disappointing. I should add that it may not be 100% your fault: the internet destroyed your business model and threw the door wide open for bloggers and independent media to fill the void. I’ve heard rumors that you are scheming to find a left-wing analog of Joe Rogan. Your ignorance is profound. Joe was the left wing Joe Rogan you now crave, and you pushed him to the right. Your premise of creating a new Joe Rogan shows a level of delusion that leaves me speechless. He is Joe Rogan because nobody created him. You also pushed Naomi Wolf, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Bret Weinstein, Mike Shellenberger, and indies like Tim Pool from the hard left to the right. The MSM may not need the revenues because the Deep State is paying your bills, but you surely need the viewers just like Pravda needs viewers. You declared that Joe Biden would never pardon his son because he would preserve democracy and then you feigned shock and dismay when he pardoned him. Of course he pardoned Hunter you lying swamp creatures: it was his son. But you guys lied, and now even your most faithful viewers can’t trust you again. I suspect that the guys in the C-suite know this and are about to purge your sorry asses into oblivion. Mika and Joe: you can get out the strap-ons and ball gags ‘cause you will have time to kill. I hope you saved some of that cash from your prior million-dollar contracts because your current market value has fallen to zero. Maybe you can pitch for MyPillow.com or some de-banked gun company or crypto exchange.

Message to Dr. Jill Biden. A loving father would pardon his son despite the backlash. A loving spouse would protect her husband as his family says the “long goodby.” Instead, you pimped him out for four more years and more chaos to satisfy your own selfish needs. You seem sweet, but a sociopath lurks at the core.

Message to the Democratic Voters: You are culpable to the extent you allowed your hatred of Trump to accept the unacceptable. You also abused Trump supporters without realizing that their political views were not the problem. (While you’re at it, lay off the anti-vaxxers; they were right too.) Maybe those family members and former friends will forgive you for being so sanctimonious. Admittedly, you have a tough row to hoe, because there is precious little evidence the voter has any control. I urge you to demand more from your party. Yell, scream, primary the bastards. Throw the bums out. Explore a class action suit against the DNC for fraudulent fund raising. Carville wants to audit the Machine to find who received that $1.5 billion that disappeared in the last 60 days of the election.^{ref 45}

Does anybody know where all that money went?

~ James Carville

It is your party and you can cry if you want to (cry if you want to), but the party elite jammed it up your asses. Democrats and Republicans alike all deserve better. And if somehow you wish to blame the right for choosing an equally problematic candidate—if you insist on playing the victim yet again—I will remind you that we did not choose Trump: he chose us, and we think we are better off in this arranged marriage. You have more in common with the imprisoned J6-ers than you realize. If you march on the Capitol to voice your grievances and fight for your Constitutional rights, the members of the right will have your backs. Many of us on the right would like to return to an era in which watching the election is akin to watching the Giants-Packers play on Sunday afternoon. Watching your team get blown out sucks, but those wings and pizza were great. And it was fun ranting with that guy sitting next to you on the couch who was so insane that he supported the wrong team while wearing a piece of cheese for a hat. He is still one of your best friends.

If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot. I probably should not have said that; my staff will deal with that later.^{ref 46}

~ Kamala Harris

Message to Kamala Harris: Hey! I’m not done talking. You are more (and less) than meets the eye. You are a shape-shifter. Stay tuned for Part 3.

Message to the Reader: Part 3 is being written. It opens with a pitch for free speech, probes the encroaching neo-Marxism, discusses the consequences of open borders, ponders the origins and consequences of gender dysphoria, and then monotonically marches deeply into the Heart of Darkness where kids get trafficked and Satanists thrive, all under the control of evil people in the Halls of Power. I may or may not publish it, but I have every intention of writing it to exorcise the demons camped out in my head rent free.

Books

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Funny anecdote: James Joyce is said to have written his acclaimed novels of the 20th century using crayon: He was nearly blind.^{ref 1} Stephen King writes his books without endings in mind. It shows.

I did an experiment and crowd-sourced suggestions for non-fiction books that were transformational to one’s thinking. The more than 1,600 responses were overwhelming. I offer the link in case you wish to fish for yourself.^{ref 2}

I asked Grok’s help as follows:

Hey Grok: In the following thread [provided] I requested book recommendations. Could you provide the top ten most popular books?

Grok: Here are the books mentioned in the thread you referenced, based on the popularity inferred from the engagement and responses:

1. “Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes” by Andrew M. Lobaczewski – Highly recommended for its deep dive into the nature of evil in political contexts.
2. “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption” by Laura Hillenbrand – Noted for its profound narrative on resilience and survival.
3. “Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It” by John Abramson – Praised for exposing the pharmaceutical industry’s impact on healthcare.
4. “Mastery” by Robert Greene – Mentioned as life-changing, focusing on achieving mastery in one’s field.
5. “The Courage to be Disliked” by Ichiro Kishimi – Recommended for its philosophical insights into personal freedom and happiness.
6. “The 33 Strategies of War” by Robert Greene – Although not directly mentioned, Greene’s work on strategy and conflict is highly regarded, fitting with the theme of personal and professional mastery.

These recommendations reflect a blend of personal growth, historical insight, and critical analysis of societal structures. Each book offers a unique perspective that could transform one’s thinking in various domains.

I encourage my graduate students to read their discipline exhaustively, prioritizing in the order (1) books, (2) review articles, and (3) primary literature. The former offers tens of thousands of man-years of experience and a grand overview of a subject at minimal cost of time and money. I also encourage them to listen to audiobooks while they walk to school or do menial chores.

I am an audiophile because I am a slow reader, and audio exploits dead and stranded time. A fifteen-minute commute or preparing dinner with headphones allows one to mow through many books that I would have never read. For long trips, I pop a ritalin to stay awake—get high as fuck and get in an intellectual groove. You can speed audiobooks up depending on the content and the quality of the reader. The cost of the book from Amazon—$10 flat rate—is nominal. The Price of Time to steal the title from Edward Chancellor’s book is what matters. Audiobooks have a huge advantage over podcasts in that audiobooks are one decision followed by 5–20 hours of decision-free listening. They also finish themselves, unlike those books stacked on nightstands world-wide with faded Post-its reminding readers that they will never be finished.

My reading choices are all non-fiction. Y’all can read Shakespeare if you want, but that guy needed to write more succinctly to hold my attention. (The erudite Douglas Murray says that Shakespeare in French is better because it is modern French, while Anglo Saxons are stuck with ye old English.) I am increasingly consumed by history. Today’s events have their roots in the past. You cannot possibly pick up the plot without backfilling the previous chapters. Beware, however, that putative factual treatises are really op-eds. Five books on events surrounding World War II that I finished this year offer five opinions that underscored my profound ignorance of the subject, deep flaws in the prevailing narratives, and formed the core of the section entitled, “World War II and FDR: A Revisionist History”. Two of Diana West’s books opened a dialog that led to a two-part podcast^{ref 3,4} in which she astutely noted that you frequently reach a point where the observers of history can no longer agree on a core group of facts. My frustration over this led to the title question of the 2024 Year in Review: What is a fact? This frustration also steered my reading over the last few years toward the underpinnings of authoritarianism and propaganda.^{ref 5}

Brief synopses of books read this year are listed below. I check Amazon reviews after reading the books to see what I may have missed. My oft-cited phrase “sticky” distinguishes books that will overtly transform my thinking going forward from those that are difficult to retain. My reading of numerous treatises on neuropsychology suggests the unsticky ideas are in my noggin waiting for a contextual trigger to spring them on some unsuspecting victim. Thus, the absence of stickiness does not necessarily condemn a book. Some are like impressionist paintings in which the details are less important than the overall impression.

Reading books on familiar subjects may not offer new facts but instead reveals how the authors articulate familiar but complex ideas. A compelling turn of a phrase or strategically placed metaphor can illuminate. Reading different books on the same subject also fills in details omitted by the other authors. Oftentimes you wonder if they wrote about the same subject.

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier.^{ref 6}

Shrier’s book was motivated by an interest in the origins and consequences of transgenderism that formed a major intellectual pursuit. I thought I had wrapped my brain around the basic principles, but Shrier tells the fascinating and horrifying story of the complex culture that has grabbed society by the shorthairs. It focuses on girls because Abigail is, and always has been, a girl, and girls are particularly susceptible to the gender shift. You are hit by a gut punch in chapter 1 as she uses the phrase “self diagnosis”, alluding to how this highly important and personal journey begins. Online influencers, social contagion, and what I would call the gender-industrial complex fuel the movement. She spoke with all the key players, which includes transgender children and adults, psychotherapists, activists, medical doctors, and parents. I had absolutely no clue what the parents have been confronting when their child, whether in kindergarten or freshman year of college, announces their new name and identity. If the parents do not sign off, the community leans hard on the kids pondering the transition to distance themselves from the unloving parents and embrace their new friends and new tribe. In some states, your teenager may show up having permanently altered biochemistry without your permission. Parents should read this book before the problem unexpectedly gets off the school bus on some fateful afternoon.

The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage by Jonathan Turley.^{ref 7}

This book is as brilliant as the author. It is a scholarly and riveting treatise of the battle for free speech beginning at the founding of the nation. Turley kills sacred cows the whole way. Madison was the only purist. John Adams tried to muzzle free speech. Jefferson was hypocritical, fighting for free speech until he became president, and then stuffing legal socks down his critics gullets. Jackson was a total authoritarian dickweed. The cases are shocking, and Turley describes case after case in which breathtaking breaches of free speech were upheld by the Supreme Court. By the end, you will have contorted emotions. It is uplifting in that we have been down this path before—free speech gets stifled when society becomes risky but returns in the calm eras. Your newly nuanced view will torment you as you wonder where the dotted lines should be drawn. The book culminates in a dangerous era—the present—in which free speech is under attack yet again. Here is the downside: recent interviews of Jonathan on his book tour reveal a constitutional scholar who worries that we may not recover from the current mess. Turley is very nervous. If everybody read this book, it would transform the modern political discourse.

Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen.^{ref 8}

Annie punches books out like Stephen King. As a fictional narrative—we haven’t had a nuclear war yet—I initially wasn’t interested, but too many smart guys (like Jeff Sachs) raved about it. Having interviewed many in the military dealing with the thermonuclear war threat, Annie is able to take you through what would transpire in a second-by-second timescale from when the first flash of a North Korean ICBM launch is detected by our satellites. Within 28 minutes, our ICBMs are pummeling North Korea and the End of the World is in sight. That launch is called by the president. You can say that the call would be made by Presidential advisors in the shadows, but the protocols are rigid, and the buck stops at the top. We desperately need one person saying, “The fate of the world is in my hands. I cannot fuck this up.” Imagine, for example, what would have happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis if you simply pulled JFK out of the room. There would be no one person shouldering the responsibility. That is why you do not want a president lacking marbles, lacking a moral compass, or hipshooting like a cowboy. Jacobsen puts the 2024 election in an interesting light for me and really puts the mindless handling of the War in Ukraine into context. Nothing that Putin has done or will do is worth risking what Annie describes. Nothing.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sachs.^{ref 9}

I have read a lot of neuropsychology books. Sachs tells wildly entertaining stories of some of the most bizarre neurological problems ever encountered. He appears to be the guy that everybody sent their most extraordinary patients. The title comes from a guy who was a successful professor of music, but nobody realized he could not see faces. At one point, he grabs his wife’s head thinking it was his hat. He also provides info on Tourette’s syndrome…fuck, shit, Biden…and other ailments that represent over-development of the brain, not deficiencies. Several people have woken up on a seemingly normal morning and discovered they have somebody else’s leg attached. They cannot be convinced to the contrary. My question in the context of the current wave of gender dysphoria: would the medical community surgically remove their legs? The analyses are probably dated since it was written in the 1980s, but the narratives are timeless. I will be reading more of Oliver’s books.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt.^{ref 10}

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and Coddling the American Mind, both attempted to understand Gen-Z as a fundamentally new and decidedly damaged generation. He previously identified 2014 as the year that college freshman showing up on campus were just different. It was a complete phase change. Neuropsychologists had tentatively tracked it to the emergence of iPhones and social media during their formative ‘tweens and teens. The research has now caught up, and it is quite clear that the apparent correlation can now be ascribed to causation. We are frying their brains by letting them have smart phones and nonstop access to the internet and social media. My best analogy would be it is like plopping them in front of slot machines in Las Vegas for 15 hours a day. The digital world is biochemically lobotomizing them, damaging their cognition, and blocking other activities that are critical to their development. The stats are compelling. The superficial good news is that evidence of risk taking has plummeted. The bad news is that such risk taking teaches them about risk and shapes their personalities. If you are a parent, pay attention. Phones and social media could destroy your kid. Haidt offers solutions that are being implemented regionally.

The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil by Michael Malice.^{ref 11}

Michael is a funny bastard with a great head on his shoulders and an anarchist foundation that he can defend with incredible dexterity. He also has roots in Russia. The White Pill describes the rise of the Soviet Union. While we often have heard that Lenin’s and Stalin’s ideas led to massive deaths in the pre-War Soviet Union—40 million estimated—I must confess to having no idea how this came about. Michael describes how some ruthless leadership caused society to basically consume itself. He touches a seemingly minor detail that had eluded me but showed up in several books read this year (especially that of Diana West): horrific atrocities were papered over by prominent western journalists for reasons that still mystify me. They were Soviet apologists. The real strength of the book is that it feels very scholarly while not getting tangled up in arcane Russian trivia. It was a very “sticky” read. He is trying to warn us not to go down that path. I am also confident, however, that he and I would come to blows if we had a discussion on the Russian-Ukraine War, but it would be worth it just to chat with him.

American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character by Diana West.^{ref 12}

Diana’s 2013 historical look at World War II comes from a genre of analyses that some call “revisionist history” that takes fresh looks at old narratives to ascertain where the truth stopped and bullshit began. I wrote about this in the separate section above, so I’ll keep it short. Contrary to most narratives, West thoroughly documents how Stalin totally controlled the flow of WWII by exploiting FDR’s weaknesses (including some decisions by FDR that are hard to dismiss as honest mistakes). FDR’s right-hand man, Harry Hopkins, who was closer than possibly any Chief of Staff in presidential history, was a Soviet spy (one of many in the system). In essence, there was totally asymmetry in Stalin’s and FDR’s relationship: Stalin got everything he wanted, and FDR got almost nothing in return. Here is a teaser: Throughout the war Stalin scooped up 15,000–25,000 Americans in Russian territory and sent them to gulags. FDR knowingly abandoned them at the end of the war. If the full story were to escape the propaganda containment field, America’s high-water mark of saving the world from tyranny might collapse.

The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy by Diana West.^{ref 13}

This is basically an epilogue to American Betrayal—156 pages in paperback—in which Diana brings the plotline from 2013 to the present. There were some really fascinating parts that I got to explore with Diana in a podcast.^{ref 14,15} She had offered minimal lip service to Putin and the role of external actors on US foreign policy, instead focusing on decidedly bad decisions made by bad actors embedded in the US. I inferred that the seeds of authoritarianism had been planted, and the problem is now within. Shocking points included an expose on former CIA director John Brennan. While it is in the public domain that he voted for a communist in his youth when he was doing more drugs than thinking, Diana makes a strong case that his communist roots are deep and persistent. She unambiguously presents the anti-Trump movements beginning with the Steele Dossier riding in on a wave of lies and bullshit as a serious assault on our system by bad actors on a decidedly patriotic US president. She names names of those who are nefarious in both actions and intent. Dubious operatives like Christopher Steele, Nellie and Bruce Orr, and James Comey share flawed political foundations in neo-Marxist belief systems and training.

Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II by Sean McMeekin.^{ref 16}

I was alerted to the existence of this book when Sean spotted Diana West and I communicating. Stalin’s War is a bigger and more detailed read than American Betrayal. In the early chapters the author lays out details about Russia that are tough for a novice to keep up with. I would say Sean and Diana are on the same page. As noted above, they ostensibly discussed the same topic—Stalin’s influence on the course of WWII—but they are highly complementary. McMeekin does a particularly solid job describing the enormous resources we sent to Stalin while the British lend-lease program was being starved of supplies. Critically to a narrative described below, Stalin even knew that the Japanese were headed for Pearl Harbor.

Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor by Robert B. Stinnett.^{ref 17}

Many of us have heard and believed that Pearl Harbor was a false flag that FDR used to pull America into WWII. Stinnett goes through the lurid details of how it is nearly impossible to escape that conclusion. We had cracked the codes. Those out of the loop were screaming at the tops of their lungs about the risk, but FDR and his inner circle made sure that the high command at Pearl Harbor never got the memos. Stinnett gives FDR latitude about making such a tough call during a difficult period in history. He seemed unaware of the details outlined by Diana West, Michael Malice, Sean McMeekin, and Robert Stinnett suggesting FDR lacked a moral compass.

New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America by Burton Folsom Jr.^{ref 18}

I had to finish off my examination of FDR once and for all. Given that he came off as such a dickweed in the books above, I had to backtrack to understand his role in the Great Depression. From the title you could imagine this being a right-of-center diatribe against left-of-center politics and the emerging Welfare State. It is not. Folsom describes a highly flawed, incompetent person with a horrendous compulsive lying streak that discovered his one and only gift: politics. The stimulus plans of the 1930s were a gigantic grift for his cronies, all for the purpose of amassing and maintaining power. The author does an excellent job of providing compelling stories of how the New Deal interventions prolonged and worsened what should have been a self-correcting economic downturn. And who do you imagine was in the middle of this economic fiasco? Harry Hopkins. It is a short, easy, and compelling read about a beloved president who is easily argued to be the most overrated in history. (For the record, I have noted previously that Herbert Hoover might have been the most underrated.)

The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity by Naomi Wolf and Amy Kelly.^{ref 19}

Naomi Wolf was at Ground Zero of the FOIA request that forced Pfizer to give up all its nearly one million pages of documentation regarding the Covid-19 vaccine trial and launch. She put out a call for help and was overwhelmed by volunteer doctors and scientists—3200 in all. Enter Amy Kelly who was an operations expert and organized the troops like a Roman Legion. This compilation of the basic takehome messages is not an easy read—quite dry actually—and nearly impossible to get all but a thumbnail sketch in audio format because of the relentless references to the accompanying PDF. Despite rave reviews, this is more of a reference book than a reading book. I forced my way through it nonetheless. You get the complete story of all the anomalous strokes, cancers, blood clots, heart damage, and normally rare diseases. The particularly horrifying part is evidence of profound destruction to female reproduction systems as the vaccine concentrated in the ovaries. Miscarriages and still births were especially well documented. Pfizer had this legalistic way of saying “there were no new safety issues”, which is code for “we already knew that so all those mamed and dead guys are old news.” It will be years before we understand the full impact of the vaccine, but the truth will be public because scientists in other countries are not wedded to the narrative as much as the US pharma-industrial complex. I believe that the vaccine and restrictions on proper healthcare (including Ivermectin therapy) may have been more damaging and fatal than Covid-19. Pfizer and the FDA knew about everything. Key players—possibly hundreds of them—should be put in front of grand juries and tried for crimes against humanity. Fortunately, tens of thousands of court cases are moving along, albeit slowly.

Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age by Naomi Wolf.^{ref 20}

I expected this to be a detailed account about Naomi’s trek through the Pfizer papers (see above). This is a story about the transformation of a pinko, commie, leftist, putty-headed city slicker limousine liberal—OK, maybe that is a bit overstated—to a small-town, gun-toting, bible-thumping anti-vaxxer doing interviews with Steve Bannon (when he’s not in prison) and Tucker Carlson. She even ended up marrying a special forces soldier. This transformation will be familiar to those who did not vaccinate. (Yes. I am a vaxxed anti-vaxxer who will never get another vaccine.) She describes how her community, coworkers, and comrades turned against her and and how none attempted to rebuild burnt bridges. So she created a whole new life for herself. Unfortunately, society in general and families in particular are still suffering under the rubble of burnt bridges. This was not a book that makes you smarter nor increases your chances of getting rich on Jeopardy, but it was an easy listen.

Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails by Sheryl Attkisson.^{ref 21}

Who needs yet another Covid-19 book, right? Well, Sharyl has street creds as a reporter for CBS News for over 25 years and spilling serious ink covering the biomedical news. She knows this world, has the contacts, and I consider her a very honest reporter. In short, Follow the Science blends perspectives akin to John Abramson’s Sickening, RFK, Jr.s The Real Anthony Fauci, and Aaron Kheriaty’s The New Abnormal, all of which were excellent reads. Although it was a bit of an answer key for those of us living in these rabbit holes for five years and who have lost our trust of Big Pharma’s motives and business models, I still found it very entertaining and enlightening. The criminality of the industry comes through loud and clear. The narrative also dives into the Gender Wars with a focus on the treatments to facilitate gender transitions and their serious side effects. I checked for critics at Amazon, and there were none. Read it for your health.

Witness to a Prosecution: The Myth of Michael Milken by Richard Sandler.^{ref 22}

This book was recommended to me by Anthony Pompliano, and it did not disappoint. Any boomer will tell you what a complete scoundrel Michael Milken was. Milken and Ivan Boesky inflicted their evil greed on unsuspecting victims in the junk bond market throughout the 1980s. The author—Milken’s lawyer hailing from Stanford Law School and friend of many decades—offers a convincing alternative view that Milken is not bad, egomaniacal, greedy, or even guilty of the crimes charged. Boesky—the real crook—cut a deal to get a light sentence by throwing Milken and his compatriots at Drexel Burnham Lambert under the bus. Once that deal was cut, the DOJ had to get Milken to save face. Milken invented the junk bond market, filling an important niche giving companies access to capital that were previously locked out of the capital markets. The hero of the story is the rookie judge who, over the many years that the case played out, slowly but surely found a way to mitigate some of the unfairness. Maybe the author duped the readers, but the real plot is a timeless description of what happens when the raw power of the State comes after you. Nothing will protect you. It is a timely read as we witness the weaponization of the Department of Justice against political adversaries and Deplorables. It reminds me of why I so detest Merrick Garland and the Soros-funded prosecutors that form the core of the Biden DOJ. I checked the negative reviews at Amazon and found them uncompelling.

63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read by Jesse Ventura.^{ref 23}

I should have known that to expect this author to capture my imagination was naïve. I thought the vignettes would be entertaining and reveal what is behind the government paywalls, but they really don’t go anywhere. Despite the 4.4-star rating from almost 1,400 reviews, I gave up halfway through. Save your money and, more importantly, your precious reading time by skipping this one.

Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism by Scott Horton.^{ref 24}

I ran across a podcast featuring Scott Horton discussing US foreign policy and was so impressed by him that I binged a few podcasts only to discover I had done one with him in 2018 on the fake Skripal poisoning by the Rooskies.^{ref 25} Go figure. This 2021 treatise is scholarly and brutally detailed with a focus on US foreign policy largely in the Middle East. It is a challenging read because the names and details don’t stick despite the dozen or so books I had read previously on this geopolitically important and mysterious region of the world. One should view it as an impressionist painting: ignore the brush strokes and absorb the big picture. You cannot possibly escape the conclusion that US foreign policy has been a total cluster fuck. As I am editing this, we are bombing Syria: why? There was an ongoing joke within the Deep State that CIA-sponsored rebels were now battling Pentagon-sponsored rebels. We would arm a tribe to fight their neighbors and then arm their neighbors to fight back. Despite paying attention over the years, I was still stunned at how many wildly ridiculous brawls leading to millions of deaths have occurred, especially since September 11, 2001. It has been my suspicion that US foreign policy in the region is simple: make sure no one country in the region becomes a politically stable, coherent force. As a Goldwater conservative and Reagan republican who voted for George W. Bush once, I would be hard pressed to name a war since the early 19^th century that was fully justified and not secretly instigated by us. What we are doing now, however, is end-of-empire behavior. A criticism found on Amazon is the lack of source citations, which is something I would not catch listening to the audiobook, but Scott is highly respected by people I highly respect.

The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation by Victor Davis Hanson.^{ref 26}

I’ve seen Hanson criticized as a classical Straussian conservative, but he is grounded and lucid. By looking at the total collapse of four empires—Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan—you are forced to draw some critical conclusions. First, the stories that we are told in school are not even close to accurate. The Aztecs thought the conquistadores were gods for about two days, Cortez was an administrator rather than a warrior, and disease played a lesser role than many say. The Aztecs fell because of inferior technology and bizarre strategies that obsessed over capturing rather than killing. All four empires appeared to be unbeatable and fell in breathtakingly short order. Most disturbingly, the attackers began each conflict to simply conquer their opponents but then realized that they would never be safe unless they exterminated them. One does not want to be on the receiving end of an extermination.

None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen and Larry Abraham.^{ref 27}

This is a very short and controversial read. It is a view of the American Experiment through the lens of those who attribute many historical events to nefarious powers (bankers, for example). I am guessing that the one-star critics at Amazon, some taking serious time to refute assertions in the book, have valid points. Focusing on the power structure—the international bankers—will naturally bring accusations of antisemitism; the Rothschilds in conjunction with the Rockefellers certainly controlled enormous wealth. Unfortunately, the author steps over the line and goes full antisemite. With that said, if you can ignore that and accept that the book offers partial truths, it is an interesting read. Somewhere between the mainstream presentations and this book probably lies the truth. I was willing to listen to this book’s lopsided presentation because it presented ideas that I had not heard before and eerily seemed to dovetail with books I read this year from potentially more credible authors. The assertion that Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky had strong support from the West from the very start and that the mainstream media acted as a propaganda machine to hide the atrocities has held up as worthy of our (my) consideration as to why.

Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans by Peter Schweizer.^{ref 28}

Peter is an accomplished sleuth and a prolific writer of books on the corruption of politics by money. Previous books that I have read include Clinton Cash and Red Handed. Peter focuses on the control of American society by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). His message is not so much the quantities of cash but the Sun-Tsu-like mechanisms used, including generic bribes, organized protests designed to disrupt society, and Chinese fingerprints all over the messages coming out of Academia, Hollywood, and social media. No single example is the smoking gun, but the breadth and persistence of the propaganda requires the attention. He digs into China’s role in shaping our Covid-19 response. A eye-catching message is that if you are witnessing a large protest, it is sponsored by somebody with wealth and power almost without exception. We are being played. Unfortunately, our politicians are so easily bribed that the pushback against China’s propaganda machine is almost non-existent. Schweitzer’s book dovetails well with Robert Spaulding’s Stealth War, which digs into the military-like tactics of the CCP to weaponize everything. For those with an eye toward the 2028 elections, Gavin Newsom, donning that 80s pornstar look, gets hammered for his CCP connections.

The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense by Gad Saad.^{ref 29}

I’ve had the pleasure of a chatting with Gad after a seminar at Cornell. He was funny and compelling. Gad takes on the culture wars that have pushed the campus left to the extreme left while muzzling the campus right. His wisdom accrued as an evolutionary psychologist shines through as he describes the tribalism. (I like to challenge people to ponder an experiment: walk around a campus with a Biden/Harris/Sanders hat on, and then repeat that with Trump’s MAGA hat and see how long it takes for conflict to erupt.) Gad’s understanding of Islam and his sarcastic wit add to his skill as an orator. The one-star reviews are not completely nuts but seem to reject the notion that a book can be like an op-ed. He convinced me that, although I in no way keep my mouth shut on tricky topics, I could speak out more. I disagree with one point: he said he was horrified at how “woke” Cornell has gotten since he earned his PhD decades ago. I reminded him that a WWII veteran returning to Cornell in the late 1960s would have confronted a far more horrific shock to their psyche.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson.^{ref 30}

I have friends who shorted Tesla and got their asses handed to them. They probably have not read this book. A one-star reviewer opened with, “This book is somewhat enjoyable if you want to learn more about Elon.” Why else would you read a biography? Others criticize the favorable slant. One reviewer complained that Isaacson was “pulled into Musk’s orbit.” I, however, really enjoyed this book. Isaacson writes great biographies faster than I can read them. The ones I have read include Steve Jobs, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin (my least favorite), and Leonardo Da Vinci. He must have an army of assistants (kind of like Edison). Isaacson describes a remarkable and remarkably quirky individual on some spectrum in a galaxy that is unfamiliar to me. His quirks are hysterical. Musk has the drive of Steve Jobs without being confined by perfectionism; Musk finds ways to cut corners and costs. I had profoundly underestimated the implications of SpaceX. By contrast, I believe the world has overestimated the implications of Tesla, which causes me to sympathize with the short sellers. If I read this book 40 years ago it might have altered how I ran my research program (despite lacking Elon’s intellectual firepower). In the current political stage, I pray that Musk is given the power to prune government. Nobody could be better suited for the job.

Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better by Lyn Alden.^{ref 31}

I’ve had the pleasure of spending some time with Lyn. She is coldly analytical about everything. I asked her what percentage of the book was about just banking, and she said, “65–70%.” The rest is about Bitcoin. Even economically literates would gain from her delineation of how banking works. The section on Bitcoin is quite analytical, which causes it to not suffer the foolish ideas proffered by those with a shakey grasp of the subject but still intend to become filthy rich. I am not a hodler convert, but I continue to pay attention. One critic said, “It’s clear that this book is the work of a Bitcoin evangelist.” I disagree: Lyn seems to understand the risk-reward relationships.