Trump

Finally, some sensible cause and effect analysis of the Ukraine conflict.

March 1, 2022 Incoherent ramblings , , , , , , , , , , ,

When you see the media all moving in lock step beating the drums of war, it’s clear that there’s a heavy propaganda element to the story, and that there must be deeper issues at play.  It seemed obvious to me that there was surely US funded covert conflict undergirding this story, as has been repeatedly been the case in so many other world conflicts.

I’ve not been going out of my way to ferret out that info, but it was inevitable that some would eventually cross my path.  I’m sure there will be more, but here’s one little bit of the story:

Ep. 2074 Russia, Ukraine, and NATO

This was, in my judgment, a sensible cause and effect analysis on the Ukraine conflict, that doesn’t just try to paint things as a reaction to NATO incursion (which is surely some part of the story.)

In that interview, Tom Wood’s guest, Gilbert Doctorow, expounds on two specific points that are significant.  The first is that there has been an informal undeclared war against the Russian Ukrainian states for 8 years (with active shelling of Ukrainian/Russian civilians in those areas, and explicit disregard for the existing negotiated treaties).  The second point is that the Ukrainian President’s recently declared his intent to start a Ukrainian nuclear weapons program.

In addition to those points, recall that psychopathic elements in the US government and power broker circles financed a coup in the Ukraine for the tune of $5 Billion dollars in 2014 (Obama era).  Some of that financing went to literal NeoNazis! We have multiple generations of US government corruption in play, with Trump keeping up the game by coordinating US weapon sales to Ukraine, and with Biden’s family playing money laundering games (and who knows what else) in the region.

I’m not excusing Putin and the psychopathic elements that surely also exist on the Russian side. There is plausible reporting on Putin’s use of bombing or attempting to bomb his own people in Moscow to justify the Chechen war. It takes a special kind of evil to kill your own people to justify killing other people. There’s also considerable reporting on the disappearing of and deaths of Russian reporters and dissidents. I’d be very surprised if there was not truth to a considerable portion of that reporting given Putin’s KGB origin story.  Putin is not a good guy in this story, even if there is unreported rationale for his actions.

It takes a lot of work to get a full scale conflict to play out, and this one is big enough that apparently everybody seems to have simultaneously forgotten all the covid fear mongering, and government and medical tyranny of the last two years. One thing that we can be certain of, is that a lot of people will make money from this war and the financial gouging that is enabled by it, regardless of the extent that it is taken.

Lots of people on both sides will die, as powerful factions on both sides profit from the chaos.

Two more books dispatched: Art of the Deal, and Deception Point.

August 3, 2019 Incoherent ramblings, Reviews , , , ,

I’ve been working hard to take down my backlog of books to read, and have now finished two more.

1) Trump’s: The Art of the Deal.

Other possible alternate titles for this book would be “How I financed my projects at others’ expense using  tax rebates and other tricks”, and “How I used PR to get what I want.”  Reading this leaves you with the slightly nauseous feeling that you have after talking to a slimy used car salesman.  A lot of what was stated left me with the feeling that relevant facts were being omitted.  I’d like to see a fact checking “Coles Notes” for this book, and to look at how the projects that are named in the book are doing now.

I am inclined to enumerate all the people that Trump mentions in the book and dig into the relationships that Trump took the time to name drop in this book.  Trump’s pedophile buddy Epstein didn’t make the cut in the book, but Adnan Khashoggi did. A lot of the other names I didn’t recognize.

EDIT: here’s some backstory on the book.  Included in that article was one more interesting name drop, Roy Cohn, Trump’s lawyer.  That name may have been mentioned in the book, but if so, I didn’t recognize it when I read that part of the book.  With Epstein’s case reactivated, I now recognize Cohn’s name from Whitney Webb’s writing [1], [2] and her interview with Pierce Redmond.

2) Dan Brown’s: Deception point.

This book would be a lot better as a movie. Like a lot of Michael Crichton books, this one moves very fast, but is pretty shallow, as well as predictable and probably forgettable.  I did enjoy it, but it’s definitely not one to keep, and I intend to bring it to the second hand bookstore, or if they don’t want it, to the communal take-or-leave a book shelf at the recycling depot.

References

[1] Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case

[2] Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era

Political correctness

November 24, 2016 Incoherent ramblings , , , , , , , ,

I saw an article on facebook about some recent idiocy at Queen’s university.

The idiocy isn’t what is being dubbed a racist party, but the fact that a costume party is dubbed racist.

A comment on this (Leon) that I thought summed things up nicely was:

“It is people who criticize a bunch of kids dressing as racists who make incidents of real racism greatly diminished.”

There is an alarming trend of perverting language in the political correct circles that is mystifying

  • A kiss without a contract, triple signed and witnessed, is now being called rape, or it’s seeming legal equivalent “sexual assault”.  There are concent posters all over UofT that outline the legalistic contracting required for sexuality in this PC age.  I was too inhibited when I was an undergrad to have had much sexual activity, but I’m glad that I’m not an undergrad now subject to the current guidelines.  It’s definitely not okay to take advantage of somebody who is drunk, but this has been flipped on its head.  Sex after consentual codrunkenness now appears to be sexual assult in some places.
  • Failing to use the “correct” gendered pronoun is now “hate speech”, and is perceived as, or at least mislabelled as, explicit violence.  I’m a firm believer that people should have complete freedom to engage in hate speech or discrimination of any sort.  Let people dig themselves their own social graves instead of trying to legislate speech.
  • Costume parties, even at halloween, are now being mislabelled racist.  Attempting to point that out at some PC universities resulted in so much PC backlash that resignations followed.

I keep hearing about instance after instance of such events.  It seems like most of the people who are pushing the political correctness agenda really desperately need dictionaries.  Just because you can label two things as identical, doesn’t mean that they are.  A perfect example of this is the use of “sexual assault” now instead of rape.  The two are now identified as identical, even though sexual assault is a much broader term that includes groping.

There was lots in the recent US election media circus about how Trump’s bragging of pussy grabbing and aggressive kissing, acts that were facilitated by stardom.  One of the debate moderators explicitly called that sexual assault.  I don’t like the phrase sexual assault, because it is ambiguous, and has connotations of rape, while not necessarily being rape.  It seems to be a phrase designed to have the emotional impact of rape, while being something lesser.

Whether or not that Trump was bragging about sexual assault is probably dependent on state law.  Ambiguous language identifies unequal events with the same weight, and seems to be a characteristic of political correct speech and activism.  For example, calling pussy grabbing rape would be an obvious example of the misuse of language.  That’s why PC correct speech uses sexual assault instead.  A side effect of such PC correct speech is that actual rape, a horribly abusive event, is trivialized.  The irony in the Trump case was that the media could have focused on actual rape.  For example, Trump and his pedophile buddy Jeffrey Epstein, are codefendents in an actual rape case (which I understand has now unfortunately been dropped due to technicalities).  Characteristic of many of the charges laid against Epstein, this one is also of a child, in this case a 13 year old.

Of his buddy Epstein Trump said

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

It remains to see if Trump is a sexual predator on par with Bill Clinton.  My gut feeling why pussy grabbing got so much attention, but Trump’s case with Epstein did not was because Bill is also a good friend of Epstein, and had been down to Epstein’s pedophile island many times.  Raising attention to that would have distracted from Hillary’s campaign (perhaps even raised the issue that she’d also “partied” there, in ways currently unspecified).

I digress.

How can political correctness be combatted?  One way is calling out explicit misuse of language.  Be very careful to use accurate words, and not to conflate things in order to push an agenda.

Because the political correctness movement is anti-intellectual, I suspect that purely linguistic techniques to fighting it are doomed.  Are there active social techniques that would be effective?

I came up with one idea that I amused myself with.  Perhaps it is time to start hosting some explicitly politically incorrect parties, just to push back.  Imagine a Halloween party that you are not allowed into, unless you are offending some minority group.  Suggested costume ideas include Hilter, blackface, transvestites or red-indians.  If you aren’t insulting somebody, then you can’t come in.  If you don’t think that Hilter is offensive enough, perhaps the host would allow you in if you dressed as some other psychopathic killer like Kissinger or Churchill, but that risks turning the party into an political party instead of an anti-PC party.  Costume prize adjudication would be biased against those that are in a visible minority group, so you should get extra points if you are a cis gendered white male.  Bonus points to the hosts of the party should they hold it on a university campus.