Thinking Trump can do no wrong is as deranged as thinking he can do no right. From Leo Hohmann at leohohmann.substack.com:

I have never seen a period in my lifetime where deception and dueling narratives were quite so intense as they are today.

Whether it’s the protests in Iran or the civil unrest in the U.S., you can literally find two polar-opposite reports of what’s going on, with online videos to support their case. It has been much the same with the situation in Venezuela and before that, Gaza.

One person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist and the parts are interchangeable.

The pressure to conform on either side of the dueling narratives is intensifying. That’s not by accident. The globalists fear a united America more than anything else. They love to drive wedges and hence all the pressure points are designed to create a bifurcated society that can’t agree on anything and becomes easily manipulated.

So those who refuse to be forced into either of the two “sides” will become the outcasts without a home. At least not an earthly home. Our home is in heaven and that’s where our allegiance lies. These folks are the real threats to the system because they judge right from wrong, constitutional from unconstitutional, according to sources outside of the left-right paradigm. As long as you operate from within that paradigm, you are a threat to no one. You are not at all dangerous to the advancing New World Order.

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The Federal Reserve is a crime. Its under-construction headquarters may be a crime on top of a crime. From Sundance at theconservativetreehouse.com:

Regardless of how you feel about the Federal Reserve Board, I think we would all agree the construct of an autonomous central bank is outside the boundaries of our constitutional framework.  Factually, the Sea Island financial group set up the Federal Reserve as a system of control over the U.S. economy that was completely unnecessary.

That same ultra-constitutional mindset of omnipotent power permeates the recent statements by FED Chair Jerome Powell, who now attempts to evade a Dept of Justice investigation by hiding behind the ruse of his non-elected office.

Last year, facing ridiculous cost overruns, Congress questioned Powell over the insane spending proposal by Powell for a new office building.  Chairman Powell characterized the construction changes, that escalated the cost of the project from $1.9 billion to $2.5 billion, as ‘minor modifications.’  That’s $2.5 billions of taxpayer money.

A referral to the Dept of Justice was made [SEE HERE] following Powell’s testimony.  Things got ugly quickly when President Trump, a builder and renovator himself, took exception with the scale and scope of the ridiculous spending plan.

In an effort to both use his office as a defense, and simultaneously weaponize the power of his position, Jerome Powell waits until Sunday evening to announce he is being investigated by the DOJ [SEE HERE], and then he claims it is political targeting.

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There’s actually a pretty well-defined decay function for organizational lifespans. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Nobody believes that “doing more of what’s failed” will actually fail, because to date it’s only made insiders rich.

Why Is Everything Such a Hot Mess? Let’s summarize the consensus views.

1. Sociopaths are in charge. There are two options: A) the sociopaths gained power through official, legitimate means such as elections or royal bloodlines, or B) the real web of power is hidden from public view and operates behind the screen of official authority.

2. Alternatively, the system itself is sociopathic and so it doesn’t matter who’s in power, as the system elevates sociopaths to power by its very nature.

Yes, there are sociopaths and yes, there are conspiracies. Every corporate price-fixing scheme is a conspiracy that is consciously organized to benefit the few at the expense of the many and protect the conspirators from any negative consequences.

These are the defining traits of every conspiracy: pull hidden strings of power for private gain (more power, more wealth, etc.) and moat the conspirators from any consequences.

In this view, if we replaced the sociopaths who gained power and exposed the conspirators / hidden web of power to consequences, then we could restore legitimacy, stability and functionality to the system.

The alternate view is: since the system itself is sociopathic, the only way to restore legitimacy, stability and functionality is to change the system from the ground up: change the structure of power, oversight, incentives, the whole ball of wax.

In a conspiracy, those organizing the hidden web of power know it’s wrong which is why they must hide it: exposure means ruin because the system still has the capacity to punish fraud, exploitation, abuse of power, etc. When the system itself is illegitimate and dysfunctional, then those rising up the ladder to positions of power don’t see it as wrong; it’s simply BAU–Business As Usual, the way things work and have always worked.

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It’s revealing to compare Trump’s foreign policy during his first term to that of his second term. From Jack Hunter at theamericanconservative.com:

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, Donald Trump and Rand Paul were aligned on foreign policy.

On Wednesday, Senator Lindsey Graham wished Senator Rand Paul a happy birthday.

“To Senator (Rand Paul), Happy Birthday!” Graham posted on X. “I hope today is full of family, friends and good cheer.”

The South Carolina Republican added, “Oh by the way, as a birthday present we have seized yet another oil tanker trying to transport sanctioned Venezuelan oil. I hear Russia isn’t too happy.”

“Next year to celebrate, maybe we can do a golf outing to Venezuela and Cuba!” he added. “Should be good to go by then.”

He was celebrating Donald Trump’s military actions in and around Venezuela, including cashiering the nation’s President Nicolas Maduro and potentially changing the entire regime—something Graham wants to see replicated in Cuba.

The birthday boy responded.

“Thanks for the B-day greetings (Lindsey Graham),” Paul replied. “Replacing one socialist with another in Venezuela doesn’t bode well for golf though. Luxuries like golf flourish only under capitalism.”

Paul was referring to Venezuela’s new interim president, the hardline socialist Delcy Rodriguez, a key ally of the ousted Maduro.

Paul has long been outspoken against regime-change wars and the need for congressional approval for the U.S. to go to war, and has warned about the long-term, negative, unforeseen effects and results of war.

Trump now goes to war without Congress specifically to change regimes and doesn’t seem worried about the aftermath. Graham absolutely loves this, and seems almost orgasmic over the prospects of a war in Cuba, which he might get.

It wasn’t always this way.

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Trump’s Venezuelan caper was nothing new. Even the propaganda used to justify it has been used before. From Donald Jeffries at donaldjeffries.substack.com:

American Exceptionalism Gone Wild

Donald Trump has finally done it. Earned the respect of The New York Times and other powerful organs of our state controlled media. CNN unquestioningly parrots the line that “the U.S. runs Venezuela.” So, let’s get this straight- we abducted the leader of another sovereign nation, bombed them, but it wasn’t an act of war. It was justified.

Don’t suggest that this is something new. Sure, Trumpenstein’s bombastic theatrical personality makes it seem that way. But this goes back to at least 1953, when the CIA ousted Iran’s prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. True, they didn’t literally kidnap him and his wife, but the leader of another sovereign nation was removed from power. By our leaders, none of whom were Iranian. The next year, Jacobo Arbenz was forced to flee from his position as leader of Guatemala, with a little help from the CIA. In 1960, the CIA made possible pan-Africanist Congo prime minister Patrice Lumumba’s assassination. The Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo was the next assassination victim of our government, in 1961. On November 1, 1963, the CIA engineered the murder of South Vietnam leader Ngo Diem, an act which outraged and deeply disturbed President John F. Kennedy, only three weeks before he met his fate in Dallas. Chile’s Salvador Allende fell to the CIA in 1973. Now, that’s a track record.

Of course, Americans found out during the 1975 Church Committee hearings in the Senate, that the CIA had comically tried to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro repeatedly during the early 1960s. Acting like Control agents from the TV show Get Smart, they were stupendously unsuccessful. Well, nobody’s perfect. In 1989, George H.W. Bush’s military invaded Panama, for the purpose of overthrowing one time U.S. asset Manuel Noriega, wanted for racketeering and drug trafficking. Any Venezuelans reading this may notice a familiar theme. The Pentagon estimated that 516 Panamanians, including over 200 civilians, were killed during the ludicrously named Operation Just Cause. This was the start of all those Orwellian names our government continues to glorify its murders and occupations with. Noriega was shockingly convicted in one of our illustrious courts of justice, and would serve thirty years in prison. It pays to not to hang out with the wrong crowd. Like the U.S. government.

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A uniformity of U.S. regime change operations is that the regime changed is always bad, and the people are always 100 percent against it. From Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed at thegrayzone.substack.com:

As deadly riots burn Iranian cities, Western media ignores the shocking wave of violence, turning instead to US government-funded NGOs for data. The one-sided portrayal has helped push Trump to the brink of authorizing renewed US attacks.

Western media has ignored a growing trove of video evidence showing terrorist tactics deployed across Iran by protesters described by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as “largely peaceful.” Recent videos published both by Iranian state media and anti-government forces reveal public lynchings of unarmed guards, the torching of mosques, arson attacks on municipal buildings, marketplaces and fire stations, and mobs of armed gunmen opening fire in the heart of Iranian cities.

Instead, Western media has focused almost exclusively on violence attributed to the Iranian government. In doing so, they have primarily relied on death counts compiled by Iranian diaspora groups funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the regime change arm of the US government, and whose boards of directors are filled with committed neoconservatives.

The NED has taken credit for advancing the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests which filled Iranian cities throughout 2023 – and which also featured gruesome acts of violence ignored by Western media and human rights NGOs. Today, the NED is far from alone among the intelligence-aligned actors seeking to fuel the chaos inside Iran.

The Israeli spying and assassination agency known as Mossad issued a message from its official Farsi language account on Twitter/X urging Iranians to escalate their regime change activities, pledging that it would be supporting them on the ground.

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h/t The Burning Platform

h/t el gato malo

If you’re buying gold, get the real thing, the stuff you can hold in your hand. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

Recently, a reader of International Man responded to an IM article regarding the danger of trusting banks (or anyone, for that matter) to hold gold in their names. He said, “How would a bank sell gold to a client and the client not take delivery? This seems strange to me.”

For those of us who have held gold for decades and have therefore had the advantage of watching the gold market develop with a seemingly endless number of permutations of ownership, the answer might seem obvious. However, his question is a reminder that there exists a great variance in the level of knowledge as to what, on the surface, seems to be a simple act – buying gold.

To those who are new to gold ownership (and I believe their numbers will soon be increasing exponentially), it would seem perfectly reasonable that gold could be purchased as simply as buying any commodity. If, for example, someone were to want to buy an apple, he would simply go to the grocery store and pay the price marked on the apple bin. If, however, he wanted quite a lot of apples, he might go to several stores and have a look at the prices marked, then choose the lowest price. Looked at from this perspective, it seems perfectly reasonable that the purchase of gold would not be significantly more complicated.

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There are a lot of things about AI and EVs that don’t make sense. The hype is starting to give way. From T.L. Davis at tldavis.com:

For a long time artificial intelligence (AI) has smacked of a bit too cute, a toy, a supercharged Alexa; great at disbursing already established knowledge, but incapable of any real innovation. It seems, like Covid or climate change, irrationally accepted without serious examination. For the best analysis of this that I’ve read, Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic explains in this post.

This goes along with something I just read that the big financial backers of AI were abandoning it in favor of compliance. I don’t know what that means, exactly, or how it is likely to be the new AI, but that’s what I heard. So, the money train is switching tracks and a lot of people are going to be left behind with little more than Alexa-plus.

The failures of AI are well expressed in the Robert Gore post, but my concern comes from the idea that the virus of thought has already infected the US Government, China and Russia and trillions will be spent trying to justify it long after everyone else has moved on, the way one is still encouraged to get the vaxx today, after the pitfalls have already been exposed.

My objection to AI has always been logistical and skeptical. First, the amount of energy needed to power huge data centers is not available now, nor will it be a decade from now. The fear put into the US Government, and Trump specifically, is that China and/or Russia would be ahead of us in the race for AI supplemented weapons systems and hold a strategic advantage. To that degree, he might be right, because if AI can do anything, it is the correlation of already existing knowledge like specific targets, ranges, coordinates, etc., but that’s not how it’s being sold to the public. It’s being sold on ideas that cannot happen.

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