STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC

The internet has made a 180 degree turn from what it was at its beginning. That’s not a good thing. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

The net result of these perverse incentives is an Internet that is increasingly toxic and untrustworthy.

Perverse incentives are funny things. Even though we know they’re harming us, we can’t stop pursuing them because the refusal harms us, too, as we’re excluded from the system.

Perverse incentives have come to dominate our lives, but slowly enough that we now accept this immiseration as “the way it is” / normal / inescapable. Let’s start with the Internet, which dominates our lives in two ways: 1) as the infrastructure that enables the entire digital realm we depend on for the majority of our transactions and processes, and 2) the engrenages / gearing of our zeitgeist: how we communicate, gather information, learn and amuse / entertain ourselves.

One advantage of being active in the early days of the Internet is we experienced a completely different World Wide Web than those who have only experienced the current version dominated by perverse incentives.

In its initial incarnation, the Web was not ruled by algorithms extracting wealth by collecting and selling every bit of information from our activity online. To post content, you needed a domain name / DNS and a host for your website. Search engines (Google) tracked incoming and outgoing links between sites, and assigned a page rank based on the number and quality of the incoming links to your site.

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Senator Rand Paul inherited his father’s independence and integrity. From Paul at responsiblestatecraft.org:

No provision in the Constitution allows the president to unilaterally bomb another nation’s capital and remove its leader

I take a back seat to no one in my disdain and loathing of state-sponsored socialism.

In fact, I wrote a book, The Case Against Socialism, describing the historic link between socialism, communism and state-sponsored violence.

I wish the people of Venezuela well and sincerely hope they will not repeat the mistake of electing the type of socialist regime that has plagued that nation since the 1970s.

Whether or not socialism is evil, however, is not the debate today. The debate to about one question and one question only. Does the Constitution allow one man or one woman to take the nation to war without the approval of Congress? Full stop.

That question is bigger than regime change in Venezuela, bigger than any claims of the ends justifying the means, bigger even than the depredations and evils that multiple socialist autocrats have perpetrated upon the once great country of Venezuela.

Even those who celebrate the demise of the socialist, authoritarian regime in Venezuela, as I do, should give pause to granting the power to initiate war to one man. The power to initiate war is so vast a power that it must be confined by checks and balances.

The debate today would not be happening if our leaders read and understood the Federalist Papers. The constitutional power to initiate war is placed squarely on the shoulders of Congress.

Current congressional leaders squirm and would like to shift the burden of initiating war to the President. Less than courageous members of Congress fall all over themselves to avoid taking responsibility, to avoid the momentous vote of declaring war.

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There are a lot of unanswered questions from Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Candace Owens has been relentlessly digging for answers. From Ginny Garner at lewrockwell.com:

Those who hope to stop the organic grassroots citizen sleuth investigation into the Charlie Kirk assassination are using the Marxist tactic of discrediting one individual, Candace Owens, attempting to create the illusion that she is the only person who doesn’t believe the “fed slop”- her term – of the official narrative.

Owens has the largest audience of any independent journalist investigating the murder, but even if she wasn’t taking action there would be still be many others looking into the tragic event, and the number of people interested in finding out the truth of what happened is increasing.

Candace’s many detractors like Alex Jones are focusing on one of the stories Candace has broken  – a meeting at Fort Huachuca – and using the legal strategy of “false in one thing, false in everything.” It is an attempt to discredit Owens and the possibility that the official narrative is wrong and make it seem this is the only thing she has discovered. The strategy is to make it appear that if one point is wrong, every other detail must be disregarded.

The Fort Huachuca meeting has not been discredited and she has revealed many interesting anomalies and raised many questions. I have watched all of her podcasts since Charlie was murdered but hadn’t kept a written list of all of everything she came up with. Luckily Candace made a list of the evidence she has presented and the stories she has broken. She is getting help from tipsters all over the world including podcasters such as Ian Carroll and Baron Coleman. The person who posted this segment of her podcast on X, Project Constitution, has broken many scoops on the assassination himself.

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“Any of Trump’s MAGA supporters who continue to support Trump in 2026 are proving themselves to be more the tyrants than those on the Left whom they have accused of being tyrants. Tyranny is tyranny whether it is shouted from under a flag, from inside the Oval Office or from behind a pulpit.” From Chuck Baldwin at lewrockwell.com:

“Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”

President Ronald Reagan

The American people must face it: The U.S. Constitution is dead. The Bill of Rights is dead. The rule of law is dead. Federalism is dead. The American experiment of self-government is dead. The Monroe Doctrine has been replaced with the Donroe Doctrine—a gross perversion of James Monroe’s magnificent manifesto of peace, independence and national sovereignty.

G.W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and especially Donald Trump have turned our constitutional republic into a Banana Republic. Trump is not a president; he is a dictator—and a mad dictator at that. In many respects, he is not unlike the emperors of Rome. And our national Congress is almost identical to the Roman senate: utterly meaningless and worthless to the maintenance of law in the face of naked aggression by the chief executive.

Scottish podcaster George Galloway recently referred to Trump as Caligula—and his historical analogy might not be far off.

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You don’t think China cutting off American ally Japan’s vital rare-earths has anything to do with Trump cutting off Venezuelan oil bound for China, do you? From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Going all the back to November 7, when Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi first provoked outrage in China by suggesting that Japanese Defense Forces could militarily defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, there’s been a steady spiraling in relations between Tokyo and Beijing. First, China’s punitive measures took place merely on the tourism, culture, and diplomatic fronts – also with some limited economic measures such as halting its exports of seafood from Japan. 

New action was also unveiled at not more than a weekly pace, or even monthly – but now after it’s been several months with no retraction and formal apology by Takaichi (demanded by Beijing), the screws are tightening on a daily basis. After this week barring Japan from dual use items (anything with military-civilian application), China has begun depriving Japan of rare earth minerals and rare earth magnets – which could have immediate impact on Japanese companies involved in components for global chip makers, and also hitting the defense and auto sectors. It will be felt by Japanese companies involved in advanced electronics, aviation components, drones and nuclear-related tech.

This sends a resoundingly clear signal to the US as well, after Beijing already moved to cut off rare-earth exports to American companies last year – and Trump blinked first by backing off his trade war with China, and now Beijing is ready and willing to apply the same leverage to close US regional ally Japan.

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Gee, might this have been a retaliation strike? It’s certainly a reminder to Trump that Russia has weapons against which the U.S. cannot defend. From Simplicius at simplicius76.substack.com:

It has happened for only the second time of the war: the Russian Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile dubbed the Oreshnik was launched from the Kapustin Yar range toward Lvov, again providing the world with an eerie spectacle:

[see article for videos of the Oreshnik strike]

It is being reported that Europe’s largest underground gas storage facility was hit:

According to preliminary data, the main target was the strategic underground Bilche-Volytsko-Uherske gas storage facility in Stryi — its capacity accounts for over 50% of all Ukrainian gas storage facilities.

It is assumed that the “Oreshnik” (or another missile) flew from Astrakhan to Lviv in 10–15 minutes — covering about 1,800 km at a speed of 10,000 km/h

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From Steve Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” The iron law of history is that might makes right has always failed, later or often sooner. The betting favorite is Trump will be in the sooner group. From Patrick Lawrence at thefloutist.com:

Post–Gaza, post–Venezuela, ours is a world ruled by power alone.

It all mattered, once. Montesquieu. (Wikimedia Commons.)

8 JANUARY—It is a long time now since the paying-attention among us began speaking of the fundamental lawlessness of our time. It was the Israelis who prompted this discourse, as readers will easily recall, by way of their daily barbarities against the Palestinians of Gaza after the events of 7 October 2023. The Western powers compounded the shock of all that real-time savagery as they supported the Zionist terror machine—militarily, materially, politically, legally, diplomatically. Alon Mizrahi, the Arab Jew who left Israel in protest three autumns ago, afterward made the point severally in The Mizrahi Perspective, his Substack newsletter: This is what comes when a people are told that however atrocious their conduct toward others, however great their crimes, there will never be any consequence. Totalized impunity: In two words, this was Mizrahi’s preoccupation.

As 2025 drew mercifully to a close, I sat to share some observations concerning law and its perversion or absence or opposite—American law, European law, international law—with the Zionist regime much in mind. The world’s most lawless state had just de-recognized the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which bears primary responsibility for the welfare of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan, so stripping UNRWA of diplomatic immunity while sequestering its finances, blocking its supplies of electricity and water, and seizing its offices in East Jerusalem.

The Israelis also barred 37 aid organizations from the Gaza Strip, including—some big names here—the French, Belgian, and Spanish affiliates of Médecins sans Frontières, Mercy Corps, the International Rescue Committee. As John Whitbeck, the tireless Parisian blogger, put it in response, “Israel’s finding a new way, virtually every day, to flaunt its contempt for the United Nations, international law, and human decency.” With the move against UNRWA, it is indeed clear the Israelis intend to destroy the U.N. and all it stands for as completely as the world lets it. And so to a second source of outrage: It looks so far as if the world is going to let it.

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h/t The Burning Platform

It would be better for the government if Kennedy wasn’t pushing healthy food. Healthy food leads to healthier people and longer lives. The government could reduce its Social Security and Medicare liabilities if people just continued to eat crap and didn’t live so long. From Jenna McCarthy at jennasside.rocks:

Big Additive is apoplectic; experts are concerned; your grandma is vindicated.

In a shocking development that’s left cereal mascots sweating through their marshmallow suits, the U.S. government has released new dietary guidelines that—brace yourselves—recommend eating actual food.

Not food-like substances. Not “fortified” rainbow pellets shaped like horseshoes. Not former-foods stripped of anything resembling nutrition or flavor or reengineered to somehow be we-promise-you-healthier than what the Divine Chef designed.

Food-food.

On the new menu: Meat. Dairy. Fats. Fruits. Vegetables. Nuts. Olives. Avocados. The kind of stuff humans accidentally survived on for millennia before being told that breakfast should be sponsored by General Mills.

Understandably, chaos ensued.

After all, even though it’s how our grandparents and their grandparents and their grandparents ate, it’s also the exact opposite of the advice America’s been given for more than half a century. As a young adult learning to feed myself, I was trained on the Food Guide Pyramid—which recommended six to eleven servings of bread, cereal, rice or pasta a day. Every single day. (I don’t think I currently eat that in a month.) If you had any room left after carb-loading your weight in processed crap, you were free to enjoy some scrambled egg whites and maybe a nice cup of nonfat yogurt.

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“Bundy and Trump, Joe Biden and Bibi Netanyahu, and their minions, are murderers all. Murder is what defines them; it’s their defining feature. Except that the last three delegated mass murder to the mercenaries of a military. Bundy did the deeds himself.” From ILana Mercer at unz.com:

Trump is a second-rate gangster and he hates it. He wants to be Bibi.

The fuss and feathers over Trump’s foreign policy is silly, childish. It attests to what happens to the minds of men when they view the very public mass murder of The Other—committed by their Leader —as unrelated to their own moral integrity and future welfare: the brain goes to mush. Or perhaps it was the size of a lentil to begin with.

In the mind of the minimally moral, minimally compos mentis American—”America First” and genocide ought to be two mutually exclusive categories.

Here’s a useful clue: If your politician of choice, going into an election, supports genocide or is silent about genocide; he’s not your friend. You ought to be smart enough, in possession of the very basic moral faculties—having reached a rudimentary development of conscience—to make that minuscule determination.

Has mommy not taught you that murder is wrong and that no mass murderer and congenital thief is your friend? Alas, the decay of the American Mind is such that Trump’s fans are apoplectic—and one or two has texted me in tears: “America First, Ilana; what-oh-what has happened to it?”

How the fuck should I know? Did I vote for Trump in 2024? No! For the reasons cited, I registered a protest vote for Jill Stein, whose foreign policy—from Israel to Latin America—is perfection.

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