Countenance Blog

Montgomery, Ala.

There’s a developing trope out there, and in fact, I can see that is already infecting our own sector, that needs to be refuted.

I’m going to set it up with a joke I heard a long time ago:

You know your kid is destined to be a Federal prosecutor if his or her first word is either conspiracy, attempted or furtherance.

The trope is that this indictment of the SPLC is underwhelming and therefore destined to fail.

The trope and those who are pushing it misunderstands the nature of the American Federal criminal prosecution.

The Feds heavily rely on process and inchoate offenses. For one, to make sure that the prosecution attempt doesn’t get knocked down for federalism slash tenth amendment, and for two, to make sure something sticks.

As an example, when the Feds indict a dope dealer, it’s not on the actual dope dealing. It will be “conspiracy to launder money via interstate commercial networks in the furtherance of the trade or transport of Federally scheduled substances,” or some such.

The reason the SPLC indictment seems underwhelming is the reason why most Federal indictments seem that way, because they don’t involve the big boom sexy legal matters. A lot of people are reading a lot of process and inchoate blah blah and mistaking it as a weak sauce case. When in reality, it’s a typical Federal case.

However, at least if you want to go by my decidedly non-qualified opinion, after reading the SPLC indictment, assuming the facts are all there, and there is no jury funny business, the DOJ has the SPLC dead to rights.

Washington, D.C.; London

“Nice” is all there is to this. It’s just “nice” to know, but apropos of nothing. Nice, but not special, and not profound.

In reality, nearly every living human being is the direct descendant of some hereditary monarch of the past, which means we wuz all kangz and queanz. Furthermore, 15th cousin is consanguinitely speaking basically nothing. In fact, if someone did some research, I bet they would find another path to a Trump-Charles relationship that is much closer than 15th cousins.

Someone back in 2016 did some digging and found that both Trump and Hillary Clinton are direct descendants of Edward III (1327-1377 reign) and the two of them were 16th cousins. It is estimated that 80% of current Britons are direct descendants of E-3. Which means that a majority of people that voted for either Trump or Hillary in 2016 are likewise.

Remember when it comes to things like this: The idea of who your relatives are is a relative concept, not an absolute concept. That’s why they’re called “relatives.” So the proper question is not if you and a given person are related or not, it’s how closely you’re related on the horizontal and/or vertical axes, and if whatever that result winds up being is close enough to matter to the given subject matter.

Washington, D.C.

My theory about last night is that nutbar made a bet that the security at any given White House Correspondents Dinner would be relatively lax, because who would ever think that anyone who would attend it would want to do a mass shooting or an assassination? Which means nutbar thought he could do a Usain Bolt past the relatively relaxed security and get into the ballroom and assassinate Trump or whoever.

Montgomery, Ala.; Washington, D.C.

Tell me I’m dreaming.

I knew the SPLC and the FBI were for a long time coordinating. That the FBI was using the SPLC for intel gathered in ways the FBI was not allowed, in exchange for the FBI having its informants engage in funny ways that would create fodder for the SPLC. That much came from actual academic work.

But I would have never thought that the SPLC would be or have ever been so stupid as to take Fed chances by actually directly funding the funny business crowd directly. Maybe partially during Trump 1.0 and fully during Trump 2.0, the SPLC didn’t have the FBI at its disposal. But that wasn’t a problem any other time. Of course that answers my own question – What did the SPLC ever have to or believe it had to fear? You get away with things for so long that you get to the point where you think you will forever. FAFO.

What is also confounding is that why the SPLC really needed to do these particular things, in terms of directly astroturfing the race-minded right, when in recent years, they’ve largely shifted their attention to World Wars G and T, largely to get gay men to open their purses. The fall of Madoff hurting the net worths of the kind of elderly Jewish women paranoid about the latter day fans of the starving Austrian artist is why the SPLC started taking up this gay business, to hunt for new donors. In the most recent years, likely in a play for Arabian oil money, they added zomg Islamophobia to the program.

Now our sector is going to have to sit back and wait on pins and needles to find out who on our side was SPLC funded. This will be a falling tide that exposes the skinny dippers. Though I think it’s obvious that they will be the groups and individuals who did the most optically outlandish things. One might also want to add the ones who were most provocative of violence, but those people and groups would be way more of interest to the FBI than the SPLC. The SPLC was all about the juicy photography. OTOH, I fear that this is going to start a doom loop within the sector where everyone is going to be accusing everyone else of being on the SPLC take, and that normiecons are going to start thinking that the whole entire alt or dissident right is nothing more than an SPLC astroturfed construct. That would be nowhere near the truth. The Fed indictment is not alleging that.

Livermore, Calif.; Sacramento; Washington, D.C.

Eric Swalwell. Really haven’t been interested in that hot mess.

But there is one angle that really does jump out at me. It leads me into a football spiking toldyaso about these structural games that political parties like to play because they think they’re locking in monopoly power, when they only wind up being too clever by half.

A likely true theory to “why now” on Swalwell is to clear out Democrats running for California governor this year. Because California has a jungle primary, top two finishers regardless of party advance, and because a lot of credible Democrats are running, the way the polling there is going now, two Republicans are currently in the top two, albeit with low percentages. The anxiety among California Democrats is to start bouncing people out of the club.

Remember, not that long ago, California Dems just had to implement this jungle primary. Their supposed official reason was to enforce moderation and discipline, and discourage fringe extremist candidates on both sides. The real reason, so they believed, was that they assumed that in all cases, with California the way it is, the top two finishers would always be Democrats, thereby ensuring some Democrat wins the whole thing.

Well, at least right now, it’s not working out that way, is it?

So much of a clusterfuck (for them) this is that they’re essentially reinstituting a party boss partisan primary, the smoke filled rooms from the bad ole days, by any other means, and in a roundabout way.

More and more of that backfiring will happen.

Now that you realize that, let me drop the other shoe:

All this mid decade legislative gerrymandering that is so fashionable among both Republicans and Democrats in America right now, is more likely to backfire (for both sides) than yield the desired result. More likely is that it will have almost zero or actually zero real holistic meaningful effect.

Budapest

This was a devastating loss.

There is no massaging this, no nuancing this, no qualifying this, no spinning this, no sugarcoating this, no butackshuwalying this.

I just got home, having been in Budapest for the weekend and for what I was hoping to be a better outcome, and I’m too tired to do much expounding.

I will say this, here and now.

First off, in a perverse way, I’m glad that it was a landslide and not close. Because a close vote would have opened the stolen election wound which would have never truly healed. At least with a landslide, it instantly settles the legitimacy and credibility question. If they’re gonna kill you, just hope they get it done right quick instead of torturously dragging it out.

Now as for the greater point. Resist the temptation to dwell on complicated reasons or politically goosed reasons. This happens with a lot of elections. After it happens, a bevy of interest groups and ideologically charged people and groups ride in to claim that whatever they’re concerned about made the whole entire difference (the obvious follow up implication is that they should get more money, publicity, power and public rectitude). Also resist the temptation to dwell on Viktor Orban’s “mistakes.” He, being human, has made mistakes and will continue to do so. It’s just that whatever mistakes he made weren’t relevant to how things went yesterday.

There is only one real meaningful reason why yesterday turned out the way it did:

It’s because the Hungarian people were for months and years bullied and blackmailed in a pincher movement with Brussels at one end and Kiev at the other. No matter how strong willed you are, if you’re pinched too tightly, you’ll eventually pop. Yesterday was the popping.

That’s the conclusion; Later this week, likely as a comment on this post, I’ll fill in everything that comes before, and also add my predictions about the incoming government.

Note – Magyar’s election night gathering which turned out to be a victory rally last night had a lot of tiki torches. ISYN.

UPDATE 4/16

I’ll pay that off now before I forget about it and be as succinct as I can.

The pressure from Brussels is that the EU had funding cutting measures it was able to do, and in fact did, for a long time. Unfortunately, Orban himself made a blunder during the Covid era when he signed on to a deal where EU countries taking EU Covid relief funding had to abide by “rule of law” (selectively enforced) provisions. That was Orban handing Brussels a whole warehouse full of grenades. And you know they used them.

The pressure from Kiev was mostly that some sort of Ukrainian assents blew up oil and natural gas pipelines that ran through Ukraine and transported Russian oil and gas to Hungary and the rest of Europe. Of course, they denied doing it, (“it was just an accident”), and, “strangely,” they dragged their heels on repairing the thing, giving estimates on when the repairs could have been done not until (“coincidentally”) after Hungary’s election day. Secondarily, the pressure from Kiev involved the impressment of ethnic Hungarians who live in the current boundaries of the Ukrainian state (the Tragedy of Triannon), that impressment leading to the deaths of several middle aged Hungarians. Not to mention generic abuses against Hungarian-Ukrainians from Kiev. The irony in that is that Orban was nothing but fully accepting to and accommodating of Ukrainian refugees who fled to Hungary. And the reason why he had to nuance the Russia question ever since 2/24/22 was that the post-Soviet Ukrainian government, no mater who has been in charge, has tended to give ethnic Hungarians the short end of the stick, if not worse.

As for my prediction for the Magyar government. He will substantively do what Brussels wants for the most part. To the small extent he doesn’t, he (with the understanding of Brussels) will tout his “resistance” to the high heavens to try to bamboozle enough of the Hungarian electorate.

Stockholm

It’s short, so read the whole thing. GT only makes a few missteps, none materially important.

This leads me to a prediction.

Just as the term “work-life balance” has been a thing for awhile, I predict we will soon start seeing and hearing the term “analog-digital balance” used as both an imperative and a virtue.

It’s a go.

Launches about half past midnight my time, so I’ll most likely be well off into log sawing land.

It’s not that what Artemis II is going to do hasn’t been done before. It’s that it’s emblematic of the ability to pick yourself up and dust yourself off. I can relate.

And yes, being as 2026 is way different from 1968 from a media and technology perspective, NASA will stream everything, except for the 45 or so minutes blackout once they’re behind the Moon on the far side. It may be the biggest internet stream in history so far.

All four of the Artemis II crew were born in the second half of the 1970s. Like a certain someone I know.

4/4

Click to enlarge. This is a screenshot from earlier today, inside the capsule, as it was around 60% of the way to the Moon.

This is a surreal image.

First off, about “that.” I’ve been too happy about the fact that this mission is even happening and so far has been successful to let myself get my usual disgruntled about the affirmative action of it all. I’ll sperg out maybe sometime later.

But that’s not what jumps out at me.

The last time any human beings were this far away from Earth was of course the final Apollo mission, 17, in December 1972.

One is wearing an Apple Watch and doodling around on a tablet. The other is wearing an Under Armour shirt and is wearing some sort of FitBit on his wrist.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Under Armour. All companies that did not exist the last time humans were that far from Earth.

Apple’s 50th anniversary of founding was in fact on A-II’s launch day this past Wednesday. Microsoft, founded about a year before. Google and UA, 1996.

That’s not including the fact that there’s no way that silicon development and other technological necessities were that far along in 1972 for smart watches and tablet sized true Turing devices to exist at that time. The tablet by itself probably has more raw computing power than the entire set of computers used to power the whole Apollo program.

So it leads to the black pill in all this: Why did it take us so frickin long just to do this again with all the technological wind in our sails?

4/5

OTOH, with Microsoft..

Someone snarked that it’s the first ever software support ticket from space.

Your Blogmeister’s Other German Desk

Otherwise not an important number, even if it is a perfect square.

But we all know which one is the next exit. It’s a biggie.

Really, I was caterwauling like a bitch in the year up to my 40th birthday.

Then it came. And afterward, I wondered why I was even crying so much.

Then a few months later, and all that has transpired since then.

I don’t fear the reaper anymore. And I’m in no way apprehensive at all about 50 over the horizon.

Mainly because all that happened in my forties has really gotten my mind straightened up and my priorities right.

These days, I care more about December 22 and May 2 as birthdays rather than my own.

Speaking of May 2, once she passes this one, guess what her own next one is going to be.

Oh yeah, I’m grabbing the popcorn. Your turn.

Washington, D.C.

I have tended to be somewhat but not completely dismissive of complaints about Donald Trump’s ego. “Not completely,” because there is a cause for concern. I’ll get to that.

Generally, the reason why I blow off screeching about “zomg Trump’s ego lol” is because just about every politician has a big ego. To wit, and someone who will be used as a compare-and-contrast foil in the rest of this post: Barack Obama, pronouns I/me.

“But something about Trump’s ego just feels different, hits different.”

Remember I said a few moments ago the words “not completely?” Here’s where I pay that off. In doing so, you’ll realize why I get paid the big bucks.

Those who think that Trump’s ego is different enough from the egoes of most politicians such that it’s at some level a cause for concern can never state how or why. They can’t get it off the tips of their tongues.

I’m going to get it off the tips of their tongues.

In doing so, I’m going to use Obama (I/me) as a metaphor for most typical high level politicians, even though he’s far from the only one. It’s just that he was President right before Trump, so he’s fresh enough in enough peoples’ minds for this conversation to be enlightening.

Here’s the difference.

Obama’s ego is a political ego. Which is to say, it’s the ego of someone who rose to the highest singular level of American politics and matriculating the standard way, even if Obama (I/me) himself speedran through the process.

Trump’s ego is a general purpose ego, grafted onto someone who is at the highest singular level of American politics. IOW, it’s a generic ego of someone doing a highly political job.

One side, political ego. Other side, generic ego.

There is a difference. Now here’s where I earn my salt (mine).

A political ego might be an ego. But it’s the type where those who have it and do political jobs will not let it either do or not do that which they would otherwise not do or do, respectively.

Let me detangle that rhetoric.

A normal politician with a political ego won’t let his ego make him change course if there are more important political considerations in the way.

For instance, Barack Obama (I/me) surely had and has an ego. But it was and is a political ego. Which meant that there was no way anyone was ever going to be able to ego massage Obama (I/me) out of doing ObamaCare, or reversing course on gay marriage (starting when he decided to quit lying about it), or the myriad of other things we associate with his administrations. Obama wanted to do ObamaCare because of the long time desire of Democrats to have universal health care or anything that would pass for it, and he wanted to do gay marriage because his gay donors wanted it. Those were political concerns that were always going to override Obama’s egotistical sense of himself.

Trump, OTOH, is a different story. He has very few core principles, he’s really transactional and hardly ideological (which has both upsides and downsides), and then there his lifelong bad habit of agreeing with the last person he talks to (“Please don’t let him strike up a conversation about this business deal with the elevator boy.”) This is why Project 2025 had to exist. The kook left thinks that P25 was about the agenda, the manifesto. In reality, P25’s policy proposals were just a situational hobcobble of junk that was lying around in think tank drawers for years, just something they had to throw together to give it some spit shine and polish, and not really the critical matter. P25 was always about personnel. The antenna is more important than the radio, the transmission is more important than the engine. P25 was about antennas and transmissions. (“Personnel is policy” – Reagan). To make sure that the last person that Trump talks to is someone who is already down with the zeitgeist. And because the first term had some not so good personnel choices which sorta mucked up the policy. The reason why P25 as personnel and not agenda couldn’t be openly admitted throughout 2024 is because Biden was still President, Garland still USAG, and admitting that would have been admitting to coordinating with a partisan political campaign, which C3s and C4s are legally not allowed to do. Now, Trump is President and Bondi is USAG, so there’s no legal fear of admitting it now.

Combine that with his generic non-political ego.

What it means is that everyone constantly has to be on pins and needles, because there is next to nothing in terms of agenda that Trump won’t sacrifice, even his keynote issues, because someone is buttering him up.

Furthermore, his ego can and has affected his plenary decision making ability.

Which leads me to Iran.

A few weeks ago, I explained why I think Trump pulled the trigger with the toys that make the noise.

Now I think that is a function, and in fact, perhaps a down side, of someone with a generic ego and not a political ego doing a political job.

If Trump had a political ego, sure, he would have still been nursing nearly a half century of butthurt over Iran hostage. However, a political ego would mean that he would think about all the other factors, the asterisks, the whatabouts, the yeahbuts, the water under the bridge, the whatifs, the whatnext, before settling on yes or no, and meaning that no would have been more likely to be the final choice. Generic ego gives the asterisks much less consideration, so it’s full ego-driven revenge ahead.

The bill is in the mail. I bill hourly.

Woodstock, Maine

I am increasingly and depressingly coming around to the idea that David Cole was right about Tucker Carlson all along.

For those who don’t know, several years ago, David Cole predicted that Tucker Carlson post-Fox and controlling his own platform would eventually go mega-flaky, that the better version of TC was the version that was on Fox and therefore under Fox’s editorial control mechanisms.

Which is to say: TC on his own was the type that would grasp at every straw he thinks he sees, whereas TC on Fox had to stay inbounds and on message, especially the kind of message that consistently drew a prime time caliber audience.

What that means now is that, while a lot of normiecons, lamercons, etc. are wondering “what went wrong” with TC, and wondering if he isn’t being blackmailed or paid off (Qatar), to explain what happened to him, the truth of the matter is that none of that was necessary. David Cole’s answer, and increasingly, mine, is that TC is just reverting to what he always was and really wanted to be, because he has no editorial guardrail supervision.

Where I think Cole still gets it wrong is that the 2020 election bit got TC bounced off of Fox. I still think that that was the excuse, that the real reason Fox wanted him gone is that his within bounds content (immigration, etc.), was angering advertisers even if it was drawing eyeballs. Which meant that Fox was going to find any reason to cut him loose; But for the 2020 election thing, they would have found something else.

Washington, D.C; London; Paris; Madrid; Berlin

I’m just going to say this, vaguely, or maybe not so.

WRT Trump, Western Europe and Iran.

What one has to realize is that with all that, assume that a lot of official public rhetoric and pronouncements are nothing more than performative fan dances.

Remember Trump is a direct protege of George Steinbrenner and also has Vince McMahon’s ex-wife in his cabinet. So he knows a thing or three about less than genuine public beefing. Plus most people who pay attention know that he leans into weaponized confusion.

Also remember that with Speedy Gonzales (Spain), Human Ken Doll (France), Two Tier (Britain), and also of course, Fred Merz in this country, they are either left of center or centrists or center-rightists governing countries with large enough Muslim populations that they feel the need to pander to, partially because of the Muslims’ numbers, but more so because of their propensity to be peaceful.

In reality, all four of those countries have been helping the allied effort against Iran in decently substantial even if not major ways, and providing that help early in the effort. Just, don’t doubt me on that. They know it, Trump knows it. And when this is all over and enough people can start being honest, that will all be “confessed.”

Of course Randy Fine is correct.

I fear this tactic will work.

Back up for a moment. Not “fear,” as such. After all, whatever works works.

If I’m right, then my consternation will be that Muslim gang rape gangs and violent terrorism and 9/11 hardly moved the needle, but hell naw to the naw when Mohammed wants to collect your dog. If they try, then every Karen and AWFL in existence will form an army and use their own hands to remigrate every Muslim they can find.

Why do people care that much more about dogs than other people?

Then again, we already have precedent.

Trump, the Springfield, Ohio, the whole Haitian migrants, “they’re eating the dogs,” even if it was a wee bit hyperbolic, actually went a long way and was a political gold mine. It resonated.

The only time in my conscious lifetime that white liberal women allowed themselves to be openly angry at a black man without fear of getting the R-word shoved back in their faces: Michael Vick.

Mainz

Apropos I’m writing this post from the city where the printing press was invented.

This from the normieconsphere got me to thinking about one of my past predictions.

You know what I predicted back on November 11. 2017. If you don’t, go read it.

In the time since then, my prediction has come true, but in a way I could not have predicted. Grammarly even back then used AI, but it was and still is a mission specific sort of AI. Large language model AI would not become viable for a few more years. But now that it has, what’s happening isn’t that peoples’ own writing is being run through Grammarly and made too perfect and banal. It’s that actual humans aren’t even writing the prose to begin with; They’re letting LLM AI do that for them, and it is generating the banal and uninspiring slop, to use the recently coined term.

They’re just not calling it “Grammarly disease.” They’re calling it “AI slop.”

Washington, D.C.

Something I need to get off the tip of my tongue.

The concept of revealed preferences.

It’s where people say one thing with their mouths but their actions show that they’re lying with their mouths.

People say they want politicians to be nicer and more congenial, but then when they vote, the nice guys finish last. (I’ve already expounded on my theory behind that, which does come into play by the end of this post, and also has relevance to my own self).

The rich white people that love diversity from their 99.99% white residential census tracts.

People say that violent terrorism and assassination are wrong, but then form love cults around the Boston Bomb Brothers and Luigi Mangione.

Now, apply this to Trump and Iran.

What I’m trying to say is that there are a percentage of people who are superficially angry that Trump did it and subconsciously thrilled that he did it, at the same time. The dichotomy is that they may be surface level angry at the politics, but happy with the decisive unilateral use of force as a general concept.

The importance behind this is of course the midterms in November. That subset of voters may well make very pivotal difference. And that thinking that Team Red is doomed because of whatever polling majority there seems to be against the Iran effort is wrong headed because the opposition to the Iran effort is a fluff statistic, a mile wide but only an inch deep.

Rolla

Stuckey’s isn’t really a Missouri thing. But there are two, one near Sedalia, and this one, in the town of Doolittle, near Rolla.

I’m presuming it’s because of the imported scabification of truckers.

Frankfurt

The “Merkel spills the beans” clip that’s burning up social media right now.

It begs the question: Votes for or against who? These people aren’t and never will be CDU voters, which means neither she nor her party were ever going to benefit from them. Generally these people would vote for one of the three left parties, more so SPD or Die Linke because the Greens have developed an elitist villa district reputation.

Was it to stop the AfD? The final national polls before she swung the border open in Sept. ’15 showed the AfD at 3%; What was there to stop? One month after, they were at 9%, and now they’re 26 or so and the country’s strongest force, peaking in one national poll at 27. If her intent was to let them all in to stop the AfD, it did just the opposite – Can’t sink someone and they end up nine times stronger.

No, what this always was all along was what we knew it was, replacement for the sake of contempt for the native population. And she just admitted it, making her confession one of several that have already happened. She just confessed to The Great Replacement (“Bevölkerungsaustausch”).

Washington, D.C.

Mentioned this in the comments of the Iran post.

But I want to bring this out front, because I think it’s that important yet hardly understood. What I’m about to say was dancing in front of my eyes yet it took even myself a long time to figure it out. It should have been just that obvious.

When Trump rode down the escalator, a lot of people started digging through his previous political statements. One of the things they unearthed back then was a long form video interview he did in 1980. Which is the earliest anyone can find that he gets himself on the record making any kind of statements about public affairs. Which means that it was at or about that time that he started getting interested in politics, at least in terms of paying them attention and adding his own commentary to others.

One year before 1980 was 1979.

We all know what happened in 1979.

Trump was 33 years old when the Iran hostage crisis started and turned 34 while it was ongoing.

Remember, for most people, age 30 is when they really start tuning in to public affairs if they do at all.

I now tend to believe that the Iran hostage crisis was Trump’s baptism by fire, his WTF moment. It was the very thing which got him into politics. His origin story. Likely also the same for a lot of the early boomers. In 1979, age 25-33 was born 1946-1954, and remember that 25-34 is the age demo that advertisers love the most because they’re the sweet spot combination of the most cognitively malleable and having disposable income (at least traditionally). For the same reason, whatever is big news when you’re in that age range, it’s going to shape you for the rest of your life. Unless you’re a weirdo like me who started paying attention in childhood.

While I wasn’t old enough to absorb this from conscious memory, I do know that for the more than a year that Iran hostage was happening, it was far and away the biggest national serial news in America, and unless there was some bigger flash event, e.g. John Lennon’s assassination and Reagan’s election happened during, it was going to be the top of the fold news on nearly all days.

Iran hostage was the singular event that “radicalized” (for the lack of a better term) a lot of early boomers, including Trump.

Which is why Trump is doing what he’s now doing with Iran at all, and why, unless it becomes impossible or impractical, he’s going to see this all the way through. It is why, provided the stars lined up in the proper way, and he believes they have, he was always going to pull this trigger. Not “Israel,” not any of the usual theories you hear from the sector.

Because he’s got a long time score to settle, a reckoning with an almost half century of butthurt, and this one would bring him full circle. This is in all practical reality his and his generation’s last chance of getting the getback that those who cut their teeth on this have wanted for a long time. Being as the early boomers are at their peak and maybe a little past peak in their ability to wield power, this is their last “bullet.”

Note: This explains why. It does not go into the “should” of the matter. I wouldn’t have, but that’s only because I’m a coward with power. That, and sometimes, you just have to let the water flow under the bridge.

Washington, D.C.

CNN, on the skinny behind Kristi Noem being shown the door. It involves someone who was of serial interest to this medium around a decade ago but has been pretty much unheard of since until now:

[Corey] Lewandowski, who’s only intended to serve in his role on a temporary basis, has developed a reputation at the department of reprimanding officials, directing the firings of personnel, requesting employees be put on administrative leave, calling agency leaders “to hold them accountable,” and micro-managing — including over the massive infusion of cash the department has received to ramp up deportations.

This kind of thing is why Trump fired him as campaign manager in the spring of 2016.

I guess Corey will always be Corey and keep on Coreying. Just Corey Things.

Dutchtown

4:

Dutchtown CID ends Flock Safety contract amid ICE data-sharing concerns

The Dutchtown Community Improvement District is ending its contract with license plate reader company re the contract expires in June. The district is seeking $7,000 back for the remaining months of the agreement.

An online petition started last November called on the CID to end the contract, citing what it described as the company’s “data-sharing relationship with Immigration Customs and Enforcement.”

Board Secretary Ann Smart, who has lived in the neighborhood for 31 years, said the situation has unsettled the community.

“This is all new territory for us; we’re not used to having ICE on the streets, coming to get our neighbors,” Smart said.

Let me translate.

When the better half and I were in St. Louis summer before last, I drove by Cherokee Street, and was amazed at how Hispanic and Mexican it has gotten since the time last I saw it before I left. And even then, it was starting to get that way.

So that explains this headline and the occasion for it. Similar to the way the Bosnians being resettled in Bevo in the late 1990s turned out to be a godsend for Bevo, because it meant a war-torn and war-hardened people doing battle with the blacks and deflecting them away, it got St. Louis’s and other similar cities’ elites to learn a lesson that the way to beat the blacks is to import their predators. So this is why that neighborhood association doesn’t want ICE bothering all the Hispanics and Mexicans there, especially on or near Cherokee. Because they were brought there to bing bang on the blacks and to get them out.

Note: Just in case you missed it, now you know why, if you live in or near a big enough city that has a lot of black people, that your city’s officials and elites are so zealous about immigration. I just gave you the cheat code.

After this weekend. Now I see it all the more clearly.

I have suddenly come to the sad realization that I wouldn’t trust myself with real power. Because I’m too much of a coward with power.

There’s a reason why people like Donald John Trump are where they are and why people like me are consigned to being the reserve to the second assistant dog catcher in life.

There’s a reason why people like Donald John Trump are made and destined to be eternally remembered, while some archaeologist of the distant future might or might not dig my bones up from the deep ground, but probably not.

Some people just have it.  After this weekend, I realize that I don’t.

Tehran

Only disguised as something else.

Trump’s purpose in the Iran strikes today is the same as what he did in Venezuela which in turn dominoes to Cuba.

This is for the vast majority part designed to drive Putin out of Ukraine.  Getting the bear back in its cave.

It’s the Zbigniew Brzezinski doctrine when it came to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.  Paraphrased:  “Drive up the cost of Soviet power projection.”

Or to put it in other words, Trump to Putin be like:  “So that’s the way you want it, huh? Well then, it’s going to cost you one of your imperial vassals after another. And it’s not like you’ve got that many to begin with. Not exactly the hardest row to hoe for me.”

The anxiety to get Putin to give up on Ukraine is to make him figure out that invasion for the purpose of territorial aggrandizement is juice that’s not worth the squeeze, so that he totally gets it out of his mind to try it against a NATO member, which would trigger Article 5 and maybe WWIII if he does.

Metaphorically speaking, this may all end with Trump parading down Constitution Avenue holding Putin’s severed head.

Your Blogmeister’s Hotel Room

This is a good guys’ response to the criticism that right wing populist and nationalist governing ideology in practice results in reduced economic growth.

I’m going to say something that might knock some of you on your backs.

This criticism is correct to an extent.

Right wing pop nat governments actually do mean reduced economic growth. And not in the sense that it confuses cause and effect (i.e. lower economic growth causes the election or ascension of RWPN govs.) It’s in the sense that what RWPN govs’ policies are the cause and lower economic growth is the effect.

Now here’s where I drop the other shoe:

Either wittingly or unwittingly, this is by design and a good thing. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Who the hell needs the all-the-time maxxed out GDP growth if it means allowing the whole world to “immigrate” into (invade) your country and turn it into an unrecognizable third world flop house?

Chasing “economic growth,” which in the real world means enacting policy only with the next quarter in mind, has resulted in the degradation of homelands, culture and civilization and genuine ecology.

It stands to reason that doing what it takes to restore these things will necessarily mean sacrificing a few percentage points in quarterly or annual GDP growth.

Because, sometimes, subtraction is addition.

To support my point, from the famous and coming up on ten years old (!) Milo and Allum Bokhari piece in Breitbart explaining the Alt-Right to lamercons normiecons and establishment Republicans:

An establishment Republican, with their overriding belief in the glory of the free market, might be moved to tear down a cathedral and replace it with a strip mall if it made economic sense. Such an act would horrify a natural conservative. Immigration policy follows a similar pattern: by the numbers, cheap foreign workers on H1B visas make perfect economic sense. But natural conservatives have other concerns: chiefly, the preservation of their own tribe and its culture. For natural conservatives, culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value. More specifically, they value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe. Their perfect society does not necessarily produce a soaring GDP, but it does produce symphonies, basilicas and Old Masters. The natural conservative tendency within the alt-right points to these apotheoses of western European culture and declares them valuable and worth preserving and protecting.

To be pithy about it, no, we’re not on the frontier selling guns to the Indians just to make a quick buck.

Robert Duvall, RIP.

One of his prominent roles was of an LAPD cop in the 1988 movie Colors. The title referring to the Bloods and the Crips.

That movie basically advertised LA black street gang branding and imagery to every ghetto in the country. Almost overnight, many cities’ black gang scenes, which had been operating under their own names, brands and labels for a long time, suddenly dropped all that and became Bloods and Crips. Including St. Louis.

Curiously, East St. Louis, in Illinois, other side of the river, didn’t, because ESL is in Illinois and so is Chicago, and Chicago’s black gang branding was long and established enough and “revered” enough to change. ESL blacks and Chicago blacks do time in the same state prisons, the former getting and keeping their cues from the latter.

Downtown St. Louis

EEOC’s lawsuit against Nike for anti-white hiring has been filed in E MO Fed D/C.

Curiously, not in the Oregon district, courts in Portland. Nike’s world HQ is near Portland.

Easy to figure why. WH thinks that if it comes to a jury, that one drawn from eastern Missouri will be more likely to see it the WH’s way than one drawn from Portland, Oregon and environs.

Mankato, Minn.; Brooklyn

Someone tried to bust ole Luigi out of the clink.

Which makes me want to ask a question out in the open which I’ve had in private ever since the initial assassination and his arrest and identification, and the left making a celebrity out of him.

Their love of him is rooted in their anger towards health insurance company CEOs and all the times insurance rejects treatments or meds or this or that.

Of course their solution is public single payer.

Except in America, Medicare definitely, and some of the various Medicaids, have a higher reject rate than “private” (as much as it really is these days).

Rhetorical question for these lefties:

Let’s say you get what you want and you get exclusive public single payer.

Who are you going to assassinate when it rejects treatments or meds or this or that?

Who would be the CEO of “single payer” that you can mow down to get revenge upon?

Let’s just say that neither the President of the United States nor the state governors are ever as easily accessible as a current private health insurance company CEOs.

Washington, D.C.

The latest James O’Keefe sting.

One side of me entertained the speculation that the Secret Service was trying to set Trump up to get assassinated.

The other side of me, looking for a more rational explanation, concluded that the Secret Service is so institutionally locked into looking for threats in specific places that the agents were totally blind to guy on sloped roof with rifle. And yes, human beings can be so blind. For instance, let’s say you work at a given job in the same place for ten years, and you live in the same place all that time. For at least 2000 times, (more than that in reality but 2000 is a nice round number), you’ll drive to and from work in the exact same route, and you never have any problems. On the 2001st time, there’s some kid playing in the street right in the route where you drive. You hit him, he dies. It’s not that you didn’t see the kid in the sense that the image didn’t hit your eyes. It’s just that you are such a slave to your own ingrained habits and expectations that you just weren’t expecting a kid to be playing in the middle of the street. (This is the real imperative for self-driving car systems, to fill in the blanks for this kind of human cognitive complacency. On the 2001st time, the car will brake before you can hit the kid.) My rational theory about Butler was that the guy on the roof with the rifle was like the kid playing in the middle of the street.

With this, now I think there’s a middle ground theory: Politically dissenting agents leaking.

Downtown St. Louis

Screenshot from the SLMPD YouTube press conference that was held some time today.

Naturally, the individual who gave the presser gloated about “since 2020” and “lowest since 2013.” Though it makes one want to ask out of common sense what happened in 2014 and 2020 to drive the spikes. Maybe figure those out and learn from them to the point of not repeating.

When 2020’s total tally was known, I predicted just after the start of 2021 (before January 7 hit and I wasn’t cognitively all there for the next two months) that 2020 was a peak and that it would all go downhill from there. The reason I was able to make that prediction, in contrast to what I suppose were others predicting that it would only get worse, is that I knew 2020 was the result of a black murder rate of in the 170s per 100k, or as Steve Sailer calculated, that holding 2020’s black murder rate in St. Louis City constant for all time would mean that a black boy or man would have a 20% chance of being murdered between birth and age 75. Those numbers are anomalously high, even for Bell Curve City. So I knew and predicted that regression to the mean would kick in. I now happen to think that St. Louis City may never have a year as high as 200 homicides ever again. The reason I’m going with that audacious call is because, from what I understand, there are far fewer young black boys on the come up in the city. Mainly as a long track consequence of AFFH. They still exist, but they’re no longer in the city itself. When they get old enough, they’ll start doing serious violent crimes close to wherever they were raised. Meanwhile, St. Louis City itself is becoming more and more the province of homosexuals, young singles, young childless couples and DINKs, plus the old retired black people that are remnants of a more bellcurve-y era.

Your Blogmeister’s Other German Desk

We’re now at the tail end of what I like to call my “getting everything I wanted cost me everything I knew” season of the year. Between December 14 and January 7.

It’s because those few weeks have important personal anniversaries. Proposed on December 14, 2019. Frick and Frack born December 22, 2020, then we bought them home two days later. My sister-in-law and the soyboy-in-law announced that they were expecting on January 6, 2021. Then the very next day, boom, the call from back in St. Louis, the other shoe dropped.

Today being the morbid fifth anniversary, and coming up on it, it has gotten me to thinking about a few things and coming to conclusions, in the sense of enough time has passed that I’ve been able to get the fog out of my eyes and really see and understand things clearly and dispassionately.

Most of it is too personal to write here. I will say these cryptic things here and in public about all that has been on my mind. I might be able to be coaxed into saying more in the comment section, but that’s not a guarantee.

God almighty in heaven above, they weren’t perfect people. And as more and more time since they’ve been gone has passed, it gets me more level headed about their lives, the good, the bad, the perfect, the imperfect. It’s just that you hope that the rightness of what they got right was and is more important than the wrongness of what they got wrong. Whatever they got wrong, and getting something wrong was inevitable because they were human beings, you have to learn from it and use it to teach the next generation. We, no matter the generation, either adapt or die.

Then there’s the more profound and society-wide impactful thing.

My late mother, the dementia, the aging. To a different extent and several years before, my late father.

We, people in general, and medical science, are clearly in an anxious rush to figure out how to extend peoples’ lifespans. As if a higher and higher number is somehow a saintly virtue by itself.

I need to ask this question:

Is modern medicine also working on including physical and cognitive vitality and productiveness to go with those longer lifespans? Is that going to be part of it?

Or is it going to be nothing more than hacking on extra and superfluous years to already difficult and falling apart and disproportionately burdensome old people?

Let me ask the same question another way:

In adding years to peoples’ lives, are we also going to add life to peoples’ years?

That’s not even asking the more fraught and unpopular question of how much we have sacrificed our future on the altar of our past in the general sense of speaking.

We’ve been so preoccupied with “can” that we don’t seem to be thinking about “should.”

I concluded awhile back, tempting fate because of how it almost happened way too soon, that, when it’s my time to go, I hope that it’s a situation where I’ve done everything I practically could and wanted in life within reason and am at peace. And that I just go painlessly in my sleep. I do not want to suffer, and I certainly don’t want to suffer for long if my grand exit is going to have to involve suffering. Most of all, I do not want to be a disproportionate burden either to those immediately around me or to the general society for anything close to an extended period of time.

Caracas

This is close to a carbon copy of Noriega, Panama, 1989. I was twelve years old then, and I’m 48 now, watching pretty much the same thing happen again. Don’t think I’m gonna live to 192 to see the next one.

This was all about removing a Beijing and Moscow ally in the Western hemisphere (Monroe Doctrine), and also a means to de-destabilize the world oil price market so as to hurt Putin’s ability to conquer Ukraine. This should be yet another opaque clue that Trump is and has been pro-Ukraine all along and that any pretense from him otherwise is and has been nothing more than negotiation tactics.

To the question of “should.” (1) I would not have, not in this way. I think the same practical thing would have happened, only without the fraught and unpredictable addition of American military force. (2) However, I am NOT spazzing out that it happened; I doubt that it will spin out of control. María Corina Machado, pro-America and pro-Trump, will probably be the next head of state in Venezuela, installed some way some how.