Posts: 2,751
Threads: 4
Joined: May 2016
** 20-Aug-2021 World View: Multiple massive events
FullMoon Wrote:> What are the feelings of the readers about how close we are to
> something more life changing than the pandemic? We've had what
> could be seen as multiple massive events in a short period of
> time. We're at the end of the era and it's not here yet but
> really, we can feel it now and it's a part of our daily lives.
> Just 2-3 years ago it wasn't half this bad. It's happening fast
> and getting faster. Please John give your estimation on the speed
> of the unravelling because it's uncomfortably quick now. Thank
> you
I wish I could tell you something that will make you less anxious, but
let's face it, if that's what you want then you're asking the wrong
person.
As I've been saying for a long time, we're headed for a global
financial crisis and a world war. The timeline and the scenario
cannot be predicted. All that we can say is that the probability that
it will begin "this year" increases each year.
Still, you've raised an interesting point that I've noticed and other
people have noticed as well. There's a kind of "quickening," where
the world is deteriorating more and more quickly, and crises are
worsening and occurring more and more frequently. Since you've asked
the question, it's worthwhile to give some of the reasons why it's
happening.
The core reason is that the Silent generation is now gone. These
people lived through WW II, and they saw war, famines, massive
homelessness, political forces driven by sheer insanity. When they
came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, they created institutions like the
United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the
Green Revolution to make sure that the mistakes that led to WW II
would not be repeated. The Silent generation ran those institutions
and made sure that they succeeded.
The generational Crisis era (Fourth Turning) began in 2003, which is
when the people in the Silent generation almost all disappeared, all
at once. The Boomers had already created a tech bubble in the late
1990s, and the Gen-Xers got revenge by creating the subprime mortgage
real estate bubble, which began to explode in 2007. That was also the
year when the counter-terrorism efforts in the war in Iraq were
successful, with George Bush's "surge."
Barack Obama was the first Gen-X president, and it was one disastrous
policy after another. He couldn't close Guantanamo prison, but he
released the jihadists that are now returning to lead al-Qaeda. His
rollout of Obamacare was the biggest IT disaster in history. On the
day of the launch, so many people had lied to him that he didn't even
know that the entire system had crashed hours earlier, and was not
operational for months.
Those are just a few examples of how things have changed since the
generational Crisis era began in 2003. Here are some other examples:
- Public debate in almost every country in the world is growing
almost out of control. Central banks around the world are preventing
a crash for as long as they can by pumping trillions of dollars of
printed money into the banking systems.
- The world population is growing so quickly that more people are
being pushed into starvation and poverty. I always refer to this as:
the population is growing faster than the food supply.
- It used to be that there would be only one or two humanitarian
crises going on at the same time. But today, there are over a dozen
humanitarian crises. Covid has made this worse, but the number
growing before the pandemic because of increased starvation and
poverty.
- The last few years have seen huge refugee crises in Asia, the
Mideast, Europe, and America. These are caused by the same starvation
and poverty.
- The same starvation and poverty has resulted in local clashes and
riots that have the potentional of expanding.
- Since Biden has become president, he has turned decision making
over to millennials like AOC who are sabotaging America. The result
is open borders, floods of illegal immigrants from dozens of
counrties, spreading Covid and bring jihadists into the country;
massive street crime in cities across the country; and now this
unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan.
- China is suffering severe demographic problems, and Xi Jinping is
under pressure to do something, especially about Taiwan. He cannot
afford to wait much longer.
So if the question is: why do things keep getting worse, and do so
more and more rapidly, I would name two core reasons in this
generational Crisis era: the survivors of WW II (Silent generation)
have disappeared, leaving decision making in the hands of idiot
children, and the population is growing faster than the food supply.
Posts: 10,465
Threads: 197
Joined: May 2016
(08-20-2021, 08:38 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 20-Aug-2021 World View: Multiple massive events
FullMoon Wrote:> What are the feelings of the readers about how close we are to
> something more life changing than the pandemic? We've had what
> could be seen as multiple massive events in a short period of
> time. We're at the end of the era and it's not here yet but
> really, we can feel it now and it's a part of our daily lives.
> Just 2-3 years ago it wasn't half this bad. It's happening fast
> and getting faster. Please John give your estimation on the speed
> of the unravelling because it's uncomfortably quick now. Thank
> you
I wish I could tell you something that will make you less anxious, but
let's face it, if that's what you want then you're asking the wrong
person.
As I've been saying for a long time, we're headed for a global
financial crisis and a world war. The timeline and the scenario
cannot be predicted. All that we can say is that the probability that
it will begin "this year" increases each year.
Still, you've raised an interesting point that I've noticed and other
people have noticed as well. There's a kind of "quickening," where
the world is deteriorating more and more quickly, and crises are
worsening and occurring more and more frequently. Since you've asked
the question, it's worthwhile to give some of the reasons why it's
happening.
I see the Unraveling as the depraved behavior of economic, cultural, religious, political, and administrative elites who have a stake in ethical behavior yet choose unethical behavior as shortcuts to achieving what they want or maximizing their take (higher rents, bigger dividends, asset appreciation, higher profits, more bureaucratic power, sweetheart deals with corrupt officials, corporate expansion, tax cuts, regulatory relief, and greater indulgence). I look at the Enrob -- excuse me, Enron -- scandal as a prime example of executives operating with no integrity, caution, or conscience because of their position. I look at the financial and real estate frauds as a prime example of a speculative boom that devours capital, a Ponzi scheme with some construction behind it. Politicians of both Parties are culpable, so let's not make this into a partisan blame-fest. I look at the infamous succession of televangelists fleecing people while winning the sympathy of politicians because the flock of those wolves-in-clerical-garb capable of impoverishing themselves can be delivered to the politicians who win their support. (If one can con people for their cash one can also con people for their votes). I look at educational 'experts' who promote No Child Left Behind as a means to prepare youth for dead-end jobs in retailing, food service, domestic toil, and farm labor as an objective due to the underinvestment in industrial plant and equipment.
Corrupt behavior by the Little Guy does not break the system. Someone taking a $20 from the till isn't going to break his employer... but he is likely to get caught due to accounting controls. Street crime usually has poor people as victims, and in a plutocratic order, nobody is more expendable than the poor except for street crooks. The big crooks have the power with which to circumvent accounting controls, and they have the authority to stop anyone from investigating them. It might not be as blatant as Lars Thorwald killing a dog who snoops in the flower bed in which he buried some damning evidence in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (Hitchcock has his way of dark humor, suggesting the cliché "curiosity killed the cat" even if the "cat" in this case is a kitten-sized Yorkshire terrier (I think that is the dog breed), but it is easy to fire anyone who might suspect something. (It's wise to act stupid in so corrupt a circumstance if one wants to keep his job).
Television pushes overt, partisan propaganda as objective reality and uses means to strengthen its emotional impact without adding more truth. Thus on FoX News, very much a 3T phenomenon, a common practice for setting up a politicized story denouncing a non-rightist (Clinton is terrible! Obama is terrible! Bernie Sanders is terrible! Biden is terrible! Critical race Theory is horrible!) is to lead in with some violent crime so that viewers can already be angry when they see the story. The violent crime may be local news far away, but anyone who gets a large amount of such stories is getting manipulated.
The speculative boom devours wealth while creating the illusion of prosperity. When people start to recognize it for what it is -- a sham -- then the whole edifice of financial and marketing legerdemain collapses. The recent underinvestment in plant and equipment has ensured non-growth in industrial jobs that pay solid salaries.
Quote:The core reason is that the Silent generation is now gone. These
people lived through WW II, and they saw war, famines, massive
homelessness, political forces driven by sheer insanity. When they
came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, they created institutions like the
United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the
Green Revolution to make sure that the mistakes that led to WW II
would not be repeated. The Silent generation ran those institutions
and made sure that they succeeded.
The Silent built institutions as "me too" participants in a GI-built world. The fault is that they founded few new industrial businesses. They did form professional practices (which can churn a profit), broadcasters, real-estate partnerships, government contractors (Ross Perot), fast-food chains (Dave Thomas), and oil-wildcatters (T. Boone Pickens)... maybe a hobby-like winery. One effect is that we have a big gap in businesses in a certain stage of the business lifecycle -- those that are vibrant with innovation and already profitable, businesses out of the infancy stage that are starting to be big employers but are not in the decline phase in which bureaucratic rigidity stifles innovation. The companies that the Silent formed either did not create large numbers of jobs unless those jobs are dead-end jobs. As for the Green revolution, that was Norman Borlaug, a GI.
Quote:The generational Crisis era (Fourth Turning) began in 2003, which is
when the people in the Silent generation almost all disappeared, all
at once. The Boomers had already created a tech bubble in the late
1990s, and the Gen-Xers got revenge by creating the subprime mortgage
real estate bubble, which began to explode in 2007. That was also the
year when the counter-terrorism efforts in the war in Iraq were
successful, with George Bush's "surge."
The subprime mortgage bubble happened about eighty years after the bubble of the 1920's... and the crash came almost eighty years later. What generation was disappearing just in time for the subprime mortgage bubble? The GI's the last living adults who remembered the last bubble of the 1920's and who blocked any repetition of such so long as they had influence in government, media, and employment. They effectively suppressed any repetition of their childhood nightmare, whatever their political position. They could still convince their juniors that they had seen it before, that it turned out badly, and anything much the same would turn out much the same. Eighty years is the time necessary for the extinction of mass memories. GI-built institutions were seen no longer as the cause of overall wealth and social sanity; they were (after the GI's were gone) entities to be milked for personal gain and power.
Quote:Barack Obama was the first Gen-X president, and it was one disastrous
policy after another. He couldn't close Guantanamo prison, but he
released the jihadists that are now returning to lead al-Qaeda. His
rollout of Obamacare was the biggest IT disaster in history. On the
day of the launch, so many people had lied to him that he didn't even
know that the entire system had crashed hours earlier, and was not
operational for months.
I realize what you think of Obama... the historical assessment is that he pushed the economic measures that kept an economic downturn from becoming a full-blown depression. You can say what you want about Obamacare, but the early bugs are gone. You might not like its spending priorities -- but that is simply your values which are those of an ideological minority.
So what really went wrong? Political results are never so neat and clean as is perfect. The concept of Too Big to Fail will almost certainly lead to "Too Corrupt to Survive". Obama saved economic entities that would have the cash with which to fund right-wing political campaigns against his political allies and stick us with such political sludge as Senator Ron Johnson and Governor Kristi Noem. Nothing quite works as intended.
Our political institutions were not made for bureaucratic behemoths capable of buying the elected officials; it was made for yeoman farmers and small shopkeepers who could get little good from the Government directly. Corporate farmers are squeezing the small-scale family farmers out by using economies of scale in everything from water supplies to the costs of compliance with labor laws and taxes. Giant defense contractors have a vested interest in wars for profit. Big Business used to prefer small government, but it has found that Big Government can offer huge profits from crony capitalism. The system that best serves bureaucratic behemoths is fascist corporatism in which the State is the ally of the rich and the oppressor of the workingman.
End of rant.
Quote:Those are just a few examples of how things have changed since the
generational Crisis era began in 2003. Here are some other examples:
- Public debate in almost every country in the world is growing
almost out of control. Central banks around the world are preventing
a crash for as long as they can by pumping trillions of dollars of
printed money into the banking systems.
- The world population is growing so quickly that more people are
being pushed into starvation and poverty. I always refer to this as:
the population is growing faster than the food supply.
- It used to be that there would be only one or two humanitarian
crises going on at the same time. But today, there are over a dozen
humanitarian crises. Covid has made this worse, but the number
growing before the pandemic because of increased starvation and
poverty.
- The last few years have seen huge refugee crises in Asia, the
Mideast, Europe, and America. These are caused by the same starvation
and poverty.
- The same starvation and poverty has resulted in local clashes and
riots that have the potentional of expanding.
- Since Biden has become president, he has turned decision making
over to millennials like AOC who are sabotaging America. The result
is open borders, floods of illegal immigrants from dozens of
counrties, spreading Covid and bring jihadists into the country;
massive street crime in cities across the country; and now this
unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan.
- China is suffering severe demographic problems, and Xi Jinping is
under pressure to do something, especially about Taiwan. He cannot
afford to wait much longer.
The central bankers can prevent crashes from spiraling into full-blown depressions, but they cannot mitigate the bad behavior of elites who can get away with seemingly anything.
Zero population growth is one of the most effective ways in which to prevent an acceleration in the depletion of resources and the emission of even more greenhouse gases. People in the industrial West are at the point at which further consumption of stuff has a near-zero return on expenditure. How many PC's do you need? How many stoves? How many blenders? How many "idiot screens"?
If you think refugee flows are floods now, then contemplate the consequences of anthropogenic global warming, when the seas inundate prime farmland now densely populated as possible with peasant farmers who supply the huge quantities of food necessary for several billion people, or when desert belts shift into what are now non-desert areas. I have seen conflicting models of how precipitation will shift (temperatures have less controversy). Will western Texas, now a marginal zone for grain production, become drier as the Hadley Cell moves farther northward or will monsoon conditions develop that bring more rain? .
Quote:So if the question is: why do things keep getting worse, and do so
more and more rapidly, I would name two core reasons in this
generational Crisis era: the survivors of WW II (Silent generation)
have disappeared, leaving decision making in the hands of idiot
children, and the population is growing faster than the food supply.
The problem is more that we have people more adept at selling nonsense than in solving problems. Our economic system gives the biggest advantages to pathological narcissists, if not outright sociopaths.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
Posts: 469
Threads: 2
Joined: Dec 2017
(For the USA) This 4T seems difficult to interpret as we are living through it. It is, or has been, divisive rather than unifying, yet remaining relatively mild. A decade from now we may be trying to understand it with the benefit of hind sight.
On the other hand, I find it hard to see this 4T end with a triumphant note. If we avoid catastrophe, I still think that the next 1T will be, at best, a weak one. Where people will simply feel relieved that the 4T is over.
Posts: 95
Threads: 10
Joined: May 2021
Related to earlier conversations about 2020-2021 being a time of enormous change even compared to earlier in this current turning, in which I mentioned a change in people's relationship to jobs...I encountered this interesting tweet today.
https://twitter.com/Tylerjoelb/status/14...4052519941
"Hustle culture" is dying, quickly and dramatically. No one (born after 1982) will miss it.
Millennials, after failing to bring change "the normal way," are now starting to "win" by sheer numbers. I'm increasingly believing that, in addition to the pandemic (and, actually, possibly helped by the pandemic, though that's a pretty morbid thought), some kind of "critical mass" of Millennials/Homelanders in the population has been reached, and that the combination of these two near-simultaneous events is what's responsible for the extremely intense change of the last year-and-a-half or so.
Posts: 2,751
Threads: 4
Joined: May 2016
** 21-Aug-2021 World View: January 6 'Insurrection' hoax collapses
![[Image: Screen-Shot-2021-08-20-at-12.08.55-PM-1234x615.png]](https://gellerreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screen-Shot-2021-08-20-at-12.08.55-PM-1234x615.png)
- The January 6 "Insurrection"
For almost eight months, the Democrats have been claiming that on
January 6, Donald Trump incited an organized attack by White
Supremacists on the Capitol Building, to prevent the certification of
Joe Biden as president. That accusation, unsupported and contradicted
by facts, has been used to justify censorship and extrajudicial
incarceration of political enemies, and charges of racism and
White Supremacy directed at anyone who disagrees with the Democrats.
Democrats claim that it was the most violent attack on American
democracy since the Civil War.
On Friday, the Department of Justice leaked reports that the
FBI has found "scant evidence" that the January 6 attack
was organized or coordinated. Federal officials have arressted
more than 570 alleged participants, often jailing them for months
with no credible charges. There were some small
groups who planned to break into the Capitol, but even those
groups had no serious plans about what to do once inside. The
vast majority of the arrests were "one-off cases" of people
who were following the crowd when Donald Trump told them to
protest peacefully.
There have been uncomfirmed reports that there were dozens of
FBI operatives in the crowd on January 6, encouraging the Trump
supporters to break into the Capitol. There were several dozen
"protesters" who entered the Capitol on January 6 who have never
been charged with anything, and suspicions are growing that those
are all FBI operatives. Republican activists suggest that
Nancy Pelosi approved the use of FBI operatives to "stage" the
entire "insurrection," for her political benefit.
There were no weapons found on January 6, except by those of the
Capitol police. Nobody was killed on January 6 except Ashli Babbitt,
a pretty young girl, a Trump supporter, just walking through the
Capitol building. The Capitol policeman who shot and killed Babbitt
has not been named, and has been officially exonerated, but is thought
to be Lt. Michael L. Byrd, a black officer of the Capitol police, on
the staff of Nancy Pelosi.
-- Exclusive: FBI finds scant evidence U.S. Capitol attack was
coordinated - sources
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusi...021-08-20/
(Reuters, 21-Aug-2021)
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Regarding Afghanistan....
Looking at various YouTube videos, it seems that Brits and Australians assign blame to Biden rather than the United States. He is viewed as a senile old man. "Cognitively impaired is the term I see being used.
Posts: 2,751
Threads: 4
Joined: May 2016
** 21-Aug-2021 World View: Biden's Afghanistan Catastrophe
(08-21-2021, 07:44 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: > Regarding Afghanistan....
> Looking at various YouTube videos, it seems that Brits and
> Australians assign blame to Biden rather than the United States.
> He is viewed as a senile old man. "Cognitively impaired is the
> term I see being used.
Biden is an pathetic, arrogant liar. He says that Americans are free
to leave the country, which is a lie. He says that America's allies
approve of what he's doing, which is a lie. He said that he wasn't
warned about a likely debacle by DoD and the CIA, which is a lie. He
said that al-Qaeda is gone, which is a lie. He says that America has
no interest in Afghanistan, which is a lie. He says that girls and
women will be safe, which is a lie. He says that it will be possible
to control terrorism in Afghanistan with "over the horizon"
technology, which is a lie. He said that he made no mistakes in the
way he ordered the evacuation to be performed, which is a lie.
There are three possible explanations of Biden's repeated lies:
- He lied on purpose to gain political advantage.
- He lied because he's senile, so he has no idea what's going on.
- He lied because his staff has lied to him, so he has no idea
what's going on.
The Democrats are looking for how they're going try their usual
strategy of using bullshit to get out of this, but this is a
catastrophe of monumental proportions, and it will go on for months,
which thousands of Americans being held as hostages by a Taliban now
flooded with billions of dollars in advanced US weapons, and by a
reconstituted al-Qaeda which will undoubtedly be holding huge
celebrations at the American Embassy on 9/11.
By the way, the Germans, French and British calling it the "biggest
debacle in Nato's history." Biden did not consult with any of them in
advance.
It's hard to see how Biden's presidency will survive much longer.
Nobody voted for Biden. 75 million people voted for Trump, and other
people voted against Trump, but nobody voted for Biden.
Posts: 103
Threads: 9
Joined: Jul 2020
(08-21-2021, 02:05 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: (08-20-2021, 08:38 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 20-Aug-2021 World View: Multiple massive events
FullMoon Wrote:> What are the feelings of the readers about how close we are to
> something more life changing than the pandemic? We've had what
> could be seen as multiple massive events in a short period of
> time. We're at the end of the era and it's not here yet but
> really, we can feel it now and it's a part of our daily lives.
> Just 2-3 years ago it wasn't half this bad. It's happening fast
> and getting faster. Please John give your estimation on the speed
> of the unravelling because it's uncomfortably quick now. Thank
> you
I wish I could tell you something that will make you less anxious, but
let's face it, if that's what you want then you're asking the wrong
person.
As I've been saying for a long time, we're headed for a global
financial crisis and a world war. The timeline and the scenario
cannot be predicted. All that we can say is that the probability that
it will begin "this year" increases each year.
Still, you've raised an interesting point that I've noticed and other
people have noticed as well. There's a kind of "quickening," where
the world is deteriorating more and more quickly, and crises are
worsening and occurring more and more frequently. Since you've asked
the question, it's worthwhile to give some of the reasons why it's
happening.
I see the Unraveling as the depraved behavior of economic, cultural, religious, political, and administrative elites who have a stake in ethical behavior yet choose unethical behavior as shortcuts to achieving what they want or maximizing their take (higher rents, bigger dividends, asset appreciation, higher profits, more bureaucratic power, sweetheart deals with corrupt officials, corporate expansion, tax cuts, regulatory relief, and greater indulgence). I look at the Enrob -- excuse me, Enron -- scandal as a prime example of executives operating with no integrity, caution, or conscience because of their position. I look at the financial and real estate frauds as a prime example of a speculative boom that devours capital, a Ponzi scheme with some construction behind it. Politicians of both Parties are culpable, so let's not make this into a partisan blame-fest. I look at the infamous succession of televangelists fleecing people while winning the sympathy of politicians because the flock of those wolves-in-clerical-garb capable of impoverishing themselves can be delivered to the politicians who win their support. (If one can con people for their cash one can also con people for their votes). I look at educational 'experts' who promote No Child Left Behind as a means to prepare youth for dead-end jobs in retailing, food service, domestic toil, and farm labor as an objective due to the underinvestment in industrial plant and equipment.
Corrupt behavior by the Little Guy does not break the system. Someone taking a $20 from the till isn't going to break his employer... but he is likely to get caught due to accounting controls. Street crime usually has poor people as victims, and in a plutocratic order, nobody is more expendable than the poor except for street crooks. The big crooks have the power with which to circumvent accounting controls, and they have the authority to stop anyone from investigating them. It might not be as blatant as Lars Thorwald killing a dog who snoops in the flower bed in which he buried some damning evidence in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (Hitchcock has his way of dark humor, suggesting the cliché "curiosity killed the cat" even if the "cat" in this case is a kitten-sized Yorkshire terrier (I think that is the dog breed), but it is easy to fire anyone who might suspect something. (It's wise to act stupid in so corrupt a circumstance if one wants to keep his job).
Television pushes overt, partisan propaganda as objective reality and uses means to strengthen its emotional impact without adding more truth. Thus on FoX News, very much a 3T phenomenon, a common practice for setting up a politicized story denouncing a non-rightist (Clinton is terrible! Obama is terrible! Bernie Sanders is terrible! Biden is terrible! Critical race Theory is horrible!) is to lead in with some violent crime so that viewers can already be angry when they see the story. The violent crime may be local news far away, but anyone who gets a large amount of such stories is getting manipulated.
The speculative boom devours wealth while creating the illusion of prosperity. When people start to recognize it for what it is -- a sham -- then the whole edifice of financial and marketing legerdemain collapses. The recent underinvestment in plant and equipment has ensured non-growth in industrial jobs that pay solid salaries.
Quote:The core reason is that the Silent generation is now gone. These
people lived through WW II, and they saw war, famines, massive
homelessness, political forces driven by sheer insanity. When they
came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, they created institutions like the
United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the
Green Revolution to make sure that the mistakes that led to WW II
would not be repeated. The Silent generation ran those institutions
and made sure that they succeeded.
The Silent built institutions as "me too" participants in a GI-built world. The fault is that they founded few new industrial businesses. They did form professional practices (which can churn a profit), broadcasters, real-estate partnerships, government contractors (Ross Perot), fast-food chains (Dave Thomas), and oil-wildcatters (T. Boone Pickens)... maybe a hobby-like winery. One effect is that we have a big gap in businesses in a certain stage of the business lifecycle -- those that are vibrant with innovation and already profitable, businesses out of the infancy stage that are starting to be big employers but are not in the decline phase in which bureaucratic rigidity stifles innovation. The companies that the Silent formed either did not create large numbers of jobs unless those jobs are dead-end jobs. As for the Green revolution, that was Norman Borlaug, a GI.
Quote:The generational Crisis era (Fourth Turning) began in 2003, which is
when the people in the Silent generation almost all disappeared, all
at once. The Boomers had already created a tech bubble in the late
1990s, and the Gen-Xers got revenge by creating the subprime mortgage
real estate bubble, which began to explode in 2007. That was also the
year when the counter-terrorism efforts in the war in Iraq were
successful, with George Bush's "surge."
The subprime mortgage bubble happened about eighty years after the bubble of the 1920's... and the crash came almost eighty years later. What generation was disappearing just in time for the subprime mortgage bubble? The GI's the last living adults who remembered the last bubble of the 1920's and who blocked any repetition of such so long as they had influence in government, media, and employment. They effectively suppressed any repetition of their childhood nightmare, whatever their political position. They could still convince their juniors that they had seen it before, that it turned out badly, and anything much the same would turn out much the same. Eighty years is the time necessary for the extinction of mass memories. GI-built institutions were seen no longer as the cause of overall wealth and social sanity; they were (after the GI's were gone) entities to be milked for personal gain and power.
Quote:Barack Obama was the first Gen-X president, and it was one disastrous
policy after another. He couldn't close Guantanamo prison, but he
released the jihadists that are now returning to lead al-Qaeda. His
rollout of Obamacare was the biggest IT disaster in history. On the
day of the launch, so many people had lied to him that he didn't even
know that the entire system had crashed hours earlier, and was not
operational for months.
I realize what you think of Obama... the historical assessment is that he pushed the economic measures that kept an economic downturn from becoming a full-blown depression. You can say what you want about Obamacare, but the early bugs are gone. You might not like its spending priorities -- but that is simply your values which are those of an ideological minority.
So what really went wrong? Political results are never so neat and clean as is perfect. The concept of Too Big to Fail will almost certainly lead to "Too Corrupt to Survive". Obama saved economic entities that would have the cash with which to fund right-wing political campaigns against his political allies and stick us with such political sludge as Senator Ron Johnson and Governor Kristi Noem. Nothing quite works as intended.
Our political institutions were not made for bureaucratic behemoths capable of buying the elected officials; it was made for yeoman farmers and small shopkeepers who could get little good from the Government directly. Corporate farmers are squeezing the small-scale family farmers out by using economies of scale in everything from water supplies to the costs of compliance with labor laws and taxes. Giant defense contractors have a vested interest in wars for profit. Big Business used to prefer small government, but it has found that Big Government can offer huge profits from crony capitalism. The system that best serves bureaucratic behemoths is fascist corporatism in which the State is the ally of the rich and the oppressor of the workingman.
End of rant.
Quote:Those are just a few examples of how things have changed since the
generational Crisis era began in 2003. Here are some other examples:
- Public debate in almost every country in the world is growing
almost out of control. Central banks around the world are preventing
a crash for as long as they can by pumping trillions of dollars of
printed money into the banking systems.
- The world population is growing so quickly that more people are
being pushed into starvation and poverty. I always refer to this as:
the population is growing faster than the food supply.
- It used to be that there would be only one or two humanitarian
crises going on at the same time. But today, there are over a dozen
humanitarian crises. Covid has made this worse, but the number
growing before the pandemic because of increased starvation and
poverty.
- The last few years have seen huge refugee crises in Asia, the
Mideast, Europe, and America. These are caused by the same starvation
and poverty.
- The same starvation and poverty has resulted in local clashes and
riots that have the potentional of expanding.
- Since Biden has become president, he has turned decision making
over to millennials like AOC who are sabotaging America. The result
is open borders, floods of illegal immigrants from dozens of
counrties, spreading Covid and bring jihadists into the country;
massive street crime in cities across the country; and now this
unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan.
- China is suffering severe demographic problems, and Xi Jinping is
under pressure to do something, especially about Taiwan. He cannot
afford to wait much longer.
The central bankers can prevent crashes from spiraling into full-blown depressions, but they cannot mitigate the bad behavior of elites who can get away with seemingly anything.
Zero population growth is one of the most effective ways in which to prevent an acceleration in the depletion of resources and the emission of even more greenhouse gases. People in the industrial West are at the point at which further consumption of stuff has a near-zero return on expenditure. How many PC's do you need? How many stoves? How many blenders? How many "idiot screens"?
If you think refugee flows are floods now, then contemplate the consequences of anthropogenic global warming, when the seas inundate prime farmland now densely populated as possible with peasant farmers who supply the huge quantities of food necessary for several billion people, or when desert belts shift into what are now non-desert areas. I have seen conflicting models of how precipitation will shift (temperatures have less controversy). Will western Texas, now a marginal zone for grain production, become drier as the Hadley Cell moves farther northward or will monsoon conditions develop that bring more rain? .
Quote:So if the question is: why do things keep getting worse, and do so
more and more rapidly, I would name two core reasons in this
generational Crisis era: the survivors of WW II (Silent generation)
have disappeared, leaving decision making in the hands of idiot
children, and the population is growing faster than the food supply.
The problem is more that we have people more adept at selling nonsense than in solving problems. Our economic system gives the biggest advantages to pathological narcissists, if not outright sociopaths.
I notice your comparison of the types of institutions the GI vs Silent built in their heydays. What institutions did the other archetypes of that time build & do we have any comparisons to today's set of archetypes (Boomer, Gen X, Millennial)? Were the Silicon Valley companies we're all familiar with now really a Gen X founding or more of a Boomer thing? My generation, Millennial, are still young enough that our biggest achievements may be yet to come down the road. If the GI are anything to go by, I'd expect us Millennials to build businesses & institutions of the type people the world over highly respect and can rely on for years to come. In a sentence, I imagine us building businesses that are boring but necessary, and not necessarily appealing to the emotions. Maybe re-tooling our energy needs away from fossil fuels & into renewables will be the thing.
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(08-21-2021, 06:29 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 21-Aug-2021 World View: January 6 'Insurrection' hoax collapses
For almost eight months, the Democrats have been claiming that on January 6, Donald Trump incited an organized attack by White Supremacists on the Capitol Building, to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president. That accusation, unsupported and contradicted by facts, has been used to justify censorship and extrajudicial incarceration of political enemies, and charges of racism and White Supremacy directed at anyone who disagrees with the Democrats. Democrats claim that it was the most violent attack on American democracy since the Civil War.
On Friday, the Department of Justice leaked reports that the FBI has found "scant evidence" that the January 6 attack was organized or coordinated. Federal officials have arressted more than 570 alleged participants, often jailing them for months with no credible charges. There were some small groups who planned to break into the Capitol, but even those groups had no serious plans about what to do once inside. The vast majority of the arrests were "one-off cases" of people who were following the crowd when Donald Trump told them to protest peacefully.
Stupidity and incompetence never override intent. Was there a herd of sheep among the wolves? Yes. Are they being tragetted by DOJ (or any other law enforcement entitiy)? No. 570 out of roughly 20,000 is what we in the thinking community call selective enforcement: the worst bad apples only! Many of them came with plans, and, in accordance with conspiracy statutes, put those plans into action. They are clearly guilty.
Don't believe me. Call any competent lawyer.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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** 22-Aug-2021 World View: Greatest Generation
(08-22-2021, 12:54 AM)nguyenivy Wrote: > I notice your comparison of the types of institutions the GI vs
> Silent built in their heydays. What institutions did the other
> archetypes of that time build & do we have any comparisons to
> today's set of archetypes (Boomer, Gen X, Millennial)? Were the
> Silicon Valley companies we're all familiar with now really a Gen
> X founding or more of a Boomer thing? My generation, Millennial,
> are still young enough that our biggest achievements may be yet to
> come down the road. If the GI are anything to go by, I'd expect us
> Millennials to build businesses & institutions of the type people
> the world over highly respect and can rely on for years to
> come. In a sentence, I imagine us building businesses that are
> boring but necessary, and not necessarily appealing to the
> emotions. Maybe re-tooling our energy needs away from fossil fuels
> & into renewables will be the thing.
Don't forget -- you will be part of the new "Greatest Generation," and
your generation's accomplishments will be molded by the war.
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** 22-Aug-2021 World View: Stalinist Fascist Democrats
(08-22-2021, 07:55 AM)David Horn Wrote: > Stupidity and incompetence never override intent. Was there a
> herd of sheep among the wolves? Yes. Are they being tragetted by
> DOJ (or any other law enforcement entitiy)? No. 570 out of
> roughly 20,000 is what we in the thinking community call selective
> enforcement: the worst bad apples only! Many of them came with
> plans, and, in accordance with conspiracy statutes, put those
> plans into action. They are clearly guilty.
> Don't believe me. Call any competent lawyer.
The Reuters story has proven all your claims to be total lies.
The Trump supporters were all sheep, peacefully protesting. The
wolves, the "bad apples," were apparently all FBI agents assigned to
provoke violence. None of those "bad apples" has been arrested, but
were apparently used by Nancy Pelosi to stage the "insurrection."
Only the peaceful "sheep" have been arrested.
In the meantime, massive violence and destruction last year by
antifa-blm fascists has been excused, and those criminals all walk
free. Even people who were arrested were immediately set free. Even
the person who shot Ashli Babbitt dead walks free.
The Trump supporters are completely innocent. The Democrats are
supporting violent criminals, but they use extrajudicial arrests to
hide their criminal activity. Don't believe me. Just ask any
Stalinist or Communist Chinese lawyer.
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** 22-Aug-2021 World View: Popular views
DaKardii Wrote:> Most of what Biden says about the Afghanistan situation are indeed
> lies. But one of the things he says here is indeed true, and
> that's us having no interest in Afghanistan.
That's what the Democrats are hoping for.
DaKardii Wrote:> Meanwhile, Biden seems to be doing all he can to make the best
> argument for further intervention imaginable. Which makes
> me very concerned not only about the bungling up of the
> exit strategy, but also that it was bungled up
> intentionally in order to discredit the non-interventionist
> crowd.
This really is a conspiracy theory. It's pretty clear that the
evacuation was bungled by stupidity and incompetence. To claim that
anyone planned it this way gives credit to people who are way too
stupid to have even thought of that.
DaKardii Wrote:> While I don't doubt that more people who voted for Trump
> than people who voted for Biden, I personally believe both
> groups are vastly outnumbered by the people who voted
> against Biden and the people who voted against
> Trump. Because if that weren't the case, we wouldn't have a
> two-party system.
I really don't agree with this. Trump is still hugely popular,
and a majority of Americans believe that the election was rigged
and stolen from him. Trump claims that he's leading the biggest
popular political movement in history. Whether that's true or
not remains to be seen, but there's no doubt that Trump is leading
a very large movement.
Trump talked about all this at the rally he gave in Alabama
on Saturday evening.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?514187-1/p...an-alabama
Trump has given dozens of rallies like this, attended by thousands of
people. If Biden gave a rally, he'd be lucky if five people showed
up.
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** 22-Aug-2021 World View: State Department
Guest Wrote:> Does anyone really believe that the State Department doesn't know
> exactly how many American citizens are in Afghanistan and where
> they are in Afghanistan? That's just ludicrous! There must be
> thousands of American citizens in Afghanistan who are nowhere near
> Kabul. They were flushed down the drain when the plug was pulled
> and are now swimming in the Taliban sewer. There is no hope for
> them to get anywhere near Kabul, much less to the airport
> there. Does Biden think they can just get in their car and drive
> to Kabul and the Taliban will give them safe passage? How many
> have been able to do that so far? None. Zero. Zip. That would be
> international news. Just think, if they don't know how many there
> are, then how will they know when we get them all out? That's the
> question I would ask, if I were able to ask Biden and that masked
> parade of brown noses who stood behind him on Friday.
I definitely believe that the State Dept. doesn't know how many
American citizens are in Afghanistan, and where they are. To believe
otherwise is to give credit to idiots who in many cases are so stupid,
they couldn't find Afghanistan on a map. However, at least they're
"woke," and that's all that's important.
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(08-22-2021, 12:40 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 22-Aug-2021 World View: Greatest Generation
(08-22-2021, 12:54 AM)nguyenivy Wrote: > I notice your comparison of the types of institutions the GI vs
> Silent built in their heydays. What institutions did the other
> archetypes of that time build & do we have any comparisons to
> today's set of archetypes (Boomer, Gen X, Millennial)? Were the
> Silicon Valley companies we're all familiar with now really a Gen
> X founding or more of a Boomer thing? My generation, Millennial,
> are still young enough that our biggest achievements may be yet to
> come down the road. If the GI are anything to go by, I'd expect us
> Millennials to build businesses & institutions of the type people
> the world over highly respect and can rely on for years to
> come. In a sentence, I imagine us building businesses that are
> boring but necessary, and not necessarily appealing to the
> emotions. Maybe re-tooling our energy needs away from fossil fuels
> & into renewables will be the thing.
Don't forget -- you will be part of the new "Greatest Generation," and
your generation's accomplishments will be molded by the war.
I've thought of it that way but we don't have a war this time as least as of yet. Media opinions on my generation for the last 10 years (or at least pre-COVID) has been 'failure to launch' / 'boomerangs' (people who moved back home after university due to 2008/9 recession). What were the older generations' (Lost/Missionary/Progressive) opinions of the GI/'Greatest Gen' at the equivalent point in the last saeculum? I suppose the 2000s/2010s equivalent last time was the 1920s/1930s except this time we got a pandemic right in the Crisis rather than the Unravelling.
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*** 23-Aug-21 World View -- The Afghanistan catastrophe
This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com
- The Afghanistan catastrophe
- Reconstitution of al-Qaeda and 'Over the Horizon' warfare
- Resurgence of ISIS Khorasan (ISIS-K)
- Biden says he is just following Donald Trump's policy
- Generational Dynamics and the Democide Pattern
- Using economic leverage against the Taliban
****
**** The Afghanistan catastrophe
****
![[Image: g210822b.jpg]](http://Media.GenerationalDynamics.com/ww2010/g210822b.jpg)
Bitter, defiant President Joe Biden angry at non-compliant press coverage (Huffington Post)
The disastrous events in Afghanistan are still unfolding, so all we
can do is summarize what happened, and make some guesses about what's
about to happen. I will say that this situation has sickened and
infuriated me more than any other article I've written.
Once President Biden made the decision to evacuate all American
forces, he made a number of additional decisions, related to the
execution of the evacuation, that turned out to the cause of the
disaster. And these assessments are based on numerous analyses that
I've heard on Fox News, MSNBC, the BBC and al-Jazeera.
The two worst decisions were the following:
- Setting a "date certain" of August 31 when all American troops
would be withdrawn, with no conditionality on the part of the
Taliban.
- Evacuating Bagram airbase on July 5, leaving behind billions of
dollars in advanced weaponry, before American civilians had been
evacuated from Afghanistan.
Analysts I heard agree that all civilians should have been evacuated
first, then all the weapons should have been removed, and only then
should Bagram airbase have been evacuated.
The most immediate results of these decisions are the following:
- 10-15,000 American citizens are left behind in villages and
provinces across Afghanistan, with no credible plan to evacuate them.
The same is true of the tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked
for and aided Americans in the last 20 years, such as interpreters.
Their lives have been threatened by the Taliban. The Americans will
be used as hostages for years to com.
- The 70,000 or so Taliban fighters are now flooded with some $85
billion in advanced American weaponry left behind, including:
warplanes, drones, m16s, blackhawks, night vision goggles, 200 small
aircraft, and advanced battlefield communications technology.
- This was not just an American mission. It was a NATO mission. If
you listen to the BBC, the Brits are heartbroken and furious at Biden
for destroying the entire NATO mission without even consulting with
the other countries. The Germans, French and British calling it the
"biggest debacle in Nato's history," questioning whether Nato can
survive. Biden did not consult with any of them in advance.
The disaster is compounded by the numerous lies that Biden told in the
last two weeks, getting visibly angry and defiant whenever anyone
challenges him. He said that Americans are free to leave the country,
which is a lie. He said that America's allies approve of what he's
doing, which is a lie. He said that he wasn't warned about a likely
debacle by DoD and the CIA, which is a lie. He said that al-Qaeda is
gone, which is a lie. He said that America has no further interest in
Afghanistan, which is a lie. He said that girls and women will be
safe, which is a lie. He said that it will be possible to control
terrorism in Afghanistan with "over the horizon" technology, which is
a lie. He said that he made no mistakes in the way he ordered the
evacuation to be performed, which is a lie.
Biden responded to criticism by claiming that he had two choices:
continue the war with more troops, or end the war. This was spin. He
used this claim to deflect from the incompetency of the evacuation,
and also, evacuating the troops was never going to end the war.
There's an increasing belief that Biden is so cognitively challenged
that he is completely out of touch with reality, his presidency is a
danger to the country. Unfortunately, his vice-president is not much
better.
****
**** Reconstitution of al-Qaeda and 'Over the Horizon' warfare
****
Biden made several false claims -- that al-Qaeda was completely gone,
that the mission in Afghanistan over the last 20 years had been
accomplished, and that Afghanistan was no longer relevant to America.
The claim that al-Qaeda was gone was contradicted by a UN report that
claimed that elements of al-Qaeda continued to exist in numerous
provinces. Al-Qaeda have always been closely related to and a part of
the Taliban, and analysts say that when the American troops have been
withdrawn, al-Qaeda will reconstitute itself fully.
At that point, al-Qaeda will be back where it was 20 years ago --
having a safe haven in Afghanistan to use as a platform to launch
international attacks on Europe, the Mideast and possibly America.
Jihadists from all over the world will be energized, and will come to
Afghanistan for training.
Biden made vague claims that al-Qaeda terrorism can be prevented by
"Over the Horizon" technology, which uses such things as drones to
augment local intelligence. The problem is that all local
intelligence has been pretty much destroyed.
****
**** Resurgence of ISIS Khorasan (ISIS-K)
****
There has been an ISIS branch in Afghanistan for some years, known as
ISIS Khorasan (ISIS-K). This is a jihadist group in competition with
al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and they pretty much hate each other. The
importance of ISIS Khorasan is that they may decide to launch some
kind of terrorist attack around Kabul to embarrass both the Taliban
and the United States.
****
**** Biden says he is just following Donald Trump's policy
****
Biden has reversed one Donald Trump policy after another, causing one
disaster after another for the country. Since Biden has become
president, he has turned decision making over to millennials like AOC
who are sabotaging America. The result is open borders, floods of
illegal immigrants from dozens of counrties, spreading Covid and
bringing jihadists into the country; changing us from an
energy-dependent country to a country begging other countries for
energy; massive street crime in cities across the country; and now
this unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan is the one Trump policy Biden chose not to reverse, but
did so in the most disastrous way possible. Biden claims that he was
just implementing a decision to withdraw the troops that had already
been committed by his predecessor, Donald Trump. But he did so in a
way most likely to sabotage America. Trump has indicated that he
would have made sure that the civilians and weapons were removed
before the troops were removed, and that claim is credible since it's
standard military procedure and is the policy used, for example, in
the evacuation of Saigon in 1975. In view of this history, it's hard
to explain Biden's decision to withdraw troops first was done other
than intentionally to sabotage America, just as opening the borders,
ending energy production and supporting street crime are apparently
done purposely to sabotage America.
However, analysts claim that Trump's decision in March 2020 to
evacuate was also delusional, and I agree with that, and I said so at
the time.
I started writing about this in 2009, during the Barack Obama
administration. President George Bush had executed a successful
counter-insurgency operation in Iraq in 2007, driving out al-Qaeda in
Iraq with a troop "surge." In 2009, I ridiculed Obama's announcement
that he would try to duplicate Bush's success with his own "surge" in
Afghanistan. ( "People are shocked! shocked! at Obama's war plan in Afghanistan. (06-Dec-2009)"
)
As I explained many times since then, Iraq and Afghanistan were
fundamentally different, with the result that a "surge" would work in
Iraq, but not in Afghanistan. I've written about this at length many
times, but briefly, the fighters in the al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)
insurgency were imported from Jordan and Saudi Arabia, while the
fighters, in the Afghan insurgency were Pashtuns indigenous to
Afghanistan. This is so simple and so obvious that it's unbelievable
how stupid the people in Washington are not to understand this. The
"surge" in Iraq sent the foreign fighters out of the country, while
the "surge" in Afghanistan just sent them to other villages within the
country.
Here's what I wrote in "16-Feb-20 World View -- US and Taliban to sign laughable 'reduction in violence' agreement in Afghanistan"
in response
to Donald Trump's agreement with the Taliban to withdraw American
forces:
<QUOTE>"Why the Afghan peace agreement must fail
Afghanistan's last generational crisis war was an extremely
bloody, horrific civil war, in 1991-96. The war was a civil war,
fought between the Pashtuns in southern Afghanistan versus the
Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks in northern
Afghanistan. The Taliban are radicalized Pashtuns, and when they
need to import foreign fighters, then can import their cousins
from the Pashtun tribes in Pakistan.
Indeed, it's much worse than that. The ethnic groups in
Afghanistan are COMPLETELY NON-UNITED and loathe each other.
Pashtuns still have scores to settle with the Tajiks, Hazaras and
Uzbeks that formed the Northern Alliance, especially the Shias.
These opposing groups have fresh memories of the atrocities,
torture, rape, beatings, dismemberments, mutilations, and so forth
that the other side performed on their friends, wives and other
family members, and they have no desire to be friends or to work
together. They'd rather kill each other.
The above is a brief summary of stuff that I've written about in
great detail in the past about why peace will fail in Afghanistan.
It's not rocket science for the so-called "Washington experts,"
but it does require studying history and trying to understand
what's actually going on in the world. But we live in a society
where SAT scores have been plummetting for decades, ever since the
Boomers graduated, and where all college courses are being taught
by incredibly stupid Marxist idiots. People in the mainstream
media know nothing about the world except Marxist sociology and
women's studies. In Congress you have total idiots like AOC who
says something every day to prove how stupid she is. And in the
Administration, you have "experts" who have also graduated from
colleges teaching Marxist sociology and women's studies.
So there's really no hope. The above summary is not rocket
science, but it's far beyond the mental capabilities of the
analysts, journalists and "experts" in Washington, almost all of
whom are way too steeped in metoo and socialist garbage to have
any clue what's really going on in the world. The same is true
about many of the other hundreds of countries and societies that
I've studied, analyzed and written about in the last 15 years.
All the people in Washington can do is stumble in the dark, until
they stumble into World War III. Then they finally learn what's
going on. That's the way the world works.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- Attributed
to American satirist Ambrose Bierce, early 1900s."<END QUOTE>
If you read the above, you get some idea why I'm always right and the
Washington experts are almost always wrong. The catastrophe going on
in Afghanistan right now shows the result. I would add that you can
also get some idea why being always right has never made me loved.
It's brought me no joy, no money, but plenty of contempt.
Generational Dynamics has been a curse on my life and has only brought
me misery, as the ability to foretell the future did for the mythical
Cassandra and the Biblical Jeremiah. I've been doing this for 20
years, and since I'm now age 77, I hope I won't be doing this much
longer.
****
**** Generational Dynamics and the Democide Pattern
****
So now we can use some Generational Dynamics analysis to predict some
patterns that we can expect to see in Afghanistan.
Regular readers know that I've written several times about the
differences that depend on whether the preceding crisis war was an
external war with another country versus an internal crisis civil war
between tribes and ethnic groups. In the former case, when the war
ends, the two armies each withdraw from the other country, and further
contact between the populations is done diplomatically. But in the
latter case, the two populations continue to live with each other when
the war ends -- in the same country, the same villages and even on the
same streets. This means that the hatred and the desire for revenge
continue at a very personal level.
After a generational crisis civil war, the two sides are never really
at peace. The losing ethnic group uses demonstrations and riots to
attack the winning government, while the winning government uses
violence and extrajudicial torture and jailing to control the losing
group. I use the term "Democide Violence" to describe this violence
by the winning ethnic group government against the losing ethnic
group.
In the case of Afghanistan, we can expect to see this Democide Pattern
played out by the Taliban against their enemies in the 1990s civil war
-- the Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks that formed the Northern Alliance.
The Democide Pattern was extremely bloody in the late 1990s, following
the 1991-96 civil war, when the Pashtuns committed massacres against
the Hazaras in northern Afghanistan.
Those massacres ended with the defeat of the Taliban 20 years ago by
Nato, but they may begin again. The Panjshir Valley in northern
Afghanistan is a hotbed of the old Northern Alliance. The Taliban
says that they are sending hundreds of fighters to the Panjshir
Valley. This drama will unfold in the next few days and weeks.
In the past, the Taliban have been unable to subdue the Panjshir
Valley because of its geography -- high mountains on three sides with
a narrow pass on the fourth side. However, there is a difference this
time because the Taliban will be armed with the advanced weapons that
the Americans left behind. This will be the first major test of the
Taliban's use of American weapons.
****
**** Using economic leverage against the Taliban
****
Biden is going to try to get the August 31 deadline extended. The
Taliban have said that they will refuse to allow that, but Biden can
use economic leverage. There $16 billion in Afghanistan Central Bank
assets being held by the United States or by the IMF, and unfreezing
these funds can be used as leverage.
However, this may cause the Taliban government to ask China or
Pakistan for a temporary infusion of funds. It's not clear how all
this will play out.
This may well end up being another humiliation for the United States.
It is just one more example of how President Biden's evacuation of
Afghanistan is, according to many analysts I've heard, the greatest
foreign policy disaster since the end of World War II, and completely
preventable.
In my opinion, the country is being led by an arrogant, bumbling fool
for a president, and an arrogant, bumbling fool for a vice-president.
This is an extremely dangerous time for all of us.
Sources:
- White House orders for a speedy military withdrawal put pressure on beleaguered Afghans as the Taliban surged (Washington Post, 19-Aug-2021)
- US allies deeply concerned by Biden's detachment (Washington Examiner, 18-Aug-2021)
- Biden, Allies Frustrated With Media’s Hawkish Coverage Of Afghanistan Withdrawal (Huffington Post, 20-Aug-2021)
- Taliban’s special forces outfit providing ‘security’ at Kabul airport (Long War Journal, 22-Aug-2021)
- US general tells British special forces: Stop rescuing people in Kabul, you're making us look bad (Washington Examiner, 20-Aug-2021)
- Taliban says hundreds of fighters heading to take Panjshir Valley (Al-Jazeera, 22-Aug-2021)
- Explained: Why Afghanistan’s Panjshir remains out of Taliban’s reach (Deutsche Welle, 22-Aug-2021)
- Afghan crisis: War clouds gather over Panjshir Valley (Tribune India, 22-Aug-2021)
- Biden administration freezes billions of dollars in Afghan reserves, depriving Taliban of cash (Washington Post, 17-Aug-2021)
- Ex-MI5 chief warns Isis could take advantage of Afghanistan’s fall (Guardian, 20-Aug-2021)
- Isis-Khorasan / Sullivan: US taking Afghanistan ISIS threat 'absolutely deadly seriously' (The Hill, 22-Aug-2021)
Related Articles:
KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Afghanistan, Joe Biden, Nato,
Taliban, al-Qaeda, Bagram airbase, Over the Horizon,
ISIS Khorasan, ISIS-K, Iraq, al-Qaeda in Iraq, AQI,
Democide Pattern, Panjshir Valley,
Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Northern Alliance
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Trump cut the deal, and we rescind it at grave risk.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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(08-22-2021, 12:46 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 22-Aug-2021 World View: Stalinist Fascist Democrats
(08-22-2021, 07:55 AM)David Horn Wrote: Stupidity and incompetence never override intent. Was there a herd of sheep among the wolves? Yes. Are they being tragetted by DOJ (or any other law enforcement entitiy)? No. 570 out of roughly 20,000 is what we in the thinking community call selective enforcement: the worst bad apples only! Many of them came with plans, and, in accordance with conspiracy statutes, put those plans into action. They are clearly guilty.
Don't believe me. Call any competent lawyer.
The Reuters story has proven all your claims to be total lies.
The Trump supporters were all sheep, peacefully protesting. The wolves, the "bad apples," were apparently all FBI agents assigned to provoke violence. None of those "bad apples" has been arrested, but were apparently used by Nancy Pelosi to stage the "insurrection." Only the peaceful "sheep" have been arrested.
In the meantime, massive violence and destruction last year by antifa-blm fascists has been excused, and those criminals all walk free. Even people who were arrested were immediately set free. Even the person who shot Ashli Babbitt dead walks free.
The Trump supporters are completely innocent. The Democrats are supporting violent criminals, but they use extrajudicial arrests to hide their criminal activity. Don't believe me. Just ask any Stalinist or Communist Chinese lawyer.
I reread the Reuters article, and have a hard time getting the same "information" from it that you did. The only thing that seems to be off the table is seditous insurrection, because they were too stupid to have more than a plan to break-in. That hardly makes them innocent (espeicailly when you cite BLM protests as models needing prosecution). There's still plenty there without that, and a few of them will get years behind bars for their trouble. Some BLM protestors will too.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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** 23-Aug-2021 World View: The FBI and the Staged Insurrection
(08-23-2021, 10:41 AM)David Horn Wrote: > I reread the Reuters article, and have a hard time getting the
> same "information" from it that you did. The only thing that
> seems to be off the table is seditious insurrection, because they
> were too stupid to have more than a plan to break-in. That hardly
> makes them innocent (especially when you cite BLM protests as
> models needing prosecution). There's still plenty there without
> that, and a few of them will get years behind bars for their
> trouble. Some BLM protestors will too.
Did you read what you've written? There's NO INSURRECTION! The
"insurrection" WAS A HOAX perpetrated by your asshole pals in the
Democrat party.
It's not even clear that "trespassing" was a crime on January 6, since
the Capitol was/is open to the public, and Capitol police apparently
invited the protesters to enter the building. If some people
illegally trespassed, or if they broke a couple of windows, then fine,
prosecute them, though they should be out on bail within a couple of
days.
But many of the so-called "insurrectionists" were simply standing
around on the Capitol steps or outside the building. They committed
no crime whatsoever, except the crime of being Trump supporters, but
they've were thrown in jail for months, often in solitary confinement.
Compare that to the antifa-blm fascists who burned down buildings and
cars, but still walk free.
So the next question is: Why did the Democrats leak the story about
"scant evidence"? What was their motive? Tucker Carlson has
investigated and believes that it was to prevent FBI agents in the
crowd from being identified.
The January 6 show had a predecessor -- a 2020 hoax to accuse a group
of Trump supporters of trying to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen
Whitmer. It now turns out that the entire attempt was provoked by a
dozen FBI agents who had infiltrated the group and helped them plan
the entire plot. The FBI was extremely embarrassed when the identity
of the FBI agents was revealed.
-- The group accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Whitmer was
riddled with FBI informants who took leading roles, according to
BuzzFeed
https://www.insider.com/kidnapping-consp...ort-2021-7
(Insider.com, 21-Jul-2021)
So Tucker Carlson believes that the "scant evidence" leak was used to
prevent the false accusations from going to trial, so that the FBI
agents in the January 6 hoax would not revealed. This is entirely
plausible, in view of Whitmer kidnapping hoax.
-- Tucker Carlson sees coverup plot behind announcement FBI found
little evidence of coordination among Jan. 6 demonstrators
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/202...tors_.html
(American Thinker, 21-Aug-2021)
Horn, you were an antiwar protester in the 1960s, weren't you? And
what if you had found out that antiwar groups had been infiltrated by
FBI agents who provoked them into committing crimes to discredit the
entire antiwar movement? How would you have reacted? We know how you
would have reacted. You would have been furious.
Now exactly the same thing is happening to innocent Trump supporters,
and you should be equally infuriated.
Horn, you still seem to be capable of thought. In this I contrast you
to Brower who is no longer capable of thought, but has become
completely evil without even realizing it. He would have been
perfectly happy in the 1930s doing Joseph Goebbels' job, or being a
Grand Kleagle in the KKK overseeing the lynching of blacks. As far as
I can tell, he has no moral center any more, but is simply a sock
puppet for Nancy Pelosi.
But you still seem to be capable of thought. Why are you in league
with these evil people who are infiltrating peaceful protesters with
FBI agents? And that's not all. These people are implementing
policies dictated by "the squad," who come from countries that hate
the United States and want to do everything possible to destroy the
country. They let criminals out of jail, they encourage blacks to
kill each other on the street, they flood the country with Covid-laden
people from countries around the world, who flood the country with
enough fentynal to kill the entire population, they've turned
energy-independent America into a country begging for energy, and now
we have the Afghanistan debacle which was implemented in the worst
possible way. These outcomes are not unintended consequences.
They're done on purpose to destroy the United States. I can imagine
AOC calling home every day and bragging that she's playing a big part
in destroying America.
Supporting these evil people makes you as evil as they are. Why are
you still supporting them?
Posts: 10,013
Threads: 103
Joined: May 2016
(08-23-2021, 02:07 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 23-Aug-2021 World View: The FBI and the Staged Insurrection
(08-23-2021, 10:41 AM)David Horn Wrote: > I reread the Reuters article, and have a hard time getting the
> same "information" from it that you did. The only thing that
> seems to be off the table is seditious insurrection, because they
> were too stupid to have more than a plan to break-in. That hardly
> makes them innocent (especially when you cite BLM protests as
> models needing prosecution). There's still plenty there without
> that, and a few of them will get years behind bars for their
> trouble. Some BLM protestors will too.
Did you read what you've written? There's NO INSURRECTION! The
"insurrection" WAS A HOAX perpetrated by your asshole pals in the
Democrat party.
It's not even clear that "trespassing" was a crime on January 6, since
the Capitol was/is open to the public, and Capitol police apparently
invited the protesters to enter the building. If some people
illegally trespassed, or if they broke a couple of windows, then fine,
prosecute them, though they should be out on bail within a couple of
days.
But many of the so-called "insurrectionists" were simply standing
around on the Capitol steps or outside the building. They committed
no crime whatsoever, except the crime of being Trump supporters, but
they've were thrown in jail for months, often in solitary confinement.
Compare that to the antifa-blm fascists who burned down buildings and
cars, but still walk free.
So the next question is: Why did the Democrats leak the story about
"scant evidence"? What was their motive? Tucker Carlson has
investigated and believes that it was to prevent FBI agents in the
crowd from being identified.
The January 6 show had a predecessor -- a 2020 hoax to accuse a group
of Trump supporters of trying to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen
Whitmer. It now turns out that the entire attempt was provoked by a
dozen FBI agents who had infiltrated the group and helped them plan
the entire plot. The FBI was extremely embarrassed when the identity
of the FBI agents was revealed.
-- The group accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Whitmer was
riddled with FBI informants who took leading roles, according to
BuzzFeed
https://www.insider.com/kidnapping-consp...ort-2021-7
(Insider.com, 21-Jul-2021)
So Tucker Carlson believes that the "scant evidence" leak was used to
prevent the false accusations from going to trial, so that the FBI
agents in the January 6 hoax would not revealed. This is entirely
plausible, in view of Whitmer kidnapping hoax.
-- Tucker Carlson sees coverup plot behind announcement FBI found
little evidence of coordination among Jan. 6 demonstrators
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/202...tors_.html
(American Thinker, 21-Aug-2021)
Horn, you were an antiwar protester in the 1960s, weren't you? And
what if you had found out that antiwar groups had been infiltrated by
FBI agents who provoked them into committing crimes to discredit the
entire antiwar movement? How would you have reacted? We know how you
would have reacted. You would have been furious.
Now exactly the same thing is happening to innocent Trump supporters,
and you should be equally infuriated.
Horn, you still seem to be capable of thought. In this I contrast you
to Brower who is no longer capable of thought, but has become
completely evil without even realizing it. He would have been
perfectly happy in the 1930s doing Joseph Goebbels' job, or being a
Grand Kleagle in the KKK overseeing the lynching of blacks. As far as
I can tell, he has no moral center any more, but is simply a sock
puppet for Nancy Pelosi.
But you still seem to be capable of thought. Why are you in league
with these evil people who are infiltrating peaceful protesters with
FBI agents? And that's not all. These people are implementing
policies dictated by "the squad," who come from countries that hate
the United States and want to do everything possible to destroy the
country. They let criminals out of jail, they encourage blacks to
kill each other on the street, they flood the country with Covid-laden
people from countries around the world, who flood the country with
enough fentynal to kill the entire population, they've turned
energy-independent America into a country begging for energy, and now
we have the Afghanistan debacle which was implemented in the worst
possible way. These outcomes are not unintended consequences.
They're done on purpose to destroy the United States. I can imagine
AOC calling home every day and bragging that she's playing a big part
in destroying America.
Supporting these evil people makes you as evil as they are. Why are
you still supporting them?
Were you part of the insurrection on Jan.6? I call it the attempted Trump coup.
Posts: 2,751
Threads: 4
Joined: May 2016
** 23-Aug-2021 World View: Insurrection by TV watching
(08-23-2021, 06:34 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: > Were you part of the insurrection on Jan.6? I call it the
> attempted Trump coup.
There was no insurrection on January 6. However, I did watch the
staged insurrection hoax on TV, but please don't tell the Democrats,
because they may decide that it's "insurrectionist" merely to watch it
on TV, and they may start jailing such people.
|
