Bill Bonner, "Confidential Agents"

"Confidential Agents"

Secret agents, mysterious deaths and the rest of the story...

by Bill Bonner

Baltimore, Maryland - "Nothing comes from nothing…no one comes from nobody…and there’s always more to the story; usually the important part of it. We were doing a little wondering about where we came from…or at least about the industry of which we’ve been a part for the last nearly 50 years. Its genesis – for our narrow little piece of it – began in the late 1930s.

Patrick Maitland was the 17th Earl of Lauderdale, by virtue of which he was also the clan chief of Clan Maitland. He went to Oxford in the early ‘30s…and then became a journalist, with a job with an obscure diplomatic newsletter, called The Fleet Street Letter. Thus did he join the hallowed company of hacks, has-beens, and occasional maverick geniuses in the newsletter trade. We acquired the Fleet Street Letter in 1993. Lord Rees-Mogg, our longtime business partner, became its chairman.

Back in the ‘30s…"The Heart of the Matter." Maitland saw the job of a newsletter then, as we do now, to get to the heart of the story…to reject the official propaganda and tell the truth in a way a mainstream rag cannot. And he did it by putting his own boots on the ground where there was most likely to be trouble.

In the mid-‘30s, Germany, Italy and Japan were ‘gunning up.’ Their leaders wore uniforms, held mass rallies, excited the masses and styled themselves as masters of war. But when Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich and reported that there would be ‘peace in our time,’ Mailtand had his doubts. He decided to find out for himself. He went to Italy. He watched. He listened. And when he returned to London, he reported that ‘peace’ was an illusion; Mussolini wanted war. Britain needed to get ready for it.

He was…of course…right. The mainstream press relies on advertising. And advertisers want the imprimatur of a mainstream publication. After all, if you see it advertised in The New York Times…it must be legit! Mainstream publications aim to keep both advertisers and readers happy by sticking with storylines that don’t challenge them or irritate them. Readers get what they want…what they expect…and what the paper wants them to have. Today’s New York Times, for example, passes along the elite, government line as news. ‘The Biden Administration did this…’ ‘Secretary of State Blinken said that…’ Etc.

Over on the editorial pages, columnists and cheerleaders explain why the elite view is correct and why opponents are silly, evil or stupid. Readers, with no alternative source of facts or opinions, fall in behind their thought leaders.

Newsletters, on the other hand, are written for the few, not for the many. They do not attempt to please advertisers; they have none. Instead, they present contrarian, alternative views…often views that make readers uncomfortable. They dig a little deeper…turn over rocks to see the slimy things beneath…and try to help readers understand what is really going on.

The Power and the Glory: Maitland scored another big coup…a ‘scoop’ as they say in journalism…after WWII. The US had demonstrated its devastating atomic bomb, kept under close guard. No other nation had it. But in 1950, Maitland was among the first to report that the Soviet Union had a working model. This was a big story. How did Maitland find out? We don’t know, but here’s a hint: he hired a very special journalist – this one from Cambridge – Kim Philby.

Here is where the story gets interesting. Philby was a Soviet spy, one of the “Cambridge Five” who infiltrated British intelligence and worked as moles for the Soviet secret police. He also wrote for the Fleet Street letter. Philby later worked at the British embassy in Washington. There, he got to know a young, gifted CIA agent named James Jesus Angleton. The two seemed to get along. What secrets they shared, we have no idea.

But Angleton was a hard-driving, divisive character. After a while he had divided the CIA into two factions…the pro-Angletons and the anti-Angletons. Angleton himself got to be a little weird and perhaps unreliable. He had been placed in charge of the CIA’s counterintelligence unit…where they sought to root out double agents. Soon, he was seeing them everywhere. He claimed that the Prime Minister of England, Harold Wilson, was a Soviet spy. Same thing for the Prime Minister of Canada, Lester Pearson. Rumor had it that in his zeal to identify potential enemies, he had ‘gone rogue.’ It was said that he worked with the mafia and with Cuban exiles.

At this time, the CIA was remarkably incompetent. It hatched more than 600 different plots to kill Fidel Castro. All of them were failures. Its Bay of Pigs operation was a disaster. John Kennedy, president at the time, was not even informed of the Bay of Pigs invasion until it was already underway. He was furious and vowed publicly to ‘smash (the CIA) into a thousand pieces.’ A few months later, he was assassinated. RFK, Jr. believes the CIA was involved in his uncle’s murder. Fingers pointed at Angleton.

Our Man in Maryland: By 1975, Sen. Frank Church had come to believe that it was time to bring the CIA under control. His ‘Church Committee’ held hearings and discovered that many of the rumors were true. One of the most important witnesses was, of course, the then director of the CIA, William Colby. Colby was granted a special privilege. As director of an on-going covert operation, his testimony was limited. But what he reported…and what he heard…was enough to make him want to clean house. He fired Angleton.

By this time, Kim Philby had defected to Moscow. And now Angleton was taking his retirement too – at least, so they announced. Privately, he was let back into the CIA in an off-the-record deal and presumably went back to doing whatever it was he was doing before.

A few years later, Bill Colby retired too. But he didn’t entirely stop working either. Instead, he joined us as a consultant. We were just trying to ‘connect the dots,’ as always. And we thought Colby may have some connections we lacked. But either he was too prudent to tell us very much…or he didn’t know very much.

When we met Colby it was usually at his house in Georgetown. But he also had a place in Maryland, down on the Chesapeake Bay. It was there, one day, that he fixed himself his usual breakfast. And then, for some inexplicable reason, he appears to have gone out in his canoe – leaving the breakfast untouched. A storm was blowing up. But that didn’t stop him. His body was found two days later…washed up on the beach."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

God help you, kids...

Dan, I Allegedly, "Cash for Keys is Back"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly 1/10/24

"Cash for Keys is Back"

"Cash for keys is back in a very big way. People are being asked to move out of houses and they’re getting cash settlement instead of being evicted or being foreclosed upon. This is happening at a pace that we haven’t seen since the 200eight financial crisis."

Comments here:

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"The Transition"

"The Transition"

by Robert Gore

"Western civilization is characterized by its institutions. Its foundations have been government, organized religion, the military, science, technology, business, academia, media, art, and entertainment. Institutions have been bulwarks of order and have enabled Western civilization to reach unprecedented plateaus of achievement and prosperity. Now, they’re under assault and crumbling, which has been often noted and decried but usually not analyzed or understood as the outcome of an epochal transition.

Institutions have been the victim of their own success. The Industrial and Information Revolutions have put goods, services, wealth, data, and choices in billions of hands in what amounts to an historical blink of an eye, less than two centuries. The average American lives better and longer than royalty did back in monarchy’s heyday and has more personal power. Kings and emperors of yore could order people around and toss them in dungeons, but they couldn’t hop on the Internet and communicate with someone on the other side of the planet or hop on a freeway and journey five hundred miles in a day.

Institutions’ loss has been individuals’ gain, and many of the latter are questioning the necessity of the former. Institutions are staring into an abyss. Many, including governments, do not have convincing justifications for their own existence. They offer little to average people and in many cases they’re a net negative, imposing nothing but burdens. Their leaders are solely devoted to furthering their own prerogatives and power. Now, institutions are fighting a rearguard action to halt or slow a transition that at best will dramatically reduce their power and could mean their extinction.

COVID, climate change, foreign wars, censorship, woke, open borders, surveillance, and digital passports and currencies are Last Gasp efforts to preserve institutional status, wealth, and power. The institutions have responded to their own drum roll with what vigor they can muster, but those causes inspire vapid virtue signaling, not authentic passion. Their only wellspring of true passion is hatred for anyone who believes differently, who challenges their science, propaganda, and mendacity, and, more broadly, their right to dictate and coerce, and to cancel, punish or execute anyone not toeing their line.

Their objective failures - many of which count in their corrupt reckonings as successes - are manifest. The COVID response, particularly vaccines’ deaths and adverse events, completely discredited governments, public health, institutional medicine, the pharmaceutical companies, and social and mainstream media, while inflicting severe collateral damage on official “science,” big business, and central banks. The institutions are regrouping under the banner of climate change, but it’s clear from the pushback they’re already receiving that their agenda can only be implemented through violence and high-tech totalitarianism.

Repeated failures and ever-mounting resistance would seem to be enough to doom their totalitarian designs. Unfortunately, in their desperation and hatred, the willingness of the elite to wage actual, kinetic war on the rest of us shouldn’t be underestimated. While the COVID vaccine death toll numbers in the millions, war still has no rival for murderous effectiveness. However, offensive violence is no solution.

Nuclear weapons changed warfare in a way that’s not generally recognized. The threat that a global nuclear conflagration could eliminate humanity rendered their use a high-risk proposition. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in 1945 remain the only wartime use of nuclear weapons. Under the umbrella created by nuclear weapons’ unemployability, technological advances have fueled the development of a staggering array of armaments that has decisively shifted the military balance from offensive to defensive warfare.

World War II was the last major war in which an offensive, or more correctly, a counter-offensive, won. The allied powers repelled the axis powers, but at huge cost. Industrial-scale, mechanized warfare’s awesome destructive power left all the major participants except the U.S. in ruins, their populations decimated.

Offensive military power has become enormously expensive relative to the defensive technologies and strategies that can be employed against it. Since World War II, there have been few successful invasions. Both sides were stymied in the Korean War. U.S. invasions have been a string of disasters since Vietnam. Afghan goat herders defeated both the Soviets and the U.S.

On the cusp of victory in Ukraine, the Russian Special Military Operation would seem to belie the trend of offensive failures. However, the Russians have actually won by playing defense. They moved through their major objective, the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine, where the majority of the population speak Russian. Many of them want to be part of Russia and hate the Ukrainian government, which has waged war on them since the 2014 coup. Consequently, the Russians were supported by the local population.

This past year featured a Ukrainian counteroffensive that was supposed to drive the Russians back from Donbass and retake the Crimean peninsula. NATO and Ukrainian strategists refused to recognize that their offensive was akin to sending cavalry units against machine-gun and artillery emplacements. They were up against an opponent well-armed with land mines, state-of-the-art field artillery and long range missiles, air cover, and surveillance and attack drones. The Russian military, which has a long tradition of waging defensive warfare, employed a complex three-layer defense. The Ukrainians rarely progressed through even the first layer, impaling themselves on the tip of the Russian spear and taking massive losses.

The successful Russians strategies and tactics will, or should be, studied by military analysts in the U.S. However, what’s most important is that those tactics implicitly acknowledge a truism central to the transition in progress. High-cost offensive warfare can be stymied and often defeated with relatively low cost defensive weaponry and asymmetric warfare.

It can be argued that an offensive against the world’s most powerful military was obviously doomed, although nobody in the Western brain trust made that argument before the Ukrainians attacked. What truly signals the dawning of a new age has been the repeated successes since World War II of guerrilla or insurgent warfare against ostensibly much more powerful forces.

The Russians learned their lesson from the Soviet failure in Afghanistan. The U.S. government hasn’t learned anything from its string of failures. In Washington, nothing succeeds like failure. Its unconditional backing of Israel’s attempted elimination of Palestinians in Gaza finds it doubling down on what hasn’t worked.

The Israelis recognize a grim reality of fighting an insurgency on insurgent territory. To win, it’s not enough to kill the guerrillas, the guerrilla-friendly local population must be eliminated as well. The Israelis’ campaign has been merciless: destroying structures, killing Palestinian civilians, and making life intolerable for the survivors. The Israeli aim is to drive the Palestinians from Gaza and Israel for good. This meets international-law definitions of genocide and has been rightly decried around the world.

What will it mean if Israel fails? The Israelis may well reduce Gaza to rubble, but that would not be mission accomplished. Rubble provides excellent cover for guerrilla strikes. Hamas’ extensive tunnels indicate that it has prepared for this war for years. In all probability, it launched the October 7 attack to get things going. Israel’s negligence detecting and responding to that attack may have been intentional, indicating that it, too, wanted the war it now has.

Hamas has a network of allies across the Middle East. Israeli and U.S. forces and maritime commerce are under attack in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean. Yemen’s Houthis have already bottled up the Red Sea. It would be an easy matter for Iran to do the same in the Persian Gulf. Control of maritime commerce at important choke points calls into question a plank as central to the American Empire as it was to the British Empire before it: control of the world’s seas and oceans.

What happens if an American-led flotilla tasked with keeping the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf open comes under a swarming missile and drone attack, plus electronic warfare that disrupts its command and control capabilities, and destroyers or aircraft carriers are sunk? Missiles, drones, and cyber disruption cost a pittance compared to battleships, and it would then be apparent that they make conventional surface naval power a paper shark. The vessels in their watery grave would send the same message as the tanks smoldering on Ukraine’s battlefields.

The power of governments rests on their ability to use violence to control populations. Yawning cost disparities, decentralized technologies, and asymmetric warfare have rendered much of conventional offensive power vulnerable or obsolete, marking an historic, tectonic transition in the relationships between governments and governed. This is no secret, particularly in the non-Western world.

Across the globe, insurgents are taking the measure of governments and finding them wanting. Governments that are not feared cannot govern. As they confront their limitations, they will, being governments, make their situations worse.

The American government has a problem not shared with many others. Its potential insurgents - urban, suburban, and rural - are armed to the teeth. They already control many of the cities (see “Ants at the Picnic, Part Two”). Heavily indebted Washington cannot command the resources necessary to subjugate the population. It gets stretched thinner with each new dollar of debt, each new tax, each new institutionalized corruption, each new illegal migrant, each new substitution of gobbledygook ideology for rationality, and each new foreign intervention. Recognition of Washington’s weakness is behind the talk of secession and some states’ defiance of its dictates.

Washington’s weakness is shared by many Western governments, although most of them don’t have to contend with armed opposition. They do have to contend with increasingly restive populations, which by sheer force of numbers can upend existing political arrangements. To think that these beleaguered national governments can be replaced by a confederated or unitary global government that could then exercise effective control is delusional.

The imposition of global government would entail an invasion by an outside force of millions of globally dispersed localities. The global force would encounter the same problem Israel faces in Gaza. Overt and covert opposition could number in the billions.

The globalists would have to contend with organized insurrection, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and terrorism, as well as random riots, criminality, and widespread disorder. They would have to resort to the Israeli “solution” in Gaza - mass extermination. While they are relying on propaganda, subversion, electronic control, and biological warfare, perhaps only nuclear weapons could achieve genocide at the necessary scale. Don’t put it past them. Don’t put it past the insurgents to acquire their own nukes.

Short of nuclear conflagration, the world will continue to devolve towards institutional failure, popular disillusionment, mounting rage, and chaotic fragmentation and balkanization. Today’s dinosaur governments are unable to exercise control, and many of them are slated for extinction. They will not be replaced by an even larger and more unwieldy dinosaur—global government—which is only the last, desperate hope of the fading regime. Instead, the vacuum created by failed governments will be filled by those proficient in decentralized violence. Those who have relied on centralized authority for their livelihoods, power, and status will find their worlds turned upside down. Many will not survive the transition. Assume crash positions."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

Hat tip to the Burning Platform for this material.

"America's Biggest Problem"

"America's Biggest Problem"

by Michael Snyder

"Survey after survey has shown that Americans overwhelmingly agree that this country is moving in the wrong direction. So how did we get here? I often write about the economy, politics, crime, immigration, homelessness, corruption, drugs, the mainstream media, online censorship, government surveillance, war and many other challenges that our nation is facing. But none of them is America’s biggest problem.

Ultimately, America’s biggest problem is the fact that our country has become completely saturated with evil. From the very top of society to the very bottom of society, we have eagerly embraced evil, and just about every form of wickedness that you can possibly imagine is exploding all around us. If we do not reverse course, there is no future for us.

Once upon a time, Washington D.C. was a beacon of hope for the rest of the world, but now it has become an epicenter of evil. Many years ago I actually worked in Washington D.C., and even at that time I could literally feel the evil in the air. I am sure that it is even worse now.

Everyone knows that our politicians are deeply corrupt, and many of them do things that should get them sent to prison for a very long time. On Monday, another batch of Epstein documents was released to the public, and the allegations that they contain are being described as “explosive”…"Another batch of documents from a defamation lawsuit related to Jeffrey Epstein were released on Monday morning. The Gateway Pundit obtained the 17 new documents on Monday and they are explosive!

The new documents, which were reviewed by this reporter, reveal there are alleged sex tapes of Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Richard Branson. “When my friend had sexual intercourse with Clinton, Prince Andrew and Richard Branson, sex tapes were in fact filed on each separate occasion by Jeffery,” said the witness, Sarah Ransome."

Of course the entire Jeffrey Epstein scandal is only a very small fraction of the overall picture. For years, those that have been raped and abused by our leaders have been coming forward, but none of our leaders are ever held accountable. So the sex crimes are just going to continue.

But as bad as our politicians are, our scientists are often even worse. Many like to point a finger at Dr. Fauci, and he is certainly unspeakably evil, but the truth is that there are thousands of other mad scientists running around that are just like him. And they are doing things that should never, ever be done.

Let me give you a perfect example of what I am talking about. It is being reported that a team of crazed scientists has used “human fetal brain tissue” to create “minibrains” which are used in very sick and twisted experiments…"For the first time, scientists have grown cerebral organoids - three-dimensional, lab-grown “minibrains” - from human fetal brain tissue. The new organoids grew to the size of a grain of rice and contained many types of cells that self-organized into complex 3D structures. The researchers also triggered the growth of brain tumors within the minibrains and tested the tumors’ response to existing cancer drugs."

There was a time when science was considered to be a noble profession. Sadly, those days are long gone. At this moment, men and women in lab coats all over the globe are involved in very serious crimes against humanity, and none of them will ever be held accountable either.

Meanwhile, the crime wave that is plaguing communities all over America just continues to grow. If you can believe it, approximately one out of every thirty people living in Oakland, California had a vehicle stolen last year…"One in thirty Oakland residents had their car stolen last year as 15,000 vehicles were stolen – a 45 percent increase in just a year. The shocking figure is the highest in 15 years. However, less than five percent of those auto theft cases lead to an actual arrest as the California city’s understaffed and underfunded police department are preoccupied dealing with a 21 percent spike in violent crime. And there are also just two police officers assigned to deal with car theft."

Of course it isn’t just property crime that is on the rise. Our streets are literally teeming with sexual predators, and some of the crimes that they are committing could have been pulled right out of a horror movie…"A Texas man has been arrested for kidnapping and holding a woman hostage after snatching her off the street nearly five years ago when she was pregnant. Lee Carter, 52, has been charged with aggravated kidnapping after police discovered the victim locked in a garage attached to his Houston home.

Court documents revealed on April 7, 2023 officers from the Houston Police Department were dispatched to 5251 Perry Street in Houston in reference to a kidnapping in progress when they heard a voice coming from the garage. Video from Fox 26 shows officers breaking the window of the garage where they found a dog and a mattress inside in the area police believe the victim was held captive."               `

  

Had you heard about that story before reading this article? Probably not. It barely made a blip in the news cycle, and that is because this sort of thing happens all the time these days.

At this stage of our societal collapse, even many of our teachers are sexual predators.This week, we learned that a teacher in Florida is being charged with sexually exploiting an 8th-grade boy after authorities discovered “28 sex videos of them together on his phone”…"A teacher in Orange County, Florida, is facing federal charges after the parents of her former 8th-grade student found 28 sex videos of them together on his phone.

The teacher, Marie-Jo Gordo, was indicted on three counts of sexually exploiting a minor on Wednesday. The jury determined that she “(enticed) a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct” and then “(produced) a visual depiction of such conduct.” The Orlando Sentinel reports, “Federal investigators said the student’s parents found video of Marie-Jo Gordo and their underage son, whom she taught in 2019, having sex in what appeared to be vehicles and hotel rooms throughout Central Florida. The videos were taken between June and September of 2023 and three were described in court filings.”

If you send your children to our public schools, you are just asking for trouble. Plus, the quality of the “education” that they will receive will be absolutely pathetic. But that is a subject for another article.

Sadly, many of our churches are also filled with sexual predators. And I am not just talking about those sitting in the audience. Almost every day there is another story in the news about some prominent preacher that is being investigated for something. And as Jonathan Cahn has aptly observed, even the Pope has gone completely off the rails at this point…

Everywhere you look, evil is growing. Our culture is rotting and decaying all around us, and as Victor Davis Hanson has explained, this process has accelerated significantly over the past six months…"In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture. The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military. These symptoms of decay share common themes.

Our descent is self-induced; it is not a symptom of a foreign attack or subterfuge. Our erosion is not the result of poverty and want, but of leisure and excess. We are not suffering from existential crises of famine, plague, or the collapse of our grid and fuel sources. Prior, far poorer, and war-torn generations now seem far better off than what we are becoming."

So what is the solution? As a nation, we should immediately change direction and we should be crying out for mercy. Unfortunately, that just isn’t happening. Instead, we are running away from God as rapidly as we can. The following comes from an article recently authored by Hal Lindsey…"But the greatest danger facing America is its arrogant dismissal of the God whose blessings it daily squanders. Vast portions of the population spend their blessings from God on activities that demean humanity and exalt evil. In this, the US is joined by most of the world. At a time when the human race should be humbled before an unprecedented potential for destruction, nations arrogantly spit in God’s face at every opportunity."

Most Americans don’t realize it yet, but time is running out for our country. If we stay on the path that we are on, there is no hope. We desperately need a national awakening, because otherwise our story will not end well."

- https://themostimportantnews.com/

Canadian Prepper, "WW3 Alert! Hospitals Prep For Mass Casualties"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 1/9/24

"WW3 Alert! Hospitals Prep For Mass Casualties;

Presidential Alert; Equador Is Mad max; Russia Nukes"

Comments here:

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Jeremiah Babe, "What Happens When Your Credit Card No Longer Can Save You?"

Jeremiah Babe, 1/9/24

"What Happens When Your Credit Card No Longer Can Save You? 

Corporations Ripping You Off; Rat Attack"

Comments here:

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Gerald Celente, "WW III: Ready To Die?"

Strong language alert!

Gerald Celente, 1/9/24

"WW III: Ready To Die?"

"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for what’s next in these increasingly turbulent times."

- https://trendsjournal.com/

Comments here:

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The Poet: gk thomas, “Wretched of the Earth”

For the 11,000 slaughtered children of Gaza...

“Wretched of the Earth”

“Poor kids,

wretched of the earth,

why should we feed you?

Why shouldn't we empty our sea of

bullets into your swollen bellies or

poison you with toxic chemicals

or depleted uranium?

Why should we care,

we who are living well?

Where is it written in stone

that you deserve better?

Or that we are not animals

subject to the law of nature:

kill or be killed?

You suspect us of being cruel,

but we are kind.

Our god tells us so.

It is yours that lies.

So you cry at night,

shivering in the cold

or sell yourselves

for a slice of bread.

What is that to those of

us who are living well?”

-  gk thomas

o

God damn to Hell the psychopathic monsters doing this genocide.

Hell is not hot enough, and eternity is not long enough...

- CP

"Tree of Liberty, Blood of Tyrants"

"La morte di Cesare", by Vincenzo Camuccini (1805)

"Tree of Liberty, Blood of Tyrants"

On revolution, through means violent and voluntary...

by Joel Bowman

From the End of the World - "What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms...The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~ Thomas Jefferson, in a 1787 letter to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams

"How do you “reboot” a country? How to “refresh the tree of liberty,” as Mr. Jefferson had it? How to, in a phrase, “throw the bums out”? We’ve had revolution on the mind of late, dear reader. Think tall lamp posts... and short ropes. Sharp guillotines... and close shaves. The ides of march... and conspiring, backstabbing senators. As a practicing anarchist, your editor abides by peaceful means, preferring voluntarism to violence. Alas, that puts us squarely in the minority on such matters.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to overthrow a government: by blood... or by ballot. That is to say, by coercion... or by consent. Historically, western societies have tended overwhelmingly to prefer the former. Whether by violent revolt from the people, or internal squabbling among the political elites themselves, our ancestors typically favored direct assault as the most expedient mode of change.

From Phillip II King of Macedon, stabbed in the ribs by his personal bodyguard... to Julius Caesar’s blood on the floor of the senate (along with the 37 Roman Emperors assassinated after him)... from the beheading of Louis XVI and his wife, Mary “let them eat cake” Antoinette... to the execution of Tsar and Tsarina Nicholas II and the rest of their unlucky brood... and plenty more besides...the history of revolution is nothing if not a sanguinary affair.

You Say You Want a Revolution: If the fish rots from the head, the respective assailants reasoned, it is the head that must go first. Besides, getting everyone on board for “change” takes time and effort. Best to just go for the jugular, they reckoned. And in this, modern times are no exception.

During the 20th Century, something like ~120 heads of state – kings, governors and emirs… presidents, grand viziers and prime ministers – were assassinated around the world. We cannot speak to whether these creatures deserved their cruel fate or not, but the fact remains: the top job does not come without its own particular occupational hazards.

In the United States alone, four sitting presidents have been assassinated while holding office; Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), and, most recently, John F. Kennedy (1963). Two others, Theodore Roosevelt (1912) and Ronald Reagan (1981), were injured in unsuccessful attempts.

Of course, blood tends to beget blood. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, there is no conservative so staunch as yesterday’s revolutionary... and he who takes power by force is likely to hold onto it by exertion of the same. (Power corrupts, observed Lord Acton, absolute power absolutely.) In turn, the self-styled liberator often becomes the object of the mob’s insurrectionary impulses. Rewind and replay, ad nauseam.

Said another way, the very word “revolution” implies a return to the point of origin. Is it any wonder, then, that history tends to rhyme, if not repeat? We’re considering all this in the context of the recent changes down here at the end of the world, in our adopted home of Argentina. With front row seats to what we’ve been calling “the greatest political experiment of our time,” we’ve been wondering what shape this current movement might take.

By Blood or By Ballot: For the past three-quarters of a century, a caste of political elites have gorged heartily at the public trough, their collective snouts dug deep in the slop. Around themselves, they erected a labyrinth of administrative and bureaucratic protections, almost as though they had in mind the cautionary words of the French philosopher, Frédéric Bastiat: “When plunder has become a way of life for a group of people living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it.”

So the voracious state grew and prospered... as the productive middle- and working classes buckled under its heaving mass. Then along came “Seńor Motosierra,” Javier Milei, and his resounding victory at the ballot box last November. For perhaps the first time in modern history, we are watching a voluntary overthrow of the state.

But while revolution through force typically requires the “blood of patriots and tyrants,” we are beginning to see that evolution through volition demands something even more of its proponents...“Liberty means responsibility,” George Bernard Shaw once observed. “That is why most men dread it.” Are the people really ready to shoulder the full weight of their destiny? To claim their freedom through peaceful means, to stand proud and tall... and deserve the kind of government, which governs not at all? Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World..."

https://joelbowman.substack.com/p/tree-of-liberty-blood-of-tyrants?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=239547&post_id=140524920&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1lwbp&utm_medium=email

Musical Interlude: 2002, “Land of Forever

Full screen recommended.

2002, “Land of Forever

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Globular clusters once ruled the Milky Way. Back in the old days, back when our Galaxy first formed, perhaps thousands of globular clusters roamed our Galaxy. Today, there are less than 200 left. Many globular clusters were destroyed over the eons by repeated fateful encounters with each other or the Galactic center. Surviving relics are older than any Earth fossil, older than any other structures in our Galaxy, and limit the universe itself in raw age.

There are few, if any, young globular clusters in our Milky Way Galaxy because conditions are not ripe for more to form. Pictured above by the Hubble Space Telescope are about 100,000 of M72's stars. M72, which spans about 50 light years and lies about 50,000 light years away, can be seen with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Water Bearer (Aquarius).”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120819.html

"A Real Church Sign"

 

"Oh yeah, we're doing fine, thanks for asking..."

"Vitae Summa Brevis"

"Vitae Summa Brevis"

"They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

Love and desire and hate:

I think they have no portion in us after

We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses;

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream."

- Ernest Dowson

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“Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam”

 is a quotation from Horace’s “First Book of Odes”: 

“The shortness of life prevents us from entertaining far-off hopes.”

"Thurber's Tail: How My Dog Brought Joy To My Elderly Dad"

"Thurber's Tail: 

How My Dog Brought Joy To My Elderly Dad"

by Tom Purcell

"My Lab puppy, Thurber, was born on Christmas Day, 2020 - the best Christmas blessing I ever received. But he bestowed even greater blessings on my mother and father. In his 87th year, my father was facing a series of health challenges. Waiting for the other shoe to drop - waiting for a middle-of-the night call to help pick him up from a fall - had become the norm. Visits to my parents’ house were becoming less joyful and more stressful as my dad, with limited mobility, needed help getting in and out of his chair and had to ask his kids to assist with the many daily tasks he used to do himself so effortlessly.

We gave my father endless support as his needs grew but his decline brought sadness, and the sadness began permeating my parents’ home, hitting us hard every time we entered the front door. That all changed the day I brought my puppy Thurber home.

Thurber's first visit: The day I picked Thurber up in Punxsutawney, Pa., my plan was to drive directly to my mom and dad’s house. I slipped into their house quietly through the garage and sneaked up the back steps. I knew they’d be in the family room watching an old movie. That’s what they often did in the afternoons - and, sure enough, that is what they were doing.

In I walked, a soft cuddly puppy in my arms - and the room lit up like a Christmas tree. The joy was immediate and, just like that, my mom and dad were transformed from their late 80s into giddy, 10-year-old children. I set Thurber on my father’s lap and the puppy was in his glory, his tail wagging wildly. Dogs always loved my father and sensed instantly, and correctly, that he was the alpha male in the room. The two played and cuddled a good long while as Thurber climbed all over my dad and found an especially comfortable spot between him and the arm of his recliner.

I brought Thurber over to my mom and she too was thrust into instant joy and affection. We never think of our parents as being children, but with a puppy in her arms my mother became a happy little girl. It was as if her father, who died when she was only 19, was watching over her again - providing her with the warmth and security he did so well in her childhood.

After a time, my mother set Thurber on the floor, where I lay enticing him to play with me. I laughed aloud as he jumped on me and showered me with his affection, but it was more than just puppy affection that brought me so much joy. It was wonderful to feel the undivided love and playfulness my puppy directed solely at me. Better yet, it made my mother and father happy to see their middle-aged son being made so happy by the puppy who would now be an integral part of his world.

An angel of joy: I stayed a few hours that Friday afternoon, the first time in months we were able to forget about my dad’s health woes - the first time we laughed in I don’t recall how long. The power of a puppy is transformative, and my transformation was just beginning then, and continues still.

There is a saying I came across in which God is talking to a puppy and he says, “I removed your wings so they won’t know you are an angel.” Well, on the day I brought Thurber home, he became an angel of joy to my father and mother.

I didn’t know that for the next year and a half I’d be able to bring him to my parents’ house for multiple visits that inevitably resulted in childlike happiness for us all - sadness left their home instantly every time Thurber visited. And when Thurber celebrated his first birthday on Christmas Day of 2021, we had the celebration in my parents’ home, and it was a grand event full of laughter and joy.

I didn’t know last Christmas that my father would leave us nine months later - he’d leave us a few days after we’d celebrated his 89th birthday. But I will treasure forever the many joyful visits Thurber and I made to my parents’ home, in which their difficult days were made so much brighter by a furry angel with hidden wings!"

- https://www.cagle.com/

Editor's note: This column is an excerpt from Tom Purcell’s new book, “Tips from a New Dog Dad.” Read more chapters at ThurbersTail.com.

The Daily "Near You?"

Tours, Centre, France. Thanks for stopping by!

"Peak Focus for Complex Tasks, With Beta Isochronic Tones"

"Peak Focus for Complex Tasks, 

 With Beta Isochronic Tones"

by Jason Lewis - Mind Amend

"This is a high-intensity audio brainwave entrainment session, using isochronic tones. Listen to this when you need a strong burst of intense focus to concentrate and study things like advanced mathematics, scientific formulas, financial analysis or any other complex mental activity. Listen to this track with your eyes open while doing the task/activity you want to focus on. Use this session in the morning, afternoon or early evening, to train your brain for better cognition, focus and thought processing. You can either sit somewhere quiet and comfortable with your eyes closed and give your brain a nice workout, or you can also listen to this while doing an activity that requires a boost in concentration.

Headphones are NOT REQUIRED for this video.

Although headphones are not required you may find they produce a more intense effect, because they help to block out distracting external sounds.

Isochronic tones are a fast and effective audio-based way to stimulate your brain. Among many of the benefits, they can help improve focus, relaxation, energy levels, sleep and more, without taking drugs or needing any special equipment. What isochronic tones essentially do is guide your dominant brainwave activity to a different frequency while you are listening to them, allowing you to influence and change your mental state and how you feel."

I strongly suggest you read Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

○

"Isochronic Tones –

How They Work, the Benefits and the Research"

This is a brainwave entrainment audio session using isochronic tones combined with music. The isochronic tones are the repetitive beats you can hear on top of the music throughout the track. If you are new to this type of audio brainwave entrainment, find out how isochronic tones work and how they compare to binaural beats here: 

- https://www.mindamend.com

○

Listen folks, we're out of time! Whether you want to know it or not we're literally in the fight of our lives, for our lives right now, and it's going to get much, much worse. This isn't melodrama, this is reality. Some of you reading this will not survive, and I may not either, so I'll take any edge I can get, and you should too... This works for me. Prepare yourself, brace for impact...

- CP

"Let Us Begin"

 

Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"

"The War Prayer"

By TDB

"My curmudgeonly grandpappy, who reveres Mark Twain and George Carlin and H.L. Mencken and people of that lovable cynic variety – or however you would characterize their philosophical disposition – put me onto "The War Prayer" back in the day. This was in the days of innocence before 9/11 and the subsequent War of Terror, and so whatever lack of an impression it made on me at the time was remedied shortly thereafter by apropos events in the real world.

Twain, in his later years when his family had died and the cynicism became more malignant, would often write fiction in which a cynical protagonist would serve as a proxy for himself. This is one such story; the “aged stranger” is Twain. Via Virginia Commonwealth University:

"It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism… on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun… nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. 

Sunday morning came - next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams - visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said …

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work…

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness… he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. 

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside - which the startled minister did - and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said: “I come from the Throne - bearing a message from Almighty God! 

God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two - one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this - keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

You have heard your servant’s prayer - the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it - that part which the pastor - and also you in your hearts - fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory – must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle - be Thou near them! With them - in spirit - we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it - for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."

(After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!” It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said."

- Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"

Twain reportedly caved to pressure not to publish the short story, as it was regarded by his family and publisher as too inflammatory for public consumption. Asked if he had plans to publish it, Twain answered: "No, I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world. It can be published after I am dead." At any rate, for whatever reason, it remained unpublished until after his death.

War is an ugly business, fraught with moral pitfalls – not to mention existential implications in the nuclear age. It might be necessary at times, but so are limb amputations. Both should be undertaken with all due discretion. I’ll choose my own wars, not the ones the government or MSNBC or the ADL tells me to."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"Washington’s Freaks, Goobers, and Diversity Retards Prep Another Disastrous War"

"Washington’s Freaks, Goobers, and 

Diversity Retards Prep Another Disastrous War"

by Fred Reed

"From military illiterates in Congress and political generals in the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel of the Potomac we hear noises about an upcoming war with China. This war, it is thought, will be chiefly naval with America’s carrier battle groups doing the heavy lifting. The carriers, it is further thought, will strike terror into the Chinese. Perhaps better thinking would help.

A bit of history: Wikipedia: In 1967aboard the carrier USS Forrestal, an anomaly caused a Zuni rocket on an F-4B Phantom to fire accidentally, striking an external fuel tank of an A-4 Skyhawk. The flammable jet fuel spilled across the flight deck, ignited, and triggered a chain reaction of explosions that killed 134 sailors and injured 161. At the time, Forrestal was engaged in combat operations in the Gulf of Tonkin, during the Vietnam War. The ship survived, but with damage exceeding US$72 million, not including the damage to aircraft.

The Zuni is a small five-inch ground-attack rocket suitable for such things as destroying trucks. This trivial weapon, all by itself, caused damage that rendered the carrier useless for over a year in the repair yards. The warhead was roughly the size of the suicide-drone warheads used in the Ukraine. That’s all it took.

Washington, looking to start a war with China, which has vast numbers of antiship missiles, many of them hypersonic, might reflect on this. We could say that the disaster on the Forrestal was a freak accident. It was. An “anomaly” means that the circuitry was badly designed, badly maintained, or badly employed. It is not likely to recur. However, almost any missile,or naval gunfire, can burst an aircraft’s fuel tanks. An aircraft carrier is a large bladder of jet fuel wrapped around high explosives. This is worth remembering.

The provincial lawyers in Congress who want a war with a country about which they know little might bear in mind a few things about China. It is not a primitive country of goatherds of the sort the American military likes to fight. It is a huge technological and industrial power with massive financial resources, universities of high quality, large numbers of excellent engineers, and an efficient government. It sent an automated sample-return mission to the Moon and a combination orbiter, lander, and rover to Mars, successful on its first try. It has a space station. America tries desperately to crush its AI program. Chinese students dominate America’s best tech universities. It isn’t Guatemala. It very, very isn’t.

For decades China has been designing its military for almost the sole purpose of fighting America in the waters off its coast. It has developed hypersonic antiship missiles. America has not. It has a larger navy than the US, in hulls if not in tonnage. It has a formidable air force. Many of China’s large and varied missiles are specifically designed as carrier killers. Military enthusiasts can argue whether the Chengdu J-20 is a better plane than the aging FA-18 or the F-35, a notorious dog. It doesn’t matter. The Chinese air force is right there, a hundred miles from Taiwan

Americans have an almost mystical faith in the superiority of their technology. What they seem not to have is the almost mystical technology. America suffers both from complacency and a tendency to regard weapons programs chiefly as a means of funneling money to the arms industry. Washington talks of sending F-16s to the Ukraine as if this were a fearsome bird. No. While it is not actually a biplane, it first flew in 1976. The Russian Su-57 is new and intended actually to fight. Kiev has 31 M1 Abrams tanks, touted as irresistible. The Pentagon, presumably noticing that Russia has destroyed the best tanks that England and Germany could sent, has kept the Abrams off the battlefield.

Unknowns come into play. Would the Russians side with Beijing and send their fleet? Mysteriously the Russian general staff has not communicated with me on this matter, but the Kremlin would have strong geopolitical incentives to do so. Then what? How much war does Washington really think it wants? The Pentagon might send strategic bombers to attack the Chinese mainland. Two can play this game. Russia and China have submarine-launched cruise missiles, of which several, hitting the Pentagon, would be something of a shock. What then?

The greatest unknown arises because no one has ever seen a battle involving a carrier-based navy on the WWII model versus satellite-guided weapons and antiship missiles, and so on. The American fleet hasn’t been in a war since 1945, the Air Force since 1973. Nobody knows what would happen. How would Washington respond to several carriers irreparably in flames Forrestal-style, with several thousand dead per each?

Times change and, often, militaries don’t. Unused forces become mired in outdated doctrine and suffer grave astonishment come war. In the Russo-Japanese conflict of 1904-05 Europe was shocked when those funny little yellow people with the squinty eyes destroyed the Russian fleet. In World War One, there were army officers who sincerely thought that cavalry would matter, utterly misunderstanding the effects of machine guns, and the armies had no idea that the conflict would consist of long years of murderous attrition war. Over and over and over, wars do not happen as expected. Few had any idea that Vietnam would go as it did. Those funny little yellow people didn’t even have supersonic fighter planes.

The American fleet of today is just an up-weaponed version of the fleet of 1945, carriers surrounded by escort vessels. These latter are fragile, unarmored. The battleships of the Second World War had sixteen-inch belt armor and were designed to take multiple hits and keep fighting. Today’s Tico class cruisers and Arleigh Burke destroyers have thin hulls and rely heavily on delicate phased-array radars.

Military history buffs will remember what a couple of French Exocet missiles, fired from Iraqui Mirages, did to the USS Stark, or what a missile did to the Israeli Eilat, or what a speedboat of explosives did to the USS Cole. Wrecked them. This bodes not well for a naval war in Asia. Check Wikipedia.

Never underestimate the effect of ravening vanity on international affairs. Biden suffered humiliation in his botched rretreat from Afghanistan. More humiliation threatens in the Ukraine. “”Losing China” is something he cannot relish having hung around his neck. Washington is on the raw edge of losing its international supremacy, and is likely to do anything at all to avoid this. China delenda est.

Further, a military is a state of mind as much as a practical organization. In my years of covering the armed forces those within them often seemed to me to be testosteronal twelve-year olds in the grip of pathological optimism. Officers tell themselves and, particularly, the enlisted men that all is well, that they are the best armed, best trained, etc., when they are not. Today’s military, unable to meet recruiting goals, rotted by social engineering, not meeting physical or mental standards, poorly led by an affirmative-action officer corps, is unlikely to fare well in a real war. Then what?

And of course if the war goes badly the United States will just go home and leave Taiwan, a hundred miles from the mainland, at war with China and with nowhere to go, as happens in all of America’s wars."

- https://fredoneverything.org/

"How It Really Is"

 
"Now what?!!" indeed...

Bill Bonner, "In the Beginning..."

"In the Beginning..."

What words can tell us about the future of progress.

by Bill Bonner

‘In the beginning was the word.’

~ John 1:1

Baltimore, Maryland - "We all have to play our roles. Citizens of a late, degenerate empire have to act like citizens of a late, degenerate empire. And talk like them. For one thing, they have to stop using words such as “progress” and “future.”

That, at any rate, is the gist of John Burn-Murdoch’s piece in the Financial Times. He studied the use of words and found that people on the way up use different words than they do on the way down. England industrialized long before Spain, for example. Just looking at the word counts, he found that the English used many more words that suggested optimism – such as “progress” and “future” – than the Spanish. He believes the words show a mindset…which may lead or even cause actual material progress.

But words do not come out of nowhere. They reflect what people see…and hear…and what they think about. Yesterday, came this story from the Wall Street Journal: "Congressional Negotiators Reach Agreement on $1.6 Trillion Government Spending Level for 2024. Deal paves the way toward full-year package averting a shutdown, but much work still needed."

Where the Desert Ends: Good news? Shutdown averted…spend, spend, spend. And here is our old friend, John Mauldin, writing in Forbes: "We have no good choices left. It is as if we are on a trip through a desert and know for certain we don’t have enough water to go back. We have to go forward, not knowing where the desert ends.

That’s the reality. Unless you want to cut Social Security and Medicare, ignore military pensions, sell the national parks, abolish departments like State and Treasury, cut the defense budget in half along with Homeland Security, Education, Labor, the Justice Department and the FBI, etc., we are going to have to live with the $2 trillion deficits. And the debt will go to $50 trillion by 2030. That’s the reality too."

The rest of the news is not exactly uplifting either. CNN: "One in every 100 people in Gaza has been killed since the war between Israel and Hamas erupted on October 7, according to Palestinian statistics. The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah announced in its daily update on Monday that at least 22,835 people have been killed in the besieged enclave since the beginning of the war."

A Gloomy Shade: So, what do the word counts show today? Just what you’d expect. Comparing the optimistic words to words the negative words - those that suggest “caution, worry or risk” – in books in English, French and German, Burn-Murdoch found ‘The West’ turned gloomy in the late 20th century and continues to walk on the shady side of the street ever since. The author may believe that the choice of words – illustrating a widespread belief that the future could be improved – actually led to improvements. More likely, people came to think what they must think when they had to think it…or when it paid to think it.

Markets make opinions, say the old timers. When tech stocks are soaring…and people are getting rich on Apple, Meta, or Nvidia…what do people think? They think they can get rich with tech stocks!

We take it for granted that reality changes opinions. What we don’t know is how much opinions change reality. There must be some power in ‘thinking positive.’ And if you’re going to lead the world in technological, manufacturing, and military power…like the English in the 18th century…it’s probably a good thing to believe that there’s a bright future ahead.

But as James Nielson, columnist at the Buenos Aires Herald, reports, people in The West are no longer optimistic: "Of late, there has been much talk about the rapid decline of the West which, in addition having to deal with a league of “autocracies” convinced that their moment has come, is being undermined from within by influential individuals who insist it is, in large measure, a criminal enterprise which owes its existence to the vile behaviour of slave-traders, white-supremacist racist bigots, imperialists, colonialists and other equally despicable beings. For those who think this way, and there are millions of them entrenched in academia, the media and national bureaucracies, the West and its indigenous inhabitants thoroughly deserve the unhappy fate they see fast approaching."

Wracked and Wrecked: Many in ancient Rome believed the empire was doomed because the people stopped believing in the old gods and stopped respecting the old customs. Gibbon, too, thought that Christianity was partly to blame. Its praise of ‘the meek’ and turning the other cheek, were not compatible with running a great empire, he thought.

But a lot of water had run under the Ponte Sant’Angelo by the time Romans had been Christianized. Many bodies had been tossed into the Tiber - victims of civil wars and political purges. The economy, too, had been wracked and wrecked, from inflation and overspending. If more words of the Romans were available on an electronic database we would probably discover that they too had, by the 5th century, lost their upbeat tone.

Just like printing paper money doesn’t make you rich, believing in a bright future doesn’t make the sun shine. And now, if the sun sets on the Great Western Empire, it’s probably not because the positive word count has gone down."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/