One of the most vital things for a successful dictatorship is military control. A politically neutral military composed of people loyal to the country, rather than its leadership, represents an ongoing threat to a despot.
For centuries, America has had that politically neutral military, but the Biden administration is accelerating a process begun under Obama, which is to weaken military readiness while ensuring that both officers and troops hew to a specific political ideology.
In the first five years of his presidency, Obama fired almost 200 military officers, some of whom felt very strongly that there was an ideological purge taking place. Certainly, the Pentagon class’s willing embrace of leftist ideologies (DEI, CRT and, especially, LGBTQ+++) indicates that those in charge of the military’s strange new destiny are on board with all of this.
As you can see above, the wokeness insanity is getting worse with LtGen DeAnna Burt feeling “compelled” to promote less qualified personnel in her hiring and promotion decisions due to “anti-LGBTQ+” laws in various states.
The federal bureaucracy is a smoldering smorgasbord of corruption, incompetence, and pride flag-waving wokeness, and the big questions for the next Republican president are where to start fixing it and how.
There are a few things that need to happen day one to begin imposing our iron discipline upon the out-of-control deep state – pardons for every persecuted victim of the two-tiered “justice” system, orders to comply with all GOP investigatory subpoenas immediately, and firing Chris Wray.
But defeating the unofficial fourth branch of government requires focus and intensity. You cannot take it down overnight because it will fight back with support from the regime media. So, you need a quick and critical win.
That’s why the first thing you fix is the military. Here’s what to do.
The summer economic forum in St. Petersburg used to be a vanity fair of Russian opulence and corruption as “Russia’s Davos.” But last week’s (6/14-17) modest, if not frugal, event was rather an exercise in self-reassurance of sustainable stagnation.
The international profile of the event was seriously curtailed, and the guest of honor was Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, who was eager to agree “with everything Comrade Putin said” and to sign the declaration of an “enhanced strategic partnership” between the two countries (Kremlin.ru, June 15).
Putin’s speech was entirely devoted to amplifying positive news about Russia’s economic performance, which according to his estimates, is still capable of delivering the volume of weapons necessary for sustaining the “special military operation” and providing broad prosperity (Kommersant, June 17).
Unemployment is indeed low, due to extra-high out-migration, but as for the alleged decline of poverty, that has been achieved primarily by doctoring the data (The Insider, June 16).
Economic statistics have indeed become scarce and carefully “improved,” thus enabling Putin to assert the diminishing dependency on oil revenues and the benefits of high war expenditures without any concern for a seeming departure from reality (Moscow Times, June 16).
I was recently told that humanity is “rapidly advancing” toward solving the socialist calculation problem. I wasn’t told why, but around the same time, economist Daron Acemoglu suggested that artificial intelligence could be the solution.
To get literary, perhaps we are on the verge of creating the Machines, the artificial intelligences that plan the global economy in Isaac Asimov’s short story, “The Evitable Conflict” (which became the last chapter of his book, I, Robot.)
The Machines perfectly calculate the needs of humanity and organize the economic order to best provide for them, in keeping with the first law of robotics, that “a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.”
Given Asimov’s insistence that the Machines were mere calculators of unimaginable speed, not “super-brains,” artificial intelligence could be a further step beyond Asimov’s robotic brains. So could artificially intelligent Machines, at last, prove the central planners right?
No, they could not, and I’ll answer the question in three ways.
April 1990. When our oldest son Brandon was six years old, I took him with me to the North Pole. It was my 14th expedition there, and as always, we stopped to visit friends at Canada’s northernmost community, the Inuit hunting village of Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island. Brandon thought it would be cool to sleep in an igloo, which the Inuit do only when they’re hunting seals or walrus far out on the ice.
So the villagers happily complied, showing him how they built one, carving out blocks of wind-blown snow, shaping and placing them in an inward-sloped spiral with one block on top, and packing snow as mortar between the blocks. When it was bedtime – still daylight with 24-hour sunshine by April – they lined the inside with caribou skins, which shed like crazy with hairs everywhere but sure are warm. Snuggled into our arctic down sleeping bags, we slept like stones.
The Antarctic island of South Georgia is one of the most extraordinary places on earth. Square miles of king penguin rookeries, thousands of fur seals, hundreds of gigantic elephant seals amidst a backdrop of massive glaciers and snow-capped mountains.
First Lady Melania Trump would instantly recognize Lake Bled, for it is considered the most beautiful place in her home country of Slovenia. It’s a glacial lake up in the Julian Alps near the border with Austria. The small lush island you see has been a pilgrimage site for millennia – first to the Temple of Ziva, the Slovene goddess of love and fertility, then until now to the Church of the Mother of God. For all that time, Slovene couples came here to get married.
There are 99 steps from the rowboat landing to the church, and from ancient times to today, the tradition is that for a happy and long-lasting marriage, the groom must carry his bride up all 99 steps while she must remain silent while he does.
This is Temple IV at the ancient Mayan capital of Tikal, now in northern Guatemala. It was from the top of Temple IV that the shot in the original 1977 Star Wars movie was filmed of the Millennium Falcon landing (at 44 seconds) near jungle temples (Temples II and III) at the Rebel Base on the moon of Yavin 4.
Built in 740 AD, at 230 feet it is the tallest pre-Columbian structure in all the Americas. While Tikal’s earliest buildings date to the 4th century BC, it was from 300 to 800 AD that Tikal flourished as one of the Mayan Empires most powerful kingdoms.
National Geographic calls the remote island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen in the Indian Ocean “the most alien-looking place on our planet,” because of its incredibly weird and bizarre plant life like the Dragon’s Blood Tree.
WE MUST FIGHT! This speech of decades ago is what President Reagan would deliver to us today – regarding Russia’s attempted terrorist conquest of Ukraine, and of our own Woke Deep State’s attempted terrorist conquest of America.
You all know that I once worked for Ronald Reagan, and now often wonder what he would say about this Woke State supporting Ukraine while destroying their own country – and about some conservatives rooting for Russian Nazi barbarism to win and America Western Civilization to lose. Everyday, you see in places like ZeroHedge rooting for the destruction of the dollar and ruination of the US economy while cheering Russia on.
One thing I’m quite sure of – that if our greatest president were in the White House today, there would be a Reagan Doctrine for freedom in Ukraine and for doing to Russia what he did to the Soviet Union – and for freedom in America by dismembering the corrupt institutions of woke fascism that are its enemies.
Please take the time to watch President Reagan’s speech more than once – then ask yourself, is there anyone running for president today who could come remotely close to his moral brilliance, clarity, and courage?
Yet, that is perhaps not the right question. For in 1980, we Americans proved worthy of electing such a president. Are we now today? When do normal Americans start taking responsibility for the moral and corrupt degradation of our country? We must prove ourselves worthy of having the president we need before we can have him. It is us to whom Ronald Reagan is giving the solution for saving our country: WE MUST FIGHT!
The DOJ appears to protest too much. The war against Trump is taking on an air of panic and desperation never before seen in American politics. Evidence shows that Joe Biden and his family members accepted bribes from the Russian FSB agent running Burisma.
Biden threatened Burisma and its Russian security service handlers with extortion demands, and the Russians likely could not believe their good fortune. They bought Joe Biden and his policy towards oil and gas fracking for relatively small sums. It is not yet known how extensive Biden's influence peddling is, but it must be comprehensive.
Why else would half of the United States government be so afraid of a president from outside the club? "Me think they doth protest too much”
Credibility and authenticity are increasingly valuable in this brave new world of artificial intelligence software The DeSantis campaign made a serious blunder by creating and releasing images of Trump embracing Fauci The error impacted future DeSantis's appeals to integrity; he scored higher than the other candidates before the mistake.
COVID-19 destroyed faith in government and created a long tail of political liability The emphasis on the LGBT show is artificial and propped up by the government. It appears that the LGBT show is not moving the narrative away from COVID-19 as fast as desired, and businesses are becoming worried about brand destruction.
The J6 show has lost severe traction with the public as the government plan to instigate a riot within the Capital is being made public. Capital police, FBI, Park police, and others drove the crowd into the Capital Building. The plan was to trap protestors within the building, where some could be shot and killed. The resulting panic would cause extensive property destruction and serve as a Reichstag Fire, justifying national emergency powers.
The plan failed because partisans in government do not understand the difference between conservatives and liberals. The conservatives herded into the Capital did not become the Antifa-like mob as planned. We have serious problems within the government that must be resolved before America enters its next long-term growth cycle.
They will be resolved.
The mystery of why corporations such as Disney accept brand destruction and stay the woke course can be explained by the relationship between inflation and debt destruction. While suitable for the debtor, inflation is hard on the lender.
History contains examples where banks failed, and central banks began to loan funds directly to businesses. Nazi Germany retooled during the Depression and financed the war through direct lending. The criteria to receive funding was political, as in accepting national socialist dogma, and not based on actual financial performance. The analogy between Nazi doctrine then and Wokism today is uncomfortably close but explains why large companies are attempting to become too woke to fail.
[This Monday’s Archive was originally published on July 15, 2016. It’s one of TTP’s Histories in a Nutshell, and I thought you’d enjoy it simply as fascinating and informative history, just to take a break from all the current lunacy we are all enduring.]
Ternate, Spice Islands of the Moluccas, present day Indonesia. I am here in the place that started the Western exploration of the world.
It was the goal of Columbus in 1492 to get here – which of course he never did with the American continents getting in the way. Vasco da Gama decided to try the other way around Africa – which he did, reaching the southwest coast of India in 1498.
By 1512, Vasco’s fellow Portuguese made it all the way – to the fabled Spice Islands, the only source on earth for nutmeg, mace, and cloves. Since the Middle Ages, they were esteemed by Europeans for their medicinal and culinary properties.
As such, they were fantastically expensive, especially because the Arabs had a monopoly on the overland trade routes. Breaking the monopoly with sea routes meant unbelievable profits. So the Portuguese cashed in. A pocketful of nutmeg seed pods could buy you a home. Imagine what an entire shipload was worth.
Ferdinand Magellan convinced Portugal’s rival, Spain led by Charles V, that he could break the Portuguese spice monopoly by sailing west – for by now (1518) everyone knew there was an ocean on the other side of the Americas but no one had crossed it. Magellan did it, but was killed in the Philippines in 1521 before he got here.
So the Portuguese got to keep the Spice Islands, where they built their first fort – called Kastela – here on Ternate in 1522. The Spanish found there were almost unimaginable amounts of gold and silver for the taking in their new colonies along the west coast of South America and forgot about the Pacific Ocean.
For the past year, the House Oversight Committee, where I serve as chairman, has been investigating the Biden family’s influence peddling schemes that generated millions of dollars for the Biden family. We are following the facts. We need to know whether these deals threaten national security and if President Joe Biden is compromised.
The Oversight Committee has already obtained thousands of pages of financial records related to the Biden family and has traced millions of dollars from China and Romania to the Biden family and their associates. Americans are asking: What is the Biden family business? They don’t sell anything, they don’t have lucrative assets generating income, yet they receive millions from around the globe. What are they selling? Influence and access.
President Biden has repeatedly lied to the American people about his family’s business dealings. Now, Americans are left wondering if Joe Biden was involved with them.
Former President Donald Trump has been indicted for illegally storing and hiding classified documents. As conservative radio host Steve Gruber describes it, the “bananafication” of our republic continues apace.
There are three reasons every American — even those of us not supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign — should find this further assault on the former president repugnant.
All three are glaring demonstrations of how corrupt the Biden Deep State is on a gargantuan scale. Let’s discuss them.
