High Noon At The DC Corral

 

Americans by nature are a suspicious lot..  The cultural heroes are revolutionaries, outlaws and gun slingers.  Robber barons are heroes on the rise, but when they reach the point of tilting the table in their favor, the mass of Americans cast them as villains and break them on the rocks of history.

One need only look at Silicon Valley to see this in real time.  The Chipper Barons once championed freedom and the Common Man, now they are slimy billionaires protecting their turf and the culture is turning against them.  Soon, we will witness the collapse.

America began as waves of settlers tied of the entrenched systems in Europe and the unequal application of those systems to favor The In-Crowd.  The American Cultural DNA is the desire to be left the hell alone to pursue life, liberty and happiness.

That weltanschauung carried through to a revolution run out of people's root cellars and pubs.  Tired of working their fool hands to the bone to pay fealty to the Crown, they banded together and put down the world's greatest superpower of that era.

America still idolizes the Old West, a period, place and mindset of rugged individualism, where there were no laws, no taxes and no systems.  Just a man against the elements, making or breaking himself on the vagaries of Nature and the elements.  His successes and failures were his alone.

In this bit of Americana, outlaws robbed banks that symbolized the encroaching System.  They held up trains, which were the medium of encroachment.  They supported the gun slingers and hired them as the "law" West of the Pecos.  Americans love flea-bit characters whose only laws were fairness, unwatered whiskey and a level billiard table.

Americans will tolerate corruption when it hurts the Establishment, but they will not abide corruption from the Establishment.  Swindling the swindlers is poetic justice and absolutely fair.  Once a hero becomes the Establishment, they fall from grace and become the targets of the new Underground.

This is precisely what is happening in the US right now.  The 60s Counterculture became the Establishment, now the American Spirit is rising up with a new Counterculture to displace the old.

To the American mind, equality is abhorrent.  The idea of Socialism, Communism or Fascism is repugnant.  Americans, for the most part, know that these systems are the formalization of Elite rule over the regular working stiff, and that "equality" is a vile concept.

Americans love "fairness".  They want the same opportunities as the next guy, but they know that it is the individual's moxy and industriousness that makes one person richer than another.  In that old Calvinist mindset, if the playing field is level, then the winner advances on skill, perseverance and moral codes, not with an Elitist protection racket that favors followers over leaders.

As I have said many times before, Donald Trump is a symptom, not a cause.  Trump is widely seen as the classic American anti-hero, pulling himself up through a system that was arrayed against him, rough around the edges but with a heart of gold.  This is not a new thing, it is the image that Trump has carefully crafted throughout his entire public life.  Folks don't look at his politics or his persona, they look at his life story and see a man - rightly or wrongly - who suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and took arms against a sea of troubles...and won.

In the election of 2020, still underway, the average Joe (pun intended) smells a rat.  He knows instinctively that the mass media have lied, that the System is rigged, and that the alternative choice is a lying, cheating plagiarist (see 1988 election).  Biden clearly has no moral code, and Americans are repelled by that kind of character.  His success was at the expense of others, not their benefit.

I don't think a lot of people particularly like Trump, but they respect him - at least far more than his opponents.  He has been a consistent character who won by playing by the rules, while being better at using the rules against his adversaries.  He is the outlaw gun slinger turned sheriff.

Trump is the outlaw.  He is the classic American anti-hero.  He played the game, but wasn't part of it.  He built an empire, but didn't weaponize it.  He's a plain talker that sounds like real folk.  And so far, no one has caught him lying - about important stuff anyway.  We all know marketing is complete bullshit, and for the most part, we tolerate it.

Trump's popular image is that he is Jesse James, or Bonnie and Clyde.  He fights the Establishment and miraculously keeps surviving, while sharing the wealth with us little folk.  He is the hero hanging off the cliff right now, and the audience is starting to root for him.  They can't wait to tune in tomorrow to see how he'll get out of this one.

Trump sells himself as the Great American Underdog - with a private jet.

There is no doubt that Americans love their superheroes.  Many a fortune has been built on these particularly American figures.  The one that seems to resonate the most with the widest possible audience is Batman.

Batman has no superpowers.  He is wealthy, yes, but he channels his wealth towards leveling the playing field.  He backs the law and order crowd, but is not part of the law and order crowd.  He will take on the Establishment as fast as any villain if their corruption tilts the table.

Trump, at least in the American psyche, is Batman.  He's just a guy with a lot of money who knows where the bodies are buried and wants to root out corruption and re-establish fairness.  He's willing to take a few punches, and deliver a few as well.  He's an inside outsider, if we can conceptualize those poles existing together.

Keep in mind, I do not say the image is true.  Only history will decide that.  I speak from the position of a Casting Director or a storyteller.  I talk about image and marketing, which never have anything to do with reality.  Real or not, Trump is cast as Batman in the minds of Americans.  He is the anti-hero with nothing but his money and his wits - and more than 70 million Americans who believe the image - and who will turn on him in a New York minute if they feel betrayed.

Trump behaves like a man who has seen the final reel and knows the good guys win, no matter how bleak it looks right now.  Is he projecting an image, or does he really know something we don't?  He behaves like the movie character who gives a quick wink to the camera to let us know that it's not as bad as it looks.

For myself, I respect Trump as a master bullshit artist.  I draw a distinct line between bullshitters and bullshit artists, and he falls solidly into the latter.  I don't trust a single word he says, but I admire the way he says it.  It works - quite well judging by his wide base of support.

What will the outcome of the 2020 election be?  I have no idea.  Here's what I do know:

The media are lying through their teeth about pretty much everything.  They are contradicting things they said as recently as the 2018 election, or even what they said about Biden in the primary season this round.  Absolutely nothing the media say can be trusted.

The law favors Trump.  Title 3 USC 1, Sec. 1 & 2 clearly say that the people, governors and Secretaries of State have a plenary right to call the elections, but after midnight on Election Day, that right can be unilaterally rescinded by the legislatures if certain conditions arise, and they have arisen in all of the contested states.  This is the law that the Supreme Court cited in stopping the Florida recounts in 2000.

There is most certainly corruption and rigging in the US election.  For one thing, history tells us that all elections are corrupt to a certain extent.  For the most part, we tolerate it and go about our merry business, but when it is so egregious and obvious, as it is now, the old American level playfield outlaw psyche kicks in.  The Affidavit of Dr. Navid Kashavariz-Nia should make even the hardest heart and head want to know the truth, regardless of where it leads.

Finally, we know the character of Joe Biden.  His career has been marked by lying, cheating and plagiarizing.  He is on record as claiming to have leveraged a billion dollar load guarantee to the Ukraine in return for firing a prosecutor who was investigating a company his son worked for.  He has claimed to have three degrees, a full scholarship to university, and to have graduated at the top of his class, none of which have proven true.  His tenure as Vice President under Barack Obama is overflowing with evidence of misuse of government agencies and power to target "enemies," including Gen. Michael Flynn, recently pardoned by Trump.  That he would stop at nothing to rig an election is plausible and evidence is mounting.

In my estimation, the 2020 Election is quintessentially America.  A corrupt Establishment tilting the table in their favor.  The lone hero tilting at windmills.  Cliffhangers.  Mob bosses.  Fairness versus Equality.  It's all there, and this is why the nation is transfixed on the outcome.

I contend that the average Joe (pun intended) down in the trenches, beaten by imaginary viruses, threatened by Communist China, struggling to overcome adversity, is hoping, praying that Trump wins.  I believe Trump knows this and is orchestrating events for maximum catharsis when it happens.  

Watch any old classic Western film then scan the headlines and see if you don't find the same connections I do.

We're in the second reel.  The hero is down and things look bleak.  We are glued to our seats waiting for the cavalry.  Stay tuned, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!

Bubble Heads And Bubble Matrices

Most people tend to buy the Establishment model of the world, which states that you must adhere to a one-dimensional view of the world, in which there are only left and right views, and on that spectrum, we are only allowed to be center-left or center-right. Outside of that narrow range, folks are called Far-Left or Far-Right.

More complex thinkers allow a second dimension - a Y-axis if you will, where people can be up or down, depending on the intensity with which they hold their views.

This comes up because I have this secret hobby. I like to troll politically charged groups who fall solidly into the Left-Right Paradigm. The easy pickin's are the Progressive Left. They whine like spoilt children when folks don't just give up and believe in everything they espouse, without reason, argument or any mentation at all.

The Conservative Right are nearly as much fun, though occasionally they will pipe up with an argument or two, flimsy as they may be.

At some point, some one is bound to ask, "What DO you believe?" This question usually comes after I have spent some time trashing all members of the Generally Accepted Left-Right Paradigm.

My answer almost always flummoxes them: "I am an anarcho- crypto-captialist-social libertarian-fiscal conservative." And yes, I've noticed that isn't an option on most social media profiles.

If you want to visualize the world the way I do, then you need to think in three-dimensional bubble graphs. I see the world as a matrix of left-right, up-down, and in-out. Within that matrix, people have views that can fall anywhere within a given space, where some of the views overlap, while others lie will outside the spheres of other groups.

I believe that government should be almost non-existent and that what little trickle of money we allow them to have must be spent with annual GAAP-compliant annual reports and severe penalties for failure to comply, including the death penalty for government employees who fail to maintain the strict rules applied to them.

Outside of that one area, I do not believe the government should have the right to incarcerate or kill anyone. That is the people's job. If, after a fair and comprehensive trial by their peers, and a fair appeals process, a criminal is found guilty of a capital crime, they should be turned over to the mob and dealt with in a public and highly visible way.

I believe that folks should be allowed to do pretty much whatever the hell they want, provided they don't murder, steal, destroy other's property or lie about other people. This is contingent on everyone behaving in public with manners and etiquette and decency, as proscribed by the larger community.

I believe that companies, including corporations, should be able to do whatever it takes to make a decent profit and benefit their employees, provided that the registered officers of said companies are completely, wholly and individually responsible for the actions of the company, up to and including the above-described process for those convicted of capital crimes.

I especially believe that any company responsible for fouling the environment should have its officers marched out and forced to wallow in their own filth.

I believe that nations should encompass the physical area representing the dominant social, religious, traditional, and racial norms of any given group of people. Immigration would only be allowed insofar as the individual was willing to fully and completely assimilate into the dominant culture of a nation.

Places without any substantial human presence would be unincorporated and exist outside the bounds of any nations. This would include Antarctica and most of the world's great deserts. Within these unincorporated areas, anyone wishing to challenge themselves against the elements is free to do whatever they want, and if they are successful and eventually create a community of like-minded individuals, then they can incorporate and become a nation.

I believe the UN should exist, but have exactly zero political power. It should be a large, air-conditioned space with a few chairs and a stage and some basic A/V equipment maintained by donations only (as are any staff). Here, anyone from anywhere and come and say anything about any topic they so please, and the speeches should be streamed on the internet 24/7.

I believe there should be no compulsory education, especially that is mandated by government. Parents should be free to choose whatever course of education they want for their children, and buy whatever services they can afford to further their goals.

I believe there should be NO mandatory health care or government-operated scheme to distribute narrowly sanctioned care. Folks should be free to buy and use whatever treatments they damn well please, and join insurance pools (if any exist) that will assist in payment for those treatments.

Related to the health care issue, if folks want to kill themselves with drugs, that is their prerogative and the only people who have the right to interfere are their families and friends, and any experts they care to jointly employ for that purpose.

I believe there should be NO welfare. Either family groups bind together for their mutual benefit, or individuals can strike out on their own. In either care, they are fully and personally responsible for their own welfare. Any attempt to force others to donate to them should be treated as stealing.

I could go on, but the dear reader probably gets the idea that my views don't fall within the Left-Right Paradigm chosen for us by the Establishment. Nor do most people, when pressed on the matter.

If one could get the Average Joe into a serious conversation, they would likely find themselves espousing beliefs that in some part fall outside the bounds of allowed thought. At some level, we are all thought criminals, which is why fascist regimes are so brutally effective - everyone is guilty of something sometime, the rest is just choosing when to prosecute.

The world is far more complex than most of us are willing to contemplate on a regular basis. In fact, the reason we tend to buy into the Establishment boundaries is because it reduced the burden of thinking we are faced with. If everything is left-right, black-white, rich-poor, then we can make decisions with coin tosses and move on with our business.

True freedom, real liberty, is a lot of work, just like those great marriages we all envy. Sure, to the world they are a happy, bubbly couple full of life and love, but behind the scenes, there is a lot of discussion, pondering and compromise.

One -dimensional thinkers are easy targets and deserve to be trolled. If they are so willfully blind and eager to wear their hearts on their sleeves, then let the games begin!

i prefer to revel in the glorious complexities that are human existence.

What Goes Around

You might want to cue up Billy Preston's big hit from the 1970s as we trundle through current events on diametrically opposed sides of the world today.

Back in 2014, a Populist reformer who goes by the nickname "Jokowi" (Joko Widodo) was elected president of Indonesia.  It was a hotly contested election against the Establishment choice, a lovely man by the name of Prabowo Sugiarto.

Prabowo figured he had it all locked up.  He was the darling of the Establishment, had spread the appropriate amounts of money in the appropriate places, and polls showed him having the edge on Jokowi.  It was a done deal.

Until it wasn't.

Prabowo lost the election by a slim margin as huge numbers of people that weren't counted in the polls showed up to vote for draining the swamp.

Enraged over losing the office that Prabowo thought was his for the taking, he mounted protests (paid warm bodies in large groups chanting prepared slogans), filed challenges in the courts (all the way up to the Supreme Court) and generally did anything to disrupt the new administration's ability to make headway in reforming and streamlining the national government.

Jokowi was elected governor of Jakarta in 2011 (Jakarta is a city, state and seat of the national government), along with his reformist ally Basuki Tjahaja (Ahok) Purnama.  When Jokowi won the presidency, Vice Governor Ahok took over the state government, becoming only the second Christian of Chinese ethnicity to hold the post (the first was 1964-5 shortly before Soeharto took over).  However, Prabowo didn't go quietly.

Prabowo moved to the background and began a campaign to get his people inserted into key positions in the Parliament, which resulted in barricade after barricade to Jokowi's reforms.  At the same time, Ahok was attacked repeatedly via his greatest weakness - saying what he thinks.  Ahok famously made a comment in September 2016, which was construed to be a slight against al-Qur'an, and Ahok was ultimately convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to 2 years in prison.  The conviction came after a hotly contested governor's election where Prabowo's chosen candidate, Anies, was elected over Ahok after a concerted effort by Prabowo's political machine to discredit the Chinese Christian based on racial and religious grounds - certainly not based on his record of cleaning up the city's operations.

Deprived of his staunchest ally, Jokowi has been left dangling in the wind.  He literally has no one watching his back now - literally or politically.  For the past two years, he could leave Jakarta to attend to the country's international interests, knowing that Ahok was keeping things under control back home.  Now, however, Ahok is well tucked away and Prabowo has installed his people in every quadrant around Jokowi.

This has led to numerous rumors flying that Prabowo will mount a coup d'etat in late July, while Jokowi attends the G20 summit in Hamburg.  True or not, it is a sign of Jokowi's weakened position that such talk can even be taken seriously.  The conditions certainly match many that existed in 1965, when another former general, Soeharto, mounted his coup.

If you are one of our thousands of North American readers, and all this sounds familiar, then you are right.

In 2016, Establishment darling Hillary Clinton thought she had the presidency of the US sewn up.  She lost by a narrow margin to a Populist reformer named Donald Trump.  After the election, a number of legal challenges were mounted against Trump, and ultimately Clinton slipped into the background where she formulated a stealth attack to block every single action and policy of the new administration.  This has led to unprecedented infighting and witch hunting in an effort to unseat the duly elected president.

The parallels are curious.  I have pointed out the many similarities between the US and Indonesia, and the fact that nearly identical political situations exist in both countries now is even more curious.  As researchers like Peter Levenda and Allan Nairn have pointed out in recent articles, the ties between the Establishment of both countries run rather deep (pun intended).  That nearly identical tactics would emerge in both places at roughly the same time seems less coincidental than intended.

This situation, combined with Macron's victory in France, Merkel's survival in Germany, and the incredibly languid foot-dragging going on over Brexit, it seems that the Establishment is engaged in a scorched-earth effort to prevent the world from escaping their iron fist.

The masses have a really bad habit of thinking elections take care of the popular agenda.  It's really not entirely their fault, since they've been indoctrinated from birth to think they live in "democracies".  They get all riled up during the election cycle, get their candidate elected, then go back to whatever it was they were doing before.  In a few years, they look up again and notice that nothing got done and they proceed to elect another reformer, who also gets nothing done.  Meantime, the Establishment runs all the way to the bank.

As George Ure likes to say, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

The Establishment are obviously hurting, or they wouldn't be so blatantly obvious in their machinations.  They're spooked by their slipping grip and will risk exposing themselves in order to maintain their cushy positions of imaginary power.

How all this will unfold is anybody's guess, but it seems we can make a fairly solid prediction that the remainder of 2017 will be one for the history books - filed under "Rhymes".

The Giant Stirs

So, I've said my piece on Donald Trump - the candidate - now I want to say something about the Trump Phenomenon.

What the world is witnessing in the US is nothing short of a revolution.  No, the shooting hasn't started - yet - but I suspect that the trip wires are set and temperaments are leaning solidly in that direction.

As I stated in The Trump Card, there is no logical reason to select Trump as president.  He has no political background, obviously little diplomatic ability and is really not even an individual, but a brand.  Yet, he is drawing unbelievable crowds, record turn-out at the polls and a following that crosses all demographic boundaries.  Beyond that, he has so rattled the ensconced powers that they will do anything to stop this man from taking the oath of office.  They are so rattled that they have spoken openly about assassination, meaning there would be little room for "conspiracy theories" if that were to happen.

Both my grandfather and father told me for years that a revolution was coming to America.  It was inevitable.  Since the dawn of the 20th century, the power structure in the US has so grossly abused its position that at some point, the masses would finally be fed up and clear the table.  Had Ron Paul been just a bit more charismatic, we would have seen this scenario played out four years ago.

If you want to understand what is happening in America, there is a fun activity you can do at home that perfectly models this year's election.  Take some sticks and put them in the freezer.  Then take a pan of water and heat it to almost boiling.  When you get there, start stirring in sugar until it just won't dissolve any more.  You now have what chemists call a super-saturated solution.  Now take your chilled sticks and put them into the solution for a few minutes.  Right in front of your eyes, big, beautiful crystals of sugar will start growing on the sticks, and viola!, you have rock candy.

For a century now, the American cultural climate has been slowly heating up to just near the boiling point.  The political elites have been stirring in racial and class tensions, profligate spending, wars and "police actions," assassinations, and all sorts of mayhem, to the point where one suspects they have either completely lost their minds or are just suicidal - or maybe they have a back-up plan?

Along comes Trump.  Let's think of him as a chilled stick.  It's not really who he is, but what he represents that matters.  Before our amazed eyes, all the crap that has been stirred into our pot of hot water suddenly congeals around him: fear of losing jobs, fear of uncontrolled immigration, fear of economic Armageddon, fear of attack by (insert enemy du jour).

Trump is a catalyst for a chemical reaction that was slowly happening all over the country for the past 100 years.  He was just the right person who stepped onto the scene and said the right things and instantly, the chemical reaction accelerated without any signs of abating.

If we switch to a medical metaphor, Trump is a symptom, but not the cause.  Treating the Trump Phenomenon will not stop the disease, and may, in fact, cause it to quicken.  The "establishment" are like ignorant doctors (or are they?); unable to understand why the disease is happening, they desperately attempt to alleviate the symptom, only to make matters far worse.  For the moment, let's assume that this has not all been intentional - that's a different article.

It appears, for all intents and purposes, that Trump will now face off with the Democratic choice in the fall elections.  At this point, the "establishment" have no real choice (in their minds) but to actually kill Trump to try and save their hides.  The problem is that making this choice, as they did with the Kennedy brothers, will likely bring the country to full boil, where the Kennedys turned up the heat.  For them, there is no smooth path out of these woods.

It is absolutely fascinating to watch this.  It is an historic event not at all unlike the environment surrounding the US Civil War.  A large and powerful block has been disenfranchised by the "establishment," and both sides now walk a very fine line to avoid all-out war.  All that is needed is a modern-day Fort Sumter, or to use another US revolution, another Lexington and Concord.

To my mind, Trump does not seek violence, but will not back down because of it.  He strikes me as one who fights fire with fire.  On the other side, the "establishment" are so terrified that violence is increasingly the only viable option they perceive.  The Big Question is, what price are the "establishment" willing to pay to keep their privileged positions?

The "establishment" has already shown its willingness to do whatever it takes to attain their goals and maintain their positions: violate the sovereignty of nations, fabricate evidence, commit acts of terror, round up citizens in concentration camps (American Indians, Japanese), commit treason, stir up internal strife to foment "regime change," and a whole list of crimes and misdemeanors.  Are they willing to shit in their own sandbox?

If history be our guide, the answer is "yes."  We must assume that if Trump continues to pose a threat to them, whatever that threat may be, the "establishment" will risk open war within America in order to protect their precious and privileged positions.  If the Bush family buying 100,000 acres in 2006, in Paraguay is any indication, the "establishment" has been preparing for this eventuality for some time.

The American Founding Fathers intended for the electoral process to be a form of peaceful revolution every four years.  It was a means to vent popular concerns, though the system was set up to buffer mob rule.  The "establishment" learned from Josef Stalin that 'he who counts the votes runs the country,' and it has worked for 100 years - but the jig is up.

The American people have often been compared to the proverbial "Sleeping Giant," slow to rouse but unstoppable once mobilized.  One senses that the Trump candidacy has awoken that giant, and the absurd fear and loathing demonstrated by the "establishment" makes it quite apparent that they are aware of the situation.

Whether or not you like Trump, or desire or fear his presidency, the larger issue is what he represents.  The long-simmering super-saturated brew that is American culture has reached the point where it can no longer absorb what it is given.  The process of crystallization has begun and there is likely nothing that can stop it, except to let it run its course.  We can speculate till the cows come home what America will look like at the end of a Trump presidency, but it seems rather certain what will happen if this process is aborted.

Yes, there are a great number of parallels with Germany at the moment the Brown Shirts began to rise, but I hardly find Trump to be another Hitler - different culture, different times, different person.  If anything, there is a stronger resemblance between the "establishment" and the Nazis, than with anything Trump represents.  I believe that what we are seeing now is actually what would have happened if Hitler had won the war and 70 years later, the German people were ready to change course.  Now there's an interesting thought.