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On Sunday, President Trump reiterated his intention to create a “crypto strategic reserve” for the United States. Besides the usual references to Bitcoin and Ethereum, this time he also mentioned three relatively obscure cryptocurrency thingamajigs: XRP, Solana, and Cardano. In attempting to find out what these entities really are, I stumbled across this definition of Cardano: “A decentralized, open-source blockchain network that can execute peer-to-peer transactions and serve as a platform for deploying smart contracts.” On its website, Cardano boasts that it is “a blockchain platform for changemakers, innovators, and visionaries, with the tools and technologies required to create possibility for the many, as well as the few, and bring about positive global change.”
Translation: Very powerful people are creating make-believe digital toys and marketing them in a sophisticated pump-and-dump scheme that has already yielded untold billions of dollars. In the 24 hours following Mr. Trump’s announcement, the price of Cardano rocketed upward by nearly 50 percent. Now that’s some “positive global change,” right there. This whole crypto game is getting completely out of hand. There is an element within the Trump Administration, along with some of the President’s big-money backers, that is capitalizing on the financial woes of the country by sucking the last blood out of the nation’s fiscal corpse before the cadaver is sent from the morgue to the graveyard. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Congress responds to the challenge of $36 trillion in national debt by formulating a budget proposal that will actually increase spending. Nero fiddles while Rome burns. Government complicity in the crypto swindle is of a piece with the proposed “sovereign wealth fund” that will, in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “monetize the asset side of the US balance sheet for the American people. We are going to put the assets to work, and I think it's going to be very exciting….There'll be a combination of liquid assets, assets that we have in this country, as we work to bring them out for the American people.” Translation: We’re bankrupt, so we’re going to have a national foreclosure sale and sell everything that isn’t nailed down. Wait, on second thought, even what is nailed down can be “monetized” or “tokenized” or put on the “blockchain,” or whatever. Yes, Mr. Bessent, it is very exciting indeed, especially for the vultures who will be feasting on the carrion. The Trump Administration has done great work in exposing and dismantling some of the nation’s worst scams, such as green energy, diversity, and the Ukraine money laundromat. But please, please, do not replace these scams with new grifts that threaten to derail your excellent accomplishments.
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Zelensky is not a politician, nor is he the leader of a country, in the usual sense of the term. His role is much different: He is a holy man, a prophet. He is the personification, the living symbol, the messianic incarnation of Peak Leftism in its gnostic twenty-first century form. And, as befits the current era, he is obnoxious, ruthless, vulgar, and kitsch. This is the man the Left has been fawning over these past ten years. It could not have been scripted any better.
If you threw Adam Schiff, Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Bolton, King Charles, and Klaus Schwab into a blender, ran it on high, stuck it in the freezer, and pulled it out a week later to thaw, out would pop Zelensky, already dressed in his cheesy imitation Che Guevara outfit. The prophet may have overplayed his hand at the White House, but in his mind, he is feathering his nest to prepare for the next stage of his career. Zelensky knows the Ukraine jig is up. The only play remaining may very well be to position himself as the ultimate Leftist hero, putting into the shade Greta Thunberg, the Just Stop Oil lunatics, the Pope, George Floyd, etc. When his regime crumbles, he will no doubt be wined and dined at all the hip places, with a first stop in Brussels to commune with the EU/WEF Kommisariat. No, Mr. Trump, one cannot “negotiate” a “deal” with a prophet. When you are face-to-face with a claimant to the throne of the Left, it is either crush or be crushed. You are confronting a challenge to civilization that will never compromise. Few people alive today in the West can remember a time when people were free to associate with whomever they chose. It requires some mental exertion to imagine a society in which a tavern or men’s club could legally exclude women, or a commercial enterprise could hire (or refuse to hire) a person for any reason it pleased—and nobody saw it as any of their damn business.
Though human nature can be suppressed, it usually manages to reassert itself in one form or another. “Birds of a feather flock together” and all that. People find workarounds. In our current world, an approximation of free association is most often achieved via narrowly-defined interest groups. If you establish a gun club, specializing in cowboy-style revolver shooting, you will probably not be bothered by the presence of too many woke lesbian illegal aliens. But this method is far from airtight, and one is always fearful of complaints, lawsuits, and other harassment. There are, however, a number of loopholes that are entirely legal. For example, the family business, which I believe is still exempt from certain kinds of interference. Another is the residential community with an “over 55” age restriction. Money certainly helps. If you have a lot of it, you can buy your way into association with a better class of people. You can live in the best neighborhood, send the kids to private school, etc. But this path is not what it used to be, as every word and action is under scrutiny. A path to free association that once saw widespread use in the U.S. was the ethnic enclave. Remember the tapestry of ethnic neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and other large cities? The iron fist of “civil rights,” notably the destruction of neighborhood schools via forced integration, put an end to that culture. Once a common feature of American life, today a successful enclave requires extremely high levels of homogeneity and unity. The groups that can still pull it off include the Amish, Orthodox Jews, lower-class blacks, and various Asian nationalities. And let us not forget the Indian reservation, which is the gold standard of exclusivity. Strong communities and a true aristocracy cannot develop unless people are allowed to segregate themselves into micro-worlds, based on any number of parameters: education, political views, religion, wealth, to name just a few. The difficulty in achieving this detachment accounts for much of the reticence to form families. Free association manifests itself in effective separation between classes, and in social and occupational groupings that are composed exclusively of a specific human type. These types evolve and are maintained by means of closely-held traditions, and strict rules for recruitment. Naturally, the rules are set by the people within a given domain, not by the legislature. This ancient social foundation was largely in effect in the U.S. until the 1960s. In Western Europe, it lasted even longer. Today, we still have traces of this structure. Almost every field retains an image, however archaic, of its consummate type: the orchestral conductor with long, unkempt hair; the stocky, wisecracking taxi driver; the stoic, unflappable nurse; the absent-minded professor; the slimy salesman; and so on. Until recently, when you stepped onto a commercial airliner and peered into the cockpit, you were almost guaranteed to see two physically fit white men, former Air Force pilots, clean shaven, with short hair. This is the human type most suited to the task at hand. And it could develop and be sustained only under conditions of free association. Obviously, this logical and natural organization of society has been largely destroyed. This accounts for much of our dysfunction and chaos. However, as we transition back to a reality-based world (see my post of 2/10/25), perhaps free association will make a comeback. The dismantling of DEI and other forms of government meddling is an encouraging sign. This must continue until the entire “civil rights” edifice is demolished, to be replaced by a resurgent zeitgeist of liberty, and its corollary, a decentralized, spontaneous ordering of society. It seems that the career of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, otherwise known as Pope Francis, is drawing to a close. Bergoglio has managed to do an excellent imitation of a pope, a sinecure that enabled him to push the woke and Globalist agenda worldwide, these past twelve years. He is a textbook case of infiltrating an organization in order to subvert it.
I will always remember Bergoglio for his impressive 2016 publicity stunt, in which he washed the feet of some Third World savages who were imported into Europe to destroy Western civilization. Well, this neo-Marxist piece of trash will have all of eternity to ponder his complicity in the ongoing stabbing attacks across the continent, not to speak of all the other mayhem. I have a suggestion for his handlers: Before Bergoglio goes to his resting place in the underworld, administer the PCR test to His Holiness. Then it can be announced that “the Pope died of Covid.” What a splendid finale to his illustrious career! Martyrdom to top it all off! By now everyone has probably heard about the unfathomable stupidity and ignorance of “journalist” Margaret Brennan, host of CBS’s Face the Nation, who put forth a peculiar thesis about the Holocaust. In a February 16 interview with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, she expressed her horror that Vice-President JD Vance, in his visit to Germany, was meeting with representatives of “the far-right party known as the AfD.” To add to her dismay, Vance “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
Just when you thought these neo-Marxist apparatchiks could not possibly be more biased, ignorant, and corrupt, they come up with something like this. But it’s par for the course, and no one should be surprised. The Trump Administration has announced measures to combat the Fake News industry. These include ethics probes by the FCC, cancellation of subscriptions, and elimination of privileges given to certain outlets at the White House and the Pentagon. This in addition to the ongoing elimination of Federal slush funds for Leftist organizations (such as the BBC), money that had been laundered via US AID and other channels. These are excellent first steps, but much more is needed. If the goal is to stop and reverse this malignant disease, we first need a more accurate diagnosis. As happens so often, the road to recovery begins with the use of correct terminology. Calling them the Mainstream media or even the Legacy media gives them credibility as news media. When Americans, particularly the older cohort, think of the press, we naively imagine hard-nosed reporters fighting organized crime or city hall, and otherwise serving the public, like this. But anything remotely resembling this quaint image ceased to exist years ago. The likes of CNN, the New York Times, Yahoo, CBS, the Washington Post, Associated Press, etc. are not news media. They are propaganda organs of the Leftist establishment; its public relations arm, if you will. They serve the same function as Pravda in the Soviet Union. We must stop referring to them as “the media,” of any kind whatsoever. There is no reason to have Soviet-style propaganda organs present at any government event, especially press conferences—which should be reserved for the press. Why on earth should these degenerates-in-a-suit be there, badgering the President (or some other official) with lies, distortions, and “gotcha” questions? Any “journalists” engaging in this practise should be forthwith excluded from the privilege of attending a press conference. Everyone has their personal biases, but shifty and deceitful Leftist behavior should not be tolerated. Instead, reserve these slots for legitimate producers of news. The internet is bursting at the seams with organizations and individuals who fit the bill. They are the real media, serving the public by providing useful information in an intelligent manner. The Trump Administration is cleaning house, eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse throughout Washington, DC. They are vigorously purging entrenched woke ideologues from all government institutions. There should be no exemption for the Deep State’s propaganda mouthpieces. Cut off the money and cut off the access. They can exercise their First Amendment rights from their mother’s basement. We began this post with the Nazis; let us end there: Allowing these fraudsters to be the filter through which millions of people receive information about the government would be like the Allied armies, after crossing the Rhine into Germany in 1945, appointing Joseph Goebbels as their press secretary. As more and more of the business of life is conducted electronically, one might be tempted to pause and consider the advisability of this trend. I believe that in most cases, the abandonment or minimization of in-person contact is detrimental to the future health of mankind.
Our species has a deep need for community, and the online world is a cheap substitute for the real item. Think of the small town or urban neighborhood of yesteryear. Its beating heart is Main Street, the primary thoroughfare of commerce, where flesh-and-blood humans interact to meet each other’s basic needs. They exchange physical money for physical goods; a value-for-value transaction occurs. Meanwhile, the humans speak to each other, cementing the bonds of community. Even the most trivial small talk helps to fulfill this function. This is one reason why using cash is so important. Granted, our fiat currency is a pale derivative, far removed from real money. Nevertheless, some-thing at least is being exchanged. Cash is a key vestige of meaningful human interaction in commerce. This is gone when you interract with a screen, avoiding the direct transfer of an object of value to the person with whom the transaction is made (if a person is even present). Returning now to the small town/urban neighborhood model: Expanding outward from the commerce of Main Street, we see schools, churches, playgrounds, parks, stadiums, courts, and the private offices of physicians. All of these are the scene of face-to-face encounters, most involving (gasp) actual physical contact. Schools, universities, and the learning of trades can never complete their mission in an online environment. Sure, via a computer screen a person can accumulate facts, but not craft. Craftsmanship, including in the white-collar world, can be acquired only from live human interaction. One must see the trade being practised, and receive on-the-spot feedback for one’s own tentative efforts. This is why true experts almost always had a tutor, mentor, master, or coach to guide them in the early days, and even throughout their careers. Let us take a step back from this later stage of education, and consider child-rearing. The creation of offspring is obviously a physical, in-person act, but so is proper upbringing. Once again, only live human role models can do the job. Integrity, character, honesty, etc. cannot be transmitted on line. My heart breaks when I see a parent giving a child, often a very small one, a screen of some kind to play with. I wonder whether this phenomenon contributes to the plague of autism-like behavior among our youth. We lament the rise of loneliness and alienation in our society. The causes are many and varied, but part of the story is surely the factors cited above. Of all the manifestations of the dehumanized society, one that is emblematic, in my mind, is “working from home.” Very few individuals possess the maturity and intelligence to work effectively in this manner. For the vast majority, it is the adult equivalent of playing hooky. This computer-age farce contributes to the angst that sits on us like a heavy fog. The infamous lockdowns, along with other totalitarian measures, led to the normalization of “working” from home. The bonds of human society were degraded. Small business was dealt a blow. Feelings of alienation were exacerbated. The building of real community, from out of the miasma that is contemporary Western civilization, would require the curtailment of lawlessness on our city streets. It also would require the restoration of freedom of association. I will cover this concept in a separate post. “What the gentleman seeks, he seeks within himself; what the small man seeks, he seeks in others.”
— Confucious (The Analects, XV.21) In my post of 12/14/24 (“Annoyances”), I listed some of the more annoying aspects of current human behavior. One item was the following:
“Uptalk. Enunciating a statement as if it were a question; constant rising intonation. Especially annoying on men. Makes them sound like little girls.” I had hoped that with the change in atmosphere following the advent of the Trump Administration, a more masculine manner of speech would be heard across the land. Sure, I expected to still be subjected to pathetic feminized uptalking from a twenty-something woke moron working at Whole Foods, but among our thought leaders, absolutely not. Unfortunately, it seems that everywhere I look, even among bright individuals with good ideas, the plague has not ceased; if anything, it has worsened. Another verbal tic that has spread far and wide is the constant use of the words “kind of” and “sort of.” Or, in more rapid speech, kinda and sorta. Yesterday I began watching a podcast featuring an expert in economic and financial affairs. This was an intelligent person, not a Leftist by any stretch of the imagination. Almost every definitive statement was preceded by kind of or sort of. I was not able to watch more than a couple of minutes. It was kind of, sort of, like, you know, well, very exhausting. These words do have a use case. There are times that one wishes to qualify an assertion, as in “her demeanor was sort of hostile, though I couldn’t point to anything explicit.” But when making a factual statement, the usage is inappropriate. There is no reason to say “the Fed kind of held interest rates where they are, with no change.” The Fed didn’t kind of hold them, they held them, period. The effect is the same as with uptalking: information ceases to be communicated as cold, hard facts. Everything is in question, and nobody wants to commit. Given the multiple crises and challenges we face today, there has never been a time that demands more forceful, unequivocal speech. What we do not need to convey is weakness, uncertainty, and self-doubt. As the Trump Administration takes action to crush DEI, and put an end to this disgraceful chapter of American history, it is important to examine the ideological antecedents that gave birth to the plague. In this vein, I invite you to read an article I wrote in 2007 for American Thinker, entitled “Diversity, Nihilism, and the Anti-Rational Mind.”
When hysterical Leftists claim that President Trump and his associates are seizing power, or engaged in a coup d’état, in a sense they are correct. Over the course of the last century, the Deep State spread its tentacles into every nook and cranny of the Federal apparatus. On January 19, 2025, this entrenched Leftist administrative juggernaut was, for all practical purposes, the government of the United States. The president had become window dressing, a quaint relic of the bygone constitutional republic.
So when Donald Trump & Co. asserted authority over the Executive branch, thinking that the elected president and his appointees are actually in charge of their agencies, they really were trying to overthrow the government. Let us not forget that “our democracy” is a codeword for the Deep State; the function of an election, as in the USSR, is for the People to show their love and affection for the legitimate rulers of the country, not—Lenin forbid—to replace them. How can you replace the true representatives of the People? And thus we have this bizarre coup d’état, where the president is seizing control of the presidency. We need a new word to describe this phenomenon. Autocoup? Retrocoup? Whatever it’s called, Trump really is overturning the established order. This situation produces a host of ludicrous scenes. As I watched one of the signing ceremonies/press conferences, this one featuring Musk, I thought to myself: Trump and Musk are taking a much-deserved victory lap after uncovering the tip of the iceberg of what may be the biggest fraud in the history of man. This is how a normal human being would view it. But the audience in the room is the White House press corps, mostly composed of “journalists” who are essentially propaganda attachés of the Deep State. Musk is taking away their rice bowl. To them, US AID is not subject to the authority of the president, rather it is an independent branch of the government; dismantling it would be akin to abolishing Congress. Trump could expose waste, fraud, and abuse until the cows come home, and the Left wouldn’t care a whit. If a thousand worthless bureaucrats and consultants inside the Beltway each have to pocket a million dollars so that the election of one conservative East European prime minister is nullified, so be it. This is how the U.S. government works. It is absolutely normal, standard operating procedure. And now we have low-level Federal judges ordering President Trump and his Cabinet to keep their hands off the agencies under their purview. This galactic level of chutzpah is the natural outgrowth of the judiciary’s illegal usurpation of power, growing in intensity for decades. Of all the genies that must be stuffed back into the bottle, this is one of the most urgent. I cringed when I heard Trump say, at the aforementioned press conference, that he would obey the judges, and appeal the rulings. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed this policy the following day. Did it ever occur to him that the President of the United States is not obligated to obey an illegal order conjured up in the feverish mind of a Leftist lunatic? If a judge tomorrow rules that Trump cannot speak with world leaders, or that the White House staff must all appear in public with ice cream cones protruding from the top of their heads, would he obey that as well? What is the limit of this farce? The Administration is going to appeal?! Does Trump not realize that in the eyes of the Left, he just surrendered to the authority of the Deep State? Does he not remember that his first administration was neutered in the same manner? This cannot be allowed to stand. Where’s our new Attorney-General Pam Bondi, that supposedly tough-as-nails supergirl? Oh, she’s busy bringing lawsuits against governors and other top officials of states (most recently New York) that are sabotaging the Administration’s enforcement of the law against illegal aliens. What is it with conservatives and lawsuits? For goodness sake, we are dealing here with criminals. Appoint a prosecutor, and slap on the handcuffs. The state officials are clearly engaged in obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting a felony, and the judges are fomenting insurrection. These apparatchiks must be behind bars, pronto. Otherwise, the autocoup may fail, and Trump will have little else to do but attend MAGA rallies and rearrange the furniture in the White House. In summary, I will repeat the words of Curtis Yarvin that I quoted in my post of 1/20/25: “Progressives do not believe in the American system of government, only in power. Conservatives do not believe in power, only in the American system of government. Therefore, progressives always win and conservatives always lose.” |
Dystopian literatureWelcome to the blog! While you're here, check out the six dystopian novels by Gary Wolf. His latest is The Cubist Supremacy. 
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