Liberty Safe markets itself as the trusted brand for liberty-minded Americans, advancing the idea that it’s a company run by rugged, freedom defending individuals who are looking out for the American everyman.

As it turns out, they’re the exact opposite of what has been advertised.

In case you missed the events of the past few days…

Last week, the FBI raided the home of Nathan Hughes, a resident of Fayetteville, Arkansas, after charging him with non-violent allegations related to his presence at the January 6, 2001 Capitol protest/riot.

Hughes is charged with “misdemeanor offenses of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, and impeding passage through the Capitol grounds or buildings,” an FBI press release said last week.

Nonetheless, the feds treated Mr Hughes as if he was akin to an ISIS terrorist.

Hughes wrote on his fundraiser page:

“On the morning of August 30th 2023, I was swarmed by 3 vehicles of heavily armed FBI agents and arrested with rifles pointed at me.”

He continues:

“At the same time, my home was raided by 10+ vehicles filled with armed FBI agents. They ordered my girlfriend Taylor out of the house with her hands up and had rifles pointed at her too. They put her in handcuffs, unplugged our home security cameras, and turned our house upside down searching it. A bunch of stuff from electronics to clothes was taken and we can’t find one of our security cams. They called the manufacturer of my Liberty Safe, got the pass code from them, and got into it too. Thank God our dogs weren't harmed.”

Now, Liberty Safe is not some random company. They possess the largest manufacturing plant in the country.

In August 2021, a New York City-based private equity fund called Monomoy Capital Partners acquired Liberty Safe at a valuation of just south of $150 million, from a publicly traded company called Compass Diversified.

As enterprises that seek to grow from within the heavily permissioned and regulated confines of the American financial system, both Monomoy and Compass represent everything that their liberty-minded customer base detests.

A closer look at these outfits reveals that the current and previous owners of Liberty Safe are nothing more than shameless hustlers for dollars of a certain ideological base.

In countless company documents, they proudly hail their compliance with the overtly statist ESG and DEI cartel agendas, in which the government encourages a fusion with private enterprise, incentivizing corporations to engage in “public private partnerships” to stay on the good side of the regime.

Last year, in demonstrating their unshakeable commitment to the fascist technocratic mania that is BlackRock/World Economic Forum/Social Credit Score agenda, Monomoy flaunted its new policy that “all new hires are required to understand the firm’s ESG policies as part of the onboarding process.”

“We firmly believe in getting everyone involved,” added the head of the Monomoy operating team. “In our portfolio companies we involve everyone in ESG, from employees on the plant floor to the board members,” he adds.

I know what you’re thinking. Why did these companies purchase Liberty Safe in the first place? Isn’t it a bit of a mismatch.

Well, Liberty got away with hiding this values incompatibility for a very long time, devoting tons of money to throwing advertising dollars to the likes of Fox News’s Sean Hannity and other major conservative/libertarian figures. It clearly worked to buy much-needed ideological clout for the corporation.

But now that we know who really runs the show, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise anymore when Liberty’s owners folded like a lawn chair when the FBI called and asked to access the safe of Mr Hughes.

Even worse, the company revealed that it had a back door master code for all of the digital safes that it sells. It appears that many Liberty customers had no idea that this “feature,” which is directly antagonistic to the idea of personal sovereignty, came installed with their safes.

Then suddenly, after the reports surfaced, via Mr Hughes, of Liberty’s willing compliance with the feds, the company attempted to engage in damage control with a statement from their Liberty Twitter/X account.

But the woke ESG bros at the New York City private equity firm made a big mistake. They exposed their ideological Potemkin village for the world to see, and it all came crashing down.

Liberty Safe conned their own customer base and presented an image of a company that was nothing but a mirage. All of the incentives in today’s system push these multi billion dollar funds in the direction of compliance, regulation, and subservience. But this is one of the rare cases when the cosplayers in Manhattan didn’t get away with it, and ended up with egg on their faces. (read more)

Most of the basic facts have been known for years, though unfortunately have not been readily available to the general public.

Way back in 2007, a physics professor at Brigham Young University, Dr Steven E. Jones, turned up critical evidence while investigating samples of World Trade Center (WTC) dust. The samples had been collected immediately after September 11, 2001 from the thick deposit of dust that blanketed the WTC site and much of lower Manhattan. Jones found tiny bits of an exotic incendiary known as thermate that can cut through steel like a hot knife through butter. Thermate burns at ~5,000°F. The main product of the reaction is molten iron.

Thermate differs from its better known cousin thermite in that it contains sulfur which lowers the melting point of iron, speeding up the reaction. The presence of both sulfur and aluminum was diagnostic for thermate. Jones called this “the last nail in the coffin.” (Dr. Steven E. Jones, Revisiting 9/11/2001. Applying the Scientific Method, 2007, posted here)

Jones also found an abundance of tiny iron microspheres in the dust (up to .05% by volume), proof that large amounts of WTC steel had melted. The diameter of the spheres ranged from one micron to 1.5 mm. When Jones obtained some thermate, which is commercially available, and used it to cut through a steel plate, the reaction produced an intense spray of molten droplets which cooled into iron microspheres identical to the spheres in the dust.

Other studies of the WTC dust also reported the iron microspheres. (Heather A. Lowers and Gregory P. Meeker, Particle Atlas of World Trade Center Dust, posted here; also see Damage Assessment: 130 Liberty Street Property. WTC Dust Signature Report: Composition and Morphology. December 2003, posted here)

Jones and his colleagues learned that thermite/thermate can be made more explosive by reducing the particle size of the ingredients. This more reactive variety is known as super thermate or nano-thermate. (Niels H. Harrit, et al, Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, 2009, posted here)

And there were other revelations. It is indeed shocking how far the development of thermate had “progressed” by the late 1990s. Jones & Co, learned that a liquid sol-gel form of nano-thermate can be applied to steel simply by spraying or painting it on. This means insiders could have prepped the twin towers for demolition undetected during an elevator retrofit, a fireproofing upgrade, or even during routine maintenance. Nor was it necessary to wire the entire building. Ignition can be accomplished remotely using a specially designed thermitic match triggered by a radio signal. Once thermate is ignited, the reaction is self perpetuating. (Kevin R. Ryan, The Top Ten Connections between NIST and Nano-thermites, July 2, 2008, posted here)

All of this is consistent with the many eyewitness accounts of explosions on 9/11. And it is consistent with the testimony of New York City firemen, first responders and clean-up crews who reported seeing copious amounts of molten steel on site. As one fireman put it: “molten steel was flowing down the channel rails like in a foundry…”

(David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor revisited, 2008, pp. 31-37; Mark H. Gaffney, The 9/11 Mystery Plane, 2008, pp.132-139; Graeme MacQueen, 118 Witnesses: The Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers, posted here)

Office and building fires do not reach temperatures anywhere near hot enough to melt steel which has a melting point of 2,500°F. Nor were there any combustible materials in the WTC, nor any combination thereof, capable of approaching this temperature. Although burning jet fuel has been frequently (and incorrectly) cited as the reason for the WTC collapse, the reality is otherwise. Jet fuel is essentially kerosene and will not burn in air in excess of 1,832°F, far below the melting point of steel.

Not long after the towers collapsed, a hard rain storm drenched Manhattan. Firemen also sprayed millions of gallons of water onto the smoking ruin of the WTC in an attempt to extinguish the fires, all to no effect. This is consistent with burning thermate, which includes its own chemically bound oxygen. This is why a thermate fire cannot be smothered by dowsing and will even burn underwater.

The WTC site was so hot it melted the workmen’s rubber boots. Search-and-rescue dogs brought in to help locate survivors suffered severe burns, and three of the dogs died. Just how hot was the pile? We got an idea on September 16, 2001 when NASA conducted a flyover using an infrared spectrometer (AVIRIS) and detected surface temperatures as high as 1,376° F. Temperatures beneath the pile were undoubtedly much higher. (See this)

The site remained intensely hot for five months. Molten steel was reported as late as February 2002 when clean-up crews finally reached the bottom of the WTC bathtub. (Jennifer Lin, “Recovery Worker Reflects on Months Spent at Ground Zero”, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, May 29, 2002, posted here)

The discovery of thermate in the WTC dust should have been front-page headline news across America, and indeed, around the world. Yet, as we know, the US media went deaf and dumb on the issue. Why? If Muslim jihadists were behind the 9/11 attacks, why would the media censor this breaking story? The only plausible reason for suppressing it was to prevent the truth from emerging about what actually happened. Blanket censorship has been the rule, ever since.

Nor was the cover up limited to the media. After many months of stalling, the G.W. Bush White House reluctantly appointed a government agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to investigate and explain the WTC collapse.

The agency released its findings in 2005. In its final report NIST unequivocally states that it found no evidence the WTC was demolished. The multi-volume 10,000-page report gives the appearance of a thorough investigation. But a close reading (I spent many weeks digging into it) shows that NIST worked backwards looking for facts to support a predetermined conclusion that plane impacts and office fires caused the WTC collapse. In the process, NIST dismissed an abundance of evidence to the contrary.

No doubt, this is why many concerned citizens flooded NIST with critical comments and questions about its report. The public wanted to know: Did your scientists actually look for explosives? If so, where is the beef?

In 2006, the agency posted a clarification on its website. NIST acknowledged that it failed to look for explosive residues. (See question #29 here)

The admission was fatal to the agency’s credibility, and exposed the NIST report for what it is, a pile of stinking manure. Testing for thermitic incendiaries and explosives is standard practice in fire investigations. The national standard calls for it. (NFPA 921)

All of which means that the familiar narrative about Osama bin Laden and nineteen fanatic A-rabs is nothing but a cover story: a tapestry of lies. There is no way foreign jihadists could have gained access to the WTC to pre-position explosives. Nor in any event could Al Qaeda have manufactured thermate in a cave in Afghanistan. The incendiary is high-tech and in 2001 only a handful of nations had the capacity to produce it, the US and Israel at the top of the list.

As Sherlock Holmes famously told Watson: My friend, once you rule out the impossible what remains must be the truth. Like it or not.

The Devil’s Trick?

But is thermate the whole truth? Can thermate alone account for everything we witnessed on 9/11? This is the contentious question that some in the 9/11 truth community have been attempting to raise, for years.

According to NIST, the steel in the monster box columns in the core of the towers was up to seven inches thick at the base. Could thermate cut through columns of this size? Doubtful. (NIST NCSTAR 1-3 p. 10).

We know that enormous explosions ripped through the basement of each tower shortly before they fell. A photographer named Rick Siegal actually captured these explosions on film from Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The quality of Siegal’s video was excellent because his camera was set on a tripod. Moreover, it was also equipped with audio so he was able to record the thunderous noise which carried across the river. The footage is graphic. After each blast a dust cloud is plainly visible rising from around the base of the tower. Collapse ensued within minutes. These huge explosions shook the ground and evidently were intended to weaken the towers by destroying the gigantic core columns. In my opinion they were not caused by thermate.

We also know that during the collapse large segments of the outer perimeter wall were thrown at least 600 feet from the base of the towers. Could thermate do this? Not likely. This points to a much more powerful explosive.

Recently, I also learned about another anomaly. On completion of the clean up at ground zero, two cavernous holes in the bedrock were very much in evidence at the site. They were located near to where the towers stood. The deepest of these was 110-feet below street level, so deep the bottom was below sea level. Obviously, thermate did not excavate these enormous voids in the granite. I was stunned when I learned about this.

Image: The crater in WTC-6 (Source: Mark Gaffney)

The official story is that ice age glaciers carved the “grand canyon of Manhattan” 20,000 years ago. (David W. Dunlap, At Ground Zero, Scenes from the Ice Age, New York Times, September 21, 2008, posted here)

However, a German physicist who thinks outside the box, Heinz Pommer, has a different explanation. In 2018, during a presentation in London, Pommer argued that the twin towers were demolished with a nuclear bomb [e.g. dirty bomb, “type of a “radiological dispersal device” (RDD) that combines a conventional explosive, such as dynamite, with radioactive material”]. He thinks the enormous voids in the granite may have been a collateral effect.

Pommer is not the first to refer to the use of nukes on 9/11. Others who did so before him have faced disbelief and ridicule. The main argument against nukes is the absence of radiation at the WTC site. Although a nuclear isotope, tritium, was definitely detected, allegedly its presence has been otherwise accounted for, ruling out nukes.

But Pommer begs to differ. He argues that the placement of the Uranium charge at the bottom of the WTC elevator shaft explains the seeming absence of radiation. The nuclear reaction in these simple but effective weapons proceeded slowly, at first. As the heat from fission built up, the Uranium charge melted down into the granite.

The result was a pressure chamber in the bedrock below each tower where fission ultimately fizzled and was contained. The fusion component, however, formed a rising plasma needle that eventually broke containment. At a critical point, super-heated gas and gamma radiation vented vertically through the core of each tower, analogous to a volcanic gas jet eruption. All of this was hidden from view until the moment the tower visibly exhaled dust and gas from the upper levels. Then came the symmetric top-down collapse.

Pommer argues (yet to be confirmed) that only the vast energy of a nuke can explain the conversion of hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete and steel into dust. And only a nuke can account for the sudden disintegration of the upper portion of the South Tower (WTC-2) which had tipped at a weird angle and was falling as a unit. And only a nuke can explain the near total absence of ceramic sinks and toilets, filing cabinets, furniture, and human bodies in the wreckage. Almost everything in the towers was vaporized by gamma radiation.

According to Pommer, the nuclear reaction progressed over at least an hour, and this would explain a number of anomalies. These include electromagnetic interference of radio and tv transmissions, spontaneous fires in surrounding buildings and in nearby vehicles, the pyroclastic cloud that enveloped lower Manhattan, conspicuous venting of steam from underground sewers, strange rainbow effects and silverfish flashes in video footage, and the like.

Recently, important new evidence has also come to light. In 2019, doctors at Mt. Sinai Medical Center reported “an increased incidence of thyroid cancer among 9/11 rescue workers….the etiology of which remains unclear.” I only learned about this, a few days ago. (See this)

Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thyroid cancer has been recognized as the tell-tale signature of exposure to nuclear radiation. A spike of thyroid cancers also occurred after the Chernobyl disaster. (See this)

I believe the thyroid cancers are the true smoking gun of 9/11, and a wake up call. Pommer’s thesis deserves thoughtful consideration. He calls it the devil’s trick. (Part one here, part two here, part three here)

Mexico is about to be toasted. The next presidential election is slated for June 2024 and they have two candidates:

1. Claudia Sheinbaum – a secular, liberal jewish feminist who ran under the right wing banner until 2021 when she made a hard left to socialist communism.
2. Xochitl Galvez – a secular progressive World Economic Forum graduate whose background details have been scrubbed.

Both came out of nowhere and were barely holding on to their already faulted positions in the government.   It bears noting Mexico is 80% Catholic so the odds of either of these secular candidates having garnered the votes of The People is about -0-%.

Of course the Global MSM is completely titillated over the fact that this means Mexico will have a female President. The gushing is reminiscent of a baby regurgitating sour milk. Yeah – incompetent as they may be to serve Mexico, they are proxies assuring that Mexico will be absorbed by the Big Daddy Pac-Man.

It would appear that their task would be to turn Mexico into a truly banana republic akin to the US, Canada, Australia and EU.

Therefore, it makes no difference who wins.   Likely they are heavily supported by the Mexicali gangs who will be given a greenlight to exploit their ware ‘everywhere’.   Planned Parenthood is gleefully hopping up and down given both candidates will legalize abortion. Setting up shop in Mexico will be lucrative!     Just more depopulation.

Sheinbaum, a secular Bolshevik Jew, was formerly the mayor of Mexico City. Mexico City is 82% Catholic.   Open Society just happens to have an office in the city proper. Sheinbaum moved to California in 1990 to pursue her masters and doctorate at Berkeley. In 2007, Sheinbaum shifted gears and began working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the UN in New York.

In 2015, she served one year in Mexico as the Secretary of Environment.   And in 2017 was nominated to run as mayor of Mexico City via the far-left wing MORENA Party.   She has multiple controversies against her for her negligence while mayor.

There is absolutely no way she could have been elected without massive election interference.

Xochitl – A feminist, Xochitl served as mayor of Mexico city before Sheinbaum.   Subsequent to her term as mayor she was ‘elected’ Senator. A devout socialist, she was recognized for her leadership by the World Economic Forum and was invited by Brazil’s Communist leader, Lula to participate in a globalization summit in Davos.

Both candidates would seem to be an Open Society bonanza.   They have no international experience and political experience on par with former mayor Pete Buttegieg appointed Director of Transportation.   Who will be guiding Xochitl and Sheinbaum in their decisions?     Alex Soros.

While irregularities inside the two Party nominations have been asserted, a billion pesos would go a long way in shutting out the competition. Mexico will become a failed state.

The only way Russia was able to remain internally governed was by booting all Soros related organizations from the country in 2015.   Certainly the Navalny power plays to oust Putin were intiated rather frequently, however they failed to create the stranglehold that is dominant today in America.   And Navalny is in a Siberian Camp.

NPR highlights the civilians wrongfully imprisoned in Russia and the State Department warns that Russia is a pariah state for Americans.   Of the 50 Americans detained across the globe, 2 are in Russia; Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich, both of whom have been arrested on espionage.

In contrast, there are over 60 Russians currently in US jails.

There are over 200 NGO’s operating in Mexico.   In 2021, Mexican President, Obrador, accused the US of interference:   “It’s interference, it’s interventionism, it’s promoting coup-plotters,” said López Obrador, who announced that Mexico had filed a formal protest with the US embassy.

Specifically, Obrador was speaking of the NGO Article 19. Funding for Article 19 is to be expected:   Open Society, Ford Foundation, USAID, NED, Netherlands, etc…   In addition, Obrador mentioned interference by;   Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI).   They are also funded by the Ford Foundation and USAID for the purpose of installing a couped President.   Obrador made serious allegations of his concerns to “Kamala”.

Under Mexican law, a foreign government may not make donations to a political group (MCCI) because it undermines sovereignty. Obrador told Kamala that USAID must suspend funding.   It is now funded by The Open Government Partnership launched in 2011 and held a global summit in Mexico City in 2015.   The same year a coup allowed Xochitl to be a surprise winner of Mexico City mayoral race   The Partnership is funded via the UN, Open Society, Omidyar Network, Hewlett Foundation and the UK Government.

The goal?   Full implementation of the Sustainable Goals as set forth by the WEF
via The Open Government Partnership.   BOOM!  Mexico will be the next victim – 2024.

Screameth the Bureau of Lies and Scams (BLS)

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 187,000 in August, and the unemployment rate rose to 3.8 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in health care, leisure and hospitality, social assistance, and construction. Employment in transportation and warehousing declined.

Hmmmm..... so employment increased but the unemployment rate went up?

What an amusing set of alleged circumstances!

The Household Survey, unadjusted of course (which is all I ever use) declined by 555,000 jobs -- and basically all of them were not counted as "unemployed" either as the "not in labor force" number rose by 515,000.  So by the "we call you" as opposed to "we call your boss" figures there were actual job loses, not gains.

August, by the way, usually is such a month (ignoring the pandemic years) so that's not a surprise.  What this indicates is that what was probably lost was the second and third jobs rather than the primary ones, as the gain in working-age population continued apace at about 200,000 (that is, approximately all of the alleged gains) which would lead you to reasonably consider the actual gain to be a net of zero.

I've noted that the PPI data has shown softness in trade and transportation, which is a rather ill wind.  Hourly wage data showed flat-to-down in manufacturing, particularly in durables.  That was a bit surprising.  Overtime and workweek hours were essentially flat, so there's no indication of good/bad there on net, but there was plenty of shuffling around.

Of note the people getting laid off or fired appear to be in those with college degrees (Bachelors or better); among those of lesser attainment they all showed significant improvement.  Of course those with degrees, generally, are those with better spending power.  That, according to Joe Biden, means that the economy is very strong.  YMMV.

Another interesting note is that over the last year among the labor force 1.194 million people acquired a new disability.  And -- their increase in labor participation (that is, working) rose faster than those without a disability.  This implies economic distress -- doesn't prove it, but certainly implies it.  That count rose 5.4% over the last 12 months while the non-disabled civilian population rose by a much smaller 0.6%; that is, roughly 10 times the general increase in the civilian non-institutional population.  What's even worse is that among the labor force the disability rate over the last 12 months increased 16.4%.  I'll leave it to you, given which side of the line this article is posted on, as to what might be causing that (oops!)  Incidentally men in the labor force wildly outperformed (that is, worse; that number was up an astounding 20% in one year) in this metric over women.  Double-oops.  I'm sure that will all buff right out.

The market seemed to think this was a perfectly-good thing in that the S&P futures rose on these figures.

One has to wonder how a 12 month run rate of the civilian labor force having the disabled count go up 16.4% can be considered a "positive" for the stock market, but then again we do live in clown world....... so all you can do is trade the tape you get. (read more)

The Ukrainian counteroffensive was doomed to fail from the start. A look at the lineup of forces on both sides and what the Ukrainian army was trying to do, coupled with an understanding of the history of conventional land war, make it clear that there was virtually no chance the attacking Ukrainian forces could defeat Russia’s defending forces and achieve their political goals.

Ukraine and its Western supporters hoped that the Ukrainian army could execute a classic blitzkrieg strategy to escape the war of attrition that was grinding it down. That plan called for punching a large hole in Russia’s defensive lines and then driving deep into Russian-controlled territory, not only capturing territory along the way, but delivering a hammer blow to the Russian army. As the historical record makes clear, this is an especially difficult operation to pull off when the attacking forces are engaged in a fair fight – one involving two roughly equal militaries. The Ukrainians were not only involved in a fair fight, but they were also ill-prepared to execute a blitzkrieg and were facing an adversary well-positioned to thwart one. In short, the deck was stacked against the Ukrainian counteroffensive from the start.

Nevertheless, there was pervasive optimism about Ukraine’s battlefield prospects among Western policymakers, pundits and editorial writers in the mainstream media, retired generals, and other experts in the American and European foreign policy establishments.[4] Retired General David Petraeus’s comments on the eve of the counteroffensive capture the prevailing zeitgeist: “I think that this counteroffensive is going to be very impressive.” He then effectively described the Ukrainians executing a successful blitzkrieg against Russian forces.[5]

In fact, Western leaders and the mainstream media put significant pressure on Kyiv to launch the counteroffensive in the months before it began on 4 June. At the time, Ukraine’s leaders were dragging their feet and showing little enthusiasm for starting the planned blitzkrieg, probably because at least some of them understood they were being led to the slaughter. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later said on 21 July that, “We did have plans to start it in the spring, but we didn’t because, frankly, we had not enough munitions and armaments and not enough properly trained brigades.”[6] Moreover, after the counteroffensive began, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Ukrainian military’s commander in chief, angrily told The Washington Post that he felt the West had not provided Ukraine with adequate arms and that “without being fully supplied, these plans are not feasible at all. But they are being carried out.”[7]

Even after the counteroffensive bogged down, which happened shortly after it started, many optimists continued to hold out hope that it would eventually succeed, although their numbers have declined over time. Retired US General Ben Hodges, one of the most enthusiastic advocates of launching the blitzkrieg, maintained on 15 June, “I think the Ukrainians can and will win this fight.”[8] Dara Massicot, a prominent expert often cited in the mainstream media, opined on 19 July that “For now, the Russian front lines are holding, despite the Kremlin’s dysfunctional decisions. Yet the cumulative pressure of bad choices is mounting. Russian front lines might crack in the way Hemingway once wrote about going bankrupt: ‘gradually, then suddenly’.” Michael Kofman, another expert frequently cited by the mainstream press, claimed on 2 August that “the counteroffensive itself hasn’t failed,” while The Economist ran a story on 16 August that proclaimed: “Ukraine’s counter-offensive is making progress, slowly: Ten weeks in, the army is starting to figure out what works.”[9]

A week later, on 22 August, when it was hard to deny that the counteroffensive was in serious trouble and there was hardly any chance of rectifying the situation, Jake Sullivan, the US national security advisor, stated: “We do not assess that the conflict is a stalemate. We are seeing Ukraine continue to take territory on a methodical, systematic basis.”[10]

Sullivan’s comments notwithstanding, many in the West now recognize that the counteroffensive has failed, and Ukraine is doomed to fight a war of attrition that it is unlikely to win, chiefly because the conflict is slowly morphing from a fair fight into an unfair fight. But it should have been obvious to Ukraine’s Western cheerleaders beforehand that the blitzkrieg they embraced was doomed to fail and that it made little sense to push Ukraine to launch it.

UKRAINE’S THEORY OF VICTORY

The Russian and Ukrainian militaries have been engaged in a fair fight since the war began in February 2022. The Russian invasion force, which was comprised of 190,000 troops at most, conquered a substantial amount of Ukrainian territory, but soon found itself overextended. In other words, it did not have sufficient troops to defend all the Ukrainian territory it controlled. Consequently, the Russians withdrew most of their forces from the Kharkiv oblast, which allowed the Ukrainian army to overwhelm the remaining few. Subsequently, the overstretched Russian army was forced to withdraw from the slice of the Kherson oblast that lies on the west bank of the Dnieper River, which the Ukrainian army then occupied without a fight. Before the Russians withdrew, however, they inflicted massive casualties on the Ukrainian forces that were trying to drive them out of Kherson. One battalion commander reported that his casualties were so high that he had “to replace the members of his unit three times.”^[11] These two tactical defeats took place in the late summer and fall of 2022.

In response to the events in Kharkiv and Kherson, Putin mobilized 300,000 troops in September 2022; they would need a few months of training before they were fully ready to fight. The Russians also scaled up their ongoing effort to capture Bakhmut in November 2022. The Ukrainians responded to the challenge in Bakhmut, and the two sides engaged in a long and grinding battle for control of that city, which finally ended with a Russian victory in late May 2023.

Bakhmut was a serious defeat for Ukraine, in part because Zelensky publicly said that he and his generals were determined to hold the city and because he committed many of Ukraine’s best units to the fight.^[12] More importantly, Ukraine suffered huge losses in the months-long battle.^[13] To make matters worse, the war was likely to turn into an unfair fight in the months ahead, because the Russians had gained about a 5:1 advantage in population size in the wake of the early fighting, which meant they could mobilize a much larger army than Ukraine, giving them an advantage that matters greatly in attrition warfare. Furthermore, the Russians already enjoyed a significant advantage in artillery, the most important weapon in a war of attrition like the one being fought in Ukraine. Neither Kyiv nor the West had the capability to rectify that imbalance, which was estimated to be somewhere between 5:1 and 10:1 in Russia’s favor.^[14]

Indeed, there was reason to think that the West might not remain fully committed to supplying Ukraine with the weaponry it desperately needed, which included other kinds of arms besides artillery, like tanks, armored fighting vehicle, drones, and aircraft. There was growing evidence of war fatigue in the West and plus the US faced a threat from China in East Asia that was a greater danger to American interests than the Russian threat. In short, Ukraine was likely to lose in a protracted war of attrition, because it would be an unfair fight.

Both Ukraine and the West therefore had a powerful incentive to find a clever strategy that would quickly produce a military victory that would end the war on favorable terms for them.^[15] This meant Ukraine would have to employ a blitzkrieg strategy, which is the only way of avoiding or escaping a war of attrition in a contest between two equally-matched land armies facing each other across a continuous front.^[16]

THE ABC’S OF BLITZKRIEG

A blitzkrieg relies on the mobility and speed inherent in an armored strike force to defeat an opponent without engaging a series of bloody and protracted battles.^[17] That strategy is predicated on the assumption that the opponent’s army is a large and complex machine that is geared to fighting along a well-established defensive line. In the machine’s rear lies a vulnerable network, which comprises numerous lines of communication, along which information and supplies move, as well as key nodal points where the various lines intersect. Destruction of this central nervous system is tantamount to the destruction of the defending army.

A blitzkrieg involves two major operations: winning a breakthrough battle and executing a deep strategic penetration. To be more specific, the attacker aims to surreptitiously concentrate its armored forces at a specific location or two along the front line, where the defender’s force-to-space ratio is low and where the attacker can achieve numerical superiority over the defender. A defense that is thinly spread out and outnumbered is relatively easy to break through. After opening a hole or two in the defender’s front line, the attacker seeks to move rapidly into the depths of the defense before the target state’s forces can move to cut off the penetration. Although it may be necessary to engage in a set-piece battle to accomplish the initial breakthrough, a high premium is placed on avoiding further battles of this sort. Instead, the attacker follows the path of least resistance deep into the defender’s rear.

The tank, with its inherent flexibility, is the ideal weapon for making a blitzkrieg work. Artillery, however, does not play a major role in blitzkrieg, in part because it requires significant logistical support, which interferes with the rapid movement of second-echelon forces into the expanding salient and more generally is a drag on mobility. Furthermore, engaging in large-scale artillery exchanges would waste valuable time and slow down the advancing armored forces. Close air support, on the other hand, presents none of these problems. Given the inherent flexibility of airplanes, drones, and helicopters, this flying artillery is an excellent counterpart to fast-moving armored forces.

As should be obvious, a blitzkrieg demands a flexible command structure peopled from top to bottom with soldiers capable of exercising initiative in combat situations where the fog of war is sometimes thick. A blitzkrieg is not based on a rigid plan that commanders must follow closely. In fact, the opposite is true. Before launching the attack, an overall objective is set, and detailed plans for the breakthrough battle are prepared. But there are no rigid guidelines for the commanders to follow as they conduct the deep strategic penetration. The underlying assumption is that no one can predict with any degree of certainty how the battle will develop. Uncertainty will be commonplace and therefore risks will have to be taken. In essence, a high premium is placed on a commander’s ability to make rapid-fire decisions that will enable the armored forces to maintain a high speed of advance in the wake of winning the breakthrough battle. Boldness is essential, even when information is incomplete, so that the attacking army can maintain the initiative.

Finally, some words are in order about the objectives associated with blitzkrieg. The usual aim is to decisively defeat the defender’s military forces. It is possible, however, to employ a blitzkrieg to win a limited victory, where the defending forces are encircled and clobbered but not completely defeated, and where the attacker captures a significant amount of the defender’s territory. The problem with not scoring a decisive victory, however, is that the fighting is likely to continue, which almost certainly means a war of attrition. Modern wars, it should be emphasized, not only tend to escalate, but they are also difficult to end. Thus, leaders have a powerful incentive to employ a blitzkrieg to win a decisive victory over the defending army, and not to pursue a limited victory.

Bringing in The Defender

The focus up to now has been on how the offender executes a blitzkrieg. But to fully understand the workings of a blitzkrieg and the likelihood of one succeeding, it is essential to consider the defender’s capabilities as well as its strategy for thwarting a blitzkrieg.

The key issue regarding capabilities is what the balance of forces between the defender and the offender looks like. Is there rough equality in terms of the quality and quantity of both their troops and their armaments? If so, a fair fight is in store. If one side, however, has clearly superior fighting forces in terms of either quality, quantity, or both, it will be an unfair fight. The difference between a fair and an unfair fight matters greatly for determining a blitzkrieg’s prospects of success.

For starters, it is much more difficult to make a blitzkrieg work in a fair fight, because the defender is not outmatched from the get-go. It is a tangle between two formidable fighting forces, not a mismatch, which makes it difficult for the attacker to be confident of success. Additionally, the consequences of a failed blitzkrieg are markedly different in the two types of fights. If a blitzkrieg fails in a fair fight, the result is likely to be to be a protracted war of attrition where the outcome is difficult to predict. After all, the conflict is between evenly matched opponents. But if a blitzkrieg comes up short in an unfair fight, the attacker is almost certain to win the ensuing war rather quickly and easily, simply because it enjoys a marked material advantage over the defender.

The defender’s strategy for thwarting a blitzkrieg also has a profound influence on the outcome.^[18] At the most basic level, the target state can deploy its forces in three different ways: forward defense, defense-in-depth, and mobile defense.

With forward defense, most of the defender’s forces are placed on the line separating the opposing armies to prevent the attacker from making a breakthrough. The defender also locates a reasonable number of its fighting forces behind the front line in mobile reserves that can move rapidly to shut down a potential breakthrough. The emphasis, however, is on defending in force along the initial line of contact. This is not to deny, however, that the defender can be tactically flexible in how it handles the attacking forces along the front line. For example, it might attempt to draw them into controlled zones where they can be pummeled by artillery.

Defense in depth is comprised of a series of well-defended lines – one a good distance behind the other – which are designed to wear the attacking army down as it fights its way through each defensive belt. Not only is it difficult for the attacking forces to break through the first line of defense, but even if they do, there is no possibility of outrunning the defender’s reserves and executing a deep strategic penetration. Instead, the attacker must fight a series of set-piece battles as it attempts to punch through the defender’s successive lines of defense.

Defense in depth is ideally suited for thwarting a blitzkrieg; it is probably the best of the three strategies for that purpose. Its major drawback is that it usually requires an especially large number of troops. It also calls for the defender not to maximize the number of troops and obstacles that it places at the front line, but instead to make sure that each line of defense is thickly populated with barriers and soldiers. Of course, defending troops along the line of contact can retreat to lines of defense behind them. Many commanders, however, will be inclined to defend the forward edge of the battle area with as many troops as possible.

Finally, there is mobile defense, which is the boldest of the three strategies. The defender locates a small portion of its troops in forward positions, where they can hinder the attacking forces somewhat, but otherwise allows them to penetrate deep into its rear area. At the appropriate time, the defender uses its Sunday punch – a large body of its own mobile forces – to strike into the flanks of the penetration and cut the attacking forces off from their base. In effect, the invading forces are encircled and isolated, making them an easy target for destruction. Mobile defense is a highly demanding and risky strategy, especially compared to the other two defensive strategies, which simply aim to wear down the attacking armored forces by forcing them to fight their way through well-fortified defensive positions.

THE HISTORY OF BLITZKRIEG

Let us now consider how the historical record fits with these analytical frameworks describing the ABC’s of blitzkrieg. There have been 11 blitzkriegs since the arrival of the tank on the battlefield, four of which involved fair fights, seven of which were unfair fights. The attacker succeeded in one of the four fair fights and in all seven of the unfair fights.

Germany launched five major offensives in World War II: against Poland in 1939, France in 1940, the Soviet Union in 1941 and then again in 1942, and against the Allied armies in 1944. The Wehrmacht did not employ a blitzkrieg strategy against Poland, although substantial tank forces were engaged in the operation.^[19] It simply steamrolled over the Polish military in what was clearly an unfair fight. One year later in the spring of 1940 the Germans launched a blitzkrieg in France and won a decisive victory. It was the first case of a blitzkrieg, and it was a fair fight. The following year, Hitler’s forces invaded the Soviet Union, engaging in another fair fight. They employed a blitzkrieg, which aimed to inflict a decisive defeat on the Red Army west of the Dnieper River. They failed to achieve that objective and the offensive eventually stalled outside Moscow in early December 1941. Seeking to avoid a war of attrition, the Wehrmacht launched a second offensive against the Red Army in late June 1942, this time driving deep toward the oil-rich areas in the Caucasus and southern Russia, hoping that capturing them would deliver a fatal blow to the Soviet Union. Despite impressive victories in the early months of the campaign, the 1942 blitzkrieg came up short and the Wehrmacht ended up in a war of attrition on the Eastern Front. Lastly, the Germans launched a blitzkrieg in the Ardennes Forest in December 1944, hoping to split and seriously weaken the American and British armies, capture the important port of Antwerp, and hopefully compel the Allies to surrender. Despite an initial breakthrough, the German offensive failed.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched blitzkriegs against the Egyptian army in 1956 and 1967. In both cases, the Israelis decisively defeated the Egyptians, but neither was a fair fight as the IDF was a superior fighting force. There have been five other blitzkriegs besides the four German and two Israeli cases: the 1945 Soviet offensive against Japan’s Kwantung Army in Manchuria; the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950; the Indian offensive against East Pakistan in 1971; the Vietnamese strike into Cambodia in 1979; and the US-led attack against the Iraqi army in Kuwait in 1991. These cases, like the two Israeli cases, were unfair fights.^[20]

This brief history points up that the fall of France in 1940 is the only case where a blitzkrieg succeeded in a fair fight. And while that German victory is one of the most impressive campaigns in military history, it was a close call.^[21] The Wehrmacht probably would have failed to achieve a quick and decisive victory if the French forces had been deployed somewhat differently or if the defending forces had reacted more quickly and effectively to the critically important German breakthrough at Sedan. The other three fair fights also involved the Wehrmacht; in each case either the Red Army or the Allies thwarted the German blitzkrieg. The other seven cases were all unfair fights in which the attacker unsurprisingly scored a decisive victory. In no instance was a blitzkrieg employed to win a limited victory. The aim in all eleven cases was to decisively defeat the target state’s military.

Turning to the defender’s strategy, a forward defense strategy was employed in all eleven cases. It is not surprising that there is no case of a target state employing a mobile defense, as that strategy s the most demanding and the riskiest. There is also no case of a defender relying on a defense in depth to thwart a blitzkrieg, which is surprising as it is well-suited for that purpose.^[22] It seems clear that given the available resources, commanders preferred to place the brunt of their forces well forward and not worry much about thickly populating the follow-on lines of defense.

In the eleven cases of blitzkrieg, all of which involved striking against an opponent employing a forward defense strategy, the attacking forces broke through the initial line of defense every time. In eight of the eleven cases, the ensuing deep strategic penetration led to a decisive victory.^[23] The three exceptions are the German blitzkriegs against the Red Army in 1941 and 1942, and against the Allies in 1944. In all three cases, the defender was able to create new lines of defense in their rear and wear down the Wehrmacht. In effect, both the Red Army’s and the Allies’ forward defense strategy morphed into a defense in depth, which, as emphasized, is ideally suited for defeating a blitzkrieg.

UKRAINE’S DOOMED OFFENSIVE

This brief history of blitzkrieg, coupled with an understanding of how that strategy works, sheds much light on the prospects of the Ukrainian counteroffensive succeeding. In fact, the evidence shows Kyiv’s blitzkrieg stood virtually no chance of succeeding. For starters, Ukraine was engaged in a fair fight, which meant that almost everything would have to go right for the strategy to work as intended. The Ukrainian army, however, was poorly suited for launching a blitzkrieg and, to make matters worse, it was striking against a formidable defense-in-depth. Ukraine’s only hope was that the Russian army would collapse once the counteroffensive was underway. But there was an abundance of evidence, which indicated that Russians were becoming better fighters who were likely to put up fierce resistance. Still, even if the Ukrainians were able to pull off a miracle and make the blitzkrieg work, the war would still go on, because Kyiv’s blitzkrieg did not aim to decisively defeat the Russians, who would survive to fight another day. Simply put, there was no way Ukraine could avoid continuing its war of attrition with Russia.

A Fair Fight

To determine whether Ukraine was engaged in a fair or unfair fight going into the counteroffensive, it is necessary to compare the quantity and the quality of the troops as well as the weaponry in the opposing armies.

Regarding the number of soldiers each side had ready for the fight, it is impossible to get precise figures. Nevertheless, the available evidence indicates that the size of the two forces going into the counteroffensive was roughly equal. I estimate that each side had roughly 250,000 soldiers who were prepared for the fight.^[24]Tellingly, I cannot find evidence of anyone claiming that either side had a meaningful numerical advantage on the eve of the counteroffensive. Ukraine’s real problem was the future, not the present, as the balance of soldiers is going to shift against them over time. Russia has a much larger population to draw from – a 5:1 advantage –and its military is growing larger by the day. In addition to the 300,000 reservists mobilized in October 2022, the Russian Defense Ministry, reports that 231,000 people enlisted in the military during the first seven months of 2023.^[25]

In terms of the quality of those fighting forces – to include their resolve – it appears that there is little difference between the two sides. One often hears the claim in the West that the Russians are “suffering serious morale and other systemic problems” and thus there was a good chance they would crack in the face of the counteroffensive.^[26] But that is not the view one usually hears from the Ukrainian military (which is doing the fighting), where it is widely acknowledged that the Russian army has become a more formidable fighting force since the war started and is not about to collapse anytime soon.^[27] Indeed, the fact that Russian forces were able to wear down the Ukrainians, who fought bravely and tenaciously, in the fiercely contested battle for Bakhmut – which happened in the months before the counteroffensive began – shows that the Ukrainians did not have a meaningful qualitative edge on the battlefield by the late spring of 2023.

Turning to the weaponry available to both armies, Russia surely had an advantage, simply because it had much more artillery than Ukraine. Although some of Ukraine’s Western-supplied artillery was qualitatively superior to Russia, it did not come close to making up for the quantitative imbalance. Nevertheless, Ukraine had enough artillery to wage a breakthrough battle. For purposes of executing the deep strategic penetration, artillery is less important because of the important role that close air support is expected to play in that phase of the campaign. Regarding tanks, armored fighting vehicles, and other weapons in the opposing armies there was rough equivalence in terms of their quality and quantity. As with troop numbers, that situation would change to Russia’s advantage over time.

In brief, given the Russian advantage in artillery, it is not an open and shut case that this was a fair fight. But given the rough balance of soldiers and other kinds of weaponry, and the fact that artillery is not as important for the attacking forces in a blitzkrieg as it is for attrition warfare, it seems reasonable to call it a fair fight. Still, if one wants to make the case that this was an unfair fight, it was the Russians – not the Ukrainians – who held an advantage when the counteroffensive started on 4 June.

As emphasized, the Wehrmacht’s 1940 victory in France is the only instance of a blitzkrieg succeeding in a fair fight. How likely was the Ukrainian counteroffensive to add a second case to the historical record? To answer that question, it is essential to assess how capable the Ukrainian army was of executing a blitzkrieg and how well-prepared the Russians were for preventing that outcome. (read more)

The following is pertinent segment of a Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris article:

What do heat waves, floods, droughts, rising sea levels, forest fires, hurricanes, African wars, mass extinctions, disease outbreaks, and human and animal migrations from South America and the Middle East have in common? According to climate activists, they are all caused by dangerous man-made global warming. And this, in turn, is supposedly caused by rising carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels resulting from our use of fossil fuels.

They might as well add alien invasions to the list, because it is all nonsense. Indeed, the climate scare industry has achieved such a level of absurdity that, on February 1, journalist Andrew Revkin reported in a National Geographic article that, “Many stories in recent days highlighted studies concluding that global warming is boosting the odds of cold [weather] outbreaks.”

Among the most absurd of recent climate alarm statements attributing recent cold spells to manmade global warming is one from University of Michigan professor emeritus of environment and sustainability Donald Scavia, who said: “In the past there was a very strong gradient of cold air at the poles and warmer air south of the poles. That gradient kept the cold where it is…. As the poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet, that gradient weakens, allowing the cold air currents to dip south.”

Dr. Tim Ball, an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, said that Scavia’s statement “is utter rubbish.” Ball explained, “It’s wrong in every aspect, from the basic assumption to the interpretation. In fact, a gradient makes things move. It doesn’t ‘keep the cold where it is.’“

It’s also a mistake to think that, if human-produced CO₂ is actually causing global warming, the poles will warm first. “There is no evidence of that; they just are assuming it to be the case,” Dr. Ball emphasized.

And, if the poles did warm first, Ball explained, the reduced temperature difference between the poles and lower latitude regions would reduce extreme weather events, not intensify them, as climate campaigners claim. After all, weather and extreme weather events are driven by the temperature gradient between latitudes. A warming Arctic would result in less intense cold outbreaks and a lesser intrusion of cold arctic air colliding with warm moist air in warmer regions. Climate alarmists have their science backwards.

Ball noted that the real cause of the severe cold outbreaks in the United States is a wavy Jet Stream.

The Jet Stream is a thin band of strong winds that flow rapidly around the planet from west to east at approximately 10 km altitude. The Jet Stream divides warm air masses, typically found at low latitudes towards the tropics, from cold air masses, usually found at high latitudes near the poles.

However, a very wavy jet stream, as we are experiencing now, allows frigid Arctic air to move south to normally warmer latitudes and warm tropical air to push into Polar latitudes. The result is an increase in extreme weather events, including the cold outbreaks in the USA. It has nothing to do with global warming. In fact, the most common cause of a wavy Jet Stream is global cooling. History shows that severe weather increases with a cooling world, not a warming one.

As to fears of more cold outbreaks due to global warming, Ball laughed, “They’re making it all up!”

Cherry Picking

Clearly, there is no end to the deceptions that the climate lobby will tell the public in order to deprive the world of reliable, inexpensive fossil fuel-based energy, the foundation of modern living standards. Perhaps the greatest deception of all is what real scientists call cherry picking – highlighting data that advance their theory and agenda, while ignoring data that do not support their politics.

[...]

The overall trend of the data is obvious: as variable “A” declines, variable “B” increases. But if you choose only a small portion of the data (or just a few years out of 100 or 1,000), you can declare the trend to be anything you want – including having “A” stay the same as “B” increases, and even having “A” increase as “B” increases.

This is the sleight-of-hand used by global warming alarmists who want the public to believe that burning fossil fuels and increasing the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide must be stopped at all costs. They want to run the nation and the world on expensive, inconvenient, unreliable wind and solar energy. They ignore the fact that those energy must be totally backed up by dependable energy sources like fossil fuel or nuclear in order to stop the grid from collapsing. It has been calculated that, were the Midwest to be dependent only on wind and solar power, at least one million people would have died of hypothermia during the recent minus-50 degrees F cold spell.

As demonstrated by Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, the latest report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, the impact of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) has been overwhelmingly positive. The report’s Summary for Policymakers states:

“Fossil fuels have benefited humanity by making possible the prosperity that occurred since the first Industrial Revolution…. Fossil fuels also power the technologies that reduce the environmental impact of a growing human population, saving space for wildlife…. Nearly all the impacts of fossil fuel use on human well-being are net positive (benefits minus costs), near zero (no net benefit or cost), or are simply unknown.”

Besides raising living standards across the world, fossil fuel use has helped elevate CO₂ in our atmosphere from a level dangerously close to the point at which plants start to die – to where we are today, with the Earth once again “greening,” as crops, forests and grasslands grow faster and better.

The global warming scare has never been about science, or even climate for that matter. The long-term goal of many activists is to unite the world under a single socialistic government in which there is no capitalism, no democracy and no freedom. After all, personal freedom is fueled largely by access to affordable energy.

An intermediate goal of climate alarmism is thus to limit the amount of energy that is available and place it under tight government control. Inexpensive fossil fuels remain an obstacle to their vision, and so must be done away with entirely, climate campaigners maintain. We must not let them succeed.

“Global cooling – and global totalitarian socialism – are the catastrophes we should fear most.”

The President further prevaricated that he had no involvement in Hunter’s various shake down schemes.

Yet, the media continued to misinform by serially ignoring these facts.

Had journalists just been honest and independent, then candidate Joe Biden might have lost a presidential debate and even the 2020 election. The public would have learned that Hunter’s business associates and his laptop proved Joe was deeply involved in his son’s illicit businesses.

Later, as the evidence from IRS whistleblowers mounted, the White House stonewalled subpoenaed efforts and sought to craft an outrageous plea deal reduction in Hunter’s legal exposure.

Reporters ignored the Ukrainians who claimed Joe Biden himself talked to them about quid pro quo arrangements.

They again discounted Hunter’s laptop that explicitly demonstrated that Hunter was whining that he had handed over large percentages of his income to his father Joe—variously referred to as the Big Guy and a “ten percent” recipient on many deals.

They played dumb about Joe Biden’s use of pseudonyms and alias email accounts to hide thousands of his communications to Hunter and associates.

They attacked the former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who now claims Biden was likely bribed by Ukrainians.

Yet the media can no longer hide the reality that the President of the United States likely took bribes to influence or alter U.S. policy to suit his payers. Those two crimes—bribery and treason—are specifically delineated in the Constitution as impeachable offenses.

In denial, the media has instead pivoted with hysterical glee over various weaponized prosecutions of Donald Trump.

But now, to use a progressive catchphrase, the proverbial “walls are closing in” on Joe Biden.

So will we at last expect the media finally to confront the truth?

Answer—only if Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical health continues to deteriorate geometrically to the point that he can no longer finish his term or run for reelection—and thus becomes expendable.

Such a cynical view of the media is justified given their record of both incompetence and unapologetic deceit.

From 2015 to 2019, we were suffocated 24/7 with lies like “Russian collusion,” “Putin’s puppet,” “election rigging” and the “Steele dossier.”

When all such “evidence” was proven to be a complete fraud cooked up through Hillary Clinton’s stealthy hiring of and collusion with a discredited ex-British spy, a Russian fabulist at the Brookings Institution and a Clinton toady in Moscow, did the media apologize for their untruth?

Was there any media confessional that perhaps Robert Mueller and his leftwing legal team (the giddy media-dubbed “all-stars,”  “dream team,” and “hunter killers”) proved a colossal waste of time?

Not at all.

Instead, the media went next right on to “the phone call” and “impeachment.”

The country then wasted another year.

The same biased reporters now claimed that the heroic Andrew Vindman had caught Donald Trump fabricating lies about the Bidens—given Joe Biden was a possible 2020 opponent—to force Ukraine to investigate them or lose American foreign aid.

On that accusation Trump was impeached.

Then the truth emerged that unlike Joe Biden, Trump never threatened to cancel aid, but merely to delay it.

Trump was right that the Bidens were knee deep in Ukrainian bribes and influence peddling.

And that the whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of the Trump call but was spoon fed a script cooked up by the gadfly Vindman and Rep. Adam Schiff.

The result was journalistic glee that we impeached a president for crimes that he did not commit but exempted another president, Joe Biden, who had actually committed them.

Then came the next hoax of the Russian fabricated facsimile of Hunter’s laptop.

The 2020 Biden campaign along with an ex-CIA head rounded up “51 intelligence authorities” to mislead the country into believing that Russian gremlins in the Kremlin had fabricated a fake laptop.

Ponder that absurd fantasy: Moscow supposedly had created fake nude pictures, fake photos of Hunter’s drug use, and fake email and text messages from Hunter to the other Bidens.

The media preposterously convinced the country that the Russians and by extension Donald Trump had once again sandbagged the Biden campaign.

No apologies followed when the FBI later admitted it had kept the laptop under wraps for more than a year, knew it was authentic, and yet said nothing as the media and former spooks misled the country and warped an election.

Now we are enmeshed in at least four court trials on cooked-up charges that could as easily apply to a host of Democrats as to Trump.

For the last eight years, a discredited media has never expressed remorse for any of the damage they did to the country. And they will not again, when their latest mythological indictments are eventually exposed. (read more)

If by the second paragraph, you sense another black-pilled doomer diatribe manifesting and would prefer your mind be massaged by uplifting and optimistic slants, remember that no effective solution to any social or personal dis-ease was ever discovered by ignoring reality in service of feelings.

The Decay Is Over

On the downward decline of a civilization’s culture, a longing for the past, often viewed through a nostalgic lens can be what Don Draper refers to in one of the most culturally important television episodes to ever air, “Delicate, but potent.”

With a cursory glance at the present, Americans are actively and more frequently looking to the past for answers. Nothing provides a more measurable perspective for which to comprehend the overwhelming dis-ease conferred by the current decrepit state of, well, everything.

During the 2012 Golden Globes, before the Big Equity Commissars of ESG hijacked the corporate advertising industry for woke virtue signaling at the expense of profits, one of the savviest commercials aired. It visually and psychologically encapsulated a shocking socio-cultural downfall.

At that moment Americans got to see a reflection of what they once had through a mirror of a cool, classy, confident, and stylish bygone era only one and a half generations departed. An era they could still see and remember but knew was barely visible in the rearview mirror, based on what stood before them in their now-undersized vanity mirrors.

The product being marketed in the commercial was an automobile, or more specifically—style—though nothing gets sold in America, or anywhere in the world, without a full-fledged psychological shelling of inner and collective voids, this essay notwithstanding.

Chrysler aimed to sell Americans their past, their longing for what they once had, back to them through the new style of their cars.

In the opening sequence, Chrysler launches its first mortar on the American psyche in the form of a question for the American people, “Whatever happened to style?”

Actor Adrien Brody’s voice proclaims, “It wasn’t too long ago. America had it.”

The confusion of regression to the culturally depraved present, now, eleven years after that commercial aired, still hits like a gut punch.

“Where has the glamour gone? It wasn’t too long ago. America had it. Looking, and feeling like a million bucks. It was practically our birthright.”

Delicate, but potent.

Americans weren’t hurried back then, overly stressed while frantically dashing everywhere to keep up with unmanageable lifestyles. They didn’t race anywhere back then proclaims Brody, “We cruised.”

The imagery plays on old Hollywood glamour at the height of American middle-class economic prosperity. The automobile was a symbol of freedom and liberation. Americans cruised the streets and boulevards of cities for fun.

The ad doesn’t use nostalgia so much as ooze nostalgia while exploiting a collective longing for a past people assumed was simply better in every conceivable way.

Americans at home watched that Chrysler commercial during the Golden Globes in 2012, quietly gnashing on Cheez-its and sipping cola, twisting in their Barca loungers to reach for the nearest deep bowl of <insert highly processed junk with seed oils or high fructose corn syrup> the message washing over them as they pondered who will win best supporting actress.

Amnesia eclipses Nostalgia in late-stage empires. While looking to the past for perspective becomes habitual, others prefer forgetting the past, making it easier to cope with all the ugliness and moral confusion of the present.

Late-stage empires tend to have a period of gradual descent, called The Decay, before terminal decline sets everything ablaze, with or without space lasers.

The imperial cycle of history is a model that attempts to document the history of empires or great states. It is used by fiction and fantasy writers to set the backstory and organize the plot. I’ve taken the liberty of adjusting them in some minor places to fit the cycle of American Imperialism and decline. (It begins precisely the year the United States became a global empire.)

1. Phase One: Expansion—During this phase, the Empire is still young and rising. These days see the Empire’s rise from military victories, often just one. The Empire racks up massive debts from the warfare, and its economy is left largely unscathed and ready to produce through expansion. It'll probably be able to pay off its debts over the next few generations. (1945-1960)

2. Phase Two: Stabilization—In this phase the conquerors die off and are replaced by administrators who help establish a system of rules and institutions used to manage their empire, overseeing an era of economic & demographic recovery and growth and gradually paying off the still-massive debts of their ancestors, though debts are still accumulating and the payoff never in sight. The greater the debt, the greater the credit. (1960-1990)

3. Phase Three: The Decay—The biggest problem facing The Empire is that more and more wealth and power are concentrated in private hands and not those of the state. Those private hands are often chosen by the state and rise above smaller merchants into State Monopolies. New generations of rulers take little pride in the history of the empire. Looting the state becomes an obsession, often wasting state money on expensive military campaigns with no reasonable goals or objectives. The people tend to spend their lives on never-ending consumerism or hedonism, wasting what previous generations left for them instead of trying to secure or multiply it through 'boring' things like building infrastructure, re-organizing the taxation system, or establishing new trade missions. (1990-2019)

4. Phase Four: The Long Night—The Empire exists in name only at this stage. It is now a failed state. The dissipation of The Empire's power to rich individuals (oligarchs) is complete, with many families and even regions now only paying lip service to The Empire and its supposed rulers. The Empire must turn its power inward, on managing the perceptions of its subjects so the illusion of its might is maintained in their minds. If it needs to resort to force to keep its subjects in check, it will not hesitate. The Empire's fiscal situation is in shambles and the state's debts are compounding with interest payments on the debt no longer manageable. The currency has been debased to lessen the debt load, but it no longer holds value in the eyes of subjects or competing states that are now ascendant. Hedonism and decadence have wrought havoc on the people. Morale is at rock bottom and the people prefer distractive spectacles to waste away their lives. The Oligarchs also prefer the people remain distracted and demoralized as they continue pilfering whatever remains of the Empire’s coffers. (2020-????)

Empires throughout history moved more slowly, hence the final phase known as The Long Night, a reference to George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones where darkness (winter) descends upon the fictional world lasting generations.

Throughout past empires, everything advanced at a snail’s pace compared to today. However as technological innovation accelerates through all industries, the time it takes to transition from one phase to the next, from The Decay to The Long Night is shortened. The Long Night is no longer “long” and can now be measured in years.

Bloggers monitoring the collapsing American Empire have made the same cyclical analogies for decades now. Many still assume, based on the history of other empires that America’s demise will last another few decades. Accounting for the acceleration of events, and speed at which pivotal transformations occur today, it may not last the rest of this decade.

Where it took ancient Rome centuries, it took Portugal, Spain, Holland, and France decades to collapse. England survived a little longer, though by the end of the First World War, it was all but over on paper and they simply had to watch and wait for the full returns to come in from their former colonies.

These empires declined on a scale proportional to the slog of technological advances, the rate of change, and the speed information traveled.

From the Declaration of Independence to when the American Empire finished expanding geographically to its current state, transatlantic travel decreased from a month to hours.

In October 1776 Benjamin Franklin boarded the wooden vessel USS Reprisal to secure treasure and men from the royal court at Versailles, and the buffoonish King Louis XVI. The journey there took over a month.

Sending and communicating information from France to the American colonies took the same amount of time. Even locally, information traveled slowly. Throughout the next two centuries, methods of communication went from letters on laid paper delivered by horseback couriers to telegraphs and telephones, in other words, from weeks or days to seconds.

The most fascinating aspect of what makes the American empire collapse so intriguing is that no empire in history has had its terminal decline documented and displayed back to the people through visual mediums that record it all as it transpires, mainly television, and film.

These unique modern mediums have thoroughly verified the decline of American style and substance, with a full recorded history of the three-piece suited gentlemen, and dress-adorning slender ladies, to the slobification of leisure-wearing obese subjects of the elastic waistband empire.

Over two centuries there was little change. For men ties got wider, then skinnier, with the size of nots and length changing with the trends often set by public figures and movie stars. For ladies dresses got tighter, and skirts shorter, with arms removed altogether, and a shift to jackets and pants breaking all fashion norms. What remained consistent through those decades was substance and style.

The Audacity of Leisure Wear

The very first thing one notices when traveling from Budapest, Prague, Berlin, Oslo, Paris, Rome, or Madrid (or any major Middle Eastern or Asian cities) to any airport hub of the American empire is the total decrepit nature of American airports, one or two excepted. The second thing one notices is the size of people lumbering through the terminals. The third thing, and most relevant to the cultural decline is the attire adorning the American people.

The fashion choices confer a people who have surrendered to comfort and excess. They are either incapable of displaying style, having eaten their way above and beyond accessible sizes, or simply given up on life altogether.

Flying in first or business class used to come with dress codes strictly enforced by airlines. Jogging suits, yoga pants, shorts, hoodies, and flip-flops were forbidden. At one point jeans and t-shirts were also forbidden.

Air travel was once a social event, with full-service meals in comfortable seats with plenty of legroom and elbow space. As Americans expanded in girth, the airlines went for broke, shrinking the seats while attempting to squeeze a caloric-storing population into tighter and tighter spaces.

Realizing an unsustainable business model of continuing to offer meals to such hungry people, they switched to sandwiches, and then tiny snacks, and then dispensed with them altogether inviting them to bring bags of greasy shit from fast food outlets in the terminal on board for their fellow passengers to gag and recoil.

At some point this century it became not only socially acceptable to wear pajama-like clothing while clutching those bags of greasy shit, but it also became the preferred attire for celebrities and their post-modern equivalents called influencers.

What exactly have these people “influenced” other than the acceleration of cultural decline?

What does it say about a people who can longer be bothered to put on clothing with buttons or zippers not made from elastic or jersey cotton when heading out in public?

What does it say about a civilization whose preferred footwear is made of rubber and can be washed by a garden hose?

Aspiration and Upward Mobility

The appearance of failure often coincides with the social depreciation of aspiration. In the past, aspiring to a greater social standing required dressing the part. Rampant nihilism and the desire for ease of life and comfort have obliterated aspiration.

The social ladder that was once used to climb upward became a slide in only one direction. As the middle class apexed in numbers, neighbors glanced at neighbors and said, “I’m not as fat as they are yet, and they’re wearing a hoodie and jogging pants, so why can’t I?”

The race to the bottom gathered steam and accelerated toward the making of the slobified majority. Two-thirds of Americans sought to wave the white flag of surrender in regard to substance and style, fitness, and health.

Conformity to decadence and hedonism common in other empires, was transformed into conformity to excesses of consumption and disregard for self, health, and image.

Nobody else is making an effort, why should I bother?

In a sick society that has completely lost its way, it is the duty of the non-conformist to preserve the past, to show those who have given up that they did so by choice, and that it is never too soon to change.

The American empire has made the conservation of its past, the symbol of non-conformity. Conservatives are now the rebels and the revolutionaries.

The non-conformist is fit and healthy, muscular and attractive. The non-conformist dresses fashionably and exerts a cool confident style, often appearing out of place with people glancing at them and wondering, “What’s the occasion?” If the non-conformist could hear their whispers, he would answer unashamedly, “It’s Tuesday, you slobs.” The non-conformist does not paint his hair or dermally defile his body with the permanent scarring of Nihilism’s most grotesque hobby.

In the decade since that Chrysler commercial aired it’s clear that a loss of style is one of the least significant absences in America today in terms of imposed suffering. Yet nothing is more obvious as a visual cue of cultural decline and signifies the absence of everything else.

It’s not likely to return anytime soon.

A civilization can only afford to worry about style with triumphs, opulence, stability, the rule of law, blind justice, social cohesion, economic liberty, and maximum prosperity for a maximum number of people.

How does a single mother working full time plus two gig jobs to support two kids do so in style?

Style doesn’t require economic riches, and it never did.

The poor and working classes of the past century didn’t give up on aspiring to ascend the economic ladder. They knew they had to first invest in a self-image of self-respect that communicated their desire for ascension.

That they knew it was possible was motivation enough.

Economically wealthy individuals today often dress like slobs, by choice. Having reached a high enough rung on the ladder of upward mobility, they’ve chosen gluttony or comfort over style. While they can afford to wear anything, they often prefer loose-fitting soft fabrics and leisure wear.

Is it a sign of affluence or a signal of indifference and surrender?

I don’t make an effort, because I don’t have to.

With its Empire in terminal decline, its institutions drowning in total corruption and malfeasance, and its laws and systems used to benefit the top tier of society who are actively investing in the demoralization and illness of the masses, a return of style and substance will be impossible until all those forces of destruction are rooted out and terminated.

People have to want to care.

Until then only the strong will survive. They will probably do so with substance and style.

They will be the ones who take care to look after themselves during the final phase of their empire.

They will be the ones with the fitness, energy, and mental fortitude to withstand the onslaught against them.

Surviving the collapse of any empire that turns inward and declares war upon its subjects simply won’t be possible in a 42-inch elastic waistband on sugar high roller coasters, wearing rubber clogs.

And the powers that be know this. (read more)

State officials warned New York school districts Monday that any policy they institute to block — or even make difficult — the enrollment of migrant kids could lead to lawsuits and fines.

The threat of legal action from Attorney General Letitia James and state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa was triggered by their discovery of discriminatory practices in some districts, such as requiring a voter ID from parents registering their kids, as schools across the state prepare for the new year and a flood of asylum-seeking children, they said.

“The [Office of the Attorney General] and [state Education Department] have recently learned that some districts employ enrollment policies that make it difficult or impossible for noncitizens, undocumented students, and people who rent their homes without a formal lease to register for school,” the pair’s letter released Monday reads, adding that “several registration policies are of particular concern.”

The questionable practices — which also include requiring a student’s residency to be more than 30 days old or providing proof of where they live on a regular basis — may “violate constitutional and statutory protections, exposing school districts to lawsuits and liability,” the state officials said.

“The law is clear: Every New Yorker is entitled to a free public education, and anyone who lives in our state is a New Yorker,” said James in announcing the warning.

Under state law, all kids between ages 5 and 21, including any migrant or undocumented students, are guaranteed a public education in New York.

Since the spring of last year, more than 100,000 migrants — adults and children — have surged into New York City after coming over the US southern border.

New York City alone expects nearly 19,000 kids to attend its public schools this upcoming year, but it has still not announced any plans on how to handle the influx, with just days until the school year starts.

It is unclear how many kids statewide are expected to enroll in New York’s schools.

“All school and district leaders must continue to faithfully carry out their duty to accept and provide educational support services for these students and their families,” Rosa warned in a statement.

The warning comes on the heels of Gov. Kathy Hochul pinning part of the blame for the crisis on fellow Democrat President Biden, urging his administration to step up and do more by providing shelters and funding to the state as well as fast-tracking work authorizations for migrants.

Mayor Eric Adams slammed the governor for not going far enough in her remarks, imploring her to ask the president to declare a state of emergency, which would quickly free up federal funds. (read more)