Open Thread

Trump is going to China!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v-7rq8bVcU

As I said in a previous post: the side that makes the other side to come to its home turf to negotiate… has the real power.

All other countries have to go to America to kiss Trump’s ring. Only China stands alone; (and Russia too, but Russia is not in any trade war or negotiation with America.)

So Musk reveals in his foreseeable Big Beautiful Break-Up with DJT that DJT is a pedophile rapist. Of course, this is just validation for some of us.

What I find astounding is the MSM’s reaction to this as well as the Dems’ reaction. It’s almost as though they have Trump’s back when it comes to Trump being in the Epstein Files. Maybe because prominent Dems like Bill Clinton are in there too.

This is where we are. This is how bad it is. The Western establishment and in particular the American establishment has now normalized pedophilia and rape. There’s nothing to see here — move along. Whatever happened to #MeToo?

Seriously, where did everyone go? Remember all those protests during Trump’s first term? They’re quiet as church mice this time around. They’ve disappeared, whoever “they” were/are.

As much as I loathe Musk and always have, I believe him about this. DJT is in the Epstein Files and not merely because he was a friend and associate of Epstein’s but because he was a client who raped trafficked underage girls which is pedophilia as far as I’m concerned. Musk is also correct that the tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of 2025 and beyond. Maybe even a depression, all things considered.

I take note of ghoul girl Joni Ernst’s comment that we’re all going to die and the lyrics to Country Joe and the Fish’s ‘Fixin to Die Rag’ pop into my mind: “. . . Yeah there ain’t no time to wonder why/we’re all gonna die.” (It was a Vietnam war protest song from the 60’s that got imprinted in my young mind and that of countless others.)

Anyway this leads to well worn reflections on the ruling class and their confused minds, speech and actions, not to mention their general unattractive appearance. Lots of distortions everywhere you look. Once again I point out the obvious; it’s a habitual pattern.

I’m going to take a leap here and mention something I remember Herbert Shelby Jr—author of Last Exit to Brooklyn—said over thirty years ago. It was along the lines of love the torturer as much as the tortured. I had a hard time wrapping my head around that, although I saw and still see the sense of it.

So looking at genocide and wars and their enablers and perpetrators, I try to hold a larger view. Not that I generally succeed, but it can be recognized there’s no furtherance in negative emotional reactions. I also acknowledge that we’re ruled by monsters.

To simplify a complex situation, what I’m trying to get at is it behooves one to maintain a higher consciousness in these savage and barbaric times.

(To quote poet Anne Waldman, Ive got those Kalyuga blues . . . )

In yet another display of the stunning incompetence of this administration, RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” report cited studies that don’t exist.

https://www.livenowfox.com/news/rfk-jr-report-cited-studies-dont-exist

The report also misinterpreted some studies that do exist. Our highly qualified and competent (har har) HHS Secretary RFK Jr. refused to say who authored the report, but the answer is blatantly obvious: the report was “authored” by AI. Someone in RFK Jr.’s office used Chat GPT to write the report and then didn’t check over what it produced. They’re asking for $500 million for the “MAHA” initiative, and they can’t even be bothered to do their own work, or even check over the work AI does for them.

And when the White House was asked about the non-existent sources in the report, they blatantly lied and claimed it was just a formatting issue. Par for the course with this administration.

I suspect that the president understands that he is in danger of losing his majority in Congress if he doesn’t distance himself from Israel and its’ genocidal policies, and I think Netanyahoo knows this. N. will protest being ignored, of course, for forms sake, but both men know that candidates for congress can’t, or at least can’t be seen, taking money from foreign governments. I must have missed it, but I have not yet heard or read where this administration is cancelling military aid to Israel.

Mary, my impeccable inside sources tell me that DJT, otherwise known as the Golden Dome because his dome is indeed golden, plans on backtracking from his decision during his first term to recognize Jerusalem as the official capital of Israel and will revert back to recognizing Tel-Aviv as the capital.

Seriously, it wouldn’t surprise me if he did this. He’s all over the place. Every day is a new adventure. Maybe he’ll recognise Tehran as the capital of Israel versus Tel-Aviv.

You know what would be a great test for him — a cognitive test? Without any aid or help, blind side him and ask him what the capital of Israel is and what was the capital before Jerusalem IF he gets Jerusalem right. The next question for him would be, how long has Saudi Arabia been a country? He has to give a number versus saying “a very, very long time.”

It’s confounding to me why these European leaders visit the Oval Office and prostrate themselves before him and kiss his ring so to speak. Why do they bother? All it does is serve to legitimate him.

He effectively called Merz a Nazi the other day when in fact, ironically, DJT is more of a Nazi than Merz. His comment that D Day was a bad day for Merz was effectively saying that there were no good Germans and in fact all Germans were Nazis. Merz set him straight and said it was a good day for Germans as well, the good ones and there were good Germans, considering they were finally liberated from the Nazi dictatorship. Merz went on to say Germany has America to thank for that but in fact Germany also has the Soviet Union to thank for that as well so maybe next time Merz meets with Putin, if ever, he can thank Putin for Soviet Union’s help in liberating good Germans from the Nazi dictatorship.

I’m sitting on my porch watching a rabbit who’s totally ignoring me, fixated as it on grabbing some oatmeal that got tossed out with the wash water.
And that set off a stream of thoughts about rabbits I have cooked and known. (Buddha forgive me for all the animals I have cooked, both dead and alive.)
So, yeah the frogs, excuse me, the French have some interesting culinary proclivities and comfort foods, like eating rodents, which is what a rabbit is, a glorified rat. Bon apetito mi amor.
I did do a mean rabbit bourgenese back in the day much to my regret.
Gotta a lotta culinary war stories and regrets along with some rabbit stories stretching from way back, but this is an open thread comment board so I’ll just leave it at that while wishing everyone good provenance and the opportunity to live a free and open life.
That rabbit I mentioned at the beginning? It’s looking at me again fearlessly like I’m going to toss something else its way . . .
I’ll always give a dog a bone, but a wild rabbit? Let it eat oatmeal.

“Seriously, where did everyone go? Remember all those protests during Trump’s first term? They’re quiet as church mice this time around. They’ve disappeared, whoever “they” were/are.” — Like & Subscribe

They are afraid of disappearing, that’s what.

Trump has made it pretty clear that he’s taking the gloves off this time, and no one wants to be the first citizen-protester to be disappeared thanks to the suspension of habeas corpus.

However, it looks like some balls are finally dropping in LA, so we will see how serious Trump is about being a true die-hard autocrat.

He’ll send in the National Guard, and at that point, and soon I figure we’ll see if the military is on the side of the Constitution or an extension of the Trump Crime Family.

A test run for where we still stand as a quasi-democratic republic with relative rights or an autocratic despotate with illusions of freedom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHvCttIB0J4
Oops O forgot to write something about what this lynx is about.

Responses to posts above–

To KT Chong– yes, of course, China’s size, economic power and ancient culture means it need not kowtow to the decaying US empire and its shambolic leader. Besides, Xi is the Donald’s “friend” the Donald says so, he likes to associate himself with success.

As to Like & Sub’s post on the Elon reveal, it was hardly news and the main impact is due to their recent closeness, one of his own far-right oligarchs calling him out. Yes, among the powerful going back even before Bill Clinton, sex-pesting and even pedophilia was okay among that set. Recall that Keir Starmer protected the serial rapist of adults and children Jimmy Saville, a popular entertainer, according to many in the British press. How long did Bill Cosby get away with drugging and raping women? Many years, evidently. Les Moonves, former head of CBS and many more. What you don’t mention is the normalization of support for genocide since Oct. 8, 2023, though even the likes of Piers Morgan are now scuttling away from that as fast as possible, and Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire is flailing, Douglas “You’ve never bean?” Murray’s career is toast. Andrew Cuomo’s running for NYC Mayor however, shameless. I’d say genocide is a bigger crime than rape or even pedophilia, but don’t even have to make that argument as Israel features both rape and child abuse regularly shared on social media as a feature of its genocide. (Thank you to Momo for their response as well.)

Oakchair brings up a childhood favorite of mine, Watership Down, must’ve been about 14 when I read that. Anthropomorphized bunnies fight to save their land, very well written, in some ways more credible and compelling than Lord of the Rings, a much more celebrated nerd-world Good v. Evil narrative.

Thanks to Bruce for a thorough summary of the no-longer SMO but now an anti-terrorist full-on war by Russia against the coked-up neo-Nazi “Keev” regime. Danny Davis’ podcast this week had a short, tragic video of the Ukrainian Door-Dash guy who brought food to a “customer”, it was 2 government thugs who put the food aside unpaid for, assaulted him and dragged him into a van to send to the front. What kind of soldier will he be for the unelected junta? A small incident like this (repeated dozens if not hundreds of times daily) I think tells a lot about the current state of play.

As to Mary B’s point about Trump stepping away from Netanyahu, I am undecided and agnostic right now. Yes, he has been mostly ignoring him, but the Gaza “Aid” by a consortium of US mercenaries and the IDF is penning Palestinians up, not giving most enough food to survive, then claiming that they are “rioting” and mass-executing many. Trump has a grudge against the Yahoo since he didn’t side with him on the “steal” in 2020 and congratulated brain-bleed Biden, as faithful a supporter of white genocide of non-white people for 5 decades plus, it’s personal dislike. But Miriam Adelson and the Lobby are still strong. You could be right about fearing the loss of Congress, but on the other hand, Trump thinks that by merely existing he will always “Win Bigly”, apart from attracting a certain base via Insult Comedy, he shows no ability to think strategically overall. I will agree that if he cares about anything it is staying in power though.

someofpart’s point stands. The Russians, the Iranians, the Chinese, they all try to do positive things for their populations and future. The US “leadership” class does no such thing and hasn’t even pretended to for decades. The results will be obvious to anyone who recognizes the results, plain as the nose on my face.

NR pulls the canvas off another part of the Trump-RFK Jr. Clown show; yes, MAHA is as big a “Winner” as the Doge-Bags were. Psuedo-Science as Spectacle, but that connects nicely to mago’s early thread take on Joni Ernst’s telling her constituents they all need to die (& soon, useless eaters!) Gotta love those mostly Southern and Bible Belt states where the pols openly shit on the voters. Joe Mansion refused Obama-era Health “Care” money for W. Va. coz that’d give his Cletuses more money for booze and meth (he claimed and few if any seemed to object.) Desantis chased away all those Latino field workers from Florida Ag ‘coz brown people aren’t wanted in Florida. Touch of irony there since the state’s name is Spanish for “flowery” and mostly brown Spaniards founded it. An equally stupid move by Desantis was attacking the Disney Corp. for its “Woke” movie tropes. Since the entire political whore class are in the Ayn Rand-Milty Friedman Cult and the R’s bray to bow down to that Golden Calf even more loudly than the Dimmies (mostly), Ron should’ve counted on the sacred Market to judge that sin– and it did, as the Critical Drinker among others has pointed out, their stock has tanked just as MSDNCs, Morning Joe, NPR has made itself irrelevant PMC class blather for decades . . .

More Mago– when I lived in New Orleans in the 80s my roomate worked for a high-class caterer and would host Ishtar celebrations with bunny. I’ve always been anti-red meat since my early 20s, the first time I saw a cow get butchered and the innards pulled out in Nicaragua, had already been off pork before that based on instinct (likely as a Spaniard I had ancestors who were Jewish or Muslim). So no pork or beef unless I’m forced to when traveling or “when in Rome”– in Salamanca at the Tapas Bar I gladly ate a pig’s foot which came with my vino tinto, thought of Billie Holiday when doing so. I haven’t eaten a bunny in years, I also ate gator when I lived in New Orleans, I will eat chicken, and my love for Mediterranean food means lamb in gyros is also on the menu. Fish are a staple, eggs too. Ate my first smelt in Spain, and on the shores of Lake Superior there’s an annual smelt festival now, they’re good breaded. Respect the spirit of the animal one consumes and that may (?) mitigate. Worms will eat me one day, doubt I could get a Zoroastrian send-off and let the vultures and wolves have my corpse, but in the ideal world that’s how I’d depart.

Have to note GrimJim’s point in closing– there is some GOOD news, believe it or not, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is back in the U$A and will get his day in Court!! Donny’s tantrums went only so far. I’m betting he will get the best pro bono lawyers available, and unless I’m mistaken (dunno all the facts, so much distortion out there) he will be acquitted and survive, as many other victims of the Empire’s wrath have (the Chicago 7, etc.) I did not have the Judiciary protecting Civil Rights and Immigrants on my Bingo Card when Trump term 2 started, but I guess they are protecting their own turf, and benefiting everyday victims some times is at least something. Let’s not forget (last I heard) that Donnie’s “best people” are so incompetent that they’d deported fewer people during the first several months than either of the “pro-immigrant” (LOL) Deporter-in-Chief Obama or Kids in Cages Bidet did. Unintended consequences all ’round.

Stephen F. Cohen saved The Nation on Russia. Compare and contrast his rhetorical tone and scholarship with, say, Timothy Snyder.

In the War of Narratives over Russia and Ukraine, I often find myself wanting to question an author’s personal moral committments. “Who are you conceiving yourself to be?” Punditry for some seems indistinguishable from cosplay. Cohen belong to a generation before history and geopolitics was reported as anime.

@Like & Subscribe,

The EUropean leaders did not kiss Trump’s ring before he was President. They only kiss his ring now because he “IS the PRESident” as Richard Nixon used to keep reminding everyone back when he was the President.

And if he becomes not-the-President-anymore again, the EUropean leaders will not kiss his ring anymore.

@someofparts,

If you want your friend to read a non left-wing source for Maidan Coup and other such things, the place to go is Turcopolier Blog from the time right before to somewhat after the Maidan Coup time. Colonel Lang was still alive at that time and he called himself a Paleoconservative and Libertarian, as in not-left-wing. The categories would be Russia/Ukraine and similar, but I can’t find it from this public library computer because the filters on the computer system here won’t even let me link to Turcopolier Blog. ( In the last few years, Turcopolier’s posts on Russia-Ukraine have been very pro-Ukraine because when Colonel Lang died, The Twisted Genius took over the blog. And TTG is descended from Lithuanian victims of the Soviet Stalinist takeover, so he takes the anti Russian view of things).

@mago,

I am not Buddhist, but to the best of my terribly limited knowledge, Buddha offers neither forgiveness nor judgement. Buddha offers the way to the path to one’s own enlightenment, and if eating rabbits is a mile marker along that road, the Buddha neither judges nor forgives. But I could be wrong about that.

@Bruce Wilder,

When a situation is the object of two dueling narratives, sometimes we cannot know what was happening till it has all-the-way happened. And sometimes not till we see both principals in the situation agree on what the objective result of all the happening turns out to have been. The Ukraine will come out in the wash. I suspect a Ukraine of some smaller size will be permitted to live on as the Paraguay of Europe.

@ Oakchair,

I once read an interesting little book called Coronaries Cholesterol Chlorine by Joseph Price. Here is a NOmazon link to the book.
https://www.abebooks.com/9780515085068/Coronaries-Cholesterol-Chlorine-Joseph-Price-0515085065/plp
Here is the tiniest micro-paragraph teaser on this site of what the book is about . . .
” Synopsis
Edition details
SynopsisThe Sensational link between Deadly Heart Disease and Chlorinated drinking water! Don’t drink anther drop until you read this book! Dr. Joseph M. Price has long held that the chlorine in our drinking water – not the cholesterol in our food – is the major cause of coronary disease. In his courageous book he challenges the medical establishment with his own well documented theory directly linking deadly heart disease…More
Buy Used
Condition: Good
Item in very good condition! Textbooks…
View this item
US$ 162.96
Convert currency ”

as you can see from the price, it is a pretty rare book these days.
Here is a link to a pdf of the book itself.
http://www.resist.com/Onlinebooks/CoronariesCholesterolChlorine.pdf
( I find it strange and sad that one has to go to the White Aryan Resistance website to get a free-to-read pdf of this book. If nicer people had offered it, I would have gone to a nicer-people website. Still, it appears that this website will let you read the book without demanding that you read any of the website’s own politics).

Here is another website which appears to offer pdf access to this book. But it insists that you follow some kind of directions first. Since i am too computer illiterate to be able to fully understand what these directions even are, I don’t know what to say about them. But here it is anyway . . .
https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/64821000/read-book-pdf-coronaries-cholesterol-chlorine-full-acces

I did a ‘deep dive’ into the Chauvin nonsense because per usual there seemed to be more there than we were getting.

Chauvin was a cop for 18 years and for 17 of those same years he also worked security at a dance club called El Nuevo Rodeo in Minneapolis. This place was a hub for all manner of illicit activity over the years including counterfeiting. Floyd was a bouncer there for about a year before he was killed by Chauvin.

Here are some mainstream articles that provide basic background. You’ll have to dig deeper for more information.

https://www.npr.org/sections/trial-over-killing-of-george-floyd/2021/03/31/983089623/watch-live-cashier-says-he-offered-to-pay-after-realizing-floyds-20-bill-was-fak

https://www.newsweek.com/derek-chauvin-george-floyd-worked-together-relationship-1579431

Chauvin was most likely involved in the counterfeiting and knew that Floyd knew he was involved and thus Floyd had to go. He came in a little while after the initial cops on the scene and took over the arrest -for obvious reasons.

If Chauvin and the boys were halfway decent at their job as civil servants/officers of the peace they would have arrested Floyd without incident and gotten him to jail where he would meet with a public attorney and be given a chance to defend himself. You don’t stand on his neck for nine minutes pleasingly looking out at everyone like a psycopath.

Paul Craig Roberts – now a sometime regular on Dialogue Works – also defended this monstrosity among the many others such as Johnson.

Roberts – ‘PCR’ as he has become affectionately known to his followers – Roberts wrote a book back in 2000 called ‘The Tyranny of Good Intentions’ which deal with the rapidly increasing problems with overzealous prosecutors subverting the law and how this trend was destroying civil liberties. He even talks about the war on drugs being an instigator for these severe – illegal – overreaches:

‘A thousand years of legal protections against tyranny are being stolen right before our eyes. Under the guise of good intentions, personal liberties as old as the Magna Carta have become casualties in the wars being waged on pollution, drugs, white-collar crime, and all of the other real and imagined social ills.

The innocent people caught up in a bureaucratic web that destroys lives and livelihoods; businesses shuttered because of victimless infractions; a justice system that values coerced pleas over the search for truth; bullying police agencies empowered to confiscate property without due process.’

Apparently bullying brutal police tactics such as this aren’t a problem for Paul. In fact, they are to be celebrated.

https://annas-archive.org/md5/1d29668c8529be956f3f29b5f3cf8b5c

When a situation is the object of two dueling narratives, sometimes we cannot know what was happening till it has all-the-way happened. And sometimes not till we see both principals in the situation agree on what the objective result of all the happening turns out to have been.

The Ukraine War is dominated by the accompanying War of Narratives. Ukraine’s ability to get the resources to stay in the fight and to weaken and handicap Russia is heavily dependent on their ability, thru manipulative propaganda, to legitimate the policies of the U.S. and NATO and the EU that supply resources and sanction the Russian economy. To a large extent, the War of Narratives is itself “what is happening”.

The cheerleading that accompanies the war porn displayed on social media is mostly puerile and obscures more than it elucidates the military course of the war. There isn’t a lot of trustworthy information that could allow objective observers to “keep score” in any objective manner. But that state of objective information simply serves to clear mindspace in which to amplify the propaganda War of Narratives, which effectively means legitimating policy stupidity and maliciousness.

This is very dangerous, because when stupid and malicious drives policy choices, risks are taken and waste of lives and infrastructure embraced.

We have already seen the destruction of Nordstream and the concomitant suppression of information about who destroyed it. The only point of suppressing that information is to disable democracy and keep the propaganda alive in ways that let governments do what they will and have those policies accepted as reasonable ways to pursue national or European interests. This is a general pattern. This is what is happening. It is a triumph of stupid, in which we in the West are required not to know what “we” are doing. Instead, we are encouraged to follow a narrative of “our side”, the feisty underdogs, fighting the good fight with a good chance of prevailing.

Excellent open thread.

Watership down made a big impression on me. One of the few books I plan to re-read.

That, and The Chrysalids.

Meanwhile, in Gaza.

Meanwhile, in Canada, the elbows are down, the defense spending is up, cash transactions over 10k are being outlawed, and dig-baby-dig is the new Black. Or Green; as it will “enable the new carbon-free era”.

Rabbits are neurotic jerks, but like all neurotic jerks have a certain charm.

I ate beaver once (speaking of rodents) but generally any land animal smaller than a deer my body is like “nope”.

The book “Eat right for your type” connects diet preference to blood type, and thus ancestry. An ex of mine could tell you your blood type from what foods ya liked or disliked.

I was sceptical about watching the following link because it had the word overshoot in the title and my understanding of that word up until now was that it either refered to a population overshooting its environmental carrying capacity or missing a target.
But in the case in this video it means the idea that we can breach 1.5 degrees of global warming and then go back to it. Therefore this video makes a lot of sense. It points out that the idea that humanity can survive by overshooting 1.5 degrees and then go back to it is a bad idea.
None the less this video is guilty of spreading false hope. I have made up my mind that spreading false hope is evil because it leads to people doing things that they really should not be doing, like having children. There are many reasons why the changes that the video says need to happen to save humanity can never happen at this point.
The best that humanity can do at this point is sink on an even Kiel and that is not likely to happen. Even if we can imagine what sinking on an even Kiel is.*

“Israeli regime is expected to be wiped out”

Whoever allowed this attack will pay a heavy price, Press TV’s Maryam Azarchehr says.

https://x.com/PressTV/status/1933336032079950218

https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/06/13/749713/Senior-IRGC-commanders,-nuclear-scientists-martyred-in-Israeli-attack–Report