Spook Stuff

There has been a kinetic aspect added to the Trump-Iranian standoff ... a continuing series of explosions and/or bombings at Iran strategic facilities. Is it Israel? Is it Saudi Arabia? Or is it the United States? 

Well a podcast offered through the Powerline blog ... featuring the former head of Israel’s military intelligence ... does not answer these questions directly ... but it does offer broad hints. Take a listen by activating the podcast within this link: Powerline Reference ... it’s fascinating!


STAND UP FOR AMERICA!

Today’s Poser

If the United States is successful in being the first to develop a COVID-19 vaccine ... when should we allocate some for China ... if ever?

STAND UP FOR AMERICA!

Demographics

“Demographics are the future.” Someone once said this basic truism which one would be wise to study and use as the basis for understanding our changing destiny.

China has roughly three times the population of the United States and the United States has roughly three times the population of Russia. This comparison , by itself, explains much of the jockeying in international relations. Now, fast forward to the year 2100 ... and China will have only twice the population of the U.S. and India will have many more people than China. Is this why the Orangeman is now in New Delhi?

Anyway, demographics are a fascinating study .... and, if I have peaked you’re interest, I have found a fascinating website that is chock full of compelling  demographics ... by gender ... by age ...by country ... and, by one and five year increments, 80 years into the future ... see  Population Pyramid.

If you can’t spend an afternoon running barefoot through these numbers ... and thinking about the implications ... you have no curiosity.

Doormat

United States (pre-Trump): Seemed happy to be the doormat to the world!

Play It Southward

If the United States was responsible for boosting  its southern neighbor, Mexico, economically ... why isn’t Mexico then not obligated to stabilize Central America’s economies?

Russian Roulette

“It’s just obvious, you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.” — Milton Friedman

What could be more suicidal than the Democrats trying to drastically increase “free stuff” in the United States while, at the same time, refusing to fix our broken immigration system?

Globalism Exposed

I have drawn this analogy before ... and it is that Trump’s form of nationalism is similar in many ways to capitalism. And no, by nationalism I don’t mean Hitler’s Nazi party ... or this so-called white supremacism. I mean what Trump means ... putting your country first just like merchants under capitalism do their level best to serve their customers better than their competitors so that these customers keep coming back and allowing their businesses to prosper.

Every country should be putting themselves first ... like many do today ... how about China, Germany, Mexico and Russia? Countries which are shrinking violets (like the United States was for the last thirty years) and don’t put themselves first or put the interests of their leaders ahead of their people’s interests don’t prosper and often become, to use Trump’s expression, shit holes.

Just like enlightened economic self-interest (no, not greed) can and does form the basis of free-market capitalism ... so, this same “my country first” attitude keeps things balanced and moving forward in the world ... particularly when all countries practice it. Moreover,  just like measured charity has a place under capitalism ... in order to present a principled face to one’s customers ... so a hand up to struggling countries can and should exist under nationalism ... just as long as a country does not give up its prerogatives to the globalist ... who believe that national interests need to take an absolute  back seat to this truly greedy notion of the new world order ... where the Davos globalists like to control things and prosper.

So that city bumpkin, Trump, has it right ... if you care to listen.

Afterthought: To complete the analogy to capitalism, Davos globalists are the equivalent of merchants forming a cartel to stifle competition and fix prices.

Caving

Why did China think that it could get away with negating, at the last minute, most of the key agreements in their long-negotiated trade pact with the United States?

Could it be that all our presidents since Bill Clinton (when China was admitted into the World Trade Organization) have caved in trade negotiations like a Florida sink hole?

Will Trump repeat on Friday?

Pearly Gates

God is, by definition, the most compassionate ... yet He still has a beautiful wall guarding His kingdom ... with a beautiful port of entry, the Pearly Gates ... through which all asylum seekers must pass ... after being vetted by St. Peter.

How can the United States Border Patrol and President Trump be immoral when they ask for a lesser wall and a more forgiving entry process?

Xi and Me

I have written before about the contest for world hegemony between the United States and China ... see: China vs. U.S. ... in which I discussed the strategic advantages of each. Since then I have had four more thoughts on this subject:

- One advantage I had given to the U.S. was that it sits between two oceans ... something China could not correct. Well, it seems that it is trying ... with an initiative called the New Silk Road ... see: Building the New Silk Road. I somehow doubt that this opening to China's west will equate to another ocean, hut, at least, China seems to recognize that it does have a geopolitical problem.

- China does have ambitions to make the yuan the basis of international trade ... replacing the U.S. dollar. However, it is clear that China has been recently devaluing the yuan as part of its trade war with the United States ... see: Bloomberg Article. This duplicity does nothing but undermine China's currency ambitions.

- One issue I did not previously address was the language differential between these two countries. The incredibly complicated nature of the Chinese alphabet and spoken language, I believe, gives the strategic nod to English and America. Yes, computer software has ameliorated this edge somewhat, but will never eliminate it.

- Although"diversity" is argued by the liberal left to be a strategic advantage, clearly China is far less diverse than the U.S. ... and seems to deem it a disadvantage as it cleanses itself of dissents. Diversity in America might end up being a plus ... but only after these diverse groups are assimilated ... which may take many years into the future.


These four points seem to shift the strategic advantage of America over China further to the plus side, albeit only slightly.  The real pudding tasting will be in how the current trade skirmish with China turns out. Stay tuned.

Strange!

Hits on Fletcher's Castoria Blog

Sometime around Thanksgiving last year the user hits on this blog suddenly jumped from about 110  per day to about 350 hits per day ... roughly tripling. The source of this dramatic jump was at first Russia, but it quickly shifted back to the United States. And the pattern of these hits is quite regular ... syncopated if you will ... and is continuing ... see the above chart of hits on this blog during the last day. Strange!

I have been scratching my head about this sudden and regular change in referencing rates to this blog and can only conclude one thing -- that a bot, or some automated software agent, is regularly generating 35 or so references to this site roughly every three hours night and day, every day. The next question is why?

My guess is that this bot is generating regular hits to this blog ... and probable attempted  click-throughs on contained ads --- which is also strange since, as you may have noticed, there are no revenue-generating ads on this blog ... which means that I could be grabbing some nice pocket change by doing so. (I consciously opt not to.)  And why might this bot be doing this? To me, I can only conclude that this is an attempt to inflate the appearance of click-throughs to either the placers of these (non-existent) ads ... or their surrogates. I do know that there have been suggestions that there are shenanigans in this possible phony ad revenue generating process on the Internet ... see: Bloomberg Article.

Are search sites or social media sites fudging things to inflate their ad revenue numbers from unsuspecting advertises? I suspect that, at some point soon, we will learn some disturbing revelations.

Are we in another Internet bubble?

Afterthoughts: You would think the designers of this assumed bot wouldd randomize the intervals and the number of hits generated? Or do they assume we are all tech illiterate? And will they stop referencing this blog site when the figure out that there are no ads here?

Headlines

These headlines are real ... they have all been discovered on Internet news sites.

Hillary fixer breaks ranks: Arranged sex trysts for her! With men and women

War-weary Libyans miss life under Kadhafi ...

Obama half-brother to support Trump at debate

4 million ineligible and dead voters on the voter rolls ...

Rigged: Obama says it helps that Dems control voting machines

Thousands of voter registrations altered in Indiana ...

Activist who bragged about starting Chicago riot was on Hillary payroll

Iran launching war drills amid accusations United States breaking nuke deal ...

Wikileaks: Podesta mocks Sanders as a 'doofus' ...

Curt Shilling announces plans to run against Elizabeth Warren for U.S. Senate

Operative: Oppo research coming on Trump that could 'end the race'

Wikileaks: Hillary wants Obamacare to 'unravel' ...

Dissing Us

President  Obummer's reception in China at the current G20 summit was, to say the most, shockingly disrespectful. To me, a possible reason for these almost unprecedented diplomatic slights is simple ...  at the top of our president's agenda is his denigrating ... through word and deed ... of the country he represents ... or, to put a shine on his lassitude, "leading from behind." For a deeper analysis of these shameful Chinese reception incidents, see: Powerline Blog.

And we're not just being dissed by China ... Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea openly spit on us at every opportunity. And even many of our former allies, the Philippines, Israel, Brazil, Egypt, and Turkey are crossing the street to avoid tipping their hats to our president ... and thus to the United States.

Why have we become such pariahs to such a wide swath of the world? And all in just eight short years! I've got it! It must be that all these world leaders are, at heart, racists!

Mauritius?

Every so often I check from whence the readers of this blog come on-line. Usually it is the United States ... less often, Russia or China. But today I was taken aback when, by a country mile, the most hits to this blog site came from Mauritius! Now Mauritius is a small French archipelago in the south Indian Ocean with a population of 1.26 million ... see: Wikipedia Entry. What in heaven's name has this blog been discussing that peaked the interest of these islanders?

Sovereignty

There is a classic battle in governance between the amount of sovereign power that resides at each level of government ... local, state, national and on up to the ultimate, world government. The United States went through paroxysms during its founding regarding how to allocate powers between the states and the federal government. The solution was resolved in the Tenth Amendment stating that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." What complicates this power give and take is how this sovereign power is achieved ... by a democratic process, by subterfuge, by the sword, or by the claim that God/Allah/etc. bestowed it.

Enter Brexit, this Thursday's vote in Great Britain as to whether this country will exit the European Union, an unelected quasi-government that has usurped many of the sovereign prerogatives that were once reserved for the British people. All sorts of liberals in the U.S. including Obummer and Hellery ... and even members of the Conservative party in Britain, including the Prime Minister, David Cameron, are urging that the Thursday vote results be "stay."

What insanity would cause peoples to give up rights and powers to a bunch of bloated bureaucrats in Brussels who are constantly trying to force immigrants upon them and onto their welfare roles? And for that matter, why would the American people allow any of our rights to be transferred to those truculant tsars on the East River in New York City, the United Nations? This failed attempt at world government has, as far as I can determine, done nothing significant for the betterment of mankind other than spending mountains of (mostly U.S.) money on five-star hotels and expensive meals.

This gives me an idea. Can we, here in America, have a vote to exit the U.N. which, after a little research, I find was not mentioned in our Constitution? It would seem to me that the surrender of any of our inalienable rights to these mostly third-world hangers-on should have required a democratic process ... namely an amendment to our Constitution ... which I don't recall happening.back in October of 1945. Maybe we should have this seemingly Constitution-required  vote now?

Border Walls

Our feckless Secretary of State, John F. Kerry (who briefly served in Vietnam), recently told the graduates of Northeastern University that they should be prepared to live in a borderless world ... for no wall can be built high enough to deter those terrorists who want to harm us ... see: Washington Examiner Article.

Yes, Gigolo John, you are correct ... but such a wall, combined with vigorous enforcement of our existing immigration laws, can significantly reduce the odds of such an occurrence. I guess that today's graduates can't understand this distinction.

Perhaps, John, we shouldn't have locks on our doors because some burglars can climb through our second floor windows ... or have bars on our jails because occasionally we lose a resourceful escapee?

We, in the United States, are now saddled with senior management who have an Utopian one-world view and are determined to implement this idiot ideology even if the vast majority of their countrymen disagree. This could easily be thought of as treasonous ... but, as anyone who has watched this Boston Brahmin's braggadocios career, this wouldn't be the first time he skipped across this red line.

How a man so stunningly stupid and duplicitous as Kerry can rise to the positions of power he has held causes one (me) to question our society's basic underpinnings. Possibly George W. Bush's greatest achievement was keeping this numbskull from "reporting for duty" at the White House.

Robert Frost had it right ... "Good fences make good neighbors."

Our $10 Trillion Indulgence

Meanwhile in Argentina

In 2008, Obummer pledged that he was going to fundamentally change America ... and he has fulfilled his promise. Our bad ... he never said that this change would be for the better.

Pour example: Infowars Revelation.

Trussed Turkey

The Turkish government, under the increasingly dictatorial President Erdogan, has seized the country's largest newspaper Zaman because of  its opposition to his corrupt regime ... see: Earthlink News Article. This type of tyranny is unlikely to happen here in the United States as most newspaper outlets have long been voluntarily under the thumb of our left-wing politicians.

Afterward: See also: Bloomberg Article.

The Dope Pope

I don't think I need to add much to all the criticism being directed toward Pope Francis over his attempt to swim in America's political pool ... clearly without his water wings. He recently held a Catholic mass at the border between Mexico and the United States and said that we Americans should be building bridges and not walls. Then he implied that Donald Trump is not a Christian for his pronouncements about illegal immigration from Mexico and Syria. This is the same man who recently called capitalism "the spawn of the devil."

This current Vicar of Christ has done almost nothing to remedy the repulsive pederast evils that are eroding the foundations of his Church ... nor has he rigorously spoken out against the Christian massacres occurring almost daily in the Middle East and Africa. He obviously has rather set his praying priorities so that his special God might smite carbon dioxide, conservatives and capitalists.

I predict that he shall forevermore be known as the Dope Pope ...

Afterward: And he is for Castro, condoms and communism ...

Sad Day

Russia is accusing the United States of covering up ISIS's smuggling of oil through Turkey to pay for its worldwide terrorist actions ... see: Yahoo News. It is a sad day when one (me) is tempted to believe Putin's propaganda over what the White House is avowing ... a sad, sad, very sad day.