On this day in 1944, the Normandy Invasion, also called Operation Overlord or D-Day, was launched. D-Day marked the beginning of the Allied invasion of western Europe during World War II. Below is a Navy team in training:
They landed on Utah Beach. Blogger's late father is first
row center -- the skipper.
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At Freedom First
Network, J B Shurk explores America’s “Descent into a Clown World.” Here’s
an extract:
Just as the beer companies, fake
conservative news networks, and so many iconic American companies before them,
the sports leagues have turned their backs on generations of loyal fans in a
display of repugnant pusillanimity. I wonder whether the Judases
will one day regret it. I know that the ESG- and DIE-pushing
communists are castrating corporate holdouts that resist the Woke Borg, but by
bending to the Borg’s will, these companies have destroyed any goodwill with
lifelong allies. When the Marxists come for another pound of flesh
from their corporate vassals — and another after that — those in charge will
eventually be forced to fight back or surrender. By that time,
though, nobody will be willing to come to their defense.
This has always been the
shortsighted corporate gamble of the Woke Wars — there’s never been a communist
revolution that did not devour itself. By yielding to those who have
always hated them and betraying those who have long defended them, companies
choosing to comply with woke orthodoxy are now entirely dependent on remaining
in the Marxists’ good graces. Yet grace is not something Marxists possess in any discernible
quantity.
It is not that politically
conservative and religious Americans have blindly defended corporate interests
in the past, but rather that liberty-loving, rights-protecting people tend to
mind their own business. Their first reaction to a company’s success
is not envy. They do not immediately turn their sights on how best
to confiscate another’s good fortune.
People who work hard for what they
own do not worry about what somebody else owns. They simply seek to
be left alone. . . .
One problem is that while communists are organized,
passionate, and good at messaging, conservatives “simply seek to be left alone”
– it’s just not an effective marketing message.
The full article is here.
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When the DOJ’s abuse of the FISA court procedures first came to light in 2018, this blogger thought that violation of FISA rules – lying to a judge is a felony – would finally result in indictments and successful prosecutions. It’s now 2023. The fearless investigative reporter, Sundance, has gone through the Durham Report, footnotes and all, and exposes yet more layers of corruption. It’s a long read, but it’s also a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the extent of the rot. Some have commented that the FBI is in need of reform. No, it needs to be shut down. Here’s the opening at Conservative Treehouse:
BIG QUESTION and A BIG COVERUP –
Durham Report Brings Sunlight on Detail Never Released
by IG Michael Horowitz About FBI Targeting Trump
I’m going to go into the deep weeds
on this story, because many people are missing a key facet. The names
behind the Trump targeting operation are included, along with citations for
independent checks by House congressional investigators.
Inside the recently released report
by John Durham [CITATION], the special counsel outlines how former FBI
Director James Comey was intimately involved in the creation of the Carter Page
FISA application. Durham notes that Comey kept asking the DOJ National
Security Division and FBI counterintelligence investigators, “Where’s the FISA,
we need the FISA.” However, John Durham never interviewed James Comey or
Andrew McCabe. The former FBI Director and Deputy refused to cooperate or
give testimony to John Durham. So, how did John Durham have details about
the demands of Comey?
The answer is found in the
footnotes. Durham reviewed transcripts of interviews given by Andrew
McCabe to the Office of the Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, who previously
investigated FBI conduct in the origin of the Carter Page FISA. Durham
pulled quotes from that transcript. [Footnote
#1207, page 199 – Durham Report]
[facsimile of transcript with
footnote]
♦QUESTION: If Andrew McCabe
gave testimony to the OIG about the motives and impetus of FBI Director James Comey
in pushing for the Carter Page FISA application, why did the OIG report never
outline those transcribed interviews? Why was the interview transcript
never included in the 2019 OIG report?
[NOTE to Congress. Now
that you know a transcribed interview of Andrew McCabe exists in the OIG
office, request the transcription and release it to the public.]
Let me answer those questions
without the customary pretending from the DC professional political
class. The short version is that OIG Michael Horowitz was trying to
protect the DOJ and FBI. The longer version is a coverup that includes Rod
Rosenstein, Bill Barr and yes, John Durham. I will share that story
below.
“Where’s
the FISA? We need the FISA?” ~ James Comey
The DOJ-NSD and FBI Co-Intel needed
to find a safe and legal way to spy on the Trump campaign. The 2016 FISA Title
1 surveillance of former FBI employee Carter Page became the fraudulent
justification for that intent. . . .
Much more here. It’s
jaw-dropping.
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Harold Robertson at Palladium Magazine has an essay “Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis” (h/t Andrea Widburg). He starts off:
At a casual glance, the recent
cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than
six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate
collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started
a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East
Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million
intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A
train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed
near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on
a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops
contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded
fourteen.
While disasters like these are
often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely
elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven
systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal
system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a
credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to
work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system
has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of
escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
And here’s his conclusion:
Americans living today are the
inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human
history. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems
possible, the modern preference for diversity has attenuated meritocratic
evaluation at all levels of American society. Given the damage already done to
competence and morale combined with the natural exodus of baby boomers with
decades worth of tacit knowledge, the biggest challenge of the coming decades
might simply be maintaining the systems we have today.
The path of least resistance will
be the devolution of complex systems and the reduction in the quality of life
that entails. For the typical resident in a second-tier city in Mexico, Brazil,
or South Africa, power outages are not uncommon, tap water is probably not safe
to drink, and hospital-associated infections are common and often fatal. Absent
a step change in the quality of American governance and a renewed culture of
excellence, they prefigure the country’s future.
Read the rest here. It’s a long read, and Mr. Robertson is
not optimistic, but as Ms. Widburg concluded: “If we recognize and address it, maybe it’s still
possible to pull the airplane of state out of its deep dive toward the earth.”
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Luis Miguel at The New
American is looking beyond the DC swamp – in order to drain the swamp:
Congress Won’t Drain the Swamp — It’s Up to
the States
No politician at the federal level is
going to drain the swamp, because the federal government is the
swamp.
It’s human nature. No one with
great power is going to strip himself of that power. That’s like expecting
Genghis Khan to step down from the throne. It’s not going to happen.
. . .
The United States began as a
federation of sovereign states unified for mutual defense. But eventually, the
capital they created — Washington, D.C. — became its own political entity and
usurped control over the states that had created it. The state-created federal
government, seated in Washington, D.C., now operates on its own independent of
the states and opposed to their interests.
. . .
Furthermore, Washington is a
city-state in which the ruling dynasty is the globalist cabal. Everything else
is a facade. All the congressmen, senators, bureaucrats, intelligence officers,
and generals who live and work there are servants of the globalist oligarchy,
not representatives of the people. The entire system in D.C. is designed to
protect the interests of the cabal — Congress can’t completely reform it from
within.
“Everything else is a façade”. Again, that fits right in with Sundance’s scenario that all of the DC political construct is a “Potemkin Village”, maintained to provide us plebes with the “Illusion of Choice.” Mr. Miguel concludes:
This is why it is up to the states,
through nullification and an aggressive reasserting of their states’ rights, to
rein in the federal government. For if D.C. is the swamp, then the city must be
drained — and only the states have the power to do it.
Read the full column here.
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Yesterday, pResident Joe Biden took a nasty prat fall at the
US Air Force Academy graduation ceremony.
The short video is at Treehouse
here. But the clip is also up on the Telegram
channel Slavyangrad, a Russian channel (no link; it’s subscribers only).
So the world watches.
Many call Biden’s presidency a case of elder abuse. True, but it’s also tragic and embarrassing to witness America now as a global laughingstock. Matthew G.
Andersson at American Thinker just published a column, “Why the White House Wants War,” and he thinks Biden’s
pResidency is even worse than embarrassing.
Mr. Andersson’s frightening conclusion:
An unsettling aspect of the Biden
administration’s foreign policy is that, while it seeks war, it isn’t prepared
to fight one (especially with a putative civilian commander qualified for 25th
Amendment removal): it invites a confrontation with Russia (and to some extent
with China) not to win, but in an unprecedented perversion of U.S. national
security interests, to lose: it has declared America, Americanism, and a
majority of Americans, as its enemy. It will use Russia as a tool for its
own domestic “transformation” which means the attempted dismantling of U.S.
constitutional law. The White House wants war, but an effective internal civil
war that results in a reconstructed government, legal system, and political
order. Biden was installed not just as an Obama proxy, but as a signal of
weakness. . . .
The full article is here.
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