"There's Something Happening Here; But What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear"
"For What It's Worth," 1967, lyrics by Stephen Stills, performed by the Buffalo Springfield
Nothing much happens during the dog days of summer, except that...
... last month, there was a non-debate between two not-yet nominated and remarkably unremarkable presidential candidates ( a "debate" most likely engineered by those who actually wanted to scuttle the campaigns of Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden);
... NATO expanded its military boundaries right to the outer limits of Russia and enlisted Asian allies in a similar armed alliance against China;
... Benjamin Netanyahu won the dubious prize of an eternal ringside seat in the innermost circle of Dante's Inferno while still trying to drag the U.S. into nuking Iran;
... continuing its propaganda war, America resurrected the Chinese scapegoat of the Yellow Peril, pumped up the Cold War and reanimated the McCarthyist Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s;
... computerized transnational business and financial systems were bricked by a klutzy cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike, forever after known as Dumbstruck;
... there was a palace coup by Party Insiders unhorsing and replacing the incoherent puppet-candidate Joe Biden with the equally incoherent puppet-candidate Kamala Harris;
... there was yet another American violent assassination attempt and pre-coup d'etat plotted by mysterious conspirators who, as usual, will never be known or implicated.
Ho Hum.
"There's Something Happening Here; But What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear"
It was simpler a few decades ago. You could, kinda, sorta, figure things out. In the pre-digital age, when a scandal or conspiracy was unearthed, the first thing you did was... follow the sound of the shredders.
Ah yes, shredders: back in the days of "paper" when plots were memorialized in "EYES ONLY" documents and hush-hush memorandums stamped SECRET and CONFIDENTIAL, it was no simple task to obliterate all of your fingerprints!
Do you remember the Iran-Contra Scandal during Ronald Reagan's second (senile) term as president? It was one of those convoluted conspiracy schemes by the freedom-loving U.S. in which it sought to a) perpetuate the bloody war between Iran and Iraq by selling American weapons to Tehran while providing poison gas to Baghdad; and b) using the proceeds of the sale of weapons to Iran to fund the AstroTurf counterrevolutionary Contras violently seeking to overthrow the duly elected socialist government in Nicaragua. Democracy, hurrah! Do you remember Fawn Hall - Lt. Col. Oliver North's comely confidential secretary with the Farrah Fawcett hair who testified before Congress that she smuggled out incriminating documents in her clothes? Ms. Hall stated under oath that she shredded so many documents so quickly that the shredding machine jammed!
Nowadays, of course, the conspiracies are as numerous as ever and their objectives are just as evil. Today, the digital tracks of dastardly deeds are easily erased, camouflaged by aliases, masked by "onion routers," spoofed, deep-faked, side-tracked by diversionary and bogus counter-narratives and artificially intelligized to obscure the truth and derail honest inquiry.
Speaking of which... will we ever know what really happened in Butler, Pennsylvania and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump?
Probably not.
It was, undoubtedly, an assassination attempt, notwithstanding the strange efforts of some airheads to deny the fact of the dead and injured. My guess is that if there was one failed effort to (literally) destroy Mr. Trump’s campaign, then there might well be others later on.
The attempted assassination of Trump was ascribed, of course, to yet another crazy "lone wolf." That sounds so much like Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, n'est-ce pas? The "investigators" (Ha ha! The same organizations over whom a cloud of dark suspicion lies!) have released a slow dribble of anonymous "information" about the mysterious young shooter as though different stories are being vetted for 'credibility.' Thomas Matthew Crooks either had no social media track record and showed no signs of malevolence; or he was a porn-addicted misanthrope seeking fame in murder. Was he a crappy rifleman (like Lee Harvey Oswald, you remember?), or a highly skilled marksman who could hit a flea's chin whisker ten miles away? Was Mr. Crooks an incredibly careful planner? Maybe. But he was spotted, surveilled, targeted, photographed and documented for hours before he purportedly pulled the trigger... as though Mr. Crooks... or someone... wanted to leave no doubt in our minds whatsoever that the 20 year old villainous Mr. Crooks acted alone.
Uh huh.
Mr. Crooks, we were informed, was a newly minted member of the Republican Party who gave to progressive Democratic causes. What is that supposed to mean? He was a solitary, average sort of guy with no inclination toward violence. Or was he a criminal mastermind who stealthily outwitted America's nonpareil bodyguards?
I conjecture that eventually --- eventually --- an "updated" portrait of the young wannabe assassin will emerge as... a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign supporter who refused Covid19 vaccines, who had secretly converted to Islam, who supported Hamas and a free Palestine ("From the River to the Sea," of course!), who was a North Korean computer hacker, who was studying Mandarin Chinese, and who was one of Putin's deep moles planted in rural Western Pennsylvania to sow chaos in our otherwise peaceful, totally fair and impartial and completely democratic elections.
Ahem.
Clearly, the would-be assassin's diabolism was enabled by a circus of Secret Service stumble-bum incompetence. Sure it was. The Secret Service are just a bunch of goofy Keystone Cops who cannot shoot straight.1 Or... the Secret Service was collaborating with other nasty professionals in Butler, PA, all segregated, compartmentalized, isolated in their discrete roles unaware of the complete picture… and whose separate actions were coordinated and directed by the usual suspects.
Hmm. Perhaps we ought to check out the nearby grassy knolls.
In Dallas 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald protested that he was just a patsy and the fall guy for John F. Kennedy's assassination. But he didn't live long enough to explain what he meant and neither did Thomas Matthew Crooks. Dead men tell no tales; and, anyway, we'll never learn the complete story about what happened this month in Butler, Pennsylvania - so, HEY! Your guess is as good as mine and what's on TV tonight?
And speaking of coups d'etat, in July the Democratic Party backroom boys (and girls!) threw Grandpaw Joe under the bus and anointed the clueless marionette Kamala Harris as the Empress of the realm. In the declining years of the Western Roman Empire, emperors rose and fell rapidly. Who knows how long the next Caesar will last before the purple toga is, again, ripped away. In 69 A.D., Rome was wracked by the rapid succession of four Caesars - Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian - as Rome's Deep State equivalent and Power Elites jockeyed to grab the reins of power.
Mr. Biden's magnanimous written abdication and Kamala Harris endorsement letter (authored by persons unknown) was probably Veri-signed while Mr. Biden was being water-boarded and Jill was under house arrest.
"Friends, Romans, Americans," said Mark Antony, the ex officio spokesperson for the Democratic Power Brokers speaking on CNN. "We have come to praise good old Joe... and to bury him."
The ink was still damp on "his" signed renunciation as the Praetorian Guard and the coordinated western media cried "Hail Caesar, All Hail Harris" and deposited oodles of money into the election campaign coffers of the Empress. Away in the White House, the deposed Mr. Biden was heard to croak faintly, "Et tu Kamala? Et tu Barry? Et tu Hillary?"
Are we seeing shades of the Chicago Democratic Party Convention 1968?
1968 was a horrible year.
Martin Luther King was assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. The Vietnam War was raging on and on. Vietnamese were napalmed and carpet-bombed. American conscript soldiers fought and died for no good reason. They were defending “democracy,” they were told. Just like today.
In 1968, the immensely unpopular President Lyndon Johnson (Hey Hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?) decided not to run for another term of office. Johnson tried to pass the baton to his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. It was Hubert Humphrey "they" pre-selected, not Robert F. Kennedy because RFK - the charismatic and surging challenger for the Democratic Party nomination - had that same summer just been gunned down by... yet another lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan. Or so they say. There were riots in Chicago, in and outside of the Convention Center. All the "peace" candidates were, ultimately pushed aside. Like today, the winning "candidate" was chosen by the political-economic machine, the insiders, the wheeler-dealers. He was then duly marketed to the voting public.
"There's Something Happening Here; But What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear"
And speaking of elections... we just received our Washington State primary ballots!
Who are these candidates and where did they come from? In national politics, the major candidates are drawn from the ranks of party stalwarts and finger puppets of the ruling class.
Washington, however, is a one party state. The illusion of choice is sustained by a gnat cloud of candidates for every office from Governor to U.S. Senator to the state Supreme Court to local representatives in the state legislature. In several instances, there are gobs of individuals running from the same party. This leads, potentially, to a "general election" in November when the final choice might come down to a choice of plain vanilla ice cream or vanilla ice cream with sprinkles.
The candidates in Washington State fall, generally, into four categories:
First, there are the perennial loonies who run for a different public office every year. Their campaigns range from merely delusional to the certifiably insane. Some are exhibitionists who just like to strut around on the election stage; or they are put-up by others to divert attention to the clown show and away from legitimate issues. Lest you think that is just my imagination, I have actually conversed with one such (arguably normal) candidate whose sole purpose, he confessed, was (at the direction of a certain major political party) to siphon off votes from Candidate B such that the preferred Candidate A would be elected.
Second, there are the inarticulate and incoherent. The voters' pamphlet dutifully prints whatever is submitted without edits or redaction. Thus, many "candidate statements" read like fragmentary streams of consciousness. Or unconsciousness, as the case may be.
Third, there are candidates who (sob) feel compelled to tell their life stories as though the more misery they have personally experienced the better they can manipulate the levers of government. Well, maybe they're right. In any event, these are the folks who want you to know that: a) they are homeless and living on the street; b) that they are alcoholics and/or drug addicts; c) that they are former (or current) residents of the state penitentiary/psychiatric institute for the criminally insane; d) that they were abused as a child/adult/spouse/dog and require ongoing therapy (such as getting elected to public office); e) that they engage in the most twisted form of sexual deviance about which, for some unknown reason, they are 'proud' and demand constitutional rights; f) that they have experienced a mushroom induced vision of the Garden of Eden or some other atavism of religious epiphany; and g) that they fit into all or some variation of the foregoing.
Some of this third category of candidates include their weird, scary photographs in the voter pamphlet. If ever they came canvassing at my house, I would probably slam the door, bar it and pull out the can of bear spray.
A fourth category of candidates are the "legitimate" ones, the incumbents whose written statements are usually no more than a concatenation of party slogans, dog whistles and clichés. They like to portray themselves as "experts" whereas, in reality, they don't know any more than you do. Maybe less. Typically, these are the "elites," the folks who get all the campaign financing and who can pay for all the advertising. Consequently, theirs are the only recognizable names when voters grind through the mail-in ballot trying to figure out which bobble head's bubble to fill in.
I haven't watched TV in 25 years and do not participate in social media, so the advertising is wasted on me. Instead, I scrutinize the candidates' written statements, make informed choices based on the issues and completely strike out in every single election. I don't think I have voted for a winning electoral candidate since Jimmy Carter's first and only term! Nor should anyone running for office actually seek my vote because I appear to be an election Jonah whose endorsement would curse the endorsee with guaranteed failure.
And while we're cruising through the "boring" month of July, did I mention... CrowdStrike's own goal by which this supposed cybersecurity expert managed single-handedly to bring down some of the world's most sophisticated computer networks? Yes, it's that same "CrowdStrike" that played a shady role in "authenticating" the now debunked Russia-Gate filching of Democratic National Committee emails and sending them to WikiLeaks (supposedly to ensure Donald Trump's election victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016). Yes, that CrowdStrike; or ClownStrike; or DumbStruck.
CrowdStrike is a very politically connected company. As a result of "Russia sanctions" imposed by the United States and its cohorts, actual cybersecurity experts like Kapersky Lab have been "banned" in the West. This, in turn, caused many western states and global corporations to use CrowdStrike for their computer security needs, instead. Thus, while CrowdStrike's global customers were smitten with endless boot-loops and system paralysis last week... Russia's computer systems... too sanctioned to use any security but their own... continued to run, completely unaffected by the world-wide computer cataclysm. The history of the world is just full of such sweet ironies!
The CrowdStrike debacle, however, points out the precarity of our highly intertwined digital civilization.
Everything depends on everything else.
Few people actually know how anything works.
Complex (and essential) systems are amazingly fragile.
If the reason for the fall of the Roman Empire remains a subject of some academic debate, I do not doubt that our own 21st Century "civilization" will collapse one day in a Blue Screen of Death occasioned by some corporate mismanagement of its own digital monopoly.
"There's Something Happening Here; But What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear"
The German author Alfred Döblin wrote in 1929 near the end of his masterpiece novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, "Wach sein, wach sein, es geht was vor in der Welt. Die Welt is nicht aus Zucker gemacht." Roughly translated, this means "Look out! Pay attention! Something's happening here! The world is not made out of sugar."
No, the world is definitely not made out of sugar.
But, thank goodness, July is a slow and boring time of the year. As I look back on it, I'm not sure I would have wanted any more excitement.
Obviously, something -- a lot -- has been happening. But exactly what? It just ain't clear.
I recommend the book by Abraham Bolden, The Echo from Dealey Plaza. Mr. Bolden was America's first Black Secret Service Agent. He was personally recruited by John F. Kennedy. As a secret service agent, Mr. Bolden experienced first-hand the racial prejudices, political biases and outright malfeasance of those charged with protecting the President's life. Mr. Bolden accused the Secret Service of incompetence, if not complicity, in the assassination of JFK and he sought to testify before the Warren Commission. As a result, Mr. Bolden was himself arrested, falsely charged, tried in kangaroo court proceedings, convicted, sentenced to prison and psychiatric "treatment."
“ Few people actually know how anything works.” - Exactly!