Like the soul of the tyrant himself, Trump's administration is beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions, including on immigration enforcement, reversing last week's pause on deportations

 All his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions, and distractions, even as the State which he resembles.                       

-- Plato, Republic 

Story. 

Crimes in high places: Mad King Ludwig admits he decided to pause tariffs early in the morning on Wednesday when he also posted "This is a great time to buy", which amounts to market manipulation

 

 Trump was asked by a reporter on Wednesday when he decided to put a pause on the tariffs. 

“I would say this morning. Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking about it. Fairly early this morning,” he said.

Quoted here in "Fund managers quietly fear Trump doesn't have a tariff plan and that he 'might be insane'".

Numbskull Jesse Watters' masculinity prohibits eating soup in public, crossing your legs, drinking with a straw, milkshakes, waving with both hands, self-awareness, intelligence informed by history . . .

... “I have rules for men,” Watters began on Wednesday’s [Fox News] The Five. “They’re just funny, they’re not that serious. Like, you don't eat soup in public. You don't cross your legs. And you don't drink from a straw. And one of the reasons you don’t drink from a straw is the way your lips purse. It’s very effeminate.”

Referring to Walz, he said: “His excuse was, ‘well I was drinking a milkshake.’ Again, you shouldn’t be drinking a milkshake. Milkshakes are for kids.” 

Watters also claimed that real men “don’t wave simultaneously with two hands.”

“We wave with one hand, not both hands at the same time,” he said. ...

More. 

 

Pete Hegseth wasn't honest with Trump about his past

 Trump transition team ‘quietly’ looking at alternatives to Pete Hegseth after he ‘wasn’t honest’ about past

Donald Trump’s transition team is said to be “upset” with Pete Hegseth because he “hasn’t been honest” about the sexual misconduct allegation from his past – prompting insiders to consider other options to lead the Pentagon.

Hegseth was tapped last week to become Trump’s defense secretary but now those in the president-elect’s inner circle are “quietly preparing a list of alternative” candidates, Vanity Fair reported.

“It’s becoming a real possibility,” a source told the outlet’s special correspondent Gabriel Sherman.

The source said that the Trump team was taken by surprise after a serious sexual assault allegation against Hegseth came to light, which led Trump’s incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles to question the former Fox News host on a call last week. Hegseth was never charged with a crime and denies the allegations.

“People are upset about the distraction. The general feeling is Pete hasn’t been honest,” a second source told Vanity Fair.

A “prominent Republican” close to the Trump transition team told the outlet that some are also unhappy with the president-elect’s choice due to Hegseth’s lack of qualifications to lead the nation’s defense. . . ..     

What else would he fail to be honest about?

 

I guess Harris accepted Dick Cheney's endorsement because she figured it would boost her approval rating

 

Our poor hard-working queens lol

When your cope becomes your hook:

 How drag developed drinking problem: 'Everyone expects us to be loud and wasted'...

... bottomless drag brunches are the new norm ... alcohol “is just part and parcel” of being in a gay bar ... A 2021 study by University College London found that LGBTQ+ people are significantly more likely to report alcohol and drug misuse than heterosexual people.

Kurds and Arabs backed by US retake ISIS' strongholds in Raqqa

Story here.

ISIS' control of Mosul ended in July.

So Trump has defeated in 10 months what Obama let develop into a grotesque scourge for three years by unwisely withdrawing US troops from Iraq. Obama has many senseless deaths on his hands as a consequence, notably many Christians with direct links to the original Christianity of the Middle East, not to mention the destruction of priceless antiquities at Palmyra and other places in the region.

You don't think this liberation would have happened under Hillary, do you?

Of course the inaugural attendance estimates were lower: Protestors blocked and delayed entry

Reported here:

After almost two hours of delays, the security gates at 7th and Independence Avenue opened to cheers from the restless crowd. ...

At John Marshall Park’s checkpoint, Black Lives Matter protesters - chanting “Shut it down” - did just that. Five men chained themselves together, preventing anyone from passing and forcing police officers to redirect attendees to other entrances. “It feels great that we closed the checkpoint,” said 28-year-old Aaron Goggans, one of the organisers. “But we know this is just the beginning.”

At the 10th and E streets in downtown Washington, protesters blocked the entrance to another checkpoint. A group of women tied themselves together with purple yarn and sat on the ground to prevent people from passing through.

New UK Prime Minister Theresa May excoriates elites like Obama: "If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere"

From the text of her speech to the Tories, reproduced here, in which you will hear echoes of American politics:

... [I]n June people voted for change. And a change is going to come. 

Change has got to come because as we leave the European Union and take control of our own destiny, the task of tackling some of Britain’s long-standing challenges - like how to train enough people to do the jobs of the future - becomes ever more urgent. But change has got to come too because of the quiet revolution that took place in our country just three months ago – a revolution in which millions of our fellow citizens stood up and said they were not prepared to be ignored anymore. Because this is a turning point for our country. A once-in-a-generation chance to change the direction of our nation for good. To step back and ask ourselves what kind of country we want to be.

... [T]he referendum was not just a vote to withdraw from the EU. It was about something broader – something that the European Union had come to represent. It was about a sense – deep, profound and let’s face it often justified – that many people have today that the world works well for a privileged few, but not for them. It was a vote not just to change Britain’s relationship with the European Union, but to call for a change in the way our country works – and the people for whom it works – forever. Knock on almost any door in almost any part of the country, and you will find the roots of the revolution laid bare. Our society should work for everyone, but if you can’t afford to get onto the property ladder, or your child is stuck in a bad school, it doesn’t feel like it’s working for you. Our economy should work for everyone, but if your pay has stagnated for several years in a row and fixed items of spending keep going up, it doesn’t feel like it’s working for you. Our democracy should work for everyone, but if you’ve been trying to say things need to change for years and your complaints fall on deaf ears, it doesn’t feel like it’s working for you. And the roots of the revolution run deep. Because it wasn’t the wealthy who made the biggest sacrifices after the financial crash, but ordinary, working class families.

And if you’re one of those people who lost their job, who stayed in work but on reduced hours, took a pay cut as household bills rocketed, or - and I know a lot of people don’t like to admit this - someone who finds themselves out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration, life simply doesn’t seem fair. It feels like your dreams have been sacrificed in the service of others. So change has got to come. Because if we don’t respond – if we don’t take this opportunity to deliver the change people want – resentments will grow. Divisions will become entrenched. And that would be a disaster for Britain. Because the lesson of Britain is that we are a country built on the bonds of family, community, citizenship. Of strong institutions and a strong society. The country of my parents who instilled in me a sense of public service and of public servants everywhere who want to give something back. The parent who works hard all week but takes time out to coach the kids football team at the weekend. The local family business in my constituency that’s been serving the community for more than 50 years. The servicemen and women I met last week who wear their uniform proudly at home and serve our nation with honour abroad. A country of decency, fairness and quiet resolve. And a successful country - small in size but large in stature - that with less than 1% of the world’s population boasts more Nobel Laureates than any country outside the United States… with three more added again just yesterday – two of whom worked here in this great city. A country that boasts three of the top ten universities in the world. The world’s leading financial capital. And institutions like the NHS and BBC whose reputations echo in some of the farthest corners of the globe. All possible because we are one United Kingdom – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – and I will always fight to preserve our proud, historic Union and will never let divisive nationalists drive us apart. Yet within our society today, we see division and unfairness all around. Between a more prosperous older generation and a struggling younger generation. Between the wealth of London and the rest of the country. But perhaps most of all, between the rich, the successful and the powerful - and their fellow citizens.

Now don’t get me wrong. We applaud success. We want people to get on. But we also value something else: the spirit of citizenship.

That spirit that means you respect the bonds and obligations that make our society work. That means a commitment to the men and women who live around you, who work for you, who buy the goods and services you sell. That spirit that means recognising the social contract that says you train up local young people before you take on cheap labour from overseas. That spirit that means you do as others do, and pay your fair share of tax.

But today, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass in the street. But if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means. So if you’re a boss who earns a fortune but doesn’t look after your staff… An international company that treats tax laws as an optional extra… A household name that refuses to work with the authorities even to fight terrorism… A director who takes out massive dividends while knowing that the company pension is about to go bust… I’m putting you on warning. This can’t go on anymore. A change has got to come. And this party – the Conservative Party – is going to make that change.

Neanderthal US General Stephen Wilson should know about raising rhetoric, compares Vladimir Putin to Adolph Hitler

You should be very afraid when a man with his finger on the nuclear trigger like General Wilson exposes himself as a demonizing thinker. The man is at the top of US Global Air Strike Command but has the intellectual subtlety of an anvil.

Here:

Lieutenant General Stephen Wilson, commander of US Global Air Strike Command, said: “I don’t think we’ve ever seen so much power put in one person in Russia, and some of the things happening there are troubling and concerning for everybody.” He added: “[They’ve] annexed a country, changing international borders, raising rhetoric unlike we’ve heard since the cold war times, and so lots of people are trying to figure out what is the strategic intent of Russia. Some of the actions by Russia recently we haven’t seen since the 1930s, when whole countries were annexed and borders were changed by decree.”

In defeat Nigel Farage realizes the problem is representation, as the American founding generation understood

Here:

"There is also the question of what is fair and reasonable. For so many millions of voters to have just one representative simply cannot be right – and I believe that whomever is the next Ukip leader has a major campaign to fight on this issue."

--------------------------------------------

He's referring, of course, to the fact that about 4 million Brits voted for UKIP yesterday but got only 1 MP out of it.

This coming from a country with much better representation than in the United States.

Here we have one representative in our parliament, the US House, for every 737,000 citizens. There they have what amounts to one MP for every 98,000 British citizens. That's seven and a half times better representation in Britain than in the US. Yet Nigel Farage complains.

Well.

The American libertarian P. J. O'Rourke visited South Thanet, evidently twice before the election and didn't find Farage there to interview, and today good ole Nigel is surprised that he lost in his own backyard. All politics is local, as we used to say. You have to work for it. Evidently Nigel Farage didn't work hard enough. 

In the US the people own not one such solitary seat as UKIP now owns in the UK, and never will until representation matters to them again as it did at the American nation's founding.

The system in Britain is more friendly to UKIP than Nigel Farage knows.

Philippe Val, pro-Israeli refounder of Charlie Hebdo, says slaughtered cartoonists "were not bad people"

Cabu's "Gay Lobby in Conclave" in ridicule of the Roman Catholic Church electing a new pope in early 2013.

Excuse me.

Traditional Catholics will agree that an image of a daisy chain of sodomizing/sodomized cardinals from the pen of Cabu is precisely the mark of a bad person, meant to provoke and not to unite.

Go ahead. Tell us this isn't the face of contemporary liberalism everywhere in the West, and that the Jewish left isn't behind this.

Philippe Val, quoted here in the UK Independent:

“I am practically alone, all my friends are gone,” he said in the statement broadcast by France Inter radio and transcribed by Libération. “They were not bad people, they just wanted to make us laugh. They just wanted humour to have a place in our lives, that's all." ...

He individually paid tribute to his murdered colleagues, including the “genius” cartoonist Cabu, full name Jean Cabut, who was murdered alongside the magazine’s editor Stéphane Charbonnier or “Charb” during their morning editorial meeting. ...

“Today is hard but it is the ultimate weapon,” Mr Val continued. “It is the weapon of solidarity. Let people laugh, let them ridicule the bastards…we cannot live in fear.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We know who the bastards are.

Obama Devotee And Vogue Editor Anna Wintour "Rehabilitates" Fag Designer John Galliano But UK Independent Never Mentions From What

Well not from homosexuality! but from Anti-Semitism, that's what:

On 8 September 2011, Galliano was found guilty of making anti-Semitic remarks and sentenced to pay a total of €6,000 in suspended fines after a French court found him guilty of giving public insults on account of race.

Anna Wintour, Editor, Vogue Magazine, is one of the top five fund raisers for Barack Obama and the Democrat Party:

Wintour is a prolific fundraiser for the president, and was rumored last year as a possible ambassador pick. According to the New York Times, she raised the fourth-most of any Obama bundler during the 2012 campaign. 

The uninformative story in the UK Independent is here.

"The Prophet Without Honor In Her Own Country": Thatcher Dead at 87

both free at last

'The second negative [which helped end her prime ministership] was [Mrs. Thatcher's] intransigent attitude to further European integration; this put her in a minority in her own party. But re-reading her strident speeches today gives no sense of them being out-of-date or belonging to a by-gone era. She dismissed the idea of a United States of Europe as a fantasy. I believed in it at the time, but now I see that she was correct. She thought that the European Union should be simply a free trade area with limited co-operation between sovereign nations. That is what an increasing number of us who were once fervent Europeans would like to get back to. As she said in a famous speech in Bruges that was widely criticised: “Working closely together does not require power to be centralised in Brussels or decisions to be taken by an appointed bureaucracy… We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the State in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”

'... [I]n light of the perpetual crisis in which members of the Eurozone have found themselves since the onset of the financial banking crisis in 2007 as a result of misjudged integration, those negative judgments now appear wrong. In this respect at least, she was an example of the prophet without honour in her own country.'

-- Andreas Whittam Smith in The UK Independent, here

Marijuana Makes At Least 2% Of Its Consumers Insane

So says a story for The UK Independent, here:

The long-suspected link between consuming cannabis and developing schizophrenia has been repeatedly confirmed by recent studies. Observers say that for cannabis the present moment is similar to that half a century ago when scientific proof of a connection between smoking tobacco and cancer became so strong that no serious doctor or scientist could deny it. ...

Sir Robin Murray, Professor of psychiatric research at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, says that studies show that "if the risk of schizophrenia for the general population is about one per cent, the evidence is that, if you take ordinary cannabis, it is two per cent; if you smoke regularly you might push it up to four per cent; and if you smoke 'skunk' every day you push it up to eight per cent".

If you were wondering why America is the way it is under Obama, you now know why.

President-Elect Hollande Of France Owns Property Worth $1.5 Million

According to this story, three properties in the French Riviera.

Part-ownership apparently is involved with two of the three properties, which are smaller, say other reports, a few of which also state that the Paris apartment is not owned but rented.  

'Mr. Normal' has claimed to dislike the rich and regards the world of finance as his enemy.

So here:

The 57-year-old Socialist has openly admitted that he "does not like the rich" and declared that "my real enemy is the world of finance". This means taxing the wealthy by up to 75 per cent, curtailing the activities of Paris as a centre for financial dealing, and ploughing millions into creating more civil service jobs.

George Orwell's Black Vision of Total Surveillance Realized With Drones

So says Peter Popham for the UK Independent, here:

The use of drones for the surveillance purposes sketched by Gitlin takes us back to their original function. The critical weakness of the Nazi doodlebug was the lack of control: its only use was as a mechanical kamikaze. Once you had control of the thing, everything changed. George Orwell was the first to describe the possibilities, in his novel 1984. "In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and dashed away again with a curving flight," he wrote in the novel's first chapter. "It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows...". ...

It is the snooping function foreseen by Orwell that is the most significant next step for drones in our societies: with our cities and public buildings already saturated with surveillance cameras, we may fondly suppose that the state's monitoring of our daily lives has gone as far as it can go. But we ain't seen nothing yet. ...

Orwell's black vision of total surveillance – "It was even conceivable," he wrote in 1984, "that [the Thought Police] watched everybody all the time" – is finally achieving its technological apotheosis. In a few weeks, the US Army is expected to deploy in Afghanistan its latest helicopter-style drone, the A160 Hummingbird, equipped with 1.8 gigapixel colour cameras. Able to hover, unlike current drones, it will have "unprecedented capability to track and monitor activity on the ground", the Army says. Able to track people and vehicles from above 20,000ft, and with a 65sq-mile field of view, it will have 65 steerable "windows" able to follow separate targets. More modest surveillance drones may be used to enhance police monitoring of London's Olympics.

Slavery in 2009: A Damning Indictment of Human Decadence

There are hundreds of thousands of slaves in the city-state of Dubai, a playground for ex-pats:

Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means "City of Gold". In the first camp I stop at – riven with the smell of sewage and sweat – the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.

For the rest of the story, go here.