This is so simple and so obvious that I am surprised many folks are overlooking the evidence that is right in front of us. The emails provided by Donald Trump Jr. show conclusively that the so-called Steele Dossier (you know, the "Golden Shower Russian Hooker Show) is a total fraud. How so?
According to the dossier, regular exchanges between Mr Trump surrogates and the Kremlin actually dates back five years:
Speaking to a trusted compatriot in June 2016 sources A and B, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin respectively, the Russian authorities had been cultivating and supporting U.S. Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump for at least five years. . . .
In terms of specifics, Source A confided that the Kremlin had been feeding TRUMP and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, for several years (see more below). This was confirmed by Source D, a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow, and who reported, also in June 2016, that this Russian intelligence had been "very helpful".
If all this true then why does Donald Trump Jr. need to take a meeting, which is arranged by a tabloid journalist, with an unknown Russian lawyer who claims to have dirt on Hillary? If the dossier is true then the Trump folks/surrogates already had that info. Why take info from an unknown source when, per the Democrat narrative, the Trumps have a direct pipeline to Putin and have been colluding with him for years?
The Trump Jr. emails expose "junior", Kushner and Manafort as terribly naive and totally ignorant of the alleged massive Russian intelligence effort to meddle in the U.S. election and install Putin's puppet, Donald Trump Sr., as President. The emails prove conclusively that Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort had no idea about the alleged five year relationship with the dastardly Russians, who were busy collecting and funneling dirt on Hillary to team Trump. The fact that the Democrats (and apparently the Trump team as well) have not grasped this simple fact exposes the lot as not thinking clearly about the matter.
The Media wants WWIII, the US media has always been Pro-War since they pushed for the Spanish-American War with yellow journalism.
The media’s mass hysteria over ‘collusion’ is out of control https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/07/11/the-medias-mass-hysteria-over-collusion-is-out-of-control/?utm_term=.b4eff69bf149
The lede to Ed Rogers op-ed reads:
You might be right that the Steele dossier is entirely false. That is one “theory of the case.” It does not rule out other possible fact patterns.
The question is whether there was collusion regarding the hacking of the DNC emails and their subsequent release by Wikileaks, which happened after the meeting.
The media is inflating the significance of the meeting, but there might be many more facts which Mueller can discover.
Trump will be gone within the year. Not just because of the Russian stuff, because American elites, managers, and the GOP itself can’t tolerate the turmoil Trump creates.
Why Would You Meet With a Nobody Promising a Watch, If Putin Already Gave You a Rolex? http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=10591#sthash.C0CIC3uc.uxfs … via @streetwiseprof
Trump Jr released his entire email chain.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/11/donald-trump-jr-email-chain-russia-hillary-clinton
British-born Goldstone adds in the exchange of 3 June 2016: “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr Trump.”
Still have no idea if there was collusion, and my best guess is that there was not, but you would think Trump could learn from the mistakes of other politicians and just release everything and get it out of the way. Clinton did the same thing and hurt herself by not being forthcoming about her emails. I guess it is just a natural tendency of politicians to try to hide stuff.
The publicist, Mr. Goldstone gets a meeting for a Russian lawyer who is in the country illegally.
She was denied a visa and her parole has expired.
Eight days after the meeting with Mr. Trump, Jr. she appears to watch a Congressional hearing, at which the former US Ambassador to Russia (appointed by Obama and kicked out by Putin) gives evidence.
(Senator Grassley is already asking questions.)
Oh yes, Fusion GPS has a bit part to play in this little saga.
(The same entity currently seeking to stone wall Senator Grassley over the funding of the Steele dossier.)
A year and a month later, the NY Times breaks the story.
The whole thing is fishy to say the least, especially as the proverbial hits the fan while Mr. Comey is being accused of leaking classified information to get back at the President.
(Are we looking at an FBI / Intelligence Community operation as Pat Lang suggests?)
In any event:
Why Would You Meet With a Nobody Promising a Watch, If Putin Already Gave You a Rolex? http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=10591
P.S. Oh yes, one has to give Mr. Goldstone some credit. Look how much the American people have learned about the Maginsky Act and Russian adoptions in the last day or so.
So young Donald got conned into meeting with a flake? so what? i have occasionally had the same thing happen to me.
For example, I took a meeting with a guy who i was told wanted us to manufacture aircraft stuff. Turned out he wanted us to get around a U.S. arms control act so I flicked him off. What does that make me, apart from stupid? Nothing to see here.
Oh man. Y’all remember this moment. Maybe learn something.
“And since the DNC emails were not a hack, but a leak, the point is moot”
We don’t know whether it’s true or not. Currently it’s only a speculation that resulted from a shoddy analysis.
TonyL,
Except that the President of the USA at the time, President Obama, said they were leaked. This was in his final press conference. You can watch it here:
http://yournewswire.com/obama-dnc-emails-leaked-not-russia/
Walrus,
It would have been a complete nothing burger if the Trumps hadn’t been denying any contacts for months. Now it has been revealed Don Jr. eagerly went to a meeting wherein such was promised…and brought several campaign people along with him. All have repeatedly denied any contacts.
An environment in which the boss lies shamelessly carries risks. Bet the house that his or her employees will start lying too…and the dumber ones will weave unnecessary tangled webs when there is no reason to do so.
And for 20 minutes. Big whoop. No wonder the Chinese are cleaning our clocks in innovation; can you imagine this being an issue there?
Not just the Millennials, the entire nation–present company excepted–seems to have become a nation of snowflakes.
Who or what is Rob Goldstone? Mercouris, at the Russian outlet Duran, points out the oddities in his emails.
http://theduran.com/donald-trump-junior-russian-lawyer-non-story-sting/
Who is/was orchestrating all this?
Wow! “Terrible naiveté” of Don Junior, Kush and Manafort is now the new line of defense? Allow me a little chuckle.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/07/11/curiousor-and-curiousor-natalia-veselnitskaya-pictured-with-obama-officals-in-dc-on-june-14th-2016/
A whole load of research already done on this curious sting(?) operation.
The e-mail story speaks for itself.
Ah well, fraud and lies are a bad thing and rather widespread even in quite ordinary things.
Well, when I was a boy, I was delivering a christian magazine in my city, and had to collect the sums it cost to abonnise it and give it to my manager. One day my manager came and, unusually, visited me at home, to tell me he had GREAT NEWS for me. I asked if he was to raise my pay. No, he wasn’t, but he said, radiant, that the great news was that he had no less than 14 new customers for the journal and I was proposed the honour to deliver the paper to them too, and had to collect the money there as well.
Ah well. Apparently the publisher had some agent troup underway in the town who had delivered new abonnement contracts. Alas. I didn’t mind the extra work, and so I agreed also ‘to serve’ the new abonnents. So I delivered the papers and, well, I tried to collect the money from the new ones. When I say ‘tried’ that’s only for precision since with some of the new customers it practically was about as much fun as pulling teeth.
Some of the new abonnents didn’t speak german (making me wonder what they would, could do with a german christian magazine, writen in, yes, german – would they use it on the loot?), and I still wonder whether some could even read. To one customer, by the name he came from turkey, I had to go every month for about six times for the bill money.
Always his kids told me that they didn’t have any money, which was absurd since the price per month was about a single euro (or, back then two DM) a month, i.e. about nothing. One time one kid told me that they had no money, and held a beer bottle in his hand. If he didn’t stole it, he must have bought it, with … some money. Alas. Finally, the kid, annoyed by my repeated visits (and annoyed I was, too) invited me inside to talk with his dad. Dad was about 70 or so years old and I told him that he owed me money for the abonnement of the paper, and his kids translated (So dad didn’t speak german but abonnised a german journal?). Ah yes, he said, and, no, he didn’t have any money but asked if I want some tea and read a Koran? How … quite christian. He offered me tea and to read the Koran – but he adonned a christian journal? Absurd.
Well, rather obviously, he had signed a contract he didn’t understand or was persuaded to by trained babblers, or, well, fraudsters. So, the agent gang had been a fraud gang who had succeeded in babbling an idiot into signing a contract for stuff they didn’t need, understand or care for. Naturally, for every signed contract the gang got a bonus. My manager was a naive fool, the whole affair was nasty, annoying and to me also slightly costly (since I had to prepay when getting the papers, which means that, if you had folks who didn’t pay, you lost money – having some 9 of such jokers added up).
So, I quit the job after two months of that bad joke, for which I am happy: More time, less annoyance, no longer my fool manager, less stress and, in the end, more money since I then started to work as a photolab worker for a local newspaper, developing and printing whatever images the reporters took of bunny clubs, pigeon clubs, horse clubs, chess clubs, stamp clubs, garden clubs, some politicos visiting various of such clubs etc. pp. The only disadvantage of that job was that it was usually late night weekend work, since the films to be worked were usually delivered thursday evening, friday evening, saturday evening and sometimes sunday evening. But then, however late, it as work at home, and I never again got any ‘tea and koran’ offers (about which I am not sad).
Mark Logan
The contact wasn’t with the Russian government, it wasn’t even with a person who claims contacts with the Russian government but a mid-level commercial lawyer who seems to deny any involvement with the Russian government beyond being a Russian citizen.
Great post.
All,
As far as the UK is concerned, the neo-McCarthyite claims about Russia are to some extent boomeranging.
A commenter whose observations have regularly been among the ‘Most recommended’ on the ‘Financial Times’, who uses the name ‘MarkGB’, has set up his own blog, which originally simply reproduced his comments, and now has other material.
In a column yesterday entitled ‘Donald Trump’s clash of civilisations versus the global community, the paper’s chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, described terrorism as ‘just a nuisance.’ In his response, which when I last looked received the second highest number of recommendations, ‘MarkGB’ focused on the question of the responsibility of Western governments for the phenomenon:
“Terrorism is a symptom of something far bigger than you suggest. The magnitude of the violence that has accelerated over the past fifteen years is the inevitable effect of an imperialistic foreign policy that flourished under Bush & his poodle Blair, that overwhelmed Obama, that has now got Donald Trump exactly where it wants him – throwing tomahawks out of his cot, posing next to a glowing orb with Saruman, demonising Iran, and scared to engage with Russia because he is afraid of being seen as a ‘puppet’ of Putin. He is a ‘puppet’ – a neocon puppet.
“Trump is weak because he hasn’t got the bottle to stand up to those people. If we want this world to be a better place, and I really get that you do Mr Wolf – we should be insisting that the US and Russia work together, insist that they stop fighting each other though proxies. Trump should say to the neoconservatives – “I’m sorry gentlemen, your profits and your delusion of exceptionalism, can both go to hell – the door’s over there”
“Terrorism is not a nuisance – it is a symptom of insanity in the perpetrators – but what it says about the western governments who ‘use it’ for an imperialistic agenda, is far worse than insane – it, and they, are evil.”
(See http://www.markgb.com/blog/2017/7/11/rather-more-than-just-a-nuisance .)
When in May, shortly following the Manchester bombing, Jeremy Corbyn made the argument about ‘blowback’, the Tories thought they had a god-sent opportunity. The Political Editor of the ‘Spectator’, James Forsyth, wrote:
‘Corbyn’s argument seems particularly ill-judged in the light of Monday night’s attack. The fact that a concert aimed at young women was specifically targeted is a reminder that these terrorists hate us not because of a particular foreign policy decision but because of the way we live our lives, and how our society is organised. To pretend that this is about Anglo-American policy in the Middle East is deluded. Corbyn’s failure to understand this, and his desire to find a way to blame the West for what is happening, is one of the many reasons that Corbyn isn’t fit to lead a political party, let alone be Prime Minister.’
(See https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/corbyn-british-foreign-policy-leads-terrorism-home/ .)
As the remarks by ‘MarkGB’ illustrate the ‘mainstream’ – whether Tory or Blairite ‘New Labour’ had totally misjudged the mood. Very many people who have cordially disliked Corbyn all their lives, and still think his views on many things are dotty, thought that on foreign policy questions he was talking sense and nobody else was – and that the ‘they hate us because of the way we live our lives’ talk so beloved of ‘neocons’ is at best a very dangerous half-truth.
The continuing failure of élites in Britain and the United States to understand the groundswell of discontent that has been building up is something I find most puzzling. And they really are not helping themselves by trying to blame everything on Putin.
When people see élites who have led us from one shambles to another, both in foreign and domestic policy, refusing to take any responsibility, accept any blame, or change direction in any signficant manner, and they are told that they only object because they are Putin’s ‘useful idiots’, the effect is liable to be, to put it mildly, counter-productive.
Thanks for making a good and should be obvious point, that merits some discussion. Let me toss out:
Perhaps the administration of the Don(ald) feels that this nothing burger as good electoral strategy. It certainly pushes attention off of other administration activities (actually, off of all other items in the news).
Walrus: the analogy would be if you had already cornered the market for airplane parts, knew everyone, had more business than you could handle, and everything about the tosser was dodgy. Oh, and you were rich rich rich and had no time to spare because you were working on a billion dollar DOD proposal.
fyi Early this morning, the President in reply to one of his own tweets under the handle @realDonaldTrump, posted the following:
.@WashTimes states “Democrats have willfully used Moscow disinformation to influence the presidential election against Donald Trump.”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/885109663217352704
Later, Jeff Lord tweeted out the article (which Drudge has now posted)
Democrats spread false Russian information on Trump, campaign aides – http://go.shr.lc/2vadQUk – @washtimes
https://twitter.com/realJeffreyLord/status/885120702982041600
LondonBob,
Ah, Interesting. So this was a “sting” set up by Clinton/Obama, but it resulted in nothing worthwhile that could be used during the campaign cycle. That it is being released now shows that the Borg is desperate and running out of ammunition.
OT:
Tyler:
I saw this article and immediately thought of you:
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/ive-worked-refugees-decades-europes-afghan-crime-wave-mind-21506
Slight nitpick. The lawyer never claimed to have info on Clinton. She just wanted to talk about the Russian adoption law. As far as I can tell the British record producer who set up the meeting made up the story about Clinton criminal evidence.
Of course there is no collusion, no hacking, no anything else, other than Trump and his family being dopes.
But the Deep State (or whatever you want to call it) and the American Establishment want Trump gone, and russiagate happens to be the fastest way for that to happen, short of assassination.
So unless and until they find a better way to rid themselves of Trump, russiagate will drag on until the desired results are achieved.
GZC, SST;
What do you (all) think will happen if “Trump will be gone within the year…. because American elites, managers, and the GOP itself can’t tolerate the turmoil Trump creat” Do you think the deplorables will take this subversion of the US Constitution w/ out protest? This is not a rhetorical question. I am wondering what the end game here can be, and how different scenarios might play out.
Ishmael Zechariah
Your idiomatic English has regressed; back to German eh? You must be fully recovering.
IZ
The only way “Trump will be gone within the year” as GZC forecasts is either he resigns or he is impeached.
Impeachment is low probability, because it requires a two-third majority vote in the Senate to convict, which would imply many Republicans joining the Democrats. This would be a sure fire way for the GOP to implode as the backlash from the “Deplorables” will be fierce. The Mueller team of prosecutors will have to first find a substantial crime that Trump knowingly committed before any significant numbers of Republican senators jump ship to convict in an impeachment trial. Bill Clinton was not convicted even after he knowingly committed perjury. A senate conviction is a tough threshold in this particularly partisan environment.
The other option is for Trump to resign. As he’s shown throughout both the primary and general election campaign and now after the concerted and constant attacks on his legitimacy as POTUS, he is no pushover. He’s shown he fights back the way he knows by directly rallying his supporters.
IMO, he will serve out his full term and I am willing to wager that he will win a second term. BTW, this is opinion as analysis and not advocacy.
David
While Jeremy Corbyn and Ron Paul are on opposite sides on economic and financial matters, they seem aligned in the position that the US foreign policy of meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, which Britain is an active participant in, has a significant role to play in global instability.
Ron is ridiculed by the Borgist politicians with precisely the argument used by James Forsyth.
I find this argument not only used by the neocons but also the R2Pers. In fact the R2Pers argue even more strenuously that the US has a moral imperative to intervene around the world. IMO, they are unwilling to accept that our interventions to eject “tyrants” and “dictators” have actually caused much more death, destruction and deprivation than those “dictators”.
I believe the elites do see the groundswell of discontent with their hegemonic policies, but are so firmly ensconced in their groupthink and have have a fear of ostracism and subsequent removal from the current gravy train that they are unwilling to act to change.
Not to be a spoil sport but my time “chasing” news or what is offered as news is in a steep decline. Is there news and considered thought out there? Surely. But given the present overload of words & on-line text my “worthy news trap lines” are close to empty..only a few grasshoppers and a one legged cricket that was barely moving.
More by Mercouris: “Russian lawyer pictured with Obama’s Ambassador [the foul Michael McFaul) to Russia after meeting Trump Jr.” http://theduran.com/breaking-russian-lawyer-pictured-with-obamas-ambassador-to-russia-days-after-meeting-trump-jr/
“Veselnitskaya was also connected to Fusion GPS, the DNC opposition research firm that produced the fraudulent and discredited Trump Dossier. ” Splendid.
Sam,
I agree with all of that.
But there is still something that baffles me.
The underlying premise of the thinking of our ‘élites’, in Britain as in the United States, is that they represent the forces of ‘enlightenment’, ‘progress’, ‘the ‘future’, against those of retrograde barbarism – the ‘deplorables.’
In fact, this is almost completely wrong.
Certainly in the UK, there are an enormous amount of people who are, as it were, ‘caught in the middle.’ It is very easy, for example, to be generally well-disposed to immigrants, but to think that when 41% of inner London’s population have been born outside the UK, and 45% of Britain’s mosques, and nearly all the UK-based training of Islamic scholars are controlled by the Deobandi, we have a major crisis on our hands.
In fact, the ‘mainstream’ consensus over the past decades in Britain has involved:
1. an open-door policy towards immigration, including massive immigration from for instance the Pakistani countryside;
2. blowing secular ‘nationalist’ governments in the Middle East to bits, in part in pursuit of fatuous Zionist dreams that ‘modernising’ the Middle East by military force will solve the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the Middle East;
3. collaborating with the Wahhabist ‘régime’ in Saudi Arabia, representing that strand of Islam most incapable of finding any kind of reconciliation with ‘modernity’, in using jihadists against those conceived of as our common enemies, in the breezy confidence that there is no risk of ‘blowback’.
What could conceivably go wrong?
When the discontents such policies produce find no spokesmen in the ‘mainstream’, unsurprisingly they end up being articulated by figures like Trump and Corbyn.
And rather than actually returning to reality, the ‘élites’ head off into full Joe McCarthy mode.
In this country, the ‘ruling classes’ used to have a reasonable capacity for ‘rational fear’ – imagining what might happen, if you pissed off too many of the people too much of the time.
When I see the breezy insouciance with which key elements in the United States, and Britain, are attempting to destabilise Trump, I think they have gone crazy. They seem to me to how no understanding whatsoever of how unpleasant this could all get.
I feel like a kid again. Should I begin digging a bomb shelter? Should I encourage the schools to build them also and then have parents send their kids’ stashes of pillows and blankets to be stored in the shelters, as my parents had to do?
One day the younger Democrats may no longer be able to find “mentors” who remember the good old days of the flower power movement, the sex, drugs, and rock and roll movement, and the protests at the ’68 Democratic convention. Oh, and don’t forget the anti-Vietnam movement. If that occurs, they may have to calm down and learn how to think logically.
At the same time, the Republicans will have to see that there are people out here in the middle who simply want something to get done in D.C. that does not cause problems for them and that does make their lives flow more smoothly.
PT knows how much I did NOT want Trump in the beginning, but at this point I can’t say any of the other Republican primary candidates would be able to push back better against the Democratic tendency to find scandals everywhere, and especially scandals involving Russians.
Why am I more concerned about Arabs and other ethnic groups who believe a God would provide glory to people who decapitate and torture other people? Or those that can’t figure out how to rid themselves of extremely corrupt governments and so have to resort to carrying drugs into our country or whatever. (I know. I am a racist. But come to think of it, since Russians might be considered more “white” than other non-American peoples that is why the Dems can so easily distrust them.) I know Russians do have a history of doing very wicked things, but it does seem that they have tried hard to move out of the first centuries after Christ’s birth without having to rely on imported help.
I think the Russians are just enjoying watching so many supposedly mature American officials acting like jerky marionettes being pulled by their strings with Russian hands.
I am nobody, but this nobody has read and listened to enough now to know in my heart that PT is right on about this issue. I’m in the Middle here. Can the East Coast and the West Coast please get some calming sedatives infused into their water? And thoush I often cringe when DT speaks and uses his Twitter account, at this point I will rise up with my crazy uncle who was a DT fanatic from the beginning and do what I can to prevent his impeachment.
Ishmael,
I agree with Sam Peralta. I see no way the Republican Congress to going to do anything to remove Trump from office. Trump said he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and his followers would still stick with him. He is absolutely right. Even if Mueller finds Trump personally worked with Putin to throw the election his way, the Congress will not move to impeach. If Trump is found repeatedly wandering around the White House grounds with his pants around his ankles yelling at the squirrels, Congress will not invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him. Since neither one of those situations is likely, I think Trump will, at least, finish his term in office.
There is no coup, just like there was no coup to remove Obama. Investigations and innuendo will continue with the purpose of obstructing Trump and the Republican agenda, just like it was under Obama.
blowback,
And if they had not tried to conceal that meeting there might not be a kerfuffle about it now. Can we fault people for not taking Don junior’s word for it that no deal took place? All this derails whatever agenda (if any) the Trumps had.
The Trumps habit of squandered their credibility on petty lies may be unfit for public service. In that game when credibility is away the interesting questions will play…and interesting questions matter.
All
It looks like the Democrats want to investigate the Trump campaign digital operations out of San Antonio for collusion with the Russians. Maybe this has to do with the Russian “reflexive control” that TTG noted.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-07-12/meet-next-trump-russia-narrative-jared-kushner-run-digital-operation
PT
The picture in LondonBob’s post above of the Russian Lawyer sitting behind anti-Putin former Russian Ambassador Michael McFaul testifying before Congress is telling. The attempted Sting of Trump Junior and Christopher Steel’s Dodgy Dossier are the only facts released publically as the basis for ramping up of the New Cold War with Russia and getting rid of Donald Trump. It is farcical except for those tragically killed and maimed so far. This is all that supports the rush to World War III. Trust is gone.
Sam Peralta, TTG;
Thanks. You both voted against GZC’s thesis which, based on some of his/her previously self-disclosed creds, might be based on data. I am wondering if there is a democratic party deus ex machina which will appear shortly and vanquish the Deplorables of the World.
I am interested in this issue primarily due to its implications in MENA. If GZC is correct, R+6 must clean up the key abscesses in Syria post-haste before some perfumed princess issues a challenge w/ other people’s sons as her stake. The izzies are still providing CAS to liver eaters. Strange times indeed.
TTG;
Here is a hypothetical question: Do you think Obama’s (or Hillary’s) foreign policy actions would have made the world more or less safe today had he still been president the past six months?
Ishmael Zechariah
Ishmael Zechariah,
If the conspiracy to overturn the election and remove Trump is successful and results in President Pence ( with Pence’s choice of Vice President), then I don’t know what the Deplorables will think.
It may depend on if the Deplorables decide a President Pence is doing everything they hoped a President Trump would do.
If the Never-Trump conspiracy removes Trump and then goes further and tries removing Pence, then Ryan, then whomever after all-the-way-down to trying to install Clinton or a Clinton replica, then the Deplorables will know whom to blame and whom to hate.
Sam Peralta,
If the Democrats nominate yet another Clintonite or Obamazoid, then Trump will certainly win. By that point the Bitter Berners may be bitter enough to vote against Clintonites at every level to try and purge and burn their way through the Democratic Party till it has been declintaminated at every level.
David Habakkuk,
This brings up a semi-tangential issue . . . the issue of “high IQ” and who has more of it and who has less of it and what it means and enables.
The leadership elites you write about all consider themselves very intelligent. They would all describe themselves and eachother as having high IQs. And that could be true. They could very well have on average IQs of 110-120 or higher . . . as measured by IQ tests.
To them this says that they are really really smart. To me this says that having a high IQ only means that one is skilled in doing well on the IQ test. And since IQ tests were invented by people who believed they were smart, they would of course write such tests to discover the amount in others of the kinds of smartness knowledge they take pride in having themselves. So to me, high IQ-ness or not and high intelligence or not . . . are two different things which have precisely zero to do with eachother. High IQ-ness is severely overrated.
Yes, a leak, from someone with access to DNC servers.
https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/guccifer-2-ngp-van-metadata-analysis/
That’s what I meant by “shoddy analysis”. Not worthy of the namesake “forensicator”.
IZ
IMO, there is no Democratic Party deus ex machina. The Democrats are in one sense the minority party as they hold only a third of the state legislatures. Their agitation against Trump is “normal” for an opposition party in our deeply partisan duopoly structure. The GOP would have agitated equally if Hillary were POTUS, just as they did with Obama. The big difference, IMO, in this campaign of delegitimization against Trump is the collusion of big media and former/current high officials in the intelligence agencies to create hysteria through a campaign of innuendo. This is qualitatively different. This is the deus ex machina. They are pissed that despite their best efforts during the election campaign, they were out-smarted by Trump, whose election campaign brought home the bacon at a fifth of the financial investment of Hillary. The real question is if Trump decides that it is the better part of valor to join them.
David
“…The underlying premise of the thinking of our ‘élites’,… is that they represent the forces of ‘enlightenment’…”
Yes. But how come there’s no cognitive dissonance? They must see the results of their “enlightened” actions. Clearly, everyone else including the Deplorables see the chaos & disasters they have created.
“…41% of inner London’s population have been born outside the UK…”
This is staggering. This is a social experiment that is bound to create enormous problems. British culture cannot survive in London with this type of demographics. Only a caricature can remain.
“When I see the breezy insouciance with which key elements in the United States, and Britain, are attempting to destabilise Trump, I think they have gone crazy.”
Yes, IMO, they’ve gone crazy because of fear. Trump’s win and Brexit have shocked them. They did not expect it, considering the intensity of their effort against both. They are now pulling out all the stops to insure it does not happen again. The unfortunate part is Trump is a poor choice to champion the discontent of the Deplorables, but the reality is he’s the only one who was able to survive the onslaught. Ron Paul & Dennis Kucinich remained on the fringe and could never really breakout.
She seems a bit Lee Harvey Oswald, a well chosen patsy. Then again maybe not?
I, too, am a nobody.
In regards to drugs; it is the proclivity of the Euro-American population for such activities that has contributed to the ruination of Mexico and not the non-European immigrants into US.
Those neocons must have the highest iq’s of all- smart enough to control the last few administrations, democrat and republican.
morongobill
IM experience they ARE that smart and did so by ruthless elimination of opponents and infiltration. pl
I am in full agreement with your comments.
Hard to answer for sure IZ. Obviously. But i’m inclined to think his supporters will be disgruntled, but, mostly, passive.
What I think is the more relevant question, at least for me, is whether or not a GOP like candidate will go after his followers. Or will the GOP swing back to it corporate norm, DC insider, neoliberal base? IOW…can they keep Trumpism, without the burden of Trump? That’s the key question. To me.
Yes, I believe I referred to the sex,drugs, and rock and roll crowd. However, the countries south of the border might have discovered that supplying drugs to those idiots was not the best way to improve their lives. Maybe figuring out how to form governments that aren’t run by brutal leaders who don’t give a darn about their citizens would be the best way to improve their lives. Like in the ME, there seems to be a culture of violence there.
I will put myself into the prejudiced category here. I grew up in a small town and went to school with half my class being Hispanic. I had MANY Hispanic friends. They were the ones whose families came here and decided to become American and to adopt American values. The other Hispanics were the ones whose families were dirt poor, didn’t value education and spent most of their time traveling back to Mexico and giving half their earnings to families down there.
My own parents were children of immigrants–from Russia, of all places. They were the Germans from Russia. My mother worked alongside Mexicans in the beet fields of Northern Colorado and lived in the same sort of shacks as they did provided by the land owners. My father’s family homesteaded in the northern drylands of Colorado. They eventually moved into the middle class, too.
The difference was that they fixed up their shacks, saved their earnings. Now you can check out Weld County Colorado’s economy. Most of them ended up owning their own farms or doing well in other occupations. And they expected that their kids do well in school and behave themselves.
That meme about our heavy use of drugs does not apply so much where I grew up. We weren’t stupid. That’s a big city East Coast/West Coast problem in many instances. The marijuana here in CO is annoying to most people, but we know that it is being regulated and contained. I have NO friends or relatives who don’t feel that the use of drugs and/or alcohol is o.k. ever. Beer might be consumed, but on special occasions and in moderation. We are, after all, the home of Coors. Church going people know of the importance of not desecrating the temple of our souls.
All this Russia, Russia, Russia stuff is just a detraction to cover the fact that these people don’t have a clue about governing but sure do know how to form “investigations.”
The Electorate must be held accountable; like this baker who voted for Trump since he thought that Obama had shown no backbone against Putin.
As I was listening to him, I thought to myself: “Does this fellow understand war and what it does?”
I think you are reminiscing about a time before 1960s; before the Drug Culture took over the minds of men and proceeded to ruin US as well as weaker countries such as Mexico, that did not have the resources of the United States to cover the damages caused by it.
I think, today, as far as Drug Culture goes, there is no difference between bi-coastal areas and the Fly-Over-Land; everywhere one goes, one is living in a Drug-infused environment – from Junior High schools to universities to parks, public libraries, housing, street corners.
In a way, it is rather interesting to me as a foreigner, to observe 3 cultural phenomena occurring in the United States at about the same time period: A Drug Infused Environment, a Food-Poisoned Environment (where cheap and bad food is widely available) and a Sexually-Charged Social milieu (e.g. the crooner called Madonna with her persona that one can be a virgin and dress like a whore at the same time) that at times becomes quite tiresome to navigate and deal with.
You will not get any arguments about this “Russia, Russia, Russia,…” – it is, I think, the politics of the United States as usual. If there were no Russia, it had to be invented – I should imagine. But the Republicans brought this unto themselves with their interminable investigations against Clinton and later on by dragging him through mud because of his dalliance with a pretty little thing – finally impeaching him out of vindictiveness – lacking any substance.
Sam,
There was a good piece by Benjamin Schwarz in ‘The American Conservative’ back in January 2016, entitled ‘Unmaking England: ‘Will immigration demolish in decades a nation built over centuries?’
(See http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/unmaking-england/ .)
Clearly, what we need to do now is think of the best available, or least worst, way of handling with the mess which has been created.
But for Martin Wolf to dismiss terrorism as ‘just a nuisance’ is stupid beyond belief.
One of the things which terrorists can commonly very easily do is polarise.
When you have a large mass of unheeded resentment about Muslim immigration in the ‘native’ population, and a lot of disoriented second-generation immigrant young Muslims, caught between what their cultures taught them to regard as sacred and the temptations of Western society, a degenerative dynamic is very easily set in motion.
Indeed, it already has been, and the question is now very much what is the ‘least worst’ way of handling the situation.
To make these calculations, one needs people who have some understanding of the Islamic societies, and of the post-Soviet space: also, people who can make a serious attempt to understand how Western societies actually work.
(How our societies actually work, is, obviously, rather different from how they are supposed to work in our idealised ‘butter-wouldn’t-melt-out-of-our-mouths’ self-images.)
A precondition for such an understanding is an ability to grapple with military matters, and also the enduring role of religious, and quasi-religious, beliefs in human affairs.
Unfortunately, ‘supermen’ – or ‘superwomen’ – who have the requisite combination of intellectual adventurousness and mundance practical experience are not easy to find. But Western ‘élites’ are materially less likely to produce some people with some of these qualities than they once were.
As ‘b’ has not commented here today, thought I’d share some information before this thread gets too stale. A commentator (hat tip to ‘h’) posted information that indicates Don Jr’s meeting with the Russian lawyer was a put-up job orchestrated by the DNC. Wikileaks has copies of emails dated May 16, 2016 where the DNC and Clinton cabal are discussing “Music video by Emin Agalarov, son of Putin-tied, Russian real estate oligarch Featuring Donald Trump “.
RE: Video Request: Trump in 2013 Music Video
https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/11812
So why are individuals connected to the DNC and Clinton discussing this video some three weeks PRIOR to Trump Jr.’s meeting, specifying ‘Putin-tied’? I can only think of one reason.
The commentator also linked to a reddit post by the source of this find.
I HAVE THE DEMS END GAME ON DT JR MEETING…
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6mqseq/i_have_the_dems_end_game_on_dt_jr_meeting_hes_a/
quote:
“MOST IMPORTANT PART (summary). This DNC hit job to connect Emin to Putin and then Emin to President Trump was planned BEFORE THE DNC WAS “HACKED” BY “RUSSIA”. This was their end game all along. Their next “bombshell” will be “Who is this Emin that set up the meeting? Oh wow he’s connected to Putin and here is President Trump in his music video”. This is how they’re going to use this bullshit cooked up meeting to go after President Trump. All planned since May of 2016 before anyone was “hacked”. And they weren’t, his name was Seth Rich . . .”
dc,
It is actually not that tangential.
Your observations raise a range of very fundamental questions, about what ‘intelligence’ means. And these are questions which are difficult actually to frame properly, as well as to answer.
But, to take a ‘sighting shot’, I think that a steadily increasing proportion of our ruling ‘élites’ have come from two overlapping categories: an ‘imbecile clerisy’ and a ‘narcissistic meritocracy.’
An ‘ideal type’ example, in the United States, might be Richard Perle. (He is known as the ‘Prince of Darkness’ – but perhaps, somewhere down in Hell, Satan is saying that he cannot be held responsible for this village idiot.)
As to Britain, the examples are legion.
Morongobill,
There are very different kinds of intelligence.
One may have finely-honed intellectual capabilities, perfectly adjusted to operating in the ‘bubbles’ of Washington DC or London – and be completely incapable of understanding the undercurrents developing at the ‘grassroots’, in the United States or United Kingdom: still less, the latent forces of fanaticism in the Middle East.
One such was Peter – nor Lord – Mandelson, whom I once knew quite well.
The kinds of intelligence he possessed made it possible for him to be instrumental in creating ‘New Labour.’
His lack of other kinds of intelligence is now a prime reason why ‘New Labour’ is – suddenly and unexpectedly – dead.
Cunning but not Intelligent, Smart with no Judgement, Knowledgeable but lacking Insight, Matriculated but Uneducated.
I think the desire to maintain one’s own way of doing things is an eminently defensible position. Recently, the Iranian Parliament, precisely on those grounds, denied a bill for automatically extending Iranian citizenship to children of Iranian women by foreign men.
This was largely directed against Afghans; a people that from many angles the closest foreign people to Iranians.
Further South and East, I cannot imagine very many Shia Iranians would welcome the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Deobandi Muslims into Baluchistan.
The English people, in my opinion, have a right to be concerned about their culture – especially in greater London area.
Please note that the centrality of alcohol consumption to European socialization makes integration and assimilation and inter-marriage that much more difficult.
Ishmael,
Sorry for the late response. I got busy kitchen painting and grease monkeying on my car.
If Obama was still President (although a Constitutional impossibility), I don’t think the world would be any less safe. His reticence to taking action was actually comforting. I say this in spite of the continued presence of people similar to Nuland within that administration.
Clinton is another story. Considering what the Russians tried to do do her during the election, think what she would have done to Russia if she was in office? Probably not nuclear war, but it would have gotten dark and ugly. Colonel Lang’s writings convinced me she is an ideologue. Before that I thought she was more pragmatic. I don’t want ideologues in the White House.
What I find interesting, is that for a big innocent nothing-burger of a meeting, Don Jr felt it necessary to make up a series of lies about it—and I think we’ve caught him in another lie today (now it turns out there were more than the 5 people at the meeting. (Additionally a translator, and an admitted former Russian intelligence officer were present.) It’s also interesting that server in Trump tower started it’s communications with Alpha Bank a few days after this meeting. Also Don Sr promised us startling new revelations about Hil’s emails a couple of days after this meeting. Now he claims he only heard about his meeting a few days ago. We’ll see how long he sticks to this story…
beowulf888,
At least we aren’t talking about the content of the Podesta emails or who decided a private server for the Secretary of State – Hilary- was a great idea. Because hey, the dirt on Trumps opponents turned out to be a Hilary set up operation via Fusion GPS. We also aren’t talking about why the founder of that firm now flip-flopped and refuses to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I wonder what the founder of Fusion GPS has to hide. I’m sure the MSM won’t be asking.
There’s nothing wrong per se with opposition research, as long as it doesn’t break Federal or State laws. It’s when you ask a foreign government to do your oppo research for you, well, then that skirts with treason. Hacking into a campaign’s servers, even if you receive the “stolen goods” from someone outside the country, is illegal (and in the digital age, it’s the same as breaking into a campaign HQ). But even if you can with a totally clear conscience say that the Trump campaign never colluded with the Russians, you’re still missing the other elephant in the room At the very least Russia acquired Kompromat on the Trumpster’s son and on all his aides who attended that meeting. The fact that Don Jr is lawyering up and is franticly spewing of half-thoughtout lies makes it pretty clear to me that Don Jr realizes that his actions are potentially prosecutable. What does that say about Donnie? He at least a semblance of a moral compass left (although he probably regrets that he didn’t take the direction it originally pointed him). The talking heads jumping up to defend his actions probably have no moral compass at all. had some important connections with some important people in Moscow who want to see your dad elected. It may be that lifting sanctions was never openly discussed. But there’s really no need, because both sides know the score.
And since you bring up Fusion GPS, let’s also bring out the fact that they were originally engaged by an anti-Trump Republican group to dig up dirt on the Great Orange One. And the group threw in the towel when it was clear that Trump had the nomination in the bag. The owner of Fusion GPS was so shocked at the quantity and seriousness at the dirt dug up on Trump that he engaged Steele to investigate the international angle. Now you may try to create moral equivalency here between the Dems hiring Fusion GPS and Trump Jr’s meeting with Veselnitskaya. But buying oppo research from a British ex-MI6 consultant is not the same as receiving oppo research from a representative who