Ring the Division Bell

February 4, 2024 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | American Politics, POLITICS |

Recently, we were sent an interesting take by George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, suggesting the likely Republican nominee for U.S. President this year, Donald Trump, was “king of the extrinsics.”  Now we have expressed concerns about George before, but felt he deserved respectful consideration none-the-less. By ‘extrinsic,’ Monbiot did not mean a “basket of deplorables,” exactly. He wrote: “Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in…

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The Modern Metternich

December 3, 2023 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | American Politics, HISTORY, POLITICS, USA History |

Henry Kissinger (27 May,1923 to 29 November, 2023) Like Klemens Metternich, he’d been a refugee, entered into the realm of international diplomacy early on, and took a realist, conservative view of world order, based on the equilibrium of power and interests. Always a ‘foreigner’ in his adopted country, one could impute to him, after Metternich, the line: “I governed the World sometimes, America never.” Kissinger became a bête noire of the left: for example, Christopher Hitchens wrote an incendiary polemic about him, declaring him guilty of war crimes. One doubts not that Henry cringed when remembering the coup in Chile, the…

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Oppenheimer

(Directed by Christopher Nolan) (2023) On 16 July 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated, at a test site named “Trinity”, in New Mexico, USA. It went so well that, on 6 August 1945 at 8.15 am, the US tried it on an actual city: Hiroshima. A blinding flash shot over the city, and then some 100,000 people were vapourised. The morning turned dark; a priest, Father Kleinsorge, wandered in the garden of his mission, dazed and bleeding, to see his housekeeper, Murata-san, crying out “Shu Jesusu, awaremi tamai!” (‘Our Lord Jesus, have pity on us!’).* Of course, President Truman’s…

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Classic Misdirection

August 2, 2023 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | American Politics, POLITICS |

Misdirection, in which the manipulator, by sleight of hand, draws a crowd’s attention to one thing to distract it from another, has an honourable place in the field of magic…. …and a dishonourable place in politics. Remember when political apparatchiks spread the word that 911 was a good day to put out bad news they’d been hiding? We’ve seen 4 inspired examples of misdirection just in the last few months, coming from Joe Biden‘s goons in the Department of Justice: MARCH 17, 2023: Hunter admits the Laptop from Hell is his. MARCH 18, 2023: Trump to be indicted in New…

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F.B.I. – Following Barack’s Instructions

May 29, 2023 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | American Politics, POLITICS, Ulalume |

The Durham Report drops (12 May 2023) On 6 May, 2016, George Papadopoulos, an unpaid foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign for the Presidency, indulged in bar talk with some Australian diplomats in London, to the effect that Russian operatives had supplied dirt on Hilary Clinton, to the Trump campaign. As if one couldn’t find enough Clinton dirt on one’s own. The diplomats passed that info to the Obama Administration, and Barry’s goons went to work immediately. All the odious apparatus of the Deep Swamp State went into overdrive, and as Durham concludes (in his truly stunning, and likely…

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