Random World News Roundup

Headline: “Republicans lash out at claims that Trump intelligence pick Tulsi Gabbard is ‘compromised.’” The LA Times reports that “Republicans” (two of them, to be precise) are “lashing out” against a couple of Democrats, and in particular U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth, who have described Donald Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence as “compromised,” based on her long history of blatantly pro-Putin comments on global issues that sound as though they might literally have been scripted by the Kremlin’s propaganda office. The Republicans cited in the article call Duckworth’s criticism “outright dangerous,” “a slur,” and “totally ridiculous.” Perhaps these defenders are unaware of what Gabbard has actually said, stretching back to her apologetics for Putin’s ally Bashar Assad, and culminating in her consistently anti-NATO, pro-Putin distortions about the war in Ukraine. Or perhaps these gentlemen simply find nothing untoward about Honolulu Rose’s defense of Putin’s interests and her desperate downplaying of his aggression and illegitimacy by means of pathetic moral equivalency arguments and “slurs” against Zelensky and NATO. In either case, if these GOP defenders of Gabbard’s claptrap represent the official party line on the dregs of Trump’s current nominees, then America and the world are in a heap of trouble — pretending that is not a tautology at this point.

The Hill offers the day’s most irrelevant and click-repulsive headline: “What’s next for Kamala Harris?” Apart from her personal relations and hired image-promoters, I am quite sure the entire planet, including the tens of millions of Americans who voted for her as “the only way to prevent a second Trump presidency,” would reply to that question in perfect unison: “Who cares?” (Within a few years, a large proportion, likely a majority, of the planet will answer it differently: “I’m sorry, Camilla who?”)

In the background — as it always is, while we sleep and vote and try to carry on with our lives in defiance of the reality of our ever-tightening chains — the world’s Marxist elite have gathered to proceed with the public optics version of their plans for global economic redistribution. And so I read this headline from Reuters: “Developing nations blast $300 billion COP29 climate deal as insufficient.” In other words, a group of countries that have, for various reasons largely related to political and historical conditions, failed to build economies as strong as those of the evil capitalist countries (who would of course be in the same “developing” condition themselves had they not made the historical decision to build economies somewhat in accordance with the principles of evil capitalist countries), are objecting to the latest “deal” in the European progressive elite’s global Marxist strategy of wealth redistribution, on the grounds that the elites are not draining their own populations’ economic futures in the name of a manufactured climate crisis fast enough. If there is one lesson tyrants who seek to rule on the charade of universal beneficence just never learn, it is that once you promise power and wealth to your serfs as the reward for their compliance, you cannot control the growing agitation they will gradually feel precisely to the extent that they have bought into your fairytales. 

The other side of this, of course, is the phony optics, from both sides of the “deal,” as well as from the ever-compliant news media, to the effect that this redistribution is necessary to pay for “the effects of climate change,” when of course what these payments are actually supposed to offset is the cost of complying with the suffocating economic restraints imposed on the developing nations, who can least afford such limitations on growth, in the fraudulent name of “combatting climate change.” Above all and most grotesquely, these optics protect those wealthy ruling class types within the poor and underdeveloped nations, the ones now decrying the “insufficient deal,” who enjoy champagne toasts at the private club of the Euro-socialist busybodies for the entry fee of kowtowing to the UN climate czars, in the process consigning their own “developing” nations to a locked-in state of permanent underdevelopment and beggary. Plus ça change.…