CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 113th Edition. Some things you aren't hearing much about right now and some things that require explanation that we're not getting. The Venezuelan Distraction Edition.

Hmmmm. . . . 

The U.S. attacked Venezuela over the weekend as its a major drug exporter to the U.S., or maybe because we wanted to liberate the country from Maduro, or maybe because it has oil.  

One of those things.  

Anyhow, 

Somethings we aren't hearing much about now.

• Where are those Epstein files?

Where, where?

Still delayed.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose leaves office today, claimed Trump would attack Venezuela as nothing distracts like war.  She said that, not me.

I'm not saying that he attacked Venezuela for that reason, although I don't put it past him.  But we sure aren't hearing much about them now, are we?

They could have dropped the entire file in a giant Playboy Ephebophilia, Collectors Edition, complete with underaged centefolds, and nobody would have noticed.

• What's up with the economy?

Do you know?  I don't, and I follow the economy.

• What's going on in the Russo Ukrainian War?

Trump was going to instantly end the war, but it turned out to be hard.  

Over the last month he was praising Putin, and then sort of praising Ukraine, and now we don't hear anything about the war at all.  Utterly nothing.

I'm sure Trump didn't end the war.

By The image created by © Yuriy Kvach, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31547668

Somethings we need explanations on.

• Greenland?

What is the real source of Trump's fascination with Greenland?  The strategic need line is complete and utter crap.  If somebody is actually telling him that, they need to be dope slapped into the 21st Century.  

I don't really think it's Trump, as I don't think Trump is smart enough to know anything about Greenland.  Having watched him now for years, I'm pretty much convinced that he was a fairly good salesman at one time, but he was never very intelligent.  Now he's demented so he's not even a good salesman.  

It's something or somebody else, or . . . 

• Putin and Trump?

We have to seriously consider once again why Donald Trump is a Russian asset.  

We know that he is a Russian asset, but we don't know why.  He may be simply because he likes them for some reason.  Or he may have really bought into some weird vision of the world that's centered in the 18th Century, in which he's King Donald the Demented and Putin is Tsar Vlad the Magnificent.  Btu with the threats on Greenland we need to at least consider the possibility that Trump is a full-blown Russian asset as they have something on him, or are giving something to him.

That sounds extreme, but a US that pulls back to the Western Hemisphere and wrecks NATO is a gift to Russia.  And it appears to be happening.  Putin had been a backer of Maduro but he didn't lift a finger to help him once our illegitimate head of state caused that illegitimate head of state to be seized.

And Putin has been oddly quiet.

It's clear that at least for the time being the relationship between the United States and Europe is wrecked.  If you were writing a script for a Russian mole to occupy the White House, even Tom Clancy couldn't do better than this.

Harry Dexter White. . . it's sort of happened before.

• Lindsey Graham.

What's going on with Lindsey Graham.  Unlike Trump, he's not dumb.  His complete and utter sycophancy needs some explanation.

• Stephen and Katie Miller

Okay, this is going to be delicate, but there's something really weird about Stephen Miller playing Joseph Goebbels and his wife playing, well, Joseph Goebbels.

They're both Jewish.

Miller is the chief proponent of White Anglo Saxon Protestantism in the administration, and he ain't one.  I don't know the ethnicity of his wife, but she could pass for a Mizrahi Jew.  

This might not quite be as weird as it sounds, although its downright dangerous for them.  Goebbels had been a Communist and you can find plenty of Nazis who were drawn from German populations that were repressed in the most violent ways during the Third Reich, but there's the lesson.  The policies that Miller advocates for would, in the end, put him and Katie in the hold of a boat and deport them to a place that people who think like him would think he would find more to their liking, or at least theirs.

Before this sounds too one sided, there's a real lesson for Catholics supporting Trump.  His people don't think you are very American either.

Careful Steve and Katie. . . this is how a lot of your fellow travelers see you.

• The weather.

It's been super warm this winter.  No winter at all.  

How long do we intend to ignore this?

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 112th Edition. Clinton calls Trump's bluff.

Labels: Bill Clinton, Crime, Donald Trump, Ephebophilia, Epstein Scandal, Republican Party, The Second Trump Administration, The wealthy, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Zeitgeist

January 5, 1876, Pokrok západu (Omaha, Neb.).

 

Remembering that the world as Stephen Miller imagines it never really existed.

Last edition:

Monday, January 3, 1876. First classes at BYU.

Labels: 1870s, 1876, American Centennial, Blog Mirror, Education, Food, Mormon, Utah (Provo)

Ascendant Ignorance in the Age of Donald Trump. Ignoramus Watch Part 2. The War is a Racket edition.

 

December 17, 2025.

WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

Gen. Smedley Butler.

American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.

Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Advisor.

Stephen Miller, who is Jewish, has somehow managed to become the most White Racist and imperialist member of the Trump Administration, apparently forgetting that the white, Protestant, demographic he's backing, doesn't regard him as white.

Maybe Miller ought to listen to some Nick Fuentes.

Anyhow, the other day Trump said something about Venezuela stealing "our land".  It made no sense, but now, with Miller's help, we know what he meant.

Geology created the Venezuelan oil industry.  Imperialism created the concept that somebody else's natural resources belongs to us.  Neo imperialism will get us bogged down in regional wars Miller won't be going to so that young American men can die for petroleum oil, which we have plenty of here in the US.

Trump is demented.  People like Miller have his ear. This is absolutely frightening.

December 19, 2025

Trump’s handpicked buttkissers on the Kennedy Center board voted to renames it the Trump Kennedy Center

It's questionable if it can legally be renamed, and all of these "love me" type of monumental acts are going to go away as soon as Trump's illegitimate interregnum is over.  The amazing things that there's such syncophantic asskissers who are willing to do things like this.

December 22, 2025

And while you are, or aren't, worrying about this:

If you are an Apostolic Christian, and aren't worried yet, you ought to be. Or maybe not. Or maybe.

You might want to worry that we have a seemingly unstable would be caudillo in the Oval Office and an administration that violated the deadline provisions of the law concerning release of the Epstein files.

At first the MAGAs were pointing toward the photos of Clinton, but within 24 hours they were pulling stuff back down that referenced Trump.  On Sunday they sent a deputy AG around to the Sunday shows to explain that they had to do that, apparently, as women who appeared in the buff in those photos might have been complaining about it.  If those women were minors, they shouldn't have released that material, but then they should have had that figured out in the first place.  If they were just nude women, well, too bad.  You get photographed in the house of a creep, you can't expect that not to get around.

Anyhow, he ran around sounding rather distraught.  Now we know that a third oil taker in our sights in the Caribbean, and today we learn that Trump has appointed a "special envoy" to Greenland who has said something about how we should annex that territory to the US.  Denmark has called in our ambassador.

Okay, how does that relate to this thread?

Trump appears to be pretty desperate right now.  Nothing distracts like a war.  Nicolás Maduro shows no signs whatsoever of backing down, and there are no signs whatsoever that his military is going to force him out.  Trump can't back down.  And what better way to change the topic at Christmas dinner from "so. . . why do you think the administration is protecting the diddler files" than by sending than by sending FA 18s over Venezuela. . . or maybe putting the Marines on the beaches?

Am I saying that is going to happen as a distraction from the embarrassing teenage girl sex story?  No, I"m not, but I am saying its not impossible to imagine that.

And at this point, it's clear, Maduro is sitting there ignoring Trump.  War with Venezuela, in some form, is inevitable.

cont:

Not really properly before in this category, but administration news nonetheless, the ambassadors to Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mauritius, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia, Uganda, Fiji, Laos, the Marshall Islands, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Vietnam, Armenia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovakia, Algeria, Egypt, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Guatemala and Suriname are being removed and replaced.

cont:

We need Greenland for national protection. They have a very small population…They say that Denmark was there 300 years ago with a boat. Well, we were there with boats too I’m sure.

Donald Trump. 

The United States isn't 300 years old. . . 

And that small population comment is just the sort of thing a New Yorker would say . . . 

And then there's this gem. Trump wants a fleet of twenty five battleships built.  Battleships have been obsolete for decades.

cont:

It appears the "battleships" will not be battleships.

December 24, 2025

Now this is interesting:

Heritage Foundation killed by MAGA

December 25, 2025.  Christmas Day

What a horrible person.

December 31, 2025

First Greene, and now Boebert.

Like Greene, Boebert was a fanatic MAGA.  Problem for Trump was that she, like Greene, MAGA than Trump who, at the end of the day, is only about Trump.

At some point somebody pointed out to Trump that there are people in the Epstein files whose names he shouldn't want released.  Maybe that's Trump or maybe that's somebody else.  Probably somebody else, but Trump already looks pretty bad in regard to hanging out with Epstein.  He didn't want those files released, and so far the administration hasn't fully released them.  Boebert, like Green voted to release them.

Now she and her district must pay the price.

Well, it was a Trump district.  If they suffer as a result, so be it.  They're getting exactly what they deserve.

Last edition:

Ascendant Ignorance in the Age of Donald Trump. Ignoramus* Watch Part 1.

Labels: 2026 Wyoming Legislature, Ascendant Ignorance in the Age of Donald Trump, Climate Change, Conspiracy Theories, Ignorance, Karlee Provenza, Mehmet Oz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Stupidity, The Liz Cheney Maxim

Blog Mirror: Stephen Miller's Charlie Kirk speech draws Joseph Goebbels comparisons

 

Stephen Miller's Charlie Kirk speech draws Joseph Goebbels comparisons