President John F. Kennedy was killed by a bullet to the head received while traveling in a open car through Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, on November 11, 1963. The Commission of inquiry into the assassination, which was headed by US Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone nut, fired the fatal shot from the Texas School Book Depository Building, which was located directly behind the President at the moment he was struck.
However, the evidence we have reviewed establishes that Kennedy was fatally wounded by a bullet to the head, not from behind, but from in front of the car in which he was riding. The critical evidence was suppressed at the time of the assassination, although it would have been readily available to the Warren Commission had they desired to have it. Therefore it can be concluded with confidence that the Warren Commission Report was a cover up.
If Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy, it follows that the Kennedy assassination was the result of a conspiracy, and apparently a rather elaborate one at that.
Oswald was not just a patsy, as he claimed before being himself assassinated. He was a patsy with Soviet connections, who'd defected to Russia, then returned to the United States, where he had agitated on behalf of a shadowy organization, the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee," which sought to promote grassroots support in America for Cuba's Communist government.
Thus any inclination that the Soviets may have had to challenge the findings of the Warren Commission Report for propaganda purposes would have been negated by the fact that this would inevitably bring upon the Soviets the charge of complicity in the killing.
Consistent with this view, FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, wrote in a memorandum to the office of the President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, that according to "[a] source who has furnished reliable information in the past and who was in Russia on the date of the assassination. ..." news of the assassination was:
...greeted [in Moscow] by great shock and consternation and church bells were tolled in the memory of President Kennedy.... According to our source, officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the 'ultraright' in the United States to effect a 'coup.' They seemed convinced that the assassination was not the deed of one man but that it arose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part."
So the Commies, who were no dopes, concluded that Kennedy was killed because he was soft on Communism. That the Soviets came to that conclusion means that the objective of the conspirators, which was, in part, to send the Soviets a message, had been achieved: Kennedy may have failed the test of leadership, but American leadership consisted in more than one man and, the poor judgement of of a weak president would not be allowed to prevail.
Yesterday I noted that publicly available evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President J. F. Kennedy was a cover up.
Specifically, there is the Zapruder film of the shooting which shows the President's head thrown violently backward as it explodes, the ejecta travelling to the rear of the vehicle. Thus, the photographic evidence proves, contrary to the Warren Commission Report, that the President was killed not by a bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from a sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository Building directly behind the President's car, but by a bullet to the head from somewhere in front of the motorcade. Moreover, there is explicit confirmation of the video evidence concerning the direction of the fatal bullet in the testimony of doctors and surgeons (and here) attending on the President at the Parkland Hospital in Dallas, where he died.
But as we noted yesterday, if the Warren Commission Report was a cover up, then it almost certainly covered up government complicity in the assassination of the President.
So who in the Government was responsible? Surely, it would have been that branch of government specializing in the assassination of heads of state; namely, the CIA. But as we argued, yesterday, the CIA would not have assassinated the President of the United States without bi-partisan approval. Lyndon Baines Johnson, Kennedy's VP, a man said to have had a maniacal desire to be President, would surely have been the go-to Democrat, and his consent would surely not have been withheld.
But who on the Republican side? Who but Richard Nixon? Nixon, as the Republican presidential candidate defeated by Kennedy in 1960, was in effect the head of the Republican Party, and a man with no great affection for Kennedy.*
But even politicians, or indeed especially politicians, must rationalize their actions, particularly their most questionable actions. What then was the rationale shared by both Democrats and Republicans that would have justified the unconstitutional removal of a president by means of assassination?
To anyone familiar with the political climate of the time, the answer must be apparent. Kennedy was, as the British might say, unsound on Communism. In the context of the times, this was of huge importance.
Tens of millions had died in the great European civil war, at the end of which the United States stood almost alone as the bulwark of Western freedom against the Communist tyranny of the Soviet Union and Red China.
It was under those circumstances that Kennedy's posture in relations with the Soviet Union was judged. And it was in this that he was judged to have shown weakness, not once, but again and again.
During the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy failed to force a Soviet stand down. Instead, he opened a back channel with the oafish Khrushchev and agreed to remove American nuclear-capable Jupiter missiles in Turkey in exchange for the abandonment of the Soviet missile base in Cuba.
During the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Kennedy refused to authorize US Air Force cover to the invading anti-Castro rebels when they became pinned down on the beach where they were soon destroyed by Cuban forces.
Then, as the Presidential election of 1964 approached, Kennedy revealed his intention, after the election, to pull US forces from Vietnam, abandoning the pro-Western, i.e., nominally democratic, South Vietnam regime to its fate at the hands of the Chinese- and Soviet-backed Communists of North Vietnam.
Under the prevailing circumstances, Kennedy's reluctance to play hardball with the Commie bastards was more than a weakness, it was treason. And for those convicted of treason, it is universally agreed that the penalty is death.
———
* Nixon's involvement in the decision, if he was indeed involved, would would tie together the CIA, events in Dealey Plaza on November 11, 1963, and the Watergate Hotel burglary on June 17, 1972, the link being E. Howard Hunt. Hunt was (a) the CIA station chief in Mexico City, where the CIA monitored Oswald’s contacts with the Soviet and Cuban embassies; (b) a self-confessed assassination “bench warmer” and, with Frank Sturgis, possibly one of the tramps arrested in Dealey Plaza the day of the assassination; and (c), with Frank Sturgis, arrested during the Watergate Hotel break-in, checking, perhaps, to see whether the Dems had evidence of Nixonian complicity in the JFK assassination.
Well for sure it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald as concluded by the report of the Commission headed by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren.
Oswald, so the Warren Commission Report concluded, shot Kennedy from a sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository Building, which was directly behind the President's car at the moment Kennedy was killed. This, however, is refuted by the famous Zapruder video, which shows that the fatal head-shot drove the President's head violently backwards with a sound described by Texas Governor John Conolly, who was riding in the car with the President, as "like the sound of a pumkin dropped to the pavement from the roof of a five-story building."
Many will place no trust in the video record, video evidence being so obviously susceptible to tampering. However, there is conclusive evidence confirming what the Zapruder film shows; namely, the testimony of the doctors and surgeons who attended on the president at the Parklands Hospital where he died.
Here is the testimony of Dr. McClelland, the first doctor to observe the large exit wound at the back of the President's head from which a lump of brain tissue, part of the cerebellum, had fallen onto the stretcher on which the President had been laid.
And here is the sketch that Dr. McClelland made at the time showing the various wounds to the president`s head and neck:
Signed drawing entitled ''President Kennedy's Wounds," rendered by Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the physicians
who attended to John F. Kennedy at Parkland Hospital after the President was shot. Source: The New York Post.
And lest you think Dr. McClelland some kind of nut, here`s confirmation from another of the attending physicians, Dr. Charles Crenshaw, who explains why he, and others attending on the President remained silent for so long about the contradiction between what the public was told about the cause of the Kennedy`s death and what they knew from direct observation to be the truth:
As for Gerry Ford, appointed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson to the Warren Commission, here is his role as reported by the New York Times 33 years after the assassination:
Thirty-three years ago, Gerald R. Ford changed ever so slightly -- the Warren Commission's main sentence on the place where a bullet entered President John F. Kennedy's body when he was killed in Dallas.
Mr. Ford's change strengthened the commission's conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and wounded Gov. John B. Connally, -- a crucial element in the commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.
But if Kennedy was shot from the front, then one can hardly doubt that the Warren Commission Report was a cover up. And if the Warren Commission Report was a cover up, then it almost certainly covered up a conspiracy to murder involving the government.
Who in the Government? Well almost certainly that branch of government specializing in the assassination of heads of state; namely, the CIA.
But it is one thing to say that the CIA killed Kennedy and another thing altogether to say that the CIA had gone rogue. Yes there were people in the CIA who hated Kennedy for failing to send in the USAF in support of the CIA-orchestrated Bay-of-Pigs invasion of Cuba, when the invading force was bogged down on the beaches and being destroyed by the Cuban army and airforce.
But it is inconceivable that the CIA would have acted without at least a nod from LBJ, the man who, as a result of the assassination, would be in a position to either destroy the CIA or provide the agency with a roof.
Furthermore, the CIA, a bureaucracy after all, and thus subject to all the Machiavellian calculation of any major bureaucracy, would have wanted more than Johnson's backing: they would have wanted bipartisan political support.
So who on the Republican side gave them a green light?
Allen Dulles, the CIA Director that Jack Kennedy fired in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion, was no Democrat, but he was undoubtedly well connected on the Republican side of the aisle, his brother, John Foster Dulles, having served for six years as US Secretary of State under Republican president General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Who then in the Republican political world would have been in a position, through Allen Dulles, to give the assassination a go?
Nixon, the Republican defeated by Kennedy in 1960, was the then top Republican guy. So was it he, who gave the CIA the Republican backing for a contract on JFK?
As to that, there is nothing well known in the public domain to indicate the truth.
However, there is a chain of events connecting Nixon with the assassination, albeit remotely. Prior to the assassination, it is known that Lee Harvey Oswald travelled to Mexico City where he applied to both the Cuban and the Soviet embassy for a visitor's visa and where he communicated with Valeriy Kostikov, a Soviet diplomat suspected of attachment to the KGB’s Department 13, responsible for assassinations and sabotage.
How do we know that? Because both the Cuban and Soviet diplomatic compounds in Mexico City were:
thoroughly monitored by the CIA, which possessed tape recordings and transcripts of Oswald’s telephone calls, as well as photographs of Oswald as he went in and out. Source
But whether or not Howard Hunt was in Dallas the day of the assassination, there seems no question that he made a deathbed confession to involvement in the assassination (serving he said as a "bench warmer"). And there is no question that Hunt was hired by Nixon, with another Dealey Plaza tramp lookalike, Frank Sturgis, to among other things, burglarize the Democratic Party's National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel complex in Washington DC.
Why did Nixon authorize such a reckless undertaking? The stakes must surely have been high, and to find out whether the Democrats had information compromising to Nixon relating to the Kennedy assassination seems a plausible explanation.
The nature of such incriminating information is not obvious. Although Gerald Ford, Nixon's Vice President, and LBJ's appointee to the Warren Commission, is among the few who might have known.
So was Gerry Ford, a man described by LBJ as "too dumb to find his arse with both hands," in fact, smart enough to gain the Presidency by blackmailing Nixon to resign? Why not?
Driven by impotent rage, political extremism, and their own frustration at President Trump’s ongoing foreign and domestic successes, the establishment media had its worst week in years last week surrounding their now-debunked border separation hoax.
The timing of last week’s disaster (which I will detail in a sec), could not have been worse. It came right on the heels of a Gallup poll full of dreadful news. A clean majority of 62 percent believe the “traditional news media” is biased. A full 44 percent believe the media is inaccurate, and another 39 percent believe the media spread misinformation.
Just like the far-left CNN, all of the media are now operating as a 24/7 Hate Machine
And those were the numbers before last week, a week full of hoaxes, lies, childish trolling, and the condoning of mob justice against Trump officials.
Here is a breakdown…
The Entire Media Narrative About Child Separation Is a Hoax
Last week’s rabid media storyline about the separation of illegal alien adults and children is a hoax, a fabricated outrage; which is not to say that children and adults are not separated into different detention centers. For their own good, for humane reasons, they most certainly are.
Ben Weingarten: As a classicist, you’ve lamented both the corruption of the academy within your own discipline and on the modern campus more broadly — in particular on its repudiation of the Western canon, its lack of adherence to principles of free inquiry and the overall triumph of progressivism. Is there any way to take back this institution, in the sense of restoring classical liberal arts education and the conditions it needs to flourish?
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, my criticism in the last 30 years of the institution, obviously a lot of us who voiced those concerns, it fell on deaf ears. So progressive thinkers and institutional administrators within the university got their way. And now we’re sort of at the end of that experiment, and the question we have to ask is what did they give us? Well, they gave us $1 trillion in student debt. They created a very bizarre system in which the federal government — subsidized through student loans, constantly increasing tuition beyond the rate of inflation — the result of which is that we’ve had about a 200 percent growth in administrative costs, and administrators and non-teaching staff within the university. We’ve politicized the education.
Wilbur Ross, Donald Trump’s commerce secretary speaking before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday said:
The Canadian steel industry is not being accused directly and individually of being a security threat
but added that Canada was a problem because
along with other countries ...Canada allows Chinese steel to pass through on its the way to the United States.
Further Ross stated:
And while they’re complaining bitterly about the tariffs, the fact is they’re starting to take the kind of action, which, if they had taken sooner, would have prevented this crisis.
So while Trudeau was whimpering about being insulted by Trump's tariff on Canadian steel and aluminum, he was, in fact, toadying to the Chinese, at America's expense. Why, because, Trudeau, the lover of all dictatorships, prefers to curry favor with Communist China headed by President-for-Life Xi, than with the democratic nation state on our border.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. And apparently they have decided to destroy America by, among other things, having the beautiful people mouth insane obscenities to the delight of their depraved followers.
Either way, the US is clearly finished as a great nation, and probably it is finished as a nation, period. Rather it has become another globalist disaster zone, where groups of alien race and culture, who are embraced, figuratively, by the elite, fight to wrest control from the former inhabitants, now demoralized, dying prematurely, increasingly drug addicted, and falling in fertility below the replacement rate.
The Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, has revealed that he was mugged by motor scooter thieves who stole his mobile phone, shortly before he was given his latest cabinet role.
Javid, who is now in charge of the nation’s policing and security, said he was targeted by criminals outside Euston station in north London..Source
Sajid Javid, England's colorful
law and order Minister.
So in ethnically cleansed London, the Home Secretary, or law and order minister, in Thereason May's laughable named Conservative government, was mugged.
Good. Let's hope Thereason May, the nerve agent hoaxster, and the war criminal Tony Bliar are next to enjoy the benefits of their having turned the two-thousand-year old English capital into a multi-culti, Afro-Asian and East European shithole, to use the current jargon.
Meantime, Putin says: "Russia Must Support the Family - Survival of Our People Depends on It"PUTIN: Russia Must Support the Family - Survival of Our People Depends on It, but the Brits and Germans prefer to be ruled by childless women who have contributed to the survival of our people neither personally, nor in the exercise of government power.
A post by Rob Slane of the Blogmire Blog offers some significant details concerning the alleged Russian poisoning of the pardoned Russian traitor and British agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia, as they sat on a park bench in the quiet English cathedral city of Salisbury on the afternoon of March 4, this year.
Based on video evidence from the scene of the crime, Lane proposes a plausible theory of how, and by whom, the Skripal's were poisoned, a key question intensively obfuscated by the British media.
Lane also explains why the poison could not have been the deadly nerve agent, Novichok, as claimed by UK Prime Minister Theresa May, a claim endlessly repeated by the British media.
Instead, Lane suggests that the poison could have been, as we have also suggested, the widely available and much less deadly nerve agent BZ, which was initially reported to have been found in blood samples from the Skripal's, a fact that was later attributed to it having been added to the blood samples by the analytical laboratory for the purpose, so it was bizarrely claimed, of calibration.
In connection with the question of the identity of the poison, Lane constructs the following relevant time-line of events:
15:35 – Sergei Skripal and Yulia leave Zizzis. They make their way to The Maltings, presumably along Market Walk (although strangely there is no CCTV footage of this), a walk of about two minutes or so. 15:37 – When they got to The Maltings, they appear not to have gone straight to the bench, but to the Avon Playground (approximately 50 yards from the bench), where they spent some time feeding ducks. They presumably then went over to the bench, a few minutes after this.
15:47 – The mysterious pair, one of whom is carrying a red bag, are seen on CCTV walking through Market Walk in the direction of The Maltings. 16:03 – One of the first witnesses to the scene, Freya Church, who was working in the nearby Snap Fitness, leaves work at 16:00 or thereabouts, and sees the Skripals on the bench at approximately 16:03. According to her account, they were already “out of it”, which suggests that they had been poisoned some minutes previously. She noted that there was a red bag on the floor next to Yulia’s feet. 16:15 – Emergency services are called and the pair are taken to Salisbury District Hospital, Yulia by helicopter and Sergei by ambulance. Upon admittance, the hospital believed that the pair had overdosed on Fentanyl, and treated this as an opioid poisoning for at least 24 hours after the incident.
Later that evening – Police remove the red bag, and it has never been heard of or mentioned in connection with the story since.
A question that Lane does not address is the video that was released showing Julia Skripal in an interview with Reuters following her release from hospital. This video is worthy of close examination.
There are at least two remarkable things to note. First, Yulia Skripal appears not only much slimmer, than before her poisoning ordeal, but distinctly younger too, which is an odd consequence of long drawn out struggle for life.
Second, Yulia, wears a dress with a high collar, but open at the front as if intended to focus attention on her deep tracheotomy scar. That seems strange. Would not most women with the misfortune to bear such a disfiguring scar have chosen a garment with a collar that concealed the scar? And if that is conceded, then it seems reasonable to assume that Yulia displayed her scar for a purpose, namely, to leave no doubt in the public mind that she had indeed been close to death and in need of surgical intervention as a result of her alleged Russian poisoning.
But if the video is a piece of theatre to reinforce the British Government narrative on the Skripal poisoning, it would seem wise to consider the possibility that the entire interview is fake. It would surely not be difficult, given the latest methods of film creation and modification, to take an old video of a slightly younger and slimmer Yulia in an unidentifiable location and dub it with a different script. How many British or American viewers would be any the wiser? Surely few indeed: she is after all, speaking Russian, not English. And to such a false presentation, the addition of a tracheotomy scar would surely not have been difficult.
Will we have a chance to learn more from Yulia in the coming months? Unlikely. The story about the Skripals has already caused the British Government enough embarrassment. More than a month ago the CIA offered to "protect" the Skripals by providing them with new identities in America. Presumably, therefore, the Skripals will by now have been taken care of, whether of their own volition or not.
What this story seems to show is that not only is the news fake, but that it is now faked at the direct instigation of the state.
As I have previously argued, the near universal access to higher education in Western countries has resulted in an epidemic of nation-destroying stupidity. Proof of that contention is now available in research showing that the mean IQ of the Brits and other Western nations is declining at the rate of three to four points per decade, which will reduce their acuity of mind to that of the sub-Saharan African nations within a generation.
A pair of researchers with the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Norway has found that IQ test scores have been slowly dropping over the past several decades (full text available here). Prior studies have shown that people grew smarter over the first part of last century, as measured by the intelligence quotient—a trend that was dubbed the Flynn effect. Various theories have been proposed to explain this apparent brightening of the human mind, such as better nutrition, health care, education, etc, all factors that might help people grow into smarter adults than they would have otherwise. But, now, according to the researchers in Norway, that trend has ended. Instead of getting smarter, humans have started getting dumber. The study by the team consisted of analyzing IQ test results from young men entering Norway's national service (compulsory military duty) during the years 1970 to 2009. In all, 730,000 test results were accounted for. In studying the data, the researchers found that scores declined by an average of seven points per generation, a clear reversal of test results going back approximately 70 years. But it was not all bad news. The researchers also found some differences between family groups, suggesting that some of the decline might be due to environmental factors. But they also suggest that lifestyle changes could account for some of the decline, as well, such as changes in the education system and children reading less and playing video games more. Source
Tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period. Among those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle class families, performance was even worse, with an average IQ score six points below what it was 28 years ago.
Some people will no doubt say that the decline in Europe's population mean IQ is due to the mass immigration to Europe of people from sub-Saharan Africa, Syria, and other low IQ lands. But obviously the causality runs the other way. It is liberal-elite-directed higher education with its mandatory component of PC indoctrination that is destroying the intelligence of the people thus making them vulnerable to mass replacement immigration. Specifically, the elite-directed destruction of the Western nations in the name of the liberal religion of anti-racism and diversity, the outcome being the genocide of the European peoples through compelled homogenization with immigrants of alien race and culture.
Canadians so hate Donald Trump that when, following last week's $600-million-dollar G7 meeting in Canada, Trump called Justin Trudeau "Very dishonest and weak," the Canadian Parliament passed, unanimously, a motion introduced by the opposition New Democrats, deploring “ad hominem statements by U.S. officials which do a disservice to bilateral relations.”
Why did the opposition come to the defense of Justin Trudeau?
Because Trump is so hated and despised in Canada that the opposition parties cannot allow Trudeau to stand alone against Trump, since that would assure him near universal public support.
And why is Trump so hated and despised in Canada?
Because the Government of Canada itself, its agent the Canadian state broadcaster, the CBC, and the liberals and leftists who comprise the vast majority of Canada's journalists and the employees of Canada's educational institutions and government bureaucracies despise and deride Trump.
And why do the liberals and the left and the corporate media despise and deride Trump?
Because he threatens to destroy their racket.
Here' the difference between Trudeau's Canada and Trump's America: Trudeau is a globalist, Trump is a nationalist.
Trump, is a nationalist (or so he wishes to be known), who aims to maximize American prosperity. That means retaining capital accumulated in America through the sweat of past generations, and imposing tariffs to insure that Americans mostly make stuff for one another rather than buying the products of off-shore sweatshop labor (and brains). By rebuilding American manufacturing, Trump can generating millions of decent jobs while restoring the incentives for clever students to study hard subjects like math, engineering, computer science, fields in which America once excelled, but is now rapidly being overtaken by the rest of the world.
So the difference between Trump and Trudeau revolves around the question of whether Canada and America are sovereign nation ruled in the interests of the voters, or merely places where a ruling elite arrange matters in their own interest and the Hell with the people.
Clearly, then, the Trump doctrine has deadly implications for the Trudeau system of post-national governance without reference to the Canadian nation. But fortunately for Trudeau, Canada is a massively bureaucratic country and the institutions of education and government, not to mention the scribes of the corporate-owned and globalist media, can be relied upon to fight relentlessly against those who advocate for anything other than the existing corruptionist regime, after all, their jobs for life and index-linked pensions depend upon it.
Buchanan.org, June 12, 2018:At the G-7 summit in Canada, President Donald Trump described America as “the piggy bank that everybody is robbing.”
After he left Quebec, his director of Trade and Industrial Policy, Peter Navarro, added a few parting words for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:
“There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door. … And that’s … what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did. And that comes right from Air Force One.”
In Singapore, Trump tweeted more about that piggy bank.
“Why should I, as President of the United States, allow countries to continue to make Massive Trade Surpluses, as they have for decades … (while) the U.S. pays close to the entire cost of NATO-protecting many of these same countries that rip us off on Trade?”
To understand what drives Trump, and explains his exasperation and anger, these remarks are a good place to begin.
Our elites see America as an “indispensable nation,” the premier world power whose ordained duty it is to defend democracy, stand up to dictators and aggressors, and uphold a liberal world order.
They see U.S. wealth and power as splendid tools that fate has given them to shape the future of the planet.
Trump sees America as a nation being milked by allies who free ride on our defense effort, as they engage in trade practices that prosper their own peoples at America’s expense.
Where our elites live to play masters of the universe, Trump sees a world laughing behind America’s back, while allies exploit our magnanimity and idealism for their own national ends.
The numbers are impossible to refute and hard to explain.
Last year, the EU had a $151 billion trade surplus with the U.S. China ran a $376 billion trade surplus with the U.S., the largest in history. The world sold us $796 billion more in goods than we sold to the world.
A nation that spends more than it takes in from taxes, and consumes more of the world’s goods than it produces itself for export, year in and year out, is a nation on the way down.
We are emulating our British cousins of the 19th century.
Trump understands that this situation is not sustainable. His strength is that the people are still with him on putting America first.
Yet he faces some serious obstacles.
What is his strategy for turning a $796 billion trade deficit into a surplus? Is he prepared to impose the tariffs and import restrictions that would be required to turn America from the greatest trade-deficit nation in history to a trade-surplus nation, as we were up until the mid-1970s?
Americans are indeed carrying the lion’s share of the load of the defense of the West, and of fighting the terrorists and radical Islamists of the Middle East, and of protecting South Korea and Japan.
But if our NATO and Asian allies refuse to make the increases in defense he demands, is Trump really willing to cancel our treaty commitments, walk away from our war guarantees, and let these nations face Russia and China on their own? Could he cut that umbilical cord?
Ike’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles spoke of conducting an “agonizing reappraisal” of U.S. commitments to defend NATO allies, if they did not contribute more money and troops.
Dulles died in 1959, and that reappraisal, threatened 60 years ago, never happened. Indeed, when the Cold War ended, out NATO allies cut defense spending again. Yet we are still subsidizing NATO in Europe and have taken on new allies since the Soviet Empire fell.
If Europe refuses to invest the money in defense Trump demands, or accept the tariffs America needs to reduce and erase its trade deficits, what does he do? Is he prepared to shut U.S. bases and pull U.S. troops out of the Baltic republics, Poland and Germany, and let the Europeans face Vladimir Putin and Russia themselves?
This is not an academic question. For the crunch that was inevitable when Trump was elected seems at hand.
He promised to negotiate with Putin and improve relations with Russia. He promised to force our NATO allies to undertake more of their own defense. He pledged to get out and stay out of Mideast wars, and begin to slash the trade deficits that we have run with the world.
And that’s what America voted for.
Now, after 500 days, he faces formidable opposition to these defining goals of his campaign, even within his own party.
Putin remains a pariah on Capitol Hill. Our allies are rejecting the tariffs Trump has imposed and threatening retaliation. Free trade Republicans reject tariffs that might raise the cost of the items U.S. companies makes abroad and then ships back to the United States.
The decisive battles between Trumpian nationalism and globalism remain ahead of us. Trump’s critical tests have yet to come.
Jordan Peterson is the University of Toronto psychology professor rightly applauded for his opposition to Canada's recently enacted law "to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code" (Bill C16) in such ways as to compel, among other things, the use of self-selected pronouns demanded by transgender and other minorities from the mundane Zie and Zim to such loony extremes as His Majesty and It's Serene Highness.
Less well known are Peterson's ideas about intelligence. In the short video below, Peterson reveals his thinking on this topic as he describes what he calls a "horrifying thing", namely what he says is the finding of US Army psychologists who were "motivated to find an accurate predictor [of the competence of recruits], so they used IQ."
One of the most terrifying statistics I ever came across [related to] the rationale of the US armed forces for not inducting anyone with an IQ of less than 83. Lets just take that apart, because it's a horrifying thing. After 100 years, essentially, of careful statistical anaylsis, the armed forces concluded that if you had an IQ of 83 or less there wasn't anything you could be trained to do in the military at any level of the organization that wasn't positively counterproductive. OK, so what, 83, OK, yeah, one in ten, one in ten, that's one in ten people, and what that really means, as far as I can tell, if you imagine that the military is approximately as complex as the broader society, then there is no place in our cognitively complex society for one in ten people. So what are we going to do about that? The answer is, no one knows. It's a vicious problem.
At that point, the interviewer interjects:
It's hard to train people to become creative, adaptive, problem solvers.
To which Peterson responds:
It's impossible. You can't do it. It doesn't work. Sorry, it doesn't work.
So here is expressed a basic mistake underlying the IQ-ist creed: it is to assume what has to be demonstrated. Specifically, that IQ test scores are an accurate predictor of competence in the military or, as Peterson clearly implies, every other sphere of human activity.
But cursory examination reveals that everything Peterson is saying is obvious bunk. If, for example, ten percent of the US population is totally incompetent, then one should expect a floor to the unemployment rate of no less than 10%, whereas in fact, US unemployment is currently under four percent, while the unemployment rate for African Americans with an average IQ of 85, or barely above Peterson's threshold for total uselessness, is under 6%.
As for the claim that there is no place in "our cognitively complex society for one in ten people," what exactly is he suggesting? The thinking of those prewar Hitler admirers in the Anglo-American eugenics movement come to mind. That Peterson concludes that the existence of so many incompetent people is a "vicious problem," certainly suggests a willingness to consider extreme solutions.
But in any case, what did he mean by "our cognitively complex society"? Can a society even have cognitive features? Perhaps what he meant was our cognitively demanding society. But is it really? Is it harder to stay alive in a world of 24/7 shopping, homeless shelters, and food stamps than in prehistoric times? And even for those productively employed, how many have cognitively challenging jobs — store clerks? coffee-shop employees? gas station attendants? hospital orderlies? Or the lower ranks of academia, say 90% of college professors?
And what about the Africans? With a mean IQ 84, half the Nigerian population is close to, or below Peterson's competence threshold, yet Nigeria's population is booming. So who's gonna win the evolutionary race: IQ 98 Americans with their below replacement fertility, or Nigerians doubling their population every 30 years? Then there's the Mozambiquans, with a mean IQ of 64 despite a significant Euro-African population component and, like Nigerians, a fertility two and half times the replacement rate.
And, conclusively refuting Peterson's claim that men with an IQ of less than 83 are useless to the US military for anything whatever is the fact that a large proportion of the troops, 354,000 of them, that were sent by the US to fight in Vietnam had IQ's of around 70. To learn more search the Web for Project 100, and MacNamara's Morons.
Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, a post-nationalist for global governance, wants unrestricted access to the US market for Canadian steel, aluminum, cars, and everything else, just as he believes in free access to the cheapest products from the sweatiest of sweaty Asian sweat shops to the Canadian market.
Donald Trump, an American nation-state democrat, wants to restore America's manufacturing base and restore working class prosperity by all necessary means including trade protectionism. In particular, Trump wants to restore prosperity to the rust-belt states of America upon whose defection from the Democratic Party his election depended. Hence Trump's imposition of tariffs on imported steel and aluminum from, among other places, Canada.
Faced by this departure from the liberal gospel of global integration and the abandonment of nation-state democracy and sovereignty, Trudeau appears to be at a loss. He talks of the inevitable return of logic and common sense to US policy, as if Trump were the moron and he the political genius in the equation.
But the more Trudeau and Canada's state broadcaster the CBC disses Trump, the more cheerfully will Trump be inclined to trounce Canada's fantasist trade minister, Chrystia Freeland, with next, perhaps, a duty on imported cars and car parts. And why not a tax on imported energy including Canadian oil, as long ago advocated by the American nationalist and speech writer to several US Presidents, Patrick J. Buchanan.
So Trudeau is stumped. Canada's chief trade partner doesn't give a damn about Canada's sappy globalist ideals. Trump simply aims to make America richer and stronger, a project that seems well on its way to accomplishment by a combination of four policies.
First, to cut corporate taxes, thereby promoting the patriation of profits of US-based international companies and investment in American manufacturing.
Second, to lift restrictions on US oil and gas extraction, thereby sharply raising US GDP.
Third, to use import tariffs to boost the profitability and hence growth of American industry.
Fourth, to impose control and selectivity on US immigration, thereby increasing the productivity of America's immigrant human capital.
For Trudeau and the CBC to express their disdain for Trump's intellect and common sense only ensures that whatever damage US policies cause Canada will be applied more relentlessly. Indeed, Trudeau's adherence to the Obaman policy of dismantling the sovereign democratic Western nation state, flooding the West with however many people from the Third World can reach Western shores, and undermining Western workers living standards by opening markets to the products of sweatshop labor abroad is now a sure-fire loser.
Trudeau's short and foolish reign is thus surely near its end. Who will succeed him? Who knows, but it is interesting to note that former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, aged 84, who said on his departure from Parliament that like England's William Ewart Gladstone, he would return in his eighties, has recently made a public reappearance. Dino, as George Dubya Bush named Chrétien, would be a match for Trump, and would surely be able to clinch a deal on trade.
But then the Tories may perhaps be wondering about Brian Mulroney, undoubtedly the most able Conservative politician of recent decades, a friend of Trump's, an expert on trade who presided over the negotiation of the Free Trade Agreement.
Could we be about to see North America return to the Mesozoic, an age of the gerontocrats*.
____
*Mohamad Mahathir, the newly elected Prime Minister of Malaysia is 91 years old, just a little younger than the blind Venetian Doge, Enrico Dandolo, who personally led the naval force that trashed Constantinople, the capital of the Western Roman Empire, on November 24, 1202.
