Author: William Zachmann

The Coming ‘Copernican Revolution’ of the 21st Century C.E.

The standard model of physics and cosmology based on Einstein’s Relativity Theory and Quantum Theory is wholly inadequate. It is the contemporary equivalent of the collapsing geocentric (Ptolemaic) model of the universe, relying on increasingly ridiculous notions of ‘epicycles’ on the brink of the Copernican Revolution 500 years ago. In this video, Canopus Research President and Semeiotic (dot com) blogger William F. Zachmann explains why – and what comes next!

Semeiotic on Crowdcast (Archived)

See My Prior Events Now On Crowdcast! Free!

The two ‘Test Events’ and the first four regular events for my old (and no longer used) Patreon Channel are still available, free, on Crowdcast in replay mode. Recorded early in 2021, they are a bit dated, but perhaps of some historical interest. Here are the links to them:

Initial [First] Test Event: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/initial-test-event

Second Test Event: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/second-test-event

First Regular Event: (“Where’s Durham“)

Second Regular Event: (“Impeachment – The Mouse is in the Trap“)

Third Regular Event: (“How Deep the Swamp“)

Fourth Regular Event: (“The Courts – Federal Districts to SCOTUS“)

wfz

Mueller’s Farewell Address?

Riding quietly off into the sunset? Nice try, Bob, but I don’t think it’s going to work!

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III this morning delivered what he clearly hopes will be his final “Farewell Address” at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. In his televised presentation Mueller said “our investigation is complete”; “we are formally closing the Special Counsel’s Office”; and “As well, I am resigning from the Department of Justice and returning to private life”.

He both opened and closed his remarks with references to alleged Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 election concluding: “I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments—that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election. That allegation deserves the attention of every American.”

He cast a bit of shade on the @realDonaldTrump‘s claim that the report ‘proved’ there was no collusion and no obstruction but did so merely by reiterating and referring to what was already in the report – adding nothing new beyond what was in the report.

Depending on their biases, various commentators and so-called ‘news’ reporters have opined that he was trying to get people more concerned about Russian interference in U.S. elections; was trying to encourage House Democrats to move forward with impeachment proceedings against President Donald J. Trump (something, curiously that the Democrat Party leadership seems suddenly rather reluctant to do); or whatever. They have thereby totally missed what is really going on here.

The real news hidden in plain sight in Mueller’s announcement this morning is none of the above: It is that he is, and for very good reasons, terrified at the possibility of having to deal with the very tough questions he will get from Republican members of Congress (House and Senate) if he is forced to testify there. He knows very well that will not go at all well for him, for his highly partisan one-sided phony investigation, or for the Democratic Party and its chances to unseat Trump in 2020.

Mueller is clearly telling the Dems in Congress that he has nothing more for them and that if they want to try to impeach Trump they need to do it on the basis of what is already in the report. He is telling the Democrats that they should not insist on bringing him in to testify before any committee of the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives. He does not want to be required to answer the questions that will be asked of him by Republican minority members of House committee or, even worse, by Republican senators in committee hearings in the Republican-controlled Senate. That is the real issue here.

If the Democrats compel Mueller to testify before House committees, that will open the door for the Republicans to expose the ridiculous bias and partisan blindness of the Special Counsel and his team of ‘angry Democrats’. Mueller hopes he can get the Democrats to lay off, to not subpoena him to testify before the House committees. He hopes the Republicans will not independently require his testimony before Senate committees – something Mueller desperately wants to avoid – if the Democrats to not require him to testify on their own hook.

Based on at least their initial reactions and comments following Mueller’s speech, it looks like the Democrats (or, at least, the Democrat leadership) got the message. It will be interesting to see how well it plays out, however, with their increasingly strident left-wing troops. Enjoy the show!

Q Put Up or Shut Up Time?

In my last post here, Querulous Questions Quickly, published on 10 September 2018, I first took note of the phenomenon of Q (#QAnon), published some links to various sites useful in learning about what Q seems to be about, and cautiously concluded as follows: 

Having put in a fair amount of time checking it out, I have no doubt that, at the very least, there is some serious there there! Q/QAnon is an important element in the unfolding drama that is the highly entertaining and amusing Reality TV show that is not just American politics, but world affairs today.

The outward manifestations of Q/QAnon over the past three months have done nothing to contradict my original cautious impression – but neither have they yet offered convincing evidence that the purported crackdown on the minions of ‘the deep state’ repeatedly predicted by Q will in fact, happen. So far, there is far more to suggest that the ‘deep state’ has been successfully  putting the hurt on President Donald J. Trump than there is of any effective or successful counter-attack against the ‘deep state’ by Trump & Friends (or anyone else).

Of course, when Q started over a year ago (in late October 2017), Q said a lot of things were about to happen  that did not happen, at least not as or when Q first said they would. But Q did not entirely strike out, either. Q has correctly indicated at least some things that did happen as predicted and has offered some reasonably convincing evidence to suggest that: 1) Q is in some why closely connected to Trump & Friends, 2) represents a real movement to counter and neutralize ‘the deep state’, and 3) may in fact accurately be predicting dramatic events yet to come.

Having said that, however, it clearly is getting closer and closer to ‘put up or shut up’ time for Q. If Q is not simply blowing smoke then some of the major moves contra various ‘deep state’ players need to start happening before long. The large and growing number of the ‘sealed indictments’ that Q has been talking about for over a year now need to morph into real indictments and arrests.

Otherwise, there will be no other sensible option but to conclude that Q is, in fact, nothing more than the kooky alt-right ‘conspiracy theory’ monger LARP that the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, and the rest of the mainstream media claim Q is.

One way or the other, we should know for sure by the Vernal Equinox, at the latest.

Querulous Questions Quickly

Funny thing about it is that I did not pay any attention to Q (#QAnon) – I was barely even aware of the phenomenon – until key elements of the extremely anti-@realDonaldTrump mainstream media freaked out over it after some folks turned up at a Trump rally wearing Q-related t-shirts.

What caught my attention were a number of virtually simultaneous denunciations of QAnon as a dangerous, right-wing conspiracy theory that broke out like rashes after a naked orgy in a bed of poison ivy on the thin skins of well-known fake news media including CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

It was immediately clear to me that anything that could so totally get their knickers in a twist was something I should surely pay more attention to than I had previously (which was, in effect, none at all).

Having put in a fair amount of time checking it out, I have no doubt that, at the very least, there is some serious there there! Q/QAnon is an important element in the unfolding drama that is the highly entertaining and amusing Reality TV show that is not just American politics, but world affairs today.

We’ll have more to say about it later but, for now, my advice to anyone who wants to have a clue about what’s going on in the world is: Check it out!

Here are a few links for the Qurious:

A mother lode of Q posts: https://qanon.pub/

Another: https://qmap.pub

A good (and reasonably sane) beginners guide to Q: 

A sort of ‘founding document’ explanation: 

A typical MSM denunciation of Q: 

A good recent (7 September 2018) update analysis: 

Another interesting perspective here:

A Contrarian Hypothesis Re: Michael Cohen

In a very interesting interview article by Isaac Chotiner with former Starr investigation attorney Paul Rosenzweig in Slate titled “What is Michael Cohen’s Endgame?” Rosenzweig expresses skepticism about the likelihood of Cohen cutting a plea bargain deal favorable to himself with prosecutors assuming, as seems likely, that he will eventually be charged with something or other. Like virtually all coverage to date, Chotiner’s article and Rosenzweig’s comments rest on the assumption that it is the Mueller investigation that is the primary mover behind the search warrant on Cohen. That looks like a reasonable assumption.

It is not, however, the only possibility. Cohen’s office was searched and documents and recordings were seized under a search warrant on April 9, 2018. President Trump terminated Cohen as (one of his) attorney(s) shortly thereafter, in May 2018. The mainstream media (MSM) immediately assumed this was somehow going to be very bad for Trump.

Recent events, however, hint at what might be a very different scenario:

First, Cohen’s own oddly public discussion(s) of the matter and his leaking of a partial recording (consistently referred to by the MSM as a ‘tape’ though more likely made with a digital voice recorder) of a phone conversation with Trump are, as Rosenzweig points out in the article cited above, extremely bizarre behavior for anyone with a real possibility of cutting a deal with prosecutors who are out to get Trump.

Second, Trump’s attorneys willingly and quickly waved attorney-client privilege with regard to all the recordings seized from Cohen’s office. This, even though the recordings of Trump were classified as privileged by the court and could have remained so if Trump’s attorneys wanted them to.

Third, Trump’s highly visible ‘spokes-attorney’ Rudy Giuliani has recently, in a Fox News interview, said that a) he expects all of Cohen’s recordings will eventually be made public and that b) he’d be happy to have them all made public immediately! Giuliani was obviously cheerful and very much enjoying himself in that interview, clearly expecting that release of all the tapes would reflect negatively on Cohen and pose no problem whatsoever for President Trump.

Fourth, Giuliani and others have hinted that many of Cohen’s recordings were with members of the press. Recall that the Trump administration was, early on, plagued by unfavorable leaks from ‘inside the White House’ to hostile members of the media. Such leaks began considerably to diminish in frequency and severity starting late in the spring of 2017.

Fifth, and finally, the search warrant against Cohen was issued as part of a criminal investigation by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York , not directly by the Mueller investigation. Note, too, that it is said to have been pressure from that very office that led James Comey to decide he had to reverse Peter Strzok‘s month-long ignoring of the issue of the presence of Hillary Clinton‘s emails on Anthony Wiener‘s laptop and to publicly address the matter just a week before the 2016 election.

Add it all up and a very interesting possibility emerges: The possibility that it was not Mueller but, rather, the Trump administration that was the real driver behind the investigation of Michael Cohen.

Perhaps Trump or Trump’s people began to suspect that Michael Cohen was the source of many of the damaging leaks to the hostile media and perhaps also working against his client’s (President Trump’s) interests in other ways as well. Perhaps they suspected him of disloyalty and betrayal, maybe even collusion with the #neverTrump movement.

Admittedly this is very speculative at this point, however it is an alternative way for “Reading the Signs of the Times” that is remarkably consistent with the five points noted above. I’m just sayin’ . . ..

 

 

Hannibal Fogg Review

Review – Hannibal Fogg and the Supreme Secret of Man by Tahir Shah

I am and have long been very positively disposed to Tahir Shah and more broadly to the members of his extended family and will continue to be so. But I am quite sure his father, for whom I have great respect, would not approve were I simply to echo the routinely five star sycophantic adulation of the ratings, so far, of this book (some of them appearing to come from sources that look a bit dodgy, to put it as kindly as I can). This is a very interesting book and very much worth reading. But it is also a book, in my admittedly not very humble opinion, that could (and should) have been much better than it is, given its long gestation period.

Though not everyone will immediately understand what I mean by saying so, I will say that this book (among other things) is one of the most interesting ‘fictional autobiographies’ yet written. Like Tahir Shah, Will Fogg engages the really quite daunting task of having to work out, in his own life, what it means to have been born into a quite extraordinary family with a history of some quite extraordinary accomplishments – the method, meaning, and significance of which is not necessarily any more immediately understandable (let alone reproducible) by virtue of having been born into that family than it might be to some random but interested external observer. The Fogg family, like the Shah family and other families with similar ‘qualities’, imposes a rather heavy burden on each new generation that comes along – a heritage that some might (and some certainly do) envy but that can sometimes be at least as much of a curse as it is a blessing for the folks involved.

This book is, again among other things, a very interesting example of how one might go about trying to make the best of it. Especially since, as the Magi guy puts it to his colleagues “on the island of Praslin in the Seychelles archipelago” on page 347: “There is surely no need to remind either of you of the danger we face. Should the Bloodchild succeed, organised faith as we know it will be doomed. The very thought of it . . . mankind in direct communication with God. It is preposterous even to contemplate it.” To which the horrified Magi woman replies: “Immense wealth accrued over centuries will evaporate. Our communal lands, our treasures, our influence . . . all will be lost in the blink of an eye.” Doggone!

A second observation is that, at least as far as this book goes, Tahir seems to me to do much better at starting it than at finishing it. The first half of the book is a delightful read inviting a willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy what begin as very fresh and inventive exercises in 1001 Nights imaginative devices. The second half, however, not only gets a bit repetitive as these devices are used, and overused, and overused again, but in effect it turns the ‘deus ex machina’ (ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός) literary device into a stellar plurality of deities, rather like chopping up the moon into a bunch of less bright stars, in which, as it were, every Djinn must have its day.

The lesser deities flow/and or drive forth, etc. in a plethora of Ian Fleming style characterizations of booze, guns, cars, clothes and such: “borrowed yellow Rolls-Royce Tourer”; “The vehicle was dominated by a V-12, 1.4-liter Falcon aviation engine, built at Rolls-Royce’s fighter aircraft factory”; “removed a revolver, a Russian-made Nagant M1895“; “a tray of flutes filled with chilled Ruinart“, “a glass of chilled Bollinger 1886″; “he tasted Cristal Roederer“; “The Baroness motioned to the sommelier, requesting that he serve yet more Taittinger“; “washed down with a glass or two of Chateau Latour 1883″; and so forth. No wonder Will prefers Bud Light!

The deities at the next level up manifest themselves as a series of incredibly dangerous situations from which it is certainly impossible to escape and even more incredibly impossible devices by which an escape is made. The long trek through the seven missing components of the Alexander Machine bears more than a little resemblance to the couples’ ‘quests’ and ‘challenges’ on the Discovery Channel’s “Naked and Afraid” ‘reality’ TV series (though Will and Emma not only remain chaste vis-a-vis one another but also remain – at least most of the time with only an exception or two – fully clothed). And the final apotheosis which in the end reunites Will with grandpa Hannibal is about as satisfying a resolution as that of Don Juan and his apprentices jumping off the cliff at the end of Carlos Castaneda’s “The Active Side of Infinity” but absent the epilogue. One suspects, however, there just might be a sequel out there somewhere at the end of the rainbow.

Having said all that, I nevertheless heartily recommend the book as a good read and look forward to Tahir’s next book – whether a sequel to this one or or not.

Understanding Donald Trump

Although many, perhaps most, Americans clearly have strong opinions about President Donald J. Trump, pro and con, few really understand him. This is true not only for his #neverTrump haters, deeply afflicted with TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) as they undoubtedly are, but for the majority of his more-or-less supporters as well.

This was egregiously demonstrated by some generally pro-Trump Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Trey Gowdy who at least briefly joined the Democrats and the MSM (mainstream media) in their cringing, hand-wringing reaction to Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin. Gingrich and Gowdy clearly failed to understand what, in fact, President Trump was (and is) doing with Putin (and the EU, NATO, North Korea and much more), why, and how he is doing it. They just don’t get it.

The key to understanding Trump is actually quite easy; quite simple. But it is so different from contemporary ‘conventional wisdom’ that for most folks, it is like the late Chicago comedian Lord Buckley‘s characterization of the bear dance in his delightful “God’s Own Drunk” comedy monologue about the whiskey still: “It was like the jitterbug. It was so simple it evaded me!”

We actually indicated the key to understanding Trump in the very first post here on semiotic.com back in the wee hours of the night on December 16, 2015 when we confidently (and correctly) said:

The Professional Pontificators got it wrong, again. They are all over the place trying to make sense of last night’s (Tuesday, 15 December, 2015) Republican debate and they are as clueless as ever. Trump is going to win. He’s going to win the Republican nomination. He’s going to win the general election in November 2016. And he’s going to win by a lot. Here’s why (and how).

Adding:

He is also not the least bit crazy, erratic, impulsive, or reckless. His ‘crazy’ is entirely as in “crazy like a fox”. It is deliberate, conscious, carefully crafted, and used as an instrument (or, when necessary, weapon) to get the results he aims to get. Whether he has ever read it or not, he embodies the practical wisdom described in Thomas Cleary’s “Thunder in the Sky: Secrets on the Acquisition and Exercise of Power”, a brilliant translation of two Chinese Taoist classics: “The Master of Demon Valley” and “The Master of the Hidden Storehouse.”

But the most concise statement of the real key to understanding Trump is in another of Cleary’s books: The Book of Leadership and Strategy,  a translation from the Huainanzi, characterized on Wikipedia as “an ancient Chinese text that consists of a collection of essays that resulted from a series of scholarly debates held at the court of Liu An, King of Huainan, sometime before 139 BC.”

The most concise key to understanding Trump may be found on page 69 of  The Book of Leadership and Strategy. It is as follows:

The way of the warrior is to show others softness but meet them with firmness, to show others weakness but to surmount them with strength, to shrink back from them but reach out to counter them.

When where you are coming from is not where you are going, and what you show is not what you plan, then no one can tell what you are doing. You are like lightning — no one can anticipate where it will strike, and it never strikes twice in the same place.

Therefore, your victories can be one hundred percent complete, in communion with hidden knowledge. When no one knows your door, this is called supreme genius.

Trump’s enemies (foreign as well as domestic) and even most of his friends simply do not understand this. Most never will.