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.
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!
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 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.
‘Fake news’ is far from being the Internet-induced innovation that contemporary historically ignorant pontificators make it out to be. On the contrary it is, like propaganda and the ‘deep state’, as old as human society on this planet. The external aspects change over time, but the underlying forms remain as they long have been
The Road to November (2018): There will, no doubt, be much to keep us amused and entertained on the political front over the next six months but nothing, no single story, is as likely to be directly decisive for the future course of the USA (and the world) as the mid-term US elections that will be held exactly six months from today (May 6, 2018) on Tuesday, November 6, 2018! Stay tuned
There seems to be a major ‘spy vs. spy’ aspect of Mueller’s attempted ‘soft coup’ to depose President Donald J. Trump that is merely the superficial tip of the iceberg of long-standing battles between sharply divided rival ‘deep state’ factions within the US military, intelligence, and foreign relations/policy establishment.
Despite the presently widely uncontested ‘fact’ that the Russians hacked the US election in 2016 on orders from Vladimir Putin, there is as yet no factual evidence to prove they did. Maybe they did. But maybe they did not. Stay tuned . . .
This is my first in what will be my regular series of Semeiotic (“Reading the Signs of the Times”) video podcasts. This one is about Donald J. Trump and former CIA Director John O. Brennan.
The absurd surrealistic drama concerning a purported ‘Russian connection’ behind Donald J. Trump’s 2016 election victory unfolding in the run-up to his inauguration as the forty-fifth President of the United States of America has a basis very different from the visible circus side show and the fake news that drives it. It reflects a struggle within the US ‘deep state’ over radically different ways to deal with China.
Ever since the secret alliance between the USA and China against the old Soviet Union, brokered in the 1970s by Henry Kissinger and the Nixon Administration, American policy toward China has been dominated by globalist “panda huggers” who believe China’s rise is inevitable and that the best the USA can do is to facilitate China’s economic development in hopes that will somehow lead to a more free, open, and democratic China.
A clear statement of that view from a self-admitted panda hugger is found in former US Secretary of the Treasury (and former Goldman Sachs CEO) Henry J. Paulson Jr.’s “Dealing with China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower”. While noting China’s ambitious to become the most powerful, most dominant nation on earth, Paulson argues that the best the USA can do is to continue to help China to develop and grow, hoping somehow to integrate it into an internationalist world order.
A contrary view is presented in Michael Pillsbury’s “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower”. Pillsbury is a long-time CIA operative and American diplomat who, like Paulson, characterizes himself as having been a long-time panda hugger–but one who has, within the past decade, had the scales fall from his eyes, enabling him to see that China is anything but a friendly panda toward the USA and to the West; that China is, in fact, a very dangerous (and very stealthy) dragon.
“I was told, [in China in 2011-2013]” Pillsbury writes, “by the same people who had long assured me of China’s only modest leadership within an emerging multipolar world–that the Communist Party is realizing its long-term goal of restoring China to it’s ‘proper’ place in the world. In effect, they were telling me that they had deceived me and the American government. With perhaps a hint of understated pride, they were revealing the most systematic, significant, and dangerous intelligence failure in American history. And because we have no idea the Marathon is even underway, America is losing.”
The first chapter of Pillsbury’s book is titled, “The China Dream.” That is an explicit reference both to a phrase popular with Communist China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, and to the book “The China Dream: Great Power Thinking and Strategic Posture in the Post-American Era” by Liu Mingfu, a retired colonel of the Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) and Professor at China’s National Defense University. Liu’s book explicitly states China’s intention to dominate the world by the middle of the Twentieth Century (if not sooner).
Should the USA, out of fear and weakness, continue down the road already travelled, as advocated by Paulson, a course clearly favored by Hillary Clinton’s and John Kerry’s US Department of State under the Obama Administration (and by globalist elements of the US Intelligence Community–including most of the Ivy League CIA elite) and thereby assist Communist China in making their China Dream of world dominance by end of the Hundred Year Marathon on the 100th anniversary of Mao’s takeover of China? Or should the USA, instead, respond in strength and determination with counter-measures to frustrate and prevent China’s intended rise?
Clearly, with Pillsbury (and in even stronger terms than he expresses), there is a growing faction in the US ‘deep state’ that does not see China’s ultimate world dominance as inevitable and that is willing to take on and to defeat the Communist China Challenge (which will very likely prove to be the ultimate reality TV show of the 21st Century). That faction is certainly present, though not in control of and as yet a minority in the CIA. It is strongest, however, in the US Military Intelligence Community. And, most important, the ‘curb China’ faction is very clearly strongest of all in the incoming Trump Administration.
China has long very skillfully played the US for a fool by actively supporting and boosting pro-China elements in the Bush(I), Clinton, Bush(II), and Obama Administrations. The purported ‘Russian interference’ in the US 2016 election pales to insignificance relative to the influence (interference, and hacking) exercised in the USA by China over the past half a century and more. The anti-Russian, anti-Putin fake news manipulation over the past year or two benefits China. It is in China’s interest (not in the interest of the USA) to encourage and to try to create an adversarial relation between Russia and the USA.
Why? Because the most effective way to for the USA to curb China’s plan to dominate the world is to build a broad coalition of allies with mutual interests to encircle, curb, and contain China. This must include not only Europe and Japan, but also countries like India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Myanmar. But, most of all, it must include Russia.
Regardless whether the recent anti-Trump, anti-Russian disinformation campaign is inspired, encouraged, and funded by China (it very likely is), it clearly works in the interest of China. As (ironically) even admitted panda hugger Paulson accurately chronicles, China in effect ‘blew the cover’ on its plan for world domination by 2049 by overestimating the extent to which the financial crises of 2008 signaled the accelerated (and incipient) decline of the US and of capitalism. China was like an American football defensive lineman who jumps prematurely across the line of scrimmage on a head fake from the offensive quarterback. Or, in terms of the Chinese 36 Strategies, China forgot the lesson of “disturb the snake by hitting the grass” and prematurely jumped into the open.
“To disturb the snake by hitting the grass can be, according to circumstances, either a desirable or an undesirable action. When the intention is to catch the snake by surprise, disturbing the grass would be a mistake. If, however, a direct confrontation with the snake is wanted, then hitting the grass is recommended so that the snake will make itself visible.”
The 2008 financial meltdown was not a clever exercise of this ancient Chinese strategy by the USA, but the effect was the same as if it had been. It flushed the incipient Chinese snake-wanting-to-be-a-dragon out into the open with exaggerated over-confidence that soon led to the explicit statement of Communist China’s real intentions with the “100 Year Marathon” and the “China Dream.”
China was further lulled into exposing its real aims by the feckless wimp-dom of an Obama Administration that was more concerned with global warming and LGBTQ rights than with maintaining America’s world leadership and a strong military. China clearly expected a continuation of these policies by a Hillary Clinton administration that would be as readily ‘for sale’ as her husband’s had been. China was even more disappointed to see Trump win than the Democrat Party was–and even more keen to delegitimize Trump and stir up trouble between the USA and Russia than the Democrats (and a few anti-Trump Republicans like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio) are.
The fake news circus side show over purported Russian influence on Trump is the last dying gasp of the pro-China panda huggers eager to sell out the USA to China. But they have lost. There is a new sheriff in town.
They, and China too, need to adjust to the reality of an America ready to be great again; ready to put an end to China’s plans for world domination. China can no longer count on the USA to roll over and surrender, as Obama & Co. were inclined to do. China’s leaders must adapt to this new reality, lest the China Dream turn into the Chinese Communist Party’s Nightmare.
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