Category: Opinions

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:

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.

 

 

Propaganda, Fake News, and the Deep State

‘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)

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

 

Spy Versus Spy

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.