Clusterfuck Nation

The mysterious financial repo markets — which practically no one outside of banking understands (and even some banking insiders don’t) — are going wonky again like they did in September 2019, just before You-Know-What sucker-punched the world with lockdowns, stolen elections, and fake vaccines. Half of America still hasn’t got its head straight. . . and here we go again.

The private equity outfits, like giant BlackRock, are wobbling so hard that they had to “gate redemptions” — meaning, investors can’t pull their money out of funds going dark with dubious collateral. It’s exactly what sparks panics. Money can only stand so much unreality. The Rube Goldberg machine of finance — a scaffold of insane complexity designed to bamboozle the rubes — is threatening to fly apart. The world only needs so many pre-owned yachts.

Plus, there’s a war on, which has disrupted the regular flow of the world’s primary resource: oil. That’s the really-real side of the picture. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. You’ve got to wonder how much additional pounding the lunatic state of Iran can take. It’s not clear who is even in charge there. Iran’s supposed foreign minister, one Aras Araghchi, is suddenly offering to give up those 440 kilos of 60-percent enriched uranium that are at the heart of this quarrel. Sounds a little surrender-ish, though he made the offer with a certain defiant bluster. Let’s see where that goes. Maybe the war will be over sooner than you thought.

Watch and listen starting at 13:00-minute Mark

With all this in motion, things slip-sliding all over the place, the week ahead may be one in which nobody can think straight or get a straight answer. Here’s something to chew on: do you think Great Britain is our dear friend because we speak the same language? Great Britain has been allowing Iran’s ruling Revolutionary Guard to park its money in London for half a century while Lloyd’s offers jacked-up insurance rates to all those tankers faring through the Strait of Hormuz.

This dynamic has made world oil up to 15-percent more expensive since the 1970s, and Britain’s banks have been creaming off the premium all the while. Trillions. Mr. Trump is putting an end to that racket while he also terminates Iran’s ability to export Jihad thuggery throughout the Middle East. That’s the meaning behind the Abraham Accords and the new Board of Peace set up to figure out Gaza — and probably to replace the broken United Nations as a mediating force in the region’s long-running conflicts.

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Mr. Trump is also sending a message to China: the US will have something to say about the flow of oil going there out of the Persian Gulf, which is to say most of China’s imported oil. (The US imports relatively little oil out of the Persian Gulf, two to three percent of total US oil consumption which is 20-million barrels a day.) This is pretty serious power politics, but notice that China has not started World War Three over it. Mr. Trump and Xi are still talking, and are scheduled to meet in Beijing in April. Meanwhile, Xi is having plenty of trouble of his own with twitchy PLA generals, a staggering deflationary export economy, and a lot of angry young people thrown out of work.

One thing our country will not get a straight answer on this week is the SAVE Act. Senate Majority Leader John Thune made noises over the weekend about staging a half-assed “debate” on the floor, a demi-filibuster. . . then holding a guaranteed-to-fail cloture vote. . . making it impossible to reach a place where the bill might be subject to a simple majority vote. The procedural bullshit at issue is surely a challenge for the general voting public to understand. The bottom line is that Majority Leader Thune is entirely in-charge of the filibuster process and could make it work to advantage the SAVE Act if he wanted to. He could call for a full, “standing” filibuster that would require the bill’s opponents to explain themselves — that is, to explain why they prefer election fraud.

So, for now, the Save Act will fail to pass. The public will register the failure, if not the twisted route that got it there, and they will be mighty pissed-off. The really interesting part is what happens after all this is acted out, especially Senator Thune’s comic attempt to explain why he did this. And especially if, in the weeks just ahead, the nation watches federal indictments rain down for election fraud in Georgia, Wisconsin, and other states where so many weird things happened right before our eyes in November, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Sometime after that, the SAVE Act will come up for a vote again, and with a vengeance!

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

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JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

Don’t lose your shit over mines in the Strait of Hormuz and the oil price shooting up. Iran has many thousands of mines. But something has to lay them out in the water. Iran has no more naval ships. They have small boats. The US can see everything moving on the surface, or sitting at docks. We are blowing them up methodically. The news outlets who want the US to fail in this operation (because: Trump) want you to think that we had no plan for dealing with this problem. That’s not so.

There are very few mines actually laid so far. Tankers are not going through the Strait of Hormuz because their captains are nervous. Their ships and their cargos are worth millions and the insurance costs millions. So, they’re waiting in place, hanging back. The US still has work to do destroying Iran’s shoreline defenses of missile and drone launch sites. Iran is firing all they’ve got left. Whenever they launch something, we see the geo-location on our satellites and radars. The mobile launchers are a little trickier because, obviously, they shoot and move. But they don’t always move fast enough, and there isn’t an endless supply of them.

The US Navy decommissioned its four Avenger-class minesweeper ships in the Persian Gulf in September, 2025, but replaced them with more agile Littoral Combat Ships (LCSs) capable of countering submarines and clearing mines. Two LCS ships — USS Santa Barbara and USS Canberra — quietly deployed in March 2025.

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An LCS uses an Airborne Laser Mine Detection System and an Airborne Mine Neutralization System via helicopter. In the water, it uses mine-hunting sonar and the Unmanned Influence Sweep System — all operated from unmanned surface vessels. The unmanned sweep vehicle triggers magnetic, acoustic, or combination mines, with the LCS at a safe distance.

The LCS vessels are armed with an 11-cell SeaRAM launcher for point defense that fires Rolling Airframe Missiles — fast, radar-guided missiles designed to knock down incoming anti-ship missiles and drones at short range. They also carry Longbow Hellfire missiles with updated software and hardware specifically to counter drones. The Longbow Hellfire uses radar-guided technology enabling it to engage targets through battlefield clutter, with a range of up to eight kilometers — giving the LCS the ability to engage drones before they get close. The LCS ships will be accompanied by Arleigh Burke-class destroyers equipped with Aegis and full missile defense suites for protection against the full spectrum of Iranian threats.

The oil markets are extremely sensitive to any changes in the oil environment, and war induces the most extreme changes. Even outside of war, weird things happen. April 20, 2020, was the apex of Covid-19 paranoia when everyday life was shutting down all over Western Civ. The price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures — specifically the May 2020 contract, which was expiring the very next day — crashed to an historic low of negative $37.63 per barrel. That is, sellers were literally paying buyers to take oil off their hands. By the following day, April 21, prices had rebounded back into positive territory, though still at very depressed levels around $10–$15 per barrel.

The current situation with oil in the $100 range is not going to be a one-day event, but it won’t last forever, either, so do your deep-breathing exercises and calm down. Of course, in America right now, a seditious news media will take every opportunity to induce exquisite anxiety in the public-at-large to deflect from the order-of-battle that President DJT is carrying out to 1) improve America’s geopolitical position and relations, and 2) to defeat the forces both external and domestic that seek to wreck the country.

Which is why you might see that the next move in the order of battle will be against the wrecking crew in our own country, including the political figures behind the decade-long conspiracy to undermine the president, the administrative rogues running the “resistance” in government agencies, the Lawfare ninjas queering the justice system, and the big money that funds the hundreds of NGOs attempting to instigate a color revolution here. I have visions of perp walks and indictments coming in on the zephyrs of spring.

It looks just now like Majority Leader John Thune and his RINO herd will trample the SAVE Act (election reform) into failure. But consider that Mr. Trump’s FBI has had more than a month to analyze the Fulton County, Georgia, ballot evidence from the 2020 election (while only last week it seized the Maricopa County, AZ, records, and for all we know the agency also has 2020 ballot evidence from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada, too). So, prepare for the public to be shocked and amazed at what has been discovered, and expect to see a sharp attitude change among embarrassed US Senators who will be compelled to come on-board for election reform.

Somewhere in all that, you might expect Cuba to fall — a momentous event, actually, considering the cumulative mischief Cuba’s government has provoked all over the western hemisphere since 1958. We don’t even have to do anything to make it happen, just respond in the aftermath with emergency food and fuel relief, and perhaps some help averting the vengeful slaughter of the old Castro governing network. We don’t want a bloodbath there.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

Alex Krainer is a Croatian-born market analyst, author, and former hedge fund manager based in Monaco. Coming of age in socialist Yugoslavia, Krainer’s unconventional path took him from serving in Croatia’s war of independence to becoming one of the few fund managers to generate positive returns (+27-percent) during the 2008 financial crisis. He founded his own investment management firm in 2007 and later joined Altana Wealth, where he developed systematic portfolio allocation strategies bridging technology and finance. Krainer is the author of Mastering Uncertainty in Commodities Trading“(ranked #1 by Financial-Expert.co.uk), The Grand Deception, and Alex Krainer’s Trend Following Bible. A sought-after voice on geopolitics, commodities markets, and global finance, he publishes regular market analysis through TrendCompass and his Substack, offering sharp, unconventional insights shaped by his unique background navigating both socialist regimes and Western financial markets.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger

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Don’t lose the plot. Embrace the suck. This is the world’s hard time, for now. The birth of anything can be a bloody horror. It can even look like death. Don’t be too afraid to see what comes on the other side of this awful spectacle.

So many Americans are rooting and wishing for the Iran war to turn out badly for Western Civ. And why? Because Trump. And why? Because at the same time he is ending Iran’s long-running nuclear blackmail game, he is terminating the rackets of the Democratic Party. The incipient changes in operational order create new categories of winners and losers.

Now you know why Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists run on the same track as America’s Woke-Jacobin-Marxists, including the pitifully deluded wine ladies of posh West LA, Grosse Point, Beacon Hill, Fairfax County, et cetera, whose brains have been hijacked by the cable news demon factory (and their sponsors). Chaos does everything possible to avoid meeting order.

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This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com.

And this is why passing the SAVE Act is as consequential as ridding the Middle East of its chief chaos agent. Do you realize how perfectly insane our country’s election procedure has become? The fraud is titanic and right in your face, and the remedy is so plain and simple. What possible excuse is there to thwart it? Non-citizens have no right to vote. Mail-in ballots are patently subject to chicanery. Vote tabulation machines are demonstrably hackable. 80-percent of Americans know this is the truth. How is there controversy over this?

How? Because among all the broken institutions in our country, Congress is the worst. The Congress of our time is demonstrating that we might not be worthy of governing ourselves. We are at a cycle-low for public rectitude. Anything goes and nothing matters as long as the campaign contributions keep rolling in. You see how this has been going.

But mark this: we are going to get election reform one way or another. It’s that urgent, and failure to accomplish it by legislation will warrant a national emergency. And when the election machinery has been fixed, we had better do something about the plague of corporate money that runs like poison through our politics because of the Supreme Court’s foolish decision in the 2010 Citizens United case. They decided (by a slim 5-4 majority) that limitless campaign contributions by corporations amounted to free speech under the Constitution.

I will tell you concisely why this was tragically fallacious. Free speech in our country is a God-given right of sovereign citizens. Corporations are not citizens. Corporations don’t have obligations, duties, and responsibilities to the public interest (a.k.a. the common good). Corporations explicitly, by law, have obligations, duties, and responsibilities solely to their share-holders. The interests of corporate share-holders and the nation’s public interest are manifestly oppositional. Perhaps now you can see why this was such a dreadful invitation to political chaos.

So, Mr. Trump, for all his flaws, attempts to bring order out of chaos at home and in global relations, and the agents of chaos mightily resent the shut-down of their precious chaos. With Iran, it has come to fighting fire with fire. It’s unlikely that most of the people in that country seek to become martyrs. The cult of martyrdom is strictly the business of the maniacs who seized power there in 1979, a reign of terror, extended by proxy around the whole Middle East and beyond.

Entwined with Iran’s oil business, and the energy security of many nations, the mullahs inflect the trade of this primary resource with their chaos. The world cannot cope with chaos in the oil trade. The collapsing regime of the mullahs wants to go out turning the entire world into a martyr. Just like the Democratic Party wants to martyr the founding principles of the USA to preserve its matrix of moneygrubbing and power-seeking. These are two forces that require the most severe discipline and Mr. Trump is acting to impose exactly that. It’s painful to witness, but it must happen if we want to continue the human project as a reality-based enterprise.

So, heed what is at stake in the events unspooling. This is a dark moment in a journey back to daylight. Have faith. As the old American hymn goes: Farther along we’ll know more about it; farther along we’ll understand why.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

You probably wonder what the end of this war will look like. It won’t look like V-J Day in Times Square, 1945, with sailors kissing girls they met five seconds ago. Our country is way too divided and disturbed with politically-inflected mental illness for love to bloom in the streets like it did then. If you happen to catch the glum crew on CNN you will detect that they really want this operation to fail because, you know, Trump.

The war will be over when Iran loses the ability to spray missiles and drones all over the place — and notice how they are pouring it on the Emirate states, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and even Azerbaijan, for Gawdsake, turning would-be bystanders into pissed-off additional enemies they need like a hole in the head.

At some point they will run out of ordnance, or the will to roll them out of the supposed 10,000 bat caves their weapons are stashed in. Our side apparently has an uncanny knack for seeing the launchers creep into daylight and efficiently blowing them up. Creates a disincentive to even think about launching. Of course, Iran might have some spectacular last-ditch thingie they can unleash to horrify the world — perhaps a “dirty” bomb that uses the 460 kilos of 60-percent enriched uranium they bragged about at one of the last negotiation sessions before the war with Witkoff and Kushner. Standing by on that.

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This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com.

But, at some point a week or so hence, a stillness will fall upon the earth and sky above Iran, and that will be all she wrote for sheer havoc. Victory will not look much like anything. Just that stillness. The body politic in Iran is another matter. Expect awful turmoil. Iran’s command structure is shattered. Officials don’t dare pick a room in some building to meet in. The Internet is down and most communication with it. Nobody knows who is really in charge, and nobody may be in charge, not for quite a long time to come.

Let’s hope we have the patience to let the Iranians sort out their own governing structure, and that it will be made up of people who are not insane, not fanatics of the martyrdom cult that has ruled the place for fifty years. It’s probably not part of the US plan to slaughter the Revolutionary Guard, or Sepah, the chief apparatus of despotic control in the country. Or the Basij, (Sâzmân-e Basij-e Mostaz’afin, which means “Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed”), an auxiliary volunteer paramilitary militia that acts as the “morality police” and cracks down on dissent. Hundreds of thousands are employed by these groups.

You might imagine circumstances in which the members of those dastardly outfits decide to peel away from them, sensing a loss of legitimacy and danger in remaining on-board. Surely, a lot of Iranians will have blood in their eyes, looking for scores to settle, just as the people took revenge on members of the Shah’s secret police, the Savak, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Even now with the bombs still falling in Tehran (perhaps even because of them), many ordinary Iranians are dancing in the streets. You must suppose there is massive opposition to the regime. But first, chaos.

Why would we feel any necessity to put “boots on the ground” in there? Why expose American troops to the factional fighting that is apt to break out, as it did in Iraq? Did we not learn the lessons of Fallujah? Wouldn’t it be enough that Iran just loses its ability to fire weapons at anyone? Loses its ability to mess with shipping in the Persian Gulf? And loses its ability to foment mischief in other countries, including any ideological influence it might still have, or any financial mojo for sponsoring terrorism? Can we not just stand by and let the Iranians figure out their own future?

Try imagining a peaceful Iran not bent on exporting Jihad (just like you might imagine a peaceful Ukraine, not making itself a problem for the rest of the world). Forgive the cliché, but Iran (a.k.a. Persia), is an old and durable culture, with a highly educated population, one of the world’s largest oil-and-gas reserves, and plenty of other resources. Iran could be somebody. It doesn’t have to be a bum with a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

As for our own country, too many people here are busy wolfing down the black pills with their Adderall and their Starbucks iced lavender cream chai. It’s actually possible that there is a satisfactory outcome to this Iran operation. Would that disappoint you — as it apparently disappoints the glum crew at CNN? As with Iran, it doesn’t pay to be insane, and something close to half of America is insane. That perturbation is mostly lodged in the American Left these days, the Democratic Party, devoted to a long list of ideas and propositions at odds with reality and locked into a strange willful hysteria that regards any kind of good faith as poison. That is exactly why we can’t have clean elections. How about fixing that?

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

Behold the Tour Montparnasse, 59-stories, 689-feet high, built in 1969-1973 during the presidency of Georges Pompidou (yes, he of the inglorious Pompidou Center across the River Seine). Note that there is nothing like it in the neighborhood. Curiously, the hidden hand behind its development belonged to American real estate poobah Wylie F. Tuttle, who enlisted a consortium of 17 French insurance companies and seven banks in the project to get Europe’s then tallest skyscraper built. Minister of Culture, André Malraux at first opposed the idea, then folded under pressure and approved a permit for the monstrosity. The joke goes that the view from the tower is the most beautiful in Paris because it’s the only spot from which the tower can’t be seen. It has also been called the box the Eiffel Tower came in.

Now, more than a half century later, the thing is getting a bit worn. The surrounding shopping mall district, spanning about 22-acres, was hemorrhaging tenants and had become the campground haunt of homeless migrants. Something had to be done! Starchitect Renzo Piano was hired to rescue it — though there was plenty of sentiment to raze the goshdarn thing altogether.

The tower itself is getting a $700-million “skin-job” — the monkeyshit brown original cladding changed-out for shiny mirrored glass, with an underskirt of hanging gardens on the lower ten floors in a nod to the still ongoing “green” mania. The surrounding shopping mall — a typically American-style urban blunder — is due to be replaced by a network of “typical Parisian streets” fronted by shops in the normal manner.

Hence, the tower supposedly gets a new lease on life, reviled as it may be as a freak. But then here we are on the threshold of Artificial Intelligence cutting its awesome swathe through the office workplace. After 2021, the Great Covid-19 Op savaged office occupancy in Europe just as it did in America, with so many employees working-from-home. All that vacancy played hell with commercial real estate. A-I is looking like the coup de grâce for the office skyscraper now, threatening to eliminate vast categories of corporate employment per se. Let’s face it: Europe is not doing a stellar job of anticipating what the actual future might bring. Anyway, nice try. (Below: the tower before and after its fix-up.)

Below: a close-up rendering of the “green” terrace to come. Note a couple of curious things: no fence or guard-rails at the edge. Hmmmm. . . . Also notice how thin the roof is. Do you really suppose it could support the growth of mature trees? I’d say, not a chance. What are they thinking?

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You’ve got to think: if the US military can pinpoint one room in Teheran with a Grand Ayatollah and 39 other high officials in it, then the US military can figure out where Iran’s missiles are being launched from and put a stop to that, too. With no high command left, Iran’s missile batteries have been on their own since Saturday, desperately trying a kind of last-ditch “Samson option” to light up the whole region and bring the House of the Middle East down with Iran.

Firing on the Emirates, and Saudi Arabia especially, was maybe not such a hot idea. Saudi Arabian air defenses intercepted almost all the drones aimed at their giant Ras Tanura oil refinery. Falling debris started a small fire that was contained while the refinery shut down safely. Iran has reawakened the centuries-old rift between Shi’a and Sunni Islam and Saudi Arabia has been stockpiling war planes from the USA for fifty years without getting to use them much. I doubt they’ll pass up the chance.

Who does speak for Iran now? Just naming a successor to the Ayatollah Khamenei would put a target on his turban. Iran’s Intel Service building was blown up on Sunday, so that network must be dark. How is Iran’s government and its remaining military command communicating? And how would US and Israeli intel not be listening in on whatever chatter is out there?

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This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com.

The world fretfully expects Iran to try to close the Strait of Hormuz, but how does that happen with tanker traffic halted and most of Iran’s navy blown up and its naval command headquarters destroyed? Without the ships to do it, it’s unlikely that Iran will be laying out minefields in the Strait. Or that any tankers will be around to sink in the channel.

President Trump has declared a four-week window for Operation Epic Fury. Sounds a little too generous. With no command structure left and no viable communication, you might give the Islamic Republic one more week, maybe. It’s a tossup whether they run out of missiles and drones before all their launch-sites and stockpiles get bombed. Meanwhile, a US / Israeli info operation that hacked Iran’s state-run TV seeks to persuade Iranian army personnel and government bureaucrats to turn on what remains of the theocracy and think about forming a secular government. Why would they stick with the loser regime?

Of course, the Trump-deranged political opposition in America is ululating over this effort to put the world’s leading fomenter of terrorism out of business. The New York Times is especially glum, claiming, “The American public’s appetite for an attack on Iran was low before Trump and Israel took action.” Maybe the Jacobin-Democrats they cater to feel that way, since the party has been increasingly synchronizing with the forces of Jihad since the Oct 7, 2023, Hamas raid. After forty-seven years of ayatollahs, what part of “Death to America” don’t they understand?

Not a few prominent figures on the Right also deplored Operation Epic Fury. The increasingly rogue Trump-hater and Israel vilifier, Tucker Carlson, called the action “disgusting and evil.” MTG called it “unnecessary and is unacceptable.” Blackwater founder Erik Prince colored it as “not serving America’s interests and inconsistent with President Trump’s MAGA agenda.” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) framed his objection in Congress’s prerogative to declare war — though the War Powers Act of 1973 permits the president to conduct military operations for 60 days after notifying Congress of his intentions.

You can understand why people are nervous about this, with so many commentators predicting World War Three and Biblical Armageddon. The Fourth Turning narrative asserts that a major war is inevitable at this moment in history. Maybe so. But Ukraine has already happened and is on a glide path to its conclusion. And Operation Epic Fury does not have to turn out badly for all concerned, including Iran. Other more sanguine observers see a more peaceful and prosperous Middle East emerging from the smoke, a fulfillment of the Abraham Protocols, and the termination of Iran-sponsored proxy wars, terror programs, and medieval social despotism.

Epic Fury looks like a turning point for Western Civ more generally as regards tolerating Jihadi insolence — its declared intent to destroy all its “infidel” enemies, meaning you and me and the remaining indigenous population of Europe. The strife Iran managed to stir up all around the Middle East and beyond for decades was largely responsible for the mass migration into Europe and the dispersion of millions into the USA during “Joe Biden’s” open border years. Citizens are now rising to oppose Islam’s aggressive promotion of Sharia Law and demographic replacement in Texas and other states. Expect bolder resistance to all that now, here and in Europe, too.

However this thing goes, Iran will not acquire a nuclear arsenal, and this was, after all, the main issue. Anyway, the Iranians must be sick of the rule of the mullahs. Mr. Trump told them some weeks ago that “help is on the way.” He meant what he said, he didn’t chicken out, and now it’s up to the people of Iran to sort out how they enter the future, starting now.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

The zeitgeist is a rough beast, hard to ride as it slouches into the unknown. Our country is trying to hang on while a party of goblins vexes and needles the beast from behind, and you cannot make them stop. Sense-making gets to seem impossible.

We don’t have an explanation from Senate Majority Leader John Thune as to why he will not do what is within his power to do: pass election reform, known as the SAVE Act, by changing the filibuster procedure. At midweek Sen. Thune said Republicans were “not unified on pursuing a talking filibuster.” Understand that bringing back a real filibuster, with continuous speech in the well of the Senate, only requires the Majority Leader’s say-so, meaning Mr. Thune is prevaricating, concealing the truth.

Which might be that he does not want to pass election reform. It appears he wants to set up the midterm elections with the now-familiar kit of unverifiable mail-in ballots, millions of non-citizen motor-votes, and dragged-out vote-counting so that Democrats will seize control of the House (if not the Senate) in order to crank-up the impeachment machine again and finally get rid of President Trump. It does not look like anything else, certainly not any kind of cunning game.

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This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com.

What might change that would be an FBI analysis of the 2020 election year ballots, voter rolls, and vote tabulation tapes recently extracted from the Fulton County, Georgia, Elections Hub, leading to indictments. They’ve had this mass of material for a month. There was already plenty of preliminary evidence of fraud from earlier investigations — which is how come U.S. Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia found probable cause to approve a search warrant for the FBI. They must have an idea by now of what the evidence shows. It’s not that complicated.

There’s no fixed statutory timeline for a referral. The FBI can pass along the matter to the DOJ for prosecution whenever they determine the evidence is sufficient. Referrals are customarily secret, as they occur during ongoing investigations and involve sensitive, non-public information. DOJ policies emphasize confidentiality in pre-charging stages to protect investigations, potential witnesses, sources, and the integrity of any future prosecution. In general, the public learns of an FBI referral only indirectly — through later developments like indictments, or news media reporting via “sources.”

Criminal referrals on the Fulton County case might have already been made, and indictments might be forthcoming. That would have to prompt some kind of attitude adjustment for Senate Majority Leader Thune on behalf of election reform. It could happen at any time. It would at least put Senator Thune between a rock and a hard place. It’s well-understood that at least 80-percent of people polled want the SAVE Act passed.

There is no debating position that reasonably argues against it. You might have noticed that Mayor Mamdani of New York City called for volunteers to shovel snow in the latest blizzard, and that anyone who stepped-up was required to show two types of photo ID to work the job. Yet, Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), aligns with the party’s longstanding opposition to voter ID laws, including the SAVE Act. No need to go figure on that. It’s just arrant dishonesty.

The president emphasized clearly why the Democrats are against election reform in this week’s State of the Union speech: because the party can only win elections by cheating, by employing massive systematic fraud. He said it so that everybody tuned-in could hear it, and the Democrats just sat stone-faced on their side of the chamber — and that was only minutes after they refused to stand for the proposition that the government’s main job was to act in the interest of American citizens.

It’s unlikely that the president can alter election procedure himself, through executive order or by declaring some kind of national emergency. Any attempt would be instantly litigated and shut down by the judiciary. The Constitution assigns primary authority over the “times, places and manner” of elections to the states (with only Congress able to alter them by law). Either Senator Thune will do his duty or not. He must have some self-awareness that he risks going down as the greatest villain in our history, the man who wrecked the country. Does anything like personal honor still exist in this land?

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

Lunacy proceeds from crime. In case you wonder why half the country has gone crazy, seek no further than Susan Rice’s stark warning to the other half of the country that is not crazy. Ms. Rice was Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor and then “Joe Biden’s” Domestic Policy Advisor. She did a podcast last week with Preet Bharaha, former US Attorney in the SDNY, now a private lawyer with the Beltway law firm WilmerHale. Her message to Trump supporters: We’re coming after you when we’re back in power. “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

It was an important signal and it got a lot of people’s attention. It telegraphed the fear running through the Lefty-left that their crimes against the country are being tallied, carefully catalogued, and presented to a grand jury in Florida. The crimes are bundled as a multifaceted conspiracy to overthrow the US government. Pretty serious. Sedition and Treason. Susan Rice knows what she (and others) did.

First, in the frantic days between Nov. 3, 2016 and January 20, 2017, Barack Obama’s White House cooked up the Russia collusion hoax with John Brennan’s CIA, James Comey’s FBI, and Loretta Lynch’s DOJ. Ms. Rice, who was in on it, notoriously wrote a CYA memo memorializing the meetings and planted it in her office desk to be easily discovered by the new Trump admin. The memo stated that “every aspect of this issue is handled by the intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’.” Of course, that was exactly the opposite of what really happened. The mischief emanating from it has run for ten years, crime upon crime upon crime.

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Secondly, and surely less-known to the American public, was Ms. Rice’s role as Domestic Policy Advisor under “Joe Biden.” Her actual job from 2021 to 2023 was to serve as a conduit for Barack Obama to run “Joe Biden’s” White House, along with Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken. During those years, the public rarely (if ever) saw Susan Rice. She avoided the news media and did not make public statements or appearances at White House events. The news media were happy to ignore her. They knew exactly what she was up to.

The prime concerns of this cabal were to protect the image (cover up the crimes) of Barack Obama and his associates, to cover up the criminal degeneracy of the Biden family, and to get the Democrat Party back in power by utterly destroying Donald Trump and the populist revolt he headed.

Everything done in “Joe Biden’s” name during those years was to guarantee his party’s return to power, especially the deluge of illegal aliens across the border to pad the census for congressional districts and provide millions of future voters indebted to the party for letting them in (and giving them tons of freebies when they got here. . . phones, housing, food, walking-around money).

Meanwhile, the Democrats erected an immense scaffold of NGOs to funnel taxpayer money into salaries for their corps of political activists — outfits such as Stacey Abrams’ empire of grift in Georgia, the national networks of Antifa and BLM street-fighters, and the matrix of Somali social service fraud in Minnesota and Maine. This created a huge parasitical patronage class, basically a national racketeering operation. Eventually all the NGO grift became an end in itself — the Democrats animating principle: grift for grift’s sake, power to just keep it all going and continue to cover up the crime behind it.

The vital component to all this was weapons-grade mind-fuckery to produce a fog of war that would keep the American public utterly bamboozled, unable to comprehend what was happening amid gales of hoaxes, ops, and scams. The Covid-19 caper was the doozy. We still don’t know definitively if the mRNA vaccine program was a deliberate depopulation project, but it kind of looked like it, while plenty of messaging from global institutions — from the Gates Foundation to the WEF to the UN — was pretty explicit about getting rid of useless eaters. On top of all that, throw in the trashing of Western Civ’s industrial economies with “green” trickery, adding another layer of anxiety onto a sore-beset citizenry.

Of course, despite their best efforts — and it was a mighty crusade of bad faith and ill will — the Democrats failed to vanquish Mr. Trump, a strange miracle itself suggesting some sort of divine intervention. The question now is, will Mr. Trump be able to vanquish them? It begins to look like he might, with plenty of help from the Democrats themselves, who have reached a pitch of madness rarely seen in human societies.

Their latest prank: a boycott of the State of the Union speech to Congress. So far, seven senators and nine congresspersons have promised to bail on the speech, led ostensibly by Senator Adam Schiff of California, a liar so prodigious and fertile that it can be truly said he never uttered an honest word including “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.” This faction will gather on the mall instead and hurl objurgations at the Capitol rotunda.

All that’s needed to finish them off, really, is passage of the SAVE Act so that voters will be required to prove their identity and citizenship, and absentee ballots will be restricted to the old rules about being too sick to get to the polling place, or else out of the country. Last week, staffers behind the walking mummy, Mitch McConnell, prevented the bill from reaching the Senate floor with some procedural rigmarole. Mr. Trump must call them out, and call out Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), too, for dragging his feet on whatever’s necessary to pass the SAVE Act. The country demands honest elections, and one way or another they’ll get them.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)

The message seems to be something like the USA isn’t messing around with all those strike forces in the waters around Iran. The Islamic Republic suddenly looks like Rock-and-Hard-Place-Land. Everybody and his uncle are trying to figure out the calculus in play, World War Three or a happy ending?

You’re seeing the most significant US military build-up over there in memory. Smells a little bit like the first Gulf War, 1991 — minus all those allies we roped in then. Mr. Trump (via Marco Rubio) has read Euroland out on this one. We are in a cold war with those birds, in case you haven’t noticed. The UK, France, Germany & Co.? They are as crazy as the ladies of The View and their millions of Cluster-B followers.

Euroland is yet in thrall to the climate nutters, the farm-and-industry-destroyers, the one-worlders, the Jihad-migrationists, the floundering banksters, and the Klaus Schwab wannabes. Euroland seeks to throttle free speech throughout Western Civ and meddle in everyone’s elections. Euroland keeps mouthing off about a war with Russia despite having no military mojo and going broke-ass broke faster than you can say Götterdämmerung. Bottom line: the US is going solo on this one.

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This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit: Vaulted.com.

What is the objective? Ostensibly “a deal” over Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Like, just cut it out, will you, please? By the way, did you know that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa in 2005 saying production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons was forbidden under Islam. But then deception is allowed in Islam under the doctrine of taqiyya, against the threat of attack from hostile forces,

I’m sure you remember Operation Midnight Hammer in June last year when we attacked and supposedly “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear research and development bunkers at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan? They got pretty banged-up, you may be sure, and nobody in Iran denied there was something nukey going on in those installations. Is there a will there to rebuild the whole darn infrastructure of uranium enrichment and so forth?

The mullahs are not saying, which means: of course, they intend to continue developing nuclear weapons — and even if that’s a stupid and futile gambit, given recent history, they still have factories churning out plain old long-range ballistic missiles and new drones by the thousands. Let’s face it: the mullahs are hardcore for Jihad and martyrdom. Since being elevated to Supreme Leader in 1989, Ayatollah Khamenei has sought relentlessly to transform the traditional Islamic concept of Jihad and establish it as the central pillar of the regime’s ideology.

Are we doing Israel’s bidding there? (Cue: roar of affirmation.) But then, Israel has a point. Iran has been cuckoo for going on forty years. If Israel wasn’t a target of the mullahs’ eternal Shia wrath, there are their other enemies, the Sunni, on the west side of the Persian Gulf (and next door in Iraq). And consider, too, Iran’s obdurate sponsorship of Jihad, wherever possible, both within and outside the Ummah — including especially Western Civ, where low-grade Jihad has been going on for over a decade. . . mass murders, rape gangs, beheadings, trucks through the Christmas markets. . . .

Okay, if Euroland is out, what about the other big dogs, Russia and China. Will they just stand by and let the US have its wicked way with Iran? Russia sent a corvette-class naval vessel down to the Strait of Hormuz for a joint operation with Iran’s navy, but what does that mean? Probably not much more than occupational therapy. Besides, Mr. Trump is just now promising to bring Russia “out from the cold” of all those onerous economic sanctions. . . to begin the process of normalizing relations. You might doubt that Russia wants to blow that for Iran’s sake.

And, while it is somewhat out of the news due to the Epstein stink-bomb, and the deepness of mid-winter, there is still a war going on over in Ukraine. Which is to say, the Russians have their hands full in their own back-yard and might, perhaps, be hesitant about piling-on in Iran. And, let’s just suppose that the US objective is actually regime change in Iran. Would Russia be indisposed if the mullahs got kicked out of power? I doubt it. Russia has longstanding annoying issues with Islamic factions distributed throughout their adjoining former Soviet republics. Russia does not need Jihad. Russia might actually live more comfortably with Iran under a secular government, tilting a bit more western in temperament. Just sayin’. . . .

China has more urgent concerns with Iran. China gets around 13-percent of its oil imports from Iran, and it enjoys a three to four percent discount on it. Regime change or war that could damage Iran’s oil terminals would be bad news for China. But then, China is at a long geographic remove from Iran, and China is not used to conducting military adventures so far from home, so don’t expect much assistance there. China’s other option would be to start a kerfuffle over Taiwan to distract and divert the US. We’ll just have to see about that. Uncle Xi Jinping has been busy lately sacking the upper echelons of his own military leadership. Are they even ready for action? Plus, China’s economy is wobbly. Consider also: has the US given China assurances of continued oil imports from Iran if it steers clear of the situation there?

What are we operationally capable of over in Iran with all our warships, fighter jets, and other stuff? I don’t know. . . and neither do you. Looks impressive, but a couple of Sunburn-type missiles landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln could produce a profound instant attitude adjustment. Perhaps President Trump, WarSec Hegseth, and StateSec Rubio have more refined plans for disarming Iran and surgically removing the cuckoo-birds in charge. Our guys are certainly acting confident. But then in geopolitics confidence is best friends with hubris. And hubris generally precedes clusterfuck. The art of the deal is not for sissies.

JHK’s new novel, a comic romp set during the week of the tragic JFK Assassination, November 1963. Autographed Copies from Battenkill Books.

Buy Autographed

Buy at Amazon

JHK’s World Made By Hand four-book novel cycle. A small town in the remnant of the USA in the not-distant future. The community struggles to carry on. . . .

NEW! Gallery 17 — Paintings from the 2025 Season. Have a look! (Click here!)