Life skills and faith.

From Winter Is Coming, and No Election Can Stop It

A dying civilisation does throw up its strong man, Spengler granted. The chaos becomes unbearable, and somebody grips the wheel.

But that man may not be the cure. He’s perhaps the last symptom of the rot.

Spengler called it Caesarism, after the men who finished the Roman Republic. It makes sense because Caesar does break the rule of money, and he does bring a kind of order, but he is ordering a people who have already forgotten how to be a people, and the old crowns and titles he puts on are fancy dress over a corpse.

To distinguish between a strongman holding the steering wheel of a collapsing civilisation and a people’s rebirth through a strongman, you can read the symptoms.

Tacitus left the plainest gauge ever written: the more corrupt the state, the more laws it keeps.

“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” —Tacitus, Annals 3.27

One might add: a people that trusts itself needs few rules; a people that trusts nothing needs a rule for everything.

Watch the free bread and the free spectacle: the poet who coined “bread and circuses” spat the words, at a public that had once handed out armies and now asked only to be fed and amused. And watch the money go thin: over two centuries, the Roman silver coin was clipped and watered by one emperor after another until it was a copper slug under a bright wash of silver, a lie you could hold in your hand.

We are not the first people to stand here.

We are only the latest to assume we are the exception.

Trump based his Presidential bids on making America great again. Anyone who does not agree with a policy of restoring their nation should leave. Why would anyone want to live in a decaying country unless their goal was to destroy it? And yet we continue to descend into chaos and bankruptcy.

The US dollar is collapsing. Everyone working a real job understands this. Every politician understands this and they offer no options other than to increase spending. DOGE should have worked but it only showed how corrupt the politicians and judiciary really is. The old saying of “not in my back yard” has become “not in my back pocket”.

The United States Treasuries are being liquidated around the world as its interest rate increases to entice people to buy them. Unfortunately, this has become a doom loop as it increases the interest on the national debt and forces the FED to print more money to monetize the debt.

So here we are at the gates of a national economic collapse. What a shame we have no politicians who would save the nation by restoring the Republic back to its foundational principles.

Iran has outsmarted Trump and Netanyahu. They know that time is on their side. The United States has severely depleted their war materiel and restocking will take years. Iran is able to effectively counter our military “superiority” with missiles and low cost drones. They do not expend massive amounts of money for an air force or navy. They do have a plan and it is working: attack US bases and Gulf States to impact world trade for elementals and oil.

There is a fourth option. In the past week, Yemen has expanded the war front and closed the southern portion of the Red Sea. This led to conflicts between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Ukraine then attacked shipping from Russia to Iran with the report of one Iranian death. As of now, Iran has only responded to Zelensky diplomatically. Once again, Iran is playing the waiting game.

The West and Israel have been goading Russia to expand their operations in Ukraine and to NATO countries supplying Ukraine with long range missiles, drones and intelligence. If a false flag attack is made, it will be the excuse to start WWIII. This would allow Trump some semblance of legitimacy and force a coalition of Western nations which are mostly bankrupt and invaded by third world aliens.

Would it be easier to launch a false flag or to assassinate a key US figure? We are about to find out because Trump is out of time and his administration knows it. None of these four options helps Make America Great Again.

The government allows poisoning our food, killing us with mRNA gene therapy, developing and unleashing bioweapons, propaganda in our educational system, endless wars and bankruptcy.

Now they have come for our water.

I thought it was the Muslims.

h/t WRSA

… or Kali yuga

From Winter Is Coming, and No Election Can Stop It

The old descriptions of that age are unnervingly exact. A man will be
measured by his money and nothing else. Law will go wherever power
goes. Holiness will be a performance. The rulers will be thieves with
better titles.
The Frenchman René Guénon put it into a phrase that is hard to shake
off: in the last age, quantity devours quality. Whatever cannot be
counted is thrown out. You cannot count honour, so it is traded for a
poll rating; you cannot count a man’s depth, so it is traded for his net
worth. The coinage tells the same story; it once carried the face of a
god, and now it is a number that believes in nothing.

This is the point where my Christian readers and my heathen readers usually drift to opposite walls of the room. So let me set down one thing that belongs to both of them and to neither.

Two traditions that never met, and never traded so much as a word, drew the end of the long winter as the same image.

In the Hindu telling, at the blackest hour of the last age, a rider called Kalki comes down on a white horse, a sword of fire in his hand, and cuts down the false kings who dared to dress as kings; and out of his coming, the age of truth begins again.

In the Book of Revelation, at the end of all things, the sky opens, and there is a white horse, and its rider is called Faithful and True, and a sword comes out of his mouth to strike the nations, and across his robe is written: King of kings, and Lord of lords.

Is this some abstraction of the same horse, sword and rider?:

They’ve come at the end of a rotten age to put it to the blade and start the world over.

I am not claiming a secret shared scripture, of course. But the same shape keeps surfacing in unconnected minds whenever they try to picture the end of a dying age.

The rider + The white horse + The sword

Heathen or Christian, you are looking at one thing from two sides:

The wheel’s deep winter giving way to spring, or the broken world meeting its rightful King.

Reports continue to circulate that Trump is flabbergasted and losing patience behind the scenes, as the Iran war drags on and slowly exhausts the US military’s clay colossus.

The truth is, by consuming his presidency, the war is precisely doing its job. Part of the major reason behind the war was to divert from the Epstein scandal which itself threatened to consume Trump’s presidency. As such, by laying a blanket over the fire, the war was able to snuff it out, yet now itself threatens to suffocate the remainder of Trump’s career and political legacy.

The article notes that even Trump’s top aides are in fear for their life due to CIA intelligence that Iran is eyeing them for liquidation:

The war has taken a personal toll on the president and some of his senior advisers. Some top aides have been advised by intelligence agencies that the Iranians are seeking to kill them and have been told to stop taking car services, according to people familiar with the matter.

The most eye-opening part of the article reveals Trump’s frustrations at not being able to deal with Iran’s leadership because he believes everytime the US has made headway in negotiations, Iran resorts to striking:

As the war lingers, Trump has grown less confident that the U.S. and Iran can find a diplomatic solution to the conflict. He has complained to advisers that it is difficult to know who speaks for top leadership, and every time the U.S. thinks it has made progress at the negotiating table, Iran continues its attacks, according to people familiar with the matter.

This, more than anything else, testifies to the deeply-ingrained nature of the imperial hubris that has taken over the heart and soul of American foreign policy. The arrant exceptionalism has grown so all-pervasive, that Trump simply operates from the base denominator that agreements made by the US need only be honored by the opposing side. The US itself is exempt, held to no standard because it’s assumed as a given that as global hegemon, the US’s side of the parley is allowed to be ‘fluid’.

Everyone knows it is in fact the US that broke and dishonored all agreements, or simply ignored contingencies such as the Israel-Lebanon inclusion, amongst other things.

Continue reading Simplicius …

Related: Sonar21

SEC. 219. UNITED STATES-ISRAEL DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY COOPERATION INITIATIVE.

    (a) Establishment.--The Secretary of Defense shall designate an executive agent, as such term is defined in Department of Defense Directive 5101.01 (relating to DoD Executive Agent, issued February 7, 2022), responsible for synchronizing cooperative efforts between the 
United States and Israel, to expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation, by--
            (1) identifying jointly developed or Israeli-origin technologies with operational utility for potential integration into United States systems and programs of record;
            (2) ensuring collaborative research initiatives involving government, private sector, and academic institutions in the United States and Israel, is done in a manner that protects sensitive technology and information and the national security interests of the United States and Israel;
            (3) facilitating the transition of technologies from research and development into procurement and acquisition pathways;
            (4) establishing frameworks for joint ventures, licensing agreements, and United States-based co-production or manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry;
            (5) coordinating with relevant Department of Defense components, including the Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate, capability development and innovation divisions, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, the Defense Innovation Unit, the United States-Israel Operations Technology Working Group, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Missile Defense Agency, the United States Space Command, the military departments, and other Department of Defense entities, as appropriate, to align efforts and avoid duplication; and
            (6) promoting joint training exercises and information-sharing mechanisms to enhance operational readiness to deploy jointly developed technologies.
    (b) Cooperative Efforts.--The synchronized cooperative efforts under subsection (a) may be carried out through the following domains:
            (1) Counter-Unmanned Systems including aerial, maritime, and ground platforms.
            (2) Anti-tunneling and subterranean threats.
            (3) Missile and air defense technologies.
            (4) Artificial intelligence, quantum, machine learning, and autonomous systems.
            (5) Directed energy and advanced sensing.
            (6) Cyber defense, electronic warfare, and digital resilience.
            (7) Biotechnology, biomanufacturing, and medical defense.
            (8) Network integration, data fusion, and contested logistics.
            (9) Defense industrial base cooperation, manufacturing, and co-production.
            (10) Other emerging technologies as jointly agreed by the United States and Israel.
    (c) Activities in Coordination With Other Federal Departments and Agencies.--The Secretary of Defense shall coordinate activities, as appropriate, with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Commerce, and the heads of other relevant Federal departments and agencies, to 
ensure consistency with existing laws and regulations.
    (d) Interim Progress Update.--Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall provide to the congressional defense committees an interim briefing on--
            (1) the executive agent designated pursuant to subsection (a) and the efforts undertaken by such executive agent to lead Department of Defense implementation of the synchronized cooperative efforts described in such subsection;
            (2) the status of coordination, Department-wide, with Israeli counterparts;
            (3) initial technology areas identified for accelerated cooperation and technologies with operational utility for integration into United States systems and programs of record; and
            (4) any early transition, prototyping, or integration activities initiated during the period covered by the update.
    (e) Annual Report.--Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, and annually thereafter until 2030, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the congressional defense committees a report on implementation of the cooperative efforts described in subsection (a). Each such report shall include--
            (1) a description of activities conducted;
            (2) an assessment of progress made in advancing shared national security interests;
            (3) an assessment of collaboration with other relevant Federal programs;
            (4) a description of technologies transitioned into United States acquisition programs or fielded systems;
            (5) a description of partnerships established with United States and Israeli industry; and
            (6) recommendations for future opportunities to promote the long-term integration of joint capabilities between the United States and Israel.
    (f) Form.--Each report required under subsection (e) shall be submitted in unclassified form and may include a classified annex.
    (g) Public Transparency.--The Secretary of Defense shall make available on a publicly accessible website of the Department of Defense periodic, unclassified updates, to the maximum extent practicable, on the synchronized cooperative efforts carried out under subsection (a), 
including a description of how these efforts contribute to United States technological and military supremacy. Such updates shall be made in a manner that ensures that classified information or other information that would compromise operational security, export controls, or sensitive technology are not released.