I must say that the quality of spambots has gone down quite a bit lately – although this one paints a picture worthy of Bruegel:
Peasant women, their husband and riff-raff of all sort, all singing and all more or less drunk.
Young people in the US have had little experience of successful political assassination – till now
They’ve only read about it. We who were old enough to remember the 1960s and 1970s recall the searing and terrible assassinations of huge American figures: JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King. To us, these things are extremely real. But to young people they’re not. They’re ancient history – if they even know the history.
Yes, there have been plenty of assassination attempts since then – including of course the Butler PA shot that hit Trump’s ear. But that experience probably only served to underline what I’m referring to, because Trump’s amazing survival with only a bloody ear probably seemed almost cartoonish: See, he bounces back! And – except for relatively minor political figures that probably escaped most people’s attention, such as the murders of Minnesota Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband – all other American political assassinations in recent years in the US have been failed attempts.
The young people I’m talking about are even too young to have experienced the shock of 9/11. To them, that’s another semi-distant historical event, long ago and far away in the background.
So young people may not even have quite believed that a successful assassination was possible till now, although obviously it was. This one was different, because they saw the gore of murder with a rifle in full public view up close. And they saw it happen to a young man, speaking to a large crowd of mostly young people on a college campus. They saw right before their eyes the difference between stupid phrases such as “words are violence” and real violence.
In a sense, they entered history, at least a little bit.
Tyler Robinson, who has not been convicted but who is almost certainly the culprit, was an avid gamer who wrote video game phrases on the casings. And many young leftists online acted like this murder was a video game, and whooped it up about the murder. But I bet a not insignificant number were stunned and are now wondering about some of the things they’ve been blithely mouthing before this happened. What percentage? I don’t know; perhaps it’s quite small. But I believe this groups exists. And as for those already in the middle, I doubt that leftism holds much appeal at all for most of them at this point.
Revisiting J6: how many FBI agents were there, and why and when?
Recently the news came out that 274 plainclothes FBI agents were at the J6 protests, and that some of them later complained they’d been used as political pawns. Some of the coverage on the right implied that they were embedded from the start – but that’s not what the report actually said. To clear that up, here’s a good summary:
The [FBI] document has proven a bombshell to lawmakers, revealing for the first time that the FBI had a total of 274 agents deployed to the Capitol in plainclothes and with guns after the violence started but with no clear safety gear of way to be recognized by other law enforcement agencies working in the chaos of the riot.
So they were sent while the brouhaha was already underway. But they were endangered by not being in uniform, and the situation became even more chaotic. Did they even have instructions on what they were supposed to do there?
More:
Wray, Patel’s predecessor, steadfastly refused to tell Congress how many if any agents went to the Capitol that day. And a prior DOJ Inspector General Report did not divulge the number, referring only to a SWAT team the bureau sent into the Capitol and having more than two dozen informants in the crowd.
The existence of mass FBI agents at the Capitol on Jan. 6 could also be a problem in many of the cases that were subsequently brought in court. If agents were witnesses at the Capitol and did not disclose it in the subsequent affidavits during prosecutions it could create grounds for defendants to appeal.
The document also reveals for the first time that there were widespread concerns for years inside the bureau – sentiments that boiled over after the FBI began sending SWAT teams to arrest Jan. 6 participants on misdemeanor charges – that the FBI had become biased in favor of liberals and against conservatives.
Over the years, I’ve written a great many posts about J6. But one of the things that struck me from the beginning and all along is how many unanswered questions there are – questions to which I strongly believe the authorities actually know the answers. You can see some of my earlier and later questions in the following posts: this written the day after, this written about five months after, this from September of 2021, and this from March of 2023.
Will we ever know the answers? I think not.
NOTE: About a week ago, before this report came out, I was thinking about J6 and one question I’ve wondered about for a long long time. I even wrote a short draft for a post, and this seems as good a time as any to ask the question: who were the people convicted for scaling the Capitol wall, or whose convictions mentioned that they had scaled the wall? After all, those men – I believe they were all men – were among the most visible and alarming participants that day. I figured they’d probably be fairly easy to spotlight, identify, and charge with something. But oddly enough, so far I’ve only found one person whose conviction mentions that he scaled the wall. The description is in this article datelined October 21, 2022, and it says [emphasis mine]:
On Jan. 6, 2021, [Matthew Bledsoe, 38] attended a rally near the Ellipse. Bledsoe then headed to the Capitol, and illegally entered the Capitol grounds shortly after 2:13 p.m. He then moved to the Capitol Building itself. He scaled a wall at the Upper Northwest Terrace and entered through a fire door at the Senate Wing. Among other things, he yelled, “In the Capitol. This is our house. We pay for this s—. Where’s those pieces of s—at?” He climbed a statue and was outside the corridor to the House Chamber and hallways near the Speaker’s Lobby. He left the building about 2:47 p.m., after approximately 22 minutes inside.
Within two hours, however, Bledsoe returned, lingering outside the East Rotunda Doors as law enforcement officers worked to secure the building and grounds.
He got a sentence of four years in prison. It appears those four years were for trespassing, climbing a statue, and yelling a few curses. No one even seems to have alleged that he was violent towards anyone. I’ve read another article about Bledsoe, which mentions that prosecutors asked for a sentence of nearly six years.
But we’re already quite familiar with the overreach of the prosecutors and the judges who applied that sort of penalty for a non-violent demonstrator. My question remains: who were the other people scaling the wall? Maybe they were all demonstrators much like Bledsoe. But I’d like to know. I realize there are many more important things about J6 that we still don’t know. But that particular one bugs me. If you can find more information on the people who climbed the wall, please put in in the comments.
Dennis Prager’s first interview on video since his accident
You may be aware that last November Dennis Prager was severely injured in a fall and became a quadriplegic. At first, and for quite a while, he was unable to talk, although his mind was clear. I’ve been following his progress and yesterday I saw this video, which was the first time (as far as I know) that he’s been on camera since his accident.
It’s somewhat shocking at first, if you’re familiar with Prager. It’s not just that he’s lying down and immobile except for his head, but it’s also that even he face looks different – he’s lost weight, for example. His voice is similar to before but somewhat different as well; it now sounds like it’s coming from the depths of the ocean. But he does seem very sharp, and his usually ebullient spirits seem to remain intact.
I haven’t watched the whole thing; it’s long. But I suggest you watch at least the first eight minutes or so to hear the part that’s the reason I put it up here (as usual, when I watched it I increased the speed setting quite a bit):
Open thread 9/27/2025
Dragon stones and lighthouse blocks
This sort of report reinforces my sense that human beings were more advanced earlier in the past than we used to give them credit for. I’d never heard of dragon stones before, but here’s the story:
A new study has illuminated the mysterious “dragon stones” of Armenia—the giant prehistoric monuments called vishaps locally—finally answering a question that has been intriguing researchers for over a century. Standing up to 18 feet high and weighing several tonnes, these carved stones, frequently fish-like or cowhide-shaped, are found irregularly scattered throughout the Armenian Highlands. Long thought to have been part of a forgotten cult, new evidence now suggests that they were used in ancient water-linked rituals and early irrigation practices. …
… [T]he study is the first statistical examination of the monuments, utilizing radiocarbon dating, spatial analysis, and precise measurements. The findings reveal that the stones were deliberately placed near springs, lakes, and prehistoric irrigation channels, suggesting that they were employed as sacred markers in a complex system of water management.
Dating to between 4200 and 4000 BCE, the dragon stones belong to the Chalcolithic era and are comparable to the earliest construction phases of other mega-sites such as Stonehenge. The researchers determined that the stones fall into two different groups. Fish-shaped stones are at higher elevations—at one point over 9,000 feet above sea level—close to natural water sources, while cowhide-shaped examples are more common at mid-altitudes in valleys where water was being used for agriculture. This distribution pattern aligns closely with ancient irrigation zones, supporting theories proposed nearly a century ago.
The process of sourcing, carving, and transporting the stones was enormous.
You can say that again.
Who knows whether this theory about the stones is correct; I certainly don’t, but I find such things fascinating. It’s intriguing to wonder about humans and how they operated back then, because they certainly went to a lot of trouble in a lot of places to haul huge pieces of stone around to no obvious purpose we can discern.
And speaking of huge pieces of stone, I missed this other intriguing news at the time it was announced, which was in July of 2025 [emphasis mine]:
After centuries underwater, 22 huge stone blocks of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, have been recovered from the Mediterranean seabed, a breakthrough in an ambitious digital reconstruction effort.
Restoration is part of the ongoing “PHAROS” project … [which] aims to virtually reassemble the structure using advanced technology.
Among the recently excavated finds are the massive lintels and uprights of the monumental entrance to the lighthouse, its threshold stones, foundation paving slabs, and fragmentary remains of a previously unrecorded pylon. The doorway of the pylon intriguingly blends Egyptian stylistic elements with Greek construction techniques, evidencing the multicultural diversity of Hellenistic Alexandria. …
Each of these blocks, weighing up to 80 tons, will be scanned using detailed photogrammetry and then passed on to volunteer engineers from the Dassault Systèmes Foundation. These specialists will digitally analyze and virtually reposition the blocks as if the fragments were pieces of a vast archaeological puzzle. Their efforts will ultimately result in a virtual twin of the Lighthouse of Alexandria so that researchers and the public will be able to view it in its original glory and understand why it collapsed.
Exciting. I’ve been fascinated by the lighthouse since I first heard about it many many years ago.
“Some men just want to watch the world burn”
That’s a famous line from the movie The Dark Knight:
It’s a description of the pure chaotic nihilistic impulse. I think that tells us something about Antifa, and also certain murderers whose motives we know little about such as the Las Vegas mass murderer Stephen Paddock. Here’s an excerpt from a post I wrote about him not long after his crime in 2017:
In other words, I believe that Paddock’s basic motive was to kill a lot of people and then kill himself (something I wrote about yesterday). It almost didn’t matter to him who those people would be, as long as there were a lot of them. …
As for why Paddock wanted to become a mass murderer in the first place, I believe that (unless an autopsy locates some organic cause such as a brain tumor in an area that deals with aggression and/or judgment) he was a psychopath like his father before him, and ultimately became an even more violent one. His father was a psychopath of the con man variety; he’s usually been described as a bank robber but that was just one of his many modi operandi … Not all psychopaths are violent by any means, and I think Paddock was a relatively law-abiding one—until he wasn’t.
I then quoted from this comment by “FunkyPhD”:
I suspect that the more we learn about Paddock, the more we’ll find out that he was just a sociopathic, black-hearted nihilist, who wanted his suicide to be spectacular. He served no ideology, was checked by no transcendental beliefs, and had no children or parents or friends or family to shame. He was tired of life, which was easy for him, and – like Oswald – bitter that the world failed to exalt him for his genius, and was therefore determined to punish his fellow human creatures for their indifference. He wasn’t in pain, or in despair, or even lashing out for some unforgivable injury or slight. As Dostoyevski so brilliantly showed, when there is no meaning or purpose or duty or responsibility, destruction of the human community is not only permissible, it is also the ultimate act of freedom. Paddock wasn’t sick (if he were sick, he couldn’t have planned this as meticulously as he did), he was, as you say, just evil. But this kind of evil isn’t a symptom of our times. It has always existed …
And yet certain times foster more of it than usual, and we may be living in such times. I’m not saying that all the recent political assassins follow that playbook; in fact, many of them seem to have political motives and complaints, however twisted. But I wonder how much that’s really operating, and how much is just a screen for nihilistic psychopathy – otherwise known as evil.
Dostoevsky was the master of the subject in his book Demons, published in 1871. A summary of its themes can be found here:
According to Ronald Hingley, [the novel Demons] is Dostoevsky’s “greatest onslaught on Nihilism”, and “one of humanity’s most impressive achievements — perhaps even its supreme achievement — in the art of prose fiction.”
Demons is an allegory of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the political and moral nihilism that were becoming prevalent in Russia in the 1860s. A fictional town descends into chaos as it becomes the focal point of an attempted revolution, orchestrated by master conspirator Pyotr Verkhovensky. The mysterious aristocratic figure of Nikolai Stavrogin — Verkhovensky’s counterpart in the moral sphere — dominates the book, exercising an extraordinary influence over the hearts and minds of almost all the other characters. The idealistic, Western-influenced intellectuals of the 1840s, epitomized in the character of Stepan Verkhovensky (who is both Pyotr Verkhovensky’s father and Nikolai Stavrogin’s childhood teacher), are presented as the unconscious progenitors and helpless accomplices of the “demonic” forces that take possession of the town.
In other words, Verkhovensky is a “useful idiot.”
I read the book in the year 1968 – which, as you can imagine, is one of the reasons it made a big impression on me.
Sorting out the Comey story
How can you tell who’s telling the truth about Comey and who’s lying? In this case, maybe all of them are lying. But Comey is probably telling even less of the truth about the matter than the others:
While [Horowitz] did not find that he disclosed the classified information, Horowitz found that Comey took “the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome.”
He further added that Comey “set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees …
Comey later admitted that he asked his friend, Columbia Law Professor Daniel Richman, to leak information from the documents to the New York Times.
Comey’s close associate, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, stated that Comey instructed him to leak information to the media. Comey denied that repeatedly under oath.
James Baker, FBI general counsel and a close adviser to Comey, also told investigators that he was “under the belief” that he was “ultimately instructed and authorized to [provide information to the Times] by then FBI Director James Comey.”
That sets up a straightforward question: Who is lying?
That’s written by Jonathan Turley, who goes on to add what Comey says about how he trapped General Flynn and had him prosecuted for lying to the FBI. I wrote many posts about that sorry episode, and this prosecution of Comey is poetic justice. Whether actual justice will come of it is another story; I have my doubts, since the trial will be in Virginia. I certainly hope the case against Comey is an extremely strong one, because otherwise the cries of “Revenge lawfare!” will grow even stronger – if such a thing be possible.
Open thread 9/26/2025
Is it time for another government shutdown?
And which party will the people blame if it comes to pass?
This time the usual roles are reversed, and in addition the Republicans say firings will ensue:
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., released a memo earlier this week highlighting past years’ comments by Senate Democrats warning of the pitfalls of a government shutdown.
“House Republicans acted responsibly last week to keep the government open with the clean short-term continuing resolution,” Johnson’s memo said.
“Senate Democrats, who used to warn that shutdowns would hurt seniors, veterans, and working families, are now threatening to force one unless Congress repeals the Working Families Tax Cut, restores taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens, and sends half a billion dollars to leftist news outlets, among other partisan spending demands.”
Democrats claim to be protecting healthcare – but there’s also the issue of government jobs:
“[A]gencies are directed to use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities” that are funded by annual appropriations but are not “consistent with the president’s priorities,” Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a memo to senior administration officials.
The move raised the stakes of a shutdown for Democratic lawmakers, many of whom are advocates for the federal workforce.
Who will blink first? And who will be blamed? To anyone who’s been paying attention to shutdowns for the past umpteen years, it would be hard for Democrats to claim that a shutdown would be good and not bad. But reversals of that kind are certainly not unusual.
Here’s a recent poll by Rasmussen on the subject:
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 38% of Likely U.S. voters say that if there is a government shutdown, Democrats in Congress will be most to blame, while 29% think congressional Republicans would deserve the blame and 21% believe most of the blame would belong to President Donald Trump. Twelve percent (12%) are not sure.
If you add the “Trump” number to the “Rebublicans” figure, you get 50%. Not sure what a poll like that means, if anything. But I would wager that most people aren’t following this and don’t even know what it’s about.
Breaking story: Comey indicted
Well, well, well – It actually happened:
Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday on charges of making false statements and obstruction of justice.
“No one is above the law,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement on X. “Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people. We will follow the facts in this case.”
This just broke, so I probably will be adding more to it later.
The left will scream “Lawfare-type revenge!” But to me it seems pretty clear these charges are well-grounded.
The new rule: all assassins are MAGA now
Actually, it’s not such a new rule that all assassinations are blamed on the right. If they managed to do it with the Communist Lee Harvey Oswald, it can be done to anyone.
The latest in the line is the guy in Dallas who tried to kill ICE agents, failed, killed some detainees instead and then himself, and left very clear messages about what he was intending:
A handwritten note recovered by investigators said, “Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, ‘is there a sniper with AP [armor piercing] rounds on that roof?’” …
Jahn, who opened fire at a van near the entrance of an ICE field office in Dallas on Wednesday morning, had also conducted multiple searches of the “Charlie Kirk Shot Video” between Sept. 23 and 24, just before the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel said in an X post Thursday. …
He also searched for apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents, and downloaded a document titled “Dallas County Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Management,” which the FBI said contains a list of DHS facilities.
He also engraved “anti ICE” on bullets. But the left insists he’s MAGA – as ACE points out – after the left celebrated the murders when they thought the dead people really were ICE agents.
There’s another angle that I think is telling, which is that Jahn apparently ran in gamer circles:
Dallas shooter Joshua Jahn’s gamer pals made ghoulish jokes about his attack on an ICE facility where he killed one person and critically wounded two others — including suggesting he “shoulda hit the range a lil more.”
The eight-member gaming group, formed in 2012 on the online gaming platform Steam, goes by the name “Fug bithces Get Money” with the tagline “we can uze da pew pew or not we are coollllll :-D.”
“[He] shoulda hit the range a lil more,” one member wrote in the gaming group chat on Thursday.
“He missed,” the user exclaimed. …
The 29-year-old gunman played mostly first-person shooting games, logging over 17,405 hours of playing time, totaling approximately two years.
Hours before Wednesday’s fatal shooting, Jahn logged onto Steam to play the first-person shooter games “Team Fortress 2” and “Left 4 Dead 2,” according to his profile created in September 2011.
So he played a shooter video game not long before the actual shooting. Was he a bad shot because he thought that practicing shooting in an online game would transfer over into real life expertise?
The left not only denies killers are on the left and claims they are MAGA (in an “absence of evidence” of any MAGA leaning), and/or blames the right for a “climate of violence” while repetitively calling the right Nazis, but it also blames the killings on guns and uses them to promote more draconian gun control. Any evidence of leftist leanings is dismissed as lies from Trump’s FBI and/or the police, who are the enemy. It’s a closed system of denial, and I doubt it convinces anyone except those already firmly on the left. But that’s a lot of people these days.
Finally, from Karoline Leavitt:
Three months ago, CNN irresponsibly gave free publicity to an app that recklessly shares the location of ICE Agents.
It has now been revealed the leftist lunatic shooter who opened fire on the Dallas ICE Facility was using one of these apps.
The liberal media is complicit in the increased threats and violence against ICE.
We see it every day — they are quick to write a fake story portraying ICE in a negative light, often omitting the real facts of these cases, and they hardly ever write about the vicious criminals that ICE is arresting every day to make our country safer.
Notice that she calls Jahn both a leftist and a lunatic. The two are not mutually exclusive.