The man of destiny. It doesn't make sense. Trump can't change it.

20240722

By a strange sequence of accidents, it appears that Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States. He is a man of destiny, for better or worse.

The assassination attempt is being presented as another lone gunman scenario, like Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray and others. We have been through this movie before. People are simply not buying it.

The excuses are simply too far-fetched. Jill Biden suddenly had an appearance on the same day? She rated all of the best agents? Trump's security detail had been being shortchanged from the beginning? The shooter was wandering around unmolested for at least half an hour before the event? Acoustics indicate that at least three guns were fired, but the mainstream media and the government continue to talk about "the gun" without even bothering to discount the forensic evidence of more than one?

I am the furthest thing from an expert, but common sense says that a rifle makes noise when the shooter pulls the trigger, the bullet whizzes past a microphone, and when it hit something. The timing in audio recordings is precise enough to distinguish when the three happen. Since a bullet travels faster than the speed of sound, the first noise to be recorded should be the sound of impact or a bullet passing the microphone.

Moreover, since muzzle speed is fairly well known, it should be possible to compute the distance of the rifle from the microphone by the time between the sound of the bullet and the sound of the rifle shooting.

The audio volume of the rifle report will decrease as the square of the distance between the rifle itself and the microphone. Since many microphones recorded the shots, it should be possible to use triangulation to determine where the rifles were located. This is the kind of thing that armies do automatically to figure out where to return fire in a firefight.

It should be extremely easy at this point to state how many rifles were involved and where they were. Investigative bodies should have collected that information from the citizens and the audience and made it available for analysis. I have not heard that it has happened. They should have recovered the bullets and conducted forensic analysis of them, which would demonstrate conclusively which weapons they came from. I have not heard that that has happened either.

That this armchair analyst, thousands of miles from the scene, should be able to ask such obvious questions is a problem. I am simply repeating what I have read from people who are pursuing this much more avidly, such as Tierney's Real News.  Here are three of their recent posts asking probing questions

Who ordered the hit?

J13: The Protection Team

J13: The Site

I do not think we are going to get answers. I believe that the bureaucracy is too thick, too self-protective, too impervious to be forced to respond. It will be like pulling teeth to get even the most obvious progress, like having Cheatle dismissed. That may be accomplished, but Mayorkas and the many others involved in the debacle will come out scot-free.

Trump is promising to sweep into office and bring radical change. He certainly did not the first time. I expect he will be stymied again, perhaps not quite so seriously. He needs to put intelligent, effective people in charge throughout the government. Where will he find such people? There are simply not that many of them, and certainly not that many willing to attempt what needs to be done. The universities have not graduated them. Corporate life has not prepared them. Their elementary school teachers did not instill appropriate values in them, by and large.

The bottom line is that it is far easier to destroy an institution such as the United States Secret Service, the Navy, the CIA and the Department of Justice than it is to build it in the first place. Not to mention our whole education system.  Whether or not he has the intelligence and ability – neither quality proven in my mind – Donald Trump does not have the raw materials needed to accomplish the task over the next four years. He may slow America’s descent, but he cannot reverse it.

I recently mentioned that I have subscribed to Quoth the Raven on Substack. He generally gets things right. He and I expect that once the current administration realizes that they don’t have much of a prayer in the election they will stop attempting to hold up the stock market, simply allowing it to collapse and blaming it on the Republicans. If it is as large of a disaster as many expect, it may allow a clean sweep of government and financial institutions and give us a chance to start over.

The alternative is that they could, could try to steal the election again using the same tricks: mail-in ballots, illegal alien voters, phony voter rolls, hacked voting machines etc. etc.  I don’t think they will dare.  The discrepancy between exit polls and needed results would be vast.  I think they will let this one come out fairly straight and hope that the witless Republicans are satisfied and don’t patch the glaring flaws in the electoral process.  My guess is that would not be a bad call.  Betting on Republican gormlessness has been a longtime winner.

Did I say give us a chance to start over? I mean the United States. I’m taking my chances here.  Putin has problems of his own.   This whole war is stupid, and his central bank digital currency scheme, vaccines-for-everybody and everything scheme, and omnipresent biometric scanning schemes are not popular.  Something will give.  I don’t think we in Kyiv need worry about learning Russian any time soon.

The weather is cooler.  The girls and I had a mini-vacation, as Oksana spent the weekend in Poland at a music festival and Eddie was in summer camp.  We went to the beach every day, read an awful lot, and prepared meals of our own choosing.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man has outwitted Microsoft itself and gotten a new computer set up.

Graham