15 Comments

It's no fun being a Cassandra. I've been writing about this since 2010 at least, though I quit for awhile because hardly anyone cared. It is rather gratifying in a way that learning how to build a house, grow more food than I can eat, ferment alcohol, play music etc skills might actually carry some weight soon, even as I am well aware of the ramifications more than most, and it grieves my heart.

Good news is, the woke/trans/critical race crowd will be utterly helpless without their GAE backstop, and a lot of those -demons are likely to meet a grisly turn to meet their maker.

Expand full comment
author

Wow, talk about a great skill set! That expertise will only get more valuable!

And you nailed it with your comment about the useful idiots of the GAE regime, who support all of its "current things" unquestioningly, but are currently protected from reality by their GAE overlords...for now.

Expand full comment
Apr 5, 2023·edited Apr 5, 2023Liked by Daniel D

So much of this rings true. I wasn't in a place to see the rose of the McMansions, but I saw similar bizarre debt deals being made. And of course, as you say, the deal maker is sotto voice, while God is misinterpreted as something like a failed Robocop, and dismissed alongside debt as imaginary.

All bills will come due, is my bet.

Expand full comment
author

<<"All bills will come due." >>

Exactly. And the bill for our ruling class's latest "forever war," i.e., their war against reality, has a bill that will be coming due soon. It's wild, to look at Watergate now, and think that it all seems so innocent, in light of what the regime pulled during and after COVID. (Your analysis of that as involving a form of hypnotism was spot on.) I mean, the Watergate era almost seems like a golden age now, having a President just acting like an old fashioned corrupt politician lying to protect his friends, instead of lying to help pharmaceutical companies force their experimental gene-therapy into everyone's arms.

Expand full comment

My Enron story. My ex-wife was part of a woman only networking group. Thanks to an incredible year at my company I recieved a bonus equal to 1/3 of my salary. My ex-wife proposed that we invest in the stock market with the help of an investment expert she had met at her networking group. I (foolishly) agreed. The woman sat down with us and said, "given your ages, risk tolerances, and investment goals I recommend you put your money into three companies, Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco."

I'm assuming everyone reading this knows what happened. It was an expensive lesson.

Fortunately, I remarried, and Lisa thinks we might want to invest in more land to grow food. My kinda gal.

https://www.brunettegardens.com/

Expand full comment
author

Ouch! That's a painful lesson to learn the hard way! But at least you're getting better investment advice from your current wife! Best of luck to you!

Expand full comment
Apr 3, 2023Liked by Daniel D

So here's a fun little fact: one of the prosecutors in the Arthur Andersen, LLP case was none other than Andrew Weissman--of Mueller Report fame. Andersen, then one of the largest accounting/auditing firms in the world, was indicted and convicted of obstruction of justice, nominally for shredding documents. Well, here's the thing: that conviction was reversed by a unanimous Supreme Court, which held that a defendant cannot be convicted of obstruction of justice without some conscious awareness of wrongdoing connected to a particular proceeding. Turns out the documents in question may well have been shredded in keeping with Anderson's blanket document retention policies. But Weissman and the rest of the prosecutorial team convinced the trial judge to modify the jury instructions such that the jury could convict without any need for corrupt motive.

This became a hallmark of prosecutorial overreach. Precisely the sort of overreach that would mark the rest of Weissman's career at DoJ. . . .

Expand full comment
author

Thanks for that additional backstory! It's wild how you keep seeing the same names popping up over and over again, as well as the bizarre "coincidences" connecting different events in different eras: https://off-the-reservation.com/2021/12/24/coincidence/

Expand full comment
Apr 3, 2023Liked by Daniel D

Oh, yeah.

Say, you remember that prosecution of Republican governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell? The one that got thrown out by a unanimous Supreme Court that rejected an exceptionally aggressive interpretation of the statute put forward by DoJ? The U.S. Attorney for E.D.Va. at the time was Dana Boente.

In case you were wondering, yes, this is the same Dana Boente that was acting U.S.A.G. during the critical months of January - February 2017, head of DoJ-NSD until at least October 2017, and then General Counsel at the FBI from Jan. 2018 - May 2020. During which periods absolutely no funny business whatsoever occurred in any of those offices.

Expand full comment
author

You're sharing some good information. It seems like you should start a substack on this theme. To borrow a phrase from the late great George Carlin, it's a big club, and we're not in it.

Expand full comment

Enron is funny because a law that was invented to punish Enron for corporate document retention is now being used to punish the January 6th protestors who supported Trump. Walking in a nearby location is being classified as "corruptly influencing and obstructing proceedings".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8RWtfjFydU

Expand full comment

This needed saying, thanks.

Expand full comment
author
Apr 2, 2023·edited Apr 2, 2023Author

Thanks, Nina!

Expand full comment

One small and funny observation is that Jim Cramer is wrong so often, and tends to align with the market peak right before a crash, that there's no way his mistakes are accidental — he is getting paid by insiders to pump stocks so that the public can provide their exit liquidity, so then the insiders dump and offload their stock onto the naive public.

This strategy gets diminishing returns, but it's pretty hilarious to see someone pick so many losers while keeping their job.

Expand full comment