The Deep State and its moral relativism — which is to say, its insistence on power over morality or principle

retweeted by former CIA, NsA Director Anthony Hayden

Anthony Hayden: “Deport unvaccinated MAGA to Afghanistan”, and posts this picture

Milley and Austin agree.

But wait, there’s more! Adored journalist of the left David Rothkopf opines, “Taliban and al-Qaeda combined aren’t as big a threat as Trump and his supporters”.

Whi is David Rothkopf? Robert Spencer answers:

… Rothkopf is not some antifa meth head scrawling ACAB on a post office in Portland. Instead, David Rothkopf is one of the cosseted elites, and a respected member of the foreign policy establishment: He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has taught at Johns Hopkins’ Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, as well as at Columbia and Georgetown. He is a regular on MSNBC and at the Daily Beast.

Late in 2020, Rothkopf published a book, Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump, that came fitted out with accolades from all the usual suspects. Neocon Never-Trumper Max Boot called Rothkopf “one of America’s leading public intellectuals” and said that the book was a “tour de force of provocative argumentation,” making the case that “Donald Trump deserves to be grouped with those few American leaders who have betrayed America.” Leftist lawyer Lawrence Tribe, who convicted Trump of all manner of crimes on Twitter, declared: “Anyone interested in the preservation of the United States from those who would betray it from within must read David Rothkopf’s compelling history of treasonous acts,” in which, of course, “Rothkopf saves his harshest condemnation for Donald Trump and the deep currents of which Rothkopf sees Trump’s rise as but a symptom.”

And so on and on. The appalling David Frum stated that “with elegantly controlled fury, David Rothkopf arraigns the 45th president of disloyalty to the United States and its people.” Obama State Department wonk Richard Stengel, who has called for criminalization of burning of the Qur’an, said: “Throughout our more than two-century history, America has experienced its share of traitors. But as David Rothkopf’s eloquent and powerful book asserts, we’ve never had an individual who has betrayed the country as consistently, as resolutely, as completely as Donald Trump.”

The Deep State has been embedded in our ruling class for decades, and its military “experts” have always been incompetent in assessing threats, braying political opinions that they disguise as objective truth. Issues & Insights highlights the 2020 campaign assessment of His Fraudulency by 70 national security veterans of GOP administrations:

“We believe Joe Biden has the character, experience, and temperament to lead this nation. We believe he will restore the dignity of the presidency, bring Americans together, reassert America’s role as a global leader, and inspire our nation to live up to its ideals.”

An exception that proves the rule, or a hint of trouble for this particular house?

282 Round Hill Road, purchased for $1.850 in July 2019, gut-renovated, and put back up for sale for $4.295 in May, 2020 just as the Covid boom was starting, has still not sold, and today has dropped its price to $3.395.

Which is a (non) result different from the rest of the market’s performance. Here’s an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal written in April, 2019, describing the pre-COVID state of affairs in Greenwich. Coincidentally, it features this exact house. “Wealthy Greenwich Home Owners Give in to Market Realities”.

After four years on the market, and three price cuts, a stately Colonial-style home on Greenwich, Conn.’s tony Round Hill Road is being sold in a way that was once unthinkable in one of the country’s most affluent communities: It is getting auctioned off. Once asking $3.795 million, the four-bedroom property will be sold May 18 with Paramount Realty USA for a reserve price of just $1.8 million.

Seller Isaac Hakim, a real-estate investor, said it is time to move on. “We are ready to sell and I don’t want it to drag on,” he said. After raising their children there, he and his wife moved to Florida several years ago. 

While luxury home auctions are utilized in other parts of the country, they have rarely been seen in markets like Greenwich. Once a beacon for Wall Street’s top brass and still one of the richest towns in the U.S., Greenwich is facing a slew of issues.

Many wealthy New Yorkers are opting to live in the city, rather than in the suburbs. Some of the wealthiest, like Mr. Hakim, have decamped to Florida in search of more favorable tax rates. Banking executives who propped up the market with their yearly bonuses have also experienced cuts in compensation.

The seemingly never-ending slump is leading some sellers to accept less — sometimes a lot less. Owners who paid top-dollar for their homes in the Fairfield County town in the mid-to-late 2000s are routinely selling for less than they paid. Dramatic price cuts are the order of the day. There were 45 properties in Greenwich priced at more than $5 million that had their price reduced by 10% or more in the 12-month period between April, 2019, and March, 2019, according to Realtor.com

It’s probably mean to suggest it, but this home’s failure to perform in either the pre-COVID era or the current boom may suggest that it has difficulties beyond just price.

Hail Caesar

(Video, if you care, is here)

Seeing the picture of a crowd of rich, mostly-old, white liberals attending a Napa Valley Democrat fundraiser brought to mind a review of Robert Strauss’ new book, “The Death of Caesar” that I read this morning, written by Roger Kimball.

‘To the plebes’, Strauss writes, ‘he brought handouts, entertainment, and debt relief — but not enough to hurt the wealthy’.

KImball’s on a roll. He also posted ths yesterday, in a different forum:

One of the most disturbing aspects of Hamburger’s analysis is the historical connection he exposes between the expansion of the franchise in the early 20th century and the growth of administrative, that is to say, extra-legal, power. For the people in charge, equality of voting rights was one thing. They could live with that. But the tendency of newly enfranchised groups—the “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” of yore—to reject progressive initiatives was something else again. As Woodrow Wilson noted sadly, “The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.” What to do?

The solution was to shift real power out of elected bodies and into the hands of the right sort of people, enlightened people, progressive people, people, that is to say, like Woodrow Wilson.

For those Taliban apologists claiming the sheepshaggers have "evolved and matured", remember New Coke

Afghanistan VP tells Lara Logan al Qaeda and the Taliban are like Coke and Pepsi

"Ideologically, the difference between ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taliban is the difference between the taste of Coke and Pepsi," he said. "If you remove the labels, can you say which one is Coke and which one is Pepsi?" he asked.

Two months after launching its new version, after a huge, multi-million-dollar national media campaign yielded disastrous results, Coke pulled the plug on the product and returned to “Classic Coke”. The difference here is, Coke executives actually intended to change the original winning formula.

Ha! Another one from the archives, but not as prescient as the other one, alas — Noel ended up getting off pretty much scot free

Does Aida's still sell penny candy?

August 3, 2009

Bad News for the Noels of Greenwich and Mustique

Irving Picard, trustee of the Bernie Madoff estate, has persuaded a judge to put Ruth on a strict allowance and she must now report all expenditures over $100. By funny coincidence, Picard is suing Walter Noel on the same legal theory of unjust enrichment and imagine the disruption to the Noel family if the same limits are imposed on them. How will Walter pay his greens fees? (I think Greenwich’s municipal course falls under the spending threshold, but can Walter even find the place?). How utterly degrading to have to ask that horrible man Irving for permission to jet off to Mustique. Or the Hamptons, for heaven’s sake – no helicopter flight across the Sound can possibly be had for such a paltry sum.

Of course none of this has happened to the Noels, yet. But if she were wise, Monica might want to stock up on must-haves now, while her credit card still works and Picard is busy ruining what’s left of Ruth Madoff’s life. Pre-pay the Round Hill dues, for instance, book flights for the Thanksgiving holidays to your villa and, just in case, get that Viagra prescription filled for Walt – I can just imagine the glee with which Picard would turn that down. How the mighty have fallen, so to speak.

UPDATE: Haha again — here’s another one, written a year after Obama took office

Change

I stumbled across my old blog site’s archives this evening and prowled through them to see the changes in both the blog’s style and Greenwich real estate. The archives only go back to 2005 — I used Google’s blog hosting service for three years before that, but Google bounced me after I was trolled by an angry flock of liberals — but there’s some interesting stuff all the same. This one from 2005 caught my eye: remember, that was two years before the iPhone was introduced. I think its prediction has stood up well.

November 26, 2005

The Market has Moved Online 

A recent analysis by Real Trends reveals that, for every marketing dollar spent by the real estate industry, 39% goes to newspaper advertising and only 11% for online marketing. The company suggested that the industry model reduce newspaper advertising to a mere 10% and bump online expenditures to 52%. I think they’re right; more important, so does my employer, who is already all over the internet and committing to more. Homeowners want to see their house advertised in print, so we all do it, but it’s not an efficient way to distribute information to buyers. The current model for advertising in Greenwich is this: each house is showcased, in a cycle, every few weeks, for one day each time. Open houses are advertised in row after row of small photos and the consumer must wade through them all to find houses in her price range that appeal to her. If she could instead specify a price range, click a button and immediately find every relevant open house that day, with directions, or every listing, wouldn’t that be easier? That’s why the industry has moved online and that’s how your house is going to sell. It’s all about price and accessibility of information; not about how beautiful your house looks in print.

No, it wasn't global warming that brought back the Taliban, but American's tolerance of massive corruption certainly hurt.

afghan bandits then, and still here

How aid billions were squandered in Afghanistan

If you want to understand the horrifying return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan, you could delve into the history of a mountain nation that repeatedly repels foreign invaders. 

Or you could consider the saga of nine Italian goats. 

These animals from Tuscany were airlifted into the country as part of a £4.4 million scheme planned by the Pentagon to help the Afghan cashmere industry and create thousands of jobs.

The blond billy goats were sent to breed with darker females to boost the yield and quality of the luxury wool from nine million local goats. 

But several fell sick, their newly designed home was too small, huge food costs made the plans unsustainable, the intended Afghan partner pulled out, and the project chief quit in dismay. 

Those in charge could not even tell if the unfortunate goats ended up in a cooking pot. ‘We don’t know,’ said John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. ‘This was so poorly managed.’

This farcical scheme perfectly symbolises the costly and corrosive folly of Western attempts to build a new society in Afghanistan, based on arrogance, arms and vast flows of aid.

Tony Blair declared it our ‘duty’ to rebuild Afghanistan as a ‘stable and democratic’ nation. 

But despite some advances in education, female empowerment and prosperity, naive foreign interventions played a damaging role in fuelling corruption, furthering divisions and fostering a mafia state, thereby assisting the return of the Taliban.

Read the full article for a nauseating recounting of this two-decade saga of corruption and incompetency (and though not mentioned, American contractors were full participants). The reporter provides multiple, detailed examples of what we turned a blind eye to, and here’s a snippet:

By 2010, a US diplomatic cable quoted the Afghan national security adviser saying ‘corruption is not just a problem for the system of governance in Afghanistan – it is the system of governance’.

But the West’s money kept flowing as shameless politicians spoke about stability: almost a trillion dollars spent by the US over two decades and £30 billion by Britain, including £3.3 billion on aid, in a country of 38 million people.

If all the international aid spent had simply been divided up among Afghans, each citizen could have become an instant millionaire. 

Instead, the poverty rate has soared in recent years to engulf more than half the population.

The big beneficiaries were the crooks in charge and the Dubai property market, where many stashed their stolen wealth. 

One powerbroker at a Kabul bank used a web of fake firms to make fraudulent loans to ministers, officials and warlords, leading to losses equivalent to one-twelfth of the size of the country’s economy.

The bank also spent £117 million on 35 luxury villas on Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah island complex, which it used for entertaining.

The slow-burn catastrophe was charted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, an unusually pugnacious official body, with quarterly reports and probing investigations.

British Ministers driving up aid budgets, such as Andrew Mitchell, spoke of ‘endemic’ corruption and parliamentary reports exposed blurred focus, weak scrutiny, lack of data and ‘leakage’ of funds.

‘People ignored the corruption because it was easier than trying to fix it,’ said a British contractor who assessed UK schemes. 

Reports of what was happening did surface over the years; I read them, but that seems to have been more than the fine people in Washington did.

Wait'll the effects of lower SAT scores (for some) kick in

RESENTMENT OF AN OVERWEENING EDUCATED CLASS, EVEN AMONG CHINESE IMMIGRANTS:  “They think that because they speak better English, that they graduated from Ivy League schools, that they are better than us.”

“To be fair, the Ivy League schools teach all their graduates that they’re better than everyone else.” Glenn Reynolds, Yale Law ‘85

So that's where it went

Oh, the humanity! Knocked over lifeguard chairs, whitecaps — make it stop! Please, make it STOP!

“Deadly” Tropical storm Henri makes landfall in Westerly, Rhode Island

Perspective: Hurricane of ‘38, Rhode Island:

Chaos at the airport: Milley, Blinken, Biden's entire staff, scramble for seats aboard Kampalla's getaway plane

outta here

I’m not saying that halfway around the world is the place they most want to be right now, but any further and they’d be on their way back home, and they very much do not want to be there.