Vance is VP

Donald Trump picked Ohio senator J.D. Vance as his running mate on Monday afternoon, choosing a grassroots favorite ahead of more seasoned political operators. The former president left it until the last possible moment, using all his showman skills to leave the world guessing, before opting for 39-year-old Vance. Trump made his announcement on Truth Social, dropping it just as delegates were rubber stamping his nomination as presidential candidate at their convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

It could have been worse. Although the fact that Vance is married to a Hindu probably doesn’t bode well on the immigration front. But regardless, we can hope that the assassination attempt and all of the prosecutions will convince President Trump to stop mucking about with irrelevant things like black employment rates and support for foreign countries and focus on doing to the Deep State what Russia is doing to Ukraine.

Unfortunately, this choice tends to suggest that the old dog hasn’t learned anything at all. About the only good thing one can say for him is that he isn’t Nimrata Haley or Marco Rubio.

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Antagonizing China

Since sanctions and seizures have worked so well against Russia, Clown World’s brilliant strategists are planning to utilize the same effective economic weapons against China.

NATO officials are discussing taking action to reclaim some Chinese-owned infrastructure projects in Europe should a wider conflict with Russia break out in the east of the continent, three officials involved in the discussions told CNN.

A decade ago, when Europe was still crawling out of the economic crater caused by the global financial crisis, the promise of infrastructure funding from Chinese-owned investment firms seemed like a major windfall.

Now, with the largest land war being waged in Europe since World War II – and the West warning of Beijing’s support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – NATO countries now see those investments as a liability, with allies beginning to discuss ways to reclaim some of those projects, the officials said. The fear, according to one US official, is that Beijing could use the infrastructure it owns in Europe to provide material assistance to Russia if the conflict were to expand. The goal, officials said, is to figure out a path forward well in advance of any potential conflict…

From rail lines connecting Eastern Europe to China, to ports located in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, China has funded tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure investments under its Belt & Road Initiative, which European nations began signing onto in 2013.

So, this should end well… It goes without saying that this is an economic catastrophe, and probably a military catastrophe as well, in the making. The sooner Americans and Europeans throw off their disastrous, destructive, and wicked ruling elites, the better chance they will have of seeing their nations survive to the 22nd Century.

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Aware of the Risks

The Secret Service had identified the rooftop from which the would-be assassin fired as “a potential vulnerability” before the event.

The rooftop where a gunman shot at former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally was identified by the Secret Service as a potential vulnerability in the days before the event, two sources familiar with the agency’s operations told NBC News. The building, owned by a glass research company, is adjacent to the Butler Farm Show, an outdoor venue in Butler, Pennsylvania. The Secret Service was aware of the risks associated with it, the sources said.

“Someone should have been on the roof or securing the building so no one could get on the roof,” said one of the sources, a former senior Secret Service agent who was familiar with the planning. Understanding how the gunman got onto the roof — despite those concerns — is a central question for investigators scrutinizing how a lone attacker managed to shoot at Trump during Saturday’s campaign event.

The Secret Service worked with local law enforcement to maintain event security, including sniper teams poised on rooftops to identify and eliminate threats, Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said. But no officers were posted on the building used by the would-be assassin, outside the event’s security perimeter but only about 148 yards from the stage — within range of a semiautomatic rifle like the one the gunman was carrying.

The Secret Service had designated that rooftop as being under the jurisdiction of local law enforcement, a common practice in securing outdoor rallies, Guglielmi said. Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldinger said his office maintains an Emergency Services Unit team, which deployed four sniper teams and four “quick response teams” at the rally. But he said the Secret Service agents were in charge of security outside the venue.

“They had meetings in the week prior. The Secret Service ran the show. They were the ones who designated who did what,” Goldinger said. “In the command hierarchy, they were top, they were No. 1.”

Goldinger said the commander of the Emergency Services Unit told him it was not responsible for securing areas outside the venue.

Question: if the Secret Service was not responsible for securing areas outside the venue, then why didn’t the police sniper fire sooner, as soon as he saw the would-be assassin on the rooftop that was a known vulnerability for which the police were responsible? Why would he require, or wait for, any permission from the Secret Service to take the shot?

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The Most Alpha Thing Ever

I go into this in a bit more detail on Sigma Game, but now that the full audio of the assassination attempt is out, I am genuinely amused by President Trump’s first response to being told to move by the Secret Service.

“Let me get my shoes, let me get my shoes on.”

A man simply doesn’t walk off the stage in his socks just because some overmedicated patsy took a pop at him with a .22, after all. First things first, gentlemen. And lady.

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The Trump Rally Story

Simplicius notes that the Clown World media complex is desperately attempting to avoid the term “assassination attempt” despite using it to describe the January 6 honeytrap.

I have never witnessed such an openly diabolical psyop and mass gaslighting operation. We literally just watched the attempted assassination of an American president, and the media is treating it like a superfluous nonevent.

Later, Barrack Obama joined the coordinated coverup, playing dumb as per his handlers’ orders. And the final proof of the operation came as Biden gave an unplanned national address, half an hour past his newly-announced 8pm bedtime and looking all the worse for it. Watch the coordinated coverup, as Biden openly refuses to call it an assassination even when directly asked…

Now, the big thing to watch is how the regime media goes forward—particularly the middle tastemaker and gatekeeper rungs like your Rachel Maddows and ‘The View’ harridans. They will be desperate to keep Trump as far away from martyrdom as possible—that means obfuscation, obfuscation, obfuscation. They will likely continue via the old CIA playbook of tangling things up, pointlessly hyperfocusing on the procedural minutiae of the investigation into what kind of attack it was. They’ll likely drag it out for weeks, months, or however long it takes without definitively ascribing it to the verboten “A” word, falling back on the false high horse of their “journalistic due diligence” and nonexistent “thoroughness and integrity”.

Yet we know full well if this had happened to a Democrat candidate, all the regime media would be rising up in one voice calling for the total lockdown of the country and physical purge of all rightwing and ‘ideological opponents’.

Alarmingly, the chief of communications for the Secret Service, Anthony Guglielmi, has already posted their official stance on the event which likewise eschews any strongly deterministic language. Given Trump’s rebuffed attempts to beef up security, and given the eyewitness who spotted the shooter and claims to have been ignored by Secret Service agents, the above release looks highly troubling.

It’s not just the Left who suspect that the assassination attempt was fake. And certainly, skepticism is valid considering how there have been no shortage of orchestrated events that were clearly staged over the last few decades.

That being said, we know Clown World is increasingly desperate. We know a number of world leaders have either been assassinated or been the target of attempted assassinations. And we also know that the Democrats have been very publicly utilizing the sort of heated rhetoric that they genuinely believe will cause people to commit political violence. Throw in the Secret Service phoning in their security, slow-rolling their response, and downplaying the assassination attempt after the fact, and I think the odds favor the attempt to kill Donald Trump – or, perhaps, his body double – being a real one.

But we can’t say anything with certainty now. If we’re fortunate, we’ll be able to figure it out one way or another soon enough. The one thing we do know is that Trump didn’t need any additional help to beat the decaying, dementia-addled Biden in November.

Razorfist has an unmissable rant on what he describes as “the expected unaliving attempt”. And Clown World color revolutionary Victoria Nuland quite vehemently predicted that Donald Trump would not be elected President in a recent interview.

UPDATE: If you want a conspiracy theory, here’s one for you. The dead guy in the crowd behind Trump who was shot in the head wasn’t an innocent victim. He was the Deep State’s second shooter who was supposed to deliver the kill shot while everyone was distracted by the windup toy with the rifle on the roof. And I don’t think it’s an accident that this happened less than two weeks after the intentional public exposure of the 5 Bidens as dementia-addled walking corpses.

UPDATE: The Chinese don’t think it was staged. From Global Times:

“The gunman’s background has three possibilities,” Li Haidong, a professor from the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Sunday. “First, it could be someone from the deep state, an elusive force within the government that does not want to see Trump win. Second, it could be from the far-left extremist forces, who do not want to see Trump, representing the far-right, win the election and thus have taken radical actions. Lastly, it could be an individual extremist without any organizational background, simply a person who is tired of Trump,” Li said.

Assuming the Chinese are correct, I think the obvious stand-down by the Secret Service and the police, the Z-team makeup of the security detail, and the headshot victim in the crowd, tend to suggest the first possibility.

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Attempted Assassination of Trump at Rally

Shooting just took place at the Trump rally. Looks like Trump – or more likely, his body double – might have been grazed on the neck or the ear.

It didn’t sound like a large caliber rifle. Six to eight shots were fired in fairly rapid succession. Any experts able to tell what it was?

UPDATE: He appears to have been lightly wounded, but he’s fine. Before the Secret Service ushered him from the stage, he stood up and pumped his fist several times. Legend.

UPDATE: Yes, his ear was clipped. Close call.

UPDATE: Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldfinger reportedly said one person is believed to be dead and ‘possibly a second.’ He said the person believed to be dead was ‘someone in the crowd.’ Secret Service agents killed the gunman within moments. 

There is also a video of what appears to be the dead shooter on a rooftop. I’ve also noticed that the media have stopped putting doubt quotes around “shot” now.

UPDATE: Some people spotted the shooter with a rifle crawling up the roof about 150 yards away from the platform and tried to warn the police and the Secret Service for several minutes, but the Secret Service didn’t do anything until after five shots were fired. They also witnessed Secret Service snipers shoot and kill the would-be assassin.

If you watch the video, you can hear the first shots are fired, then 2-3 seconds later, nearly twice as many shots are fired even though Trump is down and covered by agents. I suspect the second series of shots are the Secret Service snipers taking out the shooter.

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Barbarians at the Gates

I mean, they’re quite literally at the borders and killing border guards with spears:

A Polish border guard was killed last month by a group of spear-throwing migrants as they attempted to cross the border into Europe, as officials say a surge in arrivals through Belarus is Putin’s latest war tactic against the West.

21-year-old Sgt Mateusz Sitek from the Polish village of Nowy Lubiel was killed after a group of migrants reportedly from Africa and the Middle East attempting to cross the Polish border hurled a volley of makeshift weapons at officers. Several more were injured during the clash.

The improvised weapons appear to have been made out of tree branches and steel blades taped to the top.

If migrants are a war tactic against the West, shouldn’t Angela Merkel be arrested for war crimes? Whatever happened to “welcome refugees”?

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We Tell You Who We Are

Whether we want to or not, whether we try to disguise ourselves or not, the writer always tells the reader something about himself. This is a very astute observation from a member of the club that dare not talk about Neil Gaiman:

There was a writer whose books I loved–incidentally he is respected and talked about by NG. I had a chance to meet him at a multiple-day convention over a decade ago.

During that trip, this writer behaved sneakily and shittily toward my friend (much how NG’s behavior is being described now). At the time I was so disappointed but I figured that I loved his books and could separate the art from the artist.

Only I realized, reading his new work and trying to reread the books I’d loved, that I could see the tells in the writing. How the main characters behaved, how women were characterized, etc.–I could see him crafting justification for his characters’ behaviors that echoed his own. And that was the end of that for me.

I think the work usually reflects the creator behind it, but sometimes it takes clarity elsewhere to really see what is there.

“Sometimes it takes clarity elsewhere to really see what is there” is absolutely correct. Because what’s there is always there, but the reader is not necessarily seeing it in a relevant and meaningful context. Even when the writer explicitly warns you.

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds.”
– Neil Gaiman

For distinctly different values of “unimaginable” and “amazing”, of course. On that note, it might be interesting to know what those of you who read my fiction believe you have gleaned from it concerning my own inadvertent literary confessions, as I’ve generally tried to avoid self-inserts since my earliest attempts at fiction.

Then again, some readers never see anything at all, no matter how loudly the writer trumpets his shortcomings and evildoings. Who wants to tell this poor woman the bad news?

I’m autistic, and for the longest time the collected works of Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman were my special interest. That’s still true, but just feels different and complicated and ickier. GRRM had better not pull any shit because I can’t take any more of this!

Yeah, so, there’s a reason for those two Rs…

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