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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24830 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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I'm beginning to suspect that Powers That Be may not Be all they're cracked up to be. Current track record on presidential assassinations is leaning really heavily in favor of deranged highly motivated individuals and against the Illuminati.

edit: deranged is not really an appropriate descriptor for many presidential assassins, but even the ones with clear political motives were acting alone or in a small group, not as agents of a significant institution.

It’s not? Out of the four big assassins, the only one who made a coherent plan was Booth. Half credit for Oswald. The Reagan, Teddy, and Jackson attempts were pretty unhinged, too.

I mean, it is clearly is appropriate for many as well, but off the top of my head Booth, McKinley's assassin, the Puerto Ricans, and that one Georgian dude who threw a grenade at Dubya had fairly clear ideological motives. It may not necessarily have involved a good plan, but it wasn't like the ghost of Elvis told them to do it.

The Powers-That-Be will likely be sending Trump to prison if Trump doesn't win in the next election. Don't just look at US history, but all of human history when considering the possibility of the elites killing the guy at the top. The US has been extraordinarily lucky in nearly everything since the Civil War, so expect reversion to the mean and don't consider past US history as a good bases for your Bayesian priors.

JFK assassination seems like a case of elites killing off the top guy. Or at least I'd say I'm 80% certain the elites at the time were involved in some portion of that assassination.

I'm also about 70% certain that the elites setup Nixon for his fall.

Intelligence agencies don't seem generally trustful. I just don't think they can use overt methods anymore.

I'm not an end-of-history guy, but I do actually think the professionalism of the Secret Service is pretty remarkable. I have never heard a credible claim that they don't do their level best to protect the President regardless of who it is. American patriots are actually better than third-worlders.

They're also quite good at their original mission: investigating and stamping out counterfeit money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfeit_United_States_currency

an estimated $70 million in counterfeit bills are in circulation, or approximately 1 note in counterfeits for every 10,000 in genuine currency, with an upper bound of $200 million counterfeit, or 1 counterfeit per 4,000 genuine notes

It’s still fascinating to me we got the people who investigated money to be the presidential guard. I guess all around they’re there to make sure the presidents’ face stays intact.

Yeah it's a weird double-mission in the modern era. I guess it made more sense in the wild west days, when they were more like frontier super-policemen.

I always assumed that putting the Presidential security detail in the Treasury Department (where the Secret Service sat until it was moved into DHS in 2003) was a coup-proofing measure - you wanted the detail to have a totally different reporting line to the military or federal law enforcement. But checking dates suggests that the story might be simpler - the Secret Service took over Presidential security in 1901 (after the McKinley assassination) and the FBI wasn't established until 1908. So at the time they put the detail in the Secret Service, the only civilian alternatives were a new agency, the Marshalls Service, or the Postal Inspectorate. I suspect the Postal Inspectorate would have done a better job.

The Powers-That-Be

Can you be more specific?

The Justice Department. Jack Smith. Alvin Bragg. You know, the people currently prosecuting him for felonies.

Why not say that instead of using a needlessly vague and conspiratorial sounding term?

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