Caption: Poll, see below
An overwhelming majority of respondents believe the FBI is more corrupt than honest. That’s according to the latest unscientific poll at SharylAttkisson.com. (Sharyl’s husband is retired FBI) Eighty-nine percent (89%) say the FBI is more corrupt than honest. Approximately five percent (5%) say the FBI is equally honest and corrupt. Only two percent (2%) believe the FBI is more honest than corrupt, while nearly three percent (3%) say they don’t know.
These results underscore a significant lack of trust in the FBI among respondents.
If you offered the poll to police officers and deputy sheriffs, they’d have been harder on the FBI than that because they work around them.
FBI Special Agents are not (all) stupid as a bag of hammers. Most are solid people, but the Agency, meaning the policy level, let them down. I worked with the FBI daily for five years, including Group 1 investigations, and later supervised two FBI agents daily (sort of supervised because they also answered to an FBI Supervisory Special Agent). The outfit needs to be rethought, and the staffing could be reduced by half. Every FBI special agent should have been a street police officer for at least five years before entering federal service. They lack basic law enforcement skills across the board. Yes, it’s nice to have lawyers and accountants, but they need that five years of reality before they go into the soft office job.
When I worked with (not for) the FBI, I had Special Deputy US Marshal credentials in addition to my credentials as an Orange County California District Attorney Investigator, served federal grand jury subpoenas, wrote federal search warrants (different format from state warrants), and testified in federal cases dealing with organized crime. I did what they could not in many situations because their bureaucracy didn’t bind me. It took me one day to get a mail cover in place, and it took them six months to get the same thing (from the US Postal Inspection Service)—just one example. Sometimes, it was better to take a criminal case through the state system, and in those circumstances, I did that.
Kash Patel is correct. You could reduce the FBI staffing by 50% at a massive tax savings, and nobody would feel the pinch.
The FBI doesn’t record interviews. Instead, they interview people, write down what they think the person said, and make it gospel. This practice is sloppy and leads to corrupt practices, and it must change along with much of the FBI’s work.
Secret Service
The US Secret Service is down 1,000 special agents. If they can function with that staffing level, maybe we should reduce their authorized strength by 1,000. There are a lot of questions that should be asked as we move forward in terms of what staffing levels should be and how missions should be allocated. As one with six Secret Service special agents working for me at one point, I have nothing bad to say about them. They also investigate counterfeit US currency and access device fraud (credit cards) in addition to their protection roles, an artifact left over from when they were US Treasury agents – before they were folded into the Department of Homeland Security.
Protection is a burn-out job. Plain and simple. Currency and credit cards are what they do when they’re too new or too burned out. Somebody above my pay grade without an axe to grind needs to look at the US Secret Service and figure out how to make that agency work in human terms. If you simply fire people you’ve overworked, nobody with any sense of career will want to do the tedious, thankless, and exhausting protection work, which tends to follow election cycles – in part. To be a successful and competent protection officer, you can’t be a DEI hire, and you must always do it. It’s a demanding, broad-spectrum specialty. There is no lack of funding. Congress gives them the money they need — but how much do they need, and how should the agency operate? What they’re doing now is not working well enough.
Motivation
Weapons that Wait
CDRSAL discussed mine warfare on his blog a few days ago and shared this link. It’s a good primer on where the US Navy is on naval mine development. One key to defeating China is destroying its merchant fleet utterly – down to the last hull. Even if they have some success with fleet action on the high seas, a ravaged merchant fleet will eventually lead to their starvation. Laying sea denial weapons (mines) in choke points and forcing their merchant ships into less protected waters is a strategy that is open to the US if we have the weapons to deploy. If the war goes nuclear, then we’re all wiped out, and these tactics won’t matter much. Read more from CDRSAL here.
Bullet Points:
** Musk asks a critical question.
** My friend JohnD (Norway) sent me this link. John, my brother from another mother, likes to pull my chain when it comes to insane US policy. The Scandinavian nations were snakebit when it came to reaching out a helping hand to people from savage sand nations. The Norwegians reacted to the error first. The Danes are shoving them back to the rocks they crawled out from under, and the Swedes (having drunk the Kool-Aid deeply) are still mired. Throwing the savages out of the USA will be a big effort, but one that the incoming administration is committed to (which JohnD, who reads this blog) knows.
** How do you know how many mothers are out there committing crimes? Here is the test.
** Do you plan to retire in 2025? Do you have enough money to pull the pin?
Government Fiscal Stimulus Programs – China Doubles Down
China’s attempts at “fiscal stimulus”—the government borrowing and spending vast amounts of money to reverse the economic downturn—will ultimately fail. The longer Beijing implements stimulus, the more extended stagnation or, at minimum, historically very slow growth will persist.
China’s borrowing and spending on stimulus measures is the best its competitors can hope for: a self-immolation of the Chinese economy. Hence, Xi offered to buy a business-class seat for Paul Krugman to visit Beijing and serve as China’s economic advisor for the next decade.
Historically, stimulus in response to an endogenous economic downturn has failed every time it’s been tried. The more deficit stimulus spending, the longer the downturn drags on. Even though British economist John Maynard Keynes famously advocated stimulus spending in his 1936 book “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” the first great deficit stimulus experiment preceded him by seven years—at the start of America’s Great Depression.
President Herbert Hoover responded immediately to the 1929 stock market crash with a rash of interventionist measures, including fiscal stimulus. In his four years in office, Hoover doubled federal spending (when adjusted for inflation), and the deficit grew from a surplus of 0.8% of GDP in Calvin Coolidge’s last budget to a deficit of 5.8% in Hoover’s last budget.
By the time Hoover left office, the economy was in shambles, with 26% unemployment. However, the great banking crisis of early 1933 also contributed to that astonishingly high unemployment rate.
Franklin Roosevelt continued to borrow and spend on stimulus, running a deficit for every one of his 12+ years in office, something unheard of at the time. As a result, the depression dragged on for another 13 years, ending only in 1946. In 1940,, unemployment was still over 15%, far higher than in 1930.
Even with all that stimulus spending, the Great Depression lasted nearly three times longer, as measured by the time required to return to full private employment after a financial crisis, than the next longest depression in American history.
Some Keynesian economists claim the economy recovered in 1946 because the government didn’t borrow and spend enough for the first decade or so. Starting in 1942, it finally did what was necessary: borrowed and spent Herculean quantities of money to pay for World War II, ballooning the national debt from 44% of GDP to a record 119% in four years.
This is an odd argument, considering deficit stimulus spending never existed as a policy or even an economic theory before 1929, yet every other preceding depression in American history (and several of them) ended in, at longest, one-third the time.
The Keynesians also ignore that FDR effectively ended his New Deal during World War II and finally stopped crushing American business with strangling regulations. He needed American businesses to function properly and deliver record numbers of tanks, planes, and ships, which ended the Depression.
Japan suffered from the mother of all cheap money asset bubbles in the late 1980s, which burst in 1990. At its peak, Tokyo’s real estate was worth more on paper than all of America’s real estate, Japan’s real estate was worth more on paper than the rest of the planet, and the Japanese stock market’s capitalization was greater than the United States’ stock market capitalization despite Japan’s economy being less than 40% the size of the USA’s.
Then, the bubble burst and created a financial crisis. The Japanese government responded with the mother of all stimulus packages: nearly three decades of borrowing and spending on every government program imaginable.
From 1990 to 2024, Japan went from one of the most fiscally sound OECD governments to the worst debt-to-GDP ratio on earth: from about 65% to 264%, which is worse than Venezuela, Sudan, and Greece.
(The USA’s now-record debt-to-GDP ratio is 121%).
34 years later, Japan is widely acknowledged as having endured three decades of stagnation, the so-called “three lost decades.” Japan is already being cited as a story China might repeat: building up an export-driven economy with cheap central bank money and too much debt.
If China responds like Japan did, with years or decades of fiscal stimulus, the story is even more likely to repeat itself.
When the 2008 financial crisis struck, the Obama administration responded with classic fiscal stimulus: borrowing and spending over 8% of GDP for three straight years, then 6.7% and 4.1%, and swelling the national debt from $10.7 trillion to $19.8 trillion—nearly double—in eight years.
The result was not only the second-longest recovery to full employment in American history (only faster than the Great Depression), but the eight-year annualized economic growth rate from the crisis was by far the slowest ever in American history: an average of 2.1% per year versus anywhere from 3.5% (after the Panic of 1907) to 5.3% (after the Panic of 1893).
Also forgotten but laughable was Obama’s prediction that (paraphrasing) “If you pass this stimulus budget, unemployment will fall to 5.6% by 2012, but if you don’t pass it, unemployment will remain much higher.”
The attached chart shows the famous two blue lines that Obama’s economic team sold to the public, which the media first lauded but has since buried.
In the 140 years before 1929, when stimulus was never tried, economic recovery growth rates were usually double that of Obama’s, and unemployment came down far faster. In the old days, the government just sat back, did nothing, and let the economy recover independently.
Lastly, after the 2008 financial crisis, most Western European countries immediately implemented massive fiscal stimulus. This continued for three to four years until their debts grew so large that credit markets would no longer lend to them. In those three to four years, unemployment reached Great Depression levels in the PIIGS nations (16% in Portugal, 25% in Spain, 28% in Greece).
With things getting worse, not better, the left blamed “draconian budget cuts.” According to them, governments weren’t spending enough and were slashing spending. For years, the liberal U.S. and European press ran story after story about supposedly self-evident “massive austerity” in Europe, although they never reported actual budget statistics.
Identify the Armor
1
2
3
The flag is your first hint. It’s better than walking.
4
Identify the Feature Film/Series/Actor
A
B
C
American science fiction comedy-drama film
End
Identify the Armor:
1. Marder IFV
2. Patria AMV AMOS mortar carrier
3. RG-31 Nyala
4. RG-32 Scout
Identify the Feature Film/Series/Actor:
A. Jeremiah Johnson, Will Geer
B. The Twilight Zone, episode ‘Two’, Elizabeth Montgomery
C. Cocoon, Wilford Brimley/Hume Cronyn/Don Ameche
That was disturbingly fast, Surly.
Insomnia strikes again. :(
Actually I thought it took longer than usual. The South African light armored vehicles just didn’t click at first.
A few tricky entries coming up. At least they’d be tricky for me.
>Elizabeth Montgomery
Samantha Stevens from Bewitched?
Who knew! (besides Surly of course) I thought it was an AI image based on Sigourney Weaver.
/hangsheadinshame
My first impression as well, thinking it was a period movie with Ms. Weaver. Apparently we all have a doppleganger.
What, you haven’t memorized the original Twilight Zone episodes? For shame!
No, alas.
And I got the name wrong too. Samantha Stephens, not Stevens.
Sigh.
I believe Charles Bronson was the other half of the “Two.”
But not good ol’ Charlie Brownson.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/502292164690108925/
No one calls HIM “Blockhead”.
I actually read about that episode recently and they said it was one of the best TwiZones.
I’m looking for it.
It’s a personal favorite.
The other character in that episode was Charles Bronson.
As it is currently run, I trust the FBI to get it wrong. Does that count? Didn’t Keyes say that his policy would only work inside a closed system? Maybe this would motivate the Keynesians to build a wall around the US so they could do it right…
The FBI feeds on its image like a snake eating its tail. They live for press conferences and the next unrealistic show about the FBI on NBC or CBS that almost nobody watches.
Bongino for director/czar/whatever the stud duck’s title is at SS, yes or no?
.
I agree it is irresponsible if not outright immoral to burn people out and then cast them adrift (let them eat code). Note that the goddam Army always does that immediately after whatever form of Armistice follows cessation of hostilities. Always. Of course, we routinely do that with our allies, so………
Yes…but he says he’s not but supports, or will support, APDJT’s pick. Bongino, cop to SS, LL’s prescription, makes him a good fit.
Dan Bongino would do a splendid job, but I don’t know that he’s available. He has a brand, and he’s making big money. Changing anything in the Permanent Washington Establishment (Swamp) requires breaking rice bowls. It’s true of the Secret Service and far more true of the FBI. Somebody (like Bongino) needs to take a look at the USSS from the top to the bottom and figure out how to do it better by breaking off these artifacts from the past sixty-plus years. Should they be part of the Department of Homeland Security? I honestly don’t know the best fit in today’s environment. They have to pull from these other agencies (untrained/unqualified for protection) all the time. Witness the assassination attempt in PA on Pres. Trump and the fat lesbian dwarf who couldn’t holster her handgun past the jelly roll. There is not room for DEI in the Secret Service. At one point, many years ago, I recall a situation in their LA office when a female USSS Special Agent made so little that she was on food stamps. (single mother) They make more now, but when they’re not on protection (with overtime), they routinely make a little more than half of what they make when they’re on protection details. Or they did. I’m not current on this matter but I doubt that it has changed.
He would do a great job, but loves his day job, which he says isn’t really work.
I’m not sure. Is he a proven manager/leader?
No, he was a harness bull. Since the “leaders” have screwed the pooch, they need a visionary with experience who will listen, look and suggest changes.
He knows procedure, harps on it all the time…but ill never give up the day job (he had suggestions as to who should have the job).
I don’t trust any agency run by an attorney. They don’t think like most people, are willing to use the law to twist anything decent into corruption, and are usually only faced with losing a license in one state when they screw up. When any federal law enforcement agency decides experienced field personal are only allowed the highest positions, I might think about trusting them. Until then, nope. They have too many corrupt, and/or incompetent people on staff.
“They don’t think like most people, are willing to use the law to twist anything decent into corruption”
—
That sounds like our benevolent (and beloved) ruling class in general.
X2 – It’s a matter of being ruled by our betters. And to that point, the legislature REPRESENTS us in a Republic. They shouldn’t rule us.
Shakespeare was right regarding loy-yaz….we have far too many trying to be relevant so they go into government or government adjacent shops (which is why I harp on turning K-Street into a park, get rid of special interest lobbyists, they have no business in a proper Constitution respected Federal government).
If they FBI really cares about what us commoners think about them, they’d do well to just try to live by the Pierre the Bridge Builder joke. You can do thousands of noble, good things, but one bad thing becomes what you’re known for.
Their obsession with image means that they believe that they always must be right. So coverup becomes the theme of the day. They are also very hard on their own in many situations. I can document what I’ve seen here, but take it from me that it can be a difficult place to work. The image thing is Job One. They’ve had their share of spies like RJ Miller (Fat Mormon FBI Special Agent selling Amway out of the back of his FBI car spies for Russia to make ends meet – and to pork the Russian honeypot) and Robert Hanssen, who RAN FBI Counterintelligence (Ultra Catholic Opus Dei ideologue who also did it for money and to prove how smart he was). There are others less storied.
The big question: No.
—
Musk’s joke: those AI fakes are getting better daily, aren’t they?
FBI More Corrupt than Honest-Reminds me of a comment regarding a woman who may be in a motherly way…..”She’s a little bit pregnant”. Not possible, either she is or isn’t. In relation to the entire FBI, I’m going with the first option-Corrupt!
Some FBI Agents have very soft jobs. Two decades ago, the FBI had two undercover yachts and I’m certain that they have more than two now. Being the guy or gal who runs the yacht (captain) or languishes on the crew (all are special agents) is an example. They don’t run the ops, they just drive the yacht here or there to support ops. Once there, they never want to leave their “undercover lifestyle” of the rich and famous.
“The way that you wander is the way that you choose,
The day that you tarry is the day that you lose.
Sunshine or thunder, a man will always wonder.
Where the fair wind blows.”
The agency which every five or ten years has a lab tech sent to prison for falsifying crime lab test results?
.
The agency which collected blackmail material under Hoover for decades, then had no obvious reform when they stopped doing that? Hoover didn’t retire superrich, so he wasn’t using the material. Who is?
It really seems that John Edgar was a stand up guy.
Maligned by the left.
He liked standing up in a red dress. He would have fit in with Team Biden.
Fake news.
Rumor spread by his political enemies.
Rumor has it that Clyde Tolson was good at getting J Edgar to “stand up”.
I heard the same rumor.
J. Michael Waller dealt with that rumor and quoted sources in the interview I did with him last Saturday.
And in his book Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains.
Much of you blog, and many of the comments, are Captain Obvious. I mean that in a good way. Most people in their day to day lives are willfully oblivious to larger issues. Forums like this blog cast light on the rot and decay that is so prevalent. Sunshine is a good disinfectant. Another benefit is the building of a community of like minded people. It is encouraging to know I’m not alone.
You’re NOT alone. We are all going to the same camp [1]. Except LL who is going to do some SEAL stuff and turn the tables on our kindly Re-education Counsellors. (It will take SEAL stuff. We can’t trust SF any longer [2], can we? How long will it take before they find evidence that Matthew Livelsberger was a whytte supremacist, or a pedophile, or a Russian agent?)
[1] said for humoristic purposes. We are not going to the same camp. Accidents will happen to some. Others will get tossed into gen pop in a 90% negro prison with “bad papers” that say we are guilty of raping a child or something. Paperwork mistakes happen all the time. So unfortunate.
[2] I’m not entirely joking about this. It would be easy to convince me that there are internal forces slaveringly eager to discredit SOF of all stripes. Multiple forces, with different agendas, but working toward the same goal. Some will resent the lack of sex-integration and lower racial DEI in SOF. Others simply don’t want the US to have an effective war fighting force, some are worried about SF having a lot of smart and difficult to control people who are generally not aboard with their political agenda. And so forth.
—
Developing news: some bearded white guy was arrested in Payette, Idaho (near Boise) for allegedly planting an IED on train tracks. Idaho, land of the dreaded whytte supremacists and the entirely real and totally not-made-up Aryan Redoubt full of neo-Nazis with veritable arsenals of assault rifles. (An ARSENAL, I say. One man had TWO AR-15s and nearly a thousand bullets [sic]. He also had several Moraknivs, one with a serrated blade! Multiple knives from a Nordic country. Clearly some sort of dangerous ethnonationalist.) I saw a photo of that [alleged] train bomber. He looks like a whytte supremacist to me. However, YouTube comments are promising:
1) So they’re throwing all the spaghetti at the wall now basically.
2) FBI turning all there [sic] nuts loose
3) What an idiot, he literally left a crumb trail right to him.
3a) Um humm, just like the Vegas guy had all of his fireproof identification in the car with him. Case closed.
4) Are we gonna find out he’s a retired vet who came from the same base of the other 2 attackers? Or too obvious?
5) Blackrock going into overdrive now
Of course there are all the usual “Because he’s a Trump supporter” comments as well. But the percentage of people openly mocking The Good People (h/t to Not That Larry’s hint about being ruled by the capricious and cruel Sidhe) is WAAAY on the upswing. Not that cynicism about our government and society is a good thing.
X2 to you both….I resemble these remarks….BUT…I made a decision (contrary to what my commentary here may illustrate) to not complain or get frustrated with the imbeciles and demented running America into the ground, can’t change it other than the fact we voted in a SISU MAGA Warrior into office with a warrior/warriorette team at his side, all who know what’s behind the puppet curtain this time around. My sentiment is even more important as it relates to the everyday firehose effect of this or that showing up on news or blog feeds, most of it is premature or nitpicking and certainly more of the same each day, so more easily dismissed as nothing more than an attempt to maintain relevancy.
–
That said, VM and a few other shops are preferred info gathering/datapoint locating sites or programs (fyi, Stigall goes national in a week and a half, mornings in Hewett’s time slot…reminds me of Rush so hoping he does more than well as local to national is a big leap). Anymore, where we get our information is critically important as the MSM is currently doing the Titanic, with the rats jumping ship trying to save themselves. They can’t, they’re done…and they know it.
LL and I joke about who gets the bed next to the stove.
Won’t be me for sure…I prefer sleeping away from crowds, especially when “at camp”.
Won’t be me. I’ll go down first.
My wife said she’ll be reloading mags for me.
Heh…didn’t know Angel Studios newest “Homestead” was an EdB documentary (there were no boats or boating accidents, threw me off at first)
How many soldiers does it take to march 150 million of the armed unwilling to extermination camps? How many taxpayers does it take to supply those soldiers?
Ps. The Vegas morgue is missing a body…no way the “narrative” so emphatically stated is true, the opposite is the likely scenario simply because of who is saying it. (Which answers you main blog question LL, a hard “No
!” for me). I could be wrong but we were all a bunch of conspiracy nutjobs 4 years back…until we weren’t. Easy to presume the opposite from what is being pushed is the actual truth…we’re supposed to believe this normal guy went off the rails, offed himself while lighting the fuel cans in the back…that is unless the guy short-circuiting due to PTSD or Jason Bourne-level backroom black-ops conditioning or psychotropics pushed at every patient with problems.
Secret Service protection reform? Start by assigning the Ohio rally team to Obama. But in keeping with his 2A credentials make them gun free. Then find similar caliber people for Clinton and Biden.
Ft. Bragg, whatever name the DEI call it now, has had tens of thousands of soldiers pass through in the past couple decades. It should be now surprise if some xe-sof guy and an ex IT/hr gay went through there. That’s going to be theend of the connection though. What is troubling is the left’s ongoing narrative generation that all veterans have PTSD and thus should not have access to – you name it, they’ll try and prevent it. Kids in a divorce, firearms, security clearances….
The guy in the Tesla outside the Trump doors?
I bet he didn’t go quietly when they took him to plant him.
Never trust the FBI. Ever. Though some of the field agents may be potentially trustworthy, the whole department is an evil organization designed, by the upper and middle management, to get the facts of any case to match the already selected outcome.
–
As to the Secret Service, it needs not to be under Homeland Security. Back to Treasury. And eliminate all the DEI hires and requirements. Knew an agent who was Presidential Security under the Clintons until the agent couldn’t take it anymore. Agent said the Clintons are far worse than most of the worst estimates. And that’s all the agent would say.
–
Protection Detail needs to be big guys, preferably ex-high school/college athletes and/or fighting soldiers (not sit-on-my-ass for my tour soldiers.) They should be able to run, gun, cover, bash and hack their attackers and protect their protectees. Fat, useless deck jockeys and jockettes need not be on the detail, ever.
Just save me a bunk close to the stove… FBI and USSS need to go away and be replaced by entirely NEW agencies.
entirely NO agencies.
No, I don’t trust the FBI. I remember a world though, where I (generally) could,
and I liked it better.
*
For the Secret Service, what we need is John West and Artemus Gordon (the real ones)
to put things straight over there.
*
– Kle.
James West?
My speed about now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghCZH3tU9gI (Talented big man taken way too soon)
Yeah, Ed, James. My brain is stupider than it used to be.
*
– Kle.
Federal Bureau of Incompetence. We our funding our own demise.
-STA Lethal
Retirement funds:
https://youtu.be/pVLZyPEGukc
Some say FDR was a satan. An aristocratic one, tho.
And of course we all love and trust our beloved FBI.
Don’t say STASI.
Credit where credit’s due. Sure Frank the cripple was a satan, but without Henry Morgenthau Jr FTC would have been far less destructive. There were more parallels between the US and the contemporary USSR in the 1930’s and 40’s than we are allowed to Notice.