VIDEO: Cuba* is the enemy of the West. UN Ambassador Mike Waltz explains the Cuba Embargo

*We refer not to the people of Cuba, but to that wretched country's Communist government. Sadly, it is the ordinary people of Cuba, not the dictator and his cronies, who suffer during humanitarian crises like this week's Hurricane Melissa. 

Millions of dollars are being sent by the governments and people of the US of A, Canada and other Western nations to the government and NGOs of Jamaica, to help that country recover from the devastation caused by the disaster. But nothing is being sent to Cuba. 

Why? Because Cuba's Communist government has made itself our enemy. They want to overthrow the Western democracies and bring our prosperous societies down to the level of abject poverty experienced by their subjects.

The response of the West to the troubles caused by the Cuban government -- not just to their own island state but to countries as far afield as Ukraine -- can only be to keep the necessaries of life from reaching them. Some day, it is hoped, the hardships caused by the Cuba Embargo will cause the Cuban people to rise up and overthrow their cruel and corrupt government.

Earlier this week, Mike Waltz, the American Representative to the United Nations, explained the whys and wherefores of the Embargo to the UN General Assembly. In this video, you will here Mr Waltz's remarks in tull, as well as an interruption on a point of order by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, followed by the Ambassador's powerful conclusion.

The link to this video was sent to us by our new Agent 10, whom Walt welcomes to our little group of friends. Agent 10 knows from personal experience what it's like to live in what she calls "that hellhole". She warns that the Communists have friends in the USA and Canada, pretending to be anti-Communist expats. 

Beware of organizations with names like "Cuban-American Friendship Society"* asking for money to help the people of Cuba. Any money you give them goes straight to the Cuban government and military. Give only to people you know and trust.

Canadian readers should also want to think twice, or even three times, about going to Cuba for your winter holiday. The money you spend at Cuban resorts goes to the government, not to the people, not even the people who work in those places, who receive only starvation wages. By spending money in Cuba, you are actually helping our enemies. Don't do it!

Further viewing: Center for a Free Cuba 25th Anniversary Video.  Click here to learn more about the Center for a Free Cuba. If you donate, tell `em Walt sent ya!

* Footnote: Agent 3 sez that I forgot to mention the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. which was set up by the Castro government in 1960, and had branches all over the US of A and Canada. Lee Harvey Oswald was connected with them. Remember him? As far as we know, the FPCC no longer exists as such.

Not just a pimply-faced kid this time

Donald J. Trump, once and future President, is safe tonight after law enforcement responded to an apparent second assassination attempt, on his golf course in West Palm Beach FL.

Breitbart News reports that Mr Trump, who survived an attempt on his life at a rally in Butler PA in mid-July, was golfing on his course this afternoon, when security officers apparently encountered a man running out of some bushes, in which were found an AK-47, a GoPro camera and some other non-golf club equipment. 

Secret Service agents fired at the manafter seeing the muzzle of the gun pointing through a chain-link fence one hole ahead of where Mr Trump was playing. The person hiding in the bushes fled the scene in a car, but an alert bystander had the presence of mind to take a picture, including a clear image of the car's licence plate. The police were then able to spot the car on the Interstate, and arrest the lone occupant.

Accused of pointing an AK-47 at President Trump is 58-year-old man accused of pointing an AK-47 at former President Donald Trump is 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, of no fixed address. According to Fox News, Mr Routh has a prolific arrest record spanning several decades. A background check revealed that he currently lives in Hawaii and has faced dozens of run-ins with police, stretching back to at least the 1990s. 

Mr Routh is a native of North Carolina, where his list of arrests includes simple drug possession, driving without a licence, expired inspection and operating a vehicle with no insurance. In addition, the Greensboro News & Record reported in 2002 that he was arrested after barricading himself in his roofing company's office during a three-hour standoff that followed a traffic stop in which he put his hand on a gun before fleeing.

As a sometime Floridian (during my misspent youth, long ago), I can tell you that all the flotsam and jetsam of American society washes up in the Sunshine State, sooner or later. So it may be that Mr Routh is just another burnout, one step ahead of the men with nets, acting on his own, for reasons (?) of his own. 

That's what the lickspittle media will want you to believe. But is it true? I'm opening a book on the possibility of a misfortunate accident happening to Mr Routh before he has a chance to tell his story. Couldn't happen, you say? Remember Lee Harvey Oswald.

Taki reviews Dylan's "Murder Most Foul"

I confess... or, rather, boast... that I have never in my life listened to a "song" by Bob Dylan. Why should I? In his weekly summing up of "The Week That Perished", Taki says this about the allegedly iconic [most wrongly used word of 2019. Ed.] singer.

Dylan can't sing, can hardly strum a guitar, wheezes through a harmonica as if it's a ventilator, is as short as the average woman, is rumored to generate intense body odor, looks like a homeless person, and his music blows in the wind.

And yet... Bob Dylan, né Robert Zimmerman, remains a hero to lefties, Democrats and others who've drunk the KoolAid mixed up for us by the liberal elites, of whom he is the poet laureate. Below the meme you can read the rest of Taki's scathing review of Dylan's latest... make that only... Number 1 hit.

Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in northern Minnesota, remained Robert Zimmerman until he realized he could get away with pretending to be a non-ethnic hobo bard from the South if he rechristened himself as "Bob Dylan". As Southern humorist Roy Blount, Jr. once noted, Dylan is the type who will pronounce it "auty-mobile" and expect no one to notice that he’s faking it.

Dylan can’t sing, can hardly strum a guitar, wheezes through a harmonica as if it's a ventilator, is as short as the average woman, is rumored to generate intense body odor, looks like a homeless person, and his music blows in the wind.

Still, people in the 1960s looked up to him as a God -- even The Beatles deferred to Dylan -- which hints at how much was wrong with people in the 1960s.

He’s also the pretentious type who will give his songs inscrutable titles just to confuse people, which is why he titled a song that should have been called "Everybody Must Get Stoned" as "Rainy Day Women #12 and #35" instead. He’s that insufferable.

Despite selling 100 million albums to people who were somehow able to find wisdom in his off-key warblings, Dylan had never lodged a #1 hit in the USA. He hit #2 twice, with "Like a Rolling Stone" in 1965 and the aforementioned "Everybody Must Get Stoned" in 1966.

Now, at a point when he is roughly Methusaleh's age and when 20-year-olds don't even know who JFK or Bob Dylan was, Mr. Zimmerman has proved that people in the 2020s may be worse than those in the 1960s because he’s finally scored a #1 hit -- with an unlistenable ballad about JFK’s assassination that has more meaningless pop-culture references than an average episode of The Simpsons. Oh -- and the thing is 17 minutes long.

It is called "Murder Most Foul", and the atonal abomination recently hit #1 on Billboard’s Rock Digital Song Sales chart. Without so much as an apology, it includes the following lyrics:

Goodbye, Charlie
Goodbye, Uncle Sam
Frankly, my Scarlet, I don’t give a damn….
They mutilated his body, and they took out his brain
What more could they do? 
They piled on the pain
But his soul’s not there where it was supposed to be at
For the last fifty years they’ve been searchin’ for that….
That magic bullet of yours has gone to my head
I’m just a patsy like Patsy Cline….
Play “Mystery Train” for Mr. Mystery
The man who fell down dead like a rootless tree
Play it for the Reverend
Play it for the Pastor
Play it for the dog that got no master

Why, it's almost as if Lee Harvey Oswald shot the wrong guy!

Note from Ed.: Yes, I noticed what appears to be a typo in the meme, but I only edit Walt's stuff!

Who pulled Cesar Sayoc's strings?

A churlish reader has suggested that the arrest of Cesar Sayoc, a self-identified Republican now facing five federal charges in connection with more than a dozen -- I've lost count -- intercepted suspicious packages, disproves my theory that the "pipe bomb" affair is a hoax concocted for to give the Democrats a much-needed boost in the run-up to the mid-term elections. See "More on the moronic pipe bombs", WWW 25/10/18.

I call BS on those calling BS on my theory! If anything, what we've learned in the last 24 hours about Mr Sayoc reinforces my skepticism.

Mr Sayoc was born in New York. Eventually he drifted to Florida, which (along with California) is a magnet for America's loners, losers and nutbars. [Didn't you live there at one time? Ed.] Court records show that his conviction in the 1990s in Broward County on charges of grand theft and stolen property. In 2004, he was convicted on a felony charge of fraud and a misdemeanour of tampering with physical evidence.

In between, he was sentenced in Dade County in August 2002 for threatening to "throw, place, project or discharge any destructive device" during a conversation with a representative of a Florida utility. He served a year's probation after a judge signed a discharge certificate in November 2002. In 2015, he reported to police that his van was broken into outside of a gym in Oakland Park FL. He claimed that more than $40,000 worth of items were stolen, including $7150 worth of Donald Trump-brand suits.

Cesar Sayoc is a registered Republican. He has worked, off and on, as a stripper, promoter of "entertainment events" and, most recently, a pizza delivery man. Event promoter Tony Valentine said he hired Mr Sayoc in the 90s to strip on multiple occasions in Ohio, and that he (Sayoc) travelled the country for similar appearances. "He really couldn't find his niche in life, and I guess he found it now," Mr Valentine told the Washington Examiner. "Back in the 90s, he was running around from Minnesota to the Carolinas to Florida. He was like a gypsy."

His cousin, Lenny Altieri, was less charitable in his characterization. "He has been a loner," Mr Altieri told AP. "I know the guy is a lunatic."

We pause now for a brief lesson from the pages of history. For those who didn't catch my reference to the Reichstag Fire (in "Who's behind the pipe bombs?", WWW 24/10/18), the fire that destroyed the German parliament building in Berlin on 27 February 1933, was blamed by Hitler's government on Martinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch communist. The "intellectually challenged" Dutchman was found near the building and attributed the fire to communist agitators in general, although he claimed he acted alone.

Historians disagree as to whether Mr van der Lubbe acted alone, as he said, to protest the condition of the German working class. The Nazis accused the Comintern of the act. The Communists claimed that the arson was planned and ordered by the Nazis as a false flag operation. The court which tried Mr van der Lubbe ruled that indeed he acted alone. No-one else was involved. Of course.

Now back to my theory... Suppose you were a strategist for the Democratic Party, faced with the task of preventing the Trump Republicans from prevailing in next month's mid-term elections. You've got the lamestream media and (((Barbra Streisand))) and all of Hollywood on your side, and plenty of money to spend, thanks to (((George Soros))). But the migrant caravan approaching the southern border has heightened Americans' fears of the impending invasion, which the Democrats seem inclined to encourage rather than stop. What do you do?

What is needed (you say to yourself) is some kind of physical attack on the leaders of our party. Not an actual assassination of course, and nothing so lame as a burglary at Democratic headquarters. How about something dangerous sent through the mail? Poison, perhaps... or how about a bomb?! Great idea!! But who (you are still talking to yourself) could we get to build a bomb (or twelve bombs) and put them in the mail? Hey, how about someone who lives (yes, lives!) in a van like this?

We return now to Cesar Sayoc's conviction in 2002. Ron Lowy, the attorney who represented Mr Sayoc in the past and now represents his family, told the Clinton News Network's Anderson Cooper that he recalls someone with a "lesser IQ" and "substantial" emotional problems. Lowy said Sayoc has refused medical help for years, despite urging from his family. "He's become indignant, angry, someone who doesn't want to look at his problems."

Mr Lowy said that his former client "never seemed sophisticated enough" to put together a complicated mail bomb scheme and he wouldn't be surprised if Sayoc had someone who "helped prod or encourage him to do this."

But who? Here are a few innocent questions:
* From whom would Mr Sayoc have obtained the addresses -- home addresses -- of people like (((George Soros))) and the Prez? You can't just search the phone book to find them.
* How long would it have taken a semi-skilled person like Mr Sayoc to build not one, not two, but 12 or 14 (and counting) "bombs", and package them together with sachets of milk powder (or whatever it was) and pack them neatly in padded envelopes? A one-man job? Don't think so!
* Did Mr Sayoc actually take not one, not two, but 12 or 14 (and counting) packages to the post office, buy enough stamps to put six on each one and then hand them over the counter without anyone asking him what he was mailing?
* Suspending disbelief, if that's what happened at the post office, how come there are no postmarks on any of the packages... at least not the ones of which photos have been published?
* How did "the authorities" know where and when to look to intercept the suspicious packages before they could be delivered?
[That's enough innocent questions! Ed.]

OK, OK! But you get my point. IMHO, the whole thing reeks of publicity stunt, engineered to get Democrats out to vote in sympathy and anger! I am waiting with bated breath to hear what Mr Sayoc has to say about whether or not he acted alone. Let's just hope that he is brought to trial quickly. Wouldn't want any evil to befall him before he has a chance to speak. Of course that would never happen in America. Oh... Wait... Lee Harvey Oswald... ... ...

What the Vatican butler saw

The "Vatileaks" story -- an investigation into a recent series of links of sensitive Vatican documents -- is taking on the air of a great detective story, or even a "St. James Bond" thriller! This week saw the arrest by the Vatican police -- yes, the Holy See does have a gendarmerie -- of none other than the Pope's butler, Paolo Gabriele.

Signor Gabriele, who has been majordomo of the Holy Father's household for six years, was allegedly discovered in possession of confidential documents. He is now being held in the Vatican's little used jail -- they have one of those too -- for further questioning. [Do I hear the rack being dusted off? Ed.]

But who is Signor Gabriele? What documents would he be filching, and why? Although he's a member of the pontifical household, Gabriele is only a layman. Would he know the significance of the letters and files with which he was caught? One can picture him looking at confidential documents on the Pope's desk while he did the dusting, but what would someone with no particular influence, acting on his own, do with the papers? Sell them on eBay? Hardly likely!

Vatican insiders are convinced that the "Vatileaks" scandal has been orchestrated by some more senior official... someone deeply involved in the ongoing power struggle within the Vatican. Perhaps the point of Gabriele's arrest is to set him up as a scapegoat to deflect attention from the real mastermind... perhaps a powerful prelate. Shades of Lee Harvey Oswald! Let's hope nothing happens to the butler before he can talk!

Walt is waiting with bated (not baited) breath for the next reel, in which the identity of the villain is revealed. Want to play the guessing game with me? Ask yourself what Italian cardinal likes to regard himself as the Pope's prime minister... the No. 2 man at the Vatican... the eminence grise... the power behind the Chair of Peter.

Which cardinal feels it's time for the papacy to pass back into the hands of an Italian... like his eminent self, for instance? Those who believe Lyndon Johnson was behind the assassination of JFK should have no trouble deducing the identity of the Man Who Would Be Pope. Lifetime pct .989.