Submitted by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Lest you wonder, not only did I not vote for Mr. Trump (or Hillary), but I relished heaping opprobrium on him during the election campaign. Just so you know, I’m not advocating for him, but I’m alarmed that the Deep State (the White House + the Intel Agency gang) now appears to be trying to hack the electoral college vote against him.

The headline deployed everywhere last week, “Russia Hacks Election,” was designed by the Deep State players to deviously lead the broadly dim public to think that Russia somehow interfered with the balloting process, which was not possible since voting machines are not hooked up to the internet. And then it was repeated endlessly by the cable news networks and the newspapers, under the number one rule of propaganda: that if you repeat something often enough, the public will swallow it.

This dishonest meme was also designed to distract the public from the substance of the emails disclosed by WikiLeaks - namely, the scamming and trickery of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and the influence-peddling of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, which had her flirting with indictment last summer, and only reinforced her already-established public image as an unscrupulous person.

The New York Times especially worked the “Russia Hacks Election” story to a fare-the-well, saying in its Sunday edition:

The Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that Moscow put its thumb on the scale for Mr. Trump through the release of hacked Democratic emails, which provided fodder for many of the most pernicious false attacks on Mrs. Clinton on social media.

False attacks? What, that Hillary’s cronies put the DNC’s “thumb on the scale” against Bernie Sanders? That Donna Brazille gave Hillary debate questions beforehand? That as Secretary of State Hillary gave more face-time to foreign supplicants based on their contributions to the Clinton Foundation, and expedited arms deals for especially big givers? That she collected millions in speaking fees for sucking up to Too-Big-To-Fail bankers? That The Times and The WashPo and CNN reporters were taking direction from Hillary’s PR operatives?

Consider, too, how the Deep State “Russia Hacks Election” meme was ramped up to top volume coincidentally the week before the electoral college vote, as a last-ditch effort was launched by the old-line media, the diehard Hillary partisans, and a bunch of Hollywood celebrities, to persuade electoral college delegates to switch their votes to deprive Trump of his election victory.

President Obama did his bit to amplify the message by coloring Russian President Vladimir Putin as being behind the so-called hacking because “not much happens in Russia without, you know, Vladimir Putin,” just like not much happened in old Puritan New England without the involvement of Old Scratch. So now we have an up-to-date Devil figure to stir the paranoid imaginations of an already divided and perturbed public.

Hillary and her supporters have vehemently asserted that “seventeen intelligence agencies” agree with the assessment that Russia hacked the election. It might be greater news to the American people to hear that there actually are seventeen such agencies out there. Perhaps Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama might explain exactly what they are beyond the CIA, the FBI, the DIA, the NSA, and DHS. Personally, I feel less secure knowing that there are so many additional surveillance services sifting through everybody’s digital debris trail.

There’s been some chagrin among more prudent observers that neither the various Intel gang chiefs, including James Clapper, overall Director of National Intelligence, nor the White House have provided a shred of evidence that WikiLeaks got the Hillary emails from the Russians. One might even suppose that we discovered the hack by hacking the Russians, perhaps even Mr. Putin’s personal iPhone — but, wait a minute… we don’t intrude on other nations’ business. We don’t use the internet to spy (!) on anybody.

It will be interesting to see how Mr. Trump gets along with the Intel gang when (and if) he actually makes it into the oval office. It’s nice to think that he will fire a bunch of them, and then fire a bunch more, and maybe take a good hard look at these seventeen security and surveillance agencies and maybe shut a few of them down. In the meantime, their activity begins to look like the attempted coup d’état I warned about a few months ago.

Forgive me for changing the subject so briskly, but there was another front page piece in The New York Times on Sunday that kind of said it all about where that Old Gray Lady’s collective head is at these days. Behold this quote from the story What Women Really Think of Men: