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L.A. Apocalypse
Darrell Castle shares his take on the wildfires that have and continue to devastate much of Los Angeles California.
Transcription / Notes
L.A. APOCALYPSE
Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 17th day of January in the year of our Lord 2025. I will be talking about the wildfires that have devastated much of Los Angeles, California killing many, leaving many homeless without shelter, and ruining the lives of 10’s of thousands and also rendering the once beautiful entertainment capitol of the world a burned-out wasteland.
I want to begin this report with a quote from one of the few remaining real journalists in America, Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times.
“Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and other Democrat leaders bend over backwards to focus on left wing social justice issues that have absolutely nothing to do with the role of government. Yet when it comes to the most basic functions of government, such as keeping buildings from burning down, they have failed completely.”
“Los Angeles is being governed and the state of California is being governed by people who have lost sight of the basics of governing. They have lost sight of the idea that we pay you a tax so that you take care of basics for us. And nothing could be more basic than preventing the burning down of, as you just said in your introduction, an area twice the size of Manhattan, right? It’s hard to conceive of how big this is.”
Yes, the once beautiful Golden State with its sunshine and surfing lifestyle has been turned into a veritable living hell. The fires rage on with over 25,000 acres still ablaze as I record this with a couple still out of control. So far, more than 250,000 people have been evacuated and have no shelter, and the last count I have is 25 deaths but that will obviously climb because no one knows what lies in the rubble of the thousands of burned to the ground homes and businesses.
This was and is a total collapse of the new green-woke style of government whereby the posture of those we elect, the color of their skin, their gender, and their sexuality are all more important than whether they have the background and skills necessary to perform the basics of government. So, who’s to blame for this disaster, the politicians of course but also the people of California who elected them. In the case of California, there is no one else to blame, not Donald Trump, not Republicans, and certainly not climate change. Those are all just excuses for the complete failure and arrogant incompetence and total disdain for the people the politicians are elected to serve.
California is a state in which Republicans have zero political power. The days of Ronald Reagan are over and even Pat Brown and his son Jerry didn’t let the state burn down around them. Not just the politicians, but all the state media, the newspapers, the online news sites all the high-tech monopolies like Apple, Google, and Facebook just echo the same mindset. Anything left from the old California that still works predates the year 2000 so the destruction has been ongoing for at least 25 years. Right now, the state has a congressional delegation of 52 seats and only 17 Are Republicans. The Los Angeles city council has 15 members and not a single one is Republican so blame is fairly easy to assess.
The city’s new mayor, Karen Bass, boasts of the city’s $50 billion budget along with adding 451 positions especially in the department of youth development. Justice, Care, and Operations Departments have been added for which the mayor seems quite proud. I would wager that she is less than proud that she recently cut more than $17 million from the fire department budget. She campaigned on a pledge to not travel internationally while in office but she was in the African nation of Ghana when the fire started. True, she went before the fires started and returned when she learned that her city was on fire,
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Downsizing to Starve the Beast
Darrell Castle talks about debt and the Trump administration's effort to control it.
Transcription / Notes
DOWNSIZING TO STARVE THE BEAST
Hello, this is Darell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday, the 10th day of January in the year of our Lord 2025. I will be talking about debt and the potential for disaster if it isn’t somehow tamed. Donald Trump is at least paying lip service to it with his creation of DOGE or the Department of Government Efficiency.
Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a new department of government which he calls the Department of Government Efficiency. That is an attractive name but if flies in the face of the political trend that has existed for at least 50 years. Before that time, the government had some accountability since its wars, its tax cuts, etc. had to be paid for and it had to have enough gold deposits to cover all of it.
Once the dollar’s ties to gold were removed in 1971, the government no longer had any restraints on its spending. A government of the people and by the people needs some restraints because without them human nature will control the politicians elected to serve the people. When a politician discovers that he can achieve reelection thus retaining power by spending the resources of others or promising to do so he will do it or at least that has been the trend since 1971.
A responsible government recognizes its limits and it spends only what it can raise in taxes. If the federal government were responsible the United States would not have the 36 trillion of debt that it has today. People are alarmed at the size of the debt but not many want their pet projects or their own largesse to be reduced so I wonder if DOGE will have an opportunity to succeed. It seems that the goals of Elon Musk and Donald Trump are headed on a collision course.
If Musk gets his way, at least the way as he has described it, then we should get some positive results. There could be lower deficits which should bring lower inflation, lower interest rates and a far less expensive and less powerful government. We might even expect a business revival with the return of manufacturing to the U.S. Mr. Homan’s efforts on the border would ensure the departure of many murderers, rapists, torturers, child molesters, terrorists and assorted lunatics who now reside here illegally at government expense.
The Republican elite, and now that includes Donald Trump, may just have a different agenda. Trump has just spent 9 years and a lot of money to gain power including a Republican majority in both houses. Those majorities will not want to become less powerful but instead they will want to use that power to take more power and wealth from the American people who are supposed to hold it. That is human nature and the prevailing political trend. The hearts of mankind are black and desperately wicked the bible tells us and when power and money are unrestrained the humans who have it will use and abuse it.
Right now, Donald Trump is the most powerful man in the world and he seems to be enjoying it immensely. My guess is that he will not want to share the power with a billionaire from South Africa for very long, but I could easily be wrong and if so it wouldn’t be the first time. The President-Elect seems to enjoy conducting foreign policy even before he is inaugurated, but I suppose power abhors a vacuum and so somebody will execute foreign policy or at least that is the way he seems to see it.
He is a businessman and a negotiator and right now he has the power and he is trying to establish with friend and foe alike that business will be conducted differently in the future. Bloomberg tells us that he warned the European Union that its exports will get hit with US tariffs if European Union countries don’t buy more American oil and gas. He posted on Truth Social about that statement:
“I told the European Union that they must make up their tremendous defici...
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Biden’s Legacy
Darrell Castle discusses what the legacy of Joe Biden looks like.
Transcription / Notes
BIDEN’S LEGACY
Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 3rd day of January in the year of our Lord 2025. The first Friday of a new year and only three weeks from the end of the administration of Joe Biden. What is the legacy of Joe Biden?
Is his legacy the obvious and now admitted years long coverup of his declining mental ability. Is it the debate with Donald Trump which the Democrats finally allowed to expose his status to the whole world, or could it be his empowering the Department of Justice to conduct warfare attacks against his political opponent while pretending he had nothing to do with it. Perhaps his legacy was his repeated assurances that he would not pardon his son Hunter then finally doing so while in an act of supreme hypocrisy pretending it was because Hunter was the victim of political persecution considering he, Joe Biden, was the worst political persecutor in American presidential history. Surely one or all of these things will be his legacy. If not, then it must be his policy of inviting millions of unvetted illegals into the country many of whom were murderers, rapists, torturers, killers of children and of course terrorists and agents of adversarial foreign powers.
The legacy of Joe Biden as president of the United States is one of cognitive decline which it now seems was present when he was elected and it also seems true that those close to him knew it. His famous campaign from the basement was supposed to be a new sort of campaign whereby the candidate just holed up in his home and had very little interaction with the people who were supposed to vote for him.
His close advisors, the ranking members of the Democratic Party, told us that he was sharp as a tack and hardly anyone could keep up with him. What we saw instead were videos of him sleeping on the beach in Delaware where he spent 40% of the time he was president. Forty per cent of his time spent on vacation is the figure announced by the campaign, so it might be a little more than that especially when the number of days of LID are considered. That term means light intensity day and President Biden had many of those.
He conducted only 9 full cabinet meetings during his entire 4 years in office. I’m guessing here, but I’m going to guess that 9 is the fewest in history. Trump, by comparison, conducted 26 during his 4-year term. Testimony from elected officials in his own party was that he was almost impossible to reach even for his own national security briefings which his wife often attended. The question on my mind is who has been running the country for the last 4 years but especially last year.
The answer to that question is not completely known and that is an understatement. Apparently, it was simply his staff making decisions that affected the nation and the world. The American people elected a man who because of declining health went on vacation and left the running of the most powerful country in world history to unelected staff members. That, I submit, is the legacy of Joe Biden in a nutshell. Such a disaster would not have been possible without the complete cooperation of the American media who did not just underreport his decline, but actively covered it up.
The videos of Biden wondering helplessly on stage, shaking hands with ghosts, wondering off from the group when meeting with G-7 leaders were all just deep fakes. His slurring of words and inability to speak a coherent sentence were evidence of a slight stutter that had existed throughout his life. Normally, the explanations went back to Trump, after all he was an older man with aging issues of his own wasn’t he. Since the election of Trump with an almost landslide majority including the popular vote some in the media are starting to admit what they did.
The Wall Street Journal, in a post-election expose,
