You Know How Drugged Up Cmdr. Cornpop Had To Be To Read That Teleprompter Yesterday?!?!?!

abcnews |   Halfway into his first 100 days, President Joe Biden has yet to hold a formal, solo news conference, raising questions about accountability with the White House under increasing pressure to explain why.

Even as the nation deals with multiple crises -- a deadly pandemic and the devastating economic fallout -- Biden has gone longer without facing extended questions from reporters than any of his 15 predecessors over the past 100 years.

The tough exchanges in such a setting can reveal much more to Americans about a president's thinking and test his explanations, as opposed to what so far have been Biden's brief answers -- often one-liner quips -- in the tightly-controlled and often-scripted events the White House has arranged to date.

The contrast with former President Donald Trump has been especially striking, especially given Biden's repeated promises to Americans that he'd always be "straight" and "transparent."

The previous record was set by President George W. Bush, who waited 33 days before hosting a formal, solo press conference. But that was more of an anomaly: Many others held them within a handful of days or a few weeks of taking office, according to an analysis of documents in a database maintained by the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

CNN first reported on Biden surpassing his predecessors' record.

The White House last week pledged Biden would hold a news conference before this month was out, but it has not yet set a date. It did schedule his first primetime address for Thursday, though, "to commemorate the one year anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown."

Trump held his first solo, formal news conference 27 days after assuming the presidency, while President Barack Obama did the same 20 days after taking office.

Andrew Cuomo A Case Study In The Loss Of Public Trust In Industrial "Democracy"

newyorker |  But why did it take two months for Boylan’s accusations to be taken seriously by reporters, lawmakers, and law-enforcement officials? Her December 13th tweet received some initial news coverage. “Bombshell Cuo Claim,” one headline in the New York Post read. But, by the end of the month, the bombshell had fizzled. In an Albany Times Union article on December 26th that recapped the Governor’s year in the “national spotlight,” Boylan merited just three sentences. Partly, this can be explained by Boylan’s decision in December not to talk to reporters, and by the fact that she was, at the time, a lone accuser, whereas now she is one of several. But there is another reason: soon after she went public, someone tried to damage Boylan’s credibility and undercut her accusations by leaking damaging information about her to the press.

Within hours of Boylan’s tweet on December 13th, several news outlets reported that they had “obtained” state-government documents relating to Boylan’s job performance in the Cuomo administration. The documents—described by the Associated Press as “personnel memos,” by the Post as “personnel documents,” and by the Times Union as “personnel records”—said that several women had complained to a state-government human-resources office that Boylan had “behaved in a way towards them that was harassing, belittling, and had yelled and been generally unprofessional.” According to the Post’s account, “three black employees went to state human resources officials accusing Boylan, who is white, of being a ‘bully’ who ‘treats them like children.’ ” According to the Associated Press, the documents said that Boylan resigned after being “counseled” about the complaints in a meeting with a top administration lawyer. Reporters who wanted to dig into Boylan’s accusations against Cuomo now had to contend with the possibility that there were people out there who might have accusations to make against Boylan. At best, the documents seemed to raise questions about Boylan’s reliability. At worst, they painted her as a racist.

In a statement, Boylan’s attorney, Jill Basinger, told me Boylan has never seen the documents that the news accounts referenced—which Basinger called a “supposed ‘personnel file.’ ” Basinger accused the Governor’s office of leaking the documents, and also said she expects that the attorney general’s investigation will look into the leak. “It is both shocking and disgusting that the governor and his staff would seek to smear victims of sexual harassment,” Basinger said. “Ms. Boylan will not be intimidated or silenced. She intends to cooperate fully with the Attorney General’s investigation.”

At a press conference last week, Cuomo said that he supported “a woman’s right to come forward,” and that he was “sorry for whatever pain I caused.” At the same time, he pleaded with New Yorkers to allow him some due process. “Wait for the facts from the attorney general’s report before forming an opinion,” he said. That’s how the Governor would like to be treated. But that’s not how he traditionally has treated others. For decades, the Governor has had a reputation for scorched-earth tactics, and for retaliating against those who corner him, threaten him, or simply displease him. As Boylan weighed whether to come forward last year, her lawyer told me, she “believed that she would be retaliated against for going public with her mistreatment.” One former senior official in the Cuomo administration whom I spoke to said it was impossible to imagine that Cuomo himself hadn’t approved the leak of the Boylan documents. “There’s no question he would know about it, and direct it,” the former official said. “That’s how he would think.”

In the nineteen-nineties, while Cuomo was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, under Bill Clinton, he fell into a long-running feud with Susan Gaffney, the agency’s inspector general. In 2000, Gaffney accused Cuomo of sexual discrimination. “Gaffney claims that Cuomo has called her at home on weekends to berate her, has started collecting information to smear her, and has leaked damaging information about her,” the Post reported, at the time. In the same story, a Cuomo spokesperson said, of Gaffney, “This is nothing more than a diversion from her misconduct regarding the downloading of pornography in her office and retaliation for our efforts to get to the bottom of it.”

In 2013, Michael Fayette, a state Department of Transportation engineer, gave a few quotes about his department’s operations during Hurricane Irene to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. His statements were innocuous—“We were up for it,” he told the paper—but they hadn’t been cleared by the higher-ups in Albany. The press found out that Fayette’s superiors were moving to terminate him, and started asking how it was possible for someone to be fired over such a harmless episode. In response, a top Cuomo aide gave a radio interview during which he read aloud misconduct allegations contained in Fayette’s personnel files, including that he’d had an improper relationship with a subordinate. “They can run over you like you’re a freaking speed bump,” Fayette, who retired before he could be fired, told me, last week.

Philadelphia Special Weapons Attack Team Did THE Most

This Fool Here KNOW He's Soon For The "Pleasing White Light (And The Cleansing Blue Fire)"

japantimes |  When the elderly leader of a South Korean religious sect knelt before the nation on Monday (March 2), he had hoped to defuse public anger over his church's role in spreading the coronavirus.

Yet Lee Man-hee's apology for the national "calamity" instead whipped up more outrage - due to a watch he was wearing.

The gold-coloured watch, visible on his left wrist, was apparently given by disgraced former President Park Geun-hye, who was impeached and jailed in 2017 for corruption and abuse of power.

Images of the watch quickly trended on Twitter, while "Lee Man-hee watch" was the most searched phrase on South Korea's biggest search portal Naver.

"He is bragging about Park's gift," fumed one Twitter user. "His watch was shiny and crystal clear, like his loyalty and ties with Park Geun-hye," jibed another.

There was no comment on the controversy from Lee. But a leader at his Shincheonji Church of Jesus said there was nothing untoward about the watch, which was given as a merit award.

"It has nothing to do with politics," the official told Reuters, noting that Lee was a veteran of the Korean War. "He wears it because he doesn't have anything else."

If Elites Had Led With This Nut-Shrivelling Horror, We Would All Be United In World War C!!!

SCMP |  Doctors in the central Chinese city of Wuhan plan to embark on a long-term study of

the effects of the coronavirus on the male reproductive system, building on small-scale research indicating that the pathogen could affect sex hormone levels in men.

 

Though still preliminary and not peer reviewed, the study is the first clinical observation of the potential impact of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, on the male reproductive system, especially among younger groups.

In a paper published on the preprint research platform medRxiv.org, the researchers – from Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University and the Hubei Clinical Research Centre for Prenatal Diagnosis and Birth Health – said they analysed blood samples from 81 men aged 20 to 54 who tested positive for the coronavirus and were hospitalised in January.

 

The median age of the participants was 38 and roughly 90 per cent of them had only mild symptoms. The samples were collected in the last days of their stay in hospital.

Using the samples, the team looked at the ratio of testosterone to luteinising hormone (T/LH). A low T/LH ratio can be a sign of hypogonadism, which in men is a malfunction of the testicles that could lead to lower sex hormone production.

The average ratio for the Covid-19 patients was 0.74, about half the normal level.

Testosterone is the main male sex hormone critical for the development of primary and secondary sexual characteristics including testes, muscle, bone mass and body hair. Luteinising hormone is found in both men and women, and best known for its ability to trigger ovulation.

 

 

 

We Wuz BadMuhhukkahs Till We Got Hoodwinked, Bamboozled, Raped, and Pillaged Like Little Bishes..,.,

Full Paper

NAP |  The academic research community in the United States is heading toward an era of unparalleled discovery, productivity, and excitement. In fields as diverse as computing and materials science, high-energy physics and psychology, cosmology and the neurosciences, university-based research will open new worlds of knowledge and make possible innovations not yet imagined. The research enterprise holds great promise for advancing social, health, and economic goals into the next century.

The academic research community in the United States is heading toward an era of unparalleled discovery, productivity, and excitement. In fields as diverse as computing and materials science, high-energy physics and psychology, cosmology and the neurosciences, university-based research will open new worlds of knowledge and make possible innovations not yet imagined.

This hopeful vision for the U.S. academic research enterprise motivated the working group's deliberations and analyses. To achieve this vision, the enterprise must be guided wisely by current and future generations of investigators, university administrators, the sponsors of research, and the broader public. The working group's strong and positive presentation of this vision assumes that such guidance will prevail.

Dynamic change is a central component of this vision. The research enterprise of the future will be unlike the one of today. Significant opportunities and challenges can be expected in the decades ahead.

A GLOBAL RESEARCH SYSTEM

International research cooperation will become a pervasive feature of the U.S. academic research enterprise in the next century. Multinational research arrangements will be essential for studying such phenomena as large-scale environmental effects and the most demanding experimental problems in the physical and biological sciences. The research communities of both industrialized and developing countries will rely more and more on cooperative ventures to address these and other research problems. Just as foreign-based companies now support research in U.S. universities, in the future more governments and industries are likely to support the research activities of other nations.

Over the next few decades, the number of nations with highly effective research systems will grow. Their university, government, and industry laboratories will collaborate in novel, imaginative, and effective ways. Global competition in science and technology will require that the United States pay close attention to the research activities of other countries, especially those targeting economic growth as their primary research goal. This will be particularly true for the Western European and Pacific Rim countries, which have become fierce competitors in the knowledge-intensive global marketplace. Several of the newly democratized nations of Eastern

International research cooperation will become a pervasive feature of the U.S. academic research enterprise in the next century.

Patriot Missiles: Made in America - FAIL EVERYWHERE!!!

FP |  On March 25, Houthi forces in Yemen fired seven missiles at Riyadh. Saudi Arabia confirmed the launches and asserted that it successfully intercepted all seven. 

This wasn’t true. It’s not just that falling debris in Riyadh killed at least one person and sent two more to the hospital. There’s no evidence that Saudi Arabia intercepted any missiles at all. And that raises uncomfortable questions not just about the Saudis, but about the United States, which seems to have sold them — and its own public — a lemon of a missile defense system.

Social media images do appear to show that Saudi Patriot batteries firing interceptors. But what these videos show are not successes. One interceptor explodes catastrophically just after launch, while another makes a U-turn in midair and then comes screaming back at Riyadh, where it explodes on the ground.

It is possible, of course, that one of the other interceptors did the job, but I’m doubtful. That is because my colleagues at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and I closely examined two different missile attacks on Saudi Arabia from November and December 2017.

In both cases, we found that it is very unlikely the missiles were shot down, despite officials’ statements to the contrary. Our approach was simple: We mapped where the debris, including the missile airframe and warhead, fell and where the interceptors were located. In both cases, a clear pattern emerged. The missile itself falls in Riyadh, while the warhead separates and flies over the defense and lands near its target. One warhead fell within a few hundred meters of Terminal 5 at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport. The second warhead, fired a few weeks later, nearly demolished a Honda dealership. In both cases, it was clear to us that, despite official Saudi claims, neither missile was shot down. I am not even sure that Saudi Arabia even tried to intercept the first missile in November.

The point is there is no evidence that Saudi Arabia has intercepted any Houthi missiles during the Yemen conflict. And that raises a disquieting thought: Is there any reason to think the Patriot system even works?

l'affaire Epstein PROVED That Rich People Do Not Care About You - AT ALL!!!

medium |  No, I’m not talking about your cousin who drives a Mercedes, has his own insurance business, and always picks up the tab when you go out for beers. I’m talking about super-rich people: the Walton family, the Koch brothers and, yes, the Trumps. I’m talking about people who continue to make money off the backs of the poor while convincing those same people to remain loyal no matter what. But the truth is they are never going to share or trickle down their money to you — regardless of how white you are, how loyal you are, or how much you support their companies or their politicians.

When a family like the Waltons, worth over $50 billion — that’s billion with a “b” — are fine knowing their employees are collecting food stamps to survive and they do nothing about it, that speaks volumes. It says loud and clear: I don’t fucking care about you!

When Donald Trump was willing to close down and bankrupt multiple small businesses because he couldn’t be bothered to pay his bills, all while living in a gilded penthouse and flying around New York City in a helicopter, that screamed: I don’t fucking care about you!

Joe Biden Constantly Forgetting He Only Plays a Political Tough Guy

WaPo | “I am disappointed, and quite frankly I’m angered, by the fact — he knows me, he knows my son. He knows there’s nothing to this,” Biden said. “Trump is now essentially holding power over him that even the Ukrainians wouldn’t yield to. The Ukrainians would not yield to, quote, ‘investigate Biden’ — there’s nothing to investigate about Biden or his son.”

A Graham spokesman declined to comment and said the senator was unavailable.

Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has been at the center of the House impeachment inquiry, claimed that Biden’s comment was a “threat” against Graham.

“This is getting to be more and more like my old mafia cases,” Giuliani wrote on Twitter, alluding to his time as a federal prosecutor. “They sure do sound like crooks.”

Graham, in a letter sent Thursday to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, asked for information related to calls between Biden, when he was vice president, and then-President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, as well as documents that referred to an investigation of Burisma.

In the Obama years, Biden played an integral role in pushing Poroshenko to crack down on corruption in Ukraine, pressuring him to fire a prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was widely seen as corrupt and not doing enough to undertake crucial investigations.

The efforts to oust Shokin were mounted in coordination with U.S. allies, and several Republican senators were on board at the time. Now, however, some Republicans are asserting that Biden was attempting to get rid of Shokin to protect his son, an assertion contradicted by the circumstances at the time.

Still, Biden’s aides at the time expressed concern about Hunter’s position on the board of Burisma, worried that it could create the perception of a conflict of interest. Biden took no action to discourage his son from remaining on the board.

I Once Thought Two Piece and a Biscuit was the Pink-Toe Bottom Dollar...,

sicsemper |  My father, a former intelligence person during WWII, explained to me that if a secret is to be preserved, two links in the chain of evidence, not just one, need to be broken.

Many of us predicted that Epstein, as a serial blackmailer of the rich and influential, would not live for very long in jail, yet I was still surprised at the speed of his demise. We discussed this in some detail in August.

https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/08/epstein-killed-himself-sure-he-did-cui-bono.html

I now note that two prison guards have been arrested and charged over apparent administrative failures surrounding Epsteins "suicide".

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/19/us/jeffrey-epstein-guard-charge/index.html

My fathers dictum suggests that the two guards are unlikely to stay alive if they were in any way willing accomplices in what was perhaps a murder.

Ghislaine Maxwell? If she is smart, she will bury herself in a kibbutz in deepest Israel. I don't think she has the ability to make the trade of her continued life in the West for silence.

It's Not Just the CIA and the FBI - CONGRESS IS ROTTEN TO ITS CORE!!!

strategic-culture |  The developing story about how the US intelligence and national security agencies may have conspired to influence and possibly even reverse the results of the 2016 presidential election is compelling, even if one is disinclined to believe that such a plot would be possible to execute. Not surprisingly perhaps there have been considerable introspection among former and current officials who have worked in those and related government positions, many of whom would agree that there is urgent need for a considerable restructuring and reining in of the 17 government agencies that have some intelligence or law enforcement function. Most would also agree that much of the real damage that has been done has been the result of the unending global war on terror launched by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, which has showered the agencies with resources and money while also politicizing their leadership and freeing them from restraints on their behavior.

If the tens of billions of dollars lavished on the intelligence community together with a “gloves off” approach towards oversight that allowed them to run wild had produced good results, it might be possible to argue that it was all worth it. But the fact is that intelligence gathering has always been a bad investment even if it is demonstrably worse at the present. One might argue that the CIA’s notorious Soviet Estimate prolonged the Cold War and that the failure to connect dots and pay attention to what junior officers were observing allowed 9/11 to happen. And then there was the empowerment of al-Qaeda during the Soviet-Afghan war followed by failure to penetrate the group once it began to carry out operations.

More recently there have been Guantanamo, torture in black prisons, renditions of terror suspects to be tortured elsewhere, killing of US citizens by drone, turning Libya into a failed state and terrorist haven, arming militants in Syria, and, of course, the Iraqi alleged WMDs, the biggest foreign policy disaster in American history. And the bad stuff happened in bipartisan fashion, under Democrats and Republicans, with both neocons and liberal interventionists all playing leading roles. The only one punished for the war crimes was former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed some of what was going on.

Colonel Pat Lang, a colleague and friend who directed the Defense Intelligence Agency HUMINT (human intelligence) program after years spent on the ground in special ops and foreign liaison, thinks that strong medicine is needed and has initiated a discussion based on the premise that the FBI and CIA are dysfunctional relics that should be dismantled, as he puts it “burned to the ground,” so that the federal government can start over again and come up with something better.

Lang cites numerous examples of “incompetence and malfeasance in the leadership of the 17 agencies of the Intelligence Community and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” to include the examples cited above plus the failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the domestic front, he cites his personal observation of efforts by the Department of Justice and the FBI to corruptly “frame” people tried in federal courts on national security issues as well as the intelligence/law enforcement community conspiracy to “get Trump.”

Why Have Transgenders Been Glamorized?

coreysdigs |  How do you build an industry? How do you market it and provide support backing up your marketing? How do you exploit a community, while creating a glamorized trend throughout society, stemming from chaos and confusion? How do you grow your margins and take it all the way to the bank? How do you do all of this, and still sleep at night? The exploitation and manufacturing of the transgender “industry” kicked off in the 1950s with a mix of social and medical engineering, with a moving target on children. The manufacturing of this industry goes far beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, and if you dare question it, it is discrimination. The real discriminators are those exploiting a community who truly suffer from trauma, depression, and an attempted suicide rate of 40 percent. They are the ones who should be angrier than anyone about the atrocities these people have committed. They are now exploiting your children, and they have taken this to dangerous extremes.  

Why are transgender people being glamorized, the idea of switching genders pushed upon children, and it’s all prohibited from being discussed or debated? The remaking of a population by creating mass confusion and chaos while dishing out puberty blockers as though it’s the next best Botox treatment, has avalanched into dangerous territory. Faster than one could daringly speak the incorrect pronoun, gender clinics are popping up across this country, surgeons are sharpening their scalpels, and money is pouring into this agenda. With the suicide rate of transgenders being nineteen times greater than the general population and a large percent of transitioned transgenders wishing they hadn’t done so, one wonders how this destructive agenda got its kickstart and who’s really benefiting from it. Certainly not those dealing with gender dysphoria.

Part one will take you through the timeline and origins of the social engineering used to create this industry. Part two will cover the medical engineering behind this, and the danger to children. Part three will get into those funding this agenda and those profiting from it. Part four will show how they have manufactured a reality, who’s assisted, and how it must be stopped.

Speaking of Preverts Epstein and Cover-Ups that Make No Sense...,

NationalReview |  James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, a group that has often infiltrated news organizations to uncover liberal bias, has released an explosive “hot mic” video of Good Morning America co-host Amy Robach venting about ABC’s decision to spike a story about Jeffrey Epstein’s nefarious activities three years ago.

“I had this interview with [Epstein victim] Virginia Roberts,” Robach is seen saying in the video, “we would not put it on the air. The [British royal] Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways. We were afraid we wouldn’t be able to interview Kate and Will that we, that also quashed the story.”

Robach now claims, through a network statement, that she was caught “in a private moment” of frustration over the lack of progress on a story. “I was upset that an important interview I had conducted with Virginia Roberts didn’t air because I could not obtain sufficient corroborating evidence to meet ABC’s editorial standards about her allegations.”

Sorry, but Robach’s response to the firestorm doesn’t square with her initial comments, in which she states that “Roberts had pictures, she had everything . . . it was unbelievable what we had. [Bill] Clinton, we had everything.”

“Everything” sure sounds like sufficient corroborating evidence. Even if employing the most scrupulous journalistic standards, a giant news organization wouldn’t need three years to substantiate — or dismiss — a story with pictures, dates, and a credible witness.

We certainly know that ABC didn’t need “everything” — or much of anything, for that matter – when it was running scores of pieces online and on television, highlighting every risible accusation against then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Why 2+ Million American Expats Live in Mexico

businessinmexico |  If you’ve ever considered a move across the southern border, you may wonder what healthcare in Mexico is like for expats. While in many ways, the Mexican system is much friendlier than the U.S. healthcare system — so much so that Americans cross the border to get healthcare — there are still a lot of things you need to know.

What kind of healthcare system does Mexico have? Can you get insurance there as a resident, or while doing business in Mexico? What is the IMSS, or Seguro Popular, and how do those apply to you as a non-citizen? When it comes to medical care, south of the border, understanding your options is essential.

When many Americans think of Mexico, they think of a poverty-stricken country that people are trying to escape. While that might be true in some cases, primarily because of corruption, Mexico is a cosmopolitan 21st-century country and its healthcare system reflects that.

There are thousands of healthcare facilities throughout the country, about one-third of which belong to the taxpayers. Most healthcare providers in Mexico received at least part of their education in the United States, Canada or Europe. Finding an English speaking doctor should not be a problem.

Joe’s Ambition Trumped Joe’s Desire to Protect Hunter

neweconomicperspectives |  Goldberg’s column is unusually honest for a Democrat like Goldberg.  It includes two important admissions about Joe and Hunter Biden’s poor judgment in dealing with Ukrainian matters.

As all this was happening, Biden’s son, Hunter, sat on the board of Burisma Holdings, a natural gas company that Zlochevsky co-founded, at some points earning $50,000 a month. Zlochevsky might have thought he could ingratiate himself with the Obama administration by buying an association with the vice president. All available evidence suggests he was wrong.

We need to put Hunter Biden’s $50,000 per meeting in perspective, he began receiving it in 2014, when the purchasing power parity (PPP) per capita GDP figure for Ukraine was slightly over $8,500.  In a single month, Hunter Biden received fees over six times what a typical Ukrainian received in a year.  Hunter Biden had no relevant expertise to be on the Ukrainian firm’s board of directors.  The only disagreement I have with Goldberg’s description is her use of the word “earning” instead of “received.”  Hunter Biden does not “earn” his money.  He makes money off those who seek to get in good with his dad.  The Trump children, of course, have super-charged this sleaze.

Hunter’s one real job miraculously led to his ludicrously rapid promotion to EVP of a major bank.  The bank, of course, was a major contributor to his dad.  Hunter’s miraculous advancement to EVP is a typical sleazy payoff to elite politicians’ kids.  Both parties do it.  The sole reason Zlochevsky hired Hunter was to try to influence favorably his dad and the Obama administration.  This too is typical elite sleaze.  Yes, we should remember that Trump’s spouse, children, and their spouses, make Hunter look like a highly competent saint when it comes to cashing in on their tawdry Trump ties.

Goldberg correctly notes the modest nature of the sleaze in the Bidens’ case.  There is no evidence that hiring Hunter Biden ingratiated the Ukrainian firm with the Obama administration.  There is no evidence that hiring Hunter Biden ingratiated the Ukrainian firm with Joe Biden.  Joe Biden’s successful effort to fire the corrupt non-prosecutor increased the chances that the Ukrainian government would sanction the firm.  Trump’s claim that the fired prosecutor was an anti-corruption hero investigating Hunter’s purported corruption is a double lie.  Trump’s attacks on Joe and Hunter Biden are lies.  This should not surprise us.  First, Trump always lies.  Second, Joe and Hunter Biden’s sketchy actions are not crimes or ethical violations.  They may be ‘corrupt’ in the broad sense of that word in everyday usage, but not in the legal sense of statutes against corruption.  Trump, therefore, has substituted lies for the nuanced reality.

Long Overdue, .45 Finally Puts His Foot In Brennan's Flabby, Pasty Ass...,

realclearpolitics |  I do believe that, uh, Mr. Trump decided to take this action, as he has done with others. He has tried to intimidate and suppress any criticism of him or his administration and revoking my security clearances is his way of trying to get back at me, but I think I have tried to voice the concerns of millions of Americans about Mr. Trump's failures in terms of fulfilling the responsibilities of that sacred and solemn office of the presidency. And this is not going to deter me at all, I'm going to continue to speak out.

But I am very worried about the message that it appears Mr. Trump is trying to send to others, including those who apparently hold security clearances within the government. I think he included Bruce Ohr, a current DOJ official among those whose clearances he is reviewing. Is this an effort to try to cow individuals both inside and outside of the government to make sure they don't say anything that is critical of Mr. Trump or with which he disagrees? And I've seen this type of behavior and actions on the part of foreign tyrants and despots and autocrats for many, many years, during my CIA and national security career.

I never, ever thought that I would see it here in the United States. I do believe that all Americans really need to take stock of what is happening right now in our government, and how abnormal and how irresponsible and how dangerous these actions are.

Ain’t Nobody Asked You To Speak For Us REDUX (Originally Posted 11/07/17)

NationalReview |  If I might be permitted to address the would-be benefactors of the white underclass from the southerly side of the class line: Ain’t nobody asked you to speak for us.

One of the intellectual failings of conservative social critics is our tendency to take external forces, economic and otherwsie, into greater account in the case of struggling rural and small-town whites than in the case of struggling urban blacks.

Of course there are external forces, economic and otherwise, that act on poor people and poor communities, and one of the intellectual failings of conservative social critics is our tendency to take those into considerably greater account in the case of struggling rural and small-town whites than in the case of struggling urban blacks. “Get off welfare and get a job!” has been replaced by solicitous talk about “globalization.” Likewise, the reaction to the crack-cocaine plague of the 1980s and 1990s was very different from the reaction to the opioid epidemic of the moment, in part because of who is involved — or perceived to be involved. And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a rash of deaths from opioid overdoses. As Dr. Peter DeBlieux of University Medical Center in New Orleans put it, heroin addiction was, for a long time, treated in the same way AIDS was in its early days: as a problem for deviants. Nobody cared about AIDS when it was a problem for prostitutes, drug addicts, and those with excessively adventurous sex lives. The previous big epidemic of heroin overdoses involved largely non-white drug users. The current fentanyl-driven heroin episode and the growth of prescription-killer abuse involve more white users and more middle-class users.

But there are internal forces as well. People really do make decisions, and, whether they intend it or not, they contribute to the sometimes difficult conditions in which those decisions have to be made.

Consider the case of how I became homeless.

I wasn’t homeless in the sense of sleeping in the park — most of the people we’re talking about when we’re talking about homelessness aren’t. The people who are sleeping on the streets are mainly addicts and people with other severe mental-health issues. I was homeless in the way the Department of Health and Human Services means: in “an unstable or non-permanent situation . . . forced to stay with a series of friends and/or extended family members.” (As a matter of policy, these two kinds of homelessness should not be conflated, which they intentionally are by those who wish for political reasons to pretend that our mental-health crisis is an economic problem.) Like many underclass families, mine lived very much paycheck-to-paycheck, and was always one setback away from economic catastrophe. That came when my mother, who for various reasons had a weakened immune system, got scratched by her poodle, Pepe, and nearly lost her right arm to the subsequent infection. A long hospitalization combined with fairly radical surgery and a series of skin grafts left her right arm and hand partially paralyzed, a serious problem for a woman who typed for a living. (She’d later learn to type well over 100 words per minute with only partial use of her right hand; she was a Rachmaninoff of the IBM Selectric.) I am sure that there were severe financial stresses associated with her illness, but I ended up being shuffled around between various neighbors — strangers to me — for mainly non-economic reasons. My parents had two houses between them, but at that time had just gone through a very ugly divorce. My mother was living with a mentally disturbed alcoholic who’d had a hard time in Vietnam (and well before that, I am certain; his grandfather had once shot him in the ass with a load of rock-salt for making unauthorized use of a watermelon from the family farm) and it was decided that it would be unsafe to leave children alone in his care, which it certainly would have been. He was very precise, in funny ways, and would stack his Coors Lite cans in perfect silver pyramids until he ran out of beer, at which point he would start drinking shots of Mexican vanilla, which is about 70 proof. Lubbock was a dry city then, and buying more booze would have meant a trip past the city limits, hence the resort to baking ingredients and, occasionally, to mouthwash. I am afraid the old realtors’ trick of filling the house with the aroma of baked cookies has the opposite of the desired effect on me.

Our mortgage then was $285 a month, which was a little less than my father paid in child support, so housing was, in effect, paid for. And thus I found myself in the strange position of being temporarily without a home while rotating between neighbors within sight, about 60 feet away, of the paid-up house to which I could not safely return. I was in kindergarten at the time.

Capitalism didn’t do that, and neither did illegal immigrants or Chinese competition to the Texas Instruments factory on the other side of town. Culture didn’t do it, either, and neither did poverty: We had enough money to secure comfortable housing in a nice neighborhood with good schools. In the last years of her life, my mother asked me to help her sort out some financial issues, and I was shocked to learn how much money she and her fourth and final husband were earning: They’d both ended their careers as government employees, and had pretty decent pensions and excellent health benefits. They were, in fact, making about as much in retirement in Lubbock as I was making editing newspapers in Philadelphia. Of course they were almost dead broke — their bingo and cigarette outlays alone were crushing, and they’d bought a Cadillac and paid for it with a credit card.

Warms My Heart To See WICHITA STILL DONT PLAY!!!

KAKE |  A 14-year-old boy says he was arrested at the Warren Theatre in east Wichita because his pants were sagging.

Alonzo Taylor Jr says he went to the East Warren 20 with a group of friends when the manager approached him about his pants.

"A couple of seconds after leaving the concessions counter, the manager walked up and said to pull up your pants or you'll be escorted," Taylor said.

He says he couldn't find a belt to wear and his pants began sagging while he was carrying a drink and popcorn. 

"I was by the counter and he said that, 'You're going to have to leave. I don't care what you did. You're trespassing.'" 

Taylor says he followed all of the manager's commands but was still arrested. He believes the manager targeted him because he is black. 

Taylor's mother, Ruth Dennis, says her son is a good kid who never gets into trouble. She's not mad at police for handcuffing her son. She's mad at the theater.

"I just don't want my son's record to be messed up over sagging and to be labeled as a trespasser," she said.

Taylor is still shocked by what happened and now doesn't feel welcome at the East Warren 20.

The Fact This Potato-Headed Punk Gets a Platform Tells Me EVERYTHING I Need to Know...,

NYTimes |  Over time it has become clear to me that security decisions in the Trump administration follow a certain pattern. Discussion seems to start with a presidential statement or tweet. Then follows a large-scale effort to inform the president, to impress upon him the complexity of an issue, to review the relevant history, to surface more factors bearing on the problem, to raise second- and third-order consequences and to explore subsequent moves.

It’s not easy. The president by all accounts is not a patient man. According to The Washington Post, one Trump confidant called him “the two-minute man” with “patience for a half page.” He insists on five-page or shorter intelligence briefs, rather than the 60 pages we typically gave previous presidents. There is something inherently disturbing in that. There are some problems that cannot be simplified.

Sometimes, almost magically, he gets it right. The president’s speech last August on Afghanistan was worth listening to, clearly the product of the traditional deliberative process where intelligence sets the picture based on the best available information, and then security agencies weigh in with views that are adjudicated by the National Security Council.

But the Afghan experience has been the exception. The president continues to attack the Iranian nuclear deal and is likely to end it even in the face of intelligence that Iran has not committed a material breach of the compact, that the deal makes it more difficult for Iran to build a weapon and that it gives us visibility into its nuclear program.

Then there is Russia. The president only recently and grudgingly agreed to impose sanctions on Russians believed to have interfered in the American election, and he continues to characterize the investigation as a “witch hunt” while relentlessly attacking agencies of his own administration.

He humiliated the attorney general, undercut his national security adviser and engaged in personal vendettas against senior F.B.I. officials.

A few months after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, I got a call from a colleague who thought he might be on a very short list for a very senior position. He asked my opinion. I told him that three months earlier I would have talked to him about his duty to serve. Now I was telling him to say no. “You’re a young man,” I said. “Don’t put yourself at risk for the future. You have a lot to offer. Someday.”

When asked for counsel these days by officers who are already in government, especially more junior ones, I remind them of their duty to help the president succeed. But then I add: “Protect yourself. Take notes and save them. And above all, protect the institution. America still needs it.”

That creates a deeper dilemma. Intelligence becomes a feeble academic exercise if it is not relevant and useful. It always has to adapt to the idiosyncrasies, learning style, policies and priorities of any president to preserve its relevance and utility. But there have to be limits. History — and the next president — will judge American intelligence, and if it is found to have been too accommodating to this or any other president, it will be disastrous for the community.

These are truly uncharted waters for the country. We have in the past argued over the values to be applied to objective reality, or occasionally over what constituted objective reality, but never the existence or relevance of objective reality itself.

In this post-truth world, intelligence agencies are in the bunker with some unlikely mates: journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement and science — all of which, like intelligence gathering, are evidence-based. Intelligence shares a broader duty with these other truth-tellers to preserve the commitment and ability of our society to base important decisions on our best judgment of what constitutes objective reality.

The historian Timothy Snyder stresses the importance of reality and truth in his cautionary pamphlet, “On Tyranny.” “To abandon facts,” he writes, “is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so.” He then chillingly observes, “Post-truth is pre-fascism.”

The FBI has sided with the powerful against the powerless to maintain an unjust social order

counterpunch  |  The indictments are a major political story, but not for the reasons given in mainstream press coverage. Once Mr. Mueller’s indictment is understood to charge the exploitation of existing social tensions (read it and decide for yourself), the FBI, which Mr. Mueller directed from 2001 – 2013, is precisely the wrong entity to be rendering judgment. The FBI has been America’s political police since its founding in 1908. Early on former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover led legally dubious mass arrests of American dissidents. He practically invented the slander of conflating legitimate dissent with foreign agency. This is the institutional backdrop from which Mr. Mueller proceeds.

In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the FBI’s targets included the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Black Panther Party and any other political organization Mr. Hoover deemed a threat. The secret (hidden) FBI program COINTELPRO was intended to subvert political outcomes outside of allegations of criminal wrongdoing and with no regard for the lives of its targets. Throughout its history the FBI has sided with the powerful against the powerless to maintain an unjust social order.

Robert Mueller became FBI Director only days before the attacks of September 11, 2001. One of his first acts as Director was to arrest 1,000 persons without any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. None of those arrested were ever charged in association with the attacks. The frame in which the FBI acted— to maintain political stability threatened by ‘external’ forces, was ultimately chosen by the George W. Bush administration to justify its aggressive war against Iraq.

It is the FBI’s legacy of conflating dissent with being an agent of a foreign power that Mr. Mueller’s indictment most insidiously perpetuates. Russians are ‘sowing discord,’ and they are using Americans to do so, goes the allegation. Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders are listed in the indictment as roadblocks to the unfettered ascension of Hillary Clinton to the presidency. Russians are sowing discord, therefore discord is both suspect in itself and evidence of being a foreign agent.

The posture of simple reporting at work in the indictment— that it isn’t the FBI’s fault that the Russians (allegedly) inserted themselves into the electoral process, runs against the history of the FBI’s political role, the tilt used to craft criminal charges and the facts put forward versus those put to the side. Given the political agendas of the other agencies that the FBI joined through the charges, they are most certainly but a small piece of a larger story.

In the aftermath of the indictments it’s easy to forget that the Pentagon created the internet, that the NSA has its tentacles in all of its major chokepoints, that the CIA has been heavily involved in funding and ‘using’ social media toward its own ends and that the FBI is only reputable in the present because of Americans’ near-heroic ignorance of history. The claim that the Russian operation was sophisticated because it had corporate form and function is countered by the fact that it was, by the various agencies’ own claims, ineffectual in changing the outcome of the election.

I Have a List

While Robert Mueller was busy charging never-to-be-tried Russians with past crimes, Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, declared that future Russian meddling has already cast a shadow over the integrity of the 2018 election. Why the Pentagon that created the internet, the NSA that has its tentacles in all of its major chokepoints, the CIA that has been heavily involved in funding and ‘using’ social media toward its own ends and the FBI that just landed such a glorious victory of good over evil would be quivering puddles when it comes to precluding said meddling is a question that needs to be asked.