Prince attended a secret meeting in the Seychelles islands
days before Trump's inauguration to discuss establishing the
back-channel, The Washington Post reported Monday.
In his statement Tuesday, Prince didn't deny attending the
meeting, but still attempted to cast doubt on its supposed
purpose.
"If the politically fabricated delusion of President-elect Trump
and President Putin's coordination was true, why would anyone
need to meet me anyway?" Prince said in the statement, which was
sent to Business Insider.
In a statement that was included in the Post's story on Monday,
a spokesman for Prince said the Seychelles meeting "had
nothing to do with President Trump."
"Why is the so-called under-resourced intelligence community
messing around with surveillance of American citizens when they
should be hunting terrorists?" the spokesman said.
thehill | Former national security adviser Susan Rice on Tuesday
categorically denied that the Obama administration inappropriately spied
on President Trump or members of his transition team.
“The
allegation is that somehow, Obama administration officials utilized
intelligence for political purposes,” Rice told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.
“That’s absolutely false.”
Rice had requested that at least one Trump transition team member be “unmasked,” Bloomberg View reported Monday, leading to claims that the Obama White House had intended to use that intelligence to damage Trump’s transition.
“The
notion, which some people are trying to suggest, that by asking for the
identity of the American person is the same is leaking it — that’s
completely false,” Rice said. “There is no equivalence between so-called
unmasking and leaking.”
Rice also flatly denied exposing
Trump’s own former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who was
forced to resign in February after media reports revealed that he misled
Vice President Pence about the contents of his discussions with the
Russian ambassador.
“I leaked nothing to nobody,” she said.
thedailycaller | Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice
ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal
phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for
president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.
“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of
Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with
unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with
individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation
Investigative Group Monday.
“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody
of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova
said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of
the people in the calls.”
Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested
anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance
reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election.
counterpunch | We are now in a position to see the real story behind “Russiagate.”
It’s not about Russia, except incidentally. The Obama regime abused the
government’s surveillance powers and spied on Donald Trump and other
Republicans in order to build a dossier for the DNC to leak to the press
in an attempt to slander or compromise Trump and throw the election to
Hillary.
They’ve been caught, but we can now see that they took steps to
protect themselves against this. They prepared a cover story. They
pretend they were not spying on Trump, but on Russians – which only by
fortuitous happenchance turned up incriminating smoke against Trump.
This cover story was buttressed by the fake news story prepared by
former MI6 freelancer Christopher Steele. As Whitney reports, Steele
“was hired as an opposition researcher last June to dig up derogatory
information on Donald Trump.” Unvetted and unverified information paid
for by so-called informants “somehow” found its way into U.S.
intelligence agency reports. These reports were then leaked to
Democrat-friendly media.
This is where the crime lies. Obama regime and DNC were using these agencies for domestic political use, KGB style.
The Obama/Clinton cover story is now falling to pieces. That explains
the desperation in the attack byAdam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on
the House Intelligence Committee, on Committee Chairman Devin Nunes to
stop the exposure. Russiagate is not a Trump/Putin collusion but a
domestic spy job carried out by Democrats.
Law requires Trump to arrest those responsible and to put them on
trial for treason and conspiracy to overthrow the government of the
United States. If Trump fears to prosecute the Obama operatives within
the Deep State, they will try all the harder to attack him to the point
of forcing his removal, or at least discrediting him and his fellow
Republicans to pave the way for the 2018 elections.
unz | The latest Democratic Party shill to demonize Russia is, I am ashamed
to say, my state of Virginia’s Senator Mark Warner, who, on Thursday said
“Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a deliberate campaign
carefully constructed to undermine our election.” Last Thursday, Warner
was the top Democrat on a Senate Intelligence Committee panel
investigating Moscow’s alleged interference in last year’s presidential
election. The panel inevitably included carefully selected expert
witnesses who would agree with the proposition that Russia is and was
guilty as charged. There was no one who provided an alternative view
even though a little Googling would have surfaced some genuine experts
who dispute the prevailing narrative.
Warner joined many of his esteemed colleagues
in Congress who have completely accepted the allegations that Russia
meddled in the election in spite of the failure of the Obama
Administration to provide any indisputable evidence to that effect.
Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland has called Moscow’s claimed interference
an “attack” and labeled it a “political Pearl Harbor.” A number of other
congressmen, to include Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey and Eric
Swalwell of California have called it an act of war. And then there are
echo chambers Senators John McCain and Mark Rubio on the Republican side
of the aisle while former Vice President Dick Cheney was speaking at a
business conference in New Delhi saying the same thing. Yes, that Dick
Cheney. Why anyone in India would pay to hear him speak on any subject
escapes me.
Democrat
Adam Schiff of California is leading the charge for his party as he is
the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. He outlined his case
against Russia two weeks ago, providing a heap of minimally factual
“information”, relying heavily instead on supposition and featuring
mostly innuendo. And again, it was largely evidence-free. One assertion
is almost comical: “In July 2016, Carter Page, one of Trump’s former
national security advisers, traveled to Moscow
after being approved to do so by the Trump campaign. While there, Page
gave a speech in which he was critical of the U.S. and its efforts to
fight corruption and promote democracy.”
msn | Monday Bloomberg report
alleging that a former top Obama administration official requested the
unmasking of U.S. persons tied to the Trump campaign who were swept up
in foreign surveillance is not the “smoking gun” that the President’s backers are making it out to be.
According
to surveillance and national security experts, former Obama national
security adviser Susan Rice would be within her rights to make such
requests if she was trying to determine the extent of Russia’s
interference in the presidential election.
“Part of her job as
national security adviser is to pay attention to what foreign
governments are doing,” Rebecca Lonergan, a former federal prosecutor
who handled foreign surveillance cases, told TPM. “If she’s asking for
specific names to be unmasked in order to understand what Russia may be
doing to influence the U.S. political system and influence our
elections, presumably in a way they thought would benefit them, she’s
doing her job.”
Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst, noted on Twitter
that it was not “odd or wrong” for the national security adviser to
read “a report of foreign officials discussing US persons coming into”
the White House. And Susan Hennessey, a fellow in national security
governance studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote of the Bloomberg
article that “nothing in this story indicates anything improper
whatsoever.”
NYPost | Do you suspect that the noise over Trump-campaign contacts with the
Russians is just a political hit arranged by Obama insiders before they
left? You got fresh evidence of that Monday, with news that then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice was behind the “unmasking” of Trumpites in transcripts of calls with Russian officials.
Again, nothing on the public record so far shows that anyone on Team Trump said anything improper on those calls.
It’s no surprise that US spooks intercept foreign officials’ calls.
But intelligence-community reports don’t disclose the names of US
citizens on the other end. To get that info, a high official must (but
rarely does) push to “unmask” the Americans’ names.
Bloomberg’s Eli Lake now reports that Rice started doing just that last year.
WashingtonTimes | File this under Most Disingenuous Argument Ever. Susan Rice, of Barack Obama national security adviser fame, actually penned
a piece for the Washington Post decrying President Donald Trump
administration’s “false statements” about wiretapping — saying such
unproven allegations present a danger to America.
That buzzing in
your ears is from the rapid head-shaking that probably started,
involuntarily, as soon as you finished reading that quick sentence.
medium | Susan Rice,
who served as the National Security Adviser under President Obama, has
been identified as the official who requested unmasking of incoming
Trump officials, Cernovich Media can exclusively report.
The
White House Counsel’s office identified Rice as the person responsible
for the unmasking after examining Rice’s document log requests. The
reports Rice requested to see are kept under tightly-controlled
conditions. Each person must log her name before being granted access to
them.
Upon learning of Rice’s actions, H. R. McMaster dispatched his close aide Derek Harvey to Capitol Hill to brief Chairman Nunes.
“Unmasking”
is the process of identifying individuals whose communications were
caught in the dragnet of intelligence gathering. While conducting
investigations into terrorism and other related crimes, intelligence
analysts incidentally capture conversations about parties not subject to
the search warrant. The identities of individuals who are not under
investigation are kept confidential, for legal and moral reasons.
As
his presidency drew to a close, Barack Obama’s top aides routinely
reviewed intelligence reports gleaned from the National Security
Agency’s incidental intercepts of Americans abroad, taking advantage of
rules their boss relaxed starting in 2011 to help the government better
fight terrorism, espionage by foreign enemies and hacking threats, Circa
has learned.
Among
those cleared to request and consume unmasked NSA-based intelligence
reports about U.S. citizens were Obama’s national security adviser Susan
Rice, his CIA Director John Brennan and then-Attorney General Loretta
Lynch.
kunstler | If you thought banking in our time was a miserable racket — which it
is, of course, and by “racket” I mean a criminal enterprise — then
so-called health care has it beat by a country mile, with an added layer
of sadism and cruelty built into its operations. Lots of people
willingly sign onto mortgages and car loans they wouldn’t qualify for in
an ethically sound society, but the interest rates and payments are
generally spelled out on paper. They know what they’re signing on for,
even if the contract is reckless and stupid on the parts of both
borrower and lender. Pension funds and insurance companies foolishly
bought bundled mortgage bonds of this crap concocted in the housing
bubble. They did it out of greed and desperation, but a little due
diligence would have clued them into the fraud being served up by the
likes of Goldman Sachs.
Medicine is utterly opaque cost-wise, and that is the heart of the
issue. Nobody in the system will say what anything costs and nobody
wants to because it would break the spell that they work in an honest,
legit business. There is no rational scheme for the cost of any service
from one “provider” to the next or even one patient to the next. Anyway,
the costs are obscenely inflated and concealed in so many deliberately
deceptive coding schemes that even actuaries and professors of economics
are confounded by their bills. The services are provided when the
customer is under the utmost duress, often life-threatening, and the
outcome even in a successful recovery from illness is financial ruin
that leaves a lot of people better off dead.
It is a hostage racket, in plain English, a disgrace to the
profession that has adopted it, and an insult to the nation. All the
idiotic negotiations in congress around the role of insurance companies
are a grand dodge to avoid acknowledging the essential racketeering of
the “providers” — doctors and hospitals. We are never going to reform it
in its current incarnation. For all his personality deformities,
President Trump is right in saying that ObamaCare is going to implode.
It is only a carbuncle on the gangrenous body of the US medical
establishment. The whole system will go down with it.
The New York Times departed from its usual obsessions with
Russian turpitude and transgender life last week to publish a valuable
briefing on this aspect of the health care racket: Those Indecipherable Medical Bills? They’re One Reason Health Care Costs So Much
by Elisabeth Rosenthal. Much of this covers ground exposed in the now
famous March 4, 2013 Time Magazine cover story (it took up the whole
issue): Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,
by Steven Brill. The American public and its government have been
adequately informed about the gross and lawless chiseling rampant in
every quarter of medicine. The system is one of engineered criminality.
It is inflicting ruin on millions. It is really a wonder that the public
has not stormed the hospitals with pitchforks and flaming brands to
string up that gang in the parking lots high above their Beemers and
Lexuses.
thehill | Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Adam Schiff
have both castigated Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, for his handling of the inquiry into Russia’s
interference in the 2016 presidential election. They should think
twice. The issue that has recently seized Nunes is of vital importance
to anyone who cares about fundamental civil liberties.
The
trail that Nunes is following will inevitably lead back to a
particularly significant leak. On Jan. 12, Washington Post columnist
David Ignatius reported
that “according to a senior U.S. government official, (General Mike)
Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec.
29.”
From Nunes’s statements, it’s clear that he
suspects that this information came from NSA intercepts of Kislyak’s
phone. An Obama official, probably in the White House, “unmasked”
Flynn’s name and passed it on to Ignatius.
Regardless
of how the government collected on Flynn, the leak was a felony and a
violation of his civil rights. But it was also a severe breach of the
public trust. When I worked as an NSC staffer in the White House,
2005-2007, I read dozens of NSA surveillance reports every day. On the
basis of my familiarity with this system, I strongly suspect that
someone in the Obama White House blew a hole in the thin wall that
prevents the government from using information collected from
surveillance to destroy the lives of the citizens whose privacy it is
pledged to protect.
The leaking of Flynn’s name was
part of what can only be described as a White House campaign to hype the
Russian threat and, at the same time, to depict Trump as Vladimir
Putin’s Manchurian candidate.
antimedia | If you’re one of the countless Americans who was distraught to learn
of the revelations made by former National Security Agency (NSA)
contractor Edward Snowden, the mere idea that there might be yet another
agency out there — perhaps just as powerful and much more intrusive —
should give you goosebumps.
Foreign Policyreports
that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, is an obscure
spy agency former President Barack Obama had a hard time wrapping his
mind around back in 2009. But as the president grew fond of drone
warfare, finding a way to launch wars without having to go through Congress
for the proper authorization, the NGA also became more relevant. Now,
President Donald Trump is expected to further explore the
multibillion-dollar surveillance network.
Like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security
Agency (NSA), the NGA is an intelligence agency, but it also serves as a
combat support institution that functions under the U.S. Department of
Defense (DOD).
With headquarters bigger than the CIA’s, the building cost $1.4
billion to be completed in 2011. In 2016, the NGA bought an extra 99
acres in St. Louis, building additional structures that cost taxpayers
an extra $1.75 billion.
Enjoying the extra budget Obama threw at them, the NGA became one of
the most obscure intelligence agencies precisely because it relies on
the work of drones.
As a body of government that has only one task — to analyze images
and videos captured by drones in the Middle East — the NGA is mighty
powerful. So why haven’t we heard of it before?
theduran | To my mind what this episode shows is how sensitive the Democrats are
about the raising of the whole surveillance issue. This lends further
strength to my opinion – which I note is coming to be increasingly widely shared – that it is the surveillance carried out during the election of Donald Trump and his campaign team which is the real scandal in this affair, and that the fake ‘Russiagate’ scandal is the smoke-screen concealing it.
They will be equally disappointed there. These attempts to use
Congressional committees as investigative and prosecutorial instruments
suffer from a basic misconception: these are oversight committees, not
investigative or prosecutorial committees, and they cannot be used in
that way. They cannot magic up evidence of collusion between the Trump
campaign and Russia that the actual investigation – the one carried out
by the FBI – says is not there.
The single most important fact about the last few weeks, and the
clearest possible sign that the ‘Russiagate’ scandal is flagging, is
that there have been no more leaks from within the intelligence and
security agencies since the ones at the beginning of March about Jeff Sessions’s meetings with the Russian ambassador.
That suggests that the former Obama administration officials, who I
suspect were the people who were physically communicating the
information in the leaks to the media, are no longer being fed
information about Donald Trump and his associates or about the progress
of the FBI investigation by their sources within the intelligence and
national security bureaucracy.
That could be because people within the intelligence and national
security bureaucracy are being deterred by the investigation into the
leaking of classified material which the President has been calling for
but which the House Intelligence Committee hearing on 20th March 2017
suggested FBI Director Comey is resisting (almost certainly because
people within the FBI were involved in the leaks), or it could be
because increasingly there is no damaging information to leak.
Regardless of what the explanation is, in the absence of any more
leaks there has been nothing over the last few weeks for the supporters
of ‘Russiagate’ to work with. The result is that in the absence of
anything new the effort to keep the ‘Russiagate’ scandal going and in
the public eye is flagging.
My best guess is that it will collapse entirely by early summer.
wikileaks | Today, March 31st 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 "Marble" -- 676 source code files for the CIA's secret anti-forensic Marble Framework.
Marble is used to hamper forensic investigators and anti-virus
companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the
CIA.
Marble does this by hiding ("obfuscating") text fragments used in CIA malware
from visual inspection. This is the digital equivallent of a specalized
CIA tool to place covers over the english language text on U.S.
produced weapons systems before giving them to insurgents secretly
backed by the CIA.
Marble forms part of the CIA's anti-forensics approach and the CIA's Core Library of malware code. It is "[D]esigned to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation" as "string
obfuscation algorithms (especially those that are unique) are often
used to link malware to a specific developer or development shop."
The Marble source code also includes a deobfuscator to reverse
CIA text obfuscation. Combined with the revealed obfuscation
techniques, a pattern or signature emerges which can assist forensic
investigators attribute previous hacking attacks and viruses to the CIA.
Marble was in use at the CIA during 2016. It reached 1.0 in 2015.
The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in
English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This
would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by
pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not
American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the
use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the
wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding
fake error messages.
The Marble Framework is used for obfuscation only and does not contain any vulnerabilties or exploits by itself.
gabbard.house.gov | Continuing her commitment to common sense criminal
justice reform, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) spoke on the House floor
today urging Congress to pass bipartisan legislation to federally
decriminalize marijuana. If passed, the Ending Federal Marijuana
Prohibition Act (H.R.1227) would take marijuana off the federal
controlled substances list—joining other industries
such as alcohol and tobacco. Gabbard introduced the legislation with
Rep. Tom Garrett (VA-05), an Army veteran and former prosecutor.
“Our outdated policies on marijuana are having devastating ripple
effects on individuals and communities across the country. They have
turned everyday Americans into criminals, torn apart families, and
wasted huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to arrest, prosecute, and
incarcerate people for non-violent marijuana charges,” said Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.
“Differences in state and federal law have also created confusion and
uncertainty for our local businesses, who face contradictory regulations
that affect their bottom line and ability to operate. I urge our
colleagues to support our bipartisan legislation which would
decriminalize marijuana, bringing about long overdue and common sense
reform."
“There is growing consensus acknowledging that the effects of
marijuana are less harmful than its criminal prohibition, which has
increased incarceration rates, divided families, and burdened state
governments with the high cost of enforcement, prison and probation.
It’s clear that there are more vital needs that we as a society need to
allocate our precious resources towards, such as education, mental
health, and homelessness. Decriminalization is a step forward in making
needed criminal justice reforms, which should also include more
diversion to substance abuse treatment,” said Karen Umemoto,
Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Hawaiʻi
at Mānoa and juvenile justice researcher.
“As long as marijuana is federally illegal, FDIC
regulations make it impossible for banks to provide any services to the
eight Hawaiʻi Medical Marijuana Dispensary licensees. Federal
decriminalization will enable professional dispensaries to provide much
needed patient access and cost savings,” said Richard Ha, CEO of Lau Ola, a medical marijuana dispensary on Hawaiʻi Island.
“Descheduling cannabis will benefit Hawaiʻi patients by allowing for
more rapid research to identify the best medical marijuana strains and
dosages for individual medical conditions. Also, eliminating the
barriers to banking will make it easier and safer for Hawaiʻi patients
to purchase the medicine they need and eliminate unnecessary expense and
complexity for dispensaries,” saidBrian Goldstein, Founder and CEO of Mānoa Botanicals, a licensed medical marijuana dispensary on Oʻahu.
Background: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard supports the
full legalization of marijuana on the federal level as part of her
overall effort toward criminal justice reform. Last month, she visited
correctional facilities throughout the state, and met with inmates,
criminal justice advocates and experts, health professionals, educators
and others to discuss reducing recidivism and her continued efforts to pass federal criminal justice reform legislation like the SAFE Justice Act and the Sentencing Reform Act.
The congresswoman has also supported legislation like the Industrial
Hemp Farming Act to support the cultivation of industrial hemp in
Hawaiʻi and nationwide.
prospect |Rob Frankil of Sellersville,
Pennsylvania, followed his father into the family business after
college. “My entire life,” he said, “I’ve been involved with managing
and owning independent pharmacies.” He now owns two stores, a
traditional community pharmacy and another that caters to long-term care
facilities.
Like any retail outlet, Frankil purchases inventory from a wholesale
distributor and sells it to customers at a small markup. But unlike
butchers or hardware store owners, pharmacists have no idea how much
money they’ll make on a sale until the moment they sell it. That’s
because the customer’s co-pay doesn’t cover the cost of the drug.
Instead, a byzantine reimbursement process determines Frankil’s fee.
“I get a prescription, type in the data, click send, and I’m told I’m
getting a dollar or two,” Frankil says. The system resembles the pull
of a slot machine: Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. “Pharmacies
sell prescriptions at significant losses,” he adds. “So what do I do?
Fill the prescription and lose money, or don’t fill it and lose
customers? These decisions happen every single day.”
Frankil’s troubles cannot be traced back to insurers or drug
companies, the usual suspects that most people deem responsible for
raising costs in the health-care system. He blames a collection of
powerful corporations known as pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. If
you have drug coverage as part of your health plan, you are likely to
carry a card with the name of a PBM on it. These middlemen manage
prescription drug benefits for health plans, contracting with drug
manufacturers and pharmacies in a multi-sided market. Over the past 30
years, PBMs have evolved from paper-pushers to significant controllers
of the drug pricing system, a black box understood by almost no one.
Lack of transparency, unjustifiable fees, and massive market
consolidations have made PBMs among the most profitable corporations
you’ve never heard about.
Americans pay the highest health-care prices in the world, including
the highest for drugs, medical devices, and other health-care services
and products. Our fragmented system produces many opportunities for
excessive charges. But one lesser-known reason for those high prices is
the stranglehold that a few giant intermediaries have secured over
distribution. The antitrust laws are supposed to provide protection
against just this kind of concentrated economic power. But in one area
after another in today’s economy, federal antitrust authorities and the
courts have failed to intervene. In this case, PBMs are sucking money
out of the health-care system—and our wallets—with hardly any public
awareness of what they are doing.
consortiumnews | As those paying rudimentary attention to modern methods of
surveillance know, “wiretapping” is passé. But Trump’s use of the word
allowed FBI and Department of Justice officials and their counterparts
at the National Security Agency to swear on a stack of bibles that the
FBI, DOJ, and NSA have been unable to uncover any evidence within their
particular institutions of such “wiretapping.”
At the House Intelligence Committee hearing on March 20, FBI Director
Comey and NSA Director Michael Rogers firmly denied that their agencies
had wiretapped Trump Towers on the orders of President Obama.
So, were Trump and his associates “wiretapped?” Of course not.
Wiretapping went out of vogue decades ago, having been rendered obsolete
by leaps in surveillance technology.
The real question is: Were Trump and his associates surveilled? Wake
up, America. Was no one paying attention to the disclosures from NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 when he exposed Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper as a liar for denying that the NSA
engaged in bulk collection of communications inside the United States.
The reality is that EVERYONE, including the President, is
surveilled. The technology enabling bulk collection would have made the
late demented FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s mouth water.
Allegations about the intelligence community’s abuse of its powers
also did not begin with Snowden. For instance, several years earlier,
former NSA worker and whistleblower Russell Tice warned about these
“special access programs,” citing first-hand knowledge, but his claims
were brushed aside as coming from a disgruntled employee with
psychological problems. His disclosures were soon forgotten.
However, earlier this year, there was a stark reminder of how much
fear these surveillance capacities have struck in the hearts of senior
U.S. government officials. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New
York told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow
that President Trump was “being really dumb” to take on the intelligence
community, since “They have six ways from Sunday at getting back at
you.”
Maddow shied away from asking the logical follow-up: “Senator
Schumer, are you actually saying that Trump should be afraid of the
CIA?” Perhaps she didn’t want to venture down a path that would raise
more troubling questions about the surveillance of the Trump team than
on their alleged contacts with the Russians.
ibankcoin | Aside from what appears to be a brazen confirmation of spying on the
Trump team, the bigger red flag here is Dr. Farkas wasn’t employed by
the Obama administration at the time the Russian allegations arose.
So how did this non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, member
of the Council on Foreign Relations, and former deputy assistant
secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, gain knowledge of
intelligence regarding members of Trump’s team and their relations with
Russia, when she was the senior foreign policy advisor for Presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton?
Farkas was the prime driver behind the anti-Russia phobia inside the Pentagon during the Obama years — shilling hard for the Ukraine — requesting that the President send them anti-tank missiles — which, essentially, would mean outright war with Russia.
Back to the interview with Mika Brzezinski. Dr. Farkas said ‘we’ had
good intel on Russia. Who does she refer to when she says ‘we?’
WaPo | The first known published description of Donald Trump’s hair, as an
entity that deserved its own description, was mild. “His sandy hair is
probably a bit long by standards of the corporate world,” read a 1984
newspaper profile of the then-38-year-old mogul. “With the sides slicked
back just a bit.”
Three decades later, describing the headstuff
of the leading Republican presidential candidate has been elevated to an
art form. Is is swirled or swooped? Animal or vegetable? (Mineral?)
Burnt sienna or orange Creamsicle? Last week Gawker published an
extensive investigation asserting that the whole concoction might
actually be a $60,000 weave.
GQ | And this is why Dave Chappelle’s recent Netflix specials are so disappointing.
Perhaps
my expectations were too high. I hoped that Chappelle, now entering his
mid-40s, would have used his signature slyness and world-weary insights
to tackle subjects more daunting than the low-hanging and dated comedic
fruit of trans people, rape, and famous black men (O.J. Simpson and
Bill Cosby) accused of horrific crimes against (mostly) white women.
Especially after taking a full decade away from the public microscope.
And especially during a time when there seems to be so fucking
much—politically, culturally, and racially—for a black comedian as sharp
and shrewd as Chappelle to dive into. His focus on the horror of
political correctness, instead, felt like something you’d expect to come
from a megarich 43-year-old man from the outskirts of Ohio. Who,
instead of evolving with the world, has remained stagnant and believes
the world has gone mad while pining for time when things were simpler.
Which is who he is.
I recognize the
presumption and perhaps even self-indulgence of suggesting that I know
what Chappelle should have been talking about better than he does. There
are no emails and comments I hate worse than “Why did you write about this thing instead of this other thing I wanted you to write about?”
and I’m doing this now. I do not wish to be that guy, especially when
discussing Chappelle, a man whose break from the public came as a result
of corporate forces trying to tell him what he could and couldn’t—and
should and shouldn’t—talk about. He is a public figure whom we (black
people) have collectively and justifiably circled the wagons for;
sensitive to his wish for peace of mind, and his attempt to possess it;
ultimately aiming to protect one of our icons from the scourge of
capital letter Whiteness attempting to transmute him.
I just... I don’t know, I just would like for him to join us in 2017. There’s so much he can do here.
Citizenship, Criticism, and Communism
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In the 1940s and ’50s, Americans engaged in an intense debate over the
content of school textbooks, particularly social studies texts. Fears of
communism a...
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
