#I care a lot about this... not even talking Ukraine more broadly; I care a lot about getting rid of this specific policy

[medicinemane]

Seriously, you don't know just how long I've been shaking my fist at the screen any time this policy comes up because I've wanted it changed

This isn't just me reblogging a standard "contact your representatives" about something I care about but also... it's more of a "oh god would you stop trying to bring the 50th version of SOPPA back"

Where as this is something that I've been following every day, and I can directly draw a line for you between this policy and dead civilians

So that's why I care so much

[magustiel]

Like, you guys are getting it, right?

The US has become the bad guy. Or, in the very least, the swordbearing money factory for the bad guy. And you know deep down, left or right, everybody knew that, they just didn't know how to perceive how depending on their beliefs. You protested wars, funding strange projects while forgetting the common people. You pointed at the Kremlin in the right but forgot all about the Zionists in the left; and once that was forgotten, why, it was antisemitic to even talk about things we all well knew and protested 3 or 4 presidencies ago.

You are the amnesia generation. Influenced by thoughts long trained against a studied cultural psyche in the west, reacting without understanding, fighting faces you can think to recognize as Most Important more than broadly transnational ideologies that are infections. One twitter fight at a time, accidentally arguing their nonsense to the top until everything is a parody and nothing matters or is real.

For example. I support Ukraine. I want Ukraine independent and have deeply protected their people from Russia over the last year. On the other hand, I recognize exactly why Israel is about to suddenly start funding the hell out of them while the US crashes out and shuts down federal aid, and their AI lab of chip control idea just got sunk by China. They're trying to maintain a figure to work through in the West, Ukraine is adored, and they will repeat the process there until ripped out as well. It will save Ukraine as we want, which is good, while Putin's Russia collapses and the Kremlin are quietly swept.

These are the motions to truly pay attention to beneath all the articles with suggestive anchor phrases, or twitter reports that replace responsible cabinets with 'Trump did', or whatever method the half correct and confusing information spreads. Russia for example is known for a 60/40 tactic; what they say is 60% true 40% false, but the 40% by repetition is normalized into the dialogue until it can grow into the next point.

We have our own mistakes to face, guys. A lot of them, really. And it will, in fact, take us all pushing ourselves different ways. Each person in their own capacity, at their own limit, but if you're doing Literally Nothing during this, then you're part of the problem why we're here. I don't care if you're disabled, I don't care if you have goddamn anxiety, I truly don't. So do I. We're at an Armageddon-shaped event and fascist takeover holding off all dying in nuclear warfare from WWIII. There are truly bigger things to consider than if your back hurts to sit a few hours doing something to help. Literally, fucking. Anything. Find a thing.

Don't know a thing, after all I've been posting? That's fucking fine. Search yourself inside for the fucking thing, because the lack of self reflection on how to be awake and involved with your community is literally why we've fucked ourselves until we're hostages to our own splintered inaction. That's literally the plot, if you didn't fucking notice.

You can be as mad at the right as you want, but at the end of the day I learned how to turn them on themselves to do what the left literally refused to get done, and now everything's in the fucking upside down and everybody's complaining. You think I'm not motherfucking mcfuckingtired after this last year?

So if you do nothing else, figure out where your reactive habits have contributed to landing us here, the refusal to stop trying to control the immediate situation for marginal illusions of gain that can be removed by a penstroke, while often protecting the very system you pretended to understand to hate.

And now as the empire begins to shake and fall down, you freak out to protect it again! Reverse it!! GET MY FAVORITE BLORBO IN THERE TO PRETEND THE WORLD IS NORMAL A FEW MORE YEARS.

For what? You to anxiety rage in a dying late capitalist system a few more years while waiting for the globe to boil you off or like, what's the plan here kids?

Lying to yourselves asleep because the future was too scary to face, and our complicity in it so far too large to account for to find the truth in the haze, and even know where or how to fight.

It wasn't about truth for anyone anymore, or what was right. It was about signaling about doing what was right, but protecting their personal comforts and boundaries or expectations. And at the end of the day, you know I'm right.

I've made clear where my beliefs are on things like personal rights, identity, and all good things; I will not bare repeating it beyond laying the line of ignoring any comment intending to accuse me of anything other than I am, for simply laying out the basic idea of national accountability.

Because if you don't sit and break down how deeply you have been gamed, you will continue to be gamed. Bots, propaganda, divisive messaging using ad targeting style methods, and you know how invasive that really is. They know exactly how to keep you all divided and yet you refuse to stop fighting the circle they have created for you, insisting that the online noise alone is justice, rather than free labor for their marketing and social engineering.

It's time to stop trying to control everything immediately. To let go, just a bit, and scroll out.

I will say this. Someone, somewhere--I wonder what that guy would look like, probably someone that knew them at some point--convinced Biden and Kamala to do the right thing. They left the lights on.

We're ripping you out at the root, bitch. In every dimension.

I chose not to run from my personal Satan anymore, as that is what she made herself. Now it's your turn, as I hold them for you in ways you can only try to begin to understand.

[summeroffice]

Interview with Michael Nacke

17:12 You speak a lot about Russian propaganda, absolutely fair. But Russian propaganda is effective if and only when it rests on some kind of emotional or some other ground. And you touched on the topic of negotiations.

We see that this is not just a construct of Russian propaganda of official representatives at this stage of war. This is also a message from the Western media. Which means that the West is somehow discussing with Ukraine the supposed possibility of peaceful negotiations, and even NBC is saying how they are going to force Ukraine to do this.  

We also see, I don't know if this can be called a political program, but at least a statement from Oleksiy Arestovych, once your colleague and comrade, who is now quite active, I would say, oppositional to the Ukrainian authorities' niche and in fact also actively talks about negotiations and their necessity.

That is, some kind of discussion and emotional base on which the Russian propaganda then rests, it exists. How wide is this base in your opinion? Where does it come from and how will it develop in the future from the point of view of whether it can spread wider and further demoralise a certain amount of Ukrainian society and the military? 

Three components I would highlight. First, of course it will be expanding for some time because we are, I repeat once again, at the peak depressive stage of the war as such. And certainly, some alternative solutions are being sought here which in fact are not such. Why? Because I repeat once again, Russia is not interested in actual negotiations, Russia is interested in fixing the status quo that exists today.  

And this is essentially prolongation of the war but in other forms in a protracted format. And of course, against this background such trends will certainly continue, publications will appear, they will refer to anonymous sources and so on and so forth. Again, we need to be calm about this, give a rational explanation of the impossibility of this, well, that is, going on air again and commenting on this.  

The second component, I would still recommend paying much less attention to the statements of people like Arestovych, they do not influence the processes that are taking place in Ukraine, they do not determine the method and direction of decision-making and they are not popular in Ukrainian society, both as people and as speakers and accordingly, people who could today reflect some part of the mood in Ukraine.  

19:36 Look, at least Oleksiy was popular for some time.  

He was [he continues to speak, and smiles]. 

What happened in your opinion? What is this transformation? How do you explain it? 

Uhm, no realisation of personal ambitions. Well, that is, they have not been realised to the extent that-- This is, by the way, one of the key problems of the political process if already, in general, to speak more broadly and, let's say, to systematise, the key problem of the internal political process in Ukraine.

There always has been the attempt of people to realise their ambitions, which are not properly formalised and not properly, or rather, do not correspond to the idea that is objective within Ukraine. Well, that is, roughly speaking, narcissism too often brings people under such an absolutely incredible speed of transformation of the position of worldview ideas and so on.  

20:25 Well, politicians and public figures without narcissism, it is difficult to meet. This is a fairly common combination.  

I agree, I agree. But there is a small caveat. We are now in a state of war and here we need to be very careful to some fundamental worldview things that relate to Ukraine and Russia and how you interpret them. This is not a question of realising or not realising your ambitions, this is a question of understanding exactly what your country is experiencing or what it is not experiencing. Unfortunately, sometimes people behind these ambitions lose a sense of conformity to time and place where they are located.  

Again, within the democratic processes, any person has the right to their positions. I can't prohibit anyone from doing anything. Simply from the point of view of influencing the events that take place in Ukraine, Mr Arestovych of course does not have this, as it seems to him, well, or seems to someone, so I would pay less attention to this.  

38:08 In principle, I have the opportunity, to put it mildly, to communicate daily with both the president and Mr Zaluzhnyi [he smiles], and to be honest, I feel somehow awkward all the time to explain the common truths [that there is no conflict between them] [he smiles even more broadly].  

39:30 Look, our [he means at our place] communication at the level of the president, the commander-in-chief, goes on daily. There are military offices, headquarters, supply selectors, additional events relating to those, for example, any aspects of mobilisation, and again, supplies, and the type of war and correction of strategy, and so on, at this level, they have an ideal relationship.  

That is, there is no excessive bureaucracy, there is no need to coordinate anything through some assistants, the president is maximally loyal to the possibility of direct communication at the level of commander-in-chief, supreme commander-in-chief, and accordingly, they perceive with irony when people say that they are not talking there somewhere [he smiles; it's lovely to see him so happy], or so on and so forth. 

I see all this directly and honestly speaking, I calm everyone down all the time, well, even inside us, I say, calmly, let them talk, and we continue our work from the point of view, again, of correcting certain plans. 

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on http://techcrunchapp.com/if-the-deep-state-hates-trump-why-arent-more-officials-speaking-out-like-bolton-nbc-news/

If the Deep State hates Trump, why aren't more officials speaking out like Bolton? - NBC News

President Donald Trump and his allies have continually railed about how the “Deep State” of unelected national security bureaucrats has quietly worked to undermine the Trump presidency.

But the new allegations in a book by former national security adviser John Bolton turn that formulation on its head. If Bolton is to be believed — Trump calls him a liar — plenty of career diplomats, soldiers and spies kept quiet as they watched Trump abuse his office.

In Bolton’s telling, members of the so-called deep state, including senior intelligence and defense officials, knew about actions by Trump that were unethical, if not illegal, and said nothing. That would mean the press, the public and House impeachment investigators were kept in the dark.

The reason more insiders didn’t speak out are complex, according to a former senior national security official who served for years in the Trump administration and faced the choice on a near daily basis. But broadly, the official said, unelected national security bureaucrats tend to give great deference to the president’s policy choices, and the line between bad decisions and abuse of office is not a clear one.

“Sometimes you ask yourself: Is that malfeasance, or is that just something so dumb that you know it’s not going to happen?” the former official said.

The American system of government “has developed to give the president tremendous leeway to set policy,” said John Gans, author of a book about the White House National Security Council. “Those in the executive branch are expected to kind of nod their heads and say, ‘OK.’ There really isn’t a whistleblower system at the White House.”

Officials senior enough to be in meetings with the president don’t tend to use formal whistleblower channels anyway. Such people have long deployed anonymous leaks to the news media to flag decisions or behavior they deemed problematic.

During the Trump administration, many current and former government officials have anonymously recounted startling episodes to journalists and authors, such as Trump providing classified information to Russian officials in the Oval Office or his calling military leaders “losers” in reference to the war in Afghanistan. Once-senior officials, including former chief of staff John Kelly and former Defense Secretary James Mattis, have recently publicly questioned the president’s fitness for office, though their decisions to do so came long after they departed.

But Bolton makes a very specific case, alleging a pattern of behavior by Trump to use his presidential power in foreign affairs to further his private interests — exactly the charges in an impeachment proceeding narrowly focused on Ukraine. Bolton says the pattern went well beyond one country.

During face-to-face meetings, Trump asked the Chinese president to help get him re-elected, Bolton writes, and promised the Turkish president that he would “take care of” a Justice Department investigation deemed harmful to Turkey when he could replace Obama-appointed prosecutors with “his people.” If those exchanges happened, Bolton could not have been the only official aware of them. (Trump and one of the officials present at the summit with Chinese President Xi JinPing, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, dispute Bolton’s account.)

Bolton says Trump was willing to waive penalties on a Chinese firm, ZTE, to help with trade talks he believed would help him politically. He writes of briefing Attorney General William Barr on Trump’s “penchant to, in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked.”

Trump hasn’t spoken to the specifics, but he has denied exploiting his office for personal gain.

Bolton also asserts people across the government knew the central premise of the impeachment case against Trump was true — that the president indeed had conditioned aid to Ukraine on that government’s willingness to do him a political favor by announcing an investigation into his opponent, an allegation of quid pro quo that Trump denies.

“I think Secretary [of State Mike] Pompeo understood,” Bolton told ABC News this week. “I think the Pentagon understood. I think the intelligence community understood. I think people in the White House understood.”

Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.

Yet in the end, only a handful of national security officials were willing to testify to that during impeachment proceedings. Only one — the whistleblower — came forward voluntarily, before the process began. Spokespersons for the CIA, director of National Intelligence and State Department declined to comment.

In his book, Bolton faults House impeachment managers for failing to investigate Trump’s “ham-handed involvement in other matters — criminal and civil, international and domestic — that should not properly be subject to manipulation by a president for personal reasons (political, economic, or any other).” He calls that “impeachment malpractice.”

That criticism sidesteps the fact that the impeachment inquiry kicked off when a lone junior CIA officer decided to file a written complaint to an inspector general about Trump’s alleged extortion of Ukraine. No similar whistleblowing efforts have come to light about Trump’s conduct with China or Turkey.

Bolton himself kept quiet for nearly two years, declining to testify in the impeachment hearing. He seeks to justify that by arguing that Democrats mishandled impeachment proceedings and that his testimony in the Senate wouldn’t have changed anything.

Critics are unconvinced.

“I think what Bolton did was shameful,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “He sat on this information for two years so he could write a book.”

John Bolton attends a meeting between President Donald Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the Blue House in Seoul, South Korea, on June 30, 2019.Kevin Lamarque / Reuters file

If others besides Bolton are uncomfortable with what they have witnessed inside the Trump White House, why haven’t they come forward with specifics?

Look no further than what has happened to the few who have done so, experts say. Lawyers for the CIA whistleblower said publicly that he had to be protected by a security detail after the president and his Republican allies called him a traitor and a spy. Trump allies in Congress sought to put his name into the public record.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified against Trump during the impeachment hearings, was dismissed from his job at the White House and has found his promotion to full colonel in limbo as the Pentagon worries the White House will oppose it, two defense officials told NBC News.

“You see what happens to the people who speak up,” the former senior national security official said.

“This whistleblower followed the law every step of the way and look at what they got for it,” said Liz Hempowicz, director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight, a good-government advocacy group. Hempowicz said the already weak federal whistleblower system has disintegrated under Trump, noting the board that rules on employee disputes with management has never had enough members to make such rulings during the Trump administration.

But even for those with courage enough to brave the personal repercussions, there often is another dilemma: whether they can do more good by truth-telling or remaining in their jobs.

“Clearly people made calculations: Do you want to keep serving a president and keep our institutions intact? Or does behavior that’s so outlandish cause you to resign and report it?” said Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA officer who served in senior agency roles during the first part of the Trump administration.

“There was a lot of angst about POTUS interactions with any head of state — foreign visits or phone calls,” he said.

CIA Director Gina Haspel, for one, is seen by former colleagues and congressional observers as someone who is trying at all costs to remain at the helm of a powerful spy agency that she believes could suffer severe damage in the wrong hands.

“Thankfully, CIA has remained stable in this and that will be Gina’s legacy,” Polymeropoulos said.

Haspel was criticized for failing to speak out when Trump was bashing the CIA’s Ukraine whistleblower. But she appears to have helped defuse what has been an extremely contentious relationship between Trump and the intelligence community.

“Haspel has figured out how to not to piss off the president and keep the agency from running off the rails,” added a congressional aide who works on intelligence matters. “Everyone recognizes it’s a very difficult position she is in.”

Haspel’s general counsel made what she believed was a criminal referral after the CIA whistleblower brought his complaints to her, but the agency avoided becoming entangled in the impeachment proceedings. That’s in part because Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the Intelligence Committee chair who presided over impeachment in the House, believed it was important to keep the intelligence agencies away, as much as possible, from what turned into a vicious partisan battle, according to a person familiar with his thinking. He wanted to keep the focus on the president’s alleged abuse of office, the person said.

But if Bolton is correct that Trump broadly sought to leverage foreign policy for political gain, it’s hard to imagine the intelligence agency leaders did not become aware of it. They not only sit in high-level White House meetings, but they also spy on foreign officials who discuss what the American government is saying and doing.

“If the CIA learns of something that is an illegal act by a government official, it has an obligation to forward that information to the Department of Justice,” said former CIA Director John Brennan, an NBC News contributor. “If it’s an issue of ethics and appropriateness and one’s moral compass, then it’s more of a personal choice. Fortunately, as director, I never had to make this choice.”

It’s difficult from the outside to judge how senior officials are dealing with the turmoil inside the Trump administration, said John McLaughlin, a former deputy CIA director who served under former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

“What you’re going to get when this administration is over is a tidal wave of memoirs, the theme of which will be, ‘You don’t know how much worse it would have been if I hadn’t been there,'” he said.

“The question is, at what point are you enabling it more so than preventing bad things from happening?”

[thisdaynews]

Can Mikie Sherrill Keep Impeachment from Tearing Apart Her District?

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/can-mikie-sherrill-keep-impeachment-from-tearing-apart-her-district/

Can Mikie Sherrill Keep Impeachment from Tearing Apart Her District?

The emotion Sherrill showed that September day in her office was remarkable not only because it gave a glimpse of the toll of her role in a moment of such consequence but also because she’s usually so unflappable. Beyond her biography—former Navy helicopter pilot, former federal prosecutor, mother of four—what propelled her to victory last year was, in fact, her demeanor. She was steady, and she was moderate—moderate in her politics as well as her mien, and she was sufficiently centrist to flip a district that had been in GOP control for more than 30 years. While she ran in some ways because of her alarm at the ascension of Trump, her effective pitch was the opposite of divisive. It was all “bipartisan” and “broad coalitions.” It wascountry over party. It waslet’s get stuff done by coming back together again.

But Monday night was … not that.

Over the course of an hour and a half, Sherrill was asked about vaping, anti-Semitism, federal spending, the national debt, state and local taxes, and even her book recommendations for children (To Kill a Mockingbird). But the conversation kept coming back to an overarching theme. One of the Cub Scouts squeaked out a plea for Republicans and Democrats to stop the “fighting.” He wondered what she might be able to do to make it stop. One woman, recently retired, gave a sort of rambling confessional about how scared she is, worrying out loud whether her son, daughter and grandson are going to be OK. Whether anybody is. “What’s going to happen to all of us?” she said. “What’s going to happen to our government? To our country?” Monday night at the Hanover Township Community Center was, in sum, a raw, unsettling, ground-level manifestation of the living-on-different-planets tenor of the impeachment hearings of the past two weeks and, more broadly, the intractably split Congress and nation.

After it was over, people milled about. On the tips of tongues was the first question of the night.

“Off the wall,” said Democrat Jack Gavin, 60, an IT professional who’s a staple at Sherrill’s events.

A woman in a fur coat, a Republican named Ruth Anne, on the other hand, didn’t think the question was “off the wall.” She thought theanswerwas. “Very disturbing,” she told me. “I thought, by now, after the two weeks of hearings, she would have seen, ‘Oh, my God, there’s nothing there.’” She wouldn’t tell me her last name.

Gavin had on his tan hat that read “FACTS MATTER.” Ruth Anne had on her red hat that read “TRUMP.” They walked separately into the dark.

***

The students weren’t surprised.In attendance at the town hall were Julie White, Bianca Walder and Anna Agresti, all enrolled in Whippany Park High School’s Advanced Placement course in U.S. government and politics, taught by Richard Schwartz—for whom Sherrill’s events act as an extension of the the classroom. White had on her phone screenshots from a Hanover Township Facebook group. A man named Doug Emann had posted news of the town hall. Others had posted their responses.

“Stop the impeachment bullshit!!!” wrote a Frank Pedalino.

“I had high hopes for this coward. I thought she ran on a platform of being an independent & open minded. But she has just proved she is no different than the rest of the swamp,” wrote a William Ulrich.

“VOTE her OUT OF CONGRESS,” wrote a Julian Crawford.

The online vitriol now manifested IRL.

The man who asked Sherrill for the children’s book recommendations somehow worked into his warm-and-fuzzy, blessedly-off-politics question a Trump dig. “I’m a big reader of books,” he told her, “unlike our president.”

A different woman stood up and asked another question about impeachment. If Trump were a Democrat, too, she wanted to know, would Sherrill still have the same stance?

Sherrill answered by reminding everybody that she ran saying she wasn’t going to vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker of the House and then went to Washington and on her first day made good on that promise. “And that’s an interesting way to start your career as a member of the House of Representatives and the Democratic Caucus,” she said, calling that a “proof point” that she wasn’t beholden to some party line, returning toexplaining. “So, if we had a Democratic president who had withheld military aid from a foreign leader who was facing an existential threat—Russia is an existential threat to Ukraine—and then was trying to force that foreign power to investigate an American citizen, namely a son of his political opponent … would I want to hear more about that? Would I want to learn more about that? Would I want to begin an inquiry? Yes. I would.”

The recently retired woman who said she is scared wore a shirt showing support for Sherrill, and she embedded in all that she said a short question for the congresswoman.

“How are you feeling?”

After the woman finished, Sherrill opted to answer.

“How do I feel?” she said. “Um, I guess, you know—I think there’s a lot of people across the country that are scared, worried about their future—how they’re going to pay for their retirement, how they’re going to put their kids through college, worried about the epidemic of gun violence. And, now, those things are really scary, no doubt. But I look across this room, and I see where we’ve gotten to tonight. … We had a lot of questions. There are a lot of questions that really I think frustrate people in one way or another and even anger people in one way or another. But we all sat here together, and we’re going to keep sitting here for a little longer”—people laughed, just a little—“and we’re going to talk about this, because this is a democracy, and maybe we leave here a little frustrated, or maybe we leave here thinking, ‘I’m going to do more.’ Maybe some of you think, ‘I’m going to go knock on more doors for Mikie Sherrill.’ Maybe you think, ‘I’m going to get rid of Mikie Sherrill.’ But at the end of the day, we’re here because we care about this country. And that gives me such a great deal of hope.”

It sounded good.

***

After Sherrill’s first town hall,in January, I told her it had been “a little boring.”

She laughed.

“That’s — OK?” she said.

It’s become something of a recurring joke.

“I’m surprised you came back,” she said with a smile after a May town hall in Bloomfield.

“I love boring town halls,” I said.

On Monday night, after most people had left, I returned to the well.

“This town [hall] was …notboring,” I said.

She smiled, but this time onlykinda, and seemed not to be in the mood. “I don’t thinkanyof my town halls are boring, so …”

She told me she wasn’t surprised by how this one had gone. “There’s not much I don’t expect in our district,” she said. “We have people from across the political spectrum.”

I, too, wanted to know what the woman wearing the Sherrill shirt wanted to know. How was she feeling, heading into the holidays, as 2019 hurtles toward (deep breath) 2020?

She talked about everything but herself. She talked about everything but impeachment. “I feel like we’re moving forward on a lot of the issues that people in my district care deeply about. I hope to see H.R. 3 pass soon. … I hope we can conference that with the Senate. … I’m on the state and local tax deduction task force. … We haven’t moved forward as quickly on getting shovels in the ground. … I’ve been back and forth with the secretary of Transportation’s office. …” She went on. “Congress,” she said, “doesn’t move as quickly or as orderly as military movements.”

One of Sherrill’s staffers was making faces at another trying to nudge her out of the community center.

Her support for impeachment, of course, was for the inquiry. How she votes next month remains to be seen. For a rookie member from the sort of district at the heart of the balance of power in Congress, Sherrill appears to be, at least for now, electorally secure. She has a primary challenger who got in mainly because of her initial reluctance to come out in favor of impeachment. She has a Republican challenger who just got in the other day. Others are still mulling runs. It will be an uphill battle for any and all of them. Prognosticators peg Sherrill as safe.

Then again, in this cultural and political moment, the only certainty is volatility. Things can and do, as we’ve seen and keep seeing, change.

I shook Sherrill’s hand and wished her a happy Thanksgiving. It was time for a break.

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