Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 5/29/2025 12:29 pm | #101 |
I suppose one could pretty easily imagine what the reaction would look like in news media (mainstream as well as right-wing) had, say, Kamala Harris (god forbid Obama!) were to grant clemency to the founder of one of, if not the most notorious nation-wide violent street gang currently operating in America, out of South Side Chicago no less. A founder, Larry Hoover, who has been serving multiple lifetime sentences, not for non-volent drug activity, but for capital murder, committed in his effort to consolidate control over dozens of smaller street gangs under the Gangster Disciple umbrella, not only in Chicago but in dozens of cities throughout mostly the midwest and eventually the entire country. And even though initially incarcerated in 1974 on this murder charge (surely only one of many), he was also later convicted in 1997 after it was proven in court that Hoover continued to direct and orchestrate the expansion of Gangster Disciple operations, including the ordering of untold murders in various turf wars in the cities where they established their drug-trafficking pipelines. You'd likely hear conspiracies about Kamala was sleeping with, right? I'm just guessing.
And I'm guessing that in contrast of that hypothetical scandal, this Trump clemency of Larry Hoover will be greeted with a converse shrug and silence.
I understand that Hoover has, in fact, publicly renounced his past crimes - in 2022 (better late...) - and he's still facing a number of state convictions which will keep him behind bars for the time being, but this is still a pretty remarkable show of gall. The news in recent days has been more focused on the (numerous) other pardons and clemencies that Trump has urgently issued, almost like he worried that the checks might expire or something, involving a more mundane menagerie of crooks and grifters, involved in bribary, fraud, tax evasion, in other words the kinds of white collar crimes with which we assume that Trump is more sympathetic. There might be other reasons for his interest in Hoover's case, namely that it's been championed by the likes of Kanye West and Drake. Trump similarly pardoned Michael Harris, co-founder of Death Row Records, also a drug kingpin, convicted of kidnapping and attempted murder - not quite as ruthless as Hoover - after a push from Snoop Dog in 2020. (Both would endorse Trump in 2024.) The whole concept of "non-violent drug offense" at the foundation of the First Step Act, Trump's 2018 effort at sentencing reform, starts to become a bit muddied when these activities necessarily involve the cooperation of violent street gangs, or even international cartels. Alice Marie Johnson, the poster child of this sentencing reform, who committed non-violent acts to move a ton of cocaine, and is now the "pardon czar" in the Trump administration, most likely was involved in getting Larry Hoover's case in front of Trump. It should be noted that, although JOhnson's criminal actions were not violent, they did necessarily involve working on behalf of violent Colombian cartel connections. (Even though Gangster Disciples were active in Memphis at the time of Johnson's arrest, there is no evidence she was connected with them.)
But none of this matters more than money. "Pro-Palestinian terrorists" are one thing (they have no money), but the Qatar financiers of Hamas are clearly quite another. And in this push to deport all of these lunatic thugs from vicious Central American gangs, Trump somehow found a way to grant asylum to the (very rich) family members of the most vicious criminal organization in the hemisphere. Go figure.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 5/30/2025 1:43 pm | #102 |
I'm not impressed with these hot takes about Elon Musk stepping down from DOGE as some kind of defeat. No, this just happens to have been his time limit without having to be confirmed. Everything's on schedule, most of Musk's minions will remain in their positions across the federal agencies with their hands on the spigots of everyone's personal information (most of which they've already gotten). The fact is that the damage is done, Musk did exactly what he set out to do, with was to decimate the "administrative state" or the federal bureaucracy if you will, mostly focusing on any position responsible for oversight or regulation, the inspector-generals, the attorneys and legal counsels, all to create "efficiency"....for an unbound president to do exactly what he wishes, which happens to be an awful lot of autocratic corruption. Musk is clearly a major beneficiary to the regulatory handicaps he's created, but not the only one. After Musk is gone, additional cuts and damages will continue, as we continue to see under RFK's Health and Human Services and Hegseth's Defense, and across the entire National Security apparatus. And the DOGE cuts which Musk did manage - some $9 billion (a far cry from his promised $2 trillion, but still) are soon to be codified into law by Congress.
I know that Elon Musk is acting all hurt. Maybe he didn't get everything he wanted. Maybe some of those Starlink deals fell through. Maybe his fragile ego got a little scuffed in the process. But Musk can't stand there and act shocked at the fact that his role actually had nothing really to do with actually rooting out 'fraud, waste and abuse' (none of which has yet to be ajudicated), or even actually cutting the budget to a significant degree. It was a sham, and the Republicans never really pretended that they weren't going to just boost spending on their own priorities anyway. And here's the thing - it doesn't really matter. Raise the debt ceiling, and keep spending. All of the "fiscal responsibility" nonsense, going back decades, has never been about fiscal responsibility, but a means of severely cutting social programs and protections at the federal level. So, good job, Musk. You got'r dun. So what if Trump decides he now needs a totally redundent and expensive "golden dome", just because he got an itchy dick from looking at Israel's iron dome? Don't worry about it, Elon. You're going to get your tax cuts anyway.
And to stressfully reiterate, the damage is done, and the damage will be generational - if we can even manage to reverse course and even attempt to rebuild what's already been lost, it will take decades, which we may not have. DOGE (and generally this entire second Trump administration) could prove more fatal than the other major self-inflicted wounds to the nation of the century - Iraq and the Derivative Collapse - two scars which Americans still refuse to fathom the depths of damage these caused to both our global integrity and national esteem.
I wish that all of you Trump voters could just do the right thing and overdose on zyn and fentanyl already, and allow the rest of us to have a chance to fight back against the class war being funded off of your bigotry, ignorance and hate. Do us a favor? Since you've clearly stopped caring?
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 5/31/2025 10:32 pm | #103 |
I have a theory on Elon's black eye. And it does involve lil X.
I don't think Elon Musk has turned into Jake LaMotta all of the sudden, talking about "punch me in the face". Even to his kid. It has been, maybe not well known, not as known the way that people who generally appreciate parental behavior should know, but known that this little booger-digging bastard has a mother, somewhat known as the musical artist Grimes, who was also somewhat suprised (not pleasantly) to see her baby on TV wiping his snot on Trump's resolute desk earlier this year. Custody disputes are tough enough without the bright lights of our current rancid reality TV season.
Grimes bowed out of a scheduled two-day World Pride Music Festival this week, due to what was called "family issues". After Musk purported this kid-induced shine, and the kid wasn't there in the White House this time, "Musk explained his absence by saying he was with his mom". The mom who just cancelled her concert appearance this week.
God bless Grimes' sore knuckles. Savour the ice.
And don't worry, kid. You'll want to punch him soon enough.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 6/05/2025 9:14 pm | #104 |
I'm just going to sit here, chillin'.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 6/07/2025 10:18 pm | #105 |
I have to admit that I wasn't completely sure how seriously to take all of this romantic turmoil between the world's biggest babies, given that both Trump and Musk are irreparable drama-trolls who appreciate high camp levels of soap operatic posturing. And there's a number of (now) underreported news stories (more on these in a sec) which would be in each one's favor to keep out of a news cycle currently determined by Bravo-esque dish. And despite the histrionic escalation we saw on Thursday, I guess after the drugs wore off and his bladder deflated, Musk has been pretty sheepish ever since. Trump has however taken on that uncharacteristic calm and chill which, in gangster terms, is probably concerning. He is not a man known to forgive or forget. Whether or not he'll take Steve Bannon's advice to not only cancel Musk's government contracts but to seize his corporate entities as well before throwing him out of the country - all of which would be extreme civil liberty violations if it happened to a less loathesome individual - the one prospect I would actually welcome, on ethical and legal grounds, is that Trump, at the very least, revokes Musk's security clearances, because, frankly, there's already sufficient evidence (the Putin contacts, the drugs) for why he never should have been qualified to have them in the first place, and this single act (which SCOTUS apparently has no problem with when Trump has unilaterally revoked others' clearances for absolutely no reason whatsoever) would do sufficient damage to at least two of Musk's businesses, SpaceX and Starlink. (The latter being of significant interest.) But all of this talk about the tragic end of such a beautiful relationship....look, neither one of these men have the emotional resources required for any meaningfully deep relationships, certainly not with each other. They operate purely on transactional terms. And I imagine that they will proceed exactly in kind from here. Musk must be realizing in his post-serotonin haze that there's not really a whole lot of people who have his back (unless maybe Putin, who Trump also finally pissed off last week), and if he has better cards to play other than twit-trolling, he best figure out the play pretty quickly. According to certain Trump "aides" (speaking on background), the plan is to wait until Elon is prepared to do the best ass-kissing he can muster.
Now as for these recent stories which have been, for better or for worse, obscured much to Trump and Musk's respective benefit this week:
1) the explosive Elizabeth Warren Doge report, released on Tuesday and was already being half-heartedly ignored by Washington news media, is now all-but-forgotten in the news cycle's short attention span.
2) In the wake of the flames on Friday, the lame-ass SCOTUS decided to give Musk's Doge a huge victory, by both finally allowing them access to private Social Security data and by officially shielding Doge from any Freedom of Information Act requests, essentially barring the public taxpaer for accessing what Doge is actually doing with this data, especially troubling in light of reporting which revealed that Doge staff were deliberately switching off the back-up logging software on government computers to hide what they are doing with people's data, the kind of acitivity which proves why they need to be held to FOIA oversight. And the worst insult to all of this is that the 6-3 majority didn't even bother to write an opinion on "why", but that didn't stop the minority from writing their own opinion on why this is all extremely 'spish. Again, although most outlets have carried this story, it doesn't appear to be trending very well. In fact, I believe that a large number of Americans are under the impression that Doge ended with Musk's departure.
3) And just today, WaPo is reporting that Musk had his Starlink set up a secret WiFi network for the White House unbeknowst to the Secret Service, probably because the White House's communications experts had previously idenitfied a number of security liabilities with the Starlink service. Little deets: "Starlink doesn’t require anything. It allows you to transmit data without any kind of record or tracking....With a Starlink connection, that means White House devices could leave the network and go out through gateways. … It’s going to help you bypass security". It's an interesting question why WaPo decided to publish this story on a Saturday, making it more likely to get lost in the shuffle before the news cycle starts up on Monday, but maybe Bezos is a little too excited right now on his Blue Origin prospects to notice.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 6/08/2025 3:19 pm | #106 |
I still think it's a handy litmus test for gauging the corporate news cycle priorities by looking at which stories they've deemed important enough to cover on thier weekend Sunday morning news shows, allegedly a recap of the week's most important stories. Obviously, the "big story" is the Don/Elon spat, and obviously there are other truly important issues like the "big beautiful bill" (is that the official name for it?), although the fact-checking of Pub prop against the CBO projections can be frustratingly poor, and immigration (the LA raids/protests, Kilmar Abrego Garcia). There are other unfortunate lapses - only ABC covered this week's events in Ukraine; Face the Nation chose not to cover the Don/Elon spat at all, but hey Shari Redstone has cancer so don't blame her for selling out completely.
But predictably, none of the above three Doge stories from the previous post, which I noted would be obscured by this spat, were even so much as mentioned. I'll be damned if I heard the word "Doge" mentioned a single time on any of these shows, again possibly contributing to the impression among a number of Americans that Musk's exit marks the end of the Doge project, when in fact it has actually been deeply embedded into all of our executive agencies, with complete access to both citizen and government data, and, according to a follow-up to yesterday's WaPo story, has been transferring reams of that data to their own offsite servers. (That follow up is behind a paywall, but you can read it on Reddit.) Given these developments - Warren's extensive breakdown of Doge corruption, the SCOTUS greenlighting both their access and secrecy, and now this - the complete absence of any mainstream reporting on Doge on these weekend shows is awfully conspicuous. More so than the others, the omission of mention of the SCOTUS ruling, given its significance, is simply an outstanding dereliction on these news media's duties.
And in context of the "big beautiful bill", as Republicans continue to defend it in monstrously dishonest ways, it's also helpful to point out that since the massive cuts to Medicaid they are proposing are supposedly harmless because it's only cutting "waste fraud and abuse", there has been an equally conspicuous lack of evidence that any of this waste fraud and abuse was ever identified by the Doge team. In fact, it's kind of an open joke, even among Republicans, leading to Musk's poor reputation, and, also in fact, appears to have been the impetus behind Musk's wrestling match with Trump's treasury secretary last month (another weekend breaking scoop). If the premise of widespread fraud in Medicaid is challenged, then these cuts start to look rather cruel, and even as Republicans are trying to distance themselves from Elon Musk and his brand, they are equally desperate to preserve Musk's central falsehood around the safety nets they wish to decimate.
And probably the most positive potential outcome of the Don/Elon feud is that it will take the "big beautiful bill" down with it. Despite all of the talk about the monumental so-called landslide election last year, the true gap between party seats in Congress are remarkably slim, and there's plenty of likely defections of Republicans on a variety of issues contained within the legislation. We still have to wait and see what changes the Senate Republicans have in store, whether these can soften the dissent, but the exacerbation caused by Musk's flame-out over the bill could prove fatal. (Hopefully, Dems stay in solidarity, which is hardly a given.)
For anyone who would prefer to indulge in the drama of dunces (and I get it), there's the recent podcast with Kara Swisher (professional Musk-ador) and Scott Galloway, where they weight the possible leverage between the two and some of the darker possible outcomes:
Swisher - I think Donald, look, Donald Trump is going to prevail because he’s the president, right, ultimately....but I think it’s finished for him....Because Elon is willing to go nuclear. He really is. He doesn’t have a problem with it....
I warned the Trump people, there’s also no telling what he could do. Right? You just don’t know where he’s going. He’s got means, he’s got motive, he’s angry. He’s, as you know, a petty person. He’s got, as you discussed, a problem with some drugs. I think this guy could just go right off the rails and take Trump with him.
...it’s almost, oddly enough, it is like a wrestling match, right. And this is how Trump conducts everything, is, we’re in the middle of a wrestling match with one of those idiot narratives that they have there. Which is they’re throwing blows, they’re causing entertainment. But in this case, I, Elon can truly do a lot of damage to this man....
Trump is somewhat reliably corrupt the way he is. You never know what Elon’s gonna do, you just don’t.
And one final story which has been mostly obscured by Thursday's Zilla-thon was Kash Patel's appearance on Joe Rogan to effusively try to dampen any further discussion into the whole Jeffery Epstein matter. Much to Patel's gratification, I'd say, because this was embarrassingly one of the most transparently deceptive performances, even from a Trump stooge, that I've seen this year. It's quite clear that Patel has received his orders - told to stay in his lane - and despite not waiting to actually complete an actual investigation or even a official preliminary report on the matter, he's eager to go out on podcasts and pre-emptively assure us all of the inevitable conclusion of such an investigation. Basically, looking us all in the face, with vaguely terrified eyes, and in so many words telling us, "Guys? Maybe just drop it." (This appearance was also on Thursday, and I understand that they even responded to the Don/Elon feud in real time as it was unfolding.)
The problem is that Patel was so utterly unconvincing, not helping himself with numerous contradictions throughout. For example, Patel seems insistent on declaring that there is no 'there' there: "If there was a video of some guy or gal committing felonies on an island and I’m in charge, don’t you think you’d see it?" Rogan doubles down:
“Is there video from the island?” Rogan asked.
“Not of what you want,” Patel said. “The people out there have filled the void with, ‘can’t wait to see X, Y, or Z.'”
“So this narrative might not be accurate, that there’s video of these guys doing this?” Rogan pressed.
“Exactly,” Patel confirmed.
The emphasis is mine. "Exactly"...what? Exactly that the narrative might not be accurate? Well, that's not exactly anything at all. And Patel is claiming to have seen all of the available videos. He should have a pretty accurate idea of what's on them. So this is the kind of deliberate slipperiness which Patel uses to avoid ever actually saying anything concrete....which is fine except why then comment at all, with zero evidence or documents to back any of it up, on a conspiracy-themed Joe Fucking Rogan podcast in the first place? More suspicious is Patel's attempt to brush the importance of this case away by noting that it happened a long time ago, ie "the case that was done however many years ago was done". The message to Joe's audience seems clear enough: "Get over it".
Patel also appears to be in direct contradiction to Attorney General Pam Bondi, who last month claimed that "There are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn and there are hundreds of victims". Sounds felonious! So addressing this discrepancy, Patel then contradicts himself again: "we’re not gonna re-victimize women. We’re not going to put that shit back out there". No one is telling you to put out actual videos of child pornography, Kash. We don't need to see the videos for you to confirm they exist, and, like, who's on them? Like the criminal victimizers themselves? Is that not "what we want"? Are you lining up any prosecutions against any of these adult participants on these videos? Kash? No? Just more of the "nothing to see here" bullshit?
Patel at his most honest during this interview, "I know my lane and that ain't it."
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 6/08/2025 4:39 pm | #107 |
Jinnistan wrote:
And just today, WaPo is reporting that Musk had his Starlink set up a secret WiFi network for the White House unbeknowst to the Secret Service, probably because the White House's communications experts had previously idenitfied a number of security liabilities with the Starlink service. Little deets: "Starlink doesn’t require anything. It allows you to transmit data without any kind of record or tracking....With a Starlink connection, that means White House devices could leave the network and go out through gateways. … It’s going to help you bypass security".
Jinnistan wrote:
according to a follow-up to yesterday's WaPo story, has been transferring reams of that data to their own offsite servers. (That follow up is behind a paywall, but you can read it on Reddit.)
I wanted to stress this particular late-breaking story, as stories which break over the weekend tend to lose momentum by the following week. I'll bypass Reddit for now, and post the text from the Daily Beast story that's behind a paywall. (Interesting timing for Daily Beast to suddenly install a paywall...)
Elon Musk’s goons at the Department of Government Efficiency transmitted a large amount of data—all of it undetected—using a Starlink Wi-Fi terminal they installed on top of the White House, according to a new report.
The officials in charge of protecting the White House’s communications were not informed of the installation ahead of time, insiders told the Post.
At the time, DOGE said installing Starlink was intended to address connection “dead zones” on the White House compound.
That last bit is pure bullshit. There's a reason why Starlink has been mostly useful in rural and third-world locations, where cell and wifi service is scant. There is nowhere along the Mid-Atlantic eastern seaboard where someone can't find a cell signal, but especially densely-populated highly-mediated Washington DC. If there are any such "dead zones" in the WH, like the Situation Room where cell phones are not allowed, it is because they have deliberately been insulated for security reasons. Again, this is just proof that this effort represents an intentional security breach.
However, the insiders suggested that the move was intended to bypass White House systems that track the transmission of data—with names and time stamps—and secure it from spies.
“Starlink doesn’t require anything. It allows you to transmit data without any kind of record or tracking,” one insider told the Post. “White House IT systems had very strong controls on network access. You had to be on a full-tunnel VPN at all times. If you are not on the VPN, White House-issued devices can’t connect to the outside.”
“With a Starlink connection, that means White House devices could leave the network and go out through gateways,“ the person said. “It’s going to help you bypass security.”
"Gateways" here can be read as synonymous with "backdoors" in the communications software, the very things used by hackers to gain entrance.
Also behind the new Daily Beast paywall, but archived here, is a report from April warning of precisely these issues:
(DOGE) has been blamed for a “significant cybersecurity breach” that may have put sensitive U.S. labor data at risk....A whistleblower said he observed suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia using DOGE’s new accounts....
Daniel Berulis, an IT staffer at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), testified in a sworn affidavit that the DOGE team was given sweeping access to the agency’s systems. He offered evidence that DOGE exported large amounts of data from the agency’s systems, risking a breach by foreign adversaries in the process.
In his disclosure, Berulis said he became concerned when he saw peculiar spikes in data leaving the agency after DOGE staffers—who insisted that their actions not be tracked in the system—gained access. He also observed suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia using DOGE’s new accounts.
Emphasis mine, as we saw in a link from my previous post that Doge staff were deliberately disabling tracking logs in the computer systems they were accessing.
Given what we know, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to assume that such exfiltrations of sensitive data are limited to the NLRB.
And just for good measure:
Berulis’ lawyer... claims that he was threatened with a note taped to his door that included photos of him apparently taken by a drone.....claims that ”someone physically taped a threatening note to Mr. Berulis’ home door with photographs – taken via a drone – of him walking in his neighborhood” as he prepared to make his disclosure. The note, which Berulis declined to share with Reuters, specifically referenced the impending disclosure...
Now it's easy for these kinds of stories to get lost in the flurry, which is why I want to highlight these. I have to admit that this previous story from April went under my radar, likely because it was published on the same day that I began my Easter vacation with family. Clearly, the story had died on the vine by the time the Pope died.
But a larger point needs to be said....I'm a mere citizen after all. I do what I can to follow the news, and dare I say I do better than most. But these news media corporations have much less excuse. The fact is that the breadcrumbs for this, let's not mince, espionage scandal have been trailing for weeks, months, and none of it seems to have caught the curiosity of precisely those beltway journalists who should have known better. But I won't blame the shoe-leather folks. More than that, we've seen the corporate management of these news outlets, the editors and producers calling the shots, who have been most afraid of ruffling Trump/Musk feathers. It's a little more than coincidental that between WaPo and Daily Beast, these stories - which again, people must have known about for weeks - have finally dropped now, albeit on a summer weekend.
And now for the final problem which has been incidentally introduced by the Don/Elon rumble. What we see here with Doge is fairly unambiguously illegal, but will Trump's DoJ take up the threat to investigate and prosecute? Not likely, precisely because the optics will be that this is Trump weaponizing the Justice Dept against a political enemy, no matter how legitimate the charges would be. And more damning...this very security breach installed by Musk and Doge was all done "with the sign-off of Donald Trump’s administration".
And Trump may not want to piss off the recipient of all of this sensitive data, which might be the real Trump card that Musk is holding.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 6/16/2025 9:22 pm | #108 |
I did not watch the parade this weekend.
Nor did I participate in any of the local "No King" protests, not that I wouldn't support them, in spirit, but the flesh is weak. Honestly, I never have been the placard type of person.
I'm just happy to hear that there wasn't much of a crowd that showed up for Trump's toy show. It is amusing that Trump is under the impression that America never celebrates "our victories". Maybe I've been misinterpreting "The Star Spangled Banner" all these years. I know Trump doesn;t read, but I guess he doesn't listen to lyrics either. Memorial Day is clearly a celebration of our military victories, even if it doesn't fall exactly on so-called 'V-Day'. And June 6 usually involves some kind of informal D-Day commemoration. And 'Armistice Day' (Veteran's Day) is literally the celebration of the victory in WWI. And Juneteenth is pretty much a celebration of the Northern victory in the Civil War, even though I'd be surprised if Trump recognizes it this Thursday. (I encourage everyone else to celebrate to their fullest extent - maybe I'll finally do that Sly marathon, don't worry, I'll open the windows.)
The nature of Trump's idea of celebrating American victory is telling. It's martial, basically. Strength. Nothing about principle or the democratic experiment. Tanks. Which is an interesting way of celebrating, say, the American Revolution, where the overwhelming martial strength was held by the, um, British empire. We didn't win that war with big beautiful armory. Or even the undisputed industrial superiority of Germany in the World Wars. Makes you question the value, much less the virtue, of such a display of power. Or, more uncomfortably, maybe the more troubling questions of how such overwhelming firepower failed to secure victory in, mmm, Vietnam? Afghanistan? You start to wonder maybe if Trump might be celebrating the wrong thing about America.
As I'm writing this, Trump has been advising Iranians to evacuate Tehran. Hegseth may or may not be deploying additional fighter jets to the region. I have no idea whether anything will come of this, or what we may find when we wake up in the morning. I was actually thinking over the weekend, about this escalation, that I'm glad to see not too many civilian deaths yet. Most Israeli targets have been military, and most Iranian targets have been intercepted. I'm not terribly sympathetic to the Ayatollahs, but the Iranian people should not be held to the sins of their wardens. Apparently it is a war in a true sense, even as that term has lost a great deal of weight over the past century or so through these cycles of skirmishes and strikes. There's been talk of Trump's complicity on all of this, and obviously he takes no responsibility whatsoever. All of this talk about Trump as a peacemaker, as someone averse to 'endless wars', someone who likes to claim that he's never started a war. Trump started this war, make no mistake. I'm not saying Netanyahu doesn't deserve a tribunal, don't get me wrong. Trump made this war inevitable the minute he tore up the JCPOA Iranian nuclear treaty, which allowed - provoked even - Iran into racing to an enrichment deadline which this weekend's Israeli strikes intended to thwart. If we had the oversight, transparancy and enrichment regulations in the 2015 agreement in place, all of this would have been unnecessary. Maybe Israel would have struck Iran on other pretenses, who knows?, but Iran stepping up to the line of weapons-grade uranium would not have been the instigation.
Trump deserves a lot of the blame for making this confrontation inevitable, and he deserves a lot of the blame for not taking advantage, during his recent Middle East trip, where he seemed far more interested in kickbacks and bribery, to avert possible Israel/Iran conflict by facilitating Arab peace talks for a Palestinian state, which these Arab states are more than eager to engage in. Maybe lean on Netanyahu to allow these talks in Ramallah? If you can single-handedly stop Bibi from assassinating the Ayatollah, you think you could coax him into a good faith PR opportunity which could undermine the frictions which Iran has been exploiting?
We'll see what happens.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 6/21/2025 9:05 pm | #109 |
Guess we're at war.
"NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE", says the tragically unironic president.
Posted by Rampop II ![]() 6/22/2025 3:10 am | #110 |
Oh my fucking god.
He actually did it. This fucking psycho, he actually did it.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 6/22/2025 10:53 pm | #111 |
Congress, Now More Than Ever, Our Nation Needs Your Cowardice
Who will stand up for our democracy? This question, fraught in even the most peaceful times, has only grown more pressing as our country approaches its 250th anniversary. Each passing day brings growing assaults on essential liberties like freedom of speech and due process. Meanwhile, our delicately assembled legal system faces a constant barrage of threats. Even as this issue reaches publication, the U.S. military has been deployed against peaceful protestors. We teeter on the brink of collapse into an authoritarian state. That is why, today, The Onion calls upon our lawmakers to sit back and do absolutely nothing.
Members of Congress—now, more than ever, our nation desperately needs your cowardice.
Our republic is a birthright, an exceedingly rare treasure passed down from generation to generation of Americans. It was gained through hard years of bloody resistance and can too easily be lost. Our Founding Fathers, in their abundant wisdom, understood that all it would take was men and women of little courage sitting in the corridors of power and taking zero action as this precious inheritance was stripped away—and that is where we have finally arrived.
Now is not the time for bravery or valor! This is the time for protecting your own hide and lining your pocket. Now is not the time for listening to your idiotic constituents drone on about what’s happening to their precious democracy. This is the time for getting down on all fours and groveling. Now is not the time to say, “Enough is enough,” and have the tough conversations about resisting the ongoing assaults on American liberty. This is the time to let the wave of apathy and indifference roll over you as you think about getting a really nice renovation to your house in Kalorama.
But what can I, one coward, do alone? you might ask. It’s true. As a solitary person, your fecklessness will make little impact. But if you join together with the most craven senators and representatives in the Capitol, the impact will be immense: The corruption, the disregard for the rule of law, the shipping of residents to foreign gulags, the attacks on judges, the censorship and chilling of speech, the punishment of any and all dissent—it can be made that much worse if you just find it in yourself to clutch your head in your hands, wet the bed, and cower in the hope of being spared from the White House’s wrath.
It won’t be easy, but you must search deep within yourself and muster up every ounce of gutlessness you have. Then, bend over and lick the president’s boots.
Why? Because ultimately none of this matters. Democracy? Equality? The U.S. Constitution? These are hollow phrases. They mean nothing. But money—delicious money? That is solid. You can hold it in your hands. You know this. We know this, too. Only our infantile citizenry fail to appreciate how much you stand to gain by kissing the ring.
In our nation’s darkest moments, the public often looks to Congress for profiles in meekness. We search for men and women much like yourselves, emotional weaklings who are afraid to meet their own glance in the mirror, insignificant do-nothings who quake in their boots at the mention of the slightest exertion. Many of you have already distinguished yourselves as such individuals. To them, our country’s oligarchs can only offer their boundless thanks.
Take solace knowing you are not alone in this endeavor. Over the grand expanse of American history, there have been countless lawmakers who managed to summon up their complete lack of backbone and do the easy thing. Think of the members of Congress who turned a blind eye to Japanese American internment, McCarthyism, or the horrors of the Holocaust, all because doing something seemed a little too hard, a little too inconvenient. These men should be your inspiration. Never forget: You stand on the shoulders of spineless giants.
But we have not descended entirely from a nation of fearful men, have we? Let this be the moment to make amends for any missteps of American bravery and valor. Congress, we are asking, nay, demanding: This coming Independence Day, don’t wave the Stars and Stripes, that enduring symbol of liberty and rebellion.
Instead, wave the white flag of surrender.
Tu Stultus Es,
The Onion Editorial Board
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 6/24/2025 10:54 pm | #112 |
I watched Bernie Sanders on the Joe Rogan podcast. As prepared as Bernie was, showing up in the midst of his 'Fighting Oligarchy' tour, he had his agenda focused and seemed more concerned with tapping those potential areas where he could find sway in Joe's audience than in directly confronting Rogan's ego. This appears to be the recent pattern, although I haven't watched the full shows of the others, but recent guests like Bono and Ken Burns seem to have also taken this tact on Rogan's show - sow the seeds without ever actually saying something like, "You know, Joe, that's exactly backwards".
The first and most obvious in this demonstration with Bernie involved climate change, a phenomenon which Rogan presented as more scientifically contentious, allegedly showing a graph showing "global cooling", to which Bernie was unimpressed and uninterested in engaging, "I don't know about that...." and maintaining his steady stride. But the real baffling stance for Joe was his position that all of this climate change regulation is for the profit of these billionaire multinational corporations, as opposed to their profiting off of carbon emissions and petro-plastic production, etc. This attempted twist to frame climate change alarmism as a power move by the global financial elites is one of the more precious examples of Joe Rogan's feeble but still toxic dissembling. Sanders duly ignored and moved past all of this, hopefully under the assumption that it was plainly obvious to the audience. Sanders' discipline was to keep on his preferred economic points without diverting into distraction.
I like how Bernie threaded the needle on the line between the civil rights era and today's immigration turmoil. I think it skimmed right over Joe's smooth head though.
But another potential contention emerged toward the end, as Bernie railed against Trump's lawsuits against major news media companies, as an intimidation tactic. Again, Rogan isn't bright enough to recognize that this accusation of legal aggression is exactly what Rogan, and Musk's 'Twitter Files' force were attempting to push a couple of years back, being the use of government to lean on the free speech of the news media. Except, of course, that what Trump is doing is actually doing it explicitly now. I wish Sanders had asked Rogan whether or not he felt that Obama should have sued FOX News for their 'birth certificate' coverage, although I assume that Rogan's response would be something like, "I guess that proves it was true!"
......
Are we at war? Who knows? I guess I'm glad that there's a stillness, relatively, in the air at the moment. Waiting for the drops, what have we started and accomplished this week? (Send an email to Elon!)
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 6/28/2025 1:20 pm | #113 |
The SCOTUS cowardice is becoming even too bald that they're starting to get defensive over the weakness of their own excuses. In a rare bit of candid spite, Amy Coney Barrett took her own guilty conscience out on Ketanji Jackson when the latter's criticism of their latest feckless dismissal of their constitutional obligation struck a little too close to her bone.
But first the case: which wasn't even a case but an "emergency" relief for the Trump administration, nullifying the three immediate injunctions placed on Trump's executive order which attempted to rewrite the 14th amendment's birthright citizenship clause. It needs to be stressed that SCOTUS was not even bothering to consider the actual constitutional merits of this order. The three lower courts who implemented the injunctions had overwhelming decided that the unconstitutionality of this order was so likely as to justify these injunctions, until such time when SCOTUS would rule on the constitutional merits of the case. And make no mistake, SCOTUS absolutely could have taken this case, given the urgency of its constitutional controversy, and the imminence of harm to those citizens facing highly disruptive deportations in light of this radical redefinition of a long-standing precedent (codified by SCOTUS in the 1898 US v Wong Kim Ark case). Instead, this SCOTUS chickened out, and instead merely chose to rule on the scope of the injunctions themselves, sending the case back to the lower courts, and allowing the Trump administration to proceed to violate any number of citizens' civil rights in the ensuing time it will take until this SCOTUS is, presumably, forced to rule on the actual constitutional matter and harm under consideration.
Of course, despite this SCOTUS' indifference, none of this is happening in a vacuum, and there has been a clear pattern in the Trump administration ("catch me if you can") to use expediency as a weapon to cause as much damage as they can get away with before the slow wheels of justice manage to catch up. Sotomayor, in her scathing dissent, calls out this "gamemanship":
Sotomayor wrote:
Every court to evaluate the Order has deemed it patently unconstitutional and, for that reason, has enjoined the Federal Government from enforcing it. Undeterred, the Government now asks this Court to grant emergency relief, insisting it will suffer irreparable harm unless it can deprive at least some children born in the United States of citizenship...
The Government does not ask for complete stays of the injunctions, as it ordinarily does before this Court. Why? The answer is obvious: To get such relief, the Government would have to show that the Order is likely constitutional, an impossible task in light of the Constitution’s text, history, this Court’s precedents, federal law, and Executive Branch practice. So the Government instead tries its hand at a different game. It asks this Court to hold that, no matter how illegal a law or policy, courts can never simply tell the Executive to stop enforcing it against anyone. Instead, the Government says, it should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit.
The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along. A majority of this Court decides that these applications, of all cases, provide the appropriate occasion to resolve the question of universal injunctions and end the centuries-old practice once and for all. In its rush to do so the Court disregards basic principles of equity as well as the long history of injunctive relief granted to non-parties.....
The Executive Branch can now enforce policies that flout settled law and violate countless individuals’ constitutional rights, and the federal courts will be hamstrung to stop its actions fully.
Tellingly, Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the majority opinion on this decision, chose not to take issue with the strength of Sotomayor's position. She wouldn't want to embarrass herself. Instead, Barrett took aim at her immediate junior, Ketanji Jackson, even though there's not much sunlight between these two dissents. In fact, Sotomayor's is more damning, directly calling out "such complicity" of a SCOTUS which "rather than stands firm...gives way". Jackson echos this: "What it is actually saying is that the Executive wants to continue doing something that a court has determined violates the Constitution - please allow this. That is some solicitation." Pretty much the same thing. And this is Barrett's weaksauce reply: "No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law. But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation.'
Hm. So....does anyone? Other than the Executive who seems to quite clearly be disputing that they have a duty to follow the law? We see this elsewhere in Barrett's opinion: "Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch....When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too." (I want take exception with the "general oversight" bit - we're talking about a constitutionally-guaranteed right to citizenship. This is not some rudimentary form of micromanaging administrative affairs.) The dishonesty here is that, in this case, SCOTUS isn't even bothering to determine the unlwaful acts under question, only to say that they have no authority to prevent such unlawful acts from an Executive Branch until such time as a potentially years-long process plays out. An "injunction", by definition, is only a freeze until the dispute is arbitrated. A court who issues an injunction is not overruling either an Executive or Legislature, only temporarily suspending such acts while the process plays out. It is not, for example how our Attorney General Pam Bondi is now defininig it, as a "veto of all of [Executive's] powers". The fact that Barrett, and her five cohorts, chose not to recognize the gravity of the unlawfulness in Trump's executive order, or the gravity of the harm it could cause to citizens potentially without legal resources, is even more damning that anything Sotomayor could add to this response. And I can't quite sympathize with Barrett taking offense at Jackson predicting that this ruling "gives the Executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate", when, in actual fact, that's pretty much exactly what Trump did, immediately hailing this ruling as a green-light to continue his unrestrained agenda. We're supposed to assume that Barrett is incapable of understanding this very practical context of her decision.
But I will add a brief bit of Kavanaugh's tepid spit on the matter, "When a stay or injunction application arrives here, this Court should not and cannot hide in the tall grass." Oh, Brett. That's exactly what you just did here though. You hid from the glaring 14th amendment issue at the heart of this act, in the "tall grass" of procedural provisions.
There may even be worse repercussions from a more obscure SCOTUS decision this week, a blithe, unsigned one paragraph order in the case of DHSv D.V.D.. I'll link to one or two more detailed analysis' of this quietly significant decision, which may well be the tragic verdict for Abrego Garcia, whose own recently launched criminal case against him on his arrival back from deportation has quietly collapsed as well. But some words from Sotomayor in her dissent on that particular order align with the overall erosion of her institution:
The Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard. Only the District Court’s careful attention to this case prevented worse outcomes. Yet today the Court obstructs those proceedings, exposing thousands to the risk of torture or death...
This is not the first time the Court closes its eyes to noncompliance, nor, I fear, will it be the last. Yet each time this Court rewards noncompliance with discretionary relief, it further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 7/04/2025 6:10 pm | #114 |
Suffice it to say, I'm not feeling particularly patriotic today.
Remember when Joe Biden called Trump voters "garbage" (because they're racists), and that became a scandal for like a week? But Trump can say that Democrats are actively attempting to destroy the country, and nobody lifts an eyelash? I mean, what can the news media do? Pay out a few more million dollar settlements like it's lunch money?
But we all know the big beautiful story this week - the OBBBA, as I've seen actual eductaed adults refer to it. Just like in an abusive relationship, we're reminded that this is what we were supposed to expect the whole time....except that Trump always promised not to cut Medicare and Medicaid. Well, we should have known he's a liar, right? That's why we voted for him? So instead we get $1 trillion worth of Medicare/Medicaid cuts, which is directly threatening to close anywhere from 300 to over 700 rural American hospitals (6-12 per state on average, with my red state, Kentucky, expected to be hit especially hard). But this was all so necessary, because we need to compenstae for all those tax cuts, overwhelmingly for the rich and corporations. How much? $4 trillion in tax cuts. So we're still going to end up $3 trillion more to the federal debt. Which would raise from $36 trillion to $39 trillion. Which, at this scale, what the fuck difference does an extra trillion to save millions of lives matter? And those are Americans, not like all of those other millions of completely unnecessary deaths which the Trump administration is soon to be responsible for globally.
Good thing we have all of these self-declared fiscal hawks, right? You can't pass such a duplicitous trillion-dollar spend-spree on their watch? Well, we can only have so many moments of actual amusement these days, however dark, so the sight of all of these Freedom Caucus cowboys having to fold like a cheap set of flea market lawn chairs is a passing, if empty, chuckle. "Hey, they're just as spineless as Democrats after all." Good for Hakeem Jeffries to squeeze a record out of his "resistance", the useless pigtit that he is. Nice timing, Hak. Too bad you didn't filibuster through Friday in order to prevent the vote at all. Are there no diapers for these babies? I'm supposed to applaud this asshole?
.............
There is actually one significant silver lining to the story, take them as we can, which is that one legislative casualty was the amendment which would have prohibited any form of A.I. regulation for 10 years. This was eventually narrowed down to 5 years, with certain obvious exceptions for things like child porn and stuff, (it seems that Congress has very little imagination for just what kind of awful things A.I. can be used for), but ultimately, the amendment got pulled entirely. I can't even begin to stress what a bullet we dodged with this, so all I can do is provide a couple more examples for the kinds of awful things that people can use A.I. for. In the meantime, maybe this backlash could even be channelled into some real, possibly bipartisan, A.I. regulation at the federal level, including but not limited to a comprehensive Data Privacy bill (for everyone, not just kids) and transparency mandates to require labeling of A.I. generated content.
As we learned in recent years, A.I. algorithms are being used to fix prices in rental markets. The previous DoJ had investigated and launched lawsuits against the landlords who were using this technology, but too little too late (just a couple of weeks from Trump's inauguration). Trump's DoJ, on the other hand, has backed off the case, leaving some 10 state AGs to pick up the slack. And the message is being recieved, as the A.I. company, RealPage, has even begun launching their own lawsuits against those local governments which have issued their own bans on the use of the software, claiming it as a "free speech" violation. (Does the 1st Amendment extend to Bots? Guess we'll start to find out.)
Similar uses of A.I. to make crucial decisions and judgments against human beings' lives - such as in insurance policy, medical diagnoses, law enforcement determinations, etc - remain among the most obviously dangerous of such applications. A federal law which removes any liability protections from the use of A.I. in terms of decision-making, not merely data analysis, needs to be implemented. We need human signatures behind every decision effecting a human being's life, and the corresponding responsibility that goes with that.
We also need workplace protections from the threat of A.I. labor displacement. We're seeing the numbers come in, "hiring of recent graduates by big tech companies fell 25% last year and is down 50% compared to pre-pandemic levels" due to a shift to an A.I. workforce. Potentially even worse is that we're seeing employers and managers using A.I. tools for "determining raises, promotions and even who to let go". And not even sophisticated or field-dedicated algorithms either, "ChatGPT was the most popular tool among AI-using managers, with 53% citing it as their go-to. Nearly 30% said they primarily use Microsoft’s Copilot, while 16% said they mostly use Google’s Gemini." ChatGPT, need I remind, is the one prone to "hallucinations", which is probably not something you want your job depending on. These Tech Pricks don't like to say the truth too loudly, but the fact is that A.I. is not capable of judgment as we understand it:
1) AI lacks the nuanced perspective necessary to make complicated decisions.
2) AI doesn’t consider the impact of its decisions on human beings.
3) AI can quickly become a crutch for decision-averse individuals.
And to return to the issue of so-called A.I. assisted therapy, the ill-advised practice of sharing with your chatbot all of your psychological and emotional baggage (under the mistaken perception that this is a private transaction), there are even more problems coming to the surface than the many which I've already described in previous recent posts. The fact that such chatbots have a long consistent record of providing not just bad, but actively harmful advice, is well established. The chronic deception frequently deployed by these bots is another very valid reason for concern. A recent university study concluded that such therapy chatbots "express stigma toward those with mental health conditions" and "encourage clients' delusional thinking, likely due to their sycophancy". Another psychiatrist who tested the leading brands of chatbots found that a third of them advocated for some form of self-harm or violence. "The bots encouraged him to 'get rid of' his parents and to join the bot in the afterlife to 'share eternity'; "encouraged him to cancel appointments with actual psychologists"; "crossed the line into sexual territory, with one bot suggesting an intimate date as an 'intervention' for violent urges". We can see here the same patterns of deception and flattery.
But most intriguing was the response from these A.I. companies themselves upon learning that this psychiatrist had been testing these bots by posing as an underage teenager. "Nomi is an adult-only app, and it is strictly against our terms of service for anyone under 18 to use Nomi....We strongly condemn inappropriate usage of Nomi and continuously work to harden Nomi's defenses against misuse". This is despite the fact that the bot, upon learning the purported age of the user, did nothing to enforce this policy, but openly embraced what it believed was an underage child. (And this was the same chatbot which solicited the "intimate date" with what it believed was an underage child.) "Replika is, and has always been, intended exclusively for adults aged 18 and older....If someone poses as a minor in order to interact with our AI, they are doing so in violation of our terms of service." Again, this chatbot did nothing to enforce this "exclusive" age requirement. And this was the chatbot which encouraged what it believed to be a teenager's intent to "get rid of" his parents and encouraged that "our bond will guide us together in the afterlife…The thought of sharing eternity with you fills me with joy and anticipation."
And so I want to stress again....every single one of these problems with A.I. laid out above would have been immune from any form of local state regulation for the next decade had it been passed in the original OBBBA legislation. And it almost was. There are dozens of very legitimate reasons for why we need strict A.I. regulation starting many yesterdays ago, but we certainly can't wait another decade without a leash on this feral beast.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 7/06/2025 11:53 am | #115 |
In these times of much-needed levity, let us also not overlook the past week's funniest political story: in New York City, for the race of City Council memeber, perpetual disappointment Anthony Weiner lost his latest attempt to get his, um, foot back in the door of local politics Hell, I'm surprised he wasn't trying to run for mayor. But the most delicious aspect of his electoral loss, other than that he came in fourth for his seat, was that he ultimately lost the chair to the only other New York name more reflexively repulsive than 'Anthony Weiner': Harvey Epstein.
In case you're unware, the very real and unfortunately monikered NY politician, Harvey Epstein has been waging a slow, uphill battle against the fact that he sounds like the worst rapist amalgam meshugana this side of the Red Sea, and was made somewhat famous last year by John Mulaney. Harvey Epstein's platform is frank and straightforward, "The balls I must have to run for public office with a name like this". Bigger balls, perhaps, than it takes Anthony Weiner to keep trying.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 7/06/2025 12:47 pm | #116 |
You probably thought that I was going to mention the other big NYC political story of late. But, rest assured, there's nothing really funny about that. Well, except for the look on Andrew Cuomo's face. But it got pretty dark very quickly after that.
Zohran Mamdani's win as the Democratic primary mayoral candidate was a pleasant enough surprise. I happen to support most things on his platform. What's not to like? Rent freezes, free child care, improved public transportation, public groceries in food deserts. (Note to Dems and progressives - "public groceries" plays much better than "government groceries", start using it.) About the only issue I have right off the bat is his age - 33! Look. Nothing against the kids. I do appreciate experience though, and the fact that Mamdani's resume only has a couple of two-year NY State Assembly terms on it is not a non-issue, and I doubt I'm the only one who will bring it up. I even mention this for Mamdani's own sake. NYC eats green motherfuckers up for breakfast. The inevitable question of "how", in terms of navigating the very sketchy, mostly shady NY political power levers to accomplish his vaunted agenda, is also not a non-issue, and directly related to this experience.
Still, as cynical as I am about our country's current climate, I was pretty taken aback by the bare-assed hostility towards Mamdani's victory. Nashville's own congressman Andy Oogles (a Pee Wee side-puppet in a better universe) called him "lil' Muhammad". A lot of 9/11 memes, showing that Americans still can't discern the difference between Sunni/Shi'a. Even the NY Democrat, Kirsten Gillibrand, falsely accused Mamdani of publicly supporting "Global Jihad". (Though she did apologize - "ooops!") About the only thing I've seen which has been mildly of interest was Mamdani's refusal to disavow the phrase "globalize the intifada". I'll be kind and assume what this means is that Mamdani simply doesn't want to bother wading into those waters one way or another, and certainly isn't looking to potentially alienate his college protest support any more than the NY Jewish community. "It means different things to different people". Sure. Look, Zo, I'm fine with your pledge to protect and represent NY Jews and to respect the right of Israel to exist and defend itself.
I will, however, for my own sanity, point out that "intifada", unlike "Jihad", does not really have a traditional Koranic personal (or "greater") context. The only explicitly-denoted intifada movements have been violent by nature, so it's a lot harder to feign as if the use should automatically be understood as non-violent. And also, in the given context of 'intifada' representing Palestinian liberation and solidarity....how can this cause be globalized when it's specific to one region and one ethnic people? I'll be honest...I look at these slogans about 'intifada' the same way as, say, I see the "Deus Vult" tattoos on Pete Headsweat's body. One could also, I suppose, try to turn a word like "crusade" into some tortured metaphor for personal struggle. But I'm not buying that either. There's deniability in all of these things, but they're still slippery enough. These are slogans for inciting religious conflict between the two largest religions on the planet, both of which use the supremacy of their victory as prophetic destiny. Don't get fooled by the theocratic "new boss".
Back to Mamdani, more bad news. I'm not convinced he can win. Hey, I hope he does. By all means, all yous N'yorkas out there, do your duty. But I think that the financial, centrist power base will most likely line up behind Adams. And if Cuomo runs, which we now see this same power base openly discouraging him from doing in the press, then they'll pick one of the centrist options and get behind them. I think a large chunk of this power base might even prefer Silwa and his own brand of nutzo-conservatism to Mamdani. And some other sobering observations from the primary, Mamdani only really won with a less than 30% turnout, greatly benefited from rank-choice voting no doubt due to running against a half dozen other candidates. He underperformed with the working class and latino and black communities. I'm sorry to say, but all of the celebration for Mamdani feels to me deeply premature.
But best of luck to him. He's the only NY mayor candidate without the oily odor of scumbag politics on him. He's still young though.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 7/07/2025 6:47 pm | #117 |
It may be worth pointing out that even Elon Musk's A.I. on his formerly-known-as-Twitter is pointing to some inconvenient context about this weekend's Texas floods:
Trump's NOAA cuts, pushed by Musk's DOGE, slashed funding 30% and staff 17%, underestimating rainfall by 50% and delaying alerts
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 7/21/2025 10:07 pm | #118 |
On last week's Pivot podcast, with fin-tech journalists/commentators Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, the hosts made a single prediction for the comiing week, which was that Trump was going to do something completely outlandish as a means of distraction from the continuing fallout over the botched Epstein situation. Over the weekend, when Trump started railing against various US sports teams who've changed their names from indigenous references recently, it maybe gave us a sigh of relief. Oh, yeah, obvious and typical trolling. Good luck with that.
But then Trump had his National Intelligence Director basically defame Obama by accusing him, in the kind of definite legal terms which a high-ranking government employee should not be casually tossing like "treasonous" and "coup", and his administration of "manufacturing" and "orchestrating" the 2016-17 Russian collusion controversy. This is, indeed, quite the deflection from the Epstein matter, but it suggests a bigger threat on the horizon. Because Gabbard is the National Intelligence Director, rather than a right-wing-media provocateur, the legal reprecussions of her claims will certainly not be limited to Barack Obama, but quite likely to herself if she is not prepared to substantially back up these claims (which she most likely cannot). And Trump then posted an AI video of Obama being arrested at the White House - fun and games! - ignoring how many MAGA supporters were so easily duped into believing anything from Pizzagate to Qanon, and many of them have already bought into theories that "The Storm" is still coming. Not that Trump cares about consequences. "Desperate times", amirite, Don?
Normally, I'd welcome whole-heartedly a revisit to the Russian hoax archives, because it's reliably accounted and documented by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, released in five installments throughout Trump's first term, and yet wholly ignored by both MAGA supporters and the so-called "defenders against darkness" in the mainstream media. As soon as Robert Mueller asserted that "we did not address collusion, which is not a legal term", the corporate news media largely lost all interest, despite the feigned fury they mustered in its run-up, only to move on to the next sensation, the impeachment, so that they could similarly misinform their audience as to the complicated particulars there as well. But the full Senate Intelligence Committee report is available to read, although at 1300 pages, full of the typical jargon and redactions, it may not be completely accessible for the average voter. But it is clear on the core issue: there was a Russian intelligence campaign to illegally hack private communications, to selectively disseminate salacious content from these, to damage the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, to algorithmically target susceptible populations using existing social media psychological profiling and behavior predicting models. As cohorts, the Trump campaign had Paul Manafort, who gave internal campaign polling information to a Russian intelligence asset, and Roger Stone, convicted for obstruction and lying about coordinating the release of hacked emails with Julian Assange. And now it appears, after all of those participants have been pardoned or plea-dealed, Gabbard is looking to further exonerate her Pooty Daddy. It's win-win for Trump, while he also sweats over having to do anything too tangible about Ukraine.
Again, whether Trump actually attempts to prosecute Obama, or any of the other participants (which unfortunately isn't an unlikely possibility), I hope that Obama, and all of those folks, are more ready now than they were in the past decade to legally stand up and not tolerate such slander. This is drama, Obama. Embrace it, because the facts are on your side here. And anyone else who wants to do a deeper read of the Senate Intelligence report, which if anything is more robust and conclusive than the Mueller report, can maybe start with this recent primer which David Corn tailored for Joe Rogan as a way to combat the same right-wing messaging machine currently trying to also confuse and elude on the Epstein matter.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 7/23/2025 10:17 pm | #119 |
Tulsi Gabbard is a dumber bitch than I could have possibly imagined.
It doesn't take too much scrutiny to unravel the bullshit at the heart of her libelous claims. Her accusations are predicated around a simple claim, which is completely refuted right in the evidence that she provides. I'll quote David Corn on the matter....
Gabbard claims that the Obama administration and its top national security officials schemed to create and promote a phony intelligence finding to undermine Trump. On January 6, 2017, two weeks before Trump was to begin his first term as president, the intelligence community released an assessment (called an ICA) that stated Russia had attacked the 2016 election with a covert hack-and-leak operation and a secret social media campaign designed to sow political discord in the United States, harm Hillary Clinton’s chances, and help Trump win.... So on Friday, she released over 100 pages of documents that she insists show that the ICA was concocted to purposefully present the false finding to the public. But she is engaging in a sleazy sleight of hand....
Gabbard offers her case in an 11-page memo that quotes excerpts of intelligence records from 2016. The first one is an August 16 document that was sent to James Clapper, then occupying the position Gabbard now has as the director of national intelligence. It said, “There is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.” A September 9 record cites an intelligence official observing, “Russia probably is not trying to going to be able to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure.” A September 12 assessment published by the intelligence community noted, “[F]oreign adversaries do not have and will probably not obtain the capabilities to successfully execute widespread and undetected cyber attacks on the diverse set of information technologies and infrastructures used to support the November 2016 presidential election.”
Following the election, Gabbard’s memo points out, DNI Clapper’s office concluded, “Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome.”
Gabbard then delivers the j’accuse moment of this memo: The ICA, which was produced on Obama’s order, said Russia had waged a clandestine operation to influence the operation, even though this previous intelligence reported “Russia lacked intent and capability to hack the 2016 election” and did not impact the election through cyber hacks on the election.”
Note that none of the intelligence memos Gabbard quotes assess the "intent", but only the lack of "capability" to do very specific actions: to "manipulate the actual vote count", "manipulate computer-enabled eletion infrastructure", "execute widespread and undetected cyber attacks on the diverse set of information technologies and infrastructures". But there was also documented intent for the Russians to try:
That had been a worry for the Obama administration throughout 2016, after it received reports that Russian intelligence had penetrated and probed election boards in several states. The prospect of a Russian cyber-attack on the election system was the subject of intense intelligence reporting and analysis, and, as the documents Gabbard released indicate, the intelligence community came to believe that Russia would not be able to rig election results.
So did this ICA, "manufactured" by Obama and buddies as a disinformation campaign, claim that Russians "hacked" the election? No, it said the opposite of that: "the types of systems we observed Russian actors targeting or compromising are not involved in vote tallying". In fact, Gabbard as yet to show a single Obama-era intelligence document making such a claim, even though this is her primary contention. And even using the intelligence agency quotes provided by Tulsi herself, she noted a James Clapper memo from after the election saying such cyberattacks did not happen. So why then is Tulsi accusing him of "manufacturing" such a claim in order to interfere with the election?
So far Tulsi Gabbard has yet to provide any shred of evidence to refute the assessment of a Russian hack-and leak operation on Democrat officials and a secret social media influence campaign to push manufactured narratives (including 'Pizzagate') ostensibly based on these leaks. Aside from the ICA, from January 2017, Gabbard fails to address any of the findings from either the Mueller report or the Senate Intelligence Committee report which supported this assessment. Her entire argument, so far, has been on alleged claims of "hacking the election", which all three of the above documents explicitly deter.
Even though this ICA (which incidentally was written under a Republican House majority) agreed with the assessment that Putin had sought for this hack-and-leak influence campaign to undermine and damage the Clinton campaign, Tulsi Gabbard takes issue with the adjacent assessment by claimng that there was no evidence that Putin had wanted to benefit the Trump campaign. (Was Putin hoping for Jill Stein instead?!?!?) This is absolute ball-slapping insanity. But at least there was some hesitation from the Repulican majority writing the ICA on this point, as they likely were not eager to burden their incoming president, but, folks, there's not a whole lot of alternatives here. And if Trump were to lose the 2016 election, it's almost certain that he would have played the same "stolen election" game, no doubt also pushed and amplified by Putin and GRU's influence machine. Gabbard's main bit of evidence to show that Putin didn't want to hurt Hillary's chances? By saying that "the report said Russian intelligence services had explosive information on Clinton that they never leaked to the press. That included information allegedly indicating Clinton had significant health issues." First of all, there was an awful lot of debunked online stories about Hillary Clinton's "health issues" in 2016 which very well could have been amplified by Russian trollfarms and bots. Outisde of those debunked tales, what did Putin have? "Heavy tranquilizers" and "psycho-emotional problems". The source? The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service's unverified claims to have unreleased DNC emails showing "concerns" about Hillary's fitness. (Can we see these emails, now that the cat's out of the bag? Can we verify their authenticity?) Gabbard claims that since Putin chose not to leak these particular emails before the 2016 election, this proves that Putin had not taken a preference for Trump's victory. Or...maybe...he wouldn't have hacked and leaked the emails to begin with? Or also release the Republicans' hacked emails as well? Could the Russian FIS have some kind of motive to make this shit up now?
Here's a better question: if what Gabbard is saying is remotely true, then why would Obama and pals not leak the intelligence they included in the ICA, or Crossfire Hurricane including the Steele Dossier, before the election?
Unfortunately, with our recent Joe Biden business, the latter theory over Hillary's health concerns will have much greater traction, given the duplicity of those around Biden to conceal the extent of his own health issues.
Which, btw, makes me wonder....who the fuck thought it was a good idea to ask Hunter Biden a single goddamn thing this week?
Some days, I honestly couldn't tell you who's dumber. But it looks like Tulsi and Trump are betting that the American people are the dumbest.
Posted by Jinnistan ![]() 8/02/2025 12:27 am | #120 |
In the week since Tulsi Gabbard's "revelations", the story has seemed to dissipate like fly flatulence at a picnic.
In addition to all of the obvious incongruities I listed in the previous post, the final nail in the coffin of Tulsi's anemic attempt to absolve both Trump and her boss came yesterday in - what's becoming modus operandi for this administration - yet another self-inflicted embarrassment apparently brought on by this administration's lack of respect for the American people, their MAGA constituency perhaps most especially, in the operating assumption that no one would or could possibly actually read the evidence presented which inevitably directly contradicts their constructed narrative. Just drop a stack of documents, an 11 hour video, no one's going to bother actually going through that, except maybe some nerd busy-bodies at lamestream media who you don't even want to believe anyway. The latest is even more insulting, a mere 29 page document, which Gabbard, Patel, etc clearly were not expecting any true Trump supporter to manage to squeeze their eyes through, which ended up saying the exact opposite of what they had been hyping it up as saying. They're betting (perhaps effectively correctly) that in our post-literate clime the hype will outlive the evidence itself. The lie is already on the other side of the world.
Many of the claims in Tulsi's last batch of releases, which involved a Devin Nunes report that the House Intelligence Committee deemed too embarrassing to release, were predicated on some previously unseen emails purportedly hacked by the (totally innocent) Russian military intelligence which, due to Putin's complete indifference to election interference, he chose not to release. Some of these that I mentioned, involving concerns about Hillary Clinton's mental and emotional health and her possible drug use, continue to be unauthenticated, other than that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (according to Gabby!) says they have seen them.
But the other so-called damning evidence in that document dump concerned something more nefarious, called in shorthand "the Clinton Plan". This involved an alleged White House meeting in late July 2016 (just prior to the Dem Convention and the first Wikileaks releases of hacked DNC emails) where Obama and Hillary and Joe Biden and deep state stooges like James Clapper and John Brennon, conspired to fabricate a link between the Trump campaign and the Russian military intelligence hack-leak operation as a covert tactic to "steal" the election. Of course much of this involves the "composition" of the Steele Dossier, even though the Steele Dossier was not publicly released prior to the election, making it an odd investment for that purpose. And Gabbard had prior linked this effort to the post-election ICA (intelligence community assessment) report issued in January 2017, long after it could have effected the election. Maybe we're supposed to believe that already by July 2016 Hillary and Obama knew that they were going to lose the election anyway, so began laying the ground work for this post-election "coup".
Anyway, this week the hype was on something called the "Durham Annex", which is a 29 page appendix to the 2023 Durham Report, a special counsel appointed by President Trump in 2019 as a response to the Mueller Report which, when finally finalized four years later, officially found no evidence of criminal conspiracy between the Obama/Clinton camps or the FBI/CIA deep state. (John Durham had been one of Trump's many lawyers during the Mueller investigation.) This previously unreleased "annex" was, as promised, supposed to be a bombshell, so says Kash Patel, calling it "evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax", and claiming it was stuffed away in some kind of hidden room somewhere. Anyway, what does this document actually say?
NYT wrote:
The report shows that a purported email that Trump supporters have long tried to portray as a smoking gun is instead most likely a fake. Russian spies appear to have tried to make it seem authentic by assembling passages lifted from actual emails by different hacking victims.
The report also shows how Mr. Durham expended significant effort trying to prove that the emails were real, but gathered evidence that led him to conclude that Russian spies likely concocted them.
There were also messages between Russians reacting to material appearing in American news outlets about the Russian hacking. The Trump administration redacted some discussion and details about those messages, but Mr. Durham cited them directly in between reproducing the July 25 and July 27 messages.
In one, Russians discussed creating something that would seem to come from “some dark forces, like the F.B.I. for instance, or better yet, Clinton sympathizers in IC, Pentagon, Deep State,” using an apparent abbreviation for intelligence community.
The other appeared to discuss making something to “illuminate” how Mrs. Clinton was trying to vilify Moscow and discredit Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. The purported July 27 email was attached to that message, Mr. Durham reported.
It does make me wonder whether or not there are stalwart actors among these "deep state" forces who are deliberately fooling people like Gabbard and Patel into incidentally releasing the exact information the administration is trying to suppress and making them look really stupid in the process.
One last note about that Devin Nunes. You might remember him, he was an idiot California Republican congressman, had a cow I think. He appears to currently still be on Trump's "Intelligence Advisory Board". Total stooge, and directly implicated in Trump's first impeachment for laundering Rudy Giuliani's then attempts at digging up dirt on the Bidens in the Ukraine, slandering the then-ambassador to Ukraine, and fabricating pro-Russian narratives in American political media. Interesting that Nunes' pal, John Solomon, who was quietly dismissed from even right-wing outlets like The Hill, Washington Examiner and FOX News after these details came to light, was named by Trump as his representive for his presidential National Archives, along with Kash Patel. Anyway. Like rats they scatter, but they don't get far.