Links 8/13/2022

Lambert and I, and many readers, agree that Ukraine has prompted the worst informational environment ever. We hope readers will collaborate in mitigating the fog of war — both real fog and stage fog — in comments. None of us need more cheerleading and link-free repetition of memes; there are platforms for that. Low-value, link-free pom pom-wavers will be summarily whacked.

And for those who are new here, this is not a mere polite request. We have written site Policies and those who comment have accepted those terms. To prevent having to resort to the nuclear option of shutting comments down entirely until more sanity prevails, as we did during the 2015 Greek bailout negotiations and shortly after the 2020 election, we are going to be ruthless about moderating and blacklisting offenders.

–Yves

P.S. Also, before further stressing our already stressed moderators, read our site policies:

Please do not write us to ask why a comment has not appeared. We do not have the bandwidth to investigate and reply. Using the comments section to complain about moderation decisions/tripwires earns that commenter troll points. Please don’t do it. Those comments will also be removed if we encounter them.

* * *

Guilty Dog Pictures and the Myth of Canine Shame Atlantic (furzy)

A 1,300-Pound Walrus Could Be Killed if She Endangers the Public New York Times

Watch this video to learn how to noodle for catfish Boing Boing. Oh, I thought of goose noodling! This is at least sort of fair fighting.

First of NASA’s SunRISE SmallSats Rolls Off Production Line Space Channel (furzy)

Salman Rushdie ‘On a Ventilator and Could Lose An Eye’ After New York Attack Bloomberg

The last American aristocrat UnHerd (Anthony L)

#COVID-19

Science/Medicine

Covid still packs a punch — and likely will for some time, experts say STAT (resilc)

US

Monkeypox

An alarming graph shows Monkeypox cases rising rapidly Boing Boing

Monkeypox: experts give virus variants new names WHO (Kevin W)

Climate/Environment

European drought dries up rivers, kills fish, shrivels crops Associated Press (furzy) :-(

EU countries rush to help France tackle ‘monstrous’ wildfires Guardian. Kevin W: “Logic dictates for a continent-wide EU firefighting force. Experience shows that the EU would fuck it up and turn it into a scam.”

Finns say yes to nuclear waste DW (resilc)

Mass crop failures expected in England as farmers demand hosepipe bans Guardian (Kevin W)

Climate change increases odds of cataclysmic California flood. NPR (Kevin W)

Mass Death of Sequoias Is the Harbinger of Earth Systems Collapse Truthout

China?

China-US decoupling gushes out Indian Punchline

China State-Owned Giants to Delist From US Amid Audit Spat Bloomberg (furzy)

India jumps in as China plays Scrooge with Sri Lanka South China Morning Post

Old Blighty

Liz Truss is easy to mock, but she could do more damage than Boris Johnson ever did Guardian. Resilc: “Like DeSantis after Trump, be careful what you ask for.”

New Not-So-Cold War

News Update: Russia Planning to Leave the ISS. What’s Next? Space Channel (furzy)

Note Twitter took this Tweet down. It purported violated Twitter rules by showing a Ukraine propaganda video. Gonzalo Lira earlier showed how 4 Ukraine videos meant to be different (different characters and topics) all used the same set, passed off a dead Ukraine tank as Russian, and had soldiers in nice clean uniforms and pristine weapons.

Russia Advances Deeper Into Bakhmut; China’s Xi Goes to Saudi Arabia, Discussing Alternatives to USD Alexander Mercouris, YouTube. See at 25:50. Mercouris cites a report which not only states that shelling will not harm the reactor, and the reactor can be shut down if the cooling systems are damaged, but more important, that shelling will not cause dirty bomb type contamination even if it hit the spent fuel storage areas. I assume in practice that means employees and Russian soldiers guarding the facilities would be at risk, not the general public.

Berlin names candidate to negotiate with Moscow RT

Public buildings in Germany to be heated to 19° Celsius – econ minister Reuters

German nuclear operators push on with shutdowns despite rethink Financial Times

Syraqistan

US commits a perfect murder in Kabul Indian Punchline (Kevin W). Important.

Iranian Tanker Reloads Oil Confiscated in Greece, Embassy Says Bloomberg

What the U.S. Gets Wrong About Iran New York Times. Resilc: “I was born in 52, my entire life we supported the wrong side of the Persian Gulf.”

Afghan cleric killed by explosives in attacker’s artificial leg, say officials Guardian

Space Cooperation Between Russia, Iran Raises Western Concerns Informed Consent. I thought this was Juan Cole’s site but it looks like he has sold out. Resilc notes:

“Copyright (c)2020 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.”

I lived and travel around the world and never met anybody, American, US official or local, who ever listened to RFW/RL

‘We killed a little boy, but it was within the rules’ +972 (guurst)

Assange

Julian Assange Wins Right to Appeal His U.S. Extradition at Supreme Court Daily Beast

Trump Raid [the Financial Times called it a raid in a subhead with no quotes, so we can too]

FBI Recovered 11 Sets of Classified Documents in Trump Search Wall Street Journal

Trump search warrant: FBI took top secret documents from Mar-a-Lago BBC. Resilc:

In November 1980 I was a very junior foreign service officer in Jakarta. my first “duty week”, handling after hours and weekends at the AMNEB, covered the election. before going to bed I heard Reagan won on the BBC. Middle of the night I get a call from the embassy, we are sending a car…top secret immediate cable. action/action, a car will pick you up…….cable said Reagan wins basically…….top secret is a joke most of the time imo…

Trump spy chief on classified documents: ‘Virtually impossible to prosecute’ Washington Examiner

Ex-CIA Chief Michael Hayden Implies Trump Should Be Executed for Taking Classified Docs National Review

Anger at the Mar-a-Lago ‘Raid’ Can’t End Well Atlantic. Resilc: “The same FBI that killed Black Panthers, MLK, etc, is now the hero of the DNC/MSNBC crowd.”

Gestapo the Steal James Howard Kunstler. Looks like we’re going to have a lot of speculation and hyperventilation and not much new information.

Tucker Carlson Tonight 8/12/22 FULL Fox. Tulsi Gabbard guest hosted! No more Team Dem for her! Is her play to be The Donald’s veep? The problem with the commentary is that the Trump supporters miss the fact that Trump was not supposed to take any presidential records. But the flip side is not a crime since the Presidential Records Act lacks an enforcement mechanism, which includes criminal penalties. Admittedly, pretty much every president in the last few decades has taken records, and it seems as if partly by design, partly by accident. The normal process is the National Archives say they think stuff is missing and sometimes there is a wrangle. But the contention here is that Trump’s conduct was outside the pale, of the “differences in degree is a difference in kind.” So this is why the classified document angle becomes important, since merely foot-dragging on returning records isn’t a crime, so non-compliance there can’t be obstruction of justice.

Clarifying the System and Authorities to Classify Information–Trump Followed the Law Larry Johnson. Making some assumptions…but worth keeping the issues he raises in mind.

Rudy Giuliani Promises Revenge Raid of Biden’s House If Trump Wins in 2024 Vice. Somebody needs to put Giuliani in a Hannibal Lecter mask. He seemed to be Doing Something in his first term as NYC mayor, but most of that was due to hiring William Bratton as police chief. All downhill after that.

Other Trump

What’s up with the investigations of and lawsuits against Donald Trump CNN (furzy)

Judge Denies Trump Executive’s Request to Dismiss Manhattan Tax Case New York Times (furzy)

Biden

Biden Plots a 2024 Presidential Run — and a Trump Rematch Bloomberg. Resilc: “The best we can do for USA USA?

GOP Clown Car

Dick Cheney set Liz Cheney’s demise in motion decades ago Washington Post (furzy)

Democrats en deshabillé

Federal Appeals Court denies Democrats’ bid to block Green Party from N.C. ballot Carolina Journal (resilc)

Eli LillyCharity Finances Groups Opposing Insulin Price Controls Intercept (Dr. Kevin)

Abortion

Waiting Rooms With Bulletproof Windows FiveThirtyEight (resilc)

Anti-Abortion Utah Councilman Knows Placenta Facts. You Think You Know Placenta Facts? Wrong. Wonkette. Furzy: “Too funny!” Moi” I hope he knows more about sex than he knows about fetuses, otherwise he’s never getting laid.

Southern Baptist Convention Says It Faces Federal Investigation for Sexual Abuse New York Times (furzy). Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.

Supply Chain/Inflation

How Bad Is Inflation? Mysterious Price of Mayonnaise Holds All the Answers Bloomberg

This was a good week for inflation numbers, but whether it can last is the big question CNBC

Is America’s Job Market “Too Good”? Matthew C. Klein. Resilc:

there is no supply of:
teachers
nurses
MDs
tradesmen
mechanics
to keep up with demand
roger my 50 year old tractor mechanic has a heart condition. now, so do i…

California proposes to extend life of last nuclear plant at cost of $1.4 billion Politico. Kevin W: “Cheaper to keep running than to close?”

The Bezzle

Crypto Plunge: Pharma Bro Shkreli’s Coin Drops More Than 90% Bloomberg (furzy)

Guillotine Watch

New £20m superyacht destroyed by fire weeks after delivery to owner Guardian

Class Warfare

In Wealthy City, a Marxist Mayor Wins Over Voters New York Times (resilc)

U.S. Housing Affordability in June Was the Worst Since 1989 Wall Street Journal

In Chile, Even Water Is Privatized. The New Constitution Would Change That. Intercept (resilc)

Antidote du jour:

A bonus:

A second bonus:

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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283 comments

  1. Sardonia

    The Raid at Mar-a-Lago deserves a song parody, so, courtesy of The B-52’s – “LOVE SHACK” (best dance song ever!!)

    I can see a faded sign on the side of the road that says
    Fifteen miles to the Trump Shack! Trump Shack, yeah
    We’re headin’ down, the Palm Beach Highway
    Lookin’ for the Trump, Get-away
    Headin’ for the Trump, Get-away…
    Trump Get-away

    I got me a warrant as opaque as a brick
    And we’re headin’ on down to the Trump Shack
    I got a gang of goons, I count about thirty
    So hurry up! Let’s do the Down and Dirty!

    The Trump Shack is a little old place where
    We can steal his leverage!
    Trump Shack!
    Baby, Trump Shack!
    Trump Shack!
    Baby, Trump Shack!

    Sign says…woo…stay away fools
    Cuz Trump rules, at the Trump Shack
    But we know our job, gonna use our little mob
    To rifle through and rob, anything that hurts The Blob
    Photographs of Biden
    And the little girls he’s hidin’
    Hillary in leather
    Strokin’ Huma with a feather

    The Trump Shack is a little old place where
    We can steal his leverage!
    Trump Shack!
    Baby, Trump Shack!
    Trump Shack, that’s where it’s at
    Trump Shack, that’s where it’s at

    Huggin’ and a-kissin’, dancin’ and a-lovin’
    Cuz we stole his Oppo Research – it’s as hot as an oven!
    The whole Shack shimmies
    Yeah, the whole Shack shimmies
    The whole Shack shimmies when all our goons are rootin’
    Around and around and around and around!
    All our goons are rootin’, all our goons are lootin’
    More linin’ up outside, just to join in the fun!
    All our goons are rootin’, all our goon’s are lootin’, Baby
    Funky little shack
    Funky little shack

    I got me a warrant as opaque as a brick
    And it’s about to get sick!!!
    I got a gang of goons, I count about thirty
    So come on! Let’s do the Down and Dirty!

    The Trump Shack is a little old place where
    We can steal his leverage!
    Trump Shack!
    Baby, Trump Shack!
    Trump Shack, that’s where it’s at
    Trump Shack, Oh, Baby, that’s where it’s at

    Bang bang bang, on the door, Baby
    (thump thump)
    “Hey, you got a warrant?”
    Bang bang bang, on the door, Baby
    (thump thump)
    “Read it from 10 feet, Sugar”
    Bang bang bang, on the door, Baby
    (thump thump)
    “I wanna see the affidavit!”
    Bang bang bang, on the door, Baby
    (thump thump)
    “It’s in Jimmy Hoffa’s pocket!”
    Bang bang bang, on the door, Baby
    (thump thump)
    “You sure this is legit?”
    Bang bang bang, on the door, Baby
    (thump thump)
    “They’ll explain on CNN.”
    Bang bang bang, on the door, Baby
    (thump thump)
    “We were in negotiation!”
    Bang bang bang, on the door, Baby
    (thump thump)
    “Ha! We went in through the back.”

    “You WHAT??!!”
    “We planted docs – you’re BUSTED!!!”

    Trump Shack, baby, Trump Shack!
    Trump Shack, baby, Trump Shack!
    Trump Shack, baby, Trump Shack!
    Trump Shack, baby, Trump Shack!
    Huggin’ and a-kissin’, dancin’ and a-lovin’
    At the Trump Shack!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SOryJvTAGs

    1. griffen

      Athens, Georgia in the early to late 1980’s must’ve been a fun college town. For a variety of reasons that is a memorable song.

      My late grandmother had a Plymouth Newport. It was as big as a whale!

      1. Sardonia

        A very memorable song for me – I was living in Bangkok when it came out, and if you were in a bar with music playing, not much might be happening, but as soon as this song came on, every single person would be up dancing – on the bar, on tabletops. It was infectious.

        1. Michael Fiorillo ffiorillo.michael.77@gmail.com

          Different genre, but Sun Ra’s “It’s After the End of ths World (Don’t You Know That Yet?)” could be apropos…

      1. Sardonia

        I did one for Pelosi’s Taiwan trip – but for some reason it just…would…not…post…. It was based on Elton John’s
        “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” – entitled “Goodbye Yellow Detente”

  2. voteforno6

    Funny how people who were calling for Hillary Clinton to be locked up six years ago are now downplaying whatever is is that Trump may have done. One could call it hypocritical, until you realize that it’s simply a sign of devotion to their team.

    1. bystander

      Not hard to argue you have this backwards.

      Hillary got off for what looks like the same offense. So why should Trump be subjected to a higher standard? The hypocrisy is on the Dem side.

      Despite TDS, facts for Hillary look worse absent press deflection.

      Her joke about wiping her server as a sign of not knowing what she was up to wasn’t credible. By contrast, there are press reports that Trump personally took the FBI into the room in June with the still contested documents (the room that was subsequently locked; DoJ did not issue a second subpoena for the remaining docs with specificity as some like Jonathan Turley suggest would be the normal path, but apparently in later June did subpoena for tapes of the entrance to the locked room. Have not seen press reports as to what the required response date for that subpoena was and whether Trump complied. The failure to say he didn’t suggests he did or hadn’t hit the deadline).

      If that’s confirmed, that says Trump thought he had nothing to hide, as in had done nothing wrong.

      Trump is also insisting that he had the power to declassify. That may be be narrowly legally true but not bureaucratically true in practice (the military-intel state has done a great job of checking Presidential power, witness for instance their defiance of his order to leave Afghanistan, which he absolutely has the power to execute as Commander in Chief). No criminal intent in this arena, no crime.

      Shorter: what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

      1. marym

        If people think it was wrong that HRC wasn’t held accountable for her emails, that would be an argument against letting Trump “off for what looks [to them] like the same offense.”

        1. Lex

          No. The problem is politicizing law enforcement against federal politicians. It is not a goose – gander issue but deeper and more significant that we’ve normalized using intelligence services and DoJ to play politics. And that’s not a cat that can go back into the bag.

          1. The Historian

            Do you remember J Edgar Hoover and his secret files? I think the DOJ has been involved in politics for a long time! J Edgar was just smart enough to keep his political meddling behind the scenes and not out in the open where the media could get involved.

            Actually the problem is the media circus surrounding this. Each side has got its spin doctors working overtime to get ahead of the story. The real fact is that we don’t know anything yet.

            There is a procedure for declassifying documents. Remember, that there are copies of most classified documents so that when a document is declassified, all the copies must be located and marked as declassified too. We know Trump and his crew weren’t big on details so they may have been declassified or wrongly declassified and the FBI will only know when they can compare the documents to the Archives records – they couldn’t do that at the scene.

            But in any event, no matter what happens, all this is a tempest in a teapot – meant to increase media ratings and drive up the blood pressure of Trump lovers and Trump haters. Trump isn’t called “Teflon Don” for no reason. And even if he can’t slither out of this one, Biden, being old school, is not going to let a former president go to jail.

            So the net result of all this is to most of us is – zero!

            1. Pat

              I think you may be underestimating the hurt feefees of the beltway regulars and how much Biden will do to get in the way of those who can go after him and his kid next. Trump is not one of the club and has been outside the rules of ordinary political engagement from the moment those regulars realized Clinton wasn’t going to roll over him in the election. Pelosi impeached him twice, but the guy who got us into a twenty year war with false documentation and decided torture was no big deal is now giving candies to his successor’s wife and is being embraced.

              If they can send him to prison they will. They are that stupid and narcissistic.

          2. Leroy R

            “…deeper and more significant that we’ve normalized using intelligence services and DoJ to play politics.”

            Does resorting to this indicate that somewhere in the democrat’s leadership, someone understands the perilous standing of their under-powered (e.g. Biden) and failing party of old line politicians?

            1. JTMcPhee

              Reminds me a bit of the last days of the Soviet Union. All the scrambling by rotten old men to hold on to power via abuse of all state apparatus of oppression, while stripping the country of wealth to suit the insatiable greed of “US” neoliberals and supranational corporations, and pocketing any small change that might be left lying around by the looters. Sounds vaguely familiar.

              I doubt we have the depth of history and national character to do the kind of recovery that Russia has apparently managed, despite the best and worst effort of neocons and neolibs. And how fascinating, that the Russians actually seem to respect contracts and the real rule of law, or so it seems from my keyhole view. Not perfect, but my little participation in the intertubes turns up a lot of ‘murcans and Euros talking about what it might take to migrate to Russia… there’s a couple of youtube channels put up by people who have moved from the US West to the Russian Far East, seeing real opportunity. Hope the Russians teach these folks that moving to Russia is not the effing Gold Rushes and land grabs all over again…

        2. Pat

          While Trump was in office, was he running an unsecured internet server at Maralago contrary to all security standards? Please remember that she was being sent information at all levels of security as she was Secretary of State. Were the documents he took stored on a server with questionable security standards? When requested did Trump not supply the actual server to determine whether it had been compromised instead give it to his lawyers?

          You may have some comparison on destruction of government records, but we have clear evidence that Clinton lied both on her exit declaration and regarding her claim that all pertinent emails were returned on the wiped copy of the server that her lawyers eventually turned over, see the Abedin Weiner laptop evidence. So far we have nothing to prove Trump destroyed anything.

          So unless someone can show me that Trump was allowing anyone who came to Maralogo to rummage willy nilly through the documents in the locked room, none of which would be active on the day by keeping it unlocked and putting a sign on it saying government documents here! I think the similarity falls apart.

          Oh and when Hillary Clinton has to go for an FBI interview that is recorded get back to me.

          1. marym

            I didn’t say they were similar, the comment to which I was responding did. We don’t yet know much about the degree of sensitivity of the documents Trump took, or the security of the premises; or generally about the use of unsecured devices in the Trump administration, though that doesn’t seem to be a focus in this particular case.

            So it’s a question for now about whether or not to give the FBI/DOJ the benefit of the doubt till we know more, on which people may disagree. It’s not a strong argument to say the FBI/DOJ didn’t do enough to investigate and prosecute Clinton but it’s overreach for them to investigate Trump.

            1. Pat

              I think you trust too much and discount the quite obvious differences in the way Clinton, Biden, and yes Obama have been dealt with too easily.
              The norms and obsequious courtesy still apply to them. I don’t think it should apply to any of them, but if the same do not apply to Trump it is very questionable.

              See the problem is that neither party may be entirely trust worthy, Trump doing something wrong not unheard of, the DOJ and FBI acting in a partisan or beltway approved but less than legal manner to set up a person or situation also not unfamiliar to anyone paying attention.For instance we also have revelations that make it clear that all those officials who waved away the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop were lying through their teeth. It might not include Garland but many of them are still in top positions in those agencies we are supposed to be giving the benefit of the doubt. This after they have already acted in a partisan manner.
              You trust that the actions outside the norms are valid, I have no evidence that none of it would be happening if this were say a President Bob Dole.

            2. pjay

              Give the FBI/DOJ the benefit of the doubt?? Marym, are you really being serious here? After everything that has gone down over the last six years (well, really after the last 70 years as some commenters have pointed out)? Leaks about Trump possessing “nuclear secrets”? C’mon, man.

              Once again, this is not just about Trump. I don’t think *anyone* commenting here likes Trump. Most of us don’t like him at all. But the issues are much bigger here. Trump’s accidental victory in 2016 has provided a great service by exposing many elements of the power structure that are usually hidden. It has also revealed the posturing of the Democratic faction within that system to be the sham that it is. I have no illusions about Trump, or about the Republicans. But this s**t is getting pretty blatant.

              Personally, I think this is about documents related to Russiagate. I don’t *know*, of course, but the idea of giving the FBI the benefit of the doubt is pretty humorous at this point.

              1. marku52

                The anaphylactic reaction of the “System” to T’s election revealed how interconnected it all is. It’s a big club, and you aint in it. Nor does it have anything to do with democracy.

                As soon as HRC loses, she lets loose a hoax theory, pays for a bogus report, shops it to the media, that happily broadcast it 24/7 for at least 2 years, in the mean time the AlphaBet agencies all get involved in investigations, which again, are all broadcast 24/7 by the same hacktacular media. Meanwhile, Hunter’s laptop and Ukrainian adventures get totally buried.

                This smells just the same.

              2. marym

                I said “whether or not.” I don’t trust any of them, and except for an occasional naive moment of hope and change or lesser evilism, have never done so. I also exclude from trust most of what Trump and his minions say.

            3. anon in so cal

              “it’s a question for now about whether or not to give the FBI/DOJ the benefit of the doubt ”

              The FBI/DOJ that launched CrossFire hurricane and spying and Russiagate based on a fabricated predicate that the FBI surely knew was bogus? And then continued to engage in fraud?

              That FBI?

                1. anon in so cal

                  Yes. it “investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).” (although it seems that those agencies might be more or less running things…)

          2. Katniss Everdeen

            So unless someone can show me that Trump was allowing anyone who came to Maralogo to rummage willy nilly through the documents in the locked room…

            Does it strike anyone else as supremely “odd” that this “documentation,” so existentially critical to the national security of the united states that anyone “in possession” of it should be tried for ESPIONAGE and possibly executed, is supposedly on paper, hand marked in red with “Top Secret” or some such, and stored in cardboard or plastic Sterilite boxes from walmart?

            With all the billions of dollars in cloud computing and electronic surveillance contracts let by the “security” state over the years that have made bill gates and bezos insanely rich, the really, really important stuff is on paper in a box?

            Even hillary’s info was on a computer.

            C’mon, man. This whole thing sounds like a Boris and Natasha cartoon.

            1. The Historian

              Well the search warrant was executed under 18 USC 793, 2071, and 1519 with the max sentence of not more than 20 years, so I don’t think anyone will be getting executed here. And a search warrant is just that – a judge decided the FBI had probable cause to issue a search warrant – it is not a criminal charge against anyone. It may or may not result in criminal charges down the road, but not yet!

              Most classified information is indeed on paper. To access it online, you need secure computers and a secure computer room with EMF blocking, etc., which are very expensive. Those rooms and computers do exist, but they are usually at very special locations. Paper is just much easier to deal with, especially for people who have to use those documents. All you need is a secure safe and a room that can be locked when you need to review them.

            2. drumlin woodchuckles

              Does it? Why does it? Digital can be remote-hacked and remote-read from anywhere by anyone who knows how. Ink-on-paper pages have to be actually physically handled and read to know what is on them. They can’t be hacked into from a remote location.

              The NSA can read every keystroke you make in a comment here even as you are making them, if it wants to. Could the NSA read the keystrokes on your typewriter if you typed a letter on that? Which physical format is really a more securable way to keep a secret?

          3. Nikkikat

            Pat, I also seem to remember that all of the people around her were lawyers who conveniently could not break client/lawyer privilege and thus we’re not allowed to be interviewed.Of course, thousands of the emails were about her yoga classes and her daughters wedding. So she just deleted them.

      2. bob

        The classification of documents is really garbage. When I was in Vietnam, I had a top-secret clearance. I used to go out into the market and buy Vietnamese sandwiches, bánh mì. Of course they had to come wrapped in paper. The paper they were wrapped in was a computer print out paper all marked confidential or secret so much for classifications.

        As for the FBI – no entrapment at Ruby Ridge where they killed a dog and a man’s wife – no entrapment with Governor Whitmer – no lying on FISA warrants as found by Inspector Horowitz. They were so astute they were really on the mark with 911 not able to figure out why somebody didn’t even want to learn how to land a plane. They missed everything with Larry Nassar who was abusing female gymnasts. And let’s not forget Waco Texas where to save children from being abused they burn down the building with everyone inside. These people appear to be nothing but a bunch of clowns who enjoy running around with guns playing cowboy.

        1. Tom Stone

          Bob, 14 year old Sammy Weaver was also murdered at Ruby Ridge, shot in the back and unarmed.
          Vicki Weaver was holding her 10 month old daughter in her arms when Lon Horiuchi shot her in the head.
          She had never been charged with a crime.

          1. bob

            Thanks, hard to keep track of all the abuses. Entrapment over a sawed-off shotgun resulted in such tragedy.

            1. Synoia

              Kudos too for the FBI in arresting child abuse guests on Epstein’s Island. And to the Courts for trying Maxwell with no revelation of her knowledge of the Guests.

        2. Nestor

          They’ve made their bed and now they are going to have to lie in it as usual.

          DeSantis/Gabbard is starting to sound pretty good.

          1. orlbucfan

            I think you need your head examined. I’m a Floridian and DeSantis is a showboatin’ FRightwinger while Gabbard is a RW Hindu Fundie who is a Modi fan.

          2. Karl

            Republicans in the last cycle had better luck winning close races with female candidates.

            Why not Gabbard/DeSantis?

          3. JTMcPhee

            Before voting in the next election, I hope you will more carefully examine the “record” of our Unitary Executive here in Florida, and what he is doing off there from the over-the-horizon the Tallahassee corner of the state. He’s backed by a gerrymandered locked-in pro-business legislature and busily filling all state and local agencies with like-minded folks.

            May not really matter, of course, depending on what meaningless binary choice-of-one the legacy parties/private clubs which you and I will never be members of, serve up as possible candidates. The Dems, thee days, are just a nasty skin disease on the backside of the polity. The Reps, well, pick your epithets, good or bad.

            1. drumlin woodchuckles

              What is DeSantis’s approach to land-and-resource management, wetlands conservation, real-estate building, etc. within the state of Florida?

      3. voteforno6

        We don’t know if Trump will actually be prosecuted. My reading of the tea leaves is that the DOJ didn’t start off with the intention of prosecuting him, but he is such a petulant baby that he may force their hand. I still have doubts, though. My guess is that these documents were probably scooped up in the rush to pack up and leave the White House. That process should’ve been more orderly, but Trump was such a baby about losing the election, that he wouldn’t allow them to do that until the last minute. The government reached out to his people, they provided some, but not all of them. The government knew he had them, but being such a baby, he will never admit to being wrong about something (this is the same guy who took a Sharpie to a map rather than admit he misspoke about a hurricane forecast). DOJ issued a subpoena, he still refused to comply, so they finally got a search warrant to retrieve those documents. If they have everything now that he took, they may just leave it at that. Trump is not helping himself out, though. During this whole process, he’s clearly been even less cooperative than Hillary Clinton. That’s an extremely low bar to overcome, and of course Trump couldn’t even do that.

        His excuse for how he declassified stuff doesn’t even make any sense, when you think about it. I doubt they even followed through on that, though. It’s the information that’s in the documents that’s classified, not the documents themselves. Is he really trying to argue that he declassified who knows what programs, just so he could read over some papers while eating a Big Mac in the dining room at home, alone?

        It never ceases to amaze me how so many people are willing to carry water for someone who clearly doesn’t have the emotional maturity to serve as dogcatcher, let alone as President of the United States. But, you right-wingers have demonstrated time and again that you will take any talking point, no matter how untethered from reality, and repeat it like it’s holy scripture.

        1. John

          DJT never admits error … that’s for losers. As to the search, fishing expedition, raid,… take your choice … in the fullness of time it will have a result. What that might be is a mystery? Patience. And by the way, those who hate and despise Trump the most are giving him yet another transfusion of publicity and another occasion to claim persecution and play the victim.

        2. hunkerdown

          We’re not carrying water; we’re simply rejecting your ideology of moral capital, and whatever this need to subordinate everything and everyone comes from.

        3. anon

          “During this whole process, he’s clearly been even less cooperative than Hillary Clinton.”

          Didn’t Hillary destroy a hard drive and cell phones that were under subpoena? How is that not obstruction of justice?

          1. John Wright

            Hillary and her people deleted what they wanted BEFORE giving the email data to the government.

            HRC couldn’t be troubled to make a backup of the data just in case anyone questioned that compromising e-mails may have been deleted.

            Then to make things more difficult, the emails were printed on paper for submission to the government.

            Hillary was handled with great deference.

            If Trump was treated as HRC was, he should have been given advance warning so he could destroy compromising material with a team of lawyers sifting through the material.

        4. nippersdad

          You have just basically said that the guy is a moron. I doubt anyone here is willing to carry water for Trump, but, like you, they are cognizant of his diminished capabilities. No one has ever called Hillary Clinton a moron, so the question is one of stupid vs. evil.

          Trump did not farm out his secret server cross-country, he did not hide anything in basement bathrooms, he did not get his lawyers to systematically go through and destroy anything or say that which he destroyed had something to do with yoga or wedding plans, and, as far as I am aware, he does not have the kind of control over the state levers of power to allow him to spend five years ginning up a Red Scare just because he can. Hillary Clinton wiped her server with the FBI looking the other way even as she was calling out anyone who had a problem with that as being a Russian asset, and the very same people are still on a witch hunt against the guy for far less than she did.

          That calls into question why you are carrying water for those who have shown, by their actions, how corrupt, insular and incestuous our government actually is. Anyone wondering how we get into wars like the one in Ukraine need look no further than the latitude allowed to those who got us here.

          This is about discrediting someone who shouldn’t be a dogcatcher, but will prolly be elected president again because the alternatives are so bad that all they can do is hang him with red tape to prevent it. That is a reflection on the Democratic party, and I think that is the fact that everyone here is cognizant of and reacting to.

          1. pjay

            Well-said, but if I read voteforno6 correctly, agreeing with your comment makes me a “right-winger,” so…

          2. Karl

            No one has ever called Hillary Clinton a moron, so the question is one of stupid vs. evil.

            Actually, if you read Shatterred: Inside the Clinton’s doomed campaign, it’s pretty clear that Clinton consistently misread the political moment, so much so, that “stupid” really fits.

            To understand “Stupid” read Cipolla’s 5 Laws of Stupidity, particularly #5.

            Hanlon’s razor says: don’t attribute to malice/evil what can just as easily be explained by stupidity. You do make a plausible case; but so much about Bill and Hilary (read also Stephanopoulus’s first-hand memoir of Bill Clinton’s first term) stupidity of both Clintons (which includes incompetence and delusional over-reach) seems appropriate, rather than “evil,” IMHO.

            But this is a question about which reasonable people can disagree! Personally, I lean 60% stupidity, 20% evil, and 20% don’t know.

            1. nippersdad

              You may well be right, however I have watched them now for thirty years and my opinion has never been pretty.

              Trump, IMO, has a kind of idiot savant way of reaching people. He can especially feel the pain of the eternally butthurt; something that he can understand and channel with ease. He has never held a principle that did not further his ends for more than twenty minutes or held opinions that could outlast the last guy in the room. The man is a six year old who should have just invested Daddy’s money in a mutual fund. He is fairly easy to read.

              In much the same way, the Clintons are also fairly easy to read, but whereas Trump is stupid they are actively malevolent. Both have always been known for their brains and ability to climb ladders; Bill, whatever else one might say about him, is charming. Hillary is a viper.

              Bill has always said that Hillary is the brains of the operation and that he was the one that schmoozed her plans into fruition. He said it in the Nineties, and I believe him; she really did not want to bake cookies. She has admitted this as well, and one can sense her frustration at his getting the spotlight. This has nothing to do with misogyny, this has everything to do with her being an unreformed Goldwater Girl without the grace to admit it.*

              They found a parade in the Reagan Revolution, and they led it right into a Democratic party in disarray after Carter’s disastrous affairs with Volcker and Brzhezhynski. This was deliberate, and was the objective of Third Way politics. That is what the DLC was designed to do; push the Democratic party to the right with them at the helm.

              You can trace most of our problems straight to them and their willingness to allow the Republican party free rein to do their worst. After all of their work to design their own little world it should come as no surprise that they outlived it by weakening the host that they had parasitized. Hillary was high on her own supply. It showed in her reactions to not achieving “the precious” by a superficial and similarly greedy black guy, potentially a septuagenarian socialist and a vulgarian who only ran because Obama hurt his fee fees at the Washington Correspondents’ Dinner.

              The only portions of Shattered that I have read were extracts that involved the Clinton campaign’s decision to blame Russia for their mistakes; It came as no surprise that she immediately went home to Daddy (the John Birch Society) when she needed an excuse for her failure. Everything about her reads like an Objectivist tract, so her inability to take others that she has no interest in into account when doing her calculations also rings true.

              I do not believe she is stupid, I do believe her to be insular, and I definitely believe her to be malicious. There is no greater sociopath alive today, and we were lucky to miss out on her tender mercies. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

              >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

              * “SCOTT SIMON: I mean, did you ever, back in the ’60s — between when you were, I believe, you were a ‘Goldwater Girl’ —

              HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: That’s right —

              SCOTT SIMON: — and whatever you became politically?

              HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: That’s right. And I feel like my political beliefs in the conservatism that I was raised with. I don’t recognize this new brand of Republicanism that’s afoot now which I consider to be very reactionary, not conservative in many respects. I’m very proud that I was a ‘Goldwater Girl.'”

              https://www.npr.org/2016/03/26/471958017/-goldwater-girl-putting-context-to-a-resurfaced-hillary-clinton-interview

              Bearing in mind that Nixon was the comparatively liberal Republican choice in ’64, one questions what it was she saw in a Republican party that was so “reactionary” that she could not support it, and then promptly pushed an agenda of tax cuts, privatization of public works, deregulation, free trade and foreign wars of choice.

        5. Oh

          It looks like the Democrat party will do anything to revive the “Trump bad, Russia, Russia” chant to get their boys and girls elected. It may backfire on them because they’re giving Trump too much publicity.

        6. CarlH

          Thanks for the heads up that I am a “right winger”! Labels are so very confusing these days.

          1. JBird4049

            To the Democrats, I believe that I am a Trumpista and a bigot, but to the Republicans (and really to the Democrats as well) I am Stalinist when in the 1970s San Francisco, I would have been a regular Democratic leftist. Like the ones that were still in the party at the time.

            My views have changed, but not that much. However, the descriptions of those views by many from then to now has not changed as much as mutated into some confusing chimera.

        7. anon in so cal

          One does not have to be a right-winger to note that the current occupant of the White House is a life-long corrupt warmonger who played a key role in convincing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to approve the 2003 war on Iraq (by pushing the WMD narrative that he, Biden, knew at the time was false) and is now risking WW3 by launching the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.

            1. ambrit

              He also owes you and me $600 USD.
              I pass the front of a Payday Loan office on my way to the local grocery store. A few weeks ago, I stuck my head in the door and asked the woman behind the desk how much they would want as commission if they could get that $600 USD from Biden for me. She looked me square in the eye and said; “Don’t even bring that subject up with any loan or tax business. It’s poison.” She was dead serious.
              Irregulatory capture?

              1. HotFlash

                Well, not me, I am in Canada. But fascinating about the Payday Loan lady. Wonder what the story is on that.

                1. ambrit

                  I wondered about that also. Something about this present administration, or perhaps the “new fangled” bureaucracy, gets functionaries who’s business depends on tapping into some part of the Federal revenue stream, which goes both ways, upset. Something seems to be going wrong with their business model.
                  As for the Canadian angle to all this, I can argue that, Canadians, being citizens of an American vassal state, should be eligible for the stimulus funds.

        8. Omicron

          “But, you right-wingers have demonstrated time and again that you will take any talking point, no matter how untethered from reality, and repeat it like it’s holy scripture.”

          Bravo.

      4. Dr. John Carpenter

        1000%! It wasn’t 24 hours before a saw a meme that, IIRC, had a pic of Hillary on the phone saying “What am I doing? Oh, just sitting around in my non-FBI raided home.” I wanted to barf.

        We don’t know enough yet about the situation to definitively say this was overreach or a witch hunt, etc. My gut feeling is leaning in that direction, based on past actions. What I can say is the treatment thus far has been incredibly unequal. Does anyone anywhere think if Trump had an unauthorized mail server in his bathroom that he “wiped with a cloth” that he’d just get to laugh it off? Not a chance. And that’s just one example. That Hillary didn’t get raided is an example of the hypocrisy, not evidence of her innocence.

        And yeah, the rumblings I’m also hearing is that he cooperated. Again, take with a pinch of salt. I have to wonder though, I know it’s popular to think the guy is an idiot, but does anyone really think he’d be dumb enough to give them such an easy target to go for? He’s aware enough to know he’s under watch and at least clever enough not to take easy bait. It just doesn’t make sense.

        But still, I don’t see how anyone can look at these situations objectively, based on strictly facts in evidence*, and determine both parties were treated fairly. It feels like this whole thing was designed to give the coals of TDS one last stir in anticipation of the midterms and to provoke the MAGA audience into a 1/6 they can actually prosecute something for. I’m willing to be wrong on this, but I’m not holding my breath.

        * I see A LOT of people who should know better taking the “he must have done something wrong if they’re after him” approach to this. It’s amazing how that rule only applies to people we don’t like and not to those who are more sympathetic.

        ** And for the record, I’m not a fan of ANY of the parties in this situation. Not Trump. Not Hillary. Not the FBI. But I’ve yet to see evidence that what Trump has done is any worse than what the rest of them have done. And anyone who thinks that this is about what was done and not who has (allegedly) done it only needs to look at Hillary’s situation.

        1. CitizenSissy

          Great! Let’s set up Benghazi-style hearings and have Trump testify for eleven hours straight. And have the Kevin McCarthy Democratic equivalent bloviate about how hearings would damage political prospects.

          1. pjay

            Uh, do you remember two impeachments and four plus years of Russiagate? I think we’ve got that covered.

            Granted the Benghazi hearings were just Republican partisan theater which obscured more than they revealed. Had they revealed the *real* scandal of the Benghazi operation (CIA arms to Syria), or dealt at all with the larger destruction of Libya, then perhaps Hillary and many others would have been tried for the war criminals they are. But that will never happen.

                1. ambrit

                  And because she “got away with it,” she let her guard down during the election and lost to Trump. That’s punishment enough. The way the Clintonites put it, it is about like introducing your husband or wife to an old friend and then they run off together.

    2. Katniss Everdeen

      Can we all please just cut the crap. All this fevered “analysis” of “classified” vs. “unclassified” and “presidential records” is just so much blah, blah, blah.

      Trump’s “crime” today is the same as it’s been for the last 7 years–he beat the political, “intelligence,” federal “law enforcement,” corporate media machine in 2016 and the need for revenge has driven them insane.

      The careerists who were so certain of their moves up the power ladder that hillary’s coronation would confer, only to have their dreams snatched away at the last unfathomable minute by Trump’s victory, have never reckoned with that failure. Not to mention that, assuming they’d never be called to account, they had played so fast and loose with the “rules” during that campaign that there was a whole lot of evidence of serious criminality laying around.

      It’s not like they haven’t been doing this forever. They have. Trouble is, it’s always worked well enough. (Even with the JFK assassination.) But Trump just will not go down. He just. will. not. go. down. You can cut the frustration with a knife.

          1. the last D

            Let’s ask the central park five just what they think of trump, oh, and maybe taibbi could do the same, if he can find the time. That would at least be honest.

            1. Yves Smith Post author

              Huh? Trump was never the mayor of NYC. Bloomberg was the overseer of this travesty. Nor was Trump an owner or editor in chief of the many NYC and national press outlets that piled on.

              1. anahuna

                Yves, perhaps you are referring to Bloomberg’s loud opposition to compensation after the convictions we’re overturned? The Central Park jogger attack took place in April 1989, while Ed Koch was still mayor.The trial occurred under David Dinkins. Trump’s full-page ad appeared 10 days after the attack.

      1. anon in so cal

        +1000

        Worst of all, Trump’s surprise 2016 election delayed their long-planned hot wars against Russia, in Syria and in Ukraine.

      2. Martin Oline

        I don’t believe it is a need for revenge that motivates the powers in the beltway to try and destroy Trump. It is fear that drives them. The fear of being exposed for running an organized criminal conspiracy, something most voters have come to expect from them. There is a lot of talk That he had classified documents. No clue as to what because that’s classified. I wonder what kind of classified material would get them upset? I think the need to keep secrets from the American people is paramount. Don’t wake up the gorilla. Here is a little something from 5 years ago:
        “Even as he blocked the release of the full library four years ago, Trump said on Twitter at the time that he planned to release “ALL JFK files” someday, possibly if he was elected to a second term. There has been no similar assurance from Biden.”
        He was blocked by the ‘intelligence’ agencies who had to approve of the release. All they had to do was slow walk it for a few years. There are moles in his house, of course, who report to their real bosses. Trump probably boasted in front of the wrong people that he had the files and was going to release them when elected in 2024. That is 61 years after Kennedy was killed.

    3. none

      Funny how people who were calling for Hillary Clinton to be locked up six years ago are now downplaying whatever is is that Trump may have done. One could call it hypocritical, until you realize that it’s simply a sign of devotion to their team.

      Also funny for the same people calling the January 6 crowd treasonous for trying to delay the electoral vote count in 2021 were calling for Dems to do the exact same thing back in 2000. There is a memorable scene in Fahrenheit 451 of Congressional Black Caucus members objecting to the EV count, and Al Gore (presiding over the Senate) ruling them out of order ne by one.

      1. flora

        I still remember tv ads running in my area after the Nov 2016 election wherein famous Hollywood actors were reading scripts imploring GOP T electors to become faithless electors (quoting the Constitution even) and vote for H.

    4. Carla

      I am a little sad that TDS (to my mind an entirely bi-partisan affair) has taken over the NC Links comments section today, both above and below this.

      Personally, I am interested in Chile’s upcoming referendum on their new anti-neoliberal constitution scheduled for Sept. 4, 2022, as cited in the Intercept piece. Since I have inscribed the date on my calendar and will be watching the outcome with interest, I went looking for some more info on the proposed constitution and found this:

      https://consortiumnews.com/2022/07/27/chiles-new-constitution-on-a-knife-edge/

      BTW, the 15-minute film on water privatization in Chile embedded in the Intercept link is well worth watching, IMHO. Our town had our own dust-up with water privatizers in the form of Aqua Ohio back in 2015 — We The People won, and kept our water system public. The success of that battle ultimately led to a successful one in 2019 to change the charter of our city from the Council/Manager form of government to the Mayor/Council form, and then to the first popular election of a mayor as executive of our 100-year-old city in 2021.

      1. orlbucfan

        I wish tRump would drop dead from being fat and eating a poor/stupid diet. He can take $hrillary with him. Alas, it’s not a perfect world.

    5. chris

      I find it amusing that part of the reason Merrick Garland has the ability to make this harder on Trump is because he strengthened safeguards on documents and data during his tenure in response to Hillary’s fiasco.

      But on a technical note, some engineering friends and I were talking about what these supposed documents might be. We’ve all worked on DOD and DOE stuff. We’ve had experience with civilian nuclear too. We had some ideas about what it was and what it wasn’t, because we couldn’t imagine what classified material might have given Trump a reason to keep it. This isn’t the stuff of insider trading. There’s no great way to make money off of it. So why did he keep it and what is it classified as?

      I’m going to put down a marker and suggest that most if not all of what Trump had is classified as UCNI. Most nuclear related information that the government has is UNCLASSIFIED CONTROLLED nuclear information. It doesn’t take much to reclassify UCNI as classified according to one or more rules. That’s typically the job of a DCRO (document control review officer). I have training in handling UCNI properly. I am also familiar with civilian and government classification procedures. I will be surprised if whatever we get out of this raid is significant. A lot of people are salivating over the claim of classified nuclear program documents because they’re hallucinating about espionage. I doubt that whatever Trump has reaches that threshold.

      1. Yves Smith Post author

        IMHO this bomb business is a complete fabrication.

        If there is any substance, it’s at least as likely someone saw the word “nuclear” in a memo, as in “this would be nuclear if it got out…” or an in-passing mention to nuclear treaties or other non-controversial stuff in a memo that was also marked as classified.

        1. chris

          Yes, just think about what would have been considered a nuclear secret in WWII or Vietnam era that is common knowledge now. There were a bunch of commented rendering opinions on details that would have been classified 40 years ago. So it really has to be something for it to merit claims of espionage.

          We will have to wait and see. I’m just extremely doubtful whatever this is will be something that actually brings down Trump. Or that it even should be used as that highly sought after attack vector.

  3. digi_owl

    Curiously, searching for the place mentioned in the deleted Azmilitary1 tweet brings up a bunch of others that all use the same video and very similar looking text (in layout at least, as most of them are in languages i can’t read).

      1. digi_owl

        I saw that, but before that i went searching.

        And what i found was a bunch of tweets with the same video attached, and much the same text. Noticeable do to the “” around director, as that same pattern showed up in the other languages as well. Almost as if the tweets were ran through Google translate or something.

        I’m not disputing that the Ukrainians were up to something. But i found it curious how seemingly the same shot bit of text accompanied the same video in all those different languages.

        1. Preston

          Trump was planning on axing 50,000+ federal administrative employees? No wonder the deep state ganged up on him.

          The enemy is within. Fortunately it can be defeated in a polling place, as long as the ballots are marked by hand, counted in public and retained for recounts. If they push the defense contractor owned and controlled in some cases, electronic and mail in ballots, it’s time to fight in the streets.

          “The largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebold [Now DOMINION] are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Accenture. Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego to develop the software security in their voting machines. A majority of officials on SAIC’s board are former members of either the Pentagon or the CIA including:

          – Army Gen. Wayne Downing, formerly on the National Security Council
          – Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Director
          – Retired Adm. William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
          – Robert Gates, another former director of the CIA.”
          Old site, but informative.

          https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203×344061

          1. drumlin woodchuckles

            I doubt it was “adminstrative” employees Trump wanted to fire. I suspect it was various kinds of senior scientists, researchers, and what not . . . . the kind of people who research atmospheric science as if global warming were a real thing, the kind of people who think we should make business keep its cancer juice out of the water supply, the kind of people who have been doing eco-bio research on viable agriculture with less or zero Haber Bosch nitrogen, etc.

            The kind of people who think regulaters should regulate their responsibility areas for public benefit. The kind of people Liz Warren would have wanted in her Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The kind of people who think National Parks should not be sold to private billionaire buyers.

            That’s who and what Trump wants to mass-fire.

            So I expect I will vote for almost any Democrat against almost any Trumpiform gargoyle the Reps run for Pres in 2024.

            Now . . . if the Reps run a ticket of Jesse Ventura/ Tulis Gabbard, I’ll vote for those two. That’s a pair of Republicans I can vote for if they accept the Republican label.

            About Tulis, I predict she will never ever join a ticket with Trump on it. She is smart enough to know that Trump treats people in general the way the Democrats treated her in particular. If she gets on a ticket with Trump, she has less sense than I thought she did. And i will not vote for Trump/Gabbard just to get Gabbard a sick old heartbeat away from the Presidency.

          2. chris

            Trump had allies who were planning out how to defeat the bureaucratic state. Their concept was to fire and hire about 10000 people. True believers, all of them.

            I don’t think Trump would have had the discipline or the intelligence to see this through. But the concept will surely be used by others because it is too good to let go. Trump was defeated long before any voting in 2020 by the deep state that refused to aid or assist him. He had no people in his administration who knew how DC worked. So all of DC worked against him.

            Many of Trump’s supporters saw this and want to prevent it from happening again. I have to admit I don’t want it to happen again but in my case it’s because I want some one like a Bernie Sanders to make changes that will also be denied by this same bureaucratic cabal. Plan F might be the way to do that. If so, the street fighting between factions that people have been postulating will be real. Those political positions are cushy jobs and the people want to live at their desks until retirement. Throwing them out over politics will unleash BoBo rage throughout the country.

            1. ambrit

              And yet, that was how the system was designed. Historically, all the “employed at will” administrative positions in the government have been treated as “spoils” to be distributed among the political supporters of the incoming administration. At some point, the Civil Service system was developed to insure the continuity of an “institutional memory” in the governing instrumentality. This was to guarantee that the system functions irrespective of the Party in power at any one time.
              So, historically, the top, appointed posts have never been “secure.”
              The next layer down of bureaucrats has been armoured against caprice to protect the nation from politics in the short term. Trumps move, if it indeed is his choice, is a continuation of Grover Norquist’s policy of “drowning the government in a bathtub.”
              I always harken back to the observation that, even with all it’s faults, an entrenched bureaucracy’s first function is to protect the nation from private ambition.
              “A nation of laws and not men,” seems to sum it up best.

  4. The Rev Kev

    ‘In Gostomel, the “directors” of the Kiev regime shoot a staged video about the alleged atrocities of Russian troops against civilians’

    Twitter already killed that tweet on the grounds that it did not fit the narrative. It showed a film crew filming a bunch of ‘panicked’ civilians running by a burning car. No White Helmets in sight though.

  5. Mikel

    “Climate change increases odds of cataclysmic California flood.” NPR

    Or a bunch of water that will be right on time if a way can be found to capture it…

    1. drumlin woodchuckles

      If a bunch of water hits a burned-off or drought-dessicated watershed all at once, it will carry a bunch of rocks and mud into whatever reservoir it flows into. How much of its volume would even be water between all the rocks and mud?

      1. JBird4049

        There would be something, but yes, it would be a problem. What worries me more is about disappearing bridges, roads, dams, towns…
        Really anything near a stream or river, which is a surprising amount of the state.

        In a healthy landscape after three solid, non stop, rain is the is when places like the entire North Bay is cut off from the rest of the Earth. Actually, the Sierras and the western Rockies are probably more likely to suffer catastrophically. Think of the Donner Party only with entire towns and Reno isolated.

        None of this is really speculation, but it is from memory. But in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s we could depend on the state and local governments backed by Feds to get the roads and the airports open. Few people truly suffered as they quickly did. Unless your home or car got flooded out. I have to worry about them doing so today.

    2. Boomheist

      I opened the Times this morning and saw this LONG article about atmospheric rivers and terrible flooding, all folded deeply within the climate change/global warming frame, and yet also saw in the same article mention made that in the past there have been similar floods and droughts over California. So which is it? Man made climate change has created this gusher of water that will drown everyone or that natural climate change occasionally causes such floods, droughts, and fires? This is important, because how you answer this question devolves directly to different sets of solutions, if solutions can be found, which I would generally characterize this way – one set of solutions calls for huge engineering projects, huge programs of enticements and subsidies to offset human caused warming, while the other….wait, there is no other, except accusing, often correctly, interests of being “deniers” and making no changes at all. In fact there IS another solution, based on conservation, renewal, simplicity, learning to live within limits, but this solution runs directly counter to modern economics and endless growth.

      I see this article as another in a growing list of hyberbolic, panicked, feverish climate change porn, having exactly the opposite impact as desired. It will further entrench the PMC in judging the rabble, give comfort to all those hoping to safe the earth with their new 90,000 electric pickup truck, and not convince one pewrson anywhere that things need to change. Only real resource limits, system crashes, and scarcity will bring change. We aren’t quite there yet, but coming closer.

      1. JBird4049

        Well, they do want to instill enough passivity in the population that they can maintain profitable control. Oversimplification is a way of doing this. “It is hard to deal with this. Global warming is going to make it harder. So let’s not bother.”

        Interestingly, if going by timescales of tens to hundreds of thousands years, North America is a hard place to survive compared to Africa as the effects of climate change is more devastating. The whole continent is prone to disaster. Aside from hunting, this is one of the reasons why all the die offs of both animal species (and I suspect human societies) have happened. One could say that dealing with the problems are to much so why bother; one could also say that it’s hard to survive long term in North America and so we need to do more to survive. Humans, human society, and at times civilization has done well here despite the challenges. It’s just that the latest culture has been very successful in ignoring both its genocides and the past history of success.

        Just looking at my home state of California, despite its often great environment, both weather and climate can make it challenging. Even in “average” years it’s three months of rain in winter and then nothing interspaced with years of drought and then the occasional floods. However, the natives met that challenge and modern California was doing so as well. However, it takes time, planning, and much resources to do so at any kind of society from a small tribe to the metropolis of Los Angeles. It is not profitable for the elites to deal with the latest changes. It is certainly a loss of power for the few families that control most of California’s water. It also requires doing things like rewilding the environment, changing farming practices, maybe go into desalination or other controversial efforts. Worse of all for the elites it will mean abandoning neoliberalism and libertarianism while focusing on the whole of society. But that is Stalinist and not profitable for them.

        So we will likely see more news on the horrors and not the solutions.

  6. Pat

    While I realize the Orange Man BADDDD! crowd will ignore a lot, imo CBS This Morning highlighted a beltway notion or strategy that may put a chink in recent events. After noting that Biden was out of the loop regarding the DOJ and FBI actions, the report went on to note he is “on vacation” and keeping out of fray. It continued that leaving the focus on Trump was successful two years ago when Biden was campaigning out of his basement.

    Color me gobsmacked at how much change media and political experts have missed.
    Two years ago, we were still treating the idea that an infectious disease could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans as unacceptable and lots of people were locked in a basement. Now thanks to Biden’s administration, millions of deaths are no big deal and everyone is supposed to be out and ignoring how infectious diseases work (if the vaccines don’t work, get sick and don’t blame us), There is no hiding in the basement and laying low.
    Biden is President, not a candidate. Being out of the loop is NOT or at least was not acceptable.Trump violating the Presidential records act may not merit being on the President’s radar, but according to the DOJ and FBI, that wasn’t what the search and seizure was about. They indicated this was a far greater security threat AND that does go the President. Think of it as a Catch 22. If Trump was not a clear and present danger, no warrant, if Trump is such a danger you don’t leave it out of the Presidential briefing as national security is one of Biden’s prime duties. There is no plausible deniability.

    This will all drip drip drip.

    1. Eureka Springs

      I need a commercial after that sport commentary. /s What will they sell us next, another in an endless stream of fumbles, passing the buck, cashing in no matter what.

      I can’t stop marveling at the difference in reaction to a missing blonde girl, or even 9-11, or Vietnam, AIDS, and yet over a million covid deaths and they didn’t even get a quilt.

      It’s as if a million plus covid US citizens never existed.

      Now, let us all get back to work.

      1. Yves Smith Post author

        The tacit assumption is they were all genetically unfit or fat or diabetic and deserved to die, when IM Doc has pointed out disproportionate bad outcomes in the super fit. Not sure if it is the low body fat or regularly stressed heart muscles (microtrauma is critical to muscle development….)

        1. Basil Pesto

          I think I mentioned earlier this year in comments that one of the first deaths of someone in their 20s here was a powerlifter from Canberra. I think at the time GM mentioned this being a trend and gave a plausible hypothesis as to why but I can’t recall the technical reasoning.

            1. Basil Pesto

              I came across this study last month, which was of interest to me as a football/soccer fan. It also goes some way to confirming an ad hoc study in The Economist last year of Premier League footballers’ stats dropping slightly but discernibly after infection.

              Unfortunately, as smashsc points out, there are many who wish to attribute all bad things happening to athletes in the infinite SARS-era to the vaccines without giving a moment’s consideration to, yknow, the virus proven to cause all this horrible shit itself – that’s not to say the vaccines don’t/can’t cause adverse effects, but the outright refusal to even begin to consider the, yknow, ubiquitous SARS confounder betrays the charlatannical bent of many of these outlets who wish to blame the Bad Things Happening To Athletes In The Covid Era exclusively on vaccines, imo anyway.

              Here is the original story of the young Canberra lad who died this year

              1. HotFlash

                Apparently there are some problems with the way the vaccine was delivered, for instance the case of professional mountain biker Kyle Warner. I leave it to you to do your own searching to find a source or sources you trust. With (pretty well) everyone being vaccinated, and the vaccine being ‘leaky’, it is nearly impossible to sort out whether the culprit is Covid-19 or the vaccine. But it appears that the spike protein, from whatever source, can wreak havoc. Maybe the other proteins too? Be nice if somebody was looking into this.

                B/C if Covid-19 full-up is the culprit, that is one thing. If it is the spike protein, whether from infection or vaccination, we do have a problem. Capitalism won’t fund research to find out (no money in that), and government of, for, and by the people can’t (no money for that).

                1. Basil Pesto

                  The idea I believe is that aspiration of the syringe should be done before injection to make sure the contents of the vaccine are not accidentally delivered into the bloodstream. I’ve found this more plausible of late because one of the recent plausible hypotheses of long covid is spike protein in the blood (and there was a similar issue with a protein in the AZ vaccine). Getting the person administering the injection to aspirate in Australia is a surprisingly laborious process: nurses won’t do it, only doctors, but nurses are delivering the overwhelming majority of vaccines.

                  However

                  it is nearly impossible to sort out whether the culprit is Covid-19 or the vaccine.

                  I submit that this is nonsense. I accept that there is a possibility of confounding the two when vaccination and covid infection closely coincide temporally (within, say, 2 months). At the same time I also have to assume that scientists who study these things have some ability to distinguish between the two effects at some level before blithely assuming that each and every distinction between a vaccine adverse reaction and LC is “impossible” (I haven’t yet descended to the epistemological nihilism of “all scientists are captured + compromised by Big Pharma”), which imo is an unserious handwave.

                  Beyond those with technical expertise though, it’s something a layman infectee should be able to readily discern in numerous cases, again considering the temporal factor. By way of an example, I was infected in late July, thought I got away with one, but two weeks after I tested positive I’ve started getting pins and needles occasionally on the right side of my body, which I understand from my reading likely indicates nerve damage. My last (third) vaccination was in late March. There isn’t a single doubt in my mind that the pins and needles have been caused by the virus, not just from my general awareness and knowledge of the C19 literature, but by simple application of a “but for” test: But for SC2 infection, I’m certain I wouldn’t be experiencing these sensations.

                  1. Yves Smith Post author

                    Let me disagree. Many of the bad effects of Covid look to be the result of T-cell exhaustion/depletion….and there is a strong case that frequent Covid vaccination can produce the same outcome. That is why the EMA nixed boosting 2x a year, it was afraid of immune system fatigue.

                    And more generally, “scientists” aren’t admitting to Covid vaccine side effects, so how can you study what you insist does not exist?

          1. digi_owl

            Some sort of interaction between COVID, blood clotting and exercise maybe? Not sure how, if at all, exercise affect the platelet amount in the blood though.

          2. Terry Flynn

            Rings a bell with me too. Some anecdata: the “short-circuit” in my heart only began to manifest at age 11 as Supra-Ventricular Tachycardias. These typically occurred during intense exercise and attitudes as recent as 2009 (when summarising my history on first GP visit to give medical history upon moving to Australia) when I was asked “were you a professional athlete?” made me laugh hollowly at the perception that SVTs were more deserving of attention, being observed in “people who took care of themselves”.

            Yes I was very fit but the ED consultant warned me after my worst attack that my heart was probably permanently weakened. Subsequently, evidence has come to light that not only are SVTs just as bad as the “other heart conditions and uncontrolled hypertension” in terms of future morbidity and mortality but that they aren’t the preserve of athletes. I had an SVT out of the blue recently – “impossible following successful ablation to zap the short circuit in 2005”.

            Anyway these “healthier person” heart conditions are if anything LESS well understood though good luck finding physicians who will admit this. Plus the twitter feed about the COVID infection given above gives the heebiejeebies even to someone like me who has long ago accepted that my ticker is really a LOT older than my physiological age. Can’t believe how similar my case is to one referred to there.

                1. amechania

                  Even poorly?

                  Ok, seriously seeing myself out.

                  I heard there’s a teaching position available in town.

  7. griffen

    America’s job market appears pretty solid, well one would add the monthly payroll numbers calculated by BLS are known for prior period revisions. One cautionary thought I have, going into fall and winter of 2022 is that the wise council of the FOMC could manage to crush the job market, that’s an outcome that is still possible.

    I would add that without a little elbow grease and updated CV and resume, one could find the potential advance in a chosen profession to be as good that I can recall in a long time. Companies seem to experience a lot of churn in the past 2.5 years, of course with the noted and highly unusual period in 2020. One might even find some leverage in this market, all depends on the skill set.

    School bus drivers are in demand in these parts, southeastern US.

    1. John Beech

      Wanted; bus driver for 50 possibly infected rug rats. Yes, risk is you maybe you get infected and as a consequence, die . . . remind me, how much is the pay? Is it commensurate with the risk? Don’t need to be a math whiz to decide the odds don’t favor you. Could be the reason they’re having trouble filling these jobs is related to people don’t have to sleep in a Holiday Inn Express to decide they aren’t stupid enough to go for the job? Hmmm.

      1. 'The Rev Kev

        ‘Don’t need to be a math whiz to decide the odds don’t favor you.’

        I thought that you heard. The two mottoes for the US are supposed to be ‘In God We Trust’ – the official motto – and ‘E Pluribus Unum’ – the defacto motto of the US. The newer one is quickly being introduced and it has bipartisan support-

        ‘May the odds ever be in your favor.

        1. Pat

          I sometimes wonder how the NY, LA, Beltway crowd as in wealthy and powerful not those who clean the toilets and pools, view Panem in that book and if they realize the resemblance. (I also wonder if they understand the ending.)

      2. griffen

        Performing a personal risk assessment in 2022.

        Go to work and driving them rugrats to and from school pays ~ $34,000 in South Carolina. So let’s go with $27,000 to $35,000 as a rough estimate for this risk assessment. Probably no real masking in place, you can’t smoke your cigarette while driving and you must keep ’em all safe.

        I am thinking…not so much either.

  8. Paradan

    Diablo Canyon, so I read a while back that Diablo Canyon and it employees represent about one third of San Luis Obispo County’s economy, Cal Poly is another third, and the rest is retirement/tourism(wine).

    When they announced it was getting shut down, all the local anti-nuke people, who have been fighting for this since the 80’s, rejoiced. A few that I talked to rejoiced less after I pointed out that instead of cleaning up the site, it’s cheaper to just fence it off and hire security guards for the next 40 years.

  9. Craig H.

    Crypto Plunge: Pharma Bro Shkreli’s Coin Drops More Than 90%

    Bitcoin is now up to 24K since the trough at June 17. How long does an uptrend have to go before it ain’t a dead cat bounce?

    1. Michael Fiorillo

      And how long before its touters’ false claims – that it’s a medium of exchange and store of value, that it’s decentralized, that it’s anonymous, etc. – are publicly acknowledged?

      1. paul

        ….and that the five eyes are unable to identify the founder!

        Langley, we have a problem, and it ain’t the pizza not turning up.

    2. paul

      My unpedigreed pet just died, and I am sure it bounced back, because I wanted it to so much.

      Young mr shreckli’s offerings were worth fuck all to start with, and 10% of that is pretty much the same from any angle.

    3. Skip Intro

      I wonder how much the price is propped up by all the crypto nominally locked up in accounts at the various exchanges which are frozen due to insolvency liquidity issues. Those accounts were drained and the funds used to leverage more pump and dump long ago. They moved from bezzle to double-bezzle, but are still on some hopeful sucker’s books. With so much price manipulation and self-dealing, it is not clear what the price even represents.

      I’m surprised the whole Tornado Cash crypto-laundry sanction thing hasn’t made more waves here, as it has potential for enormous havoc and entertainment value. Apparently people are sending tiny amounts of ETH from Tornado to other wallets, causing them to be sanctioned. I’m laying in backup supplies of popcorn.

      1. paul

        I think crypto should be left to cryptomaniacs.

        Only they can see the true value of something created by upstream fraud.

        Obvously,I won’t be laughing when they have a lock on solar energy from mars.

        But that is only because I will have been the wrong side of the grass for some considerable time.

        Never the less, I will emerge from the soil and say:

        Good job!

        1. ambrit

          Considering the ‘delusional,’ ‘magical,’ nature of the “product,” how about: Cryptomancers?

      2. Checky Chubber

        “Apparently people are sending tiny amounts of ETH from Tornado to other wallets, causing them to be sanctioned. ”

        That’s not how it works. Think of it like a cloakroom ticket for your crypto. You put your stuff in the cloakroom and they give you a ticket. Another account with the correct ticket can go and collect whatever is in the cloakroom. Don’t lose that ticket!

        If you told tornado cash ahead of time where it was going, there would be a paper trail of intent, and it wouldn’t be so good for obscuring flows.

  10. griffen

    Rudy certainly appears to have drunk the kool aid and then taken a dive into the punch bowl. I recall that he had some admirable moments in the wake of and period following the 9/11 attacks. One example stands out, for me at least, as a non-New York individual. Going onto the first SNL show weeks after, stand beside the cast and Lorne Michael and being asked if it was finally okay to laugh again.

    1. Michael Fiorillo

      While he may have been an effective prosecutor in bringing down La Cosa Nostra in NYC, the man was always a bigot and a monster. Punto, finito.

    2. paul

      But not during, according to him and his press team.

      I think the new york emergency command centre was in one of those buildings, while rudolf was not.

      Going on light entertainment does not deserve a purple heart.

  11. The Rev Kev

    “U.S. Housing Affordability in June Was the Worst Since 1989”

    There has been plenty of stories like this over the years here on NC but what really rammed it home for me the other day was the latest Roundtable with Gonzalo Lira. As guests he had Katherine Dee from Chicago, Maria Dubovikova from Moscow & Kim Iversen from Los Angeles and from about the 8:00 minute mark they really spent a large amount of time on housing affordability and how crippling the costs were if you were trying to cope. Really eye-opening stuff. Well, for a non-American-

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14NY87-lzSc (1:17:58 mins)

    Warning. You really should be prepared for when Maria Dubovikova from Moscow talks about local costs in her part of the world.

    1. HotFlash

      I was turned off when Gonzalo refuted Kim I’s contention that landlords should give more than 3 days notice before eviction. I did watch to the end, but less sympathetically. Start around 14:43 and ff. Huff, huff, GD libertarians.

      1. paul

        Gonzalo can get a little high on his own supply, tony montano’s mentor always advised against this.

  12. Tom Stone

    I had a conversation about the Mar A Lago raid last night that left me so shaken I had trouble sleeping,and the news this morning that the DOJ is considering charging Trump under the Espionage act…I had to do some deep breathing to keep from throwing up.
    In that conversation I mentioned, the six years of lies about Trump being a Russian pawn or agent.
    “They weren’t lies” was the angry response.
    They insensate rage,the total lack critical thinking, the unquestioning trust in people and organisations like the FBI which has been caught lying repeatedly ,sometimes under oath…
    They want Trump punished.
    WTF?
    I have never encountered this degree of rage and hate from so many people, Occasionally I have encountered a rant by a batshit crazy Islamic cleric or evangelical “Christian” that was similar but never from ordinary people.
    Until now.
    It frightens me.
    I have spent some time trying to figure out where this rage comes from ( Anger is much to mild a word) and something my now estranged sister said comes to mind.
    Trump embarassed them.
    He is a vulgar man who is physically gross,eats fast food by preference and he blurts out uncomfortable truths among the lies.
    An embarassment to “The greatest Nation on Earth, the shining city on a hill”.
    Were they embarassed by Abu Ghraib, the kidnapping and torture programs, the drone strikes on wedding parties, the murder of American Citizens and anyone unlucky enough to be nearby to cite just a few examples?
    Nope.
    Trump embarassed the”Nice People” and he needs to be punished severely for that crime.
    And so do the 74,000,000 who voted for him.
    I’m going to be every careful who I speak to about my questions and doubts about the accusations against Trump, questioning the narrative might very well be physically dangerous,

    If Yves is seriously considering relocating I think she should accelerate her time line because I don’t think that window of opportunity will stay open much longer, a year at most.

    The USA is one stupid move away from Chaos at home and the Biden administration has form.

    1. John

      Tom, take a deep breath. Now take another one. My advice? Chill.

      Me? I’m out on the pool deck behind my house. I converted the pool into a 15k gallon cement swimming hole (apologies to the writers of the Beverly Hillbillies but it fits my narrative). So I’ve rewilded my pool for the benefit of my goldfish and I’m out here watching them surface and nibble on mosquito larva (I don’t feed them and we’ve gone from 3 to 33). That’s a lie, I did it for my benefit. No regrets.

      Point being, I sip my coffee, laptop in my . . . lap, perusing NC and watch my bit of the world go by, I reflect on the world. Hey, a small hawk just landed and stamped at something and is flying off with it in his feet, maybe a snake, can’t really tell, but something – I digress.

      My point? As it says in the Bible, this too shall pass. The trick, as I have heard more than one old guy state is to outlive the bastards! In the meantime, take it easy. Don’t fret. None of this means the end of the world. And if it does? We were born with a death sentence . . . so what if it’s early? Chill my man. Savor the moment.

      1. Tom Stone

        Thanks,John
        I’ll be heading to Armstrong woods in a few minutes,it is a place that always brings me peace.
        And if I die today it won’t be early,my doctors gave me 2 weeks to live 55 years ago.

      2. griffen

        That sounds enviable, like a good vibe for a leisurely weekend morning. Made me think of the following tune, not the original by Lennon but a cover. Chris Cornell is on my short list of all time favorite rock singers. I happen to like what he did here.

        https://youtu.be/RV6Vpk5oIc0

    2. Lex

      Yes, he’s embarrassing. It’s because he’s openly and proudly representative of what the US really is. None of these people are terribly upset about his business practices so long as their investment portfolio benefits from them in the abstract. They just don’t want to be forced to see it. Trump shatters the myth so many Americans self-impose over reality. We don’t want to see it. We don’t want to accept who we really are and what we’ve been doing in the world. The political class especially. Trump probably isn’t any more corrupt than Biden, Pelosi or the Clintons, he just isn’t quiet about it. It’s bad form and this is america where form means everything. A “third world” country in an expensive suit bought on credit is real touchy about the suit.

      1. Michael Fiorillo

        Yes, and Trump aggravates one of #McResistance liberals’ most salient qualities, their swollen moral vanity: he’s an itchy scab they love to rub raw.

        Combine that with the fact that Trump is one iteration of what empires in decline look like (which cannot be admitted in polite company, especially since liberals now love them their National Security State), and you get the hysteria, the irrationality and inability to think critically.

      2. hk

        The most revealing attempt at countering Trump that revealed the cluelessness of his opponents back in 2016: “America is already great.”. I rolled my eyes back then, but that’s the mythic they are still fighting for.

      3. digi_owl

        Yeah that seems to be a deep seated thing in US culture. How keeping up appearance is far more important than actually solving the issue.

        As a foreigner it is interesting to note the thin veils being put over alcohol consumption in USA, even though anyone that has not grown up in a cloister knows what is going on.

      4. marku52

        He utters heresies to the Neoliberal Church
        “Free trade is bad.”
        “Trade wars are easy to win.”
        “Illegal immgration hurts the US”

        You can’t say thing like that…..

      1. spud

        trumps crimes was that he broke the free trade spell that had it’s feverish grip on the throat of america.

    3. Sardonia

      This hits home, Tom. The raging response and absolutely mindlessness you describe here is what I have seen and dealt with for a few years now – and tragically, it comes from most all of my very closest and deepest friends from decades past – and I simply have no constructive way of dealing with it.

      It’s not my nature to just shut up in the face of it. I could bite back even harder than they do – but I refrain from that, as it would end 40 year old friendships. Even my usual response – mostly ignoring it, but maybe just asking an “innocent” question – is enough that I can see in their eyes that they suddenly look at me and are thinking “Can I even be his friend anymore?”

      And that feeling is becoming mutual. Not because I can’t deal with someone who has different views, but because when I suddenly see that my old friends with 140 IQ’s have turned into blithering idiots, I have to ask myself “What’s the point anymore?”

      At least if it was an old friend who was developing Alzheimer’s, there would be no issue, because they’d be aware that there was a problem. But my TDS friends – they all think they’ve suddenly become so much smarter!!

      It’s like a Great Plague in the Noosphere – with no cure.

      1. Tom Stone

        Thank you Sardonia,I have lost friends of decades standing because I questioned the narrative and am now estranged from my only sibling for the same reason.
        It is painful but I do not regret my choice.
        It isn’t the first time I have been shunned, as a child I was stoned by groups of children on three occasions,attacked with knives by two kids once (Mom took their knives away from me, which wasn’t fair) and when those actions didn’t work the way they planned they broke in to my parents home twice and stole all my Christmas presents.
        A rough neighborhood? Wildwood Ave, zip code 94610.
        Trump committed the same heinous crime that Craig Murray, Ed Snowden,Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and others have.
        He embarassed people.
        There is no greater crime.
        None.

        1. Tet Vet

          Tom – I’ve heard that there are some folks who refer to the area in which you now live as the “Whine Country” – an obvious play on “Wine Country”. The term is used because the prevalence of wine is met or exceeded by the number of people people who spend most of their time whining about one thing or another. From what I know of the politics there I bet that one of the favorite topics of the whiners is Trump, and any attempt to defend him puts you in a lonely place. BTW, my cousins grew up on 24th St. just west of 94610 (94612). My uncle paid $1,300 for the home (way) back in the day.

      2. Screwball

        I have lost quite a few friends over TDS. I’t really depressing to be honest. My latest casualty is my golf partner of over 20 years. We used to talk about politics and never had a problem. Something changed in the last year or so as he now is not the same person.

        I don’t know if his wife got him watching different news channels, but a few weeks ago we touched on politics and he informed me he was watching the Jan 6 hearings. Then, how much he liked Adam Kinzinger, so I shut up right there. I wondered why he would bother watching a kangaroo show trial, but I figured since he just retired he might need something to do. Why that?

        Then last Wednesday after golf we were sitting in the clubhouse having a beer. The TV was on to the news and they were showing the raid at Mar a logo and I said “what a complete shitshow we are living in.” He looked at me like I was nuts and said “he brought this on himself.” Really? So it’s all about Trump and not this 5 year long witch hunt that has STILL not found a way to put him behind bars? Or the fact this raid is unprecedented in American history, or the fact this looks like weaponization of the FBI? Or the fact all this has been known for how long, and NOW they decide to do something? No, it’s all about Trump.

        Him, like so many others, cannot look at anything without looking through the prism of Trump.

        I can’t deal with it any longer. We have a couple more weeks of golf and then I will be done with him too. I don’t need it, it’s not healthy, and I can find better things to do (and cheaper) with my time even if it’s by myself.

        Between Donald J Trump and all the people who hate him more than anything else on the face of the earth who will do anything and everything for as long as it takes to “solve” this Trump problem – they have done more damage to this country than they will ever imagine.

        We are sitting on a tinderbox waiting for the match. The economy is not working for many people, inflation and supply chain issues are nowhere near done, so things will get worse – and TPTB and the TDS crowd can only think about revenge.

        This won’t end well and the fix will be long and painful for many. Stay safe. Take care of yourself, and good luck. Oh, and turn off the damn news.

        1. flora

          Oh, and turn off the damn news.

          Yep, it’s all psy-ops all the time now… except for the weather and the sports scores. / ;)

          1. flora

            A lot of people are hardwired to stick with their “herd” no matter what, like it’s a matter of survival to them. (And maybe that’s generally a good thing for group survival. But sometimes not.) I discovered that questioning the anti-T narrative with TDS sufferers even gently roused a response more appropriate from someone fighting for their very life. For people hardwired My-Herd-No-Matter-What, any question becomes an existential question. I’ve learned to spot it by the change in tone of voice. Then I know where not to go in conversation. I’m now convinced they can’t help themselves, they can’t help their hardwiring. So they (an we) get lied into wars and into hating their neighbors. Then the liars joke about it and congratulate themselves afterward. I don’t have an answer.

            W at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5YgJx8VGRA

          2. Amfortas the hippie

            wife had unilaterally signed up for sat tv a month or so after that first month in the hospital, fall of 2018.
            i didn’t begrudge it….and just attempted to ignore the sounds of football and idiotic commercials that bled into my area(she had also moved into the living room at this time).

            when she passed, my eldest unilaterally did the bills…i found out later that it had been done.
            and in going through what was due, he also unilaterally decided that we didn’t need no stinking sat tv.
            so he just didn’t pay it, and it went away.

            i haven’t watched network news for at least a decade…save when we eat at my mom’s…or on days like january 6th when crazy shits going down.
            i don’t watch videos of news, either…except the occasional “Rising”, because i’ve loved Ms Ball from afar for a long time.
            all my news is print…so i get to skip the emotional blackmail and other assorted insanity making techniques that tv news uses so expertly to keep people glued to the screen, and submerged in the Koolaide.

            but we are the only ones i know who don’t partake…and it shows…at least to me…in just how uninformed everyone is.
            the fox viewing crowd is uninformed in one way…the msdnc crowd is uninformed in another way…and the cnn crowd(who view themselves as above the L/R-D/R Fray, btw) are uninformed in a third way that encompasses both of the other methods of being uninformed.
            but ignorance abounds…and with such Certainty!
            msdnc people KNOW that trump is the most dangerous man in amurka, works for putin(dr evil)…and the fox crowd KNOWS just the opposite.
            neither remember the usa’s adventures in Georgia(the country)…let alone Libya.
            and the idea that the usa is an Empire is anathema…let alone that it is in terminal decline.
            i rattle off stories about the Emperor Honorius and his pet chicken, Stilicho…named after his general who kept things going…and the like, to try to Koan them sideways into thinking about things…
            but nobody knows what the hell that crazy hippie is on about.
            so, since wife died, i just stay out here on the farm as much as possible.
            ive all but given up on trying to engineer some less hard landing in this far place…because everyone is too deep into their various silos to even contemplate that we might have to very soon be taking care of ourselves and each other.

            tiny handful of folks who are more or less on my page in all this…all of them poor, i might add,lol.
            and we’re coordinating somewhat.
            and i sit under the Big Oak sometimes and think i can see whole flocks of black swans wheeling in the high heavens.

        2. Oh

          The politics in our country is so f**ked up. Propaganda is heavy and too many people watch the one sided news (Fox or MSNBC or the networks) and believe it w/o questioning anything. The two parties have locked up the system w/ no chance for a decent third party. I’ve given up talking politics with anyone that’s PMC. Not worth the stress. Crony capitalism is ruining the USA.

          1. The Rev Kev

            You get the propaganda on the TV here in Oz too. Often I will see a “news” story about the Ukraine and you just know that it was the work of the 77th Brigade. My brother watches Fox and he has become as hard-righter climate change denialist as if he was living in America. All these comments about how people have gone off the edge reality wise and whose personal identity is now tied up with what happens with Trump tells me that it is not so much a question of education but that there is something really wrong with western culture at its heart that encourages this happening on such a huge scale.

    4. digi_owl

      My hot take is that “feminist” intersectionality has become something of a religion for the PMC. And after getting a black man into the white house with Obama, their next holy crusade was to get a woman there. This woman being Hillary Clinton. Except the “devil” in the form of a brutish misogynist won instead. Thus the crusade became instead to utterly banish him.

      Notice how their earliest trigger against him was his hot mike “grab them the pussy” comment, and how their initial protest symbol was a pink knitted “pussy” hat.

    5. Zephyrum

      Tom, I’ve also experienced this around Sebastopol. I wish it were confined to Sonoma County, but it’s all over the US. Deep hate and anger, and advocacy for violence, by people who don’t know (yet) what such violence means. My boss, a kind man, openly cheers for heinous acts when they reinforce his views. Among my friends and relatives there are only one or two who can maintain a neutral stance. Most are dedicated partisans, openly embracing obvious lies with the only criteria being reinforcement of their emotional position.

      We have 81,000,000 who voted for the worst president in my lifetime and 74,000,000 who voted for the most vulgar president in my lifetime. It seems to me they need to stay away from each other. But all 155,000,000 of them combined are on the wrong side of history with respect to the rest of the world. Will they learn to stay away from them too? One day the rest of the world will bite back; it is already growling loudly.

      I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’ve developed a foothold in another country where I’m starting to spend time and get to know the locals. I never thought it would come to this. Thank Yves and crew for Naked Capitalism. This was one of the few rational sites for news in 2008 and one of the fewer today. At least reading commentary here I do not feel quite so alone.

      1. flora

        Deep hate and anger, and advocacy for violence, by people who don’t know (yet) what such violence means.

        I see lots of MSM stories about this supposedly real thing. I don’t see my self in my daily life. I wonder if people who write those stories want it to be true. I wonder if the MSM story writers are trying to provoke, psy-ops style, for whatever reason. Maybe they’re bored in their little cubicles typing out stories all day and want more excitement. I mean, when you read someone writing that the US is nearing the situation in N. Ireland during the “troubles” it’s pretty clear they don’t know what they’re talking about. / heh

    6. wol

      #METOO

      Daily meditation, rewilding our two wooded acres and seeing to the fauna have helped me. Laying low, avoiding TDS friends and highly credentialed in-laws, clamming up when I have no choice. Occasionally I carefully ask questions, ala amfortas at the feed store. Wife and I tend to be introverts and rarely venture out (masked, ef ’em) to our heavily PMC’d town.
      I have in-laws in Sebastopol who years ago referred to the’Clinton Crime Syndicate’ and won me over immediately.

      1. wol

        p.s. Shout out to Henry Moon Pie for Tao Te Ching, Le Guin version. As well as the staff and comments, that keep me sane and connected.

    7. jr

      I have a friend who is sickly with the TDS. I try to avoid discussing it with him but when I do I notice the ”discussion” always, always orbits around Trump being the worst thing ever. No matter what point I make, no matter where the talk goes, you can practically see his mind whirling around that black hole of gut-rage. Everything is oriented towards it. No other political figures come close to that eidolon of evil.

      I think Trump just ripped the mask off of the corpse of our “democracy” and, like a mother desperately trying to breathe life into a dead infant, many think banishing him will return things to some kind of normal. People are superstitious creatures at heart, the stoniest atheist has his rituals and his shibboleths. When the cornball Olympus of American politics was invaded by the Teflon Titan, the true believer was shaken to his core. Blithely ignoring the pantheon of degenerates already nested there, their foul rottenness dripping from the vaulted ceilings, the sycophants wailed and raged in disbelief that the Temple had been defiled by such an abomination. Pity their willful ignorance, their pantomimes of righteous fury, for Lo! an army of monstrosities, smelling weakness with the acuteness of Joe Biden at a Girl Scout camp, flops and slithers and crawls towards the Sacred Mount, mewling and hissing that same old tune…

      1. Stillfeelinthebern

        The people I know with TDS are all comfortable and not really facing any of the problems that we need to solve in this country. All have terrific health care, good jobs or comfortable retirement. They don’t have family members struggling. For them, life is really pretty good.

        1. jr

          That is my experience as well. The friend I mention in a retired academic. One who is well versed in American politics. He should know better. He should know Trump is a symptom, not the disease.

          1. barefoot charley

            For years now the respectable press has run articles on the theme of “Fox News Stole My Father.” Normal, happy people became spittle-flecked spewers, their shared cultural touchstone now the Fox dystopia.

            The bigger problem was how successful Fox became. So it was imitated. Maybe soon Fox will run stories on “How MSNBC Stole My Mother,” by jacking her up in the same way with the same degree of adrenalized falsehoods. Soon setting the standard for CNN, CBS etc. (“Trump may be bad for the country, but he’s good for CBS.”

            The PMC turns out to be as vulnerable to immoral business practices as proles and deplorables. Shoulda knowed.

            1. Lex

              NPR stole my mother. The person who taught me to question authority, think for myself and look it up refused to listen to me about the origins and contours of Ukraine. Even knowing full well that I’ve lived in Russia, speak the language (albeit poorly these days) and have read nothing but history and international news since before high school. I was and am simply wrong. And how dare I think I’m smarter than Masha Gessen, that not was said directly to me. Oh, and there are no Nazis in Ukraine. It’s a wild feeling I didn’t understand when people talked about Fox stealing their parents.

    8. flora

      Good luck to FBI proving intend when T didn’t pack or ship the docs, the National Archives Service did the sorting, signing off, packing, and transporting of docs to Mar-a-Lago. See my comment below. / ;)

      (If those are really the charges and not just the NYT passing on intel bs again. See: Judith Miller.)

    9. tiebie66

      Yes, I agree that this rage is becoming very pronounced. It makes me think there might be some merit to Mattias Desmet’s Mass Formation Psychosis theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmloBdLnX3A
      Mass Formation – Brief Summary

      • Totalitarianism requires the total obedience of the masses

      • This obedience is been created via mass formation process inside the population

      • Four conditions are needed:

      1 – The masses must feel alone and isolated.

      2 – Their lives must feel pointless and meaningless.

      3 – The masses then must experience constant free floating anxiety, and

      4 – They must experience free-floating frustration and aggression.

      With these conditions met, people are now ripe for hypnosis.

      • No matter how stupid, senseless or even harmful the “solution”, people are made to feel solidarity, which validates the whole thing for them.

      • They are now changed, no longer rational. This automatically excludes analyses based on mathematical approaches like Nash’s game theory, where all agents are assumed to act completely rationally.

      • People who are consumed by the mass formation process become intolerant and cruel.

  13. The Rev Kev

    “Iranian Tanker Reloads Oil Confiscated in Greece, Embassy Says”

    Alex Christfouro was mocking this whole episode and were saying that the Greeks were not being very good pirates. First they seized that ship to steal the 115,000 tonnes of crude oil. Then the Greeks gave that oil to the US for free (!) which was why they were not good pirates. Especially when the Iranians grabbed two Greek tankers which made all the ship owners in Greece have a sad. So promptly a Greek court reversed their minds and said that the oil had to be returned. By then the oil had been pumped into another ship for transport to the US so that oil had to be pumped back into the original oil tanker before it could set off. So the long and the short of it is that Greece earned the ire of the Iranians and had nothing to show by following the US’s instruction to grab that oil. The least that you could say is that the leadership of Greece is on par with the rest of most of the leadership of the other EU nations.

  14. Lex

    I don’t know about the idea that we needed worry about ZNPP. A strike on the spent fuel might be “limited” in terms of contamination but we’re into my world here and “limited” is a relative term. A “normal” failure of a storage cask is one thing, having the storage area hit by a HE artillery round or a rocket is a lot different. The only emergency response available would be flushing it into the Dnieper. And the variables in an emergency response like that multiply faster than a pandemic in the US. Never mind it all happening in a war zone.

    I also question “just turn it off” because it’s not that simple. It’s not simple in a coal plant; it’s really not simple in a nuke plant. That action has all sorts of second order effects on the grid too as plants need incoming electricity so destabilizing the system could potentially put every other nuke plant in Ukraine into emergency shut down procedures. The only good and simple answer here is for nobody to shell a nuke plant.

    1. The Rev Kev

      A major reason why the Ukrainians targeted that plant is that the Russians are disconnecting it from the Ukrainian network and connecting it to the Russian networks so will be used to power the regions that they are taking over. I do not know if that means that little of the power from that plant was going to those regions already. In any case, not only will losing the power from that plant cause all sorts of problems for the Ukrainians, but the Ukrainian were also selling that power to the EU which they too will miss this coming winter-

      https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/08/6/7362180/

      1. hunkerdown

        .ua is state-controlled media (according to Zelensky and several proud Democrats). I wouldn’t take anything they say as fact without double-checking it. I don’t see how Russia disconnecting ZNPP from the Ukrainian grid would help the Russian interest. It provides too many propaganda points for a property-loving West to petulantly decry.

        1. The Rev Kev

          I would imagine that to rebuild all those war-ravaged Oblast that they are taking over, that they are going to need a helluva lot of energy for construction purposes. Denying that energy to the Ukraine and the EU is just a bonus.

          1. Polar Socialist

            Considering ZNPP was constructed in the Soviet era when Russia was the only net contributor to the state budget and that Russia let Ukraine off the hook regarding Soviet international debt, they might even think they deserve to keep the thing since they paid for it anyway.

      2. Skip Intro

        I thought a reason for connecting to the Russian network was to assure reliable grid connections for a safe shutdown.

      3. Lex

        They are planning to switch it but it’s not done yet and it’s not a simple process to switch a generating facility to a different grid system.

    2. Glen

      Indeed, shelling a nuke plant is insane, but we seem to have almost a worst case situation here. Ukraine is clearly getting it’s back put against the wall, and so all sorts of acts which would not have happen are now going to happen, and at the same time “the western world” is going to be bombarded with nonsense stories about how the Russians are doing the shelling. So, as far as I can tell, there is at present no pressure from Ukraine’s “allies/handlers/owners” to have them dial back the crazy. In fact, the incentives might actually tip over in the other direction where Ukraine might actually “benefit” by having ZNPP damaged in some fashion such that the rest of the EU is down wind of the fallout.

      Who in “the west” is going to apply pressure to have the shelling stop?

      And backing up even more – the blowback from America’s wars was difficult to predict ahead of time, but the neocons always assumed it would be contained in the region where the wars occurred. 9/11 both expose the error to that assumption, and poured gas on the fire. Has anybody thought about the blow back from a failed Ukraine? With tens of billions of dollars in untracked weapons tossed into the mix? Do they just naively assume all the anger will be directed east? Because that is a very bad assumption.

      1. Yves Smith Post author

        As we indicated above (did you read the links as required?) the shelling of the nuke plant is an act of psychological terror and/or to prevent the Russians from using the power in Russian-controlled areas. The plant is Soviet era and very overbuilt, so no way can it be damaged.

        What can be harmed is the refrigeration areas. That would not lead to any contamination but would force the shutdown of the reactor. The Russians were in the process of hooking the reactor to the grid that feeds Russian controlled areas.

        The second would be to try to hit spent fuel areas. Experts say even if the strike was dead on, the contamination would be limited (remember, depleted uranium is super heavy and won’t go poof in the air and float). So as I infer, a hazard to the plant workers and the soldiers guarding the plant at most, not the general public.

      2. The Rev Kev

        ‘Ukraine is clearly getting it’s back put against the wall’

        More so than you think-

        ‘Global rating agencies S&P and Fitch have lowered Ukraine’s foreign currency ratings to ‘selective default’ and ‘restricted default’, respectively, as the country’s latest debt restructuring is seen as distressed.

        Earlier this week, state-owned companies Ukrenergo and Ukravtodor requested a two-year freeze on payments on almost $20 billion in international bonds. The country’s overseas creditors agreed to suspend interest payments and postpone the maturity date of the bonds by two years.’

        https://www.rt.com/business/560764-ukraine-fitch-sp-default-restructuring/

        That is blood in the financial water that.

    1. ambrit

      I cannot so visualize.
      Assange will be ‘housed’ in an Isolation cell wherever he ends up. If he gains contact with anybody while in prison, that will be a big problem for the Security State. He could then get information out to the outside world about his treatment, etc.
      Assange has been subjected to a campaign of ‘silence’ by the state. The purpose of his prison treatment is to punish him, as in inflict maximum physical and psychological pain, and as an object lesson about the consequences of opposing the “Official Narrative.”
      Trump, on the other hand, is too public a figure to abuse too blatantly. The consequences, socio-politically, would be too dire. The Establishment severely underestimates the extent of the simmering rage against the ‘System’ present in the American public. It doesn’t have to break out in full on insurrection. Plain old everyday ‘Civil Disobedience’ can become a major political force. See the history of the Anti Vietnam War protests for an example of how that can play out.
      Stay safe. Hull down.

        1. ambrit

          He could bring Trump some cartons of smokes with which to begin a new trading empire “inside.”
          Now, if Oliver Stone visited and began a documentary about Trump’s “Message to America,” I could begin to discern the shadowy lineaments of the heritage of the Landsberg Prison and that other infamous political prison ‘literary’ work from a century ago.

      1. Screwball

        Along with Hunter, Bush 1, Cheney, Obama, Clapper, Brennen, Comey….

        Just stop, the list is too long and truly wishful thinking anyway.

        It’s a big club….

    2. Glen

      I can imagine the Clintons, Bush, Obama and Trump all taking money from Wall St banks, the MIC, and billionaires.

      In fact, it’s not hard to imagine, it’s easy to look it up at sites like OpenSecrets. After all, there is the donor owner class, and then there is the rest of us. As one of the owner class remarked “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half”, and as I can clearly see, that may be more true today that ever before in our country.

  15. Lexx

    ‘Guilty Dog Pictures and the Myth of Canine Shame’

    When it comes to pets, humans mean well but they’re morons.

    Dogs are not ‘part of our family’; we’re part of their pack. Treat a dog well and prove that you’re good at providing for the pack, and you get to be the leader. “Shaming” threatens their position in the pack, even though the dog is behaving according to dog/pack rules. These are very loose rules we constantly violate as we are a capricious species. Few dogs are capable of wrapping their heads around the nuances of human codes of behavior and yet, we expect them ‘to get it’ and punish them if they don’t.

    This is also true of our regard for quite a few humans and cultures, but that’s a subject for another day.

    On my phone are dozens of pictures of our old dog’s ‘toilet paper artwork’. At first we were annoyed and spoke to him disrespectfully about his part in the waste of our butt wipe. Then we felt so shitty about making him afraid, we left the bathroom door open as we left to run errands, and took photos when we got home before picking up the bits he hadn’t consumed. Later we found out he had Cushing’s disease and with adequate medication, he stopped tearing up the few outer layers of the paper roll. The symptoms of the disease were controlled.

    He’s still gets upset when I leave the house though and seeks out my husband for company, or sits on the footstool looking out the window for my return. Why? He’s losing his hearing and when I’m home he watches me to see what’s going on and for the signals that tell him what he should be doing – like it’s time to eat again, we’re going outside now, or let’s pile into the nest to sleep. This is the importance of ‘pack’ to him… we keep each other safe. The neighbor is well liked by us but we think our dog just likes to get his bark on. Schnauzers are a suspicious-minded breed. Between intruder alerts and three walks, it spices up his day of snoozing in sunbeams.

    1. Carolinian

      That Atlantic is a silly article. Of course dogs don’t feel guilt. They’re dogs. The real question is whether humans feel guilt or rather fear the shaming and disapproval. IMO we are a lot more like dogs (as opposed to vice versa) than we care to admit. Could be that’s why we love them.

      1. Carolinian

        Dogs of course have emotions including fear of punishment. Guilt about being hungry or bored or having to go to the bathroom–I don’t think so. Their most important emotion is love and we don’t have to be cynical about that.

  16. Mikel

    “Crypto Plunge: Pharma Bro Shkreli’s Coin Drops More Than 90%” Bloomberg (furzy)

    He popped up on Reddit after he got out. Sure he picked up some suckers to dump on there.
    It’s a place to go to set up them up.

  17. antidlc

    RE: Covid still packs a punch — and likely will for some time, experts say

    Many of us, between infections and vaccines, have had three, perhaps four, maybe even five encounters with the virus or its spike protein. It could be that we need even more exposures to really tame the virus.

    “If you get infected over and over again, and it seems like that’s going to be the case — in part because of viral evolution and in part because of waning immunity — that secondary, tertiary, quaternary, those repeated infections are probably not going to be as damaging,” said evolutionary biologist Katia Koelle of Emory University.

    Those repeated exposures — especially to different variants — should elicit deeper and broader immunity, with a stronger arsenal of fighters like antibodies and T cells, Koelle said. We might still get infected by SARS-2 dozens of times over our lifetimes — just as with the coronaviruses that cause the common cold — but in most instances, it will cause only a case of the sniffles. (In rare events, subsequent infections may make people sicker than earlier cases.)

    Oh, really? REALLY?

  18. The Rev Kev

    “Berlin names candidate to negotiate with Moscow”

    ‘Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder could be a possible intermediary’

    This is all because German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is deep in doo-doo about that turbine. It seems that lately he is spending more time with it than his wife. Just a day or two ago Scholz said at a press conference “Take it away. Here it is” but it is not so simple. The Russians are demanding a clear legal path so that any future turbines that get shipped will not encounter the same fate. The fact that this is not happening tells you all you want to know. And it has been what now – three months? But to ask ex-German chancellor Gerhard Schroder?

    Here is the kicker. It was only in May that the Bundestag’s budget committee stripped him of budgets and privileges because he was friends with Putin. ‘Officially, the new rule, which can be applied to other former chancellors, states that funding will be based “on the ongoing obligations from the office” rather than on the status of the recipient.’ Yeah, whatever that means. So recently Schroder started to sue to get his funding and privileges restored which means that before they get Schroder to go to Moscow, they may have to swallow some crow and restore his previous standing first.

    https://www.rt.com/news/560695-schroeder-privileges-bundestag-lawsuit/

    1. Polar Socialist

      The Moscow Exchange is also filing a lawsuit against EU sanction in ECJ.
      It seems we’re looking into an autumn of rage and lawsuits in Europe. Amidst rolling blackouts.

      Well played.

  19. Carolinian

    Re Trump versus DeSantis–DeSantis appears to be a goon on foreign policy so it could be like electing Pompeo. While I certainly hope Trump doesn’t become president again, at least we’d know what we’d be getting. After a couple of years of Biden that’s not to be sneezed at.

    It just seems like there’s no way out of this box that suits the current ruling crowd so very well. Gloomy times.

  20. st33ve

    Classification is not the issue.

    https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/08/12/us/trump-news/cdc5f612-c092-5f1a-8d2d-cd591fa38301?smid=url-share

    The search warrant for Trump’s residence cited three criminal laws, all from Title 18 of the United States Code. Section 793, better known as the Espionage Act, which covers the unlawful retention of defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary; Section 1519, which covers destroying or concealing documents to obstruct government investigations or administrative proceedings; and Section 2071, which covers the unlawful removal of government records. Notably, none of those laws turn on whether information was deemed to be unclassified.

    1. anon

      “the unlawful retention of defense-related information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary”

      Regarding the Espionage Act, who gets to decide what is (or may be) harmful to the US, especially when it comes to any POTUS who has declassification authority,

          1. st33ve

            If it was a jury made up of fair, honest, justice-seeking people, it wouldn’t be a jury of Trump’s peers, would it? Eh?

            1. ambrit

              Oh, Trump wouldn’t want his peers to judge him. He knows them too well to expect fairness from them.

  21. Ghost in the Machine

    Regarding the STAT article on Covid; it contains this quote:

    “If you get infected over and over again, and it seems like that’s going to be the case — in part because of viral evolution and in part because of waning immunity — that secondary, tertiary, quaternary, those repeated infections are probably not going to be as damaging,” said evolutionary biologist Katia Koelle of Emory University.“

    The recent VA study on reinfections has shown this to be untrue. Repeated infections have worse outcomes. If that result continues to be born out, that is something that will eventually be impossible to ignore.

    1. The Rev Kev

      I saw that too and shut down that page after reading that section. That is just gaslighting that and you know that other people will read it and cease to worry about taking precautions as the author is basically saying ‘what does not kill you makes you stronger.’

      1. ambrit

        When Covid doesn’t kill you, it just waits a bit and tries again, and again, and again. Persistence pays off. One million American deaths proves that.

      2. Roger Blakely

        Today I am suffering my fourteenth fourteen-day cycle of infection with SARS-CoV-2. I never know what trick it will play on me. I can assume that I will suffer fatigue, brain fog, and GI misery, but there is often a special twist. Sometimes it attacks my liver. Sometimes it attacks my genitals. Today my lower back hurts. I can barely move. Lower back pain is a legitimate COVID-19 symptom. It turns out that lower back muscles have an abundance of ACE receptors. I will be fine in a day or so. Next week I will be suffering from some other COVID-19 symptom.

        1. outside observer

          Fourteenth? Is this based on separate series of positives and then negative RATs and/or PCR tests? Or suspicion based on symptoms? I feel like surely someone should be interested to study your case.
          Best wishes for a speedy recovery.

      1. Jason Boxman

        I bet school buildings everywhere just breathed a sigh of relief. Children, not so much.

  22. Watt4Bob

    I’m having a great deal of trouble understanding why so many people can say with a straight face that they don’t understand how we in the USA ended up in the sorry situation we find ourselves in.

    In the Gonzo Lira round table vid, he asks one of his guests “Where did we go wrong, where was the wrong turn?

    She replies, something like; “I don’t know, I don’t understand/pay attention to politics.”

    There’s a big problem there, considering your everyday experience, your living conditions are so tied to politics, how is it you have managed to ignore being squeezed to the brink of disaster by conditions produced by our government, bought-off by the rich and powerful?

    Our nation’s politics/politicians are wholly owned and operated by powerful interests mostly of the FIRE sector and the MIC, who allow for no action on the part of legislators other than tax-cuts, de-regulation and warfare.

    We’ve been driving down this road to perdition steadily for at least fifty years and have finally reached this miserable point of no return, and there are supposedly serious people saying they don’t understand?

    Those who have always benefited from white privilege, and have only recently found themselves ‘inconvenienced‘ are the only ones who are expressing any taste for revolution, while those who are supposedly politically aware are hailing ‘Dark Brandon‘ as our nation’s savior?

    WTF, seriously, WFT?

    1. Daniil Adamov

      “Those who have always benefited from white privilege, and have only recently found themselves ‘inconvenienced‘ are the only ones who are expressing any taste for revolution”

      Revolutionary movements often come from recently-ascendant, but currently slightly inconvenienced groups (think Russian aristocrats or the French bourgeoisie). People who are genuinely and persistently downtrodden might be good for riots, but they seldom show much actual appetite for revolution. People don’t plot to overthrow and replace an elite on an empty stomach. (They could be used by typically more affluent counter-elites who do, though.)

      1. Sibiryak

        Those who provide the mass support for a revolution, those who lead it, and those who ultimately profit from it are very different sets of people.” — Barrington Moore

    2. fresno dan

      W4B
      In the Gonzo Lira round table vid, he asks one of his guests “Where did we go wrong, where was the wrong turn?”
      She replies, something like; “I don’t know, I don’t understand/pay attention to politics.”

      You May Not Be Interested in War, But War Is Interested in You
      same thing goes for politics.

  23. FreeMarketApologist

    Re: Public buildings in Germany to be heated to 19° Celsius

    Public buildings and private homes should be doing this all winter — saves lots of energy. I’ve done it for decades, and it’s just fine (occasionally I put on a sweater or a fleece). But I get that they want to make a political point.

  24. Mark Gisleson

    A Thai friend wrote about her childhood in Thailand on her now defunct restaurant blog. Because her family raised catfish on their farm and the catfish never grew large, she could catch them with a net.

    My mom gave me a choice: I could take the net and catch the catfish, or I could cut their heads off. I chose to be the catfish catcher.

    I took the net and would pull 20 catfish from our pond each morning. They weighed a kilogram apiece so I had to make many trips from the pond to where my mother and I would make the catfish salad. Sometimes the catfish would slip out of my mother’s hands and it was my job to catch them again as they tried to run away. This made me very mad. I wasn’t sure if I was mad at my Mom for losing the catfish, or at the catfish for not wanting us to eat them. – Anna’s True Thai News

  25. Bryan

    The terrible news of Rushdie’s attack made me think of this exchange from 25 years ago between him and John Le Carre, which I then saw was making the rounds in liberal circles to (unfairly) pillory Le Carre and Jimmy Carter, who held a similar view to Le Carre’s. I always believed Le Carre clearly got the better of Rushdie (and the insufferable Hitchens) here, and the fact Rushdie was attacked doesn’t change that.

    Rushdie sneers at my language and trashes a thoughtful and well-received speech I made to the Anglo-Israel Association, and which The Guardian saw fit to reprint. Hitchens portrays me as a buffoon who pours his own urine on his head. Two rabid ayatollahs could not have done a better job. But will the friendship last? I am amazed that Hitchen’s has put up with Rushdie’s self-canonization for so long. Rushdie, so far as I can make out, does not deny the fact that he insulted a great religion. Instead he accuses me – note his preposterous language for a change – of taking the philistine reductionist radical Islamist line. I didn’t know I was so clever.

    What I do know is, Rushdie took on a known enemy and screamed “foul” when it acted in character (my emphasis). The pain he has had to endure is appalling, but it doesn’t make a martyr of him . . .

    https://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/burning/le-carre-vs-rushdie.html

  26. flora

    Re: Anger at raid… – Atlantic

    At the same time Atlantic calls for cooler heads on the right, frmr NSA intel head Hayden agrees T should be executed, and normally cool presidential historian Michael Beschloss makes a comparison to the Rosenbergs. So glad the left is keeping cooler heads. / ugh

    an aside: if the UK grants the US extradition of Assange after seeing this show…

    1. marym

      I wasn’t able to view the video. The CNN link quotes Patel on Fox blaming the GSA; and a response from GSA. Fox also posted the GSA statement today. It seems to be a iive update screen, so you need to scroll down to (at the moment) 17 hours ago. I wasn’t able to find anything about Patel’s reference in the rcp link to the GSA saying they made a mistake.

      Patel:
      “The GSA mistakenly packed some boxes and moved them to Mar-a-Lago. That’s not on the President. That’s on the National Archives to sort that out,” [Kash Patel, who has been designated by former President Trump to handle issues with his presidential records] said on Fox.”

      GSA
      “As part of the services and support GSA provides to all outgoing presidents, GSA typically contracts for the transportation of items identified by the outgoing President as necessary to wind down the affairs of their office,” the [GSA] statement said. “The responsibility for making decisions about what materials are moved rests entirely with the outgoing president and their supporting staff.”

      https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/fbi-search-trump-mar-a-lago-08-12-22/index.html
      https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/president-donald-trump-fbi-raid-mar-a-lago-house-news

  27. Jason Boxman

    While NC readers are likely wise to classification as a tool for obscuring elite failures, if you’re interested in one in depth take on the origins of the national security state, I always recommend Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State by Wills. Heard about it over 10 years ago in all places, NPR, back when I still had that particular affliction.

  28. jr

    A request to the techies:

    Can anyone make recommendations as to the best way to remove metadata from images, both Windows and OS, with an eye towards posting them online?

    1. Mark Sanders

      I went to Google search, typed in “image delete metadata” and Google immediately gave the steps on how to do it.

      1. jr

        Yeah, brilliance, so did I, my point in asking here was on the off chance there is more to it than what a simple Google search provides…

  29. fresno dan

    https://reason.com/2022/08/11/democrats-dont-trust-the-police-but-they-do-trust-the-fbi-provided-it-is-targeting-donald-trump/
    To obtain the warrant that it used to search Donald Trump’s home at his Palm Beach resort on Monday, New York Times reporter Peter Baker says in a “news analysis,” the FBI would have been “required to meet a high level of proof of possible crimes.” That is a strange way to describe probable cause, an ill-defined standard that falls far short of the evidence needed to convict someone of a crime.
    ….
    Trump and his supporters, who see the Russia investigation as a politically inspired “witch hunt,” like to note the bias illustrated by communications between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, his girlfriend at the time. Yet even Strzok, who called Trump an “idiot” and rooted against him in 2016, was skeptical of the Russian collusion allegations. “I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there’s no big ‘there’ there,” he told Page.

    It turned out that Strzok’s gut was right, and that experience colored how Trump’s supporters perceived all subsequent allegations against him, even when they were much better-grounded. As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes, blind loyalty to Trump transforms Republicans from staunch defenders of law enforcement into harsh critics. Meanwhile, Democrats, who historically were more inclined to question the tactics of agencies like the FBI, swallow those doubts when it looks like Trump might finally get the comeuppance they think he richly deserves.
    ….
    The discretion that Comey exercised in Clinton’s case further illustrates Silverglate’s argument that the vast scope of federal law empowers the FBI to arrest nearly anyone (or not) based on arbitrary, subjective, and possibly biased judgments. At the same time, it suggests that even if Trump’s treatment of classified material was “extremely careless,” prosecuting him would not be justified without aggravating circumstances like those cited by Comey.
    ===========================================
    Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others. (Groucho Marx)

  30. fresno dan

    https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2022/08/13/war-gamers-predict-america-and-taiwan-could-beat-china-but-n489416
    Dozens of military and intelligence officials are huddled in a room in Washington playing a series of hundreds of different war game scenarios. They are trying to estimate what will happen if China invades Taiwan and the United States steps in militarily to defend the island nation. The results thus far are something of a “good news, bad news” prediction. In nearly every scenario they have tested thus far, our combined forces would eventually repel the Chinese invasion leaving Taiwan under the control of the current government. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the cost of fighting that war would be horrendous and it would almost certainly end up looking like a pyrrhic victory. (Bloomberg)
    ….
    First of all, most of the island of Taiwan would be in ruins. China simply has too many long-range rockets and air-to-surface missiles. They aren’t projecting the total number of people who would be killed yet, but most of the government, business, and even residential buildings would be destroyed or seriously damaged. The US Navy and Air Force would be crippled. Most of the United States and Japanese surface fleets in the western Pacific would be destroyed. (The scenario assumes Japan would allow America to use naval ports while not directly engaging the Chinese themselves.) We would lose an estimated 900 fighter jets or roughly half of the American Navy and Air Force inventory. The number of sailors and pilots who would be lost would be staggering. But China would eventually run low on resources and call for a truce.
    =========================
    But China would eventually run low on resources and call for a truce. I only bet when I am pretty sure I can win, and I think the US would run low on resources before the Chinese…

    1. The Rev Kev

      The US would be operating on long supply lines and I think that there are only a few logistics hubs in Asia that they could use. And how many allies would be happy to find that they may be in a war with China because of a supporting US base like with Japan? And what happens if Chinese subs target refueling ships? And in case of war, all 1,000 US bases around the world are now vulnerable to attack. If Diego Garcia got hit, the US military would freak. And what is the proper response to a US carrier going down? An attack on a city in China? Maybe Beijing? Could the US stop a sub missile attack on LA or San Francisco? Maybe no war would be a better idea. Just sayin’.

  31. ghiggler

    > Trump Raid

    Haven’t seen a top-level link to the search warrant, so here is one, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:
    https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/search-warrant-1100-S-Ocean-Blvd-08-12-2022.pdf

    Although Mar-a-Lago was cleared during the search, it was watched by the Trumps, and presumably recorded, through CCTV. Planting evidence seems difficult.

    Only documents, not persons, of interest were described in the warrant.

    Until a document has a “Declassified” stamp, and its status updated in inventories, its new status is not known to others, and they would not know to handle it appropriately. Declassifying something in your mind only is a non-event, even if you have the authority.

    In the “Receipt for Property” I find item “2 – Leatherbound box of documents” containing “2A – Various classified/TS/SCI documents” particularly interesting for several reasons:

    That the documents were in an easily identifiable “Leatherbound” box implies that they were specially selected by someone as being of particular interest.

    This was the only item containing “sensitive compartmentalized information” (SCI). Given that the processes surrounding a “sensitive compartmentalized information facility” (SCIF) are designed to make it impossible to remove or copy documents, their presence implies that some member of the security/intelligence community was complicit in their gathering.

    SCI documents are tracked: when and in which SCIF they were viewed, by whom, and which security/intelligence agents made sure that access protocols were followed. It should therefore be easier to identify the people responsible for removing or copying these documents than for any of the other classified documents.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      We did not link to the search warrant because, as was widely reported, it was not expected to be informationally valuable. What is would be the affidavit(s), which are highly likely not to be made public.

      A theory I have heard is Trump has docs showing the FBI tried to frame him, which he sought to have declassified but the FBI and its allies blocked.

      If this is correct, the effort to stop Trump was illegal under an Obama executive order that was still in effect:

      https://sonar21.com/clarifying-the-system-and-authorities-to-classify-information-trump-followed-the-law/

      NBC also concedes the matter generally is murky:

      But those in Trump’s orbit say that no president is personally bound by the removal and retention rules governing classified documents, which can be declassified if the president simply says they are, according to Ric Grenell, who was Trump’s acting director of national intelligence and who handled highly classified information.

      “There is no approval process for the president of the United States to declassify intelligence. There is this phony idea that he must provide notification for declassification but that’s just silly. Who is he supposed to notify? I think it’s the height of swampism to think the president should seek bureaucrats’ approval,” Grenell told NBC News, emphasizing that he wasn’t personally speaking for the president.

      https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-allies-say-declassified-mar-lago-documents-experts-say-unclear-w-rcna42311

      It is credible that, as when Defense officials refused to obey Trump’s direct order to take troops out of Afghanistan (see here from Douglas Macgregor at 21:10 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZIQEu_tZ1g, Trump took the needed authorization steps), that the bureaucracy refused to comply with Trump’s directives. I have yet to see anyone refer to statute that describes a bureaucratic process that limits the President’s declassification authority.

      There are some more out there theories about the FBI which are plausible but need to be firmed up before I post them here.

      1. ghiggler

        As you point out, the affidavit(s) are highly unlikely to be made public – at least for quite some time, at least until the ongoing investigation is complete, possibly even longer. Furthermore, if as I suspect, the affidavits include information from someone inside the Trump circle, revealing that would not only harm the investigation, but put them in danger. Remember, Judge Reinhart and the FBI agents involved in the search have already been threatened with death, and in apparent response to the search an FBI office near Cincinnati was attacked by an armed and armored gunman (who was killed in the attack).

        So, no, not soon at all.

      2. ghiggler

        I will reiterate “Declassifying something in your mind only is a non-event, even if you have the authority.” Doing something in your mind and expecting it to have an effect outside of it, makes no sense to me.

        It’s not a matter of authority, it’s a matter of practicality. It’s not a “bureaucratic process that limits the President’s declassification authority”, but a bureaucratic process to implement the President’s declassification decision.

         
        Let’s look at it another way.

        If the President classifies a document as TOP SECRET in his mind, but does not mark the document as such, or notify record keepers to handle it as TOP SECRET, anybody making that document public cannot be charged with anything. Am I wrong…?

        Ric Grenell mixes two concepts: approval and notification. Notifying someone of something does not mean seeking their approval. When I tell my kids to do something, I am not seeking their approval, and if I don’t tell them, I can’t blame them for not doing it.

        If I want something done, or not done, I need to tell someone, otherwise – nothing.

         
        Your second link includes the section

        The Heritage Foundation’s Stimson has a different view, given that Trump was once “the ultimate declassification authority.”

        “If any president decides to declassify a document and doesn’t tell anybody — but he has made the decision to declassify something — then the document is declassified,” Stimson said.

        He added that “there’s a rich debate about whether or not a document is declassified if a president has decided but not communicated it outside of his own head,” but Stimson said he would rather be the defense than the prosecution if the dispute ever went to trial.

        For myself, I’d much rather be on the prosecution side.

        Oops, oops, alarm, alarm, hold the presses.

        My daughter dropped by and interrupted me as I was composing this and I asked her “If I didn’t tell you to do something, and you didn’t do it, would it be fair to blame you?”

        Her answer, “Of course, no problem, that would be fair.”

        Am I wrong in my opinions above, or has she inherited my sense of humor? Now I’m not sure of anything.

        1. Yves Smith Post author

          You are straw manning what I said. And this sort of going beyond what was said (that the question was not straightforward) to attribute something to me and the article never said is not on. I’m not a Trump fan but there are real questions of law and fact here.

          And with the years of Russiagate hysteria based on a fabricated dossier, the FBI does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. That’s before ignoring the basic legal standard of innocent until a court makes a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, which you seem happy to toss out the window because Trump.

          You’ve done this sort of straw manning repeatedly, which is why you are in moderation. The thesis under discussion was that Trump wanted material declassified and had bureaucrats blocking him. That was certainly the case with the Kennedy assassination-related documents. You bring up an entirely different claim. I’m not interested in dealing with your hypotheticals, which I haven’t seen Trump himself or any member of his legal team articulate.

  32. Carolinian

    Re Unherd The Last American Aristocrat–thanks for this essay on someone I know little about and now don’t want to know more about. What twaddle from Kennan.

    Monarchy gets a similar justification, since the trappings of monarchy are “the dream, the vision, the ideal of man as he might conceivably be — of man ennobled”, a theatre without which Europe supposedly couldn’t have produced “good taste”.

    As mentioned here before you get the same sort of thing from (the great) Lord Kenneth Clark whose Civilisation program on BBC defined civilization as the history of Western European art and architecture. The vision is decidedly tunnel.

    And in reality English monarchs were an unsavory bunch with Edward said to have a special sex chair (he was fat) and his successor George V said to be interested in nothing other than his uniforms and hunting.

    The article says Kennan was also quite the bigot. Here’s one woke target who may have it coming.

  33. Jason Boxman

    https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/the-aging-student-debtors-of-america

    Student debts can plague borrowers until their last breath, jeopardizing even the government’s meagre protections for those of old age: Social Security. Defaulted student loans can trigger the Department of Education to command garnishment for tax refunds, wages, and Social Security. In 2015, more than two hundred thousand student debtors over the age of fifty had their Social Security garnished.

    (bold mine)

    America is an evil place. But liberal Democrats are gonna save us… oh, wait.

    Oh, and the Federal government doesn’t need revenue to spend, so this is just pure immiseration for its own sake. This “funds” suffering and privation and nothing more, and perhaps the myth that debt repayment (by citizens, not companies) is virtuous and nonpayment is somehow moral failure.

    Such is the crushing weight of moral rot thrust upon the body politic by our elite.

  34. Jason Boxman

    Oh, and consider this. The ‘inflation bill’ continues ObamaCare subsidies immediately, because liberal Democrats don’t want to be seen taking away a benefit people have today.

    As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Senate recently passed a three-year extension (through 2025) of enhanced subsidies for people buying their own health coverage on the Affordable Care Act Marketplaces. These temporary subsidies were originally slated to last two years (2021 and 2022) and were passed as part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). The enhanced subsidies increase the amount of financial help available to those already eligible and also newly expand subsidies to middle-income people, many of whom were previously priced out of coverage.

    Funny, that.

    So you’d think they’d want to deliver these other benefits as soon as possible, not 2-3 years into the future, so it can’t so easily be undone by a future Congress. Not to mention the electoral rewards, ha.

    What a weak sauce bill.

    https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/five-things-to-know-about-renewal-of-extra-affordable-care-act-subsidies-in-inflation-reduction-act/

    1. ambrit

      From what I have been reading and hearing, the ACA is, at best, a sick joke. Thus, immediate renewal of subsidies towards the purchase of an overpriced Catastrophic Medical Policy that masquerades as a form of Neo-liberal National Health program.
      As mentioned elsewhere, today’s Medicare system is now more holes than cheese. I can attest to that from personal experience.

      1. Jason Boxman

        Indeed, none of this helps meet the deductible on these plans. If you can’t afford the premiums, you’re screwed anyway. Thanks Obama!

        1. ambrit

          As one of our children put it a year or so ago; “Having ‘skin in the game’ equals being skinned alive. Both predict a quick and agonizing death.”

      2. Lemmy Caution

        The expanded subsidy reduced my monthly premium from about $1500 to $480. That’s kind of a big deal.

  35. Nick

    “California proposes to extend life of last nuclear plant at cost of $1.4 billion. Newsom’s office said the nuclear plant is an important part of a clean energy transition ”

    Bullshit, Newsom is more concerned about PG&E’s stock price than “clean energy transition.” Read this and tell me about “his concern”:
    California energy officials plan to slash incentives for rooftop solar
    https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/California-energy-officials-plan-to-slash-16777001.php

    Newsom has packed the California Public Utilities Commission with his identity politics, zero utility experience, puppets.

    He’s the same financial services clown that is backing building millions of new homes in California with a top down state mandate. How much more energy, water, would they use? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/us/california-housing-laws.html
    Now he’s pushing desalination, a massive energy hog for those new houses. Newsom is a two faced opportunistic liar. Maybe next in line for president?

    Harris resigns for a huge payoff, Biden appoints Newsom V.P. then resigns for health reasons, President Newsom then appoints Stacy Abrams or some such other V.P. Couldn’t happen? Examine how Jerold Ford became president.

    1. Jim

      Larry Johnson, I believe, has pointed to the difficulties the Dems would have with the maneuvers you’ve suggested. Once Harris resigns, the Dems no longer have control of the Senate. There is no guarantee they’ll be able to install a chosen successor. And this is before the midterms!

    2. Tom Stone

      The California PUC is and has been corrupt to a degree that makes CalPers look squeaky clean.
      After that San Bruno pipeline blast killed 30 people the head of the PUC and the chief lobbyist for PGE had a lovely chat over lunch at the four seasons.
      The Subject?
      Judge shopping.
      PGE has been convicted of 80 counts of Manslaughter and NO ONE has served even one night in jail for those crimes.
      Eighty Dead.
      Nothing to see here, move along.

    3. ambrit

      Gerry Ford has been much maligned because he literally had “greatness” thrust upon him. He seemed content to be the Republican leader in the House, and then Vice President under Nixon. After the Watergate scandal broke, and Nixon resigned, Ford found himself handling the hottest of political hot potatoes. He was left ‘holding the bag’ in a giant political scandal. I’m no Solon, but Ford, to my thinking, did very well in a difficult situation. He really was a caretaker President.
      Ford succeeded Spiro Agnew, who resigned the Vice President’s office after an ongoing financial scandal from when he had been a politico in, and especially Governor of Maryland came to light.
      Back then, politocos “did the honourable thing” and fell on their swords when things went South. Today, politicos who suffer setbacks excuse themselves and blame their misfortunes on the machinations of purported Oriental Despots and amazingly effective ad buys on Facebook.

      1. Robert Gray

        > Gerry Ford … seemed content to be the Republican leader in the House …

        Some biographer of Ford (sorry, can’t remember who or when) said that his life’s dream was to be Speaker of the House.

        > He really was a caretaker President.

        I would be inclined to agree with you IF he hadn’t run in ’76. Had he made it known to his party upon assuming the presidency that he saw himself, and intended to act, as a caretaker, there would have been a good year and a half for hopeful potential successors to begin mobilising for primary season. But, no: he clung to his incumbency and tried his best to extend it, which pretty much negates any caretaker-thinking.

        1. ambrit

          I have always wondered how much of the decision for Ford to run for re-election was Ford’s idea and how much was prompted by others. Is the power of that position that seductive?

      2. drumlin woodchuckles

        Ford pardoned Nixon prematurely. If Ford had let Nixon go to trial, and if Nixon had been convicted, Ford could THEN have pardoned Nixon. But by short-circuiting the justice process, Ford demonstrated that a possibly massive-criminal President could do massive crime and get away with no genuine punishment beyond some humiliation and embarrassment.

  36. Jim

    Tulsi Gabbard filling in for Tucker Carlson last night was rather amazing. And I dare say, had this appeared pre-Obama, and before oh-so-many supporters of Team Blue’s brains melted from Trump Derangement Syndrome, she would have been widely hailed for presenting, to an audience in the hundreds of thousands, a remarkable overview of US politics, domestic and foreign.
    Of course a significant portion of the hour was devoted to the FBI raid on Trump’s abode, and the massive hypocrisy on display, as discussed here on NC. One great video clip, live from yesterday: Hunter Biden boarding Air Force One for a vacation with pop Joe and the family, not under any legal constraints despite all the evidence on his laptop of corrupt dealings in Ukraine and China.
    The segment she did on sanctions policy with retired Lt. Col David Davies touched several important points. The massive use of sanctions as the “go to” response to anything “permanent Washington” doesn’t like, whether those sanctions will be effective or not, or whether they’ll hammer Europe or the US instead. Tulsi showed the full clip of Madeline “we think it’s worth it” Albright justifiying the deaths of a half million Iraqi children. Russia is earning more from energy sales now than before the sanctions – not what we’re hearing from the NYT/WaPo/NPR, is it? In another blow-some-blob-minds moment, the retired military officer says there is no way Ukraine will win this war. No way. Tulsi said the sanctions and US war in Ukraine are all about trying to “regime change” Russia. Somewhere in the hour, Tulsi showed a clip of the Democratic Party presidential debate, where she demolished some hack (Tim Ryan?) who wanted to maintain the US occupation of Afghanistan.
    She finished the hour by interviewing a female UFC fighter on the dangers of allowing trans-identifying males into women’s sports, threatening the health and safety of women, and the very existence of women’s sports.
    All through this, Tulsi Gabbard was her usual competent and clear self, extremely articulate, better than the “professional” news hour hosts. I don’t think she said anything any different from when she held a congressional seat as a Democrat, or ran for President as a Democrat. The same goes for Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey, Jimmy Dore, or any others now vilified for appearing as guests on Tucker Carlson or other Fox shows. They take advantage of the opportunity to speak to a large audience, to present the very same positions they once offered on DemocracyNow!, The Young Turks, MSNBC, etc. before their banishment for not going along with Russiagate insanity.
    Nevertheless, for anyone who’s been around long enough to remember when FOX was the ultimate evil, this is definitely an indication that political alignment in the US of A is upside down, if not shattered completely.

  37. The Rev Kev

    “Liz Cheney’s demise was set in motion by her father”

    The apple doesn’t stray far from the tree.

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