Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

It was down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

I swear, each month of 2020 will have its own history degree.

Good luck with your asparagus.

The willow is too close to the house.

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

They are all Michael Cohen now.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

This fight is for everything.

This is how realignments happen…

Wetsuit optional.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

Han shot first.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

The house always wins.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Little Things

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I’ve had a bear of a few months. Just busy and angry a lot, with a sinus headache for the last week or so. Yesterday, I felt a little bit better, and I went and got a haircut and shave, and it was the best thing I could have done for myself.

My barber is from the Philippines, but he trained to become a barber in Osaka.

Little Things

He’s 71, and immigrated here decades ago, spending most of his life in Georgia. Last year, though, he moved up to these here parts because his niece runs a Mexican restaurant, and he sings in the mariachi band as entertainment. He got bored during the days, so came out of retirement and opened up shop. As you know, I fired my barber of a decade last year because unprovoked, she launched into a racist tirade.

So I fired her, and a couple months ago by chance drove by a small place and saw a traditional barber pole, and slammed on the brakes. I knew I was at the right place when I saw the Old Spice and Clubman Pinaud.

At any rate, after my haircut, I got a full shave, which took 20 minutes, involved multiple hot wet towels, multiple applications of warm shave cream, a greasier cream for the final close shave, more warm towels, lotion, and a facial massage (for what it is worth, while editing this, I added the word massage because quit honestly without it that sentence read like something from Penthouse letters).

And it was amazing. I felt as relaxed as if I had had a full body massage and a hockey puck sized xanax. Well worth the 30 bucks, which is a lot more than I used to pay for my old haircuts.

We need more craftsmen like Tony in this world, and fewer MBA’s. That man has a valuable, honorable, and necessary skill.

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Late Night Open Thread: Fishy Tales

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Whale: You think it’s bad, getting a fly in your soup?…

show full post on front page

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Our Media Is Not Learning, In Fact They Seem Incapable of Doing So: This Is Why You Don’t Give Putin An Unearned Meeting

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Six years! Six years and these idiots have learned nothing!

The stupid, it burns!!!!

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of authoritarianism and fascism, has the right take:

You don’t give Putin an unearned meeting, especially when he’s going out of his way to rub Biden’s nose in the reality that he is not going to change his behavior unless he is made to do so, because doing so normalizes him. It allows him to set the information narrative, to shape it, to use America’s own explicit enumerated right to a freedom of the press, a right he doesn’t believe in and does not recognize within Russia, to push his own misinformation, disinformation, and agitprop. The only real question at this point is how many more bad acts is Putin or his surrogates going to undertake in as public a manner possible between now and his meeting with President Biden to demonstrate that he really could care less what President Biden or the US wants.

The meeting between President Biden and Putin is news. The events leading up to it, what happens at it, what occurs as a result of it, are news. Because all of that is news, it creates an opportunity for Putin to manipulate American news, American journalists, and through them, the American people. And the price of this is normalization of Putin. Of allowing him to present himself as a legitimate leader of a world power, rather than a thuggish former apparatchik who has impoverished and immiserated his people by turning Russia into an organized criminal enterprise running behind the facade of an illiberal, managed democracy.

This is the hard hitting “journalism” that we’re going to be getting as a result of NBC’s inability to learn anything from the past six years.

And before someone starts with the news that the Biden administration announced a huge weapons shipment to Ukraine, I’m aware. It’s been clear for several weeks to a couple of months that this was coming and it doesn’t take a genius to have estimated it would be announced before the meeting. It is a long overdue good thing that needed to happen. It isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference to Putin or change anything in his behavior. You want to change his behavior, send an armor brigade combat team to train with the Ukrainians. Announce we’re sending several Operational Detachments Alpha from 10th Special Forces Group on a Foreign Internal Defense (FIDs) mission with Ukrainian Special Operations Forces. Announce we’re sending several Civil Affairs Teams-Alpha (CAT-As) on a military support to government (MSG) mission with Ukrainian Special Operations Forces. Announce a training exercise and rotation with our Baltic allies and partners pairing the newly reconstituted V Corps and a US Army Division with our partnered forces. None of that is kinetic.

None of that is anything out of the norm for the US military. But it would get Putin’s attention because it would be a significant change in our behavior. Since Putin decided in late 2011/early 2012 that Secretary Clinton’s criticisms of Russia’s 2011 elections was actually both a personal attack on him, a political attack on him, and an act of war by the US against Russia, we have tried to 1) ignore him because he wasn’t worth the energy and we didn’t want to elevate his status, 2) tell him to knock his behavior of through channels, 3) not deter him because Mitch McConnell threatened to politicize the deterrence, 4) pander to him, as well as reward him for his low intensity war against us from JAN 2017 through JAN 2021, and 5) now give him a meeting he hasn’t earned, thereby elevating him again. And by doing so, this created the opening for him to once again exploit American news media, as well as American social media, to his own advantage.

This did not have to happen. We are at war with Russia, albeit a low intensity and largely non-kinetic war, not because we want to be, not because we actually did anything to actually attack Russia, but because Putin decided that Secretary Clinton’s mundane criticisms of problems with Russia’s 2011 elections were both personally directed at him and, therefore, an act of war by the US against Russia. After ten years it remains to be seen if the US is finally capable of recognizing this simple reality and responding appropriately. Bilateral state to state meetings with the President of the United States are for allies and partners, for heads of state we actually have a reasonable chance of influencing through the application of diplomatic power, or they are rewards for heads of state of hostile, recalcitrant, and/or bad state actors after they have changed their behavior in a positive manner. They are not business as usual.

Nothing good will come from this. Not a damn thing!

Open thread!

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Saturday Evening Open Thread: Pride

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We’ve come so far, and yet still have so far to go…

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Quick Open Thread

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I plan to write a post on what to expect from the Biden-Putin summit, but here’s a foretaste. Last week I finally said on Twitter, in plain English, what I’ve thought for some time: that nuclear weapons are unusable unless we want to destroy the Earth, so we should say that and explicitly move toward that goal. I didn’t emphasize, but will here, that I am not calling for instant destruction of all nukes, but rather stating elimination as the goal and taking steps in that direction.

So today I was very pleased to see this

And I had to gloat a little.

Open thread!

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‘We Have Agency, Let’s Use It’ Follow-Up

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This is a follow-up to the post earlier this week:  We Have Agency, Let’s Use It

⭐️  PARTICIPANTS SO FAR

These are the people who expressed interest on that post or followed up with an email.  Definitely enough interest to move forward!

*Almost Retired
*AM in NC
*Argiope
*Avalie
Benw  (data)
*Blue Galangal
BlueGuitarist
brantl
cain
*Cameron
*Capri
Capricorn
CaseyL
*ceece
*Chetan Murthy
*Dahlia
*dnfree
Dr. Fungus
Faithful Lurker + husband
featheredsprite
*Feathers  (data)
*FelonyGovt
*HinTN
hitchhiker
*ian
*Josie
*Kathleen
*Madeleine
Nancy
*O. Felix Culpa
Omnes Omnibus
*prostratedragon  (data)
Raflw
Rocks
*sab
*schrodingers_cat
Subsole
*SiubhanDuinne
*Suburban Mom
Sure Lurkalot (data)
surfk9
terraformer
*Torrey
*UncleEbeneezer
*zhenia goglia
WaterGirl
*Woodrow/asim  (not available for a few weeks)

*indicates that the person stepped up in today’s thread.

Benw has stepped forward to be the google sheet guy.  (Yay, Benw!)  I believe one other person offered to help with that, but I don’t recall who that was.  So if that was you, please chime in below!

Interested in being part of this?  Chime in below. And please mention what state you’re in, and the states you are interested in.  And of course say something if your name has been added in error.  What follows begins first with an analysis of the political situation, and then the strategy follows from that.

⭐️  ANALYSIS

The right wing has discovered key weaknesses in the US governance model and is exploiting these weaknesses to consolidate their own power.  Specifically:

  • Republican-controlled legislatures are giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations of fraud, should Democratic candidates win more votes than Republicans.Their goal is nothing less than “legislative nullification” of elections.
  • They are putting in place criminal sentences and fines meant to intimidate and scare away poll workers and nonpartisan administrators.
  • They are seeking to restrict access to the ballot, and to make the election process itself inaccessible, especially to voters of color.
  • They are working this time at the state, rather than the federal, level.  This is consistent with their 50+ year strategy of taking control of state levers of power first, before using them to isolate and neutralize federal governmental institutions.  Like it or not, we should recognize that this approach has served them well.

The right wing has assessed that changing voter demographics mean that their program cannot reliably win enough elections to maintain their power, if elections are carried out under the existing governance model.

  • Rather than changing their program, they are seeking to legally overthrow the model.
  • Their goal is to subvert, rather than participate in, a democratic model of electoral politics in which the state acts as a neutral guarantor that everyone can vote, and every vote counts.

We are faced with a slow-motion, state-based, insurrection carried out by the right wing through the political party that they have come to dominate.

  • They are doing this legally and completely out in the open
  • They are confident of their success and confident that nobody will make a serious attempt to stop them.
  • So far, this assessment has proved correct.

This means that for the left, a response that involves only electoral politics will not be sufficient to stop an enemy which is not playing electoral politics by the old rules any more.

  • Instead the left has to add counter-political warfare and civic action to its strategy set.
  • It also means that for the left, a focus on national-level politics and federal solutions is inadequate.
  • Instead the left has to focus on a fight for power at the state level because that’s where our enemies are operating.

⭐️  OVERVIEW

We are asking interested people to:

  • collect information
  • do research
  • establish or renew contacts with other organizations/activists, both on the left and in the center
  • and share that information with the blog

What we are not asking people to do is enter data (unless that’s your thing) or organize demonstrations.

Tangible benefits:

  • information is power.
  • the information we collect can help lead to better choices for what to focus on.
  • we can support collective actions to fight abuses.
  • it helps fight the discouragement and sense of hopelessness that can spring up in the face of everything that’s going on, and in the face of setbacks at the federal level, such as Supreme Court decisions that have decimated a level playing field.
  • we can model optimism, as we fight for the idea that we can make this a better situation if we try.

About what we do with the information:  

  • Always and everywhere, we want to follow the lead of the local people and organizations, and support their actions when we can.

⭐️  STRATEGY FOR ACTION – USE CROWDSOURCING: GATHER INFORMATION / ORGANIZE / ACT 

We do have agency if we are willing to use it.

About the threats:  We can begin by creating a spreadsheet where the rows represent states:

 There are 23 states where the Republicans hold a trifecta.  We can do the research, and then the information can be evaluated for people to determine priorities.

  • States where Trump lost.These will be the most critical, they have to get these electoral college (EC) votes back, if they can’t do that they have to flip other states to compensate.  That’s a harder lift.
  • States where Trump won narrowly.They have to hold onto these.
  • States where Trump won bigly.Less likely they will spend resources here rather than elsewhere but we can’t take it for granted.

There are 15 “mixed-fecta” states.  We can do the research, and then the information can be evaluated for people to determine priorities.

  • States with 1 Democratic-controlled chamber in the Legislature.Sometimes Democrats flake off, ask Joe Manchin
  • States with 2 Democratic-controlled chambers in the Legislature.
  • States with Democratic governors.

About the threats: We can organize the, with the columns represent threats of the sort described above in the “Analysis” section.  We can categorize them by:

  • Changes to the process by which a state certifices its election results.
  • Administratively or legally remove or threaten election administrators or supervisors.
  • Voter disenfranchisement / interference in the voting process
  • “Culture war” tactics meant to drive right-wing voters.  (These often appear as referenda or ballot initiatives.  They can show up anywhere, even in Democratic-trifecta states.)
  • Additional categories are possible of course.  What might they be?

About the response to the threats:  We can collect and organize information on groups that are responding to threats.

  • Electoral responses are all well and good, but we need to remember that our enemies are not playing electoral politics any more.
  • We need to target the “boots on the ground” (BOTG) groups who specialize in counter-political warfare, civic action, demonstrations, and political media strategies.

⭐️  Note:  Capricorn has fleshed out more specifics for things we can do – but there’s only so much information that can be put into a single post, so we will save that for the next one.

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Steve Bannon’s Useful Idiots – Addendum

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The story of the alleged laboratory escape (“lab leak”) from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been shopped by the Trumpies, mostly Mike Pompeo, since early in the pandemic. Its form has varied, sometimes a bioweapon, sometimes not, but there has been a concerted effort to get the story into the media. Thanks to the useful idiot bros, Pompeo and his minions, using Bannon’s tactics, may have finally succeeded.

On Twitter, John Culver (@JohnCulver689), whose bio says he is a retired intelligence officer, pointed out a Daily Beast article from June 2020, debunking a report by a Pentagon contractor. When I read it, I vaguely recalled the claims of changing car traffic around the Institute indicating that a leak had occurred. The claim was ridiculous enough that I didn’t pay much attention to it.

Peter Jacobs (@past_is_future), whose bio says he is a climate researcher, offered a longer set of analyses. He points out four attempts to shop the story this year.

That whole thread is worth reading. It covers some of the material I’ve covered recently and points out that it’s Murdoch media in the US and Australia that have helped launder the story. He also mentions David Asher, who turns up in Christopher Ford’s open letter (also here) and the Vanity Fair article that depends on him and other unreliable sources.

Ford was the Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation under Donald Trump. He also served in that part of the State Department under George Bush. He actually knows something about the job, which was unusual in the Trump administration. Although I disagree with his policies, I felt some relief when he was appointed in contrast to the know-nothing wreckers Trump appointed in other agencies. But it turns out that was not the whole story.

A Soviet practice that Trump picked up was to put someone in charge of an agency and then put “minders” below them. The Communist Party ideologue was often the second person in an agency. Something like that may have happened to Ford.

His open letter documents his difficulties with Tom DiNanno and David Asher in January 2021. He does not say how they arrived in his agency, although Ford says DiNanno admitted that, although Ford was nominally his boss, he was acting on instructions from another official in State, who took his instructions directly from Pompeo. Ford says he has no way of knowing whether this is true, but it is a heck of a thing for a subordinate to say to his boss.

 A month or so earlier, Ford had tasked them with forming “an ‘expert vetting group or process’ that would involve real scientists and intelligence experts” to evaluate claims “before going public with dramatic steps such as having Secretary Pompeo announce that it was ‘statistically’ impossible for SARS-CoV-2 to be anything other than the product of Chinese government manipulation, sending ‘demarches’ to foreign governments with this theory, or writing up China for having violated the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in connection with COVID-19.” Apparently that was what DiNanno and Asher wanted to do in December, just before Trump was to leave office.

Ford wanted to know from DiNanno and Asher why the claims had not been subjected to peer review and why they were “running around the interagency spreading these allegations.” His argument to them is that of a responsible government official: Before going public with claims, one must make sure they are correct or risk deep embarrassment. DiNanno’s claims went even further – that SARS-CoV-2 was a genetically-directed bioweapon. Ford’s response to that is “uh, wow.”

DiNanno and Asher bypassed experts in Ford’s department and other parts of the Department of State, as well as the Intelligence Community. A panel of experts was convened on January 7. The “statistical” claim seems to have been a Bayesian analysis done by someone who had never done a Bayesian analysis.

Further, “this statistical analysis is crippled by the fact that we have essentially no data to support key model inputs.” The expert panel tore it apart.

Ford’s letter is intended to justify his actions in the light of accusations published in the Vanity Fair article. He claims, with documentary evidence, that DiNanno and Asher were pressing hard to get a sensational story out about SARS-CoV-2 and to follow up with diplomatic actions against China. All this took place in the earlier parts of the timeline provided by Peter Jacobs and in the waning days of Donald Trump’s presidency. Ford may also be trying to distance himself from Pompeo and the Trump administration.

Does the dishonesty of Pompeo and his minions disqualify the idea that SARS-CoV-2 might have entered the human population through laboratory escape? Of course not, but it is necessary to say this to avoid accusations from the bros. But it seriously calls into question the sources for many an article.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner

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