Posts Tagged ‘CIA’

LinkSwarm for September 15, 2023

Friday, September 15th, 2023

The Biden economy continues to batter ordinary Americans, CIA’s bribing experts to protect China and the deep state, Ukraine makes Russian ships and air defense systems in Crimea go boom, UAW goes on strike, and sanctuary city chickens come home to roost. Plus a personal update at the end. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Joe Biden continues to work his special brand of magic on the economy: “Real household income suffers biggest drop since Great Recession.”

    Nominally, households earned more money in 2022 than they did in 2021. But thanks to inflation caused by Bidenomics, real household income (that is, income adjusted for inflation) not only fell, but fell by an amount not seen since the Great Recession.

    According to Census Bureau numbers released Tuesday, median household income fell from $76,330 in 2021 to $74,580 in 2022, a decline of 2.3%. This is the biggest drop in real household income since 2010, when it fell 2.6%. Even at the height of the pandemic, when millions of people couldn’t work, real income only fell 2.2%.

    The decline in real income was driven entirely by near-record-high inflation. According to the Census Bureau, inflation rose 7.8% between 2021 and 2022, which was the largest inflation increase since 1981.

    Isn’t not being able to feed your family a small price to pay for our elites not having to deal with mean tweets? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • The deep state at work: “CIA Bribed Analysts To Change Lab-Leak Conclusions.”

    A ‘senior-level’ CIA whistleblower has come forward to allege that the agency bribed analysts to change their opinion that Covid-19 most likely originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, according to the NY Post.

    The whistleblower told House committee leaders that his agency ‘ tried to pay off six analysts who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a Wuhan lab if they changed their position and said the virus jumped from animals to humans,’ according to a Tuesday letter from the chairmen of two House subcommittees investigating the pandemic response and US intelligence, Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and Mike Turner (R-OH).

    The pair have requested all documents, communications and pay info from the CIA’s Covid-19 Discovery Team by Sept. 26.

    “According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” reads the letter from the House panel chairmen.

    “The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis.

    “The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position,” the letters continue, adding that the analysts were “experienced officers with significant scientific expertise.”

  • Hunter Biden indicted on federal gun charges. A whole lot of observers think this is just an excuse to avoid indicting him (and his father) on bribery and corruption charges.
  • Ukraine seems to be systemically destroying Russian air defense systems in occupied Crimea and going after all of Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
  • Trump supports Paxton.
  • Abbott’s busses won the border battle.

    Washington refused to fully fund construction of a wall along the Mexican border as Congress obeyed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — whom Republicans bow to — and the galaxy of gangs, drug cartels, pedos, Chinese spies, terrorists and Methodists who back Democrats. There are some overlaps. My point is, Democrats cannot destroy the nation without help.

    There seemed to be no stopping the onslaught. What to do? What to do? What to do?

    Well, they were messing with Texas and as Texans say, don’t mess with Texas.

    Its governor’s press office said in June, “In April 2022, Governor Abbott directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to charter buses to transport migrants from Texas to Washington, D.C. The Governor added New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia as additional drop-off locations last year and most recently added Denver as a busing destination last month. Since beginning the migrant busing strategy last spring, more than 21,600 migrants have been transported to these self-declared sanctuary cities while providing much-needed relief to Texas’ overwhelmed border communities.”

    Battles are usually fought with horses, tanks or aeroplanes. Greg Abbott used buses. As of June, he shipped 500 busloads of illegal aliens to sanctuary cities. The shipments continue.

    You want ’em, you got ’em.

    It turns out, sanctuary cities don’t want them.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
    

  • Virginia Democratic statehouse candidate Susanna Gibson is complaining that there are videos of her having sex with her husband online. Gee, how did they get online? “Gibson had an account on Chaturbate, a legal website where viewers can watch live webcam performances that feature nudity and sexual activity…The videos show Gibson and her husband, John David Gibson, having sex and at times looking into the camera and asking viewers for donations in the form of ‘tokens’ or ‘tips’ to watch a private show.” It did not take Columbo to crack this case. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might bolt the party that’s trying to screw him over.

    The Democrat Party has a latent disaster on its hand vis a vis one RFK Jr.

    On the one hand, they are fully dedicated to sabotaging his campaign. Under no circumstances whatsoever will he be permitted to win the nomination.

    Even if he had 80%+ support from the electorate, the sick truth is that party leadership (influenced by the consultant and donor classes) would rather lose with Brandon than win with RFK Jr. because of what he’s liable to do to the Deep State and D.C. largesse were he ever to assume office. It would be a proverbial bloodbath for the administrative state and all of the grifters who feed on it.

    On the other hand, they need to keep RFK Jr. within the Democrat Party fold because if he were to go rogue and run third party — which he, frankly, should have been doing all along — it would be a veritable death knell for the Brandon entity’s prospects in 2024, which are wafer-thin as it is.

    Whatever perceived threat Cornel West poses to Brandon’s re-election with his Green Party run, magnify that threat by 10x, 100x and you’re in the ballpark of what RFK Jr. would do to the party. It’s not outlandish to speculate that a strong third-party run by RFK Jr. might literally break the Democrat Party for years or possibly forever. That’s how sick of the party’s BS its own members, not to mention independents and non-voters (the largest, unserviced voting bloc in the country), are.

    RFK Jr. has already proven himself nearly bulletproof from relentless Democrat Party and corporate state media attacks — arguably on the same level in this regard as “Teflon” Don.

  • “Hays County district clerk files petition to remove DA, citing new Texas law.”

    There’s a petition to have the Hays County district attorney removed from office.

    The person who filed it? The Hays County district clerk.

    The petition was filed by Hays County District Clerk Avrey Anderson on Tuesday, Sept. 12. I

    It alleged that Hays County DA Kelly Higgins implemented and executed a policy or policies that refused to prosecute a class or type of criminal offense under state law.

    The petition said DA Higgins has made public declarations that he would not prosecute the following:

    • simple drug possession offenses
    • simple cannabis possession offenses
    • procedures committed by a licensed physician in the case that they are treating transgenders
    • procedures committed by a licensed physician in the case they are performing abortions

    According to the court documents filed, there’s been an excessive amount of felony possession of cannabis, methamphetamine and cocaine cases being declined for “random and nonspecific reasons.”

    I know one of the first questions in your mind: Is Higgins a Soros-backed DA? Answer cloudy. She got $2,000 from Chip Shields in Portland, OR. Shields founded Better People, a pro ex-con thing, but I can’t find a direct Soros link to Higgins. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Things that make you go Hmmmm: “A representative of the Harris County attorney’s office told a district court judge that the county would use all legal means to prevent the deposition of the deputy director of election technology Jason Bruce.”
  • UAW goes on strike over wages, pensions…and mandating electric cars.
  • Let the child sex mutilation lawsuits begin.
  • Goodbye, Mittens.
  • National Review looks back at Simon and Garfunkel. Don’t agree with everything here, but they did make some great music Back In The Day…
  • 14-year-old son died after attempting the ‘One Chip Challenge.’ You don’t want to jump into that sort of thing without building up your resistance first. Me, I’m pretty sure I could do it, especially if I could find a way to make money off it. Maybe I could get 100,00 people to pledge a buck for every one I eat, and then then see how many I can eat on a live-stream…
  • Ever wanted to hear The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz do an album of REM covers? Yeah, me neither, but here’s “Shiny Happy People.”
  • Ooopsie! (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Democrats Complain That Illegal Immigrants Are Destroying Their Sanctuary Cities.”
  • “Experts Believe Aaron Rodgers Ankle Injury A Result Of Being Unvaccinated.”
  • Boing! Boing! Boing!

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Also, my most recent job just ended. So here’s the tip jar, if you’re so inclined:





    I don’t usual rattle the jar, because I make good money when employed, and I’m hardly destitute, but every bit helps. If you know of any remote Senior Technical Writer positions, let me know.

    Dave Smith on Rogan: The Deep State vs. Trump

    Tuesday, August 29th, 2023

    If you’ve been following this blog for a a while, very little in this Joe Rogan interview with Dave Smith will be new to you. But this is a nice explanation of how the early part of the Russiagate hoax developed if you weren’t paying attention to the blow-by-blow revelations at the time.

  • They start out with playing Schumer’s famous clip that the intelligence community has “six ways to Sunday” to get back at you.
  • They go through the foolishness of the Russiagate hoax, the bogusness of the Steele Dossier, the strangeness of the Carter Page wiretap, and the lies made on the FISA application.
  • Carter Page “was approached by a group of Russians to see if he would turn and work for them. And the CIA were, like, ‘Yes he was, and he came right back to us and told us about it.’ And then when they were putting in the application for the FISA warrant, the FBI said ‘He was approached by these Russians and the CIA confirmed it.'”
  • “They’re grasping at straws and it’s very clear they’ve weaponized the legal system against this guy.”
  • It was determined by the powers that be, you know, with the corporate media, the Deep State, all of the establishment, that he was unacceptable. And that’s not new to Donald Trump. There were a lot of candidates who have been determined to be unacceptable. Ron Paul was was unacceptable. Bernie Sanders was unacceptable. Tulsi Gabbard was unacceptable. And you saw the machine weaponized against all of them to keep them out. But Trump beat the machine. The difference is Trump won… the guy who they determined was not acceptable ended up winning. And part of what was so powerful about that is that it kind of destroyed the illusion of inevitability that I think progressives rely on.

  • “It doesn’t make people reluctant, it makes people more convinced that there’s a conspiracy against him. It makes people more convinced that there’s corruption that’s fighting against him.”
  • Indeed.

    (Previously.)

    LinkSwarm for May 5, 2023

    Friday, May 5th, 2023

    A Soros-backed DA is stepping down, a Harvard prof lying about playing footsie with commies sentenced, and another Democratic fundraiser convicted of fraud. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Good news, everyone! Soros-backed St. Louis Democrat DA Kim Gardner has resigned.

    On Thursday, a progressive prosecutor who was notoriously funded by far-left billionaire George Soros announced her resignation, after months of bipartisan pressure to do so.

    Fox News reports that Kim Gardner, the Circuit Attorney for St. Louis, announced that her resignation will be effective June 1st. Gardner was one of the first prosecutors in the country to be bankrolled by Soros, who has since expanded his efforts to other major cities across the country. She was first elected in 2016 and re-elected in 2020, largely due to Soros’ financial backing. Prior to her resignation announcement, she had declared her intention to run for a third term in 2024.

    After years of criticism for being soft on crime and siding with criminals over victims, Gardner faced a whole new wave of criticism from both parties over an incident in February: Teenage volleyball player Janae Edmonson, who was visiting St. Louis from Tennessee for a tournament, was hit by an out-of-control car while crossing the road; although Edmonson survived, she had to have both of her legs amputated.

    The driver of the car was Daniel Riley, a man who was out on bond while awaiting trial for an armed robbery case. It was later revealed that Riley had violated the terms of bond dozens of times, but was never arrested. When the blame turned to Gardner for failing to keep him off the streets, she falsely claimed that her office had attempted to have Riley jailed once again, only to be denied by a judge; there are no records of her office filing any such motion or otherwise seeking the revocation of Riley’s bond.

    Following the Edmonson incident, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R-Mo.) filed a petition quo warranto, the process by which the state attorney general can fire a prosecutor who has been determined to be neglectful of her duties. Bailey claimed that as many as 12,000 criminal cases have been dismissed due to Gardner’s failures, with another 9,000 having been thrown out right before they were set to go to trial, due to Garnder’s office refusing to provide evidence and speedy trials for defendants.

    After Gardner’s announcement, Bailey released a statement demanding that she vacate her office immediately, rather than wait for another month.

  • The Biden Banking Crisis continues to bubble along. First Horizon, PacWest, and Western Alliance are the new banks facing trouble. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Wagner Chief to Pull Mercenaries Out of Bakhmut over Ammunition Dispute with Russian Military.”

    Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said he will pull his mercenaries out of the meat grinder that is the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut on May 10, one day after Russia’s Victory Day Celebrations, which Russian president Vladimir Putin is expected to use to shore up support for the Russian invasion.

    The Wagner Group, a well-known mercenary unit known to be one of Russia’s most competent fighting divisions, is leading the charge on Bakhmut, a city that that has gained outsized symbolic importance.

    “I am withdrawing the Wagner PMC units from Bakhmut, because in the absence of ammunition they are doomed to senseless death,” Prigozhin said in full military fatigues and carrying an automatic weapon. The video he released showed him surrounded by masked Wagner fighters. Prigozhin also released a statement to the same effect.

    His forces had no choice but to withdraw to rear bases to “lick the wounds,” said Prigozhin, as translated by the Washington Post. If Wagner goes through with the withdrawal, it would be viewed as catastrophic in terms of morale. The Russian invasion has ground to a standstill after large-scale Russian and Ukrainian offensives last year. Kyiv, which has been amassing ammunitions including tanks and fighter jets, is expected to launch a fresh counterattack in the very near future.

    Prigozhin also launched a remarkable video tirade overnight on Telegram in which he displayed bodies of dozens of Wagner soldiers killed in Bakhmut. He angrily laid into the Russian Defense minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, for supplying Wagner with only 30 percent of the ammunition that’s needed.

    The statement released today claimed that number was even lower, standing at 10 percent.

    One caveat is that we’ve heard complaints from Prigozhin about his ammo supply before.

  • Russian soldiers dig trenches in horse graveyard in occupied Ukraine. Now they have anthrax.
  • Biden CIA chief met with Epstein several times after financier convicted of child sex crime. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns had three meetings with Jeffrey Epstein in 2014, when the top spy official was deputy secretary of state and after Epstein was convicted of child sex exploitation.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
    

  • “Harvard chemistry professor sentenced for lying about ties to CCP…Former Harvard University Chemistry Department Chair Charles M. Lieber was sentenced Wednesday to time served and over $80,000 in fines for committing fraud and for failing to disclose his connections to the Chinese Communist Party.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Longtime Democratic Campaign Strategist Charged with Election Fraud.” And completely different than the Democratic Party fundraiser convicted of fraud last week.

    New Jersey Democratic campaign strategist James Devine was charged with election fraud for allegedly submitting more than 1,900 fake petitions to help secure a 2021 Democratic gubernatorial primary ballot spot for candidate Lisa McCormick, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin announced Tuesday.

    Devine was McCormick’s campaign manager and sent the fake voter certifications to the New Jersey Secretary of State’s Division of Elections via email in April 2021, but the New Jersey Democratic State Committee challenged his attempt days later, arguing that all the forms featured same the style of signature and at least one of the named voters was deceased, Platkin said.

    A judge subsequently took McCormick off the primary ballot, and Devine is now charged with third-degree offenses concerning nomination certificates or petitions, tampering with public records or information and fourth-degree falsifying or tampering with records.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “Kansas Becomes 1st State to Pass Law Defining Gender as a Person’s Sex at Birth.” One down, forty-nine to go…
  • Killer in Satan’s service finds the left’s child sexual mutilation fetish disgusting.
  • Shots of Minneapolis before and after the Antifa/BLM riots of 2020.
  • El Paso Engulfed In ‘Mass Migration Dumpster Fire‘ As State Of Emergency Declared.”
  • Accused serial black widow killer charged with murdering her fifth husband.
  • “You just killed two people tonight.” “Yeah, but when can I go back to school?”
  • California banning diesel effective 2036.
  • Could sexbots and AI end humanity?
  • “Googlers angry about CEO’s $226M pay after cuts in perks and 12,000 layoffs.” Funny how you never hear the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd going after the Sundar Pichais of the world.
  • Speaking of Google, I’m hardly an expert on AI, but here’s a piece that claims Google is getting its clocked cleaned by OpenSource AI.

    LoRA updates are very cheap to produce (~$100) for the most popular model sizes. This means that almost anyone with an idea can generate one and distribute it. Training times under a day are the norm. At that pace, it doesn’t take long before the cumulative effect of all of these fine-tunings overcomes starting off at a size disadvantage. Indeed, in terms of engineer-hours, the pace of improvement from these models vastly outstrips what we can do with our largest variants, and the best are already largely indistinguishable from ChatGPT. Focusing on maintaining some of the largest models on the planet actually puts us at a disadvantage.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • The Case of the Disappearing Swiss Cheese Holes.
  • Wes Anderson’s Star Wars.
  • A nice stroke of book collecting luck: I picked up an inscribed presentation copy of H. G. Wells’ The Food of the Gods. Or rather, I picked it up as part of a multibook lot back in February and didn’t realize it was inscribed until last week.
  • “Biden Deploys 1,500 Troops At Border To Help Register New Voters.”
  • “Pro Disc Golfer Disqualified After Testing Negative For Cannabis.”
  • Haley? No. Pence? No. Pompeo? No. Sununu? No.

    Sunday, February 12th, 2023

    Now that it’s less than two years before the 2024 Presidential election, a small crop of Republicans whose last names are not “DeSantis” or “Trump” seem to have convinced themselves that they’re viable Republican presidential candidates. These people are either wrong or running for Vice President. The lack of enthusiasm for all four of the would-be candidates is palpable.

  • Former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. For some reason (photogenic?), NRSC has been using her as one of their email begathon pitch-critters for a while, which probably explains why I’ve been receiving countdown emails (“I’m making a special announcement in 6 days.”) for her-not-even-remotely anticipated run. One struggles in vain to find the significant party faction Haley appeals to. Soft feminist Republican businesswomen? Indian-Americans? Plus: She appointed Tim Scott to the senate. Minuses: Backed Rubio in 2016, and was soft on culture war/social justice issues until about late 2020, and refused to fight transgender bathrooms, very low-hanging fruit for actual conservatives, back when she had a chance as SC Governor. No thank you. Effectively running for Vice President.
  • Former Vice President Mike Pence. Former Vice Presidents (Nixon, Bush41) used to have the inside tract to a White House nod in the Republican Party, but those days are gone. A solid, unexciting Vice President in the Walter Mondale mode for the first 46 months of his term who royally pissed off Trump supporters with his words and deeds in the last two months. Rational or not, Trump supporters now seem actively hostile to a Pence run, and since they were his only potential base of significant support (and only if Trump didn’t run), that’s a real obstacle, despite him checking almost all of the right policy boxes. If he runs (I have my doubts, as he doesn’t seem to have even his own website), he’s effectively running in the John Kasich lane (right down to the “unexciting Midwestern governor” background), which is a one-way ticket to Palookaville. No thank you. The only candidate here that we know isn’t running for Vice President.
  • Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. There was a time when being Secretary of State was a solid stepping stone to The White House. And that time was “the early 1800s,” as Martin van Buren was the last to do it, and only after a stint as Vice President. Which is bad news for Pompeo, arguably the most successful Secretary of State since James Baker. Between the Abraham Accords and keeping the War on Terror coalition together long enough to destroy the nascent caliphate of the Islamic State, Pompeo was a vast improvement over the largely ineffective Rex Tillerson, and worked well with foreign nations and international organizations that were, to put it mildly, not wild about his boss. And he has some other impressive credentials as well. “He graduated first in his class from West Point, and from Harvard Law and was on Harvard Law Review. After six years in the House of Representatives, he became CIA director for Trump, and then secretary of state – the only person ever to hold both jobs.” His short congressional tenure earned him a 97% score from the ACU. For me one of the biggest problems with Pompeo is that, like Haley, I primarily know his post-office career as a guy constantly in my inbox begging for money, and also talking like a career politician that’s already cranking up the baloney factory before properly introducing himself for a run. As Beto O’Rourke found out, three terms in the house is exceptionally thin electoral experience for a Presidential run. Plus his attempt to use “pipehitter” as a catchphrase for some sort of imaginary blue collar credibility was just laughable, as the term conjures drug addicts rather than plumbers. There’s just a bit too much standard issue political phoniness here, and Pompeo strikes me as someone who’s time has already passed. No thank you, but the softest no thank you of these four.
  • New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. I was only vaguely aware of Sununu The Younger, but his attack on DeSantis for having the balls to fight the poison of social justice instantly rocketed him to the bottom of my list. You would think Romney’s failure would have soured the party on moderate business-oriented governors, but evidently Sununu didn’t get the memo. Likewise, I doubt modern voters are interested in voting for Bush Lite The Next Generation. No thank you. An unwillingness to actual fight for conservative values is automatically disqualifying, and I don’t him bringing anything to the table as a Veep pick.
  • So there you have it. Four people who are not going to be the Republican Presidential Nominee in 2024.

    Bring on the Trump-DeSantis match!

    Former CIA Officer Mike Baker On Bad Intelligence And Putin

    Saturday, March 26th, 2022

    Here’s a snippet on the Russo-Ukrainian War from an interview Joe Rogan did with former CIA officer Mike Baker last week.

    Some takeaways:

  • Putin has been “pretty damn consistent over the years.”

    If you look at what he did in Chechnya, if you look at what he did helping Assad in Syria, if you look at what he did annexing Crimea, if you look at Georgia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia. Every step of the way he’s been following in his mind this stated desire, that he’s made very public over the years, to rebuild his sphere of influence.

  • We were too optimistic, thinking that he was thinking like we do in a rational process.
  • Intelligence on what Putin actually wants is hard because his inner circle keeps getting smaller and smaller.
  • Human intelligence is hard, and despite movies, blackmail or a honeytrap are rarely the most effective methods.
  • Putin was a KGB officer for 15 years, and he served in East Germany rather than the west. “He doesn’t really understand how we think.”
  • The collapse of communism 1989-1991 was a great opportunity for recruiting spies behind the iron curtain.
  • Putin thinks “You guys have disrespected me, fuck you all. I told you I want my spirit a sphere of influence, and I don’t care whether I have to break it.”
  • “He called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, and he’s he’s serious about that, he means that.”
  • He’s cut loose some of his own inner circle over the past couple of weeks.
  • “Was he given bad intel? Or was he given intel and choose to ignore it?” Like many dictators, Putin has a “thermocline of truth” (though Baker doesn’t use that phrase) between him and any possible bad news.
  • “They were gonna get in there, maybe within 48 hours, they were going to have control of Kiev, they would be welcomed by the population in Ukraine, and they would be able to establish a puppet regime.”
  • The Mainstream Media Are Lying Liars Who Win Pulitzers For Their Lies As Long As Their Lies Help Democrats

    Sunday, November 7th, 2021

    Here’s a Glenn Greenwald thread touching on several strands of mainstream media malfeasance, including the fact that #Russiagate was an obvious hoax manufactured by Donald Trump’s political enemies, and yet the “journalists” spreading lies still won a Pulitzer for their lies, and that the Hunter Biden emails are obviously real, with huge implications for national security, foreign policy, and Biden Administration corruption.

    I think the Ben Schreckinger book Greenwald is discussing is The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power, which I have not read.

    They sleep well because they believe doing The Will of the Party is far more important than telling the truth.

    All of these things contribute to the fact that the Democratic Media Complex is one of the least trusted institutions in the world. As a cherry on the top of this distrust, bloated leftwing media talking head Cirith Ungol Cenk Uygur put out a poll asking which was more responsible for damage to the country, right wing media or corporate media:

    It’s still running, so feel free to vote. And here’s a screenshot of the current results, just in case he deletes the results:

    Afghanistan: The Inevitable Disaster, More Disastrous Than Necessary

    Sunday, August 15th, 2021

    The current debacle unfolding in Afghanistan is a bipartisan disaster at least two decades in the making made much worse by the feckless incompetence of the Biden Administration.

    Defeat has long been baked into the Afghan pie by the failure of every Administration since Bush43 to grapple with the fact that Taliban has been armed and run by the Pakistani ISI essentially since their inception:

    The Pakistan government has repeatedly denied that it provides any military support to the Taliban in its diplomacy regarding its extensive operations in Afghanistan. Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting, Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support as the Taliban’s virtual emissaries abroad, arranging training for Taliban fighters, recruiting skilled and unskilled manpower to serve in Taliban armies, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occasions apparently directly providing combat support. In April and May 2001 Human Rights Watch sources reported that as many as thirty trucks a day were crossing the Pakistan border; sources inside Afghanistan reported that some of these convoys were carrying artillery shells, tank rounds, and rocket-propelled grenades. Such deliveries are in direct violation of U.N. sanctions. Pakistani landmines have been found in Afghanistan; they include both antipersonnel and antivehicle mines. Pakistan’s army and intelligence services, principally the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), contribute to making the Taliban a highly effective military force. While these Pakistani agencies do not direct the policies of the IEA, senior Pakistani military and intelligence officers help plan and execute major military operations. In addition, private-sector actors in Pakistan provide financial assistance to the Taliban.

    As if Osama Bin Laden being caught in Abbottabad and in regular contact with the ISI and Pakistani military officials just weren’t enough of a hint. In addition to jihadist sympathies by the Muslim government, Pakistans deep state regards Afghanistan as “strategic depth” against India. But for 20 years Washington has looked the other way while Pakistan continued that support and killed our troops because we let them obtain nuclear weapons (another spectacular failure from our craptacular CIA), and confronting them would be “inconvenient.”

    The United States could have declared victory and gone home after routing the Taliban in 2001, or after the first Presidential election in 2004, or the first parliamentary election in 2005. But our political elites deluded themselves into thinking that “nation building” could be accomplished in the land known as “The Grave of Empires,” that we could succeed where The British Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union all failed. Thus a great deal of lives and treasure were lost propping up various weak leaders to govern a nation that’s historically ungovernable.

    This was a bipartisan disaster, and another black eye for national security agencies that made mistake after mistake in the region, from backing jihadist idiots like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar over Ahmad Shah Massoud, to missing Pakistan’s nuclear program, to being unable to figure out how Pakistan is backing the Taliban despite over 20 years of evidence. One has to wonder if it’s mere incompetence, or if the ISI has one or more moles in the CIA. (It also wouldn’t surprise me if China has been financially backing the Taliban as well.),

    Like Vietnam, training native armies to fight for themselves (“Vietnamization”) has been a tremendous failure, and like Vietnam, the best and the brightest among our chattering elites fought the war in a way to make us stay in and lose. The result has been the headlong rout of the Afghan national army because evidently 20 years of time, blood and money isn’t enough to mold non-Jihadist Afghans into an effective fighting force.

    Yet all that said, the Biden Administration has made things immeasurably worse.

    Instead of a quiet orderly withdrawal behind the scenes, Biden precipitously announced a September 11 withdrawal, presumably as an giant “Fuck You” to everyone with an American flag on their pickup truck.

    Now the ostensible Afghan army is melting before the Taliban advance and leaving possibly billions of dollars of modern U.S. military equipment behind. And just as in Vietnam, we’ve had to rush to evacuate the U.S. embassy, burn secret documents and leave American allies to the tender mercies of our enemies. It’s almost as though ex-Obama Administration official wanted to see American prestige abjectly humiliated on the world stage as punishment for Americans who dared vote against them.

    The fact that we’ve achieved something like successful nation building in Iraq is a topic for another time. But in Iraq and Syria, President Trump announced we were going to be withdrawing U.S. troops, and then proceeded to bomb the snot out of Jihadist enemies and whacked Qassem Suleimani. And whoever was in charge of turning the Kurds into an effective fighting forces succeeded where those training the Afghans abjectly failed.

    If there’s any grim consolation in all this is the fact that the Taliban will likely have little better success in ruling Afghanistan’s various tribal factions than America has had. Funding functioning guerrilla armies is relatively easy, but turning Afghanistan into a functional country is probably impossible, and now the Taliban and their masters in Pakistani are stuck with that tar-baby.

    Biden’s CIA Pick Runs Think Tank Filthy With Chinese Money

    Tuesday, February 9th, 2021

    Well, this seems like a huge conflict of interest:

    William J. Burns, who is President Joe Biden’s nominee for director of the CIA, is president of a think tank that has received up to $2 million from a Chinese businessman as well as from a think tank with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

    As president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Burns also invited nearly a dozen congressional staffers to attend a junket to China, where they met with a communist party operative and a president of a Chinese front group.

    Burns, who was paid $540,580 last year as president of Carnegie, will appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee for a confirmation hearing likely to be held this month. He has been president of Carnegie since March 2015.

    During Burns’ tenure at Carnegie, a businessman named Zhang Yichen joined the think tank’s board of trustees.

    “We are very fortunate to have Zhang Yichen on our board,” Burns, a former deputy secretary of state, said in a statement in October 2016. “I look forward to working with him to make Carnegie an even finer institution.”

    Zhang, the CEO of CITIC Consulting, a China-based investment firm, donated between $500,000 and $999,999 to Carnegie from July 1, 2017, through June 30, 2018, according to Carnegie’s website. He gave between $250,000 and $549,999 in the 2020 fiscal year, according to Carnegie’s 2020 annual report.

    Zhang is a member of two organizations linked to the Chinese Communist Party, according to his biography at CITIC Capital: the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and the Center for China and Globalization.

    Can you imagine any Cold War president nominating a CIA director who worked for a think tank that took Soviet money? “Sure, Hubert J. Kissup’s Detente Institute took money from the Young Communist League, but you should confirm him because he’s a swell guy!”

    Notice how quickly our garbage elites went from “Ivanaka Trump sells clothing in Russia! This is a huge conflict of interest!” to “CIA director bringing in a half million dollars in Communist Chinese money at his last gig? Nothing to see here! Move along, pleb!”

    President Trump’s list of his administration’s accomplishments cites numerous instances of confronting and reigning-in communist China. However, Democratic Party grandees seem far more concerned with sucking up to, appeasing, and profiting off China than confronting it. From Hunter Biden’s documented payoffs from China to universities taking money from China to Hollywood studios bowing to censorship pressure to attempting to repress any mention of the possibility that the Wuhan cornavirus escaped from a Chinese lab to getting a case of the vapors over mentioning Flu Manchu as the “China Virus” to a sitting Democratic congressman literally banging a communist spy, our garbage Democratic ruling class is in bed with communist China both literally and figuratively.

    The Burns nomination should be rejected on the basis of his Chinese ties alone.

    LinkSwarm for October 2, 2020

    Friday, October 2nd, 2020

    Welcome to the October country, one of my favorite months! It being 2020, things lean rather more heavily on tricks than treats…

  • Two important points from Tuesday’s debate:

    (1) If he wins, Biden will almost certainly sign off on ending the filibuster to pack the courts and add two new states for a permanent Democrat majority that will leave the Constitution behind.

    (2) Trump may have announced that he’s about to reveal that the Democrats, from Obama on down, engaged in a coup against an American president.

    (Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)

  • Is CIA Director Gina Haspel personally blocking the release of Russiagate documents?
  • New documents show that the goal of the Flynn investigation wasn’t a search for truth, it was to get him fired.
  • So, who had “Armenian Azerbaijani War Over Nagorno Karabakh” on their 2020 bingo card? Here’s a map I swiped from Wikipedia:

    And here’s the Livemap.

  • France has accused Turkey of sending Syrian jihadists there to fight for Muslim Azerbaijan. Remember that Turkey killed over 1.5 million Armenians during the rise of the Young Turks as part of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, so the bad blood there goes back a long ways.
  • Virginia passes law decreeing that Christians have no right to that pesky First Amendment and must align their theology with the tranny mafia or face fines. Is your Church government approved, comrade? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Top Obama FBI official wants a commission to rule out any presidential candidates who threaten to bust their scams. Of course, he uses different language… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Has a member of Mueller’s team flipped for Durham?
  • Australian blogger examines Wuhan coronavirus data:

    Quick conclusion: Relative to the number of infections fewer people have died in the US than in Australia. So for all the talk about not letting us have a US style health system, it has performed relatively better than ours did. True, Australian base levels of health are higher than US levels. Relatively fewer people got infected here than in the US. (We can argue about why that happened in the comments – probably policy errors in themselves at the State level in the US). Once infected, however, it looks like the chances of survival was higher in the US.

  • Kuwait’s ruler Emir Sheikh Sabah dead at 91.
  • “Clare Bronfman Becomes First NXIVM Sex-Slave Trafficker to Get Jail Time.” Namely six years and nine months. You know it’s a crazy year when you don’t have time to pay attention rich, powerful weirdos being tried for running a sex cult…
  • Coinbase SJW babies: We have to be woke! Coinbase CEO: There’s the door.
  • Hopefully Spotify will do the same to staffers demanding the right to censor Joe Rogan.
  • What things irritate the left the most during a nomination fight? Republicans nominating blacks, women, or Hispanics. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Things generating irrational hatred in Trump Derangement Syndrome suffers this week is (rolls dice)…bales of hay in Rappahannock County, Virginia, population 7,252.
  • The Texas House District 148 battle features a fight between a Hispanic Republican against a Democratic candidate with even more ties than usual to communism. “During a July 2018 presentation, “The Art and Science of Building the Communist Party,” Chairman of the Houston chapter of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) Bernard Sampson boasted that his club had placed four communist party members on the Texas ballot, including Morales-Shaw who he specifically identified as a member of his group.”
  • NBA conference finals down 40% since last year, despite involving the Lakers.

    I think the explanation for plummeting viewership is fairly obvious, even if Strauss would rather not talk about it. Conservative America is disgusted with the NBA, and therefore is tuning it out. We’re disgusted with the way the league kowtows to China and even more disgusted with the embrace of the radical BLM movement by the league and its players.

    I didn’t watch a minute of the playoffs this year and rarely even checked the scores. Not because of what many of the players think about the police and about America, in general, as slanderous as those views are. And not even because players made pro-BLM gestures before the games began.

    My problem was what was allowed, indeed encouraged, during the games. I will not watch any sports event during which the preaching of politics or ideology occurs.

    I guess I’m not alone.

    Conservative America’s divorce from the NBA is a sign, I think, of things to come. Unless corporate America steps back from its embrace of woke leftism, we are going to have to divorce ourselves from large swathes of it. To the extent feasible, we may have to divorce ourselves from many of America’s public schools. And so forth.

  • New South Korean mini nuclear reactor that can’t melt down approved for use in the United States. First plant is scheduled to come online in Utah, but not until 2029. Faster, please.
  • How to disable the nightmarish bullshit that is the WordPress “Block” Editor.
  • And here’s the post I was tempted to write: “Fuck You WordPress, Yet Again (Block Editor).”
  • Ireland’s Supreme Court rules that Subway bread isn’t. You would think that if it used that much sugar it would taste better. Then again, I’m not sure I’ve bought a Subway sandwich since the heyday of the $5 Footlong era…
  • “See Inside a 1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom, the Most Expensive Rolls-Royce Ever Made.”
  • There would be an amusing Tweet here about a guy riding a wall of death with a lion, but some bastard hacked Iowahawk’s account.
  • The good news is that he’s back, the bad news is that right now he’s lacking all tweets after May 22. I hope they get that fixed soon.
  • Enjoy a movie review of The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
  • “Amy Coney Barrett Holds Press Conference In Handmaid’s Tale Costume Just To Mess With Liberals.”
  • “Democrats Prepare To Give Republicans Free Ad Footage Of Them Attacking Successful, Religious Mother Of 7.”
  • “Ninth Circuit Court Overturns Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green.)
  • “‘Coexist’ Molotov Cocktails Now Available.”
  • Looks like someone is worried about the competition:

  • The Permanent Coup and Its Media Enablers

    Saturday, November 9th, 2019

    Lovers of irony got a double dish this week when the Washington Post mused aloud whether Republicans would accept political outcomes they didn’t like:

    It takes a lot of damn gall for the Washington Post, one of the Democratic Media Complex’s premier peddlers of the Russian collusion fantasy and the Ukraine impeachment farce, to talk about “accepting the results of an election they don’t like,” since they’re at the tip of a the spear of what Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi, neither a conservative nor a fan of President Donald Trump, call a permanent coup:

    We are speeding toward a situation when someone in one of these camps refuses to obey a major decree, arrest order, or court decision, at which point Americans will get to experience the joys of their political futures being decided by phone calls to generals and police chiefs.

    My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.

    The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped.

    Snip.

    It was also a bold new foray into domestic politics by intelligence agencies that in recent decades began asserting all sorts of frightening new authority. They were kidnapping foreigners, assassinating by drone, conducting paramilitary operations without congressional notice, building an international archipelago of secret prisons, and engaging in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans. We found out in a court case just last week how extensive the illegal domestic surveillance has been, with the FBI engaging in tens of thousands of warrantless searches involving American emails and phone numbers under the guise of combating foreign subversion.

    The agencies’ new trick is inserting themselves into domestic politics using leaks and media pressure. The “intel chiefs” meeting was just the first in a series of similar stories, many following the pattern in which a document was created, passed from department from department, and leaked. A sample:

  • February 14, 2017: “four current and former officials” tell the New York Times the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence.
  • March 1, 2017: “Justice Department officials” tell the Washington Post Attorney General Jeff Sessions “spoke twice with Russia’s ambassador” and did not disclose the contacts ahead of his confirmation hearing.
  • March 18, 2017: “people familiar with the matter” tell the Wall Street Journal that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn failed to disclose a “contact” with a Russian at Cambridge University, an episode that “came to the notice of U.S. intelligence.”
  • April 8, 2017, 2017: “law enforcement and other U.S. officials” tell the Washington Post the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge had ruled there was “probable cause” to believe former Trump aide Carter Page was an “agent of a foreign power.”
  • April 13, 2017: a “source close to UK intelligence” tells Luke Harding at The Guardian that the British analog to the NSA, the GCHQ, passed knowledge of “suspicious interactions” between “figures connected to Trump and “known or suspected Russian agents” to Americans as part of a “routine exchange of information.”
  • December 17, 2017: “four current and former American and foreign officials” tell the New York Times that during the 2016 campaign, an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer told “American counterparts” that former Trump aide George Papadopoulos revealed “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.
  • April 13, 2018: “two sources familiar with the matter” tell McClatchy that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office has evidence Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was in Prague in 2016, “confirming part of [Steele] dossier.”
  • November 27, 2018: a “well-placed source” tells Harding at The Guardian that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
  • January 19, 2019: “former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation” tell the New York Times the FBI opened an inquiry into the “explosive implications” of whether or not Donald Trump was working on behalf of the Russians.
  • To be sure, “people familiar with the matter” leaked a lot of true stories in the last few years, but many were clearly problematic even at the time of release. Moreover, all took place in the context of constant, hounding pressure from media figures, congressional allies like Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, as well as ex-officials who could make use of their own personal public platforms in addition to being unnamed sources in straight news reports. They used commercial news platforms to argue that Trump had committed treason, needed to be removed from office, and preferably also indicted as soon as possible.

    A shocking number of these voices were former intelligence officers who joined Clapper in becoming paid news contributors. Op-ed pages and news networks are packed now with ex-spooks editorializing about stories in which they had personal involvement: Michael Morell, Michael Hayden, Asha Rangappa, and Andrew McCabe among many others, including especially all four of the original “intel chiefs”: Clapper, Rogers, Comey, and MSNBC headliner John Brennan.

    Russiagate birthed a whole brand of politics, a government-in-exile, which prosecuted its case against Trump via a constant stream of “approved” leaks, partisans in congress, and an increasingly unified and thematically consistent set of commercial news outlets.

    These mechanisms have been transplanted now onto the Ukrainegate drama. It’s the same people beating the public drums, with the messaging run out of the same congressional committees, through the same Nadlers, Schiffs, and Swalwells. The same news outlets are on full alert.

    The sidelined “intel chiefs” are once again playing central roles in making the public case. Comey says “we may now be at a point” where impeachment is necessary. Brennan, with unintentional irony, says the United States is “no longer a democracy.” Clapper says the Ukraine whistleblower complaint is “one of the most credible” he’s seen.

    As a reporter covering the 2015–2016 presidential race, I thought Trump’s campaign was disturbing on many levels, but logical as a news story. He succeeded for class reasons, because of flaws in the media business that gifted him mass amounts of coverage, and because he took cunning advantage of long-simmering frustrations in the electorate. He also clearly catered to racist fears, and to the collapse in trust in institutions like the news media, the Fed, corporations, NATO, and, yes, the intelligence services. In enormous numbers, voters rejected everything they had ever been told about who was and was not qualified for higher office.

    Trump’s campaign antagonism toward the military and intelligence world was at best a millimeter thick. Like almost everything else he said as a candidate, it was a gimmick, designed to get votes. That he was insincere and full of it and irresponsible, at first at least, when he attacked the “deep state” and the “fake news media,” doesn’t change the reality of what’s happened since. Even paranoiacs have enemies, and even Donald “Deep State” Trump is a legitimately elected president whose ouster is being actively sought by the intelligence community.

    Snip.

    Trump, at least insofar as we know, has not used section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor political rivals. He hasn’t deployed human counterintelligence “informants” to follow the likes of Hunter Biden. He hasn’t maneuvered to secure Special Counsel probes of Democrats.

    And while Donald Trump conducting foreign policy based on what he sees on Fox and Friends is troubling, it’s not in the same ballpark as CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times engaging in de facto coverage partnerships with the FBI and CIA to push highly politicized, phony narratives like Russiagate.

    Trump’s tinpot Twitter threats and cancellation of White House privileges for dolts like Jim Acosta also don’t begin to compare to the danger posed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter – under pressure from the Senate – organizing with groups like the Atlantic Council to fight “fake news” in the name of preventing the “foment of discord.”

    I don’t believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.

    That piece also spawned a very interesting comments thread, including this comment from a Chuck McClenon:

    We’ve long whispered about the Deep State, assuming that the Intelligence Community should have counter-intelligence responsibilities, out of sight, protecting the Executive branch from moles planted by foreign foes, and that our secret agents would, if necessary, quietly dispatch a Manchurian Candidate. But we assume that he deep state are protecting us from foreign foes, and that the less said beyond that, the better. And we assume they operate out of some sub-basement of the CIA in Langley.

    But what we appear to have here is an alternative version in which the Deep State protects the Domestic interests of the Elite — that group of financial powers of whom nobody went to jail for any misdeeds leading to the 2008 crisis, that group which also happen to control the media which control the boundary lines of permissible political discussion, as Matt has documented in his precious book. Let us suppose that the Washington Swamp works for that elite, serve it and profit from it. And let us suppose that the Deep State are not there to protect the constitutionally designated Executive branch, but to guard and protect the Swamp.

    And so for a candidate from outside of those boundaries to be elected president, that’s not merely a threat to the power of the institutional media, it’s an existential threat to the security of all the swamp creatures. Alligators are usually solitary and don’t usually work in teams, but we suppose they are wired to respond with the same instincts and to swarm and attack the intruder.

    And since you and I understand that the alligators in the moat, or in the swamp, are there to protect against invaders, and we see them attack, we are conditioned to cheer for the alligators. They are doing their job. And if they are promoting the story that they are protecting us from Russians, all the better.

    But who do the alligators serve? Who can protect us against them? That’s the context in which Matt has framed the question, which is the worse choice to lead the country, Donald Trump, with all his known flaws and evils? Or the swamp gators? I heard Rudy Giuliani last week say something to the effect that Trump was elected on the promise of draining the swamp, but none of us has a clue how bad the swamp was. Say it ain’t so.

    Too extreme? Only if you believe that every CIA operative and MSM reporter are in on the scam. But when you see that vast swathes of our theoretically neutral elites have signed on to undo President Trump election because it hurts the interlocking interests of the permanent ruling class and the Democratic Party, it doesn’t seem like a stretch at all.