The Hughes-Nixon-Lansky Connection

President Nixon’s immediate answer to news of the Watergate burglary arrests was simple: The CIA, he told Haldeman (as recorded by the White House tapes) would close off the investigation because **if it gets out that this is ail involved, the Cuba thing would be a fiasco — it would make the CIA look bad — and it is likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing...” Watergate, the Bay of Pigs, indeed a change of government in the Bahamas and a paint company going into real estate and gambling ail were woven together, all rooted in a World War II alliance.

The ‘Twitter Files’ Is What It Claims to Expose (NY Magazine)

In sum: The New York Post published a story based on data that was apparently — but, at the time, unverifiably — Hunter Biden’s. That story falsely purported to offer “smoking gun” evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, when it actually provided no such thing. Faced with warnings from federal law enforcement about impending foreign hacks, and a story based on apparently stolen emails sourced from Rudy Giuliani, Twitter’s content moderation team chose to suppress the Post article. That decision was internally controversial, and even those who supported it said that they wished they had more information about the source of the emails. Within 24 hours, Twitter reversed course. It is possible that this reduced the ultimate reach of the Post’s story, which, given that story’s mendacious content, probably would have been beneficial to public understanding of the Trump-Biden race (after all, there was exponentially more evidence that Donald Trump had used public power to advance his family’s private business interests than evidence that Biden had done so, yet the Post’s story conveyed the opposite impression). But it’s also possible that Twitter’s decision actually increased the story’s prominence by endowing it with an aura of forbidden knowledge. Separately, when the Biden campaign flagged tweets that featured pornographic images, Twitter responded by enforcing its own rules.

Lawmakers Set to Propose Record $847B for Defense, $45B Over Biden’s Request

Indeed, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has never passed an audit. Critics point out that over half of the defense budget goes toward private contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, resulting in huge profits for these companies; in the first three quarters of 2022, while the public has been suffering due to inflation, Lockheed Martin made over $4.2 billion in profit, while Raytheon reported an operating profit of over $3.9 billion.

The JFK Cover-Up Strikes Again by James K. Galbraith

The irony is that by withholding the records, the government has already admitted, without saying so, that the Warren Commission lied and that there are vile secrets which it is determined to protect. It concedes, without saying so, that there was a conspiracy and that there is an ongoing cover-up. If there were not, all the records would have been released long ago. You don’t have to be a “conspiracy theorist” to see this.

Mort Sahl Dead: Stand-Up Comedian Tackled Political Themes - Variety

Throughout his career, Sahl frequently provoked his audience. Everyone was fair game. He went after Joseph McCarthy and the blacklist, Eisenhower and even Kennedy, whom he admired. The politically skeptical comic once declared, “Democrats are the left wing of the Republican party. Do you want vanilla or French vanilla?” Another time he said: “Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen.”

He was unyielding, even in old age. In 2011, the 84-year-old Sahl began his show at a Mill Valley, Calif., club before a pro-Obama crowd with the line, “No, he can’t.” He continued performing near his Mill Valley home

“If you were the last man on earth,” Sahl told an interviewer, “I’d have to oppose you. That’s my job.”

One of a kind original to the end. Here is his first recording. The manic energy is stunning.

Did the Coronavirus Escape From a Lab?

As Shi explained to Scientific American, late in December 2019, she heard from the director of the Wuhan Institute that there was an outbreak of a new disease in the city. Medical samples taken from hospital patients arrived at her lab for analysis. Shi determined that the new virus was related to SARS but even more closely related to a bat disease that her own team had found on a virus-hunting trip: the now-famous RaTG13. Shi was surprised that the outbreak was local, she said: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” The bat hiding places that she’d been visiting were, after all, as far away as Orlando, Florida, is from New York City. Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.” If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. Right then, there should have been a comprehensive, pockets-inside-out, fully public investigation of the Virology Institute, along with the other important virus labs in Wuhan, including the one close by the seafood market, headquarters of the Wuhan CDC. There should have been interviews with scientists, interviews with biosafety teams, close parsings of laboratory notebooks, freezer and plumbing and decontamination systems checks — everything. It didn’t happen.

QAnon Woke Up the Real Deep State | by Nicholas Grossman | Jan, 2021 | Arc Digital

The president appoints and the Senate confirms top officials, from the Secretary of State to the five members of the Arctic Research Commission, over 1,200 in total. Every other executive branch employee — over 4 million if you include the military, over 2.7 million if you don’t — is hired or recruited, not elected or appointed. This means that the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, the intelligence community, and federal law enforcement are staffed with people the agencies hired themselves.

Their mandates are broad. For example, the FBI is supposed to “investigate federal crimes and threats to national security.” While there are laws giving the FBI certain powers (e.g. to arrest people) and limits (needing warrants), a lot is open to interpretation, especially regarding national security threats.

It’s fair to say the FBI, CIA, IRS, CDC, and other federal agencies have, to some extent, taken on lives of their own. So has the military, and the larger defense-industrial complex. They’re under control of elected and appointed leaders, but also not, acting according to established laws, established regulations (many of which they wrote themselves), and individual judgment calls. You could call that “the Deep State.”

The Pro-Trump Mob Was Doing It For The Gram

But it was also quickly apparent that this was a very dumb coup. A coup with no plot, no end to achieve, no plan but to pose. Thousands invaded the highest centers of power, and the first thing they did was take selfies and videos. They were making content as spoils to take back to the digital empires where they dwell, where that content is currency.

You can see this most clearly in this photo, where the man in the god-knows-what costume, Jake Angeli, the so-called QAnon Shaman, is posing on the dais of the Senate, his friends carefully framing him to get the perfect shot. It is the Trump supporter equivalent of an Instagram influencer getting a photo beside a perfect mural.

Opinion: The election shows the United States is a broken country - The Globe and Mail

The current American crisis is in part due to those officials who refused to curb Mr. Trump’s worst behaviour. When organized crime hijacks government, officials must act aggressively, transparently, and immediately. They cannot waste time like Robert Mueller did with his plodding, placating probe. They cannot “impeach at the ballot box,” which Nancy Pelosi – a staunch opponent of impeachment until she buckled to pressure from her colleagues and the public – suggested throughout 2019. They cannot go by the book when the book is burning.

Congress Gets Ready to Smash Big Tech Monopolies - BIG by Matt Stoller

What makes these platforms unusually dangerous is that they are gatekeepers with surveillance power, and they can thus wield “near-perfect market intelligence” to copy or undermine would-be rivals. For Apple the dominant facility is the App store, for Google it’s the search engine, Maps, adtech, etc, for Facebook it’s social media, and for Amazon it’s the marketplace, AWS, Alexa, Fulfillment, and so forth. They exploit their gatekeeping and surveillance power to extract revenue, fortify their competitive barriers, and subsidize entry into new markets.

Over and over, the report just lays into the Federal Trade Commission and Antitrust Division for refusing to enforce monopolization laws and failing to stop mergers, even when they had evidence that such mergers were anti-competitive. The four companies bought more than 500 companies since 1998. However, "for most, if not all, of the acquisitions discussed in this Report,” it says, “the FTC had advance notice of the deals, but did not attempt to block any of them." What were the priorities of the agencies? "Both agencies have targeted their enforcement efforts on relatively small players—including ice skating teachers and organists—raising questions about their enforcement priorities." Ouch.

The Biggest Loser | DCReport.org

The story of Trump’s taxes is the story of a man whose lying, cheating, stealing and continual need for cash to sustain the image of a multi-billionaire has made him vulnerable to kompromat. It is the story of a known tax cheat who has taken an oath to uphold and defend our Constitution but ignores that oath, violate that oath.

It is a story whose most salient financial circumstances and connections remain hidden. And they will remain hidden unless we demand transparency not from Trump, who will never be open, but from our Congress.

Resistance Means More Than Voting | by Garry Wills | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

Obama said that people who “secretly aren’t following the president’s orders” are not defending democracy: “These people are not elected. They’re not accountable.”

Interesting, and telling, that Obama seems to consider elections the sole means of accountability. So elected officials are the only persons who may affect change. And if they torture, commit war crimes, perpetrate massive financial fraud and theft, run illegal assassination programs, the only way to hold them accountable is vote them out. And once voted out, they are punished as much as can be. We know that's what Obama believes because that is exactly what happened during his terms.

White House leakers leak about leaking - Axios

"Otherwise," the official added, "you have to realize that working here is kind of like being in a never-ending 'Mexican Standoff.' Everyone has guns (leaks) pointed at each other and it's only a matter of time before someone shoots. There's rarely a peaceful conclusion so you might as well shoot first."

I Know Which Country the U.S. Will Invade Next

This leaves only one question: Who will be next on the list of U.S. illegal invasions cloaked in bullshit justifications? Well, last week, Iran finally did it: It switched from the dollar to the euro. And sure enough, this week, the U.S. military industrial complex, the corporate media and Israel all got together to claim that Iran is lying about its nuclear weapons development. What are the odds that this news would break within days of Iran dropping the dollar? What. Are. The. Odds?

I, Cringely Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and our personal data - I, Cringely

Much like Nigerian spammers purposely including spelling errors in their emails to trap “dumb” people —the quizzes on Facebook about “Which Star Wars character are you?” are there just to get you to authorize them. Then they go harvest your data. The authorization is built into the terms of service when you take the test.

So don’t take any Facebook quizzes, surveys, or tests — EVER.

The aspect of this story that ought to be of most concern to Facebook members is that once I have authorized someone to use my Facebook data I have authorized them to use not only my data but also that of all my Facebook friends!

As of this morning I have 2,980 Facebook friends. If I was stupid enough to authorize the release of my data I’d be authorizing the release of all the data on 2,980 other people, too. Now maybe I have more Facebook connections than most people, but you can see how getting only a few thousand survey responses can yield hundreds of thousands of records.

I’m told the average active Facebook member has 250 friends, so one person signing up is like getting 250 full and complete profiles. It’s such a broken system with no way to ever opt out.

The fax of life - Vox

“We don’t expect Amazon and Walmart to share background on their customers, but we do expect competing hospital system to do so,” says David Blumenthal, who coordinated health policy for the Obama administration from 2011 to 2013. “Those institutions consider that data proprietary and an important business asset. We should never have expected it to occur naturally, that these organizations would readily adopt information exchange.”

And this is the problem: health care providers are expected to act not in the patients' interests but in the health care providers' interests. What could go wrong?

San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich Calls President Trump ‘Soulless Coward’

Speaking to The Nation’s Dave Zirin, Popovich lambasted Trump for his “never-ending divisiveness” and called him a “pathological liar” who is “unfit intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically” to be president.

“This man in the Oval Office is a soulless coward who thinks that he can only become large by belittling others,” the coach continued.

“This has of course been a common practice of his, but to do it in this manner — and to lie about how previous presidents responded to the deaths of soldiers — is as low as it gets,” he said.

“The people who work with this president should be ashamed because they know it better than anyone just how unfit he is, and yet they choose to do nothing about it. This is their shame most of all.”

Bob Costas defends Colin Kaepernick and the NFL protests after Trump's attack — Quartz

Kaepernick has repeatedly said that his protest had nothing to do with the US military. But even before Trump became president, American sports, and football in particular, have been increasingly militarized, almost becoming a brand extension of the US armed forces. The Pentagon pays the NFL millions of dollars each year to host patriotic events during games, which include full-field displays of the flag.

“[Patriotism] has been conflated with a bumper-sticker kind of flag-waving and with the military only,” Costas added, “so that people cannot see that in his own way, Colin Kaepernick, however imperfectly, is doing a patriotic thing.”

I find Costas repugnant, but in his own way, however imperfectly, what he is saying here is insightful. The USA is, and has been since we got the bomb, a military machine. War and violence are so ingrained and assimilated into the culture one wonders if it can ever be undone.

The Senate’s Military Spending Increase Alone Is Enough to Make Public College Free

One of the most controversial proposals put forward by Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential campaign was a pledge to make tuition free at public colleges and universities. Critics from both parties howled that the pie-in-the-sky idea would bankrupt the country. Where, after all, would the money come from?

Those concerns were brushed aside on Monday night, as the Senate overwhelmingly approved an $80 billion annual increase in military spending, enough to have fully satisfied Sanders’ campaign promise. Instead, the Senate handed President Trump far more than the $54 billion he asked for. The lavish spending package gives Trump a major legislative victory, allowing him to boast about fulfilling his promise of a “great rebuilding of the armed services.”

The bill would set the U.S.’s annual military budget at around $700 billion, putting it within range of matching the spending level at the height of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy | The Nation

NC: Social democracy, yeah. That’s sometimes called “the golden age of modern capitalism.” That changed in the ’70s with the onset of the neoliberal era that we’ve been living in since. And if you ask yourself what this era is, its crucial principle is undermining mechanisms of social solidarity and mutual support and popular engagement in determining policy.

It’s not called that. What it’s called is “freedom,” but “freedom” means a subordination to the decisions of concentrated, unaccountable, private power. That’s what it means. The institutions of governance—or other kinds of association that could allow people to participate in decision making—those are systematically weakened. Margaret Thatcher said it rather nicely in her aphorism about “there is no society, only individuals.”