may be rude

so on the last page i went over why i don't think trump is simply pretending to be putin's stooge, i listed some things that US defense intel would not allow to happen, even if they were doing a deep op. here's another (but with a twist): the bounties. if the president were a deep state pigeon, luring russian intel into a trap, would they let russia pay to kill US troops? info operations do have this dark side. sometimes you have to let your own troops go to their deaths because you cannot reveal a channel of information. like in world war 2, D-Day was a success largely thanks to a massive disinfo operation called Operation Fortitude, in which the allies successfully convinced the Nazis that the inevitable contintental landing attempt would take place at a location different than Normandy. a wartime scenario like this is an example in which it may unfortunately be the correct ethical choice to let some of your own troops go to their deaths, so as to not reveal an info operation. but the bounties situation does not look like that kind of a scenario, in terms of the ethical calculation. i don't think the US would have trump ignore the bounties. here is my point though. the russian bounties were a major escalation, on russia's part. that's like killing US troops. you pay to have US troops killed, that is an escalation. it's genuinely striking that they did this, even with stooge trump momentarily in power. ONE THING THAT COULD EXPLAIN IT: this would be a test. if you are russia, and you are wondering what i've been wondering, "is trump a pigeon," this is how you could test it. see if he lets you get away with the bounties. that's something a genuinely compromised trump would let russia get away with, but it's not something a US intel informant trump would let russia get away with. please note the qualifiers in my language indicating that these are speculative ideas.

well i think it's more likely than not that the russian mob has had compromising stuff on him since before he announced he was running. it requires no stretch of the imagination. anyone who looks at trump sees a mark. in addition to this natural potential for compromise, there is a significant amount of reporting suggesting that trump got himself specifically indebted to entities from the russian mafia world (deutsche bank loans given to trump when other lenders wouldn't loan to him, reportedly guaranteed/cosigned by either russian oligarchs or russian state bank vtb). i think we all noticed trump's fawning behavior toward putin. if you look at the footage, trump's posture, expression, and gesturing all seem to communicate "hey, you can help me and i can help you." it's hard to believe, so people don't believe it, but if you look at it, that's what it looks like. in addition to that strange public messaging, close observers also noticed how putin's wishlist has continually been granted (whitewashing russia's 2016 US election interference, providing sanction relief, declining to enact new sanctions, weakening NATO, removing troops from syria, undermining ukraine, ending wargames with south korea, removing troops from germany, to name a few). so i am operating under the assumption that trump has got himself into a position where he has decided to try to do some shady dealing with the russians. once he goes down that road, he's immediately outmatched. trump does not beat russian intel at chess. cohen testified that trump had him lie to congress about the timeline of moscow tower negotiations in 2016. so he's already on the other side of the line, right there. that's him dealing with the russians for personal gain and breaking US law in order to cover it up.

july 2020

there was a time when i considered possible the scenario in which tump were a double-double agent. i.e., putin was working his ear, but he had turned informant for US intel. that would make a great tom clancy novel. the president draws out a foreign intel plot to bring down the US from within. in this scenario, maybe US intel would even allow the president to go so far as to push for invoking the insurrection act, and to push for deploying federal police in states against governnor demands, and condition his followers to question the election (months ahead of time). this could be seen as an innoculation, if undertaken in a controlled way. put a crazy guy in there to flip all the switches, so that the rest of the country is forced to deal with the potential for this. hard to imagine that US defense intel would abide trump's actions towards ukraine, while they were at war with russia. also abandoning the kurds to slaughter in syria. even harder to imagine US defense intel allowing the president, in such a scenario, to ALLOW a deadly pandemic to spread in the US, claiming lives of .05% of the US population in 4 months. i could go on, but my point is that i've become convinced that trump is not a double-double agent, pretending to be traitor to putin while secretly dishing all to US intelligence. so, IF and WHEN you CONTINUE to see things where it seems as though the trump administration is being coached and/or worked by putin's military intelligence, it is important to know that this is NOT the sort of illusion explainable by US intel operations. for example, we now see not only a SECOND attempt to pit executive branch martial forces against state martial forces, but it's also a SECOND attempt to provoke the unrest that could be used as a pretense for further internal military escalation. these are coincidences worth noting. and they're not the first coincidences. even the fact that we SEE these things plays into the expected russian strategy. they would want us to think the president is a traitor. and this was one of the fishy things about the mueller findings, the russian's never acted like they didn't want to be caught. and this was one of the fishy things about the ukraine scandal, it's like putin got trump to do it knowing that trump would get caught.

2x202 st5 and cirklon1 are 2 favorites of the aphex revival

i guess actually making us forcibly remove him is exactly trump's style.

wap release the kraken earth does not get better from here but we may have some tunes

ben wittes, steve vladeck, and kate klonick of the lawfare podcast going over some of the details surrounding the little green men in portland. they start on the subject around 5 minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UE8wrilGKU

so uh this looks like provocation... and to what ends? Trump has been messaging about taking over cities with higher crime rates. Fox falsely portrays BLM protests as "rioters." it was only really the first weekend, back in may, when rioting as an organic part of the protests occurred. after the first week or so the statistics would show that 99% of protests were completely peaceful, and whatever incidents existed in the remaining 1% could typically be attributed to infiltrators, provocateurs and opportunists, who are distinct from the protestors. really, it seems more like it would round to 100% of the protests were peaceful, after that first week or two, yet fox never stopped talking about rioters and violent thugs in the cities... we saw trump conferring with pence, esper, and barr about invocation of the insurrection act, which would allow an unchecked martial law situation. we saw trump, during that first week of protests, trying to inflame unrest with antagonistic public statements. as the BLM movement has tempered, organized, and protests have decreased, we now see barr deploying secret police and abducting protestors the next day portland protests swelled in size. are they trying to stoke unrest, while simultaneously establishing a secret police? trump outrage plays into their hands. people need to play things smart and keep an eye on the others.

despots are like raccoons. you have to put a lid on your democracy or they will get in there.

good fauci today

i was speaking in generalities to make the point of comparing the typical citizen's interaction with news then versus now. maybe i should have described that comparison differently. back then the channels through which one could access info were extremely more limited. there was less access and there was less info available. journalistic institutions had evolved to function as the apparatus of society responsible for news, and they filtered out stuff like russian military disinfo, which now simply gets posted to a blog and retweeted. they provided that fact-checking service, however imperfect. now that we have the direct access, we need to be able to fact-check. that's the point, stated differently.

that's a good way to put it. some thoughts: liars accuse those who would call them out as themselves being liars. hostile foreign disinformation operations have the objective of disrupting the target's information supply. they sew distrust and confusion. the question of which sources of information are more trustworthy is an important one. there are only so many and it's possible for individuals to compare and contrast, in order to learn where and what the spins may be. this is the basic practice that constitutes the solution. not only do you learn the spins, you also learn the mechanisms by which editors and writers of different outlets produce very different stories about the same events. for example, good journalistic practices of citing sources and providing a replicatable process for verifying information may be found in some outlets more than others. also, stories may be authored around such journalistic practices of information lineage, or, alternatively, they may be authored around purposes of presenting a narrative using suggestion and innuendo. the fundamental structure and read of an article is different, depending on whether they are reporting new facts and presenting context around those, or whether they are engaging in battle in the information space and seeking to influence opinions. we cannot expect 100% of the population to dig in, that way. we are forced through trial and fire to establish new social norms by which individuals interact with each-other and communicate about journalism, which is newly important because of the changed information environment. people in the early 90's didn't know shit about politics and journalism. they were much more distant from it, and had to take what they could get to a much greater extent. world actors knew they had that veil. now, with the internet, the public gets greater access, but also, now they have to sift through the raw material themselves, which was something that the journalistic institutions of the past, functioning as middle-men, had served the purpose of. so those conversations with your family members in which you inquire about what news sources they use are actually fatefully important. those discussions do not have a feel of being a societal ritual, because this is a newer social function. but when you are able to be real with someone in a friendly way and help illuminate some aspect of the situation for them, this is an example of the new behaviors that are being evolved by the species as an adaptation to a change in the environment. the responsibility is decentralized. now the individual nodes tend after each-other. everyone doesn't have to have an opinion. we need to quash the childish reflex for someone who doesn't analyze news to feel entitled to weigh in. i don't know how but somehow we need to gently explain to these people that they need to either dig in or be quiet. it's not a pointless question like what's your favorite sports team. don't give me an answer if you don't know. say you don't know. tl:dr: you describe the appearance of the problem well, but it is approachable. humanity cannot allow a post-truth world. we have entered into an era of informaton warfare but it does not have to last forever.

the idiocracy prequel continues to write itself

cool! cue sheet pls

suicide is not a solution. suicidal thoughts are a symptom of a physiological disorder. focus on the things that do keep your interest. feel better. consider professional treatment.

got this trying to edit a posted message

i need to listen to more exm. love twels. hadn't thought of exm for twels. kind of different for him/her. but maybe not. dude has a big discography. lot of good stuff.

can we ban brian @Joyrex

the media is allied with ratings. they helped trump win. they're in love with the revenue coming from his perpetual controversy, even if they think they hate him. it's actually really sad to see these institutions struggle with the ethics of the choices they have to make. there was a lot of pressure on the networks to stop covering trump's covid press conferences, because he was using them as a free platform to pump lying rhetoric into voter ears, under the guise of epidemic info. easy ratings for the networks. viewers of msnbc and cnn were pissed at the networks and were letting them know that, and the networks were trying to pry themselves free from trump's fake covid pageant ratings teat. sometimes starting coverage late, sometimes ending coverage early, sometimes breaking away from the covid press conference and then returning, and sometimes just not covering it. some networks said they would try to fact-check them in real time, but they didn't end up really doing that, though some anchors would comment on them in their own ways. it was around the disinfectant injection episode that the white house covid press conferences kind of went away. they stopped being daily. at first they moved to earlier in the day for like a week but then they just went away. the networks were already struggling with their choice of offering the megaphone to the biggest liar causing the most deaths. cnn and msnbc were already on the brink of just stopping coverage. i think word got from the networks to the white house that they couldn't keep displacing their primetime shows to cover trump's shit shows anymore. especially if they lost birx and fauci, who were openly bristling at the nature of the pressers. so it's not idle speculation. you can witness the craven addiction of the media outlets to ratings. they air what is likely to get and keep the highest number of viewers. their agenda is not anti-trump. their agenda is pro-ratings. and actually that worked to get trump elected and it continues to amplify his messaging.

shame and ridicule have a role to play in civilized society. the new obscenity is not words like "shit," it's behaving like a shit head. the world of the future has a special place for the insistently dense and the champions of immorality.

bbq emerges as winner of nts sessions?