Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Angela Merkel uses eyes and hands to try and convince Putin that North Korea fired an ICBM

The determination that North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) this week is based on the extrapolation of its range if aimed on a standard trajectory rather than the very steep trajectory of its actual launch, as illustrated below:


In conversation with Vladamir Putin today, Angela Merkel appears to have had difficulty in pressing home the argument as her eyes tracked the steep trajectory of the missile:


Then she resorted to hand motions:

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Trump admonished the media for not being subtle and smart. Then he posted this…

On Saturday night, Donald Trump said “the press has destroyed themselves because they went too far. Instead of being subtle and smart, they used a hatchet.”

Today he posted his own subtle and smart video on Twitter:

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NASA denies that it’s running a child slave colony on Mars

The Daily Beast reports: A report on Alex Jones’ InfoWars claiming child sex slaves have been kidnapped and shipped to Mars is untrue, NASA told The Daily Beast on Thursday.

“There are no humans on Mars. There are active rovers on Mars. There was a rumor going around last week that there weren’t. There are,” Guy Webster, a spokesperson for Mars exploration at NASA, told The Daily Beast. “But there are no humans.”

On Thursday’s program, the InfoWars host welcomed guest Robert David Steele onto The Alex Jones Show, which airs on 118 radio stations nationwide, to talk about kidnapped children he said have been sent on a two-decade mission to space.

“We actually believe that there is a colony on Mars that is populated by children who were kidnapped and sent into space on a 20-year ride,” said Steele. “So that once they get to Mars they have no alternative but to be slaves on the Mars colony.”

Jones echoed Steele, saying “clearly they don’t want us looking into what is happening” because “every time probes go over they turn them off.”

“Look, I know that 90 percent of the NASA missions are secret and I’ve been told by high level NASA engineers that you have no idea. There is so much stuff going on,” Jones said.

At the beginning of his campaign in December of 2015, President Donald Trump told Alex Jones that “your reputation is amazing” and “I will not let you down” in a half-hour interview on InfoWars. [Continue reading…]

If an objective metric for establishing population-wide gullibility was internationally accepted, I have little doubt that America would rank #1.

Paradoxically, the incapacity to think clearly renders the gullible at risk of repeatedly getting duped rather than wising up.

When those with little power and little education, through the experience of being marginalized form an indiscriminate suspicion of all branches of The Establishment — government, science, academia, the mainstream media — they all the more easily get seduced by anti-establishment crackpots like Alex Jones. His perceived credibility derives solely from his clownish posturing as a fearless rebel — a little guy bold enough to challenge power.

Culpability for this state of affairs does in part rest with those in positions of influence who long felt comfortable with the notion that segments of the population could effectively be written off and treated as though they don’t exist.

The failure to build a truly inclusive society is what opened the door to throngs of crackpot radio show hosts and now a deranged president. America is now paying the price for all those it has left behind.

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Assad will ‘pay a heavy price’ if he launches another chemical attack, says White House. More ‘after-dinner entertainment’ for Trump’s guests?

The Washington Post reports: The White House issued an ominous warning to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Monday night, pledging that his regime would pay a “heavy price” if it carried out another chemical attack this year.

In a statement, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that the United States had detected evidence of preparations for a chemical attack, similar to the preparations that occurred before an attack in April.

“The United States has identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime that would likely result in the mass murder of civilians, including innocent children,” Spicer said in the statement. “The activities are similar to preparations the regime made before its April 4, 2017 chemical weapons attack.

“As we have previously stated, the United States is in Syria to eliminate the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” he continued. “If, however, Mr. Assad conducts another mass murder attack using chemical weapons, he and his military will pay a heavy price. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Several military officials were caught off guard by the statement from President Trump’s press secretary, but it was unclear how closely held the intelligence regarding a potential chemical attack was. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Several State Department officials typically involved in coordinating such announcements said they were caught completely off guard by the warning, which didn’t appear to have been discussed in advance with other national security agencies. Typically, the State Department, the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies would all be consulted before the White House issued a declaration sure to ricochet across foreign capitals.

A non-governmental source with close ties to the White House said the administration had received intelligence that the Syrians were mixing precursor chemicals for a possible sarin gas attack in either the east or south of the country, where government troops and allied forces have faced recent setbacks.

The U.S. attack on a Syrian air base came after years of heated debate and deliberation in Washington over intervention in the bloody civil war. Chemical weapons have killed hundreds of people since the start of the conflict.

The U.S. is providing air support and arms to Kurdish-led Syrian forces who are fighting to drive the Islamic State group from Raqqa, the extremists’ self-styled capital.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Tuesday that Washington would continue to provide weapons after the Raqqa battle is over. His comments were likely to anger Turkey, which views the Kurdish fighters as an extension of the insurgency raging in its southeast.

On Monday, Trump had dinner with Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and other top officials as he hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House. [Continue reading…]

The connection could be simply coincidental, but I find it curious that Trump’s first cruise missile strike on Syria and now this latest threat both occurred while he was acting as dinner host to the leaders of the world’s two largest states, China and India.

After the April attack, Variety reported:

Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross recalled the scene at Mar-a-Lago on April 6, when the summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping was interrupted by the strike on Syria.

“Just as dessert was being served, the president explained to Mr. Xi he had something he wanted to tell him, which was the launching of 59 missiles into Syria,” Ross said. “It was in lieu of after-dinner entertainment.”

Whether Trump, yesterday evening, murmured to India’s PM Modi something to the effect that he might soon need to give Assad another lesson on the application of American power, I have no idea.

Even so, when it comes to Assad’s use of chemical weapons, there’s little reason to believe that their impact on innocent children is uppermost among Trump’s concerns.

Back in 2013, Trump insisted that the U.S. had nothing to gain by getting involved in Syria and that Obama shouldn’t launch strikes without Congressional approval. He also tweeted, “I would not go into Syria, but if I did it would be by surprise and not blurted all over the media like fools.”

Nowadays it would seem he’s less concerned about maintaining the element of surprise as the White House blurts out its warning.

Given that Trump’s red lines seem to get daubed in such a haphazard way across Syria, his actions are perhaps better interpreted as serving as a form of self-expression and an instrument through which on a world stage, seated along side world leaders, he gets to assert his position as the alpha male.

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Trump slanders Comey in Fox & Friends interview

The New York Times reports: President Trump appeared to acknowledge on Friday in an interview that his tweet hinting of taped conversations with James B. Comey was intended to influence the fired F.B.I. director’s testimony before Congress, and he emphasized that he committed “no obstruction” of the inquiries into whether his campaign colluded with Russia.

The interview, with “Fox & Friends,” was shown one day after the president tweeted what most people in Washington had already come to believe: that he had not made recordings of his conversations with Mr. Comey.

Instead, the president explained in the television interview, his tweets were referring to the possibility that anyone could have taped those discussions.

“I’ve been reading about it for the last couple of months about the seriousness of the horribleness of the situation with surveillance all over the place,” the president said in the interview. “So you never know what’s out there, but I didn’t tape, and I don’t have any tape and I didn’t tape.”

When the Fox interviewer suggested that the possible existence of recordings might make sure Mr. Comey “stayed honest in those hearings,” Mr. Trump paused before responding, “Well, it wasn’t very stupid, I can tell you that.”

Referring to Mr. Comey, the president said that “when he found out that I, you know, that there may be tapes out there whether it’s governmental tapes or anything else and who knows, I think his story may have changed.” [Continue reading…]

“When he found out that I…” — at this point Trump’s brain catches up with his mouth. He can’t say that Comey “found out” that Trump recorded their conversations, having finally confirmed what everyone already assumed — that he didn’t record them.

Comey’s revelation, Trump would have us believe, was that thanks to a tweet, Comey firstly was alerted to the possibility that their conversations could have been recorded by parties unknown, and secondly on that basis he had second thoughts about lying about the content of those conversations.

Put simply, Trump is saying that had he not alerted Comey to the possibility of having been recorded, the former director of the FBI would have lied.

What Trump has yet to grasp is that each time he questions Comey’s integrity, he’s also implicitly questioning the integrity of the FBI officials and Mueller’s team who are currently investigating him.

Trump persistently acts as a man who sees himself as the target of an investigation he wants to thwart, undermine, and swiftly curtail. He has zero interest in assisting the investigation or supporting its conclusions.

He thereby provides compelling reason for the investigators to be tireless, tenacious and resolute in their pursuit of the truth.

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Has Stephen Hawking lost his marbles?

“I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth,” says Stephen Hawking.

Perhaps. It depends on who leaves and where they go — or get sent.

Sending a man to Mars might be a good idea — so long as it’s the right man.

BBC News reports: Prof Stephen Hawking has called for leading nations to send astronauts to the Moon by 2020.

They should also aim to build a lunar base in 30 years’ time and send people to Mars by 2025.

Prof Hawking said that the goal would re-ignite the space programme, forge new alliances and give humanity a sense of purpose. [Continue reading…]

One of the unfortunate effects of fame when attached to those individuals deemed to have the Great Minds of their generation is that whatever they say tends to be taken seriously — as though equal weight should be attached to all their opinions and as though each and every one of their ideas must be laden with merit.

Whatever Stephen Hawking believes, who could have the audacity to question such a luminary?

I think the best way of sidestepping this tendency to be timid about questioning the great ideas from the great minds is simply to ignore the person, engage their ideas, and imagine how much attention they would garner if they came from someone of much less renown.

Let’s set aside the question of whether world leaders or the world’s leading scientists should take it upon themselves to give humanity a sense of purpose and let’s just consider the proposition of colonizing Mars.

And let’s assume that the technical obstacles to inhabiting Mars and transporting people there in large numbers could be surmounted in the next few decades, highly implausible as that notion might seem.

Here’s the core flaw in this proposition: if humans figured out how to live on Mars and during this period of preparing for our exodus either continued causing catastrophic damage to Earth’s biosphere, or found ways to mitigate or reverse the harm we’ve already done here, wouldn’t this planet in either scenario still be a better place to live than anywhere else conceivably within reach?

Simply put, isn’t Earth however badly we damage it always going to be much more hospitable than Mars or the Moon?

Given that likelihood, if we talk about colonizing these alternative worlds, aren’t these “colonies” more likely to be prison camps constructed to house that portion of humanity deemed excess to Earth’s carrying capacity?

More realistically, isn’t learning how to make Mars inhabitable most likely to morph into a blueprint for a dystopian future on Earth — one in which a small segment of the population is provided with secure havens that insulate them from the effects of climate change and environmental destruction?

In other words, won’t a mission to inhabit other worlds almost certainly turn out to be a false promise that does less to give humanity a sense of purpose than it does to promote baseless hope followed by rapid despair?

It’s sad, but perhaps not surprising, that a man who has spent most of his life tied to machines, sees no limits to human inventiveness. Hawking doesn’t seem to recognize that the only real hope for humanity has to be grounded in a deep recognition that human life is inseparable from life on Earth.

Our destructive behavior springs in large part from our multifaceted convictions in immortality — the notion that somehow we might survive even as every other creature expires.

Instead of indulging in science fiction fantasies about colonizing other planets, we need to come to grips with the fragility of life and our own inescapable mortality.

If we ruin our future here, we have no business trying to construct a future anywhere else.

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Donald Trump’s Deep State

As the term Deep State is typically used these days, it conjures up intelligence agencies and other elements of institutional power that are supposedly intent on undermining the operation of the Trump presidency.

But like other forms of Trump propaganda, Deep State is a notion that is employed to conceal the very thing it describes.

It’s a way of directing attention towards a Deep State we cannot see, so that we don’t notice the one right before our eyes.

The Washington Post reports: The Senate bill to scale back the health-care law known as Obamacare is being written in secret by a single senator, Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and a clutch of his senior aides.

Officials at numerous agencies of the Trump administration have stonewalled friendly Republicans in Congress — not to mention Democrats — by declining to share internal documents on sensitive matters or refusing to answer questions.

President Trump, meanwhile, is still forbidding the release of his tax returns, his aides have stopped releasing logs of visitors to the White House and his media aides have started banning cameras at otherwise routine news briefings, as happened Monday.

Trump even refuses to acknowledge to the public that he plays golf during his frequent weekend visits to his private golf courses.

More and more in the Trump era, business in Washington is happening behind closed doors. The federal government’s leaders are hiding from public scrutiny — and their penchant for secrecy represents a stark departure from the campaign promises of Trump and his fellow Republicans to usher in newfound transparency. [Continue reading…]

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Under pressure from a Trump tweet, is Rod Rosenstein now obliged to recuse himself?

Noah Feldman writes: Is President Donald Trump trying to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein without actually firing him? That’s the logical inference from the president’s tweet Friday morning asserting that he’s being investigated for firing FBI Director James Comey by the person who told him to fire Comey, namely Rosenstein. The immediate effect of the tweet is to pressure Rosenstein to recuse himself from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Rosenstein will now have to do so — soon.


Whether Trump has thought it through or not, that will leave Rosenstein’s supervisory obligations in the hands of Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand. She’s a horse of a different color from career prosecutors such as Rosenstein, Comey and Mueller. Brand is more like Trump Supreme Court appointee Neil Gorsuch: a high-powered conservative appellate lawyer who clerked for the U.S. Supreme Court, worked in the George W. Bush administration, and is prominent in Federalist Society circles. Her attitude toward the investigation is likely to be a bit different from Rosenstein’s, more informed by the structure of presidential authority and less by unwritten norms of prosecutorial independence.

Even before Trump commenced his assault on Rosenstein for conflict of interest, it was becoming conceivable that the deputy attorney general would have to recuse himself from supervising Mueller. If Mueller is focused on the Comey firing as a potential obstruction of justice, he would want or maybe need to know the details of how Trump interacted with Rosenstein around that decision.

The facts of whether Trump had already decided to fire Comey before getting Rosenstein to write the memo justifying the firing are unclear and at least partially contested. That would make Rosenstein into an important witness for the Mueller investigation — which would in turn make it difficult for him to be the figure to whom Mueller is supposed to report. Rosenstein acknowledged something like this in a recent meeting, according to reporting by ABC News.

Nonetheless, without Trump’s Twitter barrage, Rosenstein could potentially have refused to recuse himself by saying that Mueller, not he, is doing the investigating. The Department of Justice regulations do after all say that “the Special Counsel shall not be subject to the day-to-day supervision of any official of the Department.”

Rosenstein could have asserted that although the regulations allow the attorney general (here Rosenstein because of Jeff Sessions’s recusal) to ask for explanations of the special counsel’s investigative process, and require periodic reports from the special counsel to the attorney general, he wasn’t going to be supervising Mueller’s investigation.

After Trump’s tweet, that course of action isn’t really available to Rosenstein. Trump not only made a concrete argument that Rosenstein has a conflict of interest, but also deepened that conflict by asserting that firing Comey was Rosenstein’s idea. If firing Comey was indeed obstruction of justice, then, according to Trump’s implicit logic, Rosenstein could be guilty of a crime of obstruction.

So Rosenstein will have to recuse himself. And that leaves Brand as the next highest Senate-confirmed official in the Department of Justice. [Continue reading…]

Before Trump’s tweet, I can see why Rosenstein might have felt he needed to recuse himself, but it seems like Trump has now provided a strong justification for Rosenstein to stay put.

By recusing himself, he would appear to be acceding to Trump’s pressure.

Trump has zero interest in the completion of an investigation whose outcome is determined by the facts. On the contrary, he wants an investigation that gets wrapped up as swiftly as possible and exonerates him fully. In other words, Trump is sparing no effort to rig the investigation.

Trump’s pressure on Rosenstein is nothing less than the latest example of Trump’s relentless effort to obstruct justice. So rather than bowing to such pressure, Rosenstein should resist it.

Rosenstein effectively recused himself by appointing Mueller. So why should he need to recuse himself twice?

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Once again, ISIS leader might have been ‘killed’ — this time as U.S. Senate votes to impose new sanctions on Russia

The New York Times reports: Russia’s military said on Friday that it was looking into whether one of its airstrikes in the Syrian desert had killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph of the Islamic State.

In a statement, the Defense Ministry said that the Russian Air Force struck a meeting of Islamic State leaders on May 28 outside Raqqa, Syria, the group’s de facto capital, possibly killing Mr. Baghdadi. [Continue reading…]

Charles Lister writes: Russia’s claim to have killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in an airstrike in Raqqa on May 28 should be taken with a heavy grain of salt. At the time in question, the U.S.-led Syrian Democratic Forces (S.D.F.) were only days away from launching their final assault on the city and there’s no logical reason imaginable why Baghdadi would have risked staying in a surrounded, sitting target. [Continue reading…]

So why exactly would the Russians put out such a claim now, knowing that at least among ISIS experts it would instantly get shot down?

For one thing, they could rely on the fact that the stenographers at the New York Times and elsewhere would give the claim some credibility merely by placing it in headlines — headlines which would parrot the claim while burying the doubts in the body of the reporting.

It could be pure coincidence, but the fact that this claim comes as the Senate raises the specter of new sanctions, might be of more relevance than events in Syria.

The idea that Russia just killed Baghdadi would certainly play well with those Trump supporters who are already convinced that the U.S. has been swept up in anti-Russia hysteria — what more compelling ‘evidence’ could there be that Trump and Putin are on the same side?

So far, @realDonaldTrump has given no indication about whether he thinks this purported strike on ISIS is “Great news!” or “Fake News” — his preoccupation remains the “Witch Hunt.”

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Without cultural appropriation, there would be no culture

Kenan Malik writes: What is cultural appropriation, and why is it so controversial? Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University, defines it as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission.” This can include the “unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

Appropriation suggests theft, and a process analogous to the seizure of land or artifacts. In the case of culture, however, what is called appropriation is not theft but messy interaction. Writers and artists necessarily engage with the experiences of others. Nobody owns a culture, but everyone inhabits one, and in inhabiting a culture, one finds the tools for reaching out to other cultures.

Critics of cultural appropriation insist that they are opposed not to cultural engagement, but to racism. They want to protect marginalized cultures and ensure that such cultures speak for themselves, not simply be seen through the eyes of more privileged groups.

Certainly, cultural engagement does not take place on a level playing field. Racism and inequality shape the ways in which people imagine others. Yet it is difficult to see how creating gated cultures helps promote social justice. [Continue reading…]

Cultures, unlike nations, have no borders. For that reason, cultures have historically been no more vibrant than in the places where they meet and interact.

The notion that cultural interaction requires permission, seems to me like a notion that would only make sense to someone who feels culturally deprived.

That a leading proponent of this concept is a lawyer, not an artist, seems no coincidence, since law so often attaches greater value to claims of ownership than anything else — and this brings to my mind Proudhon’s famous and relevant dictum: property is theft.

Consider jazz, a genuinely American cultural creation. This has inspired musicians around the world who have appropriated it and sustained its organic growth in such a way that its American roots can be traced without any limitation on the reach of its expansion. Jazz was made in America and now belongs to the world and in that transaction, no permission was sought or required.

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Trump’s interest in disassociating himself from the Russia story

Philip Bump writes: Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) made a comment during the Senate Intelligence Committee’s questioning of Attorney General Jeff Sessions that has an obvious exception.

“I don’t think there’s any American,” Risch said, “who would disagree with the fact that we need to drill down to this” — that is, Russian meddling in the 2016 election — “know what happened, get it out in front of the American people and do what we can to stop it again.”

There is one American, at least, who seems generally uninterested in that need: Sessions’s boss, President Trump.

In his testimony, Sessions told Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) that he “did not recall” any meeting during which Trump expressed concern or curiosity about what Russia had been doing during the 2016 election. Sessions also testified that he himself, as the country’s and Trump’s lead law enforcement official, was never briefed on Russian interference. [Continue reading…]

This has become a common narrative — that Trump and those around him lack interest in getting to the bottom of the issue of Russian interference in the 2016 election — but even while superficially there might appear to be a lack of interest, there can’t be any doubt that this is a facade designed to conceal terror.

Trump is terrified that as soon as he acknowledges the reality and scope of the Russian influence campaign, he opens Pandora’s box, leading to the inescapable conclusion that his presidency lacks legitimacy. That conclusion will not necessarily hinge on proof of collusion.

But the question of legitimacy runs even deeper.

Trump’s line of attack against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was to claim that each lacked legitimacy and while this might look like conventional smear tactics in dirty politics, in the case of Trump it seems more indicative of his own insatiable craving to be legitimized.

Legitimacy, and more specifically Trump’s own sense that he lacks this, is his core issue. Trump regards legitimacy as a finite resource that he can only claim if he succeeds in stealing it from others. He believes the only way to rise up is by pushing others down.

Trump’s fear of the Russia story is not necessarily an indication of collusion at risk of being exposed. More likely, it is based on the fear that eventually he will be exposed as a political fraud — incapable as he is of recognizing that in the eyes of most of the world, that is already how he is perceived.

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Trump’s cabinet of fawning admirers

 

This isn’t what democracy looks like.

The effusive praise Supreme Leader Trump received at this cabinet meeting would have made Kim Jong-un envious. The North Korean leader merely gets deferential note-taking from his meek entourage as they smile and scribble, but Trump apparently likes obeisance to come in a form more befitting for Genghis Khan.

Superficially, this performance from Trump cabinet members might merely seem like an awkward and staged presentation of “successful leadership,” but much more importantly, what each individually is doing here is publicly shredding every last ounce of self-respect they might have had, as they ingratiate themselves in an obscenely servile manner before the man who thereby claims their absolute loyalty.

No explicit loyalty pledge is necessary from those who are willing to stoop so low.

Trump hopes to ensure that his fate and that of those around him are so deeply entangled that they cannot contemplate his political demise without also beholding their own.

The fact that Trump asked for James Comey’s loyalty, demonstrates the degree to which he felt threatened by the FBI director’s independence.

For Trump, anyone with independence and integrity poses a threat to his authority.

 

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Whatever we call Trump, he stinks just as bad

Shakespeare, a master of insults who could have prolifically composed tweets and might have described Donald Trump as an “unwash’d maggot-pie,” or a “goatish bat-fowling moldwarp,” an “idol of idiot-worshippers,” whose “name blisters our tongues,” and who is not “clean enough to spit upon,” would have run into trouble if he worked for CNN or the New York Times.

The Times reports that the presenter of CNN’s weekly show “Believer,” Reza Aslan, got fired for writing tweets in which “he described the president as ‘an embarrassment to humankind’ and compared him, using profanity, to a piece of excrement.”

In point of fact, this reporting is inaccurate. Aslan didn’t compare Trump to a piece of shit — he said he is one. Aslan was using a metaphor, not a simile. He wrote:

This piece of shit is not just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He’s an embarrassment to humankind

A succinct, objective, fair assessment that in global terms cannot be seen in any sense as controversial — except for this: including the word “shit.”

But in reference to Trump, how on earth can the word “shit” be described as profane? I know he has lots of supporters, but he’s not exactly a figure of reverence. Indeed, many of those supporters regard his crudeness as one of his principle virtues.

Donald Trump is the embodiment and arguably purest distillation of vulgarity and yet the prissy gatekeepers of American mainstream-media civility have a problem when vulgar language is used to describe a vulgar man.

What other kind of language is in any sense appropriate?

Some will argue we shouldn’t stoop to Trump’s level, yet this kind of self-imposed restraint plays straight into the orange man’s little hands.

He shameless exploits the respect offered to his office, while using this as a shield behind which he can constantly lob provocations with relative impunity.

In other words, if people like CNN’s Jeff Zucker get their way, Trump can carry on being a piece of shit while anyone in the media who wants to keep their job must be afraid of calling him the way he calls to be named.

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How Trump’s endless bullshit is debasing America’s governing institutions and poisoning civic life

At today’s White House news conference, Trump was challenged on the question of whether there are tapes of his conversations with James Comey.

Reporter: “You seem to be hinting there are recordings of those conversations…”

Trump: “I’m not hinting anything. I’ll tell you about it over a very short period of time.”

Reporter: “When will you tell us?”

Trump: “Over a fairly short period of time.”

Reporter: “Are there tapes sir?”

Trump: “Oh, you’re going to be very disappointed when you hear the answer.”

Reporter: “Mr President. Are you now hinting that you’ve actually been bullshitting about these tapes all along?”

Except for the last question, that’s exactly how this brief exchange played out. The last question, of course, never got asked — the White House press corps is too polite to challenge Trump that bluntly.

Trump thinks it’s his prerogative to jerk around the press, abuse reporters personally, pour scorn on what he brands as “fake news,” and he also expects that journalists will meekly take this in their stride. He expects that he can constantly dish out bullshit while never being told to his face that he’s a bullshitter.

Matthew Yglesias writes: Donald Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call him a liar.

But that’s not quite right. As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth — and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care.

In Trump’s own book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, our now-president describes himself in a way that Frankfurt could hold up as the quintessential example of a bullshitter. Trump writes that he’s an “I say what’s on my mind” kind of guy. Pages later, he explains that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily an honest guy.

“If you do things a little differently,” he writes of the media, “if you say outrageous things and fight back, they love you.” The free publicity that results from deliberately provoking controversy is invaluable. And if a bit of exaggeration is what it takes, Trump doesn’t have a problem with that. “When,” he asks “was the last time you saw a sign hanging outside a pizzeria claiming ‘The fourth best pizza in the world’?!”

When Trump says something like he’s just learned that Barack Obama ordered his phones wiretapped, he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him will debase themselves to repeat it blindly. There’s no greater demonstration of devotion.

In his first and best-known book, The Art of the Deal, Trump writes a passage that is one of the most remarkable ever set to paper by a future American president. It’s deeply telling about Trump’s views on the distinction between integrity and loyalty. Trump sings the praises of Roy Cohn — Joe McCarthy’s infamous legal attack dog later turned Trump mentor:

Just compare that with all the hundreds of “respectable” guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty. They only care about what’s best for them and don’t think twice about stabbing a friend in the back if the friend becomes a problem. What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite. Roy was the kind of guy who’d be there at your hospital bed long after everyone else had bailed out, literally standing by you to the death.

Trump, ironically, would not stand by Cohn’s deathbed as he perished of AIDS; instead, he disavowed his friend. For Trump, loyalty is a way to size up those around him, suss out friend from foe. It is not a quality he cares to embrace in his personal life. Now president, it’s the same in his political life.

The two passages taken together illuminate an important facet of Trump’s personality, and of his presidency. He’s a man who doesn’t care much about the truth. He’s a man who cares deeply about loyalty. The two qualities merge in the way he wields bullshit. His flagrant lies serve as a loyalty test.

Trump’s tactics, in a different context, would be understood as typical authoritarian propaganda — regimes often propound nonsense more to enforce expectations on their citizens than because they are expecting anyone to actually believe it. The United States isn’t the kind of place where that can work. There’s a free and vibrant press and political debate operating wholly outside the world of Trump’s bullshit. But by filling the heads of his fans — and the media outlets they consume — with a steady diet of bullshit, Trump is nonetheless succeeding in endlessly reinscribing polarization in American politics, corroding America’s governing institutions, and poisoning civic life. [Continue reading…]

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To Eric Trump, Democrats are ‘not even people’

So Eric Trump, devoted to his father, says his father’s critics are “not even people.”

I wonder where this young man would pick up a phrase and a dehumanizing put-down like that?

And what does this say about the Trump family’s views on democracy and their conception of “the people”?

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The Intercept follows White House protocol — no further comment during an ongoing investigation

Following its publication of a top-secret document apparently sent by Reality Leigh Winner who was arrested on Saturday, The Intercept doesn’t want to respond to allegations that its handling of that document led to Winner’s arrest.

The Intercept issued a statement — though apparently doesn’t want to encourage readers of the original report to read that statement since there are no links connecting the two pages.

The Intercept warns that the FBI’s allegations against Winner “contain unproven assertions and speculation designed to serve the government’s agenda and as such warrant skepticism.” Which sounds like Glenn Greenwald whispering, “Deep State, Deep State….”

But the claims that The Intercept mishandled this document aren’t coming from the government — they’re coming from security analysts such as Rob Graham who explains exactly how the document could be traced back to Winner once The Intercept had provided authorities with a copy.

Maybe when The Intercept says, “because of the continued investigation, we will make no further comment on it at this time,” its promised silence will be in Winner’s best legal interests, but they are certainly creating the appearance that their primary interest at this juncture is in ducking for cover.

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How The Intercept inadvertently gave the FBI evidence leading to an NSA-leaker’s swift arrest

A post shared by Reezle Winner (@reezlie) on


It’s unusual for a major intelligence leak to be reported at almost the same time as the leaker gets arrested — but that’s what happened to NSA contractor Reality Leigh Winner after she leaked a top-secret document to The Intercept.

Whenever a whistleblower gets arrested, this is bound to have a chilling effect on the prospects for future leaks.

In its handling of this NSA document, reporters for The Intercept might have naively thought they were not putting their source in jeopardy because they didn’t know their source’s identity. What they apparently didn’t realize was that by sharing the document in the form in which they had received it, they were revealing information that helped investigators quickly identify and arrest Winner.

Anyone who decides to leak classified information needs to fully understand the risks they are taking and it is the individual who is ultimately responsible for protecting their own security.

At the same time, journalists who handle leaked information need to have adequate knowledge about data security — knowledge that the staff at The Intercept appear to be lacking.

The Washington Post reports: Winner was arrested Saturday. When FBI agents questioned her at her home, she admitted “removing the classified intelligence reporting from her office space, retaining it, and mailing it from Augusta, Georgia, to the news outlet,” court documents read. She remains in jail pending a detention hearing. Her lawyer declined to comment on the charges.

After the charges were announced Monday, some cybersecurity experts remarked on the apparent ease with which investigators were able to trace the leak back to Winner. Some went so far as to say the Intercept had “outed” her by posting copies of the document online. The Intercept said the materials were submitted anonymously.

According to Rob Graham, who writes for the blog Errata Security, the Intercept’s scanned images of the intelligence report contained tracking dots — small, barely visible yellow dots that show “exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed.” Nearly all modern color printers feature such tracking markers, which are used to identify a printer’s serial number and the date and time a page was printed. [Continue reading…]

So far, The Intercept has not acknowledged its role in Winner’s arrest.

Just to be clear, since Winner was arrested before The Intercept published the document, the lead the FBI used came as a result of the document being shared beforehand. “It started on May 30, when the news outlet showed authorities the printed materials and asked them to comment, according to the affidavit,” the Washington Post reported.

Given Winner’s field of expertise, it’s not surprising she didn’t understand well enough how to cover her tracks.

CNN reports: — Winner was a linguist in the US Air Force in Maryland who speaks Pashto, Farsi and Dari, her mother, Billie Winner said.

— She was raised in Kingsville, Texas, and served in the Air Force in Columbia, Maryland. Her mother confirmed she was a federal contractor in Augusta but did not know the nature of her work, or if she had contracted for the NSA.

— Winner is an athlete who loves animals, her mother said, through tears.

— She also said her daughter wasn’t especially political and hadn’t ever praised past leakers like Edward Snowden to her.

— “She’s never ever given me any kind of indication that she was in favor of that at all,” her mother said. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

— Winner spent six years in the military, said Titus Nichols, her court-appointed attorney. [Continue reading…]

Hopefully a jury will recognize that at this time there are many ways in which Americans believe they are called to serve their country — there seems little doubt that this is exactly what Winner felt she was doing.

The Intercept can’t correct the mistakes they already made, but at the very least I think Pierre Omidyar should establish and generously contribute towards a legal defense fund for Winner.

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World leaders should give Trump the cold shoulder

Bloomberg reports: Prime Minister Theresa May said she thought Donald Trump was “wrong” to attack London Mayor Sadiq Khan in the wake of Saturday’s terror attack in London.

After avoiding several attempts by reporters to get her to condemn the U.S. president for openly criticizing Khan in a series of tweets hours after the attack at London Bridge that killed seven people and left dozens injured, May was asked what it would take for her to criticize Trump. She reiterated her disappointment over his decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, before being eventually forced to defend the capital’s mayor.


“Sadiq Khan is doing a good job,” she told a press conference in central London, when asked if Trump was wrong to attack the mayor’s call for calm in the wake of the attacks. “It’s wrong to say anything else.”


May has been attacked by both the opposition Labour Party and the media for her reluctance to publicly criticize Trump. As well as mocking Khan, Trump sought to turn the London attacks to domestic political advantage by renewing his call to ban travel from some Muslim-majority countries. May’s criticism Monday follows her openly complaining last month about U.S. security agencies leaking details of the Manchester Arena suicide bombing, which British police said hurt their investigation.

While she used her disapproval of Trump pulling out of the Paris accord to illustrate that she was “not afraid to say when President Trump gets things wrong,” her name was notably absent from a joint statement last week by her European counterparts condemning the withdrawal. [Continue reading…]

An editorial in The Guardian says: Unlike other world leaders, Mrs May has made an art of avoiding public confrontation with the US president. But – in the words of her initial response to the London Bridge attack – enough is enough. She should make clear to Mr Trump how offensive and unhelpful his extraordinary intervention was, and rescind the invitation that has been extended to him for a state visit later this year. [Continue reading…]

Political leaders who persist in exercising diplomatic restraint when commenting on Trump’s behavior, are, through their timidity, becoming his enablers, reinforcing his sense that he can get away with anything.

At some point it’s going to take something much stronger than a mild rebuff to demonstrate to Trump that his words have consequences.

So far he has been treated like an obstreperous brat who has to be tolerated out of respect for his office and in spite of his inexcusable behavior.

The treatment Trump deserves, however, is the cold shoulder.

Every head of state who represents a democracy should refuse direct communication with Trump.

During his first months in office, he has amply demonstrated that he has neither the capacity nor the willingness to engage in foreign affairs in a manner that befits his position.

This isn’t just a matter of decorum; it speaks to his basic competence.

Freezing out Trump doesn’t require any form of public diplomacy. It simply means that if or when the White House places a call to a foreign leader, said leader simply declines to make themselves available. “The Prime Minister is out right now. Would President Trump like to leave a message?”

Trump is the one who has chosen a path of isolation. Let him have it.

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