radx

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Member Since: January 19, 2008
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Comments to radx

15 Comments

eric3579 says...

Haven't heard anything about this. Have a link worth checking out?

radx said:

They claim to have caught the guy who bombed the bus of Borussia Dortmund last Tuesday. Apparently, the fucker placed put options on the stock of Borussia Dortmund and intended to crash the stock value by killing or maiming as many players as possible.

Ever heard anything like it? I didn't...

enoch says...

ok....i come to you for your opinion on my new favorite political scientist.this is the man who predicted brexit and trump,and his ability to depoliticize complex political and economic dynamics is just beautiful.(or maybe i just like the fact that it sounds like i am getting schooled by shrek)

i have watched pretty much every one of his lectures,and i cannot find a flaw in his logic.he appears to have his finger on the pulse of our global economic situation.

but economics has never been my strong suit.i have always struggled with economics.so i come to you,hat in hand,and ask if maybe my adoration is misplaced.

totally worth the time:
https://videosift.com/video/mark-blythe-global-trumpism-lecture

newtboy says...

Unheard of, yes, and no dissent, curious, but an indicator that it's a political ploy by the heads of those 17 agencies, not to me, because many of them (most famously the head of the FBI) are firmly and unapologetically Trump supporters. They would not produce or agree with such damming conclusions about their guy, imo, without clear evidence. It is more than unfortunate that we won't see that evidence, if it exists, during this administration. I expect it to stay classified by presidential order so he can deny it's existence.

I do agree, what we've seen in the redacted public report is far from proof, and the intelligence community as a whole has a terrible record of lies and misdirection. I think the recent need for public attention and political involvement has only made that worse. With such a horrendous reputation, it behooves them to make public their proof as quickly as possible.....leak it?

radx said:

Nope, me neither.

Which is sort of the point. It's unheard of that all of these agencies came to the same conclusion on a specific matter. Some may take this as an indicator of how damning the evidence really is, others see this as an indicator that the "assessments" were made on hierarchical levels reserved for political appointees.

The absence of dissent supports the second point of view. No group of analysts in their right mind would create a report without also strongly pointing out contradictory facts, inconsistencies, and separating fact from interpretation. That's what Hersh is referring to. This is not an NIE, it's an opinion piece. This memo by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (wierd name) goes down the same route:

As you will have gathered by now, we strongly suspect that the evidence your intelligence chiefs have of a joint Russian-hacking-WikiLeaks-publishing operation is no better than the “intelligence” evidence in 2002-2003 – expressed then with comparable flat-fact “certitude” – of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Now, an opinion piece might be sufficient if it came from credible institutions and had a moderatly important subject. But this is throwing serious accusations at a sovereign nation in times when diplomatic relations are stressed as it is. And that's not going into the credibility problem of many of these agencies, who have a very dubious track record on these issues.

Ian Welsh had a piece the other day on the CIA vs Trump, and his take on intelligence agencies is pretty close to what mine has been since I learned about the Stasi some 20 years ago:
The CIA and NSA are not the friend of any left-wing worth having: they are innately anti-democratic, anti-privacy, and anti-rights. Secret agencies are anathema to any open government. At an existential level, intelligence agencies are at best a double edged sword, and by their nature, they always wind up serving the interests of the few, against the interests of the people.

lucky760 says...

I actually just updated our ciphers not 5 minutes ago. Can you let me know if it's okay for you now?

radx said:

Dropping some ECDHE into your ciper suite would be really appreciated, so that I don't have to change my security settings everytime I want to pay VS a visit.

newtboy says...

I haven't heard of any of the 17 organizations claiming they didn't sign off, have you? The fact that the FBI was on board, even though they are led by a Republican clearly willing to insert himself into politics to harm Democrats with nothing but innuendo and conjecture is pretty convincing.

If they had a fact, they'd give it to you...unless those facts are classified information, as they claim. Time could tell, but those reports won't be declassified while Trump is in office.

radx said:

"It’s high camp stuff. What does an assessment mean? It’s not a national intelligence estimate. If you had a real estimate, you would have five or six dissents. One time they said 17 agencies all agreed. Oh really? The Coast Guard and the Air Force — they all agreed on it? And it was outrageous and nobody did that story. An assessment is simply an opinion. If they had a fact, they’d give it to you. An assessment is just that. It’s a belief. And they’ve done it many times."

newtboy says...

This article makes Trumps recent statement 'It will be wonderful when we are one nation, under one flag, with one God.', pretty scary stuff for an atheist, or any non Christian, or the wrong kinds of Christians.

radx said:

Mike Pence Will Be the Most Powerful Christian Supremacist in U.S. History

Hell of a line, isn't it? Normally I'd blow this off as your run-of-the-mill hyperbole, but it's Jeremy Scahill, which made it a must-read for me. Well worth the time. For instance, I didn't know that Pence was buddy-buddy with Eric Prince himself. Yes, that's Blackwater's Eric Prince. Christian Supremacists with a mercenary army -- think about that for a minute.

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