This is a depressing view inside the FBI. It does not contradict any of the impressions I have already gleaned from ex-FBI agents I’ve talked to, and projects I’ve worked on where they have been involved. As usual, “not all FBI” – sure, there are some that are talented and not white supremacists – but those people (as the article shows) had to learn to work within a system that was incompetent and white supremacist.
As we’ve mentioned before, the FBI supposedly provided 25% of the KKK’s membership during the civil rights era. [stderr] I don’t blame you in the slightest if that is unbelievable – it took me a while to decide that it was probably true. And, we can see the damage that the FBI’s “penetrate and suborn” tactics do: I was listening to Ibram Kendi’s anti-racism podcast the other day, [kendi] and he was discussing anti-asian racism, and mentioned that Richard Aoki [stderr] as an example of Black/Asian cooperation. Oops, no. I wrote him a terse note to check Aoki’s background more carefully – he was an FBI agent trying to get Black Panthers killed, not help them.
The standard Hollywood “quick sand” is plain water with a layer of vermiculite floating on top. It crops up so often in movies and it’s always one of the hallmarks of a truly bad film – what director has to reach for such a hackneyed plot device, anyway?
This one is simple: people are (with good justification and for good reason) upset that the US is abandoning its Afghan allies, and (with good justification and for good reason) expect them to be torture-slaughtered as soon as the US military is no longer there to protect them.
My first reaction was “no way!” and so was my second reaction. I have no idea why Associate Director of the FBI James B. Adams would say such a thing. Was he telling the truth?
The hamon-making class is over, and I’m home and digging out from under the things that piled up while I was away.
I know a few people who were home-schooled as kids, and who grew up to be fine, decent people. I even new one who was incredibly precocious and was tutored (in addition to a good private school education) by both father and mother. Everyone in my high school class knew he was going to be somebody in the sciences and, he is! Yay!
Shiro Ishii has died and moved on. The US, predictably, did not really shut down its biowarfare efforts after the Korean War – it just changed them, outsourced some of them, transformed them, and took different approaches here and there. I see no way that Agent Orange, the famous cancer-causing dioxin-based defoliant sprayed all over Vietnam, can be seen as anything but biological or chemical warfare. Either way, it’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” – that thing the US resolutely rains sanctions down upon, when anyone except us tries to use them. And, we re-define ours so they’re not WMD. Thus, we have the irony of the US invading Iraq in an illegal war ostensibly to take away their WMD, then using WMD on the Iraqi population (White phosphorus and area bombardment). Yes, high explosive is a weapon of mass destruction. It’s one of the tragedies of our historical period that we even need to mention that.
Every time I am using a gasoline can to fill a mower, chainsaw, molotov cocktail, etc., I am annoyed by the safety mechanisms on the pouring spout.
We all hate losing, but we need to keep some kind of realistic perspective on the stakes and the game.