Back during the run-up for Gulf War II, there was discussion about how much it was going to cost (remember when they said it’d be a mere $300bn and Iraq would pay for it by having its oil looted?)
Back during the run-up for Gulf War II, there was discussion about how much it was going to cost (remember when they said it’d be a mere $300bn and Iraq would pay for it by having its oil looted?)
If I hear one more unoriginal journalist hack out the phrase “everything changed” – related to 9/11, I’m going to scream.
This is from [Gizmodo]
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.
The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is an odd piece of legislation; it was another centrist bit of legislation signed into law by Bill Clinton. I’m not going to say it’s bullshit because it was produced under Clinton. It’s bullshit because it’s American.
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 US political system is incredibly corrupt. There are perhaps a few mere millionaires in congress, but they’re the tip of an iceberg made of shit – it’s their children or spouses that are grabbing money hand over fist. I remember back in the 90s when the US media was all a’cry about the corruption of Saddam Hussein’s children, but they were ham-fisted amateurs compared to the Washington set.
It’s sad how American media carry forward the establishment’s line that it’s a surprise that Afghanistan is quickly falling to the Taliban.
The premise of representative democracy is that we have leaders who are tracking the issues that are important to their constitutents, and making the best decisions for them because those constituents don’t have time or inclination to understand those issues and make their own decisions.
[Content Warning: death, sexual abuse, suicide]
A young fellow I knew recently ended his life. We had discussed it before, and he was often miserable, saw no point in being alive, didn’t enjoy it, and as he said “never asked for it.”