“Blowback” is the CIA’s term for “nasty things that happen because of something we did, which we did not plan for.” I guess that makes it sound a bit like it’s not our fault; it’s just something that happened, gosh, it’s time to move on already isn’t it?
US president Donald Trump has gone to the edge of the cliff defending his right to privacy, although he would never phrase it that way. For Trump, it’s all couched in the language of “executive privilege” – i.e.: the right of the rich and powerful to do whatever they want (especially if it means getting richer and more powerful).
The CIA appears to believe that it has the charter to go anywhere, kill anyone, and overthrow any state that it thinks needs overthrowing. It’s nice to see that sometimes that’s still not true.
This one managed to shock me a little bit, because of what it says regarding authoritarians’ view of what constitutes an acceptable claim. It manages to be worse than some of the worst/flimsiest justifications for torture that I’ve seen.
You’ve probably seen this image: coronavirus expose-ees leaving the cruise ship in Japan, deplaning at an air base in the US.
I came at this one from a weird angle. One of the Pacifica Radio Archive shows I listened to was an interview with Betty Friedan (FTV074) @13:53 during a question period someone asks: [Read more…]
In Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes [wc] he writes at one point that what the US needed was an intelligence agency, but what it got was a “Department of Dirty Tricks.” [Read more…]
Qasem Soleimani had a “bad guy” nickname; he was “The Shadow Commander.”
It looks to me like the Trump administration thinks it’s going to announce a big peace deal and exit with honor from Afghanistan, just in time for the 2020 election campaign.
One of the basic skills of philosophy is to try to combat your own cognitive biases by flipping situations around, i.e.: “putting yourself in the other guys’ shoes” or whatever you want to call it. It’s a skill Americans don’t seem to learn in school, which is why (I believe) we have a population that is ripe for turning into imperialists and believers in various forms of exceptionalism.