The corruption and incompetence of the federal government is stunning, much worse than even I had suspected. Marc Andreessen's conversation with Joe Rogan is jaw-droppingly depressing. The problems they are discussing should make for daily headlines in the news media, but no.
Full episode on Spotify.
Fascinating discussion about Ukraine, censorship and the insanity of the neocons (of the U.S. and western Europe). Here's an excerpt from a much longer conversation titled "Gambling with Nukes" by Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn.
Matt Taibbi 0:16
There's a gamble implicit in it. You are firing missiles at a nuclear power and you are gambling that they are not going to fire them back, right? And there was, there were actually quotes from American officials talking about how, you know the real irresponsible people were the Russians. They were the ones you know, who were being irresponsible. Let's see what was the quote? The EU foreign policy chief Joseph Burrell said it's not the first time that Putin plays the nuclear gamble, okay? And this was before the launch of the British missiles, and after the launch of the of the ATACMS missiles. And then, and then this guy, [British Prime Minister, [Keir] Starmer, who comes out, and he looks like a cross of Max Headroom and Noel Coward. I mean, like, I can't even that the whole presentation is so disturbing. This like kind of blinking creature who speaks in that bizarre accent, just repeating catch phrases over and over again while he talks about firing missiles at Russia. It just seems crazy, right? And then that is succeeded by new news that came out that, apparently, the French are going to be next, and they're going to, they're going to be sending something called SCALP missiles into Russia. And, you know, then we get the ICBM fired back.
Walter Kirn 1:59
Well, they're, they're all they're all making themselves targets, aren't they? I mean, they're lining up. Should there be any doubt about the legitimacy? Who cares about legitimacy? Who cares about all the rules anymore these? Who cares about the norms? Dude, they just broke the biggest norm in history, which was to send our missiles into a nuclear state to land and explode. That's the biggest norm in American or world history, since those kind of things were invented, frankly, so the rules based international order--that's out the window. Norms are out the window, not shooting missiles into the home territory of the greatest nuclear power next to the United States is out the window. All of this being led by a lame duck American president who is all week in South America, while his vice president, who just ran for president, is vacationing in Hawaii. Well, Aloha. The whole mask is off.
The thing that scares me is how these people ever expect that they and their party will be taken seriously for five seconds should they ever try to float a peace message or a humanitarian message. Again, the party of social justice, and in England, the left wing party, the Labor Party, to which Starmer belongs, are at a moment when we have actually, in the United States, the center, the crown, of this power structure, voted out our executive It is beyond insane, and it will not end well. Matt, just as I was upset on Monday, I can tell you that next week we will be even more upset. Things are going to happen, and things are already happening every day, when this missile went off this morning. Every power in the world that has modern warning systems had an alarm go off right for the first moments after its launch. The United States had to assume that it was under nuclear attack.
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What follows is an excerpt from a Nov 20, 2024 discussion between Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson. This is a critically important discussion regarding recent developments in the Ukraine War and related U.S. Propaganda:
Glenn Greenwald [00:18:53] Tucker, there's nobody I'm certain of this in the United States, just an average, ordinary American voter who believes that their life is affected in any way by the question of who rules various provinces in the Donbass in eastern Ukraine. Nobody thinks about Ukraine, let alone the Donbass, let alone eastern Ukraine. It's an incredibly complex situation there in terms of the people's allegiances, which are far closer to Moscow than they are to Kiev. The question of what that territory should be, should it be somehow autonomous, should it be used as a buffer against the West? The whole framework, as you well know, and as other people have pointed out, when Russia agreed to the reunification of Germany, which was obviously an extraordinary thing for the Russians to agree to, given the Russian history in the 20th century with respect to Germany, when they opened, the Berlin Wall fell and they allowed the eastern and the western parts of Germany to reunite and to become part of the West and become part of the EU. The only concession they extracted in exchange for that was with reunification. NATO's now moving eastward, closer to our border in a country that has devastated our country twice in two world wars, invaded Russia twice, killed tens of millions of Russian citizens. The only thing we need as a security guarantee in exchange for allowing that is that NATO will never expand one inch eastward beyond what was East Germany and the United States agreed to that. And immediately in the 90s, an administration, the administration started talking about it and implementing NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia. Exactly what was promised to Gorbachev the United States would not do in exchange for them agreeing to reunification. And why? Why? Why did we need to expand eastward toward Russia. And now it's not just eastward in general. It's going directly up to the Russian border on the part of their border that has been invaded twice in Ukraine to destroy Russia. And both of those world wars, we also participated in the change of government. We removed the democratically elected leader of Ukraine before his constitutional term was expired in 2014 because we perceived him as being too friendly to Moscow, which is what the Ukrainians voted for and replaced him. [U.S. State Department's] Victoria Nuland constructed a government and they was replaced by a government that was more pro-U.S.. Imagine if the Russians engineered a coup in Mexico to take out the government because they were too friendly to us and put in a hard line, pro Russian, anti-American, anti-NATO president. Imagine how threatening we would regard that as. And that's exactly what we did in Ukraine. The question is, though, this has nothing to do with the national security of the American people. No American is threatened by who governs Ukraine. What they're threatened by is what the United States is doing in Ukraine, including this most recent act.
... This is not a lame duck decision and it's not like there was any emergency to it. It wasn't there was no emergency to it. They just wanted to escalate it because they thought Trump wouldn't. And so they did.
Tucker [00:27:52] It puts us in this remarkable moment where the only adult is Vladimir Putin. This person, we've been told, is Hitler and deranged, crazy, dying of nine different kinds of cancer can't be trusted like the only reason we're not. I mean, we're all relying on his restraint. That's just a fact right now. How weird is that?
Joe Biden in 2007: "I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee for 17 years, as a ranking member. I teach separation of powers and constitutes law. This is something I know. So I got together and brought a group of constitutional scholars together to write a piece that I'm going to deliver to the whole United States Senate, pointing out the President has no constitutional authority to take this nation to war against the country of 70 million people, unless we're attacked or unless there is proof that we are about to be attacked. And if he does, if he does, I would move to impeach him. The house obviously has to do that, but I would lead an effort to impeach him. The reason for my doing--and I don't say it lightly. I don't say it lightly. I say it because they should understand that what they were threatening, what they were saying, what was adding up to be, what looked like to the rest of the world what we're about to do would be the most disastrous thing that could be done at this moment in our history that I can think of."
I very much admire Coleman Hughes. He bravely stood up to the race-hucksters over the past five years and advocated for the type of color-blindness embraced by almost all classical liberals. But on CNN he naively stepped into an area in which he is not well informed: National Security. Almost everything he says in opposition to Tulsi Gabbard is incorrect and it wouldn't have taken much time to get informed before going live. Very disappointing, but this illustrates something ubiquitous. Everyone I know (even myself) who gets a lot right sometimes falls off the rails. The causes are many: tribalism, hubris, fatigue and failing to be self-critical. It happens to all of us, some of the time and free speech is the best approach we know to limit these missteps. So here is Glenn Greenwald speaking freely about Coleman's embarrassing moment on CNN:
Glenn Greenwald:
There was a panel discussion about why Tulsi Gabbard is this great evil, and the opposition to her was led by Coleman Hughes, who--I don't really understand when he became an expert on foreign policy. He became known speaking, I think, quite insightfully, about things like race and class and the intersection of them. I've been on his show before. He's been on mine.Suddenly, though, he's now a great expert in the Middle East, he's a vehement supporter of Israel--as much as Barry Weiss or Sam Harris or people like that are. And here he is on CNN, maligning Tulsi Gabbard, who knows 10 million times more about foreign policy in her toenail than Coleman Hughes has in his entire arsenal of knowledge. But here he is expressing why she's such a terrible choice as DNI [Director of National Intelligence].
Coleman Hughes:
It's a very confounding. Look, call me crazy, but I think the Director of National Intelligence should be a person who, A) trusts US intelligence, and B) likes US intelligence. What do we know about Tulsi Gabbard? We know that when Assad gassed civilians in 2017 and our intelligence agencies determined that and Trump decided to strike those facilities, Gabbard doubted that. She doubted the findings of our own intelligence and she went to go visit Assad. And we know that she defends Julian Assange, who released classified informations that imperiled the people we were working with in Afghanistan and the Taliban went out there and were able to kill them one by one. And so, you know, this is exactly the opposite of the person you would want leading national intelligence.
Glenn Greenwald:
He's saying that the only kinds of people you want to lead the intelligence agencies are people who A) trust what they tell you and B) like how they operate. How can any sentient human being who knows anything about the last 25 years of American history, --and even if you want to go back much further--and it's the same thing. But just going back to the last 25 years since the war in Iraq and the run up to it, going all the way through things like Syria and Libya and Russiagate and the Hunter Biden laptop, and all the different ways that these intelligence agencies have interfered in our politics, improperly and based on lies--It's not disqualifying to distrust the intelligence agencies or to dislike how they operate and want to change it. What's disqualifying is to trust the intelligence agencies. How mindless must somebody be to say, "Yeah, I really trust the CIA. I think their pronouncements are all correct."Oh, the audacity of her to question anything that the CIA was saying about the war in Syria, when the CIA was leading, one of those dirty wars that they love to fight at a billion dollars a year that Obama unleashed them to fight in order to remove Bashar Al Assad from power and replace [him with] someone else they wanted. Oh no, questioning the intelligence agencies. Tulsi Gabbard questioned what they said, doubted some of their pronouncements, and now she's somehow ineligible to lead them, because she doesn't have blind, mindless faith in them.
This is conventional wisdom in Washington. Coleman doesn't know anything about the topics of which he's opining, including what he said about WikiLeaks. And the idea that WikiLeaks is supposed to be considered some sort of nefarious group that nobody can defend when they've done more than anybody to bring transparency to our government, including the lies they told about the wars in which Tulsi Gabbard fought and the corruption of our allies, and all the lies that we've been told as the public about what our government was doing.
The idea that defending Julian Assange for bringing transparency is somehow disqualifying? I'm sure he would say the same thing about Edward Snowden, who Tulsi Gabbard also supports, is just mind-blowingly dumb. But this we showed you this because it's so reflective of how Washington thinks. Coleman Hughes--what he does when he doesn't know what he's talking about, is--he just picks up on conventional wisdom and the world in which he resides with Bari Weiss and those kind of people, he just repeats what that world thinks without an even an inch of knowledge. But it's nonetheless worth seeing, because that is the opposition to Tulsi Gabbard: "Oh, she's not a fan of the CIA. She's not a fan of the NSA. She doesn't think the intelligence agencies like Homeland Security have been doing a good job, have been honest with the American people. This is what Donald Trump ran on. He didn't run on appointing the kind of people that Coleman Hughes thinks should be appointed: people who think the intelligence communities are so trustworthy in whatever they're doing.
[Trump] ran on a campaign promise to uproot them, to fundamentally drain their swamp and to rebuild them into more ethical and trustworthy institutions, and Tulsi Gabbard represents that. The only people scared of her are the people who should be scared, the people who want to keep those institutions in place, despite all the lies they told and the corruption they've imposed, precisely because they're the ones who benefit most from it. But they don't want any one questioning, let alone changing, how Washington works.