Word games from "Mr. Establishment" himself... color me surprised at your 'semantic creativity.'
The FBI has an intelligence branch, but the FBI itself is law enforcement, not intelligence.
Here, in chronological order:
Office of Naval Intelligence, USN, DOD Coast Guard Intelligence, USCG, Homeland Security Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Dept. State Central Intelligence Agency, independent 25th Air Force, USAF, DOD National Security Agency, DOD Defense Intelligence Agency, DOD National Reconnaissance Office, DOD Intelligence and Security Command, US Army, DOD Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, DOE Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, USMC, DOD National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, DOD Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Treasury Intelligence Branch, FBI, DOJ Office of National Security Intelligence, DEA, DOJ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, Homeland Security
The head of the intelligence community is Dan Coats, DNI.
Personally, if you believe ANYTHING coming from the "Intel Community" either way you're an idiot. They lie. They lie straight faced in front of congress about all sorts of things, spying on Americans to there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This isn't a "Right vs Left" issue, because both sides have been on both sides of hating and defending the "intel community"
You're right, that's less of a "right vs left" issue and more of an "America vs Russia" issue. That's one of their goals - to get Americans to distrust each other and our own institutions. People need to remember who the real enemy is, it is not other Americans. The intelligence community in the US is full of people who genuinely love the country and want to see it do well, and they don't deserve these buckets of scorn. They aren't perfect, and sometimes they do something that I don't agree with, but to suggest that the entire community cannot be trusted is playing directly into Putin's hand. Watch out, in your quest to be Ultimate Patriot #1 you might realize that you're just another apparatchik.
Not when the probe has no justification for being, and is a grotesque perversion of our entire justice system.
That's an interesting justification, I don't hear that from the party apparatus much. It sounds like they're trying to discredit the investigation completely on purely partisan grounds, as if the United States has not and is not currently being attacked by Russia, which it is.
Regardless of the motivation for beginning the investigation: considering the fact that the entire intelligence community, including the DNI appointed by Trump, agrees that Russia has been and is currently attacking us, do you think we should end the investigation and, what, just ignore what Russia has been and is doing? How about the spy trying to infiltrate the GOP and NRA, just let her go because some people have the personal opinion that the basis for the original warrant was incorrect? Would it maybe be a decent idea to have that warrant looked at by a judge instead of listening to TV hosts or whoever farts out an opinion on Twitter that day?
There is no popular contest for president in the United States, so there is no popular vote.
This is just an argument over terminology, not substance.
If by "non-sequitur" you mean "gosh, that means the popular vote really is a meaningless number", then yes.
This raises a question for me - who gets the payment, and what do they do with it? Would the fine actually be paid to the collective EU government, and what would they use it for?
Which mobile OS in the EU has a higher market share than iOS and/or Android? I'm curious, if you don't use either of those, which one do you use, and why isn't it popular outside of the EU?
I don't think the article really gives them a free pass.
When the Spanish arrived in the 1540s, they wreaked havoc on the indigenous Quijos, killing many and conscripting others to brutal forced labor. The Quijos revolted, but by 1578 most of them had been killed or driven away, and the Spanish eventually retreated out of the valley.
"Possibly one of the worst tragedies in human histories occurred during this period," says Nick Loughlin, the lead author of the study, as millions of indigenous people across the region died after the arrival of European colonizers.
Word filters can only do so much, sure, but they force the spammer to do stupid shit like this:
remove spaces between characters & download
Now, really, who out there is really going to copy a URL filled with spaces and remove them just to download some totally-not-suspicious program?
And all they have to do is update the current anti-spam filter to check for strings after removing spaces to continue to block his URLs. Sure, it's an arm's race, but you'll end up with spam that is so obvious and odious, like what you see above, as to be practically useless to the spammer.
Are you saying that such interference does not happen any more?
No, I'm suggesting that all new kinds of interference are possible now that haven't been before. More to the point at hand though, the real question is whether or not the behavior of people on the Trump campaign or Russia broke any laws. If that is the case, then those people should be prosecuted, it's that simple. If any other interference breaks laws, those people should be prosecuted as well. I'm not suggesting that past evidence of interference should mean that current crimes do not get prosecuted.
I am pretty sure foreign entities do not much care if they break another entity's laws when it suits them.
That's fine. If, for example, Russian agents are shown to have committed crimes in the US, and Russia doesn't want to hand those people over, then we'll take that into consideration when dealing with Russia in the future. We can also stop those people from doing business with any American financial institution, for example. That's fine. If anyone in the US committed crimes, then they should be arrested and charged.
You can pretend whatever you'd like, but it's simply a fact that one or more of his indictments are in fact relating to Russian interference and communication by Russian government officials and/or agents with the Trump campaign. That's just a simple fact. There's not a ton of indictments, so I'm sure you can find at least one example all by yourself.
If you want to act like it's perfectly fine that Trump is there to support Russia and Putin against the interests of the US, great. I'm not going to stop you. I'm also not going to act like I have any idea what information Mueller has or does not have and who he will or will not indict, because no one but him has that information.
It kind of is when you're trying to state something which I'm not arguing. Yes, debates are not elections, congratulations. That doesn't address anything I said though.
This discussion is absurd, if you're bringing up the Libertarian party debate, or any other third-party debate, then you are completely missing the point about the Commission On Presidential Debates aiming to keep Ds and Rs in power by excluding any other party from participating in debates featuring their candidates. It's really not a difficult point to understand. Go read the Wikipedia article on the Commission On Presidential Debates if you want to understand, and pay special attention to the statement by the League Of Women Voters on why they could no longer sponsor presidential debates. It's obviously impossible to have any sort of rational or logical discussion with someone who makes so much of an effort to miss the point while lobbing out schoolyard insults.
I guess you should be relieved that the Career Politician Clinton didn't get in.
Forgive me, but I was under the impression that every government everywhere tries to interfere with every government they have relations with. I have always assumed it was part and parcel of world politics.
OK, you're forgiven.
Why is this suddenly a big deal now?
The question is whether or not laws were broken this time.
Why isn't the NSA/CIA keeping the elections safe?
That's a great question to ask, and hopefully the results of this investigation will give insight into that and also suggest additional ways we should be protecting ourselves.
No such thing as popular vote in the United States.
There is, actually. See, states report how many people vote for each candidate (it even goes finer than that, counties do this too!). When you total all of that up, that's called the "popular vote." Tune in next week for more Basic Facts, where we talk about how it's not possible to determine what information a special prosecutor does or does not have when his organization does not leak anything.
Trump didn't bother to campaign in New York and California - where Hillary's margin of "victory" comes from - because he knew he wouldn't win either state. Instead, he went to the Rust Belt - where Hillary didn't bother to campaign - to ask people for their vote.
OK, that's a complete non-sequitor from the previous statement, but OK, sure.
If presidential elections were decided by a popular vote (and they should be) it would have been a completely different race, with completely different results.
I know, and I'm not arguing against that.
So, talking about the popular vote is not just pointless, it's outright misleading.
It is literally the only metric we have. The electoral college results are directly derived from the popular vote in each state.
Mueller hasn't found anything so much as probable suspicion that a crime was committed
People keep saying that like they know exactly what he has. Come on, obviously the only things we know from Mueller are what he files in court. We have no knowledge of what he has or has not found other than what he has told the courts, because he can actually stop his people from leaking until the investigation is finished and he has indicted everyone he's going to indict. Even Ray Charles could see that.
Obviously the two major parties want to stay in power which is why they control the debates in their parties.
Yeah, obviously. But what about the debates between candidates of multiple parties? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about? Are you trying to deflect, or are you just that dumb?
Are yous saying a private institution like a political party cannot set their own rules and agreements with other private institutions?
No, I am not being nearly so abstract as that. I am saying that the two political parties in power are actively damaging the country by the fact that they hold television networks hostage in their quest to actively exclude every other political party from the national discussion.
I stand by my assessment that you are not smart enough for anything beyond your emotions and empty rhetoric.
Says the person who's not able to comprehend some pretty simple statements.
I don't know but that is a win in my book when a non politician can win against more seasoned and more moneyed politicians.
OK, I also believe that any "career politician" should be removed from office, but that statement you made is a complete non-sequitor. You really have no idea what I'm even referring to.
No, that's not what I mean by attack. It's not what the nation's 17 intelligence agencies and congressional committees mean by attack either. Try again.
Not presidential elections, they don't. Those are managed by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which pimps out their exclusive televised debates to individual networks. That seems kind of weird for a democracy, doesn't it? That presidential debates are only allowed to be broadcast by one network at a time? I wonder why that is. Obviously, because of the exclusivity that means there are major advertising dollars at play here, there is a huge financial incentive to host a debate.
So, here are some questions for a critical thinker: why do you think access to these debate dollars is so tightly controlled?
Who do you think controls that access?
What do you think would happen if a network aired a debate featuring a candidate who is not a member of one of the 2 sacred parties?
If you want to figure out those answers, look up the history of the Commission on Presidential Debates. Here's a hint: it used to be controlled by a non-partisan entity (not bi-partisan, mind you, which only means D-R, I mean non-partisan). That entity was the League Of Women Voters. Go figure out why they no longer control it, and who controls it, and why you are only ever shown 2 candidates in televised presidential debates.
Let me guess, if people think just like you about topics that would give you more of what you want they would be "critical thinkers".
If people actually thought critically about the election process then they would realize that it is a fraud, and they would demand more choices, and everyone could vote for someone who actually represents them instead of this bullshit lesser-of-evils crap that partisan idiots like yourself suck up. Womp womp.
Why do you assume that we aren't going to get to see a lot of the evidence that has been gathered? Do you really expect any evidence at all to be released before the investigation is finished? Naturally, in an investigation of this scope, the judge is going to decide that certain things shouldn't be released, but I'm confident we're going to see a lot of what Mueller has found.
Show us, let us hear the trial, let us see the evidence, and if we conclude they are guilty then so be it
That's not exactly how the justice system works. We have a whole system set up for this, you know that right? Can we just follow the same rule-of-law process that we've been following for who knows how long? Is that so bad? Do we really need to continue to degrade the rule of law in this country to benefit Trump? We don't owe Trump shit.
I'm going to purposefully ignore your use of the absolutely idiotic term "deep state." This is a term completely manufactured by conspiracy theorists pushing their agenda, and I like how you mix that in with calling everything else propaganda. It has a real nice ring to it.
There are specific laws which we have based on foreign powers influencing our elections. If those laws were broken, people should be prosecuted. Why the fuck is that so difficult to understand?
Political affiliations, or which foreign government it is, have absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether or not those laws were broken.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they require you to move to Arkhangelsk or is that optional?
Word games from "Mr. Establishment" himself... color me surprised at your 'semantic creativity.'
The FBI has an intelligence branch, but the FBI itself is law enforcement, not intelligence.
Here, in chronological order:
Office of Naval Intelligence, USN, DOD
Coast Guard Intelligence, USCG, Homeland Security
Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Dept. State
Central Intelligence Agency, independent
25th Air Force, USAF, DOD
National Security Agency, DOD
Defense Intelligence Agency, DOD
National Reconnaissance Office, DOD
Intelligence and Security Command, US Army, DOD
Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, DOE
Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, USMC, DOD
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, DOD
Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Treasury
Intelligence Branch, FBI, DOJ
Office of National Security Intelligence, DEA, DOJ
Office of Intelligence and Analysis, Homeland Security
The head of the intelligence community is Dan Coats, DNI.
Personally, if you believe ANYTHING coming from the "Intel Community" either way you're an idiot. They lie. They lie straight faced in front of congress about all sorts of things, spying on Americans to there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This isn't a "Right vs Left" issue, because both sides have been on both sides of hating and defending the "intel community"
You're right, that's less of a "right vs left" issue and more of an "America vs Russia" issue. That's one of their goals - to get Americans to distrust each other and our own institutions. People need to remember who the real enemy is, it is not other Americans. The intelligence community in the US is full of people who genuinely love the country and want to see it do well, and they don't deserve these buckets of scorn. They aren't perfect, and sometimes they do something that I don't agree with, but to suggest that the entire community cannot be trusted is playing directly into Putin's hand. Watch out, in your quest to be Ultimate Patriot #1 you might realize that you're just another apparatchik.
I don't believe it. Deep state. Carter Page. Witch hunt.
It's probably best to just end all investigations towards anything related to Russia.
Not when the probe has no justification for being, and is a grotesque perversion of our entire justice system.
That's an interesting justification, I don't hear that from the party apparatus much. It sounds like they're trying to discredit the investigation completely on purely partisan grounds, as if the United States has not and is not currently being attacked by Russia, which it is.
Regardless of the motivation for beginning the investigation: considering the fact that the entire intelligence community, including the DNI appointed by Trump, agrees that Russia has been and is currently attacking us, do you think we should end the investigation and, what, just ignore what Russia has been and is doing? How about the spy trying to infiltrate the GOP and NRA, just let her go because some people have the personal opinion that the basis for the original warrant was incorrect? Would it maybe be a decent idea to have that warrant looked at by a judge instead of listening to TV hosts or whoever farts out an opinion on Twitter that day?
There is no popular contest for president in the United States, so there is no popular vote.
This is just an argument over terminology, not substance.
If by "non-sequitur" you mean "gosh, that means the popular vote really is a meaningless number", then yes.
No, that's not what I mean by non-sequitur.
This raises a question for me - who gets the payment, and what do they do with it? Would the fine actually be paid to the collective EU government, and what would they use it for?
Which mobile OS in the EU has a higher market share than iOS and/or Android? I'm curious, if you don't use either of those, which one do you use, and why isn't it popular outside of the EU?
I don't think the article really gives them a free pass.
When the Spanish arrived in the 1540s, they wreaked havoc on the indigenous Quijos, killing many and conscripting others to brutal forced labor. The Quijos revolted, but by 1578 most of them had been killed or driven away, and the Spanish eventually retreated out of the valley.
"Possibly one of the worst tragedies in human histories occurred during this period," says Nick Loughlin, the lead author of the study, as millions of indigenous people across the region died after the arrival of European colonizers.
Word filters can only do so much, sure, but they force the spammer to do stupid shit like this:
remove spaces between characters & download
Now, really, who out there is really going to copy a URL filled with spaces and remove them just to download some totally-not-suspicious program?
And all they have to do is update the current anti-spam filter to check for strings after removing spaces to continue to block his URLs. Sure, it's an arm's race, but you'll end up with spam that is so obvious and odious, like what you see above, as to be practically useless to the spammer.
Are you saying that such interference does not happen any more?
No, I'm suggesting that all new kinds of interference are possible now that haven't been before. More to the point at hand though, the real question is whether or not the behavior of people on the Trump campaign or Russia broke any laws. If that is the case, then those people should be prosecuted, it's that simple. If any other interference breaks laws, those people should be prosecuted as well. I'm not suggesting that past evidence of interference should mean that current crimes do not get prosecuted.
I am pretty sure foreign entities do not much care if they break another entity's laws when it suits them.
That's fine. If, for example, Russian agents are shown to have committed crimes in the US, and Russia doesn't want to hand those people over, then we'll take that into consideration when dealing with Russia in the future. We can also stop those people from doing business with any American financial institution, for example. That's fine. If anyone in the US committed crimes, then they should be arrested and charged.
You can pretend whatever you'd like, but it's simply a fact that one or more of his indictments are in fact relating to Russian interference and communication by Russian government officials and/or agents with the Trump campaign. That's just a simple fact. There's not a ton of indictments, so I'm sure you can find at least one example all by yourself.
If you want to act like it's perfectly fine that Trump is there to support Russia and Putin against the interests of the US, great. I'm not going to stop you. I'm also not going to act like I have any idea what information Mueller has or does not have and who he will or will not indict, because no one but him has that information.
Take care.
Stating a simple fact is not a deflection.
It kind of is when you're trying to state something which I'm not arguing. Yes, debates are not elections, congratulations. That doesn't address anything I said though.
This discussion is absurd, if you're bringing up the Libertarian party debate, or any other third-party debate, then you are completely missing the point about the Commission On Presidential Debates aiming to keep Ds and Rs in power by excluding any other party from participating in debates featuring their candidates. It's really not a difficult point to understand. Go read the Wikipedia article on the Commission On Presidential Debates if you want to understand, and pay special attention to the statement by the League Of Women Voters on why they could no longer sponsor presidential debates. It's obviously impossible to have any sort of rational or logical discussion with someone who makes so much of an effort to miss the point while lobbing out schoolyard insults.
I guess you should be relieved that the Career Politician Clinton didn't get in.
100%. That's why I didn't vote for her.
Take care.
Forgive me, but I was under the impression that every government everywhere tries to interfere with every government they have relations with. I have always assumed it was part and parcel of world politics.
OK, you're forgiven.
Why is this suddenly a big deal now?
The question is whether or not laws were broken this time.
Why isn't the NSA/CIA keeping the elections safe?
That's a great question to ask, and hopefully the results of this investigation will give insight into that and also suggest additional ways we should be protecting ourselves.
you know that manafort was charged with something totally unrelated to election, that happened years before election, right?
Yes. Now talk about Papadopoulos and his relation to reality.
None of Mueller's indictments have anything to do with Russian interference in the election or colluding with Trump to do so.
That's simply factually incorrect.
No such thing as popular vote in the United States.
There is, actually. See, states report how many people vote for each candidate (it even goes finer than that, counties do this too!). When you total all of that up, that's called the "popular vote." Tune in next week for more Basic Facts, where we talk about how it's not possible to determine what information a special prosecutor does or does not have when his organization does not leak anything.
Trump didn't bother to campaign in New York and California - where Hillary's margin of "victory" comes from - because he knew he wouldn't win either state. Instead, he went to the Rust Belt - where Hillary didn't bother to campaign - to ask people for their vote.
OK, that's a complete non-sequitor from the previous statement, but OK, sure.
If presidential elections were decided by a popular vote (and they should be) it would have been a completely different race, with completely different results.
I know, and I'm not arguing against that.
So, talking about the popular vote is not just pointless, it's outright misleading.
It is literally the only metric we have. The electoral college results are directly derived from the popular vote in each state.
Mueller hasn't even come up with probable suspicion that a crime was committed
I want you to prove that statement. I want you to show everything that Mueller has.
Mueller hasn't found anything so much as probable suspicion that a crime was committed
People keep saying that like they know exactly what he has. Come on, obviously the only things we know from Mueller are what he files in court. We have no knowledge of what he has or has not found other than what he has told the courts, because he can actually stop his people from leaking until the investigation is finished and he has indicted everyone he's going to indict. Even Ray Charles could see that.
Debates are not elections.
Nice deflection.
Obviously the two major parties want to stay in power which is why they control the debates in their parties.
Yeah, obviously. But what about the debates between candidates of multiple parties? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about? Are you trying to deflect, or are you just that dumb?
Are yous saying a private institution like a political party cannot set their own rules and agreements with other private institutions?
No, I am not being nearly so abstract as that. I am saying that the two political parties in power are actively damaging the country by the fact that they hold television networks hostage in their quest to actively exclude every other political party from the national discussion.
I stand by my assessment that you are not smart enough for anything beyond your emotions and empty rhetoric.
Says the person who's not able to comprehend some pretty simple statements.
I don't know but that is a win in my book when a non politician can win against more seasoned and more moneyed politicians .
OK, I also believe that any "career politician" should be removed from office, but that statement you made is a complete non-sequitor. You really have no idea what I'm even referring to.
given the fact that both parties have been openly and extremely anti-Russian for over a century
Isn't it curious, then, that one party is actively trying to discredit or simply end the investigation?
No, that's not what I mean by attack. It's not what the nation's 17 intelligence agencies and congressional committees mean by attack either. Try again.
Sounds like we would be A Number One at stopping those attacks then, so why haven't we?
The States decide their elections.
Not presidential elections, they don't. Those are managed by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which pimps out their exclusive televised debates to individual networks. That seems kind of weird for a democracy, doesn't it? That presidential debates are only allowed to be broadcast by one network at a time? I wonder why that is. Obviously, because of the exclusivity that means there are major advertising dollars at play here, there is a huge financial incentive to host a debate.
So, here are some questions for a critical thinker: why do you think access to these debate dollars is so tightly controlled?
Who do you think controls that access?
What do you think would happen if a network aired a debate featuring a candidate who is not a member of one of the 2 sacred parties?
If you want to figure out those answers, look up the history of the Commission on Presidential Debates. Here's a hint: it used to be controlled by a non-partisan entity (not bi-partisan, mind you, which only means D-R, I mean non-partisan). That entity was the League Of Women Voters. Go figure out why they no longer control it, and who controls it, and why you are only ever shown 2 candidates in televised presidential debates.
Let me guess, if people think just like you about topics that would give you more of what you want they would be "critical thinkers".
If people actually thought critically about the election process then they would realize that it is a fraud, and they would demand more choices, and everyone could vote for someone who actually represents them instead of this bullshit lesser-of-evils crap that partisan idiots like yourself suck up. Womp womp.
Why do you assume that we aren't going to get to see a lot of the evidence that has been gathered? Do you really expect any evidence at all to be released before the investigation is finished? Naturally, in an investigation of this scope, the judge is going to decide that certain things shouldn't be released, but I'm confident we're going to see a lot of what Mueller has found.
Show us, let us hear the trial, let us see the evidence, and if we conclude they are guilty then so be it
That's not exactly how the justice system works. We have a whole system set up for this, you know that right? Can we just follow the same rule-of-law process that we've been following for who knows how long? Is that so bad? Do we really need to continue to degrade the rule of law in this country to benefit Trump? We don't owe Trump shit.
I'm going to purposefully ignore your use of the absolutely idiotic term "deep state." This is a term completely manufactured by conspiracy theorists pushing their agenda, and I like how you mix that in with calling everything else propaganda. It has a real nice ring to it.
There are specific laws which we have based on foreign powers influencing our elections. If those laws were broken, people should be prosecuted. Why the fuck is that so difficult to understand?
Political affiliations, or which foreign government it is, have absolutely nothing to do with the question of whether or not those laws were broken.