In the days before Trump supporters’ insurrection, the Department of Defense placed major limitations on the tactics, equipment, and resources the DC National Guard could make use of in dealing with rioters, The Washington Post reported Thursday.
Pentagon officials sent memos on January 4 and 5 barring DC guardsmen from receiving ammo and riot gear, engaging with protesters (except for self-defense), sharing equipment with local police, and using surveillance or air assets without explicit approval from President Donald Trump’s acting Defense Secretary, Christopher Miller, according to The Post.
The CISA page for the 2020 elections features guidance helpful to the nation’s election managers and has been designed to counter domestic false claims and rumors as well as foreign created or influenced disinformation.
Addendum
Posted to YouTube by Bloomberg Quick Take, June 28, 2022.
I don’t really want to introduce this lift of my own words 🙂 because it’s telegraphed well as is. Let’s try this that way.
From the Awesome Conversation
The World Wide Web is in civilizational terms still a new communications technology, and about 14 years ago, broadband and the advent of powerful search engines and networks made it an ideal tool for political friends and enemies alike. Here is the program of one of our enemies — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2020/02/13/active-measures/ Another term (on which I haven’t worked): “Hybrid Warfare”.
I try to sustain our broadest American Freedom of Speech character across partisan lines, but we must be aware — or become aware — of sophisticated agitprop, disinformation, disingenuous information, etc. across partisan lines. The vast majority here are Americans whether Democratic or Republicans. We work things out. We don’t choke down political language or presentations without critical facility of our own and an immense treasure in research capability.
The BackChannels blog is mine and represents probably the most consistently semi-productive thing I’ve been doing for about a decade.
I would view the former politically correct fascists on campus and the emerged Far White Right in Charlottesville as projects that have simmered beneath the former political surface and simply amplified and coalesced their national political presence by way of both surface and “dark web” social channels. They’re the “violent radicals” of our day and most of us should want to repopulate the positions around the aisle.
We have had enough bullying from extremists Far Out Left and Far White Right.
Additional Comment
Unlike our Russian counterparts who cannot today choose between lives in a modern and vibrant authentic democracy, Americans may choose at this time to live with modern demand for integrity and responsibility in their speech and thereby inhabit an authentically modern and revolutionary ever new world.
“The claim that a Palestinian was wounded by live ammunition is known and the incident is being investigated,” the IDF said.
Channel 12 reported on Friday night that an initial investigation indicated that Abu Aram was shot unintentionally when the weapon of one of the soldiers at the scene discharged accidentally.
Screen capture at 0:31 seconds on January 3, 2021.
The generator and its owner had been separated, albeit not entirely in the IDF’s direction. Still, what would have been the point?
I’m inclined to leave the original header in place on this post even while changing its course, a reminder to myself to have the hard independent look first and shill neither Left nor Right.
While “Palestinian Resistance” picks up with its habitual protests — and those are certain to draw others toward injury — the facade covering Iranian involvement (backed by Moscow) will slip mightily as Sunni Arab states further cement their both new and strategic relationship with Israel. Those that have done that are no fans of Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood. They’re not behind the Red-Green Far Out Left either. That pack of howling hyenas has worked as hard as the Palestinian “leadership” to encourage and sustain Palestinian self-destruction via abuse and corruption, disingenuous (the fix is always in!) speech, old Soviet communist (KGB) alliance, and deep exploitation (from use as “Pallywood” actors to child tunnel diggers to human shields).
In the Middle East as well as elsewhere across the world’s conflicted regions, appearances may be deceiving. Here, however, I would be surprised if IDF investigation were to refuse IDF fault in the injuring of Harun Abu Aram. The case now seems other — at least at this desktop — than a my-side-your-side thing. Still, states and territories have their agreements and understandings for the everyday working of their respective societies, and the suspended Palestinian semi-state and its residents should know better than to build where Israel has refused permit.
If there’s another fact irrefutable on the Palestinian side, it is just exactly that.
On Facebook and on YouTube, Ibtidah (The Beginning), the presence appears to represent the modern argument for intellectual freedom and integrity in states in which politics have been bound to religion and the state and others control education in the cause of medieval intellectual enslavement.
Personal Note on the Issue of Education in Transitioning Medieval Societies
I shared this note with the editor of Ibtidah —
Broad spectrum of choice should yield toward reason in the dissemination and uptake of information, but as some societies remain medieval in relation to power and worldviews, the medieval within societies may choose to cling to what becomes with greater knowledge simply archaic information. That doesn’t help anyone and least of all fanatical adherents to reactionary political or religious dogma.
Our species boasts the possession of about 4,300 religions with atheism quite low in percentage against believers in God or gods. Having become conscious as human (see Genesis chapters two and three as depicted in the Tenach and read without presumptions), we appear to have come equipped with imagination and moral sense that reliably, far more than less, extends into metaphysics. If we hadn’t, we would handle bodies — or perhaps presence — as we do animal nuisances and trash. That we don’t speaks to greater consciousness in the way of awareness and self-awareness: within our separable cultures, we wish children to be born and ourselves married and buried in customary ways fit to sustained cultural and social precepts.
With such ways, we take cultural form.
We may even believe ourselves beautiful by doing so.
🙂
By comparison, science may be crude in its marriage with reality and practical issues, but given the want of a compassionate modern world, the accurate conveyance of scientific information becomes all the more important for the broad and broadly distributed services we may bring to ourselves globally.
Orbán’s political takeover – buttressed by a German industrial lobby that relies on cheap labour in Hungarian plants – has largely been bankrolled by cash plundered from the European Union that he rails so fervently against. A 2019 New York Times investigation found that Orbán uses billions of euros in EU subsidies as a patronage fund that enriches his allies, protects his political interests and punishes his rivals. “The ideology is a ruse. The money is where the action is,” said Lane Scheppele.
Reasoning: America cannot deny her changed posture with Russia since the December 25, 1991 end of the Cold War. The now 26-year term opened handily with cooperation in security and trade, but it appears Moscow’s old habits for authoritarian and central control die hard — or die or fade not at all. Most recent in evidence: Russia’s extraordinary hacking of data rich and powerful Federal institutions.
BackChannels may consider the Nashville Explosion a “follow on”.
What’s next?
As with the 2017 Las Vegas shooting and the targeting of America’s Cowboy Class from the exotically eastern-named Mandalay Bay Hotel (it seems major attacks against the Homeland involve such poetics), one might consider the range both of American Cowboy cities and symbols and otherwise centers of American commercial and defense might and vitality.
The tempo of aggression would seem within Moscow’s control while Americans read of discoveries and events in the news.
Posted to YouTube by Movieclips Trailers, September 25, 2014.
The Soviet Union collapsed in bankruptcy 26 years ago on December 25, 1991. Those who believed in the failed stated, believed also in absolute power with themselves as chiefs of state otherwise known as the Party Nomenklatura. On our side, we believed, however briefly, that the tension between the Capitalist West and an expanding and thieving Communist Russia, the most central sponsor of dictatorships worldwide, including Khomeini’s to come as the Islamic Revolution in Iran, had collapsed as well and that democracy and prosperity would be Moscow’s new fate with the western world.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
President Trump’s own disingenuous remonstrance involving Russia and his undeniable involvement with the Russian Federation tells the direction the Post-Soviet Era has taken, to wit, Russia has become an authoritarian and combined mafia and police state whose elite cook up and swallow money before breakfast while those less connected with Putin and Moscow mumble along without potent representation (even Alexei Navalny in the shadow of his latest poisoning has been forced to serve his Russian constituency from beyond Russia’s borders).
Here is Mikhail Gorbachev in 2016 speaking about the dissolving of his former state —
Posted to YouTube by BBC News, December 13, 2016.
Accusation in a Mirror in One Statement
“That which I intend for you I will claim as your intention for me.”
In its secret life, Putin’s Russian Federation has mounted a challenge to the open democracies of the modern west. In Crimea, for example, it has produced the “Little Green Men” of “Hybrid Warfare” fame (it has also launched audacious cyber attacks against Ukrainian assets). Previously in the United States, it has sought to troll the nation into confusion (read up on “Cozy Bear” or the “Internet Research Agency”). Around the world and still in the domain of a perverse modern warfare, it has managed to sustain “Frozen Conflicts” that serve to inflict continuous insecurity in target states while providing comparatively safe harbors and transit zones for Transnational Crime Organizations (TCOs). Here’s a wrap by international energy consultant Agnia Grigas (2016) —
Posted to YouTube by the Atlantic Council, June 30, 2016.
The Nashville Explosion that took place Christmas morning involved procuring and producing an RV Bomb, arming it in addition with a powerful sound system and patiently programmed tape, possibly including attention-getting gunfire, and it went off in a sufficiently symbolic (there’s that cowboy thing!) location but one also deeply sensitive with AT&T communications infrastructure. Given the day and hour, there was little interest in carnage or sustained drama and attention — there was, when it was over, direct damage to a major American communications hub.
Imagine the same form of attack repeated in one city after another.
Sufficient threat shifts state positions in small and unseen ways, but an attack appropriately interpreted serves as a wake-up that in a democracy calls for “clear, accurate, and complete” public analysis as well as some necessarily immediate, opaque, and sophisticated countermeasures.
Simple Criminal Act — or Act of Terror or Act of War
Perhaps the “Nashville Christmas Morning Explosion” will turn out to be about lone nut case motivated by personal grievance and armed with money and know-how.
You know I’m in real estate, don’t you?
(Not a chance).
Addendum – In Which the Editor Considers Going Into Real Estate
The confirmation of Anthony Quinn Warner as the perpetrator has stalled where it had for Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, i.e., the “why?”.
The story will shift to the mystery woman on the other side of Warner’s “Quit Claim” in L.A., and, as with Paddock, there may still be no official explanation.
Troublesome here: “East-West Rivalry”; the “Whole Russian Thing”; The Location — Nashville, 2nd Street, hard by a critical AT&T communications center; the Christmas morning timing; the planning involved, the mockery (“Downtown”), the labor intensive execution, which had to include the gathering together and assembling of components, including the production of the tape and the creation or recording of the female voice on it.
How do you think you know what you think you know?
Where is the “Deep State”? What is “The Swamp”?
No medieval rumor mill in history competes with the accusations, innuendos, and wild conspiracy theories and faked-up notions promoted by the Far Gone Right.
To date, DT has lost numerous lawsuits for lack of evidence of fraud. AG Barr has rightly refused to walk with him over the cliff into anti-American authoritarian control of the nation by way of narcissistic paranoia and force.
“Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down,” Trump told Jones, who for years had been pushing a message that “elites” and “globalists” are part of a secret conspiracy that controls the world. “You will be very — very impressed, I hope.”
Wisdom: “He who points the finger has three pointing back at himself.”
“I just learned of absolute incontrovertible evidence of North Korean boats delivering ballots through a harbor in Maine, the state of Maine,” Stone said. “If this checks out, if law enforcement looked into that and it turned out to be true, it would be proof of foreign involvement in the election.”
Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap addressed Stone’s claims in a statement to NEWS CENTER Maine Thursday, saying the “vague rumor has absolutely no validity.”
On Election Day 2016, I sat in the passenger seat of Alex Jones’s Dodge Hellcat as we swerved through traffic, making our way to a nearby polling place. As Jones punched the gas pedal to the floor, the smell of vodka, like paint thinner, wafted up from the white Dixie cup anchored in the console. My stomach churned as the phone I held streamed live video to Facebook: Jones rambling about voter fraud and rigged elections while I stared at the screen, holding the camera at an angle to hide his double chin. It rarely worked, but I didn’t want to be blamed when he watched the video later.
What has the medieval world — its views of humanity and related political methods — been doing in our modern one?
Perhaps I’ve been naive about the evolution of the political management of power across time, for I have thought my modern American democracy and its many responsible and responsive institutions the most wonderful humanist and secular invention on earth and in history. However, some beg to disagree with the evolution of the optimal organization of open modern democratic communities, and here are we Americans saddled with surprisingly medieval mobs, an “authoritarian” president (on his way out) and, at least before the recent election, a senate full of head-bobbing lords before his questionable majesty.
Quite often on this theme, I’ve hauled in “Basic Training” — the pledge of America’s civilian and military officials and officers to the Constitution — or, as here, made mention of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but as this morning’s start brought the following ‘graphs flying off my desktop, well, a copy-and-paste seemed fitting. The first comment addresses the basic issue of having the past dragging the world’s future backward toward what has been known not to work. 🙂 The second excerpt deals with Russia’s 19th Century political ambitions for what should be a thoroughly hopping 21st Century EU/NATO.
From the Awesome Conversation
I’ve come to see the great divide in the management of power as that between feudal-medieval political absolutism underpinned by desperation, dogma, and some propensities for evil and the MODERN open democratic distribution of the same by balanced and checked integrated systems and related processes. I think there’s difficulty in popular understanding of what has been deeply planted in the soul of medieval leadership where one inevitably finds the despotic and malignantly narcissistic among kings, essentially. In the milieu of despots and Presidents-for-Life remains the endowment we have inherited from the “Old World”, and while it is here in us, we are all together still part of an evolving New World. Putin and Xi see no necessity for it. Where one may place the present personalities may well have to do with that “Medieval v Modern” theme.
From the Imperial Period to the Bolsheviks to Putin, Russia has not been able to escape feudal-medieval political absolutism. Worse, is has been able to encourage the same in EU/NATO with reversions in political modality standing out in Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Turkey. Great Britain has been a little mixed up in this too with its reaction to 9/11, post-9/11 attacks, and the Moscow-Damascus driven forced migration from Syria. It too chose to “swell” (as flesh does with stings and other assaults) against greater cooperation with Europe in the interest of sealing and securing its own culture and traditions via BREXIT.
Putin’s promotion of Russia as a pious White Russian Nationalist enterprise belies its own multicultural reality — and you have seen the Grand Mosque opening video from2015 — but for the time being in Russia and the European states mentioned, a resurgent past holds sway.
What we cling to for assurance and safety, no less than mother’s dress, is always somewhere back in time.
I’d say Moscow has had a good and medieval run against an unprepared West, but if the problem is the persistence of the Medieval world in our Modern one, then we may proceed with the greater development of a more modern and democratic world. It’s all a bump on time’s highway, not a permanent turnaround into a much, much less desirable past.
Our nation was born forward of the Age of Reason and designed to defy absolute power in favor of a checked and balanced distribution of power to be managed through democratic methods. The nation has (to this point) succeeded with that. In the regions of personal behaviors, ethics, and morals, it has been generous with tolerance but some part has migrated from raised eyebrows and winks (naughty!) into criminally dark enterprise plainly criminal incidents. Such matters require investigative and Justice Department solutions, not cultural overhauls.
BackChannels 