Obedient or self-reliant

After a few days of big posts doing big explorations of big issues today I’ll do little stories to clean out browser tabs.

Sarah Kendzior is puzzled by the mainstream media. Why aren’t they telling the truth about the nasty guy? She tweeted:

That's been the irony all along. The truth is popular. The truth sells. The truth is full of horrifying scandals the MSM usually loves -- but now they bury it out of fear of Trump. When greedy MSM works against its own profit margin, that's how you know something is deeply wrong.

A follower asked why the MSM is afraid of him. Kendzior replied:

It's a transnational crime syndicate. That means there are serious threats both to individuals and to nations and infrastructure. I will add though that some in the media don't need to be threatened or blackmailed; they are complicit volunteers.

Francisco Taveira quotes Kendzior discussing the key witnesses in the public part of the impeachment hearings:

Trump’s ability to pull off another election heist relies on silencing people such as Ms. Hill, Col. Vindman, and Ms. Yovanovitch who have seen his machinations from the inside and can explain them to the American public.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut tweeted a thread about the nasty guy again holding up foreign aid that had been approved by Congress. This time the money is for Lebanon. Murphy explains why that freeze is a really bad idea. Much of the money is to go to the Lebanese Armed Forces. The LAF is the most important multi-ethnic institution in the country. Only the LAF can protect the protesters. A weakened LAF means either (1) Hezbollah, backed by Iran, will take over, or (2) Russia will step in to back the LAF. Both options are awful. Both are exactly opposite of official policy goals in Lebanon.



Olga Lautman has some questions about Devin Nunes. He is the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and made a big show every day of advancing some weird conspiracy theory in attempts to discredit the impeachment hearings before that committee. Lautman links to a CNBC report that Nunes is a part of the Ukraine scandal. Lautman tweeted:

Why is Nunes allowed to be on the committee w access to our intel?

Why was this not brought up during impeachment hearings? How was Nunes allowed to spew GRU disinfo with no one stopping him and stating his personal involvement? Why wasn’t Nunes forced to recuse since he personally was involved in searching for Biden fabricated info re the mafia?

One of the big bits of testimony that came from the impeachment hearings came from Dr. Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council Russia expert. She said, “Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them.”

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos says that’s a big problem because, “We are also running out of experts in the government to do so.” McCarter lists a couple departures from Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. At least a dozen top officials have left and taken their experience and expertise with them.



Alexander Kaufman at HuffPost writes that that the world’s top ten fossil fuel producers are on track to extract (which we would presumably burn) far more oil, gas, and coal by 2030 than the planet can handle without catastrophic warming. There is a big discrepancy between national climate change policies and fossil fuel production policies.



Anders Aslund, an economist with a focus on Russia and Eastern Europe tweeted that he’s amazed at how many Americans are unaware that our democracy is in great danger.

What caught my attention and prompted me to include the tweet is a reply from Kerri Boxx who quoted an excerpt from an article from Political. A pollster (not named in the excerpt) says that four questions in a poll will tell whether a person is very highly invested in enforcing the social hierarchy:

These questions pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious. Respondents who picked the first option in each of these questions are strongly authoritarian.