Faye Flam, reporting in Nuclear war could come with a flub, not a bang for Japan Times (a unique perspective), writes:

Talk with experts on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, and it soon becomes clear that the biggest threat the world faces isn’t an intentional act of evil, but a confluence of stupidity and error. After all, the most frightening close calls during the Cold War started with trivial mistakes — a dropped socket from a socket wrench, for example, or a training tape put in the wrong computer.

With nine missile tests just this year, North Korea is quickly advancing the range of its nuclear weapons. The distance record goes to a missile called the Hwasong-12, which was launched May 14. It traveled about 800 km, but on a steep trajectory that demonstrated the power to have gone more than 3,800 km.

Some experts, such as Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, say that missile had an innovative design and showed evidence of real engineering competence, while others, such as German aerospace engineer Markus Schiller, aren’t so sure. Experts also disagree about how close North Korea is to being able to strike San Francisco or Washington, or whether the United States should negotiate a deal to prevent this from happening. But they do tend to agree that the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, is unlikely to launch an unprovoked attack, since the retaliation would obliterate his country.

The situation is nevertheless dangerous, given the possibility of error and misjudgment. “I cannot imagine any circumstance that would lead Kim Jong Un to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack on anyone,” Stanford physicist Siegfried Hecker said in a recent interview published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. But, he went on, “We can’t rule out a miscalculation or a desperate response to a crisis.”

Physicist David Wright, co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, has made a similar point: “The biggest threat here seems to be to that you’d get to the point where you’d have a crisis — where people do things and other people misunderstand their intentions.”

Former Rand Corp. nuclear strategist Daniel Ellsberg has spent years thinking about how to avoid this sort of situation. While he’s best-known for leaking the Vietnam War documents known as the Pentagon Papers, he says his current focus is preventing nuclear war. His book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner will be released in December.

Full disclosure, for two years of my life I was responsible for the day-to-day care of eight tactical nuclear weapons on board the USS Bainbridge, CGN 25.

[Update at 1302 on 28 January 2021: Yesterday and today, hundreds of readers have come to HCWW to read, or listen to, Kwame Alexander’s Take A Knee. I have no idea what happened out there in cyberspace, but I happy that this powerful poem is drawing attention. I would really appreciate anyone who can relate to me in the comments below how they found this post. Cheers. Jeff]

[Update at 0821 on 30 May2020: In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the riots sweeping our nation, Kwame Alexander’s poetry continues to speak for the frustrated and my traffic from readers coming to here to read Take A Knee continues to be in the top five percent of all my posts.]

[Update at 0527 on 5 December 2018: Since I first posted Kwame Alexander’s poem a year ago, more readers have consistently visited Have Coffee Will Write from dozens of countries to listen to and read this amazing poem.

Clearly, Alexander’s work has touched—as it touched me—a wide, global audience.]

[Update at 1952 on 1 August: I’m not sure why, but the embed video has stopped working. You can still listen, however, by following this link to the ESPN website.]

TAKE A KNEE

Take a moment,
Take a picture,
Take a boy
Take a park
Take a toy
Take a man
Take a gun
Take a guess
Take a look
Take a shot
Take a bullet
Take a life
Take a life?
Take a life
Take Tamir
Take Trayvon
Take Cornelius
Take Philando
Take Jamar
Take Sandra
Take William
Take Terrence
Take Freddy
Take Alton
Take Christian
Take Jesse
Take Keith
Take Walter
Take a breath Continue Reading »

I like reading about other writers’ rooms on Saturday mornings. I very seldom find a mention that I want to save, but when I do, I savor the words. This morning, reading about Barbara Trapido’s room (I had no idea who she was until this moment) her concluding paragraph gave me pause. She writes:

The way I work is to bed down in here two nights a week and rise at 3 or 4am. Then I write, cross-legged, in bed with an A4 pad on my knee until about nine. The mini-kettle and the Mr Illy tin of biscuits are because I can’t leave the room, or I get that Xanadu moment and my fantasy life flies away. Writing novels is like dreaming. My real life returns with breakfast and the room goes back to playing dead. All I use it for after that is email.

I have a drip coffeemaker instead of the mini-kettle and no biscuits (my keyboard gets dirty enough without all those crumbs) but everything else makes perfect sense to me.

So, I couldn’t care less about the wins or losses of Cleveland’s sports franchises, but I do care about the millions of tax dollars the owners suck out of the local economy while the needs of tax payers are ignored. This has long been the principle trope of Cleveland treasure Roldo Bartimole—who started as a sports’ writer—and his take resonates with Ralph Nader and, as indicated below, Ken Reed.

In Be Aware of the Dark Side of Sports Media, Nader writes:

The sports pages of major newspapers, such as the Washington Post, are thriving while other sections of newspapers such as business sections or book review pages struggle to survive.

That doesn’t mean that the sports pages allow the fans, the consumers, the taxpayers and many of the players have their say. Over the years, the sports sections have been neglecting the dark sides of organized sports as a deliberate practice, not as an oversight.

Ken Reed, author of several books, weekly columns, and the Sports Policy Director for our League of Fans, is arguably the leading contemporary essayist of sports at its best and at its worst. Ever hear of him? Probably not. His truth telling rarely makes it onto radio, television and the sports pages or into the sports publications such as Sporting News, because he writes about the greed, the covered-up dangers, Continue Reading »

[Updated at 0440 on 29 November—Michael Harriot, writing in Why Calling Elizabeth Warren ‘Pocahontas’ Is Racist, Explained for The Root, explains:

But why is this racist?

Because calling someone by a stereotypical name that is not their own because of their alleged ethnic or racial background is racist. If someone called me “Leroy,” I’m fighting. Well, I’m over 40 now, so I probably wouldn’t fight them, but I’d want to.*

*Please don’t hold me to the “I probably wouldn’t fight … ” part of that statement. I try to take the high road, but when they go low, I go high. And by “high” I mean the punches to the throat or jaw area.

It’s as if Trump went to a Holocaust survivors’ memorial and reminded them that they weren’t the only ones who were murdered, or went into a room filled with Jews and said, “Hey, I like the Jews! My daughter had sex with one!” (Bad examples. He actually did both of those things.)

But here is the biggest reason Trump’s nasty nickname is racist: because Native Americans said so.

In May the National Congress of American Indians said in a statement: “The name of Pocahontas should not be used as a slur, and it is inappropriate for anyone to use her name in a disparaging manner.”

After the incident Monday, NCAI President Jefferson Keel, a U.S. Army officer and Vietnam War veteran, stated: “We regret that the president’s use of the name Pocahontas as a slur to insult a political adversary is overshadowing the true purpose of today’s White House ceremony.”

Yeah, see that’s what racist don’t get. The people you’re being racist to/about get to set the bar. Not you. Deal.]

Or watch House of Cards…

Lauren Gambino, reporting in Trump makes ‘Pocahontas’ joke at ceremony honoring Navajo veterans for The Guardian, writes:

Addressing Native American veterans, Trump repeated a favorite taunt about Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, a political opponent who he refers to derisively as “Pocahontas”.

“You were here long before any of us were here,” Trump said, speaking to the veterans from a podium placed in front of a portrait of US president Andrew Jackson. “Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.”

That I would for the briefest moment think, It could have been worse, he might have said that he was a Redskins’ fan or made the tomahawk chop, shows just how horrible this event really was.

So, Dave and Chuck, the Koch brothers had $650 million lying around and thought that buying an interest in an aging dinosaur of a print media company would be a good idea. Since they made their money the old fashion way, they inherited it, I could buy that they would toss money around like that. Still, they had to have some reason, right? What could the reason be?

Lucia Graves, writing in ‘Their own media megaphone’: what do the Koch brothers want from Time? for The Guardian, says, that depends:

That Charles and David Koch are putting $650m into Meredith Corp’s purchase of Time would ordinarily be cause for great soul-searching in media. But then, these are not ordinary times.

Meredith’s Koch-backed deal with Time—which owns, in addition to Time magazine, titles including People, Fortune and Sports Illustrated—was sealed Sunday night. Meredith said in a statement announcing the deal that they are building “a premier media company serving nearly 200 million American consumers.”

Observers of Koch Industries, a longtime supporter of libertarian and conservative causes, especially generous with funding for climate denial through thinktanks and research groups, say more than business is at stake.

“It’s a very proper business decision—a cheap way to wield even more political influence,” said Bill McKibben, a former New Yorker writer and and key figure in the environmental movement as founder of the group 350.org. “The return on investment on their political work is off the charts, I fear.”

There certainly isn’t a financial reason for such a business deal. Who reads Time anymore?

At first glance, the oil and gas giant’s reason for backing the bid by Meredith is not readily apparent. Sure, the Kochs have appeared on the Time 100 list—in 2011, 2014 and 2015—and David Koch has lunched with the magazine’s former editor. But what kind of money-minded mogul would pivot to print in 2017—and to Time, of all places?

“Time magazine doesn’t move the needle on anything any more,” said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. “It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Unless they want to influence the Fortune 500 rankings or something.”

No, that can’t be the reason. Graves circles back to Climate Change/Global Warming and, I think, gets what the Koch Brothers are after.

Charles Alexander, whose decades-long career at Time magazine culminated in 13 years as its science editor, isn’t the least bit puzzled. He is, however, very afraid.

What’s concerning about the Kochs’ interest, according to Alexander, is not that they are conservative. Time’s founder, Henry Luce, was conservative too. What Alexander is worried about is a much more recent affliction of the Republican party: its systematic denial of the science underlying climate change and how that presaged a larger skepticism of science and facts in general.

Now that makes sense and Graves has much, much more…

When I was in middle school I read a lot of young adult biographies. There was a whole section produced by the same publisher in the school library and I think I read most, if not all of them. I remember Thomas Edison, Booker T. Washington, Nellie Bly, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Marie Curie and Gandhi among dozens of others. I carried the fascination into my teens and my adult years to this day.

From that reading comes many of the people who figure prominently on my Nineteen Books That Have Shaped My World list like, Carl Sagan, Clarence Darrow, Hunter S. Thompson, Rachel Carson, Malcolm X, Charles Hobbs, Naomi Klein and many, many others including Michael Jordan, Thomas Jefferson and Bernie Sanders.

Over the years I have, at some point, asked nearly all my students the question: Who are your heroes? Sadly, they all have answered either, I don’t have any, or they’ve mentioned some famous person who is mostly famous for being famous.

That’s a problem.

Last week, as I was reading How To Be A Stoic—Using Ancient Philosophy To Live A Modern Life by Massimo Pigliucci, I came to chapter nine: The role of role models and the chapter title gave me pause. Pigliucci writes;

As the public philosopher, and my colleague, Nigel Warburton asked me during an interview, “What about ordinary life, where people hardly have to face such extreme situations [as James Stockdale or Cato the Younger] or display such levels of courage and endurance?”

It’s a good question, but the answer is simple enough: it is by hearing about great deeds that we not only become inspired by what human beings at their best can do, but also are implicitly reminded of just how much easier most of our lives actually are. That being the case, it shouldn’t really take a lot of courage to stand up to your boss when your co-worker is being treated badly, no? I mean, the worst that can happen is that you’ll be fired, not put in solitary confinement and tortured. How difficult is it, really, to behave honestly in the course of everyday life, since we are not risking military defeat and the prospect of suicide to save our honor? And yet, imagine how much better the world would be if we all did display just a little bit more courage, a slightly more acute sense of justice, more temperance, and more wisdom each day. The Stoic gamble was that hearing about people like Cato, Stockdale and the others we have encountered here help us pout things into perspective—that is, to become slightly better humans beings than we already are.

How might our current national tsunami of sexual abuse and criminality have played out differently if more of my peers—and their children and grandchildren—had had the perspective of heroes like Stockdale and Cato The Younger; had known of the great deeds performed by real people and not just comic book superheroes.

Previously…

#FreeCyntoiaBrown: People Want Justice for Former Child Sex Slave Jailed in 2006 for Killing Man Who Exploited Her.

Now that the election is over, the City of Cleveland generously shared public information on the massive and massively subsidized proposed project with the strange name nuCLEus in the Gateway sports district.

The city generously dropped, in one message, links to documents about the project. No simple freedom of information response.

Of course, they also choose a holiday week to send it, limiting contact with people who might have more insight into the project.

It was a FOI drop of 98 charts of varying financial and other documents (some broken down with EVEN further charts). Enough to keep financial pros at work for some time.

What I can gather from this information data is that the Cleveland school system—servicing to a great degree poor students—generously gives up property tax revenue for a more than half billion dollar building containing fully tax abated apartments, a hotel, offices, parking and retail. Did we miss anything.

A virtual city within itself.

Cleveland on the rise!

One of the documents shows Tax Increment Financing at $71,651,579. That money would go to do public work for Clevelanders and educate our children.

Now it’s going to another downtown developer. So generous are we.

Other ‘gifties’ from taxpayer include—a state of Ohio grant, $1 million; JOBS Ohio $10 million; CEI & infrastructure grants, $2 million; other contributions in the millions of dollars.

And a County—always so generous to rich developers—will issue a $58.2 million bond issue. Don’t know how it will pay for the loan.

Another listing shows various sources of State of Ohio funding at $23 million. Various loans for another $19 million.

Owners will invest $72.9 million of the total $542 million cost.

Another chart (and I have to admit that I did not go through each one) shows that the Cleveland school system will go 27 years—until 2044—without collecting its share of the property taxes. It is the chief recipient of the tax at some 60 percent of the total of the County property tax.

Merry Christmas Cleveland Teachers, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County residents.

You’re being taken for another expensive ride.

Where are our city and county council members? Certainly, purposely asleep.

By Roldo Bartimole…

I received a birthday present from Oliver Burkeman this year: an introduction to How To Be A Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy To Live A Modern Life by Massimo Picliucci. In his weekly column Consumed by anxiety? Give it a day or two for the Guardian, Burkeman wrote:

The next time you’re consumed by anxiety—which, given the headlines, is probably this minute—you might borrow a tip from the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci, author of the excellent new book How To Be A Stoic. In a recent podcast, Pigliucci described how he used Google Street View and Google Earth to create a slideshow that starts with an image of his own home, then zooms out, out and out, until it shows the whole planet. He consults it when feeling overwrought. You couldn’t hope for a more vivid illustration of the Stoic “dichotomy of control”, which urges us to restrict our attempts to change things to those actually in our power, instead of making ourselves miserable railing against those that aren’t. (See also the “serenity prayer”, popularised by Alcoholics Anonymous.) You are—not to be rude—a tiny part of the cosmos. That doesn’t make you powerless. But it does mean you’re almost certainly stressing about things that will, without doubt, remain majestically unaffected by your stress.

For most of my life I have been a spiritual wonderer. (I use the term spiritual to mean the manner in which I emotionally relate to my perceived reality.) In my 40s I settled into a comfortable relationship to my own brand of secular Zen Buddhism and Reconstructionist Judaism. I’ve continued my wondering, however, and occasionally find a tidbit here or there to consider, play with and perhaps integrate into my gestalt. After reading Pigiliucci’s book (and listening to the podcast) I’m more than intrigued. Here is the first of my notes from the book

Stoicism is about acknowledging our emotions, reflecting on what causes them, and redirecting them for our own good. It is also about keeping in mind what is and what is not under our control, focusing our efforts on the former and not wasting them on the latter. It is about practicing virtue and excellence and navigating the world to the best of our abilities, while being mindful of the moral dimension of all our actions. …In practice, Stoicism involves a dynamic combination of reflecting on theoretical precepts, reading inspirational texts, and engaging in meditation, mindfulness and other spiritual exercises p. 2-3

From How To Be A Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy To Live A Modern Life by Massimo Picliucci

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Even if their congressional representative Jim Bupkis* Renacci couldn’t care less (he’s already moved on to his primary race for governor) the more than 25,000 Ohio citizens living in Green have at least one political advocate in a battle to protect their homes from environmental degradation: Mayor Gerard Neugebauer.

Sam Allard, reporting in Court Goes Green, Nexus Pipeline Paused for Scene, writes:

The Summit County city of Green, Ohio won a temporary reprieve this week when a federal appellate court granted the city’s request to block construction of the Nexus pipeline there.

[Snip…]

…Nexus cannot proceed with any construction within Green’s city limits until the issue is resolved in court. No date has been set for further arguments in this David v. Goliath battle.

How long Green’s residents can hold off the despoilers is anyone’s guess, but the fight is important.

*After extensive searches, I have been unable to determine what Renacci’s middle initial stands for. Until I can find a reliable reference to Renacci full name, Bupkis will do.

Previously…

Is breaking down a door in a house you do not own to save a child from a fire legal? Of course. Committing a minor crime, breaking down a door, to save a life falls under the necessity defense.

The defense of necessity is available where the defendant acted under the reasonable belief that committing his offense would prevent a greater evil or harm from occurring. For example:

Christopher lives in a town that sits right on the edge of the Hundred Acre Woods. At the end of a hot and dry summer some brush in the woods catches fire and a forest fire quickly develops and spreads. The fire is quickly heading toward the town and Christopher believes that if he burns the row of houses directly on the edge of the forest he will create a fire wall which will then protect the rest of the town. If Christopher does, in fact, burn some of the houses under the reasonable belief that it will protect the rest of the town from the forest fire, he will be able to use the defense of necessity if he is charged with arson.

There are, however, several requirements that must be met in order for the defendant to use necessity as a defense.

1. The defendant must reasonably believe that an actual threat exists. Therefore, in order to use the defense, Christopher must reasonably believe that the forest fire will destroy all or part of the town. Please note that as long as this belief is reasonable, he will be able to use the defense even if the forest fire never actually approaches the town.

2. The defendant must reasonably believe that the threat he is trying to prevent is greater than the damage that will result from his actions. Therefore, Christopher will be able to use the necessity defense if he reasonably believes that burning some of the houses at the edge of the forest is a lesser evil than allowing the entire town to burn.

3. The threatened harm that the defendant is trying to prevent with his actions must be imminent.

4. The defendant can only use the necessity defense if there was no other, less harmful way to avoid the threatened danger. In the above example, Christopher will only be able to use the necessity defense if burning a few of the houses was the least harmful way to protect the town.

5. The defendant will only be able to use the defense if the defendant himself was not at fault in creating the situation that made it necessary to commit his crime. In other words, if Christopher himself had been responsible for the forest fire, he would not be able to use necessity as a defense to burning those houses.

So, does the continued avoidance for any responsibility, in fact the obfuscation of that responsibility, by fossil fuel corporations for our global crisis of climate change/global warming justify invoking this defense?

Emily Johnston, a poet and co-founder of 350Seattle, says: Yes. She is betting the next 20 years of her life on that conviction. She faces trial starting 11 December on felony charges for shutting the emergency valve on the Enbridge tar sands pipeline in Leonard, Minnesota.

Johnston, writing in I shut down an oil pipeline—because climate change is a ticking bomb for The Guardian, explains why she has taken this risk:

A little over a year ago, four friends and I shut down all five pipelines carrying tar sands crude oil into the United States by using emergency shut-off valves. As recent months have made clear, climate change is not only an imminent threat; it is an existing catastrophe. It’s going to get worse, and tar sands oil—the dirtiest oil on Earth—is one of the reasons.

We did this very, very carefully—after talking to pipeline engineers, and doing our own research. Before we touched a thing, we called the pipeline companies twice to warn them, and let them turn off the pipelines themselves if they thought that was better; all of them did so.

We knew we were at risk for years in prison. But the nation needs to wake up now to what’s coming our way if we don’t reduce emissions boldly and fast; business as usual is now genocidal.

In shutting off the pipelines, we hoped to be part of that wake-up, to put ourselves in legal jeopardy in order to state dramatically and unambiguously that normal methods of political action and protest are simply not working with anywhere near the speed that we need them to.

One major hope of ours was to set legal precedent by using the “necessity defense” and bringing in expert witnesses to testify that because of the egregious nature of tar sands crude and the urgency of the climate crisis, we’d actually been acting in accordance with higher laws.

Appealing to higher laws is a risky strategy, but one that Johnston, and her co-defendant Annette Klapstein have decided is worth the potential outcome. Make no mistake. A not-guilty verdict in this case will be a devastating blow to the fossil-fuel industry and their bought-and-paid-for climate change/global warming deniers.

This is a game changer.

Donald John Trump is president of the United States of America due to no small help from the clueless apparatchiks drones at the Democratic National Committee. The ’90s are over and the leaders of the Democratic Party need to wake up, clean house or risk following the Republican Party into obscurity.

Ralph Nader has a few thoughts on that topic. In National Democratic Party—Pole Vaulting Back into Place, he writes:

Seeking to capitalize on the Republicans’ disarray, public cruelty and Trumpitis, the Democratic Party is gearing up for the Congressional elections of 2018. Alas, party leaders are likely to enlist the same old cast and crew.

The Democratic National Committee and their state imitators are raising money from the same old big donors and PACs that are complicit in the Party’s chronic history of losing so many Congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative races—not to mention the White House.

The large, embattled unions are preparing to spend millions on television ads and unimaginative get-out-the-vote efforts, without demanding fresh pro-worker/pro-union agendas from the Democratic politicians they regularly endorse.

The same old political consulting firms, which also consult profitably for corporations, are revving up their defeat-prone tactics and readying their practice of blaming the candidates—their clients—when their strategies and lucrative ad buys don’t work.

The Party’s scapegoating machine remains well-oiled. To explain why they cannot defeat the cruelest, most plutocratic, anti-worker , anti-consumer, anti-environment, anti-patient Republican Party in history, the woeful party leaders blame gerrymandering (in which they also engage), the Green Party, the Koch Brothers, voter suppression, “lying” Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the “Red States,” and more.

So what’s the plan for the Democratic Party? Their new slogan, developed at some cost by political consultants, is, “A Better Deal.” Mention this to John Continue Reading »

As an undergraduate at Ohio University during the first Reagan administration I took every course offered by Dr. David Williams. Williams, who taught in the political science department, specialized in what was then The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He had earned his master’s degree in journalism from Moscow University. He was a brilliant teacher.

The one book I remember most from his classes was Hedrick Smith’s The Russians. I still have the book on my shelf.

This morning, reading Luke Harding’s How Trump walked into Putin’s web in The Guardian, reminded me of Smith, Dr. Williams and why I was so fascinated by the Russians more than 35 years ago. Harding opens with the story of a young social and political science student at Girton College at the University of Cambridge: Christopher Steele. Steele, Harding suggests, was recruited for MI6 by one of his tutors. (Looking back now, there is a slight chance that I sadly dodged a similar call from Dr. Williams—there was always a student rumor at OU that the Political Science Department was particularly CIAish.)

Steeled went on to serve his country for 22 years as an intelligence officer and then entered private practice where he would make his living in obscurity until last year when BuzzFeed published the now infamous Company Intelligence Report 2016/080. Under the title US Presidential Election: Republican Candidate Donald Trump’s Activities In Russia And Compromising Relationship With The Kremlin, the 35 page document is best known for one paragraph on the second page where Steele wrote:

One which had borne fruit for them was to exploit personal obsessions and sexual perversion in order to obtain suitable ‘kompromat’ [compromising material] on him. According to Source D, where s/he had been present, (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and OBAMA {whom he hated] had stayed on one other official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSE control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.

Another story in this morning’s Guardian suggests that Michael Flynn, retired US Army lieutenant general and disgraced national security advisor for President Donald John Trump, cutting a deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. In Michael Flynn breaks ties with Trump’s lawyers over Russia investigation, the Associated Press reports that:

A lawyer for former national security adviser Michael Flynn has told President Donald Trump’s legal team that they are no longer communicating with them about the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference.

The decision could be a sign that Flynn is moving to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation or to negotiate a deal for himself.

That is, of course, double-plus-not-good for the golfer-in-chief.

All of this is a rambling prologue—including an international soccer turn—for Harding’s long read (excerpted from his just-published book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win) which drops the first sabot at:

Before this, in early spring 2016, Simpson approached Steele, his friend and colleague. Steele began to scrutinise Paul Manafort, who would soon become Trump’s new campaign manager. From April, Steele investigated Trump on behalf of the DNC, Fusion’s anonymous client. All Steele knew at first was that the client was a law firm. He had no idea what he would find. He later told David Corn, Washington editor of the magazine Mother Jones: “It started off as a fairly general inquiry.” Trump’s organisation owned luxury hotels around the world. Trump had, as far back as 1987, sought to do real estate deals in Moscow. One obvious question for him, Steele said, was: “Are there business ties to Russia?”

Over time, Steele had built up a network of sources. He was protective of them: who they were he would never say. It could be someone well-known – a foreign government official or diplomat with access to secret material. Or it could be someone obscure – a lowly chambermaid cleaning the penthouse suite and emptying the bins in a five-star hotel.

Normally an intelligence officer would debrief sources directly, but since Steele could no longer visit Russia, this had to be done by others, or in third countries. There were intermediaries, subsources, operators—a sensitive chain. Only one of Steele’s sources on Trump knew of Steele. Steele put out his Trump-Russia query and waited for answers. His sources started reporting back. The information was astonishing; “hair-raising”. As he told friends: “For anyone who reads it, this is a life-changing experience.”

Steele had stumbled upon a well-advanced conspiracy that went beyond anything he had discovered with Litvinenko or Fifa. It was the boldest plot yet. It involved the Kremlin and Trump. Their relationship, Steele’s sources claimed, went back a long way. For at least the past five years, Russian intelligence had been secretly cultivating Trump. This operation had succeeded beyond Moscow’s wildest expectations. Not only had Trump upended political debate in the US – raining chaos wherever he went and winning the nomination – but it was just possible that he might become the next president. This opened all sorts of intriguing options for Putin.

What the Russians had, and Donald Trump very much wanted was intelligence on the likely Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. In his first report he wrote:

A dossier of compromising material on Hillary CLINTON has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls rather than any embarrassing conduct. The dossier is controlled by Kremlin spokesman, PESKOV, directly on Putin’s orders. However, it has not yet been distributed abroad, including to TRUMP. Russian intentions for its deployment still unclear.

Harding writes:

The memo was sensational. There would be others, 16 in all, sent to Fusion between June and early November 2016. At first, obtaining intelligence from Moscow went well. For around six months – during the first half of the year – Steele was able to make inquiries in Russia with relative ease. It got harder from late July, as Trump’s ties to Russia came under scrutiny. Finally, the lights went out. Amid a Kremlin cover-up, the sources went silent and information channels shut down.

If Steele’s reporting was to be believed, Trump had been colluding with Russia. This arrangement was transactional, with both sides trading favours. The report said Trump had turned down “various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia”, especially in connection with the 2018 World Cup, hosted by Moscow. But he had been happy to accept a flow of Kremlin-sourced intelligence material, apparently delivered to him by his inner circle. That didn’t necessarily mean the candidate was a Russian agent. But it did signify that Russia’s leading spy agency had expended considerable effort in getting close to Trump – and, by extension, to his family, friends, close associates and business partners, not to mention his campaign manager and personal lawyer.

Enter the British version of our National Security Agency: GCHQ. Harding continues:

In late 2015 the British eavesdropping agency, GCHQ, was carrying out standard “collection” against Moscow targets. These were known Kremlin operatives already on the grid. Nothing unusual here – except that the Russians were talking to people associated with Trump. The precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public, but according to sources in the US and the UK, they formed a suspicious pattern. They continued through the first half of 2016. The intelligence was handed to the US as part of a routine sharing of information.

The FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of these contacts between Trump’s team and Moscow. This was in part due to institutional squeamishness—the law prohibits US agencies from examining the private communications of US citizens without a warrant.

But the electronic intelligence suggested Steele was right. According to one account, the US agencies looked as if they were asleep. “‘Wake up! There’s something not right here!’—the BND [German intelligence], the Dutch, the French and SIS were all saying this,” one Washington-based source told me.

That summer, GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at “director level”, face-to-face between the two agency chiefs.

And then, nothing. Steele became frustrated. What he had learned, he thought, had to be made public before the election. This was no October surprise, this was Chernobyl. Harding continues:

At this point Steele was still anonymous, a ghost. But the ghost’s message was rapidly circulating on Capitol Hill and inside Washington’s spy agencies, as well as among certain journalists and thinktanks. Democratic senators now apprised of Steele’s work were growing exasperated. The FBI seemed unduly keen to trash Clinton’s reputation while sitting on explosive material concerning Trump.

One of those who was aware of the dossier’s broad allegations was the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, a Democrat. In August Reid, had written to Comey and asked for an inquiry into the “connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign”. In October, Reid wrote to Comey again. This time he framed his inquiry in scathing terms. In a clear reference to Steele, Reid wrote: “In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors and the Russian government … The public has a right to know this information.”

But all this frantic activity came to nought. Just as Nixon was re-elected during the early stages of Watergate, Trump won the presidential election, to general dismay, at a time when the Russia scandal was small but growing. Steele had found prima facie evidence of a conspiracy, but by and large the US public knew nothing about it.

Enter Arizona Senator John McCain:

The same month a group of international experts gathered in Halifax on Canada’s eastern seaboard. Their task: to make sense of the world in the aftermath of Trump’s stunning victory. One of the delegates attending the Halifax International Security Forum was Senator John McCain. Another was Sir Andrew Wood, the UK’s former ambassador to Russia. Wood was a friend of Steele’s and an Orbis associate. Before the election, Steele had gone to Wood and shown him the dossier. He wanted the ambassador’s advice. What should he do, or not do, with it? Of the dossier, Wood told me: “I took it seriously.”

On the margins of the Halifax conference, Wood briefed McCain about Steele’s dossier – its contents, if true, had profound and obvious implications for the incoming Trump administration, for the Republican party, and for US democracy. The implications were alarming enough to lead McCain to dispatch a former senior US official to meet Steele and find out more.

The emissary was David Kramer, a former assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration. He was sufficiently troubled to get on a flight to London. Steele agreed to meet him at Heathrow airport. The rendezvous involved some old-fashioned spycraft. Kramer didn’t know what Steele looked like. He was told to look for a man with a copy of the Financial Times. After meeting Kramer, Steele drove him to his home in Surrey. They talked through the dossier: how Steele compiled it, what it said. Less than 24 hours later, Kramer returned to Washington. Glenn Simpson then shared a copy of the dossier confidentially with McCain, along with a final Steele memo on the Russian hacking operation, written in December.

McCain believed it was impossible to verify Steele’s claims without a proper investigation. He made a call and arranged a meeting with Comey. Their encounter on 8 December 2016 lasted five minutes. Not much was said. McCain gave Comey the dossier.

All of this feels more than familiar to me. Richard Nixon very nearly destroyed the Republican Party; Trump is set to finish the job, and McCain is prepared to play the role of Tennessee Senator Howard Henry Baker in this circus.

Oh, this is just too feckin’ good. Michael Harriot—who has replaced Matt Taibbi on my blogroll—reporting in Retired Alabama Police Officer Says She Was Told ‘to Watch’ Roy Moore Around High School Cheerleaders for The Root, writes:

A retired Gasdsen, Ala. law enforcement officer says she and her fellow officers were told to keep Republican Senate Candidate Roy Moore away from the high school cheerleading team because it was known that Moore preferred young girls.

Faye Gary, a former police officer told MSNBC that everyone in the small Alabama town was aware of Moore’s preference for young girls. This echoed reports in the New Yorker and AL.com that Moore had been banned from the local mall for hitting on underage girls.

“The rumor mill was that he liked young girls,” Faye said during an interview on Andrea Mitchell Reports on Tuesday. Faye served as a Gadsen police officer for 37 years and says she worked as a juvenile detective, explaining that every day her department “waited for a complaint to come in” about Roy Moore.

When I was a teenager I had an 48-starred American flag in my bedroom that I used to joke didn’t recognize Mississippi or Alabama as part of the United States. How many more shoes have to hit the floor before everyone, inside and outside Alabama, says enough is fucking enough?

Anyone out there who still lives in a fantasy world where corporate executives, given the choice between putting more Americans to work for their company versus using the tax windfall to buy back their company’s stock and thus increase the stock price and their personal wealth, needs a dose of reality. Ralph Nader has warned about the threat of buybacks before and, as I learned myself only recently, corporations will always favor their own profits over those of stock holder, to whom they actually have a legal obligation.

The very suggestion that the tax plan will result in more jobs for American citizens—other than the servants hired by billionaires—would be laughable if only the tragedy was so real. Nader sent the letter below to 23 Senators.

In Letter to Democratic Senators on Stock Buybacks, he writes:

Dear Senator,

Please see my recent column on the practice of stock buybacks. This would be an effective point to raise to aggressively push back against the Republican tax plan, which would only provide corporations more capital to burn buying back their own stocks. If they want the tax cuts to get more capital for investment, why have they spent more than $7 trillion since 2003 buying back their own stock? (Which is a way of burning capital.) The answer is it enhances the value of their executive compensation package.

(See Steven Clifford’s book The CEO Pay Machine: How it Trashes America and How to Stop it).

It would be beneficial for you to inject this argument into the current Senate debate on the McConnell bill that cuts income for the people in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and the big corporate firms.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

The Republican tax plan is perhaps the greatest scam and money grab yet perpetrated upon American citizens.

Pay very close attention to Gavin’s warning at the top of the comic…