patrick.net

And the people were trained by the people that Reagan's CIA trained while fighting Russia. Is this news to anyone who is bothering to read Wikileaks? Was the damage worth the benefit that we got in ending the cold war? What's Russia gaining and losing by fucking with our elections trying to damage NATO, etc? It's looking like it might be a net loss for Putin.

You don't think there isn't somewhere in the world with 10000 ISIS members hanging out in one 2 mile radius?

We killed 38 assholes get over it already.

Every evil in the world is caused by Russian meddling. Afghanistan - check. Syria - check. North Korea - check...

The point is that we are creating our own enemies in future decades by arming lessor bad guys to fight our alpha bad guys.

Its the same story over and over again. Its almost as if they was PERPETUAL WAR.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=149&v=17lkdqoLt44

Sign in to make your opinion count. Sign in 2,821 Loading... Loading... Loading... Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Uploaded on Jan 8, 2010Music video by The Gap Band performing You Dropped A Bomb On Me.

YesYNot says

Is this news to anyone who is bothering to read Wikileaks? Was the damage worth the benefit that we got in ending the cold war?

@YesYNot, the answers to those two questions are both no, although the latter question seems based on a false premise. Read about CIA consultants' involvement in "Zero Dark Thirty" (among other examples) and you might recognize the pattern. In reality, Senator Feinstein led an investigation proving CIA torture did not help find OBL, who was found due to help from a defector from Pakistan, but CIA countered those facts with a fake movie. Asking whether the benefit of ending the cold war justified the cost of empowering Sunni Muslims is like asking whether the benefit of finding OBL justified the cost of CIA torture: there is no causal connection to make sense of the question.

"success has many fathers, failure is an orphan"

As Alvin and Heidi Toffler wrote, the Soviet command economy collided with history and could not compete in the information age. Bureaucratic management produced taut planning and brittle supply chains, with chronic and sometimes absurd shortages. Farmers had sometimes to feed bread to their cattle instead of grain, depending on which they could get. If you wanted a telephone installed, you'd need to hire a tolkatch to arrange a side deal, effectively bribing someone from the phone company, or else you'd wait years. In an Orwellian sense, the articificial scarcity reinforced internal power differentials, pushing down the proles relative to the commissars, strengthening the Party by rewarding partisan loyalty and punishing dissidence. As the Soviet system frayed ever more conspicuously, Gorbachev and then Yeltsin ended it. A famous anecdote about Yeltsin: he had been a believing communist, until he visited (apparently spontaneously) an American supermarket. He had tremendous physical courage, as you may have seen when he stood on top of a tank and dared snipers to shoot him, and he was the sort of person who would step out of a limousine and walk around unannounced. He saw aisles and aisles of fully stocked supermarket shelves, and ordinary proletarian shoppers who looked obviously bored amidst the plenty, and he felt betrayed. In that moment, he saw the fundamentally materialist doctrine of communism had not delivered on its promise, and the party rhetoric had been lies.

The MIC claim credit for the fall of the Soviet empire, but in fact they failed even to predict it. CIA projections of Soviet capability were wildly exaggerated for decades, as became clear when the whole thing collapsed. The MIC used those false analyses to rationalize budget increases.

Nixon's deals with KSA and support for Pakistan enabled the latter to become a nuclear power, and created the worst threats we face today. Just as CIA "consultants" twisted the plot of "Zero Dark Thirty" to create the false impression that CIA torture found Osama bin Laden (who was actually being hidden by our Pakistani "allies" in exchange for payment from our Saudi "allies"), so too the MIC try to claim credit for bringing down the USSR via Afghan mujahideen.

The Democrats campaigned on that fake narrative, and a surrogate of the Democratic nominee claimed credit for having been personally involved in Afghanistan and said we must do the same in Syria: finance Sunni militias, send American "consultants", kill Russians. Whole careers were built on cold war deficit spending, and the mentality remains imprinted. Cognitive dissonance precludes them from recognizing Islam as a worse threat than the USSR was.

Russians never flew airliners into office towers in New York, but Saudis did, and KSA officials were accessories before and after the fact. Russians didn't hide Osama bin Laden, but Pakistanis did, while deceiving us kafirs ("Allah is the best deceiver") and collecting jizya from us on the pretext of searching for him, and for the "mercy" of not using their nuclear weapons when committing terrorism against our friends. If supporting Islam was the "cure" for communism, then as was often said of 19th century medicine, the "cure" is worse than the disease.

Lastly, regarding your question about Russian interference in the 2016 election, it's trivial compared to open American involvement in elections worldwide including in Russia, but the Clinton/Saudi policy of empowering Sunni Islam over NATO raised an existential fear for every western power that has a clear view of Islam. Even Eastern Europeans were alarmed, having joined the EU, and refused to go along with importing Muslims. Less manipulated by western propaganda, they remembered WWII, when the European Muslims joined the Nazis due to their similar ideologies. If you like movies at all, I encourage you to watch The Sum of All Fears. Western media have manipulated western voters for generations, manufacturing consent, but the manipulation set off extremely loud alarm bells when it extended to Sunni Muslims potentially hijacking NATO.

jazz music says

Just who in the fuck do you think we fight these wars to benefit?

For people who love freedom, equality and democracy. You obviously don't.

Are you sure it's the same tunnels we're talking about? The ones bombed this week looked like they were on relatively flat terrain, not mountaintops and steep hillsides.

jazz music says

The deep state is Trump's cabinet members; Exxon Mobil, Goldman-Sachs, war industry!

What would Hillary's cabinet members have been? Greenpeace, Stop GMOs Now, 1% for Peace, and Code Pink activists?

Every time I think about Hillary, i think of Victoria Nuland (Neocon Kagan's wife) running the State Department and breathe a sigh of relief.

curious2 says

Lastly, regarding your question about Russian interference in the 2016 election, it's trivial compared to open American involvement in elections worldwide including in Russia,

I'm interested to know more about this. Are there write-ups of how and when we have intervened that you consider good? I found this summary in the LA Times. I found this example of us meddling with Russia during supposedly friendly times:

The U.S. also attempted to sway Russian elections. In 1996, with the presidency of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian economy flailing, President Clinton endorsed a $10.2-billion loan from the International Monetary Fund linked to privatization, trade liberalization and other measures that would move Russia toward a capitalist economy. Yeltsin used the loan to bolster his popular support, telling voters that only he had the reformist credentials to secure such loans, according to media reports at the time. He used the money, in part, for social spending before the election, including payment of back wages and pensions.

If I were in an opposition party, I'd probably feel irked by that. OTOH, I don't think that compares to to hacking and disinformation campaigns that Russia employed last year. People are irritated at those aspects of the 2016 election, but the bigger concern is trying to figure out what else was done.
For the mentally challenged: I'm not talking about Obama making open statements about who he would prefer to win. I don't consider that meddling. The primary reason that heads of state generally avoid that is that they have to deal with the other person. Openly stating a preference is just exercising free speech.

I'll check out sum of all fears at some point.

YesYNot says

Are there write-ups of how and when we have intervened that you consider good?

"For more than 100 years, without any significant break, the U.S. has been doing whatever it can to influence the outcome of elections ― up to and including assassinating politicians it has found unfriendly."

"This scenario has been repeated so many times that the CIA actually teaches it in a special school, the notorious “School of the Americas.” (It opened in Panama but later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia.) Critics have nicknamed it the “School of the Dictators” and “School of the Assassins.""

One might also mention the ongoing war in Syria. Many Syrians would have liked their government to improve, but most of those were not demanding "regime change". As part of the Shia minority, President Assad's family protected Christians and Shia (who are even now sheltering with the government that "our" Deep State wants to remove) while securing enough cooperation from the Sunni majority to retain power.

Don't forget this all time Lie:
Raw testimony
www.youtube.com/embed/Vu8CCJTJCQk

60 Minutes: Nariyah
www.youtube.com/embed/e_JfqkEXdAg

Total BS Story, she was brought in by Lobbyists on behalf of Kuwait's Government, and she was the daughter of a wealthy and powerful Kuwaiti Sheik.

And if it worked once, why not try a variation of it again?
Premature babies and incubators because of air strikes during the liberation of Aleppo from ISIS and Al Qaeda, 2016:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/premature-babies-pulled-incubators-treated-9302371

Of course, no infants, children, or women suffered in the bombing of Mosul by the USAF. Magic technology installed in GBU series bombs prevents this from happening, due to the psychic powers of Defense Contractors who can peer into the future and reduce the bomb's blast radius in real time.

The best course when dealing with propaganda in the run up to war is to be extremely skeptical.