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Author: John Hanno
Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Bogan High School. Worked in Alaska after the earthquake. Joined U.S. Army at 17. Sergeant, B Battery, 3rd Battalion, 84th Artillery, 7th Army. Member of 12 different unions, including 4 different locals of the I.B.E.W. Worked for fortune 50, 100 and 200 companies as an industrial electrician, electrical/electronic technician.
Trump drops F-bombs and shares potentially sensitive information in newly released audio
Stephen Proctor – October 19, 2022
Previously unheard audio featuring former President Donald Trump aired Tuesday on Anderson Cooper 360. Famed journalist Bob Woodward recorded 20 conversations he had with the former president, with Trump’s knowledge, from 2016 through 2020. Trump, who is facing possible legal peril for taking classified documents when he left office, appears in one recording to share sensitive information with Woodward.
“I have built a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before,” Trump said. “We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before.”
Trump also spoke of Russia’s nuclear capabilities.
“Getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing, alright?” Trump said. “Especially because they have 1,332 nuclear f***ing warheads.”
Throughout his presidency, Trump was criticized for his apparent affinity for authoritarian leaders, which he spoke about to Woodward.
“It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them. You know? Explain that to me someday, OK,” Trump said. “But maybe it’s not a bad thing. The easy ones are the ones I maybe don’t like as much or don’t get along with as much.”
In another recording, Trump brags about how he handled being impeached, while at the same time taking shots at two of his predecessors who also faced impeachment.
“There’s nobody that’s tougher than me,” Trump said. “Nobody’s tougher than me. You asked me about impeachment. I’m under impeachment, and you said, you know, you just act like you won the f***ing race. Nixon was in a corner with his thumb in his mouth. Bill Clinton took it very, very hard. I just do things, OK?”
In 2016, Woodward asked then-candidate Trump about having his staff sign non-disclosure agreements. Woodward recorded Trump talking to his staff about who had and who had not yet signed one. Trump was confident in the effectiveness of these agreements at the time, but a multitude of former officials wrote tell-all books after leaving the administration.
Woodward plans to release the more than eight hours of recordings as an audiobook titled The Trump Tapes on Oct. 25.
Former DOJ official says Trump’s reaction to the January 6 panel is starting to look like the makings of an insanity defense
Cheryl Teh – October 17, 2022
Former President Donald Trump at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on September 3.Mary Altaffer/AP
The former DOJ official Neal Katyal commented on Donald Trump’s 14-page response to the DOJ.
Katyal said he did not think the response would help Trump unless he was trying to plead insanity.
He said Trump’s response showed “evidence” of an insanity plea.
Neal Katyal, a former Justice Department official, says former President Donald Trump’s written response to the House Capitol-riot panel’s intention to subpoena him looks like an insanity defense.
Katyal — a law professor and an Obama-era acting solicitor general — made an appearance on NBC on Sunday, three days after the House panel investigating January 6, 2021, unanimously voted to subpoena Trump. The subpoena will compel the former president to cooperate with the committee or be held in contempt of Congress and referred to the Justice Department for prosecution — much like Trump’s allies Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro.
In response to the decision, Trump sent a document to the panel that started with the sentence, “THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN!” and contained multiple baseless claims of election fraud. It also included four photos of the crowd near the Washington Monument on January 6, 2021.
“Yeah, so, this is a 14-page screed, Jonathan, that’s very hard to follow. But it does seem to dig the hole in deeper for Donald Trump,” Katyal told the MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart.
“I can’t see it in any legal way helping him unless he is trying to go for the insanity defense, of which this paper seems, you know, to be some evidence of,” Katyal added.
Katyal also said he thought it was a “pretty fanciful” idea that Trump would just give in and testify to the panel because of the congressional subpoena.
“I mean, this is a man who took the Fifth Amendment more than 400 times the last time he was questioned under oath. And I doubt he’s suddenly become eager to testify,” Katyal said.
Katyal added that he thought Attorney General Merrick Garland would indict Trump, as there’s overwhelming evidence to do so and “no contrition whatsoever” on Trump’s part.
A representative at Trump’s post-presidential press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Russia faces turmoil, says former diplomat who resigned over war
Guy Faulconbridge – October 17, 2022
LONDON (Reuters) -President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has set Russia on a path towards turmoil that could unseat the Kremlin chief, trigger civil war or even ultimately break the country apart, said a Russian diplomat who resigned over the war.
Boris Bondarev, a counsellor at Russia’s permanent mission to the United Nations in Geneva, resigned in May because he felt the war had shown how repressive and warped his homeland had become.
In a 6,500 word critique of Putin’s Russia, Bondarev said the state was infested by sycophantic “yes men”, enabling Putin to make big decisions in an echo chamber of his own propaganda.
“If Putin is kicked out of office, Russia’s future will be deeply uncertain,” Bondarev, who worked at the foreign ministry from 2002 to 2022, said in an essay in Foreign Affairs.
“It’s entirely possible his successor will try to carry on the war, especially given that Putin’s main advisers hail from the security services. But no one in Russia commands his stature, so the country would likely enter a period of political turbulence. It could even descend into chaos.”
The foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Bondarev’s article. The Kremlin has dismissed such views as deeply flawed and says Putin’s popularity has been shown repeatedly at the ballot box.
Putin said on Friday that he had no regrets about the “special military operation”, which he casts as an existential battle with an aggressive and arrogant West that he says wants to destroy and carve up Russia.
But nearly eight months into a war that has triggered the biggest confrontation with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, even Russia’s most basic aims are far from achieved.
The vast army of a former superpower has been humbled on the field of battle by a much smaller Ukrainian force backed up with weapons, intelligence and advice from Western powers led by the United States. Tens of thousands have died on both sides, according to U.S. intelligence.
RUSSIA’S COLLAPSE?
Bondarev, who casts himself as a “diplomat in exile” who stepped off the “crazy train”, is the son of an economist at the foreign trade ministry and an English teacher at Moscow’s elite State Institute of Foreign Relations (MGIMO).
He details how diplomats who cabled made-up repetitions of Russian propaganda back to Moscow were rewarded.
“Diplomats who wrote such fiction received applause from their bosses and saw their career fortunes rise,” Bondarev said.
“Moscow wanted to be told what it hoped to be true – not what was actually happening. Ambassadors everywhere got the message, and they competed to send the most over-the-top cables.”
Any ceasefire in Ukraine, he said, would give Putin time.
“Any ceasefire will just give Russia a chance to rearm before attacking again,” he said. “There’s only one thing that can really stop Putin, and that is a comprehensive rout.”
But, Bondarev said, those who dreamed about Russia’s implosion might want to consider the consequences.
“Russians might unify behind an even more belligerent leader than Putin, provoking a civil war, more outside aggression, or both,” he said.
“If Ukraine wins and Putin falls, the best thing the West can do isn’t to inflict humiliation.”
The humiliations Russians suffered after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union should, Bondarev said, be a lesson for the West.
“Providing aid would also allow the West to avoid repeating their behaviour from the 1990s, when Russians felt scammed by the United States, and would make it easier for the population to finally accept the loss of their empire.”
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
As FBI probed Jan. 6, many agents sympathized with insurrection, according to newly released email
Will Carless, USA TODAY – October 15, 2022
A “sizable percentage” of FBI employees felt sympathy towards the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, and considered the riot at the U.S. Capitol “no different than the BLM protests,” according to a warning email sent to a top FBI official by someone with apparent connections to the bureau.
In the email, which is included in a trove of documents released by the bureau this week, the sender’s name is redacted. The documents indicate the message came from an email address outside the bureau, though the subject line is “Internal concerns.”
The email was sent to Paul Abbate, now the second highest official at the FBI, who responded an hour later, thanking the sender for the message.
FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate at a news conference in 2021.
The Jan. 13, 2021, email contained a stark warning about attitudes toward the insurrection within the bureau:
“I literally had to explain to an agent from a ‘blue state’ office the difference between opportunists burning and looting during protests that stemmed legitimate grievance to police brutality vs. an insurgent mob whose purpose was to prevent the execution of democratic processes at the behest of a sitting president,” the email states. “One is a smattering of criminals, the other is an organized group of domestic terrorists.”
And it relayed concerns from agents within the bureau:
“I’ve spoken to multiple African American agents who have turned down asks to join SWAT because they do not trust that every member of their office’s SWAT team would protect them in an armed conflict.”
Michael German, a former FBI special agent and a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University and an outspoken critic of the bureau, said the email didn’t surprise him.
“It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t expect already, but I think it’s important to substantiate the suspicions me and many other people had,” German said. “They clearly are on notice about a much more serious problem within the FBI.”
An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the email.
While there may be some sympathy towards the Capitol rioters within the FBI, the bureau’s investigations have nonetheless contributed to Justice Department prosecutions of almost 900 people who were there that day. Scores of defendants have received jail time for their crimes. Dozens more have agreed to cooperate with the prosecutions.
But there has been pushback. Earlier this year, FBI special agent Stephen Friend was suspended for refusing to participate in prosecutions of Jan. 6 protesters. Friend’s stance was praised by Republican lawmakers, who called him “patriotic.”
The FBI email sheds more light on a problem that has been endemic in American law enforcement for decades, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, who has studied white supremacists since the 1980s.
“The situation has been serious enough that the FBI for almost 20 years, has been warning of insider threats from cops,” Beirich said. “And the thing is, nobody’s done anything about it.”
A 2009 warning about extremists recruiting members of the military and police officers went largely ignored by the federal government, and resulted in the ostracizing of the author of the study, a senior Department of Homeland Security official.
Ten years later, a 2019 study by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that hundreds of active duty police officers were active inside racist, Islamophobic and anti-government groups on Facebook. Another study by the Plain View Project compiled hundreds of hateful and racist posts made on Facebook by police officers. Last year, USA TODAY found more than 200 people who claimed they worked for police departments in a leaked database of members of the Oath Keepers, an armed extremist group that is now the subject of one of the biggest prosecutions emerging from Jan. 6.
And as USA TODAY reported last month, the FBI itself has also been heavily criticized for directing domestic extremism investigations overwhelmingly towards left-wing targets.
The FBI has a long and troubled history of focusing on groups on the left of the political spectrum while largely turning a blind eye to domestic extremists on the far-right, Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told USA TODAY.
“Both historically speaking and in current events, we’ve seen the amount of surveillance that has been marshaled specifically against groups fighting for racial justice increased exponentially than from what we’ve seen being monitored on the right,” said Guariglia, who holds a doctorate in the history of police surveillance.
Beirich said given the conservative nature of law enforcement, there is bound to be some “overlap” into far-right extremism within the ranks. The biggest problem is a lack of action taken by departments to root out extremists on the payroll, she said.
“Even right now, there aren’t policies in a whole lot of departments about what to do with these guys — there’s no screening mechanisms,” Beirich said. “There’s no effort to really deal with it.”
Mortality rate of wounded Russian soldiers exceeds 50%
Olha Hlushchenko – October 15, 2022
Due to the low quality of medical care and the reluctance of the Russian command to evacuate the seriously wounded to Russia, the mortality rate among the latter exceeds 50%.
Details: The General Staff reports that, according to available information, many injured are being admitted to medical facilities in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
Thus, in one of Donetsk’s hospitals, about 100 wounded were admitted this week.
Hospitals are overcrowded in the city of Tokmak, Zaporizhzhia Oblast. According to information from local residents, civilians are not being admitted to hospital because doctors are overloaded and there is a lack of hospital beds.
“Due to the low quality of medical care and the refusal by the Russian occupying forces’ command to evacuate the seriously wounded to Russia, the mortality rate among their injured service personnel exceeds 50%”, the General Staff noted.
In an op-ed Wednesday for the Montrose Daily Press, Republican state Sen. Don Coram painted Boebert as a liar who “claims credit for things she had absolutely nothing to do with.”
Coram urged Colorado voters to back Adam Frisch, a former member of the Aspen City Council, in what the polls currently predict will be a close race in November.
Boebert “spends her time jet-setting around the country promoting herself and extreme rhetoric that only divides this country further,” wrote Coram. “It’s disgraceful and we should expect more from our United States representative.”
He added, “I believe Adam Frisch is a good man,” and said the Democrat is “decent, honest, and persistent.”
Frisch has “demonstrated that he is more interested in representing the district than being a celebrity,” Coram wrote. “That’s important.”
Adam Curtis’ astonishing autopsy of the fall of Russia will leave you wide-eyed
Jasper Rees – October 13, 2022
Adam CurtisBritish documentary filmmaker (born 1955)
Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone – BBC Pictures/BBC Pictures
A long dark road ploughs through a wasteland of snow towards an icy horizon. Welcome, this opening image unequivocally says, to post-Soviet hell, where women wait in line for meat and abortions, men brawl in banks and parliaments, where everyone sells anything to survive – shoes, bodies, blood.
In Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone (BBC iPlayer), documentary essayist Adam Curtis has filleted thousands of hours of unused footage from the BBC’s archive to craft a phantasmagoric autopsy of the USSR as it breaks apart in a thousand brutal ways, making way for capitalism. The result is a garish multi-part disaster epic.
Onto a boundless compendium of chaos Curtis has contrived to impose structure via canny juxtapositions and ironic echoes. Thus in the first film the corpse of Kim Philby seems to symbolize the death of communism. In the last film, it’s the turn of democracy to lie in an open casket at the funeral of politician Galina Starovoitova, murdered a month after speaking to the BBC. In between, the leitmotif of death is everywhere from Chernobyl to Chechnya, from the reassembled bones of the last tsar to the looted graves of German soldiers.
No film by Curtis comes without a portion of irate mansplaining, crammed here into captions which tell of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and a harmless-looking pipsqueak called Putin the oligarchs finally install as their puppet. Mainly, though, he lets astonishing pictures do the talking.
“May the Russians and all generations of Russians be damned to hell!” screams a woman fleeing the bombing of Grozny. Elsewhere, expectant Russian mothers are coached to sing to their unborn children who’ll now be old enough to bomb Zaporizhzhia.
Alongside such dolorous portents, surreal metaphors for delusion and dysfunction sprout like irradiated knotweed. Grotesque bodybuilders flex pecs under giant images of Marx and Lenin. A bear wanders the forest by night, infra-red eyes glaring as if in psychic shock. A cosmonaut is marooned in the Mir station because there’s no money to fly him home.
From America, among many chancers, comes a motivational speaker teaching Russia’s women to smile. The most captivating smile of all belongs to wily street beggar Natasha. Imagine Shirley Temple in a novel by Dostoevsky. Filmed across several years by a BBC crew, like a good capitalist she eventually requests remuneration. “You’ll get paid,” she argues, “and it’s costing me my time.” This staggering masterpiece is worth yours.
A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes from a Mar-a-Lago storage room before and after the DOJ subpoenaed Trump for top-secret documents: NYT
Cheryl Teh – October 13, 2022
Walt Nauta, a longtime Trump aide, was seen moving boxes out from a storage room the FBI searched.
The incidents were caught on security footage, The New York Times reported.
Nauta was seen moving boxes before and after the DOJ demanded top-secret files be returned in May.
A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes out of a storage room in Mar-a-Lago, per a report from The New York Times. The Times did not view the security footage and Insider was not independently able to verify its contents.
The Times spoke to three people familiar with the matter, who said longtime Trump staffer Walt Nauta was seen on Mar-a-Lago’s security footage moving boxes out of a storage room that was later searched by the FBI. This took place both before and after the Department of Justice issued a subpoena in May ordering Trump to hand over classified documents, per the NYT’s sources.
Intrigue has swirled around what was kept in the storage room, and whether anything was removed from it before the DOJ searched Trump’s property. The Times’ piece dropped hours after The Washington Post reported that Trump himself explicitly directed employees to move boxes of White House documents from the storage room. These boxes were taken from the storage area to the former president’s private residence after Trump advisers received the DOJ’s subpoena in May, per The Post.
The FBI also interviewed Nauta several times before it raided Mar-a-Lago on August 8, according to one of The Times’ sources.
The DOJ is currently investigating whether Trump broke three federal laws — including the Espionage Act — by keeping the files at his Florida residence. In an August court filing, the Justice Department said it had evidence “that government records were likely concealed and removed” from the storage room at Mar-a-Lago, and that “efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”
Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., declined to comment on The Times’ reporting. Taylor Budowich, Trump’s spokesman at his post-presidential press office, told The Times the Biden administration was “colluding with the media through targeted leaks in an overt and illegal act of intimidation and tampering.”
Budowich and Woodward Jr. did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes from a Mar-a-Lago storage room before and after the DOJ subpoenaed Trump for top-secret documents: NYT
Cheryl Teh – October 13, 2022
Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes from a Mar-a-Lago storage room before and after the DOJ subpoenaed Trump for top-secret documents: NYT
Walt Nauta, a longtime Trump aide, was seen moving boxes out from a storage room the FBI searched.
The incidents were caught on security footage, The New York Times reported.
Nauta was seen moving boxes before and after the DOJ demanded top-secret files be returned in May.
A Trump aide was caught on security camera moving boxes out of a storage room in Mar-a-Lago, per a report from The New York Times. The Times did not view the security footage and Insider was not independently able to verify its contents.
The Times spoke to three people familiar with the matter, who said longtime Trump staffer Walt Nauta was seen on Mar-a-Lago’s security footage moving boxes out of a storage room that was later searched by the FBI. This took place both before and after the Department of Justice issued a subpoena in May ordering Trump to hand over classified documents, per the NYT’s sources.
Intrigue has swirled around what was kept in the storage room, and whether anything was removed from it before the DOJ searched Trump’s property. The Times’ piece dropped hours after The Washington Post reported that Trump himself explicitly directed employees to move boxes of White House documents from the storage room. These boxes were taken from the storage area to the former president’s private residence after Trump advisers received the DOJ’s subpoena in May, per The Post.
The FBI also interviewed Nauta several times before it raided Mar-a-Lago on August 8, according to one of The Times’ sources.
The DOJ is currently investigating whether Trump broke three federal laws — including the Espionage Act — by keeping the files at his Florida residence. In an August court filing, the Justice Department said it had evidence “that government records were likely concealed and removed” from the storage room at Mar-a-Lago, and that “efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”
Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., declined to comment on The Times’ reporting. Taylor Budowich, Trump’s spokesman at his post-presidential press office, told The Times the Biden administration was “colluding with the media through targeted leaks in an overt and illegal act of intimidation and tampering.”
Budowich and Woodward Jr. did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
The real story behind America’s population bomb: Adults want their independence
Clay Routledge and Will Johnson – October 12, 2022
Declining birth rates are a major concern for the United States and many countries around the world, so we – an expert in existential psychology and an expert in pulsing public opinion – surveyed the Americans choosing not to have children to learn the reasons why.
Americans are having fewer children than are needed to keep population numbers stable.
Fear of not just climate change and affordable housing
Much of the conversation in the United States about this issue has focused on fears about the future of the world or major economic challenges. For instance, the threat of climate change and the affordability of housing are frequently referenced as reasons that Americans don’t want to have kids.
While those are concerns of course, when you look at the data, family planning appears to be influenced more by people’s personal views about the independent life they want to live than their worries about potential environmental or economic issues.
This has important implications for how we as a nation approach the demographic challenge of declining birth rates.
A Harris Poll found that of those without children, about half do not want to have a child in the future, while 20% remain unsure. The only factor that the majority (54%) of Americans who don’t want to have kids endorsed as influencing their decision was maintaining personal independence.
We then asked these individuals whether their decision to not have children was influenced by a wide range of factors. Only 28% of them reported that climate change influenced their decision to not have kids. Similarly, only 33% indicated that housing prices influenced their decision.
Other factors we asked about including the political situation in the United States (31%), safety concerns (31%), personal financial situation (46%) and work-life balance (40%) were endorsed by less than half of respondents.
The only factor that the majority (54%) of Americans who don’t want to have kids endorsed as influencing their decision was maintaining personal independence.
Moreover, since respondents were able to indicate multiple reasons for not having kids, we also asked them which of those factors most influenced their decision. Further suggesting that this decision is more about personal preferences than other factors, we found that maintaining personal independence was reported as the most influential factor for more respondents than any other factor; 43% of those who considered independence to be a factor indicated that it was the most influential reason for not having kids.
For comparison, only 26% of those who considered climate change when deciding whether to have children reported that it was the most influential reason and only 9% of those who considered housing prices indicated such.
Americans may have multiple reasons for opting out of parenting, but their desire for personal independence is the most powerful one.
It is also worth noting that men and women were generally similar in their reasoning; 53% of females and 55% of males reported that their desire to maintain their personal independence influenced their decision to not have children. No other reason for not having kids was cited by a majority of men or women.
We shouldn’t oversimplify the story of why more and more Americans are choosing to not start families. It is undoubtedly complex and involves facets that public opinion surveys can’t fully capture. However, our results have important implications for cultural and political discussions around this issue.
Changes in public policy may not help
Perhaps most important, our findings suggest that public policy solutions are unlikely to have much impact on birth rates. Because Americans who are opting out of having children are more influenced by their desire to maintain their personal independence than concerns about climate change or affordable housing, or other issues such as work-life balance and safety, efforts to promote a more pro-natal society will need to be more cultural in nature.
More specifically, these efforts will need to address psychological needs related to individuals’ life goals and priorities.
How do we change people’s attitude about how children will affect their lives if they privilege personal freedom over other ideals? A good place to start is to focus on one of the most fundamental psychological needs, the need for existential meaning.
Humans are highly motivated to perceive their lives as meaningful. And it is when they perceive their lives as full of meaning that they are most mentally healthy, resilient, goal-driven, self-disciplined and self-reliant. In this way, meaning can be thought of as a key ingredient to achieving personal independence.
The Americans concerned about how having children may affect their personal independence may not realize that meaning is so empowering and that family is a fundamental source of meaning. For instance, surveys find that when people are asked what makes their lives feel meaningful, the most common response is family.
In addition, studies find that parents report higher levels of meaning than adults without children and have a greater sense of meaning when they are taking care of their children than when they are engaged in other activities.
Cultural narratives that treat parenting as a threat to personal independence and a roadblock to a fulfilling life may contribute to declining birth rates more than many realize.
There are of course environmental, economic and other challenges that can make people worried about bringing another human into this world and that can make raising children difficult.
But this is not new. For much of our history, most humans lived far more perilous lives than we live today. Our challenge is less about our material conditions and more about our mindset.
If we want a world with more children, we are going to have to convince people that having and raising kids is a critical ingredient of, not a barrier to, the good life.
