Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

When we show up, we win.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

“woke” is the new caravan.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Pelosi: “He either is stupid, or he thinks the rest of us are.” Why not both?

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

I was promised a recession.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Fight them, without becoming them!

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

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PSA – Mushroom Clouds Are Not Necessarily Nuclear

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There have been two notable explosions in Russia this past week.

  1. An arms storage depot exploded at Achinsk, near Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia. Every summer, a couple of arms storage depots explode in Russia. They have a lot of them, and their safety measures leave something to be desired. Explosions have continued for a week. Once they start, it’s dangerous to fight the fire that started them and continues. Better to evacuate the area (which has been done) and let the burning and exploding continue until there’s nothing left. Two people or more were killed and a dozen or so injured.

This event has produced some impressive video. Because of the relative humidity, you can see the shock wave as water in the air condenses and evaporates rapidly. Mushroom-shaped clouds have resulted. Large enough explosions, whether conventional or nuclear, produce mushroom clouds. Mushroom clouds are not a marker for a nuclear explosion.

  1. Something blew up at Nenoksa, near the Severodvinsk Naval Base in far northwestern Russia. Reports are fragmentary and somewhat contradictory. Five people were killed and several injured. Suspicions that the Russian government is withholding information are exacerbated by the recent showing of Chernobyl. When the Chernobyl reactor blew up, the Soviet government covered it up until they couldn’t. Which is not to say that the Russian government is or is not covering up now. So far, the confusion looks to me like the normal confusion associated with a disaster, compounded by a secret project and a desire not to admit it’s going badly.

The Russian government has now admitted that a radioactive source was associated with the Severodvinsk blast. Put that together with the Achinsk mushroom cloud and…mnh-hmnh, the crazies are running with it, which is why I am writing this post. There have been conflicting reports about radiation detected in the city of Severodvinsk. At most, it seems to have been a transient pulse of a relatively small amount of whatever it was. No abnormal radiation has been detected in Europe. We should hear more about that in the coming week.

Here’s a map. The pin is at the Severodvinsk Naval Base. Look toward the right, almost past Kazakhstan, and there’s Krasnoyarsk.

 

 

Here’s the video of the very impressive explosion at Achinsk. There’s another one of a later explosion there that also shows the shockwave well and a mushroomish cloud.

I have some thoughts about what may have happened in the Nenoksa explosion. I’ll write another post on that.

NONE OF THESE EXPLOSIONS HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS

 

Update: A friend who spends time in Krasnoyarsk pointed out to me that I had the map wrong. I corrected it.

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner

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What Did I Miss?

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I went to Albuquerque for shopping today and lunch with a friend. Just before I left, the news of an explosion at Nenoksa, in northeast Russia near the city of Severodvinsk, was hitting Twitter. I come home this afternoon to the news that Sue Gordon, Deputy Director of National Intelligence, has tendered her resignation and will be leaving the DNI’s office along with Dan Coats on August 15.

The Nenoksa explosion – There’s not much news, and it’s early news, the kind that often turns out to be wrong. The official announcement is that two are dead and several injured.

Here’s a thread from Jeffrey Lewis that is probably the best summary around. I’ll just give you the top two tweets. He’s been tweeting additional material through the day.

The Severodvinsk city government reported that their radiation detector had a sudden pulse. I haven’t seen a number in the news, but a friend had some numbers, and they were very small. The fact that it was a pulse and not continuing means it was even smaller than that. Note that the Tass article that Lewis quotes says that radiation levels in Severodvinsk are normal. My best guess is that it was a blip in the detector. Other guesses from knowledgeable people were a broken “EXIT” sign’s tritium or a smoke detector. Nonetheless, the New York Times saw fit to lead with radiation.

 

Reporting on radiation, and public ignorance of radiation, is getting worse and worse. Radiation is the ultimate terror, and it’s coming to get YOU!

A bunch of us are speculating about what it is that blew up. It may have something to do with Russia’s planned nuclear-powered cruise missile, although I think that is mainly vaporware.

 

Sue Gordon Resigns – This was pretty much expected, although reasonable people hoped it wouldn’t happen. The usual noises were emitted from the upper reaches of the Trump administration indicating displeasure with having to appoint her Acting Director of National Intelligence, which is the usual prelude to moving a person out of a job. Yes, the law said that she should become Acting, but that was why she had to be made to resign. Gordon’s career has been in intelligence, and knowledgeable people think well of her. Daily Beast article here.

Joseph Maguire, the current director of the National Counterterrorism Center, will be the Acting Director of National Intelligence. Presumably he has done the proper obeisance to Trump and will give interviews on Fox News to seal his position from acting. Although for some positions, an Acting Director can’t become Director. Tune in for next week’s drama.

Trump is removing competent people and replacing them with toadies. This is one reason that I think that Nancy Pelosi’s long game is a mistake. Every one of these jobs that gains a toady or goes unfilled adds to Trump’s power. The intelligence community has not supported his Foxified view of the world. We can look back to the report, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US,” George W. Bush’s daily briefing for August 6, 2001, to see the kind of damage missing or ignored intelligence can do.

Open thread!

 

 

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Revolutions Need Martyrs: Putin Appears To Have Moved on Navalny

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When I posted about the Russian protests ahead of the upcoming elections yesterday, I noted that Alexsei Navalny had been taken into custody the day before the protests. This is not uncommon. Putin has Navalny picked up and arrested several times a year, protests or no protests. Basically using state based and directed lawfare to harass Navalny and send a message to the opposition. Navalny stays in jail anywhere from a few days to several months, is released, and the cycle starts all over again. Until today.

From The New York Times (emphasis mine):

LONDON — A day after an unauthorized election protest he planned drew mass arrests in Moscow, Aleksei A. Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, was hospitalized with a “severe allergic reaction” in jail, his spokeswoman said on Sunday.

“Over his whole life, Aleksei has never experienced an allergic reaction,” the spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, wrote on Twitter. But she said that his face was severely swollen and he had red spots on his skin.

Mr. Navalny was arrested on Wednesday and sentenced to 30 days in jail for calling a rally on Saturday, to protest a decision by the election authorities to bar several opposition candidates from running for Moscow’s City Council.

Ms. Yarmysh wrote that employees at the special detention center in Russia where Mr. Navalny was being held had called an ambulance, and that he had been taken to a hospital where police officers were guarding his room.

Though the reason for his hospitalization was unclear, Mr. Navalny is no stranger to having his health imperiled because of his activism.

He has been roughed up by Russian law enforcement officers and arrested many times. In May 2017, an assailant threw a green chemical into his face, resulting in an 80 percent loss of his sight in one eye, he said. His vision may improve, but the outlook was unclear, Mr. Navalny wrote on his website that year, citing a doctor’s diagnosis.

On Sunday evening, Mr. Navalny’s regular physician, Anastasy Vasilyeva, visited him in the hospital with another doctor, Yaroslav Ashikhmin, and said she saw similarities to that incident.

“As the doctor who treated Aleksei’s severe eye burn two years ago, I can say with confidence that both today and in 2017 what happened was a result of the damage inflicted by an undetermined chemical substance,” Ms. Vasilyeva wrote on Facebook.

“Aleksei doesn’t have any allergy and has never had one. Moreover, he ate the same food with his cellmates and didn’t use any new perfumes or personal care products,” she said, adding that while in the hospital, Mr. Navalny can only eat the food that is allowed in prison.

Ms. Vasilyeva also wrote that her access to Mr. Navalny was limited.

“Almost immediately we were told to leave,” she wrote. Following deliberations with the hospital’s head doctor, Ms. Vasilyeva said that she and Mr. Ashikhmin were able to examine Mr. Navalny “through a door.”

The question is whether Putin is so brazen, or so desperate, as to have Navalny killed or so severely disabled in detention that he is as good as dead? Putin may be a brutal tactician more than a gifted strategist, but he’s not stupid. Alive and functional, even if imprisoned, Navalny is a pain and a problem. Dead or injured so he is good as dead and he’s a martyr. And revolutions and rebellions need their martyrs.

Open thread!

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Russians Protesting Putin’s Managed Democracy

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Russians, specifically Muscovites, have been protesting Putin’s sham managed democracy. Specifically the banning of opposition candidates in the upcoming elections and the apparent disappearance of billions of taxpayer dollars. The tax proceeds aren’t really missing, it’s just that Russians aren’t allowed to see the balances in Putin’s and his oligarch’s offshore accounts, so they don’t know for sure where their taxpayer dollars went, what it has been invested in, or what it has been spent on. The protests have, of course, led to a significant crackdown by Putin because he’s much more into the managed part of managed democracy than the democracy part. Opposition leader Alexander Navalny was preemptively arrested before the protests even began.

https://twitter.com/dabeard/status/1155145135211966464

And the crackdown was violent.

There are also reports that journalists have been rounded up. Remember, the President has joked with Putin’s about journalists and how to deal with them.

Normally we’d expect the president of the United States to issue a statement, at least, condemning Putin’s actions, providing moral support for the demonstrators, and demanding that their civil rights and liberties be respected. Given the President’s affection and affinity for Putin, as well as other authoritarian leaders, the best we can hope for is that Secretary Pompeo issues a tepid statement. I expect what will really happen is that an unattributed statement will eventually be made by the State Department.

If you, or any revolutionary wannabes, were wondering what real resistance to tyranny looks like, this is what it looks like.

Open thread.

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Special Counsel Mueller’s Testimony Before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Live Stream

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Here’s the live stream of Special Counsel Mueller testifying before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Just a quick note about all the hot takes on how Special Counsel Mueller performed this morning to keep in mind as he testifies this afternoon:

Mueller was, and will be again this afternoon, the quintessential example of a career DOJ official. He says no more than he feels he should and that’s it. He also now has serious old man voice. Together this presents as visually reticent to befuddled, but it isn’t. You’ll notice when he’s had his team’s integrity impugned, he’s been more animated. No disrespect to Jeremy Bash, but he’s a political appointee, not someone whose made a career in National Security positions of different types. His understanding and approach and expectation of how you respond to these things is different than the one Mueller learned and has abided by during his long career first as a civil servant and then as an appointed senior leader. And Frank Figliuzzi’s explanation of this reality was spot on. The news media screaming that he didn’t give them the juicy media clips they want is just garbage. Finally, this format that the committee’s use for these hearings wasn’t and isn’t designed to actually produce detailed, delineated, thoughtful responses. If the Democrats on the committee, or Democrats in Congress, or anyone else wanted that, then committee counsel should have been given the first two hours, 1/2 hours each rotation for the Democratic and Republican counsels, to ask appropriate questions and elicit detailed answers in follow ups. The final hour to 90 minutes could be reserved for individual member questions. Optimally, the whole hearing would have been done by the committee counsel and the members would have sat there and taken notes.

Open thread!

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This Is The Key Takeaway From Special Counsel Mueller’s Testimony Before the House Judiciary Committee

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It all comes down to the last ten seconds of this 34 second clip:

https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1154038990003036161

The questioner is Congressman Ken Buck (R-CO District 4). He’s a former prosecutor, so he should have known not to ask a question he didn’t already know the answer to. There is, of course, argument over whether the Special Counsel was speaking specifically about the President or hypothetically and generally about any president once they are out of office and the Office of Legal Counsel guidance that a sitting president cannot be indicted would no longer apply. Regardless, this should be the focus of Democratic information operations going forward. Just the last ten to twenty seconds of this clip, hammered over and over and over again. In TV advertisements, in radio advertisements, on social media and in Internet based advertisements, and every time a Democratic candidate for president or Federal office, or a Democratic elected official, or their surrogates are asked about the outcome of Mueller’s investigation.

And it should be paired with this 20 second clip of Congressman Lieu (D-CA District 33):

We can wait and see what this afternoon’s House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearings with Special Counsel may bring.

Also, here’s bonus footage of Congressman Gaetz (R-FL District 1/Overstimulated) preparing for this morning’s hearing:

Open thread!

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Spy vs. Spy Open Thread: Miles Kwok, Once Again

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First time I ran across Guo Wengui’s saga, I compared it to “a Trollope novel, as written by John le Carre”. The Trickster God is a lazy scripter in general, but the crossovers by every A-list GOP grifter seems particularly rich here:

… Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, who also goes by Miles Kwok, fled to the United States four years ago after learning an associate had been arrested on corruption charges. He is now one of China’s most-wanted, accused of myriad crimes by the Chinese government, including paying bribes and sexual assault. He maintains his innocence, saying the charges are politically motivated.

Guo, who made his money in real estate, has long promoted himself as a dissident being hunted by the Chinese government for his opposition to the ruling Chinese Communist Party. He is currently seeking political asylum in the United States, where he reportedly avoided deportation by the Trump administration after the president learned Guo was a member of Mar-a-Lago.

Now, filings in a civil case, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, suggest Guo may not be the dissident he claims. “Instead, Guo Wengui was, and is, a dissident-hunter, propagandist, and agent in the service of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party,” according to federal court papers filed on Friday.

The Chinese spy allegations against Guo surfaced last week in a contract dispute — rife with international and political intrigue — between a Hong Kong-based company, Eastern Profit Corporation Limited, and an Arlington, Va., research firm, Strategic Vision US, LLC.

Guo denied the allegations through his attorney, saying the claim “utterly lacks credibility.”

“This lawsuit is about a contract between Eastern Profit and Strategic. Strategic is now abusing the litigation privilege to slander Mr. Guo,” wrote Guo’s attorney, Daniel Podhaskie, in a response to the Miami Herald. He claimed the slander was retaliation after Strategic’s counterclaim was dismissed. Podhaskie pointed to Guo’s frozen assets in China as proof that he is not working with the Communist Party…

Strategic Vision, headed by CEO French Wallop, the widow of the late Wyoming GOP Sen. Malcolm Wallop, was fired by Eastern Profit in February 2018 after the research firm provided information that was mostly publicly available on the probe’s targets, the suit says. Eastern Profit demanded the return of its $1 million deposit for the research work, accusing Strategic Vision of breaching their contract.

Strategic filed a counterclaim not only against Eastern Profit but also against Guo, alleging he is actually a Chinese government spy whose “origin story is untrue.”

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