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On March 20 2018 01:19 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 20 2018 00:58 brian wrote:
i’ve seen plenty of coverage on it personally. but i have friends and family in the area so perhaps seeing it is simply more memorable.
i don’t see why it should be odd that it is not discussed here. i don’t see serial bombings and think ‘USPOL thread would be a good place for this.’
So three for knew and not surprised a serial bomber in Texas isn't US POL thread worthy. I guess I'm the odd one out thinking it's strange to see innocent civilians killed by a serial bomber in Texas and not think there might be more attention payed to it here and elsewhere. If three bombs, let alone 4 went off in say Greenwich Connecticut, or NYC, pretty sure that would be the only thing on the news before Trump or even after if they had the slightest inkling it could possibly be linked to the middle east. Seriously, there is a serial bomber on the loose in Texas and no one knows when the next bomb will go off, how big it will be, where, or anything except they don't seem to have any intention of stopping and the ability to change triggering mechanisms, it didn't even turn into a conversation until I mentioned it?
I mean I keep seeing it pop up but what is there to talk about? We all agree bombings are bad.
Nobody knows who is behind it, whats going on, how they are tracking it. What is there to actually talk about? Or is it just it should have been up to raise attention?
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again, the conversation we’re having is in regards to the lack of conversation, not the actual bombings. i’m interested really in what more you might have to add on the bombings that would actually result in the conversation you would have expected?
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On March 20 2018 01:23 IyMoon wrote:Show nested quote +On March 20 2018 01:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 20 2018 00:58 brian wrote:
i’ve seen plenty of coverage on it personally. but i have friends and family in the area so perhaps seeing it is simply more memorable.
i don’t see why it should be odd that it is not discussed here. i don’t see serial bombings and think ‘USPOL thread would be a good place for this.’
So three for knew and not surprised a serial bomber in Texas isn't US POL thread worthy. I guess I'm the odd one out thinking it's strange to see innocent civilians killed by a serial bomber in Texas and not think there might be more attention payed to it here and elsewhere. If three bombs, let alone 4 went off in say Greenwich Connecticut, or NYC, pretty sure that would be the only thing on the news before Trump or even after if they had the slightest inkling it could possibly be linked to the middle east. Seriously, there is a serial bomber on the loose in Texas and no one knows when the next bomb will go off, how big it will be, where, or anything except they don't seem to have any intention of stopping and the ability to change triggering mechanisms, it didn't even turn into a conversation until I mentioned it? I mean I keep seeing it pop up but what is there to talk about? We all agree bombings are bad. Nobody knows who is behind it, whats going on, how they are tracking it. What is there to actually talk about? Or is it just it should have been up to raise attention?
There is a serial bomber loose in a major US city with a pretty rapid bombing schedule, and people are really going with "yeah I knew, but meh what's there to talk about?"?
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On March 19 2018 08:00 Doodsmack wrote:
A good example of Trump's contempt for the Constitution, especially the First Amendment.
i don't think so i guess. seems like a sensible way to do things
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On March 18 2018 19:31 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 18 2018 18:45 a_flayer wrote:On March 18 2018 18:35 m4ini wrote:
Well it's not like you could cheer for a spineless republican politician to threaten the sitting president, like they did when another one had his dick sucked.
Guess in all that blind tribalism we forgot about that tiny problem.
As a brief sidenote, "drone king" is pretty debatable. I wouldn't call the guy acknowledging drone strikes "a drone king", but the ones who ordered it a decade before he came into office. That's just me though. Speaking of blind tribalism, what's up with the cult of personality around that mass murderer and corporate fraud that's running the defense department? Secretary of Defense James Mattis is implicated in one of the largest business scandals of the past decades, described by the Securities and Exchange Commission as an “elaborate, years-long fraud” through which Theranos, led by CEO Elizabeth Holmes and president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, “exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.”
Basically, their biotech startup was founded on the promise of faster, cheaper, painless blood tests. But their technology was fake.
Mattis not only served on Theranos’s board during some of the years it was perpetrating the fraud after he retired from US military service, but he earlier served as a key advocate of putting the company’s technology (technology that was, to be clear, fake) to use inside the military while he was still serving as a general. Holmes is settling the case, paying a $500,000 fee and accepting various other penalties, while Balwani is fighting it out in court. SourceOf course, you're gonna say "but maybe he didn't know the technology was a fraud". Sounds like an excellent person to lead the largest most destructive military force in the history of mankind, then, yes? The "warrior-monk" didn't know he was selling fake goods, so it's fine! Just like "he didn't know it was a wedding" is a fine excuse to bomb the shit out of these people. Gotta kill a whole bunch of people if you're bringing freedom and democracy to a country right (what was I saying about "fake goods" again?). USMC Major General James Mattis even said the idea of a wedding was implausible, "How many people go to the middle of the desert ... to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilization? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive." The Rakats and the Sabahs were residents of Mukaradeeb. He later added that it had taken him 30 seconds to deliberate on bombing the location.
In the aftermath, Kimmitt said, "There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration. There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too." Video footage obtained by the Associated Press seems to contradict this view. The video shows a series of scenes of a wedding celebration, and footage from the following day showing fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans and brightly colored beddings used for celebrations, scattered around a destroyed tent. SourceNot to mention the borderline unhinged approach at Iran he held while serving under Obama (before being fired on a tweet without as much as a phone call -- Trump is so terrible, right? Unprecedented). As former President Barack Obama's top commander in the Middle East, then-Gen. James Mattis pushed for military strikes to punish Iran for arming anti-American militias in Iraq. SourceApparently he wasn't done bombing innocent Iraqi Muslims, he desperately had to bomb some Iranian ones as well (which is more or less why he got fired). Darkest timeline indeed. It's frightening how so many Americans seem to worship him. It reminds me of another certain person. One that's even more hawkish than him towards Iran, to be fair, but that's not really a boon on Mattis' part. 9 out of 10 people killed by Obama's drone strikes weren't the target, Doesn't everyone remember the huge liberal/Democrat complaints? Me neither... Back to the FBI: So I demonstrated how they dramatically expanded their reach since 1972 by incorporating DEA actions and becoming an international organization. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/general/383301-us-politics-mega-thread?page=10080#201599We already covered lordawesomess 2nd point before he posted it. And your last point on the FISA court: Show nested quote +3. The FISA court was established as a result of the Church Committee hearings. It's goal was to provide vital judicial oversight of things like wiretaps, instead of the FBI wiretapping whoever Hoover felt like. The very existence of the court represents a direct check on the FBI's power in 2018 as opposed to 1972.
Has put zero criminals from the FBI into prison and also somehow missed multiple illegal spying programs. So we have a 1. the CIA isn't the FBI. 2. Something that was already acknowledged. 3. A court that approves virtually everything before it and has never held anyone accountable for a crime they committed. You can call those notable improvements that prove the FBI isn't a corrupt criminal organization, but the multiple/massive violations of people's rights (made easier and far more expansive, thanks to the internet) and complete lack of accountability says something very different. If you have long lists of FBI agents and leaders charged and sentenced for the crimes they committed I'll be very receptive, if all you have is to point to a 1975 effort that led to some of the most massive violations of US citizens rights and was made those violations exponentially worse by having access to the internet I'm going to strongly disagree that your position is stronger than mine. Here's a massive violation of law oversaw by Mueller: Show nested quote +A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said.
After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as “parallel construction.”
The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred. About interfering in Latin America.... Show nested quote +The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred. So they got 10+x bigger since 1972 (regarding this covert anti-Drug force), and they act internationally instead of domestically as the FBI did in prior to the 1980's. I vehemently disagree that Lord's post proves the FBI hasn't gotten worse/more expansive since the 70's based on the clearly noted expansion of both the laws they were meant to enforce and which countries they could operate in, and complete lack of punishment for their crimes. You're going to need to better than toothless committees that saw multiple FBI leaders flout the law and did nothing to punish them in order to convince me they are being held accountable or that they aren't more expansive than they were before. Source
The parallel construction that you are talking about is not new or unique to the FBI at all; it is a common technique used by law enforcement. It can be used, and used in good faith, to catch criminals for one very simple reason: classified material is not legally admissible in court. The US conducts extensive surveillance of bad actors, including states like Russia, China, and North Korea, and non-state actors like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the seemingly infinite number of drug cartels infesting Latin America. All intelligence gathered in this manner is not admissible as evidence in a court room. Even if it were, disclosing sources and methods in one case can permanently burn that source or method for all other cases, forever. Thus, the parallel construction.
An interesting note on parallel construction is the fact that Mueller's investigators had Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities (SCIFs) specially built in their offices. Those rooms are the only places where certain highly secret types of intelligence can be divulged. As I made clear above, absolutely nothing they learn in those rooms will be presentable to a court. Why, then, do they have them? The only conceivable answer is that the US IC has a road map laid out for them that consists of very high level Russians talking to each other about Team Trump or even talking to Team Trump directly.... Whatever Team Trump did do appear on so many Top Secret+ pieces of intelligence that Mueller had to have his own SCIFs installed must have been really bad.
Regarding point 3, you don't seem to understand how the judiciary works.
The FISA court has no role at all in policing routine FBI misconduct. If the FBI mishandles an investigation and harms someone, the victim could sue them in some state or federal court, whichever jurisdiction had standing, for whatever it was that the FBI did wrong. That has literally no connection to the FISA court whatsoever. (I'm sure xDaunt or farva could explain this better than me. Basically, the issue is that FBI misdeeds would not be brought to the FISA court, because that court exists only to rule yea or nay on certain types of surveillance warrants.) Also, the inspector general's office at DoJ exists specifically to police internal misconduct: their report is what apparently recommended firing McCabe.
You claim it's easy to get a FISA warrant. Basically everyone who has ever worked on stuff sent to the FISA court would disagree with you. Here is one article out of many that i could point you to on the difficulties of obtaining a FISA warrant.
The rest of your post is a bunch of unsubstantiated accusations about highly nebulous LOADS OF CRIMES committed by FBI agents who all got away scott free with... what exactly?
Finally, GH, if you answer any part of this, please answer this. You clearly believe that there are lots of people committing loads of white collar crime at corporations and thereby cheating oppressed Americans out of their rightful stuff. The FBI is the preeminent investigator of white collar crime in this country, and they do a pretty damn good job from what I've seen. Either you can abolish the FBI or you can increase resources for law enforcement in order to catch more actual corporate criminals. You can't do both.
Of course, you could always argue that I am presenting a false choice and that all you need is real reform, consisting of abolishing the FBI and replacing it with something better, which will go and catch the neoliberals and the crooks the FBI wouldn't or couldn't. To that, I can only say, "I don't live in fantasyland."
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not to belabor the point but you’re still on the non-conversation. did you have anything else to add with regards to the bombings? i’m definitely interested in a conversation about it. but i’m waiting for you to start one.
(i’m also interested in the non-conversation too, but i’d like to start on the more immediately pressing conversation, unless you can do both without conflating them.)
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Austin bombings are #2 on twitter. Maybe cable news isn't hitting it that hard (I don't know, I don't watch cable), but give it a few hours. Twitter is usually ahead of cable news. I am seeing cable news guys on twitter talking about it.
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On March 20 2018 01:34 A3th3r wrote:i don't think so i guess. seems like a sensible way to do things
There are multiple highly-qualified lawyers who have already offered to represent for free people who want to sue to break the NDA, because it is ridiculously illegal to force public servants to sign NDAs. The ONLY limitations on a public servant's ability to speak about his public service is national security considerations aka the classification system and certain federal ethics rules. That is it.
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There's also the Hatch Act, can't forget about that, though I suppose that figures as an ethics rule 
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On March 20 2018 01:29 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 20 2018 01:23 IyMoon wrote:On March 20 2018 01:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 20 2018 00:58 brian wrote:
i’ve seen plenty of coverage on it personally. but i have friends and family in the area so perhaps seeing it is simply more memorable.
i don’t see why it should be odd that it is not discussed here. i don’t see serial bombings and think ‘USPOL thread would be a good place for this.’
So three for knew and not surprised a serial bomber in Texas isn't US POL thread worthy. I guess I'm the odd one out thinking it's strange to see innocent civilians killed by a serial bomber in Texas and not think there might be more attention payed to it here and elsewhere. If three bombs, let alone 4 went off in say Greenwich Connecticut, or NYC, pretty sure that would be the only thing on the news before Trump or even after if they had the slightest inkling it could possibly be linked to the middle east. Seriously, there is a serial bomber on the loose in Texas and no one knows when the next bomb will go off, how big it will be, where, or anything except they don't seem to have any intention of stopping and the ability to change triggering mechanisms, it didn't even turn into a conversation until I mentioned it? I mean I keep seeing it pop up but what is there to talk about? We all agree bombings are bad. Nobody knows who is behind it, whats going on, how they are tracking it. What is there to actually talk about? Or is it just it should have been up to raise attention? There is a serial bomber loose in a major US city with a pretty rapid bombing schedule, and people are really going with "yeah I knew, but meh what's there to talk about?"?
You could say the same thing of a ridiculously huge amount of what happens in the world, especially in the states right now. So the fact that we don't know much yet, when there are plenty of things to discuss on which information is much more readily available, is pretty fair justification for not talking about this exact thing yet. Not that justification for the non-mention of a topic on a forum is needed at all.
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On March 20 2018 01:35 Wulfey_LA wrote:
Austin bombings are #2 on twitter. Maybe cable news isn't hitting it that hard (I don't know, I don't watch cable), but give it a few hours. Twitter is usually ahead of cable news. I am seeing cable news guys on twitter talking about it.
I live relatively close to Austin (Texas is a big state :D) and I've been following the bombings from local news reports. The police are obviously clueless so far about who is doing this. People are mostly just scared and horrified, because whatever nutjob is doing this has already killed multiple people, and he/they doesn't seem to be slowing down. Nothing else really to say on the matter.
On March 20 2018 01:38 farvacola wrote:There's also the Hatch Act, can't forget about that, though I suppose that figures as an ethics rule
Yep, I included that under "ethics rules."
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On March 20 2018 01:34 brian wrote:
not to belabor the point but you’re still on the non-conversation. did you have anything else to add with regards to the bombings? i’m definitely interested in a conversation about it. but i’m waiting for you to start one.
(i’m also interested in the non-conversation too, but i’d like to start on the more immediately pressing conversation, i think?)
Why do you think a serial bomber who's killed people and injured others on the loose isn't getting more media attention. There's no reason to believe there isn't another bomb that's going to explode today or tomorrow, or near one of your friends/families house tomorrow?
If there was a serial bomber in NYC do you think it would get the same level of attention as this? I'm wondering why or why not?
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On March 20 2018 01:40 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 20 2018 01:34 brian wrote:
not to belabor the point but you’re still on the non-conversation. did you have anything else to add with regards to the bombings? i’m definitely interested in a conversation about it. but i’m waiting for you to start one.
(i’m also interested in the non-conversation too, but i’d like to start on the more immediately pressing conversation, i think?) Why do you think a serial bomber who's killed people and injured others on the loose isn't getting more media attention. There's no reason to believe there isn't another bomb that's going to explode today or tomorrow, or near one of your friends/families house tomorrow? If there was a serial bomber in NYC do you think it would get the same level of attention as this? I'm wondering why or why not?
In NYC? more attention for sure, cause Austin is pretty darn small and NYC is NYC.
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On March 20 2018 01:42 TheLordofAwesome wrote:Show nested quote +On March 20 2018 01:40 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 20 2018 01:34 brian wrote:
not to belabor the point but you’re still on the non-conversation. did you have anything else to add with regards to the bombings? i’m definitely interested in a conversation about it. but i’m waiting for you to start one.
(i’m also interested in the non-conversation too, but i’d like to start on the more immediately pressing conversation, i think?) Why do you think a serial bomber who's killed people and injured others on the loose isn't getting more media attention. There's no reason to believe there isn't another bomb that's going to explode today or tomorrow, or near one of your friends/families house tomorrow? If there was a serial bomber in NYC do you think it would get the same level of attention as this? I'm wondering why or why not? In NYC? more attention for sure, cause Austin is pretty darn small and NYC is NYC.
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How about Greenwich Connecticut? You think it would get the same coverage?
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On March 20 2018 01:44 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 20 2018 01:42 TheLordofAwesome wrote:On March 20 2018 01:40 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 20 2018 01:34 brian wrote:
not to belabor the point but you’re still on the non-conversation. did you have anything else to add with regards to the bombings? i’m definitely interested in a conversation about it. but i’m waiting for you to start one.
(i’m also interested in the non-conversation too, but i’d like to start on the more immediately pressing conversation, i think?) Why do you think a serial bomber who's killed people and injured others on the loose isn't getting more media attention. There's no reason to believe there isn't another bomb that's going to explode today or tomorrow, or near one of your friends/families house tomorrow? If there was a serial bomber in NYC do you think it would get the same level of attention as this? I'm wondering why or why not? In NYC? more attention for sure, cause Austin is pretty darn small and NYC is NYC. ' How about Greenwich Connecticut? You think it would get the same coverage?
As Austin? Sure.
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I mean literally anything in NYC gets more attention than other places, that's just how the world works. First time I've heard about it, trip wired bombs seems pretty wtf though :X
Sean Hannity is becoming USA's modern rasputin, the only person the president is listening to.
I like how the president just selling out and doing ads for a commercial program is ok now because it's the least of everybody's worries.
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Yeah, they don't seem to really know anything about the bombings (or at least the public has been told almost nothing). No demands or anything. All we know is where the bombs blew up.
It could be political, it could be some whackjob just getting a kick out of blowing people up. The lack of taking ownership of the bombings makes the latter seem more likely to me-especially with the shift from packages to apparently a trip-wire this morning in a residential area with different ethnic makeup-but I'm not an expert.
Whichever it is, the person actually appears to be good at it, orders of magnitude better than your underwear bombers or the Boston marathon bombers...which makes things get very little coverage because there's no chases, no new leads, no nothing.
I think the media also fears reporting on it because getting the "why" wrong is preeeeetty nasty these days, and getting the "why" of this case right now is baffling.
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The whole Austin situation is pretty terrifying. Bomber clearly has some skill and may be upping his game. Wouldnt be surprised if we saw something like a car bomb next.
Only upside is that basically every federal law enforcement expert in the country is there looking for him/her. I can't imagine they won't find something. Nobody can cover their tracks perfectly.
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To be fair the covering for the bombings has been very different from something like the Beltway Sniper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks#Attacks_in_the_Washington,_D.C._metropolitan_area that seemed to be national news instantly.
Granted there's some reasoning for that, there were more instances in a closer time period to make it a big event right away, but the coverage still feels very different. The sophistication of the attacks seems like it should compensate for the fewer incidences.
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On March 20 2018 01:48 On_Slaught wrote:
The whole Austin situation is pretty terrifying. Bomber clearly has some skill and may be upping his game. Wouldnt be surprised if we saw something like a car bomb next.
Only upside is that basically every federal law enforcement expert in the country is there looking for him/her. I can't imagine they won't find something. Nobody can cover their tracks perfectly.
Ehhhh, the anthrax bomber would like a word with you.
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EPT
