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Melania Trump to divorce former US president Donald Trump? Latest …

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

Former US president Donald Trump celebrated his 75th birthday on Monday and the event was a low-key affair. Trump marked his 75th birthday with a dinner at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Donald Trump Jr, the son of former US president, took to his Instagram account to share some photos of the birthday party. The guests included Donald Jr.s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, former NFL star Herschel Walker, Indiana congressman Jim Banks and Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert.

The most notable absentee was Donald Trump's wife and former First Lady, Melania Trump.

Ex-wife Ivana Trump once said in an interview that "Donald hates his birthdays", and a source also told People magazine that Melania "keeps her own schedule and leads her own life" away from her husband.

The absence of Melania has once again sparked the divorce rumors between the couple but writer Kristyn Burtt said that it is wrong to say that Melania has decided to part ways with Donald Trump.

She said: "She did that at the start of his administration when she and son Barron remained in New York City so he could finish out the school year before they moved to Washington, D.C. The couple has very different hobbies and seems to prefer their independent activities, but no one should read too much into her absence. This shouldnt be seen as a sign that there is trouble in their marriage."

Notably, the only family members who were present during Donald Trump's 75th birthday celebration were Donald Jr. and his girlfriend. Daughter Ivanka Trump was also not present at the event.

Trump Reportedly Had Information About a Foreign Governments Nuclear Secrets at Mar-a-Lago, and Yeah, Thats Exactly as Bad as It Sounds – Vanity Fair

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

Question: Is there any legitimate, not-suspicious reason that a former president of the United States would take information about a foreign countrys nuclear capabilities from the White House with him when he left, stash it in his home, and refuse to give it back despite being asked to do so on numerous occasions?

Answer: No, there isnt! Not a single one! Which is why it is incredibly damning to learn that Donald Trump, whose entire life has been a series of incredibly damning moments for which he should probably do hard time, allegedly did just that.

Yes, on Monday night, The Washington Post reported that a document describing a foreign governments military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities was among the materials seized from Mar-a-Lago during the FBIs August 8 search. If youre wondering if its possible that such a document could simply include low-level, not closely guarded details about another countrys nukes, and this whole thing isnt actually as bad as it sounds, we regret to inform you that is not the case. (In fact, its probably even a bigger deal than any of us can currently comprehend.) According to The Post, some of the documents uncovered during last months search detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them and only the president, some members of his Cabinet or anear-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs. For that reason, such records, per The Post, are kept under lock and key, almost always in a secure compartmented information facility, with a designated control officer to keep careful tabs on their location.

As in: not at a for-profit country club that anyone willing to pony up the initiation fee, or their guest, or a rando off the street asking to use the pool can walk through. Its also why, when the National Archives removed 15 boxes of documents this past January and the FBI came back for more in June, theyd hoped that was everythingparticularly in light of the fact that a lawyer for Trump had signed a written statement claiming all classified material had been returned to its rightful owner, i.e., the U.S. government.

In a statement, Christopher Kise, an attorney for the ex-president, did not address the fact that Trump had stashed information about a foreign powers nuclear capabilities at Mar-a-Lago, or that he held on to it despite a subpoena from a grand jury demanding the return of all documents or writings in the custody or control of Donald J. Trump and/or the Office of Donald J. Trump bearing classification markings, including Top Secret, and the lesser categories of Secret and Confidential. Instead, he selectively decried the leaks about the case, saying they continue with no respect for the process nor any regard for the real truth, claiming the damage to public confidence in the integrity of the system simply cannot be underestimated.

On Monday, a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, granted the ex-presidents request for a special master to conduct a third-party review of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago. In a move condemned in the harshest terms by basically anyone with a law degreeincluding former Trump attorney general Bill BarrCannon also blocked prosecutors from continuing to use the documents in their criminal investigation until the review is complete.

Back in November 2020, after Trump lost the presidential election, current and former government officials sounded the alarm on the possibility he would reveal valuable, classified information to further his own interests. John Fitzpatrick, a former intelligence officer and expert on the systems used to protect state secrets, told The Washington Post that the sort of information Trump was liable to have picked up on during his time in office includedwait for itspecial military capabilities, details about cyberweapons and espionage, the kinds of satellites the United States uses and the parameters of any covert actions that, as president, only Trump had the power to authorize. Assessing the possibility that he might do something untoward with that intelligence, David Priess, a former CIA officer, told the outlet, Anyone who is disgruntled, dissatisfied or aggrieved is a risk of disclosing classified information, whether as a current or former officeholder. Trump certainly fits that profile.

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Trump Reportedly Had Information About a Foreign Governments Nuclear Secrets at Mar-a-Lago, and Yeah, Thats Exactly as Bad as It Sounds - Vanity Fair

Trump Told White House Team He Needed to Protect Russiagate Documents – Rolling Stone

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

In his final days in the White House, Donald Trump told top advisers he needed to preserve certain Russia-related documents to keep his enemies from destroying them.

The documents related to the federal investigation into Russian election meddling and alleged collusion with Trumps campaign. At the end of his presidency, Trump and his team pushed to declassify these so-called Russiagate documents, believing they would expose a Deep State plot against him.

According to a person with direct knowledge of the situation and another source briefed on the matter, Trump told several people working in and outside the White House that he was concerned Joe Bidens incoming administration or the Deep State would supposedly shred, bury, or destroy the evidence that Trump was somehow wronged.

Trumps concern about preserving the Russia-related material is newly relevant after an FBI search turned up a trove of government documents at the former presidents Mar-a-Lago residence.

Since the search, Trump has refused to say which classified government papers and top-secret documents he had at Mar-a-Lago and what was the FBI had seized. (Trump considers the documents mine and has directed his lawyers to make that widely-panned argument in court.) The feds have publicly released little about the search and its results. Its unclear if any of the materials in Trumps document trove are related to Russia or the election interference investigation. A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

But both Trump and his former Director of National Intelligence have hinted that Russia-related documents could be among the materials the FBI sought. I think they thought it was something to do with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, Trump said during a Sept. 1 radio interview. They were afraid that things were in there part of their scam material.

Former DNI John Ratcliffe told CBS days earlier that, while he had no knowledge of what was in the records, It wouldnt surprise me if there were records related to [Russia] there.

A month before the 2020 election, Ratcliffe declassified intelligence detailing how the U.S. had obtained information about Russian intelligence analysis on Hillary Clintons campaign. The intelligence community, Ratcliffe wrote, couldnt determine whether the information contained exaggeration of fabrication. Both CIA director Gina Haspel and NSA chief Paul Nakasone reportedly opposed the declassification on the grounds that it could reveal how American spies had obtained the information. Indeed, a variety of other officials familiar with the internal debate felt such declassifications could out sensitive sources.

That document was from a pretty sensitive place that you would know where it was from if you were in Russia, one former intelligence official tells Rolling Stone about the material released by Ratcliffe. There were enough clues in there that the Russians couldve figured it out.

Other intelligence officials expressed concern that Ratcliffe would reveal even more information potentially damaging to U.S. intelligence sources. We were worried theyd try to counter the bipartisan Senate Intelligence committee endorsement of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment by selectively declassing intel that the House Intelligence minority had cobbled together to counter the narrative that Russia preferred Trump, another former intelligence official says.

The 2017 assessment concluded that Russian president Vladimir Putin had meddled in the 2016 election because he wanted Trump to win a conclusion Putin himself half admitted to during his 2018 summit with the former president in Finland. But Republicans on the House Intelligence committee, led by Devin Nunes, repeatedly disputed that conclusion, even as their Republican counterparts on the Senate Intelligence committee accepted it.

The intelligence communitys resistance to Trumps efforts to declassify sensitive material related to Russia and the election specifically a classified report by Nunes disputing the 2017 assessment reportedly led Trump to consider firing CIA director Gina Haspel in November 2020 as he moved trusted allies into sensitive intelligence positions, CNN reported at the time.

Trump never fired Haspel, and the House Intelligence committees classified report wasnt released publicly. But both Trump and Meadows worked up until Biden took the oath of office to declassify information they viewed as beneficial to Trumps narrative of Deep State persecution.

In a memo to the acting attorney general and intelligence officials sent the day before Trump left office, he claimed the Justice Department had sent him a binder of materials on the FBIs so-called Crossfire Hurricane investigation in late December 2020. The department sent Trump that information, he claimed, so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.

The materials included transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, according to John Solomon, Trumps representative to the National Archives.

Trump White House Chief of staff Mark Meadows later wrote in his memoir that he personally went through every page of the documents to make sure the declassified portions didnt disclose sources and methods and described his frustration by what he considered push back from the Department of Justice and FBI.Meadows and Trump worked to release the material up until minutes before Bidens inauguration. Trump sent a memo on Jan. 19 accepting the FBIs redactions and ordering declassification. Meadows sent a followup memo on Bidens inauguration day. The material was never released publicly. But in a series of podcast interviews recorded before the FBI search, former Nunes and Trump official Kash Patel shed some light on the administrations broader plans. He claimed Trump had asked him to help retrieve and publish so-called Russiagate material the White House counsels office had sent to the National Archives in the last days of the administration.

Read the rest here:

Trump Told White House Team He Needed to Protect Russiagate Documents - Rolling Stone

Ex-FBI official says Trump’s nuclear information had high ‘price tag’ – Business Insider

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

A former FBI official said former President Donald Trump may have wanted to keep top-secret documents about a foreign power because of the astronomical price that country or its adversaries might have paid for such information.

Former FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi was asked by MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle on Wednesday why Trump would have wanted to keep top-secret documents about a foreign country's nuclear program at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida as was earlier reported by The Washington Post.

In response, Figliuzzi posited that the high price of these documents would make them attractive assets to possess.

"If I were to be asked what the highest price tag or highest value might be on what kind of classified US government information, certainly among the top of my answers would be: nuclear-related information," he said.

He elaborated that such information has "potentially the greatest value" if one were to try to "market it and capitalize" on having such files.

"Well, first, a country would give its right arm to learn what the US knew about its nuclear program and capabilities, not only for the obvious reason of, 'Hey, they figured this out,' but also because it would signal what we don't know about their program," Figliuzzi said.

"Secondly, let's move to that country's adversary. They would give their left and right arms to find out what their adversary is doing in terms of nuclear capability," he added.

Aside from the value of the information, Figliuzzi noted that the files were also located at Mar-a-Lago, which Figliuzzi said had "some of the lowest security you can imagine" with foreign nationals "traipsing in and out."

A representative at Trump's post-presidential office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Figliuzzi is not the first FBI official to speculate that foreign nationals may have tried to obtain access to Mar-a-Lago.

Former FBI official Peter Strzok who has a bitter and storied history with Trump said in August that "any competent foreign intelligence service" would have tried to gain access to the former president's Florida residence. Strzok cited Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba as possible countries these agents may have come from.

Figliuzzi is also not alone in speculating that Trump may have tried to sell such classified data.

In August, author Charles Leerhsen who ghostwrote one of Trump's books said the former president may have taken White House documents to sell as presidential memorabilia in the future. Separately, Fox News host Eric Shawn also asked during a broadcast if Trump had tried to "sell or share" these top-secret files "to the Russians" or to "the Saudis."

During the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago last month, agents seized 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked "top secret." Some of the documents may have concerned nuclear weapons, The Washington Post reported.

According to the warrant for the search, the DOJ is looking intowhether Trump broke any of three federal laws including theEspionage Act by keeping the documents at his Florida residence.

Last month, Trump dismissed the idea that there were any nuclear documents in his possession. However, The Washington Post reported this week that the files seized from Mar-a-Lago included information about a foreign government's nuclear defense capabilities.

Ex-FBI official says Trump's nuclear information had high 'price tag' - Business Insider

World Exclusive: Will Donald Trump Run Again For US President? What He Said On 2024 – NDTV

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

Former US President Donald Trump spoke to NDTV's Sreenivasan Jain.

Donald Trump has all but accepted that he'll be in the running for another term as US President in 2024. "Everyone wants me to run," he said, claiming that he's ahead in popularity polls so far, be it those in his party, the Republicans, or his rivals. "I'm leading in the polls, and every poll Republican polls and Democrat polls. I'll make a decision in the very near future, I suspect. And I think that a lot of people are going to be very happy."

After serving a four-year term from 2016, Donald Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 in a fractious fight. But the businessman-turned-TV celebrity-turned-politician appears to be eyeing a comeback in 2024.

As part of an exclusive interview with NDTV, he was asked if his being on the road with Indian-American businessman Shalabh Kumar his longtime associate and campaign donor is an indication of his 2024 run. "We've been friends from before the last campaign and 2016 and then 2020," Mr Trump said about Shalabh Kumar.

He then spoke of his equation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi too: "I've had a great relationship to India and to Prime Minister Modi. We were... we've been friends. And I think he's a great guy and doing a terrific job. It's not an easy job he's got. So, but, we've known each other a long time. Good man." PM Modi had apparently backed Donald Trump at a 'Howdy Modi' event in 2019, just months ahead of the 2020 election.

Mr Trump, when asked what he means by "a lot of people will be happy" if he fights the election, said: "I think so. A lot of people will be; and a couple of people will be unhappy."

Shalabh Kumar, who was next to Mr Trump, was asked if it's now obvious that Mr Trump is a candidate. "Of course, he should run again. That's our view. And you know, it'll be great if he runs again. I mean, our community, they will just love to have 'Trump 47'," he said, referencing a campaign pitch to make Mr Trump the 47th President of the United States.

On whether there is any other contender within the Republican Party, Mr Kumar said, "He is the Republican Party."

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World Exclusive: Will Donald Trump Run Again For US President? What He Said On 2024 - NDTV

Biden Laid the Trap. Trump Walked Into It. – The Atlantic

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

In 2016, Hillary Clinton warned that Donald Trump was a fool who could be baited with a tweet. This past Thursday night, in Philadelphia, Joe Biden upped the ante by asking, in effect: What idiot thing might the former president do if baited with a whole speech? On Saturday night, the world got its answer.

For the 2022 election cycle, smart Republicans had a clear and simple plan: Dont let the election be about Trump. Make it about gas prices, or crime, or the border, or race, or sex education, or anythinganything but Trump. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost control of the House in 2018. He lost the presidency in 2020. He lost both Senate seats in Georgia in 2021. Republicans had good reason to dread the havoc hed create if he joined the fight in 2022.

How likely is Trumps return, and what should we expect? Explore these questions with David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, and others at The Atlantic Festival on Wednesday, September 21. Register and find out more here.

So they pleaded with Trump to keep out of the 2022 race. A Republican lawmaker in a close contest told CNN on August 19, I dont say his name, ever.

Maybe the pleas were always doomed to fail. Show Trump a spotlight, and hes going to step into it. But Republicans pinned their hopes on the chance that Trump might muster some self-discipline this one time, some regard for the interests and wishes of his partners and allies.

David Frum: The justification for Bidens speech

One of the purposes of Bidens Philadelphia attack on Trumps faction within the Republican Party was surely to goad Trump. It worked.

Yesterday, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump addressed a rally supposedly in support of Republican candidates in the state: Mehmet Oz for the Senate; the January 6 apologist Doug Mastriano for governor. This was not Trumps first 2022 rally speech. He spoke in Arizona in July. But this one was different: so extreme, strident, and uglyand so obviously provoked by Bidens speech that this was what led local news: Donald Trump Blasts Philadelphia, President Biden During Rally for Doug Mastriano, Dr. Oz in Wilkes-Barre.

Yes, you read that right: Campaigning in Pennsylvania, the ex-president denounced the states largest city. I think Philadelphia was a great choice to make this speech of hatred and anger. [Bidens] speech was hatred and anger, Trump declared last night. Last year, the city set an all-time murder record with 560 homicides, and its on track to shatter that record again in 2022. Numbers that nobodys ever seen other than in some other Democrat-run cities.

Trump spoke at length about the FBI search of his house for stolen government documents. He lashed out at the FBI, attacking the bureau and the Department of Justice as vicious monsters. He complained about the FBI searching his closets for stolen government documents, inadvertently reminding everyone that the FBI had actually found stolen government documents in his closetand in his bathroom too. Trump called Biden an enemy of the state. He abused his partys leader in the U.S. Senate as someone who should be ashamed. He claimed to have won the popular vote in the state of Pennsylvania, which, in fact, he lost by more than 80,000 votes.

The rally format allowed time for only brief remarks by the two candidates actually on the ballot, Oz and Mastriano. Its message was otherwise all Trump, Trump, Trump. A Republican vote is a Trump vote. A Republican vote is a vote to endorse lies about the 2020 presidential election.

On and on it went, in a protracted display of narcissistic injury that was exactly the behavior that Bidens Philadelphia speech had been designed to elicit.

David A. Graham: Trump cant hide from the Mar-a-Lago photo

Every day since the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago has brought new proof that Trump still dominates the Republican Party. He has extracted support even from would-be rivals like Florida Governor Ron DeSantisrituals of submission within a party hierarchy that respects only acts of domination.

Republican congressional leaders desperately but hopelessly tried to avert the risk that this next election would become yet another national referendum on Trumps leadership. Despite Trumps lying and boasting, politicians who can count to 50 and 218the respective numbers needed for a majority in the Senate and Househave to reckon with the real-world costs of Trumps defeats. But Biden understood their mans psychology too well.

Biden came to Philadelphia to deliver a wound to Trumps boundless yet fragile ego. Trump obliged with a monstrously self-involved meltdown 48 hours later. And now his party has nowhere to hide. Trump has overwritten his name on every Republican line of every ballot in 2022.

Biden dangled the bait. Trump took itand put his whole party on the hook with him. Republican leaders are left with little choice but to pretend to like it.

Biden Laid the Trap. Trump Walked Into It. - The Atlantic

Oz alters stance on whether Trump won 2020 election – Yahoo News

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, said Tuesday that he believes lots more information is necessary to determine whether Donald Trump was the actual winner of the 2020 election, as the former president has claimed without evidence.

In an interview on Fox News, Oz was asked, Do you believe the 2020 election [was] stolen?

Ive been asked that question many times. Im a doctor, Im very precise with the words I use. Theres lots more information we have to gather in order to determine that and I'd be very desirous of gathering some, Oz responded. I think it would improve the process in general.

Numerous Republican candidates and office holders have faced a similar dilemma in how to portray Trumps loss to Biden in 2020 without offending the former president and his supporters. But just hours before his interview on Fox News, Oz seemed to express a different view about the 2020 results. At an event with Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., Oz indicated that if he had been a senator on Jan. 6, 2021, he would have voted to certify Bidens victory.

I would not have objected to it, Oz told reporters. By the time the delegates and those reports are sent to the U.S. Senate, our job was to approve it. Thats what I would have done.

In all, 8 Senate Republicans and 139 House GOP members voted to block the certification of the election results, many of them stating that more information was needed to determine the winner in states like Pennsylvania, which Trump lost by more than 80,000 votes. Numerous legal challenges as well as federal reviews of the results failed to overturn the outcome.

Dr. Oz with Donald Trump at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Sept. 3. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

Last weekend, Trump campaigned with Oz in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., where he railed against the Biden administration for the FBI raid on his Florida residence and continued to press his baseless claim that election fraud cost him victory in the state and nationwide.

I won Pennsylvania by a lot, Trump told his audience as Oz and Doug Mastriano, an election denier and far-right GOP gubernatorial candidate, looked on.

Story continues

Trump also went after Ozs Democratic Senate opponent Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, calling out his casual style of dress on the campaign trail.

Fetterman may dress like a teenager getting high in his parents basement, but hes a raging lunatic hell-bent on springing hardened criminals out of jail in the middle of the worst crime wave in Pennsylvania history, Trump said.

Fetterman made sure to emphasize the joint Trump and Oz appearance in a fundraising appeal following the rally.

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Oz alters stance on whether Trump won 2020 election - Yahoo News

Judge Cannon Has Introduced a Red Herring: TrumpNation Author Tim OBrien Breaks Down the Former Presidents Legal Nightmare – Vanity Fair

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

This week, cohosts Emily Jane Fox and JoeHagan talk to Tim OBrien, executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion and author of TrumpNation, about the latest obstacle in the Department of Justices investigation into Donald Trumps handling of top secretdocuments. Thedecision by Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, to appoint a special master to review the documents and slow the investigation, reeks of politics, says OBrien. Does this send a signal to other Trumpappointees that you should carry the bag for your handler? he asks.

Despite Judge Cannons recent ruling, the reality is this is a very robust and existentially threatening investigation to Donald Trump, OBrien adds, and Trumps political power in the coming midterms is clearly on the wane. Can the law prevail over politics?

Also in this episode: Hagan talks to Edward Buckles Jr., director of the searing HBO documentaryKatrina Babies. Afilmmaker from New Orleans who was 13 at the time ofHurricane Katrina, Buckles explores the tragic fallout on the lives of his friends and lovedones, most of whom never returned to their homes, part of an African American diaspora largely ignored after the tragedy faded from the American consciousness.

Excerpts from podcast interview have been edited for clarity.

Joe Hagan: Judge Eileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida acquiesced to Trumps demand that there be a special master to look at these top secret documents and discern whether this needs to go forward or how it can go forward. Whats your interpretation of that ruling?

Tim OBrien: Well, first and foremost, Judge Cannons a Trump appointee. So it has to be seen through that lens. Does this send a signal to other Trump appointees that you should would carry the bag for your handler? But even putting that aside, she essentially introduced an executive privilege argument into an attorney-client privilege matter. And without getting too boring and technical, thats incredibly important, because the executive privilege argument would be viable if Trump was still president, and hes not president; Joe Bidens president. So executive privilege issues shouldnt apply to legal rationale for deciding what the federal government does, and doesnt have to do around Donald Trumps documents. Attorney-client privilege is always viable because hes a private citizen, like anyone else. So I think Judge Cannon has now introduced this red herring into this debate about how the Justice Department should proceed. And I think it represents a fraying of judicial independence. It represents a fraying of acute jurisprudence. And I think its a problem. Does that mean its going to derail everything? I think it slows down the Justice Department. But the reality is, this is a very robust and existentially threatening investigation of Donald Trump. And for all of the talk all the time about how Donald Trump has spent a lifetime getting away with it, he has never been subjected to the kind of legal scrutiny and the armada of different investigations that are arrayed against him right now. He may get past these, that that could happen. But hes not used to being where he is right now. And hes not used to the investigators having a clear sense of purpose like these investigators do. Robert Mueller was all over the map. The two impeachments were politicized. These are pure legal investigations with an evidentiary trail and determined prosecuted around that. And he has the DEA team, as his lawyers.

Emily Jane Fox: Tim, why do you think Trump would have taken these documents in the first place?

OBrien: You know, its amazing to me, the degree to which the GOP, the propagandists at Fox and Donald Trump, still have an ability to get people to focus on the wrong thing. So when the Mar-a-Lago raid first happened, the whole thing was, you know, was the FBI acting out out of bounds and, and then it became all of these different conversations about how that might have occurred, when the core, simple thing here to remember and focus on is Why did Donald Trump take what he took from the White House and what does it mean? And I cant get into his head. And until we know what exactly he took, we wont have a full answer to those questions.

But I think, as you know, all the good work youve done on his family, in your own work, Emily, is that there arent complex motivations for the Trumps, theyre grifters. And I think part of it is Donald Trump is a seven-year-old, grown old. And he really wanted to be able to keep his model of the mock-up of Air Force One and the Time magazine cover, and he was gonna whine if we didnt get that stuff. And who cares. Theres no national security issue there.

The two that matter to me in terms of motivation. One is just money. You know, he sees Jared Kushner getting $2 billion from the Saudis and Steve Mnuchin getting $2 billion from the Saudis. And Donald Trump wants his $2 billion, or whatever that number is, at a time when his business empire is saddled with debt. And he's in businesses that have been ravaged by COVID. So was there stuff in there he wanted to sell quite possibly. Would he have sold nuclear secrets to raise some money? Sure, he could do that. I dont know that he did. But we have to really button down whether theres a national security threat here. And then I think the other thing is reputation laundering and covering up an evidentiary trail. What was there stuff in that document, that in the documents that he took, that presented a story he didnt want told about any number of things?

Judge Cannon Has Introduced a Red Herring: TrumpNation Author Tim OBrien Breaks Down the Former Presidents Legal Nightmare - Vanity Fair

Donald Trump Has The Kind Of Lawyers You Get When You Offer To Pay Your Attorneys In Livestock, If At All – Above the Law

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

(Photo by Isaac Brekken/Getty)

Donald Trump tried to pay his lawyer with a horse. Thats it, thats the tweet.

The Guardian got its hands on an advance copy of Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice, by New York Times reporter David Enrich, which contains a hilarious anecdote of the famously tightfisted client trying to settle accounts by giving his lawyer the deed to a race horse.

Describing a lawyer at a white-shoe firm who worked for Trump in the 1990s, Enrich writes: The bill came to about $2m and Trump refused to pay.

After a while, the lawyer lost patience, and he showed up, unannounced, at Trump Tower. Someone sent him up to Trumps office. Trump was initially pleased to see him he didnt betray any sense of sheepishness but the lawyer was steaming.

Im incredibly disappointed, he scolded Trump. Theres no reason you havent paid us.

Trump made some apologetic noises. Then he said: Im not going to pay your bill. Im going to give you something more valuable.What on earth is he talking about?the lawyer wondered. I have a stallion, Trump continued. Its worth $5m. Trump rummaged around in a filing cabinet and pulled out what he said was a deed to a horse. He handed it to the lawyer.

Enrich describes the lawyers stunned and angry response, in which he threatened to sue.

Trump, Enrich writes, eventually coughed up at least a portion of what he owed.

As it is written, so shall it be.

Even now that Trump has infinity GriftBux through the Republican National Committee and various PACs to pay his attorneys, sometimes he still stiffs his lawyers just for the hell of it. As in the case of Rudy Giuliani, whom Trump refused to pay more or less on principal. The Guardian outlines another telling episode from an upcoming book on Americas Erstwhile Mayor,Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of Americas Mayor, by author Andrew Kirtzman.

Kirtzman writes that Giulianis girlfriend/assistant Maria Ryan wrote a letter to Trump in January of 2021 requesting $2.5 million for defending you during the Russia hoax investigation and then the impeachment, a general pardon, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. None of the above was forthcoming, with Trump saying that Giuliani would get paid on the come, a casino reference to craps indicating that the lawyer was SOL unless he managed somehow to keep Trump in office for a second term.

And so it is hardly surprising that the roll call of Trumps many lawyers published this morning in Politico is mostly populated by weirdos who spend their time hanging out on Newsmax and Fox vomiting out nonsensical untruths about federal law and procedure. But when youve been able to stack the bench with Federalist Society loyalists, sometimes nonsensical word vomit is good enough to get you what you want anyway.

Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book says [Guardian]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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Donald Trump Has The Kind Of Lawyers You Get When You Offer To Pay Your Attorneys In Livestock, If At All - Above the Law

Fact check: False claim Liz Cheney voted with Trump 100% of the time – USA TODAY

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

Liz Cheney loses Wyoming House seat to Trump-endorsed candidate

Rep. Liz Cheney was defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in the Wyoming primaries while Sarah Palin advanced to Alaska's general election.

Cody Godwin, USA TODAY

Days after being voted out as Wyoming's sole House of Representatives member, some social media users claimed RepublicanRep. Liz Cheney's election loss was retribution for a single vote against now-former President Donald Trump.

Liz Chaney (sic) voted with Trump 100 percent of the time, read the beginning of an Aug. 20 Facebook post that was shared more than 150 times in a week. Denies the big lie and voted to impeach a crook and gets voted out. Says a lot about this Republican Party.

But records show Cheney voted against Trumps positions more than a dozen times throughout his presidency. They differed on topics includingappropriations legislation; imposing sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea; and a measure to override Trump's veto of a 2020 defense bill.

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the claim for comment.

Though Cheney supported Trumps positions an overwhelming majority of the time, there were numerous occasions when she voted against his policy preferences including well before Trump's 2021 impeachment charge.

FiveThirtyEight, a politics-focused website developed by statistician Nate Silver, saidCheney voted with Trump 92.9% of the time he was in office from 2017 to 2021. Her votes clashed with Trump's positions 13 times, according to the website's tally.

The website reported their first difference came less than four months into Trumps term, with Cheney voting against the 2017 fiscal year appropriations bill.

Cheney issued a statement saying she voted against the bill because it only contained half of the $30 billion Trump requested for military funding.

I could not support legislation that provided wholly inadequate funding to begin to rebuild Americas military, Cheney said.

Later in 2017, Cheney voted in favor of imposing sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea. Trump released a statement saying the bill was "seriously flawed particularly because it encroaches on the executive branch's authority to negotiate." But Trump said he neverthelesssigned it into law for the sake of national unity."

More: Liz Cheney is weighing a 2024 presidential bid. Here's how the Wyoming Republican got here.

Toward the end of Trumps time in office, Cheney voted in favor of overriding Trumps veto of the National Defense Authorization Act in late2020. In a press release backing the bill, she said it was needed to ensure hazard pay for military families, guard against cyber attacks and take measures against China.

Then she voted to impeach Trump on a charge of incitement of an insurrection following the Jan. 6th, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

As reported by USA TODAY, Cheney said her vote to impeach Trump stemmed from her view that he "summoned this mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack."

"There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution," Cheney said.

Trump was later acquitted by the Senate. Cheney went on to serve as vice chair of the House committee created to investigate the Jan. 6th attack.

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim thatCheney voted with Trump 100% of the time. FiveThirtyEight reported Cheney voted with Trump about93% of the time, but thetwo clashed on topics including Russian sanctions, appropriations legislation and a measure to override Trump's veto of a 2020 defense bill.

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

Continued here:

Fact check: False claim Liz Cheney voted with Trump 100% of the time - USA TODAY

Trump and accounting firm agree to give financial records to House Oversight Committee in deal to end court battle – CNBC

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a Republican-led event titled "Faith and Freedom Road to Majority" in Nashville, Tennessee, June 17, 2022.

Harrison McClary | Reuters

Ex-President Donald Trump and his former longtime accounting firm have agreed to turn over some financial records to the House Oversight and Reform Committee in a deal that will end a lawsuit over their prior refusal to do so, that panel and Trump's lawyers said.

But details of how many of those records the Mazars USA accounting firm will turn over were not included in a committee statement announcing the agreement Thursday.

The deal does not cover a separate lawsuit involving the House Ways and Means Committee, which is seeking Trump's federal tax returns from 2015 through 2020.

Last month, a federal appeals court said the Ways and Means Committee could get those returns.

The agreement with the Oversight Committee came nearly two months after another panel of judges in the same appeals court in Washington, D.C., upheld a prior ruling that the Oversight Committee had the authority to subpoena certain of Trump's financial records from Mazars in furtherance of legislative purposes.

However, the appeals court also told the committee to winnow the scope of the records it wanted to see.

On Wednesday, Trump's lawyers told the court in a filing that in light of the settlement agreement with the Oversight Committee, he would drop a motion seeking a rehearing of the case, and a related one asking that the entire lineup of judges on the appeals court take up the issue.

In a statement, committee Chairwoman Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said, "After facing years of delay tactics, the Committee has now reached an agreement with the former President and his accounting firm, Mazars USA, to obtain critical documents."

Ex-prosecutor: Trump should be arrested because he might have sold WH records – Business Insider

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner believes Donald Trump should be arrested "immediately" following the FBI's Mar-a-Lago probe to recover confidential White House documents.

In the probe, investigators recovered nearly 100 empty folders, according to a detailed inventory unsealed and released by the Justice Department.It's unclear where the contents of each empty folder are.

Kirschner, speaking in an episode of his YouTube channel, questioned whether Trump might have sold or given away some of those classified government documents.

"The most reasonable inference is that Donald Trump disposed of those classified documents after unlawfully taking them from the White House," Kirschner said. "To what purpose did he put them? Did he sell them to America's adversaries? Did he use them to blackmail people? Did he use them to leverage a favorable business deal in some country or another? We don't know yet."

A legal expert who runs a law firm that specializes in national security told The Hill that Trump having given away the documents could be a possibility.

"The least optimistic scenario is that they are nowhere to be found because they are already with someone else," Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, warned.

Last month, theFBI probed into the former president's Mar-a-Lagoresidence in Florida and recovered several boxes containing classified records that Trump took with him from the White House once he left office, according to the court records made public. Some of the boxes were distinctly marked as "top secret," Insider's Sonam Shethreported.

Under thePresidential Records Act, he should have turned the records over to the agency upon leaving office.

The Justice Department is now investigating whether Trump violated any laws pertaining to the handling of government documents. A legal analyst has previously said he could receive a 10-year prison sentence if he's convicted of violating theEspionage Act, a law that dates back to World War I that essentially bars anyone from sharing or disseminating information that could potentially harm or disadvantage the US.

Trump has so far denied all assertions of wrongdoing, saying that he had "declassified" the documents. He alsosaidthat "everyone ends up having to bring home their work from time to time."

Kirschner said Trump should be arrested immediately.

"There is no legitimate argument, there is no persuasive argument, there is no compelling argument against arresting Donald Trump promptly," he said.

Originally posted here:

Ex-prosecutor: Trump should be arrested because he might have sold WH records - Business Insider

Donald Trump Will Call for ‘Violence’ as Allies Turn on Him: Mary Trump – Newsweek

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

Former President Donald Trump may continue to advocate for political violence as his allies turn on him, according to one of his relatives and harshest critics.

Mary Trump, the ex-president's niece and a clinical psychologist, has been an outspoken critic of her uncle since 2020 with the release of her tell-all book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. She has continued to speak out frequently since then and, on Saturday morning, appeared on MSNBC's The Katie Phang Show to discuss his most recent outbursts.

During her appearance, Mary Trump discussed how her uncle had lashed out online against Bill Barr, the former attorney general under his administration, after he told Fox News that the FBI was wholly justified in its recent search of Mar-a-Lago. She reckoned that Trump would continue to lash out as his legal troubles mount and his former allies turn on him publicly.

"The window of opportunity for Donald to squirm out of this is closing because of the seriousness of the potential charges that are coming his way," she said. "And what have we seen in the past? He goes to violence. When he said that President Biden was calling for political violence, he was, as usual, projecting. That was what Donald's going to be calling for as he gets more and more cornered."

Mary Trump also said that her uncle must also be particularly rattled by someone like Barr speaking out against him, given the former attorney general's prior loyalty to him.

"On the one hand, Bill Barr was his staunchest defender at one point; acting like his private attorney," she said. "But, on the other hand, because of the egregiousness of Donald's behavior, even people like Bill Barr can't stand with him anymore."

Trump's Florida resort and residence Mar-a-Lago was searched by FBI agents in early August as part of an investigation into the former president taking classified documents from the White House and failing to return them when asked. Subsequent information released by the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) has revealed that agents found dozens of top secret files, which were also said to have been improperly secured.

The ex-president has denied any wrongdoing related to the classified documents. He has accused the FBI of being corrupt, claiming that the raid is part of a broad partisan "witch hunt" targeting him and his allies. Notably, the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, is a Republican and was appointed by Trump in 2017.

In the wake of the search, Trump has been accused of lashing out and encouraging his supporters to engage in violence against federal law enforcement in retaliation. Several instances of individuals attempting to attack FBI locations have been pinned on Trump's encouragement.

Newsweek reached out to Trump's office for comment.

Donald Trump Will Call for 'Violence' as Allies Turn on Him: Mary Trump - Newsweek

Trumpism Will Endure in the GOP Long After Donald Trump – Foreign Policy

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

Let the world beware: Trumpism was a long time coming, and it will be a long time going. It threatens to haunt us so far into the future that, by the time its gone, what U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday called the American experiment may no longer be recognizableor even salvageable.

Thats the most reliable conclusion we can draw from the malign spectacle of the last 20 months since former U.S. President Donald Trump was dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House, after he sought to destroy what was left of the U.S. constitutional order by fomenting a mob eager to hang his vice president (with Trumps endorsement). And nothing Trumps successor, Biden, has done seems to have vanquished the Trump specter; on the contrary, Biden has co-opted much of Trumps populist America First agenda even as he recently condemned Trumps movement as semi-fascism.

Similarly, very little that has come out of the congressional hearings around the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, scheduled to resume in September, appears to be changing the minds of Trumps millions of supporters. According to a Monmouth University poll releasedin early August following eight of those hearings, which revealed previously undisclosed details of how Trump incited the insurrection at the Capitol last year, only about40 percent of Republicans believe Trump did anything wrongapproximately the same percentageas did before the hearingsbeganand 61 percent of Republicans still embrace his false assertion that the election was fraudulent.

The Jan. 6 mob may have been dispersed, and more than 900 of its alleged participants prosecuted, but the angry amorality of that mob still dominates the Republican Party, rendering many of its elected and appointed officials mere toadies to Trumpian lies.

So serious is the danger that Biden, in his Thursday speech at Philadelphias Independence Hall, declared that Trump and what Biden called the MAGA Republicansreferring to Trumps Make America Great Again movementrepresent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.

The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, Dana Milbank, Doubleday, 416 pp., $30, August 2022

Why is the Trump phenomenon so durable? A slew of new and forthcoming books seeks to tell us. In one of them, The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank goes a long way to explaining why Trumps fingernail marks are still on the doors of the Oval Office and why so many people think he was unfairly forced out. Trump didnt rise out of nowhere as some hideous orange Venus emerging from the shell, Milbank writes. Rather, he was a monster the Republicans created over a quarter century. He is a symptom of their illness, not the cause.

The reason Trump sauntered so effortlessly into power, with so little opposition, is that he was merely picking his way through the rubble of what used to be the Republican establishment agenda, Milbank writes. Trumps lies spread so easily because for an entire generation the party base had already been subjected to lies and vicious innuendo almost as outrageous as those Trump would go on to use, as Republican leaders sought to appease their shrinking white base with populist anthems and nativist appeals, especially anti-immigration sentiment.

Trumps only distinction is that he was better at it than any Republican before him, and he arrived at a moment in history when the internet, social media, and 24-hour cable TV news allowed the lies to insinuate themselves deeper and more extensively than ever before. Starting in 1992 with Pat Buchananin many ways the ur-populist of the modern Republican Partyand Newt Gingrichs angry ascent to the House speakership a couple years later, party insurgents mounted many trial runs that demonstrated, again and again, the political power of an endlessly repeated lie.

Gingrich and other Trump precursors even bequeathed him his vocabulary: In 1990, Gingrichs political action committee mailed a memo to Republican candidates for public office instructing them in the fine art of demonizing Democrats, Milbank writes. Among the recommended terms to tar the opposition party with: traitors, steal, incompetent, and anti-flag. Trumps insupportable lies about the 2020 election were presaged more than two decades ago by equally nonsensical allegations about Vince Foster, the White House attorney who died by suicide early in U.S. President Bill Clintons administration. Despite incontrovertible evidence that Fosters death was a suicide, then-Rep. Dan Burton and other leading Republicans insisted (with help from future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, then a Republican apparatchik writing legal opinions) that Foster was murdered by Bill and Hillary Clinton. And that was only the beginning.

Before the Big Lie about the 2020 election, Republicans fabricated libels about Obamacare death panels, the false accusation that Saddam Hussein perpetrated 9/11, and an endless stream of conspiracy theories holding that Bill and Hillary Clinton were nothing short of serial killers, Milbank writes.

The difference is that while these beta versions of Trump eventually stumbled by overreaching, Trump has shown that overreaching is no longer a problem in a nation so polarized that every assertion by the other party is deemed false upon delivery. (It finally took an undeniable microscopic fact, COVID-19, to turn a majority of voters against him.) Today, the Republican Party is little more than a Trumpist cult, or perhaps a mafia-like family run by a ruthless political godfathercall him Don Donaldbuilt on corruption, dark money, and bottomless deceit, lacking only actual hitmen. Any way you want to define mob, this is mob rule.

Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trumps Washington and the Price of Submission, Mark Leibovich, Penguin Press, 352 pp., $29, July 2022

Little or nothing remains of a party that once stood for reasonable conservatism and compromise. In 2016, then-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell insisted to Politico that Trump was not going to change the basic philosophy of the party. As Mark Leibovich writes sardonically in another new book, Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trumps Washington and the Price of Submission: This turned out to be 100 percent true, except for Trumps basic philosophy on foreign policy, free trade, rule of law, deficits, tolerance for dictators, government activism, family values, government restraint, privacy, optimistic temperament, and every virtuous quality the Republican Party ever aspired to in its best, pre-Trump days. By the time the 2020 election rolled around, Leibovich writes, The party did not bother to even produce a new platform, for the first time since 1856.

The durability of Trump and Trumpism is bringing into harsh relief many of the deeper flaws in the U.S. political system. In numerous books and articles, scholars are questioning the Founding Fathers and U.S. Constitution with a brazen lse-majest rarely heard before. Consider the absurdly undemocratic institution that is the U.S. Senate, with the same voting power assigned to sparsely populated red states such as North Dakota and Wyoming as to populous blue ones such as New York and California. The Senate is split 50-50, and Biden has barely squeaked through his biggest legislative plans, but in truth Democratic senators represent at least 40 million more Americans than Republicans do.

The problems of an Electoral College system that does not always reflect the popular vote caused few ripples in the past. But in the last six U.S. presidential elections, the electoral college has allowed two presidentsTrump and George W. Bush, both among the most disastrous in U.S. historyto take office despite losing the popular vote. The most recent rupture to civil peace, the elimination of federal abortion rights, has come from a lifetime-tenured Supreme Court in which partisan ideology has plainly trumped the imperatives of justice.

The U.S. Constitution itself, once considered sacred scripture, is broken, two legal scholars, Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard University and Samuel Moyn of Yale University, wrote recently. The Constitution is hard-wired with too many antiquated features, such as the Senate and Electoral College, that are designed to impede change, they argued, which is why it serves reactionaries so well.

The far right has taken up the argument that U.S. democracy is irreparably damaged as well. In Arizona, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Blake Masters, is calling openly for the dismantling of many institutions of American democracy, which he has described as a dystopian hell-world. So is Masterss mentor, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who once declared: I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

In the past, these concerns about the flaws in the constitutional systemits vulnerability to imperial presidencies, the inequities of gerrymandering, and so forthtended to fade, even though they were never corrected, because the system righted itself as the founders intended. During the Red Scare of the 1950s for example, fellow Republicans ultimately stood up to the demagogic Sen. Joseph McCarthy, vanquishing the threat he and his red-baiting campaign, McCarthyism, posed to the democratic process. At the height of Watergate, a group of powerful Republican legislatorsSen. Barry Goldwater, House Minority Leader John Jacob Rhodes, and Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scottpressed then-U.S. President Richard Nixon to resign, and Nixon did. Other extremist threats to the system such as the John Birch Society remained on the margins.

The persistence of the Trump mob is more alarming. Trump is the first true demagogue in U.S. history not only to be elected president but also to remain kingmaker well afterwarda stark contrast with most losing presidential candidates, who typically descend swiftly into irrelevance. As former MSNBC anchor Brian Williams said upon retiring: The darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods. Americas most senior elected officials have chosen to join the mob and become something they are not, Williams said on air in late 2021, as Leibovich recounts. Theyve decided to burn it all down with us inside.

Leibovich details how mainstream Republicans, one by one, fell in line with the Trump mob, forming a parade of Republicans willing to discard every principle they once held for the purpose of staying in office. Most of them read Trump correctly in the beginning. Before the 2016 election, then-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley sensibly noted that Trump represented everything we hear and teach our kids not to do in kindergarten. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry called him a barking carnival act. Sen. Lindsey Graham labeled him a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. And Sen. Ted Cruz labeled him utterly amoral and a sniveling coward. Yet all of them became, instead, sniveling Trump supporters, and so they remain. The partys most stalwart opponent of Trump, Rep. Liz Cheney, was trounced in her Wyoming Republican primary by a nearly 40-point margin. Her political careerat least in the Republican Partyis almost certainly over.

The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Doubleday, 752 pp., $32, September 2022

Is there any way back from Trumpism? Any plan at all? Were just waiting for him to die, a former Republican congressman told Leibovich. Trumps permanent withdrawal from the scene will certainly help: No one quite as pathological as Trump has dominated national politics before, and it will likely be a while before someone so malignant and unpredictable does again. And as Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write in anotherforthcomingbook,The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, some U.S. institutions are holding fastmost critically, perhaps, the worlds most powerful military.

In an excerpt published in August, Baker and Glasser write that over the tumultuous four years of the Trump presidency, it was often the militarytypically, in countries that possess more independent militaries, a central player in successful coupsthat managed to stymie his worst instincts, including on Jan. 6, 2021. It turned out that the generals had rules, standards, and expertise, not blind loyalty,writeBaker, aNew York Timescorrespondent, and Glasser, aNew Yorkerstaff writer.

Unhappy with the Pentagons resistance to his demands that active-duty soldiers be deployed to crush domestic racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 (Trump had wanted to invoke the rarely used Insurrection Act of 1807), Trump at one point favorably invoked Adolf Hitlers generals as models for behavior, Baker and Glasser write. And in the days after the 2020 election, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley feared that Trump might invoke martial law and, they write, that Trumps Hitler-like embrace of his own lies about the election would lead him to seek a Reichstag moment, when Hitlers henchmen set fire to the German parliament to take control of the country in 1933. In the weeks after the election, Milley reassured Democrats close to Biden that he would not allow Trump to use the military to stay in power, and that Jan. 6, Milley and acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller dispatched National Guard troops to the Capitol to stop the insurrection.

Yet Trump has set baleful precedents that could long outlast his lifetime, including an unwillingness to accept election results and a peaceful transfer of power. He may now face indictment for mishandling classified documents after leaving office, but even that is unlikely to stop him (or land him in prison). If he manages to solidify those precedents in 2024, he could be supported by a battery of Trump-aligned state officials who are running for offices responsible for certifying electionsand many of whom believe what some have termed his Big Lie.

Republics of the past have perishedand civil wars have begunfor lesser causes. An astonishing over 40 percent of Americans think civil war is at least somewhat likely in the next decade, according to a new survey by YouGov and the Economist. In another recent survey, more than 40 percent of respondents agreed that having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy and that in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants.

But this is where a deeper analysis is needed of the generation-long trends that led to Trump. If Trump didnt just appear out of nowhere, as Milbank writes, then neither did Gingrich and Buchanan. It wasnt just that lying became the modus vivendi. Populism and nativism held so much appealand Trumpian populism was really only the other, if far more vicious, side of the coin from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on the leftbecause both political parties had failed the American people with bad policy that exacerbated inequality and inequity. Nor do some of these books explore in a deeper way how the internet fractionated public opinion and allowed lies to spread more extensively and permanently than ever before, turning E pluribus unumOut of many, one, the traditional motto of the United Statesinto a pluribus without much left to hold it together.

Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, Nicole Hemmer, Basic Books, 368 pp., $32, August 2022

Milbank ascribes the rise of lies and demagoguery in the Republican Partyand its current status as an authoritarian faction fighting democracylargely to race. Simply put, democratic means have failed the party as America grows less white demographically. In the eight presidential contests since 1988, the GOP candidate has won the popular vote only once, in 2004, he writes. Race did have a great deal to do with the radicalization of the Republican Party and its attempts to manipulate future elections by gerrymandering and excluding nonwhite voters. In another just-released book, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, Vanderbilt University scholar Nicole Hemmer writes that even before the Ronald Reagan era ended, the so-called New Right was rising, energized by opposition to the Great Society, specifically the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

This conclusion was bolstered in recent years by a powerful 2020 book by New York Times economic columnist Eduardo Porter, American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise, which argued that racial animosity by the shrinking white population, tracing back a half-century or more, led to the Tea Party and Republican obstructionism of nearly every progressive agenda. Porter contended that since the New Deal, the nations social welfare contract has been fatally fractured by animosity toward minority beneficiaries on the part of whites who are unwilling to share the bounty of state with people of other races and creeds, heritages and colors.

By the time Trump came along, having built his campaign on challenging the birth legitimacy of the first African American U.S. president, the race issue had become a dangerously dry pile of tinder. All the carnival barker from Queens had to do was apply a match. Thus Trumps astonishing triumph in 2016 did have a lot to do with what the political pundit Van Jones called a whitelash (a portmanteau of white backlash). What Trump has exposed in his presidency is theres a significant portion of the American populace that has never accepted the full implications of the civil rights movement, Joseph Ellis, a presidential historian, told me in 2020, at the height of the protest movement that erupted over the murder of George Floyd.

Yet there was more to the story. Emerging class differences had just as much to do with todays political polarization as race did, and this also helps to explain the continuing populist appeal of Trumpism. Geopolitically and socially, two major things drove the generation-long Republican transformation. First, the Cold War ended, depriving the Reaganite right of its biggest unifying issue. And then, gradually, beginning under Clinton in the wake of the collapse of Soviet-style command economics, the Democrats began to co-opt the rights Reaganite message of free markets. They, too, embraced trickle-down theologykowtowing to Wall Street, turning welfare into workfare, and permitting regressive tax policies to remain in place.

This shifted the axis of the economic agenda sharply rightward, transforming mainstream Democrats into Eisenhower Republicansas Bill Clinton lamentedand formerly moderate Republicans into anti-government zealots who resisted any new programs intended to ameliorate inequality. Both parties were culpable in denigrating the role of government in saving the middle class as the so-called China shock and tech boom decimated the livelihoods of the undereducated, giving rise to the backlash against free trade.

This trend in turn led to the 1992 presidential campaign of business magnate Ross Perotlike Buchanan a populist defector from the mainstream Republican Partyand the first iteration of the protectionist agenda that Trump later embraced (and that Biden has partially adopted). Both parties moved right on immigration as well. This fomented the progressive wing in the Democratic Partyand led to Sanderss startling surge in popularitywhich in turn only drove the Republicans further rightward. Into that vicious spiraland emerging chasmstepped Trump.

So there is a lot of blame to go around. One of todays biggest ironies is that Liz Cheney is admired as the Republicans most heroic dissident against Trumpand yet her father, Dick Cheney, played a big role as George W. Bushs vice president in destroying the very Republican agenda that made Trump possible. It wasnt just the disastrous and expensive Iraq War: the Cheney-sponsored lie about the false connection between Iraq and 9/11, which fed the insurgencies of Obama and later Trump. When Cheney pushed relentlessly for more tax cuts, and Bushs prescient first-term Treasury Secretary Paul ONeill worried aloud in a meeting about rising deficits, Cheney barked that Reagan proved deficits dont matter.

Thanks in large part to Cheneys influence, Bushs attempt to be the second coming of Reaganthe compassionate conservativewas utterly immolated in his misdirection in the so-called war on terror and the catastrophic failure of government oversight leading to the 2008 financial crash and Great Recession. The aftermath of all those policies left the rich richer and the poor poorer, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has written.

Biden has worked hard to correct these inequities, with almost no help from the Republican Party, as seen in the party-line passage of Bidens 2021 stimulus plan and his recent Inflation Reduction Act. The only real question remaining is whether, with one of its two major political parties gone completely rogue, the American experiment is beyond repair. Remember, John Adams, the nations second president, wrote in 1814, Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide.

One wishes there were some sort of suicide hotline available for democracy. But the Republicans have no one to call on but themselves.

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Trumpism Will Endure in the GOP Long After Donald Trump - Foreign Policy

Why Donald Trump Is The Most Dangerous Karen Of Them All – Yahoo Life

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

Former President Donald Trump arrives at a rally, Aug. 5, 2022, in Waukesha, Wis.

When Donald Trump won his bid for the White House in 2016, no one truly anticipated how detrimental his presidency would be. Quite predictably, the platform for his campaign was him being a Karen to the nth degree. Trumps storied history of racism, sexism and capitalism only gave him more appeal.

The former president didnt create racism, but he sure did popularize the hell out of it. His reality show The Apprentice rehabilitated his image enough to turn his popular resurgence into political capital. And with the Republican party, political capital is interchangeable with hate.

The GOP is rooted in taking away the rights of marginalized groups of people since they are viewed as a threat, which categorically makes them Karens. Trumps ascent to power based on this criteria makes him the perfect figurehead. Although this group is often mocked for their dramatic and ridiculous nature, they are one of the most harmful types of people in America.

Whether it was calling for the execution of five innocent boys of color back in 1989 or vastly expanding detention for migrant children, in typical Karen fashion Trump has shown that he will punish anyone he deems a threat to whiteness.

In addition, the lies that he continuously told led him to being the first president to be impeached twice. Trump has no problem galvanizing white supremacists to help him assert his authority. We saw it exemplified when he called those who participated in the violent 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville very fine people.

He also encouraged his followers to help overturn election results by storming the Capitol last year. And just last month, his Mar-a-Lago residence was raided by federal agents in connection with an investigation into the handling of classified documents.

Story continues

During a deposition with New York Attorney General Letitia James following the raid, Trump pleaded the fifth hundreds of timessomething he said that only guilty people do.

The thing about Karens, though, is that they are rarely held accountable for their actions. Their sinister nature is initially looked at as comical until vulnerable groups of people are damaged by it. Trump embodies this ideology and remains the most dangerous of them all.

Not just because he relishes in the depravity of white supremacy, but because in 2024 he may again have a national stage at his disposal.

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Why Donald Trump Is The Most Dangerous Karen Of Them All - Yahoo Life

Transhumanists want to upload minds. They won’t like the result – Big Think

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

If you are reading these words, your brain is alive and well, stored within the protective confines of your skull where it will reside for the remainder of your life. I feel the need to point this out because there is a small but vocal population of self-proclaimed transhumanists who believe that within their lifetimes, technological advances will enable them to upload their minds into computer systems, thereby allowing them to escape the limitations of their biology and effectively live forever.

These transhumanists are wrong.

To be fair, not all transhumanists believe in mind uploading as a pathway to immortality, but theres enough chatter about the concept within that community that excitement has spilled out into the general public so much so, that Amazon has a comedic TV series based on the premise called Upload. These may be fun stories, but the notion that a single biological human will ever extend their life by uploading their mind into a computer system is pure fiction.

The concept of mind uploading is rooted in the very reasonable premise that the human brain, like any system that obeys the laws of physics, can be modeled in software if you devote sufficient computing power to the problem. To be clear, were not talking about modeling human brains in the abstract, but modeling very specific brains your brain, my brain, your uncle Herberts brain each one represented in such extreme detail that every single neuron is accurately simulated, including all the complex connections among them.

It is an understatement to say that modeling a unique, individual human brain is a non-trivial task.

There are over 85 billion neurons in your head, each with thousands of links to other neurons. In total, there are about 100 trillion connections, which is unfathomably large a thousand times more than the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Its those trillions of connections that make you who you are your personality, your memories, your fears, your skills, your peculiarities. Your mind is encoded in those 100 trillion connections, and so to accurately reproduce your mind in software, a system would need to precisely simulate the vast majority of those connections down to the most subtle interactions.

Obviously, that level of modeling will not be done by hand. People who believe in mind uploading envision an automated scanning process, likely using some kind of supercharged MRI machine, that captures the biology down to resolutions that approach the molecular level. They then envision the use of intelligent software to turn that scan into a simulation of each unique brain cell and its thousands of connections to other cells.

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That is an extremely challenging task, but I cannot deny that it is theoretically feasible. If it ever happens, it is not going to happen in the next 20 years, but much, much further out. And with additional time and resources, it also is not crazy to think that large numbers of simulated minds could co-exist inside of a rich and detailed simulation of physical reality. Still, the notion that this process will offer anyone reading this article a pathway to immortality is utterly absurd.

As I stated above, the idea that a single biological human will ever extend their life by uploading their minds is pure fiction. The two key words in that sentence are their life. While it is theoretically possible with sufficient technological advances to copy and reproduce the precise form and function of a unique human brain within a simulation, the original human would still exist in their biological body, their brain still housed within their skull. What would exist in the computer would be a copy a digital doppelgnger.

In other words, you would not feel like you suddenly transported yourself into a computer. In fact, you would not feel anything at all. The brain copying process could have happened without your knowledge, while you were asleep or sedated, and you would never have the slightest inkling that a reproduction of your mind existed within a simulation. And if you found yourself crossing a busy street with a car racing toward you you would jump out of the way, because you would not be immortal.

But what about that version of you within a simulation?

You could think of it as a digital clone or identical twin, but it would not be you. It would be a copy of you, including all your memories up to the moment your brain was scanned. But from that instant on, it would generate its own memories. It might be interacting with other simulated minds in a simulated world, learning new things and having new experiences. Or maybe it interacts with the physical world through robotic interfaces. At the same time, the biological you would be generating new memories and having new experiences.

In other words, it would only be identical for an instant, and then you and the copy would both diverge in different directions. Your skills would diverge. Your knowledge would diverge. Your personalities would diverge. After a few years, there would be substantial differences. Your copy might become deeply religious while you are agnostic. Your copy might become an environmentalist while you are an oil executive. You and the copy would retain similar personalities, but you would be different people.

Yes, the copy of you would be a person but a different person. Thats a critical point, because that copy of you would need to have its own identity and its own rights that have nothing to do with you. After all, that person would feel just as real inside their digital mind as you feel within your biological mind. Certainly, that person should not be your slave, required to take on tasks that you are too busy to do during your biological life. Such exploitation would be immoral.

After all, the copy would feel just like you feel fully entitled to own its own property and earn its own wages and make its own decisions. In fact, you and the copy would likely have a dispute as to who gets to use your name, as you would both feel like you had used it your entire life. If I made a copy of myself, it would wake up and fully believe it was Louis Barry Rosenberg, a lifelong technologist in the fields of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. If it was able to interact with the real world through digital or robotic means, it would believe it had every right to use the name Louis Barry Rosenberg in the physical world. And it certainly would not feel subservient to the biological version.

In other words, creating a digital copy through mind uploading has nothing to do with allowing you to live forever. Instead, it would just create a competitor who has identical skills and capabilities and memories to the biological version, and who feels equally justified to be the owner of your identity. And yes, the copy would feel equally justified to be married to your spouse and parent to your children.

In other words, mind uploading is not a path to immortality. It is a path for creating another you who immediately will feel like they are equally justified owners of everything you possess and everything you have accomplished. And they would react exactly the way you would react if you woke up one day and were told: Sorry, but all those memories of your life arent really yours but copies, so your spouse is not really your spouse, your kids are not really your kids, and your job is not really your job.

Is this really what anyone would want to subject a copy of yourself to?

Back in 2008, I wrote a graphic novel called Upgrade that explores the absurdity of mind uploading. It takes place in the 2040s in a future world where everyone spends the vast majority of their lives in the Metaverse, logging in the moment they wake up and logging out the moment they go to sleep. (Coincidentally, the fictional reason why society went in this direction was a global pandemic that drove people inside.) What the inhabitants of this future world didnt realize is that as they lived their lives in the Metaverse, they were being characterized by AI systems that observed all of their actions and reactions and interactions, capturing every sentiment and emotional response so it could build a digital model of their mind from a behavioral perspective rather than from molecular scanning.

After 20 years of collecting data in this dystopian metaverse, the fictional AI system had fully modeled every person in this future society with sufficient detail that it didnt need real people anymore. After all, real humans are less efficient, as we need food and housing and healthcare. The digital copies didnt need any of that. And so, guess what the fictional AI system decided to do? It convinced all of us biological people to upgrade ourselves by ending our own lives and allowing the digital copies to replace us. And we were willing to do it under the false notion that we would be immortal.

Thats what mind uploading really means. It means ending humanity and replacing it with a digital representation. I wrote Upgrade 14 years ago because I genuinely believe we humans might be foolish enough to head in that direction, ending our biological existence in favor of a purely digital one.

Why is this bad? If you think Big Tech has too much power now having the ability to track what you do and moderate the information you access imagine what it will be like when human minds are trapped inside the systems they control, unable to exit. That is the future many are pushing for. Its terrifying. Mind uploading is not the path to immortality some believe.

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Transhumanists want to upload minds. They won't like the result - Big Think

The super-rich preppers planning to save themselves from the apocalypse – The Guardian

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

As a humanist who writes about the impact of digital technology on our lives, I am often mistaken for a futurist. The people most interested in hiring me for my opinions about technology are usually less concerned with building tools that help people live better lives in the present than they are in identifying the Next Big Thing through which to dominate them in the future. I dont usually respond to their inquiries. Why help these guys ruin whats left of the internet, much less civilisation?

Still, sometimes a combination of morbid curiosity and cold hard cash is enough to get me on a stage in front of the tech elite, where I try to talk some sense into them about how their businesses are affecting our lives out here in the real world. Thats how I found myself accepting an invitation to address a group mysteriously described as ultra-wealthy stakeholders, out in the middle of the desert.

A limo was waiting for me at the airport. As the sun began to dip over the horizon, I realised I had been in the car for three hours. What sort of wealthy hedge-fund types would drive this far from the airport for a conference? Then I saw it. On a parallel path next to the highway, as if racing against us, a small jet was coming in for a landing on a private airfield. Of course.

The next morning, two men in matching Patagonia fleeces came for me in a golf cart and conveyed me through rocks and underbrush to a meeting hall. They left me to drink coffee and prepare in what I figured was serving as my green room. But instead of me being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, my audience was brought in to me. They sat around the table and introduced themselves: five super-wealthy guys yes, all men from the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge-fund world. At least two of them were billionaires. After a bit of small talk, I realised they had no interest in the speech I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come to ask questions.

They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event? The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?

The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers if that technology could be developed in time.

I tried to reason with them. I made pro-social arguments for partnership and solidarity as the best approaches to our collective, long-term challenges. The way to get your guards to exhibit loyalty in the future was to treat them like friends right now, I explained. Dont just invest in ammo and electric fences, invest in people and relationships. They rolled their eyes at what must have sounded to them like hippy philosophy.

This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. Thats when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantirs Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now theyve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch. Will it be Jeff Bezos migrating to space, Thiel to his New Zealand compound, or Mark Zuckerberg to his virtual metaverse? And these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape thats fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where winning means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. Its as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

Yet this Silicon Valley escapism lets call it The Mindset encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.

Never before have our societys most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else. Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. Its a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.

Amplified by digital technologies and the unprecedented wealth disparity they afford, The Mindset allows for the easy externalisation of harm to others, and inspires a corresponding longing for transcendence and separation from the people and places that have been abused.

Instead of just lording over us for ever, however, the billionaires at the top of these virtual pyramids actively seek the endgame. In fact, like the plot of a Marvel blockbuster, the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned. Actual, imminent catastrophes from the climate emergency to mass migrations support the mythology, offering these would-be superheroes the opportunity to play out the finale in their own lifetimes. For The Mindset also includes a faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.

By the time I boarded my return flight to New York, my mind was reeling with the implications of The Mindset. What were its main tenets? Who were its true believers? What, if anything, could we do to resist it? Before I had even landed, I posted an article about my strange encounter to surprising effect.

Almost immediately, I began receiving inquiries from businesses catering to the billionaire prepper, all hoping I would make some introductions on their behalf to the five men I had written about. I heard from a real estate agent who specialises in disaster-proof listings, a company taking reservations for its third underground dwellings project, and a security firm offering various forms of risk management.

But the message that got my attention came from a former president of the American chamber of commerce in Latvia. JC Cole had witnessed the fall of the Soviet empire, as well as what it took to rebuild a working society almost from scratch. He had also served as landlord for the American and European Union embassies, and learned a whole lot about security systems and evacuation plans. You certainly stirred up a bees nest, he began his first email to me. Its quite accurate the wealthy hiding in their bunkers will have a problem with their security teams I believe you are correct with your advice to treat those people really well, right now, but also the concept may be expanded and I believe there is a better system that would give much better results.

He felt certain that the event a grey swan, or predictable catastrophe triggered by our enemies, Mother Nature, or just by accident was inevitable. He had done a Swot analysis strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and concluded that preparing for calamity required us to take the very same measures as trying to prevent one. By coincidence, he explained, I am setting up a series of safe haven farms in the NYC area. These are designed to best handle an event and also benefit society as semi-organic farms. Both within three hours drive from the city close enough to get there when it happens.

Here was a prepper with security clearance, field experience and food sustainability expertise. He believed the best way to cope with the impending disaster was to change the way we treat one another, the economy, and the planet right now while also developing a network of secret, totally self-sufficient residential farm communities for millionaires, guarded by Navy Seals armed to the teeth.

JC is currently developing two farms as part of his safe haven project. Farm one, outside Princeton, is his show model and works well as long as the thin blue line is working. The second one, somewhere in the Poconos, has to remain a secret. The fewer people who know the locations, the better, he explained, along with a link to the Twilight Zone episode in which panicked neighbours break into a familys bomb shelter during a nuclear scare. The primary value of safe haven is operational security, nicknamed OpSec by the military. If/when the supply chain breaks, the people will have no food delivered. Covid-19 gave us the wake-up call as people started fighting over toilet paper. When it comes to a shortage of food it will be vicious. That is why those intelligent enough to invest have to be stealthy.

JC invited me down to New Jersey to see the real thing. Wear boots, he said. The ground is still wet. Then he asked: Do you shoot?

The farm itself was serving as an equestrian centre and tactical training facility in addition to raising goats and chickens. JC showed me how to hold and shoot a Glock at a series of outdoor targets shaped like bad guys, while he grumbled about the way Senator Dianne Feinstein had limited the number of rounds one could legally fit in a magazine for the handgun. JC knew his stuff. I asked him about various combat scenarios. The only way to protect your family is with a group, he said. That was really the whole point of his project to gather a team capable of sheltering in place for a year or more, while also defending itself from those who hadnt prepared. JC was also hoping to train young farmers in sustainable agriculture, and to secure at least one doctor and dentist for each location.

On the way back to the main building, JC showed me the layered security protocols he had learned designing embassy properties: a fence, no trespassing signs, guard dogs, surveillance cameras all meant to discourage violent confrontation. He paused for a minute as he stared down the drive. Honestly, I am less concerned about gangs with guns than the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food. He paused, and sighed, I dont want to be in that moral dilemma.

Thats why JCs real passion wasnt just to build a few isolated, militarised retreat facilities for millionaires, but to prototype locally owned sustainable farms that can be modelled by others and ultimately help restore regional food security in America. The just-in-time delivery system preferred by agricultural conglomerates renders most of the nation vulnerable to a crisis as minor as a power outage or transportation shutdown. Meanwhile, the centralisation of the agricultural industry has left most farms utterly dependent on the same long supply chains as urban consumers. Most egg farmers cant even raise chickens, JC explained as he showed me his henhouses. They buy chicks. Ive got roosters.

JC is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.

So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesnt mean no one is investing in such schemes. Its just that the ones that attract more attention and cash dont generally have these cooperative components. Theyre more for people who want to go it alone. Most billionaire preppers dont want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.

Many of those seriously seeking a safe haven simply hire one of several prepper construction companies to bury a prefab steel-lined bunker somewhere on one of their existing properties. Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series Aristocrat, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.

Theres something much more whimsical about the facilities in which most of the billionaires or, more accurately, aspiring billionaires actually invest. A company called Vivos is selling luxury underground apartments in converted cold war munitions storage facilities, missile silos, and other fortified locations around the world. Like miniature Club Med resorts, they offer private suites for individuals or families, and larger common areas with pools, games, movies and dining. Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.

On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse grow room doesnt allow for such do-overs.

Just the known unknowns are enough to dash any reasonable hope of survival. But this doesnt seem to stop wealthy preppers from trying. The New York Times reported that real estate agents specialising in private islands were overwhelmed with inquiries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prospective clients were even asking about whether there was enough land to do some agriculture in addition to installing a helicopter landing pad. But while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.

Surely the billionaires who brought me out for advice on their exit strategies were aware of these limitations. Could it have all been some sort of game? Five men sitting around a poker table, each wagering his escape plan was best?

But if they were in it just for fun, they wouldnt have called for me. They would have flown out the author of a zombie apocalypse comic book. If they wanted to test their bunker plans, theyd have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.

Thats because it wasnt their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what Ive come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind apocalypse or not?

Or was this really their intention all along? Maybe the apocalypse is less something theyre trying to escape than an excuse to realise The Mindsets true goal: to rise above mere mortals and execute the ultimate exit strategy.

This is an edited extract from Survival of the Richest by Douglas Rushkoff, published by Scribe (20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Excerpt from:

The super-rich preppers planning to save themselves from the apocalypse - The Guardian

Pantheon Review: 2022’s Wildest Tech Thriller Is a Cartoon | Time – TIME

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

Eternal life through technology. That is the promise of uploaded intelligence (UI), also known as mind uploading, a phenomenonone that remains, for now, within the realm of science fictionin which an entire human brain is emulated via computer. The catch: a UI is a disembodied intelligence, without a flesh-and-blood presence in the physical world. Even if it is a real person (and thats a big if) living on as a program, that person cant snuggle in bed with a lover or kiss their children goodnight. So does their existence actually constitute human life?

Of all the many big questions that power Pantheon, a gripping, cerebral, remarkably high-concept animated sci-fi series premiering Sept. 1 on AMC+, this is both the richest and the most difficult to answer. And it arises out of a situation so mundane, it borders on trite. When we meet 14-year-old Maddie Kim (voiced by Katie Chang), shes constantly at odds with her mother, Ellen (Rosemarie DeWitt), and is getting mercilessly cyberbullied by the mean girls at her high school. Most of the girls in my class completely missed the moment when the world began to end, too wrapped up in their own drama, obsessed with their own lives, Maddie recounts in an intriguing voiceover that opens the series. Or trying to ruin mine.

Maddie and David, reunited in an online game, in Pantheon

Titmouse IncAMC

The twist comes when she starts receiving chat messages from a mysterious, seemingly omniscient correspondent who uses her tormentors electronic devices to turn them against each other. All signs point to the stranger being her late father, David (Daniel Dae Kim). But this isnt some My Mother the Car farce. Before dying of cancer, a few years earlier, David had worked for a tech behemoth called Logorhythms that was experimenting with UI. According to the company, a brain scan aimed at preserving Davids consciousness in the final moments of his (embodied) life failed. Now, it seems that Logorhythms wasnt entirely honest with Ellen.

Beyond the Kim household, Pantheon follows two characters with their own relationships to Logorhythms and UI. Another teenage misfit, gothy Caspian (Paul Dano) excels at math and hackingand seems to be living in a small-scale version of The Truman Show, with parents who are, for reasons that take some time to emerge, roleplaying a dysfunctional marriage for his benefit. And Chanda (Raza Jaffrey of Homeland), a computer engineer from Mumbai, takes a meeting with executives at one of his companys American rivals. This breakfast sets the stakes of the show: Singularity is near, Chanda tells the suits. And whoever makes the big bets, and the right bets, will control not just the market, but the future. They pronounce him a prophet.

There is a global conspiracy thriller taking shape amid the human drama, and the showbased on short stories by Hugo-winning author Ken Liu, who also translated into English the Chinese writer Liu Cixins popular and influential The Three-Body Problemnever loses sight of either element. UI introduces profound philosophical and emotional conflicts, and creator Craig Silversteins (Turn: Washingtons Spies) digs deep into both kinds of problem. How can David be both dead and alive? How can a woman, especially one as mistrustful of technology as Ellen is, carry on a marriage with a man she not only cant touch, but also doesnt quite see as real? Is David a human without a body or just an ingenious simulation? And with regard to the UI-driven future Chanda seems so excited about, for its potential to free humans from white-collar drudge work and launch new leisure industries, is it really such a great idea?

Caspian and his love interest, Hannah, in Pantheon

Titmouse Inc.AMC

Every once in a while, in the four episodes provided for review, Silversteins scripts get tangled in their own high-level ideas. But it happens much less often than you might expect from such a heady show. The choice to adapt Lius work using traditional animation also helps to keep the story down-to-earth. While computer animation might have sent it plunging into the uncanny valley and live-action TV would have required expensive CGI effects that mightve looked silly despite their price, theres a warmth to the elegant, anime-style characters and backdrops drawn by Titmouse (the studio behind Big Mouth and the new Beavis and Butt-Head projects on Paramount+). From the stages of elite tech conferences to the digital worlds of MMPORGs to late-night coffee shops, the series gets the look of contemporary, device-mediated life right.

All of thisalong with a stellar voice cast that also includes Taylor Schilling, Aaron Eckhart, Maude Apatow, and the late William Hurthelps Pantheon earn what starts out as an ambitious, potentially goofy premise and escalates into something all-out wild. Its hardly the first show to take up UI. The concept fueled story lines on Star Trek, Stargate, and other sci-fi franchises for decades, before making inroads into the prestige-drama futurism of Westworld and Black Mirror; San Junipero, a feature-length romance between two uploaded intelligences in a VR afterlife, became a breakout episode of the latter anthology series. More recently, Upload, an Amazon sci-fi comedy from The Office creator Greg Daniels, has expanded on the digital-heaven idea with premium upgrades financed by the survivors of the deceased.

As in that show, the techno-pessimism fueling Pantheon foresees a UI future that doesnt benefit regular people so much as it enriches corporations. Like a metaverse Severance, though one with more visible seams, it explores how a dream of liberation from the workplace can turn out to be a prison of ones own making. At the same, it asks how technology that can reunite a troubled teen with her long-lost dad can be all bad. While that tension can never be definitively resolved, it has the potential to fuel many seasons of drama on scales both intimate and grand.

Pisces Full Moon Meaning and 7 Ways to Benefit – Free Daily Horoscopes by The AstroTwins | Astrostyle

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

A Pisces full moon means its time for a little enchantment. Plus here are 7 ways to harness its energy.

Every year, the Pisces full moon holds ceremony in our deepest psyches. These mystical moonbeams are known for causing miracles. How? By opening our channels to spiritual guidance that can appear as signs, serendipities or messages in our dreams.

Flowy, dreamy Pisces softens our resistance to change. Do you need to let go and let it flow? Theres only one thing to do under a Pisces full moon: Surrender to the universes divine wisdom.

These prophecies probably wont make sense on paper, but do they make your soul sing? Tune in. Under these esoteric moonbeams, your intuition is the most potent voice in the chorus.

Seeds you planted near the Pisces new moon are ready to be harvest! Inquiries you made to the universe six months ago are about to burst open. They could illuminate the moody night sky with opalescent light or they could fizzle out altogether.

If something ends, Pisces will provide a soft space to reflect and let any tears and stuck emotions flow. But dont fall prey to escapism: Pisces energy can get murky and delusional, leading you astray from your path. Take a little break from any mood-altering substances if youre feeling ungrounded. This helps temper the lunacy that a full moon (and a full moon in Pisces, no less) churns up. A little emotional perspective WOULD be nice, right?

The Pisces full moon appears during Virgo season

The Pisces full moon is also called a Sturgeon Moon (Aug) or Harvest Moon or Corn Moon (Sep)

Pisces is the 12th and final zodiac sign (Pisces is symbolized by two fishes)

Pisces is a water sign, along with Cancer and Scorpio

This annual full moon is an optimal time for healing rituals. Try ours: Pisces Full Moon Ritual: Deal to Heal

Try also a meditation that draws on the energy of Pisces or one that invokes the water element

During a Pisces full moon, the veil to the spiritual underworld lifts, and boundaries between mystery and mortality blur. Pisces rules sleep and the subconscious, so pay close attention to your dreamswhich Carl Jung called the language of human consciousness. Keep a notebook by your bed so you can record your dreams immediately. Writing them down with a pen or pencil is a different, more meditative process than typing on or speaking into your phone (which you can also do, of course).

Dreams can reveal unfinished business in the psyche, bring visitations from people in our past and they can inspire creativity. Paying attention to them is an exercise in opening yourself up to serendipity. Do you regularly see symbols in your dreams? That bizarre dream about your tooth falling out could be a premonition about money coming your way. Look it up and ponder.

Keep your mind and all your channels clear, even while awake, because the universe is uploading some pretty spectacular information. If you can quiet your mind, you may be hit with a divine solution to a problem thats been plaguing youor all of humanity.

Heads up: As eager as you are to share discoveries with the entire social media universe, keep your ideas close to the vest. The elusive Pisces full moon can bring some shady characters to the surfac. You dont want to hand your million-dollar baby over to a snake in sisters clothing, right? What you do want to do is twirl yourself into a mystic night of delicious Piscean pleasures (think Tantric massage, Kama Sutra, and meditative dancing).

Ruled by ethereal Neptune, god of the seas, Pisces wants water, water everywhere. This would be a great night for a swim in the light of the full moonbut if thats not possible, you can fill up the tub. Or, if youre lucky enough to have access, dive into a private pool.

Swimming is a special kind of exercise because the waters resistance strengthens muscles while its buoyancy keeps pressure off your joints. Waters natural viscosity forces you to move more slowly, giving your brain time to more thoroughly process signals from your muscles and building muscle memory. The best part, though, is that you never feel lighter than you do while in waterand that uplifting energy can offset the heavy, introspective vibes of a Pisces full moon.

This Neptunian-guided full moon calls for compassion and empathyand that starts right where you are. When you stop to think about who you might have been blaming and shaming, dont forget to assess how youve been treating yourself.

Self-deprecation prevents us from reaching our goals by putting us into a perpetual state of inhibition. Self-kindness and self-compassion, on the other hand, lead to greater life satisfaction and deeper connection (research proves it). As Pisces Anais Nin wrote: We dont see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Vow to give yourself a daily shot of kindness, whether its a well-deserved pat on the back for a job well done or permission to curl up in your favorite faux-fur blanket and take a well-deserved nap. Want to really go to work on this? Take a gander at the exercises in The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook by Kristin Neff, PhD.

Eyes off that screen! These days, its too easy to walk around in a tech trance, more tuned in to a friends vacation photos than the actual landscape surrounding you. And while esoteric Pisces can align with that sort of virtual reality, the Pisces full moon encourages you to slow down and visually observe your surroundings.

Photography (with the exception of selfies) can be a form of meditation, helping you get powerfully connected to the present moment. Look around! Pisces has the power to find beauty in all forms, including destruction and disrepair. You dont need a trip to Tanzania to take yourself on a photo safari. Get fascinated by the peeling paint on an abandoned building, the patina on a rusted tractor, friends with amazing (but not-model-perfect) features.

Pisces photographer Diane Arbus became famous for her arresting black-and-white portraits of both ordinary people and folks on the fringe of society. In her words, A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

As the twelfth and final sign of the zodiac, its no surprise that Pisces rules the feet. Under the stirring Pisces full moon, cue up a playlist and just dance. Moving your body to music feels amazing for many reasons: It influences your heartbeat cadence and your breathing, which affects your brain function. Its a boundless form of self-expression that invites you to shapeshift with the current of every beatwhich is what go-with-the-flow Pisces is all about.

Find a club or live show where you can spin out on the dance floor, or ask Alexa to turn on some Lizzo. What a fun and sacred way to get intimate with your own bodys subtle energies and power.

As the zodiacs twelfth and final sign, Pisces turns the tide toward transitions. Endings can be the hardest necessity to face, but they cant be put off forever. Better to let it go and let it flow, because youll quickly manifest a more rewarding optionor a better way of dealing with your present circumstances.

Did you ghost someone who was actually pretty important to you? Leave business ventures unsettled? We all have those uncomfortable loose ends dangling, and the Pisces full moon is the perfect time to handle them once and for all. With Pisces tender underbelly of compassion and acceptance, youll find it much easier to cut the ties on a partnership or romance that has run its course.

Need some sacred respite? Let the sensual energy of the Pisces full moon inspire you as you create a sanctuary for yourself at home. Spruce up your bedroom or maybe a corner of your living room.

Wherever you can, find a space for a welcoming nest with plenty of soft, furry blankets and pillows, candles or an essential oil diffuser to fill the air with the stress-busting scent of lavender or uplifting jasmine. Spin some Nina Simone (a soulful Pisces if ever there lived) to set the mood. Let it be your place to nap, to dream and to just be.

Find out how the Pisces full moon will affect your sign in our weekly horoscopes: https://www.astrostyle.com/weekly-horoscopes

Photo by Daniel Adams Diversifylens

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Pisces Full Moon Meaning and 7 Ways to Benefit - Free Daily Horoscopes by The AstroTwins | Astrostyle

From social media to Pollywood, singer Noor Chahal says originality is her secret to success – The Indian Express

Posted on September 8, 2022 by Danzig

A psychology student and a talented singer who rose to popularity through Instagram and YouTube, Noor is a newbie in the Punjabi entertainment industry. She has lent her voice to the songs of the recently released film Bajre Da Sitta, where she has also showcased her skills as an actor.

Name

Prabhnoor Chahal, popularly known as Noor Chahal.

Hometown

Born in Chandigarh, Noor was raised in Mohali, where she is currently settled.

Family

Father Harsharanjit Singh Chahal is a chartered accountant while her mother Jasmeet Chahal is a homemaker. Noor has a younger brother Ishaanveer Chahal, who studies in Class 11. Her grandmother lives in their native village in Fatehgarh Sahib district of Punjab.

Education

Noor completed her Class 10 and 12 from Yadvindra Public School (YPS), Mohali. She graduated in psychology honors from Panjab Universitys Institute of Social Science Education and Research (PU-ISSER). Presently, she is studying for her masters in psychology from the same institute at the PU.

When did you discover your singing skills?

When I was in Class 2. I was an active participant in school functions. My teachers used to give me opportunities to perform solo at events. I also took part in choirs and competitions and realised I was blessed with the skill. Later, when I entered Class 8, I opted for professional training in core Hindustani classical music, which continued for the next four years.

Why did you pick psychology, and not music, in college?

We all know that a career in music and films is a little unpredictable, and one must choose a concrete option to fall back on. Having said this, Psychology is not just an option for me, I like studying it and thats why I am pursuing a masters course in it. As far as music is concerned, I have always loved it, and nothing can separate it from me. So, basically, I am doing both!

Favourite song

There is no specific genre that I stick to. As a singer too, I am open to singing anything but for songs that can offend listeners, objectify women, or glorify anything that is considered wrong by our society. Here, I want to mention that my favourite singer is Satinder Sartaaj. He is my inspiration in the Punjabi music industry.

Favourite movie

I prefer watching films that are artistic. My recently released film Bajre Da Sitta is my favourite because of its content.

You acted in Bajre Da Sitta. Did you plan to be an actor?

Not at all. The opportunity just came my way, and I didnt want to miss out on it. Though I have acted in theatre during school days, I was never intentionally inclined towards acting. Moreover, Bajre Da Sitta is a music-based film, which attracted me enough to play a role as well. I am a content-driven person and the concept of the movie motivated me to go for it.

Works till date

Noor is new to the entertainment industry. Her journey started during the lockdown when she began making videos and posted Bollywood and Punjabi song covers on Instagram, and later, on her own YouTube channel, which presently has more than 7 lakh subscribers. Her growing popularity on social media drew the attention of the Punjabi film industry and got her a role in Satinder Sartaajs film Ikko Mikke (2020). Her debut single Jhalleya Dila came out on Burfi Music this year. In addition to this, she sang all the tracks for film Bajre Da Sitta and featured as a parallel lead along with actors Tania and Ammy Virk in the movie that released in July.

Upcoming projects

Recently chosen as a part of YouTubes Foundry class of 2022 among 30 other artists across the world, Noor shares that she will be uploading a song on her channel soon.

Claim to fame

I give the credit of my fame to YouTube as it gave me the opportunity to create my own channel and exhibit my talent independently. Even though I have worked on screen now, I got real recognition from the social media platform.

My secret sauce

Theres no mantra. Be authentic and original in your approach is my secret to success. As a cover artist, I have always tried to add a unique element to the songs, which makes them quite appealing to the listeners. Therefore, I feel that artists should add their own special essence in whatever they do. Besides, one should never take the audience for granted. I always value my listeners and make sure I put my best efforts in my work.

Thoughts about Pollywood

People in the industry are lovely. They are welcoming and wonderful. Though I have just begun my journey here, I never felt like an alien. Rather, I enjoyed working with other artists. I just hope I get more opportunities so I can experience things and talk about it.

Challenges faced

Honestly, I feel lucky as my parents are supportive of my choices and that has made everything easy for me. Undoubtedly, I have worked hard to achieve things but thats just a part of the journey. Sometimes, artists feel chained when they are targeted and called out on social media but thats nothing as compared to the love they receive. So, whenever I get negative comments, I overlook them and focus on the love my fans have for me.

Future plans

I intend to work as a singer more than an actor. Music is my area of interest as of now, but if anything else comes my way, I would not mind exploring it. My future plan is to take content-based decisions that bring out my talent and tap my potential as a singer.

Fitness mantra

(Laughs out) I am not a fitness freak, and I dont like working out. To add to that, I am a big foodie. Therefore, there is no mantra to share. However, I will surely get there. (Reassuring herself)

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From social media to Pollywood, singer Noor Chahal says originality is her secret to success - The Indian Express

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