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MONDAY 21 AUGUST 2023
Guatemala
Freeman, Will (6/23/23) The Guatemalan Counterinsurgency Never Ended. Foreign Affairs
- 36-year internal armed conflict ended by UN sponsored peach talks between the government and a few leftist guerrilla groups.
- The death toll is estimated at 200,000
- 9 in 10 victims (most indigenous) had been killed by para-military.
Republicans
- 2/3 of Iowa GOP voters don’t think Trump committed serious crimes (Note: Jesus Crist).
Me
- The air conditioning man finally came. I told him he must be the most popular guy in town. He said well, either the most popular or the most hated. He also started telling stories about his visits to houses and their pets. Usually people are not there when he comes, so cat owners leave him pages of instructions about how to please the cats taped to the door. Once, he opened the door and this little dog ran out and down the block before he could even start running after him. He didn’t know the little dog’s name. This should really be a book, what stories and what a nice guy. Air Conditioning finally fixed. Oh, the pleasure.
- The cats, however, are complaining. Cats: “Our ancestors came from Africa. You are freezing us to death.” They have all (except the girls who have good sense) retreated to the screened in porch.
- I have been using a sinus rinse for four months to clear up a sinus infection. Now my joints are so painful I can barely walk. They keep assuring me that there are no side effects to squirting saline, antibiotic and steroid up my nose. My partner said: “Yeah, it’s like cocaine has no effect, right?” He’s so funny.
Trump and Company
- 100,000 bond for John Eastman? This is the “standard bond” for trying to overthrow the government? Jesus.
- $200,000 for Donald Trump? This is a joke. I have worked in and around the criminal justice system most of my adult life and I don’t expect a lot out of it, but this is absurd, absolutely absurd. What we are all seeing demonstrated is a criminal justice system that is designed to protect elite criminals.
- In 2021, there were 5.5 million people under supervision by the adult cj system. 5.5 million people. Most of these people have committed crimes less serious than trying to overthrow the government, plotting and planning to subvert democracy.
- People have no idea what it is like to live in a country that has no legal system. They never leave the country and if they do it’s to go on a holiday where they have as little contact as possible with another culture. They take for granted the benefits of a democracy, even though imperfect.
- There are going to be a lot of people running around saying: “They can’t do this.” And, yes they can do this, you handed democracy over to them without a fight. I am disgusted.
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The charges include allegations about a largely overlooked incident in Coffee County, Georgia.
— Read on www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/fani-williss-indictment-of-donald-trump-and-a-voting-system-breachseveral of the Defendants corruptly conspired” and “stole data, including ballot images, voting equipment software and personal voter information” in Coffee County, a rural outpost in the southeastern corner of the state, two hundred miles from Atlanta. Since all of Georgia uses the same Dominion voting machines and software, this theft provided access to the entire election system in the state. According to the indictment, the software was then shared with people around the country, some of whom are cited by Willis as unindicted co-conspirators. In March, according to the Los Angeles Times, during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, a small group of people, and many others online, watched a presentation using the stolen software, suggesting that it is still circulatingamong those who aim to assist Trump in his current benighted quest to recapture the Presidency.
Once copies of the Dominion Voting Systems software were made, they were uploaded to a server at SullivanStrickler, and then downloaded by others.
The alleged conspiracy came to light as a result of a confluence of a years-long lawsuit challenging the security of Georgia’s election systems, the determination of a private citizen named Marilyn Marks, and a phone call that Hall—who said that he had chartered a plane from Atlanta which took him and the SullivanStrickler employees to Coffee County—made to Marks. In 2017, Marks, who runs a small nonprofit called the Coalition for Good Governance, sued the State of Georgia and its then secretary of state, Brian Kemp, for its reliance on touch-screen voting machines. Because D.R.E. machines, as they are known, produce no paper record of cast ballots, and have been shown to be easily hacked, Marks was pushing for the state to move to hand-marked paper ballots
But what happened in Coffee County was not an isolated incident
two Republican operatives in Michigan, Matthew DePerno and Daire Rendon, were arraigned on crimes that could be charged as felonies for breaching election systems.
DePerno, who was charged with conspiracy to gain access to a computer or a computer system, among other offenses, ran unsuccessfully for Michigan attorney general last year. (He was endorsed by Trump and supported by Mike Lindell, the C.E.O. of MyPillow.) Among the charges against Rendon, a former state representative, is conspiracy to illegally obtain a voting machine. According to the Times, “the charges stemmed from a bizarre plot hatched by a group of conservative activists in early 2021 to pick apart voting machines in at least three Michigan counties, in some cases taking them to hotels and Airbnb rentals as they hunted for evidence of election fraud.” Doug Logan and Jeffrey Lenberg allegedly were also involved in the Michigan breach. (Lenberg and Logan could not be reached for comment.)
A coördinated effort to copy and disseminate voting-machine software, orchestrated by lawyers working for Trump and facilitated by election officials loyal to him, as alleged in the Georgia indictment, is an unimaginable violation.
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Despite Trump’s attacks on the FBI as biased against him, the evidence shows that the bureau did everything to protect him.
— Read on occupydemocrats.com/2023/08/20/harboring-donald-trump-and-his-fbi-protectors/Special Agent Johnathan Buma, who investigated Hunter and his dealings, also noticed and investigated Rudy Giuliani, who accepted payments from an assumed-Russian asset in Ukraine, all with the corrupt intent to gather dirt on Hunter Biden and by extension, Joe Biden.
His supervisors took in the information on Hunter Biden enthusiastically but couldn’t ever come up with evidence to support illegal foreign dealings. (As an ethical matter, Hunter Biden likely should never have been on that board, but it was not illegal.)
This all happened in 2019 under President Trump, then-Attorney General Bill Barr, and the current FBI Director, Christopher Wray.
This may be one of the few exceptions when it seems that an entire department did have one intention, to protect Donald Trump — and thereby protect itself.
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Russia edges closer to a reckoning.
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/putin-running-out-options-ukrainePutin must face an even more disturbing possibility: suppose the reckoning cannot be postponed and comes before a definitive end to the fighting, not afterward. All trends—military, economic, diplomatic—continue to point in the wrong direction, and Putin has no convincing explanation for how the situation can be salvaged. The Russian president finds himself boxed in with no good options. He may indeed already be aware that the reckoning has begun.
One way out of such a dilemma might be for Putin to get his propagandists to concoct a story to explain why, despite the appearance of loss, Russia has in fact won. The simplest story he can tell is that Russia’s war is not with Ukraine but with NATO.
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But unless the Taliban signals that it is willing to grant fundamental rights to women and girls, it is hard to envisage what a formalized U.S. presence in Kabul would represent other than a tacit endorsement of the Taliban’s deepening theocratic despotism.
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/afghanistan/united-states-dont-recognize-taliban-governmentBut unless the Taliban signals that it is willing to grant fundamental rights to women and girls, it is hard to envisage what a formalized U.S. presence in Kabul would represent other than a tacit endorsement of the Taliban’s deepening theocratic despotism.
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After Trump’s indictments, can America protect the peaceful transfer of power?
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/trump-indictments-political-warfare-comes-homeExcerpts:
World history overflows with examples of rulers who refused to relinquish power when they lost the mandate of the people. Many Americans and foreign admirers of the United States, however, assumed that the country was somehow immune from a problem that many associated instead with the developing world.
The charges against Trump raise questions not only about the line between the politically ruthless and the criminal in a democracy but also about the very ability of the judiciary, along with state and local officials, to enforce the will of the electorate against the immense power of the American presidency.
What Trump and his co-conspirators undertook was nothing less than a form of political warfare, traditionally associated with covert operations. Since World War II, American presidents have relied on these tactics to manipulate some democratic contests abroad, as Harry Truman did in Italy in 1948, for example, and John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson did in advance of 1964 elections in British Guiana and Chile.
Trump’s successive schemes to stay in office did not fail because the president lost heart or changed his mind. They failed because federal officials and state leaders outside the conspiracy stopped them
Law, Power, and Justice 