Burisma, the Day-Glo Elephant in a Very Dark Room
By John Kendall Hawkins
What a shocker for news it was.
First, there was the Guardian resurrection of Cambridge Analytica "whistleblower" Brittany Kaiser putting out the clickbait headline, 'global data manipulation is out of control', and promising to release more damaging data about 2016 -- in the coming months -- and that book marketing tactic (Targeted, see the Times review) endorsed by another self-described "whistleblower," Christopher Steele, the British contractor who sold the dossier of turds to the FBI. He commented, "...these problems are likely to get worse, not better, and with crucial 2020 elections in America and elsewhere approaching, this is a very scary prospect." Both Kaiser and Steele interfered in the 2016 election themselves (on opposite sides! Maybe cancelling each other out.) So what's scary is that they're promising to 'do something about it' again.
Before I could fully recover from that prospect, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist James Risen went apoplectic over at the Intercept: "Donald Trump is a murderer."
While I was digesting that, over at Rolling Stone, Andy Kroll was proffering the sadistic notion that holding up Nancy Pelosi's deliverance of impeachment articles to the Senate was her possible tactic of holding back one article in order to try Trump on the other one later, closer to the election. A kind of political double-tap, and a precedent. But there's been talk of multiple impeachments too.
That's all bad enough, but then you go and think: f*ck, if Biden gets elected in November, the Democrats had better maintain a majority in the House at the mid-terms, because the Senate's solidly Republican, and when he get's impeached (fuckin count on it) for his Burisma/Ukraine doings, he could be the first US president to be canned. These professional quid-pro-quoers in Congress have been going tit-for-tat since Nixon. It was amusing until it led to the 1% taking over.
But perhaps the biggest bullshit item of the week was the recent New York Times piece claiming Russians hacked into the servers of Burisma Gas. Forget the convenient timing of it and lack of logic -- the suggestion that the same Russian GRU group that "hacked" the DNC in 2016 was now doing Trump another solid by seeking diabolical data on Burisma servers, while the MSM at the same time claims the existence of such data is nothing but "conspiracy theory." Well, wouldn't the Russians know the score already? Can it be both ways?
Area 1 is the name of the security firm announcing the breach. No link to the website was offered, but that's alright, I know how to do a little research, and soon found my way there. "It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for," write our intrepid Times reporters in, but this assertion is contradicted just a few graphs later, when the Times tells us that the "firm maintains a network of sensors on web servers around the globe - many known to be used by state-sponsored hackers - which gives the firm a front-row seat to phishing attacks, and allows them to block attacks on their customers."
Well, by gum, if their specialty is watching the hackers hack live, wouldn't that suggest that they were watching the Russkies do their B-and-E? And wouldn't they have followed the mean red hackers all the way back to the mother lode of kompromat? There would have been forensic trails. See, logic tells me that's what would have happened. But maybe the strangest thing about the Times piece was the presumably unintentional gaffe in one paragraph:
The timing of the Russian campaign mirrors the G.R.U. hacks we saw in 2016 against the D.N.C. and John Podesta," the Clinton campaign chairman, Mr. Falkowitz said. "Once again, they are stealing email credentials, in what we can only assume is a repeat of Russian interference in the last election.
Has the times become so careless that they don't bother with a quick copy edit? If Falkowitz was the Clinton campaign chair, we may have a Constitutional crisis on our hands.
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