Why would you do this?
Why would you do this?
This is a throwback audit that was definitely underrated. Since this was going up on Facebook I decided to upload for the new subscribers
These clowns are unfortunately exemplary specimens of the 2 worst traits in law enforcement… paranoia and low intelligence. As a bonus they are excellent in wasting funds for a frivolous pursuit of answers
Holy shit the amount of money in maintenance for flight time is crazy. They spent all that money just to film you filming. They got some really good footage too. Got better footage of the facility than you ever would have got. They are so dumb 😅
Ha, they gave you even better footage of the building/grounds (via the COPter Cam) than you could capture on the ground…Silly Cops tricks are for Auditors!
Week 100: The Real Disappointment of the Mueller Report
I still don’t know the whys behind his behavior. Why did Donald Trump lie so tirelessly about the status of the Trump Tower Moscow project? Why did he attempt to conceal the true purpose of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a gaggle of Russians? Why did he suggest the hackers behind the stolen Democrats emails could have been China or a “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds“ when it was so obviously Russia? Why did he lie about his request to get White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller in June 2017 and then demand that McGahn lie about issuing the directive?
Why did he ask FBI Director James Comey to abort the bureau’s investigation of national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had lied to investigators about his talks about sanctions with the Russian ambassador? Why did he switch stories on why he fired Comey? Why did he ask Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to hold a presser about the firing and tell the lie that the sacking was Rosenstein’s idea? Why did he try to throttle the special counsel’s investigation? Why did he tease Paul Manafort with the promise of a pardon? Why did he shout “fake news“ so many times when he was the faker? Why did so many of the players in the Trump orbit—Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Erik Prince, Sarah Sanders, Donald Trump Jr., Michael Cohen and Roger Stone—appear to have told lies in the president’s service?
Except for pausing to explain that Trump suppressed information that would call into question the legitimacy of his election—and that he feared that incessant probing might uncover criminal activity by him, his campaign or his family—the Mueller report offers no firm theory on what motivated Trump’s constant deceptions. Likewise, Mueller’s assessment that Trump obstructed his investigation on at least 10 occasions lacks a firm explanation for why he would engage in such risky acts. For instance, why did Trump, whose sense of loyalty usually runs one way, put his neck out so far for Flynn by instructing Comey to lay off? Consider a counterfactual in which Trump dumps Flynn at the first opportunity and doesn’t interfere with Comey’s Russia investigation. No Comey sacking, no Mueller, hence no pattern of obstruction. Obviously, Comey probably would have uncovered some damaging Trump information, but those revelations would have been limited compared with what Mueller revealed because so much of the damning information in the report is about Trump’s efforts to undermine Mueller.
When Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Trump in May 2017 that a special counsel had been appointed to investigate the Russia business, the report tells us, “the president slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh, my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.’” One way to read this lamentation is that Trump understood that he was guilty of great crimes and that the special counsel’s dragnet was going to collect them all and send him and his cronies to jail. Another is that the backstage Trump captured in the “I’m fucked” anecdote is a lot like frontstage Trump: He overdramatizes and overreacts to everything. If you were to stick Trump’s finger with a pin, he would scream that he was being fed into a woodchipper.
Maybe this hysterical bearing, fueled by Trump’s imperfect knowledge of the law, prompted him to regard any legal scrutiny as a potential Armageddon. The idea that confronting controversy by telling the truth—like admitting secret payoffs to your mistresses, for example—makes better political sense than uncoiling a batch of lies to conceal the facts seems beyond Trump. One takeaway from the report is that given his druthers, Trump would rather be maimed by the backlash of one of his lies than suffer the sting of telling a simple truth.
The watchword of the Obama administration, formulated by Obama himself, was “Don’t do stupid shit.” The corresponding watchword in Trumpworld, as observed by White House counsel McGahn, was “do crazy shit.” Trump’s sustained appetite for duplicity, his brinkmanship, and his ceaseless chaos-making, thoroughly documented in the report, appear to have prevented Mueller from formulating a greater theory of the case against him. Having made dishonesty his careerlong policy, Trump encourages us to believe that his lies don’t necessarily point to any definable goals. His lies exist primarily to shield the earlier lies he’s told, making his life’s work an endless weave of fraud and falsehood. That makes anybody who punctures these lies—the “fake news media,” for example, or Democrats on the Hill, investigators like Comey or Mueller, or intelligence agencies—the enemy. And the best way to counteract their critiques is with additional lies and new vitriol, Trump surmises.
Today, with Trump dodging an indictment, it looks like he won. But that victory might be temporary. Dispassionate almost to a fault, the Mueller report punctures with legal precision Trump’s ugly methods. The report’s final use might not be as the legal cornerstone to a Trump impeachment but as a political text to guide voters in the 2020 election.
Is Liberals’ Vanity Stronger Than Their Misery?
members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.
.. However I believe that the concept of truth is fundamental to human discourse, that it is the precondition of any genuine dialogue, and that real respect for other people requires an even greater respect for truth.
.. Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts, while defining the consensus in terms of people like themselves.
.. It never seems to occur to people like Rorty that people who disagree with them on cultural matters might be anything other than bigots.
.. because they have so stigmatized anyone to their right that they both don’t want to listen, and make the price of dissent so high that dissenters end up keeping their mouths shut for fear of losing their jobs or their positions.
.. Liberals miss this by being illiberal. They shame not just the racists and sexists who deserve it but all who disagree. A 64-year-old Southern woman not onboard with marriage equality finds herself characterized as a hateful boob. Never mind that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton weren’t themselves onboard just five short years ago.
.. Political correctness has morphed into a moral purity
.. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has documented that conservatives understand the liberal mind better than liberals understand the conservative mind.
.. The basic reason is that liberals generally interpret all moral action in terms of Care and Fairness. Thus when conservatives think or behave in ways that violate what liberals believe is the Caring and Fair thing to have done, they can only figure that this is because conservatives Don’t Care and Aren’t Fair. In fact, Haidt says, there are other things going on in conservative moral reasoning, but liberals who strictly adhere to the Care/Fairness standards blind themselves to them.
.. A lot of people think there are only two genders—boy and girl. Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe they should change that view. Maybe it’s insensitive to the trans community. Maybe it even flies in the face of modern social psychology. But people think it. Political correctness is the social force that holds them in contempt for that, or punishes them outright.
.. The leftist drive to enforce a progressive social vision was relentless, and it happened too fast. I don’t say this because I’m opposed to that vision—like most members of the under-30 crowd, I have no problem with gender neutral pronouns—I say this because it inspired a backlash that gave us Trump.
.. Universities, newspapers, and political parties are not churches, but the people who run them think of them as institutional forms of secular religion
.. the liberal clerisy has just had a political version of the Ninety-Five Theses nailed to their wooden backsides by the American voter.
.. Donald Trump is not a moral or religious conservative, did not campaign as one, and is not likely to govern as one. The Religious Right did not win the culture war. To be opposed to political correctness is not the same thing as being a social conservative. Trump is right-wing, which is not the same thing as conservatism. Milo Yiannopoulos is the real face of Trumpism. Ralph Reed and all the old school Religious Right folks are just along for the ride, whether they know it or not.
The Lessons of Henry Kissinger
The legendary and controversial statesman criticizes the Obama Doctrine, talks about the main challenges for the next president, and explains how to avoid war with China.
.. He told me that he was expecting other nations, particularly the great powers, to enter a period of intense study, in order to understand how they should respond to a Trump presidency. He also said he expected the Islamic State, or other similarly minded jihadist organizations, to test Trump early by launching attacks, in order to provoke a reaction (or, he suggested, an overreaction).
.. “Nonstate groups may make the assessment that Trump will react to a terror attack in a way that suits their purposes,” Kissinger said.
.. JG: Do you think Trump is a Putin apologist?
HK: No. I think he fell into certain rhetoric because Putin said some good words about him—tactically—and he felt he had to respond.
.. I think most of the world’s foreign policy has been in suspense for six to nine months, waiting for the outcome of our election. They have just watched us undergo a domestic revolution. They will want to study it for some period. But at some point, events will necessitate decision making once more. The only exception to this rule may be nonstate groups; they may have an incentive to provoke an American reaction that undermines our global position.
.. JG: Why do you think this happened?
HK: The Trump phenomenon is in large part a reaction of Middle America to attacks on its values by intellectual and academic communities.
THE LESSONS OF HENRY KISSINGER
“ ‘Though Kissinger has been out of government service for several decades, I found his egomania to be undiminished by time.’ ”
.. Finally we came to an agreement. I would record our conversation, and transcribe it, and then show it to him, and he would, he promised, make changes only in order to clarify points or expand upon his arguments
.. I have never met someone as old as Kissinger who is so keen to impress semi-random strangers, including semi-random 19-year-old strangers. Over lunch, he was relentless in his attempt to win my daughter over to his understanding of the world, and his role in it. This quality makes him exasperating and mesmerizing, and it launches him on flights of self-exculpatory analysis. There is no issue—not the bombing of Cambodia, or his activities in Chile or Argentina, or his role in the Pakistani civil war, which gave birth to Bangladesh and resulted in mass death—that he is not eager to relitigate.
.. He laments that history is not taught consecutively, and that historical incidents are often decontextualized beyond recognition. His argument was compelling, but also self-serving: His core contention, when it comes to the greatest controversies in his career, is that postwar American support for anti-Communist allies is impossible to understand or rationalize without both proper historical context and a baseline sympathy for a pro-Western narrative. Universities, he said, “like to teach history as a series of discrete problems. And they above all don’t want to teach Western history. They believe that the West has committed so many crimes that they are not entitled to single it out. That is a thought that would never occur to a Chinese.
.. “A puzzling aspect about Obama is how someone so intelligent could treat his peers with the disdain he did in your article,” he said. “Someone of that stature usually develops a sense of humility.”
.. “The uncertainty of Clinton is whether the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party would permit her to carry out what she believes.”
.. JG: What are America’s perpetual, eternal interests?
HK: I would begin by saying that we have to have faith in ourselves. That is an absolute requirement. We can’t reduce policy to a series of purely tactical decisions or self-recriminations.
.. It seems to me that in the Western world, after the Second World War, we had a vision of a peaceful order. There was no question that we would sacrifice for it. We sent a large army to Europe. We spent a lot of money. We need to rediscover that spirit and adapt it to the realities that have emerged since then.