The unbuilt wall

No, not the one Trump is not building on our southern border. There's another one.

Note the ridiculously small number of stars

At the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency there is a wall of stars dedicated to agents who were killed while doing their dirty work. No names are attached. But there is no wall dedicated to the tens of millions of people who were killed by the CIA.

If there were,  it would have few names on it because most of the victims of the CIA died anonymously.

It would be a very big wall. The wall to the Americans killed in Vietnam lists about 60,000 names but the unbuilt wall to the Indochinese killed because of CIA conduct would be 100 times bigger.

Most of the people who were murdered because of the CIA we're not murdered by CIA agents, although some were. An incomplete list includes between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesians, at least 200,000 Guatemalans, several thousand Chileans, some tens of thousands of Uruguayans, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and worst of all somewhere between 5 million and 10 million Congolese.

But who's counting?

The CIA aspired to even worse, for example attempting to ignite a civil war in Ukraine. Only a few dozen people were killed in that operation but only because the CIA cannot maintain security. Had the agency got what it wanted, millions would have died.

It is clear that Gina Haspel was not telling the truth to Congress and it is easy to see why.

Pot goes to pot

Oregon is growing too much ganja and the sellers are complaining.

They have forgotten the adage of Freewheelin' Franklin:

Dope will get you through times no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.

I am not a user myself but my using friends say that's correct.

And thanks to Gilbert Shelton, greatest of the underground cartoonists.

Dangerous liaisons

What's really going on:

Rudy Giuliani, who was turned down 4 times by Trump for plum jobs, took his revenge by becoming Trump's lawyer and throwing him under the bus.

Choderlos de Laclos got nuttin' on us, baby.

The law and order party

Worth reading.

UPDATE Wednesday

And, as if on cue to confirm the premise of the original story, Mike Pence praises that champion of law and order Joe Arpaio.

Time for all decent Republicans -- if there are any -- to stand up and complain.

How stupid can Netanyahu be?

Awful damn stupid. The NYTimes has a piece about his presentation to show (to an audience of one, WBD) how Iran really does too have a sekrit bomb factory for making the atom bombs.

And they have evidence -- sketches!

 They took twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles
And arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each
One was, to be used as evidence against us. Took pictures of the approach
The getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that's not to
Mention the aerial photography

No, not that evidence. Real gummint evidence:

A decade ago, in early 2008, the chief inspector of the International Atomic Energy Agency gathered diplomats from around the world to a meeting at the agency’s Vienna headquarters and showed them images from a similar trove, including sketches of bomb designs and memos and budget documents from Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s project. That presentation included sketches of a “spherical device” that could be detonated using high explosives, similar to plans Mr. Netanyahu showed on Monday.

The I.A.E.A. presentation included documents showing the arc of a missile that detonates a warhead at an altitude of about 600 meters, roughly that at which the Hiroshima bomb was detonated.

Mr. Netanyahu went beyond that on Monday, and brandished what he described as Iranian plans to build up to five nuclear weapons.

A spherical device, eh? Like this?

Everybody who ever took a physics class is ROTFL. Me too who never took a physics class.

Netanyahu no doubt used his sekrit decoder ring to translate the Iranian documents:

Can you steal a free newspaper?

Free if you can find it

Possibly not but it is well-established that if you take a lot of them you may be guilty of some crime or other -- perhaps malicious mischief.

The thought arises from a report in the Los Angeles Times (which I have not seen anywhere else even though it happened weeks ago) about a longish sentence (15 months) for a computer geek who made and gave away (or sold) restore disks that Microsoft gives away.

I'd like to know more; it sure sounds like entrapment, with a hint that MS inspired the sting.

The judges appear to have acted like idiots; the idea that people take free stuff and sell it is long established; and as long as people are willing to pay for what they can get for free, ain't that capitalism? (If you want an example, this is morel season and you'll pay a stiff price for them even though the seller got them for nothing.)

I tend to think the defendant is right when he says: "I don't think anybody in that courtroom understood what a restore disc was."

Reverence for $$$

In a really terrible story, the New York Times calls Hank Greenberg a revered Wall Street titan.

Considering the complete lack of morality and realism on Wall Street, this characterization is no doubt accurate enough but for newspaper readers it calls for some context.

Greenberg was head of A much larger fraud then Bernie Madoff ever dreamed of running. It was called American Insurance Group and it was the world's largest Insurance company. It also ran a bunch of other businesses -- a giant combination that was a festival of fraud.

It also was one of the handful of American corporations that started 2008 with a AAA credit rating:entirely undeserved as is Greenberg's venerated status on Wall Street.

Greenberg is a classic example of what RtO calls the Fireproof Hotel Syndrome: an incompetent and a fool who had a longish run because capitalism, despite its founding myth about how ruthless it is, in fact does not punish incompetence -- at least not always and not immediately.

Let us recall what the AIG business actually consisted of just before the Bush crash in October 2008. There was a division called Financial Products which was insuring derivatives to the tune of trillions of dollars and had set aside $0.00 as a loss reserve. Let that sink in for a moment: Greenberg, the most respected insurance man in the country in September 2008, had a division that was exposing his company to hundreds of billions of dollars in losses and he set aside $0.00 as a loss reserve.

It might have been supportable if AIG had crashed over that -- as it would have if the government had not given it $180 billion dollars to tide it over. What is not well understood is that AiG also had total control over the commercial paper market in the United States.

It was the realization by federal regulators that if AIG went down it would take down the commercial paper market the caused panic among the regulators and led to the bailouts.

Commercial paper is a sonkish sort of a subject. It is a huge market and the most liquid in the world, even more so than US Treasury securities. Corporations that need cash borrow overnight from corporations that have cash in hand because their incoming and outgoing are not perfectly synchronized

American businesses cannot operate for two days without a functioning market for commercial paper.

Greenberg was an incompetent as he demonstrated or was demonstrated for him in 2008, but his interview with the New York Times proves that he is a fool because he learned nothing.

So, sure, Wall Street reveres him: he walked away from the wreck with a huge personal fortune. There's nothing Wall Street reveres more.