I post this essay with two additional links to secondary essays—more difficult than our usual literary standard here, but well worth the efforts of the more thoughtful posters—and I post this as the Final Word on Donald Trump and his methodology. I use that “Final Word” aware that the FBI has been investigating whether Trump is legally an asset of Vladimir Putin (he certainly is, and no one can deny it!) and that Trump’s actual Final Word may not be too far in the future. Remember, the FBI has massive sources he rest of us lack, and clarity and guilt will someday be displayed for all to see. Thank FATE and JUSTICE for that!

Remember that while we have witnessed Trump following Putin’a desires in attacks on NATO and the G-Seven, lending himself to the opportunity to abandon South Korea (as Putin wishes) and validating Putin’s attacks on Ukraine and possible future attacks pending, and his justifying other Putin moves as a sort of President Of The United States in charge of Public Relations For Vladimir Putin And His Actions, Donald Trump is a man unknown to Truth, a stranger to it, and in fact a man who ignores it as a meaningless complication unworthy of notice and an actual detriment to profit, unlimited confused action and Corruption in general.

As Michael Cohen was Donald Trump’s “fixer,” Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin’s public voice within the USA, his Fixer, using all public resources, prestige, and Ominous Authority of the US Presidency.

Read below wearing mental rubber gloves, and be prepared to watch truth sprout before your eyes, lighted by philosophical inquiry, ruthless examination, and clear and careful examination.

Be prepared to be bruised and enlightened, and to fear.


Donald Trump Just Cannot Help It

The Reichstag fire was at least a fire. Here, there is smoke and mirrors.

By Roger Cohen
Opinion Columnist
Jan. 11,2019

Watching the Trump show from the distance afforded by my brief leave of absence has been like watching a frenzy of ants. It’s hypnotic, in part because it appears devoid of meaning. Keep your eye on the bouncing ball, goes the adage. But what if the ball is a blur?

When Trump was in business, his shtick was stiffing contractors. If confronted, he would try some bombast and storm out of meetings, as he did the other day with congressional leaders, ending talks on the partial government shutdown caused by a crisis he has manufactured. His shtick now is stiffing all Americans. The technique is the same: Keep reality at a distance through hyperactive fakery.

I have been fascinated by Trump’s compulsion. Like birds feasting on mangled flesh in the middle of the road, he cannot help it. Like travelers beset with reflex gluttony in airline lounges, he cannot help it. Like the sulking child denied a video, he cannot help it.

Like the dog that returns to its vomit, he cannot help it. Like a puppet on a string, he cannot help it. Like the scorpion that stings the frog ferrying it across the torrent, he cannot help it. It’s his nature, you see.

A manufactured crisis, I said. It’s worth recalling the 5,200 troops ordered to the southern border before the midterm elections to confront the “caravan of migrants.” This was an exercise in manipulative illusion.

Monthly crossings over the southern border have declined in recent years. The number of migrants apprehended has also fallen over the past decade, with a recent tick upward. There is no humanitarian crisis, just as not a single mile of additional wall has been built since Trump took office. But absent this noise, what does reality offer the president? Robert Mueller, Nancy Pelosi and Michael Cohen, the specters of his insomnia.

One of the books I read while away included Harry G. Frankfurt’s seminal essay, “On Bullshit.” http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf Here I must excuse myself with readers who may find the bull word offensive. Please look away from the rest of this column. There really is no alternative to it, for Donald Trump is the Michelangelo of bullshit artists.
The essential distinction that Frankfurt, a professor of philosophy emeritus at Princeton University, makes is between lies and bull. As he writes, “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.”

It is a habit “unconstrained by a concern with truth” whose essence is “not of falsity but of fakery.” The addict of bull “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” He is “trying to get away with something.” His “focus is panoramic rather than particular,” and he shuns “the more austere and rigorous demands of lying.”

Frankfurt’s conclusion may be read as an ominous verdict on this president. The bull merchant “does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

It has been said that Trump’s extraordinary election victory owed much to his intuitions about the anger in the heartland. There is some truth in this. But his essential intuition was into the readiness of Americans, suspended between the real and the virtual, for a post-truth presidency.

Quinta Jurecic, in an important essay https://www.lawfareblog.com/bullshit-and-oath-office-lol-nothing-matters-presidency for the Lawfare Blog, set out the dangers inherent in this shift before Trump took office. In the essay, “On Bullshit and the Oath of Office: The ‘LOL Nothing Matters’ Presidency,” she cited Frankfurt and argued that Trump’s “foundational disrespect for meaning and consequence” — that is to say, for reality and the very concept of law — would make it “impossible for Donald Trump to faithfully execute the laws of this nation and the duties of the oath of office and to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.”

The president’s apparent readiness to “do national emergency,” as he put it, over a manufactured border crisis amounts to a perfect illustration of this danger. The Reichstag fire was at least a fire. Here there is only smoke and mirrors.

I would add one element to the reflections of Frankfurt and Jurecic on bull. There may be something amusing, or at least innocuous, about the bullshit artists encountered in a lifetime. They may be waved away. But in Trump the element of sadistic cruelty in his personality (mocking the disabled, for example), and the sheer gall of his fakery, make of him a malignant, rather than a benign, bullshit artist. He happens to occupy the world’s most powerful office.

Trump cannot help himself, I said. He can’t and won’t. But as citizens, “we have a duty to insist that words have meaning,” as Jurecic writes. If they don’t, neither does the Republic. That’s what the ants told me as I gazed at them, troubled and fixated.


Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.


Roger Cohen has been a columnist for The Times since 2009. His columns appear Wednesday and Saturday. He joined The Times in 1990, and has served as a foreign correspondent and foreign editor. @NYTimesCohen



https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/opinion/donald-trump-illegal-immigration-border-wall.html

F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia

By Adam Goldman, Michael S. Schmidt and Nicholas Fandos
Jan. 11, 2019

WASHINGTON — In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

The investigation the F.B.I. opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known: whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.

Agents and senior F.B.I. officials had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign but held off on opening an investigation into him, the people said, in part because they were uncertain how to proceed with an inquiry of such sensitivity and magnitude. But the president’s activities before and after Mr. Comey’s firing in May 2017, particularly two instances in which Mr. Trump tied the Comey dismissal to the Russia investigation, helped prompt the counterintelligence aspect of the inquiry, the people said.

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, took over the inquiry into Mr. Trump when he was appointed, days after F.B.I. officials opened it. That inquiry is part of Mr. Mueller’s broader examination of how Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with them. It is unclear whether Mr. Mueller is still pursuing the counterintelligence matter, and some former law enforcement officials outside the investigation have questioned whether agents overstepped in opening it.

The criminal and counterintelligence elements were coupled together into one investigation, former law enforcement officials said in interviews in recent weeks, because if Mr. Trump had ousted the head of the F.B.I. to impede or even end the Russia investigation, that was both a possible crime and a national security concern. The F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division handles national security matters.

If the president had fired Mr. Comey to stop the Russia investigation, the action would have been a national security issue because it naturally would have hurt the bureau’s effort to learn how Moscow interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Americans were involved, according to James A. Baker, who served as F.B.I. general counsel until late 2017. He privately testified in October before House investigators who were examining the F.B.I.’s handling of the full Russia inquiry.

“Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security,” Mr. Baker said in his testimony, portions of which were read to The New York Times. Mr. Baker did not explicitly acknowledge the existence of the investigation of Mr. Trump to congressional investigators.

No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials. An F.B.I. spokeswoman and a spokesman for the special counsel’s office both declined to comment.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer for the president, sought to play down the significance of the investigation. “The fact that it goes back a year and a half and nothing came of it that showed a breach of national security means they found nothing,” Mr. Giuliani said on Friday, though he acknowledged that he had no insight into the inquiry.

The cloud of the Russia investigation has hung over Mr. Trump since even before he took office, though he has long vigorously denied any illicit connection to Moscow. The obstruction inquiry, revealed by The Washington Post a few weeks after Mr. Mueller was appointed, represented a direct threat that he was unable to simply brush off as an overzealous examination of a handful of advisers. But few details have been made public about the counterintelligence aspect of the investigation.

The decision to investigate Mr. Trump himself was an aggressive move by F.B.I. officials who were confronting the chaotic aftermath of the firing of Mr. Comey and enduring the president’s verbal assaults on the Russia investigation as a “witch hunt.”

A vigorous debate has taken shape among some former law enforcement officials outside the case over whether F.B.I. investigators overreacted in opening the counterintelligence inquiry during a tumultuous period at the Justice Department. Other former officials noted that those critics were not privy to all of the evidence and argued that sitting on it would have been an abdication of duty.

The F.B.I. conducts two types of inquiries, criminal and counterintelligence investigations. Unlike criminal investigations, which are typically aimed at solving a crime and can result in arrests and convictions, counterintelligence inquiries are generally fact-finding missions to understand what a foreign power is doing and to stop any anti-American activity, like thefts of United States government secrets or covert efforts to influence policy. In most cases, the investigations are carried out quietly, sometimes for years. Often, they result in no arrests.

Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.

Other factors fueled the F.B.I.’s concerns, according to the people familiar with the inquiry. Christopher Steele, a former British spy who worked as an F.B.I. informant, had compiled memos in mid-2016 containing unsubstantiated claims that Russian officials tried to obtain influence over Mr. Trump by preparing to blackmail and bribe him.

In the months before the 2016 election, the F.B.I. was also already investigating four of Mr. Trump’s associates over their ties to Russia. The constellation of events disquieted F.B.I. officials who were simultaneously watching as Russia’s campaign unfolded to undermine the presidential election by exploiting existing divisions among Americans.

“In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself, you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability, America’s ability and the West’s ability to spread our democratic ideals,” Lisa Page, a former bureau lawyer, told House investigators in private testimony reviewed by The Times.

“That’s the goal, to make us less of a moral authority to spread democratic values,” she added. Parts of her testimony were first reported by The Epoch Times.

And when a newly inaugurated Mr. Trump sought a loyalty pledge from Mr. Comey and later asked that he end an investigation into the president’s national security adviser, the requests set off discussions among F.B.I. officials about opening an inquiry into whether Mr. Trump had tried to obstruct that case.

But law enforcement officials put off the decision to open the investigation until they had learned more, according to people familiar with their thinking. As for a counterintelligence inquiry, they concluded that they would need strong evidence to take the sensitive step of investigating the president, and they were also concerned that the existence of such an inquiry could be leaked to the news media, undermining the entire investigation into Russia’s meddling in the election.

After Mr. Comey was fired on May 9, 2017, two more of Mr. Trump’s actions prompted them to quickly abandon those reservations.

The first was a letter Mr. Trump wanted to send to Mr. Comey about his firing, but never did, in which he mentioned the Russia investigation. In the letter, Mr. Trump thanked Mr. Comey for previously telling him he was not a subject of the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation.

Even after the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, wrote a more restrained draft of the letter and told Mr. Trump that he did not have to mention the Russia investigation — Mr. Comey’s poor handling of the Clinton email investigation would suffice as a fireable offense, he explained — Mr. Trump directed Mr. Rosenstein to mention the Russia investigation anyway.

He disregarded the president’s order, irritating Mr. Trump. The president ultimately added a reference to the Russia investigation to the note he had delivered, thanking Mr. Comey for telling him three times that he was not under investigation.

The second event that troubled investigators was an NBC News interview two days after Mr. Comey’s firing in which Mr. Trump appeared to say he had dismissed Mr. Comey because of the Russia inquiry.

“I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it,” he said. “And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”

Mr. Trump’s aides have said that a fuller examination of his comments demonstrates that he did not fire Mr. Comey to end the Russia inquiry. “I might even lengthen out the investigation, but I have to do the right thing for the American people,” Mr. Trump added. “He’s the wrong man for that position.”

As F.B.I. officials debated whether to open the investigation, some of them pushed to move quickly before Mr. Trump appointed a director who might slow down or even end their investigation into Russia’s interference. Many involved in the case viewed Russia as the chief threat to American democratic values.

“With respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life,” Ms. Page told investigators for a joint House Judiciary and Oversight Committee investigation into Moscow’s election interference.

F.B.I. officials viewed their decision to move quickly as validated when a comment the president made to visiting Russian officials in the Oval Office shortly after he fired Mr. Comey was revealed days later.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to a document summarizing the meeting. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/us/politics/fbi-trump-russia-inquiry.html

Have you announced you’ve lost your mind?

we were‘t talking cancer!

There’s no comparison at all between the two ideas. That’s silly!

Crossings are at a 45 year low, and have declined for the last decade.

There is no crisis at the southern border, and all this is a tickle to Trumlp’s base, keeping them riled up to fight his impeachment when it occurs.

You are wandering in a blizzard of ignorance, and have left rationality.

I’ve posted enough experts on this site to make my point with any rational person.

If you don’t fit that, there’s nothing more i can do.

I can’t decide whether you’re talking about the Alamo or today’s “invasion,” but there was no US Army at the Alamo, so I guess you’re hoping for the invasion of widows and toddlers.

When those twenty-something widows and their toddlers overpower the US Army, we’ll have nothing left to worry over.

We are not bleeding! Crossings are at a 45 year low!! They’ve been going down for a decade!

And the majority of crossings are people FLYING in, not crossing to border on foot.

Sorry, you have it wrong.

3

Well sonny, you put words in my mouth. That ain’t kosher, is it?

I never said the wall didn’t stave off disaster for a day, or even for 13 days, but that it was a futile effort and everybody ended up dead, right?

Besides being too dim to see this for yourself, you are also dishonest in trying to manipulate what I said.

So...they held out for 13 days, which is longer than they could ever have lasted in the open, unprotected.

But they still died 13 days later, which is no time at all.

Remember, you don’t get to tell me who I love or who I hate, and you don’t get to tell me what I think; you don’t know these things unless I tell you, and then there’s no percentage in repeating it back to me.

But common decency and honesty demand that you not put words in my mouth, or try to make me say something I didn’t say, or manipulate or change something I said.

You don’t have much respect here, but you’ll have even less doing that.

...very succussfully? The Great Wall of China? The Great Wall of Athens?

Well, you know, I have listed many that failed. As the article says, Walls aren’t about security, but about theater.

They aren’t about making you safe, but fooling you into believing you are safe—not the same thing.

You fail to mention—perhaps to notice—that wall has caused war from the day it was built until today, and still counting. It brought no peace.

There are more than one way for a wall to fail, and this wall fails, too.

But they didn’t die of old age, did they?

Who do you think won that engagement?

That wall is still standing, but it didn’t do them a damn bit of good, did it?

But you always read it, don’t you?

And even if you don’t, the argument you raised is answered for others to read.

Who the hell cares if You read it?

AND, I didn’t lose the debate, either.

Still Wrongo, lil buckaroo; see this:

https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-573177-1.html

World of walls: How 65 countries have erected fences on their borders – four times as many as when the Berlin Wall was toppled – as governments try to hold back the tide of migrants

Security fears and a widespread refusal to help refugees have fuelled a new spate of wall-building around the world

A third of the world's countries have completed or are building barriers – compared to 16 at the fall of the Berlin Wall

They include Israel's 'apartheid wall', India's 2,500-mile fence around Bangladesh and Morocco's huge sand 'berm'

Experts are dismissive, saying: 'Their main function is theatre. They provide the sense of security, not real security'

By SIMON TOMLINSON FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 14:56 EST, 21 August 2015 | UPDATED: 03:55 EST, 22 August 2015


Globalisation was supposed to tear down barriers, but security fears and a widespread refusal to help migrants and refugees have fuelled a new spate of wall-building across the world, with a third of the world's countries constructing them along their borders. 
When the Berlin Wall was torn down a quarter-century ago, there were 16 border fences around the world. 
Today, there are 65 either completed or under construction, according to Quebec University expert Elisabeth Vallet.


From Israel's separation barrier (or 'apartheid wall' as it is known by the Palestinians), to the 2,500-mile barbed-wire fence India is building around Bangladesh, to the enormous sand 'berm' that separates Morocco from rebel-held parts of the Western Sahara – walls and fences are ever-more popular with politicians wanting to look tough on migration and security.

US presidential hopeful Donald Trump has made plans for a wall along the border with Mexico – to keep out what he called 'criminals, drug dealers, rapists' – central to his inflammatory campaign.

Yet experts say there is little proof of their effectiveness in stopping people crossing borders. 

In July, Hungary's right-wing government began building a four-metre-high (13 feet) fence along its border with Serbia to stanch the flow of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

'We have only recently taken down walls in Europe; we should not be putting them up,' was one EU spokesperson's exasperated response.

Three other countries – Kenya, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – are all constructing border fences in a bid to keep out jihadist groups next door in Somalia, Iraq and Syria.

Seven miles of barrier have already been erected along the border at Reyhanli town in Hatay province - a main point for smuggling and border-crossing from Syria - the private Dogan news agency said. 

The fence in Turkey will eventually stretch for 28 miles along a key stretch of its border with Syria. 

But the Turkish wall pales into insignificance when compared to the multi-layered fence which will one day stretch 600 miles from Jordan to Kuwait along Saudi's border with Iraq - a line of defence against ISIS.

But in spite of the aggressive symbolism, it is not clear that walls are truly effective.

'The one thing all these walls have in common is that their main function is theatre,' said Marcello Di Cintio, author of 'Walls: Travels Along the Barricades'.

'You can't dismiss that illusion, it's important to people, but they provide the sense of security, not real security.'

The limits of their effectiveness are visible everywhere - not least, with the migrants and refugees sitting on top of the fence along the border with Morocco and the small Spanish enclave of Mellila, on the North African coast.
Even the fearsome Berlin Wall with its trigger-happy sentries still leaked thousands of refugees even in its most forbidding years.

Supporters of walls say a few leaks are better than a flood. But, Di Cintio argues we must also consider the psychological price they exact.

He cites the Native American Tohono O'odham tribe, whose elders started to die off in apparent grief when the Mexican border fence cut them off from their ceremonial sites.

Their story carries shades of the 'wall disease' diagnosed by Berlin psychologist Dietfried Muller-Hegemann in the 1970s after he found heightened levels of depression, alcoholism and domestic abuse among those living in the shadow of the barricade.

Di Cintio also talked to Bangladeshi farmers suddenly cut off from their neighbours when India erected the simple barbed-wire fence between them in the last decade. 

Within a few months, he said, they had started expressing distrust and dislike for 'those people' on the other side.

'I was struck every time at how a structure so simple as a wall or fence can have these profound psychological effects,' says Di Cintio. 

At a localised level, a wall offers more security than no wall.

But they do little to address the roots of insecurity and migration – global asylum applications and terrorist attacks have risen hugely despite the flurry of wall-building. 

Rather, they just force groups to adapt.

They are mostly effective against the poorest and most desperate, says Reece Jones, a University of Hawaii professor and author of 'Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India and Israel'.
'Well-funded drug cartels and terrorist groups are not affected by walls at all because they have the resources to enter by safer methods, most likely using fake documents,' he said.

Shutting down border crossings only 'funnels immigrants to more dangerous routes through the deserts of the US southwest or on rickety boats across the Mediterranean. 

'The substantial increase in deaths at borders is the predictable result,' said Jones.

More than 40,000 people have died trying to migrate since 2000, the International Organisation for Migration said last year.

Real border control comes only through the slow, exhaustive work of building ties and sharing information with other countries, says Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, from Canada's University of Victoria.

'But with the intense flows of people we see today, walls are perhaps necessary for politicians.

'They tap into old myths about what borders should be – the line in the sand – which humans relate to,' he said.

'It's a lot more difficult for people to accept that diplomatic cooperation and sharing databases are much more effective in the long term.'



https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3205724/How-65-countries-erected-security-walls-borders.html

Wrongo, lil buckaroo.