Mark Stout

My God. I just read DNI Tulsi Gabbard's "Russia Hoax memo." It is so monumentally unpersuasive. The vast majority of it, in fact, boils down to "the IC said A didn't and couldn't happen but later the IC said X happened. This contradiction is nefarious." It's not a contradiction!

Great story from @spytalker.bsky.social and Michael Isikoff . Former head of CIA counterintelligence who headed the CIA team writing the 2016 election intelligence community assessment denies the claim in the recent tradecraft review that Brennan cooked the books.

Well, yesterday I wrote all of one paragraph for the book I'm working on. But in the process I rooted around deep in Ancestry[dot]com and I had to learn a bit about Austrian nobility to understand what I'd found. So, I don't feel tooooo bad about the very modest progress. That's my claim. Yes.

This should be a useful resource.

Why was the Pentagon summoning the Papal nuncio (ambassador) for a demarche? Isn't that State Department territory?

I live in Virginia and it's been remarkable to see how slimy and mendacious the ads and text messages against Proposition 21, the redistricting proposition, are.

It’s worth remembering that in a country of 340 million people about any insane or evil thing you can think of is happening more or less now somewhere. Finding incidents to stoke outrage about broad groups of people is a trivial endeavor.

Things in the news now are reminding me that one of Saddam Hussein's talking points inside his regime was that Iraq won the 1991 war because it survived the US and coalition air campaign which was even more devastating, he said, than what Israel did to Egypt in 1967.

Does Iran's authority to charge a transit fee through an international strait create precedents that could be used elsewhere in the world? What is the legal status of this?

This is remarkable.

Very cool.