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So another batch of Trump picks are virual idiots! That's the view of long-time chronicler of the spy agency the CIA, Tim Weiner. His latest book "The Mission" is due out next week. As he states in an interview in today's Guardian -   imagine spending years as an intelligence officer, working diligently to subvert the Kremlin, only to watch the US stand with Russia, Iran and North Korea, as it did in February when it voted against a UN resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine. In that moment, Weiner said: “You come to the realization, if you hadn’t already: ‘My God, the president of the United States has gone over to the other side. He has joined the authoritarian axis.’” Wener has followed the CIA for some 40 years as a former national security correspondent for The New York Times. With his rolodex filled with insiders prepared to leak out little bits and pieces, he knows a great deal of what he writes. Not all is about Trump. In fact he spends a good deal of the book examining the CIA's many failures. Although he does not go back as far as the first overseas foray when it overthrew the legitimately elected Prime Minister of Iran and what all that was eventually to lead with the Isalmic Revoution, it failed to spot the rise of Al-Qaida, it had incorrect intel about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, it knew little about what became the Arab Spring and "other screw ups". "But it’s the book’s final chapters, which find the organization blindsided by Russia’s influence operation on behalf of Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency, that readers may find most striking. Weeks before the election, Russia’s intelligence services, with an assist from WikiLeaks, began releasing a trove of hacked Democratic National Committee emails, dealing a devastating blow to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It was, as Weiner puts it in The Mission, “an audacious act of political warfare [that] helped elect a demagogue president of the United States”. Weiner dismisses the theory that Trump is a Russian asset, but says it’s beside the point. “He’s Russia’s ally.” Another little gem from the book - “Donald Trump hates the CIA,” Weiner said, noting that Trump considers the agency the beating heart of a “deep state” that he believes is working to undermine him. Consequently, the president has appointed “a coterie of dangerously incompetent and servile acolytes to the highest positions of national security”. Weiner describes the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe – a former personal injury attorney, Maga congressman and, briefly, director of national intelligence in Trump’s first term – as “a spineless person who will do whatever Trump tells him to do . . . He’s attempting to rid the CIA of its most experienced officers,” Weiner said, “and to impose ideological purity tests. Ratcliffe said explicitly from the get-go that he aimed to align the leadership of the CIA with the president’s view of the world. Since the president’s view of the world is largely based on falsehoods and imaginary enemies, I think this will be an extremely difficult task.” He concludes the interview -  “What keeps me up at night,” he [Weiner] continued, “is the fact that Trump has put the instruments of American national security in the hands of crackpots and fools, and that their incompetence and ideological blinkers will blind them to a coming attack. If the United States gets hit again under Trump, he will destroy what is left of our democracy.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/15/tim-weiner-cia-trump

It was my first meeting with the famous @vinapu and it was indeed extremely pleasant. He is a fascinating guy. Discussion of debaucheries will no doubt come when we next meet 🤣 🤣 

The animals behaved better LOL

That has always been the PR about the treatment. Yet in my case, in spite of the men in generations of my family being bald, the effect of Minoxodil did not wane - more than  tiny fraction. Maybe because i had been using it for about 10 years?

Just on a brief side note, I referred in a separate thread to my first job as a trainee with the BBC in London. On our first morning we were told that if you asked anyone in the Corporation the time and they said 11:15, that did not mean the 15th minute after the 11th hour. It meant the 15th second after the 11th minute. It was always assumed that everyone would know at least what the hour was! The reasoning was that many programmes in those days were beamed 'live' and when fitting into tight programme schedules from a variety of studios, seconds were vital. I believe the same would have been true in that horrendous crash.