“Keep away old man,
You won’t fool me!
You and your history
Wanna rule me!” 
Alternatively, Adam Kinzinger, former United States Air Force and Air National Guard officer, has a very cogent analysis of just how illegal that second attack was. Not to mention barbaric and heinous. As a combat pilot, he knows a thing or two about the rules of engagement.
Note also, Kinzinger retired after twenty years with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, which outranks Hegseth as an army Major. Kinzinger is 47, Hegseth is 45.
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I would think anyone with a scintilla of military training would have major alarms and explosions going on within their psyche, knowing full well this is prosecutable. The administration thinks it will get away with all of this because they plan on being in charge for a very long time. That long time might only be until March.
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Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is a national treasure.
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Maybe under the rules of war. Which must, by the US Constitution, actually be declared. By Congress. Got any of those, Petey? No? Then you’re just a terrorist goon.
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For sure, but just to be clear killing unarmed helpless people bobbing in the middle of the ocean is against the rules of war. It’s as if at the end of a battle a bunch of soldiers on the losing side surrendered, put down their weapons, hands in the air, and the winners just machine-gunned them.
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There’s no way, said Schroeder and Jacquez, there could be widespread data manipulation from the executive branch without acute public outcry.
The manipulation isn’t the “just make up some shit that will make the dictator/politburo happy that everyone else knows is bullshit” kind of manipulation that was the norm in the Soviet bloc and still goes on in China to some extent. It is the subtle kind that often operates at an entirely subconscious level every time someone exercises discretion in the collection, analysis and, above all, publication timing and use, of the data by everyone from the survey hires to the administrator and on up to the ultimate consumer, the Fed. And since January and to an increasing degree, the basic human impulse to avoid trouble where possible and avoid it when it is not will drive people to exercise whatever discretion they have in favor of not drawing the ire of the angry baby-monster to oneself. Even people resolved to resign if some red line demand is made of them are going to bend on the little discretionary calls.
That’s the distortion that is certainly occurring and that will only get worse for at least another year. And it is the cumulative effect of all of those hundreds or thousands of discretionary decisions that are all determined by the same external factor that will slowly build up into the kind of reality distortion field that only becomes perceptible to people assuring us we know we aren’t in big trouble because there are no mass resignations when they’re taken completely by surprise by a financial meltdown.
That same process is occurring in every single government agency. Including CIA, NSA and DNI. This not a new observation. And there’s a famous quote from Orwell’s essay “In Front of Your Nose" that explains exactly this process ends:
The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
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