Introduction

Well, I'm doing it. I created another blog. I have a gaming blog that's been running for 9 1/2 years at this point, but any other blog I've started has died. This one is different, because I need a place to vent in the Age of Trump. Instead of letting some perfectly good links get lost in history, I thought I'd put them here.

Also, with everyone flip-flopping their positions based on the personality of President Donald J. Trump, I thought I'd record mine here and try to work out what I believe. Sometimes our president does things I like, and sometimes I want to put my head through my desk. I want to record the important stuff I need to think through instead of the fluff designed to outrage the audience.

Let me bring up the example that led me to create this new blog today. A very smart lady posted an article from CNN in a Discord server I hang out in. The subject was corruption in the Trump administration.

A day after CNN reported that the Justice Department is investigating whether Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has broken the law by using his office to personally enrich himself, national security adviser John Bolton told the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington that ethics rules make it hard for people outside of the government to serve.

Bolton said "things have gotten more bureaucratic, harder to get things done" since he served under President George H.W. Bush in the 1990s and blamed the difficulty, in part, on the "excessive nature of the so-called ethics checks."

"If you were designing a system to discourage people from coming into government, you would do it this way," Bolton said.

"That risks building up a priestly class" of government employees, he added.

"It's really depressing to see," Bolton said of the bureaucratic red tape.

I decided to fact check the article, because I don't fully trust CNN. The "most trusted name in news" oftentimes slants their reporting to fit a narrative. So I went to Google News and did a search on Bolton Alexander Hamilton Society. The coverage of Bolton's appearance was a lot different than CNN's take on the event.

Bloomberg: Bolton Calls National Debt ‘Economic Threat’ to U.S.

U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton called the national debt a “threat to the society” that requires significant cuts to the government’s discretionary spending.

Bolton, speaking Wednesday at an event hosted by the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington, said he expects U.S. defense spending “to flatten out” in the near term. He said he didn’t anticipate major cuts to entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security.

“It is a fact that when your national debt gets to the level ours is, that it constitutes an economic threat to the society,” Bolton said. “And that kind of threat ultimately has a national security consequence for it.”

Washington Post: Bolton says U.S. is conducting ‘offensive cyber’ action to thwart would-be election distrupters

The United States is “right now undertaking offensive cyber operations” to safeguard next week’s midterm elections, though it was “too soon to tell” whether they are having an effect, White House national security adviser John Bolton said Wednesday.

Though Bolton did not specify the operation’s nature, U.S. Cyber Command has begun signaling to Russian operatives that their identities are known — an implicit warning not to attempt to disrupt American politics. The Washington Post and other media reported on those developments last week.

The offensive cyber actions were aimed at “defending the integrity of our electoral process . . . and our adversaries [had] better know that and better understand that,” said Bolton, speaking in Washington at an event sponsored by the Alexander Hamilton Society.

The Economic Times: China engaging in behaviour that is troubling Japan, India and others: Bolton 

"China's current policies, like in the South China Sea, are nearly belligerent in many respects. It is also engaging in a behaviour that is troubling to Japan, Taiwan, India and the Central Asian Republics," Bolton said in response to a question at the Alexander Hamilton Society on Wednesday.

Bolton said that the arguments for China joining the World Trade Organisation was that it would become a more market-oriented rules-based society.

Instead, for 20 years, China has continued to steal American technology, discriminated against foreign trade investment, and against internal economic systems.

Bolton said that China can no longer get away with this. 

Lots of real news out there about substantive policy issues we may see play out in Trump's final two years. And what does CNN do? Focus on their ongoing narrative.

Perhaps I'm being unfair to CNN and either Google News just isn't showing a second article on Bolton's speech or I didn't go far enough down the list. But ranting about this helps get it out of my system.