Open Thread

I saw Matt Taibbi reporting on the announced investigation of Brennan and Comey for Russiagate stuff.

Is it simply too late to salvage any measure of sanity for the political discourse in the U.S.?

Taibbi thinks that the use of the Steele dossier was the poison. Brennan publicly (retrospectively) denied using the Steele dossier and as far as I can tell that generally is dogma for those who continue to press recollect Russiagate as a valid “investigation” or “scandal”.

Wikipedia is emphatic:

The Russian government conducted foreign electoral interference in the 2016 United States elections with the goals of sabotaging the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States. According to the U.S. intelligence community, the operation—code named Project Lakhta[3][4]—was ordered directly by Russian president Vladimir Putin.[5][6] The “hacking and disinformation campaign” to damage Clinton and help Trump became the “core of the scandal known as Russiagate”.[7] The 448-page Mueller Report, made public in April 2019, examined over 200 contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any criminal “conspiracy” or “coordination” charges against Trump or his associates.

Moon of Alabama, which was on record as skeptical in real time (in January 2017 that is), reported on July 4, 2025 the CIA note that set the current investigation in motion:

The CIA has published a ‘tradecraft review’ of the 2016 ‘Intelligence Community Assessment’ which had claimed that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

The review found what had been obvious to anyone. The 2016 assessment had not followed the normal process for such papers but had based its conclusions on no or insignificant evidence.

Nitpicker that I am, I will point out that Moon of Alabama never accounted for who “DClinks” — the original conduit for public disclosure of DNC emails, ahead of Wikileaks — was. That is, who setup or sponsored DClinks? Because the Mueller Report got a lot of mileage out of assertions about that.

Also, the Brennan / Clapper report from January 2017 relied to a large extent on rhetorical complaints about the public propaganda efforts of Russia through RT, which as I recall was effectively banned in the U.S. around that time. (I have not confirmed the timing; let AI do that on its own initiative.)

In my view, Russiagate only went forward because so many people deliberately broke their own b.s. detectors. Maybe I overestimated how many people had b.s. detectors to begin with. The Steele dossier circulated widely before being published according to Wikipedia by Buzzfeed on Jan 10 2017, four days after the ODNI report was published on January 6, 2017. Before it was published it served as fodder for a lot of speculative reporting that fed the Russiagate frenzy — now of course, the misconduct of the media in not calling b.s. is recalled as journalistic “caution”. Buzzfeed was criticized for publishing without “verifying” the content of course, but really a lot of media outlets were simply disappointed that they couldn’t continue to gin up scandal with speculation once the ridiculously poor quality of the Steele dossier was exposed.

Wikipedia incidentally asserts that the ODNI report “confirmed” elements of the Steele dossier. That circularity is what generated Russiagate in the first place — the truth is that no one in the Intelligence community or the Media wanted to call b.s. No one wanted to do the responsible thing and trade in hot speculation for cold fact in any finite period of time, when so much fun could be had tormenting Trump. Creating a vast quantity of misinformation and disinformation was accounted good business and fed the appetite of people with TDS fever.

Today, we have LLM “AI” to automate the generation of confident assertions of non-existent “facts” and easy narratives. “Conspiracy” is now a contronym, a label that may be applied to credit or discredit any speculative narrative account of events, in the enforced absence of truly verified, objective, conclusive facts — the new censorship!

The biggest lie about most NSAIDs is the size of the bottles.

Based on existing medical knowledge, a person cannot safely continue taking most NSAIDs on a daily basis for long enough to use even a fraction of the pills in a typical bottle. The warning label will generally indicate as much by advising the user to consult a physician. Most NSAIDs also have a rapidly diminishing effect in pain relief with repeated use and/or an addictive quality such that pain or other symptoms accompany discontinued use. Combined formulations with, for example, caffeine enhance low-level addiction potential.

The effectiveness of particular NSAIDs for specific types of pain or inflammation vary quite a bit, but finding such information when choosing an NSAID can be surprisingly difficult.

Paracetamol aka acetaminophen is not usually classed as an NSAID because it does not have much of an anti-inflammatory effect, but it is commonly recommended for the same broad range of ailments. It can be given in a high initial dose, but it has a steep dose curve and carries a very serious risk of liver toxicity.

From personal experience with arthritis inflammation, I have found a single dose of naproxen at bedtime no more than once-a-week to be quite effective at knocking down inflammation a level or two. It seems to be a shock effect — I get a really good night’s sleep as the pain is not interfering with sleep and inflammation remains reduced for some time after the drug has worn off. ymmv