A funny thing happened on the way to the forum...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1080766/download

A few parts are especially of interest...

"Moscow seeks to create wedges that degrade trust in democratic processes..."

Can anyone here think of any events since, oh, 1985 or so that would degrade trust in democratic process? I know the McClellan incident pretty much degraded my trust in the notion that running a blog was a safe and sane response to state terror. Increased my trust in wide-area arson as a counterterrorism technique, but democratic process, definitely decreased.

The other thing of interest...

"U.S. Person 1 worked with BUTINA to jointly arrange introductions to U.S. persons having influence in American politics, including an organization promoting gun rights (hereinafter "GUN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION"), for the purpouse of advancing the agenda of the Russian Federation."

...assuming both that this is true and that the gun rights organization is the NRA, this would directly tie the Kremlin to criminal far-right interference in Central America. It would also tie the Kremlin to the cocaine trade, particularly along the eastern seaboard.

Russia is currently operated on a Duginist philosophy, a subset of NazBol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

Russia, especially under the USSR years, had... a tortured relation with the Left, at best. Stalin, for instance, allied with both Franco and Hitler (and acted directly in the Ukraine), and it was only direct attack which broke this alliance. Only in destalinization and the ensuing Brezhnev years did the KGB try "what happens when we promote, or even allow, all the left" rather than a policy of murdering anyone not far-right, a policy which continued unbroken from the October attack.

P.I.E. was the result.

To date, I've mostly been, well, trapped in the 1970s, looking at S. Africa (which I've mostly gotten down to an office building and a handful of unregistered shipping houses) and Saudi Arabia (the first extrajudicial concentration camp in the US appeared in the sound immediately upon Soviet withdrawl from Afghanistan). Tying the Kremlin to the destabilization of the NRA, however, ties them to... much else. And that is enough. Meanwhile, they're already tied to Azerbaijan, Armenia, and extractive industries in general.

So... who here is up for war? We have nothing to lose, frankly. Meanwhile, as wars go, it is a cakewalk; Russia is mostly characterized by norwegian and alaska-native culture, while Eurorussia is a bunch of Ukranian-Turkic illegal immigrants who crept too far north and started acting like jackasses. Knock out their heating, and they'll die like every other invader : in the russian winter.

Too bad, really. I liked the Sochi intro. And worse still, if the US security services actually keep occasionally catching foreign operations, I may have to stop making fun of them for sitting on their ass while a foreign power bombs the shit out of their civilian populace and being outpaced by leagues by a single dweeb with no special training or resources.

Interference with the NRA ties them to a LOT. We appear to have a state adversary. Those are much easier to eat.