I Give Trump 3 Months

Before an assassination attempt, successful or otherwise.

He's running a narrative that is the very opposite to the one the intelligence agencies are trying to push.

"The Russians hacked the election!" is being shouted by the CIA and others, yet "It didn't impact the election result!" they say.

Now excuse me for being a bit dumb, but IF the election was hacked, IF it didn't cause a problem, why is it such a big deal?

Now, is this a ploy to piss off the half of the US population that didn't vote for Trump? Is this a ploy to de-legitemise him?

As far as I can tell, the Russian hacking amounted to breaking into the Democrat's poorly secured computers and passing the information to Wikileaks. Hardly the crime of the century or an attempt to destabilise a country. In fact its almost the sort of thing that journalists should be doing, if they were true journalists. The exposure of yet more high-level emails on unsecured servers just shows how poor the Democrats view net security.

I thought it was a felony in the US to have top security documents on unsecured servers or to export them from high security servers to low security ones.

I remember my time working for big finance companies. Cyber security was taken extremely seriously.
The data centres were like Fort Knox, with x-ray scans of baggage and metal detectors for the human traffic, lest you secrete a memory stick on your person.

Emails were only sent internally and to vetted addresses whose network was confirmed as secure as the home network in advance. Emails transferred between networks were always encrypted by a secondary encryption system.

Now that's just a financial company. For feck's sake, this is government traffic we're talking about in the US. Something that should NEVER be on servers less secure than the source.

Anyway, I'll stop digressing. The CIA "briefings" for me are pretty strange. Either they affected the election result and are actionable, or they didn't and aren't. A handful of Russian teenagers hacking into Democrat email servers is not a reason to go to war. The intelligence agencies are not chumps and they don't like being made to look fools. Okay, this time they sort of did it to themselves, but still...

Obviously there's a bit of disagreement between Trump and the intelligence agencies. If I were him, I'd watch out. If just one anti-Trump person is incensed enough to take a pot shot then the intelligence agencies have the smokescreen they need to cover any attempt to get rid of Trump and impose a replacement. Better look into who the vice-president is a bit closer  then....

The Brexit plan in less than 15 seconds.

1. Prepare for the end game of being completely out and trading under WTO rules.

2. Spend 2 years negotiating better access and terms at no extra cost to us and with Referendum promises intact..

3. If regotiations fail to deliver 2. fall back to option1.

That. Is. It.

I still can't understand all the endless hours of TV coverage, with numerous talking heads espousing opinions.

All the clamour for a plan from the government. The plan is: plan for the worst, negotiate a better option.

That's what negotiations are all about. it's the same as trading: you negotiate to buy at a low price, without revealing to the seller how high you are willing to buy, how much you are willing to spend. You then negotiate to sell without revealing how low you would sell at. It's something you don't reveal in advance. Ever.

It's called maximising profit, leverage, commercial advantage.

Something those MPs in Parliament baying to be told the plan have no clue about.

Hence the apallingly poor deals we've had on PPI, Defence, Health, and virtually any other contract the government have negotiated.