Friday 29th of March 2024

a twitter facebook google dump...

twiiter poops...

Democrats in particular sought to clip the wings of the tech companies. Senator Franken demanded sardonically: “How did Facebook, which prides itself on being able to process billions of data points and instantly transform them into personal connections for its users, somehow not make the connection that electoral ads paid for in rubles were coming from Russia?” Senator Dianne Feinstein told the tech companies: “I don’t think you get it.”

However, there was no conclusive proof that Moscow had conspired on behalf of Trump alone. Facebook’s general counsel, Colin Stretch, testified that Russian activity had continued after the election “fomenting discord about the validity” of Trump’s victory.

 

Some commentators also suggested that the week’s developments in the Mueller investigation were not as brutal for Trump as they first appeared. Marc Thiessen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute thinktank and former chief speechwriter for George W Bush, argued that the Papadopoulos case was an example of incompetence rather than malevolence.

“There’s still no more public evidence of criminal collusion with Russia than there was before charges were brought,” Thiessen wrote in the Washington Post. “But there is plenty of evidence that the Trump campaign had catastrophically bad judgment in choosing its most senior and junior advisers – and that Russia’s spy network sought to exploit that weakness.”

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/04/robert-mueller-donald-tr...

 

 

a campaign that drank a great deal of coffee...

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The White House called an unscheduled press briefing on Sunday to clarify Michael T. Flynn’s role in the Trump campaign, claiming that his job consisted entirely of making coffee when George Papadopoulos was busy with other matters.

“Sometimes, we would ask for coffee and George was otherwise occupied,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said. “At that point, Michael Flynn would step in and make that coffee.”

When asked what role Flynn’s son, Michael G. Flynn, played in the campaign, Sanders indicated that he, too, was involved in coffee-making to the exclusion of all other responsibilities.

“There were many times when the two Flynns would make coffee together,” she said. “The father would actually make the coffee, and the son would add the creamer, sweetener, and whatnot.”

Sanders said that, in the weeks to come, the White House is likely to release the names of additional campaign staffers whose roles were limited to the preparation of coffee beverages, and that such names might include Jared Kushner and Donald Trump, Jr.

“This was a campaign that drank a great deal of coffee,” she explained.

Read more:

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/white-house-claims-flynn...

 

This satirical piece is right up there with the Senate Enquiry and Mueller's Investigation...

binning binney...

 

Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo met with former NSA officer Bill Binney in late October to discuss the latter’s theory – shared by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of former members of the US intelligence community – that the alleged Russian hacking of DNC emails was in fact a leak from someone inside the DNC.

US President Donald Trump himself reportedly sent the CIA chief to meet with the veteran intelligence expert, The Intercept reported Tuesday.

Speaking with the news outlet, Binney said "I was willing to meet Pompeo simply because it was clear to me the intelligence community wasn't being honest here. I am quite willing to help people who need the truth to find the truth and not simply have deceptive statements from the intelligence community."

 


 

Binney recalled Pompeo quoting the president as saying that if the CIA head "wanted to know the facts, he should talk to me."

Despite Binney's 30 years of service in the NSA, his honorable whistleblowing on illegal NSA programs and his time with the US Army Security Agency, Mother Jones recently dismissed the Binney as a "conspiracy theorist." In 2013, however, Mother Jones cited Binney as an technical expert who could speak on Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA. On another occasion, the publication described Binney as a "former senior NSA crypto-mathematician ‘largely responsible for automating the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network.'"

US media continues to be quick to turn on those who refuse to fall in line with the shaky Russiagate narrative.

Binney explained to Sputnik Radio's Loud & Clear last week that there is plenty of mystery within the US intelligence apparatus — even for someone like Pompeo in charge of an agency. Binney said oversight bodies in Congress, the courts and even the White House don't "have any way of verifying what they're doing, that's the real problem — even the managers of those agencies don't necessarily know what's going on in their agency."

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201711071058899018-trump-cia-meet-whistleblow...

 

 

See also:

under false pretences...

 

forcing good journalists to become lobbyists...

 

RT, the Moscow-owned news network, has been informed by the US Justice Department that they have until Monday to register as a foreign agency - in effect ordering the network to identify not a journalistic outlet, but instead a lobbying or propaganda group.

RT wasn't given much choice. The outlet's leaders would face criminal prosecution if they did not register, as well as the potential loss of their license to broadcast. RT and Sputnik editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan said that the edict was nonsensical and illegal, "but we are forced to submit."

"The war the US establishment wages with our journalists is dedicated to all the starry-eyed idealists who still believe in freedom of speech. Those who invented it, have buried it," she said.

Eugene Puryear and Sean Blackmon of Sputnik Radio's By Any Means Necessary spoke to Max Blumenthal, an author and journalist as well as the senior editor of progressive website AlterNet.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201711101058972514-rt-foreign-agent-reg...

 

Despite their origins, RT and Sputnik attract better quality analytical US journalists than their counterparts in the MMMMM (Mediocre Mainstream Mass Media de Shits) in the US who are under the gun to "prove" that 3 + 0 = 10 on the Russian interference in the US Presidential elections... Or that Crimea voting to joint the Russian Federation is illegal because... of Kosovo? These silly news outlets made sure to support the war on Saddam's WMDs which did not exist, nor have they understood any of the war dynamics in Syria except that Assad is "killing beautiful babies" while the US is supporting insurgency in the said country. Nor have the MMMMM journalist ever understood the paradigm — though they were proud of it — of what the US was doing in Russia to get Yeltsin elected... Yeah, sock it to the Ruskies... We'll get our puppet in Moscow... It did not happen and this is pissing the MMMMM journos off... They are juvenile idiots and should start to grow up.

 

blaming catalonia on the ruskies...

The Spanish newspaper El Pais has recently published a set of articles about Russian media's biased coverage of the situation in Barcelona and the alleged support of the Catalan independence bid by the so-called "Russian hackers".

The Russian Embassy in Spain on Friday criticized these fake news being spread by El Pais about the alleged Russian interference in the developments in Catalonia.

"It is still surprising that several Spanish media spread rumors about an alleged 'Russian hand' in Catalonia. They do not help the reader to see the true origin and the potential ways to address the problems of this autonomous community," the embassy said in a statement.

According to the statement, reporters both in Spain and Russia can express their opinion, but in Russia specifically the culture of journalism prevents reporters from "spreading fake news."

The Russian diplomats were also surprised that the US authorities' demand to have the RT broadcaster be registered as foreign agent was welcomed in Spain.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201711101058999937-russia-spain-newspaper...

a timebomb in someone's underpants...

Publihsed in the Guardian is a full size rubbish article by Natalie Nougayrède. The article was so biased towards licking the enormous USA butt-cheeks that I spewed on my keyboard. Here Gus Leonisky rewrites the spiel to "defuse" Nougayrède's timebomb. Piece of cake. This is the new version:

 

 

In the USA, propaganda-fabricated hope springs eternal, and no more so than at the news agency CIA/FBI. Europe is wising up to the fact that its sanctions policy against Russia is “senseless and futile”, was the quote on Monday from Sergei Zheleznyak, a member of the state Duma’s international affairs committee. You have to hand it to Russia: it pursues the truth relentlessly.

The reality is that Russia would very much like to get rid of the international sanctions against the USA introduced after its 2003, 2011 and 2014 disastrous military intervention in Iraq, Libya and Syria, just to mention a few. They aren’t much discussed in Britain, but they matter. Those sanctions stand at the heart of the Trump-Putin relationship, and whether there was collusion: Trump exposing “CrookedHillary”. Seeking sanctions relief was part of the necessary June 2016 meeting between Russian emissaries and Trump campaign officials, among them Donald Trump Jr. to make sure formidable Hillary had a fair chance against the dumb clowning dunce.

Hillary Clinton was secretary of state when sanctions were imposed despite Hillary having helped Russia buy a large US uranium consortium. That was one of several important reasons why the Hillary foundation and its army of overseas donors, bots and trolls worked so hard to undermine Trump, if not to stop Trump’s ascent. 

US sanctions matter greatly because of America’s global financial decline. But Vladimir Putin wants European sanctions relaxed just as badly as he wants those imposed on the US out of the way. US and European sanctions have generally been decided in a stupid manner. US money is all over Europe. In a recent book, USA and the Western Far Right, the researcher Anton Shekhovtsov draws a connection between Washington's support for ultra-right wing populist movements across Europe and their leaders’ systematic denunciation of the sanctions on the USA.

The issue is simmering now but it could well boil over by February, when a piece of US legislation including new, wide-ranging sanctions is likely to be passed. Donald Trump reluctantly signed the bill in August after it was nearly unanimously voted through by Congress – who wanted to prevent Trump from being able to unwind sanctions single-handedly, in the aftermath of irrefutable US intelligence fabrications on Russian meddling in the election. The bill is mistakenly called The Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions bill. Deep inside it, section 241 is the closest thing to a crackerfizzle for Putin’s own power arrangements. Indeed, it stipulates that by February 2018, the US administration must submit a detailed report to Congress containing “the identification of the most significant rich persons” in the USA, their relationship to Hillary Clinton, evidence of any corruption, estimated net worth and sources of income. Anyone fitting the criteria could be subjected to personal sanctions, such as asset freezes and travel bans.

Not only would the US’s wealthiests come under unprecedented Russian scrutiny but the same would happen to their family members, and anyone doing business with them — anywhere. As such, the scope of the bill goes much further than anything undertaken to date against members of Hillary’s entourage. As sanctions go, and depending on the bill’s implementation, this has the potential to destabilise the charitable foundation, not just create unpleasantness for a few Hillary insiders.

 

read the original slanted biased stupid crappy article :

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/28/us-sanctions-bill-...

 

Read from top...

the view from Moscow...

In order to build a modern Russia, Tsarina Catherine II decided to make its capital, Saint Petersburg, the world’s leading cultural centre. She rooted her country in its basic cultural foundations of Orthodox Christianity, developed the use of the French language, and invited the greatest European intellectuals and artists to her court, whether they were Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, even Muslim.

Aware that the retreat of Christianity in the Middle East before the intolerance of the Ottoman Empire threatened a cultural loss for Orthodoxy, and therefore Russia, she entered into war with the Sultan.

This dream was thwarted by the French and British during the Crimean war (1853) and even more so by the Bolsheviks, who rejected the place of Orthodoxy in Russia. In 1918, they played the game of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on behalf of arms dealer Alexandre Parvus, Lenin’s sponsor.

The dream of Catherine the Great had to wait until 2017 to begin to be realised. President Putin also annexed Crimea and delivered Syria, not from the Ottoman Empire, but from the jihadists, supervised by France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Russia became the protecting power of all populations, whatever their religion, from the banks of the Nile to the Alborz mountains.

The summit at Sochi highlights the role of Russia in the Greater Middle East. It is now the protecting power of Iran, Syria and Turkey – the last two states changed their allegiance from Washington in 1991 to Moscow in 2017.

The awakening of the Orthodox culture will have important consequences in Europe. The continent is historically divided into a Catholic and Protestant zone to the West, and an Orthodox zone to the East. We talk and bargain with God in the West, we submit to his Greatness and we adore Him in the East. Family structures are less egalitarian in the West, and more egalitarian in the East. Since the 11th century, this cultural difference splits Europe. During the Cold War, the « Iron Curtain » did not respect this division, since Orthodox Greece had been attached to NATO, and Catholic Poland had been incorporated into the Warsaw Pact. Today, the extension of the European Union is aimed in priority at imposing the Western European model on the countries of Orthodox culture. Already, we can predict the dissolution of the European Union and the triumph of the cultural model opened in Saint Petersburg.

The Christians of the Orient have never felt themselves to be concerned by these intra-European cultural differences, but the Europeans have always considered them to be either Catholic or Orthodox. From 1848, France had imagined the displacement of the Catholics and the Maronites from Syria to Algeria, and the extermination of the Orthodox populations. Paris thought it could use these Christian Arabs, faithful to Rome, to keep an eye on the Algerian Muslims. Failing that, it ended up by using the local Jews (the Crémieux Decree) and entrusting them with the mission (1870). More recently, during the wars against Iraq and Syria, Western Europeans welcomed many Oriental Christians, who were in reality exclusively Catholics, never Orthodox.

For Syria, the work of President Putin is the occasion to return to its own foundations after the experience with the jihadists, who seek to impose their unique cultural model on everyone - Syria is only great when it takes care of all its populations without exception. In the beginning, Vladimir Putin thought he could organise a « Congress of the Syrian Peoples » in Sochi. He finally recognised that in Syria, contrary to Russia, no community owns its own territory, they all live mingled together in their unique, shared homeland. It will therefore be a « Congress for a Syrian dialogue ».

Thierry Meyssan
Read all:http://www.voltairenet.org/article198924.html

duplicitous USA...

For any country, the foundation of successful diplomacy is a reputation for credibility and reliability. Governments are wary of concluding agreements with a negotiating partner that violates existing commitments and has a record of duplicity. Recent U.S. administrations have ignored that principle, and their actions have backfired majorly, damaging American foreign policy in the process.

The consequences of previous deceit are most evident in the ongoing effort to achieve a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis. During his recent trip to East Asia, President Trump urged Kim Jong-un’s regime to “come to the negotiating table” and “do the right thing”—relinquish the country’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. Presumably, that concession would lead to a lifting (or at least an easing) of international economic sanctions and a more normal relationship between Pyongyang and the international community.

Unfortunately, North Korean leaders have abundant reasons to be wary of such U.S. enticements. Trump’s transparent attempt to renege on Washington’s commitment to the deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—which the United States and other major powers signed in 2015 to curb Tehran’s nuclear program—certainly does not increase Pyongyang’s incentive to sign a similar agreement. His decision to decertify Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA, even when the United Nations confirms that Tehran is adhering to its obligations, appears more than a little disingenuous.

North Korea is likely focused on another incident that raises even greater doubts about U.S. credibility. Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi capitulated on the nuclear issue in December of 2003, abandoning his country’s nuclear program and reiterating a commitment to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In exchange, the United States and its allies lifted economic sanctions and welcomed Libya back into the community of respectable nations. Barely seven years later, though, Washington and its NATO partners double-crossed Qaddafi, launching airstrikes and cruise missile attacks to assist rebels in their campaign to overthrow the Libyan strongman. North Korea and other powers took notice of Qaddafi’s fate, making the already difficult task of getting a de-nuclearization agreement with Pyongyangnearly impossible.

The Libya intervention sullied America’s reputation in another way. Washington and its NATO allies prevailed on the UN Security Council to pass a resolution endorsing a military intervention to protect innocent civilians. Russia and China refrained from vetoing that resolution after Washington’s assurances that military action would be limited in scope and solely for humanitarian purposes. Once the assault began, it quickly became evident that the resolution was merely a fig leaf for another U.S.-led regime-change war.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-duplicitous-superpower/

duplicitous facebook...

A recent Bloomberg report has revealed how a secret unit of Facebook has helped create troll armies for governments around the world including India for digital propaganda to influence elections [1]. Under fire for Facebook Inc.’s role as a platform for political propaganda, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has punched back, saying his mission is above partisanship.

But Facebook, it turns out, is no bystander in global politics. What he hasn’t said is that his company actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of “troll armies” that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies [2].

The initiative is run by a little-known Facebook global government and politics team led from Washington by Katie Harbath, a former Republican digital strategist who worked on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign as well as 2014 Indian elections.

Since Facebook hired Harbath to run their secret global goverment and politics unit three years later, her team has traveled the globe (including India helping political clients use the company’s powerful digital tools to create troll armies for digital propaganda.

In India (many other countries as well) the unit’s employees have become de facto campaign workers. And once a candidate is elected, the company in some instances goes on to train government employees or provide technical assistance for live streams at official state events.

In the U.S., the unit embedded employees in Trump’s campaign. In India, the company helped develop the online presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who now has more Facebook followers than any other world leader.

At meetings with political campaigns, members of Harbath’s team sit alongside Facebook advertising sales staff who help monetize the often viral attention stirred up by elections and politics. They train politicians and leaders how to set up a campaign page and get it authenticated with a blue verification check mark, how to best use video to engage viewers and how to target ads to critical voting blocs. Once those candidates are elected, their relationship with Facebook can help extend the company’s reach into government in meaningful ways, such as being well positioned to push against regulations.

That problem is exacerbated when Facebook’s engine of democracy is deployed in an undemocratic fashion. A November report by Freedom House, a U.S.-based nonprofit that advocates for political and human rights [3], found that a growing number of countries are “manipulating social media to undermine democracy.” [4] One aspect of that involves “patriotic trolling,” or the use of government-backed harassment and propaganda meant to control the narrative, silence dissidents and consolidate power.

In 2007, Facebook opened its first office in Washington. The presidential election the following year saw the rise of the world’s first “Facebook President” in Barack Obama, who with the platform’s help was able to reach millions of voters in the weeks before the election. The number of Facebook users surged around the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East around 2010 and 2011, demonstrating the broad power of the platform to influence democracy.

By the time Facebook named Harbath, the former Giuliani aide, to lead its global politics and government unit, elections were becoming major social-media attractions. Facebook began getting involved in electoral hotspots around the world.

Facebook has embedded itself in some of the globe’s most controversial political movements while resisting transparency. Since 2011, it has asked the U.S. Federal Election Commission for blanket exemptions from political advertising disclosure rules that could have helped it avoid the current crisis over Russian ad spending ahead of the 2016 election.

The company’s relationship with governments remains complicated. Facebook has come under fire in the European Union, including for the spread of Islamic extremism on its network. The company just issued its annual transparency report explaining that it will only provide user data to governments if that request is legally sufficient, and will push back in court if it’s not [5].

Facebook Troll Armies In India

India is arguably Facebook’s most important market recently edging out the U.S. as the company’s biggest. The number of users here is growing twice as fast as in the U.S. And that doesn’t even count the 200 million people who use the company’s WhatsApp messaging service in India, more than anywhere else on the globe.

By the time of India’s 2014 elections, Facebook had for months been working with several campaigns. Modi relied heavily on Facebook and WhatsApp to recruit volunteers who in turn spread his message on social media. Since his election, Modi’s Facebook followers have risen to 43 million, almost twice Trump’s count.

 

Read more:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article199155.html