No production, no nonsense, and not a lot of thought on this Fast News Share (FNS) via BackChannels. Most of the time, such posts make it to the Facebook page. Here I experiment with the time involved in relaying information as well as my posture as an editor and writer overall. Today’s dilemma for all involved in Open Source Intelligence (OSI) hasn’t anything to do with how or where to access information, but a) where to dwell within the feed and b) what to do with it. In what follows, bold added for telegraphy.
“I don’t have a constitutional duty to defend against a guy that is a jerk and maybe says some things I don’t like,” Kinzinger told me, explaining what had pushed him to finally break with the president. “I do when he’s getting ready to destroy democracy—and we saw that culminate on January 6th.”
Instead of the Trump kowtowing reactionary cadre echoing the America First Party (1943) into which the Republican Party has apparently morphed, Rep. Kinzinger will set the standard for a New Republican Party equal to LBJ’s Civil Rights and Great Society Projects — and equal as well to the challenges posed by a totalitarian Beijing and the Mafia State of Moscow’s Putin.
Posted to YouTube February 28, 2021.
Russian radar station of this type was first discovered by the OSCE observers on the footage from a mini UAV. Text information about the sighting was published in the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) daily report 38/2021 dated February 17, 2021. It indicated that a 51U6 Kasta-2E1 target and acquisition radar was spotted on February 15, 2021 in a training area near Buhaivka (37km south-west of Luhansk) in the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine controlled by Russian hybrid forces. It was also indicated that the station was located 30 km from the contact line.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2020/07/01/fbi-antifa-and-swamp-gas/ That something may be believed doesn’t mean it exists, at least not in a format known to investigators. Re. BLM: of the three founders, Patrisse Cullors has — or has had — issues related to the Far Out Left’s group-think with the Palestinians and related BDS. BDS has been well debunked by representatives of the Far Left, i.e., i.e., at least Finkelstein and Chomsky — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/03/08/bds-cult-modules/ (as much has been shared with Ms. Cullors, but where her hinge is in relation to the demystification of Palestinian myth, I don’t know). The Israel Action Network has an in-depth PDF on BLM: https://www.jcouncil.org/sites/default/files/documents/BLM%20and%20M4BL%20%28002%29%206.30%20.pdf For the most part, Blacks and Jews share minority status in the United States and may be regarded as equally worth lynching (more or less) by the White Supremacist faction of more the general Far White Right politics that drifted into the Republican quarter with the development of the Civil Rights and Great Society movements and programs of the mid-early 1960s. The Far Out Left flows down from Russia’s Soviet Communist Era and remains likely to ignorantly fly and sport the image of “Che” — or Red-Green art. Look up Danish illustrator Rune Agerhus who may be in Yemen with the Houthis these days. Where the center — moderate and reasoning — has not held in American politics, the drift toward OLD extremism has been distinct and polarizing. Rx for the confused (or prepared to be bigoted): dive into real intellectual and political history. Useful reference regarding our long-lived enmity with Stalinesque political psychology: https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4874089,00.html https://conflict-backchannels.com/2020/07/22/russian-active-measures-donald-trump-and-either-evil-or-gullible-americans-or-both/ Moscow’s “Active Measures” programs and other assaults — critical western cybersystems hacking — remain quite active.
Related Online
“The Party of Lincoln” Swapped Roles with the Invasion of the Dixiecrats
Kenneth L. Marcus, Accusation in a Mirror, 43 Loy. U. Chi. L. J. 357 (2012). Available at: https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol43/iss2/5 (a good reminder of the adage, “He who points the finger has three pointing back at himself”).
While the Communist Party Soviet Union (CPSU) dissolved into history, more or less, on December 25, 1991, what emerged in the character of the Russian Federation could not be called “democratic” in any modern sense. The renewal of the Russian State under Vladimir Putin’s aegis has been regarded — by those who have looked! — as feudal as mafia and heartbreaking for Russians in the breadth and depth of related state-bound corruption. Putin challenger Navalny’s nationalism now lends itself to national pride but with the hurdle of overcoming Russia’s complex networks of undeniably criminal relationships.
In which political realm do you wish to live — medieval with ignorance (and ignorant mobs) serving political absolutism? Or modern with democracy propelled by higher integrity and empirically reasoning souls?
I’ve no idea how many megabytes of e-junkmail I handle each morning, but in the sludge — and a separate folder for circulars associated with defense, diplomacy, and security — there are often gems. Some I share to the BackChannels “Reader” on Facebook, but this morning I thought to share a few here as well.
The trial is controversial. Kagame, who won a third term in power with 98% of the vote at elections in 2017, is credited with the development and stability Rwanda has experienced since the genocide in 1994, but is also accused of intolerance of any opposition, whether domestic or international. Critics of his rule are frequently detained and several high-profile political dissidents have been murdered abroad.
Well, perhaps that’s enough before I get into listing what catches my attention (what doesn’t?) from the global defense and security shops and others moving related information worldwide.
Inspiration for this relay: I had said, “We were doing just fine with North-South peace and firecracker sales and southern rock” when the meaning of the Confederate flag was revived as a symbol of southern bigotry and secession (and slavery). My conversational partner said, “That works if you’re a privileged WHITE MALE! If you’re a Black Male it’s FUCKED!”
From the Awesome Conversation
That’s only if the Black Male thinks he’s Fucked.
Let me show you something about North and South —
Black and White?
Posted to YouTube by US National Archives, September 6, 2013 and narrated by Carl T. Rowen who was in 1963 Director of the U.S. Information Agency.
History walks slowly, and while slavery may have been done after Lincoln’s handling of the matter and segregation finished by the Great Society and LBJ, it’s understood that some evil currents and ruthless bigots hold out a long time even while time grinds them down.
With black and white bigots still at play in OUR country and some foreign agent provocateur interested in watching the United States of America come apart — and possibly just some dumb people, political simpletons, really, swallowing intellectual poison, the Confederate Flag laid to rest for war — it was created to clarify who was who in General Lee’s engagements — and made into a generalized American symbol of a rebellious spirit — has been re-contextualized BACKWARD as a living symbol of hate.
What the hell are we doing back with the mentalities of the 1930s and the 1950s?
A little more that might be associated with the now thankfully passed “Trumpian Detour”:
This guy was a bigot — and it turns out a lonely one too:
I think we’re being moved around by forces that would like to herd us back into malleable medieval mobs and somehow inclined to Think Black! Think White!
Yeah, well, Think Integrated, Multicultural, Rainbow — that’s far more our Real Cultural Politic.
Just say no to historical revisionism from Far Out Left spoilers and Far White Right idiots.
I’m not going to take on the complete review of western states and the state of freedom in each. Quite a few organizations now do that. However, given the interests of EU/NATO in responsible governance and the proper interests of mankind, I may offer this handful of related reports as bellwether to the west’s own degraded and eroding condition as a powerful network of open democracies.
What happened?
Reflexive Control.
Twenty years ago (almost) on “9/11”, al Qaeda brought a new “Muslim Question” to the fore of Western consciousness, paving the way for an appropriately defensive and primordial response that boosted cultural pride in every EU/NATO state while — with popular approval — bulking up and shaping for each their intelligence, military, and paramilitary forces to meet the challenges posed by lethal non-state actors. In some states, both the patriotic urge, sensible enough, and fear brought home and laced with xenophobia (add ten years later the start of the refugee-herding Syrian Tragedy), promoted a turn to what would become the latest craze in populism, i.e., the New Nationalism.
Well, are democracies family businesses to be managed as private businesses after all?
Have some terrorist struck and — add COVID-19 — stricken democracies become so weak as to fail to defend their own nobility in good citizens against an ignoble collection of, um, less good citizens?
Having drifted far toward a “Reactionary Right” with the support of wealthy interests, some states appear to have regressed from their own once liberating and democratically revolutionary ideals more or less in the direction of feudal power and anachronistic but familiar familial, racial, religious, or tribal conflict.
The Medieval World, so it seems, continues to stalk a few should-be Modern states in relation to either the decline in the civility of their political rhetoric or private-sided degrading of their realpolitik.
It takes a long time to build a nation’s confidence in freedom with a both a civil and extraordinary extraordinary bandwidth in cultural and personal expression and identity while maintaining internal cohesion, coherence, and security.
Some, apparently, have stumbled.
Hungary
On Feb. 15, Viktor Orbán’s government shut down Klubrádió, one of Hungary’s largest independent radio broadcasters. This comes after a Budapest court upheld a decision by the country’s media regulators to revoke the station’s license, forcing it to exist exclusively online.
Last September, the country’s Media Council, appointed by the Fidesz party, rejected the station’s broadcast permit renewal. Klubrádió allegedly breached laws by missing deadlines to file reports and playing too little Hungarian music. Therefore, the authorities refused to extend its license, which expired on Feb. 14.
NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 2 – Marking the International Day to End Impunity in Crimes against Journalists, the Italian Mission to the UN recalled that over 1,000 journalists have been killed in the last decade. “We reaffirm our commitment to press freedom and safety and protection of journalists, as cornerstones in achieving the 16th Sustainable Development Goal calling for the promotion of just, peaceful and inclusive societies.
Since the beginning of 2020, 32 media operators where killed on the line of duty, Reporters Without Borders announced today, calling for the establishment of a UN Special Representative to investigate all cases. “If we do not protect journalists, our ability to remain informed and make evidence-based decisions is severely hampered”, the UN Secretary general, Antonio Guterres, said today: “When journalists cannot do their jobs in safety, we lose an important defence against the pandemic of misinformation and disinformation that has spread online.”
Poland has fallen to 62nd out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index compiled annually by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a leading Paris-based NGO that seeks to promote and defend independent journalism and access to information. It classifies Poland as among the counties that have “a noticeable problem” with press freedom.
This is the fifth year in a row that Poland has recorded a decline in the ranking, all of which have taken place under the current Law and Justice (PiS) government that came to power in late 2015. In that year, Poland had reached a record high of 18th in the index. Now, five years later, it finds itself below Armenia (61st), Niger (57th) and Papua New Guinea (46th).
The report also pointed a finger at President Trump who, it said, “exacerbates” press freedom problems with his repeated declarations that journalists are an “enemy of the American people,” his accusations of “fake news,” his calls to revoke broadcasting licenses and his efforts to block specific outlets from access to the White House.
“The president’s relentless attacks against the press has created an environment where verbal, physical and online threats and assault against journalists are becoming normalized,” RSF Interim Executive Director Sabine Dolan tells NPR.
Among the slashed and burnt of The Great Liar’s One-Term Presidency, John Bolton stands out for greater backbone, discretion, experience, and integrity.
I believe Bolton when he suggests he leveraged his experience in national security to participate in the Trump Administration in order to produce his — not Trump’s — brand of guidance. As Trump required greater sycophancy, Bolton would also leave the malignant narcissist’s den.
The Republican Party, once the Party of the visionary Abraham Lincoln, has in the 20th Century seen equally embarrassing and shamefully self-centered days. That has become something for critically reasoning and independent Americans to take into consideration as the West with its ideas about compassion, freedom, goodness, and real human productivity faces an anachronistic, feudal, and implacable enemy in Moscow and, in post-Cold War association with it, Beijing and Tehran as well.
Tehran, worn by its own conflict-promoting behaviors over time and by sanctions, has shown no signs of retreat in relation to its nuclear missile and warhead programs nor its will, repeated with dulling frequency, to see Israel and the west destroyed for its own marauding and politically absolute ends. Where has the Republican Party (with its increasingly familiar white supremacist attachments) really stood on the Moscow-Tehran relationship? Where has it stood with regard to the rise of the proto-fascist New Nationalism in the United States as well as within NATO (have a look into authoritarian and feudal urges in Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Turkey)?
Parochial and rapacious _reactionary_ conservatism were very much part of the past too. https://t.co/0zJrDyZEUG Roosevelt had to defeat the America First Party and related supporters (like Lindbergh) to align with Great Britain (https://t.co/xlfBpl6cxf).
Here is a junction in time in which the United States, once leader of the free world — the modern open democratic world, either stands firm against politically retrograde but technologically sophisticated states or slips backward itself into some system of immense power and wealth lording over a hapless constituency whose political voice becomes so much noise to those working the levers for their own enrichment according to class and degrees of ruthlessness.
I’m not inclined to leap far into conspiracy-think. However, wind turbine technology appears engineered and manufactured by transnational corporations and firms well aware of freezing weather, so this nonsense about renewable energy failing in Texas (why not on the North Sea? Why not in Germany?) just doesn’t hold ice water.
Super conservative angst, disinformation (received or sent), and viciousness get in the way of the public’s more cool-headed gathering and perception of variables contributing to disasters. That discomforting aspect of our collective national psyche notwithstanding, I would ask news (and weather) editors and readers to simply consider the full suite of possibilities in the unfolding of dramatic stories. In this one, finger pointing at wind-generated energy overlooked frozen instruments (!) in other energy systems. Well Whisky Tango & Foxtrot, where is Homeland Security on the Big Dallas Freeze? And may the investigative journalists be all over the possibility, just that (!), of external meddling involving massive critical — and technologically delicate or vulnerable — systems.
Of course, there are other possibilities, much including the architecture and engineering in a region better known for heat than cold and successive building generations in a political environment resistant “global warming” the potential for coming extremes in the known environment.
Still, has the drama been only about old engineering and new weather?
I may be tilting at windmills.
Maybe not.
While some wind turbines did freeze, failures in natural gas, coal and nuclear energy systems were responsible for nearly twice as many outages as renewables, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot), which operates the state’s power grid, said in a press conference on Tuesday.
Frozen instruments at gas, coal and even nuclear power stations were among the main problems, Ercot director Dan Woodfin said, according to Bloomberg.
Last March—if not before, as a report by the threat-intelligence firm ReversingLabs suggests—a hacking team, believed to be affiliated with Russian intelligence, planted malware in a routine software upgrade from a Texas-based I.T. company called SolarWinds, which provides network-management systems to more than three hundred thousand clients. An estimated eighteen thousand of them downloaded the malware-ridden updates, which were embedded in a SolarWinds product called Orion. Once they did, the hackers were able to roam about customers’ networks, undetected, for at least nine months.
For the American President’s navigation: the rise of Hitler and fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain; the development of an expansionist imperial Japan; polarization in the United States between the forces of self-serving fascist sentiment related to business and popular interest in the Far Left answers to abuses generated in Far Right circles.
Add the global Great Depression.
I have not yet reached the middle of this eye-opening and insightful history, but the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “working the issues” rings clear and sound for this day.
I have made much and will continue to make much of the tensions between politically medieval and modern worlds, and my own energies and hopes are with the modern world, its potential great breadth in personal freedoms, and its obligations as steward of the earth and humanity.
Whoever you may be and wherever you are in the world — and whether you enjoy or have to make yourself do this kind of reading (smile) — this volume will set the benchmark for understanding the United States and the western civilizational project in the appreciation and defense of humanity.
BackChannels 