I don't want to be asking (with despair), "What is to be done?" here in the United States.#ModernAmericans need insight, a plan, and the courage of old friends. #Corruption
#Corruption should have been #CorruptionGreedKompromat.
#ModernAmericans may have a choice right this moment between a “hollowed-out democracy”–a democracy in superficial appearance only–or an authentic democracy, for the above-mentioned hash tag might get at the truth. Our #UnitedStatesOfAmerica just hasn’t been herself lately, and as one must know that Corruption is the Cancer of States, there might be an answer having to do with it.
Where are America’s sworn counterintelligence professionals on the possibility that we might have been compromised by our own tendencies with money and pleasure?
Probably, if not “shadow banning”, the numbers in other twitterati simply swamp individual expression or voice. Individually, we no longer matter, and collectively, we don’t seem to count.
There’s hardly point in chatyping since my most of my posts, including the above mentioned, convey reference that leads to more reference.
#ModernAmerican #RealAmericans and, for each of us, all our old friends who really believed in democracy in support of rational, responsible, and responsive governance, some way of coming together, of organizing, of being together, would be helpful.
I had caught a glimpse of a now truncated Wikipedia page for the Navy’s first and foremost Science and Technology organization prior to the establishment of the Office of Naval Research, i.e., Office of Scientific Research and Development, so there’s no point now in putting in the URL as a response to the search term “psycho-acoustic research, conscientious objectors” would no longer be found there. That Orwellian absence will, of course, thin support for the contention to nothing.
Almost.
Since when has tinnitus ever been associated with Covid?
And just like that, all of a sudden?
And since when has any “mass psychosis” been associated with unusual experiences of sound?
Government officials and military officers in the United States of America take a very special oath of office in their commitments to public service at the executive level. It is an oath not to any agency or person but a pledge to defend the Constitution of the nation itself. Implicit in that pledge is the promise to defend democracy, dignity, freedom, and humanity itself in a structured way envisioned by the Founding Fathers. It seems a long way from those 18th Century visionaries to ourselves now mired in division and suspicious of government, but there is this moment (must I take a screenshot?) on the public page of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence a statement about Truth: “We seek the truth; speak truth to power; and obtain, analyze, and provide intelligence objectively.”
So says the DNI, whom one might remind of Cromwell’s dictum, ““Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”–Lord Acton to Bishop Creighton, 1877.
I would press for further review, and in secret if needs be, of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of Naval Research in relation to what has come to be called and puzzled as “Havana Syndrome”.
This morning, I tweeted the following to investigative journalists Michael Isikoff and John Hudson who have recently published on the topic in Yahoo News and The Washington Post.
I wish not to see Americans enslaved — yet another medical mystery! — by a phenomenon as yet unproven to have any basis in biology (oh, well, maybe that will show up tomorrow in new “research”).
My friends who have had tinnitus have associated it with loud music; others have perhaps had some damage related to combat or some macho hours or years at the firing range, and we all do age and may experience some hearing loss, but this seems different and the findings dissatisfying.
Three of the Morning’s Tweets
1.
Just this once (or twice): "psycho-acoustic research" was part of the repertoire of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) prior to becoming the Office of Naval Research. I had picked the term off the OSRD Wikipedia page, which has been altered. #HavanaSignal
Related: the death of restaurateur Kent Taylor-https://t.co/cVPb091JHU Funny tinnitus has never been listed before as a post-Covid symptom. A stint in Bermuda had afforded him relief.
The intrepid may wish to check on Kent Taylor’s stay in Bermuda. I thought I had read that somewhere but can’t find my source online–and not too much into this issue, I hadn’t saved it address. In any case, at the time of his travail, the phenomenon was not so widespread nor so variously described.
This post offers in my compressed and distilled style the keys to Russia’s redevelopment as a “mafia state” through the three decades between 1992 and 2022.
“Educate, entertain, and delight” said Aristotle of the purposes of rhetoric, and while I have strove to do that, there is with, well, everything all at once, a lot to unpack–but it’s still good to have the dots and keys arranged, connected, in good order, ready, and available.
I have spent more time posting the above links–or similar in essence–than I have with reading and writing–and that only to be buried beneath the pile no matter what. At the same time, I believe it important to analyze and frame issues accurately, concisely, honestly, and with precision for an American public that has been assaulted by partisan spin and Russian “Active Measures”, efforts intended to destroy our cultural, political, and social coherence as an extraordinary secular democratic republic with a Christian majority and the world’s broadest imaginable and inclusive multicultural assembly in one nation.
Perhaps #ModernAmericans are struggling to become Americans without qualifying adjectives and an increasingly archaic and multi-hyphenated host of identity-related reservations.
To boost notice, of course, I’ve tried to adopt or invent hash tags that signal attitude, statement, and theme at once.
Broadest Frame: #MedievalVModern.
Best discriminator: #ModernAmericans, of course.
Most at risk today: #AmericanCharacterAndIntegrity.
and so it goes.
We may have our own #MafiaState given our indulgences in pleasures / sins that have perhaps too often the hands of the criminal and ruthless in them. We certainly have in our politics the kind of #MaligNarcs and #PolitCrims who preach the virtues while profiting nicely from less virtuous spending.
Posted to YouTube on February 19, 2023, this has seemed to me an extraordinary retrospective for this one-year anniversary–and may there not be another with the conflict ongoing–of Russia’s entirely surreal and unwarranted invasion of Ukraine.
I have been relaying the following URLs for some time and have no longer the patience for typing, retyping, copying or pasting the same damning set of excellent independent research–>
I think that’s enough to tie Russia’s abysmal purposes in Ukraine to its government’s criminal character at home. Russians have proven weak or bereft of power at home–more the latter, but they have nonetheless painted themselves before the world–and have made themselves ugly worldwide.
The scrapes here are dated but cogent. Ukraine has long maintained surrender hotlines for Russian troops intent on surviving Putin’s catastrophe. For defectors, Vladimir Osechkin has been a go-to via his gulagu site–I’d include the .net extension but haven’t been able to reach it myself (related in Wikipedia). What follows: scraped quotes (in no particular order) and additional reference. For philosophy: life is full of leavings, some sad and sweet, some sudden and wrenching.
Note: in the Blogosphere, “scraping” refers to a part of my method, which distills to “Collect, Select, and Opine”–but when one doesn’t “opine” very much, the work amounts to relay with a minimum of commentary, i.e., “scraping”.
So done.
With the Russia v. Ukraine War and Putin’s willful churning of young Russians into fertilizer for Ukrainian soil, Russian motivation for turning against Putin should be powerful in its latency. Indeed, Putin has made his world that of political, practical, and unconscionable criminals making themselves legend for their brutality, dishonesty, greed, ruthlessness, and, ultimately, essential worthlessness.
Caesar said Legion fighters are ideologically diverse but share in fierce anti-Putinism. “Our people hold different views, but we are united in our rejection of the Kremlin dictatorship and the desire to reformat Russia,” he said.
“Our country must become a democratic power, but for this, a reboot of the entire political and social system, lustration, decolonization, de-imperialization and a complete constitutional re-establishment of the state must be carried out.”
Senior Lieutenant at Russian FSB Counterintelligence defected to Europe. Emran #Navruzbekov was to be sent to Turkey & Syria for an operation against Russian citizens wanted by Putin. Instead, he used the opportunity to flee to Europe with a goldmine of intelligence & asked for political asylum.
Emran says the 2nd Service of the FSB essentially controls all criminal activities in Dagestan and Chechnya.
The FSB kidnaps, tortures, & extorts successful businessmen & others who can pay a ransom. The FSB has their own torture chambers across the region for this purpose.
“The last 10 years I do a lot of things to protect the human rights and other people. But in this moment, I understood that my mission to help other people created a very high risk to my family,” Osechkin told CNN from France, where he’s lived since 2015 after he fled Russia and claimed asylum. He now has full-time police protection.
He’s become the champion of a growing number of high-level Russian officials defecting to the West, emboldened and disgruntled by the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine. He says ex-generals and intelligence agents are among their number.
Igor Volobuyev spent two decades working in the heart of the Russian business establishment, first for Gazprom and then for its affiliate Gazprombank, where until February this year he was vice-president.
Then Vladimir Putin launched his war on Ukraine in late February, and Volobuyev decided he could no longer stand living in Russia. He packed a small rucksack of possessions and a stack of cash, and flew out of the country on 2 March, pretending he was going on holiday.
A few days later, he crossed from Poland into Ukraine, where he spent his childhood years. Now, he spends his days trying to convince officials to provide him with Ukrainian documents and allow him to sign up for military service.
The history of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras is rife with elaborate, almost implausible tales of defectors and double agents, sometimes even triple agents, spies who worked for one or more governments simultaneously for love or money or for the simple thrill of leading a hidden life. There are those with access to state secrets, some immeasurably valuable, who betrayed their country for ideological reasons or, as they often rationalize the treachery to themselves, perfectly pragmatic ones.
And now there is a historic first: the enemy spy who came back to the people who caught and released him.
Racecar driver Igor Sushko has a small history with compiling and relaying Russian FSB documents through his eponymous blog and related Substack. Sans backers myself, I’m feeling a little poor about the requisite spending on curiosity, but I believe he’s on track as regards Putin confidant and Wagner Group commander Yevgeny Prigozhin. This is from The New York Times two days ago (February 11, 2023).
Even the Kremlin appears to be trying to keep Mr. Prigozhin’s political rise in check. Sergei Markov, a pro-Putin political analyst and former Kremlin adviser who appears frequently on Russian state television, said that officials had been transmitting an unusual directive to Moscow’s talking heads in recent weeks: “Don’t excessively promote Prigozhin and Wagner.”
Integrity is derived from the Latin word “integer,” meaning whole. A person of integrity is complete, undivided. Sincerity, decency, trustworthy are synonyms of integrity. It’s on our shield because it is the quality that makes possible all the good that we do. Because everything we do requires that we be believed, whether that’s promising a source that we will protect her, telling a jury what we saw or heard, or telling a congressional oversight committee or the American people what we are doing with our power and our authorities. We must be believed.
Confidence in modern governance and its ability to sustain its political coherence, cohesion, and power, within and without, may be rooted in the credibility, integrity, and trustworthiness of the same.
For cause, I believe the Federal government of the United States of America better than supposed by a constituency often less educated, sophisticated, and specialized–or broadly elevated–for understanding its departments, duties, missions, and relationships. Few Americans have privilege and time, much less specific ambition and curiosity, for personally exploring the administrative machinery of the nation in the advancement and defense of the same.
NordStream II
What if Seymour Hersh’s report and analyses prove true?
The truth won’t change the barbaric, criminal, and untrustworthy character of Putin’s regime.
The truth won’t weaken the strength of America’s defenses nor the argument for inclusive, liberal, open democracies and related rule of law as the much better alternative to the ways of capricious tyrants and totalitarian systems.
The truth may force Germany and the German People to revisit the sordid and twisted political discourse of the 1930s and 1940s just to check the conclusions–and then measure the strides made by modern Germany against the feudal and primitive forces and ideas of a deeply defeated generation followed by an as astonishingly renewed and powerful German state.
The truth may be a fait accomplis, and here we are.
Whatever the truth may be, it’s too late with Russia in Ukraine–and positioned elsewhere for assault or heightened threat–for either the invention of or leveraging of a supposed casus belli. It has already in its surreal and psychopathic fashion picked its fight with NATO. However, Tsar #PutinFullTonto may be as ill in body as he appears to be sick in the head, and how far his madness takes his whole circle remains unknown.
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