Start with the cassus beli on this long journey backward to barbaric feudalism and wars founded in religious animosity and contempt.
(SRINAGAR, India) — The death toll from a car bombing on a paramilitary convoy in Indian-controlled Kashmir has climbed to 41, becoming the single deadliest attack in the divided region’s volatile history, security officials said Friday. A local Kashmiri militant rammed an explosive-laden van into the convoy along a key highway Thursday. In addition to the dead, the attack wounded nearly two dozen other soldiers, India’s paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force spokesman Sanjay Sharma said.
One, two, three — Ukraine, Venezuela, Sudan — each dictatorship associated with Soviet / post-Soviet political methods. Yesterday, it was the great talk of communism and socialism that yielded so much power to so despicable a kind of peacock thug among leaders — Yanukovych, Chavez and Maduro, al-Bashir, leading their states not to greatness but into dependence on themselves, at best, and state practices that may be regarded as rule of the strong by way of brutality.
Two days earlier the 29-year-old was running through his neighbourhood with a wide grin, draped in a Venezuelan flag. “Maduro get out, you son of a bitch,” he cried in the empty road outside his home in a defiant a video uploaded to social media. Then the feared Special Action Forces (FAES) police unit came knocking. “The people who killed him were wearing uniforms and had ski masks,” a family member who didn’t want to be identified out of fear of more violence told The Telegraph.
If the world is able to look back on this period . . . it will be sick with its memories. Bashar al-Assad with the support of Vladimir Putin and Ali Khamenei managed to physically destroy half of his state while running about half of its population as well. Now that the he has regained some areas, the past has come knocking for the release of prisoners.
Posted to YouTube February 20, 2019.
Scanning for news, rejiggering it, “scraping” as bloggers may call it — all takes time. Of late, BackChannels has been wondering what one has gotten back — or just created — from each days sail out into the sea of web-borne news. In the spirit of philosophy, one might enjoy the consolation of having seen and relayed a very small shard of time in the world.
This post has featured web artifacts dated February 20 and 21, 2019 having to do with four conflict-hot states: Ukraine, Venezuela, Sudan, and Syria. Central to the historical narratives of each: autocratic and still medieval Russia, Imperial, Soviet, Post-Soviet. The bereft and hungry of the North established tribes in Kiev around the 9th Century and lived and ruled in the feudal manner by way of the standards of the age. Contracts, expansions, hardships exceeding in excessive suffering practically every possibility short of the Holocaust — I have in mind the Mongol Invasion — and here . . . at the end of two modern revolutions and three distinct experiments with government unable to escape a paternal (and these days criminal) paternalism, . . . well here comes perhaps a different end to empire: Moscow has invaded Ukraine and Kiev is fighting back, making the sacrifices every day it must for freedom through democracy.
Venezuela’s “mafia state” will never be able to return Moscow’s “investment” in post-Soviet support — another more responsible government is needed for that.
Sudan has only this day to lose an ageing despot whose control of his state has come down to “shadow brigades” and the muzzling of truth-telling journalists. He doesn’t like the way he looks in Sudan’s newspapers. I wonder how he’ll feel when he sees himself in history.
— For the past five months, Swedish television SVT has had access to a large quantity of classified documents detailing Danske Bank’s dealings with Swedbank. There were a large number of transactions between the banks’ clients between 2007 and 2015.
The analysis reveals that 50 of Swedbank’s customers that show several risk indicators of suspected money laundering have funneled a total of USD 5.8 billion through the bank.
Little — or lesser — birdies (BackChannels, aloft on small wings and little nourishment refers to itself) have been known to tweet first thing in the morning.
The strangest thing about this is that Roger Waters learned about the Branson-backed Cucuta concert by reading The Daily Mail. (Full disclosure: I listened to a *lot* of Pink Floyd in highschool) https://t.co/DldDtXS7Tf
Perhaps this whole rig x era x technology is the dark side of the moon, for we're all here meeting. @rogerwaters Background: https://t.co/GGBKh8dnq0 The dissolving of the Soviet Union 26 years ago (Dec. 25, 1991) left behind phantoms in conflicts and kleptocratic dictatorships.
Reheat the coffee; warm up a slice of caramel cake; watch that Swedbank documentary — what can a poor boy to do but to play online as a street fighting — c’mon you Phantoms of the Soviet! — ham?
“Mick” 1969
Right spirit, but (oy) what a long, strange trip . . .
Trump’s governments — none of them — have held together for long. This latest with Mattis, a popular general, only serves to further undermine the public’s confidence in the Administration.
Crimea, Ukraine has become the front line of a deeply sabotaged NATO although it’s Ukraine that’s seeking accession.
Go figure.
Have a brief look at the political shape NATO’s in: France — rolling with the “Yellow Vest” Active Measures (most likely — time to man up, Macron); Germany — leveraged by energy dependence on Russia; Hungary — Putin bromancer Orban’s new feudal estate; Turkey — more sultanate than NATO state.
Ukraine’s SBU Security Service has reported on the arrest of three sabotage groups deployed by Russia’s military intelligence in eastern Ukraine. The SBU press service says the agency will provide details of the operation at a special briefing to be scheduled for the coming days. It is noted that the raid was carried out by Ukraine’s counterintelligence forces.
Editor’s tired . . . knows others read the news too . . . may turn to fiction . . . may also note that the loud and narcissistic Trump now appears the mirror opposite of “Jimmuh”: he’s been playing the tough guy — know the mob and the kind of company he has kept, admires dictators, takes no shit, etc. — but he’s pulling America’s troop presence out of Syria, leaving that space to America’s sworn enemies, while in Ukraine — no popular data (have a Google yourself) while Russia pushes “a big amount of military equipment to the North Crimea — and Ukrainian counterintelligence hunts down and arrests Russia Spetsnaz or similar from the sound of it.
Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council NAACP National Action Network National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity (NAPE) National Association of Human Rights Workers National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund National Association of Social Workers National Center for Learning Disabilities National Center for Transgender Equality National Council of Jewish Women National Council of Jewish Women, Pittsburgh National Council of Teachers of English National Disability Rights Network National Down Syndrome Congress National Employment Law Project National Employment Lawyers Association NATIONAL FAIR HOUSING ALLIANCE National Immigration Law Center National Legal Aid and Defender Association National LGBTQ Task Force National Organization for Women National Partnership for Women & Families National Urban League National Women’s Law Center New York City Anti-Violence Project OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates People For the American Way PFLAG National PolicyLink SEIU Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF) South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) Southern Poverty Law Center The Campaign to TAKE ON HATE The Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law The Sikh Coalition The United Methodist Church-General Board of Church & Society UnidosUS Union for Reform Judaism YWCA USA
The blog has also associated America’s deep and frequently extreme political polarization with “Active Measures” and related “hybrid” and “information” warfare designed by the dictatorships running Moscow and Tehran against the will of their people. It seems surreal that a French President would now stand before the American Congress and underscore those points while a populist American President stands some to the side and between as regards accommodating, so far, aggression in Ukraine and an unspeakable horror show for humanity in Syria, which has been strengthened also for Iranian and Russian forces as well as their proxies and “little white men” (same as those “little green” ones who literally walked into Crimea).
Best Solution – Digital Data and Artificial Intelligence
Screenshot: Sophia AI on the cover of an Indian edition of Cosmopolitan.
BackChannels heartily endorses fair and free trade, global cooperation that is constructive for all — no zero-sum games or negotiations — and, of course, due attention to the psychological and social ramifications of exchange involving Big Data and. God bless Sophia and her engineers, the revolutions to come in artificial intelligence.
I was drawn away from the desktop during this morning’s speech, but am very glad here to have returned to a recording of it (thank you Fox 10 Phoenix for fair use and fine editing) and spent the afternoon with it.
I think it safe to say that America LOVES French President Macron. At the end of this clip, I seen no one sitting in protest. I don’t know if that’s a rare occasion (another remark made about this event and one best left unremarked), but I’m going to be feeling it — feeling its goodness — for a while).
Complicated world and this is a small proof-of-principle involving an ABC News feed to Facebook (public) with an address that has evidently come through on this WordPress blog.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal involves Facebook Civilization’s (54 billion souls?) handover, somewhat unwitting, private information useful for those who make money manipulating public perception.
Also cogent to awareness of the the just-make-it-up news:
AN INTERVIEW WITH an 11-year-old Syrian boy broadcast last week on Russia’s main state-owned news channel, Russia-24, appears to have been filmed not in the boy’s hometown, where a suspected chemical attack took place, but at a Syrian army facility where Russian military advisers were present.
The report, claiming to prove that video of the attack’s aftermath was fake, is considered so important by Russian officials that Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, plans to screen it for the Security Council.
So Moscow wags the dog.
War may be a business — there’s a theme for BackChannels — but ask any victim of war if war is show business.
This may be a temporary post. I didn’t say much. Still . . . multiple sources, one live, one reportage, one an old film. Cool.
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