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Category Archives: North America

A Note on Russia’s Criminal President and the Long Effort to Destroy Western Political Coherence, Cohesion, and Will

21 Monday Mar 2022

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Europe, North America, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Russia, Ukraine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

EU/NATO Coherence and Integrity, medieval v modern, Russia v NATO, Russia v Ukraine, Russia's Criminal State

Karen Dawisha -> Andrei Nekrasov and Olga Konskaya’s “Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case” -> David Satter’s “The Unsolved Mystery Behind the Act of Terror That Brought Putin to Power” -> Anna Politkovskaya’s A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya -> John Schindler’s “Exploring Al Qaeda’s Murky Connection to Russian Intelligence” -> 9/11 : Reflexive Control -> New Nationalism — in Wikipedia, “Neo-Nationalism” — in EU/NATO and its effects in Great Britain (BREXIT), Hungary (Orban), Italy (Far Right), Poland, Turkey (Erdogan’s feudal revanche), United States (Trump).

Why?

Karen Dawisha detailed how the Soviet nomenklatura prepared in the mid-1980s for the demise of their state and what would have been their fall from grace but for plans to capture the state’s assets for themselves.

Mission accomplished.

Husband and wife Andrew Nekrasov and Olga Konskaya documented in part how former KGB driving cabs determined to return to their former status in power as politically criminal agents with the master who seems today busy with trying to steal back a state that had gotten rid of its Moscow puppet. Once again, Moscow’s premier secret police–from Okhrana to Cheka to FSB–have succeeded in destroying goodness and justice in Russia (the west may be only waiting for the Russians to figure out how they have been themselves once again enslaved).

David Satter has made a mission of convincing the world that Putin’s ascent to power was predicated by the KGB’s false flag bombing of apartment buildings over which the fingers would point toward Chechen Rebels. Given the Kremlin’s penchant for absurd lies, barbaric acts elsewhere, and dramatic political theater and reputation for Orwellian perceptual control across time, I’ve been convinced.

Anna Politkovskaya reported directly on the brutalizing of Chechen villages to drive men and boys into the camps of experienced Chechen terrorists while sustaining an Islamist warlord in power.

According to John Schindler, the KGB had terrorist Ayman al Zawahiri of hijacker coordination fame as a guest over the winter of 1996-7, which makes sense of a timeline that fits with the KGB’s “recovery” of its less savory powers a little earlier in the mid-1990s (do watch the Nekrasov documentary for what happened in the gap between the “end of the Cold War” and the launching of revenge for the Soviet loss in Afghanistan and subsequent bankruptcy).

Aside, those fond of serial coincidences may enjoy looking up Felix Dzerzhinsky’s birthday and taking into the consideration the role of “1” in the dissolving of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the September 11 attack on the United States in 2001, the start of civil war in Syria in 2011, predicated in part on fighting “The Terrorists” (together with the west), and now the Russian Invasion of Ukraine here in 2021.

Hey, wait a minute!

Lol.

(“Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps”).

Motivating terrorists to blow up the World Trade Center while working with western security to eliminate terrorism . . . that’s pretty slick, but it fits with the temperament of the damned that have also sustained the Middle East Conflict and countless other “frozen conflicts”– as well as dictatorships — worldwide, and it also helps answer the question as to why the west has bent backward so often for so long in the interest of sustained peace beneath the black cloud of mutually assured nuclear destruction.

To this point, the west (again, Zawahiri, KGB, from 1996, it’s easy to see) has been repeatedly bitten by Islamic Terrorism, albeit less lately than in previous decades, and thereby encouraged to stand up for its own cultures — and Christian or secular governments — while treated to waves of migrations motivated by once Soviet-backed conflicts, crime-related violence (at the transnational level), and economic despair (note: although desertification in the presence of global warming has had nefarious political effects, including motivating appeals to despots for relief).

When Obama offered the “reset”, the decision point to join the west over Syria’s agricultural woes — and later to the United States said, “don’t forget who you are” — as well as the stern warning to Putin not to return to the “KGB Playbook” . . . it was already too late (really: have a look at 2016’s Putin-Trump billboard in Russia – or the old “laundromat” story – or the real estate stories).

So here we are with a monster dredged from fascist, feudal, and medieval quarters that now razes with blunt force and fire a modern state aspiring to a democratic, free, honorable, and peaceful future. While we have done more than stand by and watch–we have been responding to our more stranded neighbor–we haven’t faced the full criminal scope of the Russian President’s magical narcissistic beliefs and his related and wholly destructive behavior. Deluded and drunk in power, President Putin lies to himself and to Russia, and yet no one will either dare interfere with his course, and, quite possibly, no one knows how.

Have conditions in the west to become “existential” to do as Ukraine has been doing?

UATV English, March 21, 2022.

Live at posting.

–33–

Two Twitter Spears

15 Tuesday Mar 2022

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, North America, Political Psychology, Russia, Ukraine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

medieval v modern, Russia v Ukraine, Russia's Malignant Narcissism, Russian barbarism, Russian Fascism, Trump-Putin Billboard

Life Online and the War in the Ukraine move fast!

With that speed, inspiration -> political punditry -> launch (something, anything, hope it works) has become a very short cycle.
***

Got to jump down turn around and send a missive flying
Go to jump down turn around and compose again . . . .
***
So it goes.

Sources for the first tweet date back to the Putin-Trump bromance of 2016 and the Republican chorus of denials over Russia’s onslaught of methods of perceptual channeling and control that were to be popularly known as “Active Measures”–>

@AccountableGOP @ProjectLincoln @RpsAgainstTrump@AmbDanFried @NSLforBiden @natsechobbyist @SenatorDurbin @SteveScalise @Ink8Judy
2016
–https://t.co/TpcoyQ6Ij3
–https://t.co/MwCurViW3I
–https://t.co/Me2afiVrKl
–https://t.co/asnQEvnT3E
–https://t.co/68kbZtcmq6

— J. S. Oppenheim (@JS_Oppenheim) March 15, 2022

It’s impossible to miss Russia’s criminal anger and resentment of the modern world in its aggression against the west as its secret police and other elements got to their feet in the shadows of the “End of the Cold War”. Out to the edges of the former Soviet spheres of conflict, control, and influence, an habitual penchant for Absolute Power and the endorsements of political theater and terrorism became fixtures of political behavior in Chechnya and Syria as well as Afghanistan (Russian arms and materiel were to support the Taliban all the way back to Kabul).

#RussiaUkraineWar #PutinFullTonto #RussianBarbarism #PutinBlowsUpWorld

Putin's Politically Criminal and Deluded Russia has its own Special Truth —

–https://t.co/nvCKvClJ3t
–https://t.co/9w0ynE8w8C
–https://t.co/4kCQ8gKqJ7
–https://t.co/a2vDgtjDRe
–https://t.co/D9CMwYm4mT

— J. S. Oppenheim (@JS_Oppenheim) March 14, 2022

To this day, Russia’s leadership has shown the world nothing of modern compassion, conscience, constructive ambition, empathy, or humanity while demonstrating only the feudal-medieval barbarism and rapacious destructiveness and greed of the police state it has become and that it intends to impose on Ukraine and the west.

–33–

FTAC: On NATO’s Avoidance of Potential Nuclear Exchange Involving Russia’s Emperor Putin

10 Thursday Mar 2022

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Great Britain and United Kingdom, North America, Political Psychology, Russia, Ukraine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

EU/NATO Response in Ukraine, medieval v modern, Putin's Mental Health, Ukraine v Russia

The West had perhaps thought the Cold War over on December 25, 1991 with the announcement at noon of the Soviet Union’s dissolving itself in bankruptcy, but here with are with a post-Soviet KGB/FSB President Putin in power who while demonstrating his idea of logical reasoning repeatedly proves himself barbaric, inhuman, and irrational and only best in his expression of unhelpful and wholly destructive madness. He appears to have no insight as regards his own malign and narcissistic disorder, but his army knows it, his generals see it, his inner circle suffer for it and none appear able to stop him.

It would appear that KGB Lt. Colonel President Emperor Tsar Putin has given himself the power to destroy Russia pretty much on his own through the employ of those he has managed to suborn to himself and who now appear to tremble before him.

For Ukrainians, who are but the latest to catch Tsar Putin’s cross-hairs, the question comes up as to why EU/NATO so far refuses Ukraine offensive weapons sufficient for controlling its air space. The Atlantic Council circulated a germane answer in the form of a survey of experts and simple chi-square chart, and this morning when both plea and question came up on Facebook, I felt bound to respond.

From the Awesome Conversation

In what follows, I’ve added URLs where they would be otherwise absent in plain text.

Out of laziness, perhaps, I’ve chosen to plant surprises, helpful ones, in the URLs and forego the creating of standard reference (a “Related Online” section has been otherwise a BackChannels desktop publishing tradition).


Here’s the thinking regarding NATO’s official avoidance of war with Russia beneath the black cloud of Mutually Assured Destructed attached to any exchange of nuclear weapons and related and possibly out of control (worse: computer-controlled, according to Putin) escalation.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/the-big-story/what-are-the-risks-and-benefits-of-us-nato-military-options-in-ukraine-our-strategic-risk-calculator-has-answers/

Note: Russia boasts two related threat assets: 2000 “tactical nuclear weapons” and fast-and-crooked (rather like Russia’s leadership itself) “hypersonic missiles“. Both may be easily looked up online.

Where the United States has forsworn first use of a nuclear device, Russia’s mafia-style doctrine has gambled on a smaller is larger option–and it is because the world has this smaller-leverages-larger nutcase getting everything he wants predicated on his demonstrations of ability to launch wars by proxy, his show of barbarism, especially in Syria (now Ukraine, and who’s next?), his support for “frozen conflicts” and terrorist organizations, and his employment of methods of political blackmail and compromise (look up Jeffrey Epstein’s visit to Moscow) and intimidation, he presents before all the challenge of shutting down what he would regard as his life’s work, piece of ____t that he is.

The first steps have been to erode his financing, hit his backers, and get Mother Russia — i.e., someone more authentically representing her — to take care of him.

The medieval world hates the modern–and His Malignance hates what he cannot absolutely control and plunder.


Update: An Argument for Increased Ukrainian Surface-to-Air Defenses

Rogoway, Tyler and Thomas Newdick. “Ukraine Needs Ground-Based Air Defenses Way More Than MiGs. Here Are the Best Options.” The Warzone, The Drive, March 10, 2022.

–33–

Putin the Pirate

24 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by commart in 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, Great Britain and United Kingdom, Political Psychology, Politics, Russia, Ukraine, United States of America

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

EU/NATO, New Nationalism, New Russian Imperialism, Putin the Pirate, Russia v NATO, Russia v Ukraine, Ukraine's Frozen Conflict, Vladimir Putin

Well, he stole Robert Kraft’s Sacred Superbowl Ring, so what wouldn’t he steal?

Kraft’s ring now appears on display in the Kremlin’s library, quite a trophy brought home to Moscow by Russia’s Boss of Bosses.

From CNN:

The 4.94-carat ring is in the Kremlin’s library, where all official state gifts are kept, he said. It is worth more than $25,000, according to multiple reports from 2005.

A Kraft spokesman said Sunday the story is a humorous anecdote that Kraft “retells for laughs.”

“He loves that the ring is at the Kremlin and, as he stated back in 2005, he continues to have great respect for Russia and the leadership of President Putin,” said Stacey James, a spokesman for The Kraft Group.

Eshchenko, Alla and Faith Karimi. “Russian president: I did not steal Super Bowl ring.” CNN, June 17, 2013.

No. Putin didn’t steal it. It was a gift!

🙄

***

Will Ukraine be a gift too?

***

Putin the Pirate has done a few things under the table upside-down and sideways over decades to weaken western political coherence, cohesion, and resolve. Start with the KGB’s handling of Zawahiri over the winter of 1996/7. In connect-the-dots fashion, I believe that stay led to the attack by jet hijacking Islamists on 9/11 that in turn goosed the pride of western states in their Christian and independent political cultures and led to what has been referred to as the “New Nationalism”.

When bees sting and flesh swells, the response has not been called “proud flesh” for nothing.

The popular western response in enmity and fear regarding Islam has not been misplaced in relation to Islamic Extremism and related Islamist Terror, but the same has given rise to blood-and-soil nationalism, authoritarianism, and actual autocracy in some EU/NATO states. Hungary, Italy, Poland, Turkey, and the United States (one nation under Trump for a while) have each seen their open democracies challenged by demagoguery or political perversion.

We may also take note of the “01s” in dates: 1991-dissolve of the Soviet Union in bankruptcy following American intercession opposite the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (from which Russia was forced to retreat in 1989); 2001-the September 11 attacks took place on Felix Dzerzhinsky’s birthday, quite a gift for a Moscow bent on revenge for its losses in Afghanistan-and, no, Putin didn’t do it–it was obviously radical Muslims assembled and deployed by Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama Bin Laden; 2011-The Horror taking off in Syria that would send millions of refugees into NATO (Turkey, which today hosts about 3.68 million Syrian refugees), the European Union (0.7 million-Germany), and Scandinavia (0.3 million), another goad for the defense of the rightly ethnolinguistic state cultures settled and enjoying the benefits of, well, being themselves, the only problem being a concomitant drift toward the same feudal-medieval worldviews and fascination with authority held by Bashar al-Assad, Ali Khamenei, and Vladimir Putin; 2021-Russia’s repeated threats by military feint against Ukraine, a young democratic state seeking NATO accession, and, by extension, NATO itself, but not quite as Ukraine remains without accession.

So hey, Bob (Kraft), George and George, Jr. (Bush), where are you today with Putin (the thief)?

***

Where and when are dictatorships to be stopped?

Is it when one or another has engaged in political repression and breathtaking plunder at home?

Should it be when the security service agents and agent provocateur show up within the borders of one’s democratic state?

Should it be when the tanks roll into a neighboring state struggling for its own sovereignty against barbaric force and the possibility of a return to corrupt, kleptocratic, and tyrannical governance?

Reference

Amante, Angelo and Crispian Balmer. “Analysis: Italy’s Salvini struggles as rightist ally grows stronger.” Reuters, May 10, 2021.

Bertrand, Natasha and Devan Cole. “Blinken says ‘a single additional Russian force’ entering Ukraine would trigger US response.” CNN, January 23, 2022.

Christophersen, Erik. “These 10 countries receive the most refugees.” Norwegian Refugee Council.

Cummings, William. “‘I am a nationalist’: Trump’s embrace of controversial label sparks uproar.” USA Today, October 24, 2018.

Duffin, Erin. “Nationalism in the U.S. – Statistics & Facts.” Statista, March 11, 2021.

Ellyatt, Holly. “If war is coming, the West must decide how far it will go to defend Ukraine against Russia.” CNBC, January 24, 2022.

Fearnow, Benjamin. “Donald Trump Urges Americans to Bring ‘Nationalism’ Back Into the Mainstream.” Newsweek, November 19, 2019.

Gross, Terry. “Manafort’s Guilty Plea Details His Entanglement with Russian-Backed Oligarchs.” NPR, September 19, 2018.

Harding, Luke. “Former Trump aide approved ‘black ops’ to help Ukraine president.” The Guardian, April 5, 2018.

Hemon, Aleksandar. “Trump’s Nationalism Advances on a Predictable Trajectory to Violence. His Supporters Will Kill When They’re Told To.” The Intercept, May 2, 2020.

Kajta, Justyna. “From street to state: How radical nationalists gained power in Poland.” Open Democracy, April 1, 2021.

Musharbash, Yassin. “The Globalization of Far-Right Extremism: An Investigative Report.” CTC Sentinel, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, 14:6, July/August 2021.

Oppenheim, James S. “Syria: The Horror: 2011.” BackChannels, December 29, 2017.

Oppenheim, James S. “Trump’s America in Retrospect: Russian Real Estate Entanglements.” BackChannels, October 9, 2021.

Oppenheim, James S. “Ukraine: A Reminder.” BackChannels, December 7, 2021.

Satter, David. “The Unsolved Mystery Behind the Act of Terror That Brought Putin to Power.” National Review, August 17, 2016.

Schindler, John. “Exploring Al Qaeda’s Murky Connection to Russian Intelligence.” Business Insider, June 10, 2014.

Schuster, Simon. “How Paul Manafort Helped Elect Russia’s Man in Ukraine.” Time, October 31, 2017.

Smith, Deyscha. “New details shed light on the Robert Kraft-Vladimir Putin Super Bowl ring controversy.” Boston, September 10, 2020.

Statista. “Ranking of the largest Syria refugee-hosting countries in 2020”.

Stewart, Katherine. “Christian Nationalism Is One of Trump’s Most Powerful Weapons.” The New York Times, January 6, 2022.

The New York Times. “Gerald L. K. Smith Dead; Anti-Communist Crusader.” April 16, 1976.

Troaianovski, Anton and David E. Sanger. “Russia Issues Subtle Threats More Far-Reaching Than a Ukraine Invasion.” The New York Times, January 16, 2022.

Turner, Lauren. “Ukraine: Boris Johnson warns Russian invasion would be disastrous.” BBC, January 24, 2022.

UNHCR. “Syria Refugee Crisis–Globally, in Europe and in Cyprus.” March 18, 2021.

VOA. “Russia Threatens to Deploy Tactical Nuclear Weapons.” December 14, 2021.

Wikipedia. “America First Party (1943)”.

Wikipedia. “Ayman al-Zawahiri”.

Wikipedia. “Felix Dzerzhinsky”.

Wikipedia. “Gerald L. K. Smith”.

Wikipedia. “Osama bin Laden”.

Wikipedia. “Putin’s Kleptocracy”.

Wikipedia. “Russo-Ukrainian War”.


Posted to YouTube by WGN News, January 24, 2022.

–33–

An America Compromised, Corrupt, Infiltrated

28 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Spychology, United States of America

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

American Corruption, American Infiltration, American Kompromat

Miami Herald journalist Julie Brown noted the presence of countless unanswered questions in association with her research into Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita industry. The full accounting of who, what, where, and why would today seem largely absent and sealed by Epstein’s own hanging, but perhaps there’s one aspect that bears further attention in this most distracted age: Epstein’s Russian interests. The powerful personal brands associated with the Epstein vortex range from Alan Dershowitz to Prince Andrew — so how deep and how wide the damage done?

State secret?

Anything’s possible.

Former American President Donald Trump has had his allegiance questioned quite famously in relation to the Steele Dossier, but what of his noted and more accessible financial entanglements with Russian money?

Whether by way of fear of being found out or found guilty of one crime or another, when have the business and political leaders of a nation been compromised enough to accept bridling by the state’s foremost enemy?

***

Should you pick up American Kleptocracy by Casey Michel, you will learn (here cribbing direct from the book’s title) “How the U.S. CREATED the WORLD’S GREATEST MONEY LAUNDERING SCHEME in HISTORY”. Forget expensive cars and real estate, at least until one has established sufficient anonymous businesses- as-persons courtesy of Delaware, South Dakota, Wyoming, for a start.

***

Before Maria Butina, the “illegal”, got caught, American Administrations, including Trump’s, had given the boot to Moscow’s spies-under-diplomatic-cover. The question to which only the state, actually the CIA and FBI, might respond would be “How many more Maria’s might there be?” Doing what? How? And where?

***

With respect to East-West Rivalry and Moscow-Washington Relations, just how bad might compromise, corruption, and infiltration serving Russia’s defense and promotion of political absolutism and kleptocracy be here in the United States?

We know of at least one former American President having been up to his eyeballs in Russian money related to real estate (and few will ever forget or forgive his “Helsinki Moment“).

Whatever Washington’s true state of affairs might be with Russia — and a kleptocratic Russia unrelenting in its will to confuse and degrade EU/NATO cohesion and coherence — one may hope the open democracies of the west and their allies will renew their vows (for Americans, see “Basic Training” on this blog) and rediscover and reaffirm their commitments to American and modern civility, ethics, principles, rights, and values without compromise and, always, with compassion, humanism, and reason.

Related Online

CBS News. “Russian spies livinig among us: Inside the FBI’s “Operation Ghost Stories.” October 13, 2020.

CBS SF Bay Area. “Alleged Russian Spies Told to Leave SF Include Consulate’s Chef.” December 30, 2016.

Cenziper, Debbie and Will Fitzgibbon. “Rogue Americans Stashed Assets Offshore, Eluding Victims and Impeding Investigators.” The Washington Post, October 4, 2021.

Cenziper, Debbi and Will Fitzgibbon. “The ‘Cowboy Cocktail’: How Wyoming Became One of the World’s Top Tax Havens.” The Washington Post, December 20, 2021.

Epstein, Adam. “The stranger-than-fiction story of the real Russian spies who inspired “The Americans”. Quartz, March 7, 2017; updated November 21, 2019.

FBI. “Operation Ghost Stories: Inside the Russian Spy Case.” October 31, 2011.

France 24. “US expels 35 Russian diplomats over election hacking.” December 29-30, 2016.

Mazzetti, Mark and Michael S. Schmidt. “Two Russian Compounds, Caught Up in History’s Echoes.” The New York Times, December 29, 2016.

Michel, Casey. American Kleptocracy. New York: Macmillan, 2021.

Michel, Casey. “A Ukrainian Oligarch Bought a Midwestern Factory and Let it Rot. What Was Really Going On?” Politico, October 17, 2021.

Michel, Casey. “How Delaware Became the World’s Biggest Offshore Haven.” Foreign Policy, November 19, 2021.

Michel, Casey. “It’s Put Up or Shut Up Time in the Fight Against Global Corruption.” The New Republic, December 27, 2021.

Michel, Casey. “Thanks, Paul Manafort–for showing that the U.S. needs to crack down on dirty money.” The Washington Post, August 16, 2018.

Michel, Casey. “The United States of Anonymity.” Hudson Institute, November 3, 2017. Separate PDF Report, 44 pages.

Michel, Casey. “The United States of Dirty Money: How landlocked South Dakota became one of the world’s hottest destinations for offshore funds.” The Atlantic, October 5, 2021.

Neftin, Danielle. “‘Russian Spy’ Maria Butina is Living the American Dream–In Russia.” The Daily Beast, November 29, 2021.

Northam, Jackie. “Obama Expels 35 Diplomats, Imposes Retaliatory Sanctions Against Russia for Hacking.” NPR, December 29, 2016.

Oppenheim, James S. “Basic Training.” BackChannels, February 2, 2017.

Oppenheim, James S. “Trump’s America in Retrospect: Russian Real Estate Entanglements.” BackChannels, October 9, 2021.

Patterson, Thom. “The Russian spies living next door.” CNN, July 19, 2017.

Pegg, David and Dominic Rushe. “Pandora papers reveal South Dakota’s role as $367bn tax haven.” The Guardian, October 4, 2021.

Pierce, Charles P. “Wyoming Is the Onshore-Offshore Tax Haven of Oligarch Dreams.” Esquire, December 21, 2021.

Ponniah, Kevin. “Yuri Drozdov: The man who turned Soviet spies into Americans.” BBC News, June 23, 2017.

Savage, Charlie. “Why the Discredited Dossier Does Not Undercut the Russia Investigation.” The New York Times, December 1, 2021.

U.S. Department of Justice. “Individual Arrested for Acting Within the U.S. on Behalf of the Russian Government Without Notifying the Attorney General.” (POI: Hector Alejandro Cabrera Fuentes Press Release, February 18, 2020.

Wikipedia. “Illegals Program”.

Wikipedia. “Russian espionage in the United States”.

FTAC: Aghanistan, Corruption, and Greed

28 Tuesday Sep 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Afghanistan, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Europe, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, North America

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

C&G, EU/NATO, Putin

While the Modern West most certainly appears to be at war with feudal-medieval, narcissistic, and totalitarian forces and tendencies worldwide, there seems a part in which the Modern face off with the Modern over the management of corruption and greed. This note From the Awesome Conversation may be accompanied by a minimum of inline or separate references, but I do believe each claim or implication easily substantiated with a little bit of online research effort on the reader’s part.


From the Awesome Conversation (Now Growing Old as I Grow Old) 🙂

Inline URLs have been added to the original plain text.

***

HE was thinking “Putin”, whose black market provided the Taliban with arms and materiel and whose white market sells defense goods to allies on Afghanistan’s border. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/08/20/trump-peace-deal-taliban/ Grand Game thinking and Rare Earth Minerals have been a part of this tug-of-war between Moscow and Washington as has been the intent of “updating” Islam or Islamists hewing to impossibly archaic beliefs and execrable behavioral standards. Russia now has the Taliban where it has needed them — in power, out in the open, and free of any kind of support from Washington. 🙂

Moscow’s “Absolutism”, “Active Measures”, “Hybrid Warfare”, and Medieval “Realpolitik” have been somewhat proven against EU/NATO, which by “Reflexive Control” (see “Business Insider, Zawahiri, Russia“) has itself been pushed toward the “New Nationalism” with Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Turkey motivated most of all to march forward into the feudal-medieval past.

Add the arc of Soviet / post-Soviet alliances x Areas of Control x Regions of Influence, and one may glimpse the persistently barbaric and feudal world Moscow has in mind for the global future.

Not only Zawahiri but Jeffrey Epstein as well had Moscow stays in Russia], and the medieval emphasis on “kompromat” — and potential public embarrassment — may have come through most clearly during the Trump Administration (and Trump especially had relationships involving criminal elements and substantial sums of Russian money — start with Craig Unger on all of that).

One more note on Afghanistan: the fate of that state would seem inseparable from corruption and greed on the part of all involved, from the native warlords to American industries fueled by Big Defense contracts and supported by complex battle systems requiring the cooperation and presence of ready assets, especially air-related, and the administrative and technical abilities needed to run and sustain operations.

***


Related Online

Kazmin, Amy, Benjamin Parkin, Katrina Manson. “Low morale, no support and bad politics: why the Afghan army folded.” Financial Times, August 15, 2021.

Wilkie, Christina. “‘9/11 millionaires’ and mass corruption: How American money helped break Afghanistan.” CNBC, September 10, 2021.

–33–

FTAC: A Note on Greed

30 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, transnational crime, United States of America

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

addiction, Florida Shuffle, greed, Soulless America

Greed obliterates authentic purposes to become an end in and of itself. Perhaps it helps create an ordered society, bureaucratic, impersonal, programmed — but that rather misses the mark as regards human services and well-being.


By way of cold categorization, it might be said that all addicts are criminals, but one may wonder what part are themselves predators and what other part preyed on by dealers and doctors or equivalents in counseling.

“Florida Shuffle“.

From time to time, I catch the boilerplate conservative prescription “personal responsibility!” in relation to the kind of damaged, enslaved, marginalized, and traumatized person that has lost all agency, confidence, efficacy, and esteem and wonder how pernicious and greed-ridden a society we have become. Can we tell the difference between the sad sack hipster and self-serving and profiteering sociopaths? Have we overemphasized the substance — whatever it may be or have been — and under-emphasized disconnection, marginalization, ostracism? And if so, for what?

In business terms, we are each and everyone of us our own “cost centers” — we want to live with means; we wish to pay our way; and for the most part, that’s what we do — but for a portion of America’s 320 millions souls — about a million or so the last time I checked (2019 with figures from 2017 compiled by authorities in 2018)— personalities or problems attach to expensive dependencies, and those persons then become the smallest of “profit centers” — revenue generators — for the money mad among sociopaths, and that from the curb to the corporate suite. Family’s gone and all the connections left are “fiduciary”, i.e., all about money and control bereft of conscience and soul.


As so often happens, a frantic mother called us about her 19-year-old daughter, who I’ll call Jen. A heroin addict, Jen had been shuttled between multiple treatment centers and sober homes by greedy marketers looking to cash in on the teenager’s insurance benefits by keeping her perpetually in recovery, but never sober.

Aronberg, Dave. “Opportunists Are Exploiting the ACA to Prey on Opioid Addicts.” Time, September 20, 2017.

Related Online

Aronberg, Dave. “Opportunists Are Exploiting the ACA to Prey on Opioid Addicts.” Time, September 20, 2017.

Daniels, Lisa. “My Son Got Stuck In the ‘Florida Shuffle’ and Lost His Battle to Addiction.” RyanHampton, January 13, 2019.

Fix the Florida Shuffle. “What is the Florida Shuffle?”

Lopez, German. “She wanted addiction treatment. She ended up in the relapse capital of America.” Vox, March 2, 2020.

National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators. “Florida Shuffle.”

Wooten, Colton. “My Years in the Florida Shuffle of Drug Addiction.” The New Yorker, October 14, 2019.


“There’s more to life than a little bit of money, you know.”

Published by Vice News, August 30, 2021.

–33–

At the Far End of the Poppy Field

29 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, transnational crime, United States of America

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Addiction in America, Afghani Poppy, Heroin, Kensington Avenue, Philadelphia, Philly

In the American failure lies a paradox: Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower – the opium poppy. Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium – and suffered when they failed to complement it.

McCoy, Alfred. “How the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan: Western intervention has resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true narco-state.” The Guardian, January 9, 2018.

The world’s mafia — call them “Transnational Crime Organizations (TCOs)” for this world made smaller by the Internet and jets — sustain themselves through corrupt or intimidated officials who keep the traffic illegal, the profits high, and the goods coursing through the financial bloodstreams of the world as well as, of course, the bodies and minds of the world’s addicts. At the far end of the poppy field and well beyond its horizons, a human refuse washes up on the world’s streets, leaving governments in which the corrupt grow rich while the good drown before a dangerous and endless;u horrifying surge of affliction, crime, bodily damage, and emotional need that repeatedly defies bureaucratic processes and solutions.

Here for about 10 minutes is what the end of the poppy field looks like.

Recorded along Philadelphia’s Kensington Avenue on July 26 and posted to YouTube by kimgary on July 29, 2021, conditions may have been attenuated some by a clean-up of the street on August 18, but the greater story bearing down on that street hasn’t changed. “Heroin tourism” by the user community and guys with cameras continues. And the money changing hands in proximity to the above location: $1 billion annually, so suggested to Mike Newall writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer (listed in “Related Online”).

A Brief Comment on Narcotics, Realpolitik, and East-West Rivalry

I don’t want to go too far into Darkness and Light on this post, but it may no longer prove sufficient to “Act Locally, Think Globally” in light of an apparent willingness in states as well as persons to serve not only both sides of a conflict (with visible sales of common enough deliverables) but as well demonstrated in Afghanistan both the Devil and God or the Evil and the Good. Toward the end of America’s long tour in Afghanistan, generals made note of the use of Russian arms and materiel by Taliban forces, a black market trade if ever was — but who has picked up the chips, so to speak, in Asia but Russia, which is now doing a brisk business in defense sales to the neighbors of a soon to be Talibanized Afghanistan.

For heroin laced with fentanyl, credit China’s mafia interests that appear to have had until relatively recently fair latitude for keeping the west’s glamorous or vulnerable or both high and high on their way out of this world. For lack of directed Chinese resources, they may still have it.

Around the world, “Kash”, so it may be called, is King, and ain’t manipulation o’ the King — and on the King’s behalf and one’s own — part and parcel of all politics?

Obama may not have flinched when he authorized a billion dollars worth of cocaine sales for Hezbollah in the JCPOA deal, but from a strategic if not moral perspective, one wonders whether he should have stood at that juncture and said “No!” for the greater effects such a decision might have on long-term American political cohesion and coherence.

An America Broken, Compromised, Lost

Whatever the motives of each of its drifted “residents”, McPherson Square’s “Needle Park” and Kensington Avenue’s Junktopia host a portion of the nation’s most damaged and most lost children, “dipping” and homeless as well as short on options into recoveries more reliable than stopovers for intramural billing between service-providing bureaucracies and their subcontractors. Few, if any, have a clue as regards the nefarious “international relations” and “supply chains” that put the poppy seed in the ground and nursed it all the way to a spoon and needle and arm on the streets of Philadelphia (“City of Brotherly Love“) for some in Beijing and Moscow to smile and between them say, “How well America takes care of her people!”


Related Online

AFP News Agency. “Poppies bloom across Afghanistan as drought eases.” YouTube Video (1:30), April 18, 2019: “Though we are cultivating the poppies, smugglers are the ones who pocket all the money by converting it into heroin” (1:07).

AML Films. Assorted YouTube video testimonials on heroin addiction between 6 and 35 minutes each.

Brown, Erik. “I Work Near the Largest Open-Air Heroin Market On The East Coast: Philadelphia shows us what it looks like when a city commits suicide.” Dialogue & Discourse, Medium, May 25, 2021.

Byman, Daniel. “Hezbollah, Drugs, and the Obama Administration: A Closer Look at a Damning Politico Piece.” Lawfare, January 30, 2018.

Congressional Research Service. “Illicit Fentanyl and China’s Role.” PDF. Federation of American Scientists (FAS), January 29, 2021.

Dasa, Pandit. “Karma: What Goes Around Comes Around.” HuffPost, Januarary 11, 2012.

Felbab-Brown, Vanda. “Fentanyl and geopolitics: Controlling opioid supply from China.” Brookings, July 22, 2020.

Feng, Emily. “‘We Are Shipping to the U.S.’: Inside China’s Online Synthetic Drug Networks.” NPR, November 17, 2020.

Gibbons-Neff, Thomas. “Russia is sending weapons to Taliban, top U.S. general confirms.” The Washington Post, April 24, 2017.

kimgary. “Streets of Philadelphia, Kensington Ave Story” – Assorted videos, 16-to-25-minutes.

Marin, Max. “‘There still is no answer’: Philly cracks down on Kensington encampments again as homelessness crisis intensifies.” BILLYPENN, August 18, 2021.

Meyer, Josh. “The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.” Politico, December 2017.

McCoy, Alfred. “How the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan: Western intervention has resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true narco-state.” The Guardian, January 9, 2018.

Newall, Mike. “Business and bloodshed.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 2021.

Newall, Mike. “What it’s like to live at the edge of Needle Park.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 9, 2017.

Percy, Jennifer. “Trapped by the ‘Walmart of Heroin'”. The New York Times, October 10, 2018.

Project Cassandra.

Reuters. “Russia says boosts arms supplies to Central Asia amid Afghan conflict.” August 5, 2021.

Rowlatt, Justin. “Russia ‘arming the Afghan Taliban’, says US.” BBC News, March 23, 2018.

U.S. Department of the Treasury. “Treasury Targets Chinese Persons Involved with Drug Trafficking Organization Moving Fentanyl.” August 27, 2021.

Williams, Nick. “The history of heroin as a lyrical muse.” Dazed, August 22, 2017.

Whitlock, Craig. “Overwhelmed by Opium: The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn.” The Washington Post, December 9, 2019.


Published by Afghanistan Geographic, May 24, 2021.

Posted to YouTube by Late Night Tales, September 20, 2014.

Everything we say and do determines what’s going to happen to us in the future. Whether we act honestly, dishonestly, help or hurt others, it all gets recorded and manifests as a karmic reaction either in this life or a future life. All karmic records are carried with the soul into the next life and body.

Dasa, Pandit. “Karma: What Goes Around Comes Around.” HuffPost, Januarary 11, 2012.

Moscow has positioned the Taliban of Afghanistan right where it wants them, i.e., as a block and goad to the west, as a proxy for war by needle, and as another of the most honorable, most pious, and most hypocritical entities of the world, preaching sobriety by the book while taking up its role as the world’s foremost exporter of intoxication and death.

–33–

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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