I have found “X-pression” becoming pointless as the forest wakes up, all of the birdies go tweet tweet tweet and one’s own expression drowns in the cacophony. Nonetheless, X interaction feels engaging and here serves as part of a morning routine involving strong coffee, access to a portion of the world’s best journalism online, and, sigh, also a collection of voices practically medieval in their bludgeoning unreason.
Sudan’s General Dagalo Hemeti has had both long-standing family interests in Sudan’s gold trade, and he has had for some time arrangements with Russian President Vladimir Putin involving Wagner Group oversight of smuggled shipments to Russia that bypass western sanctions and help fund Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The west’s hunkering down, bleating about democracy, and pleading for some cessation in violence seems old news as well.
So it goes here for the Sudanese People and others watching the struggles of ordinary good people against thieves taking advantage of their innocence to rob them of their birthright, their dignity, and their humanity. In fact, having displaced the dictator and war criminal Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese have helped into power, in the course of their powerlessness, two dictators in return, both of them former subordinates to al-Bashir. Of the two, Hemeti may have the more powerful relationship with Putin as he flies off-the-books gold to Russia’s dictator and serves as an envoy — for Putin, a diplomatic channel — to Saudi power as well.
Neither Russians nor Sudanese appear to have today a champion whose interests as well as psychology and temperament reside with them. The present three “strongmen”– al-Burhan, Hemeti, and Putin– appear to represent the evil that enriches and aggrandizes itself while lying without conscience to the nation each purports to represent.
Russia’s meddling in Sudan’s gold began in earnest in 2014 after its invasion of Crimea prompted a slew of Western sanctions. Gold shipments proved an effective way of accumulating and transferring wealth, bolstering Russia’s state coffers while sidestepping international financial monitoring systems.
“The downside of gold is that it’s physical and a lot more cumbersome to use than international wire transfers but the flip side is that it’s much harder if not impossible to freeze or seize,” said Daniel McDowell, sanctions specialist and associate professor of Political Science at Syracuse University.
Deputy Chairman of Sudan’s Sovereignty Council and commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Gen Mohamed Hamdan ‘Hemeti’ Dagalo, called on the international community to support the dialogue between Russia and Ukraine. This is the official position of the Sovereignty Council, he said in a statement to the Russian news channel Sputnik yesterday.
Yesterday’s statement followed Hemeti’s statements last week during his Moscow visit, where he declared support for Russia’s invasion by saying that Russia had a right to defend itself and its people.
A July 2022 CNN investigation exposed deepening ties between Moscow and Sudan’s military leadership, who granted Russia access to the east African country’s gold riches in exchange for military and political support. The relationship began in earnest after Moscow’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, when Russia began to eye African gold riches as an avenue to circumvent a slew of Western sanctions.
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the wave of sanctions that followed accelerated Russia’s gold plunder in Sudan and further propped up military rule, increasing Wagner activity in the country.
On the day before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Dagalo headed a Sudanese delegation in Moscow to “advance relations” between the two countries.
I’ve been collecting memes from Twitter, and because they’re built for mass distribution, I have found the developing catalog handy as accompaniment or main point to my own undeniably crafted tweets. My silly goal: getting to “0” characters with a sharp point.
Regarding the "rights of people in Donbas"-https://t.co/JpEtYGDtyR One admires your concern & hopes that you will stop taking nourishment from the radiator-distilled potato juice that might account for your delirium & surreal paranoid delusional narcissistic reflection of motive.
As regards the tweeting, the furious pace of communications buries all “works” and even short periods of time in history may dissolve their relevance. In the end, one has only assembled a snapshot of a political moment encapsulated in the briefest of exchanges.
I tire of conveying similar “talking points” on Twitter, so here have brought together one tweet and a few exemplary references hauled into TwitterSpace to set the point.
And what did you do to the Budapest Memorandum? Here's your narrative, 1992-2022-https://t.co/kyRk79vjQH Perhaps no democracy or western state should have cooperated with you-from the Moscow False flag to today, how many apartment buildings have your bombed or villages destroyed?
Very little post-Cold War literature speaks well of Russia, frankly.
I had years ago created in my library a small “Russian Section” but decided against become a librarian as well as a faithful, thorough, and persnickety creator of bibliography. 🙂 Nonetheless, the basic reading has turned out a lasting experience.
Does Moscow need the enmity of the world for grinding against?
Or does Russia merely represent what is barbaric, corrupt, evil, greedy, and ruthless between men?
And does Washington need the enmity of Moscow to set is own pace in defense spending and related forces and technology development?
They’re questions worth asking but far beyond my capacity to address.
The one thing well known worldwide is that Moscow has lost all credibility in aboveboard political agreements (like that Budapest Memorandum) and normal diplomatic declarations (e.g., assurances about NOT invading Ukraine even as it positioned for doing so–and now we have the same talk about not using tactical nuclear weapons even as it plans to move weapons of the type into Belarus).
As the United States and others have led the world on the basis of competitive good conduct and productivity in trade — and with the happiness of nations having to do with adjustment to long-term cultural attributes and geopolitical realities–Russia appears to have fallen into the darkest of abyss with its “Tsar Nobody” attempting to accomplish by corruption, force, and theft what he and it have no wish to do peacefully. On Putin’s course, Russia evidently means to destroy, enslave, plunder, and subjugate rival powers.
The search string, “Soviet Era Heroic Realism” yielded the second image–it helps to knowingly guess what one is after–which has the caption, “Post World War Two Russian Post–Young builders of Communism, go forth toward the new heights.”
We know how that worked out, and Stalin, at least in atrocious facsimile, appears to be with us yet.
Regarding Trump’s depiction, I have commented via Twitter (on Brigitte Gabriel’s feed) already this morning on Moscow’s Trojan Horse–he’s about that large too–in the Grand Old Party (of Greed), and here will relay the cannon fire in plain text and in a manner more easily accessed–>
“Trump is doing what he has always done. He walks to the line of openly calling for violence and stops just before making overt directives,” Kurt Braddock, an American University professor who studies far-right extremism and the ways in which communication and propaganda contribute to political violence, told Insider.
“In many ways, the implications are the same. His supporters who are looking for an excuse to turn to violence will see this as his implicit approval,” Braddock added.
Practically an Afterthought on Donal Trump’s Anti-Democratic Authoritarian Narcissistic Mentality
"“I get along well with Putin,” Trump said, adding that the Russian president discussed Ukraine regularly. “He wanted to get a piece,” Trump said. “Now it looks like he’ll probably end up getting the whole thing.” #DonaldTrump on #UkraineRussiaWarhttps://t.co/AHf5vVolJI#DTPutin
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.
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