Also in Media: “LIVE STREAM: House Open Hearing w/ FBI’s James Comey On Trump & Clinton Russia 2016 Election Hacking” | Live at Posting

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Posted by President Trump Live Speech and Press Conference


Related:

Rep. Schiff spoke both points in session.


Also regarding President Trump’s assertion of Obama Administration wiretapping, FBI Director Comey reports, “The Department has no information that supports those tweets.”

Related: http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/20/politics/comey-hearing-russia-wiretapping/index.html – “Comey confirms FBI investigating Russia, Trump ties” (Stephen Collinson).

Related on BackChannels to “east-west-” Russo-American political relations: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

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Re. Roger Stone, Paul Manfort: https://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/former-top-trump-aides-roger-stone-and-paul-manafort-both-wanted-for-questioning-in-russia-investigations/ 3/19/2017



Reference

“FISA 702”.  U. S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

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Also in Media: “War Against the West” by Ian Buruma – Project Syndicate – March 13, 2017

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There is at least one good test of where people stand: their view of the international investor and philanthropist George Soros. Like Kolnai, Soros is a Hungarian-born Jew, and has lived his adult life in Britain and the US. After the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, Soros has done more or less what US government agencies did after World War II. He has spent large chunks of his personal fortune on the promotion of liberal democratic values in former Communist countries. One of the many beneficiaries of his largesse is the current prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, who studied at Oxford on a Soros scholarship.

Now, biting the hand that fed him, Orbán recently called Soros’s “trans-border empire” a vicious threat to Hungary’s national identity. Soros, in his view, is a “predator” backed by “tons of money.” Orbán is a fiery advocate of “illiberal democracy,” as are other elected autocrats in former Soviet satellites. “In every country, they will want to displace Soros,” he declared in December.

Orbán is right about a few countries at least . . . .

Read what comes before and after the excerpt: War Against the West by Ian Buruma – Project Syndicate

Also in Media: “Open Letter of European security experts to Federica Mogherini: | European Values Think-Tank” – n.d., from preface to petition

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Open Letter of European security experts to Federica Mogherini:
Please start taking the Russian disinformation threat seriously!

The aggressive actions of the Kremlin are unprecedented in the modern era.

Invasion of neighbouring countries, massive bombings and killings of civilians, and the first annexation of a foreign land by force in Europe since World War II, constant violations of other states’ borders, kidnapping foreign citizens, harassment of foreign diplomats, or massive cyber attacks are all in Russia’s current regime toolkit.

(Photo credit: copyright by World Economic Forum, Photo by Remy Steinegger, CC BY-SA 2.0).

All these offensive incidents are accompanied by a massive, persistent, ongoing, brutally aggressive disinformation campaign.* A campaign that has been active in Europe for at least three years, establishing its channels, finding the right amplifiers and multipliers for its message – which is aimed at destabilising our societies, meddling in our elections and referendums, misleading our political leaders and breaking up the EU unity by supporting those who want to destroy it. It has been building a wide range of communication structures in most of the EU Member States, platforms that have already been functioning for a long time and have reached considerable results that cannot be erased without significant long-term counter-effort.

Read the whole thing — Open Letter of European security experts to Federica Mogherini: | European Values Think-Tank — and consider signing the petition.

*Bold and italics added by BackChannels.

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Also in Media: “Polls Lend a Glimpse Into the Minds of Middle Easterners” – Philos Project – March 14, 2017

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Although history books say that the Arab Spring ended five years ago, Stimson Center Middle East Fellow Ellen Laipson recently cautioned that the uprising’s revolutionary wave of demonstrations is in no way over. “There is enduring debate going on in the Arab world about the individual citizen’s thinking about their relationship to the government,” she said, during an event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Laipson then yielded the floor to leading pollster James Zogby, who presented results from recent Middle East opinion surveys that documented the region’s unfulfilled desire for peace and prosperity.

More: Polls Lend a Glimpse Into the Minds of Middle Easterners – Philos Project

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FTAC: Worlds Closer Together

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Inspiration for the response came from the “blame America first” community intent on demonizing the same for past horrors, and in this instance the horror was the “Halabja chemical attack” ordered by Saddam Hussein against the Kurdish community at the end of the Iran-Iraq War.

In the second part, an accusing and conspiratorial view of the United Nations came through in a question about its origins.  It’s BackChannels’ opinion that by way of sufficient financial loss and immense suffering, that the UN has provided deflection from “Great War” — not “Low Intensity Conflict” — as so much talk seems to want to precede and inform the same with a significance that matches design.  Failing that achievement, we, for the most part, refuse once again to destroy the world despite the common abundance in arms capable of doing so.  Instead, at this time, we have one state being eaten alive, as it were, and that would be Syria by way of nefarious design, and then on the western plate is another free state, Ukraine, fending off an aggressor proud of its own criminal mischief in the world, which same has become the consistent cause of the suffering of the greater portion of its population.


— The know-how and material for developing chemical weapons were obtained by Saddam’s regime from foreign sources.[23] Most precursors for chemical weapons production came from Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), and West Germany (1,027 tons). One Indian company, Exomet Plastics, sent 2,292 tons of precursor chemicals to Iraq. Singapore-based firm Kim Al-Khaleej, affiliated to the United Arab Emirates, supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX, sarin and mustard gas precursors and production equipment to Iraq.[24] Dieter Backfisch, managing director of West German company Karl Kolb GmbH, was quoted by saying in 1989 that “for people in Germany poison gas is something quite terrible, but this does not worry customers abroad.”[23] —

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_chemical_attack

The Wikipedia entry goes on to cite U.S. involvement, but the basic principle in both geopolitical evil and transnational crime would seem to have applied: people in one place would not care too much about people far removed from themselves x space x culture x time.

Conditions involving boundaries and separation have changed.


http://www.un.org/en/sections/history/history-united-nations/

Moscow continues to explore and exploit war evidently believing it pays off financially and redounds to its glory. Here’s a BBC radio piece about Soviet Era manipulation to that effect — http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1 .

Today: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/04/syria-war-showroom-russian-arms-sales-160406135130398.html

A not too long ago yesterday for Ukraine: http://www.holodomorct.org/

Ukraine under assault today: http://uaposition.com/maps/russian-troops-attacked-ukrainian-position-donbas-197-times-past-48-hours-1-soldier-killed-10-wounded/

Greed expressed in lax regulation (first), then corruption outright followed by political or mercenary crime (“transnational crime” — all “black market” all of the time) may turn out the scourge of our own age. Boundaries and limits disintegrate before it where “actors” — engaged as here; powerful elsewhere — lose the internal brakes that involve conscience and empathy in relation to others.


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FTAC: A Comment on the Usefulness in Time of the United Nations

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Inspiration: the common conservative American claim that the United Nations has proven consistently anti-Semitic and anti-Western: why fund it?


Think of the UN as having organized an institutionalized tug-of-war, i.e., a war between the medieval world and the modern one. It is the medieval world that culturally preserves and leverages anti-Semitism. It does so to deflect attention from power while it mightily exploits its deeply subjugated constituents. The situation is no different for the Arabs of the Kingdom who support the absolute power of the royals; the poor of Russia, a class once again growing by the day, whose wealth in the patrimony of the land has been swept into the hands of the patronized by the “Vertical of Power” (Putin) who are spending it elsewhere; the whites of South Africa, all of a sudden, but who have been the target of communist-aligned Jacob Zuma’s ire; and, though you may not believe me, the Palestinians whose KGB-trained Arafat and KGB-affiliated Mahmoud Abbas have kept most right where they are because for political leadership and powerful clans, the middle east conflict has turned out a spectacularly good business!

The modern world fights the medieval world at the UN.

It’s a long process, or one best approached a little bit at a time, for “the world left behind” may well swallow the one that has advanced with increments of violence from everywhere. It’s better to have one place where the truth can be dragged out into the light whether or not the representatives of so many nations wish to accept it.


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FTAC – “Lost for Representation” – A Comment on the Plight of America’s Moderate Political Rank

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Inspiration: the canard repeated by foreign politico that America’s Republican Party represents the white, wealthy, and racist of the nation.


Actually, Lincoln was the Republican way back and the southern states Democrat, and so bad as regards race that it led the front for racial politics for many decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat

Credit Texas school teacher, first, and American President, later, Lyndon Baines Johnson and the launching of the Great Society programs with stealing the Republican cause and transforming the Democratic Party into the party best redressing equality issues and fighting toward the modern popular democracy that has proven an inspiration elsewhere — and been surpassed elsewhere as well.

The employment of Islamic Terrorism to drive the New Nationalism — that’s just the way I see it from Moscow’s feudal enterprise — seems to indeed have taken root among America’s conservative Republicans (while the the “Red-Green” response has holed up with the Democrats). Such politics seem foreign to Americans of my advancing age — as a class, we may be appalled with the depth of polarization and viciousness displayed during the past election season, and having our two major parties pushed toward extremes, those of moderate temperament would seem at the moment lost for representation.


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Also in Media: “Trauma Surgeons Report ‘Profound’ Racial Disparity in Philadelphia Gun Violence” – Forensic Magazine – March 9, 2017

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With colleagues from the Penn Injury Science Center, Beard and Sims have been researching the epidemiology of gun violence in Philadelphia. In a study published in the March issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the Penn team analyzed statistics on firearm assaults in Philadelphia during 2013-14. Results showed that the gun murders and injuries were much more strongly associated with race than with neighborhood income levels. People living in relatively high-income black neighborhoods, for example, suffered a rate of firearm assault almost 16 times higher than that experienced by people living in white neighborhoods with the same income.

According to police data analyzed by the researchers, more than 80 percent of victims of firearm injuries reported in Philadelphia were black, and less than 6 percent were non-Hispanic whites.”

This racial/ethnic disparity is the ‘elephant in the room’ of firearm injury epidemiology,” Beard said. In the new essay, she and Sims argue for more research and scientific resources to explain this disparity, which they suggest may be rooted in structural inequality and other social factors that are amenable to policy interventions.

Source: Trauma Surgeons Report ‘Profound’ Racial Disparity in Philadelphia Gun Violence