Tuesday, May 13, 2014

War

US Navy develops the world's worst e-reader.
"The brainchild of the Navy's General Library Program, the electronic ink Kindle-alike has no internet capability, no removable storage, no camera and no way to add or delete content."
Great.

I don't think Ukraine is the start of WWIII.

Ukrainian coupmeisters call the organizers of the separatist vote in eastern Ukraine terrorists.

East Ukrainian voters reportedly overwhelmingly support secession, but we heard that about Crimea too, then we got a different report. Stalin knew to control who counts the votes.

Salon tells the truth about Ukraine.
"Ukraine comes full circle. In six months, a troubled but intact nation is now pulled to pieces. Vasyl Krutov, the general in charge of what the provisional government in Kiev insists on calling its “anti-terror” military campaign in the east and south, acknowledged over the weekend that the country is “essentially at war.”
Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, had to go in February because of the violence that had erupted in Independence Square, scene of demonstrations since the previous November. We still do not know who was responsible for the shootings used to justify the Yankuovych coup, but we know this: The provos who took his place are now doing the shooting — killing their countrymen, reclassified as terrorists, by the score.
Samantha Power, the most tendentious hypocrite in the Obama administration (and the competition is keen), defends these murderers thusly: “Their response is reasonable, it is proportional, and frankly it is what any one of our countries would have done in the face of this threat,” Power said in the Security Council at the weekend."
The leftists at Salon are slamming Obama.
"True, the orthodoxy has rarely been more forcefully or universally pressed than in the Ukraine case. The official line is reproduced incessantly with no deviation moving the needle even a couple of ticks either side of zero. Vladimir Putin has intervened (and never mind that he has demonstrably acted with restraint). Kiev stands for all Ukrainians (a falsehood not even debatable). Those opposed to Kiev are separatists (even as Kiev proposes to separate Ukraine from swaths of its past)."
If he's lost them, he's toast, thank goodness.
"I mentioned Ukraine and Egypt. And the comparison holds with regard to the two presidents shoved aside. Yanukovych and Mohammed Morsi had one thing in common. They were both trying to run their nations to reflect the identities of their people. This was their sin. This is what Washington has not yet learned to tolerate." 
US rulers demand obedience from every nation. They're on a power trip.
"Again, Ukraine is an especially contentious case of what goes on in numerous places. We know there has been CIA involvement in the Yanukovych coup — director John Brennan confirmed this when he visited Kiev a few weeks ago (another failed effort to get it done secretly). But we do not any longer “negotiate with extreme prejudice,” as the spooks used to call assassination plots. (Remember this wonderful euphemism?)
Subversion is cleaner now. Diplomats do a lot of the work. We use NGOs, civil society groups and agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy. There is more apple pie in it. We invest in social media projects, and who can stand against social media?
For context here, see Venezuela, where the nation-building set has been outed three times in the past year. Or the social-media program in Cuba — not covert, says the State Department (which funded it), but “discreet.” Or similar projects in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two others among the many not so far revealed. Two years ago Putin was condemned when he insisted NGOs funded from abroad register as foreign agents. Remember? When the State Department voiced “deep concern,” he condemned the Americans for “gross interference.” Now you know what he meant.
This is American foreign policy Version 2014: Often disrespectful, often unlawful, purposefully destructive of order, possessing no idea of limits. There is no more Saddam Hussein, and it takes some doing to bring him in for reconsideration, no more Gadhafi, no Morsi, no Yanukovych, there would be no more Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela if Washington had its way. You have to climb over a mountain of prejudice and misinformation to consider what Washington has done wrong in these cases, but it is wrong. The quality of these leaders has nothing to do with it."
These are acts of aggression, and they are wrong.
"This is my other point of clarity. The media entered the post-Cold War era in bad shape, having surrendered almost all ground that separates them from power (political, corporate, financial by way of the stock market). But they are now not short of craven."
I don't know why you would call a junior partner craven for being a junior partner. They're just advancing their own interests. I think he mistakenly believes the propaganda that the press is supposed to challenge the government.
"We enter a new space, it seems to me — gradually maybe, but we are unmistakably leaving Kansas behind. You cannot conduct a foreign policy indefinitely without a domestic consensus, and 1) there is none now, even in the fearful age of “terror,” and 2) more important, there seems little prospect of one in formation. I take the dissent to be seen and heard around us as a memo from the future."
You can go a long time before you reach forever.
"Neither can you run media successfully when your problem is far greater than the technological change journalists focus upon: the problem that increasing numbers of people do not believe what you say."
That's the real problem that I keep pointing out.

Holder refuses to investigate VA scandals.

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