April 25, 2014

State Dept.: Putin invades Ukraine with Duck Dynasty

There's a propaganda war going on between the Russian and American governments, and skepticism is one casualty. Here's the New York Times ombudswoman apologizing:
The Public Editor's Journal - Margaret Sullivan
Georgia 2008

Aftermath of Ukraine Photo Story Shows Need for More Caution 
By MARGARET SULLIVAN  APRIL 24, 2014, 5:58 PM 
The Times led its print edition Monday with an article based in part on photographs that the State Department said were evidence of Russian military presence in popular uprisings in Ukraine. The headline read: “Photos Link Masked Men in East Ukraine to Russia.” 
And the article began:
Ukraine 2014
For two weeks, the mysteriously well-armed, professional gunmen known as “green men” have seized Ukrainian government sites in town after town, igniting a brush fire of separatist unrest across eastern Ukraine. Strenuous denials from the Kremlin have closely followed each accusation by Ukrainian officials that the world was witnessing a stealthy invasion by Russian forces. 
Now, photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration on Sunday suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces — equipped in the same fashion as Russian special operations troops involved in annexing the Crimea region in February. Some of the men photographed in Ukraine have been identified in other photos clearly taken among Russian troops in other settings. 
More recently, some of those grainy photographs have been discredited. The Times has published a second article backing off from the original and airing questions about what the photographs are said to depict, but hardly addressing how the newspaper may have been misled. 
It all feels rather familiar – the rushed publication of something exciting, often based on an executive branch leak.  And then, afterward, with a kind of “morning after” feeling, here comes a more sober, less prominently displayed followup story, to deal with objections while not clarifying much of anything. 

A lot of the American media coverage of Ukraine reminds me of Kennedy Era coverage of Vietnam, when reporters went over to this strange country and got briefed by the State Department and CIA and came back and filed gung ho stories.
The problems with the first article did not go unnoticed by readers and commenters. Ken Miller, a professor at Columbia University Medical School, called the photo story “egregious, being based entirely on alleged identifications of individuals in pairs of photographs where the faces were so fuzzy there was no way to see anything more than a vague and perhaps entirely coincidental resemblance (not to mention that the authenticity of the photographs themselves wasn’t established in any way).” 
And the reporter Robert Parry (formerly of Newsweek and The Associated Press) on Consortiumnews.com sees a pattern in Times articles, often based on administration leaks, that “draw hard conclusions from very murky evidence while ignoring or brushing aside alternative explanations.” 
Thursday morning, I asked the foreign editor, Joseph Kahn, to talk about what had happened. ... 
He rejects the idea that The Times’s coverage has lacked skepticism and sees this instance as a result of a simple mistake: the State Department’s mislabeling. ... 
Here’s my take: The Times’s coverage of this crisis has had much to commend it, especially the quality of the on-the-ground reporting. But this article, with its reliance on an administration leak, was displayed too prominently and questioned too lightly. The Times’s influence demands that it be cautious, especially when deciding to publish what amounts to a government handout.

You get better foreign affairs coverage in the U.S. press when reporters don't see themselves as on the same team as the Administration.

This is not to say that Putin isn't sending in commandos to stir up trouble -- I would imagine he is -- nor that two Phil Robertsonskis up there aren't the same guy. But still ...
       

52 comments:

george said...

German soldiers bayoneting babies, babies being dumped from incubators, Serb rape camps, Saddam with his very own nuclear football and now the Duck Commander cuttin' for the commies. There is nothing the booboisie will not fall for.

Anonymous said...

Steve, you are not objecting to the narrative because they might be wrong in the details; e.g. they may have, possibly deliberately, misidentified an individual in a photo or whatever.

More appropriate description of your situation would be this, continuing your own analogy: You are not opposing Vietnam War because Gulf of Tonkin incident was a sham, but because you are a communist.

DJF said...

“””””You are not opposing Vietnam War because Gulf of Tonkin incident was a sham, but because you are a communist.””””

How about being opposed because of the waste of lives and money. Especially since the US political and economic class does not care if a government is communist, they only care if that government is not part of their global economic system.

Since communist Vietnam is now part of the sweat shop global supply system you don’t hear any of the ‘leadership’ of the world complaining about the Vietnamese communist dictatorship. When was the last time anyone heard any US leader complain about the fact that Vietnam is a dictatorship?

In fact the US is trying to sign Vietnam up for a ‘free trade” deal. If Ho Chi Minh had managed to open up Vietnam to become a sweatshop of the world then there probably would not have been a Vietnam war

Russia is not playing the globalist international game and so it is the enemy, if Putin has signed up like the Chinese, Vietnamese, Saudis then no one would say he was dictator

Anonymous said...

Will it occur to Putin that he has tens of millions of soft targets in America, namely, White Americans. Especially those of a conservative bent. They are ripe targets for propaganda.

Liberals (the rank-in-file, not the elite) probably don't want confrontation with Russia. And so if is only the rah-rah America boosters who would provide mass support for a war.

But most of them are White Southerners. Is Putin smart enough to peel a few of them off to hinder any Elite war?

What would happen if Putin made a direct appeal to White Christians, spoke of traditional values, and the need to protect the actual PEOPLE of your homeland.

Okay, maybe he'll never do that, but he can hint at it, and dampen the zeal for White Americans to fight Russia. That would be a propaganda coup that paid dividends for decades to come.

Anonymous said...

C'mon, Dark Enlightenment, let's throw the Frankfurt School's psychological techniques right back in their faces.

What does this say about the Frankfurt School's collective subconscious if they think that

"Christian Duck Hunter" == "Nazi"?

Well, there is no famine!

sykes.1 said...

Russia Today and English Pravda are more reliable than the NYT.

Anonymous said...

Actually, yeah, those 2 are completely different people. See high-res pictures here:

http://www.dagbladet.no/2014/04/24/nyheter/ukraina/utenriks/russland/politikk/32956566/

Daniel said...

>>The Times has published a second article backing off from the original and airing questions about what the photographs are said to depict,BUT HARDLY ADDRESSING HOW THE NEWSPAPER MAY HAVE BEEN MISLED.

This would be a first.

Mr. Anon said...

"Anonymous said...

More appropriate description of your situation would be this, continuing your own analogy: You are not opposing Vietnam War because Gulf of Tonkin incident was a sham, but because you are a communist."

An anonymous pile of horses**t from a passing anonymous liar.

One did not have to be a communist to think the Vietnam war a bad idea. It certainly proved to be a bad idea, didn't it? Similarly, the fact that Steve does not buy the american government/NGO/media line about Russia does not make him a russian stooge - it just means he is not a stooge of the american government/NGO/media.

Henry Canaday said...

“A lot of the American media coverage of Ukraine reminds me of Kennedy Era coverage of Vietnam...”

How old were you during the Kennedy Administration? Are you remembering Kennedy-era press coverage of Vietnam, or the media’s later version of its coverage?

A lot of the coverage during the Kennedy Administration was very skeptical. Time magazine, basically a supporter of the war, provided plenty of reasons to be worried about South Vietnamese prospects. And The NY Times’ man in Vietnam, David Halberstam, was famously pessimistic about the early phases of war.

Anonymous said...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szpbz1Ebg8Y

The Politics of the Creative Economy

Archbishop Cranmer said...

I'm on Russia's side here.

Not because I'm a Russian. Not because I'm Orthodox.

I'm a C of E Home Counties lad and can clearly see the error in stirring up Russian nationalism against me and mine.

PSR said...

Got to say the first photo certainly looks like a Georgian, probably south Georgia, near the Florida line.

Anonymous said...

I used to be somewhat pro-Putin, but this whole Ukraine thing is turning into a farce.. The Crimean intervention was well done and maybe even well justified, but this eastern uprising is half-assed... it's obvious they though there would be more support in two other provinces... and these people truly are acting somewhat like terrorists even if most of the population supports them in Dombass. Russia should have exerted more control of them or found a way to stop them. Even if it does turn out well for Russia, I despise the personality cult Putin's trying to build up for himself. It's no worse than Obama's, but it's still creepy.

Here's some words of warning from the past...

"And the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroad." ~ Oswald Spengler, Hour of Decision

Anonymous said...

Time Magazine reporter Simon Shuster actually traveled Slavyansk to engage in a quaint practice known as “journalism.” http://time.com/74405/exclusive-pro-russian-separatists-eastern-ukraine/

While Shuster was unable to find the mythical Russian special forces detachments, he was able to interview the bearded man and his friends at length. It would seem that the bearded man – who identified himself as Alexander Mozhaev – is an ethnic Cossack from southern Russia who is wanted by the Russian government on criminal charges. According to Mozhaev, he is not on member of the Russian special forces or security services, has never been to the nation of Georgia, and his only tie to the Russian military was serving as an army sergeant during the early 1990s.

Pat Boyle said...

I think it's odd and maybe a bit unfair that the primary female secondary sexual characteristic - the breast - is such a powerful attractant while the corresponding male sexually identifying characteristic - the beard - isn't.

All starlets know that they can get more attention from the opposite sex by having a boob job. Big jugs mark a woman as clearly female. But if a man wants to similarly emphasize his sex by growing a beard it doesn't work. Women don't seem to get all worked up over a full beard.

The net versions of British newspapers daily publish article after article with pictures of young women in bikinis. But there are no similar pictures of men with beards.

It seems to me that men grow beards for other men not for women. Every gunsmith or motorcycle mechanic on TV has some sort of facial hair. Male beards seems to have peaked in the American Civil War - a time when men were largely separated from women.

This is a breakdown in sexual symmetry.

Albertosaurus

Anonymous said...

http://danielkayhertz.com/2014/03/31/middle-class/

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon0416ar.html

Prof. Woland said...

I am right in the middle of an ongoing propaganda war. My wife, who is Russian, is glued to the Russian media. I am English speaking so I naturally gravitate towards news from the Anglosphere. This story about this guy with the beard was already debunked in the Russian Press but because the time lag is anywhere's from 10-18 hours behind we only catch up after the rest of the world has. Like the story about the leaflets being handed out to Jews in the Eastern Ukraine, this story has no legs anywhere else. My amateurish view of this is that these leaks are really geared towards the American audience much the same way political hoaxes are during elections. They are designed to dominate the news cycle for no more than one or two days in order to thwart other stories and news. The American media goes along with it because they are lazy and can't speak any other language than English.

Anonymous said...

How dare the Russians send agents provocateur into Ukraine to try to destabilize the government! That sort of thing is totally out of bounds - and has been ever since we did it a few months back and ousted the democratically elected government of Ukraine.

BurplesonAFB said...

Isn't giant beards on special forces more of an American thing?

Public representations of spetsnaz that I've seen before have all been clean shaven

Anonymous said...

OT

http://www.vice.com/read/project-prevention-compulsory-sterilization?utm_source=vicefbus

Jim Given said...

Gosh! That photo looks exactly like my thesis advisor! I always wondered what he did in his spare time! We,, let the truth be told-

David said...

>You are not opposing Vietnam War because Gulf of Tonkin incident was a sham, but because you are a communist.<

Hard to make that analogy when Steve wants Russia to pay billions of dollars as a penalty for invading Crimea.

Black Death said...

Reminds me of Walter Duranty, except this time the NYT is shilling for the US State Department.

Anonymous said...

Do you remember the heartbreaking story from Kuwait of Saddam's army taking the babies from the hospital incubators and leaving them on the floor to die, while the incubators were shipped to Baghdad?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_%28testimony%29

Anonymous said...

Steve, if you were aiming for a Russian-sounding name, Robertsonov would be better than Robertsonski which has a Polish ending. On the other hand, it's true that many Russians can trace their ancestry to Poland, and carry Polish surnames, Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Czajkowski in Polish) being the most famous example

Whiskey said...

German soldiers did in fact bayonet babies. Just not in WWI. Japanese soldiers famously DID bayonet babies and hack them to death with samurai swords, for fun, against orders by the way. Even hard-core Nazis at the Rape of Nanking were appalled. Saddam gassed his own people and basically committed genocide against the Swamp Arabs and drained the Marsh. Stalin committed the Holmodor and Mao killed about 60 million people through starvation in the Great Leap Forward and mass killings in the Cultural Revolution.

All denied furiously by the West and the Press.

So people believe the worst because the worst has been proven over, and over and over and over again to be true. In the aftermath.

Moreover, believing the worst and acting upon it is less risky than believing the best.

Suppose you don't know, and can't know, if Saddam has nukes or bio or chemical weapons (Assad has the latter two and just used Chlorine gas again, which Obama being the limp wristed, ""Ivy League Affirmative Action poster boy she-male" has ignored) ...

What do you do?

If you assume, no Saddam is a sweet guy who has not ever mass murdered anyone (provably false) and you are wrong, then you are in a world of hurt. Particularly if he uses said weapons to conquer Kuwait (again) and this time rolls into Saudi and controls the world price of oil. Suddenly gas costs $20 a gallon and you're living with NAMs in South Central to use the Blue Line to get to work. Fun times!

Or, you believe the worst (because probability says its true) and the outcome however negative is not as negative as thinking Saddam is Mr. Rogers and finding him months later running Saudi with oil sky high and your life ruined.

Given the massive dysfunction of the Third World, the nature of its leaders (basically psychotic killers, think Crips gang leaders written large), and the dangers some leaders pose (Kony is irrelevant, guys in Libya where there is oil and African migrant routes not), assuming the Worst is a logical way to min the harm done.

Whiskey said...

Let me add, in investment with money that can be lost, people will not necessarily minimize harm. If they seek the upside.

But in real life, regarding safety, people want to minimize harm. Most of them. Most people won't jump off a cliff to maybe impress a girl if they stand a good chance of being paralyzed. Some will, but not many. The risk-reward factor is too skewed. If their downside was say, a stubbed toe at worst, they'd do it. But not paralysis or death.

You want to know WHY so many believed the worst about Saddam?

He'd been proven in the past a liar about his nuke program (in the 1990s in the Gulf War aftermath). He used chemical weapons. He had a bioweapons and missile program AFTER the agreement ending the Gulf War which he repeatedly violated and for which Clinton repeatedly bombed him. And he was personally a Crips/Blood gang leader in bloodthirsty habits. Saddam was a kill-crazed lunatic, who would kill when it better suited him to simply jail or ignore.

I find Libertarians hilarious in their naive trust of foreign leaders who are basically gangster kill-crazed thugs (this does not include Putin who is a thug but not a kill crazed one, sadly he could have been more) and yet wisely distrust the pampered beltway politicians.

Whatever their faults, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Barack Obama have never personally emptied a pistol into a prone, begging prisoner. It takes a special kind of psychopath to do that, and that kind includes Saddam and Ayman Al Zawahiri (who to the dismay of his hardened jihadis did such to a pair of sexually blackmailed 11 year old boys). Even AQ jihadis drew the line at that but not Zawahiri and Saddam was the same kind of guy.

You can trust say an Angela Merkel with nukes, she's basically a staid housewife who merely wants to run her country cleanly and efficiently in a human manner. You would not trust a Saddam or a Mao with a dull butter knife cause they were born killers. Erdogan and Assad are in-between cases, sliding towards thuggery but not kill-crazyy personally.

Anonymous said...

The man in the Ukraine photo is perhaps Alexander Mozhaev. Simon Shuster of Time magazine wrote up a piece about him "Exclusive: Meet the Pro-Russian Separatists of Eastern Ukraine."

http://time.com/author/simon-shuster/

Here's a bit about him:

"His reasons for coming to Ukraine in March had a bit to do with Russian nationalism, but more to do with adventurism, and even more to do with his apparently being a fugitive from Russian law. Earlier this year, Mozhaev said, just as a revolution was forcing Ukraine’s old regime from power, he was charged in Krasnodar with a violent crime — which he described as “threatening to kill someone with a knife.” When he failed to come up with the bribe money for the corrupt officials who he says fabricated the charges, Mozhaev was put on a national wanted list in Russia and went on the run, according to his account, which could not be verified."

Art Deco said...

A lot of the American media coverage of Ukraine reminds me of Kennedy Era coverage of Vietnam,

You mean S. Sailer (b. 1958) was reading the newspaper "World" section in 1962?

sunbeam said...

"A lot of the American media coverage of Ukraine reminds me of Kennedy Era coverage of Vietnam, when reporters went over to this strange country and got briefed by the State Department and CIA and came back and filed gung ho stories."

I guess we are all cynical here, but this sort of thing has always puzzled me.

If you support a war, or oppose it, facts can always emerge to make you think your opinion is wrong.

But this country... it is really weird to watch people who were dead set against a conflict, due an immediate 180 because their team won an election, and their "new guy" keeps on prosecuting the same conflict.

I was dead set against the Serbian conflict in the late 90's. Republicans occasionally bitched about it, but most of them voted for it.

There were some elements of the Republican party, or more precisely the conservative movement who were against it, but conveniently didn't seem to notice their representative voted for the conflict, and didn't bother to remember the fact in future elections.

Democrats occasionally bitched about Bush's even crazier Iraq operation (I still can't believe anyone bought that Saddam was allied with Al Queda, if indeed that exists). But elected Democrats by and large voted for it, and kept on voting for it.

Most rank and file Democrats, or liberals, or whatever you wanted to call them protested, against the war, against torture, against Gitmo, against the surveillance state.

Then their guy got elected, nothing changed, nothing at all, but they shut up and quit bothering to think about the issues any more. And I'm quite sure they didn't, and never will remember when they go to a voting booth.

It occasionally seems to me that all this protest crap is useless, all the blog posts of whatever ideology, everyone knows it, but they keep on doing it.

Just I don't know, the Tea Party, the 99% percent people, it's like the media is "fluffing" them so they can get themselves hot in an existentialist way, kind of blow off a little steam and party or relive those groovy 60's moments.

Dunno, read this site, but I have absolutely no hope that anything will be done about immigration or any of the other important issues facing this country.

And if Jebby wins the 2016 Republican primary, and/or Hilary the 2016 Democratic one...

How can anyone with a straight face engage in this political system, even as a voter? I mean when will it ever be enough?

Mr. Blank said...

I'm surprised the administration came up with such crappy photos to push its storyline.

I work in the media, and every day the wire is filled with photos of "pro-Russian activists" who dress like Occupy Wall Street-types but look like they spend half the day pumping iron at the gym. The White House could have grabbed any of those at random and attached some B.S. explanation.

If it weren't so serious, the whole Ukraine thing would make a great comedy. It's hilarious how Putin keeps mocking the West, making a big show of punctiliously sticking to the West's own rulebook while continuing to do whatever he wants. Since diplomatic protocol prevents Western leaders from speaking with iSteve-frankness about the situation, they always end up comically sputtering like a Donald Duck cartoon.

David said...

>White Southerners. Is Putin smart enough to peel a few of them off to hinder any Elite war?<

I have my ringer volume turned up, waiting for his call.

Anonymous said...

Steve, if you were aiming for a Russian-sounding name, Robertsonov would be better than Robertsonski which has a Polish ending. On the other hand, it's true that many Russians can trace their ancestry to Poland, and carry Polish surnames, Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Czajkowski in Polish) being the most famous example.

Robertov, not Robertsonov. The genitive -ov ending already implies the "son" part.

The most common Russian surname endings are -ov, -ev and -in, but -skiy is often seen as well. And no, not all Russians with names ending in -skiy have Polish roots. That's an inane Polish fantasy. The -skiy ending is extremely common in the Russian language. American pie - Amerikanskiy pirog, English cheese - Angliyskiy syr, Russian language - Russkiy yazyk, etc., etc. It's such a common possessive ending that it would have taken a miracle for it not to have been used in the construction of Russian surnames. Certainly all the other Russian possessive endings are used in them.

The English -sh ending seen in the word English itself has the same proto-Indo European origin as the Slavic -sk. To this day Danes call their language Dansk, Swedes call theirs Svensk and Norwegians call theirs Norsk. The modern English -sh and modern German -sch pronunciations are just a corruption of this -sk.

Do you remember the heartbreaking story from Kuwait of Saddam's army taking the babies from the hospital incubators and leaving them on the floor to die, while the incubators were shipped to Baghdad?

I'm assuming that stories of Saddam shooting someone during a cabinet meeting and of his sons raping women were also propaganda. I don't know any Arabic and am not particularly interested in the Middle East, so all of my knowledge of Saddam comes from his enemies. Even if he was brutal, these enemies wouldn't have bothered to look for real examples of that. That takes effort and local knowledge. It's much easier to make stuff up. Knowing the NYT, I'm confident that that's exactly what it did in his case.

Anonymous said...

>White Southerners. Is Putin smart enough to peel a few of them off to hinder any Elite war?<

I don't know if Putin is aware of the possibility of peeling them off. He must be aware of the support he's getting from Europe's right-wing parties - Front National, Austria's Freedom Party, etc. Marine Le Pen for example is frequently covered in the media and is practically a global celebrity. She has supported Russia during this crisis.

Someone who only knows America from media coverage might conclude that the GOP speaks for White Southerners. I hope there are people in Putin's circle who are savvy enough to understand that this is not entirely true.

Bert said...

"I'm assuming that stories of Saddam shooting someone during a cabinet meeting and of his sons raping women were also propaganda."

I don't know about his sons, but Hussein did indeed execute his Health Minister after said minister unwisely suggested that Saddam temporarily step down from the presidency in order to get the Iranians to the peace table.

Anonymous said...

"What would happen if Putin made a direct appeal to White Christians, spoke of traditional values, and the need to protect the actual PEOPLE of your homeland."

He does talk about God and is sometimes shown on Russian TV participating in Russian Orthodox Church services.

He does talk about traditional values. There was that law against homosexual propaganda to minors. Russia is adopting a new cultural policy right now. I recently saw Russia's Minister of Culture explaining it. To paraphrase, he said that in the modern West the idea of tolerance has been abused to such an extent that no distinction is being made between good and evil. He condemned that attitude. The Ministry of Culture funds the arts. When asked if he approved of the sort of stuff that Kandinsky and Malevich (old avant-garde BS artists) got known for, the minister said "absolutely not".

During the Ukrainian crisis Putin has talked about protecting Russians outside of Russia's borders. He's definitely moved to the right since he came back as president in 2012, both on social issues and on the issue of nationalism. Russian nationalists used to hate him for his unwillingness to stop Central Asian immigration into the historical core of Russia. They were very pleasantly surprised by his zeal to recover the Crimea, by his promise to protect ethnic Russians in the Ukraine. His rhetoric has never before been as pro-ethnic-Russian as it js right now. I think this crisis is changing him.

Anonymous said...

"I'm on Russia's side here.

Not because I'm a Russian. Not because I'm Orthodox."

I'm on Russia's side because anything that unites the intolerant sodomite Left and the warmongering neocons should be opposed by any normal, decent person with an IQ > 85.

reiner Tor said...

Archbishop Cranmer & Anonymous:

"I'm on Russia's side here.

Not because I'm a Russian. Not because I'm Orthodox."

I'm on Russia's side because anything that unites the intolerant sodomite Left and the warmongering neocons should be opposed by any normal, decent person with an IQ > 85.


+1

Anonymous said...

"He must be aware of the support he's getting from Europe's right-wing parties - Front National, Austria's Freedom Party, etc. Marine Le Pen for example is frequently covered in the media and is practically a global celebrity."

Isn't it amazing that the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, and Fox News are all against President Putin? Somehow the heterophobic gaystream media have found common cause with the warmongering neocons. Can you imagine a mere 25 years ago the media being against the actions of any Soviet Russian leader? Who knew that we could convince the Left to oppose the USSR if only they knew how homophobic [sic] Russia is. Heck, the Cold War could have been over by 1964.

Anonymous said...

A bit more on Russians with -ski (really skiy) names:

They're usually geographic in character and the geography is often purely Russian. For example, Novgorodskiy exists as a surname. The city of Novgorod never belonged to Poland. Mozhayski, Kolomenskiy, Tverskoy - same thing. There is a large number of place name + skiy type Russian surnames whose place names were never under the Polish yoke.

Bertrand Russell's Objection to another war said...

You've not been looking. The full beard is very much a Russian soldierly thing.

I wouldn't shave while in the field anyway. Unless there was a lice outbreak.

Bertrand Russell's Objection to another war said...

Chicks dig beards. 25-35 they love em.

Auntie Analogue said...


Facial Hair Follies Fool Big Shots, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38N5OcZx3ko

Anonymous said...

Chicks dig beards. 25-35 they love em.

Only when nobody has them:

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-novelty-effect-factor-in-mate-choice.html

Anonymous said...

Beards are a gay trend these days in the US.

Anononymous said...

Peter the Great would be appalled.

Menschmaschine said...

Re: Leaks

In order for it to be necessary for an information to be ‘leaked’ only makes sense, when the information is damaging for the institution in question. If the information is - as in this case - supportive of the position of the organisation, there would be every reason for it to be publicised officially.

So, why did the State Department not show off this stuff at a press conference? Because they perfectly well knew that it was a particular shoddy propaganda fabrication, and therefore did not want to be officially on the record with it. So they published it in the usual fashion by ‘leaking’ it to a willing lap dog media rag.

Re: Russian saboteurs and seditionists

You have the Ukraine that suffers from a sharp antagonism between two ethnic groups and that is in a very poor economic situation. Then there is a violent, foreign-sponsored coup, spearheaded by rabid (western) Ukrainian Nationalists, whose first act it is to pass laws against the russian population. This is about the equivalent of throwing a napalm bomb on a village of straw huts - under these circumstances, it would have been extremely surprising if there had been no fierce reaction. The claim that only the sinister influence of russian agents could have brought the russian population to rebel is simply absurd.

The impression that I get is that Putin and most other russian politicians would have preferred to maintain the status quo, but where simply swept along by the events.

Re: Saddam Hussein:

The Halabja gas massacre was actually committed by the Iranians. They had accidentally shelled the Kurds and instead of admitting their embarrassing error, made lemonade out of lemons by showing off the dead bodies to western journalists and blaming the Iraqis. There were clear signs that this story could not be right, like the fact that the bodies showed bluish coloring, which is consistent with the cyanide gas used by the Iranians, but not with the mustard gas of the Iraqis.

But this, of course; was ignored. Neocons surely love their mullah propaganda, when it suits their purposes.

It is revealing, that in the process against Saddam Hussein he was not charged with one of his alleged ‘big’ crimes, but with a comparably minor affair when he supposedly ordered the killing of inhabitants of the town of Dujail, where an unsuccessful assassination attempt against him had taken place. Of course, there had been an orderly trial against persons suspected of participating in the assassination. Now it if irregularities at the respective trials did happen, the judges presiding at the time would have to be prosecuted, not Saddam Hussein.

Anyway, the prosecution simply avoided trying to show any irregularity in the trials (which it obviously felt it could not do) by making a ludicruous claim: that there had been NO ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT AT ALL and that Saddam Hussein had ordered the killing of people simply for no reason. The media had to do quite a bit of Winston Smithing to hush this mega whopper of an absurdity up, particularly when the defense presented a DVD of a celebration in honor of the assassination attempt were several of the prosecution witnesses were participating.

So, after several years and more than a 100 million dollars for investigations the best case the prosecution was able to come up with was obviously bogus.

Grumpy Old Man said...

Nothing new about this. The British press before the Crimean War indulged in wild Russophobia.

Thousands died rather futilely in that forgotten war.

Anonymous said...

Speak for yourself old man.

Women go wild for my whiskers

Bill said...

Anonymous said...
I used to be somewhat pro-Putin, but this whole Ukraine thing is turning into a farce.. I despise the personality cult Putin's trying to build up for himself. It's no worse than Obama's, but it's still creepy.


Concern troll is concerned . . .

Here's some words of warning from the past...

"And the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroad." ~ Oswald Spengler, Hour of Decision


. . . though not concerned enough to notice that the actual Nazis are in Kiev and the actual anti-Nazis are in the East and South.

Unknown said...

Simon Ostrovsky, the recently abducted and released reporter from Vice News happened to speak to the bearded mystery man in the New York Times. Here's his video report on the meeting, released today:
First Video Evidence of Russians Among Ukrainian Separatists: Russian Roulette (Dispatch 30)