10 more people died in the bombing. BBC says that:

“Last week, Ukrainian TV reported that the former ‘culture minister’ of the self-proclaimed DNR (one of the rebel regions in eastern Ukraine) defected to Ukraine and predicted that Zakharchenko would be removed/killed by Moscow.”

But clearly SBU is covering it’s own ass. The Ukrainians will need extra help from the West to get the fingers pointed away from them for this obvious terrorist attack.

Chuck made short work of Unz’s Hispanic crime nonsense here.

"
(1) – Cool field is invented by cool guys

(2) – Mediocre guys jump on the bandwagon

(3) – Chicks jump on the bandwagon

(4) – Somewhere among steps 2 and 3, cool guys leave and go somewhere else, and cool thing is now uncool, collapsing under the weight of losers and women (crying that cool thing should be tailored to their specific wants and needs, making cool thing lame)."

I agree, although I don't know if I'd call the techies 'cool'. 😉

Here's my question: can anyone think about organizing a boycott, or reverse boycott against a targeted company? We whine a lot about feminism but never organize to resist it.

"
The Poles seems to hate the Russians more than they hate the Germans, which is odd considering a) Russians and Poles are both Slavic peoples and b) the Nazis considered the Poles "sub-human" and planned to systematically destroy the Polish nation. As brutal as Stalin was, he didn't have plans to totally wipe Poland off the map.

(I always found it odd that the Nazis so intensely loathed the Poles but tolerated other Slavs, such as the Slovaks and Croatians. This Nazi Polonophobia was even more bizarre when you consider the not insignificant level of Polish-German admixture in some sections of the German population, particularly in eastern Germany and other regions such as Silesia.)"

Everyone hates the neighbors. This is because they have a long history of war with those neighbors over borderlands and so on. Sure adjoining countries have some gene flow between them, but that doesn't stop them from going to war. People are a lot more likely to hate the people next door who they've been fighting with for years than they are some random group across the world.

I don’t like Navalny personally. I don’t trust his ‘Yale World Fellows’ (Skull and Bones/NWO ‘vetting’?) fellowship. I think D.C.’s made strong efforts to coopt him but if La Russophobe is attacking him that may be a sign he’s shrugged off those would’ve been his Spaso House handlers. But I agree the prosecution of him looks petty and politically motivated compared to the amount of corruption in the system.

It’s my sincere hope that he represents the beginning of a genuinely (read: not foreign funded) populist opposition in Russia. That’s definitely something Russia needs. Especially since I’m convinced there’s no way an exhausted Putin will stay on until 2024 and I think it was a mistake for VVP to take a third term even though it was Constitutional. Also grimly aware that Medvedev proved weak in the Libya crisis and there was no one else ready to step up. I still think Sergey Shoigu is being groomed to succeed Putin but the rumors about his own personal wealth accumulated during his tenure at McChs will no doubt be promoted soon.

I had a longtime family friend who asked me my opinion of Navalny the other day. I used the analogy he would understand of a Ron Paul or a Gary Johnson — someone who has no initial chance of actually winning beyond a small scale but does plant the seeds for positive ideas to infiltrate the big party and (hopefully) take it over the next decade or more (and for my haters who would say that’s a joke, look at all the Chris Christie fury at Rand Paul in the past few weeks along with neocon trolling of him over one single aide’s now abandoned talk radio schtick — you don’t catch flak unless you’re over the target as the old WWII bomber pilots used to say).

While that patriotic (read: not a laydown for NATO and the West) opposition vehicle won’t be United Russia, maybe something like Fair Russia that is essentially ‘Russian Gaullist’ has a shot. As Anatoly’s documented here, real libertarianism probably has little constituency in more collectively-minded Rus (if libertarians can’t win seats in essentially individualist America or have to settle for doing so in Western states under the GOP label). But there’s always hope at least in rural or Caucasian areas the People will be free to (legally) bear arms again.

AK: Okay, I hate putting my boot down, but this has to stop. Was Snowden mentioned even once in this article? Was Gordievsky? Was TIME magazine? No, I don’t believe so. Please comment on topic or not at all.

PS Nice Matt Drudge style hat. Drudge of late despite linking to lotsa Putin bashing stuff can’t ever be politically correct enough for the mainline Right and Left hives as he (shock, horror) links to Infowars which means their daily traffic is highly competitive with that of MSNBC’s main page!

Will looks like Lulz from the hivemind.

Again, just to sum up the above:

Unlimited surveillance creates the impression that ‘the feds already know everything about me and all the guns/ammo I’ve purchased, plus they’ve ‘Cyrpus’d a portion of my 401k/IRA, stolen my veterans pension, deemed me mentally unfit to own a weapon due to PTSD, put increasingly thuggish/black body armored up federalized armed cops on my street with DHS armored vehicles, shot the dogs and barged in violating people’s 3rd Amendment rights, pissed on the states rights under the 9th and 10th amendments etc etc.

The hivemind of course either ignores this perfect storm or claims only authentically dangerous people will be targeted by our infinitely trustworthy NSA, and that the IRS harassment of ‘teabaggers’ was confined to that agency or to the White House itself, so how only paranoids could believe the above.

But if the above facts are all true and growing worse by the day, how could this perfect storm NOT lead to at least sporadic incidents of violence in a nation with 150 million rifles over the next few years? It seems only God’s grace and the restraint of not wishing to give the most fascistic elements in D.C. their perfect pretext for martial law holds things back.

Anatoly,

I can only add to this, as I know you wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of having their names and handles mentioned, that this has demonstrated how great of a hivemind both ‘Left’, ‘Right’ and ‘classical liberal’ (ha!) GETS OFF ON how much Washington can publically bitch slap around even ‘powerful’ states within the EU like France. Not unlike Germans in the late 1930s cheering their boys marching into the Sudetenland and Austria unopposed.

I agree Snowden has been naive in this affair, and so have been the Wikileakers. They and Greenwald seem actually surprised at the round the clock, PAID massive quantities of trolling, divide and conquer and pysop tactics they’ve been subjected to, as if the three letter agencies don’t have armies of trolls and contractors all doing their bidding in the infowar.

If Snowden had a super duper plan all along of where he wished to end up (which I doubt) then I think he would find Abkhazia, as a statelet that Washington will never recognize, not a bad place to while away his years with some pretty Russian wife. Washington after all cannot demand extradition from a country it refuses to acknowledge as sovereign while Putin can honestly say Snowden is no longer on Russian soil and hence not his problem.

But I will say one last bit — if the U.S. was so tyrannical as to simply start assassinating Assange, Greenwald et al for the whole world to see, either by drone or means too obvious not to involve the federal government, I could very well see two things

1) An initial wave of the usual three letter agency worshippers getting off on it on Twitter, including some on Fox News and MSNBC alike. A further alienation of the Constitutionalist Left and Right from the increasingly fascist ‘mainstream’ that has finally let the mask come off. A brief rejoicing that all opposition has been crushed, before….

2) Something akin to a ‘Dirty War’ emerging between the federal government and select militia elements inside the U.S. and perhaps even a few retaliatory hits against U.S. assets abroad, with ‘disappearances’ or Breitbarting/’Hastings cars exploding wrapped around trees’ becoming all too common over several years. While those inside the panopticon and those who work as contractors for it would like to think it’s invincible, as many Patriot sites have pointed out Christopher Dorner wreaked an enormous amount of havoc as one indiscriminate psychopath. Ditto for the D.C. snipers. Bob Owens and Western Rifle Shooters contributor and ex-Navy SEAL Matthew Bracken both explored what would happen in the event of the low level insurgency DHS has clearly been arming up to fight breaking out in the U.S.:

http://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/what-i-saw-at-the-coup/

http://www.bob-owens.com/2012/12/what-youll-see-in-the-rebellion/

http://www.bob-owens.com/2013/01/what-youll-see-in-the-rebellion-a-nation-of-sarajevos/

My point to the 3 letter agency worshippers is: I would tread more cautiously, particularly if you live in a state surrounded by ‘bitter clingers’. Eventually all the past few years of agitprop about the ‘teabaggers’ being ‘insurrectionists’ DHS/SPLC/MSNBC have all pushed hard for years might turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is why it is more important than ever that Russia begin to create its own hard money-backed Eurasian currency or currencies bloc with China. Eventually it will be ‘et tu, Berlin’ when the Germans dump the dollar and throw the euro or Nordic mark into the basket.

I’ll let Mark Safranski, someone who actually has spent large amounts of time around active duty military and top US strategists as opposed to State and USAID bureaucrats, have a word here versus the three letter agency worshipping hive mind:

http://zenpundit.com/?p=24175#more-24175

Tight money across the developed world LOL. That’s a good one.

All I can say Anatoly is that more than a year after we were banned from the hive mind we are still living rent free in their heads. Truly they fear the assault from the libertarian Ron/Rand Paul Right more than the usual Anons and lefties.

Sure they despise Putin and Anonymous but the fiercest hate (and hence the most fear) is reserved for us ‘goldbugs, Paultards/Paulbots’. etc. But Putin has no incentive in bringing the whe rotten NStasiA blackmailing machine down.

And to think the game has just begun since if any any slight Anon hack is enough to expose Booz Allen Hamilton’s criminal and civil complicity in limitless data mining on citizens, theoretically it is the contractors who represent the soft underbelly of lawfare against the NSA. Onward to litigating traitors to the Republic until they go bankrupt!

Alex,

I am reminded of the old slogan, “Russia has no allies but her army and navy.” As unfortunate as it is, there are good reasons for that…look up the Greek word Orlifka (if I’m reading the Greek right from my Cyrillic):

http://mobile.businessinsider.com/--within-grasp-and-without-a-shot-fired-putin-can-reverse-300-years-of-russian-mistakes-in-the-mediterranean-2013-3

Sure you have the Napoleonic and World Wars where Russia played a decisive role in bleeding the central European aggressor but those seem to be more the exception rather than the rule.

On the positive side, I don’t expect too much from Putin. He is still a politician, after all, not the martyred Tsar.

But yes, I would love it if Snowden somehow accessed the domestic kompromat files the NSA maintains to back up Russ Tice’s claims that NSA stands for National Stasi Agency (you can make a national security argument that the private lives of those briefed with sufficient clearance MIGHT need to be monitored to prevent a foreign power from blackmailing, ha ha, but that argument won’t fly for obscure Illinois State Senators in 2004 unless Barack Hussein Obama really was an Agency man and Agency diaper baby in which case Wayne ‘crackpot’ Madsen is vindicated). It would blow apart the last lingering arguments of the Fake Right National Security State bots/paid trolls and a certain hivemind that has clashed with our host here. Unfortunately for Snowden if he ever leaked the NSA’s kompromat files he’s as good as dead even if he eventually finds refuge in Abkhazia. I’m convinced either Abkhazia or South Ossetia is Putin’s fallback plan should sneaking Snowden on a Russian cargo jet bound for Angola and then transatlantic to Venezuela fail.

And before everyone jumps on the ‘conspiracy theorists’ popas, here’s the ORIGINAL press release from the Emergency Situations Ministry of the Russian Federation, at least before D.C. tells MChs to take it down:

http://en.mchs.ru/news/item/434203/

“In addition, the parties approved of U.S.-Russian cooperation in this field in 2013-2014, which envisages exchange of experience including in monitoring and forecasting emergency situations, training of rescuers, development of mine-rescuing and provision of security at mass events.”

So…blame it on bad English translation, or it’s the DHS/Obama White House trolling the bitter clingers…again.

“Personally, the most common refrain (both online and in real life) I’ve heard is whining to the effect that Snowden is a hypocrite for running away to evil China/Russia/Ecuador.” If only the hivemind that’s calling Snowden a traitor for fleeing to the SVO transit lounge with NSA ‘secrets’ could muster half as much rage at FEMA for inviting in the Russians, or at least — it now appears — having DHS troll patriot and militia types with the ‘Russians are doing security for the Super Bowl’ disinfo.

Naturally the hivemind always blames those who fall for the disinfo across the web (tee hee, those stupid conspiracy theorists are at it again), not the Cass Sunstein disciples in the Obama White House and Department of Homeland Security who put it out. After all, Sunstein admitted that the best way to discredit conspiracy theorists would be to create his own:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cass_Sunstein#.22Conspiracy_Theories.22_and_government_infiltration

I wonder if an oligarch could arrange for a private jet flight to Abkhazia direct from SVO, so that he would still dodge Russian ground if not air space. After all the USA doesn’t even recognize Abkhazia as a sovereign state, so how can they demand Snowden’s extradition from a government that Washington pretends doesn’t exist? There are worse places to settle than by the Black Sea…

Last comment on this thread…again I am trying to tread carefully myself and not get the host of this site in any trouble…I saw a survey saying 26% of Democrats surveyed believe that the Tea Party could pose a terrorist threat. For those who insist DHS/SPLC/MSNBC haven’t engaged in propaganda to denounce returning veterans, gun owners and libertarians as potential terrorists, read the survey results again. Seems that propaganda is starting to sink in among at least the Kos Kidz fanatics.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/06/crackpot-democrats-see-tea-party-as-top-us-terrorist-threat/

On the other side of the coin, 44% of Republicans surveyed said it’s possible at some future point Americans may have to fight their own government. If these aren’t signs of psychological precondtiioning for Civil War 2.0, what is? And casually discussing drone strikes or blackbagging Snowden is contributing to this atmosphere:

http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2013/guncontrol/

Again, three letter agency worshippers, this isn’t a game. If you love your country stop blindly excusing agencies that are out of control and that there is strong evidence are being turned inwardly against the American people. They are doing a sh*tty job of protecting you from Russia and China and if you believe NSA isn’t riddled with actual foreign spies you are head in the sand useful idiots for this regime.

Please please please do not misunderstand the above. Anyone calling for violence is just giving the D.C. fascists what they want as they are rapidly losing credibility and trust everywhere, not just in this country but worldwide. I only speak to warn EVERYONE that once the 4th Amendment is gone and people perceive that they’re losing their 2nd and 1st things can escalate dangerously. East Germany and the USSR under Stalin didn’t have 200 million guns in private hands, and 150 million of them rifles with varying military utility. Nor did the East Germans ever face the serious threat of elements in their military actually joining a ‘counterrevolution’ and taking some of their hardware with them. Unfortunately for those who would implement the Weathermen’s plans for America they better be worried that ‘insiders’ might arrest those who give them illegal or unConstitutional orders.

Let’s not get all Russophobe on Adomanis…he’s in D.C. and D.C. has put him in a tough spot. Defending Snowden wouldn’t be popular with this bosses. It’s why Joshua Foust is going after Snowden hard, probably doesn’t want to become persona non grata to his defense sources.

Even people who admit NSA looks completely incompetent on this one and may very will be riddled with actual Russian and Chinese spies will always circle the wagons when it comes to NSA being evil or having any evil people in it gleefully sending data to the White House for Stasi-style blackmail. D.C. will always choose massively, ridiculously incompetent over evil, every time, and so will the Streetwise Professor hivemind.

The national security state is massive and like the Mob is rather unforgiving unless you are a ‘made man’. Everyone else is expendable and they can even make themselves look like jackasses for hiring a ‘Paulbot’ ‘high school dropout’ who walked out with a flash drive containing data that caused ‘irreparable harm’ to national security.

One last thing…for you three letter agency worshippers who pretend to be on the Right or classical liberals or even libertarians…if you happen to live in a state like Texas that’s likely to nullify federal gun laws, tread carefully. Your neighbors might not take kindly to your fanatical defense of the agencies that could be used to blackbag or target them in the extreme case that state nullification lead to some sort of Civil War 2.0 scenario. Read Matthew Bracken’s ‘What I Saw at the Coup’ or Bob Owens for some enlightenment.

http://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/what-i-saw-at-the-coup/
Bracken: What I Saw at the Coup

http://www.bob-owens.com/2012/12/what-youll-see-in-the-rebellion/
What You’ll See at the Rebellion

DHS and NSA supposedly have their lists. But I can’t say with 100% certainty they’re the only ones.

“In fact I would go further and would say that the problem with Adomanis’s article is that so far from providing a realistic assessment of Russian weakness its problem is that it dangerously overestimates US strength. As such it is a further example of the hubris and megalomania and self deception that affects so much of the thinking in the US these days.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. George F. Will’s latest column ranting about how Putin as the leader of a ‘Third World country’ that just happens to have many nukes was another example of D.C. (including ‘conservative’ D.C.’s) detachment from reality. If you told Will that Russia was rapidly approaching convergence with South Korean levels of Purchasing Power Parity or had the highest per capita income of the BRICs (Will would probably reply that Brazil is also ‘Third World’, though it depends as in the U.S. on where you are, the Rio Grande Valley or Detroit versus Falls Church where Will lives) he’d probably just shake his head in disbelief.

Sigh. I noticed that a member of a certain fanatically Russophobic hive mind was complaining about anti-Semitic comments under RT articles and how much Greenwald, Assange et al all hate Israel and love Russia. As if Israel has not been snuggling up to Moscow both diplomatically and commercially for years, culminating in last year’s King David Hotel red carpet for Putin and his 200 strong entourage plus the Israeli UAV sales to the Russian armed forces and God knows what other transfers of U.S. taxpayer-derived technologies. As if there aren’t some in the Israeli military and perhaps even Mossad who would be fine with leaking coordinates of the worst Sunni jihadist scumbags fighting among the Syrian rebels to Russia so that the Russians can in turn allow the Assad regime to more accurately target and kill Israel’s top foes in the Syrian opposition.

And these people also discount the possibility of anyone deliberately Stormfront trolling RT’s comments threads to insist, ‘See! Everyone who reads RT is an anti-Semite!’ and give all the haters another talking point. The CNET thread under Declan McCullagh’s article about NSA warrantlessly spying was crawling with them.

I doubt 99% of RT’s website article readers bother to read the comments and of those maybe 1/10th of one percent actually leave a comment of their own. It’s the Internet equivalent of having the late white supremacist talk radio host Hal Turner on the FBI payroll.

Anyway while Russia might become a haven someday for HBD thinkers and researchers it is hardly going to be the great white hope that some U.S. white supremacists insist it is, especially given the Ghenghis Khan (Shoigu — who may prove to be Putin’s successor)/Armenian (Lavrov, following in the footsteps of Mikoyan)/Jewish (numerous oligarchs) descent of so many prominent Russians.

“From the meaningless police confiscations of Nemtsov’s “white papers” (which are only ever read on the Internet) to the harassment that frightened the economist Sergey Guriev into exile in Paris, petty authoritarianism on the part of lower level police and investigators is one of the most reliable manufactories of the ammunition that the “anti-Russian lobby” in the West uses to take potshots at Putin.”

Well said. We seem to be rapidly approaching a point where the worst scum chinovniks will rationalize their abuses in Russia (or for that matter, in China) by saying, well the Americans do it too. Can’t we just admit that all governments are dragging each other down into the same pre-global economic collapse cesspit at the moment. And Russia, after years of real progress despite active foreign subversions and proxy attacks like the Georgian assault on South Ossetia, has started to take a step back. And this is all happening at the very moment that Putin’s own mojo and Russia’s economic growth are both waning.

The fact that ‘both sides may do it’ does not make it right in the slightest. RT cannot make anyone love Russia but it can convince them that the West is almost if not just as corrupt.

Meanwhile the brigade that cries Whataboutist is firing off tweets tonight trying to warn libertarians and conservatives about the horrible threat that Glenn Greenwald and the house-arrested Julian Assange represent to their civil liberties. No I’m not kidding, they don’t have an ounce of outrage it seems left for the NSA. I won’t even say their names these people make me want to puke so bad. If I end up in a FEMA camp next to them they’ll still be ranting, no doubt, about Greenwald and Putin.

Yes it appears that Germany and Russia like two great magnets will draw the best and brightest from (in the former country): Poland, Hungary, Italy and Spain (and in the latter thanks to common religion/alphabet): Greece, Bulgaria. Romania and Baltics might split since older Balts in late 30s or 40s still speak Russian but younger generations will go West in what the American geo-politician Joel Kotkin calls the ‘New Hansa’ — Germany, Netherlands, Baltics and Nordic countries. So despite all London bankster schemes like Cyprus to get Germany and Russia again hostile towards eachother they are going to get together with China and form a new Eurasian economic and currency bloc.

This is why the WSJ’s latest is rubbish — Russian demography does not depend solely on the generational cohort born in then USSR during mid to late 1980s. And did you notice they had to publish the piece on Victory Day? That’s just smarmy.

I would only add a few things here, now some weeks removed from the events:

1) The ‘ex’ CIA founded/run Jamestown Foundation has vigorously denied that Tamerlane T. ever visited any of their conferences, which is to be expected, and they also note that the godfather of the “Grand Chessboard” strategy of permanently keeping Russia down Z. Bzrezinski is no longer on their board. The former is a response to an article published in Izvestia, the latter almost seems to me a response to the online critics of Jamestown that it’s an Amerikansky silovik front for Prometheanism and other strategies of subversion in the former Soviet space.

2) I saw Michael D. Weiss joked on Twitter that if Menatep Bank was paying for his new Russian translations mag than he wasn’t getting paid. Ahem, his paychecks come from the Qataris these days not the empty Khodorkovsky/Berezovsky cupboard. In any case, having previously asked him sarcastically why he doesn’t just strap on a suicide vest and go out with a bang alongside his glorious Syrian jihadist brothers, I won’t commence further trolling and am thoroughly done with Twitter.

3) The feds in Boston have finally caught up with reality that few folks find it credible that the brothers acted entirely alone. The White House has doubled down on the Saudi kid being a totally innocent bystander after the photos of Michelle O visiting Al-Harbi (who comes from a terror watch listed family in KSA) in the hospital leaked. The Saudis then released their own ‘leak’ to the Daily Mail insisting that they warned BigSis, who denies getting any written warning from KSA about Tsaernaev. Score one for Glenn Beck and no wonder the Establishment is so pissed with Beck and Brother Alex right now you don’t expose to what extent the Saudis (and their co-Syria jihad funders the Qataris) own Washington it’s a big no-no.

4) Alt media outlets now reporting that Uncle Ruslan was married to the daughter of an American silovik/ex-Reagan Admin spook who resides in Maryland and did some legal work for Kazahks who paid a huge kickback to Prince Andrew by paying gazillions for his overvalued UK real estate. Uncle Ruslan was also allegedly involved in a Chechen compatriots org that raised money for boots during the mid-1990s bound for the Chechen jihadists. The Debka theory that Tamerlane was recruited than turned on his handlers grows more credible…and now that the mother of Tamerlane is saying her son was in regular contact with FBI who monitored his web usage for five years they’re all a pack of liars as far as the SWP hive mind is concerned. But of course. Musn’t admit at the very least the feds spectacularly dropped the ball on monitoring ‘their’ informants.

I’m sure the Establishment Right organs like the Daily Caller will eventually interview those uniformed private security guys caught on video milling about the finish line explaining all the important work they were doing at the Marathon for Craft International. Just so we don’t get any ideas…

But Anatoly, if you want a sample of how furiously U.S. elites react when the same propaganda techniques they’ve hurled at Russia re tossed back at them, see this rant by Sen. Harry Reid on the Senate floor denouncing ‘false flags’ and people afraid of ‘black helicopters’ who’re allegedly “arming themselves…to fight police…[and] military”. Looks like Potok of the SPLC wrote this speech for him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRwwwXqghyY
Avoid the comments, they’re nekulturny

Well of course, it’s always been trutherism for me but not for thee with these people i.e. the contrast between Feltshinsky et al being taken seriously versus the 9/11 truthers being scorned and hated. Not that I am a 9/11 truther, but I am very skeptical about the Detroit junk bomber and the reasons as to why we’ll never hear from drugged out of his mind James Holmes regarding any possible accomplices in Aurora or any additional shooters at Sandy Hook. I still have trouble buying even a psychotropic’d out of his mind Adam Lanza could’ve killed all those people, all 110 pounds of him trying to carry an AR, two pistols and very large quantities of ammo.

And Anatoly, I can personally confirm from talking to a guy who used to fly guns both to the Iraqis and Iranians during that war (as alluded to in the scene where the infamous arms dealer says in Lord War, ‘What makes you think I don’t want both sides to lose?’) that Bout performed valuable services to both governments during his arms trafficking career. One side threw him under the bus, the other wanted to bring him back home.

I dunno about that but I tweeted a certain Venezuelan activist today that Moscow isn’t as big on black bagging/droning accused terrorists (including those who are given aslyum in Great Britain) as the U.S. has been in other parts of Europe with the renditions of Arab German nationals suspected of Al-Qaeda ties both pre and post 9/11.

I would’ve gone further and put Eric Holder on the list, invoking the tit for tat of the Magnitsky case being just as outside American prosecutorial jurisdiction as the slaying of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. After all, the Magnitsky list members haven’t been prosecuted — in fact they haven’t even been charged with contempt of Congress, unlike Holder. Alas, Russia would never do that because:

1) Russia is not looking to escalate but to tone down the tit for tat

2) Russia wouldn’t give any precedent/justification to the notion that Congress gets to convict foreign citizens absent trial anymore than the State Duma can convict Americans though all sovereign nations have the right to declare anyone persona non grata.

3) Everyone, even folks who pretend not to like Eric Holder and the Obama Administration in D.C. would go apes— in response to Russia treating the U.S. in a genuinely symmetrical response as opposed to a symbolic one, since I doubt anyone on the counter Magnitsky list would ever go to Russia. Though the captains of Russophobic smugistan certainly overestimate the interest of Russian elites in flying to Miami or LA.

The Cyprus episode really took the cake. Had Putin bailed out the Russian companies with Cypriot bank accounts it would’ve (somewhat rightly) been attacked as TBTF crony capitalism. But Putin doesn’t bail them out and he’s attacked for that? Ridiculous.

“In reality, as far as his priorities go, cleaner and more effective government in Russia takes a clear second place to the prime imperative of politically undermining Putin. All this just serves to illustrate how utterly divorced from reality the mainstream commentary is when it comes to Russia and Putin.” I noticed this from David Frum too, author of the “The Right Man” which at the time it was politically expedient in 2001-2002 pre-Iraq invasion highlighted Bush’s adroit post-9/11 friendship with ‘Pootie Poo’ (I’ve never seen any evidence that Bush actually called Putin that).

Frum used the story of a drunk who got caught in a garbage truck (but apparently still had his cellphone to call for help) in Moscow as evidence of Russians general heartlessness and indifference toward human life. Frum’s Russian ‘source’ for this story then proceeded to explain that Russia is still dying demographically and Tatarstan would’ve seceded from Moscow if given the chance. Naturally the need for registration to comment limited angry replies from Russians at such ludicrous tropes.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/01/david-s-bookclub-it-was-a-long-time-ago-and-it-never-happened-anyway.html

But but but…the evil Kremlin shut down a few Twitter accounts that advocate for suicide! Putin is an Internet censoring dictator, I tells ya! Phobie cited the shut down accounts but in her entire Pajamas Media article failed to mention what they were saying or quote a single one!

Helmer wrote that Pearson keeps its profits banked in Luxembourg.

The counterstrike may be slow in developing — ruble-ization is just one offbeat idea I spun off this weekend, not knowing whether it could actually work in practice. But there are many others out there.

Speaking of collapsing US Monetary union (and yes FDR did steal the American people’s gold, in effect devaluing the USD by 30% in a fortnight), did anybody see this story publicized by “Currency Wars” Jim Rickards and former RT America host Lauren Lyster about Texas wanting the UT System’s billion dollars in bulleon back from the New York City vaults?

Of course the Fed recently announced that all the gold, including Germany’s which will take seven years to repatriate, is still there and in excellent condition. But it was not an external audit.

http://www.silverdoctors.com/jim-rickards-texas-to-hoard-gold-create-fort-knox-of-texas/

If Utah, Texas, Montana and the other ‘Tea Party’ minded states start creating actual state-guaranteed gold vaults, where the state doesn’t issue the coinage but just guarantees that it’s not all tungsten inside, what will happen then? Will we see rich Russians putting their bulleon in Salt Lake City or Austin vaults?

My understanding is that a euro is a euro is a euro, though there are ‘national stamps’ and euros printed in Germany for example bear a different small marking than those printed in Greece. Please correct me if I’m wrong in case there’s a reason Russia hasn’t tried for ruble-ization, perhaps the Euros would retaliate by declaring the Cypriot euros devalued or valueless somehow hence screwing Russia out of the conversion.

My understanding Alexander is that most of the ‘hot’ money deposited in Iceland banks by British or Dutch bankers was in fact bailed out by their respective governments.

Even had the Icelanders allowed all deposits over the 100k euro threshold to fail (or fewer, since they were outside the EU and hence not subject to the now worthless EU ‘deposit insurance’ guarantee) that still would’ve been more market-based than what the Cypriot Vichy collaborators and the Teutons of the ECB did.

In fact Jeremy Warner of the UK Telegraph I think is playing to his City bosses by trying to blur the lines between the criminal things the Cypriots did and the early 20th century approach of the Icelanders (i.e. 1920s/early 30s before ‘Too Big to Fail’ entered the lexicon). If you recall the British government tried to threaten the Icelanders at the time, saying they would be banned from visiting Britain etc. Those efforts of course failed spectacularly.

The trouble now is indeed the damage is irreparable because it was designed by the Germans principally Schauble and Merkel’s aides to be thus. And the Russians will not throw good money after bad and reinject capital into banks that the ECB has already declared dead, while Cyprus remains in the EU. And since the exit from the Euro zone by treaty law takes two years (though the Cypriots can toss out the rascals and install a ‘patriotic’ or ‘national salvation’ government that will print Cypriot Pounds) in the meantime Cypriots either accept the new, near worthless currency, meekly take their euros out after the banks reopen and try to exchange their euros for dollars, swiss francs or rubles ASAP, or perhaps there is one final option: Putin should NOT agree to a bailout but should offer rubles to Cypriots at a favorable euro exchange rate once the banks reopen. That would be a counterstrike and a PR coup in that it would demonstrate that Cypriots would prefer to keep their money in rubles than euros and stick it to the Brussels bastards that way, as well as avoid a future confiscation by keeping said rubles under the mattress.

Sorry got off on a tangent about Cyprus. Here’s my link to debunking the ‘Al-KGB-aeda’ theory, including asking how ‘the KGB’ would maintain control over their ‘asset’ Ayman Al-Zawahiri:

http://reginaldquillbigsis.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/reginaldquill-and-the-al-kgb-aeda-conspiracy-theory/

“It was through researching the Moscow apartment bombings that I first realised how important Berezovsky has been in shapinng western perceptions of Russia and of Putin. I don’t personally believe he had any involvement in the bombings himself but I remember being struck how repeatedly and without exception all the supposed “sources” that claimed FSB involvement in the bombings could be traced back to him.” Berezovsky’s entire clique were critical to the ‘Al-KGB-aeda’ theory that ‘linked’

The You Know Whos seeking to rationalize the looting of Cypriots savings by the EUrocrats using British dupes/or willful puppets like Weiss or Warner don’t like sites like EuroTrib pointing out how desperate the Brussels brigands are to keep the Russians hands off Cyprus and the gas.

Personally, I’m disappointed that the Cypriots bent over for the troika this weekend. But the whole island was increasingly under blockade. I just wish the Cypriots had put Merkel and the Germans in the role of Stalin in 1948 West Berlin, and invited Putin to send a few Antonovs loaded with rubles. Trouble is that may’ve spared Cypriots from starvation or gasoline shortages by giving them a currency to receive salaries and transact in, but wouldn’t help the pensioners or cash poor-savers on the island.

I suppose they Vichy Cypriots consider the ‘haircut’ for the large deposit holders as being less destructive than trying to convert the frozen euros into a local currency had the old Cypriot pound printing presses been fired up. But there was another ‘solution’ that had not been tried at all — dollarization or ruble-ization. Had the yuan been a free floating currency, the Cypriot authorities might’ve tried that gambit like the Argentines did in desperation in 2001. Now we may never know, unless the ‘deal’ allegedly reached today gets torn up before dawn tomorrow or the Cypriot rascals who reached it flee the country.

I knew European Tribune was starting to get some traction when I saw it denounced as ‘another KGB backed media operation’ somewhere a few months ago.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/03/11/1-6-billion-rounds-of-ammo-for-homeland-security-its-time-for-a-national-conversation/

A lot of ‘tin foil hat, black helicopter’ stuff punching its way into the mainstream nowadays, as you no doubt may’ve heard if you were a regular reader of Forbes magazine which has called for a ‘national conversation’, for example, on the number of bullets the Department of Homeland Security has ordered. Although they claim only tens of millions, not billions of the 1.7 billion tallied up by the Associated Press in February have actually been delivered to all DHS agencies, even the ‘option’ to purchase enough ammo to fight a 20 year long Iraq War (if hollow points were not banned by the Geneva Conventions) or 80 years of training at the current pace suspiciously looks like back door gun control via ammo control at best. And a preparation for domestic hostilities/martial law at the worst.

Even DHS claiming the bullet purchases are merely an ‘option’ and are not already on their way seems part and parcel of a deceptive strategy, whereby taking delivery of 3,000 MRAP vehicles once destined for Iraq or Afghanistan battlefields can instead be chalked up as an ‘insane conspiracy theory’ since the vehicles are said to be purchased by the Marines. The best way of course to hide something is often in plain site and it could be two concurrent orders or DHS could take custody of the military ‘surplus’ hardware at any time without necessarily painting them DHS black like the 16 MRAPs already documented.

There is some historical precedent for this, (if you say to hell with Godwin’s law, or even pre-Godwin Germany) when looking at how the Weimar Republic evaded the Versailles Treaty by holding training exercises in the USSR during the 1920s. The Nazis of course did their aircraft training in the early 1930s as ‘civilian’ exercises, even though the gliders were practicing how to deliver materiel onto a battlefield.

http://reginaldquillbigsis.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/national-review-calm-down-about-dhsbullets/

A quote from an old timer:

“The armored personnel carriers were the last straw for me and put me on the side of this is not reasonable. I guess you could spend the day explaining away all the ammo, but it still doesn’t add up to me. Throw in the recent urban warfare games in Texas and Florida and put a tin foil hat on me. In better times, I would believe that what the government is doing is harmless, and there is no plot. But when you throw in all the issues of the times including the stonewalling on Fast and Furious and the missing witnesses of Benghazi [which Media Matters says is ‘standard’ when intelligence agencies are involved, nothing to see here folks move on from the silenced survivors – Equis], a president who said in 2008 that he wanted a civilian army as big and well funded as the US Army which would advance his agenda, then you can add, subtract, and divide the number of bullets per person all you want, but I don’t believe a word that comes out of the administration any longer.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fO-usAlqak

Here’s the video of Obama’s otherwise ‘odd’ pronouncement at a campaign stop in 2008 that we needed a ‘civilian security force…just as powerful, just as strong, and just as well funded as our military’. No Obama supporter or anyone remotely connected with the Administration has ever sought to explain what the future President was alluding to here.

However the sources of ‘The Ulsterman Report’ website came closest to explaining it when ‘White House Insider’ said Obama and Michelle needed to signal to ‘the investors’ — offshore globalists and their transnational union bagmen like Leo Gerard — that they were ‘serious’ about delivering what ‘they’ wanted.

http://theulstermanreport.com/2012/06/04/white-house-insider-barack-obamas-high-tech-snuff-films/

So you can either find a way to laugh all this off, or keep that ‘tin foil hat’ for yourself.

The title “Convict Conditioning” is derived from former University of Iowa wrestler Matt Furey (not sure if the last name is authentic)’s “Combat Conditioning” from the mid-2000s. Since Furey is married to a Mainland Chinese wife he has since expanded the Chinese martial arts Tai-Chi stuff into the repertoire of books. I own the first two so I’m not sure I would buy Convict Conditioning as it looks like the same basic moves — what Furey calls ‘the Royal Court’ of ‘Hindu’ squats, pushups, etc.

South Korea has made public rumblings about its own nuclear deterrent. Japan can’t be too far behind should the U.S. continue to weaken. This may be the actual best arguments the old farts in the dying GOP still have for ‘peace through strength’ but the simple arithmetic of U.S. assets to liabilities works against them, even with a real shale oil and gas boom (and the shale fracked wells are depleted faster, though not as fast as the Peak Oil crowd claims — in the end both the wild optimists who says the USA will restore the dollar with crude and the ultra pessimists like Engdahl who claim fracking is a hoax will be disappointed).

But calling Sen. Rand Paul an isolationist is just a knee jerk exercise and based on little more than his father’s name. He did after all endorse more sanctions on Iran which did not endear him to his father’s core of supporters but the broader tea party is largely indifferent to that.

http://reginaldquillbigsis.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/globalist-worshipping-fascists-show-their-true-colors-advocate-mass-expropriation-of-russians-and-others-accounts-in-cyprus/

Anatoly I plan to do a follow up post at my blog to your own exposing the execrable Michael Weiss, who is not [sic only] a Syria jihadi fanboy but also seems to think stealing Russians accounts (per Jeremy Warner of the Telegraph) is just an awesome idea and is exactly what the Icelanders did (wrong).

Pathological Russophobes, fascists or Bolsheviks all. Once you no longer pretend to give a damn about private property due process (i.e. drone killings) what other words are there to describe these people? Even the ridiculous Professor Pirrong is distancing himself as fast as he can from these creeps on Twitter.

As Reggie Middleton has exposed at ZeroHedge, Britain’s banking sector is also nine times GDP and also has billions in ‘dirty’ Russian money. Why don’t the banksters and eurocrats just start defecating in their own nest? Why doesn’t Jeremy Warner of the Torygraph just advocate the UK expropriating the ill gotten gains of ‘Londograd’ and Berezovsky/Abramovich in British banks to make British finances whole?

Significant swathes of the UK/US political class not only think stealing from ‘rich Russians’ is ok — in Krugman’s case, perhaps as a precedent for Obama raiding 401ks and IRAs in the not so distant future (aka a Bolshevik or Argentine Fascist mentality of ‘rob the rich, as property is theft anyway’).

They also deliberately leave out all the British pensioners and Israeli corporations who will also be subject to the ‘haircut’. In fact Walter Russell Mead, who has been ambivalent on Russia’s resurgence in many respects (loathing Putin but acknowledging that many Greeks and other Orthodox peoples of southeastern Europe are looking to Russia for answers rather than the EU) blames the Russians now for not throwing billions after bad to recapitalize a banking system that’s already been thrown into permanent jeopordy, so long as Cyprus stays in the eurozone! Why would any sane person much less government throw billions of euros into a banking system that the eurocrats can raid anytime they please?

Once again it’s damned if Russia does nothing, and damned if it does something to ‘spend babushkas money to bail out wealthy oligarchs’! The Kremlin truly can’t win in this situation!

Anatoly I plan to do a follow up post at my blog to your own exposing the execrable Michael Weiss, who is not a Syria jihadi fanboy but also seems to think stealing Russians accounts (per Jeremy Warner of the Telegraph) is just an awesome idea and is exactly what the Icelanders did (wrong). In fact I think it’s a globalist twofer, in the sense they want to promote the false idea that Icelanders just ripped off foreign depositors (they did NOT, they wiped out the bondholders, let the British and Dutch governments bailout their banks which had deposits in Iceland, and arrested the banksters’ Icelandic agents) to discredit Iceland’s approach while simulatenously advocating financial warfare against the hated Russians. If that isn’t fascist I don’t know what is.

Anatoly,

With respect to your ‘that’ll teach em’ — while I certainly can appreciate the irony of the EUrocrats who once pompously lectured Russia on the rule of law and financial stability deciding to simply steal 10 to 6.75% of all banked Cypriot savings, I cannot agree with the spirit that all the Russian money in Cyprus is somehow ‘dirty’ or is ‘evading’ Russian taxes. These smack of the rationalizations the Hagmar Schach…er, Wolfgang Schauble is touting today, saying poor German taxpayers couldn’t be expected to bailout rich Russian oligarchs, as if everyone who had savings in Cypriot banks was an oligarch (and I suspect it will soon come out in Kommersant that Abramovich or some other real oligarchs wire transferred large sums out of Cypriot banks just days before the hit — money buying private intelligence of the most useful sort, bugging the Cypriot minister’s calls should’ve been child’s play).

It’s difficult to argue, had the Russian authorities pushed harder for a tax treaty in return for a bailout prior to this SHTF, that they wouldn’t have gotten it. On the other hand, I do suspect Ksenia Sobchak probably had a few thousand euros in Cyprus and at the very least got the 6.75% haircut if not the 10% one. While that brings me no schadenfraude, it is a lesson for certain jet-setting Russian liberals like Ponamorov that their money is NOT safe in the EU or perhaps someday soon even in the U.S. and UK from the depradations of Western chinovniks/banksters. And the fact that MF Global has now been scaled up in a larger test case, precisely as I warned Craig Pirrong and other Russophobic fanatics that it would be (and ‘doom porn’ purveyors and regular RT guests/hosts like Max Keiser and Gerald Celente also warned) should also give the Establishment worshipers and Occidental chauvinists pause.

Even the Germans’ looming revolt against being model EUropeans and supporters of the Euro in favor of returning to the DM or “New Hanseatic League” EuroMark (Germany plus the Dutch, Finns, Czechs, Swedes and Danes and maybe Estonians) could be part of a larger Plan to bring Germany back towards its Eurasian destiny in the East — a defacto monetary alliance with Russia and China that you hinted at in your old essay “The Return of the Reich”.

That photo on the ski slope with a shaved head makes you look like a young but future Bond villain.

Contributing to Forbes, despite Steve’s undeniable love for Moscow and its enshrining the flat tax he’s long championed into law, must’ve gotten to Mark A. after a while — though he still does good work, don’t get me wrong. It was always going to be a tightrope though between domestic liberalism and deflecting the constant charge of being a ‘Putin apologist’. Not that National “of course we’re siding with the Muslim Brotherhood — Clifford May” Review, the Weekly war whore Standard and much of what passes for mainline Republican journals these days don’t all deserve a good swift kick in the ass. If the shade of Bill Buckley were around he might consider Rich Lowry an effeminate joke in comparison to NR’s founder, who while undeniably a man of the CIA born into money was also A MAN.

Post 2: Agree with you 100% about Russia (or more accurately, Ukraine) being the closest thing the Manosphere can find to heaven on earth (outside of Brazil, which even certain Russian oligarchs say have the more fairer women than the FSU nations) and the closest thing to hell on Earth for the modern feminist and manboob. As a married man unlike the PUAs I have no direct fleshly stake in the fight.

Post 3: Last comment on this thread…don’t want to hog it…

Another Ioffe piece that was very telling in its sheer anti-male and anti-man pleasing female aggression was “The Rise of Russia’s Gun Nuts” written for the same globalist Trotskyite (in the sense of promoting world revolution from Libya to Syria to Mali by military means) fake liberal rag, the New Republic.

In the piece Ioffe poured scorn on the Russians, especially a Russian young woman, who expressed their ADMIRATION for America’s Constitution and the 2nd Amendment and said Russia should be so lucky to have its own NRA for law abiding gun owners.

Normally Russians who love American institutions and contrast them with their own would be praised (aka liberasts), but the 2nd Amendment is a big fat exception and headache to all globalist-minded decent feminist people from D.C. to London to everywhere else the globalzis reside. The Russians quoted in the article even said it wasn’t fair that Russians should be disarmed and be unable to defend themselves from drunken or criminal police (like the crazy cop who shot several people to death at a Moscow supermarket a few years ago)! And yet they still were “gun nuts”!

Over at SWP the Prof is having a tizzy because Russian growth is ONLY 3.5% this year, tops. Considering Russia’s top trading partners besides Germany in the EU are nearly in cardiac arrest and China is slowing down (but not tipping into outright recession yet) I would think most countries around the world would gladly take 3.5%. And SWP tries to preface it by saying ‘for Russia’s state of development’. Well Russia is already a middle income country by global standards, ala Poland, with relatively mature demographics — we’re not talking India or Brazil here.

And isn’t it funny how the Russia stuff is cranked up even more hardcore during a week when the Prof’s home state of Texas had a state attorney general, one Congressman and several state Reps openly call for the arrest of any federal agents who carry out Obama’s executive orders on guns. Nothing to see in my back yard folks, move on, let’s talk about Russia 3,500 miles away some more.

Agree with Fedia. Progress is still possible. But chinovniks have to stop saying it’s ok if the West does it, we’ll screw our people over too.

Anatoly,

There is a certain fearful symmetry between the fanatical Russophobe and fanatic Russophile. Both would in Orthodox terms be guilty of the sin of Pride.

And lately what disturbs me is that whenever I see a negative trend in Russian society it is often as not copycatting a similar erosion of human rights in the West, whether the Guardian or The Economist would care to admit it or not. Establishmentarian Occidental-triumphalist fanatics like Craig Pirrong insist that there are signs the U.S. might be sinking down toward the Russian level (though Pirrong prefers to stay remarkably vague about said developments, and has done a whopping three blog posts about the theft with impunity of 1.2 billion in customer funds by Goldman Sachs kingpin Jon Corzine within Pirrong’s own industry, perhaps the biggest example of Russia in 1990s style lawlessness the Western financial markets have seen yet).

But as for me, I would prefer to see it as Russia’s halting progress of the 2000s backsliding in considerable part because Moscow’s notorious chinovniks can increasingly say, “Hey, the Americans, Brits and Eurocrats do it [some arbitrary restriction or tax on the individual’s liberty], why shouldn’t we?” And this is of course the ultimate slap to both the Russophile triumphalist who thinks Russia’s Holy Rus unique civilization will see Her through the collapse of the West AND the Occidental triumphalist who thinks Russia is pure evil and can always rationalize all manner of Western foreign policy depravity in the name of fighting the eternal Muscovy enemy [see Syria, NATO support for jihadists and then U.S. retroactively naming a group U.S. or U.S. allies have massively supported as an Al-Qaeda aligned organization, perversely confirming the truthyness of Assad’s claims that he’s been fighting terrorists all along]. To which when I point these things out to think tank kids at the Saban Center in D.C. and tell the bosses there on Twitter that they ought to feel very weird as pro-Israel advocates making Syria safe for the Muslim Brotherhood, they simply check out or call ME the tin foil hat wearer. I respond with links to the New York Times or McClatchy correctly pointing out how many members of the FSA have pledged allegiance to or refuse to disavow openly Al-Qaeda linked groups. But somehow I’M denounced as the crazy and conspiracy theorist while they cover their ears and go la la la la la can’t hear you.

But the worst thought of all is that I might take myself and my family away from the TSA gropers at the airports and highways only to have the Police State follow me to Russia!

Re: Anatoly’s comments about Mexico and her people:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/11/20/175181/mexico-facing-a-diabetes-disaster.html

Now juxtapose this with Goldman Sachs recent claims that Mexico is among the new ‘BRICs’ poised for breakthrough economic growth. Perhaps for kidney dialysis manufacturers, true. Alas for the rest of the economy and the economy that is so often tasked with absorbing Mexico’s problems, perhaps not.

Color me cynical, but perhaps BP trying to sell out its stake in TNK BP for as much cash as humanly possible in order to pay billions and billions to victimized fishermen and tourist operators in the Gulf of Mexico may have something to do with it. Can’t entirely throw feces where one has assets, old boy.

Yep it’s as if they’ve fired Ed Lucas or reassigned him for something. He exerted an iron grip over their coverage so bad, even other British journos at Western media bureaus in Moscow didn’t like the guy.

what’s the deal with someone always trolling non-Politically Correct blogs once they get popular with Stormfront links/videos? I mean seriously, a blog about Russia and you post a Panzerlied? How about the Defenders of Stalingrad March instead?

Sounds like a buncha kids in 67′ waving Viet Cong flags and then getting surprised when rednecks want to kick their asses. It was one thing to oppose getting involved or sending young men to die in Vietnam and quite another to root for the other side.

Well I haven’t seen any evidence that Von Eggert is about the rebirth of the Reich, but arch-Russophobe Edward Lucas did re-tweet an Estonian’s tweet that Kaliningrad is ‘occupied European territory’. While of course re-tweet does not equal agreement, it can be supposed that European in this context is a euphemism for German, and of course, Anatoly has well documented the ‘let’s give all our eastern islands captured in WWII back to Japan’ impulse among Moscow ‘liberasts’. One wonders how Americans would react to activists insisting we give Lousiana back to France or Alaska back to Russia.

Note that all the breathless reports of Turkey and NATO ready to attack Syria are coming from…wait for it…France 24’s Twitter feed.

“In this he shows little actual understanding of the US or of the range of opinions that exist there but not surprisingly identifies with those who are the most extreme in promoting American ideas of exceptionalism.” On that subject Alexander, I wonder how von Eggert would deal with the American Conservative’s Daniel Larison in a debate? Especially since Larison lacks the baggage, of say, a Pat Buchanan when it comes to Israel, and would just laugh at the anti-Semite charge?

The neocons love dismissing all of their opponents as ‘leftist America haters’ or ‘anti-Semites’, but cannot deal well with actual paleocon/Ron Paulish libertarian non-interventionist arguments at all — especially the argument that years of massive war spending threaten to destroy the very petrodollar that ‘defense’ spending was intended to defend.

They generally prefer to dismiss Paul and all of his followers as racists, cranks (even if this, as over at the Streetwise Professor blog or Catherine Fitzpatrick when I used to waste time trolling those folks, requires libeling the tens of thousands of American veterans who donated to Paul’s campaign as kooks/nutjobs).

Yet there is clearly an audience for those views in America otherwise RT’s YouTube channel wouldn’t be one of the most heavily downloaded in the history of the web with most of the views coming from outside of Russia.

Anatoly,

Great post! Let’s keep things on the cheery side — if Mitt Romney is elected and his advisors really do manage to marginalize the oilmen within the GOP who want to drill in the Russian Arctic in favor of a new Cold War line (though the Georgians might not be game for a second go at South Ossetia/Abkhazia), your pending book will be in even greater demand. Silver linings all around!

I’d guess the percentage that want to leave Spain or Greece or would consider leaving Italy for work is very high among the under 30 crowd. Who calls them failed states? Besides Mark Steyn, I mean.

Right, and as with the capital flight of $80 billion per year that should have drained Russia’s capital reserves by now, in truth what’s happening is money (and people) are leaving for Cyprus or the EU countries mostly only to be repatriated. These are people who are going abroad temporarily to work or for education (especially to Londongrad) then coming back within two years.

Agreed. There were rumors that Mao said something to Brezhnev at the time of the Sino-Soviet split to the effect that the USSR would run out nuclear bombs before China ran out of peasants. This seems tied in with the rumor that Brezhnev approached Nixon upon getting wind of Kissinger’s secret diplomacy to China and offered to let the USA and USSR both nuke China together. The former rumor seems plausible given Mao’s madness at the time of the Cultural Revolution, the latter does not.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/24/us-russia-summit-guriev-idUSBRE88N0QD20120924
I expected some Russian economist like Kudrin. Then I click on this story and it’s the same old, same old from Prof. Pirrong’s alleged buddy at the New Economic School. Did the Russian government collapse when oil prices dropped suddenly in early 2009?

The comforting thing for me is that I still feel there’s time to catch up on my age group peers who studied Russian (likely for what they thought would be State Dept. or other careers) as undergrads and now find themselves doing considerably better in Moscow than they could have done here in the U.S.

In other words, the looming showdown in the Republican Party between the underemployed young ‘Ronulans’ and the Craig Pirrong types 🙂

I have a feeling people are going to be shocked, shocked on November 6th that all those polls showing Obama with a six point lead were bogus, and sampling lazy people who won’t vote, even if their precinct wards ‘vote by proxy’ for them several times. Enthusiasm matters, even in American politics which does its darndest to blunt it (see all the massive sabotage of the admittedly limited ceiling Ron Paul campaign from within and without), but so do the numbers out in the heartland. In America right now with the exception of the heavily Democratic Rio Grande Valley and New Mexico it’s largely a urban cores versus suburbs and exurbs game. If there’s no stash to mobilize the folks in the urban core then what? I have a feeling Obama could lose even with precincts from Milwaukee to Detroit to New Orleans all pulling 120-130% turnout and the inner cities going 95% for him simply because depopulation in places like Milwaukee and Detroit has persisted. Without Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida Obama is toast.

Of course I say none of this with any sense of triumphalism as then the real battle the Tea Party/libertarians that actually want smaller government and the Big Government/War corporatists who dominate the party begins.

Whoa beheadings or other mutilation punishments are coming to America? I guess someone watched the Grey State trailer with the Illuminati guillotine guy at the end.

Also, how did the Dark Lord of the Kremlin manage to steal a Super Bowl ring from the owner of the New England Patriots? Am I missing something? Wouldn’t Bob Kraft have complained if he didn’t give it back? I haven’t seen Putin sporting the bling on any of his extensively photographed outings.

I also came up with “Demintern: The Propaganda War Against Russia in Word and Deed” but that would be too focused on the NED/NRI/et al and not enough on the big picture.

P.S. Ed’s redesigned page looks good.

Best one by far so far.

I mean hell if respectable D.C. TV and cable outlets can run ads showing women in veils driving power boats in ‘the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, America’s ally against terrorism’ back in 2002 why the hell not a more grass rootsey video showing modern Russia?

AK if Romney gets elected president, I had in mind a viral YouTube video shot with modern cheaper digital cameras with multiple people — young, old, professional — all in sequence saying something like, “This is modern Russia”, including Russians who work at Kaspersky, Boeing, Skolkovo, a Russian businessman who travels back and forth to Israel to work in a line about visa free travel between those two countries just to poke the neocons some, and “Governor (President???) Romney come see for yourself in Europe’s largest and fastest growing city, Moscow.”

Don’t know how much that would cost though it’s getting more possible to create very high production values on a shoe string (for an example, see the $6,000 budget trailer for ‘Grey State’ a police state thriller that at this stage isn’t more than a trailer filmed in the Twin Cities, Minnesota).

It’s more the costs of lining up the logistics and the speakers since a video with just yourself, Ed and maybe a few other folks from World Russia Forum wouldn’t get as much legs as one with lotsa beautiful Muscovites sprinkled in (no fense, and I’m sure Ed wouldn’t take it).

http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=6238#comment-91891

And I would just like to say on standards of deceny and conduct and allegedly writing more than the host blogger at the SWP hive (a lie)…let’s briefly compare. I did accuse him of soft-pedaling Jon the Don Corzine’s theft of 1.2 billion in customer funds and getting away with while playing up every example of corruption in Russia. And of covering for his buddies at the CME and failing to criticize things that have genuine libertarians up in arms such as the TSA, NDAA, SOPA, CISPA et al. In fact Pirrong said SOPA was no big deal. He also compared Ron Paul supporters to the genocidal Khmer Rouge, while yammering about ‘decency’.

I never called for anybody to be interned like some of SWP’s commenters who then lied and said they didn’t (vorobey), never denounced everyone as a KGB operative (Anders) or ZeroHedge as such based on flimsy evidence (Pirrong), didn’t call for Ron Paul supporters to be aggressively monitored by the FBI or called them neo-Confederates out of the SPLC playbook (Reggie Cointelrpo/DHS wannabe Quill). I didn’t post huge thread-clogging rants at 3 a.m. Oslo time while probably drunk like Anders routinely did, and didn’t use foul language like SWP’s Twitter groupie LibertyMeow upon being confronted with anyone not in love with Mittens Romney.

I did make fun of his alleged Kiwi commenter who seemed fixated on Georgia’s cause and compared him to a white American guy trying to join MeCha or MS-13, but that was about all. That’s about all I did over at the SWP ‘hive mind’.

“Most of this commentary seems to be about praising NATO and smearing Assange.” Not to wander too far off topic but isn’t that what the entire @ReginaldQuill twitter feed is about (well that and how Ron Paul is the devil and Russia is the global seat of anti-Semitism)? At least @LibertyLynx hurls obscenities at the occasional Occupy kid or Democrat now and then.

An Obama 2nd term is still gonna be hostile toward Russia or at least go full bore into Syria in 13′. Romney might do the same but there might be enough of a Congressional backlash among Paulians and DeMint types questioning why the hell the U.S. is taking the same side as the Muslim Brotherhood to embarass Romney enough that he won’t go in. Obama like Honey Badger don’t care about Congress.

Hell, I think the leaks that the Israelis blamed on the Obama Admin in which Foreign Policy breathlessly reported the Israelis had bought an aircraft carrier called Azerbaijan were basically scuppering IAF contigency plans to refuel their jets there for more tempo strikes on Iran, if it ever came to that (I still remain skeptical Iran gets hit due to the economic restraints, not political or military ones). In other words, the Obama Admin was leaking to try to ruin a quiet understanding Israel had reached with Russia that the Russians would denounce a strike on Iran all the way to the bank with instant $140-$150 a barrel oil lasting for several weeks until the chaos settled down.

There is of course, no way in hell the IAF could transit Azeri airspace without Russian military connivance thanks to the big X-band radar at Gabala which Putin offered Bush the use of back in 07′ to no avail. Of course if the IAF did transit Azerbaijan it would be the long way over northern Iraq via Jordan skirting Turkish air space — not a direct shot like flying over Saudi Arabia and the Gulf would be.

I know this is blasphemy to neocons and a conspiracy theory to the Russophobes (some of whom overlap with the neocon crowd), but there it is. I also know many members of the Russian general staff have said a strike on Iran could lead to WW3 but oil profits trump that.

I would love software that enabled learning Russian or Chinese faster while on the go. Wouldn’t obviate the necessity of grunt work i.e. learning cases in Russian but would speed up vocabulary. No more staring at a computer screen ala Rosetta Stone if you put on the glasses and the Cyrillic word for what you’re looking at appears.

Compare this multi-billion dollar fraud whereby illegal aliens, some living in houses that are getting millions in ‘tax refunds’ under one roof, have defrauded the taxpayers of 4 billion plus, to the Magnitsky case. Magnitsky’s case involvings several high Russian officials, some of whom have been fired, is supposed to demonstrate the lawlessness of Russia. But somehow the IRS turning a blind eye to Jose Gomez claiming he has the Social Security number of Ruby Collins who’s been dead since 1976 and getting a large refund on $25,000 a year in income doesn’t demonstrate how rotten the U.S. government has become. Where are you Twitterati?

http://www.newsmax.com/JamesWalsh/Illegal-Aliens-IRS-Tax/2011/09/23/id/412134

Of course, none dare call it a conspiracy to push one nationality to the head of the line and use them as cannon fodder to destroy the American middle class.

Since this an open thread for OT comments, I’ll just point to confirmation of something I already knew:

http://twitter.com/ReginaldQuill/status/231157029182529536

more proof some folks aren’t just bootlicking, they’re probably paid like so many flacks, some effective more than others, on Twitter. Just in case the folks lurking here whom Anatoly used to troll were still in denial about their ‘tweeps’ true loyalties to Big Sis.

AK: True but preferably OT comments are to be about (1) interesting topics, (2) TO DO WITH RUSSIA, (3) something of relevance (some nobody on Twitter is not relevant), (4) something that registers in the minds of more than a couple of people on this blog. In other words, no more Reginald Quilt/LibertyMeow/etc. I am not interested, neither is anyone else here.

Same old crap, counting Russian companies funnelling profits to their Cypriot holdings and then returning them to the country as ‘capital flight’. What if they counted Google’s Irish subsidiary the same way for capital flight from the USA.

In the U.S. it’s generally more the style of dress. Sad to see so many middle aged Ukrainian faces of women who’ve put on more pounds with our U.S. diet than their sisters in the old country. Mexico because it’s been flooded with Monsatan cheap NAFTA corn is rapidly converging with the U.S. or one of those Pacific islands for the title of fattest country in the world. Germany among Europeans is pretty fat but I’d have to agree with Anatoly that the most attractive German women usually have some sort of Slavic-like features i.e. they’re less ‘big boned’ than their German descended ‘sisters’ in the U.S.

Anatoly if you’re getting that aggressively trolled by a liberast trendy you must be doing something right. Without getting too deep into the Twitter woods, this week I’ve observed Joshua Trevino troll RT’s D.C. staff.

Anytime a fellow with an “alleged” history of lobbying on behalf of Malaysian or other foreign interests who used to work for Gov. Perry goes that hard against a news outlet lotsa folks in D.C. don’t like, I tend to assume there’s money involved. Or maybe it’s just a thing about red-bearded pro-war Texans hating anyone who rains on their parade…

The dropout/disappearance and the fact that San Diego/California in general where this kid was from was a hotbed of MK Ultra research back in the 1960s-70s has fueled the ‘Manchurian shooter’ theories.

I had a friend who drank diet sodas with aspertame for years. He ended up in a state mental hospital when he snapped. He’s ok now, but I hope he’s staying off the damn things.

How do they turn their traditional eyes into Hello Kitty dolls with mere make up?

My point is, the grandmothers of many Hispanic girls now may’ve had kids at the same age or earlier but they were married and overall slimmer even after the second or third kid than their granddaughters nowadays are after the first or even before the first. And most of those women even in the 1950s had cars and didn’t have to walk or bike everywhere in most parts of the U.S.

At least people are starting to consider water, Monsatan’s dominance of the two primary U.S. feed crops of corn (HFCS is a killer) and soybeans which find their way into darn near everything, into the fat equation.

It’s true lotsa people drove everywhere and watched a lot of TV in the U.S. back in the 1980s but there weren’t nearly as many morbidly obese land whales as now. The Jane Fonda fitness culture might have helped then though whereas as now all girls in growing demographics are supposed to be ‘curvy’. That isn’t racism it’s just an observation that shorter girls have less room to sash fat and there’s something about the evolving American foodstock and massive doses of sugar particularly toxic to some gene pools. Look at photos of non-movie star, just middle class dressed up Mexican women in the 1940s and compare to now (it’s sorta the equivalent of noticing how unveiled the women’s graduating classes were in Egypt, Afghanistan and Iran of the 1950s and 60s).

In my Gen Yer recollection there were just a few chubby folk in the 1980s-early 1990s, mostly already in their 30s at least, and not nearly as many porcine kids as now. The weight issues mostly exploded not coincidentally after GMO food was widely introduced into everything in the mid to late 1990s.

Not to mention everyone Googling Peter Savodnik and/or Craig Pirrong and coming across this piece should be aware of Pirrong’s all time nuttiest piece, in which he compared supporters of 76-year-old Texas Congressman Ron Paul to the genocidal Khmer Rouge, while his Twitter groupies insist they’re beating back the Occupy Commies and libertarian kooks they overlook such pro-Establishment fanaticism.

http://streetwiseprofessor.com/?p=5898

You can’t make this stuff up. I hope Google will steadily move this up in the SWP search results.

I cannot comment on the whole Prometheanism thing, Anatoly has already covered it in “Paul Goble: Promethean Propagandist”…except to say that there does seem to be some projection going on whereby the hardcore Russophobes (see @ReginaldQuill) are convinced that Igor Panarin, Stash Mishin, and RT are all somehow promoting the breakup of the USA into a New Confederacy that will be allied with Russia. Of course this is b-t-h-t crazy but it’s interesting how it mirror images your more evidence-based concerns that there are some in the West (Ed Lucas of the Economist is on record as foretelling that Russia would collapse into four rival states) who would at least LIKE to see the RF fall apart.

Leon, any thoughts on Israel’s recent reapproachment, if not growing trade partnership with Russia? Is it insurance against an Obama 2nd term? A confluence of interests over Iran and high oil prices that a strike on Iran would cause (I’ve actually seen the hardcore Russophobes already prep their talking points online on Iran being a victim of Putin’s plotting in case it does get hit, I kid you not)? Avigdor Lieberman being a Russian plant? Or just Israel wanting good relations with all of the BRICs?

I don’t buy that, but I do think there was some truth to Plan Kavkaz.

I think another way was possible, but lost due to the Tsar’s blundering into WWI. While I can say he was a ‘passion bearer’ I have some disagreements with the Russian Orthodox who consider Nicholas II a saint and think Holy Russia must eternally have a Tsar. Even Solzhenitysn criticized Russia’s earthly messiah complex, saying the Third Rome became the Third International rather seamlessly as one was merely a more wordly facisimile of the other.

This is linked to the sin the Orthodox have identified as ethnocentrism (they have a Greek derived fancier word for it) and was the particular excess of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, along with some clinging to a harsh judgement of their brothers who had to work with the Soviet system under severe duress and could not piously stand outside of it.

Yes, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was an early admirer of Hitler and vice versa — see the New York financiers behind the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Eugenics. Mussolini was a bit more sexy and his Fascist Futurist heyday was earlier than Hitler’s.

I say this not to suggest that I believe the USSR was a pure creation of the Illumanti/New World Order etc to have ‘the best enemy money could buy’ but rather a more nuanced historical view that some of America’s top capitalists did admire Soviet regimentation (Brave New World referred to this as ‘Fordism’ or the ‘Year of Our Ford’, the ‘Left-Right’ paradigm at least prior to the Soviet victory in WWII was partly fraudulent with plenty of ‘democrats’ admiring Mussolini, Hitler and the Soviets before their worst excesses were exposed, and with even Stalin killing off some of his own Comintern true believers during the 1930s if they got too comfortable just like his generals. (Was Stalin himself a former Cheka agent who switched sides? I think so…I’m ok with Anatoly trying to establish the historic truth about the Soviet Union under attack from all sides but I have no patience for trying to rehabilitate Stalin).

“The Russian priests, the landlords, the capitalists were executed and justly so. The Communist regime was going the right way until Lenin’s death and possibly another 4 years until Stalin has gotten grip on power and removed his opponents.” Wow, I had heard that such people (Lenin’s heart was in the right place but Stalin screwed it up) existed but had never seen one ‘in the wild’.

I think the missing component in this counterfactual comparison is THE FACT that Stalin’s industrialization drive was massively aided by American industry once full diplomatic relations were restored in the early 1930s (whether this was the influence of FDR trying to build a counterweight to the Nazis who appeared poised or just had seized power, I do not know, but the Rockefellers and Harrimans had their own dealings with the Third Reich). Bulgakov even referred to a near-mythical party at Spaso House cerca 1938 in Master and Margarita.

While some commenters here may dismiss this as bits and pieces from 1971’s “None Dare Call it a Conspiracy”, I refer them to Hoover Institution scholar Anthony Sutton who’s documented how much of the Soviet war machine even pre-Lend Lease owed to U.S. production lines imported lock stock and barrel. I don’t mean to shortchange Russian genius — in some sense they adopted this technology even faster than the Germans did as the Soviets were less likely to be burdened by racial or ideological predjudices (read: they were willing to use what Jewish scientists came up with). The off-road/broad tracked chassis of the T-34 was originally an American design, even if the sloping armor and gun were purely Soviet.

So….would a post-Tsarist but non-Bolshevik Russia, with the ability to command but not nearly to the extent that the Soviets could regiment workforces, have struck the fancy of the Fordians of Wall Street? I doubt it.

AK has had his interactions with other mentally unbalanced people, who use liberasty and Russophobia as masks for their inner rage at what is happening to the once vaunted freedoms of the West. Take for instance the groupies to Streetwise Professor aka Craig Pirrong. Dr. Pirrong once compared supporters of the Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul to the genocidal Khmer Rouge. If that isn’t unhinged I don’t know what is.

One of his ‘groupies’ in berating an Occupy person on Twitter also referred to the CFTC and FTA (since Pirrong is an academic who specializes in commodities and has testified at trials involving those bodies) as one of the regulators that financiers and speculators have to answer to. Of course those same agencies just found themselves unable to prevent a massive half billion dollar fraud by a Cedar Rapids, IA based commodities firm that had 9 figures of revenue and offices in Shanghai, China. And whose books were being ‘audited’ by a one-woman accountant officing out of her home in suburban Chicago. You cannot make this stuff up.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-07-12/business/sns-rt-us-broker-pfgbest-auditorbre86b02n-20120711_1_attempt-on-monday-morning-auditor-futures-broker

Anatoly may say I’m being off topic here but my point is there is a massive amount of cognitive dissonance, psychological rage and Russophiles are a natural target for it. People have to believe that they or their parents who fled Russia made the right choice and psychologically compensate for that sense somewhere deep inside of a lost Motherland (think @LibertyLynx). They have to not only be American patriots who can criticize their government now and then, but super patriots who insist the U.S. government despite the current administration is fundamentally benign and not predatory or corrupt and all evils, including jihadism, spring from the eternal Cold War with Russia that never ended.

So the more corrupt and fundamentally broken things appear to be here in the Land of the Free, the more they will literally gnash their teeth at the ‘Putinists’, Russia Today (aka shooting the messenger) and even ‘professional conspiracy theorists’ no one took seriously ten years ago like Alex Jones until the government made all sorts of spectacularly creepy pronouncements that made him look like a prophet, which are too numerous to list in a comments thread.

Yes. In fact I have even coined a term for this that extends beyond formally ‘neocon’ circles in D.C. I call it the Craig Pirrong Syndrome. Whereas the more corrupt or obviously lawless one’s own industry in the United States becomes (in this case, commodities fraud, first with MF Global and then with another firm within eight months). the more one must rage against Putinism with all of its corruption. It’s far easier than dealing with the mess here at home or putting Eric Holder in jail. See @LibertyLynx’s exchanges with the occupy kids where she boasts about all the supposed regulation the CFTC provides that protects the American people from Wall Street banksters. So how well have the Madoff, MF Global and the Peregrine Financial investors been protected, after the fact that their money is now gone?