UK Filters And The Slippery Slope Of Mass Censorship
By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | April 23, 2014
We’ve covered the ridiculousness of the UK’s “voluntary” web filters. UK officials have been pushing such things for years and finally pushed them through by focusing on stopping “pornography” (for the children, of course). While it quickly came out that the filters were blocking tons of legitimate content (as filters always do), the UK government quickly moved to talk about ways to expand what the filters covered.
The pattern is not hard to recognize, because it happens over and over again. Government officials find some absolute horror — the kind of thing that no one will stand up for — to push for some form of censorship. Few fight back because no one wants to be seen as standing up for something absolutely horrific online, or be seen as being against “family values.” But, then, once the filters are in place, it becomes so easy both to ignore the fact that the filters don’t work (and censor lots of legitimate content) and to constantly expand and expand and expand them. And people will have much less of a leg to stand on, because they didn’t fight back at the beginning.
That appears to be happening at an astonishingly fast pace in the UK. Index On Censorship has a fantastic article, discussing how a UK government official has already admitted to plans to expand the filter to “unsavoury” content rather than just “illegal.”
James Brokenshire was giving an interview to the Financial Times last month about his role in the government’s online counter-extremism programme. Ministers are trying to figure out how to block content that’s illegal in the UK but hosted overseas. For a while the interview stayed on course. There was “more work to do” negotiating with internet service providers (ISPs), he said. And then, quite suddenly, he let the cat out the bag. The internet firms would have to deal with “material that may not be illegal but certainly is unsavoury”, he said.
And there it was. The sneaking suspicion of free thinkers was confirmed. The government was no longer restricting itself to censoring web content which was illegal. It was going to start censoring content which it simply didn’t like.
It goes on, in fairly great detail, to describe just how quickly the UK is sliding away down that slippery slope of censorship. It highlights how these filters were kicked off as an “anti-porn” effort, where the details were left intentionally vague.
But David Cameron positioned himself differently, by starting up an anti-porn crusade. It was an extremely effective manouvre. ISPs now suddenly faced the prospect of being made to look like apologists for the sexualisation of childhood.
Or at least, that’s how it was sold. By the time Cameron had done a couple of breakfast shows, the precise subject of discussion was becoming difficult to establish. Was this about child abuse content? Or rape porn? Or ‘normal’ porn? It was increasingly hard to tell.
And, of course, the fact that the filters go too far, is never seen as a serious problem.
The filters went well beyond what Cameron had been talking about. Suddenly, sexual health sites had been blocked, as had domestic violence support sites, gay and lesbian sites, eating disorder sites, alcohol and smoking sites, ‘web forums’ and, most baffling of all, ‘esoteric material’. Childline, Refuge, Stonewall and the Samaritans were blocked, as was the site of Claire Perry, the Tory MP who led the call for the opt-in filtering. The software was unable to distinguish between her description of what children should be protected from and the things themselves.
At the same time, the filtering software was failing to get at the sites it was supposed to be targeting. Under-blocking was at somewhere between 5% and 35%.
Children who were supposed to be protected from pornography were now being denied advice about sexual health. People trying to escape abuse were prevented from accessing websites which could offer support.
And something else curious was happening too: A reactionary view of human sexuality was taking over. Websites which dealt with breast feeding or fine art were being blocked. The male eye was winning: impressing the sense that the only function for the naked female body was sexual.
But, of course, no one in the UK government seems to care. In fact, they’re looking to expand the program. Because it was never about actually stopping porn. It was always about having a tool for mass censorship.
The list was supposed to be a collection of child abuse sites, which were automatically blocked via a system called Cleanfeed. But soon, criminally obscene material was added to it – a famously difficult benchmark to demonstrate in law. Then, in 2011, the Motion Picture Association started court proceedings to add a site indexing downloads of copyrighted material.
There are no safeguards to stop the list being extended to include other types of sites.
This is not an ideal system. For a start, it involves blocking material which has not been found illegal in a court of law. The Crown Prosecution Service is tasked with saying whether a site reaches the criminal threshold. This is like coming to a ruling before the start of a trial. The CPS is not an arbiter of whether something is illegal. It is an arbiter, and not always a very good one, of whether there is a realistic chance of conviction.
As the IWF admits on its website, it is looking for potentially criminal activity – content can only be confirmed to be criminal by a court of law. This is the hinterland of legality, the grey area where momentum and secrecy count for more than a judge’s ruling.
There may have been court supervision in putting in place the blocking process itself but it is not present for individual cases. Record companies are requesting sites be taken down and it is happening. The sites are only being notified afterwards, are only able to make representations afterwards. The traditional course of justice has been turned on its head.
And it just keeps going on and on. As the report notes, “the possibilities for mission creep are extensive.” You don’t say. They also note that technologically clueless politicians love this because they can claim they’re solving a hard problem when they’re really doing no such thing (and really are just creating other problems at the same time):
MPs like filtering software because it seems like a simple solution to a complex problem. It is simple. So simple it does not exist.
Of course, if you recognize that the continued expansion of such filters was likely the plan from the beginning, then everything is going according to plan. The fact that it doesn’t solve any problems the public are dealing with is meaningless. It solves a problem that the politicians are dealing with: how to be able to say they’ve “done something” to “protect the children” while at the same time building up the tools and powers of the government to stifle any speech they don’t like. To those folks, the system is working perfectly.
Dana Nuccitelli’s lie of omission in the Guardian
By Anthony Watts | Watts Up With That? | April 22, 2014
In Bjørn Lomborg’s latest oped: Global Warming’s Upside-Down Narrative Lomborg points out the following:
- The IPCC says unmitigated climate change will cost 0.2-2% GDP/year in 2070.
- The IPCC says climate policies in 2070 will cost more than 3.4% and likely much more than that.
This is why climate mitigation makes no economic sense: the cure costs more than the disease.
But, wait, “Skeptical Science” tank driver Dana Nuccitelli has an op-ed today in the Guardian where he claims the IPCC uses only a select range of measures: the 0.2-2% is expressed in “annual global economic losses”, while the other is expressed “as a slightly slowed global consumption growth”.
He only achieves that by cutting out the actual quote from IPCC report, as you can see in the screen cap helpfully provided by Lomborg in his Twitter feed that compares texts. Note the ellipsis:
Source: [ https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/458628793825890305 ]
And that’s why we label the Dana Nuccitelli/John Cook “skeptical science” enterprise in our blogroll as a category all their own, “Unreliable”.
Nuccitelli eliminated the full text of that section of the third IPCC report so he could bolster his headline claim “preventing global warming is the cheap option”.
Imagine the screaming if any climate skeptic did something like that in an MSM venue.
Meanwhile Lomborg in his op-ed points out what is really worth worrying about, and it isn’t the beloved global warming “crisis” of the Skeptical Science Kids.
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-says-that-the-un-climate-panel-s-latest-report-tells-a-story-that-politicians-would-prefer-to-ignore#bd8cy6Bgh00L3roM.99
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-says-that-the-un-climate-panel-s-latest-report-tells-a-story-that-politicians-would-prefer-to-ignore#bd8cy6Bgh00L3roM.99
We live in a world where one in six deaths are caused by easily curable infectious diseases; one in eight deaths stem from air pollution, mostly from cooking indoors with dung and twigs; and billions of people live in abject poverty, with no electricity and little food. We ought never to have entertained the notion that the world’s greatest challenge could be to reduce temperature rises in our generation by a fraction of a degree.
Lomborg makes more humanistic sense than Nuccitelli, and he doesn’t have to make lies of omission to get his point across.
Prepping for a Ukrainian Massacre
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | April 22, 2014
Between the anti-Russian propaganda pouring forth from the Obama administration and the deeply biased coverage from the U.S. news media, the American people are being prepared to accept and perhaps even cheer a massacre of eastern Ukrainians who have risen up against the coup regime in Kiev.
The protesters who have seized government buildings in ten towns in eastern Ukraine are being casually dubbed “terrorists” by both the Kiev regime and some American journalists. Meanwhile, it’s become conventional wisdom in Official Washington to assume that the protesters are led by Russian special forces because of some dubious photographs of armed men, accepted as “proof” with few questions asked by the mainstream U.S. news media.
While the U.S. news media is treating these blurry photos as the slam-dunk evidence of direct Russian control of the eastern Ukrainian protests – despite denials by the Russian government and the protesters – the BBC was among the few news agencies that provided a more objective assessment, noting that the photos are open to a variety of interpretations.
However, in Official Washington, the stage is now set for what could be a massacre of Ukrainian civilians who have risen up against the putschists who seized control of Kiev in a Feb. 22 coup that overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych. The violent putsch was spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias, some of which have now been incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard and dispatched to the front lines in eastern Ukraine.
If the slaughter of the eastern Ukrainian protesters does come, you can expect Official Washington to be supportive. Whereas the Kiev protesters who seized government buildings in February were deemed “pro-democracy” activists even as they overthrew a democratically elected leader, the eastern Ukrainian protesters, who still consider Yanukovych their legitimate president, are dismissed as “terrorists.” And, we all know what happens to “terrorists.”
The Biased Media
If you doubt the bias of the U.S. press corps, consider this interview by the Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth with Arsen Avakov, the Ukrainian coup regime’s minister of internal affairs. As published in Tuesday’s Washington Post, the interview quoted Avakov as saying the protesters “will be punished severely” and included an exchange reflecting how thoroughly U.S. journalists have bought into the coup regime’s narrative:
Weymouth: Do you think the Russians will actually release the [government] buildings, as they said they would in last week’s Geneva meeting?
Avakov: Russia is taking advantage of the depressed condition of the local economy of these regions. … But even in spite of that situation, in the city of Kramatorsk [the Russians] did not have the level of support that they expected. We do not behave radically there for one reason.
Weymouth: When you say ‘radically,’ do you mean you don’t fight the terrorists?
Avakov: We are not acting radically in that region for two reasons. One is we do not want to hurt the peaceful population. And the second reason is we don’t want to turn the population against the central government. But that does not mean it will stay like this forever.
Weymouth: Then what happens?
Avakov: We will act.
Weymouth: What will you do?
Avakov: We will start liberating people from the terrorists. … We are going to take full control over the roads, irrespective of the resistance of some groups.
What was journalistically remarkable about this interview was that it was Weymouth who began describing the eastern Ukrainian protesters as “terrorists,” though these people who have seized government buildings have not engaged in what we would traditionally call “terrorism.” Their actions have been no more violent – and indeed much less violent – than the “pro-democracy” activists in Kiev. In February, the neo-Nazi militias killed more than a dozen police officers with firebombs and light weapons.
‘Pro-Democracy’ Putschists
And, when the “pro-democracy” protesters seized government buildings in Kiev, including the City Hall, they decked them out in Nazi symbols and a Confederate battle flag as the international expression of white supremacy. But the U.S. news media never described those acts as “terrorism.” [For more on the Ukrainian neo-Nazis, watch this report from the BBC.]
Indeed, it is now considered unacceptable to mention the key role played by the neo-Nazis in overthrowing Yanukovych, even though the neo-Nazis themselves are quite proud of what they did and got four government ministries as a reward. One of those positions is the chief of national security, Andriy Parubiy, who announced last week that some of those militias had been incorporated into the National Guard and sent to the front lines of eastern Ukraine.
For their part, those eastern protesters have said they are resisting the imposition of power from Kiev, which has included the appointment of billionaire “oligarchs” as regional administrators, and are rejecting a harsh austerity plan from the International Monetary Fund that will make their hard lives even harder.
Yet, Official Washington has largely banished those realities to the great memory hole. Many in the U.S. government and the mainstream press corps seem to be licking their lips over the prospect of unleashing hell on the eastern Ukrainians.
The preferred U.S. narrative has even edged into the conspiracy theory that Russian President Vladimir Putin somehow engineered the entire Ukraine crisis as part of a Hitler-like plot to reclaim Russian territory lost when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. This theory ignores the absurdity of Putin somehow arranging the protests and coup against Yanukovych.
The reality is that Putin was caught off-guard by the events in Ukraine, in part because he was distracted by the Sochi Olympics and the threat of terrorism against the games. As the Ukraine crisis deepened, Putin supported the Feb. 21 agreement, brokered by three European countries, that had Yanukovych agree to limit his powers, move up an election to vote him out of office and, most fatefully, pull back the police.
The police withdrawal opened the way for the neo-Nazi militias, well-organized in 100-man brigades and well-armed with weapons looted from government stockpiles, to launch the final Feb. 22 assault.
Instead of standing behind the Feb. 21 agreement, the United States and the European Union hailed the overthrow of Yanukovych and – after recognizing that the neo-Nazis were in effective control of Kiev – supported the quick formation of a new government, headed by U.S. favorite, the new Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
Rather than some mastermind planning everything in advance, Putin reacted to the fast-moving crisis on the fly, adlibbing his response, including responding to the majority will of Crimea to bail out of this failed Ukrainian state and rejoin Russia. He also got approval from the Russian legislature to defend ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine if necessary.
Yet, rather than assess these events objectively, the U.S. government and the mainstream U.S. news media have slid into a neo-Cold War madness, which may be sated only by the blood of the eastern Ukrainian “terrorists.” That, however, could force Putin’s hand again and take this unnecessary crisis to a whole new level.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Russia denies travel ban on Crimean Tatar ex-leader
RT | April 23, 2014
Russian authorities have denied reports that Ukrainian MP and former Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev had been slapped with a 5-year entrance ban to Crimea. Dzhemilev claims he was given a travel restriction order on the Russia-Ukraine border.
A spokesman for the Russian Federal Migration Service (FMS) told Ukrinform that the agency does not have any information on the travel ban imposed on the Ukranian MP from the Batkivshina Party and a former head of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, Mustafa Dzhemilev, to enter Russian territory.
“We do not have such information. Therefore, why do you think that we have banned him from entering the Russian Federation? I can send you the same document, you can also send it to me. I’ve seen it, and there is really nothing to comment on here.”
The FMS representative called the ‘document’ that Dzhemilev claims he was handed on Tuesday and posted on Mejlis website “just a piece of paper.”
“It’s just a piece of paper that someone wrote to someone without attaching an official seal or a signature,” said the spokesman, as cited by Ukrinform. “We do not comment on such papers.”
The Crimean parliament has also denied allegations of issuing such a ban on Dzhemilev, saying that his name is not included in the officially compiled travel restriction list which now has over 340 names.
“The State Council did not take any decisions restricting entry and exit of Mustafa Dzhemilev to the territory of Crimea,” the Deputy Chairman of the Crimean parliament Konstantin Baharev told Ria Novosti.
“Earlier, the Presidium of the Crimean parliament formed a list of more than 300 persona non grata from Ukrainian MPs who opposed the Crimean initiative to hold a referendum on self-determination.”
The apparently fake ‘Notification of non-permission of entry to the Russian Federation’ without any official insignia or seal was allegedly handed over to Dzhemilev early on Tuesday morning on the border of Russia and Ukraine when the MP was en route from Crimea to Kiev.
Unsigned and without letterhead, the paper said that “Mustafa Dzhemilev … citizen of Ukraine” was barred entry to Russia on the basis of federal law for five years or until April 19, 2019.
Dzhemilev was quick to spread the forged paper online commenting that the alleged ban serves to show “nothing more than an indicator of how ‘civilized’ is the state we’re dealing with,” referring to Russia, local media quoted him as saying.
But speaking to Ukraine’s Channel 5 TV, Dzhimilev acknowledged the lack of signature and said he was not certain that the document came from the Russian government, because the man who handed over the alleged ban did not identify himself. He said he intends to continue his travels to Crimea.
Premature accusations of Russia being behind the ban is “cheap anti-Russian populism and nothing more,” member of the Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights, Vladimir Shaposhnikov told Ria, adding the MP should first get acquainted with the document he received, double check the laws, and then make accusations.
“Now I can only see much ado about nothing. Before raising the cry Mr. Dzhimilev is should have first of all checked the law ‘On the Procedure for Exit from the Russian Federation and Entry into the Russian Federation’ and read the article on the basis of which he was allegedly denied entry,” said Shaposhnikov.
But Washington was quick to support Dzhimilev’s statements that he has made after his return from Crimea, in particular accusations the Russian Security Service is keeping a close watch on the Tatar poulation of Crimea.
“Today, Crimean Tatar community leader, Mustafa Dzhemilev, who has been in Washington a couple weeks ago and had meetings here in this building, gave some alarming remarks. And he said that – warned today that possible bloodshed in Crimea and southern Ukraine is coming up, and he also stated that some of the FSB officers from Moscow who hope to promote new deportation of the Tatars,” State Department’s spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporter on Tuesday.
On Monday president Vladimir Putin signed a decree ruling Stalin’s 1940s deportation of Crimean Tatars and other ethnic minorities on the peninsula was illegal.
“We must make sure that as part of Crimea’s integration into Russia, Crimean Tatars are rehabilitated and their historic rights restored,” the Russian leader said during an official meeting in Moscow. The decree also allowed Tatar education in their native language.
This is not the first time over the last few weeks the US has backed its rhetorical comments for the Western media with questionable documents presented as hard evidence. … Full article
Delusions Climactic & Otherwise @ the New York Times
By Donna LaFramboise | April 22, 2014
The New York Times publishes pablum about the IPCC.
The international edition of today’s New York Times is entertaining if you examine pages eight and nine together.
On the right (page nine), there’s an ad for the newspaper, in which it claims to be “the world’s finest journalism” and urges people to purchase a digital subscription that will “ensure” access to “trusted global news coverage and insight.” On the left (page eight) the Times runs a single editorial. Editorials are the official voice of any newspaper.
The sub-headline that accompanies today’s editorial refers to the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
In an ominous report, the world’s top scientists say a global energy revolution must begin within 15 years [bold added]
Three paragraphs down, we read that:
The I.P.C.C. is composed of thousands of the world’s leading climate scientists… [bold added]
Yes, a newspaper that thinks it’s producing the world’s finest journalism still hasn’t noticed that
- The IPCC provides no proof whatsoever that it is composed of the world’s top scientists. In fact, it declines to make public the CVs of its personnel.
- Certain IPCC lead authors and chapter leaders have historically been graduate students a decade or more away from earning their PhD (see here and here)
- Other IPCC lead authors are poorly qualified individuals from obscure nations, who were selected to give the report an international flavour.
- 60% of the people who helped produce this latest report have never worked with the IPCC before (see the bottom of p. 3 of this PDF). Was there really a 60% turnover rate in the world’s top scientists since the last IPCC report appeared in 2007?
- IPCC personnel have so little power, they aren’t able to alter their chapter title by a single word. In reality, these people are mere cogs in a large, bureaucratic, UN machine.
- Many IPCC personnel are not “scientists” in the way that term is normally understood. They are, instead, economists, geographers, policy wonks, UN employees, and activists.
The New York Times is demonstrably not offering what it claims to be offering: trustworthy news and insight.
Whoever wrote and approved today’s editorial is years out-of-date. There’s no meaty analysis here, just mindless parroting of the IPCC party line.
Times readers deserve better than this.
WHY CONSTITUTIONAL TALKS IN THE UKRAINE SHOULD START NOW
Da Russophile | April 22, 2014
The US, Kiev, their EU allies and their media echo chamber are up to their invariable game of rewriting last week’s Geneva Statement to mean not what it says but what they want it to say.
To repeat the Geneva Statement contains NO time line (see my previous post where I discussed what the Geneva Statement actually says). It does NOT require buildings and public places in the east to be evacuated before buildings and public places in the west. It does not require people in the east to disarm before people disarm in the west. Above all it does NOT require the vacation of buildings and public places in the east and the disarmament of the people there before the start of negotiations on constitutional change or make the vacation of buildings and public places in the east or the disarmament of the people there a pre condition for the start of the negotiations on constitutional change.
I make this point because that is how Kiev and its present supporters are currently trying to misrepresent the Geneva Statement. Needless to say if the buildings and public spaces in the east were vacated and the people there disarmed the pressure there currently is to start serious negotiations on constitutional change would abate with the strong probability that negotiations would then never take place at all. In reality there is nothing in the Geneva Statement that says that negotiations cannot start right away whilst the buildings and public places in the east remain occupied and the people there remain armed with the buildings and public places in the east (and the west) and the people in the east (and the west) disarming as part of an overall settlement achieved as a result of the negotiations. Given the history of broken agreements on the part of Kiev and its western sponsors (eg. the 21st February 2014 agreement) the continuing mobilisation of the people of the east whilst the negotiations are underway and until an agreement is reached and secured would seem to be a basic precaution.
I would remind everybody that the people who currently form the regime consistently refused to vacate Maidan whilst they were negotiating with Yanukovitch and he (wrongly in my opinion) never insisted that they do so.
I make this point because so far there is no sign from Kiev of any attempt to begin negotiations at all. We have not even had the announcement of a negotiating team or discussions about the venue for talks. Instead Kiev and the US administration are hiding behind the continuing occupation of the buildings and public spaces in the east and the presence of armed men there as a pretext for not starting talks. It needs to be said clearly and unequivocally that this is a false pretext and that there is no reason or excuse to delay the start of talks on constitutional change which is the overriding priority at the moment if this crisis is to be brought to a peaceful and satisfactory end.
Another NYT-Michael Gordon Special?
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | April 21, 2014
There is now a pattern to New York Times “investigative” stories that seek to pin the blame on some nefarious foreign enemy, as in the 2002 article on Iraq buying aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges; the 2013 “vector analysis” tracing sarin-laden rockets to a Syrian military base; and now a photographic analysis proving that Russian soldiers are behind unrest in eastern Ukraine.
All these stories draw hard conclusions from very murky evidence while ignoring or brushing aside alternative explanations. They also pile up supportive acclamations for their conclusions from self-interested sources while treating any doubters as rubes. And, these three articles all involved reporter Michael R. Gordon.
The infamous aluminum tube story of Sept. 8, 2002, which Gordon co-wrote with Judith Miller, relied on U.S. intelligence sources and Iraqi defectors to frighten Americans with images of “mushroom clouds” if they didn’t support President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The timing played perfectly into the administration’s advertising “rollout” for the Iraq War.
Of course, the story turned out to be false and to have unfairly downplayed skeptics of the nuclear-centrifuge scenario. The aluminum tubes actually were meant for artillery, not for centrifuges. But the article provided a great impetus toward the Iraq War, which ended up killing nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Gordon’s co-author, Judith Miller, became the only U.S. journalist known to have lost a job over the reckless and shoddy reporting that contributed to the Iraq disaster. For his part, Gordon continued serving as a respected Pentagon correspondent.
Gordon’s name also showed up in a supporting role on the Times’ botched “vector analysis” of Sept. 17, 2013, which nearly helped get the United States into another Mideast war, with Syria. That story traced the flight paths of two rockets, recovered in suburbs of Damascus after the Aug. 21 sarin gas attack, back to a Syrian military base 9.5 kilometers away.
The article became the “slam-dunk” evidence that the Syrian government was lying when it denied launching the sarin attack that killed several hundred people.
However, like the aluminum tube story, the Times’ ”vector analysis” also ignored contrary evidence, such as the unreliability of one azimuth from a rocket that landed in Moadamiya because it had struck a building in its descent. That rocket also was found to contain no sarin, so it’s inclusion in the vectoring of two sarin-laden rockets made no sense.
But the Times’ story ultimately fell apart when rocket scientists analyzed the one sarin-laden rocket that had landed in the Zamalka area and determined that it had a maximum range of about two kilometers, meaning that it could not have originated from the Syrian military base.
C.J. Chivers, one of the co-authors of the article, waited until Dec. 28 to publish a halfhearted semi-retraction. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Backs Off Its Syria-Sarin Analysis.”]
Grainy Photos
Now, the New York Times has led its Monday editions with an article supposedly proving that Russian military special forces are secretly directing the popular uprisings in eastern Ukraine in resistance to the Kiev regime, which took power after the violent overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22.
The Times based its story on grainy photographs provided by the Kiev regime supposedly showing the same armed “green men” involved in actions with the Russian military earlier and now with the pro-Russian protesters who have seized government buildings in towns in eastern Ukraine.
From the New York Times graphic package of photos in support of its article accusing Russia of sending special forces soldiers into eastern Ukraine
The Times reported:
“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.”
The Times apparently accepts the photos as legitimate in terms of where and when they were taken, but that requires first trusting the source, the post-coup regime in Kiev which has a strong motive for making this argument as a prelude to violently crushing the eastern Ukrainian protests.
Secondly, one has to believe that the fuzzy photographs of the circled faces are the same individuals. They may be, but it is difficult to be sure from what is displayed. The principal figure shown is a man with a long beard and a cap sometimes pulled down over his forehead. He could be a Russian special forces soldier or a character from “Duck Dynasty.”
And the resemblance of some uniforms to those worn by Russian soldiers is also circumstantial, since military gear often looks similar or it could have been sold to civilians, or the men could be veterans who kept their old uniforms after leaving the military. The fact that these men are adept at handling weapons also could mean that they have prior military experience, not that they are still active.
For the Times to cite the Obama administration’s endorsement of the Kiev regime’s claims as some kind of verification is also silly. Anyone who has followed the Ukraine crisis knows that the U.S. government is wholeheartedly on the side of the post-coup regime, trumpeting its propaganda and dismissing any counterclaims from the Yanukovych camp or from Moscow.
Masked Men
There’s other silliness in the Times article, such as the notion that the Russians are unusual in “masking” their special forces when U.S. military and intelligence services have been doing the same for decades. In contradicting Russian denials that the Kremlin has dispatched undercover soldiers, the Times wrote:
“But masking the identity of its forces, and clouding the possibilities for international denunciation, is a central part of the Russian strategy, developed over years of conflict in the former Soviet sphere, Ukrainian and American officials say.”
Is it possible that the Times’ reporters, including Pentagon correspondent Gordon, don’t know that U.S. Special Forces and CIA officers routinely grow beards and wear local garb to blend in when they are operating in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Central America, etc.?
When I was covering Central America policy in the 1980s, I knew American mercenaries, including former U.S. Special Forces soldiers, who provided training and other assistance to the region’s security forces. Sometimes, these veterans coordinated their actions with the U.S. government and sometimes they were simply making money.
More recently, there have been the various permutations of Blackwater, a private security firm that employs former U.S. military personnel and makes them available to governments around the world, sometimes in support of American interests but sometimes not.
All these are factors that should be considered when making claims about whether military men who show up in Kiev or eastern Ukraine or anywhere else are on assignment for a specific government or are working for a local “oligarch” or are simply inspired by nationalism. But these nuances are missing from the Times story as it jumps to its preferred conclusion.
Plus, you have to wonder how skillful the Russians really are at “masking” if they have their special forces troops wear uniforms that can be so easily traced back to Russia.
That is not to say that these “green men” might not be Russian special forces. I have one longtime source who is convinced that they are Russian soldiers (though he has not seen any proof), and another source who insists that the Russian government did not want the uprisings in eastern Ukraine and did not dispatch these men.
But the Times should have learned from its previous blunders and taken care to include alternative scenarios or point to evidentiary holes in what the Kiev regime claimed. Instead, the Times has again acted like a prosecutor determined to make a case, not a fair-minded judge weighing the evidence.
It is also an indictment of the Times’ professionalism that this newspaper of record can’t seem to detect neo-Nazis in the post-coup regime, when some have open histories of pro-Nazi behavior, while it goes to dubious lengths to discredit the eastern Ukrainians who are resisting the imposition of authority from an unelected administration in Kiev.
Just like the “aluminum tube” story that justified killing so many Iraqis and the “vector analysis” that almost unleashed a devastating U.S. bombing campaign on Syria, the Times’ “green men” piece may be the prelude to a bloodbath in eastern Ukraine. [For more on the U.S. propaganda, see “Ukraine. Through the US ‘Looking Glass.’”]
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Profit from Crisis
Why capitalists do not want recovery, and what that means for America
By Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler | Frontline | April 16, 2014
Can it be true that capitalists prefer crisis over growth? On the face of it, the idea sounds silly. According to Economics 101, everyone loves growth, especially capitalists. Profit and growth go hand in hand. When capitalists profit, real investment rises and the economy thrives, and when the economy booms the profits of capitalists soar. Growth is the very lifeline of capitalists.
Or is it?
What motivates capitalists?
The answer depends on what motivates capitalists. Conventional economic theories tell us that capitalists are hedonic creatures. Like all other economic “agents” – from busy managers and hectic workers to active criminals and idle welfare recipients – their ultimate goal is maximum utility. In order for them to achieve this goal, they need to maximize their profit and interest; and this income – like any other income – depends on economic growth. Conclusion: utility-seeking capitalists have every reason to love booms and hate crises.
But, then, are capitalists really motivated by utility? Is it realistic to believe that large American corporations are guided by the hedonic pleasure of their owners – or do we need a different starting point altogether?
So try this: in our day and age, the key goal of leading capitalists and corporations is not absolute utility but relative power. Their real purpose is not to maximize hedonic pleasure, but to “beat the average.” Their ultimate aim is not to consume more goods and services (although that happens too), but to increase their power over others. And the key measure of this power is their distributive share of income and assets.
Note that capitalists have no choice in this matter. “Beating the average” is not a subjective preference but a rigid rule, dictated and enforced by the conflictual nature of the system. Capitalism pits capitalists against other groups in society – as well as against each other. And in this multifaceted struggle for greater power, the yardstick is always relative. Capitalists – and the corporations they operate through – are compelled and conditioned to accumulate differentially; to augment not their personal utility but their relative earnings. Whether they are private owners like Warren Buffet or institutional investors like Bill Gross, they all seek not to perform but to out-perform – and outperformance means re-distribution. Capitalists who beat the average redistribute income and assets in their favor; this redistribution raises their share of the total; and a larger share of the total means greater power stacked against others. In the final analysis, capitalists accumulate not hedonic pleasure but differential power.
Now, if you look at capitalists through the lens of relative power, the notion that they should love growth and yearn for recovery is no longer self-evident. In fact, the very opposite seems to be the case. For any group to increase its relative power in society, that group must be able to strategically sabotage others in that society. This rule derives from the very logic of power relations. It means that capitalists, seeking to augment their income-share-read-power, have to threaten or undermine the rest of society. And one of the key weapons they use in this power struggle –sometimes consciously, though usually by default – is unemployment.
Joblessness affects redistribution
Unemployment affects distribution mainly through the impact it has on relative prices and wages. If higher unemployment causes the ratio of price to unit wage cost to decline, capitalists will fall behind in the redistributional struggle, and this retreat is sure to make them eager for recovery. But if the opposite turns out to be the case – that is, if higher unemployment helps raise the price/wage cost ratio – capitalists would have good reason to love crisis and indulge in stagnation.
In principle, both scenarios are possible. But as Figure 1 shows, in America the second prevails: unemployment redistributes income systematically in favor of capitalists. The chart contrasts the share of pretax profit and net interest in domestic income on the one hand with the rate of unemployment on the other (both series are smoothed as 5-year moving averages). Note that the unemployment rate is lagged three years, meaning that every observation shows the situation prevailing three years earlier.
This chart does not sit well with received wisdom. Mainstream economics tells us that the two series should be inversely correlated; that the capitalist income share should rise in the boom when unemployment falls and decline in the bust when unemployment rises. But that is not the case in the United States. In this country, the correlation is positive, not negative. The share of capitalists moves counter-cyclically: it rises in downturns and falls in booms – exactly the opposite of what economic convention would have us believe. The math is straightforward: for every 1% rise in unemployment, capitalists can expect their income share three years later to jump by 0.8%. Needless to say, this equation is very bad news for most Americans – precisely because it is such good news for the country’s capitalists.
Remarkably, the positive correlation shown in Figure 1 holds not only over the short-term business cycle, but also in the long term. During the booming 1940s, when unemployment was very low, capitalists appropriated a relatively small share of domestic income. But as the boom fizzled, growth decelerated and stagnation started to creep in, the share of capital began to trend upward. The peak power of capital, measured by its overall income share, was recorded in the early 1990s, when unemployment was at post-war highs. The neoliberal globalization that followed brought lower unemployment and a smaller capital share, but not for long. In the late 2000s, the trend reversed again, with unemployment soaring and the distributive share of capital rising in tandem. Looking forward, capitalists have reason to remain crisis-happy: with the rate of unemployment again approaching post-war highs, their income share has more room to rise in the years ahead.
The power of capitalists can also be examined from the viewpoint of the infamous Top 1%. Most commentators stress the “social” and “political” problems created by the disproportional wealth of this group, but this emphasis puts the world on its head. Redistribution is not an unfortunate side-effect of growth and stagnation, but the main force driving them.
Figure 2 shows the century-long relationship between the income share of the Top 1% and the annual growth rate of U.S. employment (with both series smoothed as 10-year moving averages). And as the chart makes clear, the distributional gains of this group have been boosted not by growth, but by stagnation. The overall relationship is clearly negative. When stagnation sets in and employment growth decelerates, the income share of the Top 1% actually rises – and vice versa during a long-term boom.
Historically, this negative relationship can be divided into three distinct periods, indicated by the dashed, freely drawn line going through the employment growth series. The first period, from the turn of the twentieth century till the 1930s, is the so-called Gilded Age. Income inequality is rising and employment growth is plummeting.
The second period, from the Great Depression till the early 1980s, is marked by the Keynesian welfare-warfare state. Higher taxation and public spending make distribution more equal, while employment growth accelerates. Note the massive acceleration of employment growth during the Second World War and its subsequent deceleration brought by post-war demobilization. Obviously these dramatic movements were unrelated to income inequality, but they did not alter the series’ overall upward trend.
The third period, from the early 1980s to the present, is marked by neoliberalism. In this period, monetarism assumes the commanding heights, inequality soars and employment growth plummets. The current rate of employment growth hovers around zero while the Top 1% appropriates 20 per cent of all income – similar to the numbers recorded during Great Depression.
So what do these facts mean for America?
First, they make the fault-lines obvious. The old slogan “what’s good for GM is good for America” now rings hollow. Capitalists seek not utility through consumption but more power through redistribution. And they achieve their goal not by raising investment and fueling growth, but by allowing unemployment to rise and jobs to become scarce. Clearly, we are not “all in the same boat.” There is a distributional struggle for power, and this struggle is not a mere “sociological” issue. It is the center of our political economy, and we need a new theoretical framework to understand it.
Second, macroeconomic policy, whether old or new, cannot offset the aggregate consequences of this distributional struggle. Not by a long shot. Till the late 1970s, the budget deficit was small, yet America boomed. And why? Because progressive taxation, transfer payments and social programs made the distribution of income less unequal. By the early 1980s, this relationship inverted. Although the budget deficit ballooned and interest rates fell, economic growth decelerated. New methods of upward redistribution have caused the share of the Top 1% to zoom, making stagnation the new norm.
Third, and finally, Washington can no longer hide behind the bush. On the one hand, the concentration of America’s income and assets, having been boosted by large post-crisis bailouts and massive quantitative easing, is now at record levels. On the other hand, long-term unemployment remains at post-war highs while job growth is at a standstill. Eventually, this situation will be reversed. The only question is whether it will be reversed through a new policy trajectory or through the calamity of systemic crisis.
Jonathan Nitzan teaches political economy at York University in Canada. Shimshon Bichler teaches political economy at colleges and universities in Israel. All of their publications are available for free on The Bichler & Nitzan Archives.
Iran slams US court ruling to expropriate NY tower
Press TV – April 19, 2014
Tehran has slammed as illegal a US court ruling to confiscate the assets of Alavi Foundation in Manhattan, saying the move runs counter to the principle of religious freedom for American citizens.
“The recent ruling regarding the forfeiture of the assets belonging to the foundation is, to all appearances, in contradiction to realities, void of legal validity and even in breach of US commitments to guarantee religious freedom for its citizens,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham said in a Friday statement.
“Contrary to the prosecutors’ baseless allegations and the court’s politically-motivated ruling which was a propaganda fuss, the Alavi Foundation is an independent charity institution in the US which has no links with Iran,” she added.
Afkham noted that Iran has been a victim of terrorism itself, dismissing as ridiculous the US court’s claim that Tehran was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
She argued that the US court verdict brings the credibility of the US judicial system into question.
On Thursday, Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara said that federal judge Katherine Forrest approved a deal between the US government and 19 anti-Iran plaintiffs to sell Alavi Foundation’s 36-story Manhattan skyscraper on Fifth Avenue and other properties owned by Iran, following a 2008 lawsuit by the government against the building’s owners.
Under the deal, the US Marshals Service will sell the 36-story building and other so-called Iran-linked property in California, Maryland, Texas, Virginia and the Queens borough of New York. US authorities will also receive the contents of bank accounts of the entities which allegedly served as Iran fronts in the past.
The US government will receive reimbursement for litigation expenses and any costs of the sales and the remainder will be distributed among what the court has called terror-attack victims, including those of the 9/11 attacks and their survivors.
In September 2013, the judge had ruled in favor of the government’s suit, claiming the building’s owners had violated Iran sanctions and money laundering laws.
Prosecutors allege the building’s owners, the Alavi Foundation — a non-profit organization promoting the Islamic culture and Persian language — and Assa Corporation, transferred rental income and other funds to Iran.
Holdren Is Wrong – Cold Winters Are Not Getting More Common
By Paul Homewood | Watts Up With That? | April 18, 2014
As WUWT points out, John Holdren is one of many who have tried to link the cold winter in the USA this year to global warming.
In his White House video in January, he had this to say:
“A growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues….
We also know that this week’s cold spell is of a type there’s reason to believe may become more frequent in a world that’s getting warmer, on average, because of greenhouse-gas pollution.”
But is there any evidence that extreme cold winters are becoming more common, or, for that matter, more extreme?
First, let’s check the temperature trends for the CONUS in winter.
Clearly, on a national basis, recent winters have not been unusually cold. In the last 10 years, only three winters have been colder than the 1901-2000 mean. Moreover, no winters in recent years have come anywhere near to being as cold as some of the winters in the 1970’s, for instance, or earlier.
But this graph only tells half the story. As it covers the whole country, it could cover up regional extremes. As we know, this winter has seen particularly cold weather in Mid West and East, but warmer conditions out West. The result is that, to some extent, they cancel each other out.
So, is there a way we can isolate the warm from the cold, and see whether cold winters are becoming more extreme in just parts of the country?
There is actually a very simple method, and that is to use NOAA’s own Climate Extremes Index. This provides the percentage of the country which have had extreme temperatures (or precipitation, drought etc) during the year. As both above average and below average temperatures are shown separately, we can look at extreme cold weather on its own.
The graphs below cover the Winter months (Dec to Feb) only, with the first using mean monthly maximum temperatures, and the second minimums. The results seem pretty similar.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei/graph/1/12-02
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei/graph/2/12-02
It is abundantly clear that much less of the country has been affected by extreme cold this winter, and indeed other recent ones, when compared with the 20thC. There is also no trend towards cold winters becoming more common.
What is also interesting is that there does not seem to be much of a trend towards milder winters taking over. Only the winter of 2011/12 stands out in this respect, and there have been plenty of similar years previously.
There has been nothing unusual or unprecedented about this winter. And, as cold winters have become less frequent in the last couple of decades, there is absolutely no evidence to support Holdren’s claim that “this week’s cold spell is of a type there’s reason to believe may become more frequent in a world that’s getting warmer”.
Technical Stuff
NOAA give this definition for the (maximum temperature) index:
The U.S. CEI is the arithmetic average of the following five or six# indicators of the percentage of the conterminous U.S. area:
- The sum of (a) percentage of the United States with maximum temperatures much below normal and (b) percentage of the United States with maximum temperatures much above normal.
And their definition for “much above normal”:
In each case, we define much above (below) normal or extreme conditions as those falling in the upper (lower) tenth percentile of the local, period of record. In any given year, each of the five indicators has an expected value of 20%, in that 10% of all observed values should fall, in the long-term average, in each tenth percentile, and there are two such sets in each indicator
The Climate Extremes Index can be accessed at the link below. It covers temperatures, drought, rainfall and hurricanes, and can used on a seasonal or annual basis. There is also a regional section.
‘Letter to Jews’, Kerry cited, appears to be fake
RT | April 18, 2014
A letter urging the Jews of Donetsk to get registered, which the US Secretary of State cited in Geneva, is a fake says a man whose signature appears on the communication.
Following the four-side meeting on the Ukrainian crisis in Geneva on Wednesday, John Kerry lashed out at a letter that was allegedly sent to Jewish citizens in Ukraine’s eastern town of Donetsk, asking them to register and report all their property, or be stripped of citizenship and face expulsion.
“In year 2014, after all of the miles traveled in all the journey of history, this is not just intolerable, it’s grotesque… beyond unacceptable,” he stated.
Images of the letter have been circulating online.
The letter was stamped and signed by Denis Pushilin, who was identified on it as the “People’s Governor.”
However, Pushilin denied he had anything to do with the letter, claiming it was a fake.
“There are similar letters not only addressed to Jews, but also to businessmen, foreign students, people of certain other occupations,” he told RT. “This is actually a fake, and not a good one. There’s a sign “People’s Governor”. First of all, no one calls me by that title, no one elected me. Secondly, the stamp is the former mayor’s. Everything’s photoshopped.”
Although the letter’s authenticity is questionable, the fact that it was mentioned by a top US official has quickly sent the “Letter to Jews” story viral. It struck a very sensitive chord with audiences worldwide and cast a grave shadow over anti-government protesters in Donetsk.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian MP who has visited the turbulent region, Boris Kolesnikov of the Party of Regions, has urged that information coming from Ukraine should be double-checked.
He believes that Ukrainian law enforcement agencies aren’t being totally honest when they describe the people participating in the protests and claim there are Russian servicemen among them.
Kolesnikov specifically referred to a video which earlier appeared online. In it a man in a military uniform told police officers, who switched sides in the city of Gorlovka and joined protesters, that he was Russian lieutenant-colonel from Simpheropol, Crimea. The man was later identified by Gorlovka residents as the former director of a local cemetery.
“Officially, I’ve only seen one Russian serviceman,” Kolesnikov said. “The next day he appeared to be the ex-director of the Gorlovka cemetery, fired 2 years ago for selling 38 fences, stealing a monument and extorting money from old women for new graves. There are Interior Ministry and intelligence services in the country, which should give us truthful information.”
He added it was quite obvious that the protesters in Donetsk did not represent any danger to civilians and called for negotiations with the activists. These talks would explain Kiev’s position and that the government is ready to make amendments to the constitution.
The US appears to be relying on information from Kiev, while ignoring alternative points of view. And so it seems that a top US official picked up and railed about a letter of questionable authenticity.
Earlier in April, spokesperson for the US Department of State, Jen Psaki, said that protest events in eastern Ukraine “appeared to be a carefully orchestrated campaign with Russian support.”
She was then asked if the department was only relying on Kiev in its assessment of the situation, or was using some independent sources.
“Well, of course we remain very closely in touch with the Ukrainian Government, and that’s who we work closely with, and of course, they are on the ground, so their information is often very relevant and current,” was the reply.
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The silver that medicine dropped — four thousand years of clinical use, four decades to erase.
Colloidal Silver — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
Lies are Unbekoming | October 16, 2026
Silver was medicine. Not alternative medicine. Not folk medicine. Medicine. In surgery. In obstetrics. In the burn ward. In water treatment. In the household medicine chest. Every physician before 1938 knew this.
By the 1870s, silver nitrate was standard in surgical wound care across the leading hospitals of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Colloidal silver preparations — Collargol, Argyrol, Protargol — entered European and American practice through the 1890s and early 1900s and became standard antiseptics in military field medicine. By the time Fleming grew his first penicillin mould in 1928, silver was the first-line antimicrobial of the Western pharmacopoeia. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal carried the clinical reports in volume. The practice ran continuously through the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the First World War, the interwar period. By 1980, almost all of it was gone.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a four-thousand-year clinical record disappeared from mainstream medicine within four decades of the Flexner Report — and what the honest account of silver looks like once that record is reassembled.
Colloidal Silver reconstructs the pre-1938 record from The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the primary literature of the era; recovers Robert Becker’s bioelectric framework from the regeneration research the pharmaceutical model buried; and places silver inside a practical terrain-paradigm guide to its current place — in water, on the body, inside the body, and in the chronic conditions where antibiotics have failed. … continue
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