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Exotica's Journal
May 5, 2018
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/clay-johnson-attempted-rape-dean-campaign_us_5aebb6d7e4b0c4f1932090ac
On April 28, 2008, Sarah Schacht received an email that terrified her. The Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency group, had invited Schacht, the head of a budding good-government nonprofit, to join a conference call. There on the invitation list was Clay Johnson — a man she says once tried to rape her. Reeling, Schacht called a friend at Sunlight, who told her the foundation had just hired Johnson. Within an hour, she said, she was on the phone with Sunlight’s executive director, Ellen Miller.
Schacht said Miller received her story with a stern voice and a battery of excuses: “Well, I’m sure there was some confusion, it was so long ago, he was so young at the time, and now he’s in this great relationship,” Schacht recalls Miller saying. In her disbelief, Schacht blurted out that she wasn’t Johnson’s only victim, but that didn’t seem to faze Miller either. “I left the phone call shaking,” Schacht said.
Although Miller insists no such call ever happened, the conversation Schacht remembers must have been repeated many times. For more than a decade, women have accused Johnson, a leader in the world of political technology, of physical and verbal abuse. They’ve complained to some of the most powerful people in Washington’s nonprofit and progressive circles — only to watch, horrified, as Johnson became a powerful figure, too.
During Johnson’s first job in politics, on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, Schacht and a fellow campaign worker separately accused Johnson of sexual assault. Word of both women’s complaints reached several of Dean’s top deputies. But Johnson kept his job, and his work on the campaign became his ticket to a high-profile career.
snip
He Was Accused Of Attempted Rape. He Became A Progressive Star Anyway.
For more than a decade, women alleged that Clay Johnson, a leader in political tech, physically and verbally abused them.https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/clay-johnson-attempted-rape-dean-campaign_us_5aebb6d7e4b0c4f1932090ac
On April 28, 2008, Sarah Schacht received an email that terrified her. The Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency group, had invited Schacht, the head of a budding good-government nonprofit, to join a conference call. There on the invitation list was Clay Johnson — a man she says once tried to rape her. Reeling, Schacht called a friend at Sunlight, who told her the foundation had just hired Johnson. Within an hour, she said, she was on the phone with Sunlight’s executive director, Ellen Miller.
Schacht said Miller received her story with a stern voice and a battery of excuses: “Well, I’m sure there was some confusion, it was so long ago, he was so young at the time, and now he’s in this great relationship,” Schacht recalls Miller saying. In her disbelief, Schacht blurted out that she wasn’t Johnson’s only victim, but that didn’t seem to faze Miller either. “I left the phone call shaking,” Schacht said.
Although Miller insists no such call ever happened, the conversation Schacht remembers must have been repeated many times. For more than a decade, women have accused Johnson, a leader in the world of political technology, of physical and verbal abuse. They’ve complained to some of the most powerful people in Washington’s nonprofit and progressive circles — only to watch, horrified, as Johnson became a powerful figure, too.
During Johnson’s first job in politics, on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, Schacht and a fellow campaign worker separately accused Johnson of sexual assault. Word of both women’s complaints reached several of Dean’s top deputies. But Johnson kept his job, and his work on the campaign became his ticket to a high-profile career.
snip
May 2, 2018
"The Scarlet Letter Reports" is a new series hosted by Amanda Knox that explores the gendered nature of public shaming. The series premieres this Wednesday on Facebook Watch.
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/paxn8z/amanda-knox-scarlet-letter-trailer
I walked onto the set to shoot the first episode of The Scarlet Letter Reports ten years ago to the day I was arrested and redefined around the world as “Foxy Knoxy.” You’ve probably heard of her: the two-faced slut who murdered her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in a fit of drug- and/or jealousy-fueled rage during a sex game gone wrong. That invented monster was convicted, but it was me—the real me—who spent four years in prison and eight years on trial in Italian court making the case for my innocence. Even in freedom, Foxy Knoxy precedes me into the world—everyone I’ve met in the last decade has already met and judged her.
As a white woman, I am rare among wrongfully convicted people, the vast majority of whom are black men. And most exonerees tend to have a very different relationship with the media. I was hounded and harassed before, during, and after my release, whereas most exonerees face being forgotten or ignored by society. These individuals have all borne the burden of our criminal justice system’s failures, and by extension, our society’s shortcomings: our racism, classism, and impulse to scapegoat, vilify, and punish. Foxy Knoxy was the product of some of these shortcomings, but filtered through society’s long history of villainizing women and particularly our sexuality.
In The Scarlet Letter Reports, a new series launching this week on Broadly, I explore the gendered nature of public shaming through interviews with women who have been objectified and villainized by the media, including: Anita Sarkeesian, Amber Rose, Daisy Coleman, Brett Rossi, and Mischa Barton. Though our backgrounds and stories are different, we were all attacked as women. And, in trying to live our lives or come forward with the truth, we faced vicious campaigns against our characters—our identities distorted and crammed into prepackaged tropes, ready-made to be discounted, condemned, and rejected: the slut, the psycho, the trainwreck, the liar, the man-eater.
In the midst of shooting this series, #MeToo exploded; we saw survivors begin to hold powerful men accountable for their actions on a massive scale, and this reinforced for me the notion that my story was not just loosely connected to those of the women I was interviewing, but a direct result of the same societal forces that allowed these other women’s traumas to occur. For example, Daisy Coleman was 14 when she attempted to bring sexual assault charges against 17-year-old Matthew Barnett. At the time, Barnett wouldn't face a trial, but Daisy did. Tried by her community, Daisy was not only viciously slut-shamed and vilified, she was also denied the same protections as defendants in the courtroom—the presumption of innocence—and punished with a guilty verdict that was never actually proven.
snip
Amanda Knox: What I Learned Meeting Other Women Villainized by the Media
In filming "The Scarlet Letter Reports," I met with women who, like me, have faced vitriolic harassment by the media and the public—and learned so much from their strength and resilience in the face of these attacks."The Scarlet Letter Reports" is a new series hosted by Amanda Knox that explores the gendered nature of public shaming. The series premieres this Wednesday on Facebook Watch.
https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/paxn8z/amanda-knox-scarlet-letter-trailer
I walked onto the set to shoot the first episode of The Scarlet Letter Reports ten years ago to the day I was arrested and redefined around the world as “Foxy Knoxy.” You’ve probably heard of her: the two-faced slut who murdered her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in a fit of drug- and/or jealousy-fueled rage during a sex game gone wrong. That invented monster was convicted, but it was me—the real me—who spent four years in prison and eight years on trial in Italian court making the case for my innocence. Even in freedom, Foxy Knoxy precedes me into the world—everyone I’ve met in the last decade has already met and judged her.
As a white woman, I am rare among wrongfully convicted people, the vast majority of whom are black men. And most exonerees tend to have a very different relationship with the media. I was hounded and harassed before, during, and after my release, whereas most exonerees face being forgotten or ignored by society. These individuals have all borne the burden of our criminal justice system’s failures, and by extension, our society’s shortcomings: our racism, classism, and impulse to scapegoat, vilify, and punish. Foxy Knoxy was the product of some of these shortcomings, but filtered through society’s long history of villainizing women and particularly our sexuality.
In The Scarlet Letter Reports, a new series launching this week on Broadly, I explore the gendered nature of public shaming through interviews with women who have been objectified and villainized by the media, including: Anita Sarkeesian, Amber Rose, Daisy Coleman, Brett Rossi, and Mischa Barton. Though our backgrounds and stories are different, we were all attacked as women. And, in trying to live our lives or come forward with the truth, we faced vicious campaigns against our characters—our identities distorted and crammed into prepackaged tropes, ready-made to be discounted, condemned, and rejected: the slut, the psycho, the trainwreck, the liar, the man-eater.
In the midst of shooting this series, #MeToo exploded; we saw survivors begin to hold powerful men accountable for their actions on a massive scale, and this reinforced for me the notion that my story was not just loosely connected to those of the women I was interviewing, but a direct result of the same societal forces that allowed these other women’s traumas to occur. For example, Daisy Coleman was 14 when she attempted to bring sexual assault charges against 17-year-old Matthew Barnett. At the time, Barnett wouldn't face a trial, but Daisy did. Tried by her community, Daisy was not only viciously slut-shamed and vilified, she was also denied the same protections as defendants in the courtroom—the presumption of innocence—and punished with a guilty verdict that was never actually proven.
snip
May 2, 2018
the numpty cocksplat Trump just called Pompeo a "calvary" officer
What an illiterate fool.
Sad!!!!
May 1, 2018
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xkp74/learn-to-spot-the-secret-signals-of-far-right-sovereign-citizens
Almost immediately after it came out that alleged Waffle House shooter Travis Reinking had self-identified as a "sovereign citizen," Mark Pitcavage started getting phone calls. He's an expert at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism who's been studying the far-right clique for a quarter of a century, mastering the ins-and-outs of the complex conspiracy theory that grounds their beliefs. And while making sense of this specific brand of anti-government ideology requires a lot of specialized knowledge—among other things, learning to decode several unhinged dialects—he doesn't mind the effort. After all, sovereign citizens are his favorite group to study.
"I don't know if I'm supposed to have favorites," Pitcavage clarified in an interview. "But let me just say the sovereign citizen movement is this strange mix of bizarre or even humorous and incredibly scary."
Still, he sometimes struggles in presentations to illustrate telltale signs exhibited by sovereign citizens. That's because, unlike the alt-right, or neo-Nazis, for instance, their's is not a neatly-defined subculture. That is to say, though adherents of sovereign citizen thinking tend to follow specific gurus, they don't often have distinct memes or tattoos that pop in a PowerPoint presentation. Even so, when I called up Pitcavage for an insider's take on how to decode the signals and "tics" exhibited by these people, he offered a few ways to tell if someone you know might have been radicalized by their strange ideology.
VICE: Do people who are kind of flirting with this stuff actually associate with the Don't Tread on Me—a.k.a. Gadsden—flag, or is that a misconception?
Mark Pitcavage: I'm sure some do, but that's more of either a Tea Party thing or a militia movement thing. It's not, like, a specifically sovereign citizen sort of symbol. It's a patriotic symbol that a lot of different types of people—both extremists and not extremists—can use. Sometimes, you have people on one of those websites where you can put anything on a cap or a T-shirt—they'll put something, with like [the part of the Uniform Commercial Code sovereigns believe preserves their common law rights] UCC 1-207 or the sovereign citizen flag on one of those.
snip
Learn to Spot the Secret Signals of Far-Right 'Sovereign Citizens'
A surprising number of Americans are caught up in the throes of a fringe anti-government conspiracy theory, adherents to which have telltale "tics."https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xkp74/learn-to-spot-the-secret-signals-of-far-right-sovereign-citizens
Almost immediately after it came out that alleged Waffle House shooter Travis Reinking had self-identified as a "sovereign citizen," Mark Pitcavage started getting phone calls. He's an expert at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism who's been studying the far-right clique for a quarter of a century, mastering the ins-and-outs of the complex conspiracy theory that grounds their beliefs. And while making sense of this specific brand of anti-government ideology requires a lot of specialized knowledge—among other things, learning to decode several unhinged dialects—he doesn't mind the effort. After all, sovereign citizens are his favorite group to study.
"I don't know if I'm supposed to have favorites," Pitcavage clarified in an interview. "But let me just say the sovereign citizen movement is this strange mix of bizarre or even humorous and incredibly scary."
Still, he sometimes struggles in presentations to illustrate telltale signs exhibited by sovereign citizens. That's because, unlike the alt-right, or neo-Nazis, for instance, their's is not a neatly-defined subculture. That is to say, though adherents of sovereign citizen thinking tend to follow specific gurus, they don't often have distinct memes or tattoos that pop in a PowerPoint presentation. Even so, when I called up Pitcavage for an insider's take on how to decode the signals and "tics" exhibited by these people, he offered a few ways to tell if someone you know might have been radicalized by their strange ideology.
VICE: Do people who are kind of flirting with this stuff actually associate with the Don't Tread on Me—a.k.a. Gadsden—flag, or is that a misconception?
Mark Pitcavage: I'm sure some do, but that's more of either a Tea Party thing or a militia movement thing. It's not, like, a specifically sovereign citizen sort of symbol. It's a patriotic symbol that a lot of different types of people—both extremists and not extremists—can use. Sometimes, you have people on one of those websites where you can put anything on a cap or a T-shirt—they'll put something, with like [the part of the Uniform Commercial Code sovereigns believe preserves their common law rights] UCC 1-207 or the sovereign citizen flag on one of those.
snip
April 29, 2018
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/29/chasing-hillary-amy-chozick-dear-madam-president-jennifer-palmieri-review
For Amy Chozick and Jennifer Palmieri, the world ended early on 9 November 2016, when Hillary Clinton tersely phoned Donald Trump to concede defeat. Chozick had spent a decade reporting on Hillary for the New York Times; Palmieri served as her “communications director”, although – as Chozick discloses – she balked at communicating the bad news to her boss on election night.
Both Chozick and Palmieri were traumatised by the unexpected result – perhaps more so than Hillary, who in a petulant transference of blame declared: “They were never going to allow me to be president.” “It was on us to save America and we let her blow up,” said Palmieri, apocalyptically. “I don’t know anything,” Chozick decided in numb misery, as she trudged home. Chozick slumped into depressed inertia, while Palmieri resorted to indignant denial, asserting that Hillary actually won the election because the popular vote put her ahead.
Thanks to therapeutic book contracts, both women are currently in recovery, having reacted differently to their psychic trial. Palmieri, awash in tears but trying to be brave, now fantasises about what might have been by composing an open letter to a future female president whose identity is as yet unknown. Aghast at the errors of an overconfident campaign, Chozick revisits the past to analyse what went wrong, or – since rage goads her to fire off a fusillade of spluttering expletives – WTF happened.
Chozick upbraids “motherfucking Michigan” and excoriates “the assholes of Wisconsin”, two states that capitulated to Trump; she accuses Hillary of a “brain fart” that led her to offend gay voters, and chokes on the “shit sandwich” the campaign’s spinners tried to cram down her throat. After all this venting, she more soberly attributes Hillary’s failure to her defensive, impersonal public demeanour. She disguised her rightful ambition as a mealy-mouthed craving to serve others, which is the ancestral female mission; everyone admired her crestfallen speech on the morning after the election because, as Palmieri remarks, surrendering gracefully is what women are meant to do.
snip
Chasing Hillary; Dear Madam President review - followers of a lost cause
Two emotional accounts of Hillary Clinton’s poll defeat – from Jennifer Palmieri and Amy Chozick – veer from lachrymose to wickedly readablehttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/29/chasing-hillary-amy-chozick-dear-madam-president-jennifer-palmieri-review
For Amy Chozick and Jennifer Palmieri, the world ended early on 9 November 2016, when Hillary Clinton tersely phoned Donald Trump to concede defeat. Chozick had spent a decade reporting on Hillary for the New York Times; Palmieri served as her “communications director”, although – as Chozick discloses – she balked at communicating the bad news to her boss on election night.
Both Chozick and Palmieri were traumatised by the unexpected result – perhaps more so than Hillary, who in a petulant transference of blame declared: “They were never going to allow me to be president.” “It was on us to save America and we let her blow up,” said Palmieri, apocalyptically. “I don’t know anything,” Chozick decided in numb misery, as she trudged home. Chozick slumped into depressed inertia, while Palmieri resorted to indignant denial, asserting that Hillary actually won the election because the popular vote put her ahead.
Thanks to therapeutic book contracts, both women are currently in recovery, having reacted differently to their psychic trial. Palmieri, awash in tears but trying to be brave, now fantasises about what might have been by composing an open letter to a future female president whose identity is as yet unknown. Aghast at the errors of an overconfident campaign, Chozick revisits the past to analyse what went wrong, or – since rage goads her to fire off a fusillade of spluttering expletives – WTF happened.
Chozick upbraids “motherfucking Michigan” and excoriates “the assholes of Wisconsin”, two states that capitulated to Trump; she accuses Hillary of a “brain fart” that led her to offend gay voters, and chokes on the “shit sandwich” the campaign’s spinners tried to cram down her throat. After all this venting, she more soberly attributes Hillary’s failure to her defensive, impersonal public demeanour. She disguised her rightful ambition as a mealy-mouthed craving to serve others, which is the ancestral female mission; everyone admired her crestfallen speech on the morning after the election because, as Palmieri remarks, surrendering gracefully is what women are meant to do.
snip
April 29, 2018
2018 White House Correspondents' Dinner (full video)
April 28, 2018
It is all about creating a fog of war environment without actual kinetic weapons being used. You churn up all the inherent pre-existing divisions within a society and get them to turn on each other.
I have been following this for years, since I first came across Vladislav Surkov (The Grey Cardinal of the Kremlin was his nickname)
How Putin Is Reinventing Warfare
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/05/how-putin-is-reinventing-warfare/
The Kremlin, according to Barack Obama, is stuck in the “old ways,” trapped in Cold War or even 19th century mindsets. But look closer at the Kremlin’s actions during the crisis in Ukraine and you begin to see a very 21st century mentality, manipulating transnational financial interconnections, spinning global media, and reconfiguring geo-political alliances. Could it be that the West is the one caught up in the “old ways,” while the Kremlin is the geopolitical avant-garde, informed by a dark, subversive reading of globalization?
The Kremlin’s approach might be called “non-linear war,” a term used in a short story written by one of Putin’s closest political advisors, Vladislav Surkov, which was published under his pseudonym, Nathan Dubovitsky, just a few days before the annexation of Crimea. Surkov is credited with inventing the system of “managed democracy” that has dominated Russia in the 21st century, and his new portfolio focuses on foreign policy. This time, he sets his new story in a dystopian future, after the “fifth world war.”
Surkov writes: “It was the first non-linear war. In the primitive wars of the 19th and 20th centuries it was common for just two sides to fight. Two countries, two blocks of allies. Now four coalitions collided. Not two against two, or three against one. All against all.”
This is a world where the old geo-political paradigms no longer hold. As the Kremlin faces down the West, it is indeed gambling that old alliances like the EU and NATO mean less in the 21st century than the new commercial ties it has established with nominally “Western” companies, such as BP, Exxon, Mercedes, and BASF. Meanwhile, many Western countries welcome corrupt financial flows from the post-Soviet space; it is part of their economic models, and not one many want disturbed. So far, the Kremlin’s gamble seems to be paying off, with financial considerations helping to curb sanctions. Part of the rationale for fast-tracking Russia’s inclusion into the global economy was that interconnection would be a check on aggression. But the Kremlin has figured out that this can be flipped: Interconnection also means that Russia can get away with aggression.
snip
Non-Linear Warfare and Reflexive Control - NATO Defense College
http://www.ndc.nato.int/download/downloads.php?icode=467
Redefining Hybrid Warfare: Russia’s Nonlinear War against the West
http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1538&context=jss
What is Hybrid Warfare?
https://globalsecurityreview.com/hybrid-and-non-linear-warfare-systematically-erases-the-divide-between-war-peace/
Conventional Western concepts of war are incompatible and fundamentally misaligned with the realities of conflict in the twenty-first century. The emergence of a unipolar post-Cold War world order has resulted in a significant paradigm shift.
This change now requires the U.S. and its allies to adopt a new legal, psychological, and strategic understanding of warfare and use of force, particularly by state actors. The term “hybrid war” (military institutions use the term “hybrid threat”) connotes the use of conventional military force supported by irregular and cyber warfare tactics. In practical application, the Russian concept of “nonlinear conflict” exemplifies hybrid warfare strategy.
Linear conflicts are defined by a sequential progression of a planned strategy by opposing sides, whereas nonlinear conflict is the simultaneous deployment of multiple, complementary military and non-military warfare tactics. A nonlinear war is fought when a state employs conventional and irregular military forces in conjunction with psychological, economic, political, and cyber assaults. Confusion and disorder ensue when weaponized information exacerbates the perception of insecurity in the populace as political, social, and cultural identities are pitted against one another.
This “blurring” divides influential interest groups and powerful political organizations by exploiting identity politics and allegiances. Additionally, nonlinear warfare tactics act as a deterrent towards a more powerful ally of the besieged state.
snip
The Hidden Author of Putinism
How Vladislav Surkov invented the new Russia
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/
“I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system,” Vladislav Surkov told us by way of introduction. On this spring day in 2013, he was wearing a white shirt and a leather jacket that was part Joy Division and part 1930s commissar. “My portfolio at the Kremlin and in government has included ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernization, innovation, foreign relations, and ...”—here he pauses and smiles—“modern art.” He offers to not make a speech, instead welcoming the Ph.D. students, professors, journalists, and politicians gathered in an auditorium at the London School of Economics to pose questions and have an open discussion. After the first question, he talks for almost 45 minutes, leaving hardly any time for questions after all.
It’s his political system in miniature: democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent.
As the former deputy head of the presidential administration, later deputy prime minister and then assistant to the president on foreign affairs, Surkov has directed Russian society like one great reality show. He claps once and a new political party appears. He claps again and creates Nashi, the Russian equivalent of the Hitler Youth, who are trained for street battles with potential pro-democracy supporters and burn books by unpatriotic writers on Red Square. As deputy head of the administration he would meet once a week with the heads of the television channels in his Kremlin office, instructing them on whom to attack and whom to defend, who is allowed on TV and who is banned, how the president is to be presented, and the very language and categories the country thinks and feels in. Russia’s Ostankino TV presenters, instructed by Surkov, pluck a theme (oligarchs, America, the Middle East) and speak for 20 minutes, hinting, nudging, winking, insinuating, though rarely ever saying anything directly, repeating words like “them” and “the enemy” endlessly until they are imprinted on the mind.
They repeat the great mantras of the era: The president is the president of “stability,” the antithesis to the era of “confusion and twilight” in the 1990s. “Stability”—the word is repeated again and again in a myriad seemingly irrelevant contexts until it echoes and tolls like a great bell and seems to mean everything good; anyone who opposes the president is an enemy of the great God of “stability.” “Effective manager,” a term quarried from Western corporate speak, is transmuted into a term to venerate the president as the most “effective manager” of all. “Effective” becomes the raison d’être for everything: Stalin was an “effective manager” who had to make sacrifices for the sake of being “effective.” The words trickle into the streets: “Our relationship is not effective” lovers tell each other when they break up. “Effective,” “stability”: No one can quite define what they actually mean, and as the city transforms and surges, everyone senses things are the very opposite of stable, and certainly nothing is “effective,” but the way Surkov and his puppets use them the words have taken on a life of their own and act like falling axes over anyone who is in any way disloyal.
One of Surkov’s many nicknames is the “political technologist of all of Rus.” Political technologists are the new Russian name for a very old profession: viziers, gray cardinals, wizards of Oz. They first emerged in the mid-1990s, knocking on the gates of power like pied pipers, bowing low and offering their services to explain the world and whispering that they could reinvent it. They inherited a very Soviet tradition of top-down governance and tsarist practices of co-opting anti-state actors (anarchists in the 19th century, neo-Nazis and religious fanatics now), all fused with the latest thinking in television, advertising, and black PR. Their first clients were actually Russian modernizers: In 1996 the political technologists, coordinated by Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch nicknamed the “Godfather of the Kremlin” and the man who first understood the power of television in Russia, managed to win then-President Boris Yeltsin a seemingly lost election by persuading the nation that he was the only man who could save it from a return to revanchist Communism and new fascism. They produced TV scare-stories of looming pogroms and conjured fake Far Right parties, insinuating that the other candidate was a Stalinist (he was actually more a socialist democrat), to help create the mirage of a looming “red-brown” menace.
snip
The Literary Intrigues of Putin’s Puppet Master
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/22/the-literary-intrigues-of-putins-puppet-master/
In the summer of 2009, a slender novel caused a literary sensation in Moscow. Centering on a poetry-loving gangster-cum-book publisher wracked by Hamletian perplexities over a possible snuff film, it unloaded a darkly absurdist, but caustically knowing, satire on the corruptions and machinations of post-Soviet Russia, with a whirligig of literary remixes and references.
What really triggered the sensation, though, over Okolonolya, or Almost Zero (subtitled gangsta fiction, in English, in the Russian edition), was the identity of its author, an unknown named Natan Dubovitsky. Dubovitsky was soon suspected, courtesy of an anonymous tip from the novel’s publisher to the St. Petersburg newspaper Vedomosti, of being a pseudonym for Vladislav Surkov, who was then the Russian presidential deputy chief of staff. At the time, this Kremlin ideologue was, arguably, the second- or third-most powerful man in the country. It was Surkov, variously called a “political technologist,” the “gray cardinal,” or a “puppet master,” who had created and orchestrated Putin’s so-called sovereign democracy—the stage-managed, sham-democratic Russia, the ruthlessly stabilized, still-rotten Russia that Almost Zero was savaging. Almost Zero is now available to English readers in a limited edition from an adventurous small publisher in Brooklyn, Inpatient Press. Inpatient takes the leap and credits Surkov as the author. (And, in the spirit of Almost Zero itself, it is publishing the novel without authorization.)
Plenty of politicos write novels; but not many write eviscerating self-satires. It was as though Karl Rove had taken the knife to his and George W. Bush’s America in, say, 2005. Surkov, however, wasn’t, and isn’t, simply a Rove. The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis calls him “a hero of our time” (in praise and opprobrium) for turning Russia’s political reality into “a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater.” For supplying an early model, if you will, for Donald Trump’s media-savvy tactics of chaos and confusion. And what a perversely fascinating, complex figure emerges from the details of Surkov’s biography: an arch-propagandist of power and an arty outsider, an authoritarian’s right hand and a bohemian aesthete whose education included studying theater at the Moscow Institute of Culture in the 1980s (he was expelled for fighting). As the USSR was collapsing, Surkov became the public-relations mastermind for oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s pioneering business, Menatep Bank, which was where Surkov met his wife, Natalya; soon, he was heading up Russia’s fledging association of ad men. Denied a partnership in business after Khodorkovsky’s ill-fated acquisition of the oil giant Yukos in the 1990s—Khodorkovsky ended up in prison during Putin’s taming of the oligarchs—Surkov left for a position with Alfa Bank (of Trump dossier notoriety, for alleged aid in Russian meddling in the 2016 election; the owners are suing for defamation). He then ran a major TV network, before devoting his image-making and lobbying talents, first, to then President Boris Yeltsin, and, subsequently, to Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.
Even in government, Surkov found time to write essays praising Bollywood movies and Joan Miró in the pages of Russian Pioneer, a glitzy intellectual magazine—which went on to publish Almost Zero in a special edition. He composed lyrics for the Russian rock band Agata Kristi (whose lead singer later sued a critic for calling him “a trained poodle for Surkov”). Famously an admirer of Tupac Shakur, Surkov can also quote Allen Ginsberg’s poetry by heart, albeit in heavily-accented English (there’s a cringe-making recording online of him reciting Ginsberg’s “Supermarket Sutra” in full). In his spacious Kremlin office, photos of Putin and Medvedev hung beside the likenesses of Jorge Luis Borges and John Lennon, Che Guevara and a young Joseph Brodsky, together with Tupac in a hoodie, Obama looking pensive, and Bismarck looking “Iron Cross.”
snip
The ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ and Russian Non-Linear War
https://www.scribd.com/document/309340420/Gerasimov-Doctrine-and-Russian-Non-Linear-War-In-Moscow-s-Shadows
Putin’s Way of War
The ‘War’ in Russia’s ‘Hybrid Warfare’
http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/issues/Winter_2015-16/9_Monaghan.pdf
GRADING GERASIMOV: EVALUATING RUSSIAN NONLINEAR WAR THROUGH MODERN CHINESE DOCTRINE
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/grading-gerasimov-evaluating-russian-nonlinear-war-through-modern-chinese-doctrine
“Wars are not declared, and having begun, proceed to an unfamiliar template,” stated General Valery Gerasimov, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, during a closed speech at the Russian Academy of Military Sciences. The primary topic of this speech was “The Role of the General Staff in the Organization of the Defense of the Country in Correspondence with the New Statute about the General Staff Confirmed by the President of the Russian Federation.”
This speech given in late 2013 was crucial because it enumerated and elucidated the strategies that would develop Russian nonlinear military doctrine in 2014, which is known as “Gerasimov Doctrine”. Russian Foreign Policy Reviews, State Security Strategies and “Gerasimov Doctrine” combined with Russian political views codify nonlinear war as the emergence of a new kind of war. This new form of warfare is facilitated by 21st century technologies and multiple actors employing combinations of conventional and unconventional instruments. In short, “the very rules of war have been fundamentally changed” and, according to General Gerasimov, non-military means have surpassed the power of force to achieve strategic and political goals. The current situation in Ukraine and, to some extent in neighboring former Soviet republics (primarily Baltic States), highlights the application of nonlinear war.
Is it working?
In order to adequately assess current and future threats to European security and the methods to counter such threats, this article intends to “grade”, or evaluates, specific applications of nonlinear war in Ukraine based on Chinese military doctrine, geopolitical strategies and conflicts in Europe.
Russia’s Road to Nonlinear War: Cold War, 1979-Present
“Gerasimov Doctrine” contains particular similarities to the Chinese doctrine outlined in Unrestricted Warfare published in 1999, and historical roots in previous Russian doctrine. Both strategies involve using proxies, or surrogates, to not only exploit vulnerabilities in low intensity conflict, but to also prepare for future operations, which may involve high intensity conflict. Other strategies involve applying both low and high tech asymmetrical means, and also engaging in several forms of war. For example, Unrestricted Warfare describes 13 forms of “total war” and methods to consciously mix “cocktails” on the battlefield, or to employ combinations of forms of warfare in order to find innovative and effective approaches. In Ukraine, the notion of consciously “mixing cocktails” to produce effective nonlinear strategies highlights the unpredictable effects that these tactics may have on the organs of government. Regardless of the particular nonlinear strategies applied, destabilization and exploitation of vulnerabilities are the results. Therefore, the assessment tool for this article is the effective application of warfare combinations in four categories to reach specific long-term political outcomes.
snip
The Cyber Underground – Resistance to Active Measures and Propaganda: “The Disruptors” - Motto: “Think For Yourself”
Summary
The open societies of the US and free and democratic nations are being subverted by active measures and propaganda to undermine political processes and sow cultural and political divisions to allow closed societies of revisionist and revolutionary powers to dominate in international affairs. The way to counter this effort is through a grass roots resistance movement that consists of an educated, activist, energetic, and empowered youth who seek to be part of something larger than themselves and validate their self-worth as disruptors of the status quo. However, the closed societies are challenging their ability to disrupt because active measures and propaganda have taken away their initiative. A new grass roots movement, a cyber underground, organized around special operations principles can create a nationwide and global network that will seek out, identify, understand, and expose active measures and propaganda from closed societies in order to protect free and open societies. In short our nation wide youth of disruptors will channel their abilities to beat the revisionist and revolutionary disruptors. The exposure of adversary active measures and propaganda will inoculate the population against their effects and render their efforts ineffective and useless. This movement will help to restore and sustain what George Kennan termed the “health and vigor of our own society” that is the vital antidote to the subversive threats that we face.
Introduction
The values and political systems of open democratic societies are facing a world wide campaign of subversion by powers that seek to undermine democracies in order to strengthen their power in their region and throughout the world. This subversive campaign requires a global asymmetric response that cannot be organized by governments. It requires a grass roots resistance to conduct a counter cyber subversion campaign. An organizing principle may be found in both the modern concept of crowd sourcing and the application of special operations principles.
Subversion, active measures, and propaganda are key elements of modern unconventional warfare campaigns and revisionist and revolutionary powers are conducting unconventional warfare campaigns. Americans and the people of like-minded modern nation state powers need to resist the campaigns and strategies of those who are attacking freedom and democracy and the international nation state system that is required for freedom and democracy to flourish.
Congress recognized this threat in the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act in Section 1097 which directed the Department of Defense in coordination with other government agencies to develop a counter unconventional warfare strategy. While Congress called for a whole of government approach that is the modern framework for national security in the 21st Century, what is really necessary is a whole of society approach and engagement through, with, and by the people. The US government, and certainly not DOD, cannot defend America from these threats. It requires the people.
Appreciate the Context
There is competition among three world powers:
snip
of course, if we have THIS in the below video unleashed into the real world, well, as they say...
How Russia Wages Non-Linear Warfare and Reflexive Control (I have been asked to make a reply an OP)
Democratic Rhetoric Toward Undemocratic IntentIt is all about creating a fog of war environment without actual kinetic weapons being used. You churn up all the inherent pre-existing divisions within a society and get them to turn on each other.
I have been following this for years, since I first came across Vladislav Surkov (The Grey Cardinal of the Kremlin was his nickname)
How Putin Is Reinventing Warfare
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/05/how-putin-is-reinventing-warfare/
The Kremlin, according to Barack Obama, is stuck in the “old ways,” trapped in Cold War or even 19th century mindsets. But look closer at the Kremlin’s actions during the crisis in Ukraine and you begin to see a very 21st century mentality, manipulating transnational financial interconnections, spinning global media, and reconfiguring geo-political alliances. Could it be that the West is the one caught up in the “old ways,” while the Kremlin is the geopolitical avant-garde, informed by a dark, subversive reading of globalization?
The Kremlin’s approach might be called “non-linear war,” a term used in a short story written by one of Putin’s closest political advisors, Vladislav Surkov, which was published under his pseudonym, Nathan Dubovitsky, just a few days before the annexation of Crimea. Surkov is credited with inventing the system of “managed democracy” that has dominated Russia in the 21st century, and his new portfolio focuses on foreign policy. This time, he sets his new story in a dystopian future, after the “fifth world war.”
Surkov writes: “It was the first non-linear war. In the primitive wars of the 19th and 20th centuries it was common for just two sides to fight. Two countries, two blocks of allies. Now four coalitions collided. Not two against two, or three against one. All against all.”
This is a world where the old geo-political paradigms no longer hold. As the Kremlin faces down the West, it is indeed gambling that old alliances like the EU and NATO mean less in the 21st century than the new commercial ties it has established with nominally “Western” companies, such as BP, Exxon, Mercedes, and BASF. Meanwhile, many Western countries welcome corrupt financial flows from the post-Soviet space; it is part of their economic models, and not one many want disturbed. So far, the Kremlin’s gamble seems to be paying off, with financial considerations helping to curb sanctions. Part of the rationale for fast-tracking Russia’s inclusion into the global economy was that interconnection would be a check on aggression. But the Kremlin has figured out that this can be flipped: Interconnection also means that Russia can get away with aggression.
snip
Non-Linear Warfare and Reflexive Control - NATO Defense College
http://www.ndc.nato.int/download/downloads.php?icode=467
Redefining Hybrid Warfare: Russia’s Nonlinear War against the West
http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1538&context=jss
What is Hybrid Warfare?
https://globalsecurityreview.com/hybrid-and-non-linear-warfare-systematically-erases-the-divide-between-war-peace/
Conventional Western concepts of war are incompatible and fundamentally misaligned with the realities of conflict in the twenty-first century. The emergence of a unipolar post-Cold War world order has resulted in a significant paradigm shift.
This change now requires the U.S. and its allies to adopt a new legal, psychological, and strategic understanding of warfare and use of force, particularly by state actors. The term “hybrid war” (military institutions use the term “hybrid threat”) connotes the use of conventional military force supported by irregular and cyber warfare tactics. In practical application, the Russian concept of “nonlinear conflict” exemplifies hybrid warfare strategy.
Linear conflicts are defined by a sequential progression of a planned strategy by opposing sides, whereas nonlinear conflict is the simultaneous deployment of multiple, complementary military and non-military warfare tactics. A nonlinear war is fought when a state employs conventional and irregular military forces in conjunction with psychological, economic, political, and cyber assaults. Confusion and disorder ensue when weaponized information exacerbates the perception of insecurity in the populace as political, social, and cultural identities are pitted against one another.
This “blurring” divides influential interest groups and powerful political organizations by exploiting identity politics and allegiances. Additionally, nonlinear warfare tactics act as a deterrent towards a more powerful ally of the besieged state.
snip
The Hidden Author of Putinism
How Vladislav Surkov invented the new Russia
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/
“I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system,” Vladislav Surkov told us by way of introduction. On this spring day in 2013, he was wearing a white shirt and a leather jacket that was part Joy Division and part 1930s commissar. “My portfolio at the Kremlin and in government has included ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernization, innovation, foreign relations, and ...”—here he pauses and smiles—“modern art.” He offers to not make a speech, instead welcoming the Ph.D. students, professors, journalists, and politicians gathered in an auditorium at the London School of Economics to pose questions and have an open discussion. After the first question, he talks for almost 45 minutes, leaving hardly any time for questions after all.
It’s his political system in miniature: democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent.
As the former deputy head of the presidential administration, later deputy prime minister and then assistant to the president on foreign affairs, Surkov has directed Russian society like one great reality show. He claps once and a new political party appears. He claps again and creates Nashi, the Russian equivalent of the Hitler Youth, who are trained for street battles with potential pro-democracy supporters and burn books by unpatriotic writers on Red Square. As deputy head of the administration he would meet once a week with the heads of the television channels in his Kremlin office, instructing them on whom to attack and whom to defend, who is allowed on TV and who is banned, how the president is to be presented, and the very language and categories the country thinks and feels in. Russia’s Ostankino TV presenters, instructed by Surkov, pluck a theme (oligarchs, America, the Middle East) and speak for 20 minutes, hinting, nudging, winking, insinuating, though rarely ever saying anything directly, repeating words like “them” and “the enemy” endlessly until they are imprinted on the mind.
They repeat the great mantras of the era: The president is the president of “stability,” the antithesis to the era of “confusion and twilight” in the 1990s. “Stability”—the word is repeated again and again in a myriad seemingly irrelevant contexts until it echoes and tolls like a great bell and seems to mean everything good; anyone who opposes the president is an enemy of the great God of “stability.” “Effective manager,” a term quarried from Western corporate speak, is transmuted into a term to venerate the president as the most “effective manager” of all. “Effective” becomes the raison d’être for everything: Stalin was an “effective manager” who had to make sacrifices for the sake of being “effective.” The words trickle into the streets: “Our relationship is not effective” lovers tell each other when they break up. “Effective,” “stability”: No one can quite define what they actually mean, and as the city transforms and surges, everyone senses things are the very opposite of stable, and certainly nothing is “effective,” but the way Surkov and his puppets use them the words have taken on a life of their own and act like falling axes over anyone who is in any way disloyal.
One of Surkov’s many nicknames is the “political technologist of all of Rus.” Political technologists are the new Russian name for a very old profession: viziers, gray cardinals, wizards of Oz. They first emerged in the mid-1990s, knocking on the gates of power like pied pipers, bowing low and offering their services to explain the world and whispering that they could reinvent it. They inherited a very Soviet tradition of top-down governance and tsarist practices of co-opting anti-state actors (anarchists in the 19th century, neo-Nazis and religious fanatics now), all fused with the latest thinking in television, advertising, and black PR. Their first clients were actually Russian modernizers: In 1996 the political technologists, coordinated by Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch nicknamed the “Godfather of the Kremlin” and the man who first understood the power of television in Russia, managed to win then-President Boris Yeltsin a seemingly lost election by persuading the nation that he was the only man who could save it from a return to revanchist Communism and new fascism. They produced TV scare-stories of looming pogroms and conjured fake Far Right parties, insinuating that the other candidate was a Stalinist (he was actually more a socialist democrat), to help create the mirage of a looming “red-brown” menace.
snip
The Literary Intrigues of Putin’s Puppet Master
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/22/the-literary-intrigues-of-putins-puppet-master/
In the summer of 2009, a slender novel caused a literary sensation in Moscow. Centering on a poetry-loving gangster-cum-book publisher wracked by Hamletian perplexities over a possible snuff film, it unloaded a darkly absurdist, but caustically knowing, satire on the corruptions and machinations of post-Soviet Russia, with a whirligig of literary remixes and references.
What really triggered the sensation, though, over Okolonolya, or Almost Zero (subtitled gangsta fiction, in English, in the Russian edition), was the identity of its author, an unknown named Natan Dubovitsky. Dubovitsky was soon suspected, courtesy of an anonymous tip from the novel’s publisher to the St. Petersburg newspaper Vedomosti, of being a pseudonym for Vladislav Surkov, who was then the Russian presidential deputy chief of staff. At the time, this Kremlin ideologue was, arguably, the second- or third-most powerful man in the country. It was Surkov, variously called a “political technologist,” the “gray cardinal,” or a “puppet master,” who had created and orchestrated Putin’s so-called sovereign democracy—the stage-managed, sham-democratic Russia, the ruthlessly stabilized, still-rotten Russia that Almost Zero was savaging. Almost Zero is now available to English readers in a limited edition from an adventurous small publisher in Brooklyn, Inpatient Press. Inpatient takes the leap and credits Surkov as the author. (And, in the spirit of Almost Zero itself, it is publishing the novel without authorization.)
Plenty of politicos write novels; but not many write eviscerating self-satires. It was as though Karl Rove had taken the knife to his and George W. Bush’s America in, say, 2005. Surkov, however, wasn’t, and isn’t, simply a Rove. The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis calls him “a hero of our time” (in praise and opprobrium) for turning Russia’s political reality into “a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater.” For supplying an early model, if you will, for Donald Trump’s media-savvy tactics of chaos and confusion. And what a perversely fascinating, complex figure emerges from the details of Surkov’s biography: an arch-propagandist of power and an arty outsider, an authoritarian’s right hand and a bohemian aesthete whose education included studying theater at the Moscow Institute of Culture in the 1980s (he was expelled for fighting). As the USSR was collapsing, Surkov became the public-relations mastermind for oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s pioneering business, Menatep Bank, which was where Surkov met his wife, Natalya; soon, he was heading up Russia’s fledging association of ad men. Denied a partnership in business after Khodorkovsky’s ill-fated acquisition of the oil giant Yukos in the 1990s—Khodorkovsky ended up in prison during Putin’s taming of the oligarchs—Surkov left for a position with Alfa Bank (of Trump dossier notoriety, for alleged aid in Russian meddling in the 2016 election; the owners are suing for defamation). He then ran a major TV network, before devoting his image-making and lobbying talents, first, to then President Boris Yeltsin, and, subsequently, to Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.
Even in government, Surkov found time to write essays praising Bollywood movies and Joan Miró in the pages of Russian Pioneer, a glitzy intellectual magazine—which went on to publish Almost Zero in a special edition. He composed lyrics for the Russian rock band Agata Kristi (whose lead singer later sued a critic for calling him “a trained poodle for Surkov”). Famously an admirer of Tupac Shakur, Surkov can also quote Allen Ginsberg’s poetry by heart, albeit in heavily-accented English (there’s a cringe-making recording online of him reciting Ginsberg’s “Supermarket Sutra” in full). In his spacious Kremlin office, photos of Putin and Medvedev hung beside the likenesses of Jorge Luis Borges and John Lennon, Che Guevara and a young Joseph Brodsky, together with Tupac in a hoodie, Obama looking pensive, and Bismarck looking “Iron Cross.”
snip
The ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ and Russian Non-Linear War
https://www.scribd.com/document/309340420/Gerasimov-Doctrine-and-Russian-Non-Linear-War-In-Moscow-s-Shadows
Putin’s Way of War
The ‘War’ in Russia’s ‘Hybrid Warfare’
http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/issues/Winter_2015-16/9_Monaghan.pdf
GRADING GERASIMOV: EVALUATING RUSSIAN NONLINEAR WAR THROUGH MODERN CHINESE DOCTRINE
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/grading-gerasimov-evaluating-russian-nonlinear-war-through-modern-chinese-doctrine
“Wars are not declared, and having begun, proceed to an unfamiliar template,” stated General Valery Gerasimov, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, during a closed speech at the Russian Academy of Military Sciences. The primary topic of this speech was “The Role of the General Staff in the Organization of the Defense of the Country in Correspondence with the New Statute about the General Staff Confirmed by the President of the Russian Federation.”
This speech given in late 2013 was crucial because it enumerated and elucidated the strategies that would develop Russian nonlinear military doctrine in 2014, which is known as “Gerasimov Doctrine”. Russian Foreign Policy Reviews, State Security Strategies and “Gerasimov Doctrine” combined with Russian political views codify nonlinear war as the emergence of a new kind of war. This new form of warfare is facilitated by 21st century technologies and multiple actors employing combinations of conventional and unconventional instruments. In short, “the very rules of war have been fundamentally changed” and, according to General Gerasimov, non-military means have surpassed the power of force to achieve strategic and political goals. The current situation in Ukraine and, to some extent in neighboring former Soviet republics (primarily Baltic States), highlights the application of nonlinear war.
Is it working?
In order to adequately assess current and future threats to European security and the methods to counter such threats, this article intends to “grade”, or evaluates, specific applications of nonlinear war in Ukraine based on Chinese military doctrine, geopolitical strategies and conflicts in Europe.
Russia’s Road to Nonlinear War: Cold War, 1979-Present
“Gerasimov Doctrine” contains particular similarities to the Chinese doctrine outlined in Unrestricted Warfare published in 1999, and historical roots in previous Russian doctrine. Both strategies involve using proxies, or surrogates, to not only exploit vulnerabilities in low intensity conflict, but to also prepare for future operations, which may involve high intensity conflict. Other strategies involve applying both low and high tech asymmetrical means, and also engaging in several forms of war. For example, Unrestricted Warfare describes 13 forms of “total war” and methods to consciously mix “cocktails” on the battlefield, or to employ combinations of forms of warfare in order to find innovative and effective approaches. In Ukraine, the notion of consciously “mixing cocktails” to produce effective nonlinear strategies highlights the unpredictable effects that these tactics may have on the organs of government. Regardless of the particular nonlinear strategies applied, destabilization and exploitation of vulnerabilities are the results. Therefore, the assessment tool for this article is the effective application of warfare combinations in four categories to reach specific long-term political outcomes.
snip
The Cyber Underground – Resistance to Active Measures and Propaganda: “The Disruptors” - Motto: “Think For Yourself”
Summary
The open societies of the US and free and democratic nations are being subverted by active measures and propaganda to undermine political processes and sow cultural and political divisions to allow closed societies of revisionist and revolutionary powers to dominate in international affairs. The way to counter this effort is through a grass roots resistance movement that consists of an educated, activist, energetic, and empowered youth who seek to be part of something larger than themselves and validate their self-worth as disruptors of the status quo. However, the closed societies are challenging their ability to disrupt because active measures and propaganda have taken away their initiative. A new grass roots movement, a cyber underground, organized around special operations principles can create a nationwide and global network that will seek out, identify, understand, and expose active measures and propaganda from closed societies in order to protect free and open societies. In short our nation wide youth of disruptors will channel their abilities to beat the revisionist and revolutionary disruptors. The exposure of adversary active measures and propaganda will inoculate the population against their effects and render their efforts ineffective and useless. This movement will help to restore and sustain what George Kennan termed the “health and vigor of our own society” that is the vital antidote to the subversive threats that we face.
Introduction
The values and political systems of open democratic societies are facing a world wide campaign of subversion by powers that seek to undermine democracies in order to strengthen their power in their region and throughout the world. This subversive campaign requires a global asymmetric response that cannot be organized by governments. It requires a grass roots resistance to conduct a counter cyber subversion campaign. An organizing principle may be found in both the modern concept of crowd sourcing and the application of special operations principles.
Subversion, active measures, and propaganda are key elements of modern unconventional warfare campaigns and revisionist and revolutionary powers are conducting unconventional warfare campaigns. Americans and the people of like-minded modern nation state powers need to resist the campaigns and strategies of those who are attacking freedom and democracy and the international nation state system that is required for freedom and democracy to flourish.
Congress recognized this threat in the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act in Section 1097 which directed the Department of Defense in coordination with other government agencies to develop a counter unconventional warfare strategy. While Congress called for a whole of government approach that is the modern framework for national security in the 21st Century, what is really necessary is a whole of society approach and engagement through, with, and by the people. The US government, and certainly not DOD, cannot defend America from these threats. It requires the people.
Appreciate the Context
There is competition among three world powers:
snip
of course, if we have THIS in the below video unleashed into the real world, well, as they say...
April 26, 2018
Not to interrupt the Joy shitshow, but a REAL homophobe, anti-choice, Islamophobe, racist, climate
change denialist, war-mongering (advocates regime change in Iran, NoKo, Syria, etc), sexist, fundie bigoted fuck is now our new Secretary of State.
Not only that but he got 6 Democratic YES votes (7 if you count Angus King).
Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Doug Jones (Ala.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Bill Nelson (Fla.), and Angus King(Maine - I).
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=115&session=2&vote=00084#position
https://twitter.com/NARAL/status/989558365616558080
One of the reasons I love Joy Reid is that she was NOT afraid to call out Democrats who voted for RW shit
This is about the RW-pushed repeal of key elements of the Dodd-Frank Act in the horrid bank de-regulation bill a month and half ago:
Joy Reid on the earlier vote (the same 17 voted yes on the final bill)
https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/971564892833632257
https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/971567511526309889
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=115&session=2&vote=00054
Bennet (D-CO)
Carper (D-DE)
Coons (D-DE)
Donnelly (D-IN)
Hassan (D-NH)
Heitkamp (D-ND)
Jones (D-AL)
Kaine (D-VA)
King (I-ME)
Manchin (D-WV)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Nelson (D-FL)
Peters (D-MI)
Shaheen (D-NH)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Tester (D-MT)
Warner (D-VA)
8 flipped, from voting FOR Dodd-Frank in 2010 to now rolling back key provisions
Michael Bennet (CO), Tom Carper (DE), Bill Nelson (FL), Debbie Stabenow (MI)
Claire McCaskill (MO), Jon Tester (MT), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), and Mark Warner (VA)
also, another shitter, from last fall
Senate Passes $700 Billion Pentagon Bill, More Money Than Trump Sought (89-9)
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/us/politics/senate-pentagon-spending-bill.html
It is all bread and circuses, whilst so much of the truly destructive shit gets shoved right through in the fog of war and insane distractions. Kabuki theatre indeed.
April 24, 2018
Great reference source to use for all things Russia and the Traitor in Chief
Interactive Timeline: Everything We Know About Russia and President Trump (Updated and Massive)
https://billmoyers.com/story/trump-russia-timeline/Great reference source to use for all things Russia and the Traitor in Chief
April 19, 2018
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmg538/extremely-racist-video-shows-syracuse-frat-swearing-to-hate-black-and-jewish-people-vgtrn
"I solemnly swear to always have hatred in my heart for n*ggers, sp*cs and most importantly the fuckin' k*kes." That was the "oath" members of Syracuse University engineering fraternity, Theta Tau, seemed encouraged to recite in an online video obtained by the college's student newspaper Wednesday, igniting widespread protests across campus, Syracuse.com reports.
The video obtained by the Daily Orange was said to be one of many filmed at the frat's house and posted to a secret Facebook group, reportedly by an SU senior and chapter member. According a Syracuse spokeswoman, they were then "sent to university officials," as the New York Times reports. In a campus-wide email sent out Wednesday, Syracuse University chancellor Kent Syverud said that the fraternity had been "immediately suspended."
"[The videos] include words and behaviors that are extremely racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, sexist, and hostile to people with disabilities," Syverud wrote. "I am appalled and shaken by this and deeply concerned for all members of our community."
According to the Daily Orange, the fraternity members engage in all kinds of horrific behavior in the various online videos—including an apparent Holocaust reference, when someone shouts "you fuckin’ k*kes, get in the fuckin’ showers!" In another, someone yells, "he’s drooling out of his mouth because he’s retarded in a wheelchair." Students are also told to talk "about their significant others while drinking different wines and talking in gay girly accents."
snip
https://twitter.com/KennedyWrites/status/986735205896654853
'Extremely Racist' Video Shows Frat Swearing to Hate Black and Jewish People
The clips posted to a secret Facebook group were also described by Syracuse University as "anti-semitic," "homophobic," and "sexist," which is really an understatement.https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmg538/extremely-racist-video-shows-syracuse-frat-swearing-to-hate-black-and-jewish-people-vgtrn
"I solemnly swear to always have hatred in my heart for n*ggers, sp*cs and most importantly the fuckin' k*kes." That was the "oath" members of Syracuse University engineering fraternity, Theta Tau, seemed encouraged to recite in an online video obtained by the college's student newspaper Wednesday, igniting widespread protests across campus, Syracuse.com reports.
The video obtained by the Daily Orange was said to be one of many filmed at the frat's house and posted to a secret Facebook group, reportedly by an SU senior and chapter member. According a Syracuse spokeswoman, they were then "sent to university officials," as the New York Times reports. In a campus-wide email sent out Wednesday, Syracuse University chancellor Kent Syverud said that the fraternity had been "immediately suspended."
"[The videos] include words and behaviors that are extremely racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, sexist, and hostile to people with disabilities," Syverud wrote. "I am appalled and shaken by this and deeply concerned for all members of our community."
According to the Daily Orange, the fraternity members engage in all kinds of horrific behavior in the various online videos—including an apparent Holocaust reference, when someone shouts "you fuckin’ k*kes, get in the fuckin’ showers!" In another, someone yells, "he’s drooling out of his mouth because he’s retarded in a wheelchair." Students are also told to talk "about their significant others while drinking different wines and talking in gay girly accents."
snip
https://twitter.com/KennedyWrites/status/986735205896654853
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