From journalism to propaganda

Whatever happened to the journalism tradition of pretending to present a balanced perspective? 

I say "pretending" because everybody always knew there were 101 ways to rig the final product, but it was the principle of the thing. Appearances matter. We were better than those totalitarian states where the government dictates the news and it's all propaganda. We in the Nations of Virtue believe in a free press, and our free press gave you the news, not propaganda.

Those days are long gone.  The CBC will have Bill Browder on and defer to him as a world expert on Russia with impeccable credentials, without ever hinting that there exists an opposing school of thought about the man. He is widely considered a fraud in Europe today.

Same with Eliot Higgins, the savant supposedly behind Bellingcat. I heard Matt Galloway interview him recently, and maybe international geopolitics isn't his bag, but he brought a level of credulity to the interview that would be more appropriate for a fan club president than a journalist.

Bellingcat is financed by the NATO countries and staffed primarily by veterans of the UK security establishment. At the very least, an interview should put that fact on the table. Instead, it's treated as Russian disinformation - just like Chrystia Freeland's Nazi Grampa.

You see this lack of balance all the time in the pages of The Globe and Mail as well. Today those stalwarts of the Yellow Peril file at the Globe, Robert Fife and Steven Chase, managed to wring a quarter page of anti-China propaganda out of a report from ACHK, the Alliance Canada Hong Kong. We are told this "is an umbrella group for pro-democracy advocates in this country."

Which it is. What we're not told is ACHK was founded in Vancouver in January last year, by pro-democracy activists who had already been kicked out of HK for their efforts or were getting out while the getting was good.

The folks who organized this crowd.

These pro-democracy activists have been lavishly funded by the US government via the National Endowment for Democracy for many years, and presumably that's who's funding ACHK now. If this organization issued a "report," what would you expect it to say?

I would expect it to say pretty much what Fife and Chase reported. But, if Fife and Chase were actual journalists, we would have seen a little more in the way of context.

Context doesn't matter. Balance doesn't matter. Nothing matters except maintaining the official narrative.

Doesn't that sound exactly like what the "journalists" used to do in those totalitarian states?

What is the mission of Bellingcat?

You gotta love those Horatio Alger bootstrap tales that Western propaganda keeps shoving down your throat.

Little Bana.

Malalah.

The Syrian sniper babe.

Pussy Riot.

Darlings of the western media, every one.

Concoctions of our full spectrum propaganda war, every one.

Eliot Higgins, Brown Moses, and Bellingcat are likewise concoctions of the establishment spin-miesters. 

I mention this only because of the hysterically self-righteous article by Eliot that the normally sensible folks at Unherd saw fit to publish. 

The slippery little turd forgot to mention his sponsorship by Regime Change Central, aka the National Endowment for Democracy. 

You know, that "non-government-organisation" totally funded by the US government.

You would think that sensible people would see through that bullshit. If you follow Higgins' work you'll see what side he's on in the overall scheme of things. That would be the side of his paymasters in case you were wondering.

You have to marvel at the provenance of the Higgins brand. Another stay-at-home loafer, brought up on Chomsky and Pilger, has a lot of spare time, and before you know it, he is discovering stuff on Google Earth that even the sharpest tools in deep state spook bunkers missed!

Of course he is!

Pot-addled hillbilly beats Ruskies to the truth about "Mississauga Pete" by eight long years

And I thought those f@ckers read my blog...

Check this out. Looks like the Ruskies finally cottoned onto Pyotr Versilov, aka Pete from Mississauga, eight long years after this blog spilled the beans.

But what is truly amazing is that Pete has managed to stretch his fifteen minutes of fame this long. A shiftless wanker from Mississauga has been coasting on his stipends from the National Endowment for Democracy way longer than I ever would have thought possible!


That does it... I'm heading to Russia to become a anti-Putin activist. I hear the money is good and the living is easy...

Freedom for Hong Kong!

After the HK freedom-fighters took a brief break on account of the Wuhan Flu, they're back!



Seriously, how retarded are these people? The only people Trump will ever liberate is billionaires from their tax obligations. This of course is the opposite of "liberation" for the rest of us, the ones who will be dealing with austerity and tax hikes for the next several generations to pay for what's going on now.

At some level I have empathy for the young people of Hong Kong. The city is virtually unlivable for them. A home of your own is entirely out of the question unless you're born into serious money. Most of these protesters are doomed to live in their parents' home till they can inherit it. Since that home is most likely a 350 ft one bedroom apartment, they are understandably grumpy.

But their shit-hole prospects are not the fault of the Peoples Republic of China.

They are the fault of HK's billionaire class, many of whom made their billions in the territory's real estate market.

Nevertheless, thanks to generous funding from the US government's "National Endowment for Democracy" and further funding from some of those very billionaires who have immiserated them, these morons have been duped into projecting their justifiable rage onto the government of the PRC.

This is of course exactly the reason the NED, a US government funded "Non-Government Organization," has lavished them with money over the years. In the pursuit of "full spectrum dominance," these useful idiots are invaluable in undermining China.

And they certainly take their mission seriously. Here they are knocking some sense into a passer-by who didn't agree with their protest.

Here's another hapless Hong Konger getting a dose of NED-style freedom and democracy


And these "protesters" are people we should support?

Sudan: revolution of the 3%?

I'm impressed with how many of the protesters in Sudan own cars. Just this morning on the CBC news we heard that protesters were coordinating the tooting of their car horns to the rhythm of protest chants. What a heart-warming story! I wonder if that's a resistance strategy promoted by one of those "civil society" initiatives the Nations of Virtue are forever pushing on the lesser peoples?

Car caravans of protesters are ubiquitous in media coverage of the protests.



This imagery seems at odds with common perceptions of Sudan as one of the worlds' most pathetic economic basket cases. So I looked up the vehicle ownership stats for Sudan.

Sudan has 33 cars per thousand population. Canada has over 600 per thousand. Obviously, Sudan's elite are spearheading the move to dump Omar al-Bashir.

Here's a list of projects the US government's NGO the National Endowment for Democracy has funded in Sudan over the last twenty years or so;

• Babiker Badri Scientific Association for Women's Studies (1996, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2004)
• Badya Center for Integrated Development Service (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005)
• Badya Centre for Integrated Development (1999)
• Center for Documentation and Advocacy (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004)
• Center for Sudanese Studies (1993, 1994)
• Center for the Strategic Initiatives of Women (2000)
• Community Development Center (2002, 2004)
• Democracy Development Center (2003)
• Environmentalists Society (2000, 2001, 2002, 2004)
• Equatoria Relief and Development Association (2003)
• Freedom Equality Peace Society (2003, 2004)
• Fund for Peace (1992, 1993, 1994, 1996)
• Fund for Peace channelled to Sudan Democratic Gazette (1995, 1996, 1997, 1998)
• Fund for Peace channelled to Six Sudanese Activist Organizations (1998)
• Gender Center for Research and Training (2002)
• Grand Africa Media Service Company – The Khartoum Monitor (2005)
• International Republican Institute (2002)
• Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies (1991)
• Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies channelled to Sudan Democratic Gazette (1992)
• Justice Africa (2002)
• KharSummary Toum MoniSummary Tor (2001)
• Khartoum Monitor (2002, 2004)
• KwoSummary To Popular Theater Group (2001)
• Kwoto Cultural Center (2002, 2003, 2005)
• Kwoto Popular Theatre Group (1999, 2000)
• Mohamed Omer Beshir Centre for Sudanese Studies, Omdurman Ahlia University (2001)
• Mutawinat Benevolent Co. (2002)
• Mutawinat Benevolent Company (1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003)
• Mutawinat (Women Cooperating) (2004)
• National Center for Peace and Development (2003, 2005)
• National Democratic Institute (2003, 2004)
• New Sudan Council of Churches (2000)
• Nile Institution for Strategic Policy and Development Studies (2004)
• Southern Women Group for Peace (2003)
• Sudan Council of Churches (2004)
• Sudan Democratic Gazette (1996, 1999, 2000, 2001)
• Sudan Human Rights Association (1993, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004)
• Sudan Human Rights Association - Uganda (2002)
• Sudan Human Rights Organization (Cairo) (1999, 2001, 2003, 2005)
• Sudan Inter-Religious Council (2005)
• Sudan Organization Against Torture (2003)
• Sudan Self-Help Foundation (2004, 2005)
• Sudanese Studies Center (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005)  (per sourcewatch)

Unfortunately, as is the case with all too many American democracy promotion initiatives, NED is going to need a little help from a man in uniform. Meet the guy who's going to midwife the birth of Sudanese democracy!

                               Lt. General Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf

Good luck, folks!

"Objective" journalism and the OCCRP

There's an old folk proverb to the effect that "he who pays the piper calls the tune." There's a lot of truth in that.

Mark MacKinnon's byline appears above a story in yesterday's Globe and Mail that was passed along by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, with perhaps a little help from Bill Browder. The story attempts to link Canada's Bombardier to payments allegedly made by shady organized crime figures supposedly in Putin's orbit, a topic on which Browder regards himself the world's leading expert.

The OCCRP home page includes the logos of its sponsors; USAID, Open Society Foundations, ICFJ, and the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

USAID is the "humanitarian" arm of the US government and as such, is used as a tool to advance US interests world-wide.

Open Society Foundations is a George Soros philanthropy. Soros' "philanthropic" interests tend to overlap to a remarkable degree with the interests of the US State Department.

The International Center For Journalists is funded by US government "ngo" National Endowment for Democracy as well as Soros' Open Society Institute, among other foundations.

The Global Investigative Journalism Network gets its money from Google and the Open Society Foundations, among others.

With respect to paying the piper, I think it's rather obvious why the OCCRP fights corruption primarily where and when said corruption can be pinned on America's "adversaries," such as Russia and Venezuela.

I'm not claiming the corruption being investigated by OCCRP isn't real. What I am saying is OCCRP is first and foremost a political tool deployed against perceived enemies of the US ruling class.


That's why they'll never investigate American corruption... or Bill Browder.

Robert Mugabe reads this blog!

On 28th October I wrote about Zimbabwe being the only country in Africa without a US military presence, but not to worry - the National Endowment for Democracy are busy beavers there, so it's only a matter of time.

Six days later, Martha O'Donovan, an American working for a NED funded project in Zimbabwe, gets arrested for offending President Mugabe. Coincidence?

In its 2016 Annual Report NED reveals that amongst the million and a half dollars it sprinkled around the country that year was a $45,000 stipend to the Magamba Network, O'Donovan's employer, "to promote freedom of expression and pro-democracy activism by youth through the use of satire, citizen journalism, and creative new media platforms..."

That is so Uncle Sam, is it not?

How is it that the US government has money for the youth of Africa to promote all that good stuff, but not for the youth of Flint or Baltimore?

Anyway, Martha, the old coot is 93 and won't be around much longer. When he finally kicks the bucket all those pro-democracy activists that the NED and Open Society Institutes have been training for years will spring into action.

It might get a little messy.

It might require a few special ops guys on the ground to protect America's enduring interests.

But change is coming to Zimbabwe!

Flint and Baltimore will have to wait.

Who's afraid of George Soros?

That's the title of a less than insightful three-pager in the Insight section of the Sunday Star today. (not to be confused with a story by the same title in the Times of Israel from a few months ago, which pretty much plowed the same ground.)

According to Emily Tamkin, a lot of your up-and-coming populist despots in Eastern Europe are deathly scared of George Soros. They're anti-Semitic of course, as populists tend to be. It's just a thing with those populists.

The take in Israel is a little more nuanced. The Likudniks and everyone to the right of them (and shocking though it may be to fathom, Likud are now "moderates" in the Israeli political spectrum) consider Soros one of the greatest anti-Semites of our time!

So who is George Soros? Anti-Semite extraordinaire or victim of antisemitism?

That's why I think the Star might have done us more of a service if they introduced us to the guy first. Nevermind who's afraid of George Soros... who IS George Soros?

When I google that out here at Falling Downs I get about 14 million responses in .85 seconds. You probably get more in less time if your working from an urban area. And what do you find there?

Well, it looks to me like about thirteen and a half million of those sites (not that I actually looked at that many) belong to hard-core conspiracy types who are hot on the trail of the New World Order; ya, the Illuminati and all that shit.

OH MY GOD THE JEWS ARE TAKING OVER!!!

Of course they are...

Here's why I have grave reservations about George Soros, and it's got nothing to do with his ethnicity. The Open Society shtick sounds good on the face of it. Who's not for open societies? Open societies are a beautiful thing!

But what does it mean? Open to who and to what? What I find profoundly disconcerting is that time and time again Soros "philanthropy" aligns itself seamlessly with the National Endowment for Democracy and similar US government sponsored and funded "Non Government Organizations."

That's always been a bit of a mind-fuck for me; how the hell are you an NGO when you get all your funding from the US government?

But anyway, the fact that Soros and the US State Department have had many joint ventures across decades should be a giant red flag, at least to my way of thinking.

Then there's the question of how Soros makes his money. He's widely touted as one of the world's most successful investors. There are investors and there are investors. Some invest in socially positive initiatives that do more than enrich the investor. Other investors are out to loot and pillage and the public good be damned. (Which reminds me; when is somebody going to write a book about Gerry Schwartz's investment adventure in Husky Injection Molding?)

What kind of investor is George Soros? The kind who makes billions in the most sophisticated currency speculation schemes imaginable. And he's really really good at it!

Alas, that does not quite bring the same suite of benefits to humanity as, say, being a really really good brain surgeon or scientist or school-teacher. But it does keep George rolling in billions, which he can then dole out to "democracy activists" in various states where he could conceivably, some day, find himself betting against the currency of that sovereign state in order to make even more billions!

But that's just my theory.

If you've got a better one, let me know.

Spring's sprung

Me and the Farm Manager were sitting on the front porch this afternoon, enjoying the warm weather, when the first guy of the season in bicycle pants rode by.

A sure sign that spring has sprung. There's a cycling club in Owen Sound that has the road in front of Falling Downs as part of their regular 50k loop. These folks always remind me of the punchline to one of Jeff Foxworthy's jokes; "if Burt Reynolds can't get down that river a Frenchman in bicycle pants doesn't stand a chance."

Too bad I can't remember the joke that was the punchline to...

I actually did a lot of cycling in my time. Back in my U of Goo days I used to pass cars coming down the Gordon Street hill. No bicycle pants, no helmet, just a Raleigh 18 speed weaving in and out of traffic after a Sociology of Poverty class and a four hour stint at the campus pub.

Those were the days!

But these days are pretty good too.

Just yesterday I put the canoe in across the road and paddled my way down to Bass Lake. That's a small lake by local standards, but it houses a few dozen cottages and a trailer park. Shame about the trailer park. You'd be hard pressed to find a cottage on that lake for under 400 thousands, but you can rent a trailer site for a hundred bucks a month. On the same lake.

Go figure.

They don't call it a "trailer park," of course; it's a "holiday resort."

Sure it is!

That Bass Lake canoe trip only happens in the spring, when the water's high. In another month I'll be able to walk down the Indian River in rubber boots and reach Bass Lake without getting my socks wet.

Nothing much in my national newspaper of record this weekend. Marcus Gee had a nice take-down of Richard Florida. He was a hot commodity a few years back when U of T hired him. An apostle of intelligent development I suppose you could call him.

Not sure what that means. I've bumped into more than a few folks in that business in my time, and none of them were stupid.

Short-sighted? Greedy? Selfish?

Maybe... but stupid?

Nope.

So Florida is having second thoughts about the thesis that brought him fame and fortune and a tenured post at U of T. Gather up all the young creative disrupters you can and turn them loose on your town. Great things will happen!

Mostly what's happened is the young creatives can no longer afford to live in Toronto.

So it was a beautiful canoe trip. You don't really get into cottage country till you're three quarters of the way down the lake. There was still spots of snow on the ground here and there and I set out a little apprehensive; after all, the historical record of me and canoe trips would suggest there's at least a 50/50 chance of ending up in the drink.

Thank goodness I beat the odds yesterday. The water was really really cold and I couldn't find a life-jacket anywhere.

Doug Saunders had a bit of a mystifying opinion piece in the paper, all about George Soros. Here's the head-scratcher that caught my eye; "One of Europe's most important higher education institutions, Central European University..."

Huh?

CEU was founded twenty-five years ago and has less than 1500 students. We're talking about Europe here. Universities are hundreds of years old and have tens of thousands of students. By what metric might CEU be considered one of Europe's most important higher education institutions?

Come on, Doug. You destroy your own cred with that kind of hyperbole.

But I suppose it can be deemed important in the context of writing hagiography for Soros. CEU is a Soros project from end to end, and Doug's opinion piece this weekend was determined to show the old greed-bag in a good light.

Soros is certainly an interesting character study. On the one hand, he lobbies for higher taxes on billionaires like himself. On the other, he's not shy about availing himself of every tax dodge he can.

On one hand he likes to portray himself as a victim of Antisemitism.  In Israel he's widely considered one of the greatest Antisemites of the modern era.

Soros has partnered for many years with the National Endowment for Democracy, the US government funded "NGO" working non-stop to make the world safer for Soros-style financial looting. By and large it's a strategy that has worked well.

There's the odd hiccup, however. Hungarian president Oban for one has seen through the "open society" schtick, as in being "open" to world class billionaire currency speculators like Soros doesn't necessarily mean good things for the man or woman on the ground in Budapest. Hence the squabble over Soros U.

At no point does Saunders address the obvious elephant in the room; billionaires just have too much money. Whether it's the Koch boys spreading Tea Party goodness or Soros pushing his "open society" agenda, a little tweaking of the tax code would go a long way toward cutting out this foolishness.

We live in messed up times. Former Soros business partner and fellow billionaire, current POTUS Donny J did a 180 on US foreign policy the other day because he saw some "beautiful babies" die on TV.

The Tomahawks were in the air before you could ask for an independent  investigation into that alleged war crime.

It's all too much for me. I think I'll just sit tight and plan my next paddle.

How Hillary could have won

The NYT International Weekly had a front page story yesterday about how Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the President of Liberia. Liberia is an impoverished African nation of some four million, where 80% of the population lives in poverty, and the rest, including many members of Johnson Sirleaf's extended family, work for the government.

Here's writer Helene Johnson;  Now, as American women grapple with the whys of Hillary Clinton's loss in November's election, the story of how Liberia's women upended centuries of male rule is newly relevant.

That in itself is a dubious proposition. Did Margaret Thatcher's stint as PM of the UK upend centuries of male rule there?

Like most African heads of state, Johnson Sirleaf is a member of the elite Bintu tribe. Collectively they've been to the elite universities of the West and spent quality time networking their careers forward through the corridors of the most prestigious Western financial institutions. In Sirleaf's case, she's been to Harvard, Citibank and the World Bank. It's a pedigree that opens doors among the Western elites.

Couple that with the fact the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy has been meddling in Liberia's politics since the 1980's, and you'd think her election victory would have been a slam dunk.

But it wasn't. It took all that plus dirty tricks galore;

...the women had their own tricks. "You want beer? Just give me your voter ID card and I will buy you beer." A group of women stationed at a bar near a major intersection lured young men in a time honored fashion.

Hmm... what do you suppose that means? Maybe the Clinton campaign was on the right track when they had Madonna offering free blowjobs, but even there they messed up. Madonna is almost sixty years old. If the Dems had had the foresight to offer blowjobs by Katy Perry AND free beer, Hillary would be in the White House today!

Countdown to Armageddon

 It's been busy times here at Falling Downs.

Bubby took another spill recently and therefore the Farm Manager has been splitting her time between the farm and Bubby's place in town. The main thrust of the time in town is to convince the fiercely independent Bubbinator to just say "yes" to a home.

The next day Hillary went viral with her denunciation of "fake news." Yup, apparently it was fake news that crippled her campaign.

It wasn't that Trump thoroughly out-worked her. I mean she was doing one event every other day and he was doing four or five every day. Trump may be a silver-spoon twat, but you gotta admit the man has a work ethic. Not only that, but he actually had stuff to say that resonated with a lot of folks.

Trump was the first political contender to ixnay the "free trade floats all boats" bullshit that has been conventional wisdom for the past quarter century. If nothing else, we should thank him for that.

But back to "fake news."

We gotta be on the look-out for fake news. It's everywhere all the time, especially once you're out of the certified truthiness neighbourhoods out there in the world 'o news. You know what I'm talking about. Play it safe; get your news from reputable news sources like WaPo and NYT and you'll be good. Get your news from some dodgy punks at Global Research or Paul Craig Roberts' website, and... well, obviously you're imbibing Putin's propaganda wholesale.

So on Friday the mainstream news was chock full of fulminations about those dastardly Russian Olympians who have been making a mockery of WADA and every wholesome convention of fair play in sports. Russians are cheaters, was the message. And of course, Russia being the dictatorship that it is, Putin bears personal responsibility for every Russian infraction of the rules of fair play.

I actually had some things to say about that on Friday. Unfortunately, Friday was consumed by the demands of the Farm Manager's holiday party at her day job. Yup, the FM has a day job. The cash flow here at Falling Downs is not sufficient for the lifestyle she is accustomed to, especially in those years when the OPP Air Force flags our herb garden. Even though we keep the herb garden on the neighbour's property, this is the kind of thing that has a very negative effect on the cash flow around here.

So instead of writing a thought-provoking blog, I had to go to a party where grown-up middle-aged types were playing "party games." People were voluntarily dabbing vaseline on their noses so they could safely carry a cotton ball across the room. Because if you could do that faster than your competition, you won the game!

Get the fuck outta here. Some of those folks are actually interesting people who I wouldn't mind talking to. Watching them carry a cotton ball across the room stuck to a gob of vaseline on their nose does NOT interest me.

In any way whatsoever.

Next day, the Russian hacker shit hit the mainstream news fan. Yup, unnamed sources have informed the Washington Post that the CIA has determined that the Ruskies interfered with the US election in favour of Trump!

Oh!

My!

God!!!

It's true then! Even as those Podesta emails were ripping the curtain away from Hillary's all-out campaign to undermine Bernie we were being side-tracked into thinking the scandal was not about the Dem hierarchy fucking Sanders, but about the "fact" that the Ruskies were behind the leaks!

That gosh-darned Putin!

So I was about to post a pithy blog about that, but had to defer it because I had a holiday family function to attend in Waterloo. My dear Uncle Werner, who used to be a professor at the University there, started this tradition a quarter century ago. Alas, he is so far ahead of me on the Alzheimer Highway that I don't even have his tail-lites in view anymore, and he hasn't attended his own tradition in years, but nevertheless I make an effort.

Even though it was six hours of driving through various levels of blizzard for a bowl of chilli I'm always glad I made the effort. You get to see those elders who are still more or less with it. And some who aren't.

You get to catch up with the youngsters who are racking up massive student debt at the finest universities in the land.

And you get to catch up with your peers who parent those kids and whose parents are not 100% anymore. It's usually a very therapeutic undertaking. You come away with a new appreciation for your situation. I mean, you can be on the brink of bankruptcy, have seventeen different medical procedures pending, but holy shit, at least you're not in cousin so-and-so's shoes...

That makes six hours of driving through blizzard conditions for a sandwich and a bowl of soup eminently reasonable!

But it did cause a further delay for the next blog post.

So here's what I've been wanting to say ever since Hillary made her anti-alt-news speech last Thursday.

The so-called fake news sites have a long way to go before they catch up to our mainstream outlets in the disbursement of fake news. When you get fake news from InfoWars or Breitbart, who cares?

When you get fake news from the Washington Post or the New York Times, bad shit happens.

Like the war on Afghanistan.

Like the war on Iraq.

Like the destruction of Libya.

Like the current fiasco in Syria.

In every case our honest and reliable mainstream news media delivered up a fully baked loaf of bullshit as though it was "real" news.

The Washington Post and the New York Times peddled the most egregious bullshit as though it were true.

Millions believed them.

Millions died.

So now we are expected to snap to attention because WaPo publishes a story attributed to "anonymous sources" in the CIA who tell us Putin interfered in this election?

Get the fuck outta here!

Yes, interfering in the democratic process is a vile thing, and ya, maybe Putin's minions have engaged in such dastardly deeds.

Maybe.

But take a gander at the home page of the National Endowment for Democracy. Right there on their home page they boast about interfering in the democratic process in over 90 countries!

And if you want to talk about fake shit, how do you like their claim that they are a "private, non-profit foundation."

Bullshit!

It's a 100% fake NGO that gets 100% of its financing from the US government! NGO stands for "non- government organization." How is a non-government organization a non-government organization if they get all their funding from the government?

Anyway, these are the sorts of folks who are running scared at the thought of a Trump presidency. If they're scared, they must know something about Trump that I don't.

Not that there isn't plenty to be scared of. I mean how many billionaires and generals and GS alumns can you pack into your cabinet and still pretend you're the saviour of the little people?

The countdown to Armageddon is on.

Orwell's Hole

Check out today's latest news from Ukraine at the Kyiv Post. I don't know about you, but I find it telling that Kyiv Post gets it's Ukrainian news from the New York Times!

But just what that is telling you, I'm not sure. The Post is the plaything of Mohammad Zahoor, a London-based Ukrainian oligarch of Pakistani origin who, in the style of an entire generation of oligarchs, parlayed being in the right place at the right time when the Soviet Union collapsed, into a fortune in Donetsk steel mills.

Well, you know how it is with this darned internet; one thing leads to another, and before you know it, the day is half over, and you're reading the National Endowment for Democracy's 2013 annual report on where in Ukraine that US government funded Non-Governmental Organization invested the American tax-payers money in that pivitol pre-Maidan year.

It's a lengthy list, but here's my favorite;

Center for International Private EnterpriseDeveloping Market Economy
$357,707
Building Advocacy MomentumTo build the capacity of Ukrainian business associations and improve the entrepreneurial climate through coalition-based advocacy. CIPE will build the skills of reform-minded business leaders through training seminars, workshops and small grants designed to stimulate advocacy on targeted issues. CIPE will also support partner business associations to advocate for improvements in the entrepreneurial environment with a focus on reducing corruption and improving public-private dialogue.

I think it's hilarious that a country that has spawned a alphabet's worth of super-rich from Akhmetov to Zahoor would need something called the "Center for International Private Enterprise," financed by the US government!

You don't imagine that might be some CIA front, do you?

Flash mob democracy

All those news stories in today's papers trumpeting the demise of Yanukovych tend to downplay one salient factor; whatever the man's shortcomings as a leader, he was in fact elected to his position in a reasonably fair election process. His premature removal from office, on the other hand, was the result of mob violence in the streets.

A not dissimilar trajectory marked the demise of Egypt's democratically elected President Morsi last July. The major difference was that in the end the street violence in Egypt was not in itself sufficient to turn the deed, and the US sponsored military had to step in to enforce "the will of the people."

In both cases we have seen the legitimacy of the democratic process trumped by the flash mob.

Both cases are victories for US based "democracy promotion" NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy and their numerous quasi-governmental affiliates. These "NGOs" are doubly deceptive; in the first instance, they are funded virtually in their entirety by the US government, rendering the "NG" part of their labels more than a little suspect.

Secondly, when they are instrumental in the removal of democratically elected governments, it is a curious sort of "democracy" they are promoting.

The NED has for some time focussed on the uses of social media as a tool to organize opposition in the countries where it operates. It's a strategy that has now been proven effective in paralyzing the government and economy of targeted societies. What we are witnessing is the evolution of how governments are installed and maintained, an evolution driven by developments in technology.

That in itself is not new. The printing press, the telegraph, radio, television, and the internet have all impacted the evolution of the democratic process.

What seems to be new is that until the present time these technological changes served to democratize the process by which governments are installed and maintained. The process of choosing  leadership was taken away from priests and magi and hereditary leaders. It was also taken away from angry hordes mobilizing in the streets.

The process was bureaucratized and institutionalized. We've evolved something called "the rule of law," which while nowhere perfect, did insulate the process effectively from the demands of easily manipulated  street mobs. The current technology seems to be a reversal. Social media are unravelling the last five hundred years in the evolution of democracy as we know it.

One of the as-yet little-appreciated effects of this change is that by its nature, this technology is very effective in gathering a mass of disaffected individuals on a given street or in a particular square. That's the definition of "flash mob." What the technology cannot do is replace the kind of oppositional networks that grow from long term commitment to activism.

Those are the kind of networks that can effectively oppose entrenched power institutions. The overthrow of the military regime in Egypt by the Muslim Brotherhood was the result of several generations of activism undertaken at great personal risk by members of an organization that had a cogent set of core values and an agenda. The overthrow of the Morsi administration was the result of mere weeks of virulent anti-Morsi flash mob activism.

We know how that has turned out.

Will Ukraine be different? Or, when the smoke settles will we see a nation, or perhaps two nations, even less accountable than the hapless Yanukovych?

And what of other flash mob revolutions currently in play to a greater or lesser extent in Venezuela, Turkey, and Thailand, all of them well trod playgrounds for the "democracy promoters" of the NED?

Technology is facilitating a brand new world of democracy, and it's starting to look a lot like the bad old world of rule by rioting mob.

The era of flash mob democracy has arrived.

America's phony NGOs and the Ukraine gambit

Since the Reagan era American taxpayers have involuntarily gifted billions of dollars to US government creations like the National Endowment for Democracy and similar fake NGO's.

It's no secret that a considerable amount of effort and money has been invested in stirring up anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine. Ukraine would indeed be a major prize, geographically and politically, to lure into the Western camp.

The Boiling Frogs blog has a comical story today "proving" that the US-funded democracy activists in Kiev have been using the identical pamphlets that the US-funded democracy activists in Tahrir Square were passing around two years ago; in translation, of course.

It's essentially the same story that Wayne Madsen had on the Voltairenet blog in the middle of December.

On the occasion of the toppling of Lenin's statue in Kiev earlier in December I wrote that those idealistic youth should be careful what they wish for. The latest numbers from the World Bank indicate a youth unemployment rate in Ukraine that is lower than almost all the EU nations. Why would they be so keen to join the EU?

That's where the slow and steady drip of ceaseless on the ground propagandizing, courtesy of America's myriad phony NGOs comes in. The Neocons thought they had Ukraine in the bag almost ten years ago with the "Orange Revolution", but that was not to be. They see this as their next best, and possibly last chance.

That's why, in addition to on-the-ground "democracy activists," even Neocon heavy hitters like John McCain and Victoria Nuland find time to assist the effort. McCain even made time to have dinner with anti-government stalwart and neo-nazi Oleh Tyahnybok while he was in Kiev.  Nuland made a point of passing out sweets and sweet talk to the protesters.

I don't live in Ukraine, so the question of whether the country chooses to be more closely aligned with the EU or Russia is neither here nor there for me. Ideally they should be able to forge good relations with both. But to do that, they need to be left to their own devices and allowed to make their own choices.

Nuland, McCain, NED, take your phony NGOs and your US-financed "democracy activists" and go home.

Let the Ukrainian people decide the future of Ukraine.