“So now the question becomes: how did Russia know to target African American voters, and especially in certain key states,” asked popular #Resistance pundit Amy Siskind in response to a New York Times article claiming Russian social media trolls targeted Sanders supporters and Black voters during the 2016 election.

“I think we’ll get our answers in the coming months from the Mueller probe,” Siskind speculated.

Well that’s a mighty good question there, Amy, and I think the answer is pretty obvious. Clearly Russia knew to target African American voters because Donald Trump called his boss Vladimir Putin and told him about America’s secret racial issues, which nobody in any foreign country could ever know about on their own. Then it was a simple matter of sending the trolls of St Petersburg’s Internet Research Agency to trick Black people into thinking that the American political system hasn’t been working for them, thereby ensuring the defeat of the rightful heir to the presidential throne, Hillary Rodham Clinton. It’s not disenfranchised voters’ fault that Hillary’s coronation failed to take place, it’s the fault of Russian memes on social media which confused their silly heads about who they wanted to vote for!

Or, alternate theory: everything about that question is immensely stupid.

✔

So now the question becomes: how did Russia know to target African Americanvoters, and especially in certain key states. I think we’ll get our answers in the coming months from the Mueller probe. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/us/politics/russia-2016-influence-campaign.html …

1,870

9:55 AM – Dec 17, 2018

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Yevgeny Prigozhin, left, and the Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin, center, at a dinner in 2011. Mr. Prigozhin was indicted by American prosecutors for his involvement in interfering in the 2016 presidential election.

Russian 2016 Influence Operation Targeted African-Americans on Social Media

Two reports commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee take a deeper look at the fake social media accounts used by Russia in the American election.

nytimes.com

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Deepfakes And Political Manipulation

November 3, 2018

Deepfakes And Political Manipulation

Not a day seems to go by without the American media writing about Russia’s Internet meddling in the US elections. Major international and specialist publications headquartered in the US are routinely regurgitating the myth about “Russian trolls” and “GRU hackers” without a single shred of evidence besides unsubstantiated accusations. Actually, evidence has been provided by a private company, but this evidence points to the contrary. As one Google project so convincingly shows, for example, for just $100 you can create the illusion that a Russian company is trying to influence public opinion within America. All you need to do is buy a mobile phone and a few SIM cards in Panama, choose a common Russian name and surname and use it to set up a Yandex account, then indicate your IP address is in Saint Petersburg using NordVPN. You can then set up an account with AdWords, pay for advertising using the details of a legally registered company, and place political content on the Internet that could be regarded as inflammatory. This was what was done by US citizens from Google and they didn’t hesitate to report on it. So what is stopping the NSA, the CIA, or some Russophobe fanatics familiar with hacking techniques from doing exactly the same thing, regardless of whether they belong to a political party or not? Common sense suggests that this is exactly what is being done to create the appearance of Russian interference, but no one is able to provide any real evidence, of course.

Another example of how the US can influence public opinion is the creation of fake propaganda, a technique that was developed by the US military in Iraq in the early 2000s.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will Elections ever be Valid Any More?

October 18, 2018

Will Elections ever be Valid Any More?

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; You have stated that you believe Kennedy was assassinated by the US Intelligence community. Given all this stuff with Comey, FBI, CIA, and NSA all conspiring against Trump, do you think that the real risk of interfering with our elections is not the Russians but closer to home? Is this a practice that always takes place that we are just suddenly becoming aware of these days?

Thank you

see you in Orlando

ANSWER: Absolutely. It is being called Spygate and it is very disturbing. The Democrats did absolutely everything to put Hillary in office. They thought they won. They had the press in their pocket like CNN, New York Times, and the Washington Post leading a host of others. We have to realize that Democracy is dead. I really do fear that Trump will be the LAST democratically elected president. What comes after Trump is not going to be warm and endearing.

Politicians have been rigging elections since ancient times. There can be no greater example of political corruption that required desperate reform than the calendar. Cato or the more moderate Cicero both criticized Julius Caesar who became pontifex max (high priest) taking charge of the calendar. The Romans used the moon calendar but knew it was incorrect and thus it required adjustments by inserting days. The corruption degenerated to such a point that elections could be postponed by the insertion of days. This realization led to bribing the high priest to even insert months to affect the political elections. This is why Julius Caesar revised the calendar to eliminate the political corruption. Moreover, interest rates would rise during elections because of the amount of money being paid out in bribing votes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Facebook Meddles in the 2018 Midterm Elections

October 16, 2018

Facebook Meddles in the 2018 Midterm Elections

Photo Source Mike Mozart | CC BY 2.0

On October 11, Facebook announced the removal of 559 pages and 251 accounts from its service, accusing the account holders of “spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

The purged users stand accused of posting “massive amounts of content … to drive traffic to their websites” with suspicious “timing ahead of US midterm elections.”

Facebook admits to “legitimate reasons” for such behavior — “it’s the bedrock of fundraising campaigns and grassroots organizations.” Not to mention the operations of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and a bunch of other users/pages which weren’t purged.

Facebook also admits that it has previously “enforced this policy against many Pages, Groups and accounts created to stir up political debate …”

In other words, Facebook’s administrators are meddling in politics — including the 2018 US midterm elections — in the name of preventing meddling in politics.

Who benefits from the meddling? It doesn’t seem to fall along “left/right” lines in particular. The victims come from across the political spectrum — from Reverb Press on the left, to Right Wing News on the right, to the libertarian Free Thought Project — some with millions of Facebook followers.

The primary thread connecting victims of the purge seems to be that they are critics and/or opponents of the American political “mainstream” or “establishment.”

In a sense, this is nothing new. Even before Internet “social media,” the old guard “mainstream media” tended to draw fairly narrow lines on either side of the perceived political “center” or “consensus” and avoid coloring (or publishing e.g. reader letters that colored) very far outside those lines. One might support or oppose a tax increase, or even a particular tax, but opposing taxation in general? Why, that was just crazy and not worthy of consideration — or of column inches.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Shaky Case That Russia Manipulated Social Media to Tip the 2016 Election

October 11, 2018

The Shaky Case That Russia Manipulated Social Media to Tip the 2016 Election

The idea promoted by NYT’s Shane & Mazzetti that the Russian government seriously threatened to determine the 2016 election does not hold up when the larger social media context is examined more closely, reports Gareth Porter.

In their long recapitulation of the case that Russia subverted the 2016 election, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times painted a picture of highly effective Russian government exploitation of social media for that purpose. Shane and Mazzetti asserted that “anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia could have made the difference” in the election.

“What we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come,” they write elsewhere in the 10,000-word article.

But an investigation of the data they cite to show that the Russian campaigns on Facebook and Twitter were highly effective reveals a gross betrayal of journalistic responsibility. Shane and Mazzetti have constructed a case that is fundamentally false and misleading with statistics that exaggerate the real effectiveness of social media efforts by orders of magnitude.

‘Reaching’ 129 Million Americans

The Internet Research Agency (IRA), is a privately-owned company run by entrepreneur Vevgeny V. Prigozhin, who has ties with President Vladimir Putin. Its employees poured out large numbers of social media postings apparently aimed at stoking racial and cultural tensions in the United States and trying to influence U.S. voters in regard to the presidential election, as Shane and Mazzetti suggest. They even adopted false U.S. personas online to get people to attend rallies and conduct other political activities. (An alternative explanation is that IRA is a purely commercial, and not political, operation.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Not All Quiet on South China Sea

October 11, 2018

Not All Quiet on South China Sea

Photo Source Official U.S. Navy Page | CC BY 2.0

The near collision last week between a US warship and a Chinese destroyer in the Spratlys was more than two naval powers playing cat and mouse on the high sea. The incident came hot on the heels of Trump and Pence accusing China of meddling in US midterm elections, America slapping sanctions on China’s defence procurement unit and its head for buying S-400 air defense system from Russia, wild allegations that China interned more than one million Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, and the intensifying Sino-American trade war.

Such vitriol coming thick and fast from Washington perturbs and angers Beijing, even though China was the preferred scapegoat and whipping boy in past American hustings. What is different this time round is the total and full-frontal assault on the People’s Republic since the National Security Strategy report in December last year named Beijing, along with Moscow, as the foremost threats and adversaries to Washington. Already, the venom and viciousness spouted by Washington against China in recent weeks have far surpassed that directed at Russia.

America’s Unipolar Moment was well and truly over when Russia regained Crimea after the US-orchestrated coup against the democratically-elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Cold War 2.0 began in earnest when Moscow sent troops to Syria in September 2015 at the request of President Assad to help Damascus fight against ISIS terrorists sponsored, trained and armed by the US. The new Cold War expanded to include China late last year after the National Security Strategy report.

It’s against such backdrop and in such geopolitical context that the recent incident in the Spratlys should be viewed. China’s patience and tolerance with almost monthly freedom of navigation patrols or FONP by the American Navy has been tested to the limit.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Step Aside Russia: Pence Accuses China Of “Meddling In American Democracy”

October 4, 2018

Step Aside Russia: Pence Accuses China Of “Meddling In American Democracy”

Update: Highlights from Pence’s speech (via Bloomberg):

*PENCE SAYS TRUMP HAS MADE RELATIONSHIP WITH CHINA `A PRIORITY’
*PENCE: CHINA USING WHOLE-OF-GOVT APPROACH TO INFLUENCE U.S.
*PENCE: HOPE THAT FREEDOM IN CHINA WOULD EXPAND WENT UNFULFILLED
*PENCE: CHINA USING STOLEN TECH TO TURN PLOWSHARES INTO SWORDS
*PENCE: CHINA POLICY HAS USED CURRENCY MANIPULATION, IP THEFT
*PENCE: CHINA USES `DEBT DIPLOMACY’ TO EXPAND ITS INFLUENCE
*PENCE: CHINA EXTENDED LIFELINE TO `CORRUPT’ MADURO REGIME
*PENCE SAYS CHINA IS MEDDLING IN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
*PENCE SAYS WHAT RUSSIANS DOING `PALES’ IN COMPARISON TO CHINA
*PENCE: U.S. WILL ASSERT AMERICAN INTERESTS ACROSS INDO-PACIFIC
*PENCE CALLS FOR GOOGLE TO END DRAGONFLY APP DEVELOPMENT

So that confirms it – China is the new enemy number 1. Xi is the new Putin!

* * *

The White House is about to ratchet up tensions possibly far beyond what they already are amidst the ongoing US trade war with China.

At 11 a.m. eastern time Vice President Mike Pence will deliver at address at the neoconservative Hudson Institute where he’s expected to call China out on a number of explosive issues around the globe where Beijing’s increasingly aggressive actions are seen as a threat to the US, but will especially focus on the Sunday incident involving the USS Decatur which was dangerously intercepted by a Chinese naval vessel in the South China Sea.

The Chinese ship reportedly came within a mere 45 yards of the American warship in international waters; however, it’s but the latest in a string of such threatening incidents intended by Beijing to lay claim to vast swathes of the South China Sea on the basis of its man-made island chains.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Russia, China Slam United States Over “Baseless Accusations Of Interference” And International Bullying

September 29, 2018

Russia, China Slam United States Over “Baseless Accusations Of Interference” And International Bullying

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov vehemently denied US charges of election interference in a speech at the United Nations on Friday – slamming Washington and its international relations.

“Baseless accusations of interference in the domestic affairs of particular countries are made while simultaneously engaging in an open campaign to undermine and topple democratically elected governments,” said Lavrov.

“[W]e see the desire of a number of Western states to retain their self-proclaimed status as ‘world leaders’ and to slow down the irreversible move toward multipolarity that is objectively taking place,” Lavrov continued. “To this end, anything goes, up to and including political blackmail, economic pressure and brute force. Such illegal actions devalue international law, which lies at the foundation of the postwar world order.”

According to the Associated Press, Lavrov later said that US-Russia relations “are bad and probably at their all-time low.”

He expanded on that at a news conference later, giving examples of U.S. interference that included the U.S. envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volcker, promoting efforts to replace the 2015 agreement reached by leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany to end the violence in eastern Ukraine. –AP

Lavrov also defended the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, proclaiming “we will do everything possible” to preserve it (so the Kremlin is now aligned with former Secretary of State John Kerry in this regard, for those keeping track). The Russian dignitary also slammed the Trump administration’s strikes on Syria.

China, meanwhile, dished out far more restrained criticism of their largest trading partner – with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi defending its trade practices, and stating that China “will not be blackmailed or yield to pressure.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Battle for Our Minds

September 26, 2018

The Battle for Our Minds

There are battlefields in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and elsewhere, but given the state of corporate media, perhaps the most consequential battle now being fought is for our minds, says Patrick Lawrence.

After reading The New York Times piece “The Plot to Subvert an Election” I put the paper down with a single question.

Why, after two years of allegations, indictments, and claims to proof of this, that, and the other did the newspaper of record—well, once the newspaper of record—see any need to publish such a piece? My answer is simple: The orthodox account of Russia-gate has not taken hold: It has failed in its effort to establish a consensus of certainty among Americans. My conclusion matches this observation: The orthodox narrative is never going to achieve this objective. There are too many holes in it.

“The information age is actually a media age,” John Pilger, the noted British–Australian journalist, remarked during a symposium four years ago, when the Ukraine crisis was at its peak. “We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media—a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.” Pilger revisited the theme in a piece last week on Consortium News, arguing that once-tolerated, dissenting opinion has in recent years “regressed into a metaphoric underground.”

There are battlefields in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and elsewhere, but perhaps the most consequential battle now being fought is for our minds.

Those who dispense with honest intellectual inquiry, healthy skepticism of all media, and an insistence that assertions require supporting evidence should not win this war. The Times piece by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti—two of the paper’s top-tier reporters—is a case in point: If the Russia-gate narrative were so widely accepted as their report purports, there would have been no need to publish such a piece at this late date.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bannon Declares ‘War Rooms’ to Win European Elections – and That’s Not Meddling?

September 25, 2018

Bannon Declares ‘War Rooms’ to Win European Elections – and That’s Not Meddling?

One trait of imperial decadence is untrammeled hubris. Given the increasingly arrant arrogance on display by United States’ officials, public figures and news media we can safely conclude that this empire is accelerating into decadence.

A recent spectacular example comes with separate visits to Europe by US defense secretary James Mattis and Steve Bannon, the former aide to President Trump.

Bannon was addressing a rightwing forum in Italy at the weekend in which he declared that he would be devoting “80 per cent” of his time to help anti-European Union parties win seats in the next European parliamentary elections due in May 2019.

Bannon said he was setting up a coordinating committee, called “The Movement”, in Brussels, from where his political project would direct “war rooms” across Europe to ensure that anti-EU and anti-immigrant parties would succeed in gaining up to a third of the total seats in the 27-nation member bloc’s parliamentary elections. In short, a declaration of political warfare. Unapologetic. Brazen. Arrogant.

The American ideologue and former Goldman Sachs banker, who is accused of inciting racism and neofascism in the US, has openly backed nationalist politicians in Europe, from the UK’s Nigel Farage to France’s Marine Le Pen, Hungary’s Victor Orban and Italy’s Matteo Salvini.

Bannon is threatening to explicitly unravel the European Union which he views with contempt for what he calls is its “cultural Marxism”.

Meanwhile, earlier last week, Pentagon chief James Mattis was in Macedonia where he gave his full-throated support for a Yes vote in the country’s referendum. The plebiscite to take place this weekend will decide if the small Balkan country can become a member of the NATO military alliance and the European Union. It is a crucial vote for the country.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How to interfere in a foreign election

August 26, 2018

How to interfere in a foreign election

Russian President Boris Yeltsin, left, welcomes U.S. President Bill Clinton in St. George’s Hall at the Kremlin Palace, Jan. 13, 1994. This is the first meeting of the three-day summit and the two will discuss a wide variety of issues of mutual interests. (AP Photo/Greg Gibson)

FOR ONE OF THE world’s major powers to interfere systematically in the presidential politics of another country is an act of brazen aggression. Yet it happened. Sitting in a distant capital, political leaders set out to assure that their favored candidate won an election against rivals who scared them. They succeeded. Voters were maneuvered into electing a president who served the interest of the intervening power. This was a well-coordinated, government-sponsored project to subvert the will of voters in another country — a supremely successful piece of political vandalism on a global scale.

The year was 1996. Russia was electing a president to succeed Boris Yeltsin, whose disastrous presidency, marked by the post-Soviet social collapse and a savage war in Chechnya, had brought his approval rating down to the single digits. President Bill Clinton decided that American interests would be best served by finding a way to re-elect Yeltsin despite his deep unpopularity. Yeltsin was ill, chronically alcoholic, and seen in Washington as easy to control. Clinton bonded with him. He was our “Manchurian Candidate.”

“I guess we’ve just got to pull up our socks and back ol’ Boris again,” Clinton told an aide. “I know the Russian people have to pick a president, and I know that means we’ve got to stop short of giving a nominating speech for the guy. But we’ve got to go all the way in helping in every other respect.” Later Clinton was even more categorical: “I want this guy to win so bad it hurts.” With that, the public and private resources of the United States were thrown behind a Russian presidential candidate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Social Media Titans Holding Private Meeting To Coordinate Strategy For 2018 Midterms

August 24, 2018

Social Media Titans Holding Private Meeting To Coordinate Strategy For 2018 Midterms

Representatives from around a dozen US tech titans are holding a private Friday meeting at Twitter headquarters to coordinate their efforts ahead of the 2018 US midterm elections, reports BuzzFeed News.

Last week, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, invited employees from a dozen companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Snapchat, to gather at Twitter’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco… –BuzzFeed News

“As I’ve mentioned to several of you over the last few weeks, we have been looking to schedule a follow-on discussion to our industry conversation about information operations, election protection, and the work we are all doing to tackle these challenges,” Gleicher wrote.

The meeting has a three-part agenda; each company will present their latest efforts to counter “information operations,” then there will be a discussion about problems each company faces; and finally, participants will discuss whether such coordination conclaves should become an annual affair.

Nine of the companies meeting Friday also met in May at Facebook to discuss similar issues along with two US government representatives; Department of Homeland Security Under Secretary Chris Krebs and Mike Burham from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force created last November. The attendees say they were discouraged after the meeting after receiving little input from the G-men.

Red Dawn?

Social media giants – particularly Facebook and Twitter – faced harsh scrutiny from Democratic legislators following the 2016 US election for allowing “fake news” and Russia to rob Hillary Clinton of her turn to be president, or for somehow forcing her to ignore several key states while campaigning.

On the other hand, Facebook VP of advertising, Rob Goldman, admitted in February that “the majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election,” and “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Worried About Election Interference? 5 Clear Times the US Meddled in Elections Abroad

August 14, 2018

Worried About Election Interference? 5 Clear Times the US Meddled in Elections Abroad

This assumption, however, is fundamentally wrong. In the past 15 years alone, there are many cases of the U.S. interfering in the Democratic process of foreign nations. Below are some of the worst examples of this election interference.

Nazis and Hand-Picked Leaders in Ukraine, 2014

While the mainstream media blames Russia for the civil war in Ukraine, the truth is that the West started the conflict. The crisis began in 2013 when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych rejected an EU offer of closer economic cooperation and instead chose to pursue closer economic ties with Russia

The U.S. then decided it was time for a new government in Kiev. In an entirely illegal process, pro-western politicians seized power from the democratically elected Yanukovych. It was later revealed in a leaked phone call that the U.S. handpicked leaders of this new illegal government. The U.S. even supported Ukrainian neo-nazis and other far-right fascist organizations that supported the Western coup. When Ukrainian rebels in the east took up arms against the new Western-backed government, the country plunged into a civil war that continues to this day.

maduro venezuela releases evidence assassination — Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro
Image: Twitter – Prensa Presidencial

Election Interference in Venezuela, 2018

Washington’s main attacks against Venezuela have generally occurred through sanctions and economic warfare, but the U.S. has also meddled in Caracas’s elections.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Intelligence Community Is Neither

July 19, 2018

The Intelligence Community Is Neither

At the big “Treason Summit” “Russopocalypse” “Catastrovent” on Monday, journalist Sam Husseini tried to ask a question about banning nuclear weapons, and was physically hauled out of the room by officials from the “Land of Press Freedom,” Finland. Meanwhile, an Associated Press reporter was permitted to ask a perfectly respectable question pushing a blatant lie that risks nuclear war. Yay for press freedom!

The AP reporter claimed that “every U.S. intelligence agency has concluded that” the Russian government interfered in the U.S. election of 2016. In fact, the report that this common lie always refers to was concocted by a group of “hand-picked” (James Clapper’s description) people from three agencies out of 18 or so. The three were the NSA, FBI, and CIA — none of which ever, ever lie or get things wrong, ever. The INR and DIA were excluded along with all the others.

That’s why the Associated Press told a lie. Here’s why it’s a blatant and dangerous lie. The same report didn’t conclude a damn thing. It just “assessed,” which is a weasel word for guessed. Of the three agencies involved, two assessed with high and one with moderate confidence that Russia did something or other to benefit Trump. Whether that something was revealing to the public the DNC’s slanting of its primary against Bernie Sanders we are not told. We are also not offered any evidence for whatever it was. We are also not told Trump was involved in it, or offered any degree of assessment of that, much less any evidence. We are also not given any claim that informing us about the DNC’s shenanigans, or any other actions, had any impact on the outcome of the election. We also are not presented any case that keeping the rigging of primaries secret from the public is essential to the sanctity and freedom of our democracy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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