She was the first Soviet citizen to be welcomed to the White House. There are pictures of her, smiling with Eleanor Roosevelt, in her Red Army dress uniform; the uniform is simple, not a beribboned affair, but one of the medals on her left chest is the plain star of the Hero Of The Soviet Union.
During the “Arab Spring” (what a loathsome, patronizing, attitude we express!) the US Government repeatedly socialized ideas about how Twitter, etc, were important to helping anti-government protests, i.e.:
The Obama administration, while insisting it is not meddling in Iran, yesterday confirmed it had asked Twitter to remain open to help anti-government protesters. [guardian]
Military ‘exercises’ are a form of imperial messaging. Right now, the US has troops in Poland in what is being described with Orwellian irony as “anti-Russian aggression NATO exercises”[1]
The troops will rotate training in Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia for the next nine months. The regional training exercises are also designed to test how U.S. forces respond on short notice to a possible conflict with Russia.
Serial fraudster Uri Geller is back; I guess he needs more money.
Wafting into the info-sphere from multiple points comes the meme that Geller was tested for psychic powers by … The CIA!
Korean grandmother, 83, is ‘punched in the head by woman, 27, screaming “white power” in downtown LA [Daily Mail]
Some of the servicemen hurt/killed in Yemen during the special forces raid were heroically wounded by their own airplane, a CV-22 Osprey.[fox]
Talleyrand, Napoleon Bonaparte’s chief diplomat, could have taught Trump’s team of motley fools a thing or two thousand. One of his famous observations: “Never interrupt your opponent when they are making a mistake.” Sun Tzu would have nodded.
Apparently the Trump administration is drafting an order to review the usage of “black sites” abroad.
In plain English that’s called “conspiracy to commit torture” which is a crime under Section 18 of the US Code, chapter 113c.
Yesterday I discussed the retro-scope of information-gathering[1] and I probably should have mentioned that President Obama – along with commuting Chelsea Manning’s sentence – handed the citizens of the US a great big “F.U.” Just before leaving office he quietly changed how the NSA is allowed to share information, considerably expanding the power of the intelligence apparatus.
The US Constitution is not a special document. It’s traditional for Americans to say something flattering about the great political geniuses who devised the US political system, but I don’t think they were so hot: after all, the country they built didn’t last 100 years before it fell apart in a vicious civil war. The democracy of the republic is a multi-levelled sham, first because something like 70% of the population (women and slaves) were disenfranchised, secondly because the franchise was mooted by the superimposed electoral college.