[Peace-discuss] Notes

[J.B. Nicholson]

I've given up on splitting the notes into 
anti-neoliberal/anti-neoconservative because there were too many overlaps 
to do this effectively in a way that made sense in the long run. Issues 
that come up a lot for AWARE on the Air and News from Neptune happen to 
cross over. Here are some notes on things to consider discussing.

Have a good show, guys.






Why you can't trust the Democrats: Cheating in California primary -- 
Californians on the Jimmy Dore show explaining how CA Democrats cheated 
progressives out of delegate seats. Democrats did this to the point where 
it was widely noticed and cause for a new election to be called.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQkOzl0aQv0 -- interview with
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWi6HS9Wfgw -- interviews with Mindy 
Pfeiffer and Jeanine Rohn.

There are around 780 total ballots involved in this election where each 
voter can vote for up to 14 people resulting in a max of around 10,920 votes.

Pfeiffer initially won her election to become a California Democratic Party 
delegate with 366 votes. Three and a half weeks passed and someone (we 
don't know who) verbally called for a challenge without following the party 
bylaws which require a written challenge to be filed within 7 days. The CA 
Democratic Party concluded that they had gotten the math wrong in 
Pfeiffer's election (three times!) and their recounts meant that Pfeiffer 
lost 80 votes dropping her to 7th place, but keeping her as a delegate. 
After a couple more people (we don't know who) flew to Sacramento and 
looked at "tally sheets" (which are ostensibly records of ballot counts, 
but are separate from and not necessarily in sync with ballot counts). An 
unknown person who requested anonymity is said to have called the so-called 
"Compliance Review Commission" and asked for a ballot recount. The 
Compliance Review Commission claims to have counted the ballots 6 more 
times and determined that Pfeiffer lost 2 more votes putting her at too low 
of a vote count to make her a delegate. Thus Pfeiffer went from being a 
delegate to not being a delegate.

Rohn was already a delegate from District 51 (Northeast and East Los 
Angeles) and was recently running as an incumbent. Rohn's election was so 
thoroughly mishandled that there will be a re-election:



Why We Fight: NPR: "In Korean DMZ, Wildlife Thrives. Some Conservationists 
Worry Peace Could Disrupt It"
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/20/710054899/in-korean-dmz-wildlife-thrives-some-conservationists-worry-peace-could-disrupt-i

NPR found someone willing to echo their neoconservative line stumping for 
more militarism:

> The DMZ is fortified with tall, barbed-wire fences, riddled with land
> mines and heavily guarded by the respective countries' militaries,
> keeping all human disturbances to a minimum. After people left the area,
> plants and wildlife were able to grow unrestrained. But with increasing
> goodwill between North and South Korea, environmentalists like Kim fear
> that the protected nature of the area is changing and may lead to
> detrimental effects on the wildlife.
> 
> "I can't help but worry that this area will face a serious threat. If we
> had preserved the region because we had agreed it's environmentally
> valuable, then it can be kept intact regardless of political
> circumstances. But this region was preserved because of the presence of
> military forces," says Kim. "Once the military tension disappears, it
> may naturally follow that people feel a strong urge to transform the
> area."





New candidate: Sen. Mike Gravel is running for POTUS on the Democratic ticket

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4q_GjsyYw -- Interview with Jimmy Dore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0770rsZIaFc -- campaign promotion video 
"Rock 2.0"



Sri Lankan blasts results in higher death toll (310 so far), ISIS claims 
responsibility

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoW_2A1ZJnc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acGP535jrLo -- Colombo officials say 
there's an international network involved in the bombings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aessRX1Des -- history of war in Sri Lanka
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ibE6Ql0xA -- hotel suicide bomber on CCTV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TtX2QM2eEM -- footage of church bomber 
moments before explosion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyjiRuwoNyY -- Probe claims Sri Lankan 
attacks are retaliation for New Zealand mosque shootings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXCZNZ8ti5o -- RT's Mike Maloof rightly 
predicted and is now confirmed: ISIS claims responsibility for Sri Lankan 
Easter bombings; Sri Lankan officials were tipped off to these attacks 
weeks before they happened but did nothing about it due to underestimating 
effectiveness of group said to be responsible; more bombings are said to be 
planned; Maloof says "I think, ultimately, we [the US] could be acting 
ourselves through Special Forces" meaning US Special Forces on the ground 
in Sri Lanka.

Related:
- "Emergency law" (marshal law) is now in effect in Sri Lanka which means 
that government can detain suspects without warrants.




Sanctions: US threatens more anti-Iran sanctions -- war against the poor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r41T-Z0AWXs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0KTa2uSRro -- The Real News on these sanctions

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfrhATD4nM0 -- Mike Pompeo: "I was 
the CIA Director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire 
training courses."



Labor: France's Yellow Vests protests
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80EY1vNOwdA -- Are recent journalist 
arrests a form of intimidation?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMMHy9ICXd0 -- Yellow Vests protestors 
question Notre Dame aid
https://www.wsj.com/articles/notre-dame-pledges-from-frances-wealthy-re-energize-yellow-vest-protesters-11555776387
> Protesters taking to the streets Saturday for the 23rd consecutive
> weekend of yellow-vest marches, however, decried the hypocrisy of elites
> who they said were willing to mobilize large sums [almost $1 billion] to
> rebuild the cathedral while allowing France's working class to
> languish.
> 
> The sight of billionaires and luxury goods companies opening their
> checkbooks for a cause that didn't directly benefit French workers
> rankled unions in particular. The head of the CGT, France's largest
> union, said the efforts on behalf of Notre Dame revealed a deep-seated
> hypocrisy at the top of French society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DrDp-0acMI -- Trump is giving US money to 
Notre Dame and not Black American churches



Economy: Most Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, can't afford a $1,000 
emergency, and find it hard to save a recommended 3 months of pay. American 
workers are producing more and making less money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SQgpXIij84 -- Most Americans live poorly 
and can't save.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuGqWdBEpO8 -- US workers producing more, 
earning less money.






Russiagate: Media coverage is mostly repeating long-debunked lies and 
distortions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElAfzUl3oRQ -- Chris Hedges: Worst moment 
for US media since the 2003 Iraq invasion


Russiagate: Hedges' RT show "On Contact" interview with Aaron Maté on 
Russiagate gets WaPO/Maddow baseless criticism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odEnNBlOJdk -- "On Contact": Chris Hedges 
interviews Aaron Maté on Russiagate. This is the show that the Washington 
Post and Rachel Maddow recently got upset and lied about. This episode got 
about 55k views, according to YouTube.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/26/youtube-recommended-russian-media-site-above-all-others-analysis-mueller-report-watchdog-group-says/ 
-- the Washington Post article in question. The claims in this article include:

> AlgoTransparency, founded by former YouTube engineer Guillaume Chaslot, 
> analyzed the recommendations made by the 1,000 YouTube channels it 
> tracks daily. The group found that 236 of those collectively
> recommended RT’s “On Contact: Russiagate & Mueller Report w/ Aaron Mate”
> more than 400,000 times.
But it's not said how a third party would obtain figures on how many times 
YouTube recommends a video.

> Formerly known as Russia Today, RT is one of the most popular media 
> channels on YouTube, claiming more than 2 billion views. The video 
> interview it recommended, posted by RT’s U.S.-focused division RT 
> America, is sharply critical of American press coverage of the Mueller 
> report and calls journalists “Russiagate conspiracy theorists” and 
> “gossiping courtiers to the elite.”
RT was so popular that YouTube once offered them an ad package that would 
better capitalize on RT's apparently widely-viewed news segments. The full 
details of what was on offer aren't known, but RT has discussed the 
existence of this offer. RT rejected the package but it stands to reason 
that YouTube would not have offered this if it were not lucrative for 
YouTube. This happened before Russiagate Congressional hearings began and 
YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook representatives were repeatedly called to 
testify before members of the American and UK governments who were all 
looking for excuses to justify electoral losses (an excuse for Mrs. 
Clinton's embarrassing and widely unexpected 2016 loss, and Brexit).

RT's popularity online is a big reason to reconsider calling corporate 
media "mainstream" -- it's not clear that, say, CNN's ratings justify 
calling it 'mainstream' but not RT. As time passes more people "cut the 
cord" and cancel cable TV while getting all of their media from the 
Internet. YouTube videos are a significant part of this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-WN8L_m2rg -- feedback from Chris Hedges.

Rachel Maddow wrote "Death by algorithm" in a tweet she posted on April 27, 
2019 in https://mobile.twitter.com/maddow/status/1122222811249086465 which 
also pointed to the aforementioned Washington Post article. Her statement 
isn't clear but any critical view of RT would be consistent her show's 
running theme for years: evidenceless allegations that unnamed Russians are 
somehow gaming systems to achieve other ends: Russiagate putting Trump in 
office, or artificially increasing RT video counts on YouTube.

Consider a few responses to her tweet:

Max Blumenthal replied in 
https://mobile.twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1122360295761092609
> “Death?” No one’s lives were threatened by a conversation between two 
> award winning journalists about the massive disinformation campaign 
> you’[v]e waged on the minds of suggestible Democrats. But they are 
> endangered by the Cold War you’ve helped to stir up.
Patricia Dowling in 
https://mobile.twitter.com/ketchmeifucan/status/1122241823521558528
> Chris Hedges won a Pulitzer prize, Aaron Maté just won an Izzy. This 
> YouTube is so much better than the war mongering conspiracy lunacy that 
> comes from you. You should be ashamed to smear good people & good 
> content in such a base & McCarthyite way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPVWEhHVmrw -- feedback from journalist Ben 
Swann. Swann mispronounced Maté's last name (which is properly pronounced 
[ma-TAY] like the beverage; Swann said "mate" like a friend or partner) but 
in Swann's defense, Maté's last name appears in on-screen credits without 
the acute accent over the "e" hence Swann's pronunciation is consistent 
with that misspelling. Swann pointed out that Stephen Colbert's show got 
millions more views than Hedges' Maté interview. Colbert is nowhere near as 
critical as he was on his Comedy Central show (and I mean that in both 
senses of 'critical': Colbert's CBS show is neither important nor 
challenging the establishment).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr6mewFNJGA -- feedback from Lionel.



War: Fighting for AI ethics from within Google

https://www.wired.com/story/google-walkout-organizers-say-theyre-facing-retaliation/
> Two employee activists at Google say they have been retaliated against
> for helping to organize a walkout among thousands of Google employees in
> November, and are planning a “town hall” meeting on Friday for others to
> discuss alleged instances of retaliation.
> 
> In a message posted to many internal Google mailing lists Monday,
> Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Research, said that after
> Google disbanded its external AI ethics council on April 4, she was told
> that her role would be “changed dramatically.” Whittaker said she was
> told that, in order to stay at the company, she would have to “abandon”
> her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research
> center she cofounded at New York University.
> 
> Claire Stapleton, another walkout organizer and a 12-year veteran of the
> company, said in the email that two months after the protest she was
> told she would be demoted from her role as marketing manager at YouTube
> and lose half her reports. After escalating the issue to human
> resources, she said she faced further retaliation. “My manager started
> ignoring me, my work was given to other people, and I was told to go on
> medical leave, even though I’m not sick,” Stapleton wrote. After she
> hired a lawyer; the company conducted an investigation and seemed to
> reverse her demotion. “While my work has been restored, the environment
> remains hostile and I consider quitting nearly every day,” she wrote.

The AI ethics board might have had the ability to get Google to say 'no' to 
certain projects including automating killer drones.



Labor/Health: Meatpacking gets worse

Pork industry will soon be inspecting itself.
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2019/04/trump-is-about-to-make-the-pork-industry-responsible-for-inspecting-itself/

> Next time you tuck into a pork chop or a carnitas-filled burrito, spare
> a thought for the people who work the kill line at hog slaughterhouses.
> Meatpacking workers incur injury and illness at 2.5 times the national
> average[1]; and repetitive-motion conditions at a rate nearly seven
> times as high[2] as that of other private industries. Much has to do
> with the speed at which they work: Hog carcasses weighing as much as 270
> pounds[3] come at workers at an average rate of 977 per hour[4], or
> about 16 per minute.
> 
> President Donald Trump’s US Department of Agriculture is close to
> finalizing a plan that would allow those lines to move even faster,
> reports[5] the Washington Post’s Kimberly Kindy. The USDA’s Food Safety
> and Inspection Service is currently responsible for overseeing the kill
> line, making sure that tainted meat doesn’t enter the food supply. The
> plan would partially privatize federal oversight of pork facilities,
> cutting the number of federal inspectors by about 40 percent and
> replacing them with plant employees, Kindy adds. In other words, the
> task of ensuring the safety of the meat supply will largely shift from
> people paid by the public to people being paid by the meat industry.

[1] https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/meatpacking/index.html
[2] 
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/11/489468205/working-the-chain-slaughterhouse-workers-face-lifelong-injuries
[3] 
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/hogs-pork/sector-at-a-glance/
[4] 
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/f7be3e74-552f-4239-ac4c-59a024fd0ec2/Evaluation-HIMP-Market-Hogs.pdf?MOD=AJPERES
[5] 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/pork-industry-soon-will-have-more-power-over-meat-inspections/2019/04/03/12921fea-4f30-11e9-8d28-f5149e5a2fda_story.html?utm_term=.33b79b746acc

This was tried before and did not go well, the report explains:

> What does this deregulation mean for the safety of our meat? We already
> have a sneak preview. For years, a USDA pilot program[1] has allowed
> five large hog slaughterhouses to operate at higher line speeds with
> fewer inspectors. A 2013 audit[2] by the USDA’s Office of Inspector
> General found that the USDA “did not provide adequate oversight” of the
> pilot facilities over its first 15 years, and as a result, the plants
> “may have a higher potential for food safety risks.”
> 
> According to the OIG report, there are 616 USDA inspected hog plants in
> the United States, meaning that just 0.8 percent of them are in the
> pilot program. Yet of the top 10 US hog plants earning the most food
> safety and animal welfare citations in the period of fiscal years 2008
> to 2011, three were enrolled in the pilot program. By far the most-cited
> slaughterhouse in the United States over that period was a pilot
> plant—it drew “nearly 50 percent more [citations] than the plant with
> the next highest number.”
> 
> And in 2015, the Government Accountability Project released affidavits
> from four USDA federal inspectors working in the pilot hog plants. Their
> reports from the sped-up line, which I wrote about here[3], don’t make
> for appetizing reading. Here’s an excerpt.
> 
> • “Not only are plant supervisors not trained, the employees taking
> over USDA’s inspection duties have no idea what they are doing. Most of
> them come into the plant with no knowledge of pathology or the industry
> in general.”
> 
> • “Food safety has gone down the drain under HIMP [the acronym for the
> pilot program]. Even though fecal contamination has increased under the
> program (though the company does a good job of hiding it), USDA
> inspectors are encouraged not to stop the line for fecal 
> contamination.”
[1] 
https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/f7be3e74-552f-4239-ac4c-59a024fd0ec2/Evaluation-HIMP-Market-Hogs.pdf?MOD=AJPERES
[2] https://www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/24601-0001-41.pdf
[3] 
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2015/02/usda-whistleblowers-report-gross-condition-hog-slaughterhouses/

We've recently seen the result of another self-regulated industry: Boeing's 
crashes that recently killed 346 people were the result of Boeing's 
self-regulation.

 From 
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/report-the-regulatory-failures-of-the-boeing-737-max.html
> According to the Seattle Times, the FAA has made a habit of delegating
> parts of the regulation process to Boeing due to cuts in funding. For
> the 737 MAX, FAA managers reportedly pressured the agency’s safety
> engineers to hand over safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to
> green-light the company’s findings. Remarkably, the paper was working on
> the report prior to the crash of the Ethiopian Airlines flight, which
> killed all 157 occupants onboard: “Both Boeing and the FAA were informed
> of the specifics of this story and were asked for responses 11 days ago,
> before the second crash of a 737 MAX last Sunday.”

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/the-national-737-max-boeing-1.5107529 --
CBC has buried the lede: the self-regulation aspect of the story (which is 
critical to understanding how the 737 Max passed regulation) is in the 
article about 75% of the way in.



Related:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Rs_6ZkcB4 -- report of this on Redacted 
Tonight (in keeping with being sponsored by meat brokers, this story 
doesn't get much coverage elsewhere)

- 
https://www.theguardian.com/animals-farmed/2018/feb/21/dirty-meat-shocking-hygiene-failings-discovered-in-us-pig-and-chicken-plants 
-- (Article from 21 Feb 2018) Horrible working conditions at US pig & 
chicken plants is not new.

- 
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/19/christmas-crisis-kill-dinner-work-abattoir-industry-psychological-physical-damage 
-- "People don’t want to work in abattoirs any more. The industry is linked 
to psychological and physical damage"

> A report in the trade magazine Farmers Weekly has revealed that staff 
> shortages at slaughterhouses are threatening Christmas sales. Some 
> 10,000 positions are unfilled at major abattoirs, meaning supermarkets 
> will “seriously struggle” to fulfil their seasonal orders. Of course 
> some of that shortfall is because of Brexit; crucially, however, the 
> report explains that for most potential applicants, the industry’s low 
> pay is not the problem but that “people simply do not want to do this 
> work any more”.





Torture: New York Times defends CIA-head 'Bloody' Gina Haspel

The NYT article referred to is 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/us/politics/gina-haspel-trump.html and 
Melvin Goodman's followup is quoted below:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/22/the-nyts-tries-to-rehabilitate-bloody-gina-haspel/
> [T]he Times appears to have decided to rehabilitate CIA director Gina 
> Haspel.  Haspel drew more negative votes in her Senate confirmation 
> hearing than any previous director in the 72-year history of the
> CIA—and for good reason.  Haspel was actively involved in the CIA’s
> torture and abuse program conducted in secret prisons in East Europe and
> Southeast Asia.
> 
> Last week’s article in the Times, written by Julian Barnes and Adam 
> Goldman, failed to mention that Haspel was the author of the cable that 
> ordered the destruction of the 92 tapes of interrogation and that it
> was disingenuous of her to explain that she was simply trying to
> “protect CIA officers.”  Like most operatives who administer torture and
> abuse, the CIA officers were hooded and in no need of protection.  In
> drafting the cable ordering the destruction of the tapes, Haspel ignored
> the views of then CIA director Porter Goss, the director of national 
> intelligence James Clapper, and two White House counsels who were 
> opposed to the destruction.
> 
> Instead, Haspel followed the instructions of her boss, Jose Rodriguez, 
> the CIA’s notorious former deputy director for operations and former 
> director of the Counterterrorism Center.  If the torture program had a 
> godfather, it was Rodriguez; Haspel was a devoted acolyte.  The 
> Department of Justice investigated the entire episode, but no one was 
> charged with obstruction of justice even though the White House and a 
> federal judge had ordered that the tapes be protected.  A CIA 
> disciplinary review ignored the Nuremberg principles and “found no
> fault with the performance of Ms. Haspel” because she drafted the cable
> “on the direct orders” of her superior.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUaDV-BmIoU -- Torture, abuses, and 
farcical courts in Bahrain: why does NATO do nothing about this?







Ukraine: Another clear rejection of neoliberalism -- landslide election for 
comic with no electoral political history

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i18b8eoQCHk -- According to the BBC 
(https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48007487), Volodymyr Zelensky is a 
comedian who is trained as a lawyer and, "a political novice, [...] best 
known for starring in a satirical television series Servant of the People, 
in which his character accidentally becomes Ukrainian president.". "He 
plays a teacher who is elected after his expletive-laden rant about 
corruption goes viral on social media."

I'm not sure why the BBC considers the character to have been 
"accidentally" elected; after Donald Trump (who also had no electoral 
political experience, also hosted a popular TV show, and pledged to "drain 
the swamp" of Washington corruption) was duly elected, it should be clear 
that one need not rise up through political ranks to become president.

In the Ukrainian election Zelensky won in the first round (over 30%) and 
has now won the second round (73.5%) making him President-elect.

https://www.thenation.com/article/ukraine-presidential-elections-poroshenko-zelensky/
> Indeed, it’s hard to consider this election as anything other than a
> referendum on not only Poroshenko’s presidency, but the entire US-backed
> Maidan project.
> 
> Calling Zelenskiy inexperienced is an understatement. The man’s never
> held political office; more importantly, he doesn’t appear to have much
> of a platform. His defining characteristic is not being Poroshenko. This
> makes his campaign, and the fact that he’s the clear front-runner, an
> unequivocal rejection of Poroshenko, the post-Maidan president.
> Specifically, it’s a rejection of the two defining features of
> Poroshenko’s presidency: corruption and ultranationalism.
> 
> Battling corruption was a central demand of Maidan. Unfortunately,
> Poroshenko failed to heed the call, enabling corruption to flourish to
> the point where even the New York Times editorial board—which has been
> extraordinarily supportive of Maidan—described Poroshenko’s Ukraine as a
> “corrupt swamp.”
> 
> But the clearest verdict on the matter comes from Ukrainian voters. Time
> and again, corruption is the major issue brought up in the land. A
> recent poll showed over two-thirds believe the country is headed in the
> wrong direction, while Gallup reported that Ukraine now has the world’s
> lowest trust in the government: 9 percent.
> 
> Over the past five years, as Western politicians and think tankers 
> churned out bromides about Kiev’s being on the front lines of freedom 
> and democracy, ordinary Ukrainians were plunged into an economic 
> nightmare in a nation that, under Poroshenko, became the poorest
> country in Europe.
> 
> [...]
> 
> The US and the EU sank billions into Poroshenko’s Kiev in the hope he’d 
> tackle corruption. Of course, the notion was ludicrous. Putting one of 
> the richest men in Ukraine—whose assets had soared the year after 
> Maidan—in charge of defeating corruption is a bit like putting the drug 
> baron El Chapo in charge of drug enforcement. The outcome wasn’t hard
> to predict.
> 
> The West’s faith in Poroshenko further cemented hatred against him. One 
> would imagine the only thing worse than being unable to afford food is 
> doing so while listening to “let them eat spreadsheets” platitudes from 
> Western analysts as the country’s billionaire president adds to his 
> piggy bank.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ySuGLyT22Y -- Jimmy Dore on this issue and 
referring to above Nation and BBC articles. You can imagine his reaction to 
learning that Zelensky's character on "Servant of the People" was "elected 
after his expletive-laden rant about corruption goes viral on social media".


https://consortiumnews.com/2019/04/22/ukraine-why-ou-lost-by-a-landslide/ 
-- Kevin Zeese on why Petro Poroshenko lost to outsider Volodymyr Zelensky 
including evidence of Poroshenko's corruption via WikiLeaks:

> In a classified diplomatic cable from 2006 released by WikiLeaks[1],
> U.S. officials refer to Poroshenko as “Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro
> Poroshenko[2].” Our Ukraine has been in the pocket of the U.S. for 13
> years.
> 
> The U.S. knew Poroshenko was corrupt. A separate cable released by
> WikiLeaks[3] makes that clear. The May 2006 cable states: “Poroshenko
> was tainted by credible corruption allegations, but wielded significant
> influence within OU; Poroshenko’s price had to be paid.”
> 
> Allowing his corruption was a price the U.S. was willing to pay to have
> Our Ukraine serving as president.

[1] https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06KIEV1706_a.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro_Poroshenko
[3] http://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06KIEV2038_a.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOSPnceX6W8 -- CrossTalk on Ukraine's 
president-elect




Vietnam

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/08/10/jury-orders-monsanto-pay-289-million-cancer-patient-roundup-lawsuit/962297002/ 
-- > [A California Superior Court] jury deliberated for two and a half days
> before finding that Dewayne Johnson's non-Hodgkin lymphoma was at least
> partly due to using glyphosate, the primary ingredient in Roundup.
> Johnson regularly used glyphosate to spray fields while working as a
> groundskeeper.


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bayer-glyphosate-lawsuits/bayers-monsanto-sued-by-8000-plaintiffs-on-glyphosate-idUSKCN1L81J0 
-- Bayer paid $63 billion for Monsanto in June 2018 and Bayer disclosed 
5,200 lawsuits against Monsanto but Bayer Chief Executive Werner Baumann 
told analysts in a conference call that "The number of plaintiffs in both 
state and federal litigation is approximately 8,000 as of end-July [2018].".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppc9B4JzyvI -- After Dewayne Johnson won a 
$289 million judgment from Monsanto (see USA Today story above) and Bayer 
(which bought Monsanto) faces about 8,000 more lawsuits on glyphosate (see 
Reuters article above), Vietnam wants justice from Monsanto for Agent 
Orange victims.


Venezuela

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZsVXEhQiQk -- Russia blames the US for the 
power cuts in Venezuela



War: Yemen coverage is virtually nil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWUfMmPS2Iw -- Peace activists tell MSNBC: 
Stop ignoring devastating US-Saudi war in Yemen




So many issues are solved with software freedom

Economy: Libertarian notion of 'letting the market decide' doesn't address 
monopoly power or the effect on computer users

https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ 
-- "Google has sabotaged Firefox for years" -- an article about claims by 
Johnathan Nightingale, a former General Manager and Vice President of the 
Firefox group at Mozilla, who described these issues as "oopses.":

> "When I started at Mozilla in 2007 there was no Google Chrome, and most
> folks we spoke with inside [Google] were Firefox fans," Nightingale
> recollected in a Twitter thread on Saturday.
> 
> "When Chrome launched things got complicated, but not in the way you
> might expect. They had a competing product now, but they didn't cut
> ties, break our search deal - nothing like that. In fact, the story we
> kept hearing was, 'We're on the same side. We want the same things',"
> the former Mozilla exec said.
> 
> "I think our friends inside Google genuinely believed that. At the
> individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we
> did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly,
> and we learned from watching each other.
> 
> "But Google as a whole is very different than individual googlers,"
> Nightingale said.
> 
> "Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail
> & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and
> bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as
> 'incompatible'," he said.
> 
> "All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we
> were still a search partner, so we'd say 'hey what gives?' And every
> time, they'd say, 'oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next
> push in 2 weeks.'
> 
> "Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the
> same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses.
> Hundreds maybe?"
> 
> "I'm all for 'don't attribute to malice what can be explained by
> incompetence' but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. I think
> they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we
> spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of
> improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we
> started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done,"
> Nightingale said.

Nightingale is not the only one to notice these choices:

> In July 2018, Mozilla Program Manager Chris Peterson accused Google of
> intentionally slowing down YouTube performance on Firefox.
> 
> He revealed that both Firefox and Edge were superior when loading
> YouTube content when compared to Chrome, and in order to counteract this
> performance issue, Google switched to using a JavaScript library for
> YouTube that they knew wasn't supported by Firefox.

https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185
> YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome
> because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM
> v0 API only implemented in Chrome. You can restore YouTube's faster
> pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension: https://t.co/F5uEn3iMLR 
> — Chris Peterson (@cpeterso) July 24, 2018

In other words, Chrome relies on old instructions which Google knows 
Firefox doesn't support but Chrome does. So any webpage that uses those 
instructions runs faster in Chrome than in Firefox. There's a Firefox 
extension to alleviate this problem, but there's no good reason to 
implement a website in this way in the first place. The better approach for 
users is to use modern, standards-compliant code that will run fast on all 
modern browsers. Google could make YouTube operate this way but Google 
chooses not to in order to give Chrome a competitive advantage thus 
encouraging users to run Chrome instead of any other browser, including 
Firefox. This is very much like the abuse of monopoly Microsoft was doubly 
found to have committed by two separate antitrust cases (in the EU and US), 
the two largest antitrust cases in the world.

ZDNet's Catalin Cimpanu concludes:
> At this point, it's very hard not to believe or take Nightingale's
> comments seriously. Slowly but surely, Google is becoming the new
> Microsoft, and Chrome is slowly turning into the new IE, an opinion that
> more and more users are starting to share[1]

[1] https://medium.com/@bdc/chrome-is-the-new-ie-1a21c1efc133 
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8n1daj/google_chrome_is_the_new_ie_6/ 
and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11366272 are referenced. 
https://archive.fo/x9vXQ is an archived copy of the last URL since 
news.ycombinator.com articles go away after a time.

The real problem here has to do with monopoly and proprietary software is 
another example of this (an example that corporate publisher Ziff-Davis 
(ZDNet) won't bring up). Proprietary software is software that denies a 
user their software freedom -- the freedom to run, inspect, share, and 
modify a published computer program. Mozilla Firefox is free software, 
Firefox respects a user's software freedom. Google Chrome is proprietary 
software. This is why so many important browsers are modifications of 
Firefox -- TOR browser (which makes it easy for novices to get increased 
privacy using the TOR network), GNUzilla (a browser with a number of 
built-in add-ons that block spying, make the browser prefer encrypted 
connections to a web server, code to foil uniquely identifying a browser 
called 'browser fingerprinting', and more).

Google Chrome, on the other hand, is based on free software but is not 
itself free software. Google Chrome shares some code with the 
similarly-named but different "Chromium" browser. Google adds proprietary 
code to Chromium and releases the combined result as Google Chrome. We know 
that Google puts code in Chrome that does nasty things to the user 
including censorship (disabling extensions not listed in Google Chrome Web 
Store, making it easy for Chrome extensions to spy on the user and many 
extensions do just this including a module that activates microphones on 
the computer and transmits audio to Google's servers, spies on the user's 
browser history, affiliations, and other installed programs, and logs a 
user's keystrokes). See https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-google.html 
for links to all of these things and more.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-23/u-s-farmers-need-a-better-way-to-fix-their-tractors 
-- John Deere tractors are controlled via proprietary software and farmers 
are learning that proprietary software makes a monopolist of the proprietor 
(nobody but John Deere may inspect, share, or alter the software which 
forces the farmer to go to John Deere for all repairs).

> The unpredictable weather in southern Minnesota means that spring
> planting season is brief and often frantic, sometimes requiring 24-hour
> shifts if the weather requires it. Farmers who want to get their crops
> in the ground can’t afford to waste an hour.
> 
> So when John Nauerth III, a farmer in remote Jackson, had trouble with
> his tractor last spring, he was worried. In years past, he told me over
> the phone, he might’ve diagnosed and fixed the problem with a
> screwdriver, or called a local mechanic.
> 
> But as tractors become as complex as Teslas, agricultural equipment 
> manufacturers and their authorized dealerships are using technology as 
> an excuse to force farmers to use the authorized service center — and 
> only the authorized service center — for repairs. That’s costing
> farmers — and independent repair shops — dearly.
> 
> Nauerth, under pressure to plant, waited a costly “two or three hours”
> for an authorized dealer to show up at his farm to plug in a computer
> and diagnose the problem. Worse, the dealer didn’t have the repair part
> — and independent repair shops, excluded from the repair monopoly,
> didn’t either.

So when the tractor breaks and the software needs to be changed, John 
Deere's software license prevents the farmer from repairing their own 
tractor. If the tractor's software needs to be debugged or improved, the 
farmer is prevented from doing the work or hiring someone they trust to do 
it for them no matter how technically-minded and willing the farmer is.

The fix for this is free software -- software freedom for all published 
software. Let John Deere earn their business by offering a repair service 
that users want to use, not one they're railroaded to use.



https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/04/looping-created-insulin-pump-underground-market/588091/ 
-- certain Medtronic brand insulin pumps could be exploited to allow users 
to control their own pump and this gave rise to one programmer to better 
help Type 1 diabetics:

> By 2014, the hardware components of a DIY artificial pancreas -- a small
> insulin pump that attaches via thin disposable tubing to the body and a
> continuous sensor for glucose, or sugar, that slips just under the skin
> -- were available, but it was impossible to connect the two. That's
> where the security flaw came in. The hackers realized they could use it
> to override old Medtronic pumps with their own algorithm that
> automatically calculates insulin doses based on real-time glucose data.
> It closed the feedback loop.

This code is shared today as free software called "OpenAPS" 
(https://openaps.org/)

> Instead of micromanaging their blood sugar, people with diabetes could
> offload that work to an algorithm. In addition to OpenAPS, another
> system called Loop is now available. Dozens, then hundreds, and now
> thousands of people are experimenting with DIY artificial-pancreas
> systems -- none of which the Food and Drug Administration has officially
> approved. And they've had to track down discontinued Medtronic pumps. It
> can sometimes take months to find one. Obviously, you can't just call up
> Medtronic to order a discontinued pump with a security flaw. "It's eBay,
> Craigslist, Facebook. It's like this underground market for these
> pumps," says Aaron Kowalski, a DIY looper and also CEO of JDRF, a
> nonprofit that funds type 1 diabetes research. This is not exactly how a
> market for lifesaving medical devices is supposed to work. And yet, this
> is the only way it can work -- for now.

If computers were fully under the control of their owners, these users 
could get any pump, documentation on how it works, and not have to rely on 
exploiting bugs in software to gain said control.

[There's no single URL I could put here] -- literally every story about 
devices that don't get updates (typically this set includes devices which 
are part of the so-called "Internet of things", also known as the 
Internet). Proprietors find that it's not profitable to invest in updating 
older software and it is profitable to release new software that will only 
run on newer gadgets. Proprietors even go to the extent of making sure the 
newer software won't run on the older devices (some variants of proprietary 
operating systems won't run on older computers by design, not because 
there's a valid technical reason).

Apple devices lock users into Apple's services 
(https://gizmodo.com/homepod-is-the-ultimate-apple-product-in-a-bad-way-1822883347) 
by designing those services to be incompatible with all other options, 
ethical or unethical. Apple's office software called "iWork" uses secret 
file formats that change with various releases of the programs in the 
suite. This prevents free software from being fully compatible and helps 
lock users in. If an Apple user wants security or feature updates, they 
have to give into whatever terms come with the latest iWork programs -- 
additional payment, switching to a newer OS, buying newer hardware even 
when one's older computer could run the program, and being denied software 
freedom. Apple also arbitrarily blocks users from installing old versions 
of iOS, and Apple participates in working to thwart right-to-repair laws 
that would help users repair their own Apple devices.

I strongly recommend https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ for an active list of 
organized links on how proprietary software is often malware. This list is 
around 400 instances as of April 2019. All cards on the table: I've 
contributed to this list.




Law/Torture: "DC Circuit says Guantanamo judge created 'intolerable cloud 
of partiality' and tosses his rulings"

http://www.abajournal.com/web/article/dc-circuit-says-guantanamo-judge-created-intolerable-cloud-of-partiality-and-tosses-his-rulings

> On Tuesday, a federal appeals court tossed every pretrial ruling issued
> in the last 3½ years by a Guantanamo judge in the case of an accused
> terrorist.
> 
> The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said Air
> Force Col. Vance Spath created “an intolerable cloud of partiality” when
> he pursued a job as an immigration judge at the same time that he was
> issuing rulings, Politico[1] reports. Just Security also has coverage[2].
> 
> The D.C. Circuit voided Spath’s orders in the case of Saudi national Abd
> al-Rahim Hussein Muhammad al-Nashiri, who was accused of orchestrating
> the al-Qaida attack on the USS Cole.
> 
> Any orders entered after November 2015, the date that Spath applied to
> be an immigration judge, will be voided “to scrub the case of judicial
> bias,” the appeals court said.
> 
> The D.C. Circuit also voided decisions in appeals of Spath’s orders by
> the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review.
> 
> The government is seeking the death penalty for al-Nashiri. “We do not
> take lightly the crimes that al-Nashiri stands accused of committing,”
> the appeals court said. “To the contrary, the seriousness of those
> alleged offenses and the gravity of the penalty they may carry make the
> need for an unimpeachable adjudicator all the more important.”

[1] 
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/16/guantanamo-military-tribunal-1277790
[2] 
https://www.justsecurity.org/63663/al-nashiri-iii-a-no-good-very-bad-day-for-u-s-military-commissions/




Israel: IDF demolishes house of Palestinian who killed 2 Israelis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLYlFchjlbs -- RT: Is this collective 
punishment?




WikiLeaks/Assange: US is eager to get people to be silent about WikiLeaks 
and Assange. We should not support them in their efforts. But French media 
outlets are taking a radically different reaction to 3 journalists who 
published leaked information about France's involvement in the war in Yemen 
going on now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW3jKKHJL_8 -- Merely being connected to 
WikiLeaks is dangerous. Both Chelsea Manning and now Ola Bini are being 
held (separately) for WikiLeaks-related reasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZSiPm4qmTE -- 37 French media companies 
back 3 journalists summoned by the French state (summoned to appear before 
the French Directorate of Internal Security or DGSI) on allegations of 
breaching national state secrecy after they published leaked documents 
which revealed that the French government sold weapons to Saudi Arabia & 
United Arab Emirates listing the "French weapons used in the war in Yemen". 
The French government repeatedly denied being so involved. This means the 
French government is also culpable in what the UN calls the world's worst 
humanitarian disaster in which over 60,000 were killed since 2016. The UN 
has said that coalition strikes are the "main cause" of civilian 
casualties. Cholera, polio, and measles threaten millions of lives 
according to the World Health Organization which reported that there were 
over 2,000 cholera-related deaths in 2017 alone. And over 14 million Yemeni 
face what is described as "imminent famine".

What weaponry did France sell SA & the UAE?

- Caesar truck-mounted Howitzers capable of firing 6 shells per minute, up 
to a 42km range (putting 436,370 people in its firing range) and are 
responsible for up to 35 civilian deaths. These were "deployed at the 
Saudi-Yemeni border on the Saudi side" according to the DRM (French 
Intelligence Agency).

- Leclerc tanks with an 'auto-loader' system. The DRM said "As of 25 
September 2018, about 40 UAE Leclerc tanks are observed in a fixed 
defensive position and advanced positions in the west..."

The French Ministry for the Armed Forces told RT:

> To our knowledge, the French weapons available to the members of the
> coalition are mostly in a defensive position, outside Yemeni territory
> or on coalition rights-of-way, but not on the frontline, and we are not
> aware of any civilian casualties resulting from their use in the Yemeni
> theatre. France is not among the leading arms suppliers of countries
> engaged in Yemen.
The pressure is on the journalists to reveal their sources.

A joint media statement from those standing by the journalists reads:
> We express our full solidarity with our colleagues, who have done only
> their job: to bring to the attention of citizens information of public
> interest on the consequences of the sale of French arms. Since these
> revelations, the government has remained silent on the facts.
This is remarkably different from how media react to Assange and WikiLeaks 
publications of Afghan & Iraq war logs. Assange is facing an American 
indictment, and the threat of being extradited to the US where he will 
likely face torture and imprisonment or assassination. Many media outlets 
republished WikiLeaks publications at the time of their release but now 
distance their organization from WikiLeaks and Assange. Some outlets cite 
allegations of sexual misconduct against two Swedish women which the 
Swedish government dropped long ago. These allegations were never charges 
and never had any basis in fact as far as we know but appear to have been 
used as character assassination against Assange while he was holed up in 
the Ecuadorian embassy.

The US tried to use the Swedish government to lure Assange out of the 
embassy -- in 2010 the Swedish Chief prosecutor Marianne Ny claimed that it 
was against the law for Assange to respond to the investigator's questions 
about allegations of sexual molestation, unlawful coercion, and 
"lesser-degree rape" from inside the embassy, he would have to travel to 
Sweden to answer the questions there. Assange denied the allegations and 
replied that he'd need a guarantee that he wouldn't be extradited to the 
US, the Swedes wouldn't provide that guarantee. By March 2015 (under public 
criticism from other Swedish lawyers) the special prosecutor admitted that 
she could interview Assange in the embassy and she began the interviews on 
November 14, 2016.

Per Wikipedia in 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange#Swedish_sexual_assault_allegations
> By this time, the statute of limitations had expired on all three of the
> less serious allegations. Since the Swedish prosecutor had not
> interviewed Assange by 18 August 2015, the questioning pertained only to
> the open investigation of "lesser degree rape", whose statute of
> limitations is due to expire in 2020.

Manning refused a summons to testify to a grand jury investigating 
WikiLeaks. On March 8, 2019 Manning was re-imprisoned for this refusal. 
Manning is likely under pressure to make a statement that Assange provided 
material support for breaking into government computers to obtain Afghan & 
Iraqi war log data -- over 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables, 
and battle records -- the very data WikiLeaks published in 2010. If the US 
government could extract such a statement from Manning, the government 
could use that statement against Assange as the basis for finding Assange 
guilty of helping Manning break into a computer system. But the US has made 
it clear that they don't have any new evidence to bring to bear. The judge 
ordered Manning to remain in jail until Manning testifies or the grand jury 
concludes its work. This jailing was appealed and Manning lost that appeal.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic8MI-9PTC4 -- Ecuador apparently got an 
IMF loan (all IMF loans are run past the US, so the US was in on this) in 
exchange for the US gaining custody of Assange.

-J