#trump moscow project

[jlcomicsandgames]

Elon Muskowrat Of To Mars

[mylionheart2]

ACTIVE MEASURES

Although find it hilarious that GOP senators voted against Rick Scott for senate majority leader in a secret ballot... Just a reminder that John Thune who was just elected republican senate majority leader was one of the 8 republican senators who spent the 4th of July in Moscow in 2018. All roads lead to Putin.

*Trump did NOT endorse Rick Scott for Senate Majority Leader. 🤔🧐

[mariacallous]

In late August 2023, Ilya Gambashidze was in a conference room at the office of Social Design Agency, a Russian IT company he founded that is based in Moscow, close to the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. Gambashidze was relatively unknown in Russian politics at the time, but just a month earlier his name had appeared on a Council of the European Union’s list of Russian nationals subjected to sanctions for playing a central role in a sprawling disinformation campaign against Ukraine.

In the conference room, Gambashidze was laying out his plans for a new target: Along with his colleagues, he began drafting what would become known as the Good Old USA Project. The project was supposed to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in favor of former president Donald Trump, specifically targeting certain minorities, swing-state residents, and online gamers, among others, in a scheme that included a full-time team dedicated to the cause.

On Wednesday, Gambashidze and his company were named by the US Department of Justice among the architects of a disinformation campaign known as Doppelganger that has for the past two years been targeting Ukraine and, more recently, US elections. The Doppelganger campaign uses AI-generated content on dozens of fake websites designed to impersonate mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Post and Fox Business, using a network of fake social media accounts to disseminate pro-Russian narratives targeting audiences across the globe. Doppelganger is a Kremlin-aligned disinformation campaign that was first linked to the Kremlin in 2023 by the French government.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced the seizure of 32 internet domains it says are linked to the Doppelganger campaign which violate US money laundering and criminal trademark laws.

“Today’s announcement exposes the scope of the Russian government’s influence operations and their reliance on cutting-edge AI to sow disinformation,” FBI director Christopher Wray said in a statement. “Companies operating at the direction of the Russian government created websites to trick Americans into unwittingly consuming Russian propaganda.”

The Treasury Department had previously sanctioned SDA and Gambashidze in March for its part in the Doppelganger campaign. But the court documents unsealed on Wednesday contain a treasure trove of documents and meeting notes from Gambashidze and his colleagues, outlining in unprecedented detail the goals and tactics that the Kremlin has been deploying in order to influence the outcome of the 2024 US election.

The records also reveal the plan was discussed at the highest levels of the Russian government, with Sergei Kiriyenko, the first deputy chief of staff of the presidential executive office, playing a key role. The notes appear to show that President Vladimir Putin may have been updated on the campaign; in one meeting with Russian government officials, Gambashidze wrote that government officials told him they had “reported to the President about the project,” which the FBI agent who authored the affidavit said he took to refer to Putin.

The documents show that the orchestrators of the campaign targeted existing divisions within US society, using racist stereotypes and far-right conspiracies to target supporters of former president Donald Trump.

​​"They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” Gambashidze writes in one document outlining his “guerrilla media” plan. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.”

The same document is full of racist and conspiratorial claims, including that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of people of color.” It adds that white middle-class people are being discriminated against with high inflation and rising prices, while “unemployed people of color end up being privileged groups of the population.”

And the goal of the campaign, from the beginning, was crystal clear: “To secure victory for [Donald Trump],” Gambashidze wrote in the Good Old USA Project planning document.

The Good Old USA plan openly admits that “none of the significant American politicians can be considered pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so rather than focus its efforts on trying to convince people that Russia is great, the plan called for promoting the idea that the US should be focusing its resources less on Ukraine and more on domestic issues, such as rising inflation and high gas prices.

“It makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort to ensure that the Republican Party’s point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of Trump supporters) wins over the US public opinion,” the Good Old USA Project planning document reads. “This includes provisions on peace in Ukraine in exchange for territories, the need to focus on the problems of the US economy, returning troops home from all over the world, etc.”

As well as getting Trump elected, the campaign’s secondary goals included increasing the percentage of Americans who believe the US is doing too much to aid Ukraine to 51 percent, and reducing the percentage of Americans who have confidence in President Joe Biden down to 29 percent.

The plan lists a variety of audiences the campaign specifically wants to target, including residents of swing states, American Jews, “US citizens of Hispanic descent,” and the “community of American gamers, users of Reddit and image boards, such as 4chan.”

The document describes this category of gamers and chatroom users as the "backbone of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet.” In recent months, the Trump campaign has embraced many of the most influential figures within these communities, including many who share deeply misogynistic rhetoric on a regular basis.

To spread their narrative, the plan called for the creation of YouTube channels that shared pro-Trump content as well as other viral videos (“music, humor, beautiful girls etc,” according to the documents) in order to appear at the top of search results for “US elections.”

Meanwhile, Gambashidze and his colleagues used Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit to create community groups of Trump supporters, with one sample name given as “Alabama for America the Great.” The document also reveals that the Russians planned to use Reddit as a vector to disseminate their propaganda as it is a platform “free from democratic censorship.”

Gambashidze’s plan outlined how Doppelganger would create 18 “sleeper cells” on social media platforms in each of the swing states, which would “at the right moment, upon gaining momentum, become an important instrument of influencing the public opinion in critically important states and portals used by the Russian side to distribute bogus stories disguised as newsworthy events.” It’s unclear if these so-called sleeper cells were created and, if so, whether they are still present on the platform.

The campaign also used targeted ads on Facebook to not only promote their narrative but also to gain valuable insight into what messages were sticking and which were falling flat. “Targeted advertising in Facebook allows tracking reactions of users to the distributed material in real time and directing the psychological response group to contribute to comments thereof,” the document reads. “With the help of a network of bots the psychological response group moderates top discussions and adjusts further launches depending on which group was affected the most.”

One of the key aspects of the Kremlin’s campaign is also to engage with influencers. According to the FBI’s affidavit, Gambashidze’s company ​​“extensively monitors and collects information about a large number of media organizations and social media influencers.”

According to the Good Old USA project document, the Kremlin was seeking to work with influencers who are “proponents of traditional values, who stand up for ending the war in Ukraine and peaceful relations between the US and Russia, and who are ready to get involved in the promotion of the project narratives.”

Among the types of influencers listed as possible collaborators are actors, politicians, media representatives, activists, and clergymen.

The affidavit references one document maintained by the Social Design Agency, which is not included in the unsealed court documents, that contains a list of more than 2,800 people identified as influencers. While this list is global, US-based influencers account for around 20 percent of the accounts being monitored, including many US lawmakers, according to an analysis of the list by the FBI.

The Social Design Agency also maintains another list, again not included in the court documents, that tracks over 1,900 “anti-influencers” from 52 different countries, with US-based accounts. The FBI agent who authored the document assessed that “anti-influencer” refers to accounts which post “content that SDA views as contrary to Russian objectives.”

In a note from one of the meetings with Russian government officials discussing the campaign’s use of influencers, Gambashidze wrote: “We need influencers! A lot of them and everywhere. We are ready to wine and dine them.” Though no links have been confirmed, hours before the Doppelganger affidavit dropped on Wednesday, Tenet Media, an organization that features a slate of right-wing commentators, was alleged in an unsealed Department of Justice indictment to have been largely funded by Russian state-backed news network RT.

The Social Design Agency operation appeared to be extremely well-run and well-resourced. There is a “project office” consisting of four teams that include one entire group dedicated to monitoring the social media posts from GOP lawmakers in order to generate ideas for topics to cover.

These would then be handed to a “text factory," with orders to whittle down the topics handed to them by the monitoring team to four to five main issues, along with eight to 10 basic posts for social media platforms and 40- to 60 comments to post under those social media posts for the network of bots. Another team was called the “manga editorial office,” which was charged with producing a daily output of three to four images, including memes. Finally, a video team was tasked with producing three to four videos each day.

“In order for this work to be effective, you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information,” the document’s authors wrote. “At the same time, you should continuously repeat that this is what is really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you.”

Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous Russian researchers who have been closely tracking Doppelganger’s activity, are doubtful that the affidavit will have a significant impact on the campaign’s activity.

“Frankly, I believe it's whack-a-mole as long as EU providers keep doing business with [Social Design Agency], and UK-registered shell companies keep helping SDA with its operation,” the researchers told WIRED, citing their own investigations earlier this year.

[fionapplespiano]

In 2000, y’all did the both sides are bad bullshit, voted for Ralph Nader, and Bush won.

In 2016, y’all did the both sides are bad bullshit, voted for Jill Stein, and Trump won.

When will y’all learn that this isn’t productive and isn’t getting us anywhere? Jill Stein especially has not interest in being president, her only interest is accepting money from Russia to run for president in order to siphon left-leaning votes from Kamala Harris, in order to ensure a Trump victory. This time around, she’s using the Palestinian cause in order to grift, which is especially disgusting.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the data from the swing states in the 2016 election:

Still unconvinced? Here’s some literature to read:

Note where it says she invests in RAYTHEON, yaknow the company that manufactures weapons that are being used in Gaza? So much for her being pro-Palestinian!

There’s only TWO options in this election, if you don’t vote for Kamala Harris, that only benefits Trump. And we know this because it’s already happened before. So please vote for Kamala Harris, because if we get Trump and Project 2025, we’re all going to burn, Gaza too.

[hellochildrenoftheatom]

Queer Jews Project Day 30 - Roberta Kaplan

Roberta Kaplan was born and raised in Ohio. In college, she spent a summer abroad in Moscow and discovered her passion for activism by helping Soviet Jews. After graduating from Harvard Law School, she rose through the ranks at top law firm Paul Weiss – making partner in seven years.

Roberta’s had a long and prestigious career, but I’m going to highlight two cases of hers. First of all, she represented Edie Windsor and took down the Defense of Marriage Act. And more recently, Roberta represented E. Jean Caroll in her defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump. She won, forcing Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $88 million in damages.

Learn more about Roberta Kaplan here.

Queer Jews Project

[no-known-cure]

Ok I've got over it already

Europe needs to get its shit together and become sovereign from the US anyway, and a second Trump term while russia is invading our neighbour is as good an opportunity to finally get fucking Germany to treat this seriously as we'll get.

Mark Rutte is the head of NATO now and he knows what's up, as well as inexplicably having a good relationship with Trump.

I trust in Poland's current government to do what needs to be done, ie. play Mr Trump for the fool that he is by flattering his ego and business interests, while rightfully dunking on Germany, which Trump will also like.

Trump's victory hasn't been warmly greeted by russia or the russian propaganda machine yet, probably because their relationship seems to have cooled down somewhat in the last few weeks as Trump started to brag about bombing moscow (if only), so it's not a given that he'll be a godsend to russia.

The US has strategic interests in Poland which extend beyond party lines and have survived the first Trump term with no problems, eg. an American anti-missile system is finally going to open in Poland in the next few days, and the construction of that project began during the Bush administration, so these things seem to be independent of domestic US politics. Similarly, Poland is spending almost 5% of its GDP on the military now and has bought a shit ton of weapons for huge sums of money from the US to be delivered over the next decade, which is hardly something that Trump's administration will want to turn its back on.

In conclusion, I for one am rubbing my mature sissy cunt in the anticipation of big MAGA cocks as we speak.

[partisan-by-default]

Musk also shared Russia-aligned talking points outside the context of the conspiracy alleged in the recent indictment, according to a report Tuesday by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Citing records from a Russian disinformation campaign, the news service said that an internet meme denigrating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and shared on X last year by Musk was made by a Moscow-based company called Social Design Agency. 

Musk did not respond to an email Tuesday asking about the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty report and about his sharing of Tenet Media content. Representatives for X also did not respond to a request for comment about Musk or about X’s handling of Tenet content. 

In posts on X, Musk has appeared unconcerned about Russia’s influence operations. The day the Tenet Media indictment was announced, Musk reacted with the “tears of joy” emoji to another user’s unproven theory that the covert project may have backfired by causing infighting among conservatives. 

The day after the indictment dropped, Musk accused The Associated Press of pushing anti-Trump “propaganda” in its coverage of Tenet Media. And he posted in defense of the right-wing podcasters \ Tenet had retained, agreeing with another conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro, that the men were deceived. 

[nicklloydnow]

“On the night of Nov. 5, I didn’t sleep at all, but it wasn’t because of air raid sirens. When it seemed clear that Donald Trump would win the U.S. presidential election, the mood on Ukrainian social media and among friends turned overwhelmingly negative (when it wasn’t outright disbelief: My publisher, who lives in Kharkiv, insisted for more than 30 minutes that something was surely wrong with the data).

The war was effectively over, people said. Mr. Trump would halt all American military aid and Ukraine would be forced to cede large swaths of territory to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. I told myself that Ukrainians have a tendency toward pessimism. That Ukraine is the front line against Mr. Putin’s project to make Russia great again, a project that is certainly incompatible with Mr. Trump’s. Surely Mr. Trump would decide that it is in his interest to thwart Mr. Putin and act decisively. But my mood, too, eventually tumbled to dark places.

(…)

In Ukraine, there is safety in simply trusting that the worst will happen. To dare to hope has always been the risk.

“What good things have I seen in my lifetime?” our 87-year-old neighbor Grandma Anya likes to say, with a solid fatalism that’s built on being born soon after the famine of the early 1930s to parents who had lost three children; on watching her savings, like many others’, become worthless right before the breakup of the U.S.S.R.; and on the steely hand from Moscow that has grasped at the heels of Ukrainians as we’ve strained for democracy, Europe and the rule of law.

In the past few years, however, there have been moments for hope. Like in the spring of 2022, when our army routed Russian forces from the suburbs around Kyiv and then took back nearly all of Kharkiv region, in the north, in the fall. There was a confidence then that Ukraine had earned the support of allies and that together we would repel Russian aggression.

But we’re tired. Some troops on the front lines have gone without leave for many months. Some in the east are falling back more than a mile a day at times. This week it snowed. The cold season is beginning, and with so many power stations already destroyed, the prospects for the winter are bleak.

We read that Russia is burning through men and matériel, but also that it has harnessed its economy to serve the war and produces weapons and ammunition around the clock. That it has used fewer missiles recently not to go easy on us, but because it is stockpiling them to inflict more damage when it gets colder.

Even before Mr. Trump’s election, the West’s support for Ukraine was indecisive, and the clamor among those who think this war is simply costing too much is growing louder. “Some still want to continue sending enormous amounts of money into this lost war,” Viktor Orban, Hungary’s president, told Hungarian national radio last week. “But the number of those who remain silent, and those who cautiously argue that we should adjust to the new situation, is growing.” Mr. Orban is on particularly friendly terms with America’s president-elect.

So what happens now? We wait. We wait for the publication of Mr. Trump’s plan for peace and eagerly consume the reported details of it that appear in American newspapers. We decide whether to believe the news reports that Mr. Trump had a call with Mr. Putin, or the Kremlin, which said the call never took place. We wait for Mr. Trump to tell us our fate in his own time. We decide whether to risk a hope.”

“Ukraine could develop a rudimentary nuclear bomb within months if Donald Trump withdraws US military assistance, according to a briefing paper prepared for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence.

The country would quickly be able to build a basic device from plutonium with a similar technology to the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, the report states. "Creating a simple atomic bomb, as the United States did within the framework of the Manhattan Project, would not be a difficult task 80 years later," the document reads.

With no time to build and run the large facilities required to enrich uranium, wartime Ukraine would have to rely instead on using plutonium extracted from spent fuel rods taken from Ukraine's nuclear reactors.

Ukraine still controls nine operational reactors and has significant nuclear expertise despite having given up the world's third largest nuclear arsenal in 1996. The report says: "The weight of reactor plutonium available to Ukraine can be estimated at seven tons ... A significant nuclear weapons arsenal would require much less material ... the amount of material is sufficient for hundreds of warheads with a tactical yield of several kilotons."

Such a bomb would have about one tenth the power of Fat Man, the document's authors conclude.

"That would be enough to destroy an entire Russian airbase or concentrated military, industrial or logistics installations. The exact nuclear yield would be unpredictable because it would use different isotopes of plutonium," said the report's author, Oleksii Yizhak, head of department at Ukraine's National Institute for Strategic Studies, a government research centre that acts as an advisory body to the presidential office and the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine.

The plutonium would need to be imploded using "a complicated conventional explosion design, which must occur with a high detonation wave velocity simultaneously around the entire surface of the plutonium sphere," the report reads. The technology is challenging but within Ukraine's expertise, according to the briefing.

Last month President Zelensky said he had told Trump that Ukraine would need nuclear weapons to guarantee his country's security if it were prevented from joining Nato, as President Putin has demanded. Zelensky later said he had meant there was no alternative security guarantee, and Ukrainian officials have since denied Kyiv is considering nuclear rearmament.

The paper, which is published by the Centre for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, an influential Ukrainian military think tank, has been shared with the country's deputy defence minister and is to be presented on Wednesday at a conference likely to be attended by Ukraine's ministers for defence and strategic industries.

It is not endorsed by the Kyiv government but sets out the legal basis under which Ukraine could withdraw from the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT), the ratification of which was contingent on security guarantees given by the US, UK and Russia in the 1994 Budapest memorandum. The agreement stated that Ukraine would surrender its nuclear arsenal of 1,734 strategic warheads in exchange for the promise of protection.

"The violation of the memorandum by the nuclear-armed Russian Federation provides formal grounds for withdrawal from the NPT and moral reasons for reconsideration of the nonnuclear choice made in early 1994," the paper states.

Russian troops are gaining momentum as they advance in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, and Trump has pledged to cut US military aid unless Kyiv submits to peace talks with Putin.

Bryan Lanza, a Trump adviser, has already said that Ukraine will have to surrender Crimea. This week Donald Trump Jr taunted Zelensky, posting on X: "You're 38 days from losing your allowance."

Ukrainian forces are heavily dependent on US weaponry, and any reduction in the flow of western arms into the country, let alone a complete curtailment, would have catastrophic consequences on the battlefield. That has prompted Ukrainians to look for a way to take matters into their own hands.

"You need to understand we face an existential challenge. If the Russians take Ukraine, millions of Ukrainians will be killed under occupation," said Valentyn Badrak, director of the centre that produced the paper. "There are millions of us who would rather face death than go to the gulags." Badrak is from Irpin, where occupying Russians tortured and murdered civilians, and he was hunted by troops with orders to kill him.

Western experts believe it would take Ukraine at least five years to develop a nuclear weapon and a suitable carrier, but Badrak insists Ukraine is less than a year from building its own ballistic missiles. "In six months Ukraine will be able to show that it has a long-range ballistic missile capability: we will have missiles with a range of 1,000km," Badrak said.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commanding officer of the UK's Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment told Times Radio that Ukraine "certainly" had the technical know-how and practical wherewithal to produce a nuclear weapon.

"Trump will take note because the last thing we want is more nuclear proliferation and any sort of nuclear strike in Europe, be it from Ukrainians or the Russians," he added.

Bretton-Gordon called Zelensky a "master strategist" who was willing to try "absolutely everything".”

[bushtruenews]

Trump partnered with mafia-linked Alex Shnaider

For Toronto Tower, Trump partnered with mafia-linked Alex Shnaider, who paid $100M to a Moscow fixer representing Kremlin-backed investors who funneled millions into the project. For financing, they used Firtash & Mogilevich's primary bank.

In 2007 Trump touted the financing for “our” Toronto project as “a testament to the strength of the Trump name." The $40M investment from his Russian-Canadian partner, Alex Shnaider, came from Kremlin-backed investors. Trump later denied any knowledge about the financing.

In 2010, Alex Shnaider authorized a $100M bribe to a Moscow fixer representing Kremlin-backed investors to facilitate the sale of his Ukraine steel mill for $850M, a deal financed by Russian-state bank VEB [chaired by Putin at the time], proceeds of which flowed to Trump.

Alex Shnaider's father-in-law, Boris Birshtein, is a longtime friend and business partner of Sergei Mikhailov, known as Mikhas the leader of Moscow’s most powerful organised crime syndicate: the Solntsevskaya Bratva [linked to Mogilevich]. Shnaider also knows Mikhailov.

Birshtein & Mikhailov co-founded laundering front Seabeco [where Shnaider worked]. In 1996, after Mikhailov's arrest [and a witness shot dead], Belgian police raided Birshtein & Shnaider’s Antwerp houses, prompting Shnaider to move back to Toronto.

Another close associate of Shnaider father-in-law Boris Birshtein is Russian mafia boss Alexander Mashkevich [ran Seabeco’s Moscow office], who, along with his Eurasia Group partners, financed several Trump-Bayrock projects, including Trump Soho.

ICYMI: According the the Sep 11 Commission Report, Alexander Mashkevich & his 2 Kazakh billionaire partners [AKA" the Trio"], are Russian/Israeli Mafia & Mashkevich [who attended Trump's inaugural & private inauguration dinner] is a mafia boss.

Birshtein [father-in-law & business assoc of Trump's Toronto partner Alex Shnaider] is also a friend of Oleg Deripaska, and in 2009, brokered a deal for the CIA to recruit Deripaska to 'rescue' Bob Levinson [missing in Iran] in exchange for a VISA.

Shnaider's mafia-linked father-in-law, Birshtein, claimed “no involvement in Trump Toronto either directly or indirectly,” however, a Cypriot company controlled by the director of Birshtein companies, was listed in 2016 as a Trump Toronto creditor.

In addition to Alex Shnaider's Kremlin-linked funds, financing for Trump's Toronto project came from Austria's Raiffeisen Bank [$243M]. According to diplomatic cables, Russian mafia boss Semion Mogilevich is a partner in Raiffeisen [the primary bank of Dmitry Firtash].

[the-jam-to-the-unicorn]

I honestly don't understand Ze and Andriy at the moment and their insane dick sucking of Trump. They can't be that stupid to think that Trump is an acual ally of Ukraine, right?!??? So what's with all the sweet talk and sucking up on Trump and his team, some of them hardcore Russian propagandists??? There isn't one interview right now, or tweet, where Ze and Andriy are not elaborately talk positively about Trump and his Ukraine support (????????). Dudes...he literally tried to blackmail you some years ago. Don't be so fucking stupid! Trump is even worse now AND Elon Moscow is behind him.

They're neither stupid nor are they underestimating Trump and his minions.

The reason they're praising Trump so much try to get on his good side is fairly simple: They want to survive as well as want Ukraine to survive. And in order for that they need the support of the US, at least until Europe finally stepped up it's game or they got a just peace. And there is only one way to get US support - to be on Trump's side and be his new favourite little project. As well as the new favourite toy of his minions. So they try to stroke his ego and feed his narcism as much as possible and pretend he is the biggest and greatest President of all time and could be, if he is a hardliner against Russia and supports Ukraine and getting them a just peace.

Of course they still know with what kind of people they deal. Ze knows first hand after the blackmail and Andriy dealed with Trump and his people during Trump's first term. And of course they're well aware about the possible Russian spies and absolute Russian mouthpieces.

[swldx]

RNZ Pacific 1311 10 Nov 2024

7390Khz 1259 10 NOV 2024 - RNZ PACIFIC (NEW ZEALAND) in ENGLISH from RANGITAIKI. SINPO = 55344. English, QRM=CRI cochannel (until s/off @1300z). s/on w/bellbird int. until pips and news @1300z anchored by Peter McIlwaine. § Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election has darkened the outlook for a strong deal at the COP29 climate summit next week and will increase pressure on Europe and China to lead international progress in curbing planetary warming, according to climate negotiators. § Donald Trump secured a victory in Arizona on Saturday, reclaiming the state and its 11 electoral votes for the Republican Party after Joe Biden's 2020 win. Control of the House of Representatives is still up in the air, and while ABC News has projected that Republicans will win the Senate, the size of their majority is still TBD. Needless to say, both of these things will have major implications for how easy it will be for Trump to enact his second-term agenda. § ACT leader David Seymour is open to meeting with the organisers of a hīkoi heading to Wellington in support of the Treaty of Waitangi. His Treaty Principles Bill is set to have its first reading this week, before being referred to a select committee for a six-month select committee process. The hīkoi gathered for a pōwhiri (Māori protest) on Sunday night at Te Kao, ahead of its Monday morning departure from Te Rerenga Wairua, Cape Reinga - with a karakia also kicking things off from Bluff. § Ukraine has attacked Moscow with at least 32 drones, the biggest drone strike on the Russian capital since the start of the war in 2022, forcing flights to be diverted from three of the city's major airports and injuring at least one person. Russian air defences shot down 32 drones flying towards Moscow over the Ramenskoye and Kolomensky districts of the Moscow region, as well as in Domodedovo city, home to one of the city's biggest airports, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. § Sports. @1303z trailer for RNZ "Afternoons with Jessie Mulligan". @1304z Weather Forecast: rain, some heavy. Isolated showers by afternoon. @1305z "All Night Programme" anchored by Peter McIlwaine, Music. Backyard fence antenna, JRC NRD-535D. 100kW, beamAz 35°, bearing 240°. Received at Plymouth, MN, United States, 12912KM from transmitter at Rangitaiki. Local time: 0659.

[mariacallous]

One of the Western populist right’s enduring myths about President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is that it is steeped in traditional values, a bastion of virtue standing in opposition to an increasingly godless West. In the United States, the fascination with Russia as a supposed global center of conservative virtue has especially gained currency in MAGA world.

This image of Russia as a traditionalist’s paradise led former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson to offer both Putin and Russian far-right philosopher Alexander Dugin, one of Putin’s most vicious cheerleaders for genocide in Ukraine, the opportunity to expound their views to millions of Americans in a comfortable, uncritical setting. It is the reason that MAGA-aligned U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene talks about Russia as a strong protector of Christianity. And it’s why former Trump administration National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has framed Putin as a defender of “family and God.”

The contrast between myth and reality couldn’t be starker. The truth is that Russia is one of the world’s least religious societies, with only 9 percent of Russians attending religious services at least somewhat regularly, according to a poll conducted in 2022 by the Moscow-based Levada Center. By contrast, nearly one-third of Americans are frequent churchgoers. Just 1.4 million Russians—a mere 1 percent of the population—attended the most recent Christmas services. The Russian state also persecutes Christians who do not adhere to Russian Orthodoxy, including Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, of course, anyone connected to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

Nor is Russia a bastion of what true conservatives would consider traditional values. Based on data calculated by the Guttmacher Institute, the Russian abortion rate from 2015 to 2019 was nearly four times higher than that of the United States and more than twice as high as that of Ukraine. Russia also has the fourth-highest divorce rate in the world—60 percent higher than in the United States and more than 50 percent higher than in Ukraine. Those among the U.S. and European far right who project their own ideals onto Russian society ignore the obvious and copious evidence.

The false image of a god-fearing Russia is hardly accidental. It is the consequence of systematic efforts by Putin and his propagandists to craft talking points for the global right—an effort that has accelerated since Russia launched its all-out war on Ukraine in 2022.

It wasn’t always so. After the Soviet collapse in 1991, a Russia shorn of most of its empire struggled with its post-communist identity. Under its first president, Boris Yeltsin, the country waded into the waters of a Russo-centric patriotism. But his chosen successor, Putin, supplanted this worldview by nostalgia for the former Soviet and Russian empires, as well as adulation of brutal autocrats such as Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and Tsar Peter the Great.

Today, to both mobilize Russians for a bloody war and undermine support for Ukraine by appealing to the political extremes in the West, Putin and his ideologues have crafted a new mythology that depicts Russia as a bastion of traditional values rooted in religious faith.

This theme was front and center at Putin’s fifth inauguration as Russian president on May 7. In his address, he declared that “support for centuries-old family values ​​and traditions will continue to unite public and religious associations, political parties, and all levels of government.”

From their putative moral high ground, Putin and his propagandists in the Kremlin-controlled media have used the bully pulpit to rail against Western “woke-ism,” political correctness, and secularism, earning admiration among right-wing populists in the West. By projecting Russians and the Russian state as deeply religious and steeped in tradition—and by denouncing the Western establishment for its supposed attacks on traditional values—Kremlin propaganda has made serious inroads among cultural and religious conservatives in the United States and elsewhere.

This has helped create some measure of sympathy for Russia’s war against Ukraine among certain segments of the far right, which see Putin as a powerful voice on their side of the culture wars.

Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russia Today, the state media conglomerate responsible for most of Moscow’s global propaganda, crystallized the postulates and far-reaching ambitions of Russia’s traditionalist propaganda during a television appearance in February.

Speaking on the heels of Carlson’s fawning chat with Putin, Simonyan saw a major opportunity for Russia to find fellow travelers and new allies among those disgruntled by secularization in the West. Unlike Ukraine and its Western backers, which she called adepts of “satanism,” she described Russia as “the city on a hill” to which the world’s traditionalists can now flock to escape their stifling secular societies. She declared that traditionalist messaging is the “beacon of a wonderful idea” whose appeal can be likened to that of communism during the Soviet era. Russia, she continued, might even counter its severely shrinking population by attracting disgruntled traditionalists from around the world as immigrants to a new promised land of traditionalism.

To this end, the Kremlin announced a new decree on Aug. 19 that eases residency rules for refugees from countries where “traditional values” are under attack from “neoliberalism” and other supposed secular ills.

Aging Russian kleptocrats such as Putin, who formerly served in the security services of the atheist Soviet state, engage in performative religion at most. As the investigations conducted by the late Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny documented, the Russian ruling elite, including Putin himself, is obscenely wealthy and deeply corrupt. But state media outlets diligently portray them as god-fearing believers, generous patrons of monasteries, supporters of religious media, and sponsors of newly built churches—all paid for with money they have stolen from the Russian people.

These performative good works are applauded by the security service operatives who control the upper reaches of the Russian Orthodox Church. Purged and brought under complete state control under Stalin, the church has consistently promoted the aims of Soviet and now Russian policies. It is a vocal supporter of Putin’s war against Ukraine.

At the apex of performative piety stands Putin. Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, born Vladimir Gundyayev and believed to be a former security services operative, has lavished praise on Putin for being “truly the first Orthodox president” of Russia. The link between Putin’s proclaimed religiosity and something approaching a divine right to rule Russia has also become part of the new ideological canon—back to the roots, if you will, of Russian Orthodoxy as an imperial church.

“May God help you to continue to carry out the ministry that God himself has entrusted to you,” Kirill said during Putin’s inauguration in May. Given the long-standing collusion between the Kremlin and a compliant church, it is little wonder that religious leaders actively support Putin’s war and encourage Russia’s young to lay down their lives.

To mask the degradation of spiritual and religious life, Russia has built a vast Potemkin village of new churches. Around 30,000 new parishes have been added in the post-Soviet era, averaging nearly three every day since 1991. Given Russians’ negligible interest in religion, they stand largely empty.

Simonyan’s comparison of Putin’s traditionalist, pseudo-Christian posturing with the global appeal of communism is apt in ways that she did not intend. Like communism, whose façade of equality and social justice masked mass repression and the emergence of privileged, all-powerful elite, today’s Russia has little patience for moral and ethical principles. Instead, the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church serve the exigencies of a kleptocratic mafia that rules over a deeply damaged, militaristic, and highly unequal society.

Indeed, in time, Russia’s newest state ideology is very likely to become another God That Failed—the title of a landmark 1949 book in which six Western intellectuals broke with communism, declaring that it was just a cover for a new form of dictatorship.

For the moment, none of this matters to the Western populist right, which has blithely ignored the carnage that Putin has inflicted on Ukraine. Nor will Russia’s performative religiosity put those Westerners off; their projection of virtue onto Putin’s Russia has become too important a part of their cynical politics. If your enemy is the West’s liberal and tolerant society, then the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

[imkeepinit]

9) Putin’s Goal: Soften America’s adversarial stance on Russia. For the past 70 years, the Republican Party was the party of Russia hawks, advocating a hard line against the Soviet Union and Russia on issues ranging from nuclear posture, human rights, missile defense, and NATO enlargement. These positions were not just vestiges of the Cold War era. In 2012, Mitt Romney, then the Republican Party’s nominee for president, famously asserted that Russia was “without question our number one geopolitical foe.”

Putin’s Payout: Trump is shifting the Republican Party’s generations-long hawkish views on Russia.

The Trump campaign shifted the 2016 RNC platform to Russia’s benefit. After Republican leaders spent years denouncing Obama’s stance against America’s “number one geopolitical foe,” the Trump campaign edited the party’s platform to be more conciliatory toward the Kremlin. Initially, a draft of the RNC platform called for “providing lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine to combat Russian incursions. Trump adviser J.D. Gordon intervened on behalf of the Trump campaign to soften the final language and call for “providing appropriate assistance” to Ukraine.

[ramrodd]

HOLY SH*T David Pakman SCHOOLS BORING Lex Fridman On HIS OWN SHOW

COMMENTARY:

In 1978, . was looking for about the same kind of money for an  IPO start-up at the same time Trump was trying to finance Trump Tower. I was working with a guy like Trump, a brilliant promoter but, unlike Trump was n operational genius at large scale  project managment, He put the first IBM Data Processing Center in Moscow and handed the key to the Sovietys and, like Armand Hammer, he may still go back to see how it's running. I was his entrepreneur that understood the project as an instrument in a larger system and my job was to help him hook up our project with the larger operational entities in aviation, At that time, the FedEx venture capital public offering had sucked all the loose change out of the markets and this was during the Stagflation Carter had inherited from the way LBJ financed Vietnam, by cashflow budgeting,, as opposed to the capital budgeting of WWII and Korea.. When Nixon began to shut down the way, the economy lost a huge chunk of its reason for being and all that cash flow left a whole in the teasury full of funny money, EdEx got the last of the hard money sluch fund for incidental specualtion, I've never been the same room with Trump, but I kept walking into places he had just left. , He was a Barnum and Bailey Barker, for all intents and purposes, but he loved to build and he had a worldl class project manager to pick up the pieces after he left the room, Barbara Res. She was playing in a league of development made possible by Nixon=Moynihan urban renewal programs, some of which I worked on as a consultan,  Trump's Art of the Deal was based on his ability to explain how the building fit into Affrimative Action to his backers and, whne the contract was signed, Barbara Res would connect all the dots, operationaly, that Trump had agreed to connect. And she did it. 22 properties in Manhattan, Trump was the leading edge of Carters domestic program leading to the completion of Stage 2 of Eisenhower's program to transfrom the Military Industirial Complex into an economic configuration necessary to sustain a lunar colony like in 2001: A Space ODyssey for 100 years, if not forever, When Reagan ran on his New Federalism platform, he was proposing to  take credit for achieving the social, materian and legislative plateau necessary to grow Eisenhower's Star War''s economics of Starship America. And Ttrump was operating at the leading edge of Stage 2 in the completion of the New Federalism, which is based on the Parable of the Talents as the open system economics of the Bible.  Reagan's economics were based on his experience as a governor and working with the Nixon-Moynihan Affirmative Action at the New States Rights level of the New Federalism, Insead, the Project 2025 element around Reagan substitued Supply Side Economics for the New Federalism and began to systematically dismantle Affirmative Action. Trump's Art of the Deal does not work in a Project 2025 milieu. He lost all the equity in his properties with Bob Doel's 1986 Tax Reform that vacated several strata of wealth in the name of removing tax shelters. Like with the Savings and Loan industry. The kind of economics of George Baily's It's a wonderful Life. Eiwenhower's economic model was based, in large part, on this American  capitalist ideal. Dole's Tax Reform blew it up  And that reuulted in the Resolution Trust Corporation and the largest unearned transfer of weaalth from the public treasury and middle class wealth to the top 1% in history, Trump shifted gears and just kept promoting, He just never had a Barbara Res at his back except for Melania to connect the dots his ceaseless lurch forward. If you are part of Gen Z boy and you are youngr than 36 and elgible for military service, the reason why we really haven't needed a draft since 1945 is because of nukes, NATO and the Untied Nations. The reason why we had a draft for Vietnam is because LBJ took some stupid political advice . It's unclear to me whether it was deliberate strategic sabotage by the same Projet 2025 agents who engineered the assassination of the Diem brothers or not, or just stupid political advice when Clausewtiz would have proceeded by deliberate organization, If Trump is elected and pulls out of NATO, you'll be in the pool for military service. Trump surrendered unilaterally to the Taliban in a battle NATO was winning. The fact that David Pakman believes this was the necessary result merely emphasizes the point that Gen Z needs to understand Clausewitz differently than us Boomers do, Trump's entire political career has been of blunders like LBJ's decision to use the draft. Projet 2025 is no Barbara Res

[head-post]

China’s nuclear project and prospects of modern world

More than half a century ago, on October 16, 1964, Beijing joined the “club of nuclear powers.” The so-called Project 596, the code name for China’s first nuclear weapons test, was made possible mainly thanks to Soviet scientists. The atomic bomb was based on the element uranium-235 and had a yield of 22 kilotons. This test made China the world’s fifth nuclear power. However, the Soviet Union was not the only one involved. Relations with China after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin were different, often quite tense, as China ‘pulled’ nuclear competences from around the world.

Why is this issue of global importance now? The history of the Chinese nuclear project explains much about the current political and geopolitical situation. The approaches and principles of the main participants in global politics have not changed much in 60-70 years.

Washington’s desire to use nuclear weapons has arisen many times since the emergence of the nuclear bomb in the US and the American Manhattan project. The US has rattled nuclear weapons towards the USSR, China and North Korea.

John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State against the background of the aggravation of the China-Taiwan crisis – Taiwan held the islands of Jinmyndao and Mazzu with the active participation of the US fleet, commenting on the words of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai about the readiness to “liberate Taiwan,” said that Washington would definitely strike, if necessary, with nuclear weapons.

Against the background of the US threat, the Chinese rushed to the USSR for help. Mao Zedong said from the very beginning of the creation of the PRC that the country should have nuclear weapons: “…we cannot do without this thing if we want not to be offended.”

In October 1954, the Chinese officially asked the USSR for help. At first then-USSR leader Nikita Khrushchev refused to help, China did not have the necessary scientific and industrial base and money, but the Chinese showed persistence, and the then head of the USSR agreed and in early 1955 it was decided to develop and create nuclear weapons.

The USSR helped to conduct geological research and develop uranium mines. Moscow helped China to build a nuclear weapons production plant. The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party decided to build delivery vehicles. Thus, Moscow created Beijing’s military-industrial complex capable of producing almost the entire range of weapons. Russian specialists built more than 700 full-fledged factories, 97 scientific and technological centres and 11 testing grounds, and trained more than 120,000 Chinese students free of charge. China employed more than 90,000 specialists of various kinds. Moscow also gave Beijing licences to produce weapons and military equipment from small arms to aircraft. China received the technology to produce jet bombers – the front-line Il-28 (Hong-5) and the long-range Tu-16 (Hong-6).

Looking at a series of historical events, a certain cyclicality can be traced. Back then, China urgently needed Russia. Today, against the backdrop of aggravating geopolitical situations, Moscow needs its support, but it will not do without Russia. After all, the answer to the question: “Does nuclear weapons today give China guaranteed defence” is no longer so unambiguous and linear.

Everything will depend on whether someone, before a direct conflict between the US and China, will use tactical nuclear weapons. If it could be used in the Ukrainian crisis or will be used in the Middle East, then Pandora’s Box will be opened. The US could use tactical nuclear weapon (TNW)  against China directly or through its allies. If this does not happen, the outcome of the conflict will depend on the results of the November elections in the US.

If Republican representative Donald Trump comes to power again (if he survives the American internal political struggle), a series of trade and currency wars will begin for China, with an attempt on the part of the US to “rock” a full-fledged Asian crisis. Going into direct conflict would be an emergency measure for both sides.

However, if the Democrats remain in power in the name of Kamala Harris, it will mean the acceleration of the process of fragmentation of the world economy. For this purpose, the US needs three conflict zones on the globe and it can be said that they are already ready: in Europe it already has – Ukraine, in the Middle East Gaza is burning and Lebanon is fighting with Israel, and in East Asia the situation is also heated to the limit. The price of the question: repatriation of capital to the US, weakening through containment of Russia, weakening of competitors in the face of China and Europe.

THE ARTICLE IS THE AUTHOR’S SPECULATION AND DOES NOT CLAIM TO BE TRUE. ALL INFORMATION IS TAKEN FROM OPEN SOURCES. THE AUTHOR DOES NOT IMPOSE ANY SUBJECTIVE CONCLUSIONS.

Xiao Duong for Head-Post.com

Send your author content for publication in INSIGHT to  headpost.social@gmail.com

[stephen-barry]

Trump’s real Project 2025 was written for him in Moscow by Vladimir Putin’s men

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/gop-trump-campaign-russia-propaganda-20240908.html