Democracy gone Astray: Sunday, July 29, 2018

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Sunday, July 29, 2018

Keystone Pipeline Leaks 5,000 Barrels Of Oil In South Dakota, TransCanada Says

A section of the Keystone oil pipeline has leaked 5,000 barrels of oil, or about 210,000 gallons, in a remote area of South Dakota, TransCanada announced Thursday.

The company said the conduit was “safely shut down” about 6 a.m. local time, in line with safety procedures, but environmental groups have pointed to the leak as evidence a sister pipeline, the Keystone XL, should be rejected in neighboring Nebraska.

Public support for Theresa May has grown despite a disastrous party conference speech, two Cabinet resignations and Brexit talks stalling.

A YouGov poll for The Times found 34% of voters want May to stay as Prime Minister, up one point from a month ago.

Backing for Jeremy Corbyn as PM, meanwhile, fell two points to 35% and a sizeable 35% said they were not sure who they wanted to lead the country.

I was a magazine guy.

After eight years as managing editor of Time, I left at the end of 2013 to become under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. It’s a fancy title, but that job is one of the few in Washington that’s tailored for someone with a media background like me. After I was nominated, some of my colleagues joked that I was now “head of U.S. propaganda,” but I thought of myself instead as the chief marketing officer of brand America. I figured I’d be spending a lot of my time combating America’s negative image in the Muslim world—and I did—but then the Russian annexation of Crimea happened in early 2014. What I saw Russia do online and in social media around this grave violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty was a revelation to me—and nothing short of a trial run for what they did to manipulate our presidential election in 2016. Few Americans realized it back then, but we were already in a global information war with Russia.

MANILA (Reuters) - Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte attacked Canada's Justin Trudeau at the end of a summit of Asian and Western nations for raising questions about his war on drugs, a topic skirted by other leaders, including U.S. President Donald Trump.

At the traditional news conference by the host nation at the end of the summit on Tuesday, Duterte was asked how he had responded to the Canadian prime minister raising the issue of human rights and extra-judicial killings in his anti-drugs drive.

The governments of 30 countries around the globe are using armies of so called opinion shapers to meddle in elections, advance anti-democratic agendas and repress their citizens, a new report shows.

Unlike widely reported Russian attempts to influence foreign elections, most of the offending countries use the internet to manipulate opinion domestically, says US NGO Freedom House.

“Manipulation and disinformation tactics played an important role in elections in at least 17 other countries over the past year, damaging citizens’ ability to choose their leaders based on factual news and authentic debate,” the US government-funded charity said. “Although some governments sought to support their interests and expand their influence abroad, as with Russia’s disinformation campaigns in the United States and Europe, in most cases they used these methods inside their own borders to maintain their hold on power.”

PRAGUE — He’s brash, provocative and blatantly politically incorrect. He recently called 90 percent of Czech Roma “unadaptable” and lazy, and he volunteered to remove a burkini from the body of a Muslim woman. He has been accused of being a racist and a cynical opportunist.

Miloš Zeman is also the president of the Czech Republic. His first term, now drawing to a close, has been marked by declarations that have provoked outrage and disbelief at home and abroad, such as a claim that the recent wave of migrants was a plot by the Muslim Brotherhood to “gradually gain control” of Europe.

On December 16, 2016, Tanya Gersh answered her phone and heard gunshots. Startled, she hung up. Gersh, a real-estate agent who lives in Whitefish, Montana, assumed it was a prank call. But the phone rang again. More gunshots. Again, she hung up. Another call. This time, she heard a man’s voice: “This is how we can keep the Holocaust alive,” he said. “We can bury you without touching you.”

When Gersh put down the phone, her hands were shaking. She was one of only about 100 Jews in Whitefish and the surrounding Flathead Valley, and she knew there were white nationalists and “sovereign citizens” in the area. But Gersh had lived in Whitefish for more than 20 years, since just after college, and had always considered the scenic ski town an idyllic place. She didn’t even have a key to her house—she’d never felt the need to lock her door. Now that sense of security was about to be shattered.

You've got to admire Mohammed Bin Salman's stamina and drive. The ambitious, adrenaline-pumped young prince is fighting a major war next door, while instigating diplomatic crises abroad and cracking down on powerful detractors at home. And yet he still finds the time to curtail the influence of the religious establishment and chart a future vision for Saudi Arabia through 2030 and beyond.

But is he reaching too far?

The evidence is overwhelming that natural gas has no net climate benefit in any timescale that matters to humanity.

In fact, a shocking new study concludes that just the methane emissions escaping from New Mexico’s gas and oil industry are “equivalent to the climate impact of approximately 12 coal-fired power plants.” If the goal is to avoid catastrophic levels of warming, a recent report by U.K. climate researchers finds “categorically no role” to play for new natural gas production.

Kudos to Germany’s spooks. Back in December 2015, the German foreign intelligence agency, BND, distributed a one-and-a-half-page memo to various media outlets titled: “Saudi Arabia — Sunni regional power torn between foreign policy paradigm change and domestic policy consolidation.” The document was pretty astonishing, both in its undiplomatic bluntness and remarkable prescience.

More than 15,000 scientists around the world have issued a global warning: there needs to be change in order to save Earth.

It comes 25 years after the first notice in 1992 when a mere 1,500 scientists issued a similar warning.

This new cautioning — which gained popularity on Twitter with #ScientistsWarningToHumanity — garnered more than 15,000 signatures.

In the Middle East, the parlor game of the moment is guessing whether Saad Hariri, Lebanon’s prime minister—or is it ex-prime minister?—is literally, or only figuratively, a prisoner of his Saudi patrons. In a stiff interview from an undisclosed location in Riyadh on Sunday, Hariri did little to allay concerns that he’s being held hostage by a foreign power that is now writing his speeches and seeking to use him to ignite a regional war. He insisted he was “free,” and would soon return to Lebanon. He said he wanted calm to prevail in any dispute with Hezbollah, the most influential party serving in his country’s government.

CALGARY — TransCanada Corp. says its Keystone pipeline has leaked an estimated 795,000 litres of oil in Marshall County, S.D.

The company says its crews shut down the pipeline early this morning after detecting a drop in pressure and are assessing the situation.

The CEO of Goldman Sachs has called for a second referendum on Brexit, claiming “many wish for a confirming vote on a decision so monumental and irreversible”.

In a rare tweet, Lloyd Blankfein told his 70,000 followers that Britain should make sure the consensus is “still there” to leave the EU.

The banking boss wrote on Thursday: “Here in UK, lots of hand-wringing from CEOs over Brexit.

After causing an uproar last week for verifying the account of white supremacist Jason Kessler, Twitter has now backtracked. On Wednesday, the tech company stripped several far-right accounts of their coveted “verified” blue check mark, ahead of a new policy on violent groups and hateful images that Twitter is due to roll out on November 22nd.

“We are conducting an initial review of verified accounts and will remove verification from accounts whose behavior does not fall within these new guidelines,” Twitter said in a statement Wednesday. Under the new guidelines, verified status can be lost if a person “promotes hate” based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability or disease.” Jason Kessler, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, and a host of several other far-right figures all lost their blue badge.

No former period, in the history of our Country, has been marked by the agitation of questions of a more important character than those which are now claiming the attention of the public.” So began the announcement, nearly 200 years ago, of a brand-new newspaper to be published in Manchester, England, which proclaimed that “the spirited discussion of political questions” and “the accurate detail of facts” were “particularly important at this juncture”.

Now we are living through another extraordinary period in history: one defined by dazzling political shocks and the disruptive impact of new technologies in every part of our lives. The public sphere has changed more radically in the past two decades than in the previous two centuries – and news organisations, including this one, have worked hard to adjust.

A U.N. panel of experts found that Saudi Arabia is purposefully obstructing the delivery of humanitarian aid into Yemen and called into question its public rationale for a blockade that could push millions into famine. In the assessment, made in a confidential brief and sent to diplomats on November 10, members of the Security Council-appointed panel said they had seen no evidence to support Saudi Arabia’s claims that short-range ballistic missiles have been transferred to Yemeni rebels in violation of Security Council resolutions.

Philip Hammond has provoked a backlash after telling the BBC’s Andrew Marr that “there are no unemployed people” in the UK.

The Chancellor made the gaffe while asserting the country was on the up following a long economic downturn.

“Where are all these unemployed people? There are no unemployed people,” he said, prompting a flurry of incredulous responses on Twitter.

New Delhi, India - Prime Minister Narendra Modi remains "by far the most popular national figure in Indian politics" more than three years after coming to power, according to a survey released by the Pew Research Center last week.

Nearly nine out of 10 Indians say they have a favourable view of Modi, says the survey conducted between February 21 and March 10 this year among 2,464 respondents.

Tributes to the man now seen as China’s most powerful ruler since Mao have come in myriad forms: Xi Jinping tapestries, oil paintings, pop songs, exhibitions, university departments even.

Now he has received a hardwood homage with reports that senior Communist party officials have made a pilgrimage to a tree honouring their country’s increasingly supreme leader.

One morning in January 2016, Martin Steltner showed up at his office in the state courthouse building in western Berlin. Steltner, who has served for more than a dozen years as the spokesman for the Berlin state prosecutor, resembles a detective out of classic crime fiction: crisp suit, wavy gray hair and a gallows humor that comes with having seen it all. There was the 2009 case of the therapist who mistakenly killed two patients in an Ecstasy-infused session gone wrong. The Great Poker Heist of 2010, in which masked men stormed a celebrity-studded poker tournament with machetes and made off with a quarter-million dollars. The 2012 episode involving the Canadian porn star who killed and ate his boyfriend and then sent the leftovers home in the mail. Steltner embraced the oddball aspect of his job; he kept a picture of Elvis Presley on the wall of his office.

In the wake of the last US election shift to the right, many Americans have turned to Canada as a land of promise. It seems as if the youth and charm of Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, has succeeded in reinforcing this problematic and deceptive image. Additionally, earlier his month, the New Democratic Party elected Canada’s first non-white party leader, Jagmeet Singh, a Sikh. Canada, however, is not immune (nor has it ever been) to the current ascendance of right-wing xenophobia. Nowhere is this truer than in Québec, where a debate on state secularism has been unfolding over the past decade.

WARSAW — Tens of thousands of people marched in Warsaw Saturday at a Polish Independence Day celebration led by three radical-nationalist groups, with banners calling for “White Europe” and “Clean Blood.”

Police estimated the crowd at 60,000, and photos of the throngs in the Polish capital, including neo-fascists in balaclavas, marching in a haze of red smoke from firecrackers, provided dramatic images from a country where millions of people died in concentration camps in World War II.

Boris Johnson, the British foreign secretary, was photographed last month with Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor who allegedly tipped off former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopolous in early 2016 that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, in the form of “thousands of emails.”

The image, posted on Facebook by a British-Indian associate of Mifsud, Prasenjit Kumar, appears to have been taken on October 19 at a Conservative Party fundraiser in Reading, outside London. Eleven days later, when court documents revealing Papadopolous’s guilty plea were unsealed, the previously obscure Mifsud became the focus of international attention.

Moscow, Russia - Viktor Didenko was born in Harbin in 1935, where his family lived while his father worked on the construction of the China Eastern Railway. This alone led him, at the age of 15, to flee from the NKVD [Soviet secret police] as a defacto "enemy of the people". If he hadn't had fled, his fate would have been imprisonment or execution.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Rupert Murdoch telephoned AT&T Inc <T.N> Chief Executive Randall Stephenson twice in the last six months and talked about cable network CNN, sources briefed on the matter told Reuters on Friday.

According to one of the sources, the 86-year-old executive chairman of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc <FOXA.O> offered to buy CNN in both conversations.

Where there's smoke, there is usually fire. It may seem like a month ago, but only last week a grand jury impaneled by Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller issued the first indictments in the Russia scandal. Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's former campaign manager, was charged with making false statements under oath, conspiracy against the United States, money laundering, working as an unregistered agent for a foreign country and various other financial crimes.

In very recent memory, the true god of Saudi Arabia was stability. The kingdom was very conservative, not just in religion and politics, but in the way it did things: slowly, cautiously, close to fossilized, with payoffs in power and money to buy calm.

That was then.

Last weekend was the shock-and-awe moment that showed how much everything has changed.

The cybersecurity expert who solved the DNC hacks believes his revelation forced the Russians to speed up their timeline for interfering in last year’s election.

Rob Johnston led the investigation by CrowdStrike into the breach, which had been discovered seven months before but largely ignored until May 2016, and he told his story for the first time to Buzzfeed News.

Omar Siagha has been in the US for 52 years. He’s a legal permanent resident with three children. He’d never been to prison, he says, before he was taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention — faced with the loss of his green card for a misdemeanor.

His brother tried to seek out lawyers who could help Siagha, but all they offered, in his words, were “high numbers and no hope” — no guarantee, in other words, that they’d be able to get him out of detention for all the money they were charging.

False information inundated social media after Sunday’s mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and Russian trolls were in the thick of it.

Conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich led the way, falsely branding shooter Devin Patrick Kelly as a member of the far-left antifa movement, and the Russian media outlet RT America had the lie posted on Facebook for five hours, according to BuzzFeed. The hashtags #antifa, #sutherlandsprings and #texas were three of the top 10 recorded over the weekend by Hamilton 68, a nonpartisan research project that tracks Russian influencers on Twitter in real time.

In Donald Trump’s America, government-run health care isn’t in retreat—it’s on the march.

Voters in Maine on Tuesday decisively chose to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to more than 70,000 additional residents, overruling a conservative governor who vetoed similar measures five separate times. In Virginia, health care buoyed Democrat Ralph Northam to a nine-point victory, with exit polls showing the issue was far and away the most important for voters. And across the country, early indications are that consumers are enrolling in insurance plans on the Obamacare exchanges in record numbers, confounding expectations that sign-ups would plummet following attempts by the Trump administration to dismantle the law.

Last January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China’s preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country’s southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America’s Arecibo Observatory, in the Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world, if not the universe. Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites even when they’re not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: The dish is Earth’s first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it first.

Richard Spencer often gets a pass within media circles.

The leader of the so-called "alt-right" — a white supremacist who does not like being called a Nazi, no matter how many times he's seen giving Nazi salutes — doesn't tend to get called out directly on his hate. Here, for example, is how he was introduced in one of his first profiles late last year, by Mother Jones:

Richard Spencer uses chopsticks to deftly pluck slivers of togarashi-crusted ahi from a rectangular plate. He is sitting in the Continental-style lounge of the Firebrand Hotel, near his home in the upscale resort town of Whitefish, Montana, discussing a subject not typically broached in polite company. “Race is something between a breed and an actual species,” he says, likening the differences between whites and people of color to those between golden retrievers and basset hounds. “It’s that powerful.”

If President Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for middle-class tax cuts and programs won’t go anywhere in the new Republican Congress, why did Obama even spend time discussing it during last week’s State of the Union?

"Because it’s something for people to run on," said Cokie Roberts as part of a Sunday pundit analysis on ABC’s This Week.

Liam Fox has been condemned after he said that Boris Johnson’s claim that a British woman being held in an Iranian prison was training journalists was merely a “slip of the tongue”.

There are fears Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who is serving a five-year sentence, could have her time in jail extended as a direct result of the foreign secretary’s comment.

The former Treasury minister James Sassoon is a beneficiary of a Bahamas trust fund that has sheltered a family fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars from tax since 1957.

The Conservative peer, who has used debates in the House of Lords to defend tax avoidance, has emerged as one of many high-profile clients of Appleby, the law firm at the centre of the Paradise Papers.

Democracy gone Astray