Josh the Broker says Russia owns England

That is so true. A broker knows who the boss
is in any deal. He notes how the UK wants
to use sanctions against Russia but is wed
to all that Russian money. So Russia owns
the UK. The UK has little industry these days.
they have to rely on the cheating bankers
who are robbing us workers every day.

checkit: The Reformed Broker

“You pay them, you own them.”

Joshua M Brown

March 7th, 2014

from the New York Times:

This is what it boils down to: Britain is ready to betray the United States to protect the City of London’s hold on dirty Russian money. And forget about Ukraine.

Britain thinks of itself as a trading nation, open for business, but it no longer has a “mission.” Any moralizing remnant of the British Empire is gone; it has turned back to the pirate England of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Britain’s ruling class has decayed not just to the point where Mr. Cameron is considered a man of exceptional talent, but to where its first priority is protecting its percentage on Russian money — even as Russian armored personnel carriers rumble around the streets of Sevastopol. But the establishment understands that in the 21st century what matters are banks, not tanks....

Yahoo! the Net's first Accidental Porn Broadcaster

We all now know of the Snowden effect. We should
all think that our online comms are being followed.

Especially if we're Senator Weiner, who had a habit
of sending photos of his eponymous to some chicks.

Anyway, since spies have the tough task of observing
our every motion, because our laptops have cams
and everybody forgets their cam on and their Net
connection on, and their clothes off.

So what are spies to do, but collect our porn
messages to our mistresses. I think I'd do it
out of sheer boredom.

and Yahoo is the worst, as you'll read. Their
software was made for broadcasting, not just
sending from point A to B and back. Enjoy.

paraphrasing Letterman:
top 10 clues that your girlfriend is having an online affair:
4. surfs naked
3. types with one hand only, ever
2.uses a lot of backslash backslash return return
1. smokes afterwards


Here's what the NSA saw:

Of course, the good stuff is cut out because Youtube is your nanny

checkit: Boing

GCHQ spied on millions of Yahoo video chats, harvested sexual images of chatters, compared itself to "Tom Cruise in Minority Report"

Cory Doctorow at 6:54 am Thu, Feb 27, 2014

A stunning new Snowden leak reveals that the UK spy agency GCHQ harvested images and text from millions of Yahoo video chats, including chats in which one or both of the participants was British or American. Between 3 and 11 percent of the chats they intercepted were sexual in nature, and revealing images of thousands of people were captured and displayed to spies. The programme, called OPTIC NERVE, focused on people whose usernames were similar to those of suspects, and ran from at least 2008 until at least 2010. The leak reveals that GCHQ intended to expand the programme to Xbox 360 Kinect cameras and "fairly normal webcam traffic." The programme was part of a facial recognition research effort that GCHQ compared to "Tom Cruise in Minority Report." While the documents do not detail efforts as widescale as those against Yahoo users, one presentation discusses with interest the potential and capabilities of the Xbox 360's Kinect camera, saying it generated "fairly normal webcam traffic" and was being evaluated as part of a wider program. Beyond webcams and consoles, GCHQ and the NSA looked at building more detailed and accurate facial recognition tools, such as iris recognition cameras – "think Tom Cruise in Minority Report", one presentation noted.

 Sexually explicit webcam material proved to be a particular problem for GCHQ, as one document delicately put it: "Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography."...

His Ames are true

When it comes to getting the inside scoop on what's
going on in the East-side of the European continent,
there are few better than Mark Ames.

He had the balls to set up the eXile mag in Russia,
and get up Putin's nose a few times... too many.
So, he has beat a hasty retreat, to the US.

He still knows his stuff. Much of what I believe
about the fascist Ukraine government isn't exactly
true, according to Ames, and he convinces me.

I did try to follow him on Twitter though and
he's a bit prickly if he thinks you're a troll.
I ain't no troll.

anyway, here's part of his story:

checkit: Pandodaily
Everything you know about Ukraine is wrong
By Mark Ames
On February 24, 2014
Although I’m deep into the reporting of my next story about the Silicon Valley Techtopus, it’s hard for me not to get distracted by events in Ukraine and Russia.
I haven’t lived in that part of the world since the Kremlin ran me out of town, so I’m not going to pretend that I know as much as those on the ground there. Still, I’ve been driven nuts by the avalanche of overconfident ignorance that stands for analysis or commentary on the wild events there. A lethal ignorance, a virtuous ignorance.
Virtuous ignorance about world affairs used to be the exclusive domain of neo-con pundits, but now it’s everywhere, especially rampant on the counter-consensus side — nominally my own side, but an increasingly shitty side to be on.
Nearly everyone here in the US tries to frame and reify Ukraine’s dynamic to fit America-centric spats. As such, Ukraine’s problems are little more than a propaganda proxy war where our own political fights are transferred to Ukraine’s and Russia’s context, warping the truth to score domestic spat points. That’s nothing new, of course, but it’s still jarring to watch how the “new media” counter-consensus is warping and misrepresenting reality in Ukraine about as crudely as the neocons and neoliberals used to warp and Americanize the political realities there back when I first started my Moscow newspaper, The eXile.
So, yes, I wanted to comment on a few simplifications/misconceptions about Ukraine today:
1. The protesters are not “virtuous anti-Putin freedom fighters,” nor are they “Nazis and US puppets”
In fact, the people who are protesting or supporting the protesters are first and foremost sick of their shitty lives in a shitty country they want to make better—a country where their fates are controlled by a tiny handful of nihilistic oligarchs and Kremlin overlords, and their political frontmen. It’s first and foremost a desire to gain some control over their fate. Anger at Kremlin power over Ukraine is not necessarily anti-Russian—although the further west you go in Ukraine, the more this does become about nationalism, and the further east you go—including Crimea and Odessa—the more the politics are a fearful reaction against west-Ukraine nationalism.
This is kind of obvious to anyone who’s spent time in that part of the world. I’ll quote from Jake Rudnitsky’s great piece about the Orange Revolution published in The eXile nearly a decade ago, which aptly describes both what an awful political figure Yanukovych is, what role the US played in that “revolution,” and the aspirations of most Ukrainians who took to the streets. It’s amazing how little has changed in this dynamic:
....

Russia Today host is sent to Siberia, I mean, Crimea

There once was a gal from Oakland, who was a protester
of the finest order. Then she became a host on RT of a
kick-ass anti-establishment show.

Then she tried to scold Putin about Crimea. She was
sent to Siberia instead and hasn't been heard from since.
Just kidding.

I really do like Abby because she is somebody you can
read, like she's really human out there. I'll post some of
her interesting human moments.

Her other colleague at RT, some midwestern broad,
tried to flip off RT and flip it into a network job in the
US. I hope you like NBC in North Dakota. At least
it's not Gitmo.

Here she introduces a guy who was a very important
investigator whom I hadn't known. Watch this -->


IMO, MC Rupert suffered from the same kind of vivid
impression of life that Philip K Dick had, who also
committed suicide.

Next, with her favourite chick friend Amber Lyon, 4:30

tough, hot, investigative gals. it's luv.

Here, she does what Twitter is so good at, reminding
us of every death caused by the Isr genocide>

Read 'em:  Intercept

RT Host Abby Martin Condemns Russian Incursion Into Crimea – On RT

By Glenn Greenwald 4 Mar 2014, 7:26 AM EST 161

Featured photo - RT Host Abby Martin Condemns Russian Incursion Into Crimea – On RT Screenshot: RT host Abby Martin condemns the Russian military action in Crimea, March 3, 2014

The vast bulk of the commentary issuing from American commentators about the Russian military action in Ukraine involves condemning exactly that which they routinely advocate and which the U.S. itself routinely does. So suffocating is the resulting stench that those who played leading roles in selling the public the attack on Iraq and who are still unrepentant about it, such as David “Axis of Evil/The Right Man” Frum, have actually become the leading media voices condemning Russia on the ground that it is wrong to invade sovereign countries; Frum thus has no trouble saying things like this with an apparently straight face: “If Russia acts the outlaw nation, can it be expected to be treated as anything but an outlaw?”

Enthusiastic supporters of a wide range of other U.S. interventions in sovereign states, both past and present and in and out of government, are equally righteous in their newfound contempt for invasions – when done by Russia. Secretary of State John Kerry – who stood on the Senate floor in 2002 and voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq because “Saddam Hussein [is] sitting in Baghdad with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction” and there is “little doubt that Saddam Hussein wants to retain his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction” – told Face the Nation on Sunday: “You just don’t in the 21st Century behave in 19th Century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.” The supremely sycophantic Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer – as he demanded to know how Russia would be punished – never once bothered Kerry (or his other Iraq-war-advocating guests, including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius) by asking about any of that unpleasantness (is it hard at all for you to sermonize against invasions of sovereign countries given, you know, how often you yourself support them?)....