Just like old times: Russians still spying

Ron Radosh at PJ Media:

It seems that some things never change. A few moments ago, this breaking story came in from the website of the New York Times. It seems, as this early report informs us, that ten Americans have been arrested for spying on behalf of Putin’s new Russia.

Via Reynolds.

Gleanings

More on the Antikythera Mechanism, including a working model. The 76-year cycle sounds like Halley's Comet. Or can you think of something else with that periodicity?

The Modern Drunkard interview with Gary Shteyngart. Lotsa vodka, a little caviar, some reflections on the condition of Russia, literature and the writing life (via).

Frozen bubbles. Via Althouse, who calls it a "cool photography stunt." Cool? Below freezing, I'd say!

Self-handicapping excuse artisans. "I coulda been a contenda." If all the if-only's were laid end to end … (via)

Wreck of the bark Trajan discovered in Newport harbor.

Faggots in the raw. (SFW!)

UFO sighting in Cumbria, UK. Turns out to be Chinese lantern balloons, released at a wedding at this hotel. Nice hotel!

Morris dancing in danger of extinction? Probably not just yet.

Speaking of dancing, in Finland they spell YMCA with a NMKY (via Althouse commenter jdeeripper).

War in Georgia

Blackfive has a bunch of posts: one, two, three, four, five, six (roundup post), so far.

More on Monday: Zbigniew Brzezinski compares the current conflict to Sudetenland (1938) and Finland (1939). And another roundup, in which Laughing Wolf says, "I expect to see Tbilisi besieged before long, for Putin is most serious about deposing the current government and president. Nor do I think his plans stop there." At StrategyPage: Why Georgia Lost the War. Putin, having re-established autocracy in Russia after their brief fling with something like democracy, is now looking to re-establish Russia as a superpower. The evil empire did not go away for long.

Robert Bidinotto describes the non-response of the West to this naked aggression as "anticipatory capitulation" (via). It looks to me just like the non-response of the West to Russian aggression in 1956, in Hungary, and 1968, in Czechoslovakia. (And no, I did not comment on that post! That's somebody else.)

Gorbachev a closet Christian

It was not hard to see, when Mikhail Gorbachev took the reins of the USSR, that something was different. All the glasnost and perestroika were new policies. An observer might have thought that the new Maximum Leader was perhaps not fully committed to the dialectical imperative. A bit of a softie, that is to say. And now we find that Gorbachev was a Christian all along, and indeed one with a particular fondness for the most gentle of saints, St. Francis of Assisi. No wonder the Wall fell. Reagan was playing the hardest of hardball against an "evil emperor" whose heart was not really in the evil empire game, unlike all of his predecessors. Sooner or later, the USSR would have had a leader who was a human being, with human feelings, rather than a committed ideologue. Better sooner than later.

Russian super-bomb won't hurt the environment. Uh, what?

Found at Certain Ideas of Europe, at The Economist:

Russia Tests Powerful 'Dad of All Bombs'

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV – Sep 11, 2007

MOSCOW (AP) — The Russian military has successfully tested what it described as the world's most powerful non-nuclear air-delivered bomb, Russia's state television reported Tuesday.

It was the latest show of Russia's military muscle amid chilly relations with the United States.

Channel One television said the new weapon, nicknamed the "dad of all bombs" is four times more powerful than the U.S. "mother of all bombs."

"The tests have shown that the new air-delivered ordnance is comparable to a nuclear weapon in its efficiency and capability," said Col.-Gen. Alexander Rukshin, a deputy chief of the Russian military's General Staff, said in televised remarks.

Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn't hurt the environment, he added.

With a blast radius of 990 feet, that's a circular area of over 70 acres that's going to be hurt. And I suspect some damage might be noticeable even a little further from the center of the blast.

KGB Psyops from the horse's mouth

Glenn Reynolds links to this at PJ Media.

"Former KGB agent and Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov explains how the KGB worked from within American universities to demoralize our society in a generation."

The manufacturing of "useful idiots:" a first-hand explanation of how and why they did it, which helps to explain why so many otherwise fine, nice, pleasant, even smart people seem so resistant to logic and even to facts, should those things contradict their negative views of "the power structure" or "bourgeois Amerika." Willi Münzenberg's old weapons of the Cold War are still working.

Here's a blogpost about Bezmenov and the documentary this clip is excerpted from, with links to other clips:

In 1984 G. Edward Griffin released a documentary titled Soviet subversion of the free press, a conversation with Yuri Bezmenov and through the magic of YouTube, snippets of that documentary are available on the web today. Now, as far as I can tell, G. Edward Griffin is a little bit odd. He's championed some questionable cancer cures and written books about monetary conspiracies and all sorts of odd stuff (there's a page about him here: G. Edward Griffin Totally Explained, but really, it doesn't do all that much explaining). Still, you can't deny the video and he lets Bezmenov rant in his own words.

Do read the rest, it's worth the click. The blogger, Rob Hafernik, talks about the documentary and also about an issue of Look magazine from 1967 that was a glowing account of the USSR and its glorious potential. That sounds a lot like those articles by Walter Duranty that the NY Times ran in the early 1930's, described in the Weekly Standard and Wikipedia, which brought the Times a Pulitzer, but which historians have concluded were pure propaganda. There is also a book about Duranty, Stalin's Apologist. (Those three are just from the first page of Google results.)

The YouTube user who uploaded these Bezmenov clips seems to be a Nazi sympathizer. I didn't like looking at his other clips, so didn't look at many, but that was the impression I got, from their content and from his descriptions. But the Devil can quote Scripture, as they say, and after the abrogation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, even a real Nazi would have little love for Russians. Which make it a bit less likely that these are some sort of double-fake.

Click the label "psyops" for more on Münzenberg and meme-war.

Update: Youtube has, as far as I can tell, removed everything from the user mentioned above. I have changed the link to one that still works; the better audio, and Portuguese subtitles! are just gravy.

Another update: Yaakov Ben Moshe has posted a couple more Bezmenov clips. Ted Kennedy appears at 6:26 in the second one.

Borscht Fascism, Part 3

Further regress toward dictatorship, or something very like:

Russia's next parliament is likely to have no genuine opposition after a court in Moscow yesterday banned a leading liberal party from standing in elections.

Russia's supreme court announced that it had liquidated the small Republican party, claiming that it had violated electoral law by having too few members. The party is one of very few left in Russia that criticises President Vladimir Putin.

Apparently (IANAL, Russian or otherwise) there is an avenue of appeal to the Collegium of the Supreme Court. Clearly this court is structured differently from what we have in the US.

This action raises a question: if a party cannot exist if it has "too few members," how could a new one possibly be started? You got to start somewhere.

More on Borscht Fascism

Excerpts from a forthcoming book by murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya. From Jerry Pournelle's mail, in Dr. Harry Erwin's regular letters from England.

December 8 [2003]

Were we seeing a crisis of Russian parliamentary democracy in the Putin era? No, we were witnessing its death. In the first place, the legislative and executive branches of government had merged and this had meant the rebirth of the Soviet system. The Duma was purely decorative, a forum for rubber-stamping Putin's decisions.

In the second place the Russian people gave its consent. There were no demonstrations. The electorate agreed to be treated like an idiot. The electorate said let's go back to the USSR - slightly retouched and slicked up, modernised, but the good old Soviet Union, now with bureaucratic capitalism where the state official is the main oligarch, vastly richer than any capitalist. The corollary was that, if we were going back to the USSR, Putin was going to win in March 2004. It was a foregone conclusion.

I earlier mentioned Borscht Fascism in As Russia goes.

As Russia goes

I briefly mentioned trends towards authoritarianism in Russia in this earlier post. John Noonan of OPFOR, guest-blogging for Michelle Malkin, has a post with a number of links on this very subject: Borscht Fascism.

New World Order a-comin'

Dan Riehl brings it together: the connection between Gore's carbon offsets firm, Generation Investment Management, and the Generation Foundation which it funds, Working Assets, George Soros, the Phoenix Group. It sounds like a conspiracy. At least the New York Times thought so: Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy (from 2004).

Update March 9 2007: Nice comment by Michael on that Dan Riehl post, connecting George Soros and Vladimir Putin. What happened to Russia, anyhow? With Yeltsin as President, they seemed headed in the freedom direction. But Putin seems to be moving back towards autocracy. In America, we are so accustomed to our liberties that we are inclined to view them as the natural state of humanity, but even a cursory study of history—or current events, for that matter—shows that any kind of freedom is a rare thing.