Russia using Westerners to spread propaganda for them? Surely not…
Russian intelligence is operating a systematic program to launder pro-Kremlin propaganda through private relationships between Russian operatives and unwitting US and western targets, according to newly declassified US intelligence.
US intelligence agencies believe that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) is attempting to influence public policy and public opinion in the West by directing Russian civilians to build relationships with influential US and Western individuals and then disseminate narratives that support Kremlin objectives, obscuring the FSB’s role through layers of ostensibly independent actors. […]
But the official stressed that the Western voices that eventually became mouthpieces for Russian propaganda were almost certainly unaware of the role they were playing.
“At the end of the day, this unwitting target is disseminating Russian influence operation, Russian propaganda to their target public,” the US official said. “Ultimately, a lot of these are unwitting people — they remain unaware who is essentially seeding these narratives.”
Well, it’s a good thing the US would never do anything like that… and anyway, I’m not particularly worried about these unwitting and unpaid stooges for Putin so much as I am the perfectly witting and presumably quite well-paid ones already in positions of influence like the media and the commentary sphere and, well, the government…
Did you notice the world didn’t end last week? I didn’t even know it was scheduled to do so, but here we still are nonetheless. A most curious story indeed…
I kind of suspect that if an entire fucking PLANET was going to smash into the Earth, the pole shift would be the least of our worries and there wouldn’t be much of an Earth left for floods, quakes and fires, or caves to hide in for that matter. I don’t know anything about Michael Buckner beyond the evident fact of either his mind-boggling stupidity or uncontrolled mental illness, but he clearly sees himself as something of a prophet… though his prophecy clearly got fucked by reality:
One lovely thing about Twitter is that other users can add “context” and fact-checking to other people’s posts if they’re spreading bullshit, and this was clearly too good an opportunity for someone to pass up. As for how Michael could’ve been so wrong, well, he thought about it from his cave and a couple of days later said it was because he hadn’t considered that the Earth is flat. JESUS FUCK even Harold Camping agreed he’d been wrong about his whole end of the world thing in 2011. Anyway, brother Buckner’s now more fascinated with the flat Earth bullshit than the apocalypse, and someone else used the “added context” function on that note:
I did indeed find this helpful (it’s introduced me to a marvellous new term) and rated it as such on the basis of “directly addresses the post’s claim”, “provides important context”, and “neutral or unbiased language”. But the best thing about Buckner’s flat Earth pinned post is the map he attached:
Click to enlarge, which you should. I traced its origin via Reddit to here, it was created as a fantasy world-building exercise that takes the common flat Earth line of Antarctica being an ice wall but then extends to what lies beyond the ice wall, and then beyond that. The map is a fascinating piece of work in itself; the idea that Michael Buckner seems to think it’s real is just the icing on the cake of this ludicrous tale…
Had to get up earlier than usual today (financial advisor paying his annual visit), but OH being able to start my day by seeing this was worth the lack of sleep from the night before…
“Grrr!”
A historic moment in which the 45th president of the US became the first former president to have his mugshot taken… don’t know why the federal arraignments didn’t require that from him while Georgia insisted on it, but there it is anyway, even better than seeing Giuliani’s mugshot yesterday. Needless to say the cult are engaging in the predictable wailing and gnashing of teeth, but they’re also exploiting the moment…
Unisex fit? That sounds suspiciously woke…
…as the Graun pointed out in their coverage this morning, the Drumpf campaign was already selling T-shirts with the new presidential portrait and the caption NEVER SURRENDER!… apparently hoping people will ignore the fact that surrendering is exactly what Trump DID! It’s what he’s done through all these proceedings, he’s been all bluster and bullshit on social media (notably, he took this occasion to finally return to Twitter too; Oolong must be absolutely CREAMING his pants), but when the moment comes he’s just given in and made his appearance without putting up anything approximating to a fight. It’s all so fake and unjust but he keeps waving the white flag. Maybe he’s saving it for the trial, which could potentially start in just two months (though it probably won’t cos Trump will do anything to delay it)? Cos apparently the federal law against televising trials doesn’t hold in Georgia, so this one could potentially be televised…
It’s BEAUTIFUL. If any single moment in Doctor Who history really changed the show forever, this first, slightly casual mention (which would be elaborated on a bit a couple of weeks later) of the Time Lords in episode six of “The War Games” (May 24th, 1969) was probably it, even more so than the famous handover of the title role at the end of “The Tenth Planet” a few years earlier. The intended joke, for those who aren’t Who fans, is that if Twitter had existed in 1969 then Doctor Who fandom would have shat its pants online just like it did with the “Timeless Child” business in the last couple of years… but it’s also funny cos there’s some truth to it.
I wouldn’t say the Time Lords ruined the show, but they obviously took away some of the mystery behind the Doctor. We kind of knew just who “Who” was. We know “The War Games” came about as it did near the end of 1968 when Derrick Sherwin had to hastily replace two other stories that weren’t working, so he drafted Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke to write this epic that would also have to set up the following season in which the Doctor would be stranded on Earth, and suggested maybe they should finally clear up the Doctor’s origins.
Said origins were apparently very casually discussed, too, Sherwin appears to have just pulled the name “Time Lords” out of his arse while the story was being plotted, and BOOM, just like that the show changed forever without apparently much forethought. Like I said, they don’t ruin the show but it would never really be the same afterwards… and we don’t know yet how the “Timeless Child” will affect the series, but at least it seems to have had more actual thought put into it than the original creation of the Time Lords.
Parenthetically, somewhere in the house I think I still have an old edition of Doctor Who Bulletin (as it then was), must have been from 1989 or ’90, in which one of the letters was from someone writing in DWB‘s patented pissy and moany style as if they were reviewing season 6 in 1969… I no longer recall the details of it (other than the brilliant ending bitching about the next Doctor being played by a comedian), but it was totally in the spirit of this picture and an excellent jab at how just shitty the show’s fandom could be even 30+ years ago…
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the chief of Russian mercenary group Wagner who staged a short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership in June, was on board a plane that crashed northwest of Moscow on Wednesday, the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency said.
“An investigation has been launched into the crash of the Embraer aircraft, which occurred tonight in the Tver region,” the Federal Air Transport Agency said in a statement, according to the official state news agency TASS. “According to the list of passengers, among them is the name and surname of Yevgeny Prigozhin.” […]
The bodies of eight people have been found at the crash site, state media outlet Russia 24 reported. Earlier, TASS reported the plane “burned up” on impact after being in the air for about half an hour.
Russian investigators have initiated a criminal case following the crash. The Russian Investigative Committee said that a team was on the way to the scene to “establish the causes of the crash.” […]
US President Joe Biden suggested Putin may have been behind the crash. “You may recall, I was asked about this,” Biden told CNN. “I said I would be careful what I rode in. I don’t know for a fact what happened, but I’m not surprised.”
Yeah. I mean, it could be entirely coincidental that this plane carrying an enemy of uncle Vlad should happen to, you know, just fall out of the sky like that and it was just a happy accident (literally) for Putin who was not involved with it in any way… but… no. I don’t think anyone actually believes that for a second, whether or not it actually is the case. The real question, of course, is whether this is something Vlad pulled off specially for Prigozhin, or whether he’s just got bored with pushing his opponents out of high windows and we can look forward to more varied acts of assassination…
Somewhat to my surprise, I only just discovered Neil Young FINALLY released Chrome Dreams a few weeks ago, only 46 years later than planned (and a mere 16 years after Chrome Dreams II)… Neil has a track record, as it were, of recording albums then not releasing them, including Homegrown which he shelved in 1975 in favour of Tonight’s the Night which he’d also shelved two years earlier, but this is probably his best-known example of that tendency. In March 1977 a test pressing was made, and somehow this eventually escaped into the wild and was the basis of various bootlegs from the early 90s onwards, while in the meantime Neil had second thoughts and converted a chunk of it into American Stars ‘n’ Bars (which came out a few months later) and recycled other songs for other albums into the 90s.
Some Steve Hoffman Forum nerd in a thread about the album was iffy about the provenance of the acetate and the tracklisting of same, partly because the album ran some 50+ minutes and he thought that was too long for a 70s Neil record. Surprise surprise, though, Chrome Dreams turns out to be the same as the bootleg after all (albeit the vinyl release is a three-sided double LP)… but the album kind of complicates that matter with its back cover:
“Poco Anus”? Also, Neil evidently was planning a long album, whatever that Hoffman forum nerd thinks…
Now, one of these things is not like the other, with the album tracklist being on the right and… something else on the left. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I’m guessing it was an alternative proposed tracklist? Noticeable differences include the removal of “Powderfinger” and the addition of “Lotta Love” (which turned up on Comes a Time) and “White Line” (which didn’t turn up on record until Ragged Glory). I just wonder what the point of putting this as the back cover art was.
As for the album itself… I suppose it’s OK? I don’t like it as much as some critics seem to do, and it’s kind of disconcerting hearing some of these songs outside of whatever album they finally appeared on, even though this was their “original” context. None of the songs are new and only two of the actual recordings (alternate versions of “Hold Back the Tears” and “Sedan Delivery”) are previously unreleased. It’s a bit much as it stands, and I think if you cut “Tears” (not as good in this version as the American Stars ‘n’ Bars re-recording) and “Like a Hurricane” (obviously magnificent but kind of out of place here), you not only get a shorter album (about 37 minutes) to make that bloke from the Hoffman forum happy, you get a more cohesive one. But even in that slightly truncated form I just don’t think it’s the hidden masterpiece some are claiming it is.
I’ve always said it was a myth that you could find absolutely everything on the Internet, but you could find a lot more than you might have expected. I was reminded of this tonight when I found a recording of a song called “Die Fahne hoch” on Internet Archive tonight. If you don’t recognise that name, you may know its informal title, The Horst Wessel Song.
“Political exploitation prohibited” indeed. Also, this appears to be an *American* release…
I found it in a collection called “78rpm Records Digitized by George Blood, L.P.“; as the name may indicate, it is full (literally hundreds of thousands) of 78rpm records posted by George Blood LP, a company specialising in film and audio preservation. It was just… there as part of this collection. In among things like records by Enrico Caruso, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, even up to the early rock ‘n’ roll era, plus early jazz and country and blues and gospel and… whatever the fuck THIS is. The collection is so big that describing it like this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.
In fact, there’s more than one Horst-Wessel-Lied recording in the George Blood collection. And they’re all just there like… normal records. And they’re not normal. “Die Fahne hoch” was the official anthem of THE FUCKING NAZI PARTY from 1930 to 1945 as well the other national anthem of Germany under Hitler after “Deutschland Über Alles”. It was a love letter to the Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts, the Nazis’ original paramilitary wing of which Wessel had been a commander (and which Hitler would notably come to love rather less than the song). It’s been banned in Germany and Austria since 1945. At least two of these recordings feature the actual SA choir. They’re not normal records. And, I suppose, neither are the Soviet-era records the George Blood collection also includes, to be sure, but somehow even though the Soviet Union was obviously hardly better than the 3rd Reich those Soviet records bother me less than the Nazi ones.
And I say that as someone who, you know, actually owns Nazi-era recordings. Many years ago EMI had a CD series of early recordings of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies, mostly from the period of the 3rd Reich. I’ve got products of Nazi Germany sitting in one of my old CD containers. I don’t think of those Bruckner recordings as “Nazi” productions when I listen to them cos, you know, Bruckner himself wasn’t a Nazi or anything, but that’s kind of what they are… I’ve got Richard Strauss doing his Alpensinfonie in 1941. And I’ve got a download of the famous 1945 “Emperor” concerto, famous for being an early stereo tape recording and for having anti-aircraft gunfire in the background during the quieter moments.
Obviously Nazi Germany had arts and entertainment like any other country; it’s just that they were Nazi arts and entertainment. Which is why I shouldn’t be surprised to find recordings of Horst Wessel on the Internet, and I suppose that, really, I’m actually not. I think it’s just the context in which I did find them that took me aback more than the act of finding them did. Anyway, the icing on the cake came at the bottom of the page for the record, in the form of a comment from someone who said words to the effect of “I’m Argentinian and my grandfather used to play this all the time”. I’ll just BET he did, my friend…
New South Wales upper house MPs Mark Latham and Rod Roberts have resigned from One Nation.
Mr Latham has tabled a letter in parliament alleging the party tried to funnel money from the NSW Electoral Commission.
Addressing the Legislative Council, Mr Latham said he cannot remain a One Nation MP due to past attempts of allegedly “defrauding NSW electoral funds”.
Oh.
So, according to Mark, he was informed in September 2021 that something was wrong with the NSW branch of ON’s finances, namely that they were being diverted to the Brisbane office of the party. Understandably, Mark cracked the shits and threatened the party’s national director with getting the police involved, whereupon the problem mysteriously ceased (and Pauline was NOT happy).
If this story is indeed true, then this is what I took from it:
1. Latham did this cos they were making his job harder, not because he thought it was the morally correct thing to do. Rod Roberts might be citing the party’s lack of morals in his resignation note, but I don’t think Latham really gives a shit about that;
2. Having dealt with the issue, Latham then continued to be part of One Nation, which again suggests to me this business about the Brisbane office misusing funds wasn’t enough of a moral problem for him to actually quit the party.
Regardless of the truth or otherwise of the story, though, it’s still not the real reason Latham’s jumped ship, which is, obviously, the bullshit from last week. All of this is about him being fucked over by Pauline and nothing to do with his outrage at the party’s bad behaviour; this other business is just a handy club he can hit them with on the way out… In any case, I just wonder what’ll happen next, if he’ll stay a lone independent or form his own party; I feel like he doesn’t have the sufficient cult of personality for the latter, but then again Bob Katter manages somehow… I rather doubt any other existing party will take him on, so could we perhaps even be looking at the end of the tedious cunt? We can always hope…
Someone posted this interesting piece on Masto today, and I’ve been pondering it… and I’m still not sure what I make of it. Basically our author did himself an injury while on holiday in June, and he’s still recovering from that, but in the meantime he’s been pondering something from an accessibility course he’s been reading that he writes about here:
1 in 5 people currently have a disability. 100% of people will have some form of disability in their lifetime. Quote from Cindy Li, “We’re all just temporarily abled.”
There’s certainly some truth in that quote, in that shit will happen to all of us at some point that, frankly, gets in the way of us being able to live normally. But I have a bit of an issue with it, in that we may indeed all be temporarily abled but the converse isn’t true. We are not all temporarily disabled; some of us get abled again. No harm to Jim Nielsen, who does at least seem to be on the mend and has found the experience an educational one… good luck to him on getting back to his old ability. Speaking as someone who’s never going to do that, I just find something irritating about that quote…
WHY DIDN’T YOU FUCKING HAVE THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE, MARK? Honestly, the rollout of Threads was a fucking joke, clearly released before it was fully ready, and I’m not sure it’s improving:
Threads, which launched as an Android and iOS app on July 5 and gained 100 million users in just five days, saw its popularity drop as users returned to the more familiar platform X after the initial rush to try Meta’s new offering.
But in just over a month, its daily active users on Android app dropped to 10.3 million from the peak of 49.3 million, according to a report by analytics platform Similarweb dated Aug. 10.
Meanwhile, the management is moving quickly to launch new features. Threads now offers the ability to set post notifications for accounts and view them in a type of chronological feed.
It will soon roll out an improved search that could allow users to search for specific posts and not just accounts.
…What the fuck is a “type” of chronological feed? Is it chronological or not? And this improved search “could” let users do that… so it also could not do that? I’m not surprised by the drop-off in user numbers cos that was bound to happen, a lot of people were signing up out of curiosity and a lot of those were bound to not bother sticking around once that curiosity was satisfied, given how little Threads seems to have had to offer… on the plus side, I suppose I’ll soon be able to satisfy my own curiosity about Threads cos at least now I’ll actually be able to use the fucking thing, but I feel like it’s probably too late to make a difference now…
You must be logged in to post a comment.