Steve Weissman at the Ron Paul Institute:

“Preparing the uprising started long before Pyatt arrived in country, and much of it revolved around a talented and multi-lingual Ukrainian named Oleh Rybachuk, who had played several key roles in the Orange Revolution of 2004. Strangely enough, he recently drew attention when Pando, Silicon Valley’s online news site, attacked journalist Glenn Greenwald and the investor behind his new First Look Media, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Trading brickbats over journalistic integrity, both Pando and Greenwald missed the gist of the bigger story.

In 2004, Rybachuk headed the staff and political campaign of the US-backed presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko. As the generally pro-American Kyiv Post tells it, the shadowy Rybachuk was Yushchenko’s “alter ego” and “the conduit” to the State Security Service, which “was supplying the Yushchenko team with useful information about Yanukovych’s actions.” Rybachuk went on to serve under Yushchenko and Tymoshenko as deputy prime minister in charge of integrating Ukraine into NATO and the European Union. In line with US policy, he also pushed for privatization of Ukraine’s remaining state-owned industries.

Despite US and Western European backing, the government proved disastrous, enabling its old rival Yanukovych to win the presidency in the 2010 election. Western monitors generally found the election “free and fair,” but no matter. The Americans had already sowed the seeds either to win Yanukovych over or to throw him over, whichever way Washington and its allies decided to go. As early as October 2008, USAID funded one of its many private contractors – a non-profit called Pact Inc. – to run the “Ukraine National Initiatives to Enhance Reforms” (UNITER). Active in Africa and Central Asia, Pact had worked in Ukraine since 2005 in campaigns against HIV/AIDS. Its new five-year project traded in bureaucratic buzzwords like civil society, democracy, and good governance, which on the public record State and USAID were spending many millions of dollars a year to promote in Ukraine.

Pact would build the base for either reform or regime change. Only this time the spin-masters would frame their efforts as independent of Ukraine’s politicians and political parties, whom most Ukrainians correctly saw as hopelessly corrupt. The new hope was “to partner with civil society, young people, and international organizations” – as Canada’s prestigious Financial Post later paraphrased no less an authority than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

By 2009, Pact had rebranded the pliable Rybachuk as “a civil society activist,” complete with his own NGO, Center UA (variously spelled Centre UA, Tsenter UA, or United Actions Center UA). Pact then helped Rybachuk use his new base to bring together as many as 60 local and national NGOs with activists and leaders of public opinion. This was New Citizen, a non-political “civic platform” that became a major political player. At the time, Pact and Soros’s IRF were working in a joint effort to provide small grants to some 80 local NGOs. This continued the following year with additional money from the East Europe Foundation.

“Ukraine has been united by common disillusionment,” Rybachuk explained to the Kyiv Post. “The country needs a more responsible citizenry to make the political elite more responsible.”

Who could argue? Certainly not Rybachuk’s Western backers. New Citizen consistently framed its democracy agenda as part of a greater integration within NATO, Europe, and the trans-Atlantic world. Rybachuk himself would head the “Civil Expert Council” associated with the EU-Ukraine Cooperation Committee.

Continuing to advise on “strategic planning,” in May 2010 Pact encouraged New Citizen “to take Access to Public Information as the focus of their work for the next year.” The coalition campaigned for a new Freedom of Information law, which passed. Pact then showed New Citizen how to use the law to boost itself as a major player, organize and train new activists, and work more closely with compliant journalists, all of which would seriously weaken the just-elected Yanukovych government. Part of their destabilization included otherwise praiseworthy efforts, none more so than the movement to “Stop Censorship.”

“Censorship is re-emerging, and the opposition is not getting covered as much,” Rybachuk told the Kyiv Post in May 2010. He was now “a media expert” as well as civic activist. “There are some similarities to what Vladimir Putin did in Russia when he started his seizure of power by first muzzling criticism in the media.”

One of Rybachuk’s main allies in “Stop Censorship” was the journalist Sergii Leshchenko, who had long worked with Mustafa Nayem at Ukrayinska Pravda, the online newsletter that NED publicly took credit for supporting. NED gave Leshchenko its Reagan Fascell Democracy Fellowship, while New Citizen spread his brilliant exposés of Yanukovych’s shameless corruption, focusing primarily on his luxurious mansion at Mezhyhirya. Rybachuk’s Center UA also produced a documentary film featuring Mustafa Nayem daring to ask Yanukovych about Mezhyhirya at a press conference. Nothing turned Ukrainians – or the world – more against Yanukovych than the concerted exposure of his massive corruption. This was realpolitik at its most sophisticated, since the US and its allies funded few, if any, similar campaigns against the many Ukrainian kleptocrats who favored Western policy.

Under the watchful eye of Pact, Rybachuk’s New Citizen developed a project to identify the promises of Ukrainian politicians and monitor their implementation. They called it a “Powermeter” (Vladometer), an idea they took from the American website “Obamameter.” Funding came from the US Embassy, through its Media Development Fund, which falls under the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Other money came from the Internews Network, which receives its funding from the State Department, USAID, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and a wide variety of other government agencies, international organizations, and private donors. Still other money came from Soros’s IRF.

New Citizen and its constituent organizations then brought together 150 NGOs from over 35 cities, along with activists and journalists like Sergii Leschchenko, to create yet another campaign in 2011. They called it the Chesno Movement, from the Ukrainian word for “honestly. ” Its logo was a garlic bulb, a traditional disinfectant widely believed to ward off evil. The movement’s purpose was “to monitor the political integrity of the parliamentary candidates running in the 2012 elections.”

This was a mammoth project with the most sophisticated sociology. As expected, the Chesno monitoring found few honest politicians. But it succeeded in raising the issue of public integrity to new heights in a country of traditionally low standards and in building political interest in new areas of the country and among the young. The legislative elections themselves proved grim, with President Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions taking control of parliament.

What then of all New Citizen’s activism, monitoring, campaigning, movement-building, and support for selective investigative journalism? Where was all this heading? Rybachuk answered the question in May 2012, several months before the election.

“The Orange Revolution was a miracle, a massive peaceful protest that worked,” he told Canada’s Financial Post. “We want to do that again and we think we will.”

The Daily Beast reported in  2012 that Mossad was behind the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists, from all the evidence:

“Six weeks ago in Washington, on the sidelines of a major U.S.-Israeli meeting known as the “strategic dialogue,” Israeli Mossad officers were quietly and obliquely bragging about the string of explosions in Iran. “They would say things like, ‘It’s not the best time to be working on Iranian missile design,’” one U.S. intelligence official at the December parley told The Daily Beast.

Those comments were a reference to a string of explosions at a missile-testing site outside Tehran on November 12. The explosions killed Maj. Gen. Hassan Moqqadam, the head of the country’s missile program. But the manner in which the message was delivered—informally and on the sidelines of an official discussion—also speaks to how Israel appears to seek to create the impression of responsibility for acts of violence and sabotage inside Iran without quite taking formal responsibility.

These kinds of actions even have their own Israeli euphemism, “events that happen unnaturally,” to quote the Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, from his remarks before the Knesset on Tuesday. In his testimony, Gantz promised more such unnatural events in 2012 aimed at thwarting Iran’s nuclear program.

All told, five Iranian scientists or engineers affiliated with the nuclear program have been killed since 2007, the latest being Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, who Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency says was responsible for procurement at the Natanz enrichment facility. A sixth, Fereydoon Abbasi, survived an assassination attempt in 2010 and is now the head of Iran’s atomic energy agency.

William Tobey, a former deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration and a National Security Council specialist on nuclear issues, said four of the six attacks on the scientists since 2007 used magnetic limpet bombs that would be attached to a vehicle carrying the target.

Tobey, who just published a paper on the assassinations for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, would not speculate on the country responsible for the attacks, but Patrick Clawson, the director of research at the Washington Institute for Near Policy, said the signs point to Israel.“

Comment:

Inspite of Israel boasting about assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists; Israel’s admission of having creating the Stuxnet virus which sabotaged both Iranian nuclear facilities and likely was used in the cyber attack on India’s electricity system; the involvement of Mossad and CIA in the Mumbai attacks: the involvement of the Mossad in the training both of Sri Lankan and LTTE forces…despite all this, there will always be sycophants of the New World Order who will show up and accuse any researcher with the integrity to put the facts out even-handedly, without cowering before the establishment, as anti-Semitic.

If so, one must learn to wear that scarlet letter A/S with equanimity.

STUDENTS FOR LIBERTY declares that in order to be a libertarian you MUST be for groups that have been “historically oppressed by the state”- which, of course, is a thoroughly CONTESTABLE position.

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-new-libertarianism

QUOTE

Whereas libertarians of the past learned from classic texts, large books of integrated but contained theory, these young people extract information from an hourly blizzard of news, memes, videos, social media threads, texts, forums, tweets, and group hangouts.

QUOTE:

. “This necessarily means a special identity with groups that have been victims of State oppression and remain so in many parts if the world.”

QUOTE:

For this reason, we should embrace the ideals of feminism in the same way we embrace the anti-slavery cause. It is our cause, our banner, our history, our movement. We should never give this up to the oppressor class.

From this to the Euston Manifesto – Bible of the liberventionist religion – is not even a step.
http://eustonmanifesto.org/

While mouthing pieties about being tolerant, the piece is a clear call to be INTOLERANT of those it declares are bigots ….(but who are really to be censored and pushed off the web, because their views DECONSTRUCT the leftist ideology).

So these new, new libertarians are going to use social media to shout down views they don’t like.  Which is what the CIA does with Twitter and Facebook, anyway.

I’m waiting for the call to turn in people for “purist” thinking.

Update:

Since I posted a quotation from Jim Goad here, I’ve come to read more of the man and detest certain things about school-children that he’s written.

I’m removing this quote on public shaming (with which I agree), as I don’t want to be seen as endorsing those other views.

It’s a form of protest on my personal property.

Some (not all) of Goad’s writing crosses what I consider permissible in public speech. They constitute a form of violent pornography, indistinguishable in my mind from actual child porn or separated only by a very thin line. Nor are they meditations that could remotely be considered art or academic analysis.

As I’ve said, I am not a free speech absolutist.

Fred Reed, being brutalist about greasy purity tests:

‘The wives and girlfriends were real women and seemed to think being a woman was a good thing. Men thought it was a good thing, that’s for sure. It was like there were two kinds of people, men and women, instead of just one. It’s a novel concept, I reckon. But we liked it. And they were just nice. You could easy tell a Southern gal from a menopausing crocodile. Up North, you’d need a DNA test.

Anyway, half the crowd already knew each other and the others didn’t have to because it was a common culture and if you had a racecar, you were in.

Greasy-purity quiz:

“I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

(1) George Wallace (2) David Duke (3) Nathan Bedford Forrest (4) Abraham Lincoln.

Uh-huh. The Great Emancipator. Himself. How I do love goodness.

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Colonial Roots of Gun-Control, by Abijheet Singh

I live in India and I am a proud firearm owner – but I am the exception not the norm, an odd situation in a country with a proud martial heritage and a long history of firearm innovation. This is not because the people of India are averse to gun ownership, but instead due to Draconian anti-gun legislation going back to colonial times.

To trace the roots of India’s anti-gun legislation we need to step back to the latter half of the 19th century. The British had recently fought off a major Indian rebellion (the mutiny of 1857) and were busy putting in place measures to ensure that the events of 1857 were never repeated. These measures included a major restructuring of administration and the colonial British Indian Army along with improvements in communications and transportation. Meanwhile the Indian masses were systematically being disarmed and the means of local firearm production destroyed, to ensure that they (the Indian masses) would never again have the means to rise in rebellion against their colonial masters. Towards this end the colonial government, under Lord Lytton as Viceroy (1874 -1880), brought into existence the Indian Arms Act, 1878 (11 of 1878); an act which, exempted Europeans and ensured that no Indian could possess a weapon of any description unless the British masters considered him a “loyal” subject of the British Empire.

An example of British thinking in colonial times:

“No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.” –James Burgh (Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses) [London, 1774-1775]

And thoughts (on this subject) of the man who wanted to rule the world:

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.” — Adolf Hitler (H.R. Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talks 1941-1944)

The leaders of our freedom struggle recognised this, even Gandhi the foremost practitioner of passive resistance and non-violence had this to say about the British policy of gun-control in India:

“Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.” — Mahatma Gandhi (An Autobiography OR The story of my experiments with truth, by M.K. Gandhi, p.238)
Post Independence

India became independent in 1947, but it still took 12 years before this act was finally repealed. In 1959 the British era Indian Arms Act, 1878 (11 of 1878.) was finally consigned to history and a new act, the Arms Act, 1959 was enacted. This was later supplemented by the Arms Rules, 1962. Unfortunately this new legislation was also formulated based on the Indian Government’s innate distrust its own citizens. Though somewhat better than the British act, this legislation gave vast arbitrary powers to the “Licensing Authorities”, in effect ensuring that it is often difficult and sometimes impossible for an ordinary law abiding Indian citizen to procure an arms license.

“A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie.” — Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Also the policy of throttling private arms manufacturing was continued even after independence. Limits on the quantity and type of arms that could be produced by private manufacturers were placed – ensuring that the industry could never hope to be globally competitive and was instead consigned to producing cheap shotguns, of mostly indifferent quality, in small quantities. A citizen wishing to purchase a decent firearm depended solely on imports, which were a bit more expensive but vastly superior in quality.

This changed towards the mid to late 1980s, when the Government, citing domestic insurgency as the reason, put a complete stop to all small arms imports. The fact that there is no documented evidence of any terrorists ever having used licensed weapons to commit an act of terror on Indian soil seems to be of no consequence to our Government. The prices of (legal & licensed) imported weapons have been on an upward spiral ever since – beating the share market and gold in terms of pure return on investment. Even the shoddy domestically produced guns suddenly seem to have found a market. Also since the Government now had a near monopoly on (even half-way decent) arms & ammunition for the civilian market, they started turning the screws by pricing their crude public sector products (ammunition, rifles, shotguns & small quantities of handguns) at ridiculously high rates – products that frankly, given a choice no one would ever purchase.

“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.” — George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, himself a socialist.”

“Therefore was the first man, Adam, created alone, to teach us that whoever destroys a single life, the Bible considers it as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a single life, the Bible considers it as if he saved an entire world.”

Rabbi Judah the Prince

The New Indian Express points out the completely political nature of the Khobragade affair, proved by recent “slavery” charges brought against Bangladesh’s consul-general by a former worker.

Although the alleged conduct is much worse in this case, the diplomat has not been arrested or stripped. Meanwhile, the zealous Preetinder Singh Bharara is going after Devyani Khobragade a second time, after a US court dismissed the first indictment against the Indian diplomat in a case that has permanently damaged Indo-US relations:

“It looks like a replay of the Devyani Khobragade affair that strained India-US relations, but it isn’t. A former domestic worker has slapped a civil suit against Bangladesh’s consul general in New York and his wife accusing them of keeping him in slave-like conditions.

But unlike Khobragade, India’s then deputy consul general in New York, the Bangladeshi diplomat has neither been arrested nor strip searched.

In papers filed in Manhattan Federal Court Friday, Mashud Parves Rana said Consul General Monirul Islam and his wife, Fahima Tahsina Prova, forced him to work from 6.30 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days a week for 18 months – and never paid him a dime, according to New York Daily News.

Rana alleged that he was lured to the US with the promise of a “good” $3,000 a month job but was kept “in forced labour in slavery-like conditions” in the couple’s sprawling $8,000-a-month apartment.

The suit also accuses the couple of barring him “from leaving their residence under his own volition, threatening to beat him or kill him, threatening that the police will arrest him or kill him if he left their residence, physically assaulting him on at least two occasions, (and) maintaining possession over Rana’s passport and visa”.

Among his tasks, the suit as cited by the Daily News says, was cooking the family’s food from scratch, washing their clothes by hand, supervising their 11-year-old son and cleaning the apartment daily.

The Daily News said its calls and emails to the Bangladesh consulate were not immediately returned.

Rana, the Daily News said, is being represented by Dana Sussman, who is also representing Sangeeta Richard, Khobragade’s former housekeeper who has accused the Indian diplomat of underpaying her.

Khobragade returned home Jan 9 after New Delhi declined to revoke her newly acquired full diplomatic immunity with India shifting her to a UN assignment.

Dashing hopes of a closure of the Khobragade affair, Indian American prosecutor Preet Bharara has secured a second indictment of the Indian diplomat two days after a New York judge dismissed the visa fraud case against her.”

The Indian Express reported last year about the ring behind the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists:

“Iranian state television Monday showed several Iranians alleged to be part of a group of 13 who “confessed” to killing four Iranian nuclear scientists after being trained by Israeli intelligence.

It said the network received orders from “Washington and London.”

The television report, available online (http://www.yjc.ir/fa/news/4047313), showed the suspects speaking of how they purportedly prepared to murder the scientists, and broadcast a re-enactment of assassins on a motorbike fixing a magnetic bomb to a victim’s car, while dramatic music played in the background.

It also showed images of a number of prefabricated temporary buildings in an arid area and said the site was an Israeli military camp used for their training.

The 40-minute report, which was broadcast overnight, said the 13 comprised eight men and five women, all of whom were named.

One of them was Majid Jamali Fashi, who was executed on May 15 after being found guilty of spying for Israel’s Mossad spy service and playing a key role in the January 2010 murder of a top nuclear scientist in return for payment of USD 120,000.

Iran’s intelligence service recently said it had broken a ring of other “spies” linked to the scientists’ slayings, which it blamed on Israel and the United States.

The United States vehemently denied any involvement in the most recent assassination, on January 11 this year. Israel has refused to confirm or deny involvement in any of the killings.

One of the suspects presented on state television, identified as Maziar Ebrahimi, told the camera that he had been “sent to Israel to learn to handle explosives, and receive other military training, including firing weapons.”

Meanwhile, India’s own nuclear scientists are dying mysteriously. without a peep from the Indian government and major English-language media.

What sanctions in support of “human rights” really mean, explains Michael Rozeff:

“An MRI scan is a modern technique to use magnetic resonance imaging to detect abnormalities in the human body. It’s a common medical tool. Imagine sending someone to jail for 20 years for only one charge of several assembled in his alleged crime of shipping a component coil to the Netherlands where it would be shipped to Iran for medical use. That’s the potential penalty in the case of a former Iranian and now American citizen, a Ph.D. scientist, who is alleged not to have obtained an export license to ship the coil. This is a piece of what is meant by sanctions on Iran.

Furthermore, in addition to the wickedness of government sanctions, the justice system in the U.S. is also wicked and cruel by hitting the man with these charges: “conspiracy to export to an embargoed country, conspiracy to smuggle goods, money laundering and obstructing justice. If convicted, he faces a maximum of 20 years in prison on the first count alone.”