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Putin and his martial arts trained security force

Mark Galeotti
Foreign Policy
Thu, 15 May 2014 16:04 UTC
Image
© AP/RIA-Novosti, Alexei Druzhinin, Pool
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, top, seen during a judo training at a sports school in St. Petersburg, Russia, Friday, Dec. 18, 2009.
Why the Russian president is turning to his fellow martial artists to staff an efficient and loyal security force

Vladimir Putin, perhaps the world's most famous judo black belt, is passionate about his sport --and not just in the dojo, but in the Kremlin. Welcome to the age of the "judocracy" in Russia, where the thinking seems to be: Those who spar together, stay together.

The most recent example of this played out on May 12, when Putin appointed Col. Gen. Viktor Zolotov to be the first deputy interior minister and commander of the Internal Troops. A close associate of the president's, Zolotov was the head of his personal security detail for 13 years -- and, of course, he was one of Putin's sparring partners. (So too was Igor Sidorkevich, once president of the St. Petersburg Judo Federation and now head of the military police.) With Zolotov's promotion, Putin brings in the security forces even closer to him, and he is making sure that they are led by a man with the focus and determination he believes judo inspires.

To a judoka, as Putin said in 2012, "success depends on mastering what is within." And that could almost be the motto of Putin's Internal Troops. It is a distinctively Russian force, a parallel army trained and equipped specifically for security operations at home. Its 180,000 troops range from ill-disciplined local reserves that secure nuclear power stations and police soccer matches, to the Independent Special Designation Brigades that bore much of the brunt of the fighting in Chechnya. The Internal Troops's First Independent Special Designation Division is based in Moscow as an elite force for the security of the Kremlin.

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Bullseye

Libyan tribes respond to U.S. Ambassador Deborah Jones

Joanne Moriarty
LibyanWartheTruth.com
Wed, 21 May 2014 00:00 UTC
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Joanne Moriarty
Deborah Jones US Ambassador to Libya spoke today at the Stimson Center in Washington DC. Her prowess for mis-statements and lies is unmatched except by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. She states the Libyan people never had a government before the so called "revolution" and that they are not capable of having a large government only of having small pieces of governments. She also states that the Libyan people do not want a great leader it is not in their culture. I am not sure where this woman is appointed as ambassador but it cannot be Libya, she is in some kind of alternate universe.

The Great Tribes of Libya have responded and you will see their response below.
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Bulb

Former Navy Seal has a great idea to immediately fix the VA: Make U.S. senators get their medical care there

Jason Howerton
The Blaze
Wed, 21 May 2014 13:04 UTC
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Marcus Luttrell
Marcus Luttrell, the former Navy SEAL behind the book "Lone Survivor," has a great idea to quickly fix the issues currently facing the Department of Veterans Affairs: Make U.S. senators go through the VA to get their medical care.

"If you had to put people, Senators - if they had to go for their V.A. to get care, it would probably get fixed," Luttrell said on "Fox and Friends" Wednesday morning.

He also suggested a more realistic solution to address the inadequate care some of the nation's veterans are currently receiving.
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Nuke

America's shame - the N-bomb guinea pigs

Peter Calder
New Zealand Herald
Sat, 17 May 2014 12:48 UTC
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The 1954 blast on Bikini Atoll was 1000 times bigger than the bombs used against Japan.
It was, at the time, the biggest bang humans had ever made. The US nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on March 1, 1954, was 1000 times larger than the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

That's not in the same league as the fury nature unleashed on Krakatoa or beneath what is now Lake Taupo, but the 15-megaton blast - codenamed Castle Bravo - has been exceeded artificially only once, by the Soviets' 50-plus megaton Tsar Bomba in 1961.

What happened next was one of the great nightmares of the nuclear age. Fallout from Castle Bravo drifted over the inhabited atolls of Rongelap, Rongerik and Utirik.

On Rongelap, children played in highly radioactive incinerated coral, thinking it was storybook snow.

An hour after the explosion, the per-hour radiation level on the islands was 130 roentgen (R); 50 hours on, it was 175R. Normal background exposure is about 20R in a lifetime.
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Snakes in Suits

'The rich think worker insecurity is a good thing': Chomsky on class warfare in the US

Scott Kaufman
The Raw Story
Fri, 23 May 2014 12:45 UTC
Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky
Noted leftist thinker and pioneering linguist Noam Chomsky recently sat down at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for a wide-ranging discussion titled "Propaganda Vs. Reality."

The host of the event, Professor Jan Nederveen Pieterse, began by noting that there would be, the next day, "a party celebrating the 1 percent."

"We live in an era," he continued, "when Hollywood celebrates idiots as culture heroes - The Great Gatsby, The Wolf of Wall Street. So is there good news for the 99 percent, and [if there isn't] what kind of news would you be looking for?" Pieterse asked.

"The good news is that there are people like you," Chomsky replied. "People committed to overcoming the narrowness of the spectrum of political discussion and the enormous oppression and inequities of society. That there are people trying to end the extremely ominous threat of nuclear war or environmental catastrophe - that is good news."

"But that's always the good news," he continued. "Class war goes on all the time, it's usually just one-sided. The business classes are very dedicated to class war. Constantly fighting it, so the question is whether there will be an opposition."

"When you see rising opposition, that's the good news."

When asked about the fate of those in a capitalist society who are living "a precarious existence," Chomsky said that "from the point of view of those conducting the class war - part of the business classes and the government - the best thing would be to have a population which is living a precarious existence."
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Pistol

Afghan women: The kill list we don't talk about

Sahana Dharmapuri
Portside
Thu, 22 May 2014 08:57 UTC
In the world of pen vs. gun, we would all benefit from putting the Arab proverb "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" to good use. If women's rights are a security threat to violent extremists, then women's rights must be the asset we protect.

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© UN Photo/Eric Kanalstein
Afghan women
Osama bin Laden, Al-Zarqawi, Mullah Omar: we know these names because they were on a kill list, a targeted roster the United States uses to pursue and kill people who are a threat to our national security.

But have you heard of Najia Sediqi, Hanifa Safi, or Malalai Kakar? They were on a list we don't talk about, the one that violent extremists use to target people who are a threat to their security.

Sediqi, Safi and Kakar have three things in common: they were women, they were Afghan public officials and they refused to participate in a political project that does not recognize the human rights of everyone. Instead, they held prominent public positions in the new Afghan government as ministers and police.
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Newspaper

US House Bill would stop door-to-door mail for millions

Pauline Jelinek
Yahoo News
Wed, 21 May 2014 08:13 UTC
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© Unknown
Millions of Americans would no longer get mail delivered to their door but would go to communal or curbside boxes instead, under a proposed law.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform debated Wednesday a bill to direct the U.S. Postal Service to convert 1.5 million addresses annually - 15 million over the next decade - to the less costly, but also less convenient delivery method.

"I think it's a lousy idea," said Democratic Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts. He was joined by some other lawmakers in saying it wouldn't work in urban areas where there's no place on city streets to put banks of so-called "cluster boxes" that have compartments for multiple homes. Under the proposal, waivers could be given to people with disabilities who have difficulty leaving their homes, and people who still want door delivery could pay extra for it - something Lynch derided as "a delivery tax."
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Oscar

Matrix star denounces 'racist' La Marseillaise at Cannes festival opening


The Connexion
Wed, 14 May 2014 07:40 UTC
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© Thetimes.co.uk
Actor Lambert Wilson has waded into La Marseillaise controversy, branding the words of France's national anthem "racist".

The Matrix actor, who will host the opening ceremony at the Cannes Film Festival later today said he thought the lyrics to the anthem were "appalling".

He told RTL Radio: "I am extremely upset that nobody says it's time to change the lyrics of La Marseillaise, which are from another time."

Mr Wilson described the lyrics as "terrible" and "bloodthirsty", and said: "When I hear the line, Let impure blood water our furrows, I am amazed that we continue to sing it."
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Bad Guys

Hysteria! Polish professor fired for daring to criticize US, EU support of neo-Nazis in Ukraine


RIA Novosti
Wed, 21 May 2014 07:25 UTC
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© Unknown
Professor Anna Razny
Poland's Jagiellonian University has sanctioned Professor Anna Razny for criticizing US and EU policies toward Ukraine.

After it was discovered that Razny had signed an open letter in support of the Russian policy in Ukraine, she was forbidden to do research at the university, the polish professor explained in an interview with the Voice of Russia radio station.

"I work in one of the oldest universities. Yesterday the Faculty Council has applied a serious 'punishment' to me by secret ballot, that is not supported the request for an extension of my research work at the Jagiellonian University," Razny said.

"However, I hope that the rector of our university will cancel the decision of the council and thus show that the Jagiellonian University, one of the oldest universities in Poland, is the place where people with different points of view can successfully work and collaborate," Razny added.

In a civilized world, people should have the right to defend different points of view, and even more so they should be able to voice them publicly and discuss them with impunity, the professor said.

Comment: Andrej Lobaczewski and the Polish professors who witnessed the Nazis and later the Soviets come into their institutions and indoctrinate whole generations of students with propaganda must be turning in their graves. The origins of political ponerology come full circle as Poland falls ever deeper into a spellbound coma, this time induced by "not quite conspecific people" in the West...

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Arrow Down

The US shale oil miracle disappears overnight - new estimate just 4%

Chris Martenson
Peak.prosperity.com
Fri, 23 May 2014 02:51 UTC
Monterey shale lands
© Unknown
The US shale oil "miracle" has about as much believability left as Jimmy Swaggart. Just today, we learned that the EIA has placed a hefty downward revision on its estimate of the amount of recoverable oil in the #1 shale reserve in the US, the Monterey in California.

As recently as yesterday, the much-publicized Monterey formation accounted for nearly two-thirds of all technically-recoverable US shale oil resources.

But by this morning? The EIA now estimates these reserves to be 96% lower than it previously claimed.

Yes, you read that right: 96% lower. As in only 4% of the original estimate is now thought to be technically-recoverable at today's prices:
EIA Cuts Monterey Shale Estimates on Extraction Challenges

May 21, 2014

The Energy Information Administration slashed its estimate of recoverable reserves from California's Monterey Shale by 96 percent, saying oil from the largest U.S. formation will be harder to extract than previously anticipated.

"Not all reserves are created equal," EIA Administrator Adam Sieminski told reporters at the Financial Times and Energy Intelligence Oil & Gas Summit in New York today. "It just turned out it's harder to frack that reserve and get it out of the ground."

The Monterey Shale is now estimated to hold 600 million barrels of recoverable oil, down from a 2012 projection of 13.7 billion barrels, John Staub, a liquid fuels analyst for the EIA, said in a phone interview. A 2013 study by the University of Southern California's Global Energy Network, funded in part by industry group Western States Petroleum Association, found that developing the state's oil resources may add as many as 2.8 million jobs and as much as $24.6 billion in tax revenues.

(Source)
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