What it all boils down to is this: Some large energy concerns, Chevron among them, want to develop the natural gas of Ukraine, and so had to dispose of the old government, which was too close to Russia.

Everything else is cover. No one ever cared about democracy, of course. That’s a given. But the other concerns – Russia’s need for a buffer against repeated western invasions, Russia’s need for a warm weather port, the fascist and neo-Nazi elements that now occupy the Vichy government in Kiev … real enough, I suppose.

But not the driver.

Former Secretary of State Madelyn Albright has been selected to head a team that will observe the coming elections in Ukraine on May 25th.

Yeah, that makes sense.

In other news, officials in Boston announced that they had exhumed the body of serial killer Ted Bundy to sit and act as an impartial observer in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Since airlines refused to fly a rotting corpse across the country, the judge ordered that the body be transported by rail.

Oh yeah, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. With that in mind, anything is possible.

We are supposed to look away from Ukraine right now, what with the horrid murders of people in the trade Union fire and evidence that the new US-backed junta did it quite deliberately, and that there are American terrorists running around the place, so Nigeria popped up on our screens, but then some Pakistani malcontent wants to focus our attention on US behavior in Pakistan …

Focus, people, focus! We are talking about Nigerian girls right now. OK? Nothing else should trouble our pretty little heads.

Note: Please be sure to read JC’s comments under this post, as he is all over this matter.

I learned from Huffington Post that Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, has an impressive résumé, as follows:

Hunter Biden currently serves as Chairman of the Board of World Food Program USA and as a Director on the not-for-profit boards of the Truman National Security Project, The Center for National Policy and the US Global Leadership Coalition. Mr. Biden serves as managing partner at Rosemont Seneca Partners, Chairman at Rosemont Seneca Advisors, is Counsel to Boies, Schiller, Flexner, LLP, a national law firm based in New York, and is a Director of CAYOVA a next generation social networking site.

Mr. Biden is also an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Masters Program in the school of foreign service. Mr. Biden is a member of the CSIS Executive Council on Development and the President’s Advisory Board for Catholic Charities in Washington D.C. From 2006-2009, Mr. Biden served on the Board of Directors of Amtrak, serving as Vice Chairman from 2007-2009. Mr. Biden was honored to serve as an Honorary Co-Chair of the 2009 Presidential Inaugural Committee and to have served in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Previously, Mr. Biden was a founding member of the law firm, Oldaker, Biden and Belair, LLP, was appointed by President Clinton to serve as Executive Director of E-Commerce Policy Coordination under Secretary of Commerce William Daley and was Senior Vice President at MBNA America Bank. He is also a member of the bar in the State of Connecticut, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Mr. Biden received a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Add to that his recent appointment to Burisma Holdings, the largest private natural gas producer in Ukraine.

The guy is juiced. He’s connected to the Vice President of the United States, and has been appointed to the board of a company in an area of immediate interest in US foreign policy, a place where there has been insurgencies, riots, a violent coup d’état, massacres, where NATO wants to expand, where Russia’s security interests are threatened and a potential confrontation between two very powerful countries is an ongoing backdrop. It is not unlike George W. Bush shilling for Enron when his Daddy was president. It is not kid-juice, but rather daddy-juice, that secures these appointments.

Newsworthy? Nah. I got hold of this tidbit via Olga75 on Twitter. Otherwise, [crickets] all the way up and down the Google.
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Update: One almost gets the feeling that, outside the United States and in the inner tubes exists a real news media. This is from a Buzzfeed story:

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told BuzzFeed that Russia saw no conflict of interest in Joe Biden working to wean Ukraine off Russian gas – which makes up about 60 percent of the country’s energy supply – while his son worked in the Ukrainian gas industry.
“Anyway, as everyone knows, there’s no gas in Ukraine,” he added. “The gas in Ukraine is Russian.”

Factor that into JC’s comments below in which Burisma appears to be nothing more than a shell – no gas fields, no real company, Cypriot ties and a connection to the former Polish president and the current US Vice President. Burisma and I have one thing in common: Both of us got our domain names from GoDaddy.

Caricature: exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics.

We are well into Twelve Years a Slave this evening, and are yet to meet a character who does not fit the above definition. I don’t know if I can sit through this much longer.

What trash! What nonsense! The quest for moral superiority is never-ending. I remind you that slavery was legal in much of the north as well as the south at that time. I remind you of Dr. King’s words, that he feared the quiet racism of the good people more than the open racism of the bad.

The Holocaust became the reason for World War II, after the fact. It appears to me that slavery became the reason for the Civil War in the same manner. Economics brings out the worst in people. There are still slaves on the planet in abundance, and sweatshop workers are not far removed. The free market demands it. There are people livening nearby you who cannot pay their bills or college loans or afford health care or have enough food based on our current system. People suffered then and now because those who control economics devalue people.

But people are the same, wherever you go. These evil southerners and noble slaves in the movie are literary devices, nothing more. The whole damned movie so far has been one long tortuous device.

Twelve Years a Slave: Rotten apples all the way through. Feel-good junk food.

It has become apparent to me in reading about the Odessa Trade Union fire, seeing videos, watching foreign news reports and listening to interviews, that the following took place (gruesome descriptions follow, but no photos or videos):
Continue reading “Odessa witness: “Third force” terrorists in Odessa set House of Trade Unions fire” →

The Kiev government is unable to rely on its own military to suppress the counterinsurgency in the east, and so is now using foreign mercenaries for that task. This story, from Voice of Russia, points to a German report to Angela Merkel that 400 of them working for the American firm Academi.

Academi, by the way, is just another name for Blackwater. Ever since Jeremy Scahill wrote that book about the company, they have been regularly morphing from one thing to another. They have gone from the unpronounceable “Xi” to Greystone to Academi. As “Blackwater” they were notorious for murdering civilians in Iraq but were left unpunished by the US legal system. Just recently the charges have reappeared via a grand jury – one lone agent is charged. That’s about all the justice that exists in this country.

The Green Berets, Navy Seals and all of that were put together as military units outside the military command structure, essentially paramilitary units under CIA control. They traveled under the euphemism “advisers” in Vietnam, and our entertainment system has done everything in its power to glamorize them. Navy Seals are held in near godlike status these days after the fake Obama killing in 2011.

Blackwater/Xi/Greystone/Academi are generally populated with ex-Berets and Seals. The companies merely uses them as hired guns, terrorists for hire, essentially removing their beards, making honest men of them.
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Update: Moon of Alabama repeats the rumors and their source and offers insight here.

“You son of a bitch, you moved the cemetery but you left the bodies, didn’t you? You son of a bitch! You left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!! YOU ONLY MOVED THE HEADSTONES!!! WHY?! WHY?!!!” (Craig T. Nelson as Steve in the 1982 movie Poltergeist)

That’s a movie quote. It came to mind this morning as I read about elections going on in the Donetsk and Lugansk region of Ukraine. They are voting on whether to be governed by the new regime installed by London/Washington in Kiev, or to be independent republics. The Russian government urged them not to do this, at least at this time. I imagine it has to do with regional security. The elections will inflame tempers in Kiev, and violence and bloodshed will follow.

What caught my eye, the reason for the movie quote was this, from a Voice of Russia article

More than 3.1 million ballots have been printed for the referendum in the Donetsk region.

In the United States we have elections, but generally we don’t have real choices since both (we are only allowed two) parties are bought with the same money. Our news media only reports on partisan differences so that when the candidates agree on the issues, as they generally do, there is nothing to report but the horse race. Our voters are so dumbed down that they are easily influenced by low-information, emotional TV advertising.

But when all else fails, if there is a threat that an election will bring about real change, we have electronic voting machines. They are easily hacked, and rarely audited in any meaningful way.

Here’s an example: David Prosser, a Scott Walker man, lost his reelection bid to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2011 to JoAnne Kloppenburg by 204 votes. So we thought, until a former Prosser worker, Kathy Nicholaus, discovered 14,000 uncounted ballots. Amazingly there were just enough votes for Prosser in that fortuitous find to not only win the election for him, but also to give him a large enough margin so that there could be no recount.

The election was stolen in broad daylight.

So anyway, I imagined an exchange between, say Zbigniew Brzezinski and his protegé, Barack Obama, that went something like this:

• Obama: It’s not looking good, Zbig. There’s a lot of resistance to our people in Kiev. The vote won’t be to our liking.
• Brzezinski: So change the vote.
• Obama: I can’t.
• Brzezinski What do you mean you can’t? You send your people in with program fixes, you switch enough votes to change the goddammed outcome. You find missing votes in laptops. What the hell is wrong with you? You know this stuff!
• Obama: They use paper ballots. They count them by hand.
• Brzezinski: You son of a bitch, you let them have elections and you forgot to give them voting machines, didn’t you? You son of a bitch! You left the elections and you let them use paper ballots!! YOU LET THEM USE PAPER BALLOTS!!! WHY?! WHY?!!!”

It’s ugly however, as fascists, as with Walker in Wisconsin, do not care about elections. If they cannot change them, they ignore them. Kiev has already said it will not recognize the outcome.

There will be blood.
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Update: Disruptions by the Kiev regime junta are underway as we speak.