Canned Heat:
Who’s provoking Ukraine unrest?
Russia is vowing to keep its troops in the Ukrainian region of Crimea in what has become Moscow’s biggest confrontation with the West since the Cold War. Ukraine’s new Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said Russian President Vladimir Putin had effectively declared war on his country. Concern is growing that more of eastern Ukraine could soon fall to the Russians. Earlier today, Russian troops seized a Ukraine Coast Guard base in the Crimean city of Balaklava. On Sunday, the new head of Ukraine’s navy defected to Russia. To talk more about the crisis in Ukraine, we speak to Yale University History Professor Timothy Snyder. His latest article for The New York Review of Books is “Ukraine: The Haze of Propaganda.” We also speak to retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern. He focused on Russian foreign policy for the first decade of his 27-year career with the Agency. He recently wrote an article titled, “Ukraine: One ‘Regime Change’ Too Many?”
Watch the full debate uninterrupted here.
Invisible-Hand-Of-The-Free-Market-Man
Tom Tomorrow:
My baby loves a bunch of authors
Moxy Fruvous:
Things that make me happy
I had the Comcast guy come to my house Saturday and move my cable connection, because my neck hurt all the time from having my coach perpendicular to the TV.
My TV (which I bought used) had a problem: big patches of red pixilation — but only when I watch broadcast channels. (Mostly, I watch Netflix.) Well, the Comcast guy tells me it’s their policy to swap out the cable box for a new one every time they service the system. “I hope it works,” I said. “Because every box I’ve ever gotten ends up not working and I have to get a new one.”
But guess what? The red patches are gone. And my neck doesn’t hurt when I watch TV anymore. It’s the little things, right?
The kids are alright
http://youtu.be/-pWLNoRZ9mg
Obama’s legacy will be as the president who let it all happen so he could get reelected:
More than 300 anti-Keystone XL protesters were arrested Sunday afternoon outside the White House in the latest push by environmentalists to convince the Obama administration to reject the Canadian oil pipeline.
The student-led protest, organized by XL Dissent, started with a rally at Georgetown University. The students marched from there to the White House — with a stop at Secretary of State John Kerry’s house along the way.
Students from 80 colleges participated in Sunday’s event, and another protest will be held on Monday in San Francisco, said Aly Johnson-Kurts, a freshman at Smith College and one of the organizers of the event.
“The youth really understand the traditional methods of creating change are not sufficient … so we needed to escalate,” said Johnson, shortly before she was arrested at the White House.
An organizer estimated the crowd at about 1,200 people. U.S. Park Police could not immediately provide a count of those arrested Sunday afternoon.
Organizers held civil disobedience training on Saturday to ensure that the demonstration went peacefully.
The crowd marched down H Street, holding banners and chanting songs. Some wore painter’s scrubs with black paint on them — “hazmat suits” with oil — while others held signs with slogans like “Keystone XL: pipeline to hell” and “Keep your oil out of my soil.”A tide of energy undulated through the crowd as speaker after speaker got up to encourage them to risk arrest.
“I want you to know how important what you’re doing is,” Chris Wahmhoff, a member of the Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands and candidate for the U.S. Senate, told the crowd, holding a block of oil sands in his hand. “The sick people in Michigan, the sick people in Canada, they’re looking to you.”“They say we are too young to make a difference, but we are proving them wrong, right here, right now,” Earthguradians Youth Director Xiuhtezcatl Martinez said to the cheering crowd.
“I think when the public sees college students coming out and getting arrested,” he said to POLITICO later, “people can say the youth came out. We were here. Because our generation will be the most impacted by whatever decision is made by the government.”
The snow was a bust
Thank God. Most of it went to South Jersey, Delaware and Maryland.
In the meantime, I’m going to try to stay awake enough to watch “The Act of Killing,” the Oscar-nominated documentary, today. Here’s a Mother Jones piece about it.
I did manage to watch “Dirty Wars,” the Jeremy Scahill documentary. (I kept falling asleep and had to watch it twice, but I did get through it.) Jeremy Scahill’s voice is very much (ironically) a drone, but push through that and watch. It’s worth it.
The older I get, the more I learn about wars and how they’re run, the more disgusted and skeptical I become. It surprises and frustrates me that people keep falling for the sales pitch, again and again.
Sick bay
Apparently I have a strep throat (white spots all over my throat and feels like I swallowed razor blades) so I will be blogging in between naps today.
Enjoy the fucking snow!
I wonder if they’ll ever allow it here
If Big Pharma can’t get make enough money to make up for the antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds they can sell instead, odds are slim:
Exactly a century after ecstasy was first patented, Health Canada has approved the drug’s import for the first Canadian study using the illegal substance in trauma survivors’ therapy.
The decision to allow two Vancouver therapists to import nine grams of MDMA from a laboratory in Switzerland — one of only two such permitted facilities worldwide — will kickstart the first experiment with the euphoria-and-empathy-producing drug in B.C. on Jan. 1, according to a Health Canada email obtained by the National Post, dated Nov. 23.
“I don’t know if we’ll have to wait until the MDMA is actually in our hands, but we’ve got a whole list of people who want to come to do it,” Dr. Ingrid Pacey, one of the researchers, told the Post. “There’s a part of me that still doesn’t quite believe it. When the MDMA arrives from Switzerland … when it finally lands on Canadian soil, then I’ll be certain.”
The B.C. study follows U.S. research by Medical University of South Carolina psychiatry professor Michael Mithoefer and wife Ann Mithoefer, a nurse. In the Journal of Psychopharmacology, they reported that more than 83% of several PTSD patients treated with MDMA and therapy had completely recovered, “without evidence of harm.” A follow-up study published last month found that the patients still had virtually no symptoms two years later.
“What the MDMA does, because of the physiological effects, it means you are in a present, fearless state — able to look at those events without being re-traumatized, and healing in the present what was the trauma of the past,” Dr. Pacey said.
‘You can’t invade another country on a trumped-up pretext’
Deja vu all over again! My, I’d forgotten how supportive the Very Serious People get when it’s time for another war. I wonder how enthusiastic they would be if it was their children on the front lines. Sis boom bah! How long until they put on their American flag pins again?
Secretary of State John Kerry made the round of Sunday shows this morning to condemn Russia’s “incredible act of aggression” in Ukraine, warning Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that the country faces harsh economic sanctions from the international community.
“It is really a stunning, willful choice by President Putin to invade another country,” Kerry said on Face the Nation.
But in the seriousness of the situation, the irony of Kerry’s next comments may have gone missed. ”You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” he said.
He went on to repeat the assertion on Meet the Press, keeping a straight face as he told host David Gregory: ”You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests.”
I’m still trying to figure out exactly what the U.S. is up to in the Ukraine. We’ve been funneling millions to the Ukraine opposition for a while, and we’ve selected the new prime minister. Also, late last year, the IMF demanded that Ukraine double prices for gas and electricity to industry and homes, that they lift a ban on private sale of Ukraine’s rich agriculture lands, make a major overhaul of their economic holdings, devalue the currency, slash state funds for school children and the elderly to “balance the budget.” In return Ukraine would get a paltry $4 billion.
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