It’s true. Probably. I am likely the last writer on the planet to have to yet to write about Russiagate. Well, that ends here. Actually, if things had gone as planned, it would have ended Tuesday, before it even got started, and I wouldn’t be writing this post two days later today on Thursday. Clear enough?
It’s not that Russiagate and its many actors, some unmasked, others still masked, doesn’t interest me. It does. But interest is not the same as surprise. Nothing I’d read about Russiagate had really surprised me to the point of needing to set forth digitally my two cents worth. From what I recall of my university history and political science seminars, spies spy and national governments, friends and foes, are at all times engaged in espionage. That’s the drill. That’s what they do.
As for Trump, I have not written a whole lot about him, or got too wound up on those few occasions I have. I did write last July 17 that we “stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.”
But I also went onto say, “the American republic can survive this difficult historical moment. Right-wing populism is not centralized authoritarian Fascism.
“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]
“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January. Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.
“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.
“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.
“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to terms who served two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.
“Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.”
I also really haven’t had a lot to say about Vladimir Putin even though it was here in Canada, in Ottawa, that some historians locate the start of the Cold War with the defection of cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet embassy on Sept. 5, 1945 with 109 documents stuffed under his shirt.
A year later, the Communications Branch of the National Research Council of Canada (CBNRC), was formed by combining two wartime cryptologic offices; the civilian Examination Unit (XU) and the military Joint Discrimination Unit (JDU), made up by 1945 of what had been the disparate SIGINT collection units of the Navy, Army and Air Force. The Examination Unit was Canada’s first civilian office that was solely dedicated to the encryption and decryption of communications signals traffic content. Until then, signals intelligence (SIGINT) was entirely within the purview of the military. Flash forward some 72 years and its the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) using its Internet cable-tap program Atomic Banjo, through its CSE Web Operations Centre (CWOC), to track 10 to 15 million user uploads and downloads daily and analyze the records in its needle-in-a-haystack effort to stumble upon extremist plots and suspects. It monitors and collects HTTP metadata for “Free File Upload” (FFU) file-sharing sites, commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files.
So would I be surprised if the entire Trump White House and cabinet were suspected of being agents of Russian influence? No.
Oh wait a minute, that’s pretty much what they are suspected of being anyway. We’re just waiting for the evidence. And waiting.
I’ve been reading Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone since around the time of his July 2009 article in the magazine, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” where in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, he described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Catchy prose.
So when I noticed he had penned a piece for Rolling Stone a couple of days ago headlined, “Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives: Whatever the truth about Trump and Russia, the speculation surrounding it has become a dangerous case of mass hysteria,” I read it with my usual interest in Taibbi’s work. Then I posted it to Facebook. And then I had to write about it here.
Why?
Because less than a minute after I had posted the Rolling Stone article by Taibbi, someone supposedly named Keti Korakhashvili from Tbilisi, Georgia in the former Soviet Union, who is also on Facebook had “liked” it and posted her own link below it, which led me to a YouTube link from 10 years ago and an NBC Nightly News piece with then anchor Brian Williams on what life might be like now in 2017 with advances in RFID chips and face recognition software (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YJsxMcAJoA). Interestingly, the NBC piece has since been canvassed on Snopes because the brief 2:01 clip is commonly cited inaccurately as an exhibit in an evidentiary package that has all Americans receiving a microchip implant by the end of this year.
Georgia is in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the south by Turkey and Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital and largest city is Tbilisi. Georgia covers a territory of 69,700 square kilometres (26,911 sq mi), and its 2016 population is about 3.72 million. Georgia is a unitary, semi-presidential republic, with the government elected through a representative democracy. Between 1921 and declaring independence in April 1991, Georgia was part of the old Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.).
Korakhashvili was able to “like” and post on my timeline because my Facebook privacy settings were set to “public” and not limited to “friends” or friends of friends liking and posting on my Facebook page. Frankly, while I review my settings on occasion, I’ve never tried to fine tune them to the extent that all my posts are targeted at specific audiences in terms of who can respond and who can’t. It could be done.
Considering I had posted the Taibbi article less than minute earlier and the local time in Tbilisi is nine hours ahead of Central Daylight Time here in Manitoba, making it between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. in Georgia, I wondered if Keti Korakhashvili, if that is her name, is some kind of Internet troll, tipped off by some algorithm gobbling bot perhaps, a bot who picked up on keywords in posts and/or combinations of names, words, etc.? Maybe in this case Matt Taibbi and Rolling Stone were flagged in combination along with Trump, Putin, Russia and the United States?
Questions, questions, so many questions, and so few answers in the Year of the Alternative Fact.
Korakhashvili used my posting of the Taibbi article as an opportunity to “like” and comment on my post. Her Facebook page itself looks like it might be legit and not some sort of fake profile such as I see from time to time when one of my old but wouldn’t you know it bogus Facebook “friends” is stranded in (fill in the blank for city) and needs some money, although they seem to all of a sudden have few Facebook friends of their own.
Not reading the Russian Cyrillic script alphabet, it’s kind of hard to be sure about any of this. But Korakhashvili’s photos did lead me to some nice pictures of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Tbilisi, commonly known as Sameba Cathedral, the main cathedral of the Orthodox Church in Georgia, and Kolkheti Restaurant in Tbilisi.
Then, lo and behold, someone claiming to be Tamo Ratiani from Mestia, also in Georgia, and about 450 kilometres northwest of Tbilisi, “liked” another post I had added to Facebook a few hours after the Taibbi article, but also commented by posting an identical link to Korakhashvili’s on the 2007 NBC Nightly News piece with then anchor Brian Williams on what life might be like now in 2017 with advances in RFID chips and face recognition software.
It was at that point I restored my Facebook privacy setting from public to friends for liking and commenting on posts appearing on my timeline.