Day: September 17, 2022

Some More Updates: Ukrainian army shells Donetsk centre with French guns, killing four civilians and wounding eight

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

Ukrainian army shells Donetsk centre with French guns, killing four civilians and wounding eight

Other shells hit the Post building, as well as the Voroshilovsky district administration building, the Oplot TV studios, and the monument to Pushkin, the Russian author, located behind the theatre, a few meters from Lenin Square. There, three civilians were killed, including a woman who was walking right next to a children’s park that is usually crowded when the weather is nice like today. The initial toll of three injured civilians was eventually raised to eight, including a TeleSur journalist.

And the toll on journalists could have been much worse. As they arrived on the scene quickly after the bombing, War Gonzo journalists witnessed the second strike live, which again targeted Lenin Square, hitting the already burning van a second time. Fortunately their car was behind another vehicle and they were able to get out safely.

But this second strike, shortly after the first, shows that Ukraine continues to carry out terrorist bombings, the aim of which is to kill or maim as many rescue workers and journalists as possible when they arrive in an already bombed area.

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But after submitting the photos of the shrapnel I found on the spot to Adrien Bocquet*, who is now a NATO weapons expert for the DPR’s representation in the JCCC (Joint Monitoring and Co-ordination Centre on Ukraine’s War Crimes), he confirmed that they were American 155mm shells, some fired from Caesar guns and others from TRF1 guns.

The famous TRF1 guns that can fire (banned) 155 mm cluster munitions, which I had mentioned in June, and which the Western press had assured that France had not supplied to Ukraine! Before learning at the beginning of September that Paris had indeed sold them to Kiev!

Previously:

Updated: Four killed in Ukrainian shelling attack on downtown Donetsk

* A French Volunteer Described How He Witnessed Dramatisations in Bucha

*French Medical Volunteer in Ukraine Opens Up About Azov Regiment’s ‘War Crimes’

John Parker on his Fact-Finding Mission to Ukraine & Findings: US-NATO Proxy War on Donbass & Russia

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

On September 17, 2022, John Parker, the founder and coordinator of the Harriet Tubman Center For Social Justice in Los Angeles and a leading member of the Socialist Unity Party and a candidate for the US Senate in California on the Peace and Freedom ticket, and also a union organizer, public school teacher, journalist, activist and coordinator of the International Action Center, joins the show to discuss his recent Fact-Finding mission to the Donbass and their findings: US-NATO Proxy War on Donbass & Russia

John Parker on his Fact-Finding Mission to Ukraine & Findings: US-NATO Proxy War on Donbass & Russia via Activist News Network

Previously:

Fact-Finding Mission to Donbass Part 3

Techbro Influencer Scott Galloway Heads To The Fainting Couch Over TikTok

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Techbro Influencer Scott Galloway Heads To The Fainting Couch Over TikTok

This week, Galloway spent his time pushing the hot DC claim du jour: that TikTok is a profound menace to the planet and should be banned. He made the point at the Vox Code conference, then hopped over to Bill Maher’s HBO show to make a similar pronouncement:

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Actual evidence of TikTok being uniquely dangerous (especially any indication China has used or could use TikTok to bedazzle U.S. children) has been sorely lacking, but that doesn’t stop folks from heading to the fainting couches. This face fanning has been especially popular among a certain set of xenophobic DC politicians, and companies that don’t want to have to directly compete with China.

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The problem: the U.S. is a corrupt, xenophobic, superficial dumpster fire, so most of the “solutions” to this potential problem have been stupid and performative.

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Here’s the thing: you could ban TikTok immediately, and China could hoover up location, browsing, and behavior data from an ocean of completely unaccountable and hugely shady data brokers and middlemen. And they can do that because U.S. privacy and security standards are hot garbage. And in some instances, they’re hot garbage because of the same people now complaining about TikTok.

Both Carr and Cruz have extensive histories of undermining regulatory oversight and privacy rules at absolutely every opportunity, yet both are lauded by Galloway in a blog post for being heroic leaders in the “ban TikTok” crusades. Galloway’s a top pundit, yet somehow can’t see that Carr and Cruz are engaged in a zero-calorie xenophobic theatrics, and couldn’t care less about actual consumer privacy.

For literally thirty straight years, at absolutely every single turn, we prioritized making money over transparency or consumer privacy. As a result, consumer privacy protections are garbage, regulators are toothless, governments exploit the attention economy to avoid having to get warrants, and any idiot with a nickel can easily build gigantic, hugely detailed profiles about your everyday life without your consent.

“Banning TikTok” does nothing meaningful if you’re genuinely interested in meaningful surveillance and privacy reform. There will always be another TikTok. There’s an ocean of companies engaging in the same or worse behavior as TikTok because we’ve sanctioned this kind of guardrail-optional hyper-collection and monetization of consumer behavioral data at every step of the way.

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Many of the folks beating the “ban TikTok” drum may be well intentioned but just don’t really understand how broken the consumer privacy landscape is. They may not understand that this is a problem that’s exponentially more complicated than just what we do with a single app. Freaking out exclusively about a single app tells me you either don’t really understand the data-hoovering monster we’ve built, or don’t really care if anybody other than China exploits it (waves tiny American flag patriotically).

Many of the other folks calling for a TikTok ban aren’t operating in good faith. Facebook/Meta, for example, spends a lot of time spreading scary stories about TikTok in the press and DC because they want to crush a competitive threat they’ve been incapable of out-innovating. Similar, Politico’s owner is on the Netflix board and simply wants to curtail what he sees as a threat to market and advertising mindshare.

Then there’s just a ton of Silicon Valley folks who believe they inherently own and deserve the advertising market share TikTok occupies. And then of course there’s just a whole bunch of rank bigots who are mad because darker skinned human beings built a popular app, and try to hide this bigotry behind patriotic, pseudo national security concerns.

All of this converges to create a stupid, soupy mess that’s devoid of any actual fixes to any actual problems. Hyper surveillance and propaganda are very real problems that require a dizzying array of complicated fixes, including media and privacy policy reform, antitrust reform, tougher consumer protection standards, education reform, and a meaningful privacy law for the internet era.

Previously:

The NATO to TikTok Pipeline: Why is TikTok Employing So Many National Security Agents?

The White House is briefing TikTok stars about the war in Ukraine

UK uses TikTok influencers to urge teens to get jab after Pfizer-linked vaccine committee chair admits policy lacks evidence + White House enlists army of social media influencers to promote COVID-19 vaccines

Mark Sleboda on the new reality unfolding in Ukraine after Russia’s Kharkov retreat

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Loud in the press this week has been the major development in the NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, what is described as a massive “Russian defeat” in the Kharkov region of east Ukraine. Russia’s manpower-lite and artillery-heavy military formation was forced to organize a withdrawal from Kharkov, facing multi-axis and casualty-heavy attacks from the Kiev forces, which unlike the now-destroyed Ukrainian military of some months ago, are fully equipped and operated as a NATO army manned by Ukrainians. Despite evacuation efforts, this leaves behind Eastern Ukrainians who will pay brutally with their lives as the Kiev bureaucracy implements what it has already announced as cleansing for anyone deemed a Russia-collaborator. There is now a massive movement of both NATO-Ukrainian and pro-Russian military building up in the south and south-east, preparing for a storm in the next weeks.

To assess this situation, “On the Barricades” has the pleasure of bringing repeat-guest Mark Sleboda onto the show for a two-part series this weekend. Mark is a former US Navy specialist, military expert, and academic who attended the London School of Economics before becoming a senior lecturer at Moscow State University.

In this first episode, hosts Maria Cernat and Boyan Stanislavski enlist Mark’s military analytical expertise to help piece together interpretations of the events in Kharkov, and to dissect the big questions that follow. He tells us about what’s happening on the ground, what military entities are engaged, what the events represent in terms of the Moscow and Kiev-NATO strategy, and what changes to the dynamic could come out of this now unstable balance of forces. We also hear updates about the role of Belarus in the war, the relevance of the renewed Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict, as well as the general mood of the Russian population toward the Putin regime and their attitude toward escalating the conflict to a full-out mobilization for war with NATO.

Mark Sleboda on the new reality unfolding in Ukraine after Russia’s Kharkov retreat via The Barricade

Updated: Four killed in Ukrainian shelling attack on downtown Donetsk

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)1 Comment

Four killed in Ukrainian shelling attack on downtown Donetsk

https://youtu.be/LawoFFzGUqw

The shelling is carried out with NATO-style 155mm caliber shells from a French Caesar. A car is burning on Lenin Square, people were burnt alive. A hit was recorded on the administration building of the Voroshilovsky district. People are hiding in basements and parking lots, fragments from explosions scatter hundreds of meters.

Consequences of shelling by NATO in Donetsk via Itapirkanmaa2

Related:

18+ Donetsk, still Ukrainian artillery shots in the center via V-N Rangeloni (In Italian, so you’ll have to turn on subtitles and automatic translation. He explains how Ukraine shells the same spot, after about 30 minutes, to target emergency rescue services)