Putinova Rusija

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The World Anti-Doping Agency alleged Wednesday that Russian athletes and government agencies continued to obstruct and deceive drug testers, even as Russia tries to regain its place in Olympic track and field.

In a report published two days before a key vote on whether to readmit Russia's track team for the Rio Olympics...

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The latest allegations relate to the period since the Russian anti-doping agency was suspended in November over accusations it covered up drug use. Since then testing in Russia has been led by foreign authorities, with Britain's UK Anti-Doping taking the lead.

Wednesday's WADA report says doping control officers were "intimidated" when trying to find athletes who said they were in so-called closed cities hosting military facilities, and alleges "armed FSB agents threatening DCOs with expulsion from the country."

When samples were sent abroad for testing, laboratories said the packages had been tampered with by Russian customs officers, WADA said. In such cases, "sample bottles (are) often not with corresponding chain of custody form," WADA said. That could potentially cause a case to collapse if an athlete convinces a tribunal that samples were mishandled.

Athletes also appear to be dodging tests by withdrawing from competitions at short notice when drug testers are present. In one case an athlete ran away from testers at a competition, and another "exited the stadium" during her own race, WADA said. At a competition in race walking, where top Russians have repeatedly failed drug tests, 15 athletes "did not start, withdrew or were disqualified," including Olympic medalists.

While UK Anti-Doping has conducted 455 tests since it started work in Russia in February, samples could not be collected in 73 cases for reasons including "athlete not available," WADA said.

WADA said in May that the number of tests conducted in Russia over the preceding six months had fallen by more than half against the same period a year earlier, when the Russian agency was still controlling the tests. UKAD has significantly less testing capacity than the Russian agency did because of a limited number of staff and delays to payments from the Russian authorities.

Earlier Wednesday, Russia ramped up its campaign Wednesday for its track and field team to be allowed to compete at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, contending it had met the conditions for reinstatement and saying it would be "obvious discrimination" to exclude athletes who have been not linked to doping.

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One of the things that floors me is how people in the West not only seem to be more susceptible to Putin’s cult of personality, but they actually end up projecting their own values and ideas onto him. This is a topic I’ve dealt with before in this parody article.

https://nobsrussia.com/2016/04...you-believe-in/

Or if you prefer a fresh case study, take a look at this idiotic article on an extremely sketchy website.

http://endingthefed.com/putin-tells-u-s-citizens-do-not-give-up-your-guns.html

It just so happens that today, shortly after I discovered that article, a friend of mine hit the mother lode of insane bullshit. And I do seriously mean insane. As you shall soon see, the only way the author could be sane is if they are deliberately lying, and to lie on that level would suggest they might be a sociopath, i.e. insane.


Behold, as former-civil-servant-turned-conspiracy-crank Paul Craig Roberts writes an article that displays so much admiration, if not awe of Vladimir Putin, that one gets the impression that Roberts was actually masturbating furiously while writing it.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/v...e-world/5410035

Now there are plenty of other reasons to dismiss Roberts as an insane crank. Here’s the latest, for example.

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/06/14/orlando-shooting-still-no-evidence/

But for the sake of argument I’m only going to deal with his insane love affair with the midget.


...I’m going to highlight one key part because it demonstrates what I’ve been saying about people projecting their ideal onto Putin with no background knowledge of Russia or its president. Here it is right here, in all its tin-foil covered glory:

In my opinion, Putin is such a towering figure that Washington has him marked for assassination. The CIA will use one of the Muslim terrorists that the CIA supports inside Russia. Unlike an American president, who dares not move among the people openly, Putin is not kept remote from the people. Putin is at ease with the Russian people and mingles among them. This makes him an easy target for the CIA to use a Chechnya terrorist, a Jihadist suicide bomber, or the traditional “lone nut” to assassinate Putin.

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Now let’s get to the meat of this paragraph of incomprehensible stupid. American presidents don’t “move among the people openly,” and Putin “mingles” among the Russian people. Uh…No. No he does not. Putin has photo ops with some ordinary (carefully hand-picked people) from time to time and he does a call in show once a year to take specially planned calls. Other than that, Putin doesn’t even come into the Kremlin very often in recent years. On his third inauguration in 2012 the streets of Moscow were closed off for miles around. It turned out to be all for naught, however, since the thronging crowds failed to appear.

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In fact I recently learned that on at least one occasion when the president was visiting RT’s offices, other workers were effectively locked in their offices for security reasons.

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I could go on, citing example after example with link upon link, but I think this will suffice in order to make my point, which is that Paul Craig Roberts basically knows dick about Vladimir Putin, a man whom Roberts seems to worship. There is only one other possibility- Roberts does know more about Putin’s actual routine and yet is deliberately lying about him. Either way it’s bad, but to be honest I think my initial conclusion is correct. Roberts doesn’t know anything about Putin so he basically fills in the gaps with his own ideal fantasy president.

Does the reader appreciate how bizarre this is? Here’s a guy that assumes that any world leader who appears to be on the “mainstream media’s” shit list must be a wonderful, wise, and great leader. He knows nothing about him and yet without even bothering to check he invents a fantasy of this incredibly accessible president who “mingles” openly among his people. He’s just a few steps away from believing in Santa Claus.

This thing totally baffles me because I simply cannot get into the heads of people who do this. I don’t know who the president or prime minister of Indonesia is at the moment. What if I looked them up, and then simply because they are not my country’s leaders, began to project all my political ideals onto them without having visited Indonesia or without even doing cursory research on their background and political history? What if I just decided that they were radical socialists who believed in the same values I believe in, and I explained away the lack of Western media coverage as a hostile media blackout? Would that not be insane?

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Senior government officials fear the violence unleashed by Russian hooligans at Euro 2016 was sanctioned by the Kremlin and are investigating links with Vladimir Putin’s regime.

It is understood that a significant number of those involved in savage and highly coordinated attacks on England fans and others in Marseille and Lille have been identified as being in the “uniformed services” in Russia.

The theory is that the sanctioning of hooliganism by Putin is a continuation of what has been described as Russia’s campaign of “hybrid warfare”. Whitehall experts fear the tactic is a ploy to demonstrate Russian strength while building on a narrative inside the country that the rest of the world is lining up against it.

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A Whitehall source told the Observer that social media had been scrutinised to discover the backgrounds of those involved. “It is difficult to prove this was sanctioned by the Kremlin but we can see that a number of them are in the uniformed services in Russia,” the source said. “It looks like a continuation of the hybrid warfare deployed by Putin.”

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Po slovam ministra sporta Rossii Vitaliya Mutko, rossiyskiy sport nakhoditsya v tupikovoy situatsii. "Prichastnykh k dopingu uvol'nyayut, a oni stanovyatsya informatorami", — poyasnil on, dobaviv, chto eto obrazuyet "zamknutyy krug".

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According to the Russian Minister of Sport Vitaly Mutko, Russia's sports is at an impasse. "Involvement in doping fired, and they become informants", - he explained, adding that it forms a "vicious circle".

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For two years the so-called Cyber Caliphate has been the online weapon brandished by the Islamic State against its enemies. Its hacking offensive, including aggressive use of social media, made front-page news around the world, heralding a new front in that murderous group’s worldwide jihad against “infidels.”

Pledging support to ISIS, the Cyber Caliphate hacked and defaced U.S. Government websites and social media feeds, including those of Central Command, the Pentagon’s Middle East headquarters. Numerous smaller cyber-attacks followed. They also hacked into Department of Defense databases and posted the personal information of 1,400 American military affiliates online.

The Cyber Caliphate has attacked targets in many countries, including allegedly accessing top secret emails belonging to senior British government officials. The most public of their attacks was the April 2015 hijacking of several feeds belonging to the French channel TV5Monde, which included defacing its website with the slogan “Je suis ISIS.” This assault, seen by millions of people worldwide, gave the group the notoriety it craved.

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However, there have long been whispers that the Cyber Caliphate is not what it claims to be. French intelligence examined the group closely after the TV5Monde attack and concluded that the hackers involved actually had nothing to do with the Islamic State. Rather, they were affiliates of a hacking collective known to be affiliated with the Kremlin, in particular APT 28, a notorious group that’s a secret arm of Moscow, according to Western security experts. In other words, the Cyber Caliphate is a Russian intelligence operation working through what spies term a cut-out.

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In other words, the Cyber Caliphate is a Russian false-flag operation. Although that loaded term has been hijacked by tinfoil-hat wearers and fringe websites, including lunatics who think horrific school shootings didn’t actually happen, it’s a perfectly legitimate espionage method of venerable vintage. Spy agencies routinely pose as third parties for operational purposes such as agent recruitment and covert action. The nastier intelligence services will even masquerade as terrorists to further their agenda.

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U.S. secret agencies, including the National Security Agency, which controls American cyber-espionage and works closely with CYBERCOM, came to similar conclusions. “APT 28 is Russian intelligence, it’s that simple,” explained an NSA expert to me recently. Hence the mid-2015 State Department security report that, while assessing the jihadist hackers as a formidable threat, nevertheless concluded, “Although Cyber Caliphate declares to support [the Islamic State], there are no indications—technical or otherwise—that the groups are tied.”

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Russian hackers linked to the Kremlin could be behind one of the biggest attacks to date on televised communications, which knocked French station TV5Monde off air in April, sources familiar with France's inquiry said.

A French judicial source told Reuters that the investigators are "leaning towards the lead of Russian hackers," confirming a report in French magazine L'Express.

Hackers claiming to be supporters of Islamic State caused the public station's 11 channels to temporarily go off air and posted material on its social media feeds to protest against French military action in Iraq.

But the judicial source said the theory that Islamist militants were behind the cyber attack was no longer the main lead in the investigation.

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But the site was hosted on the same block of Internet Protocol addresses and used the same domain name server as the group called APT28 by FireEye and Pawn Storm by Trend Micro, another large security company.

"We suspect that this activity aligns with Russia's institutionalized systematic `trolling' -devoting substantive resources to fulltime staff who plant comments and content online that is often disruptive, and always favorable to President Putin" of Russia, FireEye said via email.

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Code used in the attack had been typed on a Cyrillic keyboard at times of day corresponding to working hours in St Petersburg or Moscow, FireEye said.

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Society pages: Russian oil executive, 55, marries model, 18, whom he met when she was 13.

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Pickets outside parliament before Russia cuts benefits to mothers & children in Chernobyl fallout zone on July 1

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Russia is not the country you think it is. Its economy is smaller than South Korea’s. Its people are poorer than Kazakhstan’s. It trails Finland in technology. And it has a smaller military budget than Saudi Arabia.

For most of the 20th century, what Moscow thought and did mattered from Havana to Hanoi. Then the collapse of the Soviet Union left behind a battered, broken shell of a country. When the Berlin Wall fell, so did Russia’s status in the world.

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Russia hosted the Olympics, punched Georgia in the nose, took back the Crimea, invaded Ukraine, flew bombers through NATO airspace, built military bases in the Arctic, and generally flexed and posed like an oiled, aged, but still buff, body builder. And we’ve been paying increasingly rapt attention, not noticing the geriatric walker hidden just off stage. A closer look is almost shocking.

According to the International Monetary Fund’s most recent data, the Russian economy is approximately the same size as Australia and slightly smaller than South Korea. As an exporter, it is now less important than Belgium, Mexico, and Singapore.

And it is poor. The World Bank ranks Russia’s GDP per capita below Lithuania, Equatorial Guinea, and Kazakhstan. A larger proportion of its population lives below the poverty rate than in Indonesia, India, or Sri Lanka. It is ranked 67th in the world in the Global Competitive Index and 66th in the UN’s Human Development Index.

These economic woes are having serious social impacts. There are now fewer doctors than a decade ago. Life expectancy in Russia is nine years less than in the United States and is declining. Infant morality rate is two to three times higher than most of the Western world. Its alcoholism rate is now the highest on the planet, three times North America’s; and consumption of alcohol has doubled in the past 20 years. Not surprisingly, the Russian statistical agency Rosstat has identified aging and shrinking demographics as the single biggest challenge facing the country over the next 30 years.

Intellectually, Russia is a distant speck in the rearview mirror. Once, esteemed Soviet universities educated the engineers and doctors of the developing world. Now, the United Nations ranks Russia’s education system behind nearly every other European country, and on par with the Pacific island of Palau. The technological leader that launched Sputnik now produces fewer patents per capita than Iceland. Its scientific publications are cited less often than Finland’s.

In nearly every indicator of health, wealth, and influence, Russia ranks below even the middle powers. What do they have left? Guns and bombs mostly. At 8,000 nuclear warheads, it still has 700 more than the United States. It ranks second globally for combat aircraft, military satellites, and nuclear submarines. Moscow’s military budget has increased every year since Putin’s arrival in 1999.

But even these numbers are misleading. According to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Institute, Russia’s defense budget is still less than China, and Saudi Arabia. It is roughly on par with India, France, and the United Kingdom.

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When we talk about the Eurocup, we talk about Russian hooligans rioting in the stands, attacking other spectators, and even assaulting tourists on the trains home. Or we marvel at the belligerent response from Moscow when Igor Lebedev, the Deputy Chairman of the Russian parliament and a senior official in the Russian soccer official tweeted “I don’t see anything wrong with the fans fighting. Quite the opposite, well done lads, keep it up!”

Lebedev understands a lesson that has been well taught by Putin: If you can’t compete on the field, make as much noise as you can off it. Russia is so far behind economically, technologically, socially, and politically, it just doesn’t matter anymore. But it can still get our attention, and it is.

When Russia next moves its tanks to the border, we should take it seriously. It has a lot of tanks (although less than Pakistan). But we should also remember that this is not a world power. By most indicators, it’s not even a middle power. Russia is a soccer hooligan: poor, drunk, and frustrated it can’t win anymore. It can only throw beer bottles from the bleachers.

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Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that neither the United Kingdom nor Western Europe wanted the reunification of Germany. Thatcher also clarified that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it, telling Gorbachev "We do not want a united Germany".[21] Although she welcomed East German democracy, Thatcher worried that a rapid reunification might weaken Gorbachev,[22] and favoured Soviet troops staying in East Germany as long as possible to act as a counterweight to a united Germany.[19]

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Russian intelligence and security services have been waging a campaign of harassment and intimidation against U.S. diplomats, embassy staff and their families in Moscow and several other European capitals that has rattled ambassadors and prompted Secretary of State John F. Kerry to ask Vladimir Putin to put a stop to it.

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Some of the intimidation has been routine: following diplomats or their family members, showing up at their social events uninvited or paying reporters to write negative stories about them.

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But many of the recent acts of intimidation by Russian security services have crossed the line into apparent criminality. In a series of secret memos sent back to Washington, described to me by several current and former U.S. officials who have written or read them, diplomats reported that Russian intruders had broken into their homes late at night, only to rearrange the furniture or turn on all the lights and televisions, and then leave. One diplomat reported that an intruder had defecated on his living room carpet.

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The harassment is not new; in the first term of the Obama administration, Russian intelligence personnel broke into the house of the U.S. defense attache in Moscow and killed his dog, according to multiple former officials who read the intelligence reports.

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“Since the return of Putin, Russia has been engaged in an increasingly aggressive gray war across Europe. Now it’s in retaliation for Western sanctions because of Ukraine. The widely reported harassment is another front in the gray war,” said Norm Eisen, U.S. ambassador the Czech Republic from 2011 to 2014. “They are hitting American diplomats literally where they live.”

The State Department has taken several measures in response to the increased level of nefarious activity by the Russian government. All U.S. diplomats headed for Europe now receive increased training on how to handle Russian harassment, and the European affairs bureau run by Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland has set up regular interagency meetings on tracking and responding to the incidents.

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There was a debate inside the Obama administration about how to respond, and ultimately President Obama made the decision not to respond with similar measures against Russian diplomats, McFaul said.

A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington sent me a long statement both tacitly admitting to the harassment and defending it as a response to what he called U.S. provocations and mistreatment of Russian diplomats in the United States.

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Kerry raised the issue directly with Putin during his visit to Moscow in March. Putin made no promises about ending the harassment, which continued after Kerry returned to Washington. The U.S. ambassadors to Europe are asking the State Department to do more.

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“The problem is there have been no consequences for Russia,” said Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who serves as president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. “The administration continues to pursue a false narrative that Russia can be our partner. They clearly don’t want to be our partner, they’ve identified us as an adversary, and we need to prepare for that type of relationship.”

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