kynik retweeted
US State Department statesman George F. Kennan, who was fluent in German and Russian, “who knew Russia best,” testified against Bill Clinton’s proposed NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, stating it would be “the most fateful error of US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.”
At a US Senate hearing in 1997, Kennan declared that NATO’s eastward expansion into former Warsaw Pact countries would once again divide Europe and rekindle the Cold War. Kennan’s final, departing words, "Don't meddle in the Ukraine."
Disregarding Kennan’s warning, during election year 1996, eyeing the Eastern European emigree vote in northern Illinois and Indiana, Bill Clinton campaigned on expanding NATO into the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland - which became members in 1999.
Continuing NATO enlargement in 2004, George W. Bush added Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia - and in 2008 at the NATO summit in Bucharest - asserted that “Ukraine has a roadmap to NATO.”
As Kennan predicted, the Cold War reignited after 1999 and is the root cause of the war in Ukraine: NATO's encroachment into the Russian borderlands, and the West's refusal to listen to or address Russia's legitimate security concerns.
Displaying the strategic patience of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping: “Hide your strength, bide your time,” Russia is preventing NATO and its proxy #Ukraine army from defeating, harming Russia. And, as Barack Obama pointed out, “In its own neighborhood, Russia enjoys escalatory supremacy."
kynik retweeted
Messerscharfer Leserbrief meines Freundes Botschafter Hellmut Hoffmann in der FAZ zum Wandel der grünen Sicherheitspolitik, die buchstäblich das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten. Nicht gut für das Kind im Allgemeinen.
Cc @RealFakeHanna Shopping Idee? 🤔 😉
kynik retweeted
Sorry to rain on the parade, but shifting from the red capitalist party to the blue capitalist party simply ensures that the source of our problems, capitalism, remains unthreatened.
Americans should rejoice that Trump and the Republicans were defeated, but we should be clear-eyed about the deeper reality: Trump has always been nothing more than a symptom of a decrepit capitalist system that values profits more than people.
Democrats winning the House and Senate, does not change the capitalist and imperialist system that we live under. It simply gives the system a more palatable face for the liberal class, which means there will be less resistance to the horrors of capitalism and imperialism.
The wars overseas will rage on. The genocides in Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan will not stop. The mass exploitation of workers and the cost of living crisis will continue unabated all while the rich keep getting richer.
All those atrocities will continue under the Democrats because they serve the exact same capitalist and imperialist system as Republicans. This is the insanity of the duopoly that voters can’t seem to figure out.
With that said, I will always believe a better world is possible. I am just clear-eyed in that this better world cannot be born from the system that created the decaying world we inhabit now.
It can only be born from the people rising up together and fighting for a new system where workers own the means of production and resources are used for the benefit of all!
kynik retweeted
The Democrats may have taken control of the House and the Senate, they may have humiliated Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but the real fight is only beginning. It is not simply a battle to hold the corrupt Trump regime to account, something that can only be done if the Democrats are willing overcome their reluctance to carry out impeachment proceedings against the president. It is also a battle to sweep away the corporate-indentured hierarchy of the Democratic Party, including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
The Democratic Party since the presidency of Bill Clinton, who gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and gutted New Deal-era welfare programs such as the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, is a more polished version of corporate and oligarchic rule, abjectly subservient to the war machine, the Israel lobby and their funders in the billionaire class.
The country is broken. Corruption, in both parties, is endemic. Federal agencies have been hollowed out and destroyed. The courts, including the Supreme Court, have been handed over to right-wing ideologues. The working class is crippled with debt peonage and substandard wages. Constitutional norms and protections have been erased. Billionaires, including Trump, pay little to no income tax. The 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which allows big business to fund their hand-picked candidates, sustains a system of legalized bribery.
The public may clamor for a raise in the minimum wage, Medicare for All, regulation of the big banks and private equity firms, an end to arms shipments to Israel and campaign finance reform, but no one in the leadership of the Democratic Party listens or cares. They serve their paymasters.
Will cutthroat capitalism, sold to us under the sanitized name of neoliberalism, be allowed to continue to impoverish the citizenry and funnel wealth upwards into the hands of the 1 percent? Will corporations be regulated and policed? Will corporate criminals be brought to trial? Will our democracy be restored? Or will the grotesque sight of a trillionaire, Elon Musk, gutting federal agencies and pouring hundreds of millions into elections to try and control the outcome be normalized?
The handful of politicians who attempt to confront the corruption and the devastation visited on the American working class through deindustrialization and deregulation, such as Bernie Sanders, see their campaigns sabotaged by the Democratic Party leadership, including Barack Obama.
We must demand that progressive candidates, including Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson, build coalitions to oust the Democratic Party leadership, raise the minimum wage, enact universal health care, prosecute corporate crime and impeach Trump. It will be up to us.
The Democratic Party hierarchy will see the results not as a repudiation of Trump, but an endorsement of the flaccid and ineffectual position of a party that stands for little and fights for less. This would be yet another betrayal by the Democrats of voters. It would keep alive the very real prospect of another fascist, one better organized and more intelligent, taking the White House in two years.
Of course, this fight will mean not only jettisoning a corrupt Democratic Party leadership, but turning on the mega-donors, lobbyists and corporations that fund and control the Democratic Party.
The effort to wrest the party back from the hands of corporations and oligarchs will be vicious and difficult. It will require us to rely on the power of mass movements to sever these bonds. Nothing else will work.
If we fail, our anemic democracy will not be saved by these midterm elections, but doomed.
kynik retweeted
Mass surveillance is not a conspiracy theory. It's already happening.
Use Mullvad, Monero, Bitchat and Signal, NadaNada.me, Linux, GrapheneOS, Vanadium, Librewolf, local AI models (heretic variants).
Fuck them before they fuck you.
1993: "We just need a backdoor in encryption. It's only for criminals and terrorists."
2000s: "We just need expanded surveillance powers to fight terrorism."
2010s: "We just need access to your encrypted messages to keep everyone safe."
2020s: "We just need age verification, mandatory ID checks and VPN restrictions to protect the children"
What comes next?
The excuse changes. The infrastructure of surveillance remains.
kynik retweeted
The political-media establishment has a busy day ahead: whitewashing Zelensky’s torture chambers, downplaying the revelations, and making sure the story disappears from public view.
kynik retweeted
As a former Learjet pilot with thousands of hours and a former aircraft accident investigator, I’m truly shocked and horrified at some of the insane theories and ridiculous conclusions being posted all over X.
kynik retweeted
Is the police attacking GrapheneOS users?
Netherlands is launching a large-scale police operation to seize Google Pixel Phones, part of a major state-sponsored campaign against GrapheneOS.
Some of the citizens are fleeing the country, afraid of police abuse.
They can track phones through cellular networks, but locating a device doesn't mean they can decrypt it. The state will do anything to stop privacy-focused users. If you thought you were safe from criminals while using GOS, you were right, and the government doesn't like that.
They don't want you to be safe; they want control, and they will enforce it by any means possible.
We're reaching a point where people may feel they need to hide the fact that they're using GrapheneOS. And that's an even stronger reason why we should continue using it.
Now, Pixel Devices, then scan your ID to access weather reports and get your ID leaked by shitty government database security.
Privacy is not a crime. It's a human right.
Fight for privacy.
Fight for freedom.
See ad.nl/binnenland/paniek-in-o… for an example of what's ongoing in the Netherlands to scare people away from using open source privacy projects. It's also ongoing in Germany at the same time with similar talking points. This largely started in Spain and has been worst in France.
kynik retweeted
📱 La France première en chasse au téléphone chiffré. Je ne suis pas étonné !
GrapheneOS, l'OS mobile open source le plus durci du marché l'a écrit noir sur blanc : les Pays-Bas, l'Espagne et la France sont les principaux États à entretenir la peur autour de lui... "surtout la France"
Pour contexte :
- Aux Pays-Bas la police a perquisitionné les 26 et 27/10 chez des clients d'un revendeur de Pixel. Selon leurs avocats beaucoup n'étaient même pas suspects
- GrapheneOS dénonce une "campagne de désinformation soutenue par l'État" aux Pays-Bas et en Allemagne "commencée en Espagne et pire en France"
- Il vise aussi les médias... des articles qui relaient la version des autorités sans la vérifier et qui le confondent avec des copies vendues par des boîtes douteuses
- Le Royaume-Uni, pourtant champion des lois anti-vie privée, n'en a pas fait un bouc émissaire, souligne GrapheneOS.
Et ce n'est pas nouveau j'en ai déjà parlais @GrapheneOS avait retiré tous ses serveurs d'OVHcloud et quitté la France en évoquant des attentes de portes dérobées dans le chiffrement et des menaces policières et judiciaires !
Et ce n'est pas tout... GrapheneOS accuse des fabricants européens "privacy" dont les français Murena (/e/OS) et iodé, de participer à ce dénigrement tout en vendant des téléphones moins protégés qu'un iphone
Mon avis c'est que en France chiffrer son téléphone n'est pas illégal, mais on fait tout pour que ça ait l'air suspect. Le jour où le modèle de ton téléphone devient un indice la présomption d'innocence a déjà changé de camp 🤷♂️
Bref... ils appellent ça lutter contre le crime mais ça ressemble surtout à punir ceux qui se protègent contre ce système qui de plus en plus de moyens de surveillance.
#Privacy 🇪🇺🪦
There's a major state sponsored misinformation and smear campaign towards GrapheneOS in the Netherlands and Germany. The misinformation campaign includes unsubstantiated security claims not holding up to scrutiny to scare people away from it. They're also heavily misrepresenting who uses it overall.
These smear campaigns conflate GrapheneOS with forks and modifications of it sold by shady companies. Those usually include a device management app to remotely manage the devices of their customers as if they're employees. These are largely not GrapheneOS devices or have preinstalled malware apps.
A common tactic being used in these smear campaigns is to make unsubstantiated and outright false claims about the capabilities of forensic data extraction tools. They misrepresent how they get into devices. They want to scare people into using far less secure devices which are easier to exploit.
France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands are becoming increasingly authoritarian surveillance states with an ongoing crackdown against privacy. It's happening throughout the whole EU and it's likely both secure devices and end-to-end encryption without backdoors are going to end up outlawed.
There are a bunch of companies based in the EU selling phones with drastically worse privacy and security than an iPhone including Jolla, Volla, Murena and iodé. These products are effectively backdoored by not providing standard privacy and security patches/protections while misleading users.
France and other EU countries are actively cracking down on legitimate privacy and security projects while supporting unsafe products within their control. These products make it far easier to remotely exploit devices and also to bypass encryption to extract data. They're phony privacy products.
Each of the companies we've listed have participated in the misinformation and smear campaigns against GrapheneOS. Jolla spent years working closely with Putin's regime. Volla, Murena and iodé are building an EU Play Integrity API. None provides the crucial standard privacy patches/protections.
Murena is directly assisting with state anti-privacy campaigns smearing highly private and secure devices as mainly benefiting criminals. They've repeatedly falsely claimed GrapheneOS is mainly used by criminals. Here are 2 of many examples:
teapaw.org/GrapheneOS/status/2040…
clubic.com/actualite-604786-…
GrapheneOS, end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, Monero and other projects are being targeted with state and corporate propaganda and anti-privacy laws. Meanwhile, the same governments heavily fund and support phony privacy projects clearly downgrading privacy and security compared to an iPhone.
GrapheneOS is only an initial target for these state actors and their sycophants in corporate news organizations. Apple heavily works on protecting users against exploits too. It would be much harder to convince the public that an iPhone is for criminals so they're starting with open source.
kynik retweeted
NY Times calls me the "author of lauded Cold War histories" and says my new book "offers one of the thornier accounts of the causes of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, placing a lot of the blame on the many decades of C.I.A. interventions in Eastern Europe."
nytimes.com/.../books/new-bo….
kynik retweeted
Chancellor Merz (@bundeskanzler) has lamented that the Iran war has cost Europe more than €100 billion in higher energy prices and declared that the conflict has no military solution.
Apparently, the war became a European concern when its costs appeared on Europe's energy bills.
Not when missiles struck a girls' elementary school in Minab, killing 168 girls in their classrooms, some so horrifically dismembered that they could be identified only through DNA.
Not when missiles struck a sports hall and residential homes in Lamerd, scattering tungsten pellets that killed at least 21 civilians, seven of them children.
Not when US strikes hit bridges and power plants, after Trump openly vowed to "knock out all their power plants."
Not when diplomacy was betrayed. Two days before the war began, Oman's foreign minister, acting as mediator, had announced significant progress in the Geneva negotiations.
Not when the UN Charter was violated.
And not when Merz, alongside Macron and Starmer, condemned Iran's exercise of self-defence "in the strongest terms", while withholding that condemnation from the aggression that had provoked it.
Throughout these events, Merz stood with the attackers. He had already described Israel's 2025 strikes as "the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us." The day after the Minab massacre, he declared that Germany would not lecture its partners about their military strikes.
There was no legal ambiguity here. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force against another state's territorial integrity or political independence, except under the recognised exceptions, including self-defence in response to an armed attack. Iran was at the negotiating table when the war began. Deliberate or indiscriminate attacks against civilians constitute war crimes under international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute, which Germany has ratified. Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions obliges Germany to respect and ensure respect for international humanitarian law in all circumstances.
Europe's €100 billion bill is the price of a political choice. Berlin helped undermine the prohibition on the use of force when the victims were Iranian children. It now laments the economic consequences when those consequences reach European households.
The children of Minab and Lamerd were priceless. Their lives cannot be reduced to an energy bill.
We will never forget them, Mr. Chancellor.
kynik retweeted
Early ECB departures allow the Euro elite to lock in their pet candidates ahead of French elections. This is done in the name of preserving democracy. I'd never vote for the AfD or Le Pen, but - I'm sorry - don't pretend this is about preserving democracy.
robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/…
kynik retweeted
There's a major state sponsored misinformation and smear campaign towards GrapheneOS in the Netherlands and Germany. The misinformation campaign includes unsubstantiated security claims not holding up to scrutiny to scare people away from it. They're also heavily misrepresenting who uses it overall.
These smear campaigns conflate GrapheneOS with forks and modifications of it sold by shady companies. Those usually include a device management app to remotely manage the devices of their customers as if they're employees. These are largely not GrapheneOS devices or have preinstalled malware apps.
A common tactic being used in these smear campaigns is to make unsubstantiated and outright false claims about the capabilities of forensic data extraction tools. They misrepresent how they get into devices. They want to scare people into using far less secure devices which are easier to exploit.
France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands are becoming increasingly authoritarian surveillance states with an ongoing crackdown against privacy. It's happening throughout the whole EU and it's likely both secure devices and end-to-end encryption without backdoors are going to end up outlawed.
There are a bunch of companies based in the EU selling phones with drastically worse privacy and security than an iPhone including Jolla, Volla, Murena and iodé. These products are effectively backdoored by not providing standard privacy and security patches/protections while misleading users.
France and other EU countries are actively cracking down on legitimate privacy and security projects while supporting unsafe products within their control. These products make it far easier to remotely exploit devices and also to bypass encryption to extract data. They're phony privacy products.
Each of the companies we've listed have participated in the misinformation and smear campaigns against GrapheneOS. Jolla spent years working closely with Putin's regime. Volla, Murena and iodé are building an EU Play Integrity API. None provides the crucial standard privacy patches/protections.
Murena is directly assisting with state anti-privacy campaigns smearing highly private and secure devices as mainly benefiting criminals. They've repeatedly falsely claimed GrapheneOS is mainly used by criminals. Here are 2 of many examples:
teapaw.org/GrapheneOS/status/2040…
clubic.com/actualite-604786-…
GrapheneOS, end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, Monero and other projects are being targeted with state and corporate propaganda and anti-privacy laws. Meanwhile, the same governments heavily fund and support phony privacy projects clearly downgrading privacy and security compared to an iPhone.
GrapheneOS is only an initial target for these state actors and their sycophants in corporate news organizations. Apple heavily works on protecting users against exploits too. It would be much harder to convince the public that an iPhone is for criminals so they're starting with open source.
Gaël Duval is the founder and president of the /e/ foundation along with the CEO of Murena. Duval and his organizations have consistently taken a stance against protecting users from exploits. In this video, he once again claims protecting against exploits is for only useful pedophiles and spies.
Translation to English:
> There's the attack surface, on that front we're not security specialists here, so I couldn't answer you precisely, but from the discussions I've had, it seems that everything we do reduces attack surface. However, we don't have a "hardened security" approach, we aren't developing a phone for pedo(censored) so they can evade justice. So there aren't difficult things to check if the memory is corrupted, really hardened security stuff that could clearly be useful for executives, in the secret service, or whatever. That's not our goal, our goal is to start from an observation: today our personal data is constantly being plundered and that wouldn't be legal in real life with the mail or the telephone, we want to change that. So we are making you a product that changes that by default for anyone.
Transcription in French:
> Il y a la surface d'attaque, là pour le coup on est pas des spécialistes de la sécurité, donc je ne pourrais pas te répondre avec précision, mais des discussions que j'ai eu, il semblerait que tout ce qu'on fait, ça réduit la surface d'attaque. Donc oui, probablement ça aide. Par contre, on a pas une approche "sécurité durcie", on développe pas un téléphone pour les pédo(bip) pour qu'ils puissent échapper à la justice. Donc il y a pas des trucs pas possibles pour voir si la mémoire est pas corrompue, des trucs de sécu vraiment durcis qui pourraient être utiles clairement pour des dirigeants, dans les services secrets ou que sais-je. C'est pas notre but, notre but c'est de partir d'un constat, aujourd'hui nos données personnelles sont pillées en permanence et ça serait pas légal dans la vraie vie avec le courrier ou le téléphone, on veut changer ça. Donc on vous fait un produit qui change ça par défaut pour n'importe quelle personne.
kynik retweeted
Ko smo se odločali za vstop v EU, si ni nihče predstavljal, da bo v kaki njeni članici in uniji nasploh mogoče brez posledic:
1. Razveljaviti predsedniške volitve (Romunija);
2. Ukiniti informativni program na nacionalni RTV (Madžarska);
3. Poslati policijo na Ustavno sodišče (Poljska);
4. Tri tedne pred volitvami poslati v zapor predsednika stranke, ki vodi v anketah (Slovenija);
5. Zasesti nacionalno RTV s policijo in zamenjati vodstvo (Poljska);
6. Prekiniti mandate vodstvu nacionalne RTV in izvesti čistko zaposlenih (Slovenija);
7. Poslati v zapor člane prejšnje vlade brez možnosti obrambe (Madžarska);
8. Podeliti skoraj milijon državljanstev ilegalnim migrantom po hitrem postopku (Španija);
9. Zapreti novo Nuklearno elektrarno in zgraditi plinovod do Rusije (Nemčija);
10. Obdavčiti ogljične energetske vire ob hkratnem zapiranju NE ter preseliti industrijo v države z nizkimi ekološkimi standardi pod pretvezo, da tako rešujemo planet.
Nastala je EU, ki se mora reševati sama pred sabo.
kynik retweeted
Auch:
werner-raetz.de
Hervorragender aattac-Experte v.a. zur Rentenfrage.
Christoph Butterwegge zerlegt die Erzählung von der angeblich unbezahlbaren Rente. Seit Jahrzehnten beteiligt sich der Staat an ihrer Finanzierung. Doch statt über eine gerechtere Verteilung der Lasten zu sprechen, sollen Beschäftigte länger arbeiten und Rentner um ihre Absicherung bangen. Während auf viele Kapitalerträge nur 25 % Steuern anfallen, können auf hohe Arbeitseinkommen 42 % fällig werden. Wer arbeitet, wird hoch besteuert. Wer sein Geld für sich arbeiten lässt, wird steuerlich begünstigt. Und ausgerechnet bei der Rente soll plötzlich kein Geld mehr da sein? Nicht die Rentner sind zu teuer. Die Verteilung des Reichtums gehört auf den Prüfstand.
Cc @sheepshooter64 😁😉 wer braucht da noch ne stihl?
