Stephan: Clips from Tucker Carlson's Fox propaganda show are running on Russian state-controlled television in order to suggest that Americans support what Russia is doing in Ukraine. And more and more stories are emerging showing connections between the Republican Party and Putin and his oligarchs who have been shown to be funders of the Republican Party. Here is the latest. I don't think this linkage between Putin and the American fascist rightwing is getting anywhere near the attention it deserves.
Russian oligarchAndrey Muraviev Credit: New York Times
Andrey Muraviev was indicted on charges of making donations as a foreign national to boost licensing decisions for a marijuana business.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan on Monday accused a Russian tycoon of scheming to make $1 million in illegal campaign donations to federal and state political candidates in the United States to gain favorable licensing decisions for a cannabis business venture.
The prosecutors said the donations by the businessman, Andrey Muraviev, 47, were at the heart of an illegal campaign finance scheme conducted in the months before the 2018 midterm elections that also involved two Soviet-born businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, and two other co-defendants.
Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman were allies of Rudolph W. Giuliani, former President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, and assisted Mr. Giuliani in his efforts to undermine Joseph R. Biden Jr. when he was a leading Democratic presidential candidate.
The allegations against Mr. Muraviev are not new; his name and alleged role surfaced at the October trial of Mr. Parnas and a co-defendant, Andrey Kukushkin, who […]
Stephan: This is another aspect of Putin's evil war on Ukraine. Since the fall of the Soviet Union Russia has slowly integrated with the rest of the world in a way never seen during the Soviet period, and I think one of Putin's miscalculations was how Russian citizens, particularly the young and well-educated have shown they are not willing to give up those international connections and are fleeing Putin and what he is doing to their country. As this article notes, it really began with Putin's persecution of Alexei Navalny, but the outflow of people has gone up dramatically with Putin's ill-conceived war on Ukraine.
More than 8,600 Russians have sought refuge on the US border with Mexico from August through January. Credit: Joebeth Terríquez/EPA
Maksim Derzhko calls it one of the most terrifying experiences of his life. A longtime opponent of Vladimir Putin, he flew from Vladivostok to the Mexican border city of Tijuana with his 14-year-old daughter and was in a car with seven other Russians. All that separated them from claiming asylum in the United States was a US officer standing in traffic as vehicles inched toward inspection booths.
The emotions are “hard to put into words,” he says. “It’s fear. The unknown. It’s really hard. We had no choice.”
The gamble worked. After spending a day in custody, Derzhko was released to seek asylum with his daughter, joining thousands of Russians who have recently taken the same route to America.
Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to punishing sanctions from the US and its allies, the United States was already seeing an increase in Russian asylum-seekers.
More than 8,600 Russians sought refuge on the US border with Mexico from August through January – […]
Stephan: One of the other trends that Putin's Ukraine war has brought into high focus is the politicization, even weaponization, of disinformation. I think it is important to watch and remember, a pre-internet world without Facebook, Tiktok and others, and the present day when disinformation is in every pocket or purse. We need to develop democratically, a social boundary on media integrity. Just as it is socially not acceptable to yell, "Fire!" in the crowded theater. We have no norms on media corporations. It is just a profit operation.
Tiktok is now restricting service in Russia because of a change in the law that threatens prison sentences for statement that differe from the official. Credit: Stinger/Picture Aliance/Getty
An investigation by VICE News has uncovered a coordinated campaign to pay Russian TikTok influencers to post videos pushing pro-Kremlin narratives about the war in Ukraine.
Numerous campaigns have been coordinated in a secret Telegram channel that directs these influencers on what to say, where to capture videos, what hashtags to use, and when exactly to post the video.
These campaigns were launched at the beginning of the invasion and have involved a number of the highest-profile influencers on TikTok, some of whom have over a million followers.
And even though TikTok has banned new uploads from users located inside Russia, the campaigns have not stopped. The Telegram channel is run by an anonymous administrator who recruits social media influencers and told VICE News he was a journalist. The administrator lays out the requirements, such as minimum views required and the date and time the video needs to be […]
Christof Koch, Chief Scientist of both the MindScope Program at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and The Tiny Blue Dot Foundation - MIT Press Reader
Stephan: If you read me regularly, or have read any of my books or papers you know that I strongly believe that the experimental data confirms what Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics told us almost a century ago: Consciousness is causal and fundamental spacetime, and everything in it, arises from consciousness not consciousness from spacetime. Materialism, in my view, is a dying paradigm, not because it is wrong, simply because it is inadequate because it does not recognize the causal and fundamental nature of consciousness. Paradigms change because so many anomalies arise that cannot be explained by the old paradigm that a new one that does incorporate those anomalies arises. This article published by MIT is one sign that consciousness is slowly being recognized for what it is.
Honey bees can recognize faces, communicate the location and quality of food sources to their sisters via the waggle dance, and navigate complex mazes with the help of cues they store in short-term memory. Credit: Boba Jaglicic/Unsplash
What is common between the delectable taste of a favorite food, the sharp sting of an infected tooth, the fullness after a heavy meal, the slow passage of time while waiting, the willing of a deliberate act, and the mixture of vitality, tinged with anxiety, just before a competitive event?
All are distinct experiences. What cuts across each is that all are subjective states, and all are consciously felt. Accounting for the nature of consciousness appears elusive, with many claiming that it cannot be defined at all, yet defining it is actually straightforward. Here goes: Consciousness is experience.
That’s it. Consciousness is any experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted. Some distinguish awareness from consciousness; I don’t find this distinction helpful and so I use these two words interchangeably. I also do not distinguish between feeling and experience, […]
Stephan: As I look at what is going on with the Putin created war in Ukraine what I see is the sad reality that in the second decade of the 21st century one dictator can still destroy two countries and there is no obvious way to stop him. Putin, like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco before him can kill thousands, or even millions, and the rest of humanity has no choice to tack to that wind. It makes one question, have we learned anything from the two world wars in the 20th century that killed tens of millions? Honestly, I'm not sure, but as this article lays out there are changes occurring, and if we engineer them well, good things may come of these changes.
The now discontinued Nord Stream 2 landfall facilities in Russia. Source: Nord Stream 2 AG
President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is forcing governments worldwide to digest the geopolitical consequences of war pursued by an energy superpower.
The 27-nation European Union has responded by speeding up its disconnection from Russian gas, while the U.S. has barred Russian oil imports and is scouring the world for alternative supplies. Saudi Arabia is reveling in a renewed strategic importance as crude prices that collapsed two years ago hit new highs.
And Russia, by threatening to withhold energy exports to Europe, is being thrust closer to China.
With the war in its third week, the shifts underway are inflaming old grievances but also creating the opportunity for fresh alliances as blocs start to align in what looks like a new world energy order.
“This represents the biggest re-drawing of the energy and geopolitical map in Europe — and possibly the world — since the collapse of the Soviet Union, if not the end of World War II,” said Bob McNally, president […]
