Tag: ukraine

Firefox removes Yandex search, will auto-switch affected users to Google

Mozilla has pushed a new release of its Firefox browser with one notable change; it will no longer have Yandex, the Russian search engine, and Mail.ru as options.

“Yandex and Mail.ru have been removed as optional search providers in the drop-down search menu in Firefox,” Mozilla said.

“If you previously installed a customized version of Firefox with Yandex or Mail.ru, offered through partner distribution channels, this release removes those customizations, including add-ons and default bookmarks. Where applicable, your browser will revert to default settings, as offered by Mozilla.

“All other releases of Firefox remain unaffected by the change.”

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Romney’s “Treason” Smear of Tulsi Gabbard is False and Noxious, But Now Typifies U.S. Discourse

The crime of “treason” is one of the gravest an American citizen can commit, if not the gravest. It is one of the few crimes other than murder for which execution is still a permissible punishment under both U.S. federal law and the laws of several states. The framers of the U.S. Constitution were so concerned about the temptation to abuse this term — by depicting political dissent as a criminalized betrayal of one’s country — that they chose to define and limit how this crime could be applied by inserting this limiting paragraph into the Constitution itself; reflecting the gravity and temptation to abuse accusations of “treason,” it is the only crime they chose to define in the U.S. Constitution. Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution states:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Treason was the only crime to be explicitly defined and limited by the Founders because they sought “to guard against the historic use of treason prosecutions by repressive governments to silence otherwise legitimate political opposition.” In other words, the grave danger anticipated by the Founders was that “treason” would radically expand to include any criticisms of or opposition to official U.S. Government policy, activities they sought in the Bill of Rights to enshrine as an inviolable right of U.S. citizenship, not turn it into a capital crime.

In a 2017 op-ed in The Washington Post, law professor Carlton Larson reviewed the increasing tendency to call other Americans “traitors” and explained: “Speaking against the government, undermining political opponents, supporting harmful policies or even placing the interests of another nation ahead of those of the United States are not acts of treason under the Constitution. Regarding the promiscuous use of the word by liberals against Trump, Professor Larson wrote: “An enemy is a nation or an organization with which the United States is in a declared or open war . Nations with whom we are formally at peace, such as Russia, are not enemies.” For that reason, even Americans actively helping the Soviet Union during the Cold War could not be accused of “treason” given that there was no declaration of war against the USSR. Using the most extreme hypothetical he could think of to illustrate the point, he explained: “Indeed, Trump could give the U.S. nuclear codes to Vladimir Putin or bug the Oval Office with a direct line to the Kremlin and it would not be treason, as a legal matter.”

For that reason, treason has rarely been prosecuted in the U.S.: “according to the FBI, the U.S. government has successfully convicted fewer than 12 Americans for treason in the nation’s history.” While Americans who rebelled against the British crown were technically traitors, as were those who waged war against the union during the Civil War, prosecutions have been exceedingly rare. That means that through all the various wars the U.S. has fought from the 18th Century until now — the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, the Mexican-American War, the two World Wars of the 20th Century, the Cold War, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the dirty wars in Central America, the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, the War on Terror — the number of total treason prosecutions is less than a dozen. That is because Americans understood, based on constitutional constraints and Supreme Court law restricting its scope, that this crime is very difficult to charge and applies only in the narrowest of circumstances.

That understanding is now gone. During the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq, neocons routinely accused war opponents and skeptics of their “anti-terrorism” civil liberties assaults of being traitors. David Frum’s stint as Bush White House speechwriter enshrined this “patriotism” attack as his and their speciality. Bush and Cheney’s speeches, especially leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the 2002 midterms, and then the 2004 re-election campaign, inevitably featured innuendo if not explicit claims that Americans opposed to their war policies were against America and on the side of the terrorists: i.e., traitors. The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson produced a campaign ad for the 2002 Georgia Senate race morphing the face of the Democratic incumbent Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, into Osama bin Laden’s. Upon leaving the White House, Frum continued to build his career on impugning the patriotism and loyalty of anyone — right, left, or in between — who opposed all the various wars he wanted to send other people’s children to go fight and die in.

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We’re Moving Into More Dangerous Mob Mentality

We’ve seen with BLM, COVID, and other topics how the narrative can get out of control and squash the people who question or counter it. We saw, in Canada, to what lengths the government would go to crush peaceful protest — not by legitimately arresting people who might be blocking a street — but by doing things like freezing people’s bank accounts without due process of law and blocking GoFundMe accounts to crush the protest.

We’re seeing something like that bubble up again when it comes to the situation with Russia and Ukraine. Sanctions on the government of Russia — or oligarchs who prop it up — make a lot of sense. But discriminating against all Russians and all things Russian because you think that somehow virtue signals that you care is madness. That shouldn’t need to be said. But, it does, because that’s exactly what some are doing. It’s a crushing of people who the narrative deems “wrong”– in this case, for the “crime” of being Russian.

Alexander Malofeev is a 20-year-old piano prodigy. He isn’t an oligarch and he isn’t a friend of Vladimir Putin. He’s just a guy who had piano performances scheduled with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra over the past few days. But they were canceled. Not because he supported the war — he was against the invasion and he said so. He even has family members in Ukraine. But because he happened to be Russian.

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Cops in America Have So Much Militarized Gear, They are Sending It to Ukraine

There is no question that police in the land of the free have become the Standing Army that the founders warned us about. Armed to the teeth with tactical gear fit for the battlefield in Afghanistan, American cops are prepared for war domestically. In fact, they are over prepared, and they have so much military gear that they are now sending their surplus to be used in Ukraine to battle the Russians.

“Many of our Department of Defense (DOD) and State Department contacts have asked the law enforcement community for equipment to help the Ukrainian people push back against this violence and protect their citizens,” Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt Hoffman said on Twitter — noting that his department is sending hundreds of ballistics helmets to Ukraine.

Hoffman is one of many sheriffs and law enforcement personnel sending their equipment to Ukraine to be used in war against Russia.

As VICE News reports, the Colorado Department of Public Safety said it was donating more than 80 sets of body armor and 750 helmets, and that it was accepting donations from other law enforcement agencies in the state.

“This is equipment that we are no longer able to use because it is beyond life cycle, or in some cases it may have been replaced or upgraded by some equipment that maybe better fits our needs or is safer,” Colorado DPS spokesperson Patricia Billinger told local station KARE9.

In true American political fashion, however, this move is not free from corrupt practices.

Though much of this equipment is at the end of its life cycle Hoffman said that the Pentagon is attempting to “supply more than 50,000 helmets and law enforcement supplies in the coming weeks” from a weapons manufacturer in his town — a claim the Pentagon denies.

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In Praise of ‘Whataboutism’

When war propaganda prevails regarding Ukraine or any other place where the hegemon is doing its dirty work, it is reasonable to ask probing questions. Why are the deaths of 14,000 people killed by Ukraine’s civil war swept under the rug? Why is it forbidden to ask about the U.S. destruction of Libya? But once having asked a good question, one will be told that raising the topic is proof of the whataboutism sin.

The word whataboutism is in the dictionary and is defined as, “the act or practice of responding to an accusation of wrongdoing by claiming that an offense committed by another is similar or worse.” That meaning is accurate and also completely defensible.

The charge is meant to censor the speaker, excuse U.S. actions, and defend its human rights violations. The denials and apologies are exactly why whataboutism should be defended. It is terrible when lies and crimes are not countered with verifiable information exposing them.

The term has gained popularity in part because there is so much hypocrisy to point out and there are so many adherents to American exceptionalism who defend what they should condemn. When the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that it would begin investigating “the Situation in Ukraine” corporate media and their political partners gloated and pointed fingers at Russia.

They didn’t point out that the U.S., like Russia, is not a signatory of the Treaty of Rome which brought the ICC into existence. Not only is the U.S. not a member state, but in 2002 Congress passed the American Service Members Protection Act , popularly known as the Hague Invasion Act. It gives the U.S. the right to extract any American held at the court in the Hague. The removal part isn’t even necessary because the act prohibits the extradition of Americans to the ICC.

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