29 March 2015. From the Russian Web… What Your Cat Can Do For You: Save Your Sun-lounger for You When You’re in the Pool!

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Let your feline be of use! They can sprawl on your sun-lounger as you swim in the pool, saving it from crass barbarians who’d take it. Guarded by the attack cat! Youse been warned…

BMD

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29 March 2015. “Thank You, America, for this Hummer!”

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The image shows Cossack commander Sergei Kozitsyn, a patriot leader in the VSN in Novorossiya, displaying his new Humvee command vehicle, captured from junta forces in Debaltsevo. There is bootless talk of American “lethal aid” to the junta forces. Firstly, the USA can’t send NATO-standard ordnance to the junta… all of its present equipment is Sov-standard; if it sent NATO-standard matériel, it’d create a logistics nightmare. Things are bollixed up enough in the junta-misruled Ukraine… to have two separate logistics streams running at the same time is an invitation to disaster. To speak plainly, that makes a classic snafu of sending NATO-standard munitions to a unit using Sov-standard ordnance (or vice versa) ridiculously probable (the junta forces are FUBAR enough without such foolishness). Frankly, the level of C³I* in the junta forces is too low to gamble with such. Factor in the fact that many of the prewar cadre of the Ukrainian forces rallied to Russia and that many of the rest were “lustrated”… well, you can see where I’m going. In the best of situations, it’s looking for trouble… Banderstan is a Jabberwockian state full of more nuts than a PayDay bar. It’d be bollocks on stilts…

• C³I: Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence

By the way, the machine gun on the cupola is a Sov-standard DShK… it means that the junta has enough people left with brains to remove the NATO-standard GPMG, as it’d be almost impossible to keep it supplied with sufficient ammunition. Besides that, to fire the weapon, a crewman has to expose themselves… it isn’t in an enclosed mounting. Also, note that there are no slits in the armoured visors over the windscreen. That is, the visors must always be in the “up” position when on the move. This vehicle isn’t a combat vehicle… the “armour” is only sufficient to keep out rifle-calibre rounds… a heavy MG, autocannon, or RPG could easily defeat this. On top of all that, the additional weight of the improvised armour package puts strain on the engine, drivetrain, and suspension. In short, this is a battle-taxi, nothing more.

BMD

It’s Worse Than You Thought: The “Kremlin Troll Army” Exposed

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Editor:

It’s time for Victor Potapov to quit Radio Liberty and to condemn it on the “front-page” of the official ROCOR website. It’s issuing egregious lies about the Rodina and about the Church. I didn’t believe that I could think lower of Potapov (a man hated by most of his brother-priests for his arrogance), but he’s hitting new lows. He aids the enemies of Christ’s Church… full stop. I don’t believe that he’s going to quit… draw the appropriate conclusions. He holds a knife to the back of Russian patriots and to the throats of all Russian Orthodox Christians by working for such a theomachistic organisation. I’d say, “Look at what he does, don’t listen to what he says. He makes his money as a Judas”. Don’t fight with such sorts… but do avoid their company… they have spiritual “cooties”.

This article below proves that RFE/RL issues black propaganda of the vilest sort… Potapov must leave it. He won’t… that speaks volumes.

BMD

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As an alleged Kremlin troll army continues its apparent octopus-like spread across the globe, the US government’s international broadcaster RFE/RL has courageously struck back by exposing it right in its lair. However, would that be enough? In the past few days, articles have been popping up around the web, providing explicit details about a “Kremlin troll army” which operates out of a St Petersburg suburb, a scary place where laughter is prohibited and 400 professional trolls toil day and night to convert public opinion in Russia and abroad. There is only one problem with the article… there’s no pro-Kremlin “trolling” taking place in the evidence the authors provide. Whilst employees of these “troll farms” do allegedly make hundreds of political posts, they’re made on local forums with tiny membership, rarely over 500 users, and even tinier posting activity at most, 5 posts per person, most of which appears to be from the “trolls”.

Considering the extremely low impact of such posting, the goal appears to be not to convert public opinion, but rather search engine optimisation (SEO)… search engines such as Google crawl the web for keywords and links, which are then used to give weight to certain web pages when search terms are entered. The interviewee even admits it himself, “There are keywords, tags that are needed for search engines. We’re given five keywords… for example, “Shoigu”, “Defence Minister”, “Russian Army”. All three of us have to make sure these keywords appear all over the place in our comments. You can’t even conjugate or decline them. Sometimes, it’s very hard to write when you can’t use any declensions!” The bit about declensions is important because Google doesn’t work well with Russian morphology; for example, processing the keyword “armies” separately from the keyword “army”, unlike Russian search engines such as Yandex. Keywords give weight to certain words when used in Google searches. Then, there’s the question of “fake discussion”. Of course, no forum moderator would be happy if they discovered that their forums are used to post link spam. However, if the articles do generate some discussion, which seems to be limited to 2-5 replies, and do seem to be expressing different points of view, forum moderators would be more likely to keep them. The use of tiny forums with low readership is also important for this, as that allows the posts to remain on the websites for months or years, without deletion, because there are other threads discussing the same topics or being archived.

The US government’s international broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) did discover something, but it’s quite the opposite from an ominous troll army working around the clock to convert the entire world to a Putin-based religion. They found a search engine optimisation (SEO) company, likely subcontracting for a political consultancy firm. The history of SEO… in particular, “Google bombs“… as well as their use by businesses and politicians goes back to the 1990s. Google and other search engines combat their use by blocking their most obvious use, but hundreds, if not thousands of SEO companies continue working to promote business and political interests around the world.

However, some use fear of “Russian propaganda trolls” to whip up hysteria, which they then use to push through funding increases for RFE/RL and other foreign broadcasters. This coincides with the very poor journalism of the article reporting on the “troll army”, as the authors don’t attempt to corroborate the story. There doesn’t appear to be security risks involved, as it publishes the first and last name, as well as a photo of the interviewee, and considering advancements in modern technology, hidden camera investigations have become one of the easier things in the world.

In this sense, the sensationalism of the story, the poor quality of the research, and the lack of definite information about the “troll army” somewhat ironically contributes to the decline of government-controlled international broadcasters, which now ring the alarm about the rising popularity of networks such as RT. The sentiment is also echoed in Europe, where politicians such as German parliamentarian Norbert Rottgen claim that “Russian propaganda” presents itself as a “source alternative to Western media”, which must be countered by “strengthening European international media, Deutsche Welle, BBC International, and RFI (Radio France International)”.

28 March 2015

Sputnik International

http://sputniknews.com/politics/20150328/1020147102.html

29 March 2015. A Translated Russian Demot… Yuliya vs Poklonskaya

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