Here is a February 13, 2014 article in Workers World, U.S. officials caught in Ukraine plot.

On Feb. 6, Victoria Nuland, U.S. assistant secretary of state for European affairs, discovered that someone considered her recent phone discussion with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, too frank and pithy to remain in the archives.

First of all, their conversation showed Washington considered it perfectly normal and reasonable not only to have an opinion on who among the Ukrainian contenders should run the country, but to intervene to make sure a U.S. favorite won. In addition, it showed that the U.S. is contemptuous of the role of its EU partners, who are also imperialist rivals.

Why bring this up now?  I got into a discussion where I was challenged by my assertion that the U.S. was meddling in Ukrainian affairs before Russia started taking military action against the Ukraine.  I remembered the incident that helped form my opinion, but I wasn’t sure I could find the article on this blog to show it.  The key name that I did not remember was Victoria Nuland.  How could everyone, including me, forget this important name?

Although I did get a long list of articles when I searched the blog for the word “ukraine”, I didn’t have the time to read them all enough detail to pick out the reference to this incident.

Now that I know the name, I see that a search for “nuland” does bring up two of those articles.

This all fits in nicely with my previous post, The science of protecting people’s feelings: why we pretend all opinions are equal.  The incident of finding Victoria Nuland’s name is a perfect demonstration of why I have this blog.  I get so frustrated when I know the “facts” support me, but people put an equal weight on the opinions of others who just don’t know what they are talking about.  Marden Seavey is always calling me out for my believing I am always right.  The purpose of the blog is to archive the material to prove I am always right.  (Come on folks, can’t you see the self-deprecating humor in what I have just written?)  You might notice I also like to hear myself blather on.

The Washington Post has the article The science of protecting people’s feelings: why we pretend all opinions are equal.

I’ll give you one of the conclusions in the article.  You’ll have to read the article to find out why the author offers this opinion.

Still, I think it’s pretty obvious that human groups (especially in the United States) err much more in the direction of giving everybody a say than in the direction of deferring too much to experts. And that’s quite obviously harmful on any number of issues, especially in science, where what experts know really matters and lives or the world depend on it — like vaccinations or climate change.

I think this explains why so many people (Jacquelyn Wells) think it more important to get a middle of the road consensus than it is to have people fighting for what they believe is essential for success of the society, political system, economic system.  It isn’t necessarily found in the middle of the road where there is probably a lot of road kill (to mix metaphors a little).

Thanks to Sarah Clark for posting this on her Facebook page.

As I said to Sarah and I will remind Marden Seavy, this is why I get so frustrated when people cannot see that I am always right 🙂

The Boston Globe does it yet again in the piece Opinion: How to fix the T.

However, the state’s anti-privatization Pacheco Law, passed in 1993, has rendered it very difficult to pursue further savings by contracting out.

To which, I responded in a comment:

The Boston Globe is pretty adamant that they will try to ignore the rhinoceros in the room no matter how strongly its readers are pointing to it.  Despite twice posting a link to the article “The Boston Globe Covers Up for Wall Street, Ignores Swaps Losses in Coverage of MBTA Turmoil” as comments on two letters yesterday, The Globe still likes to pretend that there was no Wall Street rip-off.  Instead they blame the employees, the pensions, and the Pacheco Law.  Is the Wall Street rip-off an example of what we could achieve if we could only do some more privatization?  I didn’t realize that John Henry’s purchase of The Boston Globe would turn long-time Globe columnists into shills for Wall Street.

Here is a reflection of the above article posted on my blog: http://ssgreenberg.name/PoliticsBlog/2015/02/16/the-boston-globe-covers-up-for-wall-street-ignores-swaps-losses-in-coverage-of-mbta-turmoil/

In that previous post, I quote the underlying article as saying.

Particularly if you are in Massachusetts, please call or e-mail the Globe’s managing editor for news, Christine Chinlund and tell her the Globe is showing bias by ignoring the role of Big Finance in the MBTA’s tsuris.

Chinlund’s e-mail is: chinlund@globe.com and her phone is 617 929-3134.

I finally listened to the advice I had published for others to take, and sent Chinlund an email.

I thought I had this covered by yesterday’s post, Boston Globe Ignores Its Own Culpability In Misleading About the MBTA.  Apparently it is going to take a more concerted effort to get The Boston Globe to take an ethical stand and print the information it would rather cover up.

The YouTube video is titled Robin Hood In Reverse.

I am disappointed that Bernie Sanders still talks as if reducing the debt and deficit were necessary for any rational reason. His Chief Economic Adviser, Stephanie Kelton, knows full well what baloney this is. Perhaps the two of them have gotten together and decided that the heads of the Republican Senators would explode if they were exposed to the truth.

See my previous post The Peterson Foundation Sings the Same Old Song. Here is one of the excerpts that I showed in that post.

So, the lower deficit Peterson approves of is close to or past putting the private sector into an aggregate annual loss position. And, in advocating for further deficit reduction, what Peterson is doing is advocating for placing the private sector into a much deeper and unsustainable loss position over a period of years. Doesn’t Peterson know that government deficits add to private sector aggregate net financial assets? Doesn’t he know that budgetary austerity will cause the private sector to lose financial wealth? Doesn’t he know that the deficit doesn’t harm the government’s capability to spend, but that cutting it does harm the private sector’s capability to spend by destroying private sector wealth over time?

Are any of my readers paying any attention?

File charges against the 47 U.S. Senators in violation of The Logan Act in attempting to undermine a nuclear agreement is the Whitehouse petition that is gathering the signatures. It has over 260,000 as I write this post.  It only needed 100,000 signatures within 30 days to cross the second threshold and require a response.  April 8 is the deadline.

The concluding sentence:

This is a clear violation of federal law. In attempting to undermine our own nation, these 47 senators have committed treason.

may be a little overdone, but  if you want your signature to really count, then I think this is the petition to sign.