The New York Times reported today on a story you saw in Balloon Juice more than a month ago, based on accounts in Finnish media. A wealthy Russian businessman was buying up properties along an important Finnish sealane. The Finnish authorities raided those properties, which had some of the look of preparing for military action. Finnish government and business websites were then hit with a DDoS attack.
Anyhow, welcome to the party, New York Times!
And open thread!
DonL140
You know. Income inequality?
Joe Falco
The New York Times: “The Most Current News of Yesterday, Today!”
Gin & Tonic
Well, Finnish is a difficult language. Maybe it took them a while to translate things.
Roger Moore
Unless they’ve found a bunch more details that were missed in the original reporting, this would fall more into the category of olds than news.
Kraux Pas
@Joe Falco:
Well, we can’t inform the public about things that may harm them before the perpetrators have had an opportunity to profit off of it.
A Ghost To Most
Religion of peace, my ass
Chyron HR
@A Ghost To Most:
Well, at least it’s better than the neoliberal status quo.
Ruckus
@A Ghost To Most:
Many old religions were never peaceful long ago. Of course a lot of the non peacefulness was towards people who wouldn’t fall in line. Hard to keep a grift going when people can just walk away. For proof I present your post about a wonderful politician with an idea that biblical law is the real deal. It was more than an ideal long ago. He just wants to get back to what he considers normal.
Roger Moore
@Chyron HR:
It would certainly heighten the contradictions.
Cheryl Rofer
@Gin & Tonic: All the Finnish reports were in English. I can’t read more than a few words of Finnish myself.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@A Ghost To Most: He didn’t appear in a vacuum. Who else is he talking to? Where did he come from? Who put this stuff in his head? How many of them are there?
I hope to get back to a society where murder and terrorism are crimes even when committed by white evangelicals.
Gin & Tonic
So in anticipation of today’s news conference by that idiot Jacob Wohl presenting the “credible witness” accusing Mueller of rape or something, it appears that said witness has suddenly gotten cold feet and will not be at the news conference.
Who could have predicted?
Gin & Tonic
@Cheryl Rofer: I was trying (not very seriously) to throw the NYT a lifeline.
Frankensteinbeck
@Chyron HR:
There may be no word I hate more than ‘neoliberal.’ The dumbasses who use it correctly define it, but they’re so determined to be More Pure Than Thou that they think the Democratic Party is neoliberal. It’s a fantasy land of what our policies are as warped as Republicans’. They just love that the word sounds like ‘liberal’ and they can make the association.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Gin & Tonic: Link?
Frankensteinbeck
@Cheryl Rofer:
I have a Finnish friend, and the language sounds like gibberish to English speaking ears. Like, not even ‘a foreign language I don’t understand.’ It sounds like something you would make up on the spur of the moment pretending to speak a foreign language for a joke. However, I challenge anyone to read the Kalevala and not come away with the belief the Finns are better than us.
Gin & Tonic
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Here you go.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Gin & Tonic: TY
Platonailedit
Pittsburgh murderer pleads not guilty.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46062277
OzarkHillbilly
@Gin & Tonic: more like fearful of the FBI.
Cheryl Rofer
@Frankensteinbeck: Yes. Finnish and Estonian put the stress on the first syllable, which is how the Kalevala works. The best translations repeat the rhyme scheme. But English mostly puts the stress on the second syllable, so Finnish and Estonian can sound like gibberish to English speakers. When I was learning Estonian, an article came out about how babies learn to speak their language. Early on, they recognize the stress patterns. “Oh good,” I thought, “I’m not even up to the baby stage.” But now I can hear the words and even understand some large part of what people are saying in Estonian. There are aspects of the syntax that completely baffle me, though.
Mike J
Hear about the Russian NOTAMs?
Omnes Omnibus
@Platonailedit: So?
Frankensteinbeck
@Cheryl Rofer:
If you haven’t read the Kalevala (and you seem like someone who would have), I cannot sufficiently recommend it. Boy, is it not like any other national oral epic. It’s practically a season of My Little Pony. Lessons in friendship and instructions for practical skills!
Platonailedit
“US authorities have brought criminal charges against two former Goldman Sachs bankers and Malaysian financier Jho Low.
The Department of Justice charges stem from the long-running scandal at Malaysia’s state development fund, 1MDB.
One former Goldman banker admitted to conspiring to launder money and violate a US anti-bribery law, it said.
The other banker has been arrested, while Mr Low remains at large.
These are reportedly the first US criminal charges to surface in the scandal, in which authorities say public officials stole billions from the state fund to buy art, property and other items.
The claims of corruption played a role in the election defeat earlier this year of Malaysia’s former prime minister, Najib Razak.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46062576
PaulWartenberg
NaNoWriMo officially starts today for 2018. 30 days of 50,000 words.
Also, work is driving me crazy.
The two are surprisingly unrelated EVEN THOUGH I am hosting a kickoff Write-In tonight at the library. Y’all are invited to attend. It’s from 4 to 7 PM in Bartow FL
PaulWartenberg
@Platonailedit:
I am horrified that when he asks for a jury of his peers he’ll insist on Pure Aryan types.
PaulWartenberg
@A Ghost To Most:
I’m not surprised he worked it down to “14” points. /headdesk
Origuy
Cheryl or Frank, can either of you recommend a good translation? I’ve been meaning to read the Kalevala for a long time. My first exposure to it was in the Harold Shea stories of Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague DeCamp.
germy
Roger Moore
@PaulWartenberg:
I suspect this is more a matter of wanting to turn the trial into an opportunity to get his hateful ideology into the media than it is an attempt at a serious criminal defense.
bjacques
That details of that suspected Russian plan for invading Finland reminds me of a really old episode of The Avengers, from back when England was all villages and a hundred nogoodniks with Sten guns and a few Austin Minor vans (yeah, I had to look it up) could conquer the whole country starting in Margate.
Frankensteinbeck
@A Ghost To Most:
I am sympathetic to the way a purely academic treatise could be mistaken for a personal agenda, except there is no old testament justification for outlawing abortion. So, without even further investigation his excuse falls apart.
Doug R
I guess the NYT needs to eats their spinach so they can fights through the Finnish.
What can I say? I yam what I yam.
Amir Khalid
@Platonailedit:
Jho Low’s a wanted man in Malaysia too. Najib has already been charged, and I imagine there are charges ready to go here against Jho Low as soon as someone gets hold of him.
germy
Let me get this straight
Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.
Frankensteinbeck
@Origuy:
The one I read was by Elias Lonnrot. I suspect Lemmenkainen’s sexual escapades have been slightly bowdlerized, but they’re not subtle as is.
Cheryl Rofer
@Frankensteinbeck: Yes I have, and Estonia has a related national epic, Kalevipoeg, literally “The Son of Kalev.”
Cheryl Rofer
@Origuy: The translation I have is by Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. Not sure if there’s a more recent one. I’ve also got an English translation of Kalevipoeg, but it’s with the Estonian version in a very fancy edition. Probably not available outside of Estonia.
catclub
@A Ghost To Most:
Did they crib ‘first we kill all the lawyers’ from Bill Shakes.
Anonymous At Work
The Pittsburgh shooter just plead Not Guilty to all 44 charges and requested a jury trial. Am I being paranoid that he wants a jury trial to preach to the jury about Antisemitism and conspiracy theories?
Kent
@A Ghost To Most:
Astonishing. I live in Washington State and had heard nothing of this or Matt Shea other than he is the typical wingnut from the eastern side of the state. The Raw Story article on this biblical nonsense was first reported by the Spokane newspaper. I went back and searched the archives of my local paper (Vancouver Columbian) as well as the two big Seattle papers and none of them reported on it or really had any news reports on Matt Shea other than old tea party nonsense and bigotry he was involved in going back to 2013.
Really seems like a failure of the big mainstream media in this state to report on far down the rabbit hole the psychopathic wingnut GOP has gotten in this state.
clay
@germy:
Whoa. This is getting too deep for me.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anonymous At Work: Everyone pleads not guilty at this stage. Don’t read in to it.
Kent
This is our boy Matt Shea from a 2013 Seattle PI article. Apparently he has been a complete wingut for a long time
A Ghost To Most
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: This is the kind of seditionist crap that flows between my family and their friends. Too occasionally, they reply to their entire contact list, and I get Shit like this, and worse.
For me, it’s personal.
germy
This video:
These two guys are so obviously crooked, I’d walk out if I found myself in a car dealership with them.
catclub
@A Ghost To Most:
Adherents to a different religion of peace want the blood of a Christian woman charged with blasphemy in Islamabad.
Gravenstone
@A Ghost To Most: Air drop his ass into Afghanistan (parachute optional). Sounds like he’d be right at home with the Taliban.
Mandalay
More horse shit on the horse race from the NYT:
Democrats in an All-Hands-on-Deck Scramble to Save Menendez in New Jersey
Scary stuff!!! Except Menendez is up by 8 points in the most recent poll, and 538 gives him a 90% chance of winning.
While Menendez is probably going to win, an 8 point lead and a 90% chance of winning is not a done deal. But what on earth is prompting the narrative “a last-minute, all-hands-on-deck effort to rescue Mr. Menendez’s candidacy”? He’s been ahead in every poll for the past month.
The reporting about this election has been mediocre, and the NYT has been a serial offender for weeks.
patroclus
I predicted that the Dems are going to flip the House and pick up 80 seats in the House on Tuesday the other night and now I’m going to predict that the Dems are going to break all historical records and pick up at least 12 governors as well. The most ever flips was in 1994 when the Republicans picked up 11 governorships – I think we’ll beat that and establish the Dems as the majority party at the statehouse level as well. Here in Illinois, Pritzker only leads the odious Rauner by 18 – I can hardly believe that we’re doing so poorly. The Senate? Well, we have a chance, but I’m not going to predict it. This would be a good result (obviously) but we can do better. Go vote and drag others with you!
Kraux Pas
@Mandalay:
People won’t be interested in the
horse raceelection coverage if we don’t act like things are close and everything is a crisis. And they certainly won’t be interested in stories of substance. /MSMgenerallyNYTspecificallyGravenstone
@germy: Keep digging, little dude. Keep digging.
Chyron HR
@germy:
Wouldn’t it have been more convincing if they’d gotten a woman to accuse him?
Gravenstone
@Doug R: In before NotMax? If so, please stop.
chopper
@germy:
so at least one of these motherfuckers is willing to listen to his lawyer.
Platonailedit
@Amir Khalid:
Is najib’s corrupt ass in jail yet?
A Ghost To Most
@Chyron HR: Jessica Rabbit wouldn’t do it.
/WhoFramedRobertMueller?
The Pale Scot
@Frankensteinbeck:
Finnish is related to Basque, they are considered closest to the Proto Indo European originator language. many of their nouns for objects like horse or hut are thought to very close to the language spoken by the first wave off the steppes
Wapiti
@Doug R:
I don’t know whether to boo or groan.
Mandalay
@patroclus:
And yet the Chicago Tribune’s headline this morning is What’s on Gov. Bruce Rauner’s legislative wish list if he wins re-election against J.B. Pritzker?
Because horse race.
A Ghost To Most
@Platonailedit: I keep resolving your nym to Plato nail edit.
Amir Khalid
@Platonailedit:
All in good time. Najib is out on bail pending trial, but his passport has been taken so he’s not going anywhere.
satby
@Mandalay: the Trib has always been a Republican paper. So much so that they hated Trump but couldn’t support Hillary, so they endorsed the Libertarian in 2016.
The Moar You Know
@germy: They already lost. FOR ONCE, our guys played offense and broke the story first. Unlike football, in media wars, the defenders almost always lose, even if they’re better. And in this case, they are not. Those guys are going to try and salvage their ginned-up bullshit, but it won’t work.
Brachiator
Coincidentally, this podcast, by a French techie currently living in Finland, gave an interesting take on this story.
Russian “investments” near Turku
H.E.Wolf
@Kent:
Thanks for pulling the curtain open on this individual. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
There have been, and are, a lot of Democratic volunteers on the ground in that district this year. It’s been great to see (from my back-room, data-entry perspective).
H.E.Wolf
@A Ghost To Most:
… she’s just not drawn that way.
:)
trollhattan
@Platonailedit:
I demand the NY Post front-page this. “Jho Low Lays Low”
germy
They have a talent for finding gigs and making money.
A Ghost To Most
@H.E.Wolf: Ooh, thanks. I had forgotten that line.
Sister Golden Bear
But to me it seems quite clear
That’s it’s all just a little bit of history repeating
https://theconversation.com/how-the-nazis-destroyed-the-first-gay-rights-movement-80354
Kraux Pas
@germy:
If Fox News isn’t dishonest and apocalyptic enough for you…
germy
@Kraux Pas: RT didn’t make an offer?
A Ghost To Most
Chauncey DeVega and David Neiwert keep trying to convince me that I’m really seeing what I think I’m seeing.
Kraux Pas
@germy: RT?
Gin & Tonic
@The Pale Scot: I’m sorry, but I believe that is entirely mistaken. Neither Basque nor Finnish are Indo-European. Basque is, in fact, an “isolate” – it may be called pre-Indo-European, but not proto-Indo-European. Finnish is proto-Uralic, and is at least somewhat related to Estonian and, further back, Hungarian, but has no known relationship to Basque.
germy
chris
@Sister Golden Bear: Thought of you when I found this sad but happy story last night.
Don’t let the bastards grind you down!
A Ghost To Most
@A Ghost To Most: Neiwert closes:
WaterGirl
@PaulWartenberg:
50,000 words a day seems excessive. :-)
Gravenstone
@germy:
Only when it’s convenient to me or the scam I’m running at the moment. Keep digging little dude. Keep digging.
Gravenstone
@germy: A rabidly pro-Trump micronetwork? Whodathunkit?
Uncle Cosmo
@Cheryl Rofer: Same stress-on-1st-syl in magyarul – um, Hungarian – all Finno-Ugric tongues.
Some of the most brilliant minds involved in the Manhattan Project were from Hungary (Johnny von Neumann, Eugen Wigner, etc.) & when gathered together naturally slipped into their Ursprache. Baffled listeners-in would ask what language that was & were told Hungarian…but the story goes (you surely already know this, but for the unaware amongst us) that many refused to believe it – the rumor went round that those guys were in fact Martians who’d learned to disguise themselves perfectly as human beings, except once in awhile they’d slip up & start speaking Martian amongst themselves – Hungarian was a natural cover story since no one except a Hungarian would know the difference, & they were all Martians anyway…
Paulwartenberg
@WaterGirl:
YOU CAN DO IT
clay
@germy: I cannot think of a worse person to host a show than Carter Page. Mr. Flop-Sweat-Talk-Himself-Into-A-Corner has a horrible television presence.
germy
@clay: No worse than a bad cold.
Cheryl Rofer
@Uncle Cosmo: One of my trips to Estonia was coordinated with a graduate student studying monuments and their meanings. At that time, Tallinn still had some wonderful used book shops that she greedily patronized. She had spent a year in Hungary as an exchange student and after a couple of days said, “Oh, Estonian is just like Hungarian, but different vocabulary!”
Snarki, child of Loki
@bjacques: “that suspected Russian plan for invading Finland reminds me of a really old episode of The Avengers, from back when England was all villages”
Plus Emma Peel dressed in skin-tight leather and tied up by the baddies, also, too.
Good times, good times.
evodevo
@Frankensteinbeck: Yes. The ONLY times abortion is even obliquely mentioned is in a context of miscarriage caused by misadventure (treated as a property damage tort kind of way) and as a sort of ordeal by abortifacient administered by a priest in a temple(?). No mention AT ALL of outlawing it.
StringOnAStick
@germy: I like that a liberal dude has shown up in the parking lot of the “news conference” site with a giant inflatable rat with the Mango Moron’s “hair”. Thats the level of respect Wohl and Co deserve, which is none.
StringOnAStick
@A Ghost To Most: Neiwert nails it in that quote. I know of two leftier than thou people IRL; one moved to India and thankfully quit her job in our dental office since I was sick of the diva act/snottiness since none of us were Boulder hipster enough to not contaminate her, and the other is a patient I see every 4 months who can’t stop talking loudly and saying “fucking idiots” so loud that other patients hear him, so he’s a bit of a douche. Of course he hates Nancy Smash with a passion.
Gin & Tonic
@StringOnAStick: He wasn’t just in the parking lot, he was in the “news conference” and was live-tweeting.
StringOnAStick
@Gin & Tonic: Even better!
StringOnAStick
Even more better: as his partner in crime was calling li’l Wohl a brilliant young man” a heckler yelled “he can’t even open an Etrade account!”..
opiejeanne
@Uncle Cosmo: That’s a great story, made me chuckle.
I used to play the organ at a Hungarian Reform church in the late 1970s, so I heard Hungarian every Sunday and sometimes on the following Monday as well. I know one word in Hungarian: lelke. (Lelki?). It means “soul”.
They preached a lot about witches and Communism in the sermon delivered by the Lelke Pastor, or instructed to turn to page XX in the Hymnusz (spelling?). A lot of words were borrowed. Apparently the Communists were practicing witchcraft. The congregation split over some silly disagreement while these very old people were busy building a new church building. One sweet old guy in his 90s insisted on going up the ladder to look at the roof rafters after church and we were all terrified. The truly hilarious thing about the schism is that the preacher of the new church was the son of the preacher and the congregation attended both services on Sundays, to support the younger man as well as their chosen leader. I played for that congregation a couple of Sunday until I just couldn’t take it any more.
After about a month they reconciled and everything went back to normal. I would sometimes find myself drifting off during the extremely long sermons and imagine I could understand Hungarian, but when I heard the word “hymnusz” I’d spring into action and play, disappointed that I did not now understand Hungarian.
Dan B
@Kent: There’s a history of nazis in Washington state. It originates in Redmond, WA. Yeah, that Redmond, on the wet side, not the Aryan Nations Spokane / Northern Idaho part of the PNW. William Dudley Pelly founded a nazi group in the 30’s called the Silver Shirts. They had enough members to get Pelley on the ballot as a candidate for President. I believe the party was renamed the Christian Party. After Pelley was convicted of sedition in the 40’s they drifted to eastern WA and were the core of the Aryan Nation and other groups. The current Neo Nazi groups strategy is to look and sound respectable. Their plan to power is to take over the state GOP. They’ve gotten lots of coverage from small media orgs but not the biggies.
u
@Cheryl Rofer: Ded thred, but what the hell.
IIRC once the Hungarians got control of their cultural institutions via the Ausgleich of 1867, one of their early projects was to strip all the non-Magyar-rooted words out of the vocabulary. Worked well enough for them that the Nazis tried the same thing upon assuming power. They, however, fell foul of the Teutonic tendency to construct massive compound words.
According to my 20th Century German Lit prof at JHU, Dr. William McClain (RIP), the seminal early instance of a non-Aryan word marked for extinction was der Nase (“nose”, from the Latin). The “good Aryan” replacement they came up with was – wait for it –
(“the projection out of the face”)
Apparently the day after this was introduced it was the hot topic of conversation in Lokalen, Restauranten, on S-Bahn & U-Bahn & whatever-the-hell-Bahn platforms – with the vast majority of participants doubled over with laughter.
In a very short while the putsch, erm, push to Teutonize the German language was quietly tief-Sechs‘d, never to resurface.
Dr. McClain noted that it took most of the world’s developed nations 6 years & tens of millions of casualties to defeat the Third Reich on the battlefield – but the German people managed it in days. By laughing at them. Fascisti & other authoritarians hate, hate, hate to be made objects of ridicule.