IT’S THE RUSSIAN WAY OF WAR: Granted, burying the enemy in a mountain of your own corpses worked better when Russia had a growing population. But cultural habits die hard. 450,000 Russians Dead In Ukraine?

THE LEFT DROPS ITS MASK AND REVEALS ITS HIDEOUS FACE:  Evidence of Evil.

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Don’t trust your kids to people who hate them.

THE INTERNET OF DANGEROUSLY CONNECTED THINGS: Iran blamed for fridge hacks.

France has accused Iran of being behind an “unprecedented” cyber attack on its supermarket fridges that spoilt food worth millions of pounds.

Jean-Noël Barrot, the country’s foreign minister, vowed to retaliate against Tehran as he blamed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for the Oct 11 and 12 hacks. He also summoned the Iranian ambassador.

“I can confirm that this attack was carried out by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” said Mr Barrot.

“This attack is unprecedented in both its scale and its level of aggression,” he said, adding: “We will implement sanctions at the European level against all those responsible for this attack.”

From August: Iran-Linked Cyberattack on US Water Systems Explained. “The cyberattack on US water supply systems has once again shown how severe lapses in critical infrastructure security can be. At least seven states, including Michigan and Minnesota’s Water and Wastewater Sector (WWS) companies, reported issues to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). There has been degraded water operations caused as a result of the activity.”

As Glenn likes to say, I do not trust the Internet of things. Particularly very big things, such as supermarket freezers and the control of local water supply systems.

THE DEMS UNDERSTAND TAKING AND EXERCISING POWER:

BRENDAN O’NEILL: Russell Brand and the tyranny of the Greater Good.

Brand is the Jimmy Savile of the liberal elite. He’s the pig whose sexist blather and misogynistic behaviour they were ‘willing to overlook’, just as their stiffer, posher forebears of the 1980s media establishment overlooked the tsunami of rumours about Savile. In both instances, a blind eye was turned in the name of the Greater Good. In Savile’s case, that ‘good’ was his charity work, his primetime ratings, his position as an elder statesman of BBC pop and his chuminess with royalty. In Brand’s case, it was his saucy leftism, his frisson of ‘revolution’ in an era of Cameroon Toryism, his sprinkling of debauchery at a tired BBC and his chuminess with the bourgeois press. The result was the same, though: female safety traded in for fleeting moral gain.

[Owen] Jones [of the Grauniad] is not alone. There are numerous reports and allegations that media bigwigs were ‘willing to overlook’ Brand’s comments and behaviour on the grounds that he was a cash cow, the great spicer-up of their bland output. It is alleged that as early as 2013, Channel 4 executives considered reducing the number of female production staff on Brand’s shows, so that they wouldn’t be victimised. The BBC failed to investigate Brand after he flashed his penis at a female member of staff in its LA offices in 2009. As Konstantin Kisin says, ‘the fact that Brand [was] a rapist’ was an ‘open secret’ in British comedy circles, yet little was done.

This is pure Savile territory. The wilfully blind might be different – younger, less stuffy and more ‘hip’ than the BBC suits who ignored whispers about Savile’s depravity. But their instinct was the same: to stare at their shoes as rumours swirled because their man was just too damn useful, whether because he was making gains for the crappy Labour left or money for TV execs. In both cases we witnessed the tyranny of the Greater Good – the horrors that can flow, or at least go under the radar, when elites prioritise riches or ideology over decency.

“This is pure Savile territory,”  for several reasons, as Kisin tweeted today. “[A] lot of people commenting on the Russell Brand case don’t understand how defamation law works in Britain…If you publicly make a claim about another person, that person can sue you for defamation and you will reliably lose and have to pay them huge damages, as well as their legal costs and your own, unless you can prove that your claim is true. Large media organisations like major newspapers will sometimes risk publishing claims they believe to be true on the basis that a story is in the public interest and an honest opinion but they regularly lose defamation cases and pay out millions in lost and settled cases. So, when I say that Russell Brand being a rapist was an ‘open secret’ on the British comedy circuit – that is a fact that is perfectly compatible with the fact that people didn’t say anything about it in public. From memory, some tried and were threatened or even sued into submission.”