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November 3rd Led to February 24th
The Russian attack on Ukraine can be traced to the 2020 presidential election. Leaving aside the question of voter fraud, the replacement of Trump by Biden strengthened Russia’s economy. One of the first actions Biden took was to cancel the Keystone pipeline. He also discouraged drilling. Gas and other fossil fuel prices jumped. Russia depends heavily on energy exports so this was a huge cash infusion into its economy.
Biden appointed incompetent people such as Austin who became secretary of defense. When he wasn’t chowing down, he appeared to think that his most crucial issue was to root out conservatives in the defense department. A friend of mine knew a young man who joined the Air Force to work on cyber defense. With the emphasis on transgenders getting surgeries, he’s getting out as soon as his enlistment ends.
Austin also thinks that forcing people who are not at risk from COVID to get a leaky vaccine is critical. When push came to shove in Afghanistan, no one stood up to Biden and said that we should hold Bagram Air Base until the very end. It’s much more secure than Kabul but none of our generals were willing to put their careers on the line on behalf of the safety of our military. And in the debacle we left tens of billions of dollars of weapons behind.
Biden was always a gaffe machine, but by Election Day 2020 he was clearly unfit to be president. He barely campaigned. In his few press conferences since he’s become president, he calls on specific reporters and has the answers written out on 3×5 cards. His recent performance shows a man who is almost comatose.
https://t.co/llgadKtta0
pic.twitter.com/NyNiQZk26O— Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 (@ezralevant) April 28, 2022
Putin attacked Georgia when Bush was president. He then seized Crimea during Obama’s presidency. Now he’s attacking Ukraine. The only president he appears to have respected was Trump. The people who supported Biden are to blame for this debacle. And the escalation which is being pushed by Bill Kristol and other war hawks is dangerous. It’s good for Raytheon but no so good for Ukraine. We need to encourage de-escalation rather than ramping up the rhetoric.
Published in Foreign Policy
@garyrobbins
:) It’s a TED talk. Hundreds of private planes flying into Switzerland from all over the world is a TED talk.
So it’s a coalescence of like-minded folks. I’d still like to really know their names.
Stephen A. Douglas and Bleeding Kansas for the Donbas?
(Can the United States then have a vote to trade Vermont for Alberta?)
Ukraine might just have to read the situation. France and other allies wanted to give Denmark even more additional land after World War I. Apparently Denmark was willing to take some areas which wanted to be ruled by Denmark but not the areas which did not want to be ruled by Denmark. However, Putin is going to corrupt the situation completely, if not just expel and kidnap the dissenters and assassinate the dissent leaders.
The Donbas will probably be a lawless area for years as neither Ukraine or Putin will be able to back down too much.
I think 90% of Russians including most the pro-American Russians consider Crimea to be part of Russia.
Is there a final solution for the Middle East, Taiwan, Korea, Tibet, Kurdistan, Scotland, Quebec, Ireland, part of Spain, etc.? Things just keep limping along until they just don’t anymore.
Here are the vote results that actually took place. The 83% Donbas referendum vote would be a huge landslide in an American election.
Ha! He has never understood anything much about American politics. Stories from the Bush administration prove that. Putin is more like the KGB thug wearing the Potemkin village idiot mask. Putin does seem to enjoy bribery, domestic propaganda, and all-around mischief, but that does not make him smart.
That does not make him smarter than the average or slightly average American about — America.
Putin has proven to be rather stupid recently. He is also surrounded by yes-men as no one wants to provide him with an opposing view. He saturates in his own propaganda like a typical American Leftist.
You don’t have to be smart, just know who you’re talking to.
Do you know who actually guides Biden into the room at the G20? Or who preps him for his sit-downs with foreign leaders? Putin probably has a better idea that you or I do.
“You’re willing that Ukraine fight to the last man.”
I’m not even sure what that quote is supposed to mean.
I think Russia has lost about 5 or 10 times the number of soldiers as Ukraine. I guess if you include civilians the number could much different. It’s all the fog of war. Putin is never going to reveal how many Russian soldiers were killed or how many Ukrainian civilians he butchered or exiled.
“You’re willing that Ukraine fight to the last man.”
Ukraine is going to fight back whether you like it or not. They didn’t make those Neptune missiles and anti-tank weapons primarily to sell to other countries.
It takes an unbelievable amount of manpower and money to control a nation like Ukraine just as it took a lot to keep things under control in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Vietnam, or during the Cold War.
Ukraine is going to fight back just as any country would, at least when possible.
Besides it’s Ukraine’s choice to fight. The decision cannot be made by the United States, the UN, NATO, or anyone else.
Wikipedia says that the conflict is between…
Russia: ~175,000–190,000
Donetsk PR: 20,000
Luhansk PR: 14,000
supported by Belarus
versus
Ukraine: 209,000 (armed forces) 102,000 (paramilitary) 900,000 (reserves)
It doesn’t mention anything about globalists and nationalists.
I never even heard of the term globalist until maybe 2015. I guess it replaced George H. W. Bush’s New World Order phrase for which there was both legitimate fear and conspiracy-laden paranoia.
“This is not about Russia and Ukraine.”
I could ask someone living in Ukraine if they think this is a conflict between globalists and nationalists, but I don’t think you would like the answer.
Like there’s a big difference between Biden and Bernie. More energy in the executive from the older guy? Presidents can only do so much.
Bernie vs. Weekend at Bernie’s?
The opposite would be that Ukraine has to give up. You think they will?
If similarly armed, who is more likely to give up? An intruder or a home owner?
Putin already gave up the entire Northern Front around Kyiv about a month ago, although most of the battle lines have been rather frozen ever since this time.
Russia only controlled about 1/4 or 1/3 of the Donbas area before February 24.
No they don’t have to give up. Russia can just wipe out the country as an ongoing concern. Russia can win that way. Crappy win , but still one.
It means we have a lot of warhawks in the U.S. who cheer on Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian, while U.S. warhawks keep their hands clean. Do they care how many Ukrainians die in the process?
Yep. But they’re encouraged to keep fighting to the last Ukrainian because the West is financing their war with money and materiel. Which is to say, we’re helping them weaken and destroy themselves in the process of destroying Russia.
There is no question now that is a proxy war between the West and Russia. Ukraine is the West’s chosen battleground and is being turned into a pile of rubble by Western powers.
If Russia is doing as terribly as the Western media insists (why would we think they’re suddenly telling the truth after decades of lies?), then Putin is probably looking for an off-ramp. The West doesn’t want peace. As Joe Biden has frequently blurted out, they want regime change in Russia and will destroy Ukraine to get it.
I’m sure you’ve investigated this and have come to your own conclusions. All wars exact a terrible toll to the countries affected. And wars pretty much always take place in a broader world context. But some have been strictly between two nations, while others have been proxy wars between two other nations, with goals of the instigating nations that are independent of the goals of the fighting countries or factions. The Ukraine-Russia war is a sort of proxy war between nationalist Russia and globalist organizations and groups in Europe and the US.
The way this war was (some would say as a result of incompetent foreign policy and actions of the US and NATO) was brought about leads me to the conclusion that the war in Ukraine fills another higher purpose.
But the terms “globalist” and “anti-globalist” first came to my attention in 1999 riots against the WTO in Seattle. I thought it was a pretty fringe thing at the time, but globalism has only grown since then. And interestingly, there is an extension of national governments and their war-making that now includes undeclared (and undeclarable) non-governmental organizations and multi-national corporations in so-called fifth generation warfare.
As for Bush 41’s New World Order, that recalls a much earlier term One World Order, that’s been around all my life.
As for your reference to “both legitimate fear and conspiracy-laden paranoia”, I see the conspiracy but not any paranoia. You can believe that the world goes on as it has since WWII, but it’s not the same world now. People seem to want to ignore grand changes. It amazes me that more people don’t understand the significance of going off the gold standard. And it amazes me that people don’t see the significance of the continuing formation and empowering of international bodies such as the WTO, the IMF, the WHO, NATO, the EU and even the global climate accords.
This created a terrible dynamic between the financial system and the political system. It creates all kinds of social problems and interferes with conservative/libertarian objectives. Slapping the European Monetary Union on top of it is even worse for those guys.
Just to be super clear. You don’t have to be on a gold standard and it has a lot of disadvantages. The problem is when you use colored pieces of paper, you have to do things a certain way and of course we didn’t. This has played out over and over and in history.
Here’s my pitch for something nobody’s going to do. lol the latest hidden forces podcast interviews of Russell Napier and Grant Williams are excellent with regard to this. He gives away the first hour for free. Transcripts are really expensive, but the podcast alone is really fair.
Would MMT have been possible with a gold standard? And seriously, isn’t that reason enough for a gold standard?
You can’t have any of that stuff with the gold standard. MMT. Keynesianism. Inflationism. It forces societies and their politicians to be create productivity.
I don’t know how to explain it, but the gold standard is sort of unwieldily. The other thing is you have to be able to switch into an inflationist posture if you are going to be militaristic. i.e. better us than anybody else keeping the global trade roots open.
If you don’t have a gold standard what you end up doing is just stuffing the economy with debt regardless of the productivity. You are constantly levering up everything. Then you can’t stop. Russell Napier explained this really well in the podcast. British guys call levering, gearing.
What you actually need is, lots of community banks with intelligent bankers creating loans instead of the way we do it. This is a real bitch to listen to, but the interview with Mike Green on gestalt University podcast explains this. There is a free transcript. He is basically endorsing democrat type solutions, and I think he’s probably right, but he also admits that we are too stupid and corrupt to do it.
Most people to get by need to lever up at the right time and steal from your fellow citizens through government as much as possible. That is the way you make it in this country.
I think we should just make this retired hedge fund manager dictator of everything. lol
This is pretty educational and most of it is pretty easy. All podcast platforms but not YouTube
https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnRlbnQuY29tL2QvcGxheWxpc3QvNjFhZjBmNzgtNjQ0YS00NTAwLTk3OTItYTg5NTAwZWE3OGU1LzRjNTllYzE0LTY1OWQtNGIwZS05Y2Q1LWE4ZGIwMTQwMDhkOC9mM2IxMDEzZi00MjFkLTRiYzAtOGZlOC1hOGRiMDE0MDA4ZGMvcG9kY2FzdC5yc3M/episode/MDdkMzcwZjAtMjg3NS00NDRmLTk2NmItYWU4NjAxM2M2YjI0?hl=en&ved=2ahUKEwjllerH_L73AhXNLc0KHTeSD4gQjrkEegQILxAF&ep=6
It’s worse than that. Most states have heating assistance in one way or another, as an example. In Vermont, LIHEAP basically subsidizes heating costs for gas or oil, maybe even electricity.
So: You can sport policies that drives the prices up, but it’s really an opportunity to expand entitlements and therefore buy more votes.
Win-win. Why wouldn’t they, when they’re not paying for it, and it’s upside to them? That’s why they blame Putin or Trump for rising gas prices, because it’s garbage, but some of the voters will buy it, and that’s enough at the margins.
What’s *really* hard about starting up slow-moving programs is not the production line for the final assembly, it’s the zillion component suppliers that may or may not be able to support a spurt in demand. Some may no longer be in business, so you’ll have to go out and qualify a new vendor.
This is standard spares stuff, I used to estimate these requests from the DoD for General Dynamics. We had one supplier (one!) who was qualified to build what was essentially one huge gear for turrets to rotate on. Spares were rarely purchased, but when they were, it would take months to re-qualify the tooling and get the delivery setup. It’s one big hunk of metal (like 10 feet across? Can’t remember but it was big).
Anyway, something to think about. When you’re not in full production, you’re not – rebuilding the inventory can take years.
Very interesting.
In Vermont, back in the heady 1970’s, most new housing, and particularly condos, were built out with electric baseboard heat. Why? Vermont Yankee Nuclear power plant was providing cheap and reliable energy for the foreseeable decades, so why would you build out gas lines, install furnaces, etc, when baseboards were cheap and distribution was already built into the power lines?
Well. Something has changed. It whipsawed from “nuclear is evil” to “fossil fuels are evil” back to “nuclear is the green solution” in about the space of 50 years. These houses and condos built in the 1970s have an assumed life of like 2x that.
It makes one want to punch things. Hard. To stop the stupid.
Even if electricity were actually free, baseboard heat is still awful.
Value Add = 0
I know, but I am more talking about his thought process or lack of thought process.
Never Trump and the really idealistic libertarians and Republicans should not be naïve about this.
Putin probably approved all the bribes paid to the Clinton and Biden crime families. I don’t know what he knows, but certainly has access to more gathered intelligence on American leaders than the average American does.
Last nights Bill Cunningham show had a caller at 9:30 about Susan Rice et. al. that was just incredible. That would be at about a 20 minute mark.
Look at this thread.
@garyrobbins