"Then what is the answer? Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before. When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose the least ugly faction; these evils are essential. To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will not be fulfilled. To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand Is an ugly thing and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history... for contemplation or in fact... Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken."
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "When the money goes, everything goes. Today, we look at what went last week. Yes, Dear Reader, at this late, degenerate stage of the Bubble Epoch, nothing is so crazy… so absurd… or so appalling that it isn’t front-page news. And from Capitol Hill last week came the usual pernicious headlines.
First, the Democrats say they want to pack the Supreme Court, to make it easier for them to do any fool thing they want. Second, they want to pave the way for giving reparations to people whose families suffer – allegedly – from a wrong done to their ancestors 170 years ago. And that doesn’t include all the other nonsense on the agenda – forgiving student debt, providing regular stimmy checks, another $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” boondoggle, etc., etc.
Arbitrary Rearrangement of Wealth: When money is no object, no object is too asinine to spend it on. Economist John Maynard Keynes described it in 1919: "By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.
[…]. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery."
Some get rich from the government’s “arbitrary rearrangement” of wealth. Those on the receiving end – contractors, connivers, and cronies – do well. But the disorder soon spreads to the rest of the economy, where money itself… and the process of getting and spending it… becomes a joke.
Great Visionaries: In this respect, Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer must be viewed as great visionaries. On December 6, 2013, they launched Dogecoin – a cryptocurrency that was apparently half serious and half spoof. From the very beginning, the one-liners kept coming. Two weeks after the launch, the crypto money went up 300% in 72 hours – to be worth $0.00095 each! Six days later, the system was hacked. Millions of coins were stolen. By 2017, the Dogecoin market was worth $2 billion.
January, 2020 – a price spike sent the coin up 800% in 24 hours, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk began posting mysterious tweets. “No highs, no Lows, only Doge,” quoth the oracle. Last week, a big runup put Dogecoin up almost 8,000% for the year. Whoopee! “Hey guys. I just became a Dogecoin millionaire,” announced one Reddit user. Another anonymous enthusiast (perhaps with the initials, EM?) apparently now has a $15 billion fortune – based on his Dogecoin holdings alone (assuming he has not lost the key to his wallet.)
Missing the Point: What do you do when you have that kind of money? It is strange “wealth,” neither clearly the fruit of win-win nor of win-lose. It is more like win – huh? What can you do with that kind of “win-huh?” money? How about buying a Non-Fungible Token (NFT)? Last week, too, set new records in the NFT market. Here’s ABC News: "An NFT called The Pixel — an image of a single pixel — was also up for auction, fetching $US1,355,555 million after a 90-minute bidding battle. The artist is known only as Pak, with the Twitter handle @muratpak.
NFTs are an almost perfect match for cryptocurrencies. They provide what we like to call a safe space for the digital fantasists (SSDF).Normally, things (and people, too) are judged on two basic criteria. They are either useful or decorative. If they are neither, they have no value. But in this new SSDF, weird money meets weird consumer items – neither of which has any physical form – and they live happily ever after. NFTs have no utility. Nor are they much fun to look at. The Pixel piece is just a square of gray.
And if you’re looking for value in an NFT like The Pixel… or in Dogecoin… or in the hundreds – maybe thousands – of publicly traded, money-losing U.S. companies… or in the U.S. dollar… or in federal financial policies – you are missing the point. They are valuable precisely because they have no value. They have neither utility nor aesthetic value. They destroy real wealth; they don’t create it. But the more wealth they destroy, the more important they become. Does that make sense? We didn’t think so.
Who Gets It? But we’re trying to connect some pretty slippery dots – like beads of mercury in a hot skillet – so stick with us. When the money is fake, people change their attitudes towards it. If you are a politician… whether Donald Trump or Elizabeth Warren… you want to “go big” with some monumental program – like the Great Pyramid of Giza – that will signal your greatness for years. If you are an artist, you create an NFT. Even cooler, you sell it, letting it be known that you think the buyer is a moron. Cooler still, you buy it… And coolest of all if you pay far too much money for it. You say to your friends, “I paid a million dollars for this.” And your friends think you are an idiot. But you’re a very cool idiot… one who “gets it” and can afford to throw away a million dollars to prove it.
Big Fraud: Gets what? That “money” no longer represents real worth. And that by spending it recklessly, he is throwing swill before swine. A man can buy a box at the Super Bowl without honest toil, without saving, without starting a business, nor by increasing the world’s wealth with useful or decorative output. He might have simply bought Dogecoin… or got a stimmy check… or put his money in the stock market and let the Federal Reserve make him rich. The meaning of “wealth” itself has evolved towards what the Fed has made it – a gamble and a lottery. But also a fraud. And it is such a big fraud that – one way or another, winner or loser – we are all in on it."
else the knaves would not have enough to live upon."
- Samuel Butler
"Vast Stretches Of America Have Now Descended
Into A State Of Deep Economic Hopelessness"
by Michael Snyder
"Even though the stock market has been booming and the corporate media is full of talk about “recovery”, there are many communities in the United States where a permanent atmosphere of despair seems to hang in the air. The federal government gives us doctored numbers that show that the national unemployment rate is low, but in small towns all across the country it seems like almost everyone is either unemployed or working extremely low paying jobs. Earlier this month, one such town was profiled by USA Today. Even before the COVID pandemic came along, the little town of Ogdensburg, New York was deeply struggling, but now economic conditions have become extremely dire…
"Ogdensburg is tiny and desperately poor, so it experiences these national trends in concentrated form. The median house in this city of 10,000 people sells for $68,000, according to the U.S. Census. The average family earns $42,000 a year, and 2,300 residents live below the federal poverty line, giving Ogdensburg a poverty rate 75% higher than the rest of New York State.
Then the economy closed. The governments of Canada and the United States tried to limit the spread of COVID-19 by shutting the international border, including the curvy suspension bridge between Ogdensburg and Prescott, Ontario. In the small industrial park east of town, the few remaining warehouses and Canadian-owned factories shut down. The hospital in Ogdensburg furloughed 174 people. Most restaurants and grocery stores stayed open, primarily by firing every person they could. Like millions of other Americans, most people living in Ogdensburg are just trying to find some way to survive month after month."
The fact that stock market investors are rolling in giant mountains of cash doesn’t matter to the citizens of Ogdensburg. At this point the city government is “nearly bankrupt”, and the latest economic downturn has fueled “a spike in narcotics overdoses and deaths”… "The economic collapse fueled further crises. Ogdensburg’s city government is nearly bankrupt, says City Manager Stephen Jellie. Stores that depend on customers crossing the border from Canada are nearly empty. The pandemic closed 12-step groups across the St. Lawrence Valley, causing a spike in narcotics overdoses and deaths."
Ogdensburg’s struggles started 62 years before the pandemic, when the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway destroyed the city’s port. Now the city faces so many problems simultaneously, it’s difficult for people here to imagine what “recovery” even means.
Of course Ogdensburg is far from alone. Similar articles could have been written about thousands of other towns and cities from coast to coast. There is so much economic pain out there right now, and it is getting worse with each passing month.
As he drives to work each day, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell gets a firsthand view of the economic suffering that he has helped to cause. Just two blocks away from his office, a tent city has sprung up that just keeps growing and growing… "As he drove past the intersection of 21st and E streets in Northwest Washington, a 68-year-old man peered through the window,struck by an encampment of homeless people here that grew from 10 tents to 20 in the past year. Then 30. Now 40.
The people living in those tents had no idea that their burgeoning village kept this man, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, up at night, or that he kept thinking about them as he drove two blocks south to his office. Powell doesn’t know their names or backstories, either. But what he saw was clear. A visceral reminder of the uneven economic recovery. Right there in the Fed’s shadow."
Powell sure seems to know how to shower stock market investors with cash, but he appears to be powerless to do anything about the tent cities that are mushrooming all over the nation. Unfortunately, the housing crisis in this country is only going to get worse. As foreign governments, real estate investment companies and wealthy individuals gobble up properties at a feverish pace, millions upon millions of ordinary Americans are being priced out of the market.
This is particularly true for young adults. At this point more of them have moved back home with their parents than ever before… "The number of adults aged 18-34 living at home with their parents continues to accelerate to levels not seen in decades, according to Goldman Sachs, citing US Census Bureau data which found that just over 33% have returned to the nest."
And while real estate in major markets is booming, the percentage of young adults in the ‘boomerang generation’ – who leave the nest only to return years later – has taken a dive, as unemployment and punishing (self-inflicted) student debt has forced many younger Americans out of the housing market.
But at least the financial markets have been doing well, right? If you believe that this financial bubble is real, you are just deceiving yourself. It isn’t going to last, but the social decay that is rapidly growing all over America will.
Earlier today, I came across an article that claimed that the “knockout game” has now returned to New York City… "Areas of the city which were generally thought to be safe, such as Midtown Manhattan, Chelsea and the leafy Upper West Side, have all been locations on random assaults in recent months.Some are describing the assaults as proof of the return of the so-called ‘knockout game.’"
And civil unrest continues to rage in many of our major cities on an almost nightly basis. In fact, rioters in Portland set an Apple Store on fire on Friday night… "Despite advance warnings, Portland Police Bureau officers were powerless to stop another night of rioting, arson, and gunfire carried out by Antifa. Rioters set multiple fires and engaged in drive-by gunfire. Antifa rioters set an Apple Store on fire Friday night during the third declared riot in five days. The fire was one of the multiple fires Portland police officers were powerless to prevent."
Didn’t those rioters know that Apple is a “woke” company? Sadly, those involved in the rioting, looting and violence are not going to check whether you are “woke” or not when they come to your neighborhood either. As I have warned for a very long time, civil unrest in the United States is going to rise to absolutely horrific levels.
A lot of people out there expected the civil unrest to go away once Joe Biden got into the White House, but that obviously hasn’t happened. As economic conditions deteriorate, people are only going to get even angrier, and the rest of the world will watch with great interest as American cities burn."
"The realization hit me like a bolt of mental lightning. The bastards are GOING FOR THE GUIDESTONES! They are betting that their long campaign to dumb down the global population combined with their evil-eye surveillance grid, will now allow them to stomp Humanity into total submission.
These soulless predators, who I scornfully and gleefully, describe as our Malignant Overlords, are not particularly motivated by greed. They all have more than enough money. What they truly desire is POWER – the sickest variety – the type that allows them to utterly control the lives of ordinary people.
Yet, even that is not enough to satisfy the desires of the most wicked of them. They find the common people so loathsome, that they would prefer to eliminate the vast majority of them. Their scheme is to transform the planet into a 21st century Techno-Feudalism – but with an enormously reduced population.
A tiny core of self-proclaimed Elites would rule. Beneath them, the Technicians would run the computers, the robots and the Artificial Intelligence. The next level down would be the Enforcers. The Police and the Military who would provide security for The Despised at the top. At the very bottom would be the Neo-slaves of the global Cyber-plantation. They would struggle to exist at even a subsistence level. They would be forced to do the undesirable work that even the robots would refuse to perform. Their income would barely support them; and their pastimes and pleasures would be dictated by the World Government via their mandatory, personal screens.
These devices would also monitor everything about them – their movements, bank accounts, vaccine compliance, health status, etc. These “miracle devices” could even discover any dangerous anti-government proclivities.
With this control grid in place, the oppressors could convert the entire planet into one gigantic Club Med – or should that be Club Mad – for themselves. They would no longer have to share the ski slopes at Aspen with the little people. The French Riviera would be cleansed of the riff-raff. Only the powerful would travel by air or enjoy sea cruises. That is the true intention of the U.N.’s Agenda 21/2030. It would convert Earth into a resort for the rich – and a gulag for the rest.
When that flash of recognition jolted me, I suddenly realized that after many decades of careful preparation, the Malignant Overlord’s had finished setting the trap. Now, they were about to spring it. Their Georgia Guidestones moment had arrived.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with this strange monument that stands 16 feet tall, sneering down at the lesser people, that is to be expected. After all, every single day you are being simmered in a toxic sludge of industrial grade propaganda. Your controllers want you misinformed, confused, terrified and incapable of resistance.
BTW, these so-called Guidestones are the perfect rebuttal to the claim that “there are no secret cabals of powerful men conspiring for world domination.” These gigantic granite slabs were designed and financed by an “anonymous person, who represented a clandestine group that never revealed itself.” And it has now been over 40 years since those mysterious modern Ten Commandments were placed in a north Georgia pasture.
The very first edict, which is carved into the granite – in EIGHT different languages – states “Maintain Humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with Nature.” The “in perpetual balance with Nature” phrase seems admirable. However, the 500 million number sickens me. I suspect that the other 7.5 billion humans, who would have to be eliminated, are also appalled by this directive.
A normal person might interject at this point that nobody is so evil that they wish to kill the vast majority of the people on Earth. But you believe that because you possess “decency bias.” You are blessed with compassion, empathy and the tendency to “live and let live.” You don’t wish to rule anyone’s life, and you certainly don’t wish to rule everyone’s life.
But tragically, there is a subset of homo sapiens that doesn’t just desire control over others, they crave it! And what makes this addiction even more horrific is their ability to delude themselves with the lie that their control freak sickness is actually for “the Greater Good.” They are so convinced of their personal superiority and the nobility of their cause, that they feel no guilt in subjecting people to gruesome, joy-trampling domination. Don’t forget, we are only a couple of decades removed from a century that witnessed the deaths of hundreds of millions of people at the hands of their cold-blooded leaders.
What initially triggered my Guidestones revelation, was my careful examination of the way that the political and medical establishment had responded to the Wuhan Virus. When you examine the actions that these “deciders” have imposed, they make no sense if they are actually fighting a battle for health. BUT, if their hidden agenda – their TRUE goal – is to fulfill the depopulation directive of the Georgia Guidestones, then their policies make complete sense.
Here are some examples that demonstrate this:
Lockdowns: For many centuries the best way of dealing with a virulent disease, was to isolate the sick people away from those who are healthy. This allowed the infected to receive specific treatment, while permitting the un-afflicted to develop antibodies and herd immunity. If this method has worked for centuries, why was the protocol reversed for the Wuhan Virus? It makes no sense – unless your true purpose is to sicken and not to heal.
Masks: The absurdity of these cheap blue masks as a disease inhibitor is mind-boggling. It actually states on the box that they come in, that they are not suitable for stopping the spread of viruses. The masks are so porous that a great descriptive meme was created back in early 2020 to describe the lunacy of their usage. It joked that these masks were about as reliable as “stopping a mosquito with a chain link fence.”
But even though there is no upside to these embarrassing face diapers, there is plenty of downside. And I am not referring to their symbolic value as badges of obedience to “the Science the State.” I am referencing the fact that they dramatically block the flow of oxygen to all of the vital organs in our bodies. AND they force us to repeatedly breathe in particles that our systems are trying to expel through our exhalations. So, masks make no medical sense, unless you are trying to weaken and destroy massive amounts of people.
The Non-Vaxx Vaxx: Why the unceasing demands that everyone be vaccinated? After all, the survival rate for this supposed pandemic is around 99%. And there are cheap alternative therapies such as HCQ and Ivermectin that are very effective. And the vaccine itself is not even a vaxx – it is some experimental gene altering concoction (I won’t grace it with the word “therapy.”). Furthermore, it only received “emergency approval” by by-passing the usual rigorous testing required of new vaccines. Maybe that was because in the few animal tests that they did on gerbils and rats, all of the animals DIED!!
A clear thinker would conclude that a disease that is no more severe than the common flu and that can be treated effectively with safe, inexpensive drugs, surely does not require a mandatory global campaign of mass vaccination. That same unbiased thinker would have to examine the DARK possibility that the vaxx is not a cure jab … but a KILL JAB.
As I conclude this essay, I am deeply saddened by how easily the vast majority of Humanity fell for this massive Covid scam. Even though several hundred of us have been on the World-Wide Watchtowers sounding the alarm, it feels like we have just been barking at the dark side of the moon. It appears that the dream of the Malignant Overlords for planetary control, that they carved onto those granite slabs, will soon be fulfilled.
But then I think of other gigantic monuments erected by prior megalomaniacs, who also had dreams of omnipotent control. I recall the Pharaohs and their pyramids and the Caesars and their Colosseum. Slowly, a smile brightens my un-masked face. For I suddenly realize that those enormous structures are now only … RUINS. They are windswept monuments to the failure of those who seek to dominate! And one day … the Guidestones will also crumble."
"Rep. Maxine Waters (D – Calif) laid it out neatly Friday night on a visit to Minneapolis, where she apparently went to stir a pot of racial hatred that was already on boil without her help, following the accidental killing of felonious bail jumper Daunte Wright (first-degree aggravated robbery, fleeing from police, and possession of a handgun without a permit): “We got to stay on the street,” Ms. Waters yelled at the mob gathered in the suburb of Brooklyn Center, “get more confrontational!” Yes, exactly what the sore-beset city needs, as it awaits this week’s verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin, about which she added: “I am very hopeful… that we will get a verdict that says guilty, guilty, guilty. If we do not, we will not go away.”
Former police officer Chauvin is charged with Murder 2, Murder 3, and Manslaughter all predicated on varying degrees of intention and recklessness in the death of George Floyd, the internationally acclaimed saint-of-oppressed-peoples who died under Mr. Chauvin’s knee in an indelible video shared ‘round the world last May. The video has the status of a religious icon, portraying, as it seems to, the vivid distillation of the black experience in America: pure, unalloyed, hateful, murderous subjugation.
The trouble is what’s not in the indelible picture: Mr. Floyd’s prodigious ingestion of the world’s hardest narcotic, fentanyl, at a level likely to cause death, plus methedrine, plus THC, on top of a 90-percent blockage of a coronary artery, and other cardiopathies, and Covid-19, all according to the official medical examiner. Also, as it happened in the instance of his arrest, Mr. Floyd was failing to follow police instructions, and acting dangerously deranged - behavior apt to lead to police restraint, under which he died, rest his soul.
So, now it will be left to the jury to sort all this out, under the threat of getting “doxed” (having their home addresses disclosed) by the Black Lives Matter org, as well as following the $27-million lawsuit settlement on the Floyd family for “wrongful death” by the Minneapolis City Council before the trial commenced - not exactly a propitious lead-in for a fair outcome. One might even view the public expressions of black opinion leaders and politicians as coercive - but then coercion is the animating spirit of liberal Wokery, the wish and the will to punish at all costs.
In any case, the fine spring weather around the country invites the young and energetic to caper angrily in the streets after a harsh winter of lockdowns. The mobs will turn out, things will burn, businesses will get looted (and destroyed), and people will get hurt. So it will be for two reasons: groups of people follow social scripts and societies give tacit permission for the acting-out of feelings - in this case, feelings of grievance that demand retribution and vengeance.
What’s actually at issue here is whether black people in America really want to join with the other ethnic groups present in the land in a national common culture - that is, a consensus about behavior, ceremonies, and manners - or would rather opt out of it, oppose it, or violently destroy what’s left of it. The key to these questions is how to explain the failure-to-thrive of a large black demographic despite the apparent victories of a long civil rights campaign, colossal expenditures of tax money for assistance, and affirmative action galore. I would explain it as the malign influence of neurotic white liberalism acting on the aforesaid black ambivalence about joining in or remaining apart from that common culture.
The upshot, for now, is that white liberalism has given black America permission to act violently and destructively, to disobey the law, to oppose officers attempting to enforce the law, and to justify the whole package of uncivil behavior on the grounds that “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” are the forces that keep black Americans from thriving. The script for all this prevails because liberalism cannot otherwise explain its own failure to uplift black America over many years of sedulous striving. They are left disappointed, ashamed, and guilty, and neurotically give themselves permission to support black hostility and hatred against white people as a form of self-punishment. The catch is that not all white people in America are neurotic liberals and they are not in favor of continuing white self-punishment.
The question at hand is how much longer this crazy script will be allowed to run. It appears that the country is about evenly split between those in favor of promoting black hostility and those disinclined to further submission. It’s up to American political leadership to decide, and for now the liberals are the party holding the levers of power - government, in essence, representing the blunt force that determines which way things go. And, at the head of this government sits the inert and tractable Joe Biden, who seems to have had it decided for him."
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."
- Smedley Butler
"It’s a scorpion battle inside a vortex of distorted mirrors inside a circus. So let’s start with the mirrors in the circus.The non-entity that passes for Ukrainian Foreign Minister traveled to Brussels to be courted by US Secretary of State Blinken and NATO secretary-general Stoltenberg. At best, that’s circus shadowplay. Much more than NATO advisers in a frantic revolving door in Kiev, the real shadowplay is MI6 actually working very close with President Zelensky. Zelensky’s warmongering script comes directly from MI6’s Richard Moore. Russian intel is very much aware of all the fine print. Glimpses were even carefully leaked to a TV special on the Rossiya 1 channel.
I confirmed it with diplomatic sources in Brussels. British media also got wind of it – but obviously was told to further distort the mirrors, blaming everything on, what else, “Russian aggression”. German intel is practically non-existent in Kiev. Those NATO advisers remain legion. Yet no one talks about the explosive MI6 connection. Careless whispers in Brussels corridors swear that MI6 actually believes that in the case of a volcanic but as it stands still preventable hot war with Russia, continental Europe would burn and Brexitland would be spared.
Dream on. Now back to the circus. Oh, you’re so provocative Both Little Blinken and NATO straw man Stoltenberg parroted the same script in Brussels after talking to the Ukrainian Foreign Minister. That was part of a NATO “special meeting” on Ukraine – where some Eurocrat must have told a bunch of extra clueless Eurocrats how they would be carbonized on the spot by Russian TOS-1 Buratino’s terrifying explosive warheads if NATO tried anything funny.
Listen to the sound of Blinken yappin’: Russian actions are “provocative”. Well, his staff certainly did not hand him a copy of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu examining step by step the deployment of the annual US Army DEFENDER-Europe 21: “The main forces are concentrated in the Black Sea and Baltic region.”
Now listen to the sound of Stoltenberg yappin’: We pledge “unwavering support” to Ukraine. Woof woof. Now go back to play in your sandboxes. No, not yet. Little Blinken threatened Moscow with “consequences” whatever happens in Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov’s infinite patience is nearly Daoist. Sun Tzu’s "Art of War", by the way, is a Daoist masterpiece. Peskov’s answer to Blinken: “It is simply not necessary for us to go around forever proclaiming: ‘I am the greatest!’ The more one does this sort of thing, in fact, the more people doubt it…”
When in doubt, call the irreplaceable Andrei Martyanov – who always tells it like it is. The Crash Test Dummy gang in D.C. still does not get it – although some Deep State pros do. Here’s Martyanov: "As I am on record constantly – the United States never fought a war with its Command and Control system under the relentless sustained fire impact and its rear attacked and disorganized. Conventionally, the United States cannot win against Russia in Europe, at least Eastern part of it and Biden Admin better wake up to the reality that it may, indeed, not survive any kind of escalation and, in fact, modern Kalibrs, 3M14Ms, as a matter of fact, have a range of a 4,500 kilometers, as well as 5,000+ kilometer range of X-101 cruise missiles, which will have no issues with penetrating North American airspace when launched by Russia’s strategic bombers without even leaving the safety of Russia’s airspace."
The Patrushev effect: The circus went on with the phone call from “Biden” – that is, Crash Test Dummy with an earpiece and a teleprompter in front of the phone – to President Putin. Call it the Patrushev effect. In his stunning interview to Kommersant, Triple Yoda Patrushev mentioned a very civilized late March phone call he had with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Of course there’s no smokin’ gun, but if anyone would come up with the face-saving idea of a Biden-Putin phone call that would have been Sullivan.
The spin from Washington and Moscow is only slightly divergent. The Americans highlight that “Biden” – actually the deciding combo behind him – wants to build “a stable and predictable relationship with Russia, consistent with US interests.” The Kremlin said that Biden “expressed interest in normalizing bilateral relations.”
Away from all this fog, what really matters is Patrushev-Sullivan. That has to do with Washington telling Turkey that US warships would be transiting the Bosphorus towards the Black Sea. Sullivan must have told Patrushev that no, they won’t be “active” in Donbass. And Patrushev told Sullivan, OK, we won’t incinerate them.
There are absolutely no illusions in Moscow that this putative Biden-Putin summit in a distant future will ever take place. Especially after Daoist Peskov had made it very clear that “no one will allow America to speak with Russia from a position of strength.” If that sounds like a line straight out of Yang Jiechi – who made shark fin’s soup out of Blinken-Sullivan in Alaska – that’s because it does.
Kiev, predictably, remains stuck in circus mode. After getting sharp messages from Mr. Iskander, Mr. Khinzal and Mr. Buratino, they changed their mind, or at least pretend to, and are now saying they don’t want war. And here comes the intersection between circus and the serious stuff. The “Biden” combo never said, explicitly, on the record, that they don’t want war. On the contrary: they are sending those warships to the Black Sea and – circus again! – designating an envoy, Ministry of Silly Walks-style, whose only job is to derail the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
So the cliffhanger – like a teaser for Snowpiercer – is what happens when Nord Stream 2 is completed. But before that, there’s something even more momentous: next Wednesday, on his speech to the Russian Security Council, President Putin will lay down the law.
It’s Minsk 2, stupid: Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, has struck a much less Daoist note than Peskov: “The United States is our enemy, doing everything to undermine Russia’s position in the international arena, we do not see other elements in their approach to us. These are our conclusions”. That’s stone to the bone realpolitik. Ryabkov knows the Hegemon’s “non agreement-capable” mindset inside out. So an added dimension to his observation is its direct connection to the only solution for Ukraine: the Minsk 2 agreements.
Putin reiterated Minsk 2 on his live teleconference with Merkel and Macron – and certainly to “Biden” in their phone call. The Beltway, the EU and NATO are all aware of it. Minsk 2 was signed by Ukraine, France and Germany and certified by the UN Security Council. If Kiev violates it, Russia – as a member of the UNSC – must enforce it.
Kiev has been violating Minsk 2 for months now; it refuses to implement it. As a faithful Hegemon satrapy, they are also not “agreement-capable”. Yet now they are seeing the – firepower – writing on the wall if they as much as think of starting a blitzkrieg against Donbass.
The open secret in the whole Ukraine/Donbass wilderness of mirrors under the circus tent is of course China. Yet Ukraine, in a sane world, would not only be part of a Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) corridor, but also part of the Russian Greater Eurasia project. China specialist Nikolai Vavilov recognizes the importance of BRI, but is also certain Russia is above all defending its own interests.
Ideally, Ukraine/Donbass would be inserted in the overall revival of the Silk Roads – as in internal Central Eurasian trade based and developed taking into consideration Eurasia-wide demand. Eurasia integration – in both the Chinese and Russian vision – are all about interconnected economies via inter-regional trade. So it’s not by accident that the Hegemon – on the verge of becoming an irrelevant player across Eurasia – is going no holds barred to harass and try to smash the continental integration by all means available. In this context, manipulating a failed state to meet its own doom is just (circus) business."
“Like delicate cosmic petals, these clouds of interstellar dust and gas have blossomed 1,300 light-years away in the fertile star fields of the constellation Cepheus. Sometimes called the Iris Nebula and dutifully cataloged as NGC 7023 this is not the only nebula in the sky to evoke the imagery of flowers. Still, this remarkable image shows off the Iris Nebula's range of colors and symmetries in impressive detail. Within the Iris, dusty nebular material surrounds a hot, young star.
The dominant color of the brighter reflection nebula is blue, characteristic of dust grains reflecting starlight. Central filaments of the dusty clouds glow with a faint reddish photoluminesence as some dust grains effectively convert the star's invisible ultraviolet radiation to visible red light. Infrared observations indicate that this nebula may contain complex carbon molecules known as PAHs. The bright blue portion of the Iris Nebula is about six light-years across.”
"Mostly we think of life in terms of individuals - this person, this tomato plant, this frog, this oak tree, this gnat. And we talk about birth and death as the beginning and ending of life. But there is another sense in which life is just one thing, whose beginning is lost in the depths of time and whose end is not in sight. Life in this sense embodies itself in matter, temporarily, as a tomato or a frog, puts on matter and puts off matter as we might don or doff clothes. By this account, I am an ephemeral conglomeration of atoms that life is using to perpetuate itself.
But what is this thing called life? It cannot exist except as embodied form, but it maintains a continuity independent of any particular embodiment. It is a strange enduring wave that stirs the material world into purposeful and directed avenues. With Johannes Kepler we might call it the facultas formatrix of nature, the formative faculty, but giving something a name doesn't explain it. Whatever life is - in the unitary, enduring sense - it would be surprising if it only existed here on Earth. If I were a betting man I would bet that life is as pervasive as matter itself, or energy. Matter, energy and complexification. We have lots left to learn.
But let's be cautious. There are lots of folks out there with half-baked biocentric theories of the universe. Someone once chided the philosopher W. V. O. Quine with a quote from Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” To which Quine is said to have responded: “Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.”
“My name is Paul Dalio. I’m a filmmaker, husband of my NYU film school classmate, father of two children and bipolar. Of these labels, the one I’m certain stands out in your mind is bipolar - and not in a good way. That’s no fault of your own, since you probably don’t know much about it other than what you’ve heard. I’m either right about this assumption or wrong about it. But either way, I’m certain of it because of my past experiences with the stigma that surrounds it.
So how do I deal with this label? I could remove the “I am” part to avoid it defining me and just say “I have” in which case I would have to add the word “disorder” to “bipolar,” which isn’t exactly the ideal fix. I could say I have a mental illness or am manic-depressive. But other than that, what label do I have to choose from that’s not a disorder, disease, illness or defect in my humanity?
The recent attempts to fight stigma have been to say “you are not your illness,” but I and others of my kind can’t swallow that because we can’t get around the fact that God weaved that illness into the fabric of our DNA, since bipolar is genetic and has been running through our family trees since the origin of our being.
I remember when I received the label at age 24. It was just after I could have sworn I saw God lift the veil and unfold the entire miracle of the universe before my eyes. I was thrown into a hospital, pumped full of drugs and came down only to be told that I wasn’t experiencing anything divine; I just triggered a lifelong illness that would swing me from psychotic manias to suicidal depressions with progressive intensity until I would most likely fall into the 1-in-4 suicide statistic - unless I took my meds, which made me feel no emotion.
If you can imagine missing feeling sad, it’s the only thing worse than pain. All every medical book had to offer was that if I stayed on these meds, I could live a “reasonably normal life.” I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I was pretty sure it sounded like “just get by.” So I stepped out of the hospital, knowing I wouldn’t be the sane person I used to be and not wanting to be this new human diseased me.
Six months later, I came across a book, "Touched with Fire", by Kay Jamison. It was the first medical text showing a tangible correlation between bipolar and artistic genius, profiling some of the greatest artists in history. Kay Jamison is a psychologist who in the middle of her time at UCLA went manic. She was going to hide it at first, afraid of how her psychiatric community would react, but she decided to be open about it and write books about it, one of which was "Touched with Fire."
For the first time, I heard words, shining right through every medical book’s thick printed clinical ink, describing something I could be proud to be. I was like, Yeah, that’s what I am. I’m “touched with fire.”
It would be destructive for me to deny all four seasons of the bipolar fire. When summer’s mania exceeds its stay and the fall shadows grab hold of your brain, you can feel your will within each withering leaf clinging to the trees of the entire forest surrounding you slipping as they fall down on you. When winter rolls around and your soul retreats deep beneath the frozen ground, and it’s calling your body down, it feels like your ashes are fighting gravity. And when spring comes again, it extends a warm invitation to rise too high and repeat the bipolar cycle that will lay waste to your lives.
Likewise, it would be unwise for a doctor to deny that on those manic summer nights, when we look out our hospital windows, we can see the stars pulsing spirals of fire across the sky, as God lifts the veil and unfolds the entire universe before our eyes. We know that humanity’s most beloved image of the sky was seen through a sanitarium window with Van Gogh’s manic eyes, and that scientists have recently discovered a phenomenon in nature that occurs in the sky called turbulence which, while painted perfectly in Van Gogh’s manic sky, is invisible to the human eye.
The reasons why it would be unwise for a doctor to deny this is because if the doctor acknowledged that maybe there was something to it, that maybe it wasn’t just some misfiring synapsis flashing through a crack in our minds, maybe we saw something that was just too beautiful to prove, he would also be able to remind the patient that while Van Gogh may have seen that sky through manic eyes, he didn’t paint it when he was manic, because he didn’t need the mania to have the fire.
And that doctor would then be able to assure the patient that he doesn’t want to stomp out that fire, that over time with gradual adjustments in medications they would work together to make sure the patient keeps that fire, and sustains it without letting it get out of control and burn down his mind, leaving his life in ashes.
How much more receptive would a patient be to treatment if the patient was told that the treatment was to nurture a gift they had, instead of terminate a disease they had? When out of all the poets who received the Pulitzer - the prize awarded to those who made the biggest contributions to the human spirit - 38 percent of them were bipolar, how can we simply label it a human disorder? Think how much more they could contribute to the human spirit if they knew it could be used as a gift to humanity, instead of something to hide from humanity?
However, in order for this to work, the doctor has to be able to trust the patient just as much as the patient has to be able to trust the doctor. My doctor trusted me, since he saw I was impeccable with my health habits, I was patient, willing to wait years before finally feeling full rich emotion, and that I would be satisfied without mania. So in return, he was never satisfied until I felt I had full rich emotion. I now feel deeper, richer emotion and more creativity than I ever did before bipolar, to the point where I can call it a gift, so much that given the opportunity I wouldn’t want a “cure.”
Still, I know I’ll always be walking a tightrope, but you get better at it over time, and like the guy who crossed the twin towers, you learn not to fall. And the higher the stakes and tighter the wire, the stronger and more disciplined you’re forced to become in order to survive. It’s only when things are so dark you can’t see hope one inch in front of your eyelids and it’s so cold, your soul is so numb, you don’t even know if it still exists, when just as your dim glow is this close to being blown out by your own lips a sudden spark of grit and will to live breaks into a flame of desperation, raging to blaze its way into the light of day again. So by the time you finally rise, the light in all those sunbathing souls combined couldn’t hold a candle to the fire in just one of your eyes. And when you combine that with the bipolar fire, no matter what anyone labels you, that’s something they can’t deny.
Van Gogh said, “What am I in the eyes of most people? - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.”
I’m sure what he meant is, if you step out of the MoMA after seeing “Starry Night” and you walk by a crazy man gazing up at the sky with wide crazy eyes, before you cross the street to avoid walking past him, maybe you’ll see him differently now that you saw through his eyes. And instead of saying “he’s bipolar,” maybe you’ll say, or at least think, “Oh, he’s touched with fire.”
"Comedian Bill Maher used his HBO show once again to highlight some awkward 'facts' and ask some uncomfortable questions about media and politicians approach to COVID. He rightly decries the politicization of medicine and the manner in which the media has been a handmaiden of panic throughout. Let us hope that his monologue, transcript below, is a foreshadowing of what will soon emerge as the conventional wisdom. Full transcript below:
"And finally new rule, don’t spin me when it comes to my health. Over the past year, the COVID pandemic has prompted the medical establishment, the media, and the government to take a scared straight approach to getting the public to comply with their recommendations. Well, I’m from a different school. Give it to me straight doc, because in the long run that always works better than you can’t handle the truth.
Now I get it, doctors tell people lies because they don’t trust you to finish the antibiotics…. And media, well, I think we all know if it bleeds, it leads. The more they can get you to stay inside and watch their panic porn the higher the ratings. Researchers at Dartmouth built a database recently monitoring the COVID coverage of the major news outlets across the world and found that while other countries mix the good news in with the bad, the U.S. national media reported almost 90% bad news. Even as things were getting better, the reporting remained negative. And politicians, they lie because it’s their nature to cover their ass. They don’t get blamed if things goes badly and also to keep in practice.
But when all of our sources for medical information have an agenda to spin us, yeah, you wind up with a badly misinformed population including on the left. Liberals often mock the Republican misinformation bubble, which of course is very real. Ask anyone who works at Hillary’s pizza parlor. And we do know conservatives have some loopy ideas about COVID like the third of Republicans who believe it couldn’t be spread by someone showing no symptoms. But what about liberals? You know the high information by the science people. In a recent Gallup survey,
Democrats did much worse than Republicans in getting the right answer to the fundamental question: what are the chances that someone who gets COVID will need to be hospitalized? The answer is between one and 5%. 41% of Democrats thought it was over 50%, another 28% put the chances at 20 to 49.
So almost 70% of Democrats are wildly off on this key question and also have a greatly exaggerated view of the danger of COVID too and the mortality rate among children. All of which explains why today, the states with the highest share of schools that are still closed are all blue states. So if the right wing media bubble has to own things like climate change denial, shouldn’t liberal media have to answer for how did your audience wind up believing such a bunch of crap about COVID.
A new report in the Atlantic says the media won’t stop putting pictures of the beach on stories about COVID even though it’s looking increasingly like the beach is the best place to avoid it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and vitamin D is the key to a robust immune system. Texas lifted its COVID restrictions recently and their infection rates went down in part because of people getting outside to let the sun and wind do their thing.But to many liberals that can’t be right because Texas and beach loving Florida have Republican governors, but life is complicated.
I’ve read that the governor of Florida reads. I know we like to think of Florida as only middle school teachers on bath salts having sex with their students in front of an alligator but apparently the governor is also a voracious consumer of the scientific literature. And maybe that’s why he protected his most vulnerable population, the elderly, way better than did the governor of New York.
Those are just facts. I know it’s irresponsible of me to say them. Look, here’s what I’m saying, I don’t want politics mixed in with my medical decisions. And now that everything is politics… That’s all we do. If their side says COVID is nothing, our side has to say it’s everything. Trump said it would go away like a miracle. And we said it was World War Z. Trump said we should ingest household disinfectants and we laughed as we should of course. And then it turned out 19% of America was literally drenching the fruit in Clorox. And now of course, we find out that all that paranoia about surfaces was bullshit anyway even though we spent hours and hours wiping our knobs with Lysol. And if you’ve ever wiped your knob with Lysol, I think you know.
Now go home and wash the mail. If you lie to people, even for a very good cause you lose their trust. I think a lot of people… Thank you. I think a lot of people died because of Trump’s incompetence. And I think a lot of people died because talking about obesity had become a third rail in America. I know you’ve heard me pound this fried drumstick before, but since I last mentioned it, a stunning statistic was reported. 78% of those hospitalized, ventilated, or dead from COVID have been overweight. It is the key piece of the puzzle by far the most pertinent factor, but you dare not speak its name. Imagine how many lives could have been saved. If there had been some national campaign [inaudible 00:06:49] Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move Program with the urgency of the pandemic behind it.
If the media and the doctors had made a point to keep saying, but there’s something you can do. But we’ll never know because they never did because the last thing you want to do is say something insensitive. We would literally rather die. Instead, we were told to lock down. Unfortunately the killer was already in the house and her name is Little Debbie."
“The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.”
And, of course, the universal and inevitable excuse…
“A person who is going to commit an inhuman act invariably
excuses himself to himself by saying, “I’m only human, after all.”
“One evening I went with my family to a Thai restaurant for dinner. They seated us near the back, not far from the kitchen doors. A very bubbly waitress brought us our menus, filled our waters and told us to let her know if we needed anything, or had any questions about anything at all. When she came back, we ordered. “Perfect!” she said with a huge smile, taking our menus. She went off to the kitchen. As soon as she was through the doors, her voice changed. She was chatting with the staff and we could hear every word.
“Oh my God, I was so sick this morning! I couldn’t stop puking. My boyfriend had to hold my hair back for me.” She went on about the trip to bar, the shooters, the cab ride, the stupid friends who didn’t show up. Lots of details and swear words. Then she came through the doors again, her waitress face back on, and took orders from a few more tables. She went back into the kitchen again. More profane banter. When she brought out our food, she had a wide, wholesome smile, and it was really hard not to laugh.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Jean-Paul Sartre had written about a similar scenario to illustrate a human tendency he called bad faith. His waiter at a cafe seemed to be completely under the spell of his role as a server. He moved too quickly, too snappily. He spoke about the daily specials with an enthusiasm that no food could warrant in real life. His gestures were so ridiculously waiterly that he seemed to have lost track of the fact that he was a free-choosing person, as if there was nothing to him besides his current role.
Sartre believed that we have much more freedom than we tend to acknowledge. We habitually deny it to protect ourselves from the horror of accepting full responsibility for our lives. In every instant, we are free to behave however we like, but we often act as though circumstances have reduced our options down to one or two ways to move forward.
This is bad faith: when we convince ourselves that we’re less free than we really are, so that we don’t have to feel responsible for what we ultimately make of ourselves. It really seems like you must get up at 7:00 every Monday, because constraints such as your job, your family’s schedule, and your body’s needs leave no other possibility. But it’s not true – you can set your alarm for any time, and are free to explore what’s different about life when you do. You don’t have to do things the way you’ve always done them, and that is true in every moment you’re alive. Yet we feel like we’re on a pretty rigid track most of the time.
We often think of freedom as something that can only make life easier, but it can actually be overwhelming and even terrifying. Think about it: we can take, at any moment, any one of infinite roads into the future, and nothing less than the rest of our lives hinges on each choice. So it can be a huge relief to tell ourselves that we actually have fewer options available to us, or even no choice at all. In other words, even though we want the best life possible, if life is going to be disappointing, we’d at least like that to be someone else’s fault.
When freedom is scary, we pretend it isn’t there: As soon as I learned about the concept of bad faith, I started noticing that I am guilty of it all the time. I might delay on a worthwhile-but-nerve-wracking phone call until it’s no longer an option to make, and tell myself the opportunity slipped through my fingers accidentally. I might pretend I didn’t hear a critical comment so that I didn’t have to decide how to respond to it. I often tell myself I can’t do any worthwhile work unless I have two uninterrupted hours to do it in.
I have a long history of bad faith. Maybe you do too. In high school, I remember deliberately learning as little as possible about scholarship opportunities, because I’d rather not apply for one than apply and see it go to someone else. Afterwards I might even complain that a guy like me could never compete with all the goodie-goodie students who schmoozed with the teachers.
I also used bad faith to rationalize my extreme levels of shyness, making life much harder in the process. Some part of me knew that being a functioning adult meant learning how to engage in small talk. But it was scary, so I told myself that small talk is all vapid and worthless, and I was abstaining from it out of principle, rather than fear. Like a lot of very shy people, I didn’t date in high school because I was afraid of rejection, but told myself it was because I had high standards.
We’ve probably all done this one: you’re dreading a to-do item because it requires a difficult decision. So you put it off, ignoring reminders you’ve set for yourself, putting less-important things ahead of it. You do this even though some part of you knows it has to be done anyway, and delays only make things worse for you. You make excuses why you can’t do it today – “I should get a better sleep before dealing with this” – even though nobody is fooled but yourself, and not even you benefits from your pretending you can’t do it yet. But you do get that hit of relief when you make a new excuse.
All of these kinds of behaviors are ways of denying our own freedom. If we acknowledged all of our options, the obvious thing to do might be something intimidating. Once you’ve acknowledged that it isn’t actually impossible for you to quit smoking, then you have to quit smoking. When freedom is scary, we pretend it isn’t there.
Bad faith is easier to notice in others than ourselves. You’ve almost certainly known people who complain about their situations, and insist that it is beyond their control when it obviously isn’t. When it’s really obvious, we call it a victim mentality. We tell ourselves stories that make us out to be hapless objects in the world – billiard balls on the table, rather than the players.
A former friend of mine perpetually expressed dissatisfaction with his overweight body, and had a shoot-down reason for every possible way to lose the weight. Running is bad for the knees. Restricting your diet leads to eating disorders. Lifting weights is for meatheads. Gyms are trying to rip you off. It was obvious these were not real barriers he ran into when he tried, but ways of arguing that his circumstances alone are responsible for his troubles, and that he was out of moves.
Essentially, all instances of bad faith are performances of some kind, in which we’re acting as though our hands are tied. We’re trying to convince ourselves (often by way of convincing others) that we actually can’t do the right thing, when in fact we simply won’t.
Life is a field, not a corridor: Bad faith leads to living inauthentically – living others’ values because you’re afraid of living your own. It is inherently self-defeating.
Sartre wanted us to really feel our freedom, as an almost physical sensation – the sensation of walking down a corridor, then noticing you were in a field the whole time. It is an exhilarating feeling to consciously go the other way at a juncture where you normally act in bad faith. It feels like you’ve unlocked a hidden area with new skills and possibilities, and that such secret rooms are everywhere.
Whenever you feel a sense of “this is just the way it is”, there is probably some bad faith there. For years I assumed I can’t expect to get any writing done after 5pm – the energy or focus just isn’t there, so I’m practically sentenced to spend the evening reading, watching something on a screen, going out or otherwise not working.
This is an old, self-defeating lie, and there’s no telling what it’s cost me. There’s no barrier at 5pm. The line is completely imaginary. There’s just a strong aversion to my work when I get close to that time of day, and I pretend it’s some kind of natural law.
Our lives are riddled with imaginary lines. Bedtime isn’t a real thing. It’s a choice, every time. Going to work is a choice. Eating lunch is a choice. Letting ourselves down is a choice. Meeting a deadline is a choice, and missing it is a choice, as much as we’d like to believe each of those outcomes was inevitable all along.
Noticing bad faith doesn’t cure it, but it makes it harder to ignore. We can let ourselves suffer certain problems for years, if we think they’re happening to us, the way weather does. But once you recognize a particular condition in your life as ultimately voluntary, its days are probably numbered.
I can’t describe to you how strong a feeling it is, but once it’s past 5 pm, I truly feel like I can’t write. It seems like the part of my brain that does that is shuttered like a storefront on a Sunday evening. But when I actually do sit down at six or seven or eight and start typing, the words come out like any other time. The door was always open, I just walked by it again and again and again.”
"All-out War: Ukraine and Russia Surge as Troops ‘Ready for Assault’"
"Fears of all-out war between Ukraine and Russia are intensifying as front line troops described being "ready for the assault". Tensions between the two nations have risen after Ukrainian diplomats called Russia’s growing army “the largest troop movement since the Second World War”. US President Joe Biden issued a warning on Thursday, urging Russian President Vladimir Putin to de-escalate tensions and “refrain from military action.” In a statement, Mr Biden said: “If Russia continues to interfere with our democracy, I’m prepared to take further actions to respond. “Now is the time to de-escalate.” The US cancelled deployment of two warships to the Black Sea on April 14 in order to avoid an unnecessary escalation of the situation."
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"Putin's Ukrainian Judo" (Excerpt)
by Dmitry Orlov
"A terrible war is about to erupt on Russia’s border with the Ukraine - or not - but there is some likelihood of a significant number of people getting killed before project Ukraine is finally over. Given that around 13 thousand people have been killed over the past seven years - the civil war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine has gone on for that long! - this is no laughing matter. But people get desensitized to the mostly low-level warfare. Just over the past couple of weeks a grandfather was shot by a Ukrainian sniper while feeding his chickens and a young boy was killed by a bomb precision-dropped on him from a Ukrainian drone.
But what’s about to happen now is forecasted to be on a different scale: the Ukrainians are moving heavy armor and troops up to the line of separation while the Russians are moving theirs up to their side of the Ukrainian border, a position from which they can blast any and all Ukrainian troops straight out of the gene pool without so much as setting foot on Ukrainian territory—should they wish to do so. The Russians can justify their military involvement by the need to defend their own citizens: over the past seven years half a million residents in eastern Ukraine have applied for and been granted Russian citizenship. But how exactly can Russia defend its citizens while they are stuck in the crossfire between Russian and Ukrainian forces?
The rationale of defending its citizens led to conflict in the briefly Georgian region of South Ossetia, which started on August 8, 2008 and lasted barely a week, leaving Georgia effectively demilitarized. Russia rolled in, Georgia’s troops ran off, Russia confiscated some of the more dangerous war toys and rolled out. Georgia’s paper warriors and their NATO consultants and Israeli trainers were left wiping each others’ tears. Any suggestion of arming and equipping the Georgians since then has been met with groaning and eye-rolling. Is the upcoming event in eastern Ukraine going to be similar to the swift and relatively painless defanging of Georgia in 2008? Given that the two situations are quite different, it seems foolish to think that the approach to resolving them would be the same.
Is it different this time and is World War III is about to erupt with eastern Ukraine being used as a trigger for this conflagration? Do the various statements made at various times by Vladimir Putin provide a solid enough basis for us to guess at what will happen next? Is there a third, typically, infuriatingly Russian approach to resolving this situation, where Russia wins, nobody dies and everyone in the West is left scratching their heads?"
Please view this complete, lengthy, and critically important article here:
"Love That, Not Man Apart From That"
