20 years ago I could open the pages of NYT/WaPo, tune into NPR or watch 60 mins and get a decent idea on how the war in Iraq was going. sure it wasn’t the full picture, but by late 2004 I new about the insurgency, the sectarian conflicts between Sunni and Shia, the disbanding of the Republican Guard and the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
two decades later, I have a small device that can stream data from all over the world and I know next to NOTHING about a years long conflict with a nuclear power. even asking questions about troop levels gets me labelled a Putin lover!
literally everyone who supports this war only knows that Putin Bad/Ukraine Good. insane...
Agree, the Duran is one of the few ways to get decent info short of subscribing to a bunch of UKR and RUS Telegram channels and doing Google Translate.
Great point. At the time, the 2000’s felt like an exceptionally dumb, reductive era in American politics. But there were actual debates aired in mainstream media about troop levels, funding, and the best strategy in Iraq, informed by conditions on the ground and an acknowledgment of the motivations, history, and capabilities of the various factions in the conflict.
With Russia-Ukraine, we’re going to end up with the exact result the “Putin-loving conspiracy theorists” predicted 2 years ago, wasting billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives to reach the resolution the belligerents had already tentatively negotiated in the spring of 2022.
I imagine the outcome of the eventual negotiations will look similar to what could have been achieved in April 2022. the only difference will be the untold suffering, destruction and deaths of well over a half a million lives.
Ukraine is a pawn sacrifice for American grand strategy. As far as the deep state is concerned, the Cold War never ended - Russia (and China) will always be competitors for resources, influence, etc.
The fall of the Soviet Union presented an opportunity to expand America’s sphere of influence deep into Eastern Europe, create new markets for American business, and force Russia to expend resources that could have been devoted to becoming a serious world power again.
This is the game our permanent bureaucracy has always played, and they view the American voter and taxpayer as threat to it, which is why they’re so freaked out by populism at home and abroad.
It helps considerably to be able to read a little Russian, if you know the Greek alphabet and German and French, you can pretty quickly spot "borrow words" and then use deepl.com for good machine translation. Look at meduza.io and the Russian Foreign Ministry web page, also Institute for the Study of War for good maps, and the Telegram channels mentioned therein - many of which are in Russian. Having a rudimentary knowledge of Russian won't help you much with Ukrainian, it's a separate language and a lot harder than Russian. Also see Slavland Chronicles and Edward Slavsquat Substack pages.
I responded to one of his tweets with a shitpost. He responded and unironically told me, in a passive aggressive neocon way, to go sign up for the fighting in Ukraine before I started spouting off on the internet. I told him death threats aren't allowed on X, and he blocked me. It was pretty funny, but also very telling.
Cowards will never show up to weigh in, too vulnerable. The first clown's tweet, Snyder, my immediate, instinctive thought was, "Go pick up a rifle then Timmy."
While the HIB Visa kerfuffle is raging, the only argument I would make in support of immigration is that our K-PhD education is fully captured. They don't teach, they indoctrinate. I guess your PhD from UCLA is, what, not ELITE ENOUGH for these clowns?
I imagine McFaul was pleased by your endorsement of his Senior Research Fellow Jay Bhattacharya though. I know that you know that McFaul is Bhattacharya's boss, and that Obama and McFaul remain very close.
I think he does answer to him in many ways. McFaul is the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute and Bhattacharya has been a Senior Fellow at FSI for many years, and during all of those years McFaul has headed the Committee that selects and approves the Senior Research fellows. There are only 5o Senior Fellows and McFaul is hands-on operationally.
Bhattacharya has also been a Research Associate at Acumen LLC since 2007, and Acumen LLC has received over $980,000,000 in HHS/NIH funding since 2007. Bhattacharya has sat on many NIH committees and acted as Principal Investigator for studies at NIH since the early 2000s. His private business interests, and who he has worked for at Acumen LLC pose important questions.
The rest of his NIH insider experience could be a qualifying factor for him in many people's eyes, yet he and his handlers lie about it by posing him as the outsider, the rebel coming in to impose sweeping changes. I just want people to tell the truth.
jay b is fake opposition. he was shilling for the death shot as late as fall 2021. as you would expect from someone whose field is "health economics" i.e. how to get rid of old people as cheaply as possible
Ukraine wins by getting NATO protection with a path towards NATO membership. Putin didn’t invade for crappy territory he invaded to win the hearts and minds of Ukrainians…and so he has already lost.
Now Trump did surrender to the Taliban but that was the correct decision so he has no problem making difficult decisions that are unpopular…but helping Ukraine is on our interests because they are degrading an adversary’s military capabilities and thus making Americans in the homeland safer. So unfortunately the Americans deployed to Afghanistan didn’t make Americans safer after about February 2002. And Iraq was counterproductive from day 1. Israeli soldiers are also making Americans safer and Biden is correct to help them.
Good one RG , all the psyops is from a keyboard. …. Even telehealth. Too many keyboard know it alls . It will be interesting, how this all ends with Ukraine / Russia. .
Right, and millions suffer and are dead, mutilated for life and displaced with a destroyed infra structure and for what? for what?!! Not to speak of the many billions borrowed by a bankrupt government and spent on this worthless war while serious problems at home go unaddressed. Insane. Perhaps I should just add the posibility of WWIII with nuclear armed powers, a much greater real possibility than some nebulous claim that cow farts are destroying our world and our chickens need to be slaughtered because of "bird flu" scare, didn't we learn anything from the co vid nonsense?
Putin has always said that having NATO in Ukraine was a non starter. So when Pres Biden makes moves in that direction it is seen as saber rattling by Russia.
It's a resource conflict, oil, coal, and gas formations off the coast of Crimea and the northern Black Sea, and in a band going across Ukraine to Moldova/Romania - and the second largest supply of lithium and rare earth metals in Europe. Russian oligarchs want it, so do Ukrainian oligarchs, so do US megacorps. The Ukrainian people have ended up sucking hind tit and getting little good out of this incredible wealth, they could have a US/European quality of life if not for the rampant corruption and theft, but behind Russia those people are the second poorest people in Europe. It's a battle of kleptocracies.
Our invasion of Iraq was about resources…Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is about spheres of influence. That’s why Putin has already lost and so now it’s just a temper tantrum to inflict as much pain as possible to save face.
That's the way Aleksandr Dugin saw it, for sure, in his Foundations of Geopolitics, but Putin has a PhD in Natural Resource Economics from St Petersburg Mining University (1997) and I think he was trying to take a more pragmatic approach - resources plus adjacent warmwater port as opposed to Siberia/Far East - Siberia is depleting pretty fast, they're down to fracking, there's lots of exploration in the Far East, but it's (a) pretty cold and (b) right across the Amur River from China, and China has made a grab for that land, before, in 1969. Then, the Soviet Army was pretty easily able to kick China out; today's Russian Army, after 3 years of debacle and stalemate in Ukraine, not so much. And with the loss of Syria, he's screwed and royally so - Libya won't make up for that loss. So he's really got to get Eastern Ukraine and Crimea or he's going to take a flying lesson - luckily for him, he's got enough useful idiots in the West to get his way by bluffing, bluster, and deception - unless people wise up. We'll see about that...
Natural gas is now the most important fossil fuel and there is an abundance of global natural gas. The Bush administration was awful but their one success was Qatar which was supposed to export LNG to America…which is insane to think about in 2025 as America is energy dominant. Putin was in the catbird seat in 2008 when Bush/Cheney had almost destroyed America…now he’s desperate because his competitive advantage (huge natural gas reserves) isn’t a big deal thanks to fracking.
And Putin’s most successful disinformation campaign was anti-fracking disinformation that liberals in the West like Greta amplified…and yet in 2022 American progressives failed to implement penalties on fossil fuel producers because Putin invaded Ukraine and Europe needed our LNG.
As Americans we believe some causes are worth fighting and dying for…who are you to judge Ukrainians for fighting for something they believe in?? France helped us in our war for independence and helping other countries in wars against common adversaries has always been an option especially for super powers like America.
If war makes lil’ Cindy Lou Who upset then she can write a letter to Santy Claus asking for peace! Oh shucks, Santy Claus just came by and it will be another year begging he can bring peace to the world! I’m so sorry, Cindy Lou Who!! 😢
It's quite obviously not true that Ukrainians are fighting for a cause that they believe in. A third of the country has fled, and many of the rest are trying to escape the war.
Ok, Dick Cheney. I guess you know more than Ukrainians. At a certain point you just have to trust other countries to do what they think is best for their country…and you can stay in Jackson Hole or Kiawah Island with the .00001%.
Actually it’s absolutely possible that we see things more clearly from here than Ukrainians do. People in Gaza believe Hamas is winning still. They’re obviously deluded and from what I hear from my friends who are contracting over there, most Ukrainians actually know they’re losing. He wears his trump shirt all over Ukraine and many express relief this will all be over soon.
But you understand the territory being fought over isn’t what this war is about?? Zelensky just said he would part with the territory for NATO security guarantees. So the only way for Trump to end the war is to stop helping Ukraine and then Zelensky’s government will collapse and Putin will install a puppet. Or in the alternative Trump could just give Putin the territory they currently occupy and say if Putin crosses the new borders we will hit their troops with everything we got. Or Trump can keep helping Ukraine until Putin gives up or is replaced. I think he will just continue helping Ukraine and hope Putin comes to his senses because Ukraine will never be part of Russia’s sphere of influence as long as Putin is their leader.
2.) We can not and should not provide those NATO guarantees and Russia shouldn’t accept those terms. Not in their best interest and we’d never permit Mexico to do such a thing.
3.) ok.. why should Americans be paying billions to artificially prop up Zelenskyy?
4.) Trump should do exactly this - Russified areas go to Russia. No more expansion. The end. I don’t care which passport these people carry and it wasn’t worth committing demographic suicide over.
5.) Putin isn’t getting deposed or replaced. Retarded to even act as if this is an “option.”
6.) it will be in the Russian sphere of influence and Russia shouldn’t accept anything else. This is realpolitik and it’s the same reason we would crush Mexico if China was making overtures towards them.
Russia is a great nation. Ukraine isn’t. Russia is also a dying star that is no real threat to us beyond they’re aging nuclear weapons. There’s no real reason for us to need to continue to hem them in. If the Europeans are so inclined they’re welcome to fight their own battles, but of course they won’t.
I'm no Putin FanBoy, but thus far in this conflict he's been the only adult in a room filled with neocon psychopaths. Interestingly I have now had the benefit of studying more bits and pieces of Russian history.....no wonder they Sovietized; they've been under attack by foreign nations for centuries! I suppose one of their options was to expand as opposed to simply protecting themselves (Russia). That didn't work out well, but at least stopped the never-ending wars against them for three generations. They spoke their piece and signed the Minsk Agreement in 1991; as far as I can tell, theyre the only country who hasn't broken that agreement yet. The authentic problem is neocons like Snyder and McFaul, who would both fight to the last Ukrainian....without fighting themselves, you know?
I keep hearing this claim, but it’s not true. Or rather it’s sorta kinda maybe true. When the Berlin Wall fell and German reunification occurred, there were a series of meetings between US and Soviet diplomats, some of which involved allies. Some people at those meetings claim that assurances were given that NATO would not be expanded. Others disagree. I wasn’t there; I don’t know.
But what I do know is this: if you want a BINDING international agreement that will constrain the actions of successor governments years later when the parties to the oral representations have left the scene, there is a way to do it. You sign a TREATY. A written document ratified according to the domestic law of the nation in question. If Gorbachev had wanted to make that agreement binding, he could have demanded a treaty to that effect.
If such an agreement had been written down and ratified by the US Senate, you’d have a point. But Russia entered into a binding treaty when the Soviet Union broke up. It agreed to respect the territory of Ukraine, a successor state after the Soviet Union dissolved. The US might or might not have made oral representations that were subsequently repudiated. The two are not the same. “Get it in writing” applies to international relations.
And you know what? People who bitch about NATO expansion all act like only the US has agency. All of these former Soviet states and parts of the Evil Empire asked to join NATO. They weren’t dragooned or invaded or occupied. And countries that didn’t want to join NATO were free not to do so -- nobody molested Finland or Sweden during the Cold War. The reason that all these countries want to be in NATO is that Russia is a really bad neighbor.
After learning just a smidgen of what's come out about US efforts to overthrow and destabilize unfriendly governments I'm not prepared to accept unquestioningly that the former Soviet states and parts of the evil empire acted totally with their own agency in seeking NATO membership. Not blaming the US if and to the extent it soft-dragooned any such state, just being grown up enough to recognize that This Is What Countries Do.
Except that ignores the related and knotty issue of the "right to self-determination" and where this sits. The oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk declared autonomous status and were attacked by Kiev for their pains so they declared independence and beat off the attack. Russia then assisted the new people's republics and ultimately, in the face of rising threats of imminent military attack, weighed in with military force on their invitation. Putin is nothing if not legalistic and I think would argue that there has been no violation of UN articles. He didn't just wake up one day and decide to invade. There's much history. Whether a part polity is 'allowed' to declare UDI is a moot point as they often do so. Kosovo, Eritrea, South Sudan, Abkhasia and Catalonia come to mind but not all these moves are self-initiated. It's complicated.
I have had at least 20 different people in my Californian town say “why don’t you love Ukraine” or “why don’t you want Ukraine to win” when in relation to political ideologies, not once have they had a military aged husband, not once have they had a military aged son. They simply cannot comprehend that if you send young men to die you better be doing it for general societal safety. Not just to make your butthole tingly as I get shipped out of my home to die in a country that wants me dead as much as there enemy. They wanted to kill the babies with the abortion, the kids with the trans movement, and the young men with Ukraine.
It’s not just about money. There’s a whole contingent of people in our international policy apparatus who are prosecuting their blood grievances over the pogroms under the deluded notion that “the Russians” were more responsible than Ukrainians. That Zelenskyy is a coethnic probably contributes.
Yes. I wonder if it has something to do with the structure of our electoral system, which encourages a two-party, two-option binary, such that disagreeing with Candidate A or Party X is taken by the intellectually lazy to be the same as agreeing with Candidate B or Party Y. It may also have to do with the northeastern Puritan strain of American society.
I see it as a media fabrication borne largely of our failed system of higher ed that instructs kids too low IQ to go into STEM, telling them nonsense like "gender is a social construct" and misrepresenting any opposition to such nonsense as bigotry, to take a basic example.
They're doing exactly as they are taught. Mindlessly repeat any gibberish that comes from on high, then hyper-moralize it and apply a Manichean binary to it.
Edit: Though your hypothesis might have some merit to it as well... It may explain why we only have options "A" and "B", but it doesn't explain why "B" is retarded.
“Don’t worry with the new ‘Google Air Space’, we’re able to project advertisements and notifications directly into the sky! To save you the hassle of taking out your phone!!!”
I posted something similar at the start of the war. ‘Hypothetical situation - US decides they have had enough of border crossings. They take 10 miles of Mexico across the entire Length of the border. The world rallies around Mexico and ‘helps’ them. The US and Mexico go to war. Who wins? Ukraine will be destroyed by us helping them.’ Man! Was I jumped on. I also dissed Z. Liberal women went after me. Lefties, now pro war, insisted Russia was done. Putin would be ousted and Russia would fall to Ukraine! The stupidity was over the top. There is no path to victory. None. Ukraine has been ruined.
It is remarkable however, that some eighty percent of Ukrainians want to keep fighting. The polls say so. How many of the 38 million remaining pick up the phone or answer the door to the “pollsters”? Riiight.
Doncha know they hung their blue and yellow flags, struck a virtue signalling pose, and voila, it was all over in their minds. Don't confuse them with facts or details.
It must be awful to start 2025 with NPR. Listening to MORNING EDITION is like stuffing feces into your ears.
Of all the things we have to worry about (e.g. Islamic takeover of the USA), the fate of Ukraine is just silly. Russia will not stand to have a NATO member on its border. Maybe a few more hundred clones fired into Kiev this week will expedite matters. Regardless, Trump will have stopped the killing in eighteen days and, once the rioting in DC, NYC, LA, and San Francisco have been put down, life will be sweet. Just sweet.
I had a short drive home from Trader Joe's, and thought I'd just check in with NPR very briefly to see what the world currently looks like to idiots. Imagine my surprise.
“Russia will not stand to have a NATO member on its border.”
Correction: Russia apparently will not stand to have *yet another* NATO member on its border. There are already six, as of 2023 (not including the maritime border with the U.S. between the Diomede islands).
I think the thing about Ukraine is that for many Russians, including Putin, as he set out in his long historical essay in 2021, Ukraine joining would be more like having a NATO member within its borders.
It's like having your spouse joining NATO against you. The economic, cultural, historical, family ties between the countries are high. Think Canada joining China against the US.
The Diomede Islands will never become a flashpoint between East and West. The current war between Ukraine in Russia is a practice round before NATO invades Russia via Norway.
Wonder why our loving establishment (1) made war on seven Islamic countries, creating lots of refugees who hate the U.S., then (2) opened the borders and even transported and paid angry refugees to move here? Then they tell us ISIS terrorists are here to kill us, especially Trump, so we should give up all our rights to "stay safe," and if anything happens to martyr the hated Trump, we should definitely blame Iran and turn it into a parking lot. Meanwhile, our ISIS terrorist allies abroad have just helped overthrow Syria, a major project of the Israeli and U.S. governments for at least a decade. Nice of ISIS to help out.
People don’t plan that far in advance or with that level of competence. Bill Kristol and David Frum really did think Iraq would be Sweden in a decade. I think Cheney thought it would become an American puppet state.
Remember how network television news used to praise the Kurdish women warriors who were largely responsible for the destruction of the ISIS caliphate? President Trump was as bad as Biden when he turned his back on the Kurds. People in Afghanistan know just how trustworthy Uncle Sam is. The chickens are coming home to roost.
Finland has a long border with Russia, and it is now in NATO. If Putin’s strategic goal was to prevent NATO from expanding to his border, it backfired spectacularly.
If St. Petersburg is a target, American bombers can level it. Of course, that would lead to an attack on an equally valuable asset in America. Would it be Disney World or Times Square?
There ya go again with the patriarchy stacking up the cisgender haypersons, er strawmen, wait... isnt Logic 101 racist? I thought so. Can we please refer to strawmen as straw-fluid? In case they realize theyre being oppressed too?
First, I agree that we should help Ukraine defend itself from the Russians. I also agree that they are in a losing fight. They are outnumbered at least 3 to 1 in people, AFV, Artillery. They don’t have an effective Air Force and their enemy has a semi-effective Air Force. These are overwhelming disadvantages. They have outfought the Russians, but not enough to make up for the basic disadvantage of being outnumbered. They will inevitably lose a war of attrition. This is very much like the American Civil War. The South outfought the North, but simply could not make up for the overwhelming advantages of numbers held by the North. A negotiated peace is the only way out for them.
The best time to have tried this was right after they thoroughly defeated the initial invasion. But for some reason, the NATO leadership encouraged them to continue fighting. Not sure what they were thinking because the basic situation was clear from jump.
They didn’t defeat the initial invasion. The Russians held back from Kiev as a show of good faith going into the peace talks that were subsequently wrecked by NATO.
I think your analysis is basically correct. They have outfought the Russians, but not enough to win. As others have pointed out, they’ve demographically destroyed themselves doing it. What others have not pointed out is that Russia has done the same. And Russia has been cut off from the US petroleum industry, which is long-run devastating, because much of their oil and gas requires serious technology to access, and the Russians have systematically destroyed their own ability to produce new technology.
The comparison to the American Civil War is inapt, and lapses a bit into the “lost cause” mythology. With the advantage of decent geography, interior lines of communication, and a fundamentally defensive war aim, the Confederacy could have won, despite the Northern material advantages. They outfought the Union forces in the Eastern theater for the first few years, though Lee’s aggressive forays into the North caused serious attrition to his army. And the Confederates blundered at Gettysburg.
However, in the West, Grant and Sherman and to a lesser extent Thomas outfought their Confederate counterparts by a large margin. The tussles around northern Virginia were important, but consolidating control of the Mississippi and occupying Tennessee was strategically devastating to the South. Once Grant went East and took overall command, the jig was up.
I think it’s important to point out that there was a path to avoiding the whole war. Putin and Zelenskyy were on that path. And Biden and Boris Johnson scuttled it.
This whole thing is a contrivance where the type of mimetic culture shitheads smeared their poopy symbols around and created a REAL WORLD PROBLEM out of it.
But now it’s a real world problem with some very basic elements. America withdrawing support from a proxy we WALKED HEADFIRST INTO A WAR is international suicide.
For similar reasons Putin can’t win anything meaningful or the entire western alliance starts presuming he’ll do it again and maybe he really doesn’t start thinking he can do it again.
So we’re stuck in a position I would call a Pyrrhic Stalemate.
The only way this ends without breeding more wars is if the border doesn’t move an inch and all that death was for nothing.
It’s very good news that Ukraine has taken Russian territory because now they have something to give back.
BTW - I’m no expert either but it doesn’t take an expert to see this dynamic.
“We have experts who gloss over the obvious problems that infest their glib theories, generally unchallenged, and policies that are based on bulldozing rather than arguments.” Describes our elite experts perfectly. What was it William F. Buckley said about the first few hundred people in the phone book?!!
An historic tragedy and waste of life. Never had to happen. It would be so great if the people actually responsible for it were held accountable. Maybe the FBI can release Anthony Weiners emails and/or Russia will release all the emails between Clinton and Obama about how they wanted to start this war and then we can really know the truth and hold the people accountable.
Would ask McFaul to weigh in, but he has ignored my emails for years and blocked me on I-still-call-it-Twitter.
20 years ago I could open the pages of NYT/WaPo, tune into NPR or watch 60 mins and get a decent idea on how the war in Iraq was going. sure it wasn’t the full picture, but by late 2004 I new about the insurgency, the sectarian conflicts between Sunni and Shia, the disbanding of the Republican Guard and the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
two decades later, I have a small device that can stream data from all over the world and I know next to NOTHING about a years long conflict with a nuclear power. even asking questions about troop levels gets me labelled a Putin lover!
literally everyone who supports this war only knows that Putin Bad/Ukraine Good. insane...
listen to the Duran Report podcast. RFKjr has said that if he only has time to listen to one podcast, it's the Duran
Agree, the Duran is one of the few ways to get decent info short of subscribing to a bunch of UKR and RUS Telegram channels and doing Google Translate.
Great point. At the time, the 2000’s felt like an exceptionally dumb, reductive era in American politics. But there were actual debates aired in mainstream media about troop levels, funding, and the best strategy in Iraq, informed by conditions on the ground and an acknowledgment of the motivations, history, and capabilities of the various factions in the conflict.
With Russia-Ukraine, we’re going to end up with the exact result the “Putin-loving conspiracy theorists” predicted 2 years ago, wasting billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives to reach the resolution the belligerents had already tentatively negotiated in the spring of 2022.
100%
I imagine the outcome of the eventual negotiations will look similar to what could have been achieved in April 2022. the only difference will be the untold suffering, destruction and deaths of well over a half a million lives.
for what?
For what? Some really large balances in Swiss bank accounts.
Ukraine is a pawn sacrifice for American grand strategy. As far as the deep state is concerned, the Cold War never ended - Russia (and China) will always be competitors for resources, influence, etc.
The fall of the Soviet Union presented an opportunity to expand America’s sphere of influence deep into Eastern Europe, create new markets for American business, and force Russia to expend resources that could have been devoted to becoming a serious world power again.
This is the game our permanent bureaucracy has always played, and they view the American voter and taxpayer as threat to it, which is why they’re so freaked out by populism at home and abroad.
It helps considerably to be able to read a little Russian, if you know the Greek alphabet and German and French, you can pretty quickly spot "borrow words" and then use deepl.com for good machine translation. Look at meduza.io and the Russian Foreign Ministry web page, also Institute for the Study of War for good maps, and the Telegram channels mentioned therein - many of which are in Russian. Having a rudimentary knowledge of Russian won't help you much with Ukrainian, it's a separate language and a lot harder than Russian. Also see Slavland Chronicles and Edward Slavsquat Substack pages.
I responded to one of his tweets with a shitpost. He responded and unironically told me, in a passive aggressive neocon way, to go sign up for the fighting in Ukraine before I started spouting off on the internet. I told him death threats aren't allowed on X, and he blocked me. It was pretty funny, but also very telling.
He's a corpulent coward hiding behind a big desk and lots of cash from the Leftoid Neocons at Stanford.
Cowards will never show up to weigh in, too vulnerable. The first clown's tweet, Snyder, my immediate, instinctive thought was, "Go pick up a rifle then Timmy."
While the HIB Visa kerfuffle is raging, the only argument I would make in support of immigration is that our K-PhD education is fully captured. They don't teach, they indoctrinate. I guess your PhD from UCLA is, what, not ELITE ENOUGH for these clowns?
Cowards.
bsn
I imagine McFaul was pleased by your endorsement of his Senior Research Fellow Jay Bhattacharya though. I know that you know that McFaul is Bhattacharya's boss, and that Obama and McFaul remain very close.
I know where they work, but I don't think Bhattacharya answers to McFaul like a "boss" in a corporate setting, getting his approval for his work.
I think he does answer to him in many ways. McFaul is the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute and Bhattacharya has been a Senior Fellow at FSI for many years, and during all of those years McFaul has headed the Committee that selects and approves the Senior Research fellows. There are only 5o Senior Fellows and McFaul is hands-on operationally.
Bhattacharya has also been a Research Associate at Acumen LLC since 2007, and Acumen LLC has received over $980,000,000 in HHS/NIH funding since 2007. Bhattacharya has sat on many NIH committees and acted as Principal Investigator for studies at NIH since the early 2000s. His private business interests, and who he has worked for at Acumen LLC pose important questions.
The rest of his NIH insider experience could be a qualifying factor for him in many people's eyes, yet he and his handlers lie about it by posing him as the outsider, the rebel coming in to impose sweeping changes. I just want people to tell the truth.
🎯
jay b is fake opposition. he was shilling for the death shot as late as fall 2021. as you would expect from someone whose field is "health economics" i.e. how to get rid of old people as cheaply as possible
Ukraine wins by getting NATO protection with a path towards NATO membership. Putin didn’t invade for crappy territory he invaded to win the hearts and minds of Ukrainians…and so he has already lost.
Now Trump did surrender to the Taliban but that was the correct decision so he has no problem making difficult decisions that are unpopular…but helping Ukraine is on our interests because they are degrading an adversary’s military capabilities and thus making Americans in the homeland safer. So unfortunately the Americans deployed to Afghanistan didn’t make Americans safer after about February 2002. And Iraq was counterproductive from day 1. Israeli soldiers are also making Americans safer and Biden is correct to help them.
Chris-
Every time one of these lawn-flag-flying-freedom-fighters says something like this online i reply with something like this:
Easy for you to say from a keyboard.
Why don't you ask the people who live in the "reclaimed" land to see what they think.
I think you'll be surprised with their answers.
I don't agree with Putins actions...but alas there's only one constant in mankind:
Conflict over real estate.
Let me know how you plan to fix that from your keyboard
CRICKETS
Good one RG , all the psyops is from a keyboard. …. Even telehealth. Too many keyboard know it alls . It will be interesting, how this all ends with Ukraine / Russia. .
It ends exactly how it began:
Russia gets the land they want and Ukraine doesn't get into NATO.
While all the usual scoundrels fatten their wallets.
Right, and millions suffer and are dead, mutilated for life and displaced with a destroyed infra structure and for what? for what?!! Not to speak of the many billions borrowed by a bankrupt government and spent on this worthless war while serious problems at home go unaddressed. Insane. Perhaps I should just add the posibility of WWIII with nuclear armed powers, a much greater real possibility than some nebulous claim that cow farts are destroying our world and our chickens need to be slaughtered because of "bird flu" scare, didn't we learn anything from the co vid nonsense?
I suspect much, if not most, of those billions of US taxpayer dollars are, and have been, stolen.
No doubt at all, and laundered to you probably have a pretty good idea where and to whom.
From your keyboard....could not agree more!
Yes indeed! and thank you. Nice to see so many aware unbrainwashed people on this site.
And the world gets to see that the paper tiger that is the West.
🎯
Putin has always said that having NATO in Ukraine was a non starter. So when Pres Biden makes moves in that direction it is seen as saber rattling by Russia.
As was intended.
And hundreds of thousands of deaths. 😞
^^This!^^
It's a resource conflict, oil, coal, and gas formations off the coast of Crimea and the northern Black Sea, and in a band going across Ukraine to Moldova/Romania - and the second largest supply of lithium and rare earth metals in Europe. Russian oligarchs want it, so do Ukrainian oligarchs, so do US megacorps. The Ukrainian people have ended up sucking hind tit and getting little good out of this incredible wealth, they could have a US/European quality of life if not for the rampant corruption and theft, but behind Russia those people are the second poorest people in Europe. It's a battle of kleptocracies.
Our invasion of Iraq was about resources…Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is about spheres of influence. That’s why Putin has already lost and so now it’s just a temper tantrum to inflict as much pain as possible to save face.
That's the way Aleksandr Dugin saw it, for sure, in his Foundations of Geopolitics, but Putin has a PhD in Natural Resource Economics from St Petersburg Mining University (1997) and I think he was trying to take a more pragmatic approach - resources plus adjacent warmwater port as opposed to Siberia/Far East - Siberia is depleting pretty fast, they're down to fracking, there's lots of exploration in the Far East, but it's (a) pretty cold and (b) right across the Amur River from China, and China has made a grab for that land, before, in 1969. Then, the Soviet Army was pretty easily able to kick China out; today's Russian Army, after 3 years of debacle and stalemate in Ukraine, not so much. And with the loss of Syria, he's screwed and royally so - Libya won't make up for that loss. So he's really got to get Eastern Ukraine and Crimea or he's going to take a flying lesson - luckily for him, he's got enough useful idiots in the West to get his way by bluffing, bluster, and deception - unless people wise up. We'll see about that...
Natural gas is now the most important fossil fuel and there is an abundance of global natural gas. The Bush administration was awful but their one success was Qatar which was supposed to export LNG to America…which is insane to think about in 2025 as America is energy dominant. Putin was in the catbird seat in 2008 when Bush/Cheney had almost destroyed America…now he’s desperate because his competitive advantage (huge natural gas reserves) isn’t a big deal thanks to fracking.
And Putin’s most successful disinformation campaign was anti-fracking disinformation that liberals in the West like Greta amplified…and yet in 2022 American progressives failed to implement penalties on fossil fuel producers because Putin invaded Ukraine and Europe needed our LNG.
As Americans we believe some causes are worth fighting and dying for…who are you to judge Ukrainians for fighting for something they believe in?? France helped us in our war for independence and helping other countries in wars against common adversaries has always been an option especially for super powers like America.
If war makes lil’ Cindy Lou Who upset then she can write a letter to Santy Claus asking for peace! Oh shucks, Santy Claus just came by and it will be another year begging he can bring peace to the world! I’m so sorry, Cindy Lou Who!! 😢
"...who are you to judge Ukrainians for fighting for something they believe in??"
The Ukrainian military is evaporating. Ukraine has a demographic crisis, a conscription crisis, and a desertion crisis.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/01/02/ukrainian-soldiers-go-awol-before-shot-fired/
It's quite obviously not true that Ukrainians are fighting for a cause that they believe in. A third of the country has fled, and many of the rest are trying to escape the war.
Ok, Dick Cheney. I guess you know more than Ukrainians. At a certain point you just have to trust other countries to do what they think is best for their country…and you can stay in Jackson Hole or Kiawah Island with the .00001%.
Actually it’s absolutely possible that we see things more clearly from here than Ukrainians do. People in Gaza believe Hamas is winning still. They’re obviously deluded and from what I hear from my friends who are contracting over there, most Ukrainians actually know they’re losing. He wears his trump shirt all over Ukraine and many express relief this will all be over soon.
But you understand the territory being fought over isn’t what this war is about?? Zelensky just said he would part with the territory for NATO security guarantees. So the only way for Trump to end the war is to stop helping Ukraine and then Zelensky’s government will collapse and Putin will install a puppet. Or in the alternative Trump could just give Putin the territory they currently occupy and say if Putin crosses the new borders we will hit their troops with everything we got. Or Trump can keep helping Ukraine until Putin gives up or is replaced. I think he will just continue helping Ukraine and hope Putin comes to his senses because Ukraine will never be part of Russia’s sphere of influence as long as Putin is their leader.
1.) Dont care what this war is about.
2.) We can not and should not provide those NATO guarantees and Russia shouldn’t accept those terms. Not in their best interest and we’d never permit Mexico to do such a thing.
3.) ok.. why should Americans be paying billions to artificially prop up Zelenskyy?
4.) Trump should do exactly this - Russified areas go to Russia. No more expansion. The end. I don’t care which passport these people carry and it wasn’t worth committing demographic suicide over.
5.) Putin isn’t getting deposed or replaced. Retarded to even act as if this is an “option.”
6.) it will be in the Russian sphere of influence and Russia shouldn’t accept anything else. This is realpolitik and it’s the same reason we would crush Mexico if China was making overtures towards them.
Russia is a great nation. Ukraine isn’t. Russia is also a dying star that is no real threat to us beyond they’re aging nuclear weapons. There’s no real reason for us to need to continue to hem them in. If the Europeans are so inclined they’re welcome to fight their own battles, but of course they won’t.
I'm no Putin FanBoy, but thus far in this conflict he's been the only adult in a room filled with neocon psychopaths. Interestingly I have now had the benefit of studying more bits and pieces of Russian history.....no wonder they Sovietized; they've been under attack by foreign nations for centuries! I suppose one of their options was to expand as opposed to simply protecting themselves (Russia). That didn't work out well, but at least stopped the never-ending wars against them for three generations. They spoke their piece and signed the Minsk Agreement in 1991; as far as I can tell, theyre the only country who hasn't broken that agreement yet. The authentic problem is neocons like Snyder and McFaul, who would both fight to the last Ukrainian....without fighting themselves, you know?
Politicians & neocons find it pretty damn easy to spend other peoples money & sacrifice other peoples kids to war.
Nailed it
Except they agreed to recognize Ukraine as an independent nation and respect its borders. That’s a pretty big violation.
And we agreed nit to expand NATO east....a pretty big violation as well.
I keep hearing this claim, but it’s not true. Or rather it’s sorta kinda maybe true. When the Berlin Wall fell and German reunification occurred, there were a series of meetings between US and Soviet diplomats, some of which involved allies. Some people at those meetings claim that assurances were given that NATO would not be expanded. Others disagree. I wasn’t there; I don’t know.
But what I do know is this: if you want a BINDING international agreement that will constrain the actions of successor governments years later when the parties to the oral representations have left the scene, there is a way to do it. You sign a TREATY. A written document ratified according to the domestic law of the nation in question. If Gorbachev had wanted to make that agreement binding, he could have demanded a treaty to that effect.
If such an agreement had been written down and ratified by the US Senate, you’d have a point. But Russia entered into a binding treaty when the Soviet Union broke up. It agreed to respect the territory of Ukraine, a successor state after the Soviet Union dissolved. The US might or might not have made oral representations that were subsequently repudiated. The two are not the same. “Get it in writing” applies to international relations.
And you know what? People who bitch about NATO expansion all act like only the US has agency. All of these former Soviet states and parts of the Evil Empire asked to join NATO. They weren’t dragooned or invaded or occupied. And countries that didn’t want to join NATO were free not to do so -- nobody molested Finland or Sweden during the Cold War. The reason that all these countries want to be in NATO is that Russia is a really bad neighbor.
After learning just a smidgen of what's come out about US efforts to overthrow and destabilize unfriendly governments I'm not prepared to accept unquestioningly that the former Soviet states and parts of the evil empire acted totally with their own agency in seeking NATO membership. Not blaming the US if and to the extent it soft-dragooned any such state, just being grown up enough to recognize that This Is What Countries Do.
Uummm, there is this agreement called The Minsk Agreement….just saying.
Except that ignores the related and knotty issue of the "right to self-determination" and where this sits. The oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk declared autonomous status and were attacked by Kiev for their pains so they declared independence and beat off the attack. Russia then assisted the new people's republics and ultimately, in the face of rising threats of imminent military attack, weighed in with military force on their invitation. Putin is nothing if not legalistic and I think would argue that there has been no violation of UN articles. He didn't just wake up one day and decide to invade. There's much history. Whether a part polity is 'allowed' to declare UDI is a moot point as they often do so. Kosovo, Eritrea, South Sudan, Abkhasia and Catalonia come to mind but not all these moves are self-initiated. It's complicated.
I have had at least 20 different people in my Californian town say “why don’t you love Ukraine” or “why don’t you want Ukraine to win” when in relation to political ideologies, not once have they had a military aged husband, not once have they had a military aged son. They simply cannot comprehend that if you send young men to die you better be doing it for general societal safety. Not just to make your butthole tingly as I get shipped out of my home to die in a country that wants me dead as much as there enemy. They wanted to kill the babies with the abortion, the kids with the trans movement, and the young men with Ukraine.
I’ve generally responded along the lines of…
“Why are you cheering on one million dead ukranians?”
Also
“Why are you cheering on a nato proxy war with a nuclear power”
Its like a video or sports game to these people. Its easy for them to support when there are no personal costs involved.
I live in an area with a substantial Ukrainian population.
Utterly comical seeing military aged young men who just got here with their “Slava Ukraini” stickers and tee shirts.
How about you go back over there and contribute if you feel so strongly?
Elon predicted that the only variable in the outcome of the war is how many died. Ceding the land is forgone.
The disgusting avarice that keeps this Ukraine grift running must not be allowed to continue.
Biden is keeping the funding going down to the last, bitter kickback.
has anybody seen hunter lately?
The ovens were still warm at aushwitz when the allies arrived.
Someone is always willing to catch money that others throw away. The problem is worst when the catchers "win" elections.
It’s not just about money. There’s a whole contingent of people in our international policy apparatus who are prosecuting their blood grievances over the pogroms under the deluded notion that “the Russians” were more responsible than Ukrainians. That Zelenskyy is a coethnic probably contributes.
2024 (and 2025's) "Objectively pro-Saddam".
I couldn't stand the GOP then. Can't stand the Dems now.
It's amazing how many people fall for the same basic false-dichotomy trick over and over again.
But what the fuck do I know, I don't even believe in Science..
Yes. I wonder if it has something to do with the structure of our electoral system, which encourages a two-party, two-option binary, such that disagreeing with Candidate A or Party X is taken by the intellectually lazy to be the same as agreeing with Candidate B or Party Y. It may also have to do with the northeastern Puritan strain of American society.
I see it as a media fabrication borne largely of our failed system of higher ed that instructs kids too low IQ to go into STEM, telling them nonsense like "gender is a social construct" and misrepresenting any opposition to such nonsense as bigotry, to take a basic example.
They're doing exactly as they are taught. Mindlessly repeat any gibberish that comes from on high, then hyper-moralize it and apply a Manichean binary to it.
Edit: Though your hypothesis might have some merit to it as well... It may explain why we only have options "A" and "B", but it doesn't explain why "B" is retarded.
That's very interesting. When I was writing about the northeastern Puritanism, the word "Manichean" came to mind.
The discourse on Ukraine has become retarded, if not, subtarded.
Academic chicken hawks are the worst. I learned my lesson with Iraq. I see the same MO here.
But some of those tards in the academic Idiocracy get kickass salaries!
It’s only the second of January and I already want to buy an island and live with puppies.
And kitties!
But no people - or TV.
“Don’t worry with the new ‘Google Air Space’, we’re able to project advertisements and notifications directly into the sky! To save you the hassle of taking out your phone!!!”
Guess MY island is going to have to be a long, long way from what passes for "civilization".
I posted something similar at the start of the war. ‘Hypothetical situation - US decides they have had enough of border crossings. They take 10 miles of Mexico across the entire Length of the border. The world rallies around Mexico and ‘helps’ them. The US and Mexico go to war. Who wins? Ukraine will be destroyed by us helping them.’ Man! Was I jumped on. I also dissed Z. Liberal women went after me. Lefties, now pro war, insisted Russia was done. Putin would be ousted and Russia would fall to Ukraine! The stupidity was over the top. There is no path to victory. None. Ukraine has been ruined.
It is remarkable however, that some eighty percent of Ukrainians want to keep fighting. The polls say so. How many of the 38 million remaining pick up the phone or answer the door to the “pollsters”? Riiight.
Not a chance. I am sure 80% wouldn’t have wanted a war with Russia two years ago.
I am confident their polling is about as reliable as ours. For all we know Ann Selzer is working over there now.
And "Joe Biden" got 81 million votes.
Doncha know they hung their blue and yellow flags, struck a virtue signalling pose, and voila, it was all over in their minds. Don't confuse them with facts or details.
It must be awful to start 2025 with NPR. Listening to MORNING EDITION is like stuffing feces into your ears.
Of all the things we have to worry about (e.g. Islamic takeover of the USA), the fate of Ukraine is just silly. Russia will not stand to have a NATO member on its border. Maybe a few more hundred clones fired into Kiev this week will expedite matters. Regardless, Trump will have stopped the killing in eighteen days and, once the rioting in DC, NYC, LA, and San Francisco have been put down, life will be sweet. Just sweet.
I had a short drive home from Trader Joe's, and thought I'd just check in with NPR very briefly to see what the world currently looks like to idiots. Imagine my surprise.
I used to RELIGIOUSLY listen to NPR in the morning until 2015 when it clearly becamse nothing but a mouthpiece for Progressive Democrat Socialism.
“Russia will not stand to have a NATO member on its border.”
Correction: Russia apparently will not stand to have *yet another* NATO member on its border. There are already six, as of 2023 (not including the maritime border with the U.S. between the Diomede islands).
I think the thing about Ukraine is that for many Russians, including Putin, as he set out in his long historical essay in 2021, Ukraine joining would be more like having a NATO member within its borders.
It's like having your spouse joining NATO against you. The economic, cultural, historical, family ties between the countries are high. Think Canada joining China against the US.
The Diomede Islands will never become a flashpoint between East and West. The current war between Ukraine in Russia is a practice round before NATO invades Russia via Norway.
Except in 1991, Russia agreed to its borders, and that agreement did not include Ukraine within the borders of Russia.
The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie left most of the Dakotas to the native Americans. When gold was found, we violated that treaty.
Treaties are broken. Life goes on.
And if the Sioux had had a couple of armor divisions and some fighter jets, they’d have been totally justified in waging war against the US.
Wonder why our loving establishment (1) made war on seven Islamic countries, creating lots of refugees who hate the U.S., then (2) opened the borders and even transported and paid angry refugees to move here? Then they tell us ISIS terrorists are here to kill us, especially Trump, so we should give up all our rights to "stay safe," and if anything happens to martyr the hated Trump, we should definitely blame Iran and turn it into a parking lot. Meanwhile, our ISIS terrorist allies abroad have just helped overthrow Syria, a major project of the Israeli and U.S. governments for at least a decade. Nice of ISIS to help out.
If this even made the Washington Post...
"Ukrainian operatives aided Syrian rebels with drones, Washington Post reports"
https://www.reuters.com/world/ukrainian-operatives-aided-syrian-rebels-with-drones-washington-post-reports-2024-12-11/
People don’t plan that far in advance or with that level of competence. Bill Kristol and David Frum really did think Iraq would be Sweden in a decade. I think Cheney thought it would become an American puppet state.
Remember how network television news used to praise the Kurdish women warriors who were largely responsible for the destruction of the ISIS caliphate? President Trump was as bad as Biden when he turned his back on the Kurds. People in Afghanistan know just how trustworthy Uncle Sam is. The chickens are coming home to roost.
🎯
Finland has a long border with Russia, and it is now in NATO. If Putin’s strategic goal was to prevent NATO from expanding to his border, it backfired spectacularly.
Just that attacking from Finland means attacking into a wasteland of bog after bog. Except for St. Petersburg of course.
If St. Petersburg is a target, American bombers can level it. Of course, that would lead to an attack on an equally valuable asset in America. Would it be Disney World or Times Square?
There ya go again with the patriarchy stacking up the cisgender haypersons, er strawmen, wait... isnt Logic 101 racist? I thought so. Can we please refer to strawmen as straw-fluid? In case they realize theyre being oppressed too?
Plastic strawmen feel morally superior to paper strawmen.
I believe California has banned plastic strawmen
Not for Gruesome and his associates.
California has banned men.
Canada has, we just have soggy paper men that are useful for absolutely nothing.
First, I agree that we should help Ukraine defend itself from the Russians. I also agree that they are in a losing fight. They are outnumbered at least 3 to 1 in people, AFV, Artillery. They don’t have an effective Air Force and their enemy has a semi-effective Air Force. These are overwhelming disadvantages. They have outfought the Russians, but not enough to make up for the basic disadvantage of being outnumbered. They will inevitably lose a war of attrition. This is very much like the American Civil War. The South outfought the North, but simply could not make up for the overwhelming advantages of numbers held by the North. A negotiated peace is the only way out for them.
The best time to have tried this was right after they thoroughly defeated the initial invasion. But for some reason, the NATO leadership encouraged them to continue fighting. Not sure what they were thinking because the basic situation was clear from jump.
Politicians make better bank with war than peace.
They didn’t defeat the initial invasion. The Russians held back from Kiev as a show of good faith going into the peace talks that were subsequently wrecked by NATO.
I think your analysis is basically correct. They have outfought the Russians, but not enough to win. As others have pointed out, they’ve demographically destroyed themselves doing it. What others have not pointed out is that Russia has done the same. And Russia has been cut off from the US petroleum industry, which is long-run devastating, because much of their oil and gas requires serious technology to access, and the Russians have systematically destroyed their own ability to produce new technology.
The comparison to the American Civil War is inapt, and lapses a bit into the “lost cause” mythology. With the advantage of decent geography, interior lines of communication, and a fundamentally defensive war aim, the Confederacy could have won, despite the Northern material advantages. They outfought the Union forces in the Eastern theater for the first few years, though Lee’s aggressive forays into the North caused serious attrition to his army. And the Confederates blundered at Gettysburg.
However, in the West, Grant and Sherman and to a lesser extent Thomas outfought their Confederate counterparts by a large margin. The tussles around northern Virginia were important, but consolidating control of the Mississippi and occupying Tennessee was strategically devastating to the South. Once Grant went East and took overall command, the jig was up.
I think it’s important to point out that there was a path to avoiding the whole war. Putin and Zelenskyy were on that path. And Biden and Boris Johnson scuttled it.
This whole thing is a contrivance where the type of mimetic culture shitheads smeared their poopy symbols around and created a REAL WORLD PROBLEM out of it.
But now it’s a real world problem with some very basic elements. America withdrawing support from a proxy we WALKED HEADFIRST INTO A WAR is international suicide.
For similar reasons Putin can’t win anything meaningful or the entire western alliance starts presuming he’ll do it again and maybe he really doesn’t start thinking he can do it again.
So we’re stuck in a position I would call a Pyrrhic Stalemate.
The only way this ends without breeding more wars is if the border doesn’t move an inch and all that death was for nothing.
It’s very good news that Ukraine has taken Russian territory because now they have something to give back.
BTW - I’m no expert either but it doesn’t take an expert to see this dynamic.
Exactly.
It's almost, as if, certain people are getting rich off of not allowing the two parties to work it out themselves....
Almost?
The Ukrainians have their best mechanized units tied up in Kursk while they’re steadily losing territory in Donbas.
It was a strategic gamble that the Russians didn’t fall for.
That report is not confirmed and may or may not be true.
“We have experts who gloss over the obvious problems that infest their glib theories, generally unchallenged, and policies that are based on bulldozing rather than arguments.” Describes our elite experts perfectly. What was it William F. Buckley said about the first few hundred people in the phone book?!!
Reminder: Major General Smedley Butler, 1935 article, "War is a Racket". Based on his years of experience
Short read. Worth it.
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
An historic tragedy and waste of life. Never had to happen. It would be so great if the people actually responsible for it were held accountable. Maybe the FBI can release Anthony Weiners emails and/or Russia will release all the emails between Clinton and Obama about how they wanted to start this war and then we can really know the truth and hold the people accountable.