Two Years

Frightened enough yet ?

So, we're just one week into the Trump presidency, and any remaining doubt is gone (Forget punching Nazis, next arsehole to suggest we should give him a chance, gets it): America has elected an utterly insane, emotionally unstable narcissistic child & Fascist as President.  USA! USA! USA!

I tweeted out recently a prediction that the Congressional GOP would never impeach Trump, which might seem a tad premature for just days into his presidency, what with all the rumours swirling about GOP concerns for his mental health, and others predicting impeachment, whether within a six-month timeframe, immediately after the midterms, or whenever.

I can't predict the future, obviously.  No-one can.  But nonetheless, I feel compelled to give my best guess as to how things play out from here, based upon my read of Trump, Dem. & GOP politicians, and the American public.  And while I hope I'm wrong, I very much believe that we are drifting into a Turkish or Russian style pseudo-democratic Authoritarian state, a 'strong man'-led defacto dictatorship.

Right now, we still have a nominal semi-democratic republic in the United States.  We still have, in theory, rule of law, and a written constitution with guaranteed rights & protections for ordinary citizens & residents. In theory, even as Trump and some around him (Can you say 'emoluments' ?) may be in violation of certain provisions thereof already.

But I don't think this transitional period will last long, and given Trump's rhetoric & executive actions, given that dressing-down of the media by Spicer and thinly veiled threats by Bannon, I don't think it's long before the crackdown on the media & on dissent generally kicks into high gear.  It's going to be an aggressive push to dismantle the norms. and the protections of American democracy, and I don't think either the media or general public are remotely ready for what is coming.

Personally, I think it all plays out over the next two years...before the midterms.  If change is to come, in whatever form, be that impeachment by the Republicans, a mass popular uprising, military coup, some sort or foreign intervention, or hell, while we're clutching at straws, act of G-d, I feel it comes in the next two years or not at all.  My prediction (and by all means call me out if I'm wrong), is that, if Trump survives to the midterms, the only way he leaves the White House, is in a wooden box.

And no, I still don't think the Republicans will impeach him.  My read of the greedy cowards & bullies in Congress is that a) they are almost to a man, in awe of the greater bully in Trump, and constitutionally disinclined to take him on, and b) that they see allowing a crazy person to sit in the White House as the price they have to pay for maintaining power, and a price they are more than willing to pay.

The GOP stood on the precipice of being wiped out prior to the last election.  Ideologically, politically the country is becoming more & more progressive over time, as also demographically the population becomes less & less white, and their most loyal voters (the Fox News demographic of largely older white males) die off.  This election was characterised by many, and I'd say accurately, as the last stand of the conservative white male, and having not only held on to power, but expanded it, with control of all three branches of the federal government, and a majority of governorships & statehouses, why the hell would the GOP ever risk giving it up again...possibly forever ?

In two years time, perhaps the Democrats run on opposition to Trump, on impeachment even. Perhaps there is a groundswell of popular support for this.  Meanwhile, where will the tattered remnants of the Voting Rights Act be, under Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions & a hard-right dominated Supreme Court ?  What will have happened to (the, if any) investigation into Crosscheck, and the irregularities of the last election, into the widespread attempts at voter-suppression ?  What will have happened to the already heavily gerrymandered districts, to the easily manipulable electronic voting-machines dotting the country ?  Don't be surprised if that groundswell of public support for the Democrats somehow translates into the Republicans massively outperforming expectations.  And don't expect any other elections, or other than sham affairs after that.

I say you have two years, America/Americans.  Two years in which anything could happen.  What you do, what you could do in that time, I don't know.  Maybe you find a way to fight back against creeping fascism, maybe you just learn to adapt...maybe you leave.  But I think your window to avoid an Erdoğan- or Putin-style autocracy is much smaller than you think.  I give it two years.

Kremlin Apologist or Useful Idiot ? (or maybe I just don't want to die in a nuclear holocaust...)

Never did finish/post piece I intended on Russia & US Elections, but the Russian bear does still loom even larger than usual in Western political discourse, so I should probably say something, even as my suspicion that I may eventually end up regretting defending Russia grows...

I'll start thusly...As a Westerner I don't particularly fear Vladimir Putin...at all.  The man some want to paint as a Siberian candidate, soon to be POTUS Trump, a thin-skinned mentally deranged narcissist bully and confessed sexual predator OTOH...That sumbitch in control of not just the most powerful military of the planet, but also in possession of the codes to the US nuclear arsenal fucking terrifies me.  Why the difference ?  Because one, I judge on his past behaviour to be a rational actor, whilst the other...well, his words and actions rather speak for themselves.

I was vaguely hopeful up until the general election even that Trump, who prides himself on his unpredictability, might surprise us, that the incompetence & recklessness shown during the campaign might turn out to have been an act, but at this point, listening to commentators on the BBC mere days before inauguration still holding out promise that he can change, and insisting that we should give him a chance, give him the benefit of the doubt, I have do ask What are they smoking ?  Will the chattering classes still six months from now, eighteen months from now still be denying the obvious ?  That the man is exactly who he has shown himself to be, the last two years of the campaign...The last seven decades of his life ?  FFS !

Anyways...Putin...Russia...I've written here before on what I think about/how I feel about events in South Ossetia, in Ukraine & Crimea.  How I feel that Russia's geopolitical strategy is, certainly from their point of view, primarily defensive, and an attempt through fostering frozen conflicts, to establish buffer-zones between themselves, and what they see as Western encroachment/encirclement.  And it's a smart strategy.  Russia, despite what the USSR may or may not have been, and despite attempts at modernisation, is likely not as powerful militarily as they would have us believe, and even before falls in the price of oil & natural gas*, hardly an economic powerhouse.

What does it cost Russia to maintain frozen conflicts around Georgia & Ukraine ?  How many military assets does Russia need to sustain a minimal presence in South Ossetia or Abkhazia ?  How much does it cost to fund a simmering uprising in the East of Ukraine, to send over the occasional advisers or armaments ?  The cost of fortifying and rebuilding the infrastructure of Crimea I would imagine are substantial, but of the territories in question, this is the only one of true militarily strategic value to the Russians, so I'd be surprised if they didn't spend there, whether they have the money or not.  It's an investment in the future.

And so long as the unrest simmers in Eastern Ukraine, so long as Ukraine declines to relinquish its claim to Crimea, Ukraine is stuck/frozen.  No EU membership for Ukraine, no invitation to join the NATO umbrella.  Same for Georgia so long as it maintains its claims to Abkhazia & South Ossetia.  (Perhaps another non-European nation will be the first instead to take the EU out of the actual European subcontinent...if the European experiment even survives the next few years...) Cheap & effective.

Know what wouldn't be cheap ?  Rolling tanks into fucking Poland.  Or even Kiev.  This is the fear, right ?  Not that Russia might have slightly more influence in its own backyard, might maintain a buffer holding back western expansion, not even that Russia might have some influence in Europe, but that...the Russkies are coming any moment now to kill us all !

What would it cost the Russians to invade, conquer, and then occupy European countries...or any other hostile territories** ?  To destroy entire armies, to maintain infrastructure, to suppress likely ongoing violent resistance ?  And, in the event of attacking NATO nations (there's the rub in a bit...), risking outright nuclear war ?  For what ?  'Cos evil Vladimir Putin ('Vlad the Impaler' as Russophobic idiot Randi Rhodes has taken to calling him) wants to rebuild the Soviet Empire ?!!  I have no doubt that Putin does want to restore what he sees as Russian pride, as Russian honour, as respect for Russia.  As no doubt, do most ordinary Russians.  But where is the evidence for imperial ambitions ?

I could be wrong, of course, but when has Putin acted irrationally, when has he shown himself to be anything other than the cool calculating pragmatist, acting in what he rationally sees as the best interest of the Russian people ?  Empires are expensive.  (And even the most successful, even the mightiest eventually collapse under their own weight.)  If Putin truly is the psychopath some would make him out to be, maybe he doesn't care, but there's no evidence of this.  Russia, economically, is still largely in a state of  contraction.  Putin can puff his flabby chest out all he want, but Russia is no Rome, no industrial Britain.  Russia, large as it is, doesn't have the resource-constraints of an island Britain or a Japan to drive it on to overseas conquests.  And it doesn't have the ideological motivation of a Nazi Germany or its own predecessor the USSR for empire-building, nor even the putative motivation of US empire in 'spreading democracy.'  Why, unless Putin is a complete maniac, would Russia be so stupid as to roll out the tanks into Europe ?

I meant it, that I don't fear Vladimir Putin.  I don't like the bastard, I don't think he's 'a good person', I despise his treatment of the LGBT community, his record on civil liberties, his targeting of political enemies, and I don't trust him as such, but I do on the basis of his past action see him as a rational actor.  As he moves the various (likely to him, disposable) pieces around on the chessboard, Putin is a ruthless player, but not so far as I can tell, ever a reckless one.

---

Now, for the caveat: Donald Fucking Trump.

I don't know to what degree the Russians may have worked with his campaign, or whether they might have some hold over him via bribery or blackmail.***  The fact that they not so much wanted him as President per se, but far more obviously Did Not Want Fucking Russophobic Warmonger Hillary, I don't blame them for, and the idea that of all the factors in the election, from Hillary's own inappropriateness as a candidate to the GOP suppression of the vote, we would focus on supposed Russian hacking as responsible for Hillary's loss, I find laughable.  And ooh, CIA goons, shock horror, RT is involved in producing state-propaganda, that tends to favour Russian interests over the West ?...No Shit !  But...if only via Paul Manafort, there do seem to be ties between the Donald and the Kremlin; there is reason for suspicion.

And, I have to say this...Trump potentially changes everything.  Trump is the wildest of wild cards, and could destabilise the global order seven ways from Sunday with any given tweet, never mind access to nukes.  And Trump is on the record, questioning the relevance or necessity of NATO.  Personally, I'm not sure myself whether NATO should have continued post Cold War****, but all my past calculations regarding the actions of Russia & other possible hostile powers have been posited at least in part on an assumption that the shared military & nuclear deterrent of NATO would hold.  Disbanding or neutering the NATO deterrent at this point in time would seems to me incredibly reckless (more so or less so than massing NATO forces on Russia's border as idiot Obama & the EU currently doing debatable), let alone in concert w/encouraging nuclear proliferation in the Far East & Middle East, but...idiot Americans decided to elect maniac Trump, and such ill-thought-out policies does he bring.

I still don't particularly fear Putin, but then again, I don't live in Eastern Europe...  I couldn't blame them back in the (well, still technically in for a few more days) relatively safe era of Obama for being wary of Putin & the Kremlin at least.  Back when I assumed the NATO alliance would endure well into the foreseeable future.  If that alliance goes away, or is significantly weakened...if the immediate threat of Mutually Assured Destruction is removed ?...

Well, I still don't think it likely that even then Putin would be stupid enough to invade & occupy the Baltic states, never mind Poland...Germany...  Empire, as I said, is Expensive.  But...some more localised disturbance, on the pretext say of protecting Russian citizens, Russian speakers, some version of the strategy of frozen conflicts ?  Some interference in the political process, an attempt to install political figures friendly to Russian interests...?  If I lived in the Baltics right now, in the soon-to-be Trump era, yeah, I'd be at least a little worried.  Live nowhere near, and I'm fucking terrified, but again, in my case,...of Donald, not Vlad.

The point of all of this ?  Nothing more than to set out where I stand on these issues currently, how I see events possibly playing out.  And, even in the era of the Cheeto King Trump, advising caution, that we treat Putin and the Russians generally as respected adversaries, and as proven rational actors, rather than as cartoon-supervillains.  Putin's hold on power won't last; Nor will Trump's.  One way or another, the earth will dawn on a day neither of said authoritarian arseholes hold sway over their respected peoples.  I'd rather the reason therefor were not the nuclear annihilation of all human civilisation.



* And if you believe that there wasn't a coordinated effort between the US & Saudi in this regard...

** Hint, hint...South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea...not only not hostile territory to Russia, but friendly.

*** If the CIA et al do have any further potentially damaging info. or rumours on Trump, I would suggest they release it post haste, to pre-empt any blackmail, and to let Trump deal with the embarrassment whilst he still lacks actual nukes at his disposal.

**** It could have been maintained as more of a Northern alliance, if we had pursued closer friendlier relations & possible alliance w/a certain large country of similar cultural origins, but neither here nor there now...

Salon: Putin might be right on Syria

Meant to have this up much earlier, but editing this b* down is not easy, which is a compliment.  The best option ended up being to simply lop off the latter part, which referred to the wisdom of Messrs. Gordon Adams & Stephen Walt on said crisis.  Maybe just read what they have to say and ignore anything below...

...

Very simply, we have one secular nation helping to defend what remains of another, by invitation, against a radical Islamist insurgency that, were it to succeed, would condemn those Syrians who cannot escape to a tyranny of disorder rooted in sectarian religious animosities. And we have the great power heretofore dominant in the region hoping that the insurgency prevails. Its policy across the region, indeed, appears to rest on leveraging these very animosities.

Now we can add the names back in.

In the past week Russia has further advanced its support of Bashar al-Assad with intensified bombing runs and cruise missiles launched from warships in the Caspian Sea. Not yet but possibly, Russian troops will deploy to back the Syrian army and its assorted allies on the ground. This has enabled government troops to begin an apparently spirited new offensive against the messy stew of Islamist militias arrayed against Damascus.

It was a big week for Washington, too. First it pulled the plug on its $500 million program to train a “moderate opposition” in Syria—admittedly a tough one given that Islamists with guns in their hands tend to be immoderate. Instantly it then begins to send weapons to the militias it failed to train, the CIA having “lightly vetted” them—as it did for a time in 2013, until that proved a self-defeating mistake.

The fiction that moderates lurk somewhere continues. Out of the blue, they are now called “the Syrian Arab Coalition,” a moniker that reeks of the corridors in Langley, Virginia, if you ask me.

In Turkey, meantime, the Pentagon’s new alliance with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan government starts to play out just as the Turkish prime minister intended. All the persuasive signs are that the government was responsible for bombs that killed more than 120 people in Ankara last weekend as they protested Erdoğan’s renewed violence against Turkey’s Kurdish minority. The Middle East’s crisis has just spread into another country.

*

Since Russia reinvigorated its decades-old support for Damascus last month, the vogue among the Washington story-spinners has been to question Putin’s motives. What does Putin—not “Russia” or even “Moscow,” but Putin—want? This was never an interesting question, since the answer seemed clear, but now we have one that truly does warrant consideration.

What does the U.S. want? Why, after four years of effort on the part of the world’s most powerful military and most extensive intelligence apparatus, is Syria a catastrophe beyond anything one could imagine when anti-Assad protests egan in the spring of 2011?

After four years of war—never truly civil and now on the way to proxy—Assad’s Syria is a mangled mess, almost certainly beyond retrieval in its current form. Everyone appears to agree on this point, including Putin and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian leader’s foreign minister. There is no putting this humpty-dumpty back on any wall: The Russians readily acknowledge this, acres of groundless journalism to the contrary notwithstanding.

In the meantime, certain realities are essential to recognize. The Assad government is a sovereign entity. Damascus has the beleaguered bones of a national administration, all the things one does not readily think of as wars unfold: a transport ministry, an education ministry, embassies around the world, a seat at the U.N. In these things are the makings of postwar Syria—which, by definition, means Syria after the threat of Islamic terror is eliminated.

Anyone who doubts this is Russia’s reasoning should consider the Putin-Lavrov proposal for a negotiated transition into a post-Assad national structure. They argue for a federation of autonomous regions representing Sunni, Kurdish and Alawite-Christian populations. Putin made this plain when he met President Obama at the U.N. last month, my sources in Moscow tell me. Lavrov has made it plain during his numerous exchanges with Secretary of State Kerry.

Why would Russia’s president and senior diplomat put this on the table if they were not serious? Their proposed design for post-Assad Syria, incidentally, is a close variant of what Russia and the Europeans favor in Ukraine. In both cases it has the virtue of addressing facts on the ground. These are nations whose internal distinctions and diversity must be accommodated—not denied, not erased, but also not exacerbated—if they are to become truly modern. Russians understand the complexities of becoming truly modern: This has been the Russian project since the 18th century.

In the past week Washington has effectively elected not to support Russia’s new effort to address the Syria crisis decisively. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s latest phrase of the moment is “fatally flawed.” If he said it once he said it a dozen times: The Russian strategy is fatally flawed. We heard you the third time, Ash.

As to Obama, he rejects any notion that Washington has effectively ceded leadership on the Syria question—with potentially wider implications—to Moscow. In his much-noted interview with 60 Minutes last weekend, he found Putin foolhardy for risking the lives of Russian soldiers and “spending money he doesn’t have.”

Say what?

Whose strategy in Syria is fatally flawed, Mr. Carter? I assume there is no need to do more than pose the question. (Memo to SecDef: Get a new scriptwriter, someone who allots you more than one assigned phrase a week.)

As to Obama’s remarks, one wishes he were joking. We are $5 trillion into the mess that began with the invasion of Iraq a dozen years ago, and we are counting the fatalities one side or the other of a million. There are roughly 4 million Syrian refugees by the latest count. And Putin’s at fault for risking lives and blowing money? Who puts a smart guy like you up to this, Mr. President?

...

I'm not at all convinced that the Russians really know what they are doing here, or what the endgame looks like, but as for the Americans...

T'would seem that the Obama administration inherited from Bush & Co. the rather naïve view that if various tyrannical despots in the Middle East could be removed with the support of  Western military-aid, that the populations would immediately and unhesitatingly embrace both the West, and secular democracy, despite the historical record, in which revolutions, even well-meaning ones as often as not, if not more often, create worse outcomes than that which went before.  And despite both the existence of relatively widespread animosity towards the United States and the West generally in many of these countries, and the lack of a democratic tradition (the latter a problem for post-Soviet Russia also as we have seen).

The Arab Spring seemed liked it might be going well for a while (as perhaps did the War in Iraq early on), and having seen Qadaffi & Mubarak fall, Western leaders (who had previously sucked up to the same), decided to turn on al Assad, only...he didn't fall right away, and decided to fight instead.  Fight to the death perhaps if it came to it.  Which left the West rooting for the downfall of Assad in a civil war that involved various occasionally overlapping anti-Assad elements, some of which were explicitly Islamist, some more secular, some more or less concerned with ethnic or nationalistic factions, lining up as much against one another as against Assad.

And then the West (by which of course I mean the US) chose the amorphous opposition, not knowing into what it might morph as its champion against Assad a) assuming incorrectly as it happened that Assad would fold quickly, and b) with no awareness of whether the forces arrayed against Assad would ultimately be dominated by more Western-leaning more secular forces, or by the likes of Al Qaeda or ISIS.  Not like we have the history of living memory to look back on or anything for advice...

And so the West bet against Assad, (the now much denounced but recent ally still of the US), and by proxy for an ever amporphous coalition of groups, some of which are no doubt secular and democratic, but others of which would very much like to establish an Islamic caliphate all the way to Spain thank you very much, and if they can do it with donated US weapons, thanks that very much more.

Some of the non-ISIS-aligned & non-al-Qaeda aligned elements may still exist in the coalition against which Russia is currently fighting alongside the 'regime-forces'* & Iranians, but whom would we ask ?  Where/who/what is the leader of the Free Syrian Army ?  Where are the five or six (by most ambitious official military estimates) of the tens of thousands of US-trained opposition-forces meant to be in place by now ?

The US' official position is that Russia's involvement is prolonging the conflict unnecessarily, as if the conflict hadn't already been going on for four years with the US' involvement, and no end in sight.  I read somewhere (some beltway hackery no doubt) some speculation that the Russian involvement might in fact unite the various anti-Assad faction against the foreign 'imperialist' forces, and hasten Assad's removal.  Doubt it much, but even if that were the case, who would put money on the current conflict ending without either a) Western ground-forces having to intervene (likely to no avail in the long term), b) Assad remaining in power for the foreseeable future at least, or c) a victory for Islamist extremists ?

For our more Russophobic friends, we've seen how even the most relatively peaceful transitions from authoritarian dictatorship, can simply replace one dictator with another.  How in the absence of a concerted committed long-term international coalition dedicated to long-term liberal democratic reform, any hopes for a more progressive future may be dashed, even in historically liberal societies... Anyone think the US is willing or able to commit to a Marshall plan for Syria ?

* As in the still legitimate government of Syria under international law

** PS Fuck you any one who is still this far into the twenty-first century defending the mind-blowing incompetence of Microsoft Inc.

*** I hate the very notion of WYSIWYG, at least at it's implemented by our (consistently proven)-not betters.

Inscrutable

As it should be.

Manspreading*

So...came across this picture of two major world-leaders whilst writing the previous piece.  And...uh, it wasn't a good look for Dubya.  It's no better a look for Bibi & Vlad.  In fact, these two have never looked more childish.**  We get it arseholes, now can we discuss actual policy whilst you for a moment at least pose like statesmen ?


* Not that this phenomenon amongst say male riders on transit in any way inherently justifies legal penalties.  If there's room for all, and you're comfortable with that pose, and not a fucking politician having pictures taken for global media, then hey, go for it.

** Hee hee hee...my balls are so big...In case you actually needed this idiocy spelt out.

This Will Catch on any Moment Now

So, if you haven't seen, United Russia* has developed what the media is characterising as a counter to the 'gay-pride' rainbow-flag.  The design of which being stolenborrowed from a French group opposed to same-sex marriage, La Manif Pour Tous, except that the Russian version has one extra child, which is supposedly symbolic of traditional Russian values.

I had thought that the three kids was a little optimistic for ya know...Russia, but checking the stats., turns out Putin has instituted various bribes to would-be mothers that have helped bring the birthrate up now to a rate of 1.7 children, which is apparently better than other European countries.  Who knew ?

Not sure at what event the flag of the French group is flying, but it looks ever so slightly better attended that the Russian event, which I gather from Russian sources, was expected to attract more than a thousand families.  Perhaps would-be supporters were put off by the fact that they found the flag just a little bit 'gay' for their liking...

But, still, I'm sure it'll take off on the internet and go viral any moment now...

The slogan on Putin's ruling party's anti-gay flag is "#realfamily": #настоящаясемья Here are some improved versions. pic.twitter.com/afCBhlj0wW

— Ystri Ya (@ystriya) July 10, 2015

All families where love rules are #realfamilies #настоящаясемья pic.twitter.com/78idnNMKtm

— 茶色猫 (@biglittlecat) July 9, 2015

Love you internets #настоящаясемья via @dim_stoff pic.twitter.com/9W3O1y1shu

— Laura (@LauraHuu) July 9, 2015

Oh dear.


* IE, the one party of the increasingly one-party state.  IE, the party that Putin represents.

Wishful Thinking at its Best

Report: Russia's right wing is egging on Texas' secessionist movement

By John-Henry Perera | June 23, 2015 | Updated: June 23, 2015 11:46am

A Russian newspaper conducted an interview with Nathan Smith, a representative of the Texas Nationalist Movement, who just happened to be in St. Petersburg for a right-wing convention in Spring 2015.

Google Translate is a little rusty when it comes to the Cyrillic alphabet, but Smith's interview is more or less a repeat of everything we've heard before from pro-secessionists: Why should we be part of a union that takes but never gives back? U.S. policy is bad for Texas. We can do better on our own.

Politico writer Casey Michel notes that Texas' homegrown movement is delicious for Russian right wingers who blame much of the country's ills on the U.S., particularly after the recent sanctions on the country following the Crimean invasion in 2014. It also plays well with the country's long-term strategy of destabilizing the west.

"Cheered primarily by Igor Panarin, a former KGB agent and head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's diplomatic academy, the theory posits that a fractured United States, akin to the Soviet Union's demise, would disintegrate entirely, with nearby nations hoovering the assorted states."

The Russians cannot possibly be this stupid...can they ?


Although I see where the Russian's are coming from in the current tensions with the West, although I understand their point of view regarding maintaining influence in their backyard, and although I agree with much of their criticism of NATO, I think there's one thing they maybe misunderstand: Much as people throughout the world may harbour some distrust of the United States and its motives, including many in the West, and even in the United States itself, they don't necessarily hate the US.  And many of them share that distrust of America with a desire to be American themselves.

Russia, on the other hand, isn't exactly beloved by many of its neighbours, to say the least (never mind how the rest of the world sees the country, fairly or not), and for the many states that left the Warsaw pact and/or the Soviet Union after the latter's collapse it was very explicitly a question of liberation from what they saw as a decades-long* oppressive foreign influence.  An opinion that would be held in many of those countries by a clear majority.


The occasional mutterings of discontent in states like Texas, Alaska, Arizona, or wherever in the US, are little more than a temporal political protest, usually against the particular policies at one point in time of one ruling party.  The Texans aren't going to secede today any more than the so-called 'blue-states' were after the Bush-Gore decision in 2000, however much gnashing of teeth there may have been at the time.


And yet, even if the Russians aren't stupid enough to think that a secession of Texas or any other American state is remotely likely, they sure do put an awful amount of money and effort into their anti-Western  and Western-targeted propaganda outfits, possibly the jewel in the crown of which is RT (formerly Russia Today).  RT is a well-financed, slick media outfit, staffed with many Western presenters, that just so happens to specialise day after day after day in reporting on stories that make the West (The US & UK especially) look bad (some more justifiably, some less)

And there's an audience for the type of thing they cover.  An audience that occasionally includes me for that matter, well aware of the propagandistic agenda as I may be.  And there's a fair number of mid-level media-personalities in the West (usually either of the more slightly radical lefty or the more libertarian political persuasion) that flock to work with RT, eager as they are to get any coverage of opinions that they know are increasingly locked out from the mainstream corporate-media in the West.

But the vast majority of people in the West don't care what those individuals say, don't watch RT, don't read Sputnik or the Moscow Times, and won't be touched by the comments of Putin's keyboard-armies on the pages of the Telegraph or the Indy or on CiF on the Guardian.  The criticism of the West (some of it justified) never quite reaches them, whilst daily they absorb the news & the jokes from the mainstream media that reinforce their inherited view of Russians as inherently evil two-dimensional cartoon-villains.

I suspect that the Russian government just fundamentally hasn't come to terms with how to either successfully manipulate or to interpret public opinion in the age of social media.  And I don't really know why, other to assume that it's that age-old question of no-one wanting to tell the emperor that he may have ever-so slightly imagined his own attire.

Whatever.  We're all be dead soon if we keep the idiotic wargames up at the current rate.


* Or more.

Speaking of...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH !

Madness

Well you lunatics in DC & the EU wanted a new Cold War, and now you have it.  Good news for the military-industrial complex.

MOSCOW — Russia's military will add over 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles this year alone that are capable of piercing any missile defenses, President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday in a blunt reminder of the nation's nuclear might amid tensions with the West over Ukraine.

Putin spoke at the opening of an arms show at a shooting range in Alabino just west of Moscow, a huge display intended to showcase Russia's resurgent military.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg accused the Russians of "nuclear saber-rattling," and said that was one of the reasons the western military alliance has been beefing up its ability to defend its members.

So, something the Russians just announced in response to your recent promise of permanently placing more tanks and heavy artillery in Eastern Europe is the reason for you doing the same ?  What crazy circular logic is that ?  It's called tit-for-tat you fools.  And it's as stupid a game in which to participate as Russian roulette.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, briefing reporters via teleconference from Boston, where he is recovering from surgery on a broken leg, called Putin's announcement concerning.

"We're trying to move in the opposite direction," Kerry said. "We have had enormous cooperation from the 1990s forward with respect to the structure of nuclear weapons in the former territories of the Soviet Union. And no one wants to see us step backwards."

You lying sack of shit !  Sorry, but chutzpah doesn't describe it.  There just isn't a word sufficient for such shameless lying.  Not that our stenographer-media in the West will call him on it.

But now that the nasty Russians are building more missiles, you'll have to announce another escalation on your part, won't you ?  To which the Russians will respond, to which you will respond, and so on...

...Until mushroom-clouds grace the skylines of every major metropolis.  Whee !

Defining a new Security Architecture for Europe That Brings Russia in from the Cold: Roundtable discussion in Brussels with John Mearsheimer, Stephen Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel

So much sense spoken in one room.  No snark here.  Suppose it had to happen in Brussels, rather than in the US media.

Part 1, Presentations by the Panelists:

Part 2, Discussion with Panelists and Participants:

You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment

TheBlaze, huh.  Anyways, no of course, the US Government would never speculate on the health of a foreign leader.  That would be inappropriate and disrespectful and...oh, wait...

Melys: Achilles Heel

So in recent news, people's perception of colour varies (and many people's monitors are incorrectly calibrated), and some llamas escaped.  Oh, and the Federal Communications Commission had some trivial ruling or other.  Oh and those naughty naughty tricksters ISIS engaged in an act of minor vandalism in Iraq.  Oh, and surprisingly Russia still has an opposition, given that an opposition leader was gunned down near the Kremlin.  But don't worry, the Russian government has assured us that Vladimir Putin (the er, chief suspect in most people's mind) is going to personally head the investigation, after a few months of which some Chechen separatist or Ukrainian fascist will presumbably be charged with the crime (and die in custody days or weeks later), unless relations with the West deteriorate even further in which case, it will turn out to be a plot by SIS or the CIA.

Apologies to Ukraine

My apologies to the people of Ukraine.  Our leaders continue to rant and rave as if they are going to risk military confrontation with Russia over the conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk, as if Russia can be forced to hand back Crimea.  It's cruel, the false hopes they persist in encouraging.  They're liars, and they can't admit the truth.

Sorry to have to say it, but the Ukraine you knew is gone...forever, and no amount of bluster or outrage will bring it back.  No, it isn't fair, but as parents say to their children, life isn't either.  And we tolerate plenty of unfairness we could do something about, never mind the things we can't.  Men earning more than women isn't fair, or whites earning more than minorities, or CEO's earning multiples in the hundreds of what their lowest paid employees get.  We tolerate income inequality, just as we tolerate homelessness, poor families going hungry, disproportionate incarceration of minorities, businesses colluding against consumers, politicians selling their office to the highest bidder.  We imprison whistleblowers pointing out the crimes of our governments, whilst war criminals go free.  We have an exceptionally high tolerance for unfairness generally.

And as for unfair territorial disputes or questions of sovereignty ?  We allow our greatest trading partner to bully its neighbours, and persistently threaten one of them (a peaceful democratic ally of ours) with use of military force up to and including nuclear weapons.  We've allowed an entire population in the West Bank and Gaza to be held hostage as political pawns, to be kept in amber as a perpetual 'refugee' population, decades after the wars that made them refugees.  We allow a population of twenty-five million in North Korea to be imprisoned under an insane radical dictatorship that threatens us with nuclear war because it suits the People's Republic of China to have it there between them and US-ally South Korea as a buffer state.  We won't be waging any 'wars of liberation' in North Korea anytime soon, will we ?  An entire state sacrificed for the realpolitik concerns of China, and we won't do anything about it...because we can't.

Buran: The Soviet Space Shuttle

A fact rarely remembered, but, in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the USSR had and launched at least one successful test flight of its own space shuttle: The Buran.  A craft that oh so coincidentally seemed almost an exact twin of NASA's shuttles, just as NASA's earliest orbital rockets happened to be the not so subtle twins of the V-rockets that rained down on Britain from the Third Reich, and just as China's latest stealth planes just so happen to look like carbon-copy clones of their American counterparts.  What comes around and all that.

No idea who originally put together the videos herein, but the soundtrack is suggestive of the perspective behind it.  And who indeed knows what might have been had we ended up ruled by a different despotic overlord rather than the one that happened to win out in our modern day Game of Thrones ?  Most born today presumably will scarce be able to countenance the possibility of the (first ?) Cold War having gone differently, just as we can't easily conceive of different outcomes for the (first two ?) so-called World Wars and the various (American, French, Russian, some other countries we don't really care about) revolutions of the past few centuries.  Always healthy to gain what little perspective one can with a taste, however fanciful, of what might have been.

Oh, and say what you will of the US Shuttles, the fact that the US in grounding them willingly placed itself in almost total dependence upon Putin's Russia at a time of growing tensions, even prior to the Ukrainian provocations (by which I mean, the expansionary and de-stabilising activities of the EU & NATO, lest I be misunderstood), is indeed almost funny.  Almost, were it not for the fact of us continuing to be eager to pretend that the threats of nuclear war have somehow vanished with the end of the cold war, when in fact nothing of the sort is or ever was remotely the case, and when the actual threat of global nuclear annihilation is probably as great today as it was in the time of our grandparents.  Of course the planet may well boil if we carry on burning fossil fuels at the current rate, possibly before we get the chance to blow ourselves up, so it may be a moot point.  Stupid fucking humans !