Not Psychological Warfare But Failure To Recognize Objective Reality...,

TAC  |  Given that American politicians are always more preoccupied by domestic affairs than foreign policy, members of Congress are quick to adopt the “true faith.” This faith explains why for the last eight years members thought a future war with Russia was a low-risk affair. Ukrainians would provide the cannon fodder and Washington would provide the expensive weaponry and munitions. 

Predictably, Washington’s governing strategic principles are unchanged from previous U.S. interventions around the world. Muddle through: masses of soldiers—in this case Ukrainians advised by U.S. and allied officers—and huge infusions of cash, equipment, and technology can and will permanently alter strategic reality in America’s favor. 

The stupefying air of self-righteousness the Biden administration assumes when it attacks erstwhile strategic partners such as Saudi Arabia or delivers moralizing lectures to Beijing’s leadership, or when its media surrogates express contempt for the Russian state, is downright dangerous. Political figures in Washington are ready to indulge any transgression if it is committed in the name of destroying Russia. They do not view U.S. foreign policy in the context of a larger strategy, nor do they comprehend Russia’s capacity to hurt the United States, a bizarre judgment of Russia’s actual military and economic potential. 

The result is a toxic climate of ideological hatred making it hard to imagine a contemporary U.S. secretary of State ever signing an international agreement renouncing war as an instrument of U.S. national policy, as Secretary of State Frank Kellogg did in 1928. But as one of Shakespeare’s characters in the Merchant of Venice warned, “The truth will out.” 

The ongoing buildup of 700,000 Russian forces with modern equipment in Western Russia, Eastern Ukraine and Belorussia is a direct consequence of Moscow’s decision to adopt an elastic, strategic defense of the territories it seized in the opening months of the war. It was a wise, though politically unpopular choice in Russia. Yet, the strategy has succeeded. Ukrainian losses have been catastrophic and by November, Russian Forces will be in a position to strike a knockout blow. 

Today, there are rumors in the media that Kiev may be under pressure to launch more counterattacks against Russian defenses in Kherson (Southern Ukraine) before the midterm elections in November. At this point, expending what little remains of Ukraine’s life blood to expel Russian forces from Ukraine is hardly synonymous with the preservation of the Ukrainian state. It’s also doubtful that further sacrifices by Ukrainians will assist the Biden administration in the midterm elections.  

The truth is Moscow’s redline concerning Ukrainian entry into NATO was always real. Eastern Ukraine and Crimea were always predominantly Russian in language, culture, history, and political orientation. Europe’s descent into economic oblivion this winter is also real, as is support for Russia’s cause in China and India and Moscow's rising military strength.

In retrospect, it is easy to see how Congress was beguiled by the denizens of think tanks, lobbyists, and retired generals, who are, with few exceptions, people with a cocktail level of familiarity with high-end conventional warfare. Members of the House and Senate were urged to support dubious strategies for the use of American military assistance, including reckless scenarios for limited nuclear war with Russia or China. For some reason, U.S. politicians have lost sight of the reality that any use of nuclear weapons would overwhelm the ends of all national policy. 

Andrei Martyanov: Now We Turn Our Attention To A Serious Russian

americanaffairsjournal  |  The book really comes into its own in the long sections on the American economy. These chapters seem especially prescient after Western sanc­tions against Russia failed to stop the invasion or decisively cripple the Russian economy, while causing increasing strains in the West. In a word, Martyanov views American prosperity as largely fake, a shiny wrapping distracting from an increasingly hollow interior.

Martyanov, reflecting his Soviet materialist education, starts by discussing the food supply. He recalls the limited food options available in the old Soviet Union and how impressed émigrés were by the “over­flowing abundance” of the American convenience store. But Martyanov notes that today such abundance is only the preserve of the rich and powerful. He references a 2020 study by the Brookings Institution which found that “40.9 percent of mothers with children ages 12 and under reported household food insecurity since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.” And while some of this was driven by the pandemic, the number was 15.1 percent in 2018. Martyanov makes the case that these numbers reflect an economy that is poorly organized and teetering on the edge. In the summer of 2022, when the food component of the CPI is increasing at over 10 percent a year and rising fast, Martyanov’s chapter looks prophetic.

Martyanov then moves on to other consumer goods. He recalls the so-called kitchen debate in 1959 when Vice President Richard Nixon showed Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev a modern American kitchen. During this debate, Nixon explained to Khrushchev that the house they were in, with all its modern luxuries, could be bought by “any steel worker.” Nixon explained that the average American steel worker earned about $3 an hour—or $480 per month—and that the house could be obtained on a thirty-year mortgage for the cost of $100 a month. Martyanov points out that this is impossible in the contemporary American economy. As vital goods have become less and less affordable for the average American, debt of all types has exploded. He notes that the flip side of this growing debt has been a decline in domestic indus­trial production, which has been stagnant in nominal terms and falling as a percent of U.S. GDP since 2008. “The scale of this catastrophe is not understood,” he writes, “until one considers the fact that a single manufacturing job on average generates 3.4 employees elsewhere in non-manufacturing sectors.”

Needless to say, Martyanov does not believe that America has the most powerful economy on earth. Deploying his old school materialist toolkit, he surveys core heavy industries—including the automotive industry, the commercial shipbuilding industry, and later the aerospace industry—and finds U.S. capacity wanting. He points out that in steel production “China outproduces the United States by a factor of 11, while Russia, which has a population less than half the size of that of the United States, produces around 81% of US steel output.”

Martyanov is particularly critical of GDP metrics as a basis for determining the wealth of a country or the power of its economy, because they assign spending on services the same weight as spending on primary products and manufactured goods. He believes that the postindustrial economy is a “figment of the imagination of Wall Street financial strategists” and that GDP metrics merely provide America with a fig leaf to cover its economic weaknesses. In a separate podcast that Martyanov posted to his YouTube channel, he explains why these metrics are particularly misleading from the point of view of military production. He compares the U.S. Navy’s Virginia-class fast-attack sub­marine and the Russian Yasen-class equivalent. He argues that these are comparable in terms of their platform capabilities, but that the Yasen-class has superior armaments. Crucially, however, he notes that the cost of a Virginia-class submarine is around $3.2 billion while the cost of the Yasen-class submarine is only around $1 billion. Since GDP measures quantify economic output (including military output) in dollar terms, it would appear that, when it comes to submarine output, Russia is pro­ducing less than a third of what it is actually producing. Using a purchasing-power-parity-adjusted measure might help somewhat here, but it would still not capture the extra bang for their buck that the Russians are getting.

A few years ago, it would have been fashionable to dismiss this sort of materialist analysis as old fashioned. Pundits argued that the growing weight of the service sector in the American economy was a good thing, not a bad thing, a sign of progress, not decline. But today, with supply chains collapsing and inflation raging, these fashionable arguments look more and more like self-serving bromides every day.

Next, Martyanov looks at energy. While many American pundits believed that the emergence of fracking technology would make Russian oil and gas less and less important, Martyanov views the shale oil boom as “a story of technology winning over common economic sense.” He believes that America’s shale boom was a speculative mania driven by vague promises and cheap credit. He quotes the financial analyst David Deckelbaum, who noted that “This is an industry that for every dollar that they brought in, they would spend two.” Ultimately, Martyanov argues, the U.S. shale industry is a paper tiger whose viability is heavily dependent on high oil prices.

Martyanov is even more critical of “green energy,” which he views as a self-destructive set of policies that will destroy the energy independence of all countries that pursue them. He also points out that China, Russia, and most non-Western nations know this and, despite lip service to fashionable green causes, avoid these policies.

Finally, Martyanov returns to the collapse of America’s ability to make things. He recites the now familiar numbers about falling manu­facturing output and an increased reliance on imports from abroad. But he also points to the collapse in manufacturing expertise. Martyanov cites statistics showing that, on a per capita basis, Russia produces twice as many STEM graduates as America. He attributes this to a change in elite attitudes. STEM subjects are difficult and require serious intellectual exertion. They often yield jobs on factory floors that are not particularly glamorous. “In contemporary American culture domi­nated by poor taste and low quality ideological, agenda-driven art and entertainment, being a fashion designer or a disc jockey or a psychologist is by far a more attractive career goal,” he writes, “especially for America’s urban and college population, than foreseeing oneself on the manufacturing floor working as a CNC operator or mechanic on the assembly line.”

Rotting from the Head Down

Martyanov’s economic analysis may reflect his Soviet materialist education, but ultimately, he views America’s core problem as being a crisis of leadership. He traces this problem back to the election of Bill Clinton in 1993. Martyanov argues that Clinton represented a new type of American leader: an extreme meritocrat. These new meritocrats believed their personal capacities gave them the ability to do anything imaginable. This megalomaniacal tendency, Martyanov observes, has been latent in the American project since the founding. “Everything American,” he writes, “must be the largest, the fastest, the most efficient or, in general, simply the best.” Yet this character trait has not dominated the personality of either the American people or their leaders, he says. Rather, the Ameri­can people remain today “very nice folks” that “are generally patriotic and have common sense and a good sense of humour.” Yet in recent times, he argues, something has happened in American elite circles that has let the more grandiose and delusional side of the American psyche run amok, and this has happened at the very time when America is most in need of good leadership.

Martyanov believes that America’s extreme meritocrats vastly over­estimate their capabilities. This is because, rather than focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the country they rule, they have been taught since birth to focus on themselves. They believe that they just need to maximize their own personal accomplishments and the good of the country will emerge as if by magic. This has led inevitably to the rise of what Martyanov characterizes as a classic oligarchy. Such an oligarchy, he argues, purports to be meritocratic but is actually the opposite. A proper meritocracy allows the best and the brightest to climb up its ranks. But an oligarchy with a meritocratic veneer simply allows those who best play the game to rise. Thus, the meritocratic claims become circular: you climb the ladder because you play the game; the game is meritocratic because those who play it are by definition the best and the brightest. Effectively, for Martyanov, the American elite does not select for intelligence and wisdom, but rather for self-assured­ness and self-interestedness.

President Of Russia Vladimir Putin's Energy Week Speech

kremlin.ru |   I cannot help but quote some statistical data. According to EU statistics, exports to Russia amounted to 89.3 billion euros in 2021 and imports from Russia to 162.5 billion euros. The deficit in Russia’s favour is 73.2 billion euros. That is data for 2021. In the early months of 2022, this deficit increased to 103.2 billion euros.

What caused it? We sell our goods and we are ready to buy European products, but they refuse to sell them. They imposed embargos on several categories of goods one after another, hence the deficit. What does this have to do with us? They will blame us again. We sell what they want to buy – and at market rates. We are ready to buy from them but they will not sell. The deficit keeps growing, to repeat, through no fault of our own. Just do not walk away from cooperating with Russia. That is it.

I would like to note – as European officials at the highest level also mentioned – that European wellbeing in the past decades has been mainly based on cooperation with Russia.

The consequences of the partial rejection of Russian goods are already hitting the European economy and residents. But instead of working on restoring their own competitive advantage in the form of affordable and reliable Russian energy sources, the Eurozone countries are only making the situation worse, including by capping the price of oil and oil products from our country. But it is not only European countries; they are doing this together with North America, as planned, beginning December of this year.

I will quote the American economist, Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman: “If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers cannot sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you will have a tomato shortage. It is the same with oil or gas,” end of quote. Let me remind you that Milton Friedman passed away in 2006. He had nothing to do with the Russian government and cannot be designated as a Russian agent of influence.

It would seem that these are truisms. But the leaders of some countries, their bureaucratic elites dismiss these obvious considerations, and, on someone else's command, are deliberately pursuing a policy of deindustrialising their countries, reducing people’s quality of life, which will certainly entail irreversible consequences.

It should be clearly understood that if the price of oil from Russia or other countries is limited, if some artificial price caps are imposed, this will inevitably worsen the investment climate in the entire global energy sector, then exacerbate the global shortage of energy resources and further increase their cost, and this, I repeat, will primarily hit the poorest countries. These inevitable consequences are plain to see. And experts, including world-class ones – I just gave you a quote – talk about it all the time.

No amount of intervention or the unsealing of oil reserves will remedy the situation. They simply do not have as much spare resources as they need – that is the whole point. They need to understand this eventually.

The fact is that aggressive promotion of the green agenda, which, of course, needs support, as I said, but it should be done right, so, the aggressive promotion of this agenda, including in the euro area, has led to underinvestment in the global oil and gas sector. Already. Meanwhile, the EU and the United States have imposed sanctions on leading oil producers, which make up about 20 percent of the global output.

As a result, in 2020–2021, investment in oil and gas production dropped to the lowest levels in the past 15 years. You see, it happened in 2020 and 2021, long before our special operation in Donbass. Investment was less than half of what it was in 2014 in the wake of what the so-called Western politicians did, and businesses underinvested by $2.5 trillion. I will come to that later: what does the OPEC+ decision have to do with it? The OPEC+ decision is designed solely to balance the global market. They have found their scapegoat in OPEC+. What does it have to do with anything? Clearly, to reiterate, they are simply covering up their mistakes. I will come to that later.

There is one more important point. Suppose the oil price cap is imposed. Who can guarantee that a similar cap will not be imposed in other sectors of the economy, such as agriculture, the production of semiconductors, fertilisers, or the metal industry, and not only with regard to Russia, but to any other country? No one can give such guarantees, meaning that with their reckless decisions, some Western politicians are breaking the global market economy and are, in fact, posing a threat to the well-being of billions of people.

The so-called neo-liberal ideologists of the West are known to have destroyed traditional values before, we all see. Now, they seem to have set their sights on free enterprise and private initiative.

As I mentioned earlier, Russia invariably fulfills its obligations in stark contrast to Western countries, which cynically refused to honour signed finance and technology, as well as equipment supply and maintenance contracts.

I am here to say one thing: Russia will not act contrary to common sense or underwrite someone else’s prosperity. We are not going to supply energy to the countries that introduce price caps. I want to tell those who prefer con jobs and shameless blackmail to business partnerships and market mechanisms – we have been living in this political paradigm for decades now – you should know that we will not do anything that disadvantages us.

There Are No Uncertainties Concerning The Outcome Of The War On The Ground

Reality is that a tiny allied force of perhaps 200,000 (personnel from the Donetsk, Luhansk, Chechnya and Russia) with only the Russians being particularly well equipped, has inflicted acknowledged losses of over 100,000 on a NATO equivalent force of between 500 and 600 thousand, wiped out the military stockpiles not only of the Ukraine, but of NATO, and has captured and is holding about a third of Ukraine.

By adding Russian troops relieved from other posts by the mobilization, along with current equipment, Russia will be better positioned to limit Ukrainian incursions into already demilitarized areas and perform their important denazification and demilitarization missions without the concern of leaving previously liberated areas undefended against reincursion.

Liman had a population of 25,000. Smaller than many villages in the USA. Thanks to flight and evacuation it now has a population of around a tenth of that, and is being defended by the Krasnolimansky garrison of a few hundred who are succeeding in causing thousands or tens of thousands of reserves and combat forces from other areas to be transferred in to the region of Liman only to die in force. Liman is important to the Ukrainians only because its small garrison suggested that it could be overrun and it's politician claimed it would be captured. 

There is no reason to imagine that it is important to the allies or serves any strategic purpose. Look at a map. This is why, while undoubtedly grateful for the garrison's efforts, and their completely disproportionate impact on Ukrainian forces, the Russians have almost certainly ordered the garrison to withdraw (and perhaps evacuate remaining civilians who want to leave) if threatened with being overrun, after which any surviving Ukrainians can occupy the ruins - and Kiev can claim an enormous victory. It certainly not the first time, and probably will not be the last..."

PS The ascension of the liberated regions of Ukraine will only occur with ratification by all the government bodies, so, while it is practically inevitable, it will only be after that, probably in two to six weeks when, if the Ukraine has not already surrendered or at least withdrawn, Russia will deploy additional resources to the Ukraine. Until then it is likely that the Allies will simply continue to assist the Ukrainians in demilitarizing themselves through attrition by artillery.

A little more reality for you to consider:

1) This is the first war in the history of mankind where both sides have access to excellent satellite recon. Forget drones. They can be jammed, bidirectionally. Piloting commands can be jammed, imagery transmitted back can be jammed. Only the autonomous one-way drone going to a specific latitude/longitude mean anything, and they are usually not recon. They are suicide type.

2) Satellites come in types. At geosynchronous altitude of 23,000 miles you don't get much imagery. Recon satellites are lower in altitude and Keplerian element sets define their orbit, typically overhead at some locale for at most 15 minutes. They traverse the sky. They don't hang overhead. That is what geosynch does and those are for communications and even sometimes radar or eavesdropping, seldom if ever imagery with decent resolutions of square meters per pixel. So, those low altitude (call it 500 miles) passes are entirely predictable. You can inform troops to hide, or be sure to move afterwards.

3) 1 and 2 above means something important. There are no surprises. You cannot mass equipment or troops without being seen. The spacecraft are typically multi-spectral but even with that, it's a cloudy planet. The great pictures you see are one of 100s taken before clear sky was present. Also, those 15 minute passes . . . usually groups of 3. The first is 8 minutes maybe, then 15, then another 8, and then 12 hours pass before the next group of three. These spacecraft are usually polar type orbits with the planet rotating under them. That it why you don't have to maneuver. The desired location for imaging will be seen each day two times per day, though one group of three is usually dark. Babbling a bit but you wackos need to know this. THERE ARE NO SURPRISES.

4) The senior officers of both sides went to the same schools, in Russia. The past 8 years since 2014 some junior officers likely have gotten US and UK training, but the generals who took 25 years to reach their rank, they went to the MTI annexes of Russian civilian universities. This is just like US ROTC, where most officers come from. Academies do supply officers, and Russia has them, too, but most officers are from ROTC or these Military Training Institutes attached to civilian universities. Thus, the Russian and Ukrainian generals were classmates. They may have even kept in touch over the decades. They all learned the same tactics from Stalingrad. They all have the same satellite imagery. They all know the eventual outcome of what is going on.

5) This will also likely be the mechanism for the eventual military coup, that to some extent is the only possible outcome. No one will trust anyone in any agreements that might be signed, so a coup is almost certainly the only way it ends. The US and UK certainly are aware of this and have taken steps to keep Ukraine military senior personnel out of the relevant Kiev buildings, but . . . it doesn't matter. It's the only conceivable eventual end.

 

The Big Change That Comes With Referenda And Mobilization

What the western analysis is missing is that legally it’s not possible for Russian military units to be active in foreign countries. There have obviously been workarounds in Ukraine, but it’s part of why so few regular army units are involved and the parsimonious use of manpower. That’s the big change that comes with the referenda and mobilization.

At this point the AFU is significantly but not catastrophically degraded. The minimal force applied by Russia has had its share of failures but has done that degradation and mostly held the line. It likely would have been sufficient for the whole task except the west has gone all in and is now a direct participant in the conflict. That’s problematic but has apparently done terrible things to western military stocks (especially Eastern European stocks), which does reduce the larger threat to Russia in the short term.

Partial mobilization means the ability to backfill rear duties in the conflict as well as border duties in the western military zone and along the Russian-Ukrainian border. With the referenda, regular army can be applied at large scale against a degraded AFU and with loosened rules of engagement concerning infrastructure. It’s openly telegraphed to give Washington DC another chance to act rationally. If not, you go NATO on the degraded AFU, infrastructure and aim to give the west a crushing defeat on the battlefield of its choosing. It will be costly but could achieve encirclement of the AFU in Donbas/Kharkov as well as the capture of Odessa. And I maintain that when Odessa falls, the US taps out.

In this scenario we all have to hope the US doesn’t further escalate because that escalation ladder will see nukes. NATO leadership thinks it can manage and win a “limited nuclear war” and it doesn’t handle losing very well.

Something obscured by the Western MSM’s focus on playing up the general threat of Putin escalating to nuclear weapons is what Putin actually said:

“Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the wind rose (NATO symbol) can turn around.”

There’s a very specific threat implied in that phrasing, which gives Putin and Russia the scope of climbing another rung up the escalation ladder before actual use of nuclear weapons. The threat is as follows: –

[1] The Kiev regime’s shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, its lies about that, and the subsequent refusal of the IAEA and the UN to acknowledge those Ukrainian lies - will have further hardened Russian attitudes towards the EU and the West .

[2] There are fifteen nuclear reactors located across four power plants in Ukraine, nine of which remain in the Kiev regime’s territory.

[3] When the coming referenda are done, the territories of Donetz and Lugansk will become officially Russian. The US-NATO will then continue its proxy war and push the Kiev regime to attack those regions, though they will then be Russia by Russian lights. At that point, the Russians will take that as an act of war, conclude the special military operation, and commence the war proper on Ukraine.

[4] They can then do what they’ve been technically capable of doing from the beginning and what the USA canonically does when it invades a country: target and take out with missile and air strikes both the enemy’s C&C centers — currently occupied to some greater or lesser extent by the US-NATO personnel actually directing this war — and the country’s civil infrastructure of water, railroads, communications, specific bridges and roads, and its power plants and transmission lines.

[5] In general, as Docotorow suggests, then. But among those power plants are the nine nuclear reactors. And the targeting of those could be done on days when the wind is specifically blowing east to west, towards Europe.

[6] Not only that. Here’s a map of those reactors’ locations.

Presumably, those reactors are built to Soviet specs and, like Zaporizhzhia, are built to standards whereby conventional attack by shelling or an aircraft crashing into them won’t crack their containment vessels (Although spent fuel pools are far more vulnerable.) A Kinzhal hypersonic missile OTOH — or a barrage of them — will break open their containment vessels   .

An exclusion zone created at South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant, a.k.a the Pivdennoukrainsk Nuclear Power Plant, in Mykolaiv oblast, about 350 kms south of Kiev, would have the effect of focusing a few minds in the US, NATO, and the EU.

Indeed, the Russians sent a warning three days ago.

 

There Is No Contract, Hence No Agreement, Hence No Deal....,

smart-union  |  Since the announcement of the tentative agreement (TA) yesterday morning, a number of posts purporting to reveal the finalized contents or finalized components of the TA have spread rapidly and are being presented as factual.

They are not.

Anyone who states that they have seen a final copy of the TA, have a copy of the final TA or knows the final contents of the agreement is not being truthful. The final documents have not been fully reviewed by both parties’ legal counsel as is required before it can be presented to the SMART-TD District 1 General Chairpersons, nor has it been distributed to officers or membership.

Per the SMART Constitution, the TA’s language, when finalized, will first be released to General Chairpersons engaged in national handling for their review. This is anticipated to happen as soon as sometime next week.

Once the proper steps with our SMART-TD District 1 General Chairpersons have occurred, factual information will be released on the union website for members for them to evaluate and to carefully consider the tentative agreement.

In the meantime, please do not draw conclusions on the information concerning this agreement from what is being circulated on social media until such time that it comes from our official sites.

We thank you for and appreciate your patience.

Gazprom Presents The Lullabye Of Winter For The West

DW  | Putin accused the West of attempting to "subordinate" Russia with sanctions during a speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. He also announced new deals with China and Myanmar regarding gas and oil. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has admitted some sectors of the Russian economy are suffering due to sanctions and political pressure, which he referred to as the "economic, financial and technological aggression of the West," but remained bullish on building new ties with Asia.

Putin made the comments in a landmark speech at the Eastern Economic Forum in the far east city of Vladivostok on Wednesday.

"Other challenges of a global nature that threaten the whole world have replaced the pandemic," the Russian president said.

"I am speaking of the West's sanctions fever, with its brazen, aggressive attempt to impose models of behavior on other countries, to deprive them of their sovereignty and subordinate them to their will."

However, Putin added: "No matter how much someone would like to isolate Russia, it is impossible to do this."

Grain shipments under threat

During his speech, Putin said said Russia had been "grossly swindled" by a grain shipping deal that was reached with Ukraine in July. The deal, brokered by Turkey and the UN, was intended to shield the world's most vulnerable people from a looming food crisis.

The Russian president claimed only two out of 87 ships went to poor countries, and said Russia had been unable to resume lucrative fertilizer exports which had been promised as part of the deal. Putin said he would now consider limiting the destinations for grain exports under the agreement.

Ukrainian authorities hit back later on Wenesday, with presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak calling Putin's proposal "unexpected" and "groundless."

"The agreements signed in Istanbul ... concern only one issue, and that is the transfer of cargo ships through the Black Sea," Podolyak told Reuters.

"Russia can't dictate where Ukraine should send its grain, and Ukraine doesn't dictate the same to Russia." 

Oil and gas in limbo

Russia is the world's largest natural gas exporter, and the second-largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia.

Putin said Russia would renege on energy contracts if the Group of Seven (G7) countries imposed a price cap on Russian oil, threatening to cut the flow of gas to Europe.

"Will there be any political decisions that contradict the contracts? Yes, we just won't fulfil them. We will not supply anything at all if it contradicts our interests," Putin said. "We will not supply gas, oil, coal, heating oil — we will not supply anything."

Hours after Putin's comments, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters: "We will propose a price cap on Russian gas... We must cut Russia's revenues which Putin uses to finance this atrocious war in Ukraine."

 

 

WRT Ukraine - India Ain't Have To Lie To Nobody About Nothing

indianpunchline |  The US media vaguely claims that Ukrainian forces are making “tactical gains” and are preparing “for a long and hard-fought battle before winter sets in… Western officials cautioned the counteroffensive won’t sweep the Russian forces out of Ukraine any time soon. However, success in retaking the region of Kherson and gaining control of the western side of the river would be “really significant.” (Politico) 

The daily noted, “Such a victory would show Ukraine’s Western allies that they are right to continue sending billions of dollars of weapons and supplies to help counter Russia.” 

This last bit is the crux of the matter. The arms supplies from European countries to Ukraine have virtually dried up to a trickle and a similar trend is discernible with the US supplies too. The Biden Administration is asking Congress to approve another $11.7 billion in aid for Ukraine but that is in anticipation of the likelihood that the 2023 budget may not be passed by the deadline of Oct. 1. The White House Office of Management and Budget announcement on Sept. 2 acknowledges that this is “a short-term continuing resolution to keep the Federal government running.” 

The OMB statement says the White House wants this anomaly because funds from previous packages to boost Ukrainian military are running low, with three-quarters distributed or committed, and more will follow in the next month. Importantly, though, of the $11.7 billion requested by the White House, $4.5 billion would go toward replenishing Pentagon’s depleted stockpiles, $4.5 billion to budgetary support for Ukraine’s government, and only $2.7 billion to defence and intelligence aid as such. This new round of aid is intended to last through December. 

Zelensky must be a worried man. He needs to convince the US that such massive multi-billion dollar military aid has been worth it. He should show at the very least, a bloody stalemate on the southern warfront. (Russia is gaining the upper hand in Donass already.) 

There is always the danger that Zelensky might overreach. Politico disclosed: “Western governments have warned Kyiv against spreading its forces too thinly in a bid to capture as much territory as possible, since the Ukrainians would have to hold any gains they make. The officials said they expect Ukraine to reassess its military goals if it retakes Kherson. However, the city of Melitopol, also in the south, remains too far away from the Ukrainian positions, while a ground attack against Crimea during this offensive is not plausible.” 

Now, all this juxtaposes with the upbeat tone but bare factual information shared in the official Russian statements on Kherson front. Other Russian reports say that the “counteroffensive” has been virtually muzzled and Ukrainian forces have taken heavy casualties running into several thousands. It seems to be an apocalyptic scenario , too tragic to recount. 

The solitary Ukrainian breakthrough remaining as of Saturday night was a bridgehead across the Ingulets river — the so-called Andreevsky bridgehead. There is speculation that Russians may have lured the Ukrainian troops into a “fire trap.” The river crossings have been cut off and Russians are probably encircling the Ukrainian troops trapped on the western side of Ingulets with no supplies or reinforcements reaching them. 

The counteroffensive has lost its bite and is now turning into positional battles on one or two sites in the Mykolaiv-Krivoy Rog direction. A Russian counterattack has also been mentioned to the effect that the frontline now touches the “administrative boundary” of Mykolaiv region (which is a crucial city en route to Odessa.) Heavy bombardment of Mykolaiv city has also been reported. The Russians claim to have destroyed vast quantities of weaponry. 

Russia’s “domain control” can be put in perspective: the enemy is, on the one hand, caught on the bare steppe and cut down with the overwhelming superiority of Russian artillery and aviation, and, on the other hand, encountering well-fortified, entrenched defence lines. 

That said, Zelensky cannot give up, as he is desperately in need of a success story. Kiev still hopes to reverse the situation, but how that is achievable remains to be seen. 

Against this sombre backdrop, more and more sceptical voices are being heard in the US about the Biden Administration’s policy trajectory. The latest is an opinion piece in Wall Street Journal by Gen. (Retd) Mark Kimmitt, formerly Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs in the Bush administration. Kimmitt predicts that “a breakthrough is unlikely” and soon, “logistics shortfalls” may force a change in US strategy.

America Needs To Stop Lying About Russia And China

johnmenadue |  The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy.

The essential narrative of the West is built into US national security strategy. The core US idea is that China and Russia are implacable foes that are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” These countries are, according to the US, “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their. militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”

The irony is that since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen just to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union. The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.

President Joe Biden has promoted this narrative, declaring that the greatest challenge of our time is the competition with the autocracies, which “seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.” US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.

The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts. A generation earlier George W. Bush, Jr. sold the public on the idea that America’s greatest threat was Islamic fundamentalism, without mentioning that it was the CIA, with Saudi Arabia and other countries, that had created, funded, and deployed the jihadists in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere to fight America’s wars.

Or consider the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which was painted in the Western media as an act of unprovoked perfidy. Years later, we learned that the Soviet invasion was actually preceded by a CIA operation designed to provoke the Soviet invasion! The same misinformation occurred vis-à-vis Syria. The Western press is filled with recriminations against Putin’s military assistance to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad beginning in 2015, without mentioning that the US supported the overthrow of al-Assad beginning in 2011, with the CIA funding a major operation (Timber Sycamore) to overthrow Assad years before Russia arrived.

Or more recently, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recklessly flew to Taiwan despite China’s warnings, no G7 foreign minister criticised Pelosi’s provocation, yet the G7 ministers together harshly criticised China’s “overreaction” to Pelosi’s trip.

The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandisement: in 1999, incorporating three Central European countries; in 2004, incorporating 7 more, including in the Black Sea and Baltic States; in 2008, committing to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia; and in 2022, inviting four Asia-Pacific leaders to NATO to take aim at China.

Nor do the Western media mention the US role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych; the failure of the Governments of France and Germany, guarantors of the Minsk II agreement, to press Ukraine to carry out its commitments; the vast US armaments sent to Ukraine during the Trump and Biden Administrations in the lead-up to war; nor the refusal of the US to negotiate with Putin over NATO enlargement to Ukraine.

Of course, NATO says that is purely defensive, so that Putin should have nothing to fear. In other words, Putin should take no notice of the CIA operations in Afghanistan and Syria; the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; the NATO occupation of Afghanistan for 15 years; nor Biden’s “gaffe” calling for Putin’s ouster (which of course was no gaffe at all); nor US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the US war aim in Ukraine is the weakening of Russia.

At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea. The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices). In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 percent of the world compared with 41 percent in the BRICS.
There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US. It’s past time that the US recognised the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony. With such a revised foreign policy, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.

Canada Should Organize A Team To Counter Its Own Lies And Misinformation

torontosun  |  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled plans to create a special team focused on countering Russian disinformation and propaganda on Tuesday, as Ukrainians prepared to mark the six-month anniversary of Moscow’s invasion of their country.

The prime minister announced the new initiative as part of a package of new Canadian measures designed to support Ukraine and punish Russia for launching a war that has killed tens of thousands and whose impacts are being felt around the world.

Canada is also imposing sanctions against 62 more people, including those the government described as several Russian regional governors and their families, as well as a Russian company whose products include anti-drone equipment.

Ottawa is also planning to spend nearly $4 million on two projects to bolster Ukraine’s military and police services, including training to help Ukrainian police officers better handle cases involving sexual trauma as well as mental-health programs.

Trudeau revealed the package during a special meeting of leaders from countries that have been supporting Ukraine since Russian forces first crossed into the country on Feb. 24, launching Europe’s largest conflict since the Second World War.

Notionally intended to discuss Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the meeting also came as Ukrainians prepared to mark on Wednesday the anniversary of their country’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Appearing via videolink from Toronto alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is in the midst of a three-day visit to Canada, Trudeau accused Russia of falsely blaming western sanctions for escalating food prices and shortages around the world.

While Russian officials have blamed the sanctions imposed in response to its invasion of Ukraine for the food crisis, Canada and its allies say Moscow is responsible for having disrupted critical Ukrainian food production and exports.

“I want to repeat yet again, that there are no sanctions on food. When the Russian regime blames sanctions for the food crisis around the world, they’re engaging in disinformation,” Trudeau said.

“We need to continue fighting Russian disinformation. That’s why Canada will create a dedicated team to help increase our capacity to monitor and detect Russian and other state-sponsored disinformation.”

 

 

More Thinking About The Fabric Of Reality

If you look at the graphic at the top of the article (Penrose tiling) you'll notice there are a bunch of points that are centers of rotational symmetry (you can rotate it 2pi/N and get the same thing) and lines of reflection symmetry (you can mirror it over that line and get the same thing) but there is no translational symmetry (you can't slide it over in any direction and overlap with the original), this is a "quasicrystal" (in 2d)

Compare this to a grid of squares that has reflection and rotation symmetry but also has translational symmetry, this is a true "crystal" (in 2d)

This article is treating a train of laser pulses as a "1d crystal" and if long/short pulses resemble a Fibonacci sequence treating it as a "1d quasicrystal". This seems to be noteworthy in that using such a structured pulse train provides some improvements in quantum computing when it's used to read/write (i.e. shine on) information (i.e. electron configuration) from atoms / small molecules (i.e. qubits)

The "2 time dimensions" thing is basically that a N-d "quasicrystal" is usually a pretty close approximation of an [N+M]-d "true crystal" projected down into N dimensions so the considering the higher dimension structure might make things easier by getting rid of transcendental numbers etc.

They could have just said "aperiodic laser pulses" are used. No need to introduce fantastical sounding terminology about multiple time dimensions, which seems to have been done quite deliberately.

The biggest and most important step is to make sure you drop any mysticism about what a "dimension" is. It's just a necessary component of identifying the location of something in some way. More than three "dimensions" is not just common but super common, to the point of mundanity. The location and orientation of a rigid object, a completely boring quantity, is six dimensional: three for space, three for the rotation. Add velocity in and it becomes 12 dimensional; the six previous and three each now for linear and rotational velocity. To understand "dimensions" you must purge ALL science fiction understanding and understand them not as exotic, but painfully mundane and boring. (They may measure something interesting, but that "interestingness" should be accounted to the thing being measured, not the "dimension". "Dimensions" are as boring as "inches" or "gallons".)

Next up, there is a very easy metaphor for us in the computing realm for the latest in QM and especially materials science. In our world, there is a certain way in which a "virtual machine" and a "machine" are hard to tell apart. A lot of things in the latest QM and materials science is building little virtual things that combine the existing simple QM primitives to build new systems. The simplest example of this sort of thing is a "hole". Holes do not "exist". They are where an electron is missing. But you can treat them as a virtual thing, and it can be difficult to tell whether or not that virtual thing is "real" or not, because it acts exactly like the "virtual" thing would if it were "real".

In this case, this system may mathematically behave like there is a second time dimension, and that's interesting, but it "just" "simulating" it. It creates a larger system out of smaller parts that happens to match that behavior, but it doesn't mean there's "really" a second time dimension.

The weird and whacky things you hear coming out of QM and materials science are composite things being assembled out of normal mundane components in ways that allow them to "simulate" being some other interesting system, except when you're "simulating" at this low, basic level it essentially is just the thing being "simulated". But there's not necessarily anything new going on; it's still electrons and protons and neutrons and such, just arranged in interesting ways, just as, in the end, Quake or Tetris is "just" an interesting arrangement of NAND gates. There's no upper limit to how "interestingly" things can be arranged, but there's less "new" than meets the eye.

Unfortunately, trying to understand this through science articles, which are still as addicted as ever to "woo woo" with the word dimensions and leaning in to the weirdness of QM and basically deliberately trying to instill mysticism at the incorrect level of the problem. (Personally, I still feel a lot of wonder about the world and enjoy learning more... but woo woo about what a "dimension" is is not the place for that.) 

The Shining Brief Moment Of Black Radio News

pacificanetwork |  As the keynote speaker at the Grassroots Radio Conference held in early October in Rochester, NY, Glen explained how not all preachers in the 60’s invited Dr. Martin Luther King to come to their town, for they preferred to handle relations with the dominating white system on their own.  According to Ford, The Civil Rights Movement hadn’t reached towns like Augusta except through the media.

Believing that Black clergy of Augusta were “collaborating with the white power structure,” instead of building a community of empowerment for black people, Ford threw the list of names in the trash and proceeded to search for people who would represent what he described as, “the real Augusta.”  For him, the real Augusta was made of people who were not being served by the system. So, Ford looked for leaders of the community who he thought would join him in disrupting that system.  Such as “a rather loud black woman whom all the other tenants respected” to address on housing and poverty; or “that brother who jumps up every time the police beat down another brother” to address criminal justice.

With these new allies, Ford made his own list of “experts,” and watched them grow swiftly in their roles as public commentators.  He called them his committee of 10.  Because they were already natural leaders in their community, they collectively set out to awaken everyday people to their own power.

Under Ford’s leadership, that committee of 10 called for a boycott of the downtown businesses of Augusta to protest their refusal to employ black workers.  The campaign was called “Don’t Shop Where You Can’t Work.” This was Augusta Georgia’s first mass movement. 

The project was promoted on the radio to community enthusiasm and support. On the eve of the boycott, the minister with the largest congregation held an over-flow event at his church. Cheers erupted from the crowd when it was announced that James Brown himself was coming to town to donate $600 of bail money if anyone was arrested during the boycott.  

But James Brown’s radio station relied on advertising from downtown merchants, and when Ford showed up for his broadcast featuring the boycott, he found a note taped to the microphone, saying “There will be no coverage of the downtown merchant’s boycott on this radio station.” Ford was terminated from his job after the verbal altercation that followed with James Brown that almost came to blows.  

Without the radio behind the boycott, the boycott in Augusta collapsed. However, Ford’s organizing through radio resulted in on-going local organizing in Augusta and launched Ford’s distinguished journalism and organizing career.

It's Conspicuously Obvious To The Casual Observer That Biden Is A Senile Old Man

technofog |  The troubling thing is that most of the presidency is off-script.

How do you address inflation and families being priced-out of groceries when you struggle through a press conference?

How do you formulate a strategy about China or Russia when you rely on a cheat sheet for a 5-minute meeting?

Make no mistake, Biden’s senility is one of the biggest stories in the world. The media’s silence on this matter is telling. Never before has the press tried to so hard to ignore so big a story (I venture this is bigger than Hunter’s laptop), as they’re afraid of what a correct assessment of Biden’s facilities might reveal. Ask whether Dementia-in-Chief is a threat to national security or economic recovery.

Also revealing is the media’s attempts to explain-away or otherwise repackage Biden’s mental and physical deficiencies. Peter Baker, writing for The New York Times, says Biden’s “age has increasingly become an uncomfortable issue for him, his team and his party.” Of course, Biden’s age isn’t the issue per se - it’s Biden’s mind. “Age” is just The New York Times’ way of being polite, of serving the Biden Administration.

To make matters worse, there was the unbelievable “uniform” reporting of Biden’s competence by those interviewed by Baker:

In interviews, some sanctioned by the White House and some not, more than a dozen current and former senior officials and advisers uniformly reported that Mr. Biden remained intellectually engaged, asking smart questions at meetings, grilling aides on points of dispute, calling them late at night, picking out that weak point on Page 14 of a memo and rewriting speeches like his abortion remarks on Friday right up until the last minute.

Those comments by Biden’s closest advisors and Democrat officials are certainly contrasted by how they treat Biden, and Baker unfortunately makes no effort to push-back on that point. As Baker concedes: “He stays out of public view at night and has taken part in fewer than half as many news conferences or interviews as recent predecessors.”

“Out of public view at night.” Could it be because Biden struggles with sundowning, which causes confusion, aggression, anxiety, and depression? Baker doesn’t ask.

But - if you have any concerns about Biden’s health or acuity - don’t worry. The New York Times has found experts that “put Mr. Biden in a category of ‘super-agers’ who remain unusually fit as they advance in years.”

Sadly, Baker doesn’t challenge that conclusion either. And what an easy challenge it would have been.

There’s the old cliché that journalists must speak truth to power. As Chomsky once observed, speaking truth to power is pointless because the powerful already know the truth. Better to speak truth to the powerless. As to Biden’s age-related failures - dare I say dementia - the press has chosen to avoid speaking the truth to the power and the powerless.

How much it matters is another story. This is likely a one-term president and the public is seeing Biden’s real-time deterioration for themselves.

But - if the press is willing to cover-up Biden’s dementia - then what other stories are they euthanizing?

NYTimes Would Have You Believe That Biden Is An Unusually Fit "Super-Ager"

NYTimes |  “I do feel it’s inappropriate to seek that office after you’re 80 or in your 80s,” said David Gergen, a top adviser to four presidents. “I have just turned 80 and I have found over the last two or three years I think it would have been unwise for me to try to run any organization. You’re not quite as sharp as you once were.”

Everyone ages differently, of course, and some experts put Mr. Biden in a category of “super-agers” who remain unusually fit as they advance in years.

“Right now, there’s no evidence that the age of Biden should matter one ounce,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity specialist at the University of Illinois Chicago who studied the candidates’ ages in 2020. “If people don’t like his policies, they don’t like what he says, that’s fine, they can vote for someone else. But it’s got nothing to do with how old he is.”

Still, Professor Olshansky said it was legitimate to wonder if that would remain so at 86. “That’s the right question to be asking,” he said. “You can’t sugarcoat aging. Things go wrong as we get older and the risks rise the older we get.”

The White House rejected the idea that Mr. Biden was anything other than a seven-day commander in chief. “President Biden works every day and because chief executives can perform their duties from anywhere in the world, it has long been common for them to spend weekends away from the White House,” Andrew Bates, a deputy press secretary, said after this article was published online.

The president’s medical report in November indicated he had atrial fibrillation but that it was stable and asymptomatic. Mr. Biden’s “ambulatory gait is perceptibly stiffer and less fluid than it was a year or so ago,” the report said, and gastroesophageal reflux causes him to cough and clear his throat, symptoms that “certainly seem to be more frequent and more pronounced.”

But overall, Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor, the president’s physician, pronounced him “a healthy, vigorous 78-year-old male who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”

Questions about Mr. Biden’s fitness have nonetheless taken a toll on his public standing. In a June survey by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and the Harris Poll, 64 percent of voters believed he was showing that he is too old to be president, including 60 percent of respondents 65 or older.

Mr. Biden’s public appearances have fueled that perception. His speeches can be flat and listless. He sometimes loses his train of thought, has trouble summoning names or appears momentarily confused. More than once, he has promoted Vice President Kamala Harris, calling her “President Harris.” Mr. Biden, who overcame a childhood stutter, stumbles over words like “kleptocracy.” He has said Iranian when he meant Ukrainian and several times called Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, “John,” confusing him with the late Republican senator of that name from Virginia.

Republicans and conservative media gleefully highlight such moments, posting viral videos, sometimes exaggerated or distorted to make Mr. Biden look even worse. But the White House has had to walk back some of his ad-libbed comments, such as when he vowed a military response if China attacks Taiwan or declared that President Vladimir V. Putin “cannot remain in power” in Russia.

Mr. Biden was famously prone to gaffes even as a younger man, and aides point to his marathon meetings with families of mass shooting victims or his working the rope line during a trip to Cleveland this past week as evidence of stamina.

Sri Lankans Show Bitch-Made Americans And Canadians How REAL PROTEST Is Done....,

michaelshellenberger |  Sri Lanka has fallen. Protesters breached the official residences of Sri Lanka's Prime Minister and President, who have fled to undisclosed locations out of fear of death. The proximate reason is that the nation is bankrupt, suffering its worst financial crisis in decades. Millions are struggling to purchase food, medicine and fuel. Energy shortages and inflation were major factors behind the crisis. Inflation in June in Sri Lanka was over 50%. Food prices rose by 80%. And a half-million people fell into poverty over the last year.

But the underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture and “ESG,” which refers to investments made following supposedly higher Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria. Sri Lanka has a near-perfect ESG score (98) which is higher than Sweden (96) or the United States (51), notes a commentator.

To be sure, there were other factors behind Sri Lanka’s fall. COVID-19 lockdowns and a 2019 bombing hurt tourism, a $3 billion to 5 billion-per-year industry. Sri Lanka’s leaders insisted on paying China back for various “Belt and Road” infrastructure projects when other nations refused to do so. And higher oil prices meant transportation prices rose 128% since May.

But the biggest and main problem causing Sri Lanka’s fall was its ban on chemical fertilizers in April 2021. Over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers and, after the ban, 85% experienced crop losses. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold. Tea, the nation’s main export, also suffered, thereby undermining the nation’s foreign currency and ability to purchase products from abroad.

While there are 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 70% of the nation’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming. “We are furious!” said one rice farmer in May. “Angry! Not just me - but all the farmers who cultivated here are angry.”

American Police Are Poorly Trained And Perversely Incentivized Liars, Bullies, And Cowards....,

hotair |  This ties up a loose end from yesterday’s post. According to the timeline laid out by Texas DPS chief Steve McCraw, one of the Uvalde school district cops on the scene told the other officers that he’d been on the phone with his wife, Eva Mireles, a teacher at the school who’d been shot in room 112. She was dying, she had said. He relayed that information to them at 11:48 a.m.

United States cops watch in amazement while other country's police do their jobs without taking any lives. pic.twitter.com/iGh71VugTN

— 🥀_Imposter_🕸️ (@Imposter_Edits) June 20, 2022

Police didn’t enter the room and confront the shooter for another 62 minutes.

How could the officer, Ruben Ruiz, not have ignored the warnings to stand down and rushed into the room to try to save his wife?

They detained him, disarmed, and kicked him out of the building while his wife bled out on the other side of the wall. That’s not the only example of cops detaining people who were willing to risk their own lives to try to stop the shooter either.

If I were Ruiz, I don’t know how I’d function. Every hour would be consumed wondering whether my wife would have been saved if the police had made their way in sooner. How can he ever work with those cops again? For that matter, why did he allow himself to be escorted from the scene instead of defying orders and barging into the room?

Were all of the officers at the scene under the impression that the doors were locked — even though, per McCraw, it turns out they weren’t? No one tried the knob once in desperation?

Again, Ruiz told his colleagues at 11:48 a.m. that his wife was shot but alive. Mireles was still alive 22 minutes later, per a 911 call by one of the children trapped in the classroom:

“There is a lot of bodies,” a 10-year-old student, Khloie Torres, quietly told a 911 dispatcher at 12:10 p.m. — 37 minutes after the gunman began shooting inside the classrooms — according to a review of a transcript of the call. “I don’t want to die, my teacher is dead, my teacher is dead, please send help, send help for my teacher, she is shot but still alive.”

Incredibly, Mireles was *still* alive when cops finally burst in and killed the shooter. “Officers could be seen in video footage rushing a few children out of the room and carrying out Ms. Mireles, who appeared to be in extreme pain,” the Times reported earlier this month. “She reached an ambulance, but died before reaching a hospital.”

What if they had reached her an hour earlier?

If not for Mireles’s phone call to Ruiz, one could imagine that the cops in the hallway might have believed they were in a hostage situation. If the shooter had stopped firing, they may have assumed that everyone inside the classroom who had already been shot was dead and now it was a matter of trying to wait him out in hopes that he’d surrender before harming anyone else.

But once they knew that someone was alive inside and bleeding, waiting should have been unimaginable. Even if they didn’t know about the 911 calls from the kids due to poor communication with dispatchers, they knew from Ruiz that they had to get in there to save Mireles ASAP, at whatever cost. But they didn’t. And they didn’t let him try either.

 

 

Decide For Yourself If Russia Is Issuing Checks It Can't Cash!!!

indianpunchline |  Fundamentally, the Western economies are facing a systemic crisis. The complacency that the reserve-currency-based US economy is impervious to ballooning debt; that the petrodollar system compels the entire world to purchase dollars to finance their needs; that the flood of cheap Chinese consumer goods and cheap energy from Russia and Gulf States would keep inflation at bay; that interest rate hikes will cure structural inflation; and, above all, that the consequences of taking a trade-war hammer to a complex network system in the world economy can be managed — these notions stand exposed. 

When the money printing presses whirred in Europe and America, no one felt uneasy about the structural flaws in the system. In a haze of ideological bluster, the Biden Administration and its junior partner in Brussels didn’t pay any due diligence before sanctioning Russia and its energy and resources. Europe is much worse off than America. Inflation in Europe is well into double digits. A European sovereign debt crisis may already have begun.

The accelerating inflationary crisis threatens the standing of western politicians, as they will encounter real popular anger once inflation eats away at the middle class and high energy prices gut business profits.

How to arrest the unfolding slow burn political debacle for both Europe and the US? The logical way is to force Zelensky to go to the negotiating table and discuss a settlement. The narrative of continuing the attrition against Russian forces for the coming months, to inflict hurt on Russia, does not help European politicians. Mariupol, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia have fallen. Donbass might also, soon. What’s the next red line? Odessa? 

Paradoxically, the long war in Ukraine could only work to Russia’s advantage. President Putin’s speech at the SPIEF at St. Petersburg on Friday shows how thoroughly Moscow studied the western financial and economic system and identified its structural contradictions. Putin is adept at using the weight and strength of his opponents to his own advantage rather than opposing blow directly to blow. The West’s overextension can ultimately be its undoing. 

That’s where the actual inflection point lies today — whether the structural contradictions in the western economies have matured into disorder. Putin sees the West’s future as bleak, hit simultaneously by the blowback from its own imposition of sanctions, and the resultant spike in commodity prices, but lacking agility to deflect the blows due to institutional rigidities. 

The big question today is at what point Russia retaliates against the countries who are involved in the gun-running business in Ukraine if they accelerate on that path. The air strikes by Russian jets last Thursday on the militant terror groups harboured in the US garrison at Al-Tanf on the Syrian-Iraqi border may well have carried a message.

Shrapnel In The Forest And Shells From The Sky

NYTimes |   Under the fire of Russia’s long-range arsenal and facing a desperate need for ammunition and weapons, Ukrainian forces remain outgunned on the long and pockmarked eastern front, according to military analysts, Ukrainian officials and soldiers on the ground.

Just one engagement on Thursday and Friday on a small swath of the line, in a forest north of the town of Sloviansk, sent about a dozen Ukrainian soldiers to a military hospital with harrowing shrapnel wounds.

“You ask how the fighting is going,” said Oleksandr Kolesnikov, the commander of a company of soldiers fighting in the forest, interviewed on an ambulance gurney outside a military hospital in Kramatorsk. “There was a commander of the company. He was killed. There was another commander. He was killed. A third commander was wounded. I am the fourth.”

Out on the highways in the Donbas region, trucks towing howitzers and flatbeds carrying tanks rumbled east on Saturday, suggesting the Ukrainian military was reinforcing its front lines. The army does not disclose its force numbers but has publicized the arrival of Western weaponry, including American M777 artillery guns.

“We needed to move a group to the left flank and they immediately started pounding us with mortars,” said Mr. Kolesnikov. “That is how I was wounded.”

He called for artillery fire from the Ukrainian side to hit the Russian mortar crew, but said the Ukrainian battery was only able to shoot a dozen or so shells, which did not halt the Russian mortar attack.

The deputy commander, Anatoly Ignatyenko, was wounded a day earlier in the same spot. The two soldiers, now off the front line, comforted one another in the ambulance, and Mr. Ignatyenko helped his commander drink from a bottle of water.

Both said President Biden and the leaders of other Western nations need to hasten the supply of long-range weapons, such as rocket artillery, to even the odds in the battle for the Donbas.

“Let Biden not be stingy with weapons,” said Mr. Ignatyenko. Russian artillery attacks were relentless, he said: “There is not an hour without a pause.”

Also on Friday, a Ukrainian logistics unit resupplying the soldiers in the forest suffered losses. Soldiers drove an armored personnel carrier to the position to deliver food and ammunition.

When the soldiers inside stepped out, a mortar landed nearby, killing the commander of the carrier and wounding two others.

“I’ve never seen such hell,” said Mykola Pokotila, a soldier wounded by shrapnel in the forest.

Another wounded soldier, Serhiy Osetrov, sat gingerly in the same ambulance, wincing from shrapnel still lodged in his right leg.

The Ukrainian soldiers were deployed to the forest to repel a Russian advance in the area, on the western edge of the larger battle raging in the east. “We try to push them back but it doesn’t always work,” said Mr. Kolesnikov. “We don’t have enough people, enough weapons.”

Nearby, another more heavily wounded man was wheeled out on a stretcher, his head bandaged. Bloodied field stretchers were stacked up in a line against the wall, traces of the daily cost from the front lines of the Donbas.