unz | Scott Ritter(5:20 mark)– “The idea that the Ukrainian military
has been eliminated as an effective fighting force is a flawed concept,
and unless Russia broadens its special military operation– probably to
the point of changing it form a special military operation to a war
which includes the totality of Ukrainian battle-space–(then) this is a
conflict that is dangerously close to becoming unwinnable by Russia
which means that while they can complete their objectives in the east
with 200,000 troops, they aren’t able to prevent Ukraine from rearming
and reequipping when Ukraine is being provided with tens of billions of
dollars of equipment by NATO —Whenever you provide your enemy with “safe space” to rebuild military capability, you’re never going to win. …
Yes,
Russia is winning in the east which is what they said their objective
was all along. And they are accomplishing that. That is the special
Military Operation. But now we’re talking about “war”, and I don’t think Russia has made that transition yet. This
is a defacto proxy war between the west and Russia using Ukrainian
forces as NATO’s sword. The object of this is to “bleed Russia dry”. And
if Russia doesn’t change the dynamic, Russia will be bled dry.”
Zelensky has indicated that he’s willing to mobilize a million people,
at a time when the west is ready to provide the funding and equipment to
turn those million men into a real military threat.
So, I see what has been happening in the last few weeks as being decisive.
The
military aid the west is providing is changing the dynamic and if
Russia doesn’t find a way to address this meaningfully, and to eliminate
it as a military capability… then the conflict will never end.” (“Saturday Morning Live with Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern, You Tube)
WaPo | Almost all conversations about roadblocks Trump faces or opposition to
his initiatives centered on what was perceived as the media’s biased
portrayal of him and his administration, rather than on anything the
Democrats were doing.
Republicans and conservatives have grumbled about unfair coverage
from the “mainstream media” for decades. But the Trump era has brought
us to a new plateau, one where the media has moved from adversarial to
oppositional. Many observers, on both right and left, have come to see
the media as the leader of the resistance.
If you care about
journalism, it’s a disturbing trend. Many in the media would undoubtedly
lay much of the blame on Trump’s “fake news” attacks. But peruse the
pages or websites of most of our nation’s leading news providers, and
it’s easy to understand why such a perception has taken hold, apart from
Trump’s claims.
Former Democratic president Jimmy Carter’s widely reported comments in Maureen Dowd’s recent New York Times column about the media’s coverage of Trump were a welcome acknowledgment of the obvious from someone other than a Trump loyalist.
“I
think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president
certainly that I’ve known about,” Carter said. “I think they feel free
to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without
hesitation.”
That’s what you would expect from the opposition party. The problem is, headlines accusing Trump of “sabotage,” “lies”
and more are not uncommon from our major media outlets. That’s why I
was curious whether the DNC was still bothering to employ a press staff
when it has been made so redundant.
readingjunkie | Here’s the thing, as correctly observed by CNN, the Ukrainian
strategy of holing up in densely populated cities and using human
shields is very effective. There is also enough passive and sometimes
even active loyalty from the civilian population for this strategy to
work without significant backlash. So why are Ukrainians suddenly doing
the opposite? Why not get out of the kill zone in the Donets basin and
retreat to more defensible positions? Furthermore, why is the West
enabling this strategy by funneling billions of dollars of equipment
into a meat grinder where most of it is just destroyed immediately?
Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to retreat, even if this means
abandoning their equipment?
Refusing to capitulate to Russia is morally indefensible, but from a pragmatic point of view, it would make sense, if
there was a chance of the situation improving. If the Ukrainian army
were to escape from Donbass, that would presumably give the Zelensky
government more bargaining power at the negotiation table. But instead
they’re sitting in their fortifications and being destroyed wholesale.
Without artillery support in good quantity the Ukrainian military
has no chance to hold the line and to stop Russian moves. Any unit
which attempts is hold the line will simply be mauled by Russian
artillery until it is no longer able to fight. That is happening now. As
the Ukrainians have orders not to leave or move their defense lines
they either have to give up or die defending them.
By giving ‘hold the line’ orders the Ukrainian leadership is contributing to the Russian demilitarization of the Ukraine.
It is the ‘west’ that is preventing Zelensky from suing for peace.
The
‘west’ has fallen for its own propaganda. It believes that the Russian
troops near Kiev were defeated by Ukrainian forces. In reality they
retreated in good order after the diversion they constituted was no
longer needed. The ‘western’ fairytale that they were ‘defeated’ gave
hope that Russia could be ‘weakened’, as the U.S. Secretary of State
said.
The war will hardly ‘weaken’ Russia. But the war will destroy the Ukrainian military and many, many of its men.
So
no matter which way you look at this situation, it seems unsustainable,
both for Ukraine and for NATO. While the writers at Moon of Alabama are
probably correct that there is downward pressure on Kiev to keep their
forces committed in Donbass, there is another possible explanation.
Here’s my theory on what is happening.
Russia is using their
contract soldiers, and spent years rotating them all through large-scale
training exercises, including the exercise they just finished in
February. Thanks to this, they rolled into this war with a warm start,
as opposed to a cold one. They can perform adequately on a strategic and
operational level. Tactical inadequacies in the face of a real-life
enemy could be quickly corrected.
As for the Ukrainian side, it
looks like they are a NATO-quality force rebuilt from the ground up
after their serious failures in 2014-15. As individuals and small units,
they can hold their own against their Russian and often win, especially
with the added advantage of being on the defensive. The problem is that
so far they have never demonstrated the ability to push back Russian
forces and retake ground. And no, recapturing terrain that the enemy
voluntarily abandoned doesn’t count. Ukrainians recapturing suburbs
around Kiev was a victory in the same sense as water filling a bowl.
Wars are won by shaping the battlefield to your advantage and forcing
the enemy to conform to it. Flowing into channels the enemy created for
you is the opposite of winning.
Eight years was enough time to build a huge army almost from scratch, but it was not
enough time to properly train them to function at anything higher than a
battalion level, and I think we are seeing that deficiency play out in
Donbass. In previous months they couldn’t maneuver to exploit Russian
mistakes and tactical defeats, and now they can’t maneuver to escape
destruction. Aside from losing a huge number of their vehicles, they
don’t have the doctrine and cohesion to move 40-100 thousand men to
safety.
The logistical complexity of uprooting and moving that
many people is enormous and there is also the morale factor. Standing
your ground is one thing, but if these soldiers moved westward in a
clear retreat, there would be an overwhelming urge to desert and go
home, and that’s what many of them would probably do.
Ukrainians
can’t capitulate, they can’t retreat, so all they can do is stay where
they are and die. Rather than conserve their resources, Kiev is doing
the opposite and sending a continuous stream of additional men and
equipment to be destroyed in the Donbass pocket.
“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud,” according to Orwell. In which case we’ve been totalitarian since at least 2001
TAE | I’ve been wondering for a long time why Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin
as his successor in 1999, and I can’t find much information on it.
Yeltsin was a US asset, and sold out his country to the CIA and a bunch
of CIA-asset homegrown oligarchs. I’ve always suspected that when
Yeltsin left, he felt a lot of regret for what he had done to Russia,
and that maybe appointing Putin was his way to try and make up for that.
I see people saying that Yeltsin thought Putin was pliable, but I think
perhaps he knew exactly how Putin thought.
A “detail”: remember that after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
male life expectancy for a period of time feel from a very steep cliff.
And nothing Yeltsin did provided a solution to that crisis. Then, in
August 1999, he appointed Putin as his prime minister, and didn’t leave a
year later as planned, but 4 months later, in December. His chief of
staff, Valentin Yumashev , who had hired Putin as his deputy in 1997, wrote his resignation speech:
Mr Yumashev was entrusted with writing Yeltsin’s
resignation speech. “It was a hard speech to write. It was clear the
text would go down in history. The message was important. That’s why I
wrote the famous line ‘Forgive me’. “Russians had suffered such shock and stress during the 1990s. Yeltsin had to speak about this.”
Back to today. All economic -and other- sanctions against Russia
since Putin first became president have led to one thing only: the
country has dramatically increased its self-sufficiency. And in the
process has upgraded its weapons arsenal to a level that no western
country even comes close to, including the US, for maybe 10% of what the
same US has spent on its own arsenal.
Russia’s latest generation of hypersonic missiles, against which no
country has any defense, are far superior to what anybody else
possesses. When they said recently they could take out a specific
building in Kyiv if they wanted, they were not exaggerating. So yeah,
look for Biden and Blinken and NATO et al to soon start using that
superiority as a reason to incite more war vs Moscow.
A war they could never win, but that’s not the point any longer. One
might argue of course that it never was after the advent of nuclear
weapons. The whole point of NATO today, its raison d’être, is that it
can create chaos wherever it goes and looks. It’s no longer capable of
defending anyone from the Russian threat, but then that threat hasn’t
been there for many years.
And NATO wants to continue existing, as does the Pentagon, and Boeing
and Raytheon, it’s all about money, so they have to make up a threat,
aided by their media brethren. That‘s why you see, from time to time,
reports about Putin having yet another person “poisoned”, why
governments in countries like the UK and Germany go along with the
narrative, and why media in all other vassal states parrot these
stories.
Russia only sprung into action when the west tried to take away their
sole warm water port, Sevastopol in Crimea. An election was held, and
97% of mostly Russians voted to be part of Russia. Yeah, that upset NATO
and the other usual suspects, but that doesn’t make Russia an
aggressor.
Russia has no reason to “invade” Ukraine. They don’t need even more
territory, they’re already by far the largest nation on earth. Moreover,
they don’t have the military to occupy large swaths of land. They only
have the capacity to protect their own.
Thing is, they really got that down. So the only thing NATO can do,
in its quest to prove it has reason to exist, is to create chaos, as I
said before. But there is a problem with consciously creating chaos
between nuclear powers, instead of maintaining communication channels,
as the US and USSR always did during the Cold War. Do we all understand
this means we are in a worse situation today than back then?
And that some fool could actually fire a nuclear missile because of
that? Me, I’m not so sure anymore. Between the Covid virus and the US
cancel culture, there are not that many western people paying attention
to warmongers and NATO aka warheads. Not a good idea.
popularresistance | Margaret Flowers: You’re listening to Clearing the FOG,
speaking truth to expose the forces of greed, with Margaret Flowers. And
now I turn to my guest, Michael Hudson. Michael is the president of the
Institute for the Study of Long-term, Economic Trends, ISLET. He’s a
Wall Street financial analyst and a distinguished research professor of
Economics at the University of Missouri, in Kansas City. He’s also the
author of numerous books and recently updated his book, “Super
Imperialism: The economic strategy of American Empire.” Thank you for
taking time to speak with me today, Michael.
Michael Hudson: Well, thanks for having me on Margaret.
MF: You’ve talked a lot and written a lot about dollar hegemony and
what’s happening now with de-dollarization. Can you start out by
explaining to my listeners what dollar hegemony is and how it has
benefited the wealthy class in the United States?
MH: Dollar hegemony seems to be the position that has just ended as
of this week very abruptly. Dollar hegemony was when America’s war in
Vietnam and the military spending of the 1960s and 70s drove the United
States off gold. The entire US balance of payments deficit was military
spending, and it began to run down the gold supply. So, in 1971,
President Nixon took the dollar off gold. Well, everybody thought
America has been controlling the world economy since World War I by
having most of the gold and by being the creditor to the world. And they
thought what is going to happen now that the United States is running a
deficit, instead of being a creditor.
Well, what happened was that, as I’ve described in Super Imperialism,
when the United States went off gold, foreign central banks didn’t have
anything to buy with their dollars that were flowing into their
countries – again, mainly from the US military deficit but also from the
investment takeovers. And they found that these dollars came in, the
only thing they could do would be to recycle them to the United States.
And what do central banks hold? They don’t buy property, usually, back
then they didn’t. They buy Treasury bonds. And so, the United States
would be spending dollars abroad and foreign central banks didn’t really
have anything to do but send it right back to buy treasury bonds to
finance not only the balance of payments deficit, but also the budget
deficit that was largely military in character. So, dollar hegemony was
the system where foreign central banks keep their monetary and
international savings reserves in dollars and the dollars are used to
finance the military bases around the world, almost eight hundred
military bases surrounding them. So, basically central banks have to
keep their savings by weaponizing them, by militarizing them, by lending
them to the United States, to keep spending abroad.
This gave America a free ride. Imagine if you went to the grocery
store and you just paid by giving them an IOU. And then the next week
you want to buy more groceries and you give them another IOU. And they
say, wait a minute, you have an IOU before and you say, well just use
the IOU to pay the milk company that delivers, or the farmers that
deliver. You can use this as your money and just you’ll as a customer,
keep writing IOU’s and you never have to pay anything because your IOU
is other people’s money. Well, that’s what dollar hegemony was, and it
was a free ride. And it all ended last Wednesday when the United States
grabbed Russia’s reserves having grabbed Afghanistan’s foreign reserves
and Venezuela’s foreign reserves and those of other countries.
And all of a sudden, this means that other countries can no longer
safely hold their reserves by sending their money back, depositing them
in US banks or buying US Treasury Securities, or having other US
investments because they could simply be grabbed as happened to Russia.
So, all of a sudden this last week, you’re seeing the world economy
fracture into two parts, a dollarized part and other countries that do
not follow the neoliberal policies that the United States insists that
its allies follow. We’re seeing the birth of a new dual World economy.
MF: Wow, there’s a lot to unpack there. So, are we seeing then other
countries starting to disinvest in US dollars? You’ve written about how
the treasury bonds that these central banks buy up have been basically
funding our domestic economy. Are they starting to shed those bonds or
what’s happening?
TAC | s a twenty-something living in Washington, you have to find ways to
cut costs. A lot of people here go without cable. Others sell their cars
and rely on public transport. I like television and the open road, so I
gave up food instead.
I eat the same thing every week. It’s a
joke around the office. On Saturday, I’ll buy chicken breasts, ground
turkey, sweet potatoes, asparagus, protein bars, eggs, and wheat bread
at the supermarket. If I play my cards right, I can walk out of the
store having paid less than $60. For five days’ worth of food, that’s
not bad. I cook some of it Sunday and the rest on Wednesday night. I
hate it, but it’s been pretty good on my waistline.
Even on the
Club Fed diet, I’m feeling the pinch of rising food prices. Bread has
become more expensive in the past three months. Eggs have, too. Buying
store-brand chicken is like buying Ibérico ham.
I’ll survive. I
can always cut cable. For wannabe proles in the laptop class, the rise
in food prices has been at most an inconvenience. But the outbreak of
war in Ukraine and the coming disruptions in global food markets will
immiserate the actual working class in this country and may kill
thousands of the world’s poor.
Well before war broke out in
Ukraine, prices in the food industry were surging. U.S. food prices rose
a whopping 7.5 percent between 2021 and 2022. Indexed global food
prices hit an all-time high last month.
The
causes are familiar. Supply-chain disruptions have slowed production
and slashed supply. The sight of barren grocery shelves has incentivized
consumers to buy in bulk, sending aggregate demand skyward.
Labor-retention issues and slumping workforce participation rates have reduced output and further cut supply. Labor issues have reached a point where meatpacking companies like Tyson plan to automate their processing plants to weather labor shortages.
At
the same time, the prices of industry inputs like oil, animal feed, and
fertilizer have soared. The price of urea—a popular, highly soluble
nitrogen-based fertilizer—nearly doubled at the pivotal New Orleans port last year. In input-dependent industries like agriculture, where producers net only 15 percent of final retail cost, consumers inevitably bear most of the increase in input costs.
The
effects of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions imposed against the
Russian government and economy threaten to accelerate these trends.
Russia is the world’s leading producer of wheat; Ukraine is fifth.
Together, they are responsible for some 30 percent of the world’s wheat exports. War will almost certainly disrupt planting season in both Russia and Ukraine.
gilbertdoctorow | In recent days, in what is surely a coordinated action by NATO and
European authorities acting hand in glove, Russian news broadcasters
have been taken off servers in Europe and effectively made inaccessible
to the entire European public. This modern day “jamming” concerns not
just RT or Sputnik, the best known state owned voices of Russia because
they broadcast in English and other languages that we all know, but
virtually every news outlet based in Russia, public and privately owned,
and broadcasting in the Russian language.
In this regard, EU Member States are waging an Information War of
greatest significance that is absolutely not mentioned, let alone
discussed in Western media, whether mainstream or otherwise. The victim
is the European public, which, if bad turns to worse, will not know what
hit them and why when cruise or hypersonic missiles descend on NATO
bases or infrastructure. This enforced silence prevents Western civil
society from taking any steps to save its own neck in what have become
wartime conditions on the Continent.
The blockage is not uniformly enforced at all times, so that some
Russian print and video producers can be accessed at one moment or
another before going black.
In particular, one vitally important 3.30 minute video of Russian
military spokesman Igor Konoshenkov yesterday and this morning remains
accessible on youtube. I will detail below what he was saying, because
the messenger and the message concern whether you and I will live to see
another day.
Konoshenkov’s points in this video were the following:
1) Russia has now destroyed the entire Ukrainian air force that remained within the confines of Ukraine
2) There are also Ukrainian fighter jets that left the country and
are now parked in Romania and other neighboring countries. If these
planes are allowed by local authorities to take off from Romania, etc.
and enter Ukrainian air space, Russia will consider the country from
which they took off as a co-belligerent and will take appropriate action
against them. The subtext is that Russia is ready to make missile
strikes against NATO airfields that transgress the rules of war.
4) Russia has received documentation from Ukrainian health authorities on the production of biological weapons (anthrax, Siberian
plague and much more) by Ukrainian labs in Kharkiv and elsewhere in
cooperation with the United States. Stocks of such weapons were being
stored in direct violation of international conventions. On 24
February, in advance of the start of Russia’s ‘special military
operation’ in Ukraine, the Ukrainian health authorities destroyed these
illicit biological weapons. However, Russia has obtained the official
documentation certifying this destruction of what should never have been
there. Moscow is now studying this documentation, which indicates
United States participation in the development of the biological weapons
and will publish the incriminating documents, starting from yesterday.
5) Russia has also obtained documentation proving that Ukraine, in
cooperation with the United States, was since the presidency of Petro
Petrushenko, actively developing nuclear weapons, including “dirty”
nuclear devices using readily available fuel from its reactors. Such
activity was going on in the Zaporozhye nuclear plants, and it is very
likely that the fire reported at a ‘training unit’ adjacent to an active
reactor two days ago related to destruction of incriminating papers, if
it was not otherwise a ‘false flag’ operation to allege a Russian
attack on the power station, in violation of international law.
johnhelmer | In the Foreign Ministry’s new paper for the State Department,
delivered on Thursday afternoon and then published on the Ministry website,
there is a restatement of the Russian proposals for security in
Europe which the US refuses to address. There is also nothing new in the
threat: “In the absence of the readiness of the American side to agree
on firm, legally binding guarantees to ensure our security from the
United States and its allies, Russia will be forced to respond,
including through the implementation of military-technical measures.”
President Vladimir Putin said
the same thing to the assembly of the Russian officer corps on December
21. “Is anyone unable to grasp this? This should be clear…I would like
to emphasise again: we are not demanding any special exclusive terms for
ourselves. Russia stands for equal and indivisible security in the
whole of Eurasia. Naturally, as I have already noted, if our Western
colleagues continue their obviously aggressive line, we will take
appropriate military-technical reciprocal measures and will have a tough
response to their unfriendly steps.”
Putin’s point was repeated by Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov
in Geneva on January 10, following his talks with his State Department
counterpart, Wendy Sherman. For more detail on those talks, read this.
What is meant by “military-technical measures” is Russia’s black box
defence. This is not the place – it will not be the place – to read what
this will be. Anglo-American think-tankers are paid by their
governments to guess what is inside the box, as is the new source for
analysis of Russia in the Anglo-American media, the Estonian Foreign
Intelligence Service.
Three things are certain about what is inside the black box. The
first is spelled out emphatically in yesterday’s Foreign Ministry paper:
“There is no ‘Russian invasion’ of Ukraine, as the United States and
its allies have been officially declaring since last autumn, and there
are no plans for it.” This rules out a land force invasion of Ukraine,
as well as aerial bombing, missile and drone strikes launched from
Russian territory.
The second sure thing about the black box defence is that it is black: it will be a surprise.
The third thing is, as Putin said last December, it will be
“reciprocal”. This means the Americans and their European allies are
already using comparable measures in their attacks on Russia directly
and in the Donbass. Reciprocal in this Russian vocabulary may mean
comparable; it does not mean symmetrical along the Russian land border
with the Ukraine; offshore, in the Black and Azov Seas; in the airspace
above the Donbass or in the cyberspace .
The Russian paper was handed to US Ambassador John Sullivan at the
Foreign Ministry and then posted publicly. The ministry website, mid.ru,
was then incapacitated for more than an hour. The official English
translation will follow during Friday.
“The package nature of Russian proposals has been ignored, from which
‘convenient’ topics have been deliberately chosen. They, in turn, have
been ‘twisted’ in the direction of creating advantages for the United
States and its allies. This approach, as well as the accompanying
rhetoric of American officials, reinforces reason for doubt that
Washington is really committed to correcting the situation in the field
of Euro-security.”
The paper then itemizes the specific security measures and treaty
articles which have been tabled by the Russian side since December, and
which the US and NATO replies have so far ignored. For analysis of each
of the booby traps contained in the US paper released in Spain a
fortnight ago, read this.
Twice the new Foreign Ministry paper uses the term “concrete”. The
first is to signal that this remains to be provided in the papers sent
to Moscow by the US and NATO so far. “We expect concrete proposals from
the members of the alliance on the content and forms of legal
consolidation of the rejection of further expansion of NATO to the
east.”
In the second application of the term “concrete”, the paper says:
“the United States and its allies should abandon the policy of
‘containing’ Russia and take concrete practical measures to de-escalate
the military-political situation, including in line with paragraph 2 of
Article 4 of our draft treaty.”
Article 4 says, not only that NATO will not include Ukraine and
Georgia as members, but that even if formal membership is ruled out,
there will be no US military bases in non-member states, no military
infrastructure (arms stockpiles, for example), and no “bilateral
military cooperation” targeted at Russia.
Among other concrete issues required for negotiation, the Russian
paper identifies “heavy” (nuclear) bomber flights close to Russian
airspace, combat vessels in the Black and Baltic Seas, the Aegis Ashore
missiles batteries in Romania and Poland, and intermediate and
short-range nuclear missiles.
For a Russian analysis of Russia’s black box options, published at the end of January in Vzglyad, read this.
NYTimes | President
Biden said on Friday that the United States has intelligence showing
that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made a final decision to
reject diplomatic overtures and invade Ukraine, in what Mr. Biden said
would be a “catastrophic and needless war of choice” in Eastern Europe.
Speaking
from the Roosevelt Room in the White House, Mr. Biden said “we have
reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to and intend to
attack Ukraine in the coming week, in the coming days,” adding that “we
believe that they will target Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, a city of 2.8
million innocent people.”
Asked
whether he thinks that Mr. Putin is still wavering about whether to
invade, Mr. Biden said, “I’m convinced he’s made the decision.” Later,
he added that his impression of Mr. Putin’s intentions is based on “a
significant intelligence capability.”
Still, Mr. Biden implored Russia to “choose diplomacy.”
“It
is not too late to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table,”
Mr. Biden said, referring to planned talks between Secretary of State
Antony J. Blinken and Russia’s foreign minister on Thursday. “If Russia
takes military action before that date, it will be clear that they have
slammed the door shut on diplomacy.”
In
the hours before Mr. Biden’s late afternoon remarks, Russia-backed
separatists in eastern Ukraine called for mass evacuations in two
contested regions of the country, claiming, with little evidence, that
Ukraine’s military was about to launch a large-scale attack there, an
assertion that appeared intended to provoke Russian military
intervention.
The ominous messaging of
the rebels in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk was loudly echoed by
Moscow, raising fears that Russia was setting the stage for an imminent
invasion that could ignite the biggest conflict in Europe in decades.
The
call by the Russian-backed separatists for evacuations came as they
blamed Ukraine for an array of provocations, including shelling along
the front lines between Ukraine and the separatist forces, and an
explosion involving an empty car that pro-Moscow news outlets said
belonged to the head of the region’s security services.
Mr.
Biden, who had just concluded a video call with a dozen Western
leaders, rejected the claims as lies intended by Mr. Putin to inflame
the situation on the ground and provide a pretext for war — something
the United States and other European leaders had been warning about for
weeks.
He cited the bombing of a
Ukrainian kindergarten as a Russia-backed provocation. And he pointed to
Russian separatist accusations that Ukraine was planning to launch a
major offensive attack as evidence of Russian efforts to justify
military action with misinformation.
“There
is simply no evidence to these assertions, and it defies basic logic to
believe the Ukrainians would choose this moment, with well over 150,000
troops arrayed on its borders, to escalate a yearlong conflict,” Mr.
Biden said.
The president’s comments
are the clearest indications of just how close the world may be to the
largest conflict in Europe since World War II. He took the highly
unusual course of specifically predicting the time frame and parameters
of the invasion, despite the risks that he could be proved wrong.
johnhelmer | US Secretary of State Antony Blinken revealed publicly in Geneva on Friday, January 21, that he will not negotiate a no-war agreement with the Russians because he cannot. This is already understood by the Russians; by the French and Germans; and by several senior officials of the Biden Administration.
The evidence of Blinken’s incapacity is in the words he says.
It was during the last world war, when US policymakers had next to no intelligence on how their German counterparts were thinking and what they were intending, that a group of American sociologists were engaged by the War Department, as the Pentagon was called then, to do what was called content analysis of German propaganda. One of the sociologists, a Russian émigré Nathan Leites, went on to apply the same method to Soviet publications in order to uncover what Leites called the operational code of the Politburo. That was in 1951. It was immediately used by US negotiators during the Korean War armistice negotiations which began in July of that year and ran for two years. By then Leites had produced a sequel, A Study of Bolshevism. Both were paid for and published by RAND, the think-tank created in 1945 by the US Air Force, the Douglas Aircraft Company, and the War Department.
Since then the method has not been used on US Government officials, at least not by RAND nor publicly by any American sociologist.
When the RAND method is used to analyze what Blinken told the US press, following his meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, it is revealed that Blinken has no intention whatever of negotiating a non-aggression pact with the Russians on any terms. According to the scientific method devised by the best and brightest Americans for dealing with their enemies, it’s now clear from Blinken’s own words that he is unable to understand what Russians tell him. In the mind behind the words there is only one compulsive idea – attack, punish, destroy Russia.
The State Department has published the transcript of Blinken’s statement and answers to questions at his press conference.
*****************************
The late senator John McCain described Blinken as not only unqualified but dangerous to America.
Blinken directed some of the most murderous initiatives of the Obama era: Libya, Syria, and Gaza. But worse, he then cashed-in withJohn Thain(of the gold-plated Merrill office with the $90K rug who insisted on $20 billion in bonuses from the government bail-out of the bankrupt firm) on thisPrivate Equity/SPACdesigned to cash-in on Blinken and Lloyd Austin’s connections, especially to skim Covid relief monies.
Thismurderous greed-headis a complete horror-show — emblematic of why the voters have deserted theshamelessly corruptDemocrats in droves. Blinken and Austin are transparently ginning-up this “crisis” in order to personally profit from arms sales by needlessly militarizing Eastern Europe against a non-existant “invasion” threat from Russia — whowillact to protect the large Russian populations stranded in the former SSR’s by the disorderly breakup of the Soviet Union from being liquidated.
eand.co |It is impossible — flatlyimpossible — for theaverage Americanto make ends meet.
I can tell you that as an economist, one of the only really good ones
America’s ever had. Americans grew poor because their economy failed
them. But a poor society can’t afford many things. Things which matter.
Like democracy, truth, reason, goodness, decency.
Societies faced with sudden descents into poverty implode into
authoritarianism, just the way America is. Greed broke America in this
larger, truer sense.
But
Americans don’t really understand it yet, I think, just how extreme and
out of control greed really is in America — and how, paradoxically, it
left society poor. Too poor to afford to even be a functioning country or democracy anymore, in the end, and so America’s just imploding now.
Let’s
do a little math first, to prove the point that it’s impossible to make
ends meet, and then I’ll teach you a little bit about how what’s normal
in America is completely and totally abnormal in the rest of the entire
world, more or less.
The median American income is about $35K.
That is what millions of Americans earn. For a “household,” meaning in
economic statistics, a family of four, it rises to about $60K.
It is impossible, and I mean impossible, to live on that level income. That is a median income more suited to a poor country than a rich one. But let’s prove it.
Rent? The average rent for an apartment was $1124 in 2021. That’s $14,000. That’s half of the average person’s income eaten up by rent alone. Now we have…all the other expenses of life. Let’s start with the other big one in America: healthcare. The average cost
for a family paying for healthcare was almost exactly the same: $1152.
Bang. Another $14K. That’s the average American’s entire income gone, on
just rent and healthcare.
But
maybe you object — my employer pays for my healthcare. Or maybe I don’t
even want healthcare (LOL, you mean you can’t afford it, I get it,
we’ll come back to that). Sure — it’s not going to make much difference
in the end. The average American spends about $1200
“out-of-pocket” even if they’re insured by their employer — let’s call
it $1500, because that’s surely an underestimate. That leaves us with
maybe about 14K of income per year for the average person — and we still
haven’t gotten to most bills.
You need a car in America, to get much of anywhere. You need insurance for it. The average monthly car payment is $600. Let’s call insurance another $100. That’s $700…a month. Or $8400 per year. Suddenly, we’re left with about $5K to cover everything else you need in life.
Water,
electricity, gas to put in the car. Internet. A mobile phone. The
average water bill’s around $100 per month — bang, another $1200 gone —
and now we’re down to just about $3800. Internet and a phone? Call them
another $100 per month. Now we’re down to $2600. Electricity? Another
$100 per month. Now we’re down to just $1400. Average annual cost of gas
to put in that car? It’s about $1100.
Now you’ve got just $300 left.
But you still have to feed and clothe yourself. Your kids. Pay
for random stuff like maybe a toy here and there, a treat. I’m sure
I’ve left plenty of stuff out that isn’t remotely a luxury — like paying
off student loans.
The point I’m trying to make should be crystal clear by now — not least because you’re probably living it. Making ends meet in America is flatly impossible. It
cannot be done. My lovely wife’s income is so low that it doesn’t even
cover her expenses — car, travel, a hotel every now and then because
she’s asked to work overtime regularly.
The economic effect of all this is somewhere between a joke and an embarassment. I’m
subsidising this world-famous billion dollar institution which pays its
“administrators” millions, because my wife isn’t even paid enough to
cover her basic living expenses. Think of how ridiculous that is. The reason those administrators earn millions is because I’m effectively paying them to employ my wife — after they get a cut of overcharging Americans for operations and medicine.But this story isn’t personal — it’s social. Those economics — people can’t make ends meet — are absolutely fatal for a society.
theatlantic | To understand how ideologically
scrambling the Omicron wave has been, consider this: Some 2022 Democrats
are sounding like 2020 Republicans. In spring 2020, many Republicans,
including President Donald Trump, insisted that COVID was hardly worse
than the flu; that its fatality risk was comparable to an everyday
activity, like driving in a car; and that an obsessive focus on cases
wouldn’t give an accurate picture of what was going on in the pandemic.
In the current Omicron wave, these Republican talking points seem to have mostly come true—for most vaccinatednon-senior adults, who are disproportionately Democrats.
But
Democratic talking points about the severity of COVID and the need for
commensurate caution remain valid and not only for the sick and elderly.
Ironically, they are especially true for the unvaccinated—a disproportionately Republican group
that has seen their hospitalization rates soar this winter to all-time
highs. About 9,000 Americans are dying of COVID every week. Preliminary
state data suggest that more than 90 percent of today’s deaths are still among unvaccinated people. This year, COVID is on pace to kill more than 300,000 unvaccinated people who would, quite likely, avoid death by getting two or three shots.
The messiness of Omicron data—record-high cases! but much milder illness!—has deepened our COVID Rashomon,
in which different communities are telling themselves different stories
about what’s going on, and coming to different conclusions about how to
lead their lives. That’s true even within populations that, a year ago,
were united in their desire to take the pandemic seriously and were
outraged by those who refused to do so.
A
virus that seems both pervasive and mild offers an opening to people
who are, let’s call them, “vaxxed and done.” The attitude of the VADs is
this:
For
more than a year, I did everything that public-health authorities told
me to do. I wore masks. I canceled vacations. I made sacrifices. I got
vaccinated. I got boosted. I’m happy to get boosted again. But this
virus doesn’t stop. Year over year, the infections don’t decrease.
Instead, virulence for people like me is decreasing, either
because the virus is changing, or because of growing population
immunity, or both. Americans should stop pointlessly guilting themselves
about all these cases. In the past week, daily confirmed COVID cases per capita
were higher than the U.S. in Ireland, Greece, Iceland, Denmark, France,
the U.K., Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and even Australia, one
of the most COVID-cautious countries in the world. As the coronavirus
continues its unstoppable march toward endemicity, our attitude toward
the virus should follow a similar path toward stoicism. COVID is
becoming something like the seasonal flu for most people who keep up
with their shots, so I’m prepared to treat this like I’ve treated the
flu: by basically not worrying about it and living my life normally.
It’s
hard to put a number on how many people are in this group, but we have
some hard data to prove that their ranks are growing. This past
December, airports processed twice as many travelers
compared with the same period in 2020, despite many flights being
canceled. On several days, TSA-checkpoint numbers exceeded their totals
from pre-pandemic 2019. This is not the picture of a country that is
hunkering down for Omicron. It is the limited snapshot of a mostly
vaccinated population with millions of people who are eager to move on.
I have a lot of sympathy for this group’s case, especially as it relates to schools. The risk of COVID to vaccinated teachers and even unvaccinated students seems lower than we initially thought. Meanwhile, the costs of remote schooling seem higher than we feared.
The White House and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona have come out
strongly in support of keeping schools open. Other Democratic leaders,
like Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are fighting reluctant teachers to
keep school in person. Even among pro-vaccine Americans, a growing
number of people seem to be saying they are done with remote school as a
baseline COVID policy.
notesfromdisgraceland |The abject hovers at the boundary of
what is assimilable, thinkable, but is itself unassimilable which means
that we have to contemplate its otherness in its proximity to us but
without it being able to be incorporated. It is the other that comes
from within (so it is part of ourselves) that we have to reject and
expel in order to protect our boundaries[3].
The abject is a great mobilizing mechanism. While the state of being abject is threatening to the self and others, the operation of abjecting involves rituals of purity that bring about social stability. Abjection seeks to stabilize, while the abject inherently disrupts[4].
When the mass of the excluded increases to
a size impossible to ignore, they trigger rituals of abjection, which
work themselves into identity politics.The repulsion and efforts to distance from the excluded — the abjection – which reinforces the self-awareness of the social standing of regular folks, are in conflict with the attraction by the powers the abject population enjoys and exudes. They are the power bottoms
in this relationship as they define the location, robustness and
porousness of the boundaries of the enclosure. Fascination with the abject’s power pulls the viewers in, while they remain at arm’s length because of the threats the abject exert.
This
makes the excluded a tool that drives the wedge between different
social groups and prepares the population for political usage of the abject as leverage.
Objectifying minorities has been
institutionalized in America since its inception — from slavery and Jim
Crow to ghetto and hyperghetto, prisons, wars, opioids, and other tools
of soft and hard marginalization. However, with the rise of the white
underclass in the second half of the 20th century, American ideology has become highly nuanced around the questions of exclusion.
To a large extent, the Right wing has
stuck to its white supremacists roots of yesteryear (either in a
closeted form or explicitly) while centrists, both Left and Right, have
shown greater initiative in modernizing the process. However, when it
came to exclusion of the white underclass, the problem proved to be more
difficult. Complicated by globalization, technology, the decline of
American manufacturing, weaning off conventional energy sources and the
general decay of demand for labor, low-skill jobs have been disappearing
irreversibly, and the ranks of white underclass grew unstoppably
together with their discontent.
Social outcasts and minorities are
relatively easy to objectivize. Permanently excluded – criminals, drug
addicts, homeless – they have already been cast out. The residual, white
precariat, which has always been perceived as a building block of this
country’s social fiber, remains still on the inside, but unable to get
reintegrated within the context of modern developments.
In a white dominated/ruled society the marginalization of the excluded
white subproletariat has been a political hard sell. They grew in size
and have acquired a sense of entitlement minorities never could. Their
sudden political awareness, no matter how fragile, has become an
expression of pleasurable transgressive desires. As a new center of
social subjectivity, they draw their power from this position, which
serves as an inspiration for their own identity politics.
The emergence of 21st century Right-wing populism represents the biggest innovation on that terrain. Right-wingers now recognize the abject
as a source of political leverage and, instead of exclusion, their
program revolves around subjectivizing them. Voluntarily casting oneself
as abject — identification with the white subproletariat – has
become a quest for authenticity, aimed at acquiring a stigma in order
to become a credible voice of the marginalized. This is the core of the
modern populist abject gambit.
NYTimes | With
Omicron sweeping the world at alarming speed, governments are
scrambling to figure out how to contain it in the face of significant
public pressure against reimposing harsh restrictions on daily life,
curbing holiday celebrations and deepening the economic pain wrought by
two years of pandemic.
A new British
report shows that booster doses are less effective against Omicron than
previous variants, and their effectiveness wears off faster — within 10
weeks. Vaccine makers are trying to adjust their shots to target
Omicron.
In
addition to concerns that a fourth shot in less than a year could
actually weaken immunity, some experts said Israel’s government had
still not made the most of other options, such as vaccinating more of
the unvaccinated or giving a third shot to about a million eligible
citizens who have so far not received one.
Along
with the generally sparse knowledge about Omicron, the effect of a
fourth dose against the new variant is also unknown. But the country’s
medical experts point to waning immunity in those 60 or older, who were
the first to receive the third shot starting in August.
Israeli
researchers from the Health Ministry and several academic institutions
presented data to the advisory team that made the recommendation for the
fourth shot on Tuesday. The presentation, obtained by The Times, showed
a doubling of the rate of infection from Delta among the 60-plus age
group within four or five months of the third shot.
There was no clear indication of reduced efficacy against severe illness.
Israel
has confirmed a few hundred cases of Omicron, but officials say the new
variant is much more widespread, and could overtake Delta as the
dominant variant in the country within two or three weeks.
scienceblog | As polarization has escalated in the U.S., the question of if and
when that divide becomes insurmountable has become ever more pressing.
In a new study, researchers have identified a tipping point, beyond
which extreme polarization becomes irreversible.
The researchers employed a predictive model of a polarized group,
similar to the current U.S. Senate, to reveal what can happen when the
country faces an attack by a foreign adversary or a global pandemic.
“Instead of uniting against a common threat,” said lead author
Michael Macy, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Sociology
and director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory in the College of Arts
and Sciences, “the threat itself becomes yet another polarizing issue.”
The model allows researchers to study the effects of party identity
and political intolerance on ideological extremism and partisan
division.
“We found that polarization increases incrementally only up to a
point,” Macy said. “Above this point, there is a sudden change in the
very fabric of the institution, like the change from water to steam when
the temperature exceeds the boiling point.”
The dynamics resemble what physicists call “hysteresis loops.”
“We see this very disturbing pattern in which a shock brings people a
little bit closer initially, but if polarization is too
extreme, eventually the effects of a shared fate are swamped by the
existing divisions and people become divided even on the shock issue,”
said co-author Boleslaw Szymanski, a professor of computer science and
director of the Army Research Laboratory Network Science and Technology
Center (NeST) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “If we reach that
point, we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change,
pandemics, or other challenges to the survival of our society.”
The work builds on an earlier general model Szymanski developed to
study the interactions of legislators in a two-party political system.
Although the model isn’t specifically tuned to distinctive practices,
customs, and rules of the U.S. Congress, it was trained using data, and
previous research comparing model outcomes to 30 years of Congressional
voting records demonstrated strong predictive power. In one finding from
that work, the model accurately predicted the shift in polarization in 28 of 30 U.S. Congresses.
hks.harvard | More than half of young Americans feel
democracy in the country is under threat, and over a third think they
may see a second U.S. civil war within their lifetimes, according to the
42nd Harvard Youth Poll, released by Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics (IOP) on Wednesday.
The poll also found approval of President Biden has plummeted, and a
majority of respondents are unhappy with how the president and Congress
are doing their jobs. In addition, many of the respondents feel strongly
affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and are worried about the threat of
climate change. Half of all respondents also said they struggled with
feelings of hopelessness and depression.
The Harvard Youth Poll—which is conducted twice a year, in fall and
spring, and has run for over 20 years—captured responses on these topics
and others from 2,109 people between the ages of 18 and 29, from across
the country. Students from the Harvard Public Opinion Project (HPOP)
organized the survey, under the supervision of John Della Volpe, director of polling at the IOP.
“After turning out in record numbers in 2020, young Americans are
sounding the alarm. When they look at the America they will soon
inherit, they see a democracy and climate in peril—and Washington as
more interested in confrontation than compromise,” Della Volpe said.
“Despite this, they seem as determined as ever to fight for the change
they seek.”
Jing-Jing Shen, a Harvard College undergraduate and the HPOP student
chair, said, “Right now, young Americans are confronting worries on many
fronts. Concerns about our collective future—with regard to democracy,
climate change, and mental health—also feel very personal.” Shen noted,
however, that “young people have come to even more deeply value their
communities and connections with others” in this challenging time.
The survey found a striking lack of confidence in U.S. democracy among
young Americans. Only 7% view the United States as a “healthy
democracy,” and 52% believe that democracy is either “in trouble” or
“failing.” This concern is echoed in the fact that 35% of respondents
anticipate a second civil war during their lifetimes, and 25% believe
that at least one state will secede.
nbcnews | More than a dozen people stormed a Louis Vuitton store in a
Chicago suburb and were caught on surveillance footage grabbing bags and
wiping shelves clear, according to police.
The theft took place at the store located in the Oakbrook Center in Oak Brook, Illinois, on Wednesday around 3:30 p.m., police said.
The
footage shows the suspects, wearing masks and hooded sweatshirts, burst
into the store and spread out, filling their arms with bags and other
goods before dashing out.
Police said the 14 suspects all
escaped the scene in three separate vehicles waiting for them. As of
Friday, the Chicago Police Department recovered one of the three
vehicles allegedly used in the theft: a Dodge Charger reported stolen in
October out of Chicago, Oak Brook police said.
No injuries were reported and no weapons were displayed.
Oak Brook police said in an update Friday that the merchandise taken was worth an estimated $120,000.
"We
are still developing and working several leads to identify the
offenders involved in our incident," Oak Brook police said Friday.
reuters | Police
in California on Sunday were seeking about 80 suspects who they said
swarmed into a Bay Area Nordstrom department store in a coordinated
robbery, ransacking as much as they could carry and fleeing in cars they
had parked outside.
Three
people were arrested at the scene of the "organized theft" reported
shortly before 9 p.m. local time on Saturday in suburban Walnut Creek,
about 15 miles (25 km) east of Oakland, police said.
"The
remaining participants in this criminal mob fled from the area in cars
at high speeds," Walnut Creek police said in a statement on Sunday.
The
robbery followed another brazen mob-heist of high-end stores on Friday
night in San Francisco's Union Square, about 25 miles (40 km) to the
west.
Video
posted by a KNTV television reporter showed several people running out
of the store with merchandise and climbing into about 25 parked cars
that ringed the building and jammed traffic on the streets.
"It
was crazy for a second," said Brett Barrette, a manager of a restaurant
across the street, who told KPIX-TV that the thieves wore ski masks and
were armed with crow bars and weapons. "All the guests inside were
getting concerned."
Police
said the suspects assaulted two Nordstrom employees and pepper-sprayed
another. They said they are reviewing surveillance footage in an effort
to identify them.
slate |Why
do you think there’s this disconnect that might exist between what a
vaccinated parent is willing to do for themselves and what they might be
willing to do for their kid?
One
is that you feel a sense of responsibility to your children that
sometimes feels harder than to yourself, because you’ve been taking
risks with yourself your whole life. You’ve probably made some
reasonably risky decisions in your 20s, both with respect to sexual
activity and perhaps with substances—you’re used to understanding
tradeoffs. With kids however, we’re much more restrictive. And we feel
that we could be blamed. The dangers seem much bigger and the benefits
sometimes pale in comparison.
Of
course, weighing benefits and risks of vaccines is nothing new. That’s
why families turn to their pediatricians for advice. For years, doctors
have tried to increase vaccination rates and fight hesitancy. Did this
same struggle occur with earlier vaccines?
When
the varicella vaccine got approved in the ’90s, lots of parents were
like, “Why should I vaccinate my kid against chicken pox? It’s a nothing
big, minor illness. Everybody gets it.” And for a lot of people, that’s
true. But when adults get chicken pox, it’s massively bad.
Plus, some number of babies died every year of varicella infection. It
wasn’t huge numbers, but they were real numbers.
And
just a couple of years after we really started vaccinating kids, in the
early 2000s, zero babies died of chicken pox. That’s a huge win, given
that zero babies are immunized against chicken pox. You can’t get it
until you’re 1 year of age. But by vaccinating children, we’ve protected
everyone. And now today we have like 86 percent of eligible children
vaccinated, and chicken pox has largely gone away.
You wrote about your experience
as a young pediatrician, vaccinating kids with the varicella vaccine
against chicken pox. How did you break through to skeptical parents?
I
think it’s time and effort and it’s building up trust. I would talk
about risk and benefits. In fact, this is part of what we do with
everything. When parents are like, “I want an antibiotic for my kid’s
ear infection,” I talk about these are the benefits of it and these are
the risks. It’s negotiation. It’s making sure people feel heard,
making sure that you understand what they’re going through, that it’s
not unreasonable and trying to find a solution that works.
In
your writing about varicella, I noticed that you said in 2008, only
about 34 percent of eligible adolescents were fully immunized. And by
2018, about 90 percent of kids have been vaccinated. That seems both
great, and made me think: Are we talking about immunizing kids against
COVID on a decade long timeframe? Is it going to take us 10 years?
Unless
we have mandates, yeah, I think it is because, and, to be honest with
you, we won’t get all the way there without mandates. Let’s be clear
too. I can’t win 90 percent as a pediatrician. I just own that. It’s not
going to happen. You need these to become so expected that the school
system’s requiring it. The default has to be “vaccinated,” so that most
people will do it.
Nature Boy {a singularity}
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April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...