Valodya's Meeting With The Head Of Rostec State Corporation Sergey Chemezov

kremlin.ru  |  Vladimir Putin:  Sergey Viktorovich, Rostec is our largest defense industry corporation. Do you have an annual performance report?

Sergei Chemezov :  Yes, here is our annual report.

The theme of our annual report is "Environment for the Development of the New". A lot has been done in 2021. Our consolidated revenue grew by almost 10 percent and amounted to two trillion 60 billion [roubles]. We have crossed an important psychological milestone of two trillion. We have been striving for this for a long time, and finally last year we overcame this barrier, this milestone.

Consolidated net profit increased by almost 47 percent and amounted to 163.5 billion rubles. EBITDA increased by 18 percent and reached 335 billion. The total market value of assets, a new indicator that we have introduced since last year, is 980.5 billion rubles, which is one and a half times higher than in 2020, that is, the value of our assets is constantly growing.

The share of civilian products in the consolidated revenue reached 45.5 percent.

Vladimir Putin:  Good.

Sergei Chemezov:  Yes. You set us the task of reaching 50 percent by 2030. We set ourselves the task of 2025, but last year the share of civilian products was 45.5 percent.

This, of course, thanks primarily to KamAZ. We have enterprises that produce a fairly large volume of civilian products, such as KamAZ and Russian Helicopters. The same UAC has begun to produce civilian aircraft in large quantities - not yet in large enough quantities, but we are striving for this.

Vladimir Putin:  Now there is a chance to occupy the domestic market.

Sergei Chemezov:  That is correct, of course.

Our pharmaceutical holding Nacimbio did a great job last year and the year before last. We have delivered more than 100 million sets of all kinds of vaccines to our consumers all over Russia: against covid, flu, and various other diseases. We manufacture most vaccines ourselves.

The achieved financial results have made it possible to increase the volume of investments by 18 percent, which already amounts to 242 billion rubles today. Thus, at the end of 2021, the corporation achieved all the goals that we set for ourselves.

I would like to dwell on some of the events that took place in the life of our corporation. 72 technological modernization projects were completed. First of all, this is the modernization of the aviation complex of enterprises producing helicopters and airplanes, as well as aircraft engines, because today this is the most important area in which we work.

We carried out the technical re-equipment of the enterprises of the optical industry at the Vologda and Novosibirsk optical plants. And the equipment has been replaced, and the technologies are modern.

Vladimir Putin:  Modernization.

Sergei Chemezov:  Yes. We carried out a deep modernization.

57 innovative technologies have been mastered and put into production, including technologies for manufacturing aircraft engine parts using direct laser growth, glazing technologies for the cabin of a new domestic cruise liner, which is currently under construction, called "Peter the Great", which will sail along the Volga and the sea, the river - sea.

Service for urban management.

We completed the development of 233 innovative products, including the MS-21-300 aircraft with a wing made of Russian composite, and the Okhotnik combat unmanned aerial vehicle. I will talk about these projects in more detail later.

A deep modernization of the Tu-160M ​​missile carrier with a new NK-32 engine has been completed. We have actually created a new machine. Only the former appearance remained, but, in fact, everything is new there: the engine is new, and the on-board equipment, all units have been replaced. All documentation was completely digitized, because the last car was produced at the Kazan plant somewhere in the 1980s.

Issued 834 patents and 474 know-hows. The total investment in research and development work has reached 170 billion rubles.

What products did we create last year? First of all, this is a Checkmate light tactical aircraft. Why is it named in English? Because it is mainly export-oriented. We are creating this aircraft at our own expense, without attracting budget money. We hope that, perhaps, the Ministry of Defense will mature and also acquire such an aircraft. I think that this plane will be very good. This is a fifth generation machine, a light aircraft. We first showed it at MAKS last year. This is a new generation multifunctional platform. It is capable of effectively countering fifth-generation aircraft in long-range and close combat.

Vladimir Putin:  Easy, right?

Sergei Chemezov:  Yes, it is light, it has one engine.

We took the basis of the onboard equipment, the engine, from the fifth-generation Su-57 aircraft, but slightly modified it. Now the design documentation is being developed, a new sample has been created.

Vladimir Putin:  I saw him.

Sergei Chemezov:  Yes, we did. We plan to start mass production in 2027.

PD-14 engine is already running.

Vladimir Putin:  Excellent.

Sergei Chemezov:  We have certified it. Serial production will begin in 2023. In 2023, certification tests will be carried out on our composite wing and on our engine.

Vladimir Putin:  On MS-21?

Sergei Chemezov:  MS-21. In 2024, we will produce the first six machines.

Drone "Hunter": its distinguishing feature is a flat engine nozzle. The new technical solution made the aviation complex less visible to radars. In addition, a new ground control post is being created for the drone. In 2021, the first flight model was rolled out. Already in 2023, we will start mass-producing it and supplying it to the Ministry of Defense.

The first offshore helicopter Mi-171A3. We also showed him for the first time at MAKS last year, he made his first flight. Designed for offshore operations and maintenance of offshore drilling platforms. There are already customers: our gas workers, oil companies. In 2023, we will start mass production. Certification tests are currently underway. The first deliveries are scheduled for early 2024.

Created a new marine diesel-gas turbine unit M55R. This is a new engine that is installed on our frigates. This is the first such Russian engine. We are already starting to mass-produce it.

In the field of healthcare, we have done a lot, and covid has spurred this on. In this regard, we have increased the share of civilian products. In particular, we have created the Diathera magnetotherapy device. It is intended for the treatment and prevention of eye diseases. It treats myopia, farsightedness and, in addition, computer vision syndrome - it has now become very common among young people, because they sit at the computer all day. This device does not require special medical training: treatment can be done at home or in any clinic. We started to produce it, it is already on sale. It is in the rating of the program "100 best goods of Russia" for the last year. A very interesting device.

The drug COVID-globulin is a drug created from the plasma [blood] of people who have recovered from covid and already have antibodies. Last year, it was actively used to treat patients. He is very helpful and in high demand.

Portable ventilator "Aventa-Vita": can be used in ambulances, and in ambulance helicopters, in ambulance aircraft, as well as at home. At the end of this year, we will start mass production and sale.

The neonatal ventilator SLE 6000 is a new version of the ventilator for supporting breathing in newborns. It differs from analogues in the function that eliminates air retention in the lungs, and the ability to automatically control saturation.

The Oxipolus oxygen concentrator is a very interesting device: it produces oxygen from the air. It produces, cleans, disinfects it, after which it delivers a sterile stream directly to the patient. In this regard, you can put a ventilator with this device anywhere, in any room, in any hospital, and it is not necessary that it be provided with special gases.

Vladimir Putin:  How long did it take to create all this?

Sergei Chemezov: About  one and a half to two years. As soon as covid started, we started working on it.

Vladimir Putin:  So, by and large, in a year and a half or two, it is possible to achieve import substitution for those products that are now difficult to import?

Sergei Chemezov:  Of course. In 2022, we will start mass-producing these devices, oxygen concentrators.

Vladimir Putin:  Good.

The Strategic Supremacy Is Conspicuously Obvious To The Casual Observer

thecradle  |  Strategic primacy, for Byzantium, more than diplomatic or military, was a psychological affair. The word Strategia itself is derived from the Greek strategos – which does not mean “General” in military terms, as the west believes, but historically corresponds to a managerial politico-military function.

It all starts with si vis pacem para bellum: “If you want peace prepare for war.” Confrontation must develop simultaneously on multiple levels: grand strategy, military strategy, operative, tactical.

But brilliant tactics, excellent operative intel and even massive victories in a larger war theater cannot compensate for a lethal mistake in terms of grand strategy. Just look at the Nazis in WWII.

Those who built up an empire such as the Romans, or maintained one for centuries like the Byzantines, never succeeded without following this logic.

Those clueless Pentagon and CIA ‘experts’

On Operation Z, the Russians revel in total strategic ambiguity, which has the collective west completely discombobulated. The Pentagon does not have the necessary intellectual firepower to out-smart the Russian General Staff. Only a few outliers understand that this is not a war – since the Ukraine Armed Forces have been irretrievably routed – but actually what Russian military and naval expert Andrei Martyanov calls a “combined arms police operation,” a work-in-progress on demilitarization and denazification.

The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is even more abysmal in terms of getting everything wrong, as recently demonstrated by its chief Avril Haines during her questioning on Capitol Hill. History shows that the CIA strategically blew it all the way from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. Ukraine is no different.

Ukraine was never about a military win. What is being accomplished is the slow, painful destruction of the European Union (EU) economy, coupled with extraordinary weapons profits for the western military-industrial complex and creeping security rule by those nations’ political elites.

The latter, in turn, have been totally baffled by Russia’s C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) capabilities, coupled with the stunning inefficiency of their own constellation of Javelins, NLAWs, Stingers and Turkish Bayraktar drones.

This ignorance reaches way beyond tactics and the operational and strategic realm. As Martyanov delightfully points out, they “wouldn’t know what hit them on the modern battlefield with near-peer, forget about peer.”

Elvira Nabiullina: Even Russia's Central Bank Chief Is Vastly Superior To Ours The Feds

NYTimes |  For the second time in less than a decade, Elvira Nabiullina is steering Russia’s economy through treacherous waters.

In 2014, facing a collapsing ruble and soaring inflation after barely a year as head of the Central Bank of Russia, Ms. Nabiullina forced the institution into the modern era of economic policymaking by sharply raising interest rates. The politically risky move slowed the economy, tamed soaring prices and won her an international reputation as a tough decision maker.

In the world of central bankers, among technocrats tasked with keeping prices under control and financial systems stable, Ms. Nabiullina became a rising star for using orthodox policies to manage an unruly economy often tethered to the price of oil. In 2015, she was named Central Bank Governor of the Year by Euromoney magazine. Three years later, Christine Lagarde, then the head of the International Monetary Fund, effused that Ms. Nabiullina could make “central banking sing.”

Now it falls to Ms. Nabiullina to steer Russia’s economy through a deep recession, and to keep its financial system, cut off from much of the rest of the world, intact. The challenge follows years she spent strengthening Russia’s financial defenses against the kind of powerful sanctions that have been wielded in response to President Vladimir V. Putin’s geopolitical aggression.

She has guided the extraordinary rebound of Russia’s currency, which lost a quarter of its value within days of the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. The central bank took aggressive measures to stop large sums of money from leaving the country, arresting a panic in markets and halting a potential run on the banking system.

In late April, Russia’s Parliament confirmed Ms. Nabiullina, 58, for five more years as chairwoman after Mr. Putin nominated her to serve a third term.

“She’s an important beacon of stability for Russia’s financial system,” said Elina Ribakova, the deputy chief economist of the Institute of International Finance, an industry group in Washington. “Her reappointment has symbolic value.”

Cleaning up the banks

Besides her record on monetary policy, Ms. Nabiullina has drawn praise for pursuing a thorough cleanup of the banking industry. In her first five years at the bank, she revoked about 400 banking licenses — essentially closing a third of Russia’s banks — in an effort to cull weak institutions that were making what she termed “dubious transactions.”

It was considered a brave crusade: In 2006, a central bank official who had started a vigorous campaign to close banks suspected of money laundering was assassinated.

“Fighting corruption in the banking sector is a job for very courageous people,” said Sergei Guriev, a Russian economist who left the country in 2013 and is now a professor at Sciences Po in Paris. He called her program flawed, though, because it was largely limited to private banks. This created a moral hazard problem that left state-owned banks feeling comfortable taking on lots of risk with the protection of the government, he said.

Ms. Nabiullina’s integrity has never been questioned, added Mr. Guriev, who said he had known her for 15 years. “She’s never been suspected of any corruption.”

 

My Money's On Zakharova Vs. Kirby In the Octagon

dailymail  |  Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova slammed Pentagon press secretary John Kirby and said he's 'losing his nerve' in his comments over Putin's invasion of Ukraine. 

Kirby delivered an emotional condemnation of Vladimir Putin's 'depravity' in Ukraine on Friday, and came close to tears as he described the horror of looking at images coming from the war-torn country.

Zakharova, who has served as Moscow's foreign ministry spokesperson since 2015, called Kirby's statement 'rude, insulting and troublesome' in a post on Telegram. 

She added that Kirby 'said some nonsense' about Russian President Putin. 

'Among other gibberish, he said it was 'hard to look at what Russian forces are doing in Ukraine.' Really? How hard can it be for an American rear admiral to look at anything?' she asked. 

The Pentagon press secretary has won rave reviews for his unflappable manner and dry sense of humor during briefings, delivering grim news with the minimum of fuss.

But on Friday, the toll of 65 days of war in Ukraine caught up with him when he was asked about President Putin's state of mind. 

'I'm not going to go into the psychology of Vladimir Putin,' he began.

'It's hard to look at what he's doing in Ukraine, what his forces are doing in Ukraine and think that any ethical, moral individual could justify that. 

'It's difficult to look at the...'

He tailed off, apparently choking up and battling to regain his composure.

After a few seconds, he resumed his train of thought and delivered one of his most powerful condemnations yet of the Russian president. 

'Sorry,' he said.

'It's difficult to look at some of the images and imagine that any well-thinking, serious mature leader would do that. 

'So I can't talk to his psychology. But I think we can all speak to his depravity.'

Has Interception Of Straight Line Ballistic Missiles Been Demonstrated In Combat?

moonofalabama |   The Americans are now crying ‘uncle’ about Russia’s hypersonic weapons. After the most recent flight test of the scramjet-powered Zircon cruise missile, the Washington Post on July 11 carried a Nato statement of complaint:

"Russia’s new hypersonic missiles are highly destabilizing and pose significant risks to security and stability across the Euro-Atlantic area," the statement said.

At the same time, talks have begun on the ‘strategic dialog’ between the US and Russia, as agreed at the June 16 Geneva Summit of the two presidents. The two sides had already agreed to extend the START treaty on strategic weapons that has been in effect for a decade, but, notably, it was the US side that initiated the summit—perhaps spurred by the deployment of the hypersonic, intercontinental-range Avangard missile back in 2019, when US weapons inspectors were present, as per START, to inspect the Avangard as it was lowered into its missile silos.

But what exactly is a hypersonic missile—and why is it suddenly such a big deal?

We all remember when Vladimir Putin announced these wonder weapons in his March 2018 address to his nation [and the world]. The response from the US media was loud guffaws about ‘CGI’ cartoons and Russian ‘wishcasting.’ Well, neither Nato nor the Biden team are guffawing now. Like the five stages of grief, the initial denial phase has slowly given way to acceptance of reality—as Russia continues deploying already operational missiles, like the Avangard and the air-launched Kinzhal, now in Syria, as well as finishing up successful state trials of the Zircon, which is to be operationally deployed aboard surface ships and submarines, starting in early 2022. And in fact, there are a whole slew of new Russian hypersonic missiles in the pipeline, some of them much smaller and able to be carried by ordinary fighter jets, like the Gremlin aka GZUR.

The word hypersonic itself means a flight regime above the speed of Mach 5. That is simple enough, but it is not only about speed. More important is the ability to MANEUVER at those high speeds, in order to avoid being shot down by the opponent’s air defenses. A ballistic missile can go much faster—an ICBM flies at about 6 to 7 km/s, which is about 15,000 mph, about M 25 high in the atmosphere. [Mach number varies with temperature, so it is not an absolute measure of speed. The same 15,000 mph would only equal M 20 at sea level, where the temperature is higher and the speed of sound is also higher.]

But a ballistic missile flies on a straightforward trajectory, just like a bullet fired from a barrel of a gun—it cannot change direction at all, hence the word ballistic.

This means that ballistic missiles can, in theory, be tracked by radar and shot down with an interceptor missile. It should be noted here that even this is a very tough task, despite the straight-line ballistic trajectory. Such an interception has never been demonstrated in combat, not even with intermediate-range ballistic missiles [IRBMs], of the kind that the DPRK fired off numerous times, sailing above the heads of the US Pacific Fleet in the Sea of Japan, consisting of over a dozen Aegis-class Ballistic Missile Defense ships, designed specifically for the very purpose of shooting down IRBMs.

Such an interception would have been a historic demonstration of military technology—on the level of the shock and awe of Hiroshima! But no interception was ever attempted by those ‘ballistic missile defense’ ships, spectating as they were, right under the flight paths of the North Korean rockets!

The bottom line is that hitting even a straight-line ballistic missile has never been successfully demonstrated in actual practice. It is a very hard thing to do.

But let’s lower our sights a little from ICBMs and IRBMs [and even subsonic cruise missiles] to a quite ancient missile technology, the Soviet-era Scud, first introduced into service in 1957! A recent case with a Houthi Scud missile fired at Saudi Arabia in December 2017 shows just how difficult missile interception really is:

At around 9 p.m…a loud bang shook the domestic terminal at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport.

‘There was an explosion at the airport,’ a man said in a video taken moments after the bang. He and others rushed to the windows as emergency vehicles streamed onto the runway.

Another video, taken from the tarmac, shows the emergency vehicles at the end of the runway. Just beyond them is a plume of smoke, confirming the blast and indicating a likely point of impact.

The Houthi missile, identified as an Iranian-made Burqan-2 [a copy of a North Korean Scud, itself a copy of a Chinese copy of the original Russian Scud from the 1960s], flew over 600 miles before hitting the Riyadh international airport. The US-made Patriot missile defense system fired FIVE interceptor shots at the missile—all of them missed!

Laura Grego, a missile expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, expressed alarm that Saudi defense batteries had fired five times at the incoming missile.

‘You shoot five times at this missile and they all miss? That's shocking,’ she said. ‘That's shocking because this system is supposed to work.’

Ms Grego knows what she’s talking about—she holds a physics doctorate from Caltech and has worked in missile technology for many years. Not surprisingly, American officials first claimed the Patriot missiles had done their job and shot the Scud down. This was convincingly debunked in the extensive expert analysis that ran in the NYT: Did American Missile Defense Fail in Saudi Arabia?

This was not the first time that Patriot ‘missile defense’ against this supposedly obsolete missile failed spectacularly:

On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi Scud hit the barracks in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 14’th Quartermaster Detachment.

A government investigation revealed that the failed intercept at Dhahran had been caused by a software error in the system's handling of timestamps. The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation for 100 hours, by which time the system's internal clock had drifted by one-third of a second. Due to the missile's speed this was equivalent to a miss distance of 600 meters.

Whether this explanation is factual or not, the Americans’ initial claims of wild success in downing nearly all of the 80 Iraqi Scuds launched, was debunked by MIT physicist Theodore Postol, who concluded that no missiles were in fact intercepted!

 

Vladimir Putin Meets With Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu

kremlin  |  The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and the people’s militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic have liberated Mariupol. The remaining nationalists are hiding in the industrial area of the Azovstal steel plant.

Mariupol is a major industrial centre and the main transport hub on the Sea of Azov. In 2014, the Kiev regime declared the city the temporary capital of the Donetsk Region, and during the subsequent eight years it has been turned into a powerful stronghold and the base of far-right Ukrainian nationalists. In fact, it was the capital of the Azov Battalion.

A large amount of heavy weaponry and military hardware have been deployed in the city, including tanks, the Smerch and Uragan multiple rocket launcher systems, heavy artillery systems and the Tochka-U missile complexes. Tochka-U has a range of 120 kilometres, while the distance from Mariupol to Russia’s city of Taganrog is 94 kilometres and approximately the same to Rostov, the capital of the Southern Federal District.

The city has been stocked with missiles, munitions, fuel and lubricants, and food provisions for lengthy hostilities. The main infrastructure facilities, including the seaport and the waterway, have been mined and blocked with floating cranes. The majority of vessels there belong to foreign states.

As for armoured vehicles, there were 179 tanks and armoured fighting vehicles there, 170 various guns and mortars, including multiple rocket launchers which I have already mentioned, the Smerch and Uragan systems. When the city was surrounded on March 11, there were more than 8,100 troops of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and nationalist units in the city, as well as foreign mercenaries, who formed a large group. During the operation to liberate the city, over 4,000 of them have been neutralised, 1,478 have surrendered, and the remaining group of over 2,000 has been blocked in the industrial area of the Azovstal plant.

In their resistance efforts, the nationalists used almost all residential buildings as fortified emplacements. Armoured vehicles and artillery were placed on ground floors, and snipers took up positions on upper floors. There were separate units armed with ATGMs as well. The residents were brought to the middle floors and basements and used as human shields. It was done in almost every block of flats.

When retreating, the Ukrainian army and the nationalist battalions in Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities were using civilians as a cover. We are aware of four instances when, in order to cover their retreat, they made people leave the basements. The latest incident was literally four days ago, when we were liberating the port area and they made almost everyone leave high-rise buildings so that they could flee leaving behind ruins, including completely destroyed socially important and cultural sites.

While liberating Mariupol, the Russian army and the people's militia units from the DPR took every precaution to save civilian lives. Mr President, as you instructed, humanitarian corridors have been created daily since March 21 to evacuate civilians and foreign nationals.

Servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and militants from nationalist battalions were encouraged to lay down their arms. Of course, they were guaranteed life, safety and medical help.

We remained in daily communication with Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine [Irina] Vereshchuk with regard to planned humanitarian acts, which included corridors and transport, both ambulances and buses. Occasionally, up to 100 such buses and 25 to 30 ambulances were made available per day.

Foreign diplomatic missions got in touch with us in various ways because their nationals were there. By the way, we have been able to free and evacuate many of them from Mariupol as part of these humanitarian initiatives. We provided official notifications to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the relevant OSCE structures, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international organisations stating the time and place of these initiatives. In some instances, we even insisted on their presence to make sure that all the humanitarian rules are complied with to the extent it was possible, considering the constant and never-ending fire coming from the nationalist battalions and the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Despite the resistance of the fighters and all others, we were able to evacuate 142,711 civilians from Mariupol after you issued instructions to this effect. We freed all hostages at the seaport, including sea crews. Those who took them hostage damaged their communications systems so that they could not get in touch with anyone. The port was mined, and the waterway blocked. I hope that these ships will now be able to leave this port.

As of today, the Russian Army and the Donetsk People’s Republic’s people’s militia control all of Mariupol, reliably blocking Azovstal territory with what remains of the nationalist forces and foreign mercenaries.

Over the past two days, again as per your instructions, we declared a ceasefire between 2 pm and 4 pm, stopped all military action and opened humanitarian corridors to enable civilians who may be at Azovstal to leave.

We prepared about 90 buses for them, and 25 ambulances. Of course, considering all the distortions we face, we installed Russian Aerospace Forces cameras and received the stream almost in real time here at the command centre. No one left Azovstal. However, other civilians, over 100 of them, were able to leave. This was a major effort for us over the past few days, and we carried it out together with all the relevant international organisations.

The city is now calm, which allows us to begin efforts to restore order, enable people to return to their homes and bring peaceful life back to the city. As for those hiding at Azovstal, we have reliably sealed its perimeter, and need three or four days to complete this effort at Azovstal.

This concludes my report.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: I believe it would be inadvisable to storm this industrial zone.

I order you to cancel it.

Sergei Shoigu: Yes, sir.

Vladimir Putin: This is the case when we have to prioritise preserving the lives and health of our soldiers and officers. Of course, this is our constant priority, but even more so in this case. There is no need to penetrate these catacombs and crawl under these industrial facilities.

Seal off the industrial zone completely.

Sergei Shoigu: Yes, sir.

Vladimir Putin: You must offer all those who have not laid down their weapons to do so. Russia guarantees them their lives and dignity as per the relevant international legal instruments. All the wounded will get medical assistance.

You successfully completed the combat effort to liberate Mariupol. Let me congratulate you on this occasion, and please convey my congratulations to the troops. I am also asking you to submit proposals on bestowing state decorations on the service personnel who distinguished themselves. Of course, as usual, there will be various decorations, but I want everyone to know that they are all heroes for us and for all of Russia.

In this context, we need to make sure that we fulfil all the social commitments to our service personnel, especially the wounded and the families of our fallen comrades.

However, I believe that this would not be enough. We have to do more and come up with additional support measures, and in some case to consider ways of perpetuating the memory of those of our comrades who displayed heroism and sacrificed their lives so that our people in Donbass live in peace and to enable Russia, our country, to live in peace. These people deserved this by what they did and the way they honoured their oath.

I am asking you to work on this matter within the Defence Ministry, while I will issue the corresponding instructions to the Presidential Executive Office. I will talk to my colleagues in the regions, and they will work with the municipalities across Russia.

Assuming control over Mariupol, a major city in the south of the country, is obviously a success. Congratulations.

Sergei Shoigu: Thank you, Mr President.

Areas Of Ukraine That Russia Is In Process Of Securing

Tass  |  The Russian army during the second stage of the special operation should establish full control over the Donbass. This was stated by Deputy Commander of the Central Military District (CVO), Major General Rustam Minnekayev, at the annual meeting of the Union of Defense Industries of the Sverdlovsk Region.

"From the beginning of the second phase of the special operation, it has already begun, literally two days ago, one of the tasks of the Russian army is to establish full control over the Donbass and southern Ukraine," he said.

The control of the Russian Armed Forces over the Donbass will allow the creation of a land corridor to the Crimea, Minnekaev emphasized.

"This (control over the Donbass - TASS note) will provide a land corridor to the Crimea, as well as influence the vital facilities of the Ukrainian [military forces], Black Sea ports through which agricultural and metallurgical products are delivered to [other] countries," - said the deputy commander.

"Control over the South of Ukraine is another way out to Transnistria, where there are also facts of oppression of the Russian-speaking population. Apparently, we are now at war with the whole world, as it was in the Great Patriotic War, all of Europe, the whole world was against us. And now the same thing, they never liked Russia," he added.

Minnekaev stressed that the technical superiority of the Russian army over the Ukrainian Armed Forces on land, sea and airspace is obvious.

"During strikes, the Russian armed forces do not suffer any losses. This kills the morale of the personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine the most. The technical superiority of the Russian army on land, at sea and in the air has become obvious," he said.

Minnekaev added that the special operation should be "successfully brought to its logical conclusion." He stated that all tasks set will be fulfilled.

“We didn’t start this war, but we will finish it,” Minnekaev said.

Omicron Out'chere Freeballing No Matter What You Call Yourself Doing

The data from figure 4 shows that fully-vaccinated sera with the Moderna vaccine saw a 33-fold drop in neutralization against Omicron, Pfizer a 44-fold drop, and AstraZeneca a 36-fold drop. Notably, recently released data shows that sera from people who received the third dose lost almost ninety percent of its potency against Omicron after two weeks. After three months, most third-dose sera failed to neutralize at all. This data confirms the epidemiological observations that most fully doubly-vaccinated and triply-vaccinated individuals, including those with prior infection, are susceptible to infection by Omicron within weeks of the last boost.

Forbes  | In a few short weeks, the COVID-19 virus variant Omicron has spread around the world. The incidence of new infections is rising rapidly, even in well-vaccinated populations and those previously infected by earlier variants of SARS-CoV-2. The epidemiologic evidence strongly points to a variant that is resistant to most if not all extant vaccines, and possibly many monoclonal antibodies treatments. Here we explore these concerns. This is the third in our series that outlines what we know about Omicron. We summarize the finding of recent experiments by Cameroni et al. in a bioRxiv preprint from December 14th.

Omicron ACE2 Binding

The first question asked was how tightly the Omicron Spike (S) protein binds to the ACE2 receptor. The data is summarized in Figure 1. Cameroni et al. show that Omicron’s affinity for the ACE2 receptor is 2.5 times as great as that of the S protein from the original Wuhan isolate. Omicron binds to the receptor as well as the Beta variant, but not as well as Alpha, which binds ACE2 almost six times more tightly. The N501Y mutation in Omicron is universally observed to increase affinity roughly 6-fold, yet other mutations in key sites like K417N, Q493R, and G496S were shown by deep mutational scanning to decrease affinity. Increased affinity for the receptor may account, in part, for increased transmissibility, but that is clearly not the whole story as Omicron is much more transmissible than any previously isolates, including Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta.

Many seem surprised at the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to mutate to increase resistance against convalescent sera, most vaccines, and most monoclonal antibodies. However, the surprise was unwarranted for those who realized that coronaviruses have evolved over many millions of years to reinfect hosts over time. Those previously infected with earlier strains of the virus, contrary to our assumptions earlier in the pandemic, are able to be reinfected with Omicron and strains to come.

We previously predicted that SARS-CoV-2 would persist, continue to vary, and evade our natural and adaptive immune responses. We have also learned that SARS-CoV-2 has the potential to become far more lethal than it is today. We reiterate that the sister of this virus, SARS-CoV, and its cousin, MERS-CoV, ranged between 10% and 30% lethality. This is presumably due to slight variations in the structural, nonstructural, and accessory proteins. We must be ever alert now and for many years in the future of the possibility of such changes and their consequences.

 

Kevin Samuels Vivisection - MUCH MORE Impressed With Adella Afadi Than I Am With Myself...,

If Penrose Talm'bout Gravitational Waves, Then Get Your Surfboard Ready!!!

space  |  Penrose admits it's a wild suggestion, but believes that like all good scientific theories, it might be tested through experiment and observation. These tests stem from the idea that our aeon and the one preceding it were not completely isolated from one another. "Information does get through," he said. "It gets through in the form of a shock wave in our universe's initial dark matter." 

Dark matter, like dark energy, is a shadowy substance, this time needed to account for the way structures such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies formed in the early universe. According to Penrose's calculations, that shock wave would have had an effect on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the leftover radiation from the Big Bang, released when the universe was under 400,000 years old. "You'd see rings in the CMB that are slightly warmer or cooler than the average temperature," he said.

The equations of CCC predict that a shock wave arriving from a previous aeon would have dragged matter into our universe. If that caused material to head toward us, we would see light from that region shunted to shorter wavelengths — an effect astronomers call blueshift. Equally, a region carried away from us by a CCC shock wave would be redshifted, meaning its wavelength would be stretched out. 

Blueshifted regions would appear hotter and redshifted areas cooler. It's these changes Penrose believes we'd see as rings in the cosmic microwave background. Multiple shockwaves might even have produced a series of concentric rings. "I asked whether anyone had looked for these rings in the sky," Penrose said.

Several years ago, it did seem as if those rings had been found, a veritable smoking gun for CCC. "Except nobody believed us. They said it must have been a fluke or something," Penrose said. 

"But those signatures have been confirmed by alternative groups," said Vahe Gurzadyan a physicist at the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia and Penrose's long time collaborator on CCC.

The scientists point to the fact that a team of Polish and Canadian researchers confirmed the presence of the rings to a confidence level of 99.7%. However, there are still many doubters. Gurzadyan remains steadfast. "These structures are real – there is no doubt that our calculations are reliable and correct," he said. Still, Penrose has been exploring other approaches that might further support the pair's claims about CCC and a time before the Big Bang.

The transition between aeons would do something more fundamental that just create a shock wave in our dark matter and rings in the cosmic microwave background. "A new material, the dominant material in the universe, is created at the crossover," Penrose said. He regards that new material as the initial form of dark matter itself. 

"But in order that it doesn't build up from aeon to aeon, it has to decay," he said. He calls these initial dark matter particles erebons after Erebos, the Greek god of darkness.

On average it would take 100 billion years for an erebon to decay, but there are some that will have decayed in the 14-billion-year history of our universe. Crucially, as they decay, Penrose says erebons dump all their energy into gravitational waves.

Dignity Is Something You TAKE!!! NOT Something You Whine And Beg For...,

NPR  |  In the mid-'80s, just as his career as a writer was reaching its first ascent, Stanley Crouch presided over an attempted, unexpected, coup d'etat. Crouch wanted to return to a time when the serious Black practitioners participated in the gatekeeping. (The title of a 2000 Crouch piece in the New York Times says it all: "Don't Ask the Critics. Ask Wallace Roney's Peers.") That was all to the good, but another, more reactionary and perhaps even more commercial aspect of his proposed revolution proved impossible to implement: defining jazz as a fixed object made up of conventional swing, blues, romantic ballads, a Latin tinge... and not too much else. While executing this maneuver, Crouch rejected — by some lights, betrayed — his original peer group of Murray, Blythe and Newton, and instead embraced the latest musicians intrigued by a comparatively straight-ahead approach. (Newton complained, "A stylistically dominant agenda in jazz is like bringing Coca-Cola to a five-star dinner!")

It was an artificial conceit to begin with, and Crouch was too contrarian and combative to lead a movement. However, he did have one important acolyte: Wynton Marsalis, the man anointed as the biggest new jazz star of the era. Marsalis studied the texts of Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray the way he did the music of Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong. In what may have been an unprecedented event, a major jazz artist actually read critics, and let those critics inform his music. (Crouch also contributed liner notes to the first run of excellent Marsalis LPs.)

Between them, Marsalis and Crouch kicked off the jazz wars of the '80s and '90s, an argument about tradition versus innovation, a tempest in a teacup that played out in all the major jazz magazines, in many mainstream publications, in bars and clubs everywhere – and in the end did very little good to anybody. (The day Keith Jarrett angrily invited Wynton Marsalis to a "blues duel" in the New York Times was a notable low point.) The 2001 Ken Burns documentary Jazz, which featured Marsalis and Crouch as both off-screen advisors and on-screen commentators, was the climactic battleground. People who love post-1959 styles connected to funk, fusion and the avant-garde are still very upset about Ken Burns' Jazz. 

Still. When he started assembling the repertory institution Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1987, Wynton Marsalis was advocating for the primacy of the Black aesthetic at a time when the white, Stan Kenton-to-Gary Burton lineage dominated major organizations like the Berklee College of Music and the International Association of Jazz Educators. The music of Kenton and Burton has tremendous value, but their vast institutional sway and undue influence in jazz education is part of this discussion. We needed less North Texas State (Kenton's first pedagogical initiative) and more Duke Ellington in the mix, and Marsalis almost single-handedly corrected our course – although Marsalis himself would give Crouch a lot of the credit. Indeed, Crouch's long-running internal mandate to get Ellington seen as "Artist of the Century" had finally paid off on a macro level, and the free high school program "Essentially Ellington" is one of JALC's most noble achievements.

Crouch and Marsalis also strove to bury the once-prevalent idea that Louis Armstrong was an Uncle Tom, and encouraged the Black working class to reclaim the jazz greats as crucial to their heritage. (Those ready to hate on Ken Burns's Jazz should keep that perspective in mind.)

There was some bad, a lot of good, and plenty to argue about. What can be said for sure: JALC never quite pulled off Crouch's proposed coup. All these years later, JALC remains merely a part of what makes jazz interesting today. Younger practitioners and listeners comfortably see the music as a continuum that can contain anything from the avant-garde harp musings of Alice Coltrane to the electric fusion of John McLaughlin to hip-hop stylings of Robert Glasper. Crouch's definition of jazz does not dominate the conversation the way he intended, perhaps paradoxically proving the original point that jazz musicians and critics don't really have much to do with each other.

Love Me Some Vika, But GOTTDAYYUM - Naomi Is The GOAT!!!

大阪直美-ほとんど無料の黒人女性

Getting Into Shape vs. Getting Into Condition

Heed The Words Of The Brother!

Back after EXACTLY one year!

Putin Has Made Many of His Critics Look Like Fools, Thus the Rage and Hysteria

straightlinelogic |  Vladimir Putin is a black belt in judo, the only Russian and one of the few people in the world to be awarded the rank of eighth dan. He also practices karate.

A fundamental principle of martial arts is using an opponent’s size and momentum against him. This is Putin’s strategic approach. Westerners demonize Putin, but few try to understand him. Trying to understand someone else is regarded as a pointless in narcissistic America, selfie-land. Perhaps 90 percent of the populace is incapable of grasping anything more subtle than a political cartoon.

That’s a pity, because Putin has accomplished a geopolitical triumph worthy of study. He’s catalyzing the downfall of the American empire, and it has nothing to do with subverting elections or suborning Trump.

Putin became acting prime minister in 1999, then president in 2000. The Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse devastated Russia. The economy shrunk and life expectancies fell. A group of rapacious oligarchs, many with Western backing, acquired Soviet industrial and commercial assets at fire sale prices.

Putin coopted the most important oligarchs, letting them hold on to their loot and power in exchange for their allegiance. This bargain has been a bulwark of both his continuing political support and his reportedly immense personal fortune. He quelled a long-running insurrection in Chechnya and stabilized the situation there, exchanging a measure of autonomy for a declaration in the Chechen constitution that it was part of Russia. During his first two terms, from 2000-2008, the economy began recovering from the 1990s. Projecting a law and order image while stifling critics, he solidified what has become his unwavering support, winning 72 percent of the vote in the 2004 presidential election.

A coterie of highly placed idiots in the US and Europe insist that Putin’s ultimate goal is to reconstitute the former Soviet Union on his way to global domination. Russia’s GDP, after 18 years of recovery, is $1.4 trillion, compared to almost $20 trillion for the US and over $17 trillion for the European Union. Russia’s military budget is $61 billion, versus $250 billion for NATO nations (excluding the US) and over $700 billion for the US. The scaremongering screeds never say where Russia will get the money to invade and conquer former Soviet provinces, much less conquer the world. Putin, unlike America’s high and mighty, realizes from Soviet experience that empires drain rather than augment an empire’s resources.

Conquering the world is one thing, throwing the American empire to the mat another. Putin must have smiled when George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden, purported mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. The US’s hubristic rage led it into what has been a quagmire at best, a graveyard at worst, for a string of invaders, including the Soviet Union.

Merry Christmas Fetishists: Was Teddy the Jay-Z to Harold's Dame Dash?

Cause we all already KNOW y'all ain't know a DAYYUM THANG about this..., but anyway

Harold Melvin an'em Blue Notes really wasn't ALL THAT without the late, great, Mr. Teddy Pendergrass. 

See, and better still, listen for yourself to this epic case of aural domination....,

then in HQ Audio

What Exactly Does The Costly Little Apartheid Garrison State Contribute to U.S. Security?

WaPo |  Trump has elicited strong reaction from many U.S. Jews, who are divided about how to respond to a candidate who has set off so much concern about racism and xenophobia — causes Jewish leaders say are of particular alarm to their communities.

Among the hundreds who waited to get into the Verizon Center before the talk were Debbie Kurinsky and Jacquelyn Furman, who came from Needham, Mass. They had no problem with the organization’s decision to invite Trump to speak.

“I don’t understand it. I think it’s not respectful of what the organization is trying to achieve,” Kurinsky said of people who planned to walk out.

Furman said attendees should listen to Trump regardless of their own politics.

“I personally think he’s a bigot. I’m not planning to endorse him. I plan to welcome him civilly.”

Milling around with those waiting to get in and a few protesters was a man selling $15 yarmulkes with the candidates’ names on them.

Among those who walked out was rabbinic student Rena Singer. Before the event, waiting in line, said she and her classmates at Hebrew Union College in New York had discussed how to handle the AIPAC talk. Some wanted to listen, saying that AIPAC had as much of a duty to invite Trump as any other candidate, or that the Jewish community needs to be able to work with any politician.

Singer said that at first she was unsure. “But then I thought about the reason I decided I wanted to be a Reform rabbi in the first place,” she said. “It’s a movement that has historically stood up to hatred and injustice.”

So as she waited in a long line to enter the Verizon Center, she didn’t plan to stay inside long. “I look forward to walking out.”

Waiting just behind Singer, David Rubin, 18, of Woodbine, N.Y., said he planned to stay for the speech. “Whether I agree with him or not, he is running for president.”

why the truly great adolph reed jr. gets no love at all while tanussy is the belle of the ball...,

educationright |  This also helps to make sense of what has struck me as most incomprehensible about the reparations movement -- its complete disregard for the simplest, most mundanely pragmatic question about any political mobilization: How can we imagine building a political force that would enable us to prevail on this issue? As with earlier Pan-Africanist ideologues, internationalist rhetoric is in part a sleight-of-hand attempt to sidestep that question by abstracting to a larger black universe.

But the question ultimately does not arise because reparations talk is rooted in a different kind of politics, a politics of elite-brokerage and entreaty to the ruling class and its official conscience, the philanthropic foundations, for racial side- payments. Robinson makes this appeal unambiguously: "Until America's white ruling class accepts the fact that the book never closes on massive unredressed social wrongs, America can have no future as one people." Lest there be any doubt about the limited social vision that makes such an entreaty plausible, he brushes away the deepest foundations of American inequality: "Lamentably, there will always be poverty." His beef is that black Americans are statistically overrepresented at the bottom. It is significant as well that Jim Forman's 1969 demand was crafted at a conference funded and organized by liberal religious foundations. This is a protest politics that depends on the good will of those who hold power. By definition, it is not equipped to challenge existing relations of power and distribution other than marginally, with token gestures.

There's a more insidious dynamic at work in this politics as well, which helps to understand why the reparations idea suddenly has spread so widely through mainstream political discourse. We are in one of those rare moments in American history -- like the 1880s and 1890s and the Great Depression -- when common circumstances of economic and social insecurity have strengthened the potential for building broad solidarity across race, gender and other identities around shared concerns of daily life, concerns that only the minority of comfortable and well-off can dismiss in favor of monuments and apologies and a politics of psychobabble. Concerns like access to quality health care, the right to a decent and dignified livelihood, affordable housing, quality education for all. These are objectives that can be pursued effectively only by struggling to unite a wide section of the American population who experience those concerns most acutely, the substantial majority of this population who have lost those essential social benefits or live in fear of losing them. And isn't it interesting that at such a moment the corporate-dominated opinion-shaping media discover and project a demand for racially defined reparations that cuts precisely against building such solidarity? And isn't it also interesting that Randall Robinson, mainstream poster boy for reparations advocacy, is a member of the Rockefeller family's Council on Foreign Relations?

I know that many activists who have taken up the cause of reparations otherwise hold and enact a politics quite at odds with the limitations that I've described here. To some extent, I suspect their involvement stems from an old reflex of attempting to locate a progressive kernel in the nationalist sensibility. It certainly is an expression of a generally admirable commitment to go where people seem to be moving. But we must ask: What people? And where can this motion go? And we must be prepared to recognize what can be only a political dead end -- or worse.

valodya and scot free have a lot in common..,

CNN |  Vladimir Putin has his man in the U.S. presidential race: Donald Trump. On Thursday, the Russian president reportedly declared Trump to be the "absolute leader" of the race.

Putin -- a natural if brawny showman who has posed fishing shirtless, shooting shirtless and horseback riding shirtless -- also said of Trump: "He's a very lively man, talented without doubt."

Thus did the man who embodies the parody of homoeroticism from the 1970s endorse one who embodies the parody of a blow-hard executive from the 1980s. But while Moscow has long been interested in American politics, what inspired the man who has essentially run Russia since 2000 to take the unusual step of commenting on the election process of an adversary?

Two things: empathy and desire.

Whether he knows it or not, Putin practices a key tenet of statecraft identified by Mel Brooks. His darkly comical musical "The Producers" features the number "Heil Myself!" (also known as "Springtime for Hitler"), in which a campy rendition of the German dictator sings, "It ain't no mystery, if it's politics or history, the thing you gotta know is, everything is showbiz."

The line could be the leitmotif of the reality show that is Trump's campaign.

The Donald's approach to politics likely reminds Putin of himself and he empathizes. Not only do the two men share a love for spectacle and an appreciation of its ability to move low-information voters, but Putin also sees Trump's self-reference as something Moscow can exploit.

ain't but one rule...everything else is frivolous conversation....,

theatlantic |  Last week, I noted an effort by two sociologists to explain the rise of what they call “victimhood culture.” They focused their paper on “a new species of social control that is increasingly common at American colleges: the publicizing of microaggressions.” The scores of emails I’ve received in response to the article include people on both sides of the larger debate on whether “microaggressions” are a sound or unsound framework. Its defenders often fail to realize how many of its critics share their desired ends, if not their preferred means.