Debt Rattle February 7 2023
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@Redneck: I read the Slavsquat suggestions on how to transit and evaluate the Russian blogosphere with auto-translation functions. He spends his time doing that, and I appreciate that he does.
Batiushka has this on the (counting down) Saker blog: Anglo-Zionism and the Confederation of Europe
Hey, Ilargi, TAE was still wet behind the ears when my friend Joe told me he looked at you every morning with coffee in early 2008.
“John Rubino has been a strong supporter of the Automatic Earth since the start. Which reminds me, I totally forgot that we had our 15th anniversary on Jan. 22.”
Hal Turner says Zelensky dodged the Ukrainian draft 4 times in 2014-2015, and the draft age there is now 16, and that they have lost 257,000 soldiers by recent report to Lloyd Austin.
https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/en/news-page/world/report-zelensky-dodged-the-draft-four-times-in-2014-2015@Dr D Rich: “Everybody everywhere, except not pro athletes suddenly got fat during COVID and started dying excessively.” That is a really embarrassingly bad position for Unz to take, but there it is.
Russian forces near Bakhmut center, hold 1/3 of the city, and Ukrainian troops are withdrawing in an orderly fashion. (Try Google translate) https://warnews247-gr. translate.goog/titloi-telous-gia-to-kievo-rosiki-lailapa-ekapse-tis-oukranikes-amynes-sto-bakhmut-oi-rosoi-elegchoun-to-1-3-tis-polis-bainoun-sto-kentro-tis/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Take out the space beteen gr. and translate. The link would not upload.
@JohnDay
Sorry to take so long getting back to you about those traffic lights. I spent the morning going to one of my favorite towns in the hemisphere, Hermann, Missouri. Not only is it charming and quaint, with the hands down finest beer, wine and whisky known, it is also home to the best bratwurst this side of Thüringen. The billboard on the way into town proclaims “Best Wurst in the Country!”, and they ain’t lying.
Thank God for traffic lights on the highway of life. They give you a chance to stop, look around, and figure out where you are and whether or not you are there yet. One of these days, when I’m stopped at one of those lights, I’m just gonna hop out and walk away.
I see in Bukhmut, the Russians are following Sun Tsu’s strategy by allowing the Ukrainians a retreat exit by Shank’s Mare.
After buying a US Himar rocket from the Ukrainians, the Russians have updated their S-300, S-400, and S-500 air defense missile software so these US missiles are now routinely shot down just like all the other Ukrainian missiles. Before the software upgrade, the Russians dispursed and camouflaged all of their ammunition depots.
Looks like total US government and private liabilities now exceed total assets. Could defaults be far behind? The Great Reset?
DR. John Day – A new Medical business opportunity in the Ukraine!
Desparate Ukrainian summoned draft age male, visiting his Doctor. “I have just been summoned!”
Doctor: “I can fix your draft summons, for a fee!”
Desparate Ukrainian. “How can a fee fix it?
Doctor. “Simple, I break your arm, then fix you up!”
Relieved Ukrainian. “Yes, that will work! But only for a few months.”
Doctor. “I can fix that too, for another fee!”
Desparate Ukrainian. “How?”
Doctor. “I will simply break your other arm!”
Relieved Ukrainian. “Yes, that will work!”Kassandra said
It’s like another universe.
Interesting to read because all the comments sound like the NYT. The comments are based on unproven assumptions that us at TAE would immediately question. The main assumptions they all make is that the government is a force for good, not evil, and that the vaccinations work. Interesting that some of them are blaming the failure of the vaccinations on the mandates, that again is them avoiding the real issue which was that the vaccines were not properly tested and did not work as advertised, so were not in the same category as the childhood vaccines which, prior to the Fauci era, were actually tested and monitored after release. But even that last statement is a questionable assumption given that the VAERS reporting system would only have been set up if past vaccines had been a problem, but maybe only after Fauci took the reins. An interesting insight into how little the Democrats know about how the other side thinks, revealing that the non-Democrats have a much better handle on how Democrats think, given that they can just turn on the TV to find the Democrat point of view being forced down their throats in typical looney left authoritarian fashion.
A Midwestern Doctor’s latest dissection of a MSM article, this time it’s the Newsweek semi-apology op-ed from a med student.
Dissecting The New Plea for COVID Amnesty
https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/dissecting-the-new-plea-for-covidDr D Rich
Ron Unz.com lost the plot beneath his unsuccessfully hidden contempt for “anti-vaxxers”.
He then produced a few articles containing manipulated data to show that after the vaccinations started, death rates went down and that the proof the unvaxxed were using of vaccine ineffectiveness was data from before the vaccination rollout. I was kind of surprised to see him resort to such primitive tactics to defend his position, especially surprised as he is generally open to many extreme view points. Made me think that he is up to no good. Why would someone buy into the vaccinations so absolutely? Being a neutral observer of the vaccinations makes a lot more sense.
jb-hb said
would guess the reason for Western heavy equipment coming in dribs and drabs is that it isn’t really a matter of limited equipment being sent, but volunteers being found to operate it.
They had since 2014 to train these people, but they did not do it and that was on purpose. Now that they cannot “find people to operate the equipment” is the desired outcome. Had NATO really wanted to win this war, all sorts of heavy weapons would have landed in Ukraine before Russia even invaded, there would have been a build up, but that did not happen, they did even try to defeat Russia, they wanted the war to do other things, mostly to cut Europe off from Russia.
When there are no fish in the barrel, you back away so that the fish can fill it up again.
I’m sure the ultimate goal of Russia is to not become the hated murderer like the US has become. Every Islamic country, and many others, have committed themselves to eternal hate of the US. And for good reason.
Putin knows that the West’s puppeteers are doing everything they can to cajole, tease, threaten, engineer and gaslight the Russians into becoming the “Vile thing to Hate”. This is not working. Putin has been very careful to follow a path and a plan that makes him look like the tolerant one when facing a room full of bullies.
Putin knows that, after the dust settles, his countrymen will have to live in close proximity to what remains of the Ukrainian people. He is trying to accomplish this without causing endless hate that rolls on into the future.
The soldiers sent against Russia will be allowed to retreat leaving all their broken expensive imports behind. Those that stand and fight will be fish in the barrel and be ground away with minimal loss of Russian soldiers and Ukrainian citizens. Rinse and repeat. The horrors of war are being played very carefully by Putin.
@Wes
“After buying a US Himar rocket from the Ukrainians, the Russians have updated their S-300, S-400, and S-500 air defense missile software….”Hahahaha
The Ukronazis are so utterly and cravenly corrupt they would sell F-16’s to the Russians if they got their bloody little hands on any.
Speaking of has-beens, the F-16 entered service in Jan 1979, making it 43 years old this Jan.
Great Granddaddy Grey beard of ‘fighter’ fame.Just for laughs, go back 43 years from 1979 and you have the Bf-109 Messerschmitt entering service in the Spanish Civil War in 1937!
That’s what a 43 year old fighter plane design looked like in 1979 next to an F-16!
Hahahahahaha
That’s how the Russians view the F-16
The Ukronazis could probably get more money by selling an Abrams tank to the Russians than an F-16
Hahahaha
A 1937 Bf-109 in Spain
State of the Art!
I love sunflowers, and the painting is most apt because sunflowers not only look spectacular but they are also a source of food.
Most of mine are between 1 metre and 2 metres tall but I do have a few approximately 3 metres tall.
Ukraine used to be noted for sunflowers. I guess it will again, once the fascists, neo-Nazis and actual Nazis [of Ukraine and Oceania] have been dealt with by Russia (taking Nazi to be a version of fascism that emerged in Germany and lived on in Ukraine and Airstrip Two, whereas the fascists of Airstrip One were fascists before the term fascism was commonly used -attributed to, or invented by, Mussolini, as I understand it.
The fascists of Airstrip Five just do what they’re told to do, including using the populace as guinea pigs for economic experiments, social experiments and medical experiments, as thought-up by the fascists in London, Washington, Brussels etc.
Whilst the North Island was utterly drenched in unprecedented rain that cause chaos, much of the South Island is turning biscuit brown from lack of rain.
The water table has dropped massively and ‘my’ stream is about to go dry. I named it Ruawai (earth-water) after learning that Hurunui Deceit and Crime refer to it as The Eastern Drain.
Literal swamps are draining but the political swamp still remains undrained…. till it doesn’t. 🙂
Internet intermittent again 🙁
Exactly. He’s mean and deliberately wrong,, but still a persuasive writer. There’s some weird pushback going on and Unz’s enlistment in this worse-than-misplaced effort is unsettling.
He’s been paid off…handsomely. prove me wrong.4 Billion Years of Global Temperature :
A fascinating graphic. It shows that for the past 600 million years the ‘normal’ temperature of Earth was about 12C higher than today. It also strongly suggests that there is a definite upper limit of about 24C, so no ‘runaway greenhouse effect’! There must be a feedback mechanism limiting the temperature. I suspect this is due to increasing cloud cover upping Earth’s albedo and so reflecting more heat back into space.
Last night my Wife informed me that an elderly 84 or 85 year old aunt, suffering from Parkinson, living in Vancouver B.C. will have a medically assisted death (called MAIDS in Canada – a so innocently nice sounding name isn’t it?) on February 28th. (I suspect if she was vaxxed, that this could have speeded up her illness’ down hill progression.)
I have rather mixed feelings about all of this.
I watched both my Mother and Father slowly and painfully die of cancer long before MAIDS was an option.
So I can see that at a certain point, life is no longer worth living, due to the extreme level of suffering.
So, MAIDs could be appropriate.My observation is too often MAIDS is being performed rather too quickly, with little checks and balances.
This seems to be a feature not a bug.
A person goes into the hospital, with a none life threatening illness, then a day or two later the family finds out, too late, that the person was MAIDed.
Sadly, Canadian veterans are routinely offered MAIDS as a solution to their on going illnesses.
I believe the doctor’s fee for performing MAIDS is about $1,400 to $1,500.
Some Canadian doctors have performed over 300 and 400 such MAIDS, so it is very lucrative.Trudeau is now planning on offering this service to the mentally ill.
Only the patient’s signature is required and no public notice is required to be made to next of kin.
Basically there seems to be few external checks, or second opinions, before performing MAIDs.
Legalized murder.
To meet the needs of both dying people but mainly the state’s Death Panel’s need to kill off undesirables.Very interesting window
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/how-russians-learned-stop-worrying-and-love-warAstonishing, no way to cover this in any normal fashion, I’ll just quote:
“Russia has just lived through the most terrifying year in post-Soviet history. Yet despite growing loss of life and stark moral defeats, there has been no shattering of national foundations. Sure, Russians are becoming divided, and their opinions polarized, as people grow tired of war.”
“The regime has a formidable arsenal of instruments to deploy against anyone who speaks out or otherwise expresses opposition. It has used the legal system to crush any dissent, handing down Stalinist prison terms to antiwar activists. It has invented its own equivalent of yellow stars to harass, threaten, and intimidate those deemed “foreign agents.” (I had the honor of receiving such a designation in late December.) It has closed down or blocked access to virtually all independent media. And it has pinned the unofficial label of “national traitor” on anyone who does not express delight at the state’s ramping up of repression, the war, and the increasingly personal military-police-state regime that is driving it.”
“Putin is building a new empire, but it is not going well.”
“Still, 2022—a year of war, a year of permanent shock—has done little to change popular acquiescence for the regime. This is not just a defense reflex on the part of ordinary Russians—“My country, right or wrong” or “Our leaders know best, since they have more information than we do.” Instead, it is a double-edged response that seeks to keep reality at bay. On the one hand, it is expressed in desire for vengeance against the enemy, who are no longer even seen as human beings. On the other hand, it is grounded in the fantasy that normal times can continue in a country in which committing violence against outsiders and sacrificing oneself in a heroic death on the battlefield are becoming socially accepted norms.”
“All those tools of tyranny were used with increasing force during the year, and yet people said that they were less concerned about them than before. That declining concern is not only an effect of the pressure to sustain wartime unity; it is a conscious unwillingness to acknowledge that anything has changed—a desire for self-deception. Incidentally, according to polling data, the only major fear that people express at the same high level as previously is the prospect of another world war. That seems to be the only thing average Russians are not deceiving themselves about.
A significant part of the population has all but overlooked Putin’s violation of the very social contract that he laid down years before the “special operation” began. From the beginning, officials asserted that they were just military professionals doing their job and promised Russians that, as long as they supported the regime, basic needs would be met and normal life would continue. Now, of course, that promise can no longer hold. Putin requires the nation to share in what he has embarked on, and it turns out he needs the bodies of Russians themselves to offer up in sacrifice. This shift has been justified by the promise that death in this manner will eclipse all their earthly sins, as the patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, once said. Sometimes the more terrible the lie and the more outlandish the justification of horrors, the more easily the majority choose to believe it.
It helps that many Russians are utterly beholden to the state. According to official statistics, the proportion of social payments in the real incomes of the population is greater now than it was in Soviet times. Despite the emergence of a market economy and a significant class of self-sufficient people, Putin has done everything he can to ensure that the economic role of the state remains as large as possible. And he has used the influx of petrodollars to further that goal.
People who depend on the state are obedient, above all politically, and the direction of the Russian economy in recent years has reinforced that reality. Only a small percentage of the population gets its income from business activity, whereas salaries from the public sector and social payments command a large portion of people’s income. According to data from the 2021 census, one out of three Russians—33 percent—depend on social payments …
Putin is making his new demands for cannon fodder against a relatively calm socioeconomic backdrop. But this could change as the economy plummets. Given the inevitable drop in federal budget revenues because of restrictions on oil and gas exports, fading economic activity, and significant spending on defense and security, the state will have fewer opportunities to buy the loyalty of the population in the coming months. Still, it is likely that Putin will pull it off. For one thing, security and law-enforcement agencies, from the army and police to the special services, will continue to be well funded, and it is they who will enforce loyalty.
Russian prosecution data gives some indication of both the extent of overt opposition to Putin and the official response to it. In 2022, 20,467 people were detained on political grounds, mainly for expressing antiwar sentiment in public; and 378 people were criminally prosecuted for “discrediting or spreading fake news about the Russian army”—in other words, for taking an antiwar position. Of those 378, fifty-one have already been sentenced. Attracting the most attention have been the cases against Moscow municipal …
“in 2022, 176 individuals and organizations were declared “foreign agents,” and the Russian parliament passed 22 new laws aimed at enhancing the state’s repressive powers. Among these were a new law targeting LGBT “propaganda” and one giving the state drastically expanded powers over so-called foreign agents.
Equally striking has been the growing use of censorship. In 2022, the authorities blocked more than 210,000 websites and Putin’s machine effectively silenced any remotely independent media left in Russia…
“Russians who want to watch, listen to, or read alternative information and opinions can use a virtual private network (VPN) to do so. Many exiled independent media also broadcast on YouTube, which the Russian government is reluctant to block for fear of invoking the wrath of the platform’s huge numbers of depoliticized users.
In fact, as high as these numbers are, the tally of political prosecutions and blocked websites reveals only what is on the surface.”
“The most read book at the beginning of last year was George Orwell’s 1984. Other books selling well include those about everyday life in 1930s Germany, in which people recognize themselves and their fears.”
“…These writers, too, are expressing sentiments that many Russians today can identify with.
Given the scale of the repression, it is unrealistic to expect a mass uprising against Putin, especially since most ordinary Russians prefer to bury their heads in the sand and find some bizarre rationality and truth in the regime’s logic. People do not want to be on the side of evil, so they designate evil as good, thereby forcing themselves to believe that Putin is bringing peace. As one Kremlin spin doctor put it, the president is launching “missiles of righteousness.”
Putin and his Kremlin ideologues love to talk about the West’s desire to wipe Russia off the map. For their part, they would like to see Russia take up a much bigger place on the map by building an enormous empire. They want a return to the distant past.
“The West once saw Russia as a country on the path to democracy. Now it regards it as an international pariah and a failed state. Russia’s former Soviet neighbors—members of the Commonwealth of Independent States—are frightened and have politely distanced themselves
“China and India, while remaining on friendly terms with Russia at the rhetorical and economic level, have watched in disbelief as Putin descends into a vortex of irrational self-destruction, taking his nation’s economy, workforce, dignity, and soft power with him.
In March 2022, 80 percent of Russians “definitely supported” or “mostly supported” Russia’s war, according to a Levada Center poll. To be precise, they supported “the actions of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine.” Back then, public opinion was not ready to consider it a “war,”
“y December, the terms had changed. There was no longer any doubt that Russia was fighting a war, to the point that top officials, seeking to justify the army’s serial failures, were calling it a “war with NATO.”
“the portion of the population who “definitely supported” it had dropped from 52 percent in March to just 41 percent in December. Among those who are most dismayed by Putin’s bloodbath are younger Russians and people who get their information from the Internet rather than Russian television. …Society is divided.”
“currently, only about one in four Russians expresses some degree of responsibility for the war, and just one in ten Russians consider themselves “definitely” responsible. By contrast, about six out of ten absolve themselves of any responsibility whatsoever for the deaths of people from a fraternal nation”
“When people are being killed and cities and essential civilian infrastructure are being razed, disavowing responsibility is both infantile and amoral. But Russians’ acceptance of collective responsibility, not to mention guilt, will have to come later—if at all. For the foreseeable future, the brutal authoritarian regime under which they live imposes certain norms of behavior and has no intention of disappearing, toning down its repression and propaganda, or bringing an end to the war. Of course the obedient, if weary, population will accept with gratitude whatever the autocrat gives—even peace.”
“Sometimes it seems as though Russia really has disappeared from the map or has been illegally annexed by its own government. In less than a year, Putin and his team have managed to discredit everything Russian, even Russian culture. Russia’s image has not taken such a battering since the days of Stalin. The Soviet Union in its later years had a lot more global respect than Russia does now.
In one sense, everything that happened since Russia invaded Ukraine is captured in the vicious circle of the country’s political history.”“Foreign Affairs is an American magazine of international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Affairs Motto: “We’re Everywhere” You know, like James Bond’s Spectre.
You can see why I didn’t know what to say to that.
Dr D said
You can see why I didn’t know what to say to that.
Wow, for anybody learning psychology, this is called “Projection”. USA’s war mongers are losing the war and have no credibility left, making a negotiated peace impossible, so they project the worst of their own evils and the worst of their religion’s evils – like rejecting LGBT – onto the Russian people and onto Putin. I guess the aim is to generate generalised hate of Russians. Fascinating.
Dr. D:
Just more sofiscated deep state propaganda!
Just do the mirror effect.
Replace Russia with the US.
Replace Putin with the deep state.
Replace war in Ukraine with the war on covid vaccine misinformation.Re-read!
We are accusing the enemy of what we are doing!
@WES: Sorry about the turn of theCanadian government to fast-track medical suicide. It seems like just another variation on the theme of quietly making more people disappear. The “owners” are still working on how to do this, and all new ideas will be given a thorough evaluation.
@Dr. D : Yes, a fictional tale of an alternate universe.
@DBS: People used to get out of their cars at stoplights more before smart phones. Now they just sit there looking down, until somebody who is not looking down honks. It can take a while. On a bike i have an unusually good look at the drivers. Anyway, real power is to just drive through red lights with a big police escort and sirens, like when Obama came to san Antonio. Probably, like jumping out of an airplane, the first time is the most exciting…
Ron Unz.com lost the plot beneath his unsuccessfully hidden contempt for “anti-vaxxers”. It’s interesting Unz et al accuse the anti-vaxxers of the same hysteria and hyperbole that the covidiots like Taleb, Fauci, Birx, Gottlieb employed to promote the non-crisis from its inception. Why wouldn’t they expect folks to fight fire with fire? Is it the psychopath’s total lack of insight?
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